Chi-gung evolved as an integral part of a comprehensive system of healthcare and life extension known as yang-sheng dao, the ‘Tao of Cultivating Life’. Based on traditional Taoist principles of balance and harmony, natural law and universal energy, the Tao of Cultivating Life is a synergistic system of self-cultivation that weaves every aspect of daily life into the fabric of chi-gung practice. Practising chi-gung without adopting the rest of the yang-sheng system greatly diminishes its overall health benefits and increases the possibility of energy deviations. For example, if you don’t reform your diet to reduce consumption of acid-forming foods, your eating habits will conflict directly with your chi-gung practice, negating the alkalizing benefits of deep breathing. If you don’t cultivate the universal virtues of wisdom and compassion along with the universal power of energy, your ego and emotions are more likely to bend your newfound power for deviant purposes. Therefore, if you decide to practise chi-gung to protect your health and prolong your life, you are advised to adopt the complete yang-sheng system as a whole way of life. This will make your body, energy and mind work together as a team to achieve your goals and keep them all firmly on the path of Tao, maximizing the benefits of practice and minimizing the defects and deviations caused by counterproductive habits of body and mind.
There are two sides to the coin of cultivating life with chi-gung. On one side, you learn to bring your chi-gung practice into every aspect of your daily life. On the other side, you learn to adjust every aspect of your daily life to supplement and support your chi-gung practice. Let’s take a look at what this means.
Applying Chi-Gung to Daily Life
One of the most effective ways of promoting health and longevity through chi-gung is to apply the precepts of practice, and the principles of Tao in general, to the ordinary activities of daily life. By learning to regulate body, breath and mind in preparation for every activity in life the same way that you regulate them for a session of chi-gung, you expand your practice to encompass every aspect of life and you extend it to cover the whole day. In fact, one of the main purposes of chi-gung is to learn how to slow down, deepen, balance, harmonize and control every activity in daily life, based on how you work with body, breath and mind in practice sessions, and to apply the techniques of conserving and cultivating energy to ordinary affairs, not just to formal practice. As the Zen master Haikuin declared, ‘Meditation in activity is infinitely superior to meditation in stillness.’ By this he meant that meditators should carry their practice from the meditation cushion to the kitchen, bedroom, garden, workplace and everywhere else, twenty-four hours a day, and should conduct themselves at all times and places with the same spirit they cultivate while meditating in stillness.
A basic example of how to carry your practice into daily life is breathing. It’s very important to breathe consciously and correctly at all times, not just while practising chi-gung. This alone will do more to protect your health and prolong your life than all the medicines in the world combined. Breathing correctly at work greatly enhances productivity and creativity, prevents fatigue, renders one virtually invulnerable to stress and emotional turmoil, and helps keep the mind focused on the task at hand. Correct breathing in the bedroom is the basis of Taoist sexual yoga, enabling males to control ejaculation and females to circulate orgasmic energy. Breathing properly while working in the garden, reading a book, standing in a queue at the bank, driving a car and so forth, transforms every activity into a sort of chi-gung session, and each and every breath taken in this manner contributes another measure of balanced energy to the long-term goals of health and longevity.
The ‘Three S’s’ of movement in chi-gung practice – soft, slow and smooth – may be applied to all movements in daily life. Learn to move slowly and deliberately, to tread softly, to coordinate activities smoothly, and everything in life becomes a ‘moving meditation’. These days people seem to feel that if they hurry and rush through the day, they will be able to accomplish more and ‘save time’, but that’s a fallacy. The faster you move and the more you hurry, the more swiftly time seems to pass, the more mistakes you make along the way, and the less you actually accomplish. Rushing through life makes life pass more quickly, effectively shortening it. Time is, after all, relative, as Einstein proved to the satisfaction of modern science. The relative point of reference is the mind: the faster the mind moves, the faster time flies. On a more physiological, less philosophical level, moving slowly, softly and smoothly at all times keeps the autonomous nervous system in the restorative, life-prolonging parasympathetic mode of operation, even while working, especially if deep abdominal breathing is practised at all times. Here again we see how we can transform every activity into a form of practice and bring the healing, life-preserving benefits of practice into our daily activities. It’s simply a matter of technique.
Balance and harmony, which are the primary precepts of practice, should also serve as general guidelines for all aspects of daily life. Practising moderation in all things, avoiding extremes, cultivating equilibrium, and cleaving to the ‘Golden Mean’ have always been central principles in the Tao of Cultivating Life, and today they are more important than ever. The roots of human life lie in nature and the cosmos, not in industry and technology, and chi-gung shows us how to nurture these roots and harmonize our lives with the natural rhythms and laws of the universe. Through chi-gung practice, we begin to realize the impact which external forces and power fields can have on our internal energies, not just during practice but at all times. This in turn might inspire us to clean up our energy environments by minimizing our exposure to harmful electromagnetic fields, such as those generated by television, electric hair dryers, and other household appliances, to adapt our diets to seasonal shifts in ambient energy rather than to the latest food fads and to take other practical measures to balance our internal energy and harmonize our systems with external fields.
Perhaps the most fundamental lesson of all which chi-gung practice holds for daily life is to focus more attention on internal energy as the primary factor in life and pay less attention to external appearances. When meeting new people, when selecting a suitable location to work and live, when picking colours for clothing and decor, when settling disputes, when analysing a situation of any kind, we should train ourselves to look more closely at the underlying energy factors involved and not to be fooled by appearances or swayed by rationalizations. Once you’ve determined the basic equation of energy at work in a particular situation or decision, it’s a relatively simple matter to apply the same basic principles which prevail in chi-gung to achieving balance in all of the energy equations of life. Energy manifests in manifold ways – colour, smell, sound, food, sex, emotion – but its fundamental nature is universal, and therefore it always responds to the same universal laws of nature. Chi-gung familiarizes us with the basic nature of energy and teaches us the universal laws which govern it. By applying that nature and those laws to all aspects and activities in daily life, we save a lot of time and energy, and time and energy are, after all is said and done, life’s most precious commodities.
Cultivating Life as the Ground for Chi-Gung
The yang-sheng system of cultivating life is an ancient Chinese approach to health and longevity based on the same basic principles that run through all of the traditional Taoist arts and sciences. From these philosophical roots grows a tree of health with branches in diet, herbs, exercise, sex, meditation and other disciplines, all of which work with the same basic energies of Heaven and Earth and conform to the same fundamental principles of balance and harmony.
Chi-gung itself works directly with energy, which makes it the central practice in the Tao of Cultivating Life. Other practices such as diet, supplements and sexual yoga focus on various other manifestations of energy in the body, while cultivating the right attitude, behaviour and spiritual virtues provides proper leadership for energy in the mind. The yang-sheng system weaves together many different threads of life to produce a tapestry of health and longevity whose patterns reflect the eternal rhythms and universal laws of nature and the cosmos. To paraphrase Lao Tze in the Tao Teh Ching, ‘Heaven and Earth endure precisely because they function in accordance with the Tao.’ By harmonizing your life with Heaven and Earth and living in accordance with the Tao, you too may endure. Let’s look at some of the ways this can be done.
Food
Food is the primary postnatal source of the True Energy that fuels corporeal human life on earth, providing the raw material for the essence-to-energy conversion stage of internal alchemy. Nutritional scientists are fond of reminding us that ‘you are what you eat’, while chi-gung masters teach us that ‘you are energy’.
Therefore, whatever you eat should provide the sort of energy that creates a healthy body and sustains life.
In the Tao of Diet, bioenergy rather than biochemistry is the basic barometer of nutritional value in food. The principles of Yin and Yang and the Five Elemental Energies that govern energy in chi-gung and regulate the vital organs and their functions in traditional Chinese medicine apply equally to establishing harmonious energetics in food and cultivating a ‘balanced diet’. Take, for example, enzymes. Enzymes are involved in each and every metabolic function and biological activity in the body. In order to produce enzymes, the body must invest not only valuable proteins, vitamins and minerals, but also the most precious ‘nutrient’ of all – energy. Therefore, the more enzymes we assimilate with our food, the less energy we must expend to produce them in our bodies, and the more energy we save for other purposes. Modern diets are notoriously deficient in enzymes, which are destroyed when food is over-heated, chemically treated and industrially refined. Moreover, enzymes are required in great quantities for digestion, and therefore nature, in its universal wisdom, endowed wholefoods with abundant supplies of precisely the sort of enzymes each type of food requires to digest properly after it enters the digestive tract. But when we consume junk food, convenience food and other kinds of enzyme-dead food, not only do we fail to assimilate sufficient amounts of this essential nutrient to sustain health, we further tax our systems and drain our energy by forcing our bodies to produce large quantities of digestive enzymes just to process the nutritionally empty things we eat.
This sort of ‘negative nutrition’ depletes the body’s reserves of nutritional essence and robs it of energy. Rather than providing the body with the basic building blocks of life and furnishing the energy system with the essential ingredients required to generate energy, modern diets strain the internal organs and drain our reservoirs of energy, impairing rather than protecting health.
As in chi-gung, the Great Principle of Yin and Yang is the main gauge of energy balance in food. All foods may be divided into Yin or Yang categories, depending on the sort of energies they release in the system when digested. Yang foods tend to warm and stimulate the internal organs, while Yin foods have a cooling, calming effect. This principle may be used to select foods in such a way that they help to achieve optimum energy balance in the human system. For example, for a person with slow metabolism and Yin constitution a balanced diet would include more warming, stimulating Yang foods and fewer Yin items, whereas a person with too much hot Yang energy would balance his or her diet by favouring cooling Yin foods and cutting down on warming Yang items. In Western nutrition, a ‘balanced diet’ is regarded as being the same for everyone, based on the biochemical composition of the food itself, while in traditional Chinese medicine diets are balanced according to the constitutional energy traits of each individual. This aspect of Yin and Yang balance in food may also be used to rebalance the diet throughout the year according to seasonal changes. In winter, when the body requires extra heat, more Yang foods are added to the diet, and in summer, external heat is counterbalanced by consuming more cooling Yin products.
The traditional Chinese approach to food energetics, which suggests dietary guidelines that produce effects on human energy which are synergistic with chi-gung practice, differ significantly from the Western approach. Take, for example, raw vegetable salads, which Western nutritionists extol as an excellent choice for everyone every day in every season and which many Western women eat to the exclusion of all other food in order to control their weight. According to Yin/Yang energetics, raw vegetable salads are extremely Yin, which means that they generate very cold, Yin energy within the human system. Excessively cold Yin foods are contraindicated for most women in Chinese medicine, and for almost everyone during cold winter weather. If you’re practising chi-gung and you do not observe Yin/Yang energy balance in your diet, you may end up creating deviations in your energy system which conflict directly with your practice and negate some of its benefits.
Another important aspect of Yin/Yang balance in food is alkaline and acid, or pH balance. People today consume far too much acid-forming (Yang) foods, resulting in chronic acidosis of the blood and intercellular fluids, and this is one of the primary contributing factors to many common degenerative conditions, such as arthritis, osteoporosis, high blood pressure, immune deficiency, cancer and many others. The major culinary culprit in this dietary folly is refined sugar, one of the most acidifying items in the world, and as discussed in chapter 8 the worst offender of all is sweet carbonated soft drinks. One 12-ounce (360ml) glass of the world’s most popular cola contains about 9 teaspoons of refined sugar, and it’s so acidifying to the human bloodstream that it would require thirty-two glasses of alkaline water to neutralize it. Obviously, no one chugs down thirty-two glasses of alkaline water every time they guzzle a can of cola. On the other hand, if the body did not take immediate measures to rebalance the pH of the blood after ingesting such an acid bomb, death would occur in less than a minute. So what the body does is leach calcium from the bones and teeth and draw it into the bloodstream to counteract the acidity caused by the sugar and carbonation from the cola. That’s because calcium is the most effective nutrient alkalizer. But it also means that people who consume a lot of sugar, especially in the form of carbonated soft drinks, as well as other acid-forming foods such as meat and dairy products, are constantly draining calcium from their teeth and bones. That’s why so many people in America lose their teeth and suffer from osteoporosis by the time they reach middle age.
Consequently, calcium has become one of the most essential nutrients that require supplemental sources in modern diets. Not only is calcium the most important building block in bones and teeth and the body’s most effective alkalizing agent to counteract acidosis, it is also an absolutely essential element for nerve transmission and hormone secretion and therefore plays a vital role in the PNI healing response that is triggered by chi-gung. Without sufficient calcium in the diet, many of chi-gung’s immunity-enhancing benefits are compromised. Besides consuming foods rich in calcium and avoiding foods that drain calcium due to their acidifying properties, it’s also a good idea to take calcium supplements and drink water rich in ionized calcium. Remember, however, that the body cannot assimilate calcium without sufficient supplies of vitamin D, which the body produces in response to exposure of the skin to sunlight.
pH balance in the blood and other bodily fluids is closely connected with energy balance and energy circulation, which is why it is so important to regulate pH balance through diet. Proper pH is maintained mainly by alkaline minerals, particularly calcium, and diet is the body’s sole source of these minerals. These minerals also serve as electrolytes to store and transmit energy in the body’s various vital fluids. Energy does not flow freely through an acid medium, and therefore acidosis of the blood and other fluids counteracts the benefits of chi-gung practice. Chi-gung practitioners should pay close attention to the pH aspect of Yin/Yang balance in their diets, favouring foods that produce an alkalizing effect and avoiding excess consumption of acid-forming foods. The chart overleaf, which lists a variety of acid and alkaline foods in order of strength, may be used as a general guideline for selecting a pH-balanced diet:
Acid-Forming Foods | Alkaline-Forming Foods |
sugar | ginger |
rice | spinach |
egg yolk | mushrooms |
oats | cabbage |
tuna | potatoes |
chicken | radish |
pork | squash |
beef | bamboo shoots |
cheese | turnips |
barley | egg white |
shrimp | pears, grapes |
bread | watermelon |
butter | tofu (bean curd) |
The Five Elemental Energies also manifest their activity in foods, in the form of the Five Flavours, each of which has a ‘natural affinity’ for a particular organ-energy system in the body. Sour Wood foods may thus be consumed to tonify the liver and gall bladder, sweet Earth foods for the spleen and stomach, salty Water products for the kidneys and bladder and so forth. When using chi-gung to heal or boost a particular organ or vital function, this aspect of food energetics may be applied to supplement the therapeutic benefits of the chi-gung.
There are many ways that the precepts of chi-gung practice may be applied to cultivate dietary habits which produce nutritional energy effects that are synergistic with the benefits of chi-gung. A simple example is the principle of slowness, which governs both breathing and bodily movements in chi-gung. Applied to eating, this implies eating slowly, which means chewing food very well before swallowing it. This measure alone greatly improves digestion and assimilation, for it allows food to be pre-digested by salivary enzymes in the mouth. This saves a lot of enzyme power and other forms of digestive energy in the stomach and increases the amount of nutrients released for assimilation. The bottom line here is that you obtain more nutritional essence and energy per unit of food consumed, while also conserving a lot of vital enzyme essence and energy, when you eat as slowly and chew your food as deliberately at the table as you breathe and move your body in chi-gung practice.
The other way of regulating the diet and balancing the entire digestive system in Taoist tradition is to abstain entirely from all food from time to time. This regimen, known as bi-gu (‘abstention from grains’), has already been discussed earlier. Periodic fasting is one of the best ways on earth to cleanse the digestive tract, purify and balance the blood, and detoxify the entire body. When practised in conjunction with chi-gung, it greatly enhances the efficiency of the internal alchemy of digestion and metabolism, training the system to extract more energy from the body’s available reserves of essence. And just as food may be used to cure specific ailments, so abstention from food may be used to cure the whole body by triggering a full-scale internal house-cleaning operation that sweeps out all toxic residues and rejuvenates the entire system.
Readers who wish to reform their diets according to traditional Taoist nutritional principles and thereby bring their eating habits into harmony with their chi-gung practice may refer to the chapters on diet and nutrition in my previous works, The Tao of Health, Sex, and Longevity and The Complete Book of Chinese Health and Healing, in which the Tao of Diet is discussed in full detail.
Water
In terms of energy conductivity, water and ionized minerals are the two most important nutritional elements in the human system and together they constitute what are known as electrolytes, mineral-rich fluids that conduct and store energy in the tissues. Furthermore, water is the richest source of ionized minerals for the human body, but only if the water is pure, alkaline and free of chemical additives. One reason that Hindu yogis and Taoist hermits preferred to live and practise in high mountains is because mountain spring water is loaded with calcium and other essential alkaline minerals in ionized form, and also rich in oxygen. Drinking such water enhances internal energy to such a degree that the need for solid food is significantly decreased. It also provides a strong foundation for higher spiritual work by increasing the body’s capacity to store, transform and circulate energy.
Oxygen is another important element in water. Oxygen helps maintain proper pH balance by promoting alkalinity and also assists the body in detoxifying the cells and tissues. Furthermore, with the available oxygen in the atmosphere reduced by half over the past two hundred years, water has become more important than ever as a supplementary source of oxygen. The best way to obtain oxygen from water is to infuse the water with ozone gas, then drink it. Ozonated water may also be used for bathing, for enemas and colonic irrigations, and for vaginal douches, all of which methods facilitate assimilation of abundant supplies of oxygen from ozonated water.
Unfortunately, public drinking water today has become a source of toxic chemicals rather than essential minerals and oxygen. Chlorine and fluoride, which are often added to public water supplies throughout the world, are both certified poisons. In addition, public water supplies are laced with lead, cadmium, aluminium and other toxic metals. ‘You are what you drink’ even more so than what you eat, because more than 80 per cent of the body’s composition is water. Purity and proper pH balance in water is therefore even more essential to health and longevity than in food, and chi-gung practitioners would be wise to ensure that the water they drink works in conjunction rather than conflicts with their other health practices. The best way to prepare and balance drinking water so that it supports internal alchemy, stores and transmits energy, and promotes health is to first run it through a water ionizer to ionize the minerals, filter out toxins, remove acids, and alkalize the water (this produces what’s known as ‘microwater’), then suffuse it with ozone. Devices for both of these purposes are now commercially available and may be ordered from the supplier listed in the Appendix.
Supplements
The judicious use of herbal and nutritional supplements can be very helpful as a form of synergistic support for chi-gung. In China, chi-gung and medicinal herbs have been used in close conjunction for thousands of years, both in the prevention and cure of disease as well as for martial arts and spiritual training. Chinese medicine categorizes and prescribes herbs according to their effects on the human energy system, and after more than 5000 years of clinical experience, the specific effects of the more than 2000 herbs in the Chinese pharmacopoeia have all been recorded in great detail. This information can be of great practical benefit in fine-tuning your energy system as your chi-gung practice progresses. Detailed information on the nature and use of more than one hundred individual herbs and three dozen compound formulas may be found in my previous work A Handbook of Chinese Healing Herbs.
Supplementary herbal formulas fall into three major categories. The category most highly favoured by chi-gung practitioners, and by the Chinese in general, are tonic herbs and formulas, known in Chinese as ‘Superior Medicine’ (shang yao). Tonics are meant to be taken only when you’re in good health, and their purpose is to further elevate your health by boosting immunity, enhancing vitality and strengthening vital functions, including sexual potency and mental faculties. Due to their stimulating effects on hormone production, tonics are increasingly favoured for their age-retarding benefits as one grows older. They may be taken as pills, powders, teas, liquids, extracts or cooked into food.
The second category is constitutional formulas. These formulas are specifically combined to produce effects that compensate for constitutional imbalances in an individual’s energy system. If a person has an innately weak digestive system, for example, he or she would take a herbal formula that enhances digestive functions. People with constitutional deficiencies may use specially blended herbal formulas to balance their systems, then gradually reduce and eliminate the herbs as chi-gung practice begins to correct the condition. Using herbs to boost the effects of chi-gung saves some time in such cases.
The third category is curative formulas, which are only used when symptoms of disease have already appeared. Curative herbs may be used to relieve symptoms as well as cure root causes of disease, and the formulas are adjusted every week or two as the cure progresses. When the system has regained balance and the disease is cured, herbal treatment stops, after which an appropriate tonic or constitutional formula may be taken to prevent a similar imbalance from occurring again.
The other type of supplement is nutritional, including vitamins, minerals, enzymes and food concentrates. Abundant information on this topic is available elsewhere and need not be repeated here, except to stress the particular importance of sufficient mineral supplementation in chi-gung practice. Due to their crucial role in the synthesis of electrolytes and enzymes, minerals are vital elements in all essence-to-energy transformations in the human body and are also involved in the storage and circulation of energy. It should also be noted that minerals are much more difficult to assimilate than other nutritional supplements, and therefore should be taken in several forms, to ensure sufficient supplies. All multi-vitamin formulas contain a spectrum of minerals, and these may be further supplemented by using alkaline water (preferably prepared by ionization), fresh raw vegetable juices and whole sea salt. And be especially careful to take enough calcium.
Sexual Yoga
‘All the best medicines and good food in the world cannot help one achieve longevity unless one knows and practises the Tao of Yin and Yang.’ So wrote the great Taoist alchemist Ko Hung seventeen centuries ago. Sexual yoga has played a central role in the Tao of Cultivating Life ever since the dawn of Chinese civilization 5000 years ago, when the Yellow Emperor is said to have attained immortality by using the method of ‘contact without leakage’ in his sexual relations with a harem of 1200 women. In Secrets of the Jade Bedroom, Peng Tze, the ‘Chinese Methusela’ who is reported to have lived to the age of 800, explains that for men semen is the fundamental fountain of life and must be carefully conserved in sexual intercourse:
In sexual intercourse, semen must be regarded as a most precious substance. By saving it, a man protects his very life. Whenever he does ejaculate, the loss of semen must then be compensated by absorbing the woman’s essence.
Sexual secretions constitute the body’s most potent form of vital essence for internal alchemy, and sexual energy is the most powerful kind of energy for cultivating spiritual vitality. For men, the importance of conserving semen by carefully regulating frequency of ejaculation cannot be overstated, especially after the age of forty, for nothing erodes male vitality more quickly than reckless sexual activity. As the Plain Girl, the Yellow Emperor’s chief advisor on sexual matters, explains to him, ‘If a man can learn to control and regulate his ejaculations during sex, he may derive great benefits from this practice. The retention of semen is highly beneficial to man’s health.’
While women do not need to worry about losing sexual essence during sex and may therefore enjoy as many orgasms as they wish, sexual yoga also serves the female very well by teaching her how to transform sexual energy and raise it up to the head to nurture spirit, and how to circulate it through the whole system to elevate vitality and enhance immunity. In Taoist sexual yoga, man and woman are equal, and the sexual act becomes a living metaphor for the internal alchemy activated by chi-gung. As the Plain Girl explains:
When men and women indulge freely in sex, exchanging their bodily fluids and breathing each other’s breath, it is like Fire and Water meeting in such perfect proportions that neither one defeats the other. Man and woman should ebb and flow in intercourse like the waves and currents of the sea, first one way, then another, but always in harmony with the Great Tide (female orgasm).
Many of the techniques used to regulate breath and energy in chi-gung practice may also be used by men to control ejaculation and by women to transform and circulate sexual energy during sexual intercourse. The anal lock, for example, is the primary preventive against premature ejaculation for men and the main technique for raising orgasmic energy from sacrum to cerebrum for women.
Learning How to ‘Lock the Gate’
The rhythmic contraction and relaxation of the anal sphincter can be practised any time, anywhere, in any position. Be sure to contract both the external and internal sphincters and to hold the contraction for several seconds before relaxing it.
When utilizing the anal lock for ejaculation control, you should apply it strongly as your lungs fill up, hold it tightly while you briefly retain the breath, but do not release it during exhalation, as you would in ordinary breathing exercises. Hold it locked tightly through two or three complete breathing cycles, or for as long as necessary to regain composure and control. Only then should you release it, slowly and gently. Remember that this exercise also benefits women by toning up the entire urogenital diaphragm and drawing sexual energy upward.
The muscles that control the anal sphincters may be further contracted to exert control over the prostate, the ureter and the entire penile shaft. When properly applied, you can feel this extended contraction lift the entire pelvic floor upwards as it closes off the urogenital canal.
This enhanced anal, prostate and penile lock, combined with breath retention, is the key that ‘locks the gate’, a key that every man may forge for himself by daily practice of a single, simple exercise that is as easy to remember and perform as going to the toilet. Here’s how it’s done: while urinating, a few seconds before the flow of urine stops, sharply lock the anus and contract the penile shaft to ‘squeeze off’ the ureter and halt the flow, as if you were ‘holding it’ while looking for a toilet. After a second or two, relax the contraction, let the flow of urine resume, then immediately ‘squeeze it off’ again. Each squeeze will cause a strong spurt of residual urine as the ureter is contracted. Repeat this three to five times, or until no more urine spurts out when you squeeze, then hold the last contraction for 5 to 10 seconds while you tuck yourself back in and zip up. You can further enhance the effects of this exercise by standing up on your toes while doing it.
If a man performs this exercise habitually every time he urinates, he will automatically be practising the correct method of ‘locking the gate’ during intercourse – several times a day, every day.
The Orgasmic Upward Draw for Women
Men must learn ejaculation control in order to prevent depletion of essence and energy during sexual intercourse. While women need not worry about essence and energy loss through ejaculation, they do experience significant loss of vital energy as a result of menstruation and the gradual slackening of vaginal muscles. To reduce such losses, women may practise the ‘Orgasmic Upward Draw’.
The key muscle in this exercise is the pubococcygeal muscle, also called the ‘Love Muscle’, which controls the labia, vagina and other parts of the female sexual organ. Before even attempting the Orgasmic Upward Draw, women should spend a few months tightening and toning the Love Muscle by practising deep contractions of the anus and perineum and extending the contraction all the way through the vagina. This exercise alone will eventually reduce menstrual bleeding, prevent loss of chi through the vagina, stimulate secretions in the sacral glands, and help open the lower channels of the Microcosmic Orbit.
The Orgasmic Upward Draw is the technique by which women may direct the energy of orgasm inward and upward through the spinal energy channels, so that the sexual energy spreads to all parts of the body and into all the vital organs via the meridian network. Not only does this conserve energy and tonify the organs, it results in a total body orgasm that only women are capable of experiencing.
To cultivate the Orgasmic Upward Draw, first practise alone and unaroused, as follows. Sit on the edge of a stool or chair and perform a few minutes of Bellows breathing (see “Seven Ways of Breathing in Chi-Gung,” chapter 7). Then inhale slowly and deeply, retain the breath and lock up the entire body by clenching feet and fists, contracting anus, perineum and vagina, and applying neck and abdominal locks as well. Press tongue to palate, tilt sacrum forward to straighten sway in lower spine, and roll eyes up towards top of head. Then slowly exhale through the nostrils as you gently release all locks and relax all muscles and visualize energy moving up the spine. After practising this exercise for a few weeks, try it in a state of self-arousal, applying the locks and retention when you are about 95 per cent towards the brink of orgasm.
When you start feeling heat gathering in the vagina and perineum and energy tingling up your spine during this exercise, then you are ready to practise it during sexual intercourse with a partner. During actual intercourse, the most important thing is to start applying the Orgasmic Upward Draw before actual orgasmic contractions of the vagina commence, but after the energy of orgasm has already been aroused inside. Just prior to orgasm, lock the gates, tighten the muscles, inhale deeply and retain the breath. Then tuck the pelvis forward to straighten the spine and perform six to nine deep contractions of the pubococcygeal muscle. When properly performed after long practice, this will cause orgasmic contractions to reverse the flow of sexual energy during orgasm, sending it coursing up the spinal channels instead of out through the vagina, and filling the entire body with the ecstatic sensation of orgasm.
Despite its novelty in the light of conventional sexuality, ejaculation control is really as natural as breathing and flexing muscles. What is most difficult for most conventional men to master is the mentality of ejaculation control. As semen gathers and the exquisite sensations associated with a mounting ejaculation flood the body, men tend to lose their mental resolve and abandon their physical discipline. A nagging little voice bleats inside their heads, tempting them with rhetorical arguments, ‘Go ahead! Why not? To hell with Tao! Life is short!’ Men who heed this devilish voice too often will indeed discover that ‘life is short’.
Beginners often complain that retaining semen during intercourse is ‘impossible’, or that it leaves them with that full feeling in the scrotum known as ‘lover’s balls’, or that their partners don’t ‘cooperate’ enough. When first attempting semen retention, post-coital pressure in the testicles is perfectly natural and no cause for alarm. It is caused by a very fundamental change in physical habit and a complete reorganization of the ejaculatory apparatus. It is no different than the bloated or jittery feelings you get in your stomach whenever you make a major, permanent change in dietary habits. After the body grows accustomed to the mechanics and biochemistry of the new routine, all uncomfortable side-effects disappear entirely. In the meantime, you can relieve that ‘full feeling’ with a few minutes of post-coital deep breathing and by gently massaging the region between anus and scrotum.
In order to help smooth the way for beginners on the path to ejaculation control, the author offers the following five fundamental guidelines:
1. First and foremost, enlist your wife or lover as a partner. A man cannot master ejaculation control with strangers. He needs a woman who is fully familiar with him and with the principles and practices involved. An understanding and patient partner serves a novice male as the Plain Girl served the Yellow Emperor, guaranteeing complete cooperation and a carefree relationship. Once a man has mastered the methods, he may apply them with any partner.
2. Start out by practising ejaculation control during the daytime and promising yourself the treat of an ejaculation later on that day or night. This makes it a lot easier to ignore the advice of that bleating voice as ejaculation approaches, for you may look forward to an emission during a second round later.
3. Once you have learned to suppress ejaculation during daytime intercourse, try skipping the bribe of a later ejaculation, and start experimenting objectively with your physiological and psychological responses to intercourse without ejaculation. Take note of your physical vitality and mental alertness after sex without emission, take pride in your new-found self-control, and take pleasure in your partner’s ever-growing satisfaction with your sexual skills.
4. When you have finally mastered both the methods and the mentality of ejaculation control, make it a permanent habit by adopting it as a form of birth control.
5. Follow your own instincts and personal experience in determining your own ideal ejaculation frequency. Every five or six years, decrease the frequency of emission according to the same factors, without decreasing your frequency of intercourse. This will automatically adjust your sexual habits to suit the requirements of advancing age and guarantees sufficient stores of essence and energy to replenish the depletions associated with ageing.
With diligent practice, some men can even learn to approach the very brink of ejaculation and enjoy all the exquisite sensations associated with it, without spilling a drop of semen. These sensations are similar to the series of ‘mini-orgasms’ women sometimes experience en route to the ‘big bang’ at the end.
Deep diaphragmic breathing with a prolonged retention during the compression stage is another way of controlling semen emission and circulating energy in Taoist sexual yoga. Conversely, the extra supplies of sexual essence and energy accumulated by practising Taoist sexual yoga provide potent fuel for internal alchemy in chi-gung, enhancing immunity, strength and spiritual vitality.
Another reason that serious practitioners of chi-gung should regulate their sexual activities according to the Tao of Yin and Yang is because when sexual energy gets involved with human emotions, as it normally does in life, it can turn a person’s life topsy-turvy and cause all sorts of unnecessary complications in human relationships. Taoist sexual yoga bypasses the human emotions by drawing raw sexual energy up from the sacrum, refining it in the channels and energy centres along the spine, and raising it directly into the brain to nurture spirit. Not only does this prevent the animal instinct of sex from controlling human behaviour by inflaming the ego and agitating the emotions, it also puts sexual energy directly under the command of spirit, where it may be expressed with wisdom and compassion rather than lust.
Last but not least, sexual yoga produces sexual harmony and happiness between man and woman in marriage, and this in turn provides the sort of emotional stability required for swift progress in chi-gung. Like Fire, male sexual energy naturally tends to flare up quickly, burn intensely, then fizzle out, while female energy, like Water, usually takes a long time to warm up, but once it’s hot, it stays hot for a long time. The Tao of Yin and Yang teaches men how to control their Fire so that it burns more slowly and lasts a lot longer, thereby enabling it to bring female Water to a full boil and keep it hot for as long as a woman needs to feel completely satisfied. The ever practical Tao thus provides a way for loving couples to utilize sexual energy for health, longevity and spiritual development, while also maximizing the mutual pleasure derived from the sexual act.
The Power of Emptiness
The term ‘emptiness’ crops up time and again in Eastern mystical teachings, for emptiness is the essential nature of all existence and the primordial ground from which all manifest form arises and ultimately returns. It is also the basic nature of energy and spirit, the immaterial forces that mould the manifest universe. In the modern world of commerce and compulsive consumerism, all empty space and time are obsessively filled with construction, decoration, billboards, sensory distractions and entertainment, and consequently the practical value and expressive power of emptiness have been largely forgotten. Yet in terms of functional utility, nothing is more practical and potent than emptiness, as Lao Tze so clearly illustrates in the Tao Teh Ching:
We put thirty spokes together and call it a wheel;
But it is on the space where there is nothing that the usefulness of the wheel depends.
We turn clay to make a vessel;
But it is on the space where there is nothing that the usefulness of the vessel depends.
We pierce doors and windows to make a house;
But it is on the spaces where there is nothing that the usefulness of the house depends.
Therefore, just as we take advantage of what is, so we should recognize the usefulness of what is not.
Thus an ancient Taoist adage advises, ‘Those who strive for longevity should maintain the “Four Empties”.’ The Four Empties are useful guidelines in the Tao of Cultivating Life, providing daily reminders of the utility of emptiness in all aspects of life:
• Empty Mind. What one does not think about is far more useful than the speculative chatter with which one usually fills the mind. Wisdom never arises from idle fantasy and discursive thought, but rather from direct intuitive perception of truth, which can only occur when the mind is still and empty of thought. The reason meditation is so important in Eastern mystical traditions is that meditation is the most effective way to experience the primordial purity and power of emptiness, even if for only a few moments, and because emptiness is the original ground of enlightened awareness. However, in order to be of practical utility in daily life, this emptiness of mind must be carried into ordinary activity as well; otherwise it remains a mere mental exercise.
• Empty Stomach. This is a reminder that gluttony paves a quick path to the grave and impedes progress on the path of self-cultivation. The human tendency to over-eat has been further aggravated today by supermarkets, fast food, convenience food shops, home delivery and mass advertising campaigns. Nothing on earth pollutes the body more swiftly than to overstuff the stomach with a haphazard combination of denatured foods that can only be partially digested and whose putrefied by-products linger and stagnate in the digestive tract for weeks, months and years, polluting the blood by osmosis and producing a chronic state of acidosis and toxaemia. On the other hand, leaving the stomach completely empty, as in the period is abstinence from food (bi-gu) practised by chi-gung adepts, is by far the best way to detoxify the system, purify the blood and alkalize the tissues and bodily fluids. Eat only when you feel hungry, but do not eat only to fill an empty stomach. From the viewpoint of chi-gung practice, an empty stomach is far more useful for energy work than a full one.
• Empty Kitchen. A good way to maintain an empty stomach is to keep an empty kitchen. Storing large quantities of food in the kitchen not only promotes over-eating, it also allows food to get stale and grow mould. The less food you keep in the kitchen, the more careful you tend to be about eating, and the more often you must go out to purchase fresh food. Today, with deep freezers and microwave ovens, some people don’t go shopping more than once a month, subsisting entirely on pre-cooked, industrially processed frozen foods heated up by microwaves. Anyone who wishes to fully benefit from regular practice of chi-gung would be well advised to consume only fresh foods in moderate quantities and to banish all pre-cooked and artificially processed foods from the kitchen. If you are simply too lazy to properly prepare fresh food at home, then go out and eat in restaurants that serve wholesome health food. Cost need not be a consideration here, because if you follow the ‘empty stomach’ guideline and cut down the quantity while elevating the quality of the food you consume, then you need not spend much money dining out.
• Empty Room. Walk into any disco on any night in any city in the world and you will experience the utter antithesis of ‘empty room’. Ear-piercing music reverberates in the smoky, air-conditioned air, while flashing lights, lasers and strobes bombard the eyes and flood the brain with a constant barrage of sensory distraction that precludes even a moment of emptiness from arising in the mind. The same chaotic cacophony and visual clutter prevail in department stores, shopping malls, offices and private homes. As discussed earlier, the internal microcosm of the human system reflects the prevailing energy conditions of the external macrocosm, and whatever external energies we expose our systems to imprint their patterns on our internal energies. Thus the more clutter and chaos we perceive in our immediate environment, the more chaotic and cluttered become our minds and energies. There’s not much you can do to simplify and harmonize the prevailing energies in public spaces, but you can certainly control your own private living space. Zen gardens and room decor in Japan are designed to still and empty the mind by imparting their simplicity and natural harmonics to the human energy system, thereby sweeping away the artifice and complexity of human thought and allowing emptiness to arise naturally in the mind. Though spartan in appearance, an empty room is pregnant with potential insight and energy; when the human mind perceives such a room and tunes itself into the prevailing emptiness, all sorts of energy and awareness will spontaneously begin to stir, suffusing the mind with the sort of primordial power and awareness that can only arise from emptiness.
Chi-gung and other Taoist health regimes are founded on the potential power and awareness that arise from emptiness. Moreover, the principle of emptiness manifests itself in many other subtle ways in the Tao of Cultivating Life, such as in the superiority of restraint over aggression, silence over noise, not-doing over doing, stillness over speed, abstinence over indulgence, and so forth. It is the human attachment to material form that creates so much greed and illusion in life, and drives people to value material gain over spiritual virtue, only to realize at the moment of death that ‘you can’t take it with you’. Awareness, however, is an eternal asset that follows you from life to life, so whatever spiritual insights you acquire in life become permanent dividends of everlasting value. To gain such valuable insight, one must cultivate an implicit understanding and appreciation of the power of emptiness. Cultivating the Four Empties in daily life teaches us to recognize the value and practical utility of emptiness and familiarizes us with the terrain of spiritual immortality.
Cultivating the Right Mind for Practice
‘Right Mind’ is one of the basic precepts of the ‘Noble Eight-Fold Path’ taught by the Buddha as a way to end suffering and achieve spiritual liberation. Without the right attitude and a wholesome outlook on life, no practice in the world can bring you peace of mind, physical health, happiness and longevity. There is a very strong tendency today to believe that everything can be accomplished entirely through science and technology, modern medicine and diet, physical exercise and various other external methods, without the slightest consideration for the most important factor of all – consciousness.
One of the main purposes of chi-gung is to cultivate ‘right energy’ as a functional basis for ‘right mind’. When our energy systems are deficient and imbalanced, clogged with stagnant energies, obstructed with toxins and tensions, and out of tune with the forces of nature and the cosmos, not only does this cause physical disease and degeneration, it also gives rise to mental distress and emotional imbalance. When your energy is pure, strong and well balanced, so are your body and mind. On the other hand, since ‘spirit commands energy’, it’s equally important to cultivate spiritual virtue as a basis for energy work. A mean spirit always generates mean energy, and an angry mind causes the energy cultivated by chi-gung to deviate into anger. While chi-gung can certainly help balance and harmonize the mind by nurturing spirit with the pure primordial energy generated by internal alchemy, there is a limit to how far energy can influence spirit.
As we already know, spirit is the ultimate authority in the human system, and therefore it has the power to over-rule energy. Thus a conscious effort must be made by mind itself to cultivate spiritual virtue as a basis for practice. No matter how much energy is harvested from the universe and how well it is cultivated within the human system, if the human mind deviates from the path of wisdom and compassion paved by primordial spirit and defies the universal laws of nature and the cosmos, then energy will heed the same deviant call and manifest the same delinquent activity, for energy always follows the mind. Indeed, one reason that so many people today are so unhealthy, short-lived and spiritually stunted is that they subvert their own vital energy resources with perverse thoughts and deviant intentions.
We have already discussed the power of positive thinking as a basis for awakening the body’s own natural healing responses. Positive thinking includes one’s entire outlook on life and cultivates an optimistic point of view, precluding the cynical attitudes and dark pessimism which have become so fashionable these days. All too often people discount positive thinking as mere ‘wishful thinking’, because they’re afraid to trust the power of spirit and unwilling to cultivate ‘right mind’ as a basis for life. There is, however, a tremendous reservoir of transformative power locked inside the mind, and the key to unleashing this power is a positive attitude towards life. What this basically means is that your energy is capable of accomplishing whatever you believe it can do, for ‘spirit commands energy’. A positive attitude always propels energy in a positive direction, and ‘right mind’ naturally guides energy the ‘right way’.
All true chi-gung masters make a strong point of teaching their students that their ordinary behaviour in daily life sets the tone for their entire practice, and that private practice and public life can never be separated. If you truly understand and accept the view that all phenomena in life reflect the interplay of universal energies and that all relationships are governed by the interaction between the personal energy fields of the individuals involved, then you must realize the truth of the statement that ‘no man is an island’. In terms of energy, there are no concrete boundaries between objects or between people, because all energy fields radiate outward infinitely, and therefore they ultimately intersect with everything else in the universe.
Thus, if half the people on the planet are suffering and unhappy, that negative energy is bound to affect the rest of the people on the planet, whether they are aware of it or not. Unhappy minds project unhappy energies, and unhealthy bodies generate unhealthy energy fields, and those energies and fields broadcast a miasma of misery out in all directions, producing a planetary pall that ultimately affects everyone else in the world. Building high walls and installing steel gates around your home may keep out burglars and protect your material possessions from theft, but they won’t keep out the negative energy of other people’s misery nor protect you from its negative influence.
According to this view, greedy, selfish behaviour towards others is always counterproductive because it causes others to project negative energy that bounces back and harms the perpetrators of greed. Similarly, whenever we help others and make others happy, we thereby also help ourselves and make ourselves happy, because the happiness we bring others with our helpful behaviour is projected straight back to us from their minds.
Even if we cannot bring ourselves to be overtly helpful to others, at the very least we should refrain from being harmful and thereby avoid invoking the negative impact of others’ enmity. If we go one step further and actually go out of our ways to help others, we then earn their everlasting gratitude. Gratitude and enmity are very different qualities in terms of the type of energy they generate and project on to others. If you earn the enmity of enough people, there is no question that the cumulative effects of the negative energy they project to you will have a strongly negative impact on your life, just as the energy of gratitude can be of tremendous benefit. This point goes beyond moral considerations: it’s a basic fact of life, a universal principle of energy, and therefore an important point of practice.
It is due to the primacy of energy in life that human relationships provide such fertile ground for training in energy work. This is especially true of personal family relationships, in which emotions come into play. As everyone knows, the Chinese put great stock in family relationships, viewing the family as a microcosm of society, the state, and the entire cosmos. The energy dynamics between parents and children and among siblings is a training ground for how personal energy is expressed in the world at large. Relationships between teacher and student, master and disciple, were also regarded as sacred, because the teacher or master taught younger people how to harness their instinctive animal energies to serve the higher purposes of Heaven, Earth and Humanity. All such relationships in life may contribute valuable lessons in chi-gung practice, and all the precepts of balance and harmony which govern chi-gung may be applied with equally beneficial results to human relationships.
Perhaps the most important element of all in cultivating the right mind for life on the path of spiritual practice and energy work is love. Love, in the altruistic sense of selfless unconditional compassion for others, seems to have gone completely out of style in the modern world, and few people today attribute the rapid decline in human health throughout the world to the absence of love. It is not an accident that all of the world’s great religious and mystical traditions consistently stress the over-riding importance of love. The great martial artist Chang San-feng, who is credited with developing Tai Chi Chuan six hundred years ago, summed up his entire approach to life by saying, ‘Therefore, to those who want to know the way to deal with the world, I suggest, Love People.’
This is not a goody-two-shoes, pie-in-the-sky moral injunction to be a nice guy or girl, but rather a very basic lesson in energy work and spiritual power. The universe from which we harness power when we practise chi-gung is a living organism with spirit, and that spirit is guided by wisdom and compassion. All of our energy comes from the universe and ultimately returns to it. In order to fuel our lives, we borrow as much energy from the universe as we need, or as much as our practice permits, but in order for it to work positively for us, universal energy must be utilized in accordance with the other two universal virtues with which it is inseparably linked at its primordial source – wisdom and compassion. In this pragmatic age of science and technology, people are prone to overlook the power of love, but it doesn’t take much vision to see very clearly that science and technology, which can be said to represent energy unbridled by love, have certainly brought neither health nor happiness to the world. If love were taken seriously as a guideline for utilizing energy, then atomic energy would never have been allowed to be used to produce weapons of mass destruction. This may seem obvious, and perhaps naïve, but the fact remains that love is the best safeguard against the deviant use of energy, and spiritual self-cultivation is the best way to understand how wisdom, love and energy are inseparable triunal virtues that must always be cultivated together.
To cultivate love, you must practise it daily, just as you do to cultivate energy and wisdom. Here are a few ways to cultivate love as ‘the way to deal with the world’.
• Try to hug someone at least half a dozen times per day. Make it a real bear hug, and do it the same way you practise chi-gung – with body relaxed, breath deep and slow, mind still and empty. If you really relax into a hug and pay attention to how you feel, you’ll be amazed at how much positive energy it generates – and how much negative energy it releases from the system.
• Learn to say, ‘I love you’. It’s amazing how difficult these words are for most people to say today. When you say ‘I love you’ to someone and mean it, you beam healing energy to them and enhance their health and happiness. That seems simple enough in principle, but in practice many people have trouble doing it. Furthermore, if you can say it with an open heart, you’ll notice that it feels very good and stirs a lot of power between you and the recipient, and that somehow it feels right.
• Laugh a lot. Laughter is a very positive expression of energy, and it’s closely related to love. Laughter comes from the heart, so when you laugh, you open your heart and balance your heart energy. Laughter does not always have to be prompted by humour; simple happiness suffices to stimulate a good belly laugh. For releasing physical as well as mental and emotional tension, nothing compares to the power of laughter, and in this sense, it is a very effective form of chi-gung.
• Avoid anger like the plague. Anger completely wilts the most carefully cultivated garden of love. Anger generates highly volatile, very destructive energy, and the person who suffers most from anger is the one who expresses it, not the one at whom it is directed. Therefore, getting angry only hurts yourself, not others, although temper tantrums can certainly be annoying to others. In terms of chi-gung, a brief burst of anger totally negates the cumulative benefits of many weeks of practice, so here again, as with love, it is the individual who expresses that energy who is most deeply affected by it.
• Practice the ‘Golden Rule’: do not do unto others what you would not have them do unto you. Simple as this seems, people consistently do things that are harmful to others, as long as they believe that they can ‘get away with it’. But you never get away with anything when it comes to generating energy. If you do something deliberately, knowing that the result of your action will harm someone else, that sets in motion a chain reaction of energy dynamics which ultimately backfires on you. This is the basis of karma in Oriental thought. By refraining from harming others, you also refrain from causing harm to yourself.
• Always give before you receive, and you will never want for anything. Giving is an expression of love. If there’s something you really want in life, the quickest way to get it is to give others what they want, and this in turn will establish a flow of positive energy back to you. Whenever you express your personal energy with love, such as in giving, you receive energy from others in the same spirit. Like everything else related to love, this may strike the modern man and woman in the age of science and technology as facile, but in actual practice it works. Try it – you’ll love it!
Chi-gung is without doubt one of the swiftest paths to health and longevity in the world, but in order for it to work for you, you must practise it within the total context from which it arose. That means cultivating wisdom and compassion together with energy, and utilizing energy with wisdom and compassion. Most important of all is to take full personal responsibility for protecting your own health, and for curing your own disease when preventive measures fail, and take responsibility for your own behaviour and its consequences in your life. Chi-gung teaches us how to take our lives into our own hands by showing us how to manage our personal energy and cultivate a direct personal relationship with the universe. Like all relationships from which we learn something and obtain beneficial results, respect is an essential factor in the relationship between a human being and the spirit of the universe. The spirit of the universe creates life by organizing the power of energy with wisdom and love. Those who call upon that power must do so with due respect for the wisdom and love that command it, for in the grand order of the universe wisdom, love and power are inseparably linked. Thus it behoves those who practise chi-gung to cultivate wisdom and love along with energy, so that the power they cull from the universe is not co-opted for deviant purposes by the ignorance, greed and aggression of the human mind. The Tao of Cultivating Life provides the most suitable context for chi-gung practice precisely because it regulates every aspect of human life with the same basic principles of wisdom and love that govern power at the highest levels of the universe, drawing every facet of daily life into one’s practice and leaving no loopholes for self-deception and deviation.