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How do power dynamics play out in your marriage? What are the hidden power struggles getting in the way of your happiness and fulfillment within your marriage? How can we reclaim marriage from it’s history as a system of ownership and transform it into a container to create the kinship, belonging and security we all crave?

In this episode, we explore sex and power within marriages, and how you can come into a more consensual Power-With relationship with your spouse.

We talk about:

• the history of marriage as an institution of Power-Over
• what a Power-With relationship might look and feel like
• decision-making in marriages
• aligning your marriage to support your life goals and values
• how domestic labor and caretaking reflect power dynamics
• how withholding sex can be a unspoken power grab
• visions for equitable, consensual power dynamics within marriages

Want to weigh in on this episode, help us shape future episodes & get our personal support on your erotic journey? Join our membership community, The Pleasure Pod!

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In this encore episode we share the ten ways learning massage can make you a better lover. From learning how to use your hands to touch your lover’s most sensitive parts to communicating specific requests, learning massage together will not only bring the luxury of massage home, it will also transform the way you make love!

When you are ready to master the art of erotic touch with us, enroll in our Couples Massage Online Course!

This episode originally aired as episode 061 in 2014.

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Interoception is known as the “eighth sensory nervous system” of humans – and is perhaps the most important sense that you’ve never heard of!

Interoception is our human ability to feel the insides of our own bodies, thanks to the vast network of internal nerve receptors found throughout our internal body but especially concentrated around our heart and lungs, guts and pelvis. These internal nerve endings communicate vital information to us all day long.

How do you know when you have to use the bathroom? How do you know when you are hungry? Interoception!

But interoception is ALSO responsible for telling us how we FEEL. How do you know when you are angry? How do you know when you WANT something? Interoception!

In this episode we introduce you this incredible super power you already possess and share why interoception is a key erotic skill to develop.

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Check out this interactive version of Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions

More Resources On Interoception

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Transcript for Speaking of Sex Podcast Episode #375 : Feeling Myself : Discovering Erotic Interoception

Chris Maxwell Rose (00:00):
Welcome to Speaking of Sex with the Pleasure Mechanics. I’m Chris.

Charlotte Mia Rose (00:05):
I’m Charlotte.

Chris Maxwell Rose (00:06):
We are the Pleasure Mechanics and on this podcast, we have honest, explicit, soulful conversations about sex, love, relationship, pleasure and joy. Come on over to pleasuremechanics.com where you find all of our resources that have been developing for you since 2006. We’ve been creating online resources to support you in experiencing more pleasure, joy, connection and love in your life. Come on over to pleasuremechanics.com, you’ll find it all. And when you’re ready to dive deeper with us, go to pleasuremechanics.com/love.

Chris Maxwell Rose (00:46):
Many of you have been with us for years, listening to this podcast and taking in bits and pieces and maybe you sense that you are ready for more. Whenever that feeling arises for you, come on over to pleasuremechanics.com/love because we have so much to offer you. You’ll find it all there. On today’s episode, we’re continuing our miniseries on the master language of love, touch. Touch. We’re exploring touch over the next many episodes, diving deep into all of the ways we can touch and stimulate and arouse and thrill one another.

Chris Maxwell Rose (01:30):
But first, we wanted to drop in a second because so often when we talk about sensation and pleasure and touch, the first thing we think about is things coming from the outside in. Your lover stimulates you. You see a beautiful sight. You taste a rip peach and you respond to that external stimulus with pleasure. This is all super important and valid and we’re going to talk about all sorts of ways to stimulate one another, but there’s a whole realm of skills in receiving tough and experiencing pleasure that so often go overlooked.

Chris Maxwell Rose (02:12):
From our experiences as erotic masseurs, as professional somatic sex educators, we’ve witnessed all sorts of people receive touch. The skills of receiving touch really deserve their own study and practice. And today, we want to talk about the internal experience of sensation, how we feel our bodies from the inside. This is called interoception. I am super geeky about it, but when we share it with you today, we really want to break it down about the skills of developing interoceptive awareness, which we can think about as feeling myself. Can you feel yourself? Can you feel your internal state?

Chris Maxwell Rose (03:04):
Because if you can’t feel your inside body, if you can’t feel how you feel, how do you know what you want? How do you know if you want more or less pressure? How do you know if you want a beautiful spanking? It’s hard to know you want if you can’t feel what you’re feeling. It’s also hard to know when enough is enough or when you want more or less of something or what you are desiring. The ability to feel your desire is an interoceptive skill. To even know to ask for what you want, you have to be able to feel your feelings.

Chris Maxwell Rose (03:39):
And this realm, the eighth sensory system of humans, interoception, is not talked about very much. Very few of us ever think about how we feel, what we feel inside our bodies. So, we are going to get a little geeky about interoception and guide you through a few ways that you can increase your interoceptive awareness. In other words, get better at feeling yourself.

Charlotte Mia Rose (04:08):
Interoception is what tells us that we have to go to the bathroom or we’re hungry. So we get that information and then we do something with it.

Chris Maxwell Rose (04:16):
We get that information from nerve endings. It’s the same system that tells your body that something’s coming from the outside. A bug lands on your arm, sensory nerves experience that, send a signal to your brain and you swat it away. We have nerve endings on our insides, so it’s really important to know that. Sometimes we think, “Oh, it’s like this mysterious sense if I’ve got to pee.” No, those are sensory nerve ending being triggered by your full bladder. It’s a really incredible process, but I just wanted to interrupt you for a minute to really point out that they are nerve endings on our insides.

Charlotte Mia Rose (04:55):
It’s so cool. It’s so amazing.

Chris Maxwell Rose (04:57):
Amazing.

Charlotte Mia Rose (04:58):
We can strengthen that relationship between those nerve endings and our brain and our awareness and then so much becomes possible. When we bring this into the erotic realm, we can begin to track our arousal, our turnon, our climax and we’re paying attention to the sensations as they’re increasing and decreasing. We’re feeling emotions as that’s happening and we’re getting comfortable with all of that.

Chris Maxwell Rose (05:25):
So you mentioned emotions and it’s really important to know that interoception not only assists us with the basic biological functions of homeostasis, so telling you when you have to pee, telling you when you’re hungry, telling you when you’re thirsty, alerting you when you core body temperature gets too high or too low. All of these are kind of those basic survival functions of our internal animal body telling us what it needs and then our brain, on more or less conscious levels, registering those needs and being motivated to seek the resolution for those needs.

Chris Maxwell Rose (06:04):
You have to pee. Your brain gets that signal and you either get up from your desk and go pee right away or your brain can be like, “Okay, I am understanding I have to pee and I will get to it.” Those signals also have a scale of urgency. You feel more or less of these signals depending on both the urgency of the situation and your sensitivity to them. Hunger signals. You feel that rumbling in your stomach. You feel kind of a contraction of guts and you’re like, “Mm, food.” And if you start noticing these systems as they’re triggered, you start noticing how multisystem they are, how our body responds to these queues and we start thinking about food and then saliva might start coming and our whole body starts moving towards food.

Chris Maxwell Rose (06:59):
Now, it’s also really important to know that interoception is how we feel our feelings, how we feel our emotions. This is where it just gets really vast and really personal, but so important to start paying attention to. How do you know when you are angry? How do you know when you are afraid? When we start tracking the emotional process in our bodies, we become aware that emotions, feelings are deeply physical, multisystem processes of awareness. Later in the episode, we will share with you some practices. But what we become aware of is that as we start paying attention to our bodies, as we start bringing our awareness to our insides, we can start tracking these responses.

Chris Maxwell Rose (07:59):
We can start becoming in tune with how our body responds to different emotional states and this becomes a wealth of information and it also becomes a really important compass towards your desires. And later on, I’m going to share practices and strategies for using this incredible super power of interoception to know what you want, to answer that question of, “Well, what do you want to do tonight?” “Well, I don’t know.” “What should I….” “I don’t know.” Most people respond to “What do you want?” with a big old, “I don’t know.”

Chris Maxwell Rose (08:39):
How do we know what we want? How do we know what our sexual desires are? How do we differentiate them from fantasies? This is all also the realm of interoception, so I just want to draw that link because it’s so important to know that interoception is a deeply erotic skill. And interoception has been around for hundreds of years. It’s been scientifically named for over 100 years, but only recently is it being studies. The biggest place it’s being studied is with autism research because sensory processing disorders have a lot to do with autism and how it presents in individuals.

Chris Maxwell Rose (09:20):
Erotic interoception has not really been studied. And when it is studied, it’s very hard to study because it’s such a deeply personal sense of what you feel inside. But just because it’s hard to study, doesn’t mean it’s hard to practice. It’s incredibly easy to practice and it gives us such big rewards. Just like any other skill, just like anything else we want to become aware of a deeper level, by practicing the skills of interoception, by bringing language to the experiences on the inside of your body, this skill can be strengthened. And in my experience, this is one of those sexual superpowers that as we strengthen it, it informs our entire erotic experience.

Chris Maxwell Rose (10:09):
That’s why we wanted to put this in our touch series because it’s really about how we are touching ourselves on the inside. When you are excited, when you get aroused and your heart starts beating, can you feel it? Because that heart beating faster is your body telling you something. Likewise, when there is something you don’t want to do and you respond with disgust and fear, can you feel that wrenching inside? Can you feel your whole body go, “No.”? And once you feel it, can you bring voice to that? Can you express the awareness you have about your inside emotional state?

Chris Maxwell Rose (10:56):
You can see how over time, this ability to go towards what you want, to say no to what you don’t, to pay attention to how you feel and how your internal body is responding is just an incredible erotic power that we all have that really is part of what modulates social connection. The ability to feel what you’re feeling, express that clearly and read what other people are feeling based on their clear expression is kind of the fabric of human connection and we’ve lost touch with this.

Chris Maxwell Rose (11:33):
There is a lot of different speculations about modern life and technology and the pace of information and all of the why’s, but I think we can all agree that a lot of us are really out of touch with ourselves. We don’t really know how we’re feeling all the time. We can’t really track our emotions. We can’t really feel the inside of our body very well. We do not eat based on how food feels on the inside of our body. The more we can get in practice of getting in tune with how we feel and then expressing those feelings, being motivated to listen to our bodies asks and wants, by changing our behavior. This is really radical terrain for all of us, but we need to remember this is one of our most basic human capacities. We are designed for this. Any amount of being out of touch with this system is part of what causes so much discord amongst us and within us.

Chris Maxwell Rose (12:39):
We want to invite you in to practicing erotic interoception because you can practice this in all sorts of ways, but part of our theory is why not practice in our most pleasurable realm, in the realm that’s really charged with a lot of energy and excitement so we can really feel and then we can map it out to the rest of our lives.

Charlotte Mia Rose (12:59):
I love it. So often our sexuality is determined by what we feel like we should be doing. This is a way to get out of our head and feel the sensations in our body and allow that to direct or inform what we’re requesting, what we’re desiring, what we’re doing. One of the amazing pieces about cultivating the skill of interoception is being able to be with the feelings as we’ve talked about. And during sex, there are so many different emotions that come up; anxiety, embarrassment, shame. When we practice being with these feelings as we’re increasing the sensation of arousal, as we’re playing with climax, we begin to be okay with those feelings being there and still allowing turnon to happen.

Charlotte Mia Rose (13:49):
This is a skill that a lot of us want and need to practice in order to be able to have more fulfilling sex.

Chris Maxwell Rose (13:56):
That’s so much about being able to feel more than one thing at once. I think that’s one of the things as you drop in and start tracking your emotions, start noticing what you’re feeling, you can notice that you’re feeling both shame and turnon. Some of our emotions are louder than others, some of our systems are louder than others and sometimes we allow one experience to shut us down or high jack us. Part of the proficiency that Charlotte’s talking about is, “Oh, I’m noticing my body shame respond, but I’m also noticing that my lover is really turned and they don’t seem to be noticing. And so, I’m going to notice that and keep going.” That is part of what we’re talking about when we say expanding your capacity to feel.

Chris Maxwell Rose (14:48):
It’s not that the shame goes away, it’s that you feel it and you feel it in context of everything else that’s going on. And over time, you become in active dialog with your feelings. As shame rises, you can say, “You are here, but you don’t get control,” and then it seems to dissipate. What we know about emotions and feelings is that most of them have a lifespan of about a minute 90 seconds is kind of the organic lifespan of all emotions, all feelings. They run through us, then they’re complete and our body looks for what’s next. We are novelty seeking engines. Our bodies don’t want to linger in any one emotion too long.

Chris Maxwell Rose (15:32):
What happens is an emotion comes up, our internal homeostasis is disturbed and then our brain becomes fixated on that emotion, starts thinking about the emotion, reinforcing that physiological response and then it thinks about it again and then the response comes and then it thinks about it. We get into this self fulfilling loop. Anger is a really good one to track this with. Are you still angry about what you thought you were angry about? Are you angry about the fact that you’re angry? Without check, emotions can take over and kind of become a fixation. With practice of going inside and noticing emotions, you can start finding the freedom from these self fulfilling loops.

Chris Maxwell Rose (16:21):
You can notice your anger. You recognize the fact that your heart is racing and then your brain gets a chance to be like, “What am I angry about? What am I feeling right now and why?” And then be motivated towards the action that will resolve that. You can’t always resolve why you’re feeling something, but there is something really inherent about recognizing the emotion, naming it, paying attention to the physiological systems that have been disturbed and then allowing your body to resolve them. That’s like the least sexy application of interoception I think, but it does really help us relationally and help us track what is causing this stir because so much of interoception is noticing what your body is feeling when things change.

Chris Maxwell Rose (17:11):
It would be impossible and it would be chaotic if our bodies felt every little thing that was going on inside. We can’t keep up with all of that information. We are tracking it. Be real, your body is tracking it all the time and responding to internal changes all the time and doing so much work on our behalf to keep us healthy and going, but our conscious mind is only drawing attention to things in moments of change or disruption or a shift. That’s the moment where we get to be curious about what our body is experiencing.

Chris Maxwell Rose (17:49):
A change is when your bladder gets too full and you have to pee. You’ll notice that. There’s a threshold point. If you keep pushing it and keep chugging water, you’ll notice the urgency get more and more intense until you either wet yourself or go potty. Right? I can’t believe I just said go potty.

Charlotte Mia Rose (18:07):
That’s something a kid would…

Chris Maxwell Rose (18:10):
Equally, like with thirst, you’ll notice it starting and then if you ignore it, it gets louder and louder and louder. How does this function with sexual desire? How does this function with you want? We need to pay attention to that and be able to track it because sometimes those feelings, if they get louder and louder, we don’t really know what to do with them. But often, what happens is we don’t even feel them in the first place. We don’t really notice our erotic interoceptive abilities. We don’t really notice all of the nerve endings on the inside of pelvis.

Chris Maxwell Rose (18:47):
We need to practice this. We need to start getting in touch with what it feels like to feel erotic desire, what it feels like as arousal builds in your body. Because as we get in touch with these capacities, then we can expand them. Once you notice what desire feels like, you then feel it more often. I just want to say that this is trained ignorance of our erotic capacities. We are taught to pay attention to hunger and thirst. It is social acceptable to say, “I’m sorry, I need to step out of this meeting because I need to use the restroom.” It is socially acceptable to feel your emotions and express in certain context. This is one of the places that you’ll… We’ll come back to this at some point around feeling big feelings, but you probably are more attuned to the feelings that are socially safe in your cultural context.

Chris Maxwell Rose (19:54):
If you come from a family where joy and revelry and celebration were really part of your life, you can probably feel that rise of joy, like, “Woo.” You know you what that feels like. If you came from a home with no joy, with no celebration, it might be hard for you. You can even walk into a party and be like, “Woo hoo.” Right? That’s not just personality, that is trained and conditioned interoceptive skills and the ability to express ourselves. Right?

Chris Maxwell Rose (20:26):
I want to draw attention here. There’s two parts. There’s awareness, feeling what you’re feeling and then expressing it. Bringing that into outward action and expressing. Erotic interoception, for most of us, is just completely untrained and punished, so trained in the direction of ignoring overriding not feeling. Trained in the direction of numbing it out. Because as youth, as children, if we had erotic feelings, if we had sexual feelings, if we had the internal feeling of horniness, we weren’t given permission to go resolve it. We weren’t given permission to express it and often we were punished if we did.

Chris Maxwell Rose (21:19):
We live in a culture that doesn’t model erotic interoception very well and so we need to practice this on purpose. We need to give ourselves a ton of forgiveness for not being able to feel when we’re turned on. So many people we talk to, like they don’t know when they’re sexually aroused. They don’t know when something feels good. There’s kind of this vague like, “Well, I think that feels,” or, “I think that’s what I want,” but it’s not specific and it’s not really a skill we have developed. So we’re going to do it together.

Charlotte Mia Rose (21:53):
And I love what that makes possible because you were talking about how it’s really important to be able to understand our desires, but it’s also really important to be able to feel the depth of pleasure, which is a related but separate skill that we can cultivate through similar practice. Because as we’re feeling more of the sensations that are being offered to us from ourselves or from another person, we’re able to feel pleasure more deeply.

Chris Maxwell Rose (22:19):
Well, I want to stop you because there’s two skills there and we’re going to get into the skill of receiving external stimulation and sensory pleasure that is provided to you from the outside. Right? Getting in touch with how it feels and the skills of communicating to receive the kind of touch you want, being able to stay present for touch, overcoming distractions, all of those things, but there’s this whole set of feeling what it makes you feel. Right? Because touching your clitoris or touching your penis can create surface external sensations that feel pleasant. Great.

Chris Maxwell Rose (23:02):
The internal experience of that, the building of arousal towards climax, the social and emotional meaning of sex, what are you feeling when you look down and see your partner’s lips around your cock and she looks up and you? That is not just sensation, there’s a world of feeling in there. And if you can’t track what you’re feeling and allow yourself to feel it, then you are kind of numbed out to that experience.

Charlotte Mia Rose (23:36):
Or you’re missing the full potential for sure.

Chris Maxwell Rose (23:38):
Yeah. Or it becomes really confusing. Interoceptive confusion is real. So sometimes, we mistake excitement for nervousness. Sometimes we mistake an overwhelm and a feeling of a heart opening joy overwhelm with fear. Right? We don’t have a very good sense always of how we’re feeling and our capacity for that feeling and so we can shut an emotion down.

Charlotte Mia Rose (24:09):
And then from there, we can take different actions that shut the experience down. So being able to be with the feelings and take the actions that you want to is really important to allow love connection, joy belonging to continue to grow instead of shutting off from it because we’re overwhelmed by what we’re feeling.

Chris Maxwell Rose (24:26):
Mm-hmm (affirmative). And being able to feel, as we’ve said, all of those different things that once, you might be in the throes of pleasure with your lover, not want it to stop, but a wave of grief comes up and you feel that in your body. And when you feel that sadness and the grief, what do you do? Do you shut down? Do you blame it on your partner? Do you feel like something is wrong with this experience, something is wrong with you? Or can you allow that feeling, feel it fully, allow it to pass through and let it open you up to new intimacy, new connection?

Chris Maxwell Rose (25:03):
Emotions and feelings are kind of mysterious, but they are also just part of who we are as human beings. The more comfortable and I want to say native we can get with them, the more we understand emotions are just part of who we are, how we connect, how we experience the world. They have wisdom and information for us. That wave of grief that comes through you and just is released on your orgasm might need to be felt, so feel it. We’re not very good at feeling all of the things our bodies want us to feel and then we’re wondering why we feel kind of confused and disconnected from ourselves. Let’s get more comfortable with feeling the richness of what is inside of us and not being scared of it.

Chris Maxwell Rose (25:54):
That’s another piece here is the more you know, the less scared you have to be and the more you trust your body to hold and contain all of this. This is what you are built for. You are meant to feel deeply, fully and you are designed to express that in ways that other humans can understand and then feel with you. Right? This is empathy. If your anger rises and you can express your anger in a sophisticated way. You can connect with other people who are angry about the same thing. If it just roils within you and you’re not in touch with it and you’re not really allowing it to express itself, all of that energy is just within you and it doesn’t expressed and therefore, it doesn’t get resolve and it cycles. So much of this is letting things move, letting things be felt and trusting that you have a big enough container to hold it all.

Charlotte Mia Rose (26:52):
Totally. It’s about letting yourself feel really deeply alive because all of these feelings moving through us are about living more deeply and being in connection with all that is and having a framework to understand, as Chris was saying, that the feelings are okay and they can move and we can still take the actions that we want to take. It doesn’t cut us off from being in relationship with other people because we’re overwhelmed by these feelings. So, there’s so much learning and if this feels like a lot, it makes sense. Our culture has taught us not to pay attention to all of these feelings and the sensations in our own bodies, so we’re all really kind of new at this. And so, please be gentle with yourself.

Charlotte Mia Rose (27:38):
This is something that we can practice. This is something that we can gain skill over and with. There’s excitement and potential and possibility and pleasure and connection on the other side of that.

Chris Maxwell Rose (27:50):
We mentioned the scale of urgency and the scale of intensity that we can feel these things. It’s worth mentioning that that’s also a level of individual proclivity and how individuals are wired amongst our hugely neuro diverse species. Some people feel some times much more intensely than others. This is why interoception is studied so much in the autism community because autism presents itself as hyper feeling or hypo feeling often. You’re on one end of the spectrum with ability to feel different inputs and express them or to read social inputs from other people, but we’re all on those neuro diverse spectrums somewhere.

Chris Maxwell Rose (28:37):
You might be feeling like, “Oh, I already am such a big feeler.” This practice is still for you because it can get you more sophisticated with how you feel about intensity. Some of us just inside feel constantly like a glitter thing shaken up and everything is just constantly moving and it’s overwhelming. It’s an overwhelming amount of information. Other people feel almost nothing inside and can barely feel when they have to pee or eat or drink, can barely feel sexual desire. Other people are distracted by it all day long. So wherever you are on that, practicing these skills with us is what helps you become more fluent in them, more sophisticated with them and helps you kind of even out your skills across the spectrum.

Chris Maxwell Rose (29:26):
We’re been talking a lot about practice. Last week on the podcast, we announced our new membership community called The Pleasure Pod, which you can find at pleasuremechanics.com/pod. A big part of The Pleasure Pod community is Pleasure Practices Library. So often on this podcast, we talk to you about these theories and ideas, but we don’t have the opportunity to give you the tools to practice. The Pleasure Practices Library is our ever expanding library of pleasure practices, solo and partnered explorations to develop your skills of pleasure, joy, connection and eroticism.

Chris Maxwell Rose (30:14):
Pleasure practices can be explored at your own pace, on your own time, but they’re generally like five to 20 minute practices that you can do again and again. We guide you in developing these specific skills. Think about practices and their relationship with your sexual pleasure as learning to play basketball. You don’t just start playing the game, you pick up a ball. You learn how it bounces. You learn how to pass. You learn how to shoot. Even professional basketball players practice the basics over and over again. It gives us the muscle memory and the skills, the capacity in our body to bring these skills into action during game time. Right?

Chris Maxwell Rose (31:00):
As we practice pleasure, in and of itself, it should be fun. Just like throwing a ball around with your friend is a fun way to spend a few minutes. The practice itself will be pleasurable and interesting and exciting, but what we’re also doing is developing the skills to bring into the in real time eroticism of our lives, into our relationships, into bed, into sex, into our orgasms. The idea of pleasure practice has emerged over the past 14 years as we’ve been teaching sex and noticing that we can really pull all of this apart, operationalize the different skills of pleasure, practice them and become better lovers to ourselves, to our partners, to the world.

Chris Maxwell Rose (31:50):
We invite you to practice pleasure with us. Join The Pleasure Pod, become a member of our global community of pleasure seekers and you’ll also be unlocking members only resources, direct contact with Charlotte and I and so much more. Come on over to pleasuremechanics.com/pod. And for this week in The Pleasure Practices Library, what we’re going to be adding is a few different practices. The first practice just dropping in and feeling our bodies, Charlotte guides you through a practice that you can do over and over again to really feel the internal landscape of your body and start mapping it. And then, we’re going to invite you into a practice where you pay attention during arousal. When you pay attention during orgasm, what can you notice about your internal states during these heightened experiences?

Chris Maxwell Rose (32:48):
For me, this is where so much of the really interesting information comes up. When you pay attention during a heightened state, it’s like you’re on an information super highway with your brain. You really get a lot of great information when you pay attention during a highly aroused state. And, it’s again, one of those skills that will make you way more orgasmic, way more fun in bed over time. But we’re going to start with The Pleasure Practice.

Charlotte Mia Rose (33:15):
I’m just so excited about this because it is such a clear, simple way for people to be guided through an experience of being able to feel more pleasure and then share more pleasure and gain more proficiency. We all want to be better at sex and be having more fun during sex. These are really tangible, practical ways to be able to build these skills and I’m so excited for us all to do this together.

Chris Maxwell Rose (33:41):
Mm-hmm (affirmative). When we say together, you’re in your own home. You’re doing it at your own pace, but you’re supporting in the community. We are there to root you on, to answer any questions and then we’re going to provide interactive ways to share your experience so we can map them alongside all of the other pleasure seekers in our community. Through these tools, over time we’ll be able to track patterns and notice what is happening in the erotic body that is shared between us. Right?

Chris Maxwell Rose (34:12):
It becomes really interesting to map your erotic experience alongside other people’s and find the pattens. This is what we’re doing in The Pleasure Pod. Come on over to pleasuremechanics.com/pod and you will find the options for joining. We really want this to be accessible and inviting for all of our podcast listeners because so many of you have been listening to us for years, but have not had the opportunity to be guided in physical practice in transformational skills. These are the things we bring to our high end coaching sessions, but now we want to share them with the whole community and really motivate us all to practice more, to dig in with these skills and notice how we can expand our capacity for feeling pleasure, for feeling joy and for connecting as erotic beings.

Chris Maxwell Rose (35:11):
Yes, pleasure join us at pleasuremechanics.com/pod. The Pleasure Pod is open to everyone. All bodies are welcome and we hope you will join us. That’s pleasuremechanics.com/pod. We are building out so many beautiful offerings for you there and curating the 14 years of resources we’ve developed for you as the Pleasure Mechanics. It’s really lovely to see it coming together and we want your beautiful body there. Pleasuremechanics.com/pod for this week’s pleasure practice and so much more.

Chris Maxwell Rose (35:49):
All right. I’m Chris.

Charlotte Mia Rose (35:50):
I’m Charlotte.

Chris Maxwell Rose (35:51):
We are the Pleasure Mechanics-

Charlotte Mia Rose (35:53):
Wishing you a lifetime of pleasure.

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What is the master key to more pleasure, joy and connection? What if there was one skill you could learn to unlock way more relaxation, arousal & orgasmic bliss – not to mention loving connection with every human you love?

After over 370 Speaking of Sex Podcast episodes, we are returning to our roots, the spark that started it all for us – our love of TOUCH, and using touch as a language of love.

Join us as we kick off a new podcast series, a deep dive into the skills of giving and receiving erotic touch. You’ll find the complete series and more at PleasureMechanics.com/touch

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Transcript for Speaking of Sex Podcast Episode #374: The Key To Pleasure and Connection

Chris Maxwell Rose (00:01):
Welcome to Speaking of Sex With the Pleasure Mechanics. I’m Chris.

Charlotte Mia Rose (00:05):
I’m Charlotte.

Chris Maxwell Rose (00:06):
We are the Pleasure Mechanics, and on this podcast we have honest, explicit, soulful conversations about sex, love, relationships, and the experience of these bodies of ours. Come on over to pleasuremechanics.com, where you will find all of our resources that we have been creating with love and reverence for you since 2006. We have been the Pleasure Mechanics devoted to creating resources for your erotic pleasure and fulfillment. Come on over to pleasuremechanics.com, where you will find all that we have to offer, and when you’re ready to dive a little deeper with us go to pleasuremechanics.com/love, where you will find easy ways to step in and go a little deeper with us, rooting you on every step of the way.

Chris Maxwell Rose (01:02):
It is July 2020. We are midyear in this unforgettable year of a global pandemic, of popular uprisings against police brutality, of the movement for Black Lives Matters swelling into a global call for justice. This is an unforgettable year of change, of turmoil, of possibility, and our hearts are with you. Wherever you are in the world we are with you. We are so grateful to be receiving your stories. Our love and care is with you no matter what you are going through, and we really hope that you know that and feel that. Wherever you are in this journey, you are not alone.

Chris Maxwell Rose (01:51):
There is so much unknown ahead for all of us, but what we do know is that we have each other. We have each other here in the Pleasure Mechanics community, but also look around to the people in your life for support, for care, for love. Remember that whatever is overwhelming you right now, you are not alone. Whether that’s emotional overwhelm, financial stress, parental stress, isolation and touch, starvation, whatever you are feeling, it is being felt by millions and there is some solace in that.

Chris Maxwell Rose (02:31):
We are here for you. Our inbox is open. And starting today, we’re going to also be inviting you into a new opportunity to get closer with us and join our community so we can be in more active dialogue and support you through this year of transformative change for us all. We’ll tell you more about that opportunity for the Pleasure Mechanics community, what we’re calling the pleasure pod, but today we want to open up a conversation about what really is at the core of everything we do is the reason Charlotte and I started Pleasure Mechanics all those years ago in 2006, after meeting one another, and is really at the foundation of everything else we offer.

Chris Maxwell Rose (03:22):
You’ll notice on this podcast, we go to great lengths to talk about the complexity of human sexuality. We talk about the relational issues, the physical stuff, the emotional and mental health elements of eroticism and sexuality. And underneath all of this, when we’ve been talking recently about how we want to recalibrate the show and deepen our commitment to the world and show up even more fully for you all, we went back to the core of what we do, and we want to open up now a series on this podcast to dive in deep to our favorite topic what we believe is the key to pleasure, connection and joy. And that key is touch. Touch.

Charlotte Mia Rose (04:17):
Touch is so essential and important for all of us, for our individual bodies and our health, for our connections with those we love and care about, for our sense of belonging. I mean the benefits and the importance of touch in our life cannot be overstated. It has been a part of how our species has kept alive over the generations.

Chris Maxwell Rose (04:43):
Not part of; it is.

Charlotte Mia Rose (04:46):
It is.

Chris Maxwell Rose (04:47):
It is how our species exists. What does touch mean when we talk about touch? In this series, we’re going to be talking about all kinds of touch; touch that arouses us and thrills us, touch that comforts us and holds us in the hardest of moments, touch that connects us with other human beings, but also touch that brings us deeper into communion with ourselves and the entire world around us.

Chris Maxwell Rose (05:19):
When we say touch, let’s start by defining touch. And what Charlotte just said about touch being foundational to the human species, touch is the first sense to emerge in our human bodies, and every other sense is a specialized version of touch. Touch is what allows us to not only mate, the pleasure of touch creates reproductive behaviors. And we’ll talk about that too, rest assured. But also touch is how we survive, how we seek out the nipple to breastfeed, how we connect and bond parent to infant and keep our infants alive. And it turns out that touch, touch of all kinds input onto the sensory nerve endings in our body is essential for all wellbeing and survival as human bodies.

Chris Maxwell Rose (06:19):
We will talk later about touch starvation and what that means when the capacity for touch and connection to our sensory environment is taken away from us. Human beings have a failure to thrive under those conditions. That’s been studied very well in children and babies, but it’s true for adults too. The deprivation of touch is a form of torture. Perhaps all of us are feeling little threads of this right now, as we are three months into social distancing and quarantine, a lot of our avenues of casual social touch have been cut off from us. The stress and the turmoil of our lives have changed our erotic lives for a lot of us, and a lot of us are feeling, touch starved, a longing, a hunger in our bodies for the connection and contact that makes us human, that makes us thrive.

Chris Maxwell Rose (07:20):
Touch, when we think about this word touch, what does it mean? It means contact. It means our body meeting our environment in space. Touch is one of the most poetic words. We use it for all sorts of things. That idea of really touched me. You might want to touch on that in your talk. You’re losing touch with reality. We use this word to remind us all the time of how we connect and relate to the world around us and how important that is on every level from physical, to emotional, to intellectual, all of our feelings. This is the world of touch.

Chris Maxwell Rose (08:04):
So how did we become obsessed with touch? Why is touch so important to our understanding of human sexuality and what can we do to start getting in touch with our sense of touch? These are some of the things we’re going to be touching on today. And in upcoming episodes, we will be taking much deeper dives into all of the ways we can use touch, explore touch, get in touch with our capacity to feel.

Chris Maxwell Rose (08:34):
In 2006, when Charlotte and I met, we met in a sex education training, and one of the things we had in common was that we were both trained in massage. When we fell in love and started dating, touch and massage was just foundational to the way we interacted, the way we made love, to the way we expressed our feelings for one another. And it was out of that cauldron of erotic touch sharing that Pleasure Mechanics was born, that we had the idea for this business and we had the fuel to start it, and we had the commitment and vision to carry us all the way to present day 14 years later.

Chris Maxwell Rose (09:19):
I want to ask you Charlotte, when did you first become aware of your love for touch? Why did you decide to go to massage school? And what were you aware of when we met and touch became such a part of how we were making love?

Charlotte Mia Rose (09:34):
This is so delicious to think about. I have always loved touch. I come from a very huggy family. My mom used to give us back massages before bed as little kids. Touch was always part of my life. As I grew up, I started practicing self-massage as a form of self-care and self-love, and that has been a practice of mine for decades that has really nourished me.

Charlotte Mia Rose (10:06):
I became a massage therapist because I felt like intuitively there was something incredibly healing in that work. And as I dove into it, and as I practiced later erotic massage on thousands of bodies, I saw from being immersed in that pleasure that people left an hour long massage just soaked in pleasure, soaked in being connected to themselves. They left feeling more human, I think. It’s a beautiful gift to offer another person and to experience.

Chris Maxwell Rose (10:45):
What changed for you when you trained in massage, because you had always loved touch, but when you became a professional giver of massage? When I met you we were in a 24 person somatic sex education course at the very beginning of the sexological body work profession. I was your teacher. There were 24 students in the room. And immediately I noticed the beauty of your touch. I had seen a lot of trained hands at that point; I was a teacher in a massage school. Something extraordinary really stuck out about the way you touched. I want to name it as sacred. I want to name it as you were transported into a role that really feels kind of holy.

Chris Maxwell Rose (11:35):
Did you experience this in giving? What was your experience in becoming a giver of sacred, holy, erotic touch?

Charlotte Mia Rose (11:45):
Thank you. I felt that way totally. I feel like it is a moment in time where you put your entire presence and care and love and devotion into your hands. So you’re your mind is paying attention, your hands are paying attention to the flesh underneath your hands. Your full awareness is on how much pleasure can I bring this square inch of skin. When your whole being is focused on that, it does become a holy act and there’s nothing more beautiful. It is such a gorgeous experience to be in service to someone’s pleasure and relaxation and feeling their own self. I just, I just love it.

Charlotte Mia Rose (12:30):
I also want to name in that experience, I got to witness you teach and touch and I was blown away by the presence and care and reverence that you brought to touch. I mean, it was exquisite.

Chris Maxwell Rose (12:51):
This is the beginning of our love story. We are in a 24 person, two week long intensive training. As a teacher, I felt really strongly about holding boundaries. I had a lot on my plate to hold and facilitate that, so we actually barely spoke during those two weeks and yet noticed one another so deeply. Our souls were already beautifully connected.

Charlotte Mia Rose (13:16):
Yeah, Chris had amazing boundaries. I really like to add that. And it was many months later that I asked her out.

Chris Maxwell Rose (13:21):
You actually asked my boyfriend out on a date.

Charlotte Mia Rose (13:23):
That’s true, but I was trying to be polite, and I asked if you wanted to come too. But we stuck.

Chris Maxwell Rose (13:27):
This is our San Francisco.

Charlotte Mia Rose (13:28):
… San Francisco. What can I say?

Chris Maxwell Rose (13:29):
I was in an open relationship with a wonderful man, and Charlotte was interested in him and perhaps me a little bit and so we went out on a three-way date. I walked her back to her car after falafel.

Charlotte Mia Rose (13:41):
You touched my hip actually. You touched my hip. And in that moment, in that touch, I knew what was coming. It opened up this whole world for me.

Chris Maxwell Rose (13:53):
And we will talk about that later in this series, the way a single touch can communicate a whole world of feeling and emotion and possibility.

Chris Maxwell Rose (14:03):
We went on that date. A few days later, we went on a hike and that night we made love for the first time. When Charlotte and I came together in love making, I had been … My touch story; I had arrived in San Francisco as a sex educator, very much in the brain. Annie Sprinkle linked me up with Joseph Kramer, who’s the granddaddy of erotic massage. I will link in the show notes a page to my long form interview with him about the birth of erotic massage. I was plunged into this master level training of full body touch, erotic massage. We went into sexological body work of how we could use touch to teach people what their bodies are capable of.

Chris Maxwell Rose (14:51):
I started practicing massage on all of my lovers. I was in this poly-kinky community. As soon as I started training in massage, I was like, “Who wants touch? Anyone want touch? I’m here,” and I just gave so many massages to so many people. For me it was this homecoming. I had been so in my head and in an intellectual at Vassar, and I thought my worth was in my intellect, and this body was just what carried my brain around.

Chris Maxwell Rose (15:22):
When I was invited to go to massage school, and I think I’ve told this story before, I actually stood out front of the massage school and hesitated to go in because I was worried no one would want to touch me and that I would be so bad at touch … little did I know. And then a wonderful gay man came up and was like, “You going to massage school too? Come on honey.” And we walked up those stairs together and into the rest of my life because it was this homecoming into my body.

Chris Maxwell Rose (15:50):
Both giving and receiving massage was this invitation back into my entire being that existed below my brain and connecting that with my beautiful brain. So they weren’t two things. They were one being, working together, sourcing wisdom from every cell of my being. And the process of learning massage, receiving massage is a huge part of what helped me heal from my own sexual trauma since childhood was a huge part of waking up to the sensations and feelings and capabilities of my body as a sexual being.

Chris Maxwell Rose (16:29):
I was a few years into that when we met. I was no stranger to using massage as part of sex and giving erotic massage. My big thing is I would go to sex parties and kind of be the service hands because I’m kind of a germaphobe. I loved my communal sex community, but I didn’t really want to be doing it in the holes with everyone. I would have a list for the night, like I would fist you and then give you an erotic massage and then give you a warm up massage and then take care of her after her flogging. I loved all of that. B.

Chris Maxwell Rose (17:04):
But with you, it was the first time I was in a relationship with another trained set of hands, with another erotic masseur. And what we discovered as you and I were falling in love is that not only could we not keep our hands off one another in that early lusty stage, but that our touch and massage became this entire language between us. It was how we woke up in the morning. It was how we talked over coffee. It was how we warmed one another up to make love. When we would go out in the world and talk to people and it just kind of came up in conversation of like, “Oh yeah, we’re in love and we’re both trained erotic masseuses,” people would just melt visibly in front us and say things like, “Oh, that must be so nice to get a massage from your lover.” And we were like, “Yes, it is.”

Chris Maxwell Rose (17:58):
We heard this again and again and again. And this was the spark that started Pleasure Mechanics because what we noticed is that we had these skills, both full body touch, erotic massage, the presence and attention giving that you talked about that makes someone feel sacred and holy and human under your hands. What we realized is you and I had learned these skills; other people can learn them. Anyone can learn these skills, but not everyone is going to go to massage school. And certainly not everyone is going to go to an erotic massage school.

Chris Maxwell Rose (18:36):
And so we looked at each other … YouTube was just starting in the world, online video technology was just being born and in our conversations, in our lovemaking, in that place of, “Oh my god, this is the most amazing way to be in love a skill that really is sustaining us,” we decided to teach touch to the world through online technology. That was our first initiating spark was what if everyone knew how to touch one another with this level of skill and attention and love? What would be possible?

Chris Maxwell Rose (19:18):
Because in your erotic massage practice, you were not only seeing people saturated with pleasure and walking out, feeling like dos. Sometimes at your erotic massage studio, I would wait outside to pick you up and help you clean up after the night. I would watch a guy walk in and then walk out an hour later, and they walked differently in the world after an erotic massage. It is a game changing experience to have an hour of pampering, full body, erotic touch lavished upon you.

Chris Maxwell Rose (19:51):
But what we also noticed is that touch was coming up in all of these different arenas in our life. Friends who were grieving; we would offer them a massage. Friends who were getting married; we would give them a massage before their wedding, as a ritualistic relaxation into their day. My grandparents died, and I was able to sit in hospice and stroke my grandfather’s hand and have that last beautiful moments of touch with my beloved elders.

Chris Maxwell Rose (20:23):
Touch started showing up in all of our relationships in the way we loved everyone in our lives. The results of touch, I was saying it’s not only that pleasure, not only feeling like a sacred vessel of holiness, not only coming back to hear your humanity, but what we realized was touch was a language of love that carried us through all seasons of our life. From pampering a pregnant woman, and massaging her through birth, to stroking the hand of a dying man in hospice, every season of our lives can be supported and nourished and enhanced by touch. Touch is what connects us to one another as human beings and creates these irrevocable bonds of love between us.

Chris Maxwell Rose (21:19):
I remember every body I have touched. Touch is not exclusive to us humans. Microscopic organisms have sensory capacities and sense organs that help them navigate through the plasma of this world. But us as humans have refined touch to be a key to our humanity, our survival as a species and our love networks, how we connect with one another emotionally throughout life.

Chris Maxwell Rose (21:59):
Touch is one of the most human things we have and yet how many people are trained in touch? Do we ever get encouraged to develop the skills of touching? Do we ever get the opportunities to learn how to receive touch? Touch education is all but missing from our culture. A lot of us, unlike Charlotte, don’t grow up in households where we are massaged by our parents and bathed in rose pedals, my love. So for a lot of us, there’s a touch deficit we have to overcome and then embrace the full capacity of what touch can bring us.

Chris Maxwell Rose (22:40):
Pleasure Mechanics has been working on touch for 14 years now. We have created all of these online courses. And what all of the courses have in common is touch education. From our full body massage course to our foreplay course, to spanking and kink. All of what we teach integrates the education of our language of touch, becoming fluent in this language of touch, how to give touch, how to receive touch, how to communicate our intentions through touch. Touch is how we relax. It’s an incredible way to complete stress cycles. It’s an incredible way to communicate love. And then we begin touching to arouse, to thrill, to delight. That full range of touch is so much what the Pleasure Mechanics are about. We realized we have not yet had these full conversations about touch and all of the ways we can develop our capacities to touch and feel with one another.

Charlotte Mia Rose (23:50):
We wanted to dive into this with you and really explain and share why we are so evangelical about the experience of touch. It is such a language, and once we learn the vocabulary, the phrases, we can gain more mastery and we can share this more deeply with one another, because it can be a learned skill that then opens up an entirely new way of communicating with yourself and another. It just broadens our experience of being human, as well as our experience of pleasure. There’s so much in this and we so want for you to be able to feel more and offer more, and offer more love because that’s really what it ends up being. It is access to another vocabulary, another way of being with one another that can have us both feel more rich and loved.

Chris Maxwell Rose (24:49):
I want to say, we’ve talked a lot about touch as part of our relationship and making love, but also in all of our relationships with our community, but touch is also a solo experience. For everyone who’s either in social distancing alone, or lives more of a solo lifestyle, touch is for you too. There is self-touch and solo massage that Charlotte is going to guide us in, in the coming weeks and months, but also the touch of the world around us. We need to remember this, our touch receptors, our bodies that feel, are in relationship not only with ourselves and our lovers, but with the entire world around us.

Chris Maxwell Rose (25:36):
A lot of the benefits of touch can be felt by lying under a weighted blanket, lying on the grass and feeling the air around you, choosing the sensory inputs and then paying attention to them, unlocks almost all of the benefits of touch. We want to make this series and our offering relevant and accessible to all of us, whether or not you have a partner, whether or not you have a lover, you can still master and become fluent in the language of touch. That practice, we talk so much about practice, meaning we try these things out with a spirit of curiosity, we become open to developing our skills, when we practice touch it not only enhances our relationship with ourself and our capacity to feel our feelings and enjoy ourselves on this earth, but all of our relationships with our family, with our friends and with our lovers will benefit from us waking up to our capacity to touch and to feel.

Chris Maxwell Rose (26:48):
We will be diving in to touch and all of the uses of touch and the skills of giving and receiving touch in coming episodes. We will be gathering all of these resources together at pleasuremechanics.com/touch, so you can find everything easily. That’s pleasuremechanics.com/touch.

Chris Maxwell Rose (27:12):
To finish up this kind of intro episode, we want to invite you into thinking about touch in your life. How have you been touched? Who has touched you with the most love and kindness? Was there a moment where touch changed the moment for you? So meaning whatever you are feeling, a sense of overwhelm or a sense of fear, someone came and offered you compassionate human touch, and it completely changed that experience for you. What are the ways and what are the moments where you have offered touch to other people and what meaning has that touch had? And what kind of touch are you longing for?

Chris Maxwell Rose (28:00):
Can you imagine a world where touch was abundant and plentiful, and you could ask for the kinds of touch you were craving? What would that be? What kind of touch is your body hungry for? Getting in touch with those desires, with those longings is really an important place to start. When we think about what our bodies are wanting and hungry for, for so many of us it’s specific kinds of touch. I just want to lie in a quiet room and be held. I want to be aroused and spanked wildly. I want to be touched like I am being cherished and worshiped. I want to be roughed up and touched like a beast. How do you want to be touched? By who, how? Getting specific about this is a great map to our longings.

Charlotte Mia Rose (29:00):
But also it’s a place that we can offer ourselves some of that. Some people are not going to have access to lovers right now. And can you give yourself some of that touch? It is so powerful to have that kind of agency over our own bodies and to be able to touch ourselves in the way that we crave.

Chris Maxwell Rose (29:19):
When we talk about self-massage in the coming weeks, it’s not just going to be light, glidey self-massage. That is one style. There’s a lot of other ways to stimulate your own body, to feel different things, to release different emotions, and we’re going to be talking all about that.

Chris Maxwell Rose (29:38):
I want to invite you all into a touch exercise. We are not going to do that here. We are inviting you all, and this will be an ongoing invitation into what we are calling the Pleasure Pod. The Pleasure Pod is our new membership community, where we can dive deeper with you. You have direct access to our inbox because frankly, my email inbox has become overwhelmed and I can’t respond to the general inquiries. By stepping into the membership, you unlock direct access to both of us. You’ll unlock an ever-growing resource library, where I am curating all of our best resources from the past 14 years into easy to use digestible guides by subject so you can find what you want, easier and engage.

Chris Maxwell Rose (30:33):
We will be doing members only inquiries, experiments, and pleasure practices. It’s so often on the podcast, we talk to you about a subject, and then we want to offer you an experiential inquiry, we want to give you something to practice and try out. And then we want to hear how those things go for you. The way we develop our communal erotic wisdom together is by practicing, trying things out and then reporting back. The Pleasure Pod will give us a great way to offer you practices, guide you through, and then give you ways of reporting back to us what the results were. What worked, what did you feel, what did you experience, and then compare them with the experiences of our global community.

Chris Maxwell Rose (31:20):
We’re super excited about this. It’s been hatching for a while and it is ready for you. This is replacing our Patrion community, by the way. This is where you want to go to step into our inner circle, engage with us directly, unlock members only resources and participate in these pleasure practices. Yes. So pleasuremechanics.com/pod. Pleasuremechanics.com/pod; that will give you the options for stepping in. W want all of you, all of you to step into this inner circle with us so we can be in more vibrant community dialogue and practice these things and be in conversation together.

Chris Maxwell Rose (32:08):
Come on over to pleasuremechanics.com/pod. Our first pleasure practice that we will be offering, in addition to all of our archived resources curated for you, our first new offering to the Pleasure Pod will be a touch exercise that you don’t need anyone else for. It’s not even your own body yet; we are touching objects and we are activating our sense of touch and our touch vocabulary by practicing touching the world around us. Yes. And this, by the way, is a practice that a lot of somatic therapists use and sex therapists use. You can go to sex therapy and spend hundreds of dollars a session and learn this, or you can learn it in community with us as part of the Pleasure Pod and as just one baby step towards all of the other pleasure practices we will be exploring together.

Chris Maxwell Rose (33:06):
It’s a great place for us to start, I think, as a pleasure community. We are excited to offer that at pleasuremechanics.com/pod. Join the Pleasure Pod, be in conversation with us. We’re super excited about this offering and really encourage you to join.

Charlotte Mia Rose (33:25):
I just love the idea that together we can begin deepening a vocabulary of touch. That there are tangible skills that we can cultivate easily and simply in an un-intimidating way where we are literally training our bodies to be able to gain more information, to feel more so that later when you’re like deep inside your lover’s body with your hands, that you can feel more, you can gain more information through your hands, through what you’re feeling. The way that this kind of transforms forward into your sex life is really delicious. We are just learning phrases, we’re learning a language here together so we can pleasure each other more.

Chris Maxwell Rose (34:11):
Yeah, and this practice is one of the key things that takes hands from being working hands that poke buttons and push your mouse all day long, to feeling hands, touching hands, lover’s hands. It is a foundational practice. We teach all of the people we work with and it’s where we wanted to start the Pleasure Pod practices together.

Chris Maxwell Rose (34:36):
pleasuremechanics.com/pod, join us. pleasuremechanics.com/touch to find this and all other resources about touch. That’s where you’ll also find links to our touch courses that we will continue to invite you into. But if you are like, “Hell yes, I want to learn touch, how do I get started,” get started with our online courses in erotic touch mastery. You’ll find links to those at a beautiful discount, because we’re feeling generous, at pleasuremechanics.com/touch.

Chris Maxwell Rose (35:10):
I am feeling really excited about this series because we have talked about so many. We have 370 some podcast episodes. We’ve explored so many realms of sexuality together, and this is again a homecoming. Back to the foundation, back to what started it all for Charlotte and I was a love of touch and using touch to express love. This is where it began, and this is where we are going to continue from at this point in mid 2020. As so much as changing around us, let’s come home to the foundational root of pleasure in the human body. The key to pleasure, connection and joy; touch.

Chris Maxwell Rose (36:00):
Yes, we love you. If we could reach through these mikes and give you all an hour long massage, there would be nothing that would delight us more. Maybe someday we will gather in a sweaty room that smells of coconut oil and be able to pamper you all. But in the meantime, we are going to transform your ability to touch and feel and express love through touch one stroke at a time.

Chris Maxwell Rose (36:32):
I’m Chris.

Charlotte Mia Rose (36:33):
I’m Charlotte.

Chris Maxwell Rose (36:34):
We are the Pleasure Mechanics …

Charlotte Mia Rose (36:35):
Wishing you a lifetime of pleasure

Chris Maxwell Rose (36:41):
… and so much good touch. Cheers.