Hello and welcome to another solo episode of the Mark Groves podcast. Today I want to dive into a

subject that feels like a bit of a leap for me. And what I mean by that is if you've been following

my journey for a while, then you know that I essentially have had sort of what would be seen

as maybe a repairing relationship with the word God.

So I grew up Catholic and, you know, maybe you grew up Christian, maybe you grew up in some form of religious sense.

And I think when the interesting thing about religion is that we are born into it, our religion, we're not really given a choice about what our faith or

spiritual practices are going to be. And even if our family are atheists, that shows up in sort of what

relationship we have with the idea of God. And because religion was really weaponized when I was

younger, you know, I went to a Catholic school and things like intimacy, sex, arousal, those things were associated with going to hell, the devil, shame.

And so I always found this to be an interesting thing to balance as a human because, of naturally you're going to have for the experience of

arousal like you know first time well this is back in the day this would be dating me but the first

time you look at a sears catalog and you check out the bra section you're like whoa that was like

our pornography back then in a national geographic with a you know sort of a tribal picture of a tribal group and getting to see

boobs as if they just didn't even matter. That was, I remember just being like, whoa. And so,

of course, naturally because you're human, you're going to experience arousal. And if your religion

teaches you that arousal is bad, that it's the devil, that it's

evil, that you're going to go to hell, then you either have to disassociate from arousal in order

to hold the belief or question the belief and hold on to arousal. But nonetheless, what it does

is create a fracture in the relationship that we have with desire.

And so then as we get older, in order to be in the company of arousal, we often have to be drunk

or, you know, do something to anesthetize the shame and fear that's present in the presence with someone else.

And what an intimate, beautiful act it can be if we're

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