Better Beliefs
Better Beliefs tells the stories of everyday people who change everything, by first changing their minds about themselves or what's possible.
Better Beliefs
The Oldest Way To Feel Fully Alive
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Think about the last time you felt fully alive. Not happy. Not successful. Alive. For most of us, those moments are rare enough that we can count them.
This episode is about how to get more of those 'fully alive' moments.
I sit down with embodiment guide Heather Mazzei, who says aliveness isn't luck. It's a current you were born with — and most of us quietly turned it down a long time ago. She'd call that current sexual energy. Stay with it, because this conversation isn't about sex. It's about vitality, and what it costs you to spend your life performing the version of yourself other people approved of.
We get into the University of Rochester research on subjective vitality, June Tangney's work on the difference between guilt and shame, and Heather's personal journey from hiding the truest parts of herself to awakening as a burlesque dancer.
Heather is the author of the guidebook Spirit Sex. Find her at https://www.alternativelove.com/
— she also writes on Substack at https://alternativelove.substack.com/ and is on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/alternativelove.sf.
If this one moved you, follow the show and send it to one person who needs it.
And remember, the most dangerous thing is a made-up mind.
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Music Credits
"Bloom Within" by Maciej Wojcik
"Landing on the Ground" by Yehezkel Raz
"For The Broken Hearted" by Yehezkel Raz
"Infinite Dreams" by Out of Flux
"Venus" by Alton Perez
"Voices" by Open State
"Contemplative Question" by The Tennessee Pistols
Think about the last time you felt fully alive. Not happy, not successful, not relaxed, alive. The kind of moment where you weren't watching yourself, weren't managing anything, where something was just moving through you and you were along for the ride. Maybe it was in the middle of doing something you love. Or maybe it was a trip somewhere and you got lost in the culture, or when you were out connecting with nature, or maybe it was something as simple as singing your favorite song at full blast in the shower. We're so present in those moments, aren't we? But for most of us, those moments are rare. We can just about count them without having to take our shoes off. The rest of the time, we're fine. We're functioning. We're getting through the to-do list that's become our lives. But fine and alive, those aren't the same thing. And somewhere down deep, I think we all know it. We talk about wanting more energy. We talk about feeling stuck or flat or like we're just going through the motions. And sure, we come up with a lot of reasons. We blame our sleep, our schedule, our age. But what if the thing we're missing isn't rest? What if it's a kind of energy we stopped letting ourselves feel a long time ago? Most of us, we treat those fully alive moments like weather, like they just happened to us. And all we can do is hope another one comes around. But what if that feeling of aliveness isn't luck? What if it's something you're born with? A current that's still running through you right now, no matter how faint it's gotten.
SPEAKER_01Everybody has sexual energy. We're born with sexual energy. That is, sexual energy is the breath of life that animates your being. It's what is moving you and propelling you through the world.
SPEAKER_00That's Heather Mazay. She's an embodiment guide, which is just a fancy way of saying she helps people get back into their own bodies and back in touch with the life force they forgot they had. And just in case you want to turn this off, because she said the word sexual energy, stay with me. Because this episode isn't really about sex, it's about the energy of being alive. Welcome to Better Beliefs. What if the only thing standing in your way is what you believe about yourself, your life, or what's possible? Thousands of people have faced that same question and discovered the power to shift reality itself. I'm Brent Kokel, and on Better Beliefs, I tell the stories of real people who changed everything by first changing their minds. Heather's story starts on a Friday night, years ago in a room with a stage in a crowd. The lights come up and Heather walks out. She's a burlesque dancer, and right now, in this exact moment, she's not thinking about how she looks or who's watching or whether she's doing it right. She's not correcting. She's not managing, she's not wondering what anybody thinks of her. She's just there, fully, and every person in that room can feel it coming off of her.
SPEAKER_01Power. That's a feeling powerful. And that it's like in that moment that you asked me, it's like that's what society and conditioning, shame around sexuality is trying to stop is people feeling powerful. Because when you feel powerful and alive, wow, you can actually go out and do the things that you want to do. But I think society is still afraid of that. People who are really in their power. And I'm not talking about power over, right? I'm talking about the power that comes from within when you're standing there and expressing yourself in your fullest, truest, most authentic version of you.
SPEAKER_00That level of confidence can only come from the inside. And it's something Heather had worked on for more than a decade. Fifteen years before that stage, Heather was the exact opposite of the woman standing on it. So let's go back to when she was 14. She was a church girl and she was a dancer. She's a kid with a lot of life moving through her, and that life is just starting to turn into something she can feel.
SPEAKER_01That's the time for me when shit got r started to get really real and really weird. Because I started to have all of these hormones and all of this excitement and all this vitality. And what did my mother start hearing from the crowd of people? My own mother told me, people are calling you a slut. I was 14. I had never even like made out with the guy yet.
SPEAKER_00Look at the two things that collided in that story. On one side, a girl waking up to her own energy for the first time. On the other, a label built to make her ashamed of it. She hadn't done anything. She was just coming online. And the feedback that she got was that coming online was dangerous.
SPEAKER_01Because my sexuality, because I was wanting to wear, like, you know, and show my body a little bit, because I wanted to flirt with men, because I wanted to dance provocatively. Already I was starting to be labeled as this is something that's that's not okay with us. So we're gonna put you in this box over here. And when that starts happening really young for people, then I think sex becomes this thing, right? Well, I can't talk to my dad about it. Well, I can't talk to my mom about it.
SPEAKER_00So she built the box herself and climbed in. There was a good girl everyone got to see, and then there was this other part, the alive part, folded up and put away where nobody could call it a name. And she lived like that, split right down the middle for the better part of 15 years. And I want to stop here for a second because what happened to her is bigger than just her. When I was researching this episode, I came across the work of a psychologist named June Tagney, who spent her career on two emotions that we treat like the same thing, but they aren't guilt and shame. She wrote a book in 2002 with another psychologist named Rhonda Deering, where they laid out the fundamental difference between guilt and shame. Guilt says, I did something bad. Shame says, I am something bad. One is about a thing you did, so you can own it and move on. The other is about who you are. And there's no fixing that without really deep work on yourself. So the only other move left is to hide. And that's exactly what Tangni's research found. People carrying shame, they usually don't repair. They withdraw, they shrink, essentially disappear from the person they used to be. Nobody told 14-year-old Heather she did a bad thing. They told her she was a bad thing. Now, think back to what I said at the top of the show about that current that we stopped letting ourselves feel. This is a big part of how I think it dulls. We don't usually decide to hide the alive part of ourselves. Shame decides for us. And the cruelest version isn't shame about something you did, it's shame about who you are. Because you can walk away from a person you feel ashamed in front of, but you're stuck with yourself. So it just runs in the background all day. A low hum of I am not okay. And we've carried that for so long we don't even hear it anymore. And that hum, it's expensive. Which brings me to the word at the center of this whole episode: vitality. It sounds soft, like something maybe off of a candle label, but it's been measured for decades. And yes, we've got to jump back into some more science here. Two researchers named Richard Ryan and Christina Frederick, out of the University of Rochester, they published a paper together in the Journal of Personality in 1997 on what they called subjective vitality. Their definition of that was basically that feeling of being alive and energized. And across six studies they found it wasn't just a good mood. Interact with real health, more motivation, more resilience, and even a stronger physical body. But here's the finding that matters most for us. Ryan's bigger body of work, what he calls self-determination theory, shows that vitality drains out of us when we live under pressure and control, when we're running on the everything we should do model, when we're performing a life to earn somebody else's approval. And it actually comes back to us when we act from something that's actually our own. So a kid who gets told who she's allowed to be and spends 15 years performing the approved version, that's gonna leak vitality the entire time. And that's not a metaphor, that's the finding of the study. And it puts a sharper edge on the line from the top. Sexual energy is the breath of life. Because when Heather says energy, she doesn't mean what happens in the bedroom. She means the raw current of being alive. The same force that makes a musician close their eyes on a solo, or a person light up a room just by walking into it. It's creative, it's magnetic, it's the opposite of flat. And it was never the problem. The shame we stacked on top of it was. Which is why Heather doesn't ask the questions the rest of us asked. When we're checking on how our life is going, she's asking a different question.
SPEAKER_01How do you express yourself? How is your vitality? How do you exchange energy with the world? I think too much of the conversation gets stuck around: are you having enough sex? Are you having better sex? And are you having sex with somebody that you love? Rather than the conversation around how are you relating to your sexuality and do you love yourself first?
SPEAKER_00How much life is moving through you? That's really a better gauge of how we're really doing than almost anything on our calendars. So let's talk about how you might get more of it, starting with how Heather got hers back. Because the woman who spent 15 years in a box didn't climb out through therapy or a book or a weekend retreat. She climbed out through the same stage we opened the story with. Somebody invited her to a burlesque workshop almost at random. And the part of her that had been folded up for 15 years, part of it didn't want to go, but the other part was curious enough to say yes. That yes became a school. And the school became a troupe. And the troop filled with women chasing the same thing she was.
SPEAKER_01I was bringing and attracting all of these women who who wanted to actually be in their bodies, who wanted to feel sexy, who wanted to uh that creative expression and that outlet, and then put it on stage for other women to see. And I remember distinctly one of my dancers coming to me. This was a woman who was, you know, mid-30s, two kids, married, just like, you know, kind of like, ugh, like lost in life, and joining the burlesque troupe, getting on stage, expressing herself. And one night she said to me, like, thank you for bringing me back to life.
SPEAKER_00She keeps insisting she didn't do anything, and I think she's almost right. She didn't hand that woman anything new. The aliveness was already in there, just boxed up. Probably the same way it had been in Heather, and probably the same way it is in a lot of us. All she did was build one room where it was safe for it to come back out. You might assume all of this runs on the crowd, the lights, the applause, being seen in this raw kind of carnal power. And then Heather told me about a moment with no crowd at all. She was in San Francisco on one of those electric scooters you can rent when she started to hear one of her favorite songs come on.
SPEAKER_01I put the scooter down and I just stood there and I just let my body move and dance. There's surely lots of people around, right? My eyes are closed, I am in it because life is moving through me. I am so connected to myself, to my own divine nature, to my own spirit that I'm just moving. And it's like I'm not even moving, I'm being moved.
SPEAKER_00Her eyes were closed. There was no one to perform for. People on the street would more likely think she was crazy than performing, which means the things she found on the sidewalk was the same thing she found on the stage. And it was never coming from the people watching, it was coming up through her. The stage wasn't the source, it was just the first place she gave herself permission to let it out. So let's get practical because knowing this and doing something about it, those are two different things.
SPEAKER_01I don't know what your preferences or background is, but most people understand that religious people like go to a church or to a synagogue, or some people go to a sound bathroom. And these opportunities are a time to be in reverence, a time to be in devotion, and a time to be in respect and sacredness, a time to connect with the great spirit of God or whatever. What I'm saying is your body is the temple. You are the divine creature, you are the divine nature. So how do you go to your body and pray?
SPEAKER_00Think about how far that is from how most of us treat the bodies we live in. We treat them like projects, numbers on a scale, a thing that's either ahead or behind of where we want it to be. Even the people who take great care of their bodies, those are usually the harshest judges of themselves. What she's describing is the opposite of judgment. It's respect. The same respect you'd walk into a temple with, pointed at the one you're already living in. And the first step isn't some big ceremony. It's smaller, and I think it might be harder than that.
SPEAKER_01Before we got on this call, what did I do to connect to myself and to drop into that energy? I danced for myself in front of the mirror. I danced with my eyes closed. Like all I have to do is close my eyes, go inside, and follow that thread. And that takes years of development and practice, but that's embodiment. I'm not searching for it anymore out there. I'm just closing my eyes and going inside and allowing it to come rather than trying to force it.
SPEAKER_00Notice the recurring theme of what Heather doesn't have in these experiences: no audience, no goal, nothing to achieve. The practice isn't about adding anything, it's about taking something off. The part of you that stands outside yourself, grading the performance and the guilt of what other people say you are. Now, I'd be lying if I said any of that came easy to me, or to most people I know for that matter. And Heather says this is a different climb depending on which energy you lead with.
SPEAKER_01And so I would say the the way in is for men to drop into their feminine is through sensuality and slowness. And that can be really challenging.
SPEAKER_00Here's what I think she's getting at. A lot of us, men especially, already have a door into feeling alive. It's just the loud one. It's called intensity, the heavy lift, the cold plunging, the lungs burning in this sprint, the smash the gas pedal moment where all of our other worries, they get drowned out. Those work. I use them, and they make you feel something real. But notice what they all have in common. They're all based on force. They're all based on smashing the accelerator. And what Heather is pointing at is a door that most of us have never walked through. It's the one that opens the other way. Not more force, less. Not gripping harder to control, but loosening our hands on the wheel for a second and seeing what moves when you're not the one doing the driving. And that's the thing I've been chewing on since Heather and I talked, because I've been that guy. I know what it's like to run on pure intensity. I'd set a goal, I'd make a plan, I'd put my head down, and I'd go, and it has worked out for me. That engine has built almost everything I'm proud of, but there's been a voice in the back of my head lately that there's this whole other level of living, a whole other level of creating, that the gas pedal just can't reach. That the next thing I'm really after isn't on the other side of more effort. It's on the other side of the one skill I've never actually practiced because I never looked at it as a skill. That's loosening my grip and letting myself be moved by the force of life instead of always being the one doing the moving. And I definitely don't have all this figured out. I don't. But I'm starting to believe that the people who seem most alive aren't the ones pushing the hardest.
SPEAKER_01Now that I have the embodied experience of it, it's anchored in me. I don't need to go on a stage now in front of people to feel that way. That's part of my sexuality. Exhibitioning. Being seen is one of the ways that turns me on, that allows me to be in my power, and it's one of the ways that I love to share how I share love with the world. But the truth is, I don't need to be with anybody to experience that.
SPEAKER_00There's the payoff to the woman we met on the stage earlier in the episode. She doesn't need the stage anymore. She needed it once to learn the feeling and to prove to herself it was real. But once it was anchored in her body, she could find it anywhere. On a sidewalk, in a kitchen, in front of a mirror with the door closed. The applause, that was never the fuel. It was just training wheels. And then she told me where she thinks the fuel actually comes from.
SPEAKER_01Most of us are living in the horizontal plane, this very relational place. I spend a lot of time in my vertical channel, connecting with spirit, with source, connecting with the earth, and allowing that energy to move through me, and that's where my power comes from. Not from out here, it comes from verticality.
SPEAKER_00We spend almost all of our lives looking sideways. We're comparing, we're performing, and we're checking the faces around us to see if what we did was okay. And all of that sideways looking is where we learn to see how we stack up. But it's also the first place we learn to turn ourselves down. What she's describing is an inward look instead of a sideways one. A kind of way to see yourself without comparison to anyone else. What Heather sees, and what I hope you're starting to see for yourself, is that there's a source of life running through you right now. And it's not something you have to earn or achieve or perform well enough to deserve. It's already there. It's been there since long before anyone taught you you had to turn it down. You just stopped drawing from it because somewhere along the way, you decided you had to be a certain way to be accepted. Here's the shift I want to leave you with, though. So many of us have accepted that the flatness is just what becoming an adult feels like. That the alive part of us was a younger person's luxury, and we had to trade it in for the responsibility and the role we play for other people around us. But what if none of it was ever lost? What if it was just a dial that got turned down, waiting for you to reach back in and turn it back up?
SPEAKER_01Just has to do with are you in your body? And are you following that thread of aliveness?
SPEAKER_00That's the question Heather left me with, and the one I'm gonna hand to you. Not whether you're successful, not whether you've got it all together, and not whether you've earned it yet. Just are you following that thread of aliveness? So here's what I'd have you sit with this week. Think of one thing you used to do that made you feel fully alive. And be honest about when you stopped and who or what taught you it was too much. Then ask yourself, what would it really cost me to turn it back up? You might find the thing that you turned down all those years ago is the exact thing you've been missing. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode. As always, it's a joy to put these things together. Now, I open this episode by asking you to remember the last time you felt fully alive. And I want to leave you with something that didn't really have a place in the story, but I think it's relevant now. Heather recorded this conversation with me from San Diego while she was waiting for a biopsy, not knowing what the next few days would bring for the body she spent her life learning how to honor, and of everything she could have done with that hour if she chose to spend it talking with me about what it means to feel alive. Now I don't think that was an accident, but I don't really think anything in it is an accident. I think that's a woman who knows exactly where her power comes from. So I want to thank Heather for her courage and her openness in recording this episode. Her guidebook is called Spirit Sex, and the very first invitation in it is the one that circled this whole episode, which is treating your body like a temple. You can find all of her work, her writing on Substack and her Instagram. I'll link all of those in the show notes. And if this episode stirred something with you, please send it to somebody you know that you think would benefit from it. That's the only way this show grows. Also, please rate the show on whatever platform you listen to it on. Five stars is appreciated, of course, if you think it's worth it. That's it for this episode. I'll see you on the next one. Better Beliefs is owned by 6350 Ventures. It's written, edited, and produced by me, Brent Kokel. Cover art is by Jenny H. Designs, and the original music you hear at the opening of every Better Beliefs podcast is by the Lonely Ramblers. All other music credits are in the show notes.