Jamie Wheal and Vishen Lakhiani: Recapture the Rapture

if you're like the vast majority of people in the world you know what relationships are like we have this huge intense honeymoon-like period in the beginning but then that honeymoon-like feeling starts to burn out my guest today Jamie wheel is on his third appearance in the mind Valley podcast and look every time I interview this man he completely blows my mind today we're going to be discussing a really intriguing topic from his book recapture the Rapture how do we keep that feeling of love that deep powerful human emotion in our relationships longer and how to take that honeymoon period and stretch it out as well as we can so that we can create beautiful committed long-term relationships Jamie welcome to the Mind Valley podcast oh great to be here Vision so let's start with with this idea of love one of the most interesting chapters in this book are the two chapters where you discuss the future of sex and that incredible experiment that you performed in relation to love and sex let's start there sure I mean I mean it was on it was a sort of um strange and Meandering Road where I kind of slid backwards into this subject my actual field of professional engagement is Peak Performance and flow States so we get kind of into the neuroscience and the physiology of optimum human functioning and the further I went down all of those rabbit holes of how do we actually tune our bodies and brains to be on demand for the highest performing highest Stakes most ecstatic or meaningful situations in life and this was with groups from SEAL Team Six to the extreme athletes of Red Bull to the executives of Google to the community of Burning Man you name it right what makes us tick and what makes us come alive at our highest level I slowly came to this sort of unavoidable conclusion which is that if you pursue the neuroscience and physiology of optimum Human Performance to its logical and inevitable conclusion and you're not squeamish and you don't flinch you end up in one of two places you end up with sexy biohacking or nerdy Kink and and I thought dear God this is not my field this is not my jam I'm not a tantra teacher I'm not a sexologist I'm not a therapist but the more I looked around I was like it feels like there's this giant missing chapter of the story of human sexuality and what we can do with it if we understand it and if we can then reclaim it and put it towards the highest purposes and passions of our existence firstly sexy biohacking or nerdy Kink yeah explain those two well basically I mean look nature is a very efficient design system right and and we are sort of you know packed in you know our bodies um are very tightly organized with um little systems with very little wasted space and even just usually take our orifices for example right there's none of them are single use right no noses can smell but it also filters air mouth taste and also chew and eat food we we pee and ejaculate out of the very same little appendage right this all of these things right have multiple uses and if you really want to get to full interventions on our neurophysiology you kind of need to get somewhat intimate with your body and either you have a licensed practitioner or professional which is vanishingly rare in our contemporary world or you need a trusted buddy slash practice partner and so that's kind of how it all came together and and my first insights on this were and of the potential for it right was John Lilly the famous and controversial scientist who invented sensory deprivation tanks and did that sort of almost wacky but also very Cutting Edge sanction research through the NIH with LSD and dolphins and then that work got shut down and then he went further into float tanks and ketamine usage and all of these things well way back before all of that 1953 he was on an NIH Grant and he was studying with rhesus monkeys and putting wire sleeves into their brains it was the first technology in the first time that it ever been done and he came to the conclusion that our ecstatic and reward circuitry maps one-to-one in primates with our sexual arousal Network and at the time early 50s super controversial Whispers And hushes but these days you're like yeah of course that makes total sense and why does it make sense it makes sense because all animals for millions of years have had to figure out how to get it on with zero instruction manuals so you're like man Evolution must have thrown the kitchen sink at incentives rewards right and impulses and drives to get us to consistently perform that singular act so that was kind of the first Scooby Snack clue I was like wait a sec that our whole pleasure and reward system Maps one to one with the sexual arousal Network because if any animal doesn't figure out how to procreate we die it dies straight simple and then I was I was actually on a panel at the battery Club in San Francisco with Rick Dublin who's the founder of maps the multi-disciplinary association for psychedelic studies and our mutual friend Jason Silva and in between in between panel discussions I was catching up with Rick because I'm like Rick tell me the deal you guys are in phase three clinical trials with MDMA and PTSD how's it going what are you learning spill the beans and he said well you know what's kind of interesting is that what we're finding is that number one memory in this case traumatic memories are plastic they're not just like fixed events that happened in the past our memories are constantly changeable rewriteable and and updatable and that's a huge part of the work that happens when they put people who have been suffering from PTSD into the supersaturated state of safety connection love even that MDMA can chemically provide and he said you know what now this is what stopped me in my tracks he said you know what the closest analog that we have found to the high prolactin High oxytocin High vasopressin state is the post-orgasmic state and I was like wait a second are you kidding me you mean you guys have spent 100 million bucks you know it's taken 30 years you were pushing this incredibly through this Byzantine federal system of Regulation and policy to get it it's Noble heroic work God bless you and thank you for doing it but you mean all along long we could we could have been getting to comparable trauma healing out of this exalted state known only to scientists as post-orgasmic you're like are you kidding me so so between those two like that in John Lenny's 1953 study and that conversation a few years ago I was like okay there's a there there and I want to get under the hood and start studying exactly why that happens and what we can do about it and how we can use those tools and insights to hopefully open source that kind of healing and that kind of connecting and that kind of inspiration for everybody because you know right now as it stands if you if you don't get lucky enough to be able to get on a list for one of those trials clinical trials right you're on the waiting list for when MDMA therapy is broadly available and even then it's not going to be cheap and then you think well wait every single human on this planet has a prefrontal cortex spinal columns and androgynous zones and if we can teach them how to use them better if we can give them permission and information to reclaim that part of themselves and flip the script from it being a source of so much pain so much suffering so much heartbreak and so much trauma and instead turn it to Healing inspiration and connection that would be a worthwhile project so that all sounds amazing but for most people in mid to long term relationships the passion is long gone I remember something I heard once it was that if you put an Eminem in a jar for every time you have sex in the first year of marriage and then you take out an m m for every time you have sex past the first year you would never run out of Eminem right and so we know we know that after a certain number of years being in a committed relationship with someone a desire for sex goes down but that seems so unhealthy and so disappointing how do we recapture that giving how given how powerful this orgasmic experience can be I think one of the best ways for us to do this is sort of get off this problem to solve it so so if it I think it's really helpful just to pan way back and literally kind of go back into how did we even get to human sexuality Circa 21st century and what are the motors and drivers that all of us are subject to but we might not even notice right so if you think about it I mean I think the first thing to really share with everybody is just this notion that evolution is a moral it doesn't have a moral code it doesn't care for the same things we humans care about we stand up in front of our families and our congregations to promise to honor and cherish and love and Obey and forever and you know forever and ever amen and all Evolution cares about is propagating the most robust gene pool possible and it doesn't give a [ __ ] who who we [ __ ] to get that so examples right in Helen Fisher one of one of the researchers I actually went deeply into the bodies of work and interviewed two Kinsey Institute icons and one is Dr Helen Fisher who's now the chief scientist for match.com and the other was Dr Nicole prowsy who was at Harvard and now UCLA and she's been doing some of the most groundbreaking research in this field and Helen's work is very specific about the sort of three stages of Attraction and life there's there's lust there's attraction and there's long-term bonding right and and we kind of all know this right but lust is fundamentally driven by the hormones testosterone and estrogen they're literally they just the idea of just mating monkeys you just find somebody you click there doesn't have to be any Rapport it can be what Erica Zhong memorably called the zipless [ __ ] right it's whatever that is just just the magnetism to get together and and and bump uglies right and then that can continue into attraction and that's where you get dopamine that's where you get serotonin that's where you get the I'm head over heels in love and funnily enough it actually creates a temporary plummet in serotonin which is some scientists argue is the closest we get to OCD if you were a teenager and you lost your mind for your first life or God forbid you're trying to parent teenage kids and they are losing their minds that's some of what's going on they obsess they can't stop thinking about them all of those kinds of things and that keeps cooking right that keeps cooking long enough and whoops wouldn't you know it this strange and magnificently polarizing fascinating act of putting our bits and pieces together creates a baby nine months later like those two acts to us just simple hominids back in the day hundreds of thousands years ago have nothing to do with each other as far as our motives and drivers like one is deeply pleasurable lost a brief moment and then the other is had you know profound painful scary and the consequences last a lifetime and that's kind of where Evolution really does US dirty right because after basically all that magic of passion your M M's idea right all of the M M's stop about three years in right because that's the time which is just long enough to conceive gestate deliver and wean a small child and then Mother Nature's like hey want to have another crack at it and then right so suddenly and this is the seven year ish that famous Marilyn Monroe film all of that stuff happens right on schedule and this is right and the three year mark well three three to seven years in seven years and you know something like 50 of divorces occur in households with children under the age of three and how many percent fifty percent of divorces occur in households with children under the age of three yeah which makes sense right the sleeplessness the lack of love and interest you see the overwhelm the financial pressures all of it and it's breaking families apart and and most of the time it's because we're out of M M's we're out of like love in the bank account right and right around that same time and this is just a couple of dirty tricks right one is is that when if if you told a man like hey there's going to be a time of the month where your woman is just had it with you she is sick to death of the way you look the way you talk the way you smell you name it and you'll be like oh I think that's PMS right I think I heard about PMS and you're like nope sorry bud it's not that weak it's it's the subsequent week of ovulation and there's some fascinating research that shows that women when they're in their time of peak fertility right actually have a tendency or at least a possibility this doesn't happen all the time but it's been observed and measured that they just get absolutely sick of their stable long-term partner and they suddenly get the itch to scratch right of new hot novel sex and typically with a high testosterone man so in in cell terminology Reddit terminology this would be going to find a chat right a strong jaw the high masculinity all of those things and then back to Mother Nature playing dirty tricks if she climaxes if she has an orgasm with that novel partner ovulation and conception can slide three days in either direction from her normal cycle so even if she got her Yaya's out she went to her you know she went to the bar she did she she did her thing came back the next day like okay I'm ready to get back to my home and my relationship the odds are unusually high that she's just conceived a love child with her dangerous baby daddy right so you're like the cost it's in because it's new sperm because yes because organ yes new genetic material that's what evolution wants so this this explains a really startling fact I read in the book why beautiful people have more daughters so it's a book on evolutionary biology nice it's said that in test of many populations so they did a test in Germany and they found that five percent of the German population has a father that is not the father they think and that's one in 20 people yeah yeah absolutely and then you know you take you take the other example so that that is that's those are the drivers for women in midlife the drivers for men are sort of the flip side which is right around 40 as you probably well know right men experience a decrease in testosterone production they experience it as listlessness lack of mental acuity uh change from lean muscle mass to kind of pooling around a sort of dad bod middle right and one of the yearnings I mean this is the classic midlife crisis format I'm going to get an earring and a tribal tattoo and maybe a convertible Porsche right and I am now and I and I feel for the first time in my life that it's a sort of slow slip to the Grave from here and I start seeking out new attention and mates the classic cliche is getting the divorce and running off with the secretary or whatever it would be right that's the old you know sort of 50s kind of model and that is actually again once again for the male orgasm with a new younger mate is one of the highest spikers of testosterone but when they do that and then they also move through the lust attraction into pair bonding phase with their newer incompatible mate they're like wait a second I'm not sure where that compatible you know like I'm single malt scotch and you're a fireball shooter you know like I'm Nintendo and you're like Xbox like wait a second my friends aren't the same my movie references are we got nothing in common right meanwhile they have boom blown up their prior relationship created all of this conflict and really they could have completely saved all of that stuff by just going to their doctor and asking for a testosterone patch wow right with ludicrous it's like the Coolidge effect you know kind of busting out of the hen house and showing up in the suburbs you know that famous so if men could have solved it with a testosterone patch if men could have solved that itch with a testosterone patch how would women solve that age well I mean this is another one I mean because this gets down to the hormonal kind of endocrine balances another dirty trick and we're we're in the midst of it these days is that you know many women are on hormonal birth control before the last 40 years plus really since the Advent of the pill in the mid 60s that's been kind of the go-to Fail-Safe right right but what it does is it completely throws out of whack a woman's natural hormonal Cycles and as a result she's basically and I mean I use this term loosely and respectfully but she's basically Broody right she is ready to have a child and settle down and what she's seeking in that hormonal state is a safe secure stable father to be then they get married or they do whatever they do they conceive and have she's like okay I'm ready to start trying to have a baby let's do this thing she goes off the pill her natural normal cycle comes back her testosterone goes up all these things she's like who is this milk toast weenie boy in my bed I got no time for this guy and women on the pill have lower orgasmic Peaks and satisfaction they have higher relationship dissatisfaction there's actually a fascinating book called love drugs by an Oxford ethicist and a Yale biologist and they just go into the great details and the absolutely hammering negative effects of hormonal birth control for women so the bottom line is for men and women is understand that so much of the melodrama of our lives right infidelity divorces love jealousy and also including the heavier stuff sexual trauma sexual abuse right all you know abortions miscarriages like so much human suffering is caused because evolution is sitting up here just daunting us like puppets on a string of utterly indifferent genetic code and getting us to want to [ __ ] as many people as we can to propagate the human species and wreaking havoc in our lives and our relationships right so the question is is once we understand that you're like oh my goodness first of all no one none of us are to blame like this deck has been stacked from the beginning and we're like just goobers at the Vegas you know blackjack table just wondering why we're out of money all the time so once we understand the inputs once we understand the neurochemistry once we understand these possessed incentives of evolution and just how different they are from what we care about and cherish then we can snip those strings right and we don't have to be puppets dancing on anybody's strings we can take those incredibly strong drivers those almost irresistible incentives and we can repurpose them to Healing to wholeness and to Passion which brings us back to your initial question which is if folks are experiencing some of that if they've experienced Bed Death right the loss of passion if they've found themselves suddenly just waking up next to a roommate and it's nothing but taking out the trash and paying the bills and getting the kids to school and soccer and it's just work obligations and responsibility and we wonder where the Spock went right what do most people say ah yeah buddy get used to it right that's just thems the brakes and let me order another beer for us and we can we we can weep into our mugs you know or women having comparable conversations and so and there's a sense that it's inevitable there's a sense that it's unavoidable that is just the way things are but once you understand this research you're like oh my gosh we can roll back the clock so how do we do that how do we recapture that passion yeah well I think the first is just to understand the hows and whys of how we lost it understand what literally what's the neurochemistry of that lust phase what's the neurochemistry of that attraction phase and to know that it's often neurochemistry it's not necessarily bad character we are fighting against on neurochemistry yeah and let's just assume that ninety percent of life is nothing but hits it's nothing but Judy's obligation responsibilities and setbacks it's why so many of us lose that loving feeling right but ten percent we have the ability to like literally make love we can create and precipitate the neurochemical Cascade just like Rick Dublin was sharing about that PTSD MDMA research we can create that ourselves and once you're in that neurochemical state magically you feel lust you feel attraction you feel novelty you can't keep your hands off each other and everything is fresh and shiny again and you stop the practices and it goes away and you start the practices again and it comes back and okay so this explains something I observed yesterday so we're here at afest which which is a mind Valley festival and yesterday on Dance Floor there was this adorable couple they met at a mind Valley event they met at mine Valley University they came back to afest and they were probably in their 50s or 60s but they were just in the Dance Floor just making out with each other for hours oblivious to everyone else everybody loved it they thought that these this couple um being together for one year and being so into each other was such a beautiful romantic sight to behold but I remember having a conversation with some of my team members and the girl next to me said I wonder what are they doing to maintain that level of passion and fire in their relationship I'd like to ask you that question yeah so there's several steps and I and I think the first is just to give ourselves permission because like for most of us right sexuality is entrenched in culture psychology power games right Sexes is either a reward for an awesome day it's the exclamation point at the end of that sentence right or it's a bargaining chip to attain or achieve other things that we want whether that's time attention doing the dishes you know earning more money whatever it might be it becomes it becomes sublimated into sexual politics and power games so either exclamation point Yeehaw or a bargaining chip for other things I want and that is an incredibly I mean that sets us up for failure and misery and that plays into Evolution's hands right because we're just gonna play that spin those roulette wheels and and we're never going to be satisfied so I think the first step is to realize huh I do yoga I floss my teeth I lift weights I do whatever I do for my Fitness Wellness practice Step One is what would it be like to cultivate a sexual Fitness practice just like every other aspect of my life and so the the relational conversation is Step One is commit to sexual Fitness as Ironclad practice right I don't wait until I'm super happy Ting decide tonight's the night I've lost my teeth I don't wait till I just spring out of bed in an awesome morning like today I go to yoga like I go to yoga whether hell or high water because I know in the long term it's better for me right so it's first just changing the bucket from bargaining chip or exclamation point into hey we bow onto this mat on a consistent basis because we believe the accrued long-term effects are something we value or even cherish in our life so that's step one right step two is work with whatever comes up right so if you're committed to the practice right and it's working and we can talk about specific protocols and and programs that came out of that study that we did um but once you commit to that right um if it's working well things will get worse after they get better and there will be a point in fact there's a there's an Australian Tantra teacher whose name is Barry long he's he's now dead but he said something so jarring I've never forgotten it but he said he said until you would rather eat a [ __ ] sandwich then [ __ ] your partner you haven't even started Tantra so you're like oh okay um and that happens right because basically what what will happen as you start is at first you'll be super excited and thrilled because you're like Hey we're like two electromagnetics you know we're spinning up like copper wire right and the more they rotate the more magnetic pull they have and it's just practice based right and then suddenly boom you're just that's passion right you're you're glued together again you're like this is amazing we have cracked the code secret life all that and that's invariably it sort of boils down through the day-to-day stuff you you start you go from I wonder if this is even possible can we rekindle our love and passion to oh yes we can't miss no look three three you know three-pointers look weird boom and then you just run into the Rock which is like three years ago five years ago ten years ago wherever the buried resentments imbalances traumas are in your relationship you will run smack dab into them and right at that moment you got two choices right you can either get kicked out out of the practice and be like [ __ ] you I hate you I'm gonna go and hang out with the buddies or we're gonna go watch football or you're gonna go drink or whatever is going to happen whatever our old patterns are or you can be like oh my gosh this was anticipated it's right on schedule let's not flinch and yes I would rather eat a [ __ ] sandwich right now than [ __ ] you but we're going to show up on the mat slash our bed wherever our practice place is and we're going to practice anyway teeth when I hate your [ __ ] guts this reminds me of this this scene from the Kevin Bacon movie she's having a baby and there's this hilarious scene in the movie it's about a husband and wife and and they're trying to conceive and they set a timer every time they are scheduled to have sex and then there's this hilarious scene in the movie where Kevin comes Kevin Bacon's character comes back and he's tired from work but the timer goes off and he's he's looking so jaded and tight but he's still taking off his pants he has a giant erection and he pushes himself to just [ __ ] her but I loved that scene because it shows commitment to the ACT and that's essentially what you're talking about yeah and as you're saying that I mean how do we overcome those situations when we we just can't stand their face because we had a fight yeah well I mean I think this is this is where Dr Nicole Crosby's work I think was it was a beautiful unlock because she did a study um she actually did several studies and some that even that have made you know mainstream media and kind of gone viral one of which was um they did a 3D this was a UCLA study and they did a 3D printing of haptic objects which is basically 3D printed dildos and they gave and they laid them out for women because women would often in all past studies they were just given pictures of penises and penis size like what size cosmopolit Cosmo 101 kind of stuff you know does size really matter but then they finally for the first time printed out 3D printed objects and and the women got to choose and what and what they found was actually that they preferred for their regular lover their kind of go-to session lover a penis of six inches but for their one night stands they kind of they upgraded a little bit they sort of selected for like 6.25 or six and a half inches and then the paper was very Prim it was like we we conclude that a woman would be choosing the sort of the higher testosterone option right for their one night stands which kind of goes back to the earlier stuff we were studying but the study that she did with a practice of basically manual stimulation of a woman's clitoris by her partner for 15 minutes so no penetration no another other stuff and no reciprocity the woman wasn't on the hook to do anything on behalf of their partner right and what she found was um that just that alone a created a neurochemical Cascade it created a sort of saturation of parasympathetic nervous system so instead of being stressed wired and tired like in my sympathetic system with norepinephrine and cortisol and kind of vigilance right the women over time were able to slow down settle down and regulate their autonomic nervous system and then interestingly they also had Peak experiences they reported mystical States and they compared that they used the same questionnaire the mystical experience questionnaire the meq 30 which was originated at Johns Hopkins and they used that and compared it to Johns hopkins's research on psilocybin and they actually ripped the women just from 15 minutes of digital stimulation of their clitoris had four to six percent higher Peak States than the maximum dosage of mushrooms in the Hopkins study wow so you're like okay four to five percent yeah more more Peak States so it's a tiny amount but it's still significant then psilocybin or MDMA and that was just from stimulation off the [ __ ] yeah and was that self-stimulation or by that was with a partner and I think some of the premise was I mean obviously uh women know their bodies rather than most of their Partners but there was some sense of like how you can't tickle yourself there was kind of an additional effect right by having it not be your own volition right and so one of the most important things a man can do is to treat his woman by learning how to stimulate her [ __ ] when she's having a rough day yes and literally her research was can we use this as a substitute for prescription Pharmaceuticals can we literally use it medically so she's like hey even in this sort of sex positive therapy space she's like there's still some subtle shaming going on if somebody comes to their therapist and says you know what after a hard day or when I'm stressed I masturbate I have an orgasm they'll be like that's poor coping skills you should figure out something else and and Nicole is really Drawing the Line she's like why if this can alleviate physical pain like I've got Crohn's disease or rheumatoid arthritis or or recovering from an arthroscopic injury or whatever it might be and it does the endorphins and the anandamide can super saturated I mean give me pain relief better than Anvil better than motion why on Earth wouldn't I use it if I'm having anxiety or sleeplessness why would I just get prescribed Klonopin or Ambien couldn't I learn to manage this with my very own medicine cabinet right which is you know my prefrontal cortex right my complex brain connected to my spinal column connected to my erogenous zones and and fascinatingly I mean you said you know something as simple as you know stimulating a woman's clitoris the woman's clitoris is by a country mile the highest concentration of nerve endings to be found in a human anywhere man or woman it's close to double the number of neurons that a man the head of a man's penis has so you're like okay that is a magical spot and for for any of you guys taking notes and listening along at home also just be under advisement what every woman has ever been trying to tell you which is it's not just a little love button it's a complex Wishbone shaped organ that goes that wraps around a woman's pelvis and has an entire and massive realm of stimulation engorgement arousal and sensation so you're like okay and what were you saying about the science of exploring the [ __ ] when you were on stage earlier you mentioned about how we've been to the Moon we've explored the depths of the ocean but yeah I mean I mean fundamentally it's just crazy if you just sort of track civilizations progress you know 1945 we learned to split the atom Robert Oppenheimer is like the cold we have become death destroyer of worlds you know 1969 we send it we put a man on the moon and Neil Armstrong's like one giant step and it's not until like 1996 or thereabouts that in of course a a female gynecologist and scientist accurately and fully mapped the woman's clitoris 1996. did you know did you just didn't take that wow you know we're sort of dumb but we're slow so so that becomes and back to like practices right and you even use that example of Kevin Bacon in the movie and he's sort of reluctant here we go it's kind of even even sex can become a Juda chore and an obligation right and sort of you know exacerbate performance anxiety still exacerbate any tensions in the relationship um I just thought as you were talking of all the couples that struggle with uh in vitro right and and one of the most consistent stories that people report from that is just how it became so stressful and how it became so loaded and how it became so rote and structured and and burdened with expectation and we lost the spontaneity and we lost the play it was all just Duty and obligation you know it was almost like a Veterinary process right and now do you recommend to bring back that play to bring back that Discovery one try sex with psychedelics say psilocybino MDMA well we are rushing all the way to the end of the fun stuff here but we'll come back to that right so so the first thing I think is um based on Nicole Brown's work right the simplest as a we've committed to sexuality as a practice so we've said sexual Fitness Matters and we're going to try it so just give yourself a month right and then just commit nothing more for that 30 days of 15 minutes of clitoral stimulation for a feminine identified partner okay right 15 minutes day of clutch will stimulus okay and that's it and no reciprocity and in fact you should even have the kibosh on any follow-up or escalation exactly so the man should basically keep his power he stays close this goes back to the Kevin Bacon story right because I mean at least speaking for myself speaking with other men the mind is doing it without expectation of any reciprocity well not just that also without any expectation or requirement of Razzle Dazzle performance right so like if you think about it if a man comes home and he's tired or he's stressed he's just got his ass kicked by his boss whatever like he's not feeling like a superstar oh no honey I can't I want almost to go down to my man cave and you know watch sports but the idea of like oh can I show up and give you your daily medicine I can do that right right and it fits like 15 minutes I mean how many times do householders do couples together especially with children right be like we never have the time and the only time we have the time is at the end of our days right when all of our chores and duties have been completed and our kids are in bed and maybe to get in the mood maybe we'll even have a couple of drinks we'll mix alcohol in with this and you and if you hang your hat if you hang your relational satisfaction on end of the day alcohol facilitated are we still feeling it you will be oh for a thousand because there's also a diurnal cycle right there's the cycle of men's testosterone the whole um morning wood thing right a man wakes up often with an erection some of that is need to pee but the rest of it is a spike in testosterone right there and then it tapers through the morning and then it comes back up in the early afternoon which is hence with more oxytocin available so if a woman just wants you know a quick and dirty your morning man's the guy right but if she actually wants relatedness and connection with passion Afternoon Delight sky rockets in flight right that's the time there's a reason there was the rock song about it and then from there it's just a slow slippery slide to the grave and so after 8 PM a man's testosterone drops off a cliff and you're both exhausted and you're fright so it's so the biggest move you could possibly make as a couple is beg borrow or steal time in the afternoon for your practice and if that's simply impractical how convenient that in our world today more and more people are working from home yeah exactly exactly and that alone that will change your hit rate by a factor of 10 to 100 right um and and so again once again it's not us it's the structures if you're really saying we've Lost That Loving Feeling and we only can you know it's it's the pillow the dear sweet rest or us getting busy and then throw in the plummeting of sexuality at night because everyone's on their screens right so like I've got a dopamine slot machine in front of me or we could kind of dust off that crusty old relationship and we haven't even talked about the [ __ ] that went down this week no I'm gonna just I'm just gonna keep scrolling until I pass out so no screens basically bedrooms should be for two things and two things only sleeping and [ __ ] and take all screens out of that environment right plug them in down in the kitchen leave them alone and no TV in bedrooms so once you have that then you have the capacity to start spinning that flywheel so right we're we're at sexist practice the sex is Ironclad practice we do it whether we feel like it or not clitoral stimulation as prescription pharmaceutical and 30 days of providing that for the female identified partner nothing else right just let that simmer then and and I and I would you know without giving away the game I guarantee you that's not all that's going to be happening in that month right yeah right but then you can start adding in now you add in a Cadence so you add Tuesdays or Thursdays or right somewhere in the middle of the week um one hour of you start the same exact way you still start with your 15 minute beginning and by the way you know for the boys and men here you shouldn't you should never attempt you should never attempt penetration before your woman has had at least one orgasm because that whole clitorial system which is as big as the males business um just takes a while to Prime and pump up right so so if a woman is only meeting a guy when he's got a boner and is ready to put it somewhere she's always going to end up disappointed I see the clock you got to synchronize the clocks and you start and this and the clocks are off by at least 15 to 20 minutes so start with that then you can go into whatever your practice would be and enjoy it right twice a week and then we would highly encourage reclaiming some version of a secular Sabbath so then that it's an hour plus an hour your Tuesdays and Thursdays and then come out two hours or even three hours for what you might call sort of body church right your secular Sabbath your time together and then you can really kick out the jams then you can engage and then what what that study that we conduct in right the participants describe this as a sort of sexual yoga of becoming and now you you can really bust out all the bells and whistles which doesn't have to be you know what we think of as sexuality and erotic stuff it's literally like Bodywork like how do I combine sexual arousal right all of that neurochemistry all of that circuitry with Thai massage right with fascial massage with Thera guns with loving and healing and and touching each other and how can we combine that in a way that ramps up the energy increases the neurochemical Cascade and maximizes and optimizes the healing and release to be gained from it beautiful beautiful so sex and MDMA sex and psilocybin is that something that you think might help spice up a couple's love life yeah well so now let's take a let's pan back from that and take a look at the entire concept of making love right how do we create the neurochemical priming right that renders Peak States deep connection and Trauma release most possible so the first is is you know um back to what we were talking about earlier right what is the endocrine balance of the two partners so if there's a male identified partner what what is his free testosterone and availability um for the woman it will be what is her testosterone and availability because that is also present in women in a key element in sex drive but also her estrogen balance right she's been on the pill remember she's out of whack if she is post her cycle and she's into a perimenopausal state or a menopausal State um there was all of that very inflammatory research about oh estrogen therapy estrogen replacement therapy causes cancer so many women that just kind of made the rounds and an awful lot of women are under supplemented so however you're going to balance it balance it so that your hormonal profile of your sex hormones is optimized women can take DHEA which is a precursor which can become estrogen or testosterone men can too and you just kind of need to watch what epigenetic Expressions you have as to what it gets coded as in your body but you can take you can take take precursors and primers you can also supplement with nitric oxide right so nitric oxide whether that beets beet juice any of the concentrates is kind of a baby step if you also go because that increases blood flow and dilation so you have you have more engorgement you have more blood flow more sensation right more arousal so you can do that as well also actually more neurochemical access to Bliss Herbert Benson at Harvard University Call It The Spirit Molecule and how do you get nitric oxide so you can supplement it dietarily with beet juice with beet concentrates if you in fact most like gncs right all of the weight I believe L-Arginine yes right L-Arginine would help would do that so that's the kind of mild version you can do it dietarily dietarily you can do sesame seeds and pumpkin seeds and and beans you can do it with supplements that would be kind of the medium version and then the spicy version would be literally or Cialis or or Viagra those are all interact with that pathway and while many folks have you know right lightly claimed that a woman's arousal pattern because we actually know the Harvard gynecologist who was on that that drug Addy which was supposed to be the female Viagra and it got canned and panned right but he actually told us the whole backstory of the the clinical trials and actually how close it actually was to being uh effective but without a doubt while there are many components to a full and satisfying arousal relatedness and Human Experience you can also make the case that right blood flowing engorgement helps right Prime that situation and so that's the sort of that's the full-on version then you can also go as far as I know uh Dave Ashby I think has mentioned this maybe even on your podcast or elsewhere um topical testosterone gels even applied to a woman right can massively increase arousal and engorge but you need to be very mindful of not over indexing on these things these are incredibly powerful drugs that we'll be putting back into our system but you can absolutely Prime yourself and there's also a timing situation so if you want to increase when we said that on a day-to-day basis right on a diurnal cycle last thing at night is your death now avoid that at all cost but there's also the you know men are solar right our Cycles come and go by the day women are lunar as all women know and go on a 28 day cycle more or less and the key Peaks is is you know there's a whole range between progesterone estrogen testosterone prolactin and there are times that are fallow right where a woman doesn't has is slow to arouse is is not particularly fired up and there's times of peak ovulation where she is ready to have wild swing from the chandeliers hookups and for any guys that are clueless about this their only senses look she's on the regular she's not you know like I had to get somewhere I don't like if that's if that's the binary basic that the dude is operating from you're out to lunch brother you know there's this there's a 28 day cycle and there is a week in there that is your absolute magic zone so if you're ever like what's up honey like last weekend leg was rocking your world like what's up now you want me to slow down and like give you a massage like come on right so like guys are just clueless and if you're going to again back to like families couples householders if you're gonna plan what you know in the UK they call your dirty weekend where are you gonna go away to a hotel right to make love and have privacy um you want to time it 100 for the weekend that overlaps with the woman's ovulatory week and what's more right you can enter it again for for folks playing along at home you can play Hotwire roulette you know go into Hotwire they don't tell you what the hotel is Select four or five stars and then just ring the bell and see where you get and one of the best hacks because for many people Child Care is a rate limiter it's really really hard to figure it out and definitely for overnights right and what you can do instead is play Hotwire roulette on the week that you're a female identified partner is ovulating so that's your maximum time Prime with your testosterone with your nitric oxide supplementation with all of those elements and then check in as early as you can check in and have amazing afternoon love making in privacy go out to dinner after most of dating is like we go to dinner and then with full stomachs and booze on boards somebody hopes to get lucky don't do that go and like Fitness athletes check in have an amazing magical afternoon have an incredible dinner bathing in the Afterglow and be home by 10 or 11 and the ability to have a babysitter from 4 to 11 is infinitely higher brilliant idea right I mean I I learned this the hard way at staying at my in-laws for for uh Christmas holidays and I was going out with my partner and we were we went to a movie and then went to Sushi and I'm like all I want to do is be with you what are we doing let's get out of here and then still come home so it was like a big huge aha right so that's a great hack and now we get to the place of okay we've done our pre-priming we've done our neurochemistry we've got our schedules and timing so then the question is okay what does the spicy look like and this goes back to that that book love drugs because they made a case they're like hey if anybody thinks that use combining drugs with sexuality is cheating or it's a shortcut or any of those kind of things they're like look the bad news is we're already doing it we use alcohol we use hormonal birth control and we use ssris constantly in fact you know find the person that is not under the influence of at least one of those during their sexual concussion and they're like every single one of them is terrible for us I mean ssris the antidepressants like Prozac right are well known to basically yes they take you out of the bottom but they also take off the top and one of the most consistent side effects in addition to potential weight gain is utter tanking of your libido right so it's like we're already doing chem sex we're just doing it badly so the questions is what kind what is healthy productive responsible chemical supplementation and priming for optimized sexuality right so we've covered a few of them and now you're kind of you're nudging into what about in pathogens uh like MDMA what about psychedelics like psilocybin or LSD um Sasha Shogun who is the famous Renegade chemist who who basically cracked the code on all designer drugs and he was the first one along with his wife Ann who was also a psychotherapist and made use of MDMA for those situations he has an entire logbook which they publish they published against the DA's advice they're just like we want those recipes to be out there for Humanity and every single one of their notes they would have erotic and they'd give it a score right so they literally what was it like to make love under the influence of that compound and they had a magical love life they were honestly probably some of the most some of the sort of psychedelic Tantra Pioneers um and and Sasha and Anne's hands down favorite was 2cb which is in the sort of mescaline family um but for them they found that that was kind of the combination of kind of magical plus arousing plus manageable or steerable right and MDMA which is often you know it's it's street name these days is ecstasy it that was kind of a Rebrand when it made it into gay culture in Dallas in the sort of in the club scene when it was still legal in the 80s prior to that when Sasha and Anne were using it largely in the Bay Area for psychotherapeutics it was called empathy and even Adam because it was sort of brought you back to your Primal being and it does have a known side effect of any serotonergic enhancement and you know serotonin soft tone so typically erections are harder to maintain under the influence of MDMA now most ravers and Club goers hacked that in Ibiza there was the notion of sextacy right which became the combining of Viagra or some other what are the whatever the class is called um with MDMA giant warning on that one because it's come you're doing two different things to your nervous system and you can end up um passing out you can end up either with accelerated heart rate and and it's so you know don't try that at home kids like know that when you're combining things and you're also combining it with intense arousal those things can be dangerous so consult consult your curious courageous connected functional medicine doctor right before trying any of that at home and another another um caveat or caution is you know that way lies you know both ecstasy and enlightenment and Madness and ruin so if you're going to be in those kind of states and places with the supplementation of entheogens right you may well find yourself um moving through deep and profound traumas of your own biographical trauma like this is my life maybe even this is in our relationship you will then potentially find yourself coming up to the level of archetypal traumas where you're like oh my gosh I'm feeling something for all women not just me I am I am now in that kind of numinous space and I'm now managing stuff that's coming through me it could be epigenetic and ancestral it could be archetypal and just out there in the neurosphere who knows right there's a I mean TBD on on how we nail that down it's very novel territory that I don't think has been documented especially well and then you might even get all the way up into tron's personal Realms where you're like whoa we're not even humans anymore right and what is happening here and then you can find yourself um straight outside of time in what you know in uh the Greek tradition would have been called Kairos so you kind of slip out of Kronos and again this is a very there's a very straight neurophysiological profile to this and it tends to correlate with brain stem reset right which shows up as very low neuroelectric activity so it's almost like that movie flatliners you know where those those med school students paddle each other and knock each other out and they died and then bring them back and in between they're in magical Realms of course it always goes horror because like you shouldn't play with that stuff right that's the moral but the reality is is we can Flatline ourselves near about into Delta wave activity and you you and I have talked about Delta delta waves before it is a bafflingly bizarre potent and interesting domain and you can get there via prolonged edging and stimulation of the nervous system and the arousal networks and back to Nicole prowessi I told you she had a while on MDMA with or without chemical supplementation but the width just ramps it up more I see now what about psilocybin yeah I mean psilocybin it depends how it lives in your body for some people they end up with kind of like stomach distress and bloating or body load or fatigue so if you if it agrees with you and or specific strains agree with you and you're into sort of threshold dosing right um I think that would be something that would be possible LSD obviously has a very long Half-Life so you're in for ride but it's cleaner in the sense of it's it's less of a body load so you can play with those you can also play with them this is not advice this is simply a description of what's possible you can also play with breath work with oxygen and nitrous oxide and you can also play with ketamine ketamine lozenges or intranasal ketamine and oxytocin funnily enough you can combine those two in a liquid intranasal form so you get potentially and the research is still out on how effective intranasal oxytocin is crossing the blood-brain barrier versus this just kind of up your nose and waisted and of course we want to stress that all of this should be done in places where they are legal absolutely like under the advisement and consultation with a functional medicine Doctrine right right um but you combine those things and you can actually layer them so now you're going from hey a 12 hour Acid trip or Ayahuasca trip that's a hell of a commitment and I'm and in order for me to get to a place that's really inspirational I gotta load up and the more I load up the weirder the up the ramp up and the come down are from the Mountaintop do I just sploogey and that's kind of that's a risky time that's time I can get tired it's the time weird stuff can happen in life I'm not Super Compass mentors and instead you can say hey let's compress the time zone and raise the amplitude and you can do that by intentional stacking of practices and substances and that way you can get in get all the way up to the stratosphere there right come back make sure you don't fumble that football right here's this golden egg you've just been given these gifts don't forget it as you slip out of Delta and as you come back into awaken Consciousness and then cherish it integrate it that's amazing let's let's wrap up as we come to the closing of this podcast yeah I mean I think the simplest is just to realize that um if if you were experiencing Bed Death or you're even concerned about maybe ending up the yourself and your relationship you've seen friends you've seen family do it and then it's kind of a slow slip to the Grave or the divorce court the simplest answer is to realize it's not you it's not personal this is structural and this goes back to Helen Fisher's work and that kind of progression of evolution making us glue together like Madness and stay together just long enough to have a kid and then kind of kind of pushes us apart and it's also just a reflection on the actual realities of our day-to-day that like keeping a house together paying the bills together coming and going from commutes and work managing kids and families and aging parents kind of sucks it's kind hard and if we didn't have a way to put more credits in the bank account we're going to end up relationally bankrupt so if we're feeling that way just know oh that's structural that's not personal and we can reverse it and we can reverse it by committing to sexuality as a practice and perfecting how to make love how to actually Prime the neurochemistry of the lust and the attraction that Fighters up in the beginning and we swore was in the rearview mirror of our lives but we can actually bring it back and light our path ahead Jamie that was a beautiful beautiful Journey that you just took us on and I think what you just shared is going to be so valuable for so many couples who are experiencing this so quick recap um the first thing you mentioned is that we need to be aware that evolution is going to screw us over and between the three to seven year mark we're certainly going to get that itch but that itch is basically a biochemical reaction and as you mentioned there are certain things we can do you to help help tame that itch but the second thing we want to do is develop a sexual Fitness practice and you outline multiple ways we can do that what else in summary well I mean the simplest is to realize that it's basically a sliding Spectrum right the first half of that sexual Fitness practice is just how do we defrag our nervous systems from micro PTSD the day-to-day grinds that accumulates the stones in our shoe but the second half if we stick with it and particularly if we get more ambitious with the questions that you're asking supplementing stacking adding neurochemistry and entheogens it can go all the way into a Transcendent practice and allow us to heal and rewrite our deepest traumas and potentially even be doing work on behalf of our extended Clans and lineage and if people are interested in learning more and actually literally the paint by numbers step by step study that we conducted with 10 couples over 12 weeks you can go and see the entire study the research their journal entries exactly how to and everything else at capture the rapture.com and then just click on the link I think it says research and it's one of the research studies beautiful and the book is called recapture the Rapture rethinking God Sex and Death in a world that's lost its mind amazing book Jamie just gave a talk on this book here at AFS to a beautiful Standing Ovation uh Jamie give us a quick idea of what people are going to get from this book sure well it's divided into three parts three stories really and the first one is called choose your own apocalypse which is hey we're all living in Wild times we're doom scrolling our phones and we don't know whether to make heads or tails of what's happening outside each day and how do we choose and Shout our life so the first one is not that any one of us can know what to think but we're going to help you think through your own decisions to have some clarity and some calm on the road ahead part two is what we've been talking about it's called The Alchemist cookbook which is a play on that old underground book The Anarchist Cookbook which was like how to build bombs and this kind of stuff so think of The Alchemist cookbook is how to blow yourself to God Consciousness using household materials and then if we figure that out right the part three is ethical cult building if we're going to create experiences of peak States and deep healing and vulnerability we almost always put it in the ditch with Celtic community so the question isn't not isn't can we avoid Cults it's how do we build ethical community and how do we learn the toolkit that allows us to do that right that allows us to keep each other inspired but to hold each other accountable and to never forget the important life-saving work we all have to do in the world gorgeous thank you Jamie so a couple of resources that you guys can tap into if you are a Mindvalley member these are some content that you'll find in the mind Valley app that I think will take you deeper down this rabbit hole for first click on the Discover button click on series and explore the film category 13. it's under Mindvalley film so this is a short documentary film we produce with John and Missy butcher John and Missy butcher the creators of lifebook which is a division of Mind Valley it is America's number one goal and life envisioning system but John and Missy have been a monogamous couple for 33 years and they have turned their sex life into an art form category 13 is a film that shows you how to create sex as art and it is gonna open your mind to so many remarkable ways to create an incredible depth of intimacy with your partner John and Missy have been together as I said 33 years five grandchildren but they are more madly in love than ever they are such an Exquisite couple to observe so check out category 13. now when it comes to Jamie's recommendation on stimulating the clitoris we have a program on that it's called waves of pleasure by Bibi brajoshka so this program is something designed for women but if you're a man who happens to care about a woman you can watch it too and you will learn the art of stimulating the breast and the [ __ ] in the most Exquisite ways this program is just beautifully created in seven days you become a master of delivering pleasure so go check it out it's called waves of pleasure by Bibi brijushka and finally a new Tantra program is coming soon it's by Leila Martin She's widely considered the greatest contract teacher on the planet today Leila's new program on Tantra will be coming to your mind Valley membership soon so all of that is available for you if you are a mind Valley member thank you for joining us on this episode of the Mindvalley podcast don't forget to click subscribe if you're watching this on YouTube or Spotify off click follow and also if you found this topic interesting please share this with couples whom you think are going to find this this message really beneficial for their health and their relationships thank you Jamie thanks for having me man [Music]