Exposed

Are Yogasms Real? Seems like more and more yoga enthusiasts are admitting to them.

Nothing like strengthening those PC muscles and adding in a bit of yogic breathing to make your yoga practice that much more pleasurable. Perhaps if you practice regularly you can start having spontaneous orgasms wherever you are!

Whether you are in a relationship or in the process of looking for a relationship that really works for you, it is important to know why they fail and what you can do about it! There are many reasons why relationships fail, from being in the vortex and activating each other’s old wounds to following social habits and learning that cause us to hide our true selves. At the end of the day, we see some very harmful patterns between men and women that cause relationships to melt down. For women, often relationships fail because you don’t know what it is you really want from your partner or, if you do, you don’t ask clearly. If this goes on long enough, you end up resentful and frustrated and take it out on your partner. For men, often relationships fail because you are trying to pretend to be something you are not, the perfect boyfriend, husband, father or man, instead of admitting your true needs and your own challenges. If this goes on long enough, you end up defensive and are driven to get your needs met elsewhere. While some women have a more male approach and some men have a more female approach, these destructive patterns usually are the ruination of relationships. Women, we have created The Relationship You Want workshop coming up this month, which will help you get in touch with your own desires, explore any negative patterns and habits you have that are relationship killers and make the commitment to clearly and honestly share your needs in a constructive way. We will help you overcome any fears you have about doing so! Men, it is time to get really honest with yourself and with your partner – what makes you excited and passionate in your life, what are your struggles – it is time to start sharing all of this, even if there are things you think your partner may not want to hear. It is also important to learn how to share constructively! A great way to start is by reading Cockfidence and then attending our next Cockfidence Workshop. Men, Women and Couples, your relationships and your sex lives can improve exponentially by doing some in-person Somatica Therapy and Coaching for Couples, Women and Men.

This is a great and very balanced article on sex surrogacy recently published by CBS News. We have found that a very small subset of our clients need sex surrogates, but that most of our client are able to benefit greatly from the level of practical, experiential sex coaching we provide. Both women and men can overcome sexual dysfunction and expand their sexual horizons through the Somatica Method  and we have also helped folks evaluate if a surrogate is the right way to go for them!

Women (and men too) – your body is beautiful, right now, just as it is. So many women spend so much of their lives hating their body, struggling against it and punishing it for having curves or wrinkles or spots. Women feel like they don’t deserve to have sexual pleasure until their bodies are perfect (and there is no such thing as a perfect body, even the magazines airbrush supermodels). The media, the dieting industry, the fashion industry and so many of our cultural outlets tell women that they have to change themselves to be beautiful. In this way, they can keep making money off of women’s insecurities. And, women’s insecurities about their bodies are yet another cause of low libido.

When women diet in unhealthy ways, starve themselves or overexercise, their sex drive goes down – if you think about it in biological terms, it doesn’t make sense to make a baby if you won’t be able to feed it or yourself. Also, many women feel ashamed about being naked in front of their partners and, instead of feeling the pleasure of sexual arousal, experience sex as though they are outside of themselves watching to make sure their stomach or thighs aren’t too fat. If there is one thing that we know about body image, it is that body image DOES NOT CHANGE from changing your body, it changes when you start loving your body just the way it is and stop monitoring every bit you eat or every pound you have and then beating yourself up about it.

Sometimes just the act of loving your body in this way inspires you to take good care of yourself, eat healthy and exercise. When you look at your body with love and picture others doing the same, you begin to walk in the world in a way that is more open and alive, you believe that you deserve pleasure and people begin to respond to this aliveness and this belief. The freedom from diet-brain and self-hatred is a personal freedom, it is about claiming your own right to pleasure and self-love. To improve your body image towards better libido follow the three steps in our previous post on loving yourself in 3 steps.

Also, an this might sound surprising, libido is also about having power out in the world, about claiming your voice, connecting with other women and changing the world in positive ways so that women’s sexuality is celebrated and cherished instead of denigrated and denied. One example of this might be attending a Slut Walk, a walk organized to respond to a comment by Toronto police offer who said that to remain safe, “women should avoid dressing like sluts.” At events like this, women speak out about ways that they have triumphed in the face of adversity and about issues that still need to be addressed around women and women’s sexual freedom. Another option would be starting a women’s group, or a mother/daughter group, with your friends or acquaintances and educating yourselves and each other about women’s issues and women’s sexuality (or girls’ sexual development). We love to come in and speak to women’s groups, so please invite us if you do! When you begin to see how all women have been denied the full expression of their sexual desire, you will become motivated and inspired to change the world and when you make positive changes in the world, you feel more alive and sexual as well!

We would love to have your comments and experiences, so please write them below.

Since we’ve been on the topic of women’s libido, we thought we’d offer Jenny Block’s list of 7 reasons why sex isn’t on women’s radar. It’s a great list though her conclusion that people just need to talk about it may not be enough. Unfortunately sex is a language that we, as a culture, don’t have a huge vocabulary for. Sometimes you need the help of a book (such as Cockfidence or one of the many books we have on our resource list), a video, a coach or a therapist. Get yourself informed, get some support, communicate your needs and start practicing!

I an earlier blog entry we talked about the importance of hormones, rest and the just-right-seduction in your libido. Here we will talk about the social messages and how they shape and play a role in your sexuality, desire and turn on. How you feel about yourself as a sexual person has a huge impact on your libido and, unfortunately, in our culture and many others, women’s sexuality is repressed and stigmatized. From the time we are girls all the way through the phases of womanhood, we are given messages that sex is not for women – sexual women are still called “sluts” or “whores” and we are told from early on to fear and feel responsible for preventing pregnancy and STD’s. We are also given the responsibility of gatekeeping boy’s and men’s desire in order to protect our virginity or our reputation as women are generally separated into two categories – marriagable mothers or whores who you sleep with.

In the midst of these kinds of negative messages, however, to get in a relationship and keep our relationships happy, we also are supposed to look and act sexy and want sex even though so much of what we hear is that we are not supposed to want it or do it. Have you ever noticed that most highly sexual women in movies and television shows are usually villains, who often end up being punished or killed, while the less sexual women get rescued, loved and married? In the face of a constant bombardment of these messages, some of it inevitably sinks in, leaving women shameful of their sexuality, distanced from their own sexual desires, and denied the freedom to pursue these desires openly and honestly. We distance from our desire to protect ourselves from being labeled “slut”, and end up not being able to reconnect with it when we want it. We often lose our natural abilities to walk in the world comfortably connected with our sexuality, which inhibits not only our libido but many other things including our ability to flirt, attract partners, seduce, enjoy pleasure, touch and move our bodies in sensual ways, make sexual sounds and reach orgasms. Unfortunately, because of all of this, women often don’t even think about the need for sexual compatibility when choosing a long-term partner. So take a moment to think about your own comfort with your sexuality and ask yourself a few questions:

To often we come across articles that talk about women faking orgasm. Our hope is that women will stop faking it and start learning how to give themselves orgasm to then teach their partners how to give them orgasms. Yes, it can be a bit complicated and it can take some time and extra stimulation, but if we continue to let men think that just jumping to intercourse after a few kisses and squeezes is going to work, we all miss out, even men, who actually really want to please their partners! Stop faking and start exploring. Got some tips on how you’ve trained a partner into getting you off? We would love to hear it in the comments.

Women – your libido is tied to shifts in hormones and energy throughout your day, throughout your monthly cycle and throughout your lifetime. In contrast to men, who generally experience a build-up of sexual energy when they have not had sex for a while, and a lowering when they do have sex, your libido is likely to fluctuate more based on your hormonal changes and changes in your energy level throughout your day. Libido is also heightened when sexual experiences have been recent (as opposed to a distant and fading memory). To put your hormonal changes simply, overall your libido-supporting hormones go down throughout your lifetime – in the big picture women in their 40s are less hormonally horny than women in their 20s. That being said, each month, as long as your are not on a hormonal form of birth control, your hormones experience a peak during ovulation and menstruation and these are often when your libido will be at its highest. You can begin noticing when you have peaks in your desire and track these throughout the month. If you have children, you will likely (or likely did), have an experience of heightened libido during your pregnancy and then lowered libido afterward due to hormonal fluctuations. Since rest has a huge impact on libido, getting enough sleep and choosing to have sex in the morning, afternoon or early evening (whenever your energy level is the highest), can do miracles to your sexual desire and response (and also partially explains why women have lowered libido after childbirth – very little rest, and keeping sex to the end of the day when the kids are in bed!). Finally, in menopause, your sexual hormones drop and stay quite low throughout the month.

As we mentioned above, when you go long stretches of time without sex, your body tends to “forget” what you liked about sex in the first place, and often, once you have sex more regularly, you end up wanting it more. There is one caveat to this, it has to be GOOD SEX or else, as your hormonal desire for sex drops, you will be less and less interested. We have this myth in our culture, that our partners are just supposed to know what we want and be able to provide it without us having to ask, however, since your body, your hormones , your orgasms and your needs to be touched change throughout time, it is essential to teach your partner and continue to communicate with your partner what you need in order to feel turned on. As we have lower and lower hormonal support for our arousal, seduction, fantasy, creativity and communication become more and more essential to keep us interested in sex.

We cannot emphasize enough the importance of seduction and how questions from our partners like, “are you horny,” or “do you want to have sex now” are NOT SEDUCTIONS. Research has shown that women often not interested in sex until they are already somewhat aroused, this means that your partner needs to know how to arouse your body instead of asking you if you want sex because you won’t want it until you are already somewhat aroused.

Here are some important tips to take away:

1) Get as much rest as possible – naps can be hugely rejuvenating

2) Look for times to have sex when you feel the most physiologically aroused – this may mean you will have to initiate sex, which many women are not used to doing (we will talk more about this in our next segment on social messages and libido)

3) When thinking about how your partner can seduce you better, don’t only tell them how to touch you, teach them how to look at you, how to talk to you, what kinds of fantasies most turn you on (so they can tell them to you or you can act them out), and how they can help make sure you get enough rest. If you need more ideas about what is on the menu, check out the second half of our book, COCKFIDENCE.

4) Try to find a birth control method with the least hormonal impact

5) If you are one of those SUPER BUSY WOMEN, make sex dates with your partner or yourself, where you set aside time for intimacy and sexual connection. To those who complain that this will not be spontaneous, we say, there is plenty of time for spontaneity once you get to the date and making the time doesn’t mean you have to have sex – just that you do something that helps you connect to your own body and your partner in a sensual or intimate way.

6) Start tracking your menstrual cycle, keeping an eye on when you have peaks in your arousal and initiate sex during these times or any time you think you might be in the mood

In the next couple of blogs, we will tell you more of the reasons why you may have low libido and how you can change it! Also, we would love to hear your experiences and welcome comments and questions – so feel free to leave comments bellow.

“Disaster Recovery in the Bedroom: Staying sexy through ED and vaginal dryness” is a Psychology Today article that recently caught our attention. There are a few good suggestions in this article but what we REALLY liked about it was that it normalizes the fact that our bodies change throughout our life, and that sex can’t always just be “spontaneous” or work “the way it used to.”

There are ways to learn how to be connected and sexual with each other that focus on learning what is pleasurable for your body NOW and what your body is capable of NOW instead of wishing it could all be like it used to be. The acceptance of this is what creates the possibility for a long-term, satisfying sex life!

Read full article here.

Studies have shown that the number one sexual complaint of women across the U.S. is low sexual desire (low libido). For the next few posts, we will present the main reasons why women suffer from low libido and give some ideas on how women can help themselves and gain the help of their partners in increasing their desire for and enjoyment of sex.

In this series, we will go over the psychological, interpersonal and social reasons why women suffer from low libido. In addition to these, there are some lifestyle choices, medications and illnesses that can cause low libido in women so, if you are not feeling satisfied with your level of sexual desire, it may be important to take a look at these possible factors as well. For example, anti-depressants can lower desire and can also impede orgasm (which can, in turn decrease the desire for sex), Hormonal forms of birth control (such as the pill) can decrease libido as can alcohol and drug use. Fatigue and very low weight (caused by eating or exercising disorders) can also effect women desire for sex. Rest, eating healthy, regular exercise and avoiding excessive drinking are all extremely helpful and basic to desire, however there is so much more that effects women’s desire and there are some great, natural ways that women, along with the help of their partners, can feel more turned on, more sexual and more desirous of sex.

Over the next few posts we are going to talk about the ways that women become distanced from their desire, the myths and incorrect assumptions about what turns women on and the pathway back to healthy and satisfying levels of sexual desire. You will find out what is in sex for you and how you can create it in your life and your partnerships.

Since you are reading this right now, why not begin with a short exercise. Take a moment to think about your best sexual experience or your hottest fantasy and write it down. If you are drawing a blank, simply write down what you feel when you are asked to think about these things – what emotions arise, what thoughts, what images. In the upcoming posts, we will talk more about why you have the fantasies you do, how to get them, and why so many women draw a blank when it comes to knowing what they want…