They
simply don't feel as strong a compulsion to pursue such a yang,
expansive goal of teaching outwardly. Women have a different
journey. But this is also the very heart of man's fascination with
woman and with her orgasm, which is a kind of inward teaching for
the male adept subtle enough to learn from her. The female orgasm
is an inward explosion—or implosion—of her yin essence. In the
valley orgasm man can experience this imploding yin energy in his
different Tan Tiens as a fusion, a kind of meltdown. Yin represents
earth energy, or physical matter. What happens during her orgasm
is that the very structure of her body is vibrating and imploding,
and by harmonising your energy with hers you are opened up to a
new and polar opposite experience of your body. The woman's
wisdom is that if you go deep into the earth, your body, it will lift
you into heaven. It's an initiation into an inner mystery of being
that women are empowered to give men, but can't bestow without
an infusion of male energy as a catalyst. Lovers who have no esoteric model to guide their path some-
times gain glimpses of this meltdown state when they languish in a
kind of sweet trance after love-making and their energies fuse in a
spontaneous valley orgasm. Their bodies may feel transparent, or
they may feel like they are floating; sounds arrive with a tinkling
crystal clarity, and colors in the room seem brighter, as if freshly
washed. This is an altered state of consciousness in which they are
perceiving with purity and directness the primal unity of the natural
world. The goal of Taoist cultivation is to sustain and intensify that
state, in which the separateness we ordinarily feel is dissolved and
integrated into a higher reality. A higher orgasm of our mind and
body magically moves us closer to the original chi which exists
everywhere. The pure fusion of the yin and yang subtle energies in
the microcosm of our body reminds us that the same is happening
in the macrocosm—that the sun and the moon and earth and the
Milky Way literally make love with one another. The planets at-Orgasm and Wu Wei 183
tract each other with vast electro-magnetic and gravitational fields. The stars and quasars shoot out hot yang streams of light and
radiation to be received by the cold yin vacuum of empty space. We witness this cosmic love-making from afar, reflected in the
eerie light that reaches us on earth by way of the moon or shooting
stars that streak across the sky. Perhaps all this light energy ends
up being sucked back into the womb of the universe, the black
holes, beyond which is true nothingness, what the Taoists call
"Wu Chi." In a parallel sense the male's seed is his solar or nuclear
energy. He cultivates or stockpiles it so it can be exploded in a
controlled manner in his tan tiens. It is then emitted out into his
personal space as radiant heat. A woman can absorb it and give it
back in material form as a cooling mystic heat which heals. The
Taoists call the balance of mind within which this alchemical pro-
cess of transformation effortlessly occurs "Wu Wei". This is trans-
lated as "non-action", and sometimes taken to mean that the Tao-
ists are passive mystical observers of nature who never get
involved for fear of upsetting the delicate balance of yin/yang. What it really implies is a neutrality, or state of receptivity, so that
anything can spontaneously happen. It's a passive state in the
sense that the entire universe is pure potential, but it is active in
that it exists in total harmony with the universe that is dynamically
manifesting itself every moment. You are eternally free to act or
not-act, depending on what the situation demands. On a practical level, women might be seen as living closer to
the state of "Wu Wei" than men, for it is their nature as yin to
empty themselves and receive the universe to realize fullness. This
yin essence is what makes a woman's energy so spontaneous and
attractive to a man. The less effort she makes, the more natural and
easy and accessible she appears to a man. A woman can just lie
there and get pregnant; she makes the very act of creation seem
simple. Men, on the other hand, are yang, with an expanding en-
ergy that seems to imply great effort to sustain itself. How can men
effortlessly get bigger or stronger or create anything without work
and more work? Perhaps men can find an answer in their experience of the
valley orgasm. This orgasm of the total mind, body, and spirit is
entered into effortlessly. When you are in the valley, strolling
through the lovely scenery that includes only you, your lover, and184 Taoist Secrets Of Love
the subtle cosmos, you remember how easy and natural this higher
harmony is, that you've been there before, but forgot it while you
were busy struggling out in the world to earn money, raise a family,
etc. You don't have to work to create this sense of loving peace. To
the contrary, this state of "Wu Wei" is achieved not by exerting
yourself, but by lying in relaxed intercourse with your lover and
simply being with her. Wu Wei is nothing more than being balanced
in the field of pure subtle energies generated by your bodies and by
the pre-existing fields of yin/yang energy in the universe. Your
love-making is practice for staying in that relaxed state, so even-
tually you'll be able to constantly feel that deep serenity within
yourself after you return to the world of chores. I have found the spontaneous effortlessness of the valley
orgasm reaches to the very heart of the Taoist teachings. Some
men may get trapped by their fascination with the techniques of chi
cultivation—by the mechanics of the Big Draw method. They may
get a lot of chi from it, but if they are trying too hard they may
never experience the valley orgasm or the wu wei process, which is
a delicate balance of non-striving yin energy and very directed
yang energy. When the two are balanced in a valley orgasm you
experience the full paradox of standing still (yin) and moving at the
same time (yang). That is why the great Taoist poets write of the paradoxical
nature of the Tao. Wu Wei is doing nothing, but everything hap-
pens. My first experience of the valley orgasm took me and my
lover by surprise, probably because we expected the Taoist eso-
teric methods of love making to be like the deep solo meditative
experiences both of us had experienced for a number of years
before we became lovers. During the valley orgasm I felt like I was
in two places at once. My body was imploding and fusing inwardly,
while my awareness was expanding outwards into larger energy
fields and subtle realms of being impossible to describe. I found it amazing the way my body seemed to take its cues
from my lover's body. My entire body started to vibrate rapidly at
the same speed as hers and stayed attuned for some minutes. De-
spite the orgasmic intensity, my body temperature was neither hot
nor cold, but even and pleasant. It was very different from my
previous meditative practice which stimulated the kundalini energy
to rise in a column of hot electric yang energy and led to explosive
opening of my crown or third eye centers. It would sometimes putOrgasm and Wu Wei 185
me into a trance where I forgot I even had a body. My conscious
mind would shut down while my body raced to absorb the high
dose of subtle yang energy. The point I'm trying to make in describing such a subtle and
subjective personal experience is that Taoist cultivation teaches
balanced meditation in all the body's tan tiens (or chakras). This is
considered the most stable marriage of yin and yang—the cooler
grounding lower centers receiving the heat from the expanding
higher centers, the classical mixture of fire and water. This is the
middle path of the Tao—staying grounded in your body while on a
lifetime journey though the subtle energy realms. The spiritual direction of Taoist dual cultivation is not Sudden
Enlightenment, or astral travel, dissolution in bliss, or fantastic
visions. These might occur as temporary side effects of the prac-
tice. But the main intention of the Taoists aspiring to immortality
was simply to maintain a dynamic balance of energy during the
10,000 ordinary moments of the day. The Taoists are suspicious of
any transcendental path that claims to be very high and very quick
or that leaves the human body uncared for in the rush to become
divine. Their wisdom is that what counts is an evolution that lasts,
and that such growth usually comes slowly and steadily. The
10,000 daily moments when stretched over 25 years adds up to a
125 million moments, so you have plenty of opportunities to prac-
tice cultivating the your chi over a lifetime. Fortunately, these
millions of moments occur one by one, making the task simpler,
and a bit less imposing. Many people in the west want 60-second Enlightenment, and
they may well get what they project—Enlightenment that lasts 60
seconds. The Taoist process may seem slow to some with its insis-
tence on circulating higher energies into the lower centers. It seems
much easier to open a third eye and go to the spiritual worlds
directly, without bothering with a clumsy and heavy physical body. This is the value of the Taoist practice of dual cultivation of sexual
energy. It leads to the acceptance of the ordinary moment, of
human desire, of the never ending sexual impulse, as a valuable in-
the-body way of understanding the Tao. This emphasis on the ordinary in daily life being an essential
part of the wholeness of the Tao is why the ancient sages did not
live for peak spiritual experiences, or seek an explosive peak
orgasm in sex. This seeking after bliss is like trying to be all yang. It186 Taoist Secrets Of Love
is an extreme state. The valley orgasm is not just a code name for
bliss. It balances the yin energy of our earthly body (and the
Karma, or suffering, it creates) and the bliss of transcending it with
heavenly yang energy. When this bodily suffering and heavenly
bliss are balanced, they cancel each other out. Emptiness is the
result. This is true serenity, remaining empty even as you acknowl-
edge both poles of experience as possibilities. Neither pole con-
trols you, so you are truly free to choose. The desires for bodily
pleasure and spiritual transcendence are born and destroyed every
moment. You remain both empty and full, and life becomes a tai
chi dance. When you experience this, you have tasted enlighten-
ment. When you can stay that way, you are immortal. PRESERVING POLARITY:
WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE YANG? By Michael Winn
"A Sage will practice the Tao. A fool will only admire it." Ancient Taoist proverb. I interviewed several dozen of Master Chia's students in the course
of writing this book with him, and was deeply struck by the dif-
ferences in attitude to sexual cultivation between men and women. In couples that were practicing the methods taught here, the men
were more fascinated by the energy generated or the states of mind
that might be reached. The women were more concerned to know
that their man loved them; whether or not he succeeded at his
spiritual technique was secondary. Some women were worried initially that all the time their man
spent doing Taoist exercises and meditations meant less time for
his relationship with her. A few complained that a sense of tech-
nique invaded their love-making. Most admitted that this negative
aspect seemed to disappear as the Taoist semen retention methods
began to work. The love-making grew longer, and the added time
allowed for more tenderness to develop in the relationship. Other men began doing the Taoist practices and encountered
resistence from their lover over the holding back of ejaculation. Their women felt that when the man ejaculated, it was a more totalOrgasm and Wu Wei 187
surrender of himself to her and thus more loving. These women
were also concerned that by missing his ejaculation the woman
might somehow be at fault for not bringing him to full conventional
orgasm. Most of this resistance is due to lack of spiritual education,
or may be an unconscious attempt to maintain sexual power over a
man. As one woman explained it to me, "some women get a feeling
that they can possess their man only when he has surrendered by
ejaculating. She isn't consciously aware of the energy equation,
but it may be the way she alleviates her insecurity about his love
for her." In this kind of relationship the man's ejaculation has become a
kind of football on the sexual playing field. The pattern is one
wheje after the man surrenders his seed, he unconsciously holds
back from her in other ways to conserve his energy and identity. She unconsciously senses this, and thinking she is strengthening
their relationship encourages him to ejaculate. When he learns the
Taoist method of retaining his seed and moving the energy up
within himself, she resists because she is losing the tangible symbol
of his surrender to her, his semen. Her motives are loving on one
level, but unfortunately they are possessive. The only remedy for this situation is for the man to share his
experience of increased energy and love with her. Taoist lovemak-
ing is impossible to master if the relationship is poisoned by jeal-
ousy and possessiveness over the exchange of lower sexual en-
ergy. The essence of the process of esoteric love is to transform the
energy up to the heart and spiritual centers before exchanging it
with your lover. This highlights the importance of the man return-
ing to the woman the energy he has received from her during sex. If
he tries to keep it for his own personal ends or projects it out his
third eye into some fantastic vision, he disperses the chi and breaks
the cycle of exchange with her. This is why the Taoists believe it is
better to repay the immediate source of your energy—your lover—
as she can use the higher transformed energy you give her to bal-
ance herself and you. The energy of the two partners in the relationship begins to
move in an upward spiral, and becomes more exquisitely refined
with each spiral. It eventually expands to embrace friends and
family members in the dynamic. This spiral relationship is actually
expressed in the Taoist symbol of yin/yang circling endlessly
around in a circle. The male energy is directed, like an arrow188 Taoist Secrets Of Love
moving in a straight line. The female energy is rounded and em-
bracing, like an empty circle. When they intersect, the circle em-
braces the straight line and bends it in a spiral. Taoist love-making
is a spiritual ecology system for recycling lower energies into
higher ones, with Enlightenment and Immortality being phases of
the spiralling process when the energies get very pure. However, most of us, myself included, are still very mortal
and struggling with our ego. Once I leave the small and private
world of sexual intimacy or meditation, my public ego adamantly
refuses to adopt a stance of spontaneous non-action, of Wu Wei,
and keeps insisting I plan ahead for my own self-interest. To ame-
liorate this selfish tendency, I try to focus on serving the ever-
changing balance of subtle energy around me instead of my ego. My ego is very good at lying to itself and is always getting me into
trouble with its own projections, rationalizations, and hidden agen-
das. Seeing things in terms of their energy encourages a certain
neutrality—I stop struggling to get money or position and look at
what kind of energy the things I want really represent. While it is easy to misinterpret the quality of chi I feel in
myself or sense in a person or situation, I feel that ultimately the
energy doesn't lie because it is the very glue connecting me with
other beings, both human and spiritual. In this sense Taoist chi
cultivation is a method of refining one's power of intuition, of
knowing beyond one's rational mind. Most western men find it
easy to accept this in theory. But the balancing of yin and yang
energy can seem very abstract and impractical. I read Taoist po-
etry and the / Ching for years and liked it, but never got a deep
"gut" feeling of what was really happening with yin and yang. Only when I began doing Taoist yoga and practicing testicle
breathing, the big draw, the microcosmic and fusion meditations
did I experience in my body the distinct subtle energies of hot and
cold, and the energies in the five major organs, heart, kidney, etc. I
had to get trained by Master Chia on what to look for. When I saw
it right inside my body I felt ecstatic, like Christopher Columbus
confirming the world was not flat. There was a cool, yin energy
inside me, a new dimension of my being to explore. I set sail on the
Taoist path with the faith that the world was round and I would
return to my starting point a bit wiser. I find that spirit has en-
livened my love-making as well. Dual cultivation has become an
adventurous journey into a new part of myself and my lover.Orgasm and Wu Wei 189
Yin and yang are not just concepts. They represent real
qualities of chi energy that can be stored in your body and used in
your ordinary life. A purely intellectual approach to Taoism is one
of the toughest obstacles a highly educated western student has to
overcome. Westerners consider the intellect to be the mind, while
Taoists see intellect as just one tool of the whole mind-body-spirit. When Taoists cultivate their chi and refine the union of body,
mind, and spirit with their spiritual exercises and alchemical medi-
tations, they are training the mind to live in a world filled with
dynamic fields of energy. This means to be a Taoist you stop living in a disembodied
world of words and concepts constructed by your intellect. You
doq't stop thinking, but you may need to learn how to think-feel
with your whole being. To do this you will develop faculties you
forgot you had and which are right now sitting dormant in the 90%
unused portion of your brain and body capacity. That is why sex is
so healthy for western men; it is the only time many of them escape
from the conceptual prisons of their intellect and ego, and gain an
experience of being wholly in the body. If you are just beginning to cultivate your chi, don't worry if
you have trouble distinguishing between yin and yang energy. Just
do your exercises and meditations daily. When you begin to sense
any vibration, warmth, tingling, or altered sense perceptions it is a
sign your body is waking up to its subtle energy. In time you will
realize this play of ying/yang energy is not an abstract metaphysical
game, but your personal destiny. By knowing it you can slowly
come to grips with the source of the subtle forces working through
your psyche. These are the polarized energies that find their way
into your hormones, your health, your behavior, your male person-
ality, your perceptions of who you are and what the world is all
about. Some men get the confused idea that becoming spiritual
means dropping their assertive masculine qualities and becoming
passive, meditative, wearing soft flowing clothes, and acting moth-
erly and nurturing after the yin female model. According to Taoist
teachings, this is a mistake; if a man becomes too yin he is in
danger of losing his polar attractiveness to women and the very
qualities that satisfy them both sexually and spiritually. Instead of becoming spiritual, you may become a sissy—soft,
yielding, and spineless. Balancing the yin/yang polarity within your190 Taoist Secrets Of Love
psyche does not mean you should weaken your yang energy and
shed your masculine qualities. The goal of Taoist cultivation is not
androgeny, to make life colorless and sexless. It's not to prove that
there is really no difference between men and women, since both
are "one", in a bland soup called the Tao. The difference between the polarity of masculine and femi-
nine is what creates energy. The dynamic tension between yin and
yang is what gives life to a relationship between a man and a
woman. Every man and woman has both yang and yin poles within
themselves, and will express a wide mixture of masculine and femi-
nine qualities in their personality. But a man's primary subtle en-
ergy charge will be yang, and it is only in relation to this that he
inwardly cultivates the yin pole of his yang energy. This may out-
wardly change the quality of his masculine energy, softening his
rough edges or leading him to direct his male energy for more
wholesome and loving purposes. But he will and should remain
male in his orientation with the outer world, because that is his true
nature. Women love strong men; the point of cultivating your chi is
to become more sensitive and feeling within that strength. Like-
wise, you must help your lover to develop her strengths as well. On the psychological level, I will risk the generalization that
one of the major difficulties men have in practicing dual cultiva-
tion, is in harmonizing their ego with the woman's emotional sen-
sitivities. The lesson both need to learn, is that people are not
either their ego or their emotions, but that these are manifestations
of deeper subtle energies within the self. Many couples with prob-
lems expend much time, money and energy frantically pruning the
dying leaves of their relationship with the aid of marriage coun-
selors and psychiatrists. This is working from the outside in. On
one level this is very helpful, as talking about something can open
the door to self-improvement. But the Taoist approach is to nourish the roots of the tree, so
that the sap can run strong and feed the entire trunk, branches, and
wilting leaves from within. This works from the inside out. The
process is more invisible, but it is more lasting. The sap in a human
tree is chi energy, and if you want to nourish your woman you must
not let your ego block the process of sharing energy. The woman is
a mirror to a man. The subtle law of universal energy is that you get
back what you project out. If you send her an abundance of love
and energy, she will respond and return it to you. The proof ofOrgasm and Wu Wei 191
whether a couple practicing dual cultivation has transformed their
ego and emotional imbalances will be known internally to each, but
also reflected in the tenderness and harmony that develops in their
daily living. A good rule to follow in Taoist dual cultivation, is to make
love with your chi energy, not your ego. Sexual energy will begin
to cause a degeneration in couples when it is used to feed male
egotism or female emotional domination. This is the danger of
using sex for spiritual growth when you don't really have your
personal life together. The only protection is to give as much love
and respect to your lover as you humanly can. A woman needs a
certain emotional stability before she can balance higher subtle
energies. Likewise, a man's ego will block him from receiving
higher energies or experiencing the valley orgasm. If you can self-
lessly send your supportive masculine love to a woman, the energy
will empower her to return it to you ten times over. This is the yin/
yang dynamic. It's a single energy that constantly flows wherever
your intention sends it. It then returns to its source, just as you
spiritually are returning to your source. I have begun to notice the subtle domino effect between sex-
ual love and my destiny in the world. When I reach the point of Wu
Wei, of spontaneous non-action during sex, it creates a serenity in
me that softens the demands of my ego in the outside world. Some-
how, the struggle of life gets easier, I find myself resolving prob-
lems with less effort. Life is like one of those puzzle-box eggs: when you open it
there is another egg, and inside that another, and so on. Sexual
love is one of the eggs halfway to the empty egg at the center of the
puzzle. When you make love and transform your selfish ego, raw
vital chi energies and raw sex drive into something more refined
and radiant, this middle egg shines through to the other eggs in the
puzzle, lighting up both the innermost spiritual egg as well as the
worldly outer shell. The idea of Wu Wei and committment to a lover is very con-
fusing. The practice of spontaneous neutrality would seem to en-
courage the very opposite of long term commitment to another
person. Indeed, there are Taoist sex manuals on the market which
encourage readers to love as many people as possible to satisfy our
spontaneous impulses. I feel this is an irresponsible and misleading
oversimplification of the esoteric Taoist teachings on sex. Dual192 Taoist Secrets Of Love
cultivation is directed at experiencing and balancing our inner sub-
tle energy fields, not at acting out with our bodies the same basic
sexual impulse again and again. Promiscuity is not the effortless
grace of the Tao, but a superficial use of spiritual philosophy to
justify dilettantish tendencies and erotic fantasies. The excuse of
needing many partners often masks a fear of deeper intimacy with
oneself and one's lover. Spiritually, it can block the alchemical
union of ching, chi, and shien. The process of transformation re-
quires a certain stability of the lower physical forces that are upset
by wild, erratic, or excessive sexual behavior. While the Taoist philosophy on sex requires a totally non-
possessive attitude toward the energies being exchanged, it does
not imply acting irresponsibly towards other people. The neutral
mind of Wu Wei implies a balanced wisdom in spontaneously
choosing the middle course at every moment. This would apply to
questions of committment in a relationship as well. The perfect
middle choice would naturally balance the virtue of stability in a
relationship with the need for freedom to nourish one's subtle en-
ergy. These are difficult questions, but there is no ancient Taoist
sage who can answer them for you. You and your lover must
cultivate your own energy and become subtle beings wise enough
to know the truth of your own modern situation. In short, you must
become the sage, moment by moment, over the course of your
lifetime.CHAPTER 12
COMMONLY ASKED QUESTIONS ABOUT
SEMEN RETENTION
1. I've had a vasectomy. Will that affect my ability to do the
Big Draw? Chia: The effects of vasectomy upon one's sexual life and
general health warrant consideration. It is well-recognized that
there prevails among vasectomized men a normal level of physical
and mental health. Most individuals surveyed after vasectomy
have considered their health good to excellent. Many wives
thought their husbands' distinctly more virile. Improved sexual performance may be readily accounted for:
sperm is no longer discharged and its energies are no longer
wasted. The body reabsorbs active principles of the sperm cells via
the blood stream. However, those secretions not formed in the
testes are ejaculated. These benefits and far greater ones are enjoyed by Taoist
lovers. They retain not only the sperm but the entire volume of
seminal fluid, each part of which bursts with enzymes, vitamins,
proteins, trace elements, and electrical energies. Yet this is not the
most important advantage. Secretion of the vasectomized male's testes lessens over a
period of time. The volume of hormones available for reabsorption
gradually declines. While the vasectomized man never more loses
sperm, he ordinarily does not stimulate hormonal production.194 Taoist Secrets Of Love
The Big Draw Method increases hormonal secretion. First,
one focuses energy on the genitals to directly stimulate them. Sec-
ond, the transformation of sex energy to a higher level produces
higher quality hormones. Fortunately, a vasectomized man may use the Big Draw to
"steam" the seminal energies up to the head and vital organs. Moreover, with this method every man, vasectomized or not, may
exchange fortifying energies with his love partner. 2. I thought yin energy is supposed to be cool, and yang
warm. Why does a woman feel so warm when you have sex with
her? Chia: Relative to the male, however, the woman remains
more yin in her basic polarity. Some men may have very yin,
female-like qualities that they have cultivated and some women
may be very aggressive and yang in their personality. Such a cou-
ple would exchange their excess energy to achieve balance. But
this doesn't change the polarity at its most primordial, pure level. In this practice you will eventually get to the point where you
experience the woman's energy as cool. This happens normally in
the resting stage, during the yin/yang exchange. You will feel a cool
fluid running up the spine to the top of your head. It will move up
the spine in stages, as if climbing a ladder. When you learn to
surrender your fiery hot yang male energy you will feel this cool,
soothing yin female within you. At the higher level of practice you
can get this effect by simple meditating alone on the yin pole of
your yang energy. 3. How long do the Taoists take to make love? It sounds like a
very long affair. Chia: Intercourse lasts as long as both lovers desire and
should depend on the quality of the energy being exchanged. Don't
force extra orgasms, or if you haven't mastered the method, extra
ejaculations. Once you begin feeling deep satisfaction, you won't
feel the need to have sex as frequently so when you do have it don't
rush. Sometimes perfect polarity can be achieved quickly, but usu-
ally when you make love the Taoist way, it is no casual affair. From the beginning foreplay to the final quiet embrace may involve
two hours or all day. The Taoist classics suggest one thousand
loving strokes to satisfy a woman. You may rest several times and
renew more active loving. Allow an appropriate length of time
without distraction. Take the phone off the hook, and get rid of the
kids!Commonly Asked Questions 195
4.1 believe that if you ejaculate, the woman can gain a lot of
yang energy directly from the sperm. What's the difference be-
tween giving it to her this way versus giving her yang energy and
yin/yang exchange? Chia: So long as you keep the male fluid, you may give her
energy and quickly recharge yourself. If you give her the fluid, you
lose the means of re-charging for a long time. Give her much en-
ergy, but don't give away the whole battery. Unless she is an
advanced yogini who has developed the meditative ability to really
draw the full power of sperm into herself, she can't use it and you
will lose the power to give more. Even an advanced yogini will be
limited in the amount she can absorb from physical sperm. Ul-
timately, she is much better off if her yogi conserves and trans-
mutes his seed. Give her baskets of peaches: don't uproot the tree
and send her shaggy roots. 5. When I do the yin/yang exchange, I sometimes feel a mini-
orgasm in my genitals. How do I know if I am losing fluid? Chia: During exhalation and relaxation, the penis will often
"jump" as though you were ejaculating. In fact, no seminal fluid
pours from the body. The prostate gland and seminal vesicles can
also "pop" periodically, yielding great pleasure. The Taoist
Method provides this orgasmic pleasure yet keeps the fluid inside
the body. Make sure at first there is no loss of fluid in the popping. When you keep every drop, the method is properly performed. If
there should occasionally be some loss, immediately use the Hard
Contractions and the Three Finger External Locking together to
prevent further waste of seed. You must also distinguish between
losing "milk" and "water". Milk is thick and whitish sperm fluid
and is the secret elixir Taoists seek to conserve. Water is clear and
thin runny seminal fluid that the prostate produces to help deliver
the sperm. It is possible to leak some water without ejaculating any
milk. If you are at this level you shouldn't rely solely on the
method as a means of birth-control, as it only takes one sperm cell
in the watery semen fluid to impregnate a woman. 6. I'm just beginning to learn the Big Draw. Will it harm my
effort if I fail and ejaculate? Chia: Don't make it an issue of your failing or not. Nobody
expects you to hit a home run the first time you swing a bat. You
hit some singles, then a double, eventually you run to third base.196 Taoist Secrets Of Love
When you've got full control you can hit a home run almost at will. The main thing in learning something new is to keep a positive
attitude. When you begin to practice seminal conservation, try to
ejaculate no more than once per week. As you improve keep the
loss down to once or twice per month. Continuing to progress, you
will lose less and less fluid. Don't worry about losing the seed,
simply learn to harbor it for increasing periods of time. Taoists
accept what is natural, they never force any sudden change on their
body. If you lose your seed, enjoy it and send it lovingly to your
partner who will absorb at least a part of its yang essence into her
body. Likewise, never force yourself to ejaculate to please yourself
or your lover. This is a gradual process: you will spend the rest of
your life increasing in knowledge and perfecting the Tao of love. 7. What is the relationship between the strength of the buttock
and pelvic muscles and sex? I thought having sex strengthened
them, since you get a lot of exercise in your lower body. Chia: A moderate amount of sex is healthy for your body in
many ways; your glands are exercised, especially the prostate, and
more chi runs through your meridians. But a lot of these benefits
leak out the anus and buttocks because so many men with office
jobs develop a fat ass. You wouldn't believe how much chi just
trickles out of the body through the buttocks. Ejaculation is open-
ing the flood gates to energy loss, and it has an after effect on your
buttocks. Frequent sex with ejaculation disrupts your health by spas-
modically coughing forth vitality. After a period of long abuse, it
weakens the tissues so that they are unable to inhale life properly. Frequent ejaculation breaks down the tone of the lower body, in-
ducing chronic flaccidity and steady trickling out of power. I teach
pelvic strengthening exercises to improve lower body tone. By
maintaining this tone, you constantly save energy that frequent
ejaculators lose. 8.1 feel less sexual desire after doing the Big Draw every day
for several weeks. What's happening to my sexual energy? Chia: For the first several weeks of Big Draw practice, you
may experience slight lessening of sexual appetite. This is more
likely to occur if you are in a weakened condition. This indicates
that you are successfully transferring power upward from the geni-
tal area to the higher centers. Don't be alarmed! This is a sign thatCommonly Asked Questions 197
you are progressing well. You are conserving energy as never be-
fore and beginning to change it to a higher form. After no more than several weeks the power will complete the
microcosmic circuit and return much increased to the sexual cen-
ters. The power will recirculate to the genital region, which will
then be permanently fortified. Once you have completed the cir-
cuit, the power will flow throughout your entire body every time
you make love and revitalize you further. Then your appetite for
sex may well increase. Its different for each man and his lover. 9. Aren't you being a bit fanatic in trying to save every drop of
sperm? There's so much of it. I thought Taoism was a "middle"
path that advocated no extremes. Cfaia: Semen retention is simple and natural once you've un-
learned your old habit. Taoists claim that it was once the middle
way, a natural function that all humans could do naturally, and that
our current sex habits are a product of degeneration. That's why
we've got 4 billion people on earth and all the problems of over
population and pollution of a once pure earth. If people felt more
fullfillment within, they would create fewer demands without. Not
to worry. Nature—the Tao—always finds the proper way to bal-
ance itself. The conventional idea of male orgasm as a few instants of
(literally) blinding pleasure is an extreme one. After ejaculation the
man is finished unless he digs deep into himself for more energy
only to rush forth again before falling off into a pleasant emptiness. To spend the vital seed wastefully is to excrete life. Frequent
ejaculation is an infantile attempt to solve our lonely separation
from bliss. It is a rejection of the inborn joy that we may all know. Of course, people can and do love deeply without retaining
their seed during sex. But these people are unconsciously trans-
muting their seed power into love the rest of the time—this is
where love obtains its power of spontaneity. But they may miss a
deeper joy. Until you learn this deeper joy I must strongly recom-
mend you not be fanatic about losing a few drops of sperm—nature
is abundant and forgiving and its best to change gradually. Then the
change will be more permanent. But at the same time you won't be motivated to change your
sex habits unless you remember that ejaculation isolates. It cuts
you off and enslaves you in small steps to a lower state of energy. Ejaculation is one of many subtle forms of suicide, including drugs,198 Taoist Secrets Of Love
over-eating, over-everything. Your real task is not to prevent
ejaculation: it is to establish direct contact between your physical
nervous system and the subtle sources of life. To do so you must
conserve the vehicle through which your chi life energy flows. 10. Most modern sex manuals claim it's healthy to fantasize
about your erotic desires. What do the Taoists say? Chia: Many sexologists are not aware of the higher pos-
sibilities of their mind and don't understand the process of trans-
forming energy into spirit, ching into shien. Above all, Taoists are
training the mind. It is very important to keep the mind free of
distracting images. Fantasizing about sex ultimately strangles the
mind. It breaks the flow of life and provokes orgasm. Open your mind to the power of life: this will dissolve fan-
tasies. When you empty the mind of thoughts, cosmic energies
stream into the void. This is the first principle of meditation. The
act of love becomes a meditation on the great life force. Of course,
it takes time to cultivate this level of crystal clarity in your mind, so
don't worry about your habit of fantasizing. Simply begin by not
encouraging it, by catching yourself when you drift off, and return
to the present. The presence of your lover should arouse you. If her company
doesn't stimulate you, if you have to turn to erotic fantasizing, wait
for another occasion or partner. Obsessive erotic thinking inevita-
bly leads to loss of the life force. Fantasizing causes energy to seep
out even where there is no ejaculation, as well as preventing life
from flowing in spontaneously. The same is true of electric
vibrators or other stimulators. They feel good, but they mechanize
your sexual response. You can grow dependant on your machine. If you want to be more human and ultimately find deeper pleasure,
follow your natural impulses only, not the ones contrived by your
culturally conditioned mind. 11. Will this practice of holding my sperm inside eventually
lead to my losing my appetite for the physical passion of sex? Chia: As you advance in the practice you lessen your need for
physical movement. Physical movement is but the shadow of
movement of the energy body. Contact with your lover's subtle chi
is incomparably more thrilling than the hooked-fish leaps that are
often mistaken for the heights of love. Your definition of sex will be
radically changed by mastery of these practices that will find you
concerned with the quality of your subtle energy relationship with
your lover.Commonly Asked Questions 199
12. What's the difference between the physical pleasure of sex
and the pleasure of feeling love? Chia: Your pleasure is limited only by your level of con-
sciousness. The difference between whole body orgasm and
ejaculatory orgasm is the difference between human and animal
love. The animal frantically ejects his energies. The higher man
responsibly conserves vital energy and changes it to love. The truly
free and wise man ever restores himself and his partner. This su-
preme art is his duty, privilege and joy. The purest pleasure is far
beyond any sensory feeling perceived through our emotions or
intellect. When you cultivate your original spirit, your delicate
sense of subtle energy flows as well as your physical sensations are
a quantum leap beyond what most people accept as pleasure. The quality of your feeling determines the quality of energy
you generate and absorb. If your desires are selfishly erotic, the
energy may temporarily heighten your animal vitality but will not
rise and open the higher genius of your heart, mind, and spirit. These principles apply universally, but the act of love is par-
ticularly momentous for a human being. It involves one's entire
destiny. The energy of every act and thought is preserved: one who
thinks egotistically will find nothing but egotism from others. An-
other finds love everywhere because he unfailingly brings it within. When you raise your sexual seed-essence to a high level of spiritual
intention, it becomes a light-essence, or light seed that illuminates
your path through life and beyond. This is the Taoist enlightenment
taught in the higher levels of meditation. 13. If the goal is to build up one's sexual energy, what's the
harm of sleeping with a lot of different women (or men) to increase
your ching chi? Chia: The goal is not to build up one's sexual energy—it is to
transform raw sexual energy into a refined subtle energy. Sex is
only one means of doing that. Promiscuity can easily lower your
energy if you choose partners with moral or physical weakness. If you lie with degenerates, it may hurt you, in that you can
temporarily acquire your partner's vileness. By exchanging subtle
energy, you actually absorb the other's substance. You become the
other person and assume new karmic burdens. This is why old
couples resemble each other so closely: they have exchanged so
much energy that they are made of the same life-stuff. This practice
accelerates this union, but elevates it to a higher level of spiritual
experience.200 Taoist Secrets Of Love
So the best advice I can give is to never compromise your
integrity of body, mind and spirit. In choosing a lover you are
choosing your destiny, so make sure you love the woman with
whom you have sex. Then you will be in harmony with what flows
from the exchange and your actions will be proper. If you think you can love two women at once, be ready to
spend double the chi to transform and balance their energy. I doubt
if many men can really do that and feel deep serenity. For the sake
of simplicity, limit yourself to one woman at a time. It takes a lot of
time and energy to cultivate the subtle energies to a deep level. It is impossible to define love precisely. You have to consult
your inner voice. But cultivating your chi energy sensitizes you to
your conscience. What was a distant whisper before may become a
very loud voice. For your own sake, do not abandon your integrity
for the sake of physical pleasure or the pretense that you are doing
deep spiritual exercises. If you sleep with one whom you don't
love, your subtle energies will not be in balance and psychic war-
fare can begin. This will take its toll no matter how far apart you
are physically until you sever or heal the psychic connection. It's
better to be honest in the beginning. For the same reason make love only when you feel true ten-
derness within yourself. Your power to love will thus grow
stronger. Selfish or manipulative use of sex even with someone
with whom you are in love can cause great disharmony. If you feel
unable to use your sexual power lovingly, then do not use it at all! Sex is a gleaming, sharp, two-edged sword, a healing tool that can
quickly become a weapon. If used for base purposes, it cuts you
mercilessly. If you haven't found a partner with whom you can be
truly gentle, then simply touch no one. Go back to building your
internal energy and when it gets high you will either attract a
quality lover or learn a deeper level within yourself. 14. Isn't the Big Draw a form of sexual vampirism, teaching
men how to suck women's juices, etc? Chia: This view is incorrect for several reasons. First of all
there is necessarily an exchange of energy between partners, all
lovers exchange energy; the Big Draw just dramatically adds to its
magnitude. You cannot inhale the yin from your partner without
surrendering to her an equal measure of yang. This is simply a law
of etheric energy. Generosity is its own reward: the more you give, the moreCommonly Asked Questions 201
you will receive. If you selfishly refuse to surrender the yang to
your partner, you can absorb little energy from her. Thus, attempts
at selfish use of the Big Draw will lead to failure. Their only effect
of trying would be to deeply imbalance oneself mentally and spir-
itually. Likewise, generous and compassionate use of the method
guarantees the fullest flow of invigorating energy from your part-
ner. This "Fail-Safe" aspect of the method not only prevents se-
rious abuse of one's partner, but the natural law of the Tao will
ultimately mete out an equal punishment to one who tries to take
advantage of his lover. Taoists agree with the Bible here: "As ye
give, so shall ye receive." Secondly, when you draw up power you inhale mainly the
energy of your own sexual centers. During the act of love the
hundreds of millions of sperm cells swim about frantically in their
desire to get out of you and into the egg. Their motion creates a
high electromagnetic charge in the semen. In this way your lover
stimulates you to produce and concentrate your own energy, which
you move to higher centers with the big Draw. Finally, a major part of the energy you draw from the lover
would leave her body at any event as a result of sexual stimulation. If you did not absorb it, the power would dissipate into the atmo-
sphere. By suppressing your ejaculation and your partner's
orgasm, both lovers lose much less energy than they would in
conventional sex. By following the Big Draw Method both effec-
tively absorb some of the energy the other releases instead of let-
ting it blow away. 15. After practicing dual cultivation for a while, how do you
feel when you ejaculate again? Chia: When you begin to meditate and cultivate your sexual
energy and engage in various Taoist exercises, you notice imme-
diately what happens when you ejaculate. There's an immediate
feedback in what happens to your energy level. You feel emptied,
weakened, sometimes enough to temporarily depress you. The
same feeling prior to doing Taoist practices you might have called
"pleasant fatigue"; now the loss begins to feel painful on a psychic
level, as you are accustomed to living at a higher standard of chi
energy. In actual sex, in ejaculation the energy loss is very appar-
ent and very obvious. 16. How are the eyes used in Sexual Kung Fu practice?202 Taoist Secrets Of Love
Chia: The eyes are very important. Later on, if you just use
the eyes and a little breathing you can do the whole Big Draw. You
should keep your eyes closed during sex to maximize your internal
energy; if you are looking around, the mind will be distracted and
chi will escape as the eyes are the most yang organ in the body. Learn to see inside your body and that of your lovers. The eyes
reflect your intention psychologically so you can literally direct
everything with your eyes. Correct practice of Taoist cultivation
will help you develop powerful eyes. The opposite is true as well;
improper sex can destroy the sparkle in your eyes. If you're obser-
vant, without knowing anything about oriental medicine, you can
actually "see" people who have depleted themselves sexually. You see it in the face, the sallowness of the eyes and skin, and lack-
luster quality in the hair. 17. How will ill health, tension, stress and other adverse psy-
chological states affect Taoist sex? Chia: A good sex life is closely related to your physical health
and mental condition. If you are tense it is difficult to use mind
control and the big draw methods. Your ability to use these meth-
ods in actual sex is more limited when you are tense, and it's not
much fun having uptight sex anyway. Microcosmic meditation and
Tai Chi Chi Kung will greatly help you to calm down. If you're not
feeling well or if your general level of chi is low, your sex should be
passive with your partner moving on top, giving you the healing
energy. What happens in your sexual encounters is like a micro-
cosm of daily life that is magnified tremendously. Your psychological state is very important. Feeling loving,
feeling relaxed, feeling calm and not having a lot of negative emo-
tions is essential. If you're very angry or sad or fearful it's very
difficult to engage joyfully in sex and to use this kind of practice. It
may throw you or your partner off emotionally, as your aura is
very open during sex and you absorb negativity easily. Better to sit
down together and use the Fusion of Five Elements meditation to
calm the mind. Even after years of having practiced the Big Draw,
if you are not in a good psychological state you might have to exert
considerable effort to hold your seed. On the other hand, when you
feel calm and good psychologically you can carry the whole thing
off with no effort. 18. What is the difference between mechanically blocking
ejaculation through celibacy and the Taoist cultivation method?Commonly Asked Questions 203
Chia: You can mechanically block ejaculation using your
mind only by refusing to have sex or masturbate. But this is using
willpower against the body impulse; Taoists cultivate the bodily
impulses, they put the chi energy to work elsewhere. If you are
celibate and can naturally transform your sex energy and you can
keep your body fully integrated with your mind, you should be
shiny and radiant. But not many men are so naturally enlightened. There's some negative evidence on health and celibacy based
on data that has been collected about priests, using sheer willpower
to mechanically prevent sex. This can create long term problems of
the prostate, causing failure and inflammation of that organ and
very often considerable pain and debility. One study did medical
autopsies on over a thousand Catholic priests and found one third
died of prostate complications or prostate cancer. The suggestion
is that their celibacy was bad for their health. In their case appar-
ently it was true, I've heard of celibate yogis who have similar
problems with their prostate. The problem arises, I believe, because they did not know how
to cultivate their sex energy properly. Their energy channels aren't
open between their lower and upper body and so their sex energy is
blocked and congests the blood and hormones in the genitals and
the prostate. To prevent prostate problems, a celibate should
squeeze his perineum tightly and relax it several dozen times a day. This will exercise the prostate somewhat, although not as well as
the Big Draw, which also circulates chi energy through it. If you try
to cure a weak prostate by having more sex it can work, as orgasm
exercises your prostate, but you risk losing a lot of sperm energy
unless you know the Taoist method. Other men weaken their pros-
tate from excess ejaculation and depletion of their sexual energy. For them celibacy is a cure. Stopping ejaculation with an internal (big draw) practice may
look similar to mechanically stopping sex through celibacy, but the
difference is great. The Big Draw consciously transforms your en-
ergy up using internal skill, celibacy leaves it to chance or will-
power. I've done this practice many years and never had any prob-
lems at all. Sometimes, when there's some congestion, just a little
massage clears it up. That's why in terms of hygiene, you cannot
separate this practice from the larger context of meditation and the
energy work in the Taoist system not to speak of other consider-
ations that have to do with ethical, psychological and spiritual
aspects.204 Taoist Secrets Of Love
19. Could you summarize the advantage of the Taoist total
body orgasm over a loving normal sex orgasm with ejaculation? Chia: A total orgasm of the body and mind might be described
as a showering of nectar from the head, running down your insides
like a springtime shower. It is unmistakable. It is a wave of subtle
chi energy that breaks up muscle armoring, releases nerve and
lymphatic tension, and opens up hidden powers of feeling. You feel
like a new born baby, only instead of experiencing your rebirth as a
baby does—as unconscious bliss—you are very adult and con-
scious. The weight of the world is there, but suddenly it becomes
lighter than a feather. This feeling of lightness hanpens because the heavy fluid of
your sperm-seed has successfully been transmuted into a light-seed
which nourishes your higher consciousness. You feel happy deep
inside because you know you have found the path home. You are
not weighted by yourself or your lover. This is different from a
genital orgasm, which is usually followed by either a heavy sleep as
the body attempts to recover energy lost or by a still anxious mind
that asks: "What next?" With genital orgasm the body is relaxed,
but the mind and spirit are not; they are still hungry for nourish-
ment of subtle energy because the polarity between lovers is not
complete. 20. Could you explain in detail what happens when you reach
the point of no return during an orgasm? Chia: The curve of sexual arousal in both men and women but
especially for men (because women have a greater capacity to
maintain a plateau) is to have a gradual (or rapid) arousal, a short
plateau and then a rapid and sudden fall off and that's it ... The
Big Bang Theory. Taoist cultivation teaches you to use the Steady
State theory, which is continuous expansion and contraction of yin
and yang during a series of "valley" orgasms. The Big Bang
theory, currently in vogue as the cosmological theory of the Uni-
verse, has as its roots the sexual desires of the western male scien-
tist. Now, the plateau can be likened to a "primal zone", that is an
experience of primal time and space. Minutes may seem like hours;
however you choose to define it. It is what psychologists call an
altered state of consciousness. Women seem more capable than
men of extending this plateau. Beyond that there is a critical point
of no return and then the "fall off." The plateau can last anywhereCommonly Asked Questions 205
from a few seconds to several minutes to a half hour or longer and
is characterized by quieting, relaxation and a diminishing erection
in the male. In practice, after this period of quiet the couple re-
sumes mutual stimulation, building up the energy, building the chi
through thrusting and various other means of arousal. And again a
plateau may be reached and maintained a while. It takes practice to keep from "stepping off the edge" but the
rewards are great. It's like climbing a pyramid—the top of each
step is safe and flat, but going up over the edge to the next step is a
little dizzying. In this step procedure you build a potential to re-
spond to your lover that's enormous and so the probability of
losing control increases as you progress to higher steps. It's as
though you were building more and more pressure, but it's a plea-
surable pressure, because the energy of each plateau is greater than
the last. In fact, the plateaus get longer as the energy builds. When
sufficient energy has developed and you are at a plateau, the chi
energy begins to run through the chi channels in the body and so
what had begun as a genital response now becomes a bodily one. If
the whole body energy of the male is balanced with that of the
female, the energy penetrates the subtle bodies on mental and spir-
itual levels as well, aligning your total polarity and opening your
awareness of both knowledge and bliss. The nature of the Tao
reveals itself to be both awesome and ordinary. The "primal zone" on the plateau is a very precarious place
and it is here that the skill of Taoist dual cultivation can really be
said to be exercised. The sensitivity and ability to keep from going
on to the "point of no return" is a function of your experience,
your intention and your overall state of relaxation and health and
your relationship to your partner. Now a woman can trigger a
man's ejaculation quite easily thru her own orgasm or by stimulat-
ing him by contracting vaginal muscles. So this technique does not
require a mutual orgasm and especially in the learning phase, the
man must be permitted time to gain some stability at the plateau. It's interesting that many women feel that unless a man has an
ejaculation he's not satisfied. This is where sexual politics comes in
with all the attitudes and expectations which color responses tre-
mendously. Both men and women have to gradually de-condition
themselves of their old concepts. This will happen naturally as a
couple cultivates their energy together.206 Taoist Secrets Of Love
21. Does homosexuality or group sex block spiritual develop-
ment? Chia: The Taoists are too wise to condemn anything outright,
as everything leads back to the Tao. So the question really is how
can it be against nature, or the Tao, if the Tao created it? Homo-
sexuality is not against the Tao, but it is also not the highest experi-
ence of the Tao possible. It's impossible to experience the full
balance of male-female polarity with homosexual love. The subtle
energies are lacking and you can't create something if the raw
materials are absent. The highest harmony of yin and yang cannot
be achieved. It depends on how far on the spiritual path you wish
to proceed. If you go deep enough into meditation you may culti-
vate your opposite polar energy within. But then your homosexual
love life might disrupt that balance, so you would constantly be
correcting it. The problem is greater for two men than for two women,
because their double yang energy is too expansive and more easily
leads to conflict. A double yin energy can be harmonious, as yin is
yielding, but neither woman will experience deepest fulfillment. Both cases can lead to subtle organ imbalances that require atten-
tion if best health is to be maintained. The situation for male homosexuals can be somewhat amelio-
rated if the men seek alternate sources of yin energy. They could
eat more yin food, spend more time with female friends and work
in the garden cultivating earth chi. You can also absorb energy
directly from the earth by lying face down on the ground and medi-
tating, drawing it into your penis and hands. This might help if it
were done before or after sex. If you wish to practice semen reten-
tion and find yourself in rapidly changing male homosexual rela-
tionships, I advise you to become celibate for a period and attempt
to gain stability through intensive single cultivation using the Big
Draw and Meditation. In group sex it is even more difficult to harmonize the subtle
energies. I recommend you avoid it as it is rarely motivated by
love. The only exception might be two women with one man, as the
double yin can harmonize his yang if they are also in harmony. For
most people this is unlikely to be stable, which is necessary for real
cultivation to occur. If you feel attracted to several people the best
thing you can do for them is to inspire them to cultivate themselves
using Tai Chi, meditation, yoga, or the methods described in thisCommonly Asked Questions 207
book. Teach by example; you don't have to physically love every-
one you feel attracted to. You will never go deep in yourself if you
scatter your energy widely. 22. What causes the penis to go flaccid, if you began with a
stiff erection but didn't ejaculate? Chia: It may be that your mind has left the act of love, and is
distracted elsewhere. The chi moves with the mind, it is guided by
it. If your mind is concentrating on a higher exchange of energy
with your lover and you've lost your erection, it may be a sign that
physical love is no longer needed and you should relax and enjoy
the communion. You should keep your flaccid penis within her or
touching her if possible, as the chi can still flow through it. But
please, for yourt)wn sanity, don't try to force a new erection. 23. If I master the Big Draw and am celibate, but still have wet
dreams, what should I do? Chia: If you really master the Big Draw this should not hap-
pen at all, but this might happen to someone who retains the sex
energy but hasn't transformed all of it up to a higher center. The
sex energy remaining in the lower part might be causing trouble. The Taoist method of Microcosmic Orbit Meditation, Fusion of
Five Elements, and Kan and Li contain the formulas for transform-
ing the energy up. If that doesn't work and the wet dreams persist,
listen to your body's message and find a lover. 24. Is it o.k. to make specific wishes or project a thought at
the moment of orgasm? Chia: I strongly recommend you avoid projecting your ego at
the moment of orgasm or at any time during love-making. This is a
magical practice that can have very unexpected effects, sometimes
dangerous to your spiritual growth. Evil astral entities can attach
themselves if you are not well balanced. Some men have sex with
"phantom" lovers in their dream state that are real entities. You
might also get what you asked for—and much more that you failed
to specify and that you find extremely undesirable. You will also
lose energy by sending it all outside. I know one woman who did
this "magical child" projection for ten years. It made her pale and
sickly. It is best to give the energy back to your lover, as that is
where it came from. In this way you pay the universe immediately
for its blessing. If you increase your lover's energy instead of some
ego desire, she will be transformed to a higher level and be in a
position to return even higher blessings to you or others in the208 Taoist Secrets Of Love
universe. Spiritual progress comes from achieving balance of yin/
yang, from being both spontaneously present and neutral, not from
fulfilling some mental projection. Taoists refine their chi in their
body. We don't send out our dirty laundry and hope it comes back
washed—we clean it ourselves. So keep your attention on balanc-
ing your chi where you are; that is your entire obligation to the
universe.CHAPTER 13
STUDENT EXPERIENCES OF TAOIST SEXUAL
CULTIVATION
This interview was conducted by Michael Winn with a 46 year old
psychologist and student of Master Chia who has raised several
children. M.W. : Was it easy to learn the Sexual Kung Fu? Student: I've been practicing Seminal Kung Fu for a year and
a half now. I found it easy to learn when I practiced alone but
difficult to implement during sex because of an unconscious resis-
tance from making love for so many years in a different way. It got easier as I grew more aware that normal sex fatigued
me. But it is not possible to divorce this practice from the other
practices that I've studied, such as the Microcosmic and fusion
meditation formulas, Iron Shirt Chi Kung, and Tai Chi. They in-
creased my sensitivity to energy, particularly the Iron Shirt Chi
Kung. M.W. : How has it affected your daily relationship? Student: It has produced a very strong bonding. Many times
the expression takes the form of energy that flows between us. Sometimes it's translated into telepathic or clairvoyant experi-
ences. That happens in many relationships when partners are to-
gether over a long period of time. What's unusual in my rela-
tionship is that it's happened very, very quickly. My Taoist
practice accelerated the process. M.W. : Has it been so satisfying to you that you've wanted to
have sex less often?210 Taoist Secrets Of Love
Student: No. The reverse. I want sex more frequently, three
or four times a week, depending on the occasion or the situation. Sometimes a number of times during the day. And quite frequently
during the week. When sex does become tiring is when I fail to do the practice
and I lose my energy by ejaculation. And I still find that after a year
and a half, almost 2 years, of doing this practice that it happens
periodically that I lose the will to implement it, I find it quite
interesting as a psychologist to see the old conditioning which still
remains in myself is not yet totally overcome. That I just want to go
for the orgasm. That's something I'm still struggling with. I have
control of it now but I have to be pretty watchful. M.W. : It's like looking at an aspect of your former self. Student: I owe it much to social and cultural conditioning. This type of sexual activity is absolutely counter to the drive of
western sexuality as we understand it. M.W. : Can you describe any extraordinary experiences? Student: A number of them. They were characterized by in-
tense energy flow between us after a period of intercourse and
repeated control of ejaculation. There were many occasions where
the energy would build up and there was an arching between our
mouth and genital, like electricity leaping across a gap. Or it would
zoom through our Microcosmic Orbits, back and forth between us. At other times it was like a cocoon of energy that just wraps us
both, radiating inside and outside our bodies. M.W. : Is the cocooning valuable to the relationship or is it
just for its pleasure?
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Summarize the following text section accurately and concisely. Maintain specific details and numerical information, and use anti-repetition mechanisms:

        They
simply don't feel as strong a compulsion to pursue such a yang,
expansive goal of teaching outwardly. Women have a different
journey. But this is also the very heart of man's fascination with
woman and with her orgasm, which is a kind of inward teaching for
the male adept subtle enough to learn from her. The female orgasm
is an inward explosion—or implosion—of her yin essence. In the
valley orgasm man can experience this imploding yin energy in his
different Tan Tiens as a fusion, a kind of meltdown. Yin represents
earth energy, or physical matter. What happens during her orgasm
is that the very structure of her body is vibrating and imploding,
and by harmonising your energy with hers you are opened up to a
new and polar opposite experience of your body. The woman's
wisdom is that if you go deep into the earth, your body, it will lift
you into heaven. It's an initiation into an inner mystery of being
that women are empowered to give men, but can't bestow without
an infusion of male energy as a catalyst. Lovers who have no esoteric model to guide their path some-
times gain glimpses of this meltdown state when they languish in a
kind of sweet trance after love-making and their energies fuse in a
spontaneous valley orgasm. Their bodies may feel transparent, or
they may feel like they are floating; sounds arrive with a tinkling
crystal clarity, and colors in the room seem brighter, as if freshly
washed. This is an altered state of consciousness in which they are
perceiving with purity and directness the primal unity of the natural
world. The goal of Taoist cultivation is to sustain and intensify that
state, in which the separateness we ordinarily feel is dissolved and
integrated into a higher reality. A higher orgasm of our mind and
body magically moves us closer to the original chi which exists
everywhere. The pure fusion of the yin and yang subtle energies in
the microcosm of our body reminds us that the same is happening
in the macrocosm—that the sun and the moon and earth and the
Milky Way literally make love with one another. The planets at-Orgasm and Wu Wei 183
tract each other with vast electro-magnetic and gravitational fields. The stars and quasars shoot out hot yang streams of light and
radiation to be received by the cold yin vacuum of empty space. We witness this cosmic love-making from afar, reflected in the
eerie light that reaches us on earth by way of the moon or shooting
stars that streak across the sky. Perhaps all this light energy ends
up being sucked back into the womb of the universe, the black
holes, beyond which is true nothingness, what the Taoists call
"Wu Chi. " In a parallel sense the male's seed is his solar or nuclear
energy. He cultivates or stockpiles it so it can be exploded in a
controlled manner in his tan tiens. It is then emitted out into his
personal space as radiant heat. A woman can absorb it and give it
back in material form as a cooling mystic heat which heals. The
Taoists call the balance of mind within which this alchemical pro-
cess of transformation effortlessly occurs "Wu Wei". This is trans-
lated as "non-action", and sometimes taken to mean that the Tao-
ists are passive mystical observers of nature who never get
involved for fear of upsetting the delicate balance of yin/yang. What it really implies is a neutrality, or state of receptivity, so that
anything can spontaneously happen. It's a passive state in the
sense that the entire universe is pure potential, but it is active in
that it exists in total harmony with the universe that is dynamically
manifesting itself every moment. You are eternally free to act or
not-act, depending on what the situation demands. On a practical level, women might be seen as living closer to
the state of "Wu Wei" than men, for it is their nature as yin to
empty themselves and receive the universe to realize fullness. This
yin essence is what makes a woman's energy so spontaneous and
attractive to a man. The less effort she makes, the more natural and
easy and accessible she appears to a man. A woman can just lie
there and get pregnant; she makes the very act of creation seem
simple. Men, on the other hand, are yang, with an expanding en-
ergy that seems to imply great effort to sustain itself. How can men
effortlessly get bigger or stronger or create anything without work
and more work. Perhaps men can find an answer in their experience of the
valley orgasm. This orgasm of the total mind, body, and spirit is
entered into effortlessly. When you are in the valley, strolling
through the lovely scenery that includes only you, your lover, and184 Taoist Secrets Of Love
the subtle cosmos, you remember how easy and natural this higher
harmony is, that you've been there before, but forgot it while you
were busy struggling out in the world to earn money, raise a family,
etc. You don't have to work to create this sense of loving peace. To
the contrary, this state of "Wu Wei" is achieved not by exerting
yourself, but by lying in relaxed intercourse with your lover and
simply being with her. Wu Wei is nothing more than being balanced
in the field of pure subtle energies generated by your bodies and by
the pre-existing fields of yin/yang energy in the universe. Your
love-making is practice for staying in that relaxed state, so even-
tually you'll be able to constantly feel that deep serenity within
yourself after you return to the world of chores. I have found the spontaneous effortlessness of the valley
orgasm reaches to the very heart of the Taoist teachings. Some
men may get trapped by their fascination with the techniques of chi
cultivation—by the mechanics of the Big Draw method. They may
get a lot of chi from it, but if they are trying too hard they may
never experience the valley orgasm or the wu wei process, which is
a delicate balance of non-striving yin energy and very directed
yang energy. When the two are balanced in a valley orgasm you
experience the full paradox of standing still (yin) and moving at the
same time (yang). That is why the great Taoist poets write of the paradoxical
nature of the Tao. Wu Wei is doing nothing, but everything hap-
pens. My first experience of the valley orgasm took me and my
lover by surprise, probably because we expected the Taoist eso-
teric methods of love making to be like the deep solo meditative
experiences both of us had experienced for a number of years
before we became lovers. During the valley orgasm I felt like I was
in two places at once. My body was imploding and fusing inwardly,
while my awareness was expanding outwards into larger energy
fields and subtle realms of being impossible to describe. I found it amazing the way my body seemed to take its cues
from my lover's body. My entire body started to vibrate rapidly at
the same speed as hers and stayed attuned for some minutes. De-
spite the orgasmic intensity, my body temperature was neither hot
nor cold, but even and pleasant. It was very different from my
previous meditative practice which stimulated the kundalini energy
to rise in a column of hot electric yang energy and led to explosive
opening of my crown or third eye centers. It would sometimes putOrgasm and Wu Wei 185
me into a trance where I forgot I even had a body. My conscious
mind would shut down while my body raced to absorb the high
dose of subtle yang energy. The point I'm trying to make in describing such a subtle and
subjective personal experience is that Taoist cultivation teaches
balanced meditation in all the body's tan tiens (or chakras). This is
considered the most stable marriage of yin and yang—the cooler
grounding lower centers receiving the heat from the expanding
higher centers, the classical mixture of fire and water. This is the
middle path of the Tao—staying grounded in your body while on a
lifetime journey though the subtle energy realms. The spiritual direction of Taoist dual cultivation is not Sudden
Enlightenment, or astral travel, dissolution in bliss, or fantastic
visions. These might occur as temporary side effects of the prac-
tice. But the main intention of the Taoists aspiring to immortality
was simply to maintain a dynamic balance of energy during the
10,000 ordinary moments of the day. The Taoists are suspicious of
any transcendental path that claims to be very high and very quick
or that leaves the human body uncared for in the rush to become
divine. Their wisdom is that what counts is an evolution that lasts,
and that such growth usually comes slowly and steadily. The
10,000 daily moments when stretched over 25 years adds up to a
125 million moments, so you have plenty of opportunities to prac-
tice cultivating the your chi over a lifetime. Fortunately, these
millions of moments occur one by one, making the task simpler,
and a bit less imposing. Many people in the west want 60-second Enlightenment, and
they may well get what they project—Enlightenment that lasts 60
seconds. The Taoist process may seem slow to some with its insis-
tence on circulating higher energies into the lower centers. It seems
much easier to open a third eye and go to the spiritual worlds
directly, without bothering with a clumsy and heavy physical body. This is the value of the Taoist practice of dual cultivation of sexual
energy. It leads to the acceptance of the ordinary moment, of
human desire, of the never ending sexual impulse, as a valuable in-
the-body way of understanding the Tao. This emphasis on the ordinary in daily life being an essential
part of the wholeness of the Tao is why the ancient sages did not
live for peak spiritual experiences, or seek an explosive peak
orgasm in sex. This seeking after bliss is like trying to be all yang. It186 Taoist Secrets Of Love
is an extreme state. The valley orgasm is not just a code name for
bliss. It balances the yin energy of our earthly body (and the
Karma, or suffering, it creates) and the bliss of transcending it with
heavenly yang energy. When this bodily suffering and heavenly
bliss are balanced, they cancel each other out. Emptiness is the
result. This is true serenity, remaining empty even as you acknowl-
edge both poles of experience as possibilities. Neither pole con-
trols you, so you are truly free to choose. The desires for bodily
pleasure and spiritual transcendence are born and destroyed every
moment. You remain both empty and full, and life becomes a tai
chi dance. When you experience this, you have tasted enlighten-
ment. When you can stay that way, you are immortal. PRESERVING POLARITY:
WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE YANG. By Michael Winn
"A Sage will practice the Tao. A fool will only admire it. " Ancient Taoist proverb. I interviewed several dozen of Master Chia's students in the course
of writing this book with him, and was deeply struck by the dif-
ferences in attitude to sexual cultivation between men and women. In couples that were practicing the methods taught here, the men
were more fascinated by the energy generated or the states of mind
that might be reached. The women were more concerned to know
that their man loved them; whether or not he succeeded at his
spiritual technique was secondary. Some women were worried initially that all the time their man
spent doing Taoist exercises and meditations meant less time for
his relationship with her. A few complained that a sense of tech-
nique invaded their love-making. Most admitted that this negative
aspect seemed to disappear as the Taoist semen retention methods
began to work. The love-making grew longer, and the added time
allowed for more tenderness to develop in the relationship. Other men began doing the Taoist practices and encountered
resistence from their lover over the holding back of ejaculation. Their women felt that when the man ejaculated, it was a more totalOrgasm and Wu Wei 187
surrender of himself to her and thus more loving. These women
were also concerned that by missing his ejaculation the woman
might somehow be at fault for not bringing him to full conventional
orgasm. Most of this resistance is due to lack of spiritual education,
or may be an unconscious attempt to maintain sexual power over a
man. As one woman explained it to me, "some women get a feeling
that they can possess their man only when he has surrendered by
ejaculating. She isn't consciously aware of the energy equation,
but it may be the way she alleviates her insecurity about his love
for her. " In this kind of relationship the man's ejaculation has become a
kind of football on the sexual playing field. The pattern is one
wheje after the man surrenders his seed, he unconsciously holds
back from her in other ways to conserve his energy and identity. She unconsciously senses this, and thinking she is strengthening
their relationship encourages him to ejaculate. When he learns the
Taoist method of retaining his seed and moving the energy up
within himself, she resists because she is losing the tangible symbol
of his surrender to her, his semen. Her motives are loving on one
level, but unfortunately they are possessive. The only remedy for this situation is for the man to share his
experience of increased energy and love with her. Taoist lovemak-
ing is impossible to master if the relationship is poisoned by jeal-
ousy and possessiveness over the exchange of lower sexual en-
ergy. The essence of the process of esoteric love is to transform the
energy up to the heart and spiritual centers before exchanging it
with your lover. This highlights the importance of the man return-
ing to the woman the energy he has received from her during sex. If
he tries to keep it for his own personal ends or projects it out his
third eye into some fantastic vision, he disperses the chi and breaks
the cycle of exchange with her. This is why the Taoists believe it is
better to repay the immediate source of your energy—your lover—
as she can use the higher transformed energy you give her to bal-
ance herself and you. The energy of the two partners in the relationship begins to
move in an upward spiral, and becomes more exquisitely refined
with each spiral. It eventually expands to embrace friends and
family members in the dynamic. This spiral relationship is actually
expressed in the Taoist symbol of yin/yang circling endlessly
around in a circle. The male energy is directed, like an arrow188 Taoist Secrets Of Love
moving in a straight line. The female energy is rounded and em-
bracing, like an empty circle. When they intersect, the circle em-
braces the straight line and bends it in a spiral. Taoist love-making
is a spiritual ecology system for recycling lower energies into
higher ones, with Enlightenment and Immortality being phases of
the spiralling process when the energies get very pure. However, most of us, myself included, are still very mortal
and struggling with our ego. Once I leave the small and private
world of sexual intimacy or meditation, my public ego adamantly
refuses to adopt a stance of spontaneous non-action, of Wu Wei,
and keeps insisting I plan ahead for my own self-interest. To ame-
liorate this selfish tendency, I try to focus on serving the ever-
changing balance of subtle energy around me instead of my ego. My ego is very good at lying to itself and is always getting me into
trouble with its own projections, rationalizations, and hidden agen-
das. Seeing things in terms of their energy encourages a certain
neutrality—I stop struggling to get money or position and look at
what kind of energy the things I want really represent. While it is easy to misinterpret the quality of chi I feel in
myself or sense in a person or situation, I feel that ultimately the
energy doesn't lie because it is the very glue connecting me with
other beings, both human and spiritual. In this sense Taoist chi
cultivation is a method of refining one's power of intuition, of
knowing beyond one's rational mind. Most western men find it
easy to accept this in theory. But the balancing of yin and yang
energy can seem very abstract and impractical. I read Taoist po-
etry and the / Ching for years and liked it, but never got a deep
"gut" feeling of what was really happening with yin and yang. Only when I began doing Taoist yoga and practicing testicle
breathing, the big draw, the microcosmic and fusion meditations
did I experience in my body the distinct subtle energies of hot and
cold, and the energies in the five major organs, heart, kidney, etc. I
had to get trained by Master Chia on what to look for. When I saw
it right inside my body I felt ecstatic, like Christopher Columbus
confirming the world was not flat. There was a cool, yin energy
inside me, a new dimension of my being to explore. I set sail on the
Taoist path with the faith that the world was round and I would
return to my starting point a bit wiser. I find that spirit has en-
livened my love-making as well. Dual cultivation has become an
adventurous journey into a new part of myself and my lover. Orgasm and Wu Wei 189
Yin and yang are not just concepts. They represent real
qualities of chi energy that can be stored in your body and used in
your ordinary life. A purely intellectual approach to Taoism is one
of the toughest obstacles a highly educated western student has to
overcome. Westerners consider the intellect to be the mind, while
Taoists see intellect as just one tool of the whole mind-body-spirit. When Taoists cultivate their chi and refine the union of body,
mind, and spirit with their spiritual exercises and alchemical medi-
tations, they are training the mind to live in a world filled with
dynamic fields of energy. This means to be a Taoist you stop living in a disembodied
world of words and concepts constructed by your intellect. You
doq't stop thinking, but you may need to learn how to think-feel
with your whole being. To do this you will develop faculties you
forgot you had and which are right now sitting dormant in the 90%
unused portion of your brain and body capacity. That is why sex is
so healthy for western men; it is the only time many of them escape
from the conceptual prisons of their intellect and ego, and gain an
experience of being wholly in the body. If you are just beginning to cultivate your chi, don't worry if
you have trouble distinguishing between yin and yang energy. Just
do your exercises and meditations daily. When you begin to sense
any vibration, warmth, tingling, or altered sense perceptions it is a
sign your body is waking up to its subtle energy. In time you will
realize this play of ying/yang energy is not an abstract metaphysical
game, but your personal destiny. By knowing it you can slowly
come to grips with the source of the subtle forces working through
your psyche. These are the polarized energies that find their way
into your hormones, your health, your behavior, your male person-
ality, your perceptions of who you are and what the world is all
about. Some men get the confused idea that becoming spiritual
means dropping their assertive masculine qualities and becoming
passive, meditative, wearing soft flowing clothes, and acting moth-
erly and nurturing after the yin female model. According to Taoist
teachings, this is a mistake; if a man becomes too yin he is in
danger of losing his polar attractiveness to women and the very
qualities that satisfy them both sexually and spiritually. Instead of becoming spiritual, you may become a sissy—soft,
yielding, and spineless. Balancing the yin/yang polarity within your190 Taoist Secrets Of Love
psyche does not mean you should weaken your yang energy and
shed your masculine qualities. The goal of Taoist cultivation is not
androgeny, to make life colorless and sexless. It's not to prove that
there is really no difference between men and women, since both
are "one", in a bland soup called the Tao. The difference between the polarity of masculine and femi-
nine is what creates energy. The dynamic tension between yin and
yang is what gives life to a relationship between a man and a
woman. Every man and woman has both yang and yin poles within
themselves, and will express a wide mixture of masculine and femi-
nine qualities in their personality. But a man's primary subtle en-
ergy charge will be yang, and it is only in relation to this that he
inwardly cultivates the yin pole of his yang energy. This may out-
wardly change the quality of his masculine energy, softening his
rough edges or leading him to direct his male energy for more
wholesome and loving purposes. But he will and should remain
male in his orientation with the outer world, because that is his true
nature. Women love strong men; the point of cultivating your chi is
to become more sensitive and feeling within that strength. Like-
wise, you must help your lover to develop her strengths as well. On the psychological level, I will risk the generalization that
one of the major difficulties men have in practicing dual cultiva-
tion, is in harmonizing their ego with the woman's emotional sen-
sitivities. The lesson both need to learn, is that people are not
either their ego or their emotions, but that these are manifestations
of deeper subtle energies within the self. Many couples with prob-
lems expend much time, money and energy frantically pruning the
dying leaves of their relationship with the aid of marriage coun-
selors and psychiatrists. This is working from the outside in. On
one level this is very helpful, as talking about something can open
the door to self-improvement. But the Taoist approach is to nourish the roots of the tree, so
that the sap can run strong and feed the entire trunk, branches, and
wilting leaves from within. This works from the inside out. The
process is more invisible, but it is more lasting. The sap in a human
tree is chi energy, and if you want to nourish your woman you must
not let your ego block the process of sharing energy. The woman is
a mirror to a man. The subtle law of universal energy is that you get
back what you project out. If you send her an abundance of love
and energy, she will respond and return it to you. The proof ofOrgasm and Wu Wei 191
whether a couple practicing dual cultivation has transformed their
ego and emotional imbalances will be known internally to each, but
also reflected in the tenderness and harmony that develops in their
daily living. A good rule to follow in Taoist dual cultivation, is to make
love with your chi energy, not your ego. Sexual energy will begin
to cause a degeneration in couples when it is used to feed male
egotism or female emotional domination. This is the danger of
using sex for spiritual growth when you don't really have your
personal life together. The only protection is to give as much love
and respect to your lover as you humanly can. A woman needs a
certain emotional stability before she can balance higher subtle
energies. Likewise, a man's ego will block him from receiving
higher energies or experiencing the valley orgasm. If you can self-
lessly send your supportive masculine love to a woman, the energy
will empower her to return it to you ten times over. This is the yin/
yang dynamic. It's a single energy that constantly flows wherever
your intention sends it. It then returns to its source, just as you
spiritually are returning to your source. I have begun to notice the subtle domino effect between sex-
ual love and my destiny in the world. When I reach the point of Wu
Wei, of spontaneous non-action during sex, it creates a serenity in
me that softens the demands of my ego in the outside world. Some-
how, the struggle of life gets easier, I find myself resolving prob-
lems with less effort. Life is like one of those puzzle-box eggs: when you open it
there is another egg, and inside that another, and so on. Sexual
love is one of the eggs halfway to the empty egg at the center of the
puzzle. When you make love and transform your selfish ego, raw
vital chi energies and raw sex drive into something more refined
and radiant, this middle egg shines through to the other eggs in the
puzzle, lighting up both the innermost spiritual egg as well as the
worldly outer shell. The idea of Wu Wei and committment to a lover is very con-
fusing. The practice of spontaneous neutrality would seem to en-
courage the very opposite of long term commitment to another
person. Indeed, there are Taoist sex manuals on the market which
encourage readers to love as many people as possible to satisfy our
spontaneous impulses. I feel this is an irresponsible and misleading
oversimplification of the esoteric Taoist teachings on sex. Dual192 Taoist Secrets Of Love
cultivation is directed at experiencing and balancing our inner sub-
tle energy fields, not at acting out with our bodies the same basic
sexual impulse again and again. Promiscuity is not the effortless
grace of the Tao, but a superficial use of spiritual philosophy to
justify dilettantish tendencies and erotic fantasies. The excuse of
needing many partners often masks a fear of deeper intimacy with
oneself and one's lover. Spiritually, it can block the alchemical
union of ching, chi, and shien. The process of transformation re-
quires a certain stability of the lower physical forces that are upset
by wild, erratic, or excessive sexual behavior. While the Taoist philosophy on sex requires a totally non-
possessive attitude toward the energies being exchanged, it does
not imply acting irresponsibly towards other people. The neutral
mind of Wu Wei implies a balanced wisdom in spontaneously
choosing the middle course at every moment. This would apply to
questions of committment in a relationship as well. The perfect
middle choice would naturally balance the virtue of stability in a
relationship with the need for freedom to nourish one's subtle en-
ergy. These are difficult questions, but there is no ancient Taoist
sage who can answer them for you. You and your lover must
cultivate your own energy and become subtle beings wise enough
to know the truth of your own modern situation. In short, you must
become the sage, moment by moment, over the course of your
lifetime. CHAPTER 12
COMMONLY ASKED QUESTIONS ABOUT
SEMEN RETENTION
1. I've had a vasectomy. Will that affect my ability to do the
Big Draw. Chia: The effects of vasectomy upon one's sexual life and
general health warrant consideration. It is well-recognized that
there prevails among vasectomized men a normal level of physical
and mental health. Most individuals surveyed after vasectomy
have considered their health good to excellent. Many wives
thought their husbands' distinctly more virile. Improved sexual performance may be readily accounted for:
sperm is no longer discharged and its energies are no longer
wasted. The body reabsorbs active principles of the sperm cells via
the blood stream. However, those secretions not formed in the
testes are ejaculated. These benefits and far greater ones are enjoyed by Taoist
lovers. They retain not only the sperm but the entire volume of
seminal fluid, each part of which bursts with enzymes, vitamins,
proteins, trace elements, and electrical energies. Yet this is not the
most important advantage. Secretion of the vasectomized male's testes lessens over a
period of time. The volume of hormones available for reabsorption
gradually declines. While the vasectomized man never more loses
sperm, he ordinarily does not stimulate hormonal production. 194 Taoist Secrets Of Love
The Big Draw Method increases hormonal secretion. First,
one focuses energy on the genitals to directly stimulate them. Sec-
ond, the transformation of sex energy to a higher level produces
higher quality hormones. Fortunately, a vasectomized man may use the Big Draw to
"steam" the seminal energies up to the head and vital organs. Moreover, with this method every man, vasectomized or not, may
exchange fortifying energies with his love partner. 2. I thought yin energy is supposed to be cool, and yang
warm. Why does a woman feel so warm when you have sex with
her. Chia: Relative to the male, however, the woman remains
more yin in her basic polarity. Some men may have very yin,
female-like qualities that they have cultivated and some women
may be very aggressive and yang in their personality. Such a cou-
ple would exchange their excess energy to achieve balance. But
this doesn't change the polarity at its most primordial, pure level. In this practice you will eventually get to the point where you
experience the woman's energy as cool. This happens normally in
the resting stage, during the yin/yang exchange. You will feel a cool
fluid running up the spine to the top of your head. It will move up
the spine in stages, as if climbing a ladder. When you learn to
surrender your fiery hot yang male energy you will feel this cool,
soothing yin female within you. At the higher level of practice you
can get this effect by simple meditating alone on the yin pole of
your yang energy. 3. How long do the Taoists take to make love. It sounds like a
very long affair. Chia: Intercourse lasts as long as both lovers desire and
should depend on the quality of the energy being exchanged. Don't
force extra orgasms, or if you haven't mastered the method, extra
ejaculations. Once you begin feeling deep satisfaction, you won't
feel the need to have sex as frequently so when you do have it don't
rush. Sometimes perfect polarity can be achieved quickly, but usu-
ally when you make love the Taoist way, it is no casual affair. From the beginning foreplay to the final quiet embrace may involve
two hours or all day. The Taoist classics suggest one thousand
loving strokes to satisfy a woman. You may rest several times and
renew more active loving. Allow an appropriate length of time
without distraction. Take the phone off the hook, and get rid of the
kids. Commonly Asked Questions 195
4. 1 believe that if you ejaculate, the woman can gain a lot of
yang energy directly from the sperm. What's the difference be-
tween giving it to her this way versus giving her yang energy and
yin/yang exchange. Chia: So long as you keep the male fluid, you may give her
energy and quickly recharge yourself. If you give her the fluid, you
lose the means of re-charging for a long time. Give her much en-
ergy, but don't give away the whole battery. Unless she is an
advanced yogini who has developed the meditative ability to really
draw the full power of sperm into herself, she can't use it and you
will lose the power to give more. Even an advanced yogini will be
limited in the amount she can absorb from physical sperm. Ul-
timately, she is much better off if her yogi conserves and trans-
mutes his seed. Give her baskets of peaches: don't uproot the tree
and send her shaggy roots. 5. When I do the yin/yang exchange, I sometimes feel a mini-
orgasm in my genitals. How do I know if I am losing fluid. Chia: During exhalation and relaxation, the penis will often
"jump" as though you were ejaculating. In fact, no seminal fluid
pours from the body. The prostate gland and seminal vesicles can
also "pop" periodically, yielding great pleasure. The Taoist
Method provides this orgasmic pleasure yet keeps the fluid inside
the body. Make sure at first there is no loss of fluid in the popping. When you keep every drop, the method is properly performed. If
there should occasionally be some loss, immediately use the Hard
Contractions and the Three Finger External Locking together to
prevent further waste of seed. You must also distinguish between
losing "milk" and "water". Milk is thick and whitish sperm fluid
and is the secret elixir Taoists seek to conserve. Water is clear and
thin runny seminal fluid that the prostate produces to help deliver
the sperm. It is possible to leak some water without ejaculating any
milk. If you are at this level you shouldn't rely solely on the
method as a means of birth-control, as it only takes one sperm cell
in the watery semen fluid to impregnate a woman. 6. I'm just beginning to learn the Big Draw. Will it harm my
effort if I fail and ejaculate. Chia: Don't make it an issue of your failing or not. Nobody
expects you to hit a home run the first time you swing a bat. You
hit some singles, then a double, eventually you run to third base. 196 Taoist Secrets Of Love
When you've got full control you can hit a home run almost at will. The main thing in learning something new is to keep a positive
attitude. When you begin to practice seminal conservation, try to
ejaculate no more than once per week. As you improve keep the
loss down to once or twice per month. Continuing to progress, you
will lose less and less fluid. Don't worry about losing the seed,
simply learn to harbor it for increasing periods of time. Taoists
accept what is natural, they never force any sudden change on their
body. If you lose your seed, enjoy it and send it lovingly to your
partner who will absorb at least a part of its yang essence into her
body. Likewise, never force yourself to ejaculate to please yourself
or your lover. This is a gradual process: you will spend the rest of
your life increasing in knowledge and perfecting the Tao of love. 7. What is the relationship between the strength of the buttock
and pelvic muscles and sex. I thought having sex strengthened
them, since you get a lot of exercise in your lower body. Chia: A moderate amount of sex is healthy for your body in
many ways; your glands are exercised, especially the prostate, and
more chi runs through your meridians. But a lot of these benefits
leak out the anus and buttocks because so many men with office
jobs develop a fat ass. You wouldn't believe how much chi just
trickles out of the body through the buttocks. Ejaculation is open-
ing the flood gates to energy loss, and it has an after effect on your
buttocks. Frequent sex with ejaculation disrupts your health by spas-
modically coughing forth vitality. After a period of long abuse, it
weakens the tissues so that they are unable to inhale life properly. Frequent ejaculation breaks down the tone of the lower body, in-
ducing chronic flaccidity and steady trickling out of power. I teach
pelvic strengthening exercises to improve lower body tone. By
maintaining this tone, you constantly save energy that frequent
ejaculators lose. 8. 1 feel less sexual desire after doing the Big Draw every day
for several weeks. What's happening to my sexual energy. Chia: For the first several weeks of Big Draw practice, you
may experience slight lessening of sexual appetite. This is more
likely to occur if you are in a weakened condition. This indicates
that you are successfully transferring power upward from the geni-
tal area to the higher centers. Don't be alarmed. This is a sign thatCommonly Asked Questions 197
you are progressing well. You are conserving energy as never be-
fore and beginning to change it to a higher form. After no more than several weeks the power will complete the
microcosmic circuit and return much increased to the sexual cen-
ters. The power will recirculate to the genital region, which will
then be permanently fortified. Once you have completed the cir-
cuit, the power will flow throughout your entire body every time
you make love and revitalize you further. Then your appetite for
sex may well increase. Its different for each man and his lover. 9. Aren't you being a bit fanatic in trying to save every drop of
sperm. There's so much of it. I thought Taoism was a "middle"
path that advocated no extremes. Cfaia: Semen retention is simple and natural once you've un-
learned your old habit. Taoists claim that it was once the middle
way, a natural function that all humans could do naturally, and that
our current sex habits are a product of degeneration. That's why
we've got 4 billion people on earth and all the problems of over
population and pollution of a once pure earth. If people felt more
fullfillment within, they would create fewer demands without. Not
to worry. Nature—the Tao—always finds the proper way to bal-
ance itself. The conventional idea of male orgasm as a few instants of
(literally) blinding pleasure is an extreme one. After ejaculation the
man is finished unless he digs deep into himself for more energy
only to rush forth again before falling off into a pleasant emptiness. To spend the vital seed wastefully is to excrete life. Frequent
ejaculation is an infantile attempt to solve our lonely separation
from bliss. It is a rejection of the inborn joy that we may all know. Of course, people can and do love deeply without retaining
their seed during sex. But these people are unconsciously trans-
muting their seed power into love the rest of the time—this is
where love obtains its power of spontaneity. But they may miss a
deeper joy. Until you learn this deeper joy I must strongly recom-
mend you not be fanatic about losing a few drops of sperm—nature
is abundant and forgiving and its best to change gradually. Then the
change will be more permanent. But at the same time you won't be motivated to change your
sex habits unless you remember that ejaculation isolates. It cuts
you off and enslaves you in small steps to a lower state of energy. Ejaculation is one of many subtle forms of suicide, including drugs,198 Taoist Secrets Of Love
over-eating, over-everything. Your real task is not to prevent
ejaculation: it is to establish direct contact between your physical
nervous system and the subtle sources of life. To do so you must
conserve the vehicle through which your chi life energy flows. 10. Most modern sex manuals claim it's healthy to fantasize
about your erotic desires. What do the Taoists say. Chia: Many sexologists are not aware of the higher pos-
sibilities of their mind and don't understand the process of trans-
forming energy into spirit, ching into shien. Above all, Taoists are
training the mind. It is very important to keep the mind free of
distracting images. Fantasizing about sex ultimately strangles the
mind. It breaks the flow of life and provokes orgasm. Open your mind to the power of life: this will dissolve fan-
tasies. When you empty the mind of thoughts, cosmic energies
stream into the void. This is the first principle of meditation. The
act of love becomes a meditation on the great life force. Of course,
it takes time to cultivate this level of crystal clarity in your mind, so
don't worry about your habit of fantasizing. Simply begin by not
encouraging it, by catching yourself when you drift off, and return
to the present. The presence of your lover should arouse you. If her company
doesn't stimulate you, if you have to turn to erotic fantasizing, wait
for another occasion or partner. Obsessive erotic thinking inevita-
bly leads to loss of the life force. Fantasizing causes energy to seep
out even where there is no ejaculation, as well as preventing life
from flowing in spontaneously. The same is true of electric
vibrators or other stimulators. They feel good, but they mechanize
your sexual response. You can grow dependant on your machine. If you want to be more human and ultimately find deeper pleasure,
follow your natural impulses only, not the ones contrived by your
culturally conditioned mind. 11. Will this practice of holding my sperm inside eventually
lead to my losing my appetite for the physical passion of sex. Chia: As you advance in the practice you lessen your need for
physical movement. Physical movement is but the shadow of
movement of the energy body. Contact with your lover's subtle chi
is incomparably more thrilling than the hooked-fish leaps that are
often mistaken for the heights of love. Your definition of sex will be
radically changed by mastery of these practices that will find you
concerned with the quality of your subtle energy relationship with
your lover. Commonly Asked Questions 199
12. What's the difference between the physical pleasure of sex
and the pleasure of feeling love. Chia: Your pleasure is limited only by your level of con-
sciousness. The difference between whole body orgasm and
ejaculatory orgasm is the difference between human and animal
love. The animal frantically ejects his energies. The higher man
responsibly conserves vital energy and changes it to love. The truly
free and wise man ever restores himself and his partner. This su-
preme art is his duty, privilege and joy. The purest pleasure is far
beyond any sensory feeling perceived through our emotions or
intellect. When you cultivate your original spirit, your delicate
sense of subtle energy flows as well as your physical sensations are
a quantum leap beyond what most people accept as pleasure. The quality of your feeling determines the quality of energy
you generate and absorb. If your desires are selfishly erotic, the
energy may temporarily heighten your animal vitality but will not
rise and open the higher genius of your heart, mind, and spirit. These principles apply universally, but the act of love is par-
ticularly momentous for a human being. It involves one's entire
destiny. The energy of every act and thought is preserved: one who
thinks egotistically will find nothing but egotism from others. An-
other finds love everywhere because he unfailingly brings it within. When you raise your sexual seed-essence to a high level of spiritual
intention, it becomes a light-essence, or light seed that illuminates
your path through life and beyond. This is the Taoist enlightenment
taught in the higher levels of meditation. 13. If the goal is to build up one's sexual energy, what's the
harm of sleeping with a lot of different women (or men) to increase
your ching chi. Chia: The goal is not to build up one's sexual energy—it is to
transform raw sexual energy into a refined subtle energy. Sex is
only one means of doing that. Promiscuity can easily lower your
energy if you choose partners with moral or physical weakness. If you lie with degenerates, it may hurt you, in that you can
temporarily acquire your partner's vileness. By exchanging subtle
energy, you actually absorb the other's substance. You become the
other person and assume new karmic burdens. This is why old
couples resemble each other so closely: they have exchanged so
much energy that they are made of the same life-stuff. This practice
accelerates this union, but elevates it to a higher level of spiritual
experience. 200 Taoist Secrets Of Love
So the best advice I can give is to never compromise your
integrity of body, mind and spirit. In choosing a lover you are
choosing your destiny, so make sure you love the woman with
whom you have sex. Then you will be in harmony with what flows
from the exchange and your actions will be proper. If you think you can love two women at once, be ready to
spend double the chi to transform and balance their energy. I doubt
if many men can really do that and feel deep serenity. For the sake
of simplicity, limit yourself to one woman at a time. It takes a lot of
time and energy to cultivate the subtle energies to a deep level. It is impossible to define love precisely. You have to consult
your inner voice. But cultivating your chi energy sensitizes you to
your conscience. What was a distant whisper before may become a
very loud voice. For your own sake, do not abandon your integrity
for the sake of physical pleasure or the pretense that you are doing
deep spiritual exercises. If you sleep with one whom you don't
love, your subtle energies will not be in balance and psychic war-
fare can begin. This will take its toll no matter how far apart you
are physically until you sever or heal the psychic connection. It's
better to be honest in the beginning. For the same reason make love only when you feel true ten-
derness within yourself. Your power to love will thus grow
stronger. Selfish or manipulative use of sex even with someone
with whom you are in love can cause great disharmony. If you feel
unable to use your sexual power lovingly, then do not use it at all. Sex is a gleaming, sharp, two-edged sword, a healing tool that can
quickly become a weapon. If used for base purposes, it cuts you
mercilessly. If you haven't found a partner with whom you can be
truly gentle, then simply touch no one. Go back to building your
internal energy and when it gets high you will either attract a
quality lover or learn a deeper level within yourself. 14. Isn't the Big Draw a form of sexual vampirism, teaching
men how to suck women's juices, etc. Chia: This view is incorrect for several reasons. First of all
there is necessarily an exchange of energy between partners, all
lovers exchange energy; the Big Draw just dramatically adds to its
magnitude. You cannot inhale the yin from your partner without
surrendering to her an equal measure of yang. This is simply a law
of etheric energy. Generosity is its own reward: the more you give, the moreCommonly Asked Questions 201
you will receive. If you selfishly refuse to surrender the yang to
your partner, you can absorb little energy from her. Thus, attempts
at selfish use of the Big Draw will lead to failure. Their only effect
of trying would be to deeply imbalance oneself mentally and spir-
itually. Likewise, generous and compassionate use of the method
guarantees the fullest flow of invigorating energy from your part-
ner. This "Fail-Safe" aspect of the method not only prevents se-
rious abuse of one's partner, but the natural law of the Tao will
ultimately mete out an equal punishment to one who tries to take
advantage of his lover. Taoists agree with the Bible here: "As ye
give, so shall ye receive. " Secondly, when you draw up power you inhale mainly the
energy of your own sexual centers. During the act of love the
hundreds of millions of sperm cells swim about frantically in their
desire to get out of you and into the egg. Their motion creates a
high electromagnetic charge in the semen. In this way your lover
stimulates you to produce and concentrate your own energy, which
you move to higher centers with the big Draw. Finally, a major part of the energy you draw from the lover
would leave her body at any event as a result of sexual stimulation. If you did not absorb it, the power would dissipate into the atmo-
sphere. By suppressing your ejaculation and your partner's
orgasm, both lovers lose much less energy than they would in
conventional sex. By following the Big Draw Method both effec-
tively absorb some of the energy the other releases instead of let-
ting it blow away. 15. After practicing dual cultivation for a while, how do you
feel when you ejaculate again. Chia: When you begin to meditate and cultivate your sexual
energy and engage in various Taoist exercises, you notice imme-
diately what happens when you ejaculate. There's an immediate
feedback in what happens to your energy level. You feel emptied,
weakened, sometimes enough to temporarily depress you. The
same feeling prior to doing Taoist practices you might have called
"pleasant fatigue"; now the loss begins to feel painful on a psychic
level, as you are accustomed to living at a higher standard of chi
energy. In actual sex, in ejaculation the energy loss is very appar-
ent and very obvious. 16. How are the eyes used in Sexual Kung Fu practice. 202 Taoist Secrets Of Love
Chia: The eyes are very important. Later on, if you just use
the eyes and a little breathing you can do the whole Big Draw. You
should keep your eyes closed during sex to maximize your internal
energy; if you are looking around, the mind will be distracted and
chi will escape as the eyes are the most yang organ in the body. Learn to see inside your body and that of your lovers. The eyes
reflect your intention psychologically so you can literally direct
everything with your eyes. Correct practice of Taoist cultivation
will help you develop powerful eyes. The opposite is true as well;
improper sex can destroy the sparkle in your eyes. If you're obser-
vant, without knowing anything about oriental medicine, you can
actually "see" people who have depleted themselves sexually. You see it in the face, the sallowness of the eyes and skin, and lack-
luster quality in the hair. 17. How will ill health, tension, stress and other adverse psy-
chological states affect Taoist sex. Chia: A good sex life is closely related to your physical health
and mental condition. If you are tense it is difficult to use mind
control and the big draw methods. Your ability to use these meth-
ods in actual sex is more limited when you are tense, and it's not
much fun having uptight sex anyway. Microcosmic meditation and
Tai Chi Chi Kung will greatly help you to calm down. If you're not
feeling well or if your general level of chi is low, your sex should be
passive with your partner moving on top, giving you the healing
energy. What happens in your sexual encounters is like a micro-
cosm of daily life that is magnified tremendously. Your psychological state is very important. Feeling loving,
feeling relaxed, feeling calm and not having a lot of negative emo-
tions is essential. If you're very angry or sad or fearful it's very
difficult to engage joyfully in sex and to use this kind of practice. It
may throw you or your partner off emotionally, as your aura is
very open during sex and you absorb negativity easily. Better to sit
down together and use the Fusion of Five Elements meditation to
calm the mind. Even after years of having practiced the Big Draw,
if you are not in a good psychological state you might have to exert
considerable effort to hold your seed. On the other hand, when you
feel calm and good psychologically you can carry the whole thing
off with no effort. 18. What is the difference between mechanically blocking
ejaculation through celibacy and the Taoist cultivation method. Commonly Asked Questions 203
Chia: You can mechanically block ejaculation using your
mind only by refusing to have sex or masturbate. But this is using
willpower against the body impulse; Taoists cultivate the bodily
impulses, they put the chi energy to work elsewhere. If you are
celibate and can naturally transform your sex energy and you can
keep your body fully integrated with your mind, you should be
shiny and radiant. But not many men are so naturally enlightened. There's some negative evidence on health and celibacy based
on data that has been collected about priests, using sheer willpower
to mechanically prevent sex. This can create long term problems of
the prostate, causing failure and inflammation of that organ and
very often considerable pain and debility. One study did medical
autopsies on over a thousand Catholic priests and found one third
died of prostate complications or prostate cancer. The suggestion
is that their celibacy was bad for their health. In their case appar-
ently it was true, I've heard of celibate yogis who have similar
problems with their prostate. The problem arises, I believe, because they did not know how
to cultivate their sex energy properly. Their energy channels aren't
open between their lower and upper body and so their sex energy is
blocked and congests the blood and hormones in the genitals and
the prostate. To prevent prostate problems, a celibate should
squeeze his perineum tightly and relax it several dozen times a day. This will exercise the prostate somewhat, although not as well as
the Big Draw, which also circulates chi energy through it. If you try
to cure a weak prostate by having more sex it can work, as orgasm
exercises your prostate, but you risk losing a lot of sperm energy
unless you know the Taoist method. Other men weaken their pros-
tate from excess ejaculation and depletion of their sexual energy. For them celibacy is a cure. Stopping ejaculation with an internal (big draw) practice may
look similar to mechanically stopping sex through celibacy, but the
difference is great. The Big Draw consciously transforms your en-
ergy up using internal skill, celibacy leaves it to chance or will-
power. I've done this practice many years and never had any prob-
lems at all. Sometimes, when there's some congestion, just a little
massage clears it up. That's why in terms of hygiene, you cannot
separate this practice from the larger context of meditation and the
energy work in the Taoist system not to speak of other consider-
ations that have to do with ethical, psychological and spiritual
aspects. 204 Taoist Secrets Of Love
19. Could you summarize the advantage of the Taoist total
body orgasm over a loving normal sex orgasm with ejaculation. Chia: A total orgasm of the body and mind might be described
as a showering of nectar from the head, running down your insides
like a springtime shower. It is unmistakable. It is a wave of subtle
chi energy that breaks up muscle armoring, releases nerve and
lymphatic tension, and opens up hidden powers of feeling. You feel
like a new born baby, only instead of experiencing your rebirth as a
baby does—as unconscious bliss—you are very adult and con-
scious. The weight of the world is there, but suddenly it becomes
lighter than a feather. This feeling of lightness hanpens because the heavy fluid of
your sperm-seed has successfully been transmuted into a light-seed
which nourishes your higher consciousness. You feel happy deep
inside because you know you have found the path home. You are
not weighted by yourself or your lover. This is different from a
genital orgasm, which is usually followed by either a heavy sleep as
the body attempts to recover energy lost or by a still anxious mind
that asks: "What next. " With genital orgasm the body is relaxed,
but the mind and spirit are not; they are still hungry for nourish-
ment of subtle energy because the polarity between lovers is not
complete. 20. Could you explain in detail what happens when you reach
the point of no return during an orgasm. Chia: The curve of sexual arousal in both men and women but
especially for men (because women have a greater capacity to
maintain a plateau) is to have a gradual (or rapid) arousal, a short
plateau and then a rapid and sudden fall off and that's it. The
Big Bang Theory. Taoist cultivation teaches you to use the Steady
State theory, which is continuous expansion and contraction of yin
and yang during a series of "valley" orgasms. The Big Bang
theory, currently in vogue as the cosmological theory of the Uni-
verse, has as its roots the sexual desires of the western male scien-
tist. Now, the plateau can be likened to a "primal zone", that is an
experience of primal time and space. Minutes may seem like hours;
however you choose to define it. It is what psychologists call an
altered state of consciousness. Women seem more capable than
men of extending this plateau. Beyond that there is a critical point
of no return and then the "fall off. " The plateau can last anywhereCommonly Asked Questions 205
from a few seconds to several minutes to a half hour or longer and
is characterized by quieting, relaxation and a diminishing erection
in the male. In practice, after this period of quiet the couple re-
sumes mutual stimulation, building up the energy, building the chi
through thrusting and various other means of arousal. And again a
plateau may be reached and maintained a while. It takes practice to keep from "stepping off the edge" but the
rewards are great. It's like climbing a pyramid—the top of each
step is safe and flat, but going up over the edge to the next step is a
little dizzying. In this step procedure you build a potential to re-
spond to your lover that's enormous and so the probability of
losing control increases as you progress to higher steps. It's as
though you were building more and more pressure, but it's a plea-
surable pressure, because the energy of each plateau is greater than
the last. In fact, the plateaus get longer as the energy builds. When
sufficient energy has developed and you are at a plateau, the chi
energy begins to run through the chi channels in the body and so
what had begun as a genital response now becomes a bodily one. If
the whole body energy of the male is balanced with that of the
female, the energy penetrates the subtle bodies on mental and spir-
itual levels as well, aligning your total polarity and opening your
awareness of both knowledge and bliss. The nature of the Tao
reveals itself to be both awesome and ordinary. The "primal zone" on the plateau is a very precarious place
and it is here that the skill of Taoist dual cultivation can really be
said to be exercised. The sensitivity and ability to keep from going
on to the "point of no return" is a function of your experience,
your intention and your overall state of relaxation and health and
your relationship to your partner. Now a woman can trigger a
man's ejaculation quite easily thru her own orgasm or by stimulat-
ing him by contracting vaginal muscles. So this technique does not
require a mutual orgasm and especially in the learning phase, the
man must be permitted time to gain some stability at the plateau. It's interesting that many women feel that unless a man has an
ejaculation he's not satisfied. This is where sexual politics comes in
with all the attitudes and expectations which color responses tre-
mendously. Both men and women have to gradually de-condition
themselves of their old concepts. This will happen naturally as a
couple cultivates their energy together. 206 Taoist Secrets Of Love
21. Does homosexuality or group sex block spiritual develop-
ment. Chia: The Taoists are too wise to condemn anything outright,
as everything leads back to the Tao. So the question really is how
can it be against nature, or the Tao, if the Tao created it. Homo-
sexuality is not against the Tao, but it is also not the highest experi-
ence of the Tao possible. It's impossible to experience the full
balance of male-female polarity with homosexual love. The subtle
energies are lacking and you can't create something if the raw
materials are absent. The highest harmony of yin and yang cannot
be achieved. It depends on how far on the spiritual path you wish
to proceed. If you go deep enough into meditation you may culti-
vate your opposite polar energy within. But then your homosexual
love life might disrupt that balance, so you would constantly be
correcting it. The problem is greater for two men than for two women,
because their double yang energy is too expansive and more easily
leads to conflict. A double yin energy can be harmonious, as yin is
yielding, but neither woman will experience deepest fulfillment. Both cases can lead to subtle organ imbalances that require atten-
tion if best health is to be maintained. The situation for male homosexuals can be somewhat amelio-
rated if the men seek alternate sources of yin energy. They could
eat more yin food, spend more time with female friends and work
in the garden cultivating earth chi. You can also absorb energy
directly from the earth by lying face down on the ground and medi-
tating, drawing it into your penis and hands. This might help if it
were done before or after sex. If you wish to practice semen reten-
tion and find yourself in rapidly changing male homosexual rela-
tionships, I advise you to become celibate for a period and attempt
to gain stability through intensive single cultivation using the Big
Draw and Meditation. In group sex it is even more difficult to harmonize the subtle
energies. I recommend you avoid it as it is rarely motivated by
love. The only exception might be two women with one man, as the
double yin can harmonize his yang if they are also in harmony. For
most people this is unlikely to be stable, which is necessary for real
cultivation to occur. If you feel attracted to several people the best
thing you can do for them is to inspire them to cultivate themselves
using Tai Chi, meditation, yoga, or the methods described in thisCommonly Asked Questions 207
book. Teach by example; you don't have to physically love every-
one you feel attracted to. You will never go deep in yourself if you
scatter your energy widely. 22. What causes the penis to go flaccid, if you began with a
stiff erection but didn't ejaculate. Chia: It may be that your mind has left the act of love, and is
distracted elsewhere. The chi moves with the mind, it is guided by
it. If your mind is concentrating on a higher exchange of energy
with your lover and you've lost your erection, it may be a sign that
physical love is no longer needed and you should relax and enjoy
the communion. You should keep your flaccid penis within her or
touching her if possible, as the chi can still flow through it. But
please, for yourt)wn sanity, don't try to force a new erection. 23. If I master the Big Draw and am celibate, but still have wet
dreams, what should I do. Chia: If you really master the Big Draw this should not hap-
pen at all, but this might happen to someone who retains the sex
energy but hasn't transformed all of it up to a higher center. The
sex energy remaining in the lower part might be causing trouble. The Taoist method of Microcosmic Orbit Meditation, Fusion of
Five Elements, and Kan and Li contain the formulas for transform-
ing the energy up. If that doesn't work and the wet dreams persist,
listen to your body's message and find a lover. 24. Is it o. k. to make specific wishes or project a thought at
the moment of orgasm. Chia: I strongly recommend you avoid projecting your ego at
the moment of orgasm or at any time during love-making. This is a
magical practice that can have very unexpected effects, sometimes
dangerous to your spiritual growth. Evil astral entities can attach
themselves if you are not well balanced. Some men have sex with
"phantom" lovers in their dream state that are real entities. You
might also get what you asked for—and much more that you failed
to specify and that you find extremely undesirable. You will also
lose energy by sending it all outside. I know one woman who did
this "magical child" projection for ten years. It made her pale and
sickly. It is best to give the energy back to your lover, as that is
where it came from. In this way you pay the universe immediately
for its blessing. If you increase your lover's energy instead of some
ego desire, she will be transformed to a higher level and be in a
position to return even higher blessings to you or others in the208 Taoist Secrets Of Love
universe. Spiritual progress comes from achieving balance of yin/
yang, from being both spontaneously present and neutral, not from
fulfilling some mental projection. Taoists refine their chi in their
body. We don't send out our dirty laundry and hope it comes back
washed—we clean it ourselves. So keep your attention on balanc-
ing your chi where you are; that is your entire obligation to the
universe. CHAPTER 13
STUDENT EXPERIENCES OF TAOIST SEXUAL
CULTIVATION
This interview was conducted by Michael Winn with a 46 year old
psychologist and student of Master Chia who has raised several
children. M. W. : Was it easy to learn the Sexual Kung Fu. Student: I've been practicing Seminal Kung Fu for a year and
a half now. I found it easy to learn when I practiced alone but
difficult to implement during sex because of an unconscious resis-
tance from making love for so many years in a different way. It got easier as I grew more aware that normal sex fatigued
me. But it is not possible to divorce this practice from the other
practices that I've studied, such as the Microcosmic and fusion
meditation formulas, Iron Shirt Chi Kung, and Tai Chi. They in-
creased my sensitivity to energy, particularly the Iron Shirt Chi
Kung.
Women don't feel as strong a compulsion to pursue an expansive goal of teaching outwardly.
What is the difference in the approach to teaching and learning for men and women?
The male's ejaculation is an inward explosion or implosion of his yin essence, allowing him to experience a new and polar opposite experience of his body.
What is the significance of the male's ejaculation in the Taoist practice?
The Big Draw is not about mechanically blocking ejaculation, but rather transforming and balancing the energy.
Can you explain the difference between the Big Draw and mechanical blocking of ejaculation?
A man should learn to surrender to his lover, and by harmonizing his energy with hers, he is opened up to a new experience of his body.
How can a man balance his ego with his lover's emotional sensitivity?
Taoist practices can improve one's overall health by circulating higher energies into the lower centers, which is not possible through ordinary sex.
Can Taoist practices be used to improve one's overall health and well-being?