Sensuality vs. Spirituality: Embodied Spirituality vs. Body Denial

Discovering the Body’s Hidden Language

When I began to explore—with an open mind—sources I had previously dismissed as nonsense, I discovered that the phenomenon I was interested in—namely, the sudden emergence of a strange sensation in my body that led me to mental states which, from my atheist materialist perspective, could only be described as spiritual or even mystical—was addressed by various traditions, each with its own perspective, goals, and methodologies. Some overlapped; others diverged.

Buddhism and Daoism: Two Maps of the Same Territory

The first distinction I noticed was between Buddhism and Daoism. Both traditions clearly referred to the kinds of physical sensations I was experiencing, though they used different names and maps—sometimes contradictory, sometimes complementary.
But while Buddhists saw the entire process as directed toward a single goal—exclusively spiritual and, at the time, elusive to me—which they called enlightenment, Daoists, although they also included that goal as a possible ultimate destination (if the practitioner so desired), acknowledged intermediate objectives such as improved health, longevity, or even something as mundane as the ability to punch like a beast.

Energetic Cartographies

This difference in ultimate goals translated into their representations of the “energetic system”—that is, the cartography that sensation was revealing in my body.
Daoists have a much more complex representation, with intricate meridians and channels through which a kind of esoteric energy called qi flows, forming the basis of traditional Chinese medicine. At a higher level of integration, they speak of three main centers called dantian, or “fields of cultivation,” located in the head, chest, and abdomen.

Buddhists, on the other hand, focus on just three channels—one central and two lateral—that intersect in ways that left me puzzled for quite some time. They also speak of seven points called chakras, arranged in a kind of hierarchy from bottom to top: impure below, divine above, representing progress toward enlightenment as an ascent through these chakras.

Qi, Prana, and the Art of Energy Work

Buddhists have their equivalent of Daoist qi, which they call prana, and they also claim that, besides the three main channels—ida, pingala, and sushumna—there are over seventy thousand smaller channels called nadis, which seem to correspond to the Daoist luo, capillaries that nourish the entire body.
But to my surprise, while techniques for working with this energy—qi or prana—were relatively accessible in Daoist texts (with practices like the orbit, or exquisite distinctions between mind, intention, attention, and other agents in the art of “qi refinement”), Buddhist texts, which refer to the process as “purification of the channels,” were not only far more sparse in explanation, but also seemed to treat the very sensation that had led me to what I could only describe as mystical states as a dangerous distraction—some kind of temptation placed there by the Hindu Satan to lead us astray from the path to enlightenment.

The Forums of Confusion

It was deeply disheartening to land in my first online forum where it was clear that people could feel the same sensations I did, only to find that any attempt to steer the discussion toward working with those sensations was immediately shot down by a chorus of parrots repeating the same mantra: “Forget the sensation. Just meditate, meditate, meditate.”
Fortunately, I fled that forum and found another, more open one, where Buddhists and Daoists mingled—and that proved far more enlightening.

The Real Divide

Now I see that a strict classification between Buddhists and Daoists is unrealistic, since there are hundreds of branches that mix ideas and techniques from both traditions in varying proportions.
But for me, the key distinction—the one that led me to discard a large percentage of available options—is very clear: sensuality vs. spirituality, the rejection of the body as an obstacle to spirituality versus the exact opposite view—that the body is not an obstacle but a vehicle, and potentially a Ferrari.

The Suspicious Neglect of the Body

Unfortunately, in my view, the more widespread option among sincere spiritual seekers is the body-denying one.
For them, sensuality is the exact opposite of spirituality—a concept enthusiastically embraced by institutional religions, which also form the cultural foundation for many spiritual seekers and thus completely block the path I discovered by accident.
Talking about sex in those forums is outright offensive, for example. They simply cannot conceive that one thing could have anything to do with the other.

At first, I couldn’t understand it. Why would something so vivid, so transformative, be dismissed so categorically?
But from where I stand now, I’d say this obsession with eliminating the body from the spiritual process is anything but innocent.
It’s not just a cultural bias or a doctrinal quirk—it feels like a deliberate design. A mechanism to sever the seeker from their most immediate source of power and insight.

The body is unruly, sensual, and unpredictable. By choosing embodied spirituality vs. body denial, we stop fighting our biological hardware and start using it as the vehicle it was meant to be. And perhaps that’s precisely why so many traditions—especially the institutionalized ones—have worked so hard to suppress it. The reasons behind this systemic suppression deserve a closer look.