True Confessions: Marriage, Navigating Fights and Why You Should Never Use the Word ‘Single’ with My Relationship Coach, Annie Lalla

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Spiritual Hustler

Episode: True Confessions: Marriage, Navigating Fights and Why You Should Never Use the Word ‘Single’ with My Relationship Coach, Annie Lalla
Host: Jessica Zweig
Guest: Annie Lalla
Date: November 4, 2025

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Main Theme

This episode is an intimate, no-holds-barred conversation between Jessica Zweig and her famed relationship coach Annie Lalla, delving into the raw realities, tools, and transformations within Jessica’s 13-year marriage. The pair candidly explore topics ranging from marital conflict and emotional growth to reframing singleness, all while providing practical frameworks for anyone—single, seeking, or partnered—who aspires to experience what Annie calls “true love” as a form of personal and collective leadership.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Truth about Marriage, Vulnerability & Success

• Jessica shares her hesitation and pride in making this episode, emphasizing that thriving relationships are fundamental to thriving in business and life ([00:01-08:00]).
• She spotlights the cultural sensitivity and comparison traps around sharing marital “wins” and emphasizes her desire to model committed love as a new kind of leadership.
• “When we have a really great partner, how it fuels us. When we’re struggling, how it takes us off track… We can’t have a convo about leadership and women’s empowerment without talking about relationships.” —Jessica ([07:00])

2. Annie Lalla’s Core Philosophy of Love

• Annie challenges the “happily ever after” myth, introducing the concept of “alive ever after”—embracing the full spectrum of human emotion as intrinsic to love ([14:13-16:13]).
• Memorable Quote: “The opposite of dead is not happy. It’s alive.” —Annie ([15:27])
• Annie’s visual metaphor: True love is like white light through a prism—it breaks out into every human emotion.

3. Frameworks & Tools for Navigating Relationship Dynamics

a. The Michelangelo Metaphor and True Love

• True love involves partners acting as “Michelangelos” to one another—carving away “everything that isn’t David” to reveal each other’s masterpieces ([16:13–17:51]).
• “When your partner’s complaining…they’re not changing you, they’re trying to help you be less unconscious and more yourself.” —Annie ([17:51])

b. The MLK vs. WTF Model

• Instead of approaching partner “grumbles” in a shame/blame (“WTF”) way, Annie champions transformational “marketing” of your needs via the “MLK” framework—articulating desires as an inspiring dream, not a complaint ([20:52-21:59]).
• Quote: “Every time you want to criticize your partner, see it as…a custom-crafted marketing campaign using their keywords, their values.” —Annie ([21:59])

c. Hero, Leader, and Ninja Moves

• Hero: In any conflict, Annie reframes the dynamic as a competition to see “who can be the gangster relationship leader” and return the partnership to love ([31:15-32:21]).
• Leader: The woman is often the “visionary leader” in love—directing the movement and setting the standard, not by doing everything but by pointing the way ([33:24-35:52]).
• Ninja: The next-level move—radical responsibility and taking action without prompting to repair, protect, or uplift the relationship ([40:55–47:23]).

d. Repair, Remembering Love, and the Third Entity

• Emphasis on creating and maintaining a third entity, the “relationship organism,” with its own needs and identity ([49:25-51:32]).
• The tool “I remember” is used to quickly defuse tension and bring both back to love ([52:16-52:58]).
• “I love you more than I’m angry.” —Annie ([51:34])

e. Personal Growth and Cross Training in Love

• Both partners tend to repress and express complementary emotions; growth is about “cross-training” to expand your capacity to feel and express both ([27:28-28:29]).
• The upper limit of holding a partner’s inner child is how well you can attend to your own.

4. Reframing “Single” and Attracting a Partner

a. Don’t Use ‘Single’—You’re ‘Available for Love’

• Annie cautions against self-labeling as “single,” urging use of generative, magnetic language like “available for love” ([63:24–64:30]).
• “Words become worlds.” —Annie ([63:28])

b. Bird Song & Showing Your Art

• Comparing the mating call to birdsong, Annie suggests living fully in your gifts and passions (your “art”) as the most authentic way to attract a mate ([64:30–67:24]).

c. Every Encounter Is Training

• Treat every interaction with men as if their soul is reporting back to your soulmate—a practice in dignified, high-quality relating ([67:24-67:36]).
• “Imagine that man’s mother is standing behind him… she winks at you after.” ([67:36])

d. Vision of True Love—Functional as Epic

• Jessica shares a turning point: falling in love with a “functional” marriage led to its transformation into something epic ([58:52–61:40]).
• You can’t shame someone into change—love them exactly as they are, while holding a vision for who they can become ([56:01–58:14]).

5. True Love as Leadership for the New Earth

• Annie posits that couples in committed, conscious love should be the new model for leadership in business, community, and beyond ([70:14–73:02]).
• “When the leader of a system is two people in love that refuse to coerce each other…the decision is way more trustable.” ([70:54])
• Love-led leadership translates to collaboration, harmony, and a more flourishing world.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Love is the white light of all emotions—true love breaks out as the full spectrum.” —Annie ([14:37])
• On CEO women at home: “I fucking lead everywhere else.…When I come home, I just want my husband to lead. …But I had to really adopt the identity as the leader in my marriage.” —Jessica ([33:17])
• On spiritual growth in partners: “The mark of spiritual growth is that you fall more in love with what’s so, exactly as it is—including your partner.” —Annie ([56:01])
• On requests vs. demands: “If you can’t handle a no with your request, it’s actually a demand in disguise.” —Annie ([38:00])
• Role model impact: “You already knew you were a role model as a woman, but now you’re taking on being a role model for what love could look like in our community.” —Annie ([73:07])

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Opening & episode framing: [00:01–08:00]
• Annie's introduction & philosophy: [10:39–17:51]
• Frameworks for communication & conflict transformation: [17:51–32:21]
• On being the leader (the woman) in love: [33:24–35:52]
• Understanding the “ninja move” in relationship repair: [40:55–47:23]
• The “I remember” tool, and relationship as third entity: [51:32–53:18]
• Reframing being single, tips for attracting love: [63:14–69:13]
• True love as collective leadership & vision for the new earth: [70:14–73:02]
• Quick-fire questions with Annie (books, archetypes, meaning): [75:01–78:22]

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Episode Flow and Tone

Jessica and Annie’s discussion is dynamic, emotionally honest, and laced with laughter, swearing, occasional tears, and deep spiritual insight. Their mutual respect and vulnerability provide both practical wisdom and an empowering, loving template for listeners—whether they seek to up-level their own relationship, attract a new one, or simply become more of themselves through love.

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“When the couple operates as one—where the love is wider than the anger, when the world claps for your relationship because together you give more—THAT is leadership for the new earth. That’s the new model.”—(paraphrased from Annie, [73:55])

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Recommended for:

• Anyone seeking to deepen a romantic relationship, repair conflict, or reframe being “single” as an empowered state
• Ambitious, spiritually-minded women seeking tools to integrate love leadership into all areas of life
• Couples wanting practical and soulful frameworks for staying connected and committed

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Transcript

[A]

Welcome to the Spiritual Hustler podcast. I'm your host, Jessica Zweig, multi seven figure serial entrepreneur, best selling author and branding and business coach. And this is a show where we are redefining the word hustle. Reclaiming our true feminine nature of magnetism and putting down the self judgments and shame around loving to work and making a lot of money at it. On this show, you're going to learn how to stop hustling and start spiritually hustling. By pressing play, you are now part of a new movement of women who don't hustle for money. We hustle for meaning. We don't hustle from lack. We hustle for love. We don't hustle from survival. We hustle for humanity's thriving. We hustle toward healing the ancestral programming of fear and step into a new understanding of safety in the body. To receive this shift isn't going to only heal your life, going to make you a whole lot richer too. This is the Spiritual Hustler podcast. Well, hello my beautiful spiritual Hustlers and welcome back to the podcast. I'm your host, Jess, and I am so excited and a little nervous for today's interview. Actually, I shouldn't say I'm nervous. I'm really ready, I'm really pumped, I'm really fucking proud of myself that I decided to share this episode because honestly, I wanted to serve you. This conversation is probably one of the most vulnerable and I'm pretty vulnerable to begin with and honest and no bullshit and really, really raw in most of my content. But today might take the cake. And the reason why I say that is because I am opening up about one of the most intimate, personal things in my life and that is my marriage. Now, the reason why I decided to do this was, was not only because I feel like it's empowering, because all of the women in this community are either in relationships or looking for relationship or figuring out a relationship. And when this part of our life thrives, I really believe that everything else thrives. And it's challenging to be an ambitious woman in a partnership. It's challenging to be an ambitious woman if you're not in a relationship and you're looking for one or you don't know if you have space for one. I have a lot of women in my community who are single and I shouldn't say that after you're gonna listen to my guest today say why we should never use the word single and what we should say instead. And I have a lot of women in my community that are married Divorced early in the relationships have been with their partners for years and years. And I just feel that we can't have a conversation about business and impact and leadership and success and ambition and women empowerment without talking about relationships and how it plays into the equation more than anything, to be honest, when we have a really great partner, how it fuels us when we're struggling in our relationship, how it takes us off track when we're searching for love, when we aren't available for love, just how that informs the way that we show up. There's no right or wrong, it's just a fact. And so I wanted to take you guys inside of this conversation of my marriage so that we all feel a little less crazy and a little less alone, but also, more than anything, to amplify and share one of the most brilliant women and I'm sorry I'm crying. I love her so much. She's changed my life and she's changed my marriage, which has changed my life more than any coach I've ever worked with. She's not of this earth, Annie lala. She is a true cartographer, meaning she's mapped her entire life. True love and what it really is, what it really looks like, and it's not what we think it is, and it's not what we've been programmed to believe it is. And she is a true cutting edge relationship coach. She is here to map the complexities, and it sure is complex, of romance and love and sex and conflict resolution, which upgrades our entire emotional skill set and consciousness. When we can do this work in containers of our relationship, it impacts the women that we become everywhere. And she has created a beautiful platform of practical tools and group coaching programs and one to ones and in person retreats and masterminds. She is really just. No one touches Annie lala, in my view, as far as her mastery in the space of love and relationships. And I really cannot say how blessed I feel that she came into my life and Brian's life five years ago. And since working with her for five years, we have. We've become friends, we've become sisters, which is such a gift to have that level of intimacy where she has seen the good, the bad, the ugly in me and Brian and us, and we have still chosen each other as true sisters. There's really no relationship like it in my life, to be honest. And we're gonna get really real. This is a confessional episode and I've asked my husband for permission and, you know, obviously he's been on the podcast himself, so if you wanna go listen to Brian on my podcast? I'll leave a link to that in the show notes below. And you can go, go listen to that episode, which is, not surprisingly, the most downloaded episode in my entire catalog of episodes, because everyone is interested, I guess, in people's relationships. I wanted to come back through and talk about this part of our lives with my coach herself, because if it wasn't for Annie, I don't think Brian and I would still be together. I don't think we would have made it. And while I like to say that we saved our marriage, we healed our marriage, we did the work. Annie gave us a whole new template of tools, frameworks, vocabulary that we use to this day, we use every day. And we're going to break down what all of those are and share real life stories of where and how and why Brian and I have had to use them. And if you're not in a relationship, please stay till the end because we talk about, through Annie's perspective, how to attract true love into your life if that's something that you are looking for. And the reason why I really felt compelled to share this episode, and I'm just going to leave this here before I pass the mic to Annie and I, is because the truth is, I'm really proud of my marriage. We've been together 13 years and I've never done that before. This is the longest relationship I've ever had. And if you would have told me that, I would, I don't know, be more in love, more attracted to, more obsessed with my husband at 13 years in, when I was, like, first dating him or even single and looking for love, I'd be like that. It doesn't work like that. That's not possible. That's a fantasy. And because relationships are so delicate for so many of us, and I know that everyone is at a different place when it comes to their relationship, part of their life. And because of that, I've had sensitivity around that because I never want to share my marriage and make anyone feel bad. And I say that from my heart, and I say that for my truth. I have tiptoed along that line for a really long time, years. You know, Brian and I went to Annie's Mastermind in May, which we talk about extensively in the podcast, and had just a huge quantum leap around what being happily in love, committed for life, means to the world. Like how that is leadership in its own form. And that is not something to hide, but it is something to model. And I say that with so much humility. And. And grace and pride at the same time. Because I don't think that I could come on my podcast and my platform and teach all of you about the divine feminine rising and women empowerment and leadership in business and our spiritual connection without talking about the real, true growth and upgrade that I believe we have as women, and that is in our most intimate relationships. And I'm very, very honored that Annie came into Nashville. She spent time with me and my husband when she was here, and we got to record this interview. And it's literally going to be like peeping inside a coaching session. And I can't wait for you to get to know Annie. And if you're honestly on the market to really double down on your relationship and grow to the depths of true love, that is absolutely available for you. I cannot say there is a better person on the planet than Ani Lala. She's the top. She's it. She's cutting edge. And I just can't wait for you to learn from her as I have learned from her for the last few years. This interview is just such a. This is beyond an interview. It's a portal into true love and what that really means. All right, without further ado, here is my amazing conversation with my coach, with my friend, and with my sister, Annie Lala.

[B]

One of the reasons I'm stylish and I like to decorate myself is because we always have to play patterns that keep us in rapport with our family of origin. We do do automatically, and we have to belong. And so in order to belong with my mother, I realized I was running patterns of guilt. So I would feel guilty for all kinds of things, especially being away from my daughter or doing anything that offended someone. And I realized when I traced the guilt in my body back, it felt like it was coming from my mom. And so in order to connect to my mom, I was running guilt. And so I decided I want to connect to my mom in another way. You can't not connect to your parents. So I started to create a new umbilical cord of loyalty to my mother that was not guilt, but I had to find something else that I was proud of and that she'd be proud of. And she liked to dress up. So whenever I dress up, I, like, go, in my mind, she's passed away, mom, how do I look? And she's like, girl, you look great. And so every time I dress up, I link myself to my mother. I footnote her, so that I create a new superhighway of connection. So the old Superhighway of guilt dwindles, just like when they build a new road in the street, you know, in his town. And so I dress up so that I can have a more conscious pattern that connects me to my mother, because the old one was suboptimal.

[A]

You're so coded, Annie lala. I could listen to you talk. I mean, and gratefully I get the chance to listen to you talk at me and my husband a lot. And I'm so, like, the words don't even come to me because that you're here. I know.

[B]

Because I've known you so long through the zoom. And then when I first saw you at our retreat, I hugged you and I was like, oh, my God, you're better in person. Same.

[A]

So better in person. We really quantum leaped our sisterhood at that. At that retreat.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Which we'll talk about. But I'm so blessed to have you in my space, to spend this time with you, to share you. To share our story on this podcast to everyone listening. I'm so. We're going to go there.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

Okay. Like, nothing is off limits.

[B]

Same with me. Nothing's off limits. You can ask me anything.

[A]

Great. And, you know, I know that I'm really, really proud of my marriage, but by no means is it like a gold. We have our shit. We still work through a lot of human things, but it is the greatest accomplishment of my life. And I think, to use your terminology, like, love is leadership, which we're going to talk about. I want to be able to talk openly about the work that we've done with you, to take people inside of our growth and the tools that we use because of your coaching as a. As a gift and a guide to everyone listening. Because I don't think there's a person on the planet that doesn't struggle with love.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So we're gonna. We're gonna go.

[B]

But I just wanna say I am really proud of your marriage. You know, I've worked with lots of couples, and I think couples always think, like, how do I. Are we a mess? And sometimes you would say things like, are we the worst clients you have? And I. Honestly, you're one of the couples that I feel the most proud of because you explore the full range of relationship. You go to the heights of ecstasy, and I've seen you go to the depths of darkness. Both of you. But one thing I always know, you always come back, and I remind you that you're going to move through this and that your love is stronger than whatever issues arising. Your Love is wider than whatever feeling you're having. And the resilience and the repair after the rupture, I think is what makes the strength of relationship and the intimacy increase. I'm. You're in the top percentage of my favorite client.

[A]

Really?

[B]

Totally. Yeah. Because it's aliveness that I want to optimize for.

[A]

Let's talk about this.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Let's start there. Because you have such a beautiful definition of love.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Speaking of aliveness, like this sort of happily ever after is a sham, kind of. Well, quite literally. Will you explain what the differences of happily ever after versus what you believe it is and what true love really means? Because I think those two are intertwined.

[B]

Totally. I see love as the white light of human emotion. When you shine white light through a glass prism, it breaks out into the full rainbow. When you shine true love through a human heart, it breaks out into the full spectrum of all human emotions. So to say I love you is to say, I'm willing to feel my joy, my happiness, my anxiety, my jealousy, my envy, my fear, my rage, my hopelessness, my despair, all of it. The full range. And it also means I'm willing to let you, my partner, feel all your feelings without rescuing you, fixing it, changing it, fading it, allowing you to experience the full spectrum of your human aliveness. Being in love is in service of maximal aliveness in both partners. The opposite of dead is not happy. It's alive.

[A]

So you say alive ever after.

[B]

Yes. So instead of happily ever after, which is what they sell in the fairy tales, I think that's bullshit. I think it leads people down the wrong road. Everyone's saying, well, it shouldn't be this hard. Why are we fighting? They're comparing themselves to some fairy tale. And actually, I'm in the trenches with real couples, and happiness happens sometime. You know, people think relationships, like going to the spa, supposed to be relaxed and happy. Well, it is the spa, but it's a spa inside a gym. And you're mostly in the gym. And you can go to the spa sometimes, but it's the emotional CrossFit games. Right? That's what a true love is. And when you're in CrossFit, you're not like, why am I sweating? Why is it so hard? No, it's fucking CrossFit. And I think not enough people realize that that's what you're taking on when you play the highest game of love.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

Which is not just someone who, like, feeds you comforting beliefs and, like, accommodates all your needs and wants. It's a Transformational crucible. It's a container for you to actualize and evolve to your highest, greatest self. And your partner is literally custom crafted by the universe to carve you into greatness. Like Michelangelo. I love that metaphor. You know, when your partner's complaining or criticizing you, it feels like they're trying to change you, but actually they're trying to make you more yourself. So Michelangelo said that when he saw the block of marble, he said he saw David inside the marble, and then he carved away everything that wasn't David to reveal the magnum opus of the masterpiece that people fly to Florence to see. And when you have a partner who's truly in love with you, you don't fall in love with them. You fall in love with who. You get to be around them because of them, through them. And they're your Michelangelo. And you fall in love with the vision of your greatness that they have in their mind, because your partner's supposed to see you greater than you can ever see yourself. So you fall in love with the portal to your actualization. So your job is to surrender to your partner as Michelangelo and let them emancipate the masterpiece from inside the marble and emancipate greatness from your smallness. And if you're the Michelangelo, you want to carve with delicacy, but you're not carving the person you love. You're carving away everything that is not them. All their defense mechanisms, wound driven strategies, childhood coping feature, you know, patterns. And like scraping barnacles off a boat, you're actually revealing the true essence of who they are. So when your partner's complaining, they're not changing you, they're trying to help you be less unconscious and more yourself.

[A]

Yes. Okay, can we. Let's double click into that and let's go back, because I want to use my relationship with Brian as sort of a blueprint because there's so many, like, quite literal frameworks, templates, tools, tactics, strategies, vocabulary that we built together, that we have built together, that we use. We've been working with you for almost five years. We use them every single day in our marriage, truly. And so to go back to the beginning, we were in crisis and we called you and everything you just explained, we were. We were oblivious to that. That's really what we had signed up for, this Michelangelo metaphor. And you would always say to me, your highest version of yourself, Jessica, the woman that you really want to be, you get to play her in this marriage. And you're. You're marketing to Brian incorrectly. So can we Just because I think a lot of women, especially my audience, is predominantly women. We're powerful, we're in charge, we're bosses. And we somehow feel like we can direct that force energy into our partner.

[B]

Carve them into greatness with a hacksaw.

[A]

Correct.

[B]

Yeah. Well, I think one things the of one thing my husband said to me once that really changed me, he said, when you're not sure what to do with me, ask yourself, what would the most extraordinary, emotionally brave woman in the world do here? And then do that, because that's who you are. Wow. And I'm pretty sure that's kind of the thing I would say. And that's how Brian sees you, and that's actually who you are in this context. And so I think everyone listening could ask in a situation, what would you have to do? So, so that if you were in an audience watching yourself on a movie screen and everyone in the audience were people you admired and all your future successful selves, what would that girl on the movie screen have to do for everyone in the audience to give her a standing ovation so that you could sign your name triumphantly to your behavior? This is just a way to get your values out of your head and into an embodied practice. Like, what would you do if everyone you admired was watching you? And do that? Now that takes strength, but it gives you what's the right thing to do. Then you have to work on the tactical how do I get my ass into gear so I can actually do that?

[A]

Correct. And one of the tools that you gave me, beautifully stated to begin, I was marketing my desires and wants of him, being the person I needed him to be the wrong way. And you use this.

[B]

Well, you weren't marketing.

[A]

I wasn't marketing.

[B]

You were forcing him on shame and blame and, and kind of harassing him into change. And you know, all I want to say to anyone who does that is, is it working for you?

[A]

Right.

[B]

Right. I think people have to decide, do you want a behavior change or do you want to shudder your grumble onto the other person?

[A]

Right.

[B]

And I get it's therapeutic to express your frustration, but it does not long term create behavior change. And even if they change for a little while out of terror, they go back to their original pattern as soon as you're out.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

It's not endogenously motivated. It's not sustainable.

[A]

Right.

[B]

So when, at any moment in time when someone's upset, you can consider, do I want to just shutter my upset out or do I want a behavior change? Because you don't get both. You have to pick one. And the way I describe this is WTF stance, which is what the fuck, right? And you might not say what the fuck? But you might say it with shame, blame, or make wrong. Like, did you forget the almond milk again? Or did you forget to feed the dogs? And there's some shame smeared on top. Should. Shoulding. Should is a could with shame smeared on top. And so you take your WTF utterances and you translate them into what do I call mlk.

[A]

I want you to talk about I have a Dream speech.

[B]

MLK stands for Martin Luther King. And if anyone had a reason to be, what the fuck, it was him. But he didn't. He said I have a dream and he inspired an entire nation to their next level of greatness with an inspiring and rolling invitation to the highest possibility. And so that's what's available. Whenever you have a grumble towards your partner or criticism, can you find what their values are and use those values to inspire them along their values vector so that they become more of the person they want to be?

[A]

Right.

[B]

So it's the marketing. Every time you want to criticize your partner, see it as an opportunity to create a custom crafted marketing campaign using their keywords, their values, so that they click on the button so they get to be the person they want to be. They don't do things for your reasons, they do them for their reasons.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

And so that takes some wit and wherewithal to figure out, how do I create this marketing campaign? But what you learned and what you practiced is, and I asked you, Jessica, if you were able to inspire Brian using his values and using his motivations and get him to see a new way of being, would you be more proud of that, Jessica?

[A]

Right.

[B]

Would that make you a more extraordinary version of yourself? And if the answer is yes, then that's exactly why he's behaving that way. Because he's carving you into your greater self with his crazies.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

You actually have to be a higher level version of yourself to get your partner to be enrolled in the change.

[A]

Right.

[B]

If you just bitch and complain and it's not working, it's because you're not trying. You're not split testing a new way.

[A]

And I, I stumbled my way into split testing.

[B]

You did. Until you found one that worked.

[A]

Until I did. Exactly. And I think this is why. Romantic relationships, I call them the greatest container, the biggest workshop for fucking growth and personal growth. Like true, committed, monogamous, not leaving, no escape. No escape. Like we're in this for life, no matter what. It is the crucible of self awareness, Your own inner reflection of the woman. Like you're saying that you really came here to be.

[B]

It's like a predicament bondage for your greatness.

[A]

It really is.

[B]

It's a gilded cage.

[A]

100%.

[B]

And honestly, that's why I fight for true love and nothing less. Because true love is the only force strong enough to actually keep you in the game when every single part of you wants to run.

[A]

Will you explain the difference between love and true love in your vernacular?

[B]

Oh, there's so many ways. But I love the definition that my friend John Perry Barlow has. He says the difference between love and true love is the difference between a very large number and infinity.

[A]

Yeah. Yeah. You had that poster on the tables at your summit, which we're going to talk about. I want to go back to me and Brian for a second. Our container. Like we called you in crisis.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

I'll never forget that phone call. I know where we were sitting. I know that we lived in like a million different apartments in Chicago. I know exactly which one. The day it was at night. It was cold. It was like winter time. And we were sparring. And you were on. You were on speakerphone on our iPhone. I didn't even see your face. Do you remember this? I was like. After one hour, I was like, you're hired. And then you, you know. Well, you told us how much you cost, but the best investment. So many things to say about the way you. You work and hold your clients and give them the dignity to take their relationship seriously.

[B]

Seriously. It's the most important decision you ever make in your life.

[A]

Ever make in your life. And you said on that call, Jessica, you're not my client, Brian. You're not my client. My client is your relationship. I'm here for the entity, the organism of your true love. That's my client. And it was really from that moment forward. And you have never. Not attuned to that in every single. We'll have fights where we call you separately. And I'll talk to you about him and he'll talk to you about me. And you're always advocating for our love in those conversations. And you've given us MLK as an example. One of the things that I love that I. I still try and work with Brian on this every day. My own way is like the grumble tree and like an owie. And how to really seed through the fog of when your partner is bitching or complaining. What's really going on so that you can respond as that extraordinary woman. Can you break that down?

[B]

Well, let's go from the other side. So we've made, you know, loving fun of Brian, always having a little grumble because he's one of these more empathic, doesn't say when he's hurt, doesn't say when he's frustrated. And then it builds, and it builds and then he explodes like a volcano.

[A]

Correct.

[B]

And every couple has, you know, the volcano and the one that just suffers, makes their suffering clear as they go. And one that doesn't show it, doesn't show it. And then they show all their suffering at once. So it's equal in the end, but it just drips out with one. So Brian, when he's frustrated, is always reaching for a grumble.

[A]

Is that what you were talking about?

[B]

Yes. And I think what I tried to help you see is that when he's grumbling, he's actually a crying, scared little boy. Underneath the grumble, it looks like a big angry T. Rex, but underneath they're just crying and scared. And, you know, I'm married to someone who likes getting angry. He's very good at it. He's taught me how to get angry, which is great. And by the way, the more I got angry, the less he got angry. So I think the universe gives you a quota. Whoever uses it first, there's only a little bit left for the other. So I highly recommend that. And actually, we were teaching Brian how to get more angry explicitly. But under every moment of anger is actually an owie, like a moment of hurt or pain. Behind anger is undisclosed pain or hurt or fear. And behind anxiety and stress is usually anger. So I think what you guys were dancing is Brian presents as frustrated and stressy and anxious, but he has rage underneath. That's repressed.

[A]

Correct.

[B]

And you express your anger quite comfortably, but you have fear and insecurity and anxiety. That's repressed.

[A]

Yes, I do.

[B]

And he's comfortable showing anxiety and fear but not anger.

[A]

Right.

[B]

And you're comfortable showing anger but not anxiety and fear. And so you came together to cross train, and you're here to show him how to be more explicit in real time. You want to know when he's hurt. You want to know when he's upset in real time, not four weeks later.

[A]

Right.

[B]

And he's like, I know you're hurt. Can you, like, regulate on your own without bringing it to me all the time? So you've both learned to cross train you to suffer less out loud. And more in silence. And bring it to you. Bring it to Brian. Once you've regulated and Brian's learned to express in real time. Hey, this is not working for me. I love you. And we gotta shift this. Building a backbone.

[A]

Beautiful. And one of the things that I also feel is so important and this is really for everyone listening. And I think we lose sight of, you know, we come into these adulthoods, we fall in love. Which I. And I think when you find your person, it is divinely orchestrated for your like the perfect puzzle piece, the jigsaw, to fit your wounding and trauma so that you can come in and. And heal together. Which you've really showed us.

[B]

Your partner's crazies are actually custom created by the universe to carve you into your next level self. Correct. And your needs, because you had some needs when we first started working together. You're like, these things aren't working for me. And those needs were required to build Brian into his next level.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

Well, actually think everyone's needs if they're grounded and congruent, okay. They have to be a grounded congruent need. Not from fear and frazzle. If they're grounded and congruent, those needs are actually what not only Brian needs, but the world needs from your relationship entity. So your needs are actually sacred is really what I'm saying.

[A]

Yeah. And his. I see his little boy.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

You know, I've been able to attune to the. The when he's in his volcano mode. I've gotten so much better. It's taken work, it's taken years. Where I can feel not the big boy Brian, but the little boy Brian and show up with more compassion and love.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

Versus judgment and shame. Blame make wrong to your point.

[B]

But I think the reason you can do that is because you've done so much work on holding your little girl.

[A]

I have.

[B]

You've done so much work. See, the upper limit to how much we can hold of the little boy or girl in our partner is upper limited by how much you can care and attune to your young one's self needs. And I've seen you do years of work to hold her, to meet her, to take care of her. And now that she's full and attended to and attuned to, you now have the surplus to then offer to Brian's little boy. And he's also aware that there's a burden to you. So you guys are conscious and there's a seniority thing going on. Your little girl will not let you attend to Brian's little boy. Unless you attend to her first because she has seniority. Right. So it's an inside job.

[A]

It's such an inside job.

[B]

You're basically becoming an attachment figure for your younger self so that Brian doesn't have to be that for you.

[A]

Which I wrote about in my book the Light Work, by the way, in the chapter on love and relationships, I mentioned Annie in my very first paragraph. We were in the middle of breakdown, one of many, because we've been on this journey with you for a long time, and I was in the depths of my burnout, and I. I wasn't able to hold myself.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And I made him the villain for not being able to take care of me and hold me. And you had said to me on this one particular zoom call, you looked at me like dead in the eye. I wrote about in the book, I was like, I wanted to punch her in the face or close the computer on her. When she said this, you were like, it's not Brian's job to meet all.

[B]

Of your needs and to make you.

[A]

Feel safe and to make you feel it's yours. It was so empowering, like, to be in a marriage that empowers you. You kind of have to go first.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And to that end, you introduced this concept of being the hero, which changed our marriage, among many of your tools. But can you explain what it means to be the hero?

[B]

Well, what I've noticed is in fights, couples are fighting over who's right, who's wrong, who should get the attention, who should get the binky and the love up and the makeup. And what I realized is what's happening is there's aggression in the container.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

And the aggression is kind of a push, pull, tit for tat kind of thing. It's a fight. And I wanted to alchemize the aggression into something more useful, so I turned the aggression into a competition. So instead of competing for who's right, now, you both are competing for who's the more gangster relationship leader who's going to remember that there's a way out of this hell, and that whoever finds a way to pull the system back to the light is the hero. And so I would sell it to you guys. I'd be like, okay, we're in this rabbit hole of hell right now, and we could move towards the light. Who has more resource, who's more powerful, who wants to be the hero? And I would dangle it in front of both of you. And depending on who had more resource, what one of you Would say, I'll take it. I'll be the hero. So I'm now fetishizing the leader to take the system back into love. As the hero, not the loser that's weak and has to apologize, but actually the leader of love.

[A]

You say often that women are the leaders, and I fucking resisted that so much. When we first started working together, I was like, but the man, masculine, takes care of the feminine. The man is the leader of most things. Why do I have to bear the burden of being the leader of our love? And you really had to train me, frankly, condition me to recall that feminine power inside of myself, inside of my marriage, because I. And I'm assuming women can relate. For a long time I was like, I fucking lead everywhere else. I lead in every room I'm in. I lead on stage. I lead a business, I lead a team. I lead a community. When I come home, I just want my husband to lead. I want to like, take a load off, have him be the man. And at the same time, I was struggling bringing my CEO home and constantly emasculating him. So it was a. It was a mess. And I had to really adopt the identity and embody the identity as the. As the leader in my marriage. And you said to me time and time again, the woman leads. So can you break that down?

[B]

Well, not just the woman leads, but the woman. Well, think about a mother. A mother is the visionary leader of the relationship, whether you have kids or not. The whole mating game is like, find a wife so you can have kids. And even if you don't have kids, that evolutionary imperative is still running. So a man is looking when he's looking for a mate for the leader of his family. And it's not just a leader, It's a visionary leader. And a visionary leader is someone who sees a future that is not available to anyone else. They literally walk into a future that's against all odds, that it's at odds with the evidence or past experience or the status quo, and holds a vision. That's why Martin Luther King and Gandhi are considered visionaries, because they have the audacity to have faith in something that shouldn't have no business coming true. And so, as the woman, when I say you're the leader, I don't mean you have to do everything. I mean you have to be the direction pointer. So if you think of a car, the steering wheel is the feminine part. It's the visionary points. The direction doesn't do any work. It just points the engine is the masculine problem solving make It. So make it happen. We all have both. When you're in your feminine, you are saying, here's what I think's possible in this relationship, whether you say it, or you dream it, or you feel it, you have to hold the vision in your mind so that someone on the planet is holding a way out of this rabbit hole of hell. So anytime I'm fighting with my husband, I think in the middle of it, okay, there is a way to get out of this. What would have to happen so that this fight becomes something we laugh about in an hour or tomorrow? Who could I be? What would I have to say right now? And I vision it. And then from that vision, it gives me an action to take that begins the route into that future. And then my husband follows. Husbands will always follow. And so it's not that you have to do it. All these biologists went to study the mating rituals of mammals, and they were all male. And when they study mating rituals, they noticed, oh, it's the male that starts the mating dance, starts to flap the feathers or do this schema. But when the female biologist went out, they realized it's actually the female that leads the mating dance. But the way she leads us is with assertive receptivity. So the female animal will make eye contact or put a signal that says, I'm available to be approached. She actually kicks it off and initiates it. But it's the male that walks across the bar and asks the girl for the number. So we think it's the male, but actually it's the female that says, this is what we're doing next.

[A]

Wow.

[B]

And the male follows. So it's that kind of leadership that's visioning, not seeing the worst case scenario. And I call it, not fake it till you make it, but faith it till you make it.

[A]

I love that term. I've been saying that a lot lately. It's so beautiful. It's so empowering.

[B]

But I want to speak to why you felt so upset that you had to be the leader.

[A]

Let's go.

[B]

Because there's a little girl in us that wants to be rescued from our daddy by our daddy, right? We want the male daddy figure to pull us out of trauma, pull us out of difficulty. And they did to some extent. And they didn't. And so the little girl in us is, like, still waiting. Can that masculine male archetype finally take care of me? Finally make it okay? So from the little girl in you, it totally makes sense that you would want Brian to fix it. Rescue, make it better.

[A]

My dad rescued me my whole life.

[B]

Well, there you go. So then you have that automatic. And this is why your dad was loving you, but he was also handicapping you.

[A]

Yes, he was.

[B]

And so now you had to build a muscle that had atrophied because your father never gave you the chance to rescue yourself. And so from the little girl, you're like, brian, rescue me. And he's like, I didn't marry a little girl. I married a grown ass, powerful woman.

[A]

Right.

[B]

And so you had to learn to be the leader of your own self, be the attachment figure to little Jessica, take care of her. And then he was all about helping once he didn't think that you depended on him. Yeah. When you don't need him, he's all up in your business wanting to help you.

[A]

Totally.

[B]

It's something in the man that just realizes, if I rescue her right now, she will not be as powerful as she would be if I allow her to find her own way. And when you need someone else to feel safe or to feel, okay, you're not powerful, you're contingent on a circumstance. And so really, he's carving you into greatness. And if you were ever going to be a mother or a leader or a teacher, which you are, you then can hold that visionary leadership and make it even better. Now also, being a leader could be going to Brian and saying, hey, I'm struggling right now. I'm feeling scared and unsure. Will you help me? That's also leadership.

[A]

Definitely.

[B]

That's leading, getting resource to support you in a situation where you're struggling. But if he says no, you can go to your girls, you can go to your coach. You're not leaning on him.

[A]

Correct.

[B]

Or depending on him, you're asking for help. And a true request allows for a yes or a no. On the other side, if it doesn't allow for a no, it's not a request, it's a demand in disguise.

[A]

Say it again. For the people in the back. Say it louder.

[B]

If you can't handle a no with your request, it's actually a demand in disguise.

[A]

Yes. So good.

[B]

And so no matter how you phrase it, you have to cope with the no upstream. So that when you ask, if you go into a store and you ask for change you're not expecting and being entitled to change, you're like, maybe they'll give it to me, maybe they won't. You can handle it if they don't. That's how we want to be in our relationships. You ask for support, but your partner always has the ability to say, no right now, babe, I can't do it. And the only reason your partner doesn't give you support when you need it the most is because they are actually struggling themselves. It's almost like you've fallen off the relationship and you're drowning. You're in the water, drowning, and it looks like your partner standing on the boat beside the life jacket, laughing maniacally as you ask for help. But they're not. When you're in the darkest of the dark and you're asking, crying, begging for your partner to do what you need and they don't do it, it's not because they won't, it's because they can't. And it's because they're drowning on the other side of the boat. But their drowning looks different than yours.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

And so you're busy going, save me, save me. But they're drowning.

[A]

Right.

[B]

So both are you of drowning. And the only way you can save the system is if you learn to swim to shore on your own.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Which is what learning to regulate your nervous system is. Take care of your little girl. Create what you need for yourself.

[A]

Do this work. That's one thing that you really opened our eyes to as well, which was like, anytime we'd have a big argument, one of your very first questions would always be like, was one of you hungry? Was one of you tired? PMSing, PMSing. Capped with their stress and schedule.

[B]

Like in a fight with a family member. Yeah. We call them stacks.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Stress stacks.

[A]

You're under resourced.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

So how can you show up for your partner if you're under resourced? You have nothing left to give to him or her because you're not fed.

[B]

Which is why most fights mean there's a lack of self care going on.

[A]

Oh, typically, always. Yeah. So we've talked about. Okay, so we've talked about the hero.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

We've talked about the leader. Can we talk about the ninja.

[B]

Yeah. But also, remember that tackle? I remember. I have that too.

[A]

I have so many more codes. The ninja.

[B]

Okay, we're coming back to.

[A]

Well, we'll come to all of the things. So the ninja move, you know, we're talking about like some very evolved shit right here.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Like evolved meaning conscious evolved, sophisticated emotional tools to correct whether. Obviously we're talking about marriage and relationships and we're gonna. It's not everybody listening is in a relationship.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

You know, and I have tips for that and we're gonna get there. But I do believe that these tools apply in. In universally. But Brian Brian will send me. There's an emoji for a ninja, you know that, right? Yeah. So we'll like have a big fight and then he'll pull a ninja move and he'll send me an emoji of it. Like a ninja. Like look at me like I just trumped your hero. So, so explain.

[B]

You're now competing over more in love, guarding the fort of us.

[A]

That's right. So what is the ninja move?

[B]

Well, oftentimes when we'd finish a call, I'd give you some homework and I'd go, okay, here's what I want you to practice. I want you to take care of your little girl instead of going to Brian. And, and then I would say, but there's a ninja move. It's like the bonus move. And the ninja move would be basically radically taking responsibility for the situation, owning your shit, climbing out of the cave of despair and pulling the relationship back into the light. And that is different in each time, but it's basically above hero. It's like hero is like, I'm going to take my aggression and turn it into a competition so that I can be better at loving than you. Haha, that's right.

[A]

That's exactly right.

[B]

Then ninja is like, I'm going to trump that. I'm going to top that. And so it depends on the situation. So I don't know what Brian did to ninja himself.

[A]

I'll give an example. So I'm just going to get real real here. So we're in this process of building a house.

[B]

Yeah, okay.

[A]

And we've had some conflict with some of the people that are helping us build this house because nothing will. It's an initiation. It's a full on cruise.

[B]

All your values are in conflict when you build a house.

[A]

Correct? I, I do not recommend it. It's not for the faint of heart.

[B]

I mean my husband asked to build a house last year and I've worked with so many couples building a house that go into divorce that I said no, that's how hard it is.

[A]

Everybody that we know who's walked the path warned us. Like even our own builder was like, you know, we've, we, when we broke ground like year and a half ago, they're like, we've started this process and then a year and a half later we're not even building the house. Cause the couple's not together anymore. Like we, we were like, oh, we're different, we're gonna be great. And there's been beautiful moments and it's, it's Actually been very exciting in many ways. But it just brings up a side and a stress level to you that like, compares to nothing. And, you know, financial stress is a big part of this. And Brian doesn't have, you know, his.

[B]

Less abundant minded maybe than you, like, money.

[A]

Noise is a real thing for him. I have other noise, but, like, that's his thing. That's his noise. So we've had a struggle with this one particular relationship around our. Our house, and he has, like, completely tapped out of the relationship. Like, I basically, in so many terms, like, removed him.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

To be like, I've got this from.

[B]

This person that you're working with on.

[A]

Yes. Like, I'm not gonna cop you on any more emails. This stresses you out too much. I've got it in my way. I was like, I'm being the hero by like protecting him and.

[B]

And yourself from his.

[A]

And more than anything, totally. And protecting her. This woman, like, did whatever. So he's been really resistant, really, like, angry about, you know, poor communication, unexpected invoices, like, it's gotten really real. Okay, you guys, you know that I am all about the rituals, the energy, the practices that keep us in touch with the divine and our power, the things that we can add to our life that really, really remind us who we are. And one of my favorite rituals pretty much every morning, true story. Is putting on my Malkari jewelry.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

Because honestly, these pieces are not just jewelry. They are activated sacred talismans that honestly help me lead with a consciousness as a confident woman in my business and my life. They are seriously activations, you guys. When you put them on, not only are they gorgeous and versatile and they stack and they're so many options to choose from. They are spiritual activations. And that's really because the founder of Malkari is my best friend and stylist, Tali Kogan, who is a visionary woman in the world of fashion who lives by the belief that you can have anything in life that you want as long as you dress for it. And I am here to preach from the mountaintops that that is true. And so when I wear her pieces, I feel freaking unstoppable. Yes, they're edgy and high fashion. They'll take your cutest little outfit or your T shirt and jeans to absolutely new heights, but they're also deeply spiritual. Each necklace, each ring, each bracelet is a code. And like the lion of Malkari roaring through you, it reminds you that you are already the queen of your own business in your life. When you put them on, you're Gonna feel the difference. And if you're curious, which I know you are, to up your style game and your frequency, check the link in the show notes and use the code JESSICA15 for 15% off your order because it's not often that accessories feel like medicine and Lakari is feminine power you can wear.

[B]

And you concede that he has some sanity in his opinion.

[A]

Yeah, I do, 100%. But I still. We have very different ways of dealing with this situation. And it kind of came to a head a couple weeks ago, and out of the blue, he stepped in on an email. He was so. I mean, this is months.

[B]

He reinvented his approach.

[A]

He reinvented his entire approach. Cut full fucking fat, check. Like, didn't like, because we were going to negotiate, talk about it, figure it out, and he just fucking did it. Like, he showed up in this email thread, like, so professional, so kind, so pragmatic. Like, he was a different person.

[B]

He claimed his kinghood, he claimed his. He acted the way he would sign his name to triumphantly.

[A]

And he protected me.

[B]

Oh, he protected.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Tell me more about that.

[A]

He just. He stepped in and held it. I have been holding it for months, and I have felt really alone in it. And I didn't realize how much it was weighing on me, how much it had actually been kind of breaking me. And. And he sensed that. And he just swooped in with his ninja cape and took me completely out of it and handled it, and then sent me an emoji of a ninja. Like we were in different states. We didn't even have a conversation. He just knew intuitively and he took care of it. And he. He was magnanimous in front of her. Like, he made.

[B]

He.

[A]

He showed up, like his highest version.

[B]

He had to fight everybody's.

[A]

He had to fight everybody.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

You know, and he could have been like the. Like, I feel like the hero would have come to me and said, let's talk about this. Maybe we should both go to her. Let's, you know, get on a call with her together. He just took it and he handled it. And it freed up all this bandwidth in my adrenals, you know what I mean?

[B]

But I want to point out, that's what love looks like. And I don't mean the swooping in. I mean the refined attunement that he had to the unspoken tremble in your nervous system and the tracking of your suffering without complaint, which is why he could track it because you weren't grumbling about it and the desire to support you in that Difficulty. And I think men are scanning for ways to be a hero and to support and when we don't bitch about it, but we're just present to our pain and we make it transparent without any blame or finger pointing. If we're actually in our pain and we're expressing from the pain, without blame or shame, the man gets very curious to want to take care of you and help emancipate you from the pain. Most of us, we put our pain over here and then we're over here angry, talking about the pain, but we're not embodied in the pain. So they can't feel our pain. We're just attacking. And so they're defending. If we actually have the courage to be in our pain, then they can feel it. But why would they feel our pain if we can't even feel our pain?

[A]

Totally.

[B]

But that takes courage to be in your pain. You're not defended and guarded and looking cool. You're trembling and crying and saying, I'm bleeding. You made me bleed. I'm bleeding. Will you help me? And they want to help. It's best if something they did contributed to bleeding. It's best that you don't say it. You just tell them there's blood on your hands. Will you help me? And then as they inquire, they'll realize that the blood came from something they did, that they make the connection in their own mind, in their own way.

[A]

In their own time.

[B]

Right, Their own time. If you say it, they get defensive. If they make the connection, they won't say, I'm sorry, I screwed up, but they'll silently go and change it in this lie.

[A]

It's amazing. It's amazing. Let's talk about. I remember because that. That was one of the first things you actually introduced to. To us. Because we had come to you, like I said, in crisis, and we were negotiating and fighting for our own needs and we had. We had forgotten that there is that third eye, you know, you talk about. There's. There's him, there's her, and then there's.

[B]

A third entity, the relationship entity. It's an organism.

[A]

It's an organism. We actually gave ours a name. Yeah, it's called Wonder. I'll just tell everybody and spell it. O, N, E, dash, D, E, R. Wonder. Because we represent the one like him and I. One plus one. It's a tattoo on my rib cage. I write about this in my book the Lightwork. Two equals eleven. One plus one, metaphorically speaking, in the language of love, does not equal 2. Many of us, at least I'll speak for myself. In my 30s, in my 20s, when I was single, like, I would get with a partner and I would metamorphically reshape, shapeshift myself to accommodate, to become a codependent other version of myself in service of him. And I would lose myself. I was no longer a one. I was. I looked different. I led my life differently. And when I was single, I had a big, dramatic relationship in my 20s, five years, broke up, was single for two years before I met Brian. And I got this tattoo on my rib cage. One plus one equals 11. And 11 is red. Like, the color. It's the only color tattoo I have on my body. It's always black, but red equals the color of love. And this was before I called Brian in. I was like, I want to be in a relationship where he maintains his oneness, I maintain my oneness. And together we become 11. We become quantum, we become divine. We become even greater numerically than the number two. And so that number one, you know, really speaks to our frequency of our marriage. And, like, Our address is 461, and if you add it up, we're moving into an 11 house. Like, it all points to. It's crazy magic. So we had little. Little, I would say, forgot that we were one. We hadn't even the consciousness that we were one. There was such amnesia based upon all the bullshit and the resentment and the grumbles that had accumulated like freaking like tar on our skin until we met you. And then you introduced this concept of, like, remembering the truth. The truth that we love each other.

[B]

Underneath all of it.

[A]

Underneath all of it.

[B]

And that the love is bigger, wider, deeper than any issue that's arising in the moment. Any anger that you're feeling to be able to say, I love you more than I'm angry, yes, I love you more than I'm upset in the middle of a fight. And then you can still be upset. You can be, I'm angry. Seven out of ten fucking angry, and I love you more than I'm angry. And what the fuck, it's got to change, right? But holding your love as an embargo, as hostage is actually just a manipulation tactic to get the other person to be afraid for a moment, and so they dance like a monkey. But that undermines the foundation of trust. And the truth is you do love him. In the middle of your rage, in the middle of a fight, if he suddenly had a heart attack or coughed up blood, you would drop the issue in a minute and all the love would Be there.

[A]

So today, when we're in a big fight and we fight like Brian and I, still alive ever after, all we have to say is, I remember. And it's instant diffusing. It's an instant recall. And usually it's the hero that says it, but, you know, and sometimes we don't even say it in the moment. Right? Like, we'll have a big fight and then he leaves the house or I've got to travel for work or whatever. And a day will go by, or two days will go by and then one of us will text each other. I remember. And it's like you fell in love all over again. It's really a powerful tool. It's a game changer.

[B]

And do you notice that it takes work to get the words out of your mouth? Or is it the text? Because you have to let go of your hard done by grumble. It can still be there. But the truth is, I love you came back and you're just saying to your partner, I remember. And the bookmark in the book is that we're in love and everything else will get handled in context.

[A]

Okay, so I have a confession, and this is a segue into my next question for you. So my confession is that, and you'll agree with this, Brian is actually the hero and the ninja way more than me. He remembers. He pulls that card nine and a half times out of ten than I do. He's a Sagittarius. He's pretty fucking stubborn. But when it comes to us and my own righteousness and just how I'm wired, like, it's hard for me.

[B]

He's better at remembering than you.

[A]

He's better at remembering than me. And he's kind of always been like that. But Brian has quantum leaped in the last year or two. You've seen it.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

He quit drinking. Totally. He started microdosing. He's like, oh. Like. So when I met Brian started taking.

[B]

Care of his life and himself.

[A]

Correct. He started. 13 years have gone by. And if I were to look at Brian and Jessica when we first met and say to her, by the time you reach year 13, we've been married for almost 11, but 13 together. He would be using words like trust the universe. Words are wands. This too shall pass. Being. Being my oracle and teacher and, like, open. Talking about the 5D. Like, I would be like, no, you wish for this. Exactly. You so wish. But he's.

[B]

You stopped complaining about it.

[A]

Okay, so let's talk about. Because I have a lot of women that are listening It's. The show is called the Spiritual Hustler. Women who struggle with their partners not being as conscious as they are, not being as evolved as they are, not.

[B]

Into workshops, personal growth, just making fun of their correct.

[A]

Having no interest in it. And they're being resistance and. And blocks in the relationship for them to grow together in the way that the woman thinks that they should be growing together.

[B]

But the woman wants the guy to go to the workshop because she's trying to change him.

[A]

Okay?

[B]

And he can smell it, right?

[A]

And so I want to unpack from. There's. That's a huge kind of unlock that I had to have was, you can't force your way. You can't what the fuck your partner into going along on this journey. How do you do? I never thought it was possible, but I'm living it right now. And so what strategies. And I also think this is a great note for single women who are looking for a partner, because everyone I know that's single and I've got a lot of girlfriends are like, I just want a conscious man. I just want a man who's on my level, you know? And they're, like, not finding it. And so what advice do you have? Like, how can women create more space to call in that partner or work with the partner? They do have to go on this path together without, like, engineering it, forcing it, like I was trying to do for so many years.

[B]

Well, imagine if you went away to a workshop and you come home and you're all over your husband, adoring him, appreciating him, seeing all the tiny things he does, really feeling his love. And then he goes, what's going on, sweetheart? And you go, I went to this workshop, and I just remembered how in love with you I am. He would be like, what is that workshop? I want me some of that, right? But we come back and we're like, everyone's so conscious of the workshop. All the men there were so much better than you. You need to change this. You need to change that. He's like, I ain't never going to that stupid workshop. The mark of spiritual growth is that you fall more in love with what's so as it is, including your partner, exactly as they are. And so to love someone is to be powerfully related and appreciate who they are exactly as they are. Broken, incomplete, wabi sabi, imperfect, and hold a vision for who they can be. Yes, but in that order. If you don't love someone exactly as they are, they don't have the resource, the skill, the wit, the wherewithal. Someone believing in them so they can ascend to who they could be. And so when someone loves, when your partner feels loved exactly as they are, something in them goes, I'm loved. I want to see what's next. If you don't love something exactly as it is, that piece of reality digs its heels in and goes, I'm not changing until you love me. You can't shame something into oblivion. You can only love it into submission. And this is what they're looking for. Let me see if this spiritual shit's actually working. You don't sound like no guru, but you look like a guru when you just love them exactly as they are. And you share about the retreat and what you learned for yourself and how it would be so amazing to take you with me. And it's okay if you don't. The minute they can feel that you have a death grip on them, dragging them to the retreat so they can change.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

They don't trust it because they can feel that you're putting in a competition between who they are now and who they could be. And you love that future self more than you love this one. So they're already envious and jealous of that fucker. And they don't even like that version of themselves. You're pitting the current self against their future self. They have to feel like, this one is the one you love, the one you're with. Sometimes women ask me, I don't know if I love my partner as they are, but I love their potential. Can you love their potential? And I'm like, no, they can smell it.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

And they hate that future version of themselves. They're actually going to avoid being them.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

So, you know, when my daughter was nine months old, she took her first steps, and I watched her wobble her way towards me. And my husband and I, we clap. That's what you do now that those steps were imperfect. Right. They were sloppy and she fell down. So I was loving her exactly as she is developmentally, and I was holding a vision of a future where she would walk smoothly with a great cadence. You have to appreciate the person where they're at and love their future self, but not hold your love hostage for the current version. And I'll love you when you become that because that actually keeps that future version at bay.

[A]

Can I add to that?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So this was in the last two years. Okay. And we'd fight about. I'm really showing my cards here. I was like, I would below the belt. This Was a below the belt criticism of Brian. I'd be like, our marriage is boring. You're boring.

[B]

I would hear you say that I never fall afraid.

[A]

And then he would hate it. And then one time we were like, we were in the kitchen, we were fighting. I was like, we're boring. And he's like, we're not boring. And I was like, well, then what are we? He goes, we're functional. He literally goes, we're functional. And I was like, well, I don't want to be functional. I want to be epic Brian. Anyway, we brought this to you. Do you remember this?

[B]

Yes.

[A]

Because it was so funny. It came out of his eyes like, we're not poor. I'm like, well, you tell me what we are. He's like, and he didn't even think about we're functional.

[B]

Which is a high accomplishment. Can I just.

[A]

100. 100. But I wanted it to be epic. And you looked at me on that one of those calls and you said, jessica, in order for you to get Brian to come to epic, you have to fall in love with functional. You have to celebrate functional. You have to honor and rejoice and.

[B]

And like the epicness.

[A]

And see the epicness.

[B]

Relationships are not functional. And working together. Oy vey.

[A]

I totally. And I. It was definitely one of our, our lower points. And I don't know what I was going through, but you know, that offended him. And he, he, he actually came back with like a vision. He's like, we're actually not boring at all. We're functional. But that in my current consciousness at the time wasn't enough. And I, I had to.

[B]

Can you see how he's more spiritually advanced than you in that moment?

[A]

Oh, he's so spiritually advanced. Like, he's my teacher.

[B]

You're with the energy and the crystals. And he's like, I'm just a guru sitting here.

[A]

I know. No doubt. And we'll talk about our summit with you because Brian was like the full on cheerleader, like hero of that summit. But it wasn't until. And I'm just sharing this because you. These codes are real. What you're speaking of works because it was that it was a turning point because that landed as so many all of our calls with you do. It's like, okay, I'm going to look around my functional marriage and see what's great about it and see what's epic about it. And I stopped saying we were boring. I stopped on. I started honoring the beautiful functional nature of our dynamic. And that's when shit started getting epic. Oh, our marriage is epic. It's I. All my friends who hang out with us when we double date or we go out to concerts, people are like, where did he go? What did he do with the old Brian? Like, he's such a different version.

[B]

Because you just loved the. Out of who he was.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

So he will naturally grow to his next level.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

And to me, that shows spiritual development. That shows me that the workshops are working. The way your family knows that the workshops you're doing are working is because you operate with them in a way that makes them fall more in love with themselves.

[A]

Right, Right.

[B]

And that's the work.

[A]

That's the work. So we'll talk about the summit in a second, because I want to go into something that I learned from you and Eben at that mastermind. But we've been talking a lot about partnerships and love and how to make your marriage or relationship epic and last forever. And last forever.

[B]

I'm really committed to what does it take to create a partnership across a lifetime?

[A]

That. That. And just to get into your mastermind for a second, because I want to get back to my question, but when we stepped into that room, you know, you host a summit of love, it's invite only a couple times a year.

[B]

Just for couples.

[A]

Just for couples. And the criteria is together for at least five years. Co create in the world that's together, that's meaningful.

[B]

They create some value together. That's a contribution to the world. Correct. That's not just kids.

[A]

That's not just kids. And are openly committed for life. And I've told people that, and they're like, yo. Because I was like, when you step into that kind of room with people who are playing that game, it's a very fucking different kind of room. Different conversations and different conversations, different tools, different hacks. Right. And I'm sensitive. I've been sensitive. Like, that summit really gave me radical, like, self permission to be as open about how happy I am in my marriage. Because for a long time, I. I mean, my marriage isn't perfect, but I was also. I'm sensitive. I have a wide community of women who listen to this podcast and follow me on social and come into my world that aren't in a relationship. There are probably women listening now. Be like, wow, when will I ever be able to get to five years and go to a summit like that? Like, I would dream of going to something like that, work with someone like Annie. But you do support single women.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

It's a big part of your work. And so can you kind of, like, because I've been in a relationship for 13 years, like, I'm so out of the dating consciousness. Like, what's happening?

[B]

Yeah, I have some ideas for women. I don't like to say single.

[A]

Okay, great.

[B]

His words become worlds. And, you know, words are spells. And so saying you're single, why don't we try saying, I'm available for love, open to life, partnership. I'm looking for a partner to create magic with. Like, say what you want, not what you're leaving. Right. Put that into the future. So stop saying you're single. First hack I want to give is when you walk in the streets and you hear a birdsong, it decorates the space. And birdsong is actually a mating call. It's the bird taking all its ingenuity and creating a piece of music that is attempt to attract a mate. And if you want to attract a mate, you need to be out in the world doing your bird call. And it's anything that has you come alive and feel in flow. It could be speaking, it could be dancing, it could be playing piano. It could be on a digital forum, it could be in person. But you can't be at home watching Netflix. You have to be out in the world doing something publicly where your life force and your beauty and your essence is being channeled.

[A]

This is different than, like, going to the bars.

[B]

Totally. It's like going out if someone meets you through your art.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

I have a really good friend, he's a great teacher, and he was teaching a class for. On a podcast, and a girl was in the audience, and she heard him speak. And he's been looking for a partner for years. And she saw him. She saw what I love in him. And she met him through his genius and his art, his teaching. And they're, like, in love, making it work. And I'm like, that's how you meet your partner, through your art. So be doing your art. If you're in a job that you hate, well, we gotta talk about how to emancipate you from that. But find forms where you're doing the thing you love the most. Because when you're doing that, the essence, the signature of your soul rides on that. And if you wanna find a soulmate, they have to smell your soul. So you have to be revealing that. And so that's the first thing. Find forms where you're doing the thing that brings you most alive. And that's how they'll spot you. Okay. Then the second thing, I have is let's just assume everyone's heteronormative for a moment so I can make it easy. So say you're a woman looking for a man and this can apply to a woman looking for a woman too. But if you're interacting with a man, any man, 20 year old Starbucks barista, 80 year old man in the pharmacy, little kid in the park, that's a boy. Anytime you interact with a male, interact with them as if they are an avatar of your soulmate sent back in time to interview you in that moment to see whether you're ready for a king. Imagine that right after the interaction with you, they're going to send an energetic email to your future soulmate saying, I felt amazing after interacting with her. She's ready. How would you treat every man so that that email was sent to your soulmate saying you're ready? It forces you to bring your highest level of womaning and queening to that interaction. Even if it's five seconds as you pay for your coffee, do you leave that person better than you found them or at least neutral? And another way to think about it is imagine that that man's mother is standing just a foot behind him. Invisibly. What would you have to do so that she winks at you after that she's like, thanks for taking care of my boy. Now, it doesn't mean you're flirting with these people. You're just interacting with them with the highest level of your woman so that they feel dignified and edified from the interaction. If you do that, every man you meet will feel yay. And whether they're the one or they know the one, you're practicing the highest quality womaning, which is what we'll call your mate in. And so a lot of times when you're not in partnership, it's because there's a program that comes online when you're around men that you're unconsciously playing that ends up becoming a barrier to a, a future interaction. You think the sign on your chest says I'm available for love, but actually the sign says I'm pretending I'm available for love, but actually I'm terrified and I don't want to lose X, Y and Z and so please stay away because you're cute. Like that's something thinking of all my.

[A]

Single friends right now.

[B]

Yeah. And so if you practice this, the way you interact with men will be just the highest quality of yourself. And I think that's how your partner will find you or you'll get introduced to Them.

[A]

What are your thoughts on dating apps right now?

[B]

Well, I'll tell you a story. I was in a relationship, and I, you know, he was a Columbia University therapist. He wanted to marry me. I could. I loved him. He was amazing. He was beautiful, but he just wasn't in love. And so I had the courage to finally leave that relationship. And then I went to Burning man and met Eben four days in. But right before I went to Burning man, my friend came over and he's like, you need to make an app. Not my boyfriend, another friend who's not romantic with me. He's like, we need to make a dating app profile for you. I didn't want to do it, but I finally sat down, clarified, what did I want to say? Who do I want to attract? And I put the bio up, and then I never looked at it again. And I went to Burning man and I found my soulmate. But I think the process of clarifying who you want, what you want to attract, and then taking an action that says to the universe, I'm fucking ready. I am broadcasting on every surface I can that I'm available for love says something to reality, and it brings you closer to those opportunities. So even if you're not going to use the app, I want you to go and make a bio on a dating app and take the action, because that says, I'm available on every surface.

[A]

I love that perspective.

[B]

I don't want to leave any rock unturned. Right. Like you want. How does the universe know you're serious? And I tell my single clients. I want you to tell everyone at a party that you meet. It doesn't matter if it's a woman or an old lady. Yes. This is what I do. Work. And I'm available for love. I'm looking for my life partner, and I'm ready to build a magical experience. And then they start thinking about who they can connect you with. It doesn't sound desperate and hungry. It actually sounds congruent and honest.

[A]

I love it.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

I love it so much. Okay. I could talk to you forever, ever, ever. I want to come back to your reason for being on this planet, which is true love. And when we, you know, we've been working with you for so long and getting to come to Austin in May and spend five days with you and your beautiful partner Eben, with all of these beautiful couples and learn firsthand. And we did workshops and breakouts and small groups, and we. It was beyond, like, what a gift to have experienced that. And we really took a Quantum leap. And we learned so many codes from other couples. From other couples. We, like, crowdsourced the codes and traded codes.

[B]

And I curated for the most sophisticated couples so that it was a high.

[A]

Quality, like those relationships that we made our friends, couple friends for the rest of our lives. You and Eben said something, you introduced something that I'd love us to kind of leave the audience with, which is.

[B]

Love.

[A]

True love is leadership for the new earth. And I had never heard it that way before, and I had never thought about it that way before. I had never thought about my own responsibility in leading love by being committed for life. So can you explain what that is, where it's missing, why it's so important just to plant that little kernel in the seeds of the minds of. Of women who see themselves as leaders and maybe are in a partnership or are available for love? Because I think it's an upgrade. Yeah. Can you explain that?

[B]

Well, just think, when you're a young child, who are the first leaders you ever meet?

[A]

Your parents.

[B]

Your parents. And in the traditional situation, you have a mom and a dad, and they're the leaders. They're the God and the goddess. And when you look around the world, most of the leaders are one person, usually a man, but not always, and maybe a partner, but the partner is kind of subordinate and sidekick. And so I have a vision, or divorced. I just have a vision of every leadership position, whether it's the head of a company, the head of a community, an institution, a country. The heads, the leadership positions are actually couples in collaborative relationships that are in true love, which means that they make every decision together. Every decision they make has to go to the rigorous tussle of both of their value sets, both of their philosophies. And a decision is not made until both partners can sign their name to the outcome. Now, that means you'll have to kind of go through a lot of conversations that look like conflict, but a conflict is a collaboration trying to happen. And so that's what I teach people, is how to turn conflicts into collaboration. And so when the leader of a system is two people in love that refuse to coerce each other or collapse, well, they'll. They will try to coerce and collapse, but they work it through until they find something they both can agree on. That decision that they make is way more trustable than anything they could have done separate. And that's the kind of leadership, if we had that leading companies and countries, I just think the world would be a very different place, because your partner is your unconscious. Mind, you fall in love with the parts of yourself that you've marginalized. You fall in love with your conscience. Your partner is your conscience. And they teach you how to become more moral. So when you have a couple in love, like two wings on one bird, neither wing is dominating the other because otherwise it would veer into the ground. When two wings work together, you can fly anywhere. And so I see a future where systems are led by couples in love, just like families are. And we create outcomes that provide a context for children and future generations to flourish.

[A]

I could cry. It's so good. It changed everything for me.

[B]

And you've become a self aware role model. You already knew you were a role model as a woman, but I think you taking on we are a role model for what love could look like in our community. And they're always watching. Yes, they're watching when you fight, they're watching when you resolve. And it's okay to fight. Just keep going until you resolve it. Sometimes it may take years.

[A]

Conflict, patriarchy, old world 3D paradigm collaboration, new earth 5D matriarchal harmony. Like it? It's everything in my own way that I speak to and putting a frame around the responsibility that you have. If you are in a couple relationship, how it's so much bigger than you.

[B]

And is the world clapping for your couple?

[A]

Right.

[B]

A couple is either taking from reality or giving. There's no middle ground.

[A]

Right.

[B]

So is the world clapping for your relationship? Is your relationship creating more value than you would create separately?

[A]

Right.

[B]

And that's the purpose of a relationship. But you mentioned patriarchy. I want to just head on to that because it's a term that gets thrown around a lot. But oftentimes women are perpetrating the patriarchy.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

And so I like to even take it out of patriarchy. To me, the patriarchy, if it's there, started the minute a human being put their emotions and their body sensations below their thoughts. That is the beginning of the patriarchy. So every time a woman takes her feelings and shoves them down and goes, oh, I need to justify my feeling. I need to explain why I'm sad. You are playing out patriarchy.

[A]

I love it.

[B]

So the revolution is not just I think, therefore I am, I feel, therefore I am. And they're both equal, they both dance together. And so standing for your feelings as sacred whisperings of your soul, as teachers telling you what to do next, that's the move. And remember, the more feelings you feel, the more alive you are.

[A]

I love you, Annie. I love you so Much.

[B]

Yay.

[A]

I have just a few more Quick Fire questions for you. Okay. Wrap it with Always these. These ones. So first question for you is, do you have a favorite spiritual book and business book?

[B]

The business book. I'm sorry, but Think and Grow Rich is just a fucking channeled piece of genius. One of the things I learned from Think and Grow Rich, well, one is sexual transmutation. They took out the chapter in the edited version. You should get the original version. It has a chapter on sexual transmutation. Teaches you how to take sexual energy and turn it into creativity, which is great for men, but there's a whole thing about. He has a group of leaders in his mind that are fictional. And whenever he needs to brainstorm an idea, he takes it to these characters. And I have a chorus. My chorus is always watching me. It's a group of people. It's future successful Annie's and people I admire. And they are clapping for me whenever I do something great. And they collaborate with me. And so I carry them around to give me props privately in my own mind. So I don't need to ask other people for props. So that's something I learned from thinking Grow Rich and then spiritual book. I would say be her now, but probably everybody says that. So I'm going to say one that probably people don't say. Freedom from the Known by Krishnamurti.

[A]

Never heard of it.

[B]

So Krishnamurti was a genius. But the whole book is about how knowledge, which is thoughts based on the past, is dead, ossified experience. And while I love knowledge, I have lots of books in my bookshelves. Whenever there's an opportunity to choose between fresh off the press, information coming through your senses, fresh off the press in your consciousness, you can choose between that or dead, ossified knowledge from the past. Always choose your empirical experience. So whether you're learning something in a book or hearing it from a guru, if what you're learning is at odds with your personal empirical experience, always trust that over any guru, including me. I tell all my clients this. Trust your own experience more than what you ever see outside. That's to me, what real spirituality is, is realizing you and your experience is the guru. No one else can tell you better. So that's the book that I learned it from.

[A]

I'm obsessed. I got to read that. That's amazing. Do you have a goddess, deity, angel, archetype, spirit guide, master, teacher, ancestor? You you personally connect with, work with?

[B]

Well, I love all the Hindu pantheon. I've got Saraswati, I've got Shakti. But I really need Durga because I need to find my inner Kali. Like, that's my development path is how do I slice through deception and delusion with truth and honesty and transparency. And so when I channel my Durga with my husband, I notice our relationship progresses. So Durga is who I go to Sekhmet too. But yeah.

[A]

Yeah, I could see that for you. Do you believe in aliens? Yes or no?

[B]

I probably am one. I mean, I think aliens is just a term for super consciousness from the future that comes back and tries to pull reality in that direction. And so anyone who's inspiring to you is probably some form of consciousness from the future. I think we think of green entities with big eyes, but I think we all have. All the people you admire have some alien in them.

[A]

100%. We're all hybrids for the most part. Final question. What does it mean to you, Annie, to be a co creator of the new Earth?

[B]

For me, it means finding the one idea that is so important, I want to babysit it with my intelligence, my creativity, my aliveness. So important that I would dedicate my life to it. And that's that true love is possible. It's real, and it's possible for everyone. But it requires that you believe in it first. And so I've dedicated my life to helping people believe in true love. And that's my contribution to the new Earth. Because I don't work for the. The clients or the couples. I work for their relationship and their future children. And those are the children that make the future. So when I work with a couple, I tell them, like, you know, I'm working for your future child. I want to be able to look them in the eye and say, I did everything I could to help your parents get along.

[A]

Well, you did that for us. You really did that for us. And now we get to be in.

[B]

Love as leaders and role models and role models and inspiring everyone around you. And that's what I love. I love when the couples I work with go off and people go, wow, I want what they have. Because there's enough people saying, I can't find any role models to model and we need more.

[A]

There's enough people bitching about their relationships and like. Like celebrating being divorced at 36. Like, the what you have brought, not only to this conversation, but to my life. And I know the world that you touch is the new Earth. And I'm so grateful that you came into my life. And I know Brian would say the same. And now we get to be sisters. Yay.

[B]

Yeah. I love you guys. I love your relationship. Your relationship has character, dignity, beauty, grace, elegance. Picks itself up when it falls down. I don't trust a relationship that hasn't been to the edge of annihilation and back.

[A]

Well, that's Brian and I. I love you, Annie. Thank you for bringing us here.

[B]

You love me? I love you so much.