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The day I chaperoned a beach trip with a friend for a group of high school graduates marked the beginning of a marvelous journey that has since led me to write a book, produce a DVD, launch a website and aspire to start a new sexual revolution.

This friend, who also happens to be a major investor in a renowned film production company and a fitness buff, was blown away by my revelations about how masturbation should be redefined as one of the healthiest forms of exercise available benefiting our endocrine, nervous, muscular, and skeletal systems.

He was hooked, just as I had been nearly 35 years earlier when I started studying Eastern sexuality in a Gnóstico school in El Salvador. The notion that our overall fitness, longevity, vitality, and health depend in great part on our sexuality opened up novel, dynamic, and empowering perspectives on human potential that had to be shared. Not only did my friend graciously provide all the technical assistance to produce The Rejuvenating Power of Masturbation (RPM) DVD, but a local publishing company also collaborated with me to put in print the book of the same title.

I didn’t opt for some euphemistic approach to the title like ‘self-pleasuring yourself to health’, ‘solo sex for a long life’, or ‘self-fondling for fitness’. I instead chose to use the word masturbation and challenge the negative innuendos, stigmas, shame, and societal sanctions that have demonized this archetypal aspect of sexuality we also share with a variety of animals. The great sex researchers Masters, Johnson, and Kinsey reported that the vast majority of people masturbate, so then why shouldn’t we be able to freely talk about it?

Do we still have our penises and clits shackled in manacles handed down from our Puritan ancestors?  Why is Western sexuality so divorced from the sacred and transformative attributes prolifically documented and fundamental to Eastern sexuality? In Japan, anatomically accurate phallic statues are publicly paraded around as part of certain fertility ceremonies. Try this in the USA and chances are we’d end up in the slammer for lewd behavior. Indeed, in 1994, Dr Jocelyn Elders, the Surgeon General during the Clinton Administration, was fired for publicly advocating for more education about this fundamental aspect of human sexual behavior often disparaged as a taboo and corrupting vice.

I got a lot of cheer leading from my friend and my primary care physician to spread the word about masturbation and sexual fitness and to raise awareness about the transformative powers derived from our own sexual politic. I ran the gambit contacting celebrities, talk shows, sex therapists, bookstores, colleagues, members of my social media networks, etc. and out of this myriad only a small posse of people had the open-mindedness, bravado, and humanity to say ‘tell me more’.

Enter Betty Dodson, fondly considered my Sensei and I her Grasshopper, with an invitation to meet in person. I think we blew each other’s mind on our first visit- she with her eloquent candor and profound understanding of human sexuality, and I with a challenge to her precepts of female sexuality and a rebuke of Taoism’s exclusion of women from the male-dominated concept of sexual energy channeling via semen retention. And so the email floodgates opened up between us, Betty’s insightful challenges and willingness to temporarily suspend her beliefs allowed her Grasshopper to tell his side of the story.

A year later, we had a second visit at her abode over tea and tincture which further solidified our friendship and camaraderie as sex education crusaders. I am just a new kid on the block and have much to learn about how to deal with the behemoth misconceptions perjuring our sexuality and the political, social, and economic forces that vie to keep them in place.

Nevertheless, my Sensei graciously invited me to be a blogger and so here you have it, a prelude to what I hope will be a trail of blogs ultimately testifying on behalf of a new sexual manifesto- that a knowledgeable understanding and practice of our sexuality is fundamental for our physical, mental, and spiritual health over our lifetimes. Let’s put away the pills and get out the coconut oil and dildos! What better prescription to fortify our zest for life!