EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
KIM: Welcome, Kelly! I’m so excited to have you here!
KELLY: It’s a total pleasure to hang out with you.
KIM: There are very few people in this realm whose work I wholeheartedly recommend, and Kelly is one of them. I think it’s because I find in her a quality that I see in myself, which is that I am committed to a radically holistic perspective, and I do not bend or waver on the notion that people truly can heal themselves. They don’t need surgery. They don’t need pharmaceutical drugs. A lot of people who might be calling themselves integrative or functional or more natural often will default. They’ll say, “Oh, it’s okay to prescribe hormones; it’s okay to prescribe certain things. It’s okay to prescribe birth control to control difficult periods,” where I’m in a place where I just reject that entirely and so is Kelly Brogan.
She’s put together these protocols where she’s been able to heal people through her suggestions of both outer and inner work without resorting to other measures. I have a massive appreciation for that. She really, truly embodies the concept of not giving a fuck what other people think of her! [Laughs]
Welcome, Kelly!
KELLY: What an intro! Thank you. I remember when I was first doing Vaginal Kung Fu years ago, really getting that deep sense of soul recognition with you, because I know that you also feel that way, and you can’t fake it. And other people who happen to have come to that radical, immutable, and totally reliably consistent belief in the capacity of the human body to heal—I’m hoping we’re finding each other right now, because it’s necessary for us to stand together.
KIM: Yes. For the sake of the people in my audience who may or may not know your backstory, can you give us a synopsis of how this happened for you? To come from a place of being a psychiatrist, where you acknowledge that you were giving prescriptions, relying on medication, perhaps among other things, and then you had this massive shift; you put your prescription pad down, and that was it.
Was there a specific event that did this? Was this an evolution that happened over time? How would you describe your process of being immersed deeply in the system and in psychiatry, and now you’ve come to this total 180-degree place of rejecting those methods and pioneering an entirely new path? And your approach is actually more based on science than what the other old-guard, old-school methods supposedly are.
KELLY: Yeah. I have definitely come to look at so much of what we are experiencing as humans through the lens of maturational psychology and specifically the evolution of trauma response over a lifetime. I’ve become really interested in looking at my own path, having had this kind of experience of already being several people in this lifetime in a very polarized fashion, and to say, how could that be?
I’m the same me who was so dedicated, so devoted to allopathic medicine that I specialized as a psychiatrist in prescribing for pregnant and breastfeeding women. That’s how necessary I thought these interventions were.
I was at MIT for college, and I volunteered at a suicide hotline. I still have so much difficulty tolerating distress and another’s distress specifically that I came into contact with this dynamic relationship with authority where I could appeal to the psychiatrist who was supervising the cases that came up in this volunteer hotline, to help me to feel better about what somebody else was feeling who was calling. The way that we did that together was to get them closer to medication. Help them get an appointment, help them get into the mental health center, what have you.
What kind of person becomes an allopathic doctor?
I believe that a lot of doctors become doctors because we have so little capacity to be with so-called negative emotion and experience feeling any degree of comfort with our own fear that we specialize in ameliorating, fixing, and of course, subduing and managing other people’s distress without so much as a moment’s consideration for why they’re having these experiences, what they might mean, and how they might be empowered to resolve their own challenges, or at least better understand them.
There’s not room for that because in this power dynamic we’re colluding in the experience of eliminating any extra minutes of feeling badness.
Kelly’s epiphany when she put down her prescription pad.
It really wasn’t until I had what is sometimes called a rupture of idealization, postpartum my first pregnancy, where I could no longer really resolve the cognitive dissonance that was rattling around inside me. Because I definitely was prescribing to pregnant women, while feeling like I would never take one of those meds as a pregnant woman. And that dissonance is very uncomfortable because it brings up moral/ethical issues. What am I doing? If I wouldn’t do it, why am I doing it to somebody else?
It wasn’t until I was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s thyroiditis that I could see there was no way for the system to actually give me what I wanted, which was to live without a prescription. I just didn’t want to go to CVS every month for the rest of my friggin life, and I knew that’s what Hashimoto’s meant.
With that sort of incentive, I sought out a naturopath. I resolved my Hashimoto’s. At that point, I wasn’t meditating. I wasn’t doing enemas. I wasn’t doing really much of anything other than changing my diet. I got rid of gluten, dairy, and sugar, I remember. This was 11-plus years ago. I watched my antibodies and my TSH come into the normal range on paper, and what lit up inside me was a rage that flared for years. That is what happens when you no longer see your parentified authority as all good; often you flip to the other side, and you end up vilifying them and seeing them as all bad. This power dynamic is exactly what I was saying, of course, and they are still the authority that I need to be good. I need them to be good. Listen to me! See how you’re wrong.
That went on for a couple of years until, as I shifted, I started to become the monster I was fighting, which we know in the activism world is very, very possible, if not likely, if you begin to understand what your activism and that impulse to fight the bad daddy or bad mommy is really about and how to engage it with the energy of sovereignty. With the expression of your truth, with the living of your life, as if fundamentally equally empowered, if not more empowered than that which you are exposing.
That transition didn’t happen until my mentor died suddenly in 2015. It really brought down the house for me because I had never really experienced grief like that and such disorientation. Because he was a very much idealized father figure for me, my individuation process, my experience of “Wow, I’m alone,” really began where I had to understand.
The moment of taking personal responsibility.
It’s so funny; when I went to his house after he had passed away—this is Nicholas Gonzalez, by the way—his bookshelf had all the books with their spines facing out, and there was, I swear, one book facing with the cover out. And the book’s title—I’ve never even looked it up to find out what this book is actually about—was You’re In Charge Now. That was literally the book I saw, facing up.
And that was the beginning of me understanding what it is to take personal responsibility, what it is to engage in the process of looking inward for the power that I might otherwise source externally. I’m certainly still on that path, but it was in 2010 that I put down my prescription pad, never started a patient on medications again, and I became very well acquainted through that work with the dark night of the soul.
The essential dark night of the soul.
It was almost like it manufactured and induced a dark night of the soul as these women were coming off of medication, and I got to see the anatomy of that and the sort of universal step of the hero or heroine’s journey.
And then of course, I started to experience my own dark nights and began to see that illusory personality has to die before you can really come into contact with who it is that you are that defies all of the identity construct that you are kind of stapling and pasting onto yourself, hoping nobody will notice there’s a scared child beneath.
That’s a lot of what my work has been dedicated to now, self-reclamation on the deepest level.
KIM: Yeah. I think our work is very similar in that instead of rejecting or trying to bury messages from the body and the psyche, the intention is to take them as information and wisdom and higher messages from the higher self and then interpret them and use them for healing.
That’s another place where I have always seen a parallel in our work; many people in my field say, “Oh, the woman’s not lubricating, so we’ll give her some artificial lubricant.” Or “The man’s having trouble with erections, so we’ll give him some Viagra.” Where I would say that’s not the root cause; that’s a temporary band-aid, and so let’s figure out if the woman, for example, isn’t lubricating, it’s because she’s usually out of touch with her feminine flow and energy. There’s all this beautiful and rich symbolism, if we turn our lens on it.
And you’ve done that in your work, where when you talked about the dark night of the soul, by removing those Band-Aids and those suppressants, then we have to acknowledge and look at whatever is there. Then ideally, we illuminate it and catalyze it so that those things that were perhaps weaknesses or fears or disembodied parts of the self, we then integrate, and we become more whole and more self-realized because of it.
KELLY: Yeah. I think that there’s a lot to unwind in the kind of false moralism that we’re socio-culturally raised with to understand that this is bad, and this is good. It’s bad to feel angry; it’s bad to feel sad for too long. It’s bad to be out of control. All of the ways that we are conditioned by our parents to suppress these aspects that are otherwise unacceptable or even shameful; those aspects are there.
At a certain point, you encounter opportunities to revisit those pieces of yourself that now, as an adult, you are responsible for domesticating and holding hostage. I think that that’s a big part of beginning to attune to what it is that the body and also the emotional body, if you will, is attempting to communicate.
Because if you have pain, if you have diarrhea, if you have brain fog, if you have so-called anxiety, if you’re fearful at night and you can’t sleep, there is such a deeper layer of self-rejection in trying to fix that. Even through natural means, like you’re saying; you can throw natural lube at somebody or whatever, but that cannot be the same.
Unless or until you are ready to turn toward yourself fundamentally, instead of abandoning yourself, in search of the experience of yourself as good and okay, you’re never, ever going to escape that emptiness. Because it’s the empty feeling that is the signal that there’s a part to reclaim.
The chief reason Brogan doesn’t give a fuck about what you think of her.
I think that that’s such a paradigm shift in understanding what health and emotional experiences are really about—that’s a chief reason I don’t give a fuck about what anyone says about me publicly. I really don’t.
KIM: What’s the chief reason?
KELLY: It’s because we’re not even in the same dimension. There’s no conversation to be had. Because I’ve been a science nut from the get-go, even when I was on the other team, I wrote my first book from this energy of, okay, I’m going to jam as much science in, as many references as possible. I’m going to jam it all in here, and I’m going to scream from the mountaintops about this information that I didn’t know as a prescriber. If I didn’t know and I went to Ivy League med school and whatever else, then I’m guessing that most prescribers don’t know, so how could they possibly provide informed consent? It’s not possible to be properly and ethically consented to by your prescriber, so I’m going to make sure that patients have the information and that no one is ever going to take an antidepressant again.
Well, guess what? That’s not what happened. I actually have had friends tell me, “Can you believe that my friend read your book and that she actually said, ‘Oh, that’s so interesting, but I think I’m going to take Lexapro’?”
No. It’s not about information.
Because to step into this paradigm that we’re speaking of, first of all, you have to be called into it, I believe.
You have to be willing to take massive risks. You have to be willing to lose everything, including your feeling of belonging, your experience of tribe and family, and the identity that has been your primary shield against all that you perceive as a threat in the world.
That is not for everyone and is certainly not something that you can wake up on a Friday and say, “Okay, now I’m going to get on my journey.”
What makes somebody ready to wake up?
Having really tried to study what makes somebody ready to wake up, my sense is that you get to a point where the experience of self-abandonment is so painful and so suffocating that you are ready to jump.
How you know you’re ready is you take a step in the direction of change and you feel relief just with the movement. I think relief is the first indication that you are destined to walk into the wild unknown of your unlived experience because it’s the indicator from your body that you’re coming home. It’s like signing up for one of your programs, or mine, or whatever. I’ve been told so many times, “That’s when the healing began.” The exhale starts.
Otherwise I don’t know, because I certainly know that this is not an info war. I certainly know that now more than ever, right? It’s not a deficiency of information that is keeping anyone stuck and arrested in disempowerment, helplessness, or dependency on an authoritarian system that does not have people’s best interests at heart. It’s not that. So, what is it?
I think it’s really this readiness to be experienced as dead by some people, judged, condemned, left, rejected, abandoned, and to know that as long as you stay with yourself, with your principles, with the feeling in your body, as long as you are willing to turn toward your own fear, your own shame, your own guilt, and just allow it to be.
Just allow it to be. Really get to know when that started in your life. Where are the roots of those feelings?
Then you don’t have as much of a need to play the game you were playing of taking the crumbs and mostly starving in your life for these surrogate hits for validation that really can only come from you.
KIM: I love that. I’ve seen in my own experience and observation that the price of admission is courage. I believe that everybody is given these opportunities, these windows, these portals that offer themselves, and the person has the ability to step into them or to say, “Not right now,” and then keep going. And I believe that all people, no matter what circumstances they’re in in their lives, have that come to them spiritually, energetically, as a law of the universe. That’s why we’re here. Then the people who do step through, the universe rewards courage. When we take those steps, the universe starts to support us. The universe starts to participate and co-create that journey with us.
Even if we’re going through things that are difficult and painful and a dark night of soul, that, to me, is often a rebalancing of karma. In some spiritual paths, often when you start your journey, it’s said that we go into another dimension into The Cave of Fire, where you go through purification. A lot of that ugliness and darkness comes up to the surface, and your job is just going through it.
It’s like doing a cleanse. You do a ten-day cleanse, and often day two or three can be when you feel the yuckiest, where all the toxins are coming out; you feel them, and you feel off, and once you get past that, then you feel amazing. You can feel better than you ever have in your life, but if you don’t go through those few days or few years or whatever it might be [laughs], then you never get to the other side.
I guess what’s confusing when I see it now, playing out at large, and when I’ve seen it over the years in people who are really in allopathic medicine, is how so many of those people have never done the questioning. They basically just take what’s spoon-fed to them and assume that the “science is settled”, and they’ve never bothered to dig deeper into that.
I don’t know if I’ve ever met a really, really happy allopathic physician. Honestly, all the ones I’ve met who I’ve gotten to know deeper are miserable, and often addicted to substances. I went on a surf trip, and there were these three American doctors on the boat. They were on a surf holiday in tropical waters, and they all had giant bags of pills. Morning pills, afternoon pills, evening pills, this-will-be-better-for-surfing pills. [Laughs] We were just dumbstruck. We couldn’t believe it. They were really miserable guys.
I’ve been in several situations and seen that up close. To me, the way I see that is that they know that in their work, they’re really not healing people. They’re potentially harming them. At best, they’re just maintaining them, and there’s that massive cognitive dissonance. And that’s how they are dealing with that pain, by burying it, because the truth is they’re really not healing people.
“Victim consciousness is the only pathology.”
KELLY: Yeah. The victim/persecutor/savior triangle is highly operative in that belief system.
I’ve said and will say again that I do believe that victim consciousness is the only human pathology because it’s founded on a lie which is that we are powerless and helpless instead of just feeling that way from echoes of an experience of our childhood.
As adults when we participate in this concept of the victim who needs to be saved against some bad, random aggressor from the outside—you flip-flop around the whole triangle all the time because everyone is carrying that energy of disempowerment.
Even the savior. If the doctor is the savior, the patient is the victim, and the persecutor is, interestingly, often the body, or maybe it’s a germ or a bad gene or whatever it is. It’s threaded through with this concept that badness is random, that you as a savior are obligated to find your worth in applying yourself and your self-abandonment to someone else’s well-being, or that there is such a thing as a bad guy who could get us at any moment.
It’s a hellish dimension to occupy, and when you exit that, you find, wow! Life is so much more interesting; it’s so much more dynamic when I encourage others to respond with curiosity to adversity that might emerge from their life space and to find meaning in the various challenges that come our way.
Because the only person in that narrative that can truly decode what it is that’s being delivered is the person experiencing it.
Well, isn’t that nice and tidy, right? Because then we just each take care of ourselves to the very best of our ability, and then we get to just simply be co-present to each other and support each other without actually having to fundamentally prioritize somebody in this kind of false-saviorhood. It’s such a liberation to step out of that.
The cult of allopathic medicine.
Obviously, it’s been referred to as a cult, and for good reason. It’s a hierarchical model that is founded on the experience of pain and abuse.
My training was a horrendous chronic trauma in my life that I probably attracted and was interested in to revisit this deep feeling of powerlessness and resentment and rage that I hadn’t otherwise made contact with until I became an intern and resident. I was always in power struggles and battles. I was the bad kid. The scapegoat all the time.
And that hierarchical model is designed for one thing, which is consistent compliance and obedience with a power structure that subdues the masses into order.
And it has nothing to do with your story, your health, your experience. You are Room 204C, the hepatitis case. That’s literally what you are, and that’s not because any of the people involved are fundamentally sociopaths or interested in dehumanizing. They are fellow citizens. It’s simply the nature of the belief field that is held in that system, and there’s no way out.
When I was prescribing, I never one time ever helped to facilitate remission or cure, ever.
Why do people go to allopathic medicine when it’s clear it does not heal them?
It is not even a promise that is offered by that system. It’s like if you go to the butcher, you don’t expect to learn about vegan resources. The experience of healing, whatever that might mean—integrating, recapturing, reclaiming—is not on sale at that store. And why do we go there? We go there because we want to feel taken care of. We want to be told what to do because we are afraid, and we don’t know how to be with our fear without needing it to go away.
That’s why I believe the basic protocol that I have is nothing too special. However, it’s generated a field over the years, as have yours, of almost ritual empowerment that is conferred to the participants.
And what happens in this program is that you commit with fierce discipline and self-attention to making choices that are dynamically disruptive to your default load network. To that automatic pilot you’ve been in for so many years of your own victimhood.
And as you begin to feel different, you cannot unsee the fact that you are the reason that you feel different, that your choices actually led you to this place. And how could that be true if the doctor knows better about you than you do? The science says it’s not possible, which has happened for you, and fundamentally, you didn’t even get a proper diagnosis or treatment to get to where you got. You can do this entirely on your own.
It defies too much dogma that we are then again presented with that fork where we can pretend it didn’t happen or we can say, “Okay, this must mean a lot of what I’ve been believing has been wrong at best and self-abusive at worst.”
KIM: What I think happens with people stepping into your work or my work is that they know something is off. There’s something in the answers or non-answers that they’re getting from the traditional allopathic world, but they don’t know what the right answers are because they’ve never heard them or seen them, and so they can’t articulate. They don’t have a vocabulary for a language they don’t know exists. They have kind of an intuition that this isn’t quite right. So, what, I can never be healed? Women get told things like, “You have to take out your uterus,” or in your case, “You have to be on medication for the rest of your life.”This thing is a lifelong sentence that can never be fixed.
I think something within us, if we’re not completely under the spell, says, “Really? That’s the best you can do?”
Then when they hear something or they read something and they get a glimmer of another path, the truth lights up. As long as they’ve got some remaining connection to that ability to discern, then they take one step and another step. And I think it becomes this beautifully exciting journey that once you get that validation of the truth that’s been struggling to emerge within you, then you’re pretty much on your way. It would be hard to really shut that down unless maybe you’re surrounded by a lot of people who criticize you and condemn you. And then I think that’s the critical moment of seizing that courage and stepping forward anyway, despite other people’s opinions or thoughts. And then you earn your own self-realization, which to me is really what life is all about.
It’s just shocking to see so many people—we’ve talked about this, and I know you talk about this—where the doctor with the robe is akin to a priest. An intermediary between you and God is a priest, and the intermediary between you and your body is a doctor. And “thou shalt not go there by thyself,” right? They have to interpret for you.
Whereas I know with both your work and mine, the intention is, “I will teach you some things and show you some things and then you’re on your own. I don’t want you to be dependent on me. I don’t want a business model that brings you back all the time. I want you to take these tools and then run with them, and you can.”
It’s a beautiful unfolding process. It’s not an information lack because all this information is out there, especially now with the internet. And despite the amount of censorship that’s there, if you have a modicum of research skills and curiosity, you can find it. Anybody can.
That’s why it’s kind of hard for me to have a lot of compassion for people who don’t ,because it’s a deliberate choice to remain ignorant or sick or a victim. I love that idea that the only true pathology is victimhood. [Laughs]
There is no greater fulfilment than coming home to the self. It feels so good it’s almost addictive!
KELLY: Right? Because it’s the fundamental root of disempowerment. The paradox of the fact that we have wealth-creating power; it’s like we’re God, and we’re also not. I’m this little Kelly, but I also have all of the elements that compromise the divine. How is it that I can be this powerless entity here to just suffer and struggle and flounder around until I die? Is that really what I incarnated for, or is it this reclamation?
Reclamation, for me, is the biggest ticket item. And I know it’s not for everyone. Different people, different journeys, might be a different carrot at the end of the stick, but for me, that experience of remembering, reclaiming, reconnecting to something that I already knew but forgot in my slumber; that feeling is almost addictive. Once you start to do this work and you know that pain is an indicator that you’re asleep to some part of yourself, then you know to move toward it because on the other end, like you said, is the fulfillment and gratification of reclamation, which is like nothing else in the world.
That’s why I agree so much that our best energy and efforts are spent in focusing on exposing what’s possible, and that shift happened for me around 2015 or so, when I really put down my sword. I stopped writing anti-Pharma blogs, and I said, you know what?
I’m just going to focus on testimonials and on the fact that you can heal Graves’ disease; you can heal schizophrenia; you can heal so-called bipolar disorder; you can heal migraines; you can heal lupus.
And I set to publishing these cases with a team of volunteers, putting videos out there of people who have been courageous enough to tell their story in such a stigmatized realm so that people can make contact on a heart level with what is possible for them and it’s more difficult to take the bait of the small choice. Because you don’t have a choice until you know you have a choice.
KIM: Yes.
KELLY: But once you know you have a choice, then you’re actually making one, even if you’re defaulting in powerlessness to a familiar sort of path or road. But it does require recognizing that the spell of scientism, the indoctrination, is very, very, very deep. It’s conditioning that’s now several hundred years in the making, so it’s going to be super scary to imagine that you could also be in this category of dogma-defying outcomes and not be burned at the stake or not be condemned and ostracized.
Scientism is the world’s biggest religion now.
Because like you said about the robes and the temple or whatever, science is the dominant religion on this planet right now, and that’s why we have watched all other religions bow to what it is that we call the religion of scientism.
That’s why you have the Dalai Lama eating, what was it? Lamb or something, because his doctor said he needs to. The transgression of so many other theological commitments and beliefs and practices when they conflict with what it is that modern medicine suggests is actually necessary—and never more have we seen that than in the closing of churches and everything else because of a so-called virus.
It’s important to recognize that this is a spiritual matter at its core, and to engage in that kind of a battlefield does take a tremendous amount of courage.
And you can’t not do it if you’re already destined to do it. If you’re on the path, if you’re listening to this, you know. You know that what’s being presented to you is an opportunity to reclaim that power and to truly experience self-ownership, not only on the level of bodily sovereignty and autonomy, but also on the emotional level of understanding that you are here. You’ve got to have your own back fundamentally first before you can ask that anybody else do that for you.
KIM: Yes. When you start to step onto that path and the universe, you make waves. The vibration of everything begins to change. The universe then supports that courage and those choices, and your life begins to change. But if you don’t make those choices, you just remain stuck or go backward, right? Grow or die. Because there is no such thing as just staying in one place. If you’re not growing, you’re dying, and if you’re not actively moving forward, you’re going backward.
But that’s what I love. I call it the escalator effect; once you get on that, once you take that step, the universe provides an escalator and helps you move along. But you have to take that step. I just boil it down to courage.
KELLY: Yeah. Because a lot of people, I’m sure, reflect to you and reflect to me and others who have audacious public platforms on, “Wow, you’re so courageous.” And what’s interesting to me is that my work is not where I tap into that personally. Speaking in this way is something I must do to feel safe in the world, actually.
KIM: To feel safe in the world? Describe that.
KELLY: Yeah, meaning if I don’t use whatever it is I’ve been given to do this with ease, because this is not hard for me. In my sort of post-awakened life, no aspect of this has felt like work, and no aspect of it has even honestly been challenging. It would be far more challenging if somebody broke my computer, took pen and paper away from me, and said, “You’re done expressing yourself for the rest of your life.” I would probably wither up and die.
This is catharsis. It’s a way for me to resolve invisibility. It’s a way for me to feel less alone.
And it’s a way for me to use my power to subdue or at least challenge what it is that I might otherwise perceive as a threat out there in the world, the forces that be or whatever. If I’m not fighting the fight, then they’re much more likely to come get me. I get this kind of subliminal track that’s running.
Courage never feels like necessarily going with the flow of what’s already coming out.
KIM: Right.
KELLY: The feeling I’ve had, when I have felt courageous in my life—it’s like jumping into a freezing cold lake or something. It’s like [gasp]. It’s that feeling of just taking a massive leap and not knowing to any extent what might be on the other end of it, but knowing that the cost, like you said, of staying perched on that launchpad or whatever, is a kind of pain that you can no longer endure. The risk is worth taking, but it’s like a leap. In the leap, it’s like you fall to pixels. It’s like you fall to bits. And you feel a bit like you’re dying.
A lot of the most courageous moments I have had have been in my mothering where I have really, really shown up in a way for my daughters, and particularly my one very empathic and expressive daughter—unlike my very suppressed daughter, who has adopted a lot of my defense mechanisms. It’s when I don’t take the bait of my own ego. That says, “In order to be in control right now, do this.” “In order to stay safe, do this.” And I do something different.
That is often what courage feels like. It’s like a little whisper, I think, that says, “This time just do it this way. It’s going to be fine. You’ll have another chance later.” It’s like the devil on your shoulder kind of a thing, and there’s got to be that part of you that will risk shame or risk being wrong.
I think that’s a huge, huge, huge disincentive to engaging in courageous behavior and that will tap into this trust that you are navigating yourself from a higher dimension. Your higher self, if you want to call it that, and not from the known spaces, if that makes sense.
KIM: Yes.
KELLY: It’s like you’re pledging allegiance to some compass that you can’t even necessarily see. Once you have a little contact with it, it becomes easier and easier and easier to engage it. But initially, it’s quite harrowing.
KIM: That’s really beautifully said. I love that, pledging allegiance to this compass, because it feels like that. You’re pledging allegiance—to me, it’s some kind of integrity or honesty wrapped up with courage that calls you. You feel your way toward it, but then once you get there, it gets easier and easier. And then you’re right; it’s like this higher force is now guiding your life. I love all of that.
In my work, one of the big milestones that I’ve observed, both in myself and then through years of working with women, is that when they do their sexual work and they do their deep excavation and block clearing and demon hunting and they really own and claim their sexual selves and begin to embody that, one of the qualities that they inevitably get to is not giving a fuck.
They don’t care what other people think of them, and they’re not trying not to care; they just don’t care. They go out and do things, like women going to nude beaches, where they were previously really ashamed of their bodies, of just being fully naked with their teenage daughters, of telling people things, expressing their opinions. They quit their jobs out of the blue just because their life-force energy, their sexual energy is now thriving and moving them forward.
That’s always been a way that I assess where people are at. If they’ve hit that place, I think, “They’re good.” There’s no going back once they’re at that place.
Have you noticed anything in this whole arena of people stepping into their power and getting to that place of not caring anymore? Not giving a fuck what other people think of them? Any tie-ins with their sexual development? I know you send a lot of people to me, so you may or may not see the result of that! But if you have, I’d love to hear it.
KELLY: Yeah, that’s very true. I kind of focus my work on the ritual portal. Here is your doorway. I’ll tell you how to walk through it, and then you’re on your own.
The experience that so many women I’ve known, kind of post-time in my practice, let’s say, or through Vital Mind Reset, is that often they engage in kind of erotic integration or sexual personal intimacy exploration because they get to a point where they want more pleasure in their life. They might have found my program because they want less pain.
Sexual pleasure as a beacon toward wholeness.
I think that there is something really beautiful about getting to a place where you actually are incentivized and inspired by increasing and expanding the pleasure in your life, which intuitively, we know will be sourced from our own bodies, our own self-intimacy, and our own self-knowledge. It has very little to do with our partner. It has little to do with any of the stories we’ve told ourselves.
So many of the women that I’ve worked with—you won’t be surprised to hear this—have been so-called anorgasmic; they’ve never had an orgasm in their life. In conventional allopathy, that’s the pathology with an ICD-10 code and everything else, but could there be conditions of safety that are set by the woman herself to foster this sort of reclamation of the bliss technology that the body is? The reclamation of the capacity to simply source that kind of vital force through self-knowledge and self-intimacy on the body dimension, but certainly also in understanding that we have to learn how to create safety.
I often describe the elements of VMR as just being a way to send a signal of safety so that you can simply begin the process of exploring that which has previously felt like it might kill you otherwise.
One hundred percent of the women I have ever worked with in my practice have a sexual abuse history.
KIM: Did you say 100%?
KELLY: A hundred percent, yes.
KIM: A hundred percent? Wow.
KELLY: Every single woman I’ve ever worked with. I wrote in Own Yourself about one of my patient’s experiences that I still can barely think of without shuddering. The range has been from heinous—from how horrific an experience a little girl can be born into—all the way to something that might be considered an inappropriate touch by an amusement park guy ticket-taker, whatever. Then there were also other layers of physical, emotional abuse, etc.
The role of that kind of trauma healing is very much tied into experiencing safety with one’s own body and beginning to acknowledge that pleasure is actually not a danger signal.
Do you need to re-live your trauma to heal it?
Kind of like un-entwining those two elements. I think a lot of people don’t want to look at their trauma and don’t want to do trauma work because they imagine they’re going to have to relive it and be back in that space and feel six inches tall with these looming entities and demons all around them.
The difference, at least in the way that I have approached this work, is that you already know how to take care of that child. As the adult who has encased the child herself, you already know. And once you simply turn toward her experience and offer her what it is, you, as your own child, didn’t get in those moments, which is simply validation and comforting and soothing and reassurance that any sentient woman would know to offer a child in distress, that begins to heal.
Then the experience of hands on your body and practices to engage dimensions of your body that you never even thought to be conscious of becomes another way to see what comes up. And if things come up, you engage that same practice of being with whatever it is that is coming up.
But I’ve had my own experience to know that coming back into the body often feels like a very dangerous place to be. Not only because of all the trauma imprints that often are stored here, but because it feels like getting out of the mind, and that means that you’re vulnerable.
Of course, I don’t need to tell you that that’s one of the grossest misunderstandings of what it is to be a woman.
Because until and if this body becomes your command center, until it becomes the instrument for your yes and your no, and it fundamentally informs you of what it is that you need to know in a given moment, you’re operating from self-abuse. You’re operating from the dimension of your trauma field of abuse, except you’re the one who’s actually delivering it to yourself now.
There’s this opportunity to defy whatever programs and fears that might say, “Stay up here because down here is for later. Down here is for when I have time or whatever.” Down here, this whole experience of the full spectrum of what it is that your body has to offer you, is where your power lies. I have found that there are dimensions. I reached out to you recently to ask about a sex coach. I want to really put my attention on what it is that I’m not seeing at this stage, in my forties or whatever.
Because a lot of women feel inhibited; it’s a common experience that we feel inhibited, even by ourselves. I’m a dancer. I dance every day. I love dancing. And do I ever dance by myself in front of a mirror? Never. Literally never. Why? Do I know that it would be super therapeutic to offer that experience to myself? Yes, I do. And I feel inhibited. What is that experience of unsafety conferring to the rest of my life? That’s what I want to deconstruct because there is a wild woman in there who I know is entrapped by so much conditioning around my emotional life that I see my sexuality is caged by as well.
For example, I’ll just say briefly that I don’t like drama queens. I don’t like hysterical women who are out of control—and it doesn’t have to be women; men are even worse. But I don’t like the energy of hysteria. That is why I have developed an entire personality around equanimity, around maintaining my faculties of executive functioning and articulation, even when I’m afraid. It’s why I never lose my cool. I have never screamed at anyone. I have never thrown anything. I have never lost it like that—ever.
Is that because that’s the whole of who I am? Probably not, because I wouldn’t be so triggered by these individuals—including sometimes my own daughter, who express things in tantrum form—who express things in that way when I want to have a calm conversation that is highly intellectual about what’s going on. I want to stay in the field of rationality for me to feel safe.
If I’m going to disavow the part of me that was probably told when I was a child not to express myself in too big a way or I would lose love; if I’m going to hide that drama queen inside myself, what else am I hiding?
Well, I’m probably also hiding a whole dimension of my sexuality and sexual expression that would be liberated if and when I could simply acknowledge that I have this in me and turn my attention and love toward this part of me that I’ve been ashamed of.
And that’s why I have to judge and blame this very quality in my partner, in my mom, in my daughter, and in so many friends that I have attracted over the years. And so I am fascinated by the journey that is sexual reclamation and sexual healing and how it can begin as quickly as you are incentivized to bring more dimensions of pleasure into your life, and it doesn’t need to be because you’re running from experiences of trauma or pain that you want to fix or heal.
KIM: Yes. I agree that the path through the body—the answers are at our fingertips. The body is a huge vessel both from, as we’re saying, the pain messages, but through pleasure as well.
For me, connecting to the body in terms of physical exercise and activity, anything that grounds me to my body and sexually speaking, those have been massive portals of awakening that have been like, wow, my body has all these amazing things that it can do that bring me closer to myself and to my spirit, through the body.
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Where can people dive deeper into your work if they would like to? I know that you have an amazing online community where you have all kinds of resources that are especially pertinent right now. Everything from cryptocurrency to homesteading and gardening. Where would you send people for any aspects of what we’ve discussed?
KELLY: Well, what I love about our alliance is how complementary our work really is. There are many dimensions of my work in your work but just about none of yours in mine. That’s why I send so many people your way!
However, the deep dive program, Vital Mind Reset, is my protocol. It’s in all my books; it’s online. There are many ways to access it. It is kind of my primary offering and certainly my most evidence-based and research offering.
But otherwise, we have a community really focused on medical freedom, on bodily sovereignty, and on this perspective around health. We walk the talk of taking small steps each month toward the actual lived experience of sovereignty through lifestyle choices, self-care, and unhooking-from-the-system kind of practices, getting off smart phones, etc.
These days, the newsletter is the only way to keep up because we’re doing the censorship shuffle, and who even knows..? My Telegram channel—we could find out tomorrow that we’ve got to run.
It’s a funny time, but it’s also one to have faith that we’re going to find each other, and we’re going to get the information we need. Maybe not in the ways we imagined, but the resources will appear in front of our eyes at the right moment.
KIM: Fantastic. Thank you so much, Kelly.
KELLY: Thank you so much, Kim.
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The keys to the queendom are within.
The path to well-fucked sovereignty, self-actualization and not giving a fuck, are found through giving lots of fucks—to yourself!
Through the tending of your own emotional and sexual garden, clearing space and allowing the most fertile parts of you to grow.
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The How to Be a Well-F**ked Woman Salon begins in late July.
It’s the “how to live and love in a female body” education you never—but ought to have—had.
I show you how to tap into your full sexual and orgasmic potential and own all of your sexual self, using everything from breast massage, feminine activation practices, sexual polarity work, how to quantum heal trauma as well as learning to channel your sexual energy into your life as a creative superpower.
We’ll dive into how to have all of the deeper, life-changing vaginal orgasms, plus, how to use sex acts as pathways to enlightenment.
You can find the FREE preview video series here.
Come one, come all!