In today’s podcast I am joined by my great friends, Benjamin and Azrya Bequer- Co-Founding Stewards of  BEQOMING. They are a truly unique example of a Full F*ck Yes  union, and were a guiding force in my own realization that this type of partnership was possible. We dive into the intricacies of relationships and they share their own challenges in letting their guards down, keeping their hearts open and trusting love to last. Benjamin and Azrya co-wrote a book about their journey into becoming soul mates and business partners, and are currently birthing BEQOMING, a platform that provides you with transformational tools, stories and media to see beyond the veil of who you thought you were supposed to be.

AUBREY: Benjamin and Azya Bequer, you guys have been one of the examples that when I met you, and you were talking about your union, I was like, "Wow, that's an interesting anomaly." But I didn't really believe it because I wasn't with Vylana yet. You said something to me right out of the gate. I was in a great partnership with Maya and I was like, "I'm pretty stoked about this. I think this could be it." And you said something to me that I'll never ever forget. You said, "Well, it's either a full-fuck yes or it's not. I was like, "What do you even mean? Is there such a thing as the full-fuck yes? What are you even talking about?" I didn't think such a thing existed and then I found it and I was like, "Oh, man! He was telling the truth!" You guys have found that full-fuck yes in each other and really guided the way for me to believe it was possible and I think in this conversation, hopefully, so many other people to believe that a full-fuck yes in a partnership, a full one, a blistering full one is possible. Wow.

BENJAMIN: They say the hardest note to identify is the one closest to a yes.

AUBREY: Wow. 

AZRYA: And by "They" he means, he. He says that.

AUBREY: He refers to himself in the royal ‘they’.

AZRYA: He's just humble, like "They, over there." But I'm like, "No, babe. That's your thing."

BENJAMIN: I guess what I'd say to that, too is, looking at that from an external perspective, what allowed that, from my perspective, is the work I did. I also didn't show up in previous relationships the way I needed to for them to show up the way I needed them to. You also have to be operating at that full-fuck yes level. You have to be an energetic match to that and I wasn't previously. I'm grateful for all those previous relationships that allowed me to see where I wasn't showing up the way I needed to and then I was an energetic match to Azrya.

AUBREY: When he came in, he came in with a full-fuck yes before your full-fuck yes. You were like, "Oh, yeah, maybe so." How was that feeling, that sense of certainty from him first, and then what was your process to get to your full-fuck yes?

AZRYA: His certainty was the most exhilarating and most terrifying thing I think I'd ever felt in my body. I'd never been met with that level of unwavering certainty. I remember someone asked me pretty early on right when we had met, "What is one thing about Benjamin that you would say, if you had to pick one thing to describe the nature of his love, what would it be?" The answer was instant, "Unwavering." I think because of my unique history and a lot of factors related to my childhood, including the absence of my father, and a lot of moving around, and very little stability and very little consistency, in other words, a lot of waiver, that was a very foreign sensation. At the same time, it was what I'd been longing for my whole life. So we talk a lot about, in our work, we talk a lot about everything you didn't know you wanted, like there's that thing that you didn't know you wanted but then when you when it's there, you're like, "Holy shit, I've been wanting this, on some deep subconscious level, my whole life."  It was both the paradox of feeling like this was now being presented to me but in order to fully receive it, I had to face off with all of my deepest fears around it not being real or possible, or not being ready or the commitment piece. It was an invitation into a commitment. That unwavering energy was here like, "Here I am and I know what this is, and I choose this fully. It makes no logical sense but I'm choosing it anyway." It makes no logical sense to know that within a week of meeting each other. And with that unwavering energy, then comes the invitation to meet it fully. And so what does it do? It illuminates. In my case, it illuminated all of the waver inside of me around what do I really want, who am I really, what do I want the rest of my life to look like? There were big questions that I'd never confronted before. I've been in long monogamous, committed relationships but they ended up being committed because that's just what happened. But they were never like, "Hey, we are committing to do this together." Certainly, the whole forever conversation was very foreign to me. It was like, "Forever? What is that? I don't even know what that is. I don't even know where I'm going to be a week from now. I don't know where my rent's coming from next month." I was still very much living in a deep state of uncertainty, which I had made tremendous amounts of peace with and, in a lot of ways, that uncertainty was a comfort zone for me. The unknown was a lot safer for me than the known, which is the opposite of, a lot of people see, it's the other way around. So for me to step into this timeline of a shared life that is known and also, as I'm learning, infinitely unknown... We are such complex, multi-dimensional beings. There's layers and layers and layers to one human being, you can go infinitely deep into one human being if you're willing to keep pulling back the layers. So the fear of, "Oh, my God! What if this is..." I guess there's always been a part of me, I call that aspect of myself the novelty whore, the part of me that's like, "Okay, I did that. That was really cool and now I'm on to the next thing." I had to really face off with that part of me in this journey of being together, and seeing the layers come off and also Benjamin's willingness to reveal the layers and continue on this path of becoming, as we call it, which is a shedding and a transmuting, and a constant shape-shifting, revealing of who we truly are. It never gets boring. There's no timeline where it can be boring if you're really committed to that path.

AUBREY: Yeah, that's a deep lesson, I think a lot of the fear is if you know that novelty works, but it only works to a certain depth. That's the problem with novelty, it's self defeating. By its very nature, it's self-defeating. Eventually, something becomes not novel. In the absence of the pathways that can go deeper to create new novelty at new-dimensional levels of depth, then it is monotonous and it is boring. So you have to go back to the beginning of just raw novelty rather than the exploration of novelty at a different strata of your understanding of each other.

BENJAMIN: David Brooks, in "The Second Mountain", talks about commitment and marriage, and he talks about how it's the ultimate freedom. Because once you fully commit to something. We spend so much of our time and energy searching, especially for a partner. In the commitment is tremendous freedom, because then you're free. The rest of your awareness and your bandwidth is free to focus on all the other things that you have going on in your life and you can just commit to it. It also drives a lot of freedom.

AZRYA: Yeah, it's the one choice that shapes all other choices and he says it in the book. I highly recommend the book. Even just those particular chapters are so powerful and completely changed my perspective on all of this. But he says if you actually stop and think about it, there is no decision that you will make in your entire life that is more important or more meaningful than who you're going to marry or be with or commit to in that way, because they will touch every area of your life. There's another great book called "Becoming a King", where he uses this example of your spouse's like this beautiful tree that's growing in the middle of the living room and it's just smack in the middle and it's amazing. It's alive and it's breathing and it's doing things and you love it but it's also something you never can go into any room without having to acknowledge the existence of the tree. It's going to affect every area of your life, every decision you make. It's all a co-creation at that point. For me, as a fiercely independent spirit, and someone who had created a lot of self-worth and a lot of identification around independence as a necessity from an early age, a huge part of me had to die to be able to come into this union. When you say the full-fuck yes, it's also what I'm learning. It's the full-fuck yes. What does full mean? It's the full-spectrum experience of being in something with someone which is all the light, all the magic, all the juice, and then also all the shadow, all the trauma, all the karmic patterns, all the generational ancestral stuff that we bring into relationships--

BENJAMIN: No shadow.

AZRYA: No, you know.

BENJAMIN: What are you talking about?

VYLANA: Look at that devious face as those words dance off your tongue.

BENJAMIN: It's all light, baby.

AZRYA: If it was all light, I don't think I'd be sticking around all that long because the truth is that--

BENJAMIN: It's boring.

AZRYA: There's a richness in the soil of our shadow that is, yeah. There's a turn on for me there, not just the part of me that relishes the full spectrum of the human experiences, but also the part of me that likes the danger.

AUBREY: When did you get this tattoo on your neck that says, "Trust Love"?

AZRYA: I got it five days before we got legally married.

AUBREY: It seems like that's a message to yourself in all timelines, right? A big part of this journey is how much can Azrya trust love? That's a journey that you've been on as well, Vy. It's like a journey to trusting love.

VYLANA: Yeah. Still learning how to fully, it's like my knowing is in this place that I absolutely do and my body memory that knows such a different expression of a lot of suffering and pain and trauma and love is like, my body's not totally there yet. I'm still bridging that gap of my knowing, that knows I'm so safe and I'm so free to express myself fully and to know that this is the primary commitment. Our sacred union is above all else that we experience in our lives but my body's still learning how to fully, fully be there.

AZRYA: The body is slower. It's a lot slower than the intellectual mind. And when you say "knowing," we use that word a lot too. We've talked a lot about knowing. Benjamin has this quote, I don't know if it's yours but, "The opposite of learning is knowing." But that's talking about intellectual knowing, the kind of thing that you learn through reading books or even personal experience. In our book, we capitalize the whole word, KNOWING, to distinguish it from the intellectual knowing. And the KNOWING you're talking about is like the capitalized version, which is that deep soul remembrance where it's beyond logic, beyond reason and it's just--

VYLANA: A felt sense. Aubrey calls it knowinG with a capital G as in Gnosis.

AZRYA: Yes, we almost went to the capital G and then we were like, "I don't know how many people know the whole Gnosis thing. Might be a little deep end."

VYLANA: But it's interesting to reflect because all of this patterning that we have and these constructs to protect ourselves in life like abandonment, all these things, there's a similar strand that's like, "I can't fully trust in love, I can't trust in it to hold me, to see me, to support me through those darker paths of going through our shadow. How can I actually just have this felt sense of fully trusting in love with all of me?" It's a freaking journey. It's like a lifelong--

AZRYA: I would say if you boil down the whole human dilemma, it all comes back down to trusting love, not just romantic love or love in partnership but capital L, Love, the universal love, like, "Am I loved by life, am I loved by the universe, am I safe in this place, in my body on this planet, am I loved by creation?" is this really the bigger question, right?

AUBREY: It becomes this subject-object question because it's not the love itself that's untrustworthy. Love is love. But do we trust the vehicle from which that love is transmuted? You know the fallibility of the human being. We've seen that before. And Vy's seen that so many times, like I've given you all of my love and then you've betrayed me in some way, or I've been in love with life and then a car accident happened or something happened, or I lost my sibling or something happened. I don't trust the love that I have for my life anymore. You project that onto it. It's very interesting because love is always trustworthy but the source from which it comes, which we try to say, "This is the source of love," we can have all kinds of doubts about that aspect. In one of our challenging moments, she said, "I just don't trust love." And I said, "Well, it's not that you don't trust love. It's that right now, you don't trust me."--

VYLANA: That distinction is--

AUBREY: And with that, saying, "Is there a part of you that really feels that you don't trust me?" And she's like, "Uh-huh. Let me sit with that. Let me sit with that a little bit."

VYLANA: I don't think so but I guess so. For me, that wounding came from childhood, like I experienced love, I received love, I knew love, I knew it existed, but I don't know how to feel safe and in full surrender with it.

AZRYA: But just the ability to see that and be able to express that, and be able to let that be a part of where you are at in your journey right now, and let that be welcomed in the container of this union--

BENJAMIN: Not be triggered--

AZRYA: Is in and of itself medicine, to be like, "Hey, here's this part of me that doesn't fully trust you or this..." and for him to be in that loving space of like, "Okay, let us integrate that part however long it may take," because the body mind is a lot slower and takes more time; that cellular memory, it has to be rewritten--

VYLANA: Reprogrammed.

AZRYA: Reprogrammed through new experiences, new neural networks.

VYLANA: And it can be, just so that you know, it can be a beautiful experience. The remembering that's happening here has been beautiful. Hasn't been re-traumatizing and it's just like, "Okay, here's the safe space for me to remember that I can."

AUBREY: There are precious few stories like the story that we're writing and the story that we're telling. There's all of these fantastical Disney-esque or Hollywood stories about love. It gets everybody all hopeful and fired up about it. We don't typically see it play out in reality that often. It almost makes it feels like "Ah, it's not really that possible. It can't be really that good." There's this important thing of, and I think you guys were that for us in many ways, which was how we felt it but the fact that there was somebody else. We wanted to be, "No, no, I'm telling y'all. I hear you. You're saying it's the honeymoon thing. Just wait a little while." I hear all of that. I don't disagree that based upon everything that you've seen, and the disillusionment that you've had with the stories that you believe that that's the case, but I'm telling you this is different. Everybody's like, "Get a prenup, Aub, just to be sure." I'm like, "No, I'm not. I'm certain."

BENJAMIN: She's all happy. I trust you. I trust you.

AUBREY: But everybody's like, "I know, man. I know. Everybody's certain." And I'm like, "Yeah, I get it that everybody's certain, but I'm actually certain."

AZRYA: We had a really funny call with his accountants. He was like, "They're going to be so pissed I'm not getting a prenup." We were on the phone with them on speaker and he's like, "I want to introduce you. We're going to get legally married." They're like, "Oh, great. So... Prenup?" He's like, "No." They're like, "Okay."

AUBREY: Voice is getting a pitch higher.

VYLANA: There aren't a lot of really healthy models to look at like, "That's it. I actually see it and I feel it." You feel it exuding out of your relationship. That's so rare. That's why it's been so beautiful deepening our relationship with you guys because we feel so much that you mirror so much of what our relationship represents to us and to the world. This is possible. It is possible to be a full-fuck yes.

BENJAMIN: It's important to have those four-minute mile examples out in the world. Thank you. We receive that. And it's reciprocal because seeing you guys evolve, Azrya calls it the slinky effect where seeing it reflected in you also allows us to grow. But it's so important and it's also important within the relationship. We have very different strengths. She's been my four-minute mile analogy, where I've seen the way she shows up in the world and I'm like, "Wow, I didn't know that was possible. I want to feel that and show up in that way and vice versa."

AUBREY: We learn so much more from just seeing something and knowing that it's possible like belief is such a powerful force and to really believe that. And, of course, there's going to be those people who are like, "Oh, look at these still newlyweds talking like they made it." That's fine and I welcome all of that skepticism. And if you want, wait your whole life and then you'll be proved wrong. If that's the way you want to play it, go for it, or trust that we're actually telling you the truth. Either way, you're not guaranteed that you're right, but to trust that, I think, is really interesting. It's not to force it. That was also another thing. If it's a force, it's that no that's very close to yes, if you're forcing. It's not a forcing thing. It's a lot more Taoism than stoicism or something. It's more like--

AZRYA: Allowing.

AUBREY: Allowing, really letting this happen.

AZRYA: I also think that this whole idea of this honeymoon phase is like, from a scientific perspective, it's all pretty bleak. You're biochemically, evolutionarily, going through an incredibly altered state of consciousness. What you're experiencing is really not real, it's just a bunch of chemicals released in your body and so you're seeing this person through these rose-colored glasses, and it's going to wear off and then you're going to be sitting there being like, "Holy shit, now I see the real you and I'm stuck with you. I'm kind of over it. I'm going to go find someone else."

BENJAMIN: Hey, hey, hey!

AZRYA: This is the sign. When I've read about it, from the scientific lens, I found it incredibly jaded. There's been a real curiosity for me around okay, in order for it to run that course, what that means is that we have no say over our biochemistry. Our biochemistry is essentially running us and it's doing its thing; we're just at the whim of it. I think so much of the journey of self-realization, actualization, mastery is starting to, control is the wrong word, but create a conscious relationship with your nervous system, with your energy body, with how your thought patterns and your physicality and your mannerisms and all these things affect your biochemistry. As you gain mastery over that, you have the capacity to, for example, open your heart. That's one simple thing. It's not at all simple but it sounds simple, just the ability to track what makes my heart close or contract even just slightly versus what makes it open. Being able to realize that, okay, yes, in this early stage romance, my heart is blasted open and I'm not really doing anything consciously for that to occur. But if I'm really on the path, then I can learn to open my heart through the power of choice. And in a moment where my heart may want to potentially close, which would create separation in my partnership, and over time, could create complete separation, I can consciously choose to lean in instead of lean out, I can consciously choose to open instead of close. I think it's those micro-decisions in everyday moments that ultimately determines whether you're in a relationship that is on the timeline of becoming more and more intimate, connected, passionate, alive or on the timeline of what science would say, which is this is fizzling and burning out and now we're bored and now we're moving on. Which timeline you are on is entirely determined by the micro-decisions you make in every single moment. We had a moment the other day where we were on the phone with his doctor and I was giving him a hard time for not chewing his food more fully because whatever, I'm not going to get into the details. It's coming from love. I love him so much. I don't want him to have issues. He's like, "Will you just give it a rest, please, woman?" I was triggered and I walked away. And then I sat with it and I was like, "Okay, I could just say I'm sorry and realize that that was unnecessary and I could just keep my heart open." And so I just did that. It could be that simple or I could be righteous and be like, "No, but I'm right, blah, blah, blah."

VYLANA: And then your separation goes into sleeping separately and feeling crappy and into the next. You start breeding resentment. Those micro–

AZRYA: Those things fester over time.

AUBREY: She's talking just hypothetically. She's never done that. She's never once done that--

VYLANA: Hey!

AUBREY: Where's she's just left in the middle of a fight or anything like that.

AZRYA: But these things fester, even the tiny, tiny, tiny little things. Just being able to have that, ultimately, it's all self-awareness to say "No, I don't choose this. I choose this, I choose the opening."

BENJAMIN: I think, in our relationship, one of the things that's really unique and it's new for me, it's been beautiful to step into a relationship in a different place, but we've never been in a fight. We've had the most challenging conversations we could possibly have. We've thought our relationship was at risk at times, and moved through some really challenging things.

AUBREY: You call them your death portals?

AZRYA: Our death portals.

BENJAMIN: Yeah. We went through two. And really not for anything related to the love between us, but really questioning alignment. But we did it open-hearted through all of it, through the most difficult conversation, through hearing the exact opposite thing you want to hear. That's been beautiful to experience and to see that you can stay open through the most challenging experiences.

VYLANA: Through the deep value of truth and being in integrity with yourself. We actually just had an instance last night where, like for me, what's been so helpful is just automatically naming where I'm at. If something arises and I have a physical, any kind of discomfort in my body, it's like, "This is what I'm feeling in my body," and allowing him to see me in it and not giving it any more life, to be sitting on it and letting it stir and become into a bigger monster. It's just like, "This feels a little bit threatening to me," or, "This feels a little bit unsafe." His reflection to me is like, "It's so beautiful for you to be able to witness yourself and to name it." It reads such deep intimacy through that, just a deep expression of truth. Prior to this relationship, I probably would have felt embarrassed or they're going to reject me if I have anything that's not just bright and awesome in passive. But no, this is a relationship. Intimacy comes through that deep level of truth.

AUBREY: Vy and I have had some fights. We've had some fights. I remember one of the very first really big ones we had after getting engaged was, it's always over something really small--

VYLANA: So trivial.

AUBREY: And then it just escalates. We've had different challenging relationships. Vy, in particular, has had a lot of traumatic relationships. The coping mechanisms for those come online. I've certainly had my own issues as well. I remember it was really interesting, because this blew, it got so big, this argument, so big. We were taking some space on different sides of the house or something like that. I really thought about it and it was like, "Whoa, I never would have expected us to go this deep into separation." There was this fundamental thing like, "What I feel and what I know is not wrong." It was this choice of no, no, no matter what, no matter what I choose that I'm in, no matter how many times this happens, no matter what. There was this real release in that, like you said, the freedom of, "No, no, we're committed no matter what. And this is all in." When we came together, that's just what I was expressing. I think you were huddled on the driveway somewhere after wandering, lost in--

VYLANA: In Sedona?

AUBREY: Yeah.

VYLANA: Yeah.

AUBREY: In your sorrow and I was like, we're together forever. However we want to move through this, we can. That was a big significant difference because in every other relationship I'd have been like--

VYLANA: There's an out.

AUBREY: "Well, maybe this means that it's now time."

BENJAMIN: I really liked that Jim Dethmer quote, "What are you willing to risk full aliveness." He talks about in his relationship with his spouse that they're in a relationship, and I feel like it resonates for us and I see it in you guys, that if you're willing to feel uncomfortable, to say, "I'm uncomfortable," and you're willing to put everything on the table and have those uncomfortable conversations and face them head-on with openness, then what you get on the other side of that is full aliveness, and that's a full relationship. And so being willing to say, "Hey, I feel this..." is allowing for that full expression of life.

VYLANA: In that expression too, I think the thing that's really important is the softness and curiosity like my body's having this response right now, but I'm also curious. Maybe this is an edge for me, not like, "This is my trigger. You have to be this way," but like, "This is how I'm feeling and also, I'm really curious about it. How can we work through it together?"

AUBREY: We definitely didn't hit the ground fighting elegantly. You know what I mean? This is a process for us. Everything in our relationship's been so beautiful but when it got ugly over some trivial thing, like a race up a hill that I won and joked with her a little too much about or like--

AZRYA: No way!

VYLANA: We're very sarcastic with each other and sometimes he can pick up on my sarcasm there actually being a little bit more there and my own judgment of myself like, "How could I hurt the person that I love?" sometimes gets me stuck in like, "But that's not where it was coming from." So we would just get in these circular arguments that we were just getting, and the arguments aren't screaming and yelling at each other, but they're just like, "It's not going anywhere. Nothing is happening here."

AUBREY: But there was a beautiful turning point moment where, in one of these ones went from triviality to intensity, we were arguing and I just got absolutely annihilated, absolutely decimated in this. I consider myself a fairly good arguer. I feel like I can hold my own. It's like imagining that you're like a good martial artist, and then you just get your ass whipped so bad. Maybe you're a great Taekwondo expert and then you run into Gracie and he just is choking you relentlessly and you don't know what's happening. 

BENJAMIN: So did you get turned on?

AUBREY: But what was interesting, so she goes off. It was a very ridiculous thing. She goes off to her own experience that night with a group of her friends and I was at home and we didn't really resolve it so I couldn't sleep. She didn't come home till like 5:00 in the morning--

VYLANA: I was doing a sound healing on the solstice.

BENJAMIN: She's like, "I wasn't partying all night."

VYLANA: Partying with my friends.

BENJAMIN: She's like, “Five in the morning.”

AUBREY: But, ultimately, through that time, it was actually really beautiful because that was the last point where we've ever had something that escalated like that, because I had this understanding that if we get into that, Vy will destroy me, she will absolutely destroy me. So when she came back, she was like, "Man, that was awful." I was like, "No, stop. That was awesome."

BENJAMIN: It did turn you on.

AUBREY: I was like, "That was awesome. I encountered a force of nature." I've never been dominated like that before in my life, in my life. There was this, "Oh, wow." I wasn't castigating, or I wasn't judging her for it. I was appreciating that level. Since then, there's been a couple other things that have come up where I've immediately felt where I could try and hold my ground, but I was like, "I know how this ends. It ends with me getting my ass kicked." So I'm just like, "You win, Vy. You win". And then she goes, "Oh, well, I don't want to win. I'm not trying to--"

AZRYA: It takes the fight out of you.

VYLANA: Yeah, it takes that energy out and in that experience too, moving through my own shadow and triggers, he gave me the permission to really love myself there in his acceptance of that energy in me. I've always had it. A lot of women have, people love to paint women as, "You're the crazy woman," when her boundaries are crossed and then she freaks out. I've had that energy and it's cutting and it's like my mind, for some reason, just goes into this red state where I know how to say the thing to get it to stop. But his acceptance of it and in some way, this very beautiful reverence for it, like the Kali depiction standing on top of Shiva, that force of power and his surrender to it. We haven't had... For one, it helped me to really integrate that energy in myself and be more loving with myself and to not repress that side of me. Also, his acceptance of that and his surrender, that's just like, "I know where this goes, I don't want to win," it helps me to be in--

AUBREY: Or I can't win. If I had a chance of winning, it might not have actually worked. It might have been like, "All right, you want to lock horns? We'll lock horns. Let's keep going." But when I know that it's like... I'm not going to fight Kyle Kingsbury. He's going to fucking kick my ass.

AZRYA: It sounds like an empowered surrender though because I think there's a big difference between being--

VYLANA: It is a choice.

AZRYA: Cowering to someone else's raw force of nature, whether it's holy fury or whatever and being like, "Oh my god, I'm literally scared of you," which is not at all sexy--

VYLANA: Not healthy.

AZRYA: Or being, "Whoa, I respect that and I'm not going to mess with it. But I'm empowered in my surrender." What that really is communicating to you is he can hold all of you. He can hold even that part of you, he can see it through a lens of reverence. That's a safe place.

BENJAMIN: It's been beautiful to see you guys lean into the safety of the relationship, just seeing your relationship evolve and how much more comfortable you guys are with each other in that sense. That fighting feels like it's going to just dwindle away, because-- 

AUBREY: It already is.

VYLANA: Yeah. It's like anytime we get there, it's like this switch that happens if I mentally go into that space, that's very much programming. It's also ancestral. The women in my family call it Madame Pele energy. It's like the force of the volcano that's destruction and creation. That is an aspect that we all have within us. But his surrender to it, it's like it flips the switch back so I'm thinking more from a compassionate place. "This is My beloved, this is not what I want." I also am no longer shaming myself and repressing it further and rejecting any part of myself but it's like then--

AUBREY: The shame causes you to deny that it's actually happening because you don't want to acknowledge that you're not righteous and justified in your action, because you're ashamed of that aspect. But when the shame is removed, you can see it and be like, "Oh, well..."

BENJAMIN: Well, I'd like to see it. So anytime you want to bring it out--

AUBREY: It's damn impressive.

BENJAMIN: We'll get some popcorn.

AUBREY: It is the most violent-nonviolent communication you've ever heard.

VYLANA: That's what we call it. "You're the greatest at violent-nonviolent communication."

AUBREY: It's all the right language so that you can't question the language. It's not like she's calling a name or something like, "Oh, you're going to call me names now." It's like--

VYLANA: And it's not screaming. It's very direct and very emotionless and very dry. But it's very violent-nonviolent communication.

BENJAMIN: And I'll say that in previous relationships I had that. I showed up in that way. In my last relationship, it would get nasty. And that was coming from a wounded place. That relationship taught me that I didn't like myself. When I ended that relationship, I was very much pointing the finger like, "Here's a laundry list of all the things she was doing wrong." The further I got away from that relationship, the more I looked in the mirror and was like, "Wait, wait, wait. She couldn't show up the way I needed her to because of how I was showing up." I was really defensive and attacking. I was really good. I was like you. Like, "I'll take your throat off. You want to argue? Let's go."

VYLANA: Spicy. 

BENJAMIN: Over time, our relationship snow-balled in a negative way because of that. I think, over time, with reflection, I really realized I didn't want to show up that way. I'm thankful for that relationship because it allowed me to see that within myself and show up differently.

VYLANA: And to take responsibility. It's not like he just surrendered so I'm like "Oh, I won. And I can move..." No, actually, instead of going through the cycle of I have this expression that's very shadowy and reactive and then I go into shame, because as soon as that happens, and I feel the level of hurt that I have created, I am so hard on myself and I hate myself for it. A lot of the reason why I've had an avoidant pattern is because I know my capacity to go there. And I don't want to do that, because I judge myself so intensely afterwards so I just leave. Sometimes it's helpful because I can blow off steam and journal and get clear about what's actually going on for me. Sometimes it's just a way to get out and escape. But yeah, this is just the way that we've related it. It's just helped me to not go through those cycles, to actually take full responsibility, not shaming and guilting myself through it, but owning how much I want for my beloved to feel seen and not transgressing this relationship. It's really, really helped me a lot.

AUBREY: Another code for people as we're talking about navigating conflict, which is super important in relationships, it's essential, is when she retreats, which is something that she likes to do. I would rather just hash it out until it's hashed out, stick in it and if it gets stormy or whatever, stick with the storm and the calm winds will come. She would much prefer to, "Let's take some space." I have enough sense to not chase her. If I chase her, then I'm crowding her and then it's just continuing the whole thing. So just learning, "All right, just hang out."

VYLANA: He allows me to be where I'm at without judgment. Even that didn't last very long. That was a tendency of mine in another partnership. Our attachment styles were in conflict. They were very anxious and I was avoidant. So when I needed to breathe and take space, when I felt like there wasn't communication, and then there was the anxiousness towards me not having space, it just felt like I was literally going to explode. He gives me the space when I need it and I take the space. I use it very consciously, particularly in our relationship to get clear and right with what's happening within me. The few times that that's happened, I'm journaling and then it's like, "I'm so grateful that he just gave me the space to go through my process and didn't get triggered by it, didn't shame me for it or make me feel guilty that I needed to do it." And then it's like, "Fuck." Then I go right back and I'm just like, "I want to be in love. How can we move through this?"

AZRYA: Whole pendulum swing.

VYLANA: It's fast and not dramatic, and it's helped me to unwind that very deep patterning of how I've just been in a relationship before. You're so great!

AUBREY: Oh, thanks, babe. What are some lessons from the death portals that you guys have been in, navigating situations where you just didn't know if you could make it work?

AZRYA: "Lessons from the Death Portals: A Memoir".

BENJAMIN: That's a big question.

AZRYA: God, there's a lot of lessons. I think that when everything is fine and dandy, that's great obviously. We want that. We want harmony in relationships. I think the trust that we've created and cultivated in a fairly short period of time largely came from our willingness to walk through those death portals together, not knowing if we were going to come out the other side as a unit and really going into the timelines in which we don't and fully processing that as much as you can in a hypothetical situation, but really going there emotionally and feeling that as if it's really happening. To me, the way I experience it, is there's this alchemical process that happens. It's like a transmutation process where the dross is burned away from, like all the things that are not fully in resonance or not fully working cannot continue to exist in that pressure cooker so they have to be burned away, fall away transmuted into something new. And so on the other side, there's a freshness, and a newness and an aliveness that has always come online for us, and a deeper trust and a deeper knowing. So even though they were the hardest things, they also, I think, forged us in a way that I'm super grateful for. I remember distinctly one moment, it's interesting to see the parallels, because Benjamin is a lot more like you, Vy. Aubrey and I are a lot more alike, which makes sense because of the polarities, right?

BENJAMIN: In some ways. In some ways it's the opposite too though.

VYLANA: It is way dirtier than me.

AZRYA: You're just closeted. You're just closeted.

AUBREY: I don't know, I don't know. We'll see! Listen to the Layla Martin podcast.

VYLANA: We did go to the same high school. Maybe that has to do with our education.

AZRYA: That's great! That's so wild. But anyway, in the second death portal, there was a moment where Benjamin really got to a place of real anger, a place of anger that I've never felt him in before. I think there was a part of me that was deeply afraid of, a part of me that knew that that was in there but I'd never seen it come out. Based on the situation, it came out. We had a conversation. He's like you. He needed space. So he left but he--

AUBREY: I went to your place in Sedona. I went to your ranch in Sedona for two weeks.

AZRYA: Which was really hard for me because I'm like you. I'm like, "Let's work through it now in real time." And so to just be, "No, it's okay. It's healthy for him to take the space." Anyway, he was moving through his own process, but at one point, he was fucking pissed, furious. He called me in the middle of that and we had a powerful conversation and there was... As he was sharing his rage... It was almost like one of my biggest fears I was now fully confronted with which was his rage in my face at me for something that I did. In that moment, there was this peace and this clarity that I felt because I was like, "Oh, here it is." And it's almost like I felt the love in the anger. I was like, "This is just another expression of his passion and his love for me. It's coming through rage in this moment."

AUBREY: Beautiful perspective.

VYLANA: Yeah, it's beautiful.

AZRYA: But I felt the love behind it and I was like, "He wouldn't be so pissed if he didn't love me so fucking much." It was interesting because I felt so deeply calm and centered throughout that conversation. It almost increased my clarity and my knowingness of, "I'm all in. We're doing this," even though I would have assumed that it would do the opposite, that it would make me question or be like, "See, I told you. I knew this was in here. I can't with this." But it was actually the total opposite effect. So that was an interesting learning from the experience.

BENJAMIN: I would answer the question by saying we're at a stage in our evolution and we love each other so deeply that as we move through those death portals, we wouldn't allow the other person to compromise. We got to a place where it was like, "This is your truth and this is my truth and those two truths don't go on the same path." The reason that it went to such a serious place so quickly was we both knew that we wouldn't allow the other person to compromise. I guess I'll just say that it was around a child conversation. I was a no to having more children and she went from maybe when we first met to a certainty. There was no way she was going to allow me to have a child just because she wants one and there was no way I was going to allow her not to have a child just because I didn't want to have one. And so we knew--

AUBREY: The full-fuck yes ethos right there. 

BENJAMIN: We knew we had to either separate or meet each other in a new truth. Her truth needed to shift here our mind truth and we both needed to land there--

AZRYA: Authentically.

BENJAMIN: Authentically, from our own perspective and we were able to do that. It was in that full surrender and like what she was saying earlier, when I went to Sedona, I went and felt. I went to the place and I was like, "Okay, our relationship's hypothetically over." I allowed myself to feel that fully. What does that feel like? What does my life look like? And I went into a really dark place for a moment very consciously. This wasn't like, "Oh my god, I'm spiraling." I went like, "No, let's fucking go there." I imagined her with somebody else. I imagined my life, everything we're creating and the BEQOMING platform and all that dissipating, the book, the documentary, none of that happening. I allowed myself to feel that so that I could go to that worst place scenario and say, "Okay, I felt that and I'm still good and I'm still whole."

AZRYA: Liberating yourself from the fear of that possibility.

BENJAMIN: And then liberated it so when we came back together, and both of us really did. When we came back to it, it wasn't from a place of I'm clinging and I don't want this to happen. I already felt that. It already happened. Our relationship ended internally and I processed that and I went through that so that when I came back to it, it wasn’t coming from both of us, it wasn't coming from a needy, clingy energy or attachment. It was coming from a place of no, this is actually coming from a positive full-fuck yes energy.

AUBREY: Go ahead.

VYLANA: I was just going to say we had a very similar death portal right before we got married. It's the one that you were referring to where we had a very difficult, it was supposed to be a loving ceremony that ended up being very, very challenging and the most separate I had ever felt from him. Went so deep into this idea like, "I can't believe I've never even questioned this before." I never questioned if this was the right thing. It was just always a full-fuck yes. And in my processing, I had to go through that. If I walk away from this, if this isn't the right thing, who am I on the other side? Very, very similar. That was the thing that helped me to come back to it with this different level of love and choice and acceptance like, "I will be okay. I will live my purpose, all these things but I choose this." Such a similar experience.

AUBREY: There's a lot of New Age thinking around, "Well, don't even think about it, because then you're making it into reality." But the reality is if your subconscious is afraid of it and you're thinking about it constantly, you have no opportunity to dispel it--

BENJAMIN: Anything you're resisting, you persist. 

AUBREY: Exactly. So this idea, I think it's a real misnomer about don't even think about it, because then you're calling it inaction. Well, if it's something that will affect you, there's some aspect of you that's attracting yourself towards it. And the way to dispel it is to go into it. I have a lot of experience in plant medicine journeys. It's the same thing. You try to resist, like Ayahuasca wants to take you somewhere and you want to try to hold on to the rails, on the water slide--

VYLANA: You're going to go there.

AUBREY: There's just going to be more water and it's just going to hurt worse. You're going to go upside down, half-drowning on your way out there, or you just let it go. I think another interesting example of that is Vylana's has had a lot of betrayal in her relationships, a lot of people cheating on her, lying to her and all of these things. The impetus of that that she's identified in men was lust, of course. That's what drove it and some other things there. But I remember in Ayahuasca when we were in Soltara, I had a deep ceremony where I could feel that I, of course, had that lust, the universal capital L, Lust. But I could tell that there was a part, because of her experiences, that that part of me was scary just like for you Benjamin's anger is scary. And so I felt like, "Wow, she's scared of this part." And so there's some part of me that doesn't feel seen and doesn't feel fully loved because there's a part of me that she's not willing to look at. So I expressed it then and I was like, "I was experiencing my lust. I really want to show that to you and have you hold it with me." She laughed it off, at that point. "Ha-ha-ha, your lust. Funny. You're savage. Blah, blah, blah." I was like, "Didn't land. That didn't land. We'll move on. We'll come back to it."

VYLANA: It will come back. Bookmark.

AUBREY: But then, ultimately, a little bit more, just dropping a little bit more in and the patience to let that unfurl but knowing, at some point, if we're going to deepen our union, she has to see the scary part and look at that. Finally, through a variety of different things that came to surface, she made the conscious choice, "Okay, I'm going to fucking look at it." It sounds like a very similar thing that she had to go through.

VYLANA: I wanted to resist it because the knowing in my body of how traumatic, the story the lust of the masculine means I'm not chosen, essentially. This is my sacred union, I feel safe for the first time. I truly feel chosen. This is beautiful, but there's also this other element that whether I'm facing off with it head on or not, it exists and it pops up in tiny little trigger moments where I might not be tracking it but it arises and I had to go into it, literally had to, in a ceremony space, was trying to resist it just like he was talking about. I don't want to envision him having sex with this person because then I'm going to be creating it and I'm just bargaining and trying to like not go there. And then finally, it was like, "No, you have to go in there." It was envisioning him with this other person and I hated it the whole time but I didn't die. And going into it and really--

AUBREY: I fucked her so good, you died.

VYLANA: Hey! That's dark. God.

AUBREY: Doesn't happen though.

VYLANA: Then there was this incredible release of this energy that happened and the music that happened as I was in this that brought me to the realization of the truth of what this is. It's so far beyond any physical expression, any fear I've ever had, it was like something about going into the fear helped me to realize the full expression of the truth of what this is. That was the only that I can, I mean I'm sure that there's also the physical expression of that being a potential experience but like--

AUBREY: More challenging way to go about it, not necessarily recommended.

VYLANA: But for my own psyche and my own wellness and thriving, I had to go there. I really, really had to--

BENJAMIN: Well, I got lucky. She gets turned on by the thought of me with another woman.

AZRYA: That's a different tangent.

BENJAMIN: That's a different podcast. 

AZRYA: Different podcast. No, but I was going to just say what you're saying really is the polarity, really. That's what so much of the medicine work, for me, is about, really understanding and integrating, the true polarity that we exist within in this universe, the spectrum of opposites that we exist within. It's the more you face the fear, in direct proportion, the more you can feel the truth of the safety of this love. The more that we went into the death, the more alive our union became. I have an interesting relationship with death. In a way, I feel like death is actually present for me all the time. It is the very thing that makes me appreciate life so much, because I have this almost constant awareness that nothing is ever fixed or forever. There's a constant fluidity to this experience. To not take anything for granted and be so immersed with what's right in front of me, a huge vehicle for me to be able to do that and live that way is my awareness of death as this constant polarity counterpart to the experience I'm having at this moment. I think it's part of why I can love so deeply too because nothing is guaranteed. You can make commitments and you can say vows, and you can put a ring on someone's finger, but there are universal forces that are bigger than us that we cannot control. To live with that awareness is both terrifying but also exhilarating, because it makes the colors brighter, it makes the richness of the moments so much deeper.

AUBREY: When we're going this deep into union, if there's a part that's walled off, that you you don't feel safe to show and you don't feel safe to express, if there's that part of you that's walled off, it becomes glaringly obvious like, "This is really obvious." It's like as you get healthier in your diet and you really clean your diet, maybe you were able to go eat Carl's Jr, Double Western Bacon Cheeseburger with the fucking waffle-cut fries or whatever and then you were like, "Yeah, I feel great," but then you really clean up your diet and then you eat one of those and you're like, "Goddamn, I feel horrible! This is awful!"

AZRYA: The contrast.

AUBREY: It's the contrast. And when you start entering deeper into love, those things that you're hiding, those things that are unsafe, they start to like to get louder and louder and louder and become absolutely insufferable. 

BENJAMIN: Relentless.

AUBREY: Yeah. They're relentless.

VYLANA: My dreams are a freaking savage like, "Oh, man!" Consciously, none of this is actually happening in my mind but subconsciously and unconsciously, all the programming from years of so many things, there's, "Okay, here's this new thing and approach with my beloved."

AUBREY: She was trying to express to me just the other day that she had a really bad dream, she got in a whipping fight with one of my exes and I was like--

AUBREY and BENJAMIN: Can you tell me more?

VYLANA: I didn't say it was a bad dream.

AUBREY: I was like, "Tell me more. How was the whipping fight?"

VYLANA: I didn't say it was a bad dream.

AUBREY: Describe it in detail. Hold on, let me get some lotion.

VYLANA: It was a very healing dream. There was just a having-it-out in the dream but then there was this beautiful truth, to just be able to sit down and just talk casually and openly and intimately. It wasn't horrible.

AUBREY: Oh, no. I didn't think it was horrible at all. I thought it was quite--

VYLANA: He's like, "Tell me more." I'm like, "They weren't like workout bands. Shut up."

AZRYA: It's so interesting how the subconscious processes information and, I think, a lot of times, really purges stuff too. That's a whole rabbit hole in and of itself. But the relentless piece, we use that word a fair amount, we actually almost named our book "Relentless Devotion" at one point.

BENJAMIN: We were still thinking of calling the documentary, "Relentlessly Beqoming".

AZRYA: And sometimes we say it from a place of holy shit, it's relentless. Once you're on the path, our sister, Blu, was saying this yesterday. She's like The 'Gene Keys' talk about how you think, you're like, 'Okay, I'm doing the work and I'm using the tools and I'm shedding my trauma and my childhood shit and my shadows. Everything should get easier, right?' But you become so hyper aware that you can't escape yourself anymore, not even the subtlest stuff.' So there's this sense of relentlessness where you're like, "Wow, and now I see this part, and I see this part, and now I see this part." The fine-tuning, the polishing of the diamond in the beginning, it's like this big boulder and you're taking the jackhammer to it and so there's a lot of reward. And then as it's as you get more refined with your awareness, the tiniest little thing, you can't get away with it anymore. You just can't get away with it.

VYLANA: You're too aware.

AZRYA: You're too aware.

BENJAMIN: Especially when you have a partner that's too aware. The mirror can be relentless, too.

AZRYA: Sorry, babe. And that's been something that I've had to really learn too is because I do see. One of my gifts is my ability to see the little blind spots and the little things that are slightly out of alignment or not 100% in presence or whatever. To really have the discernment to know when it's helpful to reflect that back and when it's helpful to actually not... To just let it be. I'm really in that bakery right now where I'm like, "Azrya, just walk in the other room, just sit down, take a breath, and just let it be enough. You know that you don't have to, because it can fall into the nitpicky fix of this whole, relentless, becoming who we are always designed to be thing, is beautiful, and it can get annoying."

BENJAMIN: You need a break once in a while.

AUBREY: And also to recognize, as gifted as we all are, we're fallible. Sometimes we got the wrong read, no matter what it is. It's not--

AZRYA: Or we're projecting. Sometimes I'll do that and I'll be like, "Oh, I see this thing. I want to reflect on it. Let me just take a breath." And then I'll be like, "What if I just turn the mirror on myself? Where's that exact thing showing up in me right now?" And then I'm like, "Oh, I can see it. It's right there. Okay, got it." So it's really interesting how that works. It's powerful.

AUBREY: So one of the things that a lot of people might be asking is, "All right, all right, I get it. I get a flavor of what this type of union looks like. How the hell do I go out and find it?" I think one of the things that I can identify as you got to put yourself out there in the world to get looks, to encounter people. It's almost like the souls are drawn together but you have to walk the walk to actually put yourself out there, to be visible and to meet people and to explore. Like I had to say yes to Burning Man to run into Vylana on that particular occasion. Maybe another timeline would have come through, maybe not. Maybe there was a no, a choice that I could have made to not go there that would have stopped. I think the first step is just making sure that you're encountering a lot of people, in different environments, outside of your comfort zone, places you haven't gone, things you haven't done, groups you haven't hung out with. Because if you're hanging out with the same friends, going to the same thing all the time. "Where's my lasting true love? Where is my full-fuck yes?" Well, you haven't seen anybody but the same 12 people for a year. So what are your chances? Of course, there's apps and things that are hypothetically possible for all that as well. But then, in that moment, where there's that, you get that feeling, I think there's a way in which both you and I, Benjamin, we showed up and we're like, "Okay, I see this thing and I will not let this pass by like a ship in the night." I was in a relationship at the time. I was polyamorous, but nonetheless, it was like, "No way will I let Vylana just be like, 'That was a fun Burning Man. Bye." Whatever that is, she must be integrated into a friend, into our life or whatever. I think you have a very similar story, B, where it's like you guys met and you were like, "Okay..." There's a very sacred action that still must be taken. I think it could be by the man or by the woman but it is kind of a masculine tendency to go out and say, "Okay, I'm going to take the sacred action necessary to ensure that this possibility is at least possible."

BENJAMIN: I agree with what you're saying about allowing yourself to be seen is a critical component, whatever that looks like. Sometimes it's not necessarily more people but even the way you show up in space. There's a courage that's required there that you learn over time. I guess the way I relate to that is, I was dating a lot of women and finding things I really liked in each of them and I was like, "Oh, I really liked that. I've never experienced a woman that wasn't jealous," Or, "I've never experienced a woman that I could go full spectrum fun with and not be judged. No reining in. Let's go all the way." And so I started experiencing these things. And then I created that experience. But for me there was this element of I was chasing, like you said, I forget the word you used, but you gotta go out and search. I was very much in that predatory, I'm looking for something and I was conquering. I feel like that was very much like a shadow. I knew intuitively that until I stopped chasing the shiny object, and actually just got really centered, was my woman going to show up and I just knew it in my soul. I had to stop dating. As soon as I did it, I tried to, a bunch of times, not going out with women that were fun or I enjoyed spending time with beautiful humans but weren't the one and until I stopped doing that, was she going to show up. And then when I did, it was immediately. I think there's an element as guys like us, you have to go through a phase of your life, at least, I did, of getting it out of my system. I did that for a lot of years.

VYLANA: Dirty!

BENJAMIN: When I got to that place, then I knew what I wanted enough to be able to claim fully and be like, "No, this is happening." I think whether you're a man or woman, or trans, it doesn't matter, there's Alpha and Omega energy. I think that masculine energy claiming is a safe place for the feminine energy to receive. That's how I related to it. I had to actually stop going out and stop doing all the things and just know that she was, I needed to be the energetic match so she could show up in my life because I wasn't the energetic match. There's no way she could have shown up based on how I was showing up in the world.

AUBREY: I think what you're describing is creating an energetic magnetism to your partner, which is absolutely necessary. I had a lot of deep feelings for Vylana, felt like I was deeply in love with her but until I had let that go, and surrendered that was I a match to it. So it's that combination of getting yourself energetically in the right place but putting your feet in different places. Put your feet in different places, interact with different people and then when you see that thing, and there's like a little asterisk that God puts in and says, "Listen," then at that point, just go. Go all in.

AZRYA: If you look at what happened right before we met, he moved to Venice specifically to break out of his world and be in a new community, new humans, different types of connections that he was seeking. He went to a dinner he met our mutual friend, Maria. She invited him to. No, she invited herself actually to stay at his place. He just kind of said yes, even though he didn't even really know her. And because he made this decision out of his comfort zone to let basically be a perfect stranger crash in his house in a new home and a new community, she was the link that had me show up on his doorstep very quickly afterwards. So there were a series of decisions that he made that were out of the norm.

AUBREY: I think that's essential.

AZRYA: He could have stayed in the same vortex, in the same comfort zone for his whole life and we would have never crossed paths.

BENJAMIN: I think the other thing too is letting it be okay that, I think, at least, as a man, and I only speak for myself, let it be okay that there's a period of your life where the one can't show up because you're not ready to settle down. At least, for me, I couldn't have met her a moment earlier because I wasn't ready. And maybe when you met Vylana the first time at Burning Man, you weren't--

AUBREY: No, wasn't ready.

BENJAMIN: There's a timing thing. I think a lot of people, myself included, stay in relationships because there's love there and deep connection; but the timings are not right. I think that's as important as anything. If you're not ready, not feeling guilty about that and being like, "I'm just not ready to do that and I need something different right now." And knowing that in everything there's a timing to life.

AZRYA: That was a big question when we first met was, "Am I ready to settle down?" My masculine, because I feel fairly androgynous. I feel like I flow between the two polarities quite a lot and I am attracted to women. I had always been curious about polyamory and different forms of relating, but never had the opportunity to experience that. And so in my mind, I was gearing up for--

BENJAMIN: I think you were coming out of a 10-year relationship.

AZRYA: I was coming out of a 10-year monogamous relationship and in my mind, I was like, "Okay, I'm ready to get out there, taste the rainbow, have my experiences and get it out of my system, my masculine--"

AUBREY: I've never heard taste the rainbow. Sounds so good.

AZRYA: I wanted to taste that rainbow.

BENJAMIN: She only got the Cuban ice cream flavor.

AZRYA: Oh man. But that was really my mindset when we met. And so that's why it was also such a dramatic, complete reframe for me. I was like, "Wait, what?" There was a part of him that genuinely was like, "Maybe we are meeting at the wrong time. Maybe you actually need to go do those things before we could be a potential." There was a real concern for him. Because he saw that. He could spot it in me because he had gone through it himself.

BENJAMIN: Not only that. I had a previous relationship. The girl just got out of a 10-year relationship and we just jumped into it. She wasn't ready and because she wasn't ready, it caused a lot of conflict, because she was still grieving the relationship and ended it emotionally-attached. That felt threatening to me. It just caused this awkward dynamic. I had experienced it, and I was like, "Okay that whole..." It was that guy Wayne Dyer, quote, "Life gives you an exam and if you don't pass it, it gives you over and over again." I was like, "Oh, is this universe giving me the same exam that I already failed?" I was like, "Wait, wait, I'm not failing another exam." I was really like, "Hey, do you need a minute?" Because--

AZRYA: And it was pretty serious. He was on the cusp of walking away before it even all began. This is an interesting segue, potentially, into the plant medicine conversation, because we wouldn't be where we are today. I really believe that, if we didn't have the medicine tools to support us through those moments of red flags and fears and, "Holy shit, what are we doing?" The medicine has been, up until about a year ago when it really dramatically diminished. But in the beginning, there was a lot of hurdles that we had to overcome internally around, "Can we really fully lean into this in the way that we--"

BENJAMIN: We were able to move at quantum speeds because of the medicine integration. There were a few ceremonies, like early early on the medicine was just like, "No, this wants to happen." It was like--

AZRYA: The medicine guided so much of this in the beginning. I can't imagine where we would be if we didn't have those tools as our allies, which is why we also have such a deep devotion to sharing our experiences about that, because it's an interesting conversation to have in union how can you--

BENJAMIN: Use it as a tool.

AZRYA: Use these things as a tool.

AUBREY: It's interesting. I think there's a lot of people who think of medicines as drugs. And I think a lot of people who were early in doing medicines were very careful to frame medicines in a way that we showed, "Hey, everybody who thinks these are drugs are not drugs. We're going to take this super serious. This is how super serious it is, and how super medicine it is. It's medicine, medicine, medicine, medicine." I think that was important. But then when you really start to know the medicines, and you really start to create this familiarity, you can get this ease with them where it's like, yes, all the guidelines are important and they're not for everybody and set and setting, it's all true. I'm not trying to deny any of those things, but there's this, they integrate into your life. It's just like a part of the fabric of your existence. We can say the same thing. People have asked me, "Who would Aubrey Marcus be without plant medicines?" I was like, "I don't fucking know." I have no idea. That is an impossible question.

BENJAMIN: It's like saying, "Who would Aubrey Marcus be if he never went to school and didn't know how to read?" There's tools that we have and...

AUBREY: Yeah, for sure. It's not that the reverence is lost at all. It's not that there's no more but there's this ease with which we understand how they weave and how these spirits work and how benevolent and how loving they are and also how challenging they can be. But I think it's beautiful to meet another couple on the path that has a similar, in many ways, even more, in some aspects. The way that you guys were able to use medicine in a way that is more fluid in how you've used the relationship and also know when it's a sacred no. We invited you to go down to Costa Rica to drink with my first shaman and it's like, "No, it's a no for now." And there's not a second question. It's not like, "Come on, guys. Come on!" I can't fucking do that. I love you. I respect that because I know you know. 

BENJAMIN: There's a time and place.

VYLANA: There's a really healthy level of discernment with it.

BENJAMIN: She's been really really powerful and guided us--

AZRYA: When you say, "She", you mean aya.

BENJAMIN: Yeah. Sorry.

AZRYA: Ayahuasca. Yeah.

BENJAMIN: Aya has been powerful for us and guided us all along the way. There's also a time in place where it's a tool and then there's an evolution where, at some point, and Azrya went through this viscerally and I feel like I felt this more recently, but she pushes you away and says, "We've given you the tools. Now you get to--"

AUBREY: Walk the walk.

VYLANA: Be the medicine.

AZRYA: Be the medicine.

BENJAMIN: Be the medicine, yeah. Also being conscious of that and not getting attached or clinging to it or using it as a crutch.

AUBREY: Ayahuasca is a particular one because there's, I think, the people who, I think, are scared to do ayahuasca and they're like, "That's not even how you're supposed to do ayahuasca. It's supposed to be the shaman who drinks the ayahuasca and then nobody else does it." Alright, well, that was one way that it happened. But there's many, many ways where that was not the way. Then there's ideas around dieta. Obviously, the Shipibo have their tradition, and they have the reasons for the tradition. I'm not questioning that. And when we go drink with Shipibo shamans, we follow the dieta pretty much to really respect and honor their tradition. But we started working with a Brazilian shaman who was trained in the Brazilian way. In his way, he comes out after the first day and so we got on a modified dieta, not as strict as Shipibo. But he comes out after our first ceremony, and this is recently and he goes, "You know the best thing after ayahuasca?" He goes, "Cheesecake. Love cheesecake after ayahuasca."

AZRYA: Well, that's breaking like every rule.

AUBREY: I was like, "Fucking cheesecake?! You're my dude!" And he's been serving medicine for decades. But his relationship with it has created this flexibility and this idea that ayahuasca is going to come to punish you like an angry pagan god that's going to come bring her wrath upon, no. He eats his cheesecake and loves... It's very interesting. There's no right way. There's just good guidelines, but everything is fluid.

BENJAMIN: I think the key is getting really in touch with yourself to be able to just close your eyes and tune in, "What's my truth?" and knowing what that is. That's the work of this path. It's just knowing what your truth is at any given moment. Azrya and I have experimented with plant-based medicines, and had solo sits with aya just the two of us and had really profound, profound experiences that are way out of the guidelines. But we were in integrity with ourselves. I think that's the key, is really being integrity with your truest truth.

VYLANA: And just being able to tune into yourself enough where you can have that level of discernment, that's a huge piece for me. I tend to be very rigid with guidelines and I'm the good girl. And more recently, it was a daily practice, "What feels right to me? What truly feels right to me? Am I just following something because somebody's saying it or does this actually feel true to me?" And really owning that my own level of discernment and intuition and tuning in with what I need.

AZRYA: When I think back on the time when the whole world of plant medicines and, particularly, ayahuasca opened up for me, I think I see the value of having the strictness of the guidelines be enforced because there's no context for most humans, and certainly not where I was at, around how to have a reverential relationship with the spirit of anything, let alone a plant. You know what I mean? The idea that there's this consciousness that inhabits this plant that I'm not going to commune with, that, to us, is now so normalized that yes, we can have a lot more freedom with how we play in those arenas. But I think remembering back to the time when that was such a foreign concept, there was such a power in being here's really strict rules and you need to follow them; and if you don't, there's going to be consequences. There was actually real medicine in that because, A, it completely changed my relationship to food and nutrition. It made me realize just how much junk was actually in my diet without me even being aware of it. So it was the elimination of all of that to prepare properly that really gave me that awareness, which was a gift. Now when we're like, "It's time to prepare for medicine work," we're barely tweaking our diet, because our diet is essentially already that other than salt. But really, we're eating very close to that already because of the cleanliness of what we eat and the lack of alcohol and caffeine and all these things, although, recently he's back on the coffee train. There's a time and place for everything but I think that there's a time and a place where those things are really valuable. I agree. I think as the relationship cultivates with these plant teachers, as we start to come into real communion, it's just when you go to someone's house first, you're like, "Okay, I want to be respectful of this space." And then at some point, you're homies, and you're like, "Can I throw my dirty laundry in the thing real quick? We're good, right?" So there's a little bit of a different energy that comes through the familiarity, but it's good for our western culture.

BENJAMIN: You're saying you get to be homies with aya?

AZRYA: Yeah. I mean we are homies. Sometimes she gives me a little slap in the face. And sometimes, even after all of these years and all of this experience that I have with the medicine, which for most people would be a lot. Compared to a shaman's path, it's a drop in the bucket. But even after all of that, I've also made mistakes. I've had ceremonies where I didn't show up with the right energy or I took it for granted even just subtly and I really felt the consequences. I got my ass handed to me. Or I drank even though I wasn't a full-fuck yes, I was attached to some idea of what it should be and I was like, "Yeah, whatever." Man that does not go over well. I think yeah, it's good to have the ease as long as you can keep the reverence intact.

AUBREY: It's almost like you have to earn it.

AZRYA: You have to earn it.

AUBREY: You have to earn it through your relationship, through your knowing--

VYLANA: And commitment. Like your devotion. That's literally what dieta is. It's devotion to the reverence and honoring of the medicine.

AZRYA: And you don't know where the line is, until you cross it sometimes, right?

AUBREY: And also to say, some lines are firm. Nobody says, "You know what's good after a good Ayahuasca? Get some Prozac?" 

AZRYA: That's a firm line.

VYLANA: A hard no.

AUBREY: That's a hard no.

AZRYA: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

AUBREY: There's a lot of things that are actually hard nos and some things that really make good sense like if you take a big mushroom dose, don't drink a bunch of water, you're going to get super nauseous. They're hydrophobic. Certain things that are very pragmatic in that regard. Sometimes though, it's more psychological. I remember there was a time where I was taking mushrooms a lot when I would go out to nightclubs because I like to dance, and I would drink on them and I would have some drinks and some mushrooms. One day, I was at my nightclub that I went to a lot in Austin and I was going to the bathroom, the spirit of mushrooms came through and it just says, "Take a knee." And I go, "No, I'm in a bathroom. No, no!" And it's like, "Take a knee." I was like, "No." It just kept going. It was like, "Take a knee." And I was like, "Fuck, all right." So I'm kneeling in the dirty ass bathroom.

BENJAMIN: I'm sure the guys in the bathroom were–

VYLANA: You're so germophobic.

BENJAMIN: Everyone's unzipping.

AUBREY: I went one knee. Two knees would have been real aggressiveness. If mushrooms were like, "Two knees," I'm like, "I'm drawing the line here, mushrooms!"

VYLANA: God! See? Dirty.

AUBREY: But it was this interesting moment of... And that's a very unusual experience. Mushrooms talking to me? Usually, I get ideas and things but it was a clear conversation and it was like, "Treat me with respect." I want you to listen to this. You treat me with respect. I was like, "All right, I get it. My bad. I wasn't asking. I wasn't saying, "Thank you, mushrooms."

VYLANA: Set intention.

AUBREY: I was like, "Yeah. Gobble this and wash it down with some 1942. Let's go!" There was this really powerful moment... I actually had to repair my relationships with mushrooms at Burning Man that year where I went to the temple and I was like, "I'm going to take my first mushrooms. We're going to have a conversation." We hashed it out. It's very interesting. That's one of those moments where I was just like check, like, "Hey, check yourself." Don't play this too loose. Just because you've been doing mushrooms for 20 years, don't lose sight of the fact we're here as a powerful force.

BENJAMIN: I think it's also important to highlight that you have to have reverence for it and it's okay to use it in a recreational way. 

AZRYA: If that's the intention, to play.

BENJAMIN: If that's the intention and it's in a pure way. That's as much medicine as anything. I think a lot of times in the conscious community, it gets so serious. We get to fucking live--

AZRYA: And play.

BENJAMIN: And play.

AZRYA: The medicine of play, which psychedelics can facilitate beautifully is crucial for the healing journey. We're all pretty. We know how to play but we also are generally more serious, committed types where we're going all in and we're building all the things. There's a fair amount of serious energy, certainly, in our dynamic. We have to consciously choose the play timeline sometimes.

AUBREY: That's some of the most healing times I've ever had. Many of the best experiences of my life have been mushroom journeys, where there was just absolute hilarity, sometimes skiing, sometimes with the homies, sometimes in different situations, her birthday, not this last year, but the year before. But even this past year, we had some mushrooms. We were just howling with our friend Aaron. We won't tell that story. But nonetheless, those moments, there's something so powerfully healing about that laughter.

BENJAMIN: So healing. So healing. I tend to be more serious and so it's been really powerful. Just like with serious ceremony work like aya, you also, on the recreational side, you have to tune in, "Am I ready for this? Is this good for me?" really tune in with your higher self because that can go sideways too.

AUBREY: I remember one particular journey. For whatever reason, it was a full moon, super triple moon. There were a bunch of men out in Sedona, and we all dropped in with some mushrooms. We all took what we thought was a reasonable dose--

BENJAMIN: Don't tell me you got on your knees again.

VYLANA: Oh my god!

AUBREY: That's how all men's groups are--

VYLANA: When you laugh you know it's good.

BENJAMIN: That's how they do it in Austin.

AUBREY: I'm inviting you know. That's my formal invitation. But there was one brother there who really was into the seriousness, this is sacred silence and blah, blah, blah. But you could not hold the container. It was mayhem and the only thing to surrender to was the mayhem of the situation of absolute hilarity that this is so much that none of us can handle it and nobody can hold space. The maestros there can't hold space. Nobody can hold space. We just have to allow the entire container of laughter to hold but he was fucking fighting it. He was holding it together and we're all coming out of it and he just stayed fighting in his repose, and trying to put on different music that was serious and Ram Dass talking or something like that, and it just added to the hilarity of the situation. Finally, he was really serious, had a tough journey. And then something clicked and he just went outside, and he started howling with laughter, howling with laughter. And that was this release, finally, of holding, holding, holding the seriousness and he just let it all go. It was just one of the most cathartic experiences.

BENJAMIN: Laughter is so medicine.

AUBREY: Good laughter, good sex. Do some stuff in between.

VYLANA: My god!

AUBREY: That's what I would say. You guys have a bunch of cool stuff that's emergent that's going to come together. It's not only the love that you guys have brought together; it's not only the self work that you brought together, but you're birthing a lot of different things. What's some of that that's coming up that people can keep an eye out for?

BENJAMIN: Yeah, we call it The Hidden Years. We've been in a deep dive, the last couple of years, creating all kinds of content and preparing. So it's fun to actually be on the verge of sharing with the world. But yeah, we're going to launch our platform. It's Beqoming platform with a Q, B-E-Q-O-M-I-N-G, beqoming.me. We're finishing our book that should be published probably in January or February and filmed a documentary that will be released, hopefully, next year and so we've been super busy.

VYLANA: So beautiful, very emotional.

BENJAMIN: I don't know if you want to share any more about the platform?

AZRYA: Yeah, well, the Q, we chose that very intentionally. Obviously our last name, that's the obvious connection with Bequer. But the Q is really a powerful letter in the sense that it has the feminine and the masculine. So the Q without the tail is that feminine womb, infinite circle of life, and then the tail injects that masculine linear stability into it. Because so much of our work is about the integration of polarity and opposites and so much of what we are energetically is the dance between the Alpha and Omega or the masculine, the feminine, we felt that that really captured it. And then also the Q stands for questions because ultimately, there is no--

BENJAMIN: That's where it starts.

AZRYA: There's no becoming path, no quest to self-discovery without the willingness to relentlessly ask questions and ask why and dig deeper and deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole of what truth really is. And then EQ, emotional intelligence, big part of what we do. So, really, the platform, it's more than a platform. 

BENJAMIN: Like an ecosystem. 

AZRYA: Yeah, it's this ecosystem that's birthing through us and it's vast and it's multi-dimensional and it's really a blend of personal transformation tools and content, media as medicine, which is taking many of the codes that we learned from the actual plant medicines and infusing them into digital content. But then also that married with conscious artists, and thought leaders. All the fascinating, beautiful humans that we are blessed enough to receive in our fields, how can we empower them to share their message, their voice? It's like an incubator for them to develop and expand and amplify what they have to share because medicine comes in many forms. We talked a lot about the plants today, but not everyone is going to work with plant medicine nor should they. In fact, perhaps a much smaller percentage of the population should actually be ingesting these things than we even realize, for so many reasons. What I've been learning from ayahuasca in particular is that there are specific people who are almost encoded to receive blueprints from the medicines directly. The medicines are what? They're messengers of Earth consciousness. They're a vehicle with which Gaia, the consciousness of the Earth, can communicate with us. It's like an umbilical cord, tapping us back into that ancient intelligence. From my experience, direct experience, there's these blueprints for how do we actually birth a new paradigm? How do we actually co-create and imagine this new world that we all know is possible, as Charles Eisenstein said? The more beautiful world we know in our hearts as possible. There's got to be a blueprint for that. Just like any building you want to put up, you have the architect draw up a blueprint. It's the same thing with this. A lot of the blueprints that are coming through are related to media, whether it be music, or film, or poetry, or books, podcasts, how can these things be the medicine? How can the frequency of these transmissions deliver medicine into the hearts and the minds, of the masses, of the public, of the people who are not necessarily going to be working with the psychedelics or the plants themselves? That's been a real deep mission, soul mission for both of us. And we're starting to really to lock in on how that wants to look and how that wants to be shared. So we're very much in the crowning process of our birth. It's so crazy. Right before this podcast, we were pulling up business plans or diagrams we had drawn right before we met of this. We were both already receiving this before we even met, and then when we met, we put the puzzle pieces together and it was like, "Holy shit, we couldn't be more aligned with our purpose. And we have, between the two of us, the full spectrum of all the tools and all the skill sets that we need to actually make this happen." So it's been just awe-inspiring to watch it all come to life.

BENJAMIN: Yeah, we really hope to build a platform for masters in different fields to be able to showcase. Everything we're doing, none of it is to enrich ourselves or put money in our pocket. We want to operate the whole platform on a free-will investment model so people pay what they want to support the platform. And if they choose not to, that's beautiful. We'll trust that it'll all come full circle in another way.

AUBREY: Well, I can't wait to see it birthed. It's been such a pleasure to get to know you as a couple and get to know you as individuals. I can point to many absolutely beautiful moments in this relatively young chronological friendship, which feels like it spans many, many lifetimes. It's an honor to walk the path with both of you.

BENJAMIN: The feeling's mutual.

AZRYA: Likewise. Indeed.

BENJAMIN: Likewise, likewise.

VYLANA: We love you so much!

AZRYA: Love you too! 

BENJAMIN: Many more adventures.

VYLANA: And thank you. I got this for my birthday, which I've worn, I think, on every podcast I've done since I got. I wear it almost every single day. This was a gift from them, that symbolizes their love and their community and--

AUBREY: Satiates a deep fidget craving. Satiates the deepest--

VYLANA: I feel so honored to wear it.

AUBREY: Drop your Instagram handles so if people want to follow you, individually, they can follow you as well.

AZRYA: Well, it's @beqoming with a Q. That's our shared platform for Instagram. And then I'm at @iAzrya like iPhone, but then Azrya is spelled A-Z-R-Y-A. And...

BENJAMIN: I'm @benjamin_bequer. The last name is B-E-Q-U-E-R.

AUBREY: Beautiful. Love you guys and love you guys.

VYLANA: Love you so much!

BENJAMIN: Thank you.

AUBREY: Love you too, Ryan.

VYLANA: Love you, Ryan!