La Petite Mort

What if death isn’t an ending, but a doorway into a fuller, braver way of living? 

In this episode, we begin with mortality—raw, honest, unavoidable—and follow its thread into tantra, intimacy, and the erotic as life force: the same mysterious current that draws bees to flowers, lovers to lips, and creatives toward the work that matters.

We explore our obsession with certainty—especially about the afterlife—and how dogma, distraction, and constant “seeking” can quietly dull awe and flatten intimacy. Instead, we look at what it means to build tolerance for discomfort, stay present at our edges, and treat uncertainty as a devotional practice.

I share a dream about dying: a warm room of loved ones… a spiral staircase… a playful judgment that dissolves into forgiveness. The lesson wasn’t perfection; it was being. From that vantage point, death becomes the clearest mirror: kiss in the thunderstorm, say I love you, risk where it counts.

If the only certainty is death, then the true spiritual skill is learning to hold uncertainty without shrinking from life’s invitations.

Join me for a grounded, tender exploration of grief, awe, leadership, and the afterlife—and walk away with practices to feel more, love deeper, and live at your edge. Expect conversations on the erotic, kink, death, tantra, and the holy tension between what terrifies us and what awakens us—Scorpio’s sacred domain.

UNTAMED WORSHIP —a podcast for the wild, the free, and the faithful. Join me on Fridays as we explore spirituality, culture, relationship, and the mystical to invite more beauty, peace, and awe into your daily life.

Subscribe to the UNTAMED WORSHIP publication to go deeper with subscriber-only posts, secret podcast episodes, and live community offerings.

Transcript

Mortality As Life’s Central Question

SPEAKER_00 0:09

You are listening to Untamed Worship, a podcast for the wild, the free, and the faithful. Today I'm going to talk about death and grief and the afterlife. For some, this might be the single biggest reason why they feel drawn to religion or to spiritual practice, which is to grapple with the truth of our immortality. We are physically finite, at least in our human form. I believe that we are spiritually infinite, but we can't avoid the fact that our human bodies, this physical vessel that we're in here, is limited. And that's really scary. This is the most profound fear that we all carry is the fear of death. And it brings unavoidable questions up. Like, where are we going after we die? And what is the meaning of life? Why was I here at all? And what do I need to do in order to ensure that I get to go to this place that I want to believe exists after here, after this moment. And so this is a really big philosophical, again, another existential big question mark that we have in this whole human existence here. And it is in every moment that we live, whether we draw our awareness to it or not. Like when we see something beautiful, something that moves us, there's actually a metric for being moved, like moved meaning emotionally impacted. And the metric for something that moves us and really makes us feel awe is the combination of we don't know how many times this will ever happen again, if ever again. And it surprised us. We got pattern interrupted by something that occurred in our day-to-day life, and it made us fucking feel something, even just for a moment. And knowing that we can't have that feeling forever, that that feeling is elusive, is what gives us the opportunity and the ability to feel moved by something. You know, if we lived every day forever and ever and ever, as many days as we wanted, and we could do anything we wanted all the time, eventually we would get bored with that. I think we would get bored of that pretty quickly because there's a contrast here in this physical earth experience of being a human that we're in a constant polarity of suffering and delight. And I don't mean suffering like you have to suffer existence of suffering, because I don't philosophically align with that. I mean it in the tantric sense of discomfort versus comfort or pleasure versus pain. And so if you're looking at Tantra, that is an intentional practice that helps us cultivate harmony and balance, and I believe it helps us cultivate a deeper appreciation for beauty and awareness of the sacred. So if you were to practice tantra, and if you're listening to this and you haven't heard the word tantra before, or you have, but you associate it just with sex and sexuality and the erotic, like the traditional imagery that would come up for you when you hear the word erotic, then let me just slightly double-click on it here and say that tantra is not about sex. Sex is a piece of it, just like death is a piece of it, just like life is a piece of it. It's all connected in the human experience. And so it's a practice to cultivate balance and reverence and awe and again harmony. And so with that, I'll give you an example, and I will use a sexual example because it's easy to see it sexually, and then we can zoom out. So, sexually speaking, from a tantric sense, if you were to say to me that you are seeking more pleasure, which you probably would say, I would get very curious with you. I would encourage you to get very curious with yourself about your relationship to pain and discomfort. Intimacy is the degree to which we're able to feel intimacy, is the degree to which we can tolerate uncertainty. And so this principle could apply tantrically as well. The intimacy that you seek is in direct correlation to your ability to hold uncertainty. So everything that we do to fill in the spaces and the gaps in our question marks, to give ourselves certainty, particularly in the realm of philosophical existential questions that do not have objective answers. And again, objective means no matter who receives it, no matter how you experience it, it's just a fact. The sun rises and the sun sets. That is objective. Subjective is how does this impact you? How do you feel about it? What does it mean to you? And when we get subjective and objective mixed up, and we hold hands with religion or spirituality in this subjective-objective quandary, that gets us into trouble. In the tantric practice, we are seeking a balance in this internal discomfort between pleasure and pain. You could also say between certainty and uncertainty. Use whatever word you want to try to describe something that is sort of definitionless, which is also right, the joke about the Tao is when you speak of the Tao, the Tao no longer exists, right? And so with that, let's call it pleasure and pain. The degree to which you can tolerate and experience pain is the degree to which you can experience pleasure. So it doesn't mean that life is suffering, that you're forced to be here and that you're gonna have a bad time. It means, in my opinion, in the human experience, we are here having a spectrum of an experience. We're here to be comprehensive. We're not here to deny our humanness. An example of that in Christianity would be the devil made me do it, right? Touching back on our last episode, I'm a sinner. And because I'm a sinner, I did this thing. It was inevitable that I would do this thing because I'm a sinner, the devil made me do it, the bad guy's following me, and that's actually a spiritual bypass. It's a way that we relieve ourselves of responsibility, and it's a way that we separate ourselves from our body and our human experience. Right. And so if I'm staying just for a moment more with the sexual example of Tantra, if you said that you have lost your ability to feel, let's say, an orgasm. You can't, you don't have access to the full range of pleasure that you either once had or never had. Or uh, and that could be uh tends to be a more feminine example. A masculine example of this could be I used to have so much erotic drive in my life. I used to be like super turned on, and now I just don't feel connected to that piece of my sexual essence anymore. Like there's something going on in my pleasure, my desire for pleasure, my access to pleasure. Like said plainly, my boner doesn't work the same way that it used to work. What is going on? And said for the feminine, I either can't have orgasms, or I used to be able to have orgasms and now I can't access them, or I want to go deeper into it, right? Like that's a very simple common thing that comes up for both the masculine and the feminine. Okay. And so if you were to say this to me, I would be really curious about the depth to which you can tolerate your own discomfort and your own uncertainty and your relationship to pain. So if you were to say, I really want to have better orgasms for the feminine, or if you were to say, as the masculine, I want to get my boner back, like I want my sex drive to come back in the way that it once existed, I would say the first thing that you need to do is build your tolerance to sensitivity. You're probably overstimulated in X, Y, Z ways. They might be a little different for each person, but ultimately the problem is the same, which is you are likely overstimulated andor you have lost your relationship to appreciation of beauty and your connection to all. You're probably burnt out and you're probably feeling complacent in some major areas of your life. So, step one would be let's get you more sensitive. And so we would start with taking the sexual pleasure piece away, which would look like abstinence for a window of time, not forever, maybe 40 days, depends on how devout you want to be. That's a different conversation, but ultimately, step one, you've lost your appreciation for beauty. You can't feel all right now, and you are complacent. And this is impacting your ability to feel and experience the best things of life. Your sexuality, your sexual practice is a microcosm of the macrocosm, right? And so if that's happening for you, we're gonna build your sensitivity. Number one. Number two, we're gonna work with your tolerance for discomfort. We're gonna play with pain. So, really simple example would be hey, I either want my boners to come back or I want to feel deeper, better orgasms, or any orgasm at all. I want to be more embodied. And it's it's embodiment for both the masculine and the feminine, right? I would have you cultivate a physical practice that has nothing to do with sex. So a hundred squats a day, or go do some strength training, or go on a walk, whatever feels like a physical edge for you, that is something that you have some form of resistance to that makes you feel your edge in that physical process. So it doesn't have to be something that burns you out more or like creates danger for your life, that kind of pain. I mean it's an experience in your physical body that's going to bring up this moment for you here. So imagine that you I said do a hundred squats, which is a wild amount of squats. Just imagine it for a second. Whatever amount of squats is accessible for you, like normally, what in wherever you are in your physical practice. Like if you're super athletic, maybe a hundred isn't a lot. For me, a hundred, I'm fairly athletic and a hundred squats. I do not like this idea. But anyway, so imagining that you're in that process and you now have arrived to the moment where you've hit your edge and you're like, I can't fucking do another squat. I cannot do it. What's happening in your mind? What story are you telling yourself? What is the voice? What does that voice sound like? And how do you navigate that moment? Do you completely collapse from the commitment that you made? That momentary commitment? It's not like I'm gonna do 100 squats every single day for 10 years. It's just one time right now, in this moment, I'm gonna do this today. What happens to you in that moment of your resistance physically? What story do you tell yourself? What does it mean to you? And how are you going to navigate your resistance? And that tells you a lot about yourself. And when you consciously practice that physically. So, in our example, you're doing a hundred squats. Let me say you're doing a hundred squats every day for a week or something. Again, whatever your edge is, you're gonna learn what you need to learn about yourself, and you're ultimately cultivating a deeper ability to tolerate discomfort. Right. And so that's what I mean when I say, and I'm like quoting here, play with pain, which is to get really curious with yourself about what is your edge of discomfort, what does it mean to you, why, and how do you navigate that? And this again has a direct inverse correlation to the degree of pleasure you're able to experience. And so let's now zoom out away from this sexual example into life. So this same thing applies on a macrocosmic scale. So if you don't have the ability to do hard things, make commitments, make agreements, show up to those commitments and agreements, and essentially be in devotion to life at your edge, not at your comfort zone. So when I say devotion, I don't just mean I'm devoted to the things that feel good or I'm philosophically devoted. I mean I'm devoted to this thing or this person at my edge. Like I'm holding uncertainty, I'm holding discomfort. And the most discomfort accessible to us in this practice on the highest scale is I'm afraid to love this person. Loving this person feels uncomfortable. Why? At the highest level, because that person is gonna die. That person is gonna die, and we don't know when that person's gonna die. It could be tomorrow, it could be next week, it could be in 70 years, it could be one minute, it could be during this podcast, we do not know when the people we love are gonna die. And that is fucking terrifying, and that's a tantra as well. And so if we move through life, avoiding the moments where life brings us the opportunity to love deeper, and I don't mean something that we don't want, I mean like we want it, but it scares us. Okay, I'm not saying force it, I'm saying something that you want to experience, have hold, become that scares you. That is among the most precious things that we get to experience in this lifetime because the fear is a sign. Like this is our soul telling us this matters, pay attention, feel this, be present. Our nervous system saying this is a threat, this is a threat, blinking red light, don't go there, the risk is too high. Right. And so the combination of those two things really shows us what we're made of, which again is how much discomfort can we hold? Not in our comfort zone. You know, like we get used to certain types of discomfort, and it's pretty tricky. Like our ego can attach to this, where essentially our nervous system is programmed from the environment that we are raised in. And so if we are used to whatever we're used to, that's going to be the baseline for our nervous system. So even if it's really unhealthy, super chaotic, violent, abusive, even if it's all of those things, that's our baseline state of our nervous system. And so to us, even if our mind can look at it and be like, oh, that's not it. That's fucked. That's wrong. That's not what I want. Our nervous system tells a different story. Because until we work with our nervous system to essentially say to it, hey, let's unravel and decondition around what you, nervous system, are defining as our normal baseline. We're largely being guided by that piece of our like primal brain. So, in this practice of tolerating uncertainty and our tolerance for discomfort, we must look to our soul and really feel into what we want and why it scares us and be willing to be afraid. There's no decision that we can make. There's nothing that we can do, there's no amount of money that we can have or project that we can be successful at that will relieve us of the discomfort of the unavoidable fact that the people that we love are gonna die. There's going to be loss in every single relationship that we have. And this is a part of life. And when we look at the gods, like archetypally, if we imagine God, let's make God plural for a moment. If we look at the gods as archetypal beings that are, let's say, titans in the sky that have their own particular species that's different than our species, these beings, again, as myth, they exist in an infinite realm. They have unlimited time, they have unlimited resources, they can do whatever they want. They have no limitations at all. The only limitation that the gods have is the limitation of a lack of limitations, which is paradoxical, which is to say that the only thing they don't have is what we have. So our largest limitation is that we don't have unlimited time. And because we don't have unlimited time, it makes what we experience here special. I believe that part of the signature, like the blueprint of if we were to zoom, zoom, zoom in on what's the DNA of the sacred, I think from the human point of view, part of it is we don't know how many times we're going to get to experience this. And so I better feel it now. I better cherish it. And I think it's the combination of that. This, I don't know how many chances I will have feeling against this is an ancient thing, right? Like the sunset and sunrise is ancient. We have all of these primal connections to the natural world and to the mystical and to the transcendent that are so far beyond us and will last way beyond our singular mortal experience of life. And so it's those two things holding hands. This is ancient and primal, and has been happening since the dawn of time. And I get to see it right now. Like right now, I'm here, I'm a part of the story. I get to feel it. Like that, that is what makes things sacred and transcendent for us. And so the gods, as mythological beings that are, you know, a piece of the collective story, they do whatever they want, whenever they want, however they want, with whoever they want, except with humans. Because, and you know, you have all these mythologies about gods falling in love with humans and what's the biggest story there is, you know, it's not that they can't access passion, it's not that they can't feel all of these big feelings and all these beautiful experiences together, but ultimately the human's gonna die, and then the god is gonna carry on because that moment was fleeting. And so I think that's where the deep beauty is in all of those mythologies about the gods falling in love with humans, is I think that the gods are trying to access the limitation of being alive in the human way because it makes things meaningful. And so this brings back to what I was saying at the beginning, which is the contrast, the conflict, the discomfort, the fear is a part of what makes life so rich and life so beautiful. And so let's return to where I originally began here, which is talking about death. Death is unavoidable, death is a part of life. If you're looking at a pendulum swing of aliveness to not aliveness, you would have life in death. And this is something that we grapple with all the time and always will. We can allow it to be a reason why we don't fully experience life, be it the experience to like I don't know if you want to skydive and you're afraid to skydive because you think you might die. This is an extreme example. Then if you really want to skydive, then you're gonna have to hold the possibility that you might die, right? That's there. If you want, if you love someone, whether you want to or not, because I don't know if love is totally a choice. I think the practice of choosing relationship is a choice, but love, love hits us. Like it it's a transcendent, mystical thing, right? So like if it's you love someone and you're scared, you're too scared to love them, you're going to have to grapple with your fear of either them dying in order to love them and be there and to say yes to that, or on a smaller, like slightly less intense way, just the fear of losing them in general. So we fear change. This is inherent because we fear death, and because we fear death, we fear change because change is a little death. And this is also why I think it's interesting that the French call orgasm the little death, because when we when we orgasm, we temporarily lose our fear of death. Just for a moment, we are totally present and we're in our body, and we're if we're with another person, especially if we're with another person, like we're just transcendent for for just a moment. We can we can glimpse eternity together, and then it comes back, and the degree to which we love them or care for them or need them or want them is the degree to which we're gonna be afraid of fucking it up or losing each other, right? And so this is just it's a part of it. And so the tantra of love is can I hold my fear of loss of this person and still show up fully to what life is inviting us into, yes or no? The tantra of life is can I live fully knowing that I might die? And can I get right with that? Can I hold the possibility that anything might kill me at any given moment, even if I'm so careful and still show up? And I'm gonna tell you a secret. And it's a little funny. I know it's a little funny that I start this episode, funny is a strong word, but uh ironic, to begin this episode with death. It just feels so heavy. And to then be speaking about Tantra and sex. But this is the thing, is that they are connected, and so the secret is the erotic. Like these things are inherently erotic. And erotic, the first time you hear that word, sounds to most people like sex. I'm turned on. Here's what it means to be turned on, and erotic equals sex or the conquest of sex, right? Like, that's not what the erotic means. The erotic is uh attempt to explain the transcendent, and the erotic is the energetic driving force, life force that animates the planet. So the bee that pollinates the flower, the drive to do that is erotic. Not because the bee is trying to fuck the flower, but simply because that's what life does. Like life animates life, life seeks connection, life seeks pollination, life seeks life. And so the erotic, what we really mean when we say the erotic is to form a relationship to life force, your life force and the transcendent life force of life in a way that it is inherently mysterious, but like cultivate your practice with your life force. And so when you say something is erotic, it means I have a charge, I have a connection to it, I'm in some kind of relationship or dynamic with it, just like the bee pollinating the flower. The relationship for that moment is that. It's not about a sexual relationship, it's simply just life lifing. When the squirrel finds the acorn and then chews the acorn and then drops pieces of the acorn or the caterpillar going in the chrysalis, or yes, the lovers kissing each other, or the thing that gives you charge. The erotic is the animating force of life that gives us desire to do things, desire to show up, to be in the moment. Moment presently. And so when we become complacent or like neutral in a way that we've lost our deep why and our deep connection to a thing, and it feels like we're going through the motions, or we just simply stop going through the motions at all. And we're in a moment where we're not feeling what we used to feel or think we should feel or want to feel. We have lost our connection to the erotic. We've lost our connection to mystery. We've lost our connection to the sacred. Because, and let's look at it as God, right? So God is the creator. God created us in God's own image. This is in the biblical text. So God is a creator. We are creators. You could say we are co-creators with God on this planet, in this realm for our life. So, yes, there are certain things that happen to us in life that we didn't consciously choose, that we didn't make happen. Like there's inertia in life, things do just occur. But how we respond to the thing that occurs, the meaning that we make out of the thing that occurs, and ultimately what we choose to do as a response to the thing that occurred, that's the co-creation. So you are a creator. And the erotic is the creative drive. That's it. The erotic is the creative drive. And so there are certain pathologies or dysfunctions that you will access in your life that the medicine for is to be curious about your relationship to the erotic. So, in a very dramatic religious-based example, let's say that you were taught that sex before marriage is bad. It's bad, it's bad, it's bad, right? Sex before marriage, worst thing you can do, abstinence, that's it all the way. And that was your identity. And you wore a purity ring, maybe even. Or at least you held that core identity of worth and value. If you're on the feminine side, you're like, my body is the biggest gift that I could give to my future husband. And if I've let anyone else touch it, then he doesn't get the full prize. And that's like disrespectful to him. And the paradox is like, of course, our bodies are the biggest gifts that we can give to our beloveds, but not it's not something that can be ruined. There's not any person that could touch your body that's going to ruin you for someone you give your body to, right? Like that's that's the nuance. And so if you were the purity ring wearing no sex before marriage type of person, then let's say you get married and you you did it. You fucking did it. Like you didn't have sex before marriage, and you found your person and your person didn't have sex before marriage either, and like you are you're having your unicorn experience of we're taking each other's virginity, right? In that experience, if you internalized too deeply the story that sex before marriage is bad, what may have happened in your body is your body internalized sex is bad. Sex is bad. I've tied my worth to my body and who has touched my body and how I'm allowed to use my body in the right way, et cetera. And if that has happened for you, it's gonna be very challenging for you to have orgasms. It's gonna be hard for you to get pregnant, probably. You may even develop an allergic reaction if you're a woman to your husband's sperm. That happens. Like because your body is internalizing the stories that we tell it. And so you would need to unravel that. And that's just an extreme example here of my point. Another example would be, you know, if you are an entrepreneur founder type and your business isn't thriving and you're putting a lot of energy into it, it's not like you're not showing up. It's not like you're not doing everything that you can, but you're just not scaling at the level that you think that you should be, or there's not an inverse relationship to the amount of effort you put into what is coming out. Like that is likely connected to your relationship to the erotic. And there's a funny little mechanism that happens that I think is programmed into life, which is intimacy. So this is what I mean about the edge of pleasure and pain here. So it's like when we require novelty, and novelty is a spectrum, right? But when we require, let's say just we require any kind of novelty to connect to the erotic, less sexually, that would mean like, okay, I need novelty to connect to the erotic in a non-sexual way, would be like, I don't have the ability to. I love to use the example of the sunset, right? Like, I don't have the ability to look at the sunset and want to look at it and see it and really appreciate its beauty and actually desire to be present for it. Because I have all these other things happening that I feel like are more important than watching the sunset. And so then I forget how to watch the sunset, and then I lose my sensitivity to it, and then I ultimately lose my ability to fully experience it. And so the novelty would be okay, I I used to love sunsets and I don't love them anymore. I don't even feel them anymore. I'm gonna get on an airplane and I'm gonna go watch a sunset somewhere that I've never been before. And like maybe if I stand on that beach, whether I'm alone or with the right person or whatever, maybe if I'm there in that moment or I'm on the right mind-altering substance or something, then I can appreciate the sunset. So that's an example of how novelty shows up in a non-sexual way, right? But the degree to which we require novelty to access our relationship to the erotic, to access our relationship to life force is the degree to which we can get very curious about intimacy. Or rather, saying this more clearly, that's the degree to which we need to be really curious about intimacy. Because novelty, if it's used too frequently, what happens is novelty, the ante keeps getting up. And so then, you know, you need more novelty and more novelty and more novelty, and it needs to be more extreme to get you to the same place. It's the same thing with lots of substances, right? Like if you're constantly using a particular substance, usually your body's gonna develop a tolerance to it and you're now gonna need more. Same exact concept. And so when it comes to your relationship to life force and awe and connection to life in general and your sensitivity to allowing yourself to really feel it, like let it touch you. If you need too much novelty to access that, you have an intimacy issue. And if you have an intimacy issue, it's going to trickle into your entire relationship with everything else you touch. So your business, whatever the mission of your business is, it's not gonna be as clear or as potent. So whatever your story is that you're telling, through whatever like the voice is of your business, it's only gonna go as deeply as you've gone because it's yours, right? Because that's how intimacy works. We can only meet people as deeply as they've met themselves. We can only meet other people as deeply as we've met ourselves. And so the erotic is a baseline sensitivity metric for our impact in the world. And it's a funny little mechanism. And so we get to a point where we will peak and plateau without allowing ourselves and figuring out what it takes to really do it to go into deeper levels of intimacy than we've been brave enough to go into before. And this is a, again, I think this is a programmed mechanism here in this human experience. And it doesn't mean that you have to do it. It really, like, as a non-dogmatic person, what I would say to you if you came to me saying, hey, here's what I want, here's what I desire, or here's what my problem is, here's this problem I'm trying to solve. Like, I would ask you to get really clear about what it is that you actually want and what it is that you actually don't want. And I would encourage you to ask yourself these questions, but I'm not gonna tell you that you need more intimacy and that you need more pain and that you need to hold more uncertainty. That's really your choice. And if you're a leader, you probably need to evaluate your relationship to discomfort and uncertainty. And again, not the kind of discomfort of the loops of our nervous system that are just a recreation of a pattern that we witnessed in childhood. Like if your parents fought all the time, or like you had a parent that was constantly, I don't know, getting divorced a lot or something. And so then you don't trust relationships, like that's an example, right? And so then you're gonna be like, I've done my work around being uncomfortable because like love is pain and I'm showing up to it anyway. Like, nah. The discomfort would be I'm really curious about the resistance that I have to this thing that was modeled for me. And is it possible that my resistance is an arrow pointing me in the direction of where I could have more intimacy and hold more uncertainty and tolerate more fear and ultimately have a bigger impact, like actually become more developed as a person and have a deeper spiritual practice and like invite more space for awe and beauty into my life. That's the paradox, right? Like you would think. And this is why we spiritual bypass. One of the reasons is like if I'm seeking beauty, if I'm seeking awe, if I'm seeking pleasure, then I should only set up my life in the day-to-day thing or the day-to-day, the day-to-day things that I commit to in my life should be immediately and obviously supportive of this pleasure that I want. And if it looks or feels like something that is really scary, then our nervous system is again is gonna like flash the neon light at us and be like, this is not safe. And that if you're having the experience of your nervous system and you have to be sensitive enough to figure out that this is what's going on, but like if your ego is saying, this is not safe, this is not safe, this is not safe, and the reason it doesn't feel safe is because you're afraid of loss, like them dying, or you dying, or just losing each other, that might be a clue of a place that your consciousness or like your soul wanting to evolve and learn and experience whatever it wants to evolve, learn, and experience, that might actually be a somatic signature of like, hey, this is something that might be worth exploring. And I can't make that decision for anyone. And it feels vulnerable to even talk about that piece of it because it's something I've been experiencing in my life, and it's not my intention to talk about that or make that person think this is about them. This is actually not however it's just to me it's a it's a piece of the conversation that's very hard to unwind because life is meant to be lived, and like we're here to I believe that we're here to grow, and I believe that we're here to love, and I believe that we're here to experience. And like I said earlier, if our if our MO is to only experience things within the boundaries of our comfort zone, I don't want to tell you that's wrong. I just I want you to be curious about why that is for you and what might be on the other side of it. And if you're choosing your comfort zone, and again, your comfort zone can sometimes look like the chaotic pattern of the nervous system, because that's still a comfort zone, because the nervous system and the ego respond to what it knows. And that's the irony, right? Like the certainty, right? That's why certainty and intimacy are in a relationship. The nervous system and the ego feel certain that it knows how to overcome certain patterns that it witnessed most likely in childhood. And so we'll keep repeating it because it makes us feel in control. What's much more scary is to do something differently than we would normally do it, because that's that's how we grow. And so the last thing I want to say about this through the lens of the erotic piece, and like I'll bring it to sex again, because I know y'all are gonna ask me, and it's fine. So let's just be here just a little bit longer. So in the our relationship to the erotic sexually, that's where kink comes in. Like when we get to the okay, so the tantric pain, pleasure spectrum here of the pendulum swing. I want to feel deeper pleasure. Okay, can I tolerate more discomfort? I want to have more intimacy. Okay, can you tolerate uncertainty? I want to have bigger impact in the world. Okay, can you take bigger risks in your heart and in your relationships and be willing to hold more of the complexity of the human experience? Because that's what leaders do. Leaders walk a path that no one has walked before of the universal things that humans seek. And it doesn't have to be a path that no one ever has walked before. I mean it more like you as a leader. You're walking a path holding a lantern. No one is holding a lantern for you. You don't know the way, and you don't have a guide map, and you don't know if you're making the right choice. But as a leader, we are holding codes for people who would want to walk the path that we're walking. And the things that people care the most about are like love and their purpose, right? And so leadership is connected to the fifth house, which is ruled by Leo. And Leo is a protector of love. Leo is a devoter to love. And so the reason that Leo takes up space is because Leo is the disco ball. Leo is the one that is here to liberate the room of the things that are keeping us constricted and preventing us from connecting with each other and preventing us from seeing beauty and preventing us from like really showing up to life. And so, leadership, because it's connected to Leo, leadership is about love more than anything else. Can I love myself well? Can I trust myself? And can I be a good teacher for other people? And so, because of this, there are experiences available to us in this human life that if we're leaders, there's an opportunity and maybe even a responsibility for us to figure out how to fucking hold those things and experience those things in a way that we can help other people find them too. And generally for leadership, that looks like us being afraid. And whatever the topic is, it doesn't have to be about love and relationships specifically. It's ultimately really about vulnerability and risk. And the biggest risk, again, is the risk of loss. And so, anyway, this is where kink comes from, which is it's on the discomfort pain side. And so, you know, your kink could come from something in the more contrast side of experience in your life, like something that felt traumatic or painful or hurtful or scary or whatever that you've experienced before that you now are kind of playing out or just having curiosity about or transmuting, like that could be a form of kink. It also could be that your relationship to the erotic, and this is true for everyone, which is whatever is taboo to you. So, this previous example of if you've experienced this is why the stereotype exists, right? So, like if you've experienced trauma, it may become sexy to you. That's because it's taboo. It's bad, it's wrong, it's hidden, it's in the shadow. However, you want to define taboo, whatever is taboo for you, and it might not be a trauma at all. And for a lot of people, it's not a trauma. What is taboo to you? Which is what is the thing that you resist that you're afraid of, that there's some something there for you. There's some kind of charge around that thing that becomes taboo to you, right? And so you're like, I'm not gonna look at that. And so it could be taboo because it really scares you, it could be taboo because it disgusts you, it could be taboo because it has happened before and hurt you. It could be taboo simply just like philosophically, because you're like, that just seems like something I wouldn't like. I don't know. But whatever happens in our little monkey minds of the way that we categorize things, there's a taboo file. And that taboo file is connected to our relationship to life force, life, creativity, love, et cetera. And that file needs to be interacted with if you ever get to a moment where you want to scale your business or really have actual, real, deep intimacy in your relationships. And if you don't, great, don't explore it. But if you do, if you're really here to live life, then look at what is taboo to you. Get curious about it and figure out how you can work with that in a safe way to know yourself better and see what's there for you. So if I'm making that sexual, I guarantee you that will be the sexiest thing you've ever experienced in your life when you can figure out what is taboo to me and why. For a lot of people, it's what am I rebelling against? What am I repressing? What am I scared of? Let me double click, triple click, quadruple click on that and be with that and see what happens. And maybe I'm full of shit. And the worst that can happen is you're like, I was fucking right. And then you're right, and then you carry on, and then you are exactly where you were, and then you're great. So with that, let's zoom back into the afterlife. Because I really want to get to this piece here, and there's like a lot of layers of what wanted to come through in this conversation today. But the afterlife. What is the afterlife? What does that mean? Where does our relationship to it come from? And how do we work with it in our day-to-day lives in a way that doesn't create dysfunction? As I said in the beginning of this episode, I believe that this is one of the major reasons why so many people choose religion or spirituality. When it comes to the afterlife, I find that this is one of the conversations that really splits people a lot in their choice of religion or spirituality, because religion is creating a form of certainty about the afterlife. And spirituality is a little bit more likely to not land on certainty and to have a bit more of a philosophical choose your own adventure, make up your own mind type of texture. This is not always the case, but that I think is one of the biggest splits for people. And so if you're in a space in your consciousness where you can't tolerate uncertainty about the scariest thing to be uncertain about, which is where do I go when I die? Where do my loved ones go when they die? Then you're more likely to choose religion. And that would be okay. And with that, all I can do is tell you what I think because I'm not here to create certainty for you. I'm here to invite you to find your own truth, and you may access levels of certainty of your own truth, and that's really beautiful. And you might find that that certainty changes over time as you evolve and you become deeper in your own spiritual practices. But I'm not here to give you certainty. What I think about the afterlife is that it's a space of returning to our nature. You could say literal nature, but I see it as a space of becoming and remembering. And of course I don't have certainty about what that means. And I think this is one of the biggest things that I think about regularly in my spiritual practices. How fucking nice it would be to just know. Like, I don't fault anyone for living their life in a way that they're like, if I follow the Ten Commandments, then I'll certainly go to the kingdom of heaven. Like, I don't blame anyone for subbing to God in that way. I wish that I could sub to God in that way sometimes because that sounds really comforting to have some being giving you certainty that it's all gonna be okay. And for me, like the paradox is that it's all gonna be okay and it's not at all okay, right? Like people are suffering, there's scary things happening in the world, and this is life playing out life. And if you look at nature, nature is fucking brutal, and we're a piece of nature. We have consciousness, and I think our consciousness gives us an opportunity, if not responsibility, to try to expand beyond certain pieces of primal nature, right? Like we shouldn't fuck. Like, there's like 10 things I want to say in response to that, and they all feel super controversial. So, like we should use our consciousness to be compassionate to each other. Absolutely. And we are a piece of nature, and nature is fucking brutal. And so both things are happening at once, right? Like, we're not here to transcend our humanness, but we are here, I believe, to grow and evolve and try to be better. And so, again, this is the forever paradox. And so what I want to do is I want to tell you a story about death through the lens of a dream that I had one time because this is how I am working with understanding death in my personal practice now. So I had this dream, and in this dream, I I knew that I was dying. Nothing that I can pinpoint happened. Like I don't know why I was dying, but I just knew, like I was connected to my soul, and I knew that I was dying. And I was in this room, it was like in a house. It was it was well lit with warm like candles, and it was just like a sweet experience of being and like a really good house party with just your favorite people. And I was there, right? So I'm at this party with the people that mean the most to me, and I'm totally present, and there's no rush, there's no like nothing's wrong. I just knew that it was time to die. And I stayed in the room until I was ready, and then when I was ready, I left the room. And I knew that I wasn't gonna see the people that I loved again. And I was just going really slowly. I wasn't in a rush, and I didn't feel any pressure. I didn't feel like I couldn't go back to that room if I didn't if I had wanted to, I I think I could have. You know, I was kind of like on the threshold. And I walk into a room and it looked like it was like a cast iron spiral staircase, is what it looked like to me. And I go in this room and I I took off my shoes. It was really vivid for me. I took off my shoes. For some reason, I like untied my shoelaces and I set my shoes very nicely, like right against, you know, next to the stairs, like you would if you're going into someone's house where you take your shoes off. And I I stood at the staircase for a little while. And I I just remember like using all five of my senses and like smelling the room and hearing the people that I loved. And I took a really deep breath and then I I stepped on the stair. And I was one foot at a time. And one after the other, I stepped on the first stair. And when I did that, I felt I felt peace. Like not fully, but not all the way. I wasn't like enlightened, I just felt like a little bit better, you know, like almost like if you have a stomachache and then it goes away. It's kind of like that. Like I just felt a little better. I was still a human, I was still aware of where I was and what was going on. But I just like felt a little bit more peaceful. And then I could still hear everyone I loved in the next room. And I sat there on that first step and I listened to them. And then when I was ready, I took the next step. And it was the same experience. It was a little bit more peace, and and I could hear the people still that I loved, but just a little bit less. And I felt grief, I felt some grief in that moment, and I was like, wow, I really love these people, and I really love this place, and I just felt like so much gratitude. But I was definitely sad because I felt some loss, and so I stayed on that stair for a while until I moved through the big wave of what I was leaving, and it was like the The the feeling of grief and the feeling of loss eventually shifted into curiosity for the mystery of what would be on the next stair. And so I took the next step. And when I went to the next step, was this the same? More peace. A little bit of grief. I could hear the people I loved a little bit less, and they're laughing in the next room. It was like really visceral, like they're laughing, and I didn't exactly have FOMO. It was just gratitude, mostly. And this is how it went, right? Each step exactly like this. And then I get about halfway up the stairs, and like a being like flies in front of me almost like a game show host. And he had like a jelly bean, he had like a like a scale, like a Libra scale with like literal jelly beans in it. And um, and then there was like a scroll. And so he like presents the scroll kind of like a ghost flying in uh Mario Party, you know, that little like ghost creature comes on the cloud. It was kind of like that. So it's like a lot of my my like unconscious heaven afterlife-esque imagery comes from all dogs go to heaven. I guess I watched that and it was probably one of the first visual connections that I had to it. So like a lot of my heaven dreams are all dogs go to heaven themed. Um, but anyway, so like the cloud rolls in and there's a scroll that's opened somewhat dramatically, and then like a scale presents itself, and then there's jelly beans. And I was like, oh shit, that was real. Like, I'm being judged. This is a thing. And uh the being laughed and was like, yeah, that was real. Like that whole part of the human experience is true. Like there is a scale. And I was like, oh shit. And so I watch like the scroll kind of runs through my life, you know, highlights and strengths and weaknesses and things I did well and things I completely fucked up and sins, if you will. And then like fucking jelly beans fall on the good side and the bad side, and I'm like, I'm stressed about it a little. And I can still hear the people I love in the next room. So I'm like, I'm good. I'm just kind of like surrendered to the experience, and then that happens and it balances out, and then it all goes blank, it clears, and then the being left and was like, I'm sorry, I just really like to fuck with people. Like, it's cool. It actually doesn't matter. And I was like, what do you mean it doesn't matter? And the being was like, of course, you want to become the best that you can be, and you want to become better, and you want to learn, but you did learn. And the lesson wasn't to be perfect, the lesson was to be. And you did a good job being like you're a being, and that's what you're supposed to do. And so then I it was a profound feeling of forgiveness that I felt. And it's really hard to put into words, like it has to be, has to be the same thing that the Christians are talking about. This like profound being saved kind of thing, but in a dogmatic way. And I fucking felt it. And I was like, whoa. And in addition to that feeling, I had this feeling of wanting to tell everyone. I wanted to be like, y'all, just let yourselves off the hook. Like, just be here and just show up to life and do your best and fucking love each other and experience each other without all of the existential guilt and shame and fear. Just like be, just like make out more. That was kind of how it felt, you know. Just like when you get the opportunity to like kiss the person that you love in the fucking thunderstorm, like do that. Do what it takes to make sure that you do that because that's the thing that when you're walking up those stairs that you're missing. That's the thing that means the most. Like, that's what it felt like to me. And so then after that moment, I I, you know, I walk up the stairs in the same way that I had been, but I'm going a little bit faster now because now I'm like, I think I'm enlightened at this moment. And so I'm okay. You know, the only thing like once I released the desire to liberate all the people that I loved in the way that I just described, and I like just kind of whispered it into the wind, then I was able to pass on. That was the experience. And so then I just walked up the stairs and I remember getting to the last stair, and it didn't show me where I went. It didn't show me what comes next or what happens. And so I get the sense that you know, that bright light is is the being born again moment. And I think being born again is a choice. But anyway, when I think about death, that's what I believe. And something really crazy about that dream is I woke up that that morning from that dream, and it was like really, really felt very profound to me. And then I got on my phone, and it was the same day that Ram Das died. And so I I started seeing all the posts of Ram Das having passed on. And at this time in my life, I didn't have any connection to Ram Das. Like I knew who he was as a teacher, but I wasn't like a devotee of his work, and I hadn't consciously listened to any of his work. And so I don't know if that was connected. The reason I think it may have been is because the shoe part was so vivid, and he has his whole death is like taking off your shoes thing. And when I heard that meditation for the first time, I cried because I was like, wow. So I don't know why I was shown that. Perhaps because I'm a Scorpio and Scorpios hold the complexities of the spectrum of life when it comes to sex and death and intimacy and the erotic, like death is erotic because our life force knows that it's coming. And because death exists as the ultimate discomfort, the ultimate fear that makes us really live. And so it's profoundly sad when someone we love dies. At least to me it is. But I don't think it's profoundly sad to the being that dies. I don't. I think that when we die we find peace. I don't think we get trapped. I don't think we're stuck in the bardo. I don't think we have all this unfinished business that everybody needs to work together to help free the soul. Like, I really think that the soul, when it passes on, is on a different journey. Now, the caveat to that, because I said the word bardo, so I just have to be comprehensive. I think that just like in life, that we're on our journey here, you know, we come from the womb and we're born, and then we're on this journey, and then we die, and we don't know what happens when we die. I think it's the same. Like I think we die and we're on a different journey. And so we might define that from our human vantage point in the afterlife as the Bardo. And perhaps it is, but I don't think it's suffering. I don't think it's pain. I don't think it's being trapped. I think it's simply just it's another adventure, it's another journey. And I think that souls are ready for it when they're ready for it. And it's very, very difficult to make sense of this from our human vantage point because it's change. You know, it's the ultimate change is here's this person who we love, who is a part of our life in some way meant something to us. And now they're gone. And I'll never get to talk to them again. Not once in my whole life, not not in the way that I'm used to. I'm not gonna hear their voice again, and I'm not gonna talk to them on the phone or hear their jokes or celebrate their birthday with them. Like I'm never gonna watch them blow out candles or open a present on Christmas Day, like that shit is really sad. And it's also really beautiful because inevitably it reminds us that we get to do that with the people who are still here. And so if there's a lesson in death, I think it's remember to appreciate life. Remember to appreciate the people that we get to do life with. And remember to show up as fully as we can. Because we don't know how long we have. We don't know when the people that we love are gonna pass. We don't know when we're gonna pass. And so again, at the beginning and several times throughout this episode, I've said that our ability to be in intimacy is the degree to which we can handle uncertainty. The only certainty in life is death. Life is not promised. Life is not certain. We don't know how long we get. The only thing that we know is that we will die. And because of this, death is the most transcendent, profound teacher, and inherently contains within it the erotic. And so while it seems ironic in a zoomed-out way that an episode about death is also an episode about tantra and pleasure and sex and beauty, it of course it is. Because when we die we will remember what we experienced. Like when we're on our deathbed, that's going to come up for us. Like, what did we do with our life? Did we say, I love you enough? Did we take enough risks? Did we kiss in the thunderstorms and every opportunity that we had? Did we really appreciate life as much as we could have? So whatever's going on in your life, in your world, in this moment, wherever you are in the world, and whatever lesson you've learned from death, if you're grieving now actively or have before, I hope that you remember that death is an invitation to live. Death is an invitation to be more present and to be more loving and to be more grateful, and it's a teacher of peace. The only thing that we can be certain of is death. Everything else is completely uncertain. The degree to which you can tolerate that uncertainty is the degree to which you can really enjoy your life. May you find comfort and ease and that which it is that scares you. And may you be brave to show up and do hard things, and to show up and really truly actually experience life. Whatever the life of your dreams means to you. To all those who have passed on. May you find your way to wherever it is you're going. Thank you for your lessons. Thank you for the stories to tell. And thank you for the memories to cherish. And most especially thank you for being someone that I get to miss. For it's in get missing that I am reminded how special it is to have gotten to love you at all. This week's episode is sponsored by Untamed Worship, the Substack publication. Here you can go deeper into the themes that we explored in this episode and in other episodes. Inside, you'll find articles, personal essays, tips, tools, and practices to support you in your spiritual quest and your relationship to life, love, culture, and the world around you. You'll find a virtual tea temple for those of you who long to connect in with community in an accessible, down-to-earth, grounded way that meets you where you are right now, wherever you are in the world and whatever season of life you're in. You'll also find astrological tips and support and practices to take you deeper into your relationship with the mystical cosmic realm that we exist within, as well as a space for more raw and intimate podcast style conversations that we get to have in that space together, including the opportunity to ask me questions and have your questions answered and your spiritual quest, your metaphysical astrological journey, or your relationships with those who you love. So if you would like to go deeper beyond just the space of the podcast, I invite you to join us at Untamed Worship, the Substack publication, where we expand on all these concepts and connect in and another form of community here in this digital space that we share. You can find this at untamedworship.substack.com. That's untamed worship.substack.com.