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Yeah, we've all had this experience. You're in the elevator with one or two people. And what do people do in an elevator? They stare up or they stare down.

Right?

And if you're staring down, fine. That's what people do. And you notice the person next to you has these amazing shoes on. Don't keep it to yourself. Compliment them. Say, hey, those are really cool shoes.

You're listening to Sex with Emily. I'm Dr. Emily, and I'm here to help you prioritize your pleasure and liberate the conversation around sex. Today we are gonna liberate it. I'm joined by meditation teacher, speaker, speaker, and author, Light Watkins. Bestselling author, accomplished meditation teacher, founder of the shine movement. He's an inspirational keynote speaker, workshop leader. He's delivered so many wellness themed talks around the globe. All right, everybody, enjoy the show.

First of all, I'm a huge fan of yours. I've been a voyeur of your work for a while, which is a little ironic. And how I got into this world. I started going to yoga classes, and then I started going to Meditation circle. This is back when you were doing Yur Vipassana in the mid-90s, I was up in Manhattan going to meditation classes at the Riverside Church. And then, and then I met a meditation teacher who really changed my life. He inspired me to want to teach people meditation. So I went to India for the first time and I started teaching meditation from my one bedroom apartment in West Hollywood. Turns out I was pretty good at it. Started traveling around the world, doing retreats, writing books, and then got into really deep into inspiration and started writing these daily inspirational emails. And then that led to my most recent book, Knowing where to Look.

I find that so inspirational.

Sex and relationships.

Like, how have you found that meditation impacts you and your, your students, your listeners, your followers?

When the stress evaporates incrementally, it's not going to go away overnight. But when it does, as it does, I should say, on the other end of that spectrum, you're creating space, right? So the space you have in between a potential offense and your reaction to that offense is directly correlated to how much stress you have stored in your body. So if your stress debt decreases, the amount of space increases. And it's the space that is your saving grace in relationships. Because the biggest Achilles heel of most people in relationships is their reactivity to when things are not going in the way that they think they should go. Their expectations are misaligned with their partner and they're prone to overreacting. And the overreacting really is the death of a relationship, a series of overreactions. Because what you're doing is you're making people not feel seen and, or heard. So there's, there's that lack of authenticity. And this is a little controversial that, at least for me in my circle, whenever I talk about this. But, you know, I think we all want the truth. Women, especially in my experience, talk about, oh, I want to know the truth. True to truth.

Yeah.

But here's the thing with guys is, and I don't think a lot of people understand this, but everybody wants to be completely honest, like a man to another man. Usually you are graded on your level of honesty, right. When people say be a man, yeah. Your word is everything. Like, so you are brutally honest with another man. We're going to keep it 100, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? That's how you engage in those relationships with a woman. If you were to impose that same level of brutality in your honesty, it wouldn't land in the same way. And we've all had this experience, right, where you get this Reaction.

Okay.

Oh, well, you know, let's. Okay, let's take the classic example. Woman says, do I look fat in this dress?

Yeah.

And let's say the man initially thinks, yes, she does look fat in this dress. But there's no way I'm gonna say, you look fat in this dress. I don't care how much you told me you wanted me to be honest, because the reality is you don't have to be honest about that. You want me to be honest about how I, you know, ultimately how I feel about you overall. I love you. I'm here for you. I want you to feel safe. I'm providing for you, et cetera. So. But we have to kind of figure out these sort of more nuanced ways of honesty. And I think what happens is when people. When you experiment with being yourself or being honest and the other person lashes out, they get reactive. It doesn't incentivize you to. To be as honest the next time. I'm not saying you can't be honest, but there's some trauma associated with that that makes you just hesitate a little bit, and now you're not really yourself. And then after a while, the relationship sort of. It sort of bifurcates into two versions of both of you, where you're. Your relationship version of you, and you show up in that way where you kind of cakewalking a little bit. And then there's the real you, where you. With your friends, like, yeah, you know, you have that level of communication. And I think the wider that goes, the more likely the relationship is not going to last. And so to keep that from happening, meditation creates the space so that when someone says something that you don't feel aligned with and your tendency is to react, it gives you a little bit of just a little breathing room. It's kind of like. It's kind of like the frame slows down a bit.

You don't react and you don't know.

And you can say, well, you can work through, like, your own little algorithm. Did they mean that? Is that just. Are they going. Did they not sleep well last night? You can work through all of that in a span of, like, a second. And then you may just take a breath and just say, well, you know, let's talk about it later. This is not the time or place for that. Those little moments, those moments when they add up.

And that's not about perfection.

It's not about perfection, but that's what you can bring to your relationship. That's what you can bring to your Your. Your parent or parenting skills. That's what you can bring to your. Your company. That's. So it's not just relationships. It's yours. Your relationship with everything. You get that space, and that space becomes your superpower.

The practice of the meditation with not. Not immediately, but over time, if you stick to it, you actually make that flip where you actually crave it rather than resent it. Like, I think that's been part of your genius. The way that you teach light is that you've made meditation seem less of a chore and people actually get excited about.

I'm the Emily Morse of meditation.

Yeah. And I'm the light walk ins of sex. There you go. But do you do anything come up to you about sex or relationships? Is there anything in your space that we just. I know it helps me with every area of my life when I get distracted during sex or I'm thinking about things like I just meditate. I have to meditate before I go on a date, before I have sex.

Well, share an anecdote, please. A few years ago, there was an article that got a lot of traction in the meditation community because it said that when you meditate, your body experiences the same neurochemistry as when you have sex. And everyone was excited and sharing it and every talking about it, writing these long Facebook commentaries about it. And this one guy that I follow, I don't know him personally, but he's a really funny writer. I can't even remember his name. But anyway, he wrote this article. I think it was in Huffington Post or something. He said something to the effect of, you know, it's interesting, this whole correlation between meditation and sex, just because when I'm meditating, I think about sex all the time. Like, I've often think about sex, but I've never once thought about meditation while I was having sex.

Right.

So I don't know. I don't know how that translates.

No, it translates to the fact that it's so deep within you that when you are having sex, it can be a meditative experience that you're not actually thinking.

Right. It is the meditation. Sex is the meditation.

It is, I think so. Are the breath work. Do you teach breath work as well? Because to me, that was also a game changer in recent years to realize, like, how I don't breathe properly, how I've learned how to just take the deep breaths.

Don't teach it. But I'm a huge fan of breath work. I do a lot of breath work myself. But, you know, when you get into the nuances of these practices, you understand that they're, they are. There's so many layers of understanding to each one. And so you just kind of pick which, like I might, I'm, I'm the non directive meditation guy. Which means within the meditation space there are different styles, focus based meditation styles and then there's like non directive styles, which means you let your mind roam free. You don't try to control your thoughts, you don't. It's almost like an anti focus approach. And so I'm really proficient at that because I find that to be the easiest one for busy urban professionals.

And are you still teaching that people can come?

I have not taught a training since the pandemic started because it's all live classes. It's. I've only taught in person. And that's one of the reasons why it's, people get it so quickly is because I think there's something to that analog experience. Like I can look at somebody meditating and I can pretty accurately tell what their experience is. Like, I can't see that from a book. I can't really see it just from looking at their head. Your portrait on zoom.

Right.

And so, yeah, I've kind of carved a lane out for myself to be this a bit of a more higher end, premium experience meditation teacher. I don't do guided meditations. I don't really do breath work or anything like that. I think those are all great as a starter techniques. But ultimately you want to graduate to a silent practice that you're doing on your own without anybody telling you what to think about her or how to what to imagine.

Cool. You talk a lot about the power of being consistent and discipline. And it's something that I struggle with and it's something that I always think, oh, I don't have time. But I know it's about prioritizing the time. But it is really impressive. But it also, I think I remember once someone telling me it was like some monk or somewhere and he was like, you know, routine is curative. And I'm like, yeah, but I don't like a routine. I don't want to be told what to do. But you realize that why there's all these talks now about like the morning routine and getting it all, you know, making sure there's things that you do to set you up for success. And I feel like that's a lot of what you talk about, whether it's in your new book, the Daily Doses or on your Instagram. But you weren't just born that Way right. Light. You had to learn some of these things.

No, I was not at all. And I don't even consider myself to be all that discipline, to be perfectly honest with you. What I am good at though, is being honest with myself. I've gotten a lot better at being honest with myself. So before, of course, I would take on too much and try to go cold turkey in certain areas and then swing back in the other direction with a vengeance. And now as I'm a lot more mature, I am able to see my flaws for what they are and accommodate for them and build in little stop gaps. And just an example of that is when it came to the book, my first book that I wrote, which is called the inner a 30 day workout for Strengthening Happiness. I had been dragging my feet with these outlines and these chapters and these edits for literally almost four years.

Right.

And I got so tired of thinking about this book and talking about the book and telling people this book is coming, but it never was coming. That one day I literally got out a sheet of paper and I composed a contract between me and a buddy of mine and I said, I am contracting myself to finish this book. So that is published ready by such and such date, which is probably like two months from that day. And here is a check for, I think it was $4,000, which is way more than I could afford to lose. And if I do not have the book ready to be published by this date, friend, you are obligated to take this check and cash it and spend it on whatever you feel inclined to spend it on. And I tell you, all the excuses went out the window. All this time freed up and I.

Was all of a sudden ability.

So you had bested. Yeah. I invested myself in finishing this project. I knew that that's what I needed to do because otherwise I would come up with the best sounding excuses and I wouldn't do it.

Right.

They're all real. Yeah, they're all real.

But if that was.

But they all went away. They all evaporated once I handed my friend that check with that contract and it was completely out of my hands.

God. Brilliant. Yeah. Tell me more about that.

I think it's just about being honest with yourself. And really the only way to do it is to be dishonest with your many times that you just can't even stand it anymore. So luckily I've gotten to the life stage where I've bullshitted myself so much that I just. I can't even tolerate my own bullshit anymore. And Elizabeth Gilbert talks about that she's like, true change doesn't happen until you get so fed up with your own bullshit that you just can't take it anymore. And that's been my experience. So I'm. I'm in that cat. I'm not in the discipline category. I'm in the I'm so tired of bullshitting myself category.

Yeah, no, I guess. I guess you're right. I understand that. That makes me feel much more human. But you're right, because some people are bored, very disciplined. They're like, if I don't do this thing, it will ruin my day. And I've had to very carefully. And oftentimes it does involve staff following up with me and making shit happen and being accountable, because otherwise I'll just run rampant. Just won't all.

Well, here's the other thing. Okay, let's flip it then, right? Everyone's disciplined at something. But the question is, is that thing good for you? Is it good for the world?

Right?

So I would. I would argue that somebody who is binge watching Netflix shows on a regular is discipline that binge watch. I can't do it. I can't sit in front of a television for hours and hours and hours, no matter how enjoyable the show is, because I just don't have that level of discipline. But some people are like that. Some people are disciplined. Every Sunday they're at brunch. I can't do that either. I can't be on that kind of routine. So everyone has discipline with something. The question is, is it. Is it adding value to your life or not? No judgment. Just asking the question. Is it adding value to your life or not? And if there's something holding you back, it's probably the fact that you're not being honest with yourself about some aspect of your life that is. That could be adding more value, but you're more invested in something that is not adding as much value into your life.

So how do we find those things, then?

Research and development. Just like the drug companies. You have to R and D your RD department. Yeah. R and D your life split test seriously. And eventually you'll get fed up. You get fed up.

Yeah.

The system is rigged. The house is. The house is rigged. Everybody gets fed up at some point. Some people may take 70 years, some people may take 20 years. But everyone will reach a point where they just can't take it anymore. And that's where change happens.

It's not about someone telling you, like, I really think you should stop, or I really think you should get organized. Or I really think you should. It's that we have to not be able to take it anymore. And that's the next step because we're.

The ones creating the very important sounding excuses. Change is not going to happen until those excuses go away in my experience.

Yeah, that's true. And a lot of the excuses are I don't have time. Yeah, but I only. And I've. And I've just learned to say in recent years I used to say, well, I didn't have time. I time I was like. I often say I haven't prioritized that yet in my life. I haven't prioritized it because that so much more of the truth. We all have 24 hours in a day and I just have to say I haven't been able to prioritize that happening. Just makes me feel better in some ways than just staying out of time because I know it's a bullshit excuse, don't you?

I mean time is like Raiders of the Lost Ark. It's like, it's like Star Wars. It's not real. It sounds great. It's exciting to say I don't have time and I'm doing all this. But it's a fictional story that you created to justify whatever dramas or adventures you find yourself on. And you know, and it's. We all do it.

So how do we get out of it? Yeah, how do we get out of that?

I think we have to replace that story with another story that suits where we envision our lives going.

Right.

So we have to buy into that story enough. And I really do feel like the script is embedded in our spiritual DNA and that's what we talk about, following our heart, listening to the still small voice that messaging is coming from that script of our, our highest potential. And it's never going to go away until we start to act upon it. The reason we don't act upon it is because there's not as much certainty with taking a leap of faith as there is with let me just watch these 15 episodes of this show because I know it's beginning and there's an end and it's going to take me through the whole roller coaster and there's going to be this payoff at the end, hopefully with following our heart. There's no obvious payoff to that.

Right.

And there's all these cautionary tales of other people who have kind of half assed tried to follow their heart but then gave up or fell short or whatever. And we're in this society which tells us that Our happiness is, is not in following our heart is in the next vacation. It's in the next, you know, paycheck or whatever. So we're up. We're fighting an uphill spiritual battle, most of us. And there's no cheerleader saying, you know, keep going, you can do it. Because everybody's on the same hill going up. We're all exhausted. We keep looking down at the people partying down at the base of the mountain and we keep thinking, well, maybe they have the. That's the answer. Just, just don't put all this effort into it. Just, you know, life is short. I only live once. Let me just relax and chill and blah, blah, blah. The problem is we can't sleep at night. That's the issue, right? No matter how comfortable you are, you can't sleep at night. So there's a correlation there between being fulfilled inside and being able to lay your head down on your pillow at night and fall asleep and wake up feeling refreshed instead of waking up feeling like you just landed in Shanghai and you have a whole day's worth of business meetings to attend to. Like that's how most people are living their lives. Which is why Starbucks is a $25 billion corporation.

Right? We need the caffeine, we need a thing. We got to keep going all day every day. So then how would you.

We're all functional stress addicts.

We are. I know you've written a lot about happiness too, and finding your internal happiness. And it has to come from within, but yet we think it's from getting that job, the boat, the car, the wife, the husband, the thing, the life. And that doesn't give us happiness because it has to come from internal. Our internal compass, following our internal joy. Right? We got to cultivate it from the inside out.

That's what she's. That's what she said. Yes. Yeah, you know, I. Look, I think when people hear this from people like me named Light, they probably a lot of people may dismiss it. Oh, he's one of those people who. Airy fairy types, doesn't believe in success and all that. That's not the message. I am not anti promotion, Ferrari, orgasm, none of that. I'm pro. Cultivate your happiness inside. Because we live in a world that is impermanent. And the Buddhists and the Eastern philosophers and sages and gurus have been talking about this for time immemorial. Everything is changing all the time. And if you look at your day to day experiences and be honest with yourself, your so called bad days Are not days where someone is trying to kill you or where something really life or death happens to you. A bad day really is when you have a series of experiences that are really just different variations of this impermanent world we live in. Change. Things are changing in ways that are not aligning with your preferences. And if you can't adapt to those changes enough times throughout a day, then it starts to create this sort of suffering feeling inside, which is a lack of fulfillment, a lack of contentedness. In other words, I wish something different were happening than what I'm currently experiencing. And that's a bad day. I had a bad day today. So the next time somebody says, I had a bad day, you go, okay, what happened? They're going to start listing off a series of things that changed that they could not adapt to. That's a bad day. Now, does that mean everybody on the planet who experiences those things are unable to adapt to them and they also have a bad day? No, of course not. Some people are experiencing worse things, but they're adapting to them. And you look at them in their life and they're smiling and they're joking and they're finding the silver lining and they're feeling optimistic. So that same type of thing that happened to you that caused the bad day could have happened to someone else. And that could have been the best day they've had in a long time because of the way they adapted to it. So I think that's what it comes down to.

Let's talk about that. Our choice of the moment. When something happens, how do we decide what choices to make? You're kind of. You're seeing it as the glass half full instead of half empty, right? That's kind of like the same things can happen to people and it's how we interpret it in the moment.

Right? But here's the mistake we make. We are depending upon it to be an intellectual choice. Right? And I've written about this before. Happiness in the, in the. In the sort of spiritual community, people. Oh, happiness is a choice. Choose, be happy. I don't think it works like that. I don't think happiness is like, oh, I'm gonna. Instead of wearing a blue shirt, I'm gonna wear a yellow shirt today. It's not like. It's not that easy. I think happiness is more like doing a pull up, right? What is. Emily, can you do a pull up, sort of a full extension pull up from a dead hang, right? Pull yourself all the way up.

Yeah, I can.

Chin over the bar.

I might need A little help with my feet. But yeah, I'm pretty strong.

So that I think, I think happiness is like that. I think people think about it, okay, when the demand comes to be happy, I'll be able, I should be able to do it. You know, maybe with a little bit of help I can, I can, I can knock that out. But with pull ups, it, it's not arbitrary. You have to train to do that. Right? Nobody, nobody can just jump up on a bar. You've never done any kind of back exercises or arm exercises and you just pull yourself up.

Right.

It's one of the most deceptively hard things to do. But if you can do a pull up, you are fit. If you can do 5 full extension pull ups, you are a fit person.

Right?

So happiness is like that in the sense that you have to train the inner muscles that are responsible for you feeling content. And even in the face of discomfort, even in the face of the impermanent world that we live in. And the way to do that, of course, meditation is very, I would say meditation is the most efficient way to do that. Meditation is kind of like going to the pull up analogy is kind of like having a band that you can put your knees in that can give you support and you can push. So that way you kind of cultivate the muscles. So meditation is important. And daily meditation is the only way to make meditation really pay off in the way that it's designed to. This every now and again I'm doing, following, you know, listening to what my body. I'm going to try this one week and that the next week. That's nice. But it's not going to think about meditation like your, your investments.

Right.

It's the cumulative effect, it's being in the market every day over time that leads to the big dividends down the line. So what meditation does very, very well, probably better than any anything else, is it counteracts stress. And stress is the reason why you can't get it up at night.

Right?

Right.

That's what it comes down to. If we're talking about root causes here, we can again BS ourselves and think it's about the quality of the mattress or the perfume person's wearing. No, it's stress. It comes down to stress. And meditation is a very powerful way. It's like kryptonite to stress.

Right.

Stress cannot survive in a deeply meditated nervous system. But here's the thing, we're getting stressed every day. Every day there's an incoming amount of stress. Just like every day you get bills. The bills pile up. So your whole intention with being a working adult is to make sure you're in a profession where you're getting more money coming in, then you have money going out. And if you can do that, then you can have some pretty enjoyable experiences in life. If not, life becomes very unenjoyable and time consuming. You don't have time for anything. Everything is busy, Right? So think about stress like that. There's a stress debt that a lot of people have from childhood and from burning the candle at both ends as a young person. And then when you get to be like a mature adult in your 30s and 40s, you have this stress debt, which usually starts to inhibit your ability to sleep at night, which is what we talked about earlier. So that's when people get really interested in meditation and they start doing it. And guess what the first positive symptom they experience is in almost every case, they can sleep at night. Why? Because the meditation burned off that stress that was causing them from being able to rest in a horizontal position. And so my job is really not to sell anybody on meditation, because I think we're all pretty much sold these days, but to help make the practice as accessible as possible. So you stop talking yourself out of it. So you take it out of the chore category and you put it in the puppies and the Sunday brunch and in the category with all the things that you like to do already.

How do we do that? Put it in a category? How do you make it fun? Like, I've done TM personally, I've done three silent vipassana retreats over the years. I am better at the twice a day, but sometimes it's just once. And then I beat myself up. It's not twice, but I know when it is the twice two times a day. I feel so much better. Still have stress, still have anxiety, but I'm just clearer and it helps every other area of my life. So, yeah, tell me.

The key to accessibility with meditation is really about the relationship you have with your mind, with your thoughts. That's really. That's what it comes down to. Because most people will berate their mind or I was going to use some kind of BDSM reference, but please. They'll whip the mind and treat the mind as though you're. It's wrong for thinking thoughts. And what the masters are proficient at doing is making love to their mind, to treating. Treating their mind not like the enemy, but as their beautiful partner in this meditation journey. And so because of that shift in their attitude. And that's really all it is, is a shift in your attitude because there's nothing you can really do about it. You can't stop your mind by thinking about not thinking, because that's a thought. But if you start to embrace the mind as perfect whole and complete and not intellectually, but sensually, like you really feel that way, what you're going to find over time is not going to happen overnight. But over time, what you're going to find is that the thoughts become fewer and farther in between and the mind becomes more settled. And then meditation becomes more enjoyable.

It does? Yeah. Well, let's talk about meditation and. And relationships. I often hear from people, let's say daily, who have a really hard time being in the moment during sex, being present. And I always say, well, have you ever meditated? Your breath anchors you paying attention to the senses, your five senses in the moment that allow us to ground you in the moment so you're not as distracted. But. But what have you found? Like, how has meditation impacted relationships and people's sex life and intimate lives?

I'm so glad you brought this up, because I've had. I have a lot to say about this, actually.

I love it.

Well, you know, I think there's a. There's. I wouldn't call it a misconception, but I think we put a lot of weight on the practice of meditation to improve our sex life or to improve our life in general in ways that aren't fully realistic. And I equate in this regard. I equate meditate to. It's kind of like, you know, Jiffy Lube. It's like getting your oil changed in your car. Like, it's. It's definitely a necessary maintenance thing to do, but it's not going to fix your transmission. It's not going to fix your carburetor. It falls out. So you still have to go to a body shop.

I'm a huge fan of loop. So it does fix a lot of things. I love.

I love a good loop. So I just want to make that disclaimer so for myself. Like, I've been meditating for 20 years. Am I some kind of sexual God because of that? No, I don't. I would never put myself in that category. But I'll tell you what has changed. What has changed is I have to have a connection with somebody in order to engage sexually with them. I can't do the whole casual thing anymore like I used to back in the old days, back in my. Back in my premeditation days. I mean, I granted I was younger, but still, it's, it's just, it's very clear to me. I have no, there's no ambiguity around that. And here's the thing. Even though I've been meditating, if I'm with somebody that I don't have a heart connection with, I can't get excited.

Literally, literally can't get it same.

I literally can't get excited. But if I'm with someone who I have a heart connection with, even if we have an argument or whatever, it's like I'm still engaged, I'm still invested, literally and implicitly. And I would say that's been the biggest difference is that your body speaks to you in the same way that, you know, a roommate would speak to you. You just can't ignore it.

Right.

It's not that still small voice that people talk about in metaphysical circles. It's more of a loud, annoying voice that you just, you have to hear it. You may not do anything about it, but you, you have to hear it. And whether you choose to take action upon it or not is really up to you.

Now you talk a lot about this following your inner guide, your inner tuition, like, or that's even more being more embodied, knowing that this person isn't resonating with me right now, I'm not going to feel that connection. But also, I mean, that's something that I'm always working on too. Like, I have all the answers, I have everything I need. What am I doing to sabotage that belief of following what I know to be true?

So that's where split testing comes in. And it's going to be, it's going to take time. Just like if you're running Facebook ads, you're not going to find out overnight which one is working best.

Right.

You have to split test the voices inside. There's the, there's the, there's the intuition voice, there's the voice of fear, voice of pain, voice of social conditioning. All these voices are in there competing for your attention. And unfortunately, the fight flight voice is the loudest because that's when we give them the most attention to. Right. So the still small voice is just trying to be heard. And in order to allow that one to kind of over to override the other pain voices and trauma voices and all that, you just have to follow it in the little moments, the baby steps, follow it. So an example I often give is if you're in an elevator, we've all had this experience. You're in elevator with one or two people. And what do people do in an elevator? They stare up or they stare down, right? And if you're staring down, fine. That's what people do. And you notice the person next to you has these amazing shoes on. Don't keep it to yourself. Compliment them, say, hey, those are really cool shoes. That's a great choice, right? So that's your voice of intuition. That's, that's your still small voice telling you that, you know, offering someone a compliment or an expression that helps to brighten their day and also helps you to feel connected to them. That stretches you, stretches you out of your comfort zone. And it's a small thing. Anybody can do it. It's great point adds up. And that's what causes the voice to get louder and louder. And if you do that a hundred times, then you're going to be able to take bigger leaps of faith and follow your heart in bigger ways later on.

I never draw that parallel between like, that is actually trusting in the moment. I'm not overthinking it. I'm not editing it. I'm just like, you look great, girl, that's awesome.

I mean, obviously you don't want to go up to the, you know, scary looking person and say, hey, how are you doing today? You know, you don't want to start a conversation with someone who looks dangerous or whatever. But if someone, if the situation feels safe to you. And again, this is a feeling you have, not some. The whole racism, that's all just intellectualizing things. That's not really your, your heart telling you those people are bad. It's your conditioning telling you that that's the voice you want to override ultimately. So you have to start. That's how you start trusting that voice. And then you may find yourself maybe going up to a homeless person one day and saying, hey, you know, because no one's ever really talked to this person or seen or made them feel seen or hurt. And you have a connection with them. You're not afraid because a lot of times it's just like with dogs. Your fear attracts that fearful reaction, right? And that's what causes the drama. But if you're not afraid, you're confident in your own skin because you're now trusting your inner guidance. You know, your inner guidance is not going to lead you into a dangerous situation. It's only going to lead you to situations that allow you to expand and grow. Then that translates to the way you express and the energy that they feel coming from you. And that's going to create an otherwise harmonious situation out of two people who may not have been harmonious otherwise had you not. Had. Had you not embodied that feeling.

It's a good way to put it.

So, going back to your previous question, meditation is important. Gratitude is important. You have to be grateful, right? Because gratitude keeps you present. If you're the moment, you stop being grateful, you get yanked out of the present moment. Now you're in the future. Now you're anxious. That's what anxiety really is. Or you're remorseful, you're in the past. Oh, why didn't I do this? Why? What was I thinking? Shame, remorse, now you're in the past. Anxiety, panicking, you're in the future worrying, you know, that's not present moment awareness. So when you're not in the present moment, you're not lifting your baseline level of gratitude. You're in a situation where you're hoping that everything goes your way, which chances are it's not going to go your way, which is only going to compound into this so called bad day that you potentially are having. But being grateful, and sometimes you have to really dig in the bottom of the barrel to find the gratitude, you know?

Yeah, can you give some good, because whenever I hear gratitude, people are like, oh yeah, I'm grateful. I got to do my gratitude journal at night. I got to be grateful. Like, what's the way to get people? Because I know it really works for me. Even if I'm going to bed at night, I'm like, what are the three things that went well today that made me happy, that were good? I really try to do that practice because we can always find the shit wrong. Do you have a way of embracing gratitude is something that also becomes fun, just like your meditation practice.

Okay, so here's an algorithm that I find that works really brilliantly. Okay? Take something awful that happened to you, right? So I'll use myself an example. I was with a girl one time. She got pregnant, right? I wanted to have the kid, she didn't want to have the kid, she got an abortion. But the way she did it was very suspect in my opinion, at the time of my life. Very difficult, challenging moment for me. In fact, I thought I was going to be a father for several weeks. Turned out not to be the case. So obviously you wouldn't wish that on anybody, on any side of that equation, right? But shit happens to everybody and far worse. So what I say is take a situation like that, something really awful that happened to you, not, not something that traumatizes you to think about.

Right.

If you're still working through it in therapy and you're. Takes you into a state where you're psychotic or whatever. Thinking about. That's not what I'm talking about. A situation that you've kind of healed from, a situation that you've already kind of worked your way through. Take that situation, but it's not completely resolved, you may still find yourself to be a little bit of a victim from it, like, oh, I wish that didn't happen. Some regret that you have from your past. Take that and then start reverse engineering the gratitude.

Okay, so. Oh, I love reverse engineering gratitude.

Tell me more example. You know, situation didn't work out. Okay, what's. What, what am I grateful for? I know I want to have a child. I know I want to. Want to be a father. That's. That's something to be grateful for. I know for a fact because of the way I felt.

Yeah.

I have a greater appreciation for communication because I didn't feel like I communicated as well as I could have to keep that situation on the rails. I'm grateful for listening to my heart. When my heart said, you know, I'll support this situation, even though it didn't go that way. I knew that I was capable of that. Even though I didn't really have a lot of hard evidence. Because you don't really understand what you're committed to until something is on the line.

Right.

So all those different aspects of that, that challenging situation are reasons to be grateful. And if you can be grateful there, then it's a lot easier to say, oh, I'm grateful because I had pancakes this morning, or I'm grateful because I have legs or I can see and, you know, those kind of more surface level aspects of gratitude.

I'm grateful for the lessons. Yeah.

Yeah. But then you can apply it to anything and then hopefully the lag time starts to decrease so that when something crazy happens to you in the moment, you, you can just automatically switch into reverse engineering gratitude. What am I grateful for? About this happening in this moment.

Right.

Yeah.

And it's not about denying and all that. It's just about you can do both. You can have the experience, you can go through it, you can feel the pain and whatever extent of grief you have, and you can find some semblance of gratitude which may keep you present until enough to see an opportunity. That's also in that moment. And that's, that's, that's where you start to find all the serendipity and all that.

Yeah. In life, it makes so much sense. It's like. Because I know that, like, even in last year, I made a lot of mistakes. I always make a lot of mistakes. I've made so many mistakes. I learned from them all the time. But there's one area in particular where I keep going. I can't believe I did that. And I. But ultimately, I see I learned so much from this. On the moments where I'm tired of going to bed at night or something triggers it, I'm like, yep, if I didn't make that mistake, I wouldn't be able to. I wouldn't have this problem right now. Sometimes it's really hard. But I guess there's got to be another way of, like, I learned so much by this process of trusting other people when I didn't trust my own gut or whatever it is.

I used to have this. This. This thing, this agreement with myself. And when I was a yoga teacher, I taught yoga for several years back in the day, and I'd have these big yoga classes, and they were obviously, like, really attractive women in the class, and it's hard to not give them attention.

Right.

As a straight male who loves women.

I've been in those yoga classes. I got a lot of corrections.

Yeah, it's hard to not give them. But I had to deal with myself. I said, if I. If. If I ever go and correct an attractive woman, then to balance that off, I have to find the hairiest, sweatiest guy and give him the same adjustment just to keep myself honest.

Yeah.

Give him the same adjustment. So it kept me from getting all. You know how some of these teachers can be all touchy feeling because I didn't want to have to put my hands between the thighs of some hairy, sweaty guy. But anyway, the point is, you can apply that same approach to gratitude.

Right.

In other words, if things are going amazing in your day or in your week, and naturally you're grateful for that. Like, we're really good at taking credit for when things go well. Oh, yeah. Manifested. I put on my vision board. Yeah. I was positive. Yeah. This is what you have to do to make sure you can do the same thing. But we're so good at evading responsibility when it comes to the bad stuff that happens. But what if we took that same energy when good stuff happens, and we apply it to the worst things in our opinion, the worst things that happened that week, and we force ourselves to find the gratitude.

Give me an example. Okay.

So, you know you have a week where you get fired.

Yeah.

Okay. I now have an opportunity to do exactly what my heart is telling me to do.

Right? This job wasn't right for me.

It wasn't right for me. Now I have time to like you, just list it out. It doesn't mean that you necessarily even have to believe it fully. Even if you just believe the 20% right, that's enough to offset the suffering that comes from being entrenched in. Why did this happen? The kind of victim mentality that we all are subject to from time to time. And then again, it's a practice. It's the pull up. You have to practice. It's not going to feel easy at first, but the more you do it, guess what? Doing one pull up is going to be easy one day, but doing five pull ups is going to be hard. But then a year later, doing five is going to be easy, but doing 10 is going to be hard. And then next thing you know you're going to jump up there and without even thinking about it, you're as light as a feather doing your 10 pull ups. And so you've developed the strength to be able to apply that level of happiness to almost any situation. And so now only the big things knock you off your balance or, you know, little things may knock you off temporarily for five minutes here, for an hour there. But no longer will you have days where something happens to you for five minutes and it hijacks your entire month.

Well, that's what happens. It's the hijacking that's problem. But you're saying it this. It's a skill. I always say. Well, it's a skill set. It's a, it takes practice. It's a muscle. It's a muscle. You got to build it from like communicating with your partner to masturbation practices to. This has been fabulous. I could talk to you for hours.

I know.

I want to ask you the five questions we ask all of our guests. They're quickie questions.

So you don't love a good quickie.

Let's have a quickie. This was our quickie. Biggest turn on.

Oh, biggest turn on is self awareness.

Biggest turnoff, the lack of self awareness, Narcissism. What makes good sex Connection, heart connection. Something you would tell your younger self about sex and relationships.

Go for inner beauty as much as you go for outer beauty.

What's the number one thing you wish everyone knew about sex?

Something that they don't already know about sex?

Yeah. Just so they reinforce what they need to know.

That if you really care about someone, it's so much better oh, try it without alcohol.

Oh, yeah, for sure. Or any altering substance. Alter.

Yeah, sober sex is the best sex.

I agree. I'm with you. Oh, thank you so much, Light Watkins. Okay, so your book's coming out. Tell us all the things how people can find you. Get on your plan.

So the book is called get on My Plan Knowing where to look, 108 daily doses of inspiration. You can find all the information booksellers@lightwatkins.com I'm at on all social media platforms that matter. And yeah, between those two things, I have plans. I have a community that I started, so I have to do retreats. I'm starting that back up. And I love to meet you and connect with you digitally or in person.

Okay, amazing. I would love to connect with you in person, too. But thank you so much for being here, Light. You are wise and inspirational, and this is really going to help all of our listeners. Thank you. Appreciate it.

Thank you. Thank you.

Congrats with the book launch.

Thank you.

That's it for today's episode. Thank you so much for listening to Sex with Emily. And if you love the show, please, like, subscribe and leave a review wherever you get your podcasts. And hey, hey, share this with a friend or a partner. It might just spark something. It usually does. You can find me on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, and X. It's all Sex with Emily. Oh, and I've been told I give really good email. So sign up@sexwithemily.com for free guides and articles and more ways to prioritize your pleasure. And if you have a question about sex, dating, relationships, any of it, leave a message@sexwithemily.com ask.