Have you ever noticed that it is easy to give, but oh, SO hard to receive?

Over the holidays, what do we focus on? We focus on what presents we are going to give to which person, and whether or not they will like it. And if we forget someone, we feel horrible. But do we focus on receiving gifts well? Do we make an effort to say thank you, and to show our appreciation for the gifts, and to put them to use right away in our life?

I have a receiving altar, AKA an abundance altar, in my bedroom. Whenever I receive ANYTHING, be it money, gifts, love notes, or a power object, I put it on my altar so that I can look at it several times each day and feel my gratitude for that gift in my heart. Then I make sure to start using that gift immediately if it is something I truly want to receive. And if it’s not? I pass it on to someone who is better suited to integrate that thing into their life.

This feels good to me, like I am finally starting to learn about the FLOW of abundance and love in life. Because let’s face it, gifts and money also have bits of LOVE attached to them. It is really hard to separate the two in my life. When someone gives me money for a session or an event or a book or video, it is because there is a bit of love in them for that thing that I’m providing. I get to feel that love when I receive the money into my life and send that love on when I spend the money. Do you see? Love and money are tied together.

Now I’m sure we’ll all agree that things have been challenging lately. We are in a bit of an economic downswirl, and I know it’s been frightening for many of us to feel the pinch. And fear can be so wonderful because it MOTIVATES. It has driven me to begin the process of making deep and lasting changes to my relationship with money, with love, and with sex.

I have talked about money and love, but what about SEX?

Here’s a newsflash for us all–take some time to let your partner give to you. Instead of focusing so much on how you can make them feel good, on how you can prove that you are the sexiest thing alive by showing off all your tantric positions and techniques, maybe just sit back and let yourself receive. Then give back. Then receive again. Let there be a give and take.

When I am receiving I have to be vulnerable, and that is scary. If I don’t respond with the appropriate orgasm or connection, if I am not able to receive because I am scared and I snap the energetic connection between us, then I fail. So when I have these feelings I just love myself more and say "open, open open—receive!". If I am giving, then I can get stuck in wanting to control, in expecting a certain response from my partner, in goals. When this happens I take a breath, come back into this moment and trust Spirit to guide me to a better place than I could ever imagine.

So when we get together for "Sex, Breath, and Intimacy" this Sunday, January 11th, we will focus on giving AND receiving love. We will be learning to breathe in the abundance of the universe, and to know there is no true scarcity of money OR of love.

I hope you can join us.

Kypris, Dakini and Shamanic Tantra Teacher holds a master’s degree in Biology, as well as a master’s degree in Counseling Psychology, and is an initiated HeartWisdom Tantric Priestess. She is the author of “Journey to Sexual Wholeness, The Six Gateways to Tantric Sexuality”.

Yabyummy is a teaching temple that provides a tantric path to gain sexual wholeness through breathwork, visualization, and tantric massage. We are committed to unifying sexuality with spirituality and spirituality with sexuality for growth minded men, women and couples.

Enjoy!

Kypris

Excerpted from "Courage, The Joy of Living Dangerously", by Osho

"Ordinarily people love only when their conditions are fulfilled. They say, "You should be like this, only then will I love". A mother says to the child, "I’ll love you only if you behave". A wife says to the husband, "You have to be this way, only then can I love you". Everybody creates conditions: love disappears.

Love is an infinite sky! You cannot force it into narrow spaces, conditioned, limited. If you bring fresh air into your house and close it off from everywhere–all the windows closed, all the doors closed–soon it becomes stale. Whenever love happens it is a part of freedom; then soon you bring that fresh air into your house and everything goes stale, dirty.

This is a deep problem for the whole of humanity–it has been a problem. When you fall in love everything looks beautiful, because in those moments you don’t put conditions. Two persons move near each other unconditionally. Once they have settled, once they have started taking each other for granted, then conditions are being imposed: "You should be like this, you should behave like that, only then will I love"–as if love is a bargain.

When you don’t love out of your fullness of heart, you are bargaining. You want to force the other person to do something for you, only then will you love; otherwise you will betray your love. Now you are using your love as a punishment, or as an enforcement, but you are not loving. Either you are trying to withhold your love or you are giving your love, but in both cases love in itself is not the end, something else is.

People come to me, they always say, "The other is not loving me." Nobody comes and says, "I am not loving the other." Love has become a demand: "The other is not loving me." Forget about the other! Love is such a beautiful phenomenon, if you love you will enjoy.

And the more you love, the more you become lovable. The less you love and the more you demand that others should love you, the less and less you are lovable, the more and more you become closed, confined to your ego. And you become touchy–even if somebody approaches you to love you, you become afraid, because in every love there is a possibility of rejection, withdrawal.

Nobody loves you–this has become an ingrained thought within you. How is this man trying to change your mind? He is trying to love you? Must be something false, is he trying to deceive you? Must be a cunning man, tricky. You protect yourself. You don’t allow anybody to love you and you don’t love others. Then there is fear. Then you are alone in the world, so alone, so lonely, not connected.
…………….
If you understand me well, drop all fears and love more–and love unconditionally. Don’t think that you are doing something for the other when you love; you are doing something for yourself. When you love it is beneficial to you. So don’t wait; don’t say that when others love, you will love–that is not the point at all.

Be selfish. Love is selfish. Love people–you will be fulfilled through it, you will be getting more and more blessedness through it. And when love goes deeper, fear disappears; love is the light, fear is darkness.

Well, I am having a growth spurt. Not growth in my body, but growth in my everyday emotional state. I am learning to contain more pleasure, and more and more to let go of fear, and sadness.

It was at our first six gateways retreat in June that I really became aware that I limit how much bliss I can feel. There I was on the second day of the retreat, moving sexual energy with three different yummy men, feeling myself open and feel fabulous, and then BAM! I hit a wall. I found my bliss barrier.

I’d always had some awareness that somewhere within me I had been limiting the pleasure I feel, not just in sex but in all of life. I had been noticing for years my tendency to focus on the negative. For me, sex is a microcosm of all of life–so if I am limiting the pleausre I am feeling in sex, I am limiting the pleasure I am having in all of life. And that was something I didn’t want.

So with this new awareness, I began to pay more attention during lovemaking. Sure enough, I found that I was limiting my pleausre there too. I was limiting the amount I could open my heart to feel love, and my yoni to feel ecstasy and orgasm.

I decided to try a new approach to solving this puzzle–a combination of practice and prayer. That’s right, prayer. After all, I took a vow to be married to Spirit and spend three nights a week with Him. Shouldn’t that time include asking for the healing I wanted in my sexuality?

So I have been praying and I have been practicing. I have been breathing love into my heart from God, and putting my sacred tree roots in the ground to be held in the arms of the Goddess. I have been looking at myself and how I stand in my own way. I have been breathing Dragon Fire through my chakras. I have been asking the God and Goddess to open me to more bliss. And I have been pushing my edge.

And then I had the dream. I saw myself in my back yard, trying to help a hummingbird who kept falling to the ground, flightless with the cold of the setting sun. I tried to help her fly, to set her free, but it was no use. Finally, out of solutions, I picked her up and held her to my heart. And she blossomed. She nuzzled into me and looked up at me with her tiny face, and that face was full of love. She stretched her tiny wings to show her pleasure. And as I continued through my dream landscape, holding her, all my fear and sadness and anger faded away. Nothing in my dream could upset me. It was surreal, like I was on some mega dose of ecstasy.

But more surreal, when I woke, my heart was filled with an unfamiliar sensation. It was holding joy. My chest was tingling, open, and I felt like crying with happiness. I never knew that joy could be so full of emotion. I think I always assumed that joy was boring. But no, it was as intense as the sadness I had been carrying! Since then it has been as if my heart has grown wings. Although I still sometimes feel sadness and fear, anger has almost entirely left me. And when I feel the sadness and fear, it always transforms within a few hours back to this intense feeling of ease and happiness.

So it was flying on hummingbird wings that I broke through my bliss barrier this weekend, and entered a place where my old limits no longer applied. I made love for hours, felt Steven’s lingam opening me deeper and deeper, and my yoni responding by becoming more sensitive and ecstatic with every tiny touch or movement. After a while I lost count of the climaxes, and of the number of times I ejaculated. Everything merged into one long valley orgasm that seemed to last forever, perhaps at least a half hour, while the three of us held deep ecstatic loving union with each other. My heart opened wider than ever before, and I became filled with this pleasure, as vast as the ocean, no longer feeling even a hint of fear or sadness. So much love began to spill from my heart that my nipples felt like laser guns beaming love to the universe. My chest tingled, and the size of my heart seemed to grow, while my heart itself seemed to be filled with white fire. I felt bigger than usual, and my entire body became a sexual energy container, feeling alive and ecstatic and open. I surrendered completely to the will of my lovers, letting go of all needs, simply flowing in lovemaking with them in that moment.

I can hardly wait to see what will happen not only during our six gateways retreat on September 6 and 7, but afterward. The retreat itself will be white, done fully clothed, and with lots of yummy sacred sexual practices designed to help you break through your own bliss barrier. I hope that you can join me and share in whatever that experience becomes.

Namaste,

Kypris
Creating Peace, Love and Passion

Some of you may be surprised to read this, thinking that my job is to help others and guide them on this path of spiritual enlightenment through the body. The truth is that I do this work because it makes me happy, I do this work because I am committed not only to my own joy, but to helping others find that same commitment, and ultimately, to have the experience of pervading joy in life.

From my earliest years I imagined what it would be like to wake up happy every day. There has always been a temptation for me to try to get happiness from outside myself. But even when I was younger, I knew that true happiness would come from following the path that Spirit had laid out for me. Even before I heard the call of Spirit to shamanism and to tantra, I knew that there was important work for me to do, that I had a unique contribution to make. In every pursuit in my life, I began to ask the question: "is this it? Is this the thing that will bring me joy?"

It took a lot of courage and hard work, motivated by pain and dissatisfaction, to find my way to joy. My life had to get really uncomfortable for me to make the changes that led me to where I am now. I committed to meditation because I was having intense full body panic attacks that kept me from normal functioning in life. I committed to bellydance to fill the emptiness I felt after my first divorce. I committed to yoga because it helped with my anxiety and morning sickness when I was pregnant. I am committing to a primary relationship with Spirit because I am tired of creating unsatisfying relationships with men. So you see, my commitment to joy is partially an aversion to pain.

I don’t like feeling sad. In fact, I would almost do anything to not feel sadness and fear and anger. But feeling these emotions and letting them pass through my body and down into the earth is part of my practice, because I am human. Because I am human I want to feel everything. I want to live. I want, as Osho says, to "have a little salt" in me. I don’t want to be a garden variety mystic or tantra teacher. I want to be fully expressed. To know what that full expression is for me, I have to FEEL. Because if I want to feel joy, I have to be willing to feel pain.

So that is the catch, that I can’t feel happy unless I also feel sad sometimes. I have learned through long practice that shutting down the negative emotions because I don’t want to feel them also shuts down the positive emotions. And I have to believe that my creator made me this way for a reason, that She wants me to feel, to open, to be vulnerable. I also know that over time, my creator has healed me of most of my FEAR and SADNESS. My commitment to joy is rewarded by walking the path, by doing the daily practice of living a shamanically tantric life.

Every day I meditate, even if I don’t want to. Today I really didn’t want to. I was sad when I woke up, and grieving several losses in my life. I wanted to stay in bed and pull the covers over my head. But I got up. I dragged myself down to the garden to meditate. I felt a little better after watching the phoebe catch his morning bug breakfast, and seeing the brightness of the flowers in my garden. I went back inside and heard Spirit telling me to also take some time for movement today. I didn’t want to do it, and procrastinated by doing household chores. But eventually I pulled myself to the living room and practiced dancing meditation, and after that, I felt even better. Now it is afternoon, and I am feeling happier, and the fog of sadness is lifting. Today I have kept my commitment to joy, and the feeling of lightness in my heart is its own reward.

Well after all these years, I’ve found the perfect lover, and he’s not human. He is, well, God. To be specific, a masculine warrior aspect of Spirit called Great Star Man. It’s really no surprise, because no human man could be all the things I’ve listed, even part of the time, it’s just not possible! So when you fall in love with God, what do you do? Well, like a proper priestess, you create a ceremony! In less than 7 weeks, I will be marrying Spirit in a formal ceremony, with a diamond ring shaped like a yoni, and pledging to be his primary lover for the next year.

So what does this mean? Well it’s pretty simple. God and I are polyamorous, so I’m still allowed to date, and to have lovers, but all these relationships are secondary or even tertiary. Spirit will be my primary lover, the one I always check in with before I make any plans with anyone, the one I spend at least 3 nights a week with, and the one I live with day in and day out.

This decision wasn’t one I came to by thinking it through. Rather, it was a sudden knowing, during a healing session, that this was what I needed to do to take my healing to the next level. I desperately want to feel happy and free in relationship, to stop focusing so much on what I need from the other person or what they are doing that I don’t like–to cultivate unconditional love, to let go of all my fears and insecurities about whether or not I am loved. Once I had this strong intuition that I needed to spend a year married to Spirit, I began to see how valuable this could be, to just commit to developing my spiritual connection to the divine masculine. This connection has been getting stronger and stronger for me, so strong that I feel a physical sensation of Spirit’s presence holding me or sitting beside me most of the time. With this physical presence next to me, I don’t feel lonely. Instead I feel happy and contented to be on my own. I feel strongly supported in sharing my emotions, whether through prayer orjournaling , knowing that Spirit can hold space for all of my feelings. I can even do sacred sexual practice in partnership with Spirit, calling him in to be my lover and to move energy with me. To make things even sweeter, he sends me flowers every day by making the roses in my garden bloom.

Having my needs met in these ways by Spirit brings a deep contentment and peace to my daily life. As long as I stay connected, I can let go of my fears and hangups in my human relationships, especially the need to control my lovers. If I lose my connection to my new fiance’ (and some days I do!), then I need to do the spiritual practice (meditation, breath practice, movement, ceremony that will help re-establish my awareness that He is always with me.

So how does this change my relationships with human men? On a daily basis it looks like more and more willingness to allow my lovers to do what they want, and allowing myself to do what Spirit wants. It doesn’t mean I don’t ask to get my needs met, or consider my lover’s feelings when I make a decision, or express my feelings when I am upset. The change I notice is that there is less urgency with expressing needs and feelings. I don’t have to express my needs immediately, nor do I have to be upset when the answer is no. And even when I do feel upset about something with one of my lovers, I let Spirit hold me and help me remember to breathe and calm myself. I can wait to talk it out when we are both ready.

I admit this is harder than it sounds sometimes. When I am alone with myself not by choice, but because I can’t find anyone to spend time with, I am still challenged to drop into my time with God and let go of the need for human company. I still want to be in control of whether or not I am alone with Spirit, or connected with a human. What I hope is that through taking a year to deepen my connection to Great Star Man, I can let go of this need to control how my time is spent, and come to my next primary relationship with a human from a place of being secure and complete in myself whether I am with them or not.

For now, I dream of my wedding day and all the good things I hope it will bring to my life. Like a new bride, I am nervous. I wonder if I’m doing the right thing. I worry what will happen if I’m make this commitment and then meet Mr. Right. But I know this is all just noise in my head. Instead of listening, I just breathe deeply and sit down to meditate. And as simply as that, I am in the arms of my husband, the perfect love, and the partner who can lead me to true happiness.

It started out as a hot tub conversation. I was soaking and sharing with a friend about my relationships with men, and how I was striving to be more accepting, more joyful, and more loving in those relationships. The next thing I knew, my friend was sharing about his own celibacy practice, and I heard my body resonating with the voice of Spirit, saying "yes, yes, yes!" I wasn’t happy about this. I didn’t want to be celibate. I didn’t want to become a dried up and shriveled middle-aged old crone. And besides, how could I teach tantra and be celibate? How could this possibly fit with my passion for teaching sacred sexuality, and who I am at my core?

My friend explained that his practice only meant abstaining from intercourse, but still allowing heart and sexual connection with his partners. That sounded easier. I didn’t have to give up connection, or orgasms, or moving sexual energy, just intercourse. Simple, right? Of course there would be some logistical issues, like how much contact would be okay between the yoni and lingam? And would this mean I would substitute oral intercourse for penetration? And would that really be that much of a difference?

Then the voices started in my head. Waves of fear rushed into me, fear of losing the lovers who were in my life, fear of being alone, fear of not being desirable if I couldn’t offer a full connection to the men in my life. I realized that I had been making love with my lovers not just from desire to express my sexuality, but also from some need to gain approval. I had been falling into the age-old trap of many women all over the world—giving sex to get love.

What has happened instead of this imagined abandonment has been a miracle. In fact, I have been surprised and deeply moved by the willingness of my lovers to hold space for me to move through this time. I am loving that I have a month of time to feel into my heart with each of them, to really see how we can move together from a place of unconditional love. Spirit is showing me that the choices I make about connecting sexually affect my whole body and my whole life. I am beginning to understand that my yoni can choose. She can receive and hold negative emotion from my partners. She can choose to abstain from intercourse with partners who are not emotionally clear. Or she can learn to shift and release negative energies that come into her, claiming her naturally powerful and clear state. This is the role of the tantric healer, to facilitate the release of negative energies and consciously choose not to take those energies into her body.

What’s also interesting about celibacy is how it plays out in my sexuality. I find that even though I have a strong sex drive, and like to experience my sexuality at least once a day, I don’t miss intercourse that much, especially if I am still allowed to connect to my lovers in oral sex. In fact, it’s a whole new opportunity for me to explore oral sex more than ever before, to really dive into how good it feels to connect my mouth to another’s body, and to receive oral pleasure in my yoni. But beyond this, I am finding that I can experience orgasm just from a breast massage, or from kissing, as long as I am really connecting with my partner and moving the kundalini between us. It’s the connection that’s important to me, not the way I connect. Being celibate is a true letting go of goals, and trusting that my needs will be met, both in and out of the bedroom.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not perfect, and I’m by no means free of all the nagging thoughts about my lovers that made this practice necessary for me. But I am finally free of the physical symptoms that were manifesting in my body as a result of my thoughts, and the thoughts have become whispers most of the time, instead of shouts. I am healing through this practice, and coming into a place of learning to follow Spirit in all that I do, by letting myself flow with the people in my life from a place of powerful centering.

Celibacy is giving me so far even more than I hoped it would: a deep feeling of love and respect for myself, a reality check about how much I am loved by the men in my life, some relief from my old patterns with men, and a powerful feeling of centering in my emotional body. It’s as if an energy of love and light is building in me. Lately people keep saying that I am glowing, and asking what is so different in my life that I look so alive and happy. This feels like a wonderful affirmation from Spirit that I am on the right path, which allows me to surrender more and more to the experience. In that surrender, I am finding my way back to myself, and to the powerful and loving Goddess within that is my birthright.

Namaste
Kypris

Part 2 of the interview


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How fun is this life we live While searching for websites to exchange links with, our great Yabyummy assistant Vero came across Dr. Dick’s Sex Advice. We loved what he was doing so much that we wanted to be on his podcast. To see and hear the original interview go to Dr. Dick’s Blog: Part 1 and Part 2.

My name is Richard Wagner, Ph.D., I’m a sexologist.  I’ve been working in the sex field for over 25 years, predominately as a therapist.  I’ve been involved in all sorts of sex education and sexual enrichment projects.  I’ve been writing an online sex advice column and podcast for nearly 10 years, it has been syndicated on a number of sites over the years.  I now have a home for my column and podcasts:  http://www.drdicksexadvice.com/.  You can find out a little about my background here.

Chapter 13: Balancing Your Life Excerpt

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