There are many barriers to success in spiritual cultivation, and one of the biggest is sexual desire. That is, succumbing to sexual desire and losing your jing, semen, elixir, or whatever term your spiritual school uses.

In the quest to climb the spiritual ladder, you must open up your chi channels, chakras, arouse your kundalini and abandon the view of the body. All this, at its basis, is a function of cultivating chi. Cultivating chi (qi or ki), in turn, is a product or function of accumulating chi, or "not letting the elixir leak" through sexual activities. If there is no water (jing or semenal force) in the boiler, there can be no steam (qi or chi) in the pipes….and hence the chi channels won't clear out their obstructions and chakras won't open. Kundalini, which is essentially the real chi of the body, won't arise either.

In Taoist terminology, ching transforms into chi, which transforms into shen and then emptiness. So in cultivation, the first rule is that of celibacy, or brahmacharya. Only if one can retain their jing while cultivating an empty mind of nonattachment, only then will the jing transform into chi and the chi channels open and the entire domino-effect sequence of spiritual results start occuring. Without that first step of "discipline", however, it is useless. Monkhood, priesthood, and so forth without the combination of celibacy + emptiness is useless for true spiritual ascension.

You'll certainly gain merit with a spiritual occupation, but without cultivation, very little true spiritual progress. The true success of spritiual accomplishment is enlightenment, or seeing the Tao. In the realm of samsara, falsity, or conventional worldiness, cultivating the samadhi identifies someone as having attainment. And if not that, cultivating kung-fu of some sort. You cannot achieve kungfu (gong), samadhi or the Tao without first opening your chi channels and cultivating and empty mind, and to do that it first starts with cultivating your jing and chi.

The conservation of jing, in essence, is one of the first lessons meditators have to learn about spiritual cultivation and yet hardly any know. Why? Because people don't want ot hear that they have to control their sexual urges and let their energies be transformed. But whether politically correct or not, you cannot cheat this natural fundamental requirement. No one said that it was easy to attain the Tao, or samadhi, but to deny the requirements of the path just so one can excuse themselves is simply self-deception.

So one of the first things to understand on the meditaiton path is the why, wherefores, and hows of cultivating jing, chi and shen. The first step is to understand jing, or semenal force, and how to accumulate it without force, and allow it to transform without force or leakage. While all religions refer to this first step of purity, chastity, or celibacy, the best school to understand these essences is the Chinese Tao school, or Taoism. Nan Huai-chin wrote a book, Tao and Longevity, which explains these three essences in terms of the road of spiritual cultivation, and it's the best I've ever found for understanding the topic.

Different schools for different aspects of the path is one of my mantras … but for understandig jing, chi, shen  and the importance of cultivating each of these essences on the path — without really trying or even knowing that you are so doing — Chinese Taoism is the best school to refer to.