Esoteric Arts

We use a cauldron to store materials. We use a cauldron to cook and we can use a cauldron to keep the meal in. Witches traditionally use a cauldron for making potions, creating magic, transforming ingredients.

The body is also a cauldron. In it we store our energy. In it we also store many of the residues of past experiences. They are our body armours, places where memories of past stress are stored and which, whether we wish to acknowledge it or not, affect our daily function.

In our body we cook our potions, steam our stews and also digest our meals and our daily experiences. Our digestion is good or bad. We provide healthy or unhealthy meals for this cauldron, both literally and metaphorically. We enjoy or suffer the results of this cooking. Some of us are, metaphorically speaking, walking bags of undigested material passing out our flatulence in one way or another, emitting our bad breaths in our interactions with our world.

In our cauldron we can have seething prejudices, unresolved conflicts, past losses and unrealized hopes.

The state of our cauldron is also the state of our awareness. The state of our awareness is also our experience of life. Whatever we do, whatever we aim at, whatever happens and wherever we bring ourselves, to that we bring also the state of our awareness and the quality of the energy we are producing and are. There can be no doubt of this even if we choose to ignore it.

It seems curious to me how many people pursue happiness, social justice, religious growth, psychological integration etc and tend to ignore the quality of their energy. If you pray you can only pray with the energy that you are. If you practise self examination you can only do this using your awareness, confused or clear. If you wish the world peace you can only wish from a serene or not so serene mind. You are what you attend to, what you focus on. What you focus on brings you your experiences of life You can only focus with the state of awareness you have, the sort of person you are. Your experiences of life get determined by the quality of energy you bring to your life.

You have to start where you are. No journey commences where you are not. And where you are is in a body, a cauldron of energy, a cauldron which you can use for your advantage or disadvantage. In this cauldron you can refine energy and accumulate power. Taoists call this Self Cultivation or Cultivating Energy.

So if you are a pragmatist and a realist you concern yourself with your inner energy and what you are doing with it.

Your first cauldron is in your belly. There energy can get accumulated and refined. It is called the first Dantien in Taoist alchemy. There your sexual energies are gathered (the ingredients) and cooked. This accumulated and refined energy (Jing) rises up like cooking vapours (Chi) to the next Dantien in the heart region. There it is again accumulated and refined ( the cooking process) and rises as spiritual energy (Shen) to the top Dantien in the middle of the head. At each stage you can lose or spill some of this energy. The heart to head path is one of ecstasy. You bring to the head all those delicious qualities of the heart. Here you reconcile those two great contradictions, the heart and the head.

In Tantrik understanding in your body is the energy of the Goddess Shakti. She is seeking her mate Shiva to unite with Him in Bliss.

A wise and fortunate student awakens Shakti and encourages Her in Her path upward along the spine (Sushumna) to meet with Shiva in the top of the head. Shakti wants this and will help you. But She will also get impatient if you frustrate Her too much. She can give you a hard time. She can help you purify the paths and cleanse the pot, scouring it out. This is what I call house cleaning and it is indispensable. You don’t pour new wine into old bottles! The old will pollute the new

Whatever you want to do with your life if you give attention to accumulating and refining your energies, transforming them into Power you will bring to your life a balanced, integrated, powerful and expanded sense of Self. It can only help

Love pours out of my steaming cauldron to you,

It is a vast subject so this will only be an introduction. Essentially and originally Taoism is not a religion but as the years passed Taoist monks found they needed financial support and the public would pay for rituals, prayers etc. Taoism is about each person’s relationship with the Tao, the All. It is often called the watercourse way because it emphasises softness, receptivity and relationships and is thus “feminine”. The Taoist Internal Arts have in their repertoire, Tai Chi, Dayan Chi Kung, Hsing I, Lok Hup Ba Fa, Pa Qua, Chi Kung, Internal Alchemy etc.

In order to find one’s proper place in the Universe (relationship with the Tao) one must first find a proper relationship with oneself. In Taoist Health, disease often comes from a wrong relationship between the internal organs. One organ has either too much or too little energy; their yin and yang are not in balance. Taoist exercises aim at stretching the fascia that surrounds the organs so they can move. Then, by doing the form (Tai Chi etc) properly you massage the organs.

Each organ is connected with a meridian, a pathway for chi, energy. If these are blocked chi doesn’t flow properly. There are exercises Taoism teaches and healing sounds and movements that open the meridians.

In a proper relationship with yourself your attitudes are important. How you think about yourself and how you think about others will affect the health of your body and how energy moves. If you always want to be the best in the class so you can shine you are out of balance for your ego is too heavy for right balance. If you always think of yourself first and wish to win you are out of balance in your relationships and this will affect your health.

You have to acquire compassion, love, humility and patience. These allow your body to acquire the energy of De, virtue.

Master Moy, my teacher, said that every move you make paints your state of consciousness. Your biography is reflected in your biology, your body’s health is and how you move. So, in Tai Chi, a change in your attitude will affect how you do a move. Changing your attitude will open up energy flow. This is something you don’t hear in an exercise gym!

Therefore, to work on your body, it is not just enough to do exercise but you must work on your attitudes, to yourself and others.

To practise Taoism is to concern your self with the world around you; not just the people, but all the animals, insects and plants that make up our world. Being concerned with relationships means just that.

So you become a lover of nature.

To work on attitude you also have to consider the structures in your mental body because there you will find the rigidity of concept that often determines an attitude. Structures in the mental body are determined often by heritage, family issues and cultural restraints.

You learn that to actually be yourself is extremely difficult, for you have all these voices from your parents, teachers, priests or cultural authorities telling you who you are and how to behave.

So if you want to get into a proper relationship with the Tao you have first of all to discover who the “I” really is that is coming to that relationship. If you don’t do that, you will bring a whole truck load of “not I” with you and therefore there is no possibility of a proper relationship.

Internal Alchemy includes meditation which allows the mind to become quiet. It is a quiet and open mind that can focus on the internal energy processes and discover where you are blocked. As we are a holistic and unified energy system any block of energy anywhere in that system affects the energy flow throughout the system. There is no such thing as something that is just local. Everything is related. Any rigidity here affects flow elsewhere.

Taoism gives you a philosophical construction around which you can build a system of action. You do something because you expect results from that action. It gets you up in the morning and motivates you.

However as you progress it all becomes more open ended and the constructions you held so dearly in the beginning (beliefs etc) start to become flexible just as your body is becoming flexible. Finally all supportive conceptual constructs collapse and you accept the Mystery of life and allow that Mystery to live your life.

You have surrendered to the Tao.

Thus, ultimately, the path of Taoism is a path of gradually increasingly surrender, a discarding of all you thought you were, to which you egoistically clung and which, in fact, separated you from the All. The drop becomes the Ocean and you live the Peace that passeth Understanding.

It is a path of increasing energy, increasing Power and finally total surrender.

Often when some "seekers" read that they have to raise their energy and that the energy referred to is the sexual energy they try to suppress their sexual desires. The reasoning is why throw the energy away if you need it for Self cultivation? This line of thought is understandable and even reasonable.

However things are often not so simple as we would like.

Suppressing desire is trying to stifle something; it is like strangling a baby. Your whole life is run on desire. It is Passion that makes the journey possible and Passion that allows you to leap across vast chasms. Without some element of passion you won't even get out of bed.

It is Passion that gives your life vitality. Christ said he would spit out the lukewarm. Being lukewarm is to be half hearted. I see that in my classes. The half hearted are the hardest students to teach. You have their attention by default until something takes it elsewhere. You need to WANT to grow. It is Passion that makes you .gird your loins., pay attention and tackle a task.

Nevertheless to practise internal alchemy means having something that gets transmuted. You are not working in the make belief world and having imaginings and mere mood making fantasies. What gets transmuted is the sexual energy and if there is none there is none to transmute.

So what to do?

Firstly accept that your journey is not going to be made in one great leap. Being determined is not the same as trying to rush. It is all a process of going a little deeper day by day. As the day by days pass then so do perspectives change and what was difficult once becomes easier now.

Secondly, understand that internal alchemy means turning the senses inwards so that you can feel inside. If you can't even feel outside then you are half dead (the lukewarm) and have little to turn inwards. So the senses need to be alive. Alive senses pay attention to the world outside and they pay attention to the world precisely because they enjoy it. If you don't feel pleasure in your own body then you probably won't feel the pleasure of the senses in your embrace of the world beyond your skin. They go together.

For a number of reasons, sexual abuse for one, people shut down their connection with their body. What ever has happened has been so traumatic it is better not to feel the body because in the body is great pain. You can do exactly the same thing if you feel obliged to condemn your sexual impulses.

In internal alchemy the body is your friend. The body holds secrets, which are revealed to the lovers of the body. Loving your body is a key to feeling inner energy. In many of my Chi Kung exercises I tell my class that energy follows the hands. As your hands pass up and down your body you can feel the energy moving. It is like your hands are stroking your body, caressing it. This attitude is a loving one and is important for discovering the secrets the body holds. The body won't reveal them through torture.

Loving your body is a way to increase health. Increasing health is to have energy moving vitally, to have energy moving vitally is to have something for your alchemical activities. If there is nothing in your cauldron but the withered leaves dropped from a garden that has never been watered and has died of neglect then there is nothing to transmute.

Suppressing the sexual is to gradually kill your garden. It is to turn what should be a paradise into a clear cut emptiness; to have a desert inside where there could have been a paradise, a tangle of luxuriant growth, twisting climbing vines, rich with flowers, fruit and the exotic colourful wild animals of passion and desire.

Internal alchemy involves turning the attention inwards. Sometimes it is on the outside alive and vital and sometimes on the inside. If most of the time you are trying to stop the attention on the outside by thwarting desire you will deaden yourself. Things have to be in balance and for that there is no strict formula. Live your life .naturally. and don't struggle. The journey is done day by day and step by step.

A problem is created when one sees how someone who has arrived or is near to arriving behaves and one thinks that by copying their behaviour one will be like them. In Tai Chi your learn that mere copying only takes you so far and then you have to learn to be authentically yourself in the move. In life one has to be authentically oneself; not a mere copy cat. A copy cat is someone who is only half heartedly themselves.

In fact trying to be other than yourself is a strain and it is to be a fake. You are trying to live on borrowed knowledge. To be yourself is to be natural, to be without strain, to be relaxed. You are not fighting an inner civil war but are at peace and unified.

It is not always easy in Society to be oneself. As more people are themselves society will change.
Everyone is threatened by difference and change, but it will come, and it will come day by day and step by step.

P.S I am dipping into the poetry of Pablo Neruda in a the recent collection edited by Ilan Stavans and to illustrate what a poetic man with great sensuousness (perhaps sensuality ) can feel I will quote some lines from various poems.

“To feel you in my veins like God in the rivers

How I would love you, woman, how I would

Love you, love you as no one ever did!

Die and still

Love you more.

And still

Love you more

And more.”

“ Sometimes a piece of sun

burned like a coin between my hands.”

“A long time I have loved the sunned mother-of-pearl of your body.

I will bring you happy flowers from the mountains, bluebells

Dark hazels, and rustic baskets of kisses.

I want

To do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.”

“Love is so short, forgetting is so long.”

“The river mingles its stubborn lament with the sea.”

“the pale day peers out….

…the dawn oozing everywhere.”

“How clear it is that the stones have touched time,

in their fine substance there is the smell of age

And the water that the sea brings from salt and sleep.”

“Into the night of the heart

your name drops slowly

and moves in silence and falls

and breaks and spreads its water.,”

“ And you, like a month of star, like a fixed kiss,

like a structure of wing, or the beginning of autumn,

girl, my advocate, my amorous one,

light makes its bed beneath your big eyelids,

golden as oxen, and the round dove

often makes her white nest in you.”

“ and at times it rains; from the heat of the sky falls an infusion as silent as sweat.”

“And the raucous cats that cross my garden in the dark,

like a necklace of throbbing sexual oysters…

beneath the elegant coconut trees, next to the ocean and the moon,

there is a continual life of trousers and skirts,

a rustle of stroked silk stockings,

and feminine breasts that shine like eyes..”

“like a shipwreck we die inward

like smothering in our hearts.”

When I first wrote my little essay on Sexual Energy I originally entitled it "Alive Senses", because the idea I wished to convey was that for Internal Alchemy the senses must be vitally alive. If they weren't, then the energy used for Alchemy would be missing. The title "Sexual Energy" was misleading and got many people off on the wrong track, and because it is loaded word probably stopped some from even starting. One website Momma when she posted the essay had next to it a warning "Adult Content". Frankly I wasn't aware that anything I had written was raunchy; indeed some probably would have preferred it if I had been as I got invited to some very adult sites. The "adult" designation by her made me feel good, just like an adult!

You know the joke: What is the difference between men and Canadian bonds?

Canadian bonds mature.

So here I am, an adult, saying I am sorry for the title and wishing to go back a bit.

In my understanding, we are a unitary energy system. In Tai Chi I will demonstrate this by doing what I call a "Bellows Exercise". I sit down and stand up and as I sit down I show how all my energy becomes like a concentrated ball and then as I stand up I expand it into limbs, legs and head. This is to illustrate that as energy expands it fills the whole body equally and at the same time. Furthermore you will learn, eventually, from Tai Chi, that anytime you freeze energy, anywhere, the flow of energy everywhere else also gets affected; which is why in Tai Chi you aim to acquire softness, so that all the blocks that impede energy flow are removed. Softness does not mean flabbiness but that tensions have been worked out of the system so it is relaxed.

This is not an overnight thing nor is it merely physiological as the mind, with all its rigid inflexibilities, is involved, not to mention the taut ego!

As you become aware of energy and its flows you also note that energy flows up the spine. Along the spine are various points (chakras) the energy has to pass through and as it passes it enlivens them. It also purifies the channel along which it flows and the chakras themselves. If there are blockages it can get stuck in a chakra.

This energy comes very quickly to the sex centre and people can become aroused and very sexually active if a lot of energy flows there. Indeed, if you are sensitive to energy then, when you are next to someone like that you will get a corresponding sensation in the same area. (Adult content!) Being next to most teenage boys will give you this feeling, and some young women overly aware of their breast energy, or a woman (or man too) strongly sexually attracted to you. It can become uncomfortable at times and you learn to shut it off by ignoring it and not responding to it.

My first essay wished to clarify that you have a choice how you use your energy. You can express it sexually. This allows it to repeatedly flow in that way. Or you can freeze that out. However, as we now know, freezing energy anywhere affects the flow of energy through the whole system. We don't want that.

I had a 40 year old woman write me to ask if still being a virgin had thwarted her spiritual growth. From letters she had posted on a chat site I knew she was generous, warm, supportive and kind. I replied that it didn't thwart her spiritual growth, indeed it made her very exceptional as the reason why she had never fully lain with a man was because the loving intimacy she wanted had never been there.

There is a difference between being sexually discriminating, self disciplined and being frigid; someone who for whatever reasons, abuse say or tortuous religious compunction or psychological problems, has shut down that centre. Many who do this have also closed their senses off so they feel their body less and they feel life less.

As you progress more and more of this energy will go beyond the sex centre and it becomes very fulfilling to have other centres brimming with it. This comes when the full energy has passed through and risen up.

You know the feeling you have in the body when you are full of sexual energy and before you release it how alive the body feels at that moment, well, I can't talk for women, but as man that disappears after the sex act. In Alchemy you try to keep that fullness so that the energy cooks in your cauldron. It is not for nothing that the first cauldron is precisely in the belly. There the energy is accumulated and refined so that sexual energy becomes "jing" and is transformed into chi.

And so the process goes on with accumulation of chi and its refining into "shen" spiritual energy. Moreover the refined energy also goes back down and mingles with the energy there.

How you use your energy is by choosing how you do this. Someone pointed out boxers refrain from sex so they become meaner for a fight. I don't think this implies that the quality of the energy is mean but if you have more of it can flow into the areas where you are mean and make you really mean. Like a Mike Tyson on a rampage.

You can use that energy for anything that attracts you. Being a mean boxer, writing poetry, being compassionate, being passionate about your interests, excessively long posts on chat sites! your Tai Chi or your spiritual growth. Choice and growth. All according to your perspective and attitude

But if that energy is not flowing or has been exhausted then a lot of that will stop, or be curtailed for a while.

My Sexual Energy post was not to encourage sexual activity, but to remind people the way out of any problem is through it. You don't want to shut off the flow by suppression. Until, in time, and with various practices the energy rises, then be natural and normal, and discriminating if you want, about its expression. Don't torture yourself. Pain is a path best avoided.

You know you don't want to become old and then wish you had watered that garden more. (I had some older men write that taking off their clothes and putting them back on again became all too much trouble!) It will be awful to be left with unfulfilled fantasies.

It is a wonderful relief when the energy passes through the sex centre and goes beyond, because, frankly, stuck there it poses many problems. So many people think with their genitals. It is amazing to me to see on these adult sites how people spend this energy. (Do you know I was a little shy to go into them in case I got caught out!)

Of course my post also attracted some humour. Sexual Energy had fun poked at it. Hem Hem!

Taoist Internal Alchemy meets everybody on their level. Saying the same thing in another way, you come to it as you are. As you are so you start, sexually frigid, sexually active, sexually very active, sexually restrained etc. From there you will grow. Orgasm can come to mean something very different. Shakti exploding in your head maybe.

So to the 40 year old virgin I wrote words of encouragement. It is good when passions burn but the passions have moved up in the spine.

We grow through desire. It is by pouring our energy into our passions that we will grow. The senses should be alive, vitally alive so you embrace your world with passion and energy. Then you will stroke pets, hug people, smile on the street, be friendly to cashiers, care about the world and all its little animals and species. You will embrace the physical world with physical hugs. You will be warm about it. As you express the energy thusly so too will Energy flow in you. The key is focus, love and surrender.

Internal Alchemy needs energy for its work. You grow with it; or you stifle it, then you are just slowly dying, a fish flapping in the desert of your making.

We discussed this topic in my School and humorously we decided we would attract more people if we changed our name to the School of Tai Chi & Erotic Arts. My web manager even did a new logo with nude people entwined around the letters Erotic.

In a future post I want to discuss Desire and Shakti. How to honour Her.

Love, David

New students might be confused why so many forms are offered and what the differences between them are. This short essay addresses this question.

All Taoist forms work on different levels. Some people start Tai Chi as an exercise to improve their health, some have a specific health problem, some want Martial Arts skills and some want to cultivate energy for spiritual considerations. Many people move through these categories and come to the last one after time.

The form will meet you on the level at which you enter. This means both the condition of your body and your intentions. It is delightful to see a mixed group of people, all ages and sizes doing the same thing with enthusiasm.

As you practise you find that growth depends on what I call making connections. As you make these connections you get a better understanding of how internal energy moves.

To make a connection requires that the student works on his foundation, his structure.

(For more on this see my e book “Stalking Personal Power & Peace). This can take a long time and require a lot of work. Generally speaking the older you are the more work that it will require. During this process you will be doing an exercise that is excellent for health.

Once you start making connections then the real fun begins, for you can then explore the connections.

I have found that the Yang Tai Chi set and the exercises related to it are excellent to establish the foundation and to help make some connections. Once you have some connection I have found that forms like Lok Hup Ba Fa are better suited for exploring inner energy connections. The one I like the most is probably Dayan (Wild Goose) Chi Kung. Both these forms are more ancient than Tai Chi.

Master Moy said that as you understand internal energy you have to admit that Chen Hsi-I (the founder of Lok Hup Ba Fa) knew more than Chan San Feng the founder of Tai Chi. I presume he said this because this form is able to explore more profoundly the internal energy flows in the body.

There are movements in Dayan Chi Kung that none of the other forms contain. Each movement allows the energy to flow in a particular way.

I think that meditation is essential to understand and feel internal energy flow.

Once an understanding has been gained it will naturally affect the movements in another form. Thus I have learned aspects of Hsing-I that no one ever taught me, through cross fertilisation. Most of what I most appreciate has come in this way for once you start the path exploring connections you are on your own individual path free of other;s authority.

After the hard work in making the connections has been done then the student can move into the practise of doing the form less athletically and strenuously. This is just as well because as you age you become less capable of athleticism any way.

You might have seen Martial Art forms demonstrated in a manner that require the flexibility and strength that only youth can provide. In fact I sometimes think that the demonstrator is more a gymnast or ballet dancer than anything else. If energy cultivation only required strength and flexibility then the whole Cirque de Soleil would be enlightened Masters.

It seems fitting that as you age and have less mobility for leaps etc that you can enter that quiet phase of what I call inner ecstacy. You have learned how to move energy in a way that creates flows of delight and no longer need feel constrained to sweat and look impressive. The form you practise will, to the untrained eye, give no indication of what you are feeling and experiencing.

My experience has been that if you practise your form athletically it will probably remain an exterior art. You need luck, grace or a skilled teacher to move into the realms of inner energy. The very same movement when done with an internal focus gives a different sensation. Then you know that by moving your hands you move internal energy. Not only move internal energy but can allow it to go places that can only be described as illuminating because you experience the movement as waves of light. You bring Light to your heart and feel rapture. You bring Light to your head and see a head full of Light.

This is something very different from learning how to dispatch an opponent with a blow. You might never need that self defence skill but a body full of Light is what you will experience when you die so you are laying up for yourself “Treasures in Heaven.”

At this stage your body has taken you to places that can only be described as bodiless. Maybe fulfilment of the the physcial growth is to know you are beyond body! When it eventually falls away what will remain will be that awareness of Bliss and Silence.