[Music] welcome to jyn and tantra spirituality with a twist the podcast that takes tantrism buddhism taoism sutheasm cabalism shamanism chinese medicine and all of the other isms we've been influenced by and blends them into a tall crisp cool cocktail your spirit has been longing for you to get together now isn't that refreshing thanks for tuning in to jin and tantra as always please like subscribe and share if you're checking us out on spotify this is our first foray into the video so please be patient with us as we work out the kinks if you're listening to us on any other platform then this will just be an audio recording um and if you're listening to us on apple in particular if you leave us a review we definitely appreciate it it helps out the show today we have on friend of the show lady india and lady india is a chicago-based multi-disciplined performance artist and visual artist who has recently received her doctorate from the pacific college of health sciences and acupuncture and chinese medicine the foundation of her performance art is rooted in traditional middle eastern belly dance of which she's been a disciple for the last 20 years lady india has brought her fusion of fire art sideshow burlesque and belly dance to stages nationwide off-broadway several independent film fest films festivals such as lollapalooza and has showcased multiple times on wgn morning news which is a local news organization out of chicago lady india is also the co-founder of antibiotics productions llc which has produced such popular shows as chicago's in chicago such as not another nightmare before christmas and pantheon based on neil gaiman's american gods lady india's visual art style encompasses sculptures surrealism traditional chinese painting and scientific illustration her art will soon be displayed at chicago's first and only insect and taxidermy museum known as the insect asylum in which she holds a position of secretary lady india's involvement with chinese medicine is inspired by her personal experiences of the colorful characters she's come across on her artistic journey and various avenues of personal healing we hope you enjoy the conversation as much as we did hey belgian tears episode like our spirituality with a twist as you will have heard in our intro we have the great pleasure of having on the wonderful delightful eclectic and insightful lady india diminuette thanks so much for coming on lady india oh thank you so much for having me i was like am i really is interesting to be interviewed thank you for thinking of me well the answer to that is yes and full disclosure we uh i've did this with a couple of these uh you know conversations we're having with people you and i talked for maybe like an hour to an hour and a half about all the stuff that we wanted to talk about two hours story yeah yeah and so um uh i you know it's it's my job then to kind of do this for these interviews one of the things we're trying to do is present stories of people who've done you know very unique things with their lives things that are very authentic and personally expressive which you have definitely done and hopefully that is inspiring to other people other things that other people can relate to things that people can maybe learn from um and then you know my job becomes to try to like tell a story of this which is a little weird to try to tell the story of somebody else okay but i gotta try to give it a shot and to me when i was thinking about you it really seemed like a story kind of a tren of transcendence is the way like i felt in the end after our conversation through all these different uh throughout these different mediums that you kind of accomplish this through through creativity art music dance uh through relationship through sexuality through alternative community um ultimately even like through healing others so i think it's a fantastic story and thanks for coming on to share it thanks for having me i'm i'm stoked this is going to be really weird to be um verbally truthfully naked in front of god and everybody but here we go yeah you were saying in the in the pre little show meeting we were doing that as an artist you don't always reveal as much of yourself you kind of hide behind the art a little bit or the art speaks for you i feel like that's a social media thing you're always trying to present the best foot forward and a lot of people feel like a lot of people feel very comfortable or rape or foolish even sharing some of their honesty um i don't typically share all that much because um i i just prefer to keep it a little mysterious in the past but i feel like part of healing in general for a lot of people is um the sharing atmosphere of i mean yeah it's not just all positivity you got to look at the ugly parts too and that's important yeah yeah and like you know well i mean i think the way that you did this in your life is really something that other people can learn from and be inspired by so i hope so because you know um as as uh as up and down as some of it was i mean i wouldn't necessarily call some of it unique that's also true that's also true mm-hmm well i guess to do the story i guess you for every story you need a setting so our setting starts in a very particular part of the world i like was thinking of it as a barn in a bourgeois place a very particular part of the world called hims day at illinois where you grew up and um all right so what do you think i mean can you describe it kind of about your family your mom your dad and kind of where you grew up sure of course um you know like you said every every every place has an origin so um typically when people think of hinsdale now they think of like the like really she she like the mean girl setting you know really rich people convertibles things like that we had a house that was a converted barn from the 30s and i'm going to tell you straight up my my parents they didn't have a lot of money my mom was an immigrant my dad grew up out of like cicero and he was like one of five different kids so this place was like a house not like the mansions and it wasn't even like a house it was a house it's a little hard to describe the area i was trying to think of how to describe hinsdale if you're not from this place but it's kind of like those old john hughes movies from the 80s where there's like the kind of the rich bougie kids yeah they like more like children's express and gap and i was like they're wearing like whatever like you know don't be naked here's a shirt like i hope you don't grow out of it in two weeks yeah james spader andrew mccarthy people from those old rally like molly ringwald movies or something yeah basically yeah it was it like i said it was like a house and it was like one of those places where the plumbing was kind of jimmy rigged so so like the bottom of the house it would gurgle and then the sinks up like in the mid floor would gurgle and kind of they would geyser up some water and then the top floor would do it you'd hear it go all the way to the top it was it was it was a it was an interesting place but it was um it was one of a lot of very fond memories um like i said before my mom was an immigrant so her being there was a bicultural upbringing for sure yeah so your mom was um you know from taiwan originally i think right that's correct yeah yeah yeah yeah she's from kaohsiung so so her moving here at 24 years old like she's got fire too so that's where you know where it comes from okay she's [...] fire and monkey and yeah so she she met my father through like a series of letters and in four months like she went to palm reader in four months they said she would be married and living completely far far away in a far far away land she was just like nonsense and then there she was interesting okay so it was sort of like growing up a little bit poor in a like a rich place right in this kind of different kind of household yes so then the the other part that we kind of talked about was this kind of early life spirituality of the house we're always kind of a little interested in that because people come from some place where they're starting now yeah yeah yeah so it was a little bit like i think you were saying that from your mom's side it was a little bit more of the asian cultural influence right little dollars and a little confusionism how did that kind of like feel like in the house what was that kind of like you know it was um something that i talked to you about that i really love sharing is uh is the fact that you know i when i when growing up in grade school elementary school like people would ask because they didn't really know they would ask well you know are you christian or jewish like what are you and i'm like i'm like one day i was like i was a little kid i didn't i had no idea what religion was about i never went to anything secular like on the rigs so i didn't really know and um so i asked my mom i said you know we're not christian we're not jewish i'm what are we she just looked at me like this we're good people and i was like never asking you again never doing it and i just didn't but yeah covers it right it was just like okay cool um so i think like the dowsing confusion was kind of like just hanging around in the background though right like it was kind of an influence there but it wasn't anything right it was sort of like culturally there there yeah it was like you said it was always kind of culturally there it wasn't like my parents never really put religion at the forefront of anything but wherever there's spirituality there's probably going to be like twice more superstition so we were we were raised maybe somewhat superstitiously yeah that's what you were describing it's more superstition than anything else yeah like don't look at the moon too long um hey grandma i think there's a ghost in the corner that's because there probably is gee thanks um you know yeah cause you're talking about the barn being haunted for sure right oh yeah they're totally i swear it was i swear it was there were places that you just wouldn't go in that house and it wasn't like very big at all you know for a barn kind of situation it wasn't very big but there were places that just didn't feel right this place was built in the 30s and that's something i want to like kind of really look at it that's an older thing yeah yeah and it was incredibly wooded like really wooded outside like we had just giant trees so this property probably wasn't touched except to be renovated like one time ever you know the it they were i don't know i don't know if i want to like say that there were like things that happened there but you definitely like walking through the house you could feel different rooms energy and i've never really seen a woo-woo person i just you know you walk into some place and you know how you can kind of feel like oh these people were just talking about me that's awkward yeah um yeah but even like even if you go to like a friend's house and you're visiting a couple and they're just having a huge argument and you walk in you can be like ooh this place feels weird like you don't have to be woo to feel that or that's what i'm saying yes exactly yeah that's that's kind of what it was like in the house where you could just like walk in and be like yeah okay like in in certain areas but you know after a while you and said whatever the heck else lives there will like get along sure eventually you just you gotta get to know each other my brother was like the least person in the world my brother like that would all but we were talking at some point about the house we grew up and he was like there's some scary [...] in that house and we could name the places that we thought were creepy we all agreed something weird happens you know if you would have dug down into the floor and find like some bones down there we all would have been like yep that's that's what it felt like that would have been obvious yeah yeah so on your mom it was your mom it was more like sort of the asian side from your dad that we were describing him in terms of your early life influences it was more like he seemed like kind of an eclectic kind of a person in terms of his attitudes and spirituality and you almost said like a druid like sort of yeah he's um because i took him uh i took him around ireland with me too like i we ran around quite a bit in ireland and whatnot but yeah he was um he's always been interested in dreamwalking out of body experiences that's been on my father's side more often or at least talked about very openly more often like from his mother and father and him and there's been some weird-ass [...] in that house with i'm like oh my god dad no no so you were telling me i thought even like that like you had this kind of early life in terms of the spirituality you had sort of these early life experiences you talked about like having this mirror that seemed to have these kind of weird qualities so you were talking about like the kind of like yeah you would sort of see things in the mirror uh that was really cool so uh you can see things share a little about that i thought that was awesome yeah okay cool yeah it's it you know okay i i mean like i realize how this makes me sound but you know let's roll with it we're on jen and tantra okay so um there there was this mirror that my parents were gifted i think or bought somewhere around their getting married it's always been that i i feel like i could like you know like like when you look into it you have like certain feelings about what is going to happen next you know i think it's weird when we talk and discuss memory because memory is incredibly subjective like you know your brain does fill in gaps but i feel like there are certain things that are just like like undeniable they've never changed they thought they've always been there and one of the things is um having um having like like memories of my parents through that mirror before i was even born seeing people that i was going to meet before i met them and i have met all of them at this not all of them but i had met the people that i was going to meet that i've you know like looked in through this mirror and you just have these feelings like this is gonna happen next isn't it and then lo and behold it's not even a deja vu it does and you're like [...] and it's it's kind of cool i have never been able to get rid of this mirror it's it's creepily wonderful there's like uh kind of a tab i mean i'm usually like sometimes i take this role for the purpose of this podcast so it's kind of this tibetan tradition of like mere gazing where people gaze into mirrors and try to like see [...] um i was reading um you know there's a mantra the kind of like buddhist figure of wisdom and i have a book on it and there's a whole deal about like you know um developing the ability to look in the mirrors and see [...] so when you were talking about that i was like oh this is kind of awesome here that's awesome it's a little mondestry and it's a little it's a little fire goddessy it all comes together yeah it's all fire god let's see yeah well you were almost saying like we had this reincarnation conversation we were almost saying like you know you kind of like see your parents and choose your parents and you're almost like yeah i think i saw those i think i saw those people you had memories of even seeing those people before you know you have like very very early life memories in this very like interesting way uh-huh and you know what's kind of [...] up is that oh excuse me can we swear here yeah go ahead yeah all right thank you all the time um so you know what's kind of messed up is that like um i'm not the only person in my family who has had memories kind of like that my grandmother did too so i just thought that was interesting my grandmother and my father's side had the open the father's side yeah i honestly weirdly enough but that that could only just be because i i didn't get to know my grandmother as uh as an adult later on on my mom's side but um yeah she passed away before i mean she lost her mental facilities before i could yeah um but but on my father's side yeah she had those really really early life memories not like like baby hood memories like like things that you like psychologists would you know do claim that you know this is a developmental part a portion of a child's life like this is not a memory that you would have so to speak but that's that may or may not be true i mean who knows what science may discover later but we were just talking when we were talking the other day you're basically saying like you had memories of like being like in utero no i didn't decide it's i mean only like for seconds like this memory is only for seconds but like yeah it's just like it's it was like it's like cozy it's dark it's comfortable and that life is cold air and painful and it feels bad on your skin and it hurts yeah you were describing that contrast floating in utero all peaceful and all of a sudden when you're around the world right yeah basically i think what you said is it sucked yeah no in your uterus and then being not in utero just immediately i was c-section baby oh okay yeah just you went from one to the other and it sucks remembering that's so funny now like okay in the role of putting context there are two things i thought of one is that alfred adler the great psychologist would ask people what their first memory is and you'd have to say it was in utero being honest which is i am being honest and it is so weird but it's not usually what people have so yeah and the other part was yeah daniel and i are in the midst of doing these episodes about like dukkha you know the buddhist conversations about suffering in human life and stuff and they do say birth is a suffering right it was it was it was not comfortable yeah yeah put it mildly i mean if you've never felt air on your skin before like i mean now it's just like like a fish you're just living in water it's whatever but like yeah but like but like if you've never felt air in your skin before it's like it's like going from like a warm bath to freezing cold air like that sucks that's awful like you were a fish in water and then you were like a fish tossed out into the air yeah basically yeah yeah and i i don't know why i remember that and it's just it's weird that i do yeah it's awesome never talk to anybody who had those early life memories like that and i think that's part of like spirit as far as like the theme of the show that's part of spiritual experience they do talk about like okay there's a thing in the kabbalah where they're asking people what they remember and uh everyone goes back further and further in time and eventually some of the cobblers are saying yeah i remember being like in the womb [Laughter] and you know and then some of them say i remember before the womb you know so it's it's a story of people doing this inspirational stuff so you had you had that intuition in you from the beginning right yeah i guess i guess they would just kind of put in there or whatever um and and you know like through the mirror we had discussed this earlier like with the buddhism thing i i think i thought it was weird like when we were discussing pediatrics um well not weird but cool cool weird um when we were discussing pediatrics with um i think it was david or our great yeah yeah back in uh grad school days back in grad school days yes and he was like with your parents like when you're like a little spirit floating around and you're like and you see them having sex and you're just like those that's fine i'll do that and like to some extent like i feel like okay i got this theory right where like if you were okay in your previous life maybe you get like a certain menu of people that you can actually choose from and if you were kind of crappy then me then maybe you have a like a more narrow amount of people that you can choose from and maybe that's a karmic thing and it's it's kind of a sad it's sad though because i don't feel like any child deserves to be born into a shitty family like i i would just i would say that maybe there's some karmic instance to that um from a previous life i'm just what we've kind of done stuff on tibetan book of the dead you know in the podcast previous it's almost like there's some draw to a person you know some draw to those people some kind of something pulling people it's like how they talk about it yeah it's like a magnetic force you know almost and especially if you're not as you know like you haven't practiced dying essentially in your life previous you know like the meditative practices of the bardo that these attractive forces sort of just magnetically pull you as you sort of you're floating along this tunnel right and then you're just like oh and then it's right you're right in there that's kind of that's kind of it yeah that's and i don't know why through the mirror i have that exact memory though um that's trippy mm-hmm just round out the mirror so they can all come over and like it's like really just an unassuming little dresser type thing but it's it kind of gets me i don't know okay so this is the context for our story and like as we go on with it speaking of fish out of the water uh as we were talking it got to the point like you felt kind of like a fish out of the water just growing up where you were you know and it was this idea of like just kind of like it not being your place in some ways right um yeah that isn't a common experience for spiritual people but i think maybe it can i think maybe it can be i've always been um much to my detriment of being a fish out of water i'm also very much an extrovert so it just makes it makes it kind of weirder and worse but uh yeah early life um let's see i'm like looking on our little menu here was a lot of sort of like you're talking about like bullying and like oh there we are and racism and oh god yeah i mean it was hidden yeah it was hinsdale i mean i'm gonna just talk [...] about himself i don't even care [...] you hinsdale so i it can't it can't defend itself so it's it's a perfect target yeah it okay think about consider the fact that these children are raised by um not to get super political but very conservative caucasian people with social mores from early 90s late 80s that were carried over by their parents who had like basically mad men type lives you know yeah so so like consider the fact that country clubs were still a thing and you know people who drove porsches and had their hair like out to here in a perm were a thing um and so their kids are subjected to that and so their kids were [...] i'm going to just say their kids were [...] that's fine to say yeah yeah um you know and that being said like if you're if you're the poor kid the weird kid which i totally was uh the slightly brown kid as you can see i'm not very brown but i was brown enough for them um so that that was a thing it was uh black families just did not feel comfortable living there they just they moved the [...] out um it was it was it was really sad i lost a lot of friends like that you know so um yeah i i mean this the education though i will say second to none but that's because they save it all for the really wealthy taxpayers you know yeah yeah so like when you were talking about it kind of led to a kind of a toughness right it kind of like developed this toughness in you you know and and uh maybe a kind of a determination i know but what do you all think i mean i i feel like i certainly felt this feeling growing up like i didn't kind of belong in the place where i was i wonder if that isn't a common experience for people who are spiritual folks what do you all think has that matched your your experience to date i i would say i would say so because when you when you don't feel accepted you tend to retreat and when you retreat you put up defense and when you put up defense and you and you and you retreat you don't just retreat into yourself and into your own mind you you still have to have an outlet of some sort even if you have nobody to talk to about it because you know i yeah i had like two two other friends one who is um chinese and one who is just uh she's black foot indian um and but like they were always gone over the summer so it's like what can you do um so like when you when you're in that mental place like what do you do you can express yourself via music art uh writing anything that you can do just because you are living with yourself that's it that's what you got i mean i have my sister thankful but i mean i was treating that conversation to me was like how much anger you felt like we were both talking pretty honest and i could remember feeling some of the stuff you were feeling you were basically saying it's good there weren't any firearms around because i was that angry and i was like yeah i was like i flash back and going yeah there's sometimes i'll be walking home from school just thinking oh if i had the gun fine and i'm not a violent person by my nature i was just angry right i mean like if you're you're you're you're a small child you're really receptive to like other people's like well when when bullying happens you know you're really receptive to what the energy that's coming at you and so you internalize it because you're a kid you don't have that defense mechanism quite yet and so like and so you become angry and two things happen when you become angry you either lash out like you really want to like there was i'm not gonna lie like every part of me wanted to just just torch the whole [...] thing down or um you get really tough and and um and i think on the whole good thing we became really tough it's better to go better the tough way well i can say this and i don't think i've i i don't think i've shared this with man very few people if anybody um when i was 16 i did have a gun and i got uh i got jumped i think when i first moved out to california at a school i you know didn't have i just met people i was hanging around with the group that felt most you know i felt most comfortable with or whatever usually they were minorities i just never hung around with the caucasian people and at the school that i was at there wasn't any black kids really maybe like two and then there was a larger group of asians so i started hanging out with them long story short there was a girl who liked me i liked her somebody else was upset with this and um you know he i think he asked for my gold chain one day at lunch uh and i sort of laughed you know and then i went to sat back down to continue eating lunch then about three dudes uh jumped on me pulled me on the floor started kicking my head and you know really oh jesus yeah and some kid i never met before um a black kid from new york you know hit this tall there was a guy who was on the basketball team and then two other probably shitty point guards who you know played with him um and this kid just smacked the tall guy and they all kind of backed off but i was really really angry because i just i'd only been at the school for like two weeks definitely was still an outsider um you know and just never had that experience before and um yeah and and i ended up you know wasn't my first time having a pistol and you know i called up a friend of mine and i said do you hear this noise blink link you know i said that that's what that sounds like i will i will expect an apology a phone call within the next 24 hours or i'm coming and [...] yeah yeah and i did and i got up yeah and i got apologies from everybody and you know but it taught me the way unfortunately that like the supreme kind of psychopath often gets what he wants and it's taken me a really long time to unwind that kind of response um but it does work sometimes i hate saying it but it absolutely does i mean i've had to defend people at um just even oh god this is going to sound terrible um out on dates like i went or a date at least you know what what self-respecting chicago woman doesn't carry a boot knife correct okay so like you know i'm waiting for him to come back from the bathroom and um three guys come around me so i'm like you want to say that again yeah you want to sit down like what would happen if i'm just like like no [...] that you know there's there there's a there's a you know action even in buddhism they talk about what peace increase wrath and what is it yeah well they go uh power and wrath are the two ones to get a little bit more interesting right right pacifying and piecifying situations yeah adding benefit but then they get a little bit interesting because then one is using power or magnetism yeah yeah magnetism and power and then the other is just like force yeah essentially force right yeah i mean like nobody wants to have to do those things nobody wants to be angry nobody wants to be that's the thing when you when you're pushed to a level it's not just about testing your patience or testing your limits or or seeing how good you can be in a situation it's about what do i what is actually right right what is actually right you know kind of fast thing about it for me india is i was just talking with somebody yesterday like an old uh you know friend from grad school so i hadn't seen her in like over two decades and we were talking about the whole fight fighter fight flight or freeze thing oh freezing absolutely fighting flight yeah yeah yeah you didn't you didn't you certainly didn't seem like your inclination was to freeze or flight your your inclination was to fight and i don't know that's as common with how women feel in this culture i don't know if women always fight in that way i don't know they don't always and um i feel like a lot of that you know maybe even that bullying like it like maybe even that had an and like that um uh reactions reactions to that had had actually spurred me to to fight a little bit more i feel like being in that situation teaches you to fight a little bit more and you wouldn't think like classic suburban totally safe white conservative area like you you'd be taught to fight like that but in this situation if you're like somewhat queer uh female even remotely different looking yeah you're gonna fight for yourself eventually you're gonna just fight to exist because you're not just there with these kids in grade school middle school you're there with them for 18 damn years until you get rid of them finally high school the best years of your life please what no it's it's a trip and it's really this thing if you're if you're different at all people don't know what to do with you in those environments i mean people constantly thought i was gay and i'm like well i mean it's fine but i'm just not gay but you're different at all you have to get some kind of label put on you it's a trip right it's a real trip right so it looked to me like part of this was toughness the other part was what we were talking about was sort of creativity which i think is like you know such a big part of your life and i like as we were having a conversation it was sort of art is kind of like a soulless in these kind of situations kind of an escape but also kind of like an identity does that resonate with how i'm done trying to describe this for you i think that it's the perfect thing because the thing is like even before all the nonsense and the horror and the and the [...] um and i'm chicago so i swear a lot i'm sorry guys but uh but yeah even before all that like yeah there like it did resonate with me quite a bit i just became later on a best friend to me art because i mean at that time i was taught that i was not uh i was taught that it was not beautiful i was taught that i was ugly and i was taught that it was not socially acceptable by my peers so i wanted yeah no no that was you're not yeah that's though those were the things like and i just realized later that it was because i i wasn't i wasn't blonde with blue eyes like i'd like later on realize that but like whatever so like the um so so those things i would like to make something beautiful i would like to make something that is only for me the socially unacceptable person um and that escape that creativity just kind of like you know you keep nurturing it you keep on making things that are beautiful that make you feel really good and yeah that just i think that just that blossomed into a whole career um but even before that it was it was a place of solace always and um i became well known for it in school yeah we were like you i just asked you as we were talking like you know who were some of your favorite artists and you mentioned this edward byrne jones so this is a public service to people who are listening i wasn't as familiar with this artist you can go check it out online and i was like well this is fantastic and part of the thing you were saying was in his work they're kind of these images of like powerful female figures right you know that uh a little mysterious but also having a certain amount of like power and strength to them and i thought well that's kind of like perfect for you is that kind of like you think what you resonated with it sounded like that to me hey like i didn't actually pick it apart in my mind until after we talked about it but i mean i think that like always like like visualizing or like seeing powerful female figures in classical paintings had had always um it brought to me like a sense of like [...] yeah like i mean this is before the internet that's what i had i had the museum so that's where i went and and i and every time i went it just kind of drank in these images of these powerful powerful women i don't know why with the water a lot of the time but there was like a lot of that but that element is still escaping me like psychologically in that sense but i thought it was yeah yeah mostly powerful female figures yeah it's like it's uh well we've done some episodes where we've talked to sort of about like uh what goddess imagery means to you know women people living in female form in this life it's a powerful thing to see that imagery right yeah so this lets you go into the like big big museum in chicago is the art institute of chicago for people who have never been to chicago and this led you to going to uh chicago and get your bfa so the art went in that direction you know and it became a thing for you and again like at least for my theory of your story like it was this creative aspect of you that was like transcending these things which i think is just like inspiring to other people you know but um it was also like as we were talking about it sort of like this overcoming you know these obstacles in the world and the other thing you talked about which again is now the this part is not unique for sure just like you know for so many women like getting into these relationship things and trying to figure out what those are and getting stuck in relationships that are like traumatizing and abusive yes we talked really honest about that so whatever you want to share about that that's up to you that's okay you know what i'm i'm gonna go ahead and be quite candid all right um and this is a part of me that i don't often share so you guys know the first show i'll ever share maybe last so welcome to my life y'all um i would say there was um an incredibly incredibly domestically violent abusive in every manner of the word you look at there is a wheel of traumatic abuse online you can see what like all like the eight different pie pieces or whatever how many pie pieces are in there dude he hit every single goddamn one okay so like this guy but it was a slow roll which isn't unique you know they get you in oh i love you so much you know all this other crap um love bombing and then and then feeling ownership and then and then just taking these things to a very dark and very sinister place and maybe that description is kind of weird i'm like it's dark sinister place but it it was and you're at a tender age you know 17 years old god you're you're new to the world you're new to your sexuality you're you're and and and like this this actually carried on into college so i felt like you know when i was getting my bfa so it's worthy of mention at this point that this person had damaged me emotionally psycho spiritually sexually like mentally and it and it was violent there was drugs involved um i was anorexic as hell because i was just i was always afraid i mean you're scared you don't know when somebody's going to [...] kill you constantly or themselves and and and the worst part is because you had grown up with some bullying you don't know really what love what adult love is i mean you can see your parents but my parents are pretty reserved like if they if i see them hugging they like kind of jump apart they're like oh like you don't really know what that's supposed to look like because movies are fake as hell you know um you're you're kind of like you're not equipped to to know how to break away from that situation that's something i feel like needs to be talked about in middle school not even high school forget it middle school like because these women are whether parents like it or not they're going to have sexual or sexual exploration they're going to they're going to have first relationships whether or not it's under the table whether you know about it or not it's going to happen this needs to be get this needs to get to be talked about kids 14 years old don't care has to happen i really care about that in this podcast because i i want to have these stories told and you're you're a person who grew up got tough but still four years of your life was enmeshed in this thing so that that means it can happen to i mean we all know it does i we work with patients we work with people in our lives you know that we know people get you know especially women getting meshed in these situations and they just get like uh mind [...] and trapped it's just you i really appreciate you coming home i appreciate you coming out and talking about this because i think this has to be said it really does it's it's necessary because um some of our traumas do shape us there are trials by fire in a way and i'm not saying that like this one so someone shaped me as maybe lit a fire under my ass i'm like i wasted four years of my life on this [...] maybe i need to just hurry up and get to where i ought to be because i i wasted it like i have to hurry now like and that's and so my life has felt like a great big hurry after that i think i caught up more than not yeah so i think i feel like i feel like i had this long conversation yesterday with you know this woman that i know and it was you know we're talking about this podcast obviously and i was mentioning that you were going to be on it was like i want these stories to be told so again yeah and i think it's important for women to hear them from other women and she was saying that too you know she works with women recovering from trauma abuse you know that's her professional life and she was like women need to share these stories and not hold them inside so there's more conversation about it and then you know men need to hear these stories too because if you don't work with women in the way that maybe we do clinically you don't get to hear these stories i will say that working at chicago women's health clinic i treated every single patient that i had as though they were a victim of abuse at one point and and it's and you know the thing that sucks is that like my story here it's not unique at all in this in this in that particular sense oh i spent five years with some douche that was violently abusive like can you imagine talking i would say like three-fourths of all women like they're like oh yeah i remember that one horrible time i was with this piece of [...] like and i'm not saying everybody and i'm not saying every man of course i'm saying that it's shocking how common it is maybe simply because it doesn't get talked about enough and i feel like you know dads or brothers might be so creeped out by this that they might start looking a little harder at their male counterparts and being like hey you know what listen because nobody can stand up i mean i hate to say this but even right now in nobody can stand up for a woman harder than another guy it's true interesting interesting it's true because it it's you know someone from quote unquote the other side right you know like another character from you know a minority group in this sense able to say i can do this because i'm you know whatever and it's also it's a use of physical it's a use of violence right and it's easier to kick down it's much harder to kick across especially when that other person is not scared of you right right and so you know they're like oh you can hit her maybe you can try to come hit me and see what happens you know because i'm not i'm not or not me but you know men are not in tank we're not entangled in someone else's relationship so we're not going to make excuses for some guy who's acting like a piece of [...] you know whereas the the you the victim is always going to do that until the cycle is finally broken where they can see it and leave and have the life circumstances because it's not just leaving right sometimes there's kids involved there's responsibilities it's not just so simple to just pick up and go well then you should just move away it is not so easy i have friends who've been in abusive relationships um but oftentimes if if another male you know especially a stronger stronger willed man gets involved then this the dynamic is is at least for that moment has definitely changed and i don't know if that's sad or not sad in 2022 but it is something for people who if you know anybody who's in those kinds of things a tool to to really be used i don't know that it gets used enough actually it it i don't i don't know if it does and i mean like here's the thing uh inversely speaking because i i do want to make this equal to my brother has also well brother from another mother you know he's he's my bro um he's i've had to rescue him out of an abusive relationship with a woman as well i don't you know i'm not here i just want to make this clear this is not necessarily women against men this is this is victim versus abuser yeah and and for him it was more complicated because he is a brown man this woman was a white woman and she was like amber heard against him like this is like the trials between johnny depp and heard right now are hitting him hard in the heart because because of that so um i you know just just just to be clear no it's a good that's a good point yeah um i think they came up in the conversation yesterday was this feeling of like when you get to people who are trying to be abusive and controlling it that they'll cut you off from other people yeah yeah they sure do so whether it's like you know other women or other men whoever you are you know yeah from others so to be able to get that community you know it's like you know and then the community then you can stand more you'll get that support from other people right they cut you off by getting into your head that's how they do okay that's how they do it they're like oh yeah oh yeah this guy is totally nice to you because he wants to [...] you oh these women they're really nice to you because they want this from you like so you're you're essentially psychologically being more isolated than you really should be that is that's first of all how and then when they try to control you psycho spiritually and now that was a whole other ball of wax i didn't even touch anything spiritual until i literally got to pee come i'm not gonna lie to you okay because he was messing with your head around that stuff yeah i mean i i feel a little bit in ireland but like most of most of it came back when i was in pecom you know this has at least in my mind eerie similarities to a cult yeah yeah it was definitely like a cult like it it and i you know just not not that i mean everyone's techniques are different you know every victim is has different circumstances but just the idea of manipulation of fear of aggressiveness you know definitely it's if i didn't know that you were talking about like you know abuse it would sound like that sounds like some kind of a crazy cult it kind of [...] was i mean he got he had a couple other women involved with that too um and i don't know how he ended up doing that it was just it was really weird uh and i'm not gonna say like this didn't influence me personality-wise at all i just think i was i was a shell-shocked person who was kind of a ghost of myself like very much so i would say like this is like everything you see right now that this person has nothing to do with that person except for the fact that maybe here or there i had like a glimmer of something because i had a friend outside of the circumstance that i could talk about like literally anything else too um yeah how creative were you during that period you know i gotta tell you it was hard to be at all and it was kind of messed up so i ended up because i it was so hard for me to come up with anything conceptually because my brain was always so fried and when you have okay nobody talks about this but when you're anorexic you're stupid you're so stupid you've got no brain fat you need your brain to be fatty and it wasn't so i was just i was the stupid skinny girl i just was like i i can't think anymore i i got a i did scientific illustration in lieu of that it was just something right in front of you can just do it and i mean i i asked that because it sounds like from a chinese medical perspective that this kind of thing is like an isolation of the fire element of the heart fire right in particular you know like you separate from the community first so your external fire element gets kind of like rained in and then the above gets separated from the below you lose the creativity you lose all the other kind of like self and non-self even if the integrative parts are no longer integrated you're just you quote unquote a shell of yourself because you're only yeah like just like the remnants empty shell that's it that's all you got you're just kind of going through the motions and then that creativity is like sapped yeah in the chinese medical world it's kind of like the the blood and the energy and the yang feed into the heart and the heart will empower the psyche and the spirit of the person and give them their ability to connect and their ability to create and you're getting cut off from that and this is and at that time i've never had heart palpitations like that was like the first time in my life that i ever had like boom boom boom boom boom and i was like you know what today might be the day i die i don't know my heart's going crazy like and it was like that it was really weird it was always anxiety and panic and stuff too yeah i mean and it would be like for no reason i'm like just going to step in the shower and take a shower after a long day like and and suddenly your heart's just trying to escape so like the thing that i find like thanks so much for sharing this thing i find like so inspiring about this is then switching the story then it's almost when i was writing up the notes i went well these are the healing years because you break out of this you know and you were able to do this and you know it's almost like you kind of were able to make your own choices and finally break you know and then ultimately you kind of do your escape and you talk about going to ireland i don't know what you want to share about that but yeah you know what i'm gonna do it like i said i'm gonna just freaking do it um maybe it's foolish of me but you know whatever it's it's it's what happened so um when you break out of a cyclical situation first you have to hit rock bottom and i will say my rock bottom was when i didn't care if i was alive anymore and so some people are going to be like oh my god that's not sad like no it wasn't depression at all i was like you know what that sounds nice like just having a break just dying i wouldn't have to do any of this i don't have to do any of this [...] anymore this is [...] i don't want to do any of this like dying i just start over or just not or just not or just not exist like this it's fine and so i made that choice you know i made that choice and i made that choice uh really hard when uh i did have an abortion and that was my first pivotal choice i didn't know what the hell to do with myself but it was interesting because i had to move i moved my whole life out of um oh my green screen's popping um no i had to i had to move my whole life out of uh like somewhere where i was living it was interesting because a lot of people were like wow she's so anorexic but look at her eat wow look at her go and i'm like this isn't me so i had to move uh my life from one place to another place and it was interesting because the girl who had helped me out moved me into her place there was a girl student who helped me out and she was interesting because she said you're so tiny but your boobs got really big and you're eating now like that italian boy that invited you over you ate a lot i need to help you she knew okay let's see it's happening physically yeah yeah yeah right yeah and so she's so so when she moved me out like my whole world changed and then i did have the abortion and that and that pivotal moment because i had a friend walk with me through the thing even though i had to keep it in silence i realized i do have a friend i do have a friend and there is outside of the situation and she can't be touched by this situation she doesn't care she's tough she's strong it happened to her you know and and that was a pretty powerful thing um but that situation didn't last long because she ended up uh going abroad to australia and um this this person uh followed me to that apartment place so he knew where i lived and eventually i was like i don't know what to do he's gotten violent with me there he actually took my whole head and pounded it into the freaking ground but we had the same martial arts master okay yeah i'm here without brain damage go me but yeah after after that i just i was like well [...] it i'm moving to ireland and i did and i spent a year there in an unmarked house i finished my junior year of college there you know it was it was good and i don't care what anyone says like okay drinking [...] and fighting was probably a really healing experience outside of that was the you were saying that was your irish experience when you were talking about what really struck me and maybe this is something that other people can like connect with who are you know have dealt with these situations is it like we really was like finding that first place to like make that cut in this case it was about something obviously really serious that you were going through you know there was you know serious but you like the whole thing is serious but you're able to like get to this place where you were initially able to reassert your freedom reassert your identity it was this moment where you're able to do that and you were kind of describing like well that's the moment you know it's that was that one start does that make sense like like your experience because that's what i heard from i would say it absolutely was and like the thing is like did i kind of feel bad about what what i i mean like people ask like oh do you feel guilty about your abortion global i'm liking you know in a way but i feel like still like whatever life that was with me at that time had still served its purpose by helping me you know and and i think that that was incredibly bold and valuable in its own sense in its own way powerful idea yeah that's a powerful idea so yeah it was this thing of like you know like just getting that first thing so maybe that's something else other people can relate to with this if they've gone through that in their past or if they're going through it in the present or something there's that moment where you're able to reassert yourself yeah make yeah you gotta like you gotta when you make that decision you can't waver in it you have to act on it and i understand that there's some planning involved and there's going to be like you do need an escape route like not everybody was as privileged as me to like just find a friend who was like okay we're going to do this now not everybody's going to be as privileged as me to not actually have the option to not have kids not everybody's going to be as privileged to just be like [...] it i'm going to do college and move to ireland like not everyone is and i get that but one important thing is to plan and escape plan and escape thanks for sharing that that's something that's a powerful thought when you were telling me on the other day when we were talking i was like that seems like something you know really deep to share with other people it's that when you find that like that little bit of yourself again you know do it act on it you know yeah like don't let it go like hang on to that little piece of yourself with all of your [...] dear might think about you who you were before that relationship because that was very pivotal too um that's good advice good advice yeah which is kind of weird because i was 16 so maybe like maybe i do act a little bit like young for my age whatever i don't care people can judge go ahead judge it's fine it's nothing to judge not so when i was like we were talking it all through then then it was really like you know when the things became like okay so you go through these experiences and then how do you find yourself how do you hear yourself how do you reconnect to yourself and part of it was this initial being able to get out and then it would seem to me like it was all these tools within you that you tapped into that allowed you to you know refine yourself you know refund your own your authenticity your own voice and all of this so continuing on with the story the way it seemed to me and you're going to tell it in your own words but just you know so yeah to me it looked part of like i wanted to share like tools of healing that's how i thought of it and so one of the tools certainly was like creativity for you right you had your art but then you went into this whole other part of your creative life which was really like dance and performing right right so that became kind of part of this too sure yeah and i you know what the thing is i've always loved um i never really thought of myself as a physical person in the sense of like sports or anything like that like i kind of was always uh like a big klutz but i but i um i do remember being good at ice skating when i was a kid so i was just like and one thing about art like physical like painting and and sitting there doing scientific illustration is having the patience to sit in one spot for eight hours at a time six hours i don't care what anyone says everybody's like oh you went to artsville that's so like and i'm like you don't understand what labs mean like if you do not have the patience to sit there for like six to eight hours like doing one thing at a time and then like being really hard on yourself about it and then taking your hard-earned work and putting it up in front of other people to like tell you it's [...] or not [...] depending on how they feel about it like if you don't have that emotional fortitude like forget it it's not that easy it's not as easy as you think so um that said uh dance was a way for me to more easily express myself in a faster manner that that that was more like kinetic and and it's you know it like sitting there can like really it can still bottle you up it can still frustrate you you know um if you're this kind of person you might want to go out for a cigarette or just smoke like a whole pot by yourself not even sharing so i just i was like no i need to do dance i need to get stuff out of my system like right here right now just shh yeah and and that really that really helped i've been dancing now for about 20 years i would say so it's sort of like you know in the story of it it started off kind of with belly dancing as a teenager you learned from an aunt like yes they learned it like associated with like greek town in chicago or something yeah that is part of it you know that art form right yeah and then you kind of also got like you're you're you're talking about your dance mom mentor so this whole other world kind of opened up to you yeah yes yes and my dance mom mentor is also um just a fantastic surrealist painter as well so she actually at the saic dance and um then later on she she well long story short more bullying female circles nonsense happen but we moved on and away from that i guess i guess you know like dance as as a tool of expression really helped me connect more with my inner self and an audience who gave me positive feedback which is not that i was used to previous to that and it's not something that i soaked up i was still humble about it even as even growing up i was still humble about it like you've been growing i'm growing up growing into my dance career i've been i've still tried to be humble about it because you're only going to receive a reflection of what you put out i suppose that's that could be a lot of the reason why i've i've tried to maintain a positive um just maintain the positive parts of me that i put out into the social world that could be why this is like a little bit of a scary experience talking about all this other stuff but i mean why not it happened and it's and it's a and it's developmental it's great that you're sharing the other part that was like really gutsy in this story that we have to tell is you also became a person who worked a lot with fire and so you don't have to do that so a lot of your performance really involves like not just you being a fiery person but like literal fighter so if you want to share a little bit of how you learned that you know that would be kind of i think awesome for people to hear too well a lot of a lot of my life experience also stems from relationships that i've had romantic relationships that i've had with other people for better or for worse and my dance career was um really again for better for worse launched by a musician who helped me out quite a bit um even helping me develop my my stage persona and character lady india i helped him out quite a bit too honestly he's a terrible writer he thinks he's good he's not but people listened to him that i proofread everything so uh and then i thought you learned i thought you learned the fire stuff from a couple others oh i did i did okay okay sorry um yeah yeah is that phoenix rising is that what it was oh yeah um okay sorry i'm backtrack i got a little ahead of myself oh okay this is the midwestern thing we were talking about sorry sorry so um but um but my my i was with a man for about seven years um and a fantastic person just a really good guy like on it i mean the end part was sort of on and off and it was it was really hard for us to completely separate but that's kind of what happens like you don't just get rid of some like you don't you can't just clear your heart of somebody after after seven years that's that's a marriage you know yeah but but you know after we separated permanently um it was like hitting rock bottom again and what do you do when you hit rock bottom you you a fire has to burn and i did meet again just by complete happenstance another girl who is now a dominatrix by the way love her um i uh she's gonna hate it if i don't say her dom name but i don't remember it right now okay oh wait mistress jasmine sorry mistress jasmine mistress jasmine yeah no she's lovely okay anyway um but yeah she she actually taught me um how to spin fire uh jezebel aries totally taught me how to eat fire but that came a lot later um but but she was the one who really taught me how to handle it mistress jasmine and so i'm so we we just like went out on the beach and this was before she was a dumb and we were laughing and joking and talking with some of her friends and they were really beautiful people just uplifting and when you burn with people that you just meet and you have no idea who they are they have no idea who you are but they just openly accept you and it was like a diverse group of like young people and it's just a really beautiful thing and it's really magical out there on uh on pratt beach because it's this is unlikely yeah yeah yeah but it doesn't look like lake michigan and chicago thank you yeah yeah so we do we do have a you know probably close to a third of our audience is international and for those who've never been to chicago looking out at lake michigan even though it's a lake you cannot see the ends you know it just goes out infinitely so it doesn't feel like the ocean but it can actually yes very very much so it's like it's like looking out into the horizon of um just this beautiful void so what you were talking about with that is you were learning how to work with this fire and i was like well what did you get out of that and the way you were talking about that i thought was really fascinating there's a certain element of trustedness learning how to trust your legos you're describing you learn how to trust other people you learn how to trust yourself but maybe for people who've been through you know these damaging experiences that's something right to learn oh totally sorry my cat is so noisy it's her snack it's her snack time i apologize you guys but um yeah yeah actually like learning how to work with something as volatile and as dangerous as fire yes you need a fire safety that is so key and when you have a fire safety that you trust man you hang on to that person with free to your life they're making sure that you don't go up in flames they're making sure you don't die they're making sure you don't get burnt to crisp you know um you don't just hand that fire safety [...] over to anybody i made the mistake of that one time just once and ended up in the hospital so don't don't ever take it somebody you don't trust with you but also you learn who to trust you you learn how to trust yourself you learn not to get too cocky that's a big one too a lot of people get cocky and that's when they get hurt um it keeps you humble it's very sobering as an experience but also incredibly it's incredibly um it's a word i'm looking for not freeing there's there's something that comes out of you there's something that emanates from you when you work with fire so i mean it's almost like there was this sort of like rougher parts of the earlier part of your life and then this trans like phoenix rising this transformative part right and a lot of it struck me and we were talking kind of about like trust whether it was with the people you're working with and this creative things like that or the other tool of relate of healing that really struck me was that you had kind of relationship healing so you had this very destructive relationship but then you had relationships that they're all going to have their ups and downs to them but that were you know healing and transformative and i think for like a gin and tantra point of view i think i always feel like that's an important thing to talk about like the healing quality of like human relationship with each other that we can do that for each other and i thought that was like you know a really big part of the story that you shared yeah yeah and i think it's super duper important to share this too because a lot i've noticed a lot in chinese medicine there's a lot of i'm just going to say there's sex bashing i don't think it's right okay i think it's true yeah no no it's true i don't like it okay interesting and i i am very against it i'm like no you get lou wrong you get lou wrong you you get it so you you get well these are all chinese herbs lu rong is like the antlers from the deer that's kind of aphrodisiac and then they have this herb called horny goat weed horny goat with which they've been around for a long time actually the horny goat weed is named after the goats who were eating this plant and then they were just really frisky goats yeah so that's the sex positive part of chinese medicine it's interesting though so okay so this is sexuality and relationship we're talking about here's forces of healing in people's lives but before we like they're doing it like so you all think uh like tcm is presented sex negative you feel you both feel it oh we gotta ration it we gotta just make sure a kidney chain is like this we gotta like make sure like that the girls aren't like this we gotta make sure that the guys are like this i'm like listen everyone's freaking different this is crap okay what the heck is the point if you you know what there is a there is a natural serotonin boost that somebody has when they when they have a sexual relationship and and even better when it's emotionally connected i'm not saying it all has to be either you can just enjoy yourself that's fine why should there be shame in that like if there is but if there is a serious emotional connection with somebody as then like i think that that's really healthy not just with your serotonin dopamine boost but in a human connection of like trust you're absolutely vulnerable with somebody in that position and you are absolutely giving yourself to that situation and you need to trust to be able to have that and so a lot of sexual relationships i don't care if it's with a sex worker or with a partner it can be healing and i i swear by it yeah it's like uh uh you know we talk about relationship we talk about sexuality on the show and it's like right within the theme about this idea that this is a healing enterprise you know especially for people who may become situations where that were you know uh harsh right yeah so do you have like something you would advise about people who've been through maybe like these tough relationships like what you went through to transition back to make those connections healthy again because there's trust in theirs you know what i did personally for myself and this may not work for everyone is that i took traumatic experiences and i reframed them with partners or people i trusted um in scenarios that you know like play scenarios where where you are actually taking back the power by you know either talking about it like discussing it even having a safe word like things like that like quite frankly bdsm is a large part of goth subculture i know we have i'm skipping ahead a little bit sorry yeah for sure but yeah like in gossip culture which i'm clearly you know a participant with like there are a lot of sub dom uh cultural like normatives that sometimes enter into the scenario not always but you know in in my case yes so um you know i did you know i'm friends with mr jasmine i'm friends with a lot of their mistresses as well or people that present to subs doms even men who are sub duns like uh you you consider that and you consider sexist healing and especially in um a bdsm situation where you're like no like actually the sub has more control than you know somebody would think they're actually handing the control over and they have the boundaries if you don't have those boundaries that are drawn that are healthy to draw and you are the one making those boundaries that other people are following like this is you reestablishing your trust this is you reframing negative experience this is you coming out of that situation on top frankly i mean no pun intended um but i mean that is an intimate situation of trust talking about kind of like you went through these tougher experiences but now you can kind of play with some of those feelings and play with them in a safer space that you can kind of learn how to handle them in a different way right yeah yeah and yeah cause i mean like you're never gonna really truly i don't wanna say you're never really gonna truly overcome ptsd there's always gonna be things that like come up and you're like ew what is that horrible feeling oh it's from that crap now i gotta get over it so but i mean like there's there's always gonna be something that you rediscover um or or not rediscover excuse me like that you discover that or unbury or whatever but i mean there's as long as you have the tools and the fortitude to kind of like meet that and address it it won't become a it won't be a problem for very long and um that is that is a really really helpful tool that i found helped me and it helped and it's not just helped me it's helped a lot of people um and these were straight up relationships too some of them yeah as far as like the jin and tantra of it from the tantra side there is this idea of like creative play with the emotions don't repress them you know creatively play with them a little bit in ways that you can kind of explore them and then they can come tools for healing or tools for expression or tools for creativity or tools for power really in some ways add force to the personality of the person right exactly and i mean and it is an intimate thing like i mean even if it is you know like and for me personally i work with i worked mostly with romantic partners through this but like for other people who who don't have that connection with their romantic partners if they go somewhere to um experience these things um and that's totally good i mean it can be incredibly healing for them it's it's still intimate you know you still have a relationship with that person you're still handing your trust over and you're still emotionally vulnerable in a way yeah we eric and i it's been a couple years now i think it was when eric was when we went for our uh adventure you that's true yeah so it's been a long it's been a long time um but eric and i went out and we we got some dinner and then we went to a uh uh we'll say a place where women dance in the nude um so this needs some context for this story why where you know no no i have to like just for from my point of view oh from the top so the tantric side of it what happens is so i do these you know retreats and meditations around like sort of the tantric goddesses and one of the things they say is that you'll start to get goddess figures that will start to appear in your life true happens the other part that will happen is that you can go out to places that are more like sexually charged like that you know where there's a lot of sexual energy going on and just be in those spaces you know and so i've never been to a strip club in my life so i thought okay uh daniel let's go you know we'll we'll go and do this thing and it was a fascinating night daniel tell the rest of the tale but it was like it was a fascinating night because it was a really strangely tantric night and you know anyways yeah so we're at this place and i think it was actually it was they they had to keep their bottoms on i think if i remember right you know so yeah that's chicago that's the law that's the law in chicago yeah if you serve alcohol yeah yeah um and so so you know i think even like covering up the nipples which is strange but not not always it was here but yeah i guess yeah that was that i mean i'm sure if we would have gone upstairs they would have you know unsheathed i would they would have nipped the nip you know but anyways um so we're we're just we're sort of just you know two flies on the wall we're definitely not up by the pole or we're not like that engaged we're just sort of taking it all in and you know as as usual the talking about uh talking about buddhist philosophy is our way yeah than you think on the other end too oh so so this root so this this woman uh approaches us and just sort of sits down and begins to just to talk and you know started to make a long story short because we're running a little bit short on time she ended up you know she hung out with us for for i don't know eric probably happy five minutes 40 minutes like it was a time it was a long time we bought dances from like longer just like to chat to two dudes up it wasn't just like yeah it was like there's something she you know we we just started talking and it was just kind of fascinating yeah she had she uh she was she taught meditation at this um she was a psychic actually yeah so she was doing like psychic training and she also wanted to be like you know things within the subdom community but you know we started talking about all the spirituality we started talking about taoist and buddhist stuff and she was like oh this is fascinating and we just she probably should have been making more money i don't know you know but we just chatted for this long time and it was yeah and the interesting part for the conversation is that she was telling us about some of these like you know sort of higher powered businessmen who would come to see her on a semi-regular basis and you know they would go upstairs to the little kind of vip area and you know again bottoms are not coming off there's you know there's definitely touching but it's not skin to skin per se you know and i i've been a stripper i know yeah yeah well i'm just keeping i'm giving but we have an audience to remember you know um she you know had mentioned that like a lot of these guys would come to see her and sometimes they would you know get off and sometimes they wouldn't but they would come and just like i mean they you know in their in their genes like they're not you know what i'm saying like right and so but she said that the interesting part that i remember is that sometimes they would say like she said that she would just kind of lay on the couch there and just sort of hold them you know in this very kind of like vulnerable state and like for some people that was sexually arousing and some people it wasn't but they would come there you know and they would drop you know 1500 2 000 bucks for an hour you know two hours just to be there in that space with her again no penetration no kissing not nothing like this just in the i mean it's a sexually charged place like eric mentioned but it was a deeper kind of healing uh that was occurring in a place that i would never have thought that kind of thing would happen on a regular basis you know so uh it was just it was an interesting it reminded this conversation reminded me of that so i wanted to i mean like every every situation has every situation has the potential to be either damaging or healing you just have to work with it in the proper context and push it in the right direction really and that is true and when i said i said what i said earlier it was only for four days it turns out i'm a better comedian and a better bartender all the microsoft guys really love to drink with me i would say about that particular evening for my own little like you know again only time i've ever you know done that but like it was sort of one of these little contributing great things is there's daniel and i and this woman comes over and she was just like kind of a fascinating person as you why that's not surprising but she was particularly fascinating for the two of us and we talked for all this time and i was like well this is kind of like a really like uh memorable evening in this way you know this person coming through it was like i don't know it had that core of some healing it had of course some inspiration to it yeah the tantras worked the gin and tantra came through yeah it aligned the cocktails flowed and it's wonderful because the social mores of the situation are they're not they're not i don't want to say they're not applicable i mean people try to apply all kinds of social mores to everything but i'm just saying like they're not necessary they're not necessary people try to apply so many things to what is right or what is not right and i feel like um tantrically like just connecting in that sense psycho spiritually is incredibly important for us as a human race i know we're on like three minutes of time so like oh we got we got maybe another or not five to ten right okay i would i would love it if we could have like ten more minutes let's say something no yeah we have to yeah but um you were basically saying as we were talking that we're creatures that want to connect and that connection can be healing right yes and i think it is incred it's incredibly important um and and i do think we well we mostly covered it on the whole but i feel like uh in in that sense tcm like it does have an archaic view an archaic chinese view on top of it which by the way ancient china was quite conservative like it wasn't it wasn't you know what i mean there were still concubines and you know stuff but i mean at the same time like it had a conservative view and a health related view on what it meant to be this or that and i mean to some extent you're talking as a sexual being or something right exactly like um i think that there's a but in the sense of american tcm and there is an american tcm when we talk about this there is more of a repressive quality and i think that does come in with just being in america in general i really do feel like that like yes do do over sex men bald a little faster and like sure but you know who's complaining like not them not their partners well in chinese medical thought you ladies don't have the problem so you know we are the limiting factor i guess if i like you know we're getting to the end of this as i summarize it what i thought was really great you know in this whole thing you had creativity as a healing outlet you had relationship and sexuality as a healy outlet and then you had like community too and we didn't you know go into all of this but you have this goth community and one of the things you said about it was finding a community of people who see the world differently that you can become a part of you know like so the community aspect so i think those are like tools of healing for people who are coming through these things and also you said that in the goth community especially we were there that society is a bunch of [...] and if i don't say that in every episode then the episode isn't complete yeah so we were talking the other day and all of a sudden you just went yeah one of the main things is society will [...] your [...] up and it's a bunch of [...] and i was like lady india i am ready for this podcast now i mean that's what you were gonna say yeah you get me to do it but it was like kind of finding like a group of people who could see the world different you can bond with right so that's a tool of healing too that sense of community right hang on dinah shut up sorry you can't see her and bonding with animals um but yeah no a society is a bunch of [...] in that sense because what they're trying to put parameters to put people inside of that's ridiculous like what is socially acceptable for a doctor to look like to be like to talk about to have a relationship like and we're going to let society dictate our relationships now for crying out loud that's not okay like you got you you have to or not you but you know that societal you um needs to allow people to actually just be people like this is this is about just the right to exist as we are the right for gay people to to exist as they are the right for interracial marriage to exist even before that right the right for somebody to have their bicultural upbringing or just a be an immigrant and and and learn how to be comfortable we got to let people be it's right to be who you are yes yeah i hadn't thought about it as a tool of healing too but if we did creativity relationships sexuality community probably this transcendence of this limitations that people want to put on from the outside is probably like a major tool of healing too right i would say that because you know a lot of relationships that i've had these people can i mean maybe there's some sympathy for the devil on my part but a lot of these people just looked they look terrible on paper i'm gonna i'm just gonna say it i i mean i'm still friends with so many of my exes too but like no i knew like you all y'all look awful on paper but you're good people and and and in that sense you know you kind of like you're not like attracted to people that are damaged because you want to heal them you're attracted to people who are misunderstood because you feel a connection of having been a misunderstood maybe um and this is where i'm gonna roll it over to being a healer because people who are who can you know i mean like people are attracted to healing energy healing energy is attracted to damaged energy or it can be that way and it's not necessarily always the most healthy experience i'm not i'm gonna say you have to keep wise about your boundaries and parameters you know i'm not gonna lie there was a lot of people are very very very care deeply about that were um hurting or damaged and many roads lead to oz but becoming a healer in um you know you see you see what society doesn't give a [...] about and won't help somebody with because of either what they look like or their history their medical history even or who they are and you can make a you can make a huge difference the big deal that's what really struck between this conversation you were basically saying your decision to do the traditional chinese medicine route you're also a body worker too was like initially kind of this very intuitive decision there are people around me i know in my immediate environment who need healing and then you were like yeah this is part of my place in this in this world to provide this healing it's happening in my own life with the people i know immediately and it i can spread this out and share it with other people too right well it's also giving back because art can be a very selfish endeavor our art is a selfish endeavor what am i saying it is like it's it's okay that it's selfish i needed to focus on myself for that long but healing being a healer is giving back and these people gave to me they helped me heal i want to help them heal now i think that's a i think that's a good yeah that's it that's the exclamation point of the episode yeah thank you so much lady india lady india thank you so much for for coming on and for sharing being vulnerable being emotionally naked as you said in the beginning you know it was really weird but i'm here no great great story uh we definitely appreciate you sharing i'm i'm you know looking forward to getting this posted and and uh you know just having people listen to it i think it's uh it's good i i i appreciate it i know you and eric it's a healing thing it's a healing thing this year right yeah yeah it really is it was it was a weird thought for me i was pretty freaking nervous at first but thanks for making it easy on me um sorry about my cat meowing no like basically not at all not at all not at all cats need healing too cats do need cats do need oh yeah this alice in wonderland does she not have a cat named dinah thank you so much for joining us today eric as always thank you for for being here thank you to our audience for listening um for any you know question or viewing also uh for you know any questions comments concerns feedback you know we love people's uh input you can hit us up at uh jin and tantra gmail.com lady india do you have any place where you could be found uh yeah i actually do have a lady india flow page so um but you can actually find me on instagram uh um lady india underscore uh other world arts yeah wonderful all right sweet well everybody else you know how to get a hold of us uh jintantra gmail.com on on on the gram at gin and tantra yeah and for eric this is daniel we'll catch y'all the next one peace thank you thank you india