In my clinic I am regularly seeing female clients who are sexually dissatisfied because their husbands or partners no longer want sex with them. At the same time, I treat large numbers of male clients who are internet porn users and no longer feel like having sex with their wives or girlfriends. This is an historically unprecedented situation. Back in the day you could buy a Penthouse or Playboy magazine, not purely for their excellent articles, but it was rare to find anyone who preferred that experience to a human sexual encounter. This is one side-effect of internet porn usage that is problematical but the other is the physical, spiritual and emotional implications of exchanging chi or energy with an electronic stimulus.

These problems are going to increase because internet porn viewing is increasing dramatically. A recent study from the University of Sydney found that 70 percent of men and 30 percent of women already access it, and it is highly addictive. But internet porn usage is such an emotionally loaded topic that it is hard to find a non-judgemental analysis of its effects. When I bring up the subject with women their comment is: men that ‘do that’ must be ‘sad and lonely’. Men make comments such as male internet porn users are ‘afraid of intimacy’. Any response is automatically judgemental. So, as with the drug issue, the first step is to find a neutral position to be able to look at it from.

Traditional Chinese medicine is the perfect vehicle for this. A healthy sex life is considered an important part of health and over centuries the Chinese physicians documented the symptoms of excessive sex and lack of sex and arrived at guidelines for how much sex you should have depending on your age and state of health. But they never envisaged the development of internet porn and its implications. I went on-line to check it out (as research of course) wondering what has changed and why it is so compelling for so many people, male and female. Physiologically, the visual stimulation of internet porn is instant. The viewer is immediately triggered on a primal level and for men (as I can only speak for men in this instance) the urge to see that through to ejaculation is almost irresistible. Afterwards you want to do it again. And you can because it is so easy. This aspect of internet porn has contributed to the development of the latest addiction – internet porn addiction.

I recently treated a male ‘internet porn addict’ who I will call Steve, an intelligent, friendly, good-looking guy in his mid thirties with a pretty wife and a couple of kids. For him it all began when he received pornographic images on his phone and by email from friends. This practice is endemic. I have guys sending me this stuff all the time without any encouragement on my part. For my client this was like the marijuana of the porn world, it led to one or two curious sessions at work viewing internet porn, of ‘trying’ the harder drugs, but he soon found himself wanting to do it again, and then more and more frequently. He got to the point where he purchased a small laptop computer, basically as a sex toy. It had wifi access so he could get on-line easily and untraceably and he was able to duck into the toilets at work and satisfy his need.

He was doing this several times a day and rarely having sex with his wife. He felt weird about it, because they had had a great sex life before, but said he ‘couldn’t get away from it’. He started viewing porn on-line at home late at night after his wife went to sleep. She surprised him doing this a couple of times and felt angry, betrayed and rejected. She couldn’t understand how he could ‘do that to her’ or why he didn’t want to have sex with her. She would tell him that the girl he was looking at was someone’s daughter, and how did that make him feel? She thought this alone would be enough to make him stop. She wanted the computers out of the house or filters put on them so he couldn’t access this material, and for him to swear to never look at internet porn again. She joined a group trying to get internet porn banned. But this is like trying to ban drugs, it is not a solution, it is suppression and the attraction is resting not resolved.

From my perspective as a chi cycle therapist and my experiential and theoretical interest in addiction, the problem is not internet porn (or drugs), the problem is we have senses. Internet porn activates the senses. This makes you feel alive and energised – how we are all supposed to be feeling all the time. I believe it is normal to be stimulated by sexual imagery and natural to want to follow up on that stimulation. Many internet porn viewers, male and female, want to continue the feeling of heightened sexual stimulation so add drugs like ice which allow them to maintain that state for up to 18 hours straight.

I think it’s the right idea to want to hold states of heightened awareness but drugs and internet porn are not a sustainable way to go about it. Our senses were given to us by the creator, they are divine, our job is to work with them by putting our desire for sensory stimulation in the context of the universal consciousness. We are here to evolve and uniting the stimulation of our senses with the universal mind is how we do this.

For Steve it wasn’t the internet porn that was the problem, it was that he had not been trained to interact correctly with the overwhelming sensory stimulus. None of us have. In terms of his ‘addiction’ step one was to be able to look at internet porn but not climax as it is climaxing that represents the loss of control. Climaxing to internet porn is an energetic exchange with an electric circuit. Your actions are not ‘supported’ so you lose energy in the exchange and don’t feel in control of life. Using internet porn to satisfy your sexual needs is like creating an individual or separate energy circuit that loops within your own mind and body and depletes your organs. Our sexual activities  are beneficial when linked with the universal energy field. This allows us to access powerful universal forces and it nourishes our organs and spirit.

I suggested Steve take up chi cycle lifestyle changes because it is this that provides the tools to stop getting ‘sucked in’. Living the chi cycle allows you to train in and experience the union of stimulation with the universal energy forces. It’s a reference point to something better and in any addiction scenario, you always go for the better substance. The key to freedom is repetition of chi cycle living. If you get stuck in the internet porn cycle, and set up your own loop, what can happen (and I have other cases where I have seen this) is a desensitisation to certain types of pornographic imagery and the need for more extreme types of stimulation and material that is more disturbing and dehumanising. Internet porn is an empty experience compared to what sex in harmony with chi cycle can offer so, if you live the chi cycle, you naturally lose interest in porn. If that happens to everyone it’s the end of internet porn.

Sex, like sleeping and eating, once the simple things in life that we all took for granted, are now becoming the complicated things. I have clients who use internet porn because they don’t feel they have the perfect bodies necessary to have the hot heavy exciting sex pitched to us all in movies and advertising campaigns. The myth that men want sex all the time is not helping either. Women then feel less desirable if their male partners don’t want to have sex with them, and men with a ‘yin’ constitution, which means they naturally have a low sex drive, feel inadequate for not wanting sex all the time. In fact well over half the men I treat these days are not interested in sex. Tiger Woods, the kind of ‘yang’ man that apparently does want sex all the time is becoming increasingly rare, and he ended up in a sex addiction clinic where a period of enforced celibacy was part of the treatment. I have to say, leaving all the ethics of his activities aside, I felt really sorry for him. He is a ‘yang’ man as any successful athlete is. Along with that all that natural ambition, drive and energy comes a naturally high sex drive. Filling it by sleeping around doesn’t mean you are addicted to sex, it means you are not understanding how to work with your own nature.

But getting back to the clients who no longer want sex, this is a direct result of depleted organs and blood from an unsustainable lifestyle. They just don’t have the time or energy for it. I hear this from men and women all the time. They simply ‘can’t be bothered’ having sex. In this context internet porn is the ‘takeaway’ of the sex world. Its fast and convenient. If you are feeling tired and lethargic and then get onto a porn site, you experience instant change and stimulation. Its effortless and to top it all off, its free. Just as millions of us turn to takeaway food, millions of us are turning to takeaway sex. But this is McSex. And, like McFood, its not deeply satisfying and it costs us energy.

It all comes down to the way we live. We can’t ‘hand over’, we can’t sleep so we take medications and have McSleep. We have so much yang rising we can’t eat, food just doesn’t go down, so we turn to McFood. We don’t have the time or energy to have deep sexual experiences with our partners so now millions and millions of us are having McSex. We keep losing energy, we become imbalanced and all sorts of addictive and obsessive behaviours arise. This is all because we have lost touch with our universal support system, the mothership. We weren’t meant to do this on our own, none of it. We don’t want to become McPeople. We are designed for so much more, for the ultimate experience of our chi flowing in accord with powerful universal forces and a soul-awakening experience with all our senses permanently activated. Living the chi cycle lifestyle opens the door to this incredible state.