Emiliya Zhivotovskaya Mazor: How Embracing Pleasure Can Help You Flourish | #30

Research shows that our capacity to extend our pleasure from our experiences is directly related to our capacity to savor. Our guest, Positive Psychology expert Emiliya Zhivotovskaya Mazor, Founder and CEO of the Flourishing Center in New York City, teaches us the 7 distinctions to savoring and breaks down the 6 pillars of living a flourishing life. Emiliya delivers perspective changes powerful enough to save your career, your marriage, and even your mental well-being. It all comes down to 2 things; a growth mindset and a fixed mindset. You’ll gain insight into why resilience skills are so important to cultivate so you’re better equipped to manage relationship obstacles, especially sensitive issues that arise in the bedroom.

CONNECT WITH EMILIYA 

• Emiliya’s Website  - The Flourishing Center
• Emiliya’s Podcast - The Flourishing Center Podcast
• Emiliya’s FREE GIFT -  Online Course | The Science of Resilience
• Emiliya’s FREE GIFT - Free Week of LYFT classes

OTHER EPISODE LINKS

• BOOK - Savoring; a new model of Positive Experience by Fred Bryant and Joseph Veroff
• SxR EPISODE #15 - Cervical Orgasms with Mare Simone 
• SxR EPISODE#9 - The Queen's Code with Alison Armstrong
• SxR EPISODE#19  - Never Let a Man Come First with Mary HoneyB Morrison

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Transcript

 

Introducing Emiliya Zhivotovskaya

 📍 Welcome everyone. You are in for a real mind-opening, expanding treat today. We are so thrilled and we're so honored to be here with Emiliya Zhivotovskaya who is a leading voice in the world of positive psychology. She's the C.E.O. and founder of the Flourishing Center, which has trained thousands of practitioners all over the world since 2008.

She's currently pursuing a PhD in Mind Body Medicine, so I can't wait to dive into that a little bit more. And is a badass mentor, coach and trainer, according to Leah, who has studied with her since 2020. So since Covid hit, she's been studying with this amazing woman, and I've heard so much about you, Emiliya, and I'm so excited to drop in and to connect with you today.

Welcome to the Sex Reimagined podcast, where sex is shame free. And pleasure forward. Let's get into the show. 

So welcome. Yay. 

Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. I'm so excited to be with you. Oh so, and thank you guys for doing this. Reimagine it. That's right. Let's do it. 

You gotta start, let's do it.

Start with the imagination. 

We're doing it together. Yes. 

Yes. And so what we're going to be diving into with Emiliya today is savoring sensuality and the role of pleasure in flourishing. So I'm just so excited. Like, tell us more, Emiliya, about this flourishing concept and how savoring sensuality helps you to flourish more in every aspect of life.

Thank you. I would love to anchor us into my favorite concept in the world, which is flourishing. I believe that flourishing is our birthright. It is something that we're all capable of. The same way that these, the flowers around us in the trees, when given the right conditions, they grow, they flourish, they reach towards the light.

For since 1998, the field of psychology has been focused on this idea of actually using science to understand what are the conditions that enable individuals and organizations and communities to flourish. And I've been involved in the field since I did my master's in 2006, in the field of positive psychology at the University of Pennsylvania.

What is Flourishing?

And so the idea of flourishing is it's a state of feeling a number of different experiences. It's a state of being satisfied with your life. And I like to say it's a state where you feel like the different cylinders that go into being happy and healthy in your life are firing. And so we talk about there being six pillars or pathways in positive psychology that enable us to experience flourishing.

The Six Pillars of Positive Psychology

And the first one is positivity. Second we call engagement, relationships, meaning, achievement, and the last one is vitality. And in many ways, the first one, which is positivity, means that you at the end of the day net feeling more positive emotions than you do negative emotions. And there's a lot that goes into that.

It's a feeling of optimism about your future. It's a feeling of being at peace with your past. It's being able to cultivate positive emotions in the now. And in many ways, positive psychology, which is the science of flourishing, is anchored in this idea of also studying well, what does it take to enable people to be happy, to be healthy, and how do we then also enable all of the other pillars?

And so pleasure is something that I believe anchors as a thread through all of the different pillars of flourishing. Because yes, we naturally experience pleasure when we're experiencing positive emotions. And one of the key things about positive psychology is not that we're saying, oh, we never want to experience negative emotions and we just want people to feel positive.

It's about netting positive at the end of the day. It's being able to handle whatever life is giving to you and still feel like you're being resilient, like you're showing up in the world the way that you want to. And there's so much that pleasure can bring us into that sense of netting more positive.

At the end of the day when we talk about engagement, in order to experience pleasure, you have to be in the present moment. And so for the way in which I train my practitioners, we actually teach about savoring as a pathway of becoming more deeply engaged with our life. And there's so many ways that we can savor.

And then relationships refer to the world outside of ourselves, and so we can savor and we can experience the role of pleasure that I get to have within myself. But then there's only so much that I can experience on my own and how I relate to the world around me is going to wake up a tremendous amount of pleasure if I let it.

Like I can't tickle myself no matter how many different buttons I try to press on this body, there's a certain type of pleasure, a certain frequency of pleasure that can only come in the space between myself and the world around me. 

Meaning is a pathway that we talk about, which is having a sense of purpose and connection to something bigger than yourself to feel like you belong, to feel like you matter. All of that falls under this umbrella of meaning. And and that's a pleasurable sensation when we feel like we have meaning and we matter and we belong.

Achievement is when we are getting the things that we want to achieve in life, and most of us are wanting to pursue pleasure in some way. 

And then vitality, which is about the psychology of my body being physically healthy and flourishing and vibrant, and having energy available to myself. And as I have learned from my teacher, Leah, that when we fill our bodies with pleasure, we literally are waking up the energy of our body. And so vitality is the construct that I used to describe the physical relationship to flourishing. And it is an energy. It is having energy available to oneself to perform work. And when we are able to source pleasure into our body, we actually are cultivating energy, magically. Like nothing ne like I can think my way into pleasure, I can touch myself into pleasure in this moment. I don't need things outside of myself.

And so I believe that there is this weaving of this thread of pleasure throughout all of the pathways that enable flourishing and that pleasure is a skill that we need to cultivate. 

So, you know, just so the audience knows, I'm a big fan of Emiliya. I got to meet Emiliya when she came to one of my classes and then she saved my butt when Covid happened because I was suddenly found myself with all the seminars suspended.

And I had signed up for her applied positive psychology certification and her life coaching certification in March of 2020. And so the timing couldn't have been better for me to dive deep into this wellness path of taking a look at our life and being able to learn skill sets that allowed us to have this more pleasure, to feel good about going forward, to feel good even about what was happening right now.

And I have to say, one of the things that has been driven home for me that I think about a lot is life satisfaction. And I think about when I, how the reason why it comes to me every day. Even though when I think about looking back on my life, I often am reviewing it in my mind from the day that I will be leaving this body and wanting to review and reflect like, did I love this life? Was I fully there? Was I engaged? How well did I love? It brings me back each day to go, today's the day. This is the moment that I get to contribute to that question that's going to really matter at the end of my life. And so, as I started studying with you, Emiliya, and taking a look at positive psychology, I had to come face to face with some things that I wasn't very skilled at.

One of them was resilience. 

I don't think I would've given myself a very good grade on my resilience skills. I didn't know that I was lacking in resilience, and I didn't know that my mindset needed some fine tuning because I identified as being an open-minded, kind of liberal person.

I just assumed I was open. I didn't realize actually how much my mindset was quite closed. So I'm wondering if you can maybe speak to resilience when it comes to relationship obstacles and sexual obstacles and how we can not only build better resilience, but also come at it from an open mindset.

How Resilience can help you Overcome Relationship and Sexual Obstacles

Yeah. Thank you so much for asking that Leah. I love that. I love that you were grading yourself in resilience. It's like, that actually speaks to what I'm about to say. Yes. So Resilience... My journey into positive psychology came from my desire to understand what is resilience.

How do we go about it? How do we experience it?  I've had a number of different obstacles that I've had to overcome that my family has had to overcome over the course of my life. And understanding how is it that we keep persevering when times get tough, that we keep bouncing back, that we keep getting back on our feet?

It is actually what brought me to positive psychology. Really wanting to understand the nuts and bolts of it. And when it comes to the skills that enable resilience, I like to teach that the fundamental skill starts with having a growth mindset. 

Growth Mindset vs Fixed Mindset

The difference between a growth mindset and a fixed mindset is not just like, oh, I'm open-minded, which love that you are, you're like one of the most open-minded people I know.

Growth mindset is a specific type of mindset that speaks to your belief about capacity. Where does capacity come from? Versus a fixed mindset. So when people hold a growth mindset, there is this belief that capacity is not static, whereas when you hold a fixed mindset, you tend to have this belief that capacity is a bit more innate, inborn. So what is a mindset?

I'll just back up for a second. A mindset is basically a set of beliefs and what's a set of beliefs? A set of beliefs are a set of thoughts that you've repeated often. So we can help understand what type of mindset is a person is experiencing by tuning into what are the kind of stories they're telling themselves or thoughts that they're having.

And this applies so much to resilience because when you face an obstacle, when you are faced with a marriage that's suddenly not as satisfying as it was, or you are getting to know a person and things are getting a bit challenging, or you're wanting to put yourself out, or you feel vulnerability a hangover. Like whatever the adversity is, our capacity to keep persevering, to keep persisting is resilience.

And so when people hold a fixed mindset and they believe that capacity is more inborn, that leads to a series of behaviors. If I believe some people are smart or some people are not. Some people just have that sex appeal, other people don't. Some women are just like naturally orgasmic and others are not.

Some, some people can some, Some people know how to flirt and other people don't. Like, those are the stories. And it's the story around this sort of all or nothing type of thinking that really gets you caught up in like judgment and analyzing and criticizing and comparison. Whereas a growth mindset is a belief that capacity is both some nature and nurture. And that capacity can change. 

And this becomes so important between within relationships. Because the stories we tell ourselves are the ways in which we are interacting with people around us. And the thing about fixing growth mindset, you don't have one mindset or the other. Like I've worked really hard in my life to cultivate a deep growth mindset about intelligence.

I grew up sort of thinking like some people are smart and other people are not. I People thought I was smart and I didn't really think I was all that smart. So I always felt like I was like this imposter. Like people thought I was smart, but if only they found out like my SAT grades weren't so good. And like it takes me a long time to read a book. And like all these other things.

I shed that. I was like, yes, like growth mindset when it comes to intelligence. 

But relationships have been my edge. Relationships have been my edge because no matter how much I tried to like fight the whole Disney landscape of like Prince Charming. They're, When I'm really honest with myself, when things get tough in relationship, my brain goes; maybe we're just not compatable. And I have my hand hovering over this abort mission button because if all of a sudden I have to put an effort or like, oh, well maybe we're just not meant to be, because I hold onto the story. 

So when it comes to people working with their own pleasure. When it comes to people relating to one another, if we're not able to catch the stories that we start to tell ourselves, and particularly catch those stories about where capacity comes from, we're going to be in trouble.

Because when you hold more of a fixed mindset and you believe that some people have it and other people don't, you're more likely to take on that; Well, why bother story. You take on the story; Well, my husband's not interested in my pleasure, so why bother telling him? Or, I don't know what I'm doing anyway. So why bother trying? Why bother taking this class? Why bother trying that lube? Why bother reading that book? Why bother? Because we believe either you have it or you don't. So our mindset really plays into what happens when we face those obstacles. It will impact how we view effort, it will impact our patience.

Because when you have a fixed mindset, you're more caught up on either you have it or you don't. 

So there's also like, am I there yet? Am I not? Am I there yet, am I not? And there's this constant like evaluation. Whereas we all want to enjoy the journey and not just the destination. But if you don't have a growth mindset where you're focusing on things can change and effort is actually what's needed in order for me to grow.

Effort is a good thing. Effort doesn't point to either you have it or you don't. It will impact so many things. So it'll impact effort, it'll impact criticism, it'll impact your patience level with the process. It'll impact how you treat other people. And most importantly, when you face a setback, which we all will. Do you abort mission or do you kind of roll up your sleeves and say, okay, I need a new strategy here. This strategy wasn't working. What else can I do? 

Love it. I love that. It's so powerful. And it's so interesting too, how each individual has their sort of sector of life where they go into those like reactive mindsets one way or the other.

I'm just sitting here thinking like, mine's the tech. When the tech isn't working I'm like, fuck, why bother? Like, I'm just going to not. I just want to  run away or give up, instead of like applying and learning. And since I've been working and watching Leah, she's like, I'm going to figure this out.

I'm like, oh my God, it's amazing. It's such a different mindset. 

Yep. Yep. Exactly. Yeah. And they're so subtle, and it's like people might catch it in different ways. It's like, oh, I'm not good with languages, so I don't bother trying. I'm not good with names. I can't cook or  I'm not good with technology.

And again, you may very well not be in that moment, but what you're refer, what you're reinforcing to yourself goes to the person level rather than like, it's who you are rather than what you're doing. Yeah. And so we give ourselves an out, we st we, we stay within our comfort zone. As opposed to saying like, let me learn.

You start to identify as that. Which then if you identify as something, it limits what's possible for you to be or become. 

It's interesting because technology being an example is I have a remarkable amount of patience when it comes to technology, more so than most people. And I'm, and so I've got an aptitude, so I don't mind, I like leaning into the aptitude because I feel my own spaciousness. I'm more gentle with myself there. And I find that because of that there's more success. 

But when stuff's hard, then the resistance comes in. And I don't want to bother. My husband's always saying, you gotta do harder things. You gotta do harder things. And I'm like, I don't want to do harder things. I don't like things that are hard.

But one of the things I learned from you... 

...you do like things that are hard. Sorry, we're on Sex Reimagined, so I can say that. Sorry. 

That's right. Boom. Boom. 

Especially. 

Self-Efficacy | Self-Esteem | Self-Compassion

So I love that you brought up, well, let me say it this way. I would love for you to say more about the difference between self-efficacy and self-esteem because in our work with women, Willow and I do a lot of work with women.

Self-esteem is a big topic. Self-worth is a big topic, and you just started to lean into that between like process praise and person praise and our belief systems and how that can get us sort of stuck. Could you say a little bit about what is self-efficacy? Cause I don't think that's a word we understand very well.

Yeah, absolutely. I like to think of self-efficacy as the umbrella concept that houses self-esteem. It houses self-worth, it houses our belief systems about ourselves. 

And so one of the big differences is, like the word self-esteem is often used to think about a regard for one's self. So when a person has, my esteemed colleague, whereas like my colleague that I have high regard for. Or I have self-esteem, I feel good about myself. And how I, I How I feel about myself, which is important.

Having self-esteem is not... is, we don't want to encourage a person to have low self-esteem. But if we just focus in on self-esteem, it's almost like looking through a little keyhole and you're missing the big picture, because it's not just about how I feel about myself. What if the goal is a sense of flourishing and a sense of resilience. Because the bigger, broader concept of self-efficacy has more to do with not just how I feel about myself, but my belief in my capacity to meet the challenges at hand.

It's my belief that given the circumstances, I will be able to figure it out. Like I love Leah, when you were talking about how you have a higher tolerance in patience for technology. I would say it's not that you have that not just because you feel good about yourself, like I am Leah and I have high self-esteem. You have a sense of self-efficacy that you're like, I trust I can figure it out. And then when I can't figure it out, I will still figure it out because I will figure out who's going to help me figure it out. 

So it's a sense of having resourcefulness available to you. And it's not that we want to just and it's not Like self-esteem is like, how I be in the world. And self-efficacy is like, what I do in the world.

It's not like the two have to go hand in hand. So self-esteem, yes, it's important for me to feel good about myself, but if we just limit it to that we also say, well, where do, where does a person get that sense of feeling good about oneself? There's still some elements of that which can keep us caught up in a sense of comparison. 

Comparison to either our past self, like, I feel better about myself today than I felt yesterday. So like my self-esteem is going up, or my self-esteem is going down. Or Willow's self-esteem is so good and my self-esteem is not quite there yet. So there's this still element of like a barometer and there's so many selves.

There's self-esteem, there's self-worth, there's self-efficacy. And the one that I actually, and research supports this, is actually a stronger predictor of wellbeing than self-esteem, which is self-compassion. And self-compassion is the capacity to treat yourself with kindness. The same kind of kindness that you might give to a loved one or a cherished friend.

It's the capacity to see your common humanity within yourself and others that I'm just a human being like everybody else. Human being in process, in progress, flaws and all. And it's the capacity to have a mindfulness to catch yourself in the moment. And so there's so many different self hyphens that are important that go into wellbeing.

And we want to build, they're all great, build them all, build your self-worth, build your self-pleasure, build your self-love. Build your self-efficacy. Okay. Self-esteem & others. 

It's not an either or, it's an and. 

Yeah. Yeah. Love it. To build them all simultaneously, build them all at the same time.

Which kind of triggers a thought for me when you, when we first started, Emiliya, you were talking about these tracks to becoming a more whole human, a more happy human. And so it's that we want to build and grow and evolve each one of these tracks simultaneously, right? We're not just trying to get one in place and then get the other place because they all weave together and they're really creating this web that we call life.

Yeah, exactly. And even all those things about self, we just want to make sure that we're not just getting too caught up in ourselves. Because it is my capacity not just to do this for myself, but also to do it for other people. So when I have self-compassion, I can extend that compassion to others. When I have self-efficacy, I want to support the self-efficacy, the other efficacy, other people's wellbeing and champion their success.

Emiliya, will you go over those things that you said in the beginning again? I just want for those who are listening, want them to be able to kind of grasp them. Kind of one by one. Because you kind of spoke about each one as you talked about each one. So maybe just kind of list them so we can rock them.

The Six Pillars to Flourishing Recap 

Yep. Yep. So they are pathways to this experience of flourishing. They're all important. There's no one pathway. One is a sense of positive emotion netting positive. The others feeling engaged with your life. The third is having high quality relationships. The fourth is feeling that life is meaningful. You matter. You belong. A sense of achievement, able to do the things I want to do and create in the world. And then a sense of vitality, which is having the physical body be able to nourish and nurture the other pathways because I have energy available to myself. 

It's such a beautiful map for becoming more of who you really came here to be, right?

And it's all there for you. It's just a matter of uncovering the layers of beliefs and traumas and crap that gets in the way of what's there for each and every one of us by birthright. Yeah. 

I'm wondering, Emiliya, if you could talk about what is savoring and it's relationship to like magnifying pleasure?

The Art of Savoring

Yeah, so I believe that the most powerful points within positive psychology have come out of the savoring research. The basis is understanding that most people go about this story. That if something good happens, I'll be happy. I'll be happy when, I'll be happy when I get married. I'll be happy when I have a family. I'll be happy when I get the promotion. I'll be happy when...

Because we go about this assumption that if something good is happening, we must be experiencing it. And research shows that's not the case and that the researchers that have done the most work on savoring, Dr. Bryant and Veroff say that positive events alone are not about not enough to bring about positive emotions.

We actually need to be able to attend to and appreciate the positive emotions that those positive events bring. So it's not enough just to say that just because the sun is setting, which it actually is, I'm in New York City and the sun is setting right now, and I can kind of see a peek of it out of the corner of my eye over there.

Just because the sun is setting and I'm seeing something beautiful doesn't mean that I'm actually witnessing it. And just because  something I'm eating something that is delicious doesn't actually mean that I taste it. And just because something positive is happening in my life I've, I've met a wonderful partner, or I've gotten an opportunity, or I have this blessed life and I have my home.

Just because these events are happening, these events alone are not enough to bring about positive emotions. We actually need to be able to hone in on them, to attend to them, to extend them, to accentuate them because human beings are wired with this capacity that while we have a deeply seated emotional brain that has houses our limbic system and houses our capacity to have sensory input coming into our body, we also have this neocortex that has the capacity to override some of that present momentness with thinking about the future and remembering the past and creating stories about who we are and what's happening. And so our capacity to savor has to do with our capacity to extend the amount of pleasure that we get from our experiences. And I believe that this is the one of the most important skill sets that we could ever be taught.

And most people are never encouraged to explore it or even it's ever taught to us. And there's just so many things that even like we say these things to our kids, like we say, Pay attention. Kids pay attention in class. It's like, do we ever teach them how to pay attention? Or we say like, cheer up. Do we actually teach them to cheer up? Like all of this has to do with actually being able to work with your feelings, work with your emotions. 

And so when we talk about savoring, we explore it from the perspective that there's four approaches to savoring, like four unique ways that you can savor. And then we also have three time orientations to savoring.

Savoring Time

So the time orientations is that we can savor the past present in the future. When we savor the past, we're reminiscing. It's when we go, oh my God, that trip that we took together, Leah, that time when we were in Mexico together and we were in the cenotes of the water and like just reminiscing, right? Like we have the capacity to think about those past experiences and right here, right now, if we let ourselves, we can feel positive emotions.

We're actually savoring the past. We're capitalizing on it. We're deepening those grooves in our brain when we think about savoring the past. When we savor the future, we call it anticipatory savoring. This is when we think about, I'm so looking forward to this. I can't wait to see you again and hug you in person, Leah. And Willow to hopefully meet you one day. And it's when we're thinking about the things that we're looking forward to and we're savoring the future, and we're cultivating positive emotions today about whatever it might be. When my boyfriend gets home from from his trip and I can't wait to see him on Friday. It's like I can let myself think how good will it feel to finally back be cuddling. I love when we cuddle. I'm cultivating the positive emotions and we can savor the present moment. 

And when we're savoring the present moment, that's usually cultivating pleasure in this moment. So it's what am I hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting, sensing in this moment so I can savor the moment.

Four Approaches to Savoring

So there's the orientations, and then there's 4 approaches to savoring. 

Approach Number One- Thanksgiving

One, that's my absolute favorite and it's like my go-to, and it has forever changed my life is Thanksgiving. So when we give thanks we are regulating the emotion of gratitude and it is an approach to savoring because when we express gratitude to anything that we feel like we are being blessed by, we are the recipients of someone or something else's positive actions. When we say I'm so grateful, we're elongating the gift, the pleasure that we're getting from that experience. So we've got Thanksgiving that regulates the experience of gratitude. 

Approach Number Two- Basking

We have basking. When we bask we actually allow ourselves to experience pride. This is like sometimes people think like basking is like, like ba, I don't like it's sometimes they confuse it with just pure pleasure because it's a very specific frequency of savoring. It's not about boasting or telling someone else like, wee, look at me, what I did. Basking is when you go, I did that. I did that hard thing. I'm proud of myself. It is a sense of pride. We can feel a healthy, healthy sense of pride. That you're not the same event is happening, but You are you are stretching it. You are milking it for all the positive nuggets it can give you. 

Approach Number Three- Luxuriating

Then there's luxuriating. Luxuriating is when you use your God-given senses to experience and get more pleasure out of the things that we are seeing, smelling, tasting, touching, feeling, using our body. Mm-hmm. 

And then the other one, which I think is like so beautiful and so profound, and I have to work at this one a little bit more.

Approach Number Four- Marveling

It doesn't come as naturally to me as gratitude, but it is one of my favorite ones. And this is Marveling. This is marveling. Marveling regulates our ability to experience awe. So when I am like, wow, that Mandela and Yantra behind you, Leah is like, that is like, so cool, right? Or when we marvel at the simple things like this is, it's a really profound one.

They've done a lot of research on awe, out of all of the positive emotions, awe is also really unique. People who frequently experience awe tend to have, like, there's a correlation with having lower amounts of inflammation in our body. And it could be that the mechanism is that people who are spending a lot of time in nature have lower rates of inflammation. And like nature gives us so many opportunities to experience awe and marvel.

But like marveling is an amazing approach to savoring because it's like you let life take your breath away when you go *gasp*. Right? Like that feeling. So four approaches and three time orientations create this like skillset. It's a skillset that we can practice of savoring. 

Ah, I love that. And it's so, so yummy.

It's so yummy. And I imagine too with the marveling, it's like there's this curiosity that comes in as well. So not only does it lower inflammation, but it probably also creates those new pathways in your synopsis, in your, your neuro pathways, in your brain, your head, heart and gut brain and yoni brain. Some of us think there is. 

And it creates, probably creates those new pathways because it's this like, wow, I didn't know that was possible. I didn't know it could be that good or that beautiful or that inspiring. So those new grooves get formed quicker. Yep. 

Wonder vs Awe

You know, Brene Brown on her new special on HBO talked about the difference between wonder and awe.

Very, very similar emotional experiences. But that awe is like this present moment, breath being taken away as you like marvel at this beautiful thing. Right. So it's more present moment experience. Whereas wonder it's also filled with like, wow! But it's actually a learning curiosity. It's like, wow, I want to know more about that.

Yeah. And I didn't know that there was such a distinction between the two and this conversation's just reminding me of that. Do you have any insight into some of these nuances? 

Yeah. It's such a interesting point. I mean, my own lived experience, for me, wonder is more cerebral. It's like when I'm filled with wonder, I'm like, it's like a yummy thought process that I want to engage in. When I'm filled  with awe, it is visceral in my heart. It is in my body. It is totally in the present moment. And it is like, it's like a bathing in the experience of it. And yeah, as opposed to like when you're filled with wonder there's this element of like, thinking that I experience a bit. 

It gives you energy.

I can feel it right now in my body. I'm like, okay, let me drop into awe. Even in this moment, like, I've been staring at the screen all day long, so I was like okay. But dropping into that awe, it just gives you chi, gives you vitality. 

And I think that there's something really powerful about using savoring as a tool in partnership.

Yes. To keep love alive. To keep like that appreciation for your partner, for appreciation for yourself. For celebrating having done something that was hard or overcoming an obstacle together in partnership or as a community of people who may be at a workshop are testing out some new discoveries around sexual awakening. And we're in it together. We get to remember what it felt like to overcome our fears together and to find that on the other side of that is more love than we could ever imagine. 

It brings to mind some of my favorite memories of teacher trainings, of going back and like, wow, we were all part of a miracle that day. And to go and like hug yourself with the goodness of the things that have happened to you in your life. Because so much of our time is often spent on what's wrong versus what's right. 

So if you're stuck in one of those loops, maybe it's self-judgment over your ability to feel sexual pleasure or not. Or maybe it's a hardship you're having in your relationship. How can someone guide or coach themselves out of the loop that's just going over and over about suffering or victimhood or fear, thoughts? 

How we can Better Relate to One Another

Yeah. Well, going back for just a moment about what you said about savoring being such a powerful way to help us relate to one another, because all of those pathways, if we can find them first, of course, within ourselves, but to find them for others, it is such a powerful way to build that connection.

So a lot of couples will say that it's, you get caught in these routines and you get caught in these ruts over time. But if you can find ways to marvel at your partner, to experience them as though it's for the first time. Or to continue to hold that growth mindset that we are all constantly changing.

And a lot of the research from the Gottman Institute about relating, they point out that, he makes it a joke, but he says, how do you in a restaurant know the couples that are just dating versus the ones who've been married for a long time? And his joke is that the couples who are dating, they're dating because they're talking to each other.

Yeah. And that it's not that the couples who are married for a long time, it's not that they're not talking because they know everything there is to know about one another or because they have nothing we talk about. It's because they're telling themselves a story, like, Well, why bother?

As opposed to the couples who are constantly trying to uncover and marvel. And also create new experiences together. And so I think that a lot of that rut is first, if you could catch yourself being in the rut and recognize that this is me falling into a pattern. This is me falling into a place of just more frequently experiencing negative emotions than I am positive emotions. You're already ahead of the game. 

It's also important to have some compassion for ourselves because our brain is evolutionarily wired to do criticism, judgment, frustration, worry, anger, resentment, jealousy, envy with greater ease and familiarity than it is to do grateful, serene, calm, excited, curious, hopeful, connected, loving, wise, and all the other positive emotions.

Because for thousands of years, our capacity to feel and be responsive to negative emotions protected us, it kept us alive. So our brain is constantly going to be slightly more aware of the negative and a; Yeah, but... when the positive shows up. It's like I'm so grateful for my partner, but he still does that annoying thing. Or like, she still doesn't do that thing that I've been asking her to do for all this time.

And so our capacity to just catch our emotional states and be wise enough to say, I'm going to consciously induce a positive emotion, that's personal mastery. And with that personal mastery that's flourishing because it's actually not hard to go into pleasure. It is not hard for me to go into wonder. It is not hard for me to go into gratitude. 

I can take one of these beautiful flowers that's over here behind me and I could, if I wanted to give myself the permission to, spend like an ungodly amount of time with how amazing this flower spells. It actually smells really good.  This was a gamble because I had no clue if this was actually going to smell when I pulled it up. Right? But like, to let myself feel what this is like on my skin, right? To think about how grateful I am that I live in New York City and there's like bodegas everywhere that have like fresh cut flowers that I can get and have access to. 

Like, this is not hard. What's hard is the willingness to let myself go there when I have work that needs to be done and all sorts of uncertainty about what's going to happen in the world and so many things that I can choose to pay attention to.

And it's not that I'm ignoring them and being Pollyanna because I have my flower. It's because I'm home and I'm safe and I'm not in a war and I can take the time to let myself feel and have this experience of my skin and marvel. Like if you actually look at 'em, like each little one is like so freaking cool. It's like, is it a palm tree? Like, what is it? Like how did you decide to grow this way? Yeah. And it's like luscious form of purple. And again, like I swear I've had these up for a while and like I didn't smell them. They like smell like lilacs. I don't even know what kind of plant this is. Right. 

So it starts with a D, I was a florist at one point in my life.

Yes, you were. 

Magnetize and Nurture What you Want in Life and Relationships

Yes. And this is an interesting segue into that because flowers are nature. 

And if you think about our reason for buying flowers, typically it's to say I love you, to say I'm sorry, to say your condolences, to get married. You send it to get well, you send it just because. And the reason why it is such a beautiful, effective gesture as a gift is because nature transforms our emotions.

When people are upset, I gotta go take walk. I need take a walk because they feel better. That negative energy gets absorbed by nature. And so flowers are these amazing things that absorb negative energy and then offer us beauty and give us back positive energy. So I'm a big believer in giving yourself a little weekly budget for flowers.

Even if you just have to snip a branch in your backyard, nothing's prettier than a piece of curly willow or forsythia or put some lemons in a bowl. And I, there's something that will really, again, allow you when you walk 

by to go, yeah. Yeah. 

Yeah. Beautiful. And they're little Mira And they're like, pussies and yoni's everywhere. I mean the sex that is flowers is a whole nother level. 

Yeah. So 

just thinking and learning about bees and flowers and how they make a love 

Yeah. Is just a gorgeous thing. Yes. And how the flower just sits their waits, she doesn't wonder am I worthy of being pollinated? Will I get pollinated? It's just like, I just open and I yearn and I am, and I be, I don't have to do anything other than be the flower that I am.

Yeah. And I, and I want to take that even a step further when we take a look at relationship, but one of the things I'm often coaching couples is one of them usually wants the other person to get open, be more sexual, we need to have a better sex life. Right. And the other one is struggling with that. And you don't say to a flower open up. Come on, hurry up, I'm ready for you to open. What's taking you so long? You know, you allow the flower to have its own ripe timing. You're patient, you're not demanding, you know, you don't push your fingers into opening the flower. And so there is a way with which we can actually show up for each other in sexuality with greater compassion for ourselves and our own timing for opening. Allowing that to be coaxed and also to have compassion for our partner who may be at a different season in their life.

And then of course it's just also to challenge ourselves to remember that we rarely regret a sexual experience with our partner. Like if I have a date at five o'clock with my husband, I'm not usually going, nah. I mean, I might usually be going, oh, I don't feel like doing this. I feel like eating. But if I show up and 10 minutes later, 15 minutes later, a half hour later, I've just had this beautiful connection with my husband. I never go, gee, I wish I hadn't done that. That was a real waste of my time. Yeah, so just remember, be a garden y'all. 

Love that. Yeah. 

Yeah. Be like a flower and just magnetize that pollination to you. You know, that's a big piece of the Taoist wisdom. What the Tao brings in is it's like we're not just part of nature. We are nature. Just like the earth we expand, we contract, we rise, we fall, we pull in, we push out, we open, we close. And it's these seasons that we go through, these natural, organic seasons. And so attuning your life to this wholeness that Emiliya's talking about, this new mind shift, this growth mindset that is possible for each and every one of us is the path.

That is the way, if you want to know what the way is, it's that. 

Next Level Relationships

Yeah. Emiliya, would you say something about relationship and attunement? 

Absolutely. So when we think about the relationship piece to flourishing, we think about not just going to a professional to stop you from having a marriage that fails, or family therapy that tries to break to, to fix the brokenness so that you can just be at baseline.

We talk about high quality relating, we talk about next level relating. We're talking about relationships that thrive, that help people feel like they belong, that they matter, that they're loved, that they're accepted. And so we can think about the conditions that support that in a high quality relationship.

And there. And so there are many conditions. The first and foremost one starts with trust. So when you were talking Leah about, you know, how do you get a flower to open? Well, I was like, well, first and foremost, that flower has got a trust that she can get wet or that he can get hard, because if trust isn't present, the body's going to stay and literally close up. 

So trust needs to be present and attunement is important to creating that sense of connection because when we attune, we become in sync with. And usually to attune we have to drop into the present moment with the person. So the capacity to attune involves to come into the same frequency as, and there are lots of ways of attuning.

You can empathize with the person. I love many of the Tantric rituals around how couples reunite to come back into attunement. The good old just spooning and breathing and aligning your Chakras. There David Schnarch, the couple's therapist calls it the hugging to relax. Like holding each other for at least a some people would say, 20 second embrace or six second kiss.

But it's really, there's no actual time point. It's however long it takes for the person whose nervous system is the most jacked up to come into a more parasympathetic state. So to drop in and to match one another. And so we can synchronize ourselves, we can synchronize ourselves to our partner through breathing.

We can synchronize it through moving. It could be through dancing. I remember I had a partner, we used to, we both had dogs and so we had sort of synchronized by walking the dogs together. You know, we sort of like come in sort of like bees and ants. And so we can use attunement as a tool to enhance the quality of our relationships by coming into synchrony.

And it's also one of the markers oftentimes of a high quality connection because it's like, you can feel. It's like you can feel one another. You can drop into one another. You can sometimes finish one another's sentences, not because we want to be mindreading and expecting people are going to know what we're thinking. But actually just because it's like, I'm dropped into you, I can feel you. So it's both a marker and a tool for increasing the quality of our connections. 

So well said. And just so beautiful and eloquent. I love that. So I'm wondering, Emiliya, like I know you have this amazing free gift that is an entryway into positive psychology for our listeners, but I would just love if you had like, just final words of wisdom for anyone around their intimacy, their sexuality, their love life, coming from this incredible depth of wisdom that you embody.

Words of Wisdom

I think the reminder that in many ways what we are reclaiming in our world is the divine feminine and the divine masculine, like the truest essence of it. And in particular, we live in a world that doesn't revere being as much as we do doing. 

And pleasure is, from my perspective, one of the most powerful meditations I can ever take on, because pleasure is always happening in the now. And I have a very fast moving CEO entrepreneurial brain that would is much happier, but, just wants to jump into the future, and plan, and do, and have more, and figure out, really just to protect myself.

Or ruminate about the past because, for me, it's part of my journey, part of what brought me into Leah's classes all those years ago and all the classes before that, and the classes I'm still in now, and the also relationship to my own body is to actually know that I am worthy of, and it is safe to embody pleasure and be in this present moment. Because pleasure is always happening now.

And when we are in our feminine, whether as men or as women, or as non-binary or transgendered, we are all in a feminine experience in that moment. Because pleasure's always happening now. Even if I'm thinking about future pleasure, I'm experiencing it now. And so we know the power of now. We know the power of meditation, we know the power of mindfulness and all the benefits that it gives us in all the benefits of relaxing our body.

And so to truly treat pleasure as a pathway to Self-care to wellbeing to spiritual development. And it's really a reclamation of the feminine in our world and in our lives. And to make this a really important worthwhile skill and one that I'm constantly like needing to remind myself of. Because as I'm laying there in bed, I would much rather think about the future than I would like reach for my bottle of oil and be with my yoni, with just my hand and my touch in the now. And like, why is that, I know better?

Because there's something about my mind that feels safe and there's something about the present moment and surrendering that's just not as familiar. But to really, truly flourish we need to be able to do both. And I think that there is just, there's a universe in our yoniverse that we can all experience and a universe in the Lingham-verse as well, that like we can all experience.

And if we do this for ourselves, it's the greatest gift we can give to our partners, because I can't, I can only reveal to my partner as far as I've taken myself. 

So beautiful, beautiful. 

Beautifully said. 

Thanks guys. 

Yum. Tell us about your free gifts because it's a really cool entry into all of the programs and all of the things that you teach and offer and certifications. And all that, right? 

LYFT - Emiliya's Free Gift

Thank you. Thank you. LYFT has been a dream that I have had for many, many, many, many years. And the pandemic was what finally pushed me to create it. I, as of the starting point, is actually going to be June 20th, but We've been running these programs first since the pandemic started.

I have wanted to create a place that is a gym for the mind. Gym for the mind, a gym for the heart, a gym for positive psychology. A place where people could practice in just the same way that you would have a membership at a yoga studio where there are just multiple classes happening throughout the day and every day you can practice yoga if you want, or go to a gym and take a workout or take a spin class and like you know, that there's a place you can go to where you can build your physical skillset. 

I've wanted to create a place where people could build this psychological skillset that encompasses the full spectrum of not just positive psychology theory, but actually gives people a place to practice.

So, we now run at the Flourishing Center, a program called LYFT, and we like to say that we lift you up while preparing you for life's heavy lifting. And this is a program that there are Monday through Friday, three classes that happen every single day. So you can have like a breakfast, lunch, and dinner type of dynamic where there are classes happening where you can go and learn positive psychology, practice mindfulness, learn a breathing exercise, learn a bit of research, practice it right there and then, not just like talking about a gratitude letter. Writing a gratitude letter. Not just talking about controlling your mind chatter, like actually learning to work with your mind chatter. It's a lot of fun. We do breakout group activities. We do improv activities. There's usually some creative element woven into it. And so I would love to invite anybody who's interested to check out the free gift and experience a full week of LYFT of unlimited classes for free.

And to just spread the word because it is definitely a fun membership to be a part of. And to just have a place like, I like to think of it, it's like a dojo for positive psychology, a place to practice. And someone in New York City seems to be very excited about this too. I'll honk for that. I'll honk for that. 

I love it. So these classes are live then, three a day? 

Yep. 

Wow. 

Three classes a day live. 

Okay. 

Yep. Monday through Friday. 

All right. 

18 classes a week. 

For those of you who are ready to create a positive growth mindset in your life, this is definitely the place to do it. So what an incredible gift.

Thank you so much for offering that for us, Emiliya. 

Yeah, it would be really fun if anyone wants to join me with this week of lifting, maybe we could get a group together and lift together 

for a week. Week. Yeah. Give like a book club on Lyft. Like we'll all go to the classes and then chat. Have fun.

Totally. We'll do community. Thank you so much, Emiliya. 

Thank you guys. And thank you again for doing this work and opening this space for these types of conversations. It's huge. 

Yeah. It's such a pleasure to meet you and to connect with you, and to feel your spirit and your depth of wisdom. So powerful.

Yeah. 

All right, everyone. Love, love, love. Thank you.

Time to Dish about Emiliya Zhivotovskaya!! 

Now our favorite part, the dish.

My gosh, Emiliya, positive psychology, what a wealth of information. 

Yeah, she's a right, she's a deep dive. Talk about a deep dish. 

Oh my god. Deep dish. 

That woman has studied and knows her shit and lives it, really, you can tell. 

Really lives it. 

She lives it. She walks her talk, she practices what she preaches.

And I loved this, like, this growth mindset that we really kicked it off with because I mean, so, and she really you know, described it well. So many of us go through life thinking like; Well, I would never be able to do that so I'm just not even going to try. Oh, I could never have that kind of relationship or sexuality. I'm going to turn that off in my system. And that, I feel like over time, is what causes dis-ease in the body because the soul wants to have it all. The soul wants to have this amazing relationship and this amazing, abundance in life and all of it. And it's about having that growth mindset in place in order to expand and evolve into attaining.

Yeah. We're really fortunate to be in the west where we can, many of us, not all of us, many of us have more privilege than others, but with that privilege we're allowed to actually start moving towards these more transcendent ideals of the kind of life we want to live. We actually have an opportunity to go, I can turn myself completely towards learning how to have a life that's filled with more vitality, more happiness to flourish. And it allows you to confront the parts of yourself that do get stuck in the negative judging, it's too hard mindset. Of just like allowing yourself, pushing yourself, nudging yourself just a little bit to create even more space for yourself. 

And I didn't ,know I wasn't raised understanding that when I do hard things that it's building a muscle of resilience and it allows me to grow more and greater self-efficacy and this whole thing with self-love and self-esteem and self-efficacy.

I thought all of, I love that she tied in all the self pieces. 

That was great. 

I hadn't heard her teach it quite like that before. Or if I had, I'd forgotten. It was such a good reminder. And what else was a good reminder is the difference between basking and savoring, like basking is a type of savoring. And for some reason in my mind I kept on putting them together. Sort of like, my point about awe and wonder. You know, we forget to make these distinctions that like language is really important. It's more important than I really realized. Just in the past two weeks language is starting to drop into me in a really profound level and I want to be more clear in my messaging of languaging.  

Yeah. It's how we communicate, right? We use language to get what's in our heart up through our throat chakra and out through our tongue. And Chinese medicine the tongue roots into the heart. It's like the tongue flowers from the heart.

So the language that we learn about each other too is so valuable. It's one of the things I always give my couples is like, I want you to spend a weekend and write down every word you hear your partners say multiple times over because that word is important to them. 

Good. 

And you need to be, you know, using that word with them so that they can hear you. Because if you don't have a relationship with the word, like sovereignty, that word, you know? We throw it around and people are like, oh, I don't really get it. And some people are like, oh, I just embody it. I know what it is. I remember the moment where I became like, had a relationship with that word and before that it was a bit nebulous and that would kind of gloss over. So the languaging is so important and that part of the brain, that language center in the brain is a huge, huge aspect of our brain.

So, big part of positive psychology. 

Yeah. I think it really stems from a place of our deep desire to be understood. And not only to be understood, but we also want to understand others. 

Yes. 

Like if we can understand where someone's coming from or what's true to them, it makes it easier to forgive them. It makes it easier to love them. It makes it easier to create grace with them. To create hope.  To be tender and compassionate. I mean, there's all sorts of things that understanding lends us towards. 

Yeah. 

And helps us lean into a feeling of connection and belonging. Because when we don't feel understood, we tend to lean into isolation.

That's right. 

And rejection. And all these other feelings. I find it rather remarkable, you know, some other people that we've been speaking to who've just done an excellent job with languages. Yeah. Mare Simone. Yeah. Alison Armstrong, Emiliya really brought the language game to the table.

Yeah. And I just feel so intrigued by it, like I really want to understand feeling words better.  

 And our author Honeybee.  

And Honeybee. Yes.  

Words are powerful. 

Yeah. So curious what all of you have to say about this new way of questioning your own thoughts in your own mind? I think that's the other like spin that I get a lot of value from the whole positive psychology piece that Emiliya brings.

It's just don't be on autopilot with your thoughts. Don't just believe because you had the thought that they're worth believing in. 

That's right. Yeah. Question your own thoughts. 

Question your own thoughts. 

Because a lot of times they're coming from your parents or your teachers or some other hierarchy. Yeah.

They're not even yours. Exactly. 

Yeah. In fact none of them are yours. 

No original thoughts. 

And especially when it comes to fear thoughts. To talk back to our thoughts that keep us small, that keep us from challenging ourselves, that keep us too comfortable, or that keep us stuck in negativity. 

You know, this whole idea that it takes one positive thought. No, I'm sorry, is that it? It's one positive and four negative? Yeah. Or it's the other way around? You need four positive thoughts for every one negative.  

In order to change your brain, neuro pathways. Yeah. 

Yeah. And we are predisposed to lean into the negative. 

Yeah.

Because it's a safety mechanism. Yeah. If you're out on the  Savannah and it's a sunny, gorgeous day and everything's good all around you, except for that tiger behind that tree, like all your attention is going to be on that tiger behind that tree, not the sunny, warm, gorgeous field you're in. You know? 

Can our brain, hello brain? Could you please evolve a little faster, please? 

Yeah. Hello? 

Because we're really sick of being so controlled by this old brain. 

Yeah. And it's, you know, it's why we also gravitate toward, like watching negative news and we get addicted to it. Yeah. Because the brain really is comfortable in that realm. 

Again, there's just, I gotta keep myself safe and keep myself, you know, together. And a there's some evolution there for each one of us to explore and discover. 

Yeah, I think I really want to encourage everyone, I think the best thing that ever happened to me regarding the Covid era was my enrollment with Emiliya and going through her six month program of learning positive psychology.

You get the  the certification, you learn the perv model, and you learn about all these incredible human ways, the science of the brain and the science of positivity. And it's not a happyology, right? It's not about happiness. Right. Even though it's called positive psychology, right? It's really about having self agency regarding understanding how this stuff works and that you can actually work with it in a way more powerful way than you can imagine. And to understand your impulses and why things like hope are so important and belonging and forgiveness and all these things. 

Yeah. Emiliya covered those five things she talked about in the beginning, and she did an overview of them around the middle or the end as well.

Really. That was really cool. I think, and her free gift is actually a free week into her membership portal, so you can actually check her stuff out. And then, I got to witness Leah go through the transformation of studying with Emiliya during Covid. And it was definitely profound to see just everything that was coming up for you.

Yeah. And how you were transforming and the depth of who you became through. It was really powerful. 

So there you go. 

So enjoy. 

Get yourself some, Emiliya. 

That's right, you won't you won't regret it. 

You won't regret.

Thanks for tuning in. If the hosts seem to know what they were talking about, that's because they do. Leah Piper is a Tantric sex master coach and a positive psychology facilitator. Dr. Willow Brown is both a Chinese and functional medicine doctor and a Taoist sexology teacher. Don't forget your comments, likes, subscribes, and suggestions matter.

Let's realize this new world together.