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From Heart of Intimacy: The Six Gateways to Healthy Relationships by Kypris Aster Drake

Once our physical needs are taken care of, the next step to self-love is to support ourselves emotionally. Tending to our feelings by noticing them and caring for ourselves accordingly creates emotional intelligence, the ability to use our emotions as a guidance system and to navigate feelings toward others in a healthy and supportive way. It also helps us to regulate our emotions. Over time, this emotional intelligence creates a happier life.

Emotions tend to flow and change like water, shifting easily when we feel good, and getting stuck and stagnant when we feel bad. The more we learn to let emotions flow, by breathing and being compassionate with ourselves, the less likely we are to become stuck in painful feelings and the resulting negative behavior. When we feel bad, we tend to show that in our behavior towards ourselves and our partners. Perhaps this is why the Dalai Lama recommends that we focus on the art of making ourselves happy as one path to spiritual growth. When we are happy, we tend to treat other people well, and this in turn tends to create more positive emotions in them, spreading joy from person to person. 

So often the word emotion is associated with all the negative feelings of fear, anger, sadness, and shame. But these feelings are only one end of a spectrum. At the other end are the positive feelings of love, serenity, and joy. As I experienced these positive emotions more often, I began to think of the times when I felt all of them together as a feeling of pleasure. This is not a sexual pleasure, but rather a combination of good feelings moving through our bodies. Part of the work of getting ready for a healthy relationship is learning to nurture a feeling of pleasure in our bodies, independent of a partner. Clearing old wounds and negative feelings that have been running our lives lets us be totally available to healthy relationships and to experience positive feelings more often.

From Shamanic Stress Relief: Six Gateways to a Happier Life by Kypris Aster Drake
When I officially became Pagan at 27, I learned even more about the elements and their associations, but it wasn’t until my shamanic training that I truly understood: the elements were metaphors for different aspects of my being. I’ve come to think of elements as a way to describe the type of energy that is moving through my body at any given time. I can be filled with Earth and feel calm and relaxed, or with Fire and feel energized and passionate, for example. The possible interpretations and metaphors are endless.
Each element is also a type of “medicine” for healing whenever something is out of balance. The right elemental medicine depends on what type of imbalance I’m dealing with. Healing with the elements involves either engaging in certain activities, or communing with that element in its pure form. The more I understand the nature of each element by spending time with it, the easier it is to determine which type of medicine is best for me in the moment. Eventually, I’ve reached a sort of equilibrium with myself, where it’s possible to correct an imbalance almost without thinking about, keeping me happy, healthy, calm, and centered.

From Journey to Sexual Wholeness: The Six Gateways to Sacred Sexuality by Kypris Aster Drake|

Nwyvre (literally “Dragon Fire”) is a Druidic word for the sexual/ creative/spiritual energy that runs through the body, also known as kundalini, or chi. To safely awaken the fire of the dragon, we begin to cultivate deep body awareness through movement, breath, and meditative practice. There are many warnings in older textbooks about the dangers of awakening the kundalini if a student is not properly prepared, tales of mysterious illnesses and madness. In my experience, the kundalini only has these effects when it is forced through the chakras before they are ready to open. The safest and quickest way of waking it up is to do a gentle daily spiritual practice that includes breath and movement. You may also find that a really good way to awaken nwyvre is through self pleasuring with deep full breath, strong body awareness, and intention to move energy through the body. Whatever you do, let it be a gradual and gentle process, without forcing or goals. Come to your practice each time with openness and awareness that the energy may not move where you want it to, but knowing that if you are fully aware and connected to Spirit, it will move in some perfect direction. 

Fully open and balanced chakras also create a much better sexual experience because each chakra is a place where we are able to give and receive sexual energy. We can experience ecstatic releases of energy that feel like orgasms in any of the chakras, and each chakra has a different feeling to it in this ecstatic state…a stomach chakra orgasm exploding from the solar plexus feels much different from a clitoral orgasm or a belly chakra (g-spot or prostate) orgasm. Orgasms in the third eye bring us to an intense spiritual state of mental clarity and wisdom, while orgasms in the g-spot seem to fill up my cup of desire and release any negative emotions of fear or need I have been holding onto. As part of lovemaking, with ourselves or with our partners, we can massage the chakras to bring awareness and energy to them. We can also kiss, lick, scratch, or tickle each chakra. We can blow on them with our breath. The more the chakras open, and the more we allow our sexual energy to flow through them, the more we are likely to have the ecstatic experience of the energy moving up and down the spine with an orgasm, or our merging with our partner and with all of creation, which is one experience available to us as we journey along the tantric path. 

From Heart of Intimacy by Kypris Aster Drake

Negative emotion that’s stored in the body is often called armor, because it tends to deflect any positive emotional energy that comes your way and also shut down the ability to feel emotions. Armor makes it hard to feel emotions deeply and hard to receive love from other people. Connection with others is extremely difficult, and connection to yourself is even harder. Getting in touch with your feelings is important, because they are your guidance system. Knowing what you feel tells you which direction to go — which project to choose, which people to spend time

with, which partner is right for you, or even which career to pursue. If you have good feelings about something, it makes sense to go towards it, while bad feelings tell you to move away. I often tell my clients that emotions are a sort of “GPS” for life.

Practice 7: Heartfulness Meditation

This is the meditation I did daily to begin removing my heart armor and reconnect to my feelings. It also was an incredibly nurturing practice in helping me feel safe and protected while I began to let myself be more vulnerable.

🩶 Begin by breathing deeply in through your nose and out through your mouth. Let your belly expand when you breathe in and contract when you breathe out.

🩶 Let the breath flow so that there is no pause between your inhales and exhales, cultivating a continuous flow of breath, like waves in the ocean.

🩶 Grow your roots into the Earth and your branches into the Sun, as you learned to do in the Sacred Tree Meditation in Chapter 1.

🩶 With this deep breath flowing into you, and your deep connection to the Earth and Sun, focus on your heart. Pull love up from the Earth into your heart when you inhale. At the same time, also pull love down from the Sun into your heart. Feed your heart on this love that comes directly from source, from Spirit.

🩶 Now add a link to the South direction. Imagine you are breathing love in from that direction. Visualize yourself surrounded and protected by a serpent made of light and fire that wraps its coils around you to keep you safe.

🩶 Next breathe love into your heart from the West. Imagine that there is a large black jaguar purring and walking through the space you are in, making sure you are safe and protected, and helping to remove any heaviness from your heart.

🩶 Now breathe in love from the North and imagine a beautiful hummingbird with a long flowing tail singing and filling your heart with beauty. Feel the joy of opening to love when you are on the right path.

🩶 Finally, breathe in love from the East and imagine a magnificent shining eagle fanning you with its wings, wafting into your heart the pure essence of Spirit and your best and highest good on the planet.

🩶 As you continue to breathe, feel the love coming to you from the Earth, Sky, and these four guardian spirits. Feel all of these helpers and guides connected to your heart, wanting what is best for you and helping to melt away the armor from your heart. Feel your heart grow bigger and more radiant.

🩶 Let these benevolent helpers feed your heart on love. Feel how hungry your heart is for this love and let it flow into you and fill you. Let it melt away armor. Let it grow your heart bigger and bigger. Notice what you feel.

🩶 Now breathe this love back out, once you are full, to the six directions in gratitude. Let love overflow and spill out of you. Breathe love with the universe, as the center of a mandala. Feel love spill out of you; let your heart be as open as the sky.

🩶 When you feel complete, wiggle your fingers and toes and come back to ordinary reality, fully awake and aware and present, bringing this expanded heart feeling with you.

From Shamanic Stress Relief by Kypris Aster Drake

The meditation that finally shifted my anxiety and inner fear was not Transcendental Meditation (TM), Zen, or Yoga Meditation. Instead, it was what I would call Shamanic Meditation.

At first I couldn’t do it perfectly, and some days were better than others. On good days I’d drop into this deep communion with the Earth and Sky that felt amazing. In those moments I’d receive so much inspiration and joy that I literally felt like I was high on drugs.

This may sound odd, but in the end it was the trees themselves that helped me. Something about their comforting presence reached out and anchored me to myself, the Earth, and my son. A lovely Arizona Cypress in my back yard taught me how to deeply inhabit my body while I sat underneath her branches. Every day I meditated there. I inhaled the sweet fragrance of her leaves, watched her boughs sway in the breeze, and felt her deep stillness. This tree calmed me when nothing else could, and eventually I learned to bring that serenity into my life no matter where I happened to be.

By far the most interesting thing I found in my research on meditation was that short small bursts of time spent in mindfulness are as effective as one long sitting. In other words, meditation time is cumulative. So meditating 10 times a day for one minute is as effective as meditating once a day for 10 minutes.

From Journey to Sexual Wholeness by Kypris Aster Drake

After years of marriage to others, therapy, and spiritual practice, it became clear to me that I needed a commitment to love myself above all others. This was so hard for me, because it seemed a very selfish thing to do. I had been taught that it was noble and spiritual to sacrifice my needs for the needs of others. Changing this pattern has been uncomfortable, and what finally persuaded me to do it was realizing how much I had left my feminine center to stay in relationship with my lovers. I was in a lot of pain because I had abandoned myself and my needs.

Finding my way back was easy, once I had the desire and willingness. My guides and the divine energies helped me, through dreams, trance journey messages, and strong intuitions received in meditation. I did the practices of Cultivating Feminine Energy and of Making Love to the God daily, and eventually I was given a ritual to anchor my marriage to Spirit and to myself. This ritual I named the Self Marriage Ceremony.

Since creating and experiencing this ritual, I have become stronger in knowing what is best for me in relationship, and in asking for that. I have received transformational healing of my abandonment fears through setting intention to release them and allowing a healer to work on me in that willing state. Her work was powerful, and released a giant shard of pain from my heart. Since that time I am calm and fearless, and I trust that Spirit will bring me the love that is best for me, because I have learned to love myself.

From Shamanic Stress Relief by Kypris Aster Drake

As we hopped out of the truck, I had a sudden urge to run ahead and climb up the path in front of my beloved. It was high noon in the desert, and hot, a time when all the wildlife sleeps and waits for the sun to lower itself through the sky. In that brilliant white heat, I saw the flash of a large animal moving through the brush that lined the stream bed. And suddenly, just like that, I was face to face with a coyote.

Still about 50 feet away, all I could see were his eyes. There was something in his mouth, a bird I thought, but I couldn’t see clearly. It looked like there was a fan of tail feathers spread across his nose.

We both stood and stared at each other, that coyote and I. Slowly, while continuing to keep eye contact with me, he lowered the bird to the ground and released it from his mouth. Then he stepped back and retreated into the brush, watching to see what I would do. I came closer, to see what he had left, expecting to see a desert pheasant or small bird of some kind.

I was shocked to see that instead, on the ground in front of me, was a freshly dead Red-Tailed Hawk. There was not a single mark on its body. There was no blood. The Coyote, who the Native Americans sometimes referred to as “little brother”, had given me a gift.

Most of those feathers have been passed along to my students over the years. But one tail feather remains with me, and hangs over my mantel with my altar, to remind me of the first time that the world of nature recognized the power within me.

From Heart of Intimacy by Kypris Aster Drake:

A Spirit Lover is one way to start anchoring you to a more positive and consistent experience of a partner. This guide can hold you and be with you when physical partners can’t, and is available 24 hours a day for your support. The Spirit Lover can also teach you about intimacy by helping you discover what it is like to connect with another being when you feel fully safe, accepted, and understood. The Spirit Lover helps you practice intimate relating so you can then create a healthy, happy, and heart-open human relationship.

Allow about one hour for this practice. The journey itself is short, but you will want time afterward to write about this experience and integrate your feelings about it. It may help to record the steps of the journey that are given here, or you can use the companion audio recording to guide you. You can repeat this journey as often as you like.

Prepare yourself for this journey by turning off your phone and making sure you won’t be disturbed. You can lie down on your bed or on a mattress or yoga mat on the floor. It is nice to cover yourself with a blanket to provide a sense of security and comfort, so that you can relax more deeply. You may wish to put on some shamanic drumming music in the background, to help you go deeper into this meditation. (I highly recommend the Shamanic Journey Drumming mp3 recording by Katie Weatherup, on the Amazon music app)

🩶 Once you are comfortable, begin by taking three long deep breaths, in through your mouth and out through your nose. With each exhale, let your body relax more and more, letting yourself melt down into the surface you are lying on.

🩶 Imagine now that you are going to a secret garden that is only for you to visit. This is a private and safe place where you can go to be refreshed and meet with your guides. Let your garden have within it whatever brings you joy: any flowers, trees, plants, grasses, fountains, animals that you like. Really make it yours and feel that you get to say who is and is not welcome here.

🩶 Issue an invitation for your Spirit Lover to join you here. Set the intention and feel this being come immediately in answer to your call.

🩶 When the Spirit Lover arrives, don’t worry if you have trouble visualizing their appearance at first. Just relax and spend some time getting to know each other. You can talk, make love, play together, or do anything else that feels good to you.

🩶 When you are finished, thank your Spirit Lover and ask how you can call them to you in ordinary reality. You may be given special words to use, a whistle, a hand signal, or some other form of communication.

🩶 Come back slowly and gently to ordinary reality and make some notes about your encounter.

🩶 In the days to come, invite your Spirit Lover into your daily life. You may ask them to hold you while you sleep, to go with you when you travel out into the world, or to help heal your heart. No request is too bizarre for the Spirit Lover. You may also choose to repeat this journey frequently to get to know your Spirit Lover better.

From Journey to Sexual Wholeness by Kypris Aster Drake:

“Learning to touch each other in a whole new way is the first part of weaving the elements together. New levels of pleasure and ecstasy spring into being when you are open to changing the way that you give and receive touch. When I first learned these practices from my teacher, Mellissa Seaman (see Bibliography and Resources), I was astounded by their power to evoke deep healing and awareness, in addition to the ecstasy and sexual arousal they can create. Mellissa used to tell our priestess circle that elemental touch was a way to “open all the latches” that were holding the lid of our spiritual container closed. Dropping into these practices, we open the latches one by one, until we are able to remove the lid to see all of who we are that has been locked inside.

Tantric touch takes the sexual healing modality to a deeper level, allowing us to really feel in our body how and why and when someone is touching us. Many of us need the healing that comes from loving touch, not only on our torso, legs and arms, but also on our genitals and breasts. When we allow this touch to come from a safe and sacred healing massage that includes energy healing, deep shifts in the genitals begin to happen, and layers of body armor begin to be released. Often we experience an awakening of our sexuality through regular massage, but imagine if you were to receive a massage that included loving touch on your lingam or yoni? This type of touch is important to our sexual wholeness, and I urge you to practice giving and receiving this touch with your partner. There is something magickal about receiving the gift of intimate touch from someone who does not need or even want you to touch them back or to do anything at all. For a woman receiving yoni massage, it is so beautiful to have the yoni adored without any demands to make love afterward. The yoni awakens when given this kind of touch, and especially when the touch does not insist on focusing on the g-spot. Men also benefit greatly from tantric massage that includes the lingam and the prostate without any need to be aroused. This touch on the lingam especially helps to remove armoring that stands in the way of greater sensitivity.

It is my first time with a new lover, and I am nervous about moving into physical intimacy, about how it will feel, how we will sync together. He is wise. He tells me to lie down on my belly while he massages my back. I expect a typical inexperienced back massage, but am surprised when I feel the gentle and firm touch of his hands. He is fully present to me. I hear him breathe, and I feel that he is not touching me to make some experience happen within me. Rather, he is touching me because his hands know where they are needed on my body, his hands pay attention to where they are drawn. My heart opens and I relax deeply, letting go even of feeling a head cold, charged by all the energy that is moving through me as he touches me. I am overwhelmed with the relief of being touched in such a loving way, where I can let down my guard and my boundaries, and I begin to cry, just releasing old fears and old wounds, allowing myself to receive this priceless gift of loving healing touch.

You need no formal training to do this work, only genuine desire to let healing energy flow through your hands. I first learned this work by giving healing touch to my father, who was ill with AIDS. I learned to place my hands where he had discomfort, to open my heart, and to let loving energy flow through me from Spirit and into his body. He encouraged me, saying he could feel warmth and love in my hands. Today I am a Reiki healer, but all Reiki has done is to increase the amount of energy that flows through me when I do healing touch. I encourage you to try this touch with your partner and experience how healing it is for both of you to give and receive this touch that leads toward wholeness of the body, mind, emotions, and sexuality.

There are two ways of touching on the body. One way is a very healing, loving, heart-open touch that I described above. The other way of touching the body is to create arousal. There are certain types of touch that are more arousing, and we will talk about those in detail as we explore the elemental touches. But it is mostly the intention of your touch that matters. When you touch your partner with sexual intention, you will feel aroused and your partner will feel it too. You can intentionally create a sexual touch by focusing on inhaling sexual energy up through the body. Use this arousing touch as a form of foreplay, or as a sexual experience all its own. As with any of the sexual practices, you can then flow into making love.

When you are practicing these touches, touch the other with no ego or intent about pleasing them. Rather touch to feel the texture of their skin beneath your hand, as if you were touching a lush fur rug. When you touch in this way of enjoying how your partner feels, because you feel pleasure in touching your partner, you connect directly to Spirit. This type of touch feels amazing to your partner. Breathe, and stay present to feeling your lover’s essence. As you do this, feel deeply into your touching hand and slow down. The secret is to touch your partner as if you have never touched them before. It is as if you are blind, and can only know your partner’s body by touch. Spend time in one role or the other, either fully giving or totally receiving, so that each of you can experience the joy of being fully present.”