Applying Sexual Energy to Wellness - a prototype framework

This is my attempt to articulate a prototype framework describing the application of sexual energy to wellness in health. 

Allow me an important digression to discuss the modern usage and meaning of the term "wellness". Wellness can be equated with the state of well-being, also identical with the World Health Organization's definition of health as "a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity." Hence along the spectrum of human health, wellness and pathology would occupy opposite ends. There is a growing awareness that modern medicine and therapeutics have to move beyond curing diseases, towards healing and creating a state of wellness. The "wellness industry" is fast growing, covering diverse areas in medicine such as preventive health, aesthetics, anti-aging, nutritional and functional medicine, to name but a few. It also covers a broad stroke of complementary therapies such as massage, essential oils, yoga, meditation, energetic medicine, again to name but a few. Out of all the therapies out there labelled as "wellness", it is debatable which ones are but superficial and which ones go deeper into the root causes of good health. Wellness is very much frontier country, with both exciting developments and nonsensical hype going together, promising much economic opportunity and possibly meaningful alternatives that conventional medicine can imbibe into itself. There is of course the risk of fraudulent and misleading claims on the part of those promoting new therapies, which could directly result in the individual experiencing harm, economic loss, or delay in seeking the right treatment. There is a growing momentum to equate wellness with what used to be called preventive health, in that people seek wellness to delay or prevent the onset of aging and disease, in short an attempt to cheat death for as long as possible.

In the context of using sexual energy, we are not concerned with the "wellness industry" per se, but with three aspects of wellness that it can positively influence, as follows.

Three Aspects of Wellness:

1. Self-Esteem. Which is how good you feel about yourself. Your innate confidence. How comfortable you are in your own skin. Being at ease and in harmony with your sexuality, certainly brings a confidence and shine to your presence.

2. Self-Drive. This covers two overlapping areas, namely, personal drive, and having clear directed goals. Most people would find it easy to relate to how the sexual drive accounts for so many of their motivations and actions taken in their lives, and how stubbornly these persist in the subconscious throughout one's life even when not immediately apparent in everyday waking consciousness. Harnessing and directing the sexual drive then becomes a matter of practical importance in achieving things in the world. Have you not noticed how often those people who are driven, passionate, and get things done the way they want them, are also incredibly charismatic and attractive and sexy? (Even if we do not always want to admit it.)

3. Self-Energy. The energy you possess to dare to be yourself, and do the things you want or need to. If esteem represents one's self-comfort level, and drive represents the application of energy to one's ambitions, then self-energy is the battery that fuels life itself and makes the above possible. It is the organic side of wellness, the aspect that most directly and overtly creates the living experience of wellness when it is full. Self-energy can be loosely equated to the concepts of prana in Ayurveda or chi in Chinese Medicine, at least for our purposes here. Appropriate cultivation of sexual energy can preserve and promote the rejuvenation of self-energy that is simply crucial to all life activities. 

Next I will describe briefly the domains in an individual's life in which working on sexual energy can bring about observable change, of which I have identified as the five domains of living, as below.

Five Domains of Living for observable change:

1. Physical. Exercises that train males to have non-ejaculatory orgasms, dissociate orgasm from ejaculation, can help those with premature ejaculation overcome their problem, and there have been anecdotal reports of benefit for some with symptoms of benign prostate enlargement. It definitely helps with prolonging sexual intercourse and generally raising sexual satisfaction levels for those involved. Higher levels of orgasmic experience can be reached one after the other without a (or with a markedly reduced) refractory period, without the interruption of ejaculation sending the orgasm crashing down and keeping it at a low level of intensity. For females, the experience of multiple orgasms will definitely change how she relates to sex and her partner, and improve intimacy if there was distance before, as it can take lots of trust and surrender to get there. If deep sexual satisfaction is consistently reached, that can also have the effect of improving sex addictions which are often a result of an underlying persistent dissatisfaction with one's sexual experience. 

2. Psychological. This relates to the individual's beliefs and attitudes surrounding sex. 

Addressing knowledge gaps, having open discussions, and adopting a non-judgmental attitude, all help an individual gain a more balanced and nuanced view of sex and sexual energy, if the individual so chooses. At the very least the hope is that this helps the individual not to simply close off reflexively when facing sexual matters, often due to societal and religious conditioning that the individual may not even be aware of until pointed out. 

3. Emotional. This relates to the inner emotional world of the individual. A harmonious and integrated inner world of someone who has worked on sexual energy, is going to bring about peace and stability in their psyche. Someone comfortable with their sexuality and having deeply satisfying sexual experiences, is often open-hearted and at ease, having a presence and charisma that often spills out to others around, even without the intent to project outwards. Their energy shines, just by the way they are.

4. Social. This covers all parts of living that has to do with the individual's social relationship with other people, singularly or in groups, such as work, family, and friends. This is of course a reflective mirror of one's inner state. Being at ease with oneself reflects outwards in being at ease with others, making others comfortable and causing them to gravitate towards you without you trying. Being familiar with one's inner landscape and intensities through working on sexual energy, makes one able to better connect with the inner landscape of others, and people do pick that up. This could reduce social awkwardness by making you a better listener and being more responsive to social cues, thus making new connections or deepening existing ones that may not have been possible before.

5. Existential. Orgasms are deeply intense experiences, that can bring about an immense amount of stillness, bliss and timelessness, particularly with an experience of multiple ascending orgasms (necessarily non-ejaculatory for the male). Such orgasms are often experienced in the whole body, and not just in the genitals, often accompanied by flows of energy circulating throughout the body, feeling rejuvenating and satisfying. These can be related to ancient myths of the Fall found in various traditions, where the splitting of the hermaphroditic primitive man into two sexes, created a ceaseless search for the lost half, and a separation from the state of Divine union previously experienced in Paradise. After a while of experiencing such orgasms and the deep satisfaction they bring about, it's not difficult to realize that deep in ourselves we are both man and woman, and the way back to the Divine and the lost half, is to go ever deeper into ourselves. Sex is just the start of that beautiful journey to the Divine within. 

What then, is the goal we hope to achieve, when sexual energy has been used to optimize the three aspects of wellness and brought change to the five domains of living? That goal would be a state I call the "Integrated Self". 

So what is the Integrated Self? That is probably best described by its counterpart seen in most people, the Dis-integrated Self. The reality is that most people live disconnected lives, feeling very much powerless and unaware of their true potential, as they live and work in usually urbanized environments where various parts of their lives are artificially compartmentalized, feeling like robots, and drained of energy and joy after having to meet the demands of work and family, day after day. It is fairly apparent that even though our forebears in rural environments lived harsher physical lives compared to us, they lived closer to the land and often felt more connected than we did. 

The Integrated Self is thus a healing of the fragmented urbanized individual, to attain a sense of wholeness and alignment, through the re-discovery of the tool of sexual energy in directly bringing about the sense of connection to ourselves internally and to the world outside. 

At this point the reader may ask, why does it have to be sexual energy? It could be argued that there are certainly other methods one could use to bring about wellness and integration as described, without necessarily working on sexual energy. And I certainly would have to agree, that working on sexual energy is no panacea for all the individual's suffering, and may not be suitable for everyone. Certainly people are free to choose the method they feel suits them best.   

The reasons I choose to focus on sexual energy as the most direct method of healing such self-disintegration, have been alluded to in my four preceding posts on sexual energy, which I encourage you to read if you have not. Here I will just broadly outline the angle I took. Sexual energy is life energy itself, as mentioned in so many traditional texts of medicine across many cultures, and yet so much distortion and taboo has arisen around it, that meaningful discussion of its implications to health and wellness becomes near impossible oftentimes, creating layers of repression and cycles of abuse, that perpetrate themselves across generations of humans. That itself warrants an immediate de-mystifying of sexual energy, an open discussion of its many aspects as elaborated in traditional texts, and a serious consideration of its applications to our modern age. 

And of course the positive results of my own exploration of sexual energy for my own wellness, have led me to start articulating a possible framework that other people could benefit from. I also believe working on sexual energy could benefit a range of pathological conditions both physical and psychological in nature, but I refrain from writing about that as I do not have (yet) sufficient personal or witnessed experiences of such pathologies. I can only write truthfully of what I have experienced or witnessed for myself.