(00:02) we have been duped by feminism sexual Liberation and anti-depressants we have been told that we are powerful and free now as women but we feel tired wired and bitter we’re mostly eating right exercising and meditating wrangling to-do lists and arranging playdates and yet there’s a haunting holess beneath the huge complaint what if I told you that there is a huge Storehouse a reservoir of energy inside of you that has not been tapped that you could feel light and pulsing excited and alive in ways that a wellness lifestyle
(00:49) cannot deliver that you could trust yourself that the world could feel safe and that unexpected and expected Delights could start to illuminate your path no coach therapist doctor or Guru required just you learning to get real present and attentive with you I feel like I’m here to matchmake your inner parts for the greatest love affair ever written I want to help you learn first where you’re buying eggs from the hardware store which is the source of all pain I want to help you master entering through the upset which is the
(01:27) only spiritual practice You’ll Ever Need and to get real comfortable putting on your villain Crown which is in my opinion the key to True power and then you’ll attune to your inner yes so you can live the life defined by the specific pleasure of who you are I am so excited to announce my latest book called The reclaimed woman which is available for pre-order now so if you head to the link in show notes you can learn more about bonuses events and companion offerings and I cannot wait to see your gorgeous face on the
(02:07) [Music] path I’m Dr Kelly Brogan you may know me as a New York Times bestselling author of a book with an exploding pill on the cover Renegade psychiatrist P dancer or honorary member of the disinformation doesn’t what can I say I’m a born provocator I’ve spent most of my recent life exposing deceptions connecting dots and discovering the secret places my inner victim is still waiting to be liberated and now I feel called to help you reclaim all of your parts your health your sexuality your power and your expression so that you can finally
(02:46) truly own yourself I want to ignite in you that inner knowing and the pulsing Vitality that lives beneath your disempowerment disconnection and resentment so that you can audaciously courageously and playfully alchemize your struggle into the specific pleasure of who you are this is Reclamation radio a soulfire production hi and welcome back to Reclamation radio I am Dr Kelly Brogan and I am here today with a book report on an excellent book that I finished called erotic mind by Dr Jack Morin and some of you may still be wondering why I
(03:31) am seemingly perseverating on OS sexuality sensuality and maybe I should just stick to psych meds gluten and what kind of shampoo to buy however I see very essential dots to connect in this Reclamation journey and the promised land of a vital embodied experience as a human seems to necessarily involve taking a good long look at the places we would rather not even glance in the direction of and it could be argued that the most important one of those places is our sexuality and specifically our sexual fantasies and the themes that
(04:23) arise in our life that we don’t necessarily have an intimate relationship with however we coexist with with often from childhood so I’ll back up a bit and speak about what I have seen to be one of the principle points of origin when it comes to the development of victim Consciousness in childhood and that is the pitting of our child selves against our own vital force energy our own Heros and this experience of severing and divorcing a child from his or herself is often what then leads to that child’s adult vulnerability to A system
(05:11) that says your body is a problem that you need help managing your symptoms are scary you know allow us to save you from you but it begins in these very mundane ways when an infant even expresses healthy aggression when a child or a toddler expresses curious exuberance when there is early exploration of sexuality this can be anything from literally like screaming and jumping on the couch to you know exploring our bodies you know in public right as a child these behaviors can invite shaming and even punishment but it also is
(05:57) really enacted through the ways that many parents feel entitled to so-called discipline correct and guide their children when it comes to their emotions right so if you are a child and you are experiencing emotions you are expressing your confecting you are crying maybe you’re crying and screaming and you are told you’re okay you are told calm down some of the programming and conditioning that is underway is really what leads to a sense that you don’t actually know what you’re feeling and whatever you’re experiencing is going to result in the
(06:39) loss of love so we develop naturally these strategies to protect ourselves from the pain of the loss of love the withdrawal of love and of course the fear of punishment and as we move through life we develop this ever expanding cavernous space of that which we are hiding from others and have learned to hide from others and the challenge is that we are often also hiding this from ourselves so that’s why I like to think of experiences whether it’s you know chronic fatigue or depression or anxiety as like the call
(07:26) to prayer in Devotion to you right and are you going going to answer the call are you going to recognize that this is you inviting you to respond and learn about you so that an experience of completion can finally be available and in the health Reclamation Journey when we establish a foundation physiologically for our nervous systems to begin to hold high intensity experiences like shame then we actually expand the permission field we expand the possibility for who it is we can experience ourselves to be because now
(08:09) we can at least hold the resistance to it long enough to begin to exercise curiosity and as we begin to integrate in this way we have the opportunity to look around our lives for the spaces and places we would rather not examine and that we have been in active avoidance or in passive avoidance around some of these spaces and places are going to necessarily involve our relationship to our own sexuality and the mentation around that so this dynamic between our minds and our bodies and our emotions is a lot of what is explored in this book
(08:59) and the author writes in eroticism as in life free choice increases with Consciousness so as we invite into the light of awareness that which we formerly relegated into the Realms of taboo we actually reclaim our power of voice and specifically in Dynamic with our own vital force so for some of us and for much of our lives the most intimacy that we actually have with our vital force is through the embodied experience of suffering and what I mean by that is a lot of what Carolyn Elliott references through her work on the topic
(09:43) of existential Kink is that we have a somatic experience of disappointment and of resentment right all of these victim vibration emotions we feel something we actually make contact with aive vess and it can actually become something that is pleasurable even though on a conscious level we hate it right but your desires in life whether they are something you’re aware of or they are covert or hidden even from your own Consciousness and your repulsion what you hate about your life is holding massive potential energy so how can you begin to integrate
(10:27) into the light of your awareness these polarities so that you can exercise your Power of Choice with intentionality and in the exploration of Eros and the ways in which this animating life force can manifest through our sexual desires or sexual preferences or sexual interests we find that there is a very complex terrain that we have to expand to hold in order to even begin the conversation right so there are contradictions there are paradoxes there is Shadow there is light there is good and there’s bad and it’s
(11:07) not dissolved into this like messy space it’s actually organized into specific complimentarity when we are aware that all of it is there and through the exploration of the ways in which we have kinked our pain our childhood traumas and our experiences of self-rejection we have the opportunity to alchemize right I remember the first time that I heard from Robert Augustus Masters the phrase eroticized wounds I began to understand how it could be the case that when we experience pain and injury whether it’s you know psychic or
(11:55) physical as children the energy of that is somehow tagged as erotic so that we are attracted to that which will induce something similar as adults why why would we ever do that to ourselves we might do that so that we can have the opportunity for completion so that we can begin the Journey of self- reclamation so that we can revisit these spaces bring our compassionate our tender and our you know increasing enlightened awareness to these places of hurt and pain so that we can actually choose to experience them when in our
(12:39) history it was not a choice it didn’t feel like a choice anyway how can we bring a yes to the know that is living inside of us this is the transformational power that erotic energy actually brings to our lifescape so Marin talks about this otic equation he calls it and it is part of the acknowledgment that OS necessarily involves polarities it necessarily involves opposites and it is not the case that we simply want a thing and then we get it in life and then we’re happy that’s not how this life is designed and I think we sense that right
(13:22) we sense that there is some kind of Triumph that we long to experience and that we Delight in and that perhaps it is the contrast of moving from and between pain and pleasure that is a great source of our experience of fulfillment as humans so he talks about this erotic equation which is attraction plus obstacles equals excitement attraction plus obstacles equals excitement right so not attraction equals excitement and certainly not obstacles equals excitement but that the two together actually equals excitement and this is
(14:08) Again part of the foundational understanding I took away from existential Kink which is that we may actually desire and derive arousal from the obstacles in our lives right we may actually have an experience of embodied arousal that on many levels is enjoyable I mean sounds crazy right that we would ever settle for that when we could have sort of the real deal the actual pleasure but the habituation around the Kink around our struggle and our suffering our disappointment and our resentment it’s very enlivening until we
(14:51) know we have a choice we actually don’t so that’s why I so appreciate texts like this that endeavor to bring into the light of awareness some of the most taboo topics you know that there are that have been relegated into the spaces of very sort of cined off you know this is sex belongs here it has nothing to do with health it has nothing to do with spirituality right it it stays in its little naughty corner so Morin talks about the emotional aphrodisiacs that underpin a lot of our sexual fantasies a lot of our
(15:28) sexual experiences and a lot of what it is that we generally Orient towards sexually and he has conducted this sexual assessment on this large group of people and analyzed the results and what he found was that anxiety guilt anger and closeness right are all emotional aphrodisiacs but those are three that you might not otherwise expect to be in the aphrodisiacal realm right and he talks about these cornerstones including longing and anticipation right Whenever there is a gap between desire and reality and you
(16:11) know longing as distinguished from anticipation is related to these like formidable obstacles right and I actually began to recognize my relationship to eroticized anticipation when I would do this meditation to I guess it’s a meditation it’s a too fancy a word for what it is but I would begin to practice experiencing longing in my body as a welcome emotion right so I would do this daily practice of sitting and opening my chest and my body and putting my head back so that my lips were parted and just feeling longing moving through me
(16:56) and it feels like a freight train I mean it’s not altogether unpleasant and it’s not altogether Pleasant it is a very very intense emotion that I personally had a ton of resistance around and as I was in that space I felt this almost like this erotic energy of anticipation almost like the space around me was going to place its lips on my lips right it’s like you know this moment right before one is kissed right like is that perhaps more charged and more desirable and more pleasurable and more erotic than the actual kiss itself right so
(17:35) longing and anticipation there’s violating prohibitions right so how is it that we eroticize all of the rules from our childhood right how is it that rules themselves actually hold the charge of potential pleasure there is searching for power and a lot of my recent exploration of BDSM has helped me to understand how these power dynamics hold in them when they are consciously and intentionally and consensually engaged so much alchemical potential for healing the power dynamics that were unconsented from our childhood and you know if you
(18:17) think about how erotic for so many of us this idea of forceful passion is right whether it’s just ravishment or whether it’s actually a rape fantasy right this concept of forceful passion is itself a demonstration of the desirability of the person who is submitting or being subjected to that Force right so they are that desirable right and then the surrender of let’s say a woman to a man who is applying that Force demonstrates the desirability of that man so there’s like this reification of our native desirability and perhaps even our wor
(19:08) through these power plays and for many he gives examples of you know for example somebody who is molested in childhood it’s very very common if not Universal for children who are abused in childhood you know physically or sexually but let’s just speak specifically about sexual abuse to take responsibility for that and to make themselves the reason that this happened it’s one of the you know sort of survival tactics that we engage very frequently and so what is it when a let’s say a woman who is sexually abused
(19:46) goes on to enjoy the sort of objectification and you know the soulless Loveless experience of of promiscuity and sex right so he gives a quote from one of the women that he has interviewed who says you know I would rather be the [ __ ] who seduces you know than the worthless garbage that was violated right so how is it that we eroticize our wounds take them into adulthood and engage in patterns so that we can experience this familiar yet commanded space of our own vulnerability as power right and these patterns when
(20:36) they are not exposed to our conscious awareness can wreak massive havoc on our lives and when they are they can be engaged in very intentional ways and often can you know it’s like you can peel off like the husk that is the pain body and you can be left with this beautiful powerful intention to experience power desirability worthiness and pleasure perhaps with some of the flavors of the pain of our childhood but now through your own conscious choice and lastly he includes overcoming ambivalence right so when you can get the person who was
(21:23) perhaps Not That Into You to love and want you I mean there are a few things more erotic and obviously this is at the root of so many trauma bonds right so it’s like how can I get the love and the sex from The Impossible place that reminds me of the impossible place from my origin story and then he goes on to talk about what he calls your core erotic theme and that this can be arrived at through an honest inner exploration of recurrent fantasies recurrent sexualized dreams and perhaps even fetishes right that you have you know experiened
(22:10) practicing with Partners right so he says quote your core erotic theme begins its long Evolution during childhood and is first sketched out in fantasies and Daydreams you probably don’t remember because these early images almost certainly grew out of impulses and interests considered inappropriate for children they were veiled in secrecy even now you probably still keep certain Ultra personal turn-ons those that spring from your C your core erotic theme hidden from other people and quite possibly even from yourself to whatever
(22:47) extent you feel comfortable take the risk of exploring your C it’s significance is so vast that even small discoveries about it can be highly revealing and useful so he gives an example that is very common of a man’s core erotic theme which is the experience of himself as a catalyst for passion right so this man meets this very demure you know sort of doll likee woman and seduces her and there is like a lioness underneath right and she’s like wild and expressive and this fantasy right of like good girl turned
(23:35) bad because of him it confirms and affirms his virility so this fantasy holds in it a balm like a healing and an Alchemy for What Might Have Been experienced as you know his own insufficiency in in childhood and through this fantasy often right so this may be like a very stoic man and he is exporting his masculine Vigor and perhaps through her wildness he is importing emotionality and so this completion opportunity is arrived at through his desire through his erotic drive he talks also about what is sometimes referred to as the Madonna
(24:27) horr complex or the segregation of lust and love and how certain experiences that may not conventionally register as child abuse that fall into the category of emotional imsh I would say particularly for boys can result in an inability to marry love and lust right so it feels like unsafe to experience love and to desire it because it’s so consuming right it’s like the shadow mommy type of dynamic right and so sometimes these boys grow up to be men who have you know porn addiction and specifically a dynamic with you know
(25:14) sexual objectification and very sort of lust oriented animalistic sex but then they can’t make love to their wives right and so there can be so much shame around this split that when it’s brought into into the light of day when it is discussed when it is explored has very natural and understandable and valid Origins he talks about this example of this guy who is caught by his wife masturbating wearing her lingerie that he bought her right and to her knowledge he was only ever a straight laced dude right and in the exploration of it it’s
(25:55) uncovered that he as a growing boy used to masturbate in the bathroom where his sister and his mom’s lingerie was like around and hanging and that the sensuality of the Fabrics became sort of associated with and coupled with his experience of early pleasure and that now this is essensual and erotic experience that has a lot of veilance and probably also is kinked up with a ton of Shame right and so when there is a fundamental destigmatization of these drives so that we have the opportunity to explore them with curiosity they often are drained of
(26:45) a lot of their potency and then there are layers and elements right like he might ask his wife to wear this lingerie more actively for example and that could feel good for for both of them but there is an opportunity in visiting with these preferences these desires these themes no matter how weird no matter how seemingly dirty no matter how shameful that it’s essential because there’s a piece of us locked in there right and in our erotic preferences and themes we can learn specifically about the pain that we are still holding it’s almost like
(27:26) you know this desire is is a lighthouse and it shows you what you want and potentially you can learn why you want it and then you can choose to consciously engage it with a partner or on your own in ways that are drained of the specific taboo without sacrificing a very real Avenue for turn on and what I got most out of this read is the imperative to relate differently to challenges and adversity that if we are able as a collective or even as individuals to shift how it is that we experience that which is unwanted
(28:11) whether it’s from our past or in the present moment it’s the foundational stepping stone into personal power right because when you dare to explore the nature of Eros and of our individual very personal erotic patterns preferences histories fantasies and dreams there is this very rich terrain that unfolds in front of us of the good and the bad the Shadow and the light and all of the ways that we know as humans how to turn that which is unwanted into that which is wanted and that actually that’s what we are here to do right that
(29:01) it’s not simply laying claim on what is wanted it is also developing intimacy with and receiving the message from that which is unwanted that actually these challenges and these obstacles are a part of our pleasure and a part of our enjoyment because it turns out that a problem free life is is not hot that’s the big reveal so there will be more from me on this topic and I hope that was a titilating teaser for you until next time
