 I feel like a lot of people nowadays have a problem with intimacy. Why do you think that is? Dude, I mean, I was thinking about this, is that as we're walking past those sculptures by the castle, you know, they're all boy, girl, boy, girl, boy, girl. And they're all sculptures around intimacy. And I'm thinking about that. I think that part of this comes down to people not really setting their intent for what it is that they do want, you know? There's an intimacy that's being portrayed here that is both pushing and pulling. There is both Yin and Yang. There is both receiving and transmitting of something. This is a level of balanced intimacy that I think nowadays we're struggling to reach to. It's an intrinsic part of sexuality. You're never just giving and you're never just receiving. You're supposed to be in balance between Yin and Yang. That's what true intimacy is. The idea that our sexuality is from spontaneously occurring natural force that just pours out, I think, is a ridiculous one. We're clearly not living in such naive times. We are now deep inside of Freud's fetishist split. You cannot simply desire naturally. The way that our lives have been commodified and our desires have been commodified has made it so that you can't just want something. The culture has actually trained you what to want. And as Slavoj Zizek points out, that's not enough. The final corruption, the final perversity is it doesn't just train you what to want, but how to want. So we don't even know how to desire unless we're taught first how to do it. That's how toxically passive we've become. And this is the effect, I think, of not having any kind of an intent. It's not that we live with bad intent. It's that we live with zero intent. And in that space any toxic ideology can be put in there. Thus rendering our relationship with our sexuality schizophrenic and intimacy almost completely impossible. So if we actually want to experience intimacy in our lives, it's something that we need to set our intention towards. You've got to set your body, your mind, your emotions in the direction of that happening. You can't just expect that it's just going to randomly happen for you. You can't just sit back and wait. You can't be passive. Don't be toxically passive with this. You're going to have ideas around love and intimacy running inside of your head through your stream of consciousness that are not great, that are probably not quite in alignment with what it is that you really want. But if you sit back and observe your thoughts, you'll think, wow, I actually have a lot of negative conflicting, confrontation-based, aggression-based, competition-based ideas and videos running inside of my head right now around love, around intimacy. No wonder I'm generating all of this conflict and all of this incongruence. That's what I'm focused on. When you're focused on that and your intent is pointing towards that, even though you didn't deliberately do it, it just ended up that way. The emotions that you're generating around the subject are going to be negative. They're going to be fear. They're going to be anxiety. They're going to be anger. They're going to be control-based. And that's what you're actually going to find yourself creating. So you need to set the intent for what it is that you do want. Safety, fairness, intimacy, joy, happiness, companionship, whatever it is, that's what you must set your intent to. When you do something as simple as setting your intent, it kind of transcends and works around all of the complicated psychology because it aligns your emotions straight away. It aligns your thoughts, your cognitive processes, the stream of consciousness. It automatically makes you more mindful because it brings you back into the here and now, which is the only place you can be setting your intent. So it does a lot. When it comes to issues of intimacy, you do want to make sure that if you're going to attack safely, that you make your food order first. Hello. And there it is. So once you've set your intention for something to come into being, that instantly aligns your mental state and your emotional state with what it is you do want to experience. When you're setting the intention, you're actually communicating directly with the unconscious because you're saying this already is the way it is now. And you say, well, I haven't said that inside my head. No, no, no, you don't need to just set your intent. And by setting your intent, you're automatically imagining things happening as though they are happening now. That's the only way to set your intent. That directly communicates the unconscious that this is now. You're not shoving things off into some weird fetishized neurotic future. You're not trapped in the traumatic double bind of the Freudian past. You're just saying, this is what I want to experience. And it becomes part of this subjective circle that is spherical, not linear, that brings it into the here and now. It's a much more effective way of getting things done. When it's time to start looking at setting your intent inside of relationships in the aspect of intimacy, this could be a sexual relationship or it could be something between you and a friend or a business colleague or a family member. When you're setting your intent for that safe attachment where everybody is working within the safety of clearly expressed boundaries, because boundaries like politeness and manners, keep everybody safe. It lets everybody know what they can and can't expect. It lets people know where the know is. There are areas that you don't go to, you go this far and no further. That's a good thing. There's positive to have those kinds of boundaries. It's impossible to set those kinds of boundaries though, unless you have set your intent for what it is that you do want. The setting of intent allows us to bypass a lot of complicated psychology so that you can feel safe, so that you can love and so that you can be loved within a safe context. Setting your intent can simply be boiled down to five words. Ask for what you want. This takes a tremendous amount of bravery and it is a simple but not easy discipline to maintain. If you're asking for what you want, the reason why it takes bravery is because you make yourself vulnerable. You're letting people know what it is that you actually really want. You may have become conditioned to not do that as a matter of habit, as a means of self-protection. So usually you don't even let people know what it is that you want. The other reason that it requires a degree of bravery because of the vulnerability that you put yourself in, which is in a position of hearing the word no, you could ask for what you want and be refused. So you need to ask for what you want with a smile and in a positive, emotional, good sense of humor frame. And if you hear the word no in response to you simply and clearly asking for what you want, you don't have to become upset. You can smile, you can stay in a good emotional state, you can maintain your sense of humor and say, okay, so I've told you what it is that I want, you're telling me that you can't deliver what it is that I want, and then you can make a decision from there. This means, again, that when we just jump directly to setting the intent and then working towards the fulfillment of that intent, it makes us move forward in terms of our emotional maturity because this is not something that two people coming from an emotionally immature frame can do. They manipulate, they cajole, they infer what it is that they want. Only two adults can ask for what they want. So this is a much healthier frame from which to do intimacy and safe attachment. That safe attachment, those safe boundaries that allow you to receive love and to transmit love in a way that is safe and boundary and healthy.