A traumatized nervous system can be rewired with chemistry your own body already makes. Regena Thomashauer, known to hundreds of thousands of women as Mama Gena, found that out by accident in her twenties. She walked into a class called Basic Sensuality to fix a problem with her acting auditions and walked out five years later having lived at Lafayette Morehouse, learned the practice of extended orgasm, and stopped running on fight or flight for the first time in her life. The School of Womanly Arts came out of that discovery. Her new book, On Our Knees: Loving Your Life Even When You Hate What's Happening, came out of what happened when the machine she built stopped, the stages emptied, and she spent six years inside what she calls her ego death, turning the same tools on herself. The mechanism is the spine of this conversation. Oxytocin quiets the amygdala and turns a hermit into someone who wants to bond. Endorphins do what morphine does. Dopamine lifts depression and is nicknamed the hope chemical. Prolactin brings the sleep where trauma repair happens. Regena calls it the pleasure medicine cabinet and points out that the pharmaceutical industry has spent decades trying to put it in a pill. Aubrey's version is shorter: instead of picking at the scab, make small circles around your clitoris. From there it opens outward. Why a culture that has eighty-eight keys of emotion available and only permits middle C ends up problem-centric instead of pleasure-centric. Why half the women in a room of a thousand grew up with no word at all for their own anatomy, and what that silence does to a girl. How Regena taught her daughter pleasure and boundaries as one lesson, and why she thinks boys are the harder case. Aubrey and Regena also go straight at the places where their approaches diverge: what sensual self-touch does for the feminine that it does not do for him, why hunger rather than release may be the masculine form of pleasure, and the cost-benefit of ejaculation that men rarely run. Then the myth of Psyche and Eros, Kali and Freya as energies you can summon on purpose, two stories of surrender in the face of violence that reframe what surrender even is, and the masculine architecture of holding steady while the storm comes. They close on the thing the book is really about. It is always the ego that gets surrendered. The question is whether you can still be in love with your life when it looks nothing like you thought it would. Get Regina Thomashauer's new book "On Your Knees" | https://tinyurl.com/y8xhv4nf | Mama Gena Thomashauer | Website | https://mamagenas.com/ Instagram | https://www.instagram.com/mamagena/ This episode is sponsored by ►Metal Mark Gold Aurum Collectable Art | ⁠https://mtlmrk.com/⁠ ►Korrect Life | ⁠https://korrectlife.com/ | Aubrey Marcus | ►Website | ⁠⁠https://www.aubreymarcus.com/ ►Instagram | https://www.instagram.com/aubreymarcus ►Facebook |⁠⁠ https://www.facebook.com/AubreyMarcus/ ►X |⁠ https://x.com/aubreymarcus ►Substack: https://www.aubreymarcus.com/blogs/substack ► Love To The Seventh Power: ⁠https://chakaruna.com/collections/books⁠ Subscribe to the Aubrey Marcus podcast: ►iTunes |⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://apple.co/2lMZRCn ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ►Spotify |⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://spoti.fi/2EaELZO ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠►IHeartRadio |⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://ihr.fm/3CiV4x3 ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠►Partner with the Aubrey Marcus Podcast | https://www.aubreymarcus.com/pages/booking ========================================­===== About the Podcast Founder of Onnit and modern philosopher Aubrey Marcus asks the important questions: How do we find our purpose, wake up to who we truly are, have a few more laughs, and human being a little better? The Aubrey Marcus Podcast brings in world-class guests from the fields of athletics, health, business, fitness, science, relationship and spirituality, and asks them to open up about the failures and successes that define their wisdom and character. Follow me on social to keep up with the latest, and meet many of the incredible guests we’ve been honored to have on the show.