Emily Fletcher is the founder of Ziva meditation which has absolutely revolutionized my own meditation practice. Contrary to popular belief, Emily beautifully states that “thoughts aren’t the enemy of meditation, effort is”, and details how the objective of meditation is not to get better at meditating, but to become better at life. But recently her highest excitement has come from the exploration of the deeply embodied sex magick practices that she taught to my Goddess of a wife, Vylana. Her combination of mastery in both mediation and the ecstatic practices of pleasure for the purpose of both cleansing and magnetizing desired reality is astounding. For more from Emily check outhttps://zivameditation.com/amp/.

AUBREY: Emily.

EMILY: Aubrey.

AUBREY: Wow. 

EMILY: Whoa.

AUBREY: We got a lot to talk about.

EMILY: We have a lot of ground to cover.

AUBREY: So we, of course, met a while ago. We did a podcast, talked a little bit about your book, talked a little bit about meditation. It was still somewhat theoretical at that point, even though I dabbled a little bit, and looked at a little bit of what Ziva was about. But we've been in a week long intensive, where you've been coaching myself and Vyalana, not just on meditation, although I want to talk about meditation, because it's been fucking profound. I had a clue that it would be profound, but I wasn't able to get in on the inside of the profundity. The clue was that I've known IN-Q, our dear friend Adam, we've known each other for a while and he doesn't miss meditation.

EMILY: He calls himself my number one Ziva student.

AUBREY: Doesn't matter. Doesn't matter when. He'll just go in and he'd be like, "See you in 30 minutes, bro." He's in it. 

EMILY: Non-negotiable.

AUBREY: Non-negotiable for him in the morning and in the afternoon. I didn't catch it this morning. We don't sleep together.

EMILY: Unfortunately, for the whole world

AUBREY: Except for me and Adam, who have no interest in that.

EMILY: But the rest of us would be delighted.

AUBREY: Potentially, some poetry would come out of that. So that was a good clue. And he's talked about how profound that has been for him. I talked to Kyle who went through the live version, which is what we did, actually, with this week-long, intensive. And he said it was one of the top three most profound and important things he's ever done. And I was like, "Whoa." Kyle is my best dude, he's my homie. 

EMILY: And he's done a lot of profound things. 

AUBREY: He's done a lot of profound things. We've been doing a lot of profound things together. So I had an idea but that blew me away. But this is just the appetizer course for what we've been doing. We've gone into all kinds of really beautiful processing techniques that have helped support myself and Vylana in our relationship, and the direction we're going. But really, the juicy part was that you've come in as our sacred sexuality coach. That's been mind blowing. At some point, we'll have to get Vylana's full experience receiving because she's been receiving a lot of your codes and a lot of your wisdom, but I've been there to witness and been a part woven through some of it. For those of you instantly going there, me, Vylana and Emily are not just having sex with each other all day. So sorry to disappoint if that's where your mind went and you thought that was going to be the story, not the story. But nonetheless, it's been incredible. And this is something coming out for you because you haven't talked about this much?

EMILY: This is quite literally the first time I've spoken about any of this sacred sexuality work that I've been doing really intensely for the past year and a half. I remember you looked at me a few nights ago, and you were like, "Wait, is this podcast going to be a coming out party?" And everything in my body was like, "Yes!" Scared and in the best way. So here we are.

AUBREY: And for those of you who've listened to podcasts that we've done with Layla Martin, that's your home girl. That's like your Kyle.

EMILY: Yes. And it's new. I met Layla and my cosmic lover Adam on the same day, which have both been a huge initiation. Both of those humans have changed my life and changed the course of my life and hopefully, potentially, the world.

AUBREY: As it will go, and the world is a large place but anytime you change one life, you do change the world as we're all interwoven and interconnected, of course. So you've already changed the world. Congratulations.

EMILY: Yeah. That's true. My world, at least.

AUBREY: And that's enough. You're the ocean and a drop. So let's take this somewhat in order, now having planted the seed that we're going to arrive into a thick, robust discussion of sacred sexuality and all the practices. But let's just talk about meditation for a second. I've been exposed to all kinds of meditations. But this week, my meditation has reached another fucking level. Another level, and it's like, oh, I fucking get it. I get it.

EMILY: Yes! Yes! You get it.

AUBREY: This is powerful, powerful, powerful stuff. So let's go in again. We've already told a lot of the story about it, but just get the overview of what your type of meditation, the lineage that it comes from, and a little bit of the flavor of what it's about and I'll share my experiences of what it's like to actually do it through my own language.

EMILY: So what you're experiencing right now, I thought I was doing meditation, I thought I was meditating. But wait, now I get it. It's like you were drinking a glass of water and now you got in the ocean. This is why I can't stop talking about this. This is why I shout it from any rooftop that will have me, like, "Y'all everybody's drinking glasses of water. I got the ocean for you. Let's get in."

AUBREY: Or an aquifer because oceans aren't delicious to drink?

EMILY: Fair, fair. Nobody wants to drink a salty ocean. I drank some of your mineral stuff this morning and I was like--

AUBREY: Ketones, it's a very special part of the ocean. Still, you wouldn't want to drink too many or you'll shit your pants.

EMILY: Well, hopefully, not during this podcast.

AUBREY: Nope. 

EMILY: What most people think of when they hear the word meditation is well, which free app are you doing? And they think, Oh, I gotta clear my mind. They download apps and then are sort of thinking for them or moving their mind for them, or keeping them in the left brain realm of thinking where they're focusing, whereas Ziva is all about surrendering. Ziva is all about letting go. It's all about giving your body deep healing rest. And when you give your body that rest, it knows how to heal itself. And where I find that the magic happens is that you're not just healing the rest from today, you're healing all that stress stored in your body. That can create a pretty powerful detoxification, both mentally and physically. We've seen some shades of that purge happening. I think it's one of the reasons why Kyle said it was so profound for him. He said, "This is like my first ayahuasca journey," because there really is a purging that happens even though the practice feels so simple. Whereas a lot of people are trying to focus or trying to clear their mind or trying to use an app to think for them, what I teach people how to do is to tap into that deep inner contentedness, what I call the bliss field and do that on your own, without me, without an app, without Wi-Fi, without a phone. To me, meditating with your phone is like having an AA meeting in a liquor store, like why on earth would you want to go into the belly of the beast to unplug? So I really am big on self-sufficiency and I'm really big on the simplicity of Ziva because I've just seen it happen 40,000 times over, that people just start shedding, shedding, shedding all the stress that is keeping them from being their full, beautiful, awakened self.

AUBREY: So with the tool that you do use though, because you don't go in completely without tools, you go in with one particular tool and a lot of guidance, a lot of framework, one particular tool, and that's the mantra. The way that you're teaching mantra, how is this similar and how is this different from transcendental meditation or just different mantra practices with malas? It has a different flavor. Even though mantra is used in a lot of different types of meditation, yours seems to be particularly unique from what I've been exposed to.

EMILY: So when people are using mala-bead meditation, that's called Japa. And we're using a mantra but the point of it is to focus. The point of it is to bring yourself back, bring yourself back, bring yourself back. Most mindfulness techniques, the leash is really short. Come back, come back, come back to the breath, come back to whatever the focus is. But with Ziva, it's all about letting go. Letting go. Letting go. How much can you surrender? How long can that leash get? That word mantra has been very hijacked by the wellness industry. Some people think that it means an affirmation, but actually mantras is a Sanskrit word. “Man” means mind and “tra” means vehicle. So a mantra is a mind vehicle. These mantras are designed to take you from that left-brain realm of thinking and drop you down into that right-brain realm of being, where you are actually accessing a verifiable fourth state of consciousness. So different than waking, sleeping or dreaming. And in that state of consciousness, the right and left hemispheres of the brain are functioning in unison. You're increasing neuroplasticity and you're strengthening the corpus callosum, which is the bridge between those two hemispheres of the brain. So what will be different from Japa versus Ziva is that in Ziva, you're not focusing, you're not concentrating. Yes, you're using the mantra but it's a forgetting device. Yes, you pick it up but really, one of the only pieces of instruction I say is if at any time, you seem to be forgetting it, do not try to hold on, let it go. And that's terrifying for people because, "Wait a minute, I just came here and paid you a bunch of money, rearranged my whole calendar, just so I can get this fancy word and now you're telling me to forget it? F-U. I'm  going to remember mine, thanks. I'm going to hold on to my illusion of control. I'm going to really try and clear my mind, because that's what every yoga teacher has told me for the past three decades, I got to clear my mind. And oh, PS, I don't like what's going on here. I don't like what this thing is saying to me. I've tried booze, and I've tried pot, and I've tried TV, and I've tried everything and this thing will not stop abusing me. So can you please be the thing? Can meditation be the last resort that will stop this bully in my brain?" People go in and they try and wrestle with it. They try and focus on it, they try to fight it. My job and why my course is 10 hours long is that it takes me that long to teach people how to surrender, to teach people how to trust, to teach people how to not use effort. Thoughts are not the enemy of meditation. Effort is. What the mantra teaches you and what this style of meditation teaches you is that the more you surrender, the more you let go, your brain starts treating you with dopamine and serotonin, which are bliss chemicals. The more you try and focus, the more you try and concentrate, the more your brain punishes you with headaches. Does that answer the question?

AUBREY: It does. What's the difference between TM meditation? You heard The Beatles were all into, lots of people. The word is that it's one of the most effective ways. It's really become popularized because it's a way to drop into meditation a little deeper. What are the flavor differences between what you're offering and TM?

EMILY: A lot of people think that TM is a style of meditation. That's actually the name of an organization. It's the name of a company. I'm from the south. If you want a soda in the south, you just ask for a coke. It's like, "Oh, can I have a Coke?" It's like, "Oh, do you want Coke or Sprite?" It's like, "Oh, Sprite." But you just said Coke, like Kleenex, Tampax. They're brands that have become ubiquitous with the thing. So a lot of people think that it's a style, but it's actually the name of a beautiful organization that's taught millions of people to meditate. Where Ziva is different is that what I teach with Ziva is, it's a trifecta of three Ms, so mindfulness, meditation and manifesting. For the first six years of my career, I was just teaching meditation. I started to notice that people would have resistance to starting or they would quit. I started asking deeper questions like what's coming up, like how on earth did you get the keys to the kingdom, and then put them down? I literally just gave you the key to access your own bliss and fulfillment and the only place that it resides, which is inside of you and the only time that it resides, which is right effin’ now, and you're going to stop? What? I really didn't understand it. I just kept asking questions. I realized that people, oftentimes, were not equipped to handle the level of emotional and physical detox that can happen when you start a practice as powerful as this. That's why we started the mindfulness. So the mindfulness does two things. One, it gives your brain a runway in. It's something for you to do. What I use is a sensory technique where you're using all five senses to bring yourself into the right now. That's transition from the doing, doing, doing into that surrendered restful being that this style of meditation is. But the other way that mindfulness is really helpful is that when that purge can start to happen, you have tools to lean in and feel it. So that's one piece. Then we end with the manifesting. So manifesting, you're very familiar with it, I define it just as consciously creating a life you love. I tend to work with high achievers, I tend to work with high performers, people who have a lot of difference to make on the planet. For them, it's hard to just waste their time, it's hard to justify sitting still in a chair for 15 minutes twice a day. When you hit that wagon to your dreams, it suddenly becomes justifiable. "Oh, you mean, at the end of this meditation, I can think about my quarterly goals. Oh, you mean, at the end of this meditation, I can think of how much sex I want to have this month. Cool. I'm in." What I found is that the whole really is greater than the sum of its parts. When you do all three ingredients, and you stack them the way that we do in Ziva, the return on time investment just becomes exponential.

AUBREY: All right, fast forward to me learning how to do this. A beautiful puja ceremony, which you offer to the people you work with individually, and it's a gorgeous ritual that you learned from your teacher. And it opens this. And after, at the end of that ceremony, you brought me in privately to give me my mantra.  I was expecting a long chain of words having something to do with Shiva or something to do with, and that's what I've received before from different mantras. For whatever reason, nothing ever really stuck. It didn't quite do anything. I know about Shiva, but I don't feel Shiva, I don't know Shiva with a G. So it wasn't really working. And if I tried to make myself understand it or whatever other thing it was. The Ananda hum was one mantra that I had. It's another way to say bliss and enjoy. I'm thinking about that. All right, bliss, bliss, bliss, but it had a meaning. And I think the meaning was somehow distracting me. It was bringing me back into thought, in some way. But the mantra that I received was, it's just a sound. Maybe it has a meaning somewhere, all sounds probably have a meaning somewhere in our big, broad, wide Earth in some language. But it was a simple sound. It was a simple sound, and a unique one that I would never say normally. And I was like, All right, well, that's cool. That's simple. Then we go into meditation, to try and use that mantra. The way you describe it is to use it like an anchor that's just gently drawing you deeper, deeper, deeper. And I understand going deeper into the psyche, and into this place of, the Blissfield is what you called it, with remembering, forgetting, waking, sleeping, it all starts to blur into this delicious soup of the cosmos. Alright, I get it. I understand. Didn't know that a mantra could do it. At first, when I was trying, I was trying to link it to my breath. I was like, "Inhale, mantra. Exhale, mantra. Inhale, mantra" I had tried to find some cadence. No, no, no, do less, do less, dear Aubrey do less. And when you know what's even better than this? Even less.

EMILY: Do nothing, accomplish everything.

AUBREY: You know what's even better than even less? Nothing at all. Except for this one thing. And just circle back to this. And I finally started to get it. Then you're like, "Alright, now, just allow the mantra to arise naturally in your mind. Don't think about when you're going to say it or not. It'll just appear, it'll just appear and appear. And you'll say the sounds. It's a really beautiful thing that the brain does, is that we do say sounds in our mind. We can actually come to our mind if we want. It is also nice to create the vibration in your chest, move the cells with the sound waves when you're actually speaking it out loud. But this mantra isn't said out loud. It said in the quiet of your mind, which can reproduce the sound beautifully. As I started to get it, oh, wow, oh, wow, it's working. Then thoughts come up. You have a guide for which thoughts to let run and then gently bring back. Let's not try to solve problems though. Let's try to leave the problem-solving for later, that's a little too much. So gently bring yourself back to the mantra. But don't try to use it like a baseball bat and bat them all away. Let's just try to gently move our way back to it. I started going deeper and deeper, and deeper. My head started to drop. My shoulders started to drop. Then, all of a sudden, I was like, "Oh, wow, oh, wow. This is meditating. I'm doing it. I can feel it."

EMILY: I'm doing it! I'm the best meditator in the land.

AUBREY: And then I'm like mantra, mantra, mantra, mantra, mantra. Back into that place. It was so pleasant. A lot of people say, "Meditation is hard for me." I think we did 20 minutes in that first one. I was like, "I could have gone an hour. That was beautiful." It was such a lovely place to be in, that it didn't work. Maybe the work is just getting in there and starting it. But once you're there, it's delightful. 

EMILY: Yeah! You just said it all. The work is getting your buns to the chair. Once you're there, no effort. And actually, the less effort you use, the more enjoyable it will be.

AUBREY: We don't really know that. It's a principle in Taoism called wu wei, the path of least effort. This is really blending that kind of idea, do the least, really do the least. Just a simple thing and follow it all the way down and then if you bubble back up to the surface of the water, great. Then allow yourself to matriculate down, and not one is better than the other. That's another beautiful thing that you really hammer home is a deep meditation is not better than a shallow meditation. If you have a bunch of thoughts, great. One principle that I really liked is all of these thoughts, it's like a detoxification. Things that are coming through your psyche that need to come through your psyche. So you say, "Oh, hello, and and thank you for leaving my--

EMILY: Maybe a good party guest. 

AUBREY: Yeah, exactly. 

EMILY: So you want to think of it like a party in your brain. You're always going to have guests at your meditation party. Some of them you're going to enjoy, some of them you're not going to enjoy. Your job is to be a good host. Don't be a bouncer.

AUBREY: In some ways, you're also like the door guy and all these thoughts are leaving the party. So the party gets more refined to the guests that you really want. You are saying, hello but you're saying hello on the way out because that's the detoxification aspect, right?

EMILY: Thank you and goodbye. Thank you and goodbye.

AUBREY: Thanks for coming. Bye. Goodbye. Thank you for coming. Goodbye. Until all you're left with is the essence, the essence of the party itself. And the guests all go away. You've mentioned too–

EMILY: But a really important point is I don't want people to think that the guests going away is the point because then they can't help but be the bouncer. And even if it's sneaky, they saddle up to that friend like, "Can you just get out of here? Because Aubrey said that it was just him and pure beingness. Can you just get out of here?" And the second, we try to clear the minds, the second we start using effort, and then we feel like we're failing. I've seen so many people rob themselves of a lifetime of bliss and fulfillment, because they're judging themselves based on misinformation. Like you said, everyone thinks that meditation is hard. The reason why that is, is that most people are trying to do styles that were made for monks, versus this was actually made for people like us, people with busy minds and busy lives, who like having sex with other people. It's not a monastic practice and that really matters.

AUBREY: It's interesting, because it is valuable, I think, to think of these thoughts that are coming, that they needed to come and they needed to go. The goal isn't to end, it's an endless wellspring of thoughts. But these particular ones were the ones that you're actually purging from your psyche. And tomorrow, you'll have new ones. If you started up 20 minutes after you finished, you would have new ones, and you would have new ones. It's an endless amount of people at the party. But it is gently sifting things and sorting things in a way. And, of course, metaphors all fail when you get too granular with them. But it's beautiful to think about everything being productive. There isn't one place you get to where this is where the productive part happens. But reframing the entire thing is productive, then it actually allows you to stop trying, it allows you to stop judging, stop creating a hierarchy of good, bad. It's moving beyond the polarity of this is better than this thing. It's just a different flavor.

EMILY: Yeah, beautiful. And I will say that the goal has nothing to do with what happens in the sitting itself. The goal is, am I enjoying my life more? Am I getting better at life? And this will be on my tombstone: We meditate to get good at life, not to get good at meditation. Because the second you're judging what's happening in the chair, then you're going to try and correct or use effort. The litmus test is how was I feeling and performing the day before I started versus how am I feeling and performing 30 minutes after the practice? That's what I want people to judge.

AUBREY: I've used some of these biofeedback devices like the muse and things like that. They're quite fun, but it's almost impossible not to be attached to when, for people who've used it, there's this chaotic, windy sound and then if you get really quiet, it starts to stop, and then you hear birds chirping. And when birds are chirping, that means your brainwaves are calming down from beta and alpha, maybe dipping into theta. You get into theta, oh boy, there's a bunch of birds and you're like I'm crushing it. I wonder how many points I'm  going to get.

EMILY: Competitive meditation. 

AUBREY: You just roll on that headband, see if you can get this flock of birds. I bet you won't, baby. 

EMILY: I'm so enlightened I got a video game telling me so.

AUBREY: I got birds all day. You want some birds? Oh, you didn't get any birds? I got extra birds. Don't worry, I got you. It's so hard not to do that in the gamification, although it's still valuable. So are all these other things, whether it's using Headspace or Calm or Muse or whatever. I think there's a place for all of these things. But there is something very, very special about this type. And there's a couple of things that end up happening; one, very restful and restorative, reminds me of my binaural beat practice in that way, very restful and restorative. Also, you start to feel some of the effects of what a detox actually is like. Go through a fast or go through a liver cleanse, you're going to have some shit come up emotionally. I think it was Benjamin and Azriah's who were staying in our house, they were quoting somebody else who was saying, "The issues in the tissues." There's stuff that's going to come up and, interestingly, it's like the tissue of our psyche itself, maybe even our brain, maybe even the way that our brain is, because of the brain state we're getting in, there is a tangible detox process, which has actually brought stuff up in Vy and I's relationship as well. Part of the detox was like things that were underneath, latent in the surface, now were bubbling to the surface, just like if you're doing a liver cleanse and things that are moving out of your liver, at that point, are going to move through your psyche and create emotional disturbances and, beautifully so, not disturbance in a bad way but just things are moving.

EMILY: So a lot of people think that stress is just a right-now phenomenon, like oh yeah, my mother-in-law's in town or it's crazy at work, I'm stressed. Stress actually gets stored in your cells. It is not just a present-moment phenomenon. Every single time your body's ever launched into fight or flight, it's left an open window on your brain computer. In order to survive, we have to minimize those windows. And that's what stored trauma is. What Ziva is doing is that it's giving your body this rest, it's actually five times deeper than sleep, you're de-exciting the nervous system. And when you do that you create order in your body. And when you create order, that lifetime of stored stress in the cells, those issues in the tissues can actually start to come up and out. So it's like we're maximizing the window, so that we can click X and get rid of it forever. The cool thing is that there is a finite amount of stress in the body. Once we get rid of it, it's never coming back. Of course, there's  going to be new stuff. But if you get rid of all your landmines, and you get rid of all your triggers, the way that you process new stress is going to be a lot easier. It's like just water flowing off a duck's back, you're much more adaptive. But that process can be quite intense, that initial purge, which you're experiencing right now.

AUBREY: And what you're talking about is we're also fucking stressed that one little thing is liable to set us off, because we're right on the borderline of the most we can handle. All of our coping strategies, whether it's reaching for some exogenous substance, or something that we're doing to distract ourselves, we're using everything we can to manage because we're right on the brink. But if we can actually drop that level, a lot lower of all of our stored stress, maybe there'll be some acute stress that comes in at a certain moment. But we're freeing up what you call adaptation energy, which is great, which is really resilience, the ability to receive a blow of stress, like oh shit, that happened? Damn! That's intense. And that happened. And the universe loves this. Nature loves this. Oh, you think that's stressful? How about that? And that, and that, and that and that today? That's the way it always goes with me. It comes in clumps.

EMILY: And I would argue, to your point about adaptation energy, we don't see those things coming. Are you ready? Do you have gas in the tank for when the inevitable challenges come? I really think that the marker of human success moving forward is going to be our ability to adapt. Things are changing, and they are changing quickly. If you think it's changing quickly, saddle the F up, because it's about to get a lot faster. If we don't have the ability in and of ourselves to plug into the very source of adaptation energy, then just being a human is going to feel exhausting. We gotta really resource ourselves, we want to plug into the source of energy, to the source of adaptation, to the source of bliss, so that when we interact in the world, that we're not going and sucking everyone else dry. Hey, please adapt to me. Hey, please, feel good for me. Please make me feel better. And instead, it's like, what can I give? We don't want to be bags of need running around looking to be fulfilled. This practice, in my experience–

AUBREY: We want to be bags of fulfillment running around looking for needs.

EMILY: Boom, that's exactly it. And that's what this practice does. Neurochemically, what's happening is you're flooding your own brain and body with dopamine and serotonin. You are generating your own bliss chemistry, which allows you to be fulfilled looking for need.

AUBREY: Yeah. So in this process, as you mentioned, while it seems like, "Listen, Emily. Listen, Emily, I've done Ayahuasca a bunch of times, this is not  going to bring stuff up. That's cute. Thanks for the warning. I appreciate it. You don't know who you're dealing with here with me and Vylana, all right? But okay." And then meanwhile, this morning, yesterday, whatever, we're like, "Hey, Emily. Help? Help? We need help." The beautiful thing is, you have more tools in your toolbox. You've been with us here, it's been a week-long intensive, where we've basically been living together. You've had tools that have been really helpful. And there's two of these that I really want to mention. The first of which was what we did first was the paradox process. And this is really interesting, and you're a fucking master at this thing. I know that this is probably a good method, but damn, all of your Broadway training and everything, you have your intuition, you're not all of this stuff, really makes you a master at this. Explain to people what this is all about because it's really, really potent.

EMILY: So I liken it to speed therapy, whereas if something's coming up for you, and you're having an issue, you can ask a series of questions that will clear the emotional charge around something. The goal is to get you to objectivity, to get you to be able to see the truth. This is something that I am not, here we go, here's Emily. Justify yourself. I'm not certified in this. However, I did train with the man who invented it. 

AUBREY: Ryan, can you whip up a certification real quick? Some gold stars would be good if you have it for the sheet. Whatever you used, when you had your youngest daughter, whatever, that one will work. That'll work great. Christian, get another one handy, if you want, because we're going to need it again later on in the conversation, perhaps twice more. So get a couple for Emily so she feels comfortable talking about what a master she is.

EMILY: I love you so much. Thank you for calling me out in such a loving way. So I'm dancing this dance between owning my own mastery and wanting to really be respectful to the people who've invented these tools and technologies. So shout out to this amazing man named Thomas Jones. He was my first therapist. He is an incredibly emotionally-intelligent human. I've been studying with him for 20 years, but intensively for seven. He created this practice and I've sort of adapted and made it my own. Like you said, with years of being on Broadway and years of teaching acting, you develop this real empathy skill where you can crawl inside of someone else's experience. Also shout out to my alcoholic father for my years of healing codependence. It's a superpower that I developed with having an angry parent where you're like, "Oh, well, if I can just adapt enough, or I can just soup, I can intuit when he's mad before he gets mad, and then I'll just calm it down." Everything has a light and a dark side. A lot of my superpowers come from that. Anyway, the paradox process is amazing. I think a really important point is that you set where you want to go. Hey, where would you like to be around this subject? I'll set that as the zero that we're working towards. And then you would tell me where you feel like you are on the scale. Right now I'm at 11, or I'm at four. I crawl inside of that experience and I start asking you questions. Some of them are true, some of them are not. But they all have an emotional charge. And you're just hitting the delete key, delete, delete, delete, delete, delete. And by the end of it. Usually, there's some more spaciousness, you feel a little bit lighter, you feel like you have some objectivity. And that, in conjunction with the detoxification of the meditation can be really profound.

AUBREY: Yeah. It certainly was. I love doing this on the podcast. It's giving people a sample of what it's like, but doing it for realsies. So I'd love to do that. We've been working through so much stuff though. I'm trying to think of something that actually has an emotional charge that we haven't just obliterated here.

EMILY: We did like four hours of work.

AUBREY: I'm feeling pretty good. But let me just take a moment here, let me take a moment and then we'll go through like a mini version of the paradox process, just to give people a flavor of what this looks like. Potentially, people might learn enough to be able to experiment with themselves or maybe find some professionals who could actually. 

EMILY: You have to send them to Thomas.

AUBREY: All right, so let me just take a moment here and see what's alive with me at this point. Sometimes I still feel like I'm not doing enough, that I could and should be doing more and I'm not being disciplined enough, I'm not being dedicated enough, that the world needs me, and I'm not showing up for the world in the way that I could. This is an issue that it's not super strong for me right now but it's one of those ones that comes up a lot is feeling like am I being put to good use? This is Charles Eisenstein's prayer that I love. His prayer is always: may I be put to good use. And I wonder, am I being put to good use? Am I putting myself to good use? Am I allowing the universe to move through me in a way that's for the best use of the world? This is something that comes up a lot. And with that comes an associated amount of love that I give myself to try and steer myself towards being of good use. Now, we also got to go through the beautiful medicine ceremony, which we won't talk about here on the podcast, but it involved me offering bodywork which I learned from Poranguí, and talking to people about that. Let's just call it a ketamine journey at this point, so ketamine journey with some body work, and nothing too heavy on the medicine side, but it's this beautiful process where I get to do body work with someone in a very open state, and I was able to offer that to you. In that point in time--

EMILY: Beautiful and profound. I'm so grateful. It was a real initiation. Thank you. 

AUBREY: Yeah. Thank you. At that time, what's interesting is, one of the things I love most about it is I know that at that moment, I'm being put to good use. Even though it's just me and one person, I know I'm being put to good use, but in regular life, unless I'm like, maybe right now I feel like I'm doing a podcast. I'm in the podcast, I'm in a podcast, I'm being put to good use. But the rest of my life when I'm not like offering bodywork or doing a podcast or I just crush some dope poem that I know is going to be a dope video or I'm on-stage, speaking, there's these peak moments where I'm like, "Yep, you did it buddy. Good fucking job. You're doing it." And I feel this wash of love and peace and acceptance and joy from knowing that I'm being put to good use. Also when I'm making love to Vylana, I also feel like right now there's nothing better I could or should be doing. So I get lots of reprieves from this, but generally, much of the time, there's this waking anxiety, this little grinding anxiety of what about now, what about now? Not enough, you're watching this show. You could be on your computer, and doing something, at least something and so it's this grinding thing that's grinding down my joy, and dampening and dulling the colors from my life. So then let's go for it. Because it's real.

EMILY: Yeah. Great. So let's say that the zero that we want to work towards is you feeling just how enough you are. The zero we're going to work towards is you feeling so satisfied and so in love with who you are exactly right here, right now, that you feel like, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that you are enough. Real simple, real simple zero. If that's the zero, how far away from that are you right now? 10 is like I am in full anxiety and if I don't save the whole world right now, no one's ever  going to love me!

AUBREY: I think we're in a very good spot for me, normally, but I'm like a thick, a thick three. A thick, firm-- 

EMILY: Great girth.

AUBREY: Yeah, girthy. Thick three. Yeah.

EMILY: Thick three. Okay, okay, great. So again, I'm going to ask you a series of questions. Some of them are going to be true, some will be false, but they're all going to have an emotional charge. And what I want you to say after each question is simply, "See truth." You may say that out loud, "See truth. See truth."

AUBREY: And I invite anybody who's listening to this podcast, who shares some of the same concerns or feelings, go ahead. Join in. 

EMILY: Yeah, follow along.

AUBREY: Pretend this is for you because I promise I'm not that different from you.

EMILY: Yeah, this issue of I am enough is pretty universal. Almost any human could do this along with you and say, "See truth," in their mind or out loud as they're listening. So again, I'm going to ask you a series of questions. Some of them will be true, some of them will not be true, but they're all going to have an emotional charge. And I want you to say, "See the truth," after each question. Am I enough? 

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Will I ever be enough?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Haven't I never been enough? 

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Why would I be enough if I've never been enough? 

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Who's going to tell me when I'm enough? 

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Who's going to give me the certificate? 

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Who's going to tell me when I've done enough? 

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Don't I really believe that if I could just heal a few more people then I'll be worthy of love?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Don't I really believe that if I just change a few more paradigms on the planet then I will be worthy of love?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Aren't I worthy of love right now.

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Do I believe that?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Do I believe that I'm worthy of love right fucking now?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: What's  going to take for me to believe that I'm worthy of love exactly as I am.

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Do I really have to save the whole fucking world in order to be worthy of love. 

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: When am I going to love myself? 

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: When am I going to love myself? 

AUBREY: See truth. 

EMILY: When am I going to be able to love myself from the inside? 

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Why do I have to accomplish so much in order to feel like I'm enough? 

AUBREY: See truth. 

EMILY: Isn't it exhausting? 

AUBREY: See truth. 

EMILY: Don't I love it?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Don't I get off on it?

AUBREY: See truth. 

EMILY: Isn't this my existential kink? 

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Isn't this the thing I'm secretly so proud of? 

AUBREY: See truth. 

EMILY: Don't I love this angst inside of me. 

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Hasn't this angst gotten me a lot of good stuff?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Hasn't this angst made a lot of really cool things in the world?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Aren't I proud of it?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Don't I not want to get rid of it?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Isn't it a thick three because I love it.

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Aren't I proud of this piece of me?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: What if there's nothing to fix here?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: What if there's nothing to solve?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: What if this anxiety is divinely-inspired?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: How do I see the cosmic joke in that?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: How do I see that nature made me totally perfect and totally anxious? 

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: How do I see they're not totally anything?

AUBREY: See truth. 

EMILY: Aren't l already enough?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Can I enjoy my enoughness and want to save the world?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Would I save the world if I felt like I was enough?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Aren't I afraid I'd be lazy if I believed I was enough?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Wouldn't I judge myself if I thought it was enough?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Isn't it that sacred yearning that's gotten me everything I've gotten in life?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: How do I see that the time for that level of yearning is over?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: How do I see that what got me here is not going to get me there. 

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Can I let go of the anxiety? 

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Can I let go of the self-judgment? 

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: How do I see that if I can run a seven-minute mile with a rock in my shoe, I'll still be able to run a seven-minute mile if I take the rock out of my shoe?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Isn't the anxiety just the rock in my shoe? 

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: How do I see that my destiny is my destiny?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: How do I see that if I'm meant to save the world, I'm going to save the world?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: How do I see that whatever I'm meant to change, I'm going to change?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: How do I see that the anxiety is totally negotiable. 

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: How do I see that I would actually be more effective on my mission if I stopped judging myself so hard?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: How do I see that I could actually have fun while I'm changing the paradigms if I stopped hating myself so much?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Where did this voice come from? 

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Didn't I believe when I was little that I wasn't enough?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Didn't my love get taken away from me? 

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Wasn't that fucking painful? 

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Wasn't that terrifying? 

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Aren't I afraid it's going to get taken away again?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Aren't I afraid that if I don't work my ass off that I don't deserve love?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Aren't I sick of working my ass off?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Don't I love working my ass off?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Let's take a little mini pause there, check in.

AUBREY: Yeah.

EMILY: Yeah, so what was that like for you? What came up?

AUBREY: It was a really important reframe of things. They're not foreign to me, these thoughts. They're not the first time I ever thought this but somehow, through the process, they're landing deeper, and I'm processing them in a way and they're all weaving together in a way that it's making an impact, greater than the individual thought itself. I think the idea that this is all okay, this is part of part of my design, but I can also get the same thing which I want but without the cost of the anxiety of it, and how it is absurdly woven into a lot of conditioning and patterns and other things that are just ready to drop.

EMILY: You want to do one more minute round? On a scale of one–

AUBREY: I'm like at one, a one of middle-finger flipping myself off. Fuck you, I'm not going away. So you can fucking suck it. Lick this finger and shove it and enjoy it.

EMILY: Okay, and what's that defiance? What's it protecting?

AUBREY: I actually think it's protecting me from realizing that I could have gotten rid of this already and the self judgment of being like, “See, you could have been done with this already. You could have been living a life of more joy and less stress and anxiety far longer.”

EMILY: Okay. Okay, so we're going back in. Aren't I a ding dong? 

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Why the fuck have I made this so hard. 

AUBREY: Couldn't it all have been so much easier. 

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Isn't that not true? 

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Didn't it have to be hard?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Didn't I need that fire to forge my steel? 

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Didn't I have to walk through that fire to become the king that I am? 

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Did it have to be hard?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Didn't I sometimes make it harder than I needed to?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Can I forgive myself for that?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Can I see that I had to prove myself to myself?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: When am I going to realize that I've proven myself to myself? 

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Haven't I already proven myself to everybody else?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: When am I going to prove myself to myself?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Doesn't everyone else already think I'm enough?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Don't people think I'm more than enough?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Aren't people kind of intimidated by my enoughness?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: When am I going to relish and savor my enoughness?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Isn't there a real possibility I could go to my grave and never realize that I'm enough?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Couldn't Emily and I be here at 85 doing the same fucking exercise?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Don't I get to choose?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Don't I get to choose every minute of every day?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Won't that be a new muscle?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Isn't it weak right now?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Don't I know how to make weak muscles strong?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: How do I build enough muscle just like I have every other muscle?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Am I enough?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Do I believe that I'm enough?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Aren't I afraid that if I believe I'm enough I'll stop working?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Don't I know that's not true?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Couldn't there be nothing further from the truth?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Aren't I going to bring light no matter what?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Aren't I going to bring light even if I eat Doritos and watch reality TV all day?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Wouldn't I still be bringing light?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: How do I see that my joy distributes joy into the collective?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: How do I see that me stressing while trying to make the world more joyous is not working?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: How do I see that me suffering while trying to deliver bliss is contributing to the collective suffering?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: When do I let myself have fun?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: When do I let myself enjoy it?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: How much money is it going to take? 

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: How many women is it going to take?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: How many more sales is it going to take?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: How many more cars is it going to take?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: How many more podcasts?

AUBREY: See truth. 

EMILY: How many more books? 

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: When will it be enough?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Is it enough? 

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Will it ever be enough?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Can I enjoy it right fucking now?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Can I enjoy it right fucking now?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Aren't I ready?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Don't I deserve that?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Haven't I earned that seat? 

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Didn't I deserve it even before I earned it?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Didn't I deserve it even before I earned it?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Would I look at five-year-old Aubrey and tell him he's not enough?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Would I look at 10-year-old Aubrey and tell him he has to work harder in order to earn love?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Would I look at 15-year-old Aubrey and tell him he's not enough?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Would I look at Aubrey from yesterday and tell him he has to work harder in order to earn love?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Isn't none of that true. 

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Wasn't it not even true when my parents felt like they were taking their love away? 

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Weren't they loving me to the best of their ability? 

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Weren't they doing the best that they could with the tools they had?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Wasn't I doing the best that I could with the tools that I had? 

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Aren't I doing a great job?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: When am I going to celebrate myself?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: When am I going to give myself a certificate? 

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: What if I give myself the certificate right now? I am enough.

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Aubrey Marcus, enough. Gold stars. Signed, Emily Fletcher. 

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Aubrey Marcus, you are enough. Signed, God.

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Don't I get to give that gift to myself?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Won't it make everything else more fun?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Won't I actually be able to create more because I'll be in the trusting of it?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Won't I be able to dream bigger because I will believe in myself?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Won't it be more fun?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Aren't I ready for that? 

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Isn't it go time?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Aren't I ready to have my joy contribute to the collective joy?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Aren't I ready to have the collective joy contribute to my joy?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Is that going to be a blast?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Isn't it already a blast?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Isn't it going to be more fun?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Aren't I ready?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Aren't I ready to go?

AUBREY: See truth.

EMILY: Yeah.

AUBREY: Let's fucking go.

EMILY: Let's fucking go!

AUBREY: Let's fucking go.

EMILY: And just say, "Out of zero."

AUBREY: Out of zero.

EMILY: Yeah, out of zero. Bravo. Nice work.

AUBREY: You did the work. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. That was enough. You know what I did right there? I did enough.

EMILY: That's great. 

AUBREY: Guess what I did? I did enough.

EMILY: I want you to take Vylana's lipstick and write on your mirror, "I am enough."

AUBREY: I am enough. Well, I mean, I would have needed that like 10 minutes ago, but now, shit, I don't need that--

EMILY: Don't even need it anymore.

AUBREY: I'm enough. Out of zero.

EMILY: It's amazing how enough you are!

AUBREY: Yeah, I'm just abundant in enoughness. I got enoughness to spare. It's like those birds. I'm a meditation app.

EMILY: Here you go, here you go, I got some enough for you.

AUBREY: You want some enoughness? I'm a little short on fucks to give but I got plenty of enoughness in my other pocket.

EMILY: God, yes. Let's please make that a thing. Fresh out of fucks. Plenty of enoughness.

AUBREY: Yeah, yeah, that's it. It's powerful. It's so potent. And just thank you for your guidance, your expertise. I like doing it for real rather than telling people, "Yeah, this thing is cool!" That was really working and really doing it. This is the game we're in. Enough of the, let's theoretically understand something and expand our awareness. That's all fine and has a place. It's great, especially for theoretical physics or some fucking astronomy that requires mathematical equations and shit. I get it. There's a place for this theory. That makes sense. Really what we need is just to feel something, feel it, get in there, get on the inside, whether it's meditation, whether it's these processes. Not just the talking about it, not the understanding of the concepts, but ways to move in, move energy, and change course in a way; not because the previous course was worse again than a pattern, the judgment but just get in there and do the real stuff. Do the real stuff of it. Sexuality is the same way. It's powerful already. But let's get in, let's do the real stuff of it. Let's make some stuff that's undeniably, undeniably powerful. I think that's like the age we're transitioning into. It's beyond theory. Now, let's embody it. Let's embody the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible, not just talk about it. Let's be it.

EMILY: Yeah, we don't need more information. You want any information on anything, go on your phone. More information than our ancestors had in their whole lifetimes, you could find in seven minutes,

AUBREY: And we all know it. Yeah, that's the silly thing.

EMILY: Yeah, we don't act in accordance with what we know. We act in accordance with the baseline level of stress in our nervous system. And that's why I love Ziva so much because it's moving that stuff. It's why I love these sacred sexuality practices so much because they're very healing. One of the things I learned from Layla, who you mentioned, Layla Martin, who is one of the world's most amazing Tantra teachers and my best friend, she said this thing, "Ecstasy for tens of thousands of years was seen as a purifying force. That one sentence possibly changed the trajectory of my life because we've seen it as dirty or shameful or wrong or to be hidden or keeping you from God or something to be embarrassed about. No, this is a purifying force. That's one of the things that has been lighting me up.

AUBREY: Yeah, talk about Messianic consciousness turning the tables over. All right, let's take the thing that's been the most repressed, had the most shame stacked on top of it, had the most issues and weird things evolved around it, let's go right in there, recognise that this was a tool for us to access the divine. A tool? Beyond a tool. To say it's a tool is insane. It's the everything. It's the cosmo-erotic universe. It's the craving the desire for to to become one, a covalent bond, a union, this thing that's the very core of a subatomic particle, why an electron spins around a nucleus, that's drawn to it, why the Earth is drawn to the Sun and the Sun draws the earth. It's this thing that's at the very birth and core of everything, and everything. Let's go in there because you know, what's going to be hiding in there? God's going to be hiding in there. Let's go in there. And let's use that force to do God's fucking work. 

EMILY: Yes! Preach it.

AUBREY: Let's go.

EMILY: Preach it. Let's go. If I had to summarize the entirety of the Vedas, which is what I've been studying for 13 years, which is this beautiful, ancient body of knowledge, which is a human approximation of the way that nature works, of natural law, if I had to summarize the entirety of the Vedas into one sentence, it would be: the one became two for the joy of becoming one again. It's what you just said so beautifully, the one became two, for the joy of becoming one again. And if that truth, if that fundamental everythingness is woven into the entirety of our experience, then of course, we're going to have that draw, that magnetism, that attraction inside of everything, every atom. Can we start to play with the holiness, with the sacredness of the eroticism that is inside of us already? Can we use these practices as a way to bring ourselves closer to the divine?

AUBREY: One of the interesting things that Mark Gaffney talks about, and that podcast should be out by the time hours is. Hopefully, many of you got your mind blown by this, this absolute erotic Qabalistic mystic.

EMILY: So excited.

AUBREY: One of the things that he said is they did a study about what people say when they're climaxing, when they're orgasming. And they say one of two things, in general. Of course, there's some outliers say some weird shit like, "Rhinoceros!" I don't know.

EMILY: Sheep monkey.

AUBREY: Exactly. But for the most part, they say one of two things, either their partner's name or, "Oh, God." And the way that he was actually using it was to say that actually, those are the same thing. 

EMILY: Your partner is God. 

AUBREY: Exactly, because your partner is the face of the divine, a face of the divine, a way in which the divine has taken form. So you're really actually saying the same thing with two different names. 

EMILY: Yes. 

AUBREY: Slightly different flavor, but two different names. It also speaks to the fact that we intuitively know that at that moment we're in contact, we're in contact with the divine. We know it, we know it, and we say it. And then as soon as we're done, we're like, "Oh, God, what did I just do?" Hail Marys. Repentance and be more pious.

EMILY: Walk of shame. Yes. Who said that sex should be shameful? Who said we should be embarrassed? 

AUBREY: The church! 

EMILY: Yeah, the church but when? Like, at what point?

AUBREY: Lots of times.

EMILY: Lots of times, but back in the day, there have been whole lineages, whole beautiful sacred practices that were worshipping the divine feminine that were worshipping the erotic, Aphrodite temples, goddess practices, then rape those things, taking the incense and the piousness out of it, made it quite patriarchal, quite separate from God. And then made people ashamed and embarrassed of accessing their own internal bliss chemistry right inside of themselves. We have all this oxytocin. Just like we have the dopamine and serotonin from the meditation, we have this powerful oxytocin right inside of us. But the church and others have said, "Well, don't you masturbate? Don't you touch yourself. Don't you have sex. And especially for women, there's an extraordinary amount of slut-shaming out there.

AUBREY: Maybe it came originally from the church. I don't mean to put all of the blame on the church or anything, the church has also done some beautiful things, and blah, blah, blah, I get it. It's not an attack on that. It is also a condensation of places where a lot of shame and a lot of guilt and a lot of repression of sexuality, repression of the feminine has come from, but it also comes from many different sources. I just want to acknowledge that this is a broader thing. And also sometimes, in monastic cultures that have had nothing to do with the church, these natural impulses for desire, were actually counterproductive for the monastic lifestyle, which was a very, very small portion of the population who's drawn to an asexual life, a monastic lifestyle. This would draw them out of it. So we'll even see some Buddhist texts or some other monastic culture texts where they're attacking lust as this is one of the principal things to avoid and to be careful of. If you're a woman, you can't touch one at somebody in a saffron robe, in a lot of cultures in Thailand, that was the case.

EMILY: Women aren't even allowed in many temples. That's still the case. 

AUBREY: It's spread in many, many different ways and then found a new neo-puritanical form in this slut-shaming, in this way in which sex is so scary and barbed and broken glass and shards, like holy shit, this is so intense. It's become this very, very toxic thing when it's really, at its essence, such a beautiful thing.

EMILY: I think it's why so many of us are waking up to this call of sacred sexuality at the same time, like you finding Marc Gafni. My lover, Adam, sent me the book, "A Return to Eros". I show up in Miami, to meet you and Vy and you're saying eros, eros, eros and I'm like, "Adam's been reading this book about eros." And you're like, "That'd be funny if it was "A Return to Eros." I was like, "That's it!" Marc Gafni comes into my world right after he comes into your world. 

AUBREY: That's strange.

EMILY: You say my name to him.

AUBREY: Real strange. Real strange.

EMILY: But I think there's this collective waking up. I think it's one of the reasons why I said to you, "I want to meet your wife." And now that we're working together, I see that we have such similar missions. It's like we want to bring together all of these people who are waking up to oh, we have to shift the way that cultures see sex and sexuality because we've taken the most creative force there is, sexual energy and creative energy are very, very similar. At the basis, you are drawn to someone actually to create a baby. Now, we're not creating a baby every time we have sex, but we are creating something. How are we going to use that creative energy? And when that thing gets perverted, when that thing doesn't have a beautiful outlet for expression, then it will come out in ways that are, I think, creating a lot of the suffering, unnecessary suffering and darkness on the planet.

AUBREY: You can just redact the I think. It is, it is creating. Just an absolute unnecessary amount of suffering, the unconsciousness, the shame, the broken glass pieces, all of this stuff that's woven in. For anybody who's listened to some of the podcasts I've done with Vylana, she's shared a lot of her challenging history with sexuality. She's had the full gamut from any variety of different situations where she's been taken advantage of, manipulated, violated, and also willingly given away her sexuality to people who didn't really honor her and didn't actually take care not to do more damage and leave her more whole than when they found her, was really this transactional taking energy that she's experienced beyond, just the straight up violations that she's that she's experienced in a variety of different ways. It's so sad but this is the reality for so many women and so many men. There's so much sexual trauma, as well as the just garden variety shame and guilt and repression and all of this other stuff. There's so much to work through. So one of the the ideas of bringing you two together, was for you to help her go even deeper into the sexual practices so that she could further liberate beyond what ayahuasca can do, beyond what me being a devoted, and loving husband could do. We've done a lot together, and it's been beautiful, but finding someone who could be that mentor, be a teacher, to teach her how to really liberate herself through these practices. And what she's been able to go through this week has been stunning, stunning. 

EMILY: Stunning. Yeah, she's done such beautiful work. Both of you have. And it's been a real honor for me to witness and a real initiation for me as well. And something I want to say is anytime we engage in some sort of sacred sexuality practice, before we even get to anything resembling pleasure, we first just lean right into the darkness. Before we can even access our own full bliss chemistry, where are you feeling tightness, embarrassment, shame, holding. I think you heard us the first time where it was like, "What's happening in there?" It was just a lot of rage to start. And it was breathing out the rage, moving the rage, and then finding the grief and leaning into that. And then starting to find that eros inside, then starting to breathe that creative sexual energy into the space that was left behind by the rage and the grief. 

AUBREY: One of my friends, Steven Jagger says, "Repression is released with expression. The pressure of repression is released with expression." I think that's a key thing that you find whether it's an ecstatic dance practice or a breathwork practice, and of course, this sexual repression and pressure is released with sexual expression, as well as other emotional expressions of the emotions that that act has actually caused us to store in our tissues and store in our psyche. It's all woven together. It's untangling these knots.

EMILY: It's interesting what we did first of leaning into the darkness, the different flavors of darkness to make spaciousness for more ecstasy, for more bliss. It's similar to what happens if you have a fight and then make up sex. There's the rage, and there's the grief and then there's the turn on. We walked through a practice that I learned from Regena Thomashauer, aka Mama Gena, aka my roommate, who's amazing and she's a legend, and she wrote a New York Times bestselling book called "Pussy: A Reclamation". Even this week, in my work with Vylana, me being comfortable saying that word, her being comfortable saying that word. And just a quick etymology, vagina actually comes from a word that means a sheath for a sword. That's just one element of the policy of the pussy, of this beautiful...

AUBREY: It's actually like the inner canal part?

EMILY: Yeah, and that's just the canal, versus the pussy as the whole pleasure portal. It's the matrix point. The matrix, the place where all life is birthed. Really reclaiming that word, pussy, thank you, Mama Gena. Also this practice of the rage, into the grief, into the turn on, and transmuting that rage and grief with your turn on. The way that Regina says it is that rage is a combustible power source. It's like dirty energy. Grief can also fuel you but it's dirty. And when you put your turn on into it, when you sprinkle that sexual energy to it, it turns into a clean energy source. And so that's what we've been doing as part of the practice. And then we did our first sex magick, which is something I learned from Layla Martin. I had never heard those words a year and a half ago, two years ago. For people listening who haven't maybe heard that, it's basically using your pleasure as a manifesting tool. I would call it manifesting on steroids. I've been teaching manifesting for years. Now it's just what else can we pour on top of that flame of your desire? So with sex magic, you're basically getting super clear on a vision, like what's one thing I would love to manifest and you really get into a five-senses reality of it. And then you start to create pleasure in your own body and you move that from the root up to your crown and you move it through every energy center, through every chakra. And at the moment of peak pleasure, you send that energy to the vision. And we've been doing it almost every day since we've been together, different flavors of it, different variations of it. And it's been so beautiful to have the vision keep crystallizing to see what downloads come. It's like yes, we're placing the order with the cosmic waitress at the cosmic restaurant. But then we're also very open to receive what guidance there is for us, it's like the veil gets very thin. The right and left hemispheres of the brain are functioning in unison, similar to meditation, you're flooding yourself with bliss chemistry, and, quite literally, your electromagnetic field gets bigger. So your magnet gets stronger. So these desires that you're dancing inside of, they start to be magnetized to you. So there's some real beautiful science behind sex magic. One time, we were giggling, we're like, "This is already done, but we might as well masturbate about it." We just were coming from this place of real knowing and real trust. And let's just pour some fire on it.

AUBREY: It's already done but we'll masturbate about it. That's great. Marc Gafni has been talking to me about, in the wisdom of Solomon, the Solomon traditions, the kind of mystery schools that have been hidden in the deep Qabalistic mysticism, they have a word for orgasm. And orgasm in the Hebrew, I don't have the word handy offhand, I wish I did, it's a beautiful word but it's It's the moment of so much light that you can't hold it anymore. So it's like this moment where the light is building, the light is building and you surrender to the all light. It's like the all light. And so imagining that you're holding this this crystalline vision of your future, very much like what Joe Dispenza is doing, like let's draw this future magnetized to this reality that we want to be the embodiment, be the living breathing, wet magnet for this thing that we're attracting. Let's draw that in, and then build the light, build the light, and then surrender to the all light that connection to the divine, to the light, and then crystallize that point, and then allow that to become part of our life. That's the essence of the sex magic. And, by the way, what a lovely way to do it. Doesn't have to hurt.

EMILY: No, it doesn't have to. You don't have to suffer. You don't have to grind. Well, maybe it's a different kind of grinding. I just actually did Joe Dispenza's seven-day retreat. I was fascinated by how similar what he's doing is to sex magic. He's not using, necessarily, manual pleasure creation; he's doing more breath and energy work; but it is moving that energy from the base to the crown. It was cool to see like, oh, wait, this practice that is so powerful that I've been using, you can achieve it in other ways.

AUBREY: It reminds me kind of the ways in which some of the MDMA-assisted psychotherapy practitioners talk about the difference between processing trauma with ketamine and processing trauma with MDMA. Obviously, ketamine is fully legal now. But of course, they've had access to tons of clinical trials. MAPS has done an amazing job showing how absolutely effective it is to process trauma on MDMA. And what they were saying is, that in the ketamine state, it's disassociative. It pulls you out of your ordinary reality, so that you can process trauma from a neutral place, from a neutral place, which is far better than the PTSD rigid, tight, clinging place that most of us would access trauma. Because as we go back into those traumatic memories, all of those emotions come alive, everything, you're reliving it, as you replay what's been stored on your hard disk. You're going through all that. But with ketamine, you get to go to a neutral place. But with MDMA, obviously, you're flooded with serotonin, you're flooded with all of these hormones that make you feel so good, make your heart feel so open. So you're processing not from a neutral place, but from a place of vast openness and love and safety that's created from that. And it's more powerful. It's just more powerful. It's a more powerful way to process trauma. This is from the people, the doctors that have been actually working with both and seeing it. It seems similar in that in the meditative state, you can get to a neutral place, a place where your mind is more moved from your struggles and your challenges, maybe even all the way into the bliss field, a place in which you've slipped beyond ordinary waking consciousness. It is quite pleasurable, but it's somewhat neutral, you're getting to a somewhat more neutral place, even though it's not probably totally neutral, nor is ketamine totally neutral, but it's a more neutral place. But if you're doing it from a place of pleasure, it's beyond neutral. It's super-powered, it's extra charged, just like MDMA. This is way beyond neutral when you reprogram. So it's just a more powerful way to do something very similar. Now, obviously, getting 2,000 people in a ballroom in Cancun masturbating together is something that he's not ready to do at this point. And perhaps the world isn't ready to do it. But guess what, we got someone raising their hand who's like, okay, what if we did that? What if we got thousands of people together and instead of meditating and manifesting, let's masturbate.

EMILY: Well, we're going to do both. 

AUBREY: Of course, well, you're both.

EMILY: It's a new 3Ms, we're going to meditate, we're going to manifest and we're going to masturbate.

AUBREY: 4Ms. 

EMILY: The first night, the night we really we reconnected, which I'd be interested to hear about your experience of that but I remember telling you this vision that I've been having of 80,000 people in a stadium, doing this thing, this vision that I'm calling as of now ecstatic prayer, maybe it's the meditation of ecstasy, we'll figure it out. But it would be really bringing in a high level entertainer, I want Lizzo or Billie Eilish opening it up, getting people in their bodies, and then moving into ecstatic dance, meditation, getting this whole crowd of 80,000 people holding a vision for the planet and then bringing out my good friend, Layla Martin, and having her lead people through sex magick, moving this vision through their root, all the way up to their crown. Just imagine it. Just everyone listening to this podcast holding this vision as well. Because imagine 80,000 people climaxing at the same time, seeing God at the same time, while simultaneously seeing a vision for the planet. And imagine that antenna, because one person connecting to God, powerful. 80,000 people connecting to God at the same time, can you imagine the strength of that antenna, like the hole that it would create in the universe, the timelines that would shift as a result of that? And then everybody on the field ecstatic dancing. I love what you said about this, you're like, "This world can't hold that vision." But I love this vision because as you hold it stronger, you're going to draw this new world to it. Regardless of all the naysayers, and all of my own criticism, my own judgment, I'm going to keep holding the vision because I know that as I do, I will draw that new Earth to the vision.

AUBREY: At the point that those two things clasp hands, then we're in a radically different reality. In a radically different reality where you can talk to stadium owners, and they'd be like, "Yeah, good idea. Sounds great. Sounds good." And then you could put that out, and it wouldn't just be people freaking out and attacking and going crazy and being challenged, being threatened and be like, "Yeah, cool. That's what they're doing over here. I'm in tonight. I'm going to watch the game or whatever. But I'm glad they're doing it." The whole world is at a different level of consciousness at that point. And then at that point, this is going to then supercharge the next evolution to the new world. So it's really beautiful. It's a hidden way to draw a world that could hold that vision to this reality. And then once that's there, this is both celebration, consummation and the new launch point for another reality. 

EMILY: As for reclaiming the stadiums that have been temples to war, like temples to fighting, to having men like bang up against each other and fight which there is so much sacredness in sports and competition. I'm not here to diss on sports, I know there's a lot of beauty that comes in it, but 80,000 people are going there every single Saturday to watch the same exact game. You don't think we'd get 80,000 people to come together to make history, to tap into their own pleasure, to tap into God and oh yeah, by the way, change the course of reality while we're at it? Easy.

AUBREY: Where do you think somebody listening right now, where do you think they're like, "This shit is fucking crazy. I don't know. Should I turn this shit off? I don't know, maybe this is enough." Where's this impulse that comes to be like, "No way. No way." Why is that so deeply in our culture right now?

EMILY: We've already proven that one in four women are experienced some flavour of sexual abuse. And now as the numbers are starting to really come out, it's actually one in four people. It's just that men weren't reporting it as much because that's how deep the shame was. That's like 25% of the population.

AUBREY: At least.

EMILY: At least.

AUBREY: Because when we do certain exercises in Fit For Service, where we have coaches, we do the step into circle exercises, which is really powerful, big circle of 150 people and step into the circle and you gradually go, if you've experienced some form of sexual abuse, and the numbers are way higher for men and women, way higher than 25%. And just amongst my own friends who I know and we're intimate and vulnerable enough to be able to share that, the numbers are a lot higher. Underreporting is significant. I think the amount of sexual trauma is driving a lot underneath the surface here. 

EMILY: If your first interaction with sexuality is not consensual, or not with a person that you feel safe with, then that's going to shape and color every experience you have afterwards. And even if we take off the judgment as being good or bad, it's just work that we have to do to get to a place of full surrender, full trust, full ecstasy. I think that that's where a lot of it comes from and then, societally, we've just adopted the we just don't talk about that. Parents have such a hard time talking to their children about it. I just keep getting this download that's like Tantra for teens, tantra for teens. No, thank you, nature. I love you and I trust you. I'm not interested in going to gymnasiums and talking to 17 year old boys about masturbation.

AUBREY: No, we'll leave it to Pornhub.

EMILY: Exactly, we'll leave it to YouPorn. And then we've got this misogyny, this predatory behaviour, this rape culture, and that's how we're going to introduce our kids to it? Wait, we're just telling people not to do it, they're  going to get pregnant, they're  going to get STDs, they're  going to get slut-shamed, but we don't even say why. We're not even speaking to the power of the practice. We're just like, "Don't go there. Don't do it." Don't talk about it. I'm  going to put some guards on your phone, and pretend like that's  going to keep you from getting to it.

AUBREY: Yeah, like they're not clever enough to go through. I think it's too facile to say that all pornography is rape culture, because it's not. Because I know some porn stars who've really thoroughly have just enjoyed it. They like the voyeurism of it, they like the way in which they get to be a rebel and they get to put their middle finger up to everything that's been telling them to be repressed and to hold themselves in their--

EMILY: It's like their reclamation.

AUBREY: It's their reclamation. And that is a real thing. It's not ubiquitous by any stretch of the imagination, nor even the majority from what I'm able to see. That's not always like that. And there's many different flavors of pornography, there's many different ways... But there's an energy that permeates a lot of it, which is not healthy, particularly to somebody who's trying to learn about sexuality. For me, when I was growing up, I'm 40 now, you're lucky to score a magazine. You get a magazine, and that, even in and of itself, is edgy, but it was a lot different than what's on the tube sites.

EMILY: They're starting to show the scientific differences between like looking at and the stimulation that happens in the brain from a photo and masturbating to a photo versus pornography. And it's different. It's nowhere near the same thing that's happening inside of the brain. And just this year, availability of it, as a preteen or teenager, do we really want our first dance with that flavor of the Divine to be happening, one, voyeuristically versus first person? Do we want it to be happening with adults versus someone our similar age? Just like a movie is not real life, porn is not real sex. It's messy and dirty and smelly and awkward. Sometimes there's weird sounds and embarrassing, and all of that is holy. Being in the realness of it, and figuring it out. I did my first Ziva intro to sacred sexuality event, a live event in my house a few months ago. And first we just did hours of interviewing, and I was asking a lot of questions because this is new territory for me, most people know me as a meditation-for-extraordinary-performance lady, so to talk about sex with my folks is a little edgy. I was asking people questions and almost everyone there had a not ideal introduction to sexuality, except for one man. And he was like, "Yeah, I had a partner. She was my same age. We were great. We experimented. We totally trusted each other. And it was awesome." And I was like, "Wow, how rare is that?" How many people do you know that had an awesome introduction to sexuality?

AUBREY: Some, some. There's going to be some figuring out. I remember my first experience with sexuality, I was 16 and my girlfriend was 16. The real tricky part was the condom. That was the real tricky part. It was so overwhelming and I'm nervous and I don't know if I'm doing it right.

EMILY: Had you practiced beforehand or it was your first time?

AUBREY: No, I practice. But it's one thing to practice. And it's another thing when it's game time. Game time is different. And I was like... Oh man, I'm sorry. I don't know. I don't think this is  going to work this time. She's like, "It's okay."

EMILY: Did she help you? 

AUBREY: No, she didn't know. She was a virgin too. She didn't even practice.

EMILY: Look, even this is so beautiful. You're the same age. You're experimenting. You're fumbling. You're learning together? That, to me, so many people are robbed of that.

AUBREY: It was actually really sweet. Even though I was very hard on myself and I had some conditioning that I think a lot of men have, which is like the totality of your manhood is wrapped up in how you please your woman, which is probably better than some ancient medieval misogyny. Like if anybody saw the movie, "The Last Duel", it's a great movie about 14th century France or something like that, where men didn't care about their performance, because they didn't care about a woman's pleasure. So I suppose there is some progress in the pressure that men feel because at least they are caring about it, but they're only caring about it--

EMILY: As their own ego.

AUBREY: As their own ego, being the man who could do it. Obviously, I'm hard on myself, whether I'm shooting a basketball, or whether I'm trying to put on a condom. I'm hard on myself in all of these different ways. But, ultimately, there was a lot of sweetness, it was really actually a wholesome way to go. It got really tough for me when I was in college, and I had a girlfriend. She could only climax through missionary sex for like a long period of time with a particular type of stroke and she was just god damn gorgeous. I was so into her that I couldn't last long enough. She wasn't into oral sex. I actually read books and stuff. I was trying to be the best. Aubrey is going to be the best, he's going to be enough. Sometimes I would just come up short. I would climax before her. And when I would, she would look at me and she'd go... 

EMILY: Oh, boy. 

AUBREY: And turn her back to me and sometimes grab her own vibrator or finish herself. And I was just sitting there in my own shame of not being enough and that fucked me up for a while. It took me like years to get over that. 

EMILY: I'm so sorry. 

AUBREY: Thank you. Thank you. 

EMILY: I'm sorry.

AUBREY: It's been a happy ending, I will say. It's been a very happy ending, the healing was also great. And there were a lot of great things that came on the subsequent side, but there's a lot of different things that these discussions are not being had. 

EMILY: I'm 42 years old and why am I just now discovering this stuff? Thank God nature has given me this machine gun, this fire hose of the world's best experts are just falling in my lap, my roommates, my best friend, my lover. Thank God! One of my gifts is taking esoteric information and communicating it in a way that is attractive and accessible to a mainstream audience. I've done it really well with meditation and it feels like nature is now asking me to do the same thing with sacred sexuality. I'm happy, I am excited and happy to do this, to disseminate it. You're feeling a call in ways too. And I have a little bit of that story of like, really? At 42, I'm learning this now? Not my daughter, not my son. I want a different world for them. I want a different world for us.

AUBREY: The very basics. Alright, let's talk about the basics of being human. All right, maybe we learn how to breathe, ages three to five are about breathing? Great. Great. All about breathing by the time you're five.

EMILY: We're removing trigonometry, we're putting in meditation. We're  going to take out calculus and we're going to teach you how to do your taxes.

AUBREY: Breathing, dancing. I teach ecstatic dance of course, and a big part of Fit for Service is training people that it's okay to move your body freely without judgment. It's not a performance. Allow yourself to move, emote your emotions, these basic things, none of the schools, at a school dance and they're like, "Alright, everybody, dance freely."

EMILY: Is your partner going to choose you, am I going to get chosen? 

AUBREY: Are people going to laugh at you? How about a little coaching everybody? Hey, everybody, it's bullying, to just point at somebody and laugh because they're dancing, and their dance moves don't look super cool. That's a form of bullying. And it's going to have long lasting effects where they say, Oh, I can't dance, and I don't dance. And then you have a human being who doesn't dance. And a human being who doesn't dance is not a human being, not a fully expressed being. So let's put this intelligence all through the system, so that we're building these vibrant humans beyond this realm of shame and guilt, and worry, and anxiety and performance and all of this shit. And of course, sexuality too. Sex ed in schools is nonsense. It's mostly don't do it. And if you do, here's all the fucking consequences. It's crazy.

EMILY: It's crazy. And instead, we could be teaching pleasure practices. We could be teaching sacred sexuality, legitimately, why not? Why would we not have a pleasure practice in the morning? Why would you not want to flood yourself and charge yourself up. Something that Adam and I say, Adam is my amazing lover, and he will check in. And this is a simple frame that I think can really help a lot of folks, be like, what's your level of charge right now? Vylana has given me consent to share what we worked on, and when I would check in with her, like, "What's your level of charge right now?" And when she would talk about it, I would notice a little bit of, if it was low, there'd be a little faint hint of judgment. There's something wrong and I need to fix it. And I was like, what if we just think about your level of charge, like we're looking at a thermostat? Oh, it's 76 degrees, I could use it a little cooler, I'm  going to take it down a couple notches. Oh, it's 72, I could warm it up a little bit, I'm  going to turn that up a little bit, with no judgment, just noticing that our sexual charge could actually be a thermostat, for our body for our levels of stress, our level of nourishment, our levels of feeling safe with our partner, instead of judging; there's something wrong with me because I'm not at a 10 out of 10 all the time. It's just a thermostat. And then having our own tools and knowing that turns ourselves on. So that we can turn ourselves up and down on that dial, and then guide, and instruct a partner on how we would like to receive pleasure. Because if you don't know what you want, how on earth are you  going to be able to tell your partner? And letting go of the shame of like, Oh, I feel not so turned on right now. And instead making that hot? Oh, you're at zero? Where would you like to be? A five? Can you feel into what a five might be right now? And then just as a mental exercise, can I just imagine what a five might feel like in my body, and then it becomes a bit of a game, and it becomes really, like you're checking in with each other, which can be really beautiful.

AUBREY: Yeah, I think one of the challenges with sexuality in general is there's so much predatory adult to children sexuality that exists, whether it's Boy Scouts, or whether it's Catholic school. Whatever the fucking thing is, it's like, "Oh, I'm not sending my children to some other random adult, that's going to open up this channel, because I don't fucking trust it because of what we said these wild levels of perversion that exist.

EMILY: Perversion.

AUBREY: Rolling it out, there's lots of difficulties and challenges and actually bringing this into manifest. But, of course, it makes sense. But of course, the world that we're in is not ready, is also not ready yet, because we haven't healed the adults sufficiently and healed the systems and healed the communication lines and healed so many things to allow this not to be potentially toxic.

EMILY: Yep, fair, I mean, there are so many dangers. I have a kid's meditation training, so Ziva Kids. I've even been wary to talk about sacred sexuality at all, simply because I have a kid's meditation training. It's like, well, where do we think those kids came from? If we're  going to wait for another generation till the adults are healed, before we start teaching our kids, then it never happens. That generation never actually happens. It's a complex problem. But I think we have to address it from all angles. Yes, healing the adults, yes, allowing the children, giving the children tools to learn about it in ways that are beautiful and empowering and inspiring versus shame inducing.

AUBREY: It is awkward in a family, a family dynamic is inherently awkward. And I think one of the awkwardness is because there is an erotic impulse to your parents. Freud discussed this at length, it's the Oedipal, it's a variety of these different things that is there and because it's there, and it's not supposed to be there, and there's all this shame about, of course, don't fucking do anything about it. Everybody's like, "God!" the kids are like, "Oh, my God, I can't believe I heard you guys." There's so much that's wrapped up in this thing that, even in a family dynamic, which should be the safest place to do this, it can also get all kind of crunchy and difficult, and the kids don't want to hear it, the parents don't want to talk about it. So then they're just leaving everybody out to the wild world of porn to really sort it out, or their friends who have been trained in the wild world of porn. Somewhere, something has to shift, where we have to create a new sexual narrative that allows healing to begin earlier, even preventing the necessity for healing by creating a positive runway that people can kind of navigate. And of course, sometimes there's going to be some shit that happens, All right. But how can we talk about this in a healthy way? How can we heal that? How can we move forward? How can we alchemize this and navigate our way from here to there?

EMILY: As you're saying this, the thing that's coming up is maybe the need is family facilitators, for someone who teaches the parents and the kids, someone who teaches the parents how to have the conversations with kids. Because most people don't want their kids going somewhere else to learn about this stuff, but they're not doing it either. So like you said, it's left to the wild world of porn. So maybe it's the family facilitators. Also a vision that I have that will help us get to the stadium events would be starting circles. I had this vision, circles, where you get a group of friends, maybe it's eight friends or 12 friends, and maybe it's online, maybe it's in-person but you do these sacred sexuality practices, you hold a vision. I'm in a group called Eight. There's eight of us, and every six weeks we meet and there's a game every week. And the game could be what's one thing that you'd be proud of, but then you don't want to do? Or just simply most magic wins.

AUBREY: What you would be proud of but you don't want to do. I don't know. That's a tough one.

EMILY: Well, I can give you mine, but I'm not afraid.

AUBREY: It's a coming out party. What are you proud of but you wouldn't want... I can't even think of one. Ryan, can you think of one? Christian, you got one?

EMILY: A simple would be like I want to write a book. I'd be proud of writing a book but I don't want to. 

AUBREY: It doesn't involve sexuality. 

EMILY: It doesn't involve sexuality. 

AUBREY: Because I was like if I'm proud of it, I'm pulling that out. That trick is not being held to the lens.

EMILY: I should have clarified. I should have clarified. My Eight group that I'm in is not sexuality, but I'm just giving you context for the vision.

AUBREY: Because I'm laying my proud cards first, I got this one. Oh, ace, here we go. We're  going to get to the three of clubs later, you'll see that one, but I'm not so proud of that one. 

EMILY: So every six weeks, we have a game, and then we pair up. So there's partners. And every day, we design our day, so we write out everything we're  going to do that day in the past tense. And then we report back that night. Like yes, the podcast with Aubrey was amazing. Yes, I had such an amazing session with Vylana. And then if you don't do it, then you have to pay $10 into the pot. By the end of the six weeks, there's a big pot, because people missed here and there. The point of the story is that most magic wins, and you get like a couple grand every six weeks and oh yeah, you're basically designing your day and going after your dreams and being held accountable to it. So I like the idea of starting a circle, like making an Eight group, but doing it with sacred sexuality practices. And maybe it's for couples, or maybe it's eight individuals, but people that you know and trust, and you say out loud ahead of time, this is the vision, this is the thing that I want to manifest. And I'm going to use my sacred sexuality practice to strengthen my magnet, to get myself into bliss chemistry, to dance with the divine, to receive those downloads and to place my order every single day. I'm going to do these practices, I'm  going to feel as good as I possibly can. And then at the end of the six weeks you come together and it's like a contest of who manifested their thing because we got to gamify stuff because we're ding dongs. Our bliss and fulfillment dreams coming true was not enough of a prize. So we got to put some money on the table.

AUBREY: And I think what this is talking about is how communities grow stronger together. Doing this all alone is great. And if it's just you for now, beautiful. Get in touch with this, start to explore these different practices. You can listen to the podcast I did with Layla where she breaks down different practices for an individual man, different practices for an individual woman, different practices for a couple. And then moving beyond a couple, if you wanted to explore other partners or a group scenario. It's a beautiful, very pragmatic instruction about some of these. So if you're interested like why don't you know what the fuck that means, that's one resource that I can point to. I'm sure there's many, many others. 

EMILY: Layla is a master, true master.

AUBREY: She really is. You can start these practices and they're very profound. But then ultimately, when you can start talking to your friends about it, and then potentially weaving things together. And, of course, everybody's minds are oh, it was a circle jerk? A circle jerk. There's so many ways in which we subtly push away those things that maybe inherently we know. Maybe there's some value there, maybe there's something potent there, but let's just smash it down, and make it something that's shameful, or let's denigrate it in some way. So that we don't even have to think about this as a possibility.

EMILY: That's right and during COVID, our circles got smaller, and weren't hanging out with hundreds of people, it was like a tight group of around 20. And we did it, we worked really hard to come together. And there was obviously a deeper level of intimacy that was created because it was a smaller group. 20 people gathering a lot is different than 100 people gathering a lot. And Layla would oftentimes lead us in sex magic, and it was so fascinating to see what would happen in a group dynamic like that. Does it spin out? Does it get crazy? Does it get predatory? Does it get vulnerable? Do people feel shame? And none of that happened? It was actually from those experiences with adults, consensual adults, all genders. And then what happened was this level of trust, this level of intimacy, and yes, there's like stories of like, oh, gosh, do I look this? Or are they watching? And do I have enough charge? And do I need to perform or is this really just me and God? All those stories come in? But then at this moment, can you imagine like, 24 people touching God at the same time? And then what happened for me afterwards, this has happened many times, is that immediately afterwards, it feels like the most pure, most natural, most beautiful thing in the world, where I'm like, yes! Yes, 80,000 people doing this together? Yes! Why not? Why not?

AUBREY: Why not? And so just to clarify that vision, it's not like you were thinking like cocoons and paws, allowing some privacy. So it's not just 80,000 people, because it'd be really hard to prevent some people from being like, I got my binoculars out here. This is going to be a good fucking show. Let me go to the circus here. 

EMILY: You know the Mylar silver things that people wear at the marathon after they run it, to keep warm. I'm picturing these beautiful cocoons that are really lightweight, and they pack up into a little pouch, but you have them on so that it's really quite private, but it's really just you and God. And then afterwards, once you feel clothed and covered and totally saturated in bliss, you open it up, and there's butterfly wings on the inside or Isis wings on the inside; Isis being the Egyptian goddess, not the terrorists. 

AUBREY: Good clarification there. Good clarification. Well, this is the new world that we're birthing. And look, there's a lot of logistics, and there's a lot of things and even with the caveats that we said, we understand that you listening may have thought of ones that we didn't talk about, and we think about them too. And it's not like we're blindly charging into this unaware of all of this. Yeah, of course, there's challenges, there's pain, there's stuff that's there, there's issues that are there maybe, religious upbringings that are teaching you some things that you're bumping up against, whatever, there's a ton of things. Every person is an individual, every person's sexual history, all the stories and everything is unique, no way could we cover all of that. But try to just take the essence of what we're talking about, the essence of it. The essence of it is beautiful. The essence is a reclamation of pleasure within yourself and knowing that this pleasure is divine, as all things are. As Paul Selig says, he's been on the podcast so many times, God is... God is... God is... All is God or nothing is. This is a part of it. It's a particularly powerful part of it that, far too long, has been repressed and the repression has very, very ugly results. And we've seen that over and over and over again. It's not working. It's not fucking working.

EMILY: Come with me. We're going to use your pleasure to change the world. Come with me. We're going to use your pleasure to change the world.

AUBREY: See truth. 

EMILY: See truth.

AUBREY: See truth. Emily?

EMILY: Yes?

AUBREY: You are badass, you are badass. It's been such an honor and such a pleasure and I have so much gratitude for what you've offered my life and our relationship and Vylana. I'm sure we'll get to hear her story on a podcast at some point. But just thank you.

EMILY: Wow, thank you. Thank you for seeing me. Thank you for calling me up into my mastery when I want to hide. Thank you for trusting me with the most sacred thing in your life, which is your relationship. Thank you for opening up your heart to me this week. Thank you for the brave, beautiful work that you've done. Thank you for sharing this brave message with this audience. I'm really excited for the seeds that we're planting right now. I feel really excited to watch these take root and grow.

AUBREY: Likewise. Me too. Speaking of seeds and ways in which people can follow it, you got some opportunity, some goodies if people are lit up from this, either the meditation side of things or you want to dive deeper into everything that you have to offer, give people a little guideposts to where they can go

EMILY: So we have a beautiful masterclass, which is an intro to this particular style of meditation. Even as we were recording, your audio engineer was like, "I've been meditating for 10 years. I've never heard of anything like this meditation." So if people want to learn more about that they can go to zivameditation.com/amp. So just Z-I-V-A meditation.com/amp. And that's going to take you to a free masterclass, that'll give you an intro to this style of meditation. And then if people like, I want the full thing. I want the ecstatic dance, the paradox process, the sacred sexuality, let's go, you can apply to work privately with me at zivameditation.com/private. 

AUBREY: All right. And so it is. And so it is.

EMILY: And so it is.

AUBREY: I love you, sister. Thank you for everything.

EMILY: I love you. Thank you.

AUBREY: I love you, everybody. See you next week.