Coconut Cayenne Massage Butter
 

Making your massage butter is the first step in being ready to give yourself a daily massage to increase metabolism, lose weight, and gain energy. In the process you can exercise, meditate, and bring yourself to center. When you give yourself a massage you are in charge of everything, so make your massage butter just right for your own taste.

I watched Dr. Cayenne carefully, while he made the famous Cayenne Massage Butter that he uses with his Zen style Total Body Massage Meditation.  Dr. Cayenne never used any measures except looking at it, and he always used one kind of oil at a time, but except for those changes, I think that I have a reasonable copy of what he did when he made his butter. 

In a large skillet or pot, place 1 cup of pure coconut oil, 1 cup of grape seed oil, and ½ cup of apricot kernel oil. Heat the mixture until it is hot enough to melt bee's wax. The choice of an oil mixture can be eliminated and your massage butter can be made from a single oil if you prefer. High quality olive oil is also effective. When choosing your oil be sure to think of the following qualities
 
 

Coconut oil becomes butter by itself when cold enough, and is the smoothest massage oil. It has a very pleasant faint fragrance, and spreads well. In the islands it is often the only oil for massage as well as cooking. It is eatable, and available at health food stores. (Often in the cosmetic section )
 

Grape Seed oil is a clear pale yellow oil and a little bit thicker than coconut oil. It does not go out of liquid state when cold. (no natural butter effect) It also eatable, and has almost no smell. It also spreads well, and can also be found at health food stores.
 

Apricot Kernel oil looks almost clear and is very thick and almost as slow moving as honey. I think of it as a high pressure lubricant. You can push through coconut oil and need some more, but the almond oil spreads and remains. It has a pleasant but very light smell if any. Again this oil is eatable and available at health food stores.
 

Regular Olive oil is just fine and without question the least expensive way to go. Get the best quality if you use Olive oil and remember that you can smell this oil quite clearly. Choose an oil with a light smell and a clear light yellow or green color. Olive oil is a very good for massage and is about medium in thickness. It is available everywhere and can be used for cooking and on the table for salad dressings etc.
 

Bee's wax makes the oils butter like.  The question of how much bee's wax you add to the mixture now comes into play. The more bee's wax, the more "butter like" your massage oil becomes. I use about ½ cup of the local Hawaiian bee's wax, and it comes out "just right".  Sometimes I melt a large batch of bee's wax and pour it out into an ice cube tray.  Aproximately ½ cup of bee's wax makes about two cubes.  This is an easy way to pre-measure it.  Every bee's wax is different, and you will have to experiment.  The thing is that most people do not know what "just right" really amounts to.  "Just right" is a measure of how well it works on your particular body when you actually massage yourself with it. The process of making the right massage butter includes many variables that will give you the ability to make your massage butter perfect for you.

Cayenne oil really goes deep into the joints and the internal organs as well. The great thing about Cayenne oil is that it finds its own way to wherever it is needed most. It does this right away, but it takes your attention away from its effect on the breathing or the heart or your sore back, because you only think about how hot it is on your skin! Wow!
 

You have to be careful, and you can indeed overdo it.  For the mixture above,  I use about 2-3 tablespoons of pure Cayenne oil. ( available from Lavender Lane Inc.) at:

http://www.lavenderlane.com/site_shop/index.htm  or 888-593-4400

When you get Cayenne oil in your eyes, it is very painful. You will want to urgently clear it from your eye to stop the pain. If you're not careful, you can make it worse by touching it with more oil from somewhere else on your face. Keep fresh paper towels handy where you can reach them even if you can't see. When you finish your massage, you need to tap at your face and give yourself some space between your eyes and the oil. Be sure to wash your hands before touching anything. The penetrating nature of the oil is not so handy on electronic equipment like CD's or CD players, keyboards, or even your genitals! Ouch!
 

It's water soluble, so just wash your hands when you finish using it, and be careful when you wash your face the next time you shower or you will just rub the oil into your eyes. Also if you want to recharge your Cayenne oil effect, a hot bath will be much hotter if you still have the oil on your skin. Water makes the Cayenne get hot, and it is very effective for sore joints or internal aches and pains. If you have a bad knee, a sore back, or even sore feet, just massage it with the butter and then with the oil still on the skin, soak it in a hot bath.
 

Now then, before we work on the smell of your massage butter check to make sure you have the right consistency. If you put too little bee's wax in the butter, it will keep going liquid on warm days. If you put too much, it is stiffer than butter, and doesn't melt on your skin when you use it. This will make your hands rub against your skin instead of glide as it does with a perfect massage butter.
 

The whole point of adding bee's wax, is to make the oil spread out and stay smooth even though you rub on it repeatedly. When using pure coconut oil you don't need any bee's wax, because it will stay smooth and soak in and disappear, but most oils never disappear. When you use a massage butter with bee's wax in it, your skin will become a little translucent with the application of the butter and the skin tone and color will both improve by being more vivid and lustrous, but after a while it all disappears leaving radiant healthy skin.
 

Too much bee's wax and the butter never goes away and you look greased up long after the massage. Too little, and you need to use so much oil to keep the massage smooth, that you feel all wet during the massage itself. In between that, is a buttery soft golden orange substance that is stiff, but melts almost on contact with your skin. A small pull on the surface should give you a little dab on the end of your finger. Placing this on your arm or leg, you should be surprised how far it spreads without running out as it were. This is how you make your butter last, because even if it were free, (which it is not!) you still have to make it and that takes lots of time.
 

The very last thing to do is to add a pleasant fragrance to your massage butter. Again this is completely a personal preference and you can take a long time to develop what is just right for you. As luck would have it, my favorite essential oil is Sandalwood which is the most expensive by far of the earthy smells. Cedarwood is almost as nice and it is much cheaper. I like to mix both of these oils with just a hint of Patchouli. On top of that I add a little bit of Lavender and the flower smells like Jasmine, Plumeria, Sweet Orange, or Gardenia.
 

Be careful, because this is a lot of smells to put together. Choose a single fragrance and make that dominant. For the rest of the fragrances, only put a drop or two like flowers in a room. Don't overdo the smell, but remember that it will likely follow you after you have rested and want to go about. Don't rush to wash it off either as the Cayenne is still effective when you exercise. It will stimulate your heart, facilitate breathing and warm your joints. Often on the stationary bike, I feel relief of my knee pain when there is still a little massage butter on the joints. I can also put a little bit extra on just before I start on the bike. It works great. As soon as you are heated up a little you can feel it warming the joint and away you go with no pain.
 

When you choose the way you want your massage butter to smell , think of some place that you really enjoyed. Try to think of all the smells that were there. Usually you smell the earth of a place, and then you can also smell the grass. The flowers and blossoms all come on top of that. In the massage butter, Cayenne does have a smell, but it is very subtle. The same goes for the base oils themselves. Even Olive oil is not a strong smell. Start with the lower heavier smells that are earthy in nature, and then add the flower smells and sweeter blossoms at the top.
 

Have fun and experiment. The mixture I have described just fits into a pot belly ½ liter jam jar with a rubber stopper and a wire hinge. This is what you want: something you can dip your fingers into, something that is hard to knock over, something made of clear glass, and something that is easy to snap closed and be sealed with a rubber gasket. Remember to use separate towels and sheets for your daily massages, because the oil will get stuck in them and the smells don't wash out completely. The better the butter used, the better the lingering smell on the sheets, your clothes, and your hair.
 

For my own version of the Coconut Cayenne Massage Butter, I use over half a (15ml-.5 oz) bottle of sandalwood oil, but everything else mentioned above was  just added, a few drops at a time according to my mood. Remember to wait to add the aroma oils until the massage butter is almost going solid on the last time you melt it. You might have to add oil or bee's wax to correct the consistency and that should all be done, before you give the butter a fragrance. Don't put the expensive oils into your butter when it is so hot that the smell will just vaporize off. You can always just barely re-melt the massage butter by placing it in a pan of hot water, but keep the water out of the butter.
 

Another way to go, by the way, is to use Peppermint oil. It can be used either with the butter by adding it topically as you massage, or by adding it to the mixture when you prepare the butter. The Peppermint oil will cause you to feel quite cold just before the Cayenne oil makes you feel hot. This sort of knocks out your brain's temperature readings and makes the whole body really wake up. It is good for people who have lung problems, people who need to shock the body hard to cause it to loose weight, or people who want to get over a chronic problem of some kind. I don't personally like the smell of peppermint very much, so I don't often use it myself. I can attest, however, that it was very effective for me when I received treatment from Dr. Cayenne himself. The Peppermint oil can also be purchased from Lavender Lane. http://www.lavenderlane.com/site_shop/index.htm  or 888-593-4400