Free Beyond Tantra: Healing Through Taoist Sacred Sex by Mieke Wik, Stephan Wik Page B

energy flow between us.

    tantrapp 16/7/05 5:30 pm Page 66
    66

    tantrapp 16/7/05 5:30 pm Page 67
    67

Chapter 8
Circulating Qi
    The Understanding
    It is elusive and evasive,
    yet it does manifest itself.
    —Lao Tzu
    When you circulate your Sexual Qi throughout your entire body, you open up channels for the flow of orgasmic energy. This allows you to experience multiple, powerful and healing whole-body orgasms. Using this circulation technique, you can safely increase the amount of Sexual Qi that flows through your body.
    The Background
    Qi is a fundamental Taoist term for life-force or the spiritual energy that is part of everything that exists. Working with Qi forms the basis of all the Taoist practices that involve understanding the flow of energy, whether it be acupuncture, martial arts, feng shui or Dual Cultivation. Yet the existence of Qi has not been proven in any familiar, Western sense of the word. Even within Taoism and Chinese culture, there have been heated debates as to the nature of Qi. In the West, there have been people – for example, Wilhelm Reich – who attempted to work with Qi-like energies such as ‘orgone’. Yet none of these attempts have been accepted by the Western scientific community.

    tantrapp 16/7/05 5:30 pm Page 68
    68
    Beyond Tantra – Healing Through Taoist Sacred Sex But Dual Cultivation is all about working with Qi. This can, understandably, be a source of confusion and possibly an obstacle if you’re the sort of person who has to have intellectual proof of something before proceeding to invest a lot of time and effort in it. If so, you have my heartfelt compassion since that description fits me pretty well! The only reason I was willing to try working with Qi was the fact that it is a cornerstone of practices that have been in existence for thousands of years, and many of these practices clearly work. Few can doubt the incredible results obtained by martial artists and acupuncture has been clinically demonstrated to work. The way I got around this mental block was to, quite simply, accept that Qi stands for something that I don’t totally understand and then accept that I don’t need to understand everything!
    After much research, what I did see clearly was that you don’t need to see, feel or understand Qi in order to be able to start with the Dual Cultivation practices. Most of the practices concentrate not on understanding Qi, but rather on cultivating Qi. The Qi cultivation process is often described as a combination of repetitive movements, concentration and breathing. Over time, a sense of Qi flow emerges when you follow the steps carefully and consistently. Different people experience it in different ways. Some experience warmth, some experience tingling in their hands and feet and some just report an inner sense of peace and grounding. Now, whether that sense of Qi is just ‘getting the hang of it’, ‘a useful way to describe a state where you are more aware of what is happening inside yourself ’ or indeed ‘an awareness of Qi’ is, in my experience, immaterial.
    Everyone I have spoken to who has persevered with a Taoist practice, whether Qi Gong, Tai Chi or Dual Cultivation, has clearly felt that ‘something is happening’
    and that whatever that ‘something’ is, it’s reproducible. Since the Taoists have a handy term for that ‘something’, i.e. Qi, it makes sense to use it.
    As you do the exercises, it’s totally normal in the beginning to feel that not much is happening when it comes to ‘Qi sensing’. Just keep practising on a regular basis and you will observe how you become aware of Qi flowing and how you can use this awareness to manage your Sexual Qi. By learning techniques to work with Qi, you can accomplish many things that are just not possible using Western understandings of the body and life-energy.
    So what does the statement in the Understanding ‘safely increase the amount of Sexual Qi you move through your body’ mean? Imagine for a