Michaela Boehm - Grief, Growth, and Staying Grounded In Relationship

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Welcome to the Man Talk Show. Training for Men, Answers for Women. I am Connor Beaton and joining me today is Mikayla Bohm. Mikayla is one of the most in demand teacher speakers and counselors to be found globally today. She was born in Australia, Austria. She received degrees in psychology and further extensive training in cognitive behavioral therapy, hypnosis and neuro linguistics programming. Upon moving to the United States in 1994, she established a 20 year counseling practice logging over 40,000 client hours. She quickly became a counselor to the stars in Hollywood, California and her ongoing clients include Oscar winning actors, producers, writers, multiple Grammy winning musicians, CEOs and multi billion dollar fund managers. So you may have seen her or heard her recently on the Red Table with Jada Pinkett Smith. She is Will and Jada Smith's sort of personal counselor and she was on there talking about relationships and communication and sexuality, embracing sexuality, how we can bridge the gap with our partner and be able to communicate more of what we want. So Mikaela talks about a lot of things and if you can't tell by the title of this podcast episode, we dive into some interesting topics. We don't talk too much about anal sex, which may be disappointing, but certainly we will have her back on and potentially dive into that deeper. But we talk quite a bit about, quite extensively about grief, which is showing up a lot in our current culture. We did record this episode probably about six weeks ago, maybe seven or eight weeks ago. And so this is a little bit before all the events have happened in the United States with George Floyd and a lot of rioting and protesting. So please do keep that in mind as we dive into this subject matter. But one of the things that Mikaela and I get into is how grief plays a role in our ability to connect with our partner and our ability to communicate, create intimacy and the role that grief actually plays. The important role that grief plays in our culture. We do talk about sex and intimacy and being able to bridge the gap between us and our partner. So this is a pretty extensive episode. She's very direct, very to the point. So I hope that you enjoy this. And just before I bring her on, a few housekeeping notes, we do have the men's weekend in August on the West Coast. So if you are in Canada and you're nearby and you feel like you can make it out, we do have a few spots left. You can go to connorbeaten.com or mantalks.com and sign up for that weekend. Like I said, we only have a few spots open just because we've had to shift things around because of the lockdown and quarantine. There will only be a small group of men there, just maybe about a dozen. So if you want to be one of those guys, check that out. And on another note, thank you to all the men that have been joining the Man Talks Alliance. It has really, really been powerful to see some of you guys show up in the community, show up in the conversation, in the groups, on the calls, in the resource calls that we coming up with Dr. Robert Glover, it's been wonderful to just see how that group and that community of men has been supporting you. So we've got over 225 guys in there. So for those of you who have been thinking about checking it out, it's only 27 bucks a month and you get the first month free. So if you want, go check it out for a month, see if it's a good fit for you. Make sure that you join a team. You get your own team that you get to connect with on a bi weekly basis. And then I lead the calls on a weekly basis. And we have challenges. Right now we're doing 30 days of cold showers and we are reading no More Mr. Nice Guy. And we have Dr. Glover coming on. So it's a really powerful group. And ladies, definitely get your men in there. It's a really solid access point. I find that for a lot of men who maybe haven't gone to therapy, haven't done coaching or counseling before, and even if they have, it's a very, very powerful resource. So send it their way. All right, with all those housekeeping notes out of the way, please welcome Michaela Bohm.

Thank you for having me.

Yeah, it's wonderful. I've been hearing your name from Traver, who I've had on the show a few times, and he is just such a huge supporter of yours. So it's nice to finally connect with you.

It's really lovely to be here. And yes, I have heard about you as well.

Oh, boy.

Wonderful.

Well, let's go. So let's kick things off with a question that I always ask all my guests, which is tell us a story about a defining moment in your life that made you who you are today.

Well, I think all my defining moment had moments. I think there were a few that I could list, but I think the most two recent ones that I would credit with the human I am today and also the practitioner and teacher I am today are both connected with some pretty severe loss. So I lost my previous teaching partner in a kind of freak accident. And then I lost my house in the Thomas fire about two years ago. And so in both of those situations, I had to navigate some really, really extreme circumstances in the face of having to persevere or kind of step in. And in the case of my teaching partner, I had to find him where he was missing. And so I had to find him and identify him and cremate him and drive his ashes to Vancouver island, actually close to where you are. And in the house I was in Amsterdam and I came home to about a foot high pile of ashes and that was all that was left of anything I ever owned. And so both of those incidents had a very strong influence on the way I look at things, both from the viewpoint of how things can really just go wrong in a second and how fickle and impermanent things are, but also how human resilience and community and, you know, the human spirit works under extreme circumstances. And I've learned a lot about people's relationship with death and loss and my relationship with death and loss. So I'd say that I'm a drastically different human being. Both of these things happened in the span of 10 years. So I'd say I was very different before then than now.

Yeah, I mean, it's, it's, it's interesting, right, because I feel like death and loss is one of those things where in our modern culture it's quite swept under the rug. You know, like we, we have this interesting narrative around grieving that seems to be a little bit more prominent right now. I think there was this article going around recently about grieving the loss of just the normal freedoms that we have, you know, or grieving the loss of our jobs. There's 32 million people unemployed right now in the United States because of what's happening. And so can you maybe just speak a little bit more to what revealed itself through that process of loss and. Yeah, through the process of loss.

Yeah. Well, I think it's a twofold thing. Grieving is a whole thing in itself that we can talk about, which I think is very, very important. And then loss or impermanence or whatever, you know, whatever happens, their death is a whole other one. And I think things I have learned not necessarily in the order of importance, but in the order as they appear in my mind right now is that the only way to really be with extreme grief and extreme loss is. Well, there's two ways to be with it, right? One is to kind of go into denial and just shut off.

And kind of make it mean. Other Things or numb out or you know, go in, like fly in the face of it and really be with it. And the really being with it has a really interesting set of circumstances because it's extremely painful, but in the extreme pain, because when it's that painful, when you really allow yourself to feel it, you can't close down because it will feel. I remember distinctly feeling that if I would close down in the moment of having felt that much pain, it would kill me, so to speak. It would not have, but it would have taken me out. So I had to go in. And in that moment, the best I could describe it, there was an ecstasy or an opening that was really useful where I had a much wider understanding of the circumstances and my circumstances and the circumstances of the loss at large. And even though it was extremely painful, I could make decisions with a much bigger view in mind. I have also had moments, of course, not necessarily in those two situations, but in slightly lesser extremes where I have shut down and had to deal with unwinding out of numbness and unwinding out of, you know, somewhat dissociation and being checked out and not really that responsive. And in the moment, after not being that responsive and not being really with it, in hindsight I could see that I made some pretty bad decisions for the bigger picture and pretty, you know, pretty short term panic decisions, while on the occasions where I really went in there was a chance to be with it and still function. And I would say those incidents have created incredible resilience and the knowledge that one can weather storms, there's always a bigger storm that could happen.

I'm not swinging here. The, oh, I got it clicked because I think there's things that will take you down. But so far this is what I've learned. The other thing I've learned, and this is a tough one and I think this is what a lot of people are dealing with right now, from what I can hear, is that when it comes to death and loss and grief, what you experience coming back to you from other people is their projection or their inability to deal with. And in the mildest form that's just. It feels a bit callous or, you know, they don't really understand or they think you should just get on with it or over it or something like that, right? At the worst you get really bizarre justifications and spiritual bypassing and conjectures and you know, people who put themselves into grief that doesn't belong to them or they become, you know, extreme grief warriors when really it's not theirs. And you know, it becomes all about them. So I certainly had experiences in both of those cases of people not being able to deal and hence doing some really odd thing that then was something I had to manage. And I've learned about.

How to advise people how to be with other people's grief and loss and difficulty because I found some of it extremely difficult to deal with and downright offensive at times. So I'd say that was another good learning. There's more, but let's leave.

Yeah, no, I think. I mean, that's. It's. You're so well articulated in unpacking just those sort of core principles of learning from grief. And I think you sort of hit the nail on the head with both of those aspects. I think grief is one of those weird emotions, experience human experiences that we sort of do a poor job of teaching other people, teaching society how to actually navigate and face it. And it's one of those things that I think, you know, sort of post romantic era, we locked away in the closet with a whole bunch of other shit, but we locked grief away in the closet and death away in the closet and said, we're not going to see this anymore. And anytime that you do that psychologically, of course, there's a. There's a huge ramification to that, right? There's a big. We sort of have put grief into the shadow psychologically. And, you know, I think for myself, I sort of heard you talking about coping mechanisms around grief. And I know, I know for myself, sex for. For sure was. Was a coping mechanism for grief. For a long time. It was like that for me. I think it was like the polarity, right? It's like the. The heavier that I would feel from a place of sadness or loneliness or isolation, the stronger the pull that I felt to have some sort of control over life. And that control showed up in sex. Until that. That mechanism actually sort of destroyed things within my life. And then I had to grieve, right? And then life was sort of like, no, you can't escape this anymore. So it's such an interesting way of putting it. I really appreciate that. What would you say to those who are. Who are going through grief right now, whether it's the grieving of the loss of normalcy. I think that's a big. That's the big one that people are dealing with, or a lack of freedoms. Like, how do you guide people through that experience of starting to integrate and starting to go into the grief as you were talking about?

Well, you know, I think there's a few things to Consider right there is who this is. This is a difficult one because it's multi layered, right? And I want to be very mindful not to injure anybody in what I'm about to say.

So let's put it this way, right? There is, there's abject grief and sorrow in losing things that define us and that, you know, touch our heart. And of course, amongst the worst things is when you lose somebody you love, right? When somebody you know actually dies of COVID or anything else, right. That's, that's really up there with the experiences of, of that a human being can have and endure that, you know, that's very, very multilayered. But there is of course also the grief of, you know, losing your identity in the form of your social structure and who you see yourself as a human being. And there's the grief of, of losing your job and not knowing how to support your family. I mean, that's a whole other. That's so existential and that goes so to the bone of how we have to survive when somebody we love dies. Somewhere in us, there is still the feeling of.

That'S life, so to speak, right? And those before us go before us hopefully, right? And you know, not some people lose their children and it's really horrendous, but there is still a bit of a. There's this different relationship to death. Even though it's the thing that you can't undo when you lose your livelihood and your ability to be safe and feed yourself and feed your children and stuff like that, that's so fundamentally threatening, that that's a different kind of a grief because it's also not a grief you can engage with because you now have to swim as hard and as fast as you can, right? You can't sink in the grief of losing someone. You have a bit of an option to, I don't want to say wallow, but you know what I'm saying, To immerse in that feeling. Because there's nothing else that can be done. The person's dead now. You grieve, you bury them, you give them a memorial and all of that. But when your job's dead or your life is dead, you can't stop.

You can't stop. You have to now go into full on survival mode.

Different advice applies to those two situations and we can talk about that if you want the advice for those two situations. But then, and this is why I'm saying I want to be mindful, but I also want to say it. There's a bit of A frivolous loss or grief about not being able to do the stuff one does, right? And even though I understand that, because I certainly have that right, I mean, one of my great joys is traveling the world to teach. And I love the combination of being able to do something useful and do it in different places and with different cultures, all of that. So I have huge grief around my lifestyle being gone and many other things. But the thing about that, of course, is that most of us have never experienced a war or a famine or a situation where we no longer had a country or something of that nature, where.

The life you had, you know, is never going to come back because, you know, your city has been bombed or whatever, right? And the. There has to be something put in perspective where when people can't stomach sitting home for four weeks or six weeks straight and can't do without being on Tinder or, you know, having random sex or getting their pizza delivered, then I have to say, you gotta kind of toughen up a bit because it's a very, very, very small sacrifice on that level for something that's way, way, way bigger than any of us have ever experienced. And so that grief, I have to say, you know, well, you're just gonna have to do something else in the meantime. And I think one of the main ways that I look at building resilience is that you don't resist the things that you can't alter, right? Where you just go, well, okay, I can't get pizza from my favorite, you know, boohoo. Do something else, right? The time it takes you to moan that you could do something totally different and maybe widen your repertoire a bit and become a fuller human being. So there's a certain level where we don't want to indulge the grief, right? But then there's real grief and real loss that has to be acknowledged and dealt with. So do you want to go there, or was that enough on grief and loss?

I mean, it's certainly not the conversation I expected us to kick off.

It will lead into intimacy, believe me.

100%. 100%.

We don't need to go there. We can leave it as such.

Yeah, well, I think.

I mean, it's. It's interesting. I think we should. We should continue to move forward and. And sort of go into intimacy. But I just wanted to say, you know, I think what I hear you describing is almost like grief can move into the space of playing the victim, right? When it's like grief light, it's. That's usually the victim sort of presenting itself, moaning about certain things. I've certainly found that within. Within myself is that a grief. The victim can wear the mask of grief, right? Like, oh, poor, poor me. And, you know, things are really tough. And. And I also feel like we are in a time right now where we're meeting.

Many people are meeting a form of reality that they've never actually interacted with. Right. I mean, we've never collectively experienced this type of constriction globally. And I think it'll be interesting to see how it plays out. But that's. That's beside the fact, and I think I hesitate to go further down that pathway because I think it'll. I think it has the capacity to sort of consume the rest of the. Of the conversation. But.

But maybe.

Maybe let's take the right turn because one of the reasons why I wanted to have you on the show was to talk about intimacy and was to talk about polarity and. And power dynamics and just these types of pieces. And so maybe I'll let you segue. I'll let you segue from grief into intimacy because I feel like you had something queued up there.

Well, essentially. Right. I mean, the reason we're talking about this is it's the exact same thing. You can't have a proper relationship. You can't have a deep intimacy. You can't actually be with another human till you have somewhat explored those themes. The theme of the fundamental loss of your identity, you know, through a job or the way you see yourself in the world. The theme of all things you love dying eventually in some form or another. And those are really, really important themes for what one could call radical intimacy or radical relationship, because big piece of what makes relationships unworkable and where people run into trouble is the projection of certain fairy tales and the projection of certain.

Assumptions that have nothing to do with how it goes. So one of them is, and this brings us briefly back to death, and last to wrap that up, is that in death you have to essentially understand that in everything you love will die. And hence in that, of course, is an incredible appreciation of that situation till it dies. And if you. If you don't do that, then you have to appreciate the person or the situation after its death. Which is why people are so into memorials, right? You know, nobody ever gets praised to their face the way they get praised in a memorial. And that could be because people are lying or because they suddenly get that acute sense of aliveness that that person had. And when you meet a partner, and this is a lot of the stuff that we teach, Steve and I, my teaching partner and I teach what you're doing, essentially, if you do it right, is you are intimate with the sensations that is life. And the life is expressed in that person. And so being intimate with this and being intimate was loss of identity, is being intimate with life itself. And so when you can do that, you can look at another human being and instead of seeing them as a hot body or a meal ticket or a means to self actualization, right? Because.

In the whatever, human development, personal growth.

World, there is some kind of bizarre.

Idea that you can use another person to grow yourself, you know, so you can modify your partner from the get go into a projection of something that you want. Your hopes, your fears, your dreams, your fucked up childhood, you name it. And you don't actually see them. And you don't see them for who they are, which is a mortal human who is a conglomerate of things, right? They also have a self identity or whatever. So there's all these layers between people. And true intimacy has a lot to do with.

Being able to feel yourself while feeling someone else. How do you feel yourself? Well, you know who you are. You also know.

Your loss, your grief, your insecurity, your strength very acutely. You're not only identified by the great job you have in an ideal world or by how virile you are or how beautiful you look. And then you can see the other person for somebody who is finite as well. Finite within the context of the relationship and finite within life. And that's a very sobering moment for most people, but it's the moment where actual intimacy starts. And so in our workshops and the work we do, we work a lot on pulling away and stripping the layers, you know, the many, many layers of having to be a certain way, looking a certain way, expressing a certain way, holding certain things back, and go back down to feeling the body, feeling your own body, feeling the other person's body. Steve does a very beautiful.

Piece. Often when we work with people on, he calls it meditating on the visual form where you see the person before they become the concept. And so those things are. That's the segue from the grief and death and loss into relationship. When you have those things in place, even at glimpses, you are not as likely to commodify your partner into feeding you, whatever line, you know, that you've decided you're going to be defined by. And then this brings us back to the current situation. And the thing that we see massively right now is that people were so Defined by their line, by their story. Right. Their shtick. That when any of that goes.

They'Re.

Like, I don't even know who this person is.

And I don't know if I like them because they no longer put the suit on in the morning and do the thing that I got them for. Right.

And so on and so on. There's more to it. But so that's how we can enter into intimacy. Right? Intimacy as in being intimate with the sensations and the arising. Right. Within your own body and the other person's body.

Yeah, wonderful. I mean, so, so well said. I think, you know, when, whenever, whenever we're, we're doing work either with individuals or couples, I always say intimacy. I define intimacy as into me. I see. And my capacity to see innermost, which is the, which is actually like the root of intimacy intimacies.

Is. I think the Greek for it is intimus. Right. Which means innermost. And so I love the way you just described that because it fits very well with how I've come to know intimacy for myself. It's like when I'm able to see within myself and see the parts of me that are getting in the way or see the parts of myself that are blocking me from just being able to be a container, for lack of a better word, to witness my partner, to see what's coming forward, to see that other person.

Intimacy is very challenging. Right. Because then it's, then it's really about outcomes, it's about gold, it's about how it's going to look or et cetera. So maybe if we can, let's just talk a little bit about some of the pieces that naturally block intimacy. And I'm curious, can you just give maybe a little bit of context? Because I know that you, you've done a ton of work, you co led with, I think, data for quite a while and you have a background in. I'm going to say it wrong. The type of Tantric lineage is Kashmiri, is that it?

Well, in the west it's often looked at as Kashmiri, Shaivist Tantra, but really it's, it's a Shakta Tantra tradition if we want to be really, really accurate. But it doesn't matter. I have that, but I also have about 30,000, more than 30,000 one on one counseling hours under my belt, where a lot of the things that we're talking about comes from. It has a Tantric background for sure, because Tantra is, you know, the ultimate, let's see how I can say this. Tantra is Kind of the coming from the body and going outwards and including the body and expanding from there versus negating the body and just seeking spirit. And of course things that have to do with the body and sex and relationship have to include the body. And I have a very, very in depth training in all kinds of embodiment and as a matter of fact created a whole system of embodiment practices because it's so important to me. So, but, so that's. Yeah, I have, I have a very, very extensive background and I've been at this for a long time. I've been in private practice for 26 years now and teaching for 16. So.

Great.

Well, I think like one of the reasons why I bring that up is because you're. You're one of the few people that I have interacted with.

Where the tantra side of things. I've noticed that like tantra has sort of been hijacked by a lot of spiritually bypassing people and that it's sort of from the outside getting a little bit of an interesting rap. And so I don't necessarily want to go down that road too much, but I just wanted to say I feel like the work that you do is quite integrated and there is an embodied sense there. And it is one of the reasons why I wanted to have you on the show because I feel like you have such a good amalgamation between the psychological components, the work and the embodiment of some of those practices. So let's come back to intimacy. Let's come back to some of the pieces that naturally block people. I know that there's many different layers to that, but I'll just sort of put the ball on your court and say from your perspective over the years of work that you've done, how do you start to identify some of those pieces where people are naturally being blocked? I think for me, family of origin is a. Is a huge one. You know, religious expectations is another big one, which is always an interesting place to go. But yeah, I'll hand it over to you.

Well, yeah, there's lots of that. Right. Trauma is another one of those trauma. And trauma in the widest sense, bad relational experiences, bad experiences in bringing up. But the thing that I want to focus on most, I think for this conversation we can look at some of the other ones is actually lack of skill. And that's something that. And this also goes back into some of the misconceptions around tantra and blah, blah, blah. A lot of what we're dealing with. When you really honestly look at it is just lack of skill. Because when you look at our education and how human beings learn, right, Everything we know, we learn through repetition and we learn through learning. And we're very body intelligent people as humans. We're body intelligent mammals. So we do something, we learn it through the repetition. It goes into a pattern in the brain and then you have it. You never have to really relearn it. Unless you have a stroke or your brain gets destroyed, it's there. That's of course a plus and a minus. The minus being of course, that once you have a habit, the brain doesn't see why it should replace that with yet another habit. You have it. But you can also endlessly create things and learn things. And we're never going to be able to.

Go beyond our brain capacity. So when it comes to intimacy, sexual skill, social skill, connection, we don't have any education. You know, you're only. And then come the cultural and societal and religious things because, well, how are you going to learn about being intimate, right? So, and I'm not only talking sexual into sexual intimacy, but that too, right? Because, well, if you are learning about sexual intimacy, about sex now specifically, that will actually require that you have a lot of sex. Well, now there we start, right? If you're a woman, you have a lot of sex. You know, all kinds of labels are given to you. If you're a man and you have a lot of sex, other very detrimental things can happen, right? Unwanted pregnancies, STDs.

The ability to not bond with one person. Also societal things, but lesser. So, you know, there's all kinds of things that can happen if you just engage in the proper learning that would be necessary unless you are being taught how to learn now in the sexual domain, for instance. But some people are lucky. They have a good first sexual experience and, and they experiment with their partner and they really get into it and they get the practice and they deepen into the intimacy and it's a really wonderful situation. And when you meet those people, you can tell they have an integrated sexual body, so to speak. But intimacy, we learn from the way our parents relate to us or the people who raised us. We learn from watching the people who raised us relate with each other. And that's not the best training that you can get, right? So then you already have subconsciously imprinted those things. Now then add to the fact that proper intimacy requires, and this is important, proper attentional skill, right? You can't have proper intimacy without proper attentional skills. And what I mean with attentional Skills is simply you need to be able to be with somebody while they're with you without getting distracted, right? Like you and I are doing right now. We're looking at each other and neither you nor I are scrolling through our phones, even though we could, but. Right. And it's always tempting to do other things while you're doing one thing. So a lot of people don't have proper attentional skill. Then comes when you have the attentional skill. And this brings us back to grief and loss, right? Then comes the discomfort of actually experiencing strong sensations and emotions.

And a lot of people, when it comes to real intimacy, the first time somebody is really with them, they pop out, right? They make a joke to turn away, to do something funny, they have to close their eyes, they go away. You know, they say the wrong thing, they start crying. But not, you know, not for the good reasons, all kinds of things. So the blocks to intimacy on a very fundamental level that we can address, family of origin, imprinting, attachment styles, all of that takes time, right? It's all good to explore your relationship to religion and society, whatever, right? But that takes time. You need proper counselors and therapists and experts and whatever what you can do and what is solely skill development. Till you hit the point where you have a emotional bump, right? Then you'll do some therapy or something. But is learning how to be with each other, learning how to look at each other, learning how to actually have strong upwellings of sensation, all kinds lust, love.

Sorrow. Because once again, right? This is why intimacy and death are so connected. When you really love somebody in that loving is always the kernel of loss, right? And a lot of people don't allow themselves to be properly intimate and deeply loving because they're already guarding against the loss. It's also how people relate to their children and parents often, you know, they don't go that close in because, oh God, it will hurt so much. It will hurt anyway. So you might.

Yeah, yeah, it's.

It's going to hurt no matter what you do, no matter how far away you push them. I mean, I really appreciate the context. Excuse me, I really appreciate the context of skill, you know, because I think when you just. The way that you position that, I mean, I think about. It was funny. I think you said something about, you know, how we're educated in sex. And in my head, the thought immediately was, oh, you mean porn, right? Like when I think about the majority of people out there that learn about sex, I know for myself and especially for a lot of men, because that's predominantly who I work with. Porn is the main tool that we as men especially, but some women as well have used to train ourselves. And I know for myself that was my main modality growing up as a teenager. That was my main modality of learning sex. Right. And it was so, so distorting in some ways because especially, you know, back then in like the late 90s, porn was a very different thing. Right. It's very hyper fabricated, you know, like very sort of Hollywood style. Like, nothing really real about it at all. Not, not that it's that much better today. Although there is a lot of like homemade porn being created to like actually educate couples and individuals. But, you know, that's, that's an interesting, that's an interesting thing because I think the access points for us to actually practice getting into intimacy and practice some of the embodied things that you're talking about in terms of getting closer to what intimacy actually looks like. They're, they are largely either not there, unaccepted or hidden. And so if, you know, if people hear this and it resonates with them, where can we start? Where, how do people start to start to engage in an exploration with themselves or with a partner of being able to integrate some of these practices or integrate some of these skills that you're talking about? Because I think one of the things that I've learned over the years and one of the things that really resonated with me about what you said was the distraction idea, you know, that we pull ourselves away from true intimacy with all these different methods. And after having worked with, with just so many people that have, you know, challenges, staying hard challenges, you know, not, not coming too quickly, a lot of those things are actually caused by the distraction that's happening in their mind. Right. Is that they're immediately pulling themselves away from the intense physical sensations that they're feeling or emotional sensations or spiritual sensations. And all of a sudden they retract and their mind just goes a million miles a minute and so rumination starts to happen, et cetera. So where do we start? How do people start to get into that grounded space of practicing and sort of build some of these skills?

Yeah. I want to say two things that I think are really important to say at this point, right, to the two points that you made and I made. So one of the important things that I always want to stress, and this is why I'm going back there, is that.

Skill development is not self development.

Right. And why I'm saying this is that one of the most detrimental things to the human soul, the human psyche is the line that's being sold to people that if they just do this workshop or just buy this course or just do this coaching program, then they are going to be acceptable.

I call it the golden ticket.

The golden ticket, right? And you're not good enough. And the whole marketing is about not being good enough and lack. And when you do this, you finally will be good enough and you'll get X, Y and Z. Right? So skill development is kind of the anti venom to that, you know, where you go, I'm fine as a human being, but I have certain areas I'm not developed in. Nobody beats themselves up for not being able to ice skate. Well, maybe in Canada, but.

Definitely in Canada.

Or let's say long distance run or du ballet, right? You just learn it. You just go and you learn the skill. And so when you look at your shortcomings in that domain as a skill issue, first and foremost, then all that stuff, and then you're also not falling prey to people who promise you the thing. So I think that's really, really important to honestly assess your skills without flagellating yourself about what a horrible human being you are. And then like you would do in the gym, if you don't have any biceps. Well, do some freaking biceps curls, right? Don't, don't start crying and buy a course that you watch online. Gonna have to do the biceps curl. And this brings me to the second part and then I'll tell you how to go at it. The second part being when you watch porn, you're not learning about sex.

Right? And that's really, really important because when I watch Formula one, I do not learn how to drive a Formula one car. I can watch Formula one racing all day long. I might get some ideas. But when you put me into a Formula one car, I am going to die or not drive. Right? Yeah. And the same is true with porn. You're not actually learning about sex because you are not using the gear shift, so to speak, unintended here, right? Yeah, you might use your own gear shift, but that's not the same. Right? And so porn as a tool for learning bodily action is useless. The only thing it does is it gives you mental constructs of what you could potentially do. And then you fumble about because you don't even know how to do that. You. And in sex, that's a very bad thing because just. I'm going to be very graphic here for a second. You can cut it out. Just because you've seen anal sex does not mean you know how to do anal sex. Right. As we have all experienced in the giving or receiving. Yeah, yeah.

So that's really, really important. So now we come to how do you acquire these skills?

I feel like that's probably going to be the name of the name of the podcast, just Grief and Anal Sex.

Just to really mess with people. You imagine it's like, oh, my gosh, like, gotta listen to this one. Sorry, I didn't mean to get you off track. But it just was too. It was too good not to say I was like, grief and anal sex. Like, there it is.

Well, sometimes one has to make a graphic illustration for people to get it. So this was one of those.

It's true. It's perfect.

So how do we get it? Well, the simplest way or the easiest way is to practice. And the easier and simpler the practice, the better. And so it's funny that we're talking today because we launched the two things that I'm going to tell you yesterday as courses, because it's the pandemic, right? So the two realms that you want to practice is the realm of intimacy. Not sex necessarily to begin with, but intimacy and the realms of the body. And they're connected, but you can practice them separately. So in the realm of intimacy, the things that you're going to want to learn is how to be with another human being without shrinking back. And there's practices for that. One of the ones that most people know about is eye gazing. There's a lot more to it than just staring at somebody. But you're learning how to actually be with a person. Then the next thing, that's how we do it. You learn the attentional skill, and then within the connection with the other human, all your stuff will pop up. Then you have body practices that allow you to stay relaxed and in your body so that you don't tighten and pop out. So you kind of conditioning the body to be open, able to release tension, fear, stress, trauma, be somewhat alive, able to feel pleasure, connect. You can not feel another human being till you can feel yourself. Right? That's just unfortunately the truth, right? So you do the body conditioning that allows that to happen. And then you do intimacy in the form of, let's say, eye connection, for instance. Then you do heart connection, which is the ability to be available and unguarded in the face of someone else, which is a skill that has to be learned, right? And at that point, usually that's when people's old wounding and stuff pops up, which can be worked with once again. In the body. You can release those things through the body and then you learn how to actually open somebody else's heart. There's ways to do that. One of the nicest ways to do that is through praise and generosity, which is super important, right? To have that down. And interestingly enough, learning how to give proper praise and generosity also opens your heart. So it's a. It's a mutual beneficial situation. And then the last thing you do, once you are somewhat able to withstand the strong emotions and the depth of connection, then you learn about what is sometimes called polarity. And in the way we teach it, we call it erotic friction, which is a name out of my lineage. And erotic friction. Erotic friction is a really good word because it denotes the result of erotic friction, which is hotness. Right? When you rub fingers together, right, or hands together, it gets hot. When you rub two different humans with different orientations together, you have sexual hotness. So erotic friction creates hotness and it creates attraction. Electricity flies, sparks fly, heat is produced, which I think is such a beautiful metaphor for what happens when people have that sexual chemistry, that sexual attraction. And so the sexual attraction aspect is the aspect where you learn how to pull apart into two separate humans that create an arc of attraction. That's why it's sometimes called polarity, right? The plus and the minus. Now that's a bit of a touchy area because there's a lot of kind of old school bullshit around masculine and feminine and conflation around women and feminine and men and masculine and what a masculine man requires in a feminine woman. That is such bullshit. You can cut that out if you want to.

Where?

You can leave it in crock off shit, right?

Yes. Tell us more, please.

I say that very loudly because I've been in this field for a long period of time and that particular conflation and that particular ideological, you know, infliction wipes out individuality in people. It creates gender war and it creates kind of a one flavored expression of human beings. And it really squelches individual exploration, unfolding and.

Individual play and expression, which makes that erotic friction so rich and wonderful. So a lot of people have squeezed themselves into these little containers of how they should be as a masculine man or a feminine woman. And then they suffer. They might have that moment of polarity which is like physics, right? But they suffer greatly in their life because it's not who they are. And the reason I'm so adamant about this these days is I've seen a lot of it, right? I've been around it Very, very, like, on the ground level. And I'm sure I have, you know, I have somehow committed those crimes against humanity myself.

As I was learning these things. Right? For sure, I have. You know, but because I have and because I've seen it and also to a certain degree, because I've bought into it myself at some point in my development, I can say that that's not very useful in this time and place we're in right now, where things are way more fluid than that and way more intricate and where people's natural inclinations and gifts need to be teased out and acknowledged. And the last thing I know, it's a long, long stretch here that I want to say about that is if you squeeze yourself in these boxes, you're replicating the stuff that our parents and grandparents had to do. You're just your 50s macho accountant or ad man with a, you know, ayahuasca Burning man twist. But, you know, you're still. You're still stuck in these gender roles. And that's why it's so painful to hear when people do this. Let me tell you, gentlemen, what women want. You know, it's like, no, don't.

Let's not go down that road, right? We've been there for, you know, hundreds of years. Let's foster individual expression and mutual enjoyment.

Yeah. I mean, I love. I really appreciate what you're saying because I think in many ways there is a. I mean, the human mind and just the way that we are wired, we sort of have, like, a proclivity towards having very simple constructs that we can fit into. Right. We are. I think. I think, you know, after having learned a lot about the brain and neuroscience behind how we are wired, there is a tendency to want to move towards these very simple constructs. But I appreciate what you're saying because I think it reveals the depth and the nuance and the intricacies of what actually goes into intimacy. And I think that when you layer in these.

These concepts of developing skills, rather than just trying to lean on, you need to act this way or act that way, because that's going to create, hopefully, some sort of charge in the other person. It is about developing skills within how you view yourself, how you tap into your own energy, how you feel, into your own body and its expression and give it freedom to express that. And that's much more genuine authenticity, the individual, and then hopefully to the couple as well. I know that we are. We're sort of closing in on towards the end of this interview, which is. Which I Genuinely, genuinely feel like we could. We could sit and have a discourse around this for, like, two hours. I'm gonna have to have you back in the show. And maybe next time we will. We will talk for two hours.

But maybe just as we wrap up and finish off here, what is a sort of a simple practice that you do recommend? I know you talked about eye gazing for couples. That's very popular, and.

I think it's something that can be done.

Yeah.

But it's also something that people can just do wrong, right. Where they're just sitting there looking at each other and nothing's sort of happening. So what would you recommend that people start? I mean, they can go check out your course and your program, but what might be one practice that they can start to integrate at home?

Yeah. In the courses, all the things I just talked about are in there guided, Right. There's an explanation and then there's a audio or video guidance to people. It's like being in a room with me when I teach, which is, you know, why we did it, because people can't. They're stuck at home with each other. But so here is a simple one that. So that I'm going to give you two for people who have a partner and for people who don't have a partner. So if you have a partner, one of the things that you can do, and this is super, super simple, and.

Because it's so simple, people don't want to do it, Right. So one of the things you can do is you can sit together or lay together.

Either way is fine, Right. You can lay down and look at each other and. Or you can sit and look at each other. And all you're doing is you are being with each other. Now, I'm not even saying you need to stare into each other's eyes. You're just with each other and you keep kind of focus on each other. It's best done to begin with to not talk, because that can be a distraction in itself. And then when one or the other starts drifting, thinking about the shopping list or wanting to pick up the phone, you just say gone or going right or something like that. And then both smile and you just continue. You set a timer, like, let's say five minutes. And you just note how often in those five minutes you want to go away or when you want to distract or you want to say something. And that's a really good first step towards finding out what actually happens when you engage. So that's a very useful practice. That's not super heavy. Or deep. If you don't want to do that for reasons that your feelings get hurt or whatever. Another thing you can do as a couple is you can lay together, back together, back to back, back to front. So you can do spoon back to back. Or I wouldn't do side to side. You know, you could also do front to front, but it's a bit awkward. The best way to usually do it is spooning, right? So front to back and just lay together and close eyes. You can't fall asleep, though. And with the eyes closed, one at a time, narrate the sensations of that particular situation.

Very simply not. Oh, I think you should be.

I can feel your back, the heat of your back on my chest. I can feel your breath. I can feel your belly press into my lower back. I can feel my.

You know, need to want to scroll through the phone. I want to laugh. Now I'm bored. This feels really wonderful. Your hair is tickling my nose. Whatever. So you're just going. You can go back and forth or you can do whatever, you know, however you want to do it. You narrate sensation, you feel right. So that's a very good practice because it forces you to actually feel what's happening inside.

So if you are not having a partner, you can do this very exercise by yourself. And the way you can do it is you can just stand with your eyes closed or lay down with your eyes closed and you can start moving your body. And as you move your body, you start narrating and internally or maybe allow sensations, emotions and thoughts and space done with the eyes closed. Because once we're externally referenced, other stuff pops in, right? And you just go, shoulder, shoulder, shoulder, shoulder. Oh, you know, annoyed. I'm annoyed, I'm annoyed. Oh, this feels good, right? So like, like the. Oh, dog barking, you know, I need milk. So you kind of. You start tracking what's happening inside of you and that tracking what's happening inside of you is the function that allows you to have more pleasure and believe it or not, better boundary setting.

That's a whole other conversation. How embodiment actually allows for proper boundary setting. So you have better boundary setting. You have a deeper intimacy with your sensations, including positive ones. And also it allows you to withstand negative sensations better because you will learn how quickly they pass.

So good. So wonderful. Well, this has been an absolute pleasure to have you on the show and to dive into some of these topics. And I feel like we started to go into the depths there, which is good. And I would love to have you back on the show and maybe pick up where we left off and take the lesson a little bit deeper into some of those, into some of those practices and some of those experiences. So thank you so much. Where can people find you if they want to learn more?

Well, you can find everything there is to be found on my website, which I'm assuming you'll also post in the show notes. Nikilabaum.com so my full name dot com. And on there also, there's an enormous amount of free resource. So particularly we started it when the Pandemic started. We have like a whole section on the website that's, you know, zoom calls where people have asked Pandemic specific questions and some practices, meditations. Both Steve and I have an enormous amount of SoundCloud iTunes stuff that's practical.

There's the courses, which are the five best embodiment of the five best intimacy practices condensed so they can be done at home, even in like five, 10 minutes. It's longer form stuff. This free, you know, podcast with lectures on it. You name it, we got it.

Awesome. Well, wonderful. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Thank you. It was a pleasure.

Yeah. And for everyone that's out there listening, definitely head on over and check out Mikaela's work. We'll have the link in the show notes. And until next week, this is Connor Beaton signing off. Don't forget to share this episode with maybe your partner or someone that you know would like to listen to this and get into some of the juicy details that, that we explored. And until next week, this is Carl Beaton signing it off. Talk to you.

Sa.