podcast — Page 3 — Pleasure Mechanics

The Pleasure Mechanics Visit Sex Talk With My Mom

Tune in on: Spotify | RSS

We stopped by the Sex Talk With My Mom studios in Los Angeles to talk with our old friends about opening up to pleasure, mindful sex, erection and ejaculation issues, and so much more. We hold nothing back in this candid conversation!

This episode originally aired as episode 264 of Sex Talk With My Mom. Our first conversation with them was episode 121. Check out their podcast for more candid conversation about sex, dating, love after loss and lots of great laughs. Big thanks to Karen Lee and Cam for having us on the show again!

Savoring: A Foundational Pleasure Practice

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Tune in on: Spotify | RSS

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.

The 60 Second Pleasure Point Challenge

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Tune in on: Spotify | RSS

Feeling disconnected from your partner, and maybe even from yourself? Here is a powerful framework from an award winning couples therapist to help you cultivate more moments of micropleasures into your daily life and loving relationships. Micropleasures are those experiences that bring you pleasure, joy and connection in 60 seconds or less.

Love the show? Click here to show your love and support the show! Thanks!

The 60 Second Pleasure Point framework was originally developed by Peter Fraenkel PhD.

Couples therapists often use this exercise with partners who are on the brink of divorce, in sexless marriages, or struggling with intimacy. By committing to just 3 small acts of pleasure a day, couples are asked to form an “arc of connection” throughout the day. The cumulative results are profound, which is why this exercise has become a classic couples therapy practice.

Here at Pleasure Mechanics, we challenge us all to take on the 60 Second Pleasure Point framework as a way to first slow down and connect with our own pleasure – noticing at least three micropleasures every day – and then daring to share these pleasures with those we love. Small moments of joy and kindness can really add up to change your day, and your life.

Micropleasures can combine well with your understanding of Love Languages – click here for a podcast episode where we talk more about applying Love Languages to your erotic life.

Podcast Transcript:

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

Charlotte Rose: 00:05 I’m Charlotte.

Chris Rose: 00:06 We are the Pleasure Mechanics and on this podcast we have honest, soulful, explicit conversations about every facet of sexuality, love, relationships, and how it all fits into your busy ass life.

Chris Rose: 00:22 We’re mothers, we’re business owners, I’m chronically ill. We are all on this crazy spinning planet together and our big questions with sex and pleasure is how do we make it work? How do we make it fit into our lived lives? How do we reclaim a sense of pleasure admidst the anxiety of modern life? How do we reclaim our attention and choose to pay attention to one another’s bodies instead of these devices all the time?

Chris Rose: 00:52 This is the first episode of 2020 and these are the kinds of things that are on our minds. How does sex and pleasure actually show up in our lived lives at this moment in humanity?

Chris Rose: 01:08 Welcome. Welcome to Speaking of Sex. Welcome to 2020. If you are new to the show, come on over to Pleasure Mechanics.com you will find our complete podcast archive as well as many ways to engage with us. Go to Pleasure Mechanics.com/free and sign up for our free online course and you’ll be in touch with us and we welcome you to our community.

Chris Rose: 01:35 If you love this show, if we have already touched your lives in some beautiful way, please support this work. We are community-supported erotic education, so come on over to Pleasure Mechanics.com/love where you will find a few ways to show us the love and support the work we are doing. Whether you are new to the show or have been with us for 10 years, welcome to 2020 and a new year with the Speaking Of Sex podcast.

Charlotte Rose: 02:06 Woohoo.

Chris Rose: 02:07 I feel like I want to pop a bottle of champagne. On today’s episode, we are going to be sharing a really simple yet powerful tool, a framework that we can all use right away to create an astoundingly more pleasurable year. This is one of those small things that cumulatively makes a huge difference.

Charlotte Rose: 02:30 A lot of us are really stressed out in the world right now. There is a lot going on. It’s really helpful to have a simple framework where we can practice bringing microdoses of pleasure into our relationships. This is why we picked this topic because we wanted to find something that was simple and doable and had a cumulative effect on creating more love, pleasure and connection for all of us.

Chris Rose: 02:58 When we say microdoses of pleasure what we mean is this, a lot of people find it hard to go from a stressed, anxious, day to day life into this erotic zone of erotic possibility where they’re ready to get naked and roll around with their partner, where they’re even ready to masturbate. Like a lot of us run a lot of stress and anxiety throughout the day and then find it hard to connect with either ourselves or our potential erotic partners.

Chris Rose: 03:26 What this framework does for us is it gives us something to kind of scaffold the commitment to micro pleasures, pleasures that take a minute or less, pleasures that can be peppered in throughout our day and create what the developer of this exercise calls an arc of connection throughout the day. We want to put a little twist on this and say this can be an arc of connection with yourself, with your own damn self, with your own pleasures, your own erotic body, your own sensuality and eroticism and that feeling of pleasure and calm within you. Or it can be practiced with a partner or more partners and be an arc of connection between two people.

Chris Rose: 04:16 This exercise is called the 60 Second Pleasure Point and it is brought to us by Peter Fraenkel, PHD, an award-winning couples therapist, and one of the directors at the Ackerman Institute for the Family in New York city. I first met Peter at a day-long training with Esther Perel where we had all spent … You know, 400 therapists and educators spending the whole day talking about affairs and infidelity and erotic passion.

Chris Rose: 04:47 Peter got up at the end of the day and said, “You know, there’s one thing no one’s mentioned and that’s time and rhythm.” I’m a jazz musician and a therapist and he had spoken earlier in the day and is really well known in the field so we all kind of turn towards the back of the room and he talked about this idea that one of the elements that goes really ignored when we think about our own erotic lives or our erotic connection with another person is timing and rhythm and how we get in sync with one another.

Chris Rose: 05:22 There’s so much more to say about this and maybe we’ll reach out to him and see if he’ll join us for a whole conversation about the temporal rhythms of eroticism. But this exercise, what it asks us to do is find those moments, 60 seconds or less of pleasure and connection and then do them on purpose throughout the day. Peter Fraenkel suggests this exercise for couples who are on the brink of divorce. This is like an intervention for couples who are finding it impossible to connect, can’t get it up to schedule a date night, aren’t ready for like full blown intimacy.

Chris Rose: 06:01 He invites them in therapy to come up with a list of pleasures and connection points that can be accomplished in 60 seconds or less and then each member of the couple commits to doing three a day, one in the morning, one mid day, one in the evening, and so together, collectively, you have about six minutes of pleasure and connection and shared joy.

Chris Rose: 06:23 Over time, what does that make possible? Peter Fraenkel, a PhD, teaches this all around the world to couples therapists and we wanted to share it with you because it’s a really beautiful, simple structure to remind us that these small moments of pleasure, these small moments of connection, and we’ll give you some examples, matter. They accumulate, they matter. What they do is, what we call, they create a culture of pleasure within your relationship.

Chris Rose: 06:55 They are moments of reaching out or reaching into yourself. I really want to emphasize how important this is to just do for yourself. They are moments of saying, “I am going to pause, focus on this thing that brings me joy, pleasure, arousal, titillation, excitement, and I’m going to install it. I’m going to plant it into my nervous system and allow it to change my mood and focus my attention even just for a minute in my busy day.” The results of this are pretty amazing and profound.

Charlotte Rose: 07:27 I love the simplicity of it and I love the idea of two people coming up with a list of 60 second activities that would bring them pleasure.

Chris Rose: 07:37 Do you want to come up with a list right now with me? Popcorn back and forth?

Charlotte Rose: 07:40 Yes.

Chris Rose: 07:41 When we think about 60 second pleasures it’s not like you have a stopwatch out and you’re like, “60 seconds of snogging. Let’s go.” I’ve always wanted to say snogging.

Chris Rose: 07:53 It’s more of like finding these little things that you can do that can be accomplished in a minute or less that gives you a real jolt of pleasure. A simple one might be a really good hug.

Charlotte Rose: 08:04 A really good kiss.

Chris Rose: 08:06 Cupping someone’s face in your hands and just smiling at them while looking at them in the eye.

Charlotte Rose: 08:11 Stroking the head gently.

Chris Rose: 08:14 We’re very touch oriented so I’ll switch it up.

Charlotte Rose: 08:15 We can shift. Yeah.

Chris Rose: 08:18 You can bring one another a snack. You can arm wrestle, share a joke.

Charlotte Rose: 08:24 Do charades.

Chris Rose: 08:26 As a family, we’re really into charades right now. But making one another laugh even with like a little stupid charades moment is playful and funny and can really break tension. What are some other ideas? You can do a 60 second puzzle together and some people really get into like racing one another in Sudoku.

Charlotte Rose: 08:47 You can read a poem to one another.

Chris Rose: 08:50 Do a quick dance, a little dance move, a sway, a dip.

Charlotte Rose: 08:55 Taking a photo while you’re out in the world and texting it to them and sending a sweet note with it.

Chris Rose: 09:02 Sending a meme or something that will make your partner laugh.

Charlotte Rose: 09:06 Sending a menu from a restaurant and saying, “Would you like to try this this evening?”

Chris Rose: 09:12 Picking up a little thing in a store you see because you know your partner will be delighted.

Charlotte Rose: 09:17 Sharing a toast.

Chris Rose: 09:19 Bringing a cup of coffee. Making toast and jam. That just made me hungry for toast. I think you were talking about like a champagne or a wine toast over dinner.

Chris Rose: 09:29 You get the idea and you can also map these into the five love languages, so words of affirmation, gifts, touch, acts of service and quality time. Think about your partner’s love language and your own. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, check the show notes page. We’ll link up a few episodes.

Chris Rose: 09:51 But if you can think about … And it’s a good exercise to sit down together at dinner or over a cup of coffee and just jot out what are quick things that make you happy. You can do this again for yourself or within your relationship.

Chris Rose: 10:07 As a couples therapy exercise, the classic 60 second pleasure point connection exercise is very relationally-focused, the pleasures you share and the pleasures you bring to one another, the pleasures you give and receive.

Chris Rose: 10:23 We believe here at Pleasure Mechanics it’s also really important to practice this with pleasures that you can share just with yourself, pleasures you can really sink into, feel completely, feel whatever the effect of them is, right? Because pleasure sometimes brings us warm, calm fuzzies and sometimes makes us thrilled and aroused and excited. Having a 60 second pleasure, feeling it fully, and then moving on with your day is super powerful.

Chris Rose: 10:56 Creating micro-pleasures on purpose, delighting in them, your day changes. Your days change, your weeks change, your months change, your years change, your life changes. It’s just cumulative and I’m coming at this as someone who was very tuned out of pleasure. I had a really hard time in my body. I was very dissociated. I was very numbed out. I had a lot of trauma and being invited into this kind of life over 13 years ago, learning massage, being asked to focus on the pleasure that my body was capable of experiencing in these tiny sips. Right? Please notice we are not throwing you into the depths of orgasm here. We are saying pay attention to a moment that delights you and then possibly share it with another human being. That’s all this is.

Chris Rose: 11:52 You’re walking down the street and you see a gorgeous flower. Like, stop, take a minute, enjoy it for yourself, and then maybe if you wish, snap a photo, send it to your lover and say, “The second favorite pink I’ll see today.” Right? Or like whatever your take on that is or, “Your face is just as lovely as this flower, my dear”, right? Like you can be raunchy with this. You can be silly. You can be really loving and tender. That will depend on who you are and where your relationship is at. The point is experiencing pleasure and then sharing it together in these micro moments.

Charlotte Rose: 12:31 It’s so doable and it’s this moment where you’re expressing care and that matters.

Chris Rose: 12:36 Care? Why? Why is this expressing care?

Charlotte Rose: 12:39 If you’re sending a note saying you’re thinking about them, you’re away from each other in the day and the text comes in that somebody is thinking about you and loving you and sending you words that uplift you in some way, it’s precious and this changes our chemistry and that’s why it’s so powerful because it shifts how we show up for the next 10 minutes or an hour of the day. That’s why it’s so powerful.

Charlotte Rose: 13:04 I also want to say that people who aren’t in relationships, yes, they can do it for themselves, but also to share these moments with friends and build your connections, your social connections, your kinship with people is powerful. In our culture we forget about those relationships or don’t name them as as important as a romantic relationship, but we really value and want to keep cultivating those connections deeply as well.

Chris Rose: 13:29 Shared feelings matter no matter who you’re sharing them with.

Charlotte Rose: 13:33 Lovely.

Chris Rose: 13:36 Shared feelings and when you say you feel cared for when you’re on the receiving end of this I think it’s important to remember that just that moment of realizing someone you care about has been thinking about you, remembering the things that you enjoy, and then sharing them with you … Like if you get a funny text from a friend in front of a movie poster with an actor they know you have a crush on it just creates that little thread of connection where you’re both delighting in something together.

Chris Rose: 14:08 This is like scientifically proven to uplift our mood, calm our nervous systems, make us sleep better, right? Like the science geeks would go off on all the clinical data behind something as simple as a shared moment of pleasure.

Chris Rose: 14:25 For us, what’s important is that it’s felt, it’s real and it’s doable. It’s doable. And so I want to challenge all of us to take on this 60 second pleasure point challenge, to all come up with lists of things that can be done in 60 seconds or less that make us feel joyful, that give us pleasure, that arouse us. You can even kind come up with some categories like what are the calm pleasures in 60 seconds or less and what are the arousing thrills? Then things that you can share with friends, with different people in your community, with your lover or lovers, and then to do this. That’s where it really kicks in is when you commit to doing it.

Chris Rose: 15:13 If you’re paying for couples therapy and you have a therapist saying you’re each going to do this three times a day and then come back next week, you’re more likely to take that seriously because you’re paying for that accountability. Here we’re going to invite you to just commit to doing this because you’re going to notice awesome effects in your life and you’re going to notice the uplift and then you’re going to tell us about it.

Charlotte Rose: 15:35 Many of us in a quiet moment during the day will pick up our phone and check email again or scroll and these are the moments where instead we can choose and challenge ourselves to intentionally create a moment of connection instead. I am sure that we have many of those moments in the day and this is where we can shift our habits and our behavior and it will create a much bigger outcome if we choose to take those simple moments and connect with one another instead of mindless scrolling.

Chris Rose: 16:07 Well, there’s the scrolling and we mentioned like sending texts, sending photos, so we’re not saying don’t use your devices for doing this, right? You can use your devices to connect really meaningfully. Or a lot of the time our devices leave us feeling lonely and isolated and isn’t that interesting? We need to look at that. How do we actually feel more connected through our devices?

Chris Rose: 16:32 You know, I also want to mention the timing and rhythm thing here because some people have jobs where they can receive sexy texts at work and other people do not. Part of this finding your rhythm and getting in sync is respecting your partners needs around the timing of your communication. Maybe you need to leave them alone all day and then at five o’clock you know they’re getting out of their job and you can send them a ping or maybe instead of texts you have a private email account where you can send each other sexy things knowing they will log on on their own time. For other people that thrill of having their phone ding all day long will be exciting and a welcome part their day.

Chris Rose: 17:16 You need to communicate about this. How do we want to connect? What is this arc of pleasure? Because this idea of the arc of pleasure what this does, it’s not just the isolated micro moments. It’s like you start the day with a moment of shared pleasure. You have another one as you’re heading out the door. You get a few throughout the day. You come home to one, you go to sleep with one and your day, no matter how stressful, now has five, six points of connection in it. That’s really meaningful. If we don’t do this on purpose, it is possible to go day after day without actually taking one minute to deeply connect and share pleasure.

Chris Rose: 18:01 That’s what’s kind of harrowing is is if we don’t do this on purpose, how easy is it to let it slip and just kind of move around your home if you’re cohabitating with someone or be like, “Yeah, we’ll see each other Friday night. Okay” and then you get there on Friday night, you’ve had no shared pleasure throughout the week. You’re barely connected, you’re not in sync, and you’re expecting to like connect and go into bliss space and fuck? Like that’s a lot of pressure.

Chris Rose: 18:25 What this does, that arc of connection, Peter Fraenkel talks about, it’s like dropping notes in and then a song appears. This is a self-motivating system, so because it feels good, because it affirms the social animals within us that want to feel things together, we tend to do more of them. As you do them, you tend to do more of them. They get longer than 60 seconds and lo and behold, you’re actually practicing these daily forms of pleasure just because, because it’s good, because it makes you feel better in your day and it doesn’t distract from your purpose. It doesn’t take away from your job, it doesn’t take away from your responsibilities. It’s just peppered in and it kind of brightens your day and you learn what works. You pay attention to like, “Oh, that was like a really fun thing” versus like, “Eh”, and you accumulate the wins.

Chris Rose: 19:21 All right. We would love to hear how this has been working for you. If we all commit to this for the next week and then if you are in touch with us, we would love to hear from you. This year in 2020 we would like to try something new with you. We would love to start gathering your voice memos. In the past you’ve emailed us a lot of questions. We would love to start hearing your voices and sharing your voices with one another. If you have a question for us or a testimonial about how one of our ideas or techniques have impacted you, record a short voice memo on the voice memo app on your phone and email it to us at Chris at Pleasure Mechanics or Charlotte at Pleasure Mechanics and we will gather these up and share them on future episodes.

Chris Rose: 20:14 Again, record a voice memo. Send it to us at Chris at Pleasure Mechanics or Charlotte at Pleasure Mechanics dot com or go to Pleasure Mechanics.com/hello and get in touch with us that way. We Would love to hear from you.

Chris Rose: 20:28 Welcome to 2020 it’s going to be an intense year, but we are in this together. All billions of us on this beautiful spinning planet earth we are in it together. We are here for you and you can reach us anytime. Come visit us at Pleasure Mechanics.com. We have our whole podcast archive waiting for you and lots of ways to be engaged at Pleasure Mechanics dot com/free. We love you. We’re here for you. I’m Chris.

Charlotte Rose: 21:00 I’m Charlotte.

Chris Rose: 21:01 We are the Pleasure Mechanics.

Charlotte Rose: 21:02 Wishing you a lifetime of pleasure.

Chris Rose: 21:05 Cheers.

What Do You Want?

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Tune in on: Spotify | RSS

What do you want? This is such a simple question, yet one that can be so hard to answer, especially in the erotic realm.

Love the podcast? Ready for more?

Join The Pleasure Pod & Get The Interactive Worksheet & More of the Best of Pleasure Mechanics!

What do you want? This question emerges in all arenas of our life – from the biggest picture questions about family, career and lifestyle to the micro moments of everyday life.

How easy is it for you to answer the question “What Do You Want?” How do you take space from all the “musts” and “shoulds” in life in order to create enough space to even ask this question?

In this episode we explore how to play with this question “What do you want” in order to start feeling into your embodied truths about your life. We share a simple (but not easy) process of paying attention to your body while actively fantasizing in order to access your embodied wisdom and knowledge to help you understand what you really want.

The process of tuning into your embodied knowledge is a lifelong process and one that takes practice – but here’s a quick introduction to how we can bring our body into the conversation when we sit with the question “What Do You Want?”

We are Community Supported Erotic Education – click here to show us some love!

Other Speaking Of Sex Episodes To Explore:

Rethinking Libido Mini Series

Peak Erotic Experiences

What To Do With Desires Unfulfilled

Podcast Transcript:

Chris Rose: 00:01 Welcome to Speaking of Sex with The Pleasure Mechanics. I’m Chris.

Charlotte Rose: 00:05 I’m Charlotte.

Chris Rose: 00:05 We are the Pleasure Mechanics, and on this podcast, we have honest, soulful, explicit conversations about sex, love, relationships and connection. Come on over to pleasuremechanics.com for our full podcast archive, and go to pleasuremechanics.com/free to get enrolled in our free online course and dive in a little deeper with us right away. That’s pleasuremechanics.com/free. This is going to be our last episode of 2019. We’re kind of skidding into December and hurdling towards the holiday season as a family, so we thought we’d give ourselves the gift of wrapping up the podcast season and looking forward to coming back in January.

Chris Rose: 00:55 We are going to California for the holidays, and I bring that up because we’re going to talk about what that trip has opened up in my head and heart a little later in the episode. Yeah, so we are moving towards … My birthday is coming up. We’re going to spend my birthday weekend at the Zen monastery as a family, which has become a beloved tradition of our family. Then, a few days later, we get on a plane to California, so this will be the last episode of 2019, and I just want to quickly say how grateful we are for you, our podcast audience. This year, we’ve almost doubled in size this year, so if you are new with us and just a few episodes deep, welcome and thank you, and have fun exploring the archives.

Chris Rose: 01:43 I just got an email from someone who just recently discovered the podcast and fell in love with it, and also has a new relationship, so they’ve been sending each other episodes back and forth and having long conversations about them, and I thought, “What a wonderful way to start a relationship.” Like you’ll get to know each other really well right out of the gate. Welcome to all of our new listeners and big love to all of you who have been with us for two, three, five years. Some of you have been with us as Pleasure Mechanics for 10 years now on your erotic journey, so as we move towards 2020 and this new decade together, thank you and love to all of you, and I’ll almost miss you this holiday season. I will be thinking about you, and we will be in touch with those of you on our Patreon community.

Chris Rose: 02:35 We’re doing a live call next week for our patrons. You can join that at pleasuremechanics.com/love. Find all the ways to go deeper with us, and yeah, we will be back in January with new episodes of Speaking of Sex.

Charlotte Rose: 02:52 We are so grateful for you all in our world and that we get to have these conversations with you and share ideas, and then hear how they land with you. It is really such a joy to be in community with you all, so thank you, thank you, thank you.

Chris Rose: 03:08 It really does feel like this conversation, when we broadcast out to the group, and then we hear back from waves of you at a time about how the episodes land, how these themes show up in your life, and then we roll that wisdom back out into the future episodes and courses as we build them, and over the 10 years, this is how really the Pleasure Mechanics body of knowledge has been woven, and it’s been so deeply in dialogue with all of you, so love to you guys. Welcome. All right. This episode, one more episode for 2019, and I thought we would talk about this question, “What do you want? What do you want?”

Chris Rose: 03:54 “What do you want?” is a question that comes up for a lot of people at the holiday season. “What do you want for the holidays? What do you want on your gift list? What do you want from Santa? What do you want for the New Year? What do you want to do for the holidays?”

Chris Rose: 04:09 It’s a season of want, which gets turned into all sorts of toxic mimics, but we won’t go into that. A season of want, but also, this question shows up for us in so many different arenas of our life, right? It’s a very internal question of, “What do I want? What do I want with my life? What do I want with my career?”

Chris Rose: 04:33 “What do I want out of a family? What do I value?” It’s a deeply relational question. It’s a lover’s question, “Tell me what you want.” It can be the beginning of a beautiful, erotic exchange.

Chris Rose: 04:50 “What do you want? How can I serve you? Tell me what you want. Tell me what you desire.” Then, it can also be kind of a demanding question.

Chris Rose: 05:02 Sometimes when we receive this question, it feels more of like a demand like, “What do you want? What do you want from me?” It can be a question on, that comes in a waves of desperation sometimes, so I thought this question would be an interesting one to explore, what is being asked of us when we hear this question, “What do you want?”, and how do we answer it? What is the process of answering it?

Charlotte Rose: 05:25 It’s such an interesting question because it’s relevant in a huge range of time. It’s relevant when you look at your entire life, when you look at the decade ahead, when you look at the rest of your life, or when you look at an afternoon or an hour, or 20 minutes after your kid is in bed. This question of what you want is so relevant at every scale.

Chris Rose: 05:49 And being able to answer it, having a process, having a trust in a process that you can ask yourself that question and get reliable information back, what a gift that would be because I think we all know this question and how it has shown up in our life in the big and the small moments, and we know how shitty it feels when we’re asked this question, and the answer is like, “I don’t know what I want.” We hear this from people all the time in different iterations, but not knowing what you want does not feel good, and it doesn’t serve you, and it doesn’t serve the people you love. How do we know how to live? How do we know how to fill our time, how to make love if we don’t know what we want, what we desire, what would be pleasurable, what would bring us more joy, and spark, and vitality, and pleasure into our lives? What do you want is such a generous question, but it demands specificity.

Charlotte Rose: 06:57 And self-knowing. It demands being able to feel inside your body and know what might feel good, and fulfilling, and satisfying, and that is a whole skill set.

Chris Rose: 07:09 Why make that connection? I totally agree, but tell me more about why do you have to be able to feel inside?

Charlotte Rose: 07:17 We have to be able to think of an idea and feel for a response inside our body, or we think of a feeling state that we want to experience, and then we can verbalize it. I think different people will have different ways to respond to this question. Some, it will be a body longing first, and then we articulate it, and others, it will be an idea, and then we listen for a body response.

Chris Rose: 07:45 Okay. We’re going to dive more into this. I want to say a good episode to listen to if you haven’t already is the one about desire, the pleasure of wanting, and that was part of our libido series, so if you go to pleasuremechanics.com/libido, you’ll find our entire libido series. In this episode, we talk about how sex is not a drive. We are not driven towards sex, we are pulled by desire.

Chris Rose: 08:12 It is a motivational system. Another way to think about this question, “What do you want?” is, “What are the motivational systems that are pulling you into your wanting? What is motivating you? What would motivate you into action?”, because, “What do you want?” also is a question that demands action. To go from fantasy, to desire, to action and lived experience, what do you want, you have to translate from a feeling or an idea into lived experience. That’s, I think one of the reasons that we’re a little bit afraid of this question because it demands something of us.

Chris Rose: 08:53 It asks something of us. This connection between, “What do you want?” and deep feeling, let’s go there for a second. “What do you want?” is a question that goes beyond needs, because as human beings, we all need food, we all need shelter, we all need relationality, and it also goes beyond shoulds. What do you want, sources, a certain kind of agency, a certain kind of sovereignty within the question? Like what do you, there’s a you within that question.

Chris Rose: 09:27 Want is a desire, so what do you as a specific person want specifically? I was thinking a lot about how specific this has to get recently because in our planning for our holiday trip, we’re all going as a family out to California, we’re spending some time with Charlotte’s extended family, so excited to see the uncles, and then there’s this period of time where I as an individual get to peel off and have four or five days alone in California. The certain plan was made that would take me up to San Francisco, and I’d be connecting with old friends, and my exes from before Charlotte, and I was maybe going to go to a sex party on New Year’s Eve, and this whole series of events started being scheduled, and I started noticing my body and how my body felt as I was making these plans. The more I paid attention to it, the more I was like, “Whoa, no, no, no.” Like, “This is not right. This is not actually what I want to do.”

Chris Rose: 10:31 I gave myself permission to cancel those plans and open up this wide open space of like, “You are alone in California for four or five days. What do you want? What do you want to do? What do you want to experience? What do you want to feel? How do you want to use that time?”

Chris Rose: 10:49 Like, “What would be most nourishing, most exciting, most pleasurable? Are we going for comforting and calm, or are we going for exciting and thrilling, or maybe a mix?” It’s like in the fantasy, like I, as in our day-to-day life, four days in California, I’d be like, “Yeah, I want that,” and then as soon as it’s a reality, it has to get specific. The specificity of your wants matter, and when you give yourself the opportunity to answer this question in the macro, “What do I want from my life? What are my values?”, are in the moment-to-moment. Like I literally have 20 minutes before I get in bed.

Chris Rose: 11:31 “What do I want right now?” If we really start dropping into this question, and as Charlotte said, and we’re going to explore this, that deep felt sense in the body when we start thinking about these options, when we start thinking about this question, when we start feeling into our desire, and we’re going to give you some tools to do this, so it’s not just abstract, but when you start feeling what your body is telling you, all of a sudden, these very specific things can start emerging, and we can start asking for what we want and we can start getting more of what we want. This is another big secret of this, is the more we ask for what we want out loud, the more likely we are to receive it, and it’s a snowball effect and it can be really beautiful and magical if we start allowing ourselves to have very specific wants, and then say them out loud to people who love us, and support us, and care about us.

Charlotte Rose: 12:34 Though this may sound simple, it is of course not so easy. There are so many factors that get in the way for many of us to be able to easily ask for what we want and know what we want, so let’s look at the context. Let’s look at some of the pieces that get in the way. The idea of feeling into our body and feeling what feels like a yes, what feels like a no, how do we do this practically? We need to slow down enough so that we can actually feel what we’re feeling.

Charlotte Rose: 13:08 Our culture encourages us to move so quickly and at such a pace, and we are inundated all the time with the shoulds, what we should be wanting, what we should be buying in order to feel happier. To be able to actually distinguish and separate that from what we actually specifically want as individuals is a skill set, and it is a practice and a skill to cultivate intentionally.

Chris Rose: 13:36 A lot of this depends on a trust of the brain in your gut, so a lot of traditional knowledge systems have known this for thousands of years. Modern science is just confirming and mapping this, but your gut, your viscera, your digestive system is full of neurons and is intimately connected to your heart, and to your brain, and to the hormonal system. We’re one big organism, but the neurology of the gut, the vagus nerve, we can geek out on this, but the short of it is our body has feelings, and when we listen to those feelings, there’s really good knowledge and information and wisdom within those feelings. If you can get onboard with that idea that our body has feelings that are valuable parts of our knowledge system as individuals and as a species, as humans, a lot of this relates to the mammalian neurology. Yeah. This is a whole [crosstalk 00:14:45]-

Charlotte Rose: 14:45 Save this for another time.

Chris Rose: 14:46 Yeah. This is a whole … I’ll drop some links again in the show notes page if you want to geek out on this, but this idea of the brain in your gut, your gut feelings, how you feel about a situation versus what you think about it. I’ll give you an example as we go into the holidays. Think about going home for the holidays, whatever that means to you, and if you paint that picture in your head and you feel into your body, perhaps there are people in your life that when you think about seeing them, you feel open, and warm, and cozy inside. You feel a yes. You feel an openness and a receptivity to that idea, that anticipated experience brings you pleasure and joy and a desire.

Chris Rose: 15:37 Perhaps there are people in your natal family or in your community that if you think about going to a holiday party with them, there’s a sense of constriction, contraction, a disgust or of a repelling feeling, and you’re like, “Ugh, I have to do that?” Notice those sensations. These are the feelings underneath the rational thoughts. These are our feelings in our body, our wisdom in our body, and we can tap into this in all sorts of ways for our erotic advantage. We’ll talk about this way more next year.

Chris Rose: 16:12 It comes a lot out of our study of mindful sex and our framing of what we do with massage, but this idea that we have wisdom and knowledge in our body beyond our brain is really important for this next piece. When we have to answer the question, “What do you want?”, you can think about that question and come up with things like a gift list on Amazon. Like I can think about what I want. If you start feeling into the question, “What do you want?”, a whole other galaxy of ideas and options become available to us, to feel into what do you want, because this is beyond the material. This is, “What do you want to feel? How do you want to live?”

Chris Rose: 16:58 “What kind of experiences you want to have, what kind of relationships you want to have, what kind of sex you want to be having?” We have to remember more and more to bring this back to sex, my dear. What kind of sex you want to be having, how you want to be touched, how you want to be fucked. Do you want to have rough sex? Do you want to have gentle sex?

Chris Rose: 17:17 Do you want lots and lots of full body touch? Do you want to have your hair grabbed and be spanked? The whole range is available to you, but to get what you want, you have to be specific and identify it. Here’s my process for identifying what I want in my body, and I started taking myself into this with this California trip, and in doing that, kind of recognize like, “Oh, I have this system I use when I think into potential options for things,” so the system is going into fantasy, unlocking the realm of fantasy, while paying attention to how your body feels. That’s the simple version of it.

Chris Rose: 17:59 We’ll be rolling some of this into the work we do next year, but the simple version is you’re going to really think through ideas, options, you’re going to fantasize, and then pay attention to how your body responds, and start identifying for yourself what feels like a yes, what feels like a pleasure, what feels like a desire, and what feels like a no, of repulsion, contraction, and you’ll learn for yourself how these things feel in your body, and you can access this quickly by starting with things that have already happened in your life. Get in a safe space, try to be relaxed, take a shower, go for a walk, and then lie down and spend a few minutes thinking about a peak erotic experience. We did a whole episode about this. Again, it’ll be in the show notes, but a peak erotic experience, one of the best erotic sexual experiences of your life. Think about it.

Chris Rose: 19:03 Go into deep sensual detail, the more specific you can be, and remember those details and the context of it, and how you felt in that moment. Think really deeply about it so you’re activating your brain, those neural networks in your brain, and then feel into your body. Notice how your heart feels, your breath, your stomach, your loins, your pelvis. Feel into all of that, and then notice. Notice, map it out. You might take notes for yourself or make a picture if you’re more of a visual person.

Chris Rose: 19:40 Feel it, install it. Okay. Shake that out, and then another day, do this same exercise and you want to be feeling like safe and resourced for this, but do this same exercise, thinking about a time where something didn’t go well, that it was a no, but you did it anyway, or a no and something was done to you, and I’m not recommending you relive your deepest trauma here. I’m inviting you here, just like we went to a peak erotic experience, go to a valley in your life. Like go to something that felt awful and shitty, and then start noticing how that feels in your body, and even talking about it right now, like going from that first peak erotic experience with you into this valley, I’m feeling my body change as we talk about this.

Chris Rose: 20:23 I’m looking in Charlotte’s eyes and watching her body change, feeling her breath contract. You might have heard that in the podcast. This is the secret sauce. Like this is the wisdom of your body speaking. When we pay attention to how we feel, we know how we feel about things. Again, the simplicity of this, but when you know how you feel about something, you start knowing what you want, what you want more of.

Chris Rose: 20:52 Before we move on, just to wrap up my story about California, like as I started feeling into like, “What do I really want? Do I want to be at a sex party on New Year’s Eve, 2020 alone?”, like, “Do I want to be in San Francisco?”, like I started calibrating my thoughts towards what I want, and I got a really clear picture of what I want. It turns out, it’s not at all San Francisco and it’s not at all a sex party alone, and I’m going to cultivate and shape a new experience, guided by this embodied feeling of yes, this embodied feeling of, “That’s what I want right now. That’s what would be most pleasurable.” I invite you into exploring this, and notice what you notice along the way.

Charlotte Rose: 21:41 Can I just go back to the piece where we’re encouraging people to really think about what their no feels like?

Chris Rose: 21:48 Yeah.

Charlotte Rose: 21:49 As a survivor, do you have recommendations for how to complete that for people if they have been really feeling into that, and then they are registering and learning what that shows up in their body as, and then what do you recommend after that?

Chris Rose: 22:07 Right. I mean, you can be gentle with this. You can titrate it, and this is why I say feel safe and resourced going into this, and you can choose your valley. Like you can choose just to think about how it feels when your mom demands something of you on Thanksgiving that you don’t want to be demanded of. You don’t have to go to your assaults, so thank you for that reminder, but within the realm of fantasy and playing with fantasy, one of the things I’ve done is if I get triggered or if I start thinking about a violation, or an assault, or some of my childhood abuse, or my family abuse, or I talk to a family member and that stuff is stirred up or whatever, I can change the narrative in my head and like recalibrate and come to a more embodied sense of power, so instead of leaving myself in that valley, I can imagine.

Chris Rose: 23:00 I can use my fantasy and my imagination to like write a different ending to the story, or to be like, “What would I have said to stand up for myself in that moment?”, and sometimes even having those words like saying out loud like, “No, I don’t want to do that,” or, “No, I’m not available for that.” This is also the opportunity to start pre-loading some of that language into your psyche, and this is, especially with like ongoing stuff, with like family members or relationships, feeling that no and feeling into the pattern of how a no feels, it might feel like you’re taking yourself into the ringer, but by having that aware, having that conscious in your mind of like, “Oh, that’s what I feel like when I’m being violated, when my boundaries are being crossed, when I’m doing something I don’t want to do,” then I can feel the first flickers of that feeling when I’m being asked to do something I don’t want to do, and I can preempt it. When you’re being asked to join a committee at your kid’s school and you feel that flicker in your belly, that’s like, “Ugh, really?”, you get to say, “No, I’m not available for that right now. I’m sorry. This is what I am available for,” or if your lover is pressuring you to do that sex act that they really want that you just do not want to do, you can finally come up with the language of, “No, that really, it doesn’t feel like something I’m into, so no thank you.”

Chris Rose: 24:31 “We’re going to explore where the yeses are.” What it does, it gets us out of that vague feeling of feeling the no, because we feel it whether or not we’re identifying it anyway. We feel it whether or not we are identifying it as a no, that sensation in the gut, the difference in the circulation and the respiratory system. Our bodies feel these feelings and they’re there, being circulated through our systems, and if we come into like dialogue with them and we can start identifying what we’re feeling and why, and in the mindful sex course, we call this like embodied emotions and having practices to access that and to notice how we’re feeling, it gives us such a huge range of intelligence about what we’re wanting, what we don’t want, what our motivations are, what we’re driven towards, what we’re repelled by, what we’re repulsed by, and it’s just such this well of intelligence so we can start changing our experience and saying yes to the things we want, asking for the things we want, receiving the things we want and saying no thank you to that, which will not serve us at this time. To bring it back to this question of, “What do you want?”, what do you want?

Chris Rose: 25:50 What do you want to experience this holiday season? Like a lot of us go into this holiday season with a ton of shoulds, and a lot of stress, and to-do lists, and it’s just crazy that as a culture, we’re like, “We’re going to give everyone time off so you can really stress out.” Like how do we calibrate a holiday season towards one that’s actually nourishing, and nurturing, and connecting, and replenishing, and resources us to go back into the New Year? What would that look like for you, and is there any way to bring some of those feelings into action to give yourself more of that experience? What do you want in your erotic life? You’re listening to this podcast.

Chris Rose: 26:35 You are here with us. We are grateful for that, and we want to know, we want you to feel into, “What do you want from your erotic life? What do you want to experience more of? How do you want to play? What do you want to feel and experience sexually, and in connection with another human being perhaps?

Chris Rose: 26:58 I’d love to know some of the answers to that question that come up for you, and then maybe what do you want out of some solo time? If you had five days in California, what would you do? Like how would you get specific with that, because I’m amazed at the options, you know. Do I want five days in the museums, or five days in the meditation hall, or five days in the dungeon? Like, “What do I want?”, or some mix of it all. Asking ourselves these questions, “What do you want for an afternoon?”, take one hour and fill it with your deepest wants, and nourish yourself by giving yourself what you want, instead of just defaulting to your shoulds, or your to-do lists, like the demands on you, and notice what it feels like to be in dialogue with this question, “What do you want?”

Charlotte Rose: 27:49 It requires separating from the obligations and the shoulds, and sometimes it is hard to carve out that time to really intentionally push up away the things that you should be doing, because that list is endless.

Chris Rose: 28:06 She says as a tired mother.

Charlotte Rose: 28:10 Yeah, and this, I knew so much what I wanted before having a kid. That was a very easy question for me to answer. With the new context of being a mother, I do find this question much more challenging and I’m really having to push against my own internal shoulds. I have a lot of ideas about what it means to be a good mother, it turns out, and I am challenged to make more space and time for myself, and I know I’m not alone in this. There are a lot of ideas that we integrate from culture about what is good, and what is correct, and we do this in the bedroom all the time, so we all have different areas where this shows up.

Charlotte Rose: 28:56 I feel that less in the bedroom and more in relationship to my time in mothering, so it’s a valuable question to explore no matter what phase you’re in, no matter what is available to you right now. Looking at reality, and then how can you make small or big adjustments with what is available for you, because not everyone is going to be able to take five days in California, we know that, but can you take two hours to yourself where you are saying no to obligations and you’re carving out just time to nourish you and what you want? It’s all about taking micro moments. Recently, I was remembering that before I had a kid, I would have like candlelit showers on my own often. I was like, “Why did I put that? Why did I stop that?”

Charlotte Rose: 29:50 Like I’m not going to a spa for three days and these moments where I’m taking a long, luxurious shower, feel really indulgent, and delicious, and nourishing to me.

Chris Rose: 30:00 Well, this is important. You stopped it because with an infant, candles aren’t safe.

Charlotte Rose: 30:05 Yeah, that’s right.

Chris Rose: 30:06 This is the thing, context changes.

Charlotte Rose: 30:08 And our bathroom was really small and there was no room for her in that bathroom when she was a baby, and then I forgot.

Chris Rose: 30:13 Totally. Context changes, and then it changes again, and sometimes we have to kind of shake ourselves awake enough to even look around and understand what our context is, what we have agency over, what we can change, and then take those opportunities, and sometimes little changes in our life make huge watershed differences in our life experience, and even the mental freedom.

Charlotte Rose: 30:39 Yeah.

Chris Rose: 30:39 This is the thing, we did a whole episode about what to do with desires unfulfilled. Again, I’ll link in the show notes page. This is going to be a long show notes page, but there’s so many related conversations here, but we all have way more desires than we can make happen in our lives, and that’s just so important to know as you’re going into asking yourself this question, “What do you want?” As soon as you start dropping into it, you might be flooded with what you want, and then how to understand how to shape that into your day-to-day life is a big process and it’s a process of imagination and translation. When you identify the themes, you want to feel a spa-like experience, great, that experience for yourself. Candles are really easy to buy.

Charlotte Rose: 31:27 Yeah.

Chris Rose: 31:27 I would buy you a candle the next time at the grocery store.

Charlotte Rose: 31:29 No, but I did this. I had a longing. I was having a longing for more nourishment, more of that kind of delicious, “I have all the space for myself,” and so I rearranged the bathroom and brought a candle in, and put more of my massage lotion back in there, all these things that were not, because they were like kids’ toys there. I rearranged it, and it was such a simple thing. It was such a small thing, and now the experience of having a candlelit shower, and then with a massage, and then I massage my feet after, I massage my body, and it feels really freaking good, and it didn’t take a lot of shift in my material reality, and it is a bit of time, but the output is so nourishing.

Chris Rose: 32:14 But that process you’re describing started with paying attention to yourself long enough to notice the longing, identify the longing, get specific with it, shift what we already had in our home apparently, and then you created a context to give yourself that experience over and over again. I think that’s also good to remember, is some of this work is upfront and some of the harder conversations with your partner about, “What do I want?”, well, let me really tell you, will create watershed changes that over many years, you will benefit from, and will create the skills to ask yourself this over and over again because we noticed that both our desires change and context changes. I think your example of like the context of early motherhood, being really important, because you have now shifted out of that we’re in a different stage of parenthood, but we have to pay attention enough to change our behavior with that.

Charlotte Rose: 33:13 Remember that the context has changed, and then shift ourselves to get bigger again or just different, instead of those limitations being perceived.

Chris Rose: 33:26 Then, how to be honest with ourselves and real with ourselves about what is available to us, because more is available to us than most of us ask for. We are not trained to ask for things out loud. We’re even trained as you blow out your birthday candles to keep your wishes a secret, but how does anyone know what you want? How can people give you what you want if you don’t say it? Just notice that. If you say your wishes out loud, if you hand people your wishlist, it is so much easier for them to give you that gift, and I’m not talking about the stuff under the tree.

Chris Rose: 34:03 I’m talking about what we want from our life. “I want deep friendship with you. Can you show up for this with me? I want a sense of adventure in our relationship. What will that look like for us? I want a little more freedom to explore my interest in music.”

Chris Rose: 34:22 “Can I go out once a week or once a month? What is realistic for us?” When we identify our wants, we can start changing our behaviors, and therefore, our lived experiences.

Charlotte Rose: 34:33 Right.

Chris Rose: 34:34 This is true in bed, out of bed, micro, macro. Just start playing with this, giving yourself permission to want and trusting what comes up there, and knowing you are wise enough to adapt that to your life circumstance, and that acknowledging wants is not going to take you off the deep end. As we practice answering this question, as we practice asking out loud for what we want, as we practice shifting the context, as you were beautifully saying about making that translation from fantasy to desire, from what is possible to what I actually want in my real life, that’s fantasy to desire, and then from desire to action, what can I do? What can I do in my real life because I can spin off in California and be like, “Well, I’ll go hiking for five days. Maybe not the best, most possible option for my body right now, but what does that desire speak to, time outside, long walks? We don’t have the budget to like go to a retreat center for five days, but maybe I can get a small room somewhere and create that space for myself.”

Chris Rose: 35:45 That translation, I think is so important, and in our conversations about fantasy, again, we’ll link to some other conversations about this. We talk about how important it is to go from the realm of pure imagination where anything is possible. Feel into that. Like feel into your fantasies. Translate that into desires, what you actually want, and now we’re translating that into actions. What can you do given your current context, given your current agency in your specific situation right now? That’s where the rubber hits the road, as they say or the latex hits the lube.

Chris Rose: 36:26 I just made that up. Think that’s going to stick, but that’s where it gets real because that’s where if your lover’s saying, “What do you want?”, and in your belly you’re saying like, “I want to be tossed around and roughed up and spanked, and dah, dah, dah,” like getting from that feeling and identifying that desire, which can be hard enough to translating that into the context of you and your husband on a Tuesday night, like that is where a lot of the hard work is and where the baby steps are, and where you can start asking for small pieces perhaps, and building capacity and building trust together, but it starts all from this honesty of, “What do I want?” I’ll tell you what I want, so tell me what you want what you really, really want.

Charlotte Rose: 37:16 What you really, really want.

Chris Rose: 37:16 Oh, wow. I wish we had the license to that song. I would fade out into glory. Tell us what you want. Be in dialogue with this question. Ask yourself, “What do you want?”

Chris Rose: 37:29 “What do I want to feel? What do I want to experience? What do I want to … What values do I want to live my life through? How do I want to be fucked?” All of these variations of the question of what do you want, and then let us know.

Chris Rose: 37:45 Go to pleasuremechanics.com/love, pleasuremechanics.com/free. Drop in deeper with us, be in community with us, and be in dialogue with us. As soon as you join our free course or our newsletter, you’ll start getting emails from us and you can reply to any of those emails and reach us directly. Be in dialogue with us. Share your stories.

Chris Rose: 38:08 We’ve gotten so many amazing emails recently. Thank you so much for sharing with us your experience, how you’re using this podcast, how you’re using the courses in your relationships. It is thrilling to hear how this work lands for you. If this work has made a difference in your life, if our presence in your life week-to-week is a good thing, if you want more of us, show us the love at pleasuremechanics.com/love so you can drop in deeper with us and support us in this work so we can keep going.

Charlotte Rose: 38:45 Yes, and thank you again for those emails that you send us. It is so nourishing to hear how our work is supporting you. Thank you so much for being a part of our world, for listening to this podcast, and we hope that this has given you a little inspiration to really think and feel into what you’d like more of. What do you want more of, in big ways and in small ways, and then give yourself permission to just have a little bit more of that, whatever that is, and see if it makes you feel fulfilled and satisfied, because that’s the other piece is then noticing how it makes you feel once you experience it. There’s so many parts to this, but playing and stretching yourself in any part of it is valuable and useful for all the other areas of your life, and we hope that over this holiday season, that there are some delicious moments where you get to ask for and receive what you most want, and that you get to carve out a little bit more space for that, and then it feels good.

Chris Rose: 39:56 Happy holidays, dear ones. We will be back in January of 2020, and we look forward to another decade with you. Another decade.

Charlotte Rose: 40:09 No. That one doesn’t have to stick.

Chris Rose: 40:12 We look forward to another decade with you here at pleasuremechanics.com. Thank you so much for listening to Speaking of Sex with The Pleasure Mechanics. I’m Chris.

Charlotte Rose: 40:22 I’m Charlotte.

Chris Rose: 40:23 We are the Pleasure Mechanics.

Charlotte Rose: 40:24 Wishing you a lifetime of pleasure. Decades and decades of pleasure. No.

What Is Sexual Freedom?

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Tune in on: Spotify | RSS

As we accept our nomination as finalist for a Sexual Freedom Award, we had the chance to reflect on the really big question: What Is Sexual Freedom? In this episode, we invite you to reflect on sexual freedom – both as an individual and what it means as a global project of social justice.

Big love and thanks to the folks at the Sexual Freedom Awards, we are thrilled to be finalists for Publicist of the Year for the 25th Annual Sexual Freedom Awards!

Podcast Transcript:

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: 00:05 We are the Pleasure Mechanics. And on this podcast we have soulful, explicit conversations about every element of human sexuality. Come on over to pleasuremechanics.com where you will find all of our resources waiting for you. Go to pleasure mechanics.com/free to enroll in our free online course and get started right away. And if you’ve been listening to this show for a while and have felt our work touch your life, go to pleasuremechanics.com/love where you will find multiple ways to show your love and support for this show.

Chris Rose: 00:43 Thank you for listening. We are feeling the love this week, amazing love because we were notified that we were nominated for a sexual freedom awards as part of the 25th Annual Sexual Freedom Awards ceremony in London next week. We so wish we could be at the ceremony, but it’s so meaningful to us to be nominated for this award that for 25 years has been recognizing pioneers and visionaries and artists in the field of sexuality.

Chris Rose: 01:20 And if you look at the nominees for this year alone or throughout the 25 year history of this organization, it’s a wonderful reminder that there are so many front lines of the movement we call sexual liberation or sexual freedom. There’s artists and erotic performers, there’s academics and teachers, there’s scientific researchers and social commentators. And we have been nominated as publicist of the year. And I love this category because sometimes I do feel like I am a PR agent for a healthy sex culture.

Chris Rose: 02:02 It’s like we’re reporting from the front lines of sex culture today and also envisioning what a new sex culture could look like together. So whether it was called publisher or producer or a podcast of the year, we’re just so honored to be part of this community, engaging with the very real ideas and actions and community movements that work towards erotic liberation and sexual freedom for all beings.

Charlotte Rose: 02:35 It’s such a big and bold mission and it’s been really beautiful to see all the different ways that people are contributing to that goal, and all the different flavors and styles and passion and power and creativity that people are bringing to this end. And we are thrilled to be a part of it.

Chris Rose: 02:55 And a part of what? So what does sexual freedom mean? This question was thrown in our lap this week through the nomination process. We were asked to respond to the question, what does sexual freedom mean to you in 2019. And it’s such a beautiful question, a huge question, a daunting question, and we threw it back out to our communities on different social media platforms and it was really wonderful to engage with this question this week. And so for the episode this week, we wanted to have a little conversation about this big question.

Chris Rose: 03:34 What does sexual freedom mean? Why is it worth working towards? How is it connected with the global movements of equity and social justice just as it is connected to what happens in your bedroom and your genitals in your body, right? I think inherent in this question of what is sexual freedom, some of our most immediate answers might be very personal. Freedom from shame and from secrecy, freedom to live and love and fuck how we want to, individual sexual freedom.

Chris Rose: 04:16 But then immediately on the heels of that, we recognize this is a social movement and in fact, a global project of epic proportions for any of us to be truly free, for any of us to experience sexual freedom we need freedom from the systems of oppression and human bondage and injustice that rob us of individual body autonomy and body sovereignty.

Charlotte Rose: 04:48 For the conditions to exist that all bodies could have body sovereignty, the world would have to change entirely for that to be so, and it is a worthwhile aim to work towards. It will probably never happen in our lifetime, but it is worth moving towards.

Chris Rose: 05:06 Medicine’s doing wonderful things nowadays my dear.

Charlotte Rose: 05:09 I’m sticking around to see it.

Chris Rose: 05:10 And this has been an organizing question of my life, right? What would the world look like if we had an ideal sex culture? So as much as anything, it’s a thought experiment of going into this question and wondering, what does sexual freedom mean? What does it feel like? What would it feel like in your individual body and then what would the world look like if more and more of us had access to that state of sexual freedom? So this is such an amazing question and we are not going to even take aim at answering it today more.

Chris Rose: 05:48 We just want to open the question and remind us all of this connection and just invite us to connect the dots between our individual access to pleasure, to fucking, to orgasms, to genitals, right? Like all of that really practical stuff of sex and sexual pleasure, how we can show up for that, the freedom we feel in expressing ourselves, in feeling our feelings. What is the connection between that and global systems of economy, global systems of racial justice, global systems of how we take care of one another as societies and as we explore different ways of occupying our sexualities, thinking about sharing pleasure, sharing power and resources and…

Charlotte Rose: 06:49 Connection.

Chris Rose: 06:51 Thanks for jumping in here, I am off the deep end.

Charlotte Rose: 06:54 Reel me in my love.

Chris Rose: 06:57 What was I saying? As we learn this through showing up for one another in our most intimate realms, we are modeling new ways of being together in the collective, in the biggest sense of humans on this planet together.

Charlotte Rose: 07:13 Totally. If we can live in our intimate realms without being burdened by the scripts of shame or the scripts of gender, the constrain how we can be with one another, we can begin to experience more sexual freedom in these micro moments where we feel the safest. And then from those moments we can begin to change things in a community setting, in our workplace. We can show up with a bit more strength and authenticity and feeling less shame. And that can influence an impact, a larger goal if we are all doing this.

Chris Rose: 07:53 And for now it’s enough just to think about this question of how sexually free are you. So as you think about your individual sexual freedom, there’s these lenses we can think of, the freedom from and freedom to. So freedom from being owned and dominated, freedom from your body being controlled and choices made for you rather than you making autonomous choices for your body. Freedom from shame, guilt and fear, freedom from misinformation, freedom from violence and trauma. So how free are you from those things? And then what are you free to do?

Chris Rose: 08:43 Are you free to love who you want to love? Are you free to connect with the people you want to connect to? Are you free to feel your deepest feelings and then express them safely into socially loving connected relationships that will support you in being the full human being that you are? Are you free to do those things? These are the questions that come up right on the heels of this big question, what does sexual freedom mean?

Chris Rose: 09:19 And we see how interconnected we are in the answers to these questions and how truly none of us are free until all of us are free because we cannot live together as human beings owning one another, dominating one another, subjugating one another and still have the empathy and joyful connection of eroticism intact. Eroticism invites us into deep interconnection with one another so we feel our feelings together. And that means we have shared stakes and shit.

Chris Rose: 09:57 When you feel the feelings of other human beings around you deeply, you have shared stakes in their outcome and so you’re looking for the win-win, you’re looking for a situation where you’re both pleasured. Again, the microcosm of sex, the macrocosm of society, how can we all get off? How can we all get our needs met? How can we all be tended to, loved, held, cherished no matter what. And can we build a culture around those ethics and those principles instead of an ethics of principles of domination and violence and subjugation?

Charlotte Rose: 10:34 These are really big ideas with historical context, with global context and maybe take some time to think about how this is relevant for you in your life. Last week we talked about the myth of virginity and of the hymen braking, and this is one example of ways that ideas and myths become so real in our lived lives, and have a real emotional and physical impact in how we live and how we love and what we do with our bodies. And this idea of what would more sexual freedom look like in your body, in your life is also an enormous question.

Chris Rose: 11:13 And sometimes it can be easier to go to the children. What would more sexual freedom look like for the coming generations? What does that stake in that? What are the gifts that we could pay forward in how we teach our children and children in our lives about sexuality, their bodies, consent, communication, relationships, love? We feel we know deeply how swooping these effects are in our life and how when we’re talking about sex, we’re never just talking about coitus, right?

Chris Rose: 11:50 This isn’t about the mechanical act of intercourse, this is one of the most profound and central questions about the human condition. So for some of us thinking about the children and thinking about coming generations, and then for some of us thinking about the past and dredging up, excavating all of the ways sexual freedom has been denied to human beings will be really energizing and clarifying and put your life in context of these global systems of power and oppression.

Chris Rose: 12:28 Like what did you learn as a Catholic girl growing up in California that had everything to do with the Spanish conquest of the American continents and colonialism, right? These are huge questions that are deeply connected on this really visceral level. And for some of us, myself included, geeking out on the history gives us incredible compassion for our lived experiences. But you also might want to look around and think about how you can create sexual freedom for the people in your community, in your world, in your life, in your family, and for yourself.

Chris Rose: 13:12 What few steps would carve out more sexual freedom for you? What would that look like to you, can just be a really playful, open-ended, curious question and go from there. But I think it’s really important for us all to feel into this connection between the personal and the political, the personal and the global and start thinking. I mean, I kind of think about us as just a family of billions of lovers and an intergenerational web of kin, right?

Chris Rose: 13:48 If we think about the human family that way on this fragile planet spinning around in space, when I think about it through that lens, it’s like let’s just all be really good lovers to one another and how do we start thinking about culture through that lens? Let me know how you’re thinking about this. This might resonate deeply with you and you might be thinking we’ve gone off the deep end, but we will be back next week with more really practical ideas and approaches to individual sex lives and individual relationships.

Chris Rose: 14:23 Because for us, that’s our front lines. How we show up in our bodies when we’re cumming, when we’re fucking, when we’re feeling and when we’re loving one another, that to me is how all of this shows up day to day in our life and matters the most. How we treat one another and how we treat ourselves and there’s so much work to do there. And it’s joyful work, because all of that brings us closer to ourselves, to each other, to pleasure, to what I believe is the natural human state of loving one another.

Chris Rose: 15:01 So no big deal. Sexual freedom. It was a really wonderful week of sitting with this idea and kind of like just being with our mission statement and remembering why we do this work week to week. It’s no less than a global project of erotic liberation for all sentient beings. And that starts with you and your orgasm and your genitals and your heart and your feelings. And we are here for you. Love you, honey. Thanks for being a sexual freedom fighter with me.

Charlotte Rose: 15:40 And lover.

Chris Rose: 15:42 Freedom fighter and lover.

Charlotte Rose: 15:44 Thank you for your intense passion and commitment to this.

Chris Rose: 15:48 I feel that all the time.

Charlotte Rose: 15:50 I love how much you love-

Chris Rose: 15:51 You do not get a break from it. If you do not want a break from our intense passion, and commitment to your pleasure, come on over to pleasuremechanics.com/love where you will find ways to show your support for this show and dive deeper with us. And we will be back with you next week with another episode of Speaking of Sex with the Pleasure Mechanics. I’m Chris.

Charlotte Rose: 16:14 I’m Charlotte.

Chris Rose: 16:15 We are the Pleasure Mechanics.

Charlotte Rose: 16:16 Wishing you a lifetime of pleasure.

Chris Rose: 16:20 And sexual freedom.