Sexual Healing For All w/ Layla Martin and Vylana Marcus | AMP #320

LAYLA: All of a sudden I was standing in nature with a circle of like nine women, all doing sex magic and we were free and liberated and everyone was in their divinity. It was so incredible.

AUBREY: The truth is we're all the master, we're all the healer, we're all the mystic.

ANNOUNCER: Give it up one time For Aubrey Marcus.

AUBREY: Layla Martin, Vylana Marcus.

VYLANA: [inaudible 00:33].

AUBREY: We're here.

LAYLA: We're here.

AUBREY: We're going for it today.

LAYLA: I'm now thinking about masturbating in my car. You know when people are texting in the car, and you're I'm like, "I'm going to die. I'm going to die." Sometimes you're like, "I'm trying to like channel pleasure," in the car, this is dangerous, and I got to tone it down.

AUBREY: I feel like that's easier for women than men. Men, it's process. There's a starting point to masturbating. Otherwise, it's just self-groping.

VYLANA: Oh my god.

AUBREY: You don't just start masturbating as a man. You got to get it pumped.

LAYLA: But we have to elevate self-groping in the car, though. It's just like living turned on life. It should happen anywhere.

VYLANA: It's actually an interesting thought to think of a guy, like how a woman can turn herself on, and thinking of a guy doing that, it's weird, kind of.

AUBREY: Yeah, it is.

LAYLA: We have associated so much more shame around male sexuality in that particular way. Me and my friends when we're driving, we're like, "Yes, I'm turning my pleasure, I'm activated, I'm here." There's something that's like, "Oh yeah, bitch, you're claiming your power." Then a guy's doing it in the car and you're like...

VYLANA: Does it seem weird because it seems feminine, in your body, the way that that feels to try to just--

AUBREY: It just doesn't really start working until a certain point.

VYLANA: You have to have some kind of stimulation.

AUBREY: There's an engorgement threshold into where it actually starts getting, now it's getting good. But at the start, you're like, "Come on, buddy. Let's get in the game here."

VYLANA: Oh my god. You look like you're stabbing it.

LAYLA: [inaudible 02:00] Getting turned on in this pre-engorgment thresholds, we can do this.

AUBREY: There's nothing happening and then it starts to happen, then you're like, "Okay, now we're playing. Now we're now going for it."

VYLANA: We're starting out on fire. Welcome to this podcast.

LAYLA: The whole podcast is going to be called "Masturbating in Cars, How to Do it Based on Gender".

AUBREY: How to masturbate flaccid?

LAYLA: All right.

AUBREY: Well, we are starting off talking about that. What I wanted to do is take us on an arc of all of the practices that someone can do individually.Aad then the challenges that those practices are trying to solve for and help you grow from and through; and then as a couple; and then when you expand the container beyond a couple, and how to stack all of these different practices, the challenges that you encounter, what you could unlock and reveal about yourself. So in a way, we are starting right on track.

LAYLA: I'm glad you got us out of the other rabbit hole and just took us straight in because that sounds so much better than where we were going. 45 minutes later, and we're like, "No, but you could just scrape through your testicles, as you hold the wheel with your left hand."

AUBREY: Is it the softest brush or is it a little more vigorous--

VYLANA: You got to put your hand underneath the seatbelt.

LAYLA: Should it be silk? Should it be cotton?

VYLANA: Hand underneath the seat belt so it's more comfortable for your wrist.

AUBREY: Thanks for all the tips. So let's talk about this because as an individual, we all carry different aspects of shame, repression, retraction, different things that we can start the practice of working on by ourselves. A lot of this needs to unlock with a partner because a lot of the trauma is created in partnerships and unconscious partnerships in particular, but some of the work starts with you. That's the safest place to do it but for a lot of us, it's not a safe place, because there's still the judging eye and the judging mind and the shameful eye and the shameful mind that's preventing us from actually liberating... Perhaps it's just an absence of tools and a lack of awareness of what might be underneath the surface. So let's talk about it for men and for women. I guess I'll go lead in first because we already started talking about non-engorged masturbation for men.

I want to talk about for men because I do feel like... Of course, these are all generalizations, men and women can have overlapping or different things that happen. Gender is very fluid in this regard. So we're speaking in generalities and from my own personal experience. For me, one of the big challenges that I've encountered in myself and in other men is... One of the most difficult things is the pressure to perform. This is a major one. I can think back to my performance failures, in quotes, and how brutal I was on myself. I think I've told this story once at some point before, but there was one time where I had a new partner in Australia and I was in college, and it just wasn't happening, it just wasn't happening. She was bummed out, but she was being nice enough about it. But I was so mad at myself, I was like, "You know what, you're going to stay up all night and write hate letters to yourself." I really did. I forced myself to stay awake all night and write letters about how much I hated myself. That's sad and deep. It was this pattern of you're not a man, you're not worthy. I wrapped up my entire worth in my sexuality and in my performance. Now, of course, that did wonders for my confidence moving forward. It was a great strategy that I used. Hate letters to yourself is probably the worst thing a being can do. But I did it nonetheless. Of course, I've subsequently learned from it. It's the antithesis of what you really want to do, which is love yourself fully and wholly and really embrace the totality of your sexuality beyond your engorgement and performance level.

So for a man, let's just talk about this one challenge. There's some other challenges that we can get into but this being, in my mind, the primary challenge that men encounter, and also the causal force that's preventing men from actually being present in sexuality because we're worried about how we're performing, we're concerned about different things, we're trying to prove to ourselves that we're a man in a certain way, what is something that a man can do with himself to help start to unlock and reveal and start to heal some of these deep patterns?

LAYLA: So giving yourself a container in which to address that, feel those things, do these practices, it sounds so simple, but if you were going to go... If someone was teaching you how to get fit, and they were like, "Well, you just got to lift this weight," but there was no concept of a home gym or having a workout... So for a lot of us, we just think there's masturbation and their sex. What I to encourage people to do is to actually create a sex practice, where it's 10, 15 minutes, an hour, if you want to go super pro, and you do it once a week. That's your time to actually address these pieces because if you don't have that container, when are you ever going to do it? When you are just going to casually find love for your cock or undo all of that conditioning around performance? You have to create a container. I like for people to have this idea of okay, to commit to this, I need a conscious time where I'm going to sit down and do it. From there, it's really understanding that we tend to think okay, as a man, my sexuality is just my sexuality. We don't understand all these forces that are piled on top of it. So from a very young age, scientific research has shown that infants pick up on disgust cues from parents. They won't touch a toy that a parent looks at with disgust. So so many of us started getting even body-conditioning at such a young age. Babies will masturbate in-utero. Most babies, if they try to touch their penis or their genitals, their parents will stop them. So we don't even know, sometimes, what's gotten in there. Sometimes it can be so very pre-verbal so early.

Then you're growing up... A lot of guys have shame around getting erections at the school dance, or having a fear of how exactly they're going to perform if they're not good enough. Whatever you experienced growing up, shame around masturbation... Every single time you masturbate, you are basically developing neuronal pathways in your brain that are cued emotionally and with whatever else you're experiencing at the time, that your body starts associating with the experience of sex. So when you go to do a sex practice, you're not just sitting down and dealing with your penis, you're dealing with your entire history of what's happened sexually. We're not even talking about major traumas that can happen to men or major issues like life experiences, what you're describing. Just your run of the mill experiences add up to create really intense sexual conditioning. In the nervous system, that doesn't just show up as a shadow impacting your sexuality. It literally shows up physiologically, as tension inside of your pelvis, as a disconnection from the sensations inside of your penis. There's this whole conditioned desensitization that happens that's all of these layers. So when you're talking about something like unwinding performance, it goes to the heart of can you get back to trusting your sexuality, trusting your sensations, trusting your pleasure, trusting--

AUBREY: And trusting your penis.

LAYLA: Trusting your penis, whatever it wants to do or not do? So much of that flies in the face of this sense of distrust. What happens if you don't get hard? What happens if she doesn't have an orgasm?

AUBREY: Or you come too quickly.

LAYLA: You come too quickly. There's all this shame layered around it which is so societal. I just want to say... We're going to talk about these very specific practices, but it's this heroic journey to actually sit down and be like, "I'm going to reclaim my sexuality, I'm going to unwind my addiction to performance." It's not so simple. It takes so much to even get to that point where you decide to do that. AUBREY: Yes, indeed. One of the things that I've recognised is that amount of, it's fear that becomes the thing that blocks you. What am I really afraid of? I'm afraid of myself, not necessarily the woman judging me. I'm afraid of myself judging me, because who was making me write the letters? Was she making me write the letters? Was she saying that you need to be punished for this failure? No, that was me. That was me conditioned from some things that I saw in childhood with my parents' divorce and some lyrics that I heard in songs like, "You're not fucking your woman right then I will," this type of thing like if you don't do it, somebody else is going to come in and take your love from you, because you're not performing in bed and that's the thing that matters the most, all of this stuff. So it's like, well, I'm going to teach you the way that my basketball coach taught me where if you fuck something up, you run suicides. That was me making myself run suicides. Now, it's a shitty way to coach a basketball player and it's an even shittier way to coach yourself when it comes to something that's very sensitive and needs to be done in the absence of fear.

LAYLA: Your penis is alive. Your body is alive. We have this thing of your cells are alive, how you talk to yourself. We have this compassion for our hearts. If you're sitting there yelling at your heart, what's it going to do? It's going to close up. We have this intuitive knowing but we're so disconnected from how we speak to our pussies and penises. It's this judgment, criticism, shame all the time. What's going to happen? It's going to close up and you're not going to have the deep sensitive, mind-blowing sexual experiences that you crave. Yet on the simplest level, it's how you're actually speaking to your body.

AUBREY: So what can you do? Let's say there's some men listening, I'm sure there are, that resonate with some of what I was going through when I was in my early 20s. I can talk about some of the ways that I've evolved through it, but it's been a long process, it's been a very holistic process. But what I've never done is any intentional conscious practice with my relationship with my cock. We have this arm-length trust of each other now. We've been ride-or-die homies for a long time. Bro, we've been through a lot and I respect you. We may not see eye to eye on everything but I respect you and I appreciate you. It's still not like we're one. I have not formed union with my cock. It's still like, "All right, buddy." It's like I have a wild wolf that's on a leash. And I'm like, "We're doing this today? We're going for a walk today, right? All right, we're not going to bite anybody. We're going to be cool, right? We're going to howl when we need to howl, and we're going to lay down and be nice when we need to lay down and be nice." It's this very interesting relationship. I feel even still, even though it's working but if there was tools, even now, even with all the work I've done to create this relationship with me and my wolf, there's probably some practices that I could do, because I've never done anything. Some things that I could do intentionally to be like, "Alright, let's strengthen this and let's collapse this separation so that I am my cock and my cock is me and it's not... And we talk about it like that all the time like this is the head that you think from and blah, blah, blah, collapsing that into the being one being again and being that expresses love in totality.

LAYLA: Totally. I just had the image of you and your cock riding on Harley Davidsons, or whatever the cool motorcycle is now, together and being like, "Bro," but then at one point, your cock jumps on the back and the two of you cry.

VYLANA: Oh my god.

AUBREY: He's in a sidecar. My cock is in a little sidecar? And we're like, "We're doing this." He's got his glasses on, our hair is streaming back. "You hearing a helmet today? No. All right, I get it.

VYLANA: I got balls.

AUBREY: I get it.

LAYLA: Touches me deeply. Sex practice. Boom. 15 minutes, get yourself lube, oil, whatever you want to use. The first is this intention. So it's clear that you have an intention like I want to be one with my cock. So whatever your intention is, having that, this is an intentional space for my sexuality, for my relationship with my body. Number two is what is the emotional tone I want to have. So most of the time we'll carry the emotional tone in our penis or our pussy that we just picked up along the way. So for a lot of women that's this shame or disconnection or sense that there's something wrong. It can actually be a lot of the same for men. There can be shame, there can be fear, or there can be a, "Yo, my cock's amazing." That's usually sitting on some unprocessed emotional tone. Being like, "How do I actually want to feel about my penis? Do I want to love it? Do I want to be proud of it? Do I want to feel like it's spiritual? Do I want to feel like it's powerful, do I want to feel like it's a gift?" That's really important because before you actually start touching yourself, you want to pick one or two emotional tones and pull those in, so that you are actually choosing what is my emotional relationship with this part of my body? That starts to change your emotional relationship to sex as well.

The next thing is you can actually talk to your penis. This sounds really crazy to a lot of people but it fucking works. Your penis will talk back to you in images and words and things like that. You essentially just demonstrated a conversation with your penis where you're like, "Yo, we're ride-or-die but we're still arm's length." Literally, you can say that to your penis and feel. There's going to be communication back. This really helps you as well. This helps us get out of this disconnection that we have, your body is this disconnected unanimated thing? Really, no, this is a living force inside of me. One of the most beautiful things in the tantric tradition that I've experienced over and over again is our bodies are these center points of universal energy. Your cock is representative, it's literally the transmission and the embodiment of universal penetration, spiritual awakening, alignment. When you start to relate to it, you can start to feel it not as what all of society has told you it is but how you actually feel it to be. So pussy to me is the center point of universal celebration and ecstasy. Womb is its own energy and cervix is its own energy. There's these pulsating profound energies that start to unlock. It can start with a basic conversation.

AUBREY: I can really see that. There's a deep conversation and, actually, even still, forgiveness. Because there's been so much judgment and so much, "You've really let me down this time, buddy." Not even buddy. Probably something much harsher but fuck you. I can't believe you betrayed me and so many of that but have I ever gone back and been like, "Sorry about that. We're all the same. That was unnecessary and I love you. Thank you for everything that you've offered." Really bringing that back together. I can see how that can be effective. I imagine some, like you said, some nice oil, jojoba oil or something and just with touch, with words, not in a masturbatory way that I've touched my cock many times, but then this other much more loving way like Divine Father way. All right, we're going to heal some of these things, the words, the thoughts, the things that have gone between us and start fresh and start anew.

VYLANA: It also seems like it also takes the pressure off... I think for so many people going into sex, it's with the the end game that they're like, "Okay, well, it is to come." When you're going into masturbation, it's always like you're reaching for this end game but if you're actually just presencing with yourself and listening, and tuning in, and creating the intention or the desire of what you want to feel, I can actually feel the energy of how that would shift your sexuality so significantly and probably just take all the pressure off because you're not just going for that end game anymore. You're like, "I'm going to be sexual."

LAYLA: Totally. And those animal metaphors, like you said wolf. I thought of my pussy as a literal cat, like a tiger or an actual kitten. You think if you went in, in a relationship to a wolf, if you were like, "Give me what I fucking want. I need something out of you," every single time you just went in and you're like, "I'm getting what I need from you. You better give it to me." What would that do to that wolf, to your relationship to it versus the relationship you would actually want, which is respectful, connected, loving. Yeah, I would love to have this experience with you but we're in a relationship. It's not just I'm coming in and telling you what to do for me.

AUBREY: There's also another really powerful piece about what the phallus or the yoni represents in a spiritual metaphorical way. This is the penetrating force of a man embodied in the physical form, but it is a representation of the total way in which we penetrate the world with our ideas, with our love, with our care, with everything that we have to offer. So if there's a disconnection with the physical, there's likely some disconnection with the spiritual way in which that I'm not actualizing the totality of my penetrative force, because there's a disconnect between my literal penetrative force and some way in which that relationship isn't quite right. Getting that relationship right, then will allow me to express myself in totality.

That concept is also really important, because one of the things that really was helpful for all of this performance anxiety was to realize that my sexuality wasn't condensed to my cock, that my entire body is my cock, that when I'm making love to Vylana, I'm not making love with just my penis, I'm making love with the totality of myself, with my hands, with my mouth, with my energy, with my chest, with my eyes, with my breath. Every part of me is part of the act of making love, and it's all important. The unnecessary prioritization of this one aspect, it just puts everything out of balance. When I brought that back in balance more, everything started to smooth out a lot. I can see how it's all working towards this more holistic understanding of the masculine as a penetrative force, not in a forceful way but in a way of this is what I have to offer. I'm waiting for whatever the world wants to open to me, not trying to force my way through. But what is the yoni of the world or the yoni of my woman, how deeply is it opening and how safe can they feel based on the strength that I can hold?

LAYLA: It's like when people have this sort of amorphous fear of taking plant medicine. It's often a fear of discovering their own power, their own divinity, their own oneness with the universe. Pussy and penis, are like this locus points of internal divinity, a full activation. It's not an accident that our disempowerment inside of ourselves went hand in hand with so much sexual shame, so much sexual control. So when you're facing this generalized fear of going in there, of having a conversation with your penis, it's literally also a fear of your own divinity and greatness, because that is the end point of having the deepest relationship to your sexuality.

I think what happens sometimes is people, when they're trying to be full-bodied and full-hearted, but it's not driven by connection to the penis, the sexuality doesn't fully open and flow. So that's also why, with men, with anyone, really, I recommend that they actually start with their genitals first so that that's the ground from which then the entire body and heart and everything else that you make love with comes alive.

AUBREY: It's almost if you want to change your consciousness, use the levers that are in the body. You talk to so many of the smartest people from Tony Robbins to Andrew Huberman who are like, "Alright, if you want to change something about the way you're thinking, go to your breath. Don't go to your thoughts. Go to your breath. Go to your nervous system first. Go to the physical, tangible ways, go into a cold plunge, get a hard workout, do some breathing. A lot of your thoughts are going to change on their own if you start changing your nervous system." A lot of these aspects of our spiritual becoming will change if we go to the physical and start doing that work that we can actually do with the levers that we have available that are tangible.

LAYLA: Totally. All of these luminaries in society, on the cutting edge, are talking about the nervous system in this way. We often forget that most of our major nerves actually innervate our pelvic floor, our entire sexual region. It's so important for the vagus nerves. So when we have this subtle disconnection from our sexuality, from our pelvic floor, from our genitals... I wish there was a better word for genitals. I'm trying to invent new words. I Even the pudendal nerve, it means the shame nerve in Latin, we're like... That's the major nerve that innervates the clitoris, got to change it. So anyways, when you come alive in this way, you're also activating these very rich nerve endings that are so essential for your entire nervous system. When you're subtly shutting that down with shame and fear and guilt and contraction, it's actually these core parts of your nervous system that are getting shut down. And just like we finally recognise the gut is so important for every aspect of our being, literally the way that you relate to your pussy and your penis impacts your entire nervous system and how you feel, how you relate to the world. Yes, spiritually, but also just biologically.

AUBREY: Yeah, absolutely. All right, Vy you're up. Why don't you share some of the challenges you've felt in your sexuality and then offer Layla the opportunity to talk about how to... [inaudible 25:57]

LAYLA: We have many more men's practices though. We could add just a couple more if we want because that's like...

AUBREY: Okay, yeah. Let's keep going.

VYLANA: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Go.

LAYLA: Just stop at the talking to the penis.

AUBREY: All right, let's go. Let's go.

LAYLA: Then we'll jump in. Okay, great. So from there, what I would recommend is doing a basic, what I call body meditation. Anywhere from one minute to five minutes, which is to actually scan your pelvic floor, your testicles and your penis and to describe the sensation you're feeling and where you're feeling it. What this does is it actually trains your nervous system to become very sensitized to the sensations inside of your penis, and helps you with that thing that you're talking about. That sense of separation happens because most of the time you're going out your day, and you only pay attention to your penis when something massive is going on down there versus having this every day, sensitized connected reality. What happens when you do something a body meditation, is you give more brain space to the experience of sensation inside of your penis. What that means is you become more sensitive and you're able to feel more. That's also a big part of why a lot of men aren't able to be super satisfying, if they have female partners, to women in the bedroom is because they're actually subtly desensitized. So they're having to fuck with a level of intensity and disconnection to actually feel. So you can retrain your system to actually feel more with less.

VYLANA: That feels really important for women too because when a man is very disconnected, and they're just jackhammer, bunny, sometimes that's great. But when they're disconnected, the woman feels it and it's also not very pleasurable for them to be disconnected from their own pleasure, because it can be abrasive.

LAYLA: Totally and really deep, intense, hard sex feels good when your whole body is opened. But prior to that moment, if anyone tries to massage your back and they're going super hard--

VYLANA: Whoa!

LAYLA: Exactly. That's what your body does. When a pussy does that, when a pelvic floor does that, when an anus does that, all that's left is pain or disconnection or numbness. So this idea of being able to be slow enough, sensitive enough, connected enough, the body can open and then you can be available for whatever you really desire. But if you go in too hard, too fast, the body is going to automatically contract. That's where a lot of women end up being so performative with men in the bedroom, because their bodies never got the chance to open. Once your body has contracted, it's felt unconsensual, it's felt too hard, it's felt too fast. It's very hard to unwind that again then you just feel disconnected and numb so the only thing you have available to you is performance or faking an orgasm or just getting it over with, unless you're literally; and this is so hard to do, empowered enough to be like; "Wait, my body's shut down. We need to stop and pause until I can open back up again." It's simple, a penis meditation. You're like, "Oh, and it has such a real world impact."

AUBREY: The desensitization is something that I think is universal in different ways. I think men often run into the desensitization through pornography.

VYLANA: They learning that way [inaudible 29:07]

AUBREY: The way that we're taking on sexuality is the most intense, intense energy, like through a firehose in this sexual encounter that's tapping into all kinds of different... Our own traumas and our own desire for domination and our own ego's desire to be the most powerful one and to have somebody serve us, or whatever the thing is that it's tapping into and it's just blasting, that desensitization. When you get into the actual lovemaking, you could be used to this force that's coming in. So that can make you want to force, "Whoa, whoa, this is what I'm used to." This is the neuronal pathways that I've trained within myself. I think that's a challenge that we can get into and I don't think it's probably too dissimilar to a woman that uses an ever-escalating, increasing intensity of a vibrator every day and then, all of a sudden the subtle touch of their male lovers, like, "What are you doing? Do you have something with some power that you can get here?" It's the same idea. Men don't have that for their cock, but they have it for their mind, which is the absolute extension of your cock in that way. Being mindful of desensitizing yourself? It's not to put shame upon the act of watching porn. Oh, that's bad. This is very pragmatic. This is practical.

LAYLA: Totally, let's look at the impact. What's the impact of eating white sugar? You don't have to feel ashamed about it. You don't have to feel bad, but what does it do to your body? I think we can have a realistic conversation about porn, of what is that doing, to your nervous system, to your relationship, to sexuality, over and over again. It's an important conversation for our society to have. The other thing with this body meditation, there's so much in every practice. They seem so simple and there's so much packed into it.

So that performance, we like to, as a culture, try and control our reality. Prefrontal cortex, this is how I want to feel, this is what I want to happen. I'm going to try and control my body to get me that outcome. So a lot of us insects are coming from prefrontal cortex, we're fantasizing, we're trying to make an orgasm happen. We're future-oriented. It's a beautiful part of the brain but it's also the part of the brain where very little magic happens. So if you want to experience powerful sex, rich feelings, potent orgasms, all of that happens in the deeper parts of the nervous system. We call it the reptilian brain. I like to think of it as the primal brain, the limbic system. So it's these richer, deeper parts of the nervous system that actually give us the sexual experiences that we're craving.

When we were continuously controlling our body from the cortex, we're actually numbing out those sensations, they can see that in MRI scans that they've done of people who are masturbating, that they actually will have numbed physical sensations, because controlling parts of their brain are going in and shutting down the pleasure. So something as simple as a body meditation, it shifts you out of sex coming from your cortex, into sex happening from within. It's a type of surrender and a type of trust, because you're then starting to allow your sensations to dictate what you're going to do, how you're going to move, how you're going to feel. It switches the whole thing from I'm going to perform and control sexuality to I'm going to allow sexuality through me, which can feel even more powerful. In our society, we think that control is more powerful, but actually sex coming up from within is the more powerful experience, I think most of us would agree. These very simple sexual practices are actually rewiring your nervous system in really powerful ways.

AUBREY: We'll get to this when we talk about partnership, but I think one of the beautiful things about being in this partnership with Vylana is that there's... I think, in past relationships, because of this performative element and actually... Polyamory was not particularly healthy for that aspect, because it inherently felt competitive. It was like, "Fuck, we're really in it here, you know?"

LAYLA: Must control penis harder.

AUBREY: Yeah, exactly. Because otherwise he is, whoever he is. There was this, at the moment, where you felt the engorgement start to wane, there was this, "Got to summon the most aggressive thing I can in my mind to keep this thing moving at the highest level."

VYLANA: You got to be better.

AUBREY: I had this outcome that I needed to achieve but in our lovemaking, as it unfolded, which has been very healing for both of us, as that happens, there's just no fear. If it goes all the way to retraction and we're just holding ourselves and loving each other, that's fine. I've never felt one flinch from Vy in any of those situations. So because there's no fear, the reality doesn't manifest and so I don't have to reach for these things that I conditioned through years of pornography-viewing and things. It's all right, here we are and this is what's here now. It's this sense of ease, that I'm still actually trusting more and more. It's still a process of unwinding many years of come on, here we go. Let's get ready to rumble. Come on. Yeah, yeah, exactly. She's like, "No, no, no. It's all good. We got all the time in the world to make love to each other.

LAYLA: Okay, so two more steps to this, that I would recommend. It's a complete introductory practice. The next would be, then you start touching your penis like you normally would to masturbate, but probably five times slower than you usually would. You want to slow everything down so you're really feeling. Again, you're still keeping that emotional tone there like if I wanted to feel love, if I wanted to feel reverence, I wanted to feel forgiveness, whatever it is, I'm connected to that as I start to touch my own body. As you start stroking your penis, then you're going to bring in breathwork. Again, it can be anywhere from two to five minutes of breath work, and doing a deeper, fuller breath than you usually would.

Again, a lot of these sexual practices, they've got the same intention, which is your going to take down cortical control. So when you touch your penis most of the time, because I do it all the time, but this is... I know from touching my own pussy, so I'm going to extrapolate in talking to, whatever, tens of thousands men. When you go to touch your penis, when you start bringing in that breath work, and you're going to breathe as though you could breathe into your testicles, into your penis, into your pelvic floor, into your anus, what happens is it collapses your everyday sense of being able to control your sexuality, and it collapses the inclination, the very conditioned inclination to think about your sexuality. So to either fantasize or to start thinking about orgasm, or to feel your pleasure, and then just push your pleasure towards something.

What happens when you're breathing that is you can't control in the same way becasuse that kind of breath work is literally silencing your cortex. What happens is it allows the sensational limbic responses to become stronger. You actually feel them more. So what will happen, in that case, is, on a spectrum, from feeling more pleasure, feeling more intensity, feeling more turn on, or it can actually be feeling the unfelt things. So when you start breathing, you might feel shame, you might feel the sense that you need to control, you might feel the numbness, you might have a memory float up of a past sexual experience. So what you're doing is instead of going down and being, "Okay, penis, this is what's going to happen," you're basically saying, "I'm here"--

AUBREY: It's a conversation.

LAYLA: It's a conversation. And what's here? What's here now? You're training your body and your sexuality to be less controlled, and to actually show you what's there. This is where when we say, throw out a word like sexual healing, this is where you actually make the space for something that to happen. It literally can happen. Yes, you can do super-intensive sexual healing. But even just that five minutes, you'd be surprised how much your body will allow. It's almost the body's always wanting to heal, but we don't let that natural inclination--

AUBREY: 100%.

VYLANA: Until it's like things are awful. Then we're like, "Oh no, I'm desperate. Now I got to do it."

LAYLA: Exactly. So you're basically saying to your body, "Here's the space. Show me what's unfelt," just like that Carl Jung quote, the unfelt things, if you don't feel them, they'll end up controlling you, you'll call it your destiny. It's the same thing with your sexuality. All the unfelt things in your body and your sexuality, they'll end up dictating who you are as a sexual being, who your partner ends up being, what kind of relationship you navigate, unless you have the courage to feel them. Once you start feeling them, it's not about getting rid of them or feeling shame that you have them. But then you start to have a choice. Because then it's not suddenly controlling your sexual experience anymore. You can actually get underneath the conditioning. Then that's where you have the ability to choose. From what I hear of what you're experiencing with Vylana, you've gone deep enough now that you have the choice between the, "I'm going to just go in there and perform," or the sense of I'm going to fucking connect and feel what's here and be in it. Again, it's not about the performance is wrong or we can never do that, or it's shameful. But it's giving yourself the choice neurologically. You don't get that choice until you feel those pieces and then train yourself through things like meditation and breath work to get underneath them. Then that's literally where you're sitting deep enough in your nervous system to feel that there even is a choice, let alone make one sexually.

VYLANA: Instead of just running a programme that's like, "Here's this pattern again on."

AUBREY: That's the deepest bliss of sexual union is when the mind is completely out of the way and you don't have to fantasize about anything, you're just right there in the moment. It occurs to me that it feels like a level of sexual mastery would be able to take that process all the way through a climax by yourself without actually getting into the fantasy patterns. It's something that seems almost impossible because I've had a whole lifetime of, no matter where I'm masturbating, it could be in the dark by myself, but nonetheless, the mind is still running something else to stimulate me. So it's external images and thoughts disconnected from my sensation, which I'm creating. In the merger, I can get ejaculation in this way, and it's not even about the ejaculation, but it feels if you could do that, without reaching to your fantasies and get to the point where you can actually reach full sexual ecstasy, that would be incredibly powerful and then it translates so well. It's definitely easier with a partner but it seems if you could do that with yourself, then wow, that would be powerful.

LAYLA: Totally. That's one of the challenges in our courses that we have is we actually have people do 30 days of no fantasizing, while they are self-pleasuring to literally build that neural pathway. If you never do that, your brain likes to do what it's always done. It likes the easy trigger points. So it's just like, "Great. Fantasy, let's do it." When you take the time to actually build that. at first, your brain and body are going to be like, "Hell no!" Whenever I invite people to do this, they're like, "What the fuck?" They're like, "No way, am I ever going to be able to orgasm by just touching myself and not thinking about fucking." I'm like, "No, no, no. Trust me, trust me. It's going to feel real bad at first. It's like quitting sugar. A person would be like, "Oh, my God, how?" Two or three weeks into it, you're like, "Oh shit, there's a whole new way of being." I literally challenge people to do that. They make that leap. What's amazing is because your inner relationship reflects the outer relationship. So when you can have that level of intimacy with your own sensation and your own body, then you can look into someone else's eyes and be that connected as well. So there's nothing wrong with sexual fantasies, I still love to use them in some of my self-pleasuring. I had to train myself out of ever using them with a partner. I don't really using them with a partner anymore. But in the sexual fantasizing, I was like, "It's a form of dissociation." When I sexually-fantasize, I check out of what's going on to my body, I go somewhere else so there must be something that I don't want to feel. There must be something that I'm missing. I've done this with a good number of my fantasies. But when I used to be addicted to fantasizing with my partner right before, I couldn't have an orgasm without having a fantasy with a partner in sex. I was like, "What is the trigger point that's happening? I literally went down into my pussy, I was like, "We're not going to fantasise, I'm going to feel what the fuck is happening right now." As I went in, it a legion of priests because I was raised Catholic. I was like, "What's underneath the priest." I went in and it was lust, that raw, primal, female lust that's like so, "No, no, no, eternity in hell." And I was like, "What?" I've been fantasizing to avoid my own lust. When I stopped the fantasy... I had to retrain myself so when I'd start to want to fantasize, I'd be, "No, no, no. Go in. Find the lust. Find the lust." What would happen is I would get that activation of wild female primal, animalistic lust. I was like, "Wow. I was trading out that experience, that raw, beautiful, divine experience for a fantasy? What did I miss with my partner?" So it's so powerful when we retrain ourselves of what's underneath the fantasies? What could we have if we had that level of intimacy with our own body?

AUBREY: Yeah. That's great. Homework.

LAYLA: Homework. All right, so the last step in this practice for a man is then so you're turning yourself on, you're breathing on, you're feeling things. If you feel shame, guilt, fear, sadness, story, anything else coming up, attend to it with love. So that would be more of the sexual healing path. I love myself, I love this, I'm going to allow it, I'm going to feel it. It's a process of feeling the unfelt things. Don't go into a big story around it. Stay in your body. Love your penis, love the experience that's happening and, slowly, over time, this unravels it and it allows you to stop being controlled by whatever got conditioned in there in a very simple way. This is the most simple practice. The other option is you go into pleasure, you're starting to get turned on. Again, I would recommend this practice, not fantasizing and instead using your breath to pull the pleasure from your penis into your heart, to do that for at least 21 breaths. This is so powerful because one of the core pains of the masculine is this disconnection between heart and penis. That's where you get jackrabbit sex or totally fantasizing. You feel it, as a woman, in your body when that disconnection is there, and it hurts. it hurts in a man's body too but he usually won't feel that until he gets the first connection then he realizes what was lost and not having that in the first place.

So what happens when you breathe that pleasure up to your heart is that you'll then actually be forming that connection so the two will start to work in tandem and your heart will come online when you're having sex a lot more often. Then after that, you can just touch yourself to pleasure, or touch yourself to orgasm or climax, if you want. What happens is that you've then shifted things in your nervous system, and you'll experience often climax or ejaculation or orgasm, they can all be separate experiences in a different way. That's what's also allowing your body to repattern itself after this practice into a new way of orgasming or coming. AUBREY: I have the image of, in "Avatar" when they make tsaheylu, which is the bond between the animal and the avatar person, the Na'vi people. It seems like at that point, when that connection is made, then they're one. They become one with the animal that they're riding, whether it's the dragon or Toruk Makto or whoever, whatever it is, but it's me and the wolf, all of a sudden having tsaheylu. My heart and the wolf, my heart and my penis, forming that bond, and all of a sudden, we're together and we're one. Separate but the same. The power of that, when that actually happens. That's what creates that most powerful state.

LAYLA: I want to clarify for the men listening, because I think sometimes we think my heart's in it so then it has to be always sappy sex--

VYLANA: Lovemaking, slow kissing and eye-gazing--

LAYLA: Or really slow, we're playing "Boyz II Men", or whatever situation. It's actually the opposite. It's like you can do anything when you have the penis-heart connection. The difference is, a lot of the time, any woman who's sensitive, receptive, connected to herself, she's not going to want most of what you do if it's just penis. When heart and penis are connected, that's when she wants anything. There's actually this primal freedom that starts unlocking. That's when the wild feels so much better, to the feminine. A guy just fucking in a disconnected way with just his penis. it's cool, it's okay. As soon as you start opening and connecting to your body, you're like, "Wow, I only want his wildest, craziest, dirtiest everything when he's got that connection," because when his heart's there--

VYLANA: You feel safe.

LAYLA: Exactly. So it's actually a key to greater wildness with your lovers, even though it feels not intuitive because it's through the heart.

AUBREY: Interestingly, from my own experience, the most I've felt that unity of self has been in power exchange play, even with former partners, because at that point, it's all I am is one wolf, and everything is aligned, this state where your brains in flow state or transient hypofrontality or these other states of consciousness where everything is just unified, and it's just the rapture of the moment, but it's required that intensity for me to get there often except in maybe rare occasions, and now frequently with Vylana where there can be both. There can be that wildness that draws in and allows the mind to set back and my whole heart is in some deep primal sexual expression. That was always the thing that I reached for it because what I was really craving? I was craving hat point of dissolution of separation. I was craving being one entity, one being. That would only express when it was in the most primal state. Then when it wasn't, even if that wasn't what the situation was really asking for then I was a little bit more disjointed. I had enough sensitivity and intuition to know this is not where we're going today. But nonetheless, it was more mechanical almost, because I couldn't form the connection in the softness. I could only form the connection when the full beast came alive. I think my partners could feel that and so they would actually crave that aspect of me, maybe not so much because that was their fantasy. I'm sure it was, in many cases. That is an exciting place to be but nonetheless, I think what they were really craving and what I was really craving was the unified self making love to them. And if that required some power-exchange dynamic, okay, then we're going to go there because that's when all of Aubrey as one being is making love to me or fucking me. Really interesting to make all of these connections about alright, what have I done? How has it worked? How has it worked with myself? But I've never practiced that with myself, not a single time ever, not once. I would bet that the majority of the men listening are like, "Yeah, me too." I've never had that experience by myself. Ryan, have you ever had that experience by yourself?

VYLANA: Are you sure? Mimi is going to be so grateful.

LAYLA: The heart's the first stage and then you connect the third eye, and then you connect the whole body. So it's this multistage process to get all the way into that unified field, in a sexual state.

VYLANA: And then it feels... I just would love to reiterate from the feminine perspective how safe that feels to go deep into all the different realms of expression, which can be dominant-submissive, and all the ways or it to feel safe if we feel you fully online and fully connected. It gives us the permission to go deeper. It's like wow, how extraordinary can sex be when I feel safe enough to do all these wild, primal things and let that part of me live? For sure.

LAYLA: It's so sad what has happened in this heavy conditioning of masculine sexuality, and this deep disconnection of penis from the rest of the body, from unity of consciousness, from heart, then what happens is women end up mirroring that in a heterosexual partnership with their own performance, shut down, disconnected, feeling unsafe.

VYLANA: That's what I was going to talk about. So I guess I can segue into, if you're complete there, into my own... I've actually had a lot of processing that's happened for me since we have come together. A lot of it's been really beautiful healing of wow, I'm really being loved for the first time in our sexual expression, like I've never been loved before feelings in sex. Then there's also these other elements that I've been sort of unraveling fairly recently.

AUBREY: Just to stay with that, so people understand, you felt that you've been loved, and then fucked, but those were separate expressions?

VYLANA: Very separate. It didn't feel like they had ever merged. In my mind, I didn't know the difference. So I always felt this is my partner that I'm with when we have sex. It feels good but I didn't really understand what being made love to meant until we were intimate, because I cried hysterically. I can't believe I've been in my life this long and never actually felt this love and surrender. There was grief in that. There was also a celebration like wow, I made it and I'm so grateful to be experiencing this. But it was a very intense moment for me, of having that recognition.

AUBREY: It's not like I'm sex Jesus either. I haven't even done any of the basic steps here as well.

VYLANA: It was a feeling that I am safe with this person, because I really truly feel their deep love and honor and reverence for me. I think that's the big thing that I've been unpacking for some time is a lot of my former choices, with myself, my own levels of discernment where I've transgressed myself is there wasn't this honor and reverence for my own body and the way that I allowed for men to be in my body. I've done a lot of ceremonies to unwind a lot of this so that I could reclaim my full sexual expression because I still feel it's like I'm... I'll just say it. Our sex is wild and extraordinary and fricking amazing. I can also feel it's there's this part of myself that I'm tuning into that feels like I'm not even fully there yet. There are still parts that I am unwinding that I shut down in shame of myself, because of how I've participated in very toxic sexuality. I had one relationship in particular that was very just... I'll just call it toxic. It was that tension, push and pull... I literally can't stand you but then we have makeup sex and it feels so exciting. It's the intense separation and chaos, but then coming back together in some union, it was the thing that was feeding the relationship, was this toxic sexuality. That relationship, there was a lot of betrayal and a lot of dishonesty. I think because I participated in that way with being so drawn to very toxic sexuality, I feel I can tune into my body and feel like I think there's still some aspect of me that's a little bit shut down because my body, my Yoni doesn't trust me. I've been through ceremonies where, Ayahuasca and other ceremonies, where I've had to really be with, really go deep into how I have been with former partners and people that weren't my partners and all these ways that I... There was no sacredness in sex whatsoever. There were elements of being performative. There were the toxic draws and all these different things that I've actually felt my body as its own entity, feeling unsafe with me and my discernment, and my choices.

A lot of what you were saying prior to this, and even with the practices that you were offering for the masculine, for the feminine, which I can imagine, that they could be things that are really similar to what you offered for the masculine like how to fully reclaim and be in my authority and reclaim my sexuality. Already, being in this partnership, I've explored things I never thought possible in ways that I get excited and turned on, and all these novel things that I'm getting to experience that are so exciting, and deep lovemaking. The expression has been all over the place, but I still feel like I'm not fully... I know that there's even more. I would love... I think for a lot of women, because they aren't honoring of themselves, they're not loving themselves in a way that they have boundaries to be like, "No, this isn't healthy for me, this isn't right for me. I'm not just going to do it because you want me to or because that's how I feel maybe you'll like me," all those stories. For women who feel dissociated from their own pleasure, or who feel performative... It feels like the scientific formula for going into sex is okay, well, I have to come because then they're going to come but I think, for a lot of women, they think, well, I got to do it or fake it, because then he's got to do it. That's what sex is. It's fully disconnected. I've definitely, in my past, felt that way, following that very toxic relationship where I think I just began to dissociate from my own pleasure. So for women who feel dissociated from their yoni and the power of it and the honoring of it, and the reverence for it, how do we reclaim our sexuality to be in its full expression?

LAYLA: I’m so happy you asked!

VYLANA: Orgasms for everyone! Y'all made me sweat.

LAYLA: It's such a similar process. One of the things I love about these conversations is asking you to break it down into this very granular, no, but really, how would you, car mechanic style, what do you want me to do to my pussy? I'll just say, on the biggest level, I've spent 18 years creating that body of work for women and men, but with a deep passion for women, just having a crystal egg practice, a jade egg practice, having a sex magic practice, having your own pleasure practice, so important. I love what you've just articulated so much of it. You can have a partner who's so in love with you, you're having the most amazing sex and still there's these pieces that are about your relationship to yourself, my relationship to my past, my relationship to my pussy. Again, that individual practice is so important alongside a couple's practice or just on your own if you don't have a partner, because then you're still upgrading your sexuality along the way so you're a better match to someone with a more upgraded sexuality.

VYLANA: That's an important... Let that sit for a second. If you're doing the work to upgrade your own sexuality and your intimacy with yourself, you're a vibrational match for better sexuality with others. That's really, really important to check.

LAYLA: So important, yes. And so important to really claim that when you're single, when you don't have a partner or even within partnership. I've worked with partners who have been together like 15 years and they'll take 30 days to do their own practice, to find themselves again after 15 years, to really do their own work and then come back as a different match. We tend to think, when we're out in the dating world, okay, I'm waiting for a partner to open my sexuality versus what am I doing in my own body to connect to my pussy to connect to my heart, to uplevel my entire sexuality so that's what I can say yes to in the future. So, so important. For women, it's so many things. What's fascinating is we could basically walk through the exact same process. Having a 15-minute pleasure practice. I really love for women to use something a crystal egg, which is an egg-shaped, it can be borosilicate glass, it can be jade, as long as it's a body-safe material or I actually really recommend that women, if they're in heterosexual partnerships, use a body-safe dildo when they self pleasure, because this is the... If we were talking about vibrators earlier, stimulating your body and creating those neural pathways in a way that you are then unable to receive pleasure with a partner usually, something like self-pleasuring with a dildo actually mirrors the experience with a partner. So you're creating those pathways of learning how to be orgasmic through penetration, learning how to be orgasmic with a penis inside of you, learning how to be orgasmic deep inside of your vagina versus just using your external clitoris. It's thinking very consciously about every single time I touch myself, what am I creating in my body and doing that, again, "How do I want to feel towards my pussy?" It's so normal... The first time I looked at my pussy in the mirror, I was like, "Monstrosity." I was like... I was horrified. It was crazy. I was like, "How does anyone find that attractive?" Then I was like, "Oh my god, we got to work on this." This is how a lot of women feel when they look at them. They're like, "It smells weird. It looks weird. Who could ever want it?" No, straight dudes want pussy. They actually find it very sexy.

VYLANA: He thinks it's beautiful.

AUBREY: I do.

VYLANA: It's very healing.

LAYLA: Totally. What emotional tone? Because even that simplicity of wow, looking at my vulva, what actually comes up? Is it fear? Is it shame? Is it something needs to be different? Is it it's not good enough? All of that. Is that I smell weird? What is the actual feeling? And again, just having a relationship to an actual cat. I like thinking of it as a kitten because I'm like, "How would I treat a kitten?" Would I be like, "You're fucked up? You look weird. There's something wrong with you. You smell!"

VYLANA: I'd be like, "Aw."

LAYLA: But I'd be like, "Come here, baby." Yeah. She hears you. She is you so she's responsive to that relationship. So what emotional tone do I want to feel? How do I go in there without emotional tone? I'm committing to a new relationship. A lot of women feel that sorrow that you described in not having felt it before. I call that the Ocean of Sadness. I have not yet come across a person that didn't, at some point, hit the Ocean of Sadness. For women, it's what's been lost in us doing that to ourselves? What's been lost in not having boundaries and toxic choices, and forgetting the magic and beauty of our own pussies? When you feel what's really there, you also can grieve with loss for yourself, and then the whole fucking planet. Feeling that, so important. I think sometimes we go a little bit down the journey. If you haven't done that level of work, all of a sudden, you just want to sob in sex. It can be like, "I'm doing something wrong," versus, "No, you're doing something right." Finding the Ocean of Sadness, because it means that you're starting to know that you deserve differently, and that we all deserve differently, and that there was ever a choice.

AUBREY: Let's, just for people who don't understand what you do with the Jade egg or how you use a dildo differently than how the men have been using their penis on you, if you've been in unconscious sexual experiences, what is it, from just a really mechanical standpoint? What are you actually doing? Where do you put the egg? What do you do? How do you use the dildo?

LAYLA: Right, so you put the egg in your vagina.

AUBREY: I got that part. But some people might be like, "I dont know. What do you do here? Do you wrap around it?”

LAYLA: Did we know? No, we don't know. You'd be surprised. In the anus? I'm like, "No, no, no." You can literally go all the way up into your body. Do not do that. You must always have a base in anything that you put up your anus.

VYLANA: That's good to know.

AUBREY: Lessons. Fucking guideline.

LAYLA: A crystal egg, again, it can be made of many different types of materials. Jade is the traditional one in the Taoist tradition. But as long as it's body-safe, you put it up your vagina. What's so cool about it is it's a practice, where people are like, "Oh, do kegels." When are you going to ever do kegels unless you actually have a thing that you go and do that you're connected to. You can think of a crystal egg like having a yoga mat. If someone was like, "You know what? You should do downward dog, you should do pranayama," but there wasn't a place to go and do it, when would you ever do it? When would you just be casual like, "Oh, shit, I'm going to do my pranayama now." We as humans, we need something to connect to as this is my practice. So what I love about the crystal eggs is they are a practice that you're like, "I'm going to put this egg inside my vagina. Now I'm going to do pelvic-floor strengthening work, I'm going to do emotional release work, I'm going to do sexual healing." You can think of it as having a yoga practice for your vagina, where you're literally breathing into the egg. There's all kinds of different practices. I can give you an example of one. It's called, 123 Bliss. It's a Taoist practice. You put the egg inside your vagina, and you squeeze your pelvic floor and you release, and you squeeze your pelvic floor and you release. One of the few scientifically proven ways to have a better orgasm is to have a stronger pelvic floor. But also you can have a relaxed pelvic floor. So you're not just trying to build strength, because you'll get tightness. You want strength and relaxation at the same time. Then you can actually squeeze around the egg and release. Squeeze around the egg and release. Then you go up and you focus right around your cervical area and you squeeze above, and you actually move the pleasure up through into your heart. So you're learning to turn your vagina into a pleasure channel that shoots pleasure into your heart. This is also how, if you've heard, giving him a handjob with your vagina, this is how you would train yourself to do such a thing. Again, you're not going to be sitting around just being, "I'm going to learn how to give a handjob with my vagina." You need practice. The crystal egg gives you this practice of wow.

Again, you can see how these sexual experiences we crave, we can work on them, riding a penis on top and you want that full body release. So you do a practice like that, like 123 Bliss with the egg inside and you're like, "Okay, I can squeeze my pelvic floor, I can squeeze deep inside my vagina. I'm training myself to have pleasure and sensitivity in these areas so I'm actually orgasmic in my cervical area," which a lot of women have if they don't train themselves to do that, they have compacted psychosomatic tension from fear, shame, guilt, trauma, too hard of penetration before they are ready. Slowly, over time, the cervical area contracts and creates pain. So that's why the cervix is often thought of as a painful area for most women. But when you do work to release that tension and pain, just getting a really good deep tissue massage, and then your body is open and your body starts to feel pleasurable instead of painful, you can do the same thing through sexual physiology. So then you're squeezing at the top of the egg and you're learning to shoot that pleasure into your heart and in your third eye, so when you're actually making love, it's like you're training your body to take the pleasure into all these areas. That creates that full body experience. So that's just one tiny practice that you would do with a crystal egg. There's a whole methodology behind it that's so incredible. But even that one practice, you can see how that would train you to have deeper, better, more powerful sex.

AUBREY: I used the metaphor of the wolf for my penis or the other little guy in the sidecar.

VYLANA: I'm a kitten.

AUBREY: It seems like there's a way in which, from a functional standpoint, a lot of women have thought about their sexuality, their pussy, their attraction is this almost spiderweb. I'm going to catch, I'm going to catch a man, I'm going to catch a man's attention with this thing. If I give him this thing, it'll trap them, it'll trap them in the web, because I'll hook into his pleasure. It's this very reductionist functional standpoint, instead of this is a living, breathing honey hive, birthing hive of God, that's here. Of course, if someone gets access to this, this is a sacred place, this is a very special thing that I'm offering. It's not just a trap. It's not just a web that's going to capture something and get what I want, what my mind wants which may be love, which may be safety, which may be desire, which may be validation, which may be all of these things I'm going to use this to get something. That'd be like using a part of you instead of being in relationship with it and honoring that part of you.

LAYLA: We can only really understand why women do that by understanding what patriarchy did to them, which is, instead of having a supportive tribe, a fully intact family, people who raise your child with you, for thousand of years, for most of us, it was like your entire survival, your children's survival, you having any access to wealth, any access to power is all through a man. And the moment you don't have a man in society... You couldn't even have a checking account on your own in the United States without your husband sign off in the 1970s in certain places. It's just hard to understand what that kind of experience will do to a woman. So instead of feeling like my sexuality is my own... Our grandmothers didn't have that privilege 100 years ago. They were like, "My husband can't leave me at all costs." To unwind that is to also come back into our sovereignty as women of my god, I'm sitting on this ocean of gems and everlasting abundant gold. And to know that, it's so important to have that connection to our own magnificence because if you don't have that, how can you sustain such an incredible partnership? The terror of losing it becomes too strong and true love is terrifying--

VYLANA: So fear-based.

LAYLA: So having that internal relationship to your own sexuality actually helps you have a more powerful partnership because when you're trying to track from a spiderweb, it's how can you then have this elevated, magnificent relationship? It's fine to have the spiderweb because I think relationships include everything. I come across so many women that are terrified of letting go of that trapping mentality and claiming their own power, because they're like, "Oh, I'll be alone. Someone won't be attracted to me." Versus when you have that pillar of your own radiance, that's actually when... We all know that falling in love is terrifying and having really incredible partnership is terrifying. You can withstand that terror and choose the love when you have that relationship to self and sexuality and beauty.

VYLANA: And you have the magnetism to attract what it is you actually want.

LAYLA: Totally.

VYLANA: I love that you mentioned that just about the collective healing that's happening too. If any one of us has that level of healing, that's in the collective pie. That's how things start to shift but it starts with every one of us.

AUBREY: There's this interesting dynamic, which is mirrored in all of nature, it's Red Queen effect, women using their sexuality as a spider web men, get excellent at disentangling themselves from spider webs and preventing themselves from getting stuck. Then you get even stronger spider webs and even stronger jailbreakers. The thing's like, "Uh-uh, I'm not going to get trapped. In that paradigm, it's actually just creating more and more of the same, but it's never going to actually work. You're just breeding a better, a better escape artist from the thing that you're trying to do. So you get a better spider web, and then you get a better escape artist, and then you're in this constant chase, but you're never actually finding the real fulfillment or healing.

VYLANA: Healing anything, yeah. That's an important... I could see what you're saying as potentially being maybe triggering for women or maybe not, maybe I'm totally off. However--

LAYLA: I felt a little triggered.

VYLANA: Yeah. I could see that. And I know you so I know it comes from the most loving place, but it also is, really important to reflect on, of being in integrity with self, of what am I doing here? Am I being true to me? That's that level of discernment and boundary where how he's describing it is actually what I was doing because I wanted to feel love. So I was opening myself to penetration into a person to come into my energy field in my body, because I wanted to feel love, all the conditioning that we have as women, ancestral and just collective conditioning for so long, that's patterned. So if I actually had that as a tool as much as at first, I was, "Oh, wow, that's an interesting thing to say." If I could actually look at it like that, it's actually really helpful. Am I using my yoni as a spider web right now or am I loving it and being in tune with it like a kitten?

AUBREY: And as a man, am I using this letting out my heart and showing some sign of love as a way to gain access to the yoni? This is the same spider mentality of, "Oh, I love you, baby. Now, all right. Great. Now you're going to give me access to your pussy, right?" These are these things that we may not even realize that we're doing but we're driven towards this. I think that's a very common toxic expression of the masculine. It could happen that a man's like, "Look at this dick. This is the thing. I know you want this dick." But that's another joke. It's like that Paul Rudd joke. It doesn't happen.

VYLANA: Pop a piece of this dick up in your vag.

AUBREY: We all use ways to use our sexuality or use some aspect of ourselves to get sexuality but all of this is a form of usury rather than union. It's not any judgment. We've all participated in all aspects of this in every way possible. Sometimes it's love. Sometimes it's financial support. Sometimes it's leverage. All of this is a big part of the toxicity that enshrouds it, when really, this is something of two empowered people coming together union for union sake. That's the highest articulation, but I think it's helpful to be mindful of alright, we've all stepped in places where we're in a usury standpoint.

LAYLA: Totally. And just where you give up. For me, one of the things that I really looked at this entire year is where have I given up and betrayed myself time and time again, in relationship or with sexuality because I desperately wanted love or to be chosen or to be good enough? What do I make more important than my own sovereignty and my own truth? It's like when we say oh my god, self love is so important. But it really is that thing of I love myself so much that I will get out of the lie: dishonoring myself, truly gets me what I want. It's more important to sit in self-honor then trust that that comes in a real way, rather than play in that field. That's such a process, I'm still in that process of being like oh shit, "I self abandoned again. I wanted love or I wanted..." Literally, for me, it's being chosen or not being abandoned and wanting to be... Instead of remembering how sovereign and how whole and how beautiful I am, I'm like, "Okay, I'll just give up. I'll give up whatever felt sacred or important to me and trade it." For me, it's having the honesty with myself of where do I trade my truth because I feel something's more important than my own truth.

AUBREY: I think we talked about it a little bit beforehand but this other aspect of the deep fear that has been in the male mind around an empowered woman's sexuality. This has been something that men have been terrified of because the ability to access these deeper states of consciousness and magic... We used the word magic and I'm sure we'll get into it. It's been something that's terrified men, men who are disconnected from their heart, disconnected from all of that feminine aspect of sensation, and all of these things that we're talking about. They're like, "No, no, let's, let's cut that out. Let's condense the feminine to some propertization." This is some form of property. This is a mindset for so long and so actively repressed. There's this beautiful, now, awakening and reclaiming of that. But it still takes a man with the courage to look into that immense power and be like, "Whoa," and really honor it and revere it.

LAYLA: And don't you think... Maybe, this is just my feeling about it. But you know when you're in total poverty mentality, and you want to do something big, and you look at someone with $100 million who's really successful, if you're really repressing it in yourself, all you really want to do is stop them or make them play small so you don't have to face the pain of every choice you ever made? I feel like there's the story of men are afraid of these powerful women but aren't they just afraid of their own divine magnificence? This is what I've seen in sacred sexuality. It's slightly easier in the beginning for women to open into that. There's a lot of shame and conditioning and all of that, but for a woman to be like, "Holy shit, I'm full of sexual magic and full body-orgasm, this is a pillar to the divine and my pussy is the goddess! Wow!" I'd say give me three hours and we'll get there. With a man, it's give me three months to get all the way there, not every man. But there's this process of really getting in there. The magnificence is the same. The power is the same. It's its own power. But I almost feel sometimes that men have bought into that same lie of two-dimensional sexuality; watching porn...

I have this tantric mentor I love, Ernest Morrow. He says, "Turning the ocean of a woman into a swimming pool," or the solarity a man into a glow lamp. I'll stay small, but you have to stay small with me because otherwise it's going to trigger all of these bargains that I made that I didn't really want to make. I didn't even know I made them. So sometimes I feel like a man staring into the sexual magnificence of a powerful woman and we haven't trained him to be she is an invitation into my fucking greatness if I would let her be. Instead, they're like, "Oh, she's going to eat me." Bitch, we don't want eat you. We want to be on a planet full of kings. Sometimes we don't give women enough credit. They're like, "All those angry feminists." I'm like, "Do you know what we've been through?" And we're like, "Water under the bridge, my friend." We just want to do our work. We want you to be magnificent. We want us to be magnificent. We all just want to grow together. Couple thousands of trauma and pain, let's all just turn into our divine selves. That's what awakened women really want. I feel this story of fear as well. Wow, she's just the goddess inviting you into your power but it's trading out that small story, that attachment to being a glow lamp, because you can control a glow lamp and being like, "Holy shit, I was always the uncontrollable sun."

AUBREY: Yeah, absolutely. To be with that, you really have to be willing to almost humble yourself to where you're at and just not try to control it and not have to always be in control. This is something that... Anything that men have done to women, they've also done to themselves. The place that we're all trying to get to is a place where both of us, both men and women are using each other as springboards to the Divine articulation. When we're making anybody small, we're making ourselves small, because we're demanding it, we're not having that other equal force that can actually bring us into this. So the patriarchy has been as costly to men in many psycho-spiritual emotional ways, as it has been to women. Women have just borne the brunt of it, in very particular, vicious ways, and many times, and sometimes very violent ways that men haven't had to deal with. But the psychological trauma of this mindset runs deep in all of us.

LAYLA: Totally, totally. When I've seen porn and seen the way that women are treated, I literally just want to be like, "Do you know what it would mean if you knew she was a fucking goddess? Do you know what that would do for you, who you would get to be, what we would all get to be? Yeah, it's for her but it's for you just as much." I'm reminded of I had a tantric teacher who would talk about when we would learn how to do energy orgasm practices, the whole audience could sit in a woman's awakening into her full ecstatic, full-blown body orgasm, when a man would start to crack, the level of sorrow and pain, people couldn't be with it. It's so fascinating to me that, yeah, for the last few 1,000 years, totally would have rather been a man, hands down. I don't care. We're both fucked up inside, but I'd still rather have social-economic political power and be the one in control, 100%. Now, with all of this freedom, It's so delightful. It's so freaking delightful to be a woman. There is something to that of this pain body that's being carried. We've all gone there and I think it's so... It's just not being shared how sexually magnificent and divine men really are and can be, that they have this full spectrum beauty to their sexuality that is just as rich as a woman's. We have to get there together because, we don't want to be a whole bunch of goddesses and high priestess just being like... And there's just a whole bunch of unconscious, still in his trauma, pain. We want to do this together.

AUBREY: Going back to going back to pornography, or any utilisation of sexuality for a purpose, it's really, really challenging to actually use your sexuality in that way. You can see that same type of thing, I'm going to put on this performative act in the most degrading way to myself, because it's going to get me a higher dollar amount for this particular thing, or it's going to get me booked on more. It's this condensation of that energy of use this for this purpose thing. It's got to be deeply, deeply challenging. I think it's something you can see in an exotic dancer. It's not necessarily the dancing on the pole, but it's the lap dances. I've known dancers, and I've had partners who were former dancers. That was where the the pain was that I'm giving you something because I want this thing from you in return, rather than let's celebrate this together. It's not any judgement on that path. We've all, as I said, we've all been our own porn stars, and we've all been our own dancers in our own different ways, using whatever we have to get what we want in the world. There cannot be... If you start to judge at any point, just stop, because you're not looking deeply enough in yourself to see where you've done the exact same shit in a different way. So leaving all that aside, but just recognising, and then making a choice. Do we want to participate in this energetically or do we want to not participate in it? Not with judgement, but with lack of participation and love and a hand that says, anytime you're ready, here's another path?

LAYLA: Yeah, and if there's an Ocean of Sadness in men that I've often seen, it's wow, I turned a goddess into a dehumanized object for my own egoic satisfaction, because I lied to myself and told myself that I was just an ego, rather than the divine as well. There's an Ocean of Sadness there that I feel our culture is just starting to touch.

AUBREY: Yeah. It runs deep in both. So okay, so you get into a partnership, you come with all of these challenges. You come with all these things. Now, we have a good roadmap for the self practices alone. But you get in partnership and now a whole new world opens up. Vylana and I have seen this, how we've been able to really heal each other in very deep ways, and also have amazing adventures and transcendental states that have emerged from our sexual exploration. So what are some of the things that, first of all, let's talk about the challenges, I think, in relationship, challenges that people seem to have most commonly. I'll offer one challenge. I think one challenge is that when you have this very reduced form of sexuality, then you need novelty to spring you into excitement, which springs you into presence; which is I think why novelty is so exciting it's because you're present. When you're on a date with somebody new, you don't look at your phone, you don't think about... So if you're into it, you're fucking into it, and you're there. Presence is magic itself but you're using novelty as this crude instrument to bring you into this state. I think there's virtue to all different paths, monogamy, poly, all of these different things but the novelty, it's effective, but it's a crude instrument that requires constant re-updating of that thing, because novelty ultimately gives way to taking something for granted. I think there has to be deeper ways. I know there are because we're exploring them, but deeper ways to create this hierogamy, as Jamie Wheal said, where you're actually in a partnership and actually creating new forms of novelty in new, different levels. I think that sense of monotony, that sense of this is just all fizzled out, I think that's the beast that a lot of people face in relationship and then the solution being, allright, maybe we'll go poly, and then just use novelty and continually spin novelty. It's effective, but it's a very difficult path and it also just keeps you stuck in a loop using the most crude instrument to get you to where you want to go, which is presence.

LAYLA: I love that. I think it's super relevant. I see two big challenges for, especially, long-term couples. The first is, when sex is, as we've articulated, almost this two-dimensional you-got-to-come; I-got-to-come, hopefully, around the same time; hopefully, quick enough, hopefully, in exactly the right order of the way things are supposed to happen, how many times are you going to do that before you're like, "This is as boring shit."

VYLANA: It's like watching "Forrest Gump" for every single day for forever.

LAYLA: Totally. And a lot of that comes from this, "Yeah, sex is like A plus B equals pleasure then equals coming at the same time. It's so reductionist. So when you open into tantric sexuality, sacred sexuality, and it becomes so much more of what we've been discussing, you can access higher states of consciousness. It's taking plant medicine, but it's in your sexual activity. That's endlessly fascinating. It's so engaging.

VYLANA: What's that? I can never remember the hyperfrontal... What is it called?

AUBREY: Transient hypofrontality.

VYLANA: Yeah, that is real. I think you should explain that because that's an exciting...

AUBREY: Well, Layla can probably explain it but there's been clinical studies that when you're in a dominant-submissive role, the dominant gets in a classic flow state. So [inaudible 1:31:14] classic flow state of really locked into presence, alpha frequencies and your brainwaves and all of the neurochemical cocktails. For the submissive, they actually enter a slightly different state called transient hypofrontality. So temporarily, you're getting less blood and less focus on the prefrontal cortex, which is the part that's thinking, the part that tracks time. So you enter this state of deep timelessness where you're just in like, "Where am I? What time is it? What is going... Whoa! I'm on another planet."

VYLANA: And it's shutting off, like what you were saying earlier, it's shutting off all those elements of needing to control or fantasize, where you're so present in the moment and then it literally feels like being high afterwards. It's like, "Well, I'm not going anywhere, because I feel very high and very relaxed, and very present."

LAYLA: We could do that forever. Sign me up. Of course, I could do that every day and never get tired of it. What's happening is it's literally compression in your sexual experience, but it's compression in your nervous system. Actually, with the way we're conditioned in sex, we're pushing ourselves into the prefrontal cortex, away from that state by being do I look perfect enough? Am I going to come fast enough? Do I smell okay? Am I performing? All of this conditioning is shoving us straight into the judging critical, discerning part of our minds, which is the opposite of presence, or that deep state of beingness, the reduction, the hypo, I don't know the word...

AUBREY: Transient hypofrontality.

LAYLA: Transient hypofrontality. That's what I basically been training people to do for a long time. I'm so happy there's a word for it.

VYLANA: I can never remember it, but it's awesome. I'm like, "I'm doing that thing again. What's is it called?"

AUBREY: Maybe because every time you're there...

LAYLA: Do that thing again. It's so good.

AUBREY: Because every time you are there, you don't have access to words.

LAYLA: Exactly. Which is what you're craving. It's like wow, those kinds of experiences, if we're cultivating that as a couple, well, that's something you can engage in with a lifetime over a lifetime, just like meditation, just like yoga. And yeah, your practice ebbs and flows. You'll still go through cycles, as a couple, of how much desire you have, how much sex you're having, but you can stay engaged, because you're essentially doing something that can engage you for a lifetime. Anything that's simple and formulaic, everybody gets bored of. The other way that we're really compressing sex into two-dimensional reality by making it only about climax or only about this egoic satisfaction of okay are we having enough sex to stay together? A fear-based experience. And again, I love how you always bring in so much compassion and understanding, like how we've done all of this, all of us so there's no shame in it, just really understanding what it can do to our relationships. In that compressing, we forget sexual healing. We forget the rich dimension of emotionality. We forget that when we get out of prefrontalcortical control, we wake up archetypal reality. So that's when there's all these states of play with the force of fire, the force of dominance, the force of submission, the force of goddess consciousness. Playing in those realms is so fascinating. You can see how, of course, couples are bored with sex. So that's one thing and the other thing is that I really do feel that intimate long term partnership is designed to take you home to yourself, which means that things are going to come up and if you don't see your partnership as a healing container, in which to resolve and address that which keeps you from your truth, your spiritual awakening coming home to yourself, and is specifically designed to show you your blocks to intimacy, your childhood issues, things like that, what will happen is you'll subtly... Because so many of us are carrying this idea relationship should be just happily ever after, magical all the time, happy all the time. So if you're not looking at your relationship is a container that's designed to wake you up and take you home and willing to see those arising pieces that are there to teach you, the most natural thing to do is be like, "I'm not supposed to be feeling miserable right now or my intimacy blocks or depressed," or whatever it is that's coming up, shut down, shut down, shut down and what happens is we numb out to our partner, because we don't actually understand the natural alchemy of two people is to bring each other home. If we're not understanding that, and instead, we're carrying the mentality of this should just feel good all the time, I should just feel in love all the time... Love looks everything, Not just a warm, fuzzy feeling in every moment. When we're doing that to our partnerships, the only thing to do is to numb out to the healing experience that wants to happen between us. You could think of it as an awakening experience because it's not just taking you to the pain. It's also trying to take you to ecstasy, or trying to take you home to yourself. In partnership, when there's that awareness, partnership has the capacity to keep going and getting deeper and deeper and deeper and more generative.

AUBREY: There's a problem with our stories too. I mean, everybody has the story that ends with, challenge, challenge, challenge, obstacle, obstacle, obstacle, and then union. "Desire plus obstacles equals passion," I forget who said that. There's this obstacle, Romeo and Juliet, obstacle; one's a Montegue, one's a Capulet, she's in this tower and you have to fight the things and get the tower. Obstacle, and there's all this passion and they get together and then all the bells ring and all the medieval confetti comes down, or whatever rice it is, or whatever it is. Then all of a sudden, it's all good. But then what happens after happily ever after. The movie ends and the story ends there. They made it.

LAYLA: [inaudible 1:37:12] 14.

AUBREY: Yeah, exactly. This idea that you make it and once you make it, it's supposed to be all good. nobody ever tells the rest of the story. But that's just the beginning. Congratulations, you made it. Great. But then all right, what is the consciousness that needs to come in? What is the story? And then what are the tools? What are the things that we actually do? This is the part that I've really had the hardest time with, a lot of the conventional relationship, talking voices out there, they'll say things put like put on a wig, pretend that you're the janitor. How long is that going to work? Oh, you're staying late at the school house. I was just going to come clean the desks. Sure, have fun. Do a roleplay but is that going to really--

LAYLA: It works approximately once. Then you're like, "I'm bored with the janitor. Do you know."

AUBREY: It doesn't have the substance. It's hollow. It's doing some empty ceremony in church where you're like, "I do the thing and we do the thing and we say the thing, but we don't feel anything." And it's not a bridge to God, it's just doing the damn thing, mixing it up. Sure, I don't mind a wig. Role playing can be fun. This whole thing is great. But it doesn't have the power. It doesn't have the power to create the desired result that you're looking for. What I appreciate about someone like yourself, or someone Jamie Wheal who just wrote "Recapture the Rapture," is alright, here's some tools. And these are going a little deeper, and these are some things that are a little bit more interesting that actually have the power to create this type of hierogamy, to try to create this union where there is no boredom and you don't need... The novelty is created internally within the construct of your relationships through the practices that you have rather than just continually reaching for the next shiny object.

LAYLA: In a way, it's like learning to meditate because if you sit by yourself, and you don't meditate or you're brand new to it, it's boring as shit and you're constantly looking for novelty, and you just don't want to sit there. So there's this form of when you learn to be with yourself, it becomes indescribable. You're not bored anymore, you're there. There's a similar quality to relationships because we've been given so many stories about relationships are supposed to be who we are supposed to be. Again, it lacks that quality of being able to sit in relationship in such a way that it becomes endlessly fascinating. That doesn't mean that it has to last forever. But it means if that is true, then it could right and still be fascinating. The other thing that I... I was exploring really deeply. Do you know the Pre/Trans Fallacy, Ken Wilber's work? This is the thing that I came to: we have the happily ever after story in relationships, we're just like... "You found the prince. Congratulations! Go make babies and you're going to be happy forever." But then we also have the marriage is awful and everyone hates each other.

VYLANA: Or you have to compromise.

LAYLA: Or you have to work super hard all the time. As I was navigating my own long-term relationship, I was like, "But surely, surely, there's something other than this, right?" Happily ever after isn't true but then you just have to slog it through and do the hard work the rest of your life and yeah, be in the meditation retreat, where you're just making it work thing. What I was looking at, I was like, "There's something else that I don't feel our culture has articulated. A lot of relationship guidance is actually, in my experience, more at the point of marriage is hell. You got to learn good communication, you got to buy the wigs, you got to do the work. I'm glad someone's at least saying that to people because--

VYLANA: That's the teaching point is coming with that assumption.

LAYLA: And you do have to do the work. In a fully juvenile state, people are like, "Oh, I'm going to get into a relationship, it's going to be amazing. No, you're going to either have done so much work on your own and bring that to the relationship, or you're going to do work together, probably some mix of both right? And not that your relationship is supposed to be some sort of therapy session constantly. But we know that to really be in it, you have to show up for the process. The thing that I was looking at is we lost the what is that soulful, mystical communion that you two experience. We don't even have a real articulation for that in our culture. We don't even have a language for it to describe it. Then there's also this huge suspicion of the honeymoon period. You get this amazing cocktail of hormones, and then you're going to hate each other in like eight months--

VYLANA: It keeps getting better and better.

LAYLA: With the couples I know that have this magical soul communion, it does get better. But nobody really talks about that. So I was like, "What the hell is that?" What's going on? So the thing that I was exploring in myself is... So Ken Wilber has this theory. He taught it about spirituality. It's controversial, but called the Pre/Trans Fallacy. We're basically early-stage spirituality, which is magical thinking, and I'll buy a couple of crystals, and then I'll become a millionaire. All of that can look certain... Energy is real... It can look very magical, but there's a certain consciousness that's not there in it. So then you do the work, you do the meditation, you do all the retreats, you really get into it. Let's say in the pre state, you're pretty freewheeling and expressed because everything's magical and then you get really serious in that the middle state, and you're doing all the work and you're doing the integration and then you wake up, and you're like, "Holy shit, the universe is full of magic!" Maybe this crystal... You're not in magical thinking anymore but you're connected to the beauty of the universe and you're pretty freewheeling. So it's this idea that a pre state can look very similar to a trans state on the outside, but the consciousness of the person is different. It can be similar to the emotions of a child, just expressing all over. Then you have to learn to integrate your emotions, be in harmony with them, give them a safe space, and then you can actually become a very emotionally-expressed person. So I can look like a child sometimes in my anger, in my bliss, in my joy for life, but the integration is there. So I'm not lashing out at someone for stealing my toy, but I can healthily express my anger. The pre-state looks like the trans but the consciousness makes the difference. The thing that I was looking at is what if the honeymoon state isn't all bullshit? What if the seed is there in that recognition, in that cosmic seeing of each other? And my love coach, Annie Lalla who I have so much respect for... Basically, when you first find each other in that state, that seed is there. The possibility is there for the blossoming of the truest love. It can be illusory. Some people feel that experience and you're like, "That was a toxic narcissist. Nevermind." But sometimes that state is pointing to something so real. However, my belief is because in our culture, we have lacked the level of work that's required to sustain it, and to actually realize it into its fullest form... I feel you two found your way there by doing a tremendous amount of personal work ahead of time and really getting to that ability where you could take that sacred falling in love state and actually allow it, through the power of your integration and work, to realize into its highest possibility. The trance state of being deep really in love, two years, five years, 10 years on can look similar to the pre state of falling in love. But the pre state is before you've done the work, integrated. Sometimes it falls apart, sometimes it doesn't. But to have that middle state to be able to sustain it, I just love that because then there's this... I've just seen how much there's this dismissal almost like true love doesn't exist.

VYLANA: Oh, it's just the honeymoon phase. Who are you to speak on anything you've been together for this long...

LAYLA: That thing is real. But what do we have to do and who do we have to become to have the blessing of realizing that in the everyday?

AUBREY: It seems what we're talking about is the crude instrument of novelty will create the presence that we're actually seeking. But eventually, the crude instrument fails. That which got you to the place will not get you to where you're going. Then you have to start employing some more subtle tools and some different practices to be able to maintain that state of presence and that state of rapture. But that toolkit isn't taught so everybody just looks at the aggregate. You can look at the limerence phase, and you have words for it. You can look at Dr. Wednesday Martin's work and watch how sexual interest declines. Then in the aggregate for women, it falls off a cliff. And for men, it's a steady decline. Then you get the old timers at the wedding saying marriage is about compromise, it's about commitment, and it's about [inaudible 1:46:29] their heart's not in it but it's alright, this is how do you make a business partnership work not about how you sustain that vibrant, vivacious, honeysuckle of joy with your partner? The tools, we're not aware of them. We don't know what's possible, we haven't told the story that it's possible. People haven't seen that it's possible, and people don't know the way and they don't know the story. That's what I think we're all trying to rewrite here, alright, yeah. The novelty thing will fade, that won't work. But if you layer in a bunch of other stuff, you can get back to the similar state, but it's going to be even better, because it's going to be deeper and it's going to contain that deep commitment and love that you have for each other and how well you know each other and get you to even higher states, because you've surrendered more, you've opened more, you found out more of your totality of your essence, and you're bringing all that to the table, rather than the fraction of you that you are bringing to the table and using novelty to get you to this transcendent state.

LAYLA: The trans state includes tears and sex, but if you don't know that, then you stop yourself ahead of time. We're all here reporting from the frontlines. I was out in the dark by myself, lost at the edges of the universe knows and I was like, "What the fuck is going on? Why can no one tell me? Trying to figure out what's possible.

AUBREY: One of the things that is an instrument that I think is not for everybody, nothing is for everybody. We're not being prescriptive. I think the idea here is here's tools...

LAYLA: Let's be honest, breathing into your pussy, not everybody. Comes with a warning sign.

AUBREY: I think one of the tools that it's captured the imagination very clearly, look at "Fifty Shades of Grey", power exchange dynamics have captured the imagination of people. It works. You can look at all of these statistics to show that it's one of the reliable ways, if you're willing; it's not for everybody. But it goes so deep if you're willing to go there. There's also challenges and there's also pitfalls, but you have to really embrace this with this totality of we're on a journey together. Just if you go into an ayahuasca ceremony together, you can't say, alright, we're only going for this outcome. Maybe at a certain point, there's going to be something that comes up. And at that point, you better stop the sex and be in this loving embrace and heal whatever is coming. You have to be ready for everything that might come up and just take this as Alright, we're going into the ceremony together. I'm going to explore dominance, you're going to explore submission. It could be either one of us. Doesn't have to be male or female that's doing this but we're going to go here and see what's on the other side of it. Sometimes it's going to yield this transient hypofrontality bliss state where you're both, "Whoa, where did we go?" That was amazing. Holy shit. Wow! Sometimes it's going to be stopping intercourse and just holding each other and then crying and feeling something. But I think that's also what needs to be told. It's not all just excitements and floggers.

LAYLA: My rope's too tight.

AUBREY: Exactly. And there's the art of it. There's the art and the subtlety of it, and watching what's coming up and watching yourself, watching your partner, as well as completely surrendering and letting go. It's this balance of really, really learning and exploring. But to know that it's a a portal that goes deep, deep, deep--

VYLANA: Super deep.

AUBREY: And how deep do you want to explore? How many offshoots do you want to take? But that becomes exciting because then you're on an adventure together.

LAYLA: Totally.

AUBREY: And in that place it's like, sweet, let's go on this adventure.

VYLANA: I do think there's also some level of, advisory, I would say, potentially beginning with some of the practices that you've talked about, because if somebody is really disconnected, that's where things can get a little squirrely. I think the reason we've been able to go so deep with each other is because he's so in tune with me. It's like any micro thing that might happen, he can feel if I'm fully with it, and we push the table or if I'm starting to retract a little bit because something... We've had a variety of experiences where I've had repressed memories of being sexually violated. Just certain things have triggered things that have risen and then he was able to just love me and hold space for me and then there's also been the expression of just absolute full surrender to just the most wild crazy, we're going on this fucking roller coaster. Let's go! it's been all of it. But I think for the masculine, and I can only speak to my own experience, because I'm a woman, feeling really safe and like the person feels you, is really in tune with you, is so important. Just wanted to name that. Yeah.

AUBREY: Absolutely. And this whole portal is just one portal. There's many other portals. I would throw the question back to you. Feel free to comment on that particular portal, but also talk about some other portals that have this type of depth that can be explored. This is just one one type of portal. But I can see, as you look out into your sexual union, it's portals everywhere, it's whoa.

LAYLA: Meta portals and meta portal, all the way into the meta portal.

AUBREY: Fractal portals, all the way down.

LAYLA: I just saw like a giant universal vagina with fractal portal, all the way down. Please, some sort of visionary artists make that piece of art. Andrew Jones, looking at you.

VYLANA: I would love just to name one thing, just in this realm, just from our personal experience of my own level of healing in this space. I've actually, prior to being in this relationship, never felt comfortable with physical pain. I was actually incredibly sensitive to physical pain. When we began on this journey together, there was this moment where I could feel how the physical discomfort from flogger felt like punishment because of that association from my childhood. I get spanked, I'm getting punished. I craved from him feeling loved after that moment. And he was in tune with me and showed up that way. I could feel this moment where the physical pain switched, in my psyche, to actually excitement and turn on. It was this very subtle thing that happened where it was one moment I felt a little bit intense, this is feeling like punishment to oh my god, this is exciting. It actually felt like it was healing stuff in my psyche, in that experience. So there's so many... Would love for you to expand but, for me, there's been so many different levels of healing for getting to journey into these things that I have repressed and have the masculine really be able to love me and support me and hold space for that. Also, just rewiring, like you've been talking about, what's going on in your nervous system and in your brain, just rewiring patterns for a different sexual expression.

LAYLA: Totally. I think the kink space, the BDSM space, one of the reasons I feel like it's so powerful is because it's so intentional about holding a space and entering into a particular state while also finding edges. That is a portal. And I actually trained couples in kink training, whether they identify with that or want to explore that or not, because the concept of having a shared intention, and then working towards it together through the embodied presence of a partner and the willing surrender of another, that's the portal, right? Whether you're playing with pain or ropes or pleasure. This idea of...

AUBREY: Or words.

LAYLA: Or words, yeah. How can I hold you in such a way that you become the portal, your experience itself becomes the portal? It sounds really advanced and meta, but it becomes so much more clear in something like the BDSM space where it's deeply studied, and there's this whole tradition. Yes, I believe it's one of them more profound portals. And part of it to me though, is because people are giving sexuality the structure that it's always deserved. How many of us think how deep can I take my partner in this moment to wherever it is that they want to go? What is your edge? Is it an ecstatic edge? Is it a pain edge? Is it a submission edge? What's your edge and how do we interact together such that, I am taking you to your edges? As opposed to what, all these other ways that we've been discussing. Some of those portals since you asked, and I the question, for me are, energy. The more that sex becomes less physical and more energetic, when you hear an eight-hour orgasm, that's all knowing how to use the portal of energy, because energy is infinite. My clitoris is limited, energy is infinite.So if you're drawn to energy, the way that you can work with it, the way that you can penetrate with it, the way that you can surrender into it is very a potent portal. Consciousness. We all know that that's a portal but the way that you use it in, you can be so in the sensation of your penis that you are... What that does, that's its own rabbit hole. It's so powerful, all these different portals that we can find. I find there's an archetypal portal of, basically, in Jungian psychology, you go deeper and deeper and deeper, then there's universal archetypes that show up. You can do that in sex. So it's like sex becomes this portal to the embodiment of all the unfelt things which are both spectacular and empowering and ecstatic and blissful and horrifying. What does it look to be in the portal of the demonic embodiment. There's so much that you can play with in sex and so many different types of portals.

AUBREY: Portals on portals.

LAYLA: So many portals.

VYLANA: [inaudible1:57:43] I just want to name that I really loved when you were like, "Or words." I couldn't hold it. I couldn't hold it in.

LAYLA: Sex Jesus, who can use the word portal. I was actually thinking your men's sexuality course should be called Sex Jesus.

VYLANA: Sex Jesus.

LAYLA: Vylana, at the beginning was like, "Aubrey, maybe you should teach men because you're so amazing at this." And Sex Jesus is clearly the name of your online offering.

VYLANA: Your course.

AUBREY: Talking about words, it's really interesting, because, it's come up in different sitcoms and things, talking dirty and the challenge of it. You use the words and but you listen. It's a conversation. What is this word? What's the feedback from the word, what is the feedback from this concept that we're bringing in into the container and what is the response? You start using the right words, and then you start to see a response, and then you take a risk. What about this word? What about this idea? And they're like, "Whoa! That word worked. That idea worked." Or you try this one and they're like, "Too far. Too far." That word didn't work. Noted. Noted. Wrong time, wrong delivery. There's this creativity to it. That's another aspect that keeps things interesting is the creativity of it. I think salsa dancing, for example, can get really boring when you only have the same move. Okay, here's the step, here's the step. But you watch a really good dancer, and there's infinite creativity. There are just all of these different things that they're exploring, even though they're sticking to a basic step. That idea of being creative is another really beautiful element, or surfing or whatever. It's how are you going to cut the way, what's the move that you're going to make? How is the next way that you're going to find in? And that creativity of it is also really exciting and interesting, and whether that's a new ways to use a rope or whether that's a new way to use your words or a new way to use common objects around the hotel room that you're staying in, whatever it is--

VYLANA: God, he's so crafty. He'll use--

LAYLA: [inaudible 2:00:04] Espresso rabbit. You moved too far into the portal.

VYLANA: He'll use a bath robe. He gets so creative, I'm like, "Wow. All right."

AUBREY: That's part of this exploring together. And there's this really interesting aspect of it but you have to be in an agreement where, alright, we're here to create and explore and play. And I'm not always going to be right. Sometimes we're going to make a mistake.

LAYLA: Making a mistake, it sounds so simple but so many of us are so frozen in sexuality because what if I fuck up? I'm here to perform and to get this outcome. So what if I do something stupid or my lover doesn't like it or it totally turns them off? The courage to say the wrong word is huge.

VYLANA: Yeah.

AUBREY: Yeah, for sure. So we've talked about some of these different. Is there anything else that you want to add as some of the tools that couples can use? We've talked about energy, we've talked about power exchange and kink? Are there any other tools that you want to cover before we go to the third level of this, which is, after you've really worked on self mastery, worked on mastery within your union? And then other things that you can add to the container? But is there anything you want to add to this level, the middle level of just partnership?

LAYLA: So just to simplify, because there's so much... There's so much it's so amazing and endless. But you can take a lot of what we've already discussed and bring it into partnership. So I'll have partners do a shared body meditation, which makes them feel safe to be in their sensations together, because even just, we've talked a lot about safety, there can be such a conditioned sense of I'm not safe to just feel what I feel inside. So you can do body meditations together. Breath work together is super powerful, even just doing five minutes of breathing into your genitals before you have sex, or five minutes of breathing into your heart. It's so simple and it can drastically change the way that you experience lovemaking. Even being conscious of the emotional tone that you bring into lovemaking with each other, then also, if you're doing your individual practices, that alone brings so much into the container then there's sex magic, I think it's one of the most potent experiences for a couple to engage in because it completely revolutionizes how you experience your sexual energy and the generative quality of what your sexuality can do together. It's a very powerful manifestation practice.

AUBREY: So explain that to people a little bit. I think we covered it a bit in our first podcast, and I've talked about it on a few different podcasts, but just the cursory overview because sex magic is a whole other deep portal that we go on. But for people who are like, "What the hell are they talking about?"

LAYLA: Such a good portal. Sex magic is built on the premise that your sexual energy is a type of power. So you turn yourself on and you take that power and energy, your turn-on, essentially, and you spin it through each of the chakras. So you go through the seven chakras and you're spinning it through your body. You basically have an intention, if you're on your own, or shared intention as a couple. When you get to the crown chakra, you shoot that energy out, which can be a peak experience of pleasure or can be an orgasm into the universe. And you visualize your intention and five senses reality. One of the reasons it's so powerful is that most of the time when we're thinking oh, I want to manifest something, we're doing affirmations or we're thinking about it a lot, which again, it's engaging your prefrontal cortex; it's the most superficial part of your mind. If you want a powerful manifestation, you generally want to combine three things; you want a very powerful visualization. So I do whatever it is that you're creating, you do it in five senses reality, so your whole system is engaged in the visualization of the manifestation that you're creating and very sensory at the same time. You also want the deepest parts of your nervous system and your mind in alignment with the manifestation. The unconscious, the primal mind, whatever you want to call it, that's the one with the real power to be looking at your environment and picking up cues of where you can actually be creating and having opportunities as well. You can want something but if you're terrified of it, and your nervous system doesn't think you'll survive it, you're never going to get it. So what's so cool is in the tantric tradition, one of the reasons that you activate the seven chakras is to bring your entire nervous system and body online. So in the sex magic practice, you're actually bringing your whole unconscious into the practice. So it's essentially listening because you're bringing your body with you and your whole energy system with you before you do the manifestation. And the last thing that you need is a high energy state, so being in a high state of pleasure. You've just done all this energy work, and now you're having an orgasm. It's basically manifestation on steroids.

AUBREY: Yes. All right. So we're going to close down this middle world. We're going to go take a bathroom break, and then we're going to talk about expanding or the adventurous, for the truly adventurous. And we're back.

VYLANA: And we're back!

AUBREY: And we're back. So the third chapter of this podcast is about, all right, so you've done the work individually, you've done the work in your union, you've explored some things and you're like, "Alright, now let's see what's available if we open the container to include other people, and there's many ways that you can explore that. But I guess the way to start is, when is the time? What are some of the good reasons to explore this? What is the why, first of all? We started with the challenges we're trying to overcome, personally and in relationship. I think there are some deep challenges. Maybe there's challenges that opening a container to include other people can help you overcome. I suppose we could start with that, because some are coming to mind. Some of these include jealousy issues. This is an amazing way to really have to sit with your jealousy, your possessiveness, your fear that somebody is going to be better than you in some way, your fear that you're going to lose love. This is something that gets ingrained in all of us on certain levels. I think this is something that, if you wanted to share, that you've really had to think about and realize how deeply this has impacted your life because of your own history and partnership.

VYLANA: Yeah, it's definitely a really, really deep one for me, a feeling, and I'm still getting there, of just knowing that it's safe to trust and love. So recently, we've been having these very beautiful, open conversations around deepening our sexuality and all these other elements. My programming has always been that, at some point, it doesn't matter if it's great or not great, at some point, there comes a time where there's another person, and that person is a level of threat to me, and my own protective mechanisms over myself is to be better, wanting to be the one that's chosen, all this stuff. So what's been happening for me recently, is I've been experiencing this trigger that will happen, that is my body's knowing, over the tiniest little things, things that I actually consciously don't even feel triggered by it all. But my body is having this energetic, adrenaline response to something and I'm having two full experience it in different ways. So on the one level, I'm feeling my body's memory that's alarm, alarm alarm, what this looks, watch out, you're about to get obliterated again. Here's this thing.

Then there's my knowing in my heart that's like it's so not that at all. I see this programming, I see this patterning, so I'm having both of these experiences, and I could feel, my desire for myself, and in this partnership, is to be feel fully free. My former partnership we had danced in the realm of polyamory and all being intimate with each other. I can feel this part of my body that feels afraid of sensuality with women, because that equaled a lot of pain for me. If I open myself to being sensual, as I was; this is sharing a lot, but sexual with a woman; that equals a lot of pain for me down the road. So don't do that. I have all these things that are happening. This is where he wanted me to go? But I could feel in this container of love and potential exploration, which we've only just been talking about. What I desire for myself is the liberation of that fear, is the reclamation and the establishment that I no longer have to live by that story. We've been deepening our love and this container has been the most safe thing that I've ever experienced. Still, that little voice that's like, "Watch out," I've noticed more recently is pinpointing little tiny things really wonderfully, I think, because this container is so safe, I'm so able to track it. It's not like it consumes me and I'm like, "What the hell's happening?" I'm just, "Wow, my body is feeling this crazy turmoil and my knowing is that's not what's happening." But I can feel that I'm in this space of bridging those two places and learning how to, for my nervous system, to just feel fully safe, and liberated from the story that I literally lived in my entire life of being in relationship to the masculine. I don't know where you wanted to go with that. But that's what's been really present for me. I know as ayahuasca showed me, going into the fear, is the way that I liberate myself. That means feeling the truth of what our relationship is, and just the deep knowing that I'm so safe in that exploration.

AUBREY: There's a great liberation in that but liberation is only one reason, I think, to do it. Then I think, on the other side, we were able to feel it, because we both understand that, we understand how important it is to be free and this is part of our own personal work, we're contracted around this thing? Alright, well, let's do the work to become free, because that's what we really want to be. That's our divine expression is radical freedom. But to really understand that on the other side of that freedom, is the opening and the possibility for just increased ecstasy. I think, in a recent MDMA-assisted little ceremony that we had together before she went off to Hawaii, Vylana started tapping into the ecstasy that was possible, on the other side of that, with connection with a woman or in these different expanded containers, knowing that our bond is infallible. Nothing is going to interfere with that, so it's a deep trust and deep safety and being free of all the fear and all of those, but then also realizing that, oh, and on the other side of this fear, and on the other side of this contraction is absolute bliss, is another divine being offering their divine codes into this thing and creating even more of a cosmic portal, that's possible. I guess the problem that we've been, it's both things. One is the problem of being contracted. this is a way to solve it, but also the gift of what can come on the other side of it. I suppose that's a place that also many people might be finding, they might be constricted by this thing. There may be nothing going on but it's that one look that someone gave, or this person who's a friend or this, a conversation with an ex or whatever and it's creating this massive contraction, which is then influencing their ability to be in union together. So this is a way to just push with love, stretch the limits, and then see if there's some real ecstasy on the other side that's available.

LAYLA: Yeah, I love that.

VYLANA: We just went deep. Okay, world, you know exactly where we're at.

AUBREY: Well, that is kind of our way.

VYLANA: Here you go.

LAYLA: I'll follow you down.

VYLANA: I love you, mom. I know you'll be okay with it.

LAYLA: I think you bring up an interesting point about opening things up. I do think that some people open things up because they're not fully satisfied, because they're things they don't want to look at, because of the desire for novelty. There's nothing wrong with that. If that's the highest bliss available to them in that moment, who cares? People are hiding in monogamy too so who cares if people hide in polyamory? That's up to them to decide how they want to live and what's going to work for them. I have seen, and it was part of my own experience and growth with Andrew, that in a level of trust and depth of bond and depth of knowing, there is this way that the openness feeds and fuels your connection. Your connection is the sacred center point. Those other touch points end up fueling, healing, rocketing to ecstasy. So Andrew was behind, we were always... It's funny, I always used to say monogamish and I thought that just meant hey, we can make out with people sometimes or play with energy. Then I was like, "Oh, shit," The actual Dan Savage braver version is we can fuck other people. I guess that was telling the whole world I was way more open than I was in those early years without even realizing it. When Andrew was like, "I want to experience orgies and threesomes and stuff like that," I was super triggered. I was, "Just go do it on your own." I was like, "Go fly it at some New York situation. Far be it for me to deny you an orgy before you die but I don't want to be a part of it."

Then we went really, really deep and found a new level of connection in our partnership. I was like, "What are you doing, Layla? You're going to be on your deathbed one day. Did you want to get in to the center of the front door or do you not, for you? Not the story of what he wants, not the story of what the world wants. What do you want more than anything else?" I was like, "I'm gonna roll up my sleeves and shove the fuck in for me." I wholeheartedly started to embrace that experience. It was interesting, because I had identified as bisexual in college, I dated a few women and then I like, "Maybe I'm more straight than I thought. I don't know. Put it to rest. Then I think, really, truly, because I didn't know what to do with a pussy, and I become Layla Martin in the world, I was like, [inaudible 2:16:07] if I don't know what to do with pussy. I was like, "Layla, just speak it. Just get over it. This is very simple." So me and Andrew did a play experience, and there was this gorgeous tantrika. She was so amazing. I not only made love with her, but fell madly in love with her and I was like, "Oh, this is part of my sexuality and it's not for a man and it's not for anybody else. It's something so sacred and eternal and true in me. I take this back." That was so healing for me and so powerful." There was something... As I continue to explore, there is a connection that I have with women, that is unlike what I can do with a man.

VYLANA: I can speak to this because I've experienced it a couple times. It's a beautiful thing to be tuned in with a woman in a very sensual or sexual way where I understand so much why men love making love or fucking or having sex with women. It's a beautiful thing. I don't personally just look at a woman and be like, "I want to bang her." I don't feel that at all. But there's this beautiful... There's something to it that's just so different, that I have so much reverence and appreciation for and I think there's some level of my own, desire for exploration with that, just purely for because it's for me.

LAYLA: Totally, and it's been so co-opted. You make out with your girlfriends in college, in the bar so the guys can watch or whatever--

VYLANA: It's always for the masculine or it's what they want so I'm going to do it, that's how it started for me, but ended up being beautiful in its own way.

LAYLA: It's funny how everything can get so flipped on its head. I feel, as women, we've been conditioned to be jealous, to see each other as competitors. Also, in that reality before, where my husband is my only ticket to survival on this planet, for sure, every other woman is my enemy. For sure, that's competition. Who knows about what's in there in the chimpanzee brains of us as well? Who knows what's conditioning, what's primal, we can't even really tell. One of the things that I've really found in this is energetic, devotional, sexy, ecstatic reverence with women is I'm just wow, how different the planet would be if we let ourselves have that? I truly believe that it can go all the way to liking full sex but there's also just an energetic sensuality that's so easy with women that I feel is so much more of the natural state. That we're so--

VYLANA: We're so uptight, because we're in competition. That was the space I was in, in my last partnership. We were in a three-way situation. It was. That's where I think that that programming comes for me is I've experienced this really beautiful thing and also, it's not safe because we were in competition. So there's there's so many layers of unwinding for me in my psyche and programming, but there is this... I would love to just feel so relaxed in my fullest expression of sex. I'm sensual and sexual by... I mean, we all are. I feel that in myself and I'd love to liberate that expression so that I feel I'm being my truest sense of myself.

LAYLA: Yeah. Well, I just see too, the thing, when I'm talking to you, is you're such a luminous sexual being. I don't feel that there's anything wrong in you. I just feel like you're so open to being all of it that yeah, you bump up in the places where you're not yet letting yourself be all of that which you desire but the underlying thing is actually the desire to be all of it. So when you're talking to me, I don't see you as someone with problems or issues, I see you as someone who's this expansive supernova into this world of being that's so inspiring to feel and to recognize. I remember me on my sexual journey, because sexual abuse and Catholic and good girl, and all of the things... I was just like, "This is part of it!" My expansion shows me all of those pieces so as you're articulating these things, they just have this reverence for you to be so expanded, that you're in such a discovery process of all of this. It's so brave. And just like you were saying, the more of us that are doing it on the planet, the more it just activates the potential for everyone.

VYLANA: Yeah. And also, I feel so safe. It's incredible and such a blessing to be so safe, truly, truly safe. The level of healing that I've had just through love, rather than suffering has been immense.

AUBREY: For me, in this journey, I've had threesomes and different things, but it was always, at the start, it was always just me and other women. I had this idea, this construct that there's the alpha lion, and then fights all rivals to the death, the alpha boy. Itt was this idea that I got from other men and from a misrepresentation of nature itself. It was actually at a point where I didn't even want my first partner, Caitlyn, to even show her nipples. She could do anything, she wanted to dance, however she wanted to... But nipples. Nipples is where the line is crossed.

VYLANA: Meanwhile... Later on... There's going to be 10 girls up in this bed.

AUBREY: The hypocrisy of that was intense. But there was this construct that I had. Then I read Chris Ryan's, work, and I was like, "Fuck, I had it all wrong. This is the wrong idea. It needs to be absolutely egalitarian. We both must be able to explore what we want to explore." And then entered into the polyamory journey with Whitney, we explored all that, deeply challenging, deeply liberating. But there was a beauty of... Occasionally, in different situations, there would be another man present, but there was always another man not present. It was actually easier when the other man was present because the imagination was far worse than what the actuality was. I always came back to this thing: it's worse than you hope, but not as bad as you fear, what's happening. Maybe you hope it's just very soft, gentle lovemaking that happens quickly. Well, it's probably not that, but you're probably afraid that it's this massive porno shoot of the most insane thing that you've ever seen ever, and that's what you're afraid of. But reality is just reality. It's just two people engaging in however they're engaging. There was a real liberation from my natural competitiveness, even though some of that was there but being able to work through that, even though it wasn't frequent, every once in a while, working through that was really helpful for me to get beyond that. So as we approach this, all right, I feel I've experienced it, I've gotten past a lot of the jealousy and things and it's not like I'm over it. It's not, "Oh yeah, I'm all good." I definitely don't have that impulse in me that gets excited. I never did about the thought of somebody making love to my partner or fucking them. It never triggered that button a lot of people have where it's like, "Oh, that's hot." I didn't have that thing. I wish I did. That would have made it easier. But it was a deep acceptance of that thing. So there's less about a contraction that I'm trying to overcome and more about all right, what is possible if we do this in a truly conscious way? I don't think anything's ever happened before. 2:00 a.m. You know what I mean? It was always after plenty of drinks, maybe some other substances and whatever else. It was just, "All right, we're doing this... Here we go!" But to really consciously curate an experience of there's intentionality behind this... I think there's this idea that it's just going to magically happen. All of a sudden, we're all going to be hanging out and we're going to be sober, hanging out, and then all of a sudden, we're all just going to to start hooking up. It's just not reality. To do this the right way, it feels there's an intentionality that needs to come. I mean it's not that there's a wrong way. I don't regret anything that I've experienced. It was the way that I learned and it was the way I experienced--

VYLANA: You did it well. You did it well.

AUBREY: It was a beautiful time. But I think what's interesting to me is real intentionality behind it. Let's talk about it and let's go into this experience with an idea of what we're looking to explore and what we're looking to get. The question is really how to start approaching this rather than let's all drink, let's all dance, and then at the end of the night, if there's something happening, we'll just go for it. That's cool. That's all good. But what's interesting is being more intentional, but not in a way that's feels predatory, or a way that feels awkward but a way that's alright, how do you enter into this with more intention, is, I guess, the question, because that's not something I've ever really been a part of.

LAYLA: I definitely have two experiences to share that I think are really relevant to this. My first experience of doing any of this community was actually women who had studied my practices and were my friends. They'd started as my friends but they did my programmes. They were like, "We want to do the practices together." My Catholicism means that if you get me in a ritual space, I'm limitless. If it's in service of God or enlightenment, you better believe I will be free as anything. When it's in human reality, I was more like, "Oh my!" I also lived in Georgia for some formative years, all of that. So I was like, "You guys want to do sex magic together?" I was like, "Okay." I started hosting practices where my friends would do their own energy orgasm practices, or they'd do their own pleasure practices, and then we'd start doing sex magic together. I really remember because I always identified tantric lineage. I make people work hard. Spirituality is intense. Some of that old school lineage is part of me. I never thought of myself as a witch. I never thought of myself as just a freewheeling human here to do what I desire. After, I'd say it was probably like a year of friends and community, all women at the time, doing these practices. All of a sudden, I was standing in nature, with a circle of nine women, all doing sex magic, and we were free and liberated and everyone was in their divinity, it was so incredible, and all illusions around sisterhood being around... It just melted and we were just in sacred adoration of each others' orgasm and magnificence and holiness and rawness and I was like, "Holy shit, I'm standing in a circle naked, doing sexual practices in the middle of the forest. I'm definitely a fucking witch. This is absolutely what they burned witches for in Europe." I just knew it in my bones. I was this is the thing they were trying to stop because whoa, and I was like, "Wow!" To your question, I did so long doing my own practices, doing practices within a couple and then there was this explosion of this other energy, which is one of my favorite things to do, which is wow and then there's this. And everyone who would come to those practices had done their own level of work, their own level experience, and it was still melting shame, melting stories around what it is to masturbate around other people. So much of our most derogatory... Circle jerk or fear of orgies. Orgy comes from orgia. It's the Greek word for the mystical rights in sacred celebration of the goddess. We've been taught to fear, sexuality, any communal situation and I was just, "Wow, this is so magical, so sacred and so healing." I've done lots of those and then my friends were like, "We want it to be co-ed." I was like, "All my monogamous married friends are going to hate me." But I was like, "Whatever, I'm in, I'm in surrender. The Universe obviously wants this." So we started doing co-ed sex magic, and I would do powerful gender healing or have people masturbate and express all the shame and judgment that they'd ever felt from their family, while everyone else just held the space and then go into this full celebration of them where everyone says, "Yes, yes, yes." You can just imagine what's possible in community, how we can heal each other's sexuality, how we can honor each other so deeply. This is just sex magic, where no one's even interacting with each other. That alone, just wow. We can even be in our own sexual space and it can be so radically healing and it's so powerful. Yeah, I totally wanted to do this before I died. What was I even thinking not spending Sundays doing this? Then in 2019, people had always been like, "Oh yeah, you should play parties!" I was like, "I will not be one of those tantra teachers. I will never! I am not going to go down that rabbit hole. I am the pure, pristine tantra teacher who holds incredible healthy boundaries and I'm mostly in monogamous relationships, I'm so safe. Then I read "The Surrender Experiment" bu Michael Singer and me and Andrew just took this fully, "We're going to surrender to the universe." This is really a process of... It's not what my mind thinks I'm going to feel what's been called for, I'm going to feel into the energy, the alignment, I'm going to do that, regardless of what I'm thinking in my head. So I took this vow and in my mind, I was literally, "The universe is going to want me to feed the homeless, I'm going to have to be more of service in this way. I'm going to have to give up some of my objects." I don't know what I was thinking. Within the first 48 hours, I was hosting three play parties. I was like, "The universe wants me to host play parties? What? Fuck! Fuck!" I literally got an email, someone being, "Thank you, Layla, for volunteering to host such and such play parties." I was like, "I didn't volunteer though. Who this person?" It was just so clear and I was like, "Why would the universe want this?" In New York, I made YouTube videos about this. I went to play parties. They were always hosted by men. They always felt like a lot of alcohol, cocaine, sex and stuff. It didn't turn me on. I wasn't like, "I want to partake in this." Andrew didn't believe me at the time. I was like, "This just isn't my jam. This isn't turning me on." He was like, "You're in resistance." I was like, "Nope, not my jam." I literally was, "Okay, what if I took the same mystical sensibility that causes me to do my work?" The reason I do my work in the world is because I know that we are made of magic and ecstasy and our sexuality is a portal to God. I want everyone to know that. I was like, "What if I took that same truth and allowed people to play in their sexuality with that?" I hosted those and I just did tantric breathwork, mystical rites, deshaming processes, and held the container with an hour on consent and boundaries, so deep into what does it look for people to feel so safe and for them to realize that ecstasy is sacred? What does it feel to come together in divine ecstasy? What was so amazing is I had been so horrified to engage in those experiences, because I could only imagine some of the low vibration things I had seen. Then I was like, "Wait, I am a tantrica. God is in the low vibration, the lowest vibration. Take it Layla and make it conscious. Bring consciousness to it and see what happens." It was crazy because after those experiences, my friends, in this hedonistic revelry, sacred abandon, they were the purest I have ever seen them, so bright, so illuminated, so in themselves, and I was like, "Wow, we've just been taught that this is so low vibration, so awful and so scary." And there's a system... There's a whole campaign by the Christian church to turn goddess rights into demonic things that put you in hell forever. So we have all this fear around them. I was like, "Wow, when there's intentionality, when people bring love to it, when there's sacredness here, it's so divine." I felt the universe was, "Well, Layla, here's all your egoic stories about what is sacred and right and holy. We're going to put you in the center of the thing that you've most resisted. Find truth here. In doing that, it was so amazing. I used to be just like, "I would never make out with my friends. It's so [inaudible 2:34:03]. Then it was wow, there's just so much possibility for intimacy that I didn't even... It just broke me open and I realized that our hearts are as conditioned as our pussies and penises, who we can love and how and why. None of it for me and my shadow... I love how deep you can go and live all the things. My shadow was like, "It must be pure and holy." It doesn't need to be pure and holy, but I'll bring that to whatever I do. That's part of my process. And in experiencing that, I was just like, "There's this whole beautiful dimension of sexuality and play that can be expressed." I was putting what it felt to be in my 20s on my friends. I was like, "This is going to be nothing but a world of drama. It's going to end up in a dumpster fire. We're all going to hate each other in five years, you're going to destroy your community, and everyone's going to hate you as the sex witch that you are." I was like... It was so beautiful because everyone had done their work. Everyone showed up and they brought that sensibility. Literally pretty much no drama. So much just honoring and reverence and the quality of the experiences. It's just been so much beauty. For me, in those experiences, it was so additive. One of my friends, I think, described her experience of it as Burning-Man-esque, where it's just, you can live this way. He didn't know that. He didn't know that it was possible to have more love, more ecstasy, more freedom, and just more beauty. I think the thing that I experienced out of that was I didn't do that personally from a space of I have a hole in me, and I need to fill it somehow. Again, I've filled so many holes in my life, I continue to do so but in that one experience, I wasn't like, "Oh, there's something missing. Let me try and fill it." It was I have so much beauty and magic and ecstasy to share. I want you to all know that too. What would happen if we shared from that space? It just felt like it built and built and built. I love how you picked up on there's this, you do the individual journey, then you do the couple journey and there is something there, whether people want to explore it or not. I still feel scared saying that. My friends, when they first asked me to do these things and I was so just like, "No, I was so sure that I wouldn't be accepted, that I would scare the shit out of everybody. I stand in a room and ecstatic mystical rites want to start happening. For me to do that in community was absolutely terrifying. Andrew said to me at the time, he was like, "Layla, why are you so terrified? Everyone loves you for this. They want this. This is what everyone's hungry for." And I was like, "There weren't any high priestesses when I was growing up that didn't get sent to hell or burned at the stake or abandoned or go crazy or left alone." I grew up where to be that thing as a woman was one of the most dangerous things that you could be to society. So to hold a space for people to commune in ecstasy and freedom and sexuality even in 2021 feels fucking scary and wild. And there's just so much beauty in it, so much beauty. I really thought the other day, I was wow, it's not my career calling but someone out there can show people how to do this because we're so hungry for it. I feel like it melts the loneliness that people have and the isolation. There's something so coming home about it. Even just the sex magic in your own process, you never touch anyone else but iwe take this thing that we've been so ingrained to think you have to do it so alone and then it becomes communal and there's just something healing about it that's indescribable.

AUBREY: That's beautiful. Let's get a little pragmatic for people here. Let's say you don't know a high priestess who can hold a play party and create this and maybe you know what the other thing is, the cocaine and masks, hedonism thing that you're not really into that and you don't want to sign up to Sanctum and do these other things. But you have a group of conscious people, maybe one, maybe three, whatever, however many, however many there are. What do you think is the way to, without guidance from the priestess, without guidance--

LAYLA: Maenad.

AUBREY: Yeah. without guidance from the maenad, to say alright, let's get in here and let's start to explore. Let's take it gradual, but what's the way to get a group together without access to someone who really knows what the fuck they're doing to start to enter into this with some learning?

LAYLA: Aubrey, we're all just walking ourselves home. I don't even systematize this thing. Yeah, I'd be stretching because I'm still just even exploring it myself. I think definitely the safety is so important, consent and boundaries. I think one of the things that's so important is that the women feel so fucking safe. What do they need to feel safe? What do they want? What do they need in that space? And even having them lead it or just really express what it is that they need to feel and whatever that is, honoring it. I think that's one of the things that makes the spaces I've experienced so magical is the women are safe. That's, unfortunately, so rare. I think having very clear boundaries going in ahead of time. Makeout parties are super fun, where we're not necessarily going to all have sex with each other. We'll just gonna be in lingerie and make out with each other. Dipping a toe in, really valuable because then you learn so much. I think having integration afterwards where you all sit around and talk about your experience, what came up, who got jealous, who had a thing, who had a misunderstanding, all of that is so powerful, because I think it's unspoken unintegrated things that can end up ripping people apart. But if you sit down and share them and integrate them, it's so beautiful. I think, really important in the beginning, sober, or only things that are consciousness enhancing. Tthen you can play with substances later if you want but I think when you're really stepping into it and you want it to feel ritualistic, so important. My favorite play experiences have actually been sober even though I'll play with all kinds of stuff as well. I really enjoy that level of connection. I mean I guess for just pulling that out of my ass. [inaudible 2:40:59]

AUBREY: Your ass is a rich portal of things that can emerge as gifts to humanity, Layla. Don't talk about your ass as if this is not a place...

LAYLA: It's a portal of the divine. It's one of the portals amongst portals. That should have been my answer when you were like, "What are the unexplored sexual portals?" My asshole, number one!

AUBREY:Things that come out of there that are magnificent. I think that's a beautiful guideline and I think people with just that, alone, give enough of okay, I get it. I get what it is and I think really letting the women lead, really letting the women lead and holding that as the divine masculine of I'm here in service.

VYLANA: Then it's something that's so empowering, so empowering to be able to take the lead for once and guide something in what feels safe and exciting and ecstatic for you. I, personally, really love dancing like a stripper. I got that in me. I just love it!

AUBREY: Yeah.

VYLANA: So that's what I would do.

AUBREY: I do too, actually. I do too.

VYLANA: He's really good at lap dances. He's really good.

LAYLA: Receiving them or giving them?

VYLANA: Giving them. Well, obviously, receiving them but giving them, he's really good. The last time we went to a strip club we were playing games. It just was a really fun night--

AUBREY: We were playing quarters.

VYLANA: So I don't remember what the rules were but it ended up being this dare situation. So the very last one we did, I won and he had to receive the dare. He had to air dance on this random chair in the middle of the club with other people sitting there and he's just pretending there's somebody on it and he's really getting after it. He flips the chair upside down and he goes even harder, then he had to climb to the table on all fours and give everyone a lap dance and it was amazing!

AUBREY: I was gassed at the end. I was exhausted. I thought I was in shape. That was a lot. That was a lot.

VYLANA: He was amazing!

LAYLA: It takes a lot of energy. You do have major Channing Tatum vibes, now that I think about it. In a different lifetime, yeah?

VYLANA: He does, for real. Yeah, he does.

AUBREY: Oh, man.

LAYLA: I share this because I was thinking, I was like, "Wow." I think this is next level for a lot of people. I truly think it's of deep service to the planet for people to, at least, be open to this possibility if they're drawn to it, if they feel, because there is something so powerful to it. We've been given so many codified restrictions against it. So there's so much fear around it. But truly, I've walked so many people through that fear portal, where they're just like, "What about my relationship? What about jealousy? What about all the intent..." It's so strong in people's bodies, and every single person has been like, "Oh, my God, I was so terrified." There was such beauty on the other side, such beauty in all the ways. Part of that as well, is taking, like we've been talking about in this thing, take yourself to it and listen. It's so hard to do that sometimes. When you do that, it's so for you. And also something I want people to know is women want this too--

VYLANA: Yeah. That's why I wanted to just deeply share my own experience that I haven't really played in that realm very much but I feel that desire within me, just to explore my own expression more in a way that's not contracted or in fear like I'm going to be abandoned. I feel I'm finally in a container where that can come alive. I can feel, as he had mentioned in the ceremony that we did, just tuning in with the bliss that is being so free from being able to express yourself fully. For everyone listening, just really tuning in with what's true for me. A lot of times when there's a trigger, it's an edge but on that other edge is immense freedom if you can really tune into what you need, what the situation needs, how you can push those edges, also be loving and having healthy boundaries. This is what has been most alive in our conversations recently that I can feel myself about to step through this threshold where life becomes even more blissful than it already is because I get to rewrite the story, I get to take my power back, I get to fully express my sensuality and sexuality in deep connection with people that I love. It's freaking exciting. That's my next... I can feel it--

AUBREY: That's what we're here to do. We're to play and be excited.

VYLANA: That's the next level of evolution. I don't know necessarily what exactly that looks like but I feel it happening for me.

LAYLA: Such a universal fuck yes to that, Vylana. So much yes!

AUBREY: That ecstasy, it's a guidepost. Find your bliss, and even if you have to go through the shadows to find it, great. Explore. Maybe some things that you think are going to get you bliss don't take you there, okay, you learn. That portal doesn't go anywhere that I want to go. Not all portals lead to the right place. Some are dead ends. That's okay. So see. I think we've made pleasure a derogatory thing, but go seek your pleasure.

VYLANA: And be curious. Have curiosity about it. Sometimes it's not going to be the thing, but you're still learning, you're still finding yourself, you're still coming home. It's all part of the path. I wish that I, in my life, would just allow myself to be more curious.

LAYLA: So magical and I've even said this recently to my own audience: there's this part of me that's I'm scared that people will be like, "I'm going to do a 15-minute pleasure practice and breathe into my penis and before I know it, I'm going to be naked in a circle of sex witches in a polyamorous situation." It was easier for me, when I was living a life where I was like, "You know what? You can do this and you can be monogamous and you can be so hetero and all these things." I just had to stand in front of people and say, "A tantric approach is what's true." And so if you end up doing these practices, if you open up your sexuality, you don't know where you're going to end up. You're going to end up with what's the truth. For some people, that's monogamy. For some people, that's just doing some breath work and never going farther. For some people, that is full blown ecstatic curiosity into the great unknown, and cannot promise a guaranteed outcome when you go into the majesty that's your sexuality. Can only promise that you will end up doing what is true that is so far beyond what so many of us have ever imagined. Sexuality is this magical box that opens up those possibilities. I think that's another reason why people can often be so scared of it.

AUBREY: And whatever that true is is perfect. There's no better truth than the other, whether you're in this ecstatic, multi-person thing, or whether it's, just as you said, just some breathwork, and some more awareness and a little bit more love and forgiveness. It's not a value proposition of this is better, this is worse. Wherever you are, wherever you wind up, when that place is true, you're exactly where you're supposed to be, God's circle, that place for you on a map.

LAYLA: Totally. And so many more of my practices have been crying alone with a dildo o inside of me just in my bedroom being like, "Oh, we're here again." There's at least 100 of those practices forever every divine, ecstatic, blissful experience.

AUBREY: Well, it's an honor. It's an honor to be here with both of you goddesses. And thank you for your vulnerability and your honesty and for leading this way in a place where the historical, hereditary archetype is to be really afraid of stepping out in this way, in the way that you are. I deeply, deeply honor your courage for doing that because it takes a lot, a lot, of courage. So, thank you for walking the path and shining the light so that we can all see our way through the dark.

VYLANA: Thank you. Thank you for having so much reverence for the goddess and for the healing and possibility that you've brought to my life and exude to the rest of the world through our relationship.

AUBREY: Thank you for being such a goddess. Everybody is. Layla, people who are fired up and want more Layla, more, and more, and more, and more, and more, where can they go for more?

LAYLA: You can go to laylamartin.com, sign up with your email address and I have two main programmes. I have the VITA coaching certification for becoming a sex, love and relationship coach and then also VITA sacred sexuality. That is an initiation into all the sacred sexuality practices. It's basically a year-long programme. You can do it month to month where you can tune in and like all of this, you basically get live guided initiations into everything we've discussed today and so much more. Oh, and I also have a men's sexual mastery training. We underplayed that and then we turned it evergreen. The men are so into it. So there is a men's sexual mastery training so you can do everything that we've talked about in this podcast and take it so much deeper.

AUBREY: Go, gods and goddesses, go!

VYLANA: And Aubrey's Sex Jesus 101 coming in 2022.

AUBREY: Doesn't exist.

LAYLA: We can co-affiliate.

AUBREY: Doesn't exist. We got a lot of work to do.

LAYLA: Sex witch and Sex Jesus.

AUBREY: We're going to end there, everyone. Love everyone. Thanks for tuning in. Goodbye. Thank you, all. Thanks for tuning into this video. Make sure you hit Subscribe. Follow me, @aubreymarcus. Check out the Aubrey Marcus Podcast available everywhere and leave a comment. Let me know if this video resonated or what else you would like to hear from me in the future. Thank you so much.