Never Meditate After Sex

My teacher of meditation told us to never meditate after sex. Wait for an hour at least or more, he said.

On the other hand when you start to understand what happens in meditation and see that, while meditating, you release habits of thought that block you from seeing the truth and when you stop, the habits come back, you realize that the only way you are going to benefit is by being in meditation all the time, no matter what you do and, of course, this includes sex. Also the essence of meditation, and the feature that makes it possible to benefit from it, is that meditation does not judge anything, but is open to experience everything. You learn to be in a state in which you can do this. Eventually it becomes the way you live always.

At first I took my teacher’s advice, but later I started thinking. Why does he say so?

Today I believe that his reason has to do more with culture than with the truth. In the culture of Chinese Buddhism, sex is considered to be an impediment to purity of purpose, when it comes to spirituality. It belongs to the passions of the body. It belongs to duality and attachment. If you are a householder and have a wife, you have to have sex and it is OK in these circumstances. But you hinder your development. It is good at some point, maybe when you are somewhat older, to stop having sex and devote yourself to spiritual practice. Then you will make use of all your energy for the purpose of evolving.

But this is just an opinion and it does not harmonize with many other things that Chinese Buddhist meditation promotes, like cleaning the house with awareness, cooking with awareness, meditating through everything that you do. All these things belong to duality and attachment. But sex is a stronger attachment, you may say, or the dedicated Buddhist meditator may say. It is true. We have been made this way. But every single appearance and thing in the universe is saturated with the same oneness. Every energy is so too. The energy and the activity of having sex are not different. And there are other paths to enlightenment that do not look down at both the body and sex.

By the way, even Chinese Buddhism acknowledges some householder-enlightened masters, like Vimalakirty, who had a wife and a daughter. A whole sutra is dedicated to him and he is very highly regarded in this tradition. But when it comes to practice, he is not the example to follow.

In Theta Healing there is the teaching about the fifth plane, where spiritual teachers reside. The residents of this plane are known to be opinionated. Being a teacher does not free you from having opinions. Of course it is very beneficial to study with a teacher, when you need one, but if you want only the truth, go directly to the endless. This is what they teach. When I learned a bit of Theta Healing and we, the students, were working on each other, just as my partner was trying to follow clues all the way to a core issue of mine, our teacher walked by and told her: In his case, his pain has to do with a fifth plane opinion.

This night, when my pain woke me up, it came to me to masturbate. I did, and stayed in meditation all through it. When I came, I started to feel fear creeping in. It was a strange fear. It was mixed with something else that looked like awe. I decided to respect the fear or the mixture that it was and stay with it as a witness, meaning, continue to meditate. The feeling was very strong and after a while I felt I needed some help, so I got up and went to my table to do a drawing. I wanted to see what intuition would see and say. What it saw and said will come in the next posting.

I do keep your interest alive, don’t I?

And I do endlessly love my Chinese Buddhist teacher, the late Sheng-yen. If not for him, I would not be the way I am today. I am sure he sees me as a naughty student, who follows his heart, and therefore, even his naughtiness is lovely.

When I once told him what I did not accept about his teaching, he said that every teacher wants his students to be better than him. But I only want to be who I am, which for me means, to be in the state of becoming.