Hello, horizontal lover. horizontal is the podcast about sex, love, and relationships of all kinds, recorded while lying down. This is Season 4, my Season of Experiments. This season marks the first time I’ve ever recorded remotely. So, many times, I’m no longer in the same bed as my guest— which is already a grand experiment in itself, as every single episode of my first three seasons was recorded in person, lying down, wearing robes, shoulder-to-shoulder, right next to my guest. As though stargazing, or post-coital, or in the deep hours of a very long road trip. I’m always saying that I want to expand people’s notion of what intimacy is, and can be. Remaining overseas during a global pandemic has encouraged me to expand my own notion of intimacy. I used to disparage the value of virtual connection... and suddenly, that’s most of what most of us have. And we must figure out how to make it nourishing for us… or go hungry. My mission holds steady: To make the world a more intimate place. One episode, one conversation, one essay, one video, one session, one workshop, one course, one talk at a time. So here is my current pursuit: to weave the kind of empathetic cocoon that I cultivate in person, in bed, to inspire a blossoming conversation full of raw, revealing, vulnerable, genuine intimacies, with someone who is horizontal literally across the world. In this, and the following three episodes, I lie down with the delicious Kelsey Grant, known on Instagram as @radicalselflove. She is my new friend. And I feel very proud to say so. Apropos of this season’s overarching intimacy-across-distance motif, we have not yet met in person. I look forward to the day when I can put my arms around Kelsey and squeeze. Kelsey is a Love Educator, an incisive writer, a boundaries expert, a singer and creatrix of various mediums, and a powerfully tender woman. She has a generous laugh, and her wisdom is free of bullshit. She’s in it, she doesn’t pretend to be otherwise, and that’s what makes her a whole, human, and a great leader. I have much to learn from her, and I imagine you will, too. Half of our episodes will be available in all the podcast places for all horizontalists, and the other episodes will be available exclusively to patrons of the horizontal arts. You can become a patron right this instant for access to The Full Horizontal by navigating directly to patreon.com/horizontalwithlila  When you become a patron, I send you a personal thank-you video (with a Happy Dance). If you seek guidance for your intimate struggles, I offer Personal Intimacy Roadmap Sessions: 60-minutes of judgement-free, sex-positive guidance… with a takeaway plan (your roadmap)! What ails you in the realm of sex, love, & relationships of all kinds? To schedule, email lila@horizontalwithlila.com and I’ll send you a fun form to fill out (well, I think it’s fun; I made it) so I can best prepare for you. One of my happy clients said, “I’ve had a lot of therapy. But you give advice a therapist cannot give.” Bam! Here, in my first experiment with Kelsey, we scrap the structure, and instead of starting at the very beginning (a very good place to start), as a classic horizontal episode does, we start from the very right now (also a very good place to start) with the question, “What is alive in you?” And that is how this episode came to be all about nourishing female friendship, envy, & backstabbing, the 6-month inner circle vetting process, mother-wounds, getting kicked out of the house as a teenager, emotional release & worrying about the neighbors, swamping, resisting the codependent parental undertow, & how Kelsey and her best friend heal by re-parenting each other. This episode was mixed and mastered by Irving Gadhoury of IGrecording.com. My cover art was illustrated by Shana Shay, whom you can find on 99designs. The remix of my original intro music was created by kidmental, an acapella beatbox musician, and a Black creator you can support right now on Fiverr or Patreon.