Beyond Awakening: The Reality of my Donor Relationships

Over the years, resources concerning donors and donor relationships has been something the community doesn’t do the best job of providing. Donor matters, donor relationships, and resources focused on being or having donors often take a backseat to resources about being a vampire. I can’t say definitely why that might be, but I can speculate on a few different reasons. For some, it may be carelessness, simply not considering donors and their needs or how important they are in our lives and community. For a lot of vampires, we know we can only truly share from the perspective of a vampire, we can’t speak to donor needs and experiences first hand, and with this mindset, sometimes the topic of donor matters goes undiscussed entirely for fear of doing it wrong or not having something valuable to say.  For others, I imagine it’s more about either not feeling equipped to address the subject, or more likely it’s about the intimate nature of donor relationships. For most of us, the relationships we have with our donors are deeply personal, private, and intimate, often intertwined with close romantic, sexual, or friend relationships. Vampire and donor are both at some of their most raw and vulnerable during the feeding exchange and it can be a powerful, beautiful, and overwhelming thing to experience, let alone talk about. Most of us don’t have the words. 

With all that said, I wanted to take the time out to share some anecdotes of some of the practical experiences and lessons I learned in my early donor relationships in the hopes that my trial and error can shed some light on things for others. I think many of us have lots of expectations or notions about what it’s like to have a donor and we’re never really prepared for the reality of what really does happen, especially at the beginning. Most importantly, I think many of us are ashamed or nervous about sharing experiences where we made mistakes, caused harm, or things went wrong. There is a lot of pressure to be knowledgeable, skillful, ethical, and experienced. It’s easy to forget that in order to get there, you have to learn first hand and no one is perfect at things when they are first starting out. 

Most of these anecdotes are going to be about my early experiences with psi feeding. My blood feeding experiences, as well as my more recent psi feeding experiences are far more intimate and I tend to keep them a bit closer to the vest. I want to share some of my messiest experiences and the experiences in which I learned the most about my vampiric and energy work skills.

Training Wheels 

In my first donor relationship, we were teenagers who were experimenting with these concepts and skills for the first time. We were new to energy work beyond what I had already been doing and sensing instinctively, we were new to navigating consent and relationships, we were new to vampirism. The world was shiny and exciting in front of us, until things got a bit more real and even scary on occasion. We had been exploring both energy and blood feeding at the time, though we mostly focused on energy given the risks and nature of blood and lack of access to safe blood letting resources and tools. Though we had our fair share of risk taking and trial and error there as well. My very first taste of human blood was after he cut his hand open with a box cutter. He didn’t even think twice about walking over to me saying something like, “We’ve been talking about doing it anyway. The cut has already been made, the blood is right here waiting for you if you wanna go for it.” I’ll never forget the moment. The taste, the warmth, the slightly awkward sex appeal to the way he propositioned me, how sharp it felt like my senses were in the moment. Even over 15 years later, I can remember the way the bookshelf next to us looked after I opened my eyes. 

In terms of our early energy exchanges, I think part of us went into the experience not thinking it was totally real, or at least not thinking that energy work could have some very physical consequences if we were not careful. 

We had an experience that has shaped so much of how I engage donors and navigate energy feeding even to this day. 

We had been doing feeding exchanges for a while now, by this point I had worked out that light feeds and feeding on surface level energy weren’t working well for me. I felt like I needed to feed really often or like I wasn’t getting enough energy in each individual session. I could feel the energy moving, I felt myself pulling him into me and moving the energy through my body. I could feel the energy getting settled within me, but the boost didn’t last long, sometimes it didn’t even last beyond the feeding session itself. We decided we were ready to try deep feeding. 

Looking back, we reached this decision prematurely and without strong enough skills to really manage the experience and we hadn’t given too much serious thought to any potential consequences. We lacked the mental, emotional, energetic, and maturity skills to deal with everything we were experimenting with, and overall we were very shortsighted. We only cared about getting me better fed as soon as possible, a very teenage way to approach things. The relationship between us was neither healthy nor sound, and ultimately, we found ourselves really energetically entwined (as well as co-dependent in the traditional mundane sense), really drawn to each other and unable to put an end to the relationship no matter how often we tried and how much we really fucking should have. We had this messy, dramatic on again off again bullshit that eventually resulted in him becoming the first of two abusive relationships I would have in my life. Those dynamics are hard enough to escape, but mixing in deep energy work and vampiric feeding really made for a nightmare. It would take me years to clear up the energetic mess and cut all the cords established between us, but I digress. 

Following our usual pattern, we set up for our regular feeding ritual. We had the pillows, the blinds were closed, we had some Enya going, I wasn’t allowed incense of candles at my house, so we had a fresh reed diffuser for the cozy olfactory ambiance. Together, we took a few deep breaths, and took time to ground and center our energies before he got comfortable in the pillow nest. He was resting in his stomach, we took a few more breaths then I placed my hands on his back, one between his shoulder blades, the other in the middle of his back for stability. I was planning to reach deep into his heart energy center and try to get to his deep energy and pull it into me. I have read and heard accounts of how intense, fulfilling and sustaining this deep energy could be for folks who needed a lot of energy to get by. I thought I was ready to take it to that level and experience for myself. 

I close my eyes and start my slow, rhythmic breathing as I began to bring my awareness to the energy tendrils in my hands and mouth. I connect my thick, etheric tendrils into my donor, moving them deep into his energy body, trying to focus on his heart center specifically. I start to visualize a warm, bright light, and rapidly spinning energy that is drawing me deep into him like a whirlpool. While my visualization was focusing on his heart, what I didn’t account for was both my hands responding to this visualization in unison. Instead of just reaching deep into his heart and pulling there, I also reached deep into one of his lower energy centers and started to pull large amounts of deep energy from there too. I was starting to feel like I was falling, lightheaded and dizzy with the amount of energy moving between us and flowing into my body. It was overwhelming, but just exquisite enough that I didn’t want to stop just yet. Before I had the ability to really process or think through what was going on, I heard his voice. He asked me to stop and he said something was wrong. It was harder than I care to admit, but I stopped drawing him in and pulled myself out of his energy body. When I asked him what was wrong he said he wasn’t quite sure. He was very tired and struggling to keep his eyes open. 

Attempting to move and sit up so we could face each other while we talked, he quickly realized he couldn’t move any of his limbs. He felt so tired and weak that it didn’t seem like he had enough energy available to push himself upright. At first I thought he was fucking with me, joking around or trying to scare me, but I realized he wasn’t joking. He was motionless on the floor, but thankfully still conscious and talking me through what was happening to the best of his ability. Panic was quickly setting in for both of us and we struggled to remain calm, the room was spinning, so much energy was running through me and it almost felt like I was feeling the panic and fear from us both. Things devolved into us raising our voices a bit, talking over each other and overall not communicating coherently. “What do I do-what do I do-what I do?” “Put it back! You gotta give it back. I need my energy back!”

Eventually I calmed down enough to regain some focus, I started to take that energy that was racing through me and trying to fit into my energy systems and started to move the flow backwards. I funneled energy back into where I had pulled it from and kept checking in, asking if he could move yet. It didn’t seem to be working well at first and I wasn’t sure if it was because I wasn’t really letting go of it or if I had really fucked something up. Eventually, I felt the flow returning to him properly and he was able to move and sit back up. The experience was overwhelming and really left us both very scared and left me full of shame. 

Thankfully, we both  eventually grew comfortable enough to resume trying and we had a few more years of experimenting and trial and error under our belts, even if ultimately the relationship proved toxic and unsafe for me to be in. 

My advice to everyone is, go slow, do your research, and make sure you build up a solid foundation, not just of magical and energetic skills, but of mundane ones as well. Communication, trust, maturity, discernment. Really get familiar with your own energy and make sure your donors are doing the same. You want your donor to be just as skilled at energy work as you are, you want them to be able to pull back from or terminate the connection between you mid feed should something go wrong, (or should they change their mind)  it’s your job as a vampire to not over feed and protect your donor, but as a donor, it’s important you have the skills you need to protect and handle yourself. Not just in the event of getting involved with unethical vampires, but in the event that accidents happen due to inexperience or negligence. 

 

Spontaneous Energy Flow

Years later, when I was feeding from a different boyfriend, we began to incorporate kink and impact play into our relationship. I was older, wiser, and more experienced. Much better at navigating relationships, but not at all good at it by my current definition. We had been doing feeding exchanges for a while, most often by way of sex and the occasional blood donation. I’ll never forget the way it felt the first time he begged me to let him bleed for me, but I won’t elaborate.

During one of our impact scenes where I was flogging him, I was so in the zone. I felt so connected to him as a Top. We were on a beautiful wavelength together. I was confidently landing every strike, I felt like I could really feel the sort of sensory experience it was creating for him. It almost felt like I could anticipate his reaction before they happened. I can’t remember the last time I was so dialed in during an impact scene. It really felt like we were dancing together through the moment in a deep, intimate connection. The energy was so nice. It wasn’t until the scene was over that I realized that the connection and synchronicity I was feeling was me feeding on him and the experience we were creating together. I had reached my energy into him and started moving energy through our connection, intensifying our experience, and drawing a lot of that energy into me. I hadn’t really clocked it as feeding until we finished because up until this point feeding had followed a very specific formula for me and either happened during sex in way that felt way more intense than what just happened, or in a more ritualistic, ‘sit down and put my hands on you while I focus the energy’ type scenario. It only became clear to me that I had been feeding after my boyfriend was unable to move his legs well and began to fall asleep during aftercare, so very much like that terrifying experience I had with my first donor.

We had a conversation about it the next day and other than his legs doing the thing, he didn’t mind if I fed during the process. I don’t particularly think he actually believed energy and my feeding were real, so he never seemed phased by it. This, however, also meant he didn’t have the best energetic hygiene, so the quality and flavor of the energy from feeding from him wasn’t the best and required a lot of processing. At the time, I wasn’t too bothered, because I hadn’t worked out that feeding could be a lot less work if I was feeding from folks with better energetic health and skills and that we could work together to generate a quality and flavor of energy that was much more delicious and ideal for me. A frequency and flavor that I could digest much more easily. 

Not only did this experience teach me a lot about what I like and truly need out of a donor and the quality of energy that best sustains me, but it also showed me more signs to be aware of in terms of picking up on any unintentional feeding I may still be doing in really connected and physical moments. Having that awareness means that I can stop those things from happening intentionally and non consensually, but it also means I’m aware of what moments it’s more likely to happen in so I can properly discuss all relevant consent topics as well being able to talk about how energy work, feeding, and vampirism can potentially enhance those experiences for both me and my donor partner. 

Self Defense 

On at least two occasions in my life, I instinctively deep drained abusive boyfriends in self defense during assaults. In both of these instances, it happened with folks I had been feeding from regularly, we established energetic connections and sorted out the comfortable, natural, risk aware pathway of energy flow between us as we could at the time with the knowledge and skills we had.

During our usual feeding exchanges, we used the same or similar points of focus when feeding, so over time, my energy would often start making its way down that path to start pulling the energy from my donor before I even fully consciously leaned into the feeds. By the time something went wrong and I felt the need to protect and defend myself, my energy and tendrils already had a pathway it was intimately familiar with which meant my donors also had spots in their energy bodies that were in the habit of accommodating and inviting in my energy tendrils for feeding. Some people experience this as weaker or more forgiving spots in the energy body or even small wounds from being penetrated by the energy of their vampire.

The overwhelming terror of the violence of those moments activated my energy instinctively, and I took in a huge amount of energy very rapidly through those established connections and pathways, reaching for the usual energy centers I regularly fed from. Pulling enough energy to incapacitate the men who had suddenly become my attackers, leaving just as I had left my first donor that one time, unable to move his legs, and very quickly drifting off into a state of sleep.

It’s important for me to note a few things about these experiences, not just for me, but for anyone out there who maybe has experienced something similar. Both of these instances were with people who I was feeding from regularly, and they were folks who I thought I could trust, but ultimately, they turned violent toward me and began to abuse me. 

Not only are things like energy feeding and blade use skills that we have to learn, practice and improve over time, but so is vetting and understanding when people are safe for us. I had just as many mistakes with that part of the process as I did with the practicals of actual feeding. I’m not ashamed of those mistakes, nor am I ashamed of admitting that I have been taken advantage of and abused in the past, or that I have misjudged people. And neither should you if you’ve been through something similar. For most of us, it is the life experience of going through some tough stuff that really helps us sharpen and hone those skills and that awareness. Just because you were bad at it before or seriously misjudged a situation, doesn’t mean you will always make that mistake every time. Take the experience and learn from it, and don’t be too hard on yourself. We’re all learning all the time. 

After nearly 20 years of trial and error, exploration, experimentation and regular practice. I feel like I have a good grasp on what feeding looks and feels like for me and ways it can potentially impact my donor partners. I’ve developed a rhythm for how things go and lots of important conversations to have with people before we even consider including the feeding dynamic in our relationships. I have had so many lovely donor experiences and even gotten to the point of having a couple of one time experiences with close friends who were simply curious about trying it out. I am much better able to walk us both through those moments and communicate through the experience while being mindful of everyone’s safety and needs. No one becomes knowledgeable or skilled or experienced overnight. We all have to figure it out one way or another and I hope my mistakes and less than perfect experiences help you navigate this journey a little better than I did.