Life-Changing Sex Makes Anything Possible with Kim Anami (EP#28)

Time to talk tonic herbalism, people. Maybe some medicinal mushrooms and philosophy for longevity. So pour yourself a tonic and get ready to get superhuman, baby. Let's start the show.

 

Tahnee:  Hi, everybody, and welcome to the SuperFeast podcast. Today, I have Kim Anami with me, and I'm a huge fan, so I'm a little bit nervous. Hi, Kim.

 

Kim:  Hello. Lovely to be here. Thank you for having me.

 

Tahnee: Yeah. I'm really excited today because the work that you do is something I'm really passionate about has had a massive impact on my life. I know that you're currently working as a kind of high-level sex and relationship coach. You run your gorgeous retreats around the world, you have your online salons. Is there anything else about your work that you'd love to share in terms of your bio or how you came to be doing what you do?

 

Kim:  Well from a young age, I had these experiences or the intuition that sex was this very powerful portal for healing and transformation. I was at an awareness of my own sexuality from a young age, and then that translated into having these very cataclysmic experiences even in my teenage years when I was first experimenting with sex. That really informed me going forward, that this wasn't just this way to get your rocks off. There was this much more deeper, spiritual enlightenment element to it. Then when I came across Taoist and tantric teachings in my early twenties, I was like, "Ah, so I was right." They echo the things that I was discovering experientially and intuitively where sex was this greater portal self-realization, to spiritual awakening, and that we could consciously use our sexual energy to better ourselves and to self-realize. That made so much sense to me.

 

Kim:  It's just always been a part of my wellness toolbox. Like I've been into, again from a young age, like meditation and healthy eating and exercise and philosophy and psychology. To me, sex was always in that toolbox of personal growth modalities. These were things that I did to center myself, to make myself feel like the best version of myself.

 

Tahnee: I really love that because we talk a lot about how sex drive is a sign of health and well-being and that ability to enjoy sex and find pleasure in it is a part of an overall health strategy. I think that's something that our culture really doesn't reach or educate young people in such a kind of taboo topic, and I think that's what's so inspiring about your work, is that you're actually having these conversations, and like you say, kind of positioning them as almost a tool toward personal betterment. It's in that kind of personal growth category as opposed to being just about getting your rocks off or getting too involved in the pornography industry or any of that kind of stuff, because that stuff really takes us away from what is truly a very natural energy that we all have within us and that drives the species and our own healing as well.

 

Tahnee: I've just done your Vaginal Kung-Fu salon, which is really awesome and what I really love about how you present your information, having studied with Mantak Chia, who's one of the people teaching this stuff from a Taoist perspective. It's very obtuse and esoteric and kind of difficult for people to get their heads around, and what I love about what you've done is you've made it so easy and so accessible and kind of fun, and really for the modern woman. Can you talk a little bit about how you translated these esoteric teachings into a more modern context for us?

 

Kim:  I have great respect for Mantak Chia's work and that whole lineage because there's so much wisdom in there. To me, it's really almost a science in these techniques and principles that can be proven over and over again through experience. I began looking at these teachings, like I said, in my early twenties, so it's been, gosh, about 25 years or so of looking at this stuff and practicing it and then teaching it. Yeah, of course when you start to read the books and even when I did workshops with esteemed teachers in the lineage, I still found it a bit difficult to grasp, and I'd have to read the books over and over, like read a page over and over again, but once I got it and then saw very rapidly the effects of doing these practices, then when I did begin to share them, obviously I just converted that into language that was easier to grasp, I'd say. But, I also put my own unique flavor on my own brand, like my whole way of being in the world and even talking about sex is playful, irreverent.

 

Kim:  To me, it's like the irreverent and the reverent, right? I absolutely have a deep respect for the sacredness of enlightened sex and conscious sex, and yet I'm also a very playful, kind of cheeky person, which is why I love Australians so much because I tend to be pretty well-received in this land for that reason. It's like I've got that element to my work, and so I think that being able to combine that, having had many years of experience in these practices, and then putting my own, and I wouldn't say changing them radically; there's a few points that I would disagree with Mantak Chia on but not that many, and the essence of all of the work I tremendously respect and I think I've kept loyal to. Yeah, and so now I've been able to bring that work to many, many women and I'm always just so excited when I hear people doing the work and the kind of results that they get, and how it's really stood the test of time, and these practices that are designed to get us in touch with these deep parts of ourselves and to heal and to revitalize, how very, very, very powerful they are.

 

Tahnee: I think that's what I really noticed on the salon, was just how many people were especially having emotional shifts and psychological shifts around their relationships to their body, to their menstrual cycles, to sex, to their partners. It's really deeply transformative work kind of under the guise of learning how to exercise your vagina-

 

Kim:  [crosstalk 00:06:19].

 

Tahnee: Or whatever people think [crosstalk 00:06:20].

 

Kim:  Yeah, whatever gets them in the door, you know?

 

Tahnee: Yeah. Has that really been your experience, that you kind of start offering, like, "Okay, we're going to do some jade egg practices and massage our breasts," and then people are like, "Holy shit, my whole life's changing?"

 

Kim:  Yeah. I mean I think that people don't understand the depth of connection between their sex life and every other part of their life, like the way that you're talking about, say, libido as being indicative of overall health and vitality, right? That's a great connection, and most people don't see that. They certainly would not get that confirmation from any allopathic medical practitioner, right? That their ovarian cysts or their difficult PMS, or their challenging menopause, or their erectile dysfunction has anything to do with anything other than a random event, right? Like those are just random things that are happening to people, where I look very consciously at the body as being infinitely wise and communicating with us all the time. All of those things are symptoms of imbalance. There's symptoms of sexual energy imbalance, there's symptoms of blockages in the symptom that haven't been cleared out. Most people don't see that connection right away. They're eager to learn about orgasms and to learn about having a super-powered vagina. Of course, and those are all great things to aspire to, but they're also the symbols of good health. They're also the symbols of a system which is imbalanced.

 

Kim:  As we get deeper into the work in my salons, yes, it's like uncovering the layers of, "Okay, here's the relationship between this particular expression or symptom in your body and where that could be coming from. Here's the deeper issue." As you would've heard me speak in the salon, I'm really into what I call radical responsibility and radical honesty, and self-honesty in particular where the more that we take responsibility for what's going on in our lives, what we see in our external circumstances, the faster we can change it and heal it, but if we're just considering ourselves to be effect rather than cause, it's pretty hard to change anything in our reality.

 

Kim:  We live in this climate right now where it's, I don't know how it is in Australia exactly, but certainly in North America where almost suggesting personal responsibility gets a finger pointed. "Oh you're blaming people, you're shaming people." What? I have never, ever done that. It's more from this place of inspiration and power, like, "This is how you can change it if you acknowledge that on some level you may have created this," or it comes from programming that you've picked up from the culture, or ancestral lineage of blockages and traumas that's been carried into the present that's in your cellular memory. All of these things contribute. So, I'm all about getting people to do this deep, internal excavation, overturning introspection to get truth and then to clear their space, clear their energy pathways, and then able to attain all of these magnificent things like shooting ping-pong balls with their vaginas and having 30 cervical orgasms in a row, and a man who can spend all night making love and not ejaculate or learn how to orgasm without ejaculating.

 

Kim:  All of these things are possible for every single person on the planet. It's not just the domain of some special few, some gifted few, some lucky few. No. Every single person can do that, and I've even been harassed for saying that like, "Oh, you're shaming people by saying that everyone can do that." I'm like, "Are you kidding me? I'm giving them power and hope, and I wouldn't say it if I hadn't seen it over and over again thousands of times that it is possible." It's just a matter of doing this deeper, internal work.

 

Tahnee: I really, really love that. Fist pump. I mean we talk about it in terms of sovereignty, which I think is the same thing that you're talking about, and it applies to every aspect of our life. No, if you think about that sexual energy as being creative energy and that ability to, whether it's create life or create something out into the world, or just to even take power into our own hands and create the life that we want to be living, it does really come down to, so I think having the capacity to be self-aware and to take the time to really be introspective and see, "Why do I think this is shaming?", or, "Why do I think it's not possible for me to do these things? Whose story is that that I'm carrying around in my head?" Because that's certainly something I hear a lot when I speak to people about sex and sexuality, and there's so much shame and so much fear. I think your work is really beautiful because, the vaginal kung-fu is so great because it takes them away from sex, even, as being the goal and it's just getting them connected to their vagina and starting to explore it. We're not even encouraged to do that.

 

Tahnee: People shamed as children for masturbating and all these things. I saw you had a lot of questions about women just having shame around putting their fingers inside of themselves and all these things. I mean, it's really tough for us to then go and have a healthy sex life, I think, if we carry that stuff [inaudible 00:11:04]-

 

Kim:  [crosstalk 00:11:04]. You know, what people are taught in school is like "sex will kill you" and "sex will get you pregnant, so off you go." No wonder people are struggling so much, and that's the issue, is what we've seen is that the more that you suppress sex and you censor it and you don't allow people to talk about it, you don't allow it to be part of an open, healthy life, then that is like suppressing a volcanic flow and it's going to some up someplace else. It's going to erupt someplace else, and not in a healthy place. We've seen that over and over again in people like priests, who are forbidden to have sex, and so they molest children. Really? Is that the better option? I mean, I think that there's a time and a place for celibacy, conscious celibacy, but you're using these sort of Taoist practices and learning how to redirect your energy rather than just stopping and not doing anything.

 

Tahnee: You know, I was actually with Mantak Chia last week because I do Chi Ne Tsang, which is like his belly-rubbing basically, and I keep seeing him whenever he comes out to Australia. He was talking about how the sexual energy is stupid but powerful, and the whole point of the Rao is to unite it with our wisdom, and then we have wisdom and power, right, which is awesome, but if we don't learn to control it and harness it, we're basically just running around like a bunch of overpowered crazy people. He was talking a lot about celibacy and saying how for most people, it's just really not very effective because they have no way of relating to the sexual energy in a positive way or a way that's transformational.

 

Tahnee: Yeah, I think he'd really agree with you on that, and I think that's something, like when we look at porn culture and what happens with young men, it was something Mantak was talking about how we should be doing this work with teenagers basically as soon as they hit puberty. I saw someone actually ask that question in the salon, like whether you recommend teenage girls doing the egg practices or whether you know if the Taoists are encouraging that. Can you speak a little to that? Because I have a young daughter, and it's something that I think about. I'd love to introduce her to this stuff when she hits puberty.

 

Kim:  I think the sooner the better, because you need to flood them with positive messages. Again, this idea of being cause rather than effect. Rather than them being susceptible to all of the messaging that's out there, which they're going to get in a heavy way, you can start planting those seeds as early as possible. The way that I typically talk about that with children is the idea of not hiding. It's really healthy for children to see that their parents are sexually engaged, and I don't mean having intercourse on the kitchen floor, but beyond just perfunctory affection, like having a little make-out session, having a big of a passionate kiss up against the wall. That's wonderful for children to see because it shows them that their parents are actually connected, and that provides safety and security because children always know when there's not a sexual connection between the parents. They might not be able to articulate what it is, but it's going to translate as some kind of uncertainty, and that is scary for a child rather than a couple who's really connected and very in-sync because they're sexually in harmony, that provides a much safer and more powerful, stronger container for children.

 

Kim:  I always say, in my whole experience raising my son was like everything said in the open. I'd be doing an interview like this in the living room. He might be making a smoothie in the kitchen, and so he'd hear everything from yeast infections to G-spot squirting to pre-ejaculation. Obviously I'm a unique example because I talk about these things all the time, but I have books laying out, like just not hiding it and then actually having conscious conversations, always stressing about how the door is open to talk about anything, to bring anything up. There's no judgment there, and then yes, starting to impart specific ideas and techniques as soon as they can grasp it, or before, like whenever they ask about it, because they will, using those as springboards and opportunities to give them deep and enlightened answers to their questions.

 

Tahnee: I really love that because I'm a yoga teacher and we have a tonic herb business, and we integrate those things into our daughter's life already. She sees me practice every day, she has herbs every day. She sees us kissing every day and cuddling. It just becomes a part of the family health culture, you know, or [crosstalk 00:15:16] family culture.

 

Kim:  I love that. The "family health culture." The [crosstalk 00:15:20].

 

Tahnee: Well we talk about that already now, like our philosophy. One of the things with sovereignty, right, is creating your own culture. It's going awesome. We've been born in this country and there's a certain kind of historical context of, whether it's Catholicism or whatever your particular country has. Certainly Australia's got that Christian/Catholic background, and then the same that comes with that. We both had stints at Catholic school, and so certainly I remember being a young woman, and I really relate to your story about sexuality; I was very aware of my sexual energy very early, like I remember having incidents with teddy bears as a little girl and stuff. I just remember as a teenager, I really misinterpreted that power and attention I think, like I really didn't have a good relationship with my sexuality at that time, and there was a lot of shame but also a lot of curiosity, and so I would do anything but then I would kind of feel very uncomfortable or dirty.

 

Tahnee: I think as I got older, I learned to obviously do the work and understand what was going on, but yeah. I think it's just something that we all have to kind of work through, but if we can start our kids off certainly with a little bit more comfort and ease around it ...

 

Kim:  Just from what you've said, right? You had an awareness of this energy, as did I, and you obviously didn't have really positive modeling around it because it sounds like you picked up more of what the cultural societal modeling was, right. That's what I'm saying. I think it's important for us to interject and get in there faster, and more intensely than what we know our children are going to be bombarded by. Even just looking up at billboards, right? Sex is selling things. It's okay to use breasts to sell vodka and blue jeans, but you can't breastfeed [crosstalk 00:17:00] in public. That's like the greatest offense. It's a big debate about this. There's all this conflicting stuff out there, so the faster, the sooner, the more comprehensively you can get in there with your children, the better, and they will also just pick up by osmosis. The same way that children know when their parents aren't in a good way, they know when they are, and that's a very comforting, very reassuring feeling for them, and they're going to just absorb your healthy beliefs.

 

Kim:  Even as parents, the other stuff that you can go to is just doing your own work. All the block clearing and the trauma clearing, especially around intimacy and sexuality that you can do, you will then pass along that healthier, upgraded version to your children. Even if you don't expressly explain it to them, they will get it through osmosis and they will get it even through this cellular transfer of energy.

 

Tahnee: In terms of your work with people, especially when I think about your retreats and stuff, you must be getting a lot of people coming through with a lot of those conditioned beliefs, like "a tight pussy is better" and that we should all be porn-starring in the bedroom, and all these kind of things. "There's only one type of orgasm, a clitoral orgasm," you know. Is that stuff that you're constantly having to break down for people and explain that, "No, there's actually multiple types of orgasms for women and that women are almost insatiable, and when we're engorged, we're actually soft, we're not tight?" You know, are these things you're constantly bumping up against, or ...?

 

Kim:  I think for the most part, if people, you're going to love me or not love me. By the time somebody got to the place of coming to the salon or signing up for a salon online or coming to a retreat, they're invested, or they like enough and resonate enough of what I have to say. I think part of the issue is that so much of the staff, like there's so much misconception about these things, but I think that once people start to here, well of course, what I consider to be the truth, something in them resonates. It's like a tuning fork; we all have it, and when you hear truth, something in you kind of goes, "Huh. Huh," like, "Oh, give me more of that." I feel like it's pretty easy to help persuade, like yes, I definitely do education and persuasion and try to highlight things for people like, "Okay, well how about this? Have you thought of it this way?", and open them to new possibilities.

 

Kim:  Like I said, I feel like sometimes people are much faster to glom onto it than you might think because on a certain level, they know. They know that what they've been told or what they've been searching for hasn't been satisfying for them, and when they get inklings of it, they're just so hungry for it that they just gobble it up.

 

Tahnee: Yeah. I think maybe more in the community outside of the people doing your work, because I've certainly found when I talk about some of the things, like I was just talking to my partner last night about how you were saying tight doesn't equal better and talking about circumcised penises. I think it was in one of the Q&As you had on-

 

Kim:  Oh yeah, I let that one loose.

 

Tahnee: Yeah. I mean, could you speak a little bit to that because I think as a man, he was like, "Yes. It's kind of weird." The woman had the example actually of her vagina feeling more tight, I think, after birth, which is maybe because of tension, actually [crosstalk 00:20:01] and kind of whatever emotional stuff she might have been carrying. Can you talk a little bit to that, like what's going on inside a vagina and what "tight" and "soft" might mean and "engorgement" and some of these things?

 

Kim:  Well people have this misunderstanding that it's "tight." I've never used the phrase "tight vagina" in my entire career, only to refute when people say it. I've never promoted, "Oh, what we want is a tight vagina." I said, "We want a strong, sensitive, and articulate vagina," but I've never said, "We want a tight vagina." We want to have flexibility, sensitivity, intense sensation, and yes, when a woman is truly sexually open, her vagina actually opens and opens and becomes this spaciousness within this vagina, and as you say, softness through engorgement. A tight vagina is actually like a medical condition, like a vagina that's on clamp down that's actually been traumatized, and so it's now locked down until the woman resolves that trauma. Again, this would present in western allopathic terms, "It's some mysterious condition like "woman has vaginismus" or whatever. I don't even know half the medical terms they invent or invented concepts. Not that a woman isn't real, that you're feeling that, but it's like they're making it, "Oh, this is medical condition" rather than a deep psychological condition.

 

Kim:  I had a woman client years ago and she was the product of an arranged marriage. She had been with this man like 10 or 15 years and she said she always had painful sex because they sort of reconciled their relationship but she didn't have this deep love and openness for this person. Amazingly, she had the courage to leave this relationship and then she took up with a new lover, which people rarely do anyway but the fact that she did it even in these circumstances was pretty amazing. She said, "And then I had amazing sex. I was lubricating, it never hurt. It never hurt again. I was enjoying it so much. I have a libido." It was like, "All right, so do we think maybe there's a connection between ..." you know? Like maybe they're related, and yet a physician, they never go there. They'd be like, "No, you have this mysterious thing that's just happened to you. This is the name we'd given that. We have no solution for."

 

Kim:  That's where I become really passionate about educating people that pretty much everything is improvable and changeable for everyone. Some things may have gone so far down the track that they require a more drastic degree of intervention, but mostly not. I'd say like 99.9% of things can be shifted naturally without drugs, without surgery, and that's an example right? For most people, I'd say it's psychosomatic. Her particular situation was acute, meaning she was in a relationship with this person who she obviously didn't feel deeply connected to, and somebody else, it could be sexual trauma from 20 years ago, and now that manifests as a "tight vagina" or "her vagina doesn't lubricate," or "she doesn't think that she has a libido," "she doesn't really seem to enjoy sex," and now they're trying to give women drugs for these things and suppress. See, I'm saying, "Okay, this is all valuable information. This is information that we need to discover what's really going on under the surface."

 

Tahnee: Yeah, and I've been saying, because I know you have this Sexy Mama salon, which I'm really excited to talk about. Like I talk to a lot of postpartum women, and obviously they've had a child, they're really depleted, they're kind of exhausted from birth and breastfeeding and chasing after a baby, all of the things. They obviously reject and then sex doesn't feel right. So many people have traumatic births, and I think there's this kind of unspoken correlation between these kind of emotional states after birth and then what's the unhealed trauma from the birth, and there's some really amazing work being done now by doulas and educators trying to get this stuff out into the open more, but I'm also really interested in what we can do even preconception, definitely clearing all of our emotional and mental blocks around these things while we're pregnant and preparing for birth. I remember reading Ina May Gaskin's books when I was pregnant, and she was talking about how the energy that gets a baby in is the energy that should get a baby out, right? It's all about thinking as birth of a sexual act or an extension of the sexual act.

 

Tahnee: In my birth, that was something we really tried to pay attention to. When my labor started, we went and made love and-

 

Kim:  Wonderful.

 

Tahnee: Yeah. Might be too much information for the people that know us, but giving my partner oral sex because I knew that if it opened up my throat, it would open up my vagina, and-

 

Kim:  You go, girl. Pro-birther.

 

Tahnee: Well, it really, really helped, I think, because I had a reasonably [inaudible 00:24:31] birth. I also remember Ina May talking a lot about the emotional and mental things that would come up. You know, how a woman would suddenly in the middle of a birth say, "Oh my gosh, I don't feel like my partner loves me" or, "I don't feel embarrassed to be naked in front of people," all of these really subtle things that occur and how much they lock us down, right? In terms of your salon, are you covering that content? Are you talking broader strokes or more [inaudible 00:24:58]?

 

Kim:  Yeah, all of the above because I agree with everything that you've said. I created Sexy Mama, the online course I run for holistic pregnancy and ecstatic birth, which talks about everything from conception, preconception, pregnancy, childbirth, orgasmic birth, and then postpartum, and how to use the intimate connection with the partner and self, if the woman's on her own, but mostly people would be doing this with a partner, and how to really harness that energy, and then do all the work that's necessary, like clearing blockages, like you're saying. If a woman's having this deep recognition in birth like, "Okay, I don't feel connected to my partner," "I don't feel my partner loves me," like some huge stuff that needs to get addressed beforehand, so it's trying to map out for people where to even look. Here is a map of places for you to examine in every part of your life that's going to help you clear blockages, pave the way to a really smooth, easy, and pleasurable birth experience.

 

Kim:  There's so much programming around birth in western culture, it's disgusting. Like the point where birth has become a medicalized emergency act to be navigated through physicians and the beautiful philosophy behind orgasmic birth, like the recognition of the work of Ina May Gaskin and then further carried out with like Debra Pascali Bonaro and even Dr. Sarah Buckley, the Australian [crosstalk 00:26:23] talking about all the ways in which, yes, the birth process is so much like the love-making process, and one is basically the completion of the sex act, is birth. We've been so programmed the opposite of that, but to really be able to tune into that energy, and I would say that having a natural free birth is one of the most self-actualizing, re-birthing, powerful experiences a woman can have, and yet that's constantly being taken from women. Again, like I'm not blaming women. I'm blaming the powers that be that are trying to convince women that they can't do this, that they're not able to do this by themselves, scaring them into hospital births, scaring them into surgical births.

 

Kim:  That's why it's a huge, well I don't want to say it's a huge undertaking to deprogram, but it's definitely a big commitment, and that's why I was so passionate. I honestly didn't know because I skirted around the edges of the system in my own birth experience and pregnancy; didn't have an OBGYN, listened to the [inaudible 00:27:24]. I was like, just resonated with me, and then when I realized what was going on in modern day culture, like 33% Cesarean rate in the US and I think it's similar to that in Australia. I think in New York, it's like 50%. Just crazy statistics, and I thought, "Oh my gosh." I knew that difficult births were a block because [inaudible 00:27:46] again, looking at these maps of, "Where do we look to find your blockages?", because most people don't even know where they could be blocked. I always knew that was an area, but I didn't realize how bad it had gotten, so it really lit a fire under my butt when I saw what was going on out there these days and to try to help women to realize that this is not only just something they can do naturally that's better for their health and the child's health, but it's this giant metaphysical, spiritual opportunity to really step into the energy of motherhood and womanhood.

 

Kim:  Again, I have to constantly disclaimer this; this isn't like a blame or a shaming thing, or trying to make women feel bad if you didn't have that experience, but we have to be able to have these open conversations to acknowledge that the system's gotten way off track and that women have the power and deserve the power to do this themselves. That's where the whole course is about, "Okay, so how do we do that?", and step-by-step, showing women how to do that.

 

Tahnee: I think everything you were saying earlier about what we speak to our children about and how we, I was talking to a friend the other day and she showed her son, who's about four or five, photographs of his birth. They're very graphic and beautiful. He was just so excited and happy to see them, and I thought, "Oh, that's such a powerful thing to be showing a young boy, because as he grows, that's going to be his experience, is to say that his mom had him at home in a really comfortable environment."

 

Kim:  Well, and to be like, "This is where you came from, my vagina. Aren't vaginas amazing?" Right? Even if she doesn't say those words-

 

Tahnee: Well apparently the crowning-

 

Kim:  It's like, "This is the origin of the world, and here you are coming out into this plane of existence via my vagina." What an amazing message to send to a child, especially a boy child.

 

Tahnee: Yeah, and I think that's in such stark contrast to what you see from the '50s or even now, I think sometimes men aren't allowed into the room if things are getting serious. I think it's a really beautiful, I mean I think for my partner it was such an empowering experience to kind of surrender to my strength. We've certainly talked about that. Yeah, I think it's just such a shame that it's kind of always going on behind closed doors and really not spoken about, but that said, if someone does go through a traumatic birth, are you generally working, then, with them toward getting them to do the jade egg exercises and the breathing, and just learning to reconnect to the vagina and to heal that trauma, or do you recommend doing psychological work as well? I know you're quite bit on [EFT 00:30:11] and that kind of stuff.

 

Kim:  I guess it depends on what the person's carrying and what they recognize. Like for sure, all of the work that I do from the jade egg work to breathing exercises to self-pleasuring and everything in between is all really important to regain and activate the vagina, like reconnect to the vagina, because I think one of the biggest things that a traumatic birth will do is disconnection, right, is numbness, is trauma. Then because most women are told, "Oh, well you did the best you could," and, "Hey, you got a healthy baby. Be happy about that," which really then minimizes if a woman, because I think deep down, women know that that wasn't really how it was supposed to happen. Look, there's some legitimate emergencies out there, but if we look at the stats from Ina May Gaskin's farm project where I think it was about 3,000 births. In 3,000 births, they had a 1.7% C-section rate. That would more accurately reflect an actual emergency in birth versus, like doctors even will be like, "Well let's just schedule your C-section and you'll know when the baby's going to be born."

 

Kim:  I think underneath it, women have a sense that, "This isn't really right." If they have mourning or they have postpartum depression, which I would directly connect to a difficult birth or traumatic-type birth is you'll get, "Oh, well you got a healthy baby. Just be happy with that," like a real invalidation of what they might be feeling deep down underneath that. Again, like a mapping process, and maybe part of why they had a disconnect to begin with could go back to old sexual trauma. It was never really processed and resoled and cleared in the nervous system, and Elena Tonetti-Vladimirova talks a lot about the birth imprint of the mother, and her mother. We're carrying that within us, like how we were born is very deeply going to impact how we birth, so all kinds of work to be done. Like I said, I think everything is healable and there's so many inspiring stories of women who had first or second or even third birth experiences that were less than ideal for them and hospital situations, and then they somehow clued into the idea that they could do this differently, and so they did.

 

Kim:  They worked really hard, they studied really hard. They did a lot of clearing work, so both energetically, physically, psychologically, spiritually to try and get to this place. It's like connecting to the ancestral [inaudible 00:32:26]. We all have that inside of us, but we live in a cultural that tries to separate us from our wildness from our intuition, from our knowing-ness, from our primal nature. If nothing else, sex and birth are very primal acts.

 

Kim:  So, we're trying to get people back to that recognition of self, like, "This is who you really are, and all of this wisdom is literally at your fingertips and available to you right here right now on demand," and clearing whatever's in the way of really knowing that and feeling it, and living it.

 

Tahnee: Yeah. I really, really love that reference to the ancestral line there as well and what we carry because I've spoken to a few women who have said things along the lines of, "Oh, well my mom had to have a Cesarean, so I'm going to have to have one." You sort of realize how subtle but deep these things go because my mom always said, "You give birth like a horse. You just walk around and breathe it out." I was like, "Oh, okay."

 

Kim:  Amazing. Yeah.

 

Tahnee: [crosstalk 00:33:26]. So you know, that was a natural thing, but yeah, I've always kind of thought it's such a tough one because that psychological conditioning starts literally at birth and then even beyond, you know. That's a really tough one.

 

Kim:  Well I think that what women aren't understanding for the most part, because it's not in the dominant narrative, is that birth is this massive portal. The women who've given birth naturally and even free birth feel like that experience imbues them with a kind of confidence and power and knowing as a mother, right, like as a woman and as a mother, they've now gone through this ring of fire, or ring of orgasm, however it translates for them, and that's given them this massive gift. That's initiation, right, and that's what women are being deprived of when they're not having that and they're having this opposite medical crisis intervention experience in hospitals.

 

Kim:  Again, everyone's free to choose, like you are where you are and whatever works for you. You take what you like and leave the rest, but it's my belief that this is a real essential part and a tool for women as humans. Sometimes when I look at women who I know who have had difficult experiences and I can see echoes of that then carry forward. The least of which can just be postpartum depression, and more than that can be like a sense of speaking up for themselves and expressing their truth and fighting for who they are. I also think a certain kind of grace and fierceness as a mother figure, as I said, that that's the gift of having this kind of a birth that you were meant to have.

 

Tahnee: Well I loved that about Sarah Buckley's, I think I had an interview with her, or it might have been Daniel Vitalis' podcast talking about the hormonal cascades. I've done a lot of drugs and plant medicine and things, and I remember sitting in my birth feeling like I was much more intense than any plant medicine journey or anything I'd ever done. I remember feeling like I was between worlds. I was looking out the window, it's a sunny day, and everything was shimmering and like dissolving in front of my eyes. You know, like, "This is an incredible experience." I think it's a shame like that's what I often [inaudible 00:35:35] say to friends, like it's just such an opportunity. You may only have a couple of children in your life. It's one of the few opportunities you have to experience that dimension of existence in a conscious way endogenously, like through your own biology. It's pretty cool.

 

Kim:  The thing, I just keep hammering this point home but just so that people are aware, it was an actual concerted effort on the part of OBGYNs to take this power from women. There's a quote from a physician in, I think, 1936 in the US, Dr. Hodge. He said something to the effect of, "If we can only convince women that they are too fragile and delicate a creature to do this by themselves and we can convince them that they'll be much better off in the hands of us, we'll have a job forever. The profession will carry on forever." Then they started to post posters and take out ads in papers with photos of midwives and saying, "Would you like this filthy creature to deliver your baby?" In the US at the turn of the century, there was a 99% home birth rate. In the '50s, I think it was about 50/50, and now it's like 99% hospital birth. Also remember, this wasn't just about helping women to be safe; this was an actual strategic effort to take this power away from women.

 

Tahnee: It's funny. I hadn't heard any of those things, which is hideous, but [inaudible 00:36:54] in our local hospital, and I went through a local program which offered kind of a hospital-supported home birth, which was really cool. So you see "midwives" but you don't have it at the hospital; you have it at home. The doctor who runs the program, also who runs the hospital, he wants all women to be induced at 38 weeks and brought in, and if they're not birthing after inducement to be Cesareans. He thinks it's the safest way, and he said, "All the data and studies in science points to 38 weeks being the appropriate time for a baby to come out," and my daughter was in for 42 weeks. I was just like, "You're just fucking insane." Anyway ...

 

Kim:  Good for you. Like Sarah Buckley's talking about this, that the baby, pretty sure it was Sarah Buckley that I would've saw this like-

 

Tahnee: Yeah, the baby [crosstalk 00:37:39].

 

Kim:  And maybe some other places as well, but the baby gives the signal to the mother when it's ready to be born. Usually, that signal coincides with the lungs being ready to breathe because what does a baby need to do when it comes outside? It needs to breathe oxygen by itself, right? When we preempt that, they see higher rates of asthma and breathing difficulties in babies who were born induced too early because their lungs aren't probably developed yet.

 

Tahnee: Yeah, not to mention what that does to the mother's hormonal cascade as well-

 

Kim:  Yeah, exactly.

 

Tahnee: [crosstalk 00:38:10] mama, yeah. We can talk about that all day. I did want to kind of segue a little bit to Well-Fucked Woman because this is one that I remember when I first [inaudible 00:38:19] Daniel Vitalis as well, and I had a good giggle because you were talking a lot about, you know, just what it-

 

Tahnee: You were talking about what it means to be a well-fucked woman. I don't know, it's this funny [inaudible 00:38:29] I think for a lot of women to really embrace that kind of languaging and embrace their, I don't know. It's just something that I've noticed with friends and talking to people about sex in the last so few years is that they tend to get a little bit put off by that, but I personally have found it really fun, and I think the way, like you say, it's quite irreverent, but there's something really to it where when a woman embodies that kind of juicy, satisfied pleasure that comes from being a well-fucked woman and what she's incapable of, can you speak a little bit to that in terms of what you mean with that languaging and how you see that play out in people's words?

 

Kim:  So the idea of the well-fucked woman is a woman who is comfortable and adores sexual pleasure. She's very comfortable with her sexuality, with her body. She's explored the range of her orgasmic experiences, and then she stepped into a place where she's wearing that energy. This all came out of, like a bunch of observations I guess that I'd made throughout my work and career, in myself and in others. One funny story was I used to have my studio in this apartment building and then there was a gym downstairs, a communal gym, and I used to go all the time. This other fellow was in there quite a lot as well, and he was in his mid-forties or so, a German man. I'd come into the gym and he's like, "Oh, it's been a while. Hey, Kim." I'm like, "How do you know this?", or I'd come bouncing into the gym, and he'd be like, "Oh, you're getting some heat, Kim," and he was always right.

 

Kim:  Then I began to recognize that this was an energy that we would wear, not just as women, but as men too. Then we would actually sit in the gym and look at people and be like, "Oh, she's really not getting any," and then that this idea actually goes back in history, back 2000 years ago in the time of Galen and Hippocrates talking about, now I think in the DSM is like "female sexual dysfunction" or something like that, but really it's this idea of being under-fucked. This was even in the medical literature and study 2000 years ago that when a woman wasn't having enough sex, she could be experiencing anything from irritability, rage, depression, sadness, an even flow of emotional. The word "hysteria," "hyster" means "womb" and hysteria came from this idea that a woman not having sex had an uneasy womb. So, hysterical was then this woman having like shrieking in one moment and sad the next moment, like having this whole range of kind of wild, maybe a little imbalanced emotion, all expression.

 

Kim:  So I played with that notion, and then like I said, began to see that more and more now that I identified it, thanks to the grace of Gunter, see this in people more and more, and even in myself and how when I would have really, incredible, deep, cataclysmic, cervical orgasms, feel like I'd been fucked open and seen God and seen the deepest parts of myself, I literally was reborn. Like I really felt, I guess it's not literal but metaphorically was reborn. That idea of the French term "la petit mort" where I felt like I became a new person or the better version of myself, like the false layers would drop away and I became this truer version of who I really am, the best of who I am, and without effort. I wasn't trying to be more confident or trying to be more charming, or trying to be more radiant; I just was, you know? I would suddenly begin to just attract men, like I'd walk out, say, wearing that energy and men would just come like magnets, or I would attract opportunities into my life like magnets.

 

Kim:  This magnetism gets generated from people who are wearing that kind of energy. Like I said, it's not even through "oh, I'm going to be magnetic." It's like, no, you don't even have to try. You just need to get really well-fucked. To me, really well-fucked is like an emotional, spiritual, physical opening, so you have this multidimensional experience of being met and being seen and being cracked open on all of these levels simultaneously, and that's what takes you into the realm of what I call "gourmet sex," like this higher level of enlightened sex. From there, you have a superpower. Whether you are a single person, you can still tune into this energy and learn how to harness it, and then if you're in a couple, then it explodes even ten-fold. You become supercharged, superhero with superpowers where you've got this kind of secret weapon at your disposal that most people don't even understand. Once you've got it and you've lived it, there's no going back. You can't go back to junk food sex after that. You can't go back to just like "bust one out" porn type of encountered. Maybe you do revisit the past now and then, but for the most part, you've transcended into a new level and now your new framework for relationships and intimacy is so much deeper and profound.

 

Tahnee: Well again, it's about the potential of what we can experience, right? I think when you look at how the Taoists mount the vagina, you've got all of the meridians coming down into the vaginal canal, and then the cervix is correlated to the heart and the head of a man's penis correlated to the heart. If you're talking about, first of all, hysteria and never experiencing a cervical orgasm, never experiencing a uterine orgasm, you're lacking this opportunity, I suppose, to really connect on that level to what the body might need to release or what the heart might need to feel in that moment, and then you've also got obviously your ability to create more health just through stimulating all of those parts of the body. It's just like reflexology, right?

 

Kim:  Yeah, and inter-dimensional reflexology because the heart being connected to the heart, being connected to the crown chakra and the vagus nerve, like you're hitting some very powerful points. To me, that's why I started to have that framework of sex as a personal growth tool because I would have these cervical orgasms even from a young age and I was like, "This is the shit," and that's why I began to be like, with this clitoris thing, "Who cares?" If you can get cervical orgasms, I mean that is what sex is all about. The clitoris is just warmup, like whatever, the G-spot was pretty good, but the cervix, that was the peak. Yeah, that kind really helped me define what sex is. To me, just about having pleasure, that's great but I'm actually in it for the transcendence. The pleasure is the bonus; I'm here for the enlightenment.

 

Tahnee: I find some orgasms can be very emotional sometimes and spontaneous tears, and I do remember seeing this somewhere, it might have been in the salon that you said that you had that experience too where you'd sometimes feel like all you needed to do was just cry. Like that was the healing, is just to let whatever that energy was move. Is that something you find a lot when people start to explore awakening these parts of the body? That they go through both the extreme pleasure and sometimes the opposite?

 

Kim:  Oh definitely. That's one of the great benefits of having cervical orgasms, is that all the pent-up stored trauma, tension, experiences in the tissues get released. Even the stuff that's stored in the vaginal walls, it's stored in the cervix gets this profound dissipation that happens with cervical orgasms, and women often cry when they don't even know why they're crying. They can't even attach the crying to a particular event. Often sometimes they might be able to, but most often they don't, and they don't need to. All they need to do is go with the crying and think it's an amazing thing. Let their partner know that they're not in pain, they weren't hurt. What I usually say to people, "When she cries, fuck her harder. It means she's hit some kind of level of a goldmine, and your job as a partner is to keep going and going and going." I often say as well, "One orgasms is not enough for women. So when she starts, you want to keep going down that road until she's utterly, completely exhausted and then go again." You know what I mean? Like keep going until there's nothing left of her. That's what we want. We want to blow her to fucking smithereens and allow her to reemerge, like the phoenix rising from the flames.

 

Kim:  The more that you can literally fuck the shit out of her, fuck the demons out of her, that's the kind of territory that we want to be in. For a partner, let's say a male partner, then a huge amount of the work that they need to to is build their stamina so that they've got control, they've got cock control, that they can go and go. If their woman is writhing in ecstasy and her ass is all up in the air, that they can just keep going and not just blow their load because, "Oh my God, that ass is so crazy and wild." No. Be fucking stronger and keep fucking her. That's your job, so do your fucking job and fuck her harder.

 

Tahnee: I mean, you do [inaudible 00:47:16] salon. We're focused on women in this chat because this is for our women's series, but you work a lot with men as well, right? [crosstalk 00:47:23]-

 

Kim:  Yeah, because guess what? They can relate to my language. 

 

Tahnee: I bet they love you. [inaudible 00:47:28], but also, I think a lot of guys I've spoken to, they kind of feel like their lot is their lot with what they've got sexually. I think they don't realize that they can learn how to last longer, they can learn how to use their cock better. If it's not the biggest, they can learn how to hit the right spots, whatever. There's actually a lot of education, I guess, men don't get. It's like everyone's learning on the job, I suppose, and they don't have fear-

 

Kim:  Well sure, and you're right: they susceptible to the dominant ignorant ideas out there, which would reinforce these insecurities, yet I think as well as a Taoist practitioner, you would know and have experience, like the deepest most powerful sex would be energy sex. Yes, you have these body parts that you use as tools to get you there, but ultimately if you're really conscious of your sexual energy, you're fucking your partner with your energy, and that's more powerful than anything, but at the same time, you can't be someone who just blows their load in three minutes because no one's going to cum and have deep orgasmic experiences in three minutes. She's going to, instead, resent you for that as a man and not want to have sex anymore. I feel like, "Oh my God, there's so much [inaudible 00:48:36]. I have to take off. I just can't," "No, I'm too busy," "Oh no, I need to clean the kitty litter. I need to clean it every single night this week just because I'd rather do that than get abandoned again when you cum in two minutes and then fall asleep."

 

Tahnee: Yeah, I think that's definitely going on a lot out there in the world.

 

Tahnee: On the energy stuff, so I heard Mantak say he looks at his wife when she orgasms and that made me laugh because I know he's on his [inaudible 00:49:04], and they must still be very happy. I just think, do you have much experience in terms of that higher, this is a little bit beyond yourself but that higher level, like just not touching but using energy? Because my partner and I experimented with that a little bit, and we had some really wacky experiences of almost astral traveling and, you know? Like, I don't really know even how to explain it. Like shared trips, almost? Like [inaudible 00:49:28] same vision I suppose. We'd call it "vortexing." I don't know if that makes any sense but that was the best way to describe it, but yeah. I wondered if you had any experience or knew much about that side of things.

 

Kim:  I do, yeah, and I think it's a natural progression as you study sexuality and you get to know your own body better, and you develop a very deep, surrendered, open connection with the partner, you naturally morph into those places where you develop more of a psychic connection with each other, you start to read each other's thoughts, you can telegraph information to each other, and yes, you can have long distance orgasms. I can have an orgasms with my partner when he's on the other side of the planet; when we're not talking or Skyping or anything like that, we're just energetically connecting.

 

Kim:  So yeah, all of that territory opens up, but that's through getting to go inward and do this work to clear out any debris, any impediments that are in the way of what's naturally there. I would say again, this is something that all people can do, but you have to do all this work of clearing out anything that's in the way before you can get to those places.

 

Tahnee: I'd imagine in terms of your own life, do you find it challenging, are you with someone right now? I hope you don't mind me asking this, but I was just thinking about how people on the same level, or not, you know, but with that same willingness to do the work. Do you have much experience with people going out and trying to meet a partner and if not-

 

Kim:  Well I just did a podcast last week called What To Do When You Want To Grow and Your Partner Doesn't Want To Grow, and it applies even to, I'd say, people flying solo because the ideas are the same, but it's about doing your own work and really putting the focus on you. If you feel like you keep meeting people who aren't what you consider to be yet your caliber, at your spiritual caliber, at your whatever, then you're attracting them because something in you is still at that level. Until a person goes in and then does more of this deeper work, like really commits, really throws themselves into it, really gets down on their hands and knees, ha, ha, and does this intense work within themselves, then they'll up-level, and then when they up-level, they can attract a different quality partner. But, the information you're getting from the universe is if you're attracting someone in this zone, you're still there yourself, or part of you is still there. So what have you missed?

 

Kim:  The people I know in my life who've created and manifested incredible partners have done a shit ton of work. They've done a lot of work to clear space, to heal, to find their blind spots, to hunt their demons, and then the gift of that is they find somebody in a similar position. Then you can do that journey together, ideally.

 

Tahnee: Yeah. It's funny because the day I met my partner, we obviously had literally just met and we were talking. I said, "I'm just celibate for now because I've just gone through a whole bunch of really deep experiences in work," and it was about a month later him and I connected, but it was just very funny because the day I decided I was just going to take some time to be completely on my own, he walked he into my life and I was like, "Isn't that funny how the world works?" Then he's been the person that I can have all these experiences with because I was just finding, I think what you're saying rings so true that I was still really, just to use the language I'm familiar with, "in my shit." I was attracting guys that were bringing it out, and then I was having to deal with it. That push away from anything and spending that time, that month really on my own, yeah. I found that really kind of opened me up to being really soft and receptive when I met him and ready to sort of work with someone who I felt like we could grow together.

 

Tahnee: So yeah, I've definitely [inaudible 00:53:08] that in my life. Like I remember being a younger woman and being in relationships and getting chronic yeast infections and not really having the foresight that I didn't really want to be sleeping with this person. There's things, I think, when you're younger, you don't really connect to the emotional side of it. Yeah, such an important and powerful thing to be talking about.

 

Tahnee: I'm just conscious of time, so I don't want to keep you too long, but I really would highly recommend anyone listening to check out Kim's salons, and she has a couple coming up. So the Vaginal Kung-Fu just finished, but you'll bring that back next year, right?

 

Kim:  I bring it back next year, and we sell a mini version of it: we sell a Yoni egg kit with full instructions and guided visualizations in our Anami Alchemy shop, and then people can get that today. Then when the full salon comes back again, they can actually use most of that payment as a credit towards the full Vaginal Kung-Fu salon, which is a much more deeper, expanded version of the whole practice and all things vaginal and intimate.

 

Tahnee: Awesome. Okay, so there's a shop link on your site, so we'll put in the show notes links to Kim's shop and you can check out her eggs. I've got one of her eggs and it's really beautiful.

 

Tahnee: So you've got the couples salon coming up, which I think would be really awesome. That starts in May, so that's for people that want to work together, right? Is it same sex and hetero relationships, or do you-

 

Kim:  Yes.

 

Tahnee: Yeah, awesome. Then Well-Fucked Woman comes out in July, which I'm really interested in, and then Sexy Mama, which I think is the one that really, if you're pregnant or thinking about getting pregnant, would be one to have a look at because, just think: you cannot underestimate how important it is to go deep before you go through that process of conception and birth. So, that would be one to really have a look at.

 

Tahnee: Any other resources? You've got your Instagram, your website. Is there anywhere else they can connect with you? Podcasts?

 

Kim:  Yeah. Well I do also have a course for men, which is called Sexual Mastery for Men, and that runs in about August, I think, of the year. The couple's salon is obviously for couples. Well all the other courses except for Vaginal Kung-Fu can be done with a partner, so there's partnered homework as well as the main focus is on you, but there's also home play that you can do with each other. Then yes, I started a podcast called Orgasmic Enlightenment. You can find that on iTunes and Spotify, and yeah, my YouTube channel. I have lots of free content on my website; if you sign up for my newsletter, then you get notified of everything that's happening, but there's plenty of free, great information on the podcasts and on my YouTube channel, and then I have a bunch of free video series through my website as well. For each of the salons, there's like a free preview video series with home play and exercises you can do too.

 

Tahnee: Very good, and you've also got your retreats in Bali and Mexico, yeah?

 

Kim:  Yes I do. They tend to sell out pretty fast, but yes, they do exist.

 

Tahnee: Get on the newsletter so you can find out first. [crosstalk 00:56:02].

 

Tahnee: All right, well thank you so much, Kim. I really appreciated your time and all of your wisdom. I know how busy you are, so I just wanted to say a big huge thank you from all of us at SuperFeast, and I hope you have a beautiful day.

 

Kim:  Thanks. It's been a great pleasure being here.

 

Tahnee: Awesome, thank you.