Sexuality:
Intimacy, Orgasm and Spirit

Interviews with David Deida, Charles Muir, Saida Désilets

By Ravi Dykema

The two lovers lie like spoons, he is behind, she is in front. He presses his hand between her breasts. They breathe together, both feeling their hearts. After their rhythm becomes settled, they visualize a soft warm presence moving between their hearts with each breath, into his heart with the in breath, into her heart with the out breath. She feels her back against his chest, expanding, breathing in. She feels his chest breathing out, her heart taking in his heart’s warmth and beating power. In . . . Out . . .
After some time he moves his hand to her sex (yoni) and covers her whole vulva, holding her gently, his other hand still over her heart. They continue to breathe together, now feeling their own and the other’s genitals alternately with each breath: in: into his, out: into hers, easily, no hurry, in, out.

She feels more vulnerable than ever before, held thus by him, her skin open to his skin, her heart open to his heart. She invites his sex into her yoni and they breathe together some more, lying still, their awareness moving into her, into him, into her, nowhere to go, nothing to do, just together so closely, so closely.
They fall asleep. Soon she awakes, her whole body tingling, and starts to move against him, and they slowly make love, as if for the first time discovering their own and the other’s sensations, everywhere, hands, thighs, feet, hearts, faces, genitals. Time moves like glistening honey, until she feels herself and him as one body, one vast dancing ecstatic sensation.

This example of a couple in intimate embrace might result from an introductory practice in a modern class on “sacred” sexuality. This different kind of sex is called by various names: tantra, neo-tantra, spiritual sex, Taoist sexual energy, and enlightened sex. This kind of love-making blends elements of eastern spiritual rituals and philosophies from India, Tibet, China and elsewhere with modern western ingenuity and style. The famed ‘60s sexual revolution threw open the door of experimentation for thousands of people. A few of those traveled to the orient or encountered visiting teachers from the East. They learned that sex was thought of in some religious traditions as a way to get closer to God, or to experience one’s divine nature.

Indian Tantra is one of those indigenous traditions, perhaps the most famous one. The word “tantra” refers to both a Hindu and a Buddhist philosophy. Neither one bears much resemblance to the practices and teachings that go by that name in the Western world today. Traditional Hindu Tantra, or Tantra Yoga, for example, required strict discipline over many years under the direction of a Guru (teacher), and involved memorization of elaborate Sanskrit power-sounds (mantras), visualized images, and devotional rituals. One major school of Tantra Yoga, “right hand path tantra,” excludes sexual practices altogether.

But modern so-called tantra has retained an important kernel of its historical essence: traditional tantra’s abiding gift to those seeking spiritualized sex has been its whole-hearted acceptance of and embrace of one’s body, one’s senses and one’s desire for pleasure. The late Agehananda Bharati, Professor of Anthropology at Syracuse University, writes in The Perennial Dictionary of World Religions, “The basic difference between . . . mainstream Hindu, Buddhist, and Jaina meditation on the one side, and tantric practice on the other, lies in what makes tantrism suspect to the orthodox: its full harnessing . . . of the senses and its maximizing of the sensuous personality in contrast to the ascetic style of the official traditions.”

So the modern pioneers of sex and spirit also harnessed the senses. They discovered that orgasm can stop your mind and dissolve your ego, even if only for a moment. David Deida says in our interview, “Even people who just want to have sex for the sake of sex, feel it (the spiritual dimension of sexual union). When they’re having sex, they’re saying “Oh, God!” as if they were in a divine moment.”

The new awakened sex ignites more than experiences of God and spirit. It expands intimacy between two people, it grows love. And it is for this reason too that couples flock to tantra workshops and sacred sexuality classes. Many have found that re-ignited passion injects a healing salve into their relationship, deepens their capacity to love, and may even save a rocky marriage.
In these three conversations we explore the potential of our sexuality and sensuality with two of the shining lights in this field: David Deida and Charles Muir. We also speak with an important innovator and teacher of a Taoist perspective on sexual awakening, Saida Désilets. (Ms. Désilets will be speaking at the Nexus Holistic Expo in Denver on November 18.)

David Deida is author of 9 books including the best-selling underground classic, The Way of the Superior Man, Finding God Through Sex, and his latest, Instant Enlightenment. David Deida lives on the East coast. His official website is Deida.info, and he teaches annually in this area at the Shambhala Mountain Center (www.shambhalamountain.org).

RD: I know your view of sexuality is different from most other people’s work. How do you see it?

DD: I think sexuality is deeply engrained in our biology. As a result, a lot of our desire—and our suffering—is around sexuality, because of its deep role in our evolutionary journey. So much of our attention and energy get absorbed into sexuality—not just the sexual act, but intimacy, family and relating to people, including how we present ourselves to others: how we dress, move and speak as a sexual being. Through sexual yoga, we can find a way to use our sexuality as a portal into a place of being that doesn’t seek anything, into a place of being that is already free. Otherwise, we just start seeking and grinding, and hoping to get something through sexuality, which never happens.

RD: It seems to be an engine of intense yearning, like the yearning for a breath if you’re drowning.

DD: Exactly. For most humans, sexuality shows up near the top of our hierarchy of needs; once you’re alive and fed, the next thing is sex. Then there are levels of yearning. There’s the physical sexual urge, like the male urge to ejaculate. There’s the emotional yearning, the urge to connect. There’s the subtle yearning, the urge to merge bodies, hearts and minds lovingly in subtle ways. And there’s a deeply spiritual yearning, with a sense that a kind of completion, wholeness or fullness can come from perfect sexual union.

Most people intuit this. Even the most physically based people, people who just want to have sex for the sake of sex, feel it. When they’re having sex, they’re saying “Oh, God!” as if they were in a divine moment. Our nervous systems are set up to open wide during sexuality. All kinds of spiritual practices can make use of this open state. Then, we can learn the differences between temporary states and more or less stable states. We learn to get into an open state through yogic sexual union, but then we need to practice recognizing our basic nature as openness so we can rest in this place of being 24 hours a day, even throughout our daily activities.

RD: In your book, The Enlightened Sex Manual, you say you can allow the light of your soul to shine through the sexual play of your body, as long as you know how to deal with the habits that would otherwise prevent your enlightened loving. What habits?

DD: Habits that are laid down through our evolutionary past. Men have a habit of targeting certain parts of women’s bodies, looking at their breasts or their asses. Women have a habit of presenting or adorning their bodies in ways that have led to successful reproduction among our ancestors. So, in most cultures, people dress or use makeup or jewelry to enhance certain parts of their body. This perpetuates a play of attention, which is habitual, shaped and molded through our evolutionary past as well as our cultural conditioning and personal characteristics—we pay attention to certain parts of our bodies sexually.

The yogic question is, how can we use sexual attention as a doorway? How do we take a sexual habit—say, the habit of dressing up sexy and looking at sexy people—and convert it so our attention is liberated rather than trapped by that? How do we use it as a portal for true yoga, so that as our sexual desire or attention moves toward an object or the target, it’s liberated instantly into love?

The practices I do with people are ways of taking every potential sexual moment, including these habits that are laid down biologically and culturally, and converting them into doorways. Every moment of sexuality, whether you’re making love or looking into your partner’s eyes or getting dressed in the morning, is done as an offering to others.

How can you begin to convert this particular habit? Let’s look at dressing as an example. Dressing goes through stages. The first stage is dressing sexy because you want to be seen and appreciated. “I want to be noticed. I want to attract other people’s attention. I feel good when people see me as sexy.” I call this me-orientation the first stage of sexual development. From that, we move into the second stage, the more balanced stage, when we might tone down our sexual display a bit. We might say, “Well, now that I’m a professional, I’m going to dress for success. I’m going to dress attractively, but not just because I want attention. I’m more mature than that, and I want more from life than just to be noticed sexually.”

In the third stage, people might feel “Well, we live on this earth together. How can I dress to bless others? How can I adorn my body so more light is given to the world through my body, through the way I dress?” So the third-stage approach to “sexy dressing,” if you will, is not to dress for attention, social enjoyment, safety or the sake of success. In the third-stage orientation, we might dress in a conscious way to bring light to the world. That varies, depending on the situation. How do you dress to bring light to a children’s birthday party? How do you dress to light up a nightclub? How do you dress to brighten up a visit to your grandparents? Each of these requires a different way to dress. This is just one example of a sexual habit—dressing sexy—and how we can convert this habit by growing through three stages of self-concern, safety and sharing.

RD: When a couple is together for a long time, they develop a sexual routine, like walking a pathway where the scenery is well known. That pathway, however goes on and on somewhere far beyond intimacy, release and pleasure, does it not?

DD: It does. I consider sexuality in stages, since we all grow. These stages are not hard facts, and they’re not necessarily linear. But in general, we grow from being more selfish to less selfish. We grow from being more caught in our own body and mind, to being more available to the bodies and minds of others. The first stage is to get what you want sexually, for yourself. In the second stage, you learn to share: “I’ll give you an orgasm and you give me an orgasm.” “I’ll give you a massage and you give me a massage.” That’s better than just the selfishness of the first stage. So you learn to share sexuality, emotions and pleasure.

Many Western teachers of so-called Tantra and sacred sex tend to stop there. They tend to train towards the maximization of deep, pleasurable sharing, emotionally and physically. But to me, that’s just the launching pad for realizing we’re all dying. And unless we’re also making love from this place that’s already dead—our eternal being of love, always present and free and open in this now-moment—then we’re only making love at the lower levels. The big switch comes from the second stage of feeling like you and your partner are there for each other, to the third stage, which is feeling like you and your partner are vehicles for something to come through you.

When that something comes through you—what you could call “light” or “love” or “consciousness”—it doesn’t necessarily look pretty. It’s not necessarily pleasant. If you have deep, unconscious habits, and this “light” or “energy” or “consciousness” starts coming through you sexually, it’s going to bump up against those habits. You’re going to feel friction. You may develop temporary pathologies or strange behaviors. It’s just like Hatha yoga. If you practice diligently, you’re going to come up against everything eventually—not only the limits of your own body and mind and emotions, but also all the cultural and evolutionary limits. This is just another form of yoga, using our sexuality as the grist for the mill.

RD: What happens after the third stage? Is there a fourth and fifth?

DD: To me, the third stage is the portal to all the stages beyond. The third stage and beyond includes how you avail your entire body, your nervous system, your subtle nervous system, to the fullest flow of life—for real. Not in a kind of new-age namby-pamby way, where everything is pastel and silky and you’re lighting candles and rubbing oils and saying secret chants. When many people do that, then they go off afterward to their private life of essential loneliness and watch TV, masturbate, drink coffee and eat cookies.

I’m not talking about a kind of fun ritual that’s temporary, but an actual shift in consciousness and intention: “I’m going to dedicate my sexuality as a living yoga, as a form of worship, one that includes but goes beyond me and my partner.” Of course, one must love and worship oneself, and there’s a phase in sexual yoga where you focus on worshipping your partner. Then, however, you go beyond focusing on your self or your partner or the sexual union itself. Your nervous systems are open. You’re merging sexually with your lover. But instead of the “Oh baby, oh baby, oh baby” kind of thing, its more “Oh God, Oh God, Oh God!”

How does the mystery of infinity come through our sexual loving in this moment? How do we dissolve ourselves in this, and then, as we reconstitute ourselves and give our gifts to the world, how do we allow this mystery of love to infuse our every action? If we make love for a few hours in a yogic way, the effects will last for several days in our breath, in our posture, in our bodies and hearts and the way we touch people. It will affect the foods that we eat and the way we relate to children, to men and women of all ages.

RD: Here’s a passage that relates to this, in the conclusion of your book, The Enlightened Sex Manual: “Enlightened sex means to feel beyond your own body, mind and emotions, so you can feel your lover’s. Then feel even beyond your lover’s. Include yourself and your lover, but also feel outward to the horizons of every present moment.” You’re alluding to the big picture, the context of life, the act of feeling that connects one to something much larger.

DD: Exactly. And part of “growth” means understanding what’s the object of your feeling. So again, in the first stage, the object of your feeling is yourself, your own body and your own mind. This is a critical stage. Until you can actually feel your own body, your own breath, your own emotional flow and the energy through your body, you can’t really move beyond that. That’s essential, but you don’t stop there. Once you’ve grown beyond knowing yourself enough, then you might grow more into a Mother Theresa style, the second stage. She’s not just feeling herself; she is feeling the needs of others and the Will of the divine. As we grow, we move from “I feel good,” “I feel bad,” “What can I do about me?” into “How can I help that person, through God’s will or the divine light?” A mother or father almost always does this with their children; they go beyond their own needs and help their children.

Then, in the third stage, you take the feeling function and allow it to relax open. You open your feeling beyond your own thoughts and emotions and energy and body, and beyond your partner’s, too. You can’t skip the stages of paying attention to yourself or to your partner. All of this is important to cultivate, and it might take years. But the next stage is taking your feeling function and aligning it with love’s mysterious offering.

We have habits of reducing our feeling to ourselves or our partners. Many men, for instance, when they’re having sex or ejaculating or having an orgasm, their attention shrinks down to their own body and genitals and pleasure, which is just about the most contracted or smallest form of attention you can have. Approaching the sexual act and the whole relationship as yoga allows people to learn to relax their attention outward. Instead of focusing on their own genitals, they start focusing on their partner’s needs and genitals, and then beyond. You do take care of your needs and your partner’s needs, but that’s not the sole function of feeling. It’s a matter of splaying your feeling wide open as pure love. It’s really not adding anything; it’s just being what is.

RD: This is deep and esoteric stuff, and it may be new to some of our readers. What’s the one thing, the most important point, you’d like to leave with those readers?

DD: Treat every moment as your lover. Be willing to be vulnerable and to feel every single moment of your life—not in an abstract way, but for real, relaxing right now with your whole experience: the room you’re in, the body you’re in, the relationships you’re in. Are you holding a glass? Are you sitting, are you standing? Feel this moment, and relate to the entire moment as you would to a lover. Soften your body and breathe like this moment is a lover you love. When we approach a lover to make love, we relax our bodies, we open our hearts and we soften our skin. We press our chest against our lover’s chest. We look into each other’s eyes. If it’s a good partnership, and if our lover is having trouble, we vulnerably attempt to help them, see and feel what they might need. If our lover is ready to fly, then we fly together. We attend to the needs of the moment, but then we are always willing to open deeper.

In the same way we open with our lover sexually, we can learn to open in our daily lives, moment by moment, so that essentially, ultimately, there’s no real difference between making love with a human partner and making love with this entire moment. I mean this in a very real and tangible way: How do you breathe? When the moment gets tight and difficult, how do you navigate to soft belly and humor? Where is your tongue in your mouth? How do you use your eyes? The same questions, esthetic matters and spiritual concerns that come up while making love with another human can also be part of this very moment with all of experience. I suppose if there were a take-home message, it would be to love every moment—not just in the generic sense, but to breathe with every moment, to feel every moment, to embrace every moment, to actually relax and open your body and heart as if you were making love right now, with this moment, just as it is, just as you are.

For more information on the work of David Deida see www.deida.info

Charles Muir trained with and worked for Richard Hittleman from 1966 to 78. Charles originated the “Tantra: the Art of Conscious Loving” format in 1980 & pioneered “Sacred spot massage”, a practice that is widely used among western tantra teachers. Charles is the author, with Caroline Muir, of the book, Tantra, the Art of Conscious Loving. He lives in Santa Cruz, California. He will be teaching a beginners workshop in this area, with Leah Alchin, September 28-30, and a separate graduate weekend September 21-23. Find info at www.sourcetantra.com, or call 303-449-6096.

RD: Does the world of Tantra and conscious sexuality impact society at large? Or do you see it as a relatively confined movement?

CM: One of my teachers said that to change the world, you have to change yourself. The path of Tantra tends to lead more to connection, communion and living in joy, peace and love. If you come from that place, it has to change your immediate world. Tantra goes way beyond our individual connections to our partners.

RD: Specifically, how do you see your students changing?

CM: Any time you awaken consciousness, it affects every level of your being and how you perceive life. We don’t see life as it is; we see it the way we are. This is what people don’t necessarily understand: Tantra isn’t just about how you connect sexually to your partner; it’s about how you connect with the love that dwells in your heart, and how you put that love out into the world. It’s about how you interact with people in your office, people driving down the freeway, your children.

When people decide to love consciously, they are having sex using all the charkas: the centers of consciousness, communication, the heart, personal power, survival needs, sexual needs. Some people come to Tantra looking for really long orgasms or lots of sex. But once the door opens, and you walk in on the ground level, there are many different floors you can access.

RD: How might someone, through their exploration of their sexuality, encounter a spiritual dimension they hadn’t yet discovered?

CM: The energy of orgasm is much like gradually deepening levels of meditation; it’s the only universally shared meditative moment. You’re not thinking during meditation or orgasm; it’s all about energy and experience. As you open up those energetic conduits, energy moves and pleasure becomes deeper. That which can quiet the mind in orgasm can transform the mind. For lack of a better phrase, a “Tantric orgasm” is different from a normal orgasm. The energy goes inward; it’s an in-gasm rather than an out-gasm. The ego, like in meditation, dissolves. It’s no longer “I’m having my pleasure, you’re having your pleasure.” One actually becomes the energy of pleasure, and one actually experiences dissolution of ego. So then all there is, is spirit. And the two who are “making love” discover that’s all they ever were—spirit and love and life. There is a realization that the ego is the barest part of existence. When you come back from this experience and reclaim your ego, you just don’t take it as seriously.

Once lovers have this experience, it tends to make them want to practice, to make time for the art of love, like we make time for our yoga asanas and our meditation practices. So lovemaking isn’t something we do when it’s convenient or we feel horny, but it becomes an actual practice to connect with this essence within, and with our partner’s essence.

RD: Do you have to have a partner for Tantric practices?

CM: No, you can have an individual practice. If you’re alone, you can bring a balance to your yin and yang energy, and to the two sides of the brain–let’s call these parts of the brain male and female. Interestingly enough, when singles practice Tantra, they tend to become much more magnetic, to pull in a different quality of partner or playmate than they used to pull in.

RD: Is there a lineage to the form of Tantra you teach? And what is its goal?

CM: My original teacher in White Tantra was Swami Satyananda Saraswati, and my understandings of the teachings were deepened by Richard Hittleman, who I associated with for about 20 years. There’s not a lineage to these teachings. I’ve had a lot of teachers over the years, and I try my best to integrate the practices, seeing what works and what doesn’t work.

What I call “White Tantra” is a gateway into expanding one’s consciousness, to awakening kundalini and bringing on enlightenment. “Red Tantra” is using those same practices and energies, but with a beloved, with another body. The White Tantra practice opens up the chakras, centers of energy and consciousness that are distributed throughout the body. Many times, the chakras are asleep, or they’re shut down because of trauma. The second chakra, what’s considered the sexual center, from the front to the back of the sacrum, is shrouded in darkness and has a very dense energy. It’s the same with the base chakra. Both are imprinted not only by our personal experiences, but also by our societal conditioning. Most of us Westerners have been impacted by the neurosis around sex; we aren’t given a whole lot of holistic approaches to sexuality. This kind of Tantric practice opens the chakras.

RD: How?

CM: There are several techniques. One is simply cultivating a deep physical awareness of the chakra areas. If you’re doing a solo practice, you can scan up and down the chakra line. Or you can use a “yantra” technique: you visualize or gaze upon a geometric thought wave, or “yantra,” that activates a certain chakra. So, for instance, a six-pointed star within a circle is the yantra for the heart chakra. A crescent moon within a circle is a yantra for the second chakra. When you’re making love, it’s almost impossible to not feel your second chakra. If you combine that with a yantra practice, where both partners visualize the yantra, it’s very powerful. Closed or shut-down chakras can’t help but open. Now, it takes a lot of energy to stay closed and shut down, so when that bound energy gets released, it’s freed up for use in the rest of your life.

One more thing I’ll mention: sexual energy is also creative energy. There’s a lot of talk these days about manifesting and affirming and visualizing. But the affirmation or the visualization is like an electrical appliance, like a toaster oven: unless you plug it into the electricity, the energy, it won’t work. The second chakra is like the electricity; it’s the juice, the creative force. The heart chakra is the emotional juice. So we may use Tantra as a form of sex magic. We may think, “I now want to manifest a change in my life. Let me visualize and affirm that, and let me attach it to my creative energy. And rather than squirt, let me hold that energy in me.” When you join the will to the energy of heart and the sexual energy in our loins, that’s powerful.

RD: How can we use that power in our relationships? How can Tantra foster a more enduring marriage?

CM: Many couples get together because of chemistry. Their sexual energy at the beginning is usually quite high, but at the two-year mark, most couples make love only 2.34 times a week. By three years, it’s down to once a week. We just might not “feel” like it. But Tantra practitioners know that we need to practice whether we feel like it or not. It’s like a yoga practice: you do it regularly, even when you don’t feel like it. Tantra practitioners also know “I can change how I feel by doing the practice,” just as a yoga practitioner knows “If I get down on the mat for 10 minutes, I’ll change how I feel.”

A couple’s sexuality is the juice in the relationship; it provides a feeling of deep connection, and Tantra can help couples maintain and foster that connection. Our students are taught to connect everyday, not necessarily to have intercourse, but to connect energetically, physically and emotionally. When couples do the practices, the natural outcome is “Oh, I feel more open now. I don’t feel tired anymore. I don’t have a headache now. Of course I’m open to loving you.”

Connecting with one’s partner becomes not a duty, but a pleasure. Most Westerners practice “all or nothing” sex. They’re either going to go “all the way,” or they don’t do anything. But there are Tantra practices that help partners connect, that don’t involve taking your clothes off. For instance, sitting astride one another, or spooning –lying side-by-side, back to front. Or placing the hands on the other’s chakras, or matching our breathing with our partner’s, or weaving our energy with his or hers. Tantra is a weaving of your energy with your partner’s, and this practice enables you to create a light, beautiful, expansive weaving of energy and love.

RD: What are some of the beginning practices you teach students, and what brings people to your trainings?

CM: The very first exercise we ask you to take a look at your life. What brought you to this class? What are you hoping to get from it? Why are you here? We listen to about 15 people or so in the audience to get a snapshot of what’s motivated people to come. Most of them say they never really got a good education in sexuality, or couples say their sex life is dismal, compared to how it used to be. We get husbands who are dragged to the course because their wives made them come. We get wives who are dragged by their husbands, who said to them “This will help us improve our sex life. You’re not having enough orgasms.” And I’m always amazed at the number of people who say they’re on a spiritual path. Many of them say “I’ve opened up from my heart up, and I realize now it’s time to take a look at the part of me from my heart down. Those chakras were created by the same God that created the upper chakras.”

Saida Désilets, Ph.D(c), is author of Emergence of the Sensual Woman. She trained with Mantak Chia, studying the Universal Tao and sexual energy cultivation. Saida currently lives in Maui, Hawaii. She will be presenting “The role of succulence in our lives” at the Nexus Holistic Expo on November 18 in Denver. Find info at NexusHolisticExpo.com. She will also be teaching “The Awakened Masculine” in Boulder November 9-11. Call 303-449-6096 for info.

RD: Your area of study is primarily Taoist qi gong. Does qi gong always incorporate sexuality?

SD: No. Very few qi gong practices actually reveal that teaching; it’s only given to certain disciples or students. My teacher is Mantak Chia. His main teacher of the practices that he’s translated to his Universal Tao practitioners comes from White Cloud Hermit, who lived in a mountain cave in China and practiced alone for forty years. Mantak trained with him privately, and was given these secret teachings. Before that, Mantak was a martial artist and had done a lot of meditation as a child.

RD: How did you get interested in qi gong, and specifically its relationship to sexuality?

SD: I had read Mantak’s writings long before I found a teacher. They weren’t intelligible for a beginner brain, so I sort of set them aside. Then I found a teacher when I was in my mid-20s. He said “If you continue living your life this way you’re going to get ill.” I had a massage and holistic healing practice. I was a martial artist, teaching Kung Fu; I was a professional belly dancer; I was an actor. I’m an extreme Type A. But I was burning out. There was also the sexual side. I had ended a relationship with a long-term partner but I still had a lot of sexual energy. This teacher recognized that I was likely to spread around or disperse this energy, if it wasn’t harnessed. So he presented me with some simple meditation practices that open the body, and that don’t appear sexual at all. You’re clothed, you’re sitting, you’re not touching your genitals. And you’re moving the energy through your body in a very specific way.

The practices–many of them meditations–are designed for sexual refinement and cultivation, and a lot of them deal with balancing the emotions. Once I mastered that piece, I was given information about sexual energy. It was a verbal lesson, just a few hours of discussion–that’s it. There was no formal class. There was no teacher touching me. There was no interaction. There was simply an explanation of the practices. And as I started those practices, my life was transformed.

RD: What did those practices entail?

SD: The first one was the micro-cosmic orbit, which is a major acupuncture channel that runs through the body. It’s an amazing way to harmonize your energies and balance the body. Nothing else I had tried had the same results.

RD: Is there a sexual component to that practice?

SD: Not at all. However, once you master it, you can use that pathway to move sexual energy; if you’re aroused, you continue to circulate the energy through that same channel it was practical and useful; there weren’t all these different things to do. But there are layers to the practice, and it builds on itself. When I started my sexual practice, for example, I was working specifically with the jade egg practice that was hugely transformative as well. It’s a meditative practice for women, in which a smooth, egg-shaped piece of jade is inserted into the vagina. There’s a hole in the middle with a string that runs through it, so it’s very easy to take out.

Doing the practice, I started to recognize what my sexual energy really felt like and what it really was. It’s not just arousal; I started understanding that there’s un-aroused sexual energy as well, and no one had ever taught me that. Un-aroused sexual energy, for a woman, is the ovarian energy. During the first levels of learning, you’re working only with un-aroused energy. It’s not about self-pleasuring. It’s more about making energetic contact. When you start moving this energy through the micro-cosmic orbit, instead of the normal feeling that you would develop through meditation, you’re feeling this thick, warm honey sap that starts to move into the orbit. You make contact with the energy in the ovaries, which is contained in the eggs; it’s called ovarian chi. Then you redirect that energy to the body, and you can feel it flowing through your body.

RD: It’s not just in your pelvis or your genitals?

SD: No. Most women don’t even know they have that energy. We don’t really make contact with it. Most women experience their sexual energy only when they’re aroused. You can also experience it in pregnancy, labor and delivery, and menstruation can tune you in to your sexual energy, but maybe not in the most positive light with PMS and cramping. Sexual chi gong teaches us a whole new way of relating to our sexual energy; it’s taking your sexuality and maturing it.

RD: What would be the equivalent practice for a man?

SD: For a man, it’s the sperm energy. Men have an identical practice of opening the orbit, harmonizing their emotions, and then making contact with the sperm energy. Men also learn to train the body, so instead of directing sperm energy out of the body, you make contact with it, and you train the body to pull it up through the orbit. It’s a very different pathway. I hear it’s quite an ecstatic experience for the male practitioners.

RD: We’ve been talking about what you’re calling un-aroused sexual energy. Does the practice deal with aroused sexual energy?

SD: You will, at some point, want to cultivate your aroused energy. The reason we start with un-aroused energy is that it’s easier to handle. Aroused energy, as we know, is exciting. It feels more fiery. Usually, we just want to play with it and be done with it. We don’t really want to slow down and meditate when we’re feeling aroused. But that’s exactly the practice that we’re given, once we have a clear understanding of the direction we want our energy to flow; instead of out of our body, we want it to flow into the body.

First you allow yourself to feel it in the genitals; it feels really good, like normal aroused energy. Then you also invite that energy, by using your breath and particular movements of your body, to move into that circuit I described earlier. Essentially, the energy flows up the spine all the way up to the cranium, to the palate of the mouth, down the tip of the tongue and back down to the perineum. At first, you do it alone, until you’ve mastered your own sexual energy, because it gets very complex when you start merging with another person.

After you’ve learned to circulate the sexual energy, self-pleasuring becomes very self-loving and deeply intimate. When you’re doing this, it doesn’t look like there’s a lot going on. If an outsider were to watch a practitioner, it would look like the practitioner was sleeping. There’s a lot of ecstatic energy running and they’re breathing deeply and they’re very relaxed.

RD: How do you use these teachings and practices to help couples resolve relationship issues and deepen their intimate connection?

SD: The key to a healthy couple is how they are relating in an intimate and sexual way. From a Taoist perspective, the key to a healthy sex life is not each other; it’s solo cultivation.

When couples come to me, they think they’re going to get the latest sex technique, but they don’t. What they get from me is techniques first to open their own bodies and heal their own emotions. Most of my work with couples is really intimacy work versus sexual work. People really do know how to make love; it’s a very natural thing. What doesn’t come naturally is intimacy.

RD: Do you deal with specific sexual issues, like impotence?

SD: Yes. Most impotence is psychological. If there are physical issues, they usually deal with depletion, like stress or lack of sleep or poor diet. Sometimes men take Viagra, which is depleting in the long run. Our current habits of sexuality are also seen as depleting in the Taoist traditions. For example, engaging in excessive sexual activity without circulating energy, or making love with a closed heart. For men, excessive ejaculation can also be depleting to the energy.

RD: “Excessive” being how often?

SD: Daily. People who train in this practice are able to experience orgasm, but they don’t release the semen. In the orgasmic response for the male, there’s first the contraction, and then there’s the release. In the training, men learn how to continue experiencing that contraction, but not the release; they learn to direct the impulse. In this particular lineage and practice, orgasm is not necessarily the goal; it’s more of a side effect of the practice. We like orgasmic energy, and it tends to happen, but it’s not the focus.

RD: So let’s say a woman comes to you because she rarely has an orgasm. Is it just not an issue, because that’s not the focus of the practice?

SD: I love this topic. I’d say probably 50 percent of my clients don’t have orgasms, and that’s why they come to me. The reason most women don’t’ have orgasms is because they’re disconnected from their bodies; they’re not able to feel. If you can’t feel, it’s very hard to generate an orgasm. Most people are also very tense about it; if they don’t orgasm, they feel stressed, and they keep trying, and that creates more tension. Orgasm only happens when you relax. If you’re trying to have an orgasm, it’s kind of like chasing your shadow. You can’t catch it if you’re running after it, but if you stop moving, you’ll be able to touch it.

RD: What are some practices you recommend for achieving orgasm?

SD: Specifically, those that will wake up the vagina. Most women are not vaginally orgasmic because the vagina hasn’t been awakened. Un-awakened vaginal tissue has less sensation, so some women feel nothing internally during sexual contact. Some women feel the sensation of being stretched and moved around, but they don’t feel pleasure. They’re not actually in the “Yummy, ooo, that feels good” place.

The jade egg practice helps by awakening the tissues. Regular, thrusting sexual contact does not wake up the vagina; a woman usually needs slow, soft, gentle contact, sometimes with no movement. You’re just holding a spot inside the vagina and breathing, allowing it to open and wake up.

RD: What exactly do you mean by “wake up” the vagina?

SD: I mean to pay attention to it, to sensitize the nerve endings and increase the blood flow. Most women have intercourse when they’re not even aroused yet; there’s less blood flow, and less sensation. It’s like a man trying to have intercourse with a soft penis. When a woman does her solo practice using the jade egg and other techniques, she can cultivate greater sensitivity and know when she’s ready for intercourse. That alone makes a big difference.

Another of the key things I teach women is that we’re not meant to be pushed in to by a man. We’re meant to draw in the man. This is a new experience for most women; they’re used to using tampons and pleasure toys, which they just shove in to their vaginas. When they start learning to draw in the penis, the man, the vagina wakes up.

Another huge piece of this is a woman’s sense of connection to her heart. The more open and loving a woman can be, the more she relaxes and the more her yoni opens and responds. That concept is core enough that it’s the first practice I teach. It has nothing to do with sexuality; it’s reconnecting the heart and the yoni (vagina), and doing some breathing and smiling. For some women, that’s extremely difficult.

This path is not just about orgasm and friction of the genitals. It’s a holistic path that involves much more than sexuality. It’s a way of being. It does involve sexuality, but it also involves the rest of our whole being–what it means to be alive, what it means to enjoy every moment. I would suggest that we’re all born to be omni-orgasmic. We all have the potential to breathe and feel deep joy and pleasure from our aliveness, to be able to look at a flower or a sunset or a baby and feel our aliveness. That’s the path, really.

Meet Saida in person at the Nexus Holistic Expo. She will be presenting THE ROLE OF SUCCULENCE IN OUR LIVES

Sunday, November 18th, 2007 at the Denver Merchandise Mart 10:30 - 11:45am. The talk is free with $7 admission to the expo. Find out more about the expo at: www.nexusholisticexpo.com or more about Saida at: http://www.nexuspub.com/n_expo_saida_desilets.htm