For decades, Neo-Tantra has focused on sex workshops and orgasmic bliss, overlooking the fact that the Kama Sutra is effectively a patriarchal instruction manual as well as Tantra’s grassroots origins in the lower castes in Indian society, which were responding to lofty metaphysical ideas with practical rituals everyone could partake in. From that perspective, a modern industry marketed with Shiva-Shakti figurines is yet another example of capitalist yoga in a privileged society.
Derek opens this week discussing a redpilled-lite video by Danielle LaPorte, while Julian discusses an intensely personal story related to Tantra; he also explores the role of the Aghoris. We break from Tantra talk during Matthew’s interview with Alex Auder, a veteran yoga instructor who uses comedy as a relief mechanism from the QAnon craziness in the yoga world. Matthew ends this week’s episode with a reflection on his history with Tibetan Buddhist Tantra, and how he sees echoes of its archaic elements showing up, in undigested form, in the QAnon imaginarium.
Show Notes
Danielle LaPorte’s video
How tantric sex trains people to have more intense orgasms, and why it’s so controversial
The Mysterious Death of a Tantric Sex Guru
Sex Messiah: A Tantric Odyssey
Not for the Faint of Heart: The Aghori and Their Unorthodox Path to Enlightenment
Reza Aslan (almost) loses his head
Yoga: An Evolving Story Of Cross-Cultural Innovation
Julian Feeld at the Hollywood Blvd QAnon rally
-- -- --
Support us on Patreon
Pre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada
Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | Julian
Original music by EarthRise SoundSystem
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
I'm Julian Walker, and we are sorry to announce that Matthew has joined QAnon.
Yeah, he had a good run with us.
We really tried to rehabilitate him, but no go with that.
Yeah, that cult susceptibility just finally caught up.
Oh, he's going to be mad at this part.
Matthew is on a well-deserved vacation with his family somewhere near the Arctic in Canada, and so we will be hearing from him with his interview later with Alex Odair and as well as his closer.
But for now, you can find us on Facebook, on YouTube, on our website, conspirituality.net, as well as on Patreon, patreon.com slash conspirituality, where if you are enjoying these episodes, you can support us that way and get access to exclusive content.
All right, so episode 15, Tantra, Sex, Death, and Chaos.
For decades, Neo-Tantra has been an industry focused on sex workshops and orgasmic bliss, perhaps overlooking the fact that the Kama Sutra is effectively a patriarchal instruction manual and Tantra's grassroots origins in the lower castes of Indian society.
These were responding to lofty metaphysical ideas with practical rituals that everyone could partake in.
From that perspective, this modern industry marketed by Shiva-Shakti figurines is actually another example of capitalist yoga in a privileged society, and this should not be surprising.
Derek opens this week by discussing a red-pilled light video by Danielle Laporte.
Looking forward to your analysis of this.
Well, I discuss what is actually an intensely personal story related to Tantra and also some of the underpinnings around a very sort of fierce group of yogi sadhus named the Aghori, who have a particular take on Tantra that is interesting to look into.
We break from all this Tantra talk during Matthew's interview with Alex Auder.
She's a veteran yoga instructor who uses comedy as a relief mechanism from the QAnon craziness in the yoga world under quarantine.
Matthew will end this week's episode with what I found a powerful reflection, I've seen his talk, on his history with Tibetan Buddhists Tantra and how he sees echoes of its archaic elements showing up in undigested form in the QAnon Imaginarium.
Yeah, thanks Julian.
I think we have a good balance this week because I know the stories that are coming are pretty personal and intense, and yet the interview with Alex is funny.
So we're trying to find that light-dark balance that Hunter is all about in the first place.
So it'll be an interesting ride.
But yesterday I was sent a video by Daniel Laporte from one of our listeners, Jenna Rainier.
So first off, thank you, Jenna, for sending that.
And while I'm not that familiar with Laporte's work, I have a few friends that really love her.
And in the past, I've seen material from her that I appreciate.
So this segment isn't about some serious QAnon indoctrination.
Yet, on some levels, the type of thinking that Laporte shares in her video is exactly what leads to inaction and complacency on the left, and it highlights why I've been frustrated by the wellness community for decades.
And Laporte isn't particularly a wellness person, but she is on Oprah's Top 100 list, and self-help is part of her marketing, and I get that, and that's fine.
So I would put her at least on the periphery of all of these figures we talk about.
Now, her video, which is linked to in the show notes, questions the use of the term conspiracy theory.
And from 30,000 feet, a few of her comments are really insightful.
We do get bogged down too much, especially on social media.
These platforms that we use make us too reactionary.
And we don't spend enough time listening and we do spend too much time shouting.
I'm summating all of this but so far all good.
My contention with the video is that conspiracy theories are a real thing and we need to be able to identify them.
Basically the port wants us to stop using that term and I feel that throwing out the term because it's overused isn't really helpful and in fact I believe it's pretty dangerous.
Now at one point in the video, Laporte says, do not DM me about QAnon.
I've got no patience for that association.
And that's great, but you can read my screen, but, but she follows that by saying, although there might be some truth in things.
Now that alone, that sentence, is a little disconcerting because you immediately talk about QAnon and then you're saying things.
It's like, call it for what it is.
Now, Laporte prefaces her line of questioning by discussing conspiracy theories that turned out to be true, such as big tobacco.
And there was a concerted effort by the tobacco industry to hide damning data and promote cigarettes as healthy.
And when healthy didn't work out, they pivoted to not harmful.
But these companies always knew better.
And this sort of marketing ploy is chronic in corporate industry.
Agricultural products, fossil fuels, opioids, and antidepressants are all examples of products created by companies with vested interests that actively lie to keep the profits rolling in.
Here's the thing.
These are not conspiracy theories.
Perhaps in the 80s and 90s, execs and the marketing companies they hired spun it that way, but this was never really Area 51 territory.
A more recent example is the earthquakes being caused by fracking.
There were cover-ups of the data by fossil fuel companies, but then that came to light.
And QAnon is much different than all of this, and relating Big Tobacco to this actual conspiracy theory is disingenuous.
Now, in her defense, Laporte applies a perfectly valid critical thinking exercise in her video.
The problem is context.
She argues that all communication begins with an intention, and then says we need to seek common ground, think critically, and create empathy, and that only united we will find solutions.
And this is the wedge that bothers me.
Now, I'm all for nonviolent solutions.
One of my martial arts instructors used to say that if you get into a fight, you've already lost.
But sometimes the fight comes to you and you don't have a choice in the matter.
When I was on the poetry scene in the 90s, I remember running into a fellow poet at one particular reading and he was really shaken up.
The previous weekend, he was attacked while getting on the elevator in his building, and when his attacker pulled out a knife, he was able to maneuver around him and turn the knife back on him.
In the process, my friend killed his attacker.
He was not a violent person, and killing another human really haunted him for a long time.
But if he didn't do it, he would have died.
He didn't have a choice.
And I don't know what it's going to take for Americans to realize that we're being rushed at with a knife right now.
There's plenty of documented evidence that QAnon is rooted in anti-Semitism and white nationalism.
We know the absurd numbers of children being trafficked promoted by QAnon are fake.
We also know that the theory is being promoted heavily in Romania and Russia.
Just made the Trump era rusher.
And that they're specifically targeting Americans in order to indoctrinate them and create chaos in our country.
If you want to talk about all communication beginning with an intention, the intention is the dissolution of our democracy.
And right now they're succeeding.
So you cannot sit there with a straight face and tell your audience to look for the truth in an ideology that posits a sexual predator as the world's savior, rescuing the planet from a race of reptilian overlords, and expect to be taken seriously.
By way of comparison, Marianne Williamson's recent Newsweek column provides another example.
And while I'm very happy she's calling out QAnon, she ends her piece by writing, the only real remedy is an awakening of the heart and the manifestations of collective love.
No, that is not a remedy.
That's not the remedy we need and it's not going to work.
The remedy begins at the ballot box and with the money used to support candidates that might help us get out of this mess.
And I know we're in danger of not being able to even vote properly right now, so the remedy goes far beyond that.
These aren't the only solutions, but they're a beginning.
This nonsense about only love winning the day is great for people who like watching movies those Hollywood pedophiles are known for producing, but in this context, in this age, right now, you're only enabling slacktivism and inaction, hashtag and memes, when what we need are ballots and money.
This is part of the reason Trump got into office in the first place, and if this thinking continues, it's going to be what keeps him there.
Even Gandhi knew that war is sometimes necessary.
It's never an ideal solution, but you don't always have a choice.
And this war right now looks different from any other that humans have ever faced because it's on an entirely new battlefield.
So, Laporte asks us to look for patterns, and if you can't see the patterns that this conspiracy theory of QAnon is utilizing, then this already fragile democracy that we've had the privilege to enjoy.
And I know that Laporte is Canadian, but she is invoking an American conspiracy theory in her video.
So this democracy is not going to be around much longer if we continue down this path.
And that is not a conspiracy.
Yeah, I found her video so interesting.
You know, the moment that you were just referencing where she says, look for patterns.
Right before that, she says, so what you do is you gather as much information as you can without being concerned about the source.
Right?
Just keep gathering information, and don't look at the source, and don't be critical about it.
Just gather it all together, and then look at all of it and find the patterns, and the patterns will tell you the truth.
And it's just like, wow, that's a very interesting epistemology you have there.
It's interesting too, because of the fact that she invoked Big Tobacco, and so if you want to look at the doctors that they hired to say that tobacco are healthy, are you going to just not look at the source in that context?
It doesn't make any sense.
Yeah.
So you have to look at the source.
You can't not look at the source.
And again, that's why I said that part of her exercise makes sense in terms of you do want to gather a lot of data, but taking out the source and the intention, especially, like I said, we know what the intentions are.
And if the intention is to bring down a government and a democracy, then you have to factor that in as well.
So her math is a little bit off in that video.
No, absolutely.
And it's part of an issue that I've always seen in our subculture, which is this sort of well-meaning relativism around what it means to be open-minded, where, you know, you basically end up including a lot of misinformation and nonsense and, you know, just made up stuff.
And you say, let's contrast this with the science and the truth will be somewhere in the middle between absolute fabricated nonsense and stuff that's based on evidence.
That just doesn't get you anywhere good.
Well, I always go back to the fact that this whole child trafficking and all these, a lot of the issues stem from me.
I mean, it's continual throughout time, but one of the more recent examples is how the fundamentalist Christians were able to take creationism and through a Your concerted marketing effort make it a debate with evolutionary biology.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Yeah.
So creationism versus evolution, climate science versus climate denial, all of these, somehow the Overton window gets moved so that, oh, well, there's valid positions on both sides.
Like actually on some topics there aren't.
So, this week, I know you've been watching the series as well, Derek.
I watched another episode of the really quite good Netflix docuseries, Unwell.
And the episode I watched was about Tantra.
I thought it was really quite well done.
It's a good series.
This episode, I know you've seen it as well, I thought of it as sort of equal parts three things.
So, the first is the sort of cultural appropriation critique.
From an academic religious scholar, and I'm not going to name everyone because I would have to name everyone then, so I'll just name no one, but this academic religious scholar who's basically saying there's a key distinction we need to make between this 1500-year-old tradition, roughly, of quite wild and dark supernaturalism.
He talks about it as having its origins, Tantra, in a kind of demonology.
in the archaic past and the more shiny, sexy branding of modern Western Neo Tantra.
So that's one piece.
The other part I feel they weave in is this really quite sympathetic treatment of three different neo-tantra teachers.
And I see them as really doing a kind of mind-body emotional healing work that seems quite sincere and beneficial.
And there doesn't seem to be, you know, there are no like big red flags in any of that, maybe with the exception of some sort of very charismatic leadership that potentially could be a little tricky.
And third, there's of course the cautionary tale about how communities organized around sacred sexuality can be fertile territory for a re-traumatizing abuse of power.
Especially when there's a hierarchical power structure and maybe, and this is really interesting, a set of mystifying beliefs and jargon that redefines the act of sex and renames, you know, the different acts and the sexual organs and these sorts of things, the rituals that are being enacted in a way that can potentially be kind of manipulative and confusing and make boundary violations seem sort of I don't know, sacred or spiritual or like healing moments when actually they aren't.
And as you know, I often think about the gap between Western ideas of what certain Eastern practices are about and then their actual roots on the other hand.
For example, the real beliefs and practices of this vast subject called yoga are often whitewashed or turned into something more congruent with the lovely and relaxing burbling hot tubs of Esalen and the pristine yoga rooms, essential oil infused lobby sales floors, and energy healing alcoves of American boutique studios.
We want something that's going to fit nicely with that sort of sales model.
For example, one thing that most yogis don't know is that asana practice itself most likely originates in outcast tantric groups, not in the more orthodox, dualist, aristocratic, brahmanical sects that would later appropriate it and sort of, in their way, photoshop it as being based on the metaphysics of Patanjali, who really just wrote about concentration meditation.
Most woke New Agers are also unfamiliar with the actually quite explicit links between the doctrines of reincarnation and karma and the legacy of the traditional apartheid-like caste system of theocratic oppression in India that predates the British Empire and in some ways still continues today.
And Tantra itself, far from being the Western body-positive embrace of sex as sacred, which I'm all for, by the way, and sacred sex as a way to work on healing and happiness, actually has much more terrifying and perhaps grotesque underpinnings.
Like a lot of early myth and ritual, there's a deep preoccupation in the yoga tradition with death.
And many ancient sects were seeking to attain immortality and then claiming to be able to teach you how to be immortal.
Some work on this immortality project by retaining their semen and believing they can literally drive it up into their brains where it becomes the amrita, a kind of nectar of the gods that can then be drunk by learning to insert one's own tongue up the back of their throat.
But of course, first you have to cut Right here, the frenulum underneath your tongue that attaches it to your mouth in order to be able to get it up the back of your throat.
So this is like some pretty, you know, bizarre, arcane stuff.
And not to be an engineering problem.
Yeah, there was an engineering problem.
That was the way there.
Why wouldn't we build better?
And not to be in any way like culturally superior, I think that all human cultures have their roots in all kinds of stuff that is just arcane and superstitious and wild.
And there is this sort of primal preoccupation with blood ritual, with sacrifice, with how to overcome death, with how to make sense of all of these sort of core existential conflicts.
Now, many non-tantric yogis are sadhus, and they're devoted to a particular path of yoga.
So the sadhu is someone who essentially leaves ordinary society and just sets out on the path of realization.
So they're devoted to a singular path of yoga.
They'll perform ritual practices, for example, that break the nerves in their penis.
So as to actually quell their sexual desires, they see their lives as a practice in what is called mortification of the flesh.
Or proving to God that they care nothing for their bodies and only for the eternal soul or Atman that will merge with the divine when they step off the desire-driven wheel of reincarnation.
So that's sort of the the dualistic angle, right?
Spirit versus flesh.
You've got to be on the side of spirit if you want to transcend the flesh.
The flesh is ultimately profane, dirty, something to be disconnected from.
But for the tantric sadhus, there's more of a non-dual formulation.
But I, as someone who really kind of romanticized non-dualism and tantra before I knew more, Didn't realize quite like the the details of where some of some of these particular sadhus go.
They renounce the world as well and live in the forest or in caves.
One of the things they're well known for is meditating whilst sitting on top of dead bodies.
They, like other sadhus, rub the ashes of dead bodies gathered from the funeral pyres all over their own skin.
This is fairly common.
And then some tantric sadhus, who are admittedly a minority, called the Aghori, will even eat feces, drink urine, and cannibalize corpses.
You did hear me correctly.
Cannibalized corpses as part of how they show their faith that all the universe is infused with divinity.
So we're a long way from the hot tubs at Esalen, folks.
I will include in the show notes a link to a fascinating and quite funny moment.
If you know Reza Aslan, so I'm very familiar with Reza Aslan's work.
I don't know if you know him, Derek, or if listeners will.
Sure, I've read his books.
Yeah, yeah, actually, I would imagine you would.
So Reza Aslan is a religious scholar, and a bit of a public figure.
Plenty of talks you can find and debates you can find of him on YouTube.
And in this CNN series, he did this CNN series that was really about seeking to understand the world's religions and practices and mystical experiences.
And so there's this clip that I found on YouTube, just a little snippet of one of these episodes, where he's sitting on the beach with a bonafide agori sadhu.
And he's wearing, you know, he's got like a blanket wrapped around him, he's got the forehead streak, he's really thoughtful, mild-mannered, like beautiful guy.
And he's sitting there and the sadhu is trying to get him to eat Something, we can't tell if it's little pieces of human flesh or if it's flesh from some other kind of beast.
And Reza Aslan is just kind of looking at it and then the sadhu is trying to get him to wear this garland on his head.
He actually puts it on his head and Aslan is just so, so horrified and disgusted because it's this garland made out of body parts.
You know, you can see like a gum with teeth in it and you can't, again, you can't tell if it's human or beast.
And he eventually takes it off and the sadhu is talking to him through a translator.
So this very kind of westernized looking, you know, nicely dressed Indian guy is sitting a few feet behind the ceremonial circle translating what the sadhu is saying.
And at one point the sadhu yells at him and the translator says, he says he's going to cut your head off if you don't stop talking.
And so, I mean, this is horrifying, right?
So Reza Aslan, his eyes get really wide and he calls the director over.
The director comes over, you know, like he's also the cameraman, I think, and Reza Aslan says, can you distract him and I will sneak away.
I'll be very polite about it.
And the director says, no, let's just see what happens.
And then what happens next is wild, but I'll leave that for anyone who wants to watch the video.
But yeah, the tantrics and especially the Aghori And sadhus in general and the sort of path of renouncing the world and what that means in terms of the roots of yoga practice, very, very different from our interpretation.
And I don't have like a hard line position about... I'm not a puritan with regard to yoga at all.
I think it can evolve.
I think there's a cross-cultural conversation happening.
But I also think it's good to know about these distinctions.
Yeah, it reminds me of the episode of Anthony Bourdain's show where he goes into the Congo and he says it was the most harrowing, because even just getting the film crew into the river and there, like sometimes understanding that The rest of the world isn't like the west side of Los Angeles in terms of their yoga practice.
It really takes a lot of work sometimes, especially when you're dealing with these, when you're looking back at texts that were written thousands of years ago and you're imagining applying the lifestyle that we live today, but then pushing it back 3,000 years ago, this romanization that happens, all of these practices
are rooted in these sorts of experiments with the body and also just understanding the cultural conditions.
Like you said in the show notes with Tantra, it came from the lower caste because they thought that the Brahmanic way that yoga was presented, they couldn't touch it.
It was not for them and they wanted a sort of yoga that was for them.
So they created rituals that were much closer to home and that they could make sense of.
And then how you get from that to, and I'm the same as with you about sex.
I mean, there are many ways of doing it and if it's something that's sacred to you, that's all awesome.
But when you're selling sex workshops, As a way to liberation through the lens of yoga, it's sort of problematic, just in terms of the mere presentation of it, and it's not even the practice of it.
Like you said with Ian Well, I think it is an excellent episode.
Here's what I was wondering, and I wanted to ask you about that episode.
You have this couple that goes through profound healing with that teacher that you mentioned, And it was really moving watching him because this guy is very overweight and he always has these long-standing body issues.
Now my question is, if that was filmed six months ago, where is he now?
Yeah, I think that's a great question.
And that kind of follow-up is something that would be really good.
I mean, part of why it's so moving is because he's a sexual abuse survivor.
He knows that this has always interfered with his body image, and with his self-love, and with his ability to relate to his wife, and I assume previous partners, sexually.
For me, as someone who's sort of been immersed in the whole realm of like mind-body awareness, somatic psychology, trauma work, how that intersects with yoga and things like massage, I found it to be to be a pretty legit process.
The question would always be, and again that's just my subjective opinion, I think your question is a good one.
To what extent is there follow-up and integration and is there a way that he's being well cared for and that whatever happened in those sessions then shows up in his life in ways that are truly beneficial?
Or is he just being sold on a big experience, right?
Yeah, well that's a big difference between, say, the Ayahuasca episode and the Tantra episode, is that the Ayahuasca actually shows you some of the fallout with the woman who had a seizure during the experiment, during the ritual, and she was very, it was profoundly life-changing, and then all of a sudden she had this terrible experience, and she's like, it makes me wonder if
The other experiences were either valid and the one shortcoming of this, I've watched three episodes so far, but of this particular episode was the fact that there was no follow up.
So you leave feeling that he is cured.
Yes.
You know, many people have come to me over the years who first found yoga through me or through Equinox or, you know, I was one of their first teachers.
And a week or two in, they're like, this is life-changing.
I am dedicating my life to this.
And I would, my response was always the same.
That's awesome to hear.
Come back to me in six months and say the same thing.
And I wasn't trying to be negative but I was just trying to get them ready for the fact that this is a path and of course in the beginning everything always feels good.
Now I think about the differences like I come from an athletic background and so my take on yoga is very playful, it's very experimental but it's also based on A certain set of performance of being able to get to these poses and to do them in whatever capacity you can in your body.
It's not about the photo of it, but just being able to challenge yourself.
Whereas your classes, Joanne, there's always, I've said this on previous episodes, there's always this sense of release and relief.
And I wonder how Tantra has influenced you personally and how you are as a movement instructor.
Yeah, I mean, I think it has.
I think there's a set of overlapping influences that have to do with like, you know, early somatic psychology and the idea of, you know, Wilhelm Reich's idea that we had body armor that was sort of like physical tension that was related to whatever unresolved emotions or experiences we were carrying.
That was a big influence on me.
Stuff I got from Anna was a big influence.
This is tricky to talk about, but there is a set of really fascinating and compelling experiences that most people talk about in terms of energy, and I used to talk about in terms of energy, and I don't so much anymore because I think there are ways of talking about it without making up a whole new category of, you know, reality.
That are just very profound and they can be very emotionally healing and ecstatic.
And they do have to do with release that happens through your body, through breath, through staying with what you're feeling in terms of both sensations of tension as well as emotions that might arise.
I've always sort of been fascinated with yoga as a sacred space within which some of that could happen.
And I think over time, as I've matured and as the work that I'm doing has evolved, I emphasize that less because I feel like there are certain places that people need to go that are better done in a one-on-one setting.
But yeah, certainly it had an influence on me.
But you know, it's like ecstatic dance, body work, early somatic psychology, and then later somatic psychology.
I feel like all of these things, I was seeing the stuff that I relate to in the glimpses that they gave into those tantric practitioners' healing sessions, and I relate to it.
And one thing that's come up, I said before we started recording that Tantra is not my specialty.
I have read Feierstein's work and Heinrich Zimmer's work on it.
So I do have some foundation in the general overview, but the marketing stuff has never appealed to me.
But, you know, obviously with the Aghoris and down to the roots, I mean, it's always this balance of forces with Shiva and Shakti and I feel like Sometimes the way that yoga is marketed in general is always striving for the light.
And they only talk about the dark in terms of traumatic experiences, which is valid and there is that sense of healing.
But I wonder, especially when you talk about these taking the funeral ashes and putting it on your body as part of the practice, this real immediate recognition that we're going to die and that this is the process.
What, in your estimation, are we missing from Tantra and the way that it's presented in general in America?
Yeah, I'm not sure about that.
I think if you'd asked me that question like 10 or 15 years ago, I would have said they are sort of trying to relate directly to the shadow, right?
I would have had sort of a Jungian perspective on it, that you see, you know, what's missing in more Western religious formulations is that the shadow is relegated to being like, you know, the devil, and it's just bad.
Whereas if you look at Tibetan and Hindu iconography, you see all of these deities who are super intense and wrathful and dark and lustful and, you know, all sorts of stuff.
Murderous.
I think when I was younger that appealed to me as seeming to be like a more integrated approach Of sort of facing your demons.
And I love the quote from our dear friend Joseph Campbell, where he says, any demon is just a god who has not been honored yet.
There's something there that's always, you know, spoken to me in terms of a psychological orientation of doing the shadow work.
But I think it's a lot less sort of neatly packaged for me now.
Yeah, is it the Dharmapalas that protect the Buddha?
Is that their name?
I should remember this.
The Dharmapalas, it might be, it might be something else.
So somebody can call me out on that.
But basically, the Buddha in a lot of representations is protected by two demons.
And these demons are cannibalistic, you know, they're murderous, but they protect The Buddha while he's in meditation, so no one can bother him.
And again, that balance of forces, I think, and this is personal just from my own feelings on this, but that if you don't not only face your shadow, but also actively work with it, then it's kind of hard to find something that's Truly healing.
I've always had the criticism of some people and I've expressed this to some close friends of mine.
I'm like, when are you done healing?
Because I've known you for a decade and you're always healing.
So when are you actually done?
I mean, and, and on some levels, of course, we're, we're, we're always working through things.
It's not, that's not the criticism, but this idea that you're constantly in a process of healing, it's like, okay, so when are you actually good?
Yeah, no, I got, honestly, and I've shared some of my more harrowing stories on this podcast.
I got to be like 31, 32, and that was my active meditation every day was basically me saying, I want my life back.
I don't want to be in this endless process of like every day.
Mindfully examining all the different ways that I need to heal or come out of denial or face these deep feelings and not avoid them and that can be a real trap.
Now you mentioned energy before and I, again, I'm going to go back real quick about our own teaching styles.
Like my, I've always been very exacting.
So my philosophy of teaching asana was you can go for your higher spirit or whatever that is, but if your knee is bending inside of your foot, you're going to get a meniscal injury.
So I'm going to take care of that first.
I want to make sure that's taken care of, and then we can talk about the other things.
And so alignment coming from a lot of Anusara studies, like that was very important to me.
Um, but that I also like classes that are more ambiguous that allow for exploration and I've taken those before.
And I would say that you, you have some of that because their instruction is just, is much more personal in terms of that explore, exploratory element.
And I'm just wondering if you could touch upon some of the real healing, uh, therapeutic, Thank you.
Well, let me back up a moment first to the first thing you were saying and just share that, you know, when I studied with Anna Forrest, she was incredibly, incredibly precise and exacting in terms of how she taught, but it was her own set of innovations.
And there were several things that she did that once I started stepping outside of the bubble and talking to people who were studying with Chakan Mati, for example, and who had more of maybe an Iyengar background, You can always tell the Anna students because they're doing things like letting their heads hang to the side in triangle, like they've been shot in the neck with a tranquilizer dart, like what the hell's going on?
And they're always doing that intense tucking of the tailbone, you know?
So that was interesting.
And then I got really deeply into studying anatomy.
And I had a colleague named Ellen Heade, who I taught a bunch of workshops with for about 10 years.
And we went around the country a bit and we taught a lot in LA at different studios.
So we would go to studios who knew nothing about forest yoga.
And that was the time when Anussara was becoming really popular.
And We would come across people who were very, very loyal to Anusara, and they would come up to us after class, and they would say, we need to talk.
Like, you're doing this thing with your shoulder, and we learned that you're going to injure yourself if you do that thing.
You have to do it this way.
You're doing this thing with your pelvis in these postures.
You're doing this thing with your low back while you're doing core work, and it was on and on and on.
You're doing this with your foot.
Like, it was endless, and it was a really powerful moment for me.
And I talk about this always when I do teacher trainings, because I realized that there wasn't just one way to do any particular pose, and that there were ways to focus on specific technical aspects of poses that would be very and that there were ways to focus on specific technical aspects of poses that would be very beneficial for a certain group of people that
And to a third group might be problematic, it might exacerbate or perpetuate some imbalance that they had.
And there was an opposite way of doing it that would have the opposite effect.
He said, swishing his pee thing aside, there was an opposite way of doing it that would have a completely opposite effect.
And And I realized that the group in the middle was by far the biggest group.
They could do it either way and they'd be fine.
What was important was that they were in their bodies.
They weren't doing anything, you know, obviously injurious.
And they were having an experience, and that was much more interesting to me.
But I did continue with my studies of anatomy.
I keep meaning to ask you if you're familiar with functional range conditioning, because that's something I've gotten really into.
Somebody else, a friend of mine who teaches a sort of somatic-based class, told me about it, but I don't know much about it.
It's super technical, like joint biomechanics stuff, and I'm sort of obsessed with it.
So yeah, I play around in the different zones, and I'm always interested in what I can integrate.
But as you've said, I'm less interested in being technically exacting than I am in inviting people into an in-the-body experience and seeing where it goes.
And to your main question, I mean, there's so much over the years.
I think that for anyone who has been sort of disconnected from their bodies, either because of trauma or because of some sort of adaptive response to life of just being much more in their heads, not as much in touch with embodiment, not as much in touch with their emotional intelligence, having the space
To explore what it's like to just stay open and kind and curious in a mindful way about what's happening in your inner world.
That to me is really sacred and has been golden.
The thing with my classes is that some people come once and are just like, this shit is crazy, I'm never coming back again.
Or this is just not yoga, this is not what I was expecting.
And that's fine.
But the people who come and really connect with it right away, They stick around for 10 years, 20 years, 25 years.
It's just, we're in this sort of community together where this is the work we're doing, and it's open-ended enough that it's not, you know, there's nothing sort of Dogmatic about it, but we do.
I think there is the sense that the inner life is worth exploring and using the yoga space to drop into that.
And sometimes it's about emotions coming up.
Sometimes it's just about feeling good in your body, maybe for the first time that week.
Yeah, well I've also said this before, one thing I always appreciated was having practiced so much at Jiva Mukti where everything in the class filters to the shrine and the teacher in the front.
Your class has no center and that is very powerful because everyone has their ability to have their own experience at that point without having to Focus all the energy in one place, and I think that's a much more powerful way to go.
My friend, Tara Stiles, also has that.
I mean, a little bit different, but she's never demoing, barely ever.
The class is a circle, essentially, in terms of that.
Yeah, I got that.
I have to give him props.
I first saw someone doing that in the form of Max Strom.
And I feel like part of why he did that is because he's like a six foot five, you know, big, long haired guy.
And just to have his imposing presence at the front of the room the whole time, you couldn't help but just be focused on him.
And so he had this very gentle way of moving around the space.
And speaking from the back of the room, you know, which some now, nowadays, some trauma informed folks will tell you, that's terrible.
You should never do that.
You know, people can't tell where you are and it's going to trigger them.
But I actually think it's a, it's a, it's a de-centering of the role of the, of the guru who that you're, who you're focusing on and much more about being in the shared space.
I asked you this on Slack and I do want to bring up, because I think it does, there's some crossover here, is have you watched the ESPNexium documentary yet?
The first two episodes at least.
Yeah, I'm like halfway through the second episode.
I'm watching it with my wife and we're just compelled as fuck by it.
And I have to tell you, if I knew about that organization when they were getting started, I would have been in.
Absolutely, yeah.
Like Alexis keeps saying to me, if we didn't know that this was going somewhere bad, as we're listening to the process of getting involved with it, it sounds fantastic.
What I love about it, and my wife and I talked about this after watching the second episode, but especially after the first, is the way that the documentary is being released Shows you the indoctrination process.
Exactly.
Because the first episode until the last minute, you're on board.
You're like, oh, this is everything.
This is wonderful in so many ways.
And you're hearing this.
It's a really well done documentary.
But I especially thought of you because What the Bleep guy is South African, so talking about apartheid and living through that and how he processed it was pretty interesting.
Totally, yeah, and I would never have guessed that about him either in the documentary until he said it or from the past and from watching What the bleep.
You know, it reminds me in that way of Holy Hell.
I don't know if you watched Holy Hell, but it's the CNN.
CNN did this documentary about a particular cult.
And I actually have a longtime student and friend who doesn't live here anymore, who was involved with this cult.
Oh, I'm forgetting.
I don't even know if it had a name.
It probably did have a name, but it's very similar.
It's an excellent documentary that I highly recommend called Holy Hell, because they filmed everything in the group, in the community, and they did all sorts of amazing intellectual and artistic projects together.
And they're beautiful Smart, happy people.
And so you have all of this footage showing what was so amazing about this group that you get to interact with, as you're saying, see the indoctrination process before you see what goes so horribly wrong.
It's worth looking at.
Something that you said earlier about You know, just the questioning of like, okay, this guy had a great healing experience on the table with this Tantra healer.
And then wondering like, okay, how does that get integrated?
Like, how is he now?
Where does that go?
I think that's very interesting.
And I think in both what we've been talking about last week with psychedelics and in talking about Tantra this week, and in talking about some of the stuff that you've been asking me about my approach, there's this This very tricky area, which is that powerful experiences Can often, and I talked about this, I wrote a longer article for Medium, that's like an expansion on what I talked about in my closer last week.
We're kind of in a culture where what sells is the big experience, right?
And what sells about the big experience is like, this is going to be unlike anything else you've ever experienced.
It's going to be better than therapy.
It's going to be something that science doesn't understand.
It's going to be the next level of your yoga practice, right?
And it's going to take you to this place where A kind of radical, almost instantaneous healing is possible, and I'm sort of giving the exaggerated version of it, you know, for effect.
I know that not everyone talks about these things this way, but there is kind of that hunger, right, for the big breakthrough experience, whether it's getting to hug Amici, or it's having the energetic blowout on the tantric, With the tantric healer, or on the massage table, or doing something like holotropic breath work, or it's the big psychedelic experience, or it's going and spending three days getting sleep deprived, and getting indoctrinated into like one of the landmark seminars.
All of these things are about the big breakthrough, and then supposedly you're healed, or your life has changed, right?
You're totally transformed, you have a new way of looking at everything because of this Very valuable experience.
And I think that that's very tricky, and it leads me to the story that I wanted to share today, which is about someone I was friends with.
We had been super close, probably going back to around 2010, and then for many years we hadn't really interacted much, named Psalm Isadora.
And I don't know if you know Psalm.
Did you intersect with her at all?
I know of her because, for those listeners who don't know, Julie and I ran a website in 2012 called Yoga Brains, and one of our, I know from her and Sean, one of the other guys we were working with, knew her.
So that's the extent of what I know of her.
Okay, okay.
Well, I'll never forget the day that I met Psalm Isadora.
She floated into the Yoga and Raw Food Hangout, I don't know if you ever went there, Rawvolution, on Santa Monica's Main Street.
She was all dirty bare feet, but of course painted toes, in a floral print summer dress, and she flashed these luminous green eyes directly at me.
For months, people who knew us both had been telling me I really should meet this woman with the unlikely name Psalm, like biblical Isadora, like the famous dance teacher, right?
This yoga teacher who was all about emotions and healing and sacred sexuality and dance and self-expression right up my alley.
Within 15 minutes of sharing a couch and some superfood soup, In the crowded hipster restaurant, she had her head in my lap, eyes closed and ready for a nap as I stroked this brand new head.
I remember another time early on in my knowing of her when we went for a walk to grab some lunch, and she said to me, people want me to teach them Tantra because they think it will make their life better.
They want better orgasms, more intimate relationships.
They think it can help them be rich and happy.
But Tantra wants to cut off your head.
This was one of those conversations that made me decide to keep my distance, as compelling as those flashing green eyes were.
Psalm was very open about what a mess her life was.
Her history of growing up in a fundamentalist Christian cult, that she and her family subsequently had to flee because it was discovered that her father had been molesting the little girls, he was the school principal, who were Psalm's classmates, and apparently her too.
Her life when I met her was upside down as well.
She had an estranged husband.
She was overlapping with a new boyfriend.
There were a string of men for whom it sounded like she was doing quite well-paid ritual sex work.
But from the outside, she was an inspiring and charismatic teacher, incredibly smart and eloquent.
And I think she really helped a lot of women with her self-styled tantric yoga teacher, sexual healer, women's empowerment curriculum, which was always injected with stories of her own authentic struggles, very compelling, of abuse and her healing journey.
And this sort of goes to why I segued here now, Derek, because Part of the story was, I came, this is her speaking, I came from terrible trauma and dysfunction, and through the path of Tantra, I am now healed and empowered.
It's very similar to the Anna story that I told last time or the time before.
And not only was it healing from sexual abuse trauma, but she was also bipolar.
And Psalms seemed to be on and off her meds at different times.
I don't know all the details of that part of her life, of her routines.
Now, as you said, it turns out one of our mutual friends, Shyam, had been in a relationship with Salm some years before I met her.
And Salm, maybe confusing, and Shyam, S-H-Y-A-M.
In fact, at the time that he met her, he had just escaped a Hare Krishna breakaway cult.
We can't have an episode without some conversation about a cult, in which he was perhaps being groomed as the future guru.
When he met her, and he was out in the real world for the first time in his life, he was a virgin, and he was finally free from his monastic vow of celibacy.
Yeah, so that's a wild story.
There's actually, I'll put a link in the show notes, he has a three-part series on Elephant Journal talking about this sort of episode in his life where he went from being a A boy with a monastic vow of celibacy in a very cloistered cult in Hawaii.
Actually, by the way, the same cult that Tulsi Gabbard grew up in.
They were contemporaries in that group.
Interesting aside.
And he has a book that you can buy.
I'll link to that as well.
Wet Hot American Yogi.
Yeah.
So as the story goes, Salm takes him with her to India to meet her tantric guru.
And Shalm would later write an article about how even though there was indeed this laudable project that Salm was really sort of, you know, praised for in our broader community, and she had made a film about this, that the group was helping sex-trafficked young girls in India,
What Shyam discovered is that part of the work at this particular ashram turned out to be teaching girls as young as 13 how to include tantric rituals in their sex work with adult tourists.
And this was very, very perplexing and disheartening and intense for him, especially given his background to suddenly be thrust now into all of this kind of stuff.
And so I heard over the years, as they went by and I lost touch with Psalm, that she was growing more influential and successful.
She had a show on the Playboy Channel.
She got a lot of exposure and praise from some empowering public speaking appearances.
And some whispered sort of unkindly about her getting cosmetic surgeries and really sexing up her image for mass appeal.
But, you know, you can't knock someone's hustle if that's the direction she's going in and it's getting success.
Like, I didn't necessarily judge that.
But then came a horrific shock.
When my friend Sham woke me up one morning with a phone call and said, this is so awful.
Psalm has killed herself.
He and I had another mutual friend who was a cop, and he confirmed that Psalm had hung herself with an extension cord in the stairwell of an apartment building close to where she lived.
Turned out she was off her bipolar medicine, using alcohol and Xanax to cope, and that some of her well-meaning and worried friends and students were trying to do an unsupervised home cold turkey detox with her, which Anyone listening who doesn't know this, never recommend it, especially with benzodiazepines, which Xanax is, because it does not go well.
You need to be very, very professionally supervised when you're coming off that stuff if you've formed a dependency.
And so this, I mean, just awful.
Absolutely, I could feel it now.
It raises so many questions about psychiatric diagnoses, and I know you and I have some interesting stuff that we'll get into and discuss at some point, because I want to learn from the work you've been doing, the research you've been doing, looking into all of this.
But it raises interesting questions about psychiatric diagnoses, responsible use of medication, what really counts as healing from abuse trauma.
Right?
Is it the big experience?
Is it like opening up all your boundaries and just pushing past your traumatic associations with sex and having lots and lots of sort of boundaryless encounters, which Shyam talks about in his article about their time at the ashram.
And what happens to someone Embroiled in a deep dark inner struggle, who has constructed a public identity as an empowered survivor, a beacon of light for victims of abuse, but who perhaps still was suffering so deeply from what had happened to her when she was a child.
So that was a very powerful I don't know.
Episode, I think a powerful moment in the broader community that she and I shared, the overlapping community.
And I think a lot of those questions are still sort of largely unanswered.
A lot of people who really loved her and admired her refused to believe that it was a suicide.
So it was just a powerful and loose-ended kind of chaotic community moment.
We should link to the Deadly Beast article about that, which you were featured in as well a couple years ago.
It was very powerful.
I want to Take part of what you said really briefly and then we'll get on to the interview with Alex Oder.
Because I think it's worth pointing out, and we will go more into this because it's a big part of what my upcoming book is about, but to understand what something like a benzodiazepine, and I have anecdotal history with this because I was on it for severe panic disorder.
How it goes through the FDA process sheds light on these substances and how they should be treated.
In one of the clinical trials, so you need three to pass FDA approval or two and then one other sort of trial, Xanax showed a 30% efficacy rate in the trial, whereas a placebo showed in the same trial a 20% efficacy rate.
So what that actually means is that compared to placebo and non-intervention, Xanax helped 1 out of 10 people, right?
So that's actually what it did.
Now here's the even more interesting part about it.
That trial was 14, 12 or 14 weeks.
They had markers at four weeks, eight weeks, and at the end of the trial.
At four weeks, Xanax was performing 10% better than placebo.
At eight weeks, they were even.
At the end of the trial, placebo was outperforming Xanax.
So what the pharmaceutical company did was they scrapped the last 8 weeks or 12 weeks or whatever of that trial and only submitted the 4-week data to the FDA.
These drugs are not to be played.
These are some of the most powerful substance because they're actually affecting how your brain releases serotonin.
Now, 95% of your serotonin in your body is produced in your gut.
So, the actual target neurotransmitters in your brain compared to the overall serotonin is very small, but it affects the entire system including The relationship between your brain, your nervous system, and your gut, which is the enteric nervous system, they're all related.
And so this idea that you can go cold turkey off of it is, first of all, it's preposterous, but more importantly, the pharmaceutical companies don't know how to taper off these drugs.
They didn't have to figure that out to sell them.
So there is no actual tapering protocol.
There's a documentary called Medicating Normal, which I interviewed the producers a couple of months ago, and in that they show how different psychologists or psychiatrists who have tapering protocols, I mean, it's crazy what they go through because they're just trying to figure it out.
So if you are on these substances and you're trying to get off, please take caution and do not drink on them.
Because when you told me that combination, now I know it's up in the air whether or not she committed suicide because there's something about her guru and everything.
But if you are using that combination, the suicidal ideation is a consequence of that combination.
And you have to be super careful about that.
Yeah, and she was someone who had a history of that kind of ideation anyway, as well as a history of drug addiction from when she was younger.
And so yeah, I'm really interested in where we're going to go with that conversation in the future, and we don't have to have to get into it right now.
I'll just say from my own experience, knowing several people over the years who have had a bipolar diagnosis,
It does seem that as imperfect as the meds might be, going off one's meds or trying to live without the meds and having bipolar and cycling into what can be very, very dangerous and disruptive manic phases does seem to be the worst of those two evils.
Absolutely.
And the biggest problem, and this is sort of the final point of the book, or one of the overarching points of the book, is that the chemical imbalance theory of depression and anxiety is a marketing tool by pharmaceutical companies to be able to sell them.
I just recently covered a research paper by two physical anthropologists who talk about that if you want to actually understand depression, You have to take environment, genetics, family history, socioeconomic conditions.
So, the actual chemical imbalance is a correlation that is caused by environmental factors.
It is very rare that it is a purely chemical.
Now, it can be with bipolar, for example, schizophrenia, it can be.
There are genetic markers.
Yeah, they're genetic markers.
But in a lot of cases, those genetic markers are turned on and off by the environment and by your financial situation and by your relationship status.
All those things matter.
So the idea that there's this one thing that controls your mental health is a fallacy.
It's completely made up in order to sell drugs.
And you can very easily tell this because if you track the last, let's see, Xanax is about almost 40 years old now.
If you track from when Xanax came on and the tranquilizers before that, but if you track when Xanax came on, rates of anxiety and depression have skyrocketed, but so have prescriptions.
So they're not working.
If the prescriptions were working, the rates would drop.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Pretty, pretty basic math in that sense.
Yeah, and some of what you're saying about how they're manipulating the research and how they're marketing this stuff is really fucking awful.
And it's interesting too to hear you saying everything you were just saying about all the different factors, because I'm fascinated with pain science.
And, you know, pain science is this area that just keeps going through more and more.
The paradigm just keeps shifting really rapidly.
And something that I've heard people talk about lately that's fascinating is the biopsychosocial model of pain.
So understanding that whatever the pain disorder is that someone might have, all of those different things And it sounds like you're saying something very similar about depression and other forms of psychiatric sort of diagnosis.
Well, there was some fascinating research done a number of years ago that showed that Advil helps with emotional pain.
Yeah.
So if you look at the opioid epidemic and then you compare it to what's going on with antidepressants and benzodiazepines and antipsychotics right now, pain is, first of all, it's a neurological phenomenon, right?
There are people who actually cannot feel pain.
So if you cut them, they could bleed, but I'll actually know they're bleeding.
And so, there are many ways of dealing with pain.
There's plenty of instances where people used breathing techniques and meditation to get cut open in surgeries and they were, they did not feel the pain.
So, and again, none of this is medical advice.
Everyone, you know, there are different situations where a lot of these substances are warranted and it's always important to know, and I don't know Sam's, I don't know her, Past with this, but the best instance of any of these pharmaceuticals working to treat anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation is always in conjunction with psychotherapy.
Yeah.
So that model seems to work the best.
Of course, doctors are not incentivized by insurance companies to provide psychotherapy, but they are incentivized to write scripts and therein lies one of the biggest problems.
Yeah, and I would actually extend what you just said to any of the stuff we're talking about, right?
The best outcomes for ceremonial psychedelic use, deep tantric healing experiences, cathartic approaches to yoga, bodywork, ecstatic dance, whatever the thing is that's getting you into some sort of process, best outcomes come when you also have good psychotherapeutic support or something really similar to that, that's robust, that's consistent for you, right?
Right.
Well, that's good.
we might as well leave it on a slightly upbeat note because we're going to go to some comedy now and then we're going to go deeper again with Matthew.
I had the great pleasure to sit down with Alex O'Dare where we were able to talk about how conspirituality is actually close to home for her and also about the benefits and limits of comedy when it comes to keeping sane.
Now, I've never actually met Alex in person, but 10 minutes on her IG feed always makes me feel like I'm just a little more equipped to deal with the world.
If you go there, please check out her recent Ohm Drone skits.
Her premise is that for a price, a super swanky yoga teacher can send out a drone to spy on students while they're snacking or having sex, and then she can give them better alignment cues for daily life.
So obviously this is ideal for lockdown.
Here's our interview.
Yoga world, conspirituality has invaded.
It feels like people are at home and there's this like distinct uptick in a side gig of kind of speculating on what's happening in the world.
And so this entire podcast, as you know, we're spending all of these hours tracking this kind of tangle of Conspiracism and New Age fantasies.
And are you seeing this in your own sort of circles?
I mean, in your family it sounds like, but also in your broader yoga community?
Absolutely.
Yeah, I feel like, well, one, I'm never spending as much time online as I do for The main reason is that the whole business is online and I know I never asked you the question about the yoga thing but yeah basically we shut down the brick and mortar pretty immediately.
Our lease was up and we looked at the big picture.
My husband really did first Kind of before things were shut down and he was like, we've got to get rid of all the props.
Like we can't use props.
And I was like, that's crazy.
I can't teach you.
I'll go without props.
You know, and I, you know, and you probably remember yourself in March, but it was all happening very quickly.
It's like one day you didn't believe it was happening and the next day you're like, this is happening, you know?
Right.
Right, and then there was all kinds of bets hedged on how long it would happen for, how long the transition to online classes would last for, and whether people's membership models could carry over to that, and all of that stuff.
Yeah, yeah.
And I would say that Nick, my husband, like really hit the nail on the head, and he was just like, let's We got to end this and go online and he's a tech, he's an artist, a digital artist and a filmmaker and tech person so he had all the equipment so it was fairly simple to switch over.
Stressful but simple and our lease was up and we were just like you know what we're not going to try to hold on to this.
We thought about it and we thought you know so for example now as some Amazingly, like there's a hot yoga studio in Philadelphia who still references Bikram amazingly.
And I sometimes, I refrain because I know someone who works there.
I troll them a little bit.
Just a little.
Just a little.
Come for the hot yoga.
Come for the culture of institutional abuse and stay for coronavirus.
And I'm like, okay, fine.
You like hot yoga.
Don't what you're still like, put Bikram in the fucking text.
Like, give me a break.
Like that.
It's so insane.
But anyway, um, they so they're opening up with 10, you know, minimum 10 people in person classes in a hot yoga studio mask.
I mean, people are so crazy.
Like, people want to do that.
Apparently, there's people in the room doing that.
Yeah, yeah.
No crazy, but so, you know, I guess in my... I guess they can't be, I can't, I mean, so that's, that's an interesting intersection because, because the people who are sort of really gung-ho about the individual freedom aspect of getting back to work and getting back to the yoga studio and Getting back to, you know, things as normal.
That group often intersects with the anti-mask crowd.
And who wants to wear a mask in 110 degree heat?
So I'm wondering whether that's like a trade-off internally.
It's like, well I'm really gonna get my hot yoga and I'll put up with a mask even though I don't believe in any of it.
That's what I think.
Well, I think the hot yoga personality type, you know, I apologize very, very softly, very mildly to anyone who gets offended by this.
But I noticed, yes, they tend to want to get that hot on.
No matter what, you know, it's a certain personality type.
So it doesn't surprise me that they're willing to go into a room with the heat on and a mask on.
Right.
I'm assuming someone's going to faint soon.
But I agree with you.
I think the no, it is interesting.
And I do think that personality type coincides with the no, with the no mask type.
And so I often think of this woman who I've now mentioned, she's Probably wants hopes I'm dead soon because I keep mentioning her by name, who I've known forever, who was an original Jiva Mukti yoga teacher named Jessica Belafato.
Okay.
She teaches in the Hamptons, in East Hampton, and she does like paddleboard yoga, and she's a beautiful young woman.
Well, she's my age, but I mean, no, she's a little younger than me.
And she is a very vocal, no masker, like She was the first person I noticed that posted the say no to Bill Gates and sovereignty, the hashtag.
Oh, right.
Okay.
And so I was noticing that and looking at it, I was like, huh, interesting, and started reading her stuff.
And that's when I noticed the sovereignty, the say no to Bill Gates and other yoga teachers, some of whom I know.
And I started doing a really deep dive and I noticed you were getting you were noticing it too and I was sort of obsessively like reading these things and you know I don't know I don't know if you feel this like you deal with it on such much more of a serious detailed level than I do but I get like very angry you know?
I have, there's a whole gamut of stuff that I go through.
I'm angry, I'm mystified, I'm demoralized, I get depressed.
Yeah, there's a range, there's a roller coaster.
And the main thing that gets me, and that's my personal obsession, we all have our things I think, is the libertarian Um, political aspect of it because what I think is truly dense of these people is that they think of themselves as like progressive liberals and the wake up hashtag.
Right.
It makes me absolutely nuts because they, I don't think they actually get or they don't care or they're too stupid to realize that their theories are, um, You know, what I say, you know, because they think the mask is They don't use this word, I do, is cucking you.
You know, you're cucked, you're in submission with the mask.
Oh, well, they'll say, I mean, Kelly Brogan will say that the mask is submission signaling.
Exactly.
Submission signaling.
I was really interested in that word.
And what I say is that corporations have them cucked and they're submission signaling to corporations because if you're that desperate, and I get being desperate to have the markets open because our system is so fucked up in America.
Right.
So yes, we we need work and we need to be able to make a living.
But it's not the government's fault.
It's the CEO.
I mean, also is that, of course, with Trump, it's the government's fault.
I mean, with many of our people.
But what the main issue is that the power is in the businesses and that those in the corporations hold all the power and it doesn't trickle down.
Um, and this woman also is an MLM, you know, oil.
So, so the, you know, the, the trickle down theory and the pyramid schemes are the same.
It doesn't work.
And, um, so I just, I find it astounding that there, you know, that they think they're being cucked by the government when it's, Our whole system is cucked by this by the, you know, economic injustice.
Well, it really speaks to the to the weird fluidity around the word around the concept of waking up because it's you just you just referenced it and and it it feels like People aren't talking about insight into a particular politics.
They're talking about developing, they're talking about any kind of disruption in either their culture or in a worldview or in Their philosophy about their bodies that gives some sort of excitement.
Oh, this is something new.
This is something that I can be on the inside of.
This is something I can be smart about.
But yeah, I mean, QAnon itself calls its entire program the Great Awakening.
And what are they awakening to except a paranoid fantasy of ethno-nationalism, right?
It's so insane.
And my mother, who You know, is one of those people basically who could, you know, who could have been maybe a Trumper, you know, but was a Bernie person because my sister and I were like, this is the person you're going to do is Bernie, you know?
And I'm a very vocal, I was a very vocal Bernie Sanders, still am, but you know, where's that going nowhere?
But even my mother sends me these things about the protests, for example, in Berlin, when I say, you know, do you realize that you're in alignment with, you know, fascists, neo-Nazis, libertarians, in my opinion, as I always say, libertarian is the devil, you know?
Economic conservativism slash You know, social, um, progressivism is really gross to me.
Right.
Right.
You know, um, which is how I define a libertarian.
But, um, anyway, so then she sends me, no, you know, this is happening all over the world.
Look at this.
And then she sends me these protests in Berlin, which are like fucking Nazis are doing, you know, I mean, of course people are going to, of course, there's going to be large swaths of people protesting to have stores open, you know, because everyone's suffering.
Yeah.
But she doesn't see that.
She doesn't see... I don't know.
It's like, it's very frustrating.
I don't, I truly don't know.
Like when I listened, I really liked the, I think it was the first one you guys did.
And I was, you know, really listened to the different ideas behind it.
But it's still, I still don't get why people like my mother I still don't really understand it, you know, it confuses me.
Okay, well, given her age and her sort of cultural capital over the years, and, you know, it seems like as I go through your Instagram, I can see you and your sister with, you it seems like as I go through your Instagram, I can see you and your sister with, you know, And there's a very sort of like New York society feel to it.
And I think she's hyper networked and connected.
- It's actually not.
- Oh, really?
- Well, I don't know.
On a small level, yes, but she actually is, you know, she's come, she really has no money.
It's so funny.
I don't know.
I didn't intend to like talk about my mother.
I guess we can like, she's not really, I mean, that was probably through my sister, the fundraiser.
A couple of times she's invited somewhere because of the Warhol thing.
And that's one of the issues that I agree with Ron that she's, you know, she feels somewhat exploited and has really no money, lives in like a small little thing in Palm Springs and, you know, paints all day.
She's, she actually is more of an outlier, like a fringe person.
Right.
Okay.
Because these days, no one really cares that much about the Warhol scene.
And, you know, She's not, she never, she, but yes, you are correct in that there's crossovers there.
Right.
And there was a period where she really was in the New York scene connected like that for sure.
And she was, she's a great writer and she was a journalist and she wrote for Vanity Fair and Village Voice and yes, and like, you know, we were friendly with some famous writers and artists and that kind of thing.
So yeah, there's definitely truth to it, Matthew, but at this point, she's not so much.
Right yeah no I was just thinking about the age or the generational relationship between her and somebody like Christiane Northrup who is posting all kinds of you know conspirituality up to and including QAnon stuff and but she does it with this kind of like Chatty.
I just came from cocktails.
She makes jokes.
She's very funny.
She's warm.
People want to be around her and like have tea or something like that.
And so I'm wondering how much of a kind of, I don't know, displaced need for grandmothers or for matriarchs or something like that can even be translated into, oh yeah, I'll listen to you talk about this stuff too.
You're absolutely right, because when you see the comments in Facebook, people are like, we love you, Viva, you know, we need you, you're a revolutionary, da-da-da, so you definitely did.
And like all of us, you know, you get your serotonin hit from the... Right.
Yeah, it's less about, I mean, that's such a weird thing that it always seems to be, or not always, but it often seems to be less about the content than the contact, and who one's contacting with.
Yes, I think that's so true, and I think, you know, the whole rugged individualism thing, It makes sense to me, it makes total sense with the wellness industry, with someone like the Jessica character, rather than my mother, like that they would be no maskers because the entire, you know, which is what I, you know, in the past skewered
more specifically, the entire wellness industry is based on individualism.
And put your own bootstraps, right?
So that makes sense.
Right.
And the belief that one is not only invulnerable, but also pure.
And so I think I said this in an earlier episode, but it seems that what the anti-masker is really saying is that
Because they don't understand mask science that it's not it's really just about a barrier so that your spit doesn't get on other people that's all it's not going to it's right it's it's it's fabric it's not going to stop aerosols but it is going to reduce spittle and that's the point but in order for the the person who really believes in their invulnerability or their ultimate purity they would have to to understand that they'd have to say oh I might be sick and not know it
Yeah.
And that's kind of, that's like, that's intolerable.
That's intolerable for some people.
And it goes all the way into, you know, you have to boost your immune system and all this shit.
Right.
Which, you know, I go as far as to say that that is white supremacy because it's the same dialogue that, for example, a woman who I often Her name is like Lacey something or other and she's called To Be Magnetic and she's one of those, you know, manifestors and she's got a huge following and a lot of it has to do with manifesting money.
Oh, okay.
And finances are fluid and that's a big thing in this world, right?
Is that your finances are fluid and money, it's a scarcity mentality.
Well, money is energy, right?
Money isn't money.
Exactly.
Money is energy.
And so, as we know, black people are, I think, even as much as four times more susceptible to Corona.
Like it's two times as much.
But when you look at all the data, it amps up.
Yeah.
And there's many reasons which, you know, I'm no expert, but one of one of the main reasons is systemic racism.
I mean, that's the main reason.
And within systemic racism, there's this issue with black bodies that the high levels of stress make you more susceptible.
Totally.
In general, it's a real thing.
And it's so insane that someone like Jessica would not connect those dots.
You know how they're always saying, my mom's always like, connect the dots, you know?
Yeah, well there's, yeah, there's a very small selection of dots really.
Yes, yes.
And to say, to publicly say as like a beautiful white woman in the wellness industry that you can beat corona by amping up your immune system is racist because People, even if, even if there was some truth to that, even if there was truth, which I'm sure there's a grain of truth to you.
Maybe some people can fight the virus off better.
I mean, I'm saying like a mini tiny grain, right?
If you have a certain kind of immune system, obviously some people are affected more than others, but I'm stating the obvious.
I know you already know this, but obviously a huge swath of people don't have access to Yeah.
And to even food, right?
There's food deserts in our country.
Right, right, right.
I don't know, are there food deserts in Canada?
Oh, there's definitely food deserts in Canada, for sure.
Yeah.
I would say, on the whole, our institutional resiliency and our economic conservatism or lack of recklessness has been a little bit protective here.
Yeah.
Because you know we like to fetishize Canada, us democratic socialists.
Yeah, and some, I would say that 80% of it is warranted and then there's 20% that is misdirected because we definitely have a lot to work on and many of the same.
Many of the same, you know, colossal racism issues that you have as well.
I mean, the border is pretty thin when it comes down to it, and it's thin particularly with regard to the digital landscape, which is something I've talked about.
It's like, yeah, it's very easy for David Wolff to, you know, project videos into Canada and then show up in Calgary and go to an anti-mask rally.
So, and I'm like, get out of my country.
Get out of my country.
Yeah, totally crazy.
Yeah, yeah.
So, let me talk, let me ask you about your comedy, okay?
Because, like, you have always skewered, like, this barely hidden alt-right politics of celebrity wellness.
You have always dragged MLM influencers.
You've always like done a number on yoga teachers who have turned into business coaches or spiritual coaches or yoga teachers affiliating for sweatshops or you know guru types.
I mean you're not surprised to see this No.
in libertarian politics of wellness.
No.
I don't think you're surprised to see BLM get ignored by a lot of big names.
But, you know, are you having to up your game in the same way that they are?
I don't think so.
I mean, I mean on some level it feels I feel that sort of like vindicated feeling um and then and so I'm just like all right I'll sit back a little bit and let everyone work this shit out because there's a lot of I have noticed you know at least in my Instagram feed right and I'm on Instagram a lot because now that is how I'm on it you know I've had to monetize myself with my Instagram feeling and as as you know you know I had that New York Times profile about it so I got
A bunch of followers and I never sold anything on Instagram before.
I never even posted a yoga picture ever in my life.
Right.
I just did my little thing at my brick and mortar and I often had like five people in class.
Enjoyed it but didn't make much money.
Right.
You know and we're but we're used to that.
I've done that since I was in my early 20s.
Like my husband built out little yoga studios and that's how we, you know, and we mixed with his gig work and sometimes full-time jobs, depending on what he's doing.
We made a living doing this, you know? - Yeah. - And obviously, you know, whatever, have some family, you know, stuff that helps at times.
You know, I'm not trying to say we like do it all ourselves.
Right.
So that said, we've cobbled together a life like that.
So I'm very used to teaching small yoga class.
I don't, I don't teach people like, Oh, you must have tons of people.
I'm like, I really don't.
Like I, my average amount of people in class was 10 people.
So if I social distance with that, there's no way to even pay the rent.
Yeah.
So I'm on Instagram a lot.
Now, because I sell through Instagram, and honestly, I'm doing much better.
The digital shift is financially much more lucrative.
And how about the comedy as well?
So with the extra follower, with the followers since the New York Times thing, People much prefer the comedy.
If I post a yoga thing, my followers, it's like you get whatever, like so many likes, not that many.
But if I post one of my videos, then it's like the big deal, you know, it doesn't make money.
But so I think what I noticed when I started seeing this was that You know, everybody, my feed was full of BLM posts and like, we've got to do this work.
And, you know, there was like, which is I'm not putting down.
I was glad to see that.
But a lot of like, wow, I'm seeing how, you know, we're part of this system.
And especially during the height of the protests here in Philadelphia, New York area, et cetera, around America.
And Lots of like shared, I'm sure you saw that too, like lists of how, you know, like how to help people get out of jail and these kind of things, which was all great and fine.
Again, speaking to a bubble always in Instagram, you know what I mean?
It's like suddenly every single person on Instagram is posting the same list.
Right.
Which I don't know like that's a different subject like to talk to if that's useful or not.
Right, right, right.
I was pleased to see the awareness coming up and then what I exactly I think what you're saying what I would notice is that there was an incongruency so like for I'm like loathe to say this but like for example I'm gonna say a very somebody I know who's quite
Wealthy and does, uh, I'm not going to say her name, but basically writes, you know, political things on a piece of material.
And, um, I'm trying to be slightly vague about it.
And, um, so for, you know, messages that are what might be called, you know, woke capitalism, you know?
Oh, okay.
Right.
And, um, I love how you sort of go to every example through this.
I don't really want to, and I'm always sort of expecting you to spit out the name anyway, but like I'm wondering whether you're going to be able to restrain yourself.
But here it sounds like, okay, so we've just got like woke capitalism.
I feel bad making fun of it because she is truly a sweetheart.
For other people I don't give a shit about, like Jessica Belovato, and I'll say the name Elena Brower like 800 times now.
I used to refrain, now I'm over it.
Oh my god, did you see that video?
This is an aside, just a gossip aside, where she was talking about selling things.
You have to look at my highlights on my Instagram page.
Okay.
And go to where it says, I'll alert you to it, but it's truly insane.
I did, I think, an Academy Award winning skewering of that.
But the premise was selling things?
Oh my god, it's like a little talk that somebody sent me that she did, I think, like this, you know?
And I'm not, I can't even, she's talking about how selling isn't a dirty word and she goes sell sell and it's oh it's real crazy oh and the whole point is that she's saying one day we'll get Tylenol and Advil out of the school systems and switch to oils oh my god little kids it's really psychotic um Anyway, what was I saying?
Oh, so woke capitalism.
So then the minute Kamala Harris is announced, now look, don't go crazy, people listening.
I'm going to fucking vote for Biden and Kamala.
But of course these type of people are like, yes I'm crying with tears of joy and da-da-da-da-da.
And I'm like that's interesting because you literally just posted about queer and BLM stuff and Kamala.
And defund the police and right exactly right.
So I'm like if you understand what defund the police is, I don't think you should be posting I'm crying with tears of joy about Kamala.
That's fine.
We have Kamala.
Like, I follow this thing that's, like, fine.
Settle for Biden and Kamala.
I get that she's more progressive than many people, but, like, the two posts next to each other are ridiculous, and that's... This is this, like...
They express, but they express performance, right?
Performative virtue.
Performative virtue, yeah.
And that's, I have, I can see all the difficulties with it, obviously.
I can see the hypocrisies.
I can also see this yearning, too, for people to belong and share and emote and really connect their emotional outflowings with political events.
And I feel that too, like I definitely notice when I get drawn into that and we could talk like, you know, which I know you do, like psychologically it's not necessarily all bad or all wrong to connect to a like-minded group, right, over BLM, you know?
Like if a bunch of us white people are gonna be like, yeah we want to fucking march for BLM, which I did and I totally The whole hardly believe in it and went to many marches, um, and have always believed in it, you know, I mean, but there's not necessarily anything wrong with that.
But I, but yes, I, I find that the disconnect with defund the police BLM and Systemic racism that to me is the exact product of neoliberalism is where what gets me is that then the same people will be promoting neoliberal policies.
Right and there's something too about like a narrow selection of dots that we can connect and I'm thinking of that beautiful cartoon that just showed up that compared data to information to wisdom to
Uh conspiracy theory and it was a series of dots and you could see that you know in what in data was just dots and information was a little connection and wisdom was a pathway but then but then the conspiracy theory was like a connect the dots you know unicorn or something like that that was made out of the thing and I will send it to you.
But yeah, this brings me, you know, I know our time is short, but it brings me kind of to my last thing, which is that you recently started an Instagram series in which there's some off-screen guru named Krishna G, who's allowing you to use a surveillance device called the Om Drone to spy on yoga students as they cheat on their spiritual diets or they screw up their postures or whatever.
So it's hilarious.
We'll link to it.
But it got me thinking.
You were saying that your mom just didn't respond to data in return, and it seems that this is just the sort of social dynamic of the conspiracy theory, that it's super resistant to facts.
And so I'm wondering, do you think that some sort of ultimate weapon against QAnon could be the invention of a counter-conspiracy, and wouldn't you be the person to do it?
Like, I'm thinking of that joke meme that would trick anti-maskers into wearing masks by telling them, you know, you can wear masks, you won't be detected by the deep state.
But it's got to go farther than that.
It's got to have a hero.
It has to have a journey.
So I'm wondering if anything comes to mind and whether maybe we both could cook up the counter-conspiracy that would save the world.
I like it.
I'm willing to dabble and contemplate.
I mean, my problem is I'm very lazy and have a very poor work ethic, which I think is one of the qualities of a democratic socialist, people think.
So, it's hard for me to focus in so intently on becoming the hero, you know?
Like, I can't do the hard work of the hero personality.
However, when you put that dollar sign on your forehead and you pick up those dolls, you commit.
I do commit, it's true.
But is it only for two minutes at a time?
Is that the deal?
Yeah, it's for two minutes at a time.
It's true.
It is for two minutes at a time and I You know, I mean, I feel like I didn't answer your question about the humor and stuff and amping up the game, which has to do with what you're asking.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, right.
And, yeah, I guess what I feel like is the dolls, like, while I get such pleasure out of putting the sheepskin, and I think the money symbol in lieu of the ohm is brilliant in my opinion.
Right, right.
But it really says it all, you know?
I don't think a lot of people... Some do, but I think there's a lot who don't get really what I'm saying.
You know, they just think it's funny and kooky.
They're like crazy Alex.
They don't actually see that maybe even I'm skewering them.
You know, there's a lot of people like, I love your work, and then I look at something there and I'm like, that's interesting because you're at, you actually are this person.
And I'm like, huh.
That's called, that's, isn't that like a little bit of projective identification, right?
Yeah, yeah.
I really, I really love this.
It couldn't be me.
Yeah, no way.
And so, So, and at this point, I feel like it's so obvious.
It's like that I've sort of put that aside, you know, the sheepskin.
When I started doing the Ohm, yesterday when I was doing a lot of the Ohm drone videos, I didn't do any makeup or anything.
Like, I feel like I've shifted characters now, and I think it is because of what you're saying.
I think I'm trying to target, but it wasn't, it wasn't thought out in that way.
Like the own drone came up because my good friend, we were like high and having a drink in my back porch.
And she was telling me she's, she's recently divorced and living alone.
And she told me that she had a bat in her bedroom and she called this guy called the bat guy, who's kind of hot.
And he came in and fucking remove the bat.
But do you know what he did?
It's $300.
He put a drone around the house to see whether, where there were like access and egress things.
And if there were any colonies and I was laughing so fucking hard.
I was like, you got scammed bitch.
Like, like that drone.
And I see shit with that drone.
And, um, and when with a little small amount of THC at two milligrams, I can really go in, And I've been, so that's how I came up with the Ohm Drone.
I was like, I was like, we could make a shit ton of fucking money if we said that in this virtual world, you know, we're not doing, and I would love it because I hate doing yoga privates.
They're like the, I would rather cut off my pinky finger than ever have to do another yoga private.
The Ohm Drone is coming in to check in on private yoga students as they're doing their Zoom classes?
Is that the deal?
So the theory is the Ohm Drone follows you for a month at a time and goes into your bedroom and the bathroom and watches you in your natural habitat when you're doing just your regular movements, when you're like fucking, yelling at your kids, arguing, making coffee.
Then the information sent to me, and it's many thousands of dollars if you want this, And I analyze it.
And then our private is like this.
We get on Zoom and I tell you, Matthew, everything I've observed.
So I'm like, Matthew, when you're shitting, I've noticed you're not getting your knees up high enough when you wipe yourself.
And there's actually shit getting schmeared on the back rim of the toilet seat.
No, no, no, but it has to be a health thing.
It has to be about how it's not completely eliminated from my lower colon.
Yes, yes.
Because there's a little kink there.
Oh, I'm gonna steal that.
A kink in the colon that I've noticed.
Yeah, Tomiko?
Tomiko wants to know who I'm talking to.
I'm talking to Matthew from Canada.
Oh my gosh okay so all right so so the so you've got the ohm drone but but don't you think yeah I mean just visualize with me for a moment no dollar sign but but a Q on the forehead yes okay like who would that like who what would she say I mean I mean because I haven't seen anybody I've seen I've seen memes mocking
Uh, the premises of the movement, but I haven't seen anybody do a send up of the actual, you know, in, you know, intrusive eye contact or the sermon quality or the, or the urgency or the panic or the like, like, you know, I've been crying all night because I was reading about, I was reading about, you know, children trapped in the New York subway system or, Right.
Jessica's also obsessed with the child, like, pedophilia ring and stuff.
Right.
Yes, I get what you're saying.
I'm with you, Matthew.
And when I just visualized that, I did get a spark of inspiration.
Okay.
And so something could be coming.
Something might be coming.
Oh, okay.
All right.
Well, I am not going to intervene anymore or push on you in any way.
You're an artist.
I leave you to it, and I can't wait to see how Om Drone develops and how it helps defeat the deep state.
Yeah, I'm appreciative of these ideas.
I should be taking notes.
I'm going to take notes after I hang up.
Okay.
All right.
It's really good to talk to you, Alex.
It's so good to talk to you.
Let's do it again.
Yeah, let's do it again.
Let's track this.
Let's track the arc of QAnon insanity along with comedic and political resistance.
I love it.
I love it.
And I realize you sent all those lovely questions.
There was more that we never got to, but the one thing I wanted to say was that I really appreciated that you mentioned the Um, penis drawings, the dick pics.
Yes, yes, yes.
We'll talk about that another time.
Yeah, we'll talk, yeah, and the question was basically, basically, you know, when you make, you know, an avant-garde comedic statement like drawing fluorescent penises over sex predators in yoga, like, Where do you go from there?
Can you do that with Trump, or is it kind of just redundant?
That was the question I liked.
Let's end on that, and I do want to say that.
I will say that with Trump, I find that the Trump obsession, whilst I hate his fucking guts and would not give two cents if he croaked on the walkway in front of the nation, The obsession.
I do like the woman who does the, um, the comedian who's Sarah Cooper.
Right.
I do like that.
That's actually the one Trump thing that I, that I enjoy.
Um, I, I, what you worded it in your question, which I don't have in front of me.
Right.
But it's just like, it's too obvious.
Like, and I do find the obsession with Trump for Americans.
In my social economic milieu is a bit indicative of the, I think it's a desire, an unconscious desire to like lay our hatred hooks into someone that they don't quite see.
And people, certain Democrats get mad when I say this, That the policies are not that different than what has been happening since, you know, Reagan.
And it's very hard to say that.
Not only that, but Bloomberg's New York and de Blasio's New York is still Trump's New York.
My God, what about the people who actually wanted Bloomberg?
I mean, right.
That was fucking psychotic.
That was something that I would wake up steaming about that, like this so-called liberals who were like contemplating Bloomberg.
OK, right, right, right.
Don't let me start.
Yes.
So like the Trump, it's too obvious with Trump.
I think I once I think I have done some dick pics with Trump and Jared and Ivanka because I do find Jared worth adding a dick to his head and I think the dick pics are very like poignant and to the point and they say everything and I've drawn dick pics since I was a young child.
I was really into doing like little like mini porno comics.
I wasn't sexually abused that I know of but I did draw like very Evocative sex porn comics, as it were, from a young age.
I think just from looking at a lot of Penthouse and Playboy that were laying around the house, you know?
Right.
So I very much enjoy doing that.
But Trump, yes, too obviously.
I find it much more poignant to do Eddie Stern, for example, you know?
Right.
Yeah, the person who pretends that they are not a dick pic, right?
Exactly.
That's who you have to put the dick pic on.
Exactly.
This bit of storytelling is dropping while I'm off the grid for a week with the family on Manitoulin Island.
The name means Spirit Island in Anishinaabe.
We usually take our little white boys to the open powwow when we're there, but we hear that it's cancelled this year because of COVID.
The older one is supposed to study Ontario First Nations culture this year and it looks like we're homeschooling for now because the neocon provincial government here has totally screwed up safety measures for school return.
You know, we're extremely lucky that we can swing homeschooling, but we won't stop fighting for public education.
Maybe while we're up there, we'll see if the Anishinaabe Cultural Center is open.
The boys really love it there.
They've got drums and pelts and these big taxidermy bears and, you know, wolves.
And there's an old woman there who sits and weaves at a little table.
Two weeks ago, I told a story about my former spiritual practice of mandala offering.
I learned it in the cult of Michael Roach.
I talked about how, symbolically, bringing together everything of value in the world was a rewarding ritual, and how the sheer overwhelm of data and symbols brought together in the Q-universe seems very much like that.
And I talked about how that ritual, at least for me, also alluded to elements of my spiritual life that resonate with conspiracism.
Namely that nothing happens by accident, nothing is as it seems, and everything is connected.
So today I wanted to share another ritual I learned during that time that I feel pertains to the Conspirituality to QAnon arc, but also to the feeling spectrum involved.
It's a little heavier.
All of the trigger warnings apply.
The mandala offering I described before is like elementary school and serves as one of the preliminaries to like, I don't know, college level, but really like Hogwarts college level Tibetan Buddhist tantric practice.
So I'll describe one of those practices.
But before that, I'll just say that with this story, I'll now be on record as appreciating two of the practices that were taught in an exploitative cult.
And that's just the way it is.
Not everything you learn in a cult is bad or bad for you.
And like conspiracism itself, really effective cults must hook you with a certain degree of plausibility.
They have to appeal to a need.
And in Roche's case, he was really aided by an exploitative, yet reasonably faithful connection to Tibetan ritual culture.
And I do believe he loved and respected it.
And this made him an effective communicator of it.
So, with the mandala offering and the tentric visualization I'm about to describe, I believe that Roach faithfully communicated something that carried psychocultural value, because it carried a real history of usage.
Now, the catalyst for this reflection is weird.
At the recent Hollywood Save the Children rally, which is really a QAnon rally, but brand-washed, there was a woman carrying a very strange sign.
And amazingly, she's a Zoomer, she's POC.
You know, QAnon has been associated with white replacement theory, and obviously there's a lot of white supremacists in it, but These rallies are really defying those demographic expectations.
Now this woman's sign featured an elaborate painting, I assume she'd done herself, of baby parts being cooked in a cauldron by the cabal, I guess, to render down the adrenochrome they drink to grant them eternal life.
So the picture that we've got on the show notes was taken by the reporter Julian Field of the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
And he did some great reporting.
They all did some great reporting from that day.
And in another bit, Field describes evangelical Christians going into full trance states at the protest and busting out speaking in tongues.
So for some, QAnon events are also spiritual events.
So that sign stirred up some memories for me, believe it or not, of this spiritual practice I'm going to describe.
And I think the linkage is plausible.
The cauldrons of babies that the woman has painted don't actually exist.
So what does it refer to, aside from the propaganda?
I'm going to take it more seriously than it just being a meme.
I'm going to speculate that it serves as a kind of meditation object.
I'm going to imagine that it's allowing some people to do some of the work that spiritual practices are meant to do.
So in 1997, I was initiated into the tantric practice of Vajrayogini.
My preceptor was Michael Roach's teacher, because at that point, Roach himself hadn't yet publicly taken it upon himself to give those initiations.
So Geshe Losang Tharchin, now deceased, he presided over a small temple in Howell, New Jersey, and he had a legitimate background.
I really liked him.
I can't say that I connected with him at all.
We were from completely different worlds and, you know, I never really got close to him.
I did have one personal interview with him.
And I just, I liked him.
I got a good feeling from him.
He was one of the Dalai Lama's theology examiners back in Lhasa, back before the Chinese invasion.
So, you know, this is a real person, a real teacher.
Now, another sort of caveat before I get into the actual practice is that when I was initiated, I took a vow to never disclose what I'll talk about here.
The practice was meant to be secret.
And the psychological explanation for it was straightforward, like yakking about something really precious is like gossip.
People will misunderstand it.
And maybe people will say that my reading of the ritual is a misunderstanding, and that's exactly the reason for the vow.
But there's this fear that speaking about it will degrade its power and its dignity.
But there are other reasons for Tantric secrecy, and I think those reasons are really important to consider when we're thinking about the supposed secrets that QAnon is revealing.
In brief, the secrecy of Tantric practices has in part to do with their sexual deviance, but also with the fact that at the most advanced levels, they involve breaking social taboos in ways that cross over into the criminal.
Like most earnest QAnon devotees, Tantric practitioners are meditating on chaos in order to digest and expunge it.
There will be practitioners of Tibetan Buddhism who will say that by disclosing this stuff, I'm harming the culture and that I will be personally damned.
So to that, I reply, I've already broken those vows.
And in my calculation, the secrecy of these practices has contributed to a lot of institutional abuse over the years.
Secrets conceal private, nameless, holy things, but they also hide abuse.
And hiding abuse doesn't serve any culture.
Okay, so here's what the practice was, and again, all the trigger warnings.
Six times per day, with one session consisting of a full hour-long visualization exercise, I meditated myself into the fantasy that I was a divine or enlightened 16-year-old woman Or girl.
Naked, sexually aroused, adorned with ritual elements and weapons, and dancing on the corpses of demons.
I was encouraged to fully invest in the embodiment.
My skin was crimson red, my gender was flipped, and I could actually dance, and that's a stretch.
I wore a rosary of bloody skulls around my neck.
52 skulls for the 52 letters of the Sanskrit alphabet.
The dance pad was in the center of, you guessed it from two episodes ago, a mandala or celestial palace.
The mandala offering with the rice in the rings and the trinkets was all a preparation for this.
So if you need to rewind that bit and listen to it again, feel free.
Like this is straight out of the textbook.
That's exactly what I'm not making any of that up.
And what was the point?
This particular level of tantric practice was called, in Tibetan, kīrim, which translates as the path of creation.
And the idea was to fast-track your understanding, but more importantly, your experience of enlightenment, by literally LARPing your way into it.
And the older students said as much.
They said, fake it till you make it.
So every aspect of the ritual was an effort to imagine yourself into a state of profound and ecstatic wisdom.
And maybe this appealed to me because it didn't involve psychedelics, at least not in that school.
And the imagination was supposed to be sensual, and that was liberating for me at the time.
The idea was that theorizing or studying or philosophizing your way to enlightenment and peak compassion was very slow and plodding, but perhaps forever complicated by the fact that you were using the very instrument of delusion, your conceptual mind, to do it.
There was a particular feeling that I was supposed to generate through all of this.
It was called Divine Pride.
The idea was that, as Vajrayogini, I felt myself to be infinitely compassionate, free, and enjoying the endless pleasures of enlightenment.
I became the hero at the center of a great story.
So the tantric world is quite gamified that way.
And it gave me a lot of relief at certain moments many years ago.
But the visualization did not stop with the dance.
It escalated into a full-on sacrificial event centered on autophagy.
That means eating yourself.
So in my right hand, I visualized a ritual butcher's knife.
And as the prayers came to their peak, I was to imagine chopping my fantasized body into pieces and throwing the pieces into a cauldron.
Now I never got clear on whether I was supposed to double myself while doing this because the body, you know, it's like, how is the hand going to chop itself up or whatever?
Is the hand just going to keep chopping even though it's disconnected from, like, how is that going to work?
So I don't know.
I didn't get clear instruction on that.
Maybe I screwed it up.
In any case, I suppose I was supposed to be doubled because once the body parts had been cooked down, somebody, and I guess it was me, poured them out, poured out the nectar into the cup of my own skull, which I guess hadn't been thrown into the cauldron, and I was supposed to drink from that.
And it was supposed to be nectar.
So if you need to pause and rewind again, be my guest.
You know, it's not a joke to say that it took me several years to really grasp how intense and bizarre this all was.
But then also to respect the fact that this surreal meditation had been faithfully preserved by an extremely scholastic culture.
So here's my point.
My sense is that for some people QAnon can be seen as providing a kind of distorted, tantric ritualism.
Devotees are obviously meditating on sex, death, sacrifice, and cannibalism.
But those who are externally projecting these meditations, and I mean, let's be honest, you know you're projecting when you're at a march, They might be missing something key.
It seems they think they're meditating about other people doing things and not about their own internal stuff.
Now, if you remember my earlier piece on the mandala offering, the Vajrayogini sadhana is really just an amplification of that.
You visualize being someone beautiful, who gathers into themselves all good things, and then, lest you invest in that self-image to the point of egotism, you destroy it.
Not only that, you savor the destruction.
And the meditation asks you to keep doubling down to the point at which you realize that even your fantasies about enlightenment are hollow, misleading, and grandiose.
But by using sexual imagery, oh, and I also forgot to mention that I'm also dancing in a ring of fire, the process is intensified.
And by crossing genders, at least for male practitioners who would be in the majority, and that's another subject, some strange deconstruction of identity happens that I can't quite understand.
And then, by destroying that body, there's not only an acceptance of impermanence, but a recognition that the destruction of things is a kind of nourishment.
But also, I can't ignore that there's something psychotically violent in all of this.
Something tinged with misogyny.
It's at once a fantasy of liberation, but also a nightmare of shadow and gore.
And that reminds me of QAnon.
But then again, so too does my Catholic childhood.
Like, I didn't really have to go on a neocolonial credit card-busting journey to India to learn about eating flesh and blood.
So the big reason that I'm disclosing something that I vowed to keep secret is that this genre of practices wasn't always undertaken alone.
There's a long tradition of male tantric adepts doing variations of this visualization, but in real life, fantasizing that they are male divinities engaged in ritual sex with live female partners, who are probably sometimes girls.
To my knowledge, the modern history of how this has involved abuse or rape is not fully researched, but I think we can probably imagine what the history is.
I do know that many Tantric cultures contain this history.
I also know that the Neo-Tantra movements that are centered on spiritual sex have picked this thread up, usually by wishing away its obvious patriarchy.
The Buddhist tantras are filled with references to secret sexual practices by which male yogis hope to attain esoteric realizations.
There's an 8th century Indian mystic, Saraha, who described that, trigger warnings again, The bodies of 8-year-old, 12-year-old, and 16-year-old girls had unique wisdom-bestowing qualities.
He advised feeding 12-year-old girls honey and sweets while telling them of the pleasures of kissing.
Now, this theme comes up in medieval yoga as well, but there's very little scholarship, of course, on who these women and girls were.
There is some scholarship coming, so I'm hopeful about that.
Now, in modern global context, we know that so-called authentic Tantric Tibetan teachers like Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, for example, the founder of Shambhala International, committed clerical sexual abuse constantly.
And as some of my future reporting will show, some of his victims were very young.
Recently, two members of Shambhala International have been charged with sexually abusing minors.
One was just sentenced.
Now, Michael Roach's main female attendants were always significantly younger than him.
So there's this very long shadow cast by this medieval idolization of the beautiful Yogini girl.
So basically what I'm describing here is my initiation into a process of self-hypnosis involving the deep psychic contemplation of sex and violence.
And that meditation, which yielded intense and nameless sensations, is surrounded by real world events and impacts.
It leaves survivors.
So maybe now it's starting to make more sense that I'm speaking about this in relation to QAnon.
When I described the relatively childlike mandala offering, that was like kindergarten, as I said.
The tantric offering is like black magic wizard school.
And I know that it uses some of the same elements that other transformational spiritualities employ.
Ritualized meditation on death, meticulous concentration on bodily sensation, and following charismatic leadership that you believe to be divine.
And also the belief that sexuality and spirituality are inseparable.
And always, always, all of the rules and all of the texts written by men.
It all makes me wonder about whether or not QAnons, whether they've been exposed to this material or material like this or not, whether there's an overlap.
They're visualizing themselves into a rich and provocative landscape and play action, in which they are the suffering but also triumphant and liberated hero.
They get to obsess on sex and death and sexual crimes in the most macabre ways, and it's justified, and perhaps cathartic, because their salvation is assured.
They are conjuring a world of amplified terror, but also possibility.
They're attracted to something abject.
And as I suggested before about the conflation of child vaccination with child sexual abuse, this worldview can't help but to fantasize about countless sick and abused children.
I would say that in protesting what is not there, they might be showing they wanted to be there.
One thing I should make clear is that nobody gave me any preparation for the psychological complexity of these practices.
There wasn't any like psychiatric intake evaluation.
There were no questions that were asked about, you know, like what might trigger me or what my history was.
And part of this is about the fractured nature of this globalized economy of tantric Buddhism.
Essentially, I received these teachings as a tourist.
Now, the initiations were legitimate and the Lama I had was well qualified.
So, you know, that was good, I guess.
But it's not like I was brought up in a system that would allow me to understand the process of what I was being given.
And like many neocolonial spiritual tourists, what I did with the practices was highly personalized and self-serving.
But at the same time, it wasn't bad because I think I had some safeguards within me that allowed me to understand that this really was about inner work.
I can't say that that was true for everybody that I practiced with.
Some of my colleagues seemed to believe that these practices should be manifesting themselves in real life.
And in fact, for a while, Michael Roach adopted the garb and the dress of Vajravini.
He didn't dance around naked, thank God, but he did let his hair grow out very long, and he adorned himself with some of the ritual elements and adornments, and he took on a more genderqueer appearance.
All the while maintaining his coterie of young, very obedient female attendants.
So, I was lucky that I didn't mimic that, that I didn't take this material and project it outwards.
I didn't see it as representative of consensus reality, or of a reality that I wanted to inhabit.
I understood it to be a symbolic process.
Now, as my conversation with Thea Wildcroft unpacked, the manipulative and politicized side of QAnon co-opts and weaponizes very real trauma experiences— experiences that have been forced into secrecy to the point at which they can become symbolic or mythic.
Add to this now the context that surrounds and complicates it all.
All of the terrifying ritual adventures already embedded in spiritual practice.
Meditating on death and chaos is not unique, and obviously it helps some of us come to grips with existential terrors.
As an emerging religion, I'm wondering if QAnon is playing this function for some people.
This would make it a real mistake to dismiss it as naive or insane.
But just as with the Tibetan Tantrism I practiced for years, there would have to be good guidance when journeying in the symbolic order.
Guidance that's better than the YouTube AI, for sure.
The trick would be to somehow use spiritual practice to release one's repressions around sexuality and death, should one have these, but then also without broadcasting or cosplaying the unresolved fantasies that this might involve.
Your catharsis must not become another person's panic.
Now, more than ever, we really have to avoid accusing others about what we ourselves are working on, or about what we ourselves are confused about.
Thank you for listening to Conspirituality.
You can find us on any major podcast player, as well as Conspirituality.net, where you'll find our YouTube videos, resources, and other fun material.
You can also find us on YouTube directly at youtube.com slash conspirituality, on our Facebook page at facebook.com slash conspirituality podcast, and finally on Patreon at patreon.com slash conspirituality.
If you are interested in supporting us and helping us grow this project into something larger, which we are looking to do, we would appreciate it very much.
