Excavations with Connie Chen
Conversations at the margins of faith. Excavations interviews scholars, survivors, and spiritual truth-tellers doing the work of recovering what religion buried: centering marginalized voices, bodies, and the theologies that were never supposed to survive. Hosted by Connie Chen.
Excavations with Connie Chen
The Sacred Erotic: A Threesome on Root Work
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This Excavations episode is a threesome on the sacred erotic convened by Tamice. Connie sits down with Tamice and Gary to excavate the erotic as root work, as power, as what the body already knows. Audre Lorde said the erotic is power. This episode says Jesus is Lorde.
Dr. Tamice Spencer-Helms
Dr. Gary Green
Topics: eroticism, spirituality, power, root work, feminine energy, kink, biblical stories, embodied spirituality, divine energy, liberation spirituality, authenticity, divine multiplicity, attunement, shadow work, pleasure, honesty, divine energy, vulnerability, attention, attunement, divinity, flow, breath work, play, embodiment, sacredness, neuroscience, spirituality
I would like to issue a correction before we get into this episode. Near the end of this conversation, I misgender Tamisa saying her instead of using their correct pronouns they them. I want to name that clearly. Tamisa uses they them pronouns, and I'm sorry for the mistake.
SPEAKER_01Hi everyone. This is Excavations, is a podcast that centers marginalized voices, bodies, and topics. And today, Tamise has convened a threesome. And I will let Tamise take it over from there. Who are we? What are we here?
SPEAKER_02I don't know. We got a play. Yeah, it's playtime. I think there that I have been. Connie, I just got to give you your flowers. I feel like there's some things that a bunch of friends, like some folks that I'm wanting to do this because I listened to your conversation with Ciara. I'm watching what you're doing online. And there's a whole sacred lounge that had that Audrey Lord has us in a chokehold around the erotic. And I was like, I want to have this conversation with my homie, Dr. Green, who will introduce himself, and you, because what you're doing right now, friend, is phenomenal. It's um, and Gary, I'm gonna have you talk about root work and how what Connie is doing online and in the spaces that you're in is root work. You are setting people free. And you're one of one. My friend, it's beautiful, it's brilliant. I mean, it it's erotic uh in the best way. And I'm like, I want to have the conversation about something that I've been thinking about, which is that I really see the uses of the erotic and the uses of anger in the incarnation of Jesus. And that lens has revolutionized the way I read the gospels and what my spiritual life looks like. And so I was like, I want to talk to two people who I'm like, I just I think something's gonna happen. And that's why I called it a threesome. Yeah. Dr. Green.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, I'm I'm Gary. Uh Dr. My students know me as Dr. Green or Professor Green. You can call me G, because I go by, you know, G. Um, I'm on the faculty at United Theological Seminary, uh, former athlete, and I'm naming the pieces of myself that will come to bear, I'm sure, on this conversation because they shape my thinking and my theologizing, especially as I think about Jesus. So uh, you know, I've got a book out, and two personas that came out in the preference was the comedian and the athlete. And there are those pieces living within me in terms of the way I show up in the world, the way I look at life through these lenses of the comedic or the lens of kind of this competitive but deeply attuned, loving your craft kind of way of being. Um, but yeah, that's me. I'm just I'm still just that curious kid that grew up in the black church that asked a lot of questions, that did not like easy answers. And so I, you know, that sent me on the trajectory through uh an MDiv, a PhD, and um where I'm at now. And, you know, I'm excited to talk about root work. Connie, I you came into my orbit. We came into each other's orbit not long ago. Um and then I started listening to like what d like Dr. T said to what you were doing and the way that you're getting underneath. And um my work has to do with like how we're reclaiming root work and and reinterpreting it in relation to neuroscience and uh these contemporary understandings. So I'm excited for the conversation too.
SPEAKER_01Tell tell me more about root work. Tell the audience more about root work. What is it, what where it feels I like the subterranean feel of it. I I like the sound, yes.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, yeah, yeah. Golly. Um there's a lot I could say about root work, and so I'm gonna resist the temptation for the audience to try to define it. Um but I talk about what it feels like, perhaps. And what it feels like, a lot of a lot of it has to do with, you know, one, it's directly connected with the erotic. The things that we feel that connect us back to our bodies, that emerge from our bodies, that are true in our bodies, uh, the parts that register with our nervous systems and our capacity to feel, despite or before we learn to police ourselves so much that we just kind of ignore the erotic or the feeling of our bodies. But specifically, root work as it relates to like the radical understanding, getting underneath, getting back into the soil of things, composting, shaking shit around, um, as an athlete, understanding that, you know, anytime you move in a new direction or anytime you're doing deep work, it's gonna feel awkward at first. It's gonna be uncomfortable, but eventually you develop muscle memory. And so a lot of the reason why I framed my comment to you on whatever, I can't remember which post it was that I commented on of yours on Instagram, but because what I see you doing, what I see all of us doing in different ways is is in one way getting back to the root of our existence, you know, our embodied spirituality prior to and separate from the religions that we articulate. Um but also because my ancestors understood a long time ago. And so part of this is uh is a political commitment to uh to be the comedian in relation to the demonization of African understandings of religion, uh native traditions, indigenous spiritualities, things of that nature. Like let's return that language of root work, conjure, and I think it's more true to form in terms of how we actually exist with each other and the kinds of ways that we use our energy in the world.
SPEAKER_01I am I'm drawn to this. You're you immediately said, let's refrain from the temptation to define it.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And I find that so liberating in this like overwhelmingly white space of thinking the definition serves anything. And it's like, what does it what does it feel like? You know, what does it feel like at your roots? You're making me think of I'm I'm just free associating right now. But I read this this thing that feels um I was like crying talking to my friend about this science paper. It's not the one I posted about, but it's it's about like this new modeling of the clitoris, right? Like we just have a 3D model of the clitoris. And one of the things that is different, and obviously, like nobody cares about it, it must funds it. So like it's this new thing, even though the penis was mapped like a bajillion years ago. The we had this preconception that yeah, yeah, yeah. We had this preconception that like the nerves of the clitoris as it gets to the surface, it like weakens, right? Right. And obviously, ask anyone with a clitoris, it's not how it feels. And so it it actually spreads out more and roots more, you know, and it makes me think about um rooting as not just this is like a new concept I'm playing with in my head of rooting not just inside downwards, but rooting up, but rooting towards the surface. But like, you know, like it's like a we're really like branching to reach. And what that means to me when I see an image like that, it's like if if there is a God, the God who creates something that cannot touch the skin, but really wants to reach the skin, like this is completely unnecessary bullshit, right? Like it's not needed. It's like and it is just excessive for excessive sake. It is pleasure for pleasure sake, and you cannot touch it by the skin, right? It doesn't respond, you cannot like press it and then it just responds. So what it responds to, right? Like what a root of a plant or the root of the clitoris that goes up responds to is like pressure, rhythm, and stimulation that precedes the sexual act, right? Like it's like language, it's safety. Safety, it's all of these things. Yeah. Like before we even get there, yeah, that's how we reach the roots. That's true. It's not, you know, like it's not, you're not designed for just procreation. Not in and out. It's not a burger joint, you know, like it's it's you, you, you need to be cultivated and rooted. Yeah, yeah. Conjure. Yes. Yes.
SPEAKER_05It's it's it's something that taps us deeply. And then like, you know, Tamisa and I talk about this all the time in terms of the exchange. Like, I think about life, every interaction is an exchange, right? Energetic exchange. And how that goes can it like brings us to the surface in certain ways, or there are exchanges, interactions we have that diminish our energy. And I say I-N-N-E-R-G. Like we have energies within us that we we use all the time, flippantly, oftentimes, but some engage their energy very intentionally. And of course, you know, the kind of white traditions, Western traditions that would demonize or or or talk negatively about people who are intentional and mindful about how they employ their energy. But that's what I hear you talking about. Is it's it comes up from the ground, you know, from below and rises to the you know, then it's orgasmic, if you will. You know what I mean? Like in the climactic sense, right? But there's so much group work that happens prior to.
SPEAKER_02Like conjuring to climax. Because I again, like when I said that I saw this to when I saw this in Jesus, like the the the picture that I saw was was the flipping of the tables. And I was reading Uses of the Erotic, and I was thinking of flipping those tables, and I was like, this scene is so erotic. Yeah. Because I I'm I I imagine Jesus' feet being so planted on the ground, like the flipping those tables with a full body as though you were climaxing. But it's the anger at the pornographic, the anger at the commodification of the holy that is causing this reaction. And it's like I see such a flow of like arousal in Jesus in that moment. But also, like you're saying, it isn't just like mashing on the clitoris, it's like he takes time to fashion the whip. It's foreplay for this moment. Like there, it's thoughtfulness that I'm about to flip this shit on purpose. And I'm gonna do it in public, and I'm not gonna help you clean it up. And like that type of experience of uh like refusal and erotic power and a no. I kept seeing that when I was listening to Audrey talk about this untapped power that that has been hidden from us or denied to us. And it was coming up listening to you and Ciara talk. Shout out, that episode was amazing. And I was like, we've got to talk about more about how I think Jesus gives us a route into this very powerful, angry feminine energy that comes out to flip tables. Um, and that's that's really what what I've been sitting with. Because I mean, I think the last thing I'll say is like my own experience in in like academia and sort of uh constant analysis. And I was talking to my friend Faye about how like right now all I can think in is poetry, like all I feel, you know, is is anger and I'll and I'll get a couple of sentences that feel most right, but everybody wants word counts. And like this idea of like even the shift of like being willing to get no, I'm gonna give you what I have and you're gonna like it, you know? And this idea of that Audrey is calling us to is like if you tap this erotic power, the shit will turn towards you. You don't have to like kind of conform to this plastic pornographic way of being in the world. And I feel like that's what gave Jesus that audacity, you know what I'm saying?
SPEAKER_01Can we? I love, I love this anger. I have to I have two questions. One, why is it I I agree with you, and I want to just like tease this out. What is what is feminine about that rage? Oh, what makes it different than like, you know, I don't know, my whole life watching men throw shit around, you know, like the the fear of it all. Like, why why is it feminine? Why is this feminine rage? What is this?
SPEAKER_02I think it's the use of power, it's a it's a generative use of power that also tells the truth. There to me, and I I don't know, I think my non-binary identity is helping me understand this. This is all very new to me. But it's like I feel, and I've been telling Gary about this in like close friends about like I feel that in being honest about my non-binary identity, both my masculine and feminine have come out to play in very beautiful ways. And when you look go back to that scene with Jesus flipping those tables, it says, and then he shows this outburst of anger, this rage, and it says, and then the blind and the lame, the children come to him after he blows up on, blows up the spot. Now, what kind of anger makes you want to come close? The most weak and vulnerable people in society are drawn to that explosion of anger. And there's something very like generative and go go for yeah, go ahead.
SPEAKER_05It has something inside of them that that they are aware of that perhaps they have not been able to express as well. You're kinda you you juxtaposed this feminine power with the ways that we often see men acting out in these ways. And I would argue that even in these men that act out these ways, it it is a still a feminine power. It is a it is it is grounded in this something that is more primordial, something that is rooted in feeling, um, something that it it is eros. Um but in it too often in as it relates to, you know, m mass people or male or m male men that have this kind of license to act any kind of way in this patriarchal society, it doesn't get it's not understood for the for what I would argue is the kind of feminine erotic power that it is. Um I wrote a piece a a while ago, and it's funny that you talk about the poetry, Tamise, because the the this piece, your inner child is femme. Right. Where I'm basically arguing that all of our inner child are femme, that we all begin as femme, and that masculine or the masculine is kind of that signal sent from the feminine, this strategic step in order to, you know, create containers and hold space for the anyway. I don't want to get too far into it, but that ended up being a poem. Because it became, it was more about what is what do I feel present right now in this moment. And so while my intention when I had the idea was to write in terms of prose, it came out as a poem, right? Embodying the erotic. Um and so I just there's and it's just something fairly new to me. I've been working on this for a little while, but this not this notion that we we all start out as feminine. Like our our capacity for feeling is grounded and rooted in the femininity that we all have within us. But we don't have vernacular or language, especially in this Western world, for men to be able to talk about the erotic and the ways and the dimensions of ourselves that are feminine. But all of us, you know, I've got this thing, technically we're all two-spirit, even if I'm not aware of the feminine with me. Um and so that would be my argument to that is is, you know, mm, but in the expressions that we often see, the very violent, kind of uncontained expressions of erotic power in men, it's it's distorted. It's uh it's it's often misused because men misunderstand it in the first place. So then it becomes virtually impossible to honor the feminine in the world or even in ourselves because we don't understand the power.
SPEAKER_01I hear you describing pornographic anger versus erotic anger.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And also the thing of like the language around like the inner femme thing, like it's like all embryos start with an undifferentiated gonad, right? And then you become, you acquire, like, you produce female anatomy first, and then the Y chromosome triggers testosterone production. Like it's we start femme, like it's biologically start femming, like you know, it's evolutionary too.
SPEAKER_05You know what I mean? Uh in terms of the primordial nature of a wound from which we all come, right? Um Yeah. But in and so, you know, but I think there's just a gross misunderstanding of the masculine, which disconnects us, especially from our bodies, uh, and and disconnects us from the kind the feminine energy that we carry as man.
SPEAKER_01It's like I'm uh I'm hearing like how do we I've been thinking a lot about like how what is the off-ramp for like manosphere, right? And and it's like what what I'm hearing here is not even like because I was on a call and then somebody said, we need, you know, a m the muscular man to be like this is what strength is in the Bible. And I was like, oh no, that don't sound like that's it. But like, but like what I hear right now is like, how do we re-eroticize anger? How do we like femme these masculine things? Fascinating. Kink. I think kink is the way that you do that.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Because really, like, I've been thinking a lot about what happens in a container called kink is you get to play with power in ways that are safe and consensual. And I think what the pornographic does is it it tells us we don't need the agreements and the consent. You can just take, right? Or you, or you, your your body is just for the taking. And I I don't see that like, you know, even, you know, we talked about the tree a little bit last time, Connie, but like, even like you didn't have to take from that tree, you could have received, you know, there there was another option. And I know that there's another way to read that story, but it's about the like how we play with power and like this reality that it, that I think the safety of power that is recognized, understood, and wielded with with no hesitation of like, my heart is good and I'm finna wield this power. Whose authority do you speak on? Mine. Like that level of hearness and and like and presence, presence of being is very potent. Like I feel like, you know, you you're talking about the clitters and the stimulation and stuff. And it's the moment right before climate, like the the presence of being when you're in a moment of arousal or bliss or um, you know, joy, pleasure, like that edge that you get to in your own being is where God lives. I mean, if if God's name is I am, another way to say that is God is. And so the only way to encounter that is presence.
SPEAKER_05Yeah.
SPEAKER_02It's to be here now, right now. Well, how do you feel? What's going on? What are you sensing? And I think, again, back to Gary's point with the femme, it's like the honing device is is not analytical. It's sensual. And to me, I feel like there's a sense of like needing to really return back to a sensual knowing because of the endless analysis and artificial, like y'all, uh, we're going in circles. I mean, we're literally going backward in time because there's nowhere else to go in these logics. Yeah. You know what I'm saying? Yeah.
SPEAKER_05And your point, I I just want to underscore your point uh connecting it to kink, it it calls to mind play, right? I talk about play as a portal of possibility. The things that can happen within a container of play, whatever that play space is, it's you you can move and you can, it's imagination. It's it's it's ways in which you can become present to a moment, fully attuned, which is what I what I hear when I think about Jesus, it's not atonement, it's deep attunement to where, like, what is true, what is what is what am I feeling right now in this moment, what is the most true thing in this moment. There is a freedom within the context of play for you to bring that to bear. And then what it changes to in the next moment, there's still this kind of invitation to be completely present and vulnerable to whatever that is. And we know that vulnerability, when it is treated with care, is power, but vulnerability is also subject to power. And that's why we need contained spaces to be able to move in these ways. Um it's funny also how you, you know, I you notice in in in the world of kink, where you will often find people uh trying on dimensions of themselves that they can't normally in the kind of reality that they their everyday reality. What is it about that? What is there's this intuitive, I think, invitation to people to want to um be whole humans, which entails that if I always have to be in this sense, in this way, right? A CEO, a white male, blah, blah, blah. And all of a sudden over here, it's like, well, I just want to be degraded or d or domed. Or there's a there's a kind of inherent balance that I think plays out, but we just don't have language for, right?
SPEAKER_02So then you use the language of energy, and that's interesting to me. Like, right? Like the container for the energy to flow in a different way.
SPEAKER_05Absolutely.
SPEAKER_02That's interesting to me.
SPEAKER_05And I mean, we are energy. So, you know, there's but again, when when when men, for example, feel a kind of more flowing energy, right? Not not necessarily having to always be forceful, but know how to flow, which athletes athletes know how to flow, right? That's I found flow as an athlete. And it's like there's a witness to flow. There is a balance between strength and surrender in flow, and flow is where every athlete wants to live. That shit is magic, right? But it's because it's this constant kind of interpenetration, if you will, or this constant exchange between, I would say, the masculine and the feminine.
SPEAKER_01Infinity. What what sport do you play? Because my brain is like trying to m imagine and I'm I'm like, I'm I'm halting my imagination. What is the what sport do you play?
SPEAKER_05It's a great question, because people don't typically think of football in terms of flow, but I I played football in college. And um Yeah, go ahead.
SPEAKER_01What um say more about say more about kink. I don't have a specific question, but I I like the I I want to sit with the imagination of we are switching roles, we have to inhabit like the kind of the thing that we reject in our outward world, right? Like you are saying, I'm also hearing you saying, my my inner child is femme. Though there's this distinct desire to claim. I'm thinking also, like, I'm the in this class of developing God and sex. I'm I want to talk about God going from dom to subbing from the old testament to the new testament, of like how you know it's like giving up and switching roles, right? Like, and how that is like fluid and fun and like exciting and liberatory that God would be a sub, right? Like it's like we are fully subbing here. Right. Um so like t tell me, tell me more, say more. Let's kink. Let's can I have in real quick.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah, go ahead. Because I had this image come to my mind because I I I want Gary to talk about this in a different route, but I want to say this because of what you brought up in my mind, because this whole time we've been talking about it, I keep thinking of the scene where Jesus washes the feet in John 13. Because it says, knowing who he was and where he was going, he took off his clothes, okay, put a towel around his loin, and began to wash their feet. That scene is so effing intimate because, and it's a container where they're playing with power. Because the thing that makes us uncomfortable is why would God ever do this? That's right. Why would God suffer?
SPEAKER_05Be of service. That's right. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02And their feet? Footwork? You know, there is so much happening in these scenes because the because we read it and people theologize it. But I I'm coming back to the scriptures and I'm like, what am I feeling in my body when I read this? That that scene is sensual, it's intimate, it's very, very, we are getting a peek into something very sensual in that scene. And I just feel like I want to name that because I I can't wait for this class.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, yeah. The thing that I would say about Kink, just in this regard, is just to reiterate, like that that play, that play spaces or contain spaces that are essentially set aside from the reality, if you will, like that what they allow for is more of a kind of free flow of energy, a fluidity, where whatever a person is curious about or desiring or whatever it is, there's room for that. And what often happens is that people in their whatever their daily reality is feel like they have to perform this script that is that to varying degrees they have a choice or not. And some and you know, too often we see, especially given this this podcast is for people who have marginalized experiences, so often it's marginalized people that are having to perform realities that perhaps they would not otherwise choose, right? But when you think about a space like Kink or play space in general, something that is set aside, which I argue also would argue is a sacred space because we enter that, we cross that threshold with a certain kind of intention, but an intention that is grounded in imagination, not an intention that is, you know, then it's like what can happen in this world is whatever we decide we want to happen in this world. And that's where you can have you can have things like the fact that in one setting, something can be abuse. In another setting, where it is consent, consensual, it is grounded and it's rooted in a certain kind of care, it's all of a sudden it's erotic or even climactic, or you can, you know, you get off to certain things that it's like in this setting without consent, without it taking place in a in a play space, without the the kind of foundation of care. We're talking about abuse. And so when you think about energy in that context, it's like all the kinds of things that can be alchemized or healed or trauma that can be released in in these kinds of spaces, um, I think there's that's why it's a portal. That's why I can't I can't help but think about play as a portal. Because what happens, then what you learn from these kind of encounters, then it there's no rule that says I can't, I can't bring these dimensions of myself back to my reality, where all of a sudden now I'm approaching reality through a playfulness, where it's just like, man, fuck it. I'm you I'm gonna be free, you know? Um but what other practice field do you have to to, and this is where it gets to root work, right? What other practice fields do you have other than those play spaces where you can actually practice these alternative ways of being enough to develop a certain kind of muscle memory where you now have actualized yourself, you understand your energy more fully, and now you can wield your energy in the real world in ways that perhaps you couldn't without that experience.
SPEAKER_02Probably because there's no shame. Right. There's no shame. So because all of the parts have a place to go and all of the energies have a container, it helps you to live without shame, which means that like now my being is just beaming. Like there's nothing, there's no, there's no intel that you have on me that I don't have on myself. I've looked at myself, I've taken stock of all of my energies, and they have a place to go. And I think so much ill in the world is from this, is from shame and and like the lack of an outlet for energy. And like, again, like talking to my homie about how you know energy just is what it is. It's gonna come out. Like it doesn't, it doesn't disappear. It's going to, it's going to come out somehow. So it's about finding naming and finding the container. But I but I I wanted to share this real quick, uh, because Kanye, I want to hear from you about it too, because Betty Martin has this thing on um like consent. She has these quadrants of like, you know, giving and allowing, taking and receiving, and how, you know, when these things exist within the context of consent and agreement, they exercise parts of ourselves. But when that container is not there, it becomes abuse. It becomes um, you know, abuse on the one hand and being a doormat on the other hand. And I think so much of these conversations, and I think that's what she meant by pornographic, is that like there is the it's a it's a passivity about your power, but power doesn't go anywhere, babes. You can't be passive about energy, it's there. So we see it, we feel it. Like, so you need to make some choices about how you're about to wield this. Like you can't just be passive about your energy, it's there, you know? Um and I think that's the conversation. It can get stuck.
SPEAKER_05You can get stuck, and I think that that's you know, when you to I love the language of exercising, right? If we don't have spaces within which to exercise all of ourselves, then there are parts of ourselves that atrophy.
unknownRight.
SPEAKER_05Oh, I see. And that means so then the the if I'm thinking about it in terms of like, you know, people talk about frequencies and and things of that nature. Like the beam of light that's coming from me only half online versus the beam of light that is coming from me fully online is different and it's a different kind of magnetic. Um but but there's so much, you know, I like to talk about spiritual muscle, but there's so much spiritual muscle that that particularly disenfranchised people are positioned where they cannot exercise themselves fully. So then that it's it gets stuck, right? And so we but we have to be able to exercise ourselves, often to exorcise a lot of the BS that we have to that's buried in our bodies because of the ways we've had to live.
SPEAKER_02Oh my goodness. Kai, what you think?
SPEAKER_01I I have like three, four, five thoughts just coming out of it. I know I want to hear them. None like fully, none of them fully forming, but I'll say I'll say some. Um I'm thinking, I'm pulling up this line from from the users of the erotic. She says, uh to share the power of each other's feelings is different from using another's feelings as we would use a Kleenex. And I think that that feels like what happens when this, when the consent doesn't happen, or when the when the feelings become when when the erotic becomes the shadow and we suppress it and it it comes out anyhow. It comes out as like a box of clinic Kleenex flying around and like hitting everybody. Not a very strong image, but the the feeling of the just like the scatteredness of it all. And then I'm wondering, um, because it's really interesting. I posted this video with me in lingerie, and I'm talking about the clitoris, and you like see my butt, and I lost 1700 followers in a day, right? It's and 1700 followers saved the post. Don't know if they're the same people, but very fascinating, right? That we have this split, right? That like it is split in half of this. Like, if I need to deny myself the the experience of watching skin, then I am it's it's the incognito window when we watch porn, right? Like it's like I I I'm leaving a part of me here and I cannot integrate this into me, right? Like it's 1700 desires unintegrated. And that's fascinating to me because a lot of the comments say, like, Connie, you oh, it's so brave, right? Like it's so brave and courageous to do this thing. And I was like, that's fascinating to me because I don't feel anything about it because I don't it doesn't my like my partner said, Connie, it's surprising to me. Like you're not more scared to post this. And I'm like, I'm not, why would I be scared to post this? Like I don't know what we're talking about, you know, like your sounds like you're scared to to be in your skin, right? Like I'm fine.
SPEAKER_03I have done a lot of work to do your root work.
SPEAKER_01Yes. Like I I'm like, why why is this brave, right? Like what's like what is the courage that you are looking for in me? Because I don't, I don't that that's not what I'm registering. So there's part of that, and then the other thing that I'm wondering is if if the if Christ is doming up to the point of the cross, if the cross is BDSM, if we are playing to that extent of play, what does that mean? I I I don't have anyone to talk to about these things. I am so happy right now. You guys have no idea. But it's just like who what what is what is the play? What is the play on the cross? Why do we handcuff Christ, nail him down, and nail him, right? Like we nail him down. There's this um like it's an erotic image like that we kind of have suppressed, that we put onto bodies in the old testament that I see in like in in judges, right? We are stripping the women, the women of like the the overflow of war, and people can do whatever and can take them as wives, and all of this stripping of the body that is violent and kind of a if we read it in this vein of like that is what happens, if that is what happens when we suppress the erotic, when we don't let the energy flow, when it gets stuck and it comes out in these ways that isn't an erotic anger, then like I I know this isn't the only reading of the cross, just just for listeners who are terrified right now. I'm saying, like, what if this is if we are right now in play space, if we are carving out sacred space right now where we can play with the image of Christ on the cross as BDSM, what is God trying to get at? And what are we trying, what are what is the experience that God wants to give us in this BDSM play?
SPEAKER_02I just keep thinking about we have freedom and power.
SPEAKER_05That's where I was on going.
SPEAKER_02We are responsible for what we do with it. And you cannot scat anybody else for what you do with your freedom and power. So do it ten toes down. Meet yourself, look at like actually give yourself the opportunity to see what you would do with power and then have some conversations, you know. It's when she Audrey's talking about how the knowledge this the knowing comes first and then the language. And I think there is the sense of like when you see somebody unhinged, and I when I saw it, I was like, there's so much light on this image. I was like, come on out here, Connie. Because it's like people, it's the visceral feeling that you're in a trap. And and and when people saw that image, they had a bodily reaction to the trap of their own mind. Because in the same way that Jesus is erotic shines, I mean it's full potency. I feel like, you know, it's it's the fullness of consciousness getting a hold of a human body. You get incarnational experience where things get transfigured and raised and moved and shifted, right? And I think, but that also is threatening to people who are afraid. And so shame, it's it's a play on shame and power, and like, hey, yeah, look at this man up here with these wounds. You can kill God.
SPEAKER_05Yeah.
SPEAKER_02So what you gonna do with that power?
SPEAKER_05That's where I was gonna go. There's so much in scripture that talks about being given over to basically wherever you want to go with it. Given over to your own whatever it is, right? And, you know, in my work, I specifically when I get to so I've got a book called Playing the Game, and toward the end of it, it's a book that kind of uses sports as a way in to talk about both the kind of racial politics of sports, but also opens into a constructive, kind of deconstructive and constructive theology where I'm talking about divine energy, the divine energy that we all embody. Uh, and the fact that divine energy doesn't necessarily like we have to trouble the ways that we talk about it as inherently good. What does that mean? Um is it more of, is it some capital G God, you know, in histor historically understood in this particular part of the world, this white male god, as Christina Cleveland talks about, or is this a divine energy that we live in relation with and and that we can conjure for good or for ill, right? Yeah. And so if it if we go to that that side of it, it's hard for me not to see the crucifixion as a lynching, where um this this man had so deeply attuned to the divine within himself, you know, in terms of being incarnational in every moment and living out of that that light. Um and then we see what happens when when free people are able to like, no, that this is a problem. You're not supposed to be this unlocked, right? Same way black men in the South were being lynched for for just living. You know what I mean? Um But you when I think about the goodness of God, for me, what I what comes to my mind is living incarnationally, like in interacting with the with life, with all iterations of life, because I think all all in iterations of life are iterations of the divine, right? I think that we are all iterations of God, right? In infleshed, uh, but connected to the same capital C consciousness, if you will, right? Trying to remember, trying to exercise ourselves, trying to attune like Christ did, um, then we we're free to use our power for good or for evil.
SPEAKER_02That's right.
SPEAKER_05And, you know, if we can talk about morality, we can we can debate about morality, and I and one of my points in in my work is that's it's it's foolish. Like me and the Trump supporter will never find common ground to talk about morality because we exist in two different moral universes, but we both exist in bodies and we both exercise energy, and there is a consequence to both of the ways that we exercise our energy.
SPEAKER_03Right experience of the world.
SPEAKER_05I think part of this part of this touches our our images of the divine. You know, what kind of God do we assume that we live in relation to, right? Um I see it more as as God from the ground up versus a skydaddy that, you know, has to dom everybody all the time. I don't I don't think God exists that way. And I think thinkers like Monica Coleman tap into that. I think um I think ancestral ways of understanding spirit have an understanding of that. I think even the even the sophistication of, like, for example, in in certain African spiritualities, this this notion of a kind of the multiplicity of God, right? And these different figures that represent dimensions of this being, right? But they're understood differently. But then you collapse that into a kind of monotheism uh that plays really well with empire. Uh, and then they call the monotheism more sophisticated when they call the kind of multiplicity understanding primitive. I think it should be flipped. I think uh multiplicity, understanding God's multiplicity is a more sophisticated handle based on a more deeply attuned uh connection.
SPEAKER_02I think so too.
SPEAKER_05Because it's not about it's not about serving this empire, it's about attuning to the fact that all of us carry the divine and exercise the divine.
SPEAKER_02I don't know, that shows up in my friendships too. Because I keep thinking about my relationships and like I keep, you know, you asked me that when I was on the show about like, you know, why don't you have the followers? And da-da-da-da. And it's like I really have, I'm really happy because all I really want to do is be. I want to shine light, shine my particular light, belong, and be. And when I am in around my friendships, I'm realizing how erotic my friendships are. My friends make me tingle. And I'm I I'm like, I'm not interested in relationships that don't make me tingle, you know, and in that same way, like, yeah, when you think of Orisha is this manifestation of the energy, but like I think of the people in my life, like I I listen, like I'm talking to God every day in the form of these particularities. And it's like, like, why would you want to do anything else? Like, if I I feel like I, you know, my evangelical upbringing and my, you know, interest in doing 24-7 worship and all that stuff was because I'm trying to touch God. And then you find out that the people are walking right next to you are God, then I'm I got all kinds of curiosities. I mean, what do you mean? Like, what else are we doing? And I think that that's where like I have found so much life because I think it would be disingenuous. And the reason I wanted to say that, I kind of Is because I think the the pushback is about honesty. It's like honesty is erotic as like honesty is so erotic because it's just it is what it is. It is what it is right here, right now, and tomorrow it might be a different thing. But honesty is right here, right now, I'm here. And there's no apologies, there's no shame. And I think like in the same way, like when you have friendships that are, there is no shame. The honesty is there. When you get people like that into a space, it sh it becomes a portal. And I'm I'm addicted to this, like, this sense of like, why would we be doing anything else? This is what she's asking us. Like, why would you, if the vitality is available to you, this power is unstoppable. This is the power they tried to put out. Because this power, when you tap into it to yourself, and now I'm in the like ther Howard Thurman, but like you tap this erotic, you tap this inner authority, you tap this genuine enough to, and you go through all you burrow through your shame and you burrow through all the stories you've been told about your body. And then you start to learn to like appreciate pleasure and to start to think that you deserve pleasure. And all once you get there, you find God, and then you start seeing it everywhere else. And I'm like, this is the thing that we need to be going after. It's it's really, how does it keep thinking about D'Angelo, but like, how does it feel? No, really, baby, how does it feel? You want more or less?
SPEAKER_05That's that right there.
SPEAKER_02Right?
SPEAKER_05That's why, that's why conjure, the language of conjure feels more true to form in terms of how what you're talking about. Because Connie just raised where where Lord is talking about, you know, when we look the other way or or when we share the power of each other's feelings, right? It's different from using another system. So what you just described, you come to this place where you are, you're fully embodied, like you've integrated parts of yourself, you've exercised, exorcised the shame, and now you're you're good, which you've talked about before. Like you're good. You're okay with who you are, and so now you're fully online. Now think about what happens when when we encounter each other, and I'm fully online, and neither one of us is using this exchange as a way to use each other like a Kleenex, but we're showing up kind of fully online and authentic and vulnerable with each other. And so then the signal that gets sent back and forth between us, what happens? It spins both of us up. But there's a climactic element to those kind of energetic exchanges. Whereas you know how it feels when you enter when you interact with somebody who makes you feel diminished. It it doesn't it doesn't do this, right? It does something else. Um and so then this is the way that I read um the passage of scripture in Matthew that talks about where two or three gather my name, there I am, right? Or this is the way that I read what happens in Acts, right? We traditionally we read these texts as though the spirit came from outside and came. No, it was spun up. Because we gathered in a certain name, whatever name that is, that's the part that we don't want to talk about. Because MAGA people, January 6th, gathered in the name of Trump, and look what they did. That it was just as exponential, even but unto death, not unto more life. So we have a choice. You know what I mean? But but conjure is what happens inevitably, whether we know we're doing it or not. And so when you when we can meet our vulnerabilities together in a safe space, to be to be to be naked together spiritually, energetically, to be honest, to be to be authentic with with the kind of the the what is most deeply true in terms of what we feel, which is the erotic, then we see the exponential power of that, that cut those kind of encounters. And it's the same thing that happens when you think about, you know, what I talk about in the book where you know Marshawn Lynch is in flow and makes this run and sends the stadium into such a frenzy that it cap it's an earthquake. I'm like, yo, energetically, do y'all know what just happened? It's it's worship. That is a sacred spiritual experience, but we don't have the language to talk about that. We do this every day.
SPEAKER_02It's a little more unhinged, too, for some reason. And I don't, you know, when I think about it.
SPEAKER_05Ah so then you got people who can show up to the stadium with their faces painted. They wouldn't do that, uh at work. Yeah, but like free energy, just out here. You know what I mean? Um and and then you see you see the climax that happens as a result of that.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. I work a lot on bullfighting. Um, and in my work, I've compared bullfighting to menstruation. It's a whole thing. It's it's but but like it's fascinating to me that that that like there there's no outlet, right? Like, there's no outlet outside of sports for this ritual space. Like sports feels like people are like, oh, sports is dumb. Like, this is I don't know what is happening, like who cares? These people are getting paid so much money to do this nonsense.
SPEAKER_03Right.
SPEAKER_01And you look at the face painting, you look at the ritual space, and like people don't have access to the ritual space anymore. What used to be this, right? Like, like let's kill a bull, release the blood, let's access the femme, let's access, you know, like the the blood sacrifice of it all to like unite the mask with the femme energies, like in one space, like that isn't there, you know? And um yeah, I'm this is this is a whole this is whole like I went to divinity school because of Hemingway, because of bullfighting, and like I didn't know why I went, and like now I'm starting to understand what this was all about, but it feels um like after you say a bullfight and the the the horror of it, the utter you you it's this is like hard to find language for because it feels wrong, right? Like it's like kink, where it's like I'm saying this thing and it feels wrong, but this is the shadow part of the human experience that we lock up aside, right? We don't want to say that we killed Christ. We are we are just enacting, here's the bread, here's the wine. I didn't kill nobody. I'm here to have this in peace, right? Is this is it is it peace? Because you have murdered a body, right? And then the the the killing of the bull is absolutely cruel. And it you see the space for the masculine, for the kinked side, for the shame of the masculine to exist. And does it make sense to me that the blood is it needs to be shed? Not fully, no, but it it was the first place where I felt that we when I watched the bullfight, I thought this is the closest thing to seeing the crucifixion. Because because it and it's not a glorification of the horror, but a responsibility of the horror, of the of taking the account of what we are capable of in our shadows.
SPEAKER_05We are capable of, that's right.
SPEAKER_01And and it's the for for the horror and for the horror that is that is in the world. And um it it's it's terrifying. It is terri it's a terrifying release of what it means to be human. And I think about what you said to Mis earlier of like the freedom that you have to kill a god, to kill a bull, right? The freedom we have to do violence onto each other, that you can kill a god, and to play on that a little bit and to say you have the freedom to fuck a god, right? And and like you have the freedom to fuck a god and you have the freedom to kill a god. And what do you choose? You have the freedom to flirt with God. You what what are you choosing in your autonomy and what are you understanding to be in your shadows? You know, like you can have this in your shadows because we do. And and so many of us are afraid to look at it and we enact it on uh like the Kleenex onto people. But like where is the where are you killing the bull that you are afraid to kill the bull? Right? Yeah, yeah. And like this isn't that this isn't a discussion about like animal rights and and such. I'm talking like symbolically, who are we, who do we th want to kill, and like where do we have the space to enact that so that it can have a contained sacred space for it. And the bull fight was is for a lot of people that space, you know?
SPEAKER_05Yeah. Connie, I appreciate just something you said in that was is just I think I think helping people understand, like we we are capable of all of these things, right? If we're especially if we're not careful, it's there. I mean, it's it's you know, it's it's even thinking about, you know, Peter. Oh, I would never, I would never deny you. It's like, okay, I see something in you, Peter, because I'm so deeply attuned and because we're close, I know you. You know what I mean? So I don't it's not even necessarily like foresight as though he saw, and perhaps he had a sense, right? But but this kind of intuitive sense where it's like, because of our relationship, I know that there is something, there is something within you that can be bought under the right circumstances. And there's something in all of us, especially when we don't do our own root work, that can be bought. So if I if there are pieces of me, for example, like when you talked about the the incognito window for people that, you know, want to interact with pornography or whatever, but they don't feel like they can integrate that part, that fragmentation can be bought, can be exploited, can be, can be, can be um can be twisted into something um that that can be problematic, that can be death dealing under the right circumstances. And so he's Jesus on the cross, or whether we're talking about Fred Hampton being killed by the FBI, whether we're talking about King being killed, or what whoever we're talking about in terms of this lynching tradition, um we see what we are capable of. We also see that we're capable of interacting onto more life, and every interaction can be life-giving or death dealing.
SPEAKER_02It's that oh my goodness.
SPEAKER_01Well I I want to I want to work out a thought that it isn't forming, but I I'm really intrigued, and I think you both can help me. Because it's this thing between attunement and atonement, right? Like even within the Peter story of this attunement atonement, my my story starts with I am recently doing somatic therapy. It is uh life-changing, completely embarrassing and um just full on, full on, very embarrassing. Very raw, naked baby, I'm four all the time in that room. Um the thing that the the th the therapist said, and this isn't new, but for someone with trauma, it uh when I heard it, it was too much, right? Like it I I already knew this, but when she said it to me in that room and I was four, and it was too much. It was very simple. It was just that the idea of if you have a good caregiver, good whatever good term, like a good enough caregiver. Right. Um the good the good caregiver as attuned to your needs, right? So people who have a lot of PTSD, you good it's uh likely that you experience emotions as either you you don't register it till it's a 10, right? You you don't you don't see it, you don't feel it, everything feels tolerable till it's like it's already too much because you weren't nobody showed you that attune to the two and the three and to be like, oh, I need to leave, oh I need to walk out, oh I'm actually hungry. Like, how many of us actually register hunger and thirst in our bodies and trust it and go do something about it, right? Like those levels. So how like to do somatic work as as she put it is like we need somebody, the caregiver, to show us how to attune to our own bodies. So um if we you've had that, you likely know what a two or three is before it gets to a ten, right? And then I I'm thinking about that in terms of attunement and atonement because I think that a lot of people come out of church and get those two things very confused. Because what I feel is because of yeah, because of church, what I feel is really this overwhelming sense of I am going to therapy to atone for the sins of my caregivers, right? Like as as as in like, I don't have to do this work. Someone else doesn't have to go do this work and get a headache afterwards, right? Like, I have to go atone, right? That's right. And here I'm hearing you say Jesus was attuned enough. Jesus was the I this is not a full-form thought, but I know this is heading somewhere, and I know that you guys know where this is going. Absolutely. But it's like Jesus is attuned enough to Peter that like I think something gets lost in translation where we think Peter needs to atone, right? And like, because the church taught us Peter needs to atone. We all need to atone. I need to go atone, and it's just this is this endless cycle. You're never enough. You need a tone and a tone and a tone. And what I'm hearing you say is attune. And what is the other side of Peter? Is that is the other side of Peter that receives, is he supposed to supposed to be like, oh, here is the attunement of my shadow that Jesus is presenting to me. And I have a choice to make that isn't atone, atone, atone. Because to atone is to say, what God did isn't enough for you, you know, like it's not enough. We gotta do more, right? Like, you know, fuck whatever he did on the cross. It's not good enough for me, you know. Like, I need to do more than God.
SPEAKER_05Yeah. Or the ways that we we get rooted into fetishizing our own finitude from the tradition of atonement. Atonement meaning at one minute. It it's based on the assumption that we're separated from God, right? To be put back at one with. Atonement does not assume separation. Atton, and this is what I hear Jesus talking about when he's like, oh yeah, y'all will do more than I've been doing, and or you'll do everything I've been doing, and then some, because I don't think that Jesus came to die. I think he came to demonstrate what atunement with God and to God looks like, to demonstrate for us how all of us have within us the capacity for Christ or Christ's consciousness. And um so when you're talking about this, this when I think about the difference between and I love the somatic, uh, the somatic body work example, because yeah, on one hand, it's like I'm gonna go, I'm gonna go do this work to atone for what a kind of not good enough caregiver created in my body, blah, blah, blah, versus I'm gonna go do this work so that I can attune and learn to move through these traumas so I can be free. Yes, yeah. I was telling Tames the other day, like I have got this, I've got this uh kind of meditation activation ritual or whatever that I do. And I like to do it outside bare feet in the grass on the side of my house. And when I first started doing this practice, this kind of gets back to shame. When I first started doing this practice, you're very aware of like when cars are driving by, it's like, damn, they're gonna look at me and think I'm crazy out here doing this, you know, blah, blah, blah. Eventually, you moving through this practice is I don't give a damn what they think. I know what this means for me. I know I can explain this spiritually, I can explain it scientifically. Like I'm I am coming online right now in this practice. And it has meaning for me. But the process of moving, this is why I like root work, the process of moving from that space where I'm more concerned about what it must look like to other people, their opinions about whatever it is, to I don't give a damn what they think. And that's what I heard earlier, Connie, when you were talking about like when you were in the lingerie and somebody people were projecting onto you, like, damn, that must have taken a lot of courage, which I understand why people would assume that, because for many of us, it's like, yes, some of these things, saying some of the things I say at some point in my life took a lot of courage. But the more you exercise that muscle, the easier it gets. You know what I mean? And that's that is, I think, the possibility of atonement.
SPEAKER_01What I'm hearing it when you're on barefoot on the grass, you can attune to the random drivers driving around who assume that things are, you know, what is wrong with this person doing this thing, or you can attune to something deeper, right? And it's like, can you choose who do you choose to attune with this fact?
SPEAKER_05Exactly. What matters more? I'm barefoot in soil right now. I am literally grounding while praying with my whole body.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_02Like to me, that matters more. Like, I think that's the all right, yeah. So I gotta go back to this Peter thing because there's threads and I'm gonna I'm gonna lose them if I don't share it. But like, all right. So Jesus, it's this this is one of my favorite stories. It always makes you cry. I probably won't cry today, but it's the story with this drachma where Jesus has told the disciples he's about to die. And there is a passage, I think it's it's in Matthew, I think it's 16 or something. And he's he tells him he's about to die. Peter comes in and it says that Jesus anticipates Peter. The word used is anticipation, and it was a it was a version that I meditated on because I was like, what does that mean to be anticipated? But it says Jesus anticipates Peter, and the Peter has just come from being hemmed up by the state. The state is like, are y'all gonna pay taxes? Jesus has this beautiful exchange with Peter, and he's like, you know, from whom do the do the do the sons who from whom do the people get their taxes? And Peter says, you know, from the slaves. And Jesus says, so the sons are free. But so that we can, you know, so that we can deal with this little foolishness here, I'm gonna attune. Go cast your net into the ocean. You're gonna pull up a fish. There's one for me and one for you, and to pay these little taxes. And what I feel like Jesus is saying is y'all are not, we'd live in a different world if you want to. And like, if you want to live in a different world, you can. I can bring what you need out of a fish. So then at the end of his life, speaking of the attunement and the atonement and and this idea of shame, to the end, Jesus dies, Peter denies. I'm keeping this story in mind. Peter denies. At the end, he's like, I'm going fishing. And I can't help but think if in all of the disillusionment, you go back to this story of, like, oh, he could bring it out of a fish. So Peter goes back, he goes fishing. And then again comes the attunement where Jesus appears to everybody. He's telling some people, he's like, Y'all don't cling to me. You know, he's telling other people, go ahead, put your hand in it. And then he goes, Go tell the disciples in Peter. And the difference is like Peter wasn't afraid to face it, it, but it needed to be a conversation. And what do they have a conversation around? It's a very erotic conversation. It's almost like if you were in an erotic situation and you keep asking, what should what's my name? What's my name? Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me? And there's this real exchange happening with Peter's like failure and use of power in the wrong way. And your whole friend is like was killed because of your failure. Like that level of shame to look somebody, and that's intimacy. That's what she's saying. It's like, it's, you know, the pornographic is sensing without feeling. The feeling is what you do when you look at the fact that you killed this bull. You need to feel what you did. That's how we do this. That's right. Like the way that we do this is I need you to feel it and to tell me, yes, I did that. Fuck. Like, how could I have done that? And I feel like my route back to me has been like telling my body I'm sorry, like, oh my gosh, I haven't talked to you. Like, we haven't, we don't know each other really. Like, and letting her talk to me. And like, and it's like coming into masculinity has started has started helping me see the femininity of my own body. And that's what I mean. I think there is something about looking at our dark, looking at our shame, looking at our failure, looking at our denial that that that I think Audrey is like when you're a black queer unicorn, you have to look yourself in the mirror so much. But let me tell you what I found. I found some power down here. And she talks about it as the she talks about it when she reads it. She's using clitoral stimulation to even talk about the erotic because she's talking about the vitality that comes. Up when you're seen. And it's a thing, Connie. It's the courage to be seen. You know?
SPEAKER_05By yourself first.
SPEAKER_02By yourself.
SPEAKER_05If you can see yourself and not be ashamed within your who else can make you feel that way? You know what I mean? Like you're talking about you, what you I mean, it's this is beautiful to me, Sware. You're you're exorcising things that maybe in the past had a certain hold on you, things that people could pull on, and you you confront those dimensions of yourself. You love those dimensions of yourself, accept those dimensions of yourself as part of yourself and as part of your divine energy. You know what I mean? Like in the same way that, you know, when people talk about the the God of the Hebrew Bible and like the fact that that God, like you you talk about feeling and and being all over the place. It's like, but when we understand that all of that is a part of divine energy, when you can accept all of yourself, that's it. There's nothing that anybody else can pull on.
SPEAKER_02You know all things. Yes. Lord, you know all things, and you know I love you. I'm here.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_02You know it all, and I'm still here. I mean, yeah, buddy, on this rock, I'll build a church. I need somebody who's looked at their shadow. Because this shit is hard.
SPEAKER_01I think about you guys are making me think about the in Song of Songs, the man says that under her tongue there's milk and honey. And that always struck stuck with me and gives me shivers because I'm like, you just took these people, promised them, go, they went through bloody shit. And you were like, we're gonna take you to a land of milk and honey. And the milk and honey has already been tasted and enjoyed and anticipated under the tongue of the lover, right? Like it's the milk and honey is in a body, Canaan is in a body, Canaan is embodied, Canaan is right next to you, canan is who you love, right? Like Canaan is where you go when you love is the longing. And like that is full, like it's like we think of this, you know, like let's use Exodus to justify slavery, or like let's use this to to imagine a way out of like these structures. And like there are embodied ways that's right, perhaps to imagine out of the structures, right? Like what I'm hearing you say, like barefoot on the ground, you're attuning to like Mother Earth of like where you are, right? You can attune to where you came from, and and there's a choice, which is a very enticing choice that we've been taught to attune to some random stranger, you know, like we are very attuned to our imaginary random stranger, you know? And it's like who who is where is the attunement? And like if the attunement is uh beneath the tongue of our lover, beneath the tongue of ourselves, then like like the the Canaan is right here. Of course, Canaan is in your body. Come on.
SPEAKER_05Sounds a lot like the kingdom of heaven is within.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_05Just waiting for the city.
SPEAKER_02About like the the fullness of joy and pleasure. That the boundary lines fall to me there, which is again a conversation about, in my opinion, power and erotic. If the boundary lines fall to me in pleasant places, then pleasure is where the boundaries fall. So you gotta figure it out.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Boundaries the way, like pleasure is the way you figure out your boundaries.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Like, you know what I'm saying? And I feel like I was robbed of and robbed, but I'm not angry about it. I I feel robbed, but I also feel like, oh, I'm coming back from my shit. In the sense of like, oh my God, pleasure? Like, wait, I can experience pleasure. I deserve pleasure. Like, and I there's so many people that I feel like, in terms of this root work, really just need permission to experience pleasure to pursue it.
unknownThat's right.
SPEAKER_02I mean, we really, it's pathologized.
SPEAKER_05Yeah. Yeah. In the church. And it sticks. It's like, like, I remember, and I I joke about this with people, but you know, m Monica, my wife and I got married, we just celebrated our 16-year anniversary. And we we did not uh at the time understood this language, fornicate, before we got married, right? And of course, looking back on that, we both would be like, yeah, we would have, you know, to because it's, you know, because because I remember preachers, old preachers in the church saying, like, oh, God will bless your sex life, all the blah, blah, blah. But all the way up to that point, there's this shame attached to it. And then we think that all of a sudden you say, I do, you get married, you have a honeymoon or whatever, and then and then all of a sudden that shame's gonna disappear. No, it's not. You still have to move through it. Now, now you might feel like you have permission to to move through it, but what happens is you move through it. And so that doesn't like we we develop muscle memory around anything that we continue to do in a rhythm, good or bad. And our body, our body is a this is part of our kind of survival adaptation intelligence for good or for ill. Right? Um and so we have to be able to move through these things, and when we can move through them and accept everything that we find, then you're free.
SPEAKER_01What did you how how do you what would you say to someone what would you have wanted to hear when you were trying to move through that shame? Like what did you need? How did you need to move through it? Because it's it's this the shame around sex, like with this sanctioned now you're okay to have sex. And how how do you like how now you're okay to be milk and honey, right? Like that's all it's saying when you already were, but whatever, like how but how do you what do you say to someone moving through that?
SPEAKER_02I've been holding this and thinking about it because it's me and I'm moving through it. Um and I think you know, uh this conversation has been something that I'm really, really wanting to hold out in conversation because I think that this is the power we're missing. We don't know the sources of power are off. So I think for me it would be you're not gonna die. I think I think we think that facing the shame is gonna kill you. It's not. And um, I I think for me, what I had to realize was um I can be trusted with power. I feel awesome. So, but I had to I had to meet myself. I had to go to all the places I was scared to go. I had to be confronted with narratives that were untrue and walk them down.
SPEAKER_05That's and that's the narrative. That's the yeah. The the uh the the comedian in it we would say, I I wish, you know, what I would say is that you're you're already good.
SPEAKER_02That's it.
SPEAKER_05Like you're good. You're good. You're good already. And good, I would say the the OO and good I'd put in parentheses to to double on Tundra and say you're already God. Um I think if somebody would have told me that, then would have recognized it would have put a different tag on the shame that I felt to let me know that it didn't have to it doesn't have to be there. That you're not this, you're not a s just this depraved sinner, that that that's a story that was told that is not the only way to tell the story or interpret text. And I think if people can start from the place of goodness um versus starting from this kind of the detriment of depravity, um then then it becomes a lot easier to exercise the shame because you because you know it it doesn't have to be, it shouldn't be there. That it was put there, um not necessarily of any doing of your own versus supposed to be there.
SPEAKER_01Whose shame was it first, do you think?
SPEAKER_05Well, I mean if I think about the whose voice was in my head when it was you know, it it it was whoever was interpreting it, like it was the it was the old preachers that interpreted the text and preached. It was scripture, right? The way but but but the way that I was the way that my attention was trained to interpret scripture.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_05Um and so it it's it's it's the narrative, it's the the the arbiters of that narrative, it's the structures that hold that narrative in place and that reinforce and reproduce it. Like it's this this whole thing that happens where where then it becomes our own voice, we think, um but that but our attention is being trained.
SPEAKER_02It's like the it's the ability, it's the feeling of violation that you have to kind of like name. Because I think when pastors, like I keep thinking of that one pastor who was talking about pornography that you've mentioned a lot, that God is watching you while you're doing all of this. And I'm like, this pastor is exercising his issues onto everyone else without their consent or agreement, right? And so what that does when when people perpetually do that, because again, the energy doesn't go nowhere, right? So when you have a lot of power and a microphone, you exercise your energy onto people who are there to receive from God, and it is a gross violation that I think you only come into contact with when you feel aroused or when you feel desire. And in those moments, you've got to surf that wave because that shit, that shame is not yours. It's somebody else's who violated your consent and your agreement. And so for me, like just kind of riding the wave of like who is this coming from? And I I give that shit, and I do ritual type stuff, but like, you know, I give that stuff back, it's not mine. And then I tell myself, like, I put my hands on my body. I mean, it took me to my 30s to touch myself. So like I put my hands on my body and I say, I'm not ashamed of you. You're good, you're sexy. Oh, your skin is so smooth. Like, there's gotta be a counter narrative somehow to that fat.
SPEAKER_05There has to be. Has to be. And you need to hear, and you have to hear the alternative voice.
SPEAKER_02Yes.
SPEAKER_05Because and that's part of the root work. That is part of the re retraining of your own attention, the recalibration of your body. If if every time you touch yourself in a certain way, you've been trained to believe, ooh, bad, ooh, bad, ooh, evil, ooh, nasty, ooh, sinful, then you've got to retrain that. And I'm talking about down to this is where I'm grateful for, you know, my my the training that you invariably go through as an athlete, where you recognize like you gotta rework all of this from the very detail of the last time I touched my shoulder, I thought bad. So now I need to touch my shoulder and reassociate goodness every single time. And then eventually the default becomes goodness, goodness, goodness. You know, otherwise gonna flip. That's right. That's right. Transformed by the renewing mind.
SPEAKER_01It's so fascinating. I I was talking to somebody about like God as like doing inner child work and um through the Trinity and doing parts work through the Trinity. And the thing that stuck with me was this idea of just like we don't hear a lot of praise from God about us, right? Like this thing that you're saying, like that is recorded in scripture, there isn't a ton of like, wow, child, you, you know, it's like you child for whom I'm well pleased. It's just kind of singular, right? It's really hard to earn. There isn't this, you know, for me outside of Sans, a thing of like, your skin is so smooth to me. It's like you are sexy. Look at your body. Like, I made you, you are good, you are good, is like what was said after creation, right? And then we don't say it anymore. We take this like utterance of like, you know, like Christ died on the cross and we're still like, oh, like, so we're still fucked, right? Like, like, can we go back and be like, but this I was created, and God said it was good, it was fine, it was great. It was, you know, it is good. And like, I like we how do we speak that more into each other as lovers of each other and of ourselves, is what I'm hearing. Of like, how do we we need around?
SPEAKER_02It is, yeah. Which is what creates what is creation. I mean, I think creation in the poetic sense was what happens from erotic self-talk. Like it's a it's a a Trinitarian solo session. Let us make God in our image. And light breaks forth, right? Like it is a there's something powerful. So when Gary says, you know, good it with the parentheses, it's like me telling myself how beautiful my skin is is God talk.
SPEAKER_05Yeah. That's right.
SPEAKER_02You know, that's right. And that and that's what we have to see it as.
SPEAKER_05You gotta bring your energy to the surface. You know what I mean? Like every time that you give yourself affirmation, you're speaking to an energy, your energy in a way that allows that to more fully come to the surface, right? It's it's like tantric in the sense. Yeah. Um But when you were talking about Connie, in terms of where my mind went when you were talking about like we don't see in scripture, we don't hear a lot like the affirmations or that like you, you know, I my mind went back to when Jesus said that the that the kingdom belonged to children. And it was like an assumption, right? It wasn't, it didn't even need to be an affirmation because of how children are in touch with the erotic, how children are just moved based on desire or move based on feeling without the kind of filtering that we learn as adults. It's Jesus is like, oh, kingdom already belongs to such as these. Like, y'all need to be like these or reclaim your own inner child. What do we know about children? Child, children are playful, right? Children are imaginative, children are honest, uh not afraid to take space. Exactly. Like it's just that children are free. I I've got a one-year-old right now. Those that know me know that one of my favorite things to say is fuck them kids. You know, that's a mental health practice. Like we got three kids, nine, four, and one. And toddlers, I said the other day, like, that's my least favorite stage, but in some ways it's my favorite because just the raw honesty. Do you know what I mean? Like, you may not have the language to say I'm hungry, but you will know at the moment that hunger strikes, and it will be as clear as day, versus having to kind of, well, you know the complications of trying to relate because of different levels of dishonesty for different reasons. Our energy, my energy can connect with my one-year-old very quickly and very in a kind of unfiltered way, whatever it is, because there's not the complications that are there that will be there later in life in some different ways, where then it becomes harder for us to meet each other at the heart.
SPEAKER_02Oh, it's no shame.
SPEAKER_05We're my 1910s. He hasn't learned.
SPEAKER_01Like, like when we like when a child cries, right? And the child is like, and like we're like, no, don't cry, or like shut up, or like, yeah, and we're just gonna deal with it. Like they're being honest. You're not. They're like my needs aren't met. You know, very simple. It's not personal. It's not like you're a bad parent. It's just I'm hungry. I'm I have pee in my diaper. Like it's simple. And it's like we have lost the honesty. We have lost the erotic anger.
SPEAKER_05Yeah. That's right. So when somebody says, you know, what's wrong to some like an adult, it's like oftentimes think of the pressure we feel to hold it or to not be completely honest, or to downplay it, or to this, or to that. And then that energy stays right where it is, and you and you don't have an opportunity to exercise it. So then later on, later on, somebody, you know, does something. I I saw some somebody said parenting is like you're holding, they're juggling 20 things basically, and you're all you know stoic, and then you drop a fork and just break down. It's like because there was stuff that needed to move before the fork dropped. You know what I'm saying?
SPEAKER_02Not enough of you. That's true. Okay, because I mean, it's I mean, but you bring it back to that whole Jesus Jesus says you can't enter. So we're saying that kids are an embodiment of the erotic in the anger, the erotic anger, erotic impulse. Because again, she's saying that erotic is not necessarily sexual, right? Like the difference between the erotic when it comes to kids is the consent and agreement, right? Like there, there it's a different space, right? What because what's happening with kids is the same thing that happens in sexual relationships, in erotic relationships. Give, take, receive, and allow, like all of that is in both relationships. But with kids, like the shame hasn't been projected onto them. They don't know otherwise, and they're gonna get what they want. The thing is, if you don't give me this milk, then you aren't getting sleep. Like, I don't care about how you feel about these tears. Like, and there's something, so then if you take that and you go back to what Jesus is saying, you cannot enter this kingdom unless you repent and become a child. So if you take those impulse of not hesitating, of like not having shame, of just being here now and honest about what I need, he's saying, okay, that's how you enter this kingdom, Jack. Like, you can't get in unless you go there. Like he really did say that's the that's the entrance.
SPEAKER_05Literally, like that's the portal. And holding intention with that, if the kingdom is within, then really you're letting it out. Entry is is allowing it to come out. That's it. Right? Entry, entry, entry is when two people that are attuned in this way are interacting in a way that is creating more life, that is incarnating more life, more love, then that's where the kingdom opens up.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_05Between us, from within us to between us.
SPEAKER_01And physically, and like physiologically, you just described an orgasm, right? Like the client is the release of the kingdom. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_05To live incarnationally is to is to release the kingdom.
SPEAKER_01Indeed. And it's like I I the the thing that I feel most connected to the universe is when I orgasm. I know that I am one in an embodied way, that I am bigger than I am, that I stretch out beyond my body, that I don't end where these fingertips end. I know that I feel it, you know. And it's like, yeah, you can feel it in your body. You know that the there's this weird sensation that my body exists. I have a body, I have a physical body between where my knees are, where there isn't a body. I have a body outside my knees. I have a body, you know, like here, you know, like that the body doesn't end with my hair. Like it stretches and it's infinite. And like that experience of it all is oh, this is good. It's like, you know, like that's where in that space you realize that there is more, that there is just more, and this is like it's possible to be that all of the time, perhaps, you know?
SPEAKER_05That part, that part. Because you know where else you feel that? Well, one, it could how that connects to what Tamise was saying earlier about full presence. Where else are you in a moment like that? Nowhere else. No parts of your energy is anywhere else except right there. You know where else? In flow. Whether you're doing art, whether you're whether you're doing sports or run, like whatever you're doing, when you are, if you're writing, when you're in flow, where else is your energy? You are completely absorbed. One of the definitions of flow is that you are there's a complete attention absorption in what you're doing. You are with it. You're with it completely. And this is why neuroscientists and and other, you know, people who scientists talk about the most addictive state that you can be in is if in a flow state. It's more addictive than any drug.
SPEAKER_02Wow.
SPEAKER_05And we have that magic within us already.
SPEAKER_02Eternal life. It's timeless.
SPEAKER_05Exactly. It's it's so when we talk about attunement, you're talking about attention. So we have then within us the capacity. To become fully present into any and everything that we're doing. And you can live in flow every single day. It's available to us. And this is where I look at Jesus. Jesus was locked in. And this is why he needed to remove himself all the time because of like the pulls on his energy. It's like, I, y'all, hey, listen, I gotta go lock in. Because if because somebody says something else to me, it's gonna be a problem. You know what I'm saying? And I'm trying to live incarnationally, right? I want every one of my interactions to be life-giving. And so if I don't go meditate right now, somebody getting cussed out. And that's not gonna be life-giving. Attuning to yourself is how you know I need to remove myself.
SPEAKER_02Uh-huh. Indeed.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, because attuning to yourself is attuning to God. You know, like it's attuning to yourself is attuning to God.
SPEAKER_05And like there's this only place we can find it is within ourselves.
SPEAKER_01And like, I mean, it's it's practice. It's not outside. It's not a thing that you you work and you exercise and you can access all of the time because God created you and said you're good. Yeah. It's like, how do we keep the pro how do we intentionally practice this? That's right. How do we exercise it among each other? How do we start the practice together in community?
SPEAKER_05That's what the Ten Commandments were about. Because there's actually more available than what this, these kind of these set of laws, but even the set of laws are designed to train attention. Right?
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_05It's it's the practice. We have to practice ways of being, and then they become, they become second nature.
SPEAKER_04So I don't know about it.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_05We don't really just continue. Let me see. Let me stop. Let me go.
SPEAKER_02But it's like it was so interesting to call it a threesome, Connie, because I was like, I want I like calling it a threesome because I'm like, you're demonstrating that the erotic can be conversational. It doesn't only have to be sexual, right? Like that's the thing, is like demonstrating the feel of getting lost in a conversation. That where time is gone and sensation happening, feeling and noises and movements, like that can happen outside of sex, although it's really great when it happens within sex as well. You know, it's just it's we need more of this. And this is the power that she's saying we lost because it's it's directly connected to to the feminine.
SPEAKER_05And and the world that we've created is directly construed based on this very narrow masculine patriarchal understanding, right? So then so then you find people that are coerced to move mechanically in ways that they don't that don't feel true to them. So we we practice so much of putting the erotic somewhere else or or or binding the erotic. Um and so this is why, this is why, like I told you, T, this is why I think these structures are crumbling because the it's returning. The erotic is rising up, it's awakening. Um and it's our job, I believe, to be conduits of the different way of being.
SPEAKER_01It's like you look at the news, right, and like I see the like misuse of it, the suppression of it. It's just you scroll anything, it's just keep it just keeps going, right? And it's like how do we to call this a threesome is like it's an act of resistance, but it's also honest. I think it's like also a I like I wanted to call it that. It's funny, but also like I I was like Tamise knows what this is, like to this is the honest thing of what it is, right? It's like how can we like if because what we're saying is if this is a threesome, if the erotic can live within this conversational space, then the voyeur god like is not, is not, right? Like it's not the voyeur god, the god is like God is within this, active within between. Yeah, and so it's like that's it's a live, it's a live demonstration of what's possible if we can play, right? If we can say if we can say that like what is happening with atonement and attunement, if we can say these things out loud, it changes it changes, like I I wasn't um aware of your work till recently, Dr. Gary. And then like I was, I was like, I I I looked at one of the videos and somebody asked you, how can we play? And I was immediately like I was like, oh yes. I mean I knew Tamise was right, but I was like, if this person knows to ask, ask G this question, it's it's we're on the right track here, you know. I was like, let's go. Because how do we we don't know how to play? Like I teach calligraphy, and a lot of people come to me, they think they want to learn calligraphy, they don't want to learn calligraphy. I mean, like it's like a it's a way into something else, you know. Like they think they want beautiful forms and letters and structures, they think they want the Ten Commandments. You don't want the Ten Commandments. What you want is to know what your body already knows. The best letters that people produce is when their eyes are closed and their bodies know what to do. And they're always shocked that their bodies know how to move this already. Correct, like actually, all of these things are bodywork to get you to trust what your body already knows. Can you trust it? Right. Like I love, I talk about this on occasion. My favorite thing about basketball is free throws. Because I I see the the like the place where everything levels, right? Like where you just have to trust your body. You've done this a gajillion times in practice.
SPEAKER_05That's right. That's right. Steph Curry.
SPEAKER_02Oh man, I have to say this now because your body, yeah. Well, I was gonna say you remind me of the chapter on Steph Curry in playing the game. And actually, I wasn't, I didn't know you were gonna go there, but I I wanted to tell you that when you read uh what what Dr. Green does with Steph Curry in that chapter, when I think about you and the way that you show up in the world, it it feels like that. Like the way that you show up in the world, you're one of one. I mean, really. Um I'm really, really grateful to know you and to be in conversation with you for real. And I'm sorry to cut you off, but that chapter, when you read it, let me know when you read it, because you're gonna see what I mean. It's just the precision and the honesty. Yeah.
SPEAKER_05And even just thinking about play, because since Connie, you were talking about play, like what is what is another word for play? Recreation. Recreation. Like it's it's been in front of our faces the whole time. We were created to play. You know? So yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Yeah, it's just this it's this feeling of like you can do this thing, but athletes do this free throw every time, right? Like every day they go and do it. And when people are screaming your name, wanting you to fail and wanting you to win, can you attune so that your body teaches you what you already know? So you can trust your body of what you already know, you know? Like can you enact that? Yeah. And like that is the feeling I I I see divinity in free throws, you know, absolutely. You know, here's a moment where you didn't attune. Here's a moment where you did, and I can see it because it doesn't matter how many people are screaming that you should fail and want the other team to win, and people are like, oh, you got fouled too many times unintentionally, like intentionally. You are uh you trusted your body and like you trusted the milk and honey, you trusted Kanan, like you you knew where you were, you know? And it's like that is that is like disciplined play. It's a disciplined recreation, right? And it's like there's this thing of yeah, of just like the play, you know. Like I think like what I'm I'm so struck because every time when I teach calligraphy, people will come to me and there are these old white men who have established what these scripts are, right? It always shocks my students when I tell them, hey, this is like Times New Romance versus like Ariel or Comic Sans or Bookman font. You can write whatever you want. And they're like, What? And I'm like, Well, you can write like Spencer, who coined the script Spencarian, because that's what men do. And then I'm like, you can do this or like what does Tamise want to write? And they're always surprised and they they're terrified to play, right? And I'm like, why don't we? And then they're like, well, why don't I but is it bad to copy the script? I'm like, it's like this, right? If you want to bake a brownie, it's not bad to copy some recipes, but if you want to bake your own brownie, you need to bake these recipes and be like, oh, this is what happens when this is more sugar, more co like more cocoa powder, this is what happens when there's more chocolate. If you want to recreate, recreate, if you want to play, you need to, you need to take charge and have responsibility for your play. You need to say, hey, I I want to try more chocolate, less cocoa powder, I want it to be wetter or drier, this is what I like. Do you own it? And can you can you shed this idea that you need to learn Spencer's writing or, you know, this Lopfer's writing? Can you exit out of these like white structures that are like really trapping you here?
SPEAKER_05Yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02And it's like that is the correlation that you want to do. Yeah. That's right. That's the correlation with shame and sex. Because people don't even they haven't been allowed to know what they want or what they like.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_05So you're doing what you think you're supposed to do. And even when they go back to the metaphor of free throws, right? Uh you've done this a million times. And yet when you when you allow your attention to pay uh to to when you give your attention to the pressure of, oh, I gotta make this, I gotta make this, that's when you'll miss it. But when you have a playful posture, that's when you will make it. Because you're not worried about like if I miss it, it's not the end of the world. And I mean, thinking about having so trained your attention to where if like it's the game's on the line and you have to make it, you've still got to maintain the soft activation of a playful posture. Otherwise, you will try so hard to do what you've always done that you will do it wrong. So you gotta lose your life to gain it. You gotta like it, there's a universal kind of law in that. Like, there's we've got to be willing to like play is. I don't care about the result. I'm gonna just be honest right here and live into the fullness of this moment.
SPEAKER_02That's it.
SPEAKER_05Even if it is a game, but there's you know something on the line, it doesn't matter. Because at the end of the day, it don't it don't matter. It's fine.
SPEAKER_01That's where you win.
SPEAKER_05Yes. That's exactly it. That's exactly it. When I become so concerned about winning, then then then it's no longer a game. No matter what the activity is, it ceases to be play.
SPEAKER_01And it's like to translate that into sex, right? Like there are so many of my girlfriends in these kind of okay-ish relationships, they leave after they break up after eight years, and I find out that she's never come, right? Like just so many relationships like this in my life that I and and then I'm like, d did you, you know, fake it? Did he know? Like, what is happening? And and like with the with the angle of like, oh, I need to win this game, or I need an orgasm, it's the same thing of just like I need I I think I need to fit into this mold of what I think should happen. And in that mode, you your sex life is not good, not because you didn't come, but because you weren't playing. You know, it's not it's not that it's you cannot come and have great sex, but like how do you how do you how can you play and let go of this thing that it should be that the porn has taught us and and you know movies have taught us what is what is being present during sex that can like teach us about God, what is being present during sport that can teach us about God. That's it. Because what is sacred isn't in the winning, you know, isn't in that yeah.
SPEAKER_05And that then the fact that so much of relational sexual, you know, relating is wound around the w goal of winning for men exclusively. Right? So that it ends when when that moment comes for the man when that doesn't even have to be the way a man shows up to sex.
SPEAKER_03Right.
SPEAKER_05So there's so much that gets lost on both sides when it just becomes a kind of utilitarian journey toward ejaculation. And it's just like, yo, first of all, there can be a separation for men between e uh orgasm and ejaculation. They don't have to go together. So then you know, what are we doing?
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Say more about that. How how how else do can men show up?
unknownSame way.
SPEAKER_05Well, it's well, ejaculation is I mean, if we're gonna talk physiologically, ejaculation is a physiological response where orgasm can can it can happen like it's a full-bodied exp response that does not have to it because we've practiced this way, then ejaculation usually comes pun intended, uh right when orgasm happens in the body-brain and the kind of the circuitry, right? This kind of this this kind of ecstatic reset. Um but but there is a way with attention, with training and practice that you don't have to ejaculate when you orgasm. Men are capable of orgasming in the same wavy-like way that women do, right? Or so that so that it can't, there's a there is a such thing as a a kind of multiplicity of climax where it does not have to end like because after ejaculation, there's gonna be a refractory period.
SPEAKER_03Right?
SPEAKER_05So it doesn't have to, yeah. The two can be separated, but but when and how in our society have we even had conversations like that that are not kind of toward this moment of release that is like the goal and the only goal, so that so that when you're talking about how so many, you know, women in relationships um or queer people in relationships are coerced really to miss all of the pleasure that's a vac that you know that's prior to the moment of climax. I think a lot of men missed all the pleasure that is between uh or before climax as well, because the whole goal is to win. It's to it's to bust, it's to release. And it's like you can in like not only can you enjoy the whole process, but you can actually arrive without winning. Without even least, again and again and again, without releasing, because at the moment of release, physiologically, there's going to be a period where you need to take a take a beat, you know? And so it's um and and I'm mentioning this, I feel like maybe this is coming up because when we're talking about the erotic, like I was talking to Tamisa the other day about how like men, there are there are music artists that I'm that I've thought of or that I'm and I plan to write about this where you Oh yeah. There are artists that help men touch the erotic within themselves, but we don't have a vernacular to even recognize that. And because the music is often grounded in like messages of toxicity and certain so that so that energetically it's activating me, but the meaning that I'm putting the activation on is on some some some bullshit. So then it certainly doesn't land as the erotic. But what it is is it's a distorted expression of the erotic. So it's giving men something, um, but men don't know where to place it because we don't have a language for it. We don't have a capacity that's developed to understand the femininity within ourselves and to other understand the feminine as a chaotic creative power that men draw on all the time, but would never call it femme.
SPEAKER_01And then there's this desire, as soon as we get to chaos, we want to tame it and strip it and like make it like flat, right? And it's like that is a yeah, and then two, how do we allow for the chaos? How do we just observe the chaos and let it be? Yeah.
SPEAKER_05That's why I love comedy. Because comedy is disruptive. It brings us, it occasions chaos, it brings us back into chaos and allows us to play again, to figure out how do we want to do it the next time around. Because when there's order, when we're in these kind of rituals of order where this is the way you do it every time, do it this way. Mechanical, mechanical, mechanical, blah, blah, blah. It's like, well, that that has to be disruptive before we'll, as human beings that thrive on muscle memory, we'll even have a thinking to do something different.
SPEAKER_02Yikes. Y'all deep. See? Told you.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, I know. It's two o'clock. I'm like, listen, we could be, I could be, we could be here all damn day.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, we could be here all damn day.
SPEAKER_05Multiples, just gone.
SPEAKER_02You know, yeah. There's so much. There's so much that's untapped.
SPEAKER_05Yeah.
SPEAKER_02It's like you're saying, like all of the nerve endings, right? Like there's so much.
SPEAKER_05We have so much capacity that we have we don't even know. Like we don't know how divine we are. But I think until we begin to think of ourselves like that, like in until we can move from this culture of fetishizing our finitude to to developing our divinity, to attuning to what God is what is available to us, we we have no idea what we're capable of.
SPEAKER_01What have you newly found that you are capable of? What are you discovering that you are capable of?
SPEAKER_05Well, what I just said was one. Um but also um But also I feel like I've just I've been on this journey of training attention. Like really understanding, both from like looking back over my life as an athlete and realizing that even when you when when we're in the weight room or when we're running and you know, we're we're kill killing ourselves doing these sprints or whatever it is, that like even though you're working your body, what you're really training is your attention. But now you've kind of as a scholar and as a uh like my mind works like a mad scientist. So I'm putting different pieces together from my past, neuroscience, what like evolutionary biology, and it's all pointing to this sense that we like we embody divinity. Um and so, and we've been invited to develop it. Like that's the thing that that blows my mind is is you know, people think of that as dangerous, and it's like, yo, that that's but that's what he was talking about. He was like, Y'all should be doing this too. All of y'all should be doing this, right? And so I think it's realizing that it's realizing.
SPEAKER_02How can we cast them out? Because you didn't have faith.
SPEAKER_05Right. And we talk about ritual and belief and the neuroscience of belief, or what I call the black magic of belief. Like it's all right there. But it it's it's this thing where we're like not only is our attention up for grabs, but we also can we have the freedom to train our attention. And this is this feels important to me because it also, when we think about attunement, even deeper than attention, our capacity to feel, it also brings us back into a conversation on neurodivergence or or, you know, and I don't even like divergence because neurotypicality is a myth. All of our minds work differently by design as iterations of God. So I know that if I've if I've got, you know, show up as signs of ADHD or signs of of autism, right? But that attune me differently to like writing, where the detail with which I write is like it's just there's a brilliance that that neurotypicality doesn't allow us to tap into, and it doesn't allow people to. Learn how their own minds work because they're so busy feeling pressured to make their mind work like this. None of our minds work like that. That's just in service to order. But it's so if there was more play space, it was more freedom for people to understand you're already good. Read God. Um your mind, the way your mind works, is works like that by design. So if somebody says, Oh, you know, you're a kid, you you can't sit down long enough in class, are we supposed to be sitting down all day? My clearest thinking is, well, I'm moving. You know what I mean? So I think it's it's giving ourselves permission to disentangle from these structures and to understand, like, I'm already brilliant. I already embody brilliance by the mere fact that I exist and I'm here. There's a creative intelligence that won or that that that did what it's supposed to do. So then what we what can I learn from studying myself?
SPEAKER_01Yeah. I think it's like so, oh, so, you know, like when I was in academia and I'm not anymore. And one of the biggest reasons that I struggled um to see like a future for myself is that I want to quote my body. I wanted to cite my body, and you don't let me. That's what I'm saying. You know, and like I don't I don't know what else is to do. Like I this is what I know is from. Like I can't, I don't want to cite more white men. Like, I'm sorry, but I know them, I've read them, and I'm done. I'm okay. I I I learned what I needed to learn. And I think it's a, you know, like it's fascinating how theorists sometimes don't like white theorists sometimes don't need to cite anything, right? I just have these thoughts. But suddenly coming from my body, I need to give evidence and credence. And I'm like, hey, I my knowledge is from this shit. Is this meat suit? It's this here, right? Like I know things from this. This is the the best thing that I have got. So like I most true thing.
SPEAKER_03That's right.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And so it feels yeah. Yeah. And it's why we've got the reclamation of that.
SPEAKER_05That's right. And that and you just said it. That that's the reason why I believe we need to reconsider root work. Because then everybody is invited to reconnect with their own body and what is true in terms of the their their nervous system, right? Which even people who are academics who cite all these people have certain inklings of truth before they go and say, Oh, you know what? I can put that person's name on this idea. When really the idea was theirs. Or it's reading this person that then the their idea was born from. Like I read Tamise, Tamis says something and it and it sparks something in me that makes a connection, and it just continues to. That's how inspiration works.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_05We get inspired by God when usually it's it it is by God, but it's because I heard somebody say something or somebody sing something where they were they were expressing from their their authenticity, and it touched me.
SPEAKER_02It's just inspiration because the mono, it's the monot we talked about monotheism earlier, and I think one thing I've been waiting thinking about is like not one God, but oneness, right? That's where you missed it. You made it monotheistic, which forces it to be typical. And like there is a it, there's a oneness, not a one God. God is a construct, just like human, right? But love, the one thing that's not a construct is love. You feel that, you experience that, you know, and so there is this kind of like returning to a sensing and a feeling through the divine, through the erotic, like through pleasure and desire to get back to a knowing that's not artificial. That's the point of this. That's right, right? Like the point of this is alternative intelligence, ancestral intelligence, embodied intelligence, like to not even to combat artificiality, but just to tap out of the game altogether. Like, I don't want what you want.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_05You know, that's what opens up into more life. It's not the games that we play, it's the living from that, from that place.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Yeah. Well, you said inspire, and I'm like, inspire means to breathe into. So it is, it is the to know that like like the the reason why I said what I said to me is about like followers and shit, was I'm I'm it makes me mad that not more people are following you. Not that I think the thing is important, but I it makes me upset because I'm like, whenever you say something, I'm like, here's breath. I need to look, I need to get breath. Right. Like I know that because I know I've felt it and I know you. And I'm like, why doesn't anyone else want this oxygen? What is wrong with you? Come and get oxygen. That's how I feel. Right. And it's like when you when you get the the the spirit, the breath, the wind from something like in this conversation, like I'm taking away so much, and I know I know when Tamis suggests something, I'm like, I'm gonna get some, I'm gonna get air now, right? I'm gonna get breath. I'm gonna do breath work now, right? I'm gonna get the thing. Yeah. And so it's like that feels that is different than citing a name, you know? Like to say, you know, let's it's like, can my can the citation yeah, right? Like, can I, can my citation list, can my bibliography not be called bibliography, but like breath work list, right? Like it's it's my it's where I got my breath from. And these are the people that I identify as breathing, you know, like these are the people where I get my inspiration. It's like this is so good. Yeah.
SPEAKER_05Who is it that opens up your airways? Who oxygenates you? Who energizes you? That's the same way I talk about inspiration, both in the book, and then there's gonna the the chap one of the chapters, the first chapter in in root work reconsidered is gonna be called breath work. And it's gonna have to be it's gonna have to do with inspiration and energetic intimacy.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_05Yep.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, because this is it's like it's CPR, right? It's like spiritual CPR, right? It's like Yeah, it's like it can. Can you be can you be revived? Can you revive revived out of the dead? Can I resurrect you with breath that I have not because I'm superior, but because breath flows through me? Can I inspire you?
SPEAKER_05Now think of think about think about if all of us all the time, if everybody everywhere all the time, in every interaction we had with each other, interacted in such a way that allowed it to be easier for the other person to breathe or to breathe deeper. What would happen? What would we all open each other up into? More life.
SPEAKER_02It's that that's what I'm on until I'm out of here. More life. That's what I'm on till I'm out of here, buddy. That's it. That's all it is.
SPEAKER_05That's the whole point. Creation is created to create. Like we we were made to continue the process of creating, which is why we're given divine energy. Because divine energy brings life.
SPEAKER_04Oof.
SPEAKER_01We've ridden this like three, four times now. I'm noticing.
SPEAKER_03Edging.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Buddy, I'm so late for this meeting, but I'm trusting the universe. Oh no. Okay. I do not care. The breakfast's happening here, buddy. Trust me on that.
SPEAKER_01Oh. Damn.
SPEAKER_02Trust me on that.
SPEAKER_01I don't even know. I don't I don't even know how to close this. I think this is can close itself. I think we just release, you know? Um. Gee, where where can followers find you? Tamise, where can followers find you? Let's give them, let's give them where the oxygen comes from.
SPEAKER_05Ah, that's good. Yeah. So Dr. Green Ideas on Instagram, uh, the Green Idea on Substack, uh, greenideasconsulting.com. And that's, you know, that you can find me at any of those places.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, you can find me on Instagram, Black Modern Mystic and Blackmodernistic.com. Season two is coming out in the fall.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, and you and if you haven't seen season one, you need to, because this is root work. It's beautiful.
SPEAKER_02I'm coming to talk to you next season, Connie. Get ready.
SPEAKER_01Oh, okay.
SPEAKER_02I'm excited.
SPEAKER_00Let's get ready.
SPEAKER_01This was uh, I I mean, if you're listening and you I don't even know. I don't know what you're doing if you're not following this tool. I don't know what to say to you. We're we're this was so much fun. I I'm gonna stop and I'm gonna invite you all to take a deep breath, listeners, and just see where you feel all of this in your body. Where do you feel all of this in your body? Where is the excitement? Where are you tingling and where can you sit more with that? Um and find and find the divinity that is there. And we shall let Tamise go to her meeting. And thank you.
SPEAKER_05Thank you, Connie, for for for for holding this space for us to interact. This was this was beautiful.
SPEAKER_02Appreciate ya. I'm