One of my best podcasts of all time, this emotional conversation that’s been 16 years in the making, is with my wife Vylana Marcus and former fiance / best friend Caitlyn Howe. We sit down with a bottle of whiskey and let it all out. We each take turns sharing our darkest hours and deepest shadows, with a lot of tears and a lot of laughs. We discuss my devastating 6 days in a darkness retreat, my ongoing relationship with self-love, the impetus of my name change from Chris to Aubrey Marcus, and the erotic aspect of harming oneself, to name a few themes. But perhaps most powerfully, Vylana and Caitlyn share their own shocking and emotional challenges in their relationship to the masculine. 

AUBREY: Here we are with two of my favorite humans on the planet Earth, two humans who have loved me so much over their lifetimes, and I have loved them so much over their lifetimes. Caitlyn Howe.

CAITLYN: Hello.

AUBREY: For those of you who don't know, she's currently my best friend, my coach at Fit For Service, also the best man person, woman person? My best man. I don't know how else you'd say it.

CAITLYN: That’s right. I'm your best man, man.

VYLANA: Best woman.

CAITLYN: I'm cool with taking on the title of best man. I don't think I'll get many opportunities in my life to step into those shoes. I'm taking it.

AUBREY: You're going to look fly as hell in a tuxedo.

CAITLYN: I am. I can't wait.

AUBREY: But what's really powerful about that is that we were going to get married at some point. I proposed to you and we were looking at wedding venues in Ireland and Scotland and flying owls and thinking about having Sonny or Boy Skrillex come out and rock the house at a castle in Scotland. It would have been dope but the world and our life has steered us to be just the greatest soul allies from now until forever.

CAITLYN: That's right. The universe had different plans for our chart and I'm so thankful that I did because we have just expanded into touching more lives and having more love and knowing each other in a new way that serves the world, I think, perfectly. And it's been an epic ride.

AUBREY: Epic fucking ride. Of course, I'm here with my goddess, my wife, my queen, Vylana. Vylana.

VYLANA: Hello.

AUBREY: Everything gets musical when you say Vylana. It's like the different synths come in and it's like, Vylana. As you might see, if you're watching this and if you're not watching this, we got a little Oban 14, which is my favorite scotch on the table. We got a little Caymus which is Vylana's current favorite wine on the table. It's a Wednesday night and we're going to have a few drinks and we're going to talk about some matters that are close to the heart, some things that we've all dealt with, some things that we're currently dealing with. One of the things that's come up is we recently watched a screening of my new documentary, "Awaken the Darkness." In that documentary, we talk about reclaiming, well, I talk about. It's just me in the darkness, but I talk about reclaiming Chris Marcus. That was a theme and a thread that wove through the darkness, was that there was some part of my former self that was exiled. Of all the people in my life, you know Chris Marcus the best. I mean you were engaged to Chris Marcus. You and Chris Marcus, I mean, we were fucking killing it--

CAITLYN: We burned it down.

AUBREY: We burned it down. But then Chris Marcus became Aubrey Marcus and there was a line of demarcation. Of course, I was the same person but I almost had this burn-the-boats moment where I pushed all of that aside. In the darkness, there was a way in which I really desperately needed to bring that element of myself back. This was the impetus for this to allow that story to be told and then also for all of us to tell the stories of parts of ourselves that we might have left behind. We're not really the full entirety of our being if we've exiled any aspect of our prior self, any aspect of who we once were, if we hold any aspect in judgment. The ceiling on our love and fullness of yourself is that which we hold as the least of ourselves or that which we cast out. We will never rise above that until we can reach the fullness of who we have been and who we are, even if we have changed and even if we want to evolve. It's important to bring that back home. So I thought we would all just do this together and talk about anything that's holding us back from being the fullest expression of who we are.

CAITLYN: It's a big delusion that we hold that we can actually exile part of ourselves. It doesn't really go away. It's a nice, comforting thought that we can just cut that out because it doesn't feel like it fits--

AUBREY: I'm Aubrey now! Chris Marcus is gone. Where did he go, bitch?

CAITLYN: He's right there, just down there in the basement, like, "Yo man? Love me too." For my journey, it's been a lot. For anyone who does follow me, I share pretty openly about my shadow experiences. It has been a journey of recognising all of the parts of myself that I have cast out at some point because I felt like they couldn't be loved or I didn't love them. I really had this, I think a lot of us have this, but this outsourced desire to be accepted and be validated in love, through what people dictate or insinuate is acceptable and appropriate. There's a lot of depth to me, and a lot of fire and a lot of passion and a lot of humaneness. I think realizing that all of those parts of me that I was trying not to be, some of them are very powerful, actually and some of them have big gifts to share with the world too. I've been noticing on my journey that they don't go away. They create a sense of fracturing in yourself that you can't quite pinpoint because you think you've overcome them. The reclamation process is really excruciating sometimes. It helps you be all that you are and it's really healthy and necessary and you can't escape it. You will have something that haunts you. It's somewhere in the pit of your stomach and the pit of your soul that's like, "There's something here that you refuse to look at," and it will be seen and heard in some form.

AUBREY: When we did Iboga there was a part of your shadow expression, this hungry party ghost version of yourself that you, in the Iboga journey, tried to bury and kill and did your best to do so but it was like a zombie. It was like a zombie. It wasn't going to die.

CAITLYN: So Aubrey and I did Iboga in 2012 at the beginning of the year. This was right after your name change. I actually remember sitting in Iboga and actually working by myself. Because I had been dating you for so long as Chris, I had a moment of recognising I needed to accept Aubrey, because there was still a piece of me that was unfamiliar with why does he need to change? I love him as he is. I see him--

AUBREY: Well, that made one of us. So that's good.

CAITLYN: But I was resistant to it because I was attached to Chris. I was attached to the familiar life that I knew. My attachments to my familiar life and the way that I want to see myself and feel comfortable in the world have been a real stronghold in me being able to transcend and embody more of myself over the years. Historically, particularly, at that time, I never called her a demon now, but we had a joke but it was the demon because I operate in extremes and I had a mode that was just, we called it the black eyes. I would get into... There's almost this Dionysian hunger that's just like, "More, more." That was so--

AUBREY: It's pretty much the season of "True Blood" where our boy Mehcad was in there as the character Eggs and there was, I don't know what her goddess name was--

AUBREY: It was Maryann. 

AUBREY: The maenad or whatever. She would give them all other black eyes.

CAITLYN: Yeah, and they'd all be humping and drinking.

AUBREY: That was literally Caitlyn. Caitlyn could create that.

CAITLYN: I was an orchestrator. 

AUBREY: But sometimes she would be sipping her own brew, not just curating the maenad--

CAITLYN: I was just the best at still holding the space. My medicine woman powers have shifted since then but yeah, I was holding space for debauchery, and I was doing it--

AUBREY: You did it fucking so good.

VYLANA: I didn't see that level of you, but your ability to hold space for people's total freedom and chaos and whatever kind of expression that they feel tied or contained, you bring them out of it.

CAITLYN: This is where this integration and reclaiming is so important, because that is a superpower of mine. How are you using it and why are you using it? What is it preventing you from doing in the ways that you're using it? How can you alchemize that into something that is actually utilizing your superpower and helping the world but isn't causing damage to yourself? So my modalities at that time were to get myself to a point of such uninhibitedness that I was sacrificing my own wellbeing to have the experience of orchestrating everyone else's ecstasy and joy and liberation. I knew that there was magic and medicine in that for the people that I was cheering on; and there was! I saw so many people just break through their shell. They appreciated me offering that invitation to them. So there was this exchange that felt really good for me. But the guilt and the shame that came on the other end of knowing that I was harming myself at certain points, and getting in my own way of really actualizing things that were deeply important to me or even being on purpose on a soul level at all. This was over 10 years ago. I didn't have the same framework that I do now. It would see-saw back and forth between, "This feels like me," and then, "This can't be me, because it's destructive and it hurts me and it gets in my way." So my mission with Iboga; it's such a deep medicine; was to slay the demon.

AUBREY: Do you think that there's something erotic about harming yourself? It's an interesting thing, but there seems to be an eroticism about the desecration of self. As the divine ones, there's this erotic energy about destroying the flower of our consciousness, of yourself. Well, all of us have tapped into that feeling.

VYLANA: I could definitely, I don't want to...

CAITLYN: No. Go, please.

VYLANA: That's something that has come up in the deeper work that I've done with you and with you this last year in aya, is actually tuning into that very strange erotic kink that I've experienced in myself through the desecration of myself. If this man has the most betrayal, lies the most, is manipulative, and then somehow makes its way to make-up sex, it's unreal. I had a relationship that was on and off for five or six years that was so entirely driven by sex and that super-erotic, it's difficult to even explain. It's exciting, for some reason, to go from a place of just feeling almost a hatred towards somebody like it's disgusting that I'm dancing in this realm with you, but if we can connect in that way, I feel this this very erotic expression and myself that turned into a lot of shame and closing off my yoni and all of that, but I've definitely expressed that and I--

AUBREY: There's two forces that I think would be good to separate that I can see. One force is polarity, the reclamation of the one who has rejected you, betrayed you, reclaiming them in an act them. It's a redemption.

VYLANA: Yeah, that's an important distinction.

AUBREY: It's like the desire for redemption does create a massive surge of energy. I think we've all felt that. We've all felt that at certain times--

CAITLYN: Redemption has been dominating my life.

AUBREY: And even in polyamory, they call it reclamation sex. But there's reclamation sex that can happen when there's separation in a relationship and then reclamation in union, which is sex, union comes, and there's the energy of that. But what we're talking, which is an important topic, and I don't mean to brush over that because we could spend a while exploring that.

VYLANA: That's another rabbit hole.

AUBREY: But the interesting part is the eroticism of choosing people that would defile and desecrate you because their energy was so toxic and destructive that, and even though you wouldn't be consciously choosing it, there is an eroticism to that. Listen, you look at the porn tubes and you see it all over the place. It's all about people tricking young women into doing something like a fake taxi, fake audition, sleeping this person. This idea of this trickery, deception, defiling is not only, I think, erotic for the masculine. I sense that it's erotic universally, because it's erotic for the masculine in other ways as well, the self-destruction of the self. We are all, I hold, the woman. It just so happens that some of us have cocks and some of us have yonis. But we're all desecrating the feminine. We're all the mother, we're all made up of the same wolf or shark's teeth, hummingbird feathers, pine resin, it's my favourite fucking spiel. But we're all made up of the mother, right? There is some strange and interesting eroticism to destruction. I think that's what creates the polarity. So the curious thing is to really own this deep aspect of the shadow that we don't want to look at that says, it actually turns me on to destroy myself and, potentially, to destroy others. Now, this doesn't mean that we don't temper. I think that psychopaths and sociopaths have separated themselves enough that they can actually do it to others and not feel guilty, but it's way easier to do it to yourself and not feel guilty. I think a lot of this eroticism is done in this self--

CAITLYN: It's sort of masturbatory.

AUBREY: Yeah, this masturbatory self-destruction.

CAITLYN: There's an edge there, to speak to, I think, what Vy was touching in her share; we may not allow ourselves to claim it or own it but there's a hunger for the edge. We want to feel the titillation of being on the precipice of what we're most terrified of and that's helplessness, death. It's one of the great mysteries of life, still, to me, but I did have a distinct aha moment in the past year. I was speaking with a teacher of mine she said to me, "I sense this exile in you that is almost suicidal." My ego identity was like, "No way! I love life. I love--"

AUBREY: I fucking love life. I love life more than anybody!

CAITLYN: "I love life the very most. Look at all this evidence." I really dropped into that, and I remembered being 13. I was very, very defiant. It was this brat energy that didn't want to do anything that she was told my mom took me to a psychologist. The psychologist did a test on me and I got diagnosed with oppositional defiance disorder, which I think, it's my personality. I don't want to put it in a box but it's me being in touch with this streak of emotion and charge and this energy that wants to fight and it wants to pull and it's just this fierceness in me. That was really shamed from when I was really young. But what he said to my mom was, "Caitlyn's so defiant that she will harm herself just to say no but she wouldn't harm anybody else." That was his assessment of me. And looking back, after I got that read from the woman that I was speaking to, I started remembering way back in my past, having these fantasies of suicide. I had shadowed over them with my joy and all of the new memories and stuff. But they're deep in my basement, is this young girl who's just coming into her hormones and her emotions and her volatility and her spectrum of being that felt like I'm really dark, and reacted to herself by claiming this persona and this identification with this love of life and joy and light and all this stuff. So I've been dancing with this force in me that's destroy me, destroy myself and opposing what I know is good for me.

AUBREY: Yes. I think both of you can probably speak to this because you both share the experience of being a lover of mine, so I can speak to a purview of knowing you both in that way. It's been a long time for you and I Caitlyn but--

CAITLYN: A long time. For the record.

AUBREY: For the record.

CAITLYN: I know that everybody likes to say, okay. But it's been a long time.

VYLANA: Let's check the book. It was a while ago.

AUBREY: Over a decade. But ultimately, there's an interesting way that you can play that energy where you want that but in the healthy expression, in a relationship, there's a place where you allow yourself to be annihilated, but it's in a container of love by someone who genuinely loves you and who would never actually hurt you and will hold you for however many days it takes, no matter whatever happens and will fight to the death to protect you. But there's the eroticism that actually gets to healthfully unlock in that situation.

VYLANA: I think, in a healthy way, that end of the polarity of masculine and feminine; it doesn't matter what gender you are but whatever polarity that you identify with; the feminine being the full surrender, surrender to pain, potentially, in BDSM, or dominant-submissive containers, just the absolute surrender to, "I trust you to take this where you want to go with it, and I completely open myself to receiving it," it creates the intensity of that polarity. I think, like what I was speaking of earlier, I actually do think that there was an intelligence in that energy but not in a healthy container. It's not like me having those feelings or being drawn to the eroticism of the desecration of me was wrong. It was just misplaced in the wrong container.

AUBREY: You were tapping a powerful spigot, like one of the most powerful spigots that exists. It was tainted water. It was tainted energy.

CAITLYN: It wasn't done in your power.

VYLANA: Exactly.

CAITLYN: That knowing. That's why owning these things and allowing ourselves to go to that wild place that says, "I actually like this and I choose it for myself, not because you're forcing it upon me and giving it to me," that's the balance of allowing yourself to own that.

VYLANA: That's the reclamation. That's being in your authority and your sexuality. I think there's also an element of, your sexual energy and pleasure, even laughter, these higher vibrational states of being, your moment of orgasm; there's a reason why tantra and sex magic is talked about so prevalently right now, and it's something that we're diving into; that energy is so high-vibrational that in that moment, if you have this kink of desecration and, in that moment of eroticism and ecstasy around it, it feels like there's this alchemical fire of actually transmuting energy within the body of stuff that actually might be out of order or misaligned or dark or stuck. I actually think, in the safe container that we've danced in in our sex life, going into that place where I'm in my own authority, in the surrender and having that high-vibrational energy of orgasm, I feel like it's transmuting things in my body of what I've experienced in my past.

AUBREY: It's not like this is a single one off anecdote. Even in "Own the Day", I wrote about different clinical studies that showed that people who participate in dominant-submissive sexual behaviour which can be either sex, playing the dominant role or the submissive role, have a variety of improved markers over the aggregate; more resistance to depression, more resistance to anxiety, more social adjustment. It seems like it up-levels many of the psychological factors that we have because, fuck, life is hard. There's going to be certain points where you need to surrender and endure and there's going to be certain points where you have a lot of power and you need to trust yourself not to abuse it. So, either way, this is this is the playground, but you have to be careful that it's a playground and it's not a place where you make a fucking mess.

VYLANA: Yeah. And if you can practice that, I can use an example of me and my full surrender. When I walked into ayahuasca and I had the most difficult ceremony of my entire life just two months ago, my level of surrender to the challenge, the suffering, the intensity of it, I'm there for it because I think it's something that I practice. I practice it a lot through life, but I've also practiced it really safely in our container.

AUBREY: So cat's out of the bag now. Might as well tell the story, might as well tell the story. We haven't told the story yet but here we are. I'm drinking whiskey. It's starting to make me feel flush. Might as well go into it.

VYLANA: There's some wine. Cheers, guys. Love you.

CAITLYN: Cheers. 

VYLANA: So going into this last ayahuasca ceremony, I was having a lot of stuff arise the months leading up to it of recognising how much I don't trust life, essentially. It was becoming a really big barrier in our partnership, where situations would happen and Aubrey has been nothing but absolutely honoring and honest and reverent, the absolute opposite of what any of my life experience has been. You've really just held our sacred union in its utmost integrity and showed up the greatest you possibly could. Still, the programs of what I've been through in life were so deeply stuck in my nervous system. When a situation would arise where you did nothing, I could feel in my body how much I didn't trust, because I would automatically go to the worst-case scenario. I wouldn't look at you as who you've been to me, how you treat me, how you serve me, how you see me and be like, "Okay, I trust you." It was like my mind automatically goes to the worst-case scenario. That was a pretty consistent theme leading up to the ceremony which--

AUBREY: I remember there was one particular moment where you expressed that, "I don't trust life," and I was like, "Babe--"

VYLANA: I said, "I don't trust love."

AUBREY: You don't trust love, and I said, "Well, if you don't trust love, you don't trust me." It was a really key moment where you were like, "Oh shit. That's right." I was like, "That really hurts. It really hurts that you don't trust me," because there's never been a moment, even before we were together, where I've even slightly put spin on the cue ball of my truth and integrity with you. To not be trusted, that was a deep challenge for me. I don't even think, at that point, you realized that your global mistrust of the masculine and your global mistrust of love was being projected on to me specifically.

VYLANA: Yeah. It developed in that way, where I would recognise in those instances that I was painting everyone else's face on to you in the reaction that my body would have. I didn't consciously feel I don't trust you. When I could really center myself and drop into my heart, and breathe for a moment, my knowing is I know I trust you. I don't have a doubt in my mind. But my body was having this totally opposite signal that's like, "Alarm, alarm, alarm! You know where this is going. That looks a little bit too uncomfortable for me. You know what it's like when this girl does this or that happens or whatever." I started to become like a pressure cooker--

AUBREY: And for those of you who think Vy is being exaggerative, she literally had two birthdays where she found out her partner, who she thought was monogamous, had impregnated another woman on the side. It's not like there's been a mild amount of mistrust. Literally, every person you've been with, there's been a deeply challenging betrayal that has happened at some point or another.

VYLANA: And with the feminine too, so that's why I said I can't trust love. I believe in love. I feel it, I experience it, I see it, I give it, I receive it, but I don't trust it to keep me safe because I've done it all my life and it's never shown me that I could.

AUBREY: And you wanted it so bad.

VYLANA: And I wanted it so bad. God, thank you wine. That's why we brought this. I wanted it so bad. With you, it was so difficult because it's like it's right here but my body just hadn't caught up yet. We would talk through it and we would get to a great place and we would move through it beautifully. My knowing was I trust this, I trust this. My body just still hadn't caught up yet. I knew, going into this ayahuasca journey, that I was facing something massive. I won't get into too much of the details because I don't want to hijack the whole podcast--

AUBREY: Hijack away!

VYLANA: Going into my second ceremony. We had the first ceremony and it felt like it didn't fully start until the ceremony ended--

AUBREY: We have to also share that as ayahuasca does, the ceremony started to bring things to the surface--

VYLANA: Oh, for sure. All summer.

AUBREY: This is the way ayahuasca works, for anybody listening who wants to do an ayahuasca journey, for those who already have, we all know that the moment you say yes, and it's not just saying yes but knowing that you're actually going to do it, the ceremony starts. As you get closer, the things that need to be worked on will come to the surface and show themselves. What was happening that week, it was a deep, deep challenge, a real death portal for us because I couldn't take a step without that step being doubted. There was projections and fantasies and ideas of my intentions, and other-people-who-were-in-our-group's intentions and all of these things that, ultimately, were just coming up and boiling and bubbling and boiling and bubbling until it got to the point where I was frozen in a prison where I couldn't do anything without being second-guessed and you couldn't exist without being put back into a past timeline where you'd been betrayed. This was leading up to the second ceremony, a ceremony in which we couldn't even look at each other. I went to your mat to say, "Have a great journey, sweetheart," and you couldn't even lift your eyes to meet mine. We fucking love each other. That's how deep it was going into the ceremony.

VYLANA: I felt that entire day leading up to it, I didn't want to be around anybody. I didn't want love from anybody. All I wanted was to just be alone. I couldn't want less to be around anybody. I felt very, very deeply depressed. It was touching a level of depression that I felt a lot in life so for it to be so alive again, was crashing. So we went into the ceremony and as he said, multiple people, at least five people, came up to my mat to wish me a good ceremony. I remember just grabbing my journal. I started writing in my journal what I was writing was, "I wish I could shrink and become invisible, because I can't stand one more person trying to come over here and connect with me and give me love. I can't, I just can't receive it right now." I remember Parker came up to me, who is the sweetest person on planet Earth, and he wished me a good ceremony and I felt like such an asshole because I just couldn't muster up the love to give him a tiny smirk or anything. I just looked up and did as best as I could to send him anything...

AUBREY: A brief interlude. One of our other sisters we're in here, I had a meeting with Parker here today and as a brief interlude, Parker's super experienced. He took over helping to run the SpiritQuest after Don Howard's passing. He's been around ayahuasca and huachuma medicine spaces for a long time. One of our sisters was having a really brutal time after the ceremony one, and he came up to her and was loving, impeccable. He's like a pure being--

VYLANA: He's impeccable. He's so pure.

CAITLYN: He is the purest.

AUBREY: He's a pure being. He comes up and he says, "I know this is hard and I know it feels like you're not going to make it through this but I can tell you that in two days from now, you'll be back here and you'll be looking forward to drinking another one." She just goes, "Shut the fuck up, Parker! Shut the fuck up!"

VYLANA: Oh my god!

CAITLYN: I know this one.

AUBREY: And Parker, today when we were laughing about it, because she was in here too, we're laughing about it, he was like, "And you know? That was the perfect thing for you to say. And it so happens that I was also right." She's like, "I know you'r right, Parker." He was like, "But yes, it was the right thing to say."

VYLANA: It's like fucking sneering at... I don't even know. He's just an angel. Anyways, we went to the ceremony and I went to drink. This was with El Dragon, if any of you have heard the podcast. I walk up there and he looks up at me and he could tell I was really off. He asked me what was wrong and I told him I felt really depressed and started crying before I even drank. I was crying during the yoga by myself. He gave me a cup and he said, "We'll drop into this," and I trusted that. And as soon as the medicine touched my lips, a little bit of my armor came off and I was less like, "Don't look at me. Don't breathe in my direction." I settled a little bit. It evolved after I drank my second cup. As many of my other Ayahuasca ceremonies, I started going through past memories, two of them being the two former partnerships where I remembered on my birthday, there being another woman and that they had gotten her pregnant, and then I moved through just differently, I could literally write. There could be a trilogy, at least, of movies, about the things that I've been through in relationships--

AUBREY: "The Chronicles of Betrayal"!

VYLANA: "The Chronicles of Fuckery Times a Million".

AUBREY: Fuckery can sound fun. Your fuckery was not fun. 

VYLANA: Soul-crushing fuckery.

AUBREY: Fuckery is a good Saturday night in certain places.

VYLANA: All right. You'll name it something else. We'll figure it out when we write the script.

CAITLYN: "The Crushery".

AUBREY: "The Crushery". 

VYLANA: So I'm moving through all these different memories. What I started feeling in my body was resentment. I stood up on my knees at one point, and I was looking up at, God is everywhere but I was looking up and I was like, "What in the actual fuck? How is this possible that I have loved so deeply, and given love so freely," and I'm not saying I was always the most innocent. I had definitely gone through my phases of also being the transgressor. I'm not innocent. But for this journey, part of my process. I couldn't believe how many things that I had gone through. It literally felt like Insanity to have experienced so many things in this one life and I'm only 34 years old. I wouldn't even call it anger. I was resentful. I had so much resentment towards life, and you can feel it in my energy, for just suffering so greatly. I had to sit with that for a while. I could feel the armor in my body. The armor, it felt like a boundary that said, "No." So on some level, it felt healthy, I think, in its--

AUBREY: It was adaptive for the time in which you had it but it was time for it to go.

VYLANA: But it got stuck. 

AUBREY: I had felt that too. This was something that I had mentioned to you. It'd come up prior in our relationship, I felt this subtle level of resentment, especially towards the masculine, for sure. But there was just some level of resentment towards the masculine that was felt personally, towards me, especially when it involved my lust, my expression of lustfulness. Obviously, in our sexual congress, that was generally removed, but anytime that it was felt or sensed, there was some way in which there was a subtle denigration or a subtle expression of resentment.

VYLANA: And it was buried in sarcasm, to the point where I was super unaware of it, and you would point it out--

AUBREY: And you'd be like, "I'm just kidding." There was like a biting part of this.

VYLANA: You would point it out I didn't consciously feel that, but then to sit with it for a moment, I'd be like, "You could be right. I don't actually feel that in my body. But I can absolutely see how that could be there." So I did start to get a little bit more curious about that. But yeah, fully feeling the resentment was step number one. And that resentment was the most impenetrable armor. There was nothing getting through that. It's wild to know, at this point, that I was so out of touch with that. I've processed a lot of anger, I've processed rage, I've processed grief, I've processed all kinds of emotions. Resentment was not one that I ever felt like I connected with. I didn't even understand how people could feel so resentful. I typically walk about life, and I feel so grateful I'm joyous, and I'm loving, and I'm happy. 

CAITLYN: There's the exile.

VYLANA: But the exile of the me who had so much resentment was a fragmentation that I was like, "Okay, if you want to die this away, you have to feel it." That was the first step. My intention that night was to feel my divine truth in my body in every moment. So any moment where I might have an attachment to a past timeline, any moment where I would potentially paint somebody else's face on your face, I wanted to feel truth in my body. My knowing felt like it was already there, but my body was catching up. That was my prayer. So this journey was very, very somatic and very uncomfortable. The resentment in my body felt like fire. Following that, when I moved through all the resentment I felt towards a lot of different men and women who I felt betrayal and a plethora of other things towards, I felt the separation that was present between you and I. It was the most soul-crushing thing that I could feel. So my resentment very quickly turned into my heart feeling like it was cracking open. It was the thing that I accepted into my experience, so that I could open my heart again, to keep moving forward. From there, it was just a floodgate. Every moment that I had my entire life where, and I've spoken about this a lot to a lot of people, but the memories of how many times I've been in the fetal position on the floor, just shaking and crying inconsolably, panic-attacking, breathing, and snot everywhere, just by myself, in those moments, just feeling the absolute betrayal and separation from love, it took every one of those moments. For sure, in more than 30 of my whole life, that's probably on the low end of how many times I've been in that position, it combined them all into the felt sense of separation in every single cell of my body. It was the absolute separation from God and love, and all the betrayal, and all the lying, the catastrophe of all those emotions were just moving through my entire system up and down.

CAITLYN: And I don't trust love is separation from God. 

VYLANA: Exactly.

AUBREY: Love and God being synonymous.

VYLANA: Exactly. So I was there for a long time, and what felt like it kept progressing it further and further and further was feeling how alone I felt my whole life, having to be the one to pick myself up off the floor, and get myself to stand back up and take a first step, and get out of my bedroom and go eat, and go try to just live life and get myself to work because the person that I felt that separation from was always the person I loved the most, was always my closest friend or my partner. That feeling of being alone in suffering was crippling. It was so unbelievably crippling to feel that. For hours, I was just having to feel that. I was inconsolable. I was trying to not disrupt the whole ceremony by losing my mind and actually feeling it to the level that I did. I'm pretty good at crying quietly. I was calling out for help because I knew I could not make it through by myself. That's how I got myself to this point, I was always picking myself up, but I needed help. I really, really needed help. So I called out psychically for help, and I wasn't calling out for anyone specifically, I was crying out to God, "Please help me. I can't do it on my own anymore." For any of you who've listened to the podcast with Blu, I knew at the beginning of this retreat that we needed to be next to each other for some reason and she felt the same, which I was excited about. I had been telling her for, she said 15 minutes or something like that, to go over into my mat. She said, "She was reckoning with the medicine, she's in her own space. I'm not going to impose on her journey and finally, I was just like 'Go to Vylana." I was hunched over with my face in my bucket, not because I was going to purge but because I had so many tears and snot, nothing I could do. Tissues were just ridiculous. So I was just allowing it all to purge into my bucket. She put her hand on my back. The ceremony ended probably five minutes later, and you came up and you sat behind me. And at one moment, I opened my eyes and I saw Adrian sitting in front of me with her hands in the air. That moment was so healing for me because, for the first time in my life, I was witnessed in how much I've suffered and not each instance of when it's happened, but it was in all of me in that moment and every one of you was there, holding the space for me to die that away and to let it go. That, in and of itself, Blu was being a magical priestess and stewarded--

AUBREY: I thought she was literally three people. I thanked several people and they were like, "For what?" And I was like, "Oh, it was all Blu. I'm sorry Blu."

VYLANA: You thought Falco was over there? No, it was just Blu and I felt her the whole time. I felt the energy that she was moving. I felt the energy she was sending up my spine. I could feel what she was moving out and in what she was sending in. Eventually, the inconsolable part of me, once I purged, I started to feel like I came back to myself and like my soul came back into my body. I remember sitting up to face her and she was blowing tobacco on my heart and all over me. When I'm in those spaces, I also have all of my own magic that happens. I started working on myself and speaking. And she looks up at me and looks me in the eyes. She just says, "Welcome home." I could feel that, like I could really, really feel that like for the first time in my life, I get to live from my truth, I get to be my truth and my body--

CAITLYN: Right now.

VYLANA: Right now.

CAITLYN: Right now. Not you, five years ago, ten years ago. I think you said, "I was dying all of that," and what came up for me that was really helpful for me, because I'm currently moving through my own death for it all that I didn't see coming. But death, the sense of dying, we die these parts of ourselves through feeling. The reason that they die is because we aren't separate from them anymore. So they've ceased to be others. We're feeling to bring it home.

VYLANA: And that's the important thing for people who, whether or not you're doing plant medicine, you can reach these experiences in breathwork. There's so many different modalities to experience deep healing, but if you want to pretend like you can just run from it all your life, you gotta feel it. You have to go into it to be able to let it go. Otherwise, it's just this fractured part of you that you're just shoving away, and all this lifeforce energy is going into that to keep it intact. And it shows up in what you project onto other people. It literally keeps you chained to who you have been, and takes away your wings from who you are and who you can be. It was the most extraordinary healing I've ever had. I anchored it with doing some sound healing that, hopefully, if the quality is good enough, we can release it at some point because it was really special but--

CAITLYN: It was magnificent.

AUBREY: Ryan did that come through, Vy's sound-healing from night two?

VYLANA: From night two in ayahuasca.

AUBREY: I want to say that one of the very important things here. First of all, that was the most gangster thing I've ever heard from a medicine person every say, was that moment when Blu just said, "Welcome home." Goddam! I just watched her work for 15 minutes and I did my best holding the energy of love and your back. There was nothing much else I could do at that point or I knew how to do at that point. Also, I was just watching Blu work. It was like watching a master beyond compare, just the vessel of spirit itself, moving and blowing tobacco and channelling energy. She would go and lift her hands to the heavens and draw energy from, I don't know, fucking Odin, Zeus? I don't know where she was drawing it from.

VYLANA: Cali.

AUBREY: Wherever. To watch her do that.. The moment you were back, she just said, "Welcome home." I was like, "So beautiful." But the thing that I think really impressed upon me and has actually helped me re-understand a deep calling to write a different type of book is a book about the deep, fundamental desires and needs of a human being and the first one of these five essential needs that I've identified is to be known and to be seen. This is something that you said if you had been through all of this pain, but you'd held it alone. And in that moment, you were seen in your pain and you were seen in your struggle, and you were seen in your difficulty. When that happens, you're no longer alone. We're not meant to do this alone. We're not supposed to do this alone, but everything that has been organized in our society, and in the way that we live outside of the tribal context, with all of these separations and these avatars, and these ways in which we put on a partial face of our truth. We say, "Yeah, I'm alright." And then in the privacy of our own heart, we're suffering and we're struggling, the Robin Williams of our own psyche, of just suffering quietly, alone, and not letting anybody really see it. There's this deep, deep part of the healing process that is to be seen.

CAITLYN: That's one of the beauties of getting to such a place of desperation in your pain, where you have nowhere else to turn except to look up to the sky or reach out and say, "Help me, help me", help me as a prayer to be seen and to be held. That's the silver lining of that depth of despair, where it's like, "I can't help myself." And we're not meant to.

AUBREY: There's a lot of challenges with capital R religion but there's also a beauty that there's people who are religious who can speak to Jesus, and feel like Jesus knows them and Jesus sees them. They can have that connection with that expression and their idea, their construct of God personified as a guy who died on the cross with long hair. I obviously have a very beautiful relationship with the Christ energy. I think that's a powerful way to do it and if you have that access so that God or Jesus can see you and can know you, then that's beautiful. You have to be mindful that if that God that you're projecting is a God of judgment, then you're going to have shame and you're going to be afraid to show even God--

CAITLYN: What needs to be seen.

AUBREY: What needs to be seen. This is why it's so important to understand Jesus or understand God as the one who loves you with no record of wrong, that forgives you without you ever having to ask for forgiveness because that God has never even noticed any wrong, has never flinched, never even seen a wrong. This is the mystical wisdom of Ted Dekker as he interprets and reads the real mystical text of the Christ, of the Gnostic truth behind all of this. This is important but you can find this not only in the divine, but you can find it in people. This is what we've been doing in Fit For Service. It's one of the reasons why it's been so powerful for the last three years is that we've been helping create containers where people can share this not only with the divine, which we all have a troubled relationship with, to some degree, because of what we've learned and what we've projected from our own understanding of society and our own parents on to our gods. But to find that in other people is also so, so powerful. We are all divine expressions of the one so to have that expressed in form is also oh man, here I am, really seen.

CAITLYN: One of the most helpful practices I ever did was at my very first ecstatic dance I did with you. In the end, it was Holotropic, the perinatal...

VYLANA: Matrices?

CAITLYN: Matrices. Thank you.

AUBREY: From Stan Grof who also created Holotropic Breathwork.

CAITLYN: Yes, from Stan Grof. That's where my head was at. But yes, in that process, you go back into the womb, you die, in a sense. And in the death period of that experience, I allowed myself to watch my life from a witness perspective. I naturally took on this energy of Divine Mother. I felt so much compassion for the me that I was so hard on. I watched her every day get up and try her best and reach for people and help them and harm herself sometimes and lose herself in self-deprecating thoughts and strive, and strive and feel alone, and be distracted, all the things that I was so frustrated with myself for. I realized if I died right now, and I watched my life back from this lens, I have nothing but love for this person and how she showed up. There was no judgment from that lens. But in ourselves, we don't give ourselves permission to hold ourselves in that divine nurture that's, for sure, part of us.

VYLANA: And there's also, to what you were speaking before too about, like a god that holds no judgment; if you have that, there was a part of me that felt so ashamed of everything that I've been through, for participating in everything that I've been through. So there was even a part of me, because I was so afraid of judgment, because I was already judging myself so harshly, that I was afraid of allowing for people to even really hold space for me. So a lot of it too can be self-imposed, if you're pointing judgment towards yourself in any way, to actually receive the support that you need in life to be really seen or witnessed in the truest extent. After a certain period of my life, because I had hidden my true emotions for so long, it was actually when I started my spiritual path, once I met both of you, I would be honest with even the people at the grocery store. When they would ask me, "How are you doing?" if I wasn't okay, I would be, "I'm having a really rough time right now. I'm not trying to put that on you, but it's just authentically where I'm at." I'm not just going to casually say, "I'm great." I'm no longer betraying myself by--

AUBREY: It wasn't that. It wasn't that instant. And I must say that it wasn't that instant because I know that there were times, and this was deeply challenging for me, there were times when I've known you, when you were in deep challenge, and I'd be like, "How are you, babe?" I wouldn't say babe necessarily. I don't know what I would say back then because I was pretending that I didn't feel babe. "How are you, Vy?”

VYLANA: You don't even call me babe now.

AUBREY: Sometimes I call you babe.

VYLANA: You mostly call me queenie.

AUBREY: That's true. But there was still a part of you that wanted to show that you were doing fine. I would know that there was something that wasn't fine, that wasn't fine at all. I would see you in a place where everybody was dancing and dancing is a part of your soul and you weren't dancing and I'd be like, "How are you?" "I'm great. Everything's great." That was a shame.

VYLANA: There's other layers of gaslighting yourself to be like, "I did the work. I worked through it to feel okay." I also did a great deal of gaslighting myself a lot and what you're speaking of. For anyone listening, if you've followed any of my journey, or you look to me as having it together, I've been a mess. I'm still figuring--

CAITLYN: I will say though, if I'm really dropping into deep self-honesty, I think there's been a projected envy in me of how you're willing to, like you may not always acknowledge what's obvious but it's clear when you're off. It's clear when you're bothered. You're not so self-betraying that you won't embody what you're feeling. One thing that I've been processing for myself is a deep fracturing, a deep fracturing which I've been recognizing how early on I had to be cool. Spoiler alert, you don't have to be. But that was my adaptation. It was armor. I dressed up as Cruella for Halloween. When I watched that movie--

VYLANA: It was extraordinary. Can we do a little shot here of that? 

VYLANA: I was the most bisexual I've ever been. She was so beautiful, I was like, "Wow, I can't stop staring at you."

CAITLYN: Thanks, honey. But when I watched that movie, something came--

AUBREY: That says a lot actually here, "I'm kind of bisexual."

CAITLYN: Yes, success.

AUBREY: It's not like she's a little bit bisexual.

VYLANA: That also came out at Ayahuasca. Just really quickly, I had a little coming out with myself, like an acknowledgement of my curiosity and my love for appreciating the feminine. It was funny. I had a little coming out of the closet I envisioned telling my mom and it was funny. So back to your story.

CAITLYN: Yeah, I know. To come into full acknowledgment. Let's just stay here. These are interesting polls that we're holding. We're very similar, but we actually have different adaptive mechanisms. For me, I've been highly identified with being, I am very loving, I do really appreciate the feminine and I am cool, and I love love. But my adaptation became to be so free that I--

AUBREY: Was enslaved by freedom.

CAITLYN: I was enslaved by freedom. Freedom was my coping mechanism for the fire of vulnerability that is to commit myself to something or someone. I've been going through this reckoning as I transitioned a relationship recently where it's been, I went to Aya, same Aya ceremony that we all sat in together with a prayer of, "Help me open my heart," because I could feel there was armor in my body against love--

AUBREY: Which is crazy to me though. 

CAITLYN: It's crazy, right? 

AUBREY: It's crazy to me because the Caitlyn that I know is the most fiercely loving person. You two love so hard. You love so impossibly hard. You're so kindred in this deep love. And I know that this has been the story that's been told, that you have this armor to love, maybe it's true, maybe it's not, I don't claim to understand it. I cannot compute it.

CAITLYN: I'll elaborate a little bit because what's interesting about it is I do love. I love big. I love fiercely. I love wide. I love life. I love everyone that I know. I love loving. However, I noticed a shutdown in my body; you mentioned a lot about what your body was holding, and shut down in my body with commitment. It was like anything that felt like this was going to take me away from loving the world. I'm still working through this, but something that came in pretty clear for me was there's a vulnerable piece of me that is so buried in the darkness that actually wants to be fully held by somebody, that I had cultivated this rich persona and it is me also. I don't think it's either, or but there was a vulnerable place in myself that I couldn't even touch that was excited and drawn to and comforted by the idea of being fully loved by somebody. But there was such a fear of what that would mean if I believed in it, that felt like it would kill me. The truth was, on some level, I don't believe that they will. I don't believe that they'll stay. And I wrote a poem, I'm going to release it soon, about the sailor and how the sailor of my body loves the sea and how I don't want to trade the empire world to be one man's queen.

AUBREY: Let's read it now.

VYLANA: Yeah. I think that's a--

AUBREY: We'll take a bathroom break and we'll launch into this poem, and then we'll let's go into your story.

CAITLYN: And I was to tell you what came through after that. All right.

AUBREY: All right. We're back and we're ready for your poem.

CAITLYN: All right. So this was my body's truth, is part of my body's truth. “Oh how you are home to me. I'm always at rest in your arms. Soft, sedate and sweet, you render me. You make me young and innocent again. But my body is a sailor, a pirate queen, savvy at sail on the stormy sea. She is wind-whipped and crass, with a devilish sparkle in her dark eyes. Hard and heavy she moves, her hands wear time like diamond rings. She sings of lost lovers. She raves at the moon and rages over bottles of Caribbean wine. She is a force, a tornado of freedom. She's a natural at destruction but in her nature, she spreads life around the way a bee carries pollen. Her restlessness is a mission that I no longer try to understand but you are the shore upon which we land. Still, my pussy sings like a siren. She wants more to devour. With you, she is a flower that opens to be seen. Can I trade an empire world to be one man's queen? I dream of a swallow, tattooed on my chest. I think of my sisters. I yearn for home. I consider building on your land, taking root committing myself to the infirmary of love but my body is still the captain and my heart is still a bee. I love you deeply, baby. But sailors love the sea.”

AUBREY: To the sailors.

CAITLYN: To the sailors. 

AUBREY: That poem was fucking fire.

VYLANA: It was so good.

CAITLYN: I always get a little shaky when I read my words. I'll get better.

AUBREY: I still do too.

CAITLYN: Do you?

AUBREY: Of all the things. I can give a speech to 500, 1,000, with no notes, just a vague idea of what I'm going to say. I'll look at hundreds of people or I'll think of millions of people on a podcast and I'll be "Cool Hand Luke", and then I'll go to read a little poem and my fucking hand just shivers.

CAITLYN: Yeah, what is happening?

AUBREY: Oh God, what is wrong with me?

VYLANA: You are alive.

CAITLYN: So I wrote this poem. I shared it with you guys because, for all the poets out there, you write something and when it lands you're like, "Yep, that's my truth. That was fucking good. I love that one. I want to share it." It was interesting. It was a spell. The minute I wrote it, two days later, the home that I landed on changed, disappeared.

AUBREY: The Shore said, "You're a sailor, baby. Go sail."

CAITLYN: Yeah, so I heard you. Go sail. What came through that was my own non-medicinal obliteration like what happened for you, Vy. What I noticed was my nervous system, even though my mind was like, "This is my truth. This is my truth," I felt good writing that poem; it's still part of me, it's part of my truth; but in the exile, was a piece of me that wants to be home, wants to feel safe. My body just started panicking and it never stopped for six weeks. It hasn't. I've been learning from it, learning deeply from what's here. If this was so clearly my truth, why does my body feel like this? I made a commitment to be with their feelings and not to gaslight them and not to bypass them and to listen to them. What was interesting was I went into kambo this past weekend to work on my somatic body because I could feel the same thing through aya which is really your body holding energy. It's the armor that I described to you that you're like, "I can't understand that." The armor was my body, in my tissues, car accidents. Dare I go there?

AUBREY: Go there.

CAITLYN: Sex work, at a point, in my life earlier. So many times that I gave all of myself in a place that I couldn't be safe, that I had conditioned my body to say safe isn't sexy and sex can't be safe. So there was a fracturing there. When I went into kambo, the first day, I did hapé to open the space and as soon as I--

AUBREY: For people who don't know what kambo is, it's actually a toxin that comes from a frog that's typically from Suriname, or different places in South America. It is an intense flush that is usually accompanied by an intense and sometimes violent purge, that really allows you to purge deep, deep, deep energy. It's a very powerful, not necessarily psychedelic, but very powerful indigenous medicine. So just for people who don't understand what she's saying, when she says kambo, let me just clear that.

CAITLYN: Thank you very much. It was interesting, because Aubrey's actually had a challenging experience on kambo, and I don't--

AUBREY: And a beautiful one.

CAITLYN: And a beautiful one, yes. I was hesitant. I've done ayahuasca. I've sat with ayahuasca now, 14 times and it's been five years, at least, since I've purged on it. So my body, my sailor body, has gotten so wind-whipped and hearty that she's like, "We know what this is. We're not throwing up. We're not letting go. We're not letting go." That was armor. I'm still loving but my body was adaptive and strong and like, "I know how to move in this world, I'm going to be free, I'm going to be powerful, I'm going to be resilient." That was the armor that I felt around my heart. When I went into the ceremony and received the hapé, the first thing that came into my mind was, as I closed my eyes, "You can't leave a sailor." I recognise that my identity was so wound up in being the one that can't be left that I had exiled part of myself--

AUBREY: You can't leave a sailor because a sailor always leaves.

CAITLYN: Exactly. Sailors moving. A friend of mine recently, at a show we were at, his friend was interested in me, and he told him, "You can follow that train, but she's always going to be leading." That was my adaptation. But interestingly, to go back to what the thread was, I was so fractured from my truth that I was the cool girl that I found partnerships where there was no way, not even partnerships, it wasn't partnership, I gave all my love to something that couldn't commit to me to make myself more secure. And in those agreements that I was making internally, I didn't even have permission to be mad, to express even physically, let alone verbally. It was total fragmentation. So I'm currently in this process of allowing myself to be all of it, feel it all, make a poem about all of it, own it, bring her home, bring home the sailor to myself, and then introduce her to the devoted, soft, gentle, tired woman that wants to land on the shore and rest in somebody's arms. What happens when you bring those two together? It's been a real reckoning. It's interesting. We have these sensings. But you don't always get to choose. Your body's holding a lot of energy and you can choose things that engage it to find these pieces of yourself, but your soul will, in my opinion, your soul will interject at some point and make sure that you know that there's a part of you that's not being heard and felt. That's the call, that's the point where you might end up on the floor saying, "I need help," which is where I've been with both of you for the past couple of weeks and reckoning with all of it.

AUBREY: I guess, for me, where, potentially, my bias in the way that, I view your situation lies is not that I don't hold your former romantic partner that's caused all of this to come to tumult, your shore, of recent, that's been the shore that left and left you feeling like you were adrift at sea, and that the shore is never going to be there. I have the highest admiration for that person and a deep, deep, deep brotherhood in love with that person. But I also feel that because I knew you when you were also armored, and you were also resistant, and you were also all, maybe not the same but you were a variation of that. You were in a fucking hella toxic relationship. It was gnarly what you were currently going through. Dragged out of a hotel room by your hair and locked outside, naked, gnarly shit you were going through--

CAITLYN: That was so much. That was so much.

AUBREY: It's so deep, so deep. And the accidents, and all of that. I pierced through all of that, just swam right through it. I swam right through it and you swam right to me. It, ultimately, wasn't what was ordained from spirit to be the forever thing. I just have this deep felt sense that somebody else can do the same when it's the right person. It will be the thing that will happen. This is just my feeling and may be biased because I've seen it. I'm not saying that I'm right. I don't know if I'm right. Who the fuck knows? But--

CAITLYN: It's been a long 10 years. It's been a lot more shit. But totally, I hear that. And that's curiosity.

AUBREY: But also the pattern has also been there, where you've been in a bunch of shit and a bunch of toxicity where you've only known a lot of pain and chaos and whatever, and someone just cut through all of that. From the moment where your body said yes, it never said no again, from that moment. I really believe that person is there for you. I really believe that Caitlyn. It's interesting. However, I also totally get what you're talking about, the reticence to open yourself up to that because that is obviously there. I've also watched you reject some of the most eligible bachelors in the world.

CAITLYN: That's that span I'm talking about. There's a thing.

AUBREY: I won't mention his name, but Caitlyn literally flatly turned down one of the greatest athletes of our time, who was openly hitting on her at an All-Star Conference where we happened to be around a supremely good-looking and eligible bachelor who was like, "Hey, you want to hang out after this?" Caitlyn was like, "Nah." There is some resistance.

CAITLYN: There is a resistance.

AUBREY: There's also, I must say, an interesting randomness that I think both of you, both of you, I've seen where it's like somehow, when the cosmic time clock just opens, there's a portal that opens, when the moon is in the seventh house and Jupiter is in the third fucking wave, the fog just lifts and you're like--

CAITLYN: I'm like, "Fuck it. I love you."

AUBREY: And then, all of a sudden, this motherfucker slides in and I'm like, "Whoa, where did that fucking person come from? What the fuck? I just watched you reject this person, this person, this person and this motherfucker gets in!" That's okay but it's interesting. I know many people who don't take, many women, I should say particularly, who don't take the active role. I know the converse as well. I know some women who are just getting looks all the time who don't take the active role in intentionally seeking that sacred union partnership and doing the chop wood, carry water, basic work to do that, which is I'm going to go on 20 dates--

CAITLYN: Yeah, I've never done that.

AUBREY: 20 dates in these 30 dates. Neither do you as well. Not this intentional, "I'm going to..." It's always happenstance and circumstance and then all of a sudden there's a nice act or a one moment of a good look and a little flush of the--

CAITLYN: With all of that, to speak to some of those relationships, what we touched on at the beginning of this is really, until you're intentional, until you are putting your prayer into the world with a clear map, and a clear commitment to that, as Vy has done, and here we see the result of her dedication to her prayer, until you do that--

AUBREY: Yeah, she gets all the credit for this one.

VYLANA: That's right. It was me. It was me!

CAITLYN: You showed up! You just walked in the room.

AUBREY: There it was.

VYLANA: It was all me, praying away.

CAITLYN: You might have had a prayer in yourself. Okay.

AUBREY: Don't mind me just seeing her and falling in love at first sight and continuing to cultivate that with radical love the whole time but nonetheless, carry on.

CAITLYN: There's a symbiosis here but I never had that, because my mind was going, basically, it was chasing redemption. There was a mechanism in me that connected to what you shared at the beginning and the thread that you pulled from what she talked about with her previous partners, which was the push and pull of my wound only being salved by finding somebody who said no or I can't. Trying to reclaim the experience of being chosen in an impossible situation, that only felt really enticing to me. It wasn't conscious. Until you get really clear, and all of these experiences of loss and suffering and confusion and doing the right thing the wrong way, doing the wrong thing the right way, all the closed doors and dead ends and pain, they refine your prayer. So you can get clear, and then you reach that point where you're ready to claim what is yours. I think that's my process here but it takes knowing the motives and the hidden desires in every corner of myself to get that really clear prayer. So with that, I stand and face life with curiosity, like here's my prayer, show me. Show me what is for me.

AUBREY: You could say in some regards that this pattern of, you're almost redeeming your own defiance complex by finding the defiant--

CAITLYN: Holy shit, we just had a therapy session.

AUBREY: By finding the defiance in another and then redeeming your own defiance by having that defiance surrender. That could be something. However, there is the anomalous stretch in which, yes, there were moments where, in certain levels of intoxication or whatever, you would be rather defiant, and we'd have a fight or something like that. Remember The Penguin?

CAITLYN: Never speak of that. Where is the red wine?

AUBREY: One of our biggest fights was in the wee hours of the morning after a night of fight and Caitlyn had drank--

CAITLYN: Cut, Ryan!

AUBREY: So much red wine that her mouth had turned black like the lips of The Penguin from "Batman" and she was--

CAITLYN: "Batman Returns".

AUBREY: She was yelling at me and I couldn't help but think, "You look like The Penguin." Like all blood, she had been desanguinated.

CAITLYN: He not only thought it. He told me. It was not a private thought. He might have told me later when I would have been less reactive. I can't recall.

AUBREY: I don't know. 

CAITLYN: Yeah, yeah. I don't even know how we got here. But that definitely happened.

AUBREY: It is interesting and something to to look at, all of these patterns, all the ways that we haven't reconciled all of the aspects of ourselves.

VYLANA: Circling back to even where we began, with talking about the darkness documentary and a lot of it really highlighting you calling back Chris Marcus into your being and that being like a really big moment of what you were calling in that space

AUBREY: Yeah, that was something that I was not expecting to come through in the darkness. And the power of the darkness is that there's no escape. There is just no escape. We can escape in an infinite number of ways. We can escape by simply averting our gaze. Imagine a time where you're bored and you just look at something. Most of us who are listening might be too young for this but imagine being in the bathroom before we had smartphones reading shampoo bottles.

CAITLYN: Oh, yeah.

VYLANA: Glade bottles, all the ingredients. 

AUBREY: Whatever the fuck, whatever the fuck. 

CAITLYN: I was really into lucky charm stories.

AUBREY: And what are we doing? We're escaping. We're escaping a process that's happening in our mind, because we're uncomfortable with our mind. And in the darkness--

CAITLYN: We're uncomfortable with discomfort.

AUBREY: You ain't got shit. You can wiggle. You can wiggle, you can breathe. You got no sound, you got no sight, you have nothing to do. So the things that need to come up, come up. That's why, to me, it was the most powerful medicine I've ever done. The documentary, when we watched that, we just had the premiere. When we watched that, it was one of the most powerfully brutal experiences for me to rewatch because it was so deep and such a visceral experience of everything that I went through. You start to learn where things are out of alignment. There's no escape. There's literally no way out. I think that's what's both terrifying and exciting about this, is what happens when there's no way out? What happens when you have no salve, no opportunity to do anything, no substances, no distractions, no food, no water, no sight, no sound, no song, no talk to a friend, no, look at your phone or watch TV, no go for a walk, you got nothing, you got wiggle? That's your option. I used it a lot. I wiggled but that's not that effective. I'll tell you that. It's the least attractive option for all of the ways to distract yourself but that's what was so powerful about it. What I had recognised is that I'd been surrounded by the feminine in particular, who had loved me as close to unconditionally as I'd ever known. Now, I wasn't with you yet Vy so I didn't have this iteration of an unconditional devotional love, but I had my mom for my whole life and my grandma. Man, they love me. They love me. It's unfathomable the amount of love and unconditional love that they've given me. A story that I've shared often is someone recently went to my mom and said, "Aren't you so proud of your son?" And she just looked them dead in the eye and was like, "What do you mean? Because he's successful now in his book and he's podcasting?"

VYLANA: I've always been proud of him.

AUBREY: "I've always been proud of him from the fucking drop." That's the love that my mom's always had for me, and you had that love for me, Cait.

CAITLYN: I still do. 

AUBREY: You still do.

VYLANA: There was this one night when our relationship was still fairly new. He poops with the door open so there's lots of interesting conversations that come up in there.

AUBREY: I do. I poop with the door open.

VYLANA: I just was admiring him and the faces that he makes when he poops because they're pretty consistent, and I was just laughing--

AUBREY: You got bare down sometimes. You gotta bare down.

VYLANA: It's like one eye closed and the tongue sticking out a little, dropping out a little bit. But I was just admiring him and I was like, "Have you ever been loved so much?" Because I was just exploding and giggling and being my normal self and he goes, "Caitsy loved me like you do."

CAITLYN: Yeah.

AUBREY: Yeah. And I realized that there was some part of me that never let that love in. I never let myself feel that amount of love because I didn't love myself enough to feel like I deserve to be loved that much. I had internalized the judge of the father, learned from my father, learned from his father, projected onto the Father, God, and this judgmental Father. And projected onto other people too. This father said that I wasn't worthy of love unless I was impeccable. 

CAITLYN: Because he wasn't with himself?

AUBREY: Right, and that's the thing. Even though there is this deep love from the feminine, which has given me a lot of beautiful relationships with the feminine, but my relationships with the masculine have been more strained, a lot of stress, a lot of challenges. Both of y'all know that's where I find a lot of the challenge. Sure, in the polyamory journey, it's a wild tempestuous experience, and I've experienced a lot of it, but a lot of it was actually related to my own judgment, my own judgment about, "Am I good enough? If I don't do this, will she love me enough?" A lot of that had nothing to do with the fact. Actually, Whitney, even, in her own way, loved me truly deeply. She would always say to me, she said, "I love you so much and you'll never know."

CAITLYN: And she stayed through all of that.

AUBREY: And she would have stayed, even with all my shit. I got to the tragedy of that experience was that... I found that in the darkness, I found the tragedy of the fact that I never loved her without loving what I hoped she would be. I didn't love her as she was. I tried my best to give her that, to love her as she was, rather than loving her as she could be. I never got to give that to you either, Caitsy. I loved you a lot. I really did but some part of me loved what you could be, and never got to fully love you as much as I could. Nobody has ever gotten that, and recently, in a workshop with Mama Gena and Emily Fletcher and Luna May, I got to tap into where I was holding grief and the grief was that these people that I still love, I love all of my partners, I love you guys, I love Whitney and I love Stephanie and I love Savannah; all of the people that I loved, I still love; but they never got the best in me in that way, that was heartbreaking and it was a deep grief, a deep grief for that.

CAITLYN: Thank you for that.

AUBREY: But the deepest cut of the grief was that I'd also never loved myself enough to receive the love that was available, especially in the relationship with Whitney where she said, "I love you so much and you'll never know." I don't even know if she even realized how true that was because I wouldn't allow myself to feel it. I wouldn't let that actually seep in. This is the challenge now. And now, I'm not like, "Now, I'm fucking perfect." Still, the work is ongoing but that time in the darkness opened myself up to that, at least allowed me, for the brief time we had after that, before we got together, to love Whitney in that way. We weren't destined, just like you and I Caits, to spend the rest of our lives together. I know in every bone and every cell of my body that Vylana and I have been destined for this but that doesn't mean that I would change any aspect of everything because everything has been perfect. I love all of the loves I've had. But I know that my way forward is to really let all of that love, let it all land, let the love of my mom, let your love, let your love, let all of that love come in. One of the things that I've found is the key to that is also really being safe to be seen. and that means being seen in my lust because some part of me is a sailor.

VYLANA: Oh, you got a sailor in there. 

AUBREY: Maybe even a pirate.

VYLANA: He is riding up on the... What are they called? 

CAITLYN: Are you, actually? I wrote a poem about you when we dated about pirates. I'll have to pull that out of the archives.

VYLANA: You're like Lieutenant Dan up in the big thing with the wind blowing-- 

CAITLYN: I could feel that at the time. He was a pirate. And back then, you were very much, to speak to Chris Marcus, Chris Marcus was a pirate. He wore rings on his hand like time. Not time on his hands like rings but like... He was flashy. He had the hunger of the wolf in him. He was always all that you are but he didn't see it. You had to show yourself, "I'm ready to give myself permission to see it." That was that line of demarcation.

AUBREY: Chris Marcus was desperately trying to prove that he was a man, prove that he was a man and prove that he was worthy of love and prove that a woman would love him. He never felt like he could live up to that. Now I'm in the place where it's all right. I'm with an absolute goddess and I love you so much, baby. And it's my, from here forward, life's work to allow myself to feel every bit of the infinite love that you have to offer and you Cait and my mom, and everybody, and the masculine too, which has been an aspect that I've had to do a lot of work to repair, to feel the love of my brothers and the love of the world, and the love of God, and the love of capital M Mother, and really feel the love.

CAITLYN: We have a preference bias for how we want to experience our love. The ego thrashes against receiving the other forms of it. But when we zoom out and allow ourselves to pay attention to what's actually happening, love is pouring in constantly and in wild abundance. That's something I can't deny in my life as much as I've found myself on the floor, shaking and crying recently because I lost love. Well, no, I didn't. It feels that way to my nervous system. It feels that way in my story but I'm sitting right here with love. There's love singing to me in every experience that I have every single day. I can't deny how much the Divine is holding me. Actually, I can. I do that almost every day, but when we pay attention and we allow ourselves to receive what's there, the whole script flips.

VYLANA: That seems like the common thread in each one of our stories is the ability to give immense amounts of love but how deeply have we truly been able to receive it? I feel like there's a lot of people listening to this that could really resonate to that.

CAITLYN: Yeah, I think probably every human being, that cup upon which we refuse to look at ourselves and deem ourselves unworthy and cast away those parts. That's the limitation to what we'll receive.

AUBREY: That's the devil, baby. That's it.

CAITLYN: A demon. That's the demon that must be slayed.

AUBREY: That's the only thing. It's just a delusion. This was something that Maestro Hamilton, who trained under Maestro Alberto, really ingrained in me. The demon, the devil, whatever you want to say, is just a delusion. It's just pretending that we're separate from love. It's pretending that we're unworthy, using the mechanism of judgment, to create the reality in which we aren't worthy of love, and then projecting that. The greatest trick of the demon or the devil, the greatest trick, is to project that aspect onto God so that we end up worshiping the devil calling it God. This is the story of humanity.

CAITLYN: The great wound of separation that's never there.

AUBREY: The great wound of separation caused from judgment. But fuck, it's hard because we're locked into preference because pain hurts, pleasure thrills. It's hard not to judge because the one that hurts, how do you love them like the one thrills? How do you love them? We all have people in our mind right now. Actually, we all might have the same motherfucker in our mind right now who it's hard for us to not judge that person. It's hard for us to really hold that person in the same regard as the rest of us. I've always said it's great to be Jesus if you're Jesus, but don't pretend if you're not. This is a spiritual bypass. This is the essence of spiritual bypass. So what we have to do is love our judgment while we have our judgment. If we hold ourselves to this Ram Dass standard; love everyone, tell the truth and we judge ourselves if we don't do; well, we're not loving ourselves in the judgment of not holding up the standard of love everyone, tells the truth. So we're fucking double-failing.

CAITLYN: That's a trick of the request on his part is you can't do it if you're not loving yourself so you have to find every wall, especially right here and it's a life's work.

AUBREY: Yes, yes, indeed. I actually don't even have a resolution to it. This is something that I talked, and I'll jump to you in a second, but it's something I talked to Ted Dekker about is it's so hard to transcend preference. In order to not have judgment, you almost have to transcend preference to a certain extent or be such a powerful alchemist that you can see things in a different way. This is what Paul Selig talks about. It's not that you deny war, but you don't see war as war. You see something as different. You see pain as just another chord on the organ played in the church of all existence. This is the pain chord, this is the pleasure chord, this is the love chord, the surprise, the joy, the fear, these are all just chords. But fuck, that's such a level of enlightenment.

CAITLYN: Maybe one of the hacks is to love your preference.

AUBREY: It has to be.

CAITLYN: It has to be, right?

AUBREY: It has to be.

CAITLYN: Like Thomas Moore, phenomenal, somewhat mystic writer, in my opinion, he characterizes the soul through sentimentality. He personifies the soul as a part of you, there's spirit which is energy, higher perspective, lifeforce. But the soul is human almost. It loves what it loves and it guides you, almost, with this intelligence like ayahuasca, which is we're learning and we're having an experience, and I'm going to follow what I love and I'm not going to judge. The difference between soul and human in this paradigm is soul's not judging but we love. Soul's loving. Soul is like, "We love this now, we're going to hold on to this." There's an intelligence to it. So the only way I see out of it is to love your preference to you until it all dissolves into love. I haven't tried that yet.

VYLANA: No, I think that's beautiful. And also, what I was going to say before is just where it's hard to love something, it's always showing you where there's opportunity for you. It's always showing you where there's potential work to do. It doesn't have to be immediate. And all aspects of your process with things are significant and important. But I always try to look at situations where I feel a lot of judgment, or where it's difficult to just love unconditionally, even being neutral, but it's showing me where I'm not in alignment with love, and where judgment and that energy is taking residence in my own system. Therein lies my opportunity to allow myself to be free, if that's what I choose. Maybe loving my preference is the first step because then I'm not shaming myself for not feeling love or feeling judgment towards that thing or that person. Then it goes from there. It's a small step instead of trying to leap to the top of the stairs and just be Christ consciousness.

CAITLYN: I think the key there, just listening to you speak, is also love your preference as a witness. If you're so in love with your preference that you are totally identified with it as absolute truth and attachment. I think that attachment is a big hook of suffering and it's human and it's soulful. But if we can just zoom out a little bit and say, "This is my preference, I'm going to be with it. I'm going to feel it, so I can bring it home," then it's not going to rule me so much that I get lost in my pain for this long, for years.

VYLANA: It's not written. It's not done. Right now is right now, but no story until it's over is over. There's so many more--

CAITLYN: Death has not touched us.

VYLANA: There's always so many things that can unfold that are unseen. You don't know another person's path. You don't know the work they're doing. You don't know where they're at, you don't know where they get that moment of desperation, where they're just on their knees, sobbing and crying out for help because they've gone so far into separation that they get the grace of the divine, to give them the healing so that they're actually open to love. You know what I mean? It's--

CAITLYN: That's part of the beauty is we're all taking turns. We're holding space, we're learning, we're witnessing each other and saying, "Me too."

AUBREY: I think there's a myth that if you start to adopt these higher spiritual principles, that you'll lose your passion. I think that's, again, a form of spiritual bypass and emotional rejection and stuffing of the feelings that you feel. Oh, I don't get angry. Anger is bad. But really, what you need to do is just prevent the toxic expression of this, and the repressed expression of this. I saw a video today of a bunch of people in New Zealand who were protesting the vaccine mandate. There's thousands, it looked like, in the protests, but hundreds of people broke into simultaneous haka in protest, which is this deep, passionate Maori war dance of a primal expression. It was all of their rage and all of their fire. 

VYLANA: It comes from pain.

AUBREY: And all of this was just being expressed. It was so beautiful, because in that expression, they're not throwing flaming bottles at cops. They're not just trying to hurt the people who are pro-vaccine, they're not doing it, but they're just allowing this raw, primal rage of the world, it's constricting upon them and mandating that they do something that violates their sense of freedom and sovereignty, and they're just pounding their chest and screaming, and just letting the heavens hear their roar. We can do that. We can do that. It was beautiful. This is, I think, the way. Just feel it, express it, whether it's through your dance or through whatever process that you need. We can't keep it bottled up but we also can't point it with the sharp, jagged, broken glass pieces like we do in the passive aggressive bullshit ways we do on the internet, or with other people, or with our partners, because we've repressed it so much, and it just all comes out like a broken bottle, instead of just this pure, raw, thick, rich expression of an exclamation to God.

CAITLYN: Yes. The difference, the difference in that expression of anger is they are not victims. The reactive anger is the victim. It's like I'm losing my power because you have transgressed me. When you stand in that full expression of your truth so big, you're holding all that you are. You don't have to build the armor here. You don't need armor. You're just emanating a clear, clean, powerful boundary of this is what's right for me. Let it be heard; honored, if you will; but I'm going to claim it. I never finished the thread but my Cruella costume, watching that film, lit me up because I recognised that I didn't know how to express anger unless it was reactive and volcanic. What I've been doing recently is I've been feeling more, put it in a fucking unapologetic poem. March around your house and fucking say what you need to say. Embody it, embody it, bring it back. And it gives you energy. It gives you energy when you don't let it make you small.

VYLANA: And it's not so sticky. It's not like all these instances where you're just firing off at people--

CAITLYN: Or shutting down.

VYLANA: And having the reactive anger that's really wanting to destroy others. No, this is my process that is so valid that I get to have an experience myself. When you, and I speak this from experience, when you really allow yourself to go there to channel it in a way that's healthy, the example that you brought up, it doesn't stick. That energy just flows, flows down the river with you. It's not just getting stuck in here, waiting to be something else to piss you off for you to start screaming at somebody on Instagram or going off on this person that said something to you. No, it just begins to flow through your body.

CAITLYN: And that's how pain can be too. We are a vessel of experience and sensation.

AUBREY: There's so much of our life where we're just taught not to be able to feel our feelings, it happens in childhood, where emotions are a nuisance for our parents or other people that we're around in many cases. So we're taught to repress it. Yes, I've been around some tantrums and those emotions are difficult to be around in kids who's expressed that but--

VYLANA: Or me.

AUBREY: But these things, they're essential qualities, but then we take that judgment that we've internalized, and then we project that on to others. So we get in this place where we start to imagine that everybody else is different than us and everybody else doesn't have the same emotional boiling sea, and all of these feelings of lust and anger, and rage, and jealousy, and love, and happiness, and excitement, and longing, and desire. Maybe we make ourselves numb because we don't think those things are safe and we look at that then we hide what we have, and everybody's hiding that within a relationship, within friendships, within partnerships, until maybe one point we drink enough with our bodies and actually tell the truth for once, but we're so intoxicated, it didn't really even get anywhere. It's just this interesting thing. If we could really just see each other, just all see each other.

VYLANA: And the expression, the permission and the allowance for you to feel your own emotions, it helps you to see other people.

AUBREY: Totally.

VYLANA: It helps you to witness somebody else in their anger and be like, "I get it. Maybe I don't agree with you, because all of my timeline of the history of me and all these constructs that sit in here are different than yours. I have no idea what it's like to walk in your shoes but I resonate with that feeling and I can see you in your humanity"--

CAITLYN: That is the alchemy of the illusion of loneliness that you described, when we feel I'm alone with my pain. When you show it, when you share it, and someone else can say, "I am that too," then you can remember better when you're going into that illusion. I'm not alone in this. We're all sharing this. And the depth that you're speaking to, I think, is what we call darkness. It's a depth of feeling that we... It's so on the other end of the spectrum from what's acceptable, but it's just a feeling. The basement that we put in the shadow is the depths that we're scared of in ourselves. We just get to take all of that spectrum of who we are back when we open that door.

AUBREY: An important part of doing the work as they say, which has a lot of people who are like, "Fuck doing the work. You get addicted to doing the work, blah, blah, blah. I get it. Sometimes you can get addicted to processing. I don't disagree that that's a real thing. But one thing that I unequivocally think is essential is to understand yourself. The old, old wisdom, knows thyself. To use this example of what we're seeing in the world, so many people who are projecting that they really just care about their neighbours, and that's why they're so pro-mandate, but they're not actually aware that, "Fuck, I'm just a little scared. I'm a little scared." That expression of, "I'm a little scared," that expression, everybody can look at that expression and be like, "Yeah, I get it. I know what it's like to be scared," but when you aren't aware of yourself, and then you project something that's not true, this is the most frustrating. Again, going to the person that we hold in judgment the most. It's like, "This is bullshit. This is bullshit. This isn't what you feel. This isn't the truth. This is a fucking charade. This is an absolute charade." But we also project that they should know better. But they don't, they don't. Forgive them for they know not what they do. They're gaslighting themselves. The shadow is literally what you cannot see. So much of us, and this is on both sides, some other people are like, "I'm against dehumanization. And these fucking sheep on this side..."  Wait, wait, you just said you're against dehumanization but, "These fucking sheep..." Did you just hear what you said? You just called a human being an animal and you're saying that it's dehumanization? I don't want to say that this is a one-sided thing by any fucking stretch of the imagination because everybody in every issue does the same thing. But to just be aware, it's awareness. This is the game. The game is awareness and if that's all the work is, fine. But we must play the game of awareness. We don't have to do anything but fuck, it's super helpful. It's fucking super helpful.

CAITLYN: It makes it a lot less miserable.

AUBREY: Yes, for everybody. 

CAITLYN: Give it some meaning. There we go. I think the one common thread we can all hold on to here is I'm a little bit scared. All of us. All of us. What are we scared of? Loneliness, self-destruction, feeling--

VYLANA: Death, loss.

CAITLYN: Death. It all boils down to this core thing that none of us are immune to and that's we are love that experiences fear. Can we all hold on to that together, at least?

AUBREY: I love you guys. 

CAITLYN: Yeah. That was a fun adventure. Onward to more.

AUBREY: Thank you, everybody for tuning in. The new documentary we referenced is coming out on November 17th. 

VYLANA: It's extraordinary. Congratulations.

AUBREY: Yeah.

CAITLYN: Not to be missed. Medicine for all.

AUBREY: Thank you. Thank you. A lot of ways that you can get to that. You can go to aubreymarcus.com/awakeinthedarkness. That's one way to check it out. Obviously, follow these goddesses here, @thepoetqueen, @vylanamarcus. So much to come. Fit For Service, if you want to experience this in 2022, we're opening up the ecosystem. There's going to be smaller retreats, bigger retreats, maybe even a fucking festival, I don't know.

CAITLYN: There might be. There might be. I might be able to take my maenad energy into the light. Everyone gets excited. 

AUBREY: Maenad festival. Damn.

CAITLYN: But make it conscious.

VYLANA: I wish I had a tool like Fit For Service the whole rest of my life, to feel the permission to really go into my stuff in a container where people really see you and say, "Me too," and give you the permission and hold you and cry with you.

CAITLYN: We got you now so you do have it. Thank you, guys.

VYLANA: I know I do. 

CAITLYN: Join us. 

VYLANA: But it's exceptional to be part of it and to witness it, and you're looking for your people? It's a great group of people. 

AUBREY: Love you, guys.

VYLANA: Love you.

CAITLYN: Love you so much, to the end.

AUBREY: To the end. I love all of you too. We love you too, Ryan.

VYLANA: Love you, Ryan! Bye.