Women’s Sexual Qigong Practice
Local Berkshire Class
Lifeworks Studio
50 Castle St – Great Barrington
Tuesday mornings, 10:15
First Class FREE – October 8
October 15 – November 19
What is Qigong?
Qi gong is an ancient Chinese physical practice that builds our awareness and connection by optimizing the flow of energy – known as qi or prana in other traditions – through the body.
As humans we can cultivate our capacity to be conduits of energy between the body, the earth, and the heavens. Instead of the perpetual trying to do more and better and being blown by the winds of circumstances, we learn to stay present, observing what is more true in this moment.
This may sound like a simple practice, and it is. But it is not easy.
We are continually distracted and seduced by our screens and the every day and often more tantalizing aspects of living in our busy Western culture. Yet presence – which must be fostered – is perhaps the most essential attribute to possess if we are to enjoy our human potential for a more full measure of health, wholeness, and wellbeing.
This ancient perspective predates Western duality consciousness by offering the potential for enwrapping the yin and yang of life into one enveloped whole of Oneness consciousness.
What is Women’s Sexual Qigong?
I teach this form of qigong for women with attention to helping qi to move more fluidly through our sexual centers and physical body to remember our wholeness and health.
Because every woman in this culture has likely experienced some level of sexual trauma that hinders our body’s capacity for sensation, intimacy, and pleasure, we all can benefit from a practice that helps us remember ourselves back to our original settings of wholeness and vibrancy.
Over a series of weekly sessions we build on basic qigong forms and explore those that are particularly developed to enliven and heal our organs and sexual centers.
How do Mary’s classes work?
We begin each session with warm-up practices to awaken the body’s sense of aliveness and allow more fluidity in the spine.
We learn to notice the movement of breath within the stillness. What might be there, subtle and possibly more substantial, than the physical?
Moving through space we incorporate visualization to guide the flow of qi. This helps to awaken our organs and parts of the body where energy may have been stuck or blocked. Just as visualization is at the core of any creative endeavor, in qigong practice we begin to imagine feeling the qi coursing through our bodies until one day we sense what has always been here, as we begin to feel its presence.
Practice over time opens the energetic channels for a more steady and activated flow of presence in our daily lives, in work, and in our sensual experience with or without a partner.
Toward the end of each session we store the qi so it can be protective and available for the day’s demands.
This basic flow of movements, breath, and visualization can become the template for the creation of our own personal practice, tuning into what the body wants at any moment.
Twenty years ago I encountered the qi gong practice I now teach during my first tantra 10-day workshop/training in Hawaii with Caroline Muir and Tomas and Joan Heartfield of the Divine Feminine and Awakened Masculine Institute.
My approach comes from the teachings and lineage of Dr. Saida Désilets who led those early morning qi gong practices. She had studied in Thailand with her teacher, the Chinese grandmaster Mantak Chia, and had adapted his early more patriarchal teachings for modern women’s sensitivities.
Chia had been charged with bringing to the West these ancient, long-held secrets from obscure, elite Taoist sexual practices. I am ever grateful to these teachers for the wisdom they have so generously shared and the adaptations they have made to make the work accessible to Western women.
How does qigong help to heal us as humans?
We have been schooled in the West to put life into silos, to assume the body and soul are separate, humanity separate from nature. We are encouraged to believe that each of us is ideally an autonomous being, a self-made individual, each responsible for carving the course of our own separate lives.
But our deepest joys come when we are in connection – with the depth of ourselves, the shared vulnerability and beauty of another, and the awe and wonder of the natural world’s splendor.
Instead of believing the delusion that I am alone on this planet and a victim of my circumstances, qi gong practice helps me to sense and remember what is far more true: I am intrinsically held and supported by enumerable aspects of life itself. As I begin to awaken and know through my actual embodied sensation more of who I am, I feel far more connected than my mind can begin to understand. So much more is there that we are trained out of noticing.
How is Mary’s women’s sexual qigong helpful for women, especially during peri-menopause and through maturity?
Living in our Western culture, we have rarely been given this template for a more embodied, sensually sensitive life, especially as we age.
We know the facts! We can expect a diminishment in our body’s function and sensitivity. Just as tissues begin to thin on our faces, so do our most delicate genitalia. We will likely lose some of our reliably youthful juiciness and natural responsiveness. These truths are merely part of living a long life. But our culture uses them to convince us that as aging women, we are less valuable, less potent, less sexy, and therefore deficient and expendable.
I’m here to tell a different story! When I have maintained even a semi-regular women’s sexual qigong practice, as I have done over the last 20 years, I am more in touch with the flow of breath and energy through my body. Intention and visualization help to activate the qi through specific embodied forms, bringing more blood flow to my tissues. My vulva and vagina are far more alive when I remember to practice. And with qi and blood flow comes greater sensation.
I can attest to the effectiveness of these physical benefits. I am a woman past 65 and still enjoy and desire a frequent and highly pleasurable and juicy intimate life. I rarely experience leakage, the all-to-common inconvenience most women complain about past age 55. Am I just lucky, inheriting especially good genes? Maybe so, but I think it’s far more likely that 20 years of practice, through peri-menopause and into my mature years, is the cause of my reliably enjoyable and juicy sensual life.
These physical benefits and the endorphins more regularly coursing through my body would be enough to warrant incorporating women’s sexual qi gong practices into my life. But the confidence I feel in life that comes from a fuller sense of my vibrant aliveness as the sexual being that I am transcends the bedroom.
Because I feel connected and more solidly planted here on the earth, I trust the truth of my own felt experience and am therefore more resilient with whatever the day brings. I’m less reactive to the winds of drama and circumstance that befall me.
And because I recognize and have learned to receive the blessing and palpable support of connection with the Earth and cosmos, felt in my body as a result of these qigong practices and other somatic work, I radiate this light in gratitude and care for all of life.
When I practice, I know through my own felt sense that beyond any philosophy or belief system I can never be disconnected from the life’s vast support. It is always there for me.
But my life can get busy, and I sometimes step away from regular practice. Soon I notice a loss of my sensitivity. I can get numbed out by an over-amped life and too easily lose touch with this sense-centered knowing of connection.
Sound familiar? Yet I know from years of experience that my physical and energetic connection, cultivated over time through qi gong practice, is always there, waiting to be re-membered. My tissues respond again, and I’m back within a few days.
This qigong practice is basic to my joy-filled and sensually enriched life and is within any woman’s reach! I hope you will join me to experience what can be possible for you.
Why is Mary qualified to teach?
Mary holds certifications in sexual education and practice from the Divine Feminine/Awakened Masculine Institute; Exceptional Marriage Mentoring training with Marcia and Brian Gleason; 2 year study and ordination at One Spirit Interspiritual Seminary, NYC; advanced training for 15 years with non-dual spiritual teacher Miranda Macpherson and mentor in her International Living Grace Global Sangha; Open Hearted Listening training with Don and Martha Rosenthal; as well as advanced degrees in choral conducting and music education.
Mary is the founder in 2006 of Walking Our Talk, the Berkshire-based women’s support non-profit organization. Over the years she co-facilitated numerous 8-week circles, trained 32 facilitators, and served as long time board president before her retirement in 2024. More than 450 women have participated in WOT through over 65 local in-person circles or online.
She is also an avid hiker and gardener in her Berkshire hills home, mother of three fascinating adult children following their own courageous path in the world, and partnered with a wise and wonderfully deep and supportive spiritual man.