What is Tantric Masturbation?

What is tantric masturbation and what is it all about?

 Masturbation, self-stimulation, can be a powerful tool for developing a relationship to your sexuality and to your sexual energy. It can help you learn to have more expanded orgasms, learn to orgasm without ejaculating, learn how to control your ejaculation so you can last for hours in bed, learn to use your sexual energy as a fuel to drive your creativity, to drive your spiritual path, and to drive your success in life. I know there is a lot of shame, a lot of guilt around the topic of masturbation (especially within the nofap community), and I didn't really get into this path the way that most people talking about the stuff did. It wasn't like I got on the internet, started reading about nofap, and that was my only experience. My exposure to semen retention came from my studies in Taoist alchemical practices, qigong meditation, yogic practices, and pranayama breathwork. I was studying these ancient Eastern philosophies, having a daily practice working with the energy channels in my body, learning to cultivate my chi, and I was also learning about Taoist sexual practices, sexual cultivation, and I learned how the Taoists believe that it's important for a man to regulate his jing. Your jing is your physical essence. It's what is giving birth to your body. Basically, you have a certain amount of it, and when you spend all of it it's gone. You lose jing every time you ejaculate, and it's not to say that you can never ejaculate, but if you are frequently ejaculating as most men in this overstimulated world are, then you are on a path to depletion. In my training, part of the practices was learning to not suppress sexual energy, not suppress your sexuality, that was never never encouraged, and so I never went that approach. I never suppressed my sexuality. I just learned to have a different relationship with it. I learned practices to arouse the sexual energy, but instead of ejaculating it out, bring the energy upward in the body, meditate on it, circulate it, and then store it in the dantien (this energy center in your belly. It's like a battery) and this had phenomenal effects on my life. By doing this practice consistently, I started to lose my interest in having ejaculatory orgasms.It no longer really appealed to me because I was getting these incredible high energy states, incredible blissful orgasmic states that felt amazing. Normally when you ejaculate you lose that charge, you lose everything you've built up and you just kind of feel like shit. By not ejaculating at the end of these experiences, I had this tremendous feeling of orgasmic pulsation, of just this really nice juicy, sexy feeling in my body and it lasted for days. I'd go out in public and people reacted to me differently. Women became more attracted to me and  it completely changed my life honestly.

After spending several more years studying with various teachers really going in depth into the practices, I started teaching this work, so i'm not just another guy talking about semen retention because I read a few reddit pages. I've been in depth, I've trained with masters from around the world. I've trained in very different systems and everything I talk about I have experienced first hand. This isn't theoretical, this is what I've directly experienced in my life and in my body. When I started teaching it became very apparent to me that there are so many men who have all of this shame, all of this body shame, all this guilt around sexual pleasure that's coming from themselves. It's like ‘well if i touch myself that's wrong, It's guilty, It's a sin, I'm going to hell, I'm a loser’. You're telling yourself that it's wrong for you to give yourself pleasure, to give yourself love, to give yourself what you really desire right? You can only get that from someone else, you are teaching yourself to become dependent on something external. You are teaching yourself to seek the validation of others, and to me, that's a very unhealthy pattern. Sexuality and sexual pleasure is not something to be shameful about, it's not something to feel guilty about. If you start to completely suppress your sexuality, and say ‘nope i'm never touching this part of my body again’, then it's a use it or lose a situation! You're going to start developing some issues and I’ve seen it many, many times with many of my students who are in this kind of no-fap extremist mentality of ‘I can never touch myself ever again, I just have to keep myself busy with other things’, and it becomes this act of trying to suppress this desire that you have and it really doesn't work. Here's another thing that's kind of funny to me, when I ask men who feel guilty about the topic of masturbation, they say it's wrong to touch themselves, it's wrong, it's shameful. Well...have you ever watched a video of a woman masturbating? Did you think that it was shameful and guilty? Usually men feel aroused by the thought of  a woman touching herself sexually right? So really, you have two options: you can feel shameful and guilty about a certain thing or you can learn to develop a relationship with yourself, a relationship with your body and your sexuality, and find the benefits.I'm not saying that you should sit around masturbating all day, personally, I honestly don't do much self-stimulation these days because I have a committed partner and we connect sexually very often, but there was a time in my life when this was a very valuable tool for me. It kept me from experiencing sexual frustration. I had a way to experience sexual pleasure and orgasm without trying to seek a partner because I was single for a couple years. I wanted to really, really master these practices before I got back into relationships. It was a valuable tool for clearing my sexual frustration so I wasn't seeking low vibe partners, we could say, out of desperation. It also taught me a great deal about my body and my arousal response. It's important to get to know this. If you want to learn to last for hours in bed and have non-ejaculatory orgasms, you have to learn to understand how your body reacts to certain stimulation, how your breath changes, all these different subtleties. It's very difficult to learn these things in the context of sex with a partner because there's a certain expectation about performing and pleasing your partner, and not to mention all the added stimulation of their body, the sounds they're making, the sights, everything. It's difficult to learn these sexual practices during sex. It's kind of like being a martial artist, you have to do your training by yourself first before you jump into the ring or else you're going to get your ass kicked. The same thing with sexual practice. If you just try to jump into the bedroom and learn all these things there you're going to get your ass kicked, so you train by yourself to get to know how your body responds in a zero pressure situation. Yes, you may accidentally ejaculate a few times, but it's an investment in your future. It's an investment in your mastery of your sexual energy so that, in the future, you have the choice every time you're in a sexual situation, ‘do I want to ejaculate, or do I want to hold on to this energy and use it for something else’, instead of the typical nofap approach which is to suppress while you don’t have a partner, which can lead to ejaculating in minutes once you are with a partner. You see how it's a completely different approach? The sexual kung fu approach is to train to fully engage and immerse yourself in it, learn how your body reacts, don't be afraid to touch yourself, don't be afraid to stimulate your sexual energy and start to reframe your relationship with it so that you no longer desire ejaculation, or at least you don't desire it enough to do it every day. It starts to change who you are, and when you develop that mastery by yourself, you have all of this confidence. You feel confident that you can control your ejaculation. You can control your arousal and can move this energy through the body and have these full body orgasms and now you're not afraid to jump in the ring right? You don't have sexual anxiety because you've trained! This makes you very, very confident and magnetic to others, and of course, there's a lot of other health benefits to having a consistent pleasure practice. 

Experiencing arousal and sexual stimulation is really, really good for your health. It improves your hormones. When you're aroused, when you're having sexual stimulation, your body releases all these sexual hormones. these youthful hormones, but if you ejaculate you lose all that. By practicing this tantric approach to masturbation, where it becomes about cultivating sexual energy instead of just this frenzied jerking off to release some tension that doesn't really do you any good, it's a completely different approach. I don't even really like to use the word ‘masturbation’ because so many men associate this guilt and this shame with it, so I think ‘self-cultivation’ or ‘solo cultivation’ are better words, and again, when you're regularly working with your sexual energy, when you're just suppressing it, it's like water. Let's think of water. What happens when water becomes stagnant, it stops moving, it stops flowing? It starts to grow some nasty stuff, bacteria, algaes, all these things start to grow in that stagnant water. It's the same thing with your energy, especially your sexual energy. When it becomes stagnant, meaning that you're not engaging it or not doing anything with it, you're just leaving it here in your balls which is what most men are doing because they don't know a lot about the energetics of semen retention. It becomes stagnant and it drives them to not feel very good anymore. They start to feel angry, they start to feel irritable, they feel this stuckness in their body and their mind. A lot of men refer to this as flatline, but you can completely avoid this because the key is to keep this energy moving like water. You keep it moving, keep it running like a river. You need to have a daily practice where you're circulating this sexual energy in your body. It doesn't necessarily have to be an aroused way, but you can use the mind, the breath, to guide the sexual energy through the body. It keeps it fluid, channeling it into all the organs, channeling it into the brain, enhancing the function of your body, and this is the path that makes you feel phenomenal.