how to work with your most powerful sex organ
Did you know that your most powerful sex organ is your brain 🧠 ?
Your brain and mental state massively influence how you feel about your body; how you feel about your partner; how you feel about sex and pleasure. It can either open your desire up or shut it down. In fact, what made me become a sex educator was learning about how much stress impacts our sense of pleasure. I have spent the last ten years helping people relieve stress through yoga and mindfulness practices. When I saw how these practices could directly help authenticate and deepen pleasure, I felt inspired to merge the two worlds.
“When your brain is in a calm, relaxed state, turned on, trusting, it will define anything as erotic. If you’re in a good state of mind, and your special someone tickles you, it feels good. If you are stressed, pissed off, trying to write a paper and your S.O. tickles you, violence will shortly ensue. In order to be in a context that allows your brain to feel like it is in a safe, fun, sexy place — to have the best sex of your life, mental and physical wellbeing affects how much pleasure your enjoy.” - Emily Nagoski
Before I continue, I want to be clear that I am not inferring that low desire is automatically an issue that needs to be resolved. Low desire is only an issue if it causes distress or interferes with your quality of life (your quality of life - not what the larger, dominant culture might deem quality of life).
In Better Sex Through Mindfulness, Lori Brotto references a study that looks at the relationship between brain activity and low desire:
“In a study looking at functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in women with clinically significant low desire, the women with low desire were found to have less brain activation in the occipital cortex and the middle occipital gyrus than those in a control group. They also had more activation in the left inferior parietal lobe, the medial frontal gyrus, and the basal ganglia.
This means that the parts of the brain that were more active in women with low desire are associated with attending to, reflecting on, and making inferences about one’s own emotional and mental states and those of others. This finding may help explain why women with low desire spend more time monitoring and evaluating their own sexual responses than attending to sexual cues.”
This points to spectatoring (judging your own - or someone else’s - experience during sex) and also what can happen when we ruminate. It’s not a coincidence that low desire is linked to ruminating or judging (aka making inferences) about one’s own experience. Ruminating and judging contribute to chronic stress, and chronic stress can definitely dampen our desire (among other things).
I think the first step to reawakening our desire (not just for sex and pleasure, but for life itself) is to take the pressure off. To know that this is normal, that it happens to so many other people, and that it is a product of the inevitable stress we encounter in our daily lives.
Second step is to remember that you have a say over how that stress impacts you. Of course we can’t always predict or prevent the stressors that come our way, however, we can work with the residue of that stress and how much we let it linger in our system.
The third step is to gather techniques and practices that help you discharge your stress, and therefore, create more space for desire to bloom. Just as pleasure can be bite-sized and sprinkled throughout the day, stress management can be bite-sized and sprinkled throughout the day. The accumulation of these consistent practices is what makes all the difference.
To help with step three, I’ve recorded this meditation so you can open your senses to the moment and come back to your body. This meditation will help you reopen those pathways of communication with the aliveness all around you. I hope you enjoy! Make sure to keep reading for special announcements :)
s p e c i a l • a n n o u n c e m e n t s
sex ed book club meeting 💌
Our next book club meeting will actually be a podcast meeting. I’m excited to switch things up and discuss two podcasts related to sex & pleasure. We’ll be meeting in person on Wednesday February 22nd at 7pm. Reply to this email for location details if you plan on coming. As a reminder, book club is free and open to women, femmes, and folks who have been socialized as women or assigned female at birth, regardless of their gender and orientation. See podcast episodes below!
p o d c a s t s 🎧
1:1 pleasure sessions 🌹
I’ve started opening up space for 1:1 sessions! I’m really excited to start holding space for folks who want to expand their pleasure and feel more alive in their bodies. Sessions can include: sex and pleasure education through conversation, guided yoga and mindfulness practices, somatic exercises, and a customized pleasure plan to weave more pleasure and connection into your daily life.
Rates: $85 for a one-hour session
If you’re interested in booking a session with me, you can email me or fill out this intake form so I can get an idea of what you’re looking for.
I hope you get many moments this week to savor what feels good in your body and around you 💖 Sarah