E123 - Alison Armstrong, Relationship Expert: We’ve Been Lied To, Here’s What Men ACTUALLY Want

Relationship expert Alison Armstrong explores the profound dynamics of relationships and their role in personal evolution. She delves into key insights about understanding men, addressing common misconceptions that women may have. She unpacks how masculine and feminine energies commonly interact in our society, as well as the influence of hormones on our behaviors and perspectives. Alison highlights the subtle behaviors women exhibit as requests for safety in their relationships, emphasizing how feelings of emasculation can undermine intimacy and connection. And how by harnessing the power of acknowledgement and appreciation, we can strengthen bonds in relationships. She provides powerful insights on how to learn to receive love and recognition, step into their inner king or queen, and embrace the beauty of aging with grace. Sleep Better with the Birch Mattress & Save 25%: https://birchliving.com/knowthyself Try AG1 & Save with their Special Black Friday Sale https://drinkag1.com/knowthyself André's Book Recommendations: https://www.knowthyself.one/books ___________ 0:00 Intro 1:45 Creating Heaven to Earth 7:37 The Role That Relationships Play in Our Personal Evolution 21:22 What Women Don’t Understand About Men 32:58 Hormones & Masculine/ Feminine Energies 40:28 How Hormones Shape Our Perspective 47:17 Women’s Behaviors as a Subtle Request for Feeling Safe 51:25 Emasculation is Undermining Connection 54:55 What Video Games Teach Us About Men 1:03:37 Where Objectification Comes From 1:13:43 Importance of Acknowledgement and Appreciation 1:18:42 Learning to Receive in Relationship 1:27:56 Stepping Into Our Inner King/Queen 1:36:27 Aging with Grace 1:47:18 A Higher Perspective On Love & Death 1:56:28 Conclusion ___________ Alison Armstrong, author, educator, and creator of the widely acclaimed "Understanding Men" and "Understanding Women" transformational online series, asks the question: "What if no one is misbehaving -- including you?" She explores the good reasons behind the behavior of men and women such as fundamental differences in the ways we think, act and communicate. She offers simple, partnership-based, solutions to improve our communication and intimacy by honoring ourselves and others. She's known for her insight, sense of humor and ability to articulate the human experience and predicament of gender. Website: https://www.alisonarmstrong.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thealisonarmstrong/ ___________ Know Thyself Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/ Website: https://www.knowthyself.one Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJ4wglCWTJeWQC0exBalgKg Listen to all episodes on Audio: Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4FSiemtvZrWesGtO2MqTZ4?si=d389c8dee8fa4026 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/know-thyself/id1633725927 André Duqum Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andreduqum/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  One man that you know you can count on gives a woman a sense of safety that can change her whole life. I've been unpacking this since 1991. I have to start by saying what women do to men, women do to women, and women do to themselves. Experiencing being trusted and respected is a source of security for a man. And if his wife keeps making sure he knows that she does not respect him, then everything he's poured into what he's building isn't safe. We don't understand the cause of effect, and it's part of what has us think men are terrible.

• 0:33André Duqum?

  Why is that the case for so many women?

• 0:36Speaker 00

  So, one of the things for women to understand is when we started our workshop, in one day, women seeing what they were doing to men, they were a completely different person with a completely different intent and stunned by the man that showed up instantly.

• 1:00André Duqum?

  Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Know Thyself Podcast. Our guest today has devoted over 30 years to understanding the mysteries of men and really what is at the core and heart of so much unneeded misunderstanding between men and women in relationship dynamics. She is an author, educator, and creator of The Queen's Code, which is a powerful framework for, again, understanding and appreciating men, which has transformed countless relationships. And I think this conversation is going to be filled with nuggets and insights that are really going to support anyone. Allison, thank you so much for being here.

• 1:36Speaker 00

  You're welcome. I am so excited to be here.

• 1:39André Duqum?

  Yeah. I have, through studying and getting more into your work, heard you share that since you were a young girl, you felt that your work here on earth had to do with bringing heaven on earth. What does that mean to you? Before we dive deeper into all the relationship things, that is, I think, an important umbrella in which this all falls under.

• 2:02Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 2:05Speaker 00

  You might be the first person that's asked me that question. Thank you. Well, of course, you can imagine being, I think I was seven years old when...

• 2:23Speaker 00

  I asked my mom what was happening across the street. And she said that the neighbor girl was being baptized. And I said, what does that mean? And I don't know if she actually said this because it seems like a big word for her to have used or for me to understood, understand. But what I remember, she said, that's when you're consecrated to God. And I thought, oh, I need to do that.

• 2:54Speaker 00

  And my little brother remembers. I was relentless in making my parents join a church, take me to church, get me baptized. And then that was it. Yourself going to church. But I was baptized. Okay, check. Had to have that happen. And so, you know, as it, when I first thought of myself, like, oh, I belong to God. That's what I'm doing here. And as it evolved, it, I remember being a teenager and thinking, I'm God's picture straightener. Like, that was my job, everything. And that's when heaven on earth arose. I was maybe like 15. But anything that wasn't heaven on earth,

• 3:38Speaker 00

  I was supposed to fix. And that's when the list began.

• 3:44Speaker 00

  The queue of all, right? As the awareness happens when we, you know, as young people become aware of what's really happening in the world and telling my mom, you know, we've got to send this food to China, right? We've got to, we can't, it'll spoil. And then, I mean, I'm old enough to remember when Ziploc baggies were invented. And I got so excited. I thought that was the solution. That it wouldn't spoil. We could get it to the children who needed it. And, you know, so obviously, I started with a particular view. And then as it evolved, and I started talking to a dear, dear friend about this, this whole thing of, what does it mean to be human?

• 4:29Speaker 00

  And what are we doing here? And what about, what about evil? What, oh, that seems like a really scary thing. And there was something he said to me that, that...

• 4:42Speaker 00

  It just fit. It just rang so true. And it made, made what I needed to do tangible. It made what I was compelled to do tangible. And he said, he said, "When there's heaven on earth, we'll still have the same problems. Everything will look like it looks now, but the context of earth will have shifted." Because, I don't think he used this word, but it's the word that lives for me is kind of like consecrated, preponderance.

• 5:25Speaker 00

  When a preponderance of individual human beings choose love over everything else, everything else, right? Moment by moment by moment. When there's enough who are choosing that, the context of the planet will shift. And that will be heaven on earth. And things will get worked out very differently in that space. And I think so many of us, at least, I think anybody who's going to watch your podcast would have a sense of that.

• 6:08Speaker 00

  Like, what does it mean to keep choosing love? And, you know, not little love, not I'm in love, not, "Oh, but I love him so much." Capital L, like, love. And like, like Alanis' song, you know? Love, there's only one kind of love. And so when people say unconditional love, like, why do you have to use that word? If you have to use that word, you might be thinking of something else. It's the only kind there is. And, you know, I've made a study of love and what the difference between love, which I would assert is infinite and eternal

• 6:51Speaker 00

  and never changes and always accessible, versus feeling love, right? And what, what creates the space here in a physical body to feel love?

• 7:06Speaker 00

  It's been awesome to get a hold of that. And and then versus in love. And I'm in love with being in love. So I love it all of the loves. And so, yeah, heaven on earth is. We'll still have traffic.

• 7:25André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 7:27Speaker 00

  And I don't know about lions and lambs laying down together. But however they do or don't do that, context will be totally different.

• 7:37André Duqum?

  A big reason why I was really excited to have you on the podcast is because, you know, there is a plethora of opportunities and individuals whom I could sit down with and have conversations, you know, about relationships, for example. But it's very evident that you being in love with love exudes from you and how much you smile and how much joy you really have in sharing the work that you're really passionate about in this life. And so I really appreciate not just what somebody says, but the place it's coming from. And so I think that's gonna, that that energy is gonna be felt throughout this whole conversation and support a lot of people.

• 8:15André Duqum?

  So I'm just curious to start off from like a meta perspective. How do you view relationships as it may be a training ground for us really choosing love? Like the role that relationships play on the path to realizing heaven on earth is a possibility?

• 8:34Speaker 00

  Can I start with the word relationships?

• 8:38Speaker 00

  Because it was a pivotal moment in my life. I was an activist, as an activist for the hungry and the homeless. So that Indian hunger thing, it lived on. And then I started studying men when I found out I was a frog farmer, that I was bringing out the worst in men. So that first chapter of The Queen's Code, that happened to me. My coworker was the one, and she was even worse than Melissa in the book. She challenged a trainer at Landmark Education and these horrible accusations against men. And maybe because he'd been a veterinarian, I don't know, but he called her a frog farmer.

• 9:24André Duqum?

  Do you want to explain what that is now or in the moment?

• 9:28Speaker 00

  Well, the way that Herb Tanser put it was, some women.

• 9:34Speaker 00

  Turn frogs into princes. You, my dear, turn princes into frogs.

• 9:44Speaker 00

  And then I flashed before my eyes and all these men who were so wonderful in the beginning and just loved them and I, maybe they were the one and, you know, and, and then,

• 10:00Speaker 00

  yuck, I mean horrible in so many different ways. And it happened so often that I'm laughing, like, I could make it happen in about 10 days. And, and I prided myself on that because I thought the whole wonderfulness was an act, that it was a con. And, and so I wanted to reveal the con before I fell in love again, right? Had my heart broken again. And, and so who I thought men were was really heartbreaking for me because I,

• 10:44Speaker 00

  I needed them, right? I, there's, you know, when women really admit it, men pay attention to a woman in a way that no number of women can. There's so much you can cause and, and it's independent, by the way, of sexual orientation. One man that you know you can count on gives a woman a sense of safety that can change her whole life. It can take one man in a, in a room full of 200 women.

• 11:17Speaker 00

  Someone came to my husband's celebration of life just to say, I never spoke to Greg, but I'm here to represent all the women in our course who, because he was there and how he was being, we were safe. Look around, find Greg and go, okay, everything's gonna be good. And so this like need 'em, love 'em, want 'em, hate 'em, you know, thing. And, and, and I didn't know I hated them until I got deeper into it.

• 11:52Speaker 00

  So.

• 11:55Speaker 00

  So when I found out I was a frog farmer, I was ecstatic because the alternative was that men were who I thought they were. But if I was bringing the worst out in them, which I started to liken to kicking a dog, and then being shocked that he bites, or shocked that he runs away, or shocked that he bites and runs away. And which is pretty fun under because some people are like, "Oh, men are dogs." And I was like, "Yes, they are. They're loyal, they're always happy to see you. They're looking for something to do for you.

• 12:39Speaker 00

  What could they bring you?"

• 12:44Speaker 00

  They just want to be admired and appreciated. And yeah, if you treated them like dogs, everything would turn out much better, much, much better. So anyhow, fast forward to... We started our workshop in 1995 because I wanted, I needed to study more what caused women to treat men the way that we do. And in order to be able to write the book that I didn't write. And I just kept learning, and women kept asking more and more from me. And so it was like, six years into it

• 13:27Speaker 00

  when we did our first workshop on relationships. Before that, it was all just interacting with men and then learning as women what to honor about ourselves, which I learned from men. I thought I knew women until I started listening to men talk about women. Oh, my gosh. What you all see is so much kinder than what we see about ourselves and each other. It's so much more beautiful. And so I finally get, I'm creating the Celebrating Men and Marriage Workshop. And I have all these things spread out that I want to put in it. And I learned a long time ago,

• 14:12Speaker 00

  my early twenties, to go to the dictionary. And then later realized that if a woman ever wants to know what a man means, well, first of all, ask him.

• 14:24Speaker 00

  What do you mean by that?

• 14:26André Duqum?

  What a crazy concept.

• 14:27Speaker 00

  Crazy, crazy concept. No, they don't. They ask all their friends what he meant by that, and then they come and ask me what he meant by that. I say, "Did you ask him?" "No."

• 14:46Speaker 00

  But of course, you have to be safe to answer too, right? "What do you mean by that?"

• 14:52André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 14:53Speaker 00

  "Nothing."

• 14:59Speaker 00

  And not because men are ticking. You're just smart. Why dig a deeper hole? That's just silly. Why waste energy? Instinctually, you cannot waste energy, right? And fighting a fight, you can't win. The whole system shuts down. So I looked up the word "relationship" in the dictionary, and I expected to find how everybody talked about relationship, right? Like, Andre, you and I are just at the beginning of our relationship, right? And it's this thing that will grow between us, and will be able to describe our relationship, right? You know, from the very beginning, we're playful with each other,

• 15:43Speaker 00

  a lot of respect for who the other person is. And so, you know, this thing, you know? And, you know, my best friend, more than 30 years, I could describe our relationship. It gets bigger and bigger and bigger, and starts to have this mass. And people are so worried that their marriage, like, it's unrecoverable. Our relationship is so blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? And they act like it has characteristics. And how are they ever going to overcome them? Or they act like it's so loving and tender and trusting, and that that'll last forever, right? It's in a safe deposit box. It'll save us when we need it.

• 16:27Speaker 00

  And so I expected to find something like that in the dictionary, and it said, "An instance of being related."

• 16:41Speaker 00

  I kept reading to try to find more. That's all it said.

• 16:47André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 16:48Speaker 00

  And there was no thing. There was an instance of being related. And that changed everything. I mean, absolutely changed everything. And so to your answer, to your question,

• 17:05Speaker 00

  yes, this thing that doesn't exist. So yay, it doesn't, it means we can't suck at it because there's no such thing.

• 17:15Speaker 00

  Also ridiculous for women to think they're good at it and that men suck at it, which is common. It doesn't exist. It's just an instance of being related. So is engaging in instances of being related then what matters? And most people are worried about what to say.

• 17:36Speaker 00

  What should I say? How should I say it? I've been asked those questions thousands of times. And yes, words matter. You tell a man, we have an issue. Oh, by definition can't be solved. Why should we even talk about it?

• 17:51Speaker 00

  I have a problem. Do you have a problem? How can I help you? Right? Like, words matter. But, but being? Being is the, is the universal language. Being. So how are you being in that instance of being related? That's what's going to cause the outcome. And we got to see it when we started our workshops that in one day,

• 18:21Speaker 00

  women seeing what they were doing to men, how it was antagonizing them and bringing out the worst in them, seeing how they justified doing it, but it still didn't make it work. And it was giving them everything they didn't want. And then, most of them, not all, having the courage to give it up. Just as I was asked, stop, Alison, stop.

• 18:50Speaker 00

  And so many women who had the courage to like, "Well, this clearly isn't working and I'm never gonna get what matters to me most." Okay, and so we call it laying down the sword, right? Giving up, justifying diminishing men. And we'd send them home with some conversations to have with the men in their lives and they'd come back the next day with these stories and tears streaming down their face. Because in those next instances of being related, they were a completely different person with a completely different intent

• 19:32Speaker 00

  and stunned by the man that showed up instantly. Which is one of the things that I love about the effects of testosterone. And I mean, these days, the conversation about gender can be hazardous, but I have no attachment. What's real about gender? There are hormones that go with the gonads. And if we don't understand what they do to the construct of the brain itself and how they shape perception and interpretation and sight. We don't even have the same vision and hearing.

• 20:16Speaker 00

  There's so many things that are different. And one of the really cool things about it is y'all don't hang on to as much stuff as we do. So if the person in front of you, how they're being right now is something that has you lean in instead of, "Hoo, huh, huh," right? You lean in. And you might be going, "Whoa, this is different, but let's see instead of..."

• 20:52Speaker 00

  She's different now, but will she be different tomorrow? You know, that's much more rare for a man to do that. Common for a woman to do that. Yeah, let's see how long this lasts. And then it doesn't, right? Because in the next instance of being related, you keep being regarded as an enemy or skeptically or what are you up to? Or, which is, it's normal. It's human, but it's never going to bring out the best.

• 21:22André Duqum?

  I find it so fascinating, the presumptions we have about the other people that we just, we just assume that people are the same as us and have the outlook as us. And I'm looking forward to unpacking those. And estrogen and testosterone being two contributors to the differences between us. I've heard you share that women are kind of often under the assumption of thinking that men are hairy, misbehaving women.

• 21:51André Duqum?

  That's, that's great. Why do you feel, why do you feel that? Why is that the case for so many women?

• 22:02Speaker 00

  Oh, boy. Okay. So I've been unpacking this since 1991, right?

• 22:08André Duqum?

  Been busy.

• 22:09Speaker 00

  Been, yeah. And, and my brain works while I appear to be sleeping. So I'll wake up in the morning. Oh, my God.

• 22:19Speaker 00

  And so I've been, I've been like digging. If you imagine, you know, starting up here with, okay, I'm bringing out the worst in men. And, and then, okay, so this question popped into my head. What if men are responding to women? And, okay, what if? Thank goodness it was what if. I didn't set out to prove anything. But it, I mean, digging down, right? And distinguishing what these hormones do. And then digging down so more and finding out all the ways we're the same. So it doesn't have anything to do with gender hormones. Doesn't have anything to do with roles or inculturation.

• 23:02Speaker 00

  There's, oh, these things called human instincts. Right? And then digging down further, which is kind of freaky for people, but thank goodness. To what it, they're not even human instincts. Can't say, "That's just human instinct." Uh, no, we have herd instincts and pack instincts. And you'll see them in horses and you'll see them in wolves. We are both predator and prey. We have both of them. Check these out, you know, like, oh, we're like monkeys. Oh, well, you know, you know, chimpanzees, right? Yeah, we are. And those are, and you just keep going down.

• 23:46Speaker 00

  And the latest part of my work has been the planet. What do we share with everything else on the planet? So it's, I mean, we're going all the way down to bacteria. Right? And, and what I assert, and it came from a comment someone made about our immune system, that we're built to discriminate, if you will, to discern. Let's use that word, less charged. To discern me, not me. Me, not me.

• 24:29Speaker 00

  Me you let in, that immune system, me you let in, not me, you don't let in. The best way to see it is a sneeze. A sneeze is a not me reaction. It's how we protect ourselves from things that our body's like, oh, no. Achoo! Which, you know, go with the sneeze. Don't try to, you know, get it out. It's not good for you. A cough, another kind of not me reaction. So the weird thing is, is that both of those perceptions cause problems. And, and then it comes all the way back up to the top.

• 25:14Speaker 00

  Like, men tend to lean in to not me.

• 25:22Speaker 00

  Ooh, you're not me.

• 25:26Speaker 00

  Right? And I would assert that most men, whether they know it or not, they're scanning for strength and specifically scanning for strength and sorting for complementary strength. So I'm not looking for someone like me. I'm looking for someone who's strong, not like me. So unconsciously filling a team, unconsciously making a hunting tribe. Right? He's fast, he's strong, he's accurate. He or she, we don't even care. Truthfully, it's just competency to produce the result. And it's something huge for women to understand

• 26:11Speaker 00

  that men are looking for in a mate, complementary strength. They're not looking to compete. They're looking for how are you, how are you a genius in a different way than I'm a genius? How are you brilliant? How are you, oh my gosh, she's so strong like that. Right? We, complementary strengths. Well, the hormones have most women experience feeling safe, and I would use that word strongly, feeling safe,

• 26:46Speaker 00

  which is different than factually safe. So trying to give a woman the facts that tell her she ought to feel safe, it never works. Honey, I've never run into the back of another car.

• 27:02Speaker 00

  So.

• 27:04Speaker 00

  So

• 27:07Speaker 00

  women tend more to scan for me. And.

• 27:15Speaker 00

  Because me seems like it'll be easier to connect. So, I mean, just driven, women are so driven, searching for connection. Connect, connect, connect, it's on auto. Auto redial all the time. Connect, are we connected now? Are we connected now? Are we connected now? And it's something that most men don't understand. You all have no idea how strong you are. How much stronger you are than us physically. I've encouraged men to offer women, would you like to arm wrestle? Especially men who are worried about being smaller in stature. Just offer to arm wrestle and don't put her down.

• 27:59Speaker 00

  Just, just hold your arm like that for long enough for her to realize she can't even punch you. You are so much stronger than her. Therefore, you're qualified to protect her. You just got hot. So, we're looking for me, and this is what causes all this trouble. So, we look for a man who feels like me. Oh, we have this connection, we have this instant connection. You're like me. And then we think that me is gonna carry all the way through. If you're like me, you're gonna think like me. You're gonna do like me. You're gonna react like me. And then, when men generally don't,

• 28:43Speaker 00

  we make up all kinds of things. That you're not doing what I would do because you don't love me enough. You don't respect me enough. You don't care about me enough. If you were, if you really cared about me, you would never do something like that. And you would always do something like this. And that's where the misbehaving comes from. That I think you're like me. You're just, you're just like me. And I'm not distinct. We're not distinct for ourselves. So, you're like me, but you're not acting right. And we think, one of the ways you're like me is you know the right thing to do. We're sure you know the right thing to do. And you're purposefully not doing it.

• 29:29Speaker 00

  That's where misbehaving comes in. And therefore, at the very least, you need to be trained. You maybe need to be fixed at what is having you make that choice. And the odds are you need to be punished. You deserve to be punished. And if I don't punish you for that, I am lax in my duties to protect the rest of the tribe from your aberrant. Fill it in, ways of thinking, behavior, et cetera. I mean, it's just, when I say just now, it's like, oh, it's, we're doomed.

• 30:10Speaker 00

  We're doomed unless we become aware, as you know. Without awareness, all we're gonna do is play out these things. And so, Harry misbehaving women, and a young man said to me, when he heard me say that, he said, "Oh, so is that like when a man looks at a woman, he sees a scattered, emotionally indulgent man?"

• 30:38André Duqum?

  That's great.

• 30:39Speaker 00

  Oh, my gosh, it's just like, oh, my gosh. That's how we occur. We diffuse awareness created by estrogen. We occur scattered. And we, you know, a man said, "Why do women make their feelings the center of everything?" And, I mean, it was perfect. It's like, um, excuse me, something you should probably know is, we don't make them the center of everything. They already are the center of everything. And recently, I was talking to women about how many feelings are like a stack of pancakes right here. In the center of our chest.

• 31:24Speaker 00

  I mean, we've got grief, we've got hurt, grief, sadness, um, joy, love. I mean, it's a stack of pancakes. And so we didn't make them the center of everything. And then I asked, man, where do you feel? You don't have a stack of pancakes. You have a couple combos, right? Like, like, right here, this part of your body, I would say is where you're gonna find power and anger and happiness. Those are stacked all right here. And when they're big, they're raised on your arms and out your hands.

• 32:08Speaker 00

  It's it's either the pow or the high five or the slap on the butt or the spike the ball. But that same young man who said about scattered and emotionally indulgent, I was talking about what happens when you hurt a woman's feelings. And he's like, I've had indigestion.

• 32:34André Duqum?

  It's so fascinating because we have often, whether it's overt or subtle disdain or judgment for other people in a relationship, romantic or not. And it simply originates in a lack of understanding that we have fundamental differences in our makeup, hormonally, genetically. And so I want to start going through some of these things. You hinted earlier at estrogen and testosterone and how these create fundamentally two different perspectives out on the world. Right before we get into that, if you'd like to quickly share, I know you mentioned earlier, but there can be sometimes the overgeneralization of this all applies to man

• 33:18André Duqum?

  or all applies to a woman. And I just want to, I guess, invite the space for the nuance of the gray zone where we are beautifully complex human beings and these masculine and feminine traits also and energies lie on a spectrum. And so it's easy, for ease of use, saying man and woman in this conversation totally makes sense. And any other thoughts you have there before we start to unpack the kind of differences in energies?

• 33:44Speaker 00

  Thank you for bringing that up. And you used one of my favorite words, spectrum. And I said, we are all on the spectrum. And, and you could call it masculine and feminine. You could, you could call it the autism spectrum. Extreme, single focus, known as autism. Extreme, diffuse awareness, attention deficit disorder. Right? So, so another way of saying that, which I've started to traffic in more because I'm just always looking for a way to communicate.

• 34:26Speaker 00

  This is a committed state of mind.

• 34:29Speaker 00

  What we talk about as like autism or Asperger's or would be a little bit less is, is absolute committed state of mind. And, or on this side, an open state of mind. And this is where women get wonky especially. And then, and then there's another thing that happens to what I would call descended ovaries.

• 34:57Speaker 00

  There's undescended testicles and there's descended ovaries. But our hormones vary a lot when we have menstrual cycles. So, I mean, a lot, they vary. So our hormonally created state of mind, being committed or open, can vary. And then we also can get switched. So a woman could be in an open state of mind and she's very connective and loving and nurturing and arranging crooked pillows, you know? God's picture straightener.

• 35:39Speaker 00

  And then you say, we gotta leave in five minutes. And whoop, right? When we don't have plenty of time, we just switch over. And you'd think we had a different personality. Well, then get out of my way. Who is, who is that? Right? So, and then men who...

• 36:00Speaker 00

  I mean, teenage boys and the level of test, well, they're really men, levels of testosterone are just stunning, off the chart. And, you know, moms, the best thing that you do, hmm, what's he focused on now? What's he focused on now? What's he focused on now? But as y'all get over, get older and the hormones fall naturally. It's not a bad thing. The brain reconfigures. And this is where wisdom shows up. Because now the, it can be seen, the verbal centers get hooked up to all these other parts of the brain

• 36:43Speaker 00

  that there were no connections before. And then the knowledge that a man has spent a lifetime acquiring, all of a sudden is just flowing out and flowing out and flowing out. And then women's estrogen levels have disappeared with the ovum. And so whatever testosterone we have left is taking over. So my youngest daughter, she was really hurt. She thought I was ignoring her. I wasn't ignoring her. I was approaching menopause and I'd become more focused. So I couldn't hear her. My brain was screening out everything it considered irrelevant.

• 37:25Speaker 00

  And it considered her voice irrelevant. And she was crushed, like many women are. Many moments of every day were just crushed that you're ignoring us. We don't know that you're not. That your committed state of mind has screened everything out. And I had to go through this. Like, at first I heard about it and then I had to experience as I went from being thirty, I was thirty years old when I started studying men. Now I'm sixty-four. I have gone through the whole gamut, plus hormone therapy. So I got to OD on testosterone. Find out what it was like to be an atomic bomb when somebody really ticked me off.

• 38:08Speaker 00

  Like, I thought it was gonna explode and take out the whole valley. No wonder men are so proud of having a grip on this emotion.

• 38:24Speaker 00

  I swear, men's emotions are so much more intense than ours. And you just, don't trust him, keep a good buddy. So, yes, there's a, this is, know thyself. Know thyself, know what switches you involuntarily, know what you're affected by, know where your happy place is. You know, anywhere on this is normal. Anywhere, there's no right or wrong place to be. There's not even a right or wrong state of mind. But it's one of the things we teach in our Understanding Women course. Like, how do you tell which woman this is?

• 39:08Speaker 00

  Is this the open, nurturing, loving state of mind woman? Or is this the kick-ass, take names state of mind? And you can actually tell by how a woman reacts when you walk into the room. If she looks up and how she looks up. Yes, honey? Where's the milk? Oh, hear that one? You can even tell the way she walks across a room, who she is.

• 39:38André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 39:38Speaker 00

  When we're, when we're committed state of mind, it is all forward energy. And when we're in an open state of mind, all of a sudden the hips go.

• 39:51Speaker 00

  It's like, oh, she's in that state of mind, it changes everything.

• 39:58André Duqum?

  This is whatever way, whatever language people want to apply here, whether it's line and circle, or masculine and feminine, or, or that receptive state, or, you know, committed. I think it's really valuable to examine how, as we kind of go on our own awakening journey, we behave more in alignment with what love would do in any given moment, and less of an identification with, oh, this is the manly or the womanly thing to do. It's you be that which is needed in any given moment. But I think on the path of arriving there, understanding our physiological makeup, understanding the psychology of being in a man's or a woman's body is very helpful.

• 40:39André Duqum?

  And so what do you see are the key ways in which estrogen versus testosterone create different makeups and perspectives?

• 40:49Speaker 00

  May I?

• 40:51André Duqum?

  Defused awareness?

• 40:52Speaker 00

  Well, no. Can we, can we put a pin in the relationship between hormones and mental state and mental state and hormones? Because they cause each other. And if we understand them, we get to pick.

• 41:11Speaker 00

  Which is what I'm all about, right? My, my highest value, freedom. What does it mean? The power to choose. Choose who we are, how we are, when we are, what we are. Free will. Free will to the max is.

• 41:32André Duqum?

  Great.

• 41:33Speaker 00

  Yeah. So I would, one way to think of it is also,

• 41:42Speaker 00

  do we at any given moment seek

• 41:49Speaker 00

  safety through connectivity? Or security through productivity? Which one is it? In any moment? But what?

• 42:03Speaker 00

  How are we chasing being safe or secure? And then,

• 42:11Speaker 00

  and it's fascinating because down one path, we trust feelings. This is how they become the center of everything because we think they reveal the truth. That my feelings are a reflection of the truth. And to ignore my feelings would be to ignore my truth. And if you won't let me tell you about my feelings, you don't want to know me.

• 42:41Speaker 00

  So what do I want to have anything to do with you? Right? The one thing that's helped is that gut feelings,

• 42:52Speaker 00

  productive, which men trust that more, security through being productive. But a man will have the same reaction about, "Oh, I had a gut feeling about that, and I didn't go with it. My bad." Right? So gut feelings, if you guys can, if men can think about how you trust your gut, that a woman's likely to go with this as the same thing. And of course, interesting that they've shown that there are more neurotransmitters from the gut to the brain than from the brain to the gut. This is a brain. So it's more trusting thought than feeling. Right? So another way to put that is,

• 43:37Speaker 00

  trust facts. Trust facts over feelings. And so the challenge is becoming believable, becoming a trusted source of information. So many women are not regarded as a trusted source of information about themselves by the men who are interacting with them. Because we appear incongruent.

• 44:10Speaker 00

  One of my favorite examples is a woman saying, "You know, honey, I'm tired. I'm so tired. Would you put the kids to bed?" "Sure. Okay." And he expects her to go lie down and fall asleep? And then he doesn't understand. Why is she finishing the dishes? Why is she straightening the pillows on the couch? Why is she putting a load of laundry in the dryer and waiting for it to be dry? Why is she doing all these other things? I guess what I think tired is isn't what tired is.

• 44:45Speaker 00

  So the next time she asked him to do that, he says, "No. I did what you asked and you didn't take the gift and use it." It's another productive way of thinking. Take and use. A man wants you to take and use. He just, he opened the door. Just walk through it. Take the moment of ease to be more of whatever you want to be. He tells her she's beautiful. Take it and feel more beautiful. Be more confident. Glow even brighter. Well, estrogen's gonna create safety, looking for safety through connection.

• 45:29Speaker 00

  And a big part of that is reciprocity. Precise reciprocity. You say, "You look beautiful." "Oh, so do you." And look, what the heck, right? Which is better than arguing with you about, "Oh, no, not, not me, not this." Did you, and we'll point out the flies, because we think flies discount beauty. We don't know. So it's...

• 45:57Speaker 00

  The cool thing about this, the hard and the cool thing about it, we literally have opposing instincts. The hormones have us pursue safety in ways that interfere with each other. Productivity blocks out connection. Seeking connection will interrupt productivity. So, yeah, facts versus feelings, productivity versus connectivity, take and use. How do you know a man appreciated something? He used it. You, you gave him advice and he used it. That's how you know he valued it.

• 46:40Speaker 00

  Not because he wrote you a thank you note.

• 46:47Speaker 00

  Not because he came to me and said, "Okay, now what kind of advice can I give to you?" No, he used it. And men can't use things until they own them, and by the time they own them, it's irrelevant where they came from. So I'm always telling women, "Choose: Do you want influence or credit?"

• 47:04André Duqum?

  Do you want influence or credit?

• 47:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, you can't have both. If you're always working for credit, you don't get to influence, because he can't do anything with it until you let it go.

• 47:16André Duqum?

  There's so many amazing lines from what you just said, and I'm excited to pull from a lot of those threads.

• 47:22Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 47:23André Duqum?

  Asking as a man, how much of the, I guess, behaviors coming from women are often subtle requests for feeling safe? Because I think you beautifully articulated how we kind of go about deriving a sense of safety in two different ways. And for the guys listening in, and also for the women to understand both themselves and in relation to a man, the subtle requests for safety and the innumerable actions and behaviors that, you know, one might have, what do you think about that?

• 47:55Speaker 00

  How much of it? Oh, golly.

• 48:03Speaker 00

  Spectrum.

• 48:04André Duqum?

  Spectrum.

• 48:06Speaker 00

  So for many women, it could be all of it.

• 48:13Speaker 00

  For others, there's times we're seeking safety, and other times, we're seeking respect.

• 48:24Speaker 00

  Right? Trust and respect are in the domain of productivity. And so we'll do something that seems the opposite of seeking safety. I mean, we're... Can I say pissed?

• 48:39Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 48:40André Duqum?

  You don't draw the line there.

• 48:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, and we'll abandon safety because of how... Our anger is bigger than the fear in that moment. And we will come at you for what we see as a lack of respect. And...

• 49:07Speaker 00

  And I think it's why it's so important to ask. And that's the biggest pitfall, I would say, of being human, that we don't ask. What do you need? And it could be, I need you to say, I'm sorry I hurt your feelings, which is illogical to a man. How could I have hurt your feelings? I didn't punch you. That's an hour-long conversation. Or, I need you to take that back. I said this to a man a couple of weeks ago. Take that back.

• 49:51Speaker 00

  It was an exaggeration and it was an insult. He took it back. I was not seeking safety in that moment. I was demanding truth, accuracy, and respect. So, but that's actually pretty typical in human relationships that will, will speak up about what we truly need, desperately need, when the anger at not getting it is bigger than the fear of what they'll think of us for needing it. That's like, one of the main things is at the root

• 50:32Speaker 00

  of those instances of being related. We wait until we're furious because we're so afraid to reveal a weakness, a need is a weakness. And the instinct is just to hide it, conceal it. They should already know it.

• 50:53André Duqum?

  Yeah. I feel like the journey of being able to pay attention, as a human being, pay attention to the subtleties, irrespective of communication, is a beautiful skill set. But oftentimes, we're in that case where it's just so much of our, like, struggle and strife in relation would be solved by just simple communication and checking in and asking of questions and clarifying.

• 51:21Speaker 00

  One of my favorite words. Clarify and verify.

• 51:25André Duqum?

  There you go.

• 51:26Speaker 00

  Start with, it seems like, instead of, you're this way. Yeah.

• 51:33André Duqum?

  There's a lot of very powerful reflections you give on just fundamental things that we presume and misunderstand about each other that really undermine our ability for connection. Right? And so I want to kind of go again for both of these. For women, one of the big things that I've heard you talk about is the tendency for emasculation or castration. And so there's a few of these I want to just like, I want to say and I want to hear you riff on where, why women do this, and I suppose the antidote. So what are your thoughts on the ways in which women subtly emasculate men and how it undermines connection?

• 52:19Speaker 00

  Oh, my gosh. I have to start by saying what women do to men, women do to women, and women do to themselves.

• 52:30Speaker 00

  And men are self-emasculating, and men emasculate other men.

• 52:38Speaker 00

  It's so normal to try to diminish someone's power to feel safe or to be productive, right? So there are some that are quite overt. Criticism, for example, outright denigration, just denigrating somebody, castigating them. But there's also what I would call the green, the green emasculation. You know, energy saving.

• 53:15Speaker 00

  All the ways of withholding.

• 53:18Speaker 00

  It's what you don't do. Withhold appreciation, withhold admiration, withhold accountability, which is something that women really don't understand. Men also don't. That there are things that are, that would be a privilege to be accountable for. And when the other person won't let us, they're going to tell us, like when man put it, you can tell me what to do, or you can tell me how to do it, but not both.

• 53:48Speaker 00

  And we usually do both.

• 53:51Speaker 00

  Honey, would you load the dishwasher? No, like this.

• 53:57Speaker 00

  And we withhold affection, we withhold sex. I know a woman who said, oh, I just don't feed him. Like, literally withholding food.

• 54:11André Duqum?

  Withholding admiration, appreciation, participation, or sex.

• 54:15Speaker 00

  Participation is another one, yes. Accountability, affection, attention, withholding attention. Women think men are ignoring them. Because we're really good at ignoring you.

• 54:27André Duqum?

  It's a subtle way to almost punish perceived maladaptive behavior or...

• 54:32Speaker 00

  Almost punished?

• 54:36André Duqum?

  It's, yeah, it's the attempt to, right? Or it does also in a relationship, yeah.

• 54:42Speaker 00

  Yeah. It's, it's why I, I think if women really want to become masterful in interacting with men, they should, they should study video games.

• 54:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, video games are perfectly set up for what the committed productive mind needs. And you probably didn't expect me to say video games.

• 55:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, they, I mean, just, I can do this briefly.

• 55:18Speaker 00

  You get to be whoever you want to be, right? Pick your avatar. Any, any move you make, you get points. Any effort, you get points. Bigger risks, bigger points. Take a big risk, fall off a cliff. You're, you don't have to go without sex for two weeks. You push the reset button. Try again, do better. What didn't I see? What didn't I notice? Do better, do better, do better. And then, important for women who want a boyfriend or to get married, the video game never makes you go to the next level.

• 55:54Speaker 00

  You can play the same level for decades. It'll never say, what are you, a commitment phobe? You don't want to go

• 56:04Speaker 00

  next level of this video game, the Uber challenge? It's always choice, always choice, always choice. Video game doesn't punish you. Video game doesn't tell you what an idiot you are. Video game doesn't say you're just like your father.

• 56:24Speaker 00

  They're perfect. Video games are perfect. We have so much to learn from them.

• 56:28André Duqum?

  Interesting.

• 56:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 56:30André Duqum?

  Another dynamic, I suppose, I don't know if it's, maybe it is a subtle version of punishing, but it's really just undermining connection is the withholding of quality information. And I know we've spoken to this a couple of times throughout and just the, how important communication is fundamentally for a relationship to be well lubricated. But, um, yeah. Why is that the case? Why do we withhold quality information?

• 57:01Speaker 00

  Well, one is, like, I gotta say something about communication. Yes, most people just flat don't communicate. They think complaining is communication. They think criticism is communication. Most people will do what they call communicating, which is a way to make sure someone else knows how upset they are without being exposed, without being vulnerable. So withholding quality information, actionable information, ways to make a difference, to have an impact, which women don't know, men are always looking for how to have an impact. And many women are too. We all want to have an impact.

• 57:42Speaker 00

  We, if I were to give you actionable information, now I'm exposed. You could take me telling you what I need and use it against me. You could attack it. You could, you now know what to withhold. It's instinctual. It's instinctual to not tell. And part of the instinct, and especially in a productive state of mind, and I learned this from years of listening to men, which I had to learn how to do.

• 58:18Speaker 00

  There's this thing that men say, there's no point in stating the obvious.

• 58:25Speaker 00

  I mean, what a waste of time and energy to state the obvious.

• 58:29André Duqum?

  Obvious to who?

• 58:31Speaker 00

  Thank you. Yeah. Obvious, obvious some. And it's, and even there's obviousness for productivity. There's obviousness for connectivity. So if two people focused on two different things, what's obvious to do is going to be completely different. Like, what's obvious to the productivity is, you know, I have a solution to your problem. What's obvious to connectivity is, listen to me.

• 59:05Speaker 00

  I don't want your solution. Why can't you just listen to me, right? And, and then even like the productivity connectivity obviousness is,

• 59:16Speaker 00

  I, I did a whole study once and it keeps evolving on, they're actually fundamental. I mean, you could call them an uber value, right? They're, they're, they're not just a value that someone decides. They're driven by, and what people are driven by creates obviousness. So, for example, can I just tell you?

• 59:40André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 59:41Speaker 00

  We, we identified six.

• 59:42André Duqum?

  Okay.

• 59:46Speaker 00

  We, we, we call them building, expressing, sharing, knowing, growing, and enjoying. And

• 1:00:03Speaker 00

  they affect everything. And we're, we're all a combination, some percentage of all six of them, including you could have a zero percent of something. And, and they, they're why we do what we do. They're even, if you said at the end of your life, what, you're now at the end of your life, what would you say was important about your life?

• 1:00:27Speaker 00

  People will answer the question. Do you know, or even what is the point of a relationship? What's the point of a relationship? They'll answer the question from some combination of those six. And each one of those six things creates obviousness.

• 1:00:49Speaker 00

  Obviously. And until we're aware of it, we're... We can't become out loud with it, and we hurt each other's feelings. Like, I went shopping with my daughter last weekend, and trying to gauge, is this about productivity or connectivity? And is... Are we getting something done? Or are we being together? Are we sharing this time together? So, this was navigating Walmart.

• 1:01:27Speaker 00

  So, are we trying to get out of here fast? Or is this about being together?

• 1:01:33André Duqum?

  It's like if we had rose-colored tinted glasses on, it would appear obvious to us both that the world is rose, right? It looks like that, right?

• 1:01:41Speaker 00

  Of course.

• 1:01:42André Duqum?

  And it's just that reminder of what's obvious to us is not always often obvious to others, and to invite the curiosity to try to get somebody's reality as it's different. That perception is very different, fundamentally, from every single person's is, from ours.

• 1:01:59Speaker 00

  And it's worse, even worse than that. Because we call it your hidden dominant drivers. Because you can see what a person is doing. What's invisible is why they're doing it. Which, when you ask about having on Earth, right now, you're in the domain of why I do everything I do. And I look like someone who's built a business. This is our 30th year, right? We're a publishing company. Holy moly. I mean, a few days ago, The Queen's Code was in 128 countries. Like, "Oh, Alison, you're such a builder.

• 1:02:43Speaker 00

  How did you build this?" Right? If you look closer, everything that was built was to serve what I have to express. I have to, right? So, there's all these... We have so many conflicts that are based on we don't know what matters the most to somebody, what they think the point of life and relationship and every moment is, why they spend their money the way that they do. Know thyself. Start there. You can see what you're doing. Now, step back. Why? Why do I do it?

• 1:03:26Speaker 00

  And we don't have the same whys for being in a relationship.

• 1:03:29André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:30Speaker 00

  Someone who's driven by building, the why is likely to be support.

• 1:03:37André Duqum?

  It really seems, and I've heard you speak to this many times, where another issue when it comes to men or just relating in general is when we become overwhelmed by somebody, we reduce them into a thing, into thingness. There's this objectification.

• 1:03:52Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:03:53André Duqum?

  And I've heard you talk to that as the male equivalent, objectification is, as equivalent as emasculation is. What do you think about objectification and how men tend to do it to women when we become overwhelmed? It's just, you know, we reduce them or others into a thing.

• 1:04:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:04:14Speaker 00

  Well, it's the whale. And I thought it was men, right? And I used to talk about it the most as how pissed women get when they're objectified. And...

• 1:04:32Speaker 00

  But they are without words till maybe an hour later.

• 1:04:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's what it's like to be emasculated. You just, the plug was just pulled out of the wall. No power. And so I originally saw it from that point of view. And then I dug deeper. And it's fundamental to being human that anything that we feel less than, anything that seems bigger than us. It's funny that I picked up my teacup right before you asked that because this is a handle, right? This is the objectification. If I can name it, I can get a grip on it.

• 1:05:23Speaker 00

  I can make it do what I want. And so anything that we feel powerless, like we have less power than we think we need to interact with it honestly.

• 1:05:37Speaker 00

  We put a label on it because that powerlessness has us feel very tense. That is a threat. And we hate that tension. And so we just label it. And we think if we can label it, we can handle it. We can manage it. Oh, whadda. Right? And we take this complex, multi-dimensional, how many more centuries will it take for us to even know 10% of human potential? Right? We take all of that and call it this thing.

• 1:06:20Speaker 00

  Call it noncommittal. Call it emotionally unavailable. Favorite these days narcissist. Yeah. Narcissist, narcissist, narcissist, narcissist. I did a study on that one. You could lump all of human behavior well threatened, male or female, into that description. I looked it up, "an official psychological da-da-da-da." Like, oh, oh, yeah, yeah, oh, yeah. Uh-huh, yeah, human, human, human, human, human. Fear, state of fear. How people behave in a state of fear. Some people are afraid all the time. But we just label it. And we, like we talk about in "The Queen's Code," whether it's, call a kid a brat.

• 1:07:07Speaker 00

  Typical teenager.

• 1:07:13Speaker 00

  Calling this human that we would die for, that, makes it just a little bit easier to interact with what we perceive as a lack of respect. We don't know that it's going both ways. We deserve it, they don't. I mean, just that kind of label. We feel better. I think all objectification is about feeling better and just having us think we can handle something that the moment before, we couldn't handle it. Just call it, call it something. And we do it to ourselves. I'm such a, fill in the blank.

• 1:07:58André Duqum?

  Yeah, it really feels like when we're, I guess, overwhelmed or whatever stimulus is beyond our current capacity, we close to it, you know? And it's the journey of becoming a matured human being who wants to take responsibility and grow, where you are faced with challenging circumstances in relationship dynamics or whatever in life, and to not close your heart to something that's challenging and reduce somebody into another or a thing, you know? And that is, I think it's an important, like, understanding because then you can start to view relationships as they are with the continual opportunity to grow and to keep your heart open, right? I've heard you share something, which is,

• 1:08:43André Duqum?

  "For women, if you give him enough power to handle you, he will not steal yours through objectification."

• 1:08:50Speaker 00

  Yes, yes, yes, yes.

• 1:08:53André Duqum?

  What does that mean?

• 1:08:54Speaker 00

  What does that mean?

• 1:08:59Speaker 00

  Well, so it's in concert with emasculation, which, you know, the dictionary says "to deprive of virility or power." And so there's a relationship between emasculation and objectification. And the more we emasculate, the more we'll be objectified. And usually, when people use the word "objectification," they go to sex object, right? They go to that kind of objectification instead of all the kinds of objectification.

• 1:09:44Speaker 00

  Like I said, like calling a two-year-old a brat, that's an objectification. And one of the things that, if I could wave a magic wand and for women to understand, is we are clueless about the way that heterosexual men are affected by our sexuality, our sensual energy, our skin, our curves. It's just...

• 1:10:24Speaker 00

  I mean, if I could wave a magic wand, it would be for a woman to walk around in a man's head

• 1:10:33Speaker 00

  and see through his eyes. And even to see the distinction between how a man is affected by sexual sensual energy versus beauty. Because we collapse those. And the way that

• 1:10:59Speaker 00

  men are nurtured by beauty, it's like fumes, it's like being fed. And that because of that, your vision scans for it. It scans for beauty. And it's one of the biggest gifts men gave me, was to see women through men's eyes. And to see the beauty, to see the radiance, the sparkle, the glow, the love, and how it can be found in any woman.

• 1:11:35Speaker 00

  What some people would think of as a crone, right? Like, oh, my gosh. And then the hunger, the hunger that that the curves and the skin and the sensual and sexual energy, that it's the opposite. Like, this is all giving, and this creates a desire to take. Take that. And like a hunger. And it's it's become so sad for me that we don't understand the cause of effect,

• 1:12:18Speaker 00

  and it's part of what has us think men are terrible. Terrible, terrible, terrible. And part of what, I don't know what my help is, how that women have the desire to take just as much. We, it's just different what we're trying to take. We want to take attention. Right, we want to take security. We want to take your strength and your resources and make sure they're purposed to provide for me and mine. And we'll, we'll take it.

• 1:12:57Speaker 00

  Just go into any divorce courtroom and watch the taking going on, or any singles bar, and watch the attempts at taking. And admiration, appreciation, acknowledgement, accountability, attention. All those things give men power.

• 1:13:21André Duqum?

  Very practical application for, for, for all those things, just to, to give those and realize how much they'll feed back into you.

• 1:13:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, e- even quality information. You give a man quality information, you've just given him the power to affect the impact that he wants to have.

• 1:13:43André Duqum?

  Why, why are men so affected by admiration or appreciation?

• 1:13:48Speaker 00

  I would say because of that productivity versus connectivity.

• 1:13:59André Duqum?

  So also like linked to providership?

• 1:14:02Speaker 00

  Yes, and we should visit that. Procreate, then protect, then provide, which is

• 1:14:14Speaker 00

  before gender, before human, before all that. But yes, it's, it's linked to being productive, usually in order to provide. But if you think about how a human being's going to be able to be the most productive.

• 1:14:34Speaker 00

  If they're trusted and respected. That's how you get to be part of a team. That's how you get to go on the big game hunt. If you're not trusted and respected, you're chasing bunnies by yourself, and it'll never get any better. So experiencing being trusted and respected is a source of security for a man. And if, for example, a man is married and his wife keeps making sure he knows that she does not admire him, that she does not respect him, that he's not worthy of respect, then everything he's poured into what he's building,

• 1:15:18Speaker 00

  has been building with her, isn't safe. It's now in jeopardy. And so, no security, no safety, no confidence, which means with faith. So no faith in this is a good place to keep spending who I am. This isn't a good place to keep providing, to keep giving. So I interact with admiration, respect, and affinity. And it has to do with my whole research into what causes feeling love. And it admires is to hold up. You're something I'm not.

• 1:16:03Speaker 00

  And I think it's amazing what you are that I'm not. And respect is props to you. Right? Respect is about strength. And affinity is about, I like you. I like how you are. I don't need you to change. Keep being that. Any effort you spend on that is well worth it. And I end up talking to a lot of singles. And for both men and women, in whatever form, heterosexual.

• 1:16:47Speaker 00

  Spectrum, wherever it is, to let someone know what you like about them? I like that about you.

• 1:16:57Speaker 00

  Deep breath. I like, I really like that about you. And especially since we usually dislike ways that somebody's different. Or what's wrong with you that you think that way? Instead of, whoa, you solved that in a completely different way than I would have. I like that about you.

• 1:17:21André Duqum?

  Yeah, that acknowledgement and appreciation of our differences is so fundamental. And it's so often where we go wrong. Where we started often earlier of, you know, men, women thinking that men are misbehaving women. And men often think that women are, what were the words you used?

• 1:17:38Speaker 00

  Scattered, emotionally indulgent men.

• 1:17:43Speaker 00

  It was a man who gave me those words.

• 1:17:44André Duqum?

  Yeah, I mean, that makes sense. And one of my first relations, like, like, longer term relationships, that was a big thing that came up with comparing, instead of appreciating the differences, like you're speaking to, comparing others to self is almost a standard of perfection. You know, which is funny how we do that.

• 1:18:02Speaker 00

  Interesting, right?

• 1:18:03André Duqum?

  Very interesting. And really how suffocating it is, not only for ourself, but obviously for the bandwidth of what somebody else, you know, can be and show up in a relationship. But yeah, that was one pattern that came up with the comparison of, you know, her not being as dialed in with her spiritual practice and, you know, groundedness. And coming up to face with yet another area in which we limit, you know, true connection. And where can we appreciate the differences in our current partnership? Versus continually comparing in this unreachable for anybody standard of perfection.

• 1:18:41André Duqum?

  Another dynamic here is there is this fundamental need for men, desire to provide with this, sometimes in modern living especially, women struggling with the capacity to receive and access and tap into their femininity. And of course, the dynamic between both affects one another. But for women that want to truly learn how to receive, which is such the beautiful gift of having, you know, more feminine energy, what would you say is the main thing that they can do to do so? Or perhaps it's a lack of doing something.

• 1:19:19Speaker 00

  Oh, boy.

• 1:19:24Speaker 00

  Well, I would say first to become aware of the things that are gonna get in the way. And...

• 1:19:34Speaker 00

  But I need you to know that I have spent a lot of time teaching men how to receive.

• 1:19:42Speaker 00

  Because we both...

• 1:19:46Speaker 00

  We suck at it. We all suck at it. One of the things that helps so that we can see it when it arises are the things that will prevent receiving. So, for example, that reciprocity and precise reciprocity, which is part of the connective focus. If you're trying to give to me something that I can't give back to you

• 1:20:17Speaker 00

  by receiving it from you, that the belief is that I, by letting you give me that, I am now creating an obligation that I can't afford to pay.

• 1:20:34Speaker 00

  You want to take me where? You want to treat me to that? No.

• 1:20:40Speaker 00

  Like, no. So I can take it from you? I can convince myself I've already earned it? I'm such an important person. Of course, you're gonna provide that. Right? We're like, so there's deserving, which means is related to worthy, which is related to equal to. Deserving means to be equal to by acts or qualities. So I've either done something like I was born.

• 1:21:19Speaker 00

  There's class deserving, entitlement. Or I've done something like I've spent nine months of my precious reproductive life with you. You owe me a marriage proposal. Even if I think I'd be stupid to say yes, you owe it to me. Right? So there's, there's all this stuff about deserving. Right? Huge. I'm actually gonna do a thing in 2025.

• 1:21:50Speaker 00

  The working title right now is Feels Like Love Looks Like Math.

• 1:21:59Speaker 00

  Because it is all math. So deserving, the deserving equation. We don't want to take more than we think we deserve because then I'll owe, I'll have an obligation. So, no, no, I don't deserve that. I don't deserve that. I don't deserve that. I tease people about this, that, you know, birthday gifts are not a compensation for having lived another year.

• 1:22:25Speaker 00

  They're called a gift because you don't deserve them. All gifts, deserving's relevant. That's what makes it a gift. And that's why gift exchange.

• 1:22:36André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:37Speaker 00

  There, I mean, that's what those instances of being related could be, is an upward spiral. But everyone's having to practice giving and receiving, and giving and receiving, and deserving's irrelevant. And, and...

• 1:22:55Speaker 00

  And so, and it's the beautiful thing about men and women in all contexts. There are things that are not only are they easy for me to give, I have to give them.

• 1:23:09Speaker 00

  I have to give them to be fulfilled, I have to give them to you.

• 1:23:13André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:14Speaker 00

  So if you won't receive them from me.

• 1:23:19André Duqum?

  Yeah, it's almost robbing you of your own needs.

• 1:23:23Speaker 00

  Not almost.

• 1:23:23André Duqum?

  Yeah, it is.

• 1:23:24Speaker 00

  Not almost. It is if you won't let me give them to you. Not like, okay, you can set it over here, but value it. And vice versa, and that's what's so interesting because there are things that can be easy for me to give. I can even need to give that are priceless to you. And things that you can give to me, that the value from your side seems little. And I'm honoring you by receiving it and it's priceless to me.

• 1:23:57André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:58Speaker 00

  I mean, these are the stairways to heaven.

• 1:24:00André Duqum?

  Mm hmm. Otherwise, we're robbing each other of the joy of giving to each other, which is so good. And robbing the other person to receive the joy that they're giving. And it's that reciprocity.

• 1:24:12Speaker 00

  My, my husband called that the, the great trick.

• 1:24:17Speaker 00

  Because he was such, he was just providing, providing, providing all the time. And there was something I wanted to provide for him and he just like was a total block. And it happened so much and I was so hurt. I finally, I finally screamed at him. Do you think you're the only person in this relationship that needs to give?

• 1:24:44Speaker 00

  And he was like.

• 1:24:50Speaker 00

  Are you like, what?

• 1:24:54Speaker 00

  Huh? Huh? Yeah, he called it the great trick. And he was forever grateful for the great trick. And um,

• 1:25:07Speaker 00

  he did improve greatly from that, much, much better. But he, he still, I had to work on the other side as well, which I never got in place. He, he died before it got in place. Of saying, um, when I would say, "Thank you for what he provided", for him to say, "You're welcome",

• 1:25:31Speaker 00

  to own that he did it on purpose, to own that the impact that was happening over here, he meant to cause that. Instead of, "It's nothing", he usually wouldn't say anything. "Thank you",

• 1:25:48Speaker 00

  and he just would wander away.

• 1:25:51Speaker 00

  I mean, I would not be with,

• 1:25:57Speaker 00

  there's such lame names for it, boyfriend, sweetheart, lover, playmate, adventure buddy. Um, I wouldn't be with Dan if it were not that he has a phenomenal ability to receive and a phenomenal ability to own that he gave on purpose. And, and his "you're welcome",

• 1:26:25Speaker 00

  it heals me again and again and again. "Thank you for that", "you're welcome", and even when I'm not saying, "Thank you", like the first time I talked to him on the phone and he said something that really rattled me. Oh, gosh, I was so rattled. And I finally, I just called it. "Okay, I was gonna go in one direction, you went in a different direction, and my nervous system is whacked right now. Could you just hold space for a few minutes so I could reset?" Sure.

• 1:27:00Speaker 00

  And then I,

• 1:27:03Speaker 00

  it took like less than 30 seconds 'cause his space was a ston- "Oh, my gosh, your space is amazing", "you're welcome".

• 1:27:17Speaker 00

  I did that on purpose and said, ah, it's nothing. No, I did it on purpose.

• 1:27:26André Duqum?

  I love seeing couples that really take the responsibility for the power that our love has to transform one another. And earlier on, you know, as like in our journey, I feel like there can be a lot of competitionary energy, you know? And it's counterintuitive to where you think in a relationship, right? There's these complementary balances and appreciation of differences. But often that's not the case, you know? There's more of a competition. And so what do you see as the role? Both the man can have with a woman and vice versa. But the tunnel of prince becoming king, you know? And maybe a princess becoming queen. What is that tunnel? And how we can really support each other?

• 1:28:10André Duqum?

  And the evolution of who we're becoming?

• 1:28:13Speaker 00

  I'm tackling because I wondered if you're aware of the stages of development. And but may I say something about competition first?

• 1:28:23André Duqum?

  Sure.

• 1:28:24Speaker 00

  Okay. I do a couple of hours on this, so I'm just gonna cut to the chase. Remember when I was talking about discerning me and not me?

• 1:28:35Speaker 00

  One of the consequences of seeing me, sameness. If you see sameness, and it's an equation.

• 1:28:49Speaker 00

  Sameness plus scarcity equals competition.

• 1:28:56Speaker 00

  I call it game on.

• 1:28:59Speaker 00

  And it's all perception. Perception of sameness plus a perception of scarcity, game on.

• 1:29:08Speaker 00

  Sibling rivalry. Whatever's perceived as scarce. Some families, it's food. Some families, it's approval. Some families, it's support or resources or attention. Right? But the more same, a boy and a girl have a better chance than two brothers or two sisters. Right? Identical twins. I'm sorry. Right? So, I mean, we can disconnect competition in any situation just by looking for how are we unique? How are we complementary? And is this really scarce?

• 1:29:52Speaker 00

  Seriously? Isn't there enough? It doesn't have to even be abundant. It just has to be enough. And then it's over. But what you're speaking to is one of the reasons why I encourage people to not be afraid of age differences. Because when there's a certain kind of age difference can make it okay. For example, for someone to be more successful than another person. Well, Greg was almost 11 years older than me. He was situated. Right? And he had a lot of space to support me in finding my way. And we didn't compete.

• 1:30:37Speaker 00

  At least not in that whole domain. And it doesn't matter who's older. Right? As long as there's a respect for where the other person's at. Instead of, well, when I was your age. Oh, great. Your younger self is now going to compete with me? Thanks a lot. I thought we were avoiding that. So it's...

• 1:31:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, competition can be disconnected just by, you know, stop, drop, look.

• 1:31:05André Duqum?

  Yeah. And then a tunnel.

• 1:31:08Speaker 00

  Whole body of work, almost four hours of recordings in the two different amazing development of men. But I love to update people. The more a woman is focused on productivity, the more she's going to experience stages of development. She will be a knight and a prince.

• 1:31:30Speaker 00

  Hopefully turn out a queen instead of a king, but that's okay, either way. I didn't know this until and I'd had the worst six months of my life and found myself saying, I'm not interested in that.

• 1:31:49Speaker 00

  That's king speak. Kings say, I'm not interested in that and mean it. They're not going to spend a shred of anything on it.

• 1:31:57Speaker 00

  Oh, I've been in the tunnel. No wonder that was horrible. So some things I've discovered since all the things I recorded on it is that the tunnel appears to begin with an awareness of everything, I'm just going to say a person, has done or not done to be acceptable to other people, to be approved of, to be accepted, to win something that looks like respect. So it starts with becoming aware of all the ways that they betrayed themselves

• 1:32:40Speaker 00

  in order to be accepted and approved of. And, and then foreseeing it and, and realizing the betrayal and experiencing shame. Not shamed by anybody else. The real private only takes us knowing what we did. Oh, shame, which.

• 1:33:07Speaker 00

  Good people experience shame. Men and women, good people experience shame. And, and then there's a being with that shame. Instead of getting stuck in it, I'm a horrible person. Um, labeling, I am so weak, I'm so right. All those kinds of things. Or why? It's because my mother was a narcissist. All these kind of escaping. So being able to be with it. And then, and I didn't know this until a few years ago. The coming out of the tunnel. Besides the clarity. I mean, the most beautiful thing about shame is you find out who you are by what you're ashamed of.

• 1:33:51Speaker 00

  What did I betray? In that answer is your real self. Right? That's awesome. Oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh. So that clarity by being able to go into the shame. Instead of trying to escape that horrible feeling, find the gold in it. This is who I am. And then the last part is, okay, I'm willing to pay the price of being true to myself. Even if I'm going to lose that person's approval, that group's respect, that group's acceptance.

• 1:34:33Speaker 00

  Yes, I will pay the price to be true to myself. And that's the exit of the tunnel. And it's, and in this way, becoming a king and a queen, exactly the same. Um, this is who I am. And even, it seemed to have a relationship to hormones. And I couldn't wait to be 60 years old. Cause in my estimation, women that age were, they were just unstoppable.

• 1:35:09Speaker 00

  I want to be that. And just a few weeks ago, Dan and I got into this really serious thing. This is deal breaker up with which I will not live ever. And hard, hard conversation, something he's known about since the very beginning. And at the end of it, I said, I love you. And he said, I love you too. And then I looked at him, I said, but you don't really like me right now. And he said, no, I don't.

• 1:35:51Speaker 00

  And I checked the system. I had no reaction. I mean, more estrogen 10 years before, that would, I would have burst into tears. I'm gonna die. He doesn't like me, he's not gonna protect me, I'm gonna die. No, I checked the whole system. It was fine. It was just fine that he didn't like me right then.

• 1:36:25André Duqum?

  Yeah, I'm tempted just to ask you about, as you've aged, how has your evolution of seeing men and the dynamics in relationship evolved? Because there's just so many things that I think we are under the assumption of as younger individuals, about what relationships are, about what success and beauty is. For example, I know so many women that fear getting older, you know? And that see it as society places the kind of subjective worth of a man in his success in the world and a woman in her beauty, right? Or even appearance, more in the objectified sense. And as you age, that's seen to decrease for women.

• 1:37:10André Duqum?

  But I see you embrace the perspective that life can very much so just keep getting more beautiful, you know? That's, I think, a really important thing to remember for everybody that's listening.

• 1:37:23Speaker 00

  This is true. And I keep looking, and I keep looking.

• 1:37:32Speaker 00

  There's no amount of money, no amount of money, that someone could pay me to go back

• 1:37:44Speaker 00

  even

• 1:37:46Speaker 00

  to two weeks ago.

• 1:37:49Speaker 00

  To a month ago. To six months ago. No way. A year ago. I think, like, the more we

• 1:38:03Speaker 00

  let go, the more we release. Do you know? And it's, it's one of my spiritual practices. I formally do release work three times a week. And sometimes for more than an hour at a time, my releasing partner just laughs at me. Tells her what's going on. She just laughs and laughs and laughs. And it just all floats away. But something as simple, for example, as preferences. About a year and a half ago, I realized how much I was driven by my preferences. And my preferences had preferences. And I just started just letting, just

• 1:38:42Speaker 00

  releasing, releasing, releasing, having preferences, having my preferences be catered to. Just let it go, let it go. I also, you know, I'm a girl. One of the first things I told Dan, I'm an extraordinary woman. I'm a, I'm a human girl who makes courageous choices

• 1:39:05Speaker 00

  as many times a day as I can. And that's one of the things I love about a moment. I'm having a human girl moment. Okay, what does your human girl need? Could you just hold me? Sure. You know, it's the best. Which I think is also a part of, I see it in, in women in their 30s and 40s, and I just want to save them from it.

• 1:39:32Speaker 00

  Accepting, accepting the whole thing. And

• 1:39:39Speaker 00

  And I made a commitment when I was 48, when a woman in a course said, "It's my birthday" at the microphone in front of 150 women. And I was like, "Happy birthday." And she said, "I'm 37." I was like, "Yay." She says, "You're supposed to say I look young for my age."

• 1:40:06Speaker 00

  "Okay."

• 1:40:09Speaker 00

  And then I couldn't stop thinking about it. Like, why am I supposed to say that? Why do we care that somebody says that? And that's when I, it just was dead obvious, right? That youth equals beauty. And we think we're gonna lose our beauty by getting older. And, but I've been hanging out with men, right? And men talk about radiance. And there's a woman from Japan, he said, "Is there a kind of beauty that every woman can have?" Yeah, it's called radiance. It's the light that can come off of our skin

• 1:40:53Speaker 00

  and out of our eyes and an honest-to-goodness smile, a real smile. My son said a real smile fills him up for a whole day. Any woman smiling at him, like, he'll have a whole day of energy from that, you know, "Not welcome to Walmart" smile, right? And so I just took it on. I'd been coloring my hair for like 20 years because I didn't like the color of it. I grew it out about that long and then had it all cut off. You can see pictures of me on some things. I chopped it all off, find out what's under there. And just this, okay, I, no matter what I see in the mirror, I'm going to embrace the beauty of my age,

• 1:41:38Speaker 00

  the beauty of my age, the beauty of my age. I wear a tinted sunscreen. I don't cover it all up, do you know? Then there's no radiance. There's perfection, flawlessness, right? It's one of the things I love about my best friend. She's not cut up. She hasn't done something to not be her age. And... She's my role model. Right? She is totally my role model for, I can't even call it getting older, because she just refuses. She just keeps being herself and

• 1:42:20Speaker 00

  just stunning, right? In her being and her wisdom and her everything.

• 1:42:27Speaker 00

  So I think it's one of the gifts of getting older. If you don't try to hang on. And very wise woman, just this last weekend, we were talking about being comfortable in our bodies. Everyone's trying to be comfortable in their bodies and they want to change their gender to be comfortable in our bodies and there's all this conversation about it. And she said, I just can't help it. I just think it's a spiritual disconnect. And I said, what did you mean? She said, as if we're supposed to be comfortable in these things. As if any of us is supposed to be comfortable in these. That's silly. We don't believe.

• 1:43:13Speaker 00

  This isn't us. Why should we feel at home here? It isn't us. We've misidentified who we are. And one of our courses, we talk about what happens if you call it this body. This body. Instead of my body, this body. Well, now there's two of us and we can be partners. And you can't be partners until there's two of you. And so many people are at war with my body and what's wrong with me? That my body is like this and no, no, no.

• 1:43:44Speaker 00

  So more acceptance, more distance, more space, more

• 1:43:51Speaker 00

  everything.

• 1:43:54André Duqum?

  It's a really spacious just perspective. The acceptance of growing older, whatever you want to call it. The, it's just more and more time to unlock that radiance and to like discover what your uniqueness is and your creative urges and your gifts. And like you just get more time to reveal that and share that. And

• 1:44:16André Duqum?

  yeah, I love, I love that your son said that, right? About the smile filling up for a day. That's, it's the genuine, like a genuine sincere smile is so powerful. And I think we And I have so much compassion for a woman in a society that stuffs down people's throats, the programming of value in solely appearance, you know? And so, so yeah, thank you for sharing that. I think that's important. I think that's going to resonate with a lot of people.

• 1:44:50Speaker 00

  I, I once did a whole day having, having men come to the microphone in front of co-ed audience.

• 1:45:00Speaker 00

  What's the real, the question was, what's the relationship between beauty and perfection?

• 1:45:06Speaker 00

  And man after man after man came to the microphone and says, nothing.

• 1:45:13Speaker 00

  They have nothing to do with each other. And they tell about, you know, my wife, her, her teeth overlap in the front and she hates that imperfection and to me, it's part of her beauty.

• 1:45:25Speaker 00

  And that day transformed me. And I, I was telling a man that was there that, sitting in the volunteer meeting at the end and looking at every woman as she spoke and seeing something so beautiful in her, right? And things that we wouldn't think, right? Like, oh, that ought to be different, that ought to be different. And I'm like, oh, wow. And, and when I shared it, he looked at me and he goes, good. Now you see women as we do.

• 1:45:57Speaker 00

  But it's some women don't know. You guys, you guys scan for beauty because you're fed by it. We scan for imperfection because we think we have to fix it in order to survive, in order to live, in order for you to save us. We think you'll save the most perfect of us and let the rest of us die.

• 1:46:21André Duqum?

  Whoa.

• 1:46:23Speaker 00

  We do. And if you're mad at me, for sure, you're just going to say, tiger, take her away. You want mustard with that? We don't know that you don't, you consider it dishonorable to not do the right thing because of how you feel. You could hate somebody and still risk your life to save them because of who you are.

• 1:46:46André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:47Speaker 00

  Women don't know that.

• 1:46:51André Duqum?

  I really like feeling into and just seeing how our view on relationships in general changes as we grow, as we evolve as a being. And there's this one quote I wanted to share that I read from this book called Awareness by Anthony DeMello. And it's a very interesting segment that I just wanted to, I want to hear what you think of it.

• 1:47:15Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:47:16André Duqum?

  Okay?

• 1:47:16Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:47:19André Duqum?

  "Where there is love, there are no demands, no expectations, no dependency. I do not demand that you make me happy. My happiness does not lie in you. If you were to leave me, I will not feel sorry for myself. I enjoy your company immensely, but I do not cling. Can you enjoy the relationship on a non-clinging basis, where what you really enjoy is not that person, it's something that's greater than both you and the other person? It's a kind of symphony, a kind of orchestra that plays one melody in one person's presence, but when he or she departs, the orchestra does not stop. When I meet someone else, it plays another melody, which is also very delightful.

• 1:48:04André Duqum?

  And when I'm alone, it continues to play. There's a great repertoire, and it never ceases to play."

• 1:48:12André Duqum?

  What do you think about that? Do you agree?

• 1:48:19Speaker 00

  Okay, I'll give you two short responses to that.

• 1:48:30Speaker 00

  Contrast.

• 1:48:35Speaker 00

  If it hurts, it isn't love.

• 1:48:41Speaker 00

  Period.

• 1:48:44Speaker 00

  It's attachment, it's dependency, it's expectation, it's meaning attached. That's not love. If it hurts, it is not love.

• 1:48:58Speaker 00

  And the other thing I would tell you is...

• 1:49:05Speaker 00

  When I was in my 30s with three little kids, I was terrified that Greg was gonna die. And I was talking to the first bona fide psychic I'd ever met. Like, "How do you know that?" Kind of thing. And, uh, and she said,

• 1:49:30Speaker 00

  she said, "I see you walking down the street,

• 1:49:35Speaker 00

  and you're, you're old. You're an old woman,

• 1:49:42Speaker 00

  and you're surrounded by Greg's love."

• 1:49:49Speaker 00

  And I was like, "Oh, okay." And I thought that meant he hadn't died.

• 1:50:00Speaker 00

  But when he did die, 2019,

• 1:50:05Speaker 00

  I felt his exhilaration at being free of a body that was always too slow for him. It's why he rode motorcycles very fast.

• 1:50:21Speaker 00

  And I had a hard time grieving, like a normal person.

• 1:50:27Speaker 00

  Especially that people would say, "Oh, Greg's gone."

• 1:50:33Speaker 00

  And look around, can't you feel him? He was showing up all over the place, whispering in people's ear, telling them this, giving them this message, telling this. I mean, completely disruptive. And,

• 1:50:48Speaker 00

  and what she said is true. I, and I, I plan on being a really old woman, and I'm still surrounded by his love. An idea that we can lose it, that it goes away, if a, if a person goes away,

• 1:51:06Speaker 00

  it's, it's a misunderstanding of love. It is infinite, it is eternal, and how much access we have to it is us. It's our access to it. It doesn't change.

• 1:51:24André Duqum?

  I love how alive your relationship is still within to this very day. And I think a lot of people who have the unfortunate experience of a loved one passing away can continue to hang on to what they gave them that is no longer present, or the things that are missing from that connection, instead of the continual celebration of what that unique connection gave. And it had to be in the celebration that you got to spend the time that you did with somebody like that.

• 1:51:56Speaker 00

  Yes, and it's more than that, Andre. He's not gone. And what if nobody is? I mean, I have a... I wasn't afraid of, like, death itself. I'm sorry, I have too many memories of former lifetimes to think this is all there is. And that may sound weird. And then channeling The Queen's Code, like, how do you have this screen open in a movie playing, you type as fast as you can? And I didn't invent the characters, I didn't invent the story.

• 1:52:33Speaker 00

  Everything I can validate with research, but have enough of those kind of experiences? And also, just... Someone asked me once, like, what do we fundamentally need to transform if we're gonna have the kind of relationships we really want? And what was right there was our perception of scarcity. The One, a planet of eight billion people, and there is the One. How about ultimate expression of scarcity?

• 1:53:16Speaker 00

  So our perception of scarcity and our relationship to death. Because when you said that people unfortunately have lost someone, Autumn in New York, there's a line in that movie, "100% of relationships end badly."

• 1:53:40Speaker 00

  Nobody escapes it.

• 1:53:41André Duqum?

  Yeah, spoiler alert. None of us make it out of this thing alive.

• 1:53:45Speaker 00

  Exactly, spoiler alert. And, and when, the way that I think of it, Andre, because I think I'm, I think I'm normal, right? I think I'm normal.

• 1:54:02Speaker 00

  And so, anything I experience, anybody can experience. And I've been fortunate to be with people with all different kinds of sense of perception. And, and I think of it, they're, they're like channels on a radio, they're frequencies. And, you know, if you've ever been in another country, or never, another part of this country, and you tune into a radio station, and it makes no sense whatsoever, but you can't find another one, right? You're on a road trip, so you just leave it on. And then after a while, you're like, like, oh yeah, I, I get it, I get it. And then, like, you, you may not know what that word means, but you get, you're feeling it.

• 1:54:46Speaker 00

  And, and I think, I think it's, all of life is like that. Like, like what if love is a, is a set of vibrations that you, is your choice to tune in? And maybe a beautiful relationship is one that helps you tune in?

• 1:55:07Speaker 00

  Well, you don't have to tune out, right? Because they're not there with you. Or what if people, Suzanne Geisman calls them people in spirit? What if people who aren't incorporated anymore in one of these? Funny how this is called corporal, right? What if unincorporated humans, un-corporated humans? What if it's just a different frequency? And we, we just have to tune in and listen for a while? And, you know, a couple of weeks before my dad died, I, I said, I'm, Dad, if I'm, sorry if I don't seem broken up about this,

• 1:55:51Speaker 00

  but I know you're gonna have this experience, and it'll take a while for you to get used to it, and then we'll talk story again.

• 1:55:59Speaker 00

  There's nothing that's gonna be over. And...

• 1:56:07Speaker 00

  We can get all about it, or hmm, what don't I know about that? And who has something powerful they might be able to show me? And who relates to the thing that I'm struggling with in the way that I wish I could relate to it? Okay, how do I get there?

• 1:56:29André Duqum?

  Allison, this conversation has been filled with so much insight, and I could keep going for hours and hours. And it's just been so lovely getting to connect with you and build this new friendship. And yeah, I just wanted to open the floor for any last words that you have before we close out.

• 1:56:45André Duqum?

  If you have any.

• 1:56:47Speaker 00

  Thank you. It's thank you. Thank you for doing what you do. Thank you for all the people. And I would think of it as access, right? Like, where do you want to go? Pick a road. And you make so many roads, so many paths available to people in Know Thyself. Like, just tap in and where do you light up? Go with the road that lights you up. And so I'm grateful. I'm grateful for what you do.

• 1:57:26André Duqum?

  Thank you, fully received. I received that. And yeah, thank you for what I feel like is a very unique entry point and pathway for people to explore on this platform, but also beyond, as you have a whole world that people can tap into, which we'll leave links for down in the description below. Is it alisonarmstrong.com?

• 1:57:49Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:57:49André Duqum?

  Okay, and Queen's Code, and eventually The King's Code, which I know is in the ethers, starting to get downloaded.

• 1:57:57Speaker 00

  Movie trailers. Whoa, yeah.

• 1:58:01André Duqum?

  Phenomenal. Thank you so much, really appreciate you. And for everybody that's been tuning into this episode of the Know Thyself Podcast, please let us know what in particular resonated and was impactful for you in this conversation. And until next time, be well.