Hello and welcome back to the Self-Hailer Soundboard. This week we're going to talk about a topic that's

really the underpinning of all of our conversations, all of our topics here, and that is intimacy.

And when we think of the word intimacy, most of us immediately think sex. And while sex is a

form of intimacy, we want to spend some time today really breaking down the depths of what

intimacy actually is. In getting ready for this episode, I actually was inspired to look up

with the official definition of intimacy is, and of course there's many different sources that

give their own version of a definition, but the two main concepts that I found coming up when I

googled intimacy, where familiarity and closeness, and in my opinion, and I believe probably your own

as well, that's what intimacy really is built from. The knowing of oneself, and then of course the

sharing of oneself, like we often talk about, sharing my ideas, sharing my feelings, even sharing

myself expression. How am I in the world that allows then that not just closeness, but that authentic

closeness, where I am me, and I'm expressing myself to someone else in the world. So for instance,

a eugenia, and then the intimacy that or the bonding that comes from that can be considered an intimate

relationship really. What we're describing is so much more than just taking off one's close,

and instead taking off one's figurative close, taking off our patterns, our masks, our safety

mechanisms, everything that we hide behind, and actually letting that authentic self, our full

self expression emerge. And for many of us, we spend time in this pursuit of meeting that person

or honing into who that self expressed authentic self is. And instead of searching externally,

I'd remind us all, and I remind myself daily, to turn and sit in stillness, to sit in reflection

in quiet with myself first and connecting with self. As again, like you hear every week when we're

talking about intimacy, well, before intimacy with another comes, intimacy with self comes,

and it's taking that time to truly sit, to see all of your wounds, to see all of even the darkness

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