Pleasure Mechanics

Savoring: A Foundational Pleasure Practice

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Savoring is the art of slowing down a moment enough to be fully in it, while it is happening, with presence and gratitude. Fully savoring pleasures of all kinds – from small sensual pleasures to the deepest joys of intimacy and connection – is a skill set that we humans can develop, on purpose, over time.

The Science of Well-Being course from Yale highlights savoring as an essential practice for overall well-being and happiness:

Savoring is the act of stepping outside of an experience to review and appreciate it. Often we fail to stay in the moment and really enjoy what we’re experiencing. Savoring intensifies and lengthens the positive emotions that come with doing something you love. ~ The Science of Well-Being

The practice of Savoring can bring a full body positive experience, create lasting benefits for our entire being, and create meaningful bridges between people through shared experiences of pleasure. Savoring, when practiced consistently over time, develops our ability to feel more pleasure and joy – these positive body states become easier to access and we are able to drop deeper into our experiences. In a very practical way, Savoring is the practice of expanding our capacity for feeling.

In this podcast episode, we share the why and how of Savoring – why it is such a powerful practice and how to put it into action in your life. For more pleasure practices and support in deepening your pleasure capacity, join us in the Mindful Sex online course.

Love the show? Show your love and support our work at PleasureMechanics.com/love

Resources Mentioned On This Episode:

Mindful Sex Online Course : Join us in exploring how to manage erotic distractions, stay present during sex and explore your erotic potential. This link is preloaded with a podcast listener only discount to the online course.

Rick Hanson, Ph.D. Explore the neuroscience of well-being and connection

Yale University’s Free Online Course The Science of Well-Being

Podcast Transcript:

Podcast transcripts are generated with love by humans, and thus may not be 100% accurate. Time stamps are included so you can cross reference or jump to any point in the podcast episode above. THANKS to the members of our Pleasure Pod for helping make transcripts and the rest of our free offerings happen! If you love what we offer, find ways to show your love and dive deeper with us here: SHOW SOME LOVE

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

Charlotte Rose: 00:05 I am Charlotte.

Chris Rose: 00:06 We are The Pleasure Mechanics and on this podcast we have honest, soulful conversations about every facet of sexuality, love, relationships, fantasy, desire, how it shows up in your lives. We are 360 some episodes deep into this conversation, so thank you to all of those who have been listening for years perhaps and welcome to all of our new listeners. Because we have a lot of new listeners every week now, so we welcome you on board. Come on over to pleasuremechanics.com ,where you will find our complete podcast archive or explore the podcast feed in your favorite podcast app. And definitely come over to pleasuremechanics.com/free where you can find ways of going deeper with us and joining our free online courses and being in touch via email so we can provide even more resources to you. That’s pleasuremechanics.com/free.

Chris Rose: 01:12 On today’s episode, we are going to be talking about a skill that is such a beautiful skill. It’s like almost a, I don’t know, it feels like less romantic to call it a skillset. But it was a skill I was reminded of both because… So last week we talked about micro pleasures and this idea of seizing 60 second pleasure points throughout our day, and that was a couples therapy exercise that we started the new year with. And we heard from some of you that said, “Oh, this structure is giving me so much life. I’m definitely noticing these little pleasures throughout my day. Thank you for this.” And then some of your emails said things like, “I noticed that I’m waiting for the 60 seconds to be up.” Or, “I’m finding myself noticing how excruciatingly slow 60 seconds can be. I’m not really finding things to enjoy.” Or, “Once I’m enjoying it, I don’t know how to stick with it and 60 seconds feels so long when you start to notice.”

Chris Rose: 02:18 So this brought me to this skillset called savoring. And then, synchronistically, I joined this year an online course from Yale University called the Science of Wellbeing. I will link to it in the show notes page. It’s actually a free offering from Yale as an online course. And I love these online courses because I try to stay up on how science is talking about things like wellbeing and happiness and connection and love and then map that into kind of our erotic wisdom as a community from the past 10 years plus.

Chris Rose: 02:58 And the first lesson of the year in their offering to the public about the science of wellbeing and happiness was practice number one, savoring. And so of course then I immediately forwarded that to Joe Kramer, who is our teacher of erotic massage because it struck me immediately that Charlotte and I have both been practicing this fine art of savoring, this skillset of savoring, for over a decade together because we were invited into the skillset through erotic massage from Joe Kramer. Who, part of his erotic practice, so you build up all this erotic energy, you build up this full body orgasm, you have this breath practice, you have a climax and then you savor. Built into our structure was this act of savoring and being in that afterglow after the climax. And Joe of course, wrote me back. He was like, “Yes, of course. I’ve been talking about this for decades.” And I was like, “I know. That’s why I forwarded this to you.”

Charlotte Rose: 04:13 I remember so clearly sitting in a classroom with him sharing this idea and saying that this is an erotic skill that we need to cultivate, the skill and art of savoring. And it’s such a beautiful word. It’s such a beautiful idea. And it’s something that can be practiced day by day, moment to moment, out in our regular life as a training ground for when we get into the bedroom and when we’re having erotic experiences, we can then have that skill more firmly locked into our body. It’s such a beautiful skill to practice, in and out of the bedroom.

Chris Rose: 04:55 So let’s talk about this skill. What does savoring mean? Because as you say, it’s not only something we can practice and build our capacity around, Yale University science says that it’s one of the most important skills for wellbeing. So why is this? What is savoring?

Chris Rose: 05:13 Savoring is the act of stepping even deeper into a pleasurable moment, noticing that it is happening as it is happening and installing that pleasurable moment into your physiology, into your neurology, into your lived experience, so your system learns from it. So it’s the act of capturing pleasurable moments. So instead of becoming very fleeting, they are deeply felt and remembered and lodged in your body. This turns out to be super important for our overall wellbeing is how well we are able to saver pleasures. And pleasures, very small sensory pleasures to very big pleasures of joy and connection with other human beings. The full range of pleasurable experience, how much we are able to pay attention to it as it is happening, how deeply we are able to feel it and how much we can remember and rejoice in it afterwards, turn out to be major factors in our lifelong wellbeing and happiness and access to joy.

Chris Rose: 06:35 We’re going to talk more about this, but it turns out the more you install joy and pleasure, the easier it is to feel those things. And the way we do this is we pay attention to it as it is happening. It is a practice. So wherever you are in your experience of being able to experience joy, you can build your capacity through practice. And this is science, babies. This is both ancient wisdom and knowledge, right? That we have to practice our capacity for these things. And this is backed by science that this has some of the most direct tangible results, not only in our overall well being in happiness, but in our overall wellbeing in health.

Chris Rose: 07:21 It does things like boost the immune system and protect heart health and give you deeper sleep. Surprise, it makes us more at ease humans, right? When we systematically, on purpose, practice pleasure and joy. So savoring. Why is it important? How do we practice it? What does it give us access to? How does it accumulate over time? I want to turn this over to the queen of savoring. Because when I think of savoring, Charlotte, you are so good at this skill.

Charlotte Rose: 07:57 I feel like it is a central organizing principle of my days.

Chris Rose: 08:03 Yes.

Charlotte Rose: 08:04 But there’s just so much joy to be soaked out of simple, mundane moments and I find myself really enjoying them. And I think as the science points out that the more you do it, the easier it becomes. So it becomes sort of a natural part of your vocabulary.

Chris Rose: 08:24 So you have mastery over this skill?

Charlotte Rose: 08:26 I do feel like I do. And it creates a lot of joy and pleasure and simple fulfillment.

Chris Rose: 08:33 Yeah. One of the ways this has shown up for us socially, is during a meal you are what I call a multi cheers-er. Like we’ll have a cheers at the beginning of a meal and draw attention to how grateful we are to be there together and how lovely this is and we’ll all clink glasses. And then like five or 10 minutes later, you’ll raise your glass again and then 10 minutes later. And I’ve teased you for this, but what you’re doing is drawing our attention back to this moment, how pleasurable it is, how wonderful it is, how grateful we should be to be there. And this is exactly the science of savoring.

Chris Rose: 09:13 So the science of savoring tells us that we need to either create a pleasurable experience, a joyful moment, or a moment of joyful social connection or seize upon it when it happens to us spontaneously. So we need to find ourselves or create a pleasurable moment, be in it as it is happening. So draw more of our attention and go deeper into the moment. Put it in context and find gratitude for the moment, recognize that it is a blessing, that this moment is even happening. And then you feel it deeply.

Chris Rose: 09:53 So you’re in the moment. You draw attention to the moment. You create context and gratitude for the moment and you feel it as deeply as you can. And it turns out what this does is it installs the good into your system. And this is the language of Dr. Rick Hanson, who’s a neuroscientist, PhD, Buddhist teacher. I love him. We really get a lot out of learning with him. But he talks about installing the good, letting the good in. And what this does is it takes pleasure from being a fleeting moment to a learned capacity. You install it into your system and get the benefits of that pleasurable moment and over time the accumulation of this does quite miraculous, wonderful things for our systems it turns out. So this is a central skill we want to invite you into, savoring. Savoring.

Charlotte Rose: 10:55 Also, just a note that even if there’s nothing that awesome going on in your life right this minute, you can also gain these benefits by paying attention to a memory. Your body doesn’t totally know the difference. And so if you take a moment to remember something that brings you joy or pleasure or connection and then really experience it, stay with it for a few seconds longer until you get some feeling states in your body that feel good, that has an impact on your biology as well. Which is great to remember, and a wonderful tool.

Chris Rose: 11:32 Well it’s kind of a super power that pleasure can bring us all of these benefits, not only in the moment it is experienced, it can connect us and weave us with other human beings by sharing it together. And it can be recalled later to offset, to trigger, a positive hormonal cascade in your body down the road. These become assets in your body, in your psyche, these pleasurable moments of feelings deeply felt and shared.

Chris Rose: 12:06 So this can happen alone. You can deeply savor. And I’ll often turn the corner and find Charlotte deep in a moment of pleasure, completely on her own. You can savor moments alone, because truly we’re never alone. We experience these moments with the entire universe. And for me it’s often, especially after I’ve shaven my head, a freshly shaved head, the wind on the back of my neck can feel like an orgasm with the universe.

Chris Rose: 12:34 So we can savor all of this pleasure just out in the world, but we can also share it together. And the science actually supports this, that by sharing these moments of pleasure, and this is what we were kind of talking about in the micro pleasures episode, creating bridges between people with shared pleasures. The act of sharing a pleasure actually helps you install it as well. It is a form of savoring. So feeling the experience deeply in your body, sharing it, feeling gratitude for it, all of this taps into our ability as humans to learn. And so what we are doing very deliberately is learning pleasure. And our Twitter handle for like 13 years, because back when Twitter started there was a character limit, so our Twitter handle instead of pleasure mechanics was learned pleasure was the phrase that we have been riding behind. We don’t even use Twitter anymore. I don’t know why I mentioned that.

Chris Rose: 13:34 But learned pleasure has been this phrase that for me has always been really important because… So for Charlotte she was a natural pleasure connoisseur, a bon vivant. She grew up saturated in pleasure and global travel and safety and learning how to feel joy and pleasure and connection very deeply. I did not. I came to this work, very stripped of pleasure and with a very low capacity to feel pleasure. I would hit pleasure anxiety very quickly. We all have these capacities for pleasure and our systems are literally wired and capable of feeling certain feelings. They have capacities for emotions and feeling states. And if you hit your capacity, you often trigger into anxiety or fear or numbness or shutdown or dissociation. And so this can show up for us in all different ways.

Chris Rose: 14:33 But I came into sex education from the wounded healer place. I was abused as a kid. I grew up in an abusive home. And I wanted to feel more, I wanted to feel more pleasure. And I had just enough touch with it honestly through masturbation that I knew what was available to me and I was kind of like a hungry seeker. Like, “Teach me how to learn pleasure.” And I found erotic massage and erotic breath work and all my work with Joe Kramer and Sexological Bodywork and then Pleasure Mechanics and this 10 years of practice as this community and all of the work we do together.

Chris Rose: 15:11 And I have learned over the past decade how to feel pleasure, how to run more pleasure, how to expand my pleasure capacity. And that has happened over time practicing this. And I think so much of it as being in partnership with you because we’ll be, for example, at a beautiful sunset, we’ll be driving, there’ll be this beautiful sunset, we’ll pull the car over, we’ll get out and we’ll start looking at it and I’ll be like, “Cool, let’s go.” And you’ll be like, “What? It’s still going on. Stay with it.” And I’ll be like, “Okay, so what do you want to talk about?” And you’ll be like, “We’re looking at the sunset.” Like you can just stay in the joy and pleasure, whether it’s the food or the sunset or the sex, right? The orgasmic state. You can stay in that for so long.

Chris Rose: 16:06 And I really want to draw our attention here that we can all learn this. We can slowly expand our capacity around this and how we learn it. So going back to the Yale science, the practice they recommended is once a day, one pleasure, really feel it as deeply as you can. Expand it a little bit in duration, if possible. Share it, if possible, and then log it. They have an app you can log it in, but you can also just log it down in a journal or really just in your memory. As you’re going to bed, what was the most pleasurable moment of your day? Feel it. Remember it.

Charlotte Rose: 16:47 One of the images that stuck with me from Rick Hanson was this, “Adding even just a few beads of joy changes the whole necklace of seconds that make up your day.” I feel like that’s a useful image that just taking a moment to savor something deeply throughout the day will shift your day.

Chris Rose: 17:07 So he’s talking about that even on mundane days, even on days filled with despair, right? Because he’s recognizing a lot of us have a lot of stress, anxiety, fear, despair, rage, in these moments. And even in those times, it is even more important to practice this and to turn on purpose towards joy. Because part of this too, and I think we should do a whole other episode on this because it’s important and it shows up in very interesting and unexpected ways around sex, is the negativity bias. In human psychology, in human physiology, we are to pay much more attention to the threats, to our survival than to the yummy treats in our days.

Chris Rose: 17:59 And this makes sense from the evolutionary perspective, when we are really literally just surviving as animal bodies, we need to pay attention to the threats to our survival. We need to learn the dangers and teach one another about the dangers, which mushrooms not to eat. And remember the alarm in our system around those things. But now in today’s modern world, we are now threat tracking machines and positive experience can wash over us. Rick Hanson, we’re quoting a lot of Rick Hanson today. We love him. Rick Hanson talks about it like our neurology is Velcro for the negative and Teflon for the positive.

Chris Rose: 18:47 And we know this in our bodies. Think about an average day. One bad thing can happen to you… On an average day full of joys, full of pleasures, full of sensory pleasure, waiting to be savored. One bad thing happens to you and what do you come home raging about? What do you go to bed thinking about? And all of that time you are cycling around on that negative thing, on that threat to your existence, on that annoying person at work, all of that negativity cycles in your brain are throwing off stress hormones, are throwing off cortisol are keeping you in that fight or flight mode and this is an anti-erotic.

Chris Rose: 19:30 This is one of those forces in our lives that when we think about like, “Why aren’t I more interested in sex? Why can’t I connect more deeply with my partner? Why aren’t I more available for orgasm? Why do I get distracted during sex?” All of these struggles for so many of us are informed by the fact that our systems are threat tracking all day long. Every day we’re saturated in it. A lot of people have trouble sleeping because our systems are not resetting from the stress cycles. Our systems are not getting practice, are not getting time, are not getting the opportunities to feel pleasure, joy, relaxation, connection, comfort, let alone ecstasy, euphoria, bliss, rapture. All of these positive states our human bodies our capable of and want to be in. Want to be in.

Chris Rose: 20:24 So what do we do? We practice it on purpose. We do it on purpose, we learn how to savor. We install the positive moments throughout our day. And low and behold, it gets easier. We learn how to expand those moments and drop deeper into them, right? These two vectors of duration and depth of engagement and we have more access to them in our systems. And we can all follow Charlotte into the lands of pleasure. Take us.

Charlotte Rose: 21:01 Come with me. Come with me. Yeah, and it’s this idea, I just love this idea that it’s a simple practice that we can be with and we can cultivate. And then it is laying the foundation within our bodies that for the moments where we’re having peak erotic experiences, we’re in a 45 minute athletic sex act, and we have trained ourselves to pay attention. We’ve trained ourselves to be with the sensations, to be really enjoying what’s happening and focusing on the enjoyment instead of all of the concerns and distractions that’s also very human.

Charlotte Rose: 21:40 So we are training ourselves to be able to enjoy life and sex more deeply. And that will change the course of your life slowly over time. These moments like savoring a sunset is not going to change your life in that moment, but cumulatively doing this again and again over every day is going to change the arc of your next decade. And so it is a very powerful, simple, easy skill to cultivate.

Chris Rose: 22:08 Well one of the big why’s that the science gives for why savoring is so important, why it creates so much positive uplift over time, why it is so cumulative, is because it thwarts what they call hedonic adaptation. Hedonic adaptation is, on a pure sensory level, it means you can’t really feel the clothes you are wearing in every moment. Your sensory nerve endings get kind of used to that stimuli and then adapt and await new stimuli, so you can feel the bug landing on your face. So we adapt to what is normal and we kind of normalize what is repeated. And on the bigger level of our lives, this accounts for things like why we always want to shop for new shit. We buy a new object, it gives us a moment of pleasure, we normalize its presence in our life and then we begin seeking something new.

Chris Rose: 23:07 We seek novelty, we seek new stimuli. That’s just part of who we are as sensory beings. And science points to hedonic adaptation as a source of suffering. It’s part of the reason we get restless in good situations and it’s part of the reason we can’t feel grateful for the abundance that we have available to us. So what do we do to thwart hedonic adaptation? We learn how to savor. When we talk about slowing things down. When we talk about really being deeply in the erotic moment.

Chris Rose: 23:42 Part of sexual suffering is we’re always for the next big thing, the next novel thing, the next big hit of the pleasure hormones of oxytocin, of dopamine, of those hormones in us that say, “Ooh, fun. Good. Yes. Delicious. Yummy.” New, novel experiences hit those buttons really well. Daily pleasures do not because of hedonic adaptation. The antidote to this is paying attention, is savoring. Because when you really slow down in your day to day life and bring your full attention to that house plant that is just right in bloom and bring your full attention to it and literally stop what you are doing to fully immerse yourself in that experience. And then maybe remember your friend who gave you that house plant, right? You give it context, you lean in for a sniff, you give yourself that full sensory immersion. You maybe stroke a nice glossy leaf, right? You’re having an erotic… If it sounds sensual and erotic, it’s because it is.

Chris Rose: 24:54 Savoring is a deeply erotic experience if we go to Audrey Lord’s definition of the erotic as feelings deeply felt and shared. So you’re having a moment of savoring with that house plant and that thwarts hedonic adaptation. It brings that moment of pleasure, of joy, of wonder, back into that moment of your life, of passing through your hallway.

Charlotte Rose: 25:21 And then that positive moment will affect your biology for two to four hours afterwards is what the science is saying. So these moments really do accumulate in our day and make a difference.

Chris Rose: 25:33 And so what the Yale studies don’t mention are the erotic benefits of this, right? We know the health benefits, the overall wellbeing benefits. Savoring, when you learn how to savor, and Charlotte hinted at this earlier, becomes an erotic super power. Because it allows you to drop in and deepen your experience of whatever is happening to your erotic body. And instead of this novelty seeking, like we need the new lingerie, we need the new position, we need the new kink, which is fine, novelty seeking is an important part of eroticism too, but so is depth of engagement. And depth of engagement…

Chris Rose: 26:14 Actually bringing it back to Joe Kramer. I remember him talking about how deep can we go, so if someone is just massaging your toe, you can feel it throughout your body, right? You bring your full attention to whatever is happening in your erotic touch. Someone is fucking you, licking you, kissing you, touching you, whatever is happening to you, or you’re playing by yourself or you’re out in nature and that wind is hitting you just right. Whatever is happening to your body, if you can feel that moment deeply, it just… I get what wordless. If you feel these moments deeply, the universe is available to you erotically. Meaning there’s no…

Charlotte Rose: 27:02 There’s no limit to the erotic stimulation that is out in the world.

Chris Rose: 27:06 There’s no limit to the pleasure we can feel, right? Yes.

Charlotte Rose: 27:08 Yeah, the universe can be your lover in each and every moment or many moments of the day.

Chris Rose: 27:14 Or you find the universe in your lovers touch, right? So like the universe is your lover. Yes, all of the stimuli can be deeply erotically felt, but what I was trying to say is like when your lover is touching you, if you are truly feeling it, your whole body yearns for this. And so when a lover touches you with love and care and reverence, or you get a kiss from a stranger that you want or whatever that moment is, when we start paying attention, the full body response is really fun to pay attention to because it’s not just that one part of your body being touched, your whole body lights up.

Chris Rose: 27:52 Even just thinking about one of your peak erotic experiences. Think about one of your peak erotic experiences and then start noticing those flicks of arousal and desire and want in your body. The more we can pay attention to this and come home to it and make space for it and learn pleasure, and in this case learn erotic pleasure, learn sexual pleasure, learn arousal, the bigger we can go, the deeper we can go with it. So this is literally what we’re talking about when we say learned pleasure, is installing the fuck out of these moments when things feel good and right.

Chris Rose: 28:32 This is a lot of the experience we welcome you into in the Mindful Sex course. So if you are saying yes to this, if your body is responding to this conversation with like a, “Mmm, this feels good, I want more”, notice that in your body and come over to pleasuremechanics.com/mindful where you will find the best deal currently on our Mindful Sex course. Enroll with us and start practicing with us. This course is full of practices where you can put your attention on purpose to different parts of your erotic experience to start learning some of these skills together.

Charlotte Rose: 29:12 Our culture is so focused on good sex being about what’s done to us, but the other piece of that equation is how deeply we can feel what is happening to us. And so when we cultivate both of those skillsets, we’re going to have a really dramatically different experience of sex because there’s so many more skills in that bedroom.

Chris Rose: 29:36 I just wanted to make like a cartoon like, “Pew, pew, superpowers engaged.” And that’s really what we’re doing. We are tuning into our human superpowers and why we called ourselves Pleasure Mechanics in the first place all of those years ago, my love, was to really draw attention to the mechanics of pleasure in the human body. What are we designed to do when it comes to pleasure, orgasms, fucking, loving, connecting, creating with one another. What are we designed to do? What does the body tell us is possible? Let’s play there together.

Chris Rose: 30:13 All right, I think enough for today. Let us know your experiences of this. We love hearing your stories about how this work lands for you. All we can do on this podcast and through our courses is invite you deeply into practices, kind of lay out the why and the how and let you know what other people are experiencing and then it’s kind of turned over to you to put this into practice in your life and our aim is to help you make that as easy as possible. To try to make it really simple to opt into exploring some of these things for yourself and then ask you to report back to us.

Chris Rose: 30:56 How do these things emerge for you? What shows up as you engage with these practices? And this year and beyond we’re going to start formalizing this a little bit and collecting these stories from you. So if at any point you have something to say to the Pleasure Mechanics community, we are over 10,000 strong around the globe listening and engaging with this podcast. If there’s something you want to share, either a question to be answered or a testimonial about how this is showing up for you and your life, record a voice memo on your phone and email it to us at beintouch@pleasuremechanics.com or charlotte@pleasuremechanics.com or chris@pleasuremechanics.com. Get it to us at pleasuremechanics.com and share your experience with us because we are listening and integrating these 10,000 bodies and more into this body of erotic wisdom that we’re sharing back with you. That’s how we roll here. Thank you for being a part of it.

Chris Rose: 31:59 So we will have some links on the show notes page. So whatever podcast app you are using, if you click through to the show notes page, you will find links, ways of engaging more deeply with us and with the themes of the shows. You will also find full transcripts of every show, which we are providing to increase accessibility and searchability of this show. So if there’s something you heard and want to go back and find it, you can easily do that through the transcripts. Yes.

Charlotte Rose: 32:30 Thank you to everyone who supports this show and makes this community supported erotic education possible.

Chris Rose: 32:36 Mm-hmm (affirmative). It’s important to notice we have no sponsors, we have no ads. We do not interrupt our shows with minutes of ads selling you mattresses and prescription pills and all of those things because we are community supported erotic education and we want to just provide you the most efficient, effective resources for a more erotically engaged, happy life. Yes. Help us do that. Show your love for the show at pleasuremechanics.com/love where you will find ways of going deeper with us, showing your love, supporting the show, and keeping this work going for the coming decade.

Charlotte Rose: 33:17 Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Chris Rose: 33:18 Thank you for being here with us. Send us your voice memos. Send us your love. We are sending you our love. I’m Chris.

Charlotte Rose: 33:26 I’m Charlotte.

Chris Rose: 33:27 We are The Pleasure Mechanics.

Charlotte Rose: 33:29 Wishing you a lifetime of pleasure.

Mindful Sex For Men With Performance Anxiety

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Mindful Sex May continues with an exploration of what mindful sex practices can offer men struggling with performance anxiety. This is one of the most common sexual struggles for men – you finally have the opportunity to be sexual with a partner, you start to get aroused, and then… worry, anxiety, fear and/or panic start to set in! Anxiety is the enemy of arousal – so what can you do to interrupt the pattern of performance anxiety?

Join us in exploring the practices of Mindful Sex – enroll in our online course, join the community of pleasure explorers and start practicing these simple yet powerful practices with us.

For a complete online sex therapy program specifically about performance anxiety, we highly recommend Vanessa Marin’s Modern Man’s Guide To Conquering Performance Pressure

Podcast Transcription For Podcast Episode: Mindful Sex For Men With Performance Anxiety

Podcast transcripts are generated with love by humans, and thus may not be 100% accurate. Time stamps are included so you can cross reference or jump to any point in the podcast episode above. THANKS to the members of our Pleasure Pod for helping make transcripts and the rest of our free offerings happen! If you love what we offer, find ways to show your love and dive deeper with us here: SHOW SOME LOVE

Chris Rose: 00:00 Welcome to Speaking Of Sex With The Pleasure Mechanics. I’m Chris.

Charlotte Rose: 00:04 I’m Charlotte.

Chris Rose: 00:06 We are the Pleasure Mechanics and on this podcast we have soulful and explicit conversations about every facet of human sexuality. Come on over to PleasureMechanics.com where you will find a complete podcast archive. While you are there go to Pleasure Mechanics.com/Free and enroll in the Erotic Essentials, our free online course, so you can get started right away with some of our best strategies and techniques for more pleasure in your life.

Chris Rose: 00:42 Hello. Welcome to the second episode of our Mindful Sex May series. This month we’re exploring different facets of mindful sex, different applications of these techniques and these practices. Today we want to focus on mindful cock. The mindful cock.

Chris Rose: 01:04 How can we unify mindfulness and presence and paying attention with the experience of the beloved penis and bring that penis to sexual experiences with joy and freedom and excitement and reveling in all of the pleasure penises can bring and receive and get rid of some of this penis anxiety that hangs so heavy over so many of us? There’s so much cock anxiety when you think about it. It’s a lot for that tender little organ to bear. You know?

Charlotte Rose: 01:42 It is. I think there’s so much and I think that a lot of men don’t know that because it’s such an isolating experience.

Chris Rose: 01:49 [crosstalk 00:01:49].

Charlotte Rose: 01:49 They don’t realize that other men are having such a similar experience and so many of them.

Chris Rose: 01:55 Yeah. All of them.

Charlotte Rose: 01:57 I think there’s some comfort to knowing that that you’re not alone in having some stress and anxiety and possibly some depression around having an erect penis and having it do what you want when you want it to do it and if it doesn’t then you feel like a failure. All of that is a very common experience.

Chris Rose: 02:14 Again, we’re going to highlight that the experience of anxiety and the struggle and the angst about it is not really about the experience of the penis. It’s much more about the cultural meaning and the emotional significance of what the penis is doing or not doing.

Chris Rose: 02:37 Just notice that. Notice how much of your struggle with your penis or with your partners’ penises how much of that struggle is about the actual what happens versus the meaning you’re assigning to what happens. There might be a very big chasm there.

Chris Rose: 02:55 To paint the picture a little more of what we’re talking about some penises have medical issues. Right? Some men have medical issues that affect their penises, circulation issues, hormone issues. There is a subset of penis issues that are quite medical in nature and that need medical attention and attention to your whole system, your cardiovascular health, your hormonal health.

Chris Rose: 03:21 If your penis function feels like it’s changing across the board, like how your penis functions in the morning, during masturbation, during partnered sex, kind of during all different conditions, if the erectile function, if the ejaculation function, if the urinary function … Like if something the penis is supposed to do it doesn’t do helpfully or if there’s pain during those functions that’s when you go to a doctor.

Chris Rose: 03:51 Many, many, many more of the struggles around the penis are conditional struggles. Meaning you can get erect and have an ejaculation that is satisfying during masturbation but not with your partner or with some partners but not other partners or during certain conditions and not other conditions.

Chris Rose: 04:13 When the penis function is conditional then we look to the psychological, emotional, social underpinnings of … It’s not the penis hydraulics that aren’t functioning. Right? It’s not the ejaculatory function that’s not functioning. There’s something in the whole system, the sexual system, that is going a little haywire.

Chris Rose: 04:37 This is why mindfulness can be such an amazing intervention for men, such an amazing practice, a training ground to rewire and reprogram their sexual system to create different outcomes. We’re going to engineer this mofo, right?

Chris Rose: 04:55 Dr. Lori Brotto, who is the leading researcher on mindful sex from the clinical applications of mindful sex, has for the past decade plus been focusing primarily on women, almost exclusively on women and their sexual experience, and having phenomenal results in her clinic. I will link in the show notes page to an interview with her.

Chris Rose: 05:17 She is now doing research on the application of mindful sex techniques for men and for premature ejaculation, for erectile dysfunction, for sexual performance after prostate surgery are the three main categories she is looking at and we are so excited to talk to her in a few months about what she finds in her research.

Chris Rose: 05:40 Let’s talk about how this might show up for men.

Charlotte Rose: 05:44 They just did a very small study to prove that it was a good idea to keep studying it and they found that the results of using mindfulness with men was very effective in the same way that it has been with women. It’s probable that they will find that it is awesome for men and I’m going to assume that it is but we will look forward to those studies.

Chris Rose: 06:04 We’re not doing like scientific research prediction here.

Charlotte Rose: 06:07 No.

Chris Rose: 06:09 Well, we have many data sets, right? We have also the data from all of the men in our mindful sex course who are reporting awesome successes and the most important data set, the only research that really matters for you, dear listener, is your research. It’s figuring out if any of these strategies and practices can help you struggle less and enjoy your sex more.

Charlotte Rose: 06:34 Yes. That is what we’re looking for.

Chris Rose: 06:38 Maybe that’s a good way to think about what we’re doing here because we’re not just going for this mind blowing 10 hour orgasm overnight kind of promise. We are going for less struggle, more pleasure. Less isolation, more connection. Less fear, more confidence.

Chris Rose: 06:58 How might mindful sex be a really useful tool if you experience situational erectile dysfunction … I don’t even like the word dysfunction. If you can’t always … If your penis doesn’t always do what you want it to do. That’s not even … This is the whole thing. All of the setups for men like erectile dysfunction means if it’s not erect it’s dysfunctioning.

Charlotte Rose: 07:21 Yeah. It’s not really fair.

Chris Rose: 07:23 Premature ejaculation is like ejaculation before you wanted it. Since when do we order our bodies around to do what we want them to do when we want them to do it?

Charlotte Rose: 07:33 Often but it’s not a good idea.

Chris Rose: 07:34 It’s all a setup. Just notice this. Even the language around the penises, how we think about penises and penis function, is a complete setup. It’s like if you’re not erect you are wrong and you are therefore less of a man, therefore your worth is devalued, therefore go crawl in a hole and die.

Charlotte Rose: 07:52 Oh my God. It’s so dramatic but I think [crosstalk 00:07:55].

Chris Rose: 07:54 It’s so fucking true, though. These are the emails I get all the time from men and they are good husbands, they are good partners, they’re great dads, they’re great at work. They’re like showing up in their life, they’re trying their best, and then when they can’t get an erection when they are a little bit aroused we slap them down and tell them that they’re lesser than.

Chris Rose: 08:12 It’s so cruel. I get really worked up about this. There’s so much cruelty done onto men’s sexuality that hasn’t yet been named, that hasn’t yet been unpacked. We’ve been spending the past 50 years looking at and talking about the sexual oppression of women and it’s time we talk about how this is impacting men because men are struggling, they are hurting, and they need support and they also need solidarity. Right?

Chris Rose: 08:38 The main message here, guys, is you are not alone. If your penis doesn’t always pop to attention, if it gets erect when it’s not supposed to get erect, when it doesn’t get erect when you kind of want it to, when you have ejaculations too quickly or not at all.

Chris Rose: 08:55 One way we can think about all of this it’s a mismatch between what you might be feeling and experiencing and how your genitals are behaving. This is arousal nonconcordance because so much of how this shows up is you have a sexual partner or you’ve worked really hard to get the attention of a sexual partner. You do a lot of effort to create a sexual opportunity. A sexual opportunity comes and you balk. You freak out.

Chris Rose: 09:26 A lot of the guys I talk to it’s like they can anticipate sex, they get horny, they can masturbate while fantasizing about fucking someone, and then at the time where they have a possibility, they have a receptive partner, someone is hitting on them, their wife is finally in the mood, they freak the fuck out and that anxiety loop then completely hijacks their neurology, their body, their physiology, and the penis doesn’t play. The penis doesn’t join the play in a way that we have taught men is necessary for their sexual pleasure.

Chris Rose: 10:06 There’s so many things to break down here, right? We can start at the end and say your erection is not necessary for sexual pleasure. We did a great episode recently about soft penis pleasures and all the ways you can enjoy a soft penis. We can start there but we also need to start at how can you show up for an arousing situation, receive that arousal, build that arousal, and not freak out and not spin into anxiety.

Chris Rose: 10:34 This is the main intervention of mindful sex. That’s amazing for all of us. I think it’s going to be rocket fuel for so many men to learn how to build arousal without getting anxious.

Charlotte Rose: 10:46 Because that’s what happens. You’re in an experience with a partner and you start feeling aroused and you feel those sensations in your body and then you start feeling nervous and anxious about what’s going to happen in the future and how is your erection going to be and is it going to stay and then you’re focusing all your attention on those thoughts and your erection starts to disappear.

Charlotte Rose: 11:08 That is what we want to support you in shifting. What we want to do is learn how to be aroused and feel the experience of arousal in our body while calming our thoughts, calming our mind, and being able to focus all of our attention on the sensations in your body of arousal.

Charlotte Rose: 11:30 Eventually over time the experience of arousal is not anxiety-producing. You can genuinely spend all of your attention focusing on how good it feels to be aroused and not be worrying about your erection. That is a process. That is a practice. There are things that we can do to cultivate that experience.

Chris Rose: 11:50 Well, and that you can stay aroused, stay in high states of arousal, and your erection will come and go and that’s okay. Right? When we think about the model of staying relaxed and aroused … Blood will flow in and out of the penis and there will be the full mast, half mast, all sorts of situations, but as you move dynamically through the sexual experience it will become less and less important and you experience pleasure in your whole body and your attention isn’t just on, “How hard am I? How can I thrust fast enough to get an ejaculation before I lose this erection?”

Chris Rose: 12:30 That kind of sprint is what a lot of men get into. It’s like, “I’m hard. I have the opportunity. Let’s go. Let’s do this.” That is not a great formula for sexual partners always.

Charlotte Rose: 12:42 For connection because you’re so focused on reaching the finish line, the imaginary finish line.

Chris Rose: 12:47 Right. You might be rushing your partner who is there and excited but needs way more time to warm up and then can get to the fucking. It puts a lot of pressure on that erection and it creates this thing of like if the erection goes away or if I ejaculate this opportunity is over.

Chris Rose: 13:05 I’ve been reading an article by an Olympian silver medalist who is coming out with a book about performance anxiety and erectile dysfunctions. We’re hoping to bring him on the show and talk really deeply about this.

Chris Rose: 13:21 One of the things I noticed is the juxtaposition between performance and athletic performance and competition that is so built into masculinity and how then a sexual opportunity becomes an opportunity to win or lose and that you kind of are self-scoring before you’re even get started. You’re worried about that winning and losing, you’re worried about where you are on that ranking card. Men are so like, “How do I compare to your other partners? Was he better than I?” That competition that’s built into the male ego …

Charlotte Rose: 13:56 Which we’re trained to do. That is not …

Chris Rose: 13:59 Right. It’s not because you’re an egotistical bastard. It’s because this is like your programming. Then women are trained to evaluate themselves on sexiness and desirability and how their body looks. Right?

Chris Rose: 14:11 We drop into a moment with a couple whose into each other, they want to fuck. His erection goes down, he has lowered his score, he feels like a failure, she feels like that erection is some reflection on her, she feels like a failure, and now they have to reconcile that failed sexual moment.

Charlotte Rose: 14:29 Yeah. It’s a downward spiral.

Chris Rose: 14:31 How familiar does this feel to you? How familiar does this scenario feel? I think it’s really, really common. Then there’s versions of this. There are a lot of strategies here. How does mindful sex fit into this?

Chris Rose: 14:45 Mindful sex is going to give you the strategies and the techniques so that you can first notice the patterns in your sexual response system, you notice the anxiety scripts, you notice what starts happening, and in that noticing there is so much opportunity because then you can start intervening, interfering with that script, choosing a different script earlier and earlier.

Charlotte Rose: 15:11 Part of what you get to do is begin to pay attention to what your first early signs of feeling anxiety or feeling stress as you’re getting aroused are. You have to be your own detective and figure that out and really pay attention to what your body does, what your mind does, what your thoughts are that start putting you into an unsavory loop.

Chris Rose: 15:33 We have tools to help you do that in the mindful sex course so you’re not on your own being a detective and you’re learning together also in community about the common patterns so you can start being, “Oh, yeah. That makes sense to me.” Then what happens when you’ve established these scripts and patterns where does the opportunity come?

Charlotte Rose: 15:54 Then you can begin to interrupt those thoughts, you can notice those thoughts, and replace them with different thoughts, which can then have a different outcome. You begin to train your mind to shift your attention where you want it to go instead of where it goes on autopilot.

Charlotte Rose: 16:13 We tend to think of those thoughts as real, as real truth, and sometimes they aren’t real truth. They are just programmed thoughts. When we begin to shift them to something more desirable it has an impact on our body and our body’s experience.

Chris Rose: 16:31 Then you start creating the opportunities for yourself to have different experiential outcomes. That’s when the secret sauce happens when your body experiences a different option, when your body experiences the opportunities to have relaxed arousal without a focus on the outcome and gets to feel how pleasurable that is, how joyful that can feel. You start reprogramming your neurology.

Chris Rose: 17:00 One of the fancy words for this is positive neuroplasticity. There’s a neuroscientist Buddhist teacher I’ve been really learning a lot from recently and he talks about this as installing the good. We’ll talk more about this in a future episode.

Chris Rose: 17:16 The important thing here is that when we have positive experiences we have to focus on them and tell our body to take it in as an option. Our brains are threat tracking monsters. The human brain is really good at threat tracking, at looking for the potential problems to solve.

Chris Rose: 17:40 One of the skills of mindful sex we learn to bring here is paying attention to what is in a more neutral way so we don’t project all of our anxiety and fears into the current moment.

Chris Rose: 17:55 There’s an opportunity here for open dialog with your partner where you have a conversation ahead of time, “If I don’t get an erection that stays erect for the entire time we’re playing it’s not because I don’t find you desirable. It’s something my body is doing right now. I just want to let you know ahead of time.” You pregame it and you set expectations differently. That can be a strategy.

Chris Rose: 18:18 If we go back to the juxtaposition of athletic performance and sexual performance one of the strategies we can think about here is practicing for the big event. One of the things that gives us confidence and skills to enjoy … If we even take off winning and losing, right? I don’t want to continue that performance metaphor but what helps you enjoy game day? What helps you enjoy your hobbies? It’s practicing and developing skills so you can be in the flow.

Chris Rose: 18:52 Whether that’s soccer or woodworking, I always go back to woodworking, whatever your skill is, we all know that by putting in practice and developing skills individually it helps us enjoy a flow state, an experience of something else. You put in the practice to experience the thing. We can break down so many hobbies this way.

Chris Rose: 19:18 Mindful sex gives us a set of practices, a set of strategies, a set of skills to work out, to practice with, to literally develop skills. This word practice can start feeling woo woo. Like, “What’s your erotic practice?” We’re literally practicing skills. It’s no different than dribbling a basketball. You’re practicing embodied erotic skills so that when your wife is looking at you and wants to connect and your penis is soft and you don’t feel good about that you have a whole suite of skills to deploy that allow you to stay in that present moment, look your wife in the eye, and enjoy whatever erotic opportunity is available for you.

Chris Rose: 20:07 Cumulatively, if we can stay present for all of those erotic opportunities, whether it’s the tender kiss on the shoulder before you roll over and go to sleep but you can really feel that kiss and be present to it and what it meant to the wildest of sex you can imagine. Right? That whole range of staying present for erotic opportunities, paying attention to them, feeling them fully, letting them in, that’s what your lifetime of sex is made of. It’s not the one Olympic performance. Right?

Chris Rose: 20:40 How do we develop the skills to stay present and available for the cumulative experience of being an erotic human? That’s what we’re practicing for. When it comes to the cock it’s about realigning the cock with the full man behind it so your penis gets to play with your full presence behind it and your penis isn’t this separate thing. We often treat it, it’s like this dangling, “Oh, it’s got a head of its own.” It’s this like dangling thing.

Chris Rose: 21:15 We’ve disembodied men from their penises. We treat them like they’re this demon beast that needs satisfying. You know? I don’t know. We have such weird narratives about the penis and how do we just treat the penis as a beautiful organ of pleasure that can give and receive so much pleasure, that’s fascinating and mesmerizing in its ability to change.

Chris Rose: 21:38 We need whole new dialogs about the cock. We need men who are willing to embody their cocks as lovers fearlessly and without shame and from this place and then tell other men what is possible and tell men about the internal penis and the pleasures of the internal penis and the pleasures of being penetrated. You’ve gotten me started.

Chris Rose: 22:02 Yeah. I get really excited about this, I get really fiery about it, because a lot of men confide in me and I suspect have conversations with me they’re not having with a lot of other people and this has been over the past 20 years. I have this sense of what men are struggling with and how men are treated in bed and how men treat themselves sexually. Like what men give themselves permission for and how men feel about their penises.

Chris Rose: 22:34 I’ve also been in erotic community. I’ve been with men who were fearless sexual explorers, who have devoted their life to sexual adventure. I’ve been inside so many men. I’ve had so many cocks in my hands, we have together, that we also know what is possible for men.

Chris Rose: 22:51 We have seen men in fully unbridled sexual power and it’s fucking gorgeous. This world needs more. I think there’s this sense of we need less of men’s sexuality right now and we don’t. We need more of men’s authentic, empathetic, emotional embodied sexuality because it’s fucking gorgeous and sexy and hot and beautiful and powerful and motivates men to do great work in the world and show up for their communities.

Chris Rose: 23:23 We all need this sexual liberation healing we’re talking about. This is not just for pussies. What does the liberated cock look like? We need to start painting a picture of what men’s sexual liberation will look like and what that will bring to women.

Charlotte Rose: 23:42 Part of what that looks like is men being in relationship with their own cock. This narrative of the cock has a mind of its own and you just have to follow your cock because you have no control over it. That is where men’s sexuality gets so messy.

Chris Rose: 24:03 Or that the cock is used to prove a point.

Charlotte Rose: 24:03 And dangerous. Yes.

Chris Rose: 24:06 The cock is used to prove your power. I mean, we’re getting into a whole other conversation here about …

Charlotte Rose: 24:10 But a responsible and mindful cock is when a man has a relationship with his own cock where he can know what it needs and he’s responding to it and he’s also being kind to himself, not talking badly, poorly to himself or his cock, but has a generous spirit with himself and has practices where he is able to cultivate that power. He is not letting it run away or prove a point but is letting it respecting his sexuality and his desire and his eroticism and giving it space but also cultivating it and communing with it and …

Chris Rose: 24:59 We’ve officially gone off the deep end. You just got a big honking laugh. With that, we really want this to be an invitation to all of you. You know, again, we’ve been getting emails recently about gendered language and more and more listeners want us to strip all of this gendered language out and talk about … We do. We talk about bodies. All of this comes back to the human body, the human experience of sexuality, of showing up for one another.

Chris Rose: 25:31 In this episode we’ve really been talking about cocks and people who are socialized as men and this male masculinity script that you’ve been given and that have led so many of you to a specific set of sexual experiences and a specific relationship with your penis and what it means about your masculinity and the performative, competitive relationship you have with your sexuality.

Chris Rose: 26:01 We can highlight these specific experiences and we can talk about the different socializations of men and women but ultimately these practices serve us all and they are amazing practices for human bodies, whether or not you’re in a sexual relationship right now, whether you’re queer or straight, however you identify, the mindful sex practices can serve you.

Chris Rose: 26:25 We really want these practices to be available and accessible. We have put them all in our mindful sex online course. There is special podcast pricing going on now at Pleasure Mechanics dot com slash Mindful that will take you directly to enrollment.

Chris Rose: 26:41 Enrolling in an online course means you have access to this resource library but it also means an investment, a commitment, for you to practice, to try things out, to let us into your erotic life in a deeper way, to try our techniques, to try our strategies, and see what changes for you.

Chris Rose: 27:04 Stepping into an online course as much as it’s, yes, unlocking new resources, it is stepping into an experience and then we are there to guide you along. We are there for you to shoot an email to being like, “This is what happens. It felt weird. What do you think?” I will be there for you with personalized coaching.

Chris Rose: 27:24 It’s a way we can make these techniques available to people all around the world at a really affordable way. That is why we do all of this work online. Pleasure Mechanics dot com slash Mindful. Join our mindful sex online course.

Chris Rose: 27:40 Then we’re thinking about traveling so go to Pleasure Mechanics dot com slash Live to tell us if you could join us in Los Angeles this August or if not in Los Angeles where would you like to meet us? We have wonderful responses coming in. It looks like we have a very busy travel schedule for the next 20 years.

Charlotte Rose: 28:00 Awesome.

Chris Rose: 28:01 Let us know where you are. If you’d like to come out to a live workshop experience with us go to Pleasure Mechanics dot com slash Live. The truth is many, many more of you will meet us online, join our online courses, do these practices in the privacy of your own home, feel the results of them in your own body, in your own relationships, report back to us.

Chris Rose: 28:27 We will continue to deliver you amazing resources to take you deeper into your erotic experience and together we have thousands of people gathered together into this online school all asking the question, “How can I experience more sexual pleasure in my life? How can I feel less struggle and more joy around my sexuality? How can we do this through daily practice through making incremental changes that have huge profound results?”

Chris Rose: 29:00 After 10 years we now have a community of people who have been making these changes, couples who are in totally new places, and that is feeling so exciting for me to have been working with people now for over a decade.

Chris Rose: 29:15 Join us. Pleasure Mechanics dot com is our online home. You’ll find it all there. Pleasure Mechanics dot com slash Mindful to enroll in the mindful sex course and join us for this Mindful Sex May and beyond. Yes. I’m Chris.

Charlotte Rose: 29:31 I’m Charlotte.

Chris Rose: 29:32 We are the Pleasure Mechanics.

Charlotte Rose: 29:33 Wishing you a lifetime of pleasure.

Chris Rose: 29:37 Manifested through daily practices. We’ll see you next time on Speaking Of Sex With the Pleasure Mechanics. Cheers.

Better Sex Through Mindfulness with Lori Brotto

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Better Sex Through Mindfulness with Lori Brotto : Free Podcast Episode

 

Twenty years after Viagra was approved to treat erectile issues in men, we still don’t have any quick fixes for the primary sexual struggle of women: low sexual desire. In this podcast interview, Dr. Lori Brotto shares what has been the most promising treatment for women who struggle with sexual desire – mindfulness.

Mindfulness based sex therapy is not a quick fix, but instead is an ongoing practice and lifestyle that offers profound and lasting benefits for a wide range of sexual struggles.

In her new book Better Sex Through Mindfulness: How Women Can Cultivate Desire, Lori Brotto gives an illuminating overview of the past fifteen years of research on applying mindfulness based interventions for sexual concerns. Along the way, she challenges many of the cultural narratives that drive so many of these struggles: a misunderstanding of the nature of sexual desire, the scripts and routines that drive so many sexual encounters, and the culture of distraction and stress we all live in. Meanwhile, Lori Brotto outlines several of the mindfulness practices that she uses in her clinic so readers can immediately begin applying these concepts to their own sexual experience.

The take-home message is this: mindfulness teaches women to become more aware of their internal bodily sensations, including sexual sensations, and this may improve their motivations for sex and increase their tendency to notice sexual arousal and have that arousal trigger sexual desire.

Could it really be this simple – that teaching women to tune into their body, to the signs that their body is already producing, and making them aware of these sensations can be enough to trigger sexual desire? I offer a tentative “yes” to this question. Why tentative? Because awareness of internal bodily sensations is only one of potentially many different ways that mindfulness exerts its beneficial effects on sexual desire. Without a doubt, when we pay attention to the body in a kind, compassionate, nonjudgemental and present-oriented way, it offers us a new way of being in the world. And that new way of being might just be critical for the sexual satisfaction that so many women crave. ~ Lori Brotto, Ph.D.

 

Find out more about Dr. Lori Brotto’s research here, and follow her on twitter here.

A full transcript of the podcast interview with Lori Brotto is below.

If you are ready to begin exploring the frontiers of Mindful Sex, join our online course on Mindful Sex! Our Mindful Sex course is the perfect complement to Lori’s brilliant book, and we will be discussing the book in depth within the course community.

Better Sex Through Mindfulness by Lori Brotto

 

Full Transcript of Pleasure Mechanics Interview With Lori Brotto:

[00:00:00] – Chris Rose
Lori Brotto, welcome to Speaking of Sex.

[00:00:04] – Lori Brotto
Thanks so much for having me today Chris.

[00:00:06] – Chris Rose
Can you introduce yourself and the work that you do.

[00:00:09] – Lori Brotto
Sure. So I’m Lori Brotto. I am a registered psychologist by training, a researcher in the Department of Gynecology at the University of British Columbia and the executive director of Women’s Health Research Institute in the province of B.C. and my research has been focusing mostly over the last decade or so on the development and treatment of sexual concerns in women using mindfulness meditation based approaches

[00:00:39] – Chris Rose
In the book you lay out this beautiful story, but how did you come to focus on mindfulness after the development of viagra, what is that link?

[00:00:48] – Lori Brotto
So this was really a pivotal moment not only in my own career but I think for the field of sexuality and sex research more broadly and that was the year 1998 when Viagra was approved for men and suddenly men had an effective easy to use low risk, low adverse event, very accessible medication to treat their sexual concerns- so erectile dysfunction in men which affects probably between 10 to 15 percent of men. And shortly after that in the same year there was a large study based on several thousand American men and women and it found that actually the prevalence of sexual difficulties in women was far greater than the prevalence of sexual concerns in men. And it reached somewhere around the neighborhood of about 40 percent. So around 40 percent of women over the last year reported that they had some type of sexual difficulty. The most common of which was low sexual desire. So that sort of got me started down the path of looking into – well we’ve got this effective and easily accessible treatment for men’s sexual concerns.- What is there for women.? And I quickly discovered that my literature search took all of about one minute and discovered that there were very very few treatments available. There were no medications approved. There were a handful of more psychological types of interventions but really very little research looking at effective ways of improving women’s sex response and sexual satisfaction.

[00:02:23]
And that really led to the path that I took after that point I was an animal researcher focused on animal models of sexual dysfunction and very soon after reading that paper I made the switch over to studying women’s sexual response in the laboratory. Then I was introduced to mindfulness a few years after that when I was living and working as a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Washington in Seattle and learned about mindfulness because it was a very effective part of treatment for individuals who engaged in cutting behaviour or parasuicidal behaviors and mindfulness essentially helped those patients cope. It helped them cope with the ups and downs of their emotions, their tendency to want to hurt themself and basically it taught them – if they could remain in the present and really focus on what it felt like, including all of the distressing emotions they were feeling, that they could ride it out almost like as if they were on a surfboard. So that again another pivotal turn in my career that introduced me to mindfulness. I began my own personal practice and rather intensive training and learning about mindfulness and really the rest is history so to speak.

[00:03:52] – Chris Rose
And here we are 15 years later and this treatment has proven to not only effectively help women with low sexual desire and other sexual struggles but create lasting changes. And again 15 years later we don’t have the pink Viagra. So what is it – your book is called Better Sex Through Mindfulness. So let’s start with the basics, what is it about mindfulness that can lead to a better sexual experience?

[00:04:24] – Lori Brotto
So mindfulness is essentially a way of being. It includes paying attention in the present moment moment by moment and doing so non-judgemental and compassionately. So it’s more than just paying attention or concentration training but rather it’s about how we pay attention. And one of the things we know is that individuals who have sexual concerns and in particular women who have low desire are often struck by myriad negative thoughts about their own performance, concerns about whether or not they will respond, worries and fears about how a partner may respond or or not approve about their sexual activities or outcomes, and there’s compelling data that shows that this sort of onslaught of negative thoughts and negative self judgements and essentially women be very very hard on themselves can directly and negatively affect their ability to become sexually aroused and have sexual desire. And so one of the ways that we believe mindfulness is helpful for women with sexual concerns is it teaches them to just be in the moment, to notice sensations without that tendency to jump into the future and worry about “Am I responding enough? Is this going to upset my partner? is this going to lead to disaster? Am I not going to reach an orgasm?”

[00:05:57]
And so mindfulness really allows them to really tune into sensations and really stay with the sensations so that they might still have those negative thoughts but they’re not dominating the field of their awareness. And our research has shown that that’s probably one of the important ways. There are certainly other ways as well that mindfulness is helpful but that’s really one of the key ways is really targeting that negative self judgment.

[00:06:26] – Chris Rose
The work of a lifetime.

[00:06:28] – Lori Brotto
Yeah sure is

[00:06:30] – Chris Rose
So when we think about so many women having low sexual desire do you feel like we need to rethink how we culturally talk about desire? What are your thoughts about how we reframe the human the notion of desire in the first place?

[00:06:47] – Lori Brotto
Yeah absolutely and this has been an area of work that I’ve been pretty actively involved with as along with several others and that is how do we define sexual desire? And I think that there are many cultural stereotypes around what sexual desire is and one of them being this notion that you either have desire or you don’t. And when you have it it’s something that just exists within you it lives somewhere within your body you feel it physically and it always compels you towards sexual activities. So you know you feel horny, you feel butterflies, you feel some kind of internal physical trigger that moves you towards sex. And one of the things we know is yeah that might that might express sexual desire for some people or maybe for some people some of the time depending on their context, their age, what kind of relationship there and how long that relationship is, a host of other factors. But we also know that there are other ways that desire is expressed and one of the more helpful ways of thinking about desire is as if it were an emotion just like sadness or happiness. Now we feel happy when positive things happen to us when things in our environment or people we interact with say or do things that make us feel happy so happiness happens in response to something and it can be really helpful to think about sexual desire in the same way. So we feel desire when there are triggers for desire. And the research suggests that that’s probably a much more common manifestation of desire than this idea that desire something just is or is not within you. And when we think about desire in that way, as something that can be triggered or elicited, then suddenly we feel far more empowered to explore – well what are those cultivators of desire? And if I don’t have desire or my desire is less than it used to be maybe this is an opportunity to explore the triggers and the context that would be more likely to elicit desire for me.

[00:09:11] – Chris Rose
And part of that exploration is paying attention. So how does mindfulness help us pay attention to what’s already going on in our body and tuning in rather than tuning out?

[00:09:24]
So in our own work and of course our work is heavily influenced by the much larger field of work exploring mindfulness based interventions for other issues like stress and anxiety and depression and chronic pain.

[00:09:40]
And so the way that we do that with sexual concerns is we start with introducing a formal practice. So in our groups this means that we bring groups of about eight to 10 women together we have a facilitator who is well versed in both mindfulness space practice as well as in sex therapy and we spend really the first hour of our two hour group engaged in a mindfulness practice where the facilitator will provide instructions for the participants something along the lines of – pay attention to the breath, notice where in the body the breath is experienced, notice what sensations are associated with breathing, notice any sounds or smells or thoughts or other sensations that go along with breathing. That’s just a really really quick short snippet of a much longer exercise that we do called mindfulness of breath – but essentially we encourage women to adopt a regular formal mindfulness practice in their lives where they might practice a formal meditation every day for you know 20 to 30 minutes and then we gradually tailor these exercises to more sexual contexts. So in that sense we might first encourage the women to engage in some self touch and while they’re touching themselves alone they can practice mindfulness at the same time. So what does it actually feel like these sensations as I’m touching myself head to toe including the more erogenous parts of her body – the nipples, the breasts, the vulva, the labia, et cetera. And then we also talk quite specifically about how they might incorporate these new found skills when they’re sexual together with a partner.

[00:11:41] – Chris Rose
I love that. So we released our mindful sex course about four months ago. And one of the things we include is the aroused body scan, because I think there’s different information to be gained from paying attention in a state of arousal. And I love that in your book you include all these exercises of mapping the mindful practice into the sexual encounter either alone or with a partner. What are some of the issues. So a lot of women report this disconnect between the body and the brain. Right. And in the book you talk about arousal concordance and interoception – these are big words, so how do we explain these concepts and think about this unification of the mental and physical experience of sex?

[00:12:27] – Lori Brotto
Right. So I’ll maybe just start with a bit of a real example of one of the first groups that I I worked with when I was a fellow at the University of Washington Seattle to adapt and test mindfulness and this was at a time when I was working quite closely in research with cancer survivors. And these specifically were women survivors of gynecologic cancer where their treatment involved rather radical removal of some of the the internal reproductive structures, so with a radical hysterectomy they had their uterus or cervix and the upper part of the vagina removed and many of these women described a complete lack of any any pleasure any sensation with genital contact. They often talked about it as feeling as though my partner’s touching my elbow. So rather than having that specific sexual pleasure related quality they could feel touch but it was not pleasurable for them whatsoever and it was really a potent example of this kind of disconnect because what we learned was when we taught women to really pay attention, to really notice the sensations that were there while they were engaged in erotic touch or sexual contact, that they realized that there were still sensations of pleasure that they could by focusing on them and really tuning into them could then amplify. So that’s one example of how and why paying attention can really amplify a response that maybe women are not noticing or that has been greatly reduced. Now there’s also been quite a large body of research led by Meredith Chivers, a fantastic Canadian sex researcher as well as others, that shows when you bring women into a right into a sexual psychophysiology research lab and you show them a series of erotic videos and you measure their physical response, typically by the use of a vaginal probe that measures their genital blood flow. And then you also ask them how turned on or how sexually aroused they are, that far more often than not what those studies will find is that there might be a strong physical sexual arousal response. And yet at the same time women are self reporting either minimal sexual arousal or not being sexually aroused or frankly being turned off and we often find that in our samples of women with sexual dysfunction. So the body is responding in the mind is simply not. And that’s what we mean by either low concordance or frankly discordance. And that what that means is that when exposed to a sexual trigger the body’s responding and the mind is not and sometimes you can have the opposite you might have the mind that sexually excited and turned on and the body that’s not responding. So one of the things that we’ve been very interested in in our research is how does mindfulness impact this concordance or this mind body agreement in sexual response. And we’ve now found in a few studies that essentially what mindfulness does is it increases the amount of communication between the brain’s arousal pathways and the body’s sexual response such that as women are becoming aroused in their body they’re far more likely to be tuned in also in their mind and therefore state that they feel sexually excited.

[00:16:13] – Chris Rose
And is this a function of strengthening neural pathways? Do we know yet how this functions?

[00:16:21] – Lori Brotto
Yeah. So this is really where the research needs to go next and we speculate on how and why that is and one of the kind of leading explanations that I believe is going on is we’re strengthening women’s ability to become interoceptive aware. So interception or interoceptive awareness, this is just our general ability to know what’s going on in our body.

[00:16:50]
So you might know folks who are acutely aware of their own heart rate and accurately aware of their own heart rate or those women who can actually sense when they are they ovulate or sense other internal physical sensations. That is interception and we measure interoception in our studies, both through self report questionnaires as well as through a heart rate accuracy test that women do before the mindfulness groups and after. And what we’ve found is that as women become more interoceptively aware this is also associated with their increased ability to tune into those sexual sensations as well.

[00:17:32] – Chris Rose
So in the moment of receiving sensation you are aware of how you’re feeling, then you can map the emotional response onto it and then comes the piece of nonjudgment, right. So we live in a culture that has nothing but judgment, especially around female sexual desire. How does this piece of practicing non-judgment and self compassion play out in your groups? What kind of transformations are possible there?

[00:18:04] – Lori Brotto
Yeah so this this has been really in my mind probably one of the most critical ingredients in our mindfulness based intervention. So I mentioned the awareness of the breath practice. We also have body awareness practice, awareness of thoughts, awareness of sounds and then we also have specific practices that are designed to cultivate compassion towards one’s self. And typically in the group what that looks like is there’s a lot of emotion that goes along with realizing and recognizing that we can be really hard on ourselves. And when you do a formal practice with women where your instructions invite them to cultivate a sense of love and compassion to them self and they realize just how challenging that is – so you have no difficulties at all cultivating love towards other people that they know, even other people that they don’t know. But when it comes to really channeling that love and compassion towards them self there is great great difficulty in doing that. And immediately the women realize what role that this plays in perhaps perpetuating some of their sexual concerns so because they’re constantly faced with a fear of disapproval and concerns about not being good enough sexually as well as otherwise. And when we start to really confront that in the group and send women home with practices that are designed to cultivate compassion they immediately feel transformed in fact many of the women when we follow up with women and engage them in some interviews after they do the group they’ll often tell us how that was one of the most challenging parts of of the eight week intervention is really cultivating that love towards themself.

[00:20:03] – Chris Rose
Especially when we live in the world we do right now.

[00:20:06] – Lori Brotto
That’s right.

[00:20:07] – Chris Rose
I know you you mentioned you worked with cancer survivors. You’ve also worked with trauma survivors. What has working with this population taught you?

[00:20:17] – Lori Brotto
Yeah. Wow what an opportunity that has been to offer to these women, who have in some cases really quite tragic and horrific histories of sexual abuse and assault, many of them as children. And one of my motivations in working with that group using mindfulness specifically are that these the women that we worked with had already undergone fairly extensive psychotherapy to deal with the aftermath the psychological aftermath of their abuse histories and most of them felt like they were resilient and they got past that until they found themselves in consensual sexual relationships again where engaging in sex or feeling sexual arousal triggered many of the past intrusive thoughts and nightmares and distress and dissociation as it had done in their past and their abusive situations. So very very distressing because these were women who were now in happy and consensual relationships. They wanted to be sexual. And yet they had this kind of recurrence of their their past PTSD and trauma symptoms. And so we believed that a mindfulness approach teaching women to really tune into the arousal and notice that the building sensations of arousal and staying with it, without getting pulled away into dissociation, was really quite key and we found in one study that we did where we compared this approach to another effective psychological approach Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, that the women who received the mindfulness training were able to have far less distressed sex related distress and moreover they were really able to tune into their body and experience both their body getting aroused as well as their mind getting aroused. So for me it was really after working with those women who who had experienced histories of sexual abuse that it convinced me that wow, this was really a tool and a practice that finally could make a lasting impact on women’s sexuality.

[00:22:43] – Chris Rose
And while most of your work has been around women’s sexuality, what are your thoughts on how this research translates to the male sexual experience?

[00:22:52] – Lori Brotto
Yeah I’ve been often asked that question particularly since the book has women in the title. And yet our research over the last two to three years has also adapted these same strategies, our same groups to different populations of men with some really fantastic outcomes. So for example one of the studies we did involved men who have situational premature ejaculation which essentially means that these are guys who had no difficulty with their ejaculation or their erection when they were on their own but when they’re with a partner they might ejaculate too early or the men with situational erectile dysfunction have no difficulty getting erection on their own but when they’re with a partner because of concerns and fears and worries and and concern about performance failure they might lose their erection. And so we found mindfulness to be really a powerful tool, a powerful strategy for helping them gain better control over their erections and for dealing specifically with the premature ejaculation. We’ve much more recently been delivering mindfulness based strategies also to prostate cancer survivors together with their partners.

[00:24:15]
Now this is a bit of a different population because one of the things we know is that prostate cancer treatment whether it’s the surgery or the chemotherapy or the radiation produces lasting and permanent sexual difficulties for the vast majority of men who survive their prostate cancer. So our use of mindfulness with this population is not so much focused on getting their sexual function back but rather on expanding their repertoire. Their – what we call “a buffet menu” of different ways of being sexual that don’t focus on having an erect penis.

[00:24:55]
So that work’s been very interesting because typically this is a population who’s really really distressed and very focused on getting their erection back and that also probably speaks to bigger societal notions of what it means to be a masculine man and to be a masculine man means to have a rock hard erection when one wants it, when one wants to need it. So mindfulness and in particular the compassion practice of mindfulness has been very useful for that population of men in expanding the different ways that they might be sexual.

[00:25:32] – Chris Rose
So important, I love that. Recently on the podcast we were talking about performance anxiety and the idea that excitation and anxiety are both arousal responses. How does mindfulness allow us to grow our capacity for arousal and excitation without flipping into anxiety?

[00:26:00] – Lori Brotto
That is a great question and I’m going to write that down because that would be a great future research study. And you know one of the things we know is that among women with low desire, individuals with low desire more generally, that there may be different kind of patterns for sort of their reasons for their low desire.

[00:26:23]
So it may be the case that one woman has a low capacity for becoming sexually excited so a low excitation ability and for other women they might be much higher on the inhibition domain. So they might have kind of internal structures in their brain that constantly put the brakes on and prevent them from becoming sexually excited. So in our own research we have measures of this inhibition and excitation tendency and we’re now starting to look at how mindfulness might specifically impact those two different systems the excitation and inhibition system. So we don’t quite know exactly how that happens yet but we can speculate that one of the things that mindfulness does is by tuning in and reducing avoidance tendencies that it probably does have an impact on lessening some of those inhibitory barriers that are preventing women from getting sexually excited. Now how it impacts the excitatory pathways we don’t know quite yet what the answer to that is.

[00:27:33] – Chris Rose
I look forward to it. Thank you. And when we released our mindful sex course and when we talk about mindfulness on the podcast, sometimes the response we get is “I’m all ready to self conscious during sex. I’m already too much in my head” and there’s this confusion that mindfulness means overthinking. How do you talk about the specific qualities of mindful attention that are different from everyday cognitive function?

[00:28:03] – Lori Brotto
Yeah that’s also a very common concern expressed by women in our group which is “I’m already hyper vigilant to my own function and I actually think that that’s actually getting in the way of my sexual arousal.” And so there are different ways of paying attention and in the woman who’s hyper vigilant. There can be a tendency to misinterpret what’s happening as signaling some kind of negative or disastrous or catastrophic outcome. So by hyper focusing on “am I getting aroused, am I wet yet, am I excited, what’s happening in my body, what’s happening in my vulva, what’s happening with my nipples” It’s not a hypervigilance that we’re cultivating but rather it’s an awareness and an observing. One of the other really important things that we practice with mindfulness is something that mindfulness experts call “open monitoring” and that is our ability to just kind of notice everything that is happening without attaching to any one particular experience. And so in our groups when we lead the mindfulness practice there’s really two things that we focus on. One is notice what’s happening. Notice the sensations. And then secondly notice if you have a tendency to become overfocused on those so to attach to experience attachment and simultaneously notice if there’s a tendency to want to move away from or experience some aversive reaction to those sensations. So we fold in this practicing practice of noticing attachment and aversion while we’re also noticing sensations and that can be a really useful concept for those women who tend to be hyper vigilant about their sensations.

[00:30:00] – Chris Rose
Oh yeah I know that well from being mindful during chronic pain. And to map that onto how we move away from or towards pleasure that is really powerful. So of all of your research findings over the past decade plus what has been most surprising to you?

[00:30:19] – Lori Brotto
I think one of the pleasantly surprising outcomes has been that when we invite women back six months and one year later that they continue to experience the benefits. They’re continuing to practice the mindfulness maybe not in the same kind of intensive way that they did when they participated in our groups but because they’ve experienced lasting improvements not only in their sexual response unsatisfaction but on those other important parts of quality of life like mood and ability to cope with stress ability to just engage more in life and enjoy their meals and pay attention to their conversations that they actually want to continue to do these practices in their in their life. So it’s been a really positive observation is to see that we are planting a seed but then that seed continues to be cultivated and it grows into women’s ongoing practice long after they leave our our center. So that’s been a great finding. I think one of the other maybe somewhat surprising findings is that the benefits of mindfulness were not specific to those women who already bought into the idea of Mindfulness being useful.

[00:31:44]
So basically what I mean by that is that we include baseline measures for women engaged in the groups around “how much do you think that this is going to help you” and “how much do you really agree with this kind of a mindfulness based approach” and “how skeptical are you of these strategies and whether they will work for you?” And what we found is that women’s baseline level of confidence in the mindfulness treatment and in their level of skepticism had no bearing whatsoever on whether they benefited from the mindfulness or not. So this is great news because one of the the concerns that I’ve certainly read about in the larger mindfulness literature is you know maybe this is only for a small segment of the population who practice yoga and are open to integrative and contemplative practices. Maybe these are folks who you know are have an openness to Buddhist meditation more generally. And our research finds that actually it’s not specific to that population that really cuts across different segments of the population regardless of their baseline level of belief or not.

[00:32:58] – Chris Rose
Thanks so much to your work, we have a developing new field of mindfulness based sex therapy. What do you see coming down the road for the future? What questions are you excited to ask next?

[00:33:14] – Lori Brotto
So we know that sexual difficulties are common. They cut across different ages, different demographics, different cultural groups, different relationship status, sexual orientations, and although my work has focused mostly on women and on the most common concerns being low desire and lack of sexual satisfaction, what I would love to see is kind of an exporting of these approaches for much broader groups. So perhaps individuals who are grappling with sexual identity or who are experiencing stigma or face prejudice as they’re contemplating coming out of the closet and revealing their sexual orientation. So I would love to see kind of an adaptation of these strategies for much broader populations of individuals who are again kind of confronting with different aspects in that broad field of sexuality.

[00:34:17] – Chris Rose
Thank you so much for this conversation and thank you so much for this book.

[00:34:22] – Lori Brotto
Thank you so much for the opportunity. It’s been a real treat to talk to you today.

 

Mindful Sex for Sexual Wellbeing, Better Orgasms and Deeper Love

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We have a new course available! Mindful Sex invites you to harness the power of mindfulness in your sex life. Discover how to minimize distractions, stay present during arousal, expand your capacity for pleasure and go deeper with your partner.

In this podcast, we share three different perspectives on the benefits of mindful sex. The full interviews are part of the Mindful Sex course.

First, Dr. Laurie Mintz shares her thoughts about the practical benefits of mindful sex and the profound results she sees in her sex therapy practice.

Then, sex educator and therapist Cyndi Darnell talks about how she discovered mindful sex through tantra, and how she now thinks about mindful sex as part of social justice work.

Finally, sex educator Kait Scalisi talks about practicing mindful sex in your relationship and life to create a context where great sex can happen more often.

 

What Is Mindful Sex?

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What is Mindful Sex?
What are the benefits of Mindful Sex?
How do you practice Mindful Sex?
To celebrate the release of our brand new course on (you guessed it!) Mindful Sex, here is a lively conversation all about the pleasures and practices of bringing mindfulness to your sex life.

When you are ready to experience the pleasures of mindful sex for yourself, check out our online course, Mindful Sex, by clicking here.