Breakup and Breakthrough – Transcript
Historically, I have used my breakups very productively. I have never really been a fast-rebound kind of person because I like to take my time and take stock. I want to know what happened and really understand it so that I don’t have to repeat the same mistakes again.
I can look back in any relationship and see the places where I goofed up. Where I wasn’t honest enough, I didn’t lay a strong enough boundary, or maybe I needed to walk away earlier. I ask the questions of myself, and I try and identify what motivated my actions or lack thereof.
I timeout myself, and I don’t set any goals of how long I will be. I just know that I will know when I know, and I always do. I tend to stay pretty celibate during these times—pretty celibate [laughs]—and my philosophy is I won’t go out of my way to look for love, but I also don’t go out of my way to avoid it.
If someone interesting comes along, I will check them out or maybe indulge a moment or two of just enjoying the energetic interplay of a person, but unless it’s a total yes, I let it fade away and stay focused on me.
For me, there are several stages in navigating conscious breakups. I will say that if both people can consciously break up together, it is an utterly beautiful and enlightening experience. But that is a rare one. You are usually left to consciously break up on your own.
Here is my guide to breaking up, breaking through, and using this time to uplevel not just your love life, but every part of your life.
The first stage, I would say, is active grieving. Learning to grieve well was one of the most significant tools I picked up on my personal growth journey. We live in a society of distractions, denial, and avoidance. Most people are doing their very best to avoid pain. Through television, food, alcohol, drugs, and addictive thought patterns, they are perpetually trying to avoid the deep stuff in their lives.
The entire culture reinforces and even glamorizes this as a lifestyle. Party hard, forget about tomorrow, and essentially dissociate from the present moment.
Well, all of my work, especially as it pertains to this, is about confronting our deepest issues head-on. You may have heard me use the term “demon hunting,” and this is the idea that instead of waiting for your demons or your blind spots to surprise you in the night or jump around the next corner and attack you, you go looking for them.
A beautiful example of this is a tribe in Malaysia called the Senoi. They’re known as a dreaming tribe. Meaning that they really pay attention to and look to their dreams for guidance and prophesy and direction in their lives.
They’re instructed that in their dreams, if they’re ever being chased by an adversary or a demon or what have you, they are to train themselves to turn around and confront or slay that demon, and then, after its demise or after they have been victorious, to ask it for a gift. There is some kind of wisdom or information it has within it.
Let’s apply this idea to grieving. We recognize that in order for us to truly heal and to reopen ourselves and our hearts at a later stage in our lives, we need to properly grieve. What is properly grieve?
Well, this means to give plenty of time, space, respect, and honor to our own individual processes of grieving. It means that we encourage and welcome crying and sadness and even some degree of immobilization to the extent that we can fit it into our lives, i.e., we don’t have to go to work that day if we’re in the middle of a big grief period.
We deliberately put aside habits that help us gloss over deep feelings. As I said, like drugs or alcohol or television, the things that help us to suppress and numb.
Instead, we commit to allowing ourselves to be in a raw, open, and broken state. Then you do whatever helps you to bring out those feelings. That may mean watching sad movies that make you cry or listening to a particular song that evokes tears; that’s one of my favorite ways to do it.
So do it. Listen to the song 50 times and cry your motherfucking heart out. Scream and wail. Go out into the woods for lots of walks if being alone out there makes you feel more comfortable to cry. Arrange to have time alone where you can cry with abandon.
So cry until you don’t have any tears left. When you look, they just aren’t there anymore. When you play that sad song, the tears just don’t come. That’s when you know that you have finished the active, grieving stage.
Second stage, I would say, is the “What are my patterns?” stage. Now it’s time to self-assess.
A phrase I like to use in relationship work is 150%. This means that if I decided to take not just 50 or even 100, but 150% responsibility for everything that happened in my relationship, then where did I go wrong? How did I contribute to its demise? Was I not truthful enough? Did I hide behind half-truths? Did I not fully communicate my needs or my love? Did I not set strong enough boundaries around things that I wouldn’t accept? Did I hold back my love?
So get to work. Write all of these things down, journal on them so that you can flesh them out and understand where your blind spots are and where your patterns are. You may want to enlist a coach or counselor to help you with this. Their main job is to help you validate your own intuition and aid you in seeing your blind spots, then get clear on what you could have done instead.
This exercise isn’t about throwing in blame and self-flagellation. We all tend to have places we act and react that are born out of past trauma and hurt and defensiveness and self-protection. It’s usually unconscious.
What we’re aiming to do here is to make the unconscious conscious. These tend to be the patterns that we replay over and over again in relationship. The ways in which we don’t let ourselves be too exposed or vulnerable and in which we sabotage the relationship.
We want to bring all of this stuff out into the open so we can be aware of it and then change it, if we’re ready to change it. Meaning, if you created these defense mechanisms to protect yourself, are you now ready to release them? Why? How? How can you prepare yourself to go forward and dare to be more vulnerable and more honest? What can you do?
This is where my salons come in. They are designed for people to do this deep-dive work to find the patterns they didn’t even consciously know they had and then to transform them.
All of my salons do this. They give you the tools to figure out what you’ve been doing and then change it.
Stage three is feng shui. I talk about having an intimacy quotient, or your IQ. Whatever level you are vibrating at is the level at which you will attract another person. If you weren’t happy with the quality of what you attracted previously, then you need to up your own vibration in order to get to the next level in a partner.
Some common reframes I hear from single and bruised people would be, “But there aren’t any conscious men out there.” “I can’t meet a woman who matches me.” “Most guys are selfish assholes.” And so on and on and on.
No, you are the problem. These people are just reflections of your own unresolved issues and the places where you are still wildly unconscious. Like attracts like. Intimacy quotient attracts similar IQ. You wouldn’t have attracted and been with these people if they were that far out of your range. You would’ve simply rejected them from the start.
So the work is for you to take the information you’ve gleaned from the previous stage of your self-assessment and put it to work. What needs to change about you and your life that puts you into truer alignment with who you really are?
For example, are you working at a job that you hate that’s really about paying the bills, but it’s not a true expression of your gifts and your dharma in the world? If so, this is a place where you are out of alignment.
The more areas you have in your life where you are out of alignment, the more you are going to attract someone who is too. Conversely, the more places where you are in alignment, the more likely you are to attract someone who is also living closer to their highest potential. It’s science! Metaphysical science.
I have talked about how, during my last single period, I did a massive life overhaul. There was one area in particular in my life where I was not in total alignment, and I knew that it was serving as a barricade for me to have truer and deeper sustaining love.
I took a full timeout, two and a half years. I didn’t declare official celibacy, but I did declare that I wasn’t going to be actively seeking a partner in any way until I felt like I had this part of my life sorted out, and it took two and a half years.
Then I knew. I knew I was ready, and it was like this unavailable sign that I’d been wearing for the last two and a half years suddenly switched and lit up to say available. Then, within one week, I met three serious, long-term, quality contenders.
Think 150% responsibility. What can you do to change, release, transform, let go of, and create in your life so that it is a living reflection of who you are in your highest self? You don’t have to be perfect. Nobody is, but you have to be close enough. [Laughs]
If you’re not where you think is even close enough, being in motion is enough. The idea is you’re working on it, taking active steps to get there as an ongoing journey, and then you are able to change your vibration enough and will change the kind of person that you are attracting in.
Stage four is scheduling happiness and attracting the new.
Now you start adding things in. Previously, you’ve been removing things that didn’t belong, so the question now is, what brings you joy? What are some of the secret dreams you have shelved away for ages? Or that you’ve even forgotten about? Pull all of these things out and begin implementing them in your life.
When I was emerging out of that two-and-a-half-year period, I began sliding things in that were bucket-listy. I set up proper vacations. I took a surf trip to a remote island. I traveled to some places that I’ve been wanting to visit for years, which I was super excited about.
The cultivation of this deep joy and bliss and excitement attracts a similar vibration. These things are the essence of you. They are you engaging in what makes you feel most excited and alive. Voilà! You are going to draw in people who are living in the same place in their lives.
In the generation of happiness category, I also include—surprise, surprise—self-pleasure and cultivation of your sexual energy. I am always talking about how your sexual energy is your life-force energy, the energy that creates new life. It is massively helpful to transition you through your breakup and into a breakthrough.
In my Solo Sex Date podcast, I explain exactly how to use self-pleasuring consciously to harvest your sexual energy and as a creative force in your life through my meditate/masturbate/create technique. In fact, I came up with the sequence during the pivotal breakup that I referred to earlier.
This can be done throughout all the stages we’ve been talking about. In the active grieving stage, deep orgasms help facilitate intense emotional release and the tears that we are looking for. And as you move through the other stages, your sexual energy is a catalyst for change and growth. It propels you into new places in your life and yourself, helping you to forge the new life you want from your deepest, truest self.
So that’s it in a nutshell. The Anami formula for breaking up and breaking through. As I said, this is one of the best times to work on yourself in between relationships. You can use the information, the feedback from your last relationship, and the pain of that to help you look truthfully at yourself. Use your breakup as an impetus and inspiration.
If there is one positive use of pain, it is in telling us that something is wrong, and it lets us know where we need to place our attention in order to heal.
Breakups are the ultimate for this. When your heart is cracked open, you are more pliable and open to change. Use this time productively and wisely. To guide you through the process of breaking up and through, I have created the Breakup Cleanse, which you can find in our Anami Alchemia Online Shop.
The Breakup Cleanse is a 30-day program that combines our herbal medicines, crystal elixirs, and 30 days of email inspiration and actions for you to take. It includes our Happy Endings herbal sex nectar tincture, which has a herb in it that’s called happiness bark. This has long been used in traditional Chinese medicine as a mood elevator and to help release blocked emotions. It is commonly prescribed as a natural antianxiety and mood-boosting remedy.
It is thought to enhance all elements of neurotransmitter function, and it’s referred to amongst herbalists as the “breakup herb”—can you believe that—for its ability to help one process after a loss of love. I have spoken to herbalists who actually give this to people at the end of relationships.
Then it also contains our Heartbreak Healer crystal elixir. This is a remedy that I have made out of a crystal called dioptase. Dioptase is meant to be the best crystal for healing a broken heart. Some say it can even heal a broken heart in an instant. It helps to clear out traumas, patterns, walls, and barriers from past relationships so that you can heal and move on.
We all carry the wounds of past relationships, which build up our hearts and our vision, and the idea is that dioptase will refresh and renew and create a tabula rasa, a clean slate, because we also know that our heart is a massive navigational guide for us. When our heart is clear and clean, it acts as our best form of intuition and guidance in our lives.
Then, in addition to that, you will receive emails every day with information, inspiration, and assignments. Things that you need to do every day to move you through the process.
You can find the Breakup Cleanse in our Anami Alchemia Online Shop, under Sex Cleanses.
Thank you so much for listening. If you haven’t already, subscribe, leave a review, and send someone else the gift of a healthy libido and an off-the-charts love life by sharing this episode with them. We’ll be back next week and, in the meantime, many happy orgasms.
