Episode 104 - Jamie Lee Finch is a Sex Witch.

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this episode of the liturgist podcast contains frank and open discussions of sex sexuality and even witchcraft if that might upset or offend you i'd encourage you to hit pause now and join us for another episode later on we're learning that the liturgist podcast audience isn't one audience at all people are not only in different stages of deconstruction from their faith of origin but they're in radically different places in terms of faith and life overall and so we try to figure out how to create content that's going to reach everybody that's going to kind of help you on the next step of your journey whatever that may be and so for those of us who have drifted quite far from their roots we'd like to introduce you to a dear friend of ours jamie lee finch jamie describes herself as a sexuality and embodiment coach intuitive healer self conversation facilitator sex witch and poet so she sat down with michael gunger to talk about that and what it looks like to move through faith and spirituality and your connection to your own body i think it's a delightful conversation and if it may be too far for you that's okay but i'd encourage you to just start listening and see how you respond jamie yeah hi how are you i'm man i'm so good are you i'm really good i am well good i'm so good there were some things that happened a few weeks ago that made it really clear to me that i needed to kind of start pointing more in the direction of where i'm going rather than just rooting myself in the direction of what i've come from and so y'all reaching out to have this conversation even felt perfectly in line with that kind of inner knowing because i've i've never i've never talked about this like super publicly before okay yeah i'm so used to just talking about like i used to be an evangelical and here's all the stuff i used to think and believe and but this has been like my magical practice and specifically like sex magic has been such a part of my private kind of relationship to myself and my body and for so many years now and it is something that informs what i do with my clients too on some level so i'm feeling super great and really ready to like share it like with i had to keep telling myself like you're just talking to your pal you're just talking about like not get too nervous about it because it's it's one of those things where i'm like because i haven't talked about it much i have that weird voice in my head that's like you're better at talking about this other stuff but i think it's gonna i think the timing is really perfect and i'm feeling i'm feeling great well i'm so happy to be able to just sit down and talk to you for a bit because i haven't talked to you a while now me too and i'm happy to share what you do with the world you know i'm i've realized about myself that i'm i really enjoy weird people you know they are better than boring people so yeah i'm not really that interested in like the weather or sports but if somebody comes up to me like you did at a bar in nashville tennessee and we were gonna we were just gonna go out we're like well there's people we like in nashville let's hang out with a couple people and somebody said i think it was corey maybe do you mind if i invite you jamie lee finch and you know you had done some poetry on the podcast and i'd heard of you and you seem like an interesting person from afar you're kind of a spicy meatball on twitter um a little bit a little bit i was like all right you know it's not going to be it's not probably not going to be sports in the weather and then when you came into the bar and you looked weird and you looked very interesting and then we started talking and at some point i asked so what exactly do you do and you said that you were a sex witch [Music] hi everyone my name is hilary mcbride and i'm one of the hosts of the liturgist podcast the show where we explore the most interesting topics we can find through lenses like science art faith or the laughter of on today's show michael gunger is talking with poet author coach and well sex witch jamie lee finch it's got a lot of material that's probably not suitable for younger or more cautious listeners for those of you up for the adventure welcome to the liturgist podcast everybody [Music] and suddenly you were the most interesting person in the world to talk to i mean what switch you say would there be to have to i mean i guess you could immediately get up and run out of the room but that doesn't really seem like your ml no no i was like oh i've i've met a friend i've met somebody who's going to be a good friend yes that was correct i mean i hope i hope here's the thing i do feel like telling people i'm a sex witch definitely draws the right people in and keeps the right people out it's an easy litmus it's an immediate litmus yeah so maybe before we get into sex magic and what what you mean by that and what brought you there maybe it would be good to start a little earlier in the story just so we have some context so catch us up because not you know from what i've seen worship leader to sex witch is not the most common career path not really yeah you and my dad both uh see that pretty clearly i mean i get it it does look like a pretty nuts you know hard right turn of 10 years of ministry predominantly being a worship leader and then seemingly suddenly finding myself in this position now with business cards that say sex switch on them and so i'm like well i get that that seems really abrupt to other people but for some reason for me it felt like a really i mean it was painful at times but kind of an alarmingly gentle process and almost like an obvious one like oh of course i was going to get here so it totally made sense to me as well yeah right okay thanks i'm you were charismatic right yes yes of course it's already it's already that just with a bad relationship with sex yeah well exactly and that's the whole thing too is growing up southern baptist so that was my original context was a very disembodied white evangelical religious tradition to the point where it was a joke if we started trying to clap on the one and three accidentally during a hymn like we just it was so disembodied but my childhood experience separate from the religious space was extremely embodied and so when i look back on it and even like little funny things like i obviously growing up you know really really christian like christian to the level we we're like boycotting disney because of gay days like that level of christian like there's no reason yeah oh yeah i remember that day vividly when my mother told me like no more disney she took us out for like uh frozen yogurt which i feel like was equally as smart as it was a huge letdown to be like you can froze me over also we're never going to disney world again so when i think back on my childhood experience what i can tell you is that i know i was sheltered but somehow i learned enough about witches themselves to beg my parents for a black cat for a christmas present two years in a row because that's the so real witches not like pointy hats and cartoons or you're well and there was something about the pointy hats and cartoons i'm guessing it was like halloween decorations in my public school or something where i was like oh that's what a witch is well and this this again it's almost beyond explanation this like innate knowing of oh well then that's what i need to do or be because that's what i am i have no i truly i i don't i can't explain it i really like it just it was a it was a really deep knowing wow i feel like when it comes to magic and magical practice and witchcraft is that there are people that the practice chooses and people that choose the practice and people that choose it have to do some specific work to unlearn the illusion of the isms which are you know the damaging and oppressive systems that keep people separated from themselves from each other and from you know the physical and spiritual realms and and i think that people that it chooses that the practice chooses have an early natural practically unexplainable inclination towards the unraveling of those isms that honestly nobody taught them and so i know that the black cat anecdote is like a funny one but then i also have things like so so part of witchcraft is like um yeah unlearning the illusion of all those isms and and uprooting oppressive and harmful systems in order to bring about more connection between people and each other or between people and the earth and so in unlearning things like white supremacy for example i was raised by two very racist parents in the midwestern united states in a historically racist christian denomination and i was pulled out of the public school system when i was in sixth grade to go into a private christian school system because of some things that were going on with like racial integration in my public school system so that i mean this was an ethic in my family spoken or unspoken it existed it was there and my mother it was it was spoken for her in a lot of ways and so i have no explanation for you similar to the black cat thing i have no explanation for you as to why i did things like in fourth grade our teacher was like uh we're gonna do this project and you're just gonna you're gonna write a book that's the only direction we had so most of the kids in my class wrote like fictional stories and for whatever reason my body was like you know what we're gonna do we're going to write a book where we're profiling a non-fiction book profiling famous black americans and then i had so many that i didn't want to leave out because i didn't leave anybody out and i kept finding all these incredible people that i asked my teacher if i could do a second book and i didn't even want extra credit i just didn't want to leave anybody out and this bitch over here early enneagram eight instead of doing her this homework in her bedroom away from everyone else i did all my other homework up there i sat in my dining room table in the middle of my house on purpose so my mother would see me doing this homework nobody taught me that no i mean everything in my life was apparently you know trying to point me in this direction of a certain form of belief that my early innate knowing was like now that's not right i think it i think i think that's the wrong way to be i think i think white supremacy is the wrong thing to think the wrong thing to believe and i'm not saying there wasn't more work to do beyond that point but that's the kind of stuff that i i think like they're like i said there are people that kind of choose it and come to it and then i think there are people that it calls to them in some ways and so when i look at my background it's very obvious to me now that christianity was never going to be it for me like my anglo-saxon pagan ancestors were arguably they were the ones calling to me early on and were like hey no this thing colonized us and disembodied us and it's not going to be for you and so i think that it's not surprising to me to go back to what you said a minute ago that i found my way out of these disembodied christian traditions into attempts to be a part of more embodied ones like with you know charismatic expressions and some mystical magical things like speaking in tongues and healing and stuff that i'm like wow i have an ethic for that stuff but again it was like i felt like i was trying to find what i was really looking for in these seemingly ever widening circles but they still were closed loops and so it was finally i got to a point which again crazily or unsurprisingly it started for me when i was in england so i went back to the land of my ancestors and so now looking back i'm like yeah i was in a cult but also my ancestors were speaking to me and that's when everything started so by cult i mean the christian group that you were part of yeah yeah a charismatic christian call i escalated so much to the point where i had left the country and was living in england and a part of this extremely insulated very end times focused militaristic prayer and worships and i was a worship leader there but then i ironically had experiences there where i was connecting with people who had my same last name and they had done the work to trace their lineage to certain regions in england and so i was like have this parallel experience of connecting with my ancestors and then also reach just the the boiling point of being separate from my body and in this charismatic you know christian cult and there's obviously more i could say about how that all fell apart later but there's like 25 podcasts where i talk about that people can listen to so [Music] so i'm curious still about which craft that you understand now with like you were saying with drawing people into connection and into their bodies and you know the witches on the cartoons are like usually casting spells and hurting people and things like that so what did you see something behind the spells in the pointy hat or you just liked the aesthetic or what's what's the connection there between the witchcraft you understand now and the cartoonish mainstream witchcraft that most people think yeah i think early on likely what that cartoonish version of which is at the very least was speaking to me was about how to be powerful in the midst of a definitely religious environment but also home environment i was in like an abusive environment in my home where i felt like i had no power and my religion unfortunately was agreeing with what i was learning in my home and saying well you know as a girl yeah you still don't have any power and i know that there are these cartoonish you know examples of witches and like you said like unfortunately they're being shown as doing more harm than good but there was something about them being able to be in charge of their own destiny that was so like when i think about back on like younger me that was drawn to that i hurt for her because to me i'm like oh that speaks so clearly to the fact that you felt so unsafe and also that at least planted something really early where i got curious about what are witches and you honestly because the internet exists now you don't have to dig too far to find out that those images are propped up on hundreds and hundreds of years of patriarchy murdering women the earliest witches were midwives and herbalists and or they were women who you know right around the time where it was like okay well women are property now and and that's what marriage is they're women who are kind of bucking that system and either inheriting their ancestral lands you know apart from marrying into an inheritance that goes down the male line like any time that there is a woman and there's a really great book about this um called i think it's called witches sluts and feminists where it kind of unpacks a bit of the real history of witches and how that term was co-opted to express you know taken from basically those were women who were like seen as dangerous to the the powers that be at the time and yet because there was so much kind of panic and fear rooted in the religious beliefs it was like oh yeah they have sex with the devil that's what they do that's why we're going to kill them but in reality it was women who were who were trying to offer their assistance their medical assistance to the poor when the establishment was like no absolutely not only people who have money get get to receive that assistance so i think it's a little bit of both where it was like something about seeing these cartoon images of these women who were kind of in charge of themselves was super appealing and then as i got older i started really looking into that more and when you really start to look into the actual history of witches and what they were doing and who they really were and why they were actually killed or you know ostracized you know anything from the like you know there's the extreme version of when they're killed but not they weren't all killed but you start to kind of see a little bit more it what they were doing was more rooted in justice than evil [Music] so many questions what was you've named some of this already but i love to hear you more specifically name some of the ways in which the christianity that you inherited wasn't working for you like what do you mean by being disembodied and what else specifically about what your tradition of the christianity wasn't working for you and was causing you harm yeah i think that a lot of recognizing how it was harming me and what it was actually doing has come out you know come to me on the other side of leaving and contextualizing what my body was doing when i was in it so finally realizing that okay there were certain doctrines that were taking me away from myself in ways i didn't know at the time which i'll get into but i couldn't see that clearly and so my body was trying to get my attention to get me to come back home to her in other ways through occasionally and actually pretty often through various different emotional or physical imbalances anything from panic attacks to like years-long digestive issues it's not lost on me that every time in my post-high school every time i made a step towards some kind of like career mission work in some way over the course of those you know 10 a little bit under 10 years within um a few weeks to a month of being in whatever place i just like uprooted myself and went to i got massively physically ill in a way that nobody could explain what was going on for a few years there we just called them my spells because we nobody could figure out what the hell was going on with my body so now i look back and i'm like oh she was trying to tell me that i was unsafe in doing these things and going to these places and so what i know now about what some of those things that weren't working are some of those things that were harming me and this is something i've unpacked quite a bit in my book which was my thesis there there's certain teachings and these teachings aren't necessarily present in all christian traditions but by and large when we're talking about evangelical christianity or like white evangelical christianity there are certain ethics of belief that these spaces kind of systemically sign off on so that would be things like you are born with an inherited sin nature so you're born bad and because you're born bad and you know they they have these i think and it's so nice that i forget scripture now it's great but like i know there's some part in there where it talks about being at war with the flesh and they set up this dichotomy between like spirit and flesh and if you combine that idea of like you know you're born into sin and so your flesh is bad and so jesus had to go die the myth of redemptive violence in order to make you better make you well make you safe and okay you're not really fully safe and okay because it's pretty conditional at that point so you can't really ever arrive at a full sense of safety and belonging and okayness just within yourself you are constantly dependent on something external of you like the sacrifice that jesus made or having to continually like pray and be obedient and have faith these there's conditions while the system itself is telling you it's unconditional so even there there's gaslighting and psychological manipulation in that too but then if you especially if you set up these ideas of your flesh being bad i know there's a verse where it talks about you have to kill the flesh if you believe that that is true and then you bring in these the evangelical sexual ethics i.e purity culture which is telling you not only just don't have sex before you know implied monogamous heterosexual marriage but don't arouse or awaken love until it desires in any way and so they're telling you that the only acceptable way to be a human person is to be utterly non-sexual until this day when you arrive at this place and that light switch just gets to turn on and that's that's illogical and it's also incredibly damaging we go through puberty at a certain age but now here in 2019 we're not getting married until you know our early to mid to you know and beyond 20s so you've got these you've got about 10 years there maybe arguably where you are waking up to something within yourself that you are then being told by your religious system if you participate in this waking up that means certain things about you and you might be in danger of going to a place of eternal conscious punishment that's completely insane that's completely insane it's fucked up oh yeah it's super fucked up and i think one of the things that's really complicated too is and i've had these conversations with my dad where when he and i have tried to talk about stuff like this he said something to me once about how he's like well i can tell you that whatever it is that you learned in in youth group when you were in high school i can tell you that for sure we don't teach that stuff anymore and i was like i can tell you for sure that they do he's like well we don't do those you know true love waits rallies and we don't do the rings i was like it doesn't matter if the ethic that exists inside of your church upholds heterosexism upholds this idea that masturbation is is bad or unnatural or evil in some way like if you're upholding these ideas yes you are still causing that harm to them psychologically and physiologically so even though it might be wearing different clothing now which i doubt it even is it's still the same set of values which are incredibly body negating are incredibly maladaptive and whenever you have these developing minds that are internalizing this shame to such an extent that says i'm only an acceptable correct human person if i shut down my sexuality you are only going to get incredible problems on the other side of that as they grow and get older now that doesn't mean that you can't heal if i believed you couldn't heal i wouldn't have the job that i have because that's part of what i hold space for in my coaching practice is helping people heal from that and and come home to their bodies in that way but you have to go back pretty far to look at the original problem which is i mean the stakes are high because there's apparently hell to pay if you don't follow these rules this angry deity in the sky you know killed his own son because you weren't good enough there was an innate problem with you but it was an innate problem you inherited that you didn't consent to inheriting so it's just it feels like this you're stuck and it feels like for me it felt a lot like no matter what i do or what i did it wasn't ever enough and again because i was in in a situation where i didn't feel safe in my actual home and it's something i've written about in my thesis where i didn't have anyone else on my team and so i desperately needed god to be on my team so i let that god do a whole lot of fucked up shit to me honestly i let that god tell me a whole lot of stuff about myself and about what i should do and what i should believe i let that god be the reason why at like nine years old i was reading books about martyrs and telling people that i wanted to die in order to show my devotion to that god that's not okay and that all gets that all that all the stories live in your body i'm still unpacking stuff about why i have certain thoughts and feelings towards certain causes and ideas why is it that i believe that unless i die for a cause i'm not a worthy person like wow maybe that's based on the fact that i needed god to love me so badly and i was reading i was absorbed with these stories and that was propped up by my church space which was like well if you want to show how much you love god you give your life for that god so these things live in your body in your consciousness for a long period of time and they take you away from a connection to your intuition and for a lot of people sexually or otherwise to their own actual physical bodies [Music] [Music] it's normal at so many different points in our life to feel like something is getting in the way of being present or happy something stopping us from achieving the goals that we have for ourselves or feeling connected to the people that we love betterhelp will assess your needs and match you with your own licensed professional therapist to help you work on all those things you can connect with someone in a safe and private online environment for that reason it's so convenient you don't even have to leave the house and you can start working with someone in under 24 hours when working with someone through better help you can send a message to your counselor at any time and get a timely and thoughtful response plus you can schedule weekly video and phone sessions better help has licensed professional counselors who are specialized in treating things like depression anxiety navigating family conflicts and so much more they're committed to facilitating great therapeutic matches so they make it easy and free to change counselors if needed anything you share with your counselor is confidential so many people have been using better help that they're recruiting additional counselors in all 50 states start living a happier life today as a listener you get 10 off your first month by visiting betterhelp.com liturgists join over 1 million people taking care of their mental health again it's betterhelp h-e-l-p-com slash liturgists i relate to so much of that i was just talking to lisa yesterday about how sexual shame was why i deconstructed and she's like really and i was like i mean i didn't know that at the time yeah right i had no idea until that was the last few years that i've realized looking back in the rearview mirror oh there was a constant and it wasn't sexual shame was like the the way that the idea that i'm rotten most clearly manifested so that the core of like you are a fallen sinful being that needs redeeming yeah the wound for me happened the earliest that i can remember i wrote about it in my book but was when i was like four or five years old or something like that with this girl named daisy and she wanted to kiss and i wanted her to take her clothes off and we got caught and i felt like after seeing the parents reactions and like oh no i'm bad and and then sex was at the core like that drive that was a very natural drive to like curiosity and excitement and pleasure and it was like that is what's wrong with you and that'll take you right to hell if you don't learn to fix that and um unless you learn to kill the flesh so yeah i relate to so much of that and it's only been lately that some of the the language of the scriptures like some of the flesh language i actually can see differently i'm i've referenced this on the podcast before but i remember it was a sermon that i really loved years ago i saw brian mclaren give this sermon about how we've used all these scriptures like puzzle pieces we've been trying to put together this piece of what what christianity is supposed to be but maybe we have like the entirely wrong image on the box oh wow and we've been like trying to fit the puzzle pieces together and it don't doesn't quite work out but we have the whole fundamental that's not all christianity by the way but it was my christianity the one that i inherited uh and the the the cover of the box the box top was i am rotten i am a sinner that needs to be redeemed and my body my sexuality my physicality are all something someday i'll finally leave behind now i have to deal with it and be redeemed from it and you know now i can see how ridiculous that is how damaging it is and i can also see i don't know if the the author of those if it was paul or whoever it was i don't read the bible much either but um but was actually getting at that or if he actually saw i can hear it now in new ways like i was actually thinking about that today about if you think of flesh more as ego and yeah more like the constriction away from natural flow of spirit and breath and embodiment and being and how so often are pulling away from our body it's actually precisely the opposite us pulling away from our embodied experience and as spirit can act when we constrict as just flesh as in other words as just me as just thinking of my body as separate from all other bodies and separate from the environment and which sustains and creates my body so i think there's other ways of seeing and i say that for anybody still who is christian out there who is i don't and and others and to honor other streams of christianity who don't fuck it up so bad yes yeah absolutely because they do exist they do exist yeah you know what one of the things that's really interesting that i'm thinking of too and what you're talking about with that whole um you know maybe a better way to put it rather than flesh and spirit would be like false self and true self or like ego yeah and i would say maybe ego and body like i have a very now have a very positive relationship towards the word body and to me body sometimes means physical body but it also sometimes is a stand-in word for like intuition or intuitive self or inner self here's another interesting thing and kind of even going back to witchcraft a little bit so one of the things that starhawk says in the spiral dance in witchcraft you what you're predominantly working with is the energy of desire which is actually work with desire we don't resist it and that's something too that definitely comes up in a big way when it comes to sex magic itself but the whole idea that star hot talks about in the spiral dance is that we bring about the end of desire not in abnegation of the desire but in the completion or the obtaining of the desire and she says we do not seek to conquer or escape our desires we seek to fulfill them to follow desire to its end and to unite with that which is desired to become one with it with the goddess or to arrive at oneness basically and she says the fulfillment of desire becomes not a matter of self-indulgence but of self-awareness and so that i would say the exact same thing you're saying when it's actually not our flesh or our bodies that lead us to sin it's when we're out of touch with our bodies that we end up bringing harm to ourselves and to others and also forgetting that we are the other there is no other and so when we bring harm to ourselves we are innately bringing harm to the other and vice versa and then that even comes up in witchcraft with binding spells and as a whole thing but i think about i think about this a lot especially in the way that evangelicalism makes pleasure something really evil and so therefore makes desire something evil and it's more about duty than desire yeah and the reality actually is when you are out of touch with your true desire which is that energy of desire that she's talking about when you're out of touch with it with your true desire or you are under the impression that it needs to be resisted you will behave in ways that feed reactive quote desires not not the real one not the core one so in reality working with desire and moving towards completing it on a deep you know kind of true nature level following it and and alchemizing that energy of desire is actually what brings about oneness with yourself and you know or the illusion of self essentially so that's something too where i'm like man like this whole idea that the flesh is bad and pleasure is bad desire is bad it's it's like you're you're trying to walk down a path of coming home to yourself and you're literally turned around and you're going in the opposite direction yeah we so often we just look at the surface of the desire and we scratch the itch so that we don't have to pay attention to it but the surface levels of the desire that wanting a donut wanting to fuck like whatever it is those are always there's deeper roots to that stuff there's always something underneath that and so yeah like looking at it fully fully going into it not not fully going into it necessarily meaning eat all of the donuts you can if you want but like that's the thing you can you can actually and if you do you might find that's not actually what you were looking for like if you actually pay attention and you stay with your body and you stay with yeah with the desire as you and not just use the donut to ignore the desire but actually look at it fully experience it you might realize oh i'm lonely and see and that's something i love about when you personify when we so the work i do in my coaching work is like personifying your body so your body's a he she are they instead of an it and so one of the things i really love about even that example of like you can eat all the donuts and you might get to the end of that experience what you will find if you're in relationship with your body or you're looking through you're looking at the you know your life or the world through this lens of my body's a person i'm in relationship with them there is still an option where you might get to the end of that experience and your your body can still work with that it's not this like sin paradigm it's not like you made the wrong choice and now you're fucked it's like it's it's and it's not like the more moral decision would have been to abstain and resist because it's all just information and no matter what if you're staying close to your body and if you're staying close and wanting to keep listening your body can still speak and it honestly kind of doesn't really fucking matter what the behavior is that you just did because there's still information underneath whether the obtaining of what you thought you were going to obtain or going down the path to try and obtain it and not obtaining it there's always still an opportunity for you to stay with or come back to your body and continue to grow like it's i've said it i say it a lot with my clients and out of context it might sound alarming but i swear it's okay but i'm just like honestly i don't really give a shit about your behavior within the sphere that i work there's really not much that someone could do anything up to this point i don't think that i would label as bad behavior i would just say that's information what's going on underneath that what about how it relates to i was just gonna i was thinking of somebody like murder right those are extreme and i don't know i mean there's definitely some schools of thought that go down a really interesting track that i do not know what i think about that but i think there's something about like the is it the no not the four agreements but something like sacred agreement sacred arrangements something like that so if you believe in reincarnation or if you believe that you are you have a certain role or destiny to fulfill in this incarnation then part of that and again take this loosely all because i don't know what i think just really in the information but there's space for maybe your role is to take someone else's life in this and i'm like i don't know that seems a little too extreme and also as a witch i'm not comfortable with that either because it brings harm so like i said before a second ago about the binding spell thing a binding spell i think is really really cool because when you cast a binding spell you're actually binding someone from bringing harm to others and themselves because there's an acknowledgement there that the only way in which you can bring harm to others is by way of harming yourself um and so like you can't and it's not possible to separate the two if you're harming someone else you are harming yourself and so even if you're just trying to like loving someone enough to be like please stop hurting yourself that's going to automatically feed into their inability to hurt someone else well it's to me when i hear this it it sounds kind of like we're the the trouble comes in from mixing planes of reality i've used the example on my other podcast loving this podcast about romeo and juliet and like imagine trying to critique or talk about the morality of romeo and juliet as a playwright versus a character in the story you know so like it's very different you can't it's it's really tricky to try to talk about the two side by side of course no matter what anybody has ever done it's what happened so it's in a way from a click out it's the perfect thing but you can't talk about that as a character in the story like right you can talk about how it's the perfect ending for juliet to kill herself but you wouldn't say that to juliet's dad exactly right yeah there's lots of reasons why you wouldn't yeah that's so interesting so when we talk about like the morality and there is no and you can even go to the bible for that that everything is permissible but yeah but not everything is beneficial and something that's kind of again you're kind of mixing planes a little bit like yeah everything is perfect the kingdom of god is here it's all absolutely as it should be because it is what it is because it is what it is but if you're going to be a character in the story writing the story well no don't don't hurt people yeah right or don't accept injustice yeah for what it is just because it is um don't allow other people to hurt people yeah that's really interesting but what is what it is includes your desire to not hurt people yes exactly [Music] i love how you call your body her um i don't hear that from people i wanna i think i still call my body it too often i i like that what made you start doing that she did you know i don't know when it started i can tell you that it was a time frame for sure i think that one of the first things that happened and this is a this is something that i might write more about in the future but i think for uterus having individuals uterus having humans there is an innate body betrayal that happens around the time of puberty it's kind of where we first learn if we're going to live and move in a patriarchal society where we first learn to say it's all her fault or it's all their fault or it's all his fault and begin that's where we kind of begin to our heart breaks a little bit speaking of the body yeah the body yep that's where our heart kind of starts to break a little bit for the very first time of saying well i used to be allowed into these spaces or i used to not be told that wearing this thing would make me dangerous or be in danger and now i suddenly am but nothing has changed except me and so there must be something wrong with me and i believe that that's an ethic that then unfortunately follows us throughout the rest of most of our lives as long as we are having a menstrual cycle because of the way that our world interacts with folks that have menstrual cycles and folks that bleed because there's expectation of pain and expectation of inconvenience and expectation of man this is the patriarchy so your growth should be linear you should be able your body is a machine it should be able to perform at all times in this same way and and bodies with uteruses don't do that we just we just don't i think that for me a lot of this that what i do know not so much in my brain the time i might be off in this but what i know in my body is that a lot of this and realizing she's a her and not an it was when i stopped when i made the decision to begin to stop being hostile towards my body around menstruation where i decided because i used to say this thing growing up that i guess i thought it was funny and then i just kept it for so long and then one day like i heard myself and i was like what the hell is that i just would say it absolutely i used to say all the time my uterus is trying to kill me and i was like what and and i think it was the parallel of around the time that i was trying to figure out what all these digestive issues that were that were going on with me and just trying to learn what the hell was going on with my body so i could try and take care of my body um and this was around the end of 2013 and so it was it was suddenly there was this um they didn't they didn't they those ideas didn't work together they were opposing ethics because i was like why am i doing all this work to try and take care of my body over here and yet once a month i'm speaking this way about my body these two things feel incongruent all of a sudden so i got really curious about what it might be like and i started reading some books that other people had written there's this amazing book i don't know if this word is allowed on your podcast but it's called cunt it's by inga mussio um you're the second person to ever say that word on this podcast first you're the second pete holmes pete holmes was the first one oh that's perfect i am zero percent mad yeah so me and pete just talking about cunts that's perfect but this book is amazing and it was one of my first times being introduced to some i mean someone else's writing of the fact that like hey you don't have to completely hate that this is a thing that your body does so i know that a lot of my relationship toward experiencing my body as a her and a she instead of an it came on the heels of me deciding to disagree with that idea that she you know my the what it was it at the time it was doing something at me and to me to harm me and really more like hey if this is like the oldest thing that those of us with uteruses have ever done and it's also a part of how human beings get here in the first place maybe there's nothing wrong with it which sounds so obvious to me now but when you're inside of a patriarchal system it makes you feel like there's something wrong so that's where a lot of that started with me and i know that since that point i mean as a poet too i think there was just a very innate ability to lean into just calling her a she there's something kind of poetic about it and i know that i there's a poem that i wrote which actually has to do with sex magic too because i wrote it because of i had a i don't know if you call it a session i don't know what people call it but a sex magic session with myself masturbating i was masturbating and i fell asleep with intention mastering with intention i love it calling it a sex magic session is wonderful yup yup that's for the that's for when you're in the presence of people who don't want to hear you say the big bad yeah i mean words words matter when you masturbation sounds a little medical like that cold or something calling it a sex magic session it's kind of nice is it good i like is a good term for it so i had one of those and like so and we can get probably get into this in a minute when we start talking about more about sex magic specifically but sex magic itself is really it's using your sexual energy and intention to manifest something you want into reality so you're kind of using that cultivated sexual energy and then eventually moving that into your kind of everyday sexual energy so i was participating with that and what was crazy is this i fell asleep or i went to sleep at some point and then throughout the night my body was like waking me up with lines full completed like lines and stanzas of a poem um and i don't remember if it was in order or out of order but i remember that the next morning so i woke up a bunch of times with just like different lines just that were just just came to me and the next morning when i woke up i had this completed poem and it's a poem that i mean i didn't unfortunately my sex magic session didn't give me the name of the poem so um i just titled it because it's only may and i'm already exhausted of this term and it's about the the terminology of summer body and the whole poem is like she's better than my summer body she and i referred can you read it and i'll put music to it oh my god yes here we go watch the magic of editing here it is what's it called again because it's only may and i'm already exhausted of this term she's better than my summer body my sometimes body my body for a season only if i earned her she's my sorrow body my sleepless night body my let me shoulder this weight with you body she's my thinking body my swimming body my gorgeous courageous crash and burn body she is my showing up anyway body autumn body winter body spring body blooming she moves and sways and rolls with the punches like the forged in the fires of the earth fighter that she is she is my single body my sexual body my sacred when shared body my screaming body my singing body my silent body my stronger body my sicker body my shrinking body my swelling body my sometimes shattered body she picks up she gets up she summons she stretches she sees this summertime body is my body for all seasons all sizes all circumstance she is bolder and brighter and better than three months and heat she my sunshine body stardust body she energy of everything and everyone who ever has been before she will wear whatever the fuck she wants to to the goddamn [Music] beach [Music] you're still a worship leader jamie if you didn't know you're just i mean you just are not worshiping the idol anymore i that's a hundred percent true i truly feel like you know this this work i do now in like in my coaching work is is the holiest work i've ever done in my life and yet again if you were to ask certain people that would not appear that way so yeah there's there's i can't there's even like a kind of a magical mystical quality to when she became a she to me but i know that there are many steps in the process and what i know now i can tell you is knowing her as a she that's what she's always wanted me to call her she's never been in it she's never been a machine or a vessel she's always been a person and a person that has has lived her entire life with me doing everything she can to save me and love me and make me well and when i start from that place from that perspective and relationship with her everything else in my life starts to make more sense [Music] okay so we might as well get in to let's get more into the sex magic thing so you said you briefly described it but where did this come to you and and can you just help us understand it better yeah well i think i was practicing it for a long time without knowing it i think my relationship towards my body and the experience of sex whether it was solo like self-pleasure sexual experiences or partnered experiences i think there is always this at least opportunity that i was somewhere innately aware of that there was an energy to this and um i think i said this to y'all before and your kitchen table once where i said that what i believe is like sex is the most potent form of spiritual medicine that exists and i know that with my brain now but i think again my body knew that for a very long time which is why those early messages of like purity culture she wasn't having it which is why she was like masturbating anyway and having sex anyway now granted there was a lot of shame that i had to um learn about that but when i look back on my life i was like oh man she was just trying to wake me up to something by encouraging me to participate in those experiences so i think that at the very least when i became consciously aware that sex magic is a thing or sexual alchemy is a thing i read this book called the magdalen manuscript which if there are any christians still listening they will stop after this point because the magdalene manuscript it's a book written by this guy who essentially channeled mary magdalene about her relationship towards the christ towards jesus of nazareth to christ and there how him even arriving at that state of christ consciousness was there were many reasons why that was something that he embodied but arguably at least in this manuscript sexual alchemy is how he got there so sex magic it's a great book i'm just just you ever want to borrow it just a shout out to my mother-in-law who sometimes listens to the podcast i love you you know what actually vishnu it is next to your book on my bookcase i love their similar colors so my everything's color arranged yeah it's great along with like two witchcraft books it's great it's really perfect placement continue sorry sorry to interrupt yeah no it's perfect so a fellow witch friend of mine arden lee she was the one who told me about that years ago so i started reading that started learning about sexual alchemy and what sex magic is which is essentially like i said before it's using that energy and intention to manifest what you want into reality and that could be something i mean i know there's a lot of sex magic facilitators practitioners and not i'm not saying this is good nor bad because money is just energy but they lead people in this to manifest money for me it looks like something more along the line of manifesting healing and justice but again coming from the standpoint of witchcraft where everything is energy and we're working with desire healing injustice isn't necessarily better or worse than money it's all just energy anyway so the basically kind of the the process of sex magic is you are you are entering into a sexual experience whether shared or autonomous and you are holding in your intention what you want to manifest by way of that energy that you're drawing up in your body it's not just masturbation i think you can definitely thoughtlessly masturbate but like sex magic is not that it is intentionally bringing about those experiences of self-pleasure like i said with that intention so it's it's setting that intention and then visualizing that manifestation and then working with the energy that you bring up in your body specifically during that moment of orgasm now again in sex magic you don't have to have an orgasm the energy is still created either way and it's not destination oriented but then the third component of sex magic is then you know outside of that session or whatever you call it taking action in that direction in your lived experience in the world so i mean that's kind of the the whole idea of it if you if you really want to get super weird with it and go back to the whole jesus thing and mary magdalene like on some level arguably that is if you if you want to agree with that story and you know agree with that idea it's not so weird to think that jesus potentially practiced sex magic because it's really not that weird of a thing to do i love it i just i just can imagine i mean i don't i think we've shaken most of the people that would write articles but it's just you said so many things that would be great headlines like oh yeah the liturgist podcast just believed that jesus was a sex fiend there's its own headline right now yeah there was just there it was so what have you seen with the results of this in your life and and others why the juice that you're like i'm gonna do this so for me for the most part this is something that i practice privately that informs how i function in my healing work and it's also what i used to alchemize almost everything to get me to where i am today honestly truly like i said i've directly channeled everything from my coaching curriculum to those you know full and complete poems about my summer body to the guided meditation that's on my website i don't know if that would make it weird for anybody to know that that was channel but whatever it's fine no secrets at this point i have channeled direct like methods of personal healing so physically or otherwise where my body's been able to kind of tell me like what an imbalance is or what's going on now granite partnered with a doctor this isn't i'm not just out here doing some really you know weird shit i promise i mean i don't know sometimes i am but i have gotten some really good insight into what's going on in my physical body that i don't know if i would have known any other way and i even i mean i channeled it the kind of unifying theme of my thesis with this i also on a very practical level i made my coaching work my full-time job this time two years ago right now two years ago i had six jobs all like part-time service industry type jobs and could hardly pay my bills and now on this side of it i do this what i love more than anything in the world for a living full-time and i quadrupled my income over the course of two years which let's be honest part of that is a testament to how little i was being paid before because capitalism is super fun it's really not that impressive of a number like it's just that's how small it was but still it's like the the combined energy of like quadrupling my income while doing the thing that i love and then i also manifested my partner which basically resulted in me having the first real relationship of my life at age 29 because for many many years i kept hitting these blocks about like i would date people for a couple months and then it would end and it was this whole thing that it yeah it was repeating over and over so and i mean a lot of these things have been really positive but they've also and this is the cool thing they have forced me to look a lot deeper at my former limiting stories at work in my subconscious about what makes me feel safe and what i deserve when it comes to things like love and money but then as far as like how this comes up in the work that i do with other people in my coaching work honestly like it's there's practical ways in which like helping holding space for people to reconnect with their bodies and encouraging people to whether they know it or not there's definitely some clients where i could call it sex magic and they'd be totally comfortable with that there's other clients where i'm gonna i'm gonna choose the m word and maybe like hey masturbation is okay self pleasure is okay like engage with that but hold an intention visualize this certain thing or visualize or i will encourage people to speak words out loud to their bodies when they're masturbating they have like blocks towards that where just basically saying while participating in self-pleasure saying things like you are safe you are good this is safe this is good to try and unlearn that internalized story that shame story of like what you're doing right now is unsafe and it's dangerous so i mean there's practical ways it comes up you know like i said encouraging people to engage with self-pleasure self-touch erratic and embodied self-connecting activities that are non-sexual in nature um encouraging people to begin to seek out potential partners for anything from cordial sex to long-term relationships it includes you know in the client work the affirmation of their sexual orientation and identity which does include things like asexuality and non-monogamy in my opinion there's not enough people but you know coaches or otherwise who talk about these kinds of things that are willing to center those two identities and experiences as valid and that in my opinion is a form of erasure and it's not it is not just and i am an enneagram mate so that will not fly so yeah i think it's a crucial part of people unlearning and recovering from authoritarian systems of any kind and it just so happens that most of the people i'm working with um a big one that they're trying to unlearn and recover one also just happens to be one that lied to them during the time that their subconscious was forming and told them that sex is bad so it's kind of two birds one stone with this really and i don't and it's not so much that i mean there's definitely obviously my website says sex witch and so there's a lot of people that are innately going to immediately open up and talk about you know what's going on with themselves and their relationship to themselves sexually but even if that's not their primary intention when we start working together at some point because in the form that i take people through there's a whole section about like sexuality and you know what you what you learned and what your kind of original handed sexual ethic was and we unpack all that together so no matter what like at some point it comes up where someone's like i feel disconnected from my body or my identity or my sexual orientation in this particular way as it relates to sexuality so a lot of times like i said you know utilizing some of the components of sex magic and encouraging people to engage with themselves and with maybe their partners or multiple partners in that way obviously respect autonomy consent all belongs here but i think it's a really like i said i think sex is the most potent form of spiritual medicine that exists and when it comes to practicing any kind of magic like thing i love about sex magic is you don't need anything else to do it other than your body you don't need crystals or a tarot deck or a pendulum or you know spell work or herbs like those things are all great but to me it feels like the most accessible form of magical practice because you don't need to purchase anything or really learn anything from anyone else in order to do it you follow your body and you listen to your body in order to bring about what it is that you desire to bring about [Music] do hmm wow yeah especially for those of us who have been taught that sex is at kind of the core of what's wrong with us for me that's sex has been one of the last like ways to enfold the all of my life into my spiritual experience like i say that i've been married to lisa for you know almost 19 years now and it's not we've had we've always had great sex and since we've been married it's been blessed you know even when we first got married in our in our framework now it's blessed by god but there was still you know if i would ever masturbate or something there was still for a long time something it was it's not that i thought it was wrong necessarily anymore you know what at the first few years maybe but it still didn't feel like holy and beautiful right and gorgeous and sacred and so i've i've had my own magic sessions where it was very spiritual and very like coming back to make friends with the body and it sounds funny to put that in that context shaking hands with you um but but like yeah bringing the sacred into the sexual or vice versa i don't know just seeing seeing the sacred in the sexual seeing the beauty of the body and its desires and it's and i actually had a a funny one a few months ago where it was like i was in a very deep loving spiritual kind of state of ecstatic union with the divine yeah and everything in the world felt like like the divine orgasm and yeah and i was like maybe i'll just add a physical orgasm to this yes oh my god oh my god when you're listen i have a story to tell you that i've never told anyone that i might as well just share it with thousands of people about two and a half years ago i was sitting in this coffee shop and i was working on a paper so i just gone back to school and i was actually working on a paper it might have been the first one i wrote i think but it was a paper about the connection between autoimmune disease and the sex and like sexual suppression in women which if anyone wants it's really good paper so as i was working on this paper i was also auditing a course an online course with being taught by ditch not han about how like mind and body are one and there was a module in it where granted i was trying to combine it get two things done at once but you know what it worked out so i was there was a whole module where it's basically just 40 minutes of these chants where these buddhists were just chanting um and these monks were chanting and so i was like sitting coffee shop writing this paper listening to these to this chanting going on you know on you know for minutes on end and i it's i what i i don't even know exactly how to describe it totally as what feels most accurate to my experiences that i like was adjacent to or like touched an altered state by listening to this and i became so aroused at the same moment that this was happening that like i i like started sweating i like couldn't focus and i had to pack up my stuff and leave immediately and go home luckily i was just like right up the street but i had to go home immediately and masturbate yeah and like because i couldn't like i was it was that like i am in union with all and it is this great you know divine orgasm and this experience of creation and and i went home and i masturbated and have a little sex magic session and this whole thing came to me which at some point i will write about more later about this like connection between like the upper throat and the lower throat and like women like needing to like reclaim their voices and this whole like how like you know orgasm as a part of that and it was just this stuff i had never thought about before and it felt like i was downloading it but it truly like there was no part of my brain or body that thought that just remaining sitting in that coffee shop was going to be an okay option at this point i was like i have to masturbate i have to well next time next time maybe it will just bring you to climax itself if maybe it might the i you know what that happens that happens sometimes yeah i almost yeah i was like i was having a just a very meditative car ride one time and just almost had an orgasm just from spiritual like i was just sitting driving meditating and it just like the kundalini or whatever you call it was having a good time honestly having a good time the snakes were dancing um if people don't know what kundalini is that just sounded really weird but look into it guys read the magdalen manuscript no it's so funny because i i feel like in hearing you say that now there's a part of me that's like well of course it did how else would it be yeah what i mean that's the whole universe is this yeah erotic like desire mm-hmm yang i mean just down to sub-atomic worlds like being drawn together yes you let's meld into one one cell becoming two becoming four becoming eight like the whole thing is this like fuckery yeah it's beautiful beautiful divine fuckery and that's one of the cool things about sex magic too because it's this whole idea that you are and this is something that a fellow practitioner amber elites says it's using that energy to manifest what you want to reality but she says like you know first you're beginning with your cultivated sexual energy like in a sexual experience but you are eventually moving into a space within yourself that is just your everyday erotic energy that you are constantly like and so it's always this like you're constantly having sex all yeah all the time and it's like and that's the cool thing about sex magic i feel like it centers the reality that sex means more than just the activity of what we think of as sex it's a practice that increases and focuses your awareness of your erratic energy and power because erotic energy is life force energy it's creative energy so it's increasing your awareness of where that exists in you and where that exists outside of you and where that exists and everyone that you know and how we can agree with it or partner with it or whatever you know to to bring about what we most want to see happen in the world so and again for me i'm like that when i think of that i think of healing and i think of justice and i think if we were all in touch with that part of ourselves and working with our desire and really that the core desire of what brings us most back to ourselves into each other i mean i don't want to go so far as to say like that would solve all of our problems but it would definitely make a dent it would really really help yeah i wonder how much of it's like aligning your your flow your desire your your intention like with with your body the natural like putting all the currents in one direction hmm is makes the river more powerful i mean for any like remaining sweaty blessing christians listening there is like that that erotic nature of all things and even of the divine yeah is present in christianity i mean rohr richard rohr talks about like his celibacy was not he's like it's not the monks don't want to don't want to have sex it's they're having sex with everything yes all the time yeah yeah that's the it's it's all erotic and sometimes for some people following their desires to their deepest point they realize that they will be biologically asexual in some way and and let the the making love to everything be experienced and everything else but that's that following its desire all the way to its source and it doesn't have to stop at scratching the skin right yes and that that's something that is funny as i think telling someone recently where they were kind of like what's the you know biggest misconception about something like sex magic and i think it would have to be that it's that it's all even at all about what we typically think of when we say sex in general and that it maybe exclusively results in people having like hotter wilder weirder partnered sexual experiences but i also think that's kind of a misconception anytime you happen to attach the word witch or magic to anything like it just gets like it gets put in this really specific container but like and i'm not saying that like you know the hotter wilder partnered sex isn't possible because that might be an outgrowth of you know the erotic energy and coming back home to your body but it's also not the point and so i was thinking about it this way i was thinking about this idea recently a handful of my closest female friends former husbands were the ones that actually like introduced us originally i guess not like recently is not what i'll say but you know they that's how we met was the fact that their husbands had come across my business card or like heard from someone you know what i do and they're like oh you have to meet my wife and it was like we were talking about this the other day and realizing like this connection like you know a few women that are like yeah that happened to me too yeah it was my husband too and it's laughably clear to us now that the intention of these men in wanting their wives to connect with me was that they wanted these women to become from their perspective like more you know quote sexual only if you're looking at it in that like partnered heterosexual you know sex context so they wanted them to become more sexual according to their definition of it yeah as if it was something transactional for their benefit but what actually happened which is what was so funny to us is that these women actually became more erratically engaged and more awake to themselves and therefore became more awake to some of the unhealthy dynamics that existed in their former partnerships um that kind of caused it to fall apart which is yeah exactly the laugh there signals to me that you're picking up on what's so ironic about that is they were like oh meet my wife like this will benefit me and it's like oh this didn't quite go according to plan did it so what you happen it's just it's what happens when you like and that's the whole you know going back to the childhood thing about a witch it's like oh did you think you could control the witch no sir no you could not you cannot yeah and i mean and i work with plenty of male clients or male identified clients as well so this isn't just like a thing exclusive to like one gender and you know not to another but i think that it speaks that story in general speaks to this misconception about sex in general about how sex is not just sex sex and the erotic is about is about life and the life force and every way in which we feel connected and interconnected with everyone and everything else [Music] so two things before we go one could you tell people where to go to learn more about your work and then two is there would you have another poem you could read to us to kind of finish it out i might you know what that's funny because these two things kind of almost flow together i wish it was as easy as me just pulling out my instagram to find another poem but instagram kicked me off uh about about wow it's not back yet i i'm i put it on thank you um lots of people have and i don't know i don't know if that's just a sign that i need to let it go or what but it's it's sad because there's a lot of memories that i've lost now in that but um seriously i am on instagram again my handle in there is just at i am jamie lee finch instead of just jamie lee finch you can find me on twitter where i am as you say a salty meatball and that's just at jamilyfinch and then i'm also on facebook i've um my poetry is on there a bit which might be a good place for me to look for maybe a closing poem but i think you know the best way to kind of keep track or follow me and what i'm doing would just be my website which is jamielyfinch.com on there you can access that guided meditation that i referred to you can also access my thesis in either ebook or audiobook format and we're working on working with a few people to get it into print right now which is great it'll just be like amazon print on demand self-published you can also sign up on my website and get on my wait list for the coaching work that i do and helping people to come back to their bodies sexually or otherwise and re-establish that relationship in light of maybe you had that same evangelical experience as me or maybe not maybe you just wanna someone to help you come home and that can be me [Music] this poem is actually the poem that saved my life when i wrote it so i feel like that might be a good one and i i don't think i've shared it with y'all before so listen there is still so much time do not believe just look at your own days weaving in and out of power and despair just look at your hands they will tell you everything you'll ever need to know about now listen not everything will be better but all will be well not everything will be heard but all will be known not everything will heal but one day you'll be able to answer someone else's question and it will be enough somehow to sit with grief will be enough listen it will never really be enough but you will be yesterday you already are tomorrow is the only question you have to answer but today isn't even asking do you not believe just put your ear to the ground if you want to hear something breathe reach your arms up as you walk past the willow when you're desperate to touch what is alive because listen i know i know that what you do in the dark is a clawing out of the grave i know you're just trying to find something as close as you can to what you remember of god inside someone else's body i know what it's like to hold your breath and wait for the water to wake you counting quickly morning breaks dry and it's taking ages for that creek to rise so you guess the good lord just isn't willing anymore but listen there is still so much time so many names left that you haven't learned all sand and dust and bone like you and everything is hiding there all waiting for that water too do you not believe everything do you not believe in everything open your eyes again there is still so much time so much waiting to be known about now and you are the only expert there will ever be desert throat thrown open screaming at the sky unashamed for asking well we hope you've enjoyed this conversation i've been your host michael gunger our guest is jamie lee finch this episode was produced by victory pomozano talent management by brent cradle production manager corey pig editor in sound design by matt masowski thanks for listening everybody