Kelsey & a pod of girlfriends
116. planet friendship: horizontal with radical self love (1 of 4)
Hello, horizontal lover. horizontal is the podcast about sex, love, and relationships of all kinds, recorded while lying down. This is Season 4, my Season of Experiments. This season marks the first time I’ve ever recorded remotely.
Kelsey: I have this system… that, I kind of vet someone for a long time — I’ll kind of watch them for, you know, six months to a year, and just notice how I feel in their presence. And notice how I feel when we’re out in public, or when we’re together just the two of us, and that gives me enough data to discern if that’s an inner circle connection, or if that’s maybe a second or third tier connection. And so, all of these women kind of went through a vetting system with me, just in the way that we built our relationships individually with each other, super, super slowly. And I just notice that, each of them individually, I really liked the energy that came through us when we would come together, but also, the person that I was able to be, which is the most authentic, aligned version of myself, in their presence.
Hello, horizontal lover. horizontal is the podcast about sex, love, and relationships of all kinds, recorded while lying down.
This is Season 4, my Season of Experiments.
This season marks the first time I’ve ever recorded remotely. So, many times, I’m no longer in the same bed as my guest— which is already a grand experiment in itself, as every single episode of my first three seasons was recorded in person, lying down, wearing robes, shoulder-to-shoulder, right next to my guest. As though stargazing, or post-coital, or in the deep hours of a very long road trip.
I’m always saying that I want to expand people’s notion of what intimacy is, and can be. Remaining overseas during a global pandemic has encouraged me to expand my own notion of intimacy. I used to disparage the value of virtual connection… and suddenly, that’s most of what most of us have. And we must figure out how to make it nourishing for us… or go hungry.
My mission holds steady: To make the world a more intimate place. One episode, one conversation, one essay, one video, one session, one workshop, one course, one talk at a time. So here is my current pursuit: to weave the kind of empathetic cocoon that I cultivate in person, in bed, to inspire a blossoming conversation full of raw, revealing, vulnerable, genuine intimacies, with someone who is horizontal literally across the world.
This is Kelsey Grant.
In this, and the following three episodes, I lie down with the delicious Kelsey Grant, known on Instagram as @radicalselflove. She is my new friend. And I feel very proud to say so. Apropos of this season’s overarching intimacy-across-distance motif, we have not yet met in person. I look forward to the day when I can put my arms around Kelsey and squeeze!
Kelsey is a Love Educator, an incisive writer, a boundaries expert, a singer and creatrix of various mediums, and a powerfully tender woman. She has a generous laugh, and her wisdom is free of bullshit. She’s in it, she doesn’t pretend to be otherwise, and that’s what makes her a whole, human, and a great leader.
I have much to learn from her, and I imagine you will, too.
Half of our episodes will be available in all the podcast places for all the horizontalists, and the other episodes will be available exclusively to patrons of the horizontal arts!
You can become a patron right this instant for access to The Full Horizontal:
When you become a patron, I send you a personal thank-you video (with a Happy Dance in some lovely location, like this one).
Lila, occasionally seated. Image by Kai Mata. September 2020
If you seek guidance for your intimate struggles, I offer Personal Intimacy Roadmap Sessions: 60-minutes of judgement-free, sex-positive guidance… with a takeaway plan (your roadmap)! What ails you in the realm of sex, love, & relationships of all kinds?
To schedule, email lila@horizontalwithlila.com and I’ll send you a fun form to fill out (well, I think it’s fun; I made it) so I can best prepare for you. One of my happy clients said, “I’ve had a lot of therapy. But you give advice a therapist cannot give.”
Bam!
Here, in my first experiment with Kelsey, we scrap the structure, and instead of starting at the very beginning (a very good place to start), as a classic horizontal episode does, we start from the very right now (also a very good place to start) with the question, “What is alive in you?” And that is how this episode came to be all about:
- nourishing female friendship
- envy
- backstabbing
- the 6-month inner circle vetting process
- mother-wounds
- getting kicked out of the house as a teenager
- emotional release & worrying about the neighbors
- swamping
- resisting the codependent parental undertow
- & how Kelsey and her best friend heal by re-parenting each other
In next week’s exclusive, patrons-only episode, we talk about my best friend, the defining factor of a tier one inner circle friendship, virtual and in-person connection, the ability to hold simultaneous conflicting emotions, nerding out, my weekly Covid-era ritual of Escapist Animated Movie Night, & how Kelsey’s ability to express loving boundaries with me, marks the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
To gain access to the next episode (and all the other part twos, or threes and fours going back to the beginning), become a patron of the horizontal arts!
Now come lie down with us, in Uluwatu, Bali, Indonesia, and Vancouver, BC, Canada.
Links to Useful Things:
Kelsey’s @radicalselflove Instagram account
Self-Love Service, Self Study Class, Heal Your Heartbreak course links
Mama Gena’s swamping exercise, which Kelsey & Lila both lurve, comes from Mama Gena’s School of Womanly Arts
Show Notes:
(if you quote from this resource, link to the post or the horizontal Patreon!)
[5:47] How Kelsey prepared for our first horizontal recording, by fueling up on pleasure
[10:18] What is most alive in Kelsey right now?
[10:43] Kelsey & her girlfriends share all their wins, including microwins
Kelsey: I have a pod of girlfriends who, we share all of our wins with — even just the micro synchronicities that we’re noticing that are congruent with the things that we want to create or generate. So we’re constantly texting each other all of this magic and today has just been full throttle! (giggles)
Lila: Ah I love that idea!
Kelsey: Yeah, it’s so nourishing, and these women and this sisterhood, is, almost a non-negotiable, like in order to have a pleasurable life and really lean into the things that I want to generate — being held in that safe container is so necessary for me at this point in my life. To know that I don’t have to censor myself around them and no dream is too big or wild. […] And we can just really celebrate our wins, instead of having to make ourselves small, and oh I don’t wanna threaten this person because I just had this really cool fuckin’ thing that just happened, and so it’s a really neat container for expansion for all of us, and it’s just been poppin’ this morning, so!
Lila: Mmm, I so admire that. I feel that to be really missing in my life; I have individual people that I do that with, but pretty much never a group of people that want to do that with each other. It’s such a dream for me. It sounds so delicious. It has to be with the right people I think.
Kelsey: Totally. Which is probably why it’s taken 10 years to find this exact—
Lila: Configuration?
Kelsey: Configuration.
Kelsey’s configuration of women!
[12:40] Lila on envy & how celebrating some of her friend’s wins feels easier than other ones
Lila: I notice, as a person who experiences a fair amount of jealousy and a fair amount of envy, that there are certain people whose wins don’t arouse that in me really. Even if I hear it and think, Ooo, I would like that, I don’t feel like euueuuuuuooooo I w— euuuu n— why not meeeee I want it! You know? I’m like, “Och! Yes! Linnea! Fuck yeah!” And also, I would like th— I wanna be in that magazine, or, I wanna be in a magazine! Or whatever it is, you know? […] And I wonder about that. I wonder about the people that trigger that in me and the people that don’t.
[13:25 – 16:05] Is there envy amongst Kelsey’s friend group?
[15:34]
Kelsey: For me, I’m a Manifesting Generator, I gotta try things, and if they don’t work, I recalibrate and try it again and eventually I get the perfect alchemy that happens. That’s just what it feels like, it feels like there’s been trial and error for the last 10, 11 years, in combining certain energies and seeing what fits and what doesn’t, and, these particular women seem to really energetically fit with one another, which, is a really beautiful thing.
[16:35 – 19:43] How did they come together as a pod?
[17:47] Kelsey on her vetting process for friends
Kelsey: I have this system… that, I kind of vet someone for a long time — I’ll kind of watch them for, you know, six months to a year, and just notice how I feel in their presence. And notice how I feel when we’re out in public, or when we’re together just the two of us, and that gives me enough data to discern if that’s an inner circle connection, or if that’s maybe a second or third tier connection. And so, all of these women kind of went through a vetting system with me, just in the way that we built our relationships individually with each other, super, super slowly. And I just notice that, each of them individually, I really liked the energy that came through us when we would come together, but also, the person that I was able to be, which is the most authentic, aligned version of myself, in their presence.
[19:56 – 20:54] Lila’s concept of planet friendship & its rings
[20:57] Kelsey on sisterhood wounds
[21:27]
Kelsey: I was almost born into them; if I look at my mom’s family, there’s a lot of shit between the women in the family line. And the men in that family system are quite passive, so they just kind of placate to the dominant shadow feminine in that family system. So there’s just a lot of drama, a lot of gossip, backstabbing, and so that was kind of the imprint that was part of my early life and then, that manifested between me and my mom, and my mom and I had this great relationship until I turned 13. And she had this thing that she would say to me when I was like— I think I was 10 when she started saying this, like, “When you become a teenager, you’re gonna turn into a hellion.” I was raised Catholic, so like, I didn’t even really know what a hellion was— I still don’t, to be perfectly honest with you!
Lila: You just know it’s bad!
Kelsey: But I’m just like, if you’re associating this with hell, this can’t be good. And so it started to build this association in my brain that something like, really scary was gonna happen, the day I turned 13.
Lila: Oh my gosssh. What a setup.
Kelsey: Yeah and then, she started relating to me differently, and, of course, I was relating to her differently, through that lens and, we just had a lot of issues during junior high and high school, to the point where I got kicked out of the house when I was 17. And that was simultaneously the same day that I’d had sex for the first time. […] I couldn’t even make that correlation until two years ago. That there had been this trauma that had happened, this rupture, this abandonment, this betrayal, that was literally synced with my first experience of sex.
[23:45] Kelsey on the dark, gossipy, backstabbing chapter of her story that ensued
[24:27] What was the catharsis that drove Kelsey to leave her abusive relationship and emerge from that chapter?
[24:58]
Kelsey: We worked together, and one night at work, he smashed a glass in my face.
Lila: Holy fuck.
Kelsey: And then a few days later, at home, he— like I was standing against the wall and he like punched a hole inside of the wall that was literally, right next to my face. (Lila gasps) And I was like, this is not it. And I knew enough about my mom’s history that her first husband was really abusive, and like I’m replaying my mom’s life, through mine. And this is long before I’d gone to university, or done any sort of personal development, but there was this correlation that I could see her life, almost replicating in mine. I’m like, I’m not doing that. I’m not doing it.
Lila: Is that the point you can see it almost playing out like, like a movie, like a sequel?
Kelsey: Yeah. And so I made my plan.
[25:54 -27:18] Kelsey’s escape plan
[27:31 – 32:04] The rupture Kelsey had with her best friend at the time, who set her up with a man, then didn’t want her to date him
[32:06 – 33:33] Kelsey calls for emotional education
[32:18]
Kelsey: Even just being able to identify the feelings that I was feeling, was so foreign to me at that time. And I think that there’s a huge opportunity on this planet to educate the younger generations with this emotional literacy. And normalize it! Normalize talking about our feelings and normalize calling out jealousy or envy or feeling shame or guilt… then it doesn’t, you know, maybe cause so much wreckage—
Lila: (excited) Absolutely I […] was thinking that emotional education could be violence prevention.
Kelsey: A hundred percent! Because, when you can express and, you have context for what you’re feeling, it doesn’t have to morph into this aggressive, external manifestation of what you’re feeling. We can talk about it, and then we might use punching a pillow or going to a boxing class or smashing some glass at a rage room or whatever it is, we can use a much more conscious avenue to process some of those more dense emotions.
[33:35] Lila thinks of emotions as a pressure cooker
[34:14 – 36:20] Lila’s 20 Emotional Release Techniques workshop
[36:25 -37:16] Kelsey on anger morphing into aggression, and the passive-aggressive mess that can turn into, without clean release
[37:16 – 42:22] Lila on the non-linearity of grief, her grandma’s death, and the unrelated mishap that made her pressure cooker spilled over
[43:14 – 44:32] Lila on the lack of spaces that truly welcome emotional release, and the worry that her release will disturb the neighbors
[44:35 – 45:14] Kelsey on the only place in her home where she can have a heavy cry and her neighbors won’t hear
[45:14 – 46:43] The time Kelsey’s sex noises made her neighbor yell through the wall!
Kelsey: With my last partner, there was one night where like— I dunno, we were in some sort of crazy like, sexual, wild vortex, and — I’m sure we were making a lot of noise — and the neighbors like, he just started like banging on the win— or on the wall, being like “Shut up!” And then, my former partner, he got very activated and was yelling back through the wall! […] Knowing Jamie, he would kind of want to egg him on and like, “Just be louder!” but there’s that codependent part of myself that like, felt this shutdown happen and… recently Jamie and I talked about what was going on in our relationship where were weren’t totally clicking sexually… and I’m like, well part of it is the environment, at least of my house, because after that happened, I noticed that I was caring more about my neighbor’s comfort than being in my expression of my full aliveness and wholeness— especially when it came to sexual pleasure! And so, like, I would kind of shut down my turn-on, because it was too big, it was too wild, and it was too much for the walls of this room.
[47:20 – 50:56] Kelsey and Lila rhapsodize about their love of Mama Gena’s swamping exercise
[50:58 – 53:38] Lila goes on a bit of a rant about the woo-woo people in Bali
[54:01 – 56:53] Lila’s aha moment about a core phrase her mother used to say to her
[56:53 – 58:17] The extremely difficult, lonely predicament Lila’s mother is in
[58:18 – 59:01] Kelsey on protecting yourself from the codependent undertow
Kelsey: It would be different if there had been a substantial amount of repair and healing, which requires her coming towards you and taking ownership over some of her stuff. That would be different, but, if that hasn’t happened… I think that that’s a very, actually, responsible thing, to honor your limits there. To know where that line is where we might get pulled back into that codependent undertow, where we’re responsible for their experience and their feelings.
[59:01 – 59:34] Kelsey on the harmful paradigm of the “selfless” woman
[59:17] Kelsey’s idea of a good woman
Kelsey: To me, a good woman is an embodied woman. Because that is a woman that is really safe, emotionally. She’s connected to her shadow, her emotions, her joy, her delight, her pleasure, like all of it. And she has this spiritual connection but we were saying earlier, it’s grounded in reality.
[59:37 – 1:01:52] How Kelsey’s mom did her own inner work & how Lila’s mom refuses to continue hers
[1:02:21] Kelsey on how we can heal mother-wounds in friendship
Friendship. And citrus. Also a bit of a collage?
Kelsey: And I think that there’s so much incredible healing that can happen when women can create sisterhood connections for each other and start to do some of that repair that maybe can’t happen mother/daughter, for whatever reason. With my best friend like, she has played that surrogate role of parent in these re-parenting moments with me, where the things that I might have needed to hear as an adolescent, that I didn’t get, she intuitively was able to zone in on that and deliver the thing that I needed to hear… so that I could set myself free and unshackle from some of those shame chains that I had, and that only supported my relationship growing and developing with my mom, but like, it couldn’t just be me and my mom working out me and my mom’s stuff, like, it required this additional support from my, my best friend and now this pod of women that, we, get to unravel all of these complex layers. Because there is so much complexity to it; it’s not this black and white thing, where like, oh, we’re having a tumultuous relationship with mom just cut her out like it— it’s not that easy, especially when we have these codependent threads, and we also just, have a heart!
[1:04:36] On the false and dangerous idea that you have to heal it all on your own
[1:06:48] How Kelsey and her best friend have helped re-parent each other
116. planet friendship: horizontal with radical self love (1 of 4)
Hello, horizontal lover. horizontal is the podcast about sex, love, and relationships of all kinds, recorded while lying down. This is Season 4, my Season of Experiments. This season marks the first time I’ve ever recorded remotely.
