In today’s podcast I am joined by my great friends, Benjamin and Azrya Bequer- Co-Founding Stewards of BEQOMING. We delve into the contents of their new book,BEQOMING: Everything You Didn’t Know You Wanted. This episode focused on the intricacies of relationship, and specifically how Benjamin and Azrya deepened their union at quantum speed. We explored the available tools for deepening bonds, the relationship between safety and freedom, and how fear is our ultimate ally. This powerful quote kicked off the podcast and was woven into the entirety of this conversation; “We are alive only to the degree of which we are willing to be annihilated”. 

AUBREY: Benjamin and Azrya, yes! I love looking across the table and seeing people that I know so well, because then I know that I can get deep. I can crawl inside, deep on the insides here and figure things out together, which I'm really excited to do. I wanted to start with a quote that you have early on in your book and it's a quote from Glennon Doyle. And the quote is, "We are alive only to the degree to which we are willing to be annihilated." Those are some powerful words. Why did you guys choose to put those words at the start of your book?

AZRYA: When we read her book, "Untamed", the way that she shared her story was so descriptive, and so up close and personal, like you're there with her in the moment. I think that book came to us, as we were starting to really go into another significant rewrite of our book. What we discovered in our journey of this book, which we rewrote four times, and your feedback, largely influenced one of the bigger rewrites, but what we really learned was the distinction between showing and telling, from a linguistic perspective. Showing is: my heart is racing and sweat is beading on my forehead. I reach for the doorknob, and I turn it around, and I walk through the door, and I saw the thing. That's the kind of descriptive language that really brings someone into the present moment with the character, which is much more interesting. Then telling is much more removed: He was a little bit nervous, and he walked up to the door, and he opened the door, and he walked through. There's a very different energetic, right?

AUBREY: One is much more vulnerable than the other.

AZRYA: Exactly, one is much more vulnerable. Her book was a really beautiful example of showing language, while also still weaving powerful concepts that were more universal that could apply to other people throughout. I think that was a source of inspiration for the rewrite, because our book was heavy on the telling. It felt like we were telling a lot of stories about our life, but we weren't creating the emotional impact that we knew was available there. That was one reason. Then the quote itself, I just love the way it's worded. And it really encompasses so much of what draws us, and I'll speak for both of us, because I think that's okay. 

BENJAMIN: Because you always do.

AZRYA: Yeah, what draws us to the work we do, which is really deep transformational work, shamanic work, all of which is in service to being more alive, and all of which requires us to annihilate, and let die the parts of ourselves that are no longer serving the version that we are becoming. So that quote perfectly summarized the whole spectrum, I think, of what it is that we are most excited about and passionate about in our work.

BENJAMIN:  I think another quote at the end of the last third of our book is, "Die before you die," which is Brian Muraresku quote. I think it's just the willingness to let parts of yourself die, is what allows you to grow. We've embraced death in a big way with the work that we do. And I think both of those quotes are supportive of that.

AUBREY: It really speaks to this larger theme of all of our lives in which ecstasy is on the other side of our vulnerability. You can play it safe and you can even falsely show an avatar of yourself, which is basically telling the world what you want the world to see. I'm going to tell you about me, even the way I carry myself, the way I answer questions, the way that I talk to you, I'm going to tell you what I want you to hear. But showing is a much different thing because if you're really showing somebody and showing them the truth, then you will be judged for who you really are. I think that's what's scary is we live in a world where judgment is so fast, and so easy, snap judgement, and we see it everywhere, people cancelling each other, this whole idea of show me this little glimpse of this thing, and you're fucking out, you're done. I think we're inherently afraid of that so we've learned ways to play it safe, maybe even from our parents, where we know that there's some truth but we don't want to show that because we'll get punished for that. But we can tell something different. It doesn't even have to go all the way to dishonesty, but it can be telling our own internal compliance, telling our own, these things, whereas showing vulnerability often gets punished. If you're living in that world, you're just playing this game with maybe, arguably less risk but definitely less reward. That ecstasy that comes on the other side of vulnerability is not going to be available, unless you just lay it out there and open it. I think you guys did a great job embodying that in the book, and it reminded me, as I was reading, there's a couple different parts and we'll get to this where you had certain people who were concerned about what was in the book, because you talk about a relationship you had with... You're married, and you had a relationship with another woman, named Mars. There's some things in there that more conservative people may not have liked. And then you talk about your psychedelic medicine use. We'll talk about that too. Some people may not have liked it. I think it was Stephen King who said, "For every single individual person, that if you're worried about reading your work, your work is 10% less good." And I think you guys did a great job of being like, "You know what, we'll have these hard conversations, we'll have some of our..." One of your good buddies is like, "You're a fucking druggie. Fuck you." And parents are like, "What are you guys talking about? This is crazy." But you went for it, really went for it. And I think the freedom that is going to be the reward, the coming alive, is then the reward of this. It's just a really powerful theme that dives through all of our lives and especially what you're offering here.

BENJAMIN: We were pretty strategic about it as well. We didn't let my mom read the book, for example, until after it was already too late to change anything, it was locked and loaded and off to the printer. We knew there was going to be some trigger there. But at the end, we call it the choiceless choice. There wasn't a choice to censor it. We tried to be as compassionate as we could, but also be extremely truthful and honest in the storytelling. But we were also very strategic about when people, for example, at the end of the book, we have bonus material; the audio book; where we interview the different people in the book, my mom, my daughter, my ex-wife, my best friend, and the audio with my best friend, we couldn't even use because it just did not flaw. It was like water and oil. It was a really difficult time. But at the end, because we went there, it also allowed for some real healing, with all those relationships. I think that today, we're on the other side of that, and we're in a much better place for it.

AUBREY: You guys start off, the book comes out fucking hot. It's a beautiful story because people are reticent to talk about their sex life. We're in this strange neo-puritanical world where everybody's starting to celebrate sex but don't talk about yours. Yes, yes, sex in general, beautiful, except in all of these other circumstances, except in these circumstances where it's bad and predatory and misogynistic and patriarchal, but then there's the good one, then there's the sacred one. But still, nobody's like, "Yeah, this is how we do it. And this is how we fuck our way open." And you guys just go fucking, "Alright, let's go!" Let's not leave the audience with bated breath. Let's tell that initial story where you actually reclaim something very important in your sexuality through meeting Benjamin.

AZRYA:  For sure. We thrust the reader into this very potent moment.

AUBREY: Nice word!

AZRYA:  And we did it because that moment was a pivotal turning point in both of our lives, the kind of turning point that changes you forever. I'll give a little bit of backstory. Basically, Benjamin and I met two weeks prior to this moment. We met in Los Angeles through a mutual friend and there was this chemistry right away. He had already planned a trip to go to Tulum, to attend the summit conference, and he invited me along with him. We're very new, there's this crazy chemistry. He's, for sure, unlocking things in me sexually, that I'd never experienced before. But there was also a lot of hesitation, from a logical side of us, like, "Are we really compatible right now at this moment in our lives?" I had just come out of an almost 10-year-long, monogamous relationship, I'd only ever been in monogamous relationships. And I felt like, after 10 months of celibacy, this was my time to really taste the rainbow, as I said on the last podcast, get out there. And he was like, "I've been tasting the rainbow for like the last 15 years straight. I'm good on the rainbow."

AUBREY:: I am your rainbow, baby!

AZRYA: Pretty much. So he's ready to claim and build a life and all the things. Fast forward to this moment, we spent a little bit extra time in Tulum living and we're on the beach, and it's like a beautiful sunny day, and we decide that we're going to drop some LSD together. I give a little context for those who aren't maybe in the world of the psychedelic plant medicine space, but LSD has--

AUBREY:  If you are out there, listening to my podcast and you're not in that space, this is for you.

AZRYA: Exactly. We're not going to make a blanket assumption, right?

AUBREY: That's right, that's good. That's smart.

AZRYA: So LSD is not something that we work with very often. It has a time and place, I think. Out of the--

AUBREY: And just to be clear, I've never found that time and place with LSD.

AZRYA: Really? 

AUBREY: Personally, I've done it in a variety of different situations, micro, macro, medio whatever, outside, inside, with friends, alone. I haven't found it. But I know for many people--

AZRYA: Interesting.

BENJAMIN: Everyone has their medicine. 

AUBREY: It's really interesting. We're all radically unique beings, and also radically the same. But listening to yourself and listening to what is. Doesn't mean that I've closed the door, either. But yeah, interesting, though. But anyways, obviously works for you in certain situations.

AZRYA: Yeah, and we set an intention and we ingested the medicine and it really was medicine for us. Basically, it was starting to kick in. And Benjamin was reading "The Second Mountain", which is a book that has inspired a lot of our journey by David Brooks. He was right on the chapter around marriage and commitment. My mindset was more like, marriage feels like a really outdated patriarchal system of control and property. It doesn't really feel like something that is really--

BENJAMIN: That's exactly how it works.

AZRYA: He's like, "No, you're not mistaken."

AUBREY: You were right all along, actually.

AZRYA: I'd ever had the dream of getting married one day and wearing the white dress and all of that. I was like, "I want to really question relationship dynamics." LSD, and really, all psychedelics, I would say, one of the reasons why I love them so much is they just annihilate, to use that word again, these parts of yourself that are stuck to certain ideas of what things should be. All of that was starting to melt away as we were reading this chapter together. The words were hitting me at a really deep level. And it was talking about the power and the beauty of making one choice. Instead of thinking that freedom is having infinite choice, that one choice is actually the ultimate freedom. There were so many ways in which he was wording that that was just really resonant, and really powerful. At some point, Benjamin excuses himself to go to the bathroom--

AUBREY: Let's take a pause on this because there's a tangent that I want to go down that I think is really valuable to go down and we'll leave people with the cliffhanger of where the sexy story is going.

AZRYA: Perfect.

AUBREY: I've been really thinking about the nature of freedom, because this is, I'm writing a new book, and I know that I've talked a lot about me writing a book, but this one's really going to happen. I finally figured it out. One of the core sacred desires that we all have, is to be free. We crave being free, and we crave being free from a very primitive way in which we identify, part of what we are is the boundless energy, boundless source energy, lots of ways you can say that but energy itself, which is just emanating in infinitude from source. But if you do that, and there's no binding element to that, then it's just homogeny. It's just God in its unicity state, without any interference without any boundary, there's just one, it's one, and which is beautiful, but it's one. And that's a little boring. So then introduce the mother, also known as the matrix, matrix, which is actually a derivative of mother, mater, in Latin. The matrix is all of the sacred geometry, everything that can be created. Energy infuses into all of this matrix of all the sacred geometry, of matter, and all of the organization of how everything is organized and divided. And all of the sudden, unlocks infinite creativity. So yes, we have this deep drive for freedom, which is part of us identifying as energy, as source energy. But without some container, the chalice, the matrix to be held, it's boring. We don't have the creativity to create within that container. So it's been interesting for me to like, explore, oh, yes, you need both. To really be free, for the divine to be free, it needed to be constrained by matter. For us to be free, for art to exist, art needs a constraint otherwise, it's all paint, all color, all light, all sound, it's no longer music, it's no longer a painting, it's everything. But you add constraint and all of a sudden, it's like there's real freedom.

BENJAMIN:  It also depends on your definition of freedom.In the same book that David Brooks wrote, he talks about how the ultimate freedom is actually choosing something fully. And so if you can imagine how much energy we spend, say, searching for a partner, or many partners, and when you decide to actually choose one fully, imagine all the freedom that that frees up in your system, because all that energy can now be focused into other areas of your life. It also depends on how you look at freedom, because--

AUBREY: Freedom for, which is freedom for the creation of this new thing, which is now available and freedom from all of the other distractions. It's another way to look at it. And another aspect of freedom that I've been really meditating on is that we're only free to the degree at which we're safe. Safety and freedom are on a continuum. And the moment we're not safe, we're no longer free. There's all kinds of interesting studies with kids in playgrounds, where when the kids feel safe, because there's a clearly defined fence, and they know that they're being watched and the fence is there, they fucking explore the whole playground. But if there's no fence, and it feels a little shady, the kids huddle together. So while they're even more free, they could go even farther, they could just run and not stop running, they don't, because they don't feel safe. And that's the same with us. Even in this whole COVID situation, people are like, "Freedom" and some people like, "Safety!" But really, it's just a matter of, okay, we're all for the same thing. Everybody's for freedom. But some people don't feel safe to step outside without a mask, so they don't feel free. They don't feel safe to go outside without a vaccine, so they don't feel free. They still want freedom. It's just that some people feel safer than other people. What I've discovered with Vylana is the safer our container gets, the more wildly free we are because we feel loved, we feel safe. And that's the biggest fear, right? The fear is that we're not going to be loved. Because that's another one of our sacred desires, like to be loved and to be seen. Then all of a sudden, that safety gets so strong, and then our whole orientation is like wow, I'm really free to go because I'm going to be loved no matter what. I'm going to be loved if I fucking fail this business, if I fuck this thing up, if this lawsuit goes poorly, if this thing goes bad, if my crazy shaman tells me that I can't have sex for six months, I'm safe and therefore, I'm free to choose all of these different things, little threads that we'll talk about, obviously. I'm foreshadowing some more of the book. It's really cool to explore how we want freedom, but we don't really understand freedom to the fullest extent. And I think that's what you were saying ultimately, is "Fuck, I want freedom." Of course, you still want freedom too but then you guys came to this realization like wait, maybe there's even more freedom in the safety and in the commitment of this union. But you weren't quite there yet. You were still figuring it out. But, of course, it makes sense that now you're in, and I would say, knowing you guys as dear friends, you probably felt the most free you've ever felt because you're the most loved you could ever possibly be. And that's opened a lot up. But at this point, at this point, taking some LSD, trying to figure that out, trying to explore what all this meant.

AZRYA: Yeah, trying to figure that out. There's so many things I could say to what you just shared.

AUBREY: And feel free, we got time. 

AZRYA: Maybe there's different phases of your life where you want different things. I think I was at a phase, at that moment in my journey, where the idea of making a commitment to someone felt very unsafe. Even though it feels like logically, it would be the opposite, but uniquely, where I was in that moment, that felt unsafe. And also because of some of my programming and my patterns around commitments, and not not being able to be the person that I once was for people and then destroying them and breaking their hearts or at least that was the story that I created, being the heartbreaker, there was this real fear of, if I let myself go here, like, here's this man who's inviting me into this profound depth of connection, and I want to lean in, everything in me wants to lean in, but I'm also not feeling safe to fully lean in, because I'm afraid of the consequences of what leaning in would mean. All of that was present and then the book was hitting those chords and then the LSD was  opening my heart and ripping away all my ego attachments, so what I thought I wanted, and then the weather shifts, and so he's inside in the bathroom. And all of a sudden, it's like this gorgeous, clear day, bright blue sky. One second to the next, the storm rolls in, tropical storm and starts raining. And these thick clouds come and everyone just grabs their stuff and runs inside. And I'm like, "Oh, hell no, I'm not going inside." I take off my bikini top, I go to the edge of the water, and I'm standing there now on a deserted beach by myself. Benjamin comes back and he stands next to me and he's like, "We're going in". So we get in the water and the waves are churning and we're like peeking now, it's just this most insane experience. And then we head back to the room. I walk into the room. It's this little cabana.

AUBREY: Didn't he say, "Hang on here, I'm going to set up a surprise for you"?

AZRYA: No, that's when he allegedly went to the bathroom, he had already gone and done that. So I didn't know. I didn't know anything. He was well ahead of the game.

AUBREY: You were preparing something magical.

AZRYA: So I walk in and the whole room is illuminated with candles. And I can tell something's up and he walks up to me, and he hands me a blindfold. And he basically says, do you want to say in your own words, baby? This is what we do in the book, we go back and forth, so might as well.

BENJAMIN: I handed her the blindfold, and I said, "If you accept this, then you are agreeing to fully surrender to me." And then I basically tell her the rules. I say, "The rules are, you can emote emotion, you can moan, you can scream, you can do whatever but you can't say a word. And if you do, the experience is over and we'll not begin again under any circumstances." We're two weeks into a relationship. We barely know each other. I had straps and the whole setup. 

AUBREY: Did you have one of those mobile bondage things that goes under the mattress and then hooks up on the other side?

BENJAMIN: Exactly, 

AUBREY: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Those are good. Those are good. Those are good suitcase packers.

BENJAMIN: I've surprised her a few times with those.

AUBREY: There's also the ones that go over the door and then you can have little straps to the door, there's some interesting things you can do. You don't need a dungeon, everyone. Just letting you all know. Just pack things in a nice little bundle and make all kinds of surprises.

AZRYA: You can get very creative.

AUBREY: Well, what's interesting here, and I'll let you guys finish this story is that we're going to be moving into another realm where safety and freedom are actually counterintuitive. Because we're talking about restraints and a blindfold. You're restricting. You're not free to see. You're limited in what you can say. And you're going to be tied.

AZRYA: Yeah, I'm being dominated.

AUBREY: And in that experience, you're going to find a freedom that you've never felt. Again, this same metaphor of whoa, freedom isn't actually what I thought it was.

AZRYA: Exactly.

BENJAMIN: I think what is more empowering than surrendering... Because it's one thing to be tied up against your will--

AUBREY: Not free!

BENJAMIN: It's another thing to voluntarily surrender. What more empowered position can someone be than to voluntarily surrender into that? And I think that also, it's interesting what you say about the safety and the freedom piece. I'm wondering, both in the sexual contents, and even when you say, at that point in time, you didn't feel safe to lean into a commitment. But in life, that's also a big turn on. 

AZRYA: It's a huge turn on.

BENJAMIN: And if it would have been safe to lean into it, there might not have been the polarity there.

AZRYA:  Absolutely and I was going to say that too, that yes, of course, we want safety but we also want risk, we want danger and we want to be pushed past our edges, right out of our comfort zones. I certainly wanted that. 

BENJAMIN: You're welcome.

AZRYA: But I hadn't met anyone who could do that because I was generally the person, as a coach and a facilitator, I was often holding people in that scenario where I was more of the container and pushing people past their edges, not in a sexual context, but in their consciousness, in their spiritual journey and their healing process. So I was very used to being that for people and people would lean into me, but I hadn't really met anyone at that point who could just render me speechless like literally and give me this. And because he was so clear, there was no part of him that was questioning his capacity to execute this experience--

AUBREY: This is so clutch. You can't go in this like, "Hey, so," and your voice gets a little higher--

AZRYA: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're nervous. 

AUBREY: Maybe, I was thinking like, maybe if you wanted, like, you could put this blindfold on and like, maybe I'll tie up your arms? 

AZRYA: That's not a safe space.

AUBREY: You would inherently go like, "No." We'll talk about it maybe down the road. But there's an energy of that. There's an energy of when you trust yourself, and you trust yourself with that, that surrender from someone, from anyone, doesn't matter who it is, could be a child, could be a lover, when someone surrenders to you, you have to trust yourself. That's the beauty of this power exchange dynamic is you're really learning how to trust. The one surrendering is learning to trust the other and trust themselves to make that choice. But the one who's being surrendered to is learning how to receive radical trust and how to actually hold that radical trust and not abuse that radical. Know yourself, know that you're going to guide this. It's a deep service that you actually get into because of how gracious the one surrendering what they're offering. A goddess is offering her entirety. Well, I better show up in my God right now and not overstep this thing, because the whole thing can crumple into a ball of weird--

AZRYA: Trauma.

AUBREY: Trauma.

AZRYA: Trauma and drama. 

AUBREY: Really quickly. So it's this deep practice in trust, and there's so much that goes there. But when it goes right, like this one did, how did that experience go for you, Azrya. 

AZRYA:  And for those of you who have had the experience of being on LSD, that's intense, just by itself, but then when you're like, strapped, spread eagle, butt ass naked in a bed, and you can't see anything, and this is brand new--

BENJAMIN: You can't say anything.

AZRYA: And you can't say anything. And words, of course, are my safe, happy place. I can verbally talk myself out of any situation.

AUBREY: Or into.

AZRYA: Or into. But he took that away from me. That was really, for sure, the most incredible state of because, what you said is so true, I can only trust him to the degree that he trusts himself, but because his trust in his ability to facilitate that experience was so unwavering and I think that's the word that summarizes the draw and the attraction to him, in general, is this unwavering essence that he has, it just allowed me to open and just go. Go to places, physically, that I had never gotten before in both the pleasure and the pain, thresholds. It was--

AUBREY: And those two things weave and they start to get real blurry. They start to be like, whoa, pleasure and pain and then it's sensation, different key strokes on the same organ, playing a different note.

BENJAMIN: When you make that transition from something being painful to pleasurable, it's next level ecstatic.

AZRYA: Yeah, it felt like I went beyond time. I went to a different place.

AUBREY: Transient hypofrontality. Benjamin, you are more in what a classic flow state would be. This is what the research says about power exchange. You drop into a flow state, you drop into transient hypofrontality. But in a more closed colloquial sense, what you experience is the submissive gets to surrender completely to the ecstasy of the divine, which is what we all deeply crave. Let me surrender completely and feel ecstasy. We can find that in a plant medicine ceremony, but you can also find it in sexuality. I think this is this big reclamation that's coming, the medicine of sex. And then as the as the one in the dominant role, you get to feel what it's like to fuck as God,  with unlimited power. What do I do to fuck as God with unlimited power and feel that ecstasy? And then both are like these massively ecstatic states, which have been relegated to like, yeah, it's kinky, and you can materialist reduce it down to all of these different mental states, but it's much bigger than that.

AZRYA: So much bigger.

BENJAMIN: I think too, also, the other piece is the psychedelics. I think a lot of people out there would really frown on the fact that we're using psychedelics in this way. But what psychedelics have done in recreational ways, and in ceremonial ways, both, they've allowed us to just continuously let the walls down. And so that experience, that night was a beautiful, profound ceremony of sorts. But when we finished that two weeks in the relationship, we basically went all in, or at least where we thought was all in at that point. Like, we just leaped six months in time, in that experience that we had, because beyond words, the surrendering and the trust that was built in that experience was profound. And so we leapfrog and then also, in ceremonial context, the use of ayahuasca in our relationship has been profound. We've been in a relationship for two and a half years, it feels like we've been together 20 years, and the way we navigated some of our challenges was really special, and allowed us to move at quantum speed.

AUBREY: I think we have to rewrite a lot of these narratives around psychedelics and something like this experience, because you want to talk about a sacred container? To me, the way that I'm looking at the world, and yeah, recently, I've been studying with this erotic mystic who's tracing the lineage back from the temples of Solomon and how Shekhinah, the goddess divine herself is a representation of eros, this desire, the allurement between subatomic particles, between people, this craving from one to the other, and to use medicine as a doorway to give you access to this deep, deep eros, deep presence of where you're completely rooted in the moment and there's not another fucking thought in the world, that you're just there with that one person. And you're building ecstasy together and learning the alchemy of all of these different feelings of pain, to pleasure of control, to service, to all of this, that's, like, the most sacred container. And it's just so interesting, we have all of these rules and rigidity around it. But I think now is the time for this new consciousness to emerge. No, stop! Stop with it has to be sacred, noble. There's a place for all of that. Sit on your mat and deal with your shit and don't say anything. I'm all for that too. It's not like it's not an either, or situation, but to reclaim the sacred in that sexual experience or just pleasure itself. One of the things that I also hate is people are like, "Yeah, I took mushrooms and I just laughed all the time with my friends. I'm not doing it right." What the fuck do you mean you're not doing it right? That's so right! What vibration is higher than ecstatic laughter? It's an orgasm with different spasms, and you're doing it over and over again, setting that intention.  I want to cultivate that. I want to have straight up, the whole purpose of this whole ceremony is to fucking laugh. I've had some amazing, beautiful, life-shifting medicine journeys, but the ones that I really remember the most, like man, that was a good fucking day, the ones where I'm laughing or making love. I remember the other ones, and they're great and they've changed my life, shifted everything. Typically, they're usually pretty hard before they get to that state. But I think back to my bright moments. If I looked at a heat map of my memories. It's like, oh, yeah, that one day where we just could not stop laughing about my homie trying to butter this piece of bread and we're just dying and rolling on the floor, just coming off a mushroom trip. It was so full of joy. In the hard moments, in the challenging times, we all have those fucking times, we'll think back to that ecstatic lovemaking, and that ecstatic laughter and that question of is it worth it? That question doesn't even come, because you'll be like, "Oh, yeah, remember that time? I wouldn't miss that time. I wouldn't miss that time for fucking anything." And how valuable is that? Let's reclaim our pleasure and our laughter and our eroticism.

AZRYA: Absolutely. I'm fully with you. That's why we chose to kick the book off with--

AUBREY: I know! And that's why I love it.

AZRYA: Taking people right into that moment with us, because it was that pivotal moment. It was like a ripple in the quantum field of our lives. It was okay, you're now on a timeline together. You were terrified, five minutes ago, and now here you are, and you see each other  through this lens of truth. A lot of times I think people, especially people who have not had personal experiences with psychedelics or plant medicines, they're like, "Well, you're on some kind of drug." It's this fake or--

BENJAMIN: Altered state?

AZRYA: Well, yeah. It's not a natural state. You're taking something external to change your state. My experience is that my ego's delusions in my day to day life are actually the unnatural state.

AUBREY: We're drunk all the time. And occasionally, we get sober with some help with some substances. Exactly.

AZRYA: These substances actually take away the distortions from just my conditioning and my programming and my negativity and my judgment, and allow me to see what's really there, which is perfection, and beauty and truth. I think that that's an important thing to realize that those moments are anchor moments. The work is to find our way home there in our day to day life. We don't want to be dependent on peak experiences. We don't want to feel like our sex is mediocre when we're not tripping balls, we want to have that level of communion and connection and intimacy at 7:30am, on a Wednesday morning before the first Zoom call. We want to be able to find that place, even if it's not as dramatic, even if it's not as book-worthy, but we want to find that same level of I fucking see the divine in you and you see the divine in me. And our bodies are just vessels for us to be able to merge our divinity in this moment.

BENJAMIN: And it's stripped us down to the point where, two weeks into the relationship, we were planning our entire lives together, we were like we're writing a book, we're building a retreat center, we're launching this platform. Four months into the relationship, we were buying gorgeous property to house transformational retreats. And then a month later, we decided to throw a housewarming party that was actually a surprise wedding. So in five months, we just went quantum and it just stripped us off of all the walls and allowed us to move at really quantum speed. It was a really valuable tool that allowed us to get beyond all that.

AUBREY: A couple of thoughts. One is if you don't have experience, particularly with entheogenic medicine, like MDMA, or MDA, or one of these really hard-opening medicines, and you take that with somebody, and you've never done that before, be a little careful. Be a little careful, because you might be like,  "Holy shit, I fucking love you!" And you've never felt that before. And then you can get a little confused.

AZRYA: They might not be your soulmate.

BENJAMIN: I don't think you start there. And I also don't think that psychedelics are for everyone. And I think that you need to really know, if you're in the frame of mind to be able to support that. If you're really struggling with PTSD, there are certain times where, if you're going to go there, you want to have a trained professional with you. 

AUBREY: Always important, to put that caveat out there, and that other caveat of just being mindful. But both of you guys had plenty of experience with both medicines and meeting people. You were able to use that field of reference and be like, "No, no, no." I could do this with any variety of different people, it doesn't yield the same result. It's not the drug that's creating this kind of connection, it's opening ourselves to the truth of what this connection actually really is. That's, I think, important to understand is that this could facilitate some weird matches. That's happened with Vy where one day on MDMA set her up for a couple years of hell in different situations. 

AZRYA: Really?

AUBREY: It is important to like, all right, if you don't have a lot of experience, let's be mindful of that situation, but I want to go back to another thing, because there's certain things that we say that... I'm just in this mode where I want to question and challenge everything. The challenge was something like, let's say MDMA. Is there, even though they've done a lot of good studies on the neurotoxicity level being minimal and a lot of the downside of it, is not what it was purported to be in the '80s, where it's rotting your brain and something like that. We're not even talking about MDMA here. But people say the goal is to do it on your own. All of us take supplements, and a lot of us are on hormone-replacement therapy. A lot of us are woven in with exogenous, extrinsic. We are inextricable from our environment. And a lot of these medicines are part of our environment, a lot of people are microdosing on a regular sustained basis. So the idea that, yeah, you can do it on your own, I think it's helpful to be able to get there and certainly super important, you don't want to be dependent on anything; that's like an addiction. But also, it's okay. Just be really mindful. What's the cost-benefit? It's just a weird world to me, where someone can say, "Oh, yeah, take one Prozac every day," or five, I don't know what the fucking dose is. You can take five Prozacs a day but wait a minute, you're using psychedelics to access bliss states once a week? Figure that out on your own. But if you're depressed, go talk to your doctor. Maybe not. Be really mindful of the cost-benefit. No, it's very easy to become unglued. 

There's some risks, there's some legit risks, physiologically, psychologically, spiritually, there's risks, and you have to be very mindful of it. But not to just take for granted that these things are somehow only just a tool to get you somewhere maybe. These are woven into our lives in this way that's like, okay, this is a part of life in a really beautiful way.

AZRYA: Terence McKenna said it, he's like, "If you drink a cup of coffee, or you have a piece of chocolate, you're altering your state," and these are ways that we've just accepted in our culture are totally normal, and they are integrated into the fabric of our lives. I think, for me, chocolate or coffee in moderation, there's only so much of it, that's really going to serve me.

BENJAMIN: You can have too much chocolate?

AZRYA: I know, this is a really big shocker for you.

BENJAMIN: I learned something in this podcast.

AZRYA: No but for me, my body, when I take a psychedelic substance, there is a cost energetically. I feel it the next day, or I feel that the next couple of days. I'm very mindful of that, because I actually love my sober state, I really do. And I've worked hard to get to a place where I do. For me, there's a really particular time and place, because it has a cost and I think it should. Because if it didn't have any costs, then the--

AUBREY: Well, what if it didn't? What if it didn't? What if it legitimately didn't have a cost? The thing is, it's still mildly ascribing to this idea that it's somehow not a real thing.I am fully on board with don't fucking plug me into a computer and give me some fake blue pill alternate reality nonsense. I want the real fucking thing. I don't even believe that that's even possible, first of all. I'm not a technologist and this idea that we're going to be able to recreate reality and all its divinity by some fucking Metaverse thing. I don't care. I'm just not a believer. Prove me wrong. Great. I'll look forward to it. But ultimately, I just wonder if there aren't ways to actually just use our environment, use this type of technology in a way to just really support us. I don't have a solution. I don't think it exists. I'm just philosophically opening the mind to this idea of maybe there will be tools and maybe. There's things like this heartbeat device that's still, it's not as strong as it could be, but shifts your brainwave patterns and has bliss patterns that it can go in and maybe, one day, that gets on a watch and it's you, it's fully you, but you're just in this more enlivened and loving state. I'm open to these, I'm open to this possibility of augmented true reality. It has to be true. That's like the litmus test, but an augmented true reality because I never feel more myself than when I'm in one of these states, whether I've gotten there through breath work or time in nature or a fast or just making love or whatever. I'm open to a reality in which this is just so woven into the fabric, it becomes a part of who I am and a part of my existence. Again, I don't have a plan for this. I don't think it exists necessarily yet, or at least we haven't figured it out. But I'm open. I'm open to this world in which we'd throw out all of these other rules and not say it's better if you get there on your own or not. It's better if you get there on your own if it's better and it may be better but it may not be. Whichever way works, use, throw out all the old rules and say is it? Is this true? Is this better or is this not better? But maybe this is just me in my own state where I am now like, I don't want to accept anything. I want to think about everything that I say, and be like, "What if there was a medicine that I could take, a psychedelic medicine, that just opened my heart, like 20% more every day and had no downside?" I'm not saying it exists. But what if there was? Do you not take it? I think I'd probably take it.

BENJAMIN: Oh, yeah.

AUBREY: And this is the interesting world that we're potentially entering, potentially entering a world where new things become possible, maybe new things become necessary for us to transition to this next world.

BENJAMIN:  I think what psychedelics do is they give us a reference point. You enter this state, you get an altered state, it opens your heart. But now you know what that feels like. And so when you get back to your reality, you have something to shoot for. I've seen it happen with Azrya. She's in a place like with aya, where she's not feeling called to sit and probably won't, for a pretty extended period of time because she's done enough work to where now, that altered state is what her normal state used to be, or is now. So I think she's a good example of using it as a tool, and then getting to a place where you actually, your normal state is not too far away from what the altered state used to be.

AZRYA:  I wanted to feel, having been a psychonaut now for quite some time, and having certainly, gone deep down that rabbit hole and explored a lot of different things and worked very extensively with aya, it was important for me, at one point, to really come back into just remembering what it feels like to not alter my consciousness at all for an extended period of time. 

AUBREY: I think that's very important. 

AZRYA: So I did that for, I committed to six months, and then it ended up actually being longer because I really felt, what was nice about that, it was like a reset button and I felt that any use that wasn't 100% in alignment, that was a little bit just habitual, maybe fell away during that time. And what was left was really just the relationship to these medicines or substances that felt really true and it was just less. It just became less for me, naturally, at that time. Now, does that mean it's always going to be that way? No. I don't know what's going to happen next. I think that there's different phases, and you're in a phase of questioning and exploring right now, which is a beautiful thing. But you're looking at it through the lens of like, better or worse, right? And even that is a construct of the mind. Because beyond that, it all just is. So it's really just what do you want to experience?

AUBREY: What do you want? It comes down to that ultimate, what do you really want? What is your deepest desire? And I think these hierarchies of judgment, is what I'm feeling the rebellion against. I actually completely agree with you. The mastery is being able to navigate your own ship to get yourself to a lot of these places, and then occasionally find bridges and doorways to other realities. I actually agree but I'm in this state where I don't want to make anything better or more sacred for the mere sake of it, because it's what we've been told or what we've heard. There's just very interesting limitations, the ways in which we've limited our pleasure, we've limited our bliss. We'd say that we have to earn it. All of these ideas, yeah, a lot of times, most of the time, you have to earn it. But if you're given something, then the practice of well, how do I be fully grateful and integrate it, earn it on the other side with my own gratitude for it and my own acknowledgement of this gift that I've gotten. That's just the place that I'm in. Let's be done with all of these things and let's carve a whole radically new world where we're not placing judgments on all of these things. If you're Sadhguru and you can be high every moment of the day, naturally, great. No wonder he's like, "Why would you want to get high?" Well, you're high all the time. Of course, you don't want us to get high. I get it. I'm feeling this rebellion against judgment. I think you guys do a great job of starting to dissolve, like the LSD itself, dissolve these boundaries, and dissolving these boundaries of saying like, okay, what is a relationship, what is commitment, what is it like to be in a marriage and have another lover? What is it like to be a strong, badass, powerful woman and submit and surrender completely to your man? What are all of these things like? Let's fucking throw out all of this other stuff and let's chart our own way that's true to us. And that's a big part, you guys name your process BEQOMING with a Q. But it's a big process of BEQOMING. Part of it is the unlearning of all of this shit that we've gotten downloaded. And this has been a big process that you guys have been in. How do you unlearn all of this shit, challenge everything, and then build what's true for you back without the models of judgment that we've all been a part of by our connection to the field?

BENJAMIN: Yep, for sure.

AZRYA:  Well said.

AUBREY: One of the things that you guys talk about is one of the restrictive parts of this, fear. Fear is this constricting energy and one thing that I really resonated with that you said is the ultimate fear is letting love in. How weird is that? How weird is that? And you see it in songs, love hurts, that's this idea. And it's I think this is another one of those ideas of alright, let's challenge this belief. Is it the love that hurts? Or where's this fear coming from? Why? Why are you afraid? What's going on? So, in your own experience, your own fear of being loved, because I can identify with that fear very much.

AZRYA: Yeah, I think it's a paradox. What we want more than anything is to be loved and yet, it's the thing that we often resist the most. What we want more than anything is to be seen for who we truly are, yet to actually allow ourselves to be seen as the biggest risk and the scariest choice. The way that I feel love, to me, it's a frequency and it's very viscous, it's like honey. And we have the Three Stages of BEQOMING, and we talk about the third stage being the honey stage. So it's sugar, bee, honey, which is just our way of tracking spiritual maturation through these different stages of consciousness. But we use honey as an analogy for love, because it really is that, it's thick, and it's sweet, and it's nutritious. And it fills every crack. It has no edges. I think when love penetrates us, and I'll speak for myself, when love enters into my field, the way it did with him, it's like shining this huge spotlight into your soul, and it starts illuminating all these parts of yourself that you yourself have rejected or deemed unworthy of love. And that's why it's so hard to let it in, because it's like you can no longer hide from yourself in the face of this light, of this love coming in. So your fear then tries to protect you. I mean, we say if love is the answer, fear is the teacher, because fear is actually always going to point you to where you are resisting the very thing that you already are, which is love. So your fear, instead of seeing it as this obstacle or this nemesis that we have to banish, I'm really actively in my own work and in my teaching work working on the frame, that fear is this ally, it's a misunderstood ally, but it's showing us where we're holding back or where we're trying to block out the true love that is available. And so when it pops up and it rears its ugly head, it's like, oh, hey, thanks, for showing me this is an area where I feel unlovable.

BENJAMIN: Just to add, fear is, as our friend, O, says, is really a fear of feeling something. When you really look at it through that lens, all the fear is, just a fear around feeling something fully. The real work is when you can feel something fully and lean into that, that's where bliss is, like that quote, "Bliss is any feeling fully felt."

AUBREY: Bliss is any feeling fully felt.

AZRYA: Joseph Campbell.

BENJAMIN: Joseph Campbell, yeah. When you can lean into that fear, and feel it and let it just permeate you, that's where the sweet spot is. And that's where the real magic happens. Life, all of a sudden, starts just getting easy.

AZRYA: But now that's you telling. I want you to do the showing. 

AUBREY: What were you afraid of because you were more all in from the drop. There had to still be fear.

BENJAMIN: I'll use you a different example because I certainly had fears in the relationship but I'll use a different example. I was in a really massive lawsuit and it drove a really significant amount of fear in my system. As a child, I really couldn't read, as I share in the book, I really couldn't read. I always felt like until really college, and I don't know how I got into college, but I really thought I was stupid, because I was always the one in the room that couldn't answer. And so what does that make you? It took me a long time to--

AUBREY: Like really bad dyslexia for people who don't know.

BENJAMIN: Bad dyslexia. What that created in me throughout my life was this real scared little boy that couldn't read. I needed external validation, I needed to accumulate things to feel safe, I didn't feel safe in the world. It didn't matter how successful I was, and how many companies I had or how big I grew, I always felt unsafe. I needed to create more material wealth so I could feel safer. But there was no amount of material wealth that would make me feel safe, and no amount of external validation that would make me feel safe. So I got in this lawsuit, investing in something I shouldn't have. It turned out to be a real spiritual awakening for me.

AUBREY: So it was investing in something you should have?

BENJAMIN:  Yeah, it all happened exactly as it should have, of course. But that was a real spiritual awakening for me. And I got to a place in that where I was like, okay, I'm no longer going to, I did a lot of work around this, I sat in multiple ceremonies and did some heavy lifting. And I got to a place, for the first time in my life, I would say in the last three years, really the last two years, where you could take everything away from me and I feel completely safe in the world. I had to do a lot, a lot of work to get to that place. I could have retired at 38 years old after I sold my first company. I mean, I had 1,800 employees, large and I did not feel safe. And it took that lawsuit of I'm really at risk, and I started running some doomsday scenarios in my head, and where I went in my head was not reality. But those fears of feeling and wanting to care for my family and all those things and being like, I'm going to lose it all, because if this goes bad, then that's going to go bad, and that's going to go bad. But those fears just lumped up on me and I went through a really, really challenging time. And it was early in our relationship where I was really coming out of that. And I did some real heavy lifting, with the support of ayahuasca in a big way. I was sitting every three weeks just going back and back. A lot of people sit and have these epiphanies. For me, it was like layers of an onion. Going and getting rid of another layer, getting rid of another layer, getting rid of another layer. For the first time in my life, in the last couple years, can I truly say you could take everything away from me, not a penny to my name, because that's what was more fearful. In the relationship, I didn't necessarily have that fear. But even in the relationship, I would say that scared little boy showed up and that there was a real threat. The fact that she was questioning monogamy was hitting me at the core, because the scared little boy who felt insecure, was like, "Hey, I'm actually going to go all into this relationship. And this person's questioning it." What allowed me to do that was the night before we left to go to Tulum, two weeks into the relationship, I'm like, I don't even know if I want to go on a date with you based on where you're at and where I'm at. And I went and sat in on an Ayahuasca ceremony, and grandmother just showed me. She just stripped me awake and showed me this love and showed me that I could trust it, and it just stripped away all the walls because what was I scared of? I was just scared of being heartbroken. What's that? Being scared of feeling something fully? I don't want to feel this thing so I'm not going to go after the woman of my dreams? The medicine allowed me to strip those walls down and lean into a container with somebody who was saying, "I don't know what I want. And I'm not sure that a conventional monogamous is what I'm looking for." Over and over, the medicines have helped me feel what it feels like to: one, to feel that bliss of having a reference point of where I want to go and also allow me to make peace with these fears within me of really feeling unsafe, whether it's financial or in a relationship.  I've done some heavy lifting and for the first I'm in my life, these last couple years, I don't wake up with anxiety. I didn't even know that I woke up every day perpetually anxious, energetic. Now I wake up in the morning, and I'm not like, there's stuff going on, there's stress but they don't get to me, they're not penetrating the way they used to. And I spent my entire life really anxious.

AUBREY: We're really going back to that same quote. You're coming alive, because now you're willing to be annihilated. It goes back to the same thing. That's why we're afraid of love. We're afraid of loving fully. One of the worst feelings is you love someone fully, and then that love gets shut off. That doorway to God is slammed in your face like. Fuck, that was my doorway, that was my doorway to eros. What we don't see is that,  there's many, many doorways. Don't worry. Another one will come but we condense and exile all of our communion with the divine, love as God, through this one doorway. And if that doorway shuts, it's devastating. And that's why it hurts. But if you're willing to allow that annihilation, to feel that annihilation, to surrender to that annihilation, then you're free to just fucking love fully. You can just let yourself love. You don't need to fabricate it. Don't put the fucking brakes on. Just allow yourself to feel it because otherwise, what is the risk? Of course, all right, be mindful if you're going to have children, or get in a legal binding marriage agreement. Have some discretion always or let somebody in your body like. Yeah, I get it. Understand. Discretion is important. I'm not saying throw all that out the window, but to really allow yourself to love, to live, to enjoy your abundance, enjoy your body to enjoy your breath, you have to face your fear of death, you have to face your fear of losing the relationship, you have to face all of these, which are all different forms of annihilation, and make peace with all annihilation. And it's harder, actually, the more you get, in some ways. In some ways, I sold Onnit, and I got  more abundance than I've ever had. I'm probably more stressed out, I've had to work triple hard, because the annihilation of all of my financial resources now is like, "Oh my God," the self judgment stacking on the how did you MC Hammer all of this money away? How did you even manage that?

BENJAMIN:  I've gone through that cycle. I've gone through that cycle.

AUBREY: It's very interesting. And you think that, oh, now I never have to worry about it. Show me one person that's actually like that, gets a gets a huge bunch of money and is like, "I'm fucking good now. I'm not going to be stressed out at all." It's very difficult, you have to still be willing to step through the jaws of annihilation.

BENJAMIN: And for me, it was, I sold my first company in 2010. We had a big equity event. And I went through that cycle. And what's interesting is, I feel safer today after all the ups and downs and losing. It's taken years of work to get there. I resonate with what you're saying. But the magic is getting to a place where you just feel safe in the world. And also, what's really been interesting in the last couple years is we still have challenging moments and have gone through really difficult times where we question the relationship but we've been able to do it in a conscious way that I've never done before, where the entire time, instead of looking at it at as woe is me, why is this happening, it's like, okay, what am I supposed to be learning? What's the lesson here? What am I supposed to be learning so I can get back to where I'm supposed to go. Just knowing the universe is benevolent, and it's going to continue giving you curriculum but looking at it from that perspective of this is a lesson and I'm meant to learn something so let's learn it. Versus sticking my head in the sand or crying and laying in bed all day and just being like, "Why is it happening?" Bringing consciousness to those challenging times is also really valuable.

AZRYA: I love a quote that Osho has, I'm paraphrasing, but it's like, "It's the most profound gift to go through a breakdown consciously." For me, that feeling of safety within myself and within the universe was very established when I met Benjamin. I had gone through this whole financial initiation, I had faced off with $0, I had faced all these existential fears around it and I was good. It doesn't actually matter what's in my bank account .I feel so connected to myself and so connected to the source. I know I'm always provided for, and I can lean into the uncertainty fully. It's been a much bigger journey for me to lean into the certainty actually. The uncertainty was the comfort zone at that point. The certainty of like we're doing this together and we're on this path and we're building this life together and we've made that commitment and that agreement, that brought up so much curriculum for me because that feeling of no matter what, I'm good, went away. There's a real part of me that knows that if Benjamin died tomorrow, I would not be okay in a pretty significant way. 

BENJAMIN: For like two weeks. 

AUBREY: And if you died or if something happened with you, B would not be okay. There's like a whole host of new responsibilities. 

AZRYA: Absolutely. And that was the big fear.

BENJAMIN: It's a paradox because also, in the work, it wouldn't be okay, it would never be the same and we would be okay.

AZRYA: Of course. Absolutely. But I think to let yourself be so, it’s like that part of me that wanted to be claimed, but then the fear of if I let myself fully be claimed and then I fuck it up, or I change my mind or whatever, that's risk. 

BENJAMIN: Be careful. Don't fuck it up.

AZRYA: Don't fuck it up. That's very real. And I think there's something almost beautifully humble to me to acknowledge that I'm so interwoven with this other person, that I can't imagine, right now, what my life would look like without them and I think that's humbling and beautiful. 

BENJAMIN: Who's them?

AZRYA: Them? You.

AUBREY: The multiplicity of B. Part of, I think, this process, and part of what you lead people through in the book is a clarification of yourself, and I think you talk about a big part of your own past and some of the things that formed you, was this feeling of letting down your grandmother, like you let down your grandmother and you hurt her? 

AZRYA: I broke my promise. 

AUBREY: Yeah, you broke a promise and in your mind, you hurt someone that you loved. So this idea, and then that played out, again, in different relationships, so this was a big part of the fear, this was your own curriculum, your own thing. In Kabbalist mysticism, they call it your Hisaron, which is a unique shadow,  the unique part of you that is in overcoming that, which is that if I have all of this power, really, over somebody, that I can trust myself not to hurt them. That was a big part of your journey to "BEQOMING". B, yours was the big part of can I feel worthy? Can I feel like I'm good enough, in this way, and I don't want to speak for your own Hisaron.

BENJAMIN: Even deeper than that, am I willing to risk feeling all the feelings of heartbreak? That's really what you're leaning into. That's the crux of it, is am I willing to risk feeling. In a financial situation, you could say the same thing, am I willing to go all in on this investment because it matters so much to me, that I'm willing to risk starting over? Am I willing to risk feeling heartbroken? Really, that's the real risk.

AZRYA: I would say that the reason it's even a risk is because there's some part of you that associates your worth with whatever that thing is. If that thing goes away, as you said, then the insecurity or the lack of self worth is really something you have to confront.

BENJAMIN: It goes back to the scared little boy that needs external validation. And so if all of a sudden... I've never had a girl break up with me, I've broken up with every woman I've ever been with. I would never let them get close. I was,like, "I'm out of here. I broke up with you. You didn't break it up with me." It was a defense mechanism. And so, yeah, I resonate with that.

AUBREY: In this clarification of your own core stuff, you can sometimes get a little too lost in the stories but it's also helpful. This is a process that I didn't know had a lineage. You think about this in, they talk about it in Gene Keys. You go through your unique challenge and then you get to your city, which is your unique potential. Well, shit, they've been talking about this in religious traditions, and particularly this tradition for a long time, like you're going into your shadow, and then finding the Torah and the mitzvah,  which is how they used it, and I'm just fresh off reading all this shit so I'm going to flex my terminology, but the Torah is the knowledge. This is knowledge. What knowledge do you need, to actually help you address this? And then the mitzvah, what practice do you need to help you overcome it, help you heal this? Because as they say, it's actually not just us, we're healing it for, as we are representative of the Divine, we are the divine incarnate, the divine does not have a body without us, as the divine incarnate, us healing our Hisaron, us healing this is actually healing the divine in this really beautiful way, like we're healing. And, of course, you can say it's the collective but it's healing something very important. And I think, yes, of course, you say, oh, it's all perfect no matter what. We're here to continue to move and grow and evolve. And in this process of going in and finding the knowledge and then the practice. Which brings me to the mitzvah part of it being the practice or the ritual, or that, it seems like and this was one of the initial questions that came up, is there an annihilation practice? Like, if you're going into this, because this seems like one of the most important things, getting to a state where, and ayahuasca will typically do this, it's definitely a huge assist. But beyond that, let's just leave that aside for now. Is there a practice to deal when you discover what your deepest fears are? To deal with them? To actually go in, and I know the samurai and the Stoics, everybody had some strategies for this, but what would you guys say to somebody who's like, I'm fucking tired of it, I'm tired of these things that I know I'm afraid of, and I can't deal with them. What are the things that people can do that you guys have found helpful to deal with these things you're scared of?

AZRYA: Well, at the end of the book, we have the five steps to embracing your shadow. And it's really this process of I think, first and foremost, it's about creating a space to step into dialogue with these aspects of yourself. For me, and this is just what works for me, but it's like the lens: A, the fundamental lens that likes everything that's coming up, no matter how horrendous it might feel, is serving me on some level.

AUBREY: That's part of the Torah. That's part of the knowledge base which is good.

AZRYA: And then, for me, the way that that looks in practice is, a lot of times, it's the emotion if the emotion is there, to me, that's the entry point into the work. So if the emotion is triggered by something, and especially if that emotion is something that feels familiar, where there's a pattern that I can recognise is present here that's deeper than just this one experience, because how often do you get triggered by something, or you have a fear come up, or some quote-unquote, unpleasant emotion where you're like, this situation doesn't warrant that reaction? This reaction is coming from something long ago, and far away that I haven't resolved. That's why I'm having such a strong reaction to this. The perfect time to dive into that is when it's actually alive in your body. The way that it will look, on a very practical level, is if something comes up, let's say, between us where I feel something flood my system that feels like fear or contraction, I'll try and as quickly as possible, just create spaciousness for myself where I'm by myself and I can sit down and I can go internal. For me, the practice has been most potent, has been just starting to channel it through writing, or even just through expression, like through verbalizing it. It's like, what if this part of me could speak, this aspect of me that's coming forward and communicating with me through this emotional signature? What if I just let it speak? Because the knee jerk reaction is to reject it, and try and get back to the happy place? What's very confusing about the whole kind of positive thinking movement, we shouldn't have these negative emotions. And if we do, we should just focus more on the positive, right? That's the opposite of what I found that really worked for me. If there's something there, then it's there for a reason. I need to dive into it and I need to give it the spaciousness it deserves. And a lot of times what I find is that when I open that dialogue, and I let those emotions flow, sometimes they come out through screaming or crying or movement or words or sounds. And sometimes it's more subtle than that. But when I let it communicate, it usually has some really profound gift to give to me, or it's trying to bring my awareness to something that is in my unconscious mind. I don't know if that's practical enough as a practice.

AUBREY: I think we're starting to get there. So the word Tantra is to expand. And I think there's so much medicine in the expanding of a thing rather than the avoidance or contracting away from that thing. So these feelings, if we go into them, and think there's an intuitive intelligence that we have, like I understand the doomsday scenario planning, where you figure out how everything, all right, Bitcoin goes to zero, this investment goes to zero, all of a sudden, nobody loves me anymore and all my abilities. And for some reason, even though I've always figured it out, I no longer am able to. There it is! There it is! I've figured it out and it's all fucked. I knew it all along. But there's an intelligence to that, because what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to create a reality, very much like ayahuasca will do anyways. Ayahuasca has the ability to convince you to accept a certain situation.

AZRYA: Your worst case scenario. 

AUBREY: Your worst case scenario will be like, "Here it is." We're trying to almost be our own ayahuasca in a way, but we're not quite getting there enough, there is enough of our rational mind online, and there's other cues, we can say like, "Well, that's probably not going to happen, or whatever." But I think the instinct is right. We want to go and experience the annihilation, so that we're no longer afraid of the annihilation. It's exposure and response therapy. I haven't found another way. I actually tried to ask Peter Crone about this. And we didn't even get quite to the answer there. The problem is with this exposure-response therapy addressing a fear, it does work. But then you're constantly having to go into the worst case scenario all the time, which is an unpleasant exercise.

BENJAMIN: I'll use, for me, as an example, I still have moments where I'm going to go there. But if you go there enough times, it loses its power. I would say that it's not the same the first time you go there as the 1,000th time. And so if you go there, and you willingly like, "Okay, let me let me feel this fully. Let me feel this fear fully. This is coming up. Let's actually go there. Instead of me thinking about this five seconds a day, let's spend 20 minutes and let's map out the worst case scenario and go there." Another tool that I think is really powerful is, Tim Ferriss has this fear setting exercise that's really good, where you write down all your fears, and then you go down, and you say, okay, what's the worst thing that could happen for all these fears around this particular subject? And then you write down, okay, if the worst case scenario happens, what are the things I could do to prevent those things from happening? And then if the worst thing that I could think of happened, what can I do to repair it after it happened? And so really fleshing it out. I do agree with you that, unfortunately, there's no shortcut. When the fears come up, you actually have to feel them fully. But the more you do it, the less they affect you. Eventually it gets to a point where they don't affect you at all. It's practice. It's not something that you just, "Oh, I'm done, check the box. It's a practice but for the first time in my life, I feel like I've gotten there in many aspects of my life where I've, and ayahuasca helped bring those fears to the surface, because a lot of times, our conscious mind, our ego protects us and doesn't let those fears come to the surface because they're too scary to feel. But ayahuasca just throws out the window and says, "You're a cute kid. I'm going to take you down. Let's go there. And it takes you to the worst, abysmal fears, brings them to the surface. So you can feel them fully and transmute them.

AUBREY: So taking this, this is becoming really clear to me, in this moment now. As we all know ayahuasca as much as we can know a being and an energy, and a spirit of that magnitude, but we at least trust her and trust that she's smart as hell, in many ways, knows what's best for us, when we don't even know what's best for us. What's her method? Well, she makes you feel it and feel it in such a tantrically expanded way that it's bursting out of every cell of your being, whether that's grief, whether that's guilt, whether that's fear, whatever the thing is, you feel it to such an extent, that actually, that's where the transcendence lies. As the mitzvah for your fears, I think this consciously choosing to get yourself there, go in so deep that you really get in there and do it, like you really go all the way in, because I think you can go in a little bit, a little bit, a little bit and then you're like micro-dosing fear all the time, and you're never really getting through that breakthrough moment. But it seems like there's a real value in a practice that's created where you just go in and you're like, "Let's fucking go all the way in," because every time I've done that, I remember the first time when I first was polyamorous and Whitney first had her first lover or first guy that she had sex with, I was a fucking wreck. I was a wreck. And I would think about it and I would think about a different position she was in, like doggy style, and I'd be like, vomiting on the floor. It was bad. I thought I was cut out for it but I had a lot of work to do. It was really hard and then every different thought came in: what if he spanked her? Oh my god, she likes that. Oh, no. And then I would vomit again and want to cry. And it was brutal. And then finally, after eight hours of this, I was like, "Enough! Fucking, let's go. Let's go! She was tied up in a horse barn, she was being whipped with horse instruments and butt fucked and being fed slop out of a bowl and she loved it and she just wanted more." And then I just started laughing. I was like, "That is so ridiculous." There was this big chuckle that emerged. It's not like I purged the fear entirely. Of course, there was jealousy that still came up. But by allowing myself to go so deep into this, I just started laughing. And then, of course, going down, it was hard, hard, hard, hard, hard, but there was a break moment where it was like, "That's ridiculous, bro. She was not in a horse stable. She probably just had fucking lovely sex."

BENJAMIN: But what you did was you allowed yourself to feel it fully. And most of the time, people repress it, they would numb themselves. What would people do? They go drinking, they binge food.

AZRYA: Watch Netflix.

BENJAMIN: They do anything they can to actually feel it, they resist it. And what you did was the opposite. Actually what you're supposed to do is let it all come in and feel it fully. We have the five steps at the end of the book but the last step is really, something I'm certainly working on towards, but it's loving it. It's actually putting your arm around that part of yourself that's scared and insecure and saying, "I actually fucking love you." And I feel that fear and let it come up. You can get to the point where you start laughing at it. There's no magic pill, there's no easy way around. There's no real quick solution. You have to allow yourself to feel it fully. We  were in a death portal, and we talked about it in the book where at one point we were questioning having a child and it appeared that our relationship was over. I actually went and stayed at your ranch in Sedona. Nobody was there and I was like, "Bro, I need a minute. Can I go stay at your place?" And I stayed there for a couple weeks. And what you just described is what I did. I intentionally said, Okay, I'm giving myself this period of time. I'm going to fucking go there. I'm going to imagine the worst case scenario of all of it right? Her with all these other men. The relationship's over, what does that look like? Everything we're building, the BEQOMING platform, all of it's gone. And I allowed myself to sit in that and feel it fully. And I didn't resist--

AUBREY: Just had an image of you being like a baton twirler in a cock parade, just leading a group full of men stroking themselves and naked, twirling a baton in the air, "Come with me, cock parade!"

BENJAMIN: I was able to come out of that and really, there was no feeling that I resisted. I think that this describes what you went through.

AZRYA: I would just jump in here and say that's alchemy. And not that I know much about the world of quantum but my understanding is that when an experiment is observed, just through observation, the act of seeing the experiment, changes the outcome on the quantum level, right? It's the same with our internal state. If we see it and we witness it with our awareness, we shine that light of our awareness into those crevices of our fears, our insecurities, our subconscious. It is not the same on the other side. It has to alchemize into something new. Now it might not happen in one sitting. Some things, we chew on for years and years until we  move through the other side. 

AUBREY: I think that's because we don't get to the alchemy.

AZRYA: That's right, because we don't allow ourselves to go all the way.

AUBREY: The alchemy occurs the moment you reach acceptance, surrender or ultimately laughter, like the humor. The moment where I laughed, it shattered this fucking nightmare that I was in. All of a sudden, his nightmare was so real and I could feel it in every cell in my body and then the pig slop came in, and I was like, "That's fucking ridiculous." And then at that point, it broke like black glass, like obsidian, just shattering all of a sudden. I was liberated from that, but yeah, it's about that moment. And there's many different ways, sometimes we won't get laughter or smile or anything. Just that acceptance, that moment you feel the peace, you've changed the thing entirely. That lead has become maybe not gold, but a less heavy lead, maybe an iron or something. Don't always have to be right to gold right away. If we could just learn that lesson, this is creating freedom, this is really like creating freedom. Another quote which I love that you guys put in the book was, "Fear is just excitement without breath,"  from Fritz Perls. And that's another great thing as far as a mitzvah. Breathe, breathe.

AZRYA: Breather.

AUBREY: This quote makes a lot of sense from a mythopoetic standpoint. Yeah, yeah, it's beautifully poetic, but also, straight up instructional.

AZRYA: It's so instructional. 

AUBREY: Breathe, breathe. Go for it. Start breathing. Allow yourself to move that energy with your breath, or dance or whatever. But it's fucking good advice.

AZRYA: Yeah, breath is so underrated. We barely, myself included, begin to scratch the surface of the power of our breath, and the technology of our breath. The medicine often brings me to that place, and allows me to realize that I stopped breathing. A lot of times in medicine, especially when it's intense, I'll go into visionary states, or really, start feeling like I'm being catapulted out of my body into the multiverse. And it's really intense. And my ego is clinging trying to control it and steer the ship and then I just hear that voice, breathe. First of all, I wasn't even aware I stopped breathing. But when I let that breath come in again, it's like the whole experience transforms. And that's what I love so much about the medicine and particularly ayahuasca is it gives you that instant feedback mechanism of how potent the breath really is in terms of alchemizing energy in your body. It's where all of your real, and I don't like the word control, but your real mastery over your experience lies and yet, it's the thing that's hidden in plain sight that we take the most for granted.

AUBREY: So there's another thing that facilitates a lot of fear and that's our attachment, obviously. And you guys talk about this. And this is something I've really been trying to meditate on as well, understanding that the fundamental nature of the cosmos, that we are in a cosmo-erotic universe and desire and attraction is a part of our universe. So the Buddhist idea of let me just get rid of desire, like Naval says, which is probably parroted from a million Buddhist things but, "Desire is a contract with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want," all of these ideas; let's remove ourselves from desire so that we can remove ourselves from an attachment. It may be a useful strategy, but it feels like it's missing something very important about life itself. That desire is an intrinsic part of life. This idea of removing yourself from it doesn't make sense. But attachment is brutal. That can be really difficult because then you're just afraid of not getting it and even when you do get it, it's just like you're then attached. It's not even that exciting because you've been in this relationship and then you're afraid of losing it. So the idea of allowing yourself full desire with minimal attachment, that's something that's like a real art to navigating life because that's what's giving us freedom. So in your own process, what do you guys think are some of the keys to allow yourself the full scope of desire, so not pretending that you don't radically crave each other and want to run giant, like the old Sprite commercial with the lime and the lemon, and embrace each other in this erotic desire, of course, but without the toxic levels of attachment which bring in levels of fear and all of these things. Do you guys have personal strategies? Do you think about that in those terms, I know you talk about attachment a bit in the book as well and what your strategies are, and I'll share the only solution that I've come to as well.

AZRYA: Well, for those of you familiar with the Gene Keys, and this was very helpful for me when we were going through this process, our death portals, as we call them, but I have, maybe I give a two-second background on what the Gene Keys is, might just be helpful.  Similar to astrology in the sense that you plug in your birth information, and you get a chart which is unique to you and then you can buy the book and you can really go deep into what the different keys in your particular chart mean. But these are essentially proclivities that you're born with, from a genetic perspective, but they're really relevant for your psycho, spiritual and emotional experience of being human in this lifetime. It was really interesting for me to look at my chart during this time, because I was again, grappling with this idea of polyamory versus monogamy, not that those were even necessarily words that were the right fit for what I was exploring in myself, but it was like, I don't know if I believe in conventional relationship structures. I had had so many visceral experiences, specifically in medicine space, where the answer was just like, it's love, like, it's just pure love. So the question I was sitting with was, "Well, if that's our highest expression as beings," is to just be in a state of pure love, and to know that we are safe and held and loved by life, why do we need to control things? Why do we need to say you can't be with this person? Isn't that just fear running the ship? That was my exploration. But, of course, there's also desire mixed into that, my own desires to have experiences and like I said, taste the rainbow and explore parts of myself that I hadn't been able to yet. So the Gene Key chart illuminated that I have doubled desire in my chart, and desire is the shadow. So every key has three expressions of the same key: the shadow, the gift, and the Siddhi. This gift is the one that's probably the most practical that you can work with. And then the Siddhi is the highest expression, more of the enlightened expression of that same energy. So desire is the shadow. Lightness, which comes back to humor, is the gift. And then rapture is the Siddhi. So the way they talk about it in the Gene Keys and this was super applicable to me was that, similar to Buddhist philosophy, this idea that desire isn't something that we can get rid of. It's an intrinsic and innate part of being a human being. But it is also a dead end, in the sense that the desire will never be satiated, no matter how many experiences you have, no matter how much you explore. That desire will always remain. That transforms when you bring the humor into the situation, and you realize this is actually hilarious. I'm in this loop with myself, where I'm constantly trying to fill something that was never designed to be filled. And when you finally--

AUBREY: It's insatiable by its very nature, because it's God. It's God desiring God.

AZRYA: Exactly. Because it's God.

AUBREY: Because it's desiring God.

AZRYA: In the Gene Keys, it describes it as the genetic hunger for experience itself. That's what really fuels all of the desire. When you realize that, then you can liberate yourself from this idea that there's something that will fill it. And that is when it turns into the gift. So there's this alchemical process that happens where you  throw your hands up in surrender, and you laugh at yourself, and you go, Holy shit, this is hilarious. I'm just fucked. I'm screwed, I'm always going to have desire. Desire must be felt, but it doesn't necessarily need to be acted on. If I'm in a monogamous relationship, and I have an attraction toward another person and me acting on that desire is going to implode my current relationship, that's probably not a useful expression of my desire. But can I take that energy, instead of making it wrong and shaming myself for it, can I integrate it and work with it and realize it's all just energy. So I could take that energy and I could potentially even turn that back into my relationship and bring it into my relationship, as an example. And we've viscerally experienced that with bringing a woman into our container, where it was like the attraction and the desire we both felt for this other person actually strengthened and fueled our connection. So it was a way for us to play with that. Now, of course, in the other direction, it's a lot, because Benjamin isn't attracted to men and that's just a hard no for him, I had to really face off with that part of myself that was like, "Well, I'm not feeling this now. There's no one I'm attracted to or wanting to connect with but since I'm being asked to make a lifelong commitment, I got to face off with this part of myself that--

AUBREY: Who knows if you want to be the baton twirler in the cock parade? 

AZRYA: Right, maybe I want to be the baton twirler. That was, I feel, what a lot of my process was around, was really not just looking at the external thing of this potential of another man, but really looking at desire itself as the root of all of it. And for me that tool of lightness, the practice of lightness of laughing at the paradoxical nature of human existence was a very powerful way for me to alchemize the fear that I had encasing my desire and liberate myself from it.

BENJAMIN: I'll answer the question a little differently. For me, when I look at desire and the shadow aspect of desire within myself, I've never thought about it, but when you asked the question, I reflected on where I'm at with my relationship to Azyra. It's very different today than it was even a few years ago. For me, it's been healing the core wound, that scared little boy that couldn't read, that feels insecure, that needs external validation. A lot of my desires were fueled by the need for external validation. I'm not addressing the shadow aspect of my relationship with desire directly but the way in which I've shifted it, where now, when I desire something, it doesn't feel like I'm in the shadow aspect of it, because if I don't get it, there's not that attachment to it. The way that's being healed is through the deeper work of addressing that issue with the scared little boy, so going deeper. I'm not really trying to be unattached, what I'm doing is trying to feel whole, and then the attachment just goes away. I really love Peter Crone's quote, being totally fully committed to something and simultaneously unattached. That was a real theme for me last year, actually 2020. I dealt with it in a circuitous route. I dealt with it by healing that wounded little boy that needed that external validation. And as that lifted, all of a sudden, yes, I have desires but there's no attachment to it so I'm not in the shadow expression of that desire.

AUBREY: I think one of the ways that I've dealt with it personally, historically, which I'm trying to, again, challenge and rewrite. Alright, here's how you deal with desire. Don't care. Don't care. Don't care.

AZRYA: Apathy.

AUBREY: If it happens, it happens. If it doesn't, it doesn't. I've done that with everything and it is a very useful strategy. Am I going to be a New York Times bestseller, Ah! either way. I've removed myself from the desiring of it and I removed myself also, from the joy of it. I got the news. I took a deep breath and I was like, alright, let's go out to eat. And I bought my friend some dinner and had maybe a moment.

BENJAMIN: That’s the tantra path.

AUBREY: It's the way of like, let me pretend that I don't really want this. And I'll catch myself doing that with a variety of different things where there's this feeling of excitement coming up. And I'm like, "Don't you do it?"

BENJAMIN:  So when you say pretend, do you mean, I practice that by emotionally--

AUBREY: It's been a bit of a subconscious process, but if I'm looking back now with greater clarity and some understanding about how desire, as you said, is inescapable. There's humor in that, which I think is beautiful, in that teaching. But I've been doing that all along. No matter what good things happen, I don't let myself get too high. because I want to buffer myself from the potential disappointment, so my strategy with attachment is to not care, not desire it, but it's also a little bit false because I do deeply desire it, and I still do get crushed, but I just don't get the positive side and maybe I mitigate some of the negative side. What I'm trying to shift this to and I believe will be successful is, instead of not caring, know that what I'm actually craving, what I'm desiring is desire itself. And that the desire itself is where the magic is anyways. Even when you get that thing, it's never as good as what the build up was anyways. Let's say desire is the end goal. Desire lishmah is the Hebrew word, for its own sake, desire for its own sake. You're craving something whether it's a partner, a potential lover, a business deal going well, money, some kind of thing, going happen, your book selling a million copies, the desire isn't linked to the thing actually happening. So you uncouple it from the thing happening and say, let's fucking feel it, let's feel what that desire is, let's feel that all the way and know that the desire is what you're actually going for anyways and that you've reaped the reward, whether or not you get the thing or not. It's a tricky and interesting little move. Again, a lot of this stuff is like two weeks fresh. This is my first podcast, I've been away in Miami, haven't done any fucking podcast. So I'm working out my new thought patterns here and I appreciate you guys being on this journey with me as my family but yeah, I'm really interested in putting desire at the top of the list of goals, way above the actualization of the things that I desire but say, can I get into a state of desire because that feels good and not be scared. Not to be scared that if I'm in a state of desire, that's going to mean that if I don't get what I desire, I'm going to be suffering even worse. So the only thing then that I'm attached to is desiring itself. I become attached to being a vessel of desire. And then at that, though, that's pretty safe. That's actually really safe. I'm always going to want shit. I'm actually safe. For the first time in my life, I'm safe. And I get to reap the bliss of the whole thing. Sometimes I am going to actually get things, sometimes I'm not, but it doesn't matter, because I'm going to have the full joy of the desiring and of the craving. Some part of me is like really excited to then add, okay, this is my Torah, this is my knowledge. Can I put it into practice? Can I think of that thing and not shy away and be like, yeah, if it works out, great. If it doesn't, great. It's all fine, which never was really true, ultimately, but what's really true is yeah, I fucking want that. I want that bad. I really want that. And I think that's a more exciting and colorful life that I want to paint. I want to hold that paintbrush and just be like, "Go for it, man." Just don't worry about whether you get it, but go for the desire itself.

AZRYA: Yeah, it's a really interesting perspective. I like that lens a lot because really, what you're talking about is making love to what is present, which is your desire. So it actually brings you into the present moment, which is where all the bliss is anyway. So there's a really great book that came to mind that I just finished that might be interesting for you to read, called "The Molecule of More." It's basically a neuroscience book, but it talks about dopamine. The whole book is about dopamine. And it just gives you this really comprehensive understanding of dopamine and how it works and how so much of how we're wired in our culture, especially in this western culture in this American society where it's all about a bigger, better, growth mindset, which totally applies to the spiritual consciousness journey as well. From a neurochemical perspective, it's really interesting to understand dopamine, because dopamine is essentially the molecule that has you fantasize about the future. It's always about that which has not yet occurred, the possibility. And it's this powerful chemical force that pushes you perpetually to achieve things that you haven't yet achieved, but it's not a molecule that knows satiation or fulfillment. From a biochemical perspective, it's even interesting to look at how we become addicted to our own biochemistry, like that feeling of craving something is in and of itself a high. But you can actively also nurture the opposite of that which is the here now molecules which is serotonin, and what's the other one? Oxytocin?

AUBREY: Oxytocin, usually from contact.

AZRYA: So cuddling or like things that bring you into the present moment, listening to music, like things that are happening right now that aren't about the future at all, they release these other hormones. For me reading that book was really interesting, because I was like, "Oh, I can actually feel now when the different hormones are flooding my body," when these molecules are active or not. And then also, I have more conscious choice in how much I want to give these molecules power over my experience. Do I want to keep pressing the dopamine lever over and over and over again, like the rat in the cage with the cocaine or do I want to actually stop all that and just take that big deep breath and realize the beauty of what's all around me.

AUBREY: Mark Gafni's who's become a teacher, he talks about the difference between desire and pseudo desire. And pseudo desire are the ways in which the separate self is seeking desire. So there's a clarification of your desires. The quick dopamine hits of your phone, of your followers, of your bank account, of all of that, which is inherently seeking satiation, it's self-seeking satiation would be pseudo desire, pseudo eros or the way that you reach to a substance which is actually giving you something or whether it's cocaine or nicotine or whatever that thing is that you're reaching for, you're actually trying to satiate the insatiable.  The separate self can't be satiated. True desire, if you really clarified it, I suppose it comes from the part of you that is in rapture with the present moment, in rapturous presence. And then so you would be satiating all of the other aspects as well. I guess, as I'm working through this life, it's also very important to clarify what I am desiring before I go all the way in there? If I'm going into the desire, from the perspective of the separate self, it's just going to be a pseudo desire, it's not going to be I'm in the satiation of the thing. But if I'm in, as my true self, my unique self, if I go into that, and really understand what I'm desiring and the I that is desiring, the I am desiring rather than the ego, which is more I am not, and I'm in lack, then I think you can be deeply craving this moment. Like in this moment, we could just be desiring this conversation, or in that moment where you're on mushrooms and laughing, it's like you're not craving anything else, or when you're making love, that's the beauty of it. In those moments, desire is at maximum but satiation is at full. Those are those God moments really.

BENJAMIN: That really resonates. What you're talking about is really bringing a higher level of awareness and consciousness to the desire because the dire desires, like we said, are never going away. And so the more awareness, the more consciousness you can bring to that energy. The more that you can navigate it, intentionally versus it navigating you.

AZRYA: In the BEQOMING definition, there's multiple pieces to it, but the last portion is savoring the full spectrum of life. That word savoring came to mind when you were talking about the craving and the savoring. Can they happen almost simultaneously? Because what you're describing in that rapture state, which also happens to be the Siddhi of the Gene Key, I feel like you actually shift from craving to savoring. And so in some ways, that's where desire goes away.

AUBREY: And that's ultimately what this trick is doing is if you're desiring desire, and you're feeling desire, then you're satiating your desire actually. If your desire desires you satiate desire, then you're in the savoring of your desire, and then all of a sudden, you're out of the loop.

AZRYA: Exactly. 

AUBREY: You break the cycle. 

AZRYA: Totally.

AUBREY: Interesting. 

AZRYA: Yes.

AUBREY: I think we've figured some shit out. 

AZRYA: I think we've gotten somewhere very productive.

BENJAMIN: Good job. We've been savoring the definition of "BEQOMING".

AUBREY: This part about bringing in another lover into your container, and I know we talked about it a little bit on the podcast with Vy so we don't need to go there. I think there's an  interesting pattern that I've seen in a lot of the relationships that I admire. I don't like to make generalities. To be quite honest, there's not a lot of relationships that I admire. In all of these relationships that I admire, there's a flexibility to the logos, to the law of the relationship, there's an inherent flexibility and everybody has their own different ways. For me polyamory, if you couldn't tell from my story about crawling around vomiting, in every different moment, was a little much for me. It bested me. As much as I enjoyed many aspects on the positive side, I can honestly say that for eight years, I gave it everything I got, used every tool I could, and it was bigger than me and I couldn't hold it.

BENJAMIN: I listen to a lot of your podcasts-- 

AUBREY: It got to the end. People were like, "Just stop talking about it already." I can't, I can't. That was too much. I think re-understanding and reclaiming for our own self, what our own bounds are and what the freedom and flexibility is, which requires sometimes pissing people off around you who want to reinforce this same belief because the belief that something could be different, might be too much for them to hold because they crave something so much, that if they hear that something else could be possible, they want to destroy it, they want to murder that type of thing and denigrate and slander it and make it so that it can't be and it's not right. I think it's a denial of our inherent desires. I think there's desire. As you said, it doesn't mean you have to act on them. But the flexibility to accommodate the desires that are in there, not even accommodate, to accept the desire, whether you act on them or not and then having flexibility of not rigid boundaries, but is this additive? Is this accretive to our union? Or is this not? It seems to be like a defining characteristic of the relationships that I admire. And this could be on either side, it doesn't have to be like, you get extra girls in here, extra men in here or whatever. It seems like that's a key characteristic. And I think that's the nature for everyone, but I think it's interesting that I've noticed this pattern of claiming the relationship uniquely, and then allowing the space for things to be more fluid, as kind of a pattern.

BENJAMIN: I think where I would take it is I'm not sure that I would necessarily look at it that way as it relates to our relationship, what I would say is just that when we got married, legally married, I gave one bow, to be true to you, to spirit, to Gaia, to myself, above all. I think in our relationship, I know that I know she'll never lie to me, not even about the facts about what she's feeling. There's so much trust in this relationship. The reason that we feel safe bringing, say, another woman into the container is because we both know that we're always being authentic with what we're feeling. And if anything's out of resonance, we'll adjust. The flexibility that you talk of is available because there's trust-- 

AUBREY: Radical trust 

BENJAMIN: Radical trust that we'll be truthful with each other about what we're feeling, most importantly, when we know it's going to hurt the other person. There's this willingness to just be like, "This is what I'm feeling, I'm going to share it even though I know this is the last thing you want to hear," or it's going to hurt you or whatever. And so because of that, there's just this level of trust that we can move forward into something. And if there's anything out of resonance, we're going to stop, we're going to pause, and we're going to say, where are you at because there's that level of trust that we can lean into anything really?

AUBREY: I think maybe then this is what I'm talking about, the flexibility is actually a byproduct of trust. This is actually the defining characteristic. And then when the substrate of trust is there, because I agree that's the most important thing. I think polyamory, for me, really highlighted that the slightest withhold, a 12% withhold was magnified to 1,000% destructive force, 100 times multiplier of you didn't really tell me what you were feeling and I could fucking sense it. Now, let's get the real truth. And it was close, but not exactly it. And then that would just be devastating, because there's so much pressure on it. But I think if you develop this sense of just absolute, absolute trust in each other, then from there, I think, again, safety and freedom. Then from that place of safety, the place of safety, of trust, even if it hurts a little while to start, you have so much safety, that there's like, "Well, let's be free to the extent that we're still feeling it."

BENJAMIN:  What we just talked about was being truthful to each other but the piece of that is we use the term in the book, our truest truth, but then also doing the work, to know yourself well enough to have discernment over what what is really true, what is your real truth, because a lot of times, we don't know what our real truth is. It's muddled and murky because of the programming of society, expectations, of all the things. There's also the individual work is required to be in touch with yourself, to know yourself so well and to have a clean vessel to where when something comes up, you can feel it, you might even intellectually understand it yet, but to be so in tune with what you're feeling that you can be like, "I don't know what's going on, but I have a feeling that's coming up." We say that there's the intellectual knowing and then there's the deeper knowing, that you know, in every cell, the gnosis. When you're tapped into yourself, and you can really tune into what your real truth is, that might sound easy, but it takes practice and maturity, and discernment, to really tap into that. To be able to share what's true with your partner, you have to know what's true. And that's not always as easy as it sounds.

AUBREY: No, because you have to know who you are that's desiring it. I think that's the tricky part too. Whether you're desiring and then the identity of self that's desiring and is it a pseudo desire or is it an authentic true-self desire? Of course, what does the pseudo self do? What does the ego do? It tries to trick you into believing that it's the true self. This is for divine codes that are going to be spread for the, Of course, and you're like, "Fuck, yeah, it is. That's right. And then this is what I desire and it's for the good of all." And meanwhile, the egos like, "Ha, ha, ha. Got him again." For sure, it's tricky.

AZRYA: It's very tricky. It requires tremendous awareness. And I think that's the puzzle piece to all of this is awareness. Your ability to deepen a relationship is directly connected to your ability to know who you really are. You're bringing yourself into the container of the union, only the degree that you can. And certainly your partner will illuminate parts of you that you can't see and then you're going to see more of yourself. Some parts you won't like. But I think for me, the biggest thing was the trust could only grow to the degree to which I felt like I could bring all of myself. So the part of me that was questioning monogamy was a part of myself, that was confusing and, as Benjamin said earlier, threatening to the relationship. So of course, the natural inclination would be to just say, well, let's just pretend like she doesn't exist, because she's really inconvenient right now. I have this beautiful love, this beautiful life--

BENJAMIN: Really convenient. 

AZRYA: Really fucking inconvenient but she's a part of me. If I can bring her forward, and I can put her on the table, and I can say, "Hey, I don't know what to do with this. And I know this is going to trigger all of your stuff. But this is what it is. And I need to be honest with you that this is there." He took space to process that and he went through a process, but he came home and he was like, "I'm still here." Just the fact that I was able to bring that part of me forward and still feel his love and have him not reject me and have him not run away, but to say that part of me gets to be included too, that built a whole 'nother layer of trust and of depth. And as Marianne Williamson says, "We can't really know someone until we've seen their shadow," we can't really love someone until we've seen their shadow and forgiven it. And I think that's such a beautiful truth. Maybe the real magic sauce of a lasting relationship is the willingness to bring your shadow forward and take ownership for it and love each other through it.

AUBREY: I thought there was a really potent story you guys shared where, in one of your death portal situations, you guys were at, I think it was in Tulum at the beach but ultimately, you had to think about whether or not you wanted to bring a baby into the world. You'd already been through that chapter. You were like, I don't think I'm feeling this. I don't think I want another run at this.

AZRYA: No, it wasn't, "I don't think." It was a fullfuck no.

BENJAMIN: It was I got a vasectomy 15 years ago.

AUBREY: Yeah, we're done. We're done. And you went off to the beach to clear your mind, to understand what was going on? And you knew that there was an answer that he really wanted to hear. And you love this man deeply. And there's an answer you really wanted to hear. And you took a long time, knowing that probably even though he's not the most anxious guy, from everything I know, it's tough, you're just waiting in there.

BENJAMIN: I’ll open it.

AUBREY: I'm sure and she knows that, but she took her time. You took your time. And then you come back and you're like, "I'm still not sure." That's a ballsy move and that's a beautiful move. Those are the epic, courageous, heroic things that make for an epic love. And I really want to just acknowledge reading that was like, "That's fucking dope." Because it'd been really easy to go a different way. There's lots of these little mini moments even from the very first one, acknowledging like, man, two weeks in, that blindfold and bed move, it's fucking dope. That is an OG moment for sure. But there are countless moments and stories that you guys tell where because you're allowing us to see you, really like to see you. And instead of telling us what's you've learned, but letting us see in, we can find these things, these little pieces that say, like, wow, that's fucking dope, that's a good lighthouse for me in my own stormy waters. Take as much time as I need, and come back and tell the truth, no matter what. And there's just countless amounts of those.

AZRYA: Thank you, brother.

BENJAMIN: Yeah, I think that one specific thing is really interesting, because it's been relevant for us. I think often when we're in a position where we have a tough decision to make, or we want to figure something out, there's this real urgency to come to an answer and let me talk to a counselor, let me talk to a friend, what do I have to do? Let me go to a tarot card reader, what do I have to do to get to an answer? And I think, we've recently, or through the work that we've done, also given yourself permission to what is, is what is is I don't know, and letting that be okay for a while, being like, "I don't know. And at some point, I might know." Take the pressure off of needing to know. We've gone through that. When she came back to me and was like, "I just don't know." That's come up for us and other decisions, whether to remodel our house or to do the retreat center, whatever. Let it be okay, that you don't know until you do. Peter Crone actually helped us through that once when we were in it about the thing. And he's like, "You guys don't know. All you have to do is make peace with the fact that you don't know." I was like, "Shit. That's fucking brilliant."

AUBREY: Yeah, many times, says brilliant things. That's something that's really important for people to hear. We're always so solution-oriented. We want to get to the solution. Our mind feels uneasy with the unknown and so until it's known, we'll scramble and we'll iterate and we'll go through but making peace with the moments of the unknown, if we can't do that, we're not going to enjoy anything because we'll be scrambling from one known, which is all bullshit anyways, we actually hardly ever know.

AZRYA: That's the beautiful joke of all of it, right? The unknown is actually all there is.

AUBREY: Right. I love you, guys.

AZRYA: Love you, too, brother.

BENJAMIN: It's such an honor to be here, man. I think that this podcast is going to be released the day after our book launch, which feels, of all the podcasts that we could do, to release this one with our book, just feels so true based on the relationship. You saw us in a way before really, anyone did. It was like we knew what we were up to, we knew where we were going. But we'd spent three years just creating and creating, we were behind the scenes. We call them the hidden years of just, and you immediately saw us. It feels so fitting to be launching the book and the brand and all the things with this podcast.

AUBREY: It's an honor. It's an honor. I learn from you guys all the time, right from the drop, always learning different things. It's either a full fuck yes or it's a no. And I'm like, "What do you even mean?" What fucking nonsense does this guy speak. But somehow I knew it was true. And I respected that a lot. There's been countless other things that I've learned from both of you. And today is no exception to that. Book is "BEQOMING" with a Q. And it's becoming.me, is that right? 

AZRYA: Correct. That's the URL. And then we'll make a custom link for your audience. 

AUBREY: Cool. If you listen just a moment longer, we'll put that in the wrap up notes. 

BENJAMIN: If you buy the book on the website, it's a nicer print, it's got gold foil--

AUBREY: Scratch and sniff, the whole thing. 

BENJAMIN: All the things, but we'll plant a tree for every book sold through the website. It's our way of reciprocity.

AUBREY: You guys have an audiobook too, which requires no trees, but still gets the planted tree.

BENJAMIN: Yeah, we have audio books. Azrya read. The book is about three voices. So Azrya speaks at times, I speak at times and then there's a we. And so Azrya performed the we, in a British accent that is super sexy. So it was really cool. When the teacher would say, "Johnny, start reading the first paragraph," and I knew she was going to go around the room and ask everyone to read a paragraph, I would start dripping sweat and then to go full circle to actually read the audio book was a feat.

AZRYA: That was a ceremony. 

BENJAMIN: I never thought I'd get there. Azrya would go in and fart out a chapter like it was nothing and I would be a bumbling buffoon, reading the same thing over and over again. So it was really special. And then we have bonus material where we interview the different people in the books. It was really cool.

AUBREY: Amazing, amazing. Well, I look forward to both standing on the sidelines cheering you on and weaving in and all of the different ways to just continue to shine the light on beautiful offerings that you guys have. And really the biggest offering that you have is the embodiment. That's the thing, is you don't carry the work in a book. There's lots of people who can write cool books. And but there's a far fewer number of those people who are living the living word, the living word that they print. So you guys are that and that's why your family and I love you. 

BENJAMIN: Love you too, brother. Thank you.

AZRYA: Love you too, brother. And I just want to add, we created something called the Three Stages of BEQOMING which you can get for free on our website if you sign up for our mailing list. And that's a real pretty, we put a lot of time, money and energy into creating something really substantial there. So it's video content. It's more of our personal story. We've been documenting our journey for the last couple years and so yeah, I would highly recommend grabbing that as well.

AUBREY: And 30 stages of cumming. Erotic fiction.

AZRYA: That's coming later. 

AUBREY: Coming later. Beautiful. Thanks, everybody for tuning in, much love. Bye!