Sex With Emily - Meditation Is a Lubrication w/ Light Watkins

Episode Date: May 22, 2021

Today I’m joined by meditation teacher, speaker, and author Light Watkins to share how we can better practice mindfulness in and outside of the bedroom. We discuss how meditation can transform relationships, reduce stress, and allow you to be more present during all areas of your life—including sex.Plus, we’re sharing easy hacks to curate a meditation routine, how you can cultivate happiness and fulfillment, and why training your brain is important to your overall well-being. Light also shares the ways that sex is similar to meditation, the importance of following your intuition, how to foster true positive change, and the best ways to maintain a gratitude practice.For more information about Light Watkins, visit: https://www.lightwatkins.com/For even more sex advice, tips, and tricks visit sexwithemily.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I don't have time is like Raiders of the Lost Ark. It's like Star Wars. It's not real. It sounds great. It's exciting to say I don't have time and I'm doing all this, but it's a fictional story that you create it to justify whatever dramas or adventures you find yourself on. You know, and we all do it. Look into his eyes. They're the eyes of a man obsessed by sex. Eyes that mock our sacred

institutions. Betrubize they call them in a fight on day. You're listening to Sex with Emily. I'm Dr. Emily and I'm here buy it on day. You're listening to Sex with Emily. I'm Dr. Emily and I'm here to help you prioritize your pleasure and liberate. The conversation around sex. Today we are going to liberate it. I'm joined by meditation teacher, speaker and author, Light Walkins. And we talk about practicing mindfulness and meditation, how it can help you in and out of the bedroom.

I really enjoyed this talk with Lightwalkins. After listening, I thought there's some things I wanted to share with you before you get into the interview. First, we mentioned meditation. We talk about it a lot, but maybe you've never meditated before. Or maybe you're like, that's not for me. I tried it once, but I thought I could share with you

my own practice and how I've finally gotten to the point in my life where meditation is actually something that I crave, that I know that I feel better when I do it than when I don't do it. So I started out like 20 years ago. I went on this 10 day silent meditation retreat in Thailand. And for years, I'd been tearing that I should meditate. I'd gone through my father died and there was a lot going on in my life. And I just thought meditation would be the key.

That's going to be the thing that's going to cure what else may. So when in this 10-day retreat, now I'm telling you, you cannot talk to anybody. You can't make eye contact. And you meditate from 4am to midnight. Pretty much. There's walking meditations, there's sitting meditation, there's standing meditation, but you're just basically meditating. And it was hard. I mean, it was called a Vapassana retreat. And all they teach you is about breathing. You breathe in through your nose, out through your mouth and if you find your mind wandering which you will go back to your breath. Sounds easy enough right? Until you're sitting there for

10 days and you realize by like day four I thought I have not gone more than two seconds without my mind wandering off. And then I can go back to your breath. You might have to do it a thousand times a day. But it wasn't until like the eighth day that I finally had this moment. I had this feeling that I was finally able to meditate for about five minutes where I really was just in my breath and in the moment. And I was able to feel this sort of connection

with my body, with my mind, and it was all one and I was able to meditate. And I'm telling you, it might have been a three to five minute period where I got that high of meditation, but it took a really long time. Fast forward 20 years and I realized that I wasn't able to sit for an hour a day as this Fapasana practice told you and then I would feel bad I wasn't doing it for an hour but here's my meditation hack for you. If you're much like me and you know that it would help in slowing your mind out and learning to control your mind we can control our thoughts. Our thoughts typically are not the truth. Meditation is what

allows you to take that pause that we often need before we react. It allows us to sort of train our mind to be in our control rather than in your ego's control. So I finally had another meditation teacher years ago who was like, no, don't worry so much. You have to sit up so straight. You can do it lying down. You can do it sitting. You can do it walking. But all you have to sit up so straight, you could do it lying down, you could do it sitting, you could do it walking. But all you have to do is just commit to it that every day you're going to do it, you're going to say, I am meditating, whether it's two minutes or five minutes a day. And I have a great app that I use, it's called Insight Timer, it is free, and I've sort

of gamified it. So now I've had this same app for six years. And when I look at the app, it says, and this is like, I don't know if you're into like counting your steps and all the stuff, but what the app tells me is that in all the years I've been doing it, I've spent 25,000 minutes meditating. That feels really good.

And then you get these little awards, like if I have 10 days of meditation, it'll say you've hit a milestone. And for whatever reason, seeing my days rack up, like when I'm on a 10 day streak or 15 day streak, and even if I just wake up in the morning and I press inside timer, and I just lie there for two minutes, and those two minutes I might spend breathing, I might spend with gratitude for what I'm grateful for. You know, I also do my meditate masturbate manifest. I try to do that as many days as I can a week

where I'll meditate and then I'll masturbate and then I'll manifest what I want the day to be like. Because if you think about it, instead of waking up and scrolling on your phone and getting right into work, if you could even take five minutes, it becomes sacred and it could be just that thing that helps you set your day on the right track.

So I just wanted to share with you what's worked for me. If you ever have questions about it, I'm happy to talk about it more in an episode because I have done transcendental meditation, I've done sound healing, but I'm happy to share. So in today's episode with light, we get into all of this too. We talk about meditation and happiness and meditation and relationships and just how to create fulfillment and happiness and gratitude in your everyday life. He has a great gratitude hack too. Also, we have a mutual master-beaching guide that we just launched at sexwithemily.com

slash guides. And we have all these great guides if you haven't checked them out. They're free to download. They're going to help you whether you're in a relationship or not, get the pleasure that you deserve in your life. And also, if you want to ask me questions, call my brand new hotline. It's 559 Talk Sex. Just leave me your questions or message me at sexwithemily.com slash ask Emily as always include your name gender identity Location age and how you listen to the show. All right intentions with Emily for each episode let's set an intention So when you're listening, what do you want to get out of this episode? Well my intention is to give you a new perspective on your mind and meditation,

so you can approach everything in your life, including sex, from more grounded, authentic place. All right, everybody, enjoy the show. I'm excited to welcome my guest, Light Walkins, best-selling author, accomplished meditation teacher, founder of the Shine Movement. He's an inspirational keynote speaker, workshop leader, he's delivered so many wellness

theme talks around the globe, his new book, Knowing Where To Look, 108 Daily Doses of Inspiration. Light, it's so nice to meet you. I know we're wanderlust speaking years ago, but we've never met, and I'm so happy to have you here today. First of all, I'm a huge fan of yours. I've been a voyeur of your work for a while, which is a little ironic. And how I got into this world, I started going to yoga classes and then I started going to meditation circles.

This is back when you were doing yoga in the past in the mid 90s. I was up in Manhattan going to meditation classes at the Riverside Church. And then I met a meditation teacher who really changed my life. He inspired me to want to teach people meditation. So I went to India for the first time. And I started teaching meditation from my one bedroom apartment in West Hollywood, turns out it was pretty good at it start traveling around the world doing retreats writing books and

then got it to really deepen the inspiration and started writing these daily inspirational emails and then that led to my most recent book knowing where to look I find that so inspirational Sex and relationships like how have you found that meditation impacts you and your your students, your listeners, your followers? When the stress evaporates incrementally, it's not going to go away overnight, but when it does, as it does, I should say, on the other end of that spectrum, you're creating space, right? So the space you have in between a potential offense and your reaction to that offense is directly correlated to how much stress you have in between a potential offense and your reactions to that offense is directly correlated to how much stress you have stored in your body. So if your stress decreases, the amount of space increases.

And it's the space that is your saving grace in relationships. Because the biggest Achilles heel of most people in relationships is their reactivity to when things are not going in the way that they think they should go. Their expectations are misaligned with their partner. And their prone to overreacting and the overreacting really is the death of a relationship, a series of overreactions, because what you're doing is you're making people not feel seen or heard. So there's that lack of authenticity. And this is a little controversial that, at least for me and my circle,

whenever I talk about this, but I think we all want the truth. Women, especially in my experience, talk about all I want to know the truth, true to truth. But here's the thing with guys, and I don't think a lot of people understand this, but everybody wants to be completely honest. Like a man to another man, usually,

you are graded on your level of honesty, right? When people say, be a man, yeah, your word is everything. Like, so you are brutally honest with another man. We're gonna keep it 100, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That's how you engage in those relationships with a woman. If you were to impose that same level of brutality in your honesty, it wouldn't land in the same way. And we've all had this experience. Okay. Right? It wouldn't land in the same way. And we've all had this experience, right? Where you get this reaction.

Well, let's take the classic example. When it says, do I look fat in the stress? Yeah. And let's say the man initially thinks, yes, he does fat in his dress. But there's no way I'm going to say, you look fat in his dress. I don't care how much you told me you wanted me to be honest,

because the reality is you don't want me to be honest about that. You want me to be honest about how I, you know, ultimately how I feel about you overall. I love you. I'm here for you. I want you to feel safe. I'm providing for you, et cetera. So, but we have to kind of figure out these sort of more nuanced ways of honesty. And I think what happens is when people, when you experiment with being yourself or being honest and the other person lashes out, they get reactive, it doesn't incentivize you to be as honest the next time. And not saying you can't be honest,

but there's some trauma associated with that that makes you just hesitate a little bit and now you're not really yourself. And then after a while, the relationship sort of it sort of bifurcates into two versions of both of you where you're your relationship version of you and you show up in that way where you're kind of cake walking a little bit. And then there's the real you where you were with your friends like yeah, you know, I don't know. You have that level of communication. And I think the wider that goes,

the more likely the relationship is not going to last. And so to keep that from happening, meditation creates the space so that when someone says something that you don't feel aligned with and your tendency is to react. It gives you a little bit of just a little breathing room. It's kind of like the frame slows down a bit. You don't react if you don't.

No, you can say, well, you can work through like your own little algorithm. Did they mean that? Are they going to, they're not sleep well last night? You can work through all of that in a span of like a second. And then you may just take a breath and just say, well, you know, let's talk about it later. It's not the time or place for that. Those little moments, those moments when they add up. And that's to the most. Not about perfection. Yeah, it's not about perfection, but that's what you can bring to your relationship. That's what you can bring to your parenting skills, that's what you can bring to your company.

So it's not just relationships, it's yours, your or is your relationship with everything, you get that space, and that space becomes your superpower. The practice of the meditation, not immediately, but over time, if you stick to it, you actually make that flip where you actually crave it rather than resent it. Like I think that's been part of your genius the way that you teach light is that you've made meditation seem less of a chore and people actually get excited about you. I'm the Emily Morse of meditation. Yeah, and on the light walkins of sex.

There you go. But do you have anything to do anything come up to you about sex or relationships or anything in your space that we just, I know it helps me with every area of my life when I get distracted during sex or I'm thinking about things like I just meditate. I have to meditate before I go on a date before I have sex. Well, I'll share it any though. Please. A few years ago, there was an article that got a lot of traction in the meditation community

because it said that when you meditate, your body experiences the same neurochemistry as when you have sex. Wow. And everyone was excited, sharing it, and every talking about it, writing this long Facebook commentaries about it. And this one guy that I follow, I don't know personally,

but he's a really funny writer. I can't even remember his name, but anyway, he wrote this article, I think it wasn't helping to boast or something. He said something to the effect of, you know, it's interesting this whole correlation between meditation and sex, is because when I'm meditating, I think about sex all the time. Like I often think about sex. But I've never once thought about meditation while I was having sex. Right. So I don't know, I don't know how that translates.

No, it translates to the fact that it's so deep within you that when you are having sex, it can be a meditative experience that you're not actually thinking about it. Right. It is the meditation. Yeah. Sex is the meditation.

It is. I think so. Are the breathwork? Do you teach breathwork as well? Cause to me, that was also a game changer in recent years to realize like, how I don't breathe properly, how I've learned how to just take the deep breaths. I don't teach it, but I'm a huge fan of breath work. I do a lot of breath work myself. But you know, when you get into the nuances of these practices,

you understand that they are, there's so many layers of understanding to each one. And so you just kind of pick which I'm like, I'm the non-directive meditation guy, which means within the meditation space, there are different styles, focus-based meditation styles, and then there's non-directive styles, which means you let your mind roam free. You don't try to control your thoughts. It's almost like an anti-focus approach. And so I'm really proficient at that, because I find that to be the easiest one for busy,

urban professionals. And, um, Are you still teaching that people can come? I have not taught a training since the pandemic started because it's all live classes. It's all only taught in person. And that's one of the reasons why it's people get it so quickly. It's because I think there's something to that analog experience.

I can look at somebody meditating and I can pretty accurately tell what their experience is like. I can't see that from a book. I can't really see it just from looking at their head, your portrait on Zoom. And so yeah, I've kind of carved a lane out for myself to be this a bit of a more higher-in premium experience meditation teacher. Okay. Now, I don't do guided meditations. I don't really do breathwork or anything like that. I think

those are all great as starter techniques, but ultimately you want to graduate to a silent practice that you're doing on your own without anybody telling you what to think about or how to imagine. Cool. You talk a lot about the power of being consistent and discipline. And it's something that I struggle with and it's something that I always think, oh, I don't have time, but I know it's just about prioritizing the time. But it is really impressive, but it also, I think I remember once someone telling me it was like some monk or somewhere and he was like, you know, routine is curative. And I'm like, yeah, but I don't like a routine. I don't want to be told what to do, but you

realize that why there's all these talks now about like the morning routine and getting it all, you know, making sure there's things that you do to set you up for success. And I feel like that's a lot of what you talk about, whether it's in your new book, The Daily Doses, or on your Instagram. But you weren't just born that way, right, light? You had to learn some of these things. No, I was not at all. And I don't even consider myself to be all that disciplined, to be perfectly honest with you. What I am good at, though, is being honest with myself. I've gotten a lot better at being honest with myself. So before, of course, I would take on too much and try to go cold turkey in certain areas and then swing back in the other direction with the vengeance. And now, as I'm a lot more mature,

I am able to see my flaws for what they are and accommodate for them and build in little stop gaps. And just an example of that is when it came to the book, my first book that I wrote, which is called The Inner Gym, a 30-day workout for strengthening happiness. I had been dragging my feet with these outlines and these chapters and these edits for almost four years, right? And I got so tired of thinking about this book and talking about the book and telling people

this book is coming, but it never was coming. That one day, I literally got out a sheet of paper and I composed a contract between me and a buddy of paper and I composed a contract between me and a buddy of mine. And I said, I am contracting myself to finish this book so that it's published ready by such and such date, which is probably like two months from that day. And here is a check for, I think it was $4,000, which was way more than I could afford to lose. And if I do not have the book ready to be published

by this date friend, you are obligated to take this check and cash it and spend it on whatever you feel inclined to spend it on. Wow. And I tell you all the excuses when I was out the window, all this time freed up, and I was all of a sudden. The accountability. Invested. Yeah, I invested myself in finishing this project. I knew that that's what I needed to do because otherwise, I would come up with the best sounding excuses.

That's the role. No, they're all real. Right, right? Yeah, like they're all real. Right. But that was really important. But they all went away. They all evaporated. And once I hit my friend that check with that contract, and it was completely out of my hands. God, that's brilliant. Yeah, tell me more about that.

I think it's just about being honest with yourself. And really, the only way to do it is to be dishonest with yourself so many times that you just can't even stand it anymore. So luckily, I've gotten to the life stage where I bullshit it myself so much that I just, I can't even tolerate my own bullshit anymore. And Elizabeth Gilbert talks about that. She's like, true change doesn't happen until you get so fed up with your own bullshit that you just can't take it anymore. And that's been my experience. So I'm in that category. I'm not in the discipline category.

I'm in the I'm so tired of bullshitting myself category that I can't take it anymore. I guess you're right. I understand that. That makes me feel like you're much more human, but you're right. Because I mean, our board very disciplined. Like if I don't do this thing, it will ruin my day.

And I've had to very carefully. And often times it does involve staff following up with me and making sure it happened and being accountable. because otherwise I'll just run rampant, just won't all happen. Well, here's the other thing, okay? Let's split it then, right? Everyone's disciplined at something, but the question is, is that being good for you is a good for the world, right?

So I would argue that somebody who is binge watching Netflix shows on a regular is disciplined at binge watching. I can't do it. I can't sit in front of television for hours, hours, hours, no matter how enjoyable the show is because I just don't have that level of discipline. But some people are like that. Some people are disciplined every Sunday. They're at brunch.

I can't do that either. I can't be on that kind of routine. So everyone has discipline with something. The question is, is it adding value to your life or not? No judgment, just asking the question. Is it adding value to your life or not? And if there's something holding you back, it's probably the fact that you're not being honest

with yourself about some aspect of your life that could be adding more value, but you're more invested in something that is not adding as much value into your life. So how do we find those things then? Research and development, just like the drug companies. You have to R&D, your R&D department. Yeah, you have to R&D your life split test. Seriously, right?

And eventually you'll get fed up. You get fed up eventually. If the system is rigged, the house is rigged, everybody gets fed up at some point. Some people may take 70 years, some people may take 20 years, but everyone will reach a point where they just can't take it anymore. And that's where change happens.

It's not about someone telling you, like I really think you should stop or I really think you should get organized or I really think you should, it's that we have to not be able to take it anymore. And that's the best step. Okay. Because we're the ones creating the very important sounding excuses.

Change is not going to happen until those excuses go away in my experience. Yeah, that's true. And a lot of the excuses are I don't have time. Yeah. I always get, and I've just learned to say in recent years, I used to say, well, I didn't have time. But I always get, and I've just learned to say in recent years, I used to say, well, I didn't have time. I was like, I often say, I haven't prioritized that yet in my life. I haven't prioritized it because that's so much more of the truth.

We all have 24 hours a day. And I just have to say, I haven't been able to prioritize it. It just makes me feel better in some ways than just saying out of time because I know it's a bullshit excuse. Don't you agree in a way? I don't have time is like Raiders of the Lost Art. It's like Star Wars. It's not real.

It sounds great. It's exciting to say I don't have time and I'm doing all this, but it's a fictional story that you create it to justify whatever dramas or adventures you find yourself on. And you know, and we all do it. How do we get out of that circle? How do we get out of that? I think we have to replace that story with another story that suits where we envision our lives going. So we have to buy into that story enough. And I really do feel like the script is embedded in our spiritual DNA.

And that's what we can talk about following our heart, listening to the stills, my boys. That messaging is coming from that script of our highest potential. And it's never gonna go away until we start to act upon it. The reason we don't act upon it is because it's never going to go away until we start to act upon it. The reason we don't act upon is because there's not as much certainty with taking a leap of faith as there is with, let me just watch these 15 episodes of this show because I know it's in beginning and there's an end and it's going to take me through the whole rollercoaster

and there's going to be this payoff at the end, hopefully. With following our heart, there's no obvious payoff to that, right? And there's all these cautionary tales of other people who have kind of half-assed pride to follow their heart, but then gave up or fell short or whatever. And we're in this society, which tells us that our happiness is not in following our heart, is in the next vacation and send the next paycheck or whatever. So we're fighting an uphill spiritual battle, most of us, and there's no cheerleader saying, keep going, you can do it, because everybody's on the same hill. Exactly.

So we're all exhausted. We keep looking down at the people partying down at the base of the mountain. We're thinking, well, maybe they have the answer. That's the answer, just to just don't put all this effort into it. Just, you know, life is short. I only live once. Let me just relax and chill and blah, blah, blah. The problem is we can't sleep at night.

Right. That's the issue. Right. No matter how comfortable you are, you can't sleep at night. So there's a correlation there between being fulfilled inside and being able to lay your head down on't sleep at night. So there's a correlation there between being fulfilled inside and being able to lay your head down on your pillow at night and fall asleep and wake up feeling refreshed and set up waking up feeling like you just landed in Shanghai and you have a whole day's worth of business meetings to

attend to. Like that's how most people are living their lives, which is why Starbucks is a $25 billion corporation. Right. We need the caffeine, we need the thing, we got to keep going all day every day. We're all functional stress addicts. We are. We're going to take a quick break when we come back late night, dive deep into how to find true happiness. I know you've written a lot about happiness too and finding your internal happiness and it has to come from within, but yet we think it's from getting that job, the boat, the car, the wife, the husband, the thing, the life.

And that doesn't give us happiness because it has to come from internal, our internal compass, following our internal joy, right? We got to cultivate it from the inside out. That's what she said. Yes. Yeah, you know, I look at, I think when people hear this from people like me named Light, they probably a lot of people made dismissing. Oh, he's one of those people. Who we were, who we were, airy fairy types doesn't believe in success and all that. That's not the message. I am not anti-promotion, Ferrari, orgasm, none of that. I'm pro-cultivate your happiness inside because we live in a world that is impermanent. And the Buddhists and the Eastern philosophers and sages and gurus have been talking about this

for time in the royal. Everything is changing all the time. And if you look at your day-to-day experiences and be honest with yourself, your so-called bad days are not days where someone is trying to kill you or where something really life or death happens to you. A bad day really is when you have a series of experiences that are really just different

variations of this impermanent world we live in, change. Things are changing in ways that are not aligning with your preferences. And if you can't adapt to those changes enough times throughout a day, then it starts to create this sort of suffering feeling inside, which is a lack of fulfillment, a lack of contentiveness. In other words, I wish something different

were happening than what I'm currently experiencing. And that's a bad day. I had a bad day today. So the next time somebody says I had a bad day, you go, okay, what happened? They're going to start listing off a series of things that changed that they could not adapt to. That's a bad day. Now, does that mean everybody on the planet who experiences those things are unable to adapt to them? And they also have a bad day? No, of course not. Some people are experiencing worse things, but they're adapting to them.

And you look at them in their life, and they're smiling, and they're joking, and they're finding the silver lining, and they're feeling optimistic. So that same type of thing that happened to you that caused the bad day could have happened to someone else. And that could have been the best day they've had in a long time because of the way they

adapted to it. So I think that's what it comes down to. Let's talk about that. Our choice in the moment when something happens, how do we decide what choices to make? You're kind of, you're seeing it as the glass have full instead of have empty, right? That's kind of like the same things can happen to people and it's how we interpret it in the moment throughout the day. Right, but here's the mistake we make. We are depending upon it to be an intellectual choice, right?

And I've written about this before, happiness in the, in the sort of spiritual community, people, oh, happiness is a choice to choose, be happy. I don't think it works like that. I don't think happiness is like, oh, I'm gonna instead of wearing a blue shirt, I'm gonna wear yellow shirt today. It's not like, it's not that easy.

I think happiness is more like doing a pull-up, right? What is Emily, can you do a pull-up? Sort of, sometimes. A full, a full extension pull-up. Probably not. From a dead hang. Yeah. For yourself. Chin over the bar. I might need a little help with my feet, but yeah, I'm pretty strong. So that I think I think happiness is like that.

I think people think about it. Okay, when the demand comes to be happy, I'll be able. I should be able to do it. You know, maybe with a little bit of help, I can, I can, I can knock that out. But with pull ups, it's not an arbitrary, you have to train to do that. Nobody can just jump up on a bar. You never done any kind of back exercises or arm exercises and you just pull yourself up. It's one of the most deceptively hard things to do.

But if you can do a pull-up, you are fit. If you can do five full extension pull-ups, you are a fit person, right? So happiness is like that. In the sense that you have to train the inner muscles that are responsible for you feeling content even in the face of discomfort, even in the face of the impermanent world that we live in. And the way to do that, of course, meditation is very, I would say meditation is the most efficient way to do that. Meditation is kind of like going to the pull-up analogy, it's kind of like having a band that you can put your knees in

that can give you support and you can push. So that way you kind of cultivate the muscles. So meditation is important and daily meditation is the only way to make meditation really pay off in the way that it's designed to. Every now and again I'm doing, following, you know, listening to what my body, I'm going to try this one week and then that next week. That's nice, but it's not going to think about meditation like your investments, right? It's the cumulative effect. It's being in the market every day over time that leads to the big dividends down the line. So what meditation does very, very well, probably better than anything else, is it counteracts stress. And stress is the reason why you can't get it up at night.

Right. That's when it comes down to, if we're talking about root causes here, we can, again, ESR cells, think it's about the quality of the mattress or the perfume, the person's wearing, no, it's stress. It comes down to stress. And meditation is a very powerful way. It's like kryptonite to stress. It comes down to stress. And meditation is a very powerful way. It's like kryptonite to stress. It does.

Yeah. Stress cannot survive in a deeply meditated nervous system. But here's the thing, we're getting stressed every day. Every day, where there's an incoming amount of stress. Just like every day, you get bills. The bills pile up. So your whole intention with being a working adult is to make sure you're in a profession

where you're getting more money coming in than you have money going out. And if you can do that, then you can have some pretty enjoyable experiences in life. If not, life becomes very unenjoyable and time consuming, you don't have time for anything, Everything is busy. So think about stress like that.

There's a stress debt that a lot of people have from childhood and from burning the candle at both ends as a young person. And then when you get to be like a mature adult in your 30s and 40s, you have this stress debt which usually starts to inhibit your ability to sleep at night, which is what we talked about earlier. So that's when people get really interested in meditation and they start doing it and guess

what the first positive symptom they experience is in almost every case, they can sleep at night. Why? Because the meditation burned off that stress that was causing them from being able to rest in a horizontal position. And so my job is really not to sell anybody on meditation because I think we're all pretty much sold these days. Yeah. I want to give it to you.

But help make the practice as accessible as possible so you stop talking yourself out of it. So you take it out of the chore category and you put it in the puppies and the Sunday brunch and the category with all the things that you like to do already. How do we do that? Put it in the category.

How do you make it fun? Like I've done TM personally. I've done three silent vipassas and overtrees over the years. I am better at the twice a day, but sometimes it's just once and then I beat myself up. It's not twice. But I know when it is the twice, it's two times a day, I feel so much better. Still of stress, still of anxiety, but I'm just clearer and it helps every other day

of my life. So, it's a key. So the key to accessibility with meditation is really about the relationship you have with your mind, with your thoughts. That's really, that's what it comes down to. Because most people will berate their mind, or I was going to use some kind of BSM reference but they'll whip the mind and treat the mind as though it's wrong for thinking thoughts. And what the masters are proficient at doing is making love to their mind, to treating their mind not like the enemy,

but as their beautiful partner in this meditation journey. And so because of that shift in their attitude, and that's really all it is to shift in your attitude, because there's nothing you can really do about it, you can't stop your mind by thinking about not thinking because that's a thought. But if you start to embrace the mind as perfect, whole and complete and not intellectually, but sensually, like you really feel that way,

what you're going to find over time is not going to happen all overnight. But over time, what you're going to find is that the thoughts become fewer and farther in between and the mind becomes more subtle. And then meditation becomes more enjoyable. Yeah. Well, let's talk about meditation and and relationships. I often hear from people, let's say, daily, who have a really hard time being in the moment during sex being present. And I would say, well, have you ever meditated your breath anchors you paying attention to the senses, your five senses in the moment that allows to ground you in the moment so you're not as distracted.

But what have you found? Like, how has meditation impacted relationships and people's sex life and intimate lives? I'm so glad you brought this up because I've had I've had a lot to say about this. I love it. Well, you know, I think there's a there's I wouldn't call it a misconception, but I think we put a lot of weight on the practice of meditation to improve our sex life or to improve our life in general in ways that aren't fully realistic. And I equate in this regard, I equate, it meditates you. It's kind of like, you know,

jiffy loop, it's like getting your oil changed in your car. Like it's, it's definitely a necessary maintenance thing to do, but it's not going to fix your transmission. It's not going to fix your carburetor if it falls out. So you still have to go to a little buy shop. A little bit. I'm a huge fan of loop. So it does fix a lot of things. I love a good loop. So I just want to make that disclaimer. So for myself, I've been meditating for 20 years. Am I some kind of sexual God because of that? No, I would never put myself in that category, but I'll tell you what has changed. What has changed is I have to have a connection with somebody in order to engage sexually with them. I can't do the whole casual family anymore. Like I used to back in the old days back in my premeditation days.

I mean, I was younger, but still it's just it's very clear to me. I have no there's no ambiguity around that. And here's the thing, even though I've been meditating, if I'm with somebody that I don't have a heart connection with, I can't get excited literally. I literally can't get it same. I literally can't get excited. But if I'm with someone who have a heart connection with, even if we have an argument or whatever, it's like I'm still engaged. I'm still invested literally and implicitly. And I would say that's been the biggest difference is that your body speaks to you in the same way that a roommate would speak to you. You just can't ignore it. Right. Right.

It's not that still small voice that people talk about in metaphysical circles. It's more of a loud annoying voice that you just, you have to hear it. You may not do anything about it, but you have to hear it. And what you choose to take action upon it or not is really up to you. After the break, I just like to get better at following your intuition and being your authentic self. Don't go away. Now, you talk a lot about this.

Following your inner guide, your inner tuition, like, or even more being more embodied, knowing that this person isn't resonating with me right now, I'm not going to feel that connection. But also, I mean, that's something that I'm always working on too. Like, I have all the answers. I have everything I need. What am I doing to sabotage that belief of following what I know to be true? So that's where split testing comes in. And it's going to be, it's going to take time just like if you're running Facebook ads, you're not going to find out overnight which was working best.

Right. You have to split test the voices inside. There's the, there's the intuition voice, there's the voice of fear, voice of pain, voice of social conditioning. All these voices are in there competing for your attention. And unfortunately, the fight flight voice is the loudest because that's when we give the most attention to. So the still small voices just trying to be heard and in order to allow that one to kind of over to to override the other pain voices and trauma voices and all that you just have to follow it in the little moments the baby steps follow it so an example I often

get is if you're an elevator if we've all had this experience you're an elevator we're one or two people and what are people doing an elevator they stare up or they stare down this experience, you're an elevator, we wanted to people, and what do people do in an elevator? They stare up, or they stare down, right? And if you're staring down, fine, that's what people do, and you notice the person next to you has these amazing shoes on. Don't keep it to yourself. Compliment that. Say, hey, those are really cool shoes.

That's a great choice, right? So that's your voice of intuition. That's your still small voice telling you that offering someone a compliment or an expression that helps to brighten their day and also helps you to feel connected to them. That stretches you out of your comfort zone. It's a small thing. Nobody can do it. It's a great point.

But it adds up. And that's what causes the voice to get louder and louder. If you do that a hundred times, then you're going to be able to take bigger leaps of faith and follow your heart in the bigger ways later on. Huh. I've never drawn that parallel between like that is actually trusting in the moment. I'm not overthinking it. I'm not editing it. I'm just like, you look great girl. That's awesome. I mean, obviously, you don't want to go up to the, you know, scary looking person and say, hey, how are you doing today? You know, you don't want to go up to the scary looking person and say, hey, are you doing today?

You don't want to start a conversation with someone who looks dangerous or whatever, but if someone, if the situation feels safe to you, and again, this is a feeling you have. Not some, hold the racism. That's all just intellectualizing things. That's not really your heart telling you those people are bad. It's your conditioning telling you that. That's the voice you want to override ultimately. So you have to start, that's how you start trusting that voice. And then you may find yourself maybe going up to a homeless person one day and saying, Hey, you know, because no one's ever really talked to this person or seen or made them feel seen or heard.

And you have a connection with them. You're not afraid because a lot of times just like with dogs, your fear attracts that fearful reaction, right? And that's what causes the drama. But if you're not afraid, you're confident in your own skin because you're now trusting your inner guidance, you know your inner guidance is not going to lead you into a dangerous situation. It's only going to lead you to situations that allow you to expand and grow, then that translates to the way you express and the energy that they feel coming from you, and that's going to create an otherwise harmonious situation out of two people who may not

have been harmonious otherwise had you not had you not embodied that feeling. So good way to put it. So going back to your previous question, meditation is important. Gratitude is important. You have to be grateful, right? Because gratitude keeps you present. If you're the moment you stop being grateful, you get yanked out of the present moment. Now you're in the future. Now you're in anxious. That's what anxiety really is. It's your, or you're remorseful. You're in the past. Why did I do this? Why do I think shame, remorse, now you're in the past, anxiety, panicking, you're in the future, worrying. That's not present moment awareness. So when you're not in the present moment, you're not lifting your baseline level of gratitude. You're in a situation where you're hoping that everything goes your way, which chances

are it's not going to go your way, which is only going to compound into this so-called bad day that you potentially are having, but being grateful. And sometimes you have to really dig in the bottom of the barrel to find the gratitude, you know? Yeah, can you give some good, because whenever I hear gratitude, people are like, oh yeah, I'm grateful. I got to do my gratitude journal at night, I got to be grateful. Like what's the way to get people? Because I know it really works for me, even if I'm going to bed at night, I'm like, what

are the three things that went well today that may be happy that we're good? I really try to do that practice because we can always find the shit wrong. Do you have a way of embracing gratitude? Is something that also becomes fun, just like your meditation practice. Okay. So here's an algorithm that I find that works really brilliantly. Right. Okay.

Take something awful that happened to you. All right. So I'll use myself, for example. I was with a girl one time. She got pregnant, right? I wanted to have the kid. She didn't want to have the kid. She got an abortion.

But the way she did it was very suspect, in my opinion, at the time of my life. Very difficult, challenging moment for me. In fact, I thought I was gonna be a father for several weeks, turn out not to be the case. So obviously you wouldn't wish that on anybody, on any side of that equation, right? But shit happens to everybody.

Everyone. And, and far worse. So what I say is take a situation like that, something really awful that happened to you. Not, not something that trauma ties as you to think about, right? If you're still working through it in therapy and you're, takes you into a state where you're psychotic or whatever, thinking about, that's not what I'm talking about. A situation that you've kind of healed from. A situation that you've already kind of worked your

way through. Take that situation, but it's not completely resolved. You may still find yourself to be a little bit of a victim from it like, oh, I wish that didn't happen. Some regret that you have from your past. Take that and then start reverse engineering the gratitude. Okay. So, I love your first engineering gratitude. Tell me more. In my example, you know, situations didn't work out. Okay. What's what what are my grateful for? I know I want to have a child. I know I want to want to be a father. That's that's something to be grateful for. I know for facts because of the way I felt. Yeah.

I have a greater appreciation for communications because I didn't feel like I communicated as well as I could have to keep that situation on the rails. I'm grateful for listening to my heart. When my heart said, I'll support this situation, even though it didn't go that way, I knew that I was capable of that, even though it didn't go that way, I knew that I was capable of that, even though I didn't really have a hard, hard evidence, because you don't really understand what you're committed to.

Right. Until something is on the line, right? So all those different aspects of that, of that challenging situation are reasons to be grateful. And if you can be grateful there, then it's a lot easier to say, oh, I'm grateful because I have pancakes this morning. I'm grateful because I have legs or I can see. And you know, those kind of more surface level as the gratitude.

So grateful for the lessons, yeah. Yeah, but then you can apply it to anything. And then hopefully the lag time starts to decrease so that when something crazy happens to you in the moment, you can just automatically switch into reverse engineering gratitude. What am I grateful for about this happening in this moment? Right?

And it's not about denying and all that. It's just about, you can do both. You can have the experience. You can go through it. You can fill the pain and whatever extent of grief you have. And you can find some semblance of gratitude which may keep you present enough to see an opportunity that's also in that moment. And that's where you start to find all the serendipity and all that.

That makes so much sense. It's like, because I know that like even in the last year, I made a lot of mistakes. I always make a lot of mistakes. I've made so many mistakes. I learn from them all the time. But there's one area particular where I keep going, I can't believe I did that.

But ultimately I see, I learned so much from this. On the moments where I'm tired, I'm going to bed at night or something triggers it. I'm like, yeah, but if I didn't make that mistake, I wouldn't be able to, I wouldn't have this problem right now. Sometimes it's really hard. But I guess there's got to be another way of like, yeah, if I didn't make that mistake, I wouldn't be able to, I wouldn't have this problem right now. Sometimes it's really hard, but I guess there's got to be another way of like, I learned so much by this process of trusting other people when I didn't trust my own gut. Oh, whatever it is.

I used to have this thing, this agreement with myself. And when I was a yoga teacher, I taught yoga for several years back in the day. And I'd have these big yoga classes, never obviously like really attractive women in class. And it's hard to not give them attention, right? As a straight male. Yeah, I've been in those yoga classes, I got a lot of corrections. Yeah, it's hard to not give them, but I had to deal with myself.

I said, if I, if I ever go and correct an attractive woman, then to balance that off, I have to find a hairiest sweaty guy and give him the same adjust, just to keep myself honest. I have to give him the same adjust. So it kept me from getting all, you know, how some of these teachers can be all touchy people. Oh, yeah. I've been in there because I didn't want to have to put my hands between the thighs of some hairy sweaty guy. But anyway, point is you can apply that same approach to gratitude, right? In other words, if things are going amazing in your day

or in your week and naturally you're grateful for that, like we're really good at taking credit from things going, oh yeah, manifested that. Put on my vision board. Yeah, grateful for that. Like, we're really good at taking credit from things go, oh, you have manifested that, put them on vision board. Yeah, I was positive. Yeah, this is what you have to do to make sure you can do the same thing. But we're so good at evading responsibility when it comes to the bad stuff that happens. But what if we took that same energy when good stuff happens

and we apply it to the worst things, in opinion the worst things that happened that week and we force ourselves To find the gratitude in that okay So you know you have a week where you get fired yeah, okay, I now have an opportunity to do exactly what my heart is telling me This job wasn't right for me. It wasn't right for me. Now I have time. There, like you just listed out. It doesn't mean that you necessarily even have to believe it fully. Even if you just believe the 20% right. That's enough to offset the suffering that comes from from being entrenched in, you know, why did this happen? You know, the kind of victim mentality, that we all are subject to come time to time. And then again, it's a practice, it's the pull up.

You have to practice, it's not gonna feel easy at first, but the more you do it, guess what? Doing one pull up is going to be easy one day, but doing five pull ups is gonna be hard. But then a year later, doing five is gonna be easy, but doing 10 is gonna be hard. And then next thing you know, you're going to jump up there and without even thinking about it, you're as light as a feather doing your 10 pull ups. And so you've developed the strength to be able to apply that level of happiness

to almost any situation. And so now only the big things knock you off your your balance or you know little things may knock you off temporarily for five minutes here for an hour there. But no longer will you have days where something happens to you for five minutes and it hijacks your entire month. That's what happens. It's the hijacking that's a problem. But you're saying it's a skill. I always say it's a skill set. It takes practice. It's a muscle. It's a problem, but you're saying it's a, it's a, I always say, well, it's a skill set. It takes practice. It's a muscle. It's a muscle. You got to build it from like communicating with your partner

to masturbation practices late. This has been fabulous. I could talk to you for hours. I know. I'm going to ask you the five questions we ask all of our guests. They're quicky questions. So you don't have to. Love a good, quicky.

This was our quicky. Biggest turn on. Oh, biggest turn on is self-awareness. Biggest turn off. The lack of self-awareness narcissism. What makes good sex? Connection, heart connection. Something you would tell your younger self about sex and relationships. Go for inner beauty. As much as you go for outer beauty. What's the number one thing you wish everyone knew about sex? That if you really care about someone, it's so much better. Oh, try it without alcohol. Oh, yeah. And your system or any altering substance.

Sober sex is the best sex. I agree. I bless you. Oh, thank you so much, Lightwalkins. Okay. So your book's coming out. Tell us all the things. How we look and find you. Get on your plan. Tell us all the book is called. Get on my plan. Knowing where to look, 108 daily doses of inspiration. You can find all the information. Booksellers at lightwackins.com. I'm at Lightwackkins on all social media platforms that matter. I have to retreat, so I'm starting that back up. And I'd love to meet you and connect with you digitally or in person.

Okay, amazing. Thank you so much for being here. You are wise and inspirational. And this is really going to help all of our listeners. Thank you. Appreciate listeners. Thank you. Appreciate you. Thank you. That's it for today's episode.

Thanks for listening to Sex with Emily. Be sure to like, subscribe, and give us a review wherever you listen to podcasts, and share this with a friend or a partner. Believe me, if you got something out of this episode, they will, too. We released two to three episodes a week. Find me at Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. It's all at Sex with Emily.

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