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The overarching reason couples seek help in relationships is to rejuvenate their connection and learn the skills to ensure the spark doesn’t go out in the long term.

Alicia and Erwan join me today to share their road map to creating and sustaining a thriving relationship life. They share the three key relationship stages and dive into why couples in long-term relationships should understand the benefits of maintaining early-stage skills, such as flirting, in the later stages of a committed relationship so it can thrive.

Erwan and Alicia Davon have 25+ years of experience teaching singles and couples how to have exceptional romantic relationships while growing personally and spiritually. Their unique approach to relationship coaching combines their educational backgrounds in psychology with aspects of Zen Buddhism, providing a holistic method, improving connections with the self and others. They help singles have passionate and successful intimate relationships and guide couples to take their relationships to new heights of passion and intimacy.

In this Episode 

09:21 Alicia and Erwan discuss how they developed their relationship stages and how they identified and grew through them in their relationship

14:30 How to get back the juicy passionate chemistry of earlier relationship stages and why micro gestures are gold

16:06 What a relationship blueprint is, why it is carried throughout life, and how you can discover what your blueprint is

20:43 Relationships don’t happen to us, rather they happen through us — why being intentional about how we design our relationship allows us to show up and be committed to our relationship

21:35 Alicia and Erwan’s names for the stages in a long term relationship and how to make progress through those natural stages mindful

30:20 The skills that we need to acquire before moving to the next relationship stage, and Erwan’s tips for managing the challenges of each stage

36:00 Four practices that Alicia and Erwan recommend people do every day, including spiritual and sensual practice

Your Check List of Actions to Take

• Continue using micro gestures to flirt with your partner
• Nurture and nourish your bond with your partner so that your relationship can thrive no matter how long you’ve been together
• Switch your flirting and touching practice to the start of the day rather than the end when you might be too tired to be fully present
• Take some time to figure out which relationship stage you’re in
• Be intentional about how you co-create your relationship rather than skipping over the foundational work

Mentioned

Schedule your free love life consultation with Alicia here

The Relationship Map To Happy, Lasting Love

Connect with Alicia & Erwan Davon

Website: erwandavon.com

Facebook: facebook.com/erwandavonteachings

Youtube: youtube.com/user/ErwanDavonTeachings

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Email: [email protected]

About Today’s Show

Alicia and Erwan, thank you for joining us today.

Great to be here.

Great to be here.

Yes! And you guys have a lot to offer. In today’s conversation, we’re going to be looking at the different relationship stages that you guys have developed. Before we get into that, I’m curious, how did you guys start in developing this, and maybe even if you want to talk about what got you into really supporting people in a relationship.

How it started for me was really needing help about getting into a relationship in a desperate way. My family of origin, my parents, were getting divorced right after they immigrated to this country. I was a toddler. I don’t have any recollections of them together. I went between their houses. They were not friendly with each other. Long story short, my mother left. I was in psychoanalysis as a teenager. It just gets worse and worse. I’ll spare you more than that.

Fortunately, all of that propelled me into the world of psychology—first, psychoanalysis. I was receiving it in my life. I received 15 years of psychoanalysis. In the middle of that, I got a degree in psychology. Then, I started teaching for the world’s largest transformational organization. I did every workshop on the planet, every rebirthing, arm-waving, and howling and yowling, and sex workshops, and just crazy stuff.

After a while, I was just cooked, and I could actually have a conversation and function. And then, one day, I just took a look at what I was the most interested in. I took out a piece of paper, and I started a sort of a free write, “What am I the most interested in?” I closed my eyes, and I just started to write a “W,” and an “O,” and an “M,” and an “E,” and an “N.” Women! Whoa! And then, I just kind of set my course in that direction.

Beautiful. Thank you for sharing. There’s such context and such history to your development. There’s a lot there. I appreciate that we’re not doing it justice, and you’re giving us a sense. Thank you. Alicia, do you want to say anything?

Well, I’ve always been obsessed with relationships and romantic relationships from when I was in preschool. I remember sitting on the little playground. I have such a vivid memory of me and my best friend. Her name is Carrie. We’re still in touch now, which is great. We would sit there in the sandbox and talk about which of the boys I was going to marry and which of the boys she was going to marry. We were really into relationships.

And then, being in high school, I was on the basketball team. It was this ultra-competitive team. The coach was driving us really hard. I was often nowhere to be found because there I was, sitting up in the bleachers flirting with the guy on the volleyball team that was watching us practice. I was just very into relationships.

And so, when I got into college, I started studying psychology, and I had gotten into therapy myself and was really learning how much was possible in terms of human growth and development. By the time I got to graduate school and was getting my master’s degree, and I was training to be a therapist, it was all deep and interesting, but very serious also.

I’ll never forget the first time that my friend in my graduate program took me to meet Erwan because she had a sense, I would really like him. He was leading this communication games group at his house, his apartment at the time. I walked in, and everybody was lit up. I looked to the left, and there was this woman, and her face was glowing and flirting with this guy. I look to the right, and there are these two people having this incredible conversation. It was like, bringing fun and romance and sexiness into the whole world of growing and developing. So, I basically never left after that.

Beautiful! How did your stages develop together?

We looked at how did we do it. What we found was, in the beginning, there was a lot of that sexiness and flirting that Alicia was talking about. We kept that going throughout the relationship. We took a look. Okay, there’s all this flirting going on in this beginning. How do you meet somebody? If I were to say, crassly, how do you pick somebody up?

We went through that whole process ourselves. And then, we figured out we’ll get into it, but what’s the essence of that? And then, we had a very rich kind of wild dating life. We took a look at, okay, what’s the essence of that? Then we got to the middle game of the relationship, the two of us. I was panicked because that was where it was really pushing my buttons of what was required.

Alicia moved into that stage pretty easily. I was sweating. What did I have to move through to get into that stage, and what were the skills that we needed? And then, we got married. What was marriage all about? How does spirituality or presence or consciousness fit into it? How do you share with somebody and have the honeymoon period get better 15, 20 years in than it was and even at the beginning? So, we kind of looked at how we did it, and then we laid it out.

Okay. Well, I love it because it’s bringing a lot of different aspects into connection. I think that that’s really what it’s all about, right? It is so multi-dimensional.

It is multi-dimensional. Our relationship is multi-dimensional. It requires a certain level of psychological health. It requires a certain level of skill. It requires lifestyle design. It requires sex skills and sex knowledge. There’s really a lot to it.

I want to give your listeners something kind of practical. Let’s start with flirting. The essence of flirting is micro gestures, these really little gestures. Maybe a look that a woman gives a man, or two people give each other whether they’re straight or gay, or however that goes. Right? So, it’s that look. Right? That look that’s polarized. That look has some romance in it.

Or maybe a man puts his hand behind a woman’s back as she enters a room or something like that. He’s courteous. He opens the door or something like that. There are all these little micro gestures. You want to do one that forces the other person to react to you, so you get a read on whether they like you, whether they don’t like you, or whether they’re ambivalent or don’t know.

Let’s say somebody’s single. They are in a bar. There’s somebody they’re attracted to. They might walk by and smile. It’s a micro gesture. It’s a small gesture. You get the equivalent of a text bubble above their head as to whether they’re interested, depending on how they respond to that. When people get really good at that, then it’s easy to flirt and escalate relationships.

Now, for couples, the key is to continue that. Most couples kind of drop that out as the relationship progresses. That’s probably the most important part of flirting or getting into a relationship besides something, which is kind of boring to say, which is just socializing.

If people socialize and they understand this micro gesture flirting thing and how to force reactions from other people, then the engine is started, so to speak, and it’s kind of off and running.

Right. And even with all our modern technology, this cannot be overstated enough in that we’re wired up for this responsiveness.

Exactly. If somebody says ‘cheers’ to you in a bar and smiles, you’re going to respond. You’re either going to turn away, or you’re going to turn towards them, or you might even freeze and kind of not know, but there’s going to be some kind of response. And you just do these little micro gestures ’till you get to read where the other person’s at because we are hard-wired to respond.

Typically, people’s chemistry is the biggest block and challenge our students come to us with. But the problem is not in our bodies. You’re right. We’re hard-wired to respond. It’s usually a lack of skill or a psychological issue.

This is good for both singles and couples because sometimes, it can seem insurmountable. Maybe there’s a couple, and they’ve been together for a bunch of months or a bunch of years or several decades. And maybe they have kids, or they’ve both got jobs or whatever it is. And they turn around one day and say, “Oh my gosh, the chemistry is not what it used to be. I don’t feel attraction. I want to. I don’t know how.”

It can seem insurmountable. How do we get from “Oh my God, we become roommates.” to “We want to have that juicy passionate chemistry again.”? And these micro gestures are gold! I mean, almost every day or not almost every day but several times a day, Erwan and I are doing these micro gestures with each other. I pass him in the hall, and I’m coming out of my office, and he is going into the kitchen, and I’ll just give him that look and that smile, and instantly we’re both like buzzing with that yummy energy. It doesn’t take much.

I think there’s something in what you both are saying is that continues to nurture and nourish the bond. And that’s not to be forgotten or neglected.

Yeah. That’s a critical point – to nurture and nourish that bond to actually attend. If someone has a child, they usually attend to the child, but relationships are often not attended to, to the degree that they actually need to thrive.

You mentioned, Erwan, that there’s this multi-pronged approach as we look at health in the system, right? So, if we’re not looking at our psychological health, or what might be getting triggered or activated, or how we might be protecting ourselves, I know that this impacts someone’s ability to send these clear cues, right, because there may be harboring bitterness or resentment or about something else that happened. But then, it kind of sets in this negative spiral, right, where if someone’s got this salty look on their face, and the other person’s like, “Well, we’re just passing each other in the hallway. What’s your problem?” You know, it’s just this reaction-reaction. Can you guys speak to that at all?

We have a term we call a person’s relationship blueprint. And it’s basically the person’s relational psychology. It has to do with how we interacted with one or both parents as a child and how the parents interacted with each other.

The relationship blueprint is carried throughout life and lived out for the most part unless it’s interrupted. Now, our topic tonight is not relationship blueprint but stages of a relationship. But that’s another very big piece of work that we do with people. It’s kind of the heavy lifting, actually.

Our method actually starts with that – a person discovering their relationship blueprint. So, whether we’re working with somebody in the mastery of relationship, which is a weekly class or weekend workshop like the pleasure, of course, we start off by having a person really distinguish their relationship blueprint.

It’s kind of a similar concept as a person’s attachment style. We just did a session on attachment styles recently. Then, we get into who are we really deeper contact with oneself, one’s being, or consciousness, or spirit, or however you want to look at that. Those two pieces are essential. People often try to sort of hopscotch over those to address their relationship issues.

We have to address our psychology, our relationship blueprint, and we have to get in contact with ourselves at the deeper level, or there’s nobody available to be in a relationship and all the sort of juicy qualities of life – the turn on, the love, and the intelligence, and the vitality. They can’t move through us if those things aren’t in place.

Then, the third step is masculine-feminine dynamics, whether it’s a man and a woman or two women or two men, the understanding, flirting, polarized dynamic, how is femininity different than masculinity? What’s going on there? How do you escalate that energy? Then, we were actually about to do a topic on that in Master of Relationship coming up shortly. We call it the “female decodering.” We like kind of fun titles.

And then, we get into the stages of relationships. The flirting to get into a relationship – seduction, and then dating, which is really all about fun and turning the feminine person on, and that energy exchange and like that, and setting up one’s life to like go ice skating, go to an amusement park.

And then, the middle game of relationship, vulnerability is required, lifestyle design, sex education because that’s when the honeymoon period tends to drop off for people and then the eternal date. And that’s really our specialty, a relationship that reaches higher and higher peaks of intimacy and turn-on and sexual attraction. And that’s all about what we call sexual mastery, spiritual development, skills and cherishing, and commitment, obviously. That’s a big challenge for people in different ways.

And then our favorite one at the end is developing a person’s sexual potential. We take that all the way to extended orgasm.

Thank you. Alicia, do you want to chime in?

Well, I’m thinking particularly about this couple that I’m working with. A lot of the things that Erwan just mentioned can be illustrated in this because they’re this great couple. They’re not married, but they are basically each other’s life partners. They’ve been together forever. They have this thing where, “Oh my gosh, we’re not having enough sex, and the romantic vibe just isn’t really there.”

As we were exploring it the other night, there were so many factors. Erwan mentioned masculine-feminine dynamics. This particular woman is an attorney. She’s at work all day, every day, kind of in her head having more of a, you could say, like, masculine approach to her day and her interactions, and then she hits the door, and she kind of still is in that mode. And so, what we came to is like, okay, well, her partner, he gets home much earlier than her so he can set up the space, and have it felt good, and have good incense going and dim lights and candles and have her walk into this place that draws out her feminine energy and gets her more into her body. So, there’s a lot there about masculinity and femininity, but also designing your life.

Yes, I couldn’t agree more. I think we tend to think it happens to us rather than happens through us, which it sounds like you’re both saying, not only being intentional about the design around how we co-create together, but also what we’re accessing in ourselves that allows us to show up and be in a relationship versus trying to hopscotch, like you said, over some of that work, Erwan. And so, thank you for what you’re both kinds of giving some context to. So, you’ve named the stages, but I’m wondering, just for clarity, do you guys have concise names for each stage?

Yes. The how to get into the stages would be seduction, right? Seduction, that’s like going from not knowing the person to starting to date them or being just friends and starting to date them. Then, the first stage, which is commonly known as dating, we call new and exciting because that’s the vibe. New and exciting.

The second stage, which we call, or most people would say, boyfriend-girlfriend, or maybe in the old days, going steady. The person’s kind of your person. We call that best friends and lovers.

And then the third stage, which people might call marriage or a long-term committed relationship or something, we call an eternal date.

Gotcha. And even that last title, eternal date, it seems like it represents something really beautiful that you both are both really emphasizing this flirting and the masculine-feminine polarity and the designing your relationship to support the bonding and connecting in this more romantic, sexual, playful way. Is that right?

Yes, absolutely. It’s all about being deliberate.

We’ve really submitted our schedule to our relationship. Every morning, we do a set of touching practices. And then, we do some making out. Usually, that involves clitoral stroking, and it starts the day with a bang. Then, I meditate because I need that. Alicia doesn’t need that as much. She functions a little clearer, I think. We take the day, and then the most important things are put first instead of put last.

A lot of times, people put their time to spend with their partner at the end of the day. Typically, people are just too tired, or they want to relax and something like that. It does take time, and things do get sacrificed. But like we often tell people, divorce is really expensive. A heart attack is really expensive.

And as you name the stages, I imagine for someone listening, they’re like, “Yeah, that sounds about right. That’s what people do.” But that’s more of the sliding, right? We do what people typically do. But what’s behind that, as you guys were articulating, it’s so incredibly rich. It’s so conscious. It’s so intentional. It takes a real focus as you’re even prioritizing your relationship. That’s an example of perhaps what you’re encouraging people to do, rather than just go through the motions.

Yes. You’re right. It is kind of a natural progression, right. Most people would be like, “Yeah, that’s how it goes.” The skills that make each of those stages successful are the key. So often, people will find themselves dating someone. Maybe they got lucky, or they just flirted with somebody or whatever. They end up dating someone, but then our issues and patterns can come up, and we may not do that as optimally as we can.

When I got together with Erwan, I was very, very relationship commitment-oriented, which many women are and many people are, but I was kind of extreme, right? I mean, like a month into it, right? We saw each other once a week, and it was amazing. I’d be sitting on Erwan’s couch with him for hours, and we talk, and we’d make out, and I was discovering extended orgasm, and like, “Who is this guy? He’s just amazing.”

And then, out of the blue one day, I started to feel anxious. Like, “Where is this going? Where is this going?” I arrived at his house, and I sat him down on the couch. I said, “Where is this going? I think we’re ready for a commitment. I mean, what do you want? I want that. Let’s do that now.”

And he was like, “Alicia, you’re amazing. And I’m totally open to that. We’d probably burn out if we did that, you know. Why don’t we just be light about it and see what happens?” I trusted him and trusted myself that I could relax a little bit. Luckily, I did that. I didn’t blow the whole thing up. But that’s an example of skills in the new and exciting stage – having fun, being light.

Yeah, that was an area that Alicia was challenged in. And then, in the middle game of relationship is the stage I was challenged in when it really was appropriate to move in together and be in a committed relationship. Not marriage yet or like that, but it was really time to go steady, let’s say. I really panicked because I didn’t know that world from my parents or childhood. I didn’t see that. I was a sex teacher. I’ve been teaching since ’95. You were like seven years old then.

I know. I was youngin.

Yeah. But anyway, you know, I had this kind of wild, crazy sex life, and we’re falling in love. And it’s actually time to progress. I didn’t know what to do. Fortunately, I did something reasonable, which is I asked my best friend, Julie. I said, “Hey, Julie, should I get into a committed relationship with Alicia? She wants to do that.” And Julie said, “Yeah, why don’t you try it? You never do that.” And she said, “If you don’t like it, you can leave.” I said, “Okay, great.”

And then, I didn’t do anything. I agreed with her, but I didn’t do anything. And then one day, I’m with my housemate, Adam, and I just coached him. He had a big opening. I can’t even do something about being present. He went into the garage, and he got this red paint. He wrote on his wall. I kid you not. “Wake up” in red paint. It was dripping. It just looked gory. It was intense. But it was something about him being present and being awakened that kind of thing.

And after he had this big opening, he turned to me, and he said, “Hey, Erwan, how about you? What’s next for you?” And I said, “Well, I’m going to get into a committed relationship.” Adam is a pretty smart guy. He asked me the Zen question. And he said, “When?”

Now, I know the Zen answer. The answer to every Zen question is now. So, I said now. And he said, “Great, I’ll drive you.” Oh, my God. I thought I was going to have a heart attack. We went into the garage into his big black Jeep Cherokee, drove half a mile to the lower street middle of San Francisco where Alicia lives. There’s never any parking on that street. There’s an empty spot right in front of her house. Her housemate is walking with Alicia up the block like everything is coming together. I’m like sweating buckets. Adam leans over me, pushes open a door of the car, pushes me out. I stumbled over to Alicia. Adam takes Kerry off, and they go into the house. And I say, “Yes, let’s get into a committed relationship. Let’s do it.”

And then Alicia goes, “Well, I don’t know. I’m having second thoughts.” The short of it is she was just giving me a taste of my own medicine. I had to really move through my discomfort with vulnerability and commitment and merge our lives together and like that.

So, probably a useful thing for your listeners is that different people have different issues. Some people are good at seduction and good at dating, but they’re really not good at the middle game. I was like that. Some people are good at seduction, but then when it’s kind of like time to date and have any kind of ongoing contact, they just ghost the person. So, there are all different kinds of configurations. It’s good to know where we’re strong and where we’re weak. And that’s why the relationship blueprint is required because then you can really see like, “Oh, I’m really good at this. He’s really good at that.” Like, “Okay, you know, what can I learn from this person? What do I need to deal with?”

That was one of my questions for you both. Is there a goal or skill that needs to be acquired before you move to the next stage? And it sounds like it’s not necessarily required, but that there are skills to be developed. And also, there are challenges, and there are challenges in each stage, and some might challenge others more than other challenges will challenge other people in a different way.

It’s true. Erwan and I have made it really easy for people to see and also learn what those skills are. I’ll list them now, so everybody has a really clear list. The seduction getting into dating/flirting is a big skill, which of course, we could expand on and we do in our classes in the mastery of relationship.

When you’re in the new and exciting stage, the skills include having fun. So, knowing how to have fun and have a good time focusing on the woman’s desire. That’s for both the woman and the man. The example is if he says, “Where do you want to go out to dinner?” Rather than saying, “Oh, I don’t care. You choose.” She could say something like, “Oh, there’s a sushi place I love around the corner. Would you take me there?” Or, “I don’t know. Would you give me a choice of three?”

I grew up in Greenwich Village in Manhattan. So, you know, whoever is the more feminine person in the relationship.

Thank you.

Yeah. And then, the third skill is knowing how to turn the person on. Erwan used to take me on dates to this amazing sushi place near where we then lived in our loft called Blowfish Sushi. It had Red Velvet walls and really amazing interesting rolls. Like, avocado and strawberry sushi rolls. It turned me on. It was appealing to my senses. Not to mention, he was an incredible lover. So, those are the skills for the new and exciting stage.

The skills for the best friends and lovers’ stage, there’s a different vibe. The vibe is vulnerability. The skills include communication and lifestyle design, which is designing your lives to have more time and space for each other in the relationship.

And then, what we call sex education. Okay. So, sex education, and I don’t mean like seventh-grade sex education, although that’s important too. Like, safe sex. Sex education is learning how to deliberately create chemistry.

For example, learning to give and receive pleasure and learning this skill that we teach called extended orgasm – deliberately creating pleasure in somebody’s body. Because there’s all this novelty in the beginning, right? Then when you get into the deeper stages, often that decreases. So, sex education helps with that.

And then finally, in the eternal date stage, that is characterized by spiritual development, like really developing yourself, learning, growing, shifting, changing ongoingly. This skill includes commitment. Like, really committing to the person and being free from picking and choosing and having your foot out the back door, and cherishing the person, realizing their value in your life. And like Erwan was saying, sexual mastery, sexual expertise. Like, really knowing, “Okay, sex is a cornerstone of our relationship, and we’re going to keep it hot, and we know how.”

Thank you for that. That gives such a good description/illustration. I’m wondering. I mentioned how people might progress. It sounds like one of the things that you’re really promoting is that as you move through the stages that the first stage is a part of stages two and three. The third stage is encapsulating all of it, is that right?

Yes. They’re cumulative, in other words. Sometimes, couples learn about the stages, and they’re like, “Well, we’re married. We don’t need those earlier stages because we got it here.” We say, think again because most relationships have dropped out those earlier skills of flirting and fun and even communication and certainly learning about each other sexually. So, they’re cumulative, and the eternal date stage is the culmination of all of them.

Is there anything you want to say around spiritual development as an example?

I would say to have it be actual practice. For example, meditation is a good practice for spiritual development—different types of contemplation. There’s spiritual contemplation. Who am I? That’s a big one in sort of Yoga Hindu world.

The practice of yoga, it’s not so much of an exercise routine, but it’s more about concentration and the consciousness and the energy flows and chakras and so on. That can be a good spiritual practice, but to actually have that as a practice.

Our method has five parts. Distinguishing your relationship blueprints and contacting your deeper self, and so on. And there are four practices that we recommend people do every day. And spiritual practice is the first one, you know, whatever fits whether the person is Christian, or Buddhist or agnostic or atheist, or however it goes. There’s something that the person can do that’s going to really get them in contact with. Again, I grew up in New York City. I like plain words like life or consciousness or like that.

The second one is body practice, which is surprisingly important because human beings get so top-heavy. They get so in their heads. It’s just crazy. So, it’s basically some kind of exercise, but it’s not like running on a treadmill, reading the newspaper. It could be walking around your yard barefoot, feeling the grass below your feet or the sand or whatever so that you’re really in your body. So your center of gravity, so to speak, kind of comes down from the head down into the heart and the body and the sex center, the vital center.

And then, the other one is psychological inquiry. That’s a practice that we do daily. We recommend people do all these practices daily. Take some time. It’s not like you need to dedicate hours, but it probably takes half an hour to do them all. Psychological inquiry is just, okay, well, where am I at? How am I feeling? What’s going on?

Alicia and I do that together three times a week and independently. On the other days, you can do it by journal writing. You can do it by talking to somebody. You could do it by writing a song. You could draw a picture or make a collage. So, our operating systems, so to speak, are like we kind of stay on top of it. I’m thinking now everything is so tech. I’m thinking like, it’s like anti-virus software.

I was thinking the same thing. Yes.

And then, the last one is sensual practice. And again, Alicia and I have a set of touching practices we train people in, and they’re all about connecting in the body. They’re not necessarily sexual. When we start our touching practices in the morning, they don’t need to get sexual. They usually do, but to have some way of being, whether it’s holding or touching, whether it’s deep touch or light touch, taking a sensual touch and clitoral stroking all kinds of sort of levels to it.

And if you’re single, there are exercises that can be done alone. For example, a great one, an easy one, just to give your listeners something practical, is to take five minutes and set the environment up for all your senses. You know, little Mellow music for sound. Something for taste, maybe a raspberry on a chocolate. Something for touch, maybe a fur coat or a fake fur coat if that’s more your thing. You know, something that really kind of gets you into your tactile sense: incense or essential oil for smell. And then for sight, maybe a picture book of erotic photography or something. We recommend not a screen for these exercises but just setting the environment up for your senses. And then, spending 15 minutes enjoying that has a profound effect on a person’s kind of ‘awakeness.’ So that was a long answer to your question about spiritual practice. But, you know, I’m just trying to say that actual practice, having a practice, is really important.

I really appreciate the holistic nature because so often, when we think of spirituality, it’s this more esoteric, and you’re really inviting all the different vessels and all the different dimensions. Again, it’s the body and really getting into that centering and not being top-heavy and all the mental activity and using all of our senses and also using our sexuality and our inquiry. It feels like you guys are really accessing so many parts of our experience that make it holistic. And even if there is spirituality is the focus or the intention, there’s being able to access this more holistic experience again. Is that right? That’s exactly right. You know, really approaching it from different directions. People often try to approach their relationship just psychologically, or just by the time, having enough time to go on vacation or whatever, or just a set of skills, maybe sexual skills, or something like that, but it’s very, very multi-dimensional. Addressing it from these different perspectives holistically, we find that’s really what’s necessary to make the difference because it’s not only the most rewarding, potentially rewarding part of life relating with somebody romantically, it’s our opinion anyway, but it’s also the most challenging.

Alicia, do you want to comment at all?

I think Erwan said it. He really encapsulated it. Our work is very dynamic, meaning that it’s always changing and shifting. Erwan and I discover more through our own experience, and our students, and the climate out there, and everything. We add more. We’ve developed these practices and our method over the last 20 years together.

I love speaking with people who have done the work that is practicing what they’re teaching. I really appreciate the health of just how you’re holding it all together in the system, and the sexuality and the play, and the psychological awareness of the imprint in what we’ve known around the relationship and how we’re showing up and the different skills that we need. It’s all so part of the experience of cultivating a relationship and the spirituality of it all. So, thank you so much. I know we’re winding our time down together. How do people get in touch with what you’re doing and what you’re offering?

The best way, for those of you that are listening, and you’re like, “Yeah, I’m interested in learning more about working with these guys. I love a roadmap to my relationship success.” Whether you’re single, whether you’re in a relationship, I’m offering FREE love life consultations.

So, what that is, it’s a one-on-one conversation with me. It can be on Zoom. We’ll get personal. We’ll talk about your own romantic life and your sex life. You can tell me all about challenges or goals or what you want. And if it looks like Erwan and I can support you and what you want, then I’ll lay out how we work with people. We have different options. We have mastery of relationships. That’s our most popular class. It’s a weekly online coaching class. We have private coaching and the pleasure course, and sensual training, and all sorts of stuff.

The best way to set that up is for people to text our school. The number is 415-308-9580. That’s 415-308-9580. And Jessica, I’ll also give you a link for people to click if they prefer that. And everybody who sets up the consultation will also get a free video on the five keys to a successful relationship. Our website is PleasureCourse.com. So, that’s how people can learn more.

Wonderful, I’ll make sure to put those links on today’s show notes. And for anyone that’s interested and wanting to learn more, that’ll be available there. Thank you so much for spending your valuable time with us today.

You’re absolutely welcome. You’ve been a pleasure to talk to, and your commitment is clear. Your questions were great. So, thank you.

Yeah, we’ve had a great time with you.

Signing Off

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