Ep #017 | Sex, Psychedelics, and How to Make Your Honeymoon Phase Last Forever

If you're like the vast majority of people in the world, you know what relationships are like. We have this huge, intense, honeymoon like period in the beginning, but then that honeymoon like feeling starts to burn out. My guest today, Jamie Wheal, is on his third appearance in the mindvalley podcast. And look, every time I interview this man, he completely blows my mind. Today we're going to be discussing a really intriguing topic from his book, Recapture the Rapture. How do we keep that feeling of love, that deep, powerful human emotion in our relationships longer? And how to take that honeymoon period and stretch it out as well as we can so that we can create beautiful, committed, long term relationships. Jamie, welcome to the mindvalley podcast.

Great to be here, Vishen.

So let's start with this idea of love. One of the most interesting chapters in this book are the two chapters where you discuss the future of sex and that incredible experiment that you performed in relation to love and sex. Let's start there.

Sure. I mean, it was a sort of strange and meandering road where I kind of slid backwards into this subject. My actual field of professional engagement is peak performance and flow states. So we get kind of into the neuroscience and the physiology of optimum human functioning. And the further I went down all of those rabbit holes of how do we actually tune our bodies and brains to be on demand for the highest performing, highest stakes, most ecstatic or meaningful situations in life. And this was with groups From Seal Team 6 to the extreme athletes of Red Bull to the executives of Google, to the community of Burning Man. You name it, right? What makes us tick and what makes us come alive at our highest level, I slowly came to this sort of unavoidable conclusion, which is that if you pursue the neuroscience and physiology of optimum human performance to its logical and inevitable conclusion, and you are not squeamish and you don't flinch, you end up in one of two places. You end up with sexy biohacking or nerdy kink. And I thought, dear God, this is not my field. This is not my jam. I'm not a tantra teacher, I'm not a sexologist, I'm not a therapist. But the more I looked around, I was like, it feels like there's this giant missing chapter of the story of human sexuality and what we can do with it if we understand it and if we can then reclaim it and put it towards the highest purposes and passions of our existence.

Firstly, sexy biohacking or nerdy kink. Yeah, explain those two.

Well, basically, I mean, look, nature is A very efficient design system, right? And we are sort of, you know, packed in. You know, our bodies are very tightly organized with little systems with very little wasted space. And even just. You just take our orifices, for example, right? There's none of them are single use, right? Noses can smell, but it also filters air, mouth taste and causes chew and eat food. Food. We. We pee and ejaculate out of the very same little appendage, right? This, all of these things, right, have multiple uses. And if you really want to get to full interventions on our neurophysiology, you kind of need to get somewhat intimate with your body. And either you have a licensed practitioner or professional, which is vanishingly rare in our contemporary world, or you need a trusted buddy slash practice partner. And so that's kind of how it all came together. And my first insights on this were of the potential for it, right? Was John Lilly, the famous and controversial scientist who invented sensory deprivation tanks and did that sort of almost wacky, but also very cutting edge sanctioned research through the NIH with LSD and dolphins. And then that work got shut down. And then he went further into float tanks and ketamine usage and all of these things. Well, way back before all of that, 1953, he was on an NIH grant and he was studying with rhesus monkeys and putting wire sleeves into their brains. It was the first technology and the first time that had ever been done. And he came to the conclusion that our ecstatic and reward circuitry maps one to one in primates with our sexual arousal network. And at the time, early 50s, super controversial whispers and hushes. But these days you're like, yeah, of course. That makes total sense. And why does it make sense? It makes sense because all animals for millions of years have had to figure out how to get it on with zero instruction manuals. So you're like, man, evolution must have thrown the kitchen sink at incentives, rewards and impulses and drives to get us to consistently perform that singular act. So that was kind of the first Scooby Snack clue. I was like, wait a sec. Our whole pleasure and Reward system maps 1 to 1 with the sexual arousal network. Because if any animal doesn't figure out how to procreate, we die.

It dies straight.

Simple. And then I was. I was actually on a panel at the Battery Club in San Francisco with Rick Doblin, who's the founder of maps, the Multidisciplinary association for Psychedelic Studies, and our mutual friend Jason Silva. And in between, in between panel discussions, I was catching up with Rick. Because I'm like, rick, tell me the deal. You guys are in phase 3 clinical trials with MDMA and PTSD. How's it going? What are you learning? Spill the beans. And he said, well, you know what's kind of interesting is that what we're finding is that, number one memory, in this case, traumatic memories are plastic. They're not just like fixed events that happened in the past. Our memories are constantly changeable, rewritable, and updatable. And that's a huge part of the work that happens when they put people who have been suffering from PTSD into the supersaturated state of safety, connection, love, even that MDMA can chemically provide. And he said, you know what? And this is what stopped me in my tracks. He said, you know what? The closest analog that we have found to the high prolactin, high oxytocin, high vasopressin state is the post orgasmic state. And I was like, wait a second, are you kidding me? You mean you guys have spent a hundred million bucks, you know, it's taken 30 years. You are pushing this incredibly through this byzantine federal system of regulation and policy to get it? It's not noble, heroic work. God bless you and thank you for doing it. But you mean all along we could have been getting to comparable trauma healing out of this exalted state known only to scientists as post orgasmic? Are you kidding me? So between those two, like that John Lilly's 1953 study and that conversation a few years ago, I was like, okay, there's a there there. And I want to get under the hood and start studying exactly why that happens and what we can do about it and how we can use those tools and insights to hopefully open source that kind of heal and that kind of connecting and that kind of inspiration for everybody. Because, you know, right now, as it stands, if you don't get lucky enough to be able to get on a list for one of those trials, clinical trials, right, you are on the waiting list for when MDMA therapy is broadly available, and even then it's not going to be cheap. And then you think, well, wait, every single human on this planet has a prefrontal cortex, spinal columns, and androgynous zones. And if we can teach them how to use them better, if we can give them permission and information to reclaim that part of them and flip the script from it being a source of so much pain, so much suffering, so much heartbreak, and so much trauma, and instead turn it to healing, inspiration, and connection, that would be a worthwhile project.

So that all sounds amazing, but for most people in mid to long term relationships, the passion is long gone. I remember something I heard once, it was that if you put an M and M in a jar for every time you have sex in the first year of marriage, and then you take out an M and M for every time you have sex past the first year, you would never run out of M and Ms, right? And so we know, we know that after a certain number of years being in a committed relationship with someone, our desire for sex goes down. But that seems so unhealthy and so disappointing. How do we recapture that? Given how powerful this orgasmic experience can be?

I think one of the best ways for us to do this is sort of get off this problem to solve it. So I think it's really helpful just to pan way back and literally kind of go back into how did we even get to human sexuality circa 21st century? And what are the motives and drivers that all of us are subject to, but we might not even notice, right? So if you think about it, I mean, I think the first thing to really share with everybody is just this notion that evolution is amoral. It doesn't have a moral code. It doesn't care for the same things we humans care about. We stand up in front of our families and our congregations to promise, to honor and cherish and love and obey and forever and, you know, forever and ever. Amen. And all evolution cares about is propagating the most robust gene pool possible. And it doesn't give a fuck who we fuck to get that. So examples right? In Helen Fisher, one of the researchers, I actually went deeply into the bodies of work and interviewed two Kinsey Institute icons. And one is Dr. Helen Fisher, who is now the chief scientist for Match.com and the other was Dr. Nicole Prowse, who was at Harvard and now UCLA. And she's been doing some of the most groundbreaking research in this field. And Helen's work is very specific about the sort of three stages of attraction in life. There's, there's lust, there's attraction, and there's long term bonding, right? And we kind of all know this, right? But lust is fundamentally driven by the hormones testosterone and estrogen. They're literally the just the idea of just mating monkeys. You just find somebody, you click. There doesn't have to be any rapport. It can be what Erica Jong memorably called the zipless, right? It's, it's whatever that is, just, just the magnetism to get together and, and, and bump Uglies, right? And then that can continue into attraction. And that's where you get dopamine, that's where you get serotonin. That's where you get the. I'm head over heels in love. And funnily enough, it actually creates a temporary plummet in serotonin, which is, some scientists argue is the closest we get to ocd. If you were a teenager and you lost your mind for your first love, or God forbid, you're trying to parent teenage kids and they are losing their minds, that's some of what's going on. They obsess, they can't stop thinking about them, all of those kinds of things. And that keeps cooking, right? That keeps cooking long enough and whoops, wouldn't you know it, this strange and magnificently polarizing, fascinating act of putting our bits and pieces together creates a baby nine months later. Like those two acts to us, just simple hominids back in the day, hundreds of thousands of years ago, have nothing to do with each other as far as our motives and drivers. Like, one is deeply pleasurable, lost a brief moment and then the other is, you know, profound, painful, scary, and the consequences, lost a lifetime. And that's kind of where evolution really does us dirty, right? Because after basically all that magic of passion, Your M&M's idea, right, all of the M&M's stop about three, three years in, right? Because that's the time which is just long enough to conceive, gestate, deliver and wean a small child. And then Mother Nature's like, hey, want to have another crack at it? And then, right? So suddenly, and this is the 7 year ish, that famous Marilyn Monroe film, all of that stuff happens right on schedule. And this is, right, and the three year mark. Well, three, three to seven years. Three to seven years. And you know, something like 50% of divorces occur in households with children under the age of three.

And you how many percent? 50% of divorces occur in households with children under the age of three.

Yeah, which makes sense, right? The sleeplessness, the lack of love and intimacy, the overwhelm, the financial pressures, all of it. And it's breaking families apart. And most of the time it's because we're out of M&Ms. We're out of like Love in the bank account, right? And right around that same time. And this is just a couple of dirty tricks, right? One is, is that when if you told a man like, hey, there's going to be a time of the month where your woman is just had it with you, she is sick to death of the way you look, the way you talk, the way you smell, you name it. And you'd be like, oh, I think that's pms, right? I think I heard about pms. And you're like, nope, sorry, bud. It's not that week. It's the subsequent week of ovulation. And there's some fascinating research that shows that women, when they're in their time of peak fertility, right, actually have a tendency, or at least a possibility. This doesn't happen all the time, but it's been observed and measured that they just get absolutely sick of their stable long term partner and they suddenly get the itch to scratch, right. Of new hot novel sex. And typically with a high testosterone, man. So in incel terminology, Reddit terminology, this would be going to find a chad, right? Strong jaw, the high masculinity, all of those things. And then back to mother nature playing dirty tricks. If she climaxes, if she has an orgasm with that novel partner, ovulation and conception can slide 3 days in either direction from her normal cycle. So even if she got her yayas out, she went to her, you know, she went to the bar, she, she did, she, she, she did her thing, came back the next day like, okay, I'm ready to get back to my home and my relationship. The odds are unusually high that she's just conceived a love child with her dangerous baby daddy. Right?

So you're like, because it's in, because it's new sperm.

Because. Yes, because. Or get. Yes. New genetic material. That's what evolution wants.

So this, this explains a really startling fact. I read in the book why Beautiful People have More Daughters. So it's a book on evolutionary biology.

Nice.

It said that in test of many populations. So they did a test in Germany and they found that 5% of the German population has a father that is not the father. They think. And that's one in 20 people.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And then, you know, you take, you take the other example. So that, that is, that's, those are the drivers for women in midlife. The drivers for men are sort of the flip side, which is right around 40, as you probably well know, right? Men experience a decrease in testosterone production. They experience it as listlessness, lack of mental acuity, a change from lean muscle mass to kind of pooling around a sort of dad bod. Middle, right. And one of the yearnings. And this is the classic midlife crisis format. I'm going to get an earring and a tribal tattoo and maybe a convertible Porsche, right? And I am now. And I. And I feel for the first time in my life that it's a sort of slow slip to the grave from here and I start seeking out new attention. In mates, the classic cliche is getting the divorce and running off with the secretary or whatever it would be.

Right.

That's the old, you know, sort of 50s kind of model. And that is actually, again, once again, for the male orgasm with a new younger mate is one of the highest spikers of testosterone. But when they do that, and then they also move through the lust attraction into pair bonding phase with their newer, incompatible mate, they're like, wait a second, I'm not sure we're that compatible. You know, like, I'm single malt scotch and you're a fireball shooter. You know, like I'm Nintendo and you're like Xbox. Like, wait a second, my friends aren't the same. My movie references are. We got nothing in common, right? Meanwhile, they have, boom, blown up. Their prior relationship created all of this conflict, and really, they could have completely saved all of that stuff by just going to their doctor and asking for a testosterone patch.

Wow.

Right? It's ludicrous. It's like the Coolidge effect, you know, kind of busting out of the hen house and showing up in the suburbs, you know, that famous.

So if men could have solved it with a testosterone patch, if men could have solved that itch with a testosterone patch, how would women solve that itch?

Well, I mean, this is another one. I mean, because this gets down to the hormonal kind of endocrine balances, another dirty trick. And we're, we're in the midst of it these days is that, you know, many women are on hormonal birth control for the last 40 years. Plus, really since the advent of the pill and the middle mid-60s, that's been kind of the go to fail safe. Right, Right. But what it does is it completely throws out of whack a woman's natural hormonal cycles. And as a result, she's basically, and I mean I use this term loosely and respectfully, but she's basically broody, right? She is ready to have a child and settle down. And what she's seeking in that hormonal state is a safe, secure, stable father to be. Then they get married or they do whatever they do. They conceive and have. She's like, okay, I'm ready to start trying to have a baby. Let's do this thing. She goes off the pill, her natural normal cycle comes back. Her Testosterone goes up, all these things. She's like, who is this milquetoast weenie boy in my bed? I got no time for this guy. And women on the pill have lower orgasmic peaks and satisfaction. They have higher relationship dissatisfaction. There's actually a fascinating book called Love Drugs by an Oxford ethicist and a Yale biologist. And they just go into the great details and the absolutely hammering negative effects of hormonal birth control for women. So the bottom line is, for men and women is understand that so much of the melodrama of our lives, right? Infidelity, divorces, love, jealousy. And also including the heavier stuff, sexual trauma, sexual abuse, right? All, you know, abortions, miscarriages. Like so much human suffering is caused because evolution is sitting up here just dancing us like puppets on a string of utterly indifferent genetic coding and getting.

Us to want to fuck as many people as we can to propagate the.

Human species and wreaking havoc in our lives and our relationships, right? So the question is, once we understand that, you're like, oh, my goodness, first of all, none of us are to blame. Like, this deck has been stacked from the beginning, and we're like just goobers at the Vegas, you know, blackjack table, just wondering why we're out of money all the time. So once we understand the inputs, once we understand the neurochemistry, once we understand these possess incentives of evolution and just how different they are from what we care about and cherish, then we can snip those strings, right? And we don't have to be puppets dancing on anybody's strings. We can take those incredibly strong drivers, those incredible, almost irresistible incentives, and we can repurpose them to healing, to wholeness, and to passion. Which brings us back to your initial question, which is if folks are experiencing some of that, if they've experienced bed death, right, the loss of passion, if they've found themselves suddenly just waking up next to a roommate and it's nothing but taking out the trash and paying the bills and getting the kids to school and soccer and it's just work obligations and responsibility. And we wonder where the spark went, right? What do most people say? Ah, yeah, buddy, get used to it, right? That's just. Them's the breaks and let me order another beer for us. And we can. We. We can weep into our mugs, you know, or women having comparable conversations. And so. And there's a sense that it's inevitable. There's a sense that it's unavoidable, that it's just the way things are. But Once you understand this research, you're like, oh, my gosh, we can roll back the clock.

So how do we do that? How do we recapture that passion?

Yeah. Well, I think the first is just to understand the hows and whys of how we lost it. Understand what? Literally? What's the neurochemistry of that lust phase? What's the neurochemistry of that attraction phase?

And to know that it's often neurochemistry, it's not necessarily bad character. We are fighting against our neurochemistry.

Yeah. And let's just assume that 90% of life is nothing but hits. It's nothing but duties, obligation, responsibilities, and setbacks. It's why so many of us lose that loving feeling. Right. But 10%, we have the ability to, like, literally make love. We can create and precipitate the neurochemical cascade. Just like Rick Doblin was sharing about that ptsd, MDMA research, we can create that ourselves. And once you're in that neurochemical state, magically, you feel lust, you feel attraction, you feel novelty. You can't keep your hands off each other, and everything is fresh and shiny again, and you stop the practices and it goes away, and you start the practices again, and it comes back and.

Okay, so this explains something I observed yesterday. So we're here at a fest, which. Which is a Mindvalley festival. And yesterday on the dance floor, there was this adjustment. They met at a mindvalley event. They met at Mindvalley University. They came back to a fest, and they were probably in their 50s or 60s, but they were just in the dance floor just making out with each other for hours, oblivious to everyone else. Everybody loved it. They thought that this couple being together for one year and being so into each other was such a beautiful, romantic sight to behold. But I remember having a conversation with some of my team members, and the girl next to me said, I wonder, what are they doing to maintain that level of passion and fire in their relationship? I'd like to ask you that question.

Yeah. So there's several steps, and I think the first is just to give ourselves permission, because, like, for most of us, right. Sexuality is entrenched in culture, psychology, power games. Right. Sex is either a reward for an awesome day. It's the exclamation point at the end of that sentence. Right. Or it's a bargaining chip to attain or achieve other things that we want. Whether that's time, attention, doing the dishes, you know, earning more money, whatever it might be. It becomes. It becomes sublimated into Sexual politics and power game. So either exclamation point, yeehaw. Or a bargaining chip for other things I want. And that is an incredibly, I mean that sets us up for failure and misery and that plays into evolution's hands, right? Because we're just going to play that, spin those roulette wheels and we're never going to be satisfied. So I think the first step is to realize, huh, I do yoga, I floss my teeth, I lift weights, I do whatever I do for my fitness wellness practice. Step one is what would it be like to cultivate a sexual fitness practice just like every other aspect of my life. And so the relational conversation is step one is commit to sexual fitness as ironclad practice, right? I don't wait until I'm super happy. Ding. Decide tonight's night. I floss my teeth. I don't wait till I just spring out of bed in an awesome morning like today. I go to yoga. Like I go to yoga, whether hell or high water, because I know in the long term it's better for me, right? So it's first just changing the bucket from bargaining chip or exclamation point into hey. We bow onto this mat on a consistent basis because we believe the accrued long term effects are something we value or even cherish in our life. So that's step one, right? Step two is work with whatever comes up, right? So if you're committed to the practice, right? And it's working and we can talk about specific protocols and programs that came out of that study that we did. But once you commit to that, right, if it's working well, things will get worse after they get better and there will be a point in fact, there's a, there's an Australian tantra teacher whose name is Barry Long. He's, he's, he's now dead. But he said something so jarring I've never forgotten it. But he said, he said, until you would rather eat a shit sandwich than your partner, you haven't even started tantra. So you're like, oh, okay. And that happens, right? Because basically what, what will happen as you start is at first you'll be super excited and thrilled because you're like, hey, we're like two electromagnetics. Know we're spinning up like copper wire, right? And the more they rotate, the more magnetic pull they have. And it's just practice based, right? And then suddenly you're just, that's passion, right? You're, you're glued together again. You're like, yeehaw. This is amazing. We have cracked the code secret of life, all that, and then invariably it sort of boils down through the day to day stuff. You, you start, you go from, I wonder if this is even possible, can we rekindle our love and passion to oh, yes, we can't miss. No, look, three. Three, you know, three pointers. Look, we are. Boom. And then you just run into the rock, which is like three years ago, five years ago, ten years ago. Wherever the buried resentments, imbalances, traumas are in your relationship, you will run smack dab into them. And right at that moment, you got two choices, right? You can either get kicked out of the practice and be like, fuck you, I hate you. I'm going to go and hang out with the buddies, or we're going to go watch football, or you're going to go drink or whatever is going to happen, whatever our old patterns are. Or you can be like, oh my gosh, this was anticipated. It's right on schedule, let's not flinch. And yes, I would rather eat a shit sandwich right now than fuck you, but we're going to show up on the mat, slash our bed, wherever our practice place is, and we're going to practice anyway. Through gritted teeth when I hate your fucking guts.

This reminds me of this scene from the Kevin Bacon movie. She's having a baby. And there's this hilarious scene in the movie, it's about a husband and wife and they're trying to conceive and they set a timer every time they are scheduled to have sex. And then there's this hilarious scene in the movie where Kevin Bacon's character comes back and he's tired from work, but the timer goes off and he's looking so jaded and tight, but he's still taking off his pants. He has a giant erection and he pushes himself to just fuck her. But I love that scene because it shows commitment to the act. And that's essentially what you're talking about.

Yeah. And as you're saying that, I mean.

But how do we overcome those situations when we. We just can't stand their face because we had a fight.

Yeah, well, I mean, I think this is, this is where Dr. Nicole Trousey's work, I think, was, was a beautiful unlock because she did a study. She actually did several studies and some that even that have made, you know, mainstream media and kind of gone viral. One of which was they did a 3D, this was a UCLA study, and they did a 3D printing of haptic objects, which is basically 3D printed dildos. And they gave and they laid them out for women because women would often, in all past studies, they were just given pictures of penises and penis size. Like what size Cosmo 101 kind of stuff. You know, does size really matter? But then they finally, for the first time, printed out 3D printed objects and the women got to choose. And what, and what they found was actually that they preferred for their regular lover, their kind of go to session lover, a penis of six inches. But for their one night stands, they kind of, they upgraded a little bit. They sort of selected for like 6.255 or 6 and a half inches. And then the paper was very prim. It was like, we conclude that a woman would be choosing the sort of the higher testosterone option, right. For their one night stands. Which kind of goes back to the earlier stuff we were studying. But the study that she did with a practice of basically manual stimulation of a woman's clitoris by her partner for 15 minutes. So no penetration, no other stuff, and no reciprocity. The woman wasn't on the hook to do anything on behalf of their partner. Right. And what she found was that just that alone a created a neurochemical cascade. It created a sort of saturation of parasympathetic nervous system. So instead of being stressed, wired and tired, like in my sympathetic system, with norepinephrine and cortisol and kind of vigilance, right. The women over time were able to slow down, settle down and regulate their autonomic nervous system. And then, interestingly, they also had peak experiences. They reported mystical states. And they compared that. They used the same questionnaire, the mystical experience questionnaire, the MEQ 30, which was originated at Johns Hopkins. And they used that and compared it to Johns Hopkins's research on psilocybin. And they actually ripped the women just from 15 minutes of digital stimulation of their clitoris had 4 to 6% higher peak states than the maximum dosage of mushrooms in the Hopkins studies.

Wow. So you're like, okay, 4 to 5%.

Yeah, more.

More peak states. So it's a tiny amount, but it's still significant than psilocybin or mdma. And that was just from stimulation of the clit.

Yeah.

And was that self stimulation or by.

That was with a partner. And I think some of the premise was, I mean, obviously women know their bodies better than most of their partners, but there was some sense of like you can't, how you can't tickle yourself. There was kind of an additional effect by having it not be your own volition.

Right. And so one of the most important things a man can do is to treat his woman by learning how to stimulate her clit when she's having a rough day.

Yes. And literally her research was, can we use this as a substitute for prescription pharmaceuticals? Can we literally use it medically? So she's like, hey, even in this sort of sex positive therapy space, she's like, there's still some subtle shaming going on. If somebody comes to their therapist and says, you know what? After a holiday or when I'm stressed, I masturbate to have an orgasm, they'll be like, that's poor coping skills. You should figure out something else. And. And Nicole is really drawing a line. She's like, why, if this can alleviate physical pain, like, I've got Crohn's disease or rheumatoid arthritis or. Or recovering from an arthroscopic injury or whatever it might be. And it does. The endorphins and the Anandamide can super saturate me, give me pain relief better than Advil, better than Motrin. Why on earth wouldn't I use it? If I'm having anxiety or sleeplessness, why would I just get prescribed Klonopin or Ambien? Couldn't I learn to manage this with my very own medicine cabinet? Right? Which is, you know, my prefrontal cortex, Right? My complex brain connected to my spinal column, connected to my erogenous zones. And fascinatingly, I mean, you said, you know, something as simple as, you know, stimulating a woman's clitoris. The woman's clitoris is, by a country mile, the highest concentration of nerve endings to be found in a human anywhere, man or woman. It's close to double the number of neurons that a man. The head of a man's penis has. So you're like, okay, that is a magical spot. And for any of you guys taking notes and listening along at home, also, just be under advisement. What every woman has ever been trying to tell you, which is it's not just a little love button. It's a complex wishbone shaped organ that goes. That wraps around a woman's pelvis and has an entire and massive realm of stimulation, engorgement, arousal, and sensation. So you're like, okay, and what were.

You saying about the science of exploring the clit when you were on stage earlier? You mentioned about how we've been to the moon, we've explored the depths of the ocean.

But yeah, I mean, I mean, fundamentally, it's just crazy. If you just sort of track civilization's progress, you know, 1945, we learned to split the atom. Robert Oppenheimer is like, behold, we have become death, destroyer of worlds. You know, 1969, we send it. We put a man on the moon and Neil Armstrong's like one giant step. And it's not until like 1996 or thereabouts that. And of course, a, a female gynecologist and scientist accurately and fully mapped the woman's clitoris. 1996, you know, what did it take?

That, wow.

You know, we're sort of dumb, but we're slow. So. So that becomes. And back to like practices, right? And you even use that example of Kevin Bacon in the movie and he's sort of reluctant. Here we go. It's kind of even. Even sex can become a duty, a chore and an obligation, right? And sort of, you know, exacerbate performance anxiety, still exacerbate any tensions in the relationship. I just thought as you were talking of all the couples that struggle with in vitro, Right. And one of the most consistent stories that people report from that is just how it became so stressful and how it became so loaded and how it became so rote and structured and burdened with expectation. And we lost the spontaneity and we lost the play. It was all just duty and obligation. You know, it was almost like a veterinary process, right?

Now, do you recommend to bring back that play, to bring back that discovery one tries sexual with psychedelics, say psilocybin or mdma?

Well, we are rushing all the way to the end of the fun stuff here, but we'll come back to that. Right? So, so the first thing I think is based on Nicole Prowse's work, right? The simplest is a. We've committed to sexuality as a practice. So we've said sexual fitness matters and we're going to try it. So just give yourself a month, right? And then just commit to nothing more for that 30 days of 15 minutes of clitoral stimulation for a feminine identified partner.

Okay, right. 15 minutes of clitoral stimulation, okay?

And that's it. And no reciprocity. And in fact, you should even have the kibosh on any follow up or escalation.

Exactly. So the man should basically keep his stays clothed.

And this goes back to the Kevin Bacon story, right? Because I mean, at least speaking for myself, speaking with other men, the man.

Is doing it without expectation of any reciprocity.

Well, not just that. Also without any expectation or requirement of razzle dazzle performance, right? So like if you think about it, if a man comes home and he's tired or he's stressed, he's just got his ass kicked by his boss, whatever. Like, he's not feeling like a superstar. He's like, oh, no, honey, I can't. I want. I'm just gonna go down to my man cave and, you know, watch sports. But the idea of, like, oh, can I show up and give you your daily medicine? I can do that. Right, right. And it fits like 15 minutes. I mean, how many times do householders do couples together, especially with children, right? Be like, we never have the time. And the only time we have the time is at the end of our days, right? When all of our chores and duties have been completed and our kids are in bed. And maybe to get in the mood, maybe we'll even have a couple of drinks. We'll mix alcohol in with this and you. And if you hang your hat, if you hang your relational satisfaction on end of the day, alcohol facilitated. Are we still feeling it? You will be. Oh, for a thousand. Because there's also a diurnal cycle, right? There's the cycle of men's testosterone, the whole morning wood thing, right? A man wakes up often with an erection. Some of that is need to pee, but the rest of it is a spike in testosterone, right? And then it tapers through the morning, and then it comes back up in the early afternoon, which is hence with more oxytocin available. So if a woman just wants, you know, a quick and dirty, your morning man's the guy, right? But if she actually wants relatedness and connection with passion, afternoon delight skyrockets in flight, right? That's the time. There's a reason. There was the rock song about it. And then from there, it's just a slow, slippery slide to the grave. And so after 8pm, a man's testosterone drops off a cliff and you're both exhausted and you're fried. So it. So the biggest move you could possibly make as a couple is beg, borrow, or steal time in the afternoon for your practice. And if that's simply impractical, how convenient.

That in our world today, more and more people are working from home.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And that alone, that will change your hit rate by a factor of 10 to 100, right? And so again, once again, it's not us, it's the structures. If you're really saying we've lost that loving feeling and we only can, you know, it's. It's the pillow, dear sweet rest or us getting busy and then throw in the plummeting of sexuality at night because everyone's on their screens, right? So like, I've got a dopamine slot machine in front of me. Or we could kind of dust off that crusty old relationship. And we haven't even talked about the shit that went down this week. No, I'm not just, I'm just going to keep scrolling until I pass out. So no screens. Basically. Bedrooms should be for two things and two things only sleeping. And, and take all screens out of that environment, right? Plug them in down in the kitchen, leave them alone. And no TV in bedrooms. So once you have that, then you have the capacity to start spinning that flywheel. So, right, we're at, we're at sexist practice. The sexist ironclad practice. We do it whether we feel like it or not. Clitoral stimulation as prescription, pharmaceutical, and 30 days of providing that for the female identified partner, nothing else.

Right.

Just let that simmer then. And, and I, and I would, you know, without giving away the game, I guarantee you that's not all that's going to be happening in that month.

Right?

Right. But then you can start adding in. Now you add in a cadence, so you add Tuesdays or Thursdays or. Right. Somewhere in the middle of the week, one hour of, you start the same exact way. You still start with your 15 minute beginning. And by the way, you know, for the boys and men here, you should not, you should never attempt, you should never attempt penetration before your woman has had at least one orgasm. Because that whole clitoral system, which is as big as the male's business, just takes a while to prime and pump up, right? So, so if a woman is only meeting a guy when he's got a boner and is ready to put it somewhere, she's always going to end up disappointed. I see the clocks, you got to synchronize the clocks. And you start and the clocks are off by at least 15 to 20 minutes. So start with that. Then you can go into whatever your practice would be and enjoy it. Right. Twice a week. And then we would highly encourage reclaiming some version of a secular Sabbath. So then that's an hour plus an hour, right? Your Tuesdays and Thursdays, and then carve out two hours or even three hours for what you might call sort of body church, your secular Sabbath, your time together. And then you can really kick out the jams. Then you can engage in. And what, what that study that we conducted, right, that the participants described this as a sort of sexual yoga of becoming. And now you can really bust out all the bells and whistles, which doesn't have to be, you know, what we think of as sexuality and erotic stuff. It's literally like body work. Like how do I combine sexual arousal, right? All of that neurochemistry, all of that circuitry with Thai massage, right? With fascia massage with theraguns, with loving and healing and touching each other? And how can we combine that in a way that ramps up the energy, increases the neurochemical cascade and maximizes and optimizes the healing and release to be gained from it?

Beautiful, beautiful. So sex and mdma, sex and psilocybin. Is that something that you think might help spice up a couple's love life?

Yeah. Well, so now let's take a, let's pan back from that and take a look at the entire concept of making love, right? How do we create the neurochemical priming, right, that renders peak states, deep connection and trauma release most possible. So the first is, you know, back to what we were talking about earlier, right? What is the endocrine balance of the two partners? So if there's a male identified partner, what, what is his free testosterone and availability? For the woman, it will be what is her testosterone and availability? Because that is also present in women and a key element in sex drive, but also her estrogen balance. If she's been on the pill, remember, she's out of whack. If she is post her cycle and she's into a perimenopausal state or a, or menopausal state, there was all of that very inflammatory research about, oh, estrogen therapy. Estrogen replacement therapy causes cancer. So many women that just kind of made the rounds and unfortunately, awful lot of women are under supplemented. So however you're going to balance it, balance it so that your hormonal profile of your sex hormones is optimized. Women can take dhea, which is a precursor, which can become estrogen or testosterone. Men can too. And you just kind of need to watch what epigenetic expressions you have as to what it gets coded as in your body. But you can take, you can take precursors and primers. You can also supplement with nitric oxide, right? So nitric oxide, whether that beets, beet juice, any of the concentrates is kind of a baby step if you also go, because that increases blood flow and dilation. So you have, you have more engorgement, you have more blood flow, more sensation, right? More arousal. So you can do that as well also actually more neurochemical access to bliss. Herbert Benson at Harvard University call it the spirit molecule.

And how do you get nitric oxide.

So you can supplement it dietarily with beet juice, with beet concentrates. If you in fact most like GNCs, right. All of the weight, I believe.

L Arginine, yes, right. L. Arginine would help, would do that.

So that's the kind of mild version. You can do it dietarily. Dietarily you can do sesame seeds and pumpkin seeds and, and beef. You can do it with supplements that would be kind of the medium version and then the spicy version would be literally to Dalafil or Cialis or, or Viagra. Those are all interact with, with that pathway. And while many folks have you know, rightly claimed that a woman's arousal pattern, because we actually know the Harvard gynecologist who was on that, that drug Addi, which was supposed to be the female Viagra and it got canned and panned, right. But he actually told us the whole backstory of the, the clinical trials and actually how close it actually was to being effective. But without a doubt, while there are many components to a few full and satisfying arousal relatedness and human experience, you can also make the case that, right, blood flow and engorgement helps prime that situation. And so that's the sort of, that's the full on version. Then you can also go as far as, and I know Dave Ashbury, I think has mentioned this maybe even on your podcast or elsewhere. Topical testosterone gels even applied to a woman, right can massively increase arousal and engorgement. You need to be very mindful of not over indexing on these things. These are incredibly powerful drugs that we'll be putting back into our system. But you can absolutely prime yourself. And there's also a timing situation. So if you want to increase. We said that on a day to day basis, right. On a diurnal cycle, last thing at night is your death knell. Avoid that at all cost. But there's also the, you know, men are solar, right? Our cycles come and go by the day. Women are lunar, as all women know and go on a 28 day cycle, more or less. And the key peaks is, is you know that there's a whole range between progesterone, estrogen, testosterone, prolactin, and there are times that are fallow, right where a woman doesn't has, is slow to arouse, is not particularly fired up and there's times of peak ovulation where she is ready to have wild swing from the chandeliers hookups. And for any guys that are clueless about this, their only sense is like she's on the rag or she's not. You know, like I get some or I don't like if that's, if that's the binary basic that the dude is operating from, you're out to lunch, brother. You know, there's this, there's a 28 day cycle and there is a week in there that is your absolute magic zone. So if you're ever bastard, like what's, what's up honey? Like last weekend I like was rocking your world. Like what's up now? You want me to slow down and like give you a massage? Like, come on. Right? So guys are just clueless. And if you're going to again, back to families, couples, householders, if you're going to plan what in the UK they call your dirty weekend where you go away to a hotel to make love and have privacy, you want to time it 100% for the weekend that overlaps with the woman's ovulatory week. And what's more, again for folks playing along at home, you can play hot wire roulette. You know, go onto hotwire, they don't tell you what the hotel is. Select four or five stars and then just ring the bell and see where you get. And one of the best hacks because for many people childcare is a, is a rate limiter. It's really, really hard to figure it out. And definitely for overnights, right? And what you can do instead is play hot wire roulette on the week that your female identified partner is ovulating. So that's your maximum time. Prime with your testosterone with your nitric oxide supplementation with all of those elements and then check in as early as you can. Check in and have a minimal, amazing afternoon lovemaking in privacy. Go out to dinner after. Most of dating is like we go to dinner and then with full stomachs and booze on board, somebody hopes to get lucky. Don't do that. Go and like fitness athletes, check in, have an amazing magical afternoon, have an incredible dinner, bathing in the afterglow and be home by 10 or 11. And the ability to have a babysitter from 4 to 11 is infinitely higher.

Brilliant idea, right?

I mean I learned this the hard way at staying at my in laws for, for Christmas holidays. And I was going out with my partner and we were went to a movie and then went to sushi and I'm like, all I want to do is be with you. What are we doing? Let's get out of here and then still come home. So it was like a big huge Aha. So that's a great hack. And now we get to the place of, okay, we've done our pre priming, we've done our neurochemistry, we've got our schedules and timing. So then the question is, okay, what does the spicy look like? And this goes back to that. That book Love Drugs. Because they made a case. They're like, hey, if anybody thinks that combining drugs with sexuality is cheating or it's a shortcut or it's any of those kinds of things, they're like, look, the bad news is we're already doing it. We use alcohol, we use hormonal birth control, and we use SSRIs constantly. In fact, find the person that is not under the influence of at least one of those during their sexual encounter, and they're like, every single one of them is terrible for us. I mean, SSRIs, the antidepressants, like Prozac, are well known to basically, yes, they take you out of the bottom, but they take off the top. And one of the most consistent side effects, in addition to potential weight gain, is utter tanking of your libido, right? So it's like, we're already doing chem sex. We're just doing it badly. So the questions is, what kind. What is healthy, productive, responsible chemical supplementation and priming for optimized sexuality? Right? So we've covered a few of them, and now you're kind of. You're nudging into, what about in pathogens? What about, like, mdma? What about psychedelics like psilocybin or lsd? Sasha Shulgin, who is the famous renegade chemist who. Who basically cracked the code on all designer drugs. And he was the first one, along with his wife Ann, who was also a psychotherapist and made use of MDMA for those situations. He has an entire logbook, which they publish. They published against the DA's advice. They're just like, we want those recipes to be out there for humanity. And every single one of their notes, they would have erotic and they'd give it a score, right? So they literally. What was it like to make love under the influence of that compound? And they had a magical love life. They were honestly probably some of the most. Some of the sort of psychedelic tantra pioneers. And Sasha and Ann's hands down favorite was 2C B, which is in the sort of mescaline family. But for them, they found that that was kind of the combination of kind of magical plus arousing plus manageable or steerable. Right? And mdma, which Is often, you know, it's street name these days is Ecstasy. That was kind of a rebrand when it made it into gay culture in Dallas and the sort of in the club scene when it was still legal in the 80s. Prior to that, when Sasha and Anne were using it largely in the Bay Area for psychotherapeutics, it was called empathy and even Adam, because it was sort of brought you back to your primal being. And it does have a known side effect of any serotonergic enhancement. And, you know, serotonin is soft tone. So typically erections are harder to maintain under the influence of mdma. Now, most ravers and club goers hacked that in Ibiza. There was the notion of sex to see, right, which became the combining of Viagra or some other. What are the. Whatever the class is called with mdma. Giant warning on that one. Because it comes. You're doing two different things to your nervous system and you can end up passing out. You can end up either with accelerated heart rate. And it's. So, you know, don't try that at home. Kids, like, know that when you're combining things and you're also combining it with intense arousal, those things can be dangerous. So consult, consult your curious, courageous, connected, functional medicine doctor right before trying any of that at home. And another. Another caveat or caution is, you know, that way lies both ecstasy and enlightenment and madness and ruin. So if you're going to be in those kind of states and places with the supplementation of entheogens, right, you may well find yourself moving through deep and profound traumas of your own. Biographical trauma, like, this is my life, maybe even this is in our relationship. You will then potentially find yourself coming up to the level of archetypal traumas where you're like, oh, my gosh, I'm feeling something for all women, not just me. I am now in that kind of numinous space, and I'm now managing stuff that's coming through me. It could be epigenetic and ancestral. It could be archetypal and just out there in the noosphere, who knows, right? There's, I mean, TBD on how we nail that down. It's very novel territory that I don't think has been documented especially well. And then you might even get all the way up into Tron's personal realms where you're like, whoa, we're not even humans anymore, right? And what is happening here? And then you can find yourself straight outside of time in what, you know, in the Greek tradition would have been called kairos. So you kind of slip out of Kronos. And again, this is a very, there's a very straight neurophysiological profile to this and it tends to correlate with brain stem reset. Right. Which shows up as very low neuroelectric activity. So it's almost like that movie Flatliners, you know, where there's those med school students paddle each other and knock each other out and they die to then bring them back. And in between they're in magical realms. Of course it always goes horror because like you shouldn't play with that stuff. Right. That's the moral. But the reality is, is we can flatline ourselves near about into delta wave activity. And you, you and I have talked about delta, delta waves before. It is a bafflingly bizarre, potent and interesting domain. And you can get there via prolonged edging and stimulation of the nervous system and the arousal networks. And back to Nicole Prowse.

I told you she while on MDMA.

With or without chemical supplementation. But the with just ramps it up more.

I see. Now what about psilocybin?

Yeah, I mean psilocybin, it depends how it lives in your body. For some people they end up with kind of like stomach distress and bloating or body load or fatigue. So if you, if it agrees with you and, or specific strains agree with you and you're into sort of threshold dosing. Right. I think that would be something that would be possible. LSD obviously has a very long half life, so you're in for a ride. But it's cleaner in the sense of it's, it's less of a body load. So, so you can play with those. You can also play with. And this is not advice, this is simply a description of what's possible. You can also play with breath, work with oxygen and nitrous oxide and you can also play with ketamine, ketamine lozenges or intranasal ketamine and oxytocin. Funnily enough, you can combine those two in a liquid intranasal form. So you get potentially and the research is still out on how effective intranasal oxytocin is crossing the blood brain barrier versus it's just kind of up your nose and wasted.

And of course we, we want to stress that all of this should be done in places where they are legal.

Absolutely. Like under the advisement and consultation or the functional medicine doctrine. Right, right. But you combine those things and you can actually layer them. So now you're going from, hey, a 12 hour acid trip or ayahuasca trip. That's a hell of a commitment. And I'm. And in order for me to get to a place that that's really inspirational, I gotta load up. And the more I load up, the weirder. The up. The ramp up and the come down are from the mountaintop. I just sploogy. And that's kind of a. That's a risky time. That's time I can get tired. It's a time weird stuff can happen in life. I'm not super compass mentis. And instead you can say, hey, let's compress the time zone and raise the amplitude. And you can do that by intentional stacking of practices and substances. And that way you can get in, get all the way up to the stratosphere, right? Come back, make sure you don't fumble that football. Right? Here's this golden egg. You've just been given these gifts. Don't forget it as you slip out of delta and as you come back into waking consciousness and then cherish it, integrate it.

That's amazing, Jamie. Let's. Let's wrap up as we come to the closing of this podcast.

Yeah, I mean, I think the simplest is just to realize that if you were experiencing bed death or you're even concerned about maybe ending up there yourself in your relationship, you've seen friends, you've seen family do it, and then it's kind of a slow slip to the grave or the divorce court. The simplest answer is to realize it's not you, it's not personal. This is structural. And this goes back to Helen Fisher's work and that kind of progression of evolution, making us glue together like Magnics and stay together just long enough to have a kid, and then kind of, kind of pushes us apart. And it's also just a reflection on the actual realities of our day to day. That like keeping a house together, paying the bills together, coming and going from commutes and work, managing kids and families and aging parents, kind of sucks. It's kind of hard. And if we didn't have a way to put more credits in the bank account, we're going to end up relationally bankrupt. So if we're feeling that way, just know, oh, that's structural. That's not personal. And we can reverse it. And we can reverse it by committing to sexuality as a practice and perfecting how to make love, how to actually prime the neurochemistry of the lust and the attraction that fired us up in the beginning and we swore was in the rearview mirror of our lives. But we can actually bring it back and light our path ahead.

Jamie, that was a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful journey that you just took us on. And I think what you just shared is going to be so valuable for so many couples who are experiencing this. So quick recap. The first thing you mentioned is that we need to be aware that evolution is going to screw us over. And between the three to seven year mark, we're certainly going to get that itch. But that itch is basically a biochemical reaction. And as you mentioned, there are certain things we can do to help tame that itch. But the second thing we want to do is develop a sexual fitness practice. And you outline multiple ways we can do that. What else in summary?

Well, I mean the simplest is to realize that it's basically a sliding spectrum, right. The first half of that sexual fitness practice is just how do we defrag our nervous systems from micro ptsd, the day to day grinds that accumulates the stones in our shoe. But the second half, if we stick with it, and particularly if we get more ambitious with the questions that you were asking, supplementing, stacking, adding neurochemistry and entheogens, it can go all the way into a transcendent practice and allow us to heal and rewrite our deepest traumas and, and potentially even be doing work on behalf of our extended clans and lineage. And if people are interested in learning more, and actually literally, the paint by numbers step by step study that we conducted with 10 couples over 12 weeks, you can go and see the entire study, the research, their journal entries, exactly how to and everything else@recapturetherapture.com and then just click on the link. I think it says research and. And it's one of the research studies.

Beautiful. And the book is called recapture the rapture Rethinking God's sex and death in a world that's lost its mind. Amazing book. Jamie just gave a talk on this book here at AFS to a beautiful standing ovation. Jamie, give us a quick idea of what people are going to get from this book.

Sure. Well, it's divided into three parts, three stories really. And the first one is called choose your own apocalypse, which is hey, we're all living in wild times, we're doom scrolling our phones and we, we don't know whether to make heads or tails of what's happening outside each day and how do we choose and chart our life? So the first one is not that any one of us can know what to think, but we're going to help you think through your own decisions. To have some clarity and some calm on the road ahead. Part two is what we've been talking about. It's called the Alchemist Cookbook, which is a play on that old underground book, the Anarchist Cookbook, which was like how to build bombs and this kind of stuff. So think of the Alchemist Cookbook is how to blow yourself up to God consciousness using household materials. And then if we figure that out, the part three is ethical cult building. If we're going to create experiences of peak states and deep healing and vulnerability, we almost always put it in the ditch with cultic communities. So the question isn't can we avoid cults, it's how do we build ethical community and how do we learn the toolkit that allows us to do that right? That allows us to keep each other inspired by, but to hold each other accountable and to never forget the important life saving work we all have to do in the world.

Gorgeous. Thank you, Jamie. So a couple of resources that you guys can tap into if you are a Mindvalley member. These are some content that you will find in the mindvalley app that I think will take you deeper down this rabbit hole. First, click on the Discover button, click on series and explore the film. Category 13. It's under Mindvalley film. So this is a short documentary film we produce with John and Missy Butcher. John and Missy Butcher are the creators of Lifebook, which is a division of Mindvalley. It is America's number one goal and life envisioning system. But John and Missy have been a monogamous couple for 33 years and they have turned their sex life into an art form. Category 13 is a film that shows you how to create sex as art. And it is going to open your mind to so many remarkable ways to create an incredible depth of intimacy with your partner. John and Missy have been together, As I said, 33 years, five grandchildren, but they are more madly in love than ever. They are such an exquisite couple to observe. So check out category 13. Now, when it comes to Jamie's recommendation on stimulating the clitoris, we have a program on that. It's called Waves of Pleasure by Bibi Broschka. So this program is something designed for women, but if you're a man who happens to care about a woman, you can watch it too. And you will learn the art of stimulating the breast and the clit in the most exquisite ways. This program is just beautifully created. In seven days, you become a master of delivering pleasure. So go check it out. It's called Waves of pleasure by B.B. brazoszka. And finally, a new Tantra program is coming soon. It's by Leila Martin. She's widely considered the greatest Tantra teacher on the planet today. Laila's new program on Tantra will be coming to your mindvalley membership soon, so all of that is available for you if you are a mindvalley member. Thank you for joining us on this episode of the mindvalley Podcast. Don't forget to click subscribe if you're watching this on YouTube or Spotify or click Follow. And also if you found this topic interesting, please share this with couples whom you think are going to find this this message really beneficial for their health and their relationships. Thank you Jamie.

Thanks for having me.

Sa.