This 2009 publication of recent writing by the Thai Chinese authority on Chinese healing and well-being therapies, Mantak Chia, complements earlier writing in a most challenging way. More than ever, it illustrates one of his basic mantras – you do it, you get it.
      As someone whose life has been enriched and strengthened over the past decade by earlier reading of Mantak Chia’s work, I do not need much persuasion to examine seriously new and surprising insights he offers.
      Having said that, I need to say this book challenged a number of my unquestioned, comfortable certainties in startling ways. In doing this, however, it simply brought together and gave meaning to scraps of information I had accumulated over the years but had never worked through thoroughly.
      In particular, this book reminds one that in thinking of our natural environment we need always to allow for the broader cosmic context of our world and our lives. In addition, Chia reminds of our three minds in the lower, middle and higher dan tians and of the capacity to bring these together in an empowering manner.
      I am conscious of the reality that it will be some months, if not longer, before I can feel confident I have utilised Chia’s insights to empower myself in new ways to connect from within with the universe.
      I suspect that I may more readily develop a sense of utilising what might be called my heart and gut brains to give me a much-heightened sense of awareness about my presence and role in this world.
      In this, I will be assisted by Chia’s story about the vivid memory of transplanted hearts and by his noting the fact that the small and large intestines carry the same kind of neurons and tissue as the brain in the head. I also recall a book that I read many years ago which relates how the Japanese think with the ‘hara’ or stomach.
      The major insight offered by this book, however, concerns the fact that our certainties and experiences are predetermined to a profound degree by the language and habits that we learn in youth and accept as defining our world as we grow older.
      Drawing on Daoist wisdom and practice, Chia introduces the reader to new ways of managing understanding, well-being and aspiration and invites the discovery of new physical and spiritual possibilities. In the process, the reader is reminded that many beliefs and convictions are highly contingent, almost accidental.
      It is not hard to move from this to a deepened sense of the inadequacy of many Western assumptions about the body, therapy, healing and well-being. These are often stagnant and stereotyped and become forces detracting from a robust and healthy lifestyle.
      An interest in Chinese traditional culture and values can only reinforce the sense that the West has been very negligent in allowing its sense of superiority to blind it to what it has to learn from unfamiliar civilisations. Of course, teachers like Mantak Chia have many followers across the world but Western mainstream authorities are still committed to marginalising and denigrating the wisdom of other cultures.
      The deep-rooted adherence to practices of intellectual apartheid – the marginalisation and denigration of the wisdom of other traditions – is a habit that today leaves the West increasingly vulnerable to resurgent traditions around the world.
      The sexual energy of the title is open to misunderstanding by Western readers who give it an unduly mundane meaning and fail to understand it in a Daoist tradition where it has dimensions of meaning rarely considered in the English language.
      With a survey of the six healing sounds; the mixing of saliva, qi and air; the strengthening and stretching of tendons, tongue and sexual organs; the protecting and cleansing with universal qi; and other fundamentals, the book lays a solid foundation before it proceeds to warming the stove and laughing qigong.
      Anyone unfamiliar with Chia’s writing will probably feel disorientated by this language and conceptualisation. In contrast, someone, like me, returning to Chia after an interval will be reminded of past discoveries and insights, of inadequacies in one’s own learning and practice and of the seemingly inexhaustible range of new areas still to be explored and, in some sense, discovered.
      The major task I will take from my reading of this book will be to use Mantak Chia’s guidance to better understand and utilise my heart mind and my gut mind. I will seek to deploy the former to explore and manage my physical body and organs and the latter to sense more fully and sensitively my natural and cosmic environments.
      Without access to a teacher, I know this will at best be a stumbling and uncertain process but, judging from experience, I expect it will enhance my sense of health and well-being.
      I realise that many readers may find this fanciful and implausible, as I would have twenty years ago. In those twenty years, however, I discovered through reading and reflection how much of our contemporary sense of Western medicine, science and progress is a product of dogma and misplaced faith.
      Moreover, the defence and preservation of this dogma and faith often relies heavily on the pressures and distractions in our lives that prevent us finding the time to re-examine false certainties.
      A passage headed Scientific Research on Universal Dao Practices in the last chapter is useful in reminding the reader of the difficulties in moving between Western and Chinese perceptions.
      In the experience of this reviewer, even common words like politics, law and democracy do not translate between English and Chinese without their meaning being distorted. Arguably, this is true in both social and physical sciences.
      Chia’s work offers an invaluable means of accessing important aspects of Chinese wisdom.