EPISODE 359
From Victim To Creatrix Consciousness w/ Dr. Kelly Brogan MD
Description
What if all of your symptoms are serving an intelligent function? There is a new field of medicine emerging, and Dr. Kelly Brogan MD is one of the pioneers of this field. In this podcast, we discuss the lessons she’s learned from decades of practicing holistic medicine in defiance to the conventional allopathic medical system she was indoctrinated into. We explore how illness is in some way meeting needs, the trap of victim consciousness, shadows of activism, reclaiming sexuality, immune systems of belief, and so much more.
Transcript
AUBREY: Kelly, it's good to have you here.
KELLY: It's great to be here.
AUBREY: Yeah. So an interesting thing that I like to do is we see a lot of the challenges in medicine, and health, and our psychological processes. And we can point at all these individuals, and I'm sure we'll burrow down into those. But if you had to gather up all of that information that you've accumulated and become aware of, and you're working with patients in your own personal journey, and say, alright, what is the meta crisis of health that we're experiencing right now? What is the ultimate meta crisis? What's that thing that's keeping us from seeing the truth in all of these different avenues?
KELLY: That's a beautiful question. What comes to me is that it's a lack of initiation to one's own power. So obviously, culturally, we don't have a means of transmitting any sort of elder wisdom to the adolescent, which is probably when it would have occurred, traditionally. To come into contact with the illusory limitations with the fear of death, to surpass and transcend and move through that into an expanded sense of self and ultimately, a connection to the divine. That's what initiation could provide. And because we don't experience that, we don't cross over a threshold, we carry all of our child psychology into our adulthood, and we end up just being kids running around in our trauma bodies with adult clothing on trying over and over and over again, to make something work that, by its very nature, cannot work. I've called it buying eggs from the hardware store, when we insist that we can find love in a place where it is simply not available. That is one definition of suffering. So I think that as children, we are societally, familiarly enculturated to come into great conflict and enduring conflict with our animal beingness and our human feelingness, if you will. So we develop this psychological infrastructure that says, what I am, my very nature is wrong. It's bad. I am fundamentally rejection-worthy, I am fundamentally broken. And so the curation begins and that curation ultimately results in our personality and our defensive structure. And at some point, what I initially observed in my practice was like in your 30s, or 40s. But now I think it's maybe creeping earlier. I don't know. Collectively, there is a recognition that the strategy to procure love, and connection, and approval, it's like not really working. And even the most basic sense of okayness is not available. And that's when the mask starts to slip and you have two options. You can tape it on tighter and just keep on keeping on, or you can say yes to the initiation and it tends to be rather self-led at this point. And ultimately, is a process of coming into greater connection with that feeling, felt human experience and with what it is to simply be, rather than constantly do and try to get that A plus on life that ultimately has failed to deliver the experience that we were hoping for.
AUBREY: One of the things that I was talking to Matias de Stefano, he's actually here in the house now. We had a long conversation about the importance of re-membering ourselves. If we think of our members; our arms, our legs. There's a re-membering of who, what we actually are in its totality, not the reductionist sense that the medical biology books will show us, but a cohesive re-membering where all of the pieces are attached; our energy body, our emotional body, our mental body, our physical body, our spiritual body. All of these things are inextricably woven and to have a re-membering of ourselves, then can help guide us to what we actually need. Because we all need help. We need different practices, we need different supplements. Sometimes we need the drugs. Sometimes we just do. Some staph infection or something. Some result of an environment that's creating something that's difficult for us to manage on our own. Sure, blessings and gratitude that we have these things. But it must first come with a re-membering of self So we know how to choose from the various options and not be manipulated into that choice by the profit-driven medical industrial complex, which of course, cannot be ignored that that energy is there and self-perpetuating an energy of, okay, well, we have a solution and it costs this much. And you can bill your insurance for this and all of that. So there is some pressure on the other side. But there's also a great awakening of these initiatory practices that help us re-member, re-member who we are. I totally agree with you. That seems like step one, let's re-member. And then step two, let's look at all the solutions, because there's a lot of different options that you can start to choose from there.
KELLY: There's a Greek word, I don't speak Greek, but the word is anamnesia. And my understanding is that it means to remember something once known and it arises from within. And I think those of us who've had that experience, it's this ineffable feeling of expansive delight. Like, of course, this is how it is. Of course. How could I have been so asleep? And then you feel almost compassion for the version of you that didn't quite remember to the extent that we do now.
AUBREY: Or deep grief. In these moments of anamnesia that I've experienced, it's both the exuberance of holy shit, this is good. And then looking back, oh man, I lived a whole beautiful life without this knowledge. And if I would have just remembered this, everything would have been that much sweeter. Every kiss would have been sweeter, every time I made love would have been more rich and full of Eros. Every experience of my life could have been more enlivened. And there's a grieving of that. And I think that's one of the reasons that keeps people from these experiences of transcendence because you really have to look back and say, all right, it could have been a lot different. And that's okay, I accept. That's just a memory from the past. What about from now forward? But we get stuck in the self-judgment of, I should have done something different, it could have been a different way. And it's hard for people to just be like, okay, I didn't know. Now we go forward.
KELLY: And I think that if we can extrapolate this concept of choice as the ultimate human superpower that is ever present, and we can apply it even to those experiences of suffering, that's where I personally can get myself into controversial waters. And it is my belief system that we always have agency and that choice is always available to us. And that on some level, we actually want to be having the experiences of struggle and suffering that we are having. We semi-consciously, sometimes subconsciously, choose them. Why? There's great wisdom in this. It's not because we were stupid and asleep and just didn't know better and wanted to forestall having this more extraordinary embodied experience. It could be because that is the wisdom of our very embodiment, that we are offered these patterned experiences of that little rumble of feeling and we can take it to its completion, or we can suppress and stifle it again. Because I would argue that anytime we engage in addiction. And addiction can be broadly defined as anything that stabilizes, fulfills, or otherwise meets a need. There doesn't need to be this pathological negative veil over it. It can simply be something that works. Because I have found in my patients that their addictions, whether conventional addiction, substances or otherwise, or work or sex or otherwise, relating even to the pharmaceutical establishment, through an addictive model, it works. It works until it doesn't. And so, there's some sort of meeting of the needs through these indirect, semi or unconscious ways, that then becomes more conscious and intentional. And that transition, that contrast is so much what we came here for. To know what it is, to engage in that patterned experience of just touching the wounds. Just touching the hurt, just feeling a little bit of the grief, or the shame, or the rage. Peeking out and then recognizing that it's not time for its completion yet. It'll spiral around yet again in the future, and will have that opportunity to let it be, let it alchemize, and to move through this body. But I've found that, and a lot of somatic experiencing speaks to this, your nervous system has to be healed, stabilized, integrated to a certain extent, for you to literally be able to capacitate an emotion, literally. For you to not die because of it the way that you would have as a child. As a child, for you to experience these states of terror that accompany disconnection is an existential threat. I mean, you literally as an infant or child in that kind of danger that's been coupled with the experience of death. And so when we carry that sort of psychic structure for these feeling states into our adult life, of course, we would avoid it. I could say that my entire career and activism history was predicated on an avoidance of some of my deepest fears, including that men can kill me. And imagining that to turn towards that fear, to explore it, to really allow it to speak its story, I wasn't ready even physically, to hold that experience in my body. And I certainly wasn't ready earlier in my life to truly inhabit bodily, what it is to have others, especially others that I care deeply about, think that I am bad and wrong. That would have killed me. It would have felt, at least or potentially even, really killed me.
AUBREY: Well, the me that is identified in the identity construct, which must die many, many deaths in our life of growth and evolution.
KELLY: Right. That conflict between this ego structure and the beingness, the feelingness that is native to us. What a rift? How do we exist with these fragments in this huge bag we're carrying around and curating which parts we imagine somebody might love us for me? It's exhausting. It's totally exhausting. And that's why so much of what we call depression or anxiety, certainly, I was taught the biochemical model of something is wrong with your brain. And there's a very different perspective which is that this is the calling forth of your soul's integration into your feeling body. And in psychiatry, at least the way I was trained, there's no role for the question why. Why is this experience you’re having?
AUBREY: We're in a broken machine hypothesis, which is, again, this reductionist idea, separatist reductionist idea of the body in isolation from the field and isolation from the unseen aspects of us and the unseen choices. I don't want to just gloss over that. That there's a deep reverence that we can all have that accompanies compassion, because sometimes compassion can feel like pity. Where it's like, oh, poor person. They're suffering. But you can have that. So, it's a yes and. It's like, yeah, yeah. Be with them in their suffering. Understand. And that's also one of the great ways to help somebody out of their suffering. It's not to tell them a bunch of fancy things. No, I'll go in there with you. You're in hell? Let me go into hell with you. And guess what, when I'm in hell with you, it's no longer hell anymore, because hell is a place of isolation. So, there's that one aspect of it that's like, let me get in there. But then there's also the shadow aspect of that which is pity, which puts you in a place above where they're going and pitying them, rather than honoring them as, wow, that's a brave soul. Look at the brave soul who's choosing that path of separation so that they have the opportunity to find their way back and guide others back. It's not bypassing their experience. Their experience is real as hell. But saying, just maybe this is their choice. And let me go in there and feel it with them to support them. Not try to change them, just to know that I'm there with you. And also, let me honor you. Let me honor you for this choice that your soul is making, to endure this weight, to feel this burden. And that changes things really radically than the pity model and the false compassion, which is keeping you separate and keeping you better than another person, which is a slippery, dangerous little path for the ego to go down.
KELLY: I totally agree. And I've said it before, I'll say it again, that I think that victim consciousness is the only human pathology. It is the root of what we call evil, and hurt, and suffering. And often, it is cloaked, it's hiding in these places that we wouldn't suspect it exists. Obviously, if you're in your victim consciousness, you're saying things like, poor me, why me, no fair. And you're fighting with reality as it's being presented to you. And there's a villain that you're oriented towards. There's some external source of power that is responsible for your suffering.
AUBREY: A victim requires an oppressor.
KELLY: Exactly. But what I've been interested in in my own process is to learn more about this other angle of the triangle, which is the Karpman triangle, which is the rescuer. And I would argue that most people in our position and many who call themselves healers, or facilitators, or philanthropists, or otherwise, who are consciously seeking to better humanity, and help others, and support others, are ultimately, not only doing so for their own gain, which I actually don't think is problematic. There's a guy named Bill Harris, who wrote a book called "Sacred Selfishness." So, I'm in the camp that individuation requires self-orientation, self-discovery, and self-knowing that is foundational to any capacity to offer compassion to another or to even function harmoniously in a collective dynamic. But not only is it fundamentally meeting my own needs, if I am helping another, so I better get acquainted with my own needs so that those are conscious, but that there is a subtle reification of exactly what you're describing, which is itself a disempowered model. It's the victim model because I'm saying, I have to help you. You couldn't otherwise figure this out. Without me, you couldn't do this. And even though it appears like I'm just opening my arms to your struggle, what if there was some third path, fifth path, there was some way that that individual would have resolved the tension of the conflict within them without your meddling? Almost like from an anthropological perspective, could you just watch, and support, and be co-present rather than intervening? What if they would have come into contact with their agency in a way that now is impossible because you swooped in to save them? And how can you be so sure? This was a big one for me in my activism, especially imagining that I know what's best for children. And what should happen and should happen, shouldn't happen to them with regard to—
AUBREY: Well, you might know a few things.
KELLY: I certainly still think I do.
AUBREY: Maybe not 72 injections. I don't know. Maybe not. I don't know.
KELLY: That's the thing. Maybe, maybe not. How do I know what a child's journey is?
AUBREY: Maybe you do know. I don't know.
KELLY: I'd like to think I do, but I came to the point where I can't be so sure. I cannot be so sure what anyone else needs. And when I am in that energy, imagining that I know—
AUBREY: Well, let me tell you something, Kelly. Science is real and trust science. So, I don't know what kind of blasphemy you're talking about. Because it's real and it's fixed and it's always the same. And it's known for everybody, universally.
KELLY: I know. I was taking that science down the other path.
AUBREY: We're a computer and the program works every time on the MacBook operating system of human—
KELLY: Follow the orders. I know.
AUBREY: So, I don't know what you're talking about.
KELLY: I don't either. I had to stop knowing what I was talking about a little while. It's really not for me to know. Not that I couldn't know better. But if I think that I do, then what am I trying to do? I am trying to alleviate my own discomfort with someone else's, even this anonymous victim's suffering. So is there another way for me to address or interact with my own discomfort without leveraging control over someone else's experience, even if they're colluding with me in that disempowerment? I don't know. That's how I've come to see it.
AUBREY: The deep embodied lessons from facilitating different ceremonies, breathwork being one of the ceremonies of that facilitating, you participate in one of those experiences. The way in which you facilitate that in its highest level is not to try. If someone's yelling or emoting anger, you don't go and try to be like, it's okay. It's okay. Which is subtly this condescension of you shouldn't be feeling this. Let me show you that it's all good. Or let me tell you why you shouldn't be angry. It's time to forgive. The way you facilitate, and it's the same in a Bufo ceremony, 5-MeO ceremony, the way you facilitate the highest accord is you just drop in there with them. And if they're feeling rage, you allow yourself to feel rage so that they know that you feel what they feel. And so, if they're yelling, you, yell. If they're crying, you cry. And it comes naturally. It's not like you try to do it. It's just like, let's just go in here together. And that's the only thing I'm going to do is I'm just going to let you know. And that's mostly what I say. It's just I know. I know. I know. I know. Because all of this human experience is available to us. So, if we don't recognize that whatever somebody else's feeling is also in us, we're completely full of shit because we have that too. Maybe the specific things that triggered it, this stepdad did this, or this, whatever. That's specific, I get it. And honor that there's a specific, unique thing that happened. But the universal feeling that came from it, the trauma, we all have access to it. So, it's just, I know, I know. And I'll feel it with you. That's the only thing that I've ever seen that actually accelerates the process of healing because then, people are just not alone. And that's the only thing that I think, human beings were definitely not meant to do this alone. We were not meant to do anything in isolation. That's not how we're designed. So, when you step into that role, that's the role where you're not being rescuer as separate than, which is problematic as you said, that subtle condescension, all of your own feelings of validation for look what I did and blah, blah, blah. And it doesn't mean that you're free from that trap because you can do that really well, dive in and grieve with someone's grief. And then you can pop right out and be like, man, aren't I good? I nailed that one. Tip of the top. Everybody else is doing it shitty. I know what the fuck to do. So, ego is slippery as hell. And you always have to kind of keep one little side eye on it, like I see you, buddy. I see you popping your head up. But yeah, I 100% agree with you that the way to heal is just step in on the inside just for a moment. Just step in on the inside. It's a medicine that works the best for me. It's not somebody giving me a bunch of advice. It's just like, no, I feel what you're feeling. And I'll just feel it with you.
KELLY: But it's even more that you're doing because you're offering what I think is the ultimate balm, which is approval. It's not just acceptance, or tolerance, or even just co-presence, you're actually offering when you say I know, you are saying, communicating and transmitting what you are in this moment, makes sense. What you are is something that needs to be this way. It's almost like and I'm so glad it is this way is implicit. And what that undoes relative to our childhood experiences of having our being states and our feelings states in conflict with our connection to our caregivers and a sense of safety, is extraordinary. Just even one of those experiences of approval from somebody intimate to your emotional sharing and experience, or something that you can offer yourself. I had an experience with my girls recently. I have two daughters, 13 and 10. And in some re-parenting work I've been doing on my own, I thought, there are two questions that I wish had been posited at some point earlier than my 40s. So, I thought I'm going to ask my kids these questions. And one was, tell me about an experience that you had of me that hurt you and that when you think about it, you still feel hurt now. Tell me about that. And the other was, what do you need from that you're not getting? And my kids are super chill, and they're so lovely and like not a source of a lot of my triggering at all. And I was not prepared for what it felt like to get this feedback from them. It was so devastating. So, devastating. Partly because it exposed my secret rescuer. Because even before I was into sovereignty-oriented stuff, I was always a libertarian and always very live and let live kind of parenting model. And I certainly thought that I had broken a lot of cycles in my lineage. And that my kids were pretty free to be who they needed to be. And I didn't realize that when I got the feedback that, particularly around like a very dramatic shift in one of my many rebirth processes four or five years ago, my daughter gave me the feedback that she saw me as the villain in that memory that she had. Meanwhile, in my story, I'm the hero. The villain is other folks in my family of origin or whatever. And when she gave me that feedback, it smoked out my need for her to see me in a certain way in order for me to experience myself in a certain way. And in psychological terms, that's called a narcissistic extension, when you use your children to bolster your sense of self-worth. And I had no idea I was doing that until I got this feedback that was at odds with my reality. And I cried, and I recognized that I had this secret agenda to heal my lineage and that my kids needed to have this deeply embodied spiritual experience of their femininity. And that if that didn't happen, somehow that failure would reflect on me personally. None of this was conscious. And so I went through this whole experience of what it is to fail around what I thought I came here for, literally as a woman. And then in that moment, I recognize, well, in one of the moments of crying about this, I recognize, oh my God, Kelly, this is actually the opportunity. It's right here. Here is the opportunity, it's happening right now, for me to turn towards her knowing that she has a totally different experience than mine, and to simply visit with her experience and approve of it. Because of course, I want her to know my experience. Well, here's my reasoning. Here's what you don't understand, silly child. Here's where you've gotten it wrong. And once I clear this up for you, then you'll see me differently. And you'll see me the way that I want you to see me, and I will feel loved and approved of myself, except now I'm the adult and she's the child. And I had this golden opportunity. And because I recognized that and could offer myself that framework, I was able to sit there and cross the bridge to her reality, which was fundamentally condemning, it felt like, of mine, and simply be with her. And if it's taken all of this inner work for me to feel ready, even on a nervous system level, to hold the feeling of that disapproval from somebody I care so deeply about in my body, no wonder this is not available to many of us. And no wonder we're perpetuating that experience of what's referred to as an enmeshment trauma, where we need to share a reality in order to feel safe because that's how it was as kids. And I know I have the program, especially with men like that. If you don't like what I did, or who I am or whatever, or you're disapproving or disappointed, if I can get you to understand, then I'll get what I want, which is your approval, your love, your connection, or whatever. And so, I've made an entire vocation out of making sure that it's clear that what I think is valid. I can show hundreds of references for why I'm right about what I feel and think. But fundamentally, when we need to defend ourselves, our reality, our feeling state, our experience, it's like you abandon the position of your heart and you're running into somebody else's terrain to make the case for why your heart is true. And you don't have to do that. That self-betrayal will then ultimately be reflected back as a betrayal in another. Because I could have experienced my daughter as betraying me at that moment. And because I stayed with my child self who was having her tantrum, and I stayed loyal to her, not abandoning her to prove to my daughter that I was right about my reality. It's not necessary when you're in a self-allegiance, when you're in this commitment to stay with your own experience and not needing to recruit validation and approval from the outside. Then we, paradoxically, can offer approval to others. Which is itself, it ends right there, when I can say to you, really, genuinely, makes sense that you would feel that way.
AUBREY: It is something of a paradox in that we must be able to be fully self-sovereign and we can never be also. We will always be influenced and we will always have some level of enmeshment with other people. And it's important, it's a part of our development to actually have an alternate perspective that we can offer. Now, hopefully, we find people who’s around us, who are aware that they have just a perspective, and then that perspective isn't necessarily the truth. I recently did a practice called circling, which you might be familiar with, I don't know if you are or not. But the beauty of it is, it's an interpersonal communication technique. And the idea is to name that everything that you are experiencing of another person is either your feeling, or it's your imagination about what that thing is. So, it takes radical ownership of your experience, which then lowers everybody else's defenses. Because if you even say something like, what I'm sensing or what I'm seeing in you, you're telling somebody that.
KELLY: About their inner world.
AUBREY: Yeah. And the language is very specific in circling, which is, what I'm imagining is, what I'm imagining is, what I feel is. My feeling, not what I feel about you, but what I feel in my body is or what I notice, I noticed your hands doing this. So you say I notice, I feel, and then I imagine. I imagine this. And then it allows people to have this interesting way that they can receive something and then try it on for themselves. But it's the absolute removal of the judgment, which is also... That's another thing that you were talking about. If you just remove the projection of telling somebody what it is, they don't have to defend it because they don't feel judged. They may still want to judge themselves. But there's just a nice, easy way to do that. And so I think surrounding yourself with people who have some of this information, some of this technology, some of this understanding, and are very grounded themselves is incredibly supportive. But to get into that place where you can be that incredibly supportive, you have to also become self-sovereign. And then it becomes a reinforcing circle. So it's interesting, I do feel like sometimes the self-help kind of community, the do-the-work community, it's so focused on self-love, self-love, self-love, self-sovereignty, self-soothing, self-parenting, self. And I get it. Yes. And if you can do that with a community, it's just an accelerant. But if it's the wrong community, it'll actually repattern the wounds and the trauma. So, I think it's important to recognize that it's not just all about your self-love practice. It can be really helpful to have somebody who loves you unconditionally. That's really helpful. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. It just is. Like, you do something shitty and you're judging yourself and that person just looks at you like you're still right on top. I was so lucky that my mom was like that. My mom, for example, she always loved me with that kind of unconditional way. And it didn't mean that my own self-love was perfect, because my dad was a slightly different story. But I had a good model of both. But just for an example, someone asked my mom recently, aren't you so proud of Aubrey? I've accomplished some things. I wrote a book, I had company and whatever. And she looked at him and was like, what do you mean? I've always been proud of Aubrey. All of this shit he does, I don't care. I'm proud of Aubrey because he's Aubrey. And that love, super helpful. So I can always go back to my mom to help with that. And I've also had to do tons of the self-work to get my own self-love practice and my own self-talk in a way. Still, I'll spend in different meditations and ceremonies and journeys, I'll spend five whole minutes just telling myself authentically, not like a mantra that I'm like zoned out, but like, you're doing good, Aubrey. You're doing good. Good job, buddy. Good job. For as long as it takes for me to actually feel it because that voice of self-judgment is so strong. It's kind of this both and thing where we got to handle our own shit, take responsibility for that, and then ideally, surround ourselves with a community that can help support that too.
KELLY: Right. I agree that relationally, we have the opportunity to accelerate the process of personal integration and self-discovery that's not available in a silo. I always say, enter through the upset. So, you look at your resentments, you look at your disappointments, you look at the ways that somebody kind of rubs you wrong. And there you have your perfect spiritual practice to reclaim that disavowed and projected part. So when you are in that self-soothing, connecting to that part of you that innocently experiences your own goodness and rightness, and inherent value, there is this other part, call it your inner critic or whatever, saboteur, whatever you want to call it, that is just as much a part of you, just as valid, just as deeply intrinsic a component of your heart as that more pure field of emotional innocence. And that relationship to the inner critic, I think, is one of the most important aspects of shadow work. It's to understand that that parental interject, so that voice that became a part of us for our own survival so that we can anticipate disappointment that others might experience, so that we could anticipate rejection, so that we could be prepared emotionally to mitigate this flood of negative feelings that could come if somebody doesn't like who we are or disapproves of how we have chosen to behave, to develop a relationship to that part, like literally dialogue, conversation, intimacy with that part, and what is that part trying? What's its role? What is it trying to protect you from experiencing? Who's beneath that part? How do the other parts feel about that part? It is very possible when you're in a relationship, friendship, in community, dealing with your family of origin because you get to see all of the ways that you need somebody else to be wrong and you need to be right, in order for your feelings to be valid. But that's not true. And that's why the most difficult practice I've been engaging in is how can I exercise my power of choice such that I do not need someone else to be bad or wrong In order for that not to work for me? It's very difficult for me because, again, I have this litigator inside me that's like, well, here's all the reasons why you're wrong, you need to understand that you're wrong, and why I'm leaving, you need to know that too, and why this isn't working for me. And all of the reasons are, again, that self-invalidating practice, where it can simply be the case to opt out of the victim triangle by saying, this doesn't work for me, is my favorite phrase, because there's no further discussion, there's no further justification. There's just an acknowledgement that the resonance that would feel harmonious that would nurture, that would fulfill is not present. And that doesn't make one of us wrong.
AUBREY: This podcast, like every other one, whether I mention it or not, is brought to you by Onnit Alpha Brain Black Label. Now, it's brought to you by Onnit Alpha Brain Black Label, one, because this was the company that I helped create, and a formula which I worked with some of the top experts in the world to build, which has become the flagship nootropic all across the country and many parts of the world. But it's also brought to you by it because I take it every single time I do a podcast. I don't miss a podcast without taking Black Label. Now, it used to be Alpha Brain back in the day, but since Black Label came on the market, it just provides this crystalline focus where I'm able to drop in, really connect with the guests, have access to information, stories, words. It creates this kind of flow state. And whether I'm writing, or podcasting, or reading, taking notes, whatever I'm doing, Alpha Brain Black Label is my ride or die homie. So, click the link on the screen if you're interested in checking it out, or go to onnit.com/aubrey for 10% off Alpha Brain Black Label and all other Onnit supplements and products. I'm curious because I've been deeply connecting to reclamation of our sacred want, that it's okay to want. It's okay to want.
KELLY: It's going to happen whether you like it or not.
AUBREY: But we try to pretend like we're just agnostic to our wants and there's an accord of the universe, and we're just in the accord. And I catch myself doing this all the time as well, instead of, I have a sensing, or I have a knowing. It's not me. I would want to go out and take this trip with you, but I have this feeling that... So it kind of removes me and makes me exculpable from claiming my want because I'm afraid that if I actually expose my wants, it will hurt someone's feelings. But I'm also at the same time, giving away my own sacred power. And it's a mild act of cowardice to not actually tell the truth. And it might be an act of kindness to them, potentially. But it's also a condescending kindness by saying, my sensing is, or this isn't working in accord with the greater harmony of blah, blah, blah. When it's really like, I don't want to. I don't want to. And I actually want to go out with this person instead. There's this interesting thing that I was writing an email about that today, about a trip that changed, the group changed and I wanted it to change. And so I was watching myself and watching my language about how I was trying to position this when really, the bottom line was, I want to go a different way with this. It was like a moment of courage. I don't even think I actually made it to full courage. I got pretty close. But I think there’s a beauty for that. And if we all started doing that and then not get so sensitive about it, or not make a bunch of reasons why or whatever, just like, it's not what I want right now, or it is what I want. This is what I want.
KELLY: When you think about living in a world where everybody is clear on what they want and expresses it candidly, to me, that sounds about the safest world we could possibly live in. Sign me up! Because I think there are some, not so subtle Oedipal dynamics are at the root of this. So, in your early life, you felt desire, you felt Eros coursing through your body. And it was a decentralized non-genital sexuality. I was trained in a very Freudian program and later fell in love with Jungian psychology. But in this model, I do think there's something that's very essential to consider, which is that you felt this desire, this Eros, this animation of your body as a child. And where would it be directed? At your mom. And of course, if you were breastfed, or if you were, hopefully, touched and held and cared for, that's an erotic experience by its very definition. And then there are these triangular dynamics that are enculturated by our social structures, where there's something actually dangerous. So maybe, I'm assuming this didn't happen for you, but many boys and probably a lot of girls too are shamed for masturbating, for example. Or maybe in some way, it was insinuated that the experience of this sexual energy through your body, this desire is problematic and dangerous, or maybe even on some deep terrain level, you had this sense that you would be punished, castrated for the fuller expression of your desire. So you learn to mitigate it, you learn to split off that animal sexuality from your curated persona. And it didn't go away. But somehow, we've come to understand, even in your language, that we need to reclaim this experience, which implies that we've learned that it's something that should be hidden or we will be punished for it. And I think it's absolutely the case that desire is, maybe it's the most powerful force, reality-shaping force that there is. One of the teachers out there, I love Kasia Urbaniak. She talks about, you can't unwant what you want. You want it regardless. And it's either going to be fulfilled unconsciously. So I've been looking at a lot of my struggles in life through the lens that I looked at my patients. When they would come to the end of our work together, I would often notice a resistance to fly the nest. Here they are on the brink of life without doctors ever again, without medications ever again, diagnosis-free. And I would feel this, almost like fomenting of challenges or an attachment to the model of that dyad with me. And like, wait a minute, I thought you wanted this? And somehow I was able to see, well, actually, there's a lot that we get out of our struggles. And maybe you could even take it as far as to say that we want the experiences that we have, regardless of how they look. So that's an unconscious fulfillment of the dynamics that are familiar or maybe even eroticized. Robert Masters uses the term eroticized wound to talk about the ways in which we fetishize that experience of our own punishment in ways. I've come to see in my life, rather inconveniently, to own this has been uncomfortable. But there's something I really get out of experiencing myself as like this bad girl who did something wrong, who now needs to be punished. And whether that's through—
AUBREY: Sounds hot.
KELLY: It doesn't feel hot at the moment. Whether that's through censorship, or some list I'm making or whatever, some naughty list. I always knew on some level, the poor me angle was not authentic and there was something I actually liked about it. But I didn't take it so far as to see that there's so many dynamics of struggle in my life, where I am being reflected that I've been a bad girl, love will be withdrawn or some kind of punishment is coming and that I actually enjoy that, is hard to acknowledge. Because that means that my whole life scape is something that I want. I want all of it to be exactly as it is. And desire is the driving force. So, I either consciously create with owning what it is that I want and recognizing the difficult choices I have to make around the reality that I cannot get what I want in a given relationship or in a given dynamic. And there's that rupture that often leads us to the brink of this initiation process. I've found that the signature of that process tends to be a willingness to lose something that you thought you might otherwise die without. And in my experience, that's been... Like New York City. Leaving New York City was that for me. It's an element or aspect of your identity that you imagine will lay you bare for the animals to come devour or whatever. And instead, what happens is you expand into this experience of your selfhood and associated self-concept that wouldn't have been available if you were just trying to arrange all the furniture on the deck of the Titanic.
AUBREY: I try to be mindful of the language that we use as well. Because oftentimes, we say, I have to do this. I have to go to work. No, you don't have to go to work. You want to go to work. I have to do this thing. No, you don't. No, you don't. You don't have to have to. You want to. No matter what it is. You want to. And when we start to own that... The only caveat to that is there are other people who want things who are real people and may impinge upon what you want. You can't want somebody else and have that... Some shit will happen to you that maybe you don't want and that's just life. A fucking tree could fall and smash your car like one of those Allstate commercials or something, mayhem. Some shit can happen. Got it. And it doesn't mean that you wanted that just because it happened.
KELLY: Depends how far you want to take it.
AUBREY: Depends on your worldview, depends on your cosmology, depends on how much you influence that. However, I do believe that the tree itself has consciousness. And the tree itself, in its ultimate idea, has its own consciousness, its own path. Everything has, every other person has their own sacred choice. So, it's not just all about us. There is a world. But most everything that we do is from our want. And when we start to realize that we're wanting this, and then what do we really want? I have to go to work if I want to go to work. I want to go to work because I want security, or I want to feel needed, or I want to contribute depending on what you want is for that. Or I'm afraid of so I want to mitigate the fear of losing this security. You start to go all the way back deeper, deeper, deeper, and you start to realize there's a couple big things. I want to be safe, I want to be seen, I want to be loved. It really gets simple. I want to be needed, which goes to purpose. I want to matter. I want to contribute in a way that matters. So you start to reduce and like, alright, we're all having the same soup of wants, but we've just separated ourselves from it and created a loop, a web of obligation and this exculpability, which is really the denial of our power, that superpower that you mentioned, which is choice. I'm choosing this because I want it. And then if we can get back to that, there's a lot of latent power that we have to access.
KELLY: And loss. I don't know, maybe that's my biased experience and perspective is that there is a sacrifice in the truest sense of the word that marks the threshold of initiation to that power. Because you don't have a choice when you don't know that you have a choice. But the moment that you do, there is an invocation of courage that is required. And the courage is simply the willingness to walk into that abyss of what you imagine is a kind of loss and associated grief, and pain, and fear that feels immolating. It feels like it would destroy you into a billion bits. And you can't take those steps until you're ready. I've spent my entire career trying to understand the ingredients of readiness. And maybe you have some insight because I haven't been able to figure it out. It always has seemed that the patients, for example, that I watched walk into medical history, literally, like miracles of remission befalling them. What made them ready, the moment they were ready? And then if I had knocked on their door a month before and said, hey, I think you could maybe, I don't know, come off of five meds you've been on for 25 years and never be a psych patient again. Nothing would have happened. Nothing would have alchemized. But there was some ingredient that arose from within them that created the conditions, that crucible just came into form.
AUBREY: Let's try this on. Let's try this on and see how we like it as a potential answer. So let's say that our belief system, which is our reality construct, it's actually the world that we live in. Nobody lives in the same world because our world is based on perception. Now, that doesn't mean that it's not objective truth or objective things. But our perception of the objective is always subjective. We cannot escape our perspective, our subjectivity. We just can't escape it. So nobody's watched the same movie, nobody knows the same person. Nobody's read the same book. It's all colored by our perspective. So in this world that we've built, that world, like all things, is part of our identity, forms part of our identity structure. Identity is an entity or identity is an entity and that entity wants to survive. And it wants to survive the world that it's in as part of its survival. So, it has an immune system that defends against and protects against beliefs that could destroy the entity of your identity, which is your world. And so, the idea that you could go into remission requires the willingness for your identity to die, if you believe that. If you have a really robust immune system of keeping out information that would destroy your identity, because your identity structure itself is really strong and it's impermeable, then that idea won't be able to enter your reality, that won't be able to flower and fruit inside your reality. So I would say, I would propose that the key part of being ready is your willingness to be malleable with your identity structure, or the point at which your identity structure and the world that you've perceived has failed so radically that you are just ready to discard it so that you're able to die and be reborn with a real new identity. And it can't be just the mind. It can't be just like, I watched a Joe Dispenza podcast and now I'm fucking ready. Your cells have to believe it. That's why he's always pushing you to get to that emotional state, that reality, the emotions that are translating the information into the body, into the felt sense of, oh, we're already healed. It's creating a new reality world that you're in. And with that, in his teachings, which I think are great, is if you live in that reality, where your cancer is in remission, or your Crohn's is healed, or whatever, the thing is that you live in that world, well, does it matter whether objectively it happens or not? It matters much less because already in your world, it's already done. And so you get to live that life to a certain degree. And that's the ultimate message of it is you get to build your reality. And so I think it's a matter of, like you said, goes back to that first thing. What's the initiation that can show you how malleable and how just your whole world, your identity structure is just a construct. And so new information can come in and you allow that to come in, and then you're in the place where these miracles no longer seem like miracles, but you go like, oh yeah, cool. Because that's consistent. My cells believe that it's possible. And my immune system of my belief system is not fighting off this new information anymore.
KELLY: And you understand that as an adult, you can meet those needs that we were discussing through many different avenues. That it's not only this futile attempt to meet your needs through a system or relationship that is showing you it's not there. I always say, going to the allopathic medical system for health and wellness is like going to the butcher to learn about veganism. It was never on offer through that conventional system, that you could have a meaningful experience of your symptoms as messengers. Anything that you're experiencing has any personal import for you. It's all bad genes, bad timing, just random forces that are befalling you. That system never offered you an experience of even remission, true remission of a chronic illness, that's why they're called chronic illnesses because they are expected to persist in perpetuity. So if that's not on offer there and what you actually want to experience is feeling well and whole, why are you going to that system? Why are you persisting there?
AUBREY: You're just going to reinforce the belief system that you came with, which is probably one of the reasons why you are experiencing it. It's reinforcing the reality of the world that you're in.
KELLY: And it's meeting your needs. So, when I am sick, chronically sick, what do I get? I get compassion built into my life from others who pity me and who offer me that surrogate hit of love. I get to say no, without having to actually learn to assert my boundaries and express my desires in this clear and direct way. Because of course, I'm limited by my illness, so I can't do that. I get to say no all the time. I get to experience the validation of this felt sense of wrongness and brokenness that's always lived within me. All my patients told me that the first time they got a diagnosis, they felt like, see, I knew something was wrong with me. And it ends up being like the prison number that's put on their vest. But it feels in the moment, like somebody's finally seeing their hurt. And when we end up over-identifying with that wound, with the cancer diagnosis, with the mental illness and then we think that's the problem, it's almost like imagining that the fire alarm burned the house down or something. It's missing this opportunity to go in through the experience. But I think we have to learn how to meet those needs in a different way. And ultimately, you're the one who has to meet those needs. So you have to recognize that... I'm a big proponent of shadow work and I do think a lot of spiritual approaches and even health and wellness-related approaches are short-lived in their yield, because you're taking your inner critic, your protector part from the wheel and you're putting this benevolent faith connected part of you that sees yourself as perfect and whole at the wheel. But fundamentally, what happened to that part of you? It can't be extinguished or put back in the closet. So it's like that Walt Whitman quote, we contain multitudes and until we can start to see I am the self, organizing all of these parts, and I can identify the different needs of these different parts that otherwise would seem in conflict and play that conflict out in my external reality, it's almost like I'm funding both sides of the war that I think is happening on the outside with whatever it is. Often in the victim triangle as it applies to medicine, I'm the sick patient who's the victim. I have a rescuer who is a priestly doctor. And who is the villain? My body. I am.
AUBREY: Maybe doctors should get pointy hats like the pope to really like... The white lab coats are not enough anymore because—
KELLY: We got the language, we got the costume, we got the rituals.
AUBREY: Go back to Latin for everything. Go back to Latin. And just try on a pointy hat. That way, really, you got the faith.
KELLY: It is pretty clear. I don't know. Like ritual circumcision is about as a cult as you can get. It's like in plain sight. Just look at a pap smear and just take it out of context for one moment. Look at that image, what is going on there? Almost all of the OBGYNs I was trained by were men, for example. And these are, I believe, as somebody who was trained in a cult all myself that we go in with the best rescuer intentions. And I actually think I became a doctor and maybe specifically a psychiatrist because I had that little tolerance for human suffering. Literally, that little tolerance for it. I worked a suicide hotline in college and was up close with, I was at MIT and there were a lot of completed suicides there for various cultural reasons. And I was up close and personal with what that level of despair, what that kind of swan song of pain could possibly feel like to another person, a bystander. And I could not tolerate it. Literally, in my body, I couldn't hold the feeling. And so, of course, there's this ready-made infrastructure called psychiatry and I just needed to get those people into that building. And then there's no more bad feeling inside me. And so, this is great. And they say, there's no more bad feeling inside them. And so, what's the problem? And of course, I didn't learn about the problem for many, many years until I started to see the limitations of the system, actually, through my own health experience, which is often how that rupture of idealization tends to happen is from our own experience as clinicians. But we go in with good intentions and we're indoctrinated unknowingly. if you join a cult, typically, it's elective to some extent. You know that you're joining into a field of belief, and certain customs, and associated rituals, and there's exclusivity, and there's punishment for leaving, and all these things. But in this hidden in plain sight inverted world we're living in, we don't know consciously what we're doing. However, we wouldn't be attracted to that. I wouldn't have been attracted to that cult if I didn't already hold the belief system, which is victim consciousness. I already held that field of belief. And so, of course, it made sense that I would enter and resonate.
AUBREY: The pathologization, how do you say that word?
KELLY: Now you're making me wonder. Is it pathologization? Is that a word? Pathologizing.
AUBREY: Pathologization.
KELLY: That's definitely not a word.
AUBREY: It's not a word.
KELLY: I don't know. It sounds weird.
AUBREY: Should be a word. It's hard to say though.
KELLY: When one pathologizes, how about that?
AUBREY: The pathologization of everything. This is part of our paradigm, the pathologization of everything. Everything. And you mentioned something that's interesting. We've pathologized our sexual urges off and sex addiction comes up. And it's interesting. And we've touched on sexuality quite a bit. And I don't know you personally too well, but I follow you on Instagram and I see you in a place where you're comfortable expressing the embodiment of the reclamation of your sexual energy. So, I imagine just in our conversation, also, this is a keen area of topic and we touched on some of the ways that things can get kind of shameful, and twisted, and repressed in a lot of those different ways. But it seems to me that addiction, of course, is just an attempt to meet a need. And for many of us, the only time we can enter into that space of Eros, which is if you follow the old Kabbalist lineage, is that place where you touch the divine, radical presence, interiority, union with another being, the pleasure that actually overwhelms all of your other sensations. And in that moment of rapture, you say, oh god, because it feels like you're back home with a oneness because the pleasure's so high, and you're in union. We have all of these things. But then to pathologize that and say, oh, it's a sex addiction. Maybe maybe. But it's also an interesting way to not look at the issue. And say, actually, we're all addicted to sex, we're all addicted to water, and food, and breathing. But we're just not quite doing it. So, what we're addicted to is what I would say pseudosex. So, you can get addicted to the pseudo version of the real thing.
KELLY: Localized sex.
AUBREY: It's not really what sex can be, which is this beautiful, enlivening, healing, cleansing, purifying, enrapturing experience with another person or yourself. But in the pseudo version, it's trying to fill some quick need with a quick hit and this little bit of validation in the escapist mentality. And the same with all of these other things; drinking alcohol, versus being an alcoholic. Whatever your relationship is. There's a higher expression of it, which is like, this is just nice. This glass of wine with my friends, this makes one of the reasons why I love life so much. A good Brunello at sunset, maybe with a cigar. I was doing that all week and it's just like, man, watching the sun slowly go down behind the pond, and like, this is heaven. This is a big part of it. But you can also slip into the pseudo version of that, which is addiction to tobacco and addiction to alcohol and escapism. And I think we're not differentiating well enough, and also owning our choices, and also owning this. We're just so quick to pathologize every different category of what we have. And it doesn't mean that it's not true that there aren't addictions, I think there are. But I think there's a way to instead of continually reinforce this, I'm an addict, which may be helpful in some regards to claim what it is. But just to try and shift things, just shift our perspective a little bit. Just feels like that's important, rather than slapping a sticker on ourself and excusing our patterns. And then being at war with this apparition that we've created. And then we're in constant conflict with it and we're fighting it. And I'm not trying to claim that this is like a solution to replace AA or anything like that, but it's just something to take a soft glance at. What are the ways that we're pathologizing things? What are the ways we're at war with ourselves and at war with our conditions? Rather than being back inside of our experience.
KELLY: And what is the driving fear? Is it fear of death and dying? Which sometimes actually is expressed as a want for that, like as suicidality, I've found. That they can co-locate. Or is it a fear of being fully alive for the reasons we've discussed? That to hold that much energy in your body has been coupled with danger from early on. I know that for myself in this de-secreting of my sexuality that you alluded to. I, like so many, grew up in a household where sex was not spoken of, it's a secret. So any dimension of myself as a sexual being was something that I had no context for, or framework for. And my relationship to my sexuality was fear-based. So I spent the greater part of my adult life always kind of in strategic sexual dynamics with men, especially male colleagues, where I would secure enough of their gaze, their sexualized gaze that I felt in control of the dynamic because I assumed and presumed that it would be there because their sexuality was a fundamental threat to me. And then I would manipulate that, as I need it, to get what I wanted. And later in my life and because of my relationships, I learned to come into control of my sexual energy and seal up all the leaks. But I still was in that place that you're describing, which was more of an addictive relationship and a conflict-based, attention-based relationship to my own sexuality, where I would have thought, like I always thought actually, I need to have sex every day. Every day. This is part of my needs. I require this. And now, I'm newly single and well, several months, and I would have thought I would have died not having had sex for several months. I literally thought, how do people walk around in life that is sexually unsatisfied? And, of course, my process has catapulted me into this experience of my own non-local sexuality, where I now have a relationship to my erotic energy, where it's, like ever-present, all day. And it doesn't require... Trust me, I would love to have great sex again. But it does not require the actual, securing it through the means that I thought that it did before. And my sense is that at the root of that relationship to sexuality that I had that was very, almost like, I don't know, three-dimensional and relational rather than intrinsic to my beingness, this reclamation of my animal beingness that I was put in conflict with as a child. My sense is that it's given me the opportunity to visit with this fear of punishment, that we've talked about, that was coupled with my sexuality. That was totally unconscious and driving a lot of my dynamics with men, but also men of the world, including masculine structures like the government, which was the fear that I would be killed. Jordan Peterson says that men are afraid that women will laugh at them, and women are afraid that men will kill them. And I subscribe to that wholeheartedly. Because I think that until I looked at that fear and felt that I had the opportunity to engage it through different dynamics in my personal life, where I felt literally mortally threatened, which was somehow not totally rational, but it was a real feeling. And I could interact with how long that part of me had been holding that very real fear, rather, and all of these parts that were recruited to help make sure that that part didn't have to fully experience that ever again. That describes my entire life. It is built on this one fragmentation experience where my sexuality and my sexual energy as a part of my vital force was paired with this fear of moral punishment. And whether you want to draw from Oedipal complexes or otherwise, I think it's very real. And so the reclamation process, by definition, I think, requires that we harmonize with our sensuality as you are describing. That we come into union with the pleasure, and bliss, technology that is this entire body. That's what Alan Watts would talk about, how you don't dance to get across the room or listen to a song to get to the end of it. This is how we come into contact with our beingness is to engage in the sensual and what could be described as this greater definition of sexuality that is, of course, co-opted and leveraged through the general expression of it in pornography and dominant culture. It's the inversion yet again.
AUBREY: Which comes from the repression and the exile of our erotic life. Exiling the entirety of our eroticism into the sexual and then making that shameful so it becomes transgressive sexuality. That because of the shame that's there, we know that it's wrong. So, we crave that thing that's wrong. So it creates this whole pathology that's not, I don't want to pathologize the pathology, but it becomes this aspect where we've exiled the entire erotic life into this one condensation. And then for someone, which I'm curious about, someone like yourself and my wife experiences the same thing. She's doing a visual album which is a celebration of the liberation of the feminine sexuality, a reclamation that this is mine and I claim it for me. Generally applauded, but also targeted. And her posts have been removed and people have come after her for that expression. And because they're lumping it into a whole bunch of other different categories and not actually seeing what it really is. And I imagine that for you, when you post one of your pole dancing videos or something like that, you're exposing yourself to actually the thing that originally you were afraid of, which is a reprimand for this free expression of something that is innate to all of us. So, in a way, you've alchemized that fear by facing it.
KELLY: And somebody made a joke that my, I've just started. I'm an amateur so compared to Vylana's artistry, I don't know if it's in the same world. But nonetheless, somebody made the joke that my pole dancing videos are far more threatening to the agenda and the establishment than my anti-pharmaceutical activism. And you could think that makes no sense, except that it does when you look through the lens of the possibility that the reclamation of Eros is the way out of this. It is this path that is not apparent in the polarities of these two camps who have totally irreconcilable worldviews on what it is to be a human being. Right, do we need to transcend the inherent limitations of the human body with the gift of technology and associated control-based interventions? Or is the body infinitely wise? Does it make no mistakes? And are we here to experience our innate vitalism though? Never the two shall meet, those two worldviews. I remember early on in the pandemic, I was invited to dinner by some friends who, this was early when Miami was in lockdown. And they lived a couple hours north in this beautiful place on the beach. And the dude was like, we're so excited to see you. And just so you know, we're doing the whole social distancing thing. So, we're just going to set the table that way and I'm just not going to hug you but it's totally cool otherwise. And I was like, I'm not coming then. I'm not coming. That offends my sensibilities, my humanity, my value system to interact with a human being I care about in such a dehumanizing way. I'm not doing it with it. It's not worth it. And that got me thinking like, if he can't be in a room with my body under circumstances that work for me, then we can't be in a room together. And isn't that the metaphor of this divide and conquer strategy is that it will become impossible for us to share the room of this plane together. And what is this complementarity that I know exists in all polarities? There is a way where polarities come into coherent complementarity where they serve each other in a non-dominant fashion. Each takes their terrain, and they dance and play. And I don't see how that could emerge from this, until I started to watch my own experience and to understand that as somebody who otherwise would have fought the man, becoming the tyrant and fighting is that Nietzsche quote. It is always like, you become the monster. I can't tell you how many activists I know, who literally not only are perpetuating exactly what they claim to be resolving, but they are embodying the same characteristics.
AUBREY: Fighting against discrimination with discrimination.
KELLY: Exactly. And so, if that's not the way, then what am I supposed to do? Watch Netflix and sit at home in my PJs? Or is there some other path where my personal individuation process somehow contributes to the collective organization of humanity around a totally different value system that is not predicated on this inner conflict that we then project and experience as outer struggle and warfare, and then recruit a medical system that is based on anti-everything; antihypertensives, antibiotics, antidepressants? We're just in that struggle of war that you could argue is a play that we elect into. But we also have other options and how do we access those? And that's where this integration and reclamation of Eros as the fundamental expression of the divine through the human body, seems to me like not much else I should be focusing on in my life right now.
AUBREY: It is quite possibly the core knot, the central knot where so many things are tangled. And as I've started to see how that flow of lifeforce has been denied, and repressed, and sequestered, and exiled in all of these different ways and even see amongst friends and different people where I can see how that flow is blocked in a certain area. And then I see the ways that they're going about seeking either Eros, genuine, or pseudo Eros, which is the quick hit of some drug or something that's giving you some feeling that's approximating Eros but it isn't because it'll never satiate you. And it always leaves you more empty and craving more. And that's the big difference between both of them. But if we can actually get back to that inner state of vitality, which again, is not exiled to the sexual, it has to be broadened in that entire horizon, I think I really do agree with you. This could be the place where we have to focus our attention. This is the most upstream, upstream contraction and it is woven into our sexuality. So this reclamation of our sexuality, not just in sex positive, everybody have sex. It's like as Mark Abney says sex erotic, which is like, this is a way to model the erotic. And let's use this to learn about how to live an erotic life, and model it, and experience it, but just model the way that we live by what we learn through this amazing gift that we all have, which is our sexual expression. And so, the system itself and the immune system of that system is going to attack those who are actually touching that thing which crumbles so many of the buildings that have been built on a foundation, a different foundation, a different belief system, different establishments, and complexes. You can look at the biography of Hitler and see where his constriction and repression of Eros created the monster in many ways. No one knows for sure, but you can imagine that some loving girlfriend at some time who—
KELLY: The right concubine.
AUBREY: Or yeah. Or a love temple, like they used to have in ancient civilizations where you could go. And even if you had whatever strange genital condition that he had, I'm not quite up on that. Hooked to the right, or did something weird, and was not very big. I don't know, that's the rumor that's around there. But ultimately, like that thing and that shame, and then he had to come out with his desire for power, which is like pseudo Eros in that way, and control and influence, it created all of these things. And we have our own inner little tyrant that can develop from the repression of what is this natural flow of energy, that coiling serpent that's trying to emerge and experience and taste life in all of its magnificence. If we can get back to that, I think that's incredibly powerful. I'm thinking of a friend right now who's deeply wise, incredibly, incredibly wise and I really look up to him. And he's made intense efforts, intense efforts to do all of the different healing modalities that are available; from ozonation of his blood, to fasting, to psychedelic medicine interventions, to all of these things. But fundamentally, his ability to access Eros through the physical body in particular, I think, intellectually, he's like, able to access it through deep conversation, contemplation, there's many faces of this. But his ability to feel it physically is in my, just, whatever, casual observation, might be the thing. Which is why all of these other great treatments that are always helpful, all the IVs, it's all good. But now it's not quite getting to the root, which is this feeling of making love to the world, which can heal it all.
KELLY: And there's, at least in my experience, this surprising step in the reclamation process that seems to be required, which is a willingness to really hold that experience of yourself as bad and wrong because of how it's been coupled with sexuality. It's almost like you can't get one without the other until you realize that you have, as you said, that inner sadist, that inner tyrant. Because I told you what I'm working on, which is to recognize when I choose to let something go, that I don't need anything. I don't need the system, the person to be bad and wrong for me to simply make the choice to take my energy elsewhere. That is why I want to be spiritually sovereign impulse. And fundamentally, that part of me can't own that I actually want to punish those people for hurting me, or that I actually want horrible things to happen to them and the schadenfreude and all the rest of it. And there is this part of me, I call it the wicked part of me that is like my inner dom. It's my inner predator.
And she wants to laugh at men, and shame them, and tell them what silly boys they are. She wants to impose her aggressive impulse, which again, through that Jordan Peterson model, is to laugh. It's the colly. It is like to behead, but emotionally, psychically, even spiritually, as the counterbalance to the fact that you could put your hands around my neck, and I'll be done in a minute. If I don't own that, that is in me, because I'm so invested in my spiritual bypass practice of being always, you said that slippery ego, like always finding a way to be the good person, even through my spiritual ego. If I don't own that, that part is in there, then I can't access that play, the conscious play. Whether it's through BDSM or whatever figurative ways that I engage energetically with the world. To not own that part is to never fully integrate that flow of vital force energy into my being. And it's hard because I don't want to be that person who wants bad things to happen to others. I'm not that person.
AUBREY: Well, you are. We all are. And that's the thing. Again, it goes back to what we were saying, tat tvam asi, I am that too. We all have that. You mentioned the BDSM power exchange world. And there is so much power, spiritual growth potential in that world, in that realm, that people don't look. Now you can look at the studies and the aggregate and you see the people who engage in that practice are generally happier. I wrote about all the studies in my book on the day actually. There's a whole host of studies that they've done on people who engage in that. And they're actually kinder, more compassionate, more even keeled with their emotions. It's like their whole system is settled in a way even though their practices themselves, you're like, I can't believe it. What are they doing? But what I can feel happening in that space is you're actually accessing different aspects of your divine cravings. And so, in the dom position, you have somebody who is submitting themselves entirely to you.
KELLY: Is actually the one in control.
AUBREY: Right but—
KELLY: It's a paradox.
AUBREY: It is a paradox. But let's explain how that happens. That happens because they give, if you're the dom, they give the dom the entirety of their surrender. And in that receipt of absolute power over another person, that absolute power mimics our divine craving, the craving to be in our divinity, which is a place of absolute power. And so, in the receipt of absolute power, it actually calls forth the other attributes in the divine, while satiating our desire to feel what that absolute power is. So, we don't have to go try and perpetrate this out in the world. We've received it, we've quenched it. We've quenched this desire, satiated it. And then in that flow, then we realize, oh, all of the other divine qualities start to come online; the deep compassion, the tenderness. Anybody who's in the world understands that a big part of it is the coming together and the sweetness. The sweet gentleness that comes on the other side of this thing because it calls forth, I've felt what absolute power feels like and now I am so full of love and acceptance and radical compassion. So that's on the dom side. And then on the submissive side, you get to surrender completely to what is a divine power, the absolute surrender and the freedom. The freedom to completely let go of everything is another aspect of how we orient to the divine. And then that satiates this radical trust and faith and belief in the world that you can completely surrender. And even if it's hard, God is going to take care of you. And so if you're doing it right with that. Not right, I don't want to say right or wrong. But if you're doing it with that—
KELLY: Consciously.
AUBREY: Conscious intention, it can be this magical process that's a deep, deep portal, that can really open up a lot of these different things. And I think that's why a lot of people are inherently drawn to it. But I don't think they understand what its potential is. Just like sex itself, a lot of people are drawn to it but don't understand what the potential of any type of sexuality is. That union that can give you a taste of the union of the one with the many, the one with the all, you with the divine, or you with the one. So it's such an interesting world that I think doesn't get enough credit for what it's capable of. People just stop at kinky, it's freaky. Sure, yes. And there's potential there.
KELLY: More than potential, I think if you live consciously in command of those kinds of polarity play dynamics, let's say in your personal life, in your sexual life, you will recognize when those same dynamics are playing out on the world stage. You will recognize, I'm being asked to be compliant, obedient, and to submit, potentially, against my will. And you'll also remember that consent is the key to these dynamics.
AUBREY: And trust.
KELLY: Right. And do I consent? And is this a dom that I trust? And you might come to the conclusion, as I have, that no. And so I'm just not going to play. I'm not going to play there because that's not the partner that works for me, and I'm going to take my energy dynamics elsewhere. And I do believe that that's why there's no such thing as... I believe this is a benevolent universe and it is consent-based. And all of the atrocities, and all of the horrific things that are happening in the world, and all of the ways that we would otherwise seem helplessly victimized, there were micro-consents, consents, that were offered along the way. And that's a lot of what I started to look at in my own life at the beginning of this process two years ago, where I was looking at, if this system does not serve my values, if I believe, for example, that the body is inherently wise and that it never makes mistakes, and that's my value system is that the body itself, the tissues themselves are sacred, the system doesn't happen to agree. The system doesn't happen to represent my values. And so, where are the ways in which I am offering micro consent through my smartphone, through shopping at Whole Foods, through even educating my children in Rockefeller-based systems, through the financial participation that I have in big banking cartels, and whatever, whatever. I looked at the incoherence that could underpin my conscious perception of being victimized by this system, when the truth is that I was offering consent. And so I could choose to offer that consent, and that's fine. But then I've laid bare something that otherwise would have been an unconscious play of those dynamics. And again, ultimately, a longing to revisit with whatever the pain, fear, distress, rage, shame is of that victim experience. Whatever I get out of it and whenever I'm ready I will step into my creatrix consciousness where I focus not on what I don't like about what's happening in the world, but focus on what it is that I want to offer my energy to. What do I want to make, what do I want to express? How do I say yes to my own energy, to my own vital force consistently so that I live in a world that says yes to me? And it begins with me. And that's a lot of what I've learned around inner polarities is, what it's taken for me to become my own masculine container. And I do think that's a lot of what I offered now looking back in my private practice, as I was almost this father figure for my patients. Like inviting them to experience and express and move those old energies, sometimes that were suppressed and medicated for three decades so that they could know they were in a safe space to do that. That inner polarity. Because I always thought, I need a man to offer me that container so that I can fully let go and fully surrender and come into that submissive energy. And I think that any good sub has an experience of their own space holding, totally approving, totally present, devotional like I am here no matter what. You can rely on this. You can rely on me not to abandon my post and go get lost in the fray of distraction. I am here and that inner masculine... I could never live in a world where I experienced that on the outside until and if I can offer that to myself on the inside.
AUBREY: Yeah. We're a microcosm of everything. So, we can cultivate all of these different things. And to play any of these roles, we have to know what it's like. We have to know what that feeling is to actually understand it. To identify it, when it's out of alignment, when it's being played out in all of these different ways. I think you mentioned the body not making mistakes. And I want to clarify that for some people because everything that the body is doing is an attempt at being adaptive. And that's why it's not a mistake. However, let's say you slam a Fanta, Cola, or soda, or whatever, packed with liquid sugar, an unusual experience that our body is not equipped for, that sugar is entering our bloodstream so fast that the body's like, fuck, I'm going to release a lot of insulin because I don't know when the hell this is going to stop. And it releases too much, typically. So, you go into that hypoglycemic state because the body is kind of overcorrected for that. Doesn't mean the body's making a mistake, it just doesn't know exactly because of the conditions.
KELLY: Or it generated the conditions for associated symptomatology that would invite you to say, huh, I wonder if what I just did is maybe not a match. Because if it did it correctly and the perfect amount of insulin just coasted you into glucose of 72, then you just go on with your day, never invited to explore and examine how you are self-abusing because we are our own self abusers. In the choices that we make, we sell violate, we self-betray. And so those symptoms, in my experience, anyway, are always the invitation to turn towards examine, explore, and better understand how we are out of alignment. Because your alignment is different. And that's why any one size fits all healing modality is probably not going to be the way. I still order on Amazon. In my value system that is incoherent. So, every time I do it, there's a rumble and a tension inside that eventually, I'm going to experience on the outside. And that may not be true for you. In which case, you keep doing you. But it's that inner conflict that then gets exposed to us through our choices. And that's our invitation. That sounds like my cat when I bring him in the car.
AUBREY: They are beautiful cats.
KELLY: Oh, my God. Incredible. So true.
AUBREY: Talking to Matias, cats... I don't know. We might as well just keep this in the podcast. We had a brief interlude, an interruption with our cat who decided that this was the best place he could possibly be.
KELLY: Look at my dress and his fur. It's meant to be.
AUBREY: It is very much like that. Matias de Stefano who remembers, and you can listen to my podcast to get the full story, but he remembers lives lived in different civilizations. And one of the civilizations was a precursor to ancient Egypt in a place called Kem. And the cats which were the deities, Ubasti, Bastet, all of these different cat deities, they were the only ones that were allowed in the temples. Because in the temples, there was wild shit going on. Astral things, beings in different experiences like you would see in an Ayahuasca ceremony basically. But it was happening frequently. But the cats were the only creatures that would not be, they could see. They could see across the veil and I think a lot of animals can sense when the energies shift and they're very subtly perceptive in that way. But cats would just look at the wildest shit going on and just not be afraid. And just say, hmm. Like there's something very powerful about that cat energy. It's why the jaguar is so sacred in the Amazon because it looks at the shadows of the darkness and is like, well, I'm a fucking cat. I don't give a shit. So, they were always welcome in the temple and revered for their ability to stare into the abyss of something scary and just lick their paw, like, here I am.
KELLY: Unflappable.
AUBREY: Yeah. And there's something very potent. I think that's why we're drawn to that is we're scared. We're scared. Fundamentally, there's so much fear. And to liberate ourselves from that fear is what is required for us to really be free. That freedom is like the other side of the intensity of the fear that we feel. And when we're afraid, we saw how society was controlled by fear over the last few years. People would be willing to do anything. People would not see their friends because of their fear or not see... And I understand there's certain conditions where that makes sense. Like, if you're in the throes of COVID, don't invite so and so over and share tea with them or something. There are some logical things that are like, all right. And of course, you could take the Cowan approach and some other things. But nonetheless—
KELLY: I like the Cowan approach. The audacity.
AUBREY: I'm not denying sensibility in this. But the point being that in the intensification of fear, we're willing to surrender. We're willing to surrender our sovereignty, and our freedom, and our joy, and the things that we love most about life. I'm saying this in the aggregate, some of us were never willing to do that. I would imagine that you were one of those people who were never willing. And in that, as well, I was also not willing to surrender these things. Yeah, life changed and I accepted the changes that were there and some of the other things, but I didn't stop the things that I knew were just invaluable to my life, because I wasn't going to allow fear to dictate how I lived the entirety of my life. And of course, you get a lot of criticism for that. But for those of us who decided that we weren't going to abide by that fear, that act of courage then made us more courageous in certain ways, and then brought us into a community with other people of that similar courage and value system. So, it's been both the challenge and the intensification of liberation by the facing of it. So, you either receive it and just get more afraid, or you face it and have the opportunity to transcend it. That seems to be like the fundamental lesson about fear.
KELLY: Or approve of it, understand that it had a very essential role. And that you can re-delegate to that part, another very important title in your life. For me, I had to have experiences, lived experiences that flew in the face of my pre-existing belief system in order to recognize that my fear no longer had a place. The way that I evolved my understanding of mental illness, of cancer, of heart disease, of contagion was to either, through my personal embodied experience or through patients, to see that I couldn't hold the same framework and also have this outlier exist. And that's, of course, how science is supposed... It's not a destination. It's a process of exploring, always the re-interrogation of theories when there is an outlier. That there cannot be a single inconsistent variable and the theory still stands. And of course, in the age of scientism and dogmatism, we understand that science is not a tool for inquiry. It's a geopolitical control strategy. And it's as Foucault said, it's a totally different lens that you can look through. But in its purest state, it's an exploration of nature of the natural world and honoring of it.
AUBREY: It's a process of asking questions.
KELLY: Yeah. And so, I started to ask questions when I saw that there were those inconsistencies and I could no longer... They call it cognitive dissonance. That's the beginning of change, and growth, and transformation is to have that tense wobble. And you can either collapse into denial, which of course, we all do when we're not ready for that identity, plasticity, that expansion to come into our lives. Or you can tolerate uncertainty. I think it's called negative capability. You tolerate uncertainty, paradox, and complexity. You essentially enter into that melting stage of the chrysalis, where everything seems to be dying and you feel often, that confusion can feel like you're dying. And instead of jumping in to fix it, you hold the faith that the imaginal cells will organize, and the butterfly will take shape, and that you just move through that liminal space. But it's a tall order. But every inquiry and I question everything at this point, everything I've ever paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to be indoctrinated around, I have come to question. And now, it's fun. Now, it's exciting. But in the beginning, it was world-decimating, it was identity-fracturing, to let go of not only the ideas, but what I was getting out of that victim consciousness. How I was meeting my needs, through the random mutation theory of cancer, through the germ theory of infectious disease, through the cholesterol theory of heart disease. I was participating in a field that was meeting the needs of my inner victim indirectly, through these belief systems about the body. And so, when I move into a space, where I align with my body and I understand that it's always me showing me about me. There's no other entity in the room. It's all me. There's actually nothing to be afraid of. I don't use pharmaceuticals in my household because they're not relevant. It's literally not relevant to my belief system to seek to make something stop. It's like holding my head underwater and being like, oh my God, why am I drowning? I'm the one holding my head. Not going to send in the Coast Guard or whatever. It's me. It's me. And there's nothing to be afraid of. And of course, that requires that we again, look at not only our fear of death and what that means, but also our fear of being more fully alive. I know that's been way bigger one for me recently. It's just like, can I hold so much aliveness in my body that isn't contracted through that victim story? Because if you think about anything incredible that's happened and that expansion you... How long have you been able to hold it in your body? I don't know, a couple hours, maybe a couple days. At least I'll speak for myself. I will literally drum up conflict, or focus on something that bothers me, or come up with some reason to get into that familiar energy of contraction so that my nervous system can get the memo that we're in territory that is not associated with that expansion of the child's divine energy that is ultimately tampened down by our highly conditioned parents. To recognize I'm an adult now. I can do all these. I can handle all these things. But it requires that I be willing to move beyond the pale into aliveness. Which is scary as hell.
AUBREY: It's scary because we're intensely afraid of contrast. That's one of the things that we're so afraid of. Why are you afraid to love? It's the craziest thing. You're afraid to love. What do you even mean you're afraid to love? It's the best feeling on the planet. You're afraid to love. It's crazy but it's so common. We all agree, love is the best feeling ever. But so many of us are afraid to. Well, why? It's because we've loved and then we've had our legs cut out from under us. All of a sudden, the love was gone. And the pain of the contrast was something that now we just don't even want to step into. So, if we love life and then something bad happens, well then, the contrast. But that is no way to live. It is no way to live to be denying yourself all of the good just to soften the blow of the contrast. And I think what we need to realize is that, yeah, we can handle it. It's just this faith like, okay. I get broken up with, I get cheated on. You know what? I can handle it. I also have a community that will help me handle it. I have the processes, I know how to grieve. I know how to go down to the river and wail, and cry, and express, and emote, and do, and breathe, and journal, and write poetry. And I'll make it through this fucking thing. And I'll get back in there. And I'll love again. And I'll live this thing. But if we're not mindful that we're constantly trying to protect ourselves from the slap of that contrast and we won't step into the river of ecstasy that is available in this life and it's adaptive to try to prevent us from that contrast, because at that point, we're vulnerable, I suppose, to some other conditions. But it's also denying us the great joy that we have at our fingertips. This is the courage of the poet in a way, is to feel everything and also know that you can transmute this in some way. And then just say, all right. I'm going to love and either I'm going to either, number one, love for its own sake, lishma, for its own sake. Is the Hebrew word. Do it for its own sake because it's amazing. And if it goes away, it's another note and another key and I'll express that. Even if it doesn't come out in words that are poetry, it can come out in the way I move, and cry, and breathe and write. And we all have our ways to do it and that's beautiful too. So, fuck it. Let's go.
KELLY: I know. Maybe it's part of the initiation, but it requires, for many of us, that there is an experience played out in three dimensions, often in like a cardinal relationship, where you finally give up hope that you're ever going to get the love that you wanted from your parents ever. It's never coming, it's never coming from the outside, ever. And that, talk about grief. I know certainly, what I have gone through in the past couple of months, just experiencing weeks and weeks of grief around what must be my child's self just releasing that longing forever. And, of course, what comes in the vacuum of that, the void of that is exactly the love. It is exactly the love that you imagine is going to come from these parentified figures on the outside. In all of those experiences of upset, and resentment, and disappointment, was that secret hope, that projection onto a person that they never consented to, that they could finally be that daddy or mommy. Otherwise, we would experience each other as we are. There would be no such thing as judgment, or disappointment, or resentment because we would always be seeing people exactly as they are, which we're not, as you said. We're experiencing our projections and parentification and the play of that betrayal and all of these dynamics. And so when you finally get to that moment in your life where you almost give up and grieve, something shifts where it's like, it was all here. It was all already here. And now I just get to give it. And now, I'm like a cup overflowing instead of trying to find the perfect quanta of liquid from the perfect person, and again, experiencing that play of suffering and struggle.
AUBREY: Yeah. One thing that I wanted to touch back on, and I can think of it in my own life, is this idea of inconsistencies with my belief system. And ways in which I'm reifying certain constructs that I still do, and I just close my eyes for a minute and just do it anyways. One of these things is I used to get sick a lot. Not terribly, but colds fucking constantly. Fortunately, that doesn't really happen anymore. I really don't like getting sick, not from the physical discomfort but from having to stop all of my different engagements and all of the things that I was doing. It's just a massive disrupter of everything that I want to do.
KELLY: Come on, body.
AUBREY: Yeah, for sure. So, I got into pretty, not Howie Mandel level, but pretty frequent hand washing. And I realized that every time I'm doing that, I'm just basically lathering my hands with fear, in a way. Okay, yes, they're getting clean. And presumably, sometimes they are dirty. But nonetheless, I'm taking an action that's just strengthening this fear body that's within me. And also, I still have different things that help me sleep and different things that. But still at the same time, my belief is that the body is absolutely capable of miracle on miracle on miracle. And then it'll come around 1am and I'm not sleepy yet and I'll be like, yeah, I'll take this pharmaceutical. And I just shudder a little bit and worry about this another time. And so, it's these subtle ways that I'm not living, and you mentioned it with Amazon. I haven't gotten to that level of consistency with my worldview, where that actually troubles me at this point. But for me, I know there are some things that actually do. And it's not that I disagree. There's problems with Amazon or whatever. It's just not high enough on my list for me even to even fuck with it.
KELLY: Particularly to my situation.
AUBREY: But there's this yearning in a way. There's this yearning in a way to be consistent. And it's also with my diet. I want to eat only organic produce only and also animals that live a life that approximates what a real living experience for that animal is. So chickens that were free to cruise around and smash bugs and do what chickens do. Cows that were free to roam and eat the grass. And bison that were roaming the plains. Or deer that were out in the field. That to me feels like that's consistent with my spiritual beliefs and my love, my love for the world and my love for my own body. But I'm a little hungry and we're out at this restaurant. Fuck it, I'm not going to ask them where this animal's from. And I just do it anyway and I block it out. But I think I'm potentially underestimating the cost, the cost of the inconsistency. Where I'm telling myself that you don't really believe this. If you did, you wouldn't do this. So, you don't really believe this. So I'm almost gaslighting myself with my own actions, in a way.
KELLY: Yeah. I think you're onto something and I'll take it from an angle related to what we've been talking about. Which is, how can erotic energies resolve this schism? Because you wouldn't be talking about it if there weren't parts of you in conflict. And then there's additional ones that are judging and shaming, and holding different beliefs, and prioritizing different things. I remember I first encountered this when I started to think about what it is for my patients after they decided to come off of medications of all kinds; birth control pills, and statins, and thyroid hormone, and psychotropics.
AUBREY: Just real quick. Are statins just completely ridiculous in your opinion?
KELLY: Well, I had a women's health practice and there isn't a single study, not one, that could validate the efficacy or even indication relative to the adverse effects of that medication class for women, period. So, there was no reason based on the science. And again, once you get into the belief field, where is actually the problem here? What is the why? What is the message? It becomes irrelevant. So, I used to get really into informed consent and here's all the data about. I have reams of blogs on my site about adverse effects of medications because I was never told about this. So I knew I wasn't able to provide informed consent to my patients. And that felt really messed up because I paid attention in my training. It's kind of the same story I've found for every single class of pharmaceuticals. Again, it's reflecting the consciousness of the person who would participate in a way that is consistent and coherent and fine. There's not even a place for judgment because it's all resonant if it's meant to be. The same reason I went to medical school at the time that I did, and I would never go now. And what ends up happening is these medications, they perpetuate exactly that which they purport to resolve across the board, all of them. They perpetuate the problems and propagate new problems. Like in the antidepressant realm, for example. Antidepressants drive something called tardive dysphoria, which is basically chronic depression, it's the medical term for chronic depression. According to a Yale study, 1 in 23 people who started an antidepressant are then diagnosed with bipolar disorder. So now they're spinning off new diagnoses and new problems. And Robert Whittaker, who wrote the book that was the game changer for me, "Anatomy of an Epidemic." He demonstrated with pretty robust data that these medications are responsible for what we call chronic mental illness. The medications are responsible. Because when you compare to naturalistic data where people are either taken off medications or never started, they do better.
AUBREY: And they go in a wave. They go in a natural cycle.
KELLY: And so, you could say, bad pharma. How are they doing this to people? Or you can say that it's consistent with the person's desire, unconscious, of course, to remain in that pattern of struggle. There's something that they're getting out of it until they're ready not to be. I don't know about you, but every single experience of growth that I've had, I was not ready this second before I was ready. And no one could have coerced that, no one could have even inspired it. There was no possibility. So what I would say is, if you look at these inner polarities we're talking about, like that masculine containment and that feminine flow, and expression, and movement, and dynamism, how would you, if your body was your feminine—
AUBREY: Which it is.
KELLY: Objective desire.
AUBREY: This is the woman, this is the goddess. It's part of the earth. Are we pretending that because I have a dick, suddenly, I'm not part of the mother. Get out of here. Get out of here. This is the goddess.
KELLY: Exactly. So, if you are, let's say, I play a game with myself, where now that I'm not having sex at this moment, as we've discussed, I play this game where I imagine this incredible lover's eyes on me at all times. Everywhere I'm moving, I just feel his gaze on me. It brings something forth in my body that I like. So that's the activation of that non-local sexuality that has given me and offered me an experience of, almost like decoupling fucking from Eros and from my vital force? So what if you were to offer that gaze to your own body, to your own inner experience of feeling states? You wouldn't be like, stop it. Stop doing that. Would you talk to Vylana that way? Like, stop doing that. Lose some weight. So annoying. Come on, I told you, get in bed, whatever. There is a parentified dynamic. You're the bad parent. This shitty parent who's yelling at, scolding, shaming, controlling your own body's experience, when you could be the incredible, masculine lover who is approving of holding space for allowing all of it to be welcoming, honoring, in devotional comportment. I'm just putting that out there. Who lives this way? I don't know anybody who does. However, I aspire to that relationship to myself. And that includes, if you're not sleeping and what if your child, your beloved child, or your beloved, you're a lover, was in that space of struggle? Would you just be like, go to sleep? Slam the pillow on her face and just hold it there until she does. Or would there be this curiosity? What could this mean for you? Maybe you have a lot of creative energy moving through you. Because I've dealt with, experienced so much of my patients' insomnia. That is a cardinal experience of the psychotropic withdrawal process. Insomnia is part of the deal. And you can throw whatever supplements and honestly, even pharmaceuticals at it, and it's futile. It's totally futile. So, I got to the place where I was like, what is insomnia actually about? And there's like a whole reframe that says that once it is met with approval and even embrace, there's something very meaningful in the fact that the body is choosing not to sleep at this time. Everything shifts, of course. It's in the insistence that it should be different that the struggle is perpetuated, that the need for victim consciousness oriented tools and interventions, aka, pharma, is even relevant. And I'm not saying that tritely because this is not, talk about an initiation. Insomnia. I've had patients who went nine months without sleeping.
AUBREY: Goodness.
KELLY: Literally. Benzo withdrawal can be bad. And doesn't any good initiation process, doesn't any expansion to... How do you know that on the other end of your insomnia isn't your next level? Just saying.
AUBREY: Thank you for that. No, thank you for that. I think the idea of being under the gaze of my beloved is a really, really powerful idea. Because I remember when I first got together with Vylana, I was in a state where I was so, and I still am so in love with her in every way, but I was so in just absolute adoration of her. And the fact that she would hug me, and kiss me, and look at me, would bring me to tears in the moment. And I was like, I will be the best man that I can be in the hidden moments, in the moments where I'm under her gaze or not, because I'm doing this for her. And I will do anything. And I can feel what that felt like. And actually, during that period, I got off all sleep aid, all sleep assistance, all of this stuff, got off all of that. It also coincided with an interesting time in the world where the whole world was kind of on pause. So it was a little bit easier for me to kind of step back from different things that I was doing. So, I think it's a really helpful insight, because I can imagine that. And I would love to say that that thing with Vylana is still there. And it is. I love her deeply and I treasure her. But nonetheless, our familiarity and the deepness of our bonds, this knowing she loves me unconditionally, and she's not going to not love me in the morning if I take something to help me go to sleep or not. She obviously wants me to not. But we still love each other the same. It doesn't really work. But if I hypothesize that reality and make it instead of condensed and exiled into Vylana, it's into the goddess, which is my own goddess and the goddess writ large, there's immense power in that. So, I want to thank you for that because it's a big deal. It's a big deal of how to look at this. Like my beloved is watching, which he/she is always. So that was really beautiful.
KELLY: Having you channel that. And I'm a big believer in an order of operations. That's been my MO my entire clinical practice. Don't dive in the deep end of your psychospiritual reorganizational process of your life and healing your family of origin rifts or whatever before you have sent your nervous system the signal of safety through your lifestyle choices, the chopping wood and carrying water of your daily decisions. Because, like you said with the diet wobbles or whatever, it could be that the insomnia is inviting you to uplevel through the discipline and commitment of that masculine container. Because that is what discipline is ultimately about, is to offer the experience of freedom. It's that paradox. So I believe, at least for my patients, that they go through this ritualized experience of commitment to lifestyle choices and associated discipline. And then all this clarity comes when your bloating is resolved, and you're sleeping, and your energy is stabilized. Just on the physiologic level you have more resources to then explore like some of the psychodynamic relational things.
AUBREY: Obviously, ayahuasca is a part of my life. And you actually walked in when we were watching a draft of a documentary we're going to be releasing about it. So, for dieta, you have to get off everything and get really, really clean with all that. And I do. But the interesting part about that is what allows me to do that is I also clear my fucking schedule entirely. For ayahuasca, all I have to do is drink ayahuasca. I can lay in my bed. I mean, I have friends that are there with me or whatever and I do want to eat at some point. But there's nothing for me to do. And I think what keeps me trapped in the cycles where it's this, well, I got to feed myself because I got this thing where I need to do this. I can't skip this meal because I got this thing I got to get to and I don't want to be. The food thing is not that big a deal. Actually, that's just me being a little bit lazy because I can skip a meal pretty easily. I've fasted enough that it doesn't really affect me. So that's not a good example. But the sleeping thing. I got a podcast tomorrow, so I can't sleep tonight. This is important. There's a lot of people that are listening to this. And there's this general feeling like, not now. Not now. And it's also perpetuating this worldview that without my immediate and time-sensitive and driving contribution, everything will fall apart. And so, there's like the larger belief system that I'm reifying with my actions by saying, the world cannot bear it if I stop right now. Do you see what's going on? I fucking go to sleep and shits worse. And I do love. I love being able to offer everything I can. There is great joy in it. It's not like I'm doing something I don't love. But I think I need to untangle this belief that somehow, I need to believe that everything will be okay. Everything will be okay. If I just stop, take care of myself, everything will be okay. And it will. But my cells don't believe that. My cells don't believe that.
KELLY: It's the reclamation of your omnipotence. Because as a child, let's say you're beat by your dad. The nature of our enduring connection to our own power, even though the victim model is such that as a child, I will tell myself, not he's bad. But I am bad. I can control this. I can't control him. So there grows this sense of omnipotence in children. We all encounter it. I can control my experience by attempting to control another's behavior through my experience. And that's where the rescuer and the caregiver come online. Because if I just do this, be this, hide this, then I will finally get, which of course, we never do, then I will finally get that experience of okayness, of love, of approval, of connection to the divine. And we carry into adulthood, this sense that we have that much agency and control, which is true, we do. But when it's not conscious, now you've made it conscious as you're saying, it's this semi-conscious play of the world that will halt if I do not continue to produce, perform, and to be ultimately, I'll speak for myself, this rescuer, informing, empowering others, whatever it is. That is not the ultimate reclamation of my power, which is real. The ultimate reclamation is to say, whatever is right for me in a given moment is right for the world. And if what was right for you five minutes before I showed up was to be like, yo, I'm going to take a nap instead.
AUBREY: You actually mentioned that. That was very sweet.
KELLY: Then there's a world where you, doing that, actually serves me. It didn't happen. It's theoretical.
AUBREY: I wanted this more there.
KELLY: Okay. So, you're doing what you want to do. But I subscribe to following these. Okay, so there's always a little yes and a little no. It's like a whisper. That's what I experience my intuition as. It's very uncharged and very quiet. And then on top of it is like this whole avalanche of shit. I'll get like this little yes, that's a good idea for you to do that. Have that conversation with your mom, your brother, whatever. Say that thing. And then I'll be like, no, I don't have to why. Why do I have to do this? And it's all this resistance on top. Underneath is like a little voice. And sometimes it's the opposite, where there will be a little teeny no. And then I'll be like, but what does it cost me? Come on, I'll just do it, like maybe would have been the case about this podcast if you wanted to take a nap instead. If we align with that and we take the risks inherent in being out of character, we take on those risks. I choose to believe that that organizes the world in a way that cannot arise from a force-based, performance-based, achievement- based, doing-based relationship to this human experience. So if what is being asked of you is to slow the fuck down, then you're going to manifest that because it's what you want through illness. Because apparently, in your rubric, that's how you slow down.
AUBREY: Not really. I blast through it. I blast through and produce—
KELLY: Then maybe you have a bigger illness. Whatever.
AUBREY: That's what I have to be careful of. Ignore the whispers, you have to listen to the screams. And the fortunate part is that the work that I'm doing is legitimately nourishing. This conversation in and of itself is legitimately nourishing. We're in a certain type of Eros. We're in radical presence, other than cats and toddlers, and things that have come and interrupted this podcast. But nonetheless, the things that I do, are things that I love and that's my saving grace, is that I'm not pushing to get wealthy, or pushing to get famous, or pushing to get these things. Yeah, sure, those things are fine. I appreciate influence. And I appreciate wealth. But it's not the reason. I'm getting something really potent out of it. But also, can I trust, like you were saying, that I can live my own best life? And that is ultimately, an act of service to the whole world. That's significant. It has cosmic significance, because that's the world that I want to build. I want to build a world where people radically honor themselves, and radically make those choices to live their own best life. And I don't want to build a world of martyrs of any variety. So, it's living that reality. And so I think there's some deepening clarity, a deepening clarity about the importance of that. And also to know that there's going to be certain times where, yeah, time to giddy up. Time to giddy up, cowboy up, put on your hat, slap on your jeans, rustle them cattle. Let's go. There is that point. And that's okay too. And I love that. I'm built for that. But it's just finding that balance, which I think is a greater level of faith. And now, the invaluable technique that you gave me of being under the watchful gaze of the beloved.
KELLY: And gazing upon your own experience with the same eyes.
AUBREY: Exactly. Exactly. And to actually be under that, you have to collapse the separation between that and adopt that internally. Otherwise, it won't really work. Because it's just a figment. But if it comes embodied, powerful.
KELLY: It's a commitment to love. That's ultimately, the devotional comportment is to find the beauty, the meaning, the design, in all of it without exception. And there is this competing field of consciousness that is a commitment to separation. And even in that field, we find this experience of our own... It's like you were saying. We end up attracting and developing intimacy with that which we're fighting. It's still a form of love. I found, as I explored activism and the shadows of activism, that there is such an intimacy with the enemy that you develop. You caress that enemy with your thoughts, your attention, your heart energy, all day, every day when you're in that warring posture, even as an act of freedom-loving activist. And there is a kind of twisted, perverted love there. It's just not the conscious, intentional, liberated, sacred experience we came here ultimately to reunite with. But maybe that contrast is what makes finding that again, remembering that, so much more delicious because when we do, we're like, I was getting a version of it out of that old way. But it's nothing like this.
AUBREY: Feels like if life was a video game, which I don't mean to go down like this is a simulation, because I think that's all nonsense. It's real and a simulation, if you want to call it that. But I think it tries to reduce this into something that's meaningless. And we know that it is meaningful. But just to use this as an analogy. It's like, if you were about to play the game, you're the avatar, you're the character. And it's like, choose your world. Like a race car game. Choose which track you want to be on or choose this world that you want to go and fight in and be in. And we get the chance. Choose which world you want to be in? Do you want to be in a world which you're at war with nature, at war with your body, at war? Do you want to choose a war world? Okay, well, here's war world.
KELLY: It's level two.
AUBREY: Here's war world, you can play war world. But what about this other world where you're in rapture with the beloved always? You want to play that world? Yeah, that world's pretty good. But we got to enter into that world and adapt to it. Take our character from one world that's built upon this other conflict and separation, and then enter into this other world. And it's not going to be easy to stay in that new world that we've selected, because people, all of the cultures are going to be trying to drag us into the other one. But if we can cultivate enough energy, then we can live in a different parallel reality, which then invites. If we can anchor it, it invites the world to join us in that parallel reality.
KELLY: Totally. And that the only rules of this game, as far as I can tell, are every time you experience an upset, enter through it, period.
AUBREY: That's the door.
KELLY: That's it. And that is how you rediscover your own agency, your own power, your parts, all of these aspects of yourself that are otherwise going to be characters that you're in a war world against. I really like this analogy. But every time you meet that part within... I used to be super judgmental of, oh my God, so many things. But like incompetent women. Very specific judgment. Like ditzy, disorganized, incompetent women. And the implication is that if I identify, which I do, as a competent woman, in my shadow is the incompetent Kelly. Is that incompetent part of me? And I would barely recognize this part. I've never experienced myself consciously as incompetent, for example. And so, how do I feel triggered by some woman in my life who is falling down on the job or whatever? Because if it doesn't upset me and she is that, whatever. But once it upsets me, that's the invitation. And so how do I recognize that she's holding that part of me, showing it to me? And how do I meet with this dimension of myself that I would not otherwise have been conscious of if not for my judgment, and get to know her? What is the part of me that just wants to sleep, and do nothing, and be a kept woman, and make mistakes, and doesn't matter, and not know things, and be stupid, and ask for help? Whatever it is. I don't know. But she must be in there or I wouldn't be experiencing her on the outside. And so, once that happens, then that's one character in war world, who no longer exists. And I ascend in this video game, into a world that is ultimately predicated on these, I think, fundamental, sacred values of choice, and agency, and God's creative energy that is within each of us. And we get to play together. We get to play together. What is better than that? And we ultimately circle back to that childhood experience of playing divine love that we were, I think, selectively robbed of. That's part of this whole playing hide and seek with ourselves. And Alan Watts says in one of his lectures, he talks about how if you could dream whatever dream you wanted. Have you heard? Yeah. Like the first night you'd fuck all the hot women and do all of it—
AUBREY: Dancing girls and all sorts of pleasure. Yes.
KELLY: And by the seventh night, you'd be like, fuck it. You decide. And you want to play hide and seek with your own power to dream whatever the hell you want to dream. You want to pretend that you don't have that power so that—
AUBREY: And then you'd find yourself right where you are right now.
KELLY: Exactly. Oh my god. What a mic drop. With him, there's nothing else that needed to be said.
AUBREY: Yeah, yeah. Well, speaking of which, amazing. I see why when we got to spend time at our Fit For Service event, people were coming up to me with tears in their eyes and explaining what an impact you've had on their life. And it's really, it's a beautiful encouraging thing. I know many doctors now actually, that just completely turn the understanding of what medicine really is on its head. Yourself, Zach Bush, Dr. Dan Engle, Dr. Dan Stickler, Dr. Craig Koniver, I have all of these. And it's now becoming like, this isn't just an anomaly anymore. There's a feel.
KELLY: It's a feel.
AUBREY: There's a feel that's developing and emerging. So, thank you for holding this new reality that is inviting people, your colleagues, and other people to step into. And also inviting me into a deepening of my own world that I want to live, my own more beautiful world that my heart knows is possible. So, thank you so much. Is there anywhere that you want to point people to that they can dive in and get more goodies from what you have to offer?
KELLY: Well, in the censorship shuffle that y'all are getting a nice taste of right now, the only place is just my site, kellybroganmd.com. Only reliable place, although I like playing on Instagram. I was off it for like a year and I'm so shadow banned that I think like 10 people get to enjoy my illicit content these days. But I've also found it to be, talk about reclaiming parts, like a really incredible bootcamp for meeting my own voices. Because any comments that would otherwise bother me, like somebody called me a whore today and I was like, maybe I am. I don't know. When you can get to the point where it's like, I don't know, maybe I am. Okay. Or if it just doesn't land, it's all an opportunity to explore what's up in here so that the trauma—
AUBREY: And to be upset.
KELLY: Yeah. That trauma can end on the outside.
AUBREY: Beautiful. Thank you so much.
KELLY: It's such a pleasure. Thank you. It's an honor, really.
AUBREY: Thank you so much, everybody. Love you guys. See you next week.