The Way of the Witch with Eva Clay
Step into this one with your whole body, not just your ears.
On this episode of The Rose Woman Podcast, we’re joined by someone who lives right at the crossroads of soul, sexuality, and science: Eva Clay. She isn’t here to offer cliché “tips and tricks” — she’s here to invite you into a deeper, more intelligent relationship with your own pleasure, power, and aliveness.
Eva is an acclaimed somatic psychotherapist, sexologist, speaker, and founder of the Institute of Intimacy Arts. Grounded in both clinical rigor and embodied practice, her work focuses on the integration of soul, sexuality, and science. A former professor of neuropsychology, she brings a sophisticated understanding of the brain, nervous system, and human intimacy, offering a clear perspective that intelligence and eros are fundamentally intertwined.
She’s guided thousands of people toward deeper embodiment, relational capacity, and access to pleasure and vitality. Rooted in somatic science and over two decades of training in classical and sexual tantra, her work invites a return to sensation, truth, and aliveness. She creates spaces where the nervous system can soften, guarded patterns can release, and satisfying intimacy can emerge.
Eva has a particular passion for guiding women in the midlife portal to claim agency, power and pleasure.
If you’re curious about what it really means to live erotically awake—beyond performance, beyond pathology, and beyond old stories—this conversation is for you.
Listen in and let this be an invitation back to your own sensation, truth, and wild, sovereign aliveness.
In this episode, we cover so many topics, including:
Helpful links:
Eva Clay - Join the Erotic Midlife circle a live, virtual Community to redefine sexuality - in midlife and beyond
Connect with her on Instagram @evaclay and Facebook @evaclay
Your host:
The Willingness Teachings on May 4 and 28, 2026
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Bhakti House Immersion with Christine Mason and Adam Bauer, with Special Guests Christopher “Hareesh” Wallis and Peter Dawkins on May 17–27, 2026
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Transcript
Eva Clay 0:01
If you're coming from, like, this good girl identity, to integrate your witch would mean to marry her with the good girl, you know, and if you're not, like, I don't come from the good girl situation, like, I never had that story. I almost wish I had a little more of that in my background, but I don't. I was raised an atheist, and, like, I have no religious programming at all. It's just a blank slate. So that's what it looks like.
Christine Mason 0:28
Hello everybody. It's Christine Marie Mason, and this is The Rose Woman Podcast today. I have the immense joy of speaking with Eva Clay. She is an embodied invitation into your brightest curiosity, deepest knowing and your most alive self. A somatic psychotherapist, former Neuropsychology professor, early psychedelic assisted therapy pioneer and sex coach, she somehow holds all of that without it feeling cluttered. And in this episode, we talk about the way of the witch, not the Halloween kind, but the sovereign edge dweller who shows up and what it actually looks like to integrate that energy rather than just unleash it in a messy way. We talk about burnout and Bali and ketamine and all kinds of archetypes of the witch, the witch's way. We talk about menopause. We talk about coming into your full power and moving in precision and grace with that, not just sort of the messy wild. So I hope you enjoy this conversation with Eva Clay, I start by asking her to tell us a little bit about how she arrived at this state, and for anyone who's ever been in transition, she's got some pretty good guidelines on how to listen for what wants to be born through you.
Eva Clay 1:47
So by training, I am a somatic psychotherapist, and I did start my career in clinical social work, really working in the trenches of female reproductive health. I was an HIV AIDS activist and psychotherapist for many years, and that's where I got my beginnings. And after 20 years of working in the trenches of social justice, social change, advocating for disenfranchised communities, I then retired from that career and became a sex coach, which was quite, quite a fun leap. And, you know, really specializing in sexuality from a pleasure forward perspective, rather than the pathological perspective. And so for the last 10 years or so, I have been in this world of coaching, also maintaining a clinical practice as a somatic psychotherapist. But I do a lot of other things. I love to teach. Teaching really is my dharma. As you mentioned, I'm a former professor of neuropsychology, so I worked in academia for a long time, and now I have my own platform where I'm teaching erotic intelligence, relational intelligence, to women, men and couples, in addition to my private practice. So I'm a little bit like you Christine. I'm I'm a renaissance woman. I like to do a lot of different things, and it all overlaps in into one beautiful package, definitely
Christine Mason 3:11
a beautiful package. So I wonder if we could just explode one this of this moment of transition for other people who are going through a transition, moving from pathology to pleasure, from sort of, I'm out there. I'm an activist. I'm I'm saving the world whatever into doing the sex coaching. Like, can you, can you go back in time a little bit and, like, explode that moment? How did you know it was the right choice?
Eva Clay 3:36
Yes, well, of course, it was a personal awakening, and I was very burnt out of my career. You know, it's like the hardest job in the world, almost being a social worker. But I was so called to these communities and to these women. And after 20 years and I was doing supervision, I supervised over 500 interns in my career, which is lot right, like in big positions of leadership and management, and it's an incredible load to hold you know so much suffering and so much pain. And through my own personal awakenings, studying and practicing both classical and Neo Tantra and being in the bhakti world and really beginning to understand that pleasure is power and pleasure is important. It's important fuel for our purpose and our mission. That I went to Bali on a vacation for one week, and I never went back to my job
Christine Mason 4:36
one week in Bali. Well, I ended up
Eva Clay 4:38
staying for several months, but like I went, I went on a one week vacation and and I had this huge pleasure awakening. You know, Bali gives you what you need is such deep and dark medicine. And for me, that medicine was pure pleasure, top to bottom. And I just had this epiphany that this is my life. It is passing me by, and I'm so kind. Committed to being a light in the darkness, but I was subsumed by that darkness for too long, and I realized actually I needed a bigger platform. I needed to actually reach and scale and impact more people. So I literally went to Bali and never went back to my job and struck out. It was a big scary thing to start my own business. I'd never been an entrepreneur, and I took the leap.
Christine Mason 5:28
It sounds like a ripening, like something that was ready to really fall off the vine, and you just needed a little break from your reality to allow it to fall exactly, not forced
Eva Clay 5:39
at all. Exactly. You got it right. You got it right. You got it right. And I was living this double life of being a clinician and academic during the day and running these big clinics. And, you know, in my other life, I was going to Burning Man and doing psychedelic medicine work and living in this very sex positive reality. So that was creating a lot of stress also. So in the integration of these two parts of self. This is the career that I began to build on the bottom up. I think that's very
Christine Mason 6:06
familiar to a lot of people, if you're listening and you have dissonance and like identities that aren't really talking to each other, or an argument with each other, or parts of your life that you feel like you have to hide from one group or the other. I hope this is like an invitation to sort of resolve the dissonance and lean into the wholeness and to have
Eva Clay 6:24
courage that you can do it.
Christine Mason 6:26
Yeah, courage. Beautiful. So I read that you describe your work sometimes as the menage, a trois of soul, sex and science. So when you think of gender, women or men, which part of that do they arrive most disconnected from? Or like, where's the greatest opportunity? Soul sex or science?
Eva Clay 6:47
Yeah, it's connecting soulless sex that's the greatest opportunity and the greatest divide that I find in my work, in my online courses and my clinical work, most people have never put those two together in the same sentence. I know I didn't. At one point in my
Christine Mason 7:04
life, I'm my jaws. I can't speak now because my jaws. I was like, how could you not? Because you know you. It's like one of those moments, some of the only moments of unity conscious that arise spontaneously, is in orgasm, or like in the deep connection with someone else. They're in a nature like it's so obviously a spiritual experience that tenderness, so is it? Are people having like spiritual experiences, but not connecting it to religion? Are they just interpreting it as like, bodily release? How are they interpreting that opening that happens if it's not spirit?
Eva Clay 7:39
Well, I'll speak to the women that I serve. I do primarily serve women, although also men, in that I think they're looking at it more as a performance, more as a means of getting love or connection. It's more of a relational experience for the majority of women that I work with. Also I'm seeing women who have some frustration with sexuality. So there's an orgasm glitch, or this body, you know, body image issues, and so they're not quite liberated yet to actually experience the true opportunity of lovemaking, which is communion with the divine, and also how they're defining that a divine. I mean, I see women of all of all walks. And so if you're defining the divine into some default Christianity or some like religious upbringing, then it's really hard to find that through sex. You know, there's that fundamental disconnect.
Christine Mason 8:35
It's very interesting that that you frame it as a religious relational experience or performance. Can you say more about that?
Eva Clay 8:43
Absolutely. I mean, if you're listening to this right now, I would encourage you to look within and see how much real estate in your consciousness is occupied by pleasing your partner, by being good enough for him, or beautiful enough for him, or expressive enough, etc. And so I think that for many women, they're captured, or they're hijacked in their erotic experience by his reality, his perspective, his preference. It's a good thing. We eventually evolve out of that, especially through menopause. I think we we elevate out of that. And as we become more conscious in our sexuality, we see it in a different way. And this is kind of the default lens that I'm working to dismantle, like
Christine Mason 9:28
you're objectifying yourself in a way, yeah? So menopause, this midlife and menopause as a erotic threshold, so to speak, like Yeah. So hormones change bodies, changing all of that stuff. And you've said it's not a sexual retirement, but an awakening. Can you speak a little bit more to that? What does get better? What? What is the opportunity? Well, what does get
Eva Clay 9:54
better is you stop giving a fuck. Okay? And there's never. Resonate is that right?
Eva Clay 10:02
You know, as estrogen declines, your drive to belong and to seek approval and to fit the image of the ideal feminine begins to fall away, or that begins to shift. And so we're no longer driven for that belonging that estrogen is responsible for. And so we can step into something more authentic, something more intuitive. And this is really where I love to call in the archetype of the witch. Let's do let's do that.
Christine Mason 10:35
Okay, witch, let's see. How many images do we have of which I have the pointy Black Hat witch, I have the Glinda witch, I have the haggard they're on the cowl witch. I have the, what's that one that twinkle their nose? Samantha Bewitched, yeah, the, like, the Witch that's like, hidden in suburbia, kind of doing magic on her men, you know. So, like, just to sort of take a moment and scan our inners on when we say, witch, what? What comes up we're holding all these ideas. So what do you mean when you say, witch?
Eva Clay 11:09
Yeah, to me, the witch is the face of the Divine Feminine that practices magic. It's, it's the face of the sacred feminine that leads us deeper into our soul, that leads us into more of a numinous reality that's beyond your everyday life, that escorts you to go beyond the limits of your existence. I have been with the witch for a very long time, so I have a deep intimacy with her. So I'm very passionate about offering her to other women. And to me, being a witch is really about connecting with nature, about learning to appreciate all the sensations of your life, to opening up to the vastness and the beauty and the complexity of experience, and really stepping into your power. So to me, the Witch, like she, has very, very many layers. It's super deep and essentially as the sacred feminine, primal source. She is a facet of the divine goddess as the archetype. When you work with her, she has a very primordial essence. You take the face of the witch off, it's just a mask that we put on her, and all of these, the images that you brought forward and the assumptions that we have about her. If you take that face off, at the core of hers is spirit that has a mighty force. It has an impact on us. Some of the kind of archetypal features of the witch is that she's essentially a rebel. She's an edge dweller. She's beyond the construct of what we think about Halloween or spells or evil, or even Wicca. I'm not here to talk about Wicca or witchcraft. I want to really dispatch from that. We often have this assumption that the witch has to do with witchcraft. But witchcraft is a modern invention. You know, witchcraft was constructed in the 1940s and 50s. Or Wicca as we know it today, is this kind of conglomeration of some ancient practices and ideas, but it's essentially a modern religion, right? It's surprising to know that just if you go down a rabbit hole and Google it, you'll you'll find that Aleister Crowley, you know, at the origins of Wicca, but that's not what I'm talking Okay, an older meaning, an older meaning, a deeper meaning, an older, deeper meaning. You know, the witch is fundamentally a resistor. She's the original activist. She has this capacity to call us into the wild. She returns us to the green world, into nature. She stirs inside of your unconscious, and she calls you into deeper mysteries about yourself. She has this ability to see and sense things with her third eye, with her deep intuition, with her belly, and she brings us medicine for the soul. She's really all about healing, not curing, but healing. She has this relationship to the natural world, and she has a mastery of it. You know, we think about the witch as like an herbalist with her potions and her elixirs, but she calls us to the wilderness, and she's essentially anarchy. She defies the rule of society and the rule of man. She loves to appear in dreams. She lives in imagination, in vision, in synchronicities and prophecy, in creativity and intuition, and she's been vilified as evil because her mastery is in the unseen. And she defies masculine rules. She defies the power structure
Christine Mason 14:41
that's like a beautiful poem you just read, invented, spoken to being like, I'm feeling like the enchantment, the vision that comes to me is like a doorway, like a tunnel of some sort, like a funnel, like bringing some energy down. Then, like through the body and out through her hands, and that it's like an indwelling, vibrating kind of energy, like you're, you're the you're the threshold, you're the doorway through which things are born. Really love it. So, so just interestingly, just to note momentarily, the activist that was burned out is not the original activist invited into magic in the green, green world of Bali. It's like there's something in here about how to bring about change through magic that through connection and depth, like connection to the earth, that is an inexhaustible source of change.
Eva Clay 15:40
Exactly. Yeah, beautiful, that inexhaustible source. And when we think of the witch as a facet of the sacred feminine, we can also look at how the witch has been represented historically through different archetypes and across cultures and traditions and time. You know goddesses like Hecate, the Greek goddess. She's the original witch. I call her the O, W, the original witch. She emphasizes thresholds and transitions and guidance through darkness. This is a signature of the witch. The Witch loves to meet you in a time of transition and guide you deeper into the darkness and into the mystery. The witch is an escort into your solo time inside of a cave. It's like she's reclusive. She brings you inward Circe. She represents the erotic and dangerous and sovereign witch. You know she has this ability to cast spells onto men and turn them into animals. She lives outside of civilization, and she's highly sexual. Or Baba Yaga, she's the one who tests and transforms you during a hero or heroine's journey. She's wild and ambiguous. She either devours you or she initiates you into your greatest power, the Morrigan, afreya, ISIS, even Kali and dumavati, these are other iterations of the witch inside of the pantheon of goddesses. Kali, of course, being fierce and boundary dissolving and ego destroying, force also associated with death and liberation. Dumavati. I love dumavati. She's the outcast. She is the power of what society rejects.
Speaker 1 17:34
Tell me about Hecate.
Eva Clay 17:36
Hecate, yeah, so it's tomato, tomato, O, W, yeah, tomato, tomato. With Hecate. It's Hecate or Hecate, depending on your tradition, I go with Hecate.
Christine Mason 17:47
Okay, what is she about? Tell us more.
Eva Clay 17:50
Yeah, Hecate holds this torch. Okay, so one of the overarching themes in all of these goddesses is that they guide you through the darkness, right? There one lantern, and you don't know where you're stepping, but they know where they're leading you. So Hecate is the goddess of crossroads. So when you're at a decision point, she will appear to you and guide you into the darkness to find the answer. She won't give it to you, but this is the idea of the witch. Is that the answer is found in the mystery, leaning out of what you know academically, and this was my journey, too, leading you out of the linear cognitive frontal cortex, activity of knowledge and information, and deeper indwelling into your intuition, into the intelligence of nature and Plugging you into that. So Hecate appears when you're at a crossroads. She's also associated with the nighttime and with ghosts. So she has a capacity to have dialog with those on the other side of the veil, and so she can pull information from that other side and offer it to you. She can be like a translator. She kind of is the template of what we think of as a modern witch.
Christine Mason 19:09
Yeah, there's a piece. There's a piece in the lantern, the single step where you can only see the single step that also has a Be Here Now quality like a faith and a trust. Like I can't see where I'm going, so I'm just going to concentrate on the next best step, which also is a return to the body and your immediacy of the senses. Do some of these other goddesses also carry the lantern?
Eva Clay 19:34
Many of them do, and this David White quote just came to mind, of like in the dark, the eye begins to see. In the dark, the eye begins to see.
Christine Mason 19:44
Let's unpack that beautiful. He's so great. He's so great. You know that? Did every Do you have his booklet? Does everyone know his booklet? The House of belonging? And you know he's he's having this dialog with his physical house that has kept him safe. Through many transitions. And it's such a beautiful, like animist view of this thing he's living inside and and choosing to, you know, open and leave so, so in the darkness, the eye begins to see. So do you interpret that as like the third eye, the eye within the big S self, the intuition, what? What's the eye for you in that sentence, it's the inner knowing.
Eva Clay 20:23
It's our deepest inner knowing, and sometimes we need to shut down that the circuitry of vision, of our eyesight, in order to see the deeper reality,
Christine Mason 20:35
aside, small aside, dark retreats, cool. Have you? Have you gone? No, I could invite my friend Megan to come on. She's starting a dark Retreat, retreat space where you go basically into complete darkness for seven days, and they like slip you food through a little doorway, food and water. But other than that, you're like in there with your bucket. That's it. Wow. She says she's utterly transformative psychedelic experience, actually. So so as women tap into as people tap into these art. Do you find it gender? Is it primarily for women, the Witch work? Or Absolutely? No. I to men.
Eva Clay 21:15
It applies to men too, absolutely.
Christine Mason 21:17
Do you call that wizards or Warlocks or witches? What do you call them?
Eva Clay 21:21
I call them a witch. I mean, who says that the witch is a feminine reference? There's, yeah, this idea of a warlock being a male witch, but it's if the witch is an energy. It's archetypal energy in all of us, like we don't find the witch, we allow her to emerge. And in every culture you know, we have the medicine woman, the shamanesque, the midwife, the herbalist, the healer, the Witch, is to me, essentially like a female shaman. And so when we reconnect with these very primal energies inside of us and these the identities of these archetypes, it's there. It's already there. And in all of the goddesses that I, I named, and in every tradition, there are some common denominators between all of these goddesses, and one of them is that they meet you at that threshold. But the others are that they they're sovereign, that they're outside of patriarchal rule. So you can absolutely be a male who's outside of patriarchal rule, that she's a representative of transformation through either healing, destruction or initiation, and the witch archetype, and that energy invites you to transform at the level of identity, like she's not fucking around. She has big magic, but the way that she gets you there almost always needs to disrupt your comfort so out of your comfort zone in order to initiate that awakening. And I think that's why she can become so fearsome to people.
Christine Mason 22:49
Yeah, I notice in summoning an archetype, I can easily summon a Durga archetype, or I can summon a Magdalen archetype, or something like that. But when you get into these, I feel like a little resistance, because it feels taboo, like it feels like, Oh no, no. That's not what good girls do. They don't become Circe. They don't channel the energy of, like, the wild edge feminine. It's like, that's not a good that's not good girl. And so that's sort of, you know, buried still in my consciousness. Do you encounter that, like the resistance to the witch archetype,
Eva Clay 23:22
absolutely, absolutely I do, and it's usually met with fear and excitement, because once you say the word witch, and I'll go back to actually, Christine, the first time I said it to you on the retreat with Patrick, I said, I often get asked to speak about the witch. He said, Ooh, and that's that's almost always what I get is like, ooh, that's scary and exciting at the same time, and that. And that's who she is. That's how she rolls. She is essentially like the shadow of the feminine. She's not evil. She is what has been exiled from our consciousness, labeled too much, dangerous, unacceptable. She really does lead you to the wild parts of yourself, and wild, meaning untamable, uncontrollable and uncontained.
Christine Mason 24:12
I have to take a breath. Okay? This just yesterday, just yesterday. Oh god, I'm so embarrassed by this. Okay, but it's interesting. It anyway. So I get this note from someone who I've been known for a long time, like, I've been relationship in some level for over, like 12 years, 15 years, it was something to the effect of, like, your competence makes me feel bad about myself. Like, would you please be smaller, so I'm not feeling unmanly. And I had this reaction like I did literally text it back, which I'm not a snap texter. Generally speaking, I just, like I said, Wait a minute, that's like the oldest story in the book, like a man asking a woman to be to play, to be smaller, play dumb, so he to see. More manly. And the corollary act of a woman agreeing to play dumb so her man feels big or something like that, like we are better than that. We are smarter than that. We you know, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, don't. Don't ask me to be less threatening, become braver. You know, first of all, I couldn't believe I was having that dialog at this stage of life be smaller. But also, it did come with some shame that somehow I wasn't attuning or gating my energy level to what someone else could take. And that was that's very acculturated. So when you bring up this sort of like, be in the fullness of your wild, be in the fullness of it, like they already can't take that, the Normie Magdalen woman. What are they going to do if I
Eva Clay 25:44
bring in Kali? And can I speak to that? Yeah, I think, I think you're, you're not alone in this situation, situation, but the way that I work with the wish, and I call it the witch path, which, as an aside, is tucked, tucked in and hidden into the erotic midlife program that I teach. So originally, that program was going to be called the rebel witch society, and I changed the name to make it more marketable and because, which was kind of scaring people, but it's really almost the same content. I call it the witch path. So there's the unintegrated witch, which I think you're talking about. The unintegrated witch is when all of this raw power, we could even call it Shakti, that is dark Shakti, when that's unintegrated, it looks like emotional flooding, without being grounded. It looks like sexual energy that leaks and discharges instead of seeking connection. It looks like people bypassing consent under the guy's authentic expression. So it's not regarding boundaries of others or the experience of others. So it's like this unmitigated emotional expression and control. So I want to make a distinction, then, between that and the integrated witch. So the integrated witch looks more like regulated intensity that's not suppressed, but it's also not chaotic, so there's some organization around the flow of that energy, and it can be titrated by other people, so the witch is still prioritizing connection over her expression. She has clean boundaries. She has clear yes, clear, no. She has erotic energy that has direction, that has directionality, not just leakage and explosion. And she has emotional depth, but without losing herself. So she's not loud, she's accurate, she's regulated, she's precise. And that's when the witch stops becoming such a shadowy figure and instead becomes a source of intelligence. So I find the integrated witch makes a woman incredibly magnetic and powerful.
Christine Mason 27:57
It's almost like the like a flood of energy comes. And if it's not, if you have banks established, or you've got ways to move the water through channels, that it can be very potent. But if the flood comes and it spreads out, it loses potency. And at first, when you start working for it, working with it, it would seem that you would need to have a little mercy on the fact that as you're tapping into the potency, it might come out a little wild or uncontrolled, but that gradually you'd learn how to work with it, and that probably, like that limb, that first threshold, that first encounter, can if it's handled sensitively, feels to me just just in feeling into that space, like if it's handled sensitively, you Have compassion. Like, look at the potency and the potential in there. Let's learn how to train it. Let's learn how to be in a discipleship relationship with the energy. But if it's not held, well, I just stuff that back down, and maybe even have like a countervailing conservativism
Eva Clay 28:57
try and control it. And I think this is what we do, is that we try to contain right these energies. But the unintegrated witch isn't mystical. She's messy.
Christine Mason 29:07
That's a fantastic quote. I think there's so much in all of the you're dropping so many little snippets of wisdom, like relational field first the relationship first before expression. So when people are coming out of like a people pleasing relational field to the pathology side of that, and they're just learning how to express, like I feel there's, there's a point where it's still not calibrated, you know. And so how do we create containers where you can play with what it's like to express without the concern of the other temporarily, and then evolve into this grounded, integrated place like those is that what the workshop spaces are doing, they're allowing you to play with with that energy, without having to take everybody's feelings into account.
Eva Clay 29:57
There's definitely time and a place for that. Yeah, to me, there's one place that's the best, uh huh, and that's the dance floor.
Christine Mason 30:05
Oh yeah, okay. Say more.
Eva Clay 30:09
Well, it's just, you know, because I'm a somatic practitioner, so it, you know, to feel the edges of your pendulation, you know, to feel the full swing of one side of that is interesting, it can be fun. It can also blow the doors open, but we have to pendulate back into regulation, so not into suppression, but into balance, into grounding. And to me, this work is really so beautiful with somatic psychotherapy. So the somatic models are really what I prefer. Because, yes, you know, go into your unbridled expression. But we can also really dysregulate and really, like, get stuck in that channel, because it can feel so good, so like, Oh, this feels so good to like, be unconstrained. Meanwhile, you're dumping on everyone around you and and that has an impact. And also we can, by means of our dopamine and all the circuitry, the neurological circuitry that can become a new base point, a new setting point, is that level of expression. So I think it's really important to swing, to swing back into calm from chaos, and to know the distinction
Christine Mason 31:22
that that sounds like a skill set one
Eva Clay 31:24
could learn, yes, yes, to step out of volatility or relational chaos, because that's not, it's not really what I'm talking about.
Christine Mason 31:32
Some people that I know have built a whole identity about being volatile, yep, you know, like I'm a wild one. You can't keep me in check, you know, and those, I think this is a really beautiful invitation to range.
Eva Clay 31:48
Range. Yeah, I Yeah. I love that word range. And also I call it wholeness. So Well, you know, if you're coming from like this Good girl identity to integrate your witch would mean to marry her with the good girl, you know, and if you're not, like, I don't come from the good girl situation, like, I never had that story. I almost wish I had a little more of that in my background, but I don't. I was raised an atheist, and, like, I have no religious programming at all. It's just a blank slate.
Eva Clay 32:19
So that's what it looks like. I got nothing in there.
Christine Mason 32:24
I mean, I'm in a deconstruction and reconstruction year long chaplaincy, wow, and learning all about the construction of sexual beliefs and gender beliefs from the other people in the course who are really, truly coming out of things that are quite constrained religions, and the stories are very, very deep in people. And I have a minor one, you know, like the one that comes from being in the dominant culture and a little bit of Catholic adjacent, you know. But I just want to have a moment of mercy for the internalized stories that people carry around the feminine and around their sexuality, and would know that even with that, there's great access to opening up a new narrative, and it's through the body. As you said, for people who don't know what somatic psychotherapy is, what does that mean? How is it different from regular psychotherapy?
Eva Clay 33:17
It doesn't emphasize talking as the agent of change. It emphasizes attunement to the body, through sensation, through movement, through breath, and really understanding getting an education and how your nervous system is operating. The whole show really your emotional body, the psychological stories that you're creating. It's really all in your physiology. And so that's what the therapy emphasizes, is a deeper understanding of that within yourself
Christine Mason 33:49
beautiful so you work with the body. Would you dance? Would you touch? Would you feel like? How would you guide someone?
Eva Clay 33:57
Yes, all of those things, breath, movement, sensation, touch, self awareness, bottom down, I do a lot of education around the insula, the function of the insula in the brain and how it scans for sensation in the body and creates a story out of the sensation. And that's what we want to stop doing, is creating story out of sensation. So So as someone is in session with me, and they're sharing. I'll just stop them right there in their story and drop them into their body and excavate what's going on there. It's a little challenging to describe it in such short format, but I find that it has such a greater efficacy and potency. I'm classically trained in all the talk therapy models, and I have great reservation about the efficacy of it. Yeah, the body
Christine Mason 34:43
seems to if you're able to sit with an interrogate contraction in the body, there's so much to tell you. If you if you're willing to stay with it and not go out, some people can't stay with it. They're like in a block around their own embodiment. They eat. There's a taboo even. About feeling one's own body and sort of living from the neck up, you know. So what a gift to bring people all the way down and in, partially down and in. So you mentioned that you put, like the witch path in the title, or not in the title, use menopause or midlife or sexuality in and out of the title. Like there are all these ways that people might enter the work. But there's a red herring those, those are kind of a red herring to investigate your own potency. So why not just go at like, power, potency, feel your you know, what is it about these Pat these unique pathways to enter that sort of makes people ripe for exploring the
Eva Clay 35:38
witch path? So I many, for many years, I had a program, an online course called power and pleasure. I think that just basically through marketing, you have to appeal to the problem. So the problem that I appeal to is some frustration in sexuality. And that's the front door that they enter. That's the portal. You enter, the portal of the problem. But the solution to the problem is what's unique about my work, and everybody has their medicine, right? My medicine is somatics, neuroscience and the archetype of the witch. That's what really turns me on. So once they enter my doors with their sexual problem or their desire to have a greater experience of sexuality and pleasure, they get that, but they get a lot more than that. It's a magnification of their power that's already there, but for some reason, dormant or suppressed or underneath that good girl archetype, whatever, sitting on top of it. So that you know, the methodologies that the technology that I offer rests in these domains, beautiful.
Christine Mason 36:51
So there's like another portal that you work with in addition to the problem of sexuality, and that's to invite people into molecule assisted psychotherapy, ketamine, assisted psychotherapy. What does that unlock that talk therapy, or even somatic therapy can't
Eva Clay 37:07
so deep, so deep? Yeah. So I've been doing medicine work since I think 2008 or nine. I was in the very first round of psychotherapists trained in MDMA assisted psychotherapy at
Christine Mason 37:20
maps breaks you an O W, yes, definitely.
Eva Clay 37:27
I kind of am an O W, yeah, it was so cool to be there in that very first class and and so I've been doing this work for a long time, and more recently with ketamine, which is so cool because it's legal, so I can, you know, put that on my website. It just bypasses the intellect. You know, talk about hyper neuroplasticity, reorganizing the stories that we hold about ourselves, about our body, about our sex, about our partner. I really do a lot of couples work. So when we disorganized those dominant paradigms in those stories, and it creates an opportunity, like a blank slate, a tabula rasa, for us to author a new narrative about ourselves. And so I love to work with ketamine. Actually, low dose ketamine is one of my favorite administrations, and actually do psychotherapy while the patient is on low dose ketamine. So it allows me just to bypass the dominant protector parts, which is always the intellect. It's the, you know, the cognition. So just get around that and underneath it. So when I'm working somatically with someone, I don't do hands on work, but I'm always in the body and helping to create new facets of their identity to bring new parts online. I also do ifs internal family systems or parts work a lot with the medicine. So we're bringing new parts forward. We're getting to know dormant parts inside that for some reason, don't have permission to come forward in the default consciousness. So it the ketamine especially relaxes those protector parts and lets us, you
Christine Mason 39:12
know, get to rep another modality that bypasses the controlling and domineering mind that's set in its path the body can do it as I'm hearing as I'm hearing you. You're saying the body can be a pathway to that different ways of seeing through, ifs the molecules can be a different pathway, but that somehow our beautiful, big brains that have created these protective patterns are not always our friend, and we have to, kind of like trick them to get out of the way. It sounds like put them to
Eva Clay 39:40
sleep like a little lullaby. Oh yeah,
Christine Mason 39:45
you to protect me right now. I'm going to my body. I love this. Thank you so much for sharing it. You're running a course now tell me about what how people can work with you, individually or in your classes.
Eva Clay 39:59
Yes. Yes, so the erotic midlife is a wonderful group program for women who are 40 and better and wanting to expand their relationship to the erotic and the erotic in the broader sense, the broader definition of everything that is life giving, and you know, their relationship to life itself, as you know, vitality is, is the thing in this phase of life, we meet online. I also have retreats in person retreats. I think it's really important to keep doing in person work right now. So I have some really cool retreats coming up all around libido and desire. This is a big passion of mine. For women within the erotic midlife we're looking at things like how we can actually collapse the sexuality that we had before, instead of trying to resurrect it, let's just give it a proper burial. There's power and death and let a new iteration of our sexual self emerge. And what do we want that to look like? Women are such contextual creatures that we really optimally learn and grow in the context of a group. So having other women in that container are really important in the depth of those connections. There's a study out of Berkeley, I think it's less than 10 years old, that looked at women who had some kind of sexual dysfunction, vulvodynia, vaginismus andorgasmia, stuff like that, and just put them in a group together, didn't give them any kind of curriculum, just put them in a group and had them talk to each other, and almost all of them had marked remediation in their symptoms just by talking to other women. So I lean on that a lot and put women into containers and get them prompts. So the sisterhood is deep and real and important. So inside of the erotic midlife I teach all about sexual science, we do anatomy, I have amazing guest teachers, OB GYN, naturopathic doctors who specialize in hormone regulation. So women really get this comprehensive kind of support at this phase of life, and whether they're sexually active or not, whether they have a partner or not, it doesn't matter, because we know that pleasure is power.
Christine Mason 42:20
It's beautiful. I'm I'm adding an S to your Trinity of sangha, you know, science, soul, sex and Sangha, like just talking being with one another. I agree with you on the in real life stuff, that, if you're not in a conscious present community at this stage with what's happening in the external world and the abstraction layer that comes with the digital world that it's really you're making it exponentially difficult for yourself. So wherever you're at find people to sit in a circle with and talk about volvodenia, no, to talk about whatever, to talk about whatever. Yeah, I'm so glad we got this chance to talk. I like your voice so much. It has such a nice transmission. Such a nice, calm,
Eva Clay 43:03
clear, authoritative transmission.
Christine Mason 43:06
I can imagine people being able to really receive a lot in your courses.
Eva Clay 43:10
Thank you. That means a lot.
Christine Mason 43:14
Thank you so much to Eva Clay for joining us today. If this conversation landed somewhere in your body, that's the point Eva's work lives at evaclay.com and I'll put her erotic midlife program and retreat details in the show notes. If you're in that threshold place, the crosswords place, she's a good guide to have. And if this episode is one you'd send to a person you love, please do that. Leave a review if you feel moved. I read them. I love to hear what's going on with you and what you'd like to hear more of also those conditions that Eva was mentioning, like vulvodynia and vaginismus. Many people who have those conditions report wonderful results with my honor balm at rosewoman.com you can read the reviews and see if it looks like something that's right for you. It's a vulva vaginal moisturizer that has no hormones, but many plant extracts that are used in Traditional Medicinals around the world, yes, one might say, by the witches of the world for women in menopause who are having some difficulty with dryness or the density and texture of that skin, there's also beautiful body care products, candles and other things that create a more reverent approach to living in these beautiful bodies. Thank you for joining me. You can find me and my programs at christinemariemason.com all love. All the time. You
