The Importance of Bringing Pleasure Back Into Your Life with Emily Morse

Emily Morse, popularly known as 'Sex with Emily,' has over 20 years of experience, best-selling books, and the Smart Sex Membership, shares her expertise on the complexities of female sexuality, particularly during menopause. The discussion covers how menopausal women can reconnect with their bodies, understand and reclaim pleasure, and enhance their sexual lives through various means such as solo sex, pelvic floor health, and the use of innovative sexual tools. Emily focuses on the importance of self-compassion, pleasure as a daily practice, and the unexpected journey towards better health and creativity through a mindful approach to sex. To view full show notes, more information on our guests, resources mentioned in the episode, discount codes, transcripts, and more, visit https://drmindypelz.com/ep305 Emily Morse is a doctor of human sexuality and the host of the award-winning sexuality podcast, "Sex with Emily," which has been on air for nearly two decades. She is a MasterClass instructor on sex and communication and was previously a radio host and executive producer on SiriusXM. She has been profiled in The New York Times, Forbes, and Men's Health and has been featured by The Today Show, Conan, Entertainment Tonight, Glamour, Cosmopolitan, Bustle and elsewhere. Check out our fasting membership at https://esetacademy.drmindypelz.com https://resetacademy.drmindypelz.com/. Please note our medical disclaimer https://drmindypelz.com/medical-disclaimer/.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Mindy Pelz?

  On this episode of the Resetter Podcast, I am bringing you Emily Morris. Now, some of you may know her as Sex with Emily. She has had a podcast and has been teaching the world about the importance of sex, how to have good sex for over 20 years. She is a two-time bestselling author. She has a membership group called Smart Sex. She has an incredible website if you want to check it out. But for the sake of this conversation, why I wanted to bring her to all of you is that I am having more and more conversations with women about how disconnected they feel with their bodies as they age.

• 0:46Mindy Pelz?

  And for some of us, this might show up as we don't feel like having sex anymore. For other people, I've heard a lot of women talk about how their orgasms aren't the same as they age. I've had some women really who have gone through trauma and sexual assault feel like they don't even want to think about sex anymore. And yet, sex is pleasure. And so, in this conversation with Emily, I wanted to talk about the art of pleasure. And you're going to see that we talk about it from a couple of different angles. We talk about it from just how do we as women experience pleasure? So many of us are disconnected from what pleasure even means.

• 1:31Mindy Pelz?

  And this doesn't have anything to do with sex. She and I go through a whole conversation about all the ways we can get pleasure that is not even sex-related. Then we go through connecting you to your body. And we talk about how do you make your feminine body feel safe? How do you allow sensuality back into your life? Also, not anything to do with the physical act of sex. And then, at the end of the conversation, we talk about the benefits of either solo sex or sex with another from the lens of creativity, from the lens of health of your body. We went in a lot of different...

• 2:16Mindy Pelz?

  Directions with this conversation that was way more than how do you have good sex? So please listen all the way through. Again, my goal always is to help all of us be more in our body, to fall in love with our female bodies. And if that means having better sex, if that means making sure you have pelvic pelvic floor health, or if that is what you'll learn at the end, a possibility to connect to your root chakra to bring more abundance into your life, understanding how to take pleasure back as a female is incredibly important. And Emily and I have a beautiful discussion about it. So Emily Moore, Sex with Emily,

• 3:01Mindy Pelz?

  pleasure. Here we go. Enjoy. Welcome to the Resetter Podcast. This podcast is all about empowering you to believe in yourself again. If you have a passion for learning, if you're looking to be in control of your health and take your power back, this is the podcast for you.

• 3:29Mindy Pelz?

  First, I have to welcome you to my podcast. I adore you. I loved our time together in February, and I can't believe it took us six months to get here on the podcast to talk about sex. So thank you, Emily, for being here.

• 3:44Speaker 01

  I'm so honored to be here. I adore you, too. We had a great dinner conversation. We're just gonna bring it to your podcast right now.

• 3:49Mindy Pelz?

  Exactly. I always say that that's what I want my podcast to feel like, is like you're sitting in my living room and you're having a conversation with, like a girlfriend conversation I typically would have. So I totally agree.

• 4:01Speaker 01

  I feel like you do that with people, Mindy. I feel like you make people feel very comfortable that they are sitting in your living room, even when they meet you at a dinner table. So.

• 4:08Mindy Pelz?

  Thank you. That's so sweet. I appreciate that. Yeah. So here's the thing about sex and menopause. I think it is very complex. I think we have the confluence of people who've been in long-term relationships and maybe just having boring sex. I think we have a situation of lower oxytocin and orgasms don't feel the same.

• 4:34Mindy Pelz?

  And I think we maybe even have plummeting testosterone where our desire is, it seems to be waning. And when you put that together in a heterosexual relationship, you have a serious libido mismatch that can, can lead to marital strife. So my first question is, do we have a normal idea of what a woman is going through menopause? What the heck is her libido supposed to be like? Do we have any normality of that?

• 5:12Speaker 01

  So it's really hard to normalize anything when it comes to sex because we're all so different. But I would say what I hear mostly is that yes, there's the hormone factor. So we've got to drop in the testosterone, estrogen, progesterone, they are not normalized, stabilized at all. So that is a big factor. Also, our bodies are changing, right? So the loss of estrogen could also lead to, to pain, vaginal pain. So there could be some pain around that. There's also the factors that we've been with a partner for a long time. It just might not be interesting to us anymore. There's been a lot that's happened, a lot of years have gone by and we're just like, kind of bored, kind of becoming best friends, kind of over it. And yet, when we think our libido's gone, we all of a sudden maybe run into that crush from high school, we can reconnect with

• 5:56Speaker 01

  them, or something happens, or we see them at the gym, we're like, oh my God, I actually do want to have sex, but just wasn't with my partner. So there's just a lot, there's a lot going on at this stage. And I just want to say is that the first thing is, I think we have to normalize the fact that when I ask most women, I gave a speech, and I said, I want to ask you all how your sex life is. Like, raise your hand if you've ever thought, if you never have sex again, you're going to be okay. And a lot of women raised their hand.

• 6:24Mindy Pelz?

  I would say that's the most common thing that I hear from menopausal women, is exactly like that. Like, I don't really care. If I do it again, or I don't do it again.

• 6:36Speaker 01

  So I hear that like what I hear is our sex drive is fluctuating, we're bored, like I said, we're in relationships, our sexual desires aren't getting met, we're like, how should we actually have sex at all? So what I would like to say, so at this time of life, I think the most important thing is that we actually own our pleasure. For the first time ever, we may not, and then that, because I like go to ask these women, I say, okay, I get it, like, that's all true right now, sex drive's fluctuating, we're in bored relationships, our desire isn't there. And then I also want to say, well, how was it 20 years ago? How was it ever really that great? And when I go deeper, I find that we're a lot of women, they're like, well, when we first met, well, it was really great for everyone when we first met, that's why we met, we have something called the honeymoon phase, we have the most delicious cocktail,

• 7:17Speaker 01

  feel-good hormones, dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, we could have sex with really much anything for six months, two years, until the right wave of those hormones are great, and then they come back, like any great drug, what comes up, comes down. So I get that it was great in the beginning, and then you have kids, right? So a lot of women have kids, right? A lot of us have kids, and then after kids, I was like, well, did it ever get great after that? And you kind of think about it, like, that's when the trouble really started. Because we also know, this is when the pressure starts for so many women, I guess when we're talking about women's fluctuating hormones, that you have kids, and the doctor tells you typically, I think, you tell me, I don't have kids, but like, what I hear is, you're fine, you're gonna be ready in a month from now. And then that's when the guilt starts in, and women start feeling like, you know what?

• 7:59Speaker 01

  I'm actually not ready yet, but now I'm feeling pressure, I've had this whole, I gave birth to a human, came out of my vagina, and now you're asking me to actually want to do something else for somebody else, and my hormones are gone, I'm exhausted, I'm taking care of another human, and now I'm supposed to have sex, but it's kind of painful, I don't feel it, I'm exhausted. So I feel like when I ask women to really break it down, they're like, well, I guess it hasn't been that great for a while. So to go back to women at this part of decade, we could own our pleasure, our desire, and our sexuality more in this decade than we ever had before. In fact, this is the time, this is the time where, where, where none of us were bored with owner's manual, and we've had to figure out our bodies the hard way, without accurate sex information, with a lot of sex being about performance, pleasing our partner's bodies,

• 8:44Speaker 01

  we, you know, we, we've been Figuring it out through trial and error and maybe a lot of shame, given where we grew up in the world. And feeling bad about our bodies and maybe we were put on the birth control pill or an antidepressant. Or our bodies and then we wake up at perimenopause, menopause, where we thought we figured it out and look, everything has changed again.

• 9:01Mindy Pelz?

  Yep.

• 9:02Speaker 01

  And we're frustrated and we're tired and we're angry and like now it's changing because of menopause. And I can say personally, I've been on this journey for almost 20 years. I had a wake up call that came to sex with me 20 years ago, my early 30s. And now I'm like, oh shit, we got to figure it out again. So I get it. So what I want to say is the first thing is pleasure. We're missing out on pleasure because we are focusing on everybody else still. And I think we kind of know this, but we're like, it's our kids, it's our husbands, it's the work, it's the families. We're pleasing everybody else. So we're like, how do I actually tell you that this, that's my first point for women in menopause. You can prioritize pleasure. You deserve it. Pleasure is your birth rate. This time more than ever.

• 9:40Mindy Pelz?

  You know, it's so interesting that you bring up the pleasure thing because in my new book, I'm talking about this transition. What happens to the brain as we transition through menopause. And what the cultural conditioning for so many women has been to be selfless. And if you're selfless, then you will be loved. And I actually think this has blocked women from even knowing what pleasure is. So the fact that word, even, even me, I'm like, where do I allow pleasure into my life? Because everybody, everything else that I've been trained on in the culture has taught me to not accept pleasure.

• 10:23Mindy Pelz?

  That I should be doing for everybody else, not receiving pleasure for myself. So how, how do you even get, figure out what pleasure is and bring that back into your life?

• 10:36Speaker 01

  I love this. So here's the thing, most of us, maybe you look at pleasure as something we we we only deserve, once we've jumped through a bunch of hoops to get it, right? So we have to check off everything out to do list, and then maybe I can get that massage, or maybe I can go with my girlfriend, or maybe I can take a day off. Once I do everything else, we put conditions on pleasure. But what I what I want to share is that pleasure is actually productive. So the more we can think about pleasure is actually helping us in every other area of our life, and prioritize pleasure as an important part of their mental and physical health, it's going to change everything. So how do we do that? Well, first, it's not just about sex at all. It's not about orgasms, which has been a lot of my work. It's it could be walking in nature, hang out with your friends, having a delicious meal.

• 11:21Speaker 01

  And the thing is, like, I've had to work really, really hard on this. So so an example is when I first started realizing that my life was woefully, really like I had like a huge pleasure deficit, was I was at a conference like 20 years ago when I started this work. And a woman said, we had to do this exercise where we were figuring out our pleasure percentage. And I actually just put this in my latest book. It's called Smart Sex, and it was the pleasure percentage exercise. And we had to write down everything in our lives that give us pleasure. So I even have a formula that I give people, like, people like, I don't even know what that is, to your point. And it could be anything, picking flowers, being in nature, walking my dog, you know, hanging out with friends. Like, for me, it's a pretty small list, but I really, so anyway, we had to write it all down, and then you had to do some math formula,

• 12:04Speaker 01

  and then yeah, add it all up. And what it came down to is, only 3% of my life was spending, doing anything pleasurable. Wow. And it was like, I was like, out of everything in my life, and I talk about sex for a living. Wow. And 3% of my life was pleasure. So after that point, I decided that I'm going to do everything in my power to up that percentage. And so the first thing is, like, realizing that pleasure begets pleasure. And the more we program pleasure into our life, the more we'll be open to receive it. And so, for example, I would look at my, I still do this, I look at my calendar every week. And I'd say, okay, what is for me this week? What isn't for work? What isn't for kids? What isn't for a friend? What isn't for my family? What's just for me? And again, it was like, okay, I'm going to go on two hikes a week with friends. I'm gonna get a massage. I'm gonna go.

• 12:50Speaker 01

  Who knows, not like getting a haircut, not something bad, like it's shopping, I guess, if you don't have a problem with shopping, like just what is it, taking a vacation? Putting in my calendar that every six weeks I take a five day trip or something, you know, and I don't always stick with everything, but I realize that if I didn't do that for myself, it was never gonna happen. I would never choose pleasure, I'm not programmed that way. I feel that pleasure, yeah, to jump, like I said, it was conditional, I didn't deserve it. So I had to learn that. And what I want to say is that pleasure begets pleasure. Like I just, more we do, the more we're gonna want it because, like, think about it, like, so the problem with sex, then, we're going back to pleasure and why this is important, a lot of us beat ourselves up because we're like, why don't I have the desire anymore? And that's my next point for women at this age is the desire part, because it's like,

• 13:34Speaker 01

  well, I used to always want it, but now I don't, and then normalizing the fact that, why should we, all day long, we've been walking around, not doing things for us, not doing things that make us feel good, we might even have been hating our bodies all day, Mindy, we might even walk around going, I don't look good today, my jeans are tight, I actually don't want to be naked with myself. Why should we think that we should, all of a sudden, because our partner makes a gesture, just, we should just be able to get into action when we're literally no, we haven't had any pleasure all day long, or all week long, and then I should want, it just doesn't make any sense. It doesn't work with our biology or chemistry, right?

• 14:08Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, it's, it's really true, and, and there, you know, there's a little bit of, if you're in a heterosexual relationship, like, like, men seem to be able to turn it on and off, on, on, like, whenever they want. And I don't think women in general can do that, but menopausal women, it's like, oh, wait, like, if, like, if you want to have sex with me on Sunday, I, I'm gonna need to start working on it on Monday, the Monday before that.

• 14:38Speaker 01

  So, yeah, exactly. Let me normalize that fact, because what we're talking about is that most women have something called responsive desire. We don't have spontaneous desire. So to your point, a lot of men, and I hate to even say this anymore, like, all men, because men are like, I don't have that anymore, but the majority of men, like, to your point, like, they're gonna see their partner, they're gonna think about sex, and they're ready to go. They have an erection, they're turned on, they're There's no problems here. Let's get into the sex. Where women have something called responsive desire. We respond to things in our environment and a bunch of factors have to line up. So we're going to be ready for sex. To your point, give me forty eight hours. Like, that's why planning sex, scheduling sex, is so important for couples, no matter what your age. And people use it. Tell me that was the boringest thing in the world.

• 15:21Speaker 01

  But it's like, it doesn't work. And if you're, if you're just waiting for it to hit you over the head, that's not going to happen. So if we know Saturday nights for the sex, then we get to reverse engineer that and say, what are all the factors that have to come into play for me to be ready for sex? And so then we can get into what is desire look like, especially in menopause? Like, what do we need to have? Yeah, our, so I come up with the sexual intelligence or the five pillars of sex IQ. Are really like, one of those is our health. Like really like, are we on hormones? As ours are antidepressants? Are we moving our bodies? Are we eating foods that make us feel good? Like, there's just so many factors that go into it. Are we communicating with our partner? Are we having sex that actually makes us feel good and not bad? Do we actually know, and it's okay even as women in menopause,

• 16:06Speaker 01

  do we know, because one of the pillars is self-awareness or self-knowledge? Do I actually know what I need? Do I know, do I need the sheets to be cleaned? Do I need the kids to be gone? Do I need the sticks, sinks, the kitchen, the kitchen to be cleaned up? Do I have to have shaved or worked out that day? Do I need foreplay? The majority of women aren't going to be turned on like that. We are, you know, men are more like slow cookers. We're frying pans. We're slow cookers. So like, there's all a lot of factors. It's a little more complicated than that. But a lot of us are just like, just shame ourselves for it. So I encourage women to think about, what does actually turn me on? The last time I was there, I was, what was happening? And then work backwards from there. You know, like,

• 16:44Mindy Pelz?

  And I think that, I really like your idea of seeking pleasure beforehand. So you have a relationship with pleasure. Because what, what I was thinking when you were talking about like going for a walk or getting a massage, is like, what does pleasure actually feel like? Because there are different levels of pleasure. And I think a lot of women have, have like, even if they're getting a massage, that might be pleasure. But they're, but they're thinking of their to-do list of what they're going to do when they get out of the massage. And so do we have any kind of like, is pleasure anything that brings you joy? Like, do we have a definition of pleasure that we can help people understand?

• 17:28Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, pleasure doesn't just start, yeah, it does not start in our genitals at all. It starts in our brain and it's like, I like to think of it with our senses. It's like every sense. It's our sensory touch, smell, fantasy gets processed in our nervous system and then our nervous system is going to say, this feels good. And so I like to think of it as, do I have a calm nervous system? Has my nervous system been set up to receive pleasure? And most of us are in a sort of fight or flight stressful place that no matter how much pleasure I've been, I've, I've, I've had, you know, plenty of massage thinking about the do list. I've had plenty of sex thinking about the to do list. And so to me, it's a nervous system regulation thing overall, meaning like

• 18:09Speaker 01

  the, you know, like, yeah, like, how do I, how do I make sure that my body is calm, that I have worked on, you know, making sure I have less stress, less anxiety. I think about like the, how else do I explain it? Like the, yeah.

• 18:26Mindy Pelz?

  Let's go to safety. I want to go, I want to go to the nervous system because I think there's something really powerful in what you just said that is happening to both women that are cycling and menopausal women. And I think it's a combination of not feeling safe in the culture right now. I don't think, I think women have felt like they've had to perform for the patriarchal's culture and by patriarch, I'm not meaning men, I'm meaning the power and the system and that there's a, there's an expectation in how women should show up in our culture that causes us to not feel safe. And because I'm not safe if I have to show up and look beautiful

• 19:07Mindy Pelz?

  all the time in order for you to tell me I love you. And I'm not safe if I'm working at my, in my incorporate world and I'm having to put in a 60 to 70 hour week and I'm dying. And I'm not safe when I'm having to continually wipe the butt of a two-year-old who is running away from me. Like our nervous systems in this modern world is so frazzled. Is, I think maybe before pleasure is safety and how does a woman make herself feel safe?

• 19:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's huge, you know, if we don't feel, it's really hard for women to receive pleasure, have incredible sex, even release for orgasm and connection if they don't feel safe. And to your point, a lot of us have never really felt safe sexually in our own bodies. It's always been based, based on pleasure and our partner's pleasure and performance. And there's been nothing in our culture that has ever celebrated women's sexuality and us taking a moment to actually say, what makes me feel good? What kind of touch makes me feel good? It was always based usually on the male gaze and the male touch. And so a lot of my workers, like we, getting women to actually take time to figure out on their own, like this is one of those, when you talk about self compassion, self

• 20:20Speaker 01

  pleasure, self acceptance, self love, it's really like taking the time to figure out my own body. People don't love the word masturbation, so I can say solo sex if that feels better.

• 20:31Mindy Pelz?

  People, people have, wait, people have a problem with the word masturbation? When did that happen?

• 20:36Speaker 01

  Oh my God, Mindy, really from the beginning of time. Well, honestly, yes, a lot of people do. They're like, I hate that word, young people. I don't know. I don't, I, I'm fine with it, but I don't know about your, listen, women don't want to be, they, they might never have masturbated before. They might never have looked at their genitals. They might never have. So yeah, if they're not safe because they've always been told that it wasn't enough, they weren't doing it right. And honestly, for so many women, they were never having pleasure. The sex was never about them. And the sad part is that I even know a lot of young people in my life right now, too. We're talking teens and twenties, who literally could have been me, like not much has changed. And we like to think a lot has changed with sex education and with porn and, or now they know, they don't know. They're still doing it for the male gaze. And so I think safety is, is a huge factor

• 21:21Speaker 01

  that we're constantly walking around in this fight or flight. It's really hard to receive any kind of joy.

• 21:27Mindy Pelz?

  Right.

• 21:28Speaker 01

  At all.

• 21:29Mindy Pelz?

  So that, so then.

• 21:30Speaker 01

  Building up those.

• 21:31Mindy Pelz?

  So I, I'm thinking, like, I'm always thinking in terms of steps. And I'm thinking, okay, first step is you got to get your nervous system to feel safe. Second step is you've got to get to a point where you understand pleasure. And this is even partner related. Like this is like your responsibility for you.

• 21:49Mindy Pelz?

  And then the third step, I'm thinking, because I, you know, a lot of women get to menopause that they don't feel safe. They don't know what the pleasure is. And now their testosterone's low and oxytocin is less, they're less sensitive to that. And they weren't even really having great sex to begin with.

• 22:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was never, it was never great before. And now we're menopause and we're like, holy shit. But what I'm saying is it can be better than ever.

• 22:13Mindy Pelz?

  Have you seen?

• 22:14Speaker 01

  If we're already, yeah.

• 22:15Mindy Pelz?

  Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you. Have you seen the, the movie Hello, Leo Grand? Or Good Night, Leo Grand?

• 22:22Speaker 01

  Sex surrogate. Yeah, I loved it.

• 22:24Mindy Pelz?

  I feel like that is the most beautiful example of where menopausal women land. If they haven't been in a relationship where there was an open discussion about what they like and what they don't like. And if, I forget the exact title, but it's so, such a good example. So if you're in a relationship where you want good sex, but you, you feel nervous to talk to your spouse about it, like, how do you open up the conversation? Like, hey, my neurochemical system's gone down. I'm working on pleasure, but we gotta talk about technique here. We gotta, we gotta get into this a little bit more.

• 23:04Speaker 01

  I think it's just also saying to her, if we're in a trusted relationship, I realize that we have not really spent a lot of time focusing on our, talking about our sex life. We're at different places. Because you'd be surprised, Mandy, how many couples have never ever talked about it. They talk about everything else in their life, but they've never actually said, what could we do to be the best lovers to each other? How can we continue to make this better? It just became like another item on their to do list. And so I think recognizing the fact that we have grown, we've changed, our bodies changed, let's figure out ways that we could both do this together. And what I, what I encourage couples do is maybe you just take the penetration off the table for a while. And you learn to just sort of...

• 23:47Speaker 01

  Explore each other's bodies again from a place of of just discovery. Maybe you're giving each other massages and you're just slowing down and you're and I feel like a lot of sex has gone way too fast for women's for women's nervous system for what they want. I mean, that's why foreplay, I would say, isn't just a light suggestion. It's actually a requirement and foreplay can even be the main event. I tried for years to just rebrand foreplay, take the I don't even like the name foreplay because it centers sex on penetration. And for the majority of women, they're not even going to have their most pleasure from a penis at all. So saying it's about touch, slowing down, we have time, let's just all these secondary

• 24:28Speaker 01

  bringing back like making out and and and arousal and building arousal through breath, through connection, through touch, through music, through our senses. I mean, all the other ways that we're doing things, people are really into sound healing or breath work, or maybe we just live in frigging California. But I'm telling you, there's a reason why. Like, these things calm our nervous system. They actually make us feel more connected to ourselves, to source, to our femininity. And and and if that doesn't, it's like couples can take a course together. They can do something online, they can learn to just let's slow it down and get to know each other right now. Let's give each other massages, let's just say that we don't know, let's just explore again as if we are starting again.

• 25:11Mindy Pelz?

  And what about orgasms themselves? Because a lot of women that I've heard just say their orgasms without estrogen being as prolific, their orgasms are not the same. It's a very different orgasm. Have you heard that about from menopausal women?

• 25:28Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, I've heard this a lot. Yep.

• 25:30Mindy Pelz?

  So like even the even the if it was your main event, it doesn't have the same oomph that it used to have.

• 25:39Speaker 01

  How excited, yes, and that sucks. And also, how exciting, because here's the amazing thing about women's bodies, is that we can have orgasms in so many different ways. We can have orgasms through just breathing, through our touch. We can have nipple orgasms. We can have orgasms through energy. We can, or like, so I understand that the normal way of having sex because of the loss of estrogen and because of this age of having orgasms has changed. But this is why I'm urging people to have more of a conscious, a conscious sexuality, a conscious connection with their partners where they're, where they're, where they're like slowing things down and they're building up the orgasm now through their, through their pelvic floor, through their breath, through

• 26:21Speaker 01

  movement, through energy, releasing blocks, feeling safe. It's not about the old in and out, or just even oral sex, or using a toy. And what I found that when women start to rebuild it again and reclaim their sexuality, or maybe they're claiming it for the first time ever, through more mindful work of like touching themselves, using like, you know, like these wands, or jade egg, or we can get into all that. I don't want to lose people through woo, because I'm like the, I'm not a woo sex educator. I can bring you to those people. But at the end of the day, what I look at is that that is the stuff. I don't like, that actually is where women find like, oh, I'm a, I can have incredible sex through the end of time. Like, women's orgasms

• 27:04Speaker 01

  are, if you go back to the Taoist sex, the Tantra, it's like, women can actually have hundreds of orgasms a day. We just were never trained that way. So what I'm saying is like, if we slow things down, if we take a beginner's mind to our own sexuality, if we have trusted partners who are willing to grow and explore with us, quietly, taking baths together, using massage oils and lotions, and building up our senses and creating a sexual space that feels good, like lighting candles, like I love thinking about the senses. So whenever, now here's something that's helped me is like, I have a vanilla candle that I always light when I have sex, because the scent is actually signaling to my system that I'm going to have sex. I make sure that everything is soft in my room. I have soft sheets and soft pillows. What am I hearing? I have a playlist that's actually working on like the neuroplastic layers of my brain that's more like

• 27:49Speaker 01

  Binaural beats for sex than it is just any like old rock playlist. I'm really conscious about what comes into my environment. Taste can be whatever. It can be your glass of wine or water, whatever it is that that one's a little bit harder with sex or unless you love aphrodisiac foods. So when I'm in the moment of sex, I think, what am I smelling? I'm smelling the candle. What am I hearing? That music that's getting my body ready for sex. What am I feeling? What am I hearing? I'm hearing or what am I, what am I seeing? I'm seeing my partner's beautiful body in front of me. What am I feeling? My hands on their body, my hands on the sheets. And the second you round yourself in your senses in a loop, you find that you become way more present. That you're way more in the moment and that's where it is. I get mindfulness. Pleasure lives in presence. Pleasure lives in mindfulness.

• 28:32Speaker 01

  So if you have a full sensory experience with your sex rituals where you're becoming a present in the bedroom, there's more of a pathway for pleasure and for orgasm and for sex.

• 28:43Mindy Pelz?

  Beautiful. That, that actually really makes sense. You know, like I, I have like a playlist to go work out to. And like when I, and when I don't feel like working out, I'm like, okay, put the playlist on, get the shoes on, get the outfit on and then

• 28:59Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 29:00Mindy Pelz?

  And then the minute I do all that, I'm like, okay, I feel like going now.

• 29:04Speaker 01

  That's it. You leave your shoes out the night before. I've often said that to you. I'm like, we do that for the gym. That's exactly what you're saying. We leave our shoes out, our outfit out. We can't cancel the workout. We've never done, we've just, you know, we've done about sex, Mindy, the opposite. We've been like, I'm just going to close my eyes and hope for the best. I hope that tonight I'm going to be, but no, like set your environment up for sex. Know what that is. And if you don't know, and I'm going to tell you, most people don't know, then be conscious about it with your partner, build a space, build a connection, or rebuild, or co-create a connection that is ready for, for your sexual connection.

• 29:35Mindy Pelz?

  Do you feel like a lot of women, I want to go back to the breath work and do you feel like a lot of women are just cut off from that root chakra? And again, not, not to be, not to be too woo woo, but I'll tell you, Leanne Rimes is a good friend of mine and I started to learn so much about vocal cords through her. And one day she said to me, did you know that the vocal cords and the cervix were are were the same tissue in utero and that they actually separated out. And I'm like, what do you mean? She goes, go look at a picture of vocal cords and go look at a picture of the cervix and you will see that they almost look identical. And then my brain was like, wait a second. So when women lose their voice,

• 30:20Mindy Pelz?

  do they lose connection to their cervix? And when women are raped, do they lose or have had some kind of sexual trauma? Do they lose their voice? There has to be, if there's tissue connection, there has to be something there.

• 30:38Speaker 01

  Yes, the app, there absolutely is a connection between our voice and our pelvic floor and our tissues and trauma. And all of it lives in our body and absolutely like learn, like literally losing their voice or proverbial, losing their voice. Or just like because they lost my voice, the child, it's all connected to our ability to feel pleasure. Apps, absolutely. Those tissues are are related. What's the other connection they're making now? Between our, yeah, well, everything like even back pain, pelvic floor, everything goes back to our pelvic floor, truly. And it would make sense that our vocal cords, isn't it all connected? I do to answer your question.

• 31:12Mindy Pelz?

  Like more, more and more women I'm hearing are doing pelvic floor exercises. They're going to pelvic floor therapists and and and having like work done on the pelvic floor, especially if they've had kids. Especially as you know, the things start to drop as they get older and it feels and and once I actually recently had a friend who went in and had some pelvic floor work and she started to remember some past traumas. After she had had, like, there was scar tissue in there from a rape situation. So there is something about that area for so many women has just been closed off. And and is there a way for us to open it energetically back up again?

• 31:54Speaker 01

  Absolutely, I mean, let's just remember that the pelvic floor is like this hammock of muscles and like technically responsible for so many things like our bladder, our uterus, our rectum, all the things, but it's also like blood flow, Right. lubrication, orgasm, I mean, there's so many, and if we've had, you know, if, you know, we have a strong pelvic floor for a while, but then, yes, we hold on trauma, so what pelvic floor therapy is so interesting is, or is that when we, so a lot of women, when they first start having sex, they have something, and this goes on, they'll have like vulvodynia, vulvodynia, vulvodynia or vaginismus, have you heard about this? It's very common that women have pain, so the first time they have sex or put a tampon in,

• 32:35Speaker 01

  they clench, they start clenching and they're tightening, so there's many women who've gone through life, and maybe it was because they had sexual assault, but maybe it could just be because something happened where they had fear, and the first thing we do is think about it, when something happens, we tense, right? So imagine if you had, it could be any age really, but a young age, you start tensing, tensing, these pelvic floor muscles then are really, really tight, and so when you go to have sex or put a tampon or just having orgasm or anything, you have now in a patterning of a tightness around it, and then you, so for a lot of women who don't, and many women don't even have sensitivity, so it's all the pelvic floor, so it is, so to your point, it is deeply connected to our nervous system and our emotions,

• 33:16Speaker 01

  in fact, I would say it's the most important thing, so what I love is that you could go pelvic floor physical therapist, you could also release it on your own, you don't have to go see another doctor, you could just work on breathing and releasing, and there's like dilators you could buy, but I almost feel like you could buy like a jade egg, there's certain things, practices you could do at home to release the trauma that has happened to your pelvic floor, there are sexological body work, where you could go see somebody who, actually, it's one-way touch, where they put their fingers inside of you, or they help you guide through, I've had this practice done before when I was in grad school, we had all do all the things, and a woman, a friend of mine in class would work with me where I would have my feet up in circles,

• 34:00Speaker 01

  and I thought I was feeling, I've never had trauma or anything, but you'd start to feel, and she'd go, Like around our vulva, one o'clock, two o'clock, three o'clock. And you'd realize that like there'd be areas that have a little bit of pain. Like, oh, and then you realize if you apply a little bit of pressure to that area, then you just hold it for a minute, the nerve ending starts to unwind around it. And that pleasure goes, that, that, that, that pain can go away. So women have a lot of pain that they don't even know about that are living internally, externally. So there's a lot of different practices that can help release that. So sexological bodywork, pelvic floor physical therapy, just frigging dancing and breathing and moving your body. Yep. Opening, opening, opening. Yeah. This is why we love yoga or we love Pilates.

• 34:44Speaker 01

  Although again, sometimes that's a little bit more tensing and relaxing still. But I have found yoga to be very helpful, to dance to be helpful. Doing kegels, you know, kegels are also really helpful. But then, believe it or not, I've been doing this so long that kegels also became controversial. Because women, I know, Mindy, to tell people to do kegels, over creating, overdoing kegels can, can, can create more tension. But at the end of the day, I love a good kegel exercise. I love using kegel weights. I used to wear them when I would go to the gym. They're these little balls, if you know about these kegel balls that you put inside of you. They're like progressive weights. And then I was like, I remember I used to go to spin class or go for a hike. Well, they're inside of me, so you're naturally strengthening your pelvic floor. Our pelvic floor is responsible for pleasure and orgasm.

• 35:28Speaker 01

  And over time, like everything else, it does drop. So that can be really helpful, you know, movement practices. So there's to help with circulation and then also toys and tools. So vaginal weights, vibrators designed for pelvic floor health. Even sitting on things like that chair, do you know about the M. Sella chair?

• 35:47Speaker 01

  I love this chair. It's by a company called BTL. And like a lot of times your doctor has it, gynecologist's office has it. And it's really a game changer for women experiencing urinary incontinence or weakening pelvic floor. It does 22,000 kegel exercises in 30 minutes. It's using electromagnetic stimulation. You sit on this chair for 20 minutes. Three times a week is a protocol and it can be a game changer. There's all these, you could do it holistically on your own. You could go to see a therapist, you could go sit in a chair. What I love is that we're finally talking about the power of the pelvic floor and that women can realize that. Talk about our sexual intelligence or sex IQ. It's not just one thing.

• 36:25Mindy Pelz?

  Yep.

• 36:26Speaker 01

  I think since there's a lot of shame around sex, like what's the one thing I can do? And unfortunately, taking your hormones is important, but also releasing past trauma is important.

• 36:35Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 36:36Speaker 01

  You know, just the foundation of our pleasure for women. It's where their arousal builds, but it's also where it can die. So.

• 36:42Mindy Pelz?

  So one of the other things I've heard from a lot of women, including, including myself, as they go through menopause, I call it the neurochemical armor sheds, like estrogen, testosterone, progesterone are going down, but then you've got all the dopamine and oxytocin and serotonin. It's just like this shedding that happens. And a lot of women start to have memories of sexual trauma. And I have heard this over and I'll just use myself as an example. I had a memory this year that I, my brain had completely blocked out where I was actually raped by a frat boy in college. And I didn't remember it until I slowed down. I've been doing a lot of

• 37:23Mindy Pelz?

  work on myself and all of a sudden this like literally this memory came back in all the detail, a little bit like the tell, if you've, if you've read that book, the tell. And it was like, whoa, what do I do with this? And I started to talk to my husband about it. I talked to other women about it and I am not joking, Emily, one by one, women came to me and they're like, me too, me too. I didn't realize it until I got into, into my post-menopausal years until things shifted and all of a sudden I started to remember, or like in my case, I, I thought it was my fault. I was drunk, I was drunk and I was like, of course I shouldn't have been in that guy's

• 38:05Mindy Pelz?

  room. What was I thinking? But then when I actually remembered the details, I was like, that wasn't okay whether I was drunk being drunk wasn't an excuse. So what do you do? What do women do to get that sensation of wanting to have sex again if they are remembering a trauma like that?

• 38:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. Thank you for sharing that, Biddy, because it is so, so common. And I think it's because to your point, you slowed down. You gave yourself time in perimenopause at this stage of life to really slow down and be safe in our bodies. Most of us have been running. I mean, I have a similar, similar remembering, not around sexual health, but just around just a lot of things now that I've slowed down. It's like, oh, I've been in fight or flight for my entire life. I, I've had to make it like a man, work like a man, working since I was 13, getting it done, getting it done. I think that women can, we go, go, go, go, go. And then finally we're like, wait, I, I want to slow down. So there's a knowing that comes up. So at first, the thing is having self compassion for ourselves and, and, and just realizing like honestly, feeling the feelings, letting it move through you,

• 39:06Speaker 01

  crying, talking to people, sharing it, seeing a trusted therapist. For me, somatic therapy and EMDR, so trauma therapy has been really, EMDR therapy has been a game changer for me. So I love EMDR therapy and people, if they want to find a, a EMDR therapist, it's like emdria.org, E M D R I A dot org. Um, just it's basically you're rewiring the neural pathways in your brain to not be, to have a lesser reaction to whatever trauma you had. Somatic therapy is really helpful where I've learned to feel where I used to like kick my therapist out of the room. I'd be like, I'm not going to this therapist. When they would say, where do you feel this in your body? Like 25 years ago? I was like, that's all I feel is anxiety. I have no room for this conversation. But now I realize,

• 39:49Speaker 01

  oh no, the emotions do live in my body. And I've actually had to learn to feel the range of emotions. So I would just say to women, go be patient. You don't have to want, like, what if I just gave everyone a permission slip to say, today is the first day of the rest of your sex life? What if today your sex life starts? What if it was never, what if we all say that it was never that, it wasn't really what you wanted before? You didn't really choose it? Not even because of you, because of your women, your grandmothers and your mother and grandmothers and grandmothers and ancestors. And most sexes never worked for women ever since the beginning of time. And if that's the case, then we're reclaiming, we're we're birthing, we're having the best sex, we can do it today. So to say like, like it's okay and forgiving ourselves, forgiving of the past and saying, okay, but now I'm making,

• 40:32Speaker 01

  I am making peace with my body. Today I'm getting to know her. Well, who is she? What does she want? What does she like to eat? What does she like to do? What feels good or what kind of touch? So that's why I love like a somatic, like I do exercise with couples where I'm like, let's just slow down for a minute and see like, when you close your eyes and you take your right hand and rub your left, your left elbow, or your hand, like say that if you take my right hand, and you rub it around your inner left hand, like the inner palm. And you think, oh, what is it actually? I'm giving myself touch. What does it feel like? I literally slowed down. I think, what does it feel like to touch my hand? And you realize, I have a lot of sensitivities. And then I ask people to say, is it more sensitive on your palm or the tips of your fingers?

• 41:12Speaker 01

  And we, like, I'm saying, we're gonna get Mike, we're gonna go slow here and I'm gonna learn to rebuild my ability to, to feel things in my body. My body was very, Oh, well said. I didn't feel anything for a long time. I was, I had to rebuild sensitivity. So I think to women, I'd say like, get to know it right now. That's why I love masturbation. That's why I love vibrators, because not even on your own, not even on your genitals. Take a vibrator and rub it on your inner elbow, your thighs, a little bit coconut oil and just wake up your body again. Shaking, movement, dance, swimming, whatever it is to movement is so important. And then movement, releasing the anxiety around movement and breathing, and breathing into your pelvic floor. Like,

• 41:53Speaker 01

  breath work is so important. I think we all know how important it is, but I love the exercise of breathing in. And then when you're doing that deep breath, and you get to the top of that breath, you do a kegel. And you do a little kegel, which is those peace-dapping muscles, responsible for the start and flow of urine, if we don't know. And when you do that little kegel, you are awakening your arousal systems. You're connecting your breath to your pelvic floor, maybe for the first time. Right. And then you're waking, and then when you're breathing, you're breathing it through your body, then you're releasing, you're breathing it, you have to move sexual energy through your body. Because most of our energy is stagnant and stale and just not even like awakened energy. Yeah. Now we're trying to get in bed with our partners and this thing hasn't had a pulse since nineteen, for thirty years.

• 42:36Speaker 01

  It's literally, and for your case, right? And I'm with you, we're at the same age. So it's like, holy shit, what happened? So and even in my twenties, I'm always learning more. I'm always going, there's more, there's more to be awakened. So I would tell women today can be the day, today you can start. And I'm telling you that also at our age, we probably already know, like if I told you, take a moment and think about what would make you feel right now, you, you might be able to come up with it on your own. It's less pressure. I want to turn off my phone. I want to be in nature. I want to be unencumbered. I want to take a long bath. Like that's why baths became so cliche, like take a bath, take yourself on a date, get a bike. For 20 years, I was saying to you, like, oh, really? Should I take a bath? But there's a reason why, because a bath is calming your nervous system. A bath, you can't do anything else when you're in your bath. That's why we left saunas too.

• 43:20Speaker 01

  So maybe it's a sauna, it's probably not the cold plunge, but it's a sauna. Not the cold plunge, but I know.

• 43:25Mindy Pelz?

  That's for afterwards, baby. Or that's for your partner, if you can't, if you're not in the mood.

• 43:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. But don't do that. Do the things that make us feel alive and awakened. I know that when I do my sauna, if I do it for five days, I feel more aroused. I feel more, I body, I breathe in the sauna. So does that?

• 43:43Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah. What I heard in that is get your senses of your body back on track. That's that's really beautiful. I love the idea of taking a vibrator to your arm or or just understanding what like that kind of light sort of like sensation, that touch that is sort of stimulating, like what does that feel like? Because I, I mean, I can only say for my 55 year old body, and I know every woman's different, is the, yeah, the quality of orgasm is, is less. And it, that's not fun. Like it's, it sucks actually.

• 44:21Mindy Pelz?

  And I don't know if what we need to do to bring the, that, that sensation back. So I like this idea of of getting yourself, you're anchored into the sensuality of your body. Is there, is there anything we can do about the lack of, of orgasm intensity? Is there any way to bring that to a new level?

• 44:44Speaker 01

  Well, remember I said the first day of your sex life starts today? What if we're not even comparing it to the past? We don't want to compare my body to my 20-year-old body. I don't want to compare myself to the food I was eating 20 years ago, to the relationships I had 20 years ago, and maybe the sex I was having, who I was comparing it to isn't even worthwhile for conversation right now because we're already talking about our pelvic floor might be a little bit weaker, we're on hormones, all the things. But I think it's daily arousal practices, getting to know your body when it feels good. First, I would say even for five minutes, because everything I'm learning now is it's all blood flow. If our blood flow, this is if you have a penis too, whether you have a penis or a vulva, we are having blood flow challenges. So whatever we can do to maintain our tissue health, toys that increase circulation, these are just some ways to do it right now.

• 45:28Speaker 01

  And I would say get out of the compare and despair, but into the discovery, exploration, and creativity. And so, daily arousal practice, toys that increase our circulation, so vibrators, suction toys. The reason why these pulsating toys, do you know about these toys?

• 45:42Mindy Pelz?

  Tell me.

• 45:43Speaker 01

  Oh, Mindy. When it either...

• 45:44Mindy Pelz?

  I don't, tell me, please.

• 45:46Speaker 01

  No, Mindy, I'm giving you the biggest care package when I see you in LA. When are you coming?

• 45:50Mindy Pelz?

  End of September, I'll be there.

• 45:53Speaker 01

  Okay, let's just meet up unless you need them now.

• 45:55Mindy Pelz?

  No, that sounds great.

• 45:57Speaker 01

  There's these suction toys that came out about 10 years ago that are a game changer for women's sexuality because it literally is, they, it's pleasure, air stimulation, whatever, on your clitoris and it creates a little suction. So it's literally rewired.

• 46:11Mindy Pelz?

  Oh, it's getting blood flow.

• 46:12Speaker 01

  It's getting the blood flow rolling again. So it's helping with blood flow. And not just on your clitoris, but on your entire vulva. I'm looking for my vulva puppet, which is usually sitting next to me, but it's not right, it's summer, it's on vacation. But I have a puppet. I was going to show you that you move it through your entire vulva and you move it around and you will find that if you get one of these, I love the Womanizer or the WeVibe Touch. There's some great ones.

• 46:34Mindy Pelz?

  It's suctioning, so it's like bringing blood flow into that area. That, as opposed to like just stimulating that area.

• 46:41Speaker 01

  As opposed to

• 46:42Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 46:43Speaker 01

  The vibrator that's like No, this is suction. This is working with your body.

• 46:47Mindy Pelz?

  Beautiful.

• 46:47Speaker 01

  You will find most women I have found are like, Oh, I'm good. I've got it back. She's back. I know her. I know her in ways I never knew before. So that's why I want to say women are like, it's not as intense anymore. I would say that intense needs even the word like, but was it pleasurable or was it intense? And was the intense orgasm really that great? And have you really had a great orgasm? Like this is a learned, listen, we are not, sexuality, learning to be good at sex or enjoy sex or have orgasms is a skill set.

• 47:15Mindy Pelz?

  Right.

• 47:15Speaker 01

  And it's not one where we were ever taught. So I'm saying right now we are learning it together. We are learning like, you know, and then the next thing around that is for, so the first step would be restoring blood flow and sensitivity. So we've got a daily arousal practice. We've got toys and increased circulation, topical therapy. So this is where the vaginal estrogen comes in. This is where lubricant comes in. This is non hormonal moisturizers that can help restore that sort of plumpness. There's a lot now. I mean, you know, there's some stem cell ones. I mean, I get sent, you probably get a lot of supplements sent to you. I get like every vaginal product sent to me.

• 47:46Mindy Pelz?

  I bet.

• 47:46Speaker 01

  And penis products. So I'm just, it's crazy. Five years ago, there was nothing, but now there's like so much innovation in women's pelvic floor health, which I love.

• 47:54Mindy Pelz?

  And then How could, how do you know which cream to do? I mean, that I can, it's that, it sounds like face cream. Like if I've got stem cells, I've got estrogen. I mean, do you have some on your website that are like your tried and tried?

• 48:04Speaker 01

  I do. I would go to sexwithemily.com. I have a store called, it's a shop with Emily. It's on my website. I have so many articles on the best

• 48:12Mindy Pelz?

  Beautiful.

• 48:12Speaker 01

  potions and lotions and products that you can buy to help you because it's changing all the time and it gets a little bit overwhelming even for me. So I've tested them all. You can try them out. You can, I can give you some when you come, Mindy, you'll try them out too. But the great thing is that we are now being supported.

• 48:27Mindy Pelz?

  Yes.

• 48:28Speaker 01

  Even beyond hormones, we're being supported because we understand that our vulvas also need help too. Not just our faces and we're so obsessed with our faces and the skins and we'll do with the lasers and the potions and lotions. But our vaginal skin, our vulva skin is also important and can be, it can, we can get more blood flow to it. Can, we can rebuild tissues. We can have the cells start to turn over in ways that will let it regenerate.

• 48:49Mindy Pelz?

  I

• 48:50Speaker 01

  And so before we just kind of died in the water, but that's not the case anymore.

• 48:53Mindy Pelz?

  Now, what about like orgasm and sex for just overall health? Because I've also been thinking about this, that there is sex to have connection with your partner. But then, like I heard many years ago on Oprah, this sounds so, this sounds so funny, but I heard her like interview somebody and she said, oh yeah, if you have like 300 orgasms a year, which would require that you're, you're having solo sex, that you actually can change vaginal health, you can change, you know, things like cervical, cervical cancer. And like, there's a health benefit to, that's beyond the connection benefit.

• 49:38Mindy Pelz?

  Now that was, that was years ago. What are the health benefits of sex and orgasm?

• 49:43Speaker 01

  Well, first off, I love that this was on Oprah 20 years ago because it's true. And I'm like, I'm always telling people, first off, okay, the first thing is just the feel good hormones that are released, just that, that cocktail of feel good, the oxytocin, the endorphins, the, the, the, all of the things, the serotonin, it, that is going to, it helps lower our blood pressure, it can help treat the nervous system, fight or flight, calm and connected. I know when I have an orgasm, I feel that way. So that's a great incentive. The first thing is just stress relief, pain reductions, we get endorphins, it's the natural painkillers. Our pelvic floor health, it can just help with like the rhythmic, the rhythmic, the rhythmic contractions that happen when we have an orgasm are also really, really good for us.

• 50:23Speaker 01

  We can also have better sleep, cardiovascular and brain health, because again, it's like blood flow. So, and, and think about it, it's like, I hate that saying, and I'm not even gonna say it, forget it, like the whole, you gotta use it.

• 50:34Mindy Pelz?

  Oh, no, but that's true. Yeah.

• 50:37Speaker 01

  I wanna say use it or lose it because that makes it seem like, you know why, okay, I'm gonna say it, use it or lose it. But why I'm gonna say it is not in relation to your partner. It's not because you owe your partner sex, it's because you owe yourself sex and you owe yourself touch. It's just like going to the gym. If you are not using your weights, if you're not exercising, I mean, I know this is what you talk, we all talk about, we gotta do the weights, we gotta do the weights, but. But then we're just completely ignoring this entire area. So this, our entire pelvic floor needs this kind of support. We need the, the orgasms, we need the lubrication, we need the, the toys, all the things to do to keep it, to keep it healthy. So this is why it's so good for us. It's good, has mood altering effects. It's good for our emotions. It's good for cardiovascular and brain for our health because also again, the blood flow.

• 51:20Speaker 01

  And then it's good for the oxytocin if we are thinking about our partners and the role, the relational wellbeing to have orgasms together. But again, if we haven't tried to, I'm telling you vibrator is the sure thing and there's so many to buy right now. And I know, well, I wouldn't say I don't need that. Well, like at this point in life, like I think you're going to realize that not only do you need it, you don't need it, but you really are going to like it.

• 51:40Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, right.

• 51:42Speaker 01

  It's going to enhance your body, your quality of life.

• 51:44Mindy Pelz?

  Have you, have you?

• 51:45Speaker 01

  But that's not.

• 51:45Mindy Pelz?

  Have you heard, I've heard people say before, oh, if you use a vibrator and it's too over stimulating, then we're at, when you're actually having sex. It's not, is that a myth?

• 51:55Speaker 01

  That's true.

• 51:56Mindy Pelz?

  Okay.

• 51:56Speaker 01

  No, you're not killing up because it's, listen, it's, I've never heard that anyone killed. Now, maybe, listen, just like anything, like if you went for a really long, like I, I used to run marathons. I ran, I was my, I busted my knees out. I wasn't extras. I wasn't stretching after. I had an iliotibial IT band. So I was, it was a nightmare. I didn't know this 30 years ago to stretch. If I'm going in with a strong vibrator and that's the only way I'm orgasming, well, then our pathways are getting used to or having an orgasm in that way. We didn't break anything. We didn't burn off any cells or any like neuropathways. We just have to say, you know what? I'm going to take the vibrator away. I'm going to rebuild touch again, using my fingers, using a lube, using a stimulating lotion, even CBD oil

• 52:36Speaker 01

  can be great for this. So more natural practice to kind of allow myself to become more comfortable, get used to another way of bringing myself pleasure. It just means we got used to something, but now we can get, we retrain our brain. It just means that we, yeah, got used to orgasming a certain way.

• 52:51Mindy Pelz?

  And if that's our, if that's our root chakra and we've been disconnected from our root chakra, which so many women have. Isn't the root chakra like the seat of creativity? I mean, it's, it's more than just we carried babies down there, but, but do we have, or have you seen women who start to have a relationship with this part of their body? And all of a sudden their creativity and their business, in their life, like, does it spill over?

• 53:19Speaker 01

  Everywhere.

• 53:19Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah. Talk a little bit about that because I don't think, yeah, I don't think we give that sex enough credit for that.

• 53:26Speaker 01

  No, I love that you're asking me this. It's kinda like, um, so what they call it now, I used to, I used to call, okay, so years ago I called it, and this is now, there's a whole movement around it, but I called it meditate masturbate manifest. So I have a practice, I even have candles or t-shirts that used to say that. What I mean by that is like, you do your little meditation, you get in your body, you masturbate, and at the point of orgasm, you are manifesting, you're like, I'm gonna orgasm, and I'm going to be in my creativity, and I'm gonna, I'm going to ask for what I want, I'm gonna feel as it already is, I'm going to bring in the source, I'm gonna, so it's all very, very connected. So sex, so now they call it, now it's like sex magic, basically, again, like sex magic, it's the intentional use of sexuality, arousal, orgasm, intimacy to manifest desire and heal

• 54:11Speaker 01

  parts of our body, and yes, it is creation, it is where our source is, and so I have 1,000% seen a connection between women who are more connected to their feminine, to their energy, having more abundance in their life, financially, emotionally, relationally, creatively. It, it's all, like, all blocks are related, like, how you do one thing is how you do everything. If you are completely blocked, you're like, I'm trying to come up with my next book, I'm trying to create my new podcast, I'm trying to do whatever it is, but you also sexually have to say, how's your sex life? Oh god, I have no time for that.

• 54:45Mindy Pelz?

  Right.

• 54:45Speaker 01

  Well, it's all source, it's all related, and the neuroscience is like, during orgasms, like, our blood, right, like, it floods with the dopamine, oxytocin, and all those things, creating a heightened focus, heightened focus, right? And so if you have the heightened focus and suggestibility at that time, that when you call in your greatest desires, your greatest creativity, at that moment of of source, of release, of connection, it would only make sense that that is when you're going to, you know, open up and plant a seed for manifestation.

• 55:14Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, that's so beautifully said, because one thing, there's such a, a, a, Movement of asexuality right now, not just, this isn't just in like menopause, but I just am hearing more and more, both men and women, but a lot of them are women. They're like, I'm done. And, and I keep thinking that nothing in the body is ever done by mistake. So if you still, you know, can orgasm, there's a reason for it. If you can orgasm at 75. And maybe that reason is more than just keeping a relationship alive. Maybe there's a health reason. And then what happens to the creativity of a culture that disconnects themselves from this root chakra?

• 55:57Mindy Pelz?

  And I think we have to zoom out and say, just because we have a term called asexuality now, I, I'm curious if people who are declaring asexual behavior are aware that there is a cutoff of creative flow. There is a health that you are actually damaging the health of your body by not having orgasms. Like, I think there's more to this asexual conversation that is not being had.

• 56:27Speaker 01

  I am 1,000% with you, Mindy. I've thought a lot about this because they say like 1% of the, but these are old studies, but 1% of the population is asexual. And maybe it's more right now, maybe there's current estimates between 1 and 3, but I'm with you. I always think, okay, but if we're talking about like life force, energy and source.

• 56:44Mindy Pelz?

  Right.

• 56:45Speaker 01

  There's got to be other things going on there. Maybe it was early trauma. Maybe it was sex became scary. Maybe it's the toxins in our environment and people being born with less testosterone and less energy. Like, there's so many things that have happened environmentally, socially, politically, spiritually, but I, I, I think that asexuality is limiting. Just thinking it's just about the fact that you don't have desire for sex and that you're cutting yourself off from actually a connection with yourself, because if you're not having sex with others, that's fine to be asexual, but, but I think it's, I think that saying like, but I actually still want to have a connection with myself.

• 57:16Mindy Pelz?

  Perfect, yes.

• 57:17Speaker 01

  Is the missing piece.

• 57:18Mindy Pelz?

  Yes. And that's what I, that's, I'm so happy you said that because you don't, it doesn't mean you need to go off and get a partner, but if you're 65 or 70 and you've just been like, nope, I'm done. My concern is that there's still an energy center there that's not being tended to and there's still a biological process that if it's if you're able to do it, are you are you are you actually creating more dis-ease in your body by not tapping into that?

• 57:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think so.

• 57:47Mindy Pelz?

  And I love the idea of the suction cups. That's phenomenal because that makes sense to bring all that that blood flow. But what what I worry about from a culture standpoint is I'm trying to just like you liberate women. And when we cut ourselves off from our root chakra, that is the opposite of freedom.

• 58:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:09Mindy Pelz?

  That is where we start to cage ourself and contract. And we need to bring back more opening so that we can fully express ourselves.

• 58:19Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. Absolutely. I love that, too. And then talking about this more with our friends and being like, usually we accept, yeah, I don't want any sex either. But like, not being complacent with that. And if you've ever maybe this is like I said, if you haven't really experienced this, maybe you've never you've lost a partner or you're now widowed or whatever stage of your life you're at, you think you don't need it. I encourage people, just like they would with any workout routine or starting anything new, just dabble in this. Like, I don't mean to be like, you don't start watching porn and buying a bunch of toys, but get curious about what it feels like to give yourself pleasure, just to make yourself feel good. So.

• 58:51Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah. Well, you're amazing. You're like a wealth of information. Do people like corner you at parties and they're like, hey, I got a couple of questions. I get I get blood sugar questions. Your questions are probably a lot more interesting.

• 59:04Speaker 01

  It's the same, Mindy. It's the same. But I love it. I love it because it's always. Yeah, you got it. They do. But we used to have a cross. I think we did it to each other at dinner that time. And here we are, full circle. But yeah, they do. And I love what I do. I mean, so we just we just scratch the surface. And even talking to you, I've, you know, it's helpful, like even just so many more ways to talk about this to help women because it's so I just the message is like, yeah, you are not like, there's so much more to look. This could actually I've seen it. I'm doing it myself and my friends, like, we are not like, we are just learning right now. And I think the best of sex is yet to come.

• 59:34Mindy Pelz?

  Oh, it's beautiful. It's beautiful. Okay, well, people find you because I so I can I can tell you, I've purchased a few things off your website. And yeah, and it was really cool because I trust you. And so I was like, okay, what is she recommending for vibrators? What's going on? Like so you've it's not like walking into the porn shop in Vegas or like it you it's a real classy way in which you're you're showing people tools that can be beneficial.

• 1:00:00Speaker 01

  Thank you. I want people to feel safe. So yeah, it's at sexwithemily.com shop sex with Emily. It's all on the on the site. My podcast is Sex with Emily and it's 20th year. I have a membership of smart SX. You can find out about everything at Sex with Emily, all social media. I have a membership. It's a coaching membership where we help people. We have conversations like this, one on one and groups, helping people have the sex life that they always wanted. Because I know there's not, we don't always know where to go for that. But everything is sex with Emily. Find me there.

• 1:00:28Mindy Pelz?

  Amazing. You're incredible. And I will definitely reach out when I'm down in LA.

• 1:00:32Speaker 01

  I can't wait to see you in LA. Yeah, I got a whole bunch of things for you to try.

• 1:00:35Mindy Pelz?

  Excellent. Thank you. Love you so much. Appreciate you.

• 1:00:38Speaker 01

  Love you, Mindy. I'll see you soon.

• 1:00:40Mindy Pelz?

  Bye.

• 1:00:41Speaker 01

  Bye.

• 1:00:43Mindy Pelz?

  Thank you so much for joining me in today's episode. I love bringing thoughtful discussions about all things health to you. If you enjoyed it, we'd love to know about it. So please leave us a review, share it with your friends, and let me know what your biggest takeaway is.