Expressions of Love for Yourself and Your Beloved

The Holidays are wonderful occasions for some of us to celebrate with our beloved and loved ones, but some of us are faced with more stress and feelings of loneliness. The Tantric approach can help both categories: those of us who stress to find the right presents for the loved ones and those of us who feel lonely.

Tantra suggests that there is a whole list of “presents” that you can give your lover with your special “presence”. These presents are really nourishing and building deeper emotional/spiritual intimacy and higher sensuous and sexual enjoyment without draining the finances. They can create indelible memories. You can choose from a long list of delicious possibilities: 

• starting the days with a deep a connection by breathing together, eye gazing, taking turns to express what you are grateful for,
• giving each other a wonderful scalp massage,
• finding new ways of kissing the lips and mouth of your beloved,
• honoring your lover’s genitals while looking into their eyes penetrating deeply into their soul (it might require adjusting your positions with some pillows);
• preparing a bath with rose petals swimming in it,
• bringing breakfast to bed to your lover, feeding each other, and making love to them as though for the first time, allowing your creativity to make the love dance new, nourishing and exciting!

You can add your favorite love expressions to this list. Enjoy the celebration!

For the people that are alone and enjoy their aloneness (all oneness) Holidays are fun, too. They know how to celebrate their love and are at peace with themselves.

However, many are lonely in the sense that they would rather be with someone, and that some one might have left them or never showed up in their lives. For you, the challenge is to pay attention to your loveable qualities and feel more love for who you are. Tantra says that unless you can love yourself love of another is an illusion. In reality no one can send more love into you than you allow in. If your self-love container is a smaller than the love your lover wants to give you, it can not fit all in and you still may feel deprived. You cannot let love enter you in a bigger way than you feel worthy of it.

So take the opportunity to love yourself in the special ways you would hope a lover would. Every day go through a self-loving ritual doing things for yourself that you would desire a lover to do for you. Buy yourself the present you always wanted, take a long warm bath with aromatic candles and uplifting music, lie in bed longer than you otherwise would and touch yourself sensuously, discovering the beauty of your skin, the warmth of your body and the exhilaration of the deeper breaths bring to you. Take time to tell yourself the words you would like a lover to tell you. If you love movement put on your favorite peace of music to move to and dance in front of a mirror celebrating your body in motion, moving with the music as you would move with your most intimate lover. Let the music move you. Spend time with yourself finding out what you desire and give it to yourself. This will build the self-love necessary to magnetize sooner than you think the love you desire from a beloved.

Set yourself up to be successful. Managing your time well is important: it will give you a sense of accomplishment. Be happy if you accomplish 3 or 4 of the most important items on your 10 items list. Allow yourself at least twice the time you think it takes to accomplish something so you feel successful if you do it in less time.

Make sure you take supplements that will help balance your mood. Did you know that fish oil’s anti-inflammatory action can lower the risk of heart problems, as well as help with many other conditions, such as depression and rheumatoid arthritis?

Go slow on the consumption of sweets because they have a tendency to uplift your mood temporarily and then dump you into a deeper depression. Make sure that if you eat sweets you add some protein, such as nuts, take longer to digest so you can keep your mood up longer.

The latest scientific research suggests that what we eat affects our mood, our level of alertness, concentration and our response to stress. Have you ever experienced a buzzy feeling after a great workout? Have you paid attention to the level of anxiousness you felt before a major presentation? Both experiences are influenced by neurotransmitters, chemical messengers in the brain that carry information from one nerve cell to another.

Perhaps you can give yourself the present to invest in a good book on mood altering information.

Helping someone in need can also take you out of your own depression.

However, the best way I know to create an abundance of happy hormones is Intimate Tantric sex. Since we have both male and female energy in us, we could do some Tantric practice even if we are alone.