Episode 68: Ancient Sex, Alchemy, & The Nervous System With Katherine Smailis
Can sacred sex be the path to enlightenment? The Ancient Egyptians and many other wise traditions believed to know so. Today at the Limitless One Podcast, host Anand Sukhadia sits down with Intimacy Therapist, Nervous System Specialist, and Founder of Intimacy Academy, Katherine Smailis. Together, we will destroy the shame and taboos of sex and raise the divine frequencies sex and intimacy can create in your life. Katherine tells us why intimacy is the experience of feeling truly seen, heard, and understood as your most authentic self. She dives deep into what we can learn from ancient practices about relationships as well as from understanding our nervous system. Opening a gateway from the past to our present relationships, this episode offers great insights to help us experience deeper intimacy in our lives. Tune in to this conversation as Katherine tells us more!
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Ancient Sex, Alchemy, & The Nervous System With Katherine Smailis
Getting sacred sex is the key to enlightenment. The Ancient Egyptians and many otherwise traditions believed to know so. We're going to destroy the shame and taboos of sex and rise up the divine frequency, sex and intimacy can create in your life. Katherine Smailis is an Intimacy Therapist and Nervous System Specialist on a mission to improve the foundation of families. She defines intimacy as the experience of feeling truly seen, heard, and understood as your most authentic self.
Her unwavering passion for relational energetics and the nervous system has allowed her to not only help individuals find greater happiness within themselves and their relationships but to amplify their influence into the creation of a more healthy and nurturing home environment. Katherine is the Founder of the Intimacy Academy, where she continues to build a space for individuals to experience deeper connections in all areas of their lives.
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Katherine Smailis, how are you?
I'm good. How are you?
I'm doing fantastic. I was very lucky to spend eleven days with you. We were in Egypt together and it was a pretty magical time. On the first day, we were waiting super early in the morning for buses. I gave you supplements and vitamins. I'm like, “Take this.” You're like, “I don't know if I need this.” I was like, “Take it anyway.” We got to know each other over time. You gave a talk on the ancients and sexual practices from these wise traditions in the past and how it relates to what's going on in sexuality nowadays in culture in our individual lives. It got my wheels turning in my brain. How has life been since we've been back?
It's been crazy to sit with the integration process. I study the nervous system a lot and a lot of people get stuck in like, “Learned this,” and now I have to put it into practice or do something with it immediately. I've been trying to sit back and allow the information to fully integrate into my system and see how my body feels, taking my time to explore all of the wisdom and experiences that we had there. They were profound. It has drastically changed me in several ways, which I'm still unfolding, but all in good ways.
I feel like being back. During this time we were there and going into every temple and the pyramids, my DNA was lighting up. I felt these floods of downloads, past lives and all these things coming through. It's going to take a little while to digest all of the things that happened, but I feel like it's digested anyways on a subconscious and a spiritual level. I'm consciously now becoming more aware of who I am and stepping more into my power, which I feel amazing about. I have no fears about anything in this world, this craziness and chaos of what's going on. I feel in alignment. I know that as long as we're living our purpose and passions, then what can pull us down? There's nothing.
The thing that stuck out about witnessing you in the pyramids when you had this enlightening moment when everyone was toning around you and stuff is that you were able to achieve this specific practice of the lotus coming out of your head. You brought the energy all the way to your brain and you were able to do that while we were there, which is part of the ancient sexual practice, which we'll talk about in this episode. You were able to do that. I'm excited to know that or be able to communicate to people that it doesn't have to just be through sex that you achieved this enlightened state. It was achieved in a different way.
Sexual energy can be achieved through breathwork or sex, but there are many different ways. We went through a lot of different things like Kundalini Activation, breathwork and all the ways in which we did it. It's funny because I knew that going into the King's Chamber, from what I've heard from many different people and listening to podcasts that when you go inside this chamber, it can be a very life-changing experience. I had that thought or belief going into it. What I did was I got up into the room in the King's Chamber and started my breathwork practice. I was doing a lot of vigorous breath work for maybe ten minutes beforehand.
There were a few people before me that went inside the chamber. I was doing my meditations and oming, but also doing breathwork at the time. When it was my time to go in, I'm like, “I'm primed up.” The energy is flowing. As soon as I got in there, I took one breath and all the energy started coming out of my perineum, all the way up to my third eye and then out my crown. I was physically moving my spine, vertebrae and everything like the snakehead. It was all coming out. It was wild. It was a very magical experience for me. To get an idea of the way that your mind thinks, tell us what living a limitless life means to you.
That changed after Egypt. It's viewing life through the idea and the lens that everything is possible and that with intention and concentrated attention, you can create any reality that you desire because we are all emanations of each other. You can hop into or connect with other people's timelines and stories because we're all part of this unified field. That is a download that I got from Egypt, for sure.
Everything is possible with intention and concentrated attention. You can create any reality you desire because we are all emanations of each other.
I noticed every time somebody shared something, I was like, “That's like a story in my life.” You take all these stories, put them together, and then have yourself. That's the way it was. It blew my mind every time talking to somebody with many different backgrounds, but yet at the end of the day, we are all one.
That's what I took away from this. The experiences, pyramids and all that stuff are beautiful Kundalini Activation, but looking at you and all these other people, in your eyes and seeing that soul and seeing a familiarity, that was powerful and a reminder that, “You can do this. Not just going on a trip with some amazing people, but you can do this and find the commonality, the love and the soul in every single individual that you see.” There are probably some people that don't have souls. It's a daily reminder. Look at everybody as if they're a mirror to you because you want to treat them how you want to be treated.
Noticing in the people that you have resistance. For instance, some wealthy person, you look at them and you have judgment, seeing it as a resistance to what you don't think is possible in your own life. If you can switch that and change the way that you view them or relate to them, then you're also inviting that energy and that potential into your unified field as well.
The things that we resist the most can be our greatest teachers. Tell us a little bit about your background.
I have been in the hospital system since I've been sixteen. I always volunteered at the Rehab Institute in Chicago, which is a very world-renowned rehab center. I saw things from all over the world. I saw people, conditions, experiences and tragedies from all over. I had a very different view of healing and also death from a pretty young age. I knew I wanted to go into the healing arts. I became a therapist. I've been practicing for five years. I left the hospital system completely because I realized that it's not a very healing place. We do healing very wrong. In my five years of practice, I was also a traveling therapist. I had been all over the country seeking, “Where is healing happening?” It was not happening in any of the places where I lived, which is crazy to me.
I'm like, “Maybe Oregon, Arizona, Nevada, Tennessee, Indiana or Illinois.” Nobody was doing healing in the way that I inherently knew was possible. I left the hospital system and started my own practice, off on the idea that the people who ended up being sick in the hospital shared stories of feeling very disconnected, isolated, anxious and depressed in their life and always had to do with how connected they were to others.
We're missing this intimacy education or relating to others throughout our life. People are plowing through their lives and don't have the ability or the skills, tools or knowledge to be able to foster meaningful relationships, which leaves them in isolation. An inherent human need of all people is connection. If you don't experience that, your soul is like, “Okay, bye.” That results in the physical manifestation of illness.
People are plowing through their lives and don't have the ability or the skills, tools, or knowledge to be able to foster meaningful relationships, which leaves them in isolation.
If I can create a curriculum that's fun and also enticing of deeper intimacy and sex in your relationship, but you learn interpersonal relationship skills, then you learn how to connect deeper with a stranger on a bus, somebody at work, like your spouse and yourself first and foremost. The process of unraveling the question of why people get sick led me to how deeply you experience intimacy with yourself and then how is that projected onto others in your life.
Human connection and love are one of my highest values. I don't feel good when I'm not connected to amazing people. During the pandemic, we know that a lot of people were disconnected from their families. There so was much depression, suicide attempts and all these kinds of things going on. It was because everybody was separated through technology and not physical touch. Doing a heart-to-heart hug with somebody increases many chemicals in the body that are healing elements that you need.
When we're disconnected, that's cortisol and stress hormones take over more so and the feeling of longing or needing some other person and when we're disconnected, we disconnect from who we are at our truest selves. All these ancient cultures going back to when people were living in caves, were all community-based. Nowadays, it's harder and easier because it's harder to build a community in cities when everything is moving fast-paced, but also, on the flip side, technology has made the ability to find your tribe a lot easier and then it's up to you to decide how you want to go and build that community based on knowing you have amazing commonalities with others.
I don't know if you've ever seen the study in Psychology classes, but there are two capuchin monkeys showing what will animals' energy prioritize. Will they prioritize comfort and connection or food? In the study, the little baby monkey chooses the robotic monkey mom that has a soft blanket for comfort and they don't prioritize the dish of food that's there. We are inherently driven and motivated by comfort and connection.
That makes me sad that a monkey is seeking a robot for love and connection. We're wired to feel that way. What got you interested in the topic of sex particularly?
My practice is more focused on the intimacy piece, which is different than sex. A big part of my mission is to help people separate that because everyone can figure out how to have sex, but the intimacy piece is how you stoke the fire. It's the mental and emotional connection of relationships. It's the interpersonal dynamics. It's being able to feel seen, heard and understood as the person you are, like your authentic self, which helps improve the sexual experience. It's the meat and potatoes that keep relationships nourished.
We don't ever talk about that, the mental and emotional side, and lots of people are not comfortable exploring their emotions. That leaves repression in the energetic dynamic of the relationship and then subconsciously, you start to resent your partner for not understanding where you're coming from. If you don't understand where you're coming from, you don't spend time developing your mental and emotional understanding, you're always going to project frustrations out onto your partner because you're not exploring that or communicating that well to them.
The first thing for the audience, anytime we mentioned sex, we're talking about sexual energy. We're talking about intimacy, sexual energy, and going from all your energy centers. It's not the throat chakra of having sex, but it's creational. It's going into your heart, pineal gland and then out. It's an entire field. When the sex is stuck in the base, that's when we're only talking about the physical act.
Secondly, what you mentioned is powerful. Let's break this down. Let’s say you're in a relationship and you have this certain need or desire, and then you have a couple of options. The first thing to do is to suppress it. We're suppressing that energy. We're not talking about it, but where's that energy going to go if it's suppressed? At some point, it's going to bottle out into some negative ways or you find a practice on your own where you can move that energy, whether it's having an affair or going into some Kundalini Breath or something like that.
The second option is to talk to your partner and express it through the throat chakra and talk about your needs and your desires. Your partner has the ability to say, “I want to work towards working with you,” and then they share their desires and then it becomes a situation where you're working towards a common goal, you feel heard and they also feel like they want to bring more harmony, peace and love into the relationship.
My partner's desires are as important as mine. The other option they have is to dismiss it and say, “That doesn't matter to me. I'm going to do what I want to do. It's your problem. You deal with it.” This is what's happening in many relationships out there. How do you look at the situation and help other people figure that out and navigate when they're an individual or whether they're in their partnership, but the level of awareness if both people that are maybe a little bit different?
We live in a micro philosophy. We're very much in the granularity of situations. It's hard for people to experience a wider view of what you're in because we are mostly sympathetic dominants. We're in this fight-or-flight state. Being in this arena of so much stimulus, emotions and stuff happening puts us into a narrow-minded view of a much larger picture of what relationships can do for you in your life. Both of these spectrums macro philosophy or futuristic thinking, like where we're headed and then ancient practices were in the middle of that. If you look at what those beliefs were, they saw relationships as a tool for ascension, an opportunity to determine if something is inherently for you or not for your soul growth.
In ancient practices, they didn't put an emphasis on, “You need to be in a relationship like we do now. That's the end all be all.” No, the relationship is to help you to expose obstacles to your ascension process. They knew if this isn't your divine connection, divine union, or you're personally not at that space yet, you still have room to grow individually, then the relationships you call in are simply teachers for you. They're here to show you parts of yourself that you can't consciously see on your own and they help you to ascend until you get to a space where you reach enlightenment on your own and then you also attract someone who's at that level. You use that relationship to then start to transcend your physical experience. It's more of an energetic relationship that helps you transcend the physical.
In the macro perspective, relationships are funny because you want to hold onto your partner and possess them. It's almost like a childlike view of, “This is my toy. I can't let this person get away from me. I can't let them be who they are or ascend above me. You are in my little bubble. You stay right there.” That mentality that we have been indoctrinated in based off of religion came from a good place, but within the confines of this marriage that you put into this bubble, and it has all these restrictions because of laws, it puts people into like a cage.
Esther Perel has a book called Mating In Captivity. It talks about how we're like these zoo animals in captivity. We put ourselves in all of these little boxes. If you try to put an animal in a box, initially, they're going to try to get out and escape. Eventually, they become very docile because they can't get out. We're like these repressed animals that either suppress things that we're feeling or we have these emotional outbursts that look very irrational, but it's part of our innate human animalistic behavior that stunts the growth of how people could potentially use relationships to continue to evolve and ascend individually.
Ancient Sex: Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence
I've experienced all of it that you described. In prior relationships, I realized every single one was trying to teach me the same lesson, to love myself more, to truly fall in love with myself and honor myself as I would somebody else. Being in this relationship, I realized that it's about ascension. What is it? How can I lay the foundation of support for my partner to reach that ascension and become the very best version of herself? She and I talked about unconditional love, whereas I love her to a point where I want her to ascend the best way she needs to and vice versa. I want her to be able to do that. I feel that we both want that for each other.
Going back to the ancients, they looked at it because they knew that this life is about obstacles and challenges, but then also growth because without the challenges, you don't get the growth. In the ancient’s view, there are no timelines. There's not one little life that you live for maybe 80 or 90 years and you die. Your soul needs to ascend to learn all the lessons that it needs to. Going into the symbolism of especially ancient Egypt and relating to divine masculine and feminine, can you tell us a little bit about what you've learned through your studies in it and the experience on the trip we went on?
It was beautiful for me to see all of the images on the walls of different depictions of the masculine and feminine, but it was equal. They didn't tell us what they were trying to communicate. We couldn't decipher the language on the wall, but the pictures that they showed of the masculine and feminine were embracing. They were feeding each other the onk of life. They were equal in size and shape. There was no gender that was smaller or lower. It was equal.
You felt this radiating support, equal love and respect for each other written on the walls. One thing that I noticed in my practice is that there are a lot of people right now focusing on polarity work, helping people to embody the masculine and feminine but are missing a piece that's important. It is regulating the nervous system and witnessing the pain that you've experienced so that you can naturally start to express your innate polarity.
It's hard to force yourself into being feminine if you don't feel safe in your own body. It's hard to be a more masculine man if you feel like no one's ever witnessed your pain. It's almost like you're putting yourself into more of a box by putting on a mask of like, “I'm going to practice being more masculine, but I still have this other side of me that's never been seen.” If I'm working with a couple, I have them work individually first so they can siphon through their stuff.
Ancient Sex: It's hard to force yourself into being feminine if you don't feel safe in your own body. It's hard to be a more masculine man if you feel like no one's ever witnessed your pain.
After they are seen, heard and they understand all of the ways in which, like you mentioned, I was attracting the same person that was trying to teach me the same lesson. If you don't have any awareness to that, you can continue on or it's difficult for you to step into your masculine power if that process or you never had that awareness.
If I'm working with a couple, I help them individually understand themselves, move through the residual effects of whatever they've been through, and then bring them together in a session where they naturally start to embody more of the masculine protector, the masculine energy. The woman can lay some of her hyper-independence down, for example. She starts to open up more to the man once she has this like, “I don't have to suppress the way that I'm feeling. I can trust myself. I know what that looks like. I know what that feels like,” then she can start to trust her partner. When you start to trust the masculine, it fans his flame and he wants to show up more for the feminine.
It's crazy because it's hard enough to do that on your own, but then you swim into the waters of what's going on in a society where there is so much confusion regarding all of it. If somebody wants to be more masculine, then masculine ideals or even divine masculinity is being attacked like, “That's misogynistic,” or whatever. It's like trying to navigate not offending anybody but also being your own true self. How do you focus on enlightenment and reaching a higher state if you feel that there's a lack within one-self? The first step is you have to find that baseline within yourself where you do know that you are complete and then you can start building the blocks of what you want to create.
This whole universe needs the masculine and the feminine, like you were talking about in different temples. Dendera was one of the most magical places I've ever been to. I felt a divine feminine force there. It was beautiful that it allowed me to step more into my true masculinity. When you have the divine feminine, you embrace it and it helps raise up the masculine and then vice versa, to be able to play in this joy of life. Having the whole spectrum of both energies is what we need. We don't need polarity. We need to come together.
Dendera was also my favorite. I went into it. I didn't follow the group around. I was trying to sit in the feeling of it because of the tone and the vibrational intention that I put into now my practice. When people come into my space, I try to radiate the feeling that I had in that temple so that they can absorb that feeling.
What did you specifically feel in Dendera? For those that don't know what Dendera is, it is the temple of Hathor essentially. My feeling is that it was a temple constructed to divine goddess energies. It was also a mystery school where they brought kids as young as 6 or 8 years old, those they felt they could initiate properly and became priests there. It would be a very long time period for them to become a priesthood. They would learn all the different modalities of mathematics, science, religion, being a priest where they're performing ceremonies and all this kind of stuff like the polymaths of these days, where they're learning everything and then they can go and teach other people. That's one aspect.
The other aspect of this temple was going in there like a healing space. When I went into each room, there was a very distinct feeling in all the different places. One of the coolest things I saw was there was a little temple to the side of the main temple complex where you go in there and you see this doorway, but there's no door there. It's presented as a door, but it is like a Stargate. There were a lot of things happening in these places. I don't think they did anything that was not intentional.it's interesting to be in this feeling. I would love to know about what your experience was when you were in there and what you were tapping into.
To expand on that theory is that the goddess of Hathors, there are several. They had an instrument, it was called the sistrum. They would use the sistrum to channel frequency from a different galaxy for healing. They believe that it is either hidden there or they were able to channel the frequency and put it into the pillars that are in the front. Right when you step into the place, you are exposed to 432 hertz, an incredibly healing and retuning frequency. You feel that. I believe our tour guide was saying that he doesn't believe a lot of stuff that's said. He is always very skeptical about people's theories and stuff, but he is like, I cannot discount how much information we've received about this specific place, in particular, being incredibly healing.
There is supposed to be a Zeta machine, which is a time machine that is hidden there. It's like this intergalactic station for healing, travel, and the feminine. It was mind-blowing. It is well-kept. That was another thing that blew my mind. Being there in Egypt made me sad to see how they were living. I projected a lot of like, “They must be sad and miserable because it was a poor country.” There was a lot of garbage around. It seemed like a lot of poverty. The houses that people lived in were falling down.” Amongst that, you have these magical temples that are pristine and well taken care of. It was mind-blowing to see the contrast.
Even some of the original paint is still on many of these complexes. These are thousands of years old. Who knows how many thousands? The version of reality that they share is it's 3,500 BC to 328 AD around there, but it's crazy. You're talking about this time-warp travel situation. It could be right behind the Stargate that we see. You don't know what these powers hold, but there's something that's very sure, is that there's a feeling when you go in there. I try to also separate a little bit and go on my own and not be engaged in too much talking. I love talking to everybody, but I felt like there was a mission for me to go there.
Next time I’ll just be absorbing everything and meditating. I wanted to see all the hieroglyphs because they're wild, the crypts in the basement and there's no light or smut found from the lanterns, candles or anything like that on the ceilings. It was, “How do they light these things up? What is going on here?” These temples were designed in such a way to inspire awe because they knew that they would last and they have so much love for humanity that they wanted to be like, “This is what's possible and it's no big deal.” It's like, “We do this all the time and you should be doing the same thing.” That's the feeling that I got going to this. My view of being limitless has increased so much since downloading all these ideas from that trip.
It felt like they were trying to leave a manual in every place like, “We'll write all of the information from the floor all over the ceiling and they'll get it.” We're like, “What does this mean?”
I think they're QR codes. I don't think we need to consciously understand anything because I was basically unzipping the files at night when I was dreaming. I was waking up in night sweats when we were on the Nile River Cruise. Every night for the first 4 or 5 nights was massive night sweats. I'd wake up and I'd be happy. I was like, “This is what it's like to be a mushroom all day long, every day.”
You QR code them with your eye and bring them into your brain.
Our visual eyes and third eye. I believe that it's a transmission. Either we're getting a wirelessly or we're taking a snapshot of the QR codes. It's being in there. You're absorbing the geometry, the energetics and all of the symbols whether you know it or not. That's the message that I got, at least.
Thank you for that. That makes me feel a lot better about things that I thought I missed.
On the topic of the ancient sex. What did they use sex for? I know there were a lot of reasons for enlightenment, curing, manifestation and all that kind of stuff. They knew that this energy was powerful. Talk a little bit about your belief in why they spent so much time talking about this through their hieroglyphs and messaging.
Sexual energy is the most potent energy that we have access to in our own experience. They knew that you could cultivate it in various ways. They didn't teach the principles to people who were living in their lower three chakras. It was like a secret thing that they didn't talk about until people reached a certain level of initiation to where they could handle the potency of this energy. Initiates would go through lots of training and then be handed down different ways that you could raise this energy first and foremost by yourself. They always taught like, “This should be an individual practice. You do it through breathwork. You do it through meditation.”
Ancient Sex: Sexual energy is the most potent energy we have access to.
You raise these serpents that start in your pelvic floor or root chakra. You can cultivate a lot of energy and you bring it up through your chakras into your brain. It's crazy to even talk about it without giving you images and all this stuff. The two serpents raise and then they get into your brain where your pineal and your pituitary gland connect. They create an explosion of chemicals, which is “enlightenment” that bathes all of your cells with this magical energy.
They knew that you could take the energy from this orgasmic experience that you have and channel it into two things because we are creators. We create our reality, but we also create human life. If you're not creating human life, you can use that same energy towards a goal. There are lots of people who waste this energy because they don't understand what's happening. If you're living in your lower three chakras, what you would manifest from that process is probably not good for the greater good because it's coming from a more like scarcity survival mode place.
They would wait to teach these principles, but truly you could use the energy that you're cultivating for healing. You can direct it towards healing in yourself. If you have a partner, you can start to send energy to them through a practice called the microcosmic orbit. You send energy to them to help heal. You can use it to send out and manifest things to come back to you. You can use it for creation. It's a process in that you can create any sort of reality that you want with this energy.
This life force of ours is powerful. Both women and men are engaged in these higher realms. If a person is masturbating all the time and wasting their sperm, there are a lot of things that can go wrong when you're not using this energy towards something that's higher for yourself and for humanity like a simple base practice. The other part of it is that was a mystery school, in Ancient Egypt where they would only start teaching you when you're ready. Where do you get to that point where you're ready? The thought comes to my mind is when the student is ready, the master will appear. I believe we're in a mystery school with all the chaos and everything going on in the world.
We had to do a lot of work in order to get to this place where we can all coincidental synchronicity, all find each other in the same place and have these amazing magical experiences. It doesn't happen where you wake up one day after being third eye closed and be like, “I'm going to go ahead and start learning about this stuff.”
You have to start mastering those lower three chakras. Once you're ready, the clues are all out there. When you look around in symbolism, the Masons and all this kind of stuff, the back of the dollar bill, they're showing you all these clues, but only for the initiates who are ready. You can start now understanding the awareness where it opens up a second layer or level of life where, “Things are not exactly as 3D as that we imagined them to be.”
I also want to expand on that because, for readers, it's frustrating for you to read like, “I'm curious about that,” now I'm like, “Where do I start? What do I do? What's the training process? How do you become a certain level of initiate?” I feel like there are several ways that you can do this. What I've found is helping people to understand their nervous system. If you are super activated and you are hypersensitive to the stimuli around you and you end up continuing to be in a sympathetic dominant state, or you're more sensitive to that, you close off your ability to see lots of resources in your space. You get tunnel vision.
It's the same reason if a lion ran into the room and you'd feel scared, you would lose sight of like, “There's a door next to me. There's a window.”You would panic. You're moving very primly instinctually and you lose the ability to connect to higher levels of thinking. Helping people to understand this baseline of how your nervous system is always trying to keep you safe and alive. Once you regulate that, you start to open up to see a lot more things in your day-to-day that you might not have been able to see before.
Your nervous system is always trying to keep you safe and alive.
There are many people that are having a dysregulated nervous system. Even when we get stressed, there's no way around it. Our limited thinking and creativity, you're not thinking creatively about how to grow and expand when you're nervous about something, fearful or whatever it is. How do we first create a practice in our life to start regulating the nervous system? Step one to getting to higher levels of awareness is to have that nervous system totally regulated and the ability to regulate it yourself rather than from outside circumstances.
First and foremost, it is understanding what it is because if you say the nervous system to people, if you know about it, it seems like inherent knowledge, “I'm going to continue to talk about it,” but you might be missing where someone is and their understanding of what the system is. I went to medical school and I never learned about the complexity of the nervous system. It was always very like, “This is just a system.” There was not a lot of emphasis on that.
What I have found is that it is the basis of health because you're always operating based on if you think you're safe or not. If we take out all everything else, all the complexities of what people talk about in the healthcare space, at a foundational level before anything else, your nervous system is conducting your instrument, “Am I safe or not?” If it says, “I'm not safe,” then you're pumping adrenaline and cortisol into your system, which starts to create discord in all the body systems. Now you're an out-of-tune instrument which then ripples into hormone issues, low libido, fatigue, GI issues, immune function issues and disconnection.
It's all the ripple effect of a dysregulated system. Describing that your nervous system is your alarm system, roughly 40 miles of nerves within your whole system. You have nerves that go all the way out to the tips of your fingertips out into your toes at the top of your head. They're all over. The process of which they give you information to process and be able to decide, “Am I safe or not?” is through your senses. Your senses give you information and then that information is processed through your nerves, up to your spinal cord, to your brain for processing.
Lots of people are not living in their body. You've probably seen people that are very logical and rational. They're trying to rationalize things, but they don't spend time physically in their body feeling into the present moment, feeling connected to everything around them. They're disconnected from all of the information that is coming in, trying to give you information on if you're safe or not. The complexity of this, lots of times what you're experiencing in the present moment is influenced by past experiences that you've had.
Ancient Sex: Lots of times, what you're experiencing in the present moment is influenced by past experiences that you've had.
It might not be that you're not safe at this moment. It's your body's saying, “We've been here before. It's reminding us of this time and we are little where we are unsafe. It produces the same outcome.” It's a confusing system. If you don't know what it is and are confused by it, you'll constantly not understand what you're experiencing in the present moment.
You're experiencing the same things over and over physiologically and emotionally when you're carrying all those ideas or beliefs from the past and then all of a sudden, it's a program. This software program is opening up. As soon as X happens, Y will occur inside the body. It goes back to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Safety is the first thing. A lot of it has to do with making the decision whether you're regulating your nervous system yourself through your own thoughts and decisions on how to get to your place. Breathwork is an amazing example of how to do that yourself and get yourself out of a parasympathetic state.
The other aspect is going on social media too much, “Did I get enough likes today? Who is watching my stories?” All these kinds of things. That reminds us, “I didn't have enough likes. This reminds me of this time when I was going through this.” There are many different ways. All this external stimulus, watching the news at night is going to put us into a sympathetic nervous system environment.
How do you control that? Do you wake up every single morning and look at your phone, “Who texted me? Who emailed me?” or are you going ahead and starting with the morning routine? Having the understanding that you have the ability to control your environment or reset at any moment is super important. I remember when we were on the cruise. You brought us through a five-senses exercise. Could you do that a little bit for us? Maybe you can walk us through it?
To expand on that, a big part of your being able to take a response, manage or navigate your nervous system is taking 100% responsibility for yourself, which is also hard because lots of people don't want to take full responsibility for themselves. You take full responsibility for what you're being exposed to that activates or deactivates your system. One of the ways or tools that you can use to help you say, “I know at this moment I'm feeling activated,” or even to practice a skill to help you develop what peace, calm and safety feel like to your nervous system is an orientation exercise. You can do it right when you wake up or when you're sitting talking on4 Zoom. You can do it at any time. What I'm going to have you do is look where you're looking. Look right straight ahead of you and notice what you see in your environment.
I want you to look and find something. See if you can see something in your peripheral or further down the road, or if you're sitting, you're going to find something in your environment, either above you, below you to the right or left. Letting your eyes go to that object and seeing this object in front of you. Notice that your eyes are going toward the object. You're like, “My vision, I'm going towards this object.” Instead, I want you to picture that that object is coming to you. It's starting to float to your eyes, or at least it's meeting you halfway. You don't have to try hard to look at this object anymore because as you are looking at it, it is looking at you coming to your eyes.
You can relax in receiving whatever you're looking at coming to you and let that sit in your experience for a second. Now I want you to move to your auditory sense. Whatever you are listening to, find a predominant sound in your environment. Instead of your ears going to that object, sound or vibration, letting the vibration come to you. You don't have to try so hard. It's coming to you, or at least it's meeting you halfway.
You are in the mode of receptivity. You're showing your nervous system that you're safe at this moment. The last one I'll have you do is notice what you're sitting on. While you're sitting on something, notice that it's also holding you. It's supporting you. You can also do this exercise when you're eating something with the smell and the taste, but a quick orientation exercise every day will help you get in touch with sight, auditory, and tactile.
That continues to remind your nervous system that you are in the present moment, grounded and safe in this specific moment. That will help over time, that will help you continue to build your parasympathetic state so that you can always return to a sense of safety within yourself, even amongst the chaos you experience.
It's beautiful to do that in a few minutes on a daily basis to get us back into the present moment. There are a couple of things that went through my mind. First of all, when you said, “Don't try so hard,” I was thinking of that not even a millisecond before you said it. It's like, “Why do you have to try so hard to look at something and allow it to come in?”
There's always an equal energy exchange and everything that we do. Everything we see, if we live in this holographic consciousness, is, “What I'm looking at is looking back at me.” Don't think you have to always go ahead and push forward and try to have that warrior energy and look, “I'm going to look at this thing.”
No, what you look at is that energy exchange. Be okay with it. Being in that receiving energy also puts us into more of an abundant state that, “This thing can come towards me.” I know a lot of meditation work and going into the quantum field. Dr. Joe Dispenza's work is all about that. Don't think about how to create these things in the 3D world and what you want to manifest and attract. Get to a place of total stillness. That's where creation happens.
I talked to our friend about the Shiva and the Shakti energy. The Shiva energy burns everything to a crisp in order to have the potential to create anything again. It’s like the dance between the divine masculine and divine feminine. This dance is always going. It's going to be creation and destruction at all times. When you go into that empty place, that place is the potentiality for absolutely everything.
It's this game that's going to continue forever and ever long after our consciousness is in any existence. This is beautiful, powerful and simple at the same time to be able to do these things to get us back into that present moment because the most important moment in the universe of all time. It’s right here and right now. How do you work with your clients? Tell us a little bit about the academy that you created.
First and foremost, I focus on individual development and understanding to know thy myself at a deep level. What that ever that looks like, if a couple comes to me or as an individual, I work individually with them for four months as an intensive, teaching them lots of curriculum. Depending on if it's a couple, I see them once a month. They'll each have their own experience while bringing them together.
I have an opportunity to bring people through the ascension process to meet at an intimacy retreat. That's going to be happening later in 2023. There'll be a singles opportunity. It's people who are in the space of doing the work, raising consciousness and creating the space for a divine partner. It's hard to meet a divine partner on Hinge, Bumble or Tinder.
I tried for years and it didn't happen. My partner ended up walking in into my business. That's how it happened. Individually, you have to be in the right space.
My hope is to help people along a curriculum of understanding like the Ancient Egyptians practice. Getting yourself to a certain point and then facilitating a space for people to meet in a modern, organic way. It'll be like a singles retreat to work on deepening intimacy, meeting people and connecting to them in an organic way, and then a couple's retreat. Those are all on the books. I also am launching a group that will run several times throughout the year. It's nine weeks and it's to teach a crash course of Emotional Intelligence, Nervous System Regulation, and Sacred Intimacy Principles.
What are some of the biggest challenges that are facing your clients?
The lack of prioritization on the internal transformation. People still are in the mindset of like, “I don't want to spend money on something I can't tangibly hold.” Truly, the more you transform internally, the more you start to project into your unified field whatever you want in this materialistic confirmation. Once you do the inner work, you have a greater appreciation for the things that you're physically manifesting instead of the other way around.
It's like people are like, “When I have this thing it will bring me happiness,” but it's always this never-ending pool where you're always pushing the goalpost of, “Now I have this thing, now I want that thing.” Until you find out what you want, what fulfills you, and what brings you happiness internally, you'll never see that projected outside of you.
Ancient Sex: Until you find out what you want, what fulfills you, and what brings you happiness internally, you'll never see that projected outside of you.
What is your favorite client experience, where they came to you and how they ended up after working with you?
One of them in particular that popped up is I started treating a woman who was on the verge of breaking up with her husband or ending the relationship. They had a child together. She was like, “I don't know what's going on. I'm not happy.” After working with her, she was like, “It's all me. It’s all the stuff I'm projecting onto him.” Once we healed that, she felt madly in love again with her partner and they ended up getting pregnant and very intentionally getting pregnant. The first one was an accident and this one was like, “We made a love child.” The opportunity for a child to be made purely from love, intention and conscious choice to have him. I worked with her a few years ago and she still messages me with pictures or things that are still happening from doing this work.
When we vacuum out all the things that are holding us back from our stories, then we could be like, “I have this new level of awareness.” It's always ourselves. There's never anything outside of ourselves that we want to change, it's, “Look in the mirror.” Can we step into our full power without harnessing that dormant intimacy and sexual energy within us?
Life force energy is sexual energy. If you're not in tune with life force energy, I don't think that that is connecting to your fullest potential.
Thank you so much for coming on. This is incredible. I think our audience is going to learn a lot from this. Why do you think you came here to Earth as Katherine Smailis? What did you want to experience?
I am Double Cancer in my astrology chart. I don't put a whole lot of emphasis on that, but the more that I have come back from Egypt, the more I recognize that I have the capacity to feel a lot from other people. At a global level, I can tap into the pulse of what's happening at a macro scale or this mass consciousness current level of emotion, which is sometimes painful and feel a lot. I also think that it's beneficial to be able to have that perspective and then to step in as a leader and a guide in helping those who are curious to find their way through this next phase of evolution in themselves and evolution at a global level.
The thing that I picked up about you energetically is that you have such a strong presence and simply being in a place raises the energy. I noticed when you talk to people, conversations, everybody's very engaged, but you're able to listen to somebody be present with them. It's almost a transmission that you're offering to them. Even when we're doing the ecstatic dance, you were in it and keeping the energy up for everybody. It was cool to see that.
It's easy to be like, “I'm going to hang out and do my own thing.” You were engaging people. It wasn't your job to do so. That's the type of person that you are. Any place that you are, you're going to play full out. That's what I appreciate about you. I'm trying to also do that myself a little bit more and play a little bit bigger role in every situation that I'm in. That's the one thing that I did notice about you.
Thank you for that reflection.
I'm just a mirror. I want you to be to see it as well. What does God mean to you and what do you think God is?
I think God is us. I like to view God as a source or universal frequency that we're all little pieces of. God is the creation and then creation is love. God is love being witnessed in a physical form for us to experience through all of our senses.
God is love witnessed in a physical form for us to experience through all of our senses.
How can we learn more about you and how can our audience get in touch with you if they want to work with you, which is a great idea?
You can find me on Instagram. My Instagram is @Intimacy_Academy. My website is IntimacyAcademy.org. There are lots of opportunities on there. I have lots of free webinars and stuff that I do all the time. I’m trying to create accessible knowledge for anyone at any level. You can find my email there, too, if you have any questions or DM me on Instagram.
Your words are full of wisdom. I appreciate having you on here. We're going to produce this thing and people are going to love to read this. Thank you.
Thank you.
Important Links
@Intimacy_Academy – Instagram
About Katherine Smailis
Katherine Smailis is an Intimacy Therapist & nervous system specialist on a mission to improve the foundation of families. She defines intimacy as the experience of feeling truly seen, heard, and understood as your most authentic self.
Her unwavering passion for Relational Energetics and the Nervous System has allowed her to not only help individuals find greater happiness within themselves and their relationships, but to amplify their influence into the creation of more healthy and nurturing home environments. Katherine is the founder of the Intimacy Academy where she continues to build a space for individuals to experience deeper connection in all areas of their lives.
