00:00:01.66
Gareth Pickering
I'm here with Tyson Adams, bro. Welcome to the show. It's good to have you here, man.
00:00:05.43
Tyson Adams
Yeah, thank you so much for having me.
00:00:09.13
Gareth Pickering
Probably about four months ago, i was sitting in Costa Rica. was on my way to South Africa and I was looking at refining my own message and my own gifts of how I bring my path to the world. And I searched on Facebook for sex addiction. And one of your posts came up and it sent me down a rabbit hole for your content that resonated so much for some of the themes that I've been working on in my own life, in my own journey with regards to to sex addiction and integrating my own hypersexuality.
00:00:38.18
Gareth Pickering
I would love you to just give a brief overview of what's exciting for you in your work at the moment. Why? What do you do? And yeah, why do you do what you do?
00:00:46.92
Tyson Adams
Yeah. Well, thank you, Gareth, for having me on the show. And I'll just start by saying, you know, I am, um I've been in this, in this work for a decade. ah And I'm trained as an IFS therapist. For those of you don't who don't know, that's internal family systems therapy.
00:01:02.56
Tyson Adams
I'm also a psychedelic facilitator. I also work with couples around intimacy issues. um And I run um three different men's groups, my own, just single men's group. And then I have two others that I um have co facilitators that we run. And um I love this work. It is my life and kind of taking my own like you mentioned, hypersexuality, sort of my karma and turning that into my dharmic work. So yeah, let's dive in with you know, wherever you want to go.
00:01:32.70
Gareth Pickering
So let's let's start there. like what What have you been able to recognize in your own path that led to your hypersexuality? What was what was it initially that got you to that space?
00:01:45.13
Tyson Adams
Yeah. So I saw my first pornography when I was nine years old. Um, If you're out there and you're a man, you know, invitation for you to think back on that time for yourself.
00:01:56.04
Tyson Adams
You know, that's one of the questions that I ask men when I have connection calls. And, you know, men find it in many different ways, whether, you know, ah you know, I'm 40. So in my generation, there was only, um you know, playboys and penthouses and gas station type pornography.
00:02:11.84
Tyson Adams
Whereas, you know, men that are born little bit later, you know, they went straight into high speed porn, but on the you know the digital sort of worldwide wild web that we're in now today.
00:02:23.10
Tyson Adams
So in this particular moment, I was in a field just walking through with couple of my friends and we found a board laying on the ground and we opened it up and there was a stack of Playboys in this hole.
00:02:37.03
Gareth Pickering
Wow.
00:02:38.17
Tyson Adams
Yeah, and so I bent down and started going through it and I saw Vanna White Playboy. Vanna White was from this game show called Wheel of Fortune. And I remember seeing this, opening it up, seeing, you know, ah naked body for the first time, hitting the deck, you know, like going down really quickly.
00:02:57.45
Tyson Adams
And I had several thoughts in my head, you know, the first was, whoa, what is going on with my body? What is these energies moving through my penis? Like, what is this, what is happening to me?
00:03:06.16
Gareth Pickering
Mm-hmm.
00:03:07.95
Tyson Adams
And then the two thoughts I had was i could get in trouble for this. Like, definitely this is not supposed to be here and I'm not supposed to be looking at this. And then number two, I'm coming back here and I'm coming back here as soon as possible alone without my friend, you know, because i wanted to like really go through this.
00:03:21.41
Gareth Pickering
Mm-hmm.
00:03:25.20
Tyson Adams
and And I did. I went pretty much every day for a number of weeks before somebody took them and removed them. ah And I was bummed. But, you know, that was kind of the first introduction. And that really began a 20-year porn addiction for me.
00:03:39.94
Tyson Adams
And, you know, shortly thereafter, my hometown in Euphrates, Washington, in Washington State, we got fiber wire put underground.
00:03:40.13
Gareth Pickering
Mm-hmm.
00:03:49.67
Tyson Adams
So we didn't even have AOL dial up. We just went straight to speed internet porn. And there was a program, yeah, back then called...
00:03:55.27
Gareth Pickering
wow
00:03:58.88
Tyson Adams
kazah which was kind of like limewire or napster it's basically file sharing and back then i call it the lottery of porn because you didn't know what you were going to get because there were no thumbnails so you would just type in like exactly you know like big boobs or whatever it was and then there would be these you know these these videos and you download it and and then it would be actually on your device and of course that created all kinds of um
00:04:10.01
Gareth Pickering
You just choose a phone name.
00:04:25.80
Tyson Adams
challenges and issues. One, because I got caught, my parents saw the history and the cookies and it created all these viruses. And of course that created a tremendous amount of ah shame and denying that I had done it, even though they knew I had.
00:04:32.11
Gareth Pickering
Mm-hmm.
00:04:37.74
Tyson Adams
And so that started a, you know, sort of ah a lying, you know, lying about this kind of stuff. But in addition to that, you know, i was a prepubescent boy. i was, i didn't even have pubic hair, you know, 11 and a half, I was a late bloomer.
00:04:51.72
Tyson Adams
And so here I am looking at this pornography. And as I went through my trauma training, I realized that this content was too much, too fast, and too soon for me in my own adolescent development.
00:05:05.83
Tyson Adams
And, um you know, a lot of men come to me with penis dysmorphia, and I understand it, you know, very clearly now, because if you do watch pornography before you've even hit puberty, your penis is, you know, it hasn't even hit full development. And so you're seeing these porn stars with really huge penises, and you're comparing yourself to them. And,
00:05:25.86
Tyson Adams
So some men, you know, they have an average size or even above average size penis. um And they still are relating back to when they were a child where their penis was smaller than who they saw.
00:05:37.70
Gareth Pickering
Mm-hmm.
00:05:37.87
Tyson Adams
So, you know, I didn't necessarily suffer from that, but I see that happening with a lot of men that come and and want to work with me. in relationship to you know how that works. And then you know the other thing that I want to reflect upon, i was just recently on Kimberly Ann Johnson's podcast and she asked me a pretty like intense question and she was like, how did it impact you? like How did seeing this porn impact your life uh, way of being with your partners. And I would just say it impacted everything about the way that I treated them, whether I wanted them to shave or do strange positions or whether I was, you know, acting in some form of violence towards them.
00:06:18.03
Tyson Adams
And now they're starting to connect the dots as porn, you know, as they look at pornography, um, constructively and critically, ah you can begin to not eroticize it. And they're basically, there's a lot of organizations that are saying that, you know, 90% has some form of violence in it, whether that's non-consent or eroticized wounding or very weird genres or things that are non-consensual.
00:06:36.69
Gareth Pickering
Mm-hmm.
00:06:43.34
Tyson Adams
And so that was really the pornography that I was ah watching and then I was reenacting that with my partners and especially just the the pickup culture and you know you just you're trying to conquer and once you conquer, you just discard.
00:06:44.03
Gareth Pickering
Mm-hmm.
00:07:00.55
Tyson Adams
And then the last thing that I wanna share, and then I wanna hear your story too, is um I went off to college and I went to the University of Washington in Seattle and I was ah in ah and a fraternity.
00:07:11.45
Tyson Adams
And this particular fraternity, we had over 100 guys living in one you know house and we had a a porn chairman, an actual elected position who was taking all the porn, putting it on the server and literally indexing it into different genres and porn stars and
00:07:28.42
Gareth Pickering
Wow.
00:07:29.32
Tyson Adams
There was sort of this, yeah, there's sort of this running joke where at the end of the evening, you know we would have these house meetings every week and you know the older guys or whatever, they would basically be like, get off the fucking internet and stop watching porn. like We're trying to do our homework and like the server is bogged down. We can't even log in.
00:07:48.07
Tyson Adams
And so we kind of grew up in this normal, i grew up in this sort of normalized misogynistic reality where men wanting, wanted to be initiated. I think we all come in with this desire to be initiated, but the initiation was like, you know, here, put this beer bong in your mouth and, you know, you know, strip off your clothes and, you know, put on the thong and don't, you know, don't actually make a move. Don't say anything, or you're going to get, you know, ah big pie, like smash in your face.
00:08:14.93
Tyson Adams
you know that was kind of like the world that i lived in and so i just want to call awareness to like the the the timeline of when the internet and porn converged and how that impacted both myself individually but our entire culture at that you know university so yeah that's it
00:08:36.08
Gareth Pickering
Wow, bro. Yeah, there's so much there. I'll, um... ah yeah In my own journey, you know, I'm i'm really grateful. I'm 46. And so high speed internet porn didn't come in so soon for me. My first exposure was also through a friend's dad's magazines. And the same thing, I had this rush of energy through the body that really created a split for me. One of it was like, Oh, God, that's amazing. And I wanted more of it similar to how you described. And at the same time, this feeling of guilt.
00:09:02.85
Gareth Pickering
because I didn't have a healthy reference point for what intimacy was meant to be like, or you know, what's what sexuality was even meant to be like. um My journey to reverse engineering what manifested in my life, having lost my virginity pretty young, and then following pretty much most of my life, a continual hunt to get women, which I describe as hypersexuality or sex addiction.
00:09:26.52
Gareth Pickering
actually came from a slightly different place. It it was really around a ah core wound that I had when I moved from one state in South Africa to a different state where we started um school a year earlier than the state that I moved to.
00:09:39.46
Gareth Pickering
And so as a young man, probably around a boy really 10 or 11 years old, I was the youngest by an entire year in the boys in my school and also a little bit of a late bloomer.
00:09:40.08
Tyson Adams
Mm-hmm.
00:09:50.45
Gareth Pickering
So in this space, I was on the playground wanting to be yeah fit in and accepted by my peers. And I would try any sort of strategy just to just to fit in and to be there. And I had the same thing, bro. I had this really interesting journey with my cock, which was like whenever they were swimming and we had to wear a speedo to go to do swimming, I was super, super anxious because I also didn't have pubic hair.
00:10:11.87
Gareth Pickering
I thought my cock was too small. And yeah, I had this real anxiety about every time there was a ah swimming gala or anything. I could swim really well, but this piece was like really alive for me. And I didn't have anybody to speak to about it. I just held it for myself.
00:10:25.46
Gareth Pickering
At the same time, just coincidentally, maybe some sort of beautiful soul contract, this girl in my standard asked if she could kiss me behind the bike shed at one of the breaks. And I got the chance to kiss her and she wanted to French kiss me. So she put her tongue in my mouth and it was like weird and good at the same time. And we went back our separate ways and I got back to the playground.
00:10:45.50
Gareth Pickering
And when I shared with ah the other boys on the playground that I just had a French kiss and a girl had put her tongue in my mouth, I was really accepted and celebrated in that moment.
00:10:54.70
Tyson Adams
Mm-hmm.
00:10:54.74
Gareth Pickering
And I didn't realize it then, but that was basically the starting point of me developing a strategy that sounds like when I don't feel okay around my peers or around other men, You be the guy who gets goals and then you can feel better or accepted in that space. And yeah, what manifested throughout my life from the time I lost my virginity until probably like maybe a a decade ago when I really took the time to dive into this pattern of mine, I didn't know what was driving it. I didn't know what was the point of le why I was always continually seeking. And it was on reflection now, coming from an empty place. But I also noticed when I went out to the bar with my friends, I didn't always feel comfortable with being me. So I would be the guy that would go out and, you know,
00:11:35.43
Gareth Pickering
talk to girls, connect with somebody. And then almost always in that connection, I'm looking over my shoulder to see who's looking at me to see if I can receive the validation that's triggered by this core wound of me being a 10 year old. So yeah, fortunately along this path, i haven't I haven't really had a, I personally haven't had a strong addiction with porn. It's coming to my world from time to time, but it hasn't been a strong pull for me.
00:11:59.88
Gareth Pickering
because a part of me was so deeply in love with the connection of genuine intimacy where I could actually feel a woman and be held and stuff. So that was really my, my way in, but it was, it was completely controlling me for, for most of my adult life. I would continually be on the hunt to, to get laid and yeah, it just completely took me out. I didn't have control over my desire.
00:12:19.56
Tyson Adams
Wow. Yeah. Isn't it so interesting how these young moments in time impact us so deeply and then we carry that through into our adulthood and we don't even know what's driving ah the behavior.
00:12:34.05
Tyson Adams
Yeah. And in your case, sounds like having um some concern over the size of your penis and then having this experience where you were able to share, they glorified that act that allowed for you to feel
00:12:47.26
Gareth Pickering
Yep.
00:12:48.66
Tyson Adams
ah accepted by the group and then kind of putting you down that path of actually wanting to recreate more of that. And so, yeah, that's, it's fascinating and it's quite a unique and interesting way for it to all, you know, for the sex addiction to, to come in, you know, different than other men I've, I've heard or worked with. So thank you.
00:13:07.40
Tyson Adams
Thank you for sharing.
00:13:09.06
Gareth Pickering
I want to touch on something that you spoke into, which feels true on my journey as well. You said you lifted up the the board that had these these Playboy magazines underneath them. And in that moment, you felt both excitement, but then you also said you felt like you would get into trouble. And I'd love to just unpack that. I think there might be something in that that I think maybe holds the key for a lot of people. what is Have you reflected on that particular sentence? like what does that What does that represent? Why do you think you felt like, because in many ways, it's just a beautiful woman on a piece of paper. Why did you feel that you would be in trouble?
00:13:40.39
Tyson Adams
Yeah. Well, first off, nobody's ever asked me that question. So I'm going to have to just feel into it because I don't necessarily know what was happening for me. But my sense is um that there was a lineage burden in my family.
00:13:55.74
Tyson Adams
And so what I mean specifically is, is that Everywhere I looked, there was sex addiction and porn addiction, and there was um sexual abuse as well, both on both sides, paternal and maternal. And so I think that on some level, there was a ah familial lineage burden that I was carrying around um sexuality.
00:14:17.77
Tyson Adams
But then I would also say on a more cultural level, you know we're coming out of thousands of years of
00:14:18.39
Gareth Pickering
Yep.
00:14:24.38
Tyson Adams
you know masturbation being sinful and shameful. And if you do it, you're going to hell.
00:14:27.39
Gareth Pickering
yeah
00:14:28.81
Tyson Adams
And so I think there's also an underlying collective consciousness that I was picking up on well before I even realized and knew what was happening to me. um And I think that those things were having a um an impact on me and I just wasn't aware of it. But yeah, I knew that if my parents caught me doing this that it was not going to be good.
00:14:51.38
Gareth Pickering
Wow.
00:14:51.50
Tyson Adams
and And my father, he was an alcoholic when I was young and, you know, spanking and being violent was a pretty common theme. And so I think there was already enough, uh, experiences of like, okay, if I do things that are, you know, bad, bad, whatever behavior is, there's going to be repercussions and it's going to hurt. So, yeah.
00:15:12.63
Gareth Pickering
Thank you. There's something for me which I've also reflected in as I i had i had the same the same sense, you know, but from a slightly different angle, which was um my parents were, and my lineage is pretty stable from what I can tell in terms of like there wasn't a lot of sexual abuse or not a sexual abuse that was necessarily spoken about or that I can feel.
00:15:33.52
Gareth Pickering
But being born into sort of a more cultural, sorry, more conservative home, where my mother told me it as a youngster that I should save my sexual energy for my wife one day, and that should be the time that I share it, and it should only be shared with one person.
00:15:47.42
Gareth Pickering
combined with s like an uncomfortability around sexuality and intimacy that looked like, you know, we'd be sitting watching TV as a family. And whenever there was a sexual act on the TV, they would switch the channels and I could feel everybody squirming in their chairs because of, you know, the fact that there was some intimacy happening on the TV.
00:16:02.26
Tyson Adams
Thanks.
00:16:04.76
Gareth Pickering
I think I approached it from a different angle. So when I felt my my first erotic charge flow through my body, I think the same part of me was like, wow, this feels amazing. And then also feeling guilt and shame, because this is the same thing that I feel when I see it on TV. And then mom and dad are like squirming in their chairs. So like the the the caregiver or the parental role, the people that keep me safe told me that this wasn't a good thing to do.
00:16:26.40
Gareth Pickering
And for the same reason, I also, say I think that that put my sexual desire into the shadow, which also drove the sex addiction because, you know, what I define is a healthy sex life, which could include multiple partners, and sex addiction is really two things. One of them is, are you able to control the the actual act?
00:16:45.30
Gareth Pickering
You know, like, you know, I can have multiple partners, but if I choose to be celibate for a couple of weeks or a couple of months, it's not completely controlling me or taking me out. And then the second is, is it in the light? You know, where are you?
00:16:55.77
Gareth Pickering
Do you feel guilt, shame and secretive about this the sexual connections that I have as opposed to being open and clear? with everybody that's in my world. And so yeah, there's, um there's a difference there for me, but I think it definitely had to do for me not so much with lineage stuff, but more around my my upbringing, specifically around the the contraction, and I would just say like an immaturity around sexuality.
00:17:17.50
Tyson Adams
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. And we're as children, we're so impressionable and there's mere neurons. And so if our parents are changing the channel and they're squirming in their seats, then we're going to pick up on that and our body's going to respond in similar ways.
00:17:33.13
Tyson Adams
ah versus um what I think would be an ideal way to raise children. Like I'm stepping into a stepfather role and, you know, my stepsons are going to be, so they're six and four. And so as I step into that path, you know, like, what would it look like to actually raise our boys and our girls a little bit different? So, you know, setting aside girls, let's just look at boys because you and I are having a conversation to men.
00:17:55.89
Tyson Adams
And so like in a perfect world, The way I see it would be that the men would have done their deep shut you know sexual shadow work and then they would have brought in their teenage boys together right into ah the desert, the forest, the jungle, wherever, and they would have sat in a circle around a fire for a week or some period of time.
00:18:15.27
Tyson Adams
And there would have been conversations around these things. This is what sex is. This is what porn is. This is what masturbation is.
00:18:20.42
Gareth Pickering
Mm-hmm.
00:18:20.47
Tyson Adams
This is how to treat your body, how to treat your penis. This how to treat women. This is um how to engage with your pleasure from a place of not being secretive and shameful and, so and, and, um and in in silence.
00:18:34.12
Tyson Adams
This is a way to be more fully expressed. And so, When I think about the world that we're building, you know, through these conversations and also through men's work, What I really think about is what would that look like for boys' first sexual experiences to be um not pornographic, thinking your way to orgasm um or being programmed by the pornography, but what would that be like to have men coming together and having each boy go off and do a solo and be in nature in a space where they're free from other people and they get to feel into their experience and actually feel their way to orgasm versus think their way or be programmed by porn.
00:18:56.65
Gareth Pickering
Mm-hmm.
00:19:12.53
Tyson Adams
And I think that that's ultimately the direction that we're headed, but we are a long way from there. And ultimately what we're calling awareness to is is that 99% of the men that come to me had no initiation into manhood, right? we're We're not actually, we're in a patho adolescent psychology as men, but ultimately we're still relating to sexuality the way that we did when we were young boys.
00:19:36.63
Tyson Adams
using it to feel better, which is not wrong or bad or immoral, but we're using it to feel better in the ways that we learned when we were young.
00:19:39.61
Gareth Pickering
Yeah.
00:19:44.27
Tyson Adams
So if we got bullied or we were a pimply kid or you know our parents got divorced or we moved towns or we got stressed, in the beginning it was rather innocent, but then we begin to ah use um masturbation and pornography as a way to soothe when we are mad or angry or bored or sick or anything that we are overwhelmed by.
00:20:06.51
Tyson Adams
and that becomes sort of the release valve. And again, as men, especially if you're out there raising boys, can we accept that when they walk in the door and we flinch, that they're also picking up on that, right? That we're living in secrecy. And if we can outgrow that for ourselves, then we can begin raising our boys from a different level where we break that lineage burden and that cycle where what they do with their bodies and their sexuality isn't something that is kept secret that they actually come to us when they have questions and that the bird the but you know the birds and the bees talk is not this thing that we do one time but it's a conversation over a lifetime right and so
00:20:45.84
Gareth Pickering
Mm-hmm.
00:20:47.23
Tyson Adams
Anyways, that's kind of where my mind goes just in relationship to both what you and I both received, which is this is not okay from our parents versus it is quite natural to feel these urges and to feel this pleasure and to be in connection with it.
00:20:48.92
Gareth Pickering
Mm-hmm.
00:21:01.77
Tyson Adams
But how do we do it mindfully and carefully so that we don't get victimized or commercialized by the porn companies or where we you know don't have boundaries with our friends sharing things that we're you know that we don't want to see or whatever.
00:21:16.24
Tyson Adams
so Yeah.
00:21:17.83
Gareth Pickering
so good bro yo the initiation conversation is something i've been thinking about i'm not a father um but i do think that there's something about that initiation journey where young men spend time with older men in a healthy way to go through some sort of initiation around sexuality and i yeah i want ask two things i just want to put one extra word in there which was also like celebration you know to go out into nature to find your own orgasm and to come back and be like fucking well done you know that's beautiful and
00:21:38.50
Tyson Adams
Yeah.
00:21:43.98
Gareth Pickering
you know, there's, there's so much that's, that can be celebrated around that. And it just creates an ease in the nervous system that my sex, my desires are healthy. My desires are yeah sacred in some ways. And my ability to be able to collect with my pleasure is in the light and is celebrated in some way.
00:21:58.48
Gareth Pickering
So do you have, I'm just pointing this to any users or listeners that are listening to this right now.
00:21:59.45
Tyson Adams
Yeah.
00:22:05.63
Gareth Pickering
Is this something you plan to create when your step sons get to an age, or is there something that you can point people to right now? Or, Maybe, i mean, it's probably something they could do on their own, but I'd love to know if there's an opportunity for somebody to go deeper.
00:22:12.61
Tyson Adams
yeah
00:22:16.90
Gareth Pickering
Perhaps they could work with one of us. But yeah, what are you what have you done on this so far?
00:22:21.80
Tyson Adams
Yeah, it's, um, I'm building it into a workshop. Um, part of it is protecting your children from porn, but the other part is, is what does an initiatory process look like or feel like, and ultimately there isn't anybody doing this. There are youth initiation programs and even organizations that want to help, um, or want to bring me in to help with the fathers and the sons to facilitate these types of conversations.
00:22:46.64
Gareth Pickering
Thank you.
00:22:46.88
Tyson Adams
But at this point, there isn't really any map, have there's no map that's been built. um It was really through my own process of connecting my my erotic charge and my sexuality back into nature that gave me the awareness of the importance of that.
00:23:03.67
Tyson Adams
And then so now the next step will be to build it with actual fathers and sons and to create a map because again, this hasn't this work hasn't been done yet so far from my awareness and my knowledge.
00:23:16.98
Gareth Pickering
Fuck yeah, dude. Well, just putting my hand up right now, bro, if you want some support on creating that and holding a space for that, I feel ah ah feel a strong pull for that, for for the reasons that I shared in the beginning of this conversation, which is to support...
00:23:29.90
Gareth Pickering
from the wisdom that's been integrated through my own journey. And then also recognizing, I think there's, we're growing up in a world where, you know, there are a lot of young men that are raised in homes without fathers and single mothers that are trying their best, but it's almost impossible. it is impossible to give a young man an initiation from a mother, you know, lives in a, in a female body. And so, yeah, i see a lot of that in my community and I'm also not quite tuned into exactly what this looks like, but yeah, I am really interested to be able to hold a space to initiate young men who, yeah,
00:24:00.79
Gareth Pickering
are being raised by well-intentioned mothers, but just are going to lack a healthy imprint for masculinity that includes a conversation around sexuality. Because I think you're you're right. You know, there are youth groups and church groups and stuff doing a lot of young man initiation and outward bound and wilderness type stuff.
00:24:16.13
Gareth Pickering
But i I get a sense that there's still a collective immaturity to touch on the sexuality piece, which again, you know, sort of leaves it, you know, untouched and unspoken about through these initiation portals. Yeah.
00:24:27.35
Tyson Adams
Yeah. Yeah. Well, i would be happy to you know speak again and collaborate on something like that. That'd be amazing.
00:24:33.95
Gareth Pickering
Yeah, cool.
00:24:34.12
Tyson Adams
And then I would say, you know you're you're you're so correct. you know My men's group is called Life Force and the motto is men's work that doesn't leave sex at the door, which is my way of saying men's work where sex is the conversation that we're having for the entire time.
00:24:46.49
Gareth Pickering
So good.
00:24:52.90
Tyson Adams
And what I have found is, is that men are starving for these types of places and spaces to be able to share vulnerably about their porn addictions and their sex addictions and their desires to cheat and their masturbation and their, and their wins, you know, to celebrate, as you mentioned, celebrate these new ways of being where they, they're, they're actually like feeling their way to orgasm for the first time in their life.
00:25:16.45
Tyson Adams
And so I think that just like you mentioned ah earlier about this isn't being integrated yet, it's not being integrated really into men's work until now in the last couple years.
00:25:25.22
Gareth Pickering
Exactly.
00:25:25.99
Tyson Adams
So like now we're finally beginning the process and then we can bring it to our boys, but it's still, it's, it's, uh,
00:25:26.66
Gareth Pickering
Yeah.
00:25:32.51
Tyson Adams
It's a tricky one. And then going back to your point about mothers raising boys, what I've seen to be true is you have kind of two different types of mothers. We have mothers who are really supportive of the masculine as they raise their boys.
00:25:46.18
Tyson Adams
And then there are also mothers that have been really wounded by the masculine and have a lot of rage and unprocessed emotions.
00:25:50.06
Gareth Pickering
Mm-hmm.
00:25:52.45
Tyson Adams
And I've noticed that when you have the the latter, when women are really been wounded, ah they often, um project those wounds onto their little boys and their little boys have real difficulty stepping into their power and as a masculine being. you know And then that energy ends up gets weaponized against their own bodies, which creates a lot of these sticky situations around gender.
00:26:09.24
Gareth Pickering
Mm-hmm.
00:26:16.99
Tyson Adams
And I've worked with over a dozen men who have been very confused both from pornography and also from mother wounding about being in the male body and the ways in which they, you know, treat it and speak to it and hate their own penis and look at it and see like a dangerous weapon.
00:26:36.40
Tyson Adams
And it's just like, whoa, you know, we're in a very unique and interesting time that I think is really important just to really kind of look at and examine how did our mother talk about our father or men in general?
00:26:50.00
Tyson Adams
And how did that impact the way that we see our own masculinity?
00:26:50.88
Gareth Pickering
Yeah.
00:26:54.84
Gareth Pickering
So good, bro. You spoke a few sentences ago about porn and the commercialization of porn. And I'd love for you to just give some reflection on where you see some of the challenge around this. I think, you know, from from what I can see, I think, you know, you said it as well, you know, high speed internet came in.
00:27:13.68
Gareth Pickering
porn is so accessible to anybody, any boy of any age, there doesn't seem to be much of a block to be able to get from an idea onto some pretty heavy porn pretty easily for a young man. And as you said, that basically shapes what he thinks about sex and sexuality.
00:27:29.24
Gareth Pickering
Um, in some ways it feels like a fucking global experiment with absolutely no guardrails. We just make it all available to all of us, men, women, you know, young boys, and we don't really have any real data. I mean, we're starting to see some of the costs. I think we've spoken and into some of them, but what are you, what are your thoughts on, yeah, what we're seeing in the world with porn right now? And maybe separate question, but I'd i'd love to go deeper into some of the the murky waters of AI pornography and what you know what that could look like. But maybe just start with this, specifically the commercialization of our life force.
00:28:03.83
Tyson Adams
Yeah. So we have to look at this from the sort of historical context. So Hugh Hefner started Playboy in 1953. That was really this moment in time where our grandfathers and and you know fathers, depending upon how old we are, began normalizing ah this type of content. And back then,
00:28:24.95
Tyson Adams
ah we were still in a situation where um it was rather innocent. But at the same time, if you really study Hugh Hefner's life, and he had a ah there's a documentary on A&E TV where it went deep into the shadows of the Hugh Hefner life and the um the the Playboy Mansion.
00:28:43.10
Tyson Adams
and you know And he's the type of person that bragged about having sex with over a thousand women. and um and and said that you know to objectify yourself is is is powerful right and you know i just fully disagree and he found a very strategic way to ah make it seem as if these women were being empowered by you know, ah posing in this particular way. But in reality, he was not only um victimizing them, but also men, because ultimately there was a commercialization of life force.
00:29:14.00
Tyson Adams
Obviously, prostitution has been happening for thousands of years, but this is the first time that
00:29:14.36
Gareth Pickering
Mm-hmm.
00:29:19.18
Tyson Adams
uh the commercialization of life force was happening at scale where one man was gaining like massive amounts of power and ultimately what i would say when you look at the king warrior lover magician he was the addicted lover right that archetype of there's never enough and and so then from there you know when the internet hit it went from magazines to anybody with a a camera you know and um and an internet connection could upload their pornography to the web.
00:29:47.83
Tyson Adams
And that began the sort of ah realization that, oh, people will upload this um for free. And so then these companies began to aggregate that information and that content, you know and you have these large companies like Pornhub or what have you.
00:30:02.66
Tyson Adams
And then I did a recent, um actually it was about a year ago, so I'm sure it's even grown. But out of the top 10 websites with viewer traffic in America, there's four of them that are actual porn sites.
00:30:17.52
Tyson Adams
So it's Pornhub, XX video, or XX something or other.
00:30:17.89
Gareth Pickering
Thank you.
00:30:22.16
Tyson Adams
And then there's OnlyFans, and then X Hamster. And I don't really know exactly... um Some of them are owned by Pornhub. There's a parent company that owns some of these, but OnlyFans is separate.
00:30:35.34
Tyson Adams
um But just the top four websites ah in America, ah they garner back then a year ago, 6.35 billion unique visitors per month.
00:30:48.95
Tyson Adams
Right?
00:30:49.33
Gareth Pickering
wow
00:30:49.90
Tyson Adams
And so that's a lot of men coming. So I thought to myself, okay, well, not everybody's a man and not everybody's ejaculating every time. So let's just say 5 billion ejaculations per month.
00:31:00.24
Gareth Pickering
god
00:31:01.35
Tyson Adams
So then I was like, okay, well, how much is that per day? And then how do i equate that into like an actual visual? And it's kind of a gross visual, but I'm going to throw it out there, which is if you look at one tablespoon is a, is a,
00:31:17.03
Tyson Adams
pretty equivalent to a an amount of semen that's being released.
00:31:19.87
Gareth Pickering
one release.
00:31:22.06
Tyson Adams
And so it's one Olympic-sized pool every single day is going into the void, which is men ejaculating into nothing.
00:31:33.48
Gareth Pickering
Oh God.
00:31:33.54
Tyson Adams
And that's just porn websites. And that's only the top four, not including all the hunt the thousands of other websites. that have pornography and a third of search is porn, right?
00:31:39.85
Gareth Pickering
Mm.
00:31:43.42
Tyson Adams
So when you think about that amount of energy going in, you can see that, you know, these companies have commercialized our life force. And why I say that is because it's, um it's similar to social media.
00:31:58.09
Tyson Adams
How does social media work? Well, if something's free, you are the product, no different than porn.
00:32:01.99
Gareth Pickering
Right.
00:32:03.18
Tyson Adams
Porn's free, you're the product. Why? because they feed an ad and if you click it whether you have you know a grown-up finger or a little child's finger they get paid so they don't care about your age your grades your your nervous system your religious experience your partnership you're Yeah, they don't care.
00:32:23.79
Tyson Adams
And so all they see is an IP address and your search terms, and then they just feed you more of that into your newsfeed, which gets you more and more addicted, which takes you down darker and weirder channels, and leaving you more and more drained and leaving leaving you more and more anxious and more and more programmed, all the while making billions of dollars.
00:32:24.23
Gareth Pickering
Yeah.
00:32:30.65
Gareth Pickering
Right.
00:32:44.30
Tyson Adams
And so... From my point of view, like when men come to me and they're blaming themselves, like, oh my gosh, like I have this issue, i have this issue, i have erectile dysfunction or premature ejaculation or whatever it is, right? their Men have all kinds of sexual challenges.
00:33:01.43
Tyson Adams
And if they have been watching porn or they did watch porn when they were young, you know, it's super important to remind men, look, your life force has been commercialized for decades.
00:33:12.81
Tyson Adams
And the only sane thing to do is to throw up your middle finger and to be like, fuck, no, I'm not doing this anymore because they they will not stop at any cost.
00:33:18.91
Gareth Pickering
Mm-hmm.
00:33:21.64
Tyson Adams
And we do need our anger and our, in our, in our like righteous, like, you know, no more, right.
00:33:21.66
Gareth Pickering
Right.
00:33:29.31
Tyson Adams
To be able to have an internal boundary and therefore an external boundary.
00:33:29.55
Gareth Pickering
Yes.
00:33:34.09
Tyson Adams
with these organizations. And so a lot of men blame themselves and you are not to blame. Like you have been victimized, we have all been victimized.
00:33:39.40
Gareth Pickering
Mm-hmm.
00:33:42.62
Tyson Adams
And it is the only sane thing to do to take back our life force and to say no. And, um and at the same time, thank the porn, because Again, when we had all of those tricky things, when we were in teenage years, we needed that masturbation and that pornography in order to survive the stresses of life.
00:34:02.03
Tyson Adams
So it's simultaneously like no more screw you. And also like, thank you. Thank you. Thank you for helping me and protecting me as I've made made my way to adulthood, but you're no longer wanted and needed anymore.
00:34:12.96
Tyson Adams
So, yeah.
00:34:19.59
Gareth Pickering
What's, a in your opinion, the the the difference between a healthy self pleasuring practice and being addicted to masturbation and pornography?
00:34:31.47
Tyson Adams
Yeah.
00:34:32.60
Gareth Pickering
Is there any healthy porn? Maybe that's also part of that question.
00:34:36.28
Tyson Adams
Yeah. Yeah. so Here's what I will say about that. um People ask me that all the time, ethical porn. right so you know in the In the past, I've um and needed to sort of ah look at, like okay, is there such a thing as ethical pornography? and What I have found to be true is when you look ethical porn and you pull up a bunch of browser tabs, like there's blogs that kind of aggregate this.
00:35:04.97
Tyson Adams
um I will say that there are some porn sites that have loving and beautiful, um, you know, types of pornography, but again, 90% of pornography being violent, having some form of violence in it.
00:35:22.56
Tyson Adams
So are you going to, ah get onto a site and find what you're looking for without scrolling through a bunch of shit that actually feels yucky in your system, it's it's unlikely, you know, so you're interfacing with that.
00:35:33.72
Gareth Pickering
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
00:35:35.49
Tyson Adams
um But as far as like pleasure practices go, it's always, so there's a quote by one of my mentors, Jamie wheel. And the quote is, it's never about the thing.
00:35:46.51
Tyson Adams
It's always about your relationship with the thing. So in this case, pornography, some people, it might be empowering for them because they um are looking to work through some issue.
00:36:00.72
Tyson Adams
But for most, I would say it's not, right? They're using porn as a way to soothe and to check out, not to check in.
00:36:06.58
Gareth Pickering
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
00:36:07.56
Tyson Adams
So what I'll say is, is as it relates to your, your own your own pleasure practice, are you using it to feel better or are using it to better feel? And that is the distinct ah mindset shift that we have to be able to be aware of as a, as in our nervous system, but then also within the mindset of why we're approaching ourselves and, and, and masturbation. So.
00:36:31.23
Tyson Adams
it's ah It's a nuanced thing. But I will also say that um you know I'm not an anti-porn guy because to be anti is to create resistance and to you know say that there's no therapeutic benefits to this. But you know if you're out there and you're listening and you like porn and you're in relationship and you're in a devoted monogamous journey where you like this is your life partner, you can um record yourselves and look at that information and that content.
00:37:01.08
Tyson Adams
just don't call it pornography, you know, call it, you know, call it erotica and never upload it to the internet and certainly have boundaries around what you do and when you use it and don't just objectify and use it just to get off. But like, if you want to watch that with your partner as a way to express and to see how you're checking in as a lover and to see yourself in action, I think there can be some, some beautiful um aspects to that personally.
00:37:26.28
Gareth Pickering
Mm-hmm.
00:37:26.49
Tyson Adams
So, yeah.
00:37:27.48
Gareth Pickering
Mm-hmm.
00:37:29.65
Gareth Pickering
There's one thing that i'll that I'll share around the self-pleasuring practice, which is, you know, I believe that a healthy self-pleasuring practice is important even if you're in a in a monogamous relationship, meaning my ability to be able to be sexually activated is my own responsibility.
00:37:45.84
Gareth Pickering
And I think we've been wired through pornography or through masturbation and fantasy that
00:37:46.14
Tyson Adams
Mm-hmm.
00:37:51.99
Gareth Pickering
to use those tools to be able to become sexually active or activated. And what that does is it basically gives my power away in that moment to, let's say, for example, I wasn't so deep into porn, but I would definitely masturbate and think about lovers that I've been with before or partners that I'd never been with or, you know, fantasy type stuff.
00:38:09.49
Gareth Pickering
And so I think, you know, for someone listening to this that thinks, you know, pornography isn't the way, and I agree with you, I don't i don't think there's a there's much place. There might be some erotica which could be beautiful, but mostly it's just, as you said, a commercialization of our life force.
00:38:23.33
Gareth Pickering
i would ah I don't think that means stopping the practice of self-pleasuring. And in fact, I actually think men and women should have a healthy self-pleasuring practice, which is getting reconnected to the body, reclaiming your power from pornography and learning to, as you said, feel good, you know, to actually, what did you say?
00:38:38.96
Gareth Pickering
Feel, better feel.
00:38:40.38
Tyson Adams
Yeah, better feel.
00:38:41.39
Gareth Pickering
to better feel rather than feel better and to come back to pleasuring and touching myself through a healthy self-pleasuring practice, which may or may not even include genital touch. It may or may not even include masturbation, but to come back into my own body and to become my own best lover.
00:38:57.26
Gareth Pickering
But when I do that, I'm not watching porn and I'm not running any fantasies. I'm really coming back to myself. And this allows me to come to my my relationships feeling self-activated in my own body. And in this way, I'm not outsourcing my pleasure or making it the responsibility of my partner.
00:39:12.05
Gareth Pickering
And hopefully they have a healthy self-pleasuring practice as well. So that the analogy that I have is in this is similar to like a relationship. It's not like I come to a relationship and I'm suddenly complete because I've got a partner.
00:39:23.59
Gareth Pickering
I come complete as I am, completely whole. And we are going an amazing adventure together as two whole beings in this relationship instead of like this hooking that happens when I'm only complete because you're there.
00:39:35.76
Gareth Pickering
It's the same in intimacy. It's like I'm here to get pleasure and it's your responsibility to bring it. A healthy self-pleasuring practice, I think is an important piece. And I'd love to hear what you think about that.
00:39:45.14
Tyson Adams
Well, first off, that was beautiful. And it really touches me to hear a man share that openly because you are a lot like I am in the way that you're approaching it. And if you're out there and you're you just listen to that, rewind it and listen again, because that's actually incredible advice and it's beautiful.
00:40:06.31
Tyson Adams
And ah it also shows me that you have alchemized your sexual shadow into the light. and into connection in ways that very few men ever actually will.
00:40:17.38
Tyson Adams
and um And my way of saying what you said is, is um are we outsourcing our pleasure to someone or something to make us feel better? Or can we cultivate ah through our own ah practices, the ability to access our own infinite pleasure?
00:40:36.10
Tyson Adams
Because you know anything and everything can be pleasurable if we're willing and able to actually um access it and we know how. And one of the things that I do when I run my men's group is just something as simple as like, hey, close your eyes and just like massage your own hand for a moment.
00:40:53.47
Tyson Adams
Be in the the most the the finger that's actually giving and then be in the one that's receiving. And then understanding that just that simple act of of bringing awareness to your body, that's infinitely accessible to you.
00:41:07.01
Tyson Adams
um If we know how to look out at the world and we can take in and really allow ourself to feel the pleasure of life or hear the pleasure of life or taste the pleasure of life and we're and we're not cut off from pleasure and the creation of pleasure and we're not outsourcing that pleasure, then we're not seducible.
00:41:25.53
Tyson Adams
And so we become seduction proof by creating and alchemizing and and ah being responsible for our own pleasure creation.
00:41:26.76
Gareth Pickering
Yes.
00:41:33.71
Tyson Adams
So, ah you know, and one one orienting map for that is what I say to men is is ah masturbation as a death practice. So it's basically this idea, if it were the last time you were going to masturbate and you knew you were going to die tomorrow, how would you do it differently than the way that you've been doing it for decades?
00:41:52.44
Gareth Pickering
So good.
00:41:53.51
Tyson Adams
and And what I'll say is that some men joke around, they're like oh, I would just fucking watch porn. And I'm like, okay, yeah, sure. And sit with it for a little while. Would you just go and rub one out in five minutes and just, you know, like, would or would you take some time and energy to actually...
00:42:08.58
Tyson Adams
you know turn down the lights and turn up a little music and give yourself a self-massage? And would you just go straight into the porn or would you actually like cultivate some connection to your own experience you know knowing that you were going to die tomorrow, right? And so my take on this is like as we move out of pornography being the fast food mcdonald's drive-through and we move into masturbation and our pleasure practice being you know a steak grass-fed steak meal with like amazing vegetables and you know a glass of wine and some prayer or maybe a you know medicine ceremony if you' if you're a psychedelic person
00:42:40.03
Gareth Pickering
Mm-hmm.
00:42:43.80
Tyson Adams
It's like, if we take that level of intentionality to our masturbation and we do it on some form of a timeline, for me, you know like I was in two years and nine months of celibacy. And so I was only doing it on the moon cycles. First it was you know new moon and full moon, and then it was just mainly full moon.
00:43:00.42
Tyson Adams
So once a month. So if you're going to take that level of, you know, intentionality to that experience, what would that look like? You know, and so for me, I would wake up, go to the beach, jump in the ocean.
00:43:11.53
Tyson Adams
i would end up doing yoga, slackline. i would journal, no work, nothing. I would literally, whatever day of the week it was, I would just block my my calendar out. Sometimes I'd go to a float tank. Sometimes I would microdose a little. I would go get a massage.
00:43:26.09
Tyson Adams
By the time I got to that moment, I was so excited. I was like, oh my God, this is going to be amazing.
00:43:30.87
Gareth Pickering
yeah
00:43:33.41
Tyson Adams
And I would either do that pleasure practice under the moon, connecting with source and with the eros of the consciousness of, or with eros, which I call a um um sort of like, ah what ah what's the term?
00:43:33.54
Gareth Pickering
yeah
00:43:46.61
Tyson Adams
I'm drawing a blank here. um eco-eroticism. That's basically what I call it, right? Which is reconnecting your sexuality back into the cosmos, right? So you can either do it under the moon or you can do it in the comfort of your own home in front of a mirror where you're connecting to your own eyes and you're actually cultivating that energy through the transmutation of coming alive.
00:44:01.74
Gareth Pickering
okay
00:44:06.32
Tyson Adams
So these are different tactics and skills that ah kind of came through sitting with this and you know, ultimately every man is responsible for his own sexual initiation. You know, you can, you can obviously go and see some guru, sure, but be aware that your own journey with your own sexuality is a, is something that, that, that I invite you and that surely other men that I've worked with have invited themselves into. And it's a beautiful way of self-initiation that we're not going to get, you know, in a men's group or in any sort of reality out there. So ah permission to go for it.
00:44:46.41
Gareth Pickering
Wow, dude, that's so beautiful.
00:44:46.45
Tyson Adams
And to struggle in it. And then to struggle in it too. Because you go, I don't know about you, but the first time you started connecting to your pleasure, it probably wasn't the most straightforward thing in the beginning, I would assume, right?
00:44:57.18
Gareth Pickering
Bro, i I teach a course called the Legendary Lover Method, which is 12 weeks, which starts off with a 21-day semen retention journey, which includes self-pleasure, but retaining of the seed for those 21 days, followed by relationship mastery, and then the art of lovemaking is the last three weeks.
00:45:04.38
Tyson Adams
Mm-hmm.
00:45:12.89
Gareth Pickering
Men have some of the most difficulty in just what you said, the part where you choose to touch your shoulder and be present with your own body.
00:45:20.74
Tyson Adams
Yeah.
00:45:20.97
Gareth Pickering
a lot of men love so much in the mind, the idea of coming back to the body, you're not even, you're numb, you're not, ah you're not aware of what's going on. And we just that for a lot of men can be the one of the hardest things, you know, it's just to come back to the body and to recognize
00:45:27.80
Tyson Adams
Yep.
00:45:33.75
Tyson Adams
Yep.
00:45:34.06
Gareth Pickering
I call it a relationship with the animal. You know, I recognize that there's an animal that lives inside me and I associate it with the bull because I'm double Taurus in my stars. my my My body is called Ferdinand and he's a super strong bull and he can carry on for ages. But i also recognize for most of my life, I haven't had a relationship with him. I haven't spoken to him. I haven't taken him into consideration in any of my choices. I've done marathons and triathlons and trail running and it's basically been like the mind, which I call the rider and the bull has been the animal.
00:46:02.39
Gareth Pickering
And I've just been beating the fuck out of it for most of my life to get it to do what I want it to do, whether that's run a mountain or have an orgasm or to connect with a partner.
00:46:04.77
Tyson Adams
Yep.
00:46:11.29
Tyson Adams
yep
00:46:12.28
Gareth Pickering
But there's really been no checking in with the animal to see what the fuck's going on. And so it, For me, it's actually been like a rebuilding a relationship with somebody that I haven't paid fucking any attention to for 46 years of my life. And so this part of you know reconnecting with the body is really difficult for people because we haven't done it. We live from our heads and everything that we get, including the conversation we've had around porn, is a stimulation that comes in through the so eyes and through our visual senses, and the only place that we touch ourselves is on the cock for as quick as possible to get a result and then carry on with our lives.
00:46:45.18
Gareth Pickering
And so, yeah, people found men find it really difficult to...
00:46:48.05
Tyson Adams
and Yep. I'm so amazed that there are men like yourself, like myself, and other men that are building courses and building community around self-pleasure and becoming you know an actual present lover.
00:47:04.60
Tyson Adams
There's a map that I teach um that can help men to orient around this particular topic. And basically the idea is the way this And this is what I would call a mythopoetic map. So it's not necessarily my truth or the truth. It's just an orientation.
00:47:20.19
Tyson Adams
And the idea is is um that the way that a man treats his penis is the way that he treats everyone and everything in the world.
00:47:27.32
Gareth Pickering
Hmm. Hmm.
00:47:27.90
Tyson Adams
and so it's this idea that if we're using our penis as a means to feel better, right, if we're going in five minutes and just rubbing it out to feel better, that creates an invisible part of the psyche that gets projected out onto others.
00:47:39.40
Tyson Adams
And so we treat women that way. We treat nature that way. We treat business transactions that way. We're... the way that we masturbate impacts the way that we live. And when we treat our penis with kindness, love and care, and we respect it and we don't push it to the far ends, like you're saying you with running marathons or whatever it might be,
00:48:02.00
Tyson Adams
like we can actually come back and so one of the practices that i have men do is just put their hands on their penis and just say hey i'm so sorry i'm so sorry that i didn't listen and that i pushed you time and time again and you know and then the same thing goes with your hand you miss you take your left hand if you're if you're if you masturbate with your right hand you take your left hand you massage your hand and you say
00:48:12.64
Gareth Pickering
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
00:48:26.17
Tyson Adams
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate you. I relieve you from your loyal soldier duty of of using you you know using the penis in order to feel better. And you're more than welcome to do a different job now.
00:48:38.67
Tyson Adams
you know And so it's sort of this awareness that from an IFS lens, like our parts are in our body. And if if penis is a part, it probably has a lot to say about the way you've been treating it.
00:48:50.43
Tyson Adams
It's not an it, but
00:48:50.61
Gareth Pickering
Mm-hmm.
00:48:51.72
Tyson Adams
you know if you're if you're projecting it as an it because you're using it to feel better than it isn't it but as you actually listen to it it's no longer an it it is you and then you start to see like oh i haven't been respecting my own body haven't been respecting you know my actual physicality and that is actually creating the world view that i live and if we're using others we're using ourself as a means to an end
00:48:52.58
Gareth Pickering
Yeah.
00:48:56.95
Gareth Pickering
Mm-hmm.
00:49:15.84
Tyson Adams
which that's what porn programs programs us to do, then we use others as a means to an end. And then other people use us to a means to an end. And so life is just this transactional, non-virtuous relationship.
00:49:27.99
Tyson Adams
And if we stop transacting with our own body and with our own like pleasure, then we can have a virtuous relationship with our own body, which then creates virtuous relationships that we're bringing in. And that allows for us to actually be a virtuous leader and a business owner and you know, and partner.
00:49:43.72
Tyson Adams
And that's actually like the way to be right. So to me, it is the fucking work of our time.
00:49:49.02
Gareth Pickering
okay fifty
00:49:51.77
Tyson Adams
Yeah. Yeah.
00:49:52.29
Gareth Pickering
you know what i love about having these conversations and I think I resonated with it as soon as I saw your work was like don't know think these these ideas and themes sort of start to come through the collective it's like a dynamic energy that flows through and some people take it and run with it and I have a slightly different version of your same mythopoetic lens, which is how a man penetrates his partner is how he penetrates the world.
00:50:12.96
Gareth Pickering
And it's the same thing, you know, how do you, how am I penetrating my partner?
00:50:13.35
Tyson Adams
Mm-hmm.
00:50:16.14
Gareth Pickering
Is it, and for most of my life I can own a lot of that sex addiction was mostly unconscious. I was like in a place where I hadn't had a, what you spoke about creating a beautiful space to connect with my lovers.
00:50:26.83
Gareth Pickering
It would be like, get home after the bar, 10 shots of tequila, just fucking half asleep, half passing out, just, you know, not a lot of presence in my lovemaking. Fuck, surprise, surprise, my life looked pretty similar. You know, my business was all just about getting out there, making as much money as possible. My team was, I would call them resources, you know, and it's just, it's just a way of being. And when I bring that presence and awareness back into how I choose to, to yeah be with myself, first of all, but then also how I choose to, you know, penetrate my partners is like, with presence and awareness.
00:50:56.71
Gareth Pickering
Yeah, exactly. As you said, it does shift out into how I show up into all the other areas of my life. Yeah.
00:51:01.79
Tyson Adams
Wow. I love that. The way that I penetrate my partner way that I penetrate life. I love that so much. And the reason why I love that is because one of the the one of the ways to become a better lover, right? Let's move out of porn and masturbation and let's just talk about like how do we actually become an embodied lover, you know a powerful man who has access, right? So what I talk about is is range. Range is
00:51:29.78
Tyson Adams
can we look Can we roar like a lion, but still being connected with eye contact and ever-present consent so that we're not losing our partner when we're in that sort of experience?
00:51:42.73
Tyson Adams
And can we make love like a sloth, right? Can we slow it down 100 times slower than you are you know currently moving? And can we move from slow to highly aggressive
00:51:52.39
Gareth Pickering
Mm-hmm.
00:51:57.48
Tyson Adams
with presence knowing and feeling into the subtle energetics of the moment right so and especially as it relates to ejaculation right so i am about to get engaged i'm fucking excited as hell i've been with my partner you know um a lot and we've learned a lot but what i can say is is you know I teach men in full ejaculatory choice and control. right If you can choose to ejaculate, then you can you can play with this range way more.
00:52:28.83
Tyson Adams
and If your partner can have her orgasmic experiences while you can still hold your nervous system in presence and you're not losing ah losing yourself into the moment,
00:52:38.50
Gareth Pickering
Mm-hmm.
00:52:40.07
Tyson Adams
then a whole other dimensional frequency opens up where sex is not a thing that you're doing, but it's a place that you go with your partner. And it actually creates spiritual evolution, both for you and for your partner and the collective and your family and so on and so forth. And so, but as I want to call attention, and I've never actually shared this on a podcast, and but I want to like call awareness to the importance of slowness.
00:53:02.58
Tyson Adams
And so let's say you are in the process of penetrating your partner and you've moved into that. And after some number of hours or days, you know, You're deciding, okay, I'm going to you know i'm going to release now.
00:53:15.82
Tyson Adams
My whole life, when I made the decision that I was going to release, I would speed up and speed up and speed up and speed up and I would take my nervous system to that you know sympathetic charge and then I would release at the end of that and it would blast me open and the dopamine would go wild and it would feel incredible.
00:53:34.11
Tyson Adams
And two, I started to ask myself the question, is there a different way to do this? right
00:53:39.04
Gareth Pickering
Mm-hmm.
00:53:39.17
Tyson Adams
So now it's like the complete opposite.
00:53:39.22
Gareth Pickering
Mm-hmm.
00:53:41.33
Tyson Adams
It's like, okay, I'm going to make the choice. So let's say we've been making love for five straight days, hours and hours, multiple sessions, and I've held and I've retained.
00:53:51.76
Tyson Adams
And now I'm like, okay, I'm ready to release. you know i'm I'm ready to do this. This feels like it's in alignment with where I'm at now. If we're in that moment and we start to slow it down,
00:54:05.52
Tyson Adams
And we allow for that raw sexual energy to flow down into our legs and up our spine and out our arms. And we move that energy and we feel our entire body and we create that actual like eye contact and presence. And we start to move slower and slower and slow. And then like even slower and even slower. And to the point where it's like, it's so slow that like you could actually ejaculate without even any sort of movement, like no penetration necessary.
00:54:35.51
Tyson Adams
And then from that place, releasing um with that level of intentionality and consciousness with the the the I love you versus the I'm taking from you or from the means to an end driven reality that most of us ejaculate from.
00:54:52.95
Tyson Adams
When we do that as a way of giving, we also receive.
00:54:53.82
Gareth Pickering
Mmm.
00:54:56.84
Tyson Adams
And those experiences are some of the most explosive experiences. And when I mean explosive, I mean you feel like you're 15 again and you're having those first ejaculation moments where literally like the amount of life force that's raging and roaring through your body is, you know, it's it's it's quite an experience to say the least, right?
00:55:19.01
Tyson Adams
And so the nature of becoming a sexually powerful embodied man is actually about your capacity to be in relationship to your nervous system and to, you know, really being, how do I even say this?
00:55:36.32
Tyson Adams
Where love is the North Star, where the love between you and your partner is what is arousing. That's what's arousing.
00:55:44.28
Gareth Pickering
Mm-hmm.
00:55:45.20
Tyson Adams
Not power over, not power under, not kink, not psychology, not any sort of weird things that you're doing. Not to say that those things can't be brought in and they're not fun, but when you actually are tuned to your nervous system, that is those are the most powerful soul-opening godgasms is what I call them.
00:56:02.72
Tyson Adams
So I love them.
00:56:03.57
Gareth Pickering
Mm-hmm.
00:56:05.36
Tyson Adams
And so does she.
00:56:06.73
Gareth Pickering
Wow, dude, that's so beautiful. of but um you know i think what the word that comes to me is like conscious awareness. you know That's what's happening in that moment, you know as opposed to just riding off the edge of the cliff and just like letting it all hang out. you know I think there's something so magical about slowing it down.
00:56:24.65
Gareth Pickering
as you're speaking into.
00:56:24.79
Tyson Adams
yeah
00:56:25.73
Gareth Pickering
And you know one of the things that I teach is that I've also learned in my own life is not to waste an orgasm or not to waste an ejaculation, meaning like this is one of the most powerful energies that we have as a man.
00:56:38.04
Gareth Pickering
Literally, this is what could create another human being that goes into this matrix and lives for 100 years. like Just when I take a moment to think about that and teach that to some of the clients that I work with, recognize just how sacred and powerful that moment is when you do choose to release your seed, as you're talking about, not just one off the cuff, you know, whether it's in self pleasuring, under the fucking moon, there was a lot of conscious presence and awareness there, when you're doing it with your partner.
00:57:02.100
Gareth Pickering
There's also the place of really just calling in something super powerful that you want to actually manifest and Put that energy and attention towards something that you want to cultivate in your life. It could be healing. It could be your partner. It could even be your new house that you want to call in. But really just allow that creative life force that is so powerful in the creative process, obviously to create a child, but you could also use it to create, you know, from a place of of manifestation, you know, the sex magic part of it.
00:57:26.67
Gareth Pickering
So to so just have an ejaculation and is really such a waste. And, you know, I just have this picture of the Olympic-sized swimming pool every single day because I think most of those are completely unconscious.
00:57:37.46
Gareth Pickering
it's It's the version of me that's home from work.
00:57:37.71
Tyson Adams
yeah.
00:57:39.46
Gareth Pickering
I'm fucking exhausted. The world's fucked. I just want to release and be done. There's just so much creative power that's not being utilized. And I think just bringing that presence and awareness back is a really powerful opportunity for us to bring awareness to this creative life force that' that's alive in all of us. Yeah.
00:57:56.28
Tyson Adams
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I will say that my deepest meditations of my life um during my two years and nine months of celibacy came at the end of those pleasure practices. And after the release,
00:58:09.81
Tyson Adams
allowing myself to really have my own pleasure to not just getting up and cleaning up and showering or whatever, putting, throwing the napkins away or whatever it was, right? I would stay in that moment, sit with a straight spine and recycle that energy. And then from that, allow the information to come through and build my business, my life, my like you know
00:58:30.95
Gareth Pickering
Yes.
00:58:31.41
Tyson Adams
my ah my future family that I was calling in. and then journal and and build like what I was going to write from that portal, right?
00:58:38.91
Gareth Pickering
yeah
00:58:40.79
Tyson Adams
That is where so much information is coming through.
00:58:41.28
Gareth Pickering
you
00:58:43.87
Tyson Adams
And I'll also say this, there's in my men's group, ah there was a guy, there was a guy that asked recently about like, well, how do I move out of, sort of thinking my way into sort of feeling my way because I need some sort of material there.
00:58:56.58
Tyson Adams
And I said, okay, well, here's here's what you can do. Like if you are a single guy and you're moving out of porn and you're actually trying to call in what it is you wanna call in, first off, burn the boats, which is delete all the pornography that you have on your computers, including your past lovers, let it go.
00:59:09.55
Gareth Pickering
Yep.
00:59:11.94
Tyson Adams
Because by saying no to this, you're actually saying yes to, you know with radical hope, your future.
00:59:12.73
Gareth Pickering
yeah
00:59:17.68
Tyson Adams
And then when you're in your practice, visualize her but don't visualize her as a physical being like with certain hair color and eye color and this and that and all these things that we've been programmed to think we want see her as a soul at an energetic level see her legs wrapped around you and there were moments when i had these pleasure practices where i was literally making love to her because i knew she was already here on planet earth she already existed
00:59:45.66
Gareth Pickering
Mm-hmm.
00:59:46.08
Tyson Adams
And I knew that she was just out there, but i wasn't but we hadn't met yet. And so when you hold that as a frequency, and I saw her with her legs around me, we were kissing, and I was telling her I loved her, she was telling me she loved me.
00:59:57.99
Tyson Adams
And at the end of this mindful masturbation experience, I like started weeping because I was like, oh my God. like This is not a matter of like, if she exists, she does exist. It's just a matter of when. And through these practices, I was able to manifest her. And then when we were actually making love and we had that moment and we came together after two months of no sexual contact, it was a prayer, right? We prayed, we had a music, we playlist, we had massage. Like there was actual connected ritual where we then came together and from that place,
01:00:29.39
Tyson Adams
It's like, oh my God, I've manifested the exact thing that I was mindfully masturbating to. And she is she is here.
01:00:35.77
Gareth Pickering
Mm-hmm.
01:00:37.67
Tyson Adams
And so that's the power of this way of being. And you talk about sex magic. That is sex magic. It is the capacity to take these raw sexual moments and to then bring them into this 3D plane and to manifest on this plane that which we can imagine.
01:00:54.07
Tyson Adams
And if we don't use our imagination to think about the future and we're only going backwards into the porn and to other past lovers, we can't build that life and she will not come. So.
01:01:04.46
Gareth Pickering
a Wow, dude. There's so much stuff I want to ask you. And I just want to make this masterclass one more level up. And I just want to share what what you're talking into. there's There's a practice that we teach.
01:01:14.76
Gareth Pickering
And I just want to give it here because I feel like this conversation has been so rich.
01:01:16.20
Tyson Adams
Yeah.
01:01:18.74
Gareth Pickering
I teach this, I have a slightly different version of parts work that I teach called the inner kingdom, which sort of came through me in a slightly different way.
01:01:25.70
Tyson Adams
Mm-hmm.
01:01:25.71
Gareth Pickering
And what I speak about, especially for for men that are looking to call in partnership, but even to enhance the relationship with self to show up more fully in in a marriage or an existing partnership is the the inner marriage, the part of me that recognizes I have both masculine and feminine energies that exist inside me and the ability to be able to access those a self-pleasuring practice where I've literally created a persona for my inner feminine and got to know her, the same as I explained earlier with the bull getting to know my animal, but actually getting to know Diana, which is, again, access to a part of me that inside my internal family system didn't even have a space, bring her into the kingdom, get to know her, and then have a self-pleasuring practice where I'm with myself and imagine making love to my own
01:02:03.01
Tyson Adams
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
01:02:12.48
Gareth Pickering
princess or my own feminine is also a practice for me that's just been so strong in cementing this inner marriage because I think our external relationships just mirror the the relationship that we have internally.
01:02:23.90
Gareth Pickering
And so, yeah, for someone listening to this, if you Don't even have a relationship with your body. Use the animal analogy. See what animal wants do wants to come up. But also to to connect with the the feminine that exists inside. You get to know this this being and use a self-pleasuring practice to strengthen this own inner marriage because I think this is the piece that really helps you integrate both of these polarities and it will soon start to reflect in your in your outside relationship. so
01:02:49.60
Tyson Adams
Love it. Love it. I have my own practice that's a little bit too vulnerable to share on a podcast, but that is very similar to what you just described. And um and I think that you're so right.
01:02:58.15
Gareth Pickering
Mm-hmm.
01:03:01.23
Tyson Adams
When we outsource the feminine, to the external because we haven't developed our own relationship to the feminine within, then that's again, when we are likely more likely to become seducible and also whereby which we get sucked into ah sex addiction and or ah weird type of genres of pornography that ultimately like, you know, allow for us to visually see that which we know is true, but that we haven't actually done the work. And when our masculine and feminine energies are at war,
01:03:32.70
Tyson Adams
we're more likely than not going to project that outward and then go seek that. And, and at the expense of our own integration and our own freedom ultimately. So, yeah.
01:03:43.48
Gareth Pickering
In addition to all the other things that we share, bro, we seem to have a ah similarity. My partner's name is Araminta, and I call her Minter. And watching you on social media go through your adventure with Minter, it's sort of bizarre to watch you talk about the same stuff as me, and then your partner's name is Minter, and I'm like, it's so interesting.
01:03:55.94
Tyson Adams
Yeah.
01:04:01.92
Tyson Adams
Yeah, it is very interesting.
01:04:02.86
Gareth Pickering
Wow.
01:04:04.22
Tyson Adams
and And Minta, my partner, her grandmother was Araminta. So, you know, it's fascinating to me that you and I have both similar line of work and similar name of our partner.
01:04:11.10
Gareth Pickering
Wow.
01:04:15.66
Tyson Adams
It's just wild. and And I also just want to like really, I'm meeting you for the first time right now.
01:04:16.48
Gareth Pickering
Wow.
01:04:21.62
Tyson Adams
So for those of you who are listening, like this is a very organic, very fucking natural conversation. But I just want to say like when I built out my karma to Dharma loop,
01:04:26.63
Gareth Pickering
Mm-hmm.
01:04:30.68
Tyson Adams
and it comes through and a series of stories, I just want to say that you and I have really arrived at the same place. you know We had different core wounds, different karma, but ultimately ah sex addiction for me, a porn addiction. Of course, mine also was a sex addiction. I certainly had lots of hookups through my journey and one night stands and so on and so forth.
01:04:51.01
Tyson Adams
But I just want to call awareness to like the fact that we've alchemized our karma into dharma in our own unique ways and we're basically speaking the same language, but not through a competitiveness, through like a collaborative like, oh my God, we're both doing it and we both have our communities and there are men out there that want this fucking work. And to me, it's just it's just like a sign that the universe conspires to bring good men together and solid men who are you know in their actual dharmic path to help the men that are still in that stuck part of themselves.
01:05:23.53
Tyson Adams
And once we've alchemized that, we turn back around and we help those that are still in need of support. So I just want to say like thank you for doing your work and for alchemizing it and becoming who you are and having me and on the show. This has been such a pleasure. So thank you.
01:05:40.36
Gareth Pickering
Yeah, whatever you said, I just fucking ditto that I feel the same, bro. Thank you, man. I really appreciate that. And I see the same in you. And yeah, what's ah what's a good way for people to connect with you if they want to spend time in your world? what's ah What's a way for them to be able to connect with you? And also share anything that you have, you know, happening in your world right now, events or trainings or promos or anything like that.
01:06:02.76
Tyson Adams
Yeah, well, I mean, this Thursday, or next Thursday, so a week from today, I'm i'm doing a semen retention mastery course. And it's just a two-hour workshop. um but it is the foundational principles of um this work.
01:06:18.37
Tyson Adams
I would love to have you there. That would be great. I'll send you the link.
01:06:21.46
Gareth Pickering
Cool. Sweet.
01:06:22.26
Tyson Adams
um But I sort of spent three years developing this, but um I'm building this into 20 different small workshops that I'm taking and I'm putting them together into a body of work that ultimately becomes a way for people to go super deep into this particular arena of sexuality and intimacy and
01:06:22.42
Gareth Pickering
sweet
01:06:43.77
Tyson Adams
attraction and um all those things. But if you want to find me, you know Instagram and Facebook are fine, Tyson Adams, two underscores on Instagram. um In my bio, there's a link which you can contact me through that. And then there's also um you know a ton of podcasts that I've been on if you want to listen to more of this type of stuff.
01:07:03.31
Tyson Adams
um And you know my specialty is semen retention and outgoing porn. I mean, that is my life's work. And I'm literally what I call myself unapologetically obsessed with helping men outgrow porn and master semen retention.
01:07:15.66
Gareth Pickering
no
01:07:17.25
Tyson Adams
Like legitimately, it is something that makes me come alive because when men figure this out, everything in their life changes. It's a lifestyle shift, right? Everything's different after that. So, yep.
01:07:28.61
Gareth Pickering
So good, brother. Any closing thoughts you just want to leave? Maybe something we didn't touch on or maybe just a ah word in closing before we ah sign out?
01:07:37.88
Tyson Adams
Yeah.
01:07:39.61
Tyson Adams
Go masturbate outside.
01:07:41.94
Gareth Pickering
Hmm.
01:07:42.42
Tyson Adams
If you've never done it, or you have, but it's been a long time, go move out of secrecy, silence and shame and being under the covers with your blue light and go put yourself in the sunlight, get naked, feel the sunlight on your body and how good it feels.
01:07:57.13
Tyson Adams
Massage yourself, connect to yourself, release, and and then go jump in a river or wherever you're at, right? And create a new relationship to this. um It is the most earned and beautiful and healing thing that we can do as a man is to reclaim our sexual energy and the ways in which it's been taken from us.
01:08:22.36
Tyson Adams
And it's not your fault if you're still stuck, but it is your responsibility. And so go do that.
01:08:30.23
Gareth Pickering
So good, brother. Thank you so much and appreciate the work that you're doing, man.
01:08:33.91
Tyson Adams
Yeah. Thank you for having me.
