It’s related to many spiritual sexual practices, including semen retention (wherein a penis owner learns to orgasm without ejaculating, thus allowing for multiple orgasms for men), sexual transmutation (wherein you transmute sexual energy into creative energy to fuel other areas of your life), and the energy orgasm. The main idea: Sex is a major energy source. Every time you have sex, you have the power to create new life. What if you can take that power and channel it into your day-to-day existence? You can. But most people, even if they are sexually active, don’t harness and utilize the power of their sexual energy. Instead, they leak it unconsciously. The life force energy that is the essence of our sexual connection builds and peaks at orgasm, but then we often release that energy out of our bodies instead of retaining it. Men are especially vulnerable to this energy loss. Consider the cliché of the man who has sex and rolls over and goes to sleep immediately. One of the major reasons I took up tantra and Taoist sexual energy practices (beyond the spiritual dimension they add to sex) was so I could help my lovers to last much longer. There doesn’t have to be an energetic decline after orgasm. You can tap into that cycle and draw that energy back in for yourself. After sex, you ought to feel vibrant, witty, calm, heart-centered, tingly all over, and happy to be alive. The extended orgasm is one way to extend and expand your orgasmic energy to sustain that heightened experience of pleasure and euphoria. You do this through breathing. If you practice yoga, that same four-count inhale, four-count exhale (or longer) Vinyasa flow breath can help you have a longer-lasting orgasm, aka an expanded or extended orgasm. Most people tend to hold the breath, breathe very shallowly, and tighten up the body as they approach orgasm. All of these things curtail energy flow. Instead, imagine having sex that’s like a yoga class: You breathe steadily throughout. When you get into a demanding position, instead of holding your breath, you learn to default to your breath. It carries you through to the other side. Afterward, you feel like you broke through some stuck part of yourself. You’ve grown. As we see in yoga, breath carries energy. We could even say that one of the main points of yoga is the movement of energy: releasing and clearing stagnant energy and bringing awareness to unconscious areas in our physical and emotional bodies. The poses are simply vehicles for this process. The same applies in sex. By ensuring we breathe steadily throughout the sexual encounter, we redistribute our sexual energy throughout our bodies. This energy is even stronger and denser than regular chi or prana. In fact, the Taoists had a separate name for it: “ji.” When we recirculate this potent ji throughout our systems, less of it escapes at the moment of orgasm. In fact, it doesn’t have to escape at all. What happens when you expand this flow of sexual energy is that you expand the experience of orgasm. It goes from being a very distinct burst of pleasure to a feeling that spreads throughout the body, giving rise to the term full-body orgasm. And it goes on. And on. And on. For hours. Sometimes days. Even when the physical contact stops, the feelings carry on. It also puts you in the running with Sting for marathon sex.
