Alexandra Roxo:F*ck Like a Goddess

Tami Simon: Welcome to Insights at the Edge, produced by Sounds True. My name is Tami Simon, I’m the founder of Sounds True, and I’d love to take a moment to introduce you to the new Sounds True Foundation. The Sounds True Foundation is dedicated to creating a wiser and kinder world by making transformational education widely available. We want everyone to have access to transformational tools, such as mindfulness, emotional awareness, and self-compassion, regardless of financial, social, or physical challenges. The Sounds True Foundation is a nonprofit dedicated to providing these transformational tools to communities in need, including at-risk youth, prisoners, veterans, and those in developing countries. If you’d like to learn more or feel inspired to become a supporter, please visit soundstruefoundation.org.

You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today my guest is Alexandra Roxo. Alexandra is a writer, artist, and cofounder of the online community and ritual program Radical Awakenings. Her artistic works that explore healing the modern female narrative have been viewed by millions and her writing on the intersection of spirituality, sexuality, and healing have been featured in Girlboss, Teen Vogue, and more. With Sounds True, Alexandra Roxo has written a new book called F*ck Like a Goddess: Heal Yourself. Reclaim Your Voice. Stand in Your Power.

Before I picked up the book F*ck Like a Goddess and interviewed Alexandra Roxo, I decided to put aside any judgments I might have about the title, any preconceptions, and open myself fully to this next-generation spiritual teacher, and hear from her experiences with plant medicine, experimenting with dancing with snakes, and all of her life experiences here, what I might be able to learn from them, and I’m so glad I did. This is a very rich and inspiring conversation with someone who was born just a few miles from where I grew up, but when she was born in 1984, that was right when I was starting Sounds True. Here’s my conversation with Alexandra Roxo:

Alexandra, you’ve had such an interesting life, at least to me, with your early career as a filmmaker, and in reading about it, quite honestly, it sounded very glamorous. And I was curious what happened in your life, such that you decided to leave that, what appeared to be a very successful trajectory that you were on, to start working with people in an in-depth way in their personal healing and becoming a writer and a spiritual teacher?

 

Alexandra Roxo: Well, since I was like 18, 19, I started kind of having my own wake-up experience. I read Be Here Now, and I really felt that transmission of my whole body shuddering with truth. And I read Autobiography of the Yogi and that’s when I started practicing meditation in a very Vedic, yogic, [inaudible], kind of like, “I’m going to be really clean and pure and I’m going to be ‘good yogi.’” And one of my acting teachers in college called me out on that and she said, “You’re using your spirituality as a mask.” And I was shattered and embarrassed in front of all of these people, because I had my little yoga whites on and all of that.

But at the time it was like, I already knew that my creative path, my spiritual path were intertwined and that somehow my femininity and my sort of sexuality was a part of it. So it wasn’t so much for me that I have to choose a set career; it was more of like, where is the next piece of my awakening going to be held? And it’s a little bit of an unconventional way of living, but it’s led me more, I would say, the artist’s path, where it’s not so much about the medium, but it’s about the messaging and how to, let’s say, put out certain things into the world that I feel very drawn or called to express.

And, when I was younger, my first was a play and it was called This Little Light of Mine, and it was about a Christian girl and a Muslim girl in a rehabilitation home and how they were both kind of pushed down for being too much, their was light snuffed out. And anyway, the trajectory just kept following—I was wanting to tell stories about women’s bodies and women’s voices and women’s connection to god, goddess, divine, and so that took me to film and photo and experimental films and web show, documentary. 

And I just kept listening to Spirit, if you will, which I call, whatever, I don’t kind of adhere to one word—god, goddess, divine, spirit, love, truth, whatever. But I just kept following that little spark inside of myself. And there was a place where the spark told me that my path was not to stick around in Hollywood and linger too long. I could’ve gotten cozied up there and kind of drink the delicious nectar, the [inaudible], if you will, using that word, of like, “Oh my God, Hollywood and parties and celebrities.” And I think I could have gotten stuck in that chapter for awhile, but instead I listened and the voice within said, “Now you’re going to help facilitate healing and bring other people into the depth of your spiritual practice, and you’re going to share about your own healing.” And I was like, “Oh no, I don’t want to do that. But I have agents at [inaudible], but I’m going to be someone special.” But instead, I listened. I really listened and I let parts of my ego kind of get sloughed off as I metamorphosized into someone who was like, “Oh, I’m going to be in Hollywood” into “I want to stand for truth and awakening.”

 

TS: Now, you mentioned that some of the early books that influenced you, also books that were very influential in my life, Autobiography of a Yogi and other books about Indian spirituality didn’t necessarily incorporate the path of the artist, and certainly not the path of—let’s go ahead and invoke the title of your new book—fucking like a goddess. There wasn’t a whole lot of embracing of our sexuality in the way that traditional Indian yogic spirituality is often communicated. What was that process like for you of bringing your sexuality into your spiritual path?

 

AR: Man, it’s always been a tough one because I grew up in Georgia and they were like, “You’re a sinner.” I actually remember in the play, at the musical at church, they were like, “We’re going to make you a Sin City dancer,” and they gave me a red boa, and I felt always indoctrinated in that sort of a virgin-whore dichotomy that existed in the Bible and a lot of my early art was about that exploration. But after I sort of read Ram Dass and Yogananda and I was very confused. “OK, how can I be a robust—” also my sexuality, I’ve always identified as queer, bisexual. So how can I be this robust woman? How do I fit into these spiritual traditions that I do feel like are truth, I feel truth when I read them, but I still don’t feel like all of me is welcome here?

And that’s when I stumbled upon Starhawk’s work and sort of the more goddess traditions and the paganism that did honor sexuality in a certain way, sensuality, the earth, a communication and a reverence for the earth that I didn’t feel in yoga necessarily. And that was really healing for me. I thought, “Oh my God, finally. It’s OK to be a woman and to bleed into love to dance and to sing, and I don’t have to hide away parts of myself.” That connection to the lunar rituals and the seasons of the earth and astrology and all of the more earth-based traditions felt like an important piece of my own journey. And then later I was led into the more Tantric traditions. But I don’t think that that veil, that like mysterious portal opened to me until I was ready.

And a great teacher who I know you know, Sally Kempton, she said once—I’m not quoting verbatim but like, “You have to have been meditating for at least 10 to 15 years before you can begin to understand the Tantric paths.” You have to have a very firm ground. And so I didn’t come across any of those paths really deeply until, I don’t know, probably in the past five years, that I was able to open and explore Kashmir Shaiva’s Tantra and Vajrayana Buddhism, which is a different level of incorporation of the senses. But first, in my twenties, it was finding paganism, finding earth-based traditions and that in shamanism as well, and that was really important for me.

 

TS: In a very personal way, Alexandra, what does it mean for you for your sexuality to be intrinsic and part of your spiritual journey as a person? Not so much out there in the traditions, but for you, for you personally?

 

AR: Well, the first thing that feels the most resonant is that it means that I am acceptable, lovable, whole, worthy as a being who has sexual desires. That’s kind of the baseline, and that that is not separate from my inherent divine nature. And I was taught from a young age that it was separate, that my connection to divinity and my connection to the body were severed, like they were actually not able to dance in a glorious union together.

For me, when I was like, “Holy crap, I’m allowed to be both? Allowed to be sensual and mystical, sacred and profane, spiritual and sexual?” I felt just an immense self-acceptance, and it rang like truth because I thought, “Well, I was created like this with this body. I don’t think that was a mistake.” But somehow, the world’s kind of—in the traditions that I was sinning in, I still felt over and over, my sensuality or my senses were something that I needed to transcend and overcome and tame. That’s probably been the biggest part of my life struggle, to be completely honest, or this internal kind of question since I was very young.

 

TS: One of the things that got my attention towards the end of F*ck Like a Goddess, you were talking about practices we can do to open up to more love, to receiving more love. And one of the practices you suggest is just like we commit to a meditation practice, we can commit to a solo sex practice and bring discipline and focus, and I was like, “Huh, I wonder, does this metaphor really work? Is it really similar? Is it a meditative discipline to commit to a solo sex practice?” Tell me what you think about that.

 

AR: Hmm. It is, if we bring consciousness and breath and awareness to it. And this is not an original concept that it’s—I’m not the first to discuss this, and I really do honor the people that have come before me. I think many people are taught like masturbation per se is, you kind of get really excited and build towards a climax quickly and then it’s done or something like that. And it’s very different than a practice where you’re deepening your breath and maybe making sound and maybe experiencing some grief or maybe experiencing some joy, and you’re allowing your awareness to stay actually present even if the pleasure gets really big, right? You don’t sort of lose your awareness. That is a meditative practice.

Again, I think that that’s something people have been practicing probably for thousands of years, but I found more than just that, that an awareness practice, I found it to be really healing to get to know my body on my own and to feel like I’m making love with God. And I used to hate the word “God” because I went through the phase of being a recovering Christian, but now I kind of like the word God. I’ve reclaimed it. So it’s like making love with divinity, with everything, with all that is, and I think if you have a practice where you’re not fantasizing about A, B, C, but instead you’re staying present, grounded in your body and connected to your breath, it can be so transcendental. It can be so ecstatic, blissful. And it’s been really healing for me and a lot of the women that I’ve coached and mentored, to use a crystal wand is what I would recommend, if you’re a female-bodied person, and to just take some time and go slow and allow emotions to come up as you explore your being, taking out the pressure of having a partner there and having it be about a connective intimacy moment with another, but instead creating the intimacy with self and the intimacy with the divine.

And I’ve had visions of many different deities and other presences as I’ve been in these type of deep kind of ecstatic experiences with my body and spirit coming together. And so I recommend it.

 

TS: Now you mentioned that on your own path, you felt this guidance from inside to share your own healing path with people as a way to help others, guide others through a healing process. And you talk about healing as an alchemical process. There’s an interesting chapter in the book that is called “How to Heal Your Shit.” Whatever pile of shit you’ve received, we’re going to turn it into gold. So with this idea of alchemy, help me understand how you see the healing process of turning our shit into gold.

 

AR: Well, again, something that has been sort of written about and spoken about for thousands of years and the way that I teach it and work with it is like emotional alchemy and internal alchemy. 

So using—I use emotions as the fuel. In order for transformation to occur, you need a fuel. You need a catalyst, right? Usually the catalyst can be our pain, shame, guilt, trauma, and if you just sit with that stuff in your system, it makes a home there, right? It becomes a pattern, becomes a habit or it sort of patterns itself into your nervous system in a certain way. If and when you say, “Oh, actually I see that there’s potential. It’s like if I gathered this up as fuel for my fire, what transformation might occur that would bring about something new?”

And I mean, great art is made in that way. World change is made in that way. We’re actually at a time in history where if we actually allow for some of this really dense material to become a catalyst for transformation, then we could have a global shift in the way that we exist as humans. But that process, most people are terrified of because it means that they essentially have to sit with their own demons and society’s demons. And I say that tongue in cheek—I don’t mean that specifically like a demonic force, but they have to sit with the dark parts, the painful parts and comfortable parts. And we’ve been conditioned as humans to not be in discomfort for too long. 

Our lives are centered around comfort and keeping things pretty chill, but change doesn’t happen in that place. So our senses actually become desensitized when we’re too comfortable and when there’s not any movement. I actually find there to be just insane magic when we have the courage to take that, the most stickiest material that lives in our system, the most painful bits and put them in the soup of our own internal alchemy and say, “Let’s do this.” And just do the processes—whether it’s breathwork, meditation, writing, movement, just sitting in it—there has to be some sort of a process that you engage with, but then allowing it to move into something else. And then there’s great relief there. 

And this is also a very tantric Vajrayana Buddhist—there’s so many different traditions that teach us in different ways, and I’ve found a way to teach it, specifically, I’ve worked with a lot of women, female bodies, similar patterning, similar traumas, that I’ve found a way that works. And I love facilitating that process for people where I see people that are kind of stuck in their pain and their shame and their guilt and their fear. And then, I say, “Great, yummy, fabulous. Let’s take all of that and let’s scoop it up and let’s use it for fuel for your transformation.”

 

TS: I want to hear more about the actual specific process that you take people through. And maybe we could take an example. I think an example that might have already come up for people in hearing our conversation so far, which is a feeling of some type of shame. Maybe it’s shame about their sexual history or about their body or about some part of their sexual being-ness. And what’s the process that you go through that creates this alchemical transformation?

 

AR: It’s similar to—well, I have different ways that I work with people depending on if we’re in a group or one-on-one, but the basis of the process is to identify the thing, first and foremost, and then I always want to high-five somebody, “Oh my God, you have identified and brought awareness to the fact that you’re ashamed of your sexual desires,” right? That in itself is the hugest, biggest, most important step. Most people are afraid to bring awareness to that. So to just sit in presence and awareness and go, [breathes] “Oh, I’m ashamed of my sexual desire of A, B, C or whatever.” That’s great. That first step is so important.

Then I guide people into actually feeling the depth of that thing and feeling it more deeply. Now this might not clear in one session, this might be an ongoing process. Some of these places in my own being, I work through them and then they come back and they have a little reprise and then we do more work. That’s just a part of the nature of it.

Then, the second piece is, not being afraid to feel it and to actually—and I use breathwork, sound, and movement for this bit, but you could use plant medicine, you could use you know, Qigong. You could use something else, a different modality to get into the depths of feeling it embodied in your nervous system, activated.

And again, I wouldn’t say to do this with someone if they are in a really heavy PTSD state and they haven’t ever done this. I would say, work with a guide if you’re opening some deep caverns, and I say this in my book. But if you’re dealing with something that you feel—and I say in my book, you have to take responsibility for this process and you have to have a certain level of self-awareness that you know what you can handle.

When you’re sitting with yourself and you dive into, say, that pocket of shame, say you’re using the vehicle of one of my practice where you do breath, sound, and movement, and it kind of looks like you’re going into a trance. And this is how a lot of people used to pray and go into trance, and this was something that many different traditions, specifically around women, would go into trance and moan and breathe and pray, and that’s where I lead people. And it looks like people are having an exorcism [laughs] or some sort of an orgy. I’m not sure, but there’s no touching.

Whatever modality or whatever tool you use to get to the depth of the feeling—that’s the next piece, you get to the depth of the feeling. And now at that point, that is why it helps to have a guide, you don’t want to get stuck there in a loop and you can just be like, “Oh, I’m just stuck in my shame.” There has to be a point where your own personal will and your own internal compass and state of awareness helps you to climb out and through the other side, and that place is aware. 

There will be a ding of clarity, there’s always—I’ve never sat with a client or sat in a group retreat and not had a woman—because I work mostly with women—not had a woman find some sort of a little ping of clarity after diving to the bottom of a certain feeling or a certain experience or a certain texture, density in their being. 

And then from that, you come out the other side and it really is like that sort of old axiom, “The only way out is through.” It’s like, you go through. That’s the process is you don’t avoid the fear. You don’t avoid the shame, you don’t avoid the guilt, you actually dive deeper into it. And that’s just the way that I found that things that I feel most powerful and clear is by not trying to sort of avoid them, by going deeper into them.

And so, once people then go through that process, come out the other side, then there’s a moment of reintegration. There’s a moment of clarity. There’s—this can be done with writing, with journaling, with processing, with words, with me—and then it’s usually sort of an ongoing kind of an integration of like, “Wow. I feel so much more clear and it feels so much more open.” 

That’s it, in a nutshell, and people do this in different traditions in different ways and this—I found it’s very simple to teach people how to do this with breath, sound, and movement.

 

TS: Now in F*ck Like a Goddess, I was reading that some of the origins of how you’ve developed this practice that, you are now working with other people, taking them through, had to do with your own ayahuasca experiences, and you credit ayahuasca with being one of your main teachers. And, my question is what you learned from ayahuasca that informs this process now that you take people through?

 

AR: I talk about in my book that I did and have done plant medicine work, with ayahuasca, peyote, and psilocybin being three plant medicines that have been great for my own healing journey. And I also talked about in my book that you don’t have to do plant medicine work in order to have really deep internal transformation and healing. I see myself sometimes as a curious explorer who likes to walk to the edge and sort of bring back to the people certain elements and translate them. In astrology, I have a lot of Aquarian energy and it’s the water bearer, you bring water to the people.

In my book, I talk about how in the process of sitting with ayahuasca that I had to do that thing which I just described, but very, very intensely and viscerally which is, be taken into the depths of my pains and the depths of my shadows and have the courage to sit there and come out the other side. And I started to think, “Well, how can I translate that experience to people who maybe don’t need to go do that, or who can’t do that, but could still experience something similar where you’re taken into a journey into your body and your psyche and you’re able to learn to move through really difficult textures of feelings and experiential moments in the body?”

And I really think ayahuasca gave me the transmission because honestly, I didn’t know why I started doing what I was doing with women. It just started coming through, like the way I was facilitating groups and facilitating client sessions, and it wasn’t like I sat down and thought, “This is how I’m going to help people.” But it just started channeling through me. 

And when I really reflected upon it, I’m like, there are many teachers that have been really important on my path, and the plant medicine experience, when I’m breaking down this transformational moment— [Clears throat] Excuse me. There are many different teachers, but when I’m talking about this internal alchemy and this, moving through the portal of intense emotion or transcending a trauma or a pain, ayahuasca really taught me a lot and took me to like the darkest pits of hell [laughs] in a sense where I really thought I was dying and I had to face that. And with that, I came a lot of courage out the other side, and then I translated it as I did. I’m very grateful for the indigenous peoples, and I talk about that in the book, that have so graciously extended an invitation to me in my life.

 

TS: Would you be willing to share an actual ayahuasca story and the healing that it delivered?

 

AR: Oh my goodness. Well, I’ll maybe share two, because one is just so intense that we’ve got to follow it up with something a little bit more positive. But I had one ayahuasca experience where I asked the medicine, I said, “Hey, anything that is holding me back from really, really receiving love, I’m willing to face tonight.” And when the facilitator, who was a wonderful woman, gave me the cup to drink, I noticed that it was a big double gulp. And I thought, “Uh-oh, I never had a double gulp before. Never had such a big gulp cup.” And I was like, “Just trust.” And I knew, “Oh my God, I’m about to go waaaaay in,” and man, it took me the courage to ask for help and to ask to be taken out of the room.

And that night, whatever moved through me, it was the most terrifying experience I’ve ever been in. And I just kept saying, “Take from me—” This is kind of a Ram Dass thing, actually, “Take from me all that”—no, that’s [inaudible], “Take from me all that’s not free.” I just kept saying, “Take from me all that’s not free.” And then I would lay on the floor and I would look at this angel who was sitting with me, a human who was helping me, and I would say, “I know I want to move through as much karma as possible, this life. I’d like to get closer to enlightenment. And I know I signed up for this moment and I don’t regret it, but this is the most difficult thing I’ve ever been through in my life and I’m asking for mercy.”

And I asked for mercy, I asked for the angels, I asked for Jesus, I really called in everyone, and it was dark. And it reminded me of that moment we hear where Jesus was on the cross and he said, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Because in that moment of the deepest darkness where it’s like you feel like you’re completely alone, and I knew intellectually that I wasn’t alone, but it was, I couldn’t find love, and it was so tragic. It was like, I could not feel the light of love.

At a certain point in the night, after just begging for mercy and feeling the most extreme physical, psychological discomfort in a certain night, I felt the light starting to return, and it was the wildest experience that I’ve ever had, being sort of that close and that far at the same time. And one of my dear sisters was in the other room and she said, “Oh, I kept hearing you and wanting to come help you and hold you, but I knew you had to just go through whatever you had to go through.” And the weird thing about it is that you don’t get a printout afterwards where it’s like, “OK, this is why you had to experience that.” And in the intellectual mind of mine wants to know, “Well, what was that? Was I purging out my parents’ karma? Society? Was I tapped into the collective field?” And I might never know. That one was a big toughie. That was a toughie.

But I’ve had some other ones where I felt victorious at the end and I was able to sort of feel a relief, like I had moved through and was just dancing and singing at the end and feeling an opening of joy. Yes, it’s a powerful potent teacher. Not for everyone, I don’t think, but for me since I do, I am a curious human who likes to go poke around the edges, it’s been very important.

 

TS: Now, I read that you had some snake-dancing experiences as part of your ayahuasca journey learning, and I thought, “What was that?”

 

AR: Well, it was actually two separate things. As I love to explore different traditions and different sort of mystical places on this earth, I just feel like, how could I not, because I’m here? I’m in this incarnation, it’s the freedom to just play, which is amazing. I found this sort of symbology around snake and woman and the Bible, and also in many different traditions—I mean, most cultures have such a huge association with the snake energy, and in my early twenties, I really connected with that. I would do meditations where I would sort of connect with snake energy and I held my first snake. 

And then about, let’s see, maybe five years ago or something, I was connected with a snake priestess in LA here who had three temple snakes. And, I went into a ceremony where this wasn’t—there was no plant medicine. It was just the medicine of holding this beautiful snake and then very gently dancing with the snake. And I was so impacted by this, but I just was sobbing and it was like—I thought, “This is crazy. How can just a snake on my body, make me feel like my heart is bursting open?” It really was this wild experience.

Once I did some research, I saw that women across time have been taught this art of holding snakes or dancing with snakes and that they do all of this shamanic power in a way, and these [snakes] were particularly raised in that way. They were cared for, loving. They weren’t just—I don’t advise, or I don’t think anyone advises you just go pick up a snake and channel its power, though some cultures do that, but that was such a beautiful part of me connecting with my sort of sensual nature.

And that teacher, I met her because she worked with David Deida and her name is Londin Angel Winters, and it was a very important part of my path to connect with her and the snake, and then to really study David Deida’s worked through her, which was another sort of portal of my journey. And it’s just been—in talking about it all, I mean, I’m so grateful to actually have these things present themselves to me because that’s how it usually works. It’s like, I’m not sniffing around for what’s the next thing, but it comes to me; all of that experience came to me and through that, I got to then meet this whole other world of people that were doing this intimacy work in a way that I had to heal some deep, deep shadows around men in that work and it was a piece of my healing process that was so essential and so uncomfortable [laughs].

 

TS: It’s clear, Alexandra, that you are a wild and adventurous spiritual explorer. I noticed, though, what impacts me the most, what inspires me the most is when you said on your journey, “Take everything from me that’s not free. Take anything away from me that’s not free.” And in your book, F*ck Like a Goddess, in terms of healing and healing from inherited wounds in your family, you write, “The train stops with me. The train of this trauma from one generation to another stops with me.” That really inspired me, as well. And I’m saying these things because there’s one thing—you can kind of be like, “The outer skirts of adventure! Adventure for adventure’s sake!” But there’s something else going on with you that is different than that, and I want to underscore that. And then also specifically, help me understand this idea of this train of trauma, one generation to another, stops with me, and what that’s meant for you personally in your own healing.

 

AR: Yes. Well, I first just want to presence that all of my spiritual pursuits have really been to know myself, to know love, to know God, and to heal from pain. And they haven’t just been for the fun of it though—that would be a different life which sounds kind of cute [laughs]. But for me, it’s been because I felt a gaping hole in my chest or because I felt so much pain in my body or because I knew that there was love that I’d never felt—like, there still is, but I didn’t grow up maybe feeling loved. And so by ayahuasca by sacred partnership work or whatever, that maybe it would uncover, the love of God, something. The love of oneness or something. It came with that desire to know infinity, which I think is still kind of what drives me.

And the train stops here is like—and I’m definitely not the first person to say that, but I think we all need to say that. I think that we all inherit so much. We’ve inherited culturally, systemically, and personally so many beliefs, ideas, traumas. You can look at epigenetics, you can look at all of it—and specifically looking through your parents, through the culture around you, I very quickly understood that I didn’t want to replicate some of the behaviors that I saw, either the people around me of my social class or my skin color, or my parents doing. And I knew that meant I had to make radical different decisions than they were making. And that was really uncomfortable to go, “No, I’m not going to work 9 to 5. No, I’m going to live in this communal house. Nope, I’m going to do this.”

And I feel like in my family, it made me kind of feel like a freak in a way, but I was very aware, I don’t want to make the choices that I have seen other people make towards a life that is centered around money, goals, and productivity. That’s not my core values as a human. Choosing a life that’s driven by love and connection and spirit is not the status quo in our world. It’s just not, and I’ve held that. I’ve really held that, and now I can see, I can kind of have both, I think, so that’s good, that I don’t have to go live on a mountain top and say like, “Forget money,” but that there is a beautiful coexisting of being a lay person who has a spiritual path and has a deep practice and also can have a business and function well in the world.

But, both of my parents are survivors of early childhood sexual abuse, and so I grew up experiencing their pain very close to me and their depression, anxiety, and their relationship with food, alcohol, sex, love was very much a reaction and a part of that post-traumatic experience. And there were other things as well, but I do feel like I was able to see, “Wow, I could continue on with that.” And I saw how I was starting to have the same relationship with food, alcohol, sex, love, and I thought, “No way.” And it was like, I had to kind of—purify is not my favorite word, but I had to sort of recondition, I will say, my relationship to those things and feel how—that they were all an easy way to escape the pain and escape the sitting in the deep, dark pain.

And so I did, and I kind of feel like I sat in those years of ceremony doing for my parents. And they were really about a lot of the pain that I had inherited and that had been around me my whole life, and then how I formed as a human in relation to their pain, which was feeling unsafe and never really loved and alone a lot. I was like, “I can continue with these patterns in my nervous system, of feeling unsafe, unloved, and unmet [laughs]—and potentially fixating on food, alcohol, sex, and love, or I can see this as my fuel for my tantric fires and become something and change these patterns.” And I have. I had problems with all of those things and like in a video game, I was like [makes shooting noises] “I’m going to work through each of these things and I can do it.”

And not that there’s an end point where you’re like, “Cool, I’m done.” But I feel like that chapter of my soul or human evolutionary process is complete and I see so many clients and so many people that are still really deep in the difficult relationships to their feelings or to food or to alcohol or to sex or to love or money and using any of those as an escape or fixation or obsession. And I really appreciate helping people orient back to truth from those places.

 

TS: Now, I want to pick up on one thread. You mentioned that through the snake dancing brought you into the David Deida world, and then brought you into some healing with men. What needed to heal with you and men, and how did you do that?

 

AR: Oh my goodness. Well, my dad and I have had a very difficult relationship, which I do mention in my book. I don’t go into all of it, but I do mention it and I tried to do it in a tactful, voiceful way. My dad—now we’ve made peace. I’ll tell everybody that, but he was like—for 30 years, we had a love-hate relationship that had a lot of pain in it for me. So when my parents got divorced, m mom took me away from him and then he was just kind of shut off his heart to me for the rest of the time, and there was a lot of unkind things and unkind moments, and I won’t get into all of that, but let’s just say it was hefty lot, at times, for little Alexandra to hold and I formed in relation to that.

So yes, I kind of hated men. My dad called me fat all the time. He was talking about women’s breasts. I was so mad at him and then, I was like, “Wait a minute, and men are the ones who are making the political decisions and sex trafficking women and telling me to shove a tampon in myself?” And, I really was mad. I was mad. Very typical young, angry feminist, of course. And then I was also went through being a pretty girl who was a target for sexual assault. I think most women are. I don’t think everybody just talks about it, but it was definitely not a huge part of my life, but a part of my journey.

So I did have a lot of anger. I had a lot of anger about the patriarchy, about the way women’s bodies have been treated for thousands of years, about witch trials and the way women were killed for being priestesses and healers and herbalists, and the way I wasn’t allowed to have a menstrual cycle, the way I was taught to feel that my body was dirty. I was pissed! [laughs] I was pissed at the system and the men, and my dad was the pinnacle of that. And so I chose, I think, partners that were the opposite of that in order to avoid being around any masculine men. I did not want to be around masculine men. I wanted to be—I was like, “I’ll be around queer men or artsy men or I’ll date women.” 

And when I found the David Deida work, I had come out of a relationship with a woman and I was like, “I’m going to do this work around polarity and intimacy,” and it was tough, at first. I would stand in front of a man in a workshop and I would just be like, “I’m not opening my heart to you. I don’t know you.” And I would go through these feelings and there would be crying and screaming and it was really intense. And those teachers were so lovely that they held space for me, as they probably didn’t know the depth of the trauma that I was working through.

And eventually, I had to step away because I was like, “I need to take a break from this because too much has kind of risen to the surface at once and it can be destabilizing.” And I think that’s a part of that work. It’s like, well, you do have to do the work on yourself in order to show up to a partnership in a way, so that you’re not just spewing that old, stale anger at Dad onto your partner or whatever. But, through that work, I’ve healed with my relationship to men and I’ve met some great men who I was like, “Oh my God, they’re actually trustworthy and loving and kind and respectful.” So that’s been a major part of my healing journey in the last few years and I’m very grateful for that. Now my father and I have a very beautiful relationship. He doesn’t shame me or say terrible things anymore.

 

TS: Beautiful. Thank you for sharing that story. Now, Alexandra, your new book—I’ve said it several times, it’s a fun title to say, F*ck Like a Goddess. The sub-title is Heal Yourself—and I think we’ve talked quite a lot about that; Reclaim Your Voice, which I want to talk about in just a moment; Stand in Your Power. But let’s make sure when people hear the goddess part that they know what you’re talking about. Whether we’re speaking up like a goddess or healing like a goddess or fucking like a goddess, what does that mean to you, the “like a goddess” part?

 

AR: Yes. Well, I’d like to also just address the F-word real quick.

 

TS: Go for it.

 

AR: I put these two words together because I really enjoy the sort of play of the sacred and the profane coming together. And the word “fuck” I think, it’s like a word that holds a lot of power in our world. And I like that it’s used in so many different expressions like, “I don’t give a fuck,” or like, “Fuck it,” or like, “I want to fuck,” or like, “Fuck you.” It actually holds so many different meanings within it. The word “goddess” is the divine as a feminine entity or a feminine being, and I feel like she hasn’t gotten a ton of play. And I feel like whether you’re a man, a woman, a non-binary person, there’s probably an element of the goddess that needs to rise in you and it would be helpful to rise in you.

Now, that being said, I do say in my book, you can fuck like a light being. You can fuck like an angel. You can fuck like a butterfly. You can fuck—whatever fragment of divinity speaks to you is great.

And what I mean by “fucking like a goddess” is to let yourself be made love to by life, to surrender to this life in a way that we stop trying to control everything and we allow for life’s magic to present itself to us, which is an aspect of receiving, which is an aspect of a more archetypal feminine energy, which we seem to have lost. Our days are controlled. Everything about our lives is planned, is organized. We aren’t operating in the flow with the seasons or nature. Fucking like a goddess is actually surrendering and it’s actually appreciating and taking in all of life—the good, the bad, the ugly—and finding the divinity in all of it. 

And I do talk about this and I kind of define this in the first chapter. I’m asking the reader or the audience or the person potentially buying the book, I am asking them to kind of come up with their own feelings towards the title because they don’t know all that when they see it. But the goddess, I think, is—I think until people use it a little bit more regularly as much as people use “God,” then it’s really a beautiful aspect of the divine feminine which I think is going to be important in this next phase of human civilization or evolution, because there are so many elements of feminine archetype or different goddesses exist in different cultures that embody or stand for different parts of the human psyche, that need to be brought into light, that need to come out of the shadow.

So goddess to me is important, and even it’s interesting—Yogananda, I remember in one of his talks or books, he said, “The Divine Mother is reawakening barely, right now. We are just like a little eyelash in her eye that’s lightly fluttering, but she’s nowhere close to being awoken from her slumber.” And I feel that, and we can see that with the way people are being killed on this planet, the way that the Earth’s being treated, people in cages, all kinds of craziness. The mother archetype doesn’t put children in cages, doesn’t destroy whole peoples.

The goddess does need to rise in each one of us and it’s mother, it’s sister, it’s grandmother, it’s wisdom, it’s receptivity, it’s fierceness. It is death, it’s the feminine death. It’s all of those things. It’s crone. It’s all of these aspects and you can use those words, they’re just labels for certain aspects of the collective psyche. All of that is held in the word “goddess,” in my opinion.

 

TS: Now, I mentioned that I wanted to talk about reclaiming our voice as a goddess. Reclaiming our voice as a goddess, and in a section of the book, you talk about finding our voice and you write, “Many of us oscillate between the pattern of, ‘I’m too much’ or ‘I’m not enough.’” And I though, “I think a lot of people can really relate to that when it comes to coming forward.” I know many times I’ve thought I’m too intense. I’m just, “People aren’t going to like me. They don’t like me. It’s too much, too curious, too under their skin, ask—whatever.” And then, of course, the other side, “I’m not this or that enough, I should have done a better job.” How do you help people get out of that pattern of oscillating between, “I’m too much, I’m not enough?”

 

AR: Oh, my goodness. Well, same thing as I said before, just dive headfirst into it. [Laughs] I’ve dealt with the “too much” pattern my whole life, mostly. I think, well, probably both, but more of the “too much,” because I’ve always been kind of vivacious and had a lot to say and been passionate and thought, “Wow, what a joy it is to be alive!” And people are like, “Wow, you’re such a freak.” And for me, getting through the “too much” was just actually completely owning it and going like, “Yes, I am actually too much because I don’t exist in the status quo of normalcy and mainstreamness, and I’m actually super stoked about that.” And the artists and the poets and the musicians and the visionaries that I love don’t exist in like the mainstream boxes. That’s coming at it from a rationalization and that doesn’t quite work, usually, on a long-term for most people; they have to find this in their embodied experience of self. And to me, that happens by actually taking risks. Intellectualizing, it’s great. Let’s do it. Let’s rationalize. But really the change happens in the nervous system when we actually move through those moments of life.

One thing that has helped me with the too much-ness is to actually express the depth of my emotion in front of someone I love—not spewing it onto them, not putting it on them, but expressing it in front of them and them not run out the room and say, “You’re a freak. I’m leaving.” Now, if I held back and thought, “Well, this feeling is too much. I better just save it for later. Stuff it down in my vault with ‘too much’ feelings inside of myself until I get a disease.” If I did that, then I wouldn’t get the experience in my nervous system of what it feels like to push through the “too much” and to exist in that moment and to still be loved, accepted, or at least witnessed by someone.

I would say to people, I know that it’s scary to take the risks of being too much, but if you can let yourself be witnessed in your too much-ness, either by a friend, family member, a coach, healer, whatever it is, and you can breathe in that moment, stay present in your body, then you will reprogram yourself towards what’s too much and what’s not enough and all of it, because all of that is just conditioning. It’s not even true, it’s conditioning based on the society we live in. To me, the practice of getting through those is actually in the embodied experience of being in the moment, breathing, letting myself have a too-much moment in front of someone or as a part of my work, et cetera, and feeling that there might be a contraction afterwards where my whole body contracts, where I feel like I need to shrink and staying open and breathing anyway, and staying open anyway.

And it’s so magnificent to facilitate those moments for other people. I just love it, and it’s just like they come to life, they wake up, a part of them wakes up and it’s like, there’s more light in their eyes, more beauty, their luminosity—and it’s magnetic in a way, because it’s real. It’s true. It’s authentic.

 

TS: OK, that’s one side of the oscillation, the, “I’m too much.” What about for that person who, what they hear inside is, “I’m not adventurous like Alexandra. I’m not brave like she is”?

 

AR: So that piece, it’s like being witnessed in the experience of the opposite of allowing who you are in the moment and whatever feels like your truth in that moment, finding a way—whether it’s in writing or sharing or some way that you allow yourself to feel the depth of that, “I’m not enough,” and be witnessed in that and breathe through that in that moment and see if you can just come out the other side. Now, it doesn’t have to be necessarily like claiming that you’re not enough, but breathing through that moment and finding a nugget of truth. I feel like it’s a little bit different than the “too much” one. 

For me, let’s say, I go into a party and I don’t deal with the “not good enough” one very much, I don’t think. But sometimes I do, I think, with romance. And it’s like finding that little shred of truth in my body that I know it pretty well because I spend time with it in my meditation and in my practices. So when I’m feeling, “I’m not good enough,” or something like that, if I can keep my pulse on just that little part of me that knows that I am divine as is, and that this is how I’m meant to be, then I can kind of push through that and find my center. 

And I also will use other emotions to kind of fuel those moments. So if I was at a party and I looked around and everyone looks fancier than me and cooler than me or something, I would find some little spice in my body that could vouch for me. Something in myself. I would come back to myself and find something, some reason that I love myself. Some little something because I’m in a good relationship with myself in that moment and I’ve done that work. I’m not sure if that answers it perfectly. I’m much more of a too-much expert than a not-enough expert.

 

TS: There was one other aspect about speaking up and claiming our voice that really got my attention from the book. You write, “You claim your voice first and foremost by claiming your story, by owning what has happened to you.” And I think you’ve done a beautiful job of demonstrating that here in our conversation. You’re really illustrating that point.

 

AR: I think people are ashamed to claim their story. They’re like, “Oh, no, but why would anyone want to hear that?” It’s like, it’s the most interesting movie. Don’t try to come up with another movie. The original movie that God, existence, life gave you is probably way more interesting than just some thing that exists outside of you. You are the art—your heart, your feelings, the experiences that have woven their way into you. And it’s not that you have to identify with this story or create a whole life around the stories you’ve been given, but they are a building block. They are your prima materia. They are like this gorgeous clay that molds you into you. And, if people skip over this step of actually claiming that, then I believe it’s bypassing to an extent because it’s like, “Oh, I’m just going to go over here and become this thing and forget that this, all of this is what made me that.” It’s like, “I need to look at this.” And some of that might be tough stuff to look at.

When I work with people, I make sure that they’re not ashamed of actually claiming what their story is and sitting with it and finding some gold in it and some like, “Oh my goodness, that’s incredible,” because we all have them. I have sat in rooms of so many women who each one will come up and tell their story of what they’ve lived thus far. Most of them are quite young, and the stories are jaw-dropping, wild. I just had a workshop for 40 women who are in the program with me in May, and it was a shamanic experience, just listening to 40 stories. And all of these incredible experiences—that in itself, we were all high and awake and alive. That whole next week, where we were like, “Whoa, that was just magnificent.” There was no plant medicine. There was no nothing but just our hearts and our stories. 

Whatever belief culturally that we’ve been indoctrinated into that says that’s not good enough, or that’s not special enough, or it’s not important, you got to come up with some original idea, I don’t believe that, and I think it’s a old notion. And I think in the circles, and the people that would sit in circles around fires, tell stories, bang drums, the stories were the currency. They’re a huge part of how wisdom is transferred to others. So let us not forget that.

 

TS: I’ve been speaking with Alexandra Roxo. She is the author of the new book, F*ck Like a Goddess: Heal Yourself. Reclaim Your Voice. Stand in Your Power. Thank you so much for this conversation and for your powerful stance, powerful voice, and weaving all of these threads together in such a beautiful way. Thank you.

 

AR: Thank you so much for having me.

 

TS: Thank you for listening to Insights at the Edge. You can read a full transcript of today’s interview at SoundsTrue.com/podcast. And if you’re interested, hit the subscribe button in your podcast app. And also, if you feel inspired, head to iTunes and leave Insights at the Edge a review. I love getting your feedback, being in connection with you, and learning how we can continue to evolve and improve our program. Working together, I believe we can create a kinder and wiser world. SoundsTrue.com: waking up the world.

 

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