Beyond Tantra: Healing Through Taoist Sacred Sex (23 page)

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making session. The benefit of this becomes clear when you do have a fully-fledged session and you discover that there is much more Sexual Qi available as a result of your daily practice.

Mieke’s Story

The whole area of sexual interactions with Stephan seemed to be covered with layers of tension and uneasy feelings. The excitement and pleasure had slowly disappeared over the years, almost without our noticing it. When Stephan suggested this idea of daily practice, I thought: ‘Oh no; not every day, not twice a day!’ He explained the idea, and that it was not like having sex twice a day, it was a meditation, a practice, like doing your stretches or yoga exercises in the morning. ‘OK, I will give it a try.’ I agreed eventually.

In the beginning, the practice was focused around bringing up some sexual energy and directing it to my womb for healing. We would synchronize our breathing, and together visualize the energy travelling to this area of my body. It took a bit of co-ordination, but it was not too hard to learn. There was not much sexual energy to gather up in the beginning. I was still very tired and run down, but I kept visualizing the ball of light that we created together, telling myself: ‘Qi flows where the mind goes.’

At the same time we practised soft entry. I had been doing my solo practices: orbits, PC muscle exercises. I had done them when I was pregnant, but my pelvic floor muscles had become really weak. What had happened? I kept doing the squeezes whenever I thought of it, thinking: ‘I can do better than this!’ I used my finger to check it out. I had to admit, my squeezes were not very strong at first!

Sigh! I knew that exercising the vaginal walls is important in strengthening the whole pelvic area. Now and again I asked Stephan: ‘Do you feel this?’ Hmm, he did not want to discourage me, but I could tell that he did not feel much really!

‘Keep practising, and I’m sure I will start to feel it,’ he tells me. Gradually the hard work seemed to be paying off. I felt we were becoming experts at this soft entry idea. This technique is not only useful for soft entry. I noticed that as my vaginal muscles became stronger, the squeezes added to my own pleasure as well: both during intercourse, but also during solo practice. I found that clitoral stimulation became much more pleasurable by adding some good strong squeezes. I also noticed that as my vaginal muscles became stronger, the upward orgasmic draw also became easier.

After some time of working on our daily cultivation practice, I noticed several things. The most important one for me was that it had taken the pressure off having sex with Stephan; we were learning new ways to be very intimate with

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Beyond Tantra – Healing Through Taoist Sacred Sex each other. Somehow the layers of tension were slowly being peeled away. I could not have imagined that this daily practice would be so satisfying, that it would create a new bond between us. I felt it to be a special and precious gift we were giving each other. I really treasure this time in the morning and evening.

Stephan’s Story

As I’ve mentioned before, my sexual education as a young man was a rather hit-and-miss affair. One of the unfortunate things I did learn (and I’m still not sure exactly where I got this from) is that, if you want to have sex with a woman, you have to trick her into it. Now I don’t mean ‘trick’ as in fool or deceive. It was subtler than that. You had to buy her a meal and get her a bit tipsy, or impress her in some way or do something special, but the bottom line was that only when she got something she wanted would she consent to sex.

I realize now that this is a pretty depressing view of the whole man/woman sexual dance but the reality is that an awful lot of people play that game day in and day out. Personally, I hated it. But until I met Mieke, I’d never met a woman who just said ‘Yes, I’d love to spend some intimate time with you.’

I met Mieke when I was nineteen, during a visit to a Buddhist community in the sand dunes of the West of Holland. I still remember, as if it was yesterday, standing in that caravan in the evening with Mieke and saying to her, ‘So, where should I sleep?’ I really had no idea where my bed was supposed to be as I had just arrived. We had just spent a few days travelling together with the community’s founder and fallen in love during the trip.

Mieke looked at me and said, ‘There’s room in my sleeping bag.’ I was totally speechless but I didn’t pass up the invitation! That was twenty-seven years ago.

But just because I had finally met a woman who didn’t play games when it came to sex didn’t mean that my ‘baggage’ that I had learned as a teenager suddenly disappeared. Since I still had the belief that women would only have sex if they got something, I never really trusted her in spite of her openness and honesty. In fact, it took a major crisis in our relationship fifteen years later for me to realize that these negative beliefs I had about women were slowly but surely poisoning our relationship. But even then I really didn’t know how to change this negative view I held of women.

When we started the long, slow process of learning about Dual Cultivation some years later, one of the first things we started to do was ‘Morning and Evening Prayer’. It seemed such a simple thing; you just spent a bit of time doing nine short and one long stroke without ejaculating morning and night. But

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something else happened, something incredible. After doing our ‘Prayer’ for a month or so, I woke up one morning and realized that something had changed inside me. Some deep anger or upset that I had had all my life when it came to women and sex was starting to dissolve. The fact that a woman was willingly, every single day, making time to exchange Sexual Qi with me was slowly but surely breaking down my long-held beliefs. A slow, gradual and gentle healing, but a very profound one!

Morning and Evening Prayer Exercise

Goals

• Learn the ‘Soft Entry’ method

• Learn two methods of generating Sexual Qi without ejaculation

• Learn to circulate Sexual Qi between yourself and your partner
Duration

Ten to fifteen minutes

What you’ll need

Uninterrupted time and space

Description

Morning and Evening Prayer is simply a time you set aside to generate some Sexual Qi. One of the challenges we discovered right away was that erections are not always available when you need them! There is a solution to this called Soft Entry that you may want to learn. Soft Entry is simply a technique for pulling or sucking a non-erect Jade Stalk into Yoni. Soft Entry is also handy because it removes one of the major sources of tension for many men when it comes to sex, i.e. whether one can have an erection or not. Once entry is achieved, there are two types of exercise you can use – non-moving and moving.

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Beyond Tantra – Healing Through Taoist Sacred Sex
Soft Entry Exercise

Both partners:
We have discovered that the best position for Soft Entry is side-by-side (see illustration).

Man:
Position yourself so that Jade Stalk is at the entrance to Yoni. Relax.

Woman:
Take some lube and apply to both Jade Stalk and Yoni. Raise your top leg and use your hand to move the tip of Jade Stalk to the entrance of Yoni.

Exhale and relax Yoni. Now inhale and ‘suck’ Jade Stalk into Yoni using the same pumping action that you use when doing the Small Orbit. You may have to practise a few times to get the hang of it but it’s not difficult.

Man:
Lie still and resist any urge to start moving once your partner has pulled Jade Stalk into Yoni. Just keep breathing slowly and deeply.

Woman:
Once Jade Stalk is inside Yoni, continue the same rhythm of relax

/ pull / relax / pull. Make sure that you don’t push when you exhale or you may well eject Jade Stalk! After you repeat the sequence four or five times, you can add a squeeze to the pull – first gently and then more strongly. You may find that Jade Stalk enjoys this very much and an erection will normally follow sooner or later.

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Non-moving Morning and Evening Prayer Exercise
Both Partners:
If you want to use Soft Entry, arrange yourself in the side-by-side position with lots of pillows so you can rest comfortably. The ‘woman lying on top’ position also works well for this exercise.

Woman:
Touch the roof of your mouth with the tip of your tongue. On each inhalation, pull and squeeze Jade Stalk and then pull the Sexual Qi up to the top of your orbit.

Man:
Touch the roof of your mouth with the tip of your tongue. Inhale at the same time as your partner and squeeze your PC muscle. If Jade Stalk is erect, it will move as a result of this. Pull your Sexual Qi to the top of your orbit.

Both partners:
Exhale and allow your Sexual Qi to descend down your partner’s front channel to his or her Hui Yin point and relax your PC muscle. Repeat the orbit nine times and then relax for ten seconds or so. Do three, six or nine sets of nine orbits, relaxing after each set.

Man:
Note that the idea is not ejaculate during this exercise. Have an agreed on signal that you can use to stop the squeezing if you notice that the ‘point of no return’ is approaching. You may even have to pull Jade Stalk out of Yoni if too much Sexual Qi is generated. If you do ejaculate, try to do fewer orbits next time and slowly build up the number you can do without ejaculating.

Both Partners:
At the end of the exercise, it can be a good idea to massage the man’s Hui Yin point for a minute or so to disperse any accumulated Sexual Qi. It’s also nice if the man holds his hand over Yoni to ‘close the gate’.

Moving Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer Exercise
Both Partners:
Start in either the ‘side-by-side’ or ‘woman-on-top’ position.