Breaking Patterns, Healing Triggers, and the Nuance of Self-Expression

Podcast Highlights

• Strategies for transitioning smoothly to altered states of consciousness.
• Ayahuasca and psilocybin mushrooms as soulmates and gurus.
• Inviting epiphanies through non-resistance.
• Breaking patterns: How to move from understanding to awareness to action.
• The role of integration in locking in sustainable change.
• Morning practices as Jedi training.
• Facing our shadows.
• Women, body image, sexuality, and self-healing.
• When radical self-expression is—and isn’t—appropriate.
• Shipibo healers and interdimensional masters of energy.

Show Links

1. Soltara Healing Center
2. Breathwork
3. NYU
4. Be Here Now
5. Vice
6. David Deida
7. Alexandra Roxo
8. Fuck Like A Goddess
9. Be Here Nowish
10. Shipibo

Podcast Transcript

0:00:00 Paul Austin: Welcome to The Third Wave Podcast. I'm your host, Paul Austin, here to bring you cutting edge interviews with leading scientists, entrepreneurs and medical professionals, who are exploring how we can integrate psychedelics in an intentional and responsible way for both healing and transformation. It is my honor and privilege to bring you these episodes, as you get deeper and deeper into why these medicines are so critical to the future of humanity. So let's go and let's see what we can explore and learn together in this incredibly important time.

0:00:38 PA: The Third Wave podcast is brought to you by Magic Mind. Do you want more creativity, flow and energy in your day-to-day routine? Then go to magicmind.co and get the 2-ounce shot that contains 12 magical ingredients scientifically designed to improve your productivity. I've been using Magic Mind over the last couple of months. It has replaced my morning coffee. It has matcha, Lion's Mane and a number of other nootropics, and I can't say enough about it. It is so, so useful. So if you're interested in Magic Mind, go to magicmind.co and enter promo code, "THIRDWAVE", to get 10% off and try it for yourself. As long time listeners know, yoga and meditation have played a huge role as complementary practices to my own responsible psychedelic use, and that's why we're excited to be working with Half Moon Yoga as a partner for the podcast. They carry everything from basic yoga supplies to more advanced things like bolsters and sandbags, to meditation cushions that are super comfy to sit on. And right now, they're offering a 15% discount to Third Wave listeners with the promo code, "THIRDWAVE". I'd encourage you to check them out at shophalfmoon.ca if you're looking for tools to support your yoga or meditation practice.

0:01:50 PA: You are just fresh off a week of Ayahuasca, you went to Soltara Healing Center, which is in Costa Rica, in a beautiful location on the Gulf of Nicoya. You look radiant. You look beautiful.

0:02:01 Alexandra Roxo: Thank you.

0:02:02 PA: One thing that you mentioned when you came in is that it was work. It was work to go there, it was work to sit in that space, and that you've learned so much from it in spending time there. So I'd love just to hear a little bit about your experience. How was it?

0:02:15 AR: Yeah, thank you. Well, my relationship with Ayahuasca started seven years ago, so I really do feel like it's been a long-term love affair. I hope it stays like forever. I really [laughter] I feel like we're soulmates, I'm not leaving her, and it's been throughout that period of seven years that I've taken little breaks or I've sat once, I've sat three times, I've sat once, but it'd been three years since I did my last kind of deep dive of three nights. And so when I was invited there, I really was considering like, "Okay, is this the right place for me to go to do this?" And it just seemed like they were in such integrity. I felt warmth from everyone there, even over the email. I was kind of annoying with them 'cause I was like, "Wait, but I feel like I need to go to Peru" and then I... An opportunity to go to Peru came up, but then it fell through, and so I was like, "Okay, guys, I'm coming to Costa Rica." So I felt like that was my own resistance. Honestly, whenever I play those games of back and forth in my mind, as much as I can sort of assure myself, "Oh no, it's 'cause I really need to think about this," usually it's resistance for me, of resisting love, resisting letting go, resisting facing the tough work.

0:03:29 AR: So I got through that first little tunnel of resistance into the, "Yes, I'm gonna go." And then it was just an incredible week, it was an incredible week... It was really hard work. All of my ceremonies felt really... Pretty laborious, pretty... There was a lot of intensity. I really feel like I learned a lot about the nature of my mind and where my mind is untrained and where it needs more work and practice, more gymnastics. So I feel like I was going through mind gymnastics. And I went to India and Nepal earlier this year, and I did a bunch of really deep Buddhist initiation and meditating in caves and... Going into Ayahuasca is like, "Oh shit." I think that my mind is a lot more trained, then it's not and I can see all the places where all the internal struggle that I'm creating for myself is self-created. Yeah, it's hard to describe what happens in those spaces. I'm not even gonna try. But it was great. It was deep. It was beautiful. It was incredible. [laughter]

0:04:32 PA: You've been doing this work for many, many years with mushrooms and with Ayahuasca. What was different about this experience compared to a lot of the other work that you've done in the past?

0:04:43 AR: Well, I gave myself the full week to just be at Soltara. No work, no phone, no friends, no lovers, no family, just like me and me. In the past, I've done ceremonies on a weekend or... It's been sort of intermixed with my life. I gave myself really the full time of being there. And also my whole life now is oriented towards my growth and development, so it's not like a step outside of my life. When I did three ceremonies, about three years ago, I was in this kind of Hollywood moment. I was pitching a TV show, I had just directed a TV pilot with VICE and Spike Jonze, and I was in The Matrix hardcore at that moment. I had agents at CAA, and so that... Stepping into ceremony from that, I was really facing a lot of my ego and I was really facing a lot of my shadows around success and money, and validation and approval. This time I wasn't. This time, it was just like, "Girl, you go deep every day, like your life is, you are operating at some... " That's a relative term, I mean relative in terms of my own journey, like depth, the depth that I'm with me. So this week, I already was entering into this space with a deep sense of knowing of myself and my shadows, like I know them very well.

0:06:03 AR: There are most things about myself I've been studying for so long. So even the patterns that I engage with that create more suffering for me, I know them now. And so in the past, those things would be a lot of ahas like, "Oh, my God! I didn't know I had this pattern that I keep doing. Oh, I didn't know that this shadow, I keep playing it out." I know them now. I don't know how to get out of them always, and that was part of my sort of prayer, it's just like, "How do I just get out of this?" So I did a different intention every night, and my third night, the intention was epiphany: Teach me about epiphany, or breakthrough as another similar word. And I had a beautiful breakthrough that night about some stuff I had been carrying, and the breakthrough was like, "Well, here's how you get out of the pattern: You just don't carry it anymore." [laughter]

0:06:53 PA: Release it, right? You totally let it go.

0:06:56 AR: Yes, but it's easier said than done. It's like if you are woven into the fabric of some sort of ancestral pattern of scarcity or self-sabotage or body issues, you're literally unpicking the weave in this tapestry that has been woven by the collective consciousness, by your family. You can't just escape it. Intellectually, we think that, like, "Oh, yeah, I'll just opt out of that," but it's embedded in the subconscious. By ceremony, we're able to experience, I think, those layers and feel a sense of relief. I felt a breakthrough. All of a sudden, I was sitting there, I was like, "I'm a fucking rockstar!" I was like, "I don't have to carry this wound anymore!" And I was just like, "Yeah!" And I was just dancing in the... On my sweet little mat, and the moon was pouring in on my face, and I was just... I felt such relief. And then the next night, I went back into hell.

[laughter]

0:07:52 PA: Well, what you're talking about, it's like a remembering of sorts. When we do this work, we become very familiar with our own shadow. And then we go back, we go out into the world, and we start to play the game again, we start to get involved in the matrix because in a way, that's what keeps us active, that's what keeps us engaged. And then when we're able to come back into ceremony, come back into these expanded states, we sort of... We lose a little bit of that, that inside and awareness, and then it's something that we often remember. In fact, I'm starting my own process of now working with mushrooms, in particular, in Oakland, they've been decriminalized, which is...

0:08:26 AR: So cool!

0:08:27 PA: So cool. Such good news. And so I'm now getting into a monthly ritual where I'll do mushrooms. I had my first one a couple weeks ago. And so when you're talking about this sort of, in a way, it's just a choice. It's a choice that we have to release things. It's a choice that we have to step into a new way of being. And that agency, that belief in agency, that belief that, "Oh, yeah, I can do this, I am capable of this," for me, that is what I love most about psychedelics and plant medicine, is a lot of times, when we're in the matrix, we get distracted by all these external things, and we blame and we judge and we say, "Oh, the issue is there. The issue is there. The issue is there." But that time is often... It's a time to remember that everything that we need to change is right here, it's opened up.

0:09:13 AR: Yes, yeah, exactly. And I think that we can understand it intellectually. "Oh, yeah, this, don't put your hand on the stove, it's gonna burn you." Yeah, you can understand that intellectually. But if you're so just used to doing it, even after you intellectually understand that you need to change your pattern, then you just... You're doing the, you're aware of it. "Oh, now, I'm just watching myself repeat it. Oh, interesting! There I am, repeating the pattern. Okay, cool!" And the process to get from that awareness to then, "Oh! You know what? I'm actually not gonna do it." And then you're still standing there looking at it. "I'm not gonna do it." "Oh, cool! You're not gonna do it. Awesome!" And then the next part, you just don't walk over to the stove anymore, so... But that process takes a lot of time, in my opinion. And maybe it doesn't, maybe that's a belief as well, but to change deeply ingrained habits from an embodied stance, different plant medicines help us to connect these thoughts and experience the full embodied, the also the pain of the pattern or the discomfort that we can sometimes just avoid experiencing in everyday life. It's like, "Wow! Once I feel how heavy it is that I'm carrying the sadness around for my parents, I feel the depth of the heaviness, then I have a different perspective on it." You know?

0:10:35 PA: Yeah, it's that melancholy.

0:10:36 AR: That was just a random example, but yeah. [chuckle]

0:10:38 PA: But that's the example that I'm holding on to, and that's the example that with mushrooms, in particular, it was melancholy and sadness is often... It's a choice. And when we talk about the ability to change, I think scientifically, there are only so many things that we can change at once. I don't think we can all of a sudden transform from person A to person Z.

0:10:58 AR: Buddha did it, but he had been working on it for a while.

0:11:03 PA: Yeah, Buddha had been working on it. That was the tip of the iceberg.

0:11:04 AR: It was, it was.

0:11:05 PA: That was above the line.

0:11:06 AR: He had been working on it for...

0:11:07 PA: There was a lot of stuff going on below.

0:11:08 AR: I've been working on it for a while. [chuckle]

0:11:10 PA: Yeah, and we all have. And so it's that process, it's that continuous evolution of one step at a time. And this is what integration is about after we have these huge opening experiences: How do we then integrate those insights into what we're doing now? So I wanna ask you a little bit about that. How has your integration been going? Generally, what is your process for integration?

0:11:34 AR: Yeah, well, because I already have a really deep daily practice, I've been practicing meditation for about 16 years, I've been journaling every morning since college. Some days, it's just a little; some days, it's a lot. I do morning studies. I read spiritual texts every morning. So that's been happening since I was about 19. So that's a good foundation. Now, there are periods of time where I'm like, I don't do that stuff every morning, but it's there. So my morning practice is a place where I touch base with my heart and...

0:12:13 AR: I know that that's there for me after ceremony. So that's that integration tool for me. Daily practice, meditation, contemplation, reflection study, right, even if it's 10 minutes. And then another place that helps me during integration is just community, connecting with people who can understand the experiences that I'm going through. Again, my life is set up in a way where I'm around people now who... Everyone in my life I can speak to very openly about everything I'm going through. Not that I do, and they don't need to know everything, but I feel safe in my community, with my best friends, my mom, that I can share. And that's a really lovely thing because it would feel very isolating, and it has in the past, to have a really incredible experience and then go back and be around people who are just like chugging beer and watching TV or something... Not that there's anything wrong with that. Everything's perfect whenever for whoever, but I'm using that as more of a stereotypical example.

0:13:13 AR: So now in my life, I feel really supported. I feel like everything in my life supports my integration and that's a beautiful thing that I've cultivated, but I know some people going back into a corporate setting after having an expansive peak experience or a psychedelic experience, that can be really difficult. I've worked with clients who have to go through that, and again, it's just like, "Do breath work, listen to mantras at lunch, try to refocus your attention towards what you're working on." But eventually if the environments that we're a part of are so dissonant to the growth that we're doing, I'm not sure if it works at a certain point.

0:13:54 PA: Well, at some point you have to make the leap. At some point you have to shift and it's easier to do that, like speaking for myself, I did that when I was 20 or 21 but many people are now stuck in ways of being, and they're in their 30s or 40s and they have these openings and it's like, "What's next? How do I do this?" How have you handled that with the clients who have come to you, who have needed you help?

0:14:15 AR: I mean... Again, I tell them to really commit to their morning practice. I tell them that this is like... This is the chapter of the movie of their life, that they get to go be this magical psychedelic, spiritual creature in the workplace, and if they can keep reconnecting to their breath, to their hearts, non-engaged... That it's practice. It's like Jedi training. Like you have a boss who's rude, to stand in front of that boss and still emit love and kindness, compassion, is high level training. It is, so I try to empower them, but that means they have to be doing work on themselves, because if they haven't dealt with their shadow, say of unworthy-ness or whatever, and their boss being rude to them, they can't emit loving kindness. Their shadow of un-worthiness is gonna be triggered and they're just gonna be in that loop of feeling shitty. So it's a lot of work. If you are engaged in your growth and really looking at your patterns, then there's no better place to be than a place that triggers all of it because you get to be really honest with yourself. If I'm in a just super peaceful environment all the time, then I don't have to experience my triggers coming up. I don't have to experience the things that are still in me that need to be worked on. I mean, relationships are the place where almost all of those things come up and we turn...

0:15:35 PA: Committed, deep relationships. Relationships that we've been in for many, many years often.

0:15:40 AR: Yeah, whether it's friendships or romance, I think those are the places where our deepest shadows come up. Like our deepest fears of not being loved, of not being seen, of not being heard, of feeling unworthy of love. All of these things, they do come up in there, so any time that I feel like I'm avoiding that level of depth and connection, I know that I'm also avoiding some of those deep healing moments, because we heal in relation... We're relational beings. A lot can happen in meditation or in a ceremony space where your eyes are closed in with yourself. It's Epic. Then the next part of the healing and transformational process is in relation to others in the world.

0:16:20 PA: It's that showing up process. "How do you do you show up in community? How do you show up in the world around you. How do you show up with your family and your friends?" There's that Ram Dass quote, "If you think you're enlightened, go spend a week with your family and you can see where all those triggers are." And that's always a good reminder. It's a reminder that the work is never done. It's a spiral. It's always going up. At the same time, there are markers along that path where we can go, "Oh, I used to be this way and now I'm this way. And now I wanna become this," right, so that process of becoming is this matter of evolution and... From being somewhat familiar with your work. You've started this when you were 19, and now at 35, you're embodied. You're divine, you're beautiful, you have this incredible radiant energy about you.

0:17:08 AR: Thank you.

0:17:08 PA: What were some of those shifts and changes for you over the past 16 years. Who was Alexandra at the beginning of that process, and who have you become now?

0:17:16 AR: So I grew up in Georgia, and my mother was really always into healing and spiritual type of... That that jargon was used at home, so I was aware that I was on a path. That I was on a path, as a soul... As a soul embodied in human form, and I decided to go to school in New York at NYU for theater and for art, and that's where I really feel like I did my first deep spiritual work. What they do is de-condition you as much as possible, so I went in like... I was like a Grateful Dead Phish kind of listener in high school, like Bob Marley, hanging out with the more kind of hippie kids, but we had great grades and we also did theater and I was...

0:18:02 PA: You were cool.

0:18:04 AR: I don't know, yeah.

0:18:04 PA: You were cool.

[laughter]

0:18:07 AR: My first boyfriend got arrested for selling LSD in middle school.

0:18:11 PA: Pretty cool though, yeah.

0:18:13 AR: I've always liked the visionary weirdos. [laughter] Here I am like... But... So going to school and college, I just had to retrain my body, my voice, my self-expression after being in the Bible belt and feeling like I was really treated differently because I felt expressed in my body, because I felt sexual and I wasn't afraid to be that, but I was called the slut and a whore and all these things by girls at church. So I was carrying a lot of that around with me, this internal confusion about how to be an embodied, expressed woman and also be spiritually aligned. And when I got to college, I really found that. I found it through feminist art, I found it through theater, I found it through reading the book, Be Here Now, when I was 19. Through meditation, through yoga, I found self-acceptance.

0:19:08 AR: Now, some of the stuff that was embedded in me by society about not being lovable or desirable as a woman if your body didn't look a certain way and all of that, that was so deeply embedded in me from all the years of media, TV, film, all of it, that that took a while to strip out of the conditioning. I think for most modern women, it's almost impossible, right? To not hold ourselves to beauty and body image standards that have been imposed by this very broken society, in a sense, not holistic, not in community with the earth, that was a hard one for me.

0:19:48 AR: Like definitely into my ceremonies, in my early 30s, I was still battling body image issues. And I felt like in an Ayahuasca ceremony, when I was 30, I was able to finally let go of judging my body or sort of trying to control my body, right? As a sense of control. Like if I control my weight or my appearance to a certain extent, then I can control the way that I interact with the world, the way that people interact with me, which is totally false. But I think a lot of women hold themselves to that standard of like, "Oh, well, if I look a certain way, if I look pretty, if I work out a certain thing, I'm gonna be okay.", right?

0:20:30 AR: I write about this a lot in my book that's coming out next year. It's... Definitely one major piece of my self-healing has been around body image and being a woman and being embodied, and then the other piece around sexuality. Those two things have played out in so many different areas of my life, and I've explored them in film. I went and I worked at this truck stop strip club with Vice, and I filmed it with a friend, and we got to know the dancers there and the truckers, and we asked the dancers to sort of bring us into their world and learn what it was like to be them.

0:21:01 AR: And part of that was expressing and understanding the collective sexual shadow, part of it was finding that as women, we're all the same. And I did a lot of artistic work around women, women's bodies, women's sexuality. I interviewed women who had been raped or sex trafficked, and I did photoshoots with them, I made a lot of feminist art, I made... I wrote plays about women in religion being oppressed. I did all of this work to understand why as women, our bodies and our sexuality has been so overtaken. [chuckle] It's just so overtaken by ideas, standards, beliefs that are highly oppressive and painful and capitalistic, whole industries built off them.

0:21:50 PA: It's a mindset shift, right? So...

0:21:52 AR: Yeah, of course. Yeah, I think...

0:21:53 PA: 'Cause you still take care of yourself, you still exercise, you still eat healthy, you still do all those things, so what changes then?

0:22:02 AR: Yeah, it's an internal mindshift, yeah, exactly. You could ask almost every beautiful woman in the world, "Hey, do you sometimes think you're fat and ugly or something?" and most of them are gonna say, "Yes." It's literally these beauty standards that have been imposed on us. I always loved myself to a certain extent and I feel like I had a fighter's spirit. So I would be like, "I don't give a fuck about your beauty standards." And I was like, "I'm gonna grow my armpit hair out and I won't wear make-up, you motherfuckers." And that was a great phase, I loved that. My father did not love that. [chuckle]

0:22:36 AR: And funny enough, I still had boyfriends that were awesome, nobody stopped loving... I didn't stop being lovable just because I didn't wear make-up or whatever, but I was able to make the choice later of like, "Okay, well, how do I wanna express myself?" and it varies day-to-day. Sometimes my hair's straight, sometimes curly, sometimes I do wear make-up, sometimes, I don't, it's all good, not a problem. [chuckle] But that's definitely a big part, I think, of the healing curriculum of the modern woman. Regardless of class, of the actual body size, it's like there have been a lot of standards and beliefs about our image that have been imposed on to us. And to just come home to self-acceptance and loving oneself, it's a biggie, biggie.

0:23:19 PA: For everyone.

0:23:20 AR: For everyone.

0:23:21 PA: For women in particular when it comes to body image. Men as well...

0:23:21 AR: Yeah, but men too, there's a lot of pressure.

0:23:22 PA: Men, particularly when it comes to embodying more feminine aspects.

0:23:26 AR: Yeah.

0:23:27 PA: There's a lot of stigma against that, there's a lot of... And that's starting to sort of wean off, and that happened with the 60s, men growing their hair out and getting earrings, all those things, and... [chuckle]

0:23:37 AR: I'm only rolling my eyes because a part of me loves those guys and a part of me is just like, "No." [laughter] It's a paradox.

0:23:45 PA: What part of you says, "No."? What part of you...

0:23:48 AR: I live in California and I'm sure there's plenty of strong, masculine, woke, conscious, self-aware who have worked through their shadow men. [laughter]

0:23:58 PA: You think there are plenty of them? [chuckle]

0:24:05 AR: But there are also a lot of men who are just coming online to awakening their consciousness. And there is a level of integrating those feminine traits in a way, like talking about feelings, processing... Processing feelings, therapizing the relationship, over-processing around boundaries and consent and stuff like that. Some of that is really important, and then there can become a point where, to me, it's uninteresting. I wanna be in a polarity dynamic.

0:24:43 AR: So I appreciate the hippies of... I appreciate the men who are like all touchy feely, heart like let's talk about our feelings together, I just... For me, personally, don't think that will be the type of long-term relationship that I will be in. But who knows, I don't know, I'm not a fortune teller.

0:24:58 PA: Let's get into that a little bit because our listeners will really enjoy this. 'Cause this is a topic that I've spoken about with a few other people on the podcast, in terms of "What is modern masculinity?" And it goes from the length of what we were just talking about, which is a lot of vulnerability, always talking about our feelings, embodying those much more feminine aspects, growing out our hair and all that sort of thing, to the more standard sort of 50s corporate, locked in, the breadwinner. What is your definition of a modern strong masculine person?

0:25:30 AR: Yeah, well it's great you just characterized the external right? You talked about the feelings of vulnerability a little bit, but the external is a really great way for us to conceptualize the different archetypes that we've moved through collectively. Which women have moved through these as well. I think, there's an integration piece that's happening and it's... So the person who talks about this in the way that I love the most is somebody who's a little bit controversial, but I'm gonna drop it, David Deida. [laughter]

0:26:00 AR: So David Deida breaks it down into three stages. So there's the first stage man who would be like... Or woman who... The 1950's guy right? Not talking about his feelings. Super... Hyper-masculine in this really stereotypical way so that's that breadwinner masculine. "I play football, I drink beer." Okay, so then you have the second stage guy. So the second stage guy is, "Oh my god, I started yoga. Oh my god, I love yoga. Oh my god, let me talk about my feelings, I go to therapy, let's talk about feelings." So then that sort of neutralizes the... He calls it fuck energy between two people. But it's a necessary stage. It's like the waking up... It like the level of waking up of like, "Oh wait, there's more to life than football and beer. Cool, yeah there's burning man. Oh my god, burning man. Oh my god there's Ayahuasca, Ayahuasca." [laughter] "And yoga, and grain juice."

0:26:57 AR: So there's that guy. [chuckle] So there's the second stage guy. And then eventually, the second stage, I think... It's women too. Second stage moves into an integration where there can be... It's non-performative in this way of I don't have to... Actually he says, "Looks more like the first stage again." So you can express feelings and emotions that are more raw and primal but it's with consciousness now that you've added consciousness to the picture. And it's something I've experienced in workshops and I've experienced in some moments in relating with men and I do think it takes that evolution... A lot of people are in the second stage of being super stoked to talk about burning man. Because burning man's awesome. I've been in that stage tons.

0:27:54 AR: And then you meet people who don't have to talk about all the things and they just embody deeply that consciousness and that I think is the third stage... The evolution. And I like the way he talks about it like that. And I've been like, "Oh wow I keep attracting second stage men." and I'm like, "Well, I must be emitting that energy." Talking about all of my lessons in life and burning man. And like, I'm like, "Alright cool, that's where I am." Totally fine, I don't have to hate on myself for it. But it's a different type of relating and connecting when you just move into that space of consciousness and heart where you don't have to be in that over-processing, over-therapizing... "Let's eye gaze, great." You just sort of flow.

0:28:48 AR: That to me is the integration of the more primal aspects that we have as humans and the higher ones. It's like this all chakra integration. So when you go into getting woke or whatever you sometimes leave your primal-ness out of the picture because it's like "Well if I'm now this woke evolved yogi, how can I be like, "I wanna fuck your brains out."? It just doesn't kinda work together. But the third stage, you're able to integrate that with consciousness. So you would be able to say that.

0:29:21 PA: It's finding those points of balance and it's having the flexibility to say, "Okay, I can drop into a more caretaking and nurturing energy if that feels called for."

0:29:32 AR: Yeah.

0:29:33 PA: But the predominant way of being is more direct, it's driven, it's purpose oriented, it's focused on the future. And what I love about his work is it's a lot about liberation and freedom. The man is oriented towards becoming as free as possible and then creating that freedom for people in his life so that they can become fully expressed.

0:29:55 AR: Yeah, yeah.

0:29:55 PA: And it's difficult and it's tricky and I experience this as well as someone who... You know like psychedelics are now becoming a thing. They're becoming popular, they're becoming trendy and so there are a lot of people who are getting involved in this work who are having these openings, who are going even from second stage to third stage. Because I feel like even without psychedelics, there are a lot of men who have been coming into the second stage now.

0:30:21 AR: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

0:30:21 PA: And now it's like, "Now how do we integrate those completely, so that as a man I can show up and I can do the work that needs to be done and I can be oriented towards success and building and developing but when I need to I can drop into the more flowy energy." This is something that I struggle with a lot. I tend to over-intellectualize things. I tend to over-philosophize things. I love that part about myself, but it also keeps me disconnected at times, it keeps me separate. And so the work that I've done in that is just... I feel like rituals are really helpful within that process of having that space to just, as a man, to reconnect with all aspects of who I am and enjoy both the driven focused part of me, but also the more nurturing, sensitive, caring, kind... And I feel like when it comes to then in relationships, the focus is on the polarity and that you need to keep the polarity regardless.

0:31:24 AR: Yeah, it's definitely a practice. I'm not a master at that. [laughter] I mean I'm learning still I really appreciated diving into his work and some of the teachers that he has taught and learning about that. I think it's not for everybody. Not everybody wants that type of dynamic in a relationship. Some of my best friends are in a relationship where they're just like besties and they're like so loving and nurturing to each other.

0:31:55 PA: This is something that you talk a lot about. Being embodied and you know... Sex and travel and all these things, and I think that's also...

0:32:03 AR: Sex and travel, perfect together.

0:32:05 PA: That's [chuckle] That's something that I really admire about you is when we talk about depth, when we talk about having this polarity, you feel fully comfortable expressing all aspects of who you are, both the beautiful, wonderful aspects of who you are, but also like the difficult, messy, chaotic, un-loved parts of yourself. And that, I think that requires a lot of courage. It requires a lot of courage to go into that.

0:32:31 AR: Yeah. Oh yeah, it's really not cute sometimes. But I think it is the full integration, it's like... Yeah, so if part of my sexuality has been like this work of art in progress that I don't always understand, my heart has been like this work of art that's like ever-changing like black as night, dying and then re-birthing and then my spiritual self, the same thing, how can I avoid any of those things? In a sense, I have to just be fully honest with myself, and if I am standing publicly with others like, "Yeah, I've had sexual shadow," I've totally gone to the bottom of sexual shadow collectively because I wanted to understand it, not so much just because I wanted to experience it, but also understand it, and I feel like I have this kind of very anthropological... I wanna understand humanity through my own vehicle. But yeah, being honest about that is, it requires a lot of courageousness. I actually love it. It makes me feel sort of like... I think it's a little like, "Yeah, I get to martyr. I don't even care. Let myself be the sacrificial lamb. Why don't you guys see how fucked up I am and also how amazing I am?" Because no one else is being... Not no one else.

0:33:47 AR: Okay, that's a blanket... But because I crave that realness from others, and I don't always get it. People online, I don't always feel like... Their wholeness there, and I feel like there's so much stigma around just being honest about the kind of more embarrassing or shadowy things. So I've taken it upon myself, when it feels right and in integrity to share those things and to be honest about some of the shadows that I myself have worked through and some of the places that I've been unconscious or... My sexuality has just been the one that's been really full. Which I think is collectively as well. And collectively, if you were to look at statistics around rape, sex trafficking, porn, guys going in with machine guns into schools because they're incels, and I think that on a whole, our sexual nature, especially in the West, just what I can speak for, has been highly repressed and highly oppressed. And I have allowed for that evolution of healing to happen through myself. And it is liberating and it feels great, and it feels liberating for all the people around me and who work with me. It can feel triggering to them of course, because if they're hiding their own sexual shadows and I'm just not afraid, then it's scary. What? That's you? You were triggered by me? [laughter]

0:35:08 PA: No [chuckle] no, no, no I feel very much the same way in that. When you are fully free and you're fully expressed, then that does trigger a lot of it. Because people in this day and age still feel like they have to hide a lot of parts of themselves to be loved.

0:35:21 AR: I take into consideration other people in the room and other people's hearts. So if I feel like my self-expression might actually hurt other people then I do modulate it, and then... One of my teachers taught me that. Because otherwise it can be kind of egoic in a sense, me being like, "I'm fucking sexually liberated, I don't care about with you guys... " My editor, she... I wrote about this transcendental fisting experience in my book, and she said, "This is too much, people are gonna shut down." And I was like, "But this is the truth of how it happened?" She said, "People are gonna shut down it's... " And I said, "Great, let's cut it... Totally fine."

0:36:02 PA: 'Cause you can't drop something like that. A transcendental fisting experience? Can we talk about that?

0:36:09 AR: I just had an experience where I was thrown into a state of bliss for about three days, and it was a heightened state of consciousness that came from this total liberation of my body. I'm not the first person to ever talk about this kind of thing, there are books written about the intersection, I'll take it even further back. So there are different ways that we can access altered states of consciousness, right? And there's this great pagan shaman who wrote this book, and he talks about all these altered states of consciousness, or the ways that we access them. Meditation, fasting, dance, drumming, ritual... There's eight that he mentions, the last three are psychedelics, pain and sex and possession, like spiritual possession, like taking on another deity or something through your body. So the sex and pain can create together or separate like a really huge altered state of consciousness. Now it can also just be a purely primal physical thing that happens just here in the 3D, like no biggie, or there is a state where... There's a path that you can walk, where it creates a huge expansion. This takes mastery, this takes two people practicing something that's deeper perhaps.

0:37:21 AR: Or you can sometimes stumble upon it on accident, where you're like, Oh my God, a portal just opened, essentially, during the sexual experience where we experienced a divinity or God in the room with us, essentially. We were transported; it felt like I was on mushrooms, or whatever. That's possible, like it's an access point. Right? Just like fasting, right? You can fast for a time, and all of a sudden you start having visions, you start having hallucinations, you start experiencing different levels of consciousness. So I've always been curious about that. And pain as well. Pain has been used by mystics for thousands of years to access different states of consciousness. Self-flagellation was not only because, "Oh, I'm simple, I'm simple," it was also to access different states of consciousness. As an explorer, and as a mystical explorer, I've explored how pain and sex together can create altered states of consciousness, again, only in a safe container. I've always wanted to explore different altered states of consciousness and ways to access my friend God, [chuckle] just how to get there, how to get to the good stuff. And so that was one of the ways, and it was kind of a chance happening that I was in a state of bliss for, I guess, about two days. Yeah.

0:38:40 PA: Transcendental fisting, wow!

0:38:42 AR: I mean I call it transcendental 'cause I transcended, in a way. But yeah.

0:38:45 PA: That's a cool little way of putting it.

0:38:47 AR: Yeah. I think that if you're in a safe container with two practitioners who know their shadows, who've been doing healing work on themselves, like, there's a lot of crazy far-out experiences that can happen. Whether it's through... In meditation, I've sat opposite someone in meditation, like a male partner, and had my body dissolve into light. Same thing has happened during lovemaking. Because two people who are practicing meditation, who are expanding in their consciousness, working with their consciousness, then you can do all kinds of crazy shit. I'm sure I've barely stumbled upon it. Who knows?

0:39:29 PA: There's always more. You can always go layers, like the onion...

[laughter]

0:39:32 PA: The onion always keeps peeling. That's what we said, right? The onion always keeps peeling. Now, one thing that I've noticed about your work, is you share. And you share very openly, through largely Instagram.

0:39:41 AR: Like I just did.

0:39:41 PA: Like you just did on the podcast, and I just... One advice that I once got from a mentor of mine, as someone who's also speaking about these psychedelic experiences publicly, he always said, "Be mindful of how much you're giving away." In other words, when we go through the spiritual work, it's a very personal process. And sometimes I've noticed when I talk about my own experiences too much publicly, that that can sometimes take away from the richness and then kind of the nourishment of the experience itself. How have you balanced that in your own life, in terms of keeping personal what needs to be personal, while still being vulnerable and sharing with your audience and the people who look to you for advice and guidance on this path?

0:40:37 AR: Yeah. It's a day-to-day balance, but to be honest, I give the public shares... They might feel really deep and vulnerable, and they are, but in terms of my own relationship to myself and the depth with myself, they're probably like a level two. But I'm a great writer and I'm a great storyteller, so I'm able to bring people in as if they're my best friends hearing my heart. 'Cause it is my heart, it's just not all of my heart. 'Cause no, I'm not gonna give all of my heart there. And a friend of mine once told me that. She's like, "The key is to make people feel like they are your best friend and that they are getting the full you. And they don't need to get the full you, but they feel like they are."

0:41:22 AR: And that's a skill that I've cultivated. Sometimes I totally fuck up. I give too much, and I don't like it and I feel bad about it. And then sometimes I don't land because I didn't give enough. That's just a practice. For me, it's just been something that I've done since the early days. I acted in my web show, Be Here Nowish. I gave myself there, I acted in the thing for VICE, I gave myself there. I've written, I've taken photos, I've directed, I've always put my heart in things. And I actually, I feel non-attached to my story as Alexandra.

0:41:58 AR: I don't feel like I'm clinging to like, "That's mine. I don't want anybody to have it." I feel very like, "Please have her. Let her be of service to you if it is. Not at her expense, obviously." And that's where I have to have great discernment, and I do. I do. I take time off from Instagram, I take time off from sharing. If some big heartbreak happens, I might write like, "I'm going through some pain," but I'm not gonna be, like, write the details of it all. But I shared something about my Ayahuasca ceremony today, and for me, it was like a level two of depth. But people resonated with it, because even that was super yummy for them.

0:42:38 PA: That's a good way of putting it. It's like there are all these, again, there are all these layers to what we can share, and having boundaries for ourselves in terms of what we feel is most comfortable, in terms of what both nourishes us but also nourishes our community; it is that back and forth that we need to share.

0:42:56 AR: And asking why you're sharing. What's the point of sharing? Is this for validation? Is this for approval? Is this for my ego being fluffed? And if it is, people will feel the hooks; they will feel the energy in it that just feels a little yucky. And that's our job as we share, and as public figures if we're gonna be out there, to clean ourselves so that we're not sharing from a place of hooks and stickiness trying to get people. Because we will attract other low vibrations with that. We'll attract people who wanna be stuck, want that hook.

0:43:25 AR: I can go back and read some of my writing from a few years ago where I was less clear about myself, and there's more hooks. And I love looking at that and being like, "Wow, cool There's a hook. Oh, used a little victim energy there to get a hook. Oh, did... " and that's fine. That's my own evolution, but now I really make... I don't consciously think about it, but I can feel in my body very clearly if I'm going into a shadowy energy while I'm writing. I did a few months ago. I wrote something around sexuality, and it could feel a texture of shadow and a little bit of like, "Fuck you," in the writing, but I was aware around it. I was like, "Yeah, I wanna give a little fuck you. Like yeah, like today." And that's fine, but I have awareness around it. If I was just unaware, unconsciously putting things like that out there, I would be impacting people and creating negative karma for myself that I'll have to burn off into eternity.

0:44:18 PA: So we've talked a lot about the work so far. We've talked a lot about sexuality. We mentioned Ayahuasca briefly at the beginning, but I'd like to go deeper into that since this is a podcast specifically about psychedelics. What medicines have you worked with, what medicines do you have a relationship with, and what relationship is that, or what is that relationship like with each medicine?

0:44:41 AR: So two of my teachers, I call them my teachers, I definitely... They're medicines, but I really love connecting with the plant spirit side of things. And the medicine of mushrooms and Ayahuasca have been the best teachers for me. I asked for a guru, "Please give me a guru. Who is it? Is it Amla? Is it Yogananda? Who's my guru?" Psilocybin mushrooms and Ayahuasca, 100%. I've learned about love. I've learned about myself, my shadows, so much consciousness through those teachers. And I will keep working with them. I've actually been really missing mushrooms because I had to take a little mushroom break, because of doing work with Ayahuasca. So for about a month, I can't engage with sexual thoughts. This was okay. Sexual thoughts or actions, just like you're not supposed to, or mushrooms. Totally fine. [chuckle]

0:45:37 AR: I'm excited though to have some mushrooms eventually. In a week I can have a little microdose. Psilocybin has helped me so much. It's just helped me so much to be a better writer, to be a better person, to understand my heart. And so has Ayahuasca. Peyote has as well, San Pedro... Yeah. I feel like they're my spiritual teachers in a world where sometimes humans feel a bit more troubling and untrustworthy at times. The medicines have been the spiritual teachers that my heart has been seeking, speaking to me in a language that is actually beyond the intellect and just the lower levels of the mind, and that's been incredible. It's just been incredible to experience.

0:46:21 AR: And so Psilocybin I engage with, I don't know, maybe once a month, I'll have a medium dose or once every few months, and I'll microdose sometimes like once a week. I go through phases. I did a lot of microdosing about a year ago for a while, and then I just took a bit of a break, and now I feel more call to do deeper journeys. The last time I did a deep journey, I think it was in March or something. And yeah, it was great. I have a picture framed in my house of me laughing from that day.

0:46:56 PA: What's the energy like from mushrooms for you compared to Ayahuasca?

0:47:01 AR: Mushrooms is a lot more heart-centered for me. I feel it in my heart. I feel the energy of love really there. I feel my distance from love, I feel the pain of separation from my heart easily, if it's there. I feel my longing for love. It's very heart-oriented with mushrooms. It's like I can feel where my heart is closed, where it's not online. With Ayahuasca, it's up here, like crown; it's like the mind, the nature of consciousness, like the places where my mind is creating struggling, creating suffering for me and creating an internal struggle. It's very different. I feel it in my body; I'm shaking, crying, puking, all the things, but I wish it was like, "I wanna feel overwhelming love running through my body."

0:47:55 AR: I felt a little bit of that the fourth night. I had this realization about my heart being really peaceful, and then I started getting tired and I sort of slipped into this worm hole void where I was stuck in a loop for like, felt like eternity. I was just stuck in a loop and just I was trying to fight sleep, and I was really exhausted, and I kept begging to the medicine, like, "Please, I'm so tired, and I'm so tired. I just can't." And there was something in me that wouldn't just let go, and I kept being like, "Let go, let go. You're allowed to rest. Just rest, just rest." And then my mind would say, "No, but the Buddhist masters have mastered sleep. You can get past these few hours, it's only two more hours, come on. You got this." And my body would go, "No, but I'm so tired. I'm so tired. Just please let me rest." And it was just like "whoosh" for a long time.

0:48:49 AR: Eventually all I could do is just like grab, I was like, "I need the Mapacho," but all I could do was just grab it and hold it, I was so out of it. I wouldn't have been able to light it. I just held it to my head and I was like, "Come on. We've got... " And then eventually I was like, "Sit up, Alexandra." And I put my arms on the back of the [unclear speech] and I was like, "Sit up. Get out of this. You can do this. Get out of this loop." [chuckle] It was just so rough. But I was just fighting sleep. I was literally exhausted. My mind, body and spirit was exhausted in that moment. I was talking to another Paul, friend of mine, Paul Coon, and he was like, "Oh, you didn't realize that your body and mind are one?" And I was like "No." I did not get to that realization by the end of the night, my body and my mind were just fighting like they were enemies, and it was this existential game that was happening, and it was just awful. [laughter]

0:49:42 PA: But that's the tension, right? It's always like it is, that the mind wants to keep going, the mind's like, "We can do this," and the body is like, "Hold on. I need some rest. Give me a break. Let me feel, let me just be for a second."

0:49:53 AR: I know.

0:49:54 PA: "I don't need to keep this treadmill running all the time. Right?"

0:49:56 AR: Exactly. Yeah. And I was like, "Oh." I felt like this sort of... Just like the reptilian, just like the... There are just parts that's like, "I live in a body, I must sleep." [chuckle] And my mind be like, "No. You won't." It's just a funny moment. I got through that, that was fine, and then I could laugh about it the next day. Which is awesome that we can go to the pit of an existential void, and then the next day we come out. We don't have a crazy hangover for a week of how awful the ceremony is. I'm very... I love that about Ayahuasca. For me, personally, I can go through hell one night and then still have the courage to get up and drink again.

0:50:37 PA: Well and this is, I think, what you were referring to earlier as gymnastics for the mind. The ability to do that... That's not the case for everyone who's going into Ayahuasca. Some people go through an Ayahuasca experience and it takes some six months to actually recover...

0:50:50 AR: Yeah... That's true.

0:50:51 PA: From that disruption, because it's so insane. But when you have that practice and you're familiar with all aspects of your psyche and yourself, then even three cups of Ayahuasca and three nights in a row, you're like, "Oh, I've been here before, and I've seen this, and I know this, and this isn't weird. Or maybe it is weird, but I've been in that fucking weird place before, and I don't need to worry about it." And I think, it goes back to like the safety and security of it all.

0:51:17 AR: Yeah.

0:51:17 PA: Right? When you come out of those spaces, or even when you're in those spaces, knowing at all times that you are in a container that is safe and secure. I feel like that is what makes for a great experience.

0:51:30 AR: Yeah.

0:51:31 PA: When I've been in experiences before where I haven't felt that, you just... It's hard to let go. It's hard to let yourself be in that, yeah.

0:51:37 AR: It's hard to let go. I've been in those rooms too. And Soltara, I was like, "Wow, they are fucking amazing." Impeccable container. One of the facilitators... So we had the two healers, Olga and Americo who are Shipibo who are just... Were they your healers too? And then the facilitators that were running the group were Safa and Anna, these two beautiful, incredible women. And this woman, Safa, I could just feel how deep she was, but joyful, and I was like, "This is Ayahuasca." She's so deep, but she's so joyful and just free, like there's a freedom in her, like a peace, and it was... I later read her blog and I was like, "Oh, she's been doing diets in the jungle for like three months, like eating white rice alone with her mind. I was like, "She's fucking... She's a real deal. Real deal."

0:52:27 AR: So I just, I felt held. I felt held. I was like, "I'm held by deep practitioners. This container is impeccable." I really did feel that, and I don't feel that very often. I've sat in a lot of ceremonies where I didn't let go, because I didn't feel safe, and that's what makes me wanna go back there, 'cause I'm just like, "Well, I know that's an amazing place." And then the Maestros, like, they were just awesome. At the beginning of both ceremonies, the first two nights, I felt like I got an introduction to the space, where I felt like the medicine was like, "Okay, this is this space that we're in, this is this dimension, these are the people that are walking between the worlds. This is how you kind of navigate a little bit," orienting me to the space of it. And the part of me that wants to understand everything was just wanting to stay there and just be like, "Okay, but then what happens?" And I was just like, "No, now I got vacuumed into my work." But at that point, I was able to see a little bit of how the Shipibo healers do their work and my mind was blown.

0:53:26 PA: Can you tell us about that? Like how is...

0:53:27 AR: And this is my relative, my subjective interpretation, but I was able to see how the Icaros, like, I was able to see visions of what it looked like to me. Again, totally subjective. And how the Icaros carry the consciousness and carry the energy, like the songs that they sing, and how they're these inter-dimensional masters of energy and walkers between worlds and... Yeah, the first night I was able to actually visually see it, see how the Icaros looked, and that was the only night I got that deep a visual. I was just like, "It was so beautiful!" It was just like the Icaros were like blossoming when he started singing. I was just like, "What? This is amazing." And then I went into two nights of deep cleaning. Working with those healers and being in the room with them and being able to experience their magic was just... I have utmost respect. And it also made me just realize I don't wanna sit ever in a ceremony ever again with people that don't know this inter-dimensional space like the back of their hand, 'cause that's scary, [chuckle] to open your consciousness in a room with other people that are opening, and there's energies flying around and all this craziness, and if people aren't really holding the space, then yeah, that seems kind of dangerous. And I've been in those rooms, so...

0:54:58 PA: Well, it is, because when you're in that state, you're so suggestible.

0:55:00 AR: Yeah.

0:55:00 PA: And you're so vulnerable.

0:55:02 AR: Yeah.

0:55:02 PA: It's like that saying goes that a therapist can only bring their client into the same level of development that they're at. A therapist can only help someone to the level of work that they've done.

0:55:13 AR: Exactly.

0:55:15 PA: And so with people who have committed a lot of time and effort and energy to doing their own work, then when we sit in ceremony, it's critical that that's with masters, that it's with people who have been doing this for this lifetime, if not more lifetimes, because they are the tether between the next world and this world, and having that lineage, that wisdom that's passed down again and again and again, you experience that, you experience that depth and that breadth of knowledge. I mean, this wasn't your first experience with a trained master. I'd be curious like...

0:55:52 AR: It was my first Shipibo ceremony.

0:55:54 PA: Okay.

0:55:54 AR: So this is my first ceremony with Shipibo healers. So Ayahuasca is used in many different tribes, in many different countries and many different traditions, and the Shipibo, from what I've heard, are maybe one of the more intense ways of healing. I'm not quite sure why, and I'm interested to know more about that.

0:56:13 PA: I think it's because they largely do their ceremonies at dark or in the complete dark at night with no lights, with nothing else around, in the middle of the jungle. So I feel like the setting of the Shipibo ceremonies tends to be much more intense than some of the other ones that I've done.

0:56:31 AR: And then the Icaros themselves are very intense, and I think that's just like the soul surgery. I just really imagine they're like scalpels, just like, yeah. And I have friends that have been in the Daime church, for instance, and like that, there's lights on, they're singing the whole night...

0:56:47 PA: It's like a congregation, right?

0:56:48 AR: Yeah, it's a different thing.

0:56:49 PA: It's like being in church, you're singing with everyone...

0:56:50 AR: Exactly.

0:56:50 PA: There's dozens, if not hundreds of people...

0:56:52 AR: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

0:56:52 PA: You don't drink as much. It's just a little bit, it's...

0:56:55 AR: Yeah, it depends. Yeah, yeah. So being in that Shipibos, I just felt really like, "Yeah, this feels amazing." I mean, it felt hellacious. I don't wanna make it sound like it was a pleasure cruise, it wasn't. I kept... I was like, "Just give me one night where I totally bliss out." No.

0:57:15 PA: It's so interesting 'cause most people don't get that, and what I've noticed with my own experiences, it's like Ayahuasca is always blissful, it's always beautiful.

0:57:21 AR: Really?

0:57:22 PA: It's always nice. And I must be a weird different soul to have that be the case. It's quite nice, but it is an interesting thing. So the way that I wanna wrap up, because we're now... The light is getting closer and closer on you; we're... For people who are listening to this, we're filming this as well, so you can check it out on YouTube, but we'll have it on social media, so I'd just love to wrap up. We've talked a lot about who Alexandra has been, and I'd love to hear who is Alexandra becoming. So what are your plans over the next six to 12 months, and how do you see things continuing to evolve for yourself?

0:58:03 AR: It's a great question that I don't have an answer to, hah, but I'll give what I do have. [chuckle] So I have a book coming out next year. The book is called Fuck Like A Goddess, Heal Yourself, Reclaim Your Voice and Stand In Your Power. It's not my original title, this is one of the first times I'm saying it aloud publicly. I feel good about it now. It's with Sounds True, and they're a publisher, they've published like Pema Chodron, Ram Dass, Eckhart Tolle. I feel really grateful to be on a roster of incredible spiritual teachers and leaders. The book is really a lot about my healing journey and some of the things that have helped me the most.

0:58:38 AR: So that comes out in May. And I went through a revolution of my business right now. You know, I was a filmmaker, I created original content in that space, then I started working with people as a coach and a mentor. I'm likely not gonna be seeing private clients one-on-one, but I'm doing a mastermind group next year. 'Cause I really love supporting people, putting a vision in the world. I love people that have a vision for consciousness and for influencing the collective, and I know it takes a lot of courage to put those visions out in the world, it can be very difficult. So I'm gonna be supporting a group of women next year over a few retreats with that.

0:59:16 AR: I'm teaming up with an organization next year to do a project that's in the works, it's an organization that supports indigenous women, and we're gonna be talking about decolonization and some of the wellness space, so that should be cool. I really wanna go do some international trips and work with young girls in orphanages or who have been through sex trafficking. It's been something on my heart for a while; I haven't found the exact way that I wanna engage, but I definitely feel like I need to be of some kind of greater service, and I wanna engage in that space.

0:59:51 AR: I made a joke about writing an album today. I definitely wanna sing more. I've been taking singing lessons here in LA from this amazing woman named Aya, and... Yeah, I don't know what other creative project might be birthed from me after doing this book and having these few years where I've been working a lot and really getting financially sturdy and feeling myself as a healer and a coach, and I do a lot of energy work with people, and I do a lot of deep healing work. A part of me is called to go deeper on that path as a healer, but less 'cause of money, less to make it a business, but more because I wanna learn, I wanna learn in that space. So I don't know what that... What it all looks like.

1:00:39 PA: What that will bring and what that path of knowing will bring and it's...

1:00:43 AR: Yeah. And where it is, if it's going to Peru or to Mexico, or if a mentor will drop out of the sky or... I don't know, but I'm creating a lot of space in my schedule for next year, so that magic can come, so that surprise can happen. 'Cause I've been highly scheduled the last few years, and I realize that that limits the amount of possibility in my life, so part of my business goal was, How can I make a good amount of money? I don't need to be too extravagant, which I've sort of been extravagant the last few years, 'cause it's been this healing actually around money, but now I'm like, How can I just have space in my schedule? So that if someone says, "Hey, Do you wanna come to this thing next week?" I can say, "Yeah, actually." That feels very luxurious and it also feels right 'cause that's where the next creative thing could be birthed from that potentially has an impact to shift people, so yeah.

1:01:40 PA: So beautiful. Thank you for doing the work that you do, and thank you for doing the work on yourself that you do, and thank you for having the courage to explore all these elements of who you are. I think it's beautiful, and I feel like what you share with the world is phenomenal.

1:01:56 AR: Thank you.

1:01:56 PA: So thank you for joining us today, as well, for this inaugural video podcast.

1:02:02 AR: Yeah.

1:02:02 PA: It's been really such a great fun time to sit down with you.