[00:00:00] Luke: The last time I saw you, we were in Austin, Texas, and you were just on the near other side of divorce and processing that in your life. Where are you today, Kelly Brogan?

[00:00:15] Kelly: So that's what I was telling you before we started rolling, is that I was watching a clip from the interview, and I could just see this layer on top of my literal face, my eyes and my mouth just this-- I could see my own grief in my face. And I feel so different now. It's not even a meritocracy. It's not like, oh, I'm better and so spiritually enlightened, but I feel so much more in my flesh, so much more in my skin. 

[00:00:51] And it's been really an extraordinary, whatever it's been, year and a half, something like that, of time with myself, understanding what happens inside of my systems when I create the container and let the energy flow through me. It sounds cliché, but I know you really were talking about celibate windows, and I'm in the creative life force that I have experienced. 

[00:01:28] I've learned how to dance, and saw, and sing, and all of these different professional entrepreneurial endeavors and experiences of myself as a mother. It's archetypal play that I haven't really explored when I've been coupled. And I think it's been the opportunity for me to really marry my polarities within.

[00:01:57] And we're talking about this event I have coming up in Miami in November. It's my first live event ever, and I was like, wow, this feels a lot like the other professional projects I've put together that are business-driven. And it feels like a celebration, and it feels like the marriage of my parts for everyone to see, my dark parts, my taboo dimensions, my light parts, my exalted matriarchal dimensions.

[00:02:28] And they're all coming together, and I'm inviting a bunch of women to celebrate with me. So that feels like a culmination. And that'll be, I guess, two years post major diversions for me.

[00:02:42] Luke: Many of us, at the demise of a relationship, tend to just brush ourselves off and jump into another one, which probably works sometimes, not in my experience. What prompted your decision to take some time off from that and just go within and really work on the relationship with yourself?

[00:03:04] Kelly: I'd like to say it was some conscious, intentional choice, but I think it was more born of how consuming being with my emotional experience. And I had already done enough, self-committing, I guess, up until that point to know that whatever was happening inside of me was something I wasn't going to avoid.

[00:03:27] And actually, probably since I've seen you, I've stopped drinking, working with any plant medicines. I've just been here with myself and the culmination of which was probably a water only fast and silence in my home, which was one of the more nihilistic experiences of my life, just to literally be with myself, sipping water on a couch for nine days. 

[00:03:55] Holy fuck. It was like I met the part of me that doesn't want to be incarnate. It was really one of the harder things I've ever done. And I'm still recovering from it, actually, I would say, a year later. But I was very consumed by what it was to just literally work through the dimensions of rage, and sadness, and grief.

[00:04:24] And I really ultimately got to this shame wall, just so much energy locked up behind a lot of shame. And it was almost like I was invited by my inner child parts, I guess, but invited, almost tricked, into these spaces. I found myself in a pole dance class suddenly. I found myself making some silly comedic video I never would otherwise have put together.

[00:04:55] Just post it. It's fun. Look what you did. And I found myself taking like a voice lesson, a singing lesson, under the guise of it's being just something new to try. But what actually I was confronted with through those experiences was tremendous amounts of shame. I remember being in one of my first singing lessons and just these hot tears coming down my face. I didn't even know why. 

[00:05:21] I'm sitting here with this lovely woman, and she's encouraging me to open this up for myself and legitimizing my entitlement to claim this feminine gift that not every person, but every woman certainly has as a birthright, and I just felt like crumbling into or fall and disappearing. What is that? 

[00:05:46] And I worked through a lot of that energy as I began to explore exotic dance and then was attracted to BDSM as a culture and explored a lot of what people are up to in that realm, not through my direct lived experience necessarily, but it just started to really orient me towards what I had been hiding, my secret self, I would call it. 

[00:06:17] And also how much energy I had been putting into curating and performing, and therefore not being in this vessel, not being present to my experience, not being present to whomever was in front of me, and really hoping nobody would notice these other parts that were not in mastery, these other dimensions of myself that were very alive but not necessarily part of my sense of identity and self-concept. 

[00:06:48] So that was pretty time-consuming and energetically-consuming too. And I just knew I was not in my ripened self to bring wholeness and the potential for intimacy yet. And so this experience of growing-- maturing, I would say-- my inner masculine to hold space for that embarrassment, the shame, the sense of what are you doing? You're making a fool of yourself. You can't come back from this. You've undermined everything you've built. Now don't have a man to tell you not to do the stupid things.

[00:07:27] This spine grew inside of me that was like, no, baby, I got you, and I love what you're up to. I'm here for it. And I'm not going to let you do anything that is going to be out of alignment. And with that sense of I've got me, I began to restore a connection to my own impulses, my own biological impulses.

[00:07:53] Literally, I spent months working on just relating to peeing differently, meaning-- you know what? It started on your podcast, the last time I was on your podcast. I peed on your podcast. I literally got up and peed. And that was the first time. It was so fucking long. It was three hours or something. 

[00:08:12] Luke: No, I remember that. Yeah. At one point, you're like, hey--

[00:08:15] Kelly: I know. I had never done that before. And since that time, I--

[00:08:19] Luke: I thought for a second you meant you peed in your pants on the podcast. I was like, wow. You hit it well. Cool, cool.

[00:08:27] Kelly: Yeah, no, it was just beginning to recognize that my body matters, what my body tells me matters, and I'm going to not say things like I'm going to go pee quick. I'll be right back. I'm going to just honor that. I will be that husband to myself who creates the conditions for my impulses to be taken care of for them to matter, and that extended into creative realms, where then I began to have inspiration and a sense of, I don't know, this creative open channel and that reconnection to my desire as being a sacred force within me. What do I want? What feels good? How do I make myself even more comfortable?

[00:09:18] I asked you guys to turn the air conditioning off before this. I wouldn't have done that before. And now it matters to me. My comfort matters. My experience of setting the conditions for my energy to move within me. And so that inner maturation within me, I feel, is what has readied me for partnership in a way that had I, I don't know, attracted an unavailable man to do the dance-- we're talking about the love addiction dance-- it would have been a grand expression of ongoing codepenency, and self-avoidance, and self-interference. So it's been a very rich-dimensional time for me. 

[00:10:09] Luke: Yeah, dating yourself. I've been there, man. Fuck, it can get lonely, but you know there's a North Star. It's serving a purpose. You're creating that diamond.

[00:10:27] Kelly: I spent a lot of years as an atheist. 

[00:10:31] Luke: Really? 

[00:10:31] Kelly: I was raised Catholic by my dad. My mom was an atheist. And I decided not to be confirmed at, whatever it is, 12 or 13. That was a big deal. And I became very devoted, like Dawkins, selfish gene Darwinism, real scientism practicing. It was the roots of my scientism. 

[00:10:57] Devotional practice for the ensuing decades started in my adolescence. Then when I began to wake up, probably around the time of my first pregnancy, I woke up into the new age. So I woke up into the universe and this concept of general meaning-making and spiritualism and became a Kundalini yoga teacher, practitioner, and found a lot of beauty and animism. 

[00:11:28] And I still was in a spiritual meritocracy, a will-based world, where if Kelly wanted something, she had to make it happen by aligning herself and doing the inner work. And if it didn't happen, it meant that Kelly wasn't getting an A plus on her spiritual work. 

[00:11:47] And so more recently, I've been in this moment of my life where I'm neutralizing a lot of rejection energy. And I have had a very, what I would call an immature masculine, a rule book, hard lines, like, fuck no to a lot of things. No, Kelly doesn't do that, pharma, certain foods, all the bad list. 

[00:12:09] And even in holistic wellness, we can get into that split of good and bad, and we empower the enemy, eroticize the enemy, I would say. And I really have come to a moment where one of the things that I'm revisiting in an effort to find neutrality is organized religion. What do I think about Jesus? What do I think about Christianity? Where did I leave off there? And what was this journey I've been on? 

[00:12:38] Because in my exploration of dom-sub dynamics and polarity dynamics, I consider a Christian woman, let's say, who's walking the world and she believes in a masculine God energy, and it's all around her, this safe, trustworthy, noble, honorable, masculine energy, she's literally suffused with it.

[00:13:08] That confers something to her nervous system that I don't enjoy in my new-age spirituality. I am still in my defensive structure, making things happen, and not trusting a process. And I'm interested in what it is to shift into this sense of submission that is available to men and women.

[00:13:38] Because many professional doms would say they are submissive to God. So there is a hierarchy from God to man, to woman, to child. And that finding your place in that hierarchy and how you can access submission, it does something to your system that allows it to exhale appropriately. And when you're in this, the universe has got me, I don't know. It doesn't do that for me. It's not a masculine energy. 

[00:14:07] Luke: Totally ambiguous.

[00:14:08] Kelly: Right, right. It's a little androgynous. And so I've been curious about, how is it that I can find real trust and real surrender? And part of it is knowing partnership and marriage on a new level that I now understand. Having been married and divorced twice, I have a special insight into what it is to not fully understand what the marriage covenant, and I'm not speaking from a legal perspective, obviously, but what it represents as being the historical impulse for all of human culture between men and women, let's say.

[00:14:56] And so for me to know that's awaiting me is a trust exercise of enormous proportions. And there are other tests in life that offer that moment of choice where you're either going to really allow the plot to unfold and love the story for whatever it exposes, or you are going to insist on writing it.

[00:15:26] And every page, you're going to scribble out and rewrite and try to guess where you're going to write five pages later. And I think this is my initiation on a feminine level into what it is to submit to God. And I haven't really had that experience. I've been through some challenging moments and several dark nights that have brought me to my knees, my divorce being one of them, and maybe the cardinal one.

[00:15:59] However, I haven't found that relationship to desire. It's been more that charnel ground of just being ripped into shreds or pixelated into the abyss. I've known that space. But as I relate to my own desire, I haven't come into that level of vulnerability that says, I know how to hold this, like David Deida calls it, the feminine signature of being full and wanting more.

[00:16:33] I had a qigong teacher, Mingtong Gu, who taught me this Chinese word, hao la, and it's like all is well and getting better. So how can we hold that paradox, which perhaps is the feminine essence that says, this is everything I've ever wanted right here, and it's also a yearning that is so, so deep within me for more?

[00:16:59] Luke: That brings to my awareness the principle of surrender, which, to me, has been the key to any semblance of fulfillment, joy, rest, purpose. It's all in surrender. But as you spoke on that, I don't know if I ever thought about that in order for one to fully surrender, there has to be something or someone to surrender into. Someone has to hold you. 

[00:17:29] I can't surrender to the void. There's nothing there to surrender to. There has to be a presence. And thinking back in my time spent in the throes of addiction and just complete self-will and egoic identity and living like an instinct-driven animal that I did for so long, there was no possibility of surrender because there was nothing to surrender to until all of that had failed.

[00:18:00] And then it was like, okay, I'm still not going to surrender, but I'm open to exploring that there might be something out there other than myself and the limited power that I contain as a single individual. And man, surrender is everything. But it's also something that doesn't have a finite conclusion. It's not like, oh, I surrendered. Yeah, I turned my life over to God, and everything's good now. 

[00:18:33] There's all these micro surrenders that come as we meet up against the degree of trust that we have in it. Do you find that your degree of trust and your ability to surrender goes incrementally in terms of things that are more substantial and that you're clinging to harder versus things that are easier? Oh, my car got repossessed. I'll surrender to that. But like taxes, divorce, illness, I think that's when we meet the real test of like, how surrendered am I really?

[00:19:09] Kelly: And how much of my God spark can I connect to in the moments where I feel most unworthy? Because we all have our portal, whether it's illness, or conception, meaning trying to have a family, or whether it's loss. We have the portal through which we feel potentially forsaken.

[00:19:34] And in that moment of disconnection, I would probably argue that most of what we call mental illness is shades of disconnection from your divine nature and your divine source. And that moment of contact with that forsaken experience is probably by design so that you can find it anew, but find it through your own will, through your own choice, and through the experience of spiritual courage that it takes to reclaim your life force from this familiar and seemingly soothing dimension of poor me victimhood.

[00:20:28] A lot of what I focus on is, what we have and what we're experiencing has very narratively important meaning in our life journey, and that there are many ways that our needs are met through our victimhood, through our experience of ourselves as having been forsaken. Poor me, why me? I hate this. Why is this always happening? 

[00:20:52] And ultimately, what that means is like, I'm not worthy. I'm not worthy. And so I would only not have what I want, everything that I want, all the beauty, and the money, and the children, and the friends, and the lovers-- and all the things that I want if I am unworthy of them, if I don't deserve them. 

[00:21:14] And because we're raised in these households where we're enculturated around this idea that you have to deserve love, you have to earn love, you have to meet the criteria for security, and safety, and emotional attachment, we bring that into all these dimensions of our lives. 

[00:21:35] And perhaps we have these dark moments where we are presented with the opportunity to recruit courage and choose life, choose to reconnect, and choose to find our sense of worth, even in defiance of what we may be observing around ourselves. I don't know. Surrender to me doesn't look like, oh, whatever. It'll come when it comes, 

[00:22:03] It's working with every moment of ups. I call it entering through the upset. It's working through every single moment and understanding that the feelings of upset, the disappointment, the resentment, the fear, the frustration is a rich energetic terrain within which I can make contact with a part of myself that holds like a gift. And I can do that literally through the animation and choice to embrace the emotional experience. I'm big on disappointment. That's my favorite feeling. It's so fetishized in Kelly's world. It's like, I love feeling disappointed.

[00:22:45] Luke: Is part of that because it provides you the opportunity to choose essence of a perception? Meaning, when one is disappointed, it's, in my experience, because I'm framing what was supposed to be in a certain light rather than the essence of what it actually is and the humility to know, I don't know the way it's supposed to look, which is easy to do in hindsight. You can look back on anything. You look back on a divorce, on whatever, someone died. 

[00:23:18] The most tragic things in life, for the most part, outside of maybe war, and famine, and all the real nasty stuff, but just in your subjective experience, inevitably, you're going to look back and go, oh, okay. I see why that job didn't work out or why that business failed, or whatever. And it was for me and not to me and all of that, but it's much more difficult to have a grasp on the essence and the truth of something in the moment because of all of the emotionality--

[00:23:46] Kelly: And projections. My best girlfriend, Tara-- you know Tara.

[00:23:54] Luke: Yeah, Tara. We went to Mexico together. Yeah, she's great. Where does she live these days? 

[00:24:00] Kelly: LA. 

[00:24:00] Luke: Oh, she's still there. Okay, cool. 

[00:24:01] Kelly: She's in LA. Yeah. And she coined this term I love, which could apply to any situation. She's like, there he is again. There she is again. Say that to yourself every time you're in the fetishized cycle of being disappointed again that somebody is doing the thing again. Oh, there he is again. There he is. That's actually who he is. It's who he's always shown me he is, or she, or it, government, or whatever, pharma.

[00:24:34] There is pharma is again, doing pharma's thing. Instead of this like, oh-- it's like a tantrum. It's like, oh my God, again? And we enjoy, I believe, that experience of being right about how wronged we are, trying to buy eggs from the hardware store. Doing the thing we know is not available, sourcing the love from the place we know it's not for sale.

[00:25:02] And maybe we do it because it's very vivifying, the feeling of disappointment. And I experienced this a lot in business. A vendor will disappoint me, or somebody will not come through on something, or there'll be delayed, or they'll get overwhelmed. And I don't want to hear about their overwhelm or whatever. And the feeling in my body is there's a lot of sensation. 

[00:25:29] And so a lot of the work I've done with my coach Whitney and otherwise, it's like to find the pleasure in the sensations of experiencing reality as I hate it to be. And also with disappointment, it's like there's a relinquishing. There's a, well, that didn't work. And in that is just a little taste of forced surrender, a little taste of like, oh, well now there's nothing to do because it doesn't work. Didn't work.

[00:26:08] And now I'm just going to sit here. And when we can't consciously offer ourselves bodily arousal through pleasure excitement, bliss, ecstasy, expansion, when we can't consciously offer ourselves the deliciousness of rest and doing nothing, then we create these situations where we get to micro visit with the spectrum. 

[00:26:35] And I also think there's a lot of fear, the thwarted desire for what is wanted is the experience of, it can't happen. I don't deserve it. I can't have it. It's not here for me. And so when we haven't healed that relationship to desire, then we just keep experiencing our desires thwarted. And I don't get to have the amazing team supporting me.

[00:27:05] I don't get to have the woman by my side in my darkest side. Instead I have the friend who disappoints me. So we can create that mitigated dynamic with desire through disappointment or resentment. How many couples live in the resentment space of contempt, just really, really getting off on the experience of repetitive patterned contempt in their body instead of the arousal that's available through polarity and a woman's proper submission, dare I say? 

[00:27:51] Luke: You just pissed off a lot of feminists. I don't know if any quasi feminists rather-- 

[00:27:56] Kelly: At this point. 

[00:27:56] Luke: I don't know how many listened to the show at this point. I am a white male after all. 

[00:28:01] Kelly: Yes, and your privileged position.

[00:28:03] Luke: And my privileged position. I think about that privilege thing, it's funny because everyone experiences their own traumas, capital T or lowercase t, subjectively. I like to refer to Bob Marley. I don't know if this is what he meant, but that's how I took it. Every man's burden is the heaviest.

[00:28:21] It's like you were the ignored middle child. You have your own trauma that might be sins of omission rather than commission and not overtly visible to those about you, but you still experienced it as that. But in terms of privilege, no one escapes-- maybe a few do. 

[00:28:40] No one I hang out with escaped trauma, regardless of what their socioeconomic situation was, or race, or whatever. It's like you get fucking banged around when you're a kid by default unless you happen to be karmically bestowed with a really healthy, well-developed family unit. I think that's-- 

[00:29:02] Kelly: Have you met one of those people?

[00:29:04] Luke: No, I don't think I have, but I think water seeks its own level. So people I hang around, we've been through some shit, and that's one of the unifying aspects of what draws us together and makes us able to relate. But yeah, just an offshoot thinking about that whenever I hear someone talk about-- and obviously, there are opportunities afforded to people that aren't afforded to others. I'm not dumb. 

[00:29:29] But when I think about my own life, man, I've been through some shit. For a big one, I'll just say it. I've contemplated this. Probably the most harmful thing that ever happened to me was being sexually abused when I was a little boy. Was I chosen because I was a white boy?

[00:29:50] Maybe that wouldn't have happened if I was a brown boy. I don't know. It's just theorizing. But where's the privilege in that? And maybe that was more likely to happen because I lived in a really poor neighborhood, and it had a lower level of consciousness in general. And there was probably more of that kind of nasty behavior going on, but being a white male didn't make me immune to being harmed.

[00:30:18] Kelly: Totally. And when you get into that comparative mentality, as a psychiatrist, working with women for 10 years in New York City, who to a woman were subjected to devastating levels of abuse and sexual abuse, every single patient I worked with. And some so dramatic that I could barely tell you without crying what some of these women had gone through. The comparative hierarchy of trauma, where I would say what some of these women have been through was why I never spoke about my childhood experience thinking, I haven't been through that, so it must not matter. 

[00:31:06] Plus I was trained in a system that was really not trauma-informed, despite being rather Freudian in Cornell and NYU, where I was trained. There wasn't an understanding that it really matters for everyone, the way it does now, for better or for worse. Because now there's a lot of victim coddling, and there's a lot of virtue signaling, and there's a lot of--you have to create the conditions for safety for me because of my trauma. 

[00:31:37] So there's certainly a shadow of what's happening in the zeitgeist right now. However, this understanding that our emotions are an energetic resonance, it's when you feel grief and I feel grief, it's grief. It's the signature of grief. And the narrative, the meaning that we make around it is our own personal narrative. 

[00:32:03] And that's what really infuses the principle emotion with the capacity to disempower us over a lifetime and attract more and more and more of that same resonance and then amplify it and create a huge field that becomes almost like a luge field, almost this ritualistic space that demands more and more and more of its own energy. 

[00:32:32] So you can have the same or worse of a on the books objective traumatic experience, and if you make it mean less disabling, less condemning than I do, then you will go through your life being a match to very different circumstances. 

[00:32:58] Luke: Or reaction to it perpetuating the same cycle as the perpetrator. 

[00:33:04] Kelly: Right. And that's a lot of the parasitic dynamics of that victim field. It's like you end up needing to play both sides. That's a lot of what I've learned through family constellation therapy, which has been so transformational for me, is that I find parts of myself that otherwise would have remained hidden in my unexamined stories of my experiences of trauma, maybe unshared stories even when I see myself in the perpetrator.

[00:33:39] So a lot of what I've learned through family constellation is that the most powerful thing you can do is organize yourself relative to your perpetrator. And that can be a real live human, or it can be a system. It can be whatever it is that you've empowered as the enemy. And how can you literally look in the eyes of that representative and see yourself in that person?

[00:34:03] It's always possible. It's actually more readily available than we might ever comfortably admit. And in that, you reclaim your humility, and you reclaim the part of yourself that would have remained behind that shame wall, hidden forevermore and projected onto all of your so-called enemies with different faces and different shapes for the rest of your life, where you're just in that eroticized woundology, just feeling it's-- because if you think-- 

[00:34:35] Luke: Think about this is in good faith. It's cool. 

[00:34:38] Kelly: If you think about our eros as our vital life force, then we want to feel it. We want to be animated by it. And so we're going to attract the experiences that give us that flavor, give us that movement, Kinesis. And we're going to either do it through lovemaking and polarized dynamics, or we're going to do it through our struggles. 

[00:35:07] Luke: In my own relationship with victimhood at large, not in immediate relationships, because I thankfully don't put myself in a position to be intimately victimized by anyone, at least not in a long time. But thinking about the bad actors of the world, the people pulling the strings, the shadowy figures, sometimes I feel both resentment, condemnation, blame, but on the other side of that, also fearful and victimized.

[00:35:46] And one of the things I do, and I want to see if this relates to the model that you're describing here, so take someone that I perceive to be inherently evil, a Bill Gates, a Klaus Schwab, a Tony Fauci, whoever. And my immediate reaction is probably, fuck them. Anger. I want to see harm bestowed upon them. I want them to be ended.

[00:36:11] But then if I look deeper, it's like, well, I'm afraid of them, really. So that's more in getting into the victim mode. And then I find a way out of that, or at least maybe a level of above that is to ask the question, who hurt you? Who hurt them? This is an expression of God ultimately that, for some reason, has chosen to move away from that light and has lost their access to empathy, and love, and compassion, and all the things that I hold dear and value. 

[00:36:48] But inside each one of those characters, there's innocence somewhere. And maybe, like you mentioned humility, maybe having the humility to know if I had been born with their karma in the exact circumstances of their family lineage, and their upbringing, and everything that they experienced, I would probably be the same exact person. 

[00:37:12] Because whatever made them made them. So if I was them, it would have made me, and I would be a Hitler, or a Mao, or whatever. So it helps me not feel in the position of a victim and not be afraid when I can see their frailty through compassion, where I get stuck-- and maybe you have some insight on this-- is if I'm having compassion for a diabolical, maniacal, evil freak, where's the line of enabling?

[00:37:48] It's like, can I unconditionally love a George Soros, but at the same time, stop them? Not like I have any power to stop that person, but you know what I'm saying? You have a boundary. Maybe even there's a righteous action, or a discipline, or a protection instinct. Especially for me and my masculine parts of me is like, hell no. 

[00:38:09] I will kill to protect the innocent. All humans have that if we're aligned, but maybe more so in my masculine experience of myself. So there's that. Where does the compassion and the understanding, and zooming way out, where does that intersect with standing up for what's right, and putting a stop to it, and fighting?

[00:38:30] I don't know if you have an answer or there even is an answer, but it's something I wrestle with as I go through waking up in the morning, looking at Telegram, going, ah, I got to kill this guy, or I'm afraid of this guy, or this system as a whole. It doesn't matter who the face is. It's more about just the energetics of that demonic anti-life entity that we call government. 

[00:38:52] Kelly: Right. 

[00:38:54] Luke: I go into the compassion and the forgiveness, and then I'm like, but wait, also someone has to stop them, or do they?

[00:39:02] Kelly: Yeah. Or do they? Exactly. I've thought so much about this, and I've described it as the shadow of activism, which is where a lot of the same resonant frequencies, if we want to call it that, of that which we as activists, especially in the health freedom spaces, purport to dedicate ourselves to resolving. We are perpetuating. 

[00:39:29] And what I mean by that is that when you insist that you know how reality should be, you are in a special privileged position to save those who need your saving. You need to inform the masses of what's going on and protect everyone. And I'm not speaking for men because I don't know. 

[00:39:49] I actually do think the roles may be different, but I'll speak as a recovering activist who is a woman, that I was invited to look long and hard at how I was literally propagating victim consciousness while masquerading as somebody who was here to resolve it. And the consciousness that says you are bad and wrong to literally anyone is victim consciousness.

[00:40:24] That experience of our power through superiority is victim consciousness. And even in the exercise of compassion around what might have happened to you, there's a superiority in that. You're looking from on high--

[00:40:44] Luke: The pity.

[00:40:45] Kelly: Yeah, pity and pathos. In family consolation, there's no forgiveness because you can only forgive from a place of superiority. There's just thank you. I love you. That's it. And trust me, I experienced the eye roll of the spiritual bypass in like, does anybody see what's happening? 

[00:41:04] And I also now have a deeper understanding of what sovereignty looks like. And I do believe that mature adult psychology is synonymous with sovereignty in that it is non oppositional, and it's non referential. That the immature masculine is the fuck no. And the mature masculine is the discerning wise action.

[00:41:28] I don't remember where I once heard this, but it's like when you have a dude who's just learning martial arts, and he goes into a bar, and he's all excited about his new skills, and somebody messes with him a little bit, he's going to bust out all his moves and get all aggro or whatever.

[00:41:44] But when you have a master, a seasoned master, if he were in the same situation and somebody kicks him some vibe, all he has to do is literally turn his head and glance at the dude, and it's, shut down. His literal presence is the contribution. His attention is the contribution.

[00:42:06] And I believe the masculine in each of us has that opportunity to mature such that our adolescent reactivity, our inability to hold in our systems without immediate discharge, that which we do not approve of, our experience of like, I don't like this, is matured so that we can be with that and allow ourselves to have this strong spine so that we can simply navigate from our own beingness.

[00:42:42] It's not referential. That's why I call it the erotic caress of the enemy. There were times in my life where I literally, me and my colleagues were obsessively focused on that news chatter. Like, what's he doing? What's Gates doing next? That's is an intimate dynamic. I see it in some of my critics. I'm like, are these guys masturbating about me every night? They're literally writing articles about me, blogs, podcasts. They're obsessed with me. 

[00:43:12] Luke: We talked about that last time.

[00:43:13] Kelly: It's literally that feeling of the little boy on the playground pulling the pretty girl's braids or whatever. And that's what we do sometimes as activists. We engage these dynamics perhaps so that we can re-experience that cardinal pain, that cardinal hurt, that cardinal fear. And we can experience it through the false narcissism, the false inflation of like, now I'll show you. 

[00:43:47] When I wrote my first book, I was totally imbued with that energy, like I'm going to take you down, bad daddy and mommy. And I published a book with an exploding pill on the cover and had my sword aloft, and thought I was going to take pharma down single-handedly.

[00:44:05] Pharma was, for me, that bad parent and held all of the energies of the bad parent and became this surrogate partner through which I could enact and play out all of these fantasies that maybe I get to punish. 

[00:44:22] Luke: That's funny. 

[00:44:23] Kelly: So when you're describing, I want to take them down, I want to kill them, or whatever, your inner villain, that experience of yourself as villain, you're in the triangle, dude. You're in the victim triangle as the victim, and the villain, and the rescuer. So you're all three at once. That's how we roll. When we're in this awareness space, the activism space, you occupy all of the shades of that victim consciousness.

[00:44:55] And the rescuer, for me, was the biggest one to shine a light on because, not only in my activist life, but even in my personal life. If I had a friend who is struggling with money, I couldn't hold her struggle in my body, so I would need to be like, I'll take care of it. I got it. Here, here. Don't worry. It's cool.

[00:45:16] And not only does that reify her own disempowerment and the sense that she can't figure it out on her own or she can't handle this. So I'm reifying her victimhood, and then I'm hiding my disempowerment in rescuer clothing. And so I think a lot of the opportunity that we have as we relate to what's going on in the world-- and I spent 10 years in that space of feeling like it was my job to inform the masses about how wronged we were and are, and to save them from any experience of misunderstanding what's wrong.

[00:46:03] And then it became the news cycle of people looking to me from my perspective on what's going on and what's happening in the world and how to orient. And really, it was always the virtue positioning. Where does the good go? Where does the bad go? And for me, it was often helping people see the story beneath the story. Here's what they are up to.

[00:46:30] And it was thanks to the pandemic that I decided to-- around George Floyd time-- really roll up my sleeves and go in instead of out and see how is it that I am that which I am condemning right now? How is it that I hold the exact same energies? Is there such a thing as an evil person? 

[00:47:00] And at the risk of becoming a moral relativist, I found that, yeah, I actually have been and I'm capable of doing all the bad things, all of them, cheating, lying, killing, manipulating, literally all of them. I'm not better than anyone. I'm literally not better than anyone, and I'm not better than my former versions of self. My asleep self, I'm not better than that version of me. 

[00:47:31] And so in recognizing that when I went inward, all of this orientation around power that I had enjoyed that said, I'm right, here's how we're wronged, let me help everyone else see that, it led me to this place where I was able to meet my inner villain, my inner victim, and to orient around what's happening very differently. So these days, I don't take the bait. I literally don't know what's happening in the Middle East. 

[00:48:10] Luke: Awesome.

[00:48:11] Kelly: Don't tell me. 

[00:48:13] Luke: You're my hero. 

[00:48:14] Kelly: Because I literally don't know why. And this happened with George Floyd. I never watched the video because, first of all, I have a baseline belief that what is broadcast is heavily adulterated, CGI'd, crisis-actored, and otherwise curated for a specific emotional effect. And it's called a loose ritual that there is a harvesting of a certain tenor of human emotion that is very strategically operationalized.

[00:48:53] And now it's deep fakery. There's all sorts of things, and I'm not implying that I know what's true or not true. It's just that my baseline assumption, until proven otherwise, is that there is adulteration of actual occurrences, and that when we are being asked to look at something, it's for a very specific reason, and it's not simply to share something that has occurred. 

[00:49:15] Luke: Totally.

[00:49:16] Kelly: And the reason that I don't participate in dominant news cycles is because taking the bait is very easy once you have a story and a huge growing field of bad guy, good guy options to choose from, and it is the trap. It's the trap. When you think that someone is bad wrong, be that a government, or an individual, or a system, literally, you're in your disempowerment.

[00:49:57] And you're imagining that you can fix something on the outside instead of finding a way to orient towards your okayness that is already available and already present so that you can then discern without judgment. Discernment is the recruitment of your choice the power of your choice.

[00:50:18] You can discern, and you can express your gift. You can express through wise action. And that's actually what I would like to be surrounded by, is people doing that rather than imagining that they are in some righteous position, and trust me, I have been there, to impart their knowingness about how things should be, meanwhile playing directly into the hands of exactly that which they imagine they are going to ever win.

[00:50:49] It's a very adolescent energy. It's like the petulant teenager who's like, fuck you. I'm going to show you now. And there's just such a different-- that's why I'm very sensitive to hysterical men. I don't know. I can't with that. I can't with that because--

[00:51:09] Luke: Don't go to any protests.

[00:51:11] Kelly: Yeah, it scares me to be a woman in a world with hysterical men. 

[00:51:14] Luke: It should scare you. There's probably nothing more dangerous than a man in a strong, capable body that--

[00:51:22] Kelly: Who's not emotionally self-possessed who's in his mother wound, who doesn't know how to hold his emotional energies. He doesn't have that container and is just discharging them everywhere.

[00:51:34] Luke: There's something I thought about I want to get your take on, and it's around the idea of toxic masculinity.

[00:51:42] Kelly: Yeah, I don't use that phrase.

[00:51:44] Luke: I don't either, except when I'm asking someone a question. But when I think about what I think that means, and I'm not sure because it's not a vernacular that I use, but it's something that's prevalent in the limbic system fertilizer of the media and our culture. 

[00:52:00] I think what they mean is a man who's angry, violent, oppressive, controlling, unthinking, unkind. And when I think of my experiences with men, and including myself at times, that have expressed in that manner, I think that they're actually have been overtaken by feminine energy. 

[00:52:24] It's really a toxic feminine within a male body because it lacks the stoicism, and the control, and the space holding, and the breath, and the strong spine, and the discernment over reactivity. When you see a guy freaking out and being violent or losing their temper, they're actually expressing the feminine energy.

[00:52:46] Kelly: Totally. I've thought a lot about this, actually, because I'm sensitive to that archetype, and I'm sensitive to it because it's in me. Because my inner tyrant of a masculine absolutely had no room for my feeling states. It just was like, literally, if I could narrate the way my inner masculine would speak to my inner feminine, it would be like, who has fucking time for this right now? Shut up. Deal with it. Let's go. 

[00:53:21] So that inner tyrant needs to always find the solution. The immediate way to discharge the emotion without anybody noticing is to find a solution. That's literally why I became a psychiatrist subconsciously, obviously, is because I had that little tolerance for my own discomfort with other people's discomfort that I needed to have a ready solution to their emotions so that I didn't have to feel them, feel their emotions through me. Those are called psychotropics. 

[00:53:58] So here you go. Take the Xanax. Here you go. Take the Prozac. Here you go. I got the pill for you so that you don't have-- and it looks like this is the rescuer. So nefarious. It looks like an altruistic impulse. I'm here to help you as a caring physician. And of course, there's a layer of that in there. However, what was in many ways going on was like, I need you to stop suffering because I can't handle my own empathic resonance. 

[00:54:27] Luke: Totally. Yeah.

[00:54:28] Kelly: It's too much for me, so please stop. That is the immature masculine that cannot be around the feelings because they themselves have that relationship to feelings within them. And the feelings that need to be histrionically expressed, and demonstrated, and shown, and narratively validated, that is the unbridled immature feminine that is using feelings to get a certain thing, not consciously. None of this is conscious. And so it's a match. It's like the both of them. The both halves are immature. 

[00:55:17] Luke: This is a really good piece right here for masculine energy people as a practice and something that, I don't know, I don't think I've ever heard it anywhere. I just felt better to lean into it. But say, in my relationship with my female wife, Alison, if she's experiencing heightened emotions about anything, it doesn't have to be about me, I'll notice within me that I feel uncomfortable with that, and I want to fix it and make her feel better because I care about her. 

[00:55:51] Like you said, there is some real compassion in that as there was when you were a therapist, and I want to ease her suffering, but there is definitely a part of it-- it's not a big part-- that's like, I feel uncomfortable because I can't help but take on her feeling state through that resonance. So I don't want to feel the discomfort of her discomfort, so I'm going to help her move through it or whatever. 

[00:56:15] And thankfully, I think through the awareness of what the difference is between me being there for her and me being there for myself, is using breath and presence to actually just be able to relax my nervous system and just hold space and release myself from whatever she's feeling.

[00:56:36] And this could be true of anyone. I'm just using her because she's the person I live with. But if you were having an emotional moment, there'd be a part of me that wanted to fix you so you feel better. Part of me wants to fix you so I feel better. But there's maybe a higher path, which is--

[00:56:49] Kelly: That's a beautiful masculine expression. You are the problem solver. You are the fixer. We need you to do and be that. However, if it's coming from a reactive place, it will have a certain quality that lacks true discernment. And if it's coming from a place of self-possessed wise action and the spaciousness of like, I will bring the solution at the perfect time and guide us out of this place of your struggle and suffering, it'll have a different quality. And a woman feels that difference. We're wired to that.

[00:57:28] Luke: Absolutely. 

[00:57:28] Kelly: And your attunement to her is compromised if what you're really attuned to is your own discomfort. And you can only attune to her if you have these practices of cultivating presence, cultivating self-regulation, cultivating an inner stability that allows your own discomfort to swirl around. That's cool. 

[00:57:57] However, your attunement is to her. It's external. And that is the dominant perspective. It's outwardly attuned because you have this on lock. Whatever's going on in here doesn't really even matter. But you're operating from a strudy that's so much the warrior.

[00:58:20] Luke: There's a level when it's done successfully. It's a work in progress, of course.

[00:58:27] Kelly: I know. Trust me. 

[00:58:28] Luke: When I lean into through practice, it just becomes more automatic. You go to, ooh, nervous system feels this way. What if I respond to my nervous system in this way? But there's almost-- I don't know. I can't think of the right word. It's not detachment. It's non-attachment 

[00:58:48] Kelly: Yeah. 

[00:58:48] Luke: Detachment infers that you're like, oh, I'm out of this conflict that you're having within yourself, and I'm divorcing myself from it, but it's more like a leaning into in a compassionate way, but also holding the realization that it's not my experience, and it doesn't have to be my experience. 

[00:59:07] And the craziest thing about that is if you're a fixer and you want someone to feel better for whatever your motive is, as the masculine, what I've observed is the-- I don't use the word stoicism or stoic. It's not even something I fully know how to define, but it just comes to mind, so I'll use that. 

[00:59:25] But just breathing, space, holding, stillness, openness, not trying to change, not trying to fix, allowing whatever needs to process be processed through us or through the other person, is actually the fastest way to the resolution. It's like you actually stymie the processing by trying to process it and getting involved in tussle of emotionality versus just holding space, breathing, and all of a sudden, you're like, oh, we just moved through that. I didn't even do anything. All I did was just be. 

[01:00:00] Kelly: Exactly. This is it. 

[01:00:02] Luke: Be in the deepest presence I can with an open heart. And all of a sudden, magically, whoever it is that is having the it's resolved.

[01:00:11] Kelly: Yeah. 

[01:00:11] Luke: It finds its resolution through non-action, really. It's so interesting the way that works.

[01:00:17] Kelly: My polarity and BDSM teacher, [Inaudible], that I've been working with for a bit now, he talks about this in terms of containment, that a man's role, not only for his partner but perhaps in society at large, is to offer containment. And what he describes that as, if I could summarize, is that through his own system, he confers stability and grounding to the systems around him.  That's literally it.

[01:00:58] So how do you cultivate that capacity as a man? Well, it's your journey, whether it's through silent meditation, or martial arts, or yoga, or whatever it is. You find your way to have such command over your system that you can gift it to the people around you, and you feel it.

[01:01:20] It could be that you know when to offer a hug or a firm touch. It could be a gaze, and it can simply be the way you are in a moment that offers safety to the people around you. And when you think about the activists that you and I know, what men at the helm are offering that gift? Literally none that I-- 

[01:01:49] Luke: Oh, it's wreck but only for that one. 

[01:01:49] Kelly: None that I know. So if we're specifically looking at that, it's an energetic signature, and it is a feeling. If I'm a woman listening to one of these men, it's not an activation in my body. It's a soothing in my body where I finally feel like I can exhale.  He's here.

[01:02:12] Luke: But based on perception, it would appear that that person you describe is "not doing anything". 

[01:02:23] Kelly: Right. It's Right. It's just a presence. And I think that presence is, in many ways, at odds with the activist impulse. We have friends here who, I think, embody that. Absolutely. And my friend and mentor, and in many ways, like an important father figure to me, Tom Cowan is certainly somebody who I think of like, wow, he really helps a lot of people simply being in his stable system.

[01:02:55] And so when we look at that as being the currency of the masculine gift that is conferred upon the populace, it's a very different litmus that we assess who it is that we allow to guide us and who it is that we choose to follow. And the ways that we can orient around a man's feminine energy are probably because we ourselves as, I'm speaking as a woman, are in our own defensive structure. Data will call it a masculine shell. 

[01:03:33] I will orient around an enlivened, passionate man who does not seem to be able to offer that containment. And if I myself am in my own inverted polarity, if I myself am disconnected from that deep desire to find my submission in the dynamic, and [Inaudible] and many others would say that it is the deep desire of a feminine essence being to orient towards safety and containment, conferring masculine energy, to find submission and devotion in that space, in that sacred union. 

[01:04:26] And this is relevant to every man-woman relationship. This is the study I've made over the past couple of years. As I interested myself in ending the war with men and really acknowledging that a fear of being harmed and killed by a man was at the root of a lot of my activism, I dedicated myself to no longer speaking ill of men, to expressing appreciation, and admiration, and respect, to asking men for help, whereas my formerly conditioned I got this self never would have, and it has brought about in me a deep understanding as much as I'm capable of around the twist that men are in in this moment. 

[01:05:24] Trying to understand whether to feel their feelings or grab their balls, trying to understand what women want from them. Do they want apologies, or do they want command and dominance? And I think the new age has run quite a psyop on men specifically, that has served their emasculation. And isn't that convenient? Because the population with emasculated, confused men and flailing, exhausted women is very easy to co-opt.

[01:06:01] Luke: There's also the undermining of men through the fraudulent waves of feminism--

[01:06:12] Kelly: Yeah. 100%. 

[01:06:14] Luke: That have indoctrinated mothers who emasculate their boys, maybe even with the best of intentions. 

[01:06:20] Kelly: Yeah. Because they don't know better how to feel safe and meet their needs. So when a woman is raised by a scary, heart-disconnected man, she goes on to experience men as fear-inducing, and then when her son begins to express his healthy aggression, she makes it very clear that he will lose her love if he continues to do so.

[01:06:48]  And that could be just being loud and banging sticks on the wall, or it might be he bites her nipple while he's breastfeeding as an infant. Or it might be that he tries to stand up to her as an eight-year-old and say that he disagrees or doesn't like things in a certain way. Sometimes called a shadow mommy or some other mother.

[01:07:10] What is it for a woman who, in service of her own system's regulation, requires that her son divorce himself from his own eros, divorce himself from his own vital force, divorce himself from his own dark masculinity. Then you have a man who is a nice guy. You have a beta. 

[01:07:32] You have a man who will probably erotically seek out these mother-son dynamics where he is in equal parts still terrified of this woman and her capacity to reject and shame him and also desirous of that kind of hierarchical dynamic where he's empowered her.

[01:07:59] And sometimes it's interesting to consider what a boy wants from his mommy really is not the same thing as he wants from his woman as an adult. Whereas what a little girl wants from her daddy is pretty much the exact same thing that she wants from her man. And so that-- 

[01:08:21] Luke: That's interesting because I think it's probably more common that, in a healthy way, a woman will refer to her man as daddy or papa. I know, for me, I would never be like, hey mommy, or something. I would never use that. I would never use that frame for my female partner.

[01:08:42] Kelly: Yeah, the BDSM realm is a very powerful place within which to explore. They call it incest play, but explore these dynamics, and the daddy-daughter one is a big one. And the initiation that men seem to require is different than I think what women require to become. 

[01:09:09] And perhaps that initiation that is not available in the hegemony of American culture and really the disappearance of any initiatory rights for men, say, for sacred sons. And what's being offered in contemporary models, the failure to initiate perhaps, is how it is that men carry that unerotic dynamic into their modern-day adult partnerships. 

[01:09:42] Whereas if women do not initiate this, and that's not to say that women don't have an imperative to integrate their negative animus, their negative masculine projections. We certainly do. And that's perhaps the most important work we have to do, is to really integrate, heal, mature our inner fathers, our inner masculine.

[01:10:05] But we don't need to initiate in the way that men do. And so we have a real problem and challenge when we have a society built on uninitiated men who are still fundamentally performing for the bad mommy that they long for love from and also deeply resent. And they're rightfully rageful for her castration.

[01:10:37] Luke: And the addiction to approval. That's been a big thing for me, is just shedding over the years the addiction to being liked, and approved of, and thought well of. It's such a prison psychologically to feel like you need that all the time and find yourself losing the grasp of your authenticity as the cost of attaining that. Everyone says, oh, I don't give a shit what people think. Yeah. I think the most enlightened of us still care because of social-- 

[01:11:14] Kelly: Of course. We are social animals.

[01:11:15] Luke: Yeah, I don't buy that nobody cares. But I can say, thankfully, that, as the years wear on for me, I give less shits in terms of how other people perceive me, needing less approval, being able to reconcile that there are going to be a number of people throughout my life that don't approve of me, don't like me, don't enjoy me, and being really comfortable with that.

[01:11:43] Knowing that the people that do are my people, and those that don't aren't, and God bless them, but it's impossible to do that unless you've been initiated, whether it was in a formal rite of passage when you're 14 in a sweat lodge or whatever, or just through many dark nights of the soul. I think you can acclimate yourself to not needing that to feel whole.

[01:12:09] Kelly: Or maybe even more empowering is to interest yourself in the negative feedback, and to orient towards it. Again, [Inaudible] talks about actualized men want to know the truth. They don't want to hide from it. They don't want to like, oh, I don't need to hear your opinion. They don't want to shelter themselves from disapproval. 

[01:12:37] They want to know what actually the truth is because it gives them a refining mechanism. It gives them data. It gives them the capacity to develop intimacy with what I understand is one of a man's greatest fears, which is failure. How can you develop a dynamic with failure so that you are consciously interacting with it rather than imagining that you can run from it, escape it, or somehow beat it?

[01:13:10] And so when you interest yourself in what your critics have to say, there's such important data there. Again, as a woman with an inner masculine, I have found that I've grown my container for-- I've been a very polarizing figure my whole career. And so when it was about my intellectual perspectives, or scientific perspectives, or perspectives on pharmaceuticals or germs or whatever, it's like that just rolled off my back, like making the disinformation doesn't list.

[01:13:45] I actually thought it was funny, and I liked it. I enjoyed the click juice after many of censorship. So that didn't affect me at all, was not spiritual material for me to alchemize. However, when I began to experience strong critical feedback from feminists, so called feminists, actually when I began to talk about home birth.

[01:14:10] But also, in my more recent exploration of the Psi Alpha feminism, I've gotten pushback. And then traditional man-woman relating, tons of pushback. And with what I call desecrating my sexuality, meaning really integrating my sexuality into my public image, sharing videos of myself exotic dancing, and pole dancing, and a bikini on Instagram.

[01:14:40] And these were things that were absolutely taboo for me, as my identity had been constructed as a professional. And in doing that and receiving criticism, a huge range of criticisms that were very cringeworthy for me, from like, you're a terrible dancer, to, you're an attention-seeking narcissist, to, you've destroyed your career, or whatever. You look like you have an eating disorder, just a huge litany of critiques, constructive feedback. 

[01:15:17] I'm a fighter. My stress physiology is fight. It's probably not surprising. And what I found when I would relax my body and open in those moments that I wanted to write the scathing retaliatory comeback was that I could meet the part of myself that agreed, the part of myself that was holding the very same belief that I wanted to defeat. 

[01:15:49] And so it's the micro of the macro we were discussing before. The war is inside. So how is it that, thank you to my greatest hater, I can find the dimension of myself that would have waged war within, if not for this opportunity to see that it's there through the upset that they caused me, that they put upon me, but really was the sentinel for me to interact with that part and interest myself in the part that believes I'm an attention seeking drama queen, whore, whatever.

[01:16:30] The part of me that actually does think they're right that I am embarrassing myself or I've made a big mistake. The biggest, hardest meaning-making element that I encountered of all of the criticism was like, that I'm just being a woman wrong. I'm just doing it wrong, the whole thing. I've got the whole thing wrong. 

[01:16:56] And if there is a part of me that believes that, then I will be forever outside of my gift, forever outside of what is arguably the antidote to nervous system dysregulation, which is self-expression. I will never be able to fully embody that if there is a part of me that is saying, you're not entitled to that.

[01:17:22] You don't know how you don't deserve it. You don't get the keys to the female castle. And so when I interest myself in my critics, there's a whole alchemy that becomes available, and I become mature in my masculine rather than remaining reactive, retaliatory, and vigilant in my immaturity within.

[01:17:51] And then I become a custodian for my feminine energy in a way that is not available when I'm in that place of seeking approval, which is hilarious. Even that effort is hilarious that I could please all the people. I made a video, if any-- I shared an Instagram-- of what it would look like if I took notes on everybody's feedback and tried to do all the things they were asking. 

[01:18:24] And I started out in thigh-high boots on my pole, and then I end up my white coat in a bun in a burqa with tape over my mouth, typing on my computer. This is how everybody wants me. This is good. And it's funny. It's funny to imagine what we would if we took all the feedback and tried to integrate that into some coherent behavior. It's just not possible, so give it up.

[01:18:55] Luke: Yeah. And also, you know the value and not letting praise go to your head either. It's the same coin. I forget who it was, but someone said, if you take the credit, you've got to take the blame. That neutrality of just keeping all of that feedback right-sized. And I guess, in your case, it can also serve as grist for the mill.

[01:19:25] Kelly: Yeah. And I'm sure you get this too, but I have people--

[01:19:29] Luke: No one ever criticizes me, by the way. 

[01:19:32] Kelly: I'm talking about the accolades.

[01:19:34] Luke: Oh, I get a few of those.

[01:19:35] Kelly: Yeah. People have come up to me for years and shared just absolutely staggering feedback about how I've impacted their lives. And thank you for this and thank you for that. And honestly, it feels like very little because I don't have that part in me that agrees. 

[01:19:58] So there's nowhere for it to land necessarily, but where my risk of, what in the Steinarian world is called Luciferian inflation, where the risk of that is for me is in spiritual ego. So I like to give myself a lot of credit for my courageous emotional work. So when I've had done the tough things, had the tough conversations, or come out about these vulnerable things publicly, or been more authentic than was comfortable for me at the time, there is a space that I can get into where I really like credit for all my deep inner work.

[01:20:44] And I really want to be recognized for that. It's not for my New York times bestseller, my Ivy League education. That does not go to my head. It's this realm that I've really become interested in, where my shadow lives, because I think that it's a place in the spiritualized dimension of our culture right now where a lot of us can get caught up, is imagining that we are really suffused with some important energy now that we see the truth, now that we've done the work, now that we've had the experience in that ceremony or in that circle. 

[01:21:32] It's like they say. A light bright enough blinds as much as the dark. So I really interested myself in what Steiner, to my best understanding, taught about this middle way. So there's the Luciferian energies of the transcendent rejection of the body that a lot of Kundalini, or plant medicine, or a lot of even basic meditation seeks to offer, is relief from the experience of your human body.

[01:22:11] Come out here into the light and find God there. And then there's the, what he calls the aeromonic forces and entities that are materially-oriented that's my whole allopathic training, nothing to see here soul wise. This is just parts, and buttons, and levers, and chemicals.

[01:22:35] And this is a dense material realm, and we're meant to focus on what we can measure. And somewhere in the middle is Christ consciousness. Somewhere in the middle is God through the material, God through the body. And how is it that we can stay in here and find our humble access to this enormous power, because I think that there's a lot of shadow on both ends of that spectrum.

[01:23:10] And that's why in the new-age community we saw so many people, maybe all of the real-talking heads, shilling for the jab, and the masks, and whatever else, because the body 's like a dirty realm of irrelevance. Who cares? Yeah. I put the mask on. Whatever. We just got to make sure it doesn't get the gross thing and die. Experience the horror of death, or whatever fears are hiding in that rejection of the embodied experience of our humanity.

[01:23:47] And it's almost like they start to look just like the materialists, just like those who are saying the body requires management and symptoms are something to be avoided at all costs, or meaningless, nuisance at best, and the portal to your demise at worst. What's in the middle seems to be something that is a balance of all of this experience of transcendence and all of the, really, impulse to come down into this very real space.

[01:24:23] Luke: When you describe the middle, which is where I aspire to exist on a good day, because I've been to both sides of that, more so toward the, you aren't your body, you're not your mind, therefore it doesn't mean anything. It's all consciousness. But when you describe that, the word that comes to mind is non-duality. That it's not this or that. It's all this or all that. It's totally inclusive of everything.

[01:24:53] Because the measurable, the finite is real in its own light, as is the unseen realms of the unmanifest. It's all the same thing. And I guess maybe if the pendulum that is our experience swings too much in the other direction, then we polarize ourselves. But there's a maybe a uni-polarity right in the middle somewhere that we can use as our North Star, which is everything and not oneness in the sense of a new age oneness, but that there's only one thing, and that it's consciousness, and we exist at the center of that from our own experience. But that it's true that we're not the body, but it's also true that we are body because here we are in it, right? 

[01:25:38] Kelly: Right. Yeah. 

[01:25:39] Luke: So it's all real, and it's all valid. Maybe that middle way is just-- the way I orient myself to that I think is trying to get myself out of the left or right, or black or white. It just all is and somewhere in the, even though it's an ambiguous position, it's the one that best, that seems to provide, for me at least, the most stability.

[01:26:05] Kelly: I think the resolution of the ambiguity though is in the opportunity that polarity offers. So I prefer that term to duality. Of course, we're in a realm of polarities, and what is the polarity that is specifically designed to cultivate the creative life force that's conferred by God?

[01:26:36] It's the masculine-feminine polarity. It is this dynamic experience of organized energies. Yin yang doesn't work if it's all gray and muddied together. It's not a oneness. It's a very organized--

[01:26:56] Luke: It's contained too.

[01:26:57] Kelly: Discreet complementarity. And that becomes available when we can understand how these dynamics operate within us. How do I know when I'm in my dominant yang masculine energy? How do I know when I'm in my submissive invitational feminine energy? Can I feel that difference? Can I intend to create the conditions for one to be more expressed than the other or to be in neutrality? Can I command that?

[01:27:31] That is an energetic mastery that I think then allows us to organize in polarity outside of ourselves and in dynamic with others, in dynamic with systems, in dynamic with nature, and to really leverage the, I don't know, intentional organization of energies so that we can come into complementarity. 

[01:27:55] Because, otherwise, there's just the warfare consciousness. There's just like, this is different. You're different. I'm bad. You're good. That virtue split, and we remain disconnected from our potential to access source.

[01:28:17] Luke: Do you think the world is inherently purgatorial?

[01:28:23] Kelly: So I read this book called Exit the Cave. I can't say I recommend it. It's a gnostic-- I don't want to misrepresent many of the important points in the book, and I don't want to pretend to be an expert on it. However, for me, it was at once validating of the suffering that I experienced and that I see all around me, and that we live in a world where animals eat each other. Things die. Things are destroyed.

[01:28:54] This entropic devolving space that I can't seem to make too much contact with, consistent contentment in. And I don't know anybody who is. So what the fuck? What is this then? And so is this just a harvesting farm, and are we being recycled here? And there's something that almost feels like, oh, finally, I'm being seen. I'm being seen. 

[01:29:25] Almost the way I imagine many of my patients felt when they got their first psychiatric diagnosis, it's like, finally, somebody sees how fucked up my life experience has been. And they've given me a label, and that means it's valid. However, I choose to see it differently. If I had a religion, it's sovereign consciousness. 

[01:29:52] If I had a religion, it would be to really polarize myself around what the victim resonance is and to understand it's great power to appreciate it as a catalyst and to make sure that it's on that side of the yin yang line while I'm over here in another dimension, choosing to find the sacred in all of it, the beauty in all of it, to play the game of delighting in all of it, and keeping that energy channel really open so that I can get a flat tire, experience a devastating loss that I can find myself in that pattern of my disappointment fetish, and really just smile at it.

[01:30:44] And find a way to see why this is exactly how I wanted the plot to unfold. I like learning a new dialect, having, I guess, they're Gen Z. They're teen twins. So they speak totally different language, and I'm trying to keep up, trying to learn the things. And one of the phrases I really love that's coming from that generation is, do it for the plot. It's for the plot.

[01:31:19] It's because we love the story. It's like that Alan Watts lecture where he talks about if you could make up your dreams, the first night you'd be fucking all these hot women, and eating all the delicious things, and going on these wild adventures of your design. By the seventh night, you'd be like, you know what, somebody else write this. I liked it better that way. 

[01:31:38] Pretending that we are not choosing this. It's delightful. And the story is delightful, the story of our incarnation is something that can delight us even with its devastation, you even with its micro cataclysms. And for me, finding meaning is the end of my suffering.

[01:32:04] When I can enjoy the narrative and see how this thing I hated was exactly what I wanted. Carolyn Elliott, now her name is Lovewell, her work was very pivotal for me. She wrote Existential Kink and really opens up the exploration of how it is that our patterns of struggle are meeting our needs.

[01:32:28] Because I saw that with my patients. I saw their chronic illness is actually meeting many of their needs. It's giving them an opportunity to set boundaries they couldn't otherwise set and say no in places and ways that they couldn't in their life. It's giving them an opportunity to feel cared for and attended to in ways that they couldn't ask for in other ways. 

[01:32:47] They feel validated in their struggle and suffering through their diagnosis, has an ICD-10 code, and they feel like somebody cares enough to actually help them, and save them maybe even, and rescue them. And it's that childlike impulse and desire to finally have somebody there who cares enough to offer that level of assistance and attention. 

[01:33:12] And so she goes way beyond that to say our patterns don't only meet our needs, but we derive erotic arousal from our most loathed experiences. And you can think about if you get a really triggering email and you track the sensations in your body,  can you find pleasure in the aliveness that you experience in your body as you're being triggered? I certainly can. 

[01:33:48] And for many of us who have found a dissociative state of numbness, a lot of addiction is born of that vivification, the aliveness that's conferred through the unlocking of energies through substances, or relationships, or whatever it is, gambling, skydiving, shopping. And that numbness is a hellscape. 

[01:34:15] And so to find arousal in the best ways we can, sometimes it looks like continuing to attract financial scarcity, to continue to attract rejection and betrayal, to continue to be a match for loss so that you can have that inner experience yet again. And so how acknowledging that, owning that can expand the permission field to then consciously and intentionally create the conditions to choose that in a more self-informed way. 

[01:34:50] How can you choose to feel arousal through other means? How can you move beyond your story? It requires that you acknowledge that you love it and you wanted it that way. For me, that's been very empowering.

[01:35:03] Luke: Yeah, when I think about the challenges of life and the perception I have sometimes that this world that we enter into is a purgatory, the thing I find relieves me the most is the awareness, or at least the hope, that I believe that it's true that I chose to come here. 

[01:35:27] Kelly: Yeah, yeah. 

[01:35:28] Luke: I find that to be really empowering. I don't always fully believe it because I still feel like a victim at times, not in an interpersonal sense, but we have to pay to live on the planet. You know what I'm saying? Like, what the fuck? Let's just start there. If I want to go sit out in that field, there's this superimposed matrix grid that has taken over the planet that tells me, as a living man, as a living being, that I have to give up my resources involuntarily under coercion and force to go sit there. Why would I ever choose that? So that's the victim side of it. It's like, oh God, I'm on a prison planet. 

[01:36:11] Kelly: Then there's the, why would I choose that? 

[01:36:13] Luke: If you dig in a Telegram too much, the world very much looks like that. But then there's also the me that's sitting in the field going, yeah, man, I picked this because it provides me with the opportunities to evolve as a spirit, as a soul. And if I came here and it was not purgatory, and there wasn't at least part of it that was hell, then there would be no contrast to work with. 

[01:36:43] It's like if you came here and it was utopia, and perhaps there are other dimensions or even other planets that are, people that have souls that have ascended this level, maybe you move up like Mario brothers, and it's all love and light, and you exist as an etheric being. And you help us poor souls down here on earth as a guardian angel, or whatever your role might be. But the fact is that I'm here, I'm in this body, I'm in this world where I have to pay to be in this world, or else I'll be imprisoned, or punished, or threatened with violence. 

[01:37:16] Kelly: Right, but beneath that complaint, that very victimy complaint, is desire. And desire is your erotic connection to God. It's your feminine channel. So what is the desire that is born through that? No, what is the yes? You get to make contact with that. Yes, you get to live into that. Yes, you get to claim that. 

[01:37:40] Yes, you get to exercise your power of choice that literally no one can ever take away from you because you always have the choice to narrate what is happening, even if somebody is sawing your arm off. You can narrate it. You can choose to perceive and respond to what is happening. So the desire and the birth of the desire cannot happen. Without the no, the yes wouldn't exist. That polarity is the nature of this realm. So to access the yes without the no--

[01:38:12] Luke: Yeah.

[01:38:12] Kelly: It ain't a thing.

[01:38:14] Luke: And the desire and the yes to me, if I could put it in really Flintstonian narrative, is like, I chose to be as a single expression of consciousness or God, a part of God, but a unique and differentiated expression of God. I chose to be flung out into the field and to separate as much as I could from what created me or what I really am, only to birth the desire to work my way back to the place from which I came. 

[01:38:55] That seems like what the game is, or the cycle is, is like, cool, yeah, I've separated so that I can gain the wisdom or evolution that's inherent to what it takes to claw your way back to source. It's like source plays this game with itself, just infinite expressions of itself and all its permutations.

[01:39:19] And then everyone's left out there in the field going, well, what the fuck happened? Where am I? Am I in hell? Am I in purgatory? Yes and no. Yes, if that's what you believe it to be. No, if perhaps you can, as you said, find that desire and find the yes, which is like, okay, I'm going to hike my way back. 

[01:39:38] I'm going to find a map, and I'm going to get lost many times on the way, but I'm going to keep finding my way back to my true north, and find my way back to source. When I look at it from that perspective and take ownership of the decision that I made to come here, to this place, knowing exactly what it would be and the circumstances by which I would enter, the mother and father that would be my portals, if I take responsibility for that, I find life is much more easy to gamify, and I feel less victimized by my experience of being here. 

[01:40:12] Kelly: Right. And then you have an experience of adversity, and you can orient towards it sometimes within seconds, sometimes reflexively, with curiosity, rather than the disempowerment of rejection. Rejection of what literally is. It is here. You can have a tantrum all you want, but this is the deal. It's happening. It's happened. It is happening.

[01:40:40] And sometimes I remind myself when I'm relating to desire from an immature place, and I'm feeling petulant and impatient, and I want it now or yesterday, and it's not here. And I remind myself like, oh, I'm actually living already the life that I'm afraid that I will have to live. I already don't have the thing. I already don't have the thing, and I'm okay.

[01:41:03] So the worst has already happened. I already don't have the thing. That's why the biggest lie we tell ourselves is that it's going to stay this way. It's going to stay this bad, this horrible, and l can't handle it. When I worked with suicidal patients, which was probably a good third of my practice at any given time, that was the big lie they told themselves, was this particular signature of not having what I want or living in the absence of some-- feeling forsaken, living in the absence of any sort of connection to anything that matters.

[01:41:47] This is going to go on forever. It's just going to be like this. This is what new parents tell themselves in those early days of infancy. It's like, oh my God, this is what it's going to be like? And it's a rejection of the dynamism that is the foundational nature of this realm. It's just changing, changing, changing, change all the time. So why would we imagine it would ever stay quite like this? Unless we want to really sink into that realm of futility where then we just give up.

[01:42:19] It's a nihilistic space, and it feels good. All of these spaces we say we hate and we think we hate, there's pleasure in there. And I think until we acknowledge that, it's like we're in this schizoid realm of pretending that one side of us doesn't see the other side, and they can't have a dialogue, and they can't meet face-to-face.

[01:42:42] That's why I've gotten so much out of parts work, because it's really offered me an opportunity to bring into intimacy, awareness, discussion, these dimensions of myself that are really in sibling rivalry of the utmost proportions. And so once they at least see each other and start to understand the motives of the other, then I can be me with my capital S self. I can be the directress. I can be the one who is really master of ceremonies and organizing everybody, which is all they've ever really wanted. Like, is anybody home here? I need a break from my duty as protector inside.

[01:43:32] Luke: This is the last thread that we'll go down, and I'll let you go. I always love talking to you. I would feel like three hours is nothing when we have a conversation. I guess recent journey and just your worldview, as you're describing it here today, how has that impacted your being a mother? How do you relate to your kids? How do you discern how much of your worldview you want to impart on your kids and how much you allow them to just have experience and so on?

[01:44:10] Kelly: So I made the choice to get more sober, I guess, as I told you in January of this year. And it wasn't because I had experienced any consequences of socially drinking. It wasn't because I had some inciting event. I can't say I've experienced any physical changes or benefits, and I can't say I've experienced any social benefits. My life has gotten small as a result. And where I have recognized this is why I did this is in my mothering.

[01:44:55] I have a recorded workshop called Victimless Mothering where I summarize how it is that I recognize, especially as a holistic mama, especially as someone who just passionately wants to end cycles for my daughter, is that I have perceived to exist in my mother line for many generations as a woman who feels like I know what their beautiful bodies require in terms of food, and protection, and optimization, and especially wanting to pay forward all of these gifts of my awakening.

[01:45:42] I really saw the same energies of abuse and unattuned hierarchical dominance, the same energies of conditional love, and the same control-based and fear-based impulses that informed all of those cycles I thought I was ending. And this was through the holistic grid of needing them to eat a certain way. Don't order the gluten at the restaurant kind of thing. And needing them to get on the page about tech and using the Ethernet cord instead of the Wi-Fi. 

[01:46:28] Luke: You're describing my future as a parent.

[01:46:30] Kelly: Watch my workshop, brother, because I really feel like if I could have watched my own workshop, if I could have listened to my own self-- of course, I wasn't ready for it, and you could say they chose this and this experience-- I think I would have seen it because it just felt like this reveal, like, oh my God, I'm doing the same thing. 

[01:46:52] I'm offering conditional love, except now my conditions are around health and wellness. And I started to see it trickle in in little opportunities that my daughters offered me. We were traveling in Mexico, and my daughter wanted to order this pasta. I bet this restaurant that has amazing pasta. It's weird in Mexico or whatever. I've been there before.

[01:47:24] So I'm like, oh, this pasta is so good. And they have gluten-free pasta, as they do these days. And so the waiter's like, the gluten-free is going to take 45 minutes because we don't have it ready. And we had actually traveled that day, and that just seemed unappealing. In my now more sensitized system, I could feel that she was trying to access me to sense whether or not it was okay with me that she ordered the regular pasta. You know what I'm saying? 

[01:47:59] It was just in a second, and I could feel the whole thing, that she was like, oh, mama doesn't want me to order the regular pasta, but I want to order the regular pasta, but I'm not allowed to. And if I do do that, mom is not going to love me as much. It's literally in these mundane details.

[01:48:13] I've found conventional candy hidden in my kids rooms. We're all about makeup and beauty, and so of course I have all the clean brands, and I remember one time I saw a, what's it called? Aqua 4, something. Anyway, it's a petroleum-based thing. One of my daughters had it in her purse, and I was like, what is this? You can't have that. But that impulse is control. Love does not look like that. It doesn't look like that.

[01:48:49] Luke: That's so hard.

[01:48:50] Kelly: So in that moment, I felt that, and I turned around and said, Amore, you can order the pasta. It's totally fine. And it wasn't totally fine in me, but I decided that it was more important for me to, at this age-- okay, she's 14-- acknowledge that her own bodily sovereignty is something that she requires training in. Her sovereignty. 

[01:49:23] And so because there's not an initiatory ritual, at what point do I hand the damn baton to her if what I'm trying to teach her is you own your body? It's a sacred temple, and you are the one who feels into your yes and your no. You should never do anything that you don't want to do. At what point is she in charge of that and not me?

[01:49:44] Luke: That's an interesting question.

[01:49:46] Kelly: And so you just feel it as a mother. I think you just feel the moment. Actually, it wasn't that moment. It was when she asked me for an iPhone. That was the moment. And at the time, I was off my iPhone. I was off my iPhone for two years. 

[01:49:58] Luke: I remember that. Yeah, yeah. 

[01:50:01] Kelly: You saw me and my little dorky gadget. 

[01:50:03] Luke: And then at some point, yeah, I think I had texted you. It was an iMessage or something. And I was like, oh, she's a normal-- because think before it had to be Telegram or whatever it was. 

[01:50:13] Kelly: Oh, my God. It was the whole thing.

[01:50:14] Luke: I thought it was cool. I was like, damn, respect, girl. I wish I could--

[01:50:18] Kelly: It served me because it allowed me to come into a dominant relationship to the technology where now I interact with my iPhone. I enjoy it. I use it. There's no shame. I'm not its bitch. It's mine. There was a flip. And I got back on it because of her, because she asked me for an iPhone, and at the time I was like, we don't do that. Look at me. I'm not doing that. You're not doing it either, kind of a thing. 

[01:50:53] And I just felt this was a big moment. And she said something like, mama, at this stage, I know what works for me. And she was 13 at the time. And I just felt like it's happening now. I can stay connected to this-- it makes me cry-- this angel, or I can just do the same damn thing over again that was done in my mother line, which is just powering over because I'm afraid, and I need to be right, and I need to align around my narrative being right. 

[01:51:30] And thankfully, I have amazing women in my life who are able to help me orient round how important it was to just give her command of her own experience. Plus, she's such a baller. She literally has her own money and is at her own jobs, and she could buy her own shit. So what power do I really have? And she has an iPhone now. And I still make them put their gadgets away in the car at 9:00 PM, and at least I own it. 

[01:52:05] It's not an agreement. It's a rule. It's something that makes me feel better. So where is it that I'm parenting from a place of my own self-regulation and soothing? There's still places that make me feel better. Not many, but the tech is a tough one. Because to watch a generation stare into screens-- I don't need to tell you-- it's harrowing. It's harrowing. And it's perhaps what they chose. I chose to come here now. This is the deal. This is what's going on. 

[01:52:35] We're in the awkward generation that's bridging to experiences of the outside versus the inside versus the virtual world. But I've come to many places where, okay, my kids chose to go to school. So the ethos in my household has been that every woman does what she wants. My daughters do what they want 100% of the time. And so do I.

[01:53:03] And so when we have conflicts around that, it's always through the efforting towards complementarity. So how do we find a win-win here? It's not sacrifice. It's not somebody violating their own needs. And it's really, really worked. It's really worked because now we all know that when we're doing something, it's because we really want to be doing it. Okay, they chose to go to school. I'm an unschooling advocate. They chose to go to school.

[01:53:32] Luke: Public school?

[01:53:33] Kelly: Well, initially, this private school, and then they decided they didn't want to be there anymore. And my one daughter chose to go to a Catholic school, and my other daughter chose to go to a public school. And the fact that my daughters are willfully warehoused in Rockefeller indoctrination camps, that's a tough one for me to swallow, as you can imagine.

[01:53:58] Luke: I'm sweating over here just thinking about it. They're not even my damn daughters.

[01:54:02] Kelly: Exactly. 

[01:54:03] Luke: Hell no.

[01:54:04] Kelly: With all that we all know, that's what's happening to these literal deities in my household. Okay. So given that they are choosing this, my assertion was that I was going to do Kelly School, I call it. So I'm going to do Kelly School, and I'm going to teach them about all the truths that I know. I'm going to teach them about how to think and logical fallacies, and I'm going to teach them about psyops, and I'm going to teach them about history, and I'm going to teach them about the nature of this realm, and I'm going to teach them all these things for an hour every other week on a Sunday. 

[01:54:45] And that was our agreement. And I did it for the better part of a year and a half and attacked the big myths about government, and germs, and the globe, and whatever else. And finally, my youngest started to tell me she didn't like it. She doesn't want to do it. And I got all reactive about that and was like, well, this is our agreement. You're being literally brainwashed, and I think it should be countered by something else.

[01:55:18] Meanwhile, they know I live my beliefs. They know the contagion isn't a thing. They know that they've been raised this way. It's already in there. I don't need to force things they're not interested in down their throats. And she said, mama, you always tell me that I shouldn't do things that I want to do, and here you are having me do this thing. And she said, and then when I tell you how I feel about it, you make it about how you feel about how I feel. 

[01:55:43] Luke: Damn. What a teacher!

[01:55:44] Kelly: And I was like, oh, wow. That is a real demerit. That's the demerit, is making how your children feel about how you feel about how your children feel. That's the relationship to merit. That's like the thing that is not connection, love, or intimacy. So that hit me pretty hard, and I ended Kelly School. So these moments where I was able to see how I was using my children as narcissistic extensions to stabilize my sense of self-identity and inner security, I would not have been able to explore if I was literally even having a mezcal on a Friday with a girlfriend, and I don't know what that connection is.

[01:56:29] That's what I have experienced in my sober life is a deeper capacity to look at my fear that I've failed as a mother and to own how it is that I am passing on in very covert ways through spiritual, holistic, wellness-oriented impulses, the same control-based, abusive tactics of power over and not seeing these beings in front of me, not seeing these women.

[01:57:03] And they're women. Not seeing who they are, allowing them their sovereignty, and knowing when it's time to pass that baton, knowing, and sensing, and feeling. It's no longer my role to protect them from themselves. It's actually my role to help them keep that channel open of self-attunement of embodied sensory navigation.

[01:57:30] And that it's very humbling, but there's so many reflexes that we otherwise engage of like, you owe me respect. I know better than you. I have more experience, and here I am showing you how to live. It's one thing if they ask you for help or they express interest in something, and it's a very different thing when it's just so that you feel better. 

[01:57:59] And now I feel not better all the time in support of their doing their thing. And I'm not going to get super into this just out of respect for privacy, but understanding how to relate to daughters around sexuality is a whole thing. And I think of myself as a very asexually informed and liberated woman in many ways, and the reflexive, like when you're with your boyfriend, the door needs to be open kind of thing, really? Why? 

[01:58:36] And I've been called out on that. Basic bitch parenting, as she called it. And I could receive that and really look at it and be like, you're right. What am I? I've been teaching you about sacred anatomy and sexuality since you were literally five. What is it that I'm actually trying to control here? It's just an unconscious, reflexive, like sex is bad. I don't think it's bad. Why am I acting as if it's bad? What is that? What is that?

[01:59:09] So now I have policies that you make a lot of other adults uncomfortable. And by policies, I mean an understanding and agreement with my daughter. And that is also something I wouldn't have been able to really explore because it might have meant that I was wrong about my initial impulse as a mother.

[01:59:31] And that might have meant that I failed as a mother. And to fail as a mother is something too devastating. It's why so many mothers cannot hold the adult expression of their children's narratives of the dark, abusive experiences that they had in their childhood with that very mother. 

[01:59:55] They can't hold it because it means that they are bad and wrong. And when we grow our capacity to hold the experience of someone, we love seeing us as bad and wrong. I call it wearing the villain crown. Then sovereign love is available. Then they get to have their experience. And to wear the villain crown as a parent, it takes something.

[02:00:16] It takes something. And it's pretty much your only responsibility, is to not-- I remember we talked about this last time, but to not impose your narrative on your child without their consent, willingness, and availability for that, because that it's dark dominance. And it's not ending any cycles, even if it's because you think eating the pesticides and the gluten is a really bad thing.

[02:00:44] And listen, my kids are teen twins now, so I've had all those years of feeling really comfy and cozy in my very rigid food boundaries with them. And at this point, I'm like, okay, they can do their thing. But when might I have started to loosen up? Had I had the capacity to do so? I don't know. 

[02:01:05] Maybe there is a good 10 years where it helps for you to hold that line. Maybe not. I think it's very personal because it's a feeling inside of yourself of, where is this coming from? And is it like a sacred protection, or is it just reflexive control? Because what if we're wrong about these things? The game I played with myself is like, okay, what if we're actually wrong about EMF? What if we're wrong about processed food being so bad? What if we're wrong about--

[02:01:42] Luke: Blue light.

[02:01:43] Kelly: Yeah, what if we're wrong about these things? Okay, we think we get it now and we think we even have scientific evidence to support it. But what if we actually had it wrong and we entered a belief field of victim consciousness that said, this bad thing is happening? You got to protect yourself, and you got to get other people to be worried about it otherwise no one's going to be okay. That's a victim consciousness field. Okay, fine.

[02:02:10] But what if we were wrong about it and then I looked at my behavior? Would I feel remorse? Yeah. So how can your behavior around wellness and holistic parenting come from a place where if you were wrong about the things you're so sure you're right about being bad? I'm so sure I'm right that processed dairy and gluten is bad. 

[02:02:34] I'm so sure I'm right that GMOs and pesticides are bad. Super sure that I'm right that radiation and cell phone exposure is bad. Very, very sure that public schooling is problematic. But let's just play the thought experiment. If I wasn't right, it turns out it was wrong, and I just looked at the play, the movie of my behavior. Would I feel remorse? 

[02:03:03] And how can I express the impulse that is like, I've learned this thing. It's actually really inspiring. That's where you find the yes. If you don't mind the yes, you're just in the no. You're passing on the no to your kids. Nobody wants that. So how do I inspire what it is to be in this awareness? 

[02:03:25] If I can't do that, then who knows if it's actually even coming from the right place or if it's just part of that grand luge ritual that has all of us truthers, and health advocates, and activists in the field of disempowerment thinking that we've figured out the thing that has set us free when we really have just built a new prison? I don't know. It's a really uncomfortable place to have landed. And I trust that there's something very important that is coming through the portal of my softening in these ways. 

[02:04:06] Luke: It resonates with me. I dig it. That's terrifying. I can see as, of course, in a self-referential way, even not having kids, the way that I attempt to control the experience of people I love. And some of it is because I love them and want the best for them probably more of it is my own fears that expresses the desire to control other people, which as we know, usually has the opposite effect if anyone has any self-respect. 

[02:04:39] Kelly: Totally. 

[02:04:39] Luke: You just be like, you want me to do what? Well, fuck you. I wasn't going to do the thing. Now I'm going to do it because you don't want me to. 

[02:04:44] Yeah. That's great. Man, it's been a pleasure, as always. As you speak, it's just summoned so many great ideas and so much expansion for me and I'm sure the many people that will hear this. Before we check out of here, what do you got going on? I know you have a podcast now. You mentioned an online course you have. Give us a pitch so people can go get more Kelly Brogan.

[02:05:09] And by the way, guys, you can do so at lukestory.com/brogan. And we'll also link to Kelly's prior episodes, which would have been number 91 and 404 respectively, both of which were equally enticing conversations. So you can find everything there, but what do you got going on?

[02:05:28] Kelly: Awesome. So yeah, like I said, I'm dipping my toe/throwing my whole naked body into the live event space. So I have an event, which, depending on when people are listening, is in November, at the beginning of November, in Miami. And I'm inviting to present-- I was going to say to speak, but see, it's not speaking. 

[02:05:49] It's singing, and dancing, and working through creative blocks and shame alchemy, and family consolation, and all the tools that have helped to expand my permission field to be a woman I not only never thought I could be, but I actually fiercely condemned and judged these aspects of myself in other women.

[02:06:14] So the resolution of my sister wound, as I would call it, has allowed me to recognize that I have permission to be that which I judged. I have permission to be expressed in ways I didn't think were okay for me, or I thought I would be punished for. And in ways, I have been, but when you come together with other women in a field of belonging, you can experience the permission granted in a moment, then you have it for life.

[02:06:44] I have a pole dance teacher who literally, in one session with her, gave me permission to tap into my sensuality in ways that I would have like awkwardly giggled my way into my inhibited dimension of like, oh, that's not for me. It's okay. I don't know how to walk around a pole to music. That's for you. 

[02:07:09] And formerly, I'd probably always judged women who wore that much fluidity and languid softness in their bodies as being slutty, or, I don't know, unprofessional, or whatever I would have said. 

[02:07:26] Luke: Unprofessional. That's funny.

[02:07:27] Kelly: Yeah, that was a big one for me. These 10 women held a handout in the dark to me, and I want to offer that experience to other women and myself. Honestly, it's going to be amazing. I was saying it's like the wedding of my parts. It feels like a marriage ceremony and celebration of all my dark and light parts. So that's cool. And then I continue to have available my health program full of all sorts of health rules.

[02:07:57] Luke: For people who willingly enlist.

[02:08:00] Kelly: For people who willingly enlist and want to initiate their masculine in such a way that they recognize they do have choice, they do have the capacity for a follow through, and commitment, and discipline, and devotional self-care on a level that we sometimes dabble in the health and wellness space. 

[02:08:19] And that initiation, I didn't recognize as being what it is through [Inaudible], through my program now, as a masculine initiation practice, practice for people, for women and men, but really, how do you bring that spine online? And interestingly, I think looking back on my practice, I've held that father archetype for people. Gazing into the eyes with a knowing that you've got this. You can do this. Push yourself.

[02:08:52] And that's not always an appropriate archetype to weave in. And sometimes it's exactly what's needed. Yeah. And then I have a podcast now. It's certainly not as fancy as this one, but it's called a Reclamation Radio, and it's been really amazing. I've enjoyed more sensor censorship free expression on that podcast than any other medium I have. I don't know how or why it is, but I say whatever the fuck I want.

[02:09:21] Luke: I find it strange too that this-- and I don't want to jinx it. Knock on wood. 

[02:09:24] Kelly: I know.

[02:09:25] Luke: Because in Canada, they just announced they're going to start regulating podcasts and have them register with whatever their version of EACC is. 

[02:09:31] Kelly: Oh, interesting. 

[02:09:32] Luke: Shit. I'm like, oh, here they go. They're doing a trial run. 

[02:09:35] Kelly: And just saying that.

[02:09:35] Luke: But yeah, it has been interesting through all this. I've had a few videos, RFK Junior, David Ike, controversial people have been removed from YouTube, the video part of it, but I never really had any problems. Again, knock on wood. And for you demons listening, if you are, leave me alone. 

[02:09:53] Kelly: You evil beings. 

[02:09:54] Luke: I'm trying to do good work here, man. But yeah, it's fun. Feel like, I don't know why. Maybe we're under the radar in this realm. 

[02:10:03] Kelly: Yeah.

[02:10:04] Luke: Reclamation Radio, do you do more solo cast, with guests?

[02:10:08] Kelly: Yeah. It's mostly me talking about what's alive for me, which has been a lot of really beginning to reorient around feminism, around man-woman relating, around healing these inner and outer polarities. And interestingly, a lot of my content-- I just recorded one called the Reclamation of Courtship, about what it is to say no to premarital sex, and just all these funny spaces I find myself in having tried on other costumes.

[02:10:46] And really foregrounding traditional marriage values and the covenant. I don't know. It's just so funny how I like to play in these different arenas, but that's a lot of what I talk about, BDSM and the gamut. I was talking to somebody last night. He's an older gentleman here, and he was talking about how much he loves my podcasts. And I was like, you're not really my avatar. You're not my target audience. And he's like, yeah, sometimes I blush when I get into some of the material I think I'm not supposed to be hearing. It's super interesting. So yeah, it's been fun.

[02:11:25] Luke: Cool. Awesome. Well, I encourage everyone to check it out, and I'm going to do the same. I've seen it in my feed, but I haven't listened to it yet, so I'm going to check it out. 

[02:11:33] Kelly: Take a peek.

[02:11:34] Luke: Yeah. Well, Kelly Brogan, thank you so much. It's always a blast to chat with you. Yeah, it's so fun. We always just have a really great banter. The banters that I appreciate the most, I think, of this podcast are ones that have me walking away in contemplation and these ideas where I go, oh man, I never looked at it that way. And that's really fun. And you always provide that, so thank you. 

[02:11:56] Kelly: You're super open and open-mind at heart. 

‍