Artemisia de Vine – Sexual Fantasy Coach, Former Professional Dominatrix, Sex Worker and Somatic Sexologist, The Surprising Wisdom Of Your Sexual Fantasies, Smut Instead Of Meditation, Embodied Play And More (#7)

“How can I make sense of my strange sexual fantasies that bubble up out of my subconscious against my will and get me very excited?“

What if your sexual fantasies could be the key to unlocking a deeper understanding of your ego?

Brace yourself for an intense discussion as I chat to with the captivating Artemisia de Vine, a former professional dominatrix and sex worker.

We dive into the fascinating rabbit hole of sexual fantasies, exploring everything from the innocuous to the unconventional, and how they can be acknowledged and harnessed in a healthy manner for maximum pleasure.

Artemisia dissects the intricate relationship between our sexual fantasies and our ego, specifically focusing on the three ‘S’s of ego – self-identity, status, and self-worth.

We ponder the concept of embodied play and talk about how forming an embodied relationship with desire can turn it into a beautiful ally.

The conversation intensifies as we journey into our unconscious desires and analyze how our nervous system reacts to stress and trauma. Artemisia provides a unique perspective on how these automatic responses are actually tactics for self-preservation and how we can repurpose stories as a medium to prioritize our pleasure.

She also talks about “The deVinery Method”, a system she designed to help with unlocking our sexual fantasies, as well as how understanding the three guards of ego can take us deeper into ourselves in a profoundly beautiful way.

Our conversation also gravitates towards Artemisia’s personal experiences and insights, which shed light on the psychology behind our intimate yearnings.

If you’ve ever been curious about the psychology behind fantasies or are looking for ways to bring your own fantasies to life, this episode is a must-listen.

Enjoy!

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In This Episode Of The Rageheart Podcast With Artemisia de Vine, You’ll Discover:

• How to make sense of sexual fantasies that bubble up out of your subconscious against your will and get you excited (even though they’re not what you think you should want)
• How to use smutty, sexual fantasies as a gateway into expanded (and sometimes even spiritual) states of awareness (where more of you is awake)
• How to tap into the medicine and wisdom of your sexual fantasies (yes, including the kinkiest and seemingly “dirtiest” fantasies too)
• The 3 Guards of Ego that you need to pass if you want the fantasy to take you into a expanded state of being (think of them as guards on a bridge)
• Why fantasies are the exact story our ego needs to hear to let its guard down (and why it’s not as simple as recreating exactly what you see in your head)
• How to do all of the above with OR without a partner (because if you can do this on your own, you’re never dependent on someone else to do it for you)
• How all of this relates to embodiment, nervous system health and everything at Rageheart (because getting into your body and unleashing the beast is good for your sex life)

Chapters:

• 0:03 Unleashing Sexual Fantasies
• 6:51Exploring Sexual Fantasies and Acceptance
• 21:42 The deVinery Method
• 28:14 Sexual Fantasies and Ego Power
• 43:15 Sexual Fantasies and Psychological Significance
• 58:15 Exploring Desire and Embodied Play
• 1:07:25 Exploring Embodiment and Fantasy
• 1:18:07 Nervous System and Survival Mechanisms
• 1:22:51The Daily Growl

Links From The Episode:

• Artemisia’s website – https://www.artemisiadevine.com/
• Artemisia’s free free mini-course introducing The Desire Compass – https://www.artemisiadevine.com/Desire-Compass-free-course
• Artemisia’s crowdfunding for self-publishing costs of her upcoming book The Value of Sexual Fantasies. Join her mailing list on her website – https://www.artemisiadevine.com/
• The Daily Growl (my daily email newsletter) – https://www.rageheart.co/
• The Rageheart Academy – https://www.rageheart.co/go/

Podcast Shorts

Transcription:

Speaker 1: 0:03
Welcome to the Rageheart Podcast, where we talk about how to get in touch with your emotions, connect to the universe with psychedelics and charge really, really, really shiny crystals in the light of the full moon.

Speaker 2: 0:22
I’m just fucking with you.

Speaker 3: 0:24
I can remember one in particular. One guy saying is a farmer who’s like what do you look like? Do you take it up the shit up? And that’s what he said to me on the phone. So this is all I know about him.

Speaker 2: 0:40
If you’re a turn up to the door, Alright, it’s John Wood here, the founder of Rageheart and the host of the Rageheart Podcast. I’d like to welcome you to the show. If this is your first time, or maybe your last time, we’ll see when I talk to all kinds of interesting people, including therapists, ayahuasca shamans and maestros, occasionally my pet cats, and today to a former professional dominatrix and sex worker, and we talk about all things nervous system healing, psychedelics, how to unleash the beast inside you and today, as you’ll find out, about sexual fantasies some generic ones, some normal ones or a normal one, really, I should say and some, you know, some other fantasies that are a little bit outside the norm. Let’s just say so. That’s today. Her name is Artemisia Devine and I’m not going to bother with a long intro here because she’s going to tell her story in the podcast itself. She’s a former professional dominatrix and sex worker, like I said. So she has a lot of stories to share and, I believe, even a lot of wisdom to share, especially around the area of our sexual fantasies, which a lot of us, a lot of people, are ashamed about. So hopefully, if we’ve done our job here with this episode, that’s going to change after today. Okay, I even share some of my sexual fantasies, which made me a bit nervous when I dropped it casually into the interview and I thought about removing it because I’m worried. What are people going to think? Right, Our sexual fantasies are pretty personal. You know, I’m worried that people are going to judge me. People aren’t going to think I’m the same kind of dude if they know what I’m into. But then, as I thought about it some more, when I think about Rageheart, what I want Rageheart to be about, it’s not about being someone, the person you think you need to be to please other people. You know, like I’ve said so many times before, it’s about unleashing the beast, which is really just a reference to unleashing or getting in touch with the animal that’s inside you. And if you look at animals, they don’t care, but the most part what people think about them, they are completely and totally themselves. And so, instead of cutting out any of my personal shares in this interview about my own fantasies, I decided to just to leave it all in there, because it’s not super detailed, you don’t have to, I don’t think you have to worry too much about that. But you know, I want Rageheart and I want to be an example that we don’t need to be afraid of what people think about us, whether it’s with our sexual fantasies or anything else, and so that’s what I’ve done. So that’s enough intro for that. I’ve got one review this week I’d like to read out from Cave Woman 8. She is a member of the Daily Growl. She’s also inside the Rageheart Academy and she was so kind to leave me a podcast review for the Rageheart podcast on Apple on the Apple podcast store app, whatever you want to call that. She says Cave Woman 8 says Rageheart Rocks. I love listening to the Rageheart podcast. John Wood is brilliant in the way he presents and teaches about nervous system healing. John adds a level of fun creativity unsurpassed by any other podcast. Also, I was dead and now I’m alive. Since joining the Rageheart Academy and signing up for the Daily Growl, feeling safe in my body now has changed my life in so many ways because of Rageheart. I highly recommend all of John Wood’s creativity. That review is from Cave Woman 8. Like I said, if you’d like to get onto the Daily Growl that’s a daily email newsletter go to RageArtcocom justco, sign up for the Daily Growl on the homepage there and you’ll also find out, once you’re on the Daily Growl, how to get into the Rageheart Academy, which is where I teach a lot of the techniques for nervous system healing techniques. I tease a little bit in the show as well. If you enjoy this show, if you enjoy this episode, it would blow me away, make my day. Basically, if you would jump over to Apple or Spotify and leave if that’s where you listen to podcasts and leave a review. Five stars, one star, just make it interesting, whatever it is, and if it’s funny, even if it is a one star, I’ll probably read it out. But five stars is always, always appreciated, always preferred Five stars. Now, with all of that out of the way, let’s get into the interview with Artamija Devine. All right, it’s John Wood here, the founder of Rageheart. I’m here with Artamija Devine. She is a former sex worker professional, former professional dominatrix and former certified somatic sexologist who created tailored experiences for thousands of clients. She now works as a sexual fantasy coach and helps people understand why we have sexual fantasies, from mild to the wild ones, and gives them a framework to guide people step by step through the art and psychology of bringing sexual fantasies to life, and I wanted to get her on because I’ve actually worked with her before as a sexual fantasy coach, and she talked a lot about being in the body, learning to understanding your own boundaries, understanding safety, knowing how to feel that not as a thought and even working with fantasies, not from a mental well, not only from a mental perspective, but from an embodied perspective, which is very much the same thing I’m talking about in Rageheart, not the sexual fantasy part I suppose I touch on that sometimes but more the embodiment piece of being in touch with sensation and feeling. And for that reason I just thought you’d make a really interesting guest for the podcast. I think she has some amazing ideas that I haven’t heard anyone else talking about. So just some ways of looking at and understanding our sexual impulses, all the little crevices, all the different things we secretly fantasize about and maybe you don’t understand and maybe even have a bit of shame about. So, and as I said in another podcast I did recently, sex and Sematics or Sex and Embodiment probably two of my favorite topics there’s certainly two of the most fun things for me to talk about, so that’s why I’ve got Artemisia Devine here today. So, artemisia, I have a question to begin with. There’s a lot of questions, but we’ll start with one. What got you interested in sexual fantasies?

Speaker 3: 7:03
Well, first of all, I just thank you so much for having me here. I absolutely love that you called your podcast and your body of work Rageheart. That is just fabulous. Rage is such a big, passionate, huge energy and it’s you know, I used to be so afraid of it. It’s probably actually my learning how to be in relationship with Rage in an embodied level that actually got me to a place where I could understand how we could get in relationship embodied relationship with desire, because desire is another big, hot, powerful state, right. That changes our way of thinking when we’re in it. So I just love it. I love that you called it Rageheart. That’s fantastic. Good on you. I really resonate with that. But jumping to sexual fantasies because that’s what people like to hear about is I guess my own taboo fantasies got me interested in it. How could I possibly make sense of my own strange sexual fantasies that just seem to bubble up out of my unconscious against my will and get me very excited? You know, when I was a teenager, in an extremist religious upbringing context, you know, with massive good girlitis and feminism, and my fantasies were not feminist, they were the exact opposite. So how could I make sense of these taboo fantasies that were about being treated and treating others in ways that I didn’t want to treat people in the outside world. That’s the first thing that got me intrigued, like and trying to work out how on earth do we deal with power in this? All sorts of different things. But then the second part that got me interested is later in life. I, as you mentioned before, I became a sex worker and a professional dominatrix and initially, when I started, I was not doing it for holy reasons. I wanted money really quickly. I wasn’t interested in analyzing anything or making it holy, I was just like, okay, I need, you know, $20,000 really quickly. How am I going to do that in my really boring admin job that gives me just enough money to eat out twice a week? And decided to give sex worker try and I had these. I kept stumbling around responses to people’s fantasies. That well, it definitely got me intrigued. Let’s put it that way. So it’s actually the client reactions to me, trusting their fantasy, that got me intrigued. I was like what is happening here? What is happening here? Did you ever did you start accepting your fantasies or did you? I’m not the only one, who’s? I’m pretty sure there’s listeners. There’s lots of people who’re going to be a bit confused about what to do with their fantasies. Right, I’m not the only one.

Speaker 2: 10:35
I mean, yeah, like, like a lot of that resonates with me where I have. I think the first time I had I took MDMA with. My first time I took MDMA with my ex-girlfriend in Thailand some point through this night. It was a very sexy night and some point during the night, the idea popped into my head of what would it be like to put some makeup on and wear a dress. I’d never, up until that point, I mean, I think I’d done a little bit when I was like six years old or something, you know, when you’re playing around, but I’d never really even thought about that as a thing. And when that idea came up, it’s like what? Like, how is this? How is this a thing? How is this so interesting and exciting and compelling right now? And so that sparked that was, I don’t know, 2017, so six or seven years ago now. So since then, I’ve explored it quite a bit in various ways and I think At different times, there’s been a yeah, there can be a bit of shame or a bit of I shouldn’t be doing this, or I’m a dude, I’m happy being a dude, I like being a man, and yet there’s this other part of me that’s like well, no, sometimes wouldn’t be nice to put some lipstick on or pretend you’re a girl for a few hours. And over time. I think, partly through learning from people like yourself, I’ve probably come to a place now where it’s like well, I mean, there’s healthy and unhealthy ways to do anything, light and dark of everything. So it’s not all good, it’s not all bad, it’s just another thing to explore. It’s been so much fun and it’s taught me so, so, so much. And so I think right now I’m in a place where, yeah, I accept it Comes and goes like comes in waves. You probably know this too. I’m guessing this is pretty common. It’s not always there. Sometimes I couldn’t care less. It’s been a journey. But right now I’m like no, this seems like it’s just a part of me for the time being and it’s not gonna magically disappear, and trying to get rid of it doesn’t work. So well it’s just me at the moment.

Speaker 3: 12:35
That’s fantastic. I love it so much. Ha ha ha ha. And lots of people explore that, of course, in sex work, especially once I became a dominatrix, and people felt much more free to explore the things that were not so socially sanctioned versions of sex, right, ha ha ha. So, and that’s where the interesting reactions started coming from. That’s what really got me intrigued. I mean, when I very first started you know, as I said before, I just wanted money and then I went very, very, very first started I didn’t have any concept whatsoever of how to do a pre-session consultation. I was just thrown through myself in the deep end. Let’s say, I’m not risk adverse in my life. Ha ha ha, I’m just willing to give something a try. So I’d had these experiences where people would call up on the phone and actually when I very, very, very fast started, I was in the country towns because I thought, oh, I’m not the right body type, I’m not the right beauty. I’ll just go to the country towns, where they’re gonna be less fuzzy, and put it out in the newspaper with my friend and say that’s how you started you know, but yeah, you just went to a country town, put it out in the newspaper. Wow.

Speaker 2: 13:55
Cool.

Speaker 3: 13:57
Ha ha ha. Found a hotel room that was not gonna kick us out, which is a big deal of itself, and they’re not always nice, those hotel rooms, they’re a bit sleazy. And then you get these phone calls with people who are already in the altered state of consciousness of desire, because you are in an altered state. When you’re in a state of desire and you’re sexually aroused, you think differently, you experience your own senses differently, your logic is different, the way you treat yourself and other people is different. So we think of these altered states as these. You know, going on a play at medicine expedition in the forest and jungle, like you are talking about with your play at medicine, and that is an altered state. But we can move through altered states all the time, even though the rage is a change of consciousness. Isn’t it Going into rage? Same with desire, Anyway? So they had. No, they’re not in relationship with their desire. These people who were calling me on the phone, they have no understanding about this. They’re not an embodiment relationship at all. So they’re saying I can remember one in particular. One guy saying is a farmer. He’s like what do you look like? Do you take it up the shitter? Ha ha ha.

Speaker 1: 15:15
And that’s what he said to me on the phone Ha ha ha, ha ha ha.

Speaker 3: 15:20
So this is all I know about it before I turn up to the door. Ha ha ha, oh, oh, oh, my, so I didn’t start at the sophisticated end, right? Ha ha ha. And so I turned up. Anyway, I went. Okay, I’m gonna go. So there’s me in my, in my my panel van, driving through. This is back when we had paper maps, not GPSs, so it was some time ago now, and I’m, you know, trying to find this damn farm in the driving on there. You went to the farm.

Speaker 2: 15:57
You didn’t go to the hotel.

Speaker 3: 15:58
Yeah, I went to the farm. No, I went to an out call. That’s called an out call rather than an in call. If they come to us, it’s an in call, it’s an out call if we go to them and I had my own. I won’t go into the security stuff, but yes, we had security in place. So there’s a. Yeah, we’re not silly, but I went there and, you know, as soon as I opened the door, he sees a real person in front of him. It’s different. It’s like, oh, you’re not just the fantasy in my head that I can just say do you take it up the shit? I just there’s a human being in front of me and at that point, you know, I shifted, the, shifted, the shifted the power dynamic. I let him do that really quickly, like I’m leading things, and the whole experience went from there and we ended up, you know, walking through his house and full of, you know, dogs and couches that are floral, and upstairs to a bedroom. And this was just vanilla sex, right, but it was dirty sex. As far as he was concerned, it was taboo, it was from his fantasy and I followed his. I followed what was the underlying, I trusted his fantasy and I went within my own boundaries. I didn’t actually take it up the shit, I didn’t want to, so but I found what was behind that desire and played with it and I just did it all intuitively and I followed it and by the end this really, really strange thing happened and it kept happening, these things. We were both crying, we were both looking into each other’s eyes, so touched and crying, and our hearts expanded. And he’s looking at me with tears rolling down his face, going what was that? I didn’t think, since my wife had died, that I could ever feel that again. What was that? What was that? And I didn’t know. I was like I don’t know, but wow, what was that? Where did we go just then and how did we get there? And then I shrugged and left and never saw him again. But this experience kept happening, not every time, but it kept happening and I kept being really curious about that. What’s? Why are we ending up in these heart expanded states of consciousness where our guards are fully down and we’re just feeling connected and we’re there’s feels like a transcendent experience, or maybe a better word. Transcendent sounds like up, and so there’s levels of hierarchy. It could be an expanded state of being there might be a better way of saying it More of us was awake and was there. What was happening? So this got me really intrigued. So I started trying to learn from anyone in the world. I learned from some of the world’s best sex birds. I learned that’s when I got into somatics and I learned, became a sexological body worker, and I learned from the Tantra people and other various other spiritual sexuality traditions. And while I’m so, so grateful for everything that I learned, it wasn’t answering what I was experiencing. All of these traditions were trying to focus on being really present with your senses and your partner to get to these ecstatic states. None of them was following the smut like a treasure map to these states, like I was, and I was like what is? What is going on here? How? How are our taboo sexual fantasies so magical? What is happening and why isn’t everyone talking about it? So this is what got me on my on my path to working out the magic, the value in my own new theory about why we have sexual fantasies and the meaning behind them.

Speaker 2: 20:29
This is so interesting to me because no one I haven’t really, I mean, I’m not, I’m way less, you know, in this. This might be a bit more well known now, but no one’s really talking about this. Like you said, even now, like even, it’s all about sensation and being totally present with what’s happening. And there’s all these different spiritual, seemingly spiritual, techniques for, in the context of sex, like you know, hacking into some of these states, but I don’t. Usually, pretty much all the time that attitude towards smut, as you called it, is negative. It’s oh, there’s something wrong there, something to fix, something to heal. This is from some trauma in the past. There’s something, you know, that’s the general attitude that most people have, even people that I, you know, I meet a lot of. I’m in Peru, you know, in plant medicine metropolis, and so you meet a lot of fairly open people. But even here there can be you can even see like that there can be this certain closed mindedness, I don’t know what else to describe it around, say stuff like this. So this is why it’s so interesting to me. I don’t really have anything other than that to say, but it’s very interesting and I know you’ve got this led to you develop a method. There’s a method to this madness that you figured out. There is a method to this madness.

Speaker 3: 21:39
What’s this method? Well, I call it the divinery method because after I didn’t stay in the Country Town newspaper zone, I ended up doing all sorts of things all around Australia, but eventually setting up a play space in Sydney and that had multiple different rooms. There was a cross-dressing room, there was a dungeon, there was a sensual massage and bedroom area. There was all sorts of different. There was a domestic discipline area. So it was like this place. That was a theatre of the erotic psyche where we could play anything in there and I had a red velvet couch that people would come and sit on and we’d talk about their desires and their fantasies before we’d begin. And one of my clients he came and played here. Actually, he named my play space. He said you know what, every time I come here, I feel like I am. Oh, this is a combination of two clients. Actually, one came up with the name and one yeah, anyway, never mind, I’m merging them together as one person. Okay, so you can do that when you tell stories. He called it the divinery because he felt like he was divining every time, like he’s looking through, you know, the divining stick’s looking for water. He felt like he was divining his erotic self every time he came there and discovering more treasure. Also, it’s because my last name the divine, so ever since then it’s just been nicknamed by everyone the divinery. And this is the method that I used in there when I sat them down on my red velvet couch and I asked them about their sexual fantasies and their peak experiences and I listened, and I didn’t just listen to the like, I didn’t. I learned very quickly it’s not effective to just try and live out somebody’s sexual fantasy the way it is in their mind’s eye. It doesn’t actually satisfy them in the way that they think it would. It’s much more important to hear the actual story narrative and the psychological mechanisms inside the fantasy and bring those out of our heads and into our bodies through the theater of consensual play and see where we go with that. Where does that lead? And it was a radical thing to trust. Their fantasy was right, like you said before, like your desire just bubbled up out of you. You didn’t consciously choose to have that desire, you consciously chose to interact with it, but it just arrived from somewhere unconscious into your awareness. I think there’s always a reason for that and if I trusted that like there’s, just like it can be uncomfortable to trust that our rage is right. It’s uncomfortable to trust that our desire is right. But just like we don’t let the rage run rampage, we learn how to embody and interact it. Hear its voice, hear what it’s actually trying to say. Same with desire. So if I listened to those sexual fantasies and then I would create something from that, from their play experience, and even though they had literally just told me their sexual fantasy, they were always surprised. They were like whoa, how did you know? That’s exactly what I’ve been trying to experience my whole life. I finally found it. What is that? What is that? So bless them. That was such fun to be part of that reaction. I’ll tell you what. Does that make sense? That’s what. That’s the. So that’s the divinery method is the method that I used in there and the actual key. I guess the really big takeaway is what I discovered through really living out the sexual fantasies of thousands of people like I didn’t just sit behind a desk like the therapist, didn’t analyze it, or an academic. I lived it with them. I went into the play zone and lived it with them. Right, thousands of them. I had it up, but actually is thousands like whoa Okay, I discovered that we are consistently, when we follow the map of the fantasies, ending up in a place that is A ego. Guards are down, we can connect. So from there, I discovered, I came up with the theory that our sexual fantasies are the exact story that our ego needs to hear to let its guard down so we can enter into the vulnerability of connection, pleasure, play and sometimes even those expanded states of consciousness that lie beyond ego. And this is one of the most precious things that you can share with another person on the planet To be in that, to discover yourself who am I, beyond ego, in this place of embodied, experiencing and play. Who am I, and sharing that in the state of play with somebody else. That’s so precious.

Speaker 2: 27:19
This is great. It’s interesting what you said about rage like Part of like working with. You know somatics work with the nervous system or rage or whatever the feeling happens to be is kind of going whatever’s there like, but needs no justification if the old justification it needs Is that it’s there if you’re angry. You’re angry if you said. You said it was often with to use anger or rage as an example. People like oh, no I. Can’t be angry like I don’t have a good reason to be angry. It’s not spiritual or religious to be, you know, like God doesn’t want me to be angry, I just have to turn the other cheek. We have all these stories around why we shouldn’t feel what we feel and to part of you know what I try, what I’m trying to do with rage. I tell people understand that whatever you’re feeling is perfect. It’s exactly what you meant to be feeling right now, or was what you meant to be feeling is whenever it was ago, and so it’s interesting. You sort of drew a parallel there. I just want to highlight it, that you know. I see that with emotions and sex fantasies, the things that just buy these things that bubble up out of nowhere like it’s the most fascinating, bizarre thing when you know I’ve gone into certain fantasies and it’s like, oh my God, how does that turn me on? How is that doing that to my brain right now? I don’t understand it, but for some reason it just pushes a button somehow and it, my mom, it’s so funny because the mind can’t Figure it out. It’s like this to just it’s not logical, it’s not something I would have ever consciously chosen. And yet it’s undeniable, the response that it has and that it’s such a fascinating, so interesting for me just looking. How is it just? That’s so why. And so it’s interesting that bringing in that perspective with emotions, where whatever’s there, whatever it is that’s turning us on, it’s okay, there’s Healthy and unhealthy ways to go and do it in the real world. But the fantasy in and of itself, and I guess you would say the drivers that are underneath it, I’m magical.

Speaker 3: 29:15
They have their own wisdom. They absolutely have their own wisdom. I imagine this being inside our unconscious. Just this is a story, to kind of conceptualize it, not a scientific model, but I imagine this, this being sitting in our unconscious, called desire, and it’s it’s inviting us to let go of our everyday thinking and entering to this Wonderful ocean state of a different state of consciousness where we can access ourselves beyond ego. And it’s sending their, sending symbolic messages to our own ego so that it can, it can let us guard down. So of course, it’s not logical. It’s. It’s ego logic and desire logic. It’s imagine a conversation happening between the organ of the psyche that is desire and the organ of the psyche that is ego, and trying to convince it that it tell it exactly the right seductive story that it’s going to be allowed to let its guards down. So ego is concerned with what does ego do? It gives us a sense of self, and the sense of self it creates it and it protects it vigilantly, like soldiers on a wall not letting anything in. Dragons on a wall, if you like Guards, it won’t let them. It doesn’t like vulnerability at all, ever ego. It’s against it entirely. And, and it’s amazing, we need a sense of self or we cannot walk through the world. We don’t even remember to lock our car door To protect it from somebody else taking it if we have, don’t have a concept of self because we don’t know that there’s a self to protect. And ego I like to call it the three, the three S’s of ego, the three guards of ego that the story needs to address. So imagine that there’s this wonderful world, over a bridge, where you can be connected, you’re not just focused on self. You’ve, you’ve moved into we, and maybe even you know connection with we, another person or other people, or maybe even beyond that, into connection with life itself. Is this wonderful land that’s over there where you, but you have to let go temporarily of your sense of self or the guards of us around yourself in order to get there. But on this bridge is three little guards, and they are self identity, your status and your self worth, right, all of the stuff, self, stuff that ego likes to defend enormously right. So you can’t get across, cross to the bridge unless you somehow appease these three guards. You have to tell them and desire being a seductive siren of the ocean state of our unconscious. Sing. The song tells a story that’s going to appease each of those fears around our identity, our self worth and our status. So I am self worth is is how do I value myself? I am lovable because I’m so smart. I am lovable because I fit the Gender stereotype that is sanctioned by society. I am lovable because I am manly, I am, or pretty, or whatever it is that we get our self worth from, and these are fine, but they can get in the way of trying to let go. The next one is self identity. I’m a good girl. I don’t. I don’t be selfish, I can’t focus on myself, I can’t feel this pleasure. I need to be of service to somebody else. I’m a good boy. I can’t be primal. I might hurt her, I can’t, and that’s a heterosexual examples, but clearly it can be. It can be any gender, but Let me think of some more inclusive examples as well. But the next one is status. Which is status? Is that that the ego vigilantly defends? Is our power rank in society, like, where do we sit in the hierarchy? Below these people and above those people? Ok, this feels like a good comfort zone. This is where I am. I can’t leave here, and it’s a really primal state because we, if we don’t belong to society, our self is under threat because we will die. We can’t survive without Other people, we can’t get access to resources, we, we’re not part of the tribe, we, we won’t survive. So losing rank comes up. Ego gets hyper vigilant about defending that in all sorts of subtle little ways. Like did you just talk down to me? Do you think you’re above me in rank? I need to pull you down a peg or two. You’ve tried to. You made me lose my status. So these three S’s come up in all sexual fantasies. All of them, romantic ones, muddy ones, all of them. And they must be navigated in order to let go, or you can’t let go. So that’s. That’s when I discovered that All sexual fantasies are the exact story, as I said, to allow us to be vulnerable, to let these guards down. But to do that you have to include egos, fear, and I call that the poison. You have to actually include what it’s scared of, what’s blocking it from letting go, in the actual story and then also take really close notice of how the fantasy created a really clever antidote to that fear and and triggered it so that they could let go. And oh my God, when I discovered how to do that in the in the divinary, I was talking to another dominatrix who’s wonderful in Seattle, her name is Catherine control. We were talking about how you reach a certain point in the session where you’ve, you’ve, you’ve Hold the story through a lived experience and embodied experience of their own psyche. You brought their psyche to life and you get to the point where they drop, just the bottom just drops out of them and then and then I just open into this other state of being and you can feel it viscerally, like the whole air in the room changes. They drop such a wonderful, powerful thing to do. But to do that we took on the theater of the, of the inner world. We became the villain or the hero or the victim. We became the very things that ego feared the most and then also included the antidote to that. And if you, if you include, if you really deliberately hear that when you listen to a fantasy and embody it, then that’s when everything, everything clicks. So that makes sense to you. Am I going to geeky? Because I do get out.

Speaker 1: 36:36
No, I mean you know I haven’t been there with with like.

Speaker 2: 36:40
I know that bottom dropping out. I haven’t been there with like, with sex or with fantasies, with this kind of stuff, but it’s happened with psychedelics, which I know some people for them. It’s like you mentioned what you’ve mentioned before, religion or spirituality Like that’s a you know another vehicle for me it’s been, you know, using certain spiritual techniques with magic mushrooms, or Alice D Ray was good, and you know they came up with a struggle at first. I mean one time with mushrooms on beside a river in Thailand and the mind is like doing something, basically just certain awareness practice, and at some point something happened I don’t even know what it was, but I could just drop. Dropping in like that drop is a really good word for this, the sense of I just drop into the center of my being, like infinitely deeper than whatever the mind is. It’s way up on the surface. I’m down at, like the mind is these waves on the ocean. I’m like down in the Mariana trench, like 10 or 12 kilometers beneath the surface, and there’s just yeah, so I’ve had that with psychedelics, so it’s so interesting, so I know it exists, so it’s interesting to then go. You know I’ve had that, but you can have that with music. You know I do jujitsu at the moment, like certain sports practices, almost like a flow state, but it’s interesting. It’s really interesting to me to kind of oh wow, like there’s a way to do this with Sexual fantasies, which is crazy.

Speaker 3: 38:03
Sexual fantasies are the exact map to get there if we know how to hear it. So this is absolutely plant medicines. That’s the other reason that my last name is divine is the divine is a nod to plant medicine and everything that I learned from that as well. So this is not learned entirely from from sex. So, like alone it’s, it’s informed by my experiences with ego dissolution through all sorts of different ways, and then it kept happening in sex as well, and then putting the two together, realizing that they’re actually actually just a different way of getting to the same thing, getting into the same place, yeah, that whole dropping into yourself. And people would say things like clients who had, you know, no attitude other than that Just first initially thought you know, I don’t know, I just want to a big, busty woman with a strap on to to tie me up and Roger me. Thanks, that’s, that’s what they had. No more thought that coming, coming to see me.

Speaker 2: 39:05
Take it up the show, don’t you?

Speaker 3: 39:07
like that, take it up. The show. Good Roger ring Ain’t no play for people who want to be more sophisticated about it.

Speaker 2: 39:20
Just to be clear, in case you were confused.

Speaker 3: 39:29
The sexologist want to use the technical term, but I like to use the, the language that our psyche comes up with, and because that’s where the power is. Why was I saying you were dropping down into the Marianne of trench? What was happening?

Speaker 2: 39:46
The Marianne of trench, and just being so deep and you were saying that you’ve learned, this is all informed by some of the experience you’ve had with plants. We’re psychedelics and then, seeing that it was happening with with fantasies as well, oh yeah, and they come in with no intention.

Speaker 3: 40:02
Yeah, they had no, no intention of getting to any expanded state. That wasn’t the motivation at all. When you’re in the early stages of the enticing story of this, the enticing siren call of desire with your fantasies, it doesn’t feel holy at all. It doesn’t feel anything like that end state that we got to. It just feels taboo or naughty or or exciting or any of those feelings. It doesn’t. It feels like the opposite to these expanded states that people call spiritual states. And yet the story gently moves you along to that state and by the time you get to the end, I can remember lying on the floor with clients. You know we’re covered in all sorts of lube and just mess everywhere and by the end we’re lying there and we can’t even. We’re just a heart so expand. We can’t even remember why we wanted to do this in the first place, even though we literally just finished doing it and and. But we’ve now dropped so deeply into this other state that it’s taken us to that it’s. We’re thinking differently again, with experiencing ourselves and everything else differently again. But it was the smut that got us there. So, and they would say to me things like wow, I had no idea I was, I could feel this way. This is what I’ve been searching for my whole life. This feels like I’m on ecstasy and tripping at the same time but I haven’t taken any drugs and it feels as though I am the most grounded and present I’ve ever been. This feels like this feels like this is I’m a, I’m a real, I’m whole. Now, all right. And these are people who just came in with the attitude of do you take it up? The shit I love? At the beginning of the story. So if you follow and there’s not saying that that happened every time, because that’s ridiculous, it doesn’t, it doesn’t but and you don’t necessarily want to aim for that that becomes goal oriented and it’s a ridiculous thing to do. But it does shift you from this. I cut off, separate. You know walls upstate to all the walls dropped, and now you, there’s a possibility of connection with somebody else. Then, if you go even further, there’s a connection with possibly even the land itself and the sky and life itself and this feeling of being oneness. There’s oneness feelings and they happen sometimes, but I don’t encourage anyone to be goal oriented in that. I just say let’s see what your fantasies have brought to the table, because they know they have their own wisdom. They’re geniuses at changing your internal state. They’re absolutely rubbish at giving you instructions of how to behave, literally, in the outside world. Don’t believe them for that, but they are brilliant for changing your internal state of consciousness. And in the consensual container of play, that’s where you can find them, and Dick.

Speaker 2: 43:14
So, on that note, I’m curious. You’ve mentioned, like the three guards of ego, poisons and antidotes. Can you give me some examples of? How this practice. If someone comes in with a specific fantasy, how would you do this? How would you apply this?

Speaker 3: 43:32
Let’s start with a socially sanctioned one, because people who think that they don’t have sexual fantasies do, by the way, so dreams. Some people think I don’t have dreams. Yes, you do, so you might not be aware of this point, so I haven’t actually encountered anybody. Maybe there is somebody in Europe with a neurodivergence where you don’t have sexual fantasies, but when you take a closer look, pretty much everyone has them. Romance, the romantic classic fairy tale of Disney, is a sexual fantasy. It’s a swoon fantasy. Right this whole, I know I’ve got in my head a picture of hippie women wearing white wafty things in the forest. Like a movie saying you know, this is just like my visual of my imagination when I’m thinking of this kind of fantasy of people going, oh, but I just want a man who’s like this. He will just be magically so perfect that he does. He just have his full attention on me and he’s powerful but doesn’t hurt me, and he he is, his is his impossible God of romance that just happens to magically be exactly what she wants him to be, so that she can feel loved and Special, she can feel like she’s the only one and she’s so special. And this, this fantasy, is socially sanctioned. We say, oh, that fits our idea of how gender roles should be. So that’s not a fantasy. That’s how your man should be. It’s a fantasy. Men are just humans. Men have the full spectrum of foibles and talents and and can’t possibly live up to that level of Manliness of this particular fantasy. But let’s look at the fantasy itself. A really common one coming from that place is, I would of, let’s think of heterosexual women, but it certainly can apply to anyone really. But let’s just pick one when the fantasizing about she’s fantasizing about Having someone be primarily ravishing. It’s really, you know, just consensually, but primarily ravishing because he can’t. He wants her so much that his desire is gone, primal for her, and that she and he’ll hold it down, maybe, but in all the right ways, and he will take her right. He does all the doing and she gets to be receptive. And this is the fantasy, the story. She gets to keep her status remember the three guards, let’s get to those now, the three guards. She gets to keep her status as the good girl who doesn’t do those dirty things. That comes from him and his desire. So I’m a good girl. Oh, look, I didn’t do it, I was just innocent. He ravished me in all of those dirty ways in which I really wanted, right. So you get to protect your own identity right there and still access this place beyond the bridge, in this, in this land, and there’s power, power play in there, right? So the other thing that it does is it really protects yourself worth, and that is I’m so desirable. He can’t control himself. Look at how special I am. Ego is now appeased and you can feel safe to let it down, and you can. You can now open to just pure experiencing. Look how special I am. This. All fantasies do that, by the way. All fantasies make us feel like we are the specialist special, that ever special Right, because it’s trying to appease ego and ego wants to be special. Ego wants to be precious and valuable and status right. So I get to keep my status in the community, I get to be a good girl and girls won’t. If girls are want, actively want, sex and go and proactively get it, they’re the bad girls. They’ll get cast out of society, out of the tribe, and then you risk losing your safety in In the tribe. So we need it to come from the man so that we can feel as though we’ve protected that status as well. Yeah, does that give you? Does that, did that make sense? Ask questions if it didn’t not totally not making sense.

Speaker 2: 48:46
I’m just thinking about my own fantasies at the same time like, are you, that’s interesting, I put that together there. And yeah, okay, okay, no, it makes sense. I understand what you mean. Yeah, I’m curious like what would it be like? for you know that’s. You know it’s interesting thinking it’s like that’s there, that the socially sanctioned thing is just a fantasy, like everything else. It’s no better or worse. It’s just a fantasy or, as a lot of people think, that’s just that’s what you should want. If you want something else, something’s wrong with you. But it’s interesting is that put that on equal footing. They’re all just fantasies, based on who someone is and what their specific keys are for their psyche.

Speaker 3: 49:30
Right and how much more powerful is it when you realize that that they’re all fantasies. Then we stop trying to make them reality and try and expect our partners to be our fantasies and we can deliberately go a. Can you play this role for me? Can we have a date starts at this time finishes that? I really love an experience of it, feeling this and this and this, which. Are you willing to play this role for me? And partner and fall. Can we negotiate that Because? And take turns, really getting on these, met once we recognize that that’s what it is and then coming out of that and being able to relate without projecting our fantasies onto everyday life, but seeing the actual person in front of you and really connecting with them to really, really powerful thing to do to realize how much of a romantic and sexual fantasies that we’ve misdirected by projecting into into everyday life and not giving it its safe container where it should be played with as a story to shift you somewhere inside of yourself together.

Speaker 2: 50:37
Yeah, it’s interesting, is it like puts? You know, say it puts takes all this shame that people have around around the stuff and starts to go yeah, yeah, maybe if you went and did some of these things in real life, as a fully lived out thing, it might be a little bit hairy depending on the execution, but done in like a play scenario, which can be quite different. It sort of takes them because there’s a lot of beauty and wisdom and goodness and medicine in fantasies. And yet typical about culture with China push it. A lot of people are trying to push it away or it’s in the, in the shadows, in the darkness, which creates a lot of problems. So it’s so interesting to kind of go okay, what’s there? Like. I’ve noticed my own fantasies, like, like the cross dressing, wanting to wear makeup, trying to push it away or not do it, trying to get rid of it doesn’t work. It’s the strangest thing. You can get rid of it, not consciously anyway. Maybe one day it’ll change, but I’ve learned that, like trying to let control it, trying to be like no, no, I’m not going to do this, doesn’t work. You see this in, you know, with religion and churches, priests are now we’re not going to have sex. We’re not going to do anything sexual, we just. We can just leave that go because we’re so holy and spiritual. We actually comes out sideways somewhere else. If you’re enjoying this podcast and you’d like to get more podcasts like it, hit the subscribe button to be notified of future episodes. And if you have 33 seconds, I’d love it if you could hop over to Spotify or Apple and leave me a review. Leave a review for the Rageheart podcast, whatever stars you think it deserves, and the funny. The review especially one star reviews can be surprisingly interesting and funny. So, but all the reviews help me get this information out there as well, help it rise up inside the podcast platform. So hit the subscribe leave me a review and see this in. You know, with religion and churches priests are now, we’re not going to have sex, not going to do anything sexual. We just, we can just leave that go because we’re so holy and spiritual we actually comes out sideways somewhere else. It’s very really does the energy wants to? Move. And so there’s yeah, there’s a lot of wisdom, I think, in allowing an expression, even if it’s a bit outside the what we, what some people might consider normal.

Speaker 3: 52:54
So anyway, so what about? some other fantasies yeah, I’ll give you some other fantasies. I just wanted to quickly say it’s so powerful to to recognize that we that if all of our desires are all back, all of our turn on the based on the same story to appease our egos. Right, and you think about your peak experiences where the sex just think about the circumstances around it actually appease the same three guards of ego. To get there once you recognize that and you start dating somebody. So imagine you, john, start dating one of those hippie women wafting in white in the forest and who wants to be ravished by a manly man my favorite and you want to. You want to cross dress? Yeah, they’re all wonderful, everything’s wonderful, but once you now acknowledge that that their fantasies you, you can take turns. We’ve got what? What do you mean? You can take turns. Now you can take turns and it is actually even though it’s not your primary turn on, it is the most wonderful fun. You can go deep into the play, the flow of play, with this together and it is the most intimate and wonderful experience to share this, so much more intimate than just trying to force somebody into your particular, favorite, unique erotic wiring, your, your map, your fantasy map to get to these places. Nobody’s map that’s one thing I’ve learned with being with thousands of people is nobody’s map is the same. None of them. So you might, I might, get six cross dresses coming for a week and I have to sit down, listen to each one of them, because they’re particular. Story sent by their desire to appease. Their ego is going to have different poisons and she does, different emotional aphrodisiacs, different power dynamics. I need to hear what they ask that I can create something that’s going to work for their psyche. So nobody’s turn on other same as yours. So we do have to take turns, exploring each other’s and it doesn’t mean that we’re not a good romantic match because we’re not turned on by the exact same things. Just putting that out there. But I can give you another fantasy, and let’s let’s go with a Heterosexual man’s fantasy. This is a real person’s fantasy, is a client of mine who’s given me permission to use this as an example For teaching purposes. Bless him. Lots of my coaching clients do that. Actually they give permission and then I share each other’s fantasies amongst all of my clients and they get to learn from each other this way, which is really fun and really affirming to everybody. So this fantasy is there’s a man who is in everyday life totally fine with gender they’re being more than two genders doesn’t care about gendered bathrooms In reality doesn’t care about that at all. But in the fantasy a man’s bathroom is a man’s bathroom. Women shouldn’t go in there because it’s an important plot point for the, for the story, because fantasies are just stories, right? So Is he’s washing his hands at the basin and a man’s public toilet and A woman pokes her head around the corner because she’s sick of waiting for the women’s line, which is 10 million years long, and she’s not assertive or bossy her attitude. Always take notice of people’s attitudes in fantasies. That’s key to tapping into the right level of psychological safety for someone. So she sticks a little head around the corner and she goes sorry, but she’s kind of like. It’s like one of those kind of stories that sorry, not sorry, I’m gonna do it anyway, which is not being aggressive. And she and she pokes her head through and she just comes in, even though he’s there, and walks into the store and he’s a mission initial emotional reaction is living out the resistance room remember the three guys. Who does she think she is Coming in here? Indignant, she goes into the stall because it’s a fantasy. She does a business. In about half a second comes back out again and he’s still washing his hands and in the basin and she catches his eyes for just a moment, glinting cheekily with a little smile on her face Of you know of her, her own confidence, self worth, and catches his eye and then the stuff’s behind him so she can’t see. He can’t see her anymore. The next thing he knows is he sees hands coming around from behind him and unzipping his, his fly and giving him a lovely hand job. From that point there, this is a really short fantasy and yet it includes all of the elements in there. Right, it includes everything. Because, first of all, he can’t desire it has to come from her because he wouldn’t. He doesn’t want to. I just have inside information. I know he’s actually a really cool guy who’s really considerate and wouldn’t want to Impose his own primal desires on anyone who didn’t want them. So it has to come from her. She wants to be dirty in the public place. She wants to be the one that is and it is public, right, it’s going against, literally going against this social status. You’re not supposed to do that here, right? You’ve got this inner conflict. We can’t do this. We can’t access our primal state. We have to prioritize the rules of the world. We have to be good citizens, keep our status in place, right. But she breaks that rule for him to say that he’s now allowed to access this primal state. That’s beyond his socially accepted status role. And she comes in and sneaks behind him. She, she. There’s a there’s a cheeky power play thing, because she kind of knows I know, she knows her effect that she can have on him. She’s not dominating him, but she’s. It’s a cheeky game of you, know, I know what I can get you to feel and I’m going to play with this. And and he feels wanted. He was absolutely desired. He is this woman who can’t. He wants his cock so much she can’t help herself, don’t we always want to be wanted? There’s a self worth in a being and I’m feeling special. I’m always feel like the most special person ever. And she, she also. I love that she ducked behind him. This is a very common thing Is that we find some way to temporarily make the other person’s needs not matter. We don’t have to care, take their needs for them, so that we can finally give ourselves permission to focus on ourselves, which so many of us struggle with. We want the other person to have fun, we want them to have pleasure, we want to focus on them, but we can’t fully just surrender and let go into our own pleasure if we’re focusing on them, so we need some story that’s that convinces our ego. Yes, you are still a genuine considerate person, but now you’re allowed to focus on your own pleasure for a moment. So this is a. Did that, did that? Could you see the pattern in there? Did that make sense to you?

Speaker 2: 1:00:38
Totally, totally. So it’s pretty deep. I mean, it’s such an interesting way to imagine that. You know, it’s like I’ve heard this before, like we’ve, we work together. I’ve read some of the books you recommended. Like I’m familiar with this model of thinking. But I can imagine for someone listening to this for the first time it’s going to be, or it could be, a bit like holy shit, like what, like what? Just as a way to think about, because you can map this on any fantasy, and so like if I was hearing even I’m doing it anyway and I already know about some of this stuff is saying, ok, well, I’m thinking through my own fantasies, you know? Ok, what about that? Oh, yeah, that fits there. And it’s like this model, this framework, it makes sense to me. It makes a lot of sense to me. It’s still it makes. It’s one of those things that makes sense. It’s a bit like the nervous system model, understanding fight and fly and freeze and how we get stuck in these modes. You know, before I heard about it was like I didn’t really know what was missing and then I learned it was like oh, this is such a. It’s like someone turned a light on. Now I all of a sudden I understand so much of what’s been going on and it’s a bit like that. It makes sense, but like, like in a way. Something sense in, like a way where it’s like before. You know, not that I didn’t think it didn’t make sense before, but now it’s like oh my god, no idea, but I could look at fantasies or look at this sex in this way. Once you see it, I see it.

Speaker 3: 1:02:01
Yeah, it’s my unique theory, so, as far as I know, this has never been in. There’s no books on this yet, except for the one that I happen to be writing right now, which if, if you like, I’m studying a crowdfunding thing to pay because I’m going to self publish to pay for the expenses of editing and getting an audio book made. So if anyone’s keen to hear more about that, I’m keen to just I’m down to learn more that noted. It is something you can’t learn from one podcast, like I’ve just touched on it, and is like if I just heard my own explanation of it, I would still have a lot of questions. But this is something that is, it’s an art form. So, learning how to do this In coaching I take people through step by step, like let’s feel this, because it’s taking it out of the head and into the body and into play. That is is where all of the power happens, right. So you know you can say, ok, that’s great, now I understand why you know my ego is doing that. How do I actually do that? I need to build some, some embodiments tools. I need to, and it has to begin with forming an embodied relationship with desire itself. That’s where we begin, this force inside of us that creates these. These turn on in the first place. So the very first thing that I teach people is the desire compass, and you can do the very first part of that. Go to my website and just check it out if you can see if it’s for you. It’s. It’s embodiment tools right there to actually form a two way relationship with this force inside of yourself so that you can cooperate and turn it into your ally and start delving into this path.

Speaker 2: 1:03:55
Is this something that, like you, talk about going from the mind into embodied play with? The first questions that pops into my head, which I imagine be the same for a lot of people, is what if I don’t have a partner? Like? Do I have to do this with my wife, girlfriend, husband, whoever, or can I do this on my own?

Speaker 3: 1:04:15
Yeah, I don’t currently have or desire a partner. I’m going through a phase where I don’t. I have a great sex life and I’m using all of these techniques. I’m just not including anybody else.

Speaker 2: 1:04:29
Can you say I think I’ve actually this before, but it’s it’s interesting thing to talk about on a podcast is that dropping that you talk about? Can you trigger that just playing with yourself without anyone else there?

Speaker 3: 1:04:42
Yes, I can, I absolutely can, I can totally don myself into subspace, that’s fucking crazy. Is it a consistent?

Speaker 2: 1:04:53
thing, or it just happens, when it happens that you’re not goal driven with it. But does it happen? Is it like once every couple of years, or is it? You can kind of do it fairly regularly.

Speaker 3: 1:05:04
I know the pay, I know the way. I’ve got well worn paths I can. I know the way so I could enter and once I’m in that state I can just play in it and float in it and enjoy it for a long time if I want, if I choose to.

Speaker 2: 1:05:22
So that’s kind of the that’s the payoff for people, if they want to get into this and they want to learn more about this, is they can learn to trigger this. Some of these feelings, these deep, expanded states with a partner, but even without a partner, whether it’s, you know doesn’t have to be a dominatrix you just don’t yourself. Yeah, I totally can.

Speaker 3: 1:05:46
Yeah, and it’s really valuable to know that, because then you recognize that the pathway was always inside of you, which means that if you, you know you can ask somebody to come in and take a certain role for you and play with you in that. But you don’t need them to, you don’t need them to be turned on by the same things, you just need them to really want to play with you and delight in that process. But it’s never coming from them, which means that kind of be taken away from you if they leave was always coming from you, which is a really important thing to notice. But yes, you don’t need a partner to begin this, this training, at all. When you say.

Speaker 2: 1:06:32
I’m just trying to ask the questions that I think people are going to want to know. When you say bringing it from the mind into an embodied relationship with desire, to me that sounds still sounds, you know, just playing the devil’s advocate. It still sounds a little bit conceptual. So, like what do you mean to someone who’s maybe not, maybe they haven’t even explored embodiment to a high degree, like even the world? I don’t often use the word embodiment, even in Rageheart. It’s a huge part of what it is, you know, I find for people if they haven’t. If someone’s been in their head for the last 50 years, it’s like this just going. Oh, the embodied feeling it’s. I get it, but I think a lot of people you know everyone’s at varying stages or degrees of that journey. So how would you? What do you mean by embodying or having an embodied relationship with desire?

Speaker 3: 1:07:24
Okay. So if you sit and watch a movie and it’s a beautifully done movie, you can have an entire experience the whole way through. You can notice your emotions changing, you can cry with. You know, at the sad parts you can get triumphant when the baddie gets there, come up and you can get a. You know, you feel all of these emotions as you move through, as you watch the movie and that’s and starting to notice these emotions and changing with the characters as well, because all stories are based on transformation, moving from one state to another, and you move with them. By watching this movie, even if you’re not conscious, you just think oh, you know, I was just watching a movie. It was just entertainment, right, but stories are way more magic than that. We’ve got to give them the credit. There just powerful, powerful things, stories. But that’s watching the story and still it. The first level of embodiment would be noticing the feelings and really physically, how do I feel when I feel triumphant? Physically, how do I feel when I feel grief with the sad person and I kind of, you know, fell in love with the character? How’s my body physically responding to that? And really putting your attention on that and feeling it. That’s the first level and that’s the kind of the equivalent of masturbating to a sexual fantasy, right. So you’re getting the physical responses, you’re becoming aroused by thinking about a story, right, and you’re going to get even more out of it by just dropping into the emotions that these particular and the power dynamics that these particular fantasies are evoking in you. It’s going to take it to the next level again If you become the actor that’s creating that movie, if you’re now on the stage, really going into and experiencing the triumph over the body or the falling in love with the hotty on the screen. That’s going to be. You know, it’s a story still, because you’re acting on the stage, but you are going somewhere deeper with it. You’re really feeling with everything that you’ve got now and unconscious parts of you are shifting and changing with it, as though it’s true, because that unconscious part of us can’t tell the difference between play and reality. It does fall in love temporarily, it does triumph temporarily, it goes through these things. So if we really want to embody sexual fantasies to the fullest extent, we’re trusting this unconscious part of ourselves that has sent this message that it’s got some wisdom and we’re going to trust it. We’re going to find the key elements in it and we’re going to actually, in the safety of consensual play, actually live it temporarily and see where it takes us. So this really dropping into the full experience of feeling and emotionally, physically and mentally, and maybe even beyond that. So I think it’s parts that we can’t even have words for.

Speaker 2: 1:10:44
To build on your example of the guy in the bathroom, the bathroom fantasy. So like one way to put that into, like to map that on there, like I could just, if that was my fantasy, I could just sit there, think about it, get turned on masturbate. The next level is I can think about it and start to actually notice what sensations beyond the sensations in my genitals, other emotions, things like that, noticing how that feels. I’m wondering, how do I feel when she, this woman, comes up behind me and grabs me? Whatever Are you saying? The third level is becoming the actor in the fantasy. So does that mean, for example, like I’m in my office it doesn’t really matter. I could, you know, start to imagine that the office is actually a stage or a set. It is the bathroom and I move around this room physically as though I’m actually in the bathroom with this woman. But let’s say I’m single, I don’t have a partner, I don’t want to see a dominatrix, I’m going to do this on my own. I still have to imagine the part of the woman, like I’m. Just how would I what is the execution of that at the third level or the embodied level look like?

Speaker 3: 1:11:52
Yeah, I’d love to answer that question but I’d have to teach you some things first. Like they have to build some. It’s not going to make sense in a podcast. I have to teach you a few layers and some things up. That’s beyond the scope of this. But yes, you absolutely can. There’s subtle things that, using a combination of your imagination and fantasy and real sensations and body language that you’re taking on, you can absolutely enter into an ecstatic state. And I love that bathroom fantasy. Because I asked him. I asked him why did why, you know? Were you excited? Because it was public, in a public place? Because you have to check in this. If I was going to be trying to bring his his, if I, as a sex worker, trying to bring his fantasy to life, am I going to be drawing on the taboos of it being public or not? Like you have to listen to what is his poisons and antidotes, not assume. And he’s like no, absolutely not. I’m not even interested that it’s a public place other than the initial part. Like it’s played its role already. If someone and I said what would? How would you feel if someone walked in while you were getting your hand job? And he bless him. I just love him. He’s beautiful, he’s like I’d be all get out of here, can’t you see? I’m getting my business taken care of. I’m a God. There’s my queen Like don’t come in here, right, and he’s moved in that short space from this. Hmm, who do you think you are to? I’m a king. There’s my queen. Oh my God, I’m the center of the universe and so is she, and we’re here together and this is amazing and completely open and feeling pleasure. But it wasn’t from the fit, it wasn’t actually from so, so actually, to bring that to life, it would be okay. I’m not going to try and make the, the public place, be the center excitement point. I’m going to just be. We could, we can mention that or include that just in a, in a slight way, even just by just saying, whispering a few things in the like you know, I’m walking into your bathroom or I’m walking into your office and that’s it. We don’t need to do emphasize it. It’s played its role. But what I would do is I would take on the power dynamic, the emotional most follow, the emotional fridisiac journey of that whole story and I would physically take on recognizing that disappearing like eye contact is brief, and proving consent and wanting to be there and then taking myself out of the picture. So he’s not obligated to pleasure me as a sex worker. He can focus on his own pleasure and he can feel as though he’s special and that all sexual fantasy and make us feel special and make us feel as though the other person magically wants to give us exactly what we want them to want, and that’s what they do to convince us to let us go. So I would notice the making it so that he can, so that I’m just a pair of hands. That part I would live out literally, but the rest doesn’t have to be literal at all. Right, that’s, you can actually live out that same scenario with a whole bunch of different ways that would surprise them completely, as long as it hits all of those points along the way We’ve been talking for ages. Should we stop?

Speaker 2: 1:15:26
We can wrap it up in a second. But no, I think so. I think I was getting confused, thinking, oh, we’re gonna. I’m getting too focused on the surface level thing. And and really what you’re saying is not about like, it’s almost like. It’s not about the movie. We’re talking about a movie, or I think about like another parallel with, like, the nervous system. It’s not about the same thing, but how we get triggered in our day to day life. Someone can say something or do something, or there’s a situation unfolds that happens to bring up or stir up something from the past in us, and very often it’s not the exact same scenario. It’s not the exact thing that happened. It’s not the bathroom thing. That happened back when we were 10 years. It’s like the underlying mechanics are the same and that’s why it’s so tricky, because we’re like, well, this hasn’t happened to me before. So obviously, why I’m feeling so upset right now is because of you or whoever’s you know in the environment, and so it’s a bit like that where it’s not about the surface level impression, it’s the underlying mechanics that you’re looking at of what’s the dynamic of the situation. So the bathroom almost doesn’t really matter, it’s just a venue for the dynamic to take place in. And so you’re saying you’ll take the dynamic or unpack or understand that and then execute that in, you know, in that playroom in Sydney or wherever, and it may have a different environment, but like that you know, thing that happens today that triggers this from something that happened 10 years ago. You can trigger the same thing as long as the mechanics are in place.

Speaker 3: 1:16:47
That’s right, beautifully said. I love the way you described that. Thank you, yeah, that’s excellent. We’re so focused on the trauma level. At the moment there’s trauma. Such a buzzword of thinking about triggers is only bad things. But actually what we’re doing is we’re noticing that desires, symbols, are interchangeable. They’re just trying to create an effect and this is the mechanism underneath it that triggered that effect, and now we can play with it infinitely. We don’t have to be stuck doing the same sex right over and over again. We can just hear what those wonderful triggers are and come up with creative ways to play forever with them. It’s fun, it’s really fun, all right.

Speaker 2: 1:17:25
Sounds great. I mean, I’ve explored it a little bit, I’ve got to, I got to figure this thing out on the list. But on that note, let’s, let’s wrap it up. So if people want to learn more about you, what you do, this desire, compass, how to you know? Just go further down this, this rabbit hole, let’s say glory hole. You want to go down this glory half by down the glory hole? Do you want to go?

Speaker 3: 1:17:50
If anyone wants to do that?

Speaker 2: 1:17:51
go learn more about this. Where’s the best place or places for them to do that?

Speaker 3: 1:17:57
Yeah, sure, my website is just my name, artemisiadivinecom, and you can begin. The desire compass the first part is up there for you to try, if you would like to. It’s about 90 minutes, I think. Maybe, yeah, I haven’t quite finished, so it could be slightly longer than that. A 90 minute sort of little short course for you to try and see if you can feel these experiences and see if this is for you. Yeah, but keep an eye out for my book too, please. Fantastic, that’d be great. The value of sexual fantasies.

Speaker 2: 1:18:34
Yeah, I’ll put the. Is that the name of the book?

Speaker 3: 1:18:38
Yeah, the value of sexual fantasies.

Speaker 2: 1:18:42
Oh, great, fantastic. I’ll have links to your website, the desire compass and whenever the book’s ready, I can add a link to the website too. So that’s up there. Get you some link juice. Thank you so much for doing this, artemisia. This has been thoroughly interesting and it’s given me lots of think maybe feel about too. Yeah.

Speaker 3: 1:19:07
It was so fun. Thank you so much for having me.

Speaker 2: 1:19:09
Did you know that your anxiety he’s not your fault, nor is your depression, trouble sleeping or that icky sticky imposter syndrome feeling? This is one of my favorite things about the nervous system framework and way of working. I used to blame myself for my various issues. I thought I’d somehow failed, that I was broken, something was wrong with me. But once I understood the mechanics of the nervous system survival, response, fight and flight and some of the things I talk about here on this podcast, and how we adapt to stress and trauma and bad things that happen in our lives I realized that these various issues whether it’s anxiety or depression or trouble sleeping, whatever it is I realized that it’s not really my fault and it’s not even really a bad thing. I realized that my nervous system was actually just doing exactly what it had evolved to do over millions of years to keep me safe. Right Imposter syndrome to safety mechanism Don’t stand out, don’t attract too much attention to yourself or you might get hurt. Can’t sleep Again. It’s a safety mechanism. Your nervous system is literally trying to keep you safe, and it can’t do that if you sleep too deeply because you might fail to detect a threat. Anxiety your nervous system. It’s looking for threats because right now it feels you guessed it unsafe, and so if you can find the threat, or at least discern whether there even is a threat, then it can relax. So it’s all about safety. Now, to be fair, these adaptations aren’t always well matched to the present moment, the present environment, but once upon a time they were exactly what we needed to survive, and that’s the beautiful thing. Instead of seeing our issues as problems or flaws or signs that something’s wrong with us, that it’s some failure on our part as a person, we can actually see them as natures finest work, that our various nervous ticks, our neuroses, the various things we want to change about ourselves because we’re not as happy as we want to be, we’re not as disciplined, we’re not as motivated, whatever it is, we’re not happy. We can look at these things as the result of millions of years of evolution, or, if you believe in God, call it intelligent design, I don’t really care. The very thing. The point is that these are the very things we needed to survive at some point in our lives. Isn’t that amazing? Doesn’t it change the whole feeling around our so-called issues that they’re not here to make us feel bad, as we sometimes believe. They’re here to help us. They’re here to keep us alive. The only problem is that, while they were suited to a previous environment, for example, we may have learned not to stand out as a kid, with our family, at home, with our parents, maybe even at school, because when we stood out, we got in trouble, we got hurt, people made fun of us, we lost love, we lost attention. However, the wiring happened. We learned to not stand out and at that time it’s what we needed. But they’re not usually these various strategies that we have. They’re not usually the best strategy for the present environment. For example, if you have your Nova system really thinks it’s unsafe when it’s actually safe, such as when you go to bed at night, it’s just a sign the system is a little out of sync. That’s all, just out of sync. It’s not broken, it’s not flawed. It’s just designed for a different time and place and it’s doing that job beautifully, but it’s out of sync with the present time. And that’s where the daily growl comes. In my daily email newsletter, where I share stories and tips and tricks and different ways of working with the Nova system, I knew an interesting and powerful ways of working with anxiety and depression and trouble sleeping and imposter syndrome and all the different issues people have in a very new way and in a way that doesn’t look at these things as problems to be solved but looks at them more as a once useful program that is no longer serving us. And how do we change that with the science of the Nova system? So that’s the daily growl. Like I said, my daily email newsletter, which is actually what I’ve just read out here, is one of the emails I send out. So if you found this helpful, if you’d like to get more emails like this, go to rageheartco. That’s like Braveheart, but rageheart like the podcast dot co, no dot com, just the dot co. And sign up for the daily growl on the homepage and you’ll get start getting emails like this every day. Bye for now.