Embracing Ecstasy: Exploring the Nexus of Sexuality & Psychedelics

Podcast Highlights

• The five Erotic Blueprints and their unique sexual expressions.
• Jaiya’s journey to becoming a somatic sexologist.
• The role psychedelics played in Jaiya’s healing, transformation, and sexuality.
• Psychedelics for healing sexual trauma and facilitating full sexual expression.
• The importance of safe containers and consent when it comes to sex and psychedelics.
• Cultivating ecstatic literacy.
• Finding cosmic union through Tantra.
• The Erotic Blueprint coaching certification program.
• What Jaiya is working on next.

Show Links

1. Jaiya’s website
2. Life Awake
3. ReGenesis
4. Take the Erotic Blueprint™ Quiz
5. Jaiya's Book, “Red Hot Touch”
6. Jaiya's Book, “Cuffed, Tied & Satisfied”
7. Jaiya's Book, “Blow Each Other Away”
8. Jaiya in the Netflix series,
9. Book, The Immortality Key by Brian C. Muraresku
10. Dr. Ruth Westheimer
11. Book, “The Multi-Orgasmic Man” by Mantak Chia & Douglas Abrams
12. Spiral Dynamics
13. Esther Perel
14. Book, “After the Ecstasy, the Laundry” by Jack Kornfield
15. Book, “The Immortality Key” by Brian C. Muraresku
16. Shibari master Orpheus Black
17. Psychedelics & Sex: A Powerhouse Combination

These show links may contain affiliate links. Third Wave receives a small percentage of the product price if you purchase through the above affiliate links.

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Podcast Transcript

0:00:00.0 Paul Austin: Welcome back to The Psychedelic Podcast. Today we are interviewing Jaiya, the founder of the Erotic Blueprint Breakthrough and a somatic sexologist.

0:00:11.6 Jaiya: Sex and psychedelics are both tools that lead us back to who we are. What sex is fundamentally is an awakening tool, but it's been co-opted as a recreational tool. Not that I'm against recreational sex, it's just there's also recreational aspects.

0:00:26.3 Jaiya: And we have lost the recreational aspects of sexuality, just like we lost, in some ways, the recreational aspects of psychedelics. And so I see them hand-in-hand as both tools to awakenings that have been deemed taboo things.

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0:00:40.9 Paul Austin: Welcome to The Psychedelic Podcast by Third Wave, audio mycelium connecting you to the luminaries and thought leaders of the psychedelic renaissance.

0:00:52.6 Paul Austin: We bring you illuminating conversations with scientists, therapists, entrepreneurs, coaches, doctors and shamanic practitioners, exploring how we can best use psychedelic medicine to accelerate personal healing, peak performance and collective transformation.

[music]

0:01:20.1 Paul Austin: Hey listeners, today's podcast is brought to you by the Apollo wearable. I first started wearing the Apollo in the midst of the COVID quarantine, over two years ago.

0:01:29.1 Paul Austin: It helped my body to regulate itself, to calm down, to stay more focused and to meditate in the morning. And I use it to really regulate my nervous system in a time of incredible stress, and I've continued to use it on a day-to-day basis. It is indispensable in my daily routine.

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0:03:02.9 Paul Austin: Hey folks, welcome back to the podcast. Today we have internationally recognized, award-winning psychologist and best-selling author, Jaiya, who is the creator of the Erotic Blueprint Breakthrough and the Erotic Blueprint Quiz.

0:03:15.4 Paul Austin: Through more than two decades of client observation and clinical research, Jaiya has discovered a map of arousal that reveals your specific erotic language of turn on. This revolutionary framework helps you to create deeper connections and total sexual satisfaction. So as you can imagine, this was a fun conversation today, I think the first one that we've had at the intersection of sex and psychedelics.

0:03:41.8 Paul Austin: Jaiya also talks about her own process of healing complex PTSD through MDMA-assisted psychotherapy. We go deep into the Erotic Blueprint, we talk about Tantra, we talk about consent, the importance of safe and intentional containers.

0:04:00.7 Paul Austin: There's a lot of conversation about the overlaps between sex and psychedelics and even how we can combine the two, to potentiate and amplify one another. I had a ton of fun doing this, Jaiya is an incredibly engaging guest, and I think you all are really gonna enjoy this one today.

0:04:21.5 Paul Austin: So without further ado, let's hear from Jaiya, the founder of the Erotic Blueprint Breakthrough.

0:04:26.6 Paul Austin: Jaiya, welcome to the show.

0:04:28.5 Jaiya: So pleased to be here. It's my pleasure.

0:04:31.8 Paul Austin: This is an interview that I've been looking forward to for quite some time now. And I think I was mentioning to you before we went live that we've never really explored this topic for the podcast in an in-depth way.

0:04:46.0 Paul Austin: And so to have you, to have your presence, to have your knowledge or wisdom about this topic, I'm really looking forward to it. Sex has been for so long such a taboo topic. Psychedelics have been for so long such a taboo topic. So to explore that line.

0:05:06.8 Jaiya: Put the two together, oh my goodness. [chuckle]

0:05:09.0 Paul Austin: It's like a volcanic eruption of chaos.

0:05:10.9 Jaiya: I mean, hey, I love volcanic eruptions.

0:05:13.9 Paul Austin: Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

0:05:15.5 Jaiya: Especially if they're coming from my body. [chuckle]

0:05:17.5 Paul Austin: Right. Right. Good. Okay. So this a good opener. So right before we went live, I took the Erotic Blueprint test and you have that as an option on your website, which we will link to afterwards. And I accidentally gave it away to you without knowing that I was giving it away, but I am a sensual.

0:05:37.3 Paul Austin: And so I'd love first for you, to hear what is your Erotic Blueprint? And then just let's open with that. What is the Erotic Blueprint? And tell us about the five types in the Erotic Blueprint?

0:05:49.9 Jaiya: Great. So as a somatic sexologist, I spend a lot of time with people's bodies, and a lot of time looking at arousal and how someone is erotically and educating them about what is your authentic self, without the programming and the conditioning that we've had around sex, because it's been such a taboo topic.

0:06:06.9 Jaiya: So your Erotic Blueprint is your authentic expression of your eroticism, what turns you on? It's sort of five love languages, if you've ever heard of the five love languages before. And it's how we are wired erotically.

0:06:24.5 Jaiya: And similar to other personality typing tests, it also shows us where we're limited erotically, 'cause if you're only one type, then there's this other spectrum of sexuality to explore. Would you like me to go into the five types?

0:06:35.7 Paul Austin: Let's do it. Yeah.

0:06:37.7 Jaiya: Okay. So there's energetic, and the energetic is someone who's turned on by tease, anticipation, longing, yearning. The more spacious sex is, the more time they have to assimilate it, the more arousal and turn on they are going to get.

0:06:57.5 Jaiya: It's interesting in the psychedelic space, because I feel like psychedelics give us access to this realm, which we don't always have when we don't have this expanded perception. And so with psychedelics, you can... And different ones will have a different blueprint actually, is what I've found over just looking at blueprints and mapping them with psychedelics.

0:07:20.3 Jaiya: In our eroticism, there's sensitivity, suddenly we're more sensitive, suddenly we can see maybe things that we couldn't see, the energy from somebody's hand or we're feeling things in a different way. That transpersonal realm that Stan Grof talks about. It's when we start to open up where we're experiencing, "Wow, we were lovers in another lifetime." It's like very energetic.

0:07:40.1 Paul Austin: Karmic bonds.

0:07:42.5 Jaiya: Yes. Or, "Wow, I'm having multidimensional orgasmic experiences, where suddenly I'm in the 11th dimension having this kundalini moving through my body," like some of these things that we hear the tantrics talk about. And having that, that's very much of the energetic realm.

0:08:00.7 Jaiya: The shadow side of the energetic realm has so much hypersensitivity that we shut down or we dissociate, we kind of fly out of our bodies. People who have had a lot of trauma in their history may develop this shadow side of hypersensitivity where if it's too much, too quick, too fast, I'm just going to dissociate from the experience.

0:08:22.0 Jaiya: Or if I have undealt with trauma, I'm going to dissociate from the experience. So these are some of the things that I see in... I'm giving a very short version, but some of the things that I see with the energetics.

0:08:33.2 Jaiya: Now your blueprint, the sensual, is someone who's turned on by all of their senses being ignited. So this is the taste of putting some chocolate in your mouth and letting it roll around in there. And my mouth starts watering as I start to even talk about it. And having orgasm from the sensation of the chocolate, the taste of the chocolate, the smell of the chocolate. And so we're getting all of our senses involved in the eroticism.

0:09:02.1 Jaiya: And sensuals love closeness. So the more we're collapsing space, unlike the energetics, like all the space, the sensual's like, "I wanna cuddle, I wanna... " Like MDMA is a very sensual in that empathetic aspect that it brings in or wanting to hold someone's hand and you can feel that oxytocin on your palms, that closeness is a very sensual experience.

0:09:29.2 Jaiya: It's also the beauty of the space. We talk about set and setting in psychedelics. So like what's the setting like? And if you have somebody who's very sensual, having the fur rugs, [chuckle] having beautiful art on the walls, having things that... Like the misters of spray. And just all that beautiful sensuality, little pieces of chocolate or something that people can have in their mouths, brings out that erotic aspect of the sensuality for the sensual.

0:09:57.2 Jaiya: The shadow side though is getting caught in your head and looping in your head about like, that pillow's crooked in the corner. [chuckle] Instead of feeling what's happening in between your legs, you're focusing on like, "Oh my gosh, I hope my breath is okay." Or, "Oh, their breath doesn't smell right."

0:10:13.6 Jaiya: Or all the things that might be talking to you that don't feel quite right, or going through the laundry list of to-dos, or getting really analytical and then you're not in the experience anymore, the center of the experience anymore. You start to get more peripheral and here in your mind spinning instead of really in your body. So those are the first two.

0:10:38.3 Jaiya: And then the next one is the kinky. And the kinky is someone who's turned on by what is taboo. So that definition of what is taboo is what is taboo for you. We talked about in the beginning, sex being taboo or psychedelics being taboo. So we have these inherent taboos just in playing in these realms. But really what is that thing that feels either psychologically taboo or physically taboo? 'Cause there's two different ways we can approach the kinky.

0:11:07.7 Jaiya: My partner Ian, for example, he's both, he loves the sensation of things, 'cause he also has high sensual in his blueprint map. And so the sensation of the ropes on his body. The sensation of constriction on his body.

0:11:21.6 Jaiya: But then also the psychological aspect of he has to surrender to whoever is putting those ropes on and be forced, "forced", I'm putting in quotes 'cause this is consensual, being forced into doing really fun things that he wouldn't maybe normally do.

0:11:37.3 Jaiya: And that, and when I say "normally do" I mean he needs permission and the ropes and the power dynamic give him permission to do the things he wants to do. So the kinky is about the taboo.

0:11:50.7 Jaiya: And then the shadow side of the kinky is the shame. "Why am I turned on by this? Why do I like these things? What is it about me that created me to be this way?" And the taboo of because there's that shame, maybe you're not having the consent conversations or maybe you're not having a healthy expression of this. And so we wanna look at then healing the shame and uncovering the acceptance that's there of yourself if this is your wiring.

0:12:20.8 Jaiya: Then the next one is sexual. And the sexual is what we think of in our culture as sex. So we think of penetration, we think of erections, we think of lubrication. We think of... These are the kinds of getting to the orgasm. This is very sexual.

0:12:35.8 Jaiya: And I think we have a limited definition of sex, and that's the shadow of the sexual, which is this limited definition that sex or the erotic looks like penetration or orgasm. And what I have discovered through 30 years of doing this work is that's not... That there's such a huge realm of sexuality.

0:12:54.9 Jaiya: It's not just about the orgasm, it's not just about the ejaculation. It's not just about getting in there and getting to that climax, which can be great, not pooh-poohing that.

0:13:05.7 Jaiya: And sexuals are amazing because they have that ability for high arousal. They have that ability to relax, like as orgasm when they're stressed, they have an orgasm and then they're like, "Ah, everything's right in the world." Whereas like a sensual is the complete opposite. It's like, "I need to be relaxed and in my sensual mood with my music on in order to feel like I can get into the erotic realm." So it's interesting how these different blueprints dance together too.

0:13:34.0 Jaiya: And then the final one is the shapeshifter. And the shapeshifter is someone who's turned on by all of these things that I just talked about. So if anybody listening just heard, "Oh, I'm kind of a little bit of all of that," then you might be a shapeshifter. And the shapeshifter superpower is like, they're a multilingual erotic artist. They can speak any language.

0:13:56.4 Jaiya: The shadow in that however, is that they can get where like let's say their partner is sensual, they can get stuck in just doing sensual, just doing sensual. And so they become the blueprint that is most starving.

0:14:06.8 Jaiya: And then they also get blamed for being complex, like, "You're too complex. You're too... You need too much. You want too much." And really it's just that they're very erotically sophisticated beings and they need... It's like they are the hyper sports car of sex. They need somebody who can play all, take them to their edges, take them to their maximum capacity of what they are because they're such a big erotic creature.

0:14:33.9 Jaiya: Yeah. So those are the five.

0:14:34.3 Paul Austin: And what are you?

0:14:36.6 Jaiya: I am a... Well I primarily am an energetic sexual, that's where I tend to go. And they're about equal, so I'm about 33% both of those. Just give me a little bit of energetic connection and then I'm ready to go, ready to just like, let's get to it. [chuckle]

0:14:56.9 Jaiya: But as I've developed, and this is what people can do with these blueprints, is you can develop to become the full spectrum of the eroticism, which is the shapeshifter. I truly believe we're all shapeshifters. We just get conditioned out of it. And we get this programming that tells us we can't be all of those things, or this one is okay, or that one's not, or trauma, different things will affect that.

0:15:18.5 Jaiya: And so what I've done is cultivated myself to be a shapeshifter, because my partner's blueprint, of course we're opposites, which often happens. I'm energetic sexual, he was zero sexual on his blueprint map and I was zero kinky, and he's a kinky sensual. So we had complete opposites.

0:15:36.8 Jaiya: And then once we figured that out, then I can learn and expand as long as I'm willing to learn and expand how to become more full spectrum in my sexuality. So at this point, I can give and receive in shapeshifter because that's what I've cultivated over the years, 16 years of being in relationship with him, my missing links in my sexuality.

0:15:57.4 Paul Austin: So there's a way that you can come to wholeness in a partnership, where you can explore basically all the realms and all the elements of eroticism together.

0:16:07.7 Jaiya: Absolutely. Absolutely. I say that sexual incompatibility is a myth. It's not that we're mismatched, it's that we haven't learned yet. It's all learnable skill. We just haven't learned yet. And we have to be willing to learn. I think that that's a big piece. As soon as you have a partner who's unwilling to learn, then you've got a different challenge on your hands.

0:16:30.1 Jaiya: But if both of you are willing, like learning a language, "I'm gonna go learn Spanish because I love you." Okay, "I'm gonna go learn kinky 'cause I love you." And it really is that.

0:16:40.0 Paul Austin: That commitment in a way, and that desire. It even reminds me oftentimes, through our training programs or through the podcast, I talk about psychedelics as a skill. That this is a learned skill, that it requires sort of a courageous willingness to explore aspects and elements of yourself, of these medicines that may be slightly outside your comfort zone.

0:17:03.1 Paul Austin: And this of course is why set and setting, a safe container, consent, skilled and qualified facilitators are all essential, because that growth, development, evolutionary process, I feel like is sort of this natural intelligence that we want to bring forward. And both psychedelics and sex can really help to facilitate that outcome.

0:17:25.3 Jaiya: A hundred percent. I think that sexuality and psychedelics map really well because we need the same things. When it comes to really great sex, you need an amazing set and setting. You need to have your consent conversations.

0:17:38.9 Jaiya: And when we have that sense of safety, then we can expand, then we can start to expand our consciousness or expand the pleasure capacity that we have in our body, expand our sexual experiences. And sex and psychedelics are both tools to lead us back to who we are. That all...

0:17:55.1 Jaiya: What sex is, fundamentally, is an awakening tool. But it's been co-opted as a recreational tool, not that I'm against recreational sex, it's just there's also recreational aspects. And we have lost the recreational aspects of sexuality, just like we lost, in some ways, the recreational aspects of psychedelics.

0:18:14.0 Jaiya: And so I see them hand in hand as both tools to our awakenings that have been deemed taboo things.

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0:18:22.0 Paul Austin: Okay folks, let's just take a quick second to hear from our sponsors.

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0:20:13.1 Paul Austin: So I wanna track for the listeners just your development a little bit more in terms of, one phrase is you are a somatic sexologist, which I think is a really interesting phrase and has a nice alliteration as well.

0:20:30.2 Paul Austin: So I'd love if you could just tell us a little bit about your path of growth and development, why you chose to become a somatic sexologist? And a little more insight into how the Erotic Blueprint came to be. How did you land on these five aspects of sexual expression as you've been in the space for the last 20 years?

0:20:50.6 Jaiya: So when I was a little girl, you know how some people wanna be different things when they grow up? I actually wanted to be Dr. Ruth when I grew up. So I don't know how I got that in my brain or I must have seen her somewhere. I just thought it was amazing.

0:21:05.4 Jaiya: And I actually told my parents I wanted to go to medical school 'cause there was still a little bit of shame, just in there of like, "I wanna help people with their sex lives." So I was gonna go into fertility medicine, but realized very quickly that, no, it's kind of like my own coming out of, I really want to do this.

0:21:21.6 Jaiya: So it was something I wanted to do from a very early age, it was either be a star on Broadway or a sexologist. [chuckle] And I kinda got to do both 'cause I get to play myself on stages and television.

0:21:38.1 Paul Austin: Exactly, exactly.

0:21:39.0 Jaiya: But yeah, I wanted to help people in this arena. I feel like I just kinda came into this world erotically gifted. Some people come in gifted as accountants or musicians, this was my gift.

0:21:51.7 Jaiya: And I started cultivating that very early in terms of reading all the books that I could get. Like I would sneak to the library and get every book on sexuality I could, and reading romance novels, [chuckle] like anything I got about sex, and then just blossoming that even more.

0:22:06.4 Jaiya: As soon as I turned 18, I started in on this industry and working around sexuality and learning Tantra, and that was really my early days were in Tantra and energy and that energetic blueprint and the energetic sensual development, how do we meditate and have sexual meditation, and this idea of cosmic union and kundalini energy and some of these aspects. And these expanded states of consciousness that you can access through breath and sex and utilizing these tools that we see over and over again.

0:22:41.6 Jaiya: And then eventually I wanted to become more accessible, so I studied somatic sexology at the Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality. And it was there that I started gaining like, "What's the language? How do I take Tantra and make it available to the mainstream? How do I teach sexuality in a way that's accessible to anyone? They don't have to know all the Sanskrit words and all of that." [chuckle]

0:23:06.7 Jaiya: So I started to learn that and that became a big part of my career and started to write books and just putting myself out there more and more. And becoming a somatic sexologist, you spend a lot of time educating people about their sexuality and their bodies from a somatic perspective.

0:23:22.7 Jaiya: And people don't know what the word "somatic", it's body-based. It's in the body, not just the mind. And so we would do different things on the body, and I would work with couples, teaching them, if anybody sees the Netflix Sex, Love & Goop show, you can see what that looks like. Part of leading somebody through their partner's body or your own body.

0:23:44.4 Jaiya: And in that was when I started noticing these blueprints, and so I had the "aha" moment one day working with a client when I was there and I had his wife and was working with him, and he was having a erectile problems, and she was doing all the like pogo stick pumping and all the very sexual things to try to get him aroused and it wasn't working, and I just started hovering my hands maybe four or five inches off of his body and teaching her to kind of hover.

0:24:16.4 Jaiya: And he started having these waves going... Of orgasm, just going through his body and his eyes pop open and he's like, "What is happening?" And then he gets an erection and she's looking at me like, "What is happening?"

0:24:28.0 Jaiya: And it just struck me, I'm like some bodies are wired for energy, not for the sexual touch that we're often taught. And then I just started thinking about all the sex techniques that get taught and how they're mostly in the sexual blueprint for cisgendered heterosexual men, and in the sensual for women. And what we've seen from having over two million people take the quiz is that the gender stereotypes actually don't work.

0:24:54.8 Jaiya: It's not true. Most men are a full spectrum. We have just as many energetic and sensual and shapeshifters. And so it's really interesting 'cause I think we take cisgendered heterosexual men and we put them in a box of their sexuality is simple, and it's all sexual. I mean you're a sensual, and we see that a lot. And they could also be the people who are taking the quiz and who are interested in it, that could be part of it.

0:25:18.8 Jaiya: And then for women, we do see high energetic and sensual. But the other aspects are in there as well, so. And it's interesting to look at it from a gender standpoint and orientation standpoint. And that's some of the data we've been gathering as people are taking the quiz.

0:25:34.3 Paul Austin: So the word that comes up as you're talking through a lot of this is "de-conditioning".

0:25:39.4 Jaiya: Yeah.

0:25:40.1 Paul Austin: Where we've been, for example, you mentioned cisgender men, the perception is that they would mostly be of the sort of sexual blueprint, and even as you're talking about it, I could see how for a lot of men who are raised on pornography, who were raised on having a very traditional way or a very tactical way of approaching sex that that would be, you'd almost think it would be second nature.

0:26:07.1 Paul Austin: And yet through this process of self-discovery, and this is kind of why I wanna bring psychedelics into it, right? Psychedelics can often, for me, acted as that first catalyst of de-conditioning where I recognized, "Oh, I'm taking none of these stories and narratives that are not mine, and actually I have the capacity to be expressed in a way that is totally unique and isn't beholden to what culture, what media, what my parents, what my community thinks is best for me, so to say."

0:26:39.1 Jaiya: Right.

0:26:40.2 Paul Austin: And that process of de-conditioning, it gets us back into that sort of primordial wild side, which I find has been so influential in my own sexual path. Even as an anecdote, the first time I really worked with Ayahuasca in a significant way was 2019, I was 28 years old.

0:27:04.9 Jaiya: Wow.

0:27:05.7 Paul Austin: And I had about seven experiences in two weeks, which I don't necessarily recommend.

[chuckle]

0:27:14.9 Paul Austin: But it helped to shake up the snow globe in a significant way. And so for part of my integration, a lot of my integration was coming to terms with the fact that from time to time I would premature ejaculate. From time to time, I was way more in my head.

0:27:28.1 Paul Austin: A lot of my masturbation was more about the outcome rather than the sensuality or experience of it, and I had a really good friend and mentor of mine that was like, "Hey, you should read Mantak Chia, Multi-Orgasmic Man."

0:27:40.0 Paul Austin: And so I picked it up and I started reading through it, started learning about how we can circulate energy, started learning about the importance of being very intentional about how I'm sort of self-pleasuring and whatnot, so that it isn't nearly as much about the destination, but it's much more about the journey and process of discovery, of feeling, of experiencing whatever it is that, you know, the energetics of what wants to move through, and breath essential to that and key to that.

0:28:08.5 Paul Austin: And I remember in those Ayahuasca experiences, for me what really came up, as an archetype is the importance of not being domesticated, the importance of feeling free and wild, the importance of not engaging in activities that numb and block...

0:28:24.2 Jaiya: Amen. [chuckle]

0:28:26.0 Paul Austin: The sort of primordial potent energy that can come alive, right? And that was a few years ago. There's ups and downs, there's been turns in the road. My own relationship with my own sexual energy has evolved tremendously, and yet there are still ways that I find myself wanting to be more integrated, wanting to take maybe aspects of self that have been disjointed or cut off, and really welcome back in so I can feel fully alive and powerful in my own presence in my own body.

0:29:02.3 Paul Austin: So I'd love as an opening, since this is The Psychedelic Podcast, just to hear a little bit about what role have psychedelics played in your life? In your, whether it's healing or transformational process, but really specific to even either re-discovering or getting in closer touch with that sort of true nature, that sexual energy, that root chakra that is the core of what it means to be human?

0:29:34.5 Jaiya: Love it. Love it, love it, love it. Yeah, my own journey with it started in 2018. I was sort of one of those no... You know, "this is your brain on drugs" with the egg cracking commercial people. So I hadn't really explored much 'cause I just was a purist, and breathwork, and some of these other things had been... Sex had actually been my access to self.

0:30:02.6 Jaiya: But I got a diagnosis of cPTSD, and so for those of you don't know, cPTSD is complex post-traumatic stress disorder, which came from most of my childhood being a life-threatening feeling in my body as a child and having an alcoholic father and really intense trauma growing up. I had a therapist tell me, "You're in the top 1% in terms of trauma. You're probably not gonna heal. This is something you're just gonna have to manage."

0:30:30.7 Jaiya: And I wasn't too happy with that response, so I went on a search for like, "Well, how do we heal PTSD, what helps?" And I just so happened to run into someone who was like, "I had cPTSD, I no longer have it." "What did you do?" And she was a little shy about telling me, but she did tell me, "Well, I did this MDMA thing and look into MAPS."

0:30:54.2 Jaiya: And so I went on a quest to find someone to work with, did find someone, and they just so happened to also have a background in Tantra, which was super perfect for me because it was a really good fit. And started working with them, and my first session was a miracle. And not everybody will have that experience, but my first session, I no longer had cPTSD after that, like no longer qualified to have cPTSD after that.

0:31:25.8 Paul Austin: Wow.

0:31:25.9 Jaiya: And I went through a lot of the trauma that was surface, that I had experienced as a child, and I went through also re-birthing my son, which had left me with a really intense pelvic floor trauma and a lot of pain around sex, but I got to re-experience, Stan Grof talks about experiencing that thing that you couldn't really experience.

0:31:49.3 Jaiya: And I was lost in a sauce when I was giving birth to him, [chuckle] 'cause I did it all natural, home birth at home, orgasmic birth. That's a whole story for another time. [chuckle]

0:32:03.4 Jaiya: Yeah. But I got to re-go through that and re-experience that tearing of my pelvic floor and the whole process that happened there was deeply healing and it actually healed my relationship with my son a lot. And so having gone through that first experience was... I mean everything, the nightmare stopped, the skin picking, all the things that come along with cPTSD completely stopped. And I was like a very, very different person.

0:32:31.0 Jaiya: And so that was my first experience. It was a miracle. I was graced with a deep, deep healing. And then my second session, I came in and I said, "Okay, I wanna find anywhere where I haven't found trauma, like let's get it all, like let's... " Maybe not a good intention." [chuckle]

0:32:47.5 Paul Austin: What a wish. [chuckle]

0:32:52.7 Jaiya: And so that second...

0:32:53.1 Paul Austin: Be careful...

0:32:53.2 Jaiya: Exactly, yes.

0:32:53.0 Paul Austin: What you ask for, yeah.

[chuckle]

0:32:53.1 Jaiya: Yeah exactly. And so that second session, I died for nine hours straight. It was a trans-personal experience where I went into every lifetime where I was persecuted for being a sexualities person or a outspoken person or a medicine person. Like every lifetime experience of going through that and seeing myself persecuted and murdered, over and over for nine hours straight.

0:33:19.5 Jaiya: So again, don't... Be careful what you ask for. It's like, "Where's the rest of my trauma?"

0:33:22.1 Paul Austin: This is on MDMA, right? This is...

0:33:24.4 Jaiya: This is just MDMA.

0:33:25.0 Paul Austin: Yeah, wow.

0:33:26.9 Jaiya: So really intense. And then, long story short, I think it was my fourth session that I had a complete mystical experience, and everything changed after that. Everything changed.

0:33:42.6 Jaiya: I understood things that you read in these philosophy books that you don't understand, so you have the direct experience and then you have the direct experience and you're like, "Ah." It's like being able to read a foreign language all of a sudden, everything made sense.

0:33:58.6 Jaiya: I felt after that like I needed to be an advocate in the space in whatever way that I could be an advocate, and I think ever since those experiences, I have been... You know, I kinda became a psychonaut, and I have been looking at, well, what does the space need and how do we support this and what's happening with decriminalization, and who are the voices, and what trainings can I take? And just kind of discovering what is going to be my path here.

0:34:25.1 Jaiya: I'm still in that inquiry, I'm still, if anything, just sharing my story, hopefully give some people some hope who might have cPTSD or sexual trauma. That also came out in my work with this, was like, "Oh, there was trauma I didn't even know I had." There were things that I just had dissociated from so deeply.

0:34:45.3 Jaiya: And that was the gift of ketamine, 'cause it's a dissociative, and so with ketamine, I got to such a dissociative place that I then could remember the dissociative trauma.

0:34:52.9 Paul Austin: Almost like an anchoring or remembrance of the imprint from that experience.

0:35:00.0 Jaiya: Yeah, I had to dissociate. It was so... That was the only way that I could survive through it. Yeah.

0:35:04.9 Paul Austin: Right. Wow. Well, thank you for sharing that, and I'm grateful that you had such an incredible healing and that you were able to find your way to MDMA, and even having a mystical experience in MDMA. We hear about it with Bufo...

0:35:22.0 Jaiya: With psilocybin.

0:35:22.7 Paul Austin: We hear about it with mushrooms or Ayahuasca, but my sense is because of even all of the sort of soil that you had tilled with your work around sex leading up to that experience, that context allowed for a really deep impactful healing experience, because you at least knew a little bit of the lay of the land in terms of terrain, right?

0:35:46.6 Jaiya: I knew how to navigate expanded states of consciousness from all of the work with sexuality and Tantra and breathwork, it's like, "Okay, this is... Let me breathe, let me work through this and let me move my body in a certain way."

0:36:00.4 Jaiya: If anybody had been a fly on the wall in that, I was all over the place, in terms of moving and touch and just all the things that I needed, then I had a lot of agency to be able to ask for what it was that I needed and really navigate. And through my body, through the embodiment that I had been trained in. Yeah. It helped a lot.

0:36:20.8 Paul Austin: So I'd be curious to hear just some of your thoughts, reflections, perspectives on psychedelics for healing sexual trauma. We know a lot of the clinical research on MDMA is for PTSD. Many of those who go through the clinical trials have PTSD from sexual assault, whether that's early childhood, adolescence, even in their adult years.

0:36:50.3 Paul Austin: And yet, there's a lot of folks who, men who might struggle with erectile dysfunction or a lot of women who can't necessarily orgasm or really be in touch with their body.

0:37:01.2 Paul Austin: What are just some of your thoughts and reflections on how psychedelics could be really helpful or useful tools to help with not only sexual healing but really this sort of full sexual expression of the being?

0:37:14.0 Jaiya: Yeah, it's a great question and I think we need a lot more research. People are always afraid to touch sex and these topics. It's research that I hope to do, is really how can we help heal? What are the protocols that help us heal? And maybe it's not a one size-fits-all as we've learned with psychedelics, but...

0:37:34.2 Jaiya: The way that I... I really love what Stan Grof talks about about experiencing the unexperienced. It's like going in with the intention of looking at, well, I wanna look at my sexualness, I wanna look at my sexuality and see what's there that could be at the root of some challenge that I'm really focused on or struggling with. And then how do I through that remember maybe an inciting event or let my body re-live an event.

0:38:04.8 Jaiya: Because the beauty of MDMA, as we know now, is that that allows us to experience something that was really difficult that we did dissociate from or couldn't fully experience in the moment and piece it back together, and in that, that brings the healing.

0:38:19.2 Jaiya: And so with sexuality, it's oftentimes people are able to get to content that they couldn't get to, and it's through being able to get to that content that things heal.

0:38:29.4 Jaiya: From a somatic perspective, it's also bringing them, integrating these parts that separated out. So if you had a part that separated out, a part of you that you've lost, you can help reclaim that part of you. Or the shame around who you are as a sexual being or gender.

0:38:48.0 Jaiya: I just see so many things that start to happen where we are now in acceptance of who we are without the programming and conditioning, we talked about deconstructing all of that that comes on us from society, and there are different awakenings around sexuality that I think can happen with psychedelics, depending on the medicine, different medicines doing different things, but this reclaiming of our truth is an important part in healing the sexuality.

0:39:20.6 Jaiya: Because as a culture, we've been traumatized because we've made it so taboo. And sex is the root of our aliveness. Sex is... We're all products of sex. We're all here because somebody had sex, we haven't figured out how to do that without somebody having sex yet.

0:39:32.6 Paul Austin: Not yet. Not yet. They're working on it, but not yet.

[chuckle]

0:39:38.2 Jaiya: But just the shaming, especially around marginalized communities, if you are different than what society tells us we have to be as sexual beings, the psychedelic space can open us up to really directly experiencing our truth and how we want to express.

0:40:02.8 Jaiya: I love this term about expression in our sexuality, because I feel like we're so held back in our expression sexually. It's this, "Quiet, be quiet, don't tell anybody about who you are." It's such a taboo. Thank you for having this conversation, 'cause I think it starts to give permission.

0:40:22.6 Jaiya: And I also think we're a bit held back in that primal expression you talked about, and what happens when we hold back the inherent life force, which is really this... What sexuality is about, and psychedelics open us to the inherent life force within our bodies.

0:40:39.5 Jaiya: If that looks like a yummy flow in our body, or if that looks like really like take energy. And some of these energies that we've made wrong and bad. But the reason being is that we haven't had the consciousness sexually.

0:40:55.2 Jaiya: So another thing that I think psychedelics can do is raise our consciousness about what we are doing as a collective to each other and to ourselves sexually. And this is where the trauma comes in, where we get rape culture and we get all the abuse, is that we haven't had the consciousness to fully act in our primal essence.

0:41:19.9 Jaiya: I think what psychedelics can help do with sexuality is to raise the consciousness, so then we can fully express what are the containers in which we can fully express our eroticism that are safe for everyone. And I'm really interested in that conversation, what's the safe container for us to fully express with freedom our deepest erotic expressions? Yeah, so there's a lot of things.

0:41:44.9 Paul Austin: I love this. I love... No, I wrote down "sovereignty", 'cause that's also a word that's been in my field for a long time, but particularly the last few weeks, and I think that certainly applies here, is how can we create and help to facilitate not only sovereign beings, but a sovereign culture that is willing to take ownership and responsibility for the healing of both themselves and the collective.

0:42:14.8 Paul Austin: And I love, you're in Boulder, Boulder is the home of a lot of interesting things, including Ken Wilber. And so Ken Wilber has this frame around the integrated worldview or integral perspective.

0:42:30.8 Paul Austin: And when I hear you talk about the sort of consciousness for our primal essence, Wilber will talk about it in terms of... You have, I think he has stage four, stage five, and then you have a stage six, which is the sort of teal integrated worldview which accepts the elements of everything underneath it, including the red, including the primal, including the root chakra, because that full alignment actually allows for a stabilization at a much higher level of frequency, vibration, consciousness overall.

0:43:01.9 Jaiya: 100% you're speaking my language, it's spiral dynamics there. [chuckle]

0:43:06.9 Paul Austin: Exactly. Yeah.

0:43:07.1 Jaiya: Yeah, I actually had this technique that I made based on that, of like put the color, use colored scarves and you make a consent agreement, a container and set and setting ahead of time, but then you're like, "Okay, I don't want red energy right now, I want you just to... I would love green and I want more heart-centered, eco-conscious sexuality."

0:43:29.0 Jaiya: What do you want in the moment? And you can pool scarves and play fun games of what level of consciousness are you going to enter into with your sexuality.

0:43:37.9 Paul Austin: 'Cause this gets back to these aspects of self, when we welcome all the aspects of self in, then it allows us to play with each one rather than stigmatizing or shaming or shutting out an aspect of who we are.

0:43:53.6 Jaiya: Right. I mean, all of us has to be welcome. All, all. That means all of it. And so how do we... Again, this question of what are the ethics? What is the safe container? What gives us the spaces and the permission to really have all of us held?

0:44:12.4 Jaiya: And I think that in the psychedelic space there isn't enough conversation about sexuality, it's sort of like, "Oh, just don't touch it, or just have this little conversation." My consent conversations are 90 minutes for anybody who's coming to work with me in terms of they're expressing their bodies, so you know my work that I do as a somatic sexologist.

0:44:29.2 Jaiya: And it's a 90-minute, and most people don't know how to have that in depth of a consent conversation about, "Well, here are all the possibilities." And where do you wanna go? And that creates so much safety in people to have that conscious...

0:44:44.3 Jaiya: It's probably the first time, even though they've been in relationship, even though they've had sex a lot in their life, where they've had that kind of conversation of, "Well, what's really a yes?" And a yes can always become a no, but a no can never become a yes, within this session.

0:45:00.0 Jaiya: 'Cause we get high on our sexual arousal and then we start to shift our mind and then we get consent regret later on, and so you start to hear about those kinds of things.

0:45:08.2 Jaiya: And consent is a really deep, deep place, and I think that there's places that the psychedelic space can learn from the sexuality space in terms of these kinds of conversations and allowing people to fully express on their sexuality, that we're not hiding it, that we're not shutting this aspect down. We're just not gonna talk about that one, we'll put it under the rug and maybe just talk about consent this way.

0:45:34.0 Jaiya: But just having the conversation can be really deeply healing, it can also be deeply triggering. So I highly recommend training around all of that before you're...

0:45:44.2 Jaiya: But if you're with your partner at home, maybe it's like, "Let's have a consent conversation, let's really talk about this." My partner and I pick it apart. We... 'Cause there's assumed consent in relationships. It's like, "No, let's really pick this apart, what are we consenting to on a regular basis, and how does that change and where do we wanna play, what blueprint do we wanna play in or explore?" and we're having these conversations regularly.

0:46:07.2 Paul Austin: Yeah. Nuance around consent, the particularities. Consent really became a very front and center talking point during the Me Too movement in 2016, 2017, 2018. And I have a question, 'cause actually I was gonna lead us into consent and then you just went there, and I'm so glad you did.

[chuckle]

0:46:30.6 Paul Austin: I'd be curious to hear your perspective on what's the balance in communication with consent? And I wanna sort of offer a couple anecdotes or examples, and if these are not fully correct, feel free to correct me in this.

0:46:43.8 Paul Austin: On the one hand, we have this culture of consent, which you're explaining and talking about these 90-minute conversations about what it means to get into all the particularities of consent.

0:46:56.2 Paul Austin: And on the other hand, Esther Perel, who I'm sure you're aware of has talked about consent. And again, I would like your correction in this, if I'm misunderstanding it, because I may be misunderstanding it. She's talked about consent is important and too much communication around consent can kill some of the energy, erotic energy that might be sort of bubbling up.

0:47:21.7 Paul Austin: And that it feels sometimes like consent is a very American-centric conversation because a lot of men are so clueless when it comes to reading erotic signs, what women are communicating and not communicating, whereas Esther's from France and eroticism and sexuality is much more sort of developed as a topic there.

0:47:46.1 Jaiya: So I'd love just to hear your thoughts on consent, communication, eroticism versus like... Yeah, kinda take that apart for us if you will?

0:47:54.7 Jaiya: Esther and I are friends and we love picking these conversations apart and talking about it. So it's a yes/and. And it's interesting. It's, again, it kind of comes back to that like, do you have the consciousness there to be able to read, to be able to breathe, to slow down, to notice the signs in someone's body? If not, you need to use the words, you know?

0:48:23.9 Jaiya: Do you have enough consciousness as the receiver of something that when something doesn't feel good, can you say, "Hey, can we stop?" Or do you grin and bear it and move through it? Like, where are you in that spectrum?

0:48:33.6 Jaiya: I feel like the more that we have capacity, consciousness capacity and expression capacity, the more that we are able to play more freely without all of the 90 minutes of consent before every time we have sex. But the less consciousness capacity and the less expression capacity that we have, the more we need these conversations. And so I really see it as a yes/and.

0:49:00.6 Jaiya: And then of course anybody who's in a professional role needs to really be having these conversations 'cause you don't know the person. And so I think that this also gets into like professional ethics.

0:49:09.8 Paul Austin: And there's lot of protection and trauma projection and there's a lot of...

0:49:14.2 Jaiya: Transference and countertransference and all that. Yup.

0:49:15.3 Paul Austin: Transference and all the psychological things. Not doing that.

0:49:21.6 Jaiya: Yeah. And so it's fascinating to me. To me this is still, I feel like we are learning as a collective. You know, we are in the phase of how do we freely express and not harm? How do we play all the way to our edges and not create something that hurts someone?

0:49:40.9 Paul Austin: Yeah, re-traumatizing people.

0:49:41.6 Jaiya: And then if we do hurt someone, how do we repair? 'Cause that's the more important piece. Right? And I think that this also ties into the, just the conversation also, not just about people who've been traumatized, but the people who traumatize others. They need psychedelic. You know, like all of that. Just like we all need support.

0:50:01.2 Jaiya: And so like, leaving out people who have traumatized or abused people, there is something that we can do too to uplift people in this space as well through these medicines and help them to come into more love of themselves so that they, if you have that self-love, you're less likely to harm.

0:50:20.5 Jaiya: Or how are we helping people increase their capacity for consciousness and increase their capacity for expression. If we just have a high capacity for expression then, and we don't have the consciousness to go along with it, then that can sometimes cause harm. And then we also don't have the ability to repair.

0:50:38.5 Jaiya: And so these are conversations as we're learning in the collective, as we are learning how to work with these medicines and work with sexuality, how are we increasing our capacity and how are we then repairing if something is happening?

0:50:55.6 Jaiya: We have such a litigating system. And I don't necessarily think that that... There are beauties about that system, but I also think that there's something for reparative community and something to be said for learning those.

0:51:07.6 Jaiya: It's almost like repairing stuff that happened with our parents that we didn't get to repair, and stuff when we were younger. So there's a lot of deep stuff that I'm saying here.

0:51:17.9 Jaiya: And I just wanna credit also Ori Zimmels who kind of gave me that idea around this capacity piece. You know, that we are looking at capacity and the capacity of consciousness and the capacity of expression. Both, both are important as we're navigating this journey to self.

0:51:39.3 Paul Austin: A parallel that's coming up for me is we often talk about psychedelic literacy. Right? And so the sort of context that I often draw is in this second wave of psychedelics in the counterculture, we went from having basically no access to psychedelics from a Western context. For 1700 years, we have been cut off from our lineage of the mysteries and the ancient Greeks.

0:52:06.8 Paul Austin: And so all of a sudden then LSD gets invented and it's turn on, tune in, drop out, everyone take a bunch of acid. And we didn't really have that cultural container to hold these ecstatic states that we're moving through.

0:52:17.9 Jaiya: Right, right.

0:52:21.9 Paul Austin: And so of course it went sideways. And so what I'm hearing in this sort of communication around consciousness has to meet expression, is there's a scaffolding that's being developed inside of individuals and the collective in order to hold the expansiveness of what sexuality allows without it sort of overtaking and driving and consuming the ego, the individual, even the community, you know?

0:52:55.0 Paul Austin: I've been studying a lot about intentional communities, and this was of course something else in the '60s. And the biggest reason intentional communities fail is because of strong male leaders who sleep with multiple women in this community and they have no context for how to navigate all of the complexity and emotions that arise with that, that thing, that intention.

0:53:19.9 Jaiya: Yeah. And again, this comes down to sexuality has to be talked about in this and how are we navigating it. And what are the, what is the container in within which we're playing? And then if that container then needs to morph or change, how are, like having that is vital. Otherwise we see what we're seeing here with this un...

0:53:44.9 Jaiya: The consciousness hasn't been expanded, the capacity for consciousness hasn't been expanded, even though there's lots of expression. I mean, Dionysus would love it, but... [chuckle] I've been reading The Immortality Key, really loving that book, if you haven't read it. Fascinating. Fascinating reading.

0:54:02.5 Paul Austin: Yeah. I'm a history lover. I studied history in undergrad. Even the third wave of psychedelics, first wave, indigenous and ancient Greece, second wave, counterculture. And so I always love to explore, the Dionysian archetype was one that I was exploring in many ways in the past six months.

0:54:16.9 Paul Austin: And sort of what does it signify and what does it represent and how do we balance a sort of bacchanalian ecstatic state with rationality and ethics, so to say.

0:54:32.8 Jaiya: Right. [chuckle] Yeah.

0:54:37.5 Paul Austin: Right? Because ecstasy also can lead to madness. And so this is the pendulum, right? We're always, from my lens, we're always looking for that middle way. We're always looking for that point of balance. And it's a, when we talk about sex and psychedelics, it's a narrow bridge to walk.

0:54:48.8 Jaiya: It is.

0:54:53.8 Paul Austin: Which is why containers, ethics, communication, educa... All of these are critical, so that way we can walk that narrow bridge without being knocked Off.

0:55:04.0 Jaiya: Yeah. And I feel like that's been part of my purpose in this world is how do we ride that edge of ecstasy and sexuality? And more recently, my own personal experience with psychedelics, it's how do we navigate the ecstasies in a way that stays grounded and integrated? How do we integrate back into life? How do we integrate back into the beauty after the ecstatic state?

0:55:32.1 Jaiya: There's a book called After the Ecstasy, the Laundry, by Jack Kornfield. I love that book. But that's... And that's been a big part of my journey. After my big complete mystical experience, I had like two years of a lot of, I was in a very non-dual, "There's no, there's no Jaiya here, it's all one."

0:55:50.7 Jaiya: And I stayed there for two years. Graced. Again, graced. But the beauty of now on the other side is, I love life. I'm not trying to get outta my body. I'm not trying to escape being human. Humaning is beautiful. We came here to human.

0:56:08.7 Jaiya: So like, yeah, we can reach these ecstatic states, but I don't wanna become somebody who's chasing ecstatic states, I want to bring the beauty of what I learned out in these ecstatic states back into, and now stay. The ecstatic just becomes a baseline, and then it's not madness because the ecstatic is now baseline. I'm staying.

0:56:35.0 Jaiya: Instead of having to go have the experience and come back and have the experience and come back, how about just staying instead of being a tourist?

0:56:41.8 Paul Austin: Yeah. Staying in the transformation. A body worker that I've had the pleasure to work with a couple times, who's phenomenal and crazy and wild, he talks about transformation, not transcendence. And his sort of special sauce is ketamine, rectally, as part of, as part of body work. And the reason he loves that as a tool is because he says it keeps us in those lower root chakras.

0:57:12.9 Paul Austin: Because so oftentimes we're looking for transcendence, transcendence, transcendence. And yet we're here in this body, as you said, we're here humaning, we're here to, to be of support, to love, to make babies, to play music. To all of these beautiful things that life, allows for us.

0:57:36.1 Paul Austin: Like now more than ever, we actually have the capacity to enjoy those, to be with those. And yet so often, right, we find ourselves numbing, we find ourselves disassociated, we find ourselves blocking those energetics.

0:57:56.0 Paul Austin: And so this conversation today, just again, I love that marriage of consciousness, consciousness with expression, because that, that to me represents this sort of full complexity, right?

0:58:08.8 Paul Austin: What I often talk about in our training program is like for you as a coach, practitioner, facilitator, the greater of a paradox that you can hold, the more support you can be of to the clients that you are helping to move through a really transformative process.

0:58:23.0 Jaiya: A hundred percent. Yeah.

0:58:26.0 Paul Austin: Let's, okay, so we're, I want to touch on a couple more things. We might go slightly over the, the hour mark.

0:58:33.0 Jaiya: It's all good. It's sex. People love listening about sex. [chuckle]

0:58:37.2 Paul Austin: Yeah. And I love talking about sex.

0:58:40.6 Paul Austin: So tantra, tantric practice, you are, you know, you're a Cobra Breath practitioner, I think you said level four with Ipsalu. I'd love just kind of give us the 411 on tantra. What is tantra? Why is tantra an important modality, a helpful modality?

0:58:58.5 Paul Austin: And kind of coming back to the sense of consent, containers, ethics, why is that important specifically with the practice of Tantra?

0:59:09.8 Jaiya: Yeah. I started my tantric training very young. I was like 18. I started it way before that, but... [chuckle] But officially started it then when I was of legal age to practice such things. And there's a lot of different lineages.

0:59:24.6 Jaiya: So when you look at tantra, you know, there's White Tantra, which is much more of a meditation type practice, like the tantric Tibetan monks who they meditate on a Dakini or the translation of Dakini is "sky walker, sky dancer".

0:59:39.1 Paul Austin: Sky walker. Interesting.

0:59:39.2 Jaiya: Yeah, isn't it? Like a Jedi. [chuckle] And so there's, like more breath work and meditation, but they're not discluding the erotic energy, the life force energy, that prana or Shakti energy.

0:59:55.2 Jaiya: And then there's more like a Pink Tantra, which has a lot of heart and has that white element of meditation, but it also has the root so that's why they call it pink. So it's like the combination of those two.

1:00:06.8 Jaiya: Then you've got more of like a Red Tantra, which is going to be much more of like the sexual practices that we hear about, of going into cosmic union through intercourse. And there's all kinds of different techniques, you know, that can be done within that sexual realm.

1:00:23.1 Jaiya: And then there's more of like the darker aspects, which I could call the kinky tantra, you know, like Aghora Tantra, which are the really, really taboos that people might go into. So like dancing at a cemetery or on the cremation ceremonial grounds.

1:00:39.9 Jaiya: And Tantra has a lot of ecstasy in it, so it has a lot of that aspect of it, but a lot of the focus of Tantra is taking polarities and integrating them. And I believe that we all have a prime polarity that most of us come into this life with. And when we integrate those two prime polarities, we go into a cosmic union, whatever that may be.

1:01:00.2 Jaiya: And in Tantra they talk about Divine Masculine, Divine Feminine a lot. I try to stay away from that language because people genderize it so much like, "Oh, you're supposed to be masculine 'cause you're in a male body," you know, or a body with a penis.

1:01:11.6 Jaiya: And so how are we taking these polarities and unifying them, and then coming into a cosmic union. At the moment of cosmic union, we often have a mystical experience. And so Tantra, and historically Tantra did have plant medicines as part of, you know, and biogens as part of it.

1:01:31.1 Jaiya: So like there's Soma, there's the use of cannabis. And, you know, we've lost some of the recipes over this time period where we didn't have access to these things, and then end up getting wiped out. But there was oftentimes in the rituals, a moment of the taboo with these like taking in something that was, helped us access more of these realms.

1:01:55.5 Jaiya: And so, and I've seen that a lot, like people getting access to or hearing stories as I'm helping people integrate these ecstatic experiences where they have the same experience, like we're seeing this Shakti, or we're seeing this life force, or we're feeling that life force move through our spine in some way.

1:02:17.9 Jaiya: And I was fortunate enough to come across this at a very young age and have been practicing it for a very long time. And having these, I had my very first mystical experience actually, when I was in a tantric puja and this guy that I was with...

1:02:34.5 Paul Austin: What's a puja? What's a puja?

1:02:35.1 Jaiya: A puja is where, it's a ritual where one circle is the Divine Masculine and one circle is the Divine Feminine. And oftentimes the masculine is going around from feminine to feminine to feminine, like with an eye gaze or a hand massage or some kind of little ritual that you're doing with each Divine Feminine in the space. And again, this cosmic union can come out of it. As you're going around, there's no longer the individual person.

1:03:00.4 Jaiya: Now everybody becomes the goddess. Everyone is the god. And it starts to have this very integrative of the polarities aspect happening. And you get a lot of oxytocin and you're high on your own endogenous chemicals as you're going through these exercises.

1:03:14.7 Jaiya: So I was in one of those, I was actually leading it and this guy that I was really, really into at the time, it was a group of friends, and he kissed my toe. And the whole thing, I just opened into a complete, the two of us both opened into a complete mystical experience from all the buildup because we had been going around and that it was the very last exercise, and that moment that he touched me. And we're still in relationship 20 years later. [chuckle] So, you know, it was a very magical experience that we both...

1:03:44.9 Paul Austin: That's beautiful.

1:03:46.3 Jaiya: You know, love. So that's, that's again, the power of Tantra is it's a very similar to a psychedelic experience, if people can fully surrender into it. And we're utilizing these tools like breathwork and movement and expression to raise consciousness.

1:04:02.7 Paul Austin: What about Shibari? Tell us about Shibari?

1:04:05.1 Jaiya: So those of you who aren't familiar with Shibari, Shibari is a form of rope tie. It is beautiful. It's like, it's like, to me it's like the Zen, you know, it's like Zen rope tie. It's a very meditative, it makes beautiful designs in the body.

1:04:19.1 Jaiya: Orpheus Black, who's in Los Angeles, he has like a whole Zen rope tie that I've experienced and we bring him into our events. It is like going into a meditation. It's like this one piece and then all this beautiful knot work and ties, and then you're there.

1:04:38.3 Jaiya: And then the next piece comes in and then you're like, it's like you're cocooned in this rope. Can be a very beautiful experience. Yeah, for those of you who might be kinky, I highly recommend it if you like ropes.

1:04:49.0 Paul Austin: Take the Erotic Blueprint test. That's how you, some people might know.

1:04:52.7 Jaiya: Yeah, and if you go take the test, there's two different ones. There's one that's just tells you one blueprint and there's one that gives you all the percentages. I talked about percentages at the top of the show. So you can take the in depth one and get all the percentages of exactly what you are.

1:05:05.6 Paul Austin: Okay, I'm going to do that next. That's sounds...

1:05:07.3 Jaiya: Awesome.

1:05:09.3 Paul Austin: That's super aligned. So one thing we haven't talked about yet is your training program for coaches, the Erotic Blueprint Coach. And I'd love just to hear a little bit about, I suppose the development of that program, the container that's created for that program, the intention in terms of, you know, not the intent... Who is joining this program? What process are you bringing them through?

1:05:36.9 Paul Austin: And what's the hope for the sort of completion of that training? What are they equipped to sort of go out into the world and to help facilitate and navigate?

1:05:48.5 Jaiya: Yeah, we have trained now about 350 people in the certification to become a coach. And you get a full, like you come out a sexuality coach, you know, in the Erotic Blueprint methodology, being able to take people through different exercises. And it's a somatic approach. Although we don't give a touch license, we do give hires how to do this like with a couple and how to coach them through all of that.

1:06:14.3 Jaiya: And then also working on the psyche-emotional, psycho-spiritual aspects through, we have another certification you get with it called Accelerated Evolution, which I found is amazing for polarity integration. I mean, it's a very almost tantric technology. And you're getting training in all of the different blueprints, so deep dive into energetic, deep dive into all the ones I mentioned.

1:06:38.3 Jaiya: But the people who are taking it really are like anybody in a helping profession, you know? So it might be therapists who are taking it, other somatic sexologists, people who've never coached before who are interested in like really making a career change. We get a lot of people who are like, "I've always wanted to be a sex educator, but I couldn't do it in my earlier life and now I'm like ready to be out about that."

1:07:01.6 Jaiya: And we have an amazing community. I mean, just to be in a community of erotic explorers, it's like a community of psychonauts, only it's the exploration of eroticism.

1:07:12.2 Jaiya: I always say that I'm like a astronaut and Olympian mixed together when it comes to the erotic. I like to go way far out, but I also like to see everything that's possible and what is this body? What is this instrument capable of doing in the erotic realm? What is erotically possible? And as a community of people who are really looking at what is erotically possible. Yeah.

1:07:34.5 Jaiya: And I'm really excited because I also have a book coming out finally on erotic blueprints so everybody will have access to some of this content when that book comes out in December this year, 2023.

1:07:44.2 Paul Austin: And this is your third book?

1:07:46.4 Jaiya: It's my fourth book.

1:07:46.7 Paul Austin: Your fourth book.

1:07:49.7 Jaiya: Yeah.

1:07:49.8 Paul Austin: Okay. What are the names of the other three?

1:07:52.6 Jaiya: So I have Red Hot Touch. I have one called Blow Each Other Away, and one called Cuffed, Tied, and Satisfied. And I will say all of those three books were focused on sex techniques because this was before I discovered the erotic blueprints.

1:08:06.0 Jaiya: So it's like hundreds of techniques. It's just like techniques and techniques, which are great, but you have to know what blueprint your partner is to know what techniques to actually apply.

1:08:14.8 Jaiya: So I write about this in my new book, which is the, you know, I was the sex technique goddess and I couldn't get my partner to have sex with me, 'cause my partner, Ian, he was not a sexual. And I'm trying all these sex techniques on him and he's just like, "What are you doing, woman?" You know, I'm doing the striptease in front of him. And he's just like, "That's obvious. Why are you doing that?"

[laughter]

1:08:40.7 Paul Austin: You needed to bring in the ropes.

1:08:42.2 Jaiya: I did, I needed the ropes. And as soon as I got the ropes out, we were off to the races. [chuckle]

1:08:48.4 Paul Austin: I love that. I love also this community of exotic explorers. This is for our program as well. The training is great. Information is helpful, but there's this spectrum of information versus transformation. And I find the actual experiential part of being in a group, of being in a container, of pushing oneself slightly outside the comfort zone.

1:09:15.3 Paul Austin: Even as part of ours, we do the six-day intensive in Costa Rica and actually work with medicine as part of that. And the community that flows from that. Psychedelics are so taboo. They're still illegal. And yet to be in solidarity, to be shoulder to shoulder with other people who feel that sort of call to pioneer, to create, to support, it's my favorite part of all of this work, the community.

1:09:45.8 Paul Austin: Healing really doesn't happen, transformation doesn't really happen within an individual context. We are by nature social beings. And remembering that is I think so essential to getting back to this sort of primal, wild, fully expressed self.

1:10:01.7 Jaiya: Yeah. It's something I've explored deeply in eroticism, but not yet in psychedelics. So I feel like it's my next thing is like, what does that look like in communities and groups? 'Cause I'm very insular in my experience. [chuckle] I have to take all.

1:10:13.3 Jaiya: And this is what I do often with sexuality is I'll map my bravery and sexuality onto other things in life. And so, where are you brave and where can you map that than maybe into your explorations, different explorations in life?

1:10:28.0 Paul Austin: I love that. Okay. Final question then, and then we'll wrap up. What are you most excited about? What do you have in the next three to six to nine months?

1:10:37.1 Paul Austin: We already mentioned the book, but beyond that, whether it's with the erotic blueprint, whether it's in your personal life, whether it's, you know? Yeah, whatever it is, what are you like, what's kind of moving through and coming through right now from a, from a creation perspective?

1:10:53.0 Jaiya: Well, I'm creatively on fire right now. So psychedelics gave me the gift of my voice back. I was an opera major when I was young and had a vocal cord injury. And then one session, my voice came.

1:11:04.4 Jaiya: And I'm working on an album right now, which is super exciting. My lover who I talked about who kissed my toe 20 years ago is a composer and we're working together on making music, you know, just like how do we create vibrations that help people during ecstatic states or going into these expanded states of consciousness, that help people remember who they are and get deeply in touch with themselves. So that's really exciting.

1:11:32.5 Jaiya: I'm working on several book projects and one of them is around these ideas of how do we get closer to ourself and experience ourself and increase capacity for consciousness and expression, with Ori. I mentioned Ori Zimmels, he and I are working on a project called Life Awake and it's the school for conscious capacity and expression capacity. Yeah. So I'm really excited about that.

1:11:57.6 Paul Austin: I now understand the Lady Gaga reference by the way.

1:12:01.3 Jaiya: Yeah? Yeah? [chuckle]

1:12:02.1 Paul Austin: Yeah. I mean, I got the Dr. Ruth.

1:12:03.9 Jaiya: And the yogi.

1:12:06.1 Paul Austin: I got the yogi. Now it all comes together. Yeah.

1:12:09.1 Jaiya: And then I have one more that I'm really excited about, which is it's called ReGenesis and it's addiction recovery. We're looking at how do we solve the addiction problem on this planet?

1:12:18.8 Jaiya: 'Cause we know that the rehabilitation center stuff has not been really working. And we're looking at what is it that really, what is it going to take and how do we really solve this crisis that's happening on our planet. And how do we do it pleasurably?

1:12:35.4 Jaiya: I think that that is also a question we can ask ourselves more, which is can we make this more pleasurable and easier? Like we don't have to do healing hard anymore. You know? We don't have to make it like so much suffering. It really can be pleasurable and it really can be easier. And how do we make that happen?

1:12:56.1 Jaiya: And I don't necessarily mean sexually pleasurable, I mean like let's...

1:13:00.1 Paul Austin: Generally pleasurable.

1:13:01.0 Jaiya: Let's heal...

1:13:01.1 Paul Austin: And flowy.

1:13:03.1 Jaiya: With amazing music and fur rugs. [chuckle]

1:13:05.4 Paul Austin: I'm into that. I'm into that.

1:13:07.5 Jaiya: Sensual. [chuckle]

1:13:09.1 Paul Austin: Exactly. We have this sort of self-sacrificial conditioning, right? It's part of the, the manifest destiny and the Protestant ethos that particularly American culture was built on. And for me, a huge part of my own path the last three years really has been, like you said, leaning in to what if it was easy? What if it was flowy?

1:13:32.1 Paul Austin: Certainly that doesn't mean that there won't be challenging emotions, anger or sadness or grief that need to come up and be processed, but why not have fun? Why not? Why not experience bliss? Why not be in joy?

1:13:47.6 Jaiya: Yeah, I can grieve and it can feel good. You know, like, "Oh, this grief. Yes, this too. Oh." It's when we push away something that it becomes a struggle. You know? When we start to make something that we're feeling bad and wrong, it becomes a struggle, as opposed to being like, "Yes, yes, yes grief. You too. You get to come too to the giant party."

1:14:10.2 Paul Austin: Welcoming all the the parts of itself.

1:14:12.9 Jaiya: All the parts. Yup. Yup.

1:14:15.1 Paul Austin: Beautiful. Well, Jaiya, thank you so much for, for joining us for the podcast today. Thank you for...

1:14:21.4 Jaiya: My pleasure.

1:14:23.5 Paul Austin: For your courage. Thank you for following your truth. Thank you for doing all of this work as a, I love this phrase, somatic sexologist out in the world, for the clarity you've brought through the archetypes of the erotic blueprint. And for your own willingness to heal and to confront and to explore. I had a ton of fun today.

1:14:46.2 Jaiya: Yay.

1:14:47.2 Paul Austin: It was really, it was really a pleasure.

1:14:50.4 Jaiya: And thank you so much for having this brave conversation and about these two topics that are taboo. Yeah. Thank you.

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1:15:13.8 Paul Austin: You can also go deeper into this episode at thethirdwave.co/podcast, where you'll find full show notes, transcripts, and all the links that were mentioned in this conversation.

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