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Hello and welcome to Something Positive for Positive People. I'm Courtney Brain. Something Positive for Positive People is a 501c3 nonprofit organization celebrating its 400th podcast episode. On Friday, December 19th, I'm selling tickets to an event. I rented out an event space. I really just want to recover the cost. So we got an entertainer who's going to be performing for us and also the there will be music, drinks are available as well. But I want this to be just something for the people who with me and in celebration, just for us to be able to do karaoke or a talent show of some sort. Like whatever you feel like you contribute to the space and go ahead and do that. Come through again, it's December 19th. We're celebrating the 400th podcast episode and all of the details to that are on the website on the events tab. When you go to the homepage, you'll see it as well. Before I get into the episode, a couple of things that have changed now. I know that I've been offering yoga therapy. I haven't been talking about it because it's been difficult for me to have any sort of a consistent schedule and routine. But now we do. Now that I live in Brooklyn, virtual sessions are available. There's a suggested donation amount, but it's all donation based. So whatever you need, like reach out if you know you need something more than a 30 minute support call. This is a really good place to go, especially if you don't know what you need. Yoga has been really useful to me and I'm using what I'm learning in my yoga therapy program to apply to herpes stigma identity as well as the grief that comes with it and helping people look at their sexuality in a way that is not exclusively through that lens of stigma. The support groups, I'm going to have them weekly. There will be weekly support groups the first and third Monday at 7:30pm Eastern Time. These will be virtual and these are for everyone. This is in all genders identities support group. And on the 2nd and 4th. These are exclusively for men. These are exclusively for men. Okay. Second and fourth Sunday. So all of these support groups are now going to require that you be vetted in order to enter. And the support groups are going to require a donation of something in order to be able to participate. I have reasons for putting this boundary in place and I might have talked about it before, but I want to, you know, give that too much time. I'll talk about it in the support group, but yeah, I'm maintaining a level of consistency here. I want to prioritize the support space. So effective first Monday in October, that's going to be the process. So right now I'm taking people's I'm going to send out emails to let everyone know, hey, support groups are going to start in October. But I've also shared some other support group options that are out there in the most recent newsletter, which if you have not subscribed to the newsletter, that is going to be your best bet to know what's going on with something positive for positive people and to get any updates on herpes related stigma surveys and things that we are creating and putting out because social media is not uplifting this content. So survey responses are coming in. If you're listening to this and you are not subscribed to the newsletter, all you got to do is go to spfpp.org/herpes-newsletter and if that was too much to remember, just go to the website and fill in a form on any of the pages. Join something and you'll have the option to opt into the newsletter. All right. It's as simple as that. Okay, today's podcast episode. Man, I. I remember right before going to bed last night, I was feeling very inspired. I had a wonderful day. I got up, I went. I saw the Demon Slayer movie in Infinity Castle Arc hype for how that was. The visuals were stunning, of course. And. And I cried. I cried in that movie theater. I think that I really get moved by characters. I get moved by the sacrifice. I get moved by the joy. I get moved by the triumph. I get moved by giving everything you got. And man, it just throws such a resonance for me that, yeah, like I cry. Cry. I'm sitting, I think. I don't know if other people cried at the part I cried at. And I ain't gonna talk about it in case people want to see it because it's a. It's a popular anime. And I also bought popcorn at the movie theater for the first time. I don't think I've ever purchased popcorn in a movie theater for myself and also cut chicken strips and a hot dog and a soda. So yes, I spent 40 at the movie theater on a meal when I really wanted dumplings and I could have ate that for $20 and been happy. But it was a long movie and I just, I let myself splurge. I wasn't mad about it. And after, yeah, after the movie I. I left and I went home for a few hours and I shot. I saw a friend. I saw my friend who was here from Sex Down South. It was. It was real nice seeing her again. We just hung out for a bit and in passing on our way to our next destinations. And it was real pleasant. And after that, I went to the D1 concert. So D1 is a rapper who embodies Christian values and. And speaks out and advocates against the hypocrisy within hip hop. His tour right now is called Hypocritical Hop Tour and also rename his new album his music is. There's a. There's a charge to it energetically that is attractive. It's not the music that glorifies gang violence. It doesn't glamorize women shaking ass and getting drunk and doing drugs. Like, nah, he's really speaking out against the culture. And what I want to speak to is the resonance of how you feel called to things, you feel drawn to things and people who kind of are where you are. So the. The concert wasn't that big. It might have been around 100 people that were there. But that man showed up. He showed up. He showed up with energy. He worked the crowd, he talked to us. You know, he performed. He performed like he got the crowd involved. And that was just a level of presence, you know, even in a small room. That was again, more inspiring to me because just like him, you know, I look at a lot of parallels in my life. He mentioned. He showed that he did. He met Kendrick Lamar 11 years or 14 years ago. He said that there was a picture from 11 years ago. And then 11 or 14 years later, I forget which one it was. Kendrick Lamar shouted him out of the song. And you know, the. The little like just to know. Over the course of 11 to 14 years, you know, you see somebody that you perform with at the same place and they have this huge outward success, success. And then they bring you in, they use that. Their platform to just shout you out. And in doing that, like it speaks to all the. Like you heard, oh, he met Kendrick 11 years ago and now Kendrick shouted him out. Like that might not mean nothing to a lot of people, but 11 years of grinding and working and unsear uncertainty and you don't know who's listening, you don't know who with you. And then you get that shot out. And Kendrick Lamar, he was going. He had a lot going on last year between the beef with Drake, the Super bowl, the success from the previous album with that card, you know, I guess he was going to therapy too. And so among all of that to. To get a shout out and also D1 had a couple of days ago, gotten a shout out from someone, Joe Button, who's a podcaster, who really criticizes. I ain't gonna say criticize. Yeah. I don't really know what to say. He does, but he talks. And he had. You know, he. He was on D1 before D1 responded with, you know, loving kindness and calling him out. And a few days ago, Joe Budden shouted out to him, respected him, and sort of paralleled his message or relayed his message using his platform. And it's so inspiring to just watch that shit. Like, I like that. I like watching people, you know, put that. Put in. I don't want to glorify the work, but put the work in, metaphorically honoring and following their mission, what they're supposed to be doing, because I find that inspiring. And you don't see a lot of that in real life. I can name you 30 anime where the main character has a mission that they focused on and they're pursuing it, and they got the challenges, the obstacles, opportunities that come and go. And then, you know, they. They experience defeat, they experience loss, they experience all the negativity along the way, but they never lose sight of the positive. And even if they do, they get it back. And I think that that's something that is worth transferring over on this platform, you know, to whoever's listening to this. My man said, you know, he on tour right now in the Toyota Corolla. On tour in the Corolla. A rapper, man. And it's that story. It's been inspiring. Not to mention the music was great. Music was great. It was cool. Watching people bring their young children into the place and their kids dance into this kind of hip hop, that's like uplifting them and speaking life into them, and they dance into it, and their parents able to listen to it with them. That shit was tight. And, yeah, it was. It was a real good time. I stood the whole time that month started on time. I was a little late. I ain't usually late to things, but I missed, like, the first, you know, two thirds of the panel discussion that they had about hip hop and where it is. But I got the whole concert. That's what I. That's what I wanted. That's what I came for. It did not disappoint. Point. It didn't. So I want to take from my day yesterday and apply it here for y'. All. As it relates to navigating herpes stigma, I think that we have and we activate a superpower. It's not a superpower of tolerance. It's not a superpower of survival, but it's a connectedness with something beyond our body, beyond our mind, beyond our emotions, beyond our life circumstances, beyond our environment. And the connection's always there because the world around us is responding to our awareness, our presence, to that connectedness, and we lose it. We got it when we kids, but we get it. We have it when we growing up, and we kind of phase in and out of it when we're in that flow state of doing what it is that we know we're supposed to be doing. Y'. All. I look at podcasting at this point as a presence practice. This is my spirituality. This is my prayer. Yeah. I might, you know, cuss and talk about fucking. And my. The spirituality component of this is different than what people might be used to, but that's what this is for me. It's the opportunity to live out loud in the relevant way that uplifts my purpose and puts it directly in the front of people who can learn from me, to identify what their own is. Because I believe that each of us is a light here to remember that we are. Like, I've been talking about these stars analogies lately, and I don't mean the stars talk. I'm talking about, like, cosmos and how each of our nervous systems is a solar system. And if you start to look at yourself like that, I think that you begin to view the world differently and you start to view people differently in the sense of we are this same. We are that stardust. Stardust made of infinity elements throughout space. The hydrogen, helium, the. The other elements that make up our body, carbon, whatever, whatever else. That's what we are. And we forget that, you know, in the I ams and what we say that follows, that's what we make ourselves out to be. And it's in these labels that we limit ourselves. Yeah. You know, I step into the label of being a podcast. I step into it of being a herpes stigma education advocate. I step into the role of being a lover. I step in the role of being a friend. I step in the role of being the meat suit, the body, the mind that is Courtney. I step into the yoga instructor, the yoga therapist, the support facilitator. I step into the anime watcher. I step into the party goer. I step into the dancer. And the more I recognize these as roles that I step into, the more I realize I'm not these roles. What does it feel like to just be, Even as I'm talking right now, you know, it don't don't feel like me. I came in here with a whole plan. I was. I was gonna drop a metaphor to get the announcements at the beginning, but I keep running across synchronicities for myself. Moments of resonance, that I'm on the right track, that I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing, that I am what I'm supposed to be. I'm serving who I'm supposed to serve. When I talk about service like this is a service and this. This. All this sound preaching, I'm just tell y' all now. So if you don't with the preacher like you can, you might want to just go listen to an episode. But this is supposed to be something that's encouraging for people. When I got my herpes diagnosis, I didn't know what the I needed. You heard it in my story. I had to go create that. And that was, for me, with herpes. And in the process of creating this, you know what I learned that I. It ain't just that. I learned what I needed. I learned what I wanted. I learned what I was desperate for. I learned what I desired. And. And having to take so much of a look at myself, having seen so many other people beyond how they viewed themselves and showing people who they are, reminding them again, it's always becoming about something. Not me. I ain't saying I've lived outside my body necessarily, but I've been so inhabited in it that I connected to that. That core, that core mind, that core that fuels the reality around me. You know, I always say, like, who we are, we are the. The space between the opposite ends of magnets. You know, holding ourselves together between the positive and the negative. That. That pull that we feel on either side, drawing the positive and negative together, that's us. That's us in waking life and in the dream world, we holding the magnets. You know, my views on God have evolved. My views on quantum physics and where we come from and the love and light and yoga philosophy, all of these things point us in the same direction. They point us inward. And so many of us, we're just not taught to look within, you know, the stars out there, because the stars are all around us and they're in us. And I think that we. We forget that and we minimize ourselves with the label of being a person who has herpes. And we further validate that invalidation of identity, that root cause of suffering, that. That. That constant ache within our body, our personality, our emotions, our. Our nervous system. We start to embody the. That we Give name to that we continue to give power to. Now, have you tested positive for herpes? Yeah. Say that. Are you dirty now? Prove yourself wrong. Go take a shower, wash your hands, clean your room. So those are the things that a dirty person does. A dirty person doesn't just get herpes. Promiscuous the fuck out of here. Most of y' all who got herpes and got herpes because you ain't hoes, you got it for not being hoes. And I talked to enough people to know, even me, I wouldn't be in a hoe when I got it with none of us hoeing. A lot of us were not hoeing. And that's probably part of the problem, because if we was, then we'd have been. We'd at least had a better experience. Let me not say that, because I know that a lot of times that this is a tragedy for people. People I know people, women who've been sexually assaulted. And the person who sexually assaulted them has intentionally, with malice, infected them, aimed to ruin their lives. Don't nobody deserve that. And I even have compassion for those people on the other end. I'm not justifying it. I'm saying that that's another symptom of st stigma, you know, the herpes viruses. If you give it an identity, you give it a life, or you just put yourself in his shoes. All they want is what everybody else want to be comfortable. I got herpes, and it let me know, hey, does this body you in right now, it ain't being as taken care of as it can be. And then it became an angry tenant, so. So, boom, you get an outbreak. It's like, I gotta get out of here. I'm stuck. But that's its attempt to get out, to reproduce with someone when I'm having sex with them, you know, unsuspectedly. And then it goes away after I get the lesson, take the medication, I slow down, I take care of my body. And then what, Four years later, after my. No, four years. Four. Five. No, three. Four years. Three to four years later, after my diagnosis. Oh, you got fired from that job. Oh, man, you gotta make some life changes. Let me help you. All right, cool. You got a better job, you got a little steady income. But, Courtney, you're not fulfilled. I'm going to take a break from now. I'm going take a break from now. Yeah, you're working at this ad agency, all right? Goes away. And then four or five years after that, 20, 21. Damn, Courtney, you want to slow down? On all that sugar you drinking, you just swallowing corn syrup and high fructose and added sugars. Okay? I tried to tell you, bam, outbreak. And that ended up keeping me from getting diabetes. My saying that for where you are in your diagnosis, that you need to listen to your herpes diagnosis. But what I am telling you is that there's something there. If we do look there and empathize with it, like, what would it be trying to tell us? What does it want? What does it want from your perspective? I look at it like all herpes once is just a healthy home. Don't we all want that? Don't we all want a little stability and consistency? You know, it took me four years into my diagnosis to really be able to anchor into any type of fulfillment. You know, I say this often. I don't know how the I've been paying my bills. Just ups and downs of fortunes and misfortunes that have been happening. And in all of them, like, I never cave, I never give up. Every bad thing that's happened to me, I've somehow made into a positive thing. Everybody ain't got access to that. I recognize that ADHD is rampant as fuck. I forget who I was listening to, but it was a. A YouTube clip that had some scientist. Gabriel Matt might be that I don't mature. I. I don't know who it was, but the podcast hosted asked him about adhd and he gave this really, really good example. He was like, if I say something right now that you didn't like, right? Like, what would you. What would you do? You get triggered by or overstimulated by a thing. And the podcast host was like, oh, well, you know, I could. I could either leave or I could confront you about it. And the guy goes, yeah, fight or flight. Now imagine being so into it that that doesn't work or something like that. Like, now you, You. You've come up with another way of responding to that coping mechanism. So having, you know, and I bring this up because I think a lot of people undiagnosed diagnosed will say, I have adhd. I got adhd. And so much of what I've learned about ADHD is that a lot of people, ADHD cannot be still. Like, it's very difficult to be still. And it's hard for me to sit here and, you know, preach my whole do nothing for philosophy and how vital stillness is and what information is there. And especially in a world where we got to get up, we gotta go to work, gotta get up and go to work. And that we we gotta make money. We gotta go to work. We gotta take care of ourselves. We gotta take care of other people. We gotta have friendships. We need community. So how I'm gonna sit up here and tell y' all what to do? How I'm gonna sit up here and tell you who you are? I can't do that. All I can do is live in such a way where I show you what it's like when I ask the questions. And maybe some of these questions resonate for you to be able to ask. When you got your herpes diagnosis, what else was going on in your life? Were there things that maybe you ignored? Maybe you heard a gentle whisper. Hey, make this change. Change this about what you're doing. This ain't who you are. Maybe that whisper got a little bit louder. Maybe it came from red flags from people around you. Maybe someone calls you in, hey, hey, I noticed this thing about you. Maybe, maybe it was coming in a lot, and it was overwhelming and it was intense for you, and you needed to grab a vice of some sort. Maybe you vape, Maybe you smoke weed, Maybe you do other drugs. Maybe you do people. Maybe you drink. Maybe you try and avoid. Avoid the time alone, the loneliness, the thoughts that come up. And maybe people are or are not safe. And in that presence or absence of safety, what do you do? Because we can also engage in our vices, alcohol, people, in a way that's avoiding. It's avoiding what's good for us and avoiding what's bad for us. I think that there's always going to be both in the mix, and we have full autonomy and choice in how we respond to what's presented to us. We can't always. We can't always control what happens. We can't control shit. And I think that between losing my relationship and losing my home this year, I learned that. Like, I really. That lesson got drilled into me. I don't control. None of this belongs to me. And that's the most liberating thing I've ever said to myself. None of this belongs to me. I temporarily inhabit this body, and then this gotta go back to the earth when my soul leaves, when the essence of me, that is everything else, when the time's up. And I don't think we live like that. I think we live like. Like this shit's forever. Oh, I'm gonna have herpes for the rest of my life. No, you're gonna have it for the rest of the period that this body's decomposing. Yeah, but when you, you know, attach to that. I'm not. I'm not trying to, like, use no spiritual bypass and, like, extending what the reality has been that I've been living and just giving you a nudge to try it out. That song. Row, row, row your boat Gently down the stream Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily Life is but a dream that. That always stuck with me. Like, my family didn't really do nursery rhymes with me, but I remember just like that resonating with me. And I think there's some spiritual significance to that. What if life is the dream? What if when we dream, that's our reality, our waking life, we talk about making our dreams come true? Why not make our realities come true? If this place that we're in, in waking life, when you hearing my voice right now, when whatever you doing, if you working out, you listening to this, you cleaning, if you crying in your car and looking for some type of consoling or support, whatever it is that you doing, wherever you at, when you hearing this, flip that shit, Imagine if what you dream about, your wildest, most loving, most vibrant, emotionally stimulating dreams, if that's where you really live, if that's where you really exist. What if our God, what if our goal is to just bring that. Bring what we have there. Here I dream, always dream, always dream. I'm. I'm a hero of some sort. You say, I need to stop that, but if that's who I am, that's who I am. The dreams that I have often are about moderation. I always get to a place where I'm fucking. I load my plate up, I make it pretty, it's balanced. I'm in like a cafeteria style buffet. Think Golden Corral. And then I go to sit down and somebody start talking to me. I'm talking. Maybe I. Maybe I say grace. I don't even say grace when I eat. But I give presents to whoever it is that's talking to me or diverts my attention. And then I go to take that first bite and I wake up. That's a nightmare to me. But I think that that more speaks to the kind of person I am limitless. When there are no rules, when there are no constrictions to who you can be and what you can do. Sometimes I do some ridiculous in my dreams. I'm able to fly. Sometimes. It's been very rare, but I think that my reality has really been inhibiting my dreams, y'. All. And I think that that's the case for most of us. Our realities can inhibit our dreams, you know, I talk to people. I'm like, hey, what do you dream about? Because I want to know this shit. I want to know what's the last dream you had? What you dreaming about? What you doing in your dreams? People tell me like, oh, I don't dream. I don't remember my dreams. I dream a lot. Like, just as last night, I had a dream that I empathized with Spider man and I guess fucking Mephisto, one of the. One of the devil bad guys or whatever, like, had tried to corrupt my mind or some shit. He showed me, like, some feel good shit. I was like, oh, that feels good. I was like, oh, I know what's next? Then he showed me, like, a future of me holding Mary Jane dead in my arms. And I like crying. I was like, oh, little do you know who you fucking with? It's like, I take any negative situation, and if I got the capacity to feel this level of grief, can you imagine how powerful I'm about to be? And then I woke up shortly after that. I don't remember nothing from before that, but I. I love pulling these little nuggets out of my jams because it tells me, this is. This is how you're supposed to live. Like, yeah, we here dying. It was that Biggie. I think it was a mashup of Tupac and Biggie. It was, why am I dying to live if I'm just living to die? Well, because life is just a dream. And these bodies, they have their limitations. They got. They require maintenance. They are. It is a body. It requires maintenance. It requires food, it requires movement, it requires use. This is a vehicle for expression of that light that we are. And I don't know how this work, but I know it does. And we gotta. We gotta stop objectifying ourselves. We gotta stop objectifying ourselves to the limitations of just this body and the sexual component. Right? Yes. Community can be healing. Relationships can be healing. We experience healing in the presence of another who is able to be present with us. That's how we heal addiction. It's how we heal the illusion of separation. Because that's all this is. I forgot what they call it in yoga. I'm bad with the words and names, but I try. I think it's Atman. No, admin is. God damn it. Nope. Not even going to try. I'm learning, though. And I'm living in such a way where I'm able to speak to this a little bit better, where I'm able to bring these experiences to the people that I serve. And I mean, and That's y'. All. When I say life is but a dream, you know, if you ever just look at something off into the distance and you just let your eyes, your vision, just let them go and relax, you start to see multiple of whatever it is that you're. You're facing, right? Like, if you've ever just put your thumb in front of you and you just, like, relax your eyes and you see two thumbs, you know, all that is is just. It's just light in motion. And when we give our presence to a thing, it takes form not to say that. Like, if you close your eyes and you reach and you hit a wall, right, the wall is there. But who we are with our eyes closed, who we are when we dreaming, who we are when we ain't got no responsibilities, I think that we got access to that at any point. And we need to remember that. We have to remember that. We got to remember that that's who we are. Nobody else, Nobody. Nothing less than that. A label. We can put those on. We can practice them in waking life. But I believe that this. This right here, this the dream. And that place we go to when we sleep, when we dead, that's our reality that we live in. And how we live it shapes the imprint on the universe. The merging of worlds, the merging of star systems becoming atomic structures, molecular structures, and universal. You create a body of being. Same way this platform has evolved. Started out with me just a drifting electron awakening in an environment with choice and then making choices. And those choices giving me experiences, people, relationships, personality. That just, like, stuck to me. And then it was in that enough thing sticking to me. I was like, what the fuck is this? And not really being able to listen to it, you know? That's when the whispers got louder. The voices from other people, the influences from other people got a little more, you know, aggressive. And before I knew it, I was looking at a bump on my dick. And then before I knew it, I had the question, all right, well, now, what does sex mean? What is sex? What is a relationship? Who am I? Why are these people suffering? What can I do? What can I do to help? And all of those roads lead me here. Autumn roads lead me to my purpose, my proton. And now I can speak from a place of being in rhythm and stabilizing this structure that draws in other particles and waves of light and energy. From the people who want to share their stories to the people who just want to support and keep this going. The people just want to in contribute to the surveys, to the people who Want community to the people who just need some type of motivation and need a different outlook on this. Like, I ain't gonna tell y' all what to do. I'm gonna ask you the questions because people told me what to do and they were wrong. How can you tell me what to do when you don't know me? How can I tell you what to do and I don't know you? I can make these offers and you can make the choices. But I think that more than anything, it's important for me to remind people of their power of choice. And you can choose to bring your dreams into this reality, because if you're not, then your nightmares might be running the show. Or even worse, to not dream at all. The stagnance, the apathy, that just, you know, it just made me quiver. Because at the end of the day, we got choice. We got choice in how we respond to these things. I just want to remind you of that. I want to remind you you have choice. You may not have had a choice when this happened to you. Yes, your power might have been lost in that, but I don't know. I forget who said it. Maybe it was full metal. Alchemist energy cannot be created nor destroyed. There's a law of equal exchange. For all the bad that's happening to you, you are entitled to. You are entitled to good happening to you. And if you ain't had nothing happen to you, go, go, go, go create some character development. Because life is about what happens through you. It's not about what happens to you. And people get real caught up in that, thinking that what happened to them is their identity. We see the victim, we see the victor. We see all these aspects of identity that aren't what we really are. A lot of people hate to play with ideals like we. What is God? And what do you believe in? And even if you atheist, right, play with it, what if. What if that was the case? What if the way we dream, our subconscious, what if that's where we were before we got here, before we were born? What if that's where we go to after we die? You know, what does it look like to live in such a way that that is the case? Would you smile more? Would you be given a. About this insignificant bump that pops up on our genitals periodically? Or that you don't even know where it is because you got the test results and ain't nobody, can nobody tell you what location? What would you do? I know what I'm doing. I'm smiling, I'm enjoying It. I'm being present. I'm still going to work. You know, I'm still calling and checking up on my friends and my family. And I let everybody know, like, hey, I'm in that season now, entering that season where work is about to have my ass in a chokehold, and I need people to check on me. I need my family and my friends to know I'm not going to be calling y'. All. If y' all want to talk to me, I gotta call me, because I will get lost in what I'm doing. I'm gonna have my phone on. Do not disturb when I'm doing some things sometimes. And that don't mean I don't love you. It means I do love you. And it means I got shit to do. I need y' all to not need. I need y' all to not have me depending on y'. All. I need y' all to be able to depend on me. And that means me honoring these dreams I'm having, honoring the spiritual guidance that I'm getting from the universe. And if you don't like that language, the coding of my. Not gluons, not the gluons. The gluons hold the quarks together. My. The. The quirks of my essence, honoring that blueprint. And I think that that's what my role is. I really do. I believe in. My role is to take these lived experiences that I have and transmute them into something that can be healing. And to just do so in a way where it works for me. And if you like what you hear, you can apply it to yourself. So it's important to me to practice this and give it language so that that can be what you do. Should that be what you choose to do? If that's the route you want to go down, I just want to give you options. That's important to me. So if life is but a dream, what are you dreaming about? It's going to require for you to look at your reality as well. What do you see when you close your eyes? How do you feel closing your eyes? Do you even feel safe? What does safety mean to you? If you could draw safety, what would that look like? I thought I knew what safety looked like. I thought I didn't know what safety looked like. Over last weekend at the Sex down south conference. There's a cage. It was a big ass, like, kennel for dogs, right? But in the kink world, you can be a pet. And so I was like, you know what? I'm gonna get in here. Let me See what it feels like. And what I uncovered was a different kind of safety. Yeah, you, you're in that cage. It can be your safe space, but it's small and it's uncomfortable. Yet can't nothing else get in there? Not fully. Can nobody put their whole hands in there and do no damage to you? I just so happen to have the kind of anatomy where I can let myself out if I wanted to get out. But that's safe for some people. Even having someone else be able to open and close the kids cage for me, that is safety for some people. For me, no, I feel safer outside that cage. I feel safer without an armor around me. I feel safer in my vulnerability. I feel safer stepping out of that cage, being able to look at that cage and go, oh, that's one vehicle for safety. I'm gonna use mine. And if I didn't have a choice, if that was all I knew, then being outside of that cage would feel unsafe. Being free would feel unsafe. And I want y' all to have that. I want y' all to have a glimpse of that taste that. I want you to just lean into the wildest dream that you have ever had. What were you doing? Who are you with? What did it look like? What did it smell like? What that feel like? Who was there? What y' all was doing? If it was a sex dream, something nasty, hey, you can enjoy that. If it was something fun, if it was playful, you know, you know, maybe you're playing with nieces and nephews or pets live that. I think our dreams are our fastest way to the reality that aligns with us. Before a while, I was dreaming a lot. I was dreaming a lot about the person that I saw myself being a year ago in this moment. Some of my dreams have been letting go processes, but they've always come with a message. In these dreams are other people. And I think sometimes we experience other people as our who we really are ourselves, and as they're who they really ourselves. I've seen people in my dreams, and whenever I dream about somebody, I reach out. I reach out like, hey, I hope all is well. Just checking on you. Had a dream about you, and usually they followed up with, oh, my God, I was thinking about reaching out to you. I don't know if they'd just be being nice or what, but one of the biggest lies I think I ever been told as a kid is that the world don't revolve around you. It might not revolve around you in a literal sense, but figuratively speaking, don't nothing happen that is not as a result of something in our internal world. Our external world will always validate our internal world, whether we conscious of it or not. And I recognize where a lot of shifts have been happening for me as I started to identify more with the inner spiritual world. As I identify with the smallest microscopic aspect of myself being a atom, and apply that to the largest possibility of myself, which is being a star. And that's who I am. I'm light, realized in purpose, in knowing. And that life is but a dream. What can. What can you do if life is. If life was a dream, what could you do? Who could you be? If you can dream and see if you can bring it in, bring it to the other side. I have moments where I'll be on the subway. And I use this as a meditation practice of just. Just like picturing myself. I'm on my way to dance class, doing the dance moves. And you know what happened these last two weeks? I was better at the dance moves. This Brazilian zuk is hard. That. This. This is not easy. Especially for this being my first dance class. I ain't never took dance class before. I went to like one free salsa lesson after college. Like, living in a way that. And I. I think that it's become more attractive. Like I'm attracting experiences, opportunities, challenges. And you don't. You don't just get the good. You get. You get the things that you gotta conquer too. You get things that you got to say no to. You get experiences where you are gonna experience rejection, people gonna turn you down, people gonna say, no, I want that. You're gonna put yourself out there, get your feelings hurt. You're gonna ask for something, you're not gonna get it. But all that is worth it. I tell people, you know, I'll fall in love a hundred times for that 101st time of being in love. Because I feel like it's worth it. No matter how often relationships fail or incompatibility is realized late, it's worth it. It's worth it to play with this. Life is but a dream. And when you do, talk to me and tell me and tell me how it's going for you. Tell, please, please tell me how it's going for you. Because again, I know a lot of that other out there don't work. And I'm not telling y' all what to do. I don't want to be seen as no cult leader or nothing. Like, I understand. I'm talking spiritually. I'm talking, you know, outside the Realm of, oh, you know, you got herpes. Here's what you need to do. I. I've never really liked that this is what I've needed. I needed to be able to speak freely like this, like, even in the support cause in some capacity. We go here. Unless somebody's asking me a question, how do I do this thing? Okay, well, we. Let's start here. And I mean, that's it. That's it. So closing this out, man. Life is but a dream. Ask yourself, what are you dreaming? What are you dreaming about? Like this. This. What. What if it doesn't have anything to do with herpes? If it does have something to do with herpes, what are you dreaming? Because now we got to look at how that relates to the reality around us. Your dreams are the innermost shaping of your behaviors and beliefs of what you think your reality is. But let's treat that dream world like reality. We supposed to be here creating. We supposed to be here creating experiences, co creating experiences and making it the kind of dream world or the real world that we would want to live in if this is where we at. So what are we doing? How we. How we getting together? How we communing? How are we healing? How are we connecting? This is my way. This is my presence practice. This is my prayer. This is my invitation. Continue to grow this space, this platform. Come. Share your experiences. Share your stories. Give me that so I can transmute it for us into something positive, for positive people. All this ain't negative. And if it is, we got the tools. We got the know how. We got the trust. We got the faith that it will be turned into something positive. Fuel. Let that fuel us. Let it take us where we going. Let it take us where we want to go. Are your dreams your innermost desires? Are your dreams your innermost desperations? Pull it out. Bring it here. Put that on paper. Make your dreams real. That's What's. That's the power of words. Like, we think things supposedly to ourselves. We say the thing out loud. There's an echo. It's an echo in our presence. There's an echo in our being. You ever said something from a place of conviction and integrity almost to immediately be met with something that validates the statement that you made? Man, I really want a donut. Last night, I'll finish up here. Last night I've been craving blueberry donuts like I. I've been eating well. I've been avoiding all the sugary things. And whenever I'm by a quick trip, I've Been going in to just see if they have a blueberry donut. The last time I was in a quick trip was when I went to go visit my friends in Austin, Texas. One of the guys who was driving back, I had them pull over, stop at a quick, quick trip. I went in there, they didn't have blueberry donuts. And that's been the story of my life a few times. So last night I'm feeling good vibrations is high. I cried during Demon Slayer. Had a few hours at home. We got. We caught a dub on Call of Duty. I saw my friend. I always smile when I think about it. I went to the D1 concert. I left with my soul radiating, vibrating high, like on a. On a positive high. And then I was walking home, I saw this place called Holy, Holy. Damn, I forgot what it was called. Holy cream. Holy with the ey cream. And then I was looking and I was like, oh, they got donuts. I walk in and I'm looking at the donuts, I'm looking at the prices and the lady goes, I'm not looking. If you want to just take one and leave. And it was a blueberry donut right there. I just grabbed that, I put some napkins around it so I can survive the subway because I. I gotta have my donuts and milk. Yeah, I just had to. So I put that mug in the wrapper and then the subway was packed. I had to put it in my pocket because I ain't want nobody breathing on my. So I put the donut in my pocket. I'm like not flexing my leg and everything, trying to get this donut hole. And I had to change trains. And then I got home, I walked in, I sat that donut out, had my milk with it. Oh, it was so good. But the point that I'm making is embodying, embodying that like I've had a desire, you know, it was in the back of my mind, like I don't really. It's not at the forefront. But when the opportunity came for me to get that blueberry donut, not only was it a bomb ass blueberry donut, not only was it a free donut, but it just felt like an energetic. You are on the right path. And when we do this, when we make this decision, we make the decision to start living life like it is a dream. We don't see more of that. More of my words are going to resonate with you. You're going to find support and resources outside of this that you might have always had access to. But you never viewed as intensely as you have. This is what I needed after my herpes diagnosis that nobody had for me. I didn't need another herpes coach. I didn't need more information. I didn't need to just have sex with somebody. I didn't need to just be liked. I didn't need validation. I didn't need to clap back at haters. I didn't need to reclaim my sexuality. All of those things have been really helpful. Shout out to the herpes education and stigma coaches and advocates that do what they do as well. But I needed something more spiritual. I needed something that felt more real to me. I needed somebody to talk to my soul level. And nobody did that, so I had to do it myself. The dream that I had of being able to see people being seen, my grandfather's dream. My grandfather had a dream that I was a preacher. Here I am, I gotta call him and tell him about this. He gonna eat this up and then ask me if I'm reading my Bible. I'm telling. I gotta tell them no. I'm listening to a rapper who reads his Bible, though. It's not that I got like a shitty relationship to religion. I just found what works for me. And could there be something better that works? Yeah. I trust that the guidance that I'm getting now will leave me there. And that's another beautiful thing about this man, is just to surrender. The surrender of my identity is like, yeah, I. I put the mask on as a black man, somebody strong fittish that eats that shits, that bucks, that sleeps, that tires. I pay bills, I pay taxes, I get angry. I take breaks from social media, I do yoga, I podcast, I do all this. But to be in this world, but not of this world, is to always maintain that connectedness to your. Your own inner essence, your divinity. I like the word presence because it's a combination of words before essence. Right? Like where. Where were we before that? What were we before? Essence or pre acknowledgement of essence? Right. Like, all we got to do is just give our awareness to that. Put your thoughts on the unknown and bring that into reality. That's where we find peace. That's where we find love. That's where we find ourselves smiling a lot for no reason. People around us smiling, reflecting our inner world. But around us, in reality, life is but a dream. Absol said, he's like, heaven's a better place. I hope you all die. So he's like, I wish you well. But it was in like a. If you don't. If you ain't listening. You ain't hearing it. So let me. Let me just. I wanna. I wanna iterate. This life is but a dream. I hope you sleep well. I hope you wake well. Boom. There we go. That's the episode. Life is but a dream, y'. All. All right, let me know what y' all think. That concludes this episode of Something Positive for Positive People. Please like Ray Review, comment, share subscribe to this podcast, especially the newsletter, @spfbp.org till next time.