The Hidden Teachings of Mary Magdalene and the Radical Love We Were Never Taught

There is no such thing as sin. We are not innately sinful. We are innately good. When the Empire in the 4th century wanted to make Christianity its state religion, the most fundamental aspect of what was erased was this capacity for us to know the divine within us within this human body and the voices of women who were leading us to it. Christ was about a love that liberates. He was teaching a love that was about radical equality. We are a soul of love that wants to speak through us and guide us. What happened to humans? Like, how did we get so lost? You know, for me, I welcome back to this tantric life that love it. This conversation today started because I read a book that was like when I was in Iceland by myself. And it was Mary Magdalene revealed. Now, as someone who was raised Catholic and intentionally left the church when I was 11 years old, clearly still had some damage and baggage from that experience because we will have talked about Mary Magdalene over the years. I've just been like, you know, and I couldn't put this book down. And I was like, what the actual fuck? It's all about the gospel of Mary, a real gospel, just like the gospel of John gospel of Mark that was hidden and banished from the church and from the canonical Bible. And one of the phrases that stopped me dead in my tracts as I was reading it was in this Christian gospel, the phrase, there is no such thing as sin. And understanding that that is as much a part of the Christian tradition and of Jesus' teachings has everything that I was raised with. Fundamentally changed how I understood original Christianity and who Jesus actually was. So of course, I had to bring the author, Megan Waterson, on to the podcast. And I'm so excited to share this conversation with you today. We journey deep into the gospel of Mary, some of the key teachings, why it was hidden and concealed. There's even still missing pages. We talk about what was in those. More than anything else, we talk about the legacy of these lies about Jesus' actual regard and relationship to women about the truth of Christianity is a mystical, empowering path of sovereignty. One of the things that Megan says in this interview is that salvation can be translated and originally meant-- so it can be translated as and originally meant-- to become fully alive. But the goal of early Christianity was to be fully human and fully divine. This, as Megan says, is a Christianity that we haven't tried yet. This is an extraordinary conversation. So Megan Waterson is the author of the book Magdalene Revealed. She's also a master theologian from the Harvard School of Divinity. She's the creator of the House of Mary Magdalene, a spiritual community that studies the text left out of the canon, meaning the books that the Catholic Church decided would be put into the traditional Bible versus the ones that were intentionally left out and practices deep soul communion meditations of the heart. She's been featured in the New York Times and L Magazine and all over the world for these game-changing writings on Mary Magdalene, who she really was. TLDR, not a prostitute, but one of the most extraordinary voices of wisdom and spiritual leadership. And through this podcast, I hope you get to heal any legacy in your nervous system that these spiritual lies have left so that you can claim your leadership and your voice in a whole new way, because the ways in which the teachings of the gospel of Mary were hidden has damaged all of us regardless of gender. This podcast is an invitation to face the legacy of those lies and that deception and to create a spiritual world filled with the original love, power of communion, and sovereign embodiment that is the heart of these spiritual traditions. You ever looked at my career and thought, "That's kind of amazing." I'd love to do the same thing. Well, you absolutely can. You could make good money doing inspirational heart-centric work. You can work from anywhere in the world and know that you are an inspiration to people about what is possible sexually, relationally, and spiritually and where you get to be creatively expressed in the work that you do. The Vita Coaching Certification is my one year training that shows you how to do exactly that. It's a professional certification that allows you to upgrade your healing skills so that you can be the teacher, coach, and guide that you were born to be. It trains you to coach at a mastery level. It shows you how to be a groundbreaking leader in the field of sex, love, and relationships, walks you step by step through how to launch your business and how to create a content platform like your own podcast or social media channel. And finally, teaches you how to enroll your dream clients into your retreats and your coaching and your different classes in a way that is heart and soul-centric and also incredibly effective. If you want to learn more about this program, find the link down below or go to lelamarton.com/vita. That's B-I-T-A. It'll put you on the mailing list. So learn more about the program. And I'm also going to send you my coaching checklist, which will give you all the different things to be aware of, to be successful in this career. Welcome, Megan. Thank you, thank you. So I started reading your book, Magdalen Revealed, when I was on a solo trip to Iceland. I was just in September of this year. And as I was reading it, I was like, I told you before, so I was like, what the fuck am I doing? (laughing) Read this book before. Wow. And it's an exploration of the gospel of Mary Magdalen. And it's incredible. A real legit Christian gospel. And her teaching and experience and the things that are in it, the things that are said that are written, it's, wow, I can't wait to share them with those of you listening and have you feel the vibration and frequency of this wisdom and for us to explore as you really position in your book that this was a possibility for Christianity, that this was in a privilege. It's not this. It was as true and legitimate of a stream of wisdom as the gospel of John, right? And so we had to explore that here and what it's done to our nervous systems globally and as humans to have that level of feminine wisdom silenced and expunged from one of the world's great religions. So really excited for us to get to explore this together. The gospel of Mary, for me, when I was transformed by it, was the very beginning, the first time I read it, Peter is asking her, sister, we know the Savior loved you more than all other women. That alone is a jaw drop right there. But then he says, teach us the things that you know that we don't because we haven't heard them, right? And he's referring to the other male disciples. - Yeah. - So what does she uniquely know because she's a woman and because she's the woman that Christ loves the most? This is the wisdom that he's asking for and then Mary says, I will teach you about what is hidden from you. That line, the frequency of it, my encounter with it, I literally, I was in a bookstore and I just sank to my knees and ended up reading the entire verse. of her gospel right there. I couldn't even buy it. I just had to inhale it because that one line I will teach you about what is hidden from you. It felt so infinitely familiar to me and it felt so filled with a mystery, a voice that I felt was missing. Not just in my life, but in my relationship to my body and my relationship to being able to be in a body. And what ends up following is really a metaphysical text where Mary is teaching about the ways that we can receive a vision directly from within us. So it's essentially a roadmap to hearing the voice of our own soul to hearing direct connection to the divine from within us. And so of course, you know, when in the history of Christianity, when the Empire wanted to make this tradition that started off as resistance to Empire, when the Empire in the fourth century wanted to make Christianity its state religion, it was going to have to recast that tradition itself. And the most fundamental aspect of what was erased was this capacity for us to know the divine within us within this human body and the voices of women who were leading us to it. Yeah, what that passage like how that lands in me is being raised Catholic and feeling and experiencing so many of the misogynistic teachings of the church and hearing at the time, which is not true. I was reading it was this was made up by like Pope Gregory, I think in like the sixth century Mary Madeline was a prostitute. So it's like, Oh, Jesus hung out with a prostitute and the that was fiction, total fiction, not true at all. And then you have like Virgin Mother Mary and you're definitely not allowed to teach. And I to realize this exactly, but I understand now what happened to me, which was like if these priests are the messengers of Jesus, right, and they seem to hate me as a woman. And my sexuality and my body is a sin to them. Then Jesus must have hated women or not liked women or like it's not like I ever consciously thought I just assumed because in the air, the messengers of Jesus felt that way. And because his disciples, as far as I knew, because you have to read the Bible, the canonical Bible, which we'll get into that in just a second in air quotes, like pretty carefully to be like, wait, no, there were women in his ministry because it's like, no, there was one prostitute in his ministry was the whole PR lie that got told to us. And so there was this thing that touched me so deeply, which was Jesus existed in a patriarchal culture in Judea during that time. And part of his radical teaching was a love and respect for women. And that that actually was part of early Christianity, these female teachers and leaders and to know as well, woman's capacity to share mystery teachings to reveal the holy of holies to others. It's like, wait, my religion went out of its way to tell me that there was something wrong with me as a woman. And then it went out of its way to tell me that if I should dare to try and teach spirituality or claim to be a spiritual leader, that they would torture and kill me, but they're founding God, respect to a woman that deeply. Right. Right. So it's, you know, what blew me away about writing Mary Magdalene Revealed was really the fact that then I started receiving messages from all over the world of women saying you have essentially just put into words what I've always known to be true. I always knew that this had to be true. If Christ was Christ, he was teaching a love that was about radical equality. He wasn't trying to diminish and oppress people. He was trying to liberate. And so that was really powerful to me. These messages of like you're reminding me of the Christ I knew before I went to church. And what was so interesting for me is that my whole really scholarship as a theologian was led and guided by my body. This complicated capacity to be in my body as a survivor. And when I first encountered Christianity, I broke out in hives. So that alone was like my body trying to tell me something. And I had to of course live it. I was just a little girl, you know, and I couldn't really understand why I was so upset. But it's all the reasons that you're saying, you know, I was in a very liberal, unitary in church and had been raised feminist, but still that encounter with the misogyny that's embedded into the scripture itself. In the very fact that women's voices are erased and women's authority is erased. And there's that quiet pervasive statement that if God is referred to as the father and the father had a son and we're only blessing the father, the son and the Holy Spirit, you know, we're missing the mother, we're missing the female, we're missing the daughter, we're missing the feminine altogether. So if you are in a female form, well then, you know, that rage mixed with terror for me spelled hives. Like I literally broke out in hives in my first encounter. And the thing is is that when I left the church, that presence, that knowing that had forced my mom to sort of put me in the church to begin with because I wouldn't shut up about God and love and what are we doing here? That presence of love went with me. And so I had to sort of Nancy Drew style figure out, well, how did this happen? How did how do Christianity start with a Christ that was fighting the injust, unjust systems of power in the Roman Empire to a Christianity that was enforcing it, enforcing and defying the patriarchy by the fourth century. How did that happen? That was that was what I had to prepare myself to address, but physically I couldn't do it. Like I couldn't get near Christianity physically until I first studied the divine feminine the world over. So I actually did a whole degree first to sort of protect and heal me. And I studied where the divine feminine was both in images of, for example, the goddess Kali or the Vajra Yogini, which is a female Buddha in Buddhism or the Black Madonna in Catholicism, which is a much more fierce embodied form of the Virgin Mary. So I studied all of these images and what happened in the process of it was the opposite of what you know you and I encountered in the very misogyny drenched version of religion that we were exposed to. It was the exact opposite. It was this feeling of okay, if the divine is also female and in the feminine form. And if that is also me or exists somehow also within me, I began to be able to feel safer to be in my body as a female, to come back home to my body, which I you know kept disassociating from. And the more and more I focused on that internal relationship of being able to be fully in my body, the closer and more anchored I got to that presence of love that I know God to be, you know, the ultimate divine being to be is that love that we all possess within us, the love that I think Christ was initially and foremost, fighting for us to understand we all are, no matter if we're male, female, trans, no matter what our physical form we are a soul of love that wants to speak through us and guide us. And be intimate with God. Yeah. And I think, you know, as I was studying the Nostocospels, and I've been fascinating with, fascinated with the actual history of Christianity for as long as I can remember even. Yeah. It's an undergrad at Stanford. I was like writing papers on Gossips. Mark and John, I'm like trying to make sense of all of it. And I did not come across the gospel as Mary, unfortunately, back then. It's amazing. But I did, I did start to have some understanding, which I think still not enough people know about, which is, right. Jesus did his thing. And then died around 30, I've seen E or 80, have everyone to think of it. And then all of the stories of his ministry spread throughout the Roman Empire and through North Africa and through the Middle East and through Judea. And people started to teach and understand and experience. And the Gospels weren't written until at least 30 to 50 years after he died. And there were Gospels that were created all throughout these areas and written. And when it started to get codified, meaning that certain Gospels were chosen for the canonical Bible that we know now. And others were rejected. The ones that were rejected very specifically teach that you can connect with God yourself. It sounds much more mystical like it's like God is here within you. And that being a core part of Jesus is teaching that you can have this very intimate connection here and now. Yeah. And that that was intentionally left out that the the the Gospels that were a lot more about law and sin and punishment and hierarchy were kept in. And the ones that were a lot more about true mystical capacity were left out. And it's just important to know how much what we think of as Christianity was intentionally shaped as you're saying and as I've come to understand by people who were not having the best interest of people knowing themselves as divine or loving themselves, it was a power grab. And I think that's really important to understand someone called it one of the most successful mafias in history. And there's some truth to it, not that they're having. And re-carned. Re-carned. Not that there haven't been amazing priests or pastors or teachers in the Christian church. Absolutely. But the fundamental operation of the church in Europe and especially the Catholic church was a mission to tell people that you needed the church and to tell people what Jesus said, not what actual Jesus said, but what they wanted you to believe Jesus said. Right. And how much that's messed people up and how confusing that's been. And what's really sad to me who I've seen so much is that then people either really buy into that or when they leave, they're such an alienation, such a feeling that all spirituality is toxic or all spirituality is trying to control you. So there's this alienation. And like you're talking about with your body, as I also experienced sexual abuse when I'm in the young and there was a deep alienation from my body. And I thought that so much of my alienation came from abuse and dissociation and all of the trauma of the world and all of the misogyny. And while it did, it does come from that and the lack of safety. As I traced back not only my alienation, but so many of the people I've worked with over the last 20 years, I was like, oh, the core of this, the core of our disappearing from ourselves and our dissociation from our bodies, which then distorts into self hatred. So this fundamental human rejection, which then if I hate myself and think there's something wrong with me, I'm going to have a really hard time truly connecting with anyone else. So then you, it's like the endemic of loneliness starts happening. And this loneliness and alienation actually goes back to these distorted spiritual teachings. There was that level of power in telling people what Jesus is and what God is and what you have to believe in order to be worthy of God's love and who you have to be. And that that has that is truly in my experience now. The root cause of so many things that we don't ever tie back to spiritual lies hatred, bodily rejection, fear and discomfort with pussy, you know, porn addiction, just like the falling apart of marriages because people don't know how to connect to themselves. And so it's not just exploring spiritual lies. It's actually putting together this mystery of what happened to humans like how did we get so lost and start being in so much pain. That was so, so beautifully said. And you know, for me personally, because this has never just been an academic endeavor. I can't be, you know, what or it hasn't and it could never be for me. This is inextricably linked to my own journey, my own sense of healing and as a feminist theologian, I've made a point of never separating my own story and the story of how I see religion impacting my own life. Because that's how we move the story forward. That's how we heal what has happened and reclaim, you know, to make real change in the world now. So as you were speaking, I was thinking about that beautiful passage from a Course in Miracles that says, "The holiest place on earth is where an ancient hatred has become a present love." That's one of the most powerful ways I could describe what it was like for me to be able to finally come home to my body. It was, you know, reclaiming the space of the female that has been doubted and questioned and feared and hated and being so incredibly embodied that I now realize that this is the safest place I've ever been. And I make it wholly simply by refusing to abandon it. And this is at the heart of why I think these scriptures were so threatening and dangerous to an empire that wanted to control and be the gatekeepers of who could speak on behalf of God, who could know God. And these scriptures like the Axe of Paul and Thakla or the Gospel of Mary or even the Gospel of Philip, which says, "You must awaken while in this body for everything exists in it, resurrect in this life." Right? That's like a window into a whole other side of Christianity that got silenced. And, you know, as you were articulating the process of what went down beginning in the fourth century and then, you know, it continued for hundreds of years, this aligning what used to be and what was originally a small groups of rebels refusing to adhere to the empire's understanding or ranking of worth, according to a hierarchy of existence with women in slaves being down at the bottom. These small groups, these Christ movements, refused to have anything to do with that idea. And instead, they believed in a love that existed within them that made them radically equal and worthy of the divine. And that it wasn't the empire that was greatest, but this divine power or this sovereign power, that phrase that comes up so often, even in some of the canonical gospels is the kingdom of God is within. But, and this highlights the importance of why it, you know, only male theologians and only male exegyts having a say in how words are translated and how concepts theological concepts are ingrained into the tradition that from the Greek, the kingdom of God is within could also be translated a sovereign power exists within every person. A sovereign power rather than kingdom. So, again, that word kingdom, you immediately associated with like a male being in ultimate power and ruling over where Whereas if you translate it, the Greek word, "basilio" or "vasilia," that word can also be translated into sovereign power. So there's a sovereign power that exists within every person. And if you bring so many of these scriptures back into your awareness, you see that, oh, this sovereign power, this is the love. This is that ultimate being in the Gospel of Mary, God isn't referred to as God or goddess. It's the good, capital G. That's how the Gospel is to God. And the Gospel of Mary says that the good came among us. And then there's a lowercase, good, essentially saying that that good pertains to and exists to every single person. So that we are good is not something we have to perform or prove. That we are good is intrinsic to the nature of what it means to be human. That is so incredibly profound. And that applies to us no matter who we are or what we have done. And then that changes the nature of who can speak on behalf of the divine. Because every single one of us qualifies. Yes. This is mood sex magic. This is an average Yaks supplement that I created because when it was date night with my beloved, I was like, I'm so tired. I don't want to have sex. Surely there's something that can give me a lift, a boost. Help me feel a little bit more glittery, desires, and sexual. That thing didn't exist. That was clean and effective and scientifically backed. So I made it with a team of scientists. 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And these are just a few. You want to try this? Go to shopmood.com, and we have a podcast coupon code for you for being a listener. So go ahead and pop that in, and we'll send you two free sticks with your order. I was asked if the Catholic church could change one teaching by someone who had some ability to impact that, what would I change? And said, I would ask them to change it from original sin to original beauty. It's fascinating when you say that, because when you feel like you are created from the good with a capital G, and that is what you're accessing within yourself, fundamentally changes the experience of, I don't know what I grew up with, but honestly, there's something wretched about me. Right. It's clearly something wrong with me. And we're going to compound that with perfectionism and misogyny and abuse and complex PTSD. And then I become a walking, vibratory pain body that says there's something wrong with me, and I hope you never figure it out. So I'm going to be one walking apology for myself, because there's clearly something wrong with me. And then I'm going to hide all of that with some toxic perfectionism on top of it. And that was just so far from my side. And I feel to some degree, we're making our way home from that. And in that, the line from the gospel of Mary that you write about, and that is to me the most revelatory, is there is no sin. There's no such thing as sin. Yeah. Yeah. It comes when Peter is asking Christ what is the sin of the world, and then Christ responds to Peter. And what follows then is an explanation of this statement, which is so incredibly gorgeous, and helps us understand how these earliest communities conceptualize the conundrum of what it means to be human, which is that we are ultimately an ego, right? We have to take on an ego when we take on matter. You have to be an ego to function in the world, right? Or I would have showed up naked to this podcast. Like you essentially have to have an ego. But we are all record. I would have loved that. I was not even going to go. I'll take my dress off. [LAUGHTER] Well, well, it's having this realm in the gospel of Mary, there are seven powers of the ego that include an array from darkness to anger. And we're meant to feel those. That is what it means to be human, is to have-- like the angels are jealous of that capacity, right? The angels are jealous of our capacity to be so fully human, and there are seven powers to that humanity, to existing in a body. And also, simultaneously, 100%. Not one or the other, but 100%. We are an immortal soul that will exist beyond this body. So how do we work out being both? And what Christ is trying to make clear when Peter asks about sin is that we are not innately sinful. It's that sin, which, again, this is where it comes down to semantics and translations, and wishing women could have been a part from the very beginning of translating this scripture in a way that really allows us to be made more alive, which is the original definition of salvation to be made more alive. But if we look at that word sin, it really-- we could translate it as missing the mark. And so what Christ goes on to explain is that we miss the mark when we identify our true self as one of these powers of the ego rather than the soul. And how I translate that in my own life, it's like when I act from the power of rage, for example, when I respond to somebody's rage or hatred towards me with the same back, like immediately, that's missing the mark. What I want to do is to find awareness in that moment, that, OK, I am just-- I'm seething with rage and awaken to it, awaken while in this body. And then instead of responding with more rage, I connect to the endless amount of love that also exists within me. And I only speak and move and act once love is then guiding me. Now, the important distinction, which so much of culture and Christianity has a different take on, is that when I find myself in that power of rage, because there's this oppressive history and baggage of sin, we don't want to look at it. We don't want to look at the fact that we're enraged. We don't want to feel it or experience it. We bottle it up. Then it becomes toxic or it comes out sideways as passive aggression. Or we bottle it up and we become paralyzed and immobile. And we can't take action. I was recently writing about how sacred rage is to me as a survivor because that allowing myself to experience rage was one of the most fundamental ways that I was able to return to my body. Like rage isn't inherently wrong or bad or not good or sinful. Reach is glorious and golden and succulent and amazing and can be that fuel that allows us to finally start to love ourselves in the way that we're able to effortly love others, right? To start to fight for ourselves, just to start to see the amount of injustice we've had to endure in our lives. And then, so you allow yourself to feel it, but you don't judge yourself, right? Like if it's just, if it's just not about sin, if it's about missing the mark, and if it's about this confusion of aligning with the ego versus the soul, then we can do away with all of that sense of unworthiness and that sense of like, oh my God, here I am, I'm lowly, I'm human, look at me, I'm so filled with rage, and we can understand, it's an opportunity. Like it's the whole point of being here. When you find yourself enraged, that's a blessing, that's an opportunity, that's the whole point. It's that we're meant to awaken while in it. Listen to it, like allow the rage to inform us about what we care most about. But don't act from it. Listen to it, feel it. Allow yourself to really understand the root of where that rage is coming from. But then act and speak only once. Love again is what's informing you. Are you suggesting that I could replace perpetual talk and shame and a self-loathing, anchoring into a sense that there's perpetual badness in the fabric of me as the opposite of God, say, understanding the great opportunity that it is to be in a human body. Everything is a learning opportunity. Nope. I am allowing my soul to progress to deeper. To deeper, to deeper initiatory wisdom. Yes. The blessing of this planet. Yes. I think the whole point is for love to reach where it has never been before. That's the whole point of this. That's for me is the whole point of being alive. Is anytime I experience something within me, right, which is a microcosm of the macrocosm. Anytime I experience like a deep shame or, you know, a dread or some feeling of like a lack of self-worth, it's an opportunity for me to bring love to where it hasn't been before. And that to me is absolutely the whole point, the whole opportunity, being here. Can we revisit the liberation? No, what was it? It was the, yeah, liberation being a live-ness. Salvation. Salvation. The original definition of salvation meant to be made more alive. And why that's so significant, of course, is because the church became really the gatekeepers. Of being able to be saved. And that effort no longer was within our power or control. To save ourselves, which is also part of why, you know, I loved and just was obsessed with the acts of Paul and Thakla. Because here we have a minister who was teaching alongside Paul, who everyone is heard of, like everyone, non-Christians included, everyone's heard of Paul, but next to no one, even devout Christians have ever heard of Thakla. And this scripture, the acts of Paul and Thakla, scholars dated all the way back to 70 AD. So we couldn't argue that it was excluded from the formation of the New Testament because it was dated in the second or third century. We can't argue its exclusion for that. It also includes, you know, one of the most prominent and infamous, I'm sorry, famous, sorry, he's a little infamous when it comes to feminist circles. But the most famous apostle, Paul. And so why would it be excluded? It's excluded because here we have this young girl with no power in the world around her in the first century, who after hearing Paul tell stories about the beloved Christ, she goes on, refuses to marry, which she was required to by law at that time, and baptizes herself. So that is absolutely modeling and mirroring to us that we have the power within us. Like we are meant to participate in in our own salvation. We are a part of that process. We are not just, you know, observers and we're not just sitting here waiting and praying. There's an active part to that salvation. And it has to do with listening to our soul. And it has to do with, in that case, refusing to be treated as unworthy of teaching at that time, refusing to be allowed to allow the world to dictate who she can be. Right. The world was saying as a girl, she can only be property. She can only be owned by her father and then her husband. She was saying, no, actually, I'm going to become my own. I'm going to baptize myself because Paul refuses to, she baptizes herself. And what she models to the women around her, which this is so wild, right? And also again, why it would be excluded. And order to be erased, to be destroyed is that when Thakla at the end of the Axe of Poland, Thakla, she is ordered by a governor to be killed because she shames a powerful politician when he tries to assault her in the street. And so she's put to death, which is like, you know, a first century example of gaslighting. So she is in an arena and, you know, public spectacles of violence were very common of the Roman Empire, and especially of this. And so the original form of Christianity to call yourself a Christian before the four century was to be put to death. So in an act of, you know, violence to scare other people, Thakla was ordered to be put to death by wild beasts. And this is when she's in the midst of the Roman Empire trying to execute her. And so when she baptizes herself and then the women in the arena, again, who are the ones in the first century, who would have the least amount of power in the world around them, they could not vote. They could not hold public office. And they were literally considered property. Women in the crowd stood up and refused to be bystanders, like refused to just participate in this murder, you know, of Thakla. And they were super scrappy and just started throwing into the arena, anything that they happened to have on them, Rose petals, Nard, you know, cinnamon, cardamon, they're just chucking it into the arena and it lulls the wild beast to sleep. To me, when I came across this again, this is first century scripture. The scripture says, and then the women all cried out in a loud voice as if from one mouth. So Thakla baptizing herself in powers the women around her to realize, okay, wait a second. We are, we have power, even though it hasn't been given to us, we have power that resides innately within us. We can refuse to participate in this system that is telling us that we are unworthy and less than we can refuse to participate in that system and we can stand up. Because the empire can kill one of us one at a time, but they can't kill all of us all at once. And so they unify together and the scripture says their voice, you know, shook the entire city when they joined together. And to me, what that, what that all translated for me in my life was that we are only ever as far from power as we are from our own embodiment. That's the message that Thakla gave to me and that I mean, then I felt compelled to write the girl who baptized herself because I want every single person to know that. Well, comes to me in hearing that is for the women who start to get a taste of this and explore this right there is this term, the witch wound right which becomes. what's really meant by that phrase is, my nervous system has been impacted by women being put to death and tortured and sexually assaulted. Should they dare to claim their own power? But what's underneath that in every woman is beckless. Like, is the, I, I mainline, divine connection, truly, not as in a goic delusion, right? Because so much of true spirituality will tell you to be humbled by the seductive force of your own ego. So you can tell yourself, your mainlining, divine connection, and it's really important to develop the discernment over time in your practices. You actually are. And that capacity to stand so fully for what you know, for what is true, to be willing to over turn the power of an empire and unify women in the noses of their own power and their own sovereignty is that level of power that we carry within us and in the thing I want to track here is that I have thought for a long time. I was like, you know, there was and is killing of witches and torture and that still happens today and that did happen. But it's not a huge number of people. It's significant enough to be a human tragedy. But if you really want to silence the power of women, it's messy business, right? You can, you can imply the threat of death. You can imply the threat of torture. But the most effective way to silence a woman's voice is to teach her to hate herself. And so what's so fast, she's not so. Yes, exactly. And then if the world is so unsafe for female power, then she'll teach her daughters to do the same. To silence themselves. Right before their subject to getting killed or getting harmed. So it becomes a self protective mechanism. But it also starts with the seeding of toxicity into women because they won't silence themselves until they think so little of themselves, right? There's a, even in the face of the gnarliest oppressor. If you really love yourself, you're still like, you know what? The giant middle finger, maybe a flash in my pussy. And we're going to do, it's true over here. So when I hear these things, right, it's like. It took me, I can't say I'm completely over it, but I'm so much more over it than I was. Like every single time I look in the mirror, I would compare my face to some supermodel that I saw in Cosmopolitan, like, I don't know, 26 years ago or something like that and find something wrong with my face. I would scan my body and find something wrong with my neck or my thighs or whatever was going on. And there was always some inner criticism. I wasn't good enough. I wasn't worthy of love. I was all of these pieces. And it wasn't until I went underneath all of the psychology of that and didn't try and counteract it with self-love, but actually realized that all of that was put in place yes, originally to silence women, but the reason that it got kept and passed down female lineages was because I was so unsafe to express myself. So I took it on board because survival is more important to my nervous system than a lie of this or liberation. And so the key to undoing all of that self-hatred was to embody safety. Like you're talking about like creating a temple space inside of your body coming home to your body. And actually rewiring my nervous system to such a degree safety that I no longer needed the delusion of self-hatred in order to feel safe. The delusion of self-hatred matched feeling small and hidden as being safe and once being safe, like actually safe was the feeling all of that fell away and I articulate that because when I encounter how much people still hate themselves and speak to themselves and berate themselves and feel so unlovable. We're all walking around flawed with our broken parts, with our hurt inner child, with the part of me that's like, "Are you gonna abandon me?" Like right, and somehow we're like, "But that part makes me uslovable." And the broken heartedness for that pain, the pain that still lives in me and the way that most humans are still hurting themselves to actually feel the legacy of you have sovereign power and the divine connection within you. And in order to keep you from finding that, you got seated with all these lies of self-hatred and those stayed in your nervous system because over time the feeling that it was unsafe to be powerful made self-protecting mechanisms like self-hatred, which keeps you unnaturally small and hidden, became useful. And so as you unwind that, it's like these aren't just spiritual lies, they live. These lies live inside of our bodies as perpetual negative self-talk and perpetual self-rejection and perpetual self-hatred because there's so much power in every individual. There's so much mythic capacity in every individual. There's so much sovereign divine spark in every individual and our work in our own ego is ours to do and there's still such a beautiful, blessed power and all of that. And so to take, it's like yes, an outrage at these lies, but then also the invitation as you work your way through them to find such a deep safety in your nervous system that you can restore that sovereign space within you and actually release this toxic inheritance from humanity and those lies wouldn't work, the self-hatred and the self-judgment unless you believed them. So it's like starting to separate the belief that like all of those horrible things that we can tell ourselves are actually just fundamentally not true. And that to me is part of the restoration of humanity. It's not to believe the right thing, it's not to have the right spirituality. It's actually to feel safe enough to be fully human and then to release the delusions that we tell ourselves that there's something wrong with us. It's such an exquisite articulation of why I'm so passionate about the endeavor of bringing back these voices from a razor because it has such relevance, such actual impact on our everyday lives to bring this wisdom back. And when you were speaking about the internalized patriarchy, it's just so fascinating how both the Axe of Polyntacla and the Gospel of Mary speak towards that and with the Axe of Polyntacla with feckla she gets ordered to be burned at the stake by her own mother. And her mother is such an example of that lineage that you were articulating of making certain, well, if I'm just going to accept scraps of power, right? If I'm just going to accept these proximal power, I can sort of siphon from my husband by being owned by him. Well, then my daughter is, that's the only way for her as well. She has to adhere to the patriarchy. And when feckla dares to refuse to be property, to be owned, when she wants to become her own, her mom demands that she burned, she be burned at the stake. And what's so fascinating is that as feckla is continuing to strengthen her resolve in her calling to be a voice of love in the world, to be a minister for the divine, she meets with a queen. So it's really interesting, right? There's the mother, but then there's the queen. And so it's that transformation and the queen absolutely believes in feckla and ask for feckla to pray for her daughter who had died. And so she honors who feckla has chosen to become. and to become. And she sees all of her. And of course, The queen, just if we look at it symbolically, is what we can become to ourselves, rather than the mother who would rather kill her daughter than let her be free. We can become the queen, that sovereign love that accepts us unconditionally. And so there's that transformation that exists within the Axe of Paul and Thecla, and then within the Gospel of Mary, no, I mentioned that word worth. It shows up in both of the scriptures in the Axe of Paul and Thecla, Thecla at the beginning of her scripture desires to feel worthy enough to be close to Paul, to go and to hear him and to speak to him directly. So we have that word worth. And of course she reclaims it, but when she baptizes herself at the end of it. But in the Gospel of Mary, after she replies to Peter and says, "I will teach you about what is hidden from you," and in her infinite generosity shares all the secret teachings that Christ had intentionally given to her. Peter's like, "Um, I don't think so." You know, at the end of her Gospel, he's like, "Are I to believe that Christ gave Mary a woman?" Right? So again, he's pointing out the discrepancy in power. Like, "How are we to believe the men who have considerable more power than Mary in the world that he was born into? How did Christ give Mary a woman these incredible teachings, you know, and not to us? Are we to think that he considered her worthy?" Right? And so that word worth comes up. And for me, what's so significant then in the process of that erasure is that during the four century, scriptures like the Acts of Paul and Thakula, the Gospel of Philip, the Acts of Paul and Thakula, the Gospel of Mary, all of these scriptures were considered a pocryphal, and they are to this day. And that word, a pocryphal means of doubtful authenticity. And how that has impacted us now today, for example, just incredibly concretely, you know, when I'm meditating, I do a soul-voiced meditation, which is based on the Gospel of Mary and the practice that the soul goes through in identifying the seven powers and releasing them, right? Like, with exchanging, releasing them with mercy, with self-empting love, and returning to that voice of love, you know, within us. And so, so often, when I'm in circles, and we're practicing the soul-voiced meditation, there is the greatest hindrance to actually hearing that voice is believing in it. It's not that it isn't there. It's not that it is in screaming inside all of us. Like, the second we dare to get still and just go inward, you know, it's right there. But it's believing in that voice because we have internalized that word of doubtful authenticity. The divine feminine isn't just figures like Mary Magdalene, Thakua, and an ideation of the divine also being female. The divine feminine is also the effort of going inward and being able to connect to the divine within. That's also, and that's what's been so doubted and feared and erased from our comprehension. And the impact of that is so tremendous because then we will hear the voice of love loudly in our lives, but we won't believe it, right? Like Peter doesn't believe Mary at the end of her gospel. We hear the truth within us, and we know it's the voice of love, but we don't believe it, so we fail to act on it. We silence it ourselves. And that is what I feel. You know, if we think about why have these scriptures been buried, they literally were buried in urns in the Egyptian desert, like literally buried. But why have they now come to the surface? Why are they? You can buy the gospel of Mary on Amazon, you know, it's not like these are, they're not even fixed. Yeah. I wouldn't have been nice if I could have gone to like Naga Hamadi and purchased it from the ancient stall run by grandmother or something, but no, Amazon. I think we have access to these texts now because we're ready for them. And I think because we're starving for that affirmation, like what you were describing so exquisitely of like that of what that healing is really like, you know, for me, it was that it was this crippling self-doubt. Oh my gosh, this crippling crippling self-doubt for me in my work. And this desire to be affirmed somehow from outside of me, right? That like, oh, no, you're, you're doing such a great job. You're, you're doing the best you can. And, and what I came to understand by integrating this material, in a visceral way is that ultimately only I am the one who has ever needed to believe in my own voice, right? I'm the only one who can actually can. And once I believe myself, once I, I know the truth of what I'm standing on, I don't meet anybody outside of me to believe me also. It's wonderful. And, and it feels exquisite when someone does, but it's not, it's not something that, that stops me from or silences me. I, I believe in the work that I'm doing. And I don't need anyone else outside of me to tell me that they believe it too. And it changed this power, this energetic exchange within me where I felt like maybe that is one of the hidden, hidden gems in the gospel of Mary, because even within her gospel, she's doubted by the very apostles she's trying to enlighten. And they doubt her at the end of her scripture. And for me, it felt like the fulfillment of her scripture to understand that that's part of what we're, that's part of what she's offering us is to reclaim a sense of belief in ourselves, to reclaim that knowing that we can directly connect to the divine within us and speak on behalf of love and know that we have always been worthy of such proximity to the divine. Right. Yes. Yeah, the thing that's really touching me in this conversation in a different way in a new way is the parallels to the tantric tradition, right? And in some ways, having been raised Catholic going through my disillusionment, right? And there's been a lot of people who are like, "But Christ, conscious this." And I'm like, "No." Similar to you getting hives, I'm like, "Look, I don't really know what happened back then." That was a long time ago. But I do know about the witch torture and burnings. And I do know about the mass sexual abuse perpetuated by the church. And that's still undergoing a cover up. Right. I can friend of a lot on an individual level, but no, willing just to look over that in terms of a spiritual organization that I want to give myself to, for instance. Right. And I think it's actually fascinating to understand, you know, the Romans are Indo-Europeans and the Greeks are Indo-Europeans and the Vedic, the people who spoke Sanskrit and India originally, you know, and obviously all these cultures underwent huge transformation into European, all your Indo-European languages. And one of the hallmarks of Indo-European culture, and you know, gave humanity a lot of gifts, was this hierarchal, eventually, right? They used to, they originally worship goddesses and had female spiritual teachers, but it became hierarchal power dominance, extremely patriarchal. And one of the hallmarks was male spiritual practitioners that are elite and who interface with God and you don't, right? So the Brahmins of India were very similar and the high priests of the Roman Empire were very similar. And so it's these patriarchal cultures that also utilize spirituality in a very hierarchical way. And so what's interesting is really experiencing original Christ consciousness and teachings being put through when you're saying through the Roman Empire to really understand what the Roman Empire was, which was institutionalized war, run on slavery hierarchy, that was about power and dominance. And the start of the sweep of movements which happened way before Jesus, thousands of years before Jesus, you start to see some of the rise of patriarchy and some of that is yes, agriculture and having enough resources that it makes makes sense and a distorted way to go try and steal from someone else, which is really the origin of war, like the Sanskrit word for war is desire for more cows. So once you have agriculture, somebody else suddenly has enough that you could go try and take what they have. And so right around that time that that kind of war starts to happen on the planet, female spiritual leadership starts being reduced and silenced, right? And it doesn't happen all at the same time. It's kind of a global phenomenon. And I was like, what that happened? Like why? And I was like, because the fucking high priestesses would have been like knock it off. Like, like, don't go to war, that's toxic, right? Like, why, like, what are you doing? And so it's to me, part of this demolition of female spiritual leadership, which didn't just happen with Christianity, but it happened many different places at many different times. And then the Catholic Church actively went to war against the goddess religion. So it didn't just go to war against its own teachers within the church, but it went to war with the goddess religions outside of the church. And so in all of that, right? These other traditions. So the Tantra tradition is also a very mystical, radical tradition that happened in the culture of India within the rigid hierarchies. And the hallmarks of these mystical traditions, and you could argue it's actually very, very similar with the mystical traditions in Islam happening in Persia. Also, Indo-European hierarchal dominance is this emphasis on radical love, right? There's so many parallels. The Tantric tradition is an emphasis on aliveness, on Shakti, on being in communion with the impulse of life itself and intentionally exploring all the ways in which your egoic layers block true surrender to life force and true union with that divine sovereignty within you. Also, having female gurus, right? Which is also very radical in India. And some of the teachings of the left-handed Tantric path, right? The caste system starts happening again. Indo-Europeans, they are the ones who developed the caste system better to initiate a low caste or non-cast person or even a foreigner who is even worse, a qualified foreigner or lowest caste or non-cast person than an unqualified Brahman, right? Like, that's part of the Tantric tradition, the left-handed Tantric traditions, at least, which has a lot of resonance with this original Christianity, which is in these very hierarchal, patriarchal structures and systems, the marginalization, like slaves, were not allowed to join a lot of the Roman cults and religions except the goddess traditions, the goddess traditions allowed in general, slaves and women into them. And so one of the hallmarks, that was so radical for Christianity early on was, yes, and the prostitutes and yes, slaves and yes, women, like, anyone can be a part of this and there's this collapse of better and worse than. There's this collapse of hierarchy so that people really are living in communion with sovereign humans, feeling each other in that way. And this radical love where it's not that you don't express yourself as a human, but where you're coming from, your consciousness is what dictates whether something is spiritual or not, not the actual external appearance of it. And so it's fascinating to actually reclaim and re-embodie a spirituality that isn't a co-opted, intentional way to control people and to brainwash them into hierarchy, but an actual mystical truth. And I want to say that because as you're talking about people's disbelief in things, and apocryphal, I know the definition, I remember from the SAT test is why, right? Apocryphal is the lie, it's fake, it's not true. Is that mystical traditions are still taught as, and maybe you even can connect with this as like a religious theologian and who studied this, it's like, fringe. Like you're the fringe people, you're the one out there, twirling and whatever taking medicine by yourself and the whatever, the mystical traditions, those are fringe, they're not like the great religious traditions of the world, and maybe just maybe those mystical traditions aren't fringe. Maybe those mystical traditions are far closer to the truth of how the divine interfaces with humanity and how humanity is actually divine. And maybe they were never meant to be fringe or like we think of them as secret esoteric for only the few, maybe they were always meant to be for all of humanity, but they became for the few when you could get killed for knowing it or practicing it or teaching it or understanding it. And so this recentering of these traditions as not fringe, but actually very close to the truth when you compare them to what kind of religions get taught when the person teaching you them has control at the heart of what they're teaching you and not human divine empowerment and noses. Right? In the Gospel of Mary there's this word that's repeated again and again and it's Anthropos, true human, it's translated into English as true human being, but what Anthropos from the Greek actually means is fully human and fully divine. So the communities that were practicing what the Gospel of Mary taught were focused on being the true human being, fully human, which meant to be fully human and fully divine both simultaneously at the same time and that their practice, like scholars know that the most ancient form of worship was simply feeding each other. It wasn't like reciting something or doing something that we would consider incredibly sacred or even lighting a candle, it was feeding each other. They were companions from the French with bread, they were companions, they would get together and they would feed each other. And that is the original, that is the most ancient form of worship is simply feeding each other and existing to each other, not as a landowner or someone who was literate, someone who was in a male or a female or they just existed as equals. I love that. A couple of other pieces as we wrap up, I just really do want to highlight the injustice to Mary Magdalene that I know every single one of us listening to this understands, which we haven't talked about it yet in this podcast, but she helped fund Jesus' ministry. We're talking real resources put into place to help the itinerant spiritual mystic men get housed and fed and do their things. So she is a beloved of Jesus, she is valued and honored by Jesus, she gets secret teachings, but she is also showing up hard for that ministry. She is contributing financially, she is a valued part of it. And she's not only then disbelieved by boys club of the apostles in her depth and noses. And she's the first one who speaks of the resurrection, right? And she's one of the first witnesses. She's the one who could see or perceive Christ. That was intentional and that was because of what he taught her in her gospel. God damn right. Or if I was to give a vision of Christ directly from within her, right? It wasn't a right time, right place situation. Very good see Christ because she could see Christ because that is what was intended. So I know every woman listening to this podcast and at every human to your own degree, but like definitely women know what it feels like to support, to give, to really emphasize relational integrity and depth to give finances and time and then to get painted in the PR by the fucking Pope as a fucking prostitute and then is not to diminish actual prostitutes and hookers at whores who are out there doing their own version of the Lord's work, but they knew exactly what they were doing because they knew that prostitute was a way to undermine and diminish her true role because of the way that society judges and looks at prostitutes, especially back then. And I grew up still thinking the Mary Magdalene was prostitute. Like, yeah, last year, that's how she is taught to this day from the pulpit. Even though they officially responded in 1969, it's like wing, wing, like, right. Hi, who was, she, her title was formally, I think the word was restored or rehabilitated. That's the word the Catholic Church to use. Her title was rehabilitated in 2016. I would not say she's fully rehabilitated. I would not say justice has been served. I know. Yeah. Her title is no longer the penitent prostitute. It's the apostle to the apostles, but it's literally a mascot. Like, she is still not officially considered an apostle. It's, she's like a mascot to the apostles. Damn. But it's, it's really important for us to acknowledge that the, the strategy was to delegitimize her spiritual authority, her teachings, her gospel, right? Because her gospel was really, really popular. Like, the fact that we still have three fragments of it, even when it was systematically destroyed, burned. The fact that we still have three fragments suggests that it was like the equivalent of a New York Times bestseller. It was very popular. So, and there's the missing pages too. So we don't, right. There's the missing pages and the missing pages, of course, have to do with Christ telling Mary how exactly we receive a vision from within us, right? Which, which demystifies the mystic. This is saying to be mystic isn't something that's actually exceptional. It's a part of what it is to be, it's a capacity, it's a human capacity we all possess. Yes. So, yeah, that's where the pages are missing because if we each can receive a vision of the divine from within, well, then how, how can anybody tell us, oh, you're not good enough, oh, you need to be male or oh, you need to be straight or whatever, you know, in order to speak on behalf of God. So, what's really important to also acknowledge is that horrific dualistic structure, sexual structure that was created from within the church of not just the horror which Mary Magdalene became, but then also the virgin, the perpetual virgin, the Christ's mother became that created this virgin horse split binary that still to this day messes with women and our power to be embodied and to experience sex completely and to understand that a sexual journey is a spiritual journey, right? There is no division between the two, but what it did was it first of all excluded us from the divine realm because we're too sexual. This is what was established in making Mary the prostitute, right? She's deep, she now can't be a part of this holy sanctum, the Holy of Holies, and then what was established in the Virgin Mary, if she is a maculant like the Uber ever virgin, then that strips any sanctity from an actual human woman giving birth to a child, right? We can't, we can't draw from the human strength, the divine threshold that Mother Mary went through in order to give birth to God, we can identify with that because somehow it's all a maculant which is then beyond us. So it really created this problem with sexuality that the church still hasn't sorted out and that we have to heal ourselves and we have to look at the way that that whole system can mess with our capacity to have sex, be a sexual being and know that it informs the majesty or the authority of our divine voice. It doesn't in any way take from it. It has absolutely purity, the whole concept and idea has only ever been about power. It has only ever been about trying to control our bodies and our voices and that just needs to be said. And that was really created with this fiction that still perpetuates today of the virgin in the war. Yes, well also newsflash, but Mary Magdalene, not a whore, never, she was never worth it. The mom and Gina were all whores, but you know what I mean? So Mary not a prostitute, also mother Mary, not a virgin. So that those were titles given to them, by men hundreds of years after they lived. Yes, it's really important to say that. It's really, this, this was a fiction created by men. And when so many women that I know hear that, they're like, yeah, of course, it's never resonated, right? Like that's always never fit. Like it's never felt true. It's never felt real, right? It's not real, real to our experience. Absolutely not. That's, it's, it's absolutely a fiction. And Mary was, I mean according to the Gospel of Philip, which was also considered a pocerval, but Mary was Christ's canonos in Greek, that means his companion. So she was in some way central to his teaching. And if we take the Gospel of Mary seriously, which I do, and when you integrate what Christ teaches Mary in her Gospel, you understand that it's every day an ordinary to hear, for example, the voice of an angel or to hear, for example, someone who has passed, right? But who is beloved to us and still wants to inform us in this lifetime. That's not out of the ordinary. That's a part of what it means to be human is to, you know, like the opening of all the way to the river. Liz Gilbert, it just to articulate, you know, this, this scene, this moment of hearing her beloved Ray, like speak to her. And then you, you realized in the course of the paragraph that raised been dead for many years, but they had this, the presence of Ray was in Liz Gilbert's room. And she heard and received messages from her. This is what the Gospel of Mary is trying to give to us and make clear to us. This is a part of what it means to be here, is that the love that exists within us is a bridge between this world and the next. And that we are meant to be open to it and to receive it and to allow those voices, you know, those, those beloveds, whether they're spiritual masters or, you know, grandma Betty, like they are meant to continue to have a voice through us, through our capacity to be fully embodied. Yes. And I love what you say about arrows in our erotic nature. I also feel like you can't control people who are actually connected to their erotic power because that is another deep pathway through the nervous system to sovereignty and to nocess and to divinity. And the final thing I want to add, I feel we could talk forever. I wish we could. I know podcast. Hopefully I'll come back at some point and share more of your wisdom with us. But the, the real final thing I'd like to highlight as well because we've talked a lot about the distortion of feminine archetype and what it means to be a woman in the hiding of all of that. I also want to highlight what all this did to men because at the end of the day, yeah, we're talking about the Roman Empire distorting all these teachings and then that becoming this hierarchal way of being the Roman Empire also killed Jesus and male mystics who dared to defy hierarchy and empire and that kind of religious control were also tortured and killed as Jesus was. So there's this deep control over the male psyche as well. And in this distortion of who Jesus was, right, you get so much control over men that you have to be celibate, right? That Jesus was a Jewish preacher. There's no teaching that you have to be celibate in order to be a teacher of God in the Jewish traditions. He might have chosen to be celibate at that time. We have no idea, but that wouldn't have been required. And no, historically, it would have made a lot more sense if he was married. to be a Jew in that time. It wouldn't have made sense. And it wouldn't have made him more holy to not have sacks that didn't exist until hundreds of years later. And so just imagine the pain body of thousands of years of men being alone, being in celibacy, not being able to get married because of this distorted perception and teaching from the church of who Jesus was and what's required in order to be holy. These celibacy teachings, as you're saying, they didn't come until hundreds of years later. They have their roots and Paul, but then they really just go on and they don't get instituted until around the same time that this control solidifies. Again, it's easier to control men who are that controlled and that kind of struggling and they don't have their own power center elsewhere with their families or with anybody else. It's all very institutionalized and hierarchical. So there's that and the pain body of so many men denying that impulse and that union and to be in love and not to mention all the nuns out there, but wow, like that level of pain for men. And also what they took from men being able to look up to Jesus, right? To have men be able to look up to a man who valued women who saw women as his esteemed spiritual confidant and equal, right? To have that hidden from them like to be a man is to dismiss or be a misogynist or to control right. Yes, as if we don't all come from one totally. So I just want to acknowledge like the pain done to men in all of this as well and men as well. I mean, we were on what our we've got to be like on our fifth wave of feminism. I mean, we've been working on what it means to be aligned, you know, in a powerful, loving, embodied way as a female. And I think in terms of masculinity, we are all witnessing the absolute devastation of the confusion and and the terror and the, I mean, it's, it's terrifying the state of the world right now. Toxic masculinity that, you know, performative masculinity and that inability to be able to connect to the feminine from within the masculine like that is harming obviously so many around us, but it harms every man who doesn't allow himself to be able to feel bullied. And to know that. I mean, every man I've ever encountered who is healing deeply is a man who has caught himself off from that source of love from within him, but has thought that to be a man means he must. That he has to in order to, you know, he has to put on that cloak of being unfeeling of overriding it. But those are the most tormented and and hurt and harmful men I've ever encountered. And I feel like every man I've met has experienced that to some degree, maybe not the extreme, but to some degree and it's easy to forget sometimes that men got told that they were made of sin as well, that there was something fundamentally wrong with them and to dehumanize anybody else like you had to under these false teachings. You have to dehumanize yourself, you have to actually numb yourself to being your empathizes with anybody else to see women is less than is to see themselves also as less than you can't have one without the other. And it creates this this false sense of hierarchy that just distances themselves from that, you know, radical equality that we were talking about. And it really was one of the greatest surprises out of writing in the way that I have about feminist theology is how many men who have resonated with it. And it's been a part of what they know and understand to be the divine as well. Yeah, I started out working was I'm working with men and women, but then I did a long stent of working with women and feminine beings and I when I went back to teaching men and I developed so much as a teacher and in my power and there was this nervousness, the legacy of disempowerment that I don't have a voice, capacity, an ability to share and the way that the men who have been in my spaces have been reverential to me have been grateful have been so excited by these traditions and these practices has changed me the core and released almost all of the conditioning that was in there and just made me feel so honored to be able to teach them and I would say that you can't compare pain bodies, but one of the things that eventually really struck me was that the main thing that I was going to do was to get a little bit more of a sense of the same thing. And it was that the male pain body is just as significant if not more significant than the female pain body like it's wild just in terms of the self judgment and the self criticism and the self hatred and the unworthiness and so just recognize that lies our lies our lies and they've heard all of us. Right, we can't it's we exist in and with each other. I mean a system that oppresses one oppresses all that's just inherent that's just the way it works the way it's set up and that's that's why it's also true that when we free ourselves we're we're freeing others like that's the function of freedom is to free someone else. I have can we do a couple of slightly rapid questions I know your wisdom is deep and delicious and honey filled so we'll see how rapid we can be while still maintaining integrity. What's the thing about Mary Magdalene we haven't discussed that you still think most people don't understand. That we can I'll say this beautiful sentence that came to me when I was on my knees in front of what is believed to be her skull in the south of France. I was praying inside myself how can I walk as you like how can I be more aligned how can I speak more on your behalf and I heard to walk with me is to walk as me. And it was this like feeling of radical radical equality like I had realized I was sort of putting her up on a pedestal or sort of somehow a during or or honoring her in a way that I wouldn't have honored myself and it was this statement that just helped me understand that the whole point is that I understand. I pull back those projections and I understand that. I am as she is and that that's the most powerful way for me to move in the world on teaching about her her gospel. Beautiful and for someone feeling like I want to connect with her more I want to feel that I want to have more of that connection. What is a practice or obviously reading your book as an amazing start for people or a pilgrimage something that would help people reconnect. Well, just in terms of something that you can access access right now and that go there's a practice that's touched upon in her scripture that later becomes the prayer of the heart within the hasochis the desert fathers. But it's a practice of just going inward so it's very simple but that's also what makes it so radical is really understanding that the holiest place you can reach is just the. You know, stays within us the Holy of Holy is the heart what was referred to as the heart, but it's really a mediator between the world and all you need to do is close your eyes literally take three breaths I take one intentional breath to go into the heart. The second breath to connect to the soul and then the third just to open my eyes then again now tethered to that voice of love that I know will guide me. And do you have a pet suspicion about Mary Magdalene that has no research verification whatsoever, but what you're just like, I think. - I love that, I love that. Yes, I think she was meant to continue Christ's mystery after the crucifixion. I think that he was meant to teach through her after he was killed by the Roman Empire. And that's why basically he, in her scripture, he teaches her how to receive a vision directly from within her so that they could essentially have walkie-toffee hearts, right? And he could, from the other side, transmit to her what he still wants to teach. I really ardently believe that that's why she was prepared to be able to see him and to become the voice piece for his teachings to continue. - And in your own life right now, what is a part of your own ego that you find challenging, that you are claiming love through? - So I, you know, I really do feel like being alone, I don't find it challenging in the least. And I think what I would really like to challenge is partnership in a way where, you know, I feel a sense of teaching and being taught. And, you know, being free, being held and free. And so I think that that's been something I've been trying to convince my ego that I am ready for and I want, even though I'm like, I'm so good at being a hermit and I love being. My own space and being alone, but I think that, you know, and also, you know, I told you that I'm super stealth and I really, really love being quiet. And again, it's part of the being alone and being a hermit. I've been, especially with the girl baptized herself. But for Mary's sake and for Thakla's sake, I've also been trying to cuddle my ego into being okay with speaking more and being more visible, more heard for their sake. I would personally rather, you know, just stay in meditation at home and alone. But those are the two things that I've been, you know, cuddling my ego towards is romantic, partnership perhaps, and wider platforms to talk about Mary and Thakla for their sake. - Oh, I love that for you. - Yeah, when I was reading your book in Iceland, I did have a flash of that. I like, is so interesting. Like a visceral taste of your partnership that was coming. - No, I'm sweating. - Because I know it is challenging. (laughing) - I think one, I'm like fascinating. Yes, it's different from other little glimpses you got. 'Cause I gotta be prepared. (laughing) And my final piece, besides just feeling open, heartedly excited for you and all these frontiers and endeavors. And this, yeah, this deep, true love, I feel it in my body, is the final question is in creating new spirituality on this planet. Do you feel, especially because you've gone really so much deeper into this tradition, the change and altering through the existing church structure or a rebirth outside of it? Or some, yeah, it's a really, really good question and I don't know and I don't think I'm meant to know because I think it's meant to come from the collective. But I have always felt that it's so fascinating that nothing is new. What I'm practicing and teaching and really what's coming from within me organically and lately is something that goes all the way back to the first century. And so it wouldn't be starting something new, it would be practicing a form of Christianity we haven't tried yet. And but that has its roots deeper than when the empire co-opted it, right? So I think like the idea of people coming together and studying and teaching and talking about the gospel of Mary in a way that they would the gospel of Matthew or the gospel of Jesus. That excites me. And that's sort of the vision I hold and it's what I put in Mary Magdalene revealed. It's sort of like, I'm not meant to hold all these answers because I also don't believe in this idea of like one leader or like one founder or already, it's something we're each going to find and reveal within ourselves. And then I think it comes from the collective. But what's happened around the world and from across the country is people have said, I'm gonna demand that Mary's gospel be taught next Sunday. I'm gonna try to share a part of the Acts of Paul and Decla with my community, my church community. And people sort of rising up and meeting with resistance but then pushing back and asking questions, well, okay, why are we only calling God male? Oh, well God is a man. God is far beyond like a human male. Okay, well then why aren't we calling God by a name that actually describes? You know, just moments of pushing back and of asking for more than scraps, you know, more than just like, why are we okay with just fitting in with the system that was never meant to include us? Why are we sitting in the back with the pews and feeling but not doing anything about it, you know? And so for me, I just see this vision of individuals, just coming to that presence of love and then allowing that love to guide them and inform them and to say, okay, crumbs are no longer delicious. Like I want the divine to be practiced and spoken about in a way that's healing and liberating for every single one of us. Yeah. And just, you know, doing that every one of us in all of the various ways that we can. And I don't know how that's gonna happen, but I live for that and I hope for that. And I hope I'm, you know, one small drop of water in, you know, the river that might make that happen. Yeah, it feels like a certain wave of consciousness is happening and I think the thing that that brings up for me is for us to get out of the idea that religion and spirituality is only crystallized consciousness from the past and that the greatest teachers are the dead teachers. And that lets us bypass that all teachers are human and getting to feel their humanity and touch their humanity and the value and beauty and richness of lineage. But also that all spirituality has been humans communing with the divine in real time and they doing what felt true. So spirituality is far more dynamic and available. To be recreated or just created period by all of us. That's part of the sovereign power that we all have. Yes, and moving the story forward, moving the story, living into what is meant to be next. Yes, absolutely. Love that. (laughs) Thank you so much, Megan. We'll include the links to your books and how people can follow you all around. Look amongst the podcast. and go find all of the links and I highly highly recommend just your book and your work and I know that you do teachings and people who feel very called to this just invite them to check you out and connect with you and thank you so much for this conversation from all of the work that you do. Thank you. Thank you for listening to this tantric life I am Layla Martin. This is the home for the realest conversations about sex, spirituality, polarity, conscious relationships and all kinds of topics that help us live the absolute most incredible lives. Please check out the next episode. Please go ahead and leave your rating and review on Spotify or Apple or YouTube. It's so so so helpful when you do that. If you want to stay connected to me, the most helpful supportive thing you can do is head over to laylamartin.com Sign up with your email address. That connects you to me. If you want to study deeper with me, if you want to receive my deeper teachings, I do it predominantly via email. Finally, you can check me out on Instagram at the Layla Martin. And thank you so so so much for being here.