EP100 - Shame, Sensuality & Self-Worth with Natalie Vires

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What if your shame wasn't yours to begin with? What if the heaviness you've carried in your body for decades was an energetic inheritance, silently passed down without a single word spoken?

In this week’s episode, Aimee sits down with Natalie Vires, intimacy coach and creator of The Blowjob Queen course, to explore the often taboo connections between our relationships with our fathers, our sexuality, and our sense of self-worth. 

Natalie takes us through:

- How silent shame and childhood dynamics shape sexual boundaries

- The energetic impact of parents’ emotions and behaviors

- Reclaiming your voice; literally and metaphorically

- Why pleasure, consent, and self-connection matter in intimacy

- How vocal somatics and humming can regulate anxiety and emotion

- The power of retreats, coaching, and community in healing the self

And so much more!

Natalie Vires is a transformational coach, retreat facilitator, and voice liberation guide who helps people reclaim their sensuality, confidence, and authentic expression. Her work combines inner relationship healing, somatic embodiment, and vocal practices to guide clients into deeper self-trust, intimacy, and joy. Whether through 1:1 coaching or immersive retreats in places like Mexico, Natalie creates spaces where people feel safe to drop their masks, feel sexy in their own skin, and speak with the full frequency of who they are.

Connect with Natalie: 

Follow her on Facebook: Natalie Vires

Connect with Aimee:

Instagram: @aimeetakaya 

Facebook: Aimee Takaya 

Learn more about Aimee Takaya, Hanna Somatic Education, and The Radiance Program at⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠www.freeyoursoma.com⁠⁠⁠.⁠⁠

LISTEN WHILE READING!

A: Heads up, listener, this episode contains sensitive topics around adverse childhood experiences, sexual issues, explicit language, and the exploration of the shadow side of ourselves. 

I'm speaking with Natalie Vires, intimacy coach and soul siren, and we invite you into this conversation in the spirit of transparency, compassion, and the acceptance of the multi-dimensional experience of being human. So stay tuned.

A: Every day, there is a forgetting, and every moment there is the possibility of remembering. Remembering who you truly are, awakening to your body, to the inner world, to the experience of being alive. Here is where you find the beauty, the joy, and here is where you free your Soma. I'm your host, Aimee Takaya. I'm here to help you move from pain to power, from tension to expansion, and ultimately from fear to love. 

A: Hi Natalie. 

N: Hi. 

A: Hi. I'm excited for this conversation today. I think it's been probably like two years of following your posts and commenting here and there, exchanging messages here and there. The way you share your way of sharing on social media is very bold, but vulnerable, funny, very real. That's something that I just really respect about you, and made you definitely like when I said, hey, who wants to be on the podcast? You said me. 

I was like, yes you, because I've been really inspired like seeing the way that you share and communicate about your own personal experiences and the things that you've gone through and also the moment to moment day to day stuff that shows up in, you know, and how it relates to the broader picture of human healing. So in today's conversation, just for anybody who's listening, we are going to be playing with and moving around through past and present and future and, you know, how it all connects, right? 

But one of the things that I wanted to discuss today, because it's something that I felt very connected to in your sharing, is the relationship between our parents and in specific, perhaps in this episode, our fathers, right?

Our father figures, our sexuality, and our self-worth and the way that those things are connected, but the way that it's very taboo and uncomfortable for many people to explore or even talk about how those things are connected. So maybe you can say a little bit about like, when did you kind of realize that your father was having like an impact on your body as a woman? 

N: Oh man. Well, I guess, I guess I only put it together that these things were connected in my 30s. And it was looking back in my history at certain experiences I'd had, particularly experiences I had as a teenager that were very confusing as I was learning about my sexuality. It's one of the big ahas for me was the understanding of where my difficulty with placing boundaries with men started and going back to and looking at what my experience was like asking for my own space with my father or having expressing my own needs or desires. 

I was often met with actually unspoken shame, interestingly. That was one of the things that was very that I only put together in hindsight was that I have this particular memory of trying to place a boundary with my father in my bedroom in my bed when I was 12. And I remember feeling intense shame after I made the boundary. 

And it was only after I got far enough in my understanding of myself and my empathy and how I feel energy that is not just mine in my field that I realized that I was feeling my father's silent shame in response to my boundary. And that created an incredibly emotionally confusing experience for me. 

And that was kind of like the beginnings of the seeds of how I interacted with men. I was afraid of triggering their shame. Because you would feel it. I would feel it. And I didn't understand that it was theirs and not mine. So I would experience shame. 

A: Right. That is such an interesting and powerful distinction. You know, I'm going to tell this story that is a little intense, but it's like perfectly aligned with what you're saying. 

So I'm going to make it as comfortable as I can for people. But basically, a family member of mine told me that in the 1970s, they saw an energy healer, right, an energy worker. And the energy worker did a body scan of them and then told them what they saw. 

They were clear on visual, whatever, we're clairvoyant, so they see it right in their mind. And so they said, someone when you were a little baby, right, like an infant, right, like came and they said they saw just like this man's shadow in the doorway and then the little baby in the crib, right. And they said this man came in and had an innocent curiosity, like a childlike curiosity that was just curious what a little baby vagina looked like. 

And this man came and put their finger into your little baby vagina, not like in it, but just like touched it. And at that moment that they touched you, they experienced such intense shame at what they were doing. And in that moment, that shame was transmitted directly into the tissues of your vagina. 

Mm hmm. It was like, when my family member told me this story, I was like, that is so disturbing and fascinating. And like, I feel it in my body that that is like a real thing that can happen. Because as infants, as babies, as children, you know, and this speaks to like the incredible damage that sexual abuse, you know, when it's, because what I just described like could be considered that, but like it's just, it was like more weird and murky and like, kind of more innocent than that. 

When it's like actual abuse, you know what I mean, that is like premeditated and all of that, it just speaks to the volume of pain and misery that that can cause a person when something this innocent and small can, because my family member was basically saying like, I thought about that for years, when in terms of the shame that I carried in that area of my body, in relation to men that I came in contact with. And this, you know, family member wasn't sure who this person was. They were like, I guess it could have been like my grandpa. 

They didn't think that it was their dad, for some reason, they thought maybe it could have even been like a neighbor, right? So there's kind of like these unanswered questions. And the truth is, we don't really need to know the answers to all these questions, but to start to acknowledge the energy exchange that goes on, right? 

N: Yeah, I think the awareness of how energy affects children is really lacking in the world. And one of the things, I have a seven year old son and watching his response to emotional energy makes it very clear to me that children are physically, sensationally feeling the impact of emotional energy when it's directed at them. 

And if I mess up and let myself even like curl my lip with the tiniest snarl and get irritated and send that energy at him, I can see the hurt, I can see the impact. And it was witnessing that that made me realize that children can also feel sexual energy. And I was part of my story is that I found my sexual energy and pleasure pretty early in life around five years old and, you know, had no understanding of what that meant. 

But I knew that it felt good. And I also was at five experiencing a lot of sexual turn-on energy in my body. And what I realized later in my journey is that that isn't necessarily normal to be running a ton of sexual energy at that young age. Puberty is when that starts to happen naturally; kids aren't experiencing those same urges and impulses. 

But I was. And when I put together that kids can experience energy from other people and feel it in their bodies, and identify it as their own. And then you add the fact that there's often a fair amount of enmeshment between parents and children. 

And there's a there's a, you know, a healthy natural version of that enmeshment, which is just the ability to co regulate our nervous systems are connected. And so that made me realize that I was living at the time with a father who was looking at a lot of pornography and experiencing a lot of lust throughout the day. And so I was picking up on that. And that was beginning to form my sexual experience before I had any idea what any of that was. 

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A: Yeah, and this is another layer that I can absolutely relate to. And I'm sure that people, there are women who are listening, maybe even men who are listening, who are having little pieces kind of come together as you're speaking about things they experienced in their childhood that they might have given a label or thought they had it figured out. 

And then now what you're bringing in here is this further understanding of the way that our parental figure, in this case, our fathers habits and behaviors and their energy profile, their emotions about what they're doing. Because I think that's part of it too. It's not just the looking at the pornography and the lust, it's like then the judging of himself about that, the shame about that, the other things that go on about that feelings of unworthiness or whatever the wound might be that is part of the addiction. 

Right. And we can go there in a minute to talk about like pornography addiction because it's a real thing, right, in that sense. And for me, I was exposed to my dad's magazines. 

I found them underneath a mattress when I was like four or something and was flipping through and looking at all this very hardcore stuff. And then he came in the room and found me and he was embarrassed. He was horribly embarrassed and ashamed. And he yelled at me and he grabbed them from me. And then there was like a later experience where I encountered, I woke up from a nightmare and I encountered him watching something. And again, he yelled at me. And what I understand now from like my adult brain is like, oh, he was like freaked out and ashamed and embarrassed. And he just wanted to like, you know, the fastest thing to do is just get her out of the room, just take the magazines away. What I got in that moment was that I had done something wrong, and I was bad and wrong. 

You know, and then furthermore, I like got this association with like the women's bodies. I was like, this is worthy of my dad's attention and time. And I am not, you know, specifically with that nightmare thing, which honestly, like this is one of the first things when I was 16 that I went to therapy about. And like, I didn't even know at the time, but I had like a therapist doing like EMDR and stuff. 

And it was, it was like, I dug into that one because it did affect me. It affected the way that I operated around sexuality. And it had me questioning all these things, you know, and wondering, did my dad abuse me? Did anything ever happen, you know, because I was making that connection? And what I can say now is like, no, like, he didn't do anything to me. But I felt the impact almost as if something did happen. 

Because energetically, it's not that different than actually having an experience, because it, I mean, it is different, but there's something about it that also makes that long-lasting impact. Do you know what I'm saying? 

N: Yeah, I think failing to protect you is almost as bad as abusing you. There you go. Yeah, it has a very similar impact. 

A: And also failing to co-regulate with me and comfort me and explain to me and be calm in his nervous system. But instead at the time he was 

N: just yeah, failure to prioritize your experience and recognize that you had your own emotional response and your own thoughts about what was going on there and probably needed a bit of an explanation. Right, right. 

A: And how different might it have been, right? How different might even having a father who's watching pornography and being lustful about it, it was coming from like a place that was not wounded, that was coming from a place that was like more transparent and other things in the dynamic, right? Sometimes it's not like what we're doing is like how we're doing it, the energy we're carrying about it, right? 

N: Yeah, I made a similar conclusion about the women's bodies and looking at my body, and that comparison starting at a very, very early age. Awkward time. And I just wrote recently about the recognition that unconsciously for a lot of years I held extra weight on my body because the fear was I have for a long time, I continue to have a challenging relationship with my father, and one in which his unconditional love does not feel accessible. And the fear was that if I lose the weight and look like what he approves of, and then he loves me, it won't feel as good as it would if he just loved me fat. 

A: Yeah. Or it would prove that, like you weren't lovable until you lost weight. It would like prove that that was what was holding back the love. And instead, you're like defiantly like no, if you're going to love me, you're going to love me on my terms, not because I met some standard that you have. 

N: Unconscious desires that aren't always the most helpful. I just discovered another one that I recently that I've been doing which is I'm keeping myself broke because if I create too much success, and then you love me, you only love me for that. That's the fear. 

And I've been unpacking that one just as I did successfully unpack the fear of becoming my sexiest version of myself, which is to me the healthiest version of myself, and the one that just embraces being in my happy place body. But it's a process to remove and like, pull the root of those beliefs that we plant when we're way young and we got no context and no idea that those beliefs are not helping us. 

A: Because they're not even beliefs at that time. They're just felt experiences, their sensations, their bodily reactions at that time that they're created. And then later we can look back and with our executive function and all of the more linear cognitive development that we get later on, it's like now we can give it a name and we can label it and we can now start to take it apart and deconstruct it. 

But a lot of it is at the very base level, like you were describing feelings in your body, lustful sensations, and then shameful sensations, and they were blended together. And it is, it's so confusing because when you start to trace that back to like, oh, it has something to do with my dad, like I said at the beginning of this podcast, I feel like it's a very taboo thing for people to just talk openly about. 

You know, it's not something that people are exploring or speaking to. And I think that it's affecting a lot of us, though. You know, I think it affects men too. 

They pick up on some energetic profile of the way their father experiences sexuality and then, you know, they lean into that unconsciously, they recreate that, you know, so it happens in all different directions with our parents, right? 

N: I really think the main root to all of it is shame. I think shame is the thing that looking back on how, you know, my father passed it to me, he did sometimes actively shame. A lot of the time though, it was happening simply because he was experiencing his shame and I was there for it. 

A: Like you said, silent shame, like there's the vocalized, like you shouldn't do that, that's wrong, that's bad. And then there's the feeling the person's having that they're not saying that maybe even in their words, they could be like justifying their behavior or coming up with like a reason why it's okay, but inside they're feeling the shame, right? Like it's an internal thing. 

N: And just thinking about like, you know, how shame feels in your body, it is the ickiest feeling, it's a horrible feeling. And when you're a kid, when you're little, and all of a sudden you just have this like explosion of icky sensation in your body because, and you had this interaction with this adult that you don't have any context or awareness, why it might be a shame field experience for them. It's, it just plants itself in your story of yourself as there's something wrong here. And usually it's there's something wrong with me. 

A: Right, that internalizing and making it about us. You know, I still like find myself drawn into that game where, you know, I'm around someone and I'm like picking up on certain things and I'm like, it'll take me like a little bit. I'll be like, ah, why do I feel like I'm in competition with this person? 

Like, this is so strange. Like, and I'll try to like analyze myself and like figure out why I feel that way. And then once I get some space from it, I'll be like, oh, wait, that wasn't me. I don't feel in competition with that person. That person felt in competition with me. That person felt threatened by me. But I was feeling their threatenedness and making it mine, making it my experience. 

But when I actually dig down for that in this specific context, there isn't actually a through line, right? But then speaking to kind of like how that, you know, this is kind of like a more casual moment. But like, when you've experienced these things as a child and then you carry them like you did for 25 years before you start to know the root of it, right? 

It's like, at this point, it has that expression and that sexual experience, that sexual energy has become part of your profile. It's like that inherited thing that now you get to reform and reframe and retrain your brain around that. But you don't get rid of it. We can't get rid of our conditioning. We can't get like undo it completely. 

But we can like navigate it differently. So maybe you can describe like, you know, some of the way that you operated in your teens and early 20s. And then as you have continued down this path of your increased self awareness, your body awareness, like what did that look like to come into a sexuality that felt more authentic and more like your own? 

N: So as a teen, I definitely felt my worth laid in being sexually pleasing to men and being found looking attractive. And I never felt attractive. I always felt like I couldn't quite get there. I accepted less than great treatment while dating and didn't have very many like standards or expectations for myself. I was lucky enough, I guess, like the conversation about like there was an inappropriate amount of conversation about sex going on in my family household. 

And so I was aware of it. And one of the things I'm thankful for is that it was really grounded into me to wait to have sex the first time for when I really wanted to. And I was lucky enough to have a wonderful first experience with kind of my first love in high school. And I was with him for four years. And that was the like beginnings of nurturing my sexuality. Then when we broke up and I just started dating as an adult, it was a completely different ballgame. 

I did not know how to operate in the real world with other adults and navigate all the things. And I had a period of time where I let myself have some pretty gnarly negative experiences contributed to the loss of my voice and the loss of my ability to speak in the bedroom, speak desires or speak boundaries. And eventually I kind of broke myself to the point where I connected with my former husband. 

And we, to me, he represented stability and security. And I only realized after the marriage was over that I was never actually attracted to him. And that our very limited expression of erotic intimacy was very, I think, unsatisfactory for both of us. 

And it wasn't until I left my marriage and started asking myself, who the fuck am I that I, oh, well, actually, my kind of re-initiation into enjoying my sexuality came from reconnecting with my original high school boyfriend 10 years later. And it was like, my body lit up, it was on fire. And I was like, oh, this is sexual attraction. This is how it feels when you actually want it. And that led me to an exploration of and starting to talk about and share about how common it is for women to engage in things sexually that their bodies don't actually want, that they talk themselves into. That brought me to the birth of the Blowjob Queen course. 

That was a fluke. I was in an eminent business group and someone asked a question about blowjobs, and I responded confidently. It's one of the areas I have a lot of confidence. And I was asked to teach a course. And in talking with all these women and learning about their experiences, I realized that it is super common for women to be providing pleasure and engaging in pleasure that they are not actually receiving any pleasure from. 

And so I decided that I was going to go ahead and slap that label on myself and put myself on the internet as one of the spokespeople for owning your desire and owning your pleasure and valuing yourself enough to only engage when your body is a full yes and all things are go. And doing that work with women helped to further empower me. 

And then working on my relationship with men in general, learning to discern who the kind and loving and trustworthy ones are, learning to deeply value and appreciate them and respect them. That led to finding a partner who created emotional safety for me. And within the bounds of that partnership and with a lot of communication, I reclaimed my ability to ask for what I want or say what I don't want with a lot of tears. There was a lot of crying in that relationship. 

A: Yeah, well, I mean, it's so connected, I think, like you're describing your voice and then a blowjob, I think especially in the realm of blowjobs, it's a really great place to explore boundaries because you're taking in this very intimate part of somebody else's body and it's like very intense. I think obviously penetrative sex in any way is intense, but especially a blowjob. 

It's like in your face, it's right there, up close and personal. And as you said, there's a lot of women that kind of just go through the motions or they do what they think they have to do, but there actually are like nerve endings and sensory feedback in your mouth and in your throat that can receive pleasure from it, that can enjoy it if you are present to what you're actually feeling, what you're actually ready for, what your body's saying yes to and what it's not. 

And I'm just guessing, I'm hoping, I'm guessing that like in this blowjob queen, it's like you use that word reclaim, like giving the woman that permission to take kind of control of the rhythm and the pace of the blowjob, which is I think what men actually want, even if they're doing something dumb like pushing your head down and that like crap, that I mean some people probably like that. 

N: But you know what I'm saying. It's tragic actually that a lot of women experience treatment like that and there are, like I have spoken with women who they're part, you know, the men they're with insist, you know, they can only get off one way and so they, you know, coerce women into providing it for them. And one of the things I've been talking about recently is that like one of the downfalls of like foreign industry and this like masturbatory culture we've got is a lot of men have traumatized themselves into very rigid and limited expressions of their sexuality. 

A: Right. Like they can only come one way, like you just said, like that they have this and it's usually involves some kind of shock, like they have to be shocked into it or something. 

N: Or yeah, or intensity. I mean, it's very, very common for men to believe they can only orgasm one way. And usually it's because they're trying to use a woman's body to recreate how they would do it themselves, essentially, or, you know, better than they would do it themselves. 

But it's all they know. And one thing my course does is it, yes, it empowers women to set the pace to, you know, to allow their men to get curious about what a different experience might be, to, you know, relax about things, to choose their own comfort and, and, you know, prioritize that the entire time. And yes, also a big part of it is I teach I teach women how to cultivate their desire. 

If it's not there, if you're if you're being asked for intimate connection, and your desire isn't there, how can you how can you bring yourself into that space authentically and, you know, so that you're not showing up to this as a people pleasing mechanism, but out of like, yes, I really do want you inside me right now. 

A: Oh, that's so, so important. And I think it was in my twenties, I did this, you know, period where I was celibate, but I like took it to another level, like I was like, I'm not even going to flirt with anybody, because I wanted to get a hold of like my mechanistic, like you said, people pleasing or like automatic ways that I would posture myself instantly around men. 

And I started becoming aware of it. This was when I was starting to do my somatic movement practice, which is like my whole thing now, this was very, very early on in that I started becoming aware, like, Oh, hey, like, I'm why walked into this party in this room and some part of my brain scanned the room for like, who's the most important guy here? Oh, it's the DJ. I'm going to make sure that he notices me. 

I'm going to stand in a way and I'm going to position myself in the room. And as I like became self aware of this, because 99.9% of it was like unconscious, like the things that we do, we don't even know we're doing, you know, a lot of women, they might not even know that they're feeling coerced. It's like, it's just normal to them. 

They're just like, that's what happens, you know, but as you become aware of it, it's like very uncomfortable to like realize what's been happening, you know, and so I made this sound like I'm not even going to flirt with people. I'm going to like literally be standing there talking to the DJ, and I'm going to notice that my back wants to arch and my chest wants to push forward, but I'm not going to do that. 

I'm going to like inhibit that just to see if I can, because there's, you know, we get conditioned by, you know, magazines, movies, culture to condition and hold our body in such a way as you, like you said, be pleasing to a man, right? And it's not like this positioning of ourselves in this way is like, like that there's anything wrong with it. It's like, what is the intention behind it? And is it an act of being connected to your authentic, you know, desire? Or is it just what your body does? 

Because you trained your body to do that at some point, because you saw it in a movie, you know, you watched Jessica Rabbit in the 90s or whatever, and you're like, that's what a valuable woman looks like. 

N: Oh, the social conditioning is so heavy. Even just like, you know, the idea of like, wifely duties is a way that, you know, very subtle or not so subtle coercion happens. But we very often, most often in these situations are ultimately doing it to ourselves by, you know, by overriding our own lack of desire and failing to to speak up for that. And that's, it's understandable that we have that feeling because like, like in my case, I was taught that it was a shameful thing to ask for what I needed and and say what I wanted. 

And the most basic when it came to, you know, my space, my private space, my body, I was taught that it, you know, by mistake, they certainly weren't trying to teach me this, but I was taught that it was shameful to have those needs of my own. Right. And you can go through a lot of intimate and romantic situations, believing that before you realize that that's not actually the truth. 

A: totally. Yes, it's a, I mean, I think like as a young adult, when I even just realized, like, because I was unwrapping so much of this stuff myself, as it sounds like you were too, like, when I would realize that there were women who hadn't even begun to unwrap any of this, you know, that were still just, you know, living with having never experienced an orgasm, living with, you know, like, that their body could experience pleasure, you know, and what kinds of pleasure there are and exist for, you know.

It's like, to some people who haven't been through that, it's like, it's sort of a fairy tale, if you haven't been through it, if you haven't experienced it, you know, like, when I was younger, I don't think I could have even imagined saying what I wanted someone to do, you know, if I had like a desire, like to voice that, like, when I was younger, it was inaccessible to me. 

It was that part of my nervous system, that connection was just like frozen, you know, so I think that, you know, that you've gone through that, and that you've had, like, that actual somatic experience of your voice and your actual expression fully manifested for you as like a physiological thing, you know, that that's a very, that's a very unique wound, quote unquote, to carry that can help other people that don't even know that they're holding that wound. 

Like I said, it's like still invisible to them, right? And then when they hear you talk, when they hear you speak about it, when they hear this podcast, right, like they can start to go, Oh, I've been holding back and I didn't even know that I was holding back and I've been holding back to myself. Like you said, we do it to ourselves, someone does it to us and then we keep it going unconsciously. Yeah, yeah. 

It's so refreshing to just be able to kind of share about this in an open way. You know, you mentioned before the way that you have developed more and more comfort in understanding men and understanding, you know, what what what does it look like when a man is coming from a place of having integrity in his way of interacting with a woman and what does that look like when it's not showing up? Because I think men can be both, right? 

They can be like their best self one moment and then, you know, they're dysregulated, they're tired, they're triggered or whatever, they can behave differently than that. What would you say? Like, you know, if you had a client or a woman who their husband, like they started being more vocal about what they wanted or liked, and their partner didn't like it because it was new, like their partner was like, Oh, like, that turns me off for you to like tell me what to do. What would you say to that? How would you how would you navigate that in a guy? 

N: I'm going to come back to that. Okay. Because you said something that brought something up for me. You were you said something about discernment with men. And yeah, and I wanted to reference that as I was specifically focused on looking for positive things to experience through men and kind of looking at different interactions with different men going on, you know, dating sites and having get to know you conversations, things like that. One of the biggest things I realized was a pattern was that there were men who were focused on the conversation on more on what I was going to do for them and provide for them. 

And then there were men who were focused on what they were going to do for me. And men love to do things when they're in when they're in their healthy energy, when they are tapped into their heart, when they know they have a lot to give, like giving is an expression of their love. Doing is an expression of their love. 

It's like some way of being a man, right? And, you know, fixing something for me is an expression of love carrying something heavy for me is an expression of love. And they in the right dynamic, they experience those things as, you know, a way of loving me. Similarly, if we're in a sexual situation and I voice anything, if he's in his healthy energy, he's going to want to be responsive to that. 

He's going to show that he cares what I've said. And he's and he's going to want to deliver a better or different experience to me, whatever I'm referencing. I only recently had like learned of that experience with men or not learned of it, but personally experienced it in a recent relationship. And I believe I've already said in this conversation that finding that relationship with the emotional safety was the result of doing the work to appreciate and respect men and find these qualities that I need in my life. Yeah. 

And so I would say that when it comes to expressing a sexual boundary, we start with expressing other boundaries and having non sexual interactions and allowing these men to show us who they are. And there's a big blue jay with a peanut on my porch. Distracting boy. 

Wow. And, you know, when we take the time to let someone show us who they are, we're building trust, we're building safety, like we are, I think, collectively moving away from this kind of hookup culture idea and more into just how incredible sexual connection can be when you feel fully seen by someone, when you feel fully supported by them, right? When you feel totally safe with them. When there's some kind of investment. 

When you feel connected to them emotionally and understood. Yeah, it's, I mean, it's just a completely different experience than when we're doing things more casually and, you know, trying to just like use each other to get off. 

A: Right. Yeah, it's a, it is an absolutely different framework to be in, I feel like, semantically, because it's like a means to an end versus practicing being present, right? Yeah. And what you said before, I think, is really great about creating a space inside yourself to be available for the positive traits of men to actually be felt and experienced. I appreciate you saying that because I feel like it is a huge missing link for women. 

They want men to show up differently, but they don't create the space inside of themselves. They don't, they don't let go of their own resentments and judgments. And, you know, it's probably like a good guy's worst nightmare, as he's showing up with all of his like heart and the woman's just like, Oh, you're like all the other men because she's looking at them through that lens, right? Her own bullshit lens. 

N: It's really important to recognize that your brain associates your worst experiences with men, without, without any assistance, without any help, your brain is going to be like, men are this, which if you've had some bad experiences, you are going to apply that to everyone that you know. And that is literally like a beacon that you put out that goes, if you're a good man, don't come anywhere near me, because I'm not going to be very nice to you. 

Because I don't believe that men deserve for me to be nice to them, because no man have shown me that there's this thing that we get that happens in relationships when we're when we're not happy, we turn our focus on the other person and like you make this change, you resolve this unhappiness for me, I'm unhappy because you're this way. And that is a total trap. 

It's like if we're dancing with someone, and we want to change how we're dancing, we're sitting there, doing nothing helpful ourselves, pointing at the other person going move your feet differently, move your feet like this, and then I'll move my feet like that with you, but you do it first, let me see you move your feet this way, and then I'll come join you. No one ever wants to dance like that. 

A: It's harder, it's much harder than then, you know, if you're the one who knows the direction of the dance or how you want it to go, you got to be the one to move first. 

N: We have to change our own footwork. It's actually the only thing we have any control over. And that can look like changing footwork, while right dancing with them and kind of creating a little bit of a disruption and see if they figure it out, it can look like moving away a few feet, dancing in the corner of the room on your own and giving them some time to like see if they can find their way up to your rhythm, or it can look like going dancing in a completely different place. Right. But what we get caught up in is this idea that like if we're in a relationship, I need the other person to fix this dance with me, and then I'll be happy. 

Right. And this fantasy, like all men have been terrible to me, but I just need a good man to finally come rescue me from all the terrible men. They won't touch that with a 10 foot pole. That is a woman that you cannot please. Right. 

A: Well, it's like stepping into a lens that's going to immediately like paint you in a certain light. 

N: You're immediately doubted. You are immediately not trusted. And the possibility that you will be disrespected in that scenario is really high, because there's not that woman doesn't hold respect for men. You have to develop it. You have to look for it. I recommend using divine templates as well as looking for real men. They don't have to all be real. I had fun identifying characters in literature that I think are good men, the major heroine, Aragorn. 

A: Yeah, those archetypes that we can kind of refer to and feel into their energetic profile of like a healthy state of being. It's kind of like that's great. That ties back into the things we were talking about at the beginning. I feel with our fathers and the way that our fathers, sexuality and physicalness like affects our physicalness and our feeling of safety or worthiness, or whether or not we're open to that connection and kind of tying it in with your dance metaphor. 

It's like even if we don't have a father who's willing to do the dance with us, we can still change our footwork. We can still do things. Do the things that create the healing for ourselves that allow new opportunities and new way of experiencing sexuality, of experiencing men to start coming in, even when the person in our life, that first person is not able to do that work? 

N: 100%. We do not need our fathers to heal our father wound. I think for me, I spent a good long while wishing my father would do it with me because that would have fed that rescue me daddy fantasy. 

Finally show up for me daddy. And what I have come to accept is that I actually did create a lot of successful healing in my relationship with my mother and what we had to do in order to be able to co-regulate with each other in order to feel peaceful together, harmonious, was go through a lot of pain. She had to witness a lot of my stuff and I had to witness some of hers that I spent some time being an angry teenager and angry 20-something and we alchemized all that. 

I was working on that with my father hoping to do the same thing and just found that his willingness was not there like my mom's was. He wasn't going to manage to step onto that spiritual path with me and become a partner. And instead he provided this incredible friction force for me on which to sharpen and strengthen myself. You know, I have qualities thanks to the difficulties with him that I wouldn't possess otherwise. 

I'm very strong and very brave and could do some serious damage if needed. And working on my father wound alone looks like going through that pain and those feelings with support with someone else and allowing myself to see those things can be pulled up from the root and shown to be nonsense. And yeah, it's just been a major process of turning my love on myself every time I am tempted to feel that shame. Right? 

A: Which is the shame has this diminishing quality. It shrinks you. It presses everything in. And I just love what you said, turning your love back on yourself and allowing that to open you in those moments when you want to shrink away. And that comes through in your writing. That comes through in your sharing. 

I can feel there's definitely an authenticity and a rawness to how you speak about these things that carries that energy with it of what it's like to do that, what it's like to really be with that process of, okay, here's this oppressive feeling that I've carried my whole life and it's about to come back down on me. And as I feel that weight of the moment sinking in, even as it exists, can I allow something else to exist simultaneously? Can I allow myself to love this person who's struggling right now, this person who's in pain right now? 

And I think that's life saving. That's a huge powerful blessing and it opens us in all kinds of fascinating and unexpected ways, which you've illustrated on this podcast so far in terms of even extending to the way that we experience our sexual pleasure and the way that we give a blow job, right? All coming from that place of like, as you said so beautifully, turn the love back on myself, be connected in here, right? 

N: I want to talk about mental health for a moment. Yes. I'd really, I talk about my mental health on my page a lot. I think that when we recover out loud, people are saved from suffering in silence. And I have had a checkered history of mental health failings, including bouts of depression. I'm working my way out of one right now. And I've had periods of pretty extreme generalized anxiety. 

I used to suffer from a good number of panic attacks. And first depression comes on when I have so much emotion in me that I unconsciously want to depress it, to kind of shove it down, push it down. I go into, I need to numb out, mode for a little bit. 

I have learned is never helpful to criticize myself in this state. It is helpful to allow myself to dip into it for little periods. And I think that that can be a self loving thing when there's so much to feel at once. The anxiety I have learned to manage using vocal semantics. 

And I do some body work too here and there. But for me, the voice has been a much more intuitive tool, especially considering that part of my journey has been losing and reclaiming my voice. But I am just such a massive, massive fan of singing in order to process emotion. 

There's a few things that I live by. One is humming. Humming is my baseline. I hum anytime anything remotely bothers me. I just started, I just start humming. That gives me a more regulated nervous system. When I hum, I envision in my mind the vibration of my voice claiming my field, my energy field, clearing out anything that I don't feel like experiencing. That's how I learned how to work my energetic boundaries. 

If I don't want to feel his bad mood, I don't have to. I can just hum it away. And then there's the expansive experience of loud vocal releases. When I am feeling particularly anxious or stressed or mad, any big, big feels a really big resonant toning like an aw, but really, really loud or something of that nature is so intensely relieving. 

I try to talk about engaging with these practices as much as possible because it's so simple and easy to do. And I spent a lot of time in my life feeling completely overpowered by my anxiety and then medicating to get myself out of it and then not liking who I was on medication. And so this is my way of riding the waves and not losing my mind. 

I continue to challenge myself and do things that are scary for me and grow and show up even though I have kind of these waves of things that come up all the time. And it's been very important for me to incorporate it in my content because a lot of my clients find me that way. They hear that I have similar struggles. And one of the things that I do is I help people improve how they're showing up with their self care. 

And they find me in that because that is one of the biggest things I'm still working to heal in myself. I learned a very self-neglectful relationship. I learned to make all of the importance about the other person and try to minimize myself as much as humanly possible. 

And I still, at 37, struggle with making those loving choices for myself, making that time, making that energy, particularly in romantic relationship. I slide right back into the next one. And so this is how I operate in my coaching is I create spaces where I'm working on these things and then I invite others to take part in it with me and be supported by the same structure. 

A: And yeah, beautiful. Well, I know you have some other, you know, more big projects you're working on regarding retreats. There's one coming up and this may be one that rotates throughout the year and you're bringing a lot of these tools that we've been speaking to together. Can you describe how you bring some of these practices or ideas together? 

N: So I have been gifted with this opportunity to bring people back with me to Loom and Bacalar in Mexico. And I've gone on a few now journeys there myself, which I treated as spiritual journeys. I went without a plan and followed my intuition and discovered the most incredible people and places. And now I get to take people back there with me. So in April, I'm hosting my first retreat there. The next one is likely going to be planned in October. 

That'll be nailed down soon. What's different about this experience is that as a part of the retreat package, I'm including some group coaching and someone on one coaching with me focused on intimacy with self, which looks like working on how we're showing up for ourselves throughout the day and how we're choosing ourselves, which in this context means being intentional about future experiences we want to create for ourselves and taking that inspired action. 

And so I am working deeply with these women before we go to Mexico, preparing them to relate intimately with me and each other. And then we're going to go have some heart opening plant medicine on day one and integrate in this incredible cenote that will get to inhabit privately for a few hours, and likely with a man named Jesus, Jesus. 

He's my buddy down there. And in that cave, in that cenote, we'll be conducting a song circle. So during the time that I'm coaching, everybody will become familiar with certain things we do with the voice and moving energy and things. And then we're going to do that in the cave together and basically play mermaids for a few hours. 

Then I've got another friend that the universe connected to who has a sanctuary in the jungle. And he gives massages that feel like being on plant medicine without being on anything. It's the most 5D massage I've ever experienced. 

A really incredible, incredible, talented shaman. The first massage he ever gave me, I was separated from my marriage and still wearing my wedding ring on my right hand because I was attached to it. I loved it and didn't want to stop wearing it. And in the middle of the massage, the ring started burning on my finger and saying, take me off, take me off, take me off. 

I took the ring off and then I had this massive release, emotional release, I guess releasing the remnants of my marriage on his table. I'm just very, very excited to introduce people to him. And then we are switching down to Bacalar, which is a quieter Mexican town, very authentic. And Bacalar has the lagoon of seven colors, which contains the oldest living organism on the planet. 

And those waters are special. And we have one of the most incredible villas on the lagoon, right on the water. Hayek's to use and a nice big pier where we can do yoga or meditate. We're going to have quieter days on the back end, just enjoying nature, connecting with each other, listening to our intuition when it comes to what we feel like doing at a given time. And we're going to eat incredibly well because I have scoped out the best food. 

So that offer is going to be by annual, I already have people interested in the next one who needed a little more time to get their get their act together. But it's going to be an experience like no one else can bring together. Even the last time I was in Mexico, I was brought there with friends, my oldest friend said, I'm having a shotgun wedding. 

And it just happened to be in this place where I was already planning to host a retreat. And it was on that trip that I got to discover in this little fishing town outside Bacalar called Marual. There's a seafood restaurant that cruise ships literally divert their course to like stop and funnel people into this restaurant. And I had the best Mexican seafood meal of life ever. I don't see it ever being topped. And I just that one meal alone, the excitement I feel to share that with people and get to eat it again. 

A: Well, it sounds like nothing short of magic and probably like a, you know, all of these things have been brewing for a long time in terms of like the resonance that you're bringing, you know, with working with your voice with working with intuition and just the magic of beingness. I love that it sounds like there's more spaciousness. Sometimes retreats are very like rapid fire. And I think that you definitely bring a more slower, luxurious pace to things that sounds perfect. 

N: Our whole job in Mexico is just to be, to be and have an adventure and enjoy ourselves. And I'm very excited about the structure of all this, because it's really important to do that, that nitty gritty intimacy work leading into it so that we get to have this incredibly evolved experience. But yeah, to not have to do it like in place and to just get to have fun together. 

A: That's great. So smart. I love that. So smart to do, you know, Zoom group online work before meeting in person. That's, yeah, that's where it's at. Well, this has been such an incredible conversation. 

We've gone a few different places, right? And what would you say to our listeners here, kind of as like this final piece of information today that, you know, that maybe, maybe is coming into your view through this conversation, right, about worth and about our connection to ourselves and our connection to our fathers. What's coming through right now for you? 

N: Well, when I think about my reason for empowering myself, I think about the power of my love. And I think about the fact that the more love I contain, the more flows through me into everyone and everything around me. I genuinely believe we are all capable of living a loving purpose. And I think that's why so many of us came together to connect at this time to join forces in that. 

And, you know, being able to share your love has to be rooted in understanding your own worth, understanding the value of your love and the fact that the world doesn't get to receive that love from anyone but you. You're here with this unique frequency and there are people's hearts who are waiting specifically to be impacted, opened, positively changed by your frequency. 

A: Yeah. And love truly is the antidote to shame, which was the, you know, the murky emotion that both of us picked up from our father and carried in our female body. And then as you say, generating that love, valuing yourself, valuing what you can innately provide, you know, you said it so well, like your specific love that is here to open and just dispel another person's shame that they might be carrying, right? Yeah. 

And it's like that perfect little lock and key that fit together and we're here to find those people that we just match with at that moment. Yeah. Beautiful. It's so lovely connecting with you. I will continue to be reading and following your posts. And if you're listening to this podcast and you've been touched by the transparency and the stories that we've shared and Natalie's journey, please follow her on Facebook, Natalie Vyers. That's the like tires but Vyers. And where else can people find you? 

N: Oh, you know, I am kind of lame millennial and my main presence is here on Facebook. Working on that. Right on. Facebook is my, I have an audience nurtured with so much love there. And if you do come into my world and want to connect with me specifically from this podcast, it would be wonderful if you send me a direct message and let me know where you're coming from and that you would like to join my flock because I get a lot of friend requests and I don't necessarily approve all of them. And so I'd like to know if you're coming with intention and know that you feel a sense of alignment. 

A: Wonderful. Well, thank you again. Thank you for your openness, your vulnerability, your honesty and yeah, look forward to continuing to know you. 

N: Thank you so much for asking me. I loved this conversation. Hey there, friends. 

A: I hope you enjoyed today's episode. I would love to hear your thoughts. Follow me on Instagram @AimeeTakaya and send me a DM about this episode. I'd like to thank you for being part of the Somatic Revolution. And if you'd like to support the podcast and help more people learn about semantics, consider leaving a review or a rating. And finally, if you'd like to have the experience of relief in your tight hips or back and learn to understand what your body is really saying to you, visit YouCanFreeYourSoma.com. I can't wait to share with you what is truly possible. Bye for now.