Ep. 87 Erotic Enlightenment: Spirituality & Sexuality Reimagined with Dr. Willow Brown & Leah Piper

Sex Reimagined with Dr. Willow Brown & Leah Piper [00:00:00] Charna Cassell: Welcome back. My guests this week are the hosts of Sex Reimagined podcast, Dr. Willa Brown, a Chinese medicine doctor and a Taoist sexologist, and Leah Piper, a Tantra sex expert. Together, they focus on shame free and pleasure forward sex. [00:00:16] Charna Cassell: So this is a really special episode and it feels like the depth and nuance of what we talk about. this Is a long awaited conversation. Every episode that they have, , is worth listening to. I really appreciate the depth that these two women bring. And if you're someone who's interested in the way spirituality and sexuality are connected about how moving energy in the body, what that even is and how that works and practices, this episode is chock full of practices, micro practices and bigger practices. [00:00:55] Charna Cassell: And , it's beautiful and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. I had to really contain my enthusiasm while they were speaking. All right, enjoy. [00:01:05] Learn how to live embodied If it's about to unwind Uncover new tools and start healing Leave trauma and tension behind Isn't it great laid open Let all your desires come true How can you live laid open Imagine yourself brand new. Imagine yourself brand new. [00:01:49] Charna Cassell: Welcome Willow and Leah. I'm so glad to have you. [00:01:53] Dr. Willow Brown: to be here. We had so much fun the last time we did our interview with you. It was just fantastic. [00:01:59] Charna Cassell: I have to admit, I'm, I've been having a love affair with the two of you. I really enjoy your podcast. Aww. Good. Thanks. And I've recommended it to a number of clients. It almost makes it harder, though, because then I, I've listened to so many episodes, I want to talk about everything. [00:02:19] Charna Cassell: There's a lot [00:02:20] Dr. Willow Brown: to talk about, isn't there? There really [00:02:23] Leah Piper: is. And [00:02:24] Charna Cassell: it's [00:02:24] Leah Piper: fun talking with industry people. There's so much to roam [00:02:27] Leah Piper: and flow. [00:02:28] Dr. Willow Brown: Yeah. [00:02:29] Charna Cassell: Well, there's so much overlap, you know, there's a lot of resonance in, in what you, um, offer in a combined way. Yeah. It's like there's such a holistic approach to healing emotionally, physically, energetically, sexually and spiritually, I look forward to hearing about the differences and how, and the compliment, how that you compliment one another with Tantra and Taoism. [00:02:52] Dr. Willow Brown: Great. Should we dive right into that? [00:02:55] Charna Cassell: Why don't we start with something that a lot of people who are listening, they may not know, like what is the difference between Tantra and Taoism? [00:03:02] Dr. Willow Brown: Leah, you did a good job explaining this. [00:03:06] Leah Piper: Okay, I'll, I'll, I'll get it started and then Willow will deepen it. [00:03:09] Leah Piper: The way that I always describe the difference between Tantra and Daoism is, at least from the Tantra that I've studied, that I have the most experience in, is that we use this thing called sexual energy. This, this force that is creative in nature and we harness it and we cultivate it and we use it to purify the system of anything that's inside of us that isn't love, right? [00:03:35] Leah Piper: It's this incredible way of using breath, using movement, using sound, using presence, using vulnerability and trust. To use this thing called sexual energy and move it up the body. And in so doing it breaks up the things that don't resonate with love and then takes us further into any more experiences of sexual awakening and sexual awakening does a lot of interesting things. [00:04:01] Leah Piper: A on a practical standpoint, it makes us, it makes our capacity to feel pleasure and ecstasy greater, but it also gives us transcendent experiences. Feelings of oneness, feelings of bliss, feelings of non separation, feelings of awe, feelings of gratitude, through the skin, the body, of being in the body, because it's an embodiment practice. [00:04:26] Leah Piper: And Taoism does the same exact thing, but what it specializes in, and I would say that like, the tantra that I study has really specialized in sexual healing. It's like, it's like the pinnacle. We're aiming for the sexual healing and it's through the sexual healing that we discover the sexual awakening. [00:04:42] Leah Piper: And Taoism takes that same sexual energy and uses it to heal the body, to increase vitality, to increase longevity, to help us feel truly alive and connected with nature and the world. So you take that sexual energy and [00:04:57] Dr. Willow Brown: and a lot of instances they overlap each other. And, you know, I think one of the things that, um, is so powerful about Tantra is as, as human beings, we, we get so much gets stuck in our lower chakras. [00:05:09] Dr. Willow Brown: So much gets stuck in our first and our second chakra, our sexual centers in our body. And so. There's, there's an, an unleashing of that stuck energy and movement of that stuck energy so that we can let go of constructs, beliefs, um, you know, pain, physical pain, old experiences, traumas, um, which you speak so eloquently to China. [00:05:32] Dr. Willow Brown: And so when we free up that energy, like as Leo was saying, it rises up to other It opens the heart. It can open the higher consciousness in the mind. It can open all these other centers in your body. And so I always think of it as like the fast food to healing. Like, you know, everyone wants it more, bigger, better, faster. [00:05:52] Dr. Willow Brown: And this is, you know, not that there's a pressure to go more bigger, better, faster, but it is a fast track to healing. I mean, I've studied every kind of healing modality under the sun and I have never found a more, um, complete, um, bypassing a whole bunch of, you know, unnecessary steps and just getting straight to the root cause we're getting straight to the root, right? [00:06:17] Dr. Willow Brown: We're starting at the root. We're opening that up. And, um, and with Taoism, Taoist sexology, what I think is so powerful and profound about that is What is Taoism? Let's talk about that for a second. Taoism is the relationship that we have to expansion and contraction. It's the relationship that we have to nature. [00:06:39] Dr. Willow Brown: Every single breath we take is expansion and contraction. Every day we move through. We watch those seasons rise and fall. We watch nature birth and die. You know, so it's this expansion and contraction that we're Always relating to whether we bring consciousness to it or not. It's happening constantly. [00:06:56] Dr. Willow Brown: And so in the, in the bringing more consciousness to it and, and watching how we can move this potent, creative life force energy through our bodies to different glands, which connect to different chakras. It's through our meridian systems and, you know, to all these different places that might have stuck energy or just might want to feel more pleasure. [00:07:20] Dr. Willow Brown: Then we start to experience our bodies as a microcosm of the earth's body. You know, we're not just part of the earth. We are the earth, like we are earthlings. We have the same mountains and rivers and streams and valleys that the earth has. And so when we learn how to cultivate sexual energy. The most potent energy we have because it creates new life, right? [00:07:43] Dr. Willow Brown: So we could create anything we want with it. We could create health. We could create abundance financially. We could create amazing relationships. We could create so much. And a lot of it, you know, this is where Tantra and Tao really beautifully overlap. A lot of it is like, Pulling up the old shit out of the basement and freeing it up, liberating it. [00:08:03] Dr. Willow Brown: And, um, I just love the practice of both. They interweave so beautifully and so well together. And there's, you know, and there's other sacred sexual practices, Egyptian practices and Tibetan practices as well. And it's all same, same, but different. I mean, there's really, I think any kind of sexual healing work that you're doing or, uh, Sexual pleasure enhancing capacity building is, um, is coming home to your essence more and more and the more that we are in our essence, the more that we are in presence with other people's essence, the less we are in protective structure. [00:08:46] Dr. Willow Brown: Strategies and patterns and just trying to get our needs met so I think that's the pinnacle of this whole thing [00:08:54] Charna Cassell: I just feel so much expansion and warmth in my chest and face right now because I'm just like I'm so overjoyed with getting to sit in conversation with the two of you because There's, there's such deep resonance, um, yeah, I just had to just acknowledge that. [00:09:16] Charna Cassell: I just have a permagrin right now. The piece that, that you both address that Taoism and Tantra address is the, the energetic piece that is so missing in a Western approach to healing typically. And it's something that through my teacher, who's a martial arts master through Aikido practices got very integrated into how I. [00:09:39] Charna Cassell: Work and when I would went to it like a Tantra workshop, I was surprised. I was like, Oh, I already do this stuff with my clients. This is so interesting before I knew even what Tantra exactly was. I'm curious also as it relates to. So I've also studied energy medicine like, , and had a chalk work clear out practice on, you know, multiple times daily for years. [00:10:02] Charna Cassell: And so could you, could you address the difference between how Taoism and Tantra approach working with the chakras? Because you mentioned the root, you mentioned like bringing things up and clearing them and you didn't name that exactly, but. [00:10:17] Dr. Willow Brown: Yeah, I mean, you know, sometimes the word chakras or chakras, however you like to pronounce it, can kind of throw people off and they're like, oh, that's some wooboo shit, you know? But. I mean, one of the most important things to understand about these energy centers, I I'm a big Joe Dispenza follower and he calls them energy centers, right? [00:10:36] Dr. Willow Brown: So healing the energy centers, blessing the energy centers is they're kind of like little brains in your body. They hold memory, they hold emotion, they hold different beliefs about yourself, different beliefs about the world and, and you know, how you relate to it. So there's a lot of. stuff. There's a lot of opportunity for things to get stuck in these little brains. [00:11:00] Dr. Willow Brown: And there's also a lot of opportunities for things to get unleashed in these little centers in your body. And they're also like two sides of the same coin. Your heart chakra is connected to your thymus gland, your throat chakra to your thyroid. You know, each one of them is connected to one of your physical glands in your body and those glands are responsible for your endocrine system, your entire hormonal makeup, and there's like three major systems in your body that, like, if we don't have them functioning and working well, we're just not going to feel good. We're not going to have a good emotional state. Things are not going to be working well. And that's the immune system, the, um, digestive system and your endocrine system, those three systems are so crucial. And so key when we look at the thyroid, I mean, that's, that's the throat chakra, right? [00:11:53] Dr. Willow Brown: This is where so many. Especially vulva owner clients get stuck right here. It's funny, right? As I'm talking about it, I'm like, I need to clear my throat. But right here is in, in cranial sacral world, we call it the avenue of expression. And it's right between the heart chakra and the throat chakra. And this is where it's like, where are you feeling stuck? [00:12:13] Dr. Willow Brown: When I'm doing some work with clients right here, you know, and it's. It makes sense. And then, of course, when we fold the body in half right at the belly button, the, the throat and the vagina are a mirror image of each other, right? It's like we've got these lips here, and we've got these lips down here. [00:12:29] Dr. Willow Brown: We've got this cuello, this cuello, and this cuello de cervico, that's the same word. Neck and neck of the cervix, , is the same word for neck. You know, in Spanish for these parts of the body. So I just think that's really interesting too. So chakras, I mean, there's, that's why there's so many books on it. [00:12:47] Dr. Willow Brown: That's why there's so much information on it. They're so multi layered. And one of the things that Leah and I have been working with quite a lot of these sort of psychological patterns and ways that people are keeping themselves safe and keeping themselves protected unknowingly, unconsciously doing certain things, strategies. [00:13:06] Dr. Willow Brown: to, keep themselves from getting hurt, which is also blocking them. And so a lot of that can get stuck in different chakras. Very fascinating stuff. The book, Eastern body, Western mind is a phenomenal book. Chakras. [00:13:23] Leah Piper: I love what, um, does with that book because she's really bringing the two worlds together, the Eastern approach and the Western approach to chakras. [00:13:33] Leah Piper: For those of you who aren't familiar with chakras, there's a long lineage in Eastern mystery school philosophies that takes a look at the chakras and says, let's get them aligned. So you can get ahead in the God game because it's a mind body connection that, that fuels your enlightenment. So the seven different energy centers need to be awoken. [00:13:55] Leah Piper: And so there are mantras, there are yantras, there's the sacred geometry. You focus on the meditations, the things that you chant, all these things, all these meditations, placing your hands on these chakras. And the whole point. It's to get them aligned, get them talking to each other, and get your consciousness up. [00:14:15] Leah Piper: Get up to that crown chakra and evolve. The Western approach is really interesting because it looks at the psychological impact. It's saying there are things that we go, that happen in life, and we can't process every crisis in the moment. We can't be present for every stressor. We're trying to survive those moments. [00:14:34] Leah Piper: So the body is so brilliant, it stores these crisises and the emotional residue of them into these chakras because they're in the body. And, and it's our body's wisdom. It's also why we're all in therapy. Because frankly, we know something happened in our past that is screwing us up, and we're so worried it's going to screw up our future, that we go to therapy because we're trying to resolve these issues. [00:14:56] Leah Piper: But traditional therapists don't know. , or at least, and it's becoming more popular, actually, these different somatic therapies is that it's the body that keeps the score. So therefore go to the chakras because they have psychological themes that will tell you, Oh, you were abandoned as a kid here, touch this chakra. [00:15:13] Leah Piper: Oh, you had a parent suppressing you from speaking up. Oh, go to this chakra. Oh, your heart got pummeled into a gazillion pieces during your divorce. Oh, go to this chakra. And so then we start to realize that we can place our hands and start to finish metabolizing the emotions. of these various life experiences once and for all, therefore clearing these emotional blockages. And then when we move that, then there's more space in our body, to live more fully in our body, to invite love into our life, all these great things. So that's one angle, the Western approach gives us that angle, but then there's another approach which is really connected to the more sensual, sexual aspect of all of this, which is your chakras, our erogenous zones, front and back. [00:16:01] Leah Piper: So they can also teach you how to touch. Another body, how to touch your own body to invoke, turn on, to awaken the senses in the skin, to get deeper into the embodiment experience so that you can then have more pleasure. So the more we clear our chakras, the potential for us to run safely, more erotic energy increases, therefore providing you with more profound, physically, sexual, pleasurable. [00:16:33] Leah Piper: It's chakras are so fun. I hope I want every I want to sell everyone on chakras and sometimes I called them genius zones because I'm I just to get the over the hump that people are they tune out when they hear that word. So I challenge all of you. Love your chakras and don't tune out. [00:16:49] Dr. Willow Brown: Yeah. And one of the things that's so powerful about opening them with sexual energy is it's It's so much more visceral, like it's so much more felt sense. [00:16:58] Dr. Willow Brown: You can actually get, , like tissue releases. You can have, , you know, heart, heart chakra, gasms, you can have solar plexus, gasms, you can have pineal gland, third eye, gasms, , they are a whole different kind of orgasm. You know, Leah always says it's not a sneeze in your groin, you know, it's like, it's more of a full. [00:17:17] Dr. Willow Brown: body experience. And, it's really profound. Some of the I've this year had the most insane and profound pineal gland gasms of my life that Trump, any fucking plant medicine, any other kind of fucking orgasm you could ever have totally stone cold, sober, deep in meditation. And just like, wow. Just talk about getting in touch with the one, you know, and so that's again back to Taoism It's like we're in relationship to this expansion and contraction all the time But one doesn't exist So there's this like perceived duality that we're living in and we're all kind of stuck under this This heavy lens of like, it's binary. [00:18:03] Dr. Willow Brown: It's either this or that. I like it. I don't like it. It's good. It's bad. I should do it. I shouldn't do it. It's just, it's maddening what we put ourselves under, but there's one doesn't exist without the other. So it's both and, you know, it's like, we don't have an experience of dark. If we don't know what light is, we don't have an experience of light if we don't know what dark is. [00:18:23] Dr. Willow Brown: And so when we can really feel the. The relationship that expansion and contraction have with each other, then then we're getting into non duality. Then we're getting into the oneness. Then we're getting into that. Space of infinite wisdom and possibility and consciousness. [00:18:43] Charna Cassell: I'm so tickled by everything that's being said. And then to add just a piece around semantics and chakras, It never ceases to surprise me. Anytime a client is dealing with a particular theme, right, they could be feeling like they're talking all about disempowerment. And then we do body work. [00:19:05] Charna Cassell: And where is it showing up? In their solar plexus, of course, right? Um, So, you know, and it's funny, my dog participates in body work and she will even lay on the table and she'll put her paw or she'll put her little head, she'll, exactly in the place that I'm planning to work and that the client has directed it. [00:19:27] Charna Cassell: it. How magical. [00:19:28] Dr. Willow Brown: Animals are so amazing like that. I have to tell you, I have to pause for a really fun dolphin story. So I was in the Bahamas doing cranial sacral with the dolphins, right? It's like a thing that you can do through, through the cranial sacral world. And, um, I was working with this kid and he was like probably 17 years old and just riddled with acne and so angry. [00:19:49] Dr. Willow Brown: And I just, I mean, I could tell by looking at him, he's just having a lot of problems. His dad drug him there, you know? And, um. And a lot of rage. And I was like, man, your liver is so backed up, you know? And I was just, I just did some work on his liver. I was like, do you know where your liver is? He didn't know anything about his body, where his liver was. [00:20:08] Dr. Willow Brown: And so did a bunch of work on his body before we went and got in the water with the dolphins. And then when we do it, we go and there's like, Five or six different stations. So I am the therapist and then my client is laying in the water. And these are free range dolphins. They can go out into the wild, they can come back into their little sanctuary or whatever. [00:20:27] Dr. Willow Brown: And so this, and they'll go up and basically they'll either send their sonar through the practitioner into the patient's body if it's gonna be too much direct for the patient. Or they'll go right direct into the patient. And this one dolphin just like came up and laid its head right on that kid's right rib cage. [00:20:48] Dr. Willow Brown: And just stayed there for like 40 minutes. None of the other patients got that dolphin's attention. It was pretty amazing. [00:20:55] Leah Piper: Oh my god, I want the link to go to this place. [00:20:57] Dr. Willow Brown: Yeah, animals are just so, they're so in tune like that. Dogs. Dolphins have incredible healing energy. I mean, and we are animals. We have it too. [00:21:09] Dr. Willow Brown: It's just we, we limit ourselves with our, these little prefrontal cortexes. We got to stop doing that. [00:21:16] Charna Cassell: And that's the piece, you know, it's like that, the work with, um, opening your pineal gland. Right. And it's like the amount of what I imagine, I know it's been true for me, but like your intuition has, even though it's probably existing, it probably has increased as a result of doing that work. [00:21:37] Charna Cassell: It's like when you open that, that whole level of flow, You're sensitized to all the information that's in the field between you and other people. I mean, it can be overwhelming. It can be a lot, [00:21:49] Leah Piper: but [00:21:50] Leah Piper: it can be dialed. It can be fine [00:21:52] Leah Piper: tuned. It can become a for each circumstance. Yeah. You know, to get, to find the, the level of coherence that that person's system needs to align itself to. [00:22:04] Leah Piper: I mean, it's profound this type of this energy medicine work, understanding how energy works in our systems, because we are electromagnetic fields. You can't even argue with it anymore. You know? So it's like to, to misplace energy is this woo idea is very faulty. If we can start to understand. sensitivity, then we become an incredible transmitter of wonderful energy to the people in our life that we want to love that we want to impact in a positive way. [00:22:34] Leah Piper: And then it just the impact that it makes for someone who gives Who cares about being a great lover? If you want to be a great lover, you, this is part of the mastery path. And it's really fun because as adults, this is the way we get to play. We've so forgotten that we get to play even though we have responsibilities. [00:22:55] Leah Piper: And I think we just tend to take life so seriously. And this is just like a call and a reminder that even though healing, healing can be playful. We don't always have to heal through misery and catharsis. Oftentimes pleasure can be an incredible path to healing and moving beyond what got stuck. You know, even when you look at the chakras, one of the things that makes it so efficacious and efficient is that it's a fast path. [00:23:21] Leah Piper: You don't have to look through the garbage to throw out the trash. You just have to have the courage to. Find, feel the sensation, own it, take a deep breath, give it a sound, let it move. And that's part of the purification process of moving the stuff that doesn't serve you. And when we don't, The consequence of when we don't take care of our body and do our inner work every place that you see people get sick is also in a chakra. [00:23:53] Leah Piper: Yeah. When you look at the major cancers that disable people, that kill people, or cause them to go through a, an emergency of healing, it's always chakra centers. [00:24:06] Dr. Willow Brown: Mhm. Yeah. Yeah. Breast cancer. [00:24:08] Leah Piper: So there's a correlation [00:24:09] Leah Piper: there that Um, mainstream society hasn't quite gotten hip with yet. [00:24:15] Charna Cassell: Right. You know, something incredibly simple, and I would love, I mean we could get really esoteric and I want to just have tea with you guys and keep talking. [00:24:23] Charna Cassell: Yeah. And I want people who are not as familiar to understand the very simple practices that they can be in around this. So an example is like, um, I had a client who's never stretched before, and I literally was just talking to him about fascia and meridians and showed him some stretches and soft tissue work and introduced him to qigong. [00:24:51] Charna Cassell: And so it's like it can be in these very tangible concrete things. And then I do, you know, energy center clear outs with folks that they can then do on their own. But I would love to hear from both of you regarding concrete practices that people can engage in around this? [00:25:11] Leah Piper: I'll offer a quick one and then hand it off to Willow, and that is sensuality practices, because we may not all be in touch with sensuality, but it's something that you can quickly learn, because we're all in touch with the experience of our senses. [00:25:26] Leah Piper: We've all learned about senses in kindergarten, and so when you are in a sensual environment, sexual experience or a sensual experience. You're having a really hard time getting out of your head. It's like you're ruminating and there's the list, or you're worried about performance, like all the things that derail us in intimacy. [00:25:43] Leah Piper: One of the ways that you can do a quick course correct is just to have a moment and just start to deepen your breath and then pay attention to one sense at a time. What's the sensation on your skin? Can you feel the temperature of the air on your skin? Is there a breeze? Is there heat coming out of the vent? [00:26:01] Leah Piper: And then you're just, is, how do the clothes feel resting on your skin? Is, are the sheets on your skin? And you're just noticing what part of your skin is open to the air? What part of it is covered up? Are you being touched? Can you track the sensation of touch on your skin? And then move into sound. [00:26:20] Leah Piper: What's the sound in the room? Is there a heater on? Is there music? Is there a dog outside the door? Are there kids fighting? And then what's outside, further? Can you hear the traffic? You know, start to pick up sound. And then taste, without any judgment. What's the taste in your mouth? You know, and then, and then are your eyes open? [00:26:41] Leah Piper: Are they closed? If they're closed, what's the color of the light behind your eyelids? And then smell. And so when you start to go, okay, then, because you can't not be present while you're focusing on the senses, that will start to drop you into the present moment, which is where you want to be sexual from if you want the best sexual experiences. [00:27:03] Leah Piper: So that's a really quick hack, and it doesn't have to take a long time to just remember, oh yeah, let me get present. And then you can use those five senses to then curate an intimate experience for you and a partner. It's a beautiful gift you give your partner to think about how do you want the lighting in the room to be, and what kind of smells do you want to create in the space to welcome them, and what libations would you like to have nearby so that you can offer them a sense sip of a yummy beverage or the taste of a piece of fruit. [00:27:33] Leah Piper: And you can start to think about how do I want to bring more beauty to the experience of sexuality. And one of the things I love about Tantra, it is the great beautifier of sex and sensuality is like the pinnacle beautifier. Even if you don't want to, you know, learn some of these ancient mystery school esoteric stuff. [00:27:53] Dr. Willow Brown: Yeah, that's one of the first practices that I give to clients is to do a sensuality awakening session where you go through each one of your senses and you spend one minute on each one of those senses and actually put on a timer and like see what happens. Bend one minute on your nose and one minute on your tongue and one minute on your skin and one minute on your ears. [00:28:12] Dr. Willow Brown: And that, , really is each one of those senses is a portal to presence, which Leah just so beautifully articulated. And so that again is a practice. And it's so fascinating to, , to hear clients report back and say like, well, that's really hard to do. It's just such a testament to how, , Unpracticed. We are at being present with sensation, with sensuality. [00:28:40] Dr. Willow Brown: We all know that sex without sensuality is just fucking monkey sex. It's not that good. It's maybe good exercise to get your heart rate up, but you know, it's, It's just like, there's a lot missing. And so bringing sensuality into a sexual experience, it just completely changes the game. It just completely alters the experience and it's so much more fun. [00:29:03] Dr. Willow Brown: It's so much more enriching and you don't have to be madly in love with the person, you know, and then just bringing sensuality into dinner, you know, it can just make that dinner so much more pleasure and so much more enjoyable. I think we're all just moving really fast. And there's a lot of pressure to go, go, go and achieve, achieve, achieve. [00:29:22] Dr. Willow Brown: We're living in a very young, dominant society. And so we're missing the yin, you know, and the yin is again, we're looking at that expansion contraction. Seeming duality, but the yin according to the Tao is really where, the essence is, where the juices, where the healing is, you know, again, bringing it back to cranial sacral. [00:29:42] Dr. Willow Brown: When someone goes into a still point, when their rhythm isn't moving anymore, and they're in still point, that's when all the healing happens. And still points happen all the time. And so when we're attuned to tuning into energetic, Experiences and fields and what's happening in the room with all these people or what's happening between me and one other person, or just what's happening with me, then we can actually use those moments of stillness to like re plenish ourselves and re source ourselves. [00:30:15] Dr. Willow Brown: I think so many of us are walking around really under resourced and overwhelmed as fuck. And so these Chakras and sensualizing and taking the time to go in through that. portal, that doorway to presence is the quickest and fastest way. And, you know, the sounding, the breathing, taking five minutes, you know, if you wanted to really enhance your practice, you could take five minutes with each chakra, then you're doing like a 40 minute practice. [00:30:47] Dr. Willow Brown: You know, so there's so much that you can do with it. There's so much creativity that you can do and play with it and add some oil, get naked and put some coconut oil on your chakras. What massage a guarantee if you start massaging your solar plexus, you're going to find a lot of tender, sensitive points in there. [00:31:04] Dr. Willow Brown: , what's interesting about the solar plexus is we've got the energy from the lungs. So the emotion of the lungs, which carries grief or courage, , we've got the energy of the kidneys coming from behind the energy of the heart. Each one of these organ systems carries different emotions, positive and negative emotions, and they all come into this. [00:31:24] Dr. Willow Brown: We call it the yellow key. court in Chinese medicine. And so the yellow court is like where a lot of energy can get stuck. And I, I'm really noticing, cause I talked to a lot of women from all different walks of life. And I'm really noticing this, like, just, um, over, arching theme of disempowerment, like not like even in the way that people stand, we slouch, right? [00:31:50] Dr. Willow Brown: We lose our chi right there. We stick our pelvis forward, we slouch our shoulders, and it's from right here. So even just trying this on for size, like See if you can walk around for five minutes with your solar plexus leading the way. Just play with that. Play with your heart chakra leading the way. You know, let every, it's going to bring your whole skeletal system into a line and all that neck and shoulder and hip pain can go away when we start to open up these portals of, of chi and brains of energy and vitality and start to move through life from these places. [00:32:29] Charna Cassell: So good. I love also micro practices and that was kind of what you started with. It's like these little things that And it's also very trauma informed to have it, have there be a timer, you know, to have do something for one minute feels tolerable versus being like, Oh my God, you know, uh, getting lost in a sense could feel really scary, you know, taking more breath in. I once had a client who described feeling like, no, I can't take a deeper breath. I feel like I'm a raindrop hanging on a branch. [00:33:00] Leah Piper: Wow. [00:33:01] Charna Cassell: You know, like that level of vigilance and tension at all times. And so, you know, all of us are like, there's a total continuum of like where we're starting and, you know, our starting place and what we can tolerate and be with. [00:33:16] Charna Cassell: And I love just having these tiny practices that it's like, Oh, just be with that. And then even, you know, even walking with your, with, with your attention on a center, like having your shoulders open just a little bit more, or that solar plexus open just a little bit more. It can be so. Vulnerable can bring up all these old belief systems and memories and feelings of threat and whatever it is. [00:33:44] Charna Cassell: Um, and people don't realize that just shifting, like, where their eyes are on the horizon or how their, you know, how open their ribs are, is war, is, is. You know, it is a healing practice, right? It doesn't have to be huge. Yeah, absolutely. [00:33:59] Leah Piper: How is it? I think it's Michael Singer, uh, wrote The Untethered Soul, and I love this part of his book when he's talking about, you know, living your life open and managing those parts that want to get closed and to simplify it by it's like just one breath. [00:34:16] Leah Piper: Can you just bring one breath that has the essence of open to your heart? You don't have to be wide open. You don't have to like Do all these big opening things. Can you just bring one breath? And I really noticed that if I don't start off when I'm working with somebody, if I don't start off getting them doing something like the complete breath or box breathing, where they're just expanding the length of their inhale, holding their breath for a beat or two. [00:34:41] Leah Piper: And then elongating their exhale, and then eventually can they hold their exhale out for a breath or two before taking the next breath in, so that this belly breathing, by expanding the diaphragm, you're calming the adrenals. If I don't start with that, sometimes I might forget, you get caught up in talking, and then, and then I might not bring it to the middle of the appointment. [00:35:02] Leah Piper: It's a different appointment than when I start right out of the gate. There's something around all that nervous energy, all that adrenaline that's being pumped by the adrenals that wants to kind of create a stress state as you're starting to open yourself into doing a process, into making those steps towards transformation. [00:35:23] Leah Piper: It can be too much. at a time. To just have one thing to concentrate on so that your cortisol levels can drop, you can get back to the present moment, your capacity then becomes greater for you to take your next step into where it is you want to go and who you want to be. Yeah, I like these short little bites. [00:35:43] Dr. Willow Brown: Yeah, yeah, it's, I love what you're bringing up right now, Leah. It's so important because it's, it's dropping someone out of a, A sympathetic state and, you know, most people are living in sympathetic dominance where they're in fight or flight all the time. Like every little thing is, ah, you know, and it's, it's a hard way to live. [00:36:04] Dr. Willow Brown: It's what, that's why anxiety levels are so high and, you know, everyone, every a struggle. Thing is so overwhelming. I mean, I have my phone on silent almost all the time because I know every little ping is like too much for my nervous system. So it's like little things like that. How do you need to curate your devices and your, your world around you so that your nervous system can drop into that rest and digest parasympathetic state. [00:36:31] Dr. Willow Brown: That's the more Yin state. And that's where we're more receptive. So Leah's beautiful example of like, if I, if I drop someone into receptivity at the start of a session versus halfway through, it's a completely different experience for them. And as practitioners, And we have to come with that ability and that alive in our nervous systems. [00:36:56] Dr. Willow Brown: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Because we get stressed out too. [00:37:01] Charna Cassell: Absolutely. I know that we were just talking about like micro small practices and I want to do a leap because I feel like this is so important to talk about to the sacred spot practice that you were in Leah. Sharing some about what that is, how it was significant in relation to your healing, how you use that as a, you know, like your own practice, and then also how someone might either work with you or take a course at Source Tantra, or what would be the steps towards starting that kind of practice for themselves? [00:37:38] Leah Piper: Great. Yeah. So when I stumbled into all this work, you know, I really thought I was just, I just wanted to understand how God and sex came together. Um, grew up in a Pentecostal born again, Christian household, then got baptized into Catholicism, had to go to Catholic school. And then my parents returned to their hippie ways and everything kind of became pagan at that point. [00:37:58] Leah Piper: So it was very religiously rich and quite confusing, , with a lot of shame, guilt, and fear as the, as the main condition sensations in my body compounded by, , sexual trauma, childhood, sexual trauma, just to give you all background. And so when I went to my first Tantra seminar, I thought, Oh, great. [00:38:16] Leah Piper: I'm going to learn about this. I know there's something more to sex and I really want to know what that is. And I don't feel like I've had a good model for this. And I just don't believe in the God that says this should be ashamed of. It's just not coherent for me. And I didn't realize when I started to learn this, that I was going to be confronted with this. [00:38:34] Leah Piper: the big secret in my system, which was this sexual abuse stuff. And it was, it was really scary to encounter that, but there was something else in my spirit and my soul compelling me to face it. And it was through this process of using sacred spot massage that I was able to really come to terms with the, with the fear that I felt, um, and then the shame that I felt. [00:39:00] Leah Piper: And then the space that got created for me to deeply, deeply heal, and then for my whole belief system to change as a result, so that I was no longer the girl who was sexually abused as a child. I was the girl who loved immensely. and went through an experience of great pain, but I wasn't that girl anymore. [00:39:24] Leah Piper: It was like suddenly my identity didn't have to be, I wasn't the abused girl, I was just the girl who once had this experience. And, and so it shifted everything. To be able to step out of that victim, um, archetype really freed me for being more bold, for being more brave, and to help me usher other people through a process. [00:39:45] Leah Piper: That was similar. So as I started to touch myself more intimately, , when I first learned about Sacred Spot, I was watching all these couples in this class come together. And I remember feeling so envious because they had a partner that they already trusted that they could do this intimate thing with. [00:40:00] Leah Piper: And I didn't have a partner, so what was I going to do? so I, I watched what was happening with the, with the And then I thought, oh man, I can do this on myself until I've got a partner. And so I gathered all the information from this course, at the time it was with Source Tantra, and I learned these ways to touch myself more consciously. [00:40:20] Leah Piper: So I got to learn about the chakras. Like, if I wanted someone else to touch my chakras in a way that would help heal me, how do I do that to myself? Because we learned these things about circuitry and how you could get your body to talk to other parts of your body. And so one of the things I knew I didn't have a lot of resources for was the experience of forgiveness. [00:40:41] Leah Piper: I couldn't draw on my own body to work on forgiveness, but I knew that forgiveness was a part of the everything. So I just imagined that I could breathe forgiveness into my system. I could put a hand on one chakra and put a hand on another chakra, so I'd put a hand on my heart and I would cup my vulva because I wanted to feel a connection between my heart and my vulva. [00:41:04] Leah Piper: I wanted sex to be connected to love. I didn't want it to be this thing that I did to pretend I was sexually liberated but didn't need, because that was the game I was playing outside in the world, getting drunk and, Going to bars and kind of having a good time, but sometimes not remembering it. And then I'd have to feel all that shame. [00:41:23] Leah Piper: It was like, I knew I needed to forgive the part of me that was hurting me and didn't know how to stop. And then I had to further figure out how to forgive the perpetrators in my life. The God that I grew up with, who I felt like lied to me, how to forgive my parents for not, Stopping the chaos from happening. [00:41:46] Leah Piper: How to forgive the church that was the big bad guy in the story. So like forgiveness was such a huge thing. So I would put a hand on my heart. I'd put a hand on my vulva and I would breathe forgiveness in from the earth. And then I would just aim the forgiveness wherever it made sense in my body. I've, I aimed it to my belly that felt powerless, that felt like a kid who was powerless to ask for help. [00:42:09] Leah Piper: I aimed that forgiveness to my throat for the part of me that didn't know how to ask for help, that felt like there was no voice. for anything to change. I aimed that forgiveness to my brow center so that I could heal my mind from the chaos and the rumination and, and the voice, that critical voice that said I was worthless, I was unlovable, that if anyone saw the real me, they would see I was trash. [00:42:37] Leah Piper: I mean, this was the critical voice that I was hearing all the time. And it got to the point that it was so loud that if I didn't do something about it, I thought I'd hurt myself. And so I would use like this forgiveness, breathing it up, putting it in my hands and then placing it along my body. And then I would start to massage my body with it. [00:42:54] Leah Piper: So I knew that things were happening because , I would have been able to love myself a lot earlier if the Cosmo tests worked, if watching Oprah worked, it wasn't working. So I learned that self love was an emotional, physical, spiritual, And sexual experience. I had to put the self love that I was so good at giving to everyone else in my life. [00:43:16] Leah Piper: I was so good at loving people and taking care of people and being there for people. I had to figure out a way to do that to my own nervous system. And so as I started to learn the sacred spot practice, I went, okay. I'm more than just sex. I have these sexual parts, but I'm storing my sexual wounding in my inner thighs, in my inner groin, in my pubic mons, in my labia, in my clitoris. [00:43:41] Leah Piper: All growing up, I would get this click, click, click feeling in my clitoris that told me Get out of there. I would be in, I would be getting close to an orgasm. I'd be messing around with somebody and then Fight flight came in and I had to get out of there and the signal was a clicking in my clitoris that said you're in Danger, and so it was like wow, here's that clicking feeling. [00:44:03] Leah Piper: Can I be present? Can I breathe through the fear? What would the sound of the fear? sound like If I could give it a voice. And so that was one area I worked on. Then there was another little, I'd find these what I would call hotspots or gnarly bits. And they feel like little hot pockets. Sometimes they feel a little swollen. [00:44:23] Leah Piper: Sometimes they feel like, a, like it's a hard nodule underneath the tissue. So I would be looking for hotspots along my labia, along the inner groin, along the pubic mount, along the perineum, and then inside all along the vaginal cavity. And then lastly. I would start to go up towards the G spot and the sacred spot. [00:44:42] Leah Piper: And again, I'd be looking for hotspots. And all the while it wasn't so much that I was trying to turn myself on, though I was very open to it. I was more just going, what's happening? Who am I? What do I need to see? I'm really here. I want to know myself. I want to hear you, Yoni. And I would just tell my Yoni, which is the name we use for the G, for the female genitalia and Tantra, like, I'm listening. [00:45:06] Leah Piper: I'm really, really listening. Tell me everything I need to know. I will give you a voice. And so one of the practices is you're breathing, you go down, you feel for sensation, and then you give that sensation of voice, whatever it is. You don't know what the sound is. [00:45:21] Leah Piper: So you have to make it up. And we would start with like any vowel hard or soft. And that always feels goofy. It feels very contrived. Sometimes you're trying to sound for the first time and you just feel Stupid, but that's the learning curve. So if I could drop that, then it was like, okay, uh, la, la, la, la, la, la. [00:45:39] Leah Piper: You know, I'm just until I could find the right pitch and frequency that matched that sensation. And I just kept on giving myself the courage to just, just do it. Leah, go on an experiment. Who cares if it doesn't work? And I was freeing up like there. My, my Yoni had this incredible story to tell. She was the one that was there for all of it. [00:46:02] Leah Piper: Even when I was pretending to be asleep, even when I was blacked out drunk. So I got to actually like really be in great communion with my system and be really there for what I needed to know about this journey that I was on. And in so doing, there were tears and there was curiosity and there was sweetness. [00:46:22] Leah Piper: There was also a lot of numbness. There were sensations that felt like broken glass. There were sensations that felt like burning. Can I make the sound of burning? What is burning sound like? And so I would just take a look at each sensation and I would just treat it as a teacher. I bow to the feet of this teacher. [00:46:37] Leah Piper: Burning. Tell me what I need to know. Numbness. Tell me what I need to know. Pleasure. Tell me what I need to know. And what I noticed is that whenever I had the courage to make the sound of the sensation, it would lift pretty quickly because sound has pitch and frequency. It gets measurable and you can actually, that's how the blocks were moving out. [00:46:54] Leah Piper: And then I got to discover, well, what's underneath that. And oftentimes it would start with numbness. And then I'd have a feeling of grief that felt kind of like a tender bruise, and then would come a burning which felt like rage, and then would come tingling which felt kind of anticipatory, and then would come like more full blossoming sense of pleasure. [00:47:15] Leah Piper: Or peace. Sometimes I would get visions and there would be like still water. I'd get these visions of like a smooth rock. And I'm like curled up in the fetal position. I'm in this dark cave, but I'm peaceful. And you know, other times I felt like I could feel women from these countries I'd never been to before. [00:47:33] Leah Piper: And I was connected to them viscerally somehow. And other times I felt connected to like the Leah that was 20 years older than I was then. Who's just rooting for me and I could ask her like, what do I need to know that you know now? Or I could go in and I could see little Leah at five and six years old. [00:47:50] Leah Piper: And I could remember the closet I'm hand I'm hiding in or being under the bed. Or I can remember being in the lake when I was being molested that time. And like, and I could get these things and I could bring my present day, Leah, who's listening. to the little Leah who needs me to get her. And so I was going through this incredible, I did this for a year, three days a week for a year. [00:48:12] Leah Piper: I did a half hour to 45 minute practice in the bathtub where I was discovering my body and I made sure to never leave out my genitals in the exploration. And the genitals had the most information for me, which made sense due to my traumatic experiences. So to say a little bit more about the sacred spot and what I was discovering as a result of touching this specific area is that the sacred spot and the G spot are, are found in similar places, but they have different functions. [00:48:42] Leah Piper: The G spot is the also known as the female prostate gland, also known as the urethral sponge. We know a lot more about it today than we did when I was learning about it 20 years ago, but it's the erectile tissue. It fills with blood, it engorges when you massage it. It eventually with presence and repeatability can offer you a lot of really incredible, , orgasms such as the vaginal orgasms, and those are connected to various, nerves. [00:49:06] Leah Piper: So we have a scientific understanding of how our anatomy works with this particular part of the tissue. And I could get into that another podcast, but this area psychologically of the sacred spot found along the G spot tissue is like an, it's like an acupuncture meridian and it carries the psyche of the chakra itself. [00:49:25] Leah Piper: So what's so beautiful about the sacred spot is because it represents the center of the chakra, it's one of the only chakras that you can actually go in, go inside and touch the center of. You cannot go inside and touch the center of your heart chakra. You cannot go inside and touch the center of your crown chakra or your sixth chakra. [00:49:46] Leah Piper: There's only a couple of chakras that you can actually touch the center of, which is why, Volvo owners tend to have massive experiences when they start to do this type of somatic work to this part of the body. So not only does it have an incredible amount of pleasure significance, but then all the healing. [00:50:06] Leah Piper: that one usually has to traverse before they get to the really big cosmic experiences. Not all the time. What I do notice at people's first times working ritualistically, which is different than just sexually, but ritualistically with this kind of healing modality, is they usually have a pretty good first experience. [00:50:27] Leah Piper: And then some of the experiences after that can get a little crunchy. And then if you stay with it, ooh, do they get big and they start to really blossom. So, when it's a sacred spot ritual, You have one giver, one receiver, unless you're doing it to yourself and there's a ritualizing process of it where you set intentions and you, again, you're doing all this breathing, you're paying attention, lots of deep presents. [00:50:51] Leah Piper: When you sexualize it, that means sacred spot just becomes a part of your foreplay and you're sexing, which is really fun and wonderful, but there's two ways of holding it and and that's significant to know. [00:51:05] Charna Cassell: Thank you so much for sharing all of that. There's um, the beauty of what that level of commitment and modeling is. [00:51:13] Charna Cassell: It's like being that present, rebuilding trust with that young part that was so abandoned and And then the, the forgiveness piece. I would love Willow for you to follow up with this because the way I heard it is I was thinking about it as a Qigong practice, right? It's like, you know when you do a Qigong practice and then you take your hands at the end and you hold it and you're Dante or your heart center, it's like you're bringing, and the idea, what I love about that practice is so often when there's trauma, people can't imagine. [00:51:50] Charna Cassell: something. I can't imagine safety. I can't imagine. It's like pleasure because the wires get crossed and it's just like you think about pleasure and you just feel panicked. And so to even consider like, okay, I don't know what that feels like, but it's in the field and I can, I can access something that I can't imagine because it is Exists somewhere [00:52:14] Charna Cassell: and [00:52:14] Charna Cassell: then gathering it the way you would gather, you know, it's like energy from the stars, energy from the earth or whatever, and then bringing it to your body. [00:52:22] Charna Cassell: It's just exquisite. So I'd love that you dedicated. You're so dedicated to yourself and your little ones. [00:52:29] Dr. Willow Brown: Leah's journey with her sacred spot healing that year that she spent in the devotion that she gave to herself is really what it takes to heal at that level, especially from sexual trauma, especially from an early age. [00:52:47] Dr. Willow Brown: And it's so worth it. It's so worth it, you know, and, and it, the, you know, the way that she went into the fire, she went into the glass, she went into the numbness instead of getting, trying to get away from it. We usually, if we feel something unpleasant, especially in sex, we move away from it. [00:53:08] Dr. Willow Brown: We want to fix it. We want to get rid of it. As soon as it's gone, then I'll be happy. Then I'll be at peace. But those are the, the morsels that hold all the medicine for you. That's where the medicine is, is in those. Uh, you know, dark or unpleasant experiences. Light is born from that place, from that darkness. [00:53:30] Dr. Willow Brown: There's that, you know, expansion contraction again. And so the way that she just committed to no matter what open to pleasure, sure, I'm open to it, but whatever I find in my, my energy centers, including my second and my root. I am going to be present with that. I'm going to make that sound. I'm going to breathe into that. [00:53:51] Dr. Willow Brown: And, you know, I do a lot of pelvic floor work with women where I am up in women's vajayjays all the time. And, and I tell you what, I mean, this is the second book that I'm going to write is called The Vagina Stories from Within because you cannot. Imagine the stories that come. They cannot be coming from the prefrontal cortex. [00:54:14] Dr. Willow Brown: These stories, they can't be coming from the heart. Like there's a different story. There's a different something that you're Yoni wants you to know that you're Yoni really has been taught. screaming and dying for you to listen to her. And so when you go in and you really start to listen and the sacred spot point is, it really does feel like an acupuncture point. [00:54:36] Dr. Willow Brown: So if you're not adept at looking for acupuncture points, I'll give you a little quick tutorial. If you take three fingers and you lay them across your top of your wrist, crease right there, right at the top of your top finger. There's a little divot. That's an easy one to feel. And so you can feel that. [00:54:51] Dr. Willow Brown: So acupuncture points are like mini chakras along these channels or pathways in your body in Tantra. We call them Nadi's and Taoism. We call them meridians. It doesn't matter. They're just energy pathways, just like the earth has. streams and rivers and valleys. We've got all that in our body as well. And so the sacred spot point is a really, really powerful, , acupuncture point as well, although it's not recognized by Chinese medicine as an acupuncture point, but it is, um, like this incredible little, like a chakra that's very, very. [00:55:29] Dr. Willow Brown: deeply connected to the heart. It's almost like a direct line to the heart. [00:55:32] Leah Piper: Willow was saying that there is a direct, it's almost like there's a direct access point between that sacred spot point that, that acupuncture or acupressure point that goes up to the heart. [00:55:42] Leah Piper: And I was just commenting that the nerve plexuses that runs through that G spot tissue is also the vagus nerve and the vagus nerve goes right through the heart. So yes, it just, it all correlates. [00:55:54] Dr. Willow Brown: Yeah, and the vagus nerve also goes really right through the throat. So that sounding that you're doing when you're on that point is part of the, the releasing and the connection through these chakras that we've been speaking about. [00:56:08] Dr. Willow Brown: And it's so powerful to awaken this point. A lot of times when you go in and and touch someone's sacred spot for the first time, they might feel nothing at all. It might be painful, they might get really emotional, like all kinds of things are, are potential to come up. , but regardless of whatever it is, , you know, breathing and sounding and bringing more energy and more frequency and vibration to it is, is going to be the thing that awakens it. [00:56:38] Dr. Willow Brown: And, you know, you're, you're highlighting of Leah's, Forgiveness piece around all of her, you know, sexual trauma that she went through as a young child and for a lot of her life and the healing and the shame that came around it. It's like Forgiveness is the antidote to shame. [00:56:56] Dr. Willow Brown: And this sacred spot point is almost like the physical point in your body where you can make that transition happen and the connection to the heart. [00:57:06] Leah Piper: And if I can just add, like, I think it's important for those that are listening to know that I actually have a very low pain tolerance. I hate being uncomfortable. [00:57:15] Leah Piper: I'm a cozy girl. , and so to get me through being present to the things that felt like ics, I wanted to feel yum. I had so many ics and I, I wanted to go, Okay, my job is not to just suffer through this experience as I show up for these ics. My job is to give it five seconds. Can I feel this owie for five seconds? [00:57:40] Leah Piper: And if I hit, if after five seconds, I can't tolerate it, I get to go to somewhere else. And then I go to a different point. And, and then I learn to go, Oh, there's a pleasure spot. I'm gonna build a highway. [00:57:51] Leah Piper: Between an ick and pleasure. So I would caress a yum, and then I would paint it over to a yuck. And then I would hold the yuck and feel the yuck and make a sound. [00:58:01] Leah Piper: Then I'd go back to the yum, and I'd paint a highway back to the yuck. And that really helped me build my capacity to tolerate pleasure. The scary sensations, the shameful sensations, the eww, this feels so gross feelings. Because it, it was, the part of this is hard to feel and that's how I got through it. [00:58:23] Leah Piper: It wasn't like I was just some major courageous person. I had to have a backup plan. [00:58:29] Leah Piper: Yeah. [00:58:30] Charna Cassell: What I don't know is how much did, how much trauma healing work had you done or did you know about because None. Because what you were doing was you were titrating, right? Yeah. You were feeling a resource part or a pleasurable part in your body and then you were being able to like go back to the, the hard thing, but then you would, you would know that this resource was there. [00:58:50] Charna Cassell: And so [00:58:51] Leah Piper: Yeah. [00:58:51] Charna Cassell: What I want to underscore there is just, we are Are brilliant beings and we have knowledge that we were not conscious of and our body knows how to heal and so I also imagine that you were doing this work for Many, whether timelines, lifetimes, like there's a lot there. So you were drawing on wisdom that was bigger than you in this lifetime. [00:59:13] Leah Piper: Yeah. It was like, there was a part of my subconscious that was definitely looking out for me. And I was a part of a community of people who were really helping me raise my own consciousness and were rooting for me and were giving me some of the tools and the methods and the practices to go on this path of self discovery. [00:59:31] Leah Piper: Right. And, and in the preceding years. I started to do this practice with other people. I, I, my experience was that I really needed three ways of receiving the Sacred Spot Massage. One was having the masculine stand in for me, providing me with this massage, standing in for all men, allowing me to unpack some of the stuff that had to do with the masculine, and they stayed present with their love no matter what came out of me. [00:59:59] Leah Piper: And what a huge gift. It was a part of their ability to stay there and stay present with me that helped me unlock a part of my essence. And then to have the feminine do the same thing, receiving sacred spot massage from the feminine, where they didn't want anything. Their ego wasn't involved, right? Their hands are smaller, their touch is so different. [01:00:19] Leah Piper: To be able to have that helped heal a part of the healing I needed that had to do with women. And, and then those women helped me unlock a part of my essential self. But there was this one thing around self love and I, I couldn't give that job to anyone else. And so I loved that. That sacred spot was finally the answer to the big. [01:00:37] Leah Piper: How do you love yourself? , conundrum. And for those of you who are curious, if this is inspiring to you and you want to know, well, how do I go on a journey and figure out how to do this? Willow and I have a, um, an on on demand course, that's a self study course, and it comes with all kinds of, it comes with a private session with both of us. [01:00:56] Leah Piper: That's a part of the package. It's got multiple modules and tutorials. We'll re break down. exactly how to create and curate rituals for yourself that allow you to get in touch with something like sacred spot massage or how to start to relax and open your cervix and how to be there for yourself emotionally and how to introduce us to a partner and what some of these um, why, why is it that these ancient mystery school societies have this information that us as modern day people can really explore and take advantage of, even though we only have bits and pieces of it. [01:01:31] Leah Piper: Combined with what we know through modern science now, and all the incredible work that therapists and researchers and authors have been doing for the last 10 to 20 years, we're living in a really exciting time where our sexual wellness gets to thrive, if we choose to investigate it. [01:01:49] Charna Cassell: Truly, truly. Thank you so much. [01:01:51] Charna Cassell: Is there anything else like, uh, there's this course, are there any other courses or offerings that you have that you'd like to share? [01:01:58] Dr. Willow Brown: We've got so many courses actually. There's the, , you know, the sacred spot and the, the, G Spot So exploring those, , there's like the anatomy of arousal, understanding all the different parts of your vulva and the nerve pathways that Leah has been sort of alluding to. [01:02:17] Dr. Willow Brown: So there's, it's, there's so much to learn about your body. , women's anatomy of arousal. If you have not read that yet, highly recommend that. Sherry Winston, she's been on our podcast a couple of times now as well. So you can check out those episodes. Thanks. [01:02:31] Leah Piper: We just completed a new program, , which is all about going on an adventure. [01:02:36] Leah Piper: It's totally free, where, , we call this X Ray Imagine Choose Your Own Adventure. And you get to look at three different rooms. In sort of this, into this, the heart, this castle of the heart as we like to describe it. And you can choose if you want to learn about overcoming sexual obstacles, if you want to learn more about intimacy and communication, or if you want to learn about sexual healing, you can pick a room and there's, you know, usually three to four tutorials in every adventure that you can get started with right away. [01:03:05] Leah Piper: And we'd be happy to give that to your audience as a free gift. [01:03:08] [01:03:08] Dr. Willow Brown: Another option too, for people is to go to. Source Tantra, Beginners Weekend you can go with a partner, you can go on your own. , that's a little bit more of a, of a commitment and a brave step. , it's great. It's a great step. [01:03:24] Dr. Willow Brown: If you feel ready for it, you alluded to earlier, Charna, um, just that we're all on different parts, parts of the spectrum of our, our sexual healing. And so it's really about meeting yourself where you're at. And choosing the next right step to, , your evolution and not getting too far ahead of yourself and not getting down on yourself for not being further ahead. [01:03:47] Dr. Willow Brown: This is something that we never learned growing up. We didn't learn it as we were coming of age. Nobody taught us. And so, you know, like Leah was saying, we're at a period in time now where there's, there's so much information and there's so much resource out there. And, you know, we are here for you as well. [01:04:07] Dr. Willow Brown: We're here for your sexual expansion and evolution and healing. So you can simply reach out to us as an option as well and have a conversation with us or get some hands on work with one of us. [01:04:18] Charna Cassell: And you're in Santa Cruz, is that right, Leah? [01:04:21] Dr. Willow Brown: Yeah, I'm kind of all over, uh, California these days, yeah. [01:04:24] Charna Cassell: Okay. [01:04:25] Charna Cassell: Yeah, I'm in [01:04:26] Dr. Willow Brown: Sacramento. [01:04:27] Charna Cassell: Okay. Okay, great. So California folks, lucky ducks. [01:04:32] Dr. Willow Brown: Or if you're in Greece, I'm here now. I'm also in New York right now. [01:04:36] Charna Cassell: Amazing. No, that's great. That's, that's great. And, you know, I've worked with people where we do sessions online and then they come for intensives. Yeah. To my home in Oakland. [01:04:47] Charna Cassell: And so I imagine you're available for that as well. Yeah, yeah, we both do intensives and [01:04:53] Leah Piper: I also want to invite everyone to go check out Charna's episode on the Sex Reimagined podcast. I just added the link to the chat and it's episode 88 y'all. She is so good. We had so much fun. [01:05:05] Dr. Willow Brown: That was a great episode. [01:05:07] Dr. Willow Brown: Yeah. [01:05:07] Charna Cassell: Thank you. Please say, where people can find you, like your URL. It'll all be in the in the notes, but also just audibly. [01:05:16] Leah Piper: Sure. So, um, you can find us at sexreimagined. com and you can find me at moreloveworks. com and you can find Dr. Willow at drwillowbrown. com. [01:05:28] Charna Cassell: Awesome. Oh my gosh. I adore you and I don't really know you. [01:05:33] Charna Cassell: And so I would love to, we need to have tea sometimes. [01:05:37] Leah Piper: We do. We do. We all live in the same state. We're all about like an hour and a half or less from each other. We just need to do it. [01:05:43] Dr. Willow Brown: We're going to come hang out in your garden. You told, last time you told us about your garden, so we still, it's still on my radar. [01:05:49] Charna Cassell: You are so welcome to do that. I love it. And I, you know, just like the work that you do as it connects to nature. I feel like my garden is my constant teacher and I get all the metaphors in there that just feels so healing. So have an amazing trip, Willow. And thank you so much, Leah. You're welcome. Thanks so much, Charna. [01:06:09] Charna Cassell: Bye bye. [01:06:11] Charna Cassell: Thank you for joining us. If you found this information useful, please like, rate, review and share it with people that you think it would benefit. , if you want to stay connected to me, you can find us at laid open podcast, L A I D P O D C A S T. , on , Instagram, and Facebook. And you can also, , find me on my website, info at passionate life. [01:06:38] Charna Cassell: If you want to send me an email or passionate life. org and charna cassell. com. If you want to sign up for my newsletter, you hear about courses I'm offering and all the latest and read my blog. This has been Laid Open Podcast with your host Charna Cassell. Until next time, may this podcast connect you to new resources for your own healing. [01:07:01] Charna Cassell: Lots of love.