The vaginal and anal flexing that’s going on at Tao Garden in Chiang Mai is about making the leap from orgasm to enlightenment

Female sexuality can be a formidable thing. Women who know how to use it can have men at their mercy; those who don't tend to be vulnerable.

So a course called "Cultivating Female Sexual Energy* is bound to draw some attention. It's on the menu with a variety of healing instruction at Tao Garden in Chiang Mai's green and robust Doi Saket Village.
Then again, the course has to compete with the likes of Breast Massage, Ovarian Kung Fu - which involves "Orgasmic Draw" - and the Egg Exercise, in which an egg-shaped jade ball is inserted into the vagina to strengthen muscles amid much anal flexing.

It all sounds like a training camp for Patpong showgirls, but the lessons arc supposed to be crucial to having good sex, and if you have good sex, you have a key stepping-stone to health in mind and spirit.

Prasert Jirapongsathon who's well known overseas as the Taoist master Mantak Chia, stresses that sexual energy - like fire - is neither good nor bad in itself. It depends on how it's used.

Taoists do not shy away from sex, he says, they transform its force into spiritual energy. Sex thus becomes an aid in. the spiritual pursuit of enlightenment.

The explosion of energy at orgasm is usually merely dissipated, but in Tao practice this energy is harnessed and drawn back into the body as chi, the essential life force that keeps us alive and young and is a potent remedy to any illnesses.

To ensure a full orgasm, all the sexual organs must be fit, and that's what the courses at Tao Garden aim for. There is also the abdominal massage called chi nei tsang and the higher Tao practice of lean and li dark-room meditation. Former Lufthansa airline attendant Jutta Kellenberger became a student of Master Chia in 1987 and is now herself, at 53, a senior instructor. She teaches the Cultivating Female Sexual Energy course.

The slender, red-haired German has facial wrinkles indicating her age but she's beautiful, radiating inner charm. She has the grace of a wise woman, but childlike fun glitters in her turquoise eyes.

Tao, Kellenberger says, has transformed her, both physically and mentally, as it has her husband Walter, also an instructor at Tao Garden . "My course is so uplifting," she says, "you really feel that it's a treasure to be a woman."

She doesn't conduct the classes as a how -to workshop, but creates a warm and caring atmosphere in which the .students can let down their defences and receive instruction in a relaxed, spiritual mood.

One student began menstruating again after a long time without, Kellenberger says, adding that regular practitioners find their monthly periods shortened by a few days, with less - or no - discomfort from cramps and sickness.

The practice, she says, balances and heals hormonal dysfunction in women, and may also be beneficial in treating hormone-related diseases like breast and uterus cancer. Celibates, Kellenberger notes, probably need the practice more than sexually active women, in order to control their sexual energy.

The real power of women, practitioners believe, is not something to be exerted over men but over themselves. In today's stressful world, women need to respect their sexuality more than ever. They neither have to run after, nor away from men, and power Struggles with men are unnecessary.

The best way for women to deal with men is to be genuinely happy with themselves and their health.

More information on the courses at Tao Garden is available at http://www.universal-tao.com