The Secrets of Sex Magic and Manifestation | Emily Fletcher | Align Podcast #525
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Welcome back to the Lion Podcast. My name is Aaron Alexander. Today's conversation is all about sex, sacred sexuality, sex, magic, ancient mystical practices around sex and creation and manifestation and a lot of really interesting stuff. So if you are a person with a body that wants to have a more sensual embodied experience in your life,

And you're a person that has desires that you would like to see come to fruition. This conversation could be an interesting one for you. It is with the beautiful Emily Fletcher. Emily is the founder of Ziva Meditation. She has led millions of people across the world to find greater calmness and serenity and equanimity within themselves through Ziva Meditation. She is the best-selling author of Stress Less, Live More. And she's been a friend of mine.

for many years. I appreciate her. I think you guys are going to enjoy this conversation. I also want to invite you guys to leave us a review, five star, ideally, if you think it merits one. That is a very helpful way to support this podcast. And also, thanks for sharing it with any of your friends. Thanks for checking out the Align Podcast channel on YouTube and subscribing over there for a chance to win prizes, as well as gathering the prize of wisdom and knowledge and hopefully some laughs from these conversations. That's

That's it. That's all. I hope you guys enjoyed this conversation with the beautiful Emily Fletcher. What the heck is sex magic? What does that mean? I hear these things. I like the sound of it. Have you ever done it? You've never done it? I've had sex. Okay. It's felt magical. Okay. So you're getting close. Follow the recipe, though. Okay. Yeah.

So sex magic is where you use your pleasure to pray. And the idea is that the better you feel, the more magic you attract.

So you've ever had a day where it's like you're well rested, you worked out, you did breath work. And this is probably every day for you. But like, why do you do your whole not every day? First of all, but yes. But like, you know, you're a man who takes care of yourself. Like, why do you do all those things? Like you wake up, you move your body, get sunshine in your eyes, eat healthy foods, take supplements. Like, why are any of us doing any of this stuff?

Because when you feel good, you make better decisions. You attract more opportunities. You walk into a room and you're vibrating at a different frequency. So you attract the higher vibe people in the room. So it's like more opportunities come to you when you feel better. And so the simple thing here is that the better you feel, the more magic you attract. However, so what I've spent the past four years doing is

is taking these ancient practices and trying to translate them for an audience that would never go to a tantra retreat, that would never practice something like sex magic, and taking out some of the scary words and just being like, "Hey, did you know that you could turn on the magnet and the generator of your body and start to attract things that you desire?"

And so the process that I teach is really simple and it rhymes. It's a three-step process and you just visualize, alchemize, magnetize. So the really simple way that we start is just asking people, what would you love? Like, hey, what would you love? How would you love to feel? What would you love to have happen today?

And what's crazy is that a lot of people are not asking themselves that question. They're like, why is it so bad? Why is the world coming to an end? Why did this happen to me? Why did my mom get sick? And the quality of your life is determined by the quality of your questions. And so you can simply just change that. What would I love? How would I love to feel? What would I love to have happen today? And then you visualize that thing as if it's happened.

And then we alchemize. And that is, you know, I know this is a big part of your work as well, is like, where in my body am I holding trauma? Like, where in my body do I have stuck emotions? Where have I not given myself permission to feel all the way? And most of us have been taught to not feel our feelings since we were infants.

And so I give people the tools to move the rage, to move the sadness, to move the stuck. And in that moving of it, it alchemizes. And then from that space, we magnetize. And so... How do we move the stuck?

Well, the way I do it is through manifesting. So it's like if you normally if you have a dream, like say you're trying to manifest a romantic partner and they're not showing up, like it's probably going to bring up feelings of unworthiness or I'm not good enough or I'm never going to find someone or I'm too late. I'm too old. I'm too ugly. I'm too whatever. And so those feelings, we just give them the microphone and we allow them to speak. And so sometimes it's just through tears. Sometimes it's through words.

but I will usually use music because music is medicine and invite people to like find the protector part, like find the angry five-year-old that's mad that this dream has not shown up yet. And then we dance that rage together.

It's like psychosomatic dance. And then usually that protector part, that anger, is then protecting a little bit younger, more vulnerable piece, the sorrow. - Like what were the steps if a person's at home, you know? So like I could find the part, but maybe I'm already lost and like, I don't know, this is all already above my head. - Yeah, so I would say if you wanna follow, if you wanna like do this at home, just like tune into any desire that you have, anything that you would love.

And to start, it's usually better to do personal. Like the way I'm wanting to take people is like doing massive activations at sacred sites on the planet and praying for the planet and the species. But to start, it's like, I would love a million dollars. I would love a husband. I would love to get pregnant. I would love to find my dream home. So like whatever it is that you're manifesting, whatever it is that you desire right now, it's like tune into that desire and

And like feel that. And oftentimes we don't let ourselves dream all the way because we're terrified of the disappointment. Like we're scared that it won't actually show up. And so usually if we're dreaming big enough, the fear will be right behind it. The anger will be right behind it. And like that's how you know you're kind of pushing your edge of manifestation because there's some, you know, it's a little scary. Like it might not come. And I say the disappointment is the price of admission when it comes to manifesting. God is not a short order cook.

And so there's a little, so how do you find the part? Yeah, within yourself, within your body, to actually be able to crystallize it into something that you can manifest into movement. Oftentimes, and to be honest, every time I do this, I'm like, I'm fine. I'm not angry. I don't have any anger in me. I'm totally good. And then I put on one rage song and like full blown, like just like lifetimes of rage comes out. So sometimes the music is the alchemist for me. Sometimes the music kicks up or like,

you know, we're all tuning forks, right? So you put on the music and it changes the resonance in the room and it will activate those things inside of your body. So oftentimes I'll use music to find the thing. Oftentimes when I do this in our retreats, we're doing it in a group. When I do it in Ziva Magic and the course, I'm leading people through it. So I'm actually guiding you through it. But sometimes if you don't know the practice yet and you've never been guided through it, I would say music will help you. Just put on nine inch nails, put on like any death metal and then just see.

just start punching the air, just start kicking the air, start punching a pillow, start silent screaming. You know, I used to be an actress. I was on Broadway for 10 years and I would have acting teachers that would say, you know, sometimes you punch the desk because you are angry.

And sometimes you're angry because you punched the desk. So you can work inside out, but you can also work outside in. Like, I don't know anybody that's like actually transmuted the entirety of their lineage's rage. Yeah. That's like, um, what was it? Was it, was it William James, the old, uh,

He's like what I think yes Sir William James. That was that was the fella I wrote about my book actually just wrote the book a long time ago for his name he Pioneered I think some of the concepts and ideas around that we move ourselves into feeling as opposed to like we feel ourselves into movement so it's like when you see a bear and

you don't just experience fear in between your ears. It's not just like a brain thing. Like you experience fear and you express fear through clenching of your hands or clenching of your masseter or your traps or any of the different things or changing augmentation of your breath.

And therefore you can also kind of regulate yourself from a bottom up approach and take control of your body and regulate your felt state. But most folks would probably align with like, no, I experienced the fear of that bear, like in my brain, um,

But it's actually from what William James would suggest, and it sounds like kind of what you're saying a bit here as well. You're actually moving yourself into that felt experience. I think you can do both. Both. Yeah. And I just interviewed Dave Asprey yesterday on the podcast, and he was saying that it's actually the mitochondria that's having the reaction, like before anything conscious is happening. He loves talking about mitochondria. But, you know, Amy Cuddy's work as well. You know, she did the TED Talk about power poses yesterday.

You know, sometimes you could, you know, be confident and puff out your chest and go into Superman pose or you could go into Superman pose and create confidence in your body outside in. And so with this case, it's like it's almost like emotional hygiene. I have a question with that. I wonder if sometimes people in like the spiritual esoteric space could just be exacerbating and perpetuating, quote unquote, trauma and digging themselves into like this endless cycle.

pit of my trauma, my trauma, my trauma, my trauma. And where perhaps they're like moving themselves into these experiences and trying to find all of the fear and all the guilt and all the shame. And if you try to find the thing, you will manifest and create the thing and you'll just keep on digging into this endless pit of emotions that you're actually perhaps even like creating yourself.

compared to a person that might be a little bit more like, what if we just lighten up a little bit? Look, I'm all for lightening up. And I would say I'm like a world, I'm historically like a world-class spiritual bypasser. Like I am like, yes, love and light. And let's find the joy. And let's find the, let's find the lesson in this.

And what I found is that if you're willing to just put on like two songs, like just like rage it out for a song and cry it out for a song, the amount of lightness that you create on the other side, the amount of joy, the amount of bliss, the amount of ecstasy that is available to you, if you're willing to take 90 seconds for some emotional hygiene is wild.

Like there's and to me, it's like the deeper that you're willing to go into the darkness, the more space you make for light. So for me, it's not about dancing in the dark. It's not about re-traumatizing. It's not about staying in the dark. It's about if you are not willing to go into that, if you are not willing to feel the full depth of your pain, there is no way you can reach the full height of your ecstasy.

That's why BDSM is a thing. Tell me more about BDSM. Well, let me finish this one first and then I'm happy to go into BDSM. So visualize, right? Just what would I love? Picture that thing is done. And then we alchemize anything standing in the way. The rage that it hasn't happened yet. The sorrow that it may never happen. And it's like a three song dance party.

And then what you do is you're clearing the channel. You're like letting those stuck emotions. And by the way, I don't know anyone that's actually cleared their entire backlog of unexpressed emotions. It's probably not going to happen. No. It's just probably gaining a relationship with them, like understanding. And then even if you have cleared your backlog of stored emotions in the body, then you've got your moms and your grandmas and your great grandmas and like that whole lineage. So it's like, yeah, let's clear our own and then let's get to work clearing the collective. There's a Lakota elder saying, it was Doug Goodfeather, and he said...

the suffering on the planet is the direct result of the uncried tears, thousands of years of uncried tears. And that feels true to me. And so I'm like, how can we give people the tools to do this and not make a story about it? Like, that's what I love about moving it through the body. You don't even have to be identified with the story. You can just feel it. And then what I find is that the feelings are actually meant for feeling. Yeah. There's a, um, well, uh, William Oslo. I think he's another, sir. William Oslo. I,

only deal with knights. I only quote knights on my show. How do I sign up to be a knight? Who do I talk to? I want to talk about that. You know who knows is Robert. Robert Edward Grant has been knighted three times. Three different countries. Yeah, Oslo. He's another considered father of modern medicine or something. But he...

quote from him that I like is the organs cry the tears the eyes weren't willing to something like that ooh the organs cry the tears that the eyes aren't willing to I'm gonna finish this but I will say that I went to see the Dalai Lama last year flew you know many many hours to Dharamsala India landed was talking to my friend Liz at breakfast and I said out loud you know I think I

to just go to the woods for a few days and cry the uncried tears stuck in my back because my lower back has been having a thing and I think it's just uncried tears. And then I promptly tested positive for COVID and was quarantined in the woods for three days and like almost missed my chance to meet the Dalai Lama because, you know, you don't want to be that girl that like murders the Dalai Lama with your COVID. Or immunizes him. Yeah. I mean, he's 81, so...

I'm not going to, I'm not willing to roll those dice. But anyway, I did in fact spend a lot of time crying my uncried tears and had a great time. So, okay, so we visualize, then we alchemize through movement and then we magnetize. And the way that we magnetize is by tuning into the pleasure and the body, like turning on again the magnet and the generator of the body, which is the hoo-ha. So what I was going to say is that the heart,

the electromagnetic frequency of the heart is 5,000 times stronger than that of the head. And that is exciting to me, right? Because a lot of people are visualizing and manifesting just neck up. They're just like thinking about the things that they desire. - Is this like HeartMath Institute stuff? - I mean, what HeartMath is all about is coherence, right? And I'm like, yes, coherence, but for what I'm doing with Ziva Magic is getting head, heart, and hoo-ha all into coherence with each other and then pointed towards the dream.

So it's like you're very clear in your head about the vision, the heart, like you're feeling the emotions of what it would feel like to have it done. And then you're turning yourself on. You're creating pleasure in the body. And and then through that pleasure, not only are you creating the magnetism, but also so basically you then bring yourself into peak states of pleasure, either through breath work, through

through movement, through sound, through energy, or you could even do manual stimulation. Like you'd actually physically pleasure yourself into orgasm. But then what happens is then you come back to the dream. You come back to the vision from this peak state and

And then what happens is that the dream starts to feel safe in the body. So when the opportunity comes, which it will, otherwise you wouldn't have the desire, you can greet that opportunity like a long lost lover or like a friend or like it feels safe in the body versus like, oh, no, this thing can make me or break me. This is an opportunity that you decrease your chances of self-sabotage when you've already experienced

to visualize the dream from this state of connection, from this state of oxytocin and dopamine and serotonin in the body. So it really does change your relationship with your dreams. And then also what you're doing is that you're programming the reticular activating system in the brain, the RAS, which is like a bundle of neurons in the base of the brain, which is the brain's filtration device. And it cannot...

take in the millions of inputs that are available to us at any given moment. So if we just leave it to its own devices, it's usually filtering out for potentially life-threatening situations.

But if you can get out of fight or flight, which we do with the pleasure, which we do with meditation, and then program the filtration device to look for the opportunities that will bring us towards the dream. And then if the dream feels safe in the body, this is why it starts to feel like magic. Because all of the obstacles that you normally face when manifesting something get obliterated when you move through this process. How old is sex magic?

I mean, I think it would be hard to quantify, but I'll say that last summer, my best friend Leila and I, we went on this priestess pilgrimage to Greece and we went to Eleusis and Delphi and Crete. And when we were in Crete, we went to this 16,000 year old Neolithic cave where they've been doing goddess practice, like goddess worship practices for 16,000 years.

So like Neil, they felt like pre-verbal in there. And so I can't say for sure if they were doing sex magic. But if you look even at Crete, which is one of the few matriarchal societies that we have any sort of documentation on. But a lot of the Cretan symbology, it's women like bare breasted women, very voluptuous, holding two snakes in their hands.

And the snakes would be similar to the snakes of the caduceus symbol. So it's like it's representative of that kundalini energy, of that life force energy that lives in our sacrum and that travels up the spine when we do breath work or do pleasure practices. And so, I mean, these are pretty old and even influenced a lot of paleo-Christianity that then influenced Buddhism.

Christianity and Catholicism as we know it. Like, you know, the Pope on the Pope's staff, there's the pine cone, which is representative of the pineal gland, which is relevant because when you're practicing Kundalini, it's like waking up that life force and sending it into the pineal gland. And you see that in all different lineages all over the planet. But I mean, if I had to guess, I would say well over 10,000 years old. For a fella. Yeah. He's in New Jersey. Yeah.

Maybe he's like an electrician. He wants to dabble with this a little bit. What's the breakdown? I mean, the minimum viable product. He's alone. Yeah. You do not have to have a partner. You can do this on your own. You can do it in partnership. You can do it with friends. You can do it on retreat. But the minimum viable product is that next time you're in a peak pleasure state, and that could be after breathwork. That could be after an amazing workout. It could be after sex. It could be after a self-pleasure practice. But when you're in that open state,

that post-orgasmic bliss, you could simply ask yourself the question. That'd be the simplest minimum viable practice. - Would it be something that would be happening during said self-pleasure experience, i.e. having a tug?

Well, if you, you, if we're doing the tug route for a fella. Yeah. So if you want to make a full ceremony about it, and this would go for all genders. Um, if you want to make a ceremony, what I would recommend is like really like make a ceremony, like light a candle, write it down, say it out loud, do a prayer, whatever that means to your higher self, your future self, God, goddess, whatever you pray to that, which cannot be named, um,

But name the thing that you're calling in, like be specific about it. And it's best to really do one thing at a time, like manifest one thing at a time. Don't be like, I want world peace and a million dollars and to get pregnant and my partner, like just one thing.

Picture that one thing. Feel it as if it's already done. And then I really recommend like don't just go directly into the pleasure practices, like clear the channel, like go and do a few song dance party. I'm like, go into the resistance because I would argue that there are

I believe that our desires are divinely inspired. I believe that nature has given us these desires. And so if that is true and the thing has not shown up yet, then that means that there's something in you that is not a full match for the dream just yet. So it's important to clear that thing out so that you can change your

So you can be more of a match for the dream. Your task is not to seek or find love. It's to release the barriers blocking you. That's a paraphrase quote from somebody. But it's not a doing. It's not a going out and finding. You just have the barrier. The only wood to chop is the barriers that you already possess. Yes. And you can do that through movement. You can do that through breathwork. You can do that through tears. You can do that through just feeling whatever it is that is unfelt.

And in clearing that channel, nature is not like a vacuum, right? And then from that spaciousness in the body, you can turn yourself all the way on. And again, you can do that through breath, through movement, through, I mean, probably if you're like an electrician in Jersey, you're probably not doing like energy orgasm practices yet. Maybe you're just like- I want to talk to Bob. Yeah. I will help Bob out. So like, yeah. So then, so basically just then before you're about to pleasure yourself and

ask the question, what would I love? Then pleasure yourself. And at the moment of peak pleasure, it's like you want to dedicate all of that joy, all of that bliss, all of that feel good sensation in your body, dedicate it to the dream. Like send it to the vision.

And then as you start to come back into your body, because there is a moment of transcendence, you know, in French they call orgasm le petit mort. It's the little death. So we're transcending individuality and going into totality. It's why I love meditation and pleasure practices and medicine practices because they're all practicing dying.

Like each of them are ways for us to access, again, that which cannot be named, access source energy. But I'm going to go back to Bob. Okay, so Bob, you had a prayer, right? You pleasured yourself. You got the tub of Vaseline. Oh God, please don't use petroleum on your hoo-ha. Well, maybe organic candle, beeswax. Okay, a non-scented candle, non-petroleum lubricant at a very minimum. Endocrine disrupting chemicals, really bad for manifestations. And just all things. Yes.

And then at that moment of peak pleasure, you then like send the energy to the dream. But when you come back into your body, like feel that dream as if it's already done. Like come in, like imagine it, feel it, see it, taste it, smell it, hear it, hear the thing as if it's already done. And then take action. Like what I say in Ziva Magic is pray and move your feet, pray and move your feet, pray and move your feet. Because, you know, if we're not taking, I mean, it's like God helps those who help themselves, right?

So it's not just about the prayer. But what I find is that if you take action from the place of like feeling it already done in your body, the amount of confidence, the amount of ideas, the amount of creativity that will come in is so much higher than if you're manifesting from a place of fear or lack or contraction or proving. It seems like there's something powerful to allowing as opposed to having attachment and the contraction of like reaching out.

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send it back i think you guys like it lilaq.com slash online yes well that's why i think meditation and like that's why ziva meditation and ziva magic i think are so powerful because in both cases you are creating a sense of detachment because in meditation you're flooding your brain with that dopamine and serotonin so you're like oh wait i already have everything i need like i already am god pretending to be human i am the ocean pretending to be the wave and yet i still have this desire why

Well, I would argue that that desire is now an indicator of where nature wants to use you to go and deliver your fulfillment to the world. And the paradoxical thing that happens is that when you take action from that place of I'm delivering my fulfillment to the world versus I need to go somewhere to fill myself up, that detachment is sexy. That detachment is magnetic.

And, and also it's like you get more and more of nature's support. There's more serendipity, more synchronicity, and people just like it. You know, people want to date people who feel fulfilled. People want to hire people who feel fulfilled. No one wants to date someone who is needy. No one wants to hire someone who feels desperate and needy. And then the same is true with Ziva Magic is that not only are you flooding the brain and body with dopamine and serotonin, but now we're adding into it

oxytocin, norepinephrine, adrenaline, like all the other chemicals that happen from orgasm. So it's like you're supercharging that sense of I am enough. I have everything I need. I am so fulfilled. And then from that space, taking action from that space of connection, from euphoria, from inspiration, from enoughness, like that's a fun space to take action. What do you think the core of most people's

of not feeling enough. That's something that I hear a lot. Like, you are enough. I don't feel like I'm enough. Why is that so common? That's a great question. I've never given it a lot of thought, but if I had to hypothesize right now,

I would say it's simply highlighting that journey that we're all taking from individuality to totality. Like there is a piece of us that wants to remember our divine nature. There's a piece of the wave that wants to remember that it is the ocean. There's a piece of our human that wants to remember that it is God. And so...

Rather than judging it as bad in this moment, I'm seeing it as quite holy that like, oh, little Emily wants to remember her full divine nature. And so that feeling of not enoughness will be the impetus to have me go to therapy that will have me go into relationship, which is a real dojo that will have me start the company that will have me have the child, like all of the things that we do as humans to learn the lessons that we're here to learn.

And of course, trauma and wounding and our fucked up parents and all that stuff too. But if I'm going to look at the light side of it, I think that feeling of not enoughness is simply just like, oh, I am more than just this individual. How has your journey in enoughness been? I think one of the biggest gifts that this work has given me is the willingness to feel my pain, the willingness to go into the darkness, the willingness to express my sadness, the willingness to speak my anger, the willingness to

Which I historically, like I was an actress, so I had the gift of like dancing my emotions or feeling my emotions through acting class or being on Broadway. It's performative sometimes, but the best ones are not. Like the best actors are alchemizing what is real. The best dancers are dancing what is real.

And so I certainly had both, right? Like I had like perfectionism and people pleasing and like the male gaze and like, look how perfect I am, all that, that proving energy. So I certainly had that. And I had a lifetime of creative tools like dance and voice and acting to actually express those emotions in creative ways because energy either creates or destroys. And so I,

I think as I've transitioned further away from the performative piece and from the perfectionism and even from just meditation, which in a way can be quite masculine, right? Where it's like, oh, I'm going to transcend my state of consciousness. I want to evolve. I want to accept what is. I want to ascend. And so in the visualized part of Ziva Magic, it is quite masculine. But in the alchemized part,

It's quite feminine because you could say that the hero's journey is what am I creating in the external world? But the heroine's journey is what am I creating in the internal world? What am I feeling and alchemizing in my inner landscape? And so doing this work has really given me a whole new relationship with my own emotions. And as I find the God in that, as I find the holiness in my rage and in my sorrow, I don't judge those pieces of myself anymore.

I can love them. And I think that enoughness comes from the integration that happens when you love even your shadow. And I would say that that is what Tantra is. Certainly the left-handed path of Tantra is finding God where you thought it was not. Like finding the divinity in my jealousy, finding the divinity in my rage, finding the holy in my fear.

And then if you and it's why I also I could go on a bit of a tangent on this, but it's why I'm really fascinated with the emotional and psychological landscapes of cultures that practice polytheism versus monotheism. And if you think about it as like parts work or IFS, you know, it's like internal family systems where you're looking at all the different parts of yourself. To me, if you think about the divine as an anthropomorphic education.

We like put our humanness onto God, right? And so if you are dealing with like a Greek pantheon or an Egyptian pantheon or a Vedic pantheon of gods and goddesses, you're seeing the face of the divine in like Hanuman, this like mischievous little monkey, and in Lakshmi, the goddess of abundance, and in Shiva, the god of destruction, the destroyer of irrelevance. So if you're seeing all of these different faces of the divine, how does that change your relationship with your own divinity inside of you?

versus like what we do in the West is like, oh, well, God is just this like one white dude with a beard who's judging me as good or bad and anything that is not light. He's watching Bob whack off with his Vaseline in the corner manifest. I'm just trying to manifest God. God, I'm just trying to bring my prayers. Settle down. I had a sock on the door, bro. The sock was clearly there. Clearly sock on the door, God. You're not allowed to watch me, God. It's not the time. Exactly. Making me nervous.

But how many people judge themselves and their pleasure practices as bad and wrong because we've been taught to divorce ourselves from that flavor of divinity. We've been taught that our eros is not holy, that our desires are a sin and wrong. And so I'm sort of weaving two different thoughts together, but I am very interested in how people can accept divinity.

and even love themselves into wholeness, the different facets of themselves, if they have a model of different faces of the divine versus like a monotheistic society where they're like, oh, there's one face of the divine and that thing is judging me as good or bad. It's very Santa Claus, right? Like I'm naughty or nice. If I'm nice, I'll get good presents at Christmas. I'll get to go to heaven. I'll get the 70 virgins in the afterlife. But if I'm bad, then I'm going to go to hell.

And I think that that ideology does not help us on our journey towards enoughness. I think I'd rather have some gals with a little more experience.

Fair. You know? That's a lot of urgence. As a 45-year-old sex witch, I would say that's a smart move. That's a lot of urgence. What do you think is the core of shame in the modern Western human around sexuality? Why are modern Western humans holding mostly some core of shame somewhere around their sexuality? Yeah, I think it's been a really intentional...

an active campaign to divorce us from that flavor of our power, that flavor of our divinity. And just like there's been a war on drugs, just like we've been taught to think that psychedelics are from the devil and evil and wrong, because that's a direct pathway for you to viscerally experience nature, God, again, that which cannot be named. You know, you're doing ayahuasca, you're having a direct conversation with collective intelligence. And

And the same thing can happen with sacred sexuality. It's just that it's endogenous pharmacology versus exogenous pharmacology. And so that same level of remembering, that same level of reclamation, that same level of communion with the divine can happen through sacred sexuality. And I think that people who remember how powerful and creative they are are very hard to control. And so I don't think it's an accident. And similarly,

You know, you could argue that a lot of these internal practices, a lot of these sacred sexuality practices would be associated with divine feminine or goddess worship or some of the pagan practices. And the divine feminine has also been actively removed from our history. You know, the Magdalene Gospels, they've been etched out of the stones. The pages have been ripped out of the books. And she was teaching practices similar to these.

So again, it's if you want to have a monopoly on God and if you want to create a through line to God where people have to tithe and go to church and, you know, you want to have, you know, whatever, whatever the mechanisms of control that are happening on the planet, it doesn't behoove you for people to all have their direct access to their own divinity. So your perspective on some of the core roots of shame being imposed on, um,

humans around sexuality, do you feel like it would perhaps date back to the times that sex was used as ceremony as a way of communing with a higher power?

That would be like a core of it that now is spilling into very few people. I mean, they might have been doing that unknowingly, but very few people in New Jersey or wherever are like actively knowingly communing with God when they're hooking up with their girlfriend or whatever. Well, I don't know about that. I do think that people, like in the ways that we think that sex is okay in the West, like a man and a woman having sex with each other in a monogamous relationship, like in that way that we're okay with in the West is,

even in that, I would say you are communing with the divine. You are. Yeah. But whether you would put place that language on it. Well, actually the number one thing that people say at the moment of orgasm is, Oh God,

or their partner's name, which in that moment is the same thing. - Yeah, but it's still, it's a subconscious thing more than a conscious thing for most Bobs in the world. - Yeah, but I'd say that it doesn't matter. Like, you know, when I teach meditation, I'm like, I don't care if you're learning to meditate because you want less cellulite and you wanna make more money. It's like, you're still experiencing it viscerally. It's still holy and healing.

you are in a process of I think figuratively and literally opening your heart to the person that you're with. Of course. Like obviously if anything is non-consensual if it is unconscious or an addiction right if you're trying to heal an internal void with an external thing then that's an addiction and that will be destructive. But if it is consensual if it is loving if yes you're open to the experience then I would say it is in fact holy. Probably anything that a person is doing that is potentiating

their heart would be connecting to God. And sex is like one of the main vehicles, most obvious vehicles for that. It's like you're literally like,

taking a stab kind of a pun at like becoming one. Yeah. Yeah. It's like unicity. And I think that if you, if we go back to the original question of like what was happening, you know, thousands of years ago, like we weren't living in nuclear families. We weren't living in cul-de-sacs with houses. We were living in caves and in tents and there was a more communal nature to everything. We were raising kids together. We were breastfeeding each other's children. We were likely having sex with each other. Do you know where hippies have sex and what they say afterwards? Tell me.

intense yep you got you got my first snort intense i like it intense um but you gotta think like you know if you're all in a cave like grandma's over here uncle ned's over there you're sleeping you're sleeping with your in your parents bed until you're six or seven you know like there's just a different level just like we were around birth and death more we were also around sex more

And so likely the configurations of it were not just like, just as like, you know,

one person, one person as we are now. But there were actual rituals. There were fertility rituals. I mean, we know that Edelousis, which is a town 45 minutes outside of Athens, Greece, which is now being named the cultural capital of Europe by the UN, largely because of Brian Marescu's work from the Immortality Cue, where he's been researching these rituals that were happening for thousands of years at the Eleusinian Mysteries. And many of the leaders of

Greek societies or Plato, Euripides, Aristotle, like they would go and experience these rituals, these ceremonies that would happen in Eleusis. And they would say that you would go to Eleusis to die before you died. And they'd say that if you have not been to Eleusis, you haven't really lived.

And again, if you go back to orgasm as Le Petit Mort, right, you're practicing that transcendence. You're practicing unioning with the thing that cannot be named. And it wasn't just happening through sex. They were also doing medicine ceremonies. They were serving ergot, which is the precursor to LSD. But they were also doing, I mean, these were ceremonies led by priestesses.

right so again like we don't have many archetypes in our society of females leading religious ceremonies or sacred ceremonies like that has been wiped out but it used to be a huge part of society the oracles of Delphi the kings the generals would go to get

counsel from these women who oftentimes were in altered states, either from sacred sexuality practices or medicines, or sometimes they were crones. They were women who were not menstruating anymore. So that all of that creative life force that could go into birthing another generation, then they had reclaimed for themselves. So like the wise woman, the medicine woman, the elder women have this way, this portal to the divine that we've, again, very much lost.

like shamed and diminished and ostracized in our society. Like women become invisible once they're not like, once they're not menstruating anymore in our society, not all of them, but a lot of them, right? Like, I mean, look at Hollywood, like this is very recently that you have a woman over 40 on camera in a, in a, in a Hollywood major motion picture. And largely that's happening now because of Reese Witherspoon and Oprah Winfrey and Angelina Jolie, the women who are then in their forties and producing the films themselves. And,

So anyway, long story short, for many thousands of years, there were priestesses, there were elders, there were women, there were medicine women that were not only holding ceremony, but shaping civilization, guiding the kings, helping people remember their divinity and helping people to practice dying before they died. And a lot of what was happening. So we also went to Pan's cave when we were in Greece last year. And Pan is like the Greek god of life.

revelry, hedonism, wine, like orgiastic pleasure. You know, it's like the goat God, right? And Layla shared this with me, but she said that Pan was actually the hardest God for the Catholic church to remove from the pagans. So they had given up all the other gods and goddesses. They were starting to convert the pagans into paleo-Christianity and to Catholicism. But Pan

But Pam, they wouldn't give up because he was the most fun. Right. It was just like, oh, we're having the best time. Like, we're not going to get rid of Pam. And then they turned Pam into the devil.

There is no devil in the Bible. It's Lucifer. It's a fallen angel. There's no dude with horns. There's no dude with hooves. There's no Satan in the Bible. That was made up so that people would divorce themselves from pants, so that people would divorce themselves from this flavor of their divinity. Why are they such a buzzkill? I don't get it. I know. What's the logic? I don't understand the logic in this. Well, I think that, again, I think it's power and control. Who doesn't like to have a good time?

Well, if that good time is reminding you that you are God pretending to be human, if that good time is allowing you to circumnavigate the church, and if you're trying to control people and to get them to give 10% of their income to you, then you don't want people to remember that they can have a direct line. Right? It's like, well, you got to go through me.

And so I think that that is largely why it was happening. Um, I mean, I'm sure there's many, many scholars that could do a better job articulating this than me. What else from what you know from your research with the, I always say the word wrong, hallucinian mysteries, hallucinian. Yeah. Yeah. Um, what did the ceremonies actually, uh,

look like was there any specific things obviously be very hard to know you're just finding chalices and like old stone cups and assuming probably a lot of things and some texts but well you know what's fascinating is that when we were there and by the way it was just me and leila when we were there like no we just we had the whole place the whole ruins to ourselves it was just us and a guard who was watching us very closely and blowing a lot of whistles when i would go into eros um

What does that mean, you go into Eros? There would be moments that you would say like life force energy would just start flowing through my body.

Sometimes spontaneously, sometimes on purpose. But I was like, yeah, I guess you could say the getting turned on or just like it feels like a surge of energy goes from my root up to the top of my head or sometimes, you know, like tuning forks. Like if two tuning forks are tuned to the same frequency and one of them starts vibrating, the other one will start vibrating.

And so, you know, Leila and I are very in tune with each other. So if one of us would get activated, the other one would also get activated. This is a phenomenon I don't think anyone has studied, but I would love to. Like when you get women together who all are quite open, it is like popcorn starts happening in the room. Like it's not it doesn't even feel sexual per se, but it's just like this life force starts to animate everyone's body and it moves through the whole room. It's wild. Yeah.

That's like any time Ryan Giles, camera guy Ryan Giles, walks in the room. Who's that? This guy over here. Can you hear me? Oh, yeah, Ryan. I didn't know your last name. I'm feeling activated right now, Ryan. There's popcorn every time. Every time. So I asked Layla, I said, hey, what do you think happened here? What do you think was the illicit mysteries? And by the way, they were mysteries. So it was anyone could go one time. Okay.

Yeah. But it was punishable by death if you spoke about it. Like you couldn't share what was happening. What a cool thing. I know. We need more stuff like that other than Brad Pitt fight club movies. Well, some people would say that Burning Man is like the closest thing that we have to listening mysteries, but you can totally talk about Burning Man.

But I asked, and by the way, we did a four part podcast series on this called the Priestess Pilgrimage on both of our shows. And so, but I, I, so I was recording bits of it. I was doing video, I was doing audio and trying to capture like the nuggets. And so I hit record and I was like, what do you think happened here? And she just goes, you know, eyes go back in her head and she starts channeling and she's like, basically walks through the whole deal as if it's a Tuesday and

And I went to give it to my editor for the podcast and I had only recorded two seconds of it. So, yeah, but I think I had recorded the rest of the day. The mysteries. Correct. The mysteries wanted to stay a mystery. Yeah, maybe so. Yeah. But what we do know, what Brian has written about in the immortality key is...

They were serving, you know, some flavor of ergot, which is a precursor to LSD. And they know that now because they've actually like... They can see it in the cups. Yeah, they can like research the cups. There's some technology where they can look at the molecules in the chalices. It's like from fermented wheat. And then also they were serving likely some sort of mushroom wine, some sort of mycelial mixture with wine. And also the idea there is that there's also the Plutonian cave. And so Leila and I did mushrooms in the Plutonian cave when we were there.

And that like the legend has it that that is where Persephone would go into the underworld with Hades. So again, it's about like the death, the death of the earth. And we go into winter and Demeter, Persephone's mother, when her mother dies,

like when her daughter would go into the underworld, she would get quite sad. And so she would like launch the world into winter when her daughter was gone in the underworld. And then when Persephone would come back to her mother for half of the year, Demeter would get happy again and we would go into spring and summer. So it was very much around the harvest. It would happen in the fall. So when the world is transitioning or when the northern hemisphere is transitioning into fall and winter.

So again, it's very much about dying. And so anyone who's been through a death portal, anyone who's been through a breakup, anyone who's been through a divorce or a job change, it's like you really do surrender what is, but then you're making space for what's on the other side. And I'll share this as kind of a high thing, but after like, you know, Layla and I are on mushrooms, we're in the cave, like two hours go by of just silence. And I open my eyes and the first thing I say is, Layla, it's amazing with your eyes closed. Yeah.

And it's amazing with your eyes open, which is a very high thing to say. But since then, what I've extrapolated of what I was experiencing is like, like, what if death is just as good as life?

Like, what if it's even more beautiful? And like, what if there's actually nothing to be afraid of? And that was my visceral experience in that moment, in that cave, because I was experiencing these like fractals of God, this like like this geometry, which is the language of God. The sacred geometry is the language of God. And I felt like I could tune into all of the pleasure happening on the planet simultaneously.

And it felt like, oh, there's nothing to be afraid of. And if you can really look death in the face, if you can really truly face your own mortality, I do feel like the liberation that happens in the precious time that we have left in these bodies becomes so much sweeter. But if you spend all of your days being afraid of death, afraid of change, afraid of loss, then there's no way you're going to let yourself live full out. Yeah, it's beautiful. It feels like as you're

speaking about tapping into all of the beautiful things on the planet and all of like the joy and the pleasures and such, it seems like the move is to be like the most, like the highest expression for a person would be to have not attachment to that as well as all of the turmoil and the war and the pain and the fear and the shame and all of that.

And it's like if you're in this dance where you're like trying to find the good, then you're probably going to actually be feeding energy into the into the bed.

And it's always going to be this contractive push-pull dynamic. And like the dying before you die thing would probably be, could, some iteration of that could be loving all of the pain and loving all of the shame and loving all of the guilt and loving all of the war and loving all of the ways that you don't love yourself. Loving the ways that you don't love yourself. And then just like, cool. And I equally love, you know, all the sweet things and that baby and that puppy. And like, I love that.

But like that, I think to be in that place and then also not having judgment on yourself when you kind of, you know, flub up a little bit and prefer things that, you know, warm baths instead of like, whatever, getting lashings on your back or something. I was doing the lashing, I guess. Yeah. I mean, you probably, I don't know what your preference would be between the two. I don't know. Lashings could probably be a good time. I'm not really a pain kind of gal. Like,

Like I barely like mild salsa, but I'm learning my threshold for pain is getting bigger. But thank you for articulating that so beautifully. And I think what you just described as equanimity, right? It's like what you get to in Vipassana, you know, on like day five or six when like the pain is so intense. There's like a few days that most people leave. I think it's like day four and day six is most people leave. Oh,

Or they break through to the other side and have these like waves of full body orgasm and bliss and like this divine love. But it's hard to break through to the other side. And I think exactly to your point, if you're trying to resist the pain...

then you create hell. If you're trying to resist the death, then you create hell. But if you can actually die before you die, release the attachment before you die, then you can be in heaven right here, right now. And then you're right. Then the trick is don't chase that. Don't chase the bliss. Same in meditation. It's like, don't try to avoid the thoughts

But then when you experience that bliss and transcendence, don't chase the transcendence. Same thing in pleasure, right? Like don't avoid the pain, go into the pain. But then when you experience the pleasure, don't try and like make yourself have the pleasure before it's there. And like this is the cosmic dance. It's why meditation and pleasure are the playgrounds for life.

And I think that the more we can practice these things in intentional ways, the easier it is to surf the waves of life. And I think to your original question around worthiness, like what you just said is worthiness. Like I'm loving this piece of me that doesn't feel like I'm enough. I'm loving this piece of me that hates that person. I'm loving this piece of me that hates me. And that becomes the teachings of Christ. It goes back to like actually like, oh gee, Jesus stuff. Which you could, so if we want to go back to the divine feminine, like you're

Mary Magdalene was like the feminine Christ consciousness. She was one of his like not, you know, she's taught in many lineages as a whore, but she was actually like his, she was not only a disciple of his, but a love of his, like they were tantric lovers. She was initiating him. She was an Isis, a priestess of Isis.

Isis being the Egyptian goddess of fertility, sex, magic, and sex magic. So sex magic and sex magic. And a lot of people, I mean, I did not know this until very recently, but there's a beautiful book called The Magdalene Manuscripts where it's a channeled text by Tom Kenyon.

but they go into all the practices. Dang patriarchy. Tom got them. What's that? Oh, it's just that it's a guy channeling Mary. Well, you know. The patriarchy. I don't think it matters what the gender is that is celebrating the goddess. Yeah.

I'm here for all genders being in worship of the goddess. I think it's necessary, actually. But there's also the Gnostic Gospels, at least the ones we can find. Again, a lot of Mary Magdalene's teachings were literally etched out of the stone and ripped out of the books. But a lot of them are about connecting the head and the heart. They were about using your pleasure to pray. And so, look, I have...

This stuff is hard to fact check because it's been so violently removed from our history. But a lot of people, and certainly in these channeled texts, would argue that Mary Magdalene was initiating Christ in these ancient practices and teaching him to use his life force. That's why he could come out of the cave, that he could bring his body. You know, like the yogis in India, like the advanced meditators can take their breath down into almost death-like states and stay in that for weeks, right?

airitarians, breathitarians. And this is, I mean, people could do that now. People have been doing that for thousands of years. And then also we know in Tantra and in Kundalini, you can then use this life force to activate very high states of consciousness. So, you know, there's some missing years where we don't know where Jesus was. And a lot of people say he was in Egypt and in India, that Magdalene and Christ were in Egypt and India. And so...

Yeah, it's a lot of speculative, exciting teachings, but I think that our myths matter. Because if we don't have any mythology of the divine feminine, we don't have any version of female Christ consciousness. Like what does that do to you if you're in a female body? Right? Like if your only archetype of the divine is male, then you, if you are not a male, it's harder to identify with the divinity inside of you.

And so I think that it matters the way that we anthropomorphize God. A curious question that I have, which probably be most questions would be curious for gals that I respect, which you'd fall into that category is if there would be a thing like a standout thing for you that you feel like women experience that men probably wouldn't be able to understand.

What would something be? It's kind of like a mystery to men, but women are experiencing. I mean, the reality is that if you have a womb, you have a matrix point to the unmanifest. Like you have a portal between the manifest and the unmanifest. And that is one of the holiest things that exists on our planet. And I think

for all genders to be in reverence to that is, is an opportunity. It's an opportunity to like worship the divinity inside of these human forms. So I'm reading this book right now called womb awakening and I've read it like seven times in a row. Like I'm just listening to it on audible again and again and again. And it's so potent and such a reclamation. Um,

you know, cause I mean, I grew up in the eighties, right. I'm 45. And so like a lot of like

When I was growing up, like the period was still called, your period was called the curse and you like hid the fact that you like, you wouldn't let anyone know you had like tampons or pads. And, you know, it was just like so like shameful and hidden as if there was something wrong with you because you were menstruating. And so to have this reclamation of like, oh, this is this like life force that is filled with stem cells that like feeds the new life. And this

This idea that you grow an entire other organ of placenta that is like you're an energetic and cosmic twin. Like back in the day, we used to plant the placenta near a tree and then that would it was in utero. That was almost like your twin. And so if you if your placenta got planted in the earth, then it creates this connection between you and the planet. And because we don't do that anymore, we just like incinerate people's placentas. It's like severed our connection with the planet.

And so I think that there's all of these ways that we could be reclaiming not only our relationship to the feminine, but also our connection to the earth. And if we could just love into integration a bit of the misogyny that has happened on the planet, it would really advance the species. Like I'm interested in the question of how good can it get?

Like, how good can it get? And I have a theory that if we can rebalance the masculine and feminine energies on the planet, that we could all be experiencing something a lot more akin to heaven on earth. And then last thing I'll share is that the thing that feels like, at least in my experience, it feels exclusive to women. I've not experienced it in men, is that...

like tuning fork frequency that if one, if you have a room of women who have had their life force awakened, that have this like Kundalini online that know how to channel Shakti energy, which is like divine feminine energy. If one of them gets activated, then the whole room gets activated. And like, that is a fun thing to experience. And I don't know anyone who's researched it. And yet every time I'm in a room, depending on the women, it happens without fail. Yeah.

And it's very nourishing and it's very, it feels holy to me. And I don't, I'm sure it might happen for men, but I've never experienced it. Probably. I mean, we're always attuning to each other, you know, so we're always kind of like mimicking each other in some way. And there's probably something within that of like permission as well. Yeah.

You know, it's like it's like probably there's a lot of energy that a person would hold within themselves that could feel very pleasurable or very expressive. You know, it's kind of like you go to a dance party and you want to dance probably like everybody I think wants to dance. But then enough people like two people, three people get on. There's a certain point where it's like, OK, like it's safe to dance. I could see there being something like that, like like the women that you're with.

having tapped into this sensation that feels so good and like having a desire to experience that

and almost it just being like a granting of permission in a way. It's like, ah, like open the well, like it's okay. Yeah, and I think that that's actually the role that the masculine can play in those because it's like, to me, the masculine, irrespective of gender, the masculine is the container, it's the structure, and the feminine is the flow. So even at a cellular level, it's like, if you look at an atom, it's like the masculine is the matrix, it's the architecture of that, and then the feminine is the light and the energy that comes through. And so...

If you're in a room of women and men, like the men can be the structure, can ground into the earth and then allow that life force to move through in a way that can feel balanced and even ecstatic. I love it.

Emily Fletcher. That's me. Thank you so much. Thank you, Aaron Alexander. So you are the founder of Ziva Meditation. You are an author. You're very prominent in all the world. So where's the best place for people to go to go deeper into your work? Yeah, I would say the place to find everything is zivameditation.com. It's our website. And Ziva, Z-I-V-A, it's a Sanskrit word that means bliss. So zivameditation.com. And you can find everything.

Um, we have an online meditation training. That's really, it's simple, but very profound. So if people don't have a daily meditation practice that they love, I would recommend starting there because it's just going to like viscerally give you this experience of bliss and helps us sleep and cognition. And I think we've done a podcast on the many, many benefits of meditation, but also you can find Ziva magic there, which is an online course where people can learn the visualize, alchemize, magnetize. And we just shot it. We did it with, um,

I don't know if you know Everett. He shot Vailana's music videos, but it is a work of art. It is like a 20 hour music video. We shot basically like a retreat, but captured it like a documentary with me teaching to camera. And I'm, I'm really proud of it. Like not only is it like four years of my life, but it's also a work of art. And yes, I'm really proud of it. So you can get Ziva online or Ziva magic all at Ziva meditation.com. And we're on social media as well at Ziva meditation. Perfect.

Thank you so much. My pleasure. I appreciate you. I appreciate you. That's all. I'll see you next week. Hope you guys enjoyed that conversation. I want to invite you to leave us a five-star review if you feel this program merits it. Also, I want to invite you over to the Align Podcast YouTube channel. Subscribe over there for a chance to win some sweet prizes. We pick a subscriber at the end of each month to send you some cool stuff. That's it. Thanks for doing you. Hope this conversation was helpful. I'll see you next week.