Return to Show NotesHi, thank you for joining the Empowered Relationship podcast, your relationship guide. I’m your host Dr. Jessica Higgins, licensed psychologist and relationship coach. Today’s episode is 249, “How to develop beyond distorted and collapsed ways of being in your sexual energy”, an interview with Michael McPherson.
Before we get started, I just wanna take a moment and ground with you, in recognition that we are all on a path, developing ourselves, and also simultaneously co-creating and developing our relationship. As we become more conscious, more aware, we expand our capacity for intimacy, connection, love and growth, and we understand that the path of relationship sometimes might challenge us; it might look messy, it might threaten or even bring up levels of insecurity that surprise us even… Or perhaps show us old wounding that we could do some healing work around. Whatever gets evoked, it’s a mirror, it’s an invitation, if we are willing to turn towards that as a teacher.
The conversations that happen on this podcast, the Empowered Relationship podcast, are intended to support you in that journey. What I love about this work is that we are all on the path; granted, it might look different, we might be at different phases in our development, but we’re all in this together. And as I talk about on this show, I do my very best to practice these principles. And if you want access to today’s show notes, you can visit DrJessicaHiggins.com, click on Podcast there in the top navigation bar, and you’ll see all the episodes listed on that page. Again, today’s episode is 249, “How to develop beyond distorted and collapsed ways of being in your sexual energy”, an interview with Michael McPherson.
You’ll also find various resources, gifts for you and ways to deepen in your practice, be it with coaching, individual or couples coaching… And I wanna bring your attention to a special opportunity that I’ve been talking about for group coaching. If you’re an individual and looking for how to get support in developing more skill in how you show up in relationship, particularly as it relates to emotions that you feel inside you, that perhaps might feel like insecurity, or having a difficult time really revealing transparently with your partner what you’re experiencing, that sometimes perhaps influences the way that you relate, and feel some difficulty with… And it’s a small group, so I’m really limiting it to just six people. If you’re interested, I encourage you to reach out to me directly so we can schedule a time to determine if this is a good fit for you. My direct email is [email protected].
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A quick note about today’s interview – there is a section where he is describing a few practices, one of which is a little more explicit. I did mark this as an explicit episode, just as a heads-up and awareness around where you’re listening and how you’re listening and who’s listening with you. Let’s get started in today’s interview, again, with Michael McPherson.
He is the author of Everything You Never Learned About Sex: Take Back Your Masculine Power & Use Your Sex Energy For Good, co-founder of KAKAO Ceremonial Drinking Chocolate, a non-profit devoted to saving native stains of cacao and making ceremonial-grade cacao available to the Western world, and co-founder of KAPU, a community app for light workers to share their heart-centered gifts, services, and wisdom in a safe and sacred space.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: Michael, thank you for joining us today.
Michael McPherson: Thanks so much for having me on. I really appreciate the opportunity.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: Yes, and I love bringing people that have different backgrounds and different voice to support intimacy, and we’re gonna talk a little bit more about sexual intimacy and what you’re bringing to us today on this topic. I just would love to hear what got you interested in looking at sex, and sexuality, and how that impacts an individual’s experience, and also in relationship.
Michael McPherson: Certainly. Well, it all started with my life experience. When I was young I had a pretty thwarted relationship to sexuality after my sex hormones came online… And that was mostly a by-product of the fear that I felt around being able to talk about this with my family, my friends, other adults in my life, people that I knew. I felt so much fear, because sex was considered so taboo back then, and probably still is today in most communities… And I ended up turning to pornography as a source of education, initially. So I went to porn with the intention of educating myself and becoming competent to a certain degree in the realm of sex, so that by the time I stepped out into the world and engage with other people about it, I wouldn’t sound like such a newb. I’d sound like someone who isn’t new to this conversation, and I wanted to feel confident.
But as many people probably already know, pornography really warped my relationship to sexuality, and there’s a lot that I could get into there around what happened during that time period. But for me, it took my sex energy, distinct from my sexuality, and collapsed it with my sexuality. So those two things were no longer distinct or unique, they became one and the same. So all of a sudden, the only outlet I had for my sex energy was sexuality. That led to me being promiscuous, that led to me having thwarted relationships with women, sexually objectifying women, taking on the pornographic view that I was receiving online and implementing that in my life through the programming I was receiving… And it just created a giant mess, honestly. It was very challenging for me to have true and genuine relationships, especially with women, because there was all of this conditioning behind the scenes that was keeping me from feeling comfortable, that was keeping my heart closed, and that was keeping me truly from honoring the other person as an individual, a mother, a sister, a cousin, a daughter, a soul, really. They were just, in some ways, an object to me.
So by the time I was about 27 or so, I was really fed up with my relationship to sex. I was like “Something needs to change here.” And gratefully, that’s when my beloved came into my life, McKinsey. She was the inspiration that I needed to actually create change in this area of my life. So her and I [unintelligible 00:08:11.28] We have a magical relationship. We also reflect and mirror all of our wounding and shadows to each other… So it’s very interesting, and fun, and profoundly healing… And what she mirrored for me was my immaturity around sex. That birthed in me a desire to not conquer this area, but to feel whole, to feel complete, to feel like I was coming from a place of true and genuine authenticity for myself, outside of or beyond of where I’d always come from previously.
So we went on this profound healing journey together, we worked with Masterplan medicines, and we have a non-profit, KAKAO Ceremonial Drinking Chocolate, which we’ve traveled around the world for, leading cacao ceremonies… And that’s been our opportunity to really deepen not only our personal relationship with sex and sexuality and sex energy, but also be able to connect with other people and really expand this conversation. So that’s what I’m most interested in now, is just expanding this conversation at a global scale, so that people can feel less fear, more comfort and more intimacy really with themselves.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: Michael, as you’re talking, initially, I’m assuming you’re referring to adolescence and the hormonal changes…?
Michael McPherson: Yes.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: It kind of sounds like a perfect storm, in that perhaps your family wasn’t comfortable talking about sex, and that’s common in Western culture… And then you have highly sexualized images, even just in mainstream media, but not a lot of forthright conversations, which it sounds like you’re really trying to inspire people to do now. And you turned to porn as a source of information. It just sounds like collectively that constellation is particularly skewed.
Michael McPherson: Absolutely.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: I guess I would love to hear a little bit more about what are some of the things that you see problematic with porn, and your vantage point now.
Michael McPherson: Well, from my vantage point now what I’ve really discovered and what’s been my personal experience is that porn is actually a very addictive substance. In order to experience the same neurochemical drops of dopamine and other reward chemicals, other substances in our physiology, we have to find new, different, expanded, more novel ways to experience the same thing. There’s only so many times that you can sit in front of your computer screen and put your hands down your pants, right? But the novelty is really the addictive portion. And that’s also, from my experience and what I’ve witnessed in another men, how sex becomes so distorted for the average person.
Obviously, if you go on the web and if you look on internet porn sites, you can find anything. You can find sensuality, all the way to the extreme spectrum of something like teenage porn, which we obviously know is an issue. So there’s the practical side of that, which is a lot of people that are participating in porn aren’t doing so either fully in their own empowerment; a lot of people are the by-product of sexual slavery, the by-product of sexual exploitation, and they’ve been manipulated to be this object on a screen.
Other people are there willingly, because they know that pornography is one of the biggest industries in the United States and across the world. So personally, I think it very much does warp our reality around sexuality, especially as it relates to the other.
For me, it created a sense of hypersexualization. When your sex hormones come online, obviously you feel that in your body; at puberty, you feel the changes happening in your body. You don’t know what’s happening. As a man, you don’t know the actual changes that are taking place inside of you, but you can feel it. And then when you take something like pornography and you put it on top of that, it really gives you only one outlet for the energy, which is sexuality. But the reality is that this energy was meant to have many different and various forms of expression. It wasn’t meant to be limited to sex and sex alone. But that’s what happens through our exposure to different forms of media, but specifically pornography, is it gets trapped in this one area. And then we wonder why we have a bunch of adult men in the world that are so frustrated, sexually frustrated and angry. Well, it’s because they don’t actually know that this energy can be used for other things.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: I love that. And before we turn to what you’re describing, sexual energy versus sexuality and how they can be collapsed, and how sexual energy can be used for other things, I’m just curious, your experience, did anyone ever challenge you, or did you get negative feedback in your experiences from adolescence to 20-something, before you met McKinsey? If you’re approaching a woman like you said, and you have these frameworks in your mind from porn, and perhaps not relating to the human being, that there could be some disconnect or some challenge there.
Michael McPherson: It’s a big question, and I really feel like it’s a lot of different things. Our sexuality is mixed in with all of our life experiences; it’s not only one aspect of it. We have our conditioning that we received as a young person, the environment that we’re in, the safety we felt to be ourselves… A lot of us felt different, especially from the millennial generation… And then depending on the freedom that we had to be emotional, to express emotions, to have emotional connections to other people, especially family members- all of that is kind of the background of relationship. Now we have the sexual piece, which is hypersexualization, sexual objectification… And when you add all that together, it’s just layers and layers and layers that reside over the heart. So I could have relationships with women that were very sexually satisfying, but they’d always have a timestamp on them, because sexual satisfaction is not enough. And it never will be. Not for me, not for any other man. Because there’s a deeper longing inside of every human being, especially every man, to feel the heart satisfaction of being truly intimate and sharing yourself with another. That can only come through being vulnerable. And again, there’s another societal conditioning – men are often taught not to be vulnerable, or it’s viewed as weak to be vulnerable… Or you hear these things like “Man up, don’t be such a you-know-what.” So it’s a lot of different things.
But sexuality is a common place where men can — they get away with hiding behind their sexuality. Or they can disguise their wounding, their past pains, their trauma, their shadows inside of sexuality and get away with it because of the greater that it’s all happening inside of. There’s a general acceptance that sex is sex, it’s a physical act, everybody get over it… And it’s very relaxed, I suppose.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: Yeah. And the other thing to add to that would be — I love that you named there so many things that influence our experience sexually with another person, and what we’ve been taught around expressing ourselves, and having permission to feel, and the range, the spectrum of feelings… And when we talk culturally, again, stereotypically, with men that oftentimes there’s a limited range that is acceptable, and sometimes sex can be a way o access some of those more vulnerable feelings… But like you’re saying, it can also be a way to kind of hide or kind of mask some of the wounding, too.
Michael McPherson: Absolutely. One of my greatest wounds, something that I’ve felt consistently throughout my life has been “I don’t know why I’m here. What’s my purpose?” And if I entertain that too long, it becomes “What’s the point?” It doesn’t make a difference whether I’m here or not. But I hired my sexuality to distract me from that. So that’s obviously a painful place for me to reside. If I’m there, I’m in my pain body, and it doesn’t feel good to be in your pain body. So I hired sex, and even more so, infatuation. Because how often are we really having sex in our lives? It’s maybe 1%, maybe less than 1%, in the grand scheme of things… But the entertainment, the mind’s entertainment, the infatuation, the thrill of the chase – those things actually are a much larger percentage of our life experience, because you don’t even necessarily need another person, a relationship to have those things. You can create infatuation with strangers, people you don’t even know. I mean, that’s what happens online all the time through things like social media. So that piece is what was actually the most distracting for me… But it aided me in not feeling the pain of my wound, if that makes sense.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: Was it McKinsey that inspired you to open your heart to start looking at this, or were you already beginning some of this prior to meeting her?
Michael McPherson: Yeah, so prior to meeting McKinsey I spent about two years in a personal professional development company, assisting, volunteering, even coaching, called Landmark… So I became really developed, but mostly from my mind. So I understood what had happened in my life, I understood what I made it mean, I had even gone as far as to clean up my integrity with those people, have phone calls, apologize, take responsibility… But there was definitely a deeper part of myself, an emotional, a somatic, a physiological part of myself that I hadn’t healed. So when I came together with McKinsey, that’s what got revealed to me – the emotions, the physical, somatic healing that needed to take place… And we really started that right away.
Now, it looked messy at first, and I think there’s definitely a message I wanna convey to couples – you have to be willing to get messy, and messy is distinct from abusive. But you have to be willing to let go of your sense of control, of your identity a little bit, looking good for sure, to be able to shake some of these things up inside of us… And that’s really what I had to do with McKinsey. But we had other structures that we used as well, like we started working with the [unintelligible 00:19:52.23] is a really profound template for people to get deeply connected to their life purpose, as well as their relationship to love, their relationship to prosperity… So we had that structure that we really dove into together.
We also worked with Masterplan medicines, especially ayahuasca, and we sat in those ceremonies together. So we really went deep, fast, and that took my healing from my mind down into my heart and into my body.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: Do you feel that those experiences helped you restructure some of your patterning, particularly as you’re talking about that dopamine, hiring the sexuality as a form of distraction, but also all of the infatuation and the dopamine hits and the reward system there – do you feel like some of those ceremonies helped you reorganized that, or heal some of that?
Michael McPherson: To the extent that I couldn’t even describe. It’s pretty much the foundation of where what I speak about now originated from. So in these ceremonies, she – she’s a plant deity, so it’s a her; she has her own spirit, she’s separate from us… So she introduced me to my sex energy, and would actually have me feel it in these ceremonies. So she would basically turn on my sex energy, my body would feel it all over, because when it moves freely it’s not just in your genital region, it moves all throughout your body… And then of course, what was right there was everything I had around that – all my shame, embarrassment, thinking that there’s something wrong with me, that this is happening to me in such a sacred ceremony… All of my judgments, opinions, right and wrong was right there for me to witness as soon as she did that.
So that was the first thing, was to just even see how much baggage I was carrying around, and energy that we were really bestowed with as human beings. It’s something that we’re gifted by our Creator – or you can call that whatever you’d like. It’s special, it’s sacred, it’s something that we’re meant to use as a tool in our life. But for me, it had become my greatest adversary, because I collapsed it with sexuality, so I was actually terrified of it.
So she allowed me to feel my sex energy, which allowed me to create the distinction between these two things. I could feel how much pleasure I was receiving, how much it opened my heart and it expanded my ability to give and receive and feel love… And I had never had those experiences before. So this was all very new for me. I’ll pause there…
Dr. Jessica Higgins: Well, it’s beautiful, and I appreciate — so when you say “she”, are you still referring to the plant medicine, or are you referring to interacting with McKinsey in a different way?
Michael McPherson: Yeah, I was referring to the plan medicine.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: Okay, perfect. I thought so, I thought so. So what I’m feeling from you, and I have had [unintelligible 00:23:13.23] different people speak to sexuality, and that being such a part of our vitality and our primal energy… And the way that I’m hearing you speak to it, it’s like, awakening and recognizing the awareness of that energy within you, that doesn’t necessarily have to involve someone else. You get to choose to do that if you so want to, but that’s separate from the sexual energy. But I wanna hear from you, how you have language to distinguish between the two.
Michael McPherson: Sure. Well, our sex energy, even though we call it sex energy, which would inherently have you think that it’s inherent by nature, it’s really not. There’s nothing sexual about sex energy, that’s the irony… Other than the fact that it comes from our genital region; that’s where it stems from, that’s where it originates from inside of our body. So it’s synonymous with prana, chi, creative life force is another term I like to use for it. There’s really no difference between these things. And we have it from birth, really also in gestation, to the end of our life.
Now, what happens during puberty is we obviously go through a physical maturation, and very soon, for most people, unless they have a constructive structure around them, people who are embodied in this kind of work, sexuality gets collapsed onto sex energy. They become one and the same for people. There’s no distinction between the two any longer.
So there can be tremendous fear around even having a conversation about something like sex energy because you’ve got the whole world and all of the distortion of sexuality behind it, and that’s what people fear; they think it’s one and the same.
So when you say “Hey, do you wanna learn to work with your sex energy?”, people are like “I don’t wanna get into tantra”, or “I don’t wanna be in polyamory.” There’s confusion, but they’re really distinct. And that is work that you can absolutely do on your own, but that’s also work you can share in with your partner. So when you come into a love-making ceremony with your beloved, the two of you are activating your sex energy together, and you’re utilizing it as a form of co-creation.
I like to tell people, you can create whatever you want in that ceremony. Now, I’m typically not talking about any form of materialism, although that’s not rules out… Because anytime you add two people together, your sex energy becomes amplified exponentially… And energy we know is energy; it influences everything. We’re all interconnected. The whole world is. So what you do as an individual, what you do as a couple impacts the collective, and vice versa.
So we started introducing big things, like peace for all human beings, for every person to know and feel love inside of their hear, for people to feel a sense of belonging, for people to feel grounded, rooted, connected to the Earth, into our love-making ceremonies. And then amplified those intentions with our sex energy while we were making love. I know I just went really big right there, but that’s just one example of how you can work with this energy consciously with another person… And you can definitely do it on your own as well.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: Right. It’s like a win/win/win, as far as the intention and what you’re co-creating together. There’s so many paths here, so I just wanna slow down a little bit. So for people that are listening and heard you say “Sex energy can be used for other things”, can you give some examples about that before we move towards some of the other things you’re speaking to?
Michael McPherson: Definitely. Thank you for bringing me back to that. Sex energy is a generative energy. You can think of it literally like a generator – it’s going to bring more energy, it’s going to amplify any center that it’s brought into. I like to think of this in terms of our chakra system. It’s something people are typically exposed to, accepting of. If you think about it in terms of chakra centers, if you draw that energy up into particular centers, invite it up into particular centers, it can amplify what that center is used for. For instance, if you draw it up or bring it into your sacral center – the sacral center is your source of creativity – it can amplify your creativity, whether that’s working on creative projects, whether that’s your an artist, you paint, you sing, you create music… Whether that’s you’re in business and you’re coming up with creative solutions to things that you’re bumping up against in your business. It can expand and amplify your creative abilities.
If you draw it up further into your solar plexus, it can empower you to stand in yourself, to come from your authentic self, to be who you really are.
If you bring it up even further, it hits your heart, and that’s really where I’m inviting people to go. Because when you start utilizing your sex energy to generate or expand upon the energy inside of your heart, we know the heart has its own electromagnetic field, and it’s much bigger than even the brain’s electromagnetic field. It’s the biggest one we have. So it expands at a distance beyond our body.
When we get that sex energy into our heart, it opens the heart. And this is where people have the timeless experience of an orgasmic heart, and they’ll describe it as things like bliss, nirvana. So you can actually have that experience with yourself. You can invite your sex energy into your heart mostly with your breath, the power of your breath and intention, have the timeless experience of an orgasm in your heart, and then live or be inside of that field of love you’ve just created in your interactions with other people. That’s a powerful place to come from. That’s somebody who’s gonna have a lot of positive impact on the people that they’re interacting with.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: And Michael, for people that might be listening and are perhaps new to what you’re describing, is there anything for somebody beginning – I know there’s a ton of curriculum around this… But when you’re saying “connect with and then bring it up”, is it using the breath and the intention, or was there anything else you would help people connect with? …maybe they’ve never located or consciously thought of their sex energy. Is there anything you woudl speak to for somebody just beginning that?
Michael McPherson: Definitely. There’s a few practices that I typically invite both men and women to do, that are pretty helpful for introducing or getting introduced to your sex energy. So again, because these things are collapsed, oftentimes we don’t even know when we’re experiencing our sex energy. So it’s important to identify what it is, when it’s happening.
One thing you can do – many people have probably heard of “breath of fire.” It’s one of the many Kundalini breath practices… You can look for it online and find it very easily; there’s people that’ll teach you how to do it. That is a way to utilize a breath to activate this center, to pump energy into it, if you will. And then yes, you can use intention, whether it’s beforehand or during, to ask for this energy to circulate in a certain way, to ask for it to rise, because that’s what it’s meant to do once it’s activated. It’s meant to rise from our lower centers into our higher centers. So that’s one way of working with breath and working with intention to have this experience.
Another way – and I teach men specifically this practice; it’s obviously different for women, because we have different parts – is called [unintelligible 00:31:32.02] If I were to dumb it down, it looks like masturbation, but it’s not. Instead, you set a sacred space, you have a place of quiet, you have a place where you can be present and intimate with yourself, and you apply oil to your [unintelligible 00:31:51.06] to your penis, and you massage yourself in a way that inspires arousal. On the sliding scale of pleasure, you want to keep your pleasure between – you know, zero is completely flaccid, ten is ejaculating – a seven and a nine.
What happens when men do this, when they massage themselves consciously in this way, is they actually feel their sex energy circulating through their body. It’s sometimes one of the first times that they get present to how it feels when it’s moving inside of them. That’s really important, because you identify it, you’ll never not be able to notice once it’s there.
Another great thing about this practice is it really gets you present to all the conditioning you have around this energy. So you can notice is your body tense, is it clenching? Are you not breathing, your breaths are very shallow and short? Are you relaxed, or are you able and open? Are you able to take full, conscious breaths? Are you able to be with this energy, rather than have to race to an end result, race to an end goal, to get it out? Or can you allow it to move gradually? Can you entertain it? Can you direct it to go certain places?
All of these things get illuminated in such a simple practice. It just brings in a new level of consciousness to something that most people are already doing in a very unconscious way anyways.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: Yes. And then like you said, the patterning or the programming that we might get from different messages that perhaps aren’t as supportive to our full vitality and range of experience… So can you walk us through how you were able to integrate that in the process of — because I get the transformational experience of it, but how did you integrate it?
Michael McPherson: It’s a great question. Yeah, the integration came definitely over time. I think there’s a little bit of a disillusion when you go and work with plant medicines that you walk out healed and you’re forever transformed, and that’s it. But as you’re bringing forward right now, integration is such an important piece. You can certainly receive profound healings in ceremony, but it’s actually — the real ceremony begins as soon as the plant ceremony ends. That’s the ultimate truth.
So for me, that ceremony, the integration ceremony, really looked like my relationship with my beloved. So I was doing these practices on my own, I was working with my breath in a very conscious way to have these Kundalini awakening experiences, to move this energy inside of myself… But then also, I was inviting my partner to witness me inside of that world. So I was letting her see that I was doing these practices, and then I personally took full responsibility for our experience together in our sexual union.
So I started setting sacred space before we would make love, I would clean the room, I would make the bed, I would put out essential oils, I would burn some sage, I would sometimes put on some music, setting it as if it were a ceremony that we were going into, because love-making, as I’m sure you know, is a ceremony…
Dr. Jessica Higgins: If we treat it as such…
Michael McPherson: Absolutely, absolutely.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: I mean, it is, but we don’t always treat it as such.
Michael McPherson: Absolutely. So we would come together in this space, and I call it setting sacred space, because once you know the space is sacred, anything that happens inside of that space you can consider sacred. You know it’s meant to happen. Nothing comes up by mistake. So if someone, like McKinsey, my beloved, started crying during love-making, I wouldn’t get all freaked out by that and think that something is wrong. I would actually stay present and know that something very right is happening here. And the same thing would be true for me.
So before we’d actually become physical together, we’d sit together and share our intentions. And a lot of times my intentions were to go deeper in my experience of love and intimacy with my beloved. This secret – I’ll just give it to people now – that actually has you go deeper in your experience as yourself as a beloved, through the mirror of your partner, through your beloved, you actually fall more in love with yourself, but… Park that for a second and we’ll come back.
So then, while we’re making love, all kinds of things would happen. If you haven’t experienced this before, it’s kind of hard to give voice to, because it’s a very mystical experience. But we would reach a place of timelessness, without any end goal, without time restriction, without the immaturity of my sexuality… And part of this was even giving myself permission to slow down. It doesn’t have to be [unintelligible 00:37:01.07] and it’s over. It’s like, give myself permission to actually pause. When things would become too intense for me, to relax and pause.
My beloved was so gracious that she was very supportive with these things. She never viewed it as like “Oh, is there something wrong here?” She always really worked with me. But we would have these experiences where time and space would disappear, and we would be in the experience of what I would call God, where you’re surrounded by what I (again) would call love, the energy of unconditional love.
So we started having really profound experiences like that, and then also what happened was anything that wasn’t a match for that level of love that we were co-creating together started to come to the surface, and I would share. So a lot of what I was starting to share with my partner, with McKinsey, was my past shame, and things I had done in my past that I was still hanging on to, that had me not be present to the innocence of my sexuality, the innocence of my sex energy. It had me feel like I was a bad person; that’s what shame does, right? So I started to bring those things forward… And in doing that, that’s really where I got really clean on the inside.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: It’s beautiful. I appreciate you sharing… And just in my understanding, the possibilities continue to expand. Are you open to sharing how long you guys have been together?
Michael McPherson: Yes, we’ve been together for over three years now.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: And just for people listening and the practicality, do you guys cultivate your individual sex energy as part of the ceremony before co-creating?
Michael McPherson: Not always.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: Not always?
Michael McPherson: Yeah, so what we like to do and what we’ve done in the past – it’s worked really well for us – is actually schedule when we’re gonna make love. If you’re someone that’s up to anything in life and you don’t put it on the calendar, it’s most likely not gonna happen. We all have things that we’re responsible for taking care of, especially in the busy world that we have today… So by scheduling it and putting it on our calendars, we were able to take some time beforehand, whether it’s 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 20 minutes to actually prepare for the ceremony. That’s where I would do some of my breath work practices, that’s where sometimes McKinsey would do the same… But I will be honest, that doesn’t always happen across the board.
The importance of setting sacred space initially was just for both of us to feel safe with each other inside of this space. So once we really established that safety, we’d always, always, always set our intention before our lovemaking. And it can really be anything; it can be as big as the world, or it can be very individual. We now feel so safe with each other that we don’t necessarily have to have the same structure that we once had in the past, if that makes sense.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: And did McKinsey have a similar framework to be able to meet you with this, or did you guys do ceremony together as far as the plant medicine?
Michael McPherson: Yeah, so nearly every ceremony I’ve been a part of, she’s been there with me. So we’ve done — and part of the integration piece, after the ceremony is completed, you share your experience, what you saw, what you learned, how it relates to your life, how you’re gonna implement it… So we were very open with each other the whole time. She knew sexuality was really something I was working on, working to mature for myself, and she also had past partners that were addicted to things like pornography… I went cold turkey as soon as I met my beloved, so I never used pornography in our relationship… But she had come from other experiences where men had used things like pornography, or had a very (what I would call) a low-vibration relationship to sex and sexuality, and then they were bringing that into their relationship with her. So it evoked that same fear, so she had to deal with all her past experiences around men being the way that they were in their relationship with her, and what they brought really into her womb… Because it’s an energy that’s transferred. Sex is the most expansive energetic exchange that you can possibly have/share with someone, so it’s really important to choose wisely… And obviously, we all use the discernment that we have.
But she had already worked with a healer prior to coming into our relationship. She had worked with someone in the tantric realm, who would show her how to basically activate her sex energy and circulate it in her body. So she kind of had that education before she even came into our union. I didn’t, however. Mine came through our work together with the medicines.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: Gotcha. Thank you for sharing that… Because I know just even in my dissertation around conscious intimate relationships, some people were already — they were both on the path of personal development, perhaps even spiritual development when they met, and sometimes they were already together where one started down the path, and then the other came later, and I just was curious if she had a way, or you guys had a language and a framework together.
Can you speak to sexual desire and long-term intimacy, and how that fits in our conversation?
Michael McPherson: Definitely. Desire, especially if you’re in a romantic relationship, you’ve met your beloved and your intention is to be with them, then you wanna be able to nurture desire. The irony, what I’ve learned is that desire is based a little bit on fear. You almost need a little bit of friction – and it doesn’t have to be in a bad way – between two people to have that energy of desire. And in terms of long-term relationships, I really think it’s important for the partners to have their own space. It’s important for the man to have his space, to process, to be with himself in the way that he does, whether it looks like going out into the nature, whether it looks like having men circles… It’s important for the woman to have her space and to process in the way that she does, whether it looks like sitting in ceremony, being in women’s circles… And that’s important because we’re obviously different, and we need time away from each other.
Actually, physical time away from each other is sometimes the best thing we could do to nurture sexual desire in relationship… Because it’s in the absence — for instance, my beloved and I, we live and work from home. So her and I are at home, typically together, all day. And how that used to look was we were always trying to have points of connection. So she would get off a call, I would go and talk to her; I would get off a mentoring call, she would come to talk to me… And we were trying to stay so connected all throughout the day, because we were doing different things in different rooms of the house.
Now, we’ve learned that actually allowing each other to be separate, because we live together, is nurturing for our sexuality, for our sexual desire. So when I come back after a long day of “work” (if you wanna call it that), I’m excited to see her. I haven’t been saturated with her presence all day, or I haven’t been trying to do what I’m here to do AND nurture the relationship at the same time. And that’s not to say — there obviously still are points of connection, but to give ourselves permission to have space. There’s definitely a difference between codependency and interdependency. We rely on each other for things absolutely, but we wanna do that in an empowering way, rather than — when we do it in a disempowering way, it usually diminishes our sexual fire or our sexual desire.
Outside of relationship, sexual desire – and this is what I teach men – is an internal thing. So a lot of times we think that we feel sexual desire in response to something. So for a man, you see an attractive woman, you feel a sense of arousal and you start to maybe have sexual projections, sexual thoughts; you imagine sleeping with that person, whatever. What I like to bring home for men is that desire is not something that comes from outside of us. Desire is desire is desire is desire. You desire sex in the same way you desire a tuna fish sandwich. It’s all the same. But our conditioning, and what we personally bring to desire, is what has desire be whatever it is for us.
So why this is important is because in the world and culture that we live in, a lot of times women are being projected onto. I work with a lot of women as well, so I know that simple things – going to the gym, going to the grocery store, being out at the beach, they don’t necessarily feel safe, physically safe, because they can feel that there are men (particularly) around them, looking at them in a certain way, projecting a certain energy onto them. So these men are acting from their sexual desire, but what they don’t get is that their sexual desire isn’t clean. It’s coming through the filter of the conditioning that they’ve received through things like pornography. So there’s an opportunity to clean that up, but it’s an inside job.
So when you have a man recognize that when he feels sexual desire it’s not coming from outside of him, it’s actually being stemmed from inside of him, all of a sudden he can be responsible for it. He’s no longer a victim of it being sparked whenever, wherever, with whomever. He can actually take responsibility for that energy inside of him. And what I teach men to do is, again, work with their breath to invite that energy to expand within them, distinct from and having nothing to do with that other person. You initiated this energy inside of you, so you be responsible for it and work with it now that it’s here. You did this to yourself – you know, not that you’re a victim, but… You did this, now use it for good.
So I invite them to breathe and expand that energy inside of them, and what actually ends up happening is they have this orgasmic or blissful experience. And why that’s important is because it amplifies — if you’ve ever experienced arousal/sexual desire, you know that it’s like going from 110-volt to 220-v. Suddenly, there’s a lot more energy available to you than there was three seconds ago. So we can make use of that energy to raise our energy -some people in the spiritual community would call us our vibration – to amplify our vibration, lift our spirit, lift our energy, reach higher, and actually connect with that part of us which I already mentioned earlier, our internal beloved, our soul self, and have a really sacred experience with ourselves, distinct or separate from anyone else. So that’s the possibility of working with sexual desire consciously, both inside and outside of a relationship.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: Thank you for breaking that down, I love that. I am a big fan of the term — it’s more psychological, but “differentiation”, and being able to feel yourself. I think so many messages in culture really support the idea that you give over, you’re really prioritizing your partner, which I do agree with; there’s a balance. But oftentimes, we don’t always make that space to feel ourselves, to feel our desire. And I love the responsibility that you’re inviting to then cultivate that inner beloved, and raising the vibration. Thank you for that, I love that.
Well, is there anything else you wanna say to — I wanna start transitioning to your work and what you guys are doing… But is there anything you wanna say in closing around our topic today?
Michael McPherson: Yeah, I guess I’ll just highlight some points, because I know we’ve covered a lot today, and it’s always so fun to explore how these conversations come about. So I’ll just cover the top points that I wanna leave with people, that they can take home. The first is that sexuality and sex energy are not the same thing. They’re two different things. A lot of people don’t know that, but uncollapse them or have them be distinct is really important for healing our relationship to sex, especially from a cultural perspective.
Sex energy, or sexuality I should say, has been collapsed onto our sex energy. This happens around puberty, and it’s typically a result of our exposure to media, things like pornography. What that does is it takes the sex energy and it gives it only one outlet for expression – sexuality.
There’s this big conversation happening in the world about sexual liberation. Everyone wants to feel free in their sexuality. And what I want people to know is it’s not as scary as you might think it is. Sexual liberation doesn’t look like the world falling into a giant orgy. And if you’re holding out for that, you probably need to grow up.
Sexual freedom is actually liberating our sex energy from the confines of sex, and allowing it to flow and be used and utilized in other areas of our life, because that’s the way it was designed to be used by our creator, by Gaia, by mother earth, whatever you wanna call it.
So our sex energy can be used for non-sexual things, it can be used for really beautiful things, which we’ve already touch on in this conversation… So I’d really love to just invite people to explore the possibility of that; whether they wanna work with me, whether they wanna read my book, whether they wanna work with someone else who’s having this conversation… Just to explore the possibility of utilizing this energy in a different way.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: Wonderful. I love it, and I love the ownership that you’re inviting people into, and the possibility of what is available. It’s all beautiful. Even when you were talking a little bit ago, I was like, “I feel excited in nature, and I feel the vitality.” I think there’s this life-force energy that you’re speaking to, that we have such access to, that probably many of us – I’ll speak for myself – I’m not always conscious of, or connect to… And just the inspiration that you’re offering in your message, so thank you.
How can people get in touch with what you’re doing and what you’re offering?
Michael McPherson: The best place to reach me is on my website, michaelmcpherson.co. There you can find all the resources as they relate to me. You can find my podcast there, you can find the book that I have, that’s being published on October 30th of this year, so it’ll be available really soon… And you can find other episodes that I’ve been hosted on, other podcast episodes. I have a blog… So there’s just plenty of information. You can also reach out to me personally there and get in contact with me if you wanna work with me, or just explore something. So that’s the best way.
My wife and I – we’re also on Instagram. We don’t use it in the same way that everyone else does, but my Instagram handle is @humanity.media. The one that we share together is @cacaoceremonialdrinkingchocolate. So those are some places if people wanna reach out to us, they can.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: Nice. Wonderful. I’ll make sure to have all those links on today’s show notes. Michael, I’m curious – I actually had someone reach out to me and I don’t know… I think Goop Lab did some service and offering; I don’t know if you caught — they have a series on Netflix, and their first episode… And basically, their series was exploring alternative healing modalities, and their first one was more mushrooms… So anyway, this person reached out to me and was asking for assisted therapy with psychedelic, or I can’t remember exactly what she was looking for specifically.
My understanding is in the United States there are a few people doing this underground, but the places that people can go are in other countries. Is that what you would say?
Michael McPherson: Yeah. And you just wanna be careful, or I should say responsible, when you’re traveling across the world to participate in ceremonies like this. There are places where you can go, absolutely. You can find those places easily online, but again, you wanna use your discernment. And really, do your research and get in contact with the people who are organizing or are responsible for organizing those retreats or healing centers, to just find out how legitimate or not it is… Because just with anything, there are people that are doing this work for real, there are legitimate shamans that can work with people and help them heal, and there are also people that are posing as shamans to make money and profit off of a lot of Westerners right now traveling to foreign countries to do this kind of work. So it’s just something to express extra discernment around.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: And in the ceremonies that you offer, is there — it sounds like it’s cacao… Is there any element there that is more — I keep saying psychedelic, but that’s not the word I’m thinking of. What is the general term?
Michael McPherson: Yeah, so cacao is not a psychedelic.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: I know that, [unintelligible 00:55:42.02]
Michael McPherson: Yeah, so cacao is a really beautiful medicine. It’s absolutely a plant medicine. If you wanna work with it, I suggest ceremonial-grade cacao, which is the whole bean, and it’s the native strain to whatever country it’s being brought from, or whatever region of the world, which means it’s still that direct communication from mother that hasn’t been altered by humanity at all.
So cacao is a really beautiful medicine. It’s a great starting place for people, because again, you’re not gonna have a big psychedelic experience, you’re not gonna be pushed to your limits, you’re not gonna have to go into something that you’re not prepared for. You can have a really intimate ceremony with yourself, which just looks like making your cacao, setting your intentions, inviting in the cacao spirit – because every plan has a spirit – and allowing it to work on you, whether you’re journaling, whether you’re reading, whether you’re meditating, whether you’re processing one of your life experiences…
What’s beautiful about cacao is that it’s a heart medicine… And I don’t mean to say that as if I’m an MD. It’s the same medicine that a doctor would talk about… But I say heart medicine because it’s really great at accessing the emotional body, and specifically opening the heart. And again, that’s one of those things that I can say that you don’t really know until you experience it for yourself.
She, cacao, has definitely been a profound part of my healing journey, and I’ve sat in daily ceremony with myself, as a sacred ritual that I practice for myself, nearly every day for the last three years. So again, to go back to integration – my cacao ceremonies have been a profound space of integration, because really, it’s that intentional time that I’m setting aside to be with me.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: Thank you. I hope that people will get in touch with you. It sounds like you offer mentoring and coaching, and ceremony, and different forms of support. Is that right?
Michael McPherson: That’s right, yeah. I work one on one with people, and I’m in the process now — I’m about to give my first TEDx talk, so that’s going to really expand my opportunity to work with people in a group setting, in a large group setting, which is something that I’m really excited about. But right now I do one on one work, and I’m happy to work with anyone that’s interested in something like this.
Dr. Jessica Higgins: Well, thank you again for joining us today.
Michael McPherson: Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.
I hope you have enjoyed today’s interview, again, with Michael McPherson. Again, if you are a consistent listener, you might have heard William Ayot’s interview around the power of ritual. And I love that Michael is inviting us to create sacred space, intention when we are entering into lovemaking with our significant other, as well as helping us develop and expand our understanding of sexual energy and sexuality.
Again, if you would like the links mentioned in today’s episode, you can visit DrJessicaHiggins.com, click on Podcast, and there you’ll find all the episodes. Again, today’s episode is 249, “How to develop beyond distorted and collapsed ways of being in your sexual energy”, an interview with Michael McPherson.
Again, I just wanna encourage you, if you’re interested in group coaching and you’re looking for more support, I encourage you to check on the Work With Me, scroll down to Group Coaching, and you can find more information there, again, at DrJessicaHiggins.com.
Thank you for listening, and until next time, I hope you take great care.
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