Beyond Tantra: Healing Through Taoist Sacred Sex
of your core sexual beliefs.
    •
Learn more about your partner’s beliefs.
    Duration
    About 30 minutes
    Description
    This exercise is described as a two-person activity, but you can do it by yourself if you like. Both partners take two blank sheets of paper and a pen. Put the second sheet to one side for the moment.
    On the first sheet, write a list of statements that reflect what you have been taught or have learned about sex as a child up to the age of puberty. What you’re interested in is information that was given to you by others, not discoveries of your own. Here are some questions you can start with:
    • What did my parent(s) tell me about my body and sex?
    • What did I learn in school about sex?
    • What did my friends tell me about sex? (or what did I guess they were saying?)
    • What things did I learn about men and sex?
    • What things did I learn about women and sex?
    and, most importantly,
    • What did I learn about sex that no one ever actually said to me in so many words?
    Go ahead and list as many points as you like.
    When you are done, go back through the list and ask yourself whether you intellectually still agree with each belief. Then ask yourself if your body agrees with the belief.

    tantrapp 16/7/05 5:30 pm Page 44
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    Beyond Tantra – Healing Through Taoist Sacred Sex What does ‘body agrees with the belief ’ mean? It’s quite simple really. When Mieke and I started working with the Dual Cultivation practices, it often happened that I would read about something, discuss it, try it and then find out that it didn’t work. This was a great puzzle, and a bit discouraging since I was sure I had understood the instructions. After a while I realized that, just because I understood something with my mind, it didn’t mean that my body understood it or necessarily ‘agreed’. As someone with a strong intellect, this had always been a bit of a frustration but, until I started working with Dual Cultivation, I had usually managed to succeed at most anything through sheer mental willpower. I soon discovered, of course, that you can’t do that when working with Sexual Qi.
    You can’t will an erection, and you certainly can’t force an orgasm.
    Instead, you need to learn a delicate, graceful dance that involves creating the right conditions for your body to unlearn, and relearn. It means becoming much more aware and sensitive to what your body is telling you at any given moment and accepting that your ‘being’ is much greater than just your mind. For many people this is completely obvious; for others it is a bit of a revelation. It certainly can be a revelation when you discover that your body has a mind or belief system of its own.
    How do you check a body belief? One way is to remember a situation where a belief was brought into play and recall what your actual response was. For instance, you may have a belief that ‘sex is good, clean fun’. If you notice that every time you make love you instantly get up and rush to the shower, then this could be a good indication that some part of you thinks that you have engaged in an unclean activity. The trick then is to observe telltale signs of inconsistency between your beliefs and your actions without judging yourself. You might want to try to have compassion with yourself as you do this as everyone, at one time or another, has internal struggles between their mind and body. Sex just happens to be one of the major areas where these struggles get played out.
    Another practical example of the difference between mind and body belief is one that emerged when Mieke did the exercise. In her list she wrote a statement:
    ‘Good girls don’t wear sexy, revealing clothing.’
    When she looked at this to see if she agreed or disagreed with it now, she discovered that with her mind she didn’t agree with the statement at all. Lots of perfectly nice, good women wear sexy clothes and she has never had a problem with this. When she examined her body belief

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