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Many esoteric traditions hold that kundalini awakening is impossible for the sexually active male, or for the menstruating female, because of “energy loss” resulting from ejaculation or menstruation. Is there any truth behind this, or are these merely cultural taboos resulting from sexual guilt and repression? — Here is what KAP instructor Tao Semko has to say, based on the practice and experiences of hundreds of KAP Practitioners:
–From a live online video Q&A with Tao Semko on kundalini and Dr. Glenn J. Morris’s Improved Kundalini Awakening Process.
Video Transcription:
“How important is it to refrain from losing Jing in order to quickly and efficiently awaken Kundalini. I’ve read bout Brahmacharya in yoga and Taoism’s hundred days of celibacy, and it sounds pretty difficult to me. Thank you for doing this, it’s very helpful. Johannes.”
This is a very common question especially among male practitioners. Just to clarify some of the terminology that was used in that question: Jing, or Jing Chi is what the Chinese call the physicalized chi in the body, or physicalized vital energy in the form of bone marrow, in the form of — or I should say energized bone marrow, that’s been energized with breathing techniques — in the form of seminal fluids both male and female, and in the form of the blood itself. There’s a few other things as well, but those are the principles.
And the reference to losing Jing has to do with ejaculation in men, and menstruation in women, both of which can leave the members of each of those sexes feeling rather down, feeling drained physically. It can leave them feeling even depressed or irritable.
So in some of the Eastern traditions of meditation and other things, since people were trying to meditate and to cultivate energy and to do breathing techniques on a regular basis.
If as males they were periodically losing a lot of energy from ejaculation — and not everybody loses a lot of energy through ejaculation, it is something that is based a lot on the brain chemistry of the body as well as the actual mechanics and chemistry of the ejaculate, and we’ll get into that in a sec — or women who were losing energy or having a period of a day, or days where they were feeling like it was very difficult for them to practice because they had either amenorrhea or dysmenorrhea, meaning any sort of pain or irregularity from their menstrual cycle, or simply just having a feeling of depressed vitality from the actual blood loss.
So to answer the question — oh, one more term let’s just discuss here which is Brahmacharya. Brahmacharya — which is part of Johannes’s question here — Brahmacharya refers in some traditions to complete abstinence from sexuality and even from sexual thoughts. In other religious and cultural traditions it refers simply to the not losing any seminal energy basically.
So it doesn’t mean necessarily stopping sexuality it just means not losing energy from ejaculation, or from menstruation in the female case. So this is a very common question among people who have read about about Tantrism or read about Taoism, and a lot of men get really, really hung up on this question, unnecessarily so.
The simplest answer to this question is that: if you really pay attention to what happens to you personally, as a male when you ejaculate, or as a female when you have your menstrual period and you have some degree of blood loss.
If you pay attention to what happens during the process, immediately following the process, and in the few days that follow the process, you will have a very good answer for yourself as to how that particular thing will affect you biologically, emotionally, chemically and in turn that will give you a very good indication as to how much it is affecting you energetically in terms of doing breathing practices, sexual Tantra, doing cultivation to increase the chi in the body, or the prana in the body so that you can then do Kundalini awakening practices etc.
It’s really pretty simple. If you feel depressed or intensely sleepy afterwards, either immediately afterwards or a day or two following. If you feel weak. If you feel spaced out like it’s hard for you to focus and get anything done. If you feel a loss in motivation, then obviously it is affecting the coherence of your meditation as well.
One of the reasons that there are these cautions not to lose a lot of this particular form of energy, which is both chemical and energetic is that — well there’s two things taking place. The first is that upon ejaculation, most men have a release of the hormone called prolactin in the brain. It’s the same hormone in females that, when it’s present in large quantities, causes postpartum depression.
Prolactin which is one of two chemicals also that causes women to lactate, but when it’s present in too large of a quantity in males or females, whether it’s because you just ejaculated and your brain just released a whole bunch of prolactin in your brain, or because you’re menstruating in some cases, or because you’ve eaten certain foods, or simply because you’ve just given birth.
Prolactin reduces the serotonin in the brain. It reduces the body’s — or the brains ability, excuse me, to release serotonin, to produce serotonin, releases the amount of serotonin that is currently available. Prolactin basically it makes you go “brghh.”
There are ways to inhibit prolactin release: both dietary methods, or herbal methods, also physical methods, things that you can do to change the effects of the ejaculatory reflux — reflex, excuse me, and then so that’s one, one answer to this.
The other aspect of this feeling of depression or energy loss, or lack of focus, is that ejaculate and menstrual fluid, the menstrual material, is pretty powerfully packed with nutrients, and since we cyclically, as men and women, have to replace these things once we’ve gotten rid of them.
Once they’ve left our body, a lot of our food nutrients go into manufacturing more that. Whether it’s menstrual fluid and the lining of the uterus in the female or the actual sperm in the male.
Those compounds are many of the same building blocks that are used to make brain matter. To make nerves. And to build all the other hormones that are used in the body.
When you were young, a young man or a young woman, in most cases in the male case you’re not going to have as much of a pronounced depletion of nutritional building blocks as you might as an older individual who doesn’t have as efficient of a body anymore. That can be changed through proper exercise and nutrition as you age. So it’s not a foregone conclusion.
But the same omega-3 fatty acids that make brain matter, fish oil in essence, is also used to make part of the compounds in ejaculate. These same amino acids, and polypeptides, hormonal compounds, all of those that are used to make brain matter are also used to make ejaculate and menstrual fluid.
Therefore, if your body has to put a whole bunch of effort into creating more stuff down below, the upstairs isn’t getting its share and you’re going to feel spaced out, you’re going to feel irritable, your hormones are going to be off balance because the other glands in the body, other than the sex glands are being deprived temporarily of the materials they need to function properly.
Now this isn’t to make you afraid of ejaculating, because many, many people who have rad these materials, or who consider themselves meditators suddenly become afraid of ejaculation, afraid of losing their energy, afraid of energy loss.
Well one of the things you should know is than when the thymus gland is really pumping open, its feel-good hormones, the warm fuzzies in your chest, prolactin release drops. Which means your serotonin levels go up and you feel great and you don’t have that refractory period after ejaculation.
Similarly, when the thymus gland is wide open and a woman is menstruating, she doesn’t feel as down, or irritable, or snappish and she feels more balanced. So there’s things that you can do to keep the thymus gland open pumping and moving hormones. If you are really feeling living or in love with your partner at the moment of ejaculation as a male, there is less of a prolactin release.
Now that doesn’t mean that women who are watching this video should instantly judge their partner’s if they are still falling asleep at ejaculation, or after ejaculation because its not the same effect in every man.
The prolactin release in some men is very, very strong. It has to be trained on multiple levels to actually get that prolactin release to decrease so that they don’t get that sleepiness. They don’t get that disconnection from the female upon ejaculation.
In any case, the big answer is to watch what the effects of ejaculation are on you, and rather than trying to stop ejaculation, you might think of encouraging orgasm without ejaculation. Meaning, that a lot of people have read unfortunately, even in Michael Winn own opinion, Michael Winn and Mantak Cia co-wrote Mantak Chia’s first book in the West and it’s from that one book, Cultivating Male Sexual Energy, that a lot of people have started to improperly use what’s called the Million Dollar Point technique which is a stopping technique that actually physically blocks ejaculation using a pressure point on the perineum.
If it’s improperly used, and most people unfortunately do improperly use it and don’t know what to do afterwards to correct that, it causes a whole host of imbalances in the body, and the imbalances get worse and worse each time that it’s used, unless it’s turned around and corrected.
That is not the ideal technique and indeed the author of the book has turned and said I wish I never wrote that passage in that book because it’s so misused. It’s important to know that for males and females the ejaculatory contractions and the actual sensation of orgasm itself are two separate things that frequently happen at the same time but not always.
Most people have probably — most men have probably — had an ejaculatory response without much of a pleasure response. So obviously that’s ejaculation without orgasm, you can also have orgasm without ejaculation.
Anyway, we’re getting into a whole bunch of stuff that doesn’t have that much to do directly with Kundalini, but this is something that people ask about constantly, so I figured I’d put it on this and put it up on the blog in public so that you can read it.
You don’t have to refrain entirely from sexuality to arouse Kundalini. As a matter of fact, many people arouse Kundalini for the first time while being sexually active. In some cases, especially if they’re young, it may happen after one or more ejaculatory orgasms when they’re still making love, or while they’re relaxing afterwards. So it is a bit of a myth.
The more sexual energy that is built without being lost, the easier it is to get Kundalini moving in the lower parts of the body. Doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re going to complete the movement and the circuit of Kundalini through the body.
On the other hand, somebody who has already got adrenal fatigue, if they ejaculate, they’re going to feel that much worse. And there’s whole systems of exercises, and mental awarenesses, and everything else that can be used to bring both the adrenals, and the kidneys, and the sexual chemistry, sexual awareness, and sexual energy back into balance so that that’s not the case.
Mostly if somebody’s a really uptight mediator who is constantly trying to bring the energy up but isn’t relaxing the energy back down after practice every day, or even during practice, it’s not such a good idea for them to ejaculate because they’re probably already in adrenal fatigue.
Ideally, to bring us back to Kundalini, you want Kundalini energy when you’re first working with Kundalini, first you’re trying to get it to open up out of the lower parts of the body, then it starts to move upwards, and in some cases outwards: we had a question last week from somebody who wanted to know — you know, they were feeling it on the outsides of their body, in their peripheral nervous system.
And for that person they need to bring their awareness, their kinesthetic touch awareness more deeply into the core of their body to start bringing it up through the vagus nerves and to some degree through the spinal nerves as well.
When you’re working with Kundalini, with these electrical surges that feel like huge jolts of lighting or like almost like molten magma, but not hot, kind of like a lava lamp full of sparkly living energy that is more intense than the feeling of just prana or chi.
Once you’re working with this, you want that to go up the central channel at first, eventually you’ll also be bringing it down the central channel, and it’ll be going in both directions simultaneously. Eventually after that it unfolds in all directions through the body you have a multidimensional experience of it. But when you’re first moving it, you want Kundalini going through the center of the body, that means just the very central elevator shaft, so to speak.
The rest of the body you want to be sinking and relaxing the sensations, lengthening the muscles downwards off the bones as if they’ve been cooked in a good stew, cooling the rest of the body down, feeling everything relax.
Feel all the muscles relax, the muscles of the face, get all that tension sinking back towards the ground even while the very core of you is excited and is perhaps in blissful ecstasy from all of these electrical stimulation, or electrical sensations moving upwards.
You don’t want to bring the energy up everywhere in the body, it doesn’t help anything. The systems that do that are using a blunt instrument to try to get the energy in the core to move, they get everything moving upwards which ultimately can be very unhealthy if it’s repeated over, and over, and over again.
Because in both the Chinese model, and the Ayurvedic model, in the Tibetan model, in the Greek model, you want a balance of energies moving downwards, upwards, outwards, inwards, and distributively through the whole body.
For those of you who are looking at this from a Western scientific model, simply look at those energy metaphors as metaphors describing the actual feelings the subtle tingles the experiences within the body. Obviously if you’ve ever been adrenalized, you probably felt an upward rush of energy. An upward rush of feeling if you don’t want to call it energy.
If you’ve ever felt really relaxed, if you just have a sip of wine and you’re sitting in the hot tub, most likely you feel everything in the body going slack and heavy. You get out of the hot tub and it just feels like everything’s made of, kind of like jello hanging off your bones. Everything relaxes down, then if you lie down and you breathe and you just stare up at the ceiling maybe everything feels like it sort of opens out and distributes.
Well it doesn’t matter how scientific your outlook is, those are still human experiences. Descriptive experiences of the feelings and it’s those experiences that we’re talking because each of those is linked to certain biological or physiological states in the body. States in the nervous system and states in the endocrine system.
— Transcription by Spencer Stevens
