Know Thyself - E80 - Kelly Brogan MD: The Painful Truth About Polarity, Reclaiming The Self & Freeing The Feminine

Episode Date: January 23, 2024

Today we are joined by holistic psychiatrist and author Kelly Brogan to unpack the journey from self betrayal to reclamation. Kelly shares her own story, revealing the ways her perspectives on polarity have changed after years of being a feminist activist. She discusses the process of empowerment, sharing her practices like inner-husbanding, curiosity, and awakening eros. With a deep understanding of the intricate dynamics within relationships, Kelly Brogan also imparts her unique perspective on the roles of masculinity and femininity in cisgender male/female relationships. For anyone looking to start and grow a THRIVING podcast - Check out our comprehensive Podcast with Purpose Course: https://www.podcastpurpose.com/ ___________ Timecodes: 0:00 Intro  1:50 From Self Betrayal to Reclamation  8:25 Honoring our Shadow Sides  17:20 Feeling Safe as a Woman & Inner-husbanding  28:08 Balancing Self Compassion and Curiosity  34:43 Feminism & the War on Masculinity  56:05 Gender Fluidity & Polarity 1:05:07 Acknowledging What You Truly Long For  1:09:11 How Men Undermine the Feminine Blossoming  1:18:06 Holistic Healing & Allopathic Medicine 1:30:05 Embracing Paradox: From Self Righteousness to Empowerment  1:41:02 Activism & Self Righteousness  1:50:39 Awakening Our Eros  1:55:13 Women Judging Other Women 2:05:10 Conclusion ___________ Kelly Brogan, M.D. is a holistic psychiatrist, author of the NY Times Bestselling book, A Mind of Your Own, Own Your Self, the children’s book, A Time For Rain, and co-editor of the landmark textbook, Integrative Therapies for Depression. She is the founder of the online healing program Vital Mind Reset, and the membership community, Vital Life Project. She completed her psychiatric training and fellowship at NYU Medical Center after graduating from Cornell University Medical College, and has a B.S. from M.I.T. in Systems Neuroscience. She is specialized in a root-cause resolution approach to psychiatric syndromes and symptoms. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kellybroganmd/ Website: https://www.kellybroganmd.com ___________ Download André's FREE Book Recommendation List: https://www.knowthyself.one/books Know Thyself Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/ Website: https://www.knowthyself.one Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJ4wglCWTJeWQC0exBalgKg Listen to all episodes on Audio:  Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4FSiemtvZrWesGtO2MqTZ4?si=d389c8dee8fa4026 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/know-thyself/id1633725927 André Duqum Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andreduqum/ Meraki Media https://merakimedia.com https://www.instagram.com/merakimedia/

I think a woman's desire is one of the most powerful forces on this plane. We start out having experiences of, you know, what I call the good, bad split as children, where we learn what aspects of our selves are unwelcome. And so we start to curate and perform. And in that is the fundamental self-betrayal that I think becomes the signature of our early life. That's the big plot twist for women, is that if I were to define a reclaim, woman, I would say that she is a woman in devotion to herself. I went into my private practice and looked at every single woman. I sat across from and I said, there's nothing wrong with you. So now what? Your illness

is a question only you can answer. What do you feel are ways that men undermine the potential for a woman blossoming into that feminine space? Everything you ever wanted from a woman will be gifted to you when you can. everyone welcome back to the know-they-self podcasts where every single week we get the privilege to sit down with a brilliant mind today is no different i'm sitting down today with a holistic psychiatrist a new york times best-selling author somebody who's been a beacon of light for people switching from conventional alipathy to more integrative approaches to healing and we're going to be diving into that as well as polarity dynamics sexuality feminism so many things i'm excited to dive in so kelly brogan thanks for being here thank you for having me Yeah. So you've been doing a lot more work recently around what you call the reclamation of the self. This happens to be the know-liself podcast. So a great place to start. What does that mean in your eyes? What is the reclamation of the self? So I think a lot about the individuation journey as a woman. That's all I can speak to. And so my reclamation focus is really on a woman's journey. And the archetypal elements of the of that, I'm sure you would agree, by design process, right? So we start out having experiences of, you know, what I call the good, bad split in our conditionally loving households as children where we learn, you know, what aspects of ourselves are unwelcome and will result in all manner of, you know, rejection, abandonment,

betrayal, and so we start to curate and perform. And in that is the fundamental self-betrayal that I think becomes right, like the signature of our early life. And at some point, there is a rupture. And psychology is called a rupture of empathy, where you experience the dissonance around the fact that somebody or a system or whatever it is that you imagined was there for your well-being and welfare actually may not be, at least not in the ways that you need or you define. And there are two ways you could go at that rupture. You know, you can suppress and deny that that's even occurring, or you can go off into the wild unknown, you know, of the Youngian individuation process. And the first sort of, I don't know, leg of the journey as I've experienced it is, I call it like a

reclamation of the no and that experience is rife with warfare right so you start to experience and I'm sure you can relate and people listening can you start to experience like all of the fuck no energy you never expressed and find yourself in what was formerly a space of enmeshment and merger right like now you're like wait I think this and I want this and this is bad. All of that is bad that I thought was good. And in that process, like, at least for me, it was like a decade-long experience of fighting on the outside with the medical system and the government and relations and having very discordant dynamics. And, you know, we could talk about activism and what this looks like for an activist, I think, is a very particular kind of reclamation process. However, there isn't a lot of focus on your yes, right?

Most of us at that phase, like, have no idea what we want. We have no relationship as women to desire. We don't trust it. We've been taught, you know, to triangulate against our eros, against our vital force energy, against our own bodies. And so coming into that experience of self-alignment, I think, is where we start to understand even the concept of reclamation. Like, as I meet these parts of myself, not. only that I never knew I had, but I might have been very insistent would never exist, right? Like these aspects of me that are not allowed. As I meet them, they bear gifts. And so that

reclamation process, I think, begins to self-perpetuate once you start to see and experience and feel that there is expansion and beauty and delight. It's like my favorite word. On the other side of the like I call it a shame wall on the other side of that crushing experience of of don't go there you know energy like in your own system so if I were to define like a reclaimed woman I would say that she is a woman in devotion to herself and through that orientation she experiences the emergent phenomenon of being devoted to God and all men, children, and animals, and the world, right? It's a secondary, it's a secondary development. And, you know, it's sometimes called sacred selfishness. I mean, I've taken all sorts of

heat for the perspectives that I have on self-care and self-focused. And I understand that everything is nuanced. However, I don't know that it's possible to truly offer compassion. honestly even empathy let alone love to anyone else until and if you have a sense of who it is that you are so the self-discovery process yields the capacity to develop intimacy and connection and maybe what it is that we came here for which is that like hide and seek Alan Watts calls it like hide and seek with ourselves you know like oh there I am oh that's me too And it starts to feel like play instead of, you know, like a massive existential threat to encounter these dimensions that might result in punishment or consequence. So that forgetting and remembering, like, we eventually come to see that the self, like, branches out outside of us to other people on all life and the planet.

But like that devotion to self that you're first talking about, discovering kind of came comes often as a byproduct of figuring out. we said, like you said, internally we have the places as like, ooh, don't go there is what you said. And so the growth process becomes more of a process of awareness into those parts, unlearning, figuring out those conditionings and narratives that we've picked up. Before we dive into the unraveling process of that, what do you feel like those outdated belief systems originally aimed to serve? Survival. Yeah. Yeah. I think that. There is, you know, a Maslowian hierarchy of needs that are naturally served. And obviously, I don't need to tell you or anyone listening that as, you know, human mammals, we require

love and attention for our very survival in the fourth trimester. And the strategy to secure that makes total sense. And that's why a lot of the shadow work that has been so transformational for me over the past years has been around really honoring and embracing not like these exiled parts, child parts. That's easy, you know, and I can really be with my grief when I can like really be with that part of me that just wants attention. And I can really be with those little tender bits, right, like of my inner child, like the tears flow and my heart feels open, that's easy. But to orient towards, you know, what in parts work would be called my protector parts with interest, compassion, and curiosity, to not make wrong the strategic, manipulative dimensions of

myself that in the sort of like, you know, new age spiritual perspective, we are always trying to transcend and eradicate or, you know, otherwise expose. For me, that has been really an opportunity to integrate, right? So like if I recognize that I am somebody, as I did, you know, this was, I remember back in 2018, I made this commitment to myself that I would stop lying. And how's that going? Great. It's going great. But, and the, the, You know, I have told big lies in my life. I have done all the bad things, right? Like, not all of them, but I've done a lot of them.

And I have told, you know, the omission lies and kept secrets. And the lies I was really focused on were the little lies, right? The social lies, like the ventral vagal lies of like, oh, stay connected to me like me still, I don't come to your party, right? And I say I'm busy when the truth is I just don't fucking want to go, right? So I stopped doing that. And the reason that I did was so that I could learn to say no without giving a reason, right? So as women, I think, and I don't know how it is as men, but it's very common that we self-betray when we recruit validation for our no and our yes. Right? I call like a little no and a little yes. When I have to have the reasons.

to convince you that I don't need to come or I don't want to be there or I need to be there, then I am out here and not over here, right? Like, I'm not in my lane. And so that was really the reason so that I could practice saying, I'm not available, or that doesn't work for me instead of, like, making up some bullshit so that I didn't have to do the thing I fundamentally, like, didn't want to do. And so that experience over these years has led to a kind of like self-trust and self- allegiance such that I don't really have to trust anyone else anymore, right? Whereas I was like navigating reality trying to say like, are you trustworthy?

Meaning are you good or are you bad? And I was constantly in this vigilant assessment of my environment. so that I could regulate myself and my system. And if I don't need to trust you, because I fundamentally trust me, and you can be a sociopath or you can be, you know, an epic lover, and I'm the same person regardless. I'm not shape-shifting and like in this chameleon energy all the time,

then I'm already starting to live in a safer world, right? Because the locus of that safety is now re-centralized. And so I think the process of maturing is usually the word I like to use, like maturing beyond our coping mechanisms and strategies, it has to involve like understanding the validity and the benign intent of these parts, like meaning that the part that lied is not like some shitty, dark, part that I've like cast aside and now I don't deal with her anymore right like no there were very good reasons why and I still might do it and there will be good reasons why still I remember talking to my daughter about this and you know just working on like this concept of shame and and saying to her there is always a good reason and she's like mama if somebody you know murder somebody like there's not a good reason I don't know why I'm talking like that she doesn't

talk like that at all. There's not a good reason. And I was like, yes, there is. There is always a good reason. There's always a need being met. And so when I've made contact with the good reasons, the benign intent of these parts that have done the unspiritual things, right, have done the things that were associated with my more base self-protective instincts, that is what I think has allowed me to feel safer and freer in the world in a way that confers a different kind of, like, neuroceptive capacity, meaning like I can look around the room and more accurately assess safety rather than, you know, sometimes I use the example of, like, you know, if I look over there and there's kind of like dim over there and there's like some stuff on the chair and I can be like,

oh my God, there's like, is somebody there? Like, and my whole system would respond, right, to that assessment, like, is somebody there, is there an intruder? Versus, like, saying accurately, no, it's just, like, clothes on the chair and everything is fine. So the safety doesn't actually require anything change on the outside, just, of course, right, like my perception. And so I think it's, like, one of the hacks I've learned is, like, every time I find myself doing the unsavory thing again.

I'll give you another example. The other day I was at, like a class. like a whatever workout class. And this woman comes up to me and she's like, oh, your hair is so pretty. I love your curls. And so I turned to her and I'm like, oh, thank you so much. It's so much work. First of all, what does that even fucking mean?

I don't know. And second of all, the smalling and attenuation impulse that a lot of women, I think it stems from sister wound, stemming from mother wound, whatever, I got all sorts of theories. but that reflex is now something I feel ashamed of, right? Like now the virtue has been placed in receiving, right? And just saying thank you, period. End of the statement, Kelly. Like work on, you know, holding and having beauty and allowing another woman or man to see that and just being that queen who's like, well, thank you, you know.

And I wasn't fucking that. Instead, I was, like, doing the thing, whatever, that I've done for most of my life. Like, oh, you like my shirt, I got on in the sale rack, you know, kind of a thing. And so in that moment, I felt like, fuck, I did it again, you know? And so it would be a natural extension of that to make that bad. Like, oh, why are you still here part that is smalling myself so you can stay connected to a woman who might otherwise be threatened, right, AKA the mother, right? So instead of making that part bad and wrong, there is another option. You know, there's another choice, which is to say like, oh, I see you here. You know, I see you here still.

Totally get why you did that, you know, totally get why that made sense. And be curious. Like, what is it? I talked to my parts this way. They're like here and there. Like, what is it that you're, like, that you were thinking would happen. Like if he just said thank you with a big smile, you know, and then I could learn like, oh, I might make an awkward moment or I might make her feel like she can't ever have beautiful hair. Or maybe I would have had to tell her what products she could use or like whatever, right? So you learn about that part and then that part is desecrited and perhaps, you know, disposed to another task and another, you know, another. job that feels more grounded in this being a safe place to have incarnated, which is fundamentally something I'm not sure is maybe even accessible in a woman's lifetime, you know, the biological reality of what it is to be a woman. Walking this plane is that it's an unsafe place,

and that any man could kill me at any moment with his bare hands, you know, and that's a biological reality and the relational reality is that I as a woman live in the world. If I'm a lesbian or otherwise, I live in the world with men. And so how is it that I can self-contain and confer safety to myself so that I can perceive with sobriety and clarity so that I can make decisions. and interact, behave, and connect in ways that feel like they make all of that unsafety worth it, you know, like make this whole journey worth it. Do you feel like as a woman that self-containment is fully possible to have that? Or do you think there is that, like there's the necessity of the counterpart from the masculine?

Yeah, what do you think? So I've been celibate the past couple of years. and I have otherwise been in partnership my entire life. I had never been on a date in my life, you know, kind of a thing, just organic, like serial monogamy kind of a thing. And I really wanted to, coming out of my last relationship, I really wanted to believe that I need and I'm entitled to need a man in my life by my side. to feel at ease. You know, I would spend, I share custody with, you know, my, my daughter's dad. And so we do like a

week on, week off. And so, you know, there would be weeks in these past couple of years where I would literally be like alone in my house with my cats and chickens. And I would be gaslighting myself to say that that fundamentally felt okay, you know. And I don't believe that my system is meant to feel okay alone as a woman. I don't know that in human history, women have spent the kind of time alone that we often do these days, meaning like absent other human bodies. Okay, so obviously I have my daughters around and friends around and all the things. But I really wanted to make the, and I've worked with an erotic coach, Whitney, for several years.

And at the time I would get all triggered when she would suggest that I had this responsibility to myself to learn self-containment. And I really wanted to insist that, no, that's not true. Biologically, I meant to have a man by my body, like me, Kelly. Like, not I'm not speaking for all women, but so that I can feel, you know, safe and regulated. And I think that was like a petulant protest. You know, like, I think I just, like, didn't really want to do. The work into, it felt like letting go, right, of something that I have a deep heart yearning for. And, of course, like resolving attachments, never really letting it go.

Like, it's just orienting your attention elsewhere. So once I decided to begin to learn what this whole self-safety thing is, what self-containment is, slowly, slowly, I began to feel like this vigilance, this urgency, these, I don't know, subtle layers of doingness, you know, start to ease and melt. And I started to have more like actual play in my life. And I started to create in totally different ways. And I started to prioritize. different relational experiences and my mothering, you know, just completely went through like a total transmutation that I didn't even think was necessary. Like I had thought like, oh, I'm doing a great

job and maybe I was on some level and there was a lot for me to look at. And so all of these things began to shift organically. And I have come to understand that, yes, there are many ways. ways that I can confer safety to my system. I actually now believe that's the big plot twist for women is that, you know, perhaps if you're like me anyway, learning how to be more feminine and learning how to, you know, embrace that dimension of your womanness isn't the first agenda item. You know, the first agenda item is to learn to confer. safety to your system. And I'm thinking of a mentor, a friend of mine, Omerpani, who's not going to like what I'm about to say, but I, a sweet debate about this. But I call it like, because I learn from

my coach Wanny, self-husbanding. So I like to think of interpolarities. He says that's like a major distraction. And, you know, it's problematic at the stage that we're at to, to confuse the conversation and the psychology, to even talk about intermasculine when I'm a woman and vice versa. I could see his perspective for sure. And for me to imagine, you know, that I can treat myself the way my husband would or, you know, you could say the divine father, whatever, you know, whatever works for you. For me, that term works, has made it so that when I make plans, when I have conversations, when I put my body in situations like this one right here, I have an energetic signature that is looking out for me that's got me that's assessing will my needs

be met does this work for me really and actually giving a shit about how I feel and how my body is you know um experiencing reality and if I had a different order of operations where I just declared myself some sort of divine feminine queen or something you know out the gate um I think it would have been real messy and I think that underlying fear I referenced earlier that I have become aware of driving so much of my personality, so much of my activism, this fear of men, I think would have still been hiding in there. And I probably would have remained a feminist in the classical description of liberal feminism. And I would have been putting lipstick on a pig. You know, like I would have otherwise been.

insisting on my righteous feminization rather than experiencing what has been a very different unfoldment of my reclamation process as a woman that I think has only been possible because I focused on my self-husbanding first, you know. And I do believe that we offer containment to each other as women. And we have that impulse, right? You see now men are gathers. You see now men are gathering, but we've been doing this forever. We never stopped doing this, right? Women gather. We put our bodies in the same place. If you're up in the club and you're going to the bathroom, you get your bitches to go with you. Like, that's how we roll. And we always have had a sense, I think, that our systems confer containment to each other, that we can derive safety from,

you know, co-location of our bodies. And so I've known that. So I somehow knew it wasn't just a man who give this to me. It was more nuance than that. But the experience of offering this to myself has been, I don't know, so different than I thought it might be, meaning like, what is the practice of offering this to myself? You might ask. I would say, like, it's actually literally just giving a shit about how I feel. It's so basic. So when I get a little no, or I get a little yes, I attuned to that. I pay attention to that, right? And I create the conditions for that to be honored.

And I don't know. I think clearing the slate to even feel that, I have all sorts of biases about, like, what's required on a lifestyle level, on a physiologic level, you know, like I have the health reclamation program, all the things. So I've really looked at this order of operations that has been like this masculine initiation of competence and commitment, follow through, integrity

of word, this kind of self-guardianship and custodial energy for then whatever emerges. Like, I'm not sure women, maybe men either, need to help feeling, right? Like, playing, expressing, creating. Like, I don't know that we need to go to workshops and retreats to learn how to do that. It's an emergent phenomenon. What I do think we need help with is self-containment and this kind of self-orientation that you could describe as masculine. Yeah, so I want to circle back to this masculine, feminine dance within both of us that are in differing degrees to every single person listening to this right now. But, you know, I love how you also mentioned, like, it's actually much, it's a subtle,

simple process of consciously repattering and giving a shit about your internal experience rather than this big cosmic aha enlightenment moment right because i think we like to tend to think that it has to be that you know and some sort of miraculous savior moment um but when you were speaking earlier it's like that experience with the woman in the workout class you know in like these subtle ways in which we're deceitful to ourselves often unconsciously kind of compulsively just happens right just like falls out of your mouth and whether it's to play small um whatever the characterological defect is. It's not a defect.

Okay. Well, I guess that's part of it, right? Yeah. Like, we hold so much shame and judgment. Totally. And so much self-compassion is needed in these moments of repattering. And so can you just speak to how important, like, the self-compassion is in the process of finding, like, alchemizing these deeper emotions that we're holding? Yeah.

Because you say the thing. and then you have judgment about the thing that you said. Totally. It's like a spirals on it. Yeah, it's an endless like ego squirming, right? It just keeps moving up and up and up. Right. So because now I've decided it's bad to judge the bad part.

So like, of course, we play this. We play this game. And I think that I'm going to stop saying I think you'll agree. So I want to like sit here and proselytize us if you don't know these things or people listening don't know these things. or like I'm right or have any idea. Like I don't know at all, anything. And I have some, I love patterns, you know, and I'm a psychiatrist.

So that's pretty much like what psychiatry is, pattern recognition and dot connecting. So I have observed that if I offer myself radical compassion, including all the parts, right, without personal responsibility, I can get into bypass these trouble, right? So I have as like a baseline orientation towards myself simply curiosity. Like compassion sometimes, at least for me, if it's the primary priority of self-orienting, I think I can end up in a self-justifying place just because of I guess where I am maturationally. and really starting to say like, oh, it's okay, Kelly, that you did that shitty thing, you know, again, to somebody because you're just human and you're just doing the best you can. Yeah.

It's easier to, it's harder to jump to that place of embracing it versus the curiosity is like opening the door. Yeah, like, right. What was the intent part? You know, like, what was the intent? And I don't, I don't love the phrase I'm doing the best. I can because it's never actually true. There's always better that I could be doing. It's just that I'm doing what makes sense. I'm doing what makes sense to me. So if I take responsibility, then I can see and perceive choice. And I can see and perceive what other options might exist in that

moment to clean up whatever it was. Right. So, you know, with my best girlfriend Tara, like, I have a practice. Like if I, there's probably been two times over the past couple of years where like a lie has just like slipped out. You know, I remember one time, well, whatever, I don't know if the story matters, but whatever. She asked me what I was drinking and I like lied about it. Why? I don't know. Like I tell this woman literally everything about every minute of my day and I like lied about it.

And so instead of just simply saying like, you know, it's okay. Like everybody lies and it's, you know, it's not a big deal. I don't know why we're talking about lying so much. I like literally sound like a silly amount. But it's, you know, it's just one of those simple moments of prioritizing survival-based connection, like over your truth, of course. So it's an easy example. Whereas if I take responsibility in addition to self-compassion, then I can say, like, I lied and I don't want to live in a relational world where that's my – practice, you know, like that's my thing. And it feels better to clean it up. It's an super

expensive energetic tie, right? You got to remember the thing. You got to carry it forward into this fake reality in an already fake reality. Like it gets complicated, right? Yeah, I got to keep track. Yeah, exactly. So if I take responsibility, then I could say like, oh, I did this thing. I would rather do differently. And here's my choice I can tell her, you know, and clean it up. And there's a squeeze, like the sensation of like that shame protector saying, don't do that is so intense. It's like maybe the most intense of all physiologic energetic signatures is like the, the I did, the bad thing that means I'm a bad person and now somebody's going to see that. And there's massive consequences for that.

So, you know, when you can learn how to develop the capacity to hold that, it's just seconds. It's literally just seconds, like 20 seconds, 30 seconds. And then it's different. You know, like the arc of these feeling states, I don't know that we ever learned because like simple stuff. Like we weren't allowed to cry to completion as children, right? We were told like, stop crying or don't cry or calm down or you're okay, all these gas lights. And I don't know. I know for me I never learned that if you just cry until it's over, you might start laughing or you might have all sorts of different, you know, feelings and sensations that alchemize from the arc of an emotion, which is rather mercurial. Like it comes and goes and it has an arc, right? It's not this sense that like, I mean, I remember earlier in my process, like I would start crying and I would be terrified that I might never stop. Right.

Like I think a lot of women have that experience of like, oh, maybe, I don't know, everyone does, but I could just get lost in the abyss of cryingness. And it's not true. It's like a micro journey you go on. But it's the same with shame. It's the same with all these signatures. Like they have an arc. So yeah. So I'm a big believer that personal responsibility is like one of the very meaning like I am responsible for my life experience. It's like the mantra of resolution for victim consciousness and the ways in which we can otherwise stay arrested in that. I don't think compassion is sufficient. Yeah. Yeah. I love the way you broke that down. Okay, so slight pivot, but this is all, of course, intertwined. What is the war on masculinity?

And we spoke a little bit before about this feminism sciop. So I just want to start to unravel your framework or how you're perceiving what's happening. happening societally, but also, I mean, this is a representation on the microcosm of the individual, you know, and so what, yeah, what is that war on masculinity? Yeah. So I've been a feminist as long as I can remember. Like, it feels like out the womb. And I don't know that my mom would identify as a feminist, but I was certainly raised with the

encouragement to develop financial self-sufficiency, a sort of emotional self-protection and fortitude that would not easily translate to intimate vulnerability, right? So I learned to make my way in the world. And I was like a huge campaigner for things like, the HPV vaccine and, you know, believed in medical school, I remember that taking birth control was an entitlement. I took it for 12 years, continuous cycling, which means that I, like, I didn't even bleed. That's a fake bleed anyway. But I just was like, I can do whatever you can do. And I'll show you. So that would require that I neutralize all of the biological and psychological dimensions that are divergent between me and any man, right? And there is an energy of a zero-sum game, right?

There's an energy of like, you know, we'll do this thing together, but really it's every man and woman for themselves. And, you know, I remember I was like, who, why would a woman ever have something other than an elective C-section? Why would you? ever like choose pain, right, when you could just schedule, you know, the birth of your baby and be done with it. Like, this was absolutely the psychology that I was steeped in. And I specialized, I was one of the first 300 reproductive psychiatrists in the world, which means that I specialized in treating women. Like, so I went with that mentality into a, um, a devotion to the space of caring for women. But maybe, you know, I was really in ways attempting to create a safer world for myself

by rallying more angry, scared women, to the cause of, you know, we'll win eventually. You know, kind of psychology. Okay. So I certainly did not anticipate this belief system coming under any sort of of, you know, any fires of transmogrification. Like I never saw coming my current perspective. And it's disorienting. It is and confusing because I have an extraordinary life. And I do in many ways because I listened to my mom and I did the things. And I've got myself.

And I don't need a man. Okay. So what happens then when I want one still, right? Or I want them still. Or I just like, I want still to acknowledge this longing. There's a dissonance, the cognitive dissonance. And there are so many agendas. We don't even have time to unpack them all that have contributed to this. And I would include in those agendas the, you know, what I call the feminist sire. we can unpack what I mean by that, the sexual revolution and everything that comes with the idea that if we just fuck like men, we will be free as women. And if we decouple meaning with sex, then we will no longer be constrained in the ways that we were when we, you know, thought that sex was only supposed to be with a husband. or somebody that you loved. And, you know, so this idea of hookup culture and casual recreational pleasure-based hedonistic sex

as being an entitlement that we have now secured as women and that that has conferred to us some sort of a safer world or a more free experience, I believe, is a huge gaslight because I don't believe that women actually behave that way. as if, like, sex doesn't matter, right? Because just look at rape and harassment and the Me Too movement, and you'll see that actually it's not the same as just pushing a woman, right? It's not. And we have an inherent sense of the fact that sex is not only sacred,

but it's also a very different game for women than it is for men on a biological level, let alone a psychological level. And Louise Perry wrote a fantastic book on this subject. although, you know, she wouldn't agree with a lot of the other things I stand for. I love so much of what she points out, including, you know, that this, what she calls, and she borrowed the term from somebody else, but disenchantment, sexual disenchantment, has resulted in a lot of benefits for men, right, who are the primary consumers of, you know, porn and sex working. and even fetish culture and so many of the things that are now a result of having resolved a lot of the taboo around sex and sexuality.

But it's not clear that we are benefiting as women. And that's problematic because this is a huge thrust of liberal feminism is that now we are sexually free. We can, you know, she calls it fuck back, right? Like we can, we can like sex in the city style, like have casual sex just like a man so empowering, right? But like, is it actually? And what happens when marriage as an institution is really marginalized as something that is for women of your? And we come into this chronological snobbery that says, oh, those poor silly ladies, you know, in our ancestry, like they didn't know what was going on. and they didn't have any choice to, you know, live a better life.

And she makes the important point, I think, that, you know, being domestically devotional to your husband and to men. And, you know, let's say, like, in the 1950s, there were these, you know, articles about how to be a better housewife. And we look at that as modern women. And we're like, oh, God, that's so sad and constraining and just the incredible oppression. of that role. And she makes a point that now you flip through Cosmo Magazine and you see like 20 ways to, you know, please your man sexually. Right.

So we've just translated, you know, the same orientation towards men, the zero sum game orientation towards men. But now it has like a sexual overtone, you know. And this objectifying of our sexuality as something that you take, you wear, you use, you have. is at the, I think, the core of so many of these agendas and stems from like a much deeper psychological place. Alexander Lohne is a psychiatrist. He wrote a book called The Fear of Life.

And he talks about the really like Freudian, like edible lecture at origins of triangulating against our own heroes, triangulating against our own vital force and how with. our dynamic with our same gender parent versus our opposite sex, I should say, a parent, we learn that we have to strategize around this sexual energy and vital force energy and our impulses that start to come through us in infancy, let alone like in childhood, right? And we have to start to see how not to displease the same gender parent while we are in dynamic, erotic dynamic. especially, you know, and again, I'll focus on the daughter-daddy thing as little girls, like with our fathers, right?

But of course, it's slightly different for men and their, for boys, rather, and their mothers, but it's still relevant. So we start to learn that whether it's, you know, rubbing our genitals on the couch, you know, as a three-year-old or like, you know, running screaming or wearing like a midriff to revealing an outfit as a 13-year-old tween, we start to learn like that our impulses are problematic, right? And that we best curtail them and we best hide them. And it could even track back to like, you know, the first time you are nursing and you bite your mom's nipple. You have that intense rush of like aggressive, like I'm here, I'm in a body.

Like look what this body does kind of energy, right? That is behind sex and play and creativity and all the things. And the first time you bite your mom's nipple when your teeth are growing in, she can say, stop that. That's bad. We don't do that. Even that. Versus like, oh, wow, you know, you have a lot, you know, of energy. here, let me give you something else to bite on or whatever. There are ways that are so normalized that our parents have responded to our expression of vital force that we can't even see the ways that we have split off. And again, I think this is all by design. Like it's meant to be this. It's not like a horrible thing that happens. It's just meant to be this way and it is this way. And

great, here we are. Right. So if we look at that, then we see the split of sexuality from the of sexuality from our sense of self, it starts to make sense how agendas that are predicated on that can really take off because we already are triangulating against our bodies and our sexuality. So to think it's just like a piece on the board we can manipulate and you can either be a Madonna or you can be a whore you can choose rather than we all have this. Let's learn what it is to be guardians of this and to relate to what. one another with honor and respect and perhaps as women our agenda should be you know to really create a safer world and what would that look like what would that take um the sexual revolution

i think has been a huge huge part of this uh hegelian dialectic you know this this divide and conquer between men and women uh and the new age is another one think that, you know, whether you want to look at the, even the term and its origins from, like, you know, Bill Gates Tide, you know, whatever, I don't just get into that. I'm not going to get it. So it doesn't matter. But, you know, versus like, oh, it's just, hippies have matured and now the new age spiritualists or whatever.

There is a lot of confusion that, and again, you could tell me, right, that I think men experience because of new age programming around the imperative to get in touch with your feelings and to really listen to women and talk and process emotions with women and that it's just you share your feelings, I'll share my feelings. I think in the places I have arrived through experience, that actually is not a safer world for me as a woman. when I live in a world where I'm carrying the emotional baggage of my partner, let's say, or really honestly, any men, my father, my brother.

And that is the expectation of a lot of new age teaching, is that we're all the same, and we're just going to share our feelings, and continue to play into this, like, you know, you've got the inner man and woman, I've got the inner man and women. We're all sort of like doing this together. And, you know, the feminism agenda, again, not to like get too much into some of the activist nuances, but, you know, many would say it was a Rockefeller-funded, socially engineered operation that was funded so that women could enter the workplace and double taxpayer dollars and to disconnect the, the role that the mother and father play in the child's life and to render the child a, you know, property of the state, essentially, in industrialized and institutionalized Rockefeller-funded education. That's like absolutely something that has occurred.

And to turn the females of a species against their own mothering instinct. so that we are so confused as women about how to relate to our literal, reproductive survival of the species, you know, the role, that we have disconnected from our instinct and that we are so disoriented around our psychology that we imagine that just being like more marketplace ready where we can consume and be rootless and wander around and, um, be more available to participate in capitalism is actually some sort of victory. We don't know what it is to be a woman. We're super, super disoriented and we are most of us flailing. So I am an example of somebody who got all the things that feminism promised and felt at the pinnacle of that journey a kind of hollowness a sense that I call it like I was living behind a glass wall like a sense that even the celebratory moments of my life left me wanting right there was fundamentally like a poor bargain that was struck I think you know I will disconnect from all of these dimensions of myself so that I can achieve what it is that now I can achieve right now I can achieve right now

is possible and that will work just fine. And I think for many of us it simply hasn't. And that's why there is a counter-revolution happening now, and I'm perhaps a part of it, that is interested in reclaiming many of the important aspects of our history, right? Whether that's looking at the institution of marriage, it's looking at traditional men-woman roles. It's looking at mothering mothering and motherhood and really embracing the reality of the differences between a man's biology and psychology and a woman's. And the most uncomfortable aspect of this process for me, and I think a lot of women who are very upset about the things that I've been saying lately is something that I experienced when I was at a Weston Price-Cry.

conference like I was speaking at a Western Price Conference. And there were so many people in the audience. It's a huge conference. And there were like 2,000 people in the audience. And somebody asked me a question about, like, you know, gender-related, like political stuff. And honestly, I have unsubscribed from most of what's going on in the world about like a year and a half ago. That was a huge part of my process and dissolving my identity as an activist and coming into the uncomfortable places of no longer being the expert about what's going on in the world. Right. So anyway, whatever. I mean, made some comments. And as a part of my response, I said, the women that I know have a deep longing to be well handled by a trustworthy man. And literally across the room, there was like this

ecstatic exhale. I don't know like hundreds of women that I apparently gave permission in that moment to experience that longing. And so if what we are longing for is not achievable through the behavioral programming, you know, that we're steeped in, that's going to hurt, right? We are going to suffer because of it. If that is not something, if you hear me say that and you're like, that's disgusting, that's the last thing I want. I mean, the rest of probably what I have to say in this conversation is probably not going to interest you either. But that's, okay, that's not for you. if that happens to stir a yearning in you, then it's time to get in your lane and get right with your

intentions. And what I found is that there are all sorts of ways that my behavior was, it would never secure that outcome, right? Like my behavior was micromanaging, controlling, imagining that I ever know better than a man, how he should man. Okay. And, And fundamentally, most of my behavior was oriented around this war. And I never would have acknowledged that. I wouldn't have owned it. And now I can. And it has shifted the way that I relate to men in the world, whether it's literally

my handyman or my uncle. It has shifted the orientation that I have towards safety. and how it is that I can contribute to creating more of a safe world for women. And, of course, that really has nothing to do with what the men are doing. It does not have to do with getting men to apologize and cower around, you know, what it is that the reparations that we expect as women for all these years of patriarchy. And in fact, if I am in the presence of an apologetic cowering man, what I experience is that that mother's son dynamic that is, you know, probably the greatest trauma field for any relationship, right? When that is activated in adults, right, when I am in experiencing a man's appeasement impulse of the mother, he still would like to strangle, right? Like it's a very messy mixed up place and all sorts of trauma resonance, I think, emerges from that, right?

So if I can just stay in my lane as a woman and look at the things that I can change control and modify, optimize, and if I can orient towards men with respect and regard and admiration and take opportunities, as, you know, my mentor, Omrapani says, to make every man bigger, well I might think I'm abandoning the cause, you know, make every man bigger. Like, that's not my job. Like, they have to, they have a lot of cleaning up and apologizing to do. You know, look what we deal with as women. Look at all these years of, you know, our subjugation. And yes, and I'm an outcomes girl. And if I'm going to get to the place that I say I want to get to, I now see. see that there are all sorts of ways my behavior was really incoherent, you know, around that prioritization.

For somebody that would feel, because there's like the traditional role of like masculine men and feminine women. And then there's a lot of people where their internal truth is they're on this more of this like gender fluid spectrum where they feel like their internal truth is as a woman, they have more masculine traits. And, you know, of course, regardless of whether or not women are attracted to men, they still live in a world with men. And so I just want for feminine men and masculine women that don't necessarily fully,

they still live in the biological reality where historically we've evolved with these dynamics and polarities within men and women. But feel like there's a new way emerging to relate within both. Just any thoughts that come to that? Yeah, so I am, again, I can only speak from my perspective as a heterosexual woman, and I don't pretend to have any idea what it's like to be literally anybody else, including my best friend. So I am not here telling anybody how to be. I wouldn't even be interested.

That's not interesting to me. It happens to apparently be interesting to you to hear about what it's like to be me, so that's what I'm doing here. And I am a huge fan of David Data and have. followed his work for like a decade and find his teachings on polarity to be gospel, to put it mildly. And the way that he talks about, and I'll just take liberties to paraphrase some of his work without his consent or approval, so hopefully I won't make any mistake. So the way that he speaks about it to my understanding is that you fundamentally have a masculine essence or a feminine essence. And the way that you might know, which you have, is whether as an adult sexually you would rather ravish or be ravished.

And if you're like, I don't care, whatever, the rest of this conversation is not for you, which just means, like, you are somebody who is happy with either. And, you know, that is not a polarity, right? So you will not be engaging in polarity dynamics unless it's in selective moments of your life, you opt into one lane or the other. That's just literally the definition of polarity, right? So if you're interested in, you know, what I refer to as like the free energy technology of the man-woman dyad, although, of course, you can assume polarities to men in a sexual relationship, to women. It's just about these essence differences, right? But I'll focus on what I know.

if you're interested in that, then it's important to recognize that what you might call your masculinity, right? So if I identify which I have as a very masculine woman, you know, I, in my personality, I can outman lots of men in my competence, right? And I have a deep voice. I have like a lot of intensity that wouldn't be characterized, and this has been, like, to my chagrin, right? Like, wouldn't be characterized as, like, soft, like, feminine energy, right? If I characterize that as this is who I am, then I might miss some of the nuance of, like, oh, this is who I am, meaning that I have been, I have had shells, he calls them, built upon my essence, right?

So if I was raised as a little girl to be to get love for my doingness, not my beingness, right? So I got an A plus on my report card versus I just walked into the room and smiled. And my parents said, I love being around you. Instead, they said, good job, Kelly, right, for that report card, for example. I am entrained around masculine energies and virtues and signatures that say, if I achieve the thing, if I do the things, my activities are what it is that I am identifying with. So he would say I developed a masculine shell. But then I am heterosexual, so I want men to be into me, and they're not into women with a masculine shell, let's say.

So then I would put like lipstick on that and make sure my hair was cute. And like, right? So I would like put feminizing things on top of that. Another shell. Another shell. And then I would attract a partner who has the opposite, but all of those layers to unpack. And he also talks about the stages that we can be in as women and as men. And that like this first stage interaction that you might have, you know, let's say when we were younger, is really like, I'm going to get mine.

It's like this is what I want and you should be giving me what I want. And then the second stage is like negotiation, right? So this is a lot of like more modern spiritual like considerations that I happen to think of very depolarizing, which is like, let's talk about our feelings and what we need. And I hear you when you say, you know, that you need that and I will give that to you. Polarity is not available in that something wrong with it. But if that's what you're going for is the experience of the. irreconcilably different energies somehow serving one another and serving themselves simultaneously, then it's not going to be available through that, right? Whereas he says the third stage is devotional. It's like, how can I gift myself to you? And as a man, you would be gifting me your attention, your consciousness. And as a woman, I'd be gifting you my heart, wisdom, right? My energy, my love light. He calls it. So this is how I think about things. So if I stopped the conversation at like, oh, I'm just a masculine woman, then I would

start to feel, I think, confused around that yearning that is fundamentally to be aligned with my feminine essence. And to me, that nuance is like way more helpful because it allows me to orient towards these different energetic signatures inside of myself and to recognize which ones ultimately feel like they serve my heart's desire, right? Which means that if I want to align with my feminine essence, then it's incumbent upon me to stop telling men what to do. Let's say my man, stop telling him what to do, how to drive the car, right? like how to invest our finances.

I mean, I'm just going to be general about it. Or, you know, how he should dress differently or paint the garage differently. And as women, thanks, courtesy of the feminist, siap, we have developed extraordinary competence where we know how to do lots of shit really well and sometimes better than our partners, you know, our men partners. And so the temptation to feel, and I've noticed that there are men who even seem to value, like they want to ask their woman, what do you think I should do? And rather than seeing that as an enculturation of like a shadow mother experience that he had as a little boy, you know, we might participate in that because we feel good being consulted, you know,

for what it is that we think, think, not feel. And so if I want to align with my feminine essence, then I'm going to stop doing that. And it's exquisitely difficult. It's actually one of the hardest things. I think for a woman who's interested in this kind of work and practice to engage is to like literally shut the fuck up. Like, like, just actually stop. Just stop. I mean, I remember when I first started doing this work, again, out of partnership, it's a little bit of a different game.

but like literally I would like notice I'd be in an Uber and I'd want to tell him like to turn or like tell him like oh it's coming up like just stop just let the man drive like I'm literally paying the man to drive how about I just let him do that but it's so deeply ingrained and we're co-participating in these inverted polarities and this messiness and bluriness and there's an opportunity that we have to get organized and and to experience. like God through this connection erotically and maybe otherwise. And so if that's not interesting to you, then the fluidity and the, you know, sort of like, I'm going to do whatever I want whenever I want, polyamory, like all of that. It's just another conversation and not one that I have really much to contribute to because it's been pretty heads down in this realm. Yeah. for people that can find alignment with what you're saying in terms of their own experience,

I feel like there's a lot, there's so much, so much beauty that comes on as a byproduct from the, you know, men finding deep reverence in a woman's feminine essence and vice versa. And allowing a man to be a man in that sense as well, because there's also great usefulness as a man that comes when there is that space that's provided. and encouraged, and I feel deeply how difficult it can be with so much societal programming around what it means to be a man and a woman. And ultimately, for our listeners, it's just a deeper invitation into whatever your truth is. And you don't know that unless you start examining what shells are placed on top of whatever your truth is, right? And how you might be, I call it buying eggs

from the hardware store, like how you might be insisting that something be available that like simply isn't like right is that neuroception again it's like you can't actually assess whether or not you're in your disappointment your resentment your bitterness because you are like insisting that the man in front of you be a different kind of man i mean that's that's not love right like if you don't have this fundamental capacity to see who it is that is in front of you see if they can offer you what it is that you say you want and so soberly assess that, then you're in this zero-sum game dynamic. And then you get into the kink, which is, again, by design of attempting to source love from the impossible place. And really,

I mean, it's just like, you know, query the internet for toxic relationship advice, you know, or whatever. And you'll see that there's like whole dimensions of the Akashic records that are now devoted to like helping us understand how it is that we end up in these painful relationships. And I do think that this is a huge part of it is just failing to acknowledge what it is that we truly long for some of us as women and the way that our behavior is not a means to securing that in any in any universe. I remember I saw the therapist Esther Perel, who's an extraordinary woman and maybe you've had her out of now. And I saw her as a you know, whatever you want to say, patient. And when I was in the process of dissolving my

first marriage, and she said to me, she looked at me, she's like, Kelly, you never let anybody know that you need them. And I felt super indicted by that and also recognized that she was right, that because of my self-sufficient impulses, I'd gotten to this place where I, I, could not offer, you know, my then-husband or maybe the men in my life this experience of feeling needed, of feeling useful, of feeling that there was really any specific place for him to occupy. And that is, I now believe, a violation of the natural contract. And I could never have seen it that way before, but it has all sorts of consequences energetically. when I am as a woman unable, unwilling, unready to take the vulnerable comportment of simply expressing my desire

and allowing a man to solve the problem of my wantingness, you know, in his own way. So on the flip side, what do you feel is our ways or a way that men undermine the potential for like a woman blossoming into that feminine space, you know, because we're speaking to ways in which a woman have and continually undermine the men to step into their masculinity, what ways as a woman have you experience the alternative? Yeah. So I think, again, a lot of it can be attributed to the confusion that men have about relating to their, I call it predatory energy. People don't like when I call it that, but it's just whatever the phrase that always comes to me,

relating to their own predatory energy, right? You could call it dark masculine. and you could call it, you know, healthy aggression. And because of so many years of women feeling injured by men, let's say, they are raising sons and castrating them energetically, right? And, well, we could get into circumcision conversation, which is actually a very real part of this. but suffice it to say that it's energetic and that when a woman feels unsafe about men in general

she feels like she's been abused or harmed or violated she raises her son to serve her emotional stability to meet her emotional needs and to be not so scary right not so aggressive. So this is the very well-intentioned mother who ultimately partners with her son in a way, right? And he ends up being a mommy appeasing little boy because that's how he survives. And he doesn't, you know, kill the squirrel and he doesn't rip up the curtains and he doesn't break the shit and he doesn't do the things that mommy wouldn't like because they're too aggressive and, you know, expose too much of that predatory energy to a system, hers, that cannot capacitate it without, you know, descending into trauma spaces of recollection around, like, what it is that she experienced, right?

So those men are now our partners, you know, and they are understandably confused about their role. And you could say socio-behaviorally, like their role as providers and protectors, whether they open the fucking car door or not, pay for the bill or what. And you could look at how this translates in terms of their role with regard to their woman's emotions. Right. So obviously it's very natural that, you know, you can project your mom onto your female partner and vice versa. So when you think that your woman's emotions are, like, anything ranging from a nuisance to like a very destabilizing problem, it will become often about your emotions, about your woman's emotions. And I imagine that I could speak for a lot of women when I say that that feels like shit. It feels really bad.

And ultimately becomes this spiral of pay attention to me. So both partners are vying for attention when, again, in these classical polarity dynamics, one perspective is that the man's role is to give the attention. The woman's role is to offer her enthusiasm, let's say. There are many different ways you could say that, but that's a simple way. So when men cannot self-regulate their systems, when they don't know how to offer themselves containment, this is why I think this is sort of like our job, all of us, right? Like when you don't have emotional self-possession, then you can't hold whatever comes up when a woman is upset with you.

And all you experience is I have failed. And that's my understanding is that's why. It's a very vulnerable place for a man to be in, is experiencing his own failure. It's not fundamentally the same for us. Like for us to experience feeling unloved is like it's the, you know, the most loath, you know, experience, right? So if you are experiencing your woman's upset as your failure and that triggers in you, Mommy doesn't love me and I might die, then, you know, you have an opportunity to learn how to hold all of that. That's a lot.

To learn how to hold all that in your system. Have a stable, still system, and an open heart that you offer to your woman. And that is called containment. And when you can confer that to your woman and you know that when she is experiencing her emotions. And again, not her story, literally just her like, ugh, whatever. Honoring her. Her raw emotions. Because data would say it's, any story about it is residue. So we're not talking about getting into the chitty chatty about how you did the wrong thing. It's literally just like, ouch, that she expresses, right? When you can lean into that and you can

attuned to her system better than she can so that you can see oh she needs my eye contact she needs a hand on her shoulder she needs me you know to go talk to her mom or whatever it is like you are so attuned that you can you can direct the restabilization of her system um everything you ever wanted from a woman will be gifted to you right when you can confer that That's my belief and not just mine. So I think that recognizing that that's a responsibility that men have, not just to their partners, but to children and other women in the world. And honestly, I don't know, but I think even other men, right? So I do think that, you know, men require tribes of men, you know, at their back to be able to really source that regulation in the same way that we require, you know, women in our midst as women. So I think prioritizing that containment, which isn't simply a tolerance, right, because I know a lot of women have been with men who are quiet and they seem like they're listening and they're just tolerating her experience and maybe, you know, giving some sort of

lip service to what it is, reflecting what it is that they see. It's a different thing to attune and to attune to a woman system, you have to be attuned to your own to know the difference, you know, to feel beyond that mess of mommy, you know, thinks I did the bad thing and all the understandable emotions that that brings up to hold that and feel into what's needed here, you know? I don't know. It seems intense and complex. But my sense is that it's actually rather natural for me. men when they are given permission to recognize that that's their role and maybe responsibility.

It's a maturation journey on both parts to, you know, honor somebody's reality without it. Yes. Automatically meaning something about your own survival or being wrong or failing or being incompetent. But, I mean, we're just inviting that curiosity that we spoke to earlier across the board, you know, and what you might be able to find outside of what you think or what you assume you'll find. Your journey supporting individuals and women with their own internal health journey, obviously this is the whole pie, right, in terms of the psychosomatic component to the biological, physiological reality of certain hormonal imbalances.

Like so many of these different things are contributing factors to. somebody not being able to find that balance and truth that's underneath all the shells and everything. And so you spoke to like your journey for birth control. And I know like a lot of your work initially has been supporting people from conventional alipathy to getting off meds. And so just I would love for you to share a little bit about how it's important to look at this holistically from all angles. As there are there's so many different potential factors and reasons for why we feel we're struggling within a lot of these dynamics and it doesn't always come um the biggest contributing factor may not always be uh our own conscious willingness to do the thing but we have these like unconscious

such like uh realities hormonally that are pushing us in different directions totally totally thank you it's so nice to talk to you and how much you just get it it's really like refreshing because to see the arc um i think it also just helps me like like feel less crazy, you know, because to see the arc of like, it is all connected to the same impulse has been something I have been like, what the fuck am I doing? You're like, what's happening? Why am I interested in this now? And at just this recent moment, you know, in my life, I've been able to say like, oh, yes, it was always about this journey home, you know, to self. And I have a biased rubric that says there's an order of operations.

And you don't do the plant medicine before you know how the fuck to eat. You know? And if, you know, you have these basic, if you have this identification as a sick person or with certain diagnoses or you have a relationship to pharmaceuticals, there is a first start here. Again, this is my bias. Do whatever you want and start wherever you want. However, what I have seen is that, and now I understand it more through this polarity lens of like initiating the masculine within you, right? How do you do that? You do the scary thing. And for most of us, the scary thing is to take responsibility for our experience as some people. who might otherwise be afraid of getting sick, be afraid of being sick, or be afraid of the

potential other shoe dropping someday one day where they might realize that they're in this flawed, fragile vessel that is going to fail them. Right. So getting right around that, I think is the first step. And the reason I call it a masculine initiation is because the re-encounter with the power of choice can happen in these super mundane and simple ways. So like I have a protocol and a program online called vitamin reset. And it's like a 44-day thing. There's not really anything that radical about it, honestly. And the outcomes that I have published have been history-making.

And I took this torch in ways from my mentor, Nick Gonzalez, who really anointed me with the kind of radical faith that anything can be healed, like literally, actually anything. I mean, he had 27 years of resolving terminal cancers and ways that have never been matched in the medical literature. So with that at my back, you know, I went into my private practice and looked at every single woman. I sat across from and I said, you know, there's nothing wrong with you. So now what? And there's all sorts of ways that we get our needs met by being sick. We get needs met around our no. We don't have to learn boundaries because we have this built-in validation for no, I don't want to do that. I can't do that. And we have all sorts of needs in our yes arena where we can secure attention and essentially. sense of validation and a sense of okayness from whether it's your doctor or the way people

relate to you because you're sick, whatever. So when you decide to move in the direction of like the wild unknown and you take responsibility for your experience, it can start with simply committing to a month of eating differently, you know, sleeping at a different time, sourcing your, you know, engaging in conscious consumerism and beginning to say like all of these decisions matter. Every single one of them matters. And I do have what it takes to follow through on my word to do it differently and consistently for a month. Okay. That simple ritual seems to have been the essential foundation. And what I've come to see is like not only does, Does it send your system a signal of safety?

You know, because when you choose, like in my program, it's three minutes of a kundalini meditation a day. Three minutes. That's it. And when you know, when you pause intentionally, you're sending a meta signal. So, yeah, the benefits could be from how you're breathing or what you're visualizing or whatever, you know, ancient practices you're drawing on. Or it could maybe, and it could be from the meta signal that says, I am someone now who pause it. I think this happens in the money realm too. When you buy the thing, you can barely afford because your heart has a longing to expand in that direction. You become the person who can buy the thing the moment you click, pay, you know. So there are these meta signals we send to our system. And I think when you invest in lifestyle change, comprehensive lifestyle change, and there's a healthy dose of re-brainwashing, right? So in my program, there's two weeks where I just focus on defragging all of the beliefs around. illness and the chemical imbalance theory and the promise of pharmaceuticals and the untold

story of their risks. And that reframing of the experience, sometimes it's an inverting of your understanding coupled with the behavioral change seems to confer this reconnection to a locus of power within. When you know you have a choice, which you always do, even if it's just to narrate differently what's happened, that your arm is being sought off right now. You exit the victim triangle. You exit the disempowerment that otherwise characterizes wherever you are on that triangle as rescue or villain or victim. And all sorts of sovereign possibility and creativity becomes available to you. So I am very, very much a believer that you first do that. You first do that. And then you start to be able to clear the slate, right? Like you've got bloating and joint pain and insomnia and like what you're calling anxiety and all these things. I've certainly worked with the whole gamut. You have what's called schizophrenia or bipolar, OCD, or panic. And then I ended up publishing all these cases on things I'm not specialized in.

lupus and asthma and irritable bowel and crones and you have all of that going on to feel your little yes and your little no I'm sorry how like how beneath all of that so when you clear this and you you calm all of those very real invalid signals that the body is sending in an effort towards homeostasis then you can start to feel the little pull right and the little pull might be ayahuasca in Peru. The little pole might be, you know, taking a training in essential oils. The little pull might be having conversation with your dad. Whatever it is, you start to be able to feel that and you start to be able to recognize the little know, which is where you're tolerating what you don't want in your life and where you are, you know, otherwise settling because you are colluding

with the lie that you can't have exactly what you want. So orienting around that, then your magic carpet ride, you know, begins to take off and only you know, where it is that you go next, because some have written that your illness is a question only you can answer. And that's like the good news and the bad news because of how inculturated we are to look to the authority to help us understand what's wrong with ourselves so that we can finally stop being bad and wrong and be loved. So what I have found is that you can get your health sorted, you can stabilize your physiology, and all sorts of what I've called psychiatric pretenders resolve. So these things that mask or biological imbalances that masquerade as psychiatric, so whether it's blood sugar imbalances or

micronutrient deficiencies or hypothyroidism or medication side effects. I mean, I can't tell you, you know, how many cases I worked with, where once we began to eliminate things like acid blockers or birth control or antibiotics, you know, let alone vaccines, you see, oh, what I was calling my other illness, my other psychiatric illness was simply an effect of these medications. So when you look at all of these psychiatric pretenders, there is so much, um, energy that you reclaim. But then what I found is you can be biohacking the day away, you know, and doing your sun gazing and wearing your, you know, gadgets and, you know, eating the perfect thing and exploring all the ways to optimize your health. And still something can feel not quite right.

Right. And still you can be seeking and searching. And then your self-career. your, you know, sort of wellness journey actually becomes about self-hate. It becomes about I am still bad and wrong. How do I get to the place where I'm better? And that's what really started to interest me in shame, you know, and the role of shame as this very expensive currency energetically. And how is it that can be what is keeping us from our vitality and our experience of, you know, what it is that we came here for.

And that work, you know, whether you want to call it desecrating sexuality, which is what I call it in my experience, whether you want to call it shadow work or inner child work or relational work, I just don't know how available that kind of work is before you have, you know, the chopping wood and carrying water of this is how I, I do a day in the life of me, and I do it this way because I'm choosing to and because it feels safer in the world. And just admitting that that's real and true, you know, that we develop a sense of like, I am in control here. That is the light side of I'm responsible for my victim's story. And then all sorts of things, you know, can unfold, I think, from that place.

But that's sort of the journey as I see it. If we're in that fog and we don't have free will to even make conscious choice and to be able to go into these different things, then it's going, you know, it's going to be an uphill battle continuously. And, you know, the biohacker that is on the continual never-ending journey of self-improvement without having the insight to self-acceptance, I think, is like you spoke to you feeding that self-hate and ultimately, you know, diving deeper into that own spiral. There is, I think, many people especially that are committed to the Western approach of healing have this self-righteousness of their own perceived inadequacy and their victim consciousness,

like they'd love to be right about what they've been doing that might be potentially harming them, right? because then it, you know, it makes you wrong, not just in the moment, but like you've been wrong for so long. And it's one of the just hallmark traits of somebody who's inhabiting victim consciousness is they don't love to hear that they've been playing a victim. Totally. Right. And so, you know, there is the curious invitation to bring somebody into a state of self-empowerment

that I want to explore about now because the, this. victim consciousness is very alluring and we don't realize we're doing it often when it happens. So how have you supported people really transition out of this is happening to me and into reclaiming that power to make conscious choice into that new direction? I think one of the ways, at least what comes to me when you ask that is is the commitment to resolving superiority. I know that for me I got to a place where I really felt superior to the past self, you know, versions of me. I remember I was on Joe Rogan, and he asked me, he's like, if you met yourself, I'm like a horrible impersonator. I don't know why.

I feel like I just like even changed my voice. Okay. He's like, if you met yourself in a bar, you know, 10 years ago, if you met your current self in a bar 10 years ago, like what the fuck would you have talked about with yourself? You're so different, right? And that was like eight eight rebirths again. And back then, I felt like, oh, wow, I'm a really better person now than I was then. And I've gotten to this place where I'm really not so sure. I'm really not so sure. And a lot of the work I've done in the past, I would say year is about neutralizing rejection,

like looking whether it's gluten or... you know, an X or pharma or the cabal or like whatever, like neutralizing any rejection. And I was, if I had done this work too early, it would have been a bypass. Now it is the uncomfortable thing to, you know, I was off my iPhone for two years in like, you know, an effort to walk the walk as an activist. and also because I had a lot of addictive shame, especially around my kids, like about how I was like on the thing, right? And I would like be in the bathroom like, oh, let me just get through another message and then I'll go out and they won't see that I, you know, like that kind of shit. And coming, so now I am back on said device. And for me, the way I'm constituted, which I don't imagine is very different than a lot of people, I really feel more comfortable in the absolutist place of,

I am better now and I'm doing the right thing and I won't ever go back to doing the bad wrong thing, right? And so coming into a place where I can hold that I'm somebody who was on an iPhone, then off an iPhone, now I'm back on an iPhone, has required a maturational orientation towards my process, not a linear meritocracy, right, that says, I am better now spiritually. I mean, spiritual legal. I am better now because I know these spiritual things, then you have to hide the parts of you that are not consistent with that self-concept. Talk about work, right? You know, like, what if I were to eat? I could tell a lot of funny stories, and I do on my podcast, but about, you know, like I ate an Entomans donut a few months ago. Like, do you know, an Entomans is like, this is like, whatever. If you didn't like... Krispy cream.

Yeah, it's like, I mean, I'm like dating myself, but it's, yeah, it's. It's like literally like you could keep it on a shelf for five decades and it would be fine and still fucking delicious, right? So anyway, and I had a whole funny moment of how and why I did that. And this has been such an essential part of my mothering journey too is as my girls become teenagers, like to get to a place where I can hold more neutrality around my judgment. Because a lot of holistic mamas get into this place where we power over and control our children. and we offer them conditional love based on their compliance with what it is that we have defined is the right healthy and spiritual thing to do, whether it's how they eat, how they relate to technology, what time they go to sleep, or what they do with their boyfriend.

So I resolved a lot of this just in time so that I could actually allow my daughters to be their own women. And I could hold that reflection that they might sometimes have that I'm not this amazing, wonderful. like, you know, spiritually empowered mother. And I can not offer my version. I can simply allow their reality to exist and hold space for that. Right. So the experience of this sort of like revisiting of the bad, the bad things that I also am and will continue to be.

means that I wasn't better or worse before. It also means something that has been a deep inquiry for me and a lot of the women that I work with, you know, in my containers, to look at the women of my mother line and to recognize that I'm not superior to my mom. I'm not superior to my grandmother. And most of us, I don't know if you relate to this, like look at our same-sex parent and we feel better than them. We know better. We're doing better. We're deeper. We're more actualized. Like, what if that's not true? Like, it's a mind fuck for me anyway, right? And I actually, in my heart, know that to be the case, you know, whether I believe in, you know, karma contracts and, you know, that sometimes we play the role in service of the person and we act the villain so that we can

really offer this gift, or if it's just the reality that this isn't a spiritual meritocracy, it's just a maturational realm. And we don't say that children are less than adults, like, in qualitative soul-level essence. They're just younger, right? So if I look through that lens and I encourage myself to resolve superiority within myself and my own journey, then it's a lot easier for me to help people. really start to like delight in the process of being wrong. Like how fuck I did it again. Like look at that.

Wow. Like I didn't get that either. And now I have this other, even getting that implies that like, you know, now you're enlightened or something. But then you don't, you no longer are in that place where you need to proclaim mastery and expertise prematurely. right and you no longer are in that place where you are fundamentally like maligning the past versions of yourself and that means that when you're confronted with that dissonant moment of oh wow what i'm

doing what i think is so great may not be actually serving me in the way that i think maybe it's time to go a different way you'll be totally down for that you'll be down and ready i can't tell you how many things I have questioned in my activist truth or journey. I mean, like literally everything. And now I'm at the point where, like, if you told me that 5G actually isn't a thing and is not even bad for you, I'd be like, okay, tell me more, you know? And that requires that I'd be able to hold and even, I don't know, like on some level, enjoy, like the process rather than imagining it's all.

about getting it right. Yeah, and the journey of that matured intellect is to be able to hold paradox. And I really appreciate people who are just open into not, even if they have a profound level of wisdom that they've tapped into, are still open to the new information, new possibility of willingness to be changed by whatever they hear in their life and experience. You've spoken to like that how self-righteousness is, it's a, it's. so slippery this identity that we have of even when we feel like we've improved or, you know, we've tapped into Christ consciousness. There's part of us that also comes along in that journey

that loves to be perceived as Christ, you know, that has the potential for that as the light grows so too does the possibility for that shadow it casts. And even on the journey, like we'd love to arachmonically quantify how evolved we've been or become even to our parents or especially the people around us and our peers and it's just another way in which the ego is fighting for its own survival. And so, yeah, it's so funny how it follows us within the journey. And I love how this whole, there's been a texture throughout this whole conversation of this not being something to transcend, but to continually embrace, which is a deepening versus is like reaching or, you know, bypassing often, oftentimes.

But it's just so interesting how that identity structure, no matter where you go, or if it puts on spiritual clothing, it's fighting for its own existence in so many different ways. Totally. That's why I call it wearing the villain crown. I mean, it sounds like I have made up my whole own language or something, but I have all these, like, cheat phrases, honestly, just to remind myself in the moment. of my commitments to myself. And I call it wearing the villain crown because we almost never identify as the villain. So when you grow that capacity to be seen as bad and wrong by someone you

respect and care about and to just try it on for a moment, and when you are in judgment, to explore the possibility that you are the same damn thing, you know, already, maybe even in that moment that you are condemning, you reclaim that dark energy. You reclaim that predator, you know, whether you call it dark feminine or dark masculine, you reclaim your destructive capacity so that you can, as David Data would say, slay anything less than love. And that is an essential part of the maturational process. So if you are deeply invested in always being, you know, the good and right one, you're missing out on whole dimensions of your power. it's like it's a child's game yeah and you could be thinking that you're i mean people that

were at the forefront of so many genocides thought they were doing god's work 100% so it's like 100% that's why you know again as an activist who for many years imagined that my role was to you know take down the bad you know the bad thing the bad system um and to you know sort of be victorious in the name of those more vulnerable i've really studied how um the psychospirituality of these different angles of the triangle like i absolutely thought by the way the same way that when i was prescribing to pregnant women i thought i was doing the good thing and then it translocated that virtue into i'm doing the good thing now like fighting the pharmaceutical industry and, you know, the thing about, like, the villain dimension of the triangle is that it wants blood.

Like, you know, I would only have been satisfied as an activist when I saw suffering on the part of that I had identified as the enemy. And here I am imagining that I'm actually making the world a better place. And I'm not saying that activism is wrong. I'm not saying there isn't a role for it. In my process, there came a time when identifying as doing the right thing to save the world was a way for me not only to avoid the mess of my own life. Very effective, by the way, compensation strategy, but also a way for me to imagine myself the rescuer, you know, the white knight for the women of the world, and really to be experienced by so many.

in my real life and maybe public life as being, you know, a huge, a huge part of a problem. And, you know, the maturation, I think, of the villain angle is to not need anything to be bad and wrong in order to know that I have choices and to really resolve the erotic caress of that enemy, that obsession with the enemy. I mean, the activist spaces, we get obsessed. with the next move, you know, the next bill that's coming out or the next mandate or the next this or that. And sometimes with the characters that we imagine are involved. And it's a very intimate relationship that we have with the so-called enemy. And you could, you know, I'm talking about activism, but you just think about, you know, anything that you identify as being a source of

problems in your life. And you can see, wow, I have a really intense tie to this. But a lot of my personal interrogation was around the rescuer role and really see. seeing that when I imagine it's my job to help anyone fix their life to save anyone from the bad thing I'm reifying their powerlessness and I am also very narcissistically putting myself I mean that descriptively you know putting myself in a position where they need me I remember you know when everything went down in Maui recently and that's how I'll refer to it as everything that went down. I have since, you know, I'm no longer who you, like I said, who you go to to find out about the story behind the story. You know, nobody follows my telegram or my Instagram for that

reason or whatever reads, you know, my material for that reason. And I remember scrolling social media and seeing how many people knew the story behind the story and thinking like, wow, they figured it out without me. How about did they do that? Like, I'm not needed. And so a lot of that, the victim consciousness that underlies the rescuing impulse is also requires that your hapless, the hapless victim that you're protecting remains such so that you can still be needed. Right. Like it's a very sick thing that activists love to be right about the horrible shit that is happening and the more horrible shit that might. happen later. And so it becomes this loose ritual where we get our energy, you know, or someone, I got my energy, you know, from this like a dysregulated autonomic state I was in of fear and my

compensation for that fear, which is I will fly into action. I will do the things so I don't have to experience this and I'll recruit your energy into the same resonance and I will act as if I am helping you, but really I'm reifying your powerlessness, and I need you to stay in that role, turning towards me as the expert. And I mean, I'm talking on the grand scale, but like, this happens interpersonally all the time, you know, like, I was like with my trainer the other day and he was like talking about some like financial sit she's got going on. And I found myself being like, well, here's what you need to do. Like, just do this. And again, this is a man, woman. stuff too that I was, you know, in violation of my own commitment, let's say. But then it's also

rescuer's stuff. Like, because I can't tolerate in my own system another person's vulnerability or let alone their struggle or their discord. I mean, I actually think that's why I became a doctor because I had that little tolerance for human, you know, struggle that I needed to find a way to fix it, not for them, for me, so that I didn't have to feel in my system their own. dysregulation didn't have that capacity and I was trained as a child to regulate you know the systems of others through my own you know process and it's really challenging at a certain level so the rescuer angle of the triangle I think is where a lot of us could use could ease into right because easing into the villain role like that's like that's a more intense level of play but the rescuer

and we're just really looking at, like, what if everyone has their own journey? What if I have no idea whether or not that baby should be or shouldn't be vaccinated? Like, what if it's not only not my business, but really I can't possibly know? And for most truthers and activists, that's very challenging to suggest that it's possible that there isn't an objective right and wrong, while there still is a moral grid that we all can, you know, develop some sort of coherence around. Yeah, it can be very difficult to embody, you know, even like in a interpersonal dynamic where we give somebody advice and they don't follow through with it. Yes, totally. There's some sort of pain that's incurred because of that.

Totally. If there's part of us that actually enjoys that self-righteousness of them not listening to us and then falling, having a shitty life. Then you're energetically at war. And it's like for the individuals that are behaviorally protesting or whatever the activism is, you know, whether it's for the world or something within our dynamics, if there's still part of us that enjoys the suffering that comes as a byproduct of it not happening, then we're at energetic war, whether or not we're doing the right things with our body and our words, you know? So again, I think a lot of self-compassion is required here because it's often just an unconscious process and it's all part of her journey but it's a

really important thing to point out I think totally yeah yeah comfortable and true we've covered a lot of ground here a lot of really fascinating ground and I just loved your articulation of so much of this so thanks for coming on I do want to talk to you before we start to wrap up and this could obviously be maybe will be another podcast in and of itself but the unlocking and returning and awakening to our own eros and sexuality. And I think over the past couple years, this has been a new, I guess, unlock or, you know, area you've been also teaching and exploring within yourself. And so because we spoke to it a little bit, like the original deep embedded impulse that

we have that often we develop so much shame around unconsciously, what is your journey and perception of unlocking our true erotic nature and that vital force? that life force energy that we typically have so much shame around. What have you found on either your own internal journey unlocking that, but then also for all the listeners right now that want to ravish life and experience that rapture and uncover the arrows that they have for life? Yeah. I love that.

Doesn't that sound so good? Who doesn't want that? Sign me up. Yeah. So I think, I mean, I've had a very particular journey, which I've also seen. scene is potentially archetypal, right? Beyond the sort of like post-divorce, eat, pray, love, you know, it's a thing. Unraveling, you know, where I found myself in a pole dancing class.

I probably was like, I don't know what, two years ago or so now. And it was the beginning of probably the deepest spiritual work I've ever done. And that's like, you know, it's saying something because. I've had my share of dark nights. And why, right? Like, it's just, this is just like, you know, some patriarchally embraced, you know, form of female exhibitionism. Like, why the fuck would it be so transformative? Well, since you asked, I did a podcast on the 10 spiritual lessons I learned from pole dancing.

I have a lot to say about it. But suffice at this moment to say that I was put in. in direct contact with the dimensions of myself that were living behind my shame. And I was put in contact with those dimensions, not only just within myself, you know, like I had never, you know, we all have places we store shame in our body. And I had never worn like shorts, like actually in my light. Like I don't like, I haven't. historically, I wouldn't use the present tense anymore, but I haven't historically, like, love my legs. And so I would dress strategically to, like, you know, and I always did, like, hip hop and

African or whatever. It's like I wear, like, sweatpants or it was totally fine. And in pole dancing, like, you must be almost nude or you literally won't make contact with the pole and you won't be able to do things. And so I remember the first time I was in class and I was like in this kind of, like, bikini bottom. And I, like, looked around. I couldn't believe these other women were like tolerating the sight of my ass. You know, like I was like, how is this okay? Is this okay? And that simple moment is an example of the expansion of, you know, what I'll refer to as the permission field.

And the permission, which I believe is granted largely woman to woman to occupy flavors of femininity that, we have been inculturated to believe are not available to us in our given identity constructs. So for me as a professional, as like a pedigreed, whatever I had, I mean, you can look back on, you know, YouTube or whatever and check me out over the years. Like, you will never see cleavage. You will never hear me use profanity. You will only ever see me fully closed. And so the way that I could play with the expansion of my permission to woman for me meant that I burn that down.

Right? So I go to the place where I am not allowed to go and specifically recruiting my creativity, my sexuality, my sensuality. And none of this was conscious. Like I didn't wake up on a Wednesday and say, I'm going to fuck on my life now. And I'm going to bikini pole dance on Instagram and see what the fuck happens. I have that thought very regularly. It's just a thing. It's a moment it happens for all of us.

You know, I did this. And, you know, as a result of, like, obviously I'm a provocative person. I have all sorts of opinions that people don't like. And whether it's my perspectives on germ theory or what's been going on the past. years or pharma or whatever you know i've i've always been writing that dance of like in my business especially like growth and contraction well i lost 150 000 newsletters subscribers in a year okay so like if that's any indication of my process displeasing and challenging a lot of people who otherwise came to hear about you know what they should eat for breakfast and the problems with lexapro

I had walked right into the crucible of my own further initiation and had the opportunity for my own inner husband, my inner masculine, to hold me through that. And it was not immediately available and all of the shame that I experienced and the feedback that I got from women around how I was doing myself wrong. I soon recognized was like an incredible, like spiritual opportunity for me to reclaim dimensions of myself that agreed with them. Right. So when I have another woman tell me, you know, that I am embarrassing myself or I'm doing

the reckless thing and I'm endangering the women. I said I was here to protect and why don't I just stick to this shit I'm good at or I should be doing and I can't believe you have daughters and you're acting that, you know, all the things, right? You're an intention seeking narcissistic horror. Like I literally have gotten all the things. There were some that were like, okay, that's just whatever. And then there were some that literally made me feel like nauseous and that I wanted to like disappear and never exist again, which is the signature of shame, right?

And so if I could simply interact with the part of me that agrees with that because of conditioning and programming and that does think I made big men. mistakes and I've done the thing that is unforgivable and now everybody's seen. I ultimately was able to begin to grant myself more permission, but it started for me with other women. I put my body around women who seem to have more permission to women in ways that I didn't, right? My dance teachers and my coaches and women who identified and talked about being wealthy and just what? Like, what do you do? How do you do that? And of course, the first impulse is always judgment, right? And so I have made a practice out of judging other women. And I encourage the

women that I work with to do the same. Like, if you look at your lifesape of the women that you've been exposed to or you see online or who are in your family or whatever, and you, you learn about the ways that you are imagining that they should not be acting or saying or dressing or whatever you have like a direct portal to the expansion of your permission field through the reclamation of the dimensions of yourself that do not feel they have permission to exist right what would happen to me if I do the slutty thing in public right what would happen to me if I share that I you know earn seven figures as a single woman. What would happen to me if I live in, you know, the beautiful home? What would

happen to me if I share them? My daughters love me. Like whatever. I call it havingness, right? So I share my havingness. I expose that I am full of this vital force energy and other people see that I'm not apologizing for it and I'm simply owning it and I'm playing and creating. What would happen to me? Will I get burned at the stake? Well, you'll find out. And if you look at that process as like literally the most extraordinary fast track to a more fun, enjoyable, pleasurable, desire-driven life, if I can hold that promise for you, then you might remember in the moments where you want to like literally self-immolite that that's on the other side. So the practice of sister shaming from my part or towards me has been very powerful for me and led me to the conclusion that if we want to do our part as women to create a safer world for ourselves, how about we start by no longer imagining that we know better how another woman should be womaning,

let alone men, right? like just just focus on ourselves because that sense of competition between women, if we already discussed that we are in that dynamic with men, I mean, Lord, there's no hope for ever exhaling if you can't come to a place where you understand that your judgment of how another woman is womaning is about you. And the moment you think it's your role to tell a, another woman, how to act, behave, or dress, if you can hold yourself in that moment and turn inward. I mean, I just can't even imagine what would happen. It's exciting to think about that single change, that single commitment for women to make to themselves and to other women.

And what happens, you know, as you begin to walk into the spaces you've been told you're not allowed to inhabit sensually and sexually. And money has a lot to do with this in terms of your relationship to money and wealth and having. You begin to trust your impulses. And so I would say that's like, you know, the biggest dimension of the sexual reclamation for me has been honoring my impulses and really making a space for that little yes. whether it's like, hey, go to that partner salsa class or like, you know, make that video or what if you like took a singing lesson or, you know, just these little, little, hey, you know, go check that out.

And really honoring, it doesn't mean I always do it, I almost do, always do it, but it's not about the execution, it's about the orientation towards the impulses as like fundamentally the deepest part of me that now has way more permission to exist because I'm no longer in the unconscious like performative curated place of alignment with the safe identity. And, you know, I've had like a public demonstration of what it looks like to burn that down. It doesn't have to be that obviously. And we are relational beings.

So when you have the experience of people you care about witnessing you and judging you to be bad and wrong and holding yourself through that process, literally what you're reclaiming, I think, is mostly sexual energy on the other side of that experience of the shame that has guarded it into this catacomb. Do you feel like the more that you listen to the whisper of those wants and desires? Like the louder the voice gets and that ultimately leads to a much more fulfilling life. Yes. And, you know, if we as, again, I'll speak as a woman, like if we know how to walk in the dark, it's like literally what we came here to offer, you know, the collective. Like, we know how to do that. And we have taken the bait and made the poor bargain that if we plan and we play, you know,

the man role, right, in our orientation towards life and all of its mystery. If we are trying to get it right, you know, survive and organize ourselves around strategy, we forget that we know how to walk in the dark. And when we walk in the dark, everything is nonlinear and there's all sorts of delightful things that arise from the unexpected places. And so, yeah, that reclamation, pretty quickly, I think we start to feel it. And you say, like, oh, my God, I had no idea. It had to be like this in order for me to experience this. I would never trade it, right? And I could never have designed it from my mind. And so when you live your life, again, this is why I believe in an order of operations. Because if you're doing the impulsive thing before you have, you

have that capacity within yourself to hold yourself, get yourself, and trust yourself, then you'll end up in a psych ward, you know, with a bipolar diagnosis. So there is an order of operations, but ultimately when the time is right to begin to trust and honor your impulses as the compass by which you navigate is a reunion with desire. and I think a woman's desire is one of the most powerful forces on this plane. Beautiful. Great note to end on. I think it's such an empowering message.

And yeah, just in closing, anything you want to point people towards what you got going on in life and offerings and different things. And we'll link stuff below. But first off, just thank you for coming on. I really enjoy this conversation. Loved it. Thank you. Likewise. It's great to meet you, new friend.

Likewise. Likewise. Yeah. And yeah, if you want to share before we close. Yeah. It's such a great feeling. I'm sure you have it too where it's just like

somehow there's such a so much collapse of like all the effort towards getting someone to see something right that's where my shadow lives is like I'm going to get you to see and it's just so fun like when you know we've never spoken before and we just there's so much shared understanding

and so much faster and like it's very cool so yeah I mean I am very oriented now towards this, a lot of my like current branding is around reclamation. So I love that we started a conversation this way. And I have a podcast called Reclaimed Reclamation Radio. And then I have a Reclaimed Woman offerings. And I haven't shared this yet publicly. But I mentioned you earlier that I have a book coming out in June called The Reclamed Woman, which is the very

necessary follow up to where I've left off as an author and I'm excited about that too. Congrats. Excited for that to get out there. Beautiful. Well, everybody, thanks for coming on this journey of this podcast and today's episode and let us know what awakened within you, what insight that you got, what was fascinating for your own personal journey. We'd love to hear from you.

And until next time, be welcome.