EPISODE #136 – How to Embrace Your Sexuality and Own Your Experience
We’re talking openly and frankly about sexual situations today, and I can’t wait to share everything with you. My guest Erika Alsborn is a very special person in my life, as well as a foremost leader in her field as a sexuality and birth coach.
She was one of the mentors in the coaching training that I did with Layla Martin on sex, love and relationship coaching. She loved and guided and supported me in that experience in such a beautiful way. Years later, Erika joined the Marriage Mindset Makeover, and I got to help her walk through some things in her relationship, so it feels like a beautiful full-circle moment to have her here for this episode.
The concept for this conversation came about when I was scrolling Instagram one day (as one does) and saw that Erika had shared these five essential turn-on tools. I messaged her immediately about coming on to give us the details of the five tools we’re covering today, and I know you’re going to love them as much as I do.
5 essential tools to help you learn how to embrace your sexuality
Mindset
I talk about this a lot when I talk about the power of one or taking your side of the table in your relationship. But one of the points that Erika made is, what if it’s not your partner’s responsibility to turn you on?
We’re very conditioned as women to think that the power of our sexuality lies outside of ourselves and our partner needs to initiate. But there’s a difference between initiation and taking responsibility for your own turn-on. Erika said, “Getting turned on doesn’t start just before you’re about to have sex. It’s something that is cultivated throughout every day.
Your brain is your biggest erogenous zone, and so your turn-on starts as a conscious focus using the thoughts in your brain.
If you’ve been in a long-term relationship, chances are you’ve stopped sexually objectifying your partner and also sexually objectifying yourself. But there’s a really beautiful aspect to sexual objectification that can make you feel like you’re an erotic being” and can help you get in touch with your sexual desire.
Conscious Relationship Care
I love how Erika really breaks down this idea of conscious relationship care and reiterates the power of one within it.
In long-term relationships, we start in the honeymoon phase and we’re literally thinking about sex all the time – can’t seem to get enough. Then we move in together. Then we get married and had kids… and one day, you’re just not thinking about sex anymore.
Sex starts with the thought of having sex. So if you’re not thinking about it, you’re not having it.
In these instances, Erika says that a powerful thought for women to adopt is “Sex is for me.” Fully adopt the belief system that sex is for you. It’s not something that you give to your partner, it’s for you. Maybe you have sex because it makes you feel amazing. It’s stress relief, it’s pleasurable, it’s a physical meditation.
You enjoy the intimacy, you want the orgasm, you want to tap out and have a moment for yourself, a moment to not be the chore producer. Whatever the reason, “sex is for me.” This belief system is something that we constantly have to work on because it’s never been taught to us.
Maybe you need a different kind of sexual experience with your partner or you feel like there are certain expectations from your partner you’re trying to live up to. In some cases it could be relevant to set boundaries with your kids and your body integrity. Because while yes, your partner is involved as a part of your sexual experience, they’re not the basis of it.
Ultimately, you’re leaning in to solve any issue in your sexuality or in your partner’s sexuality because you recognize and acknowledge that sex is good for me and it’s for me.
Self-pleasure
I love the idea of sensuality and how it literally connects us to our senses and to ourselves. Sensuality is not necessarily sexual, but it plays a role in our sexuality. You can practice connecting with your senses really easily: light a scented candle, eat something delicious, wear something soft against your skin, play beautiful music. Practice your ability to stay with those sensations.
This is super helpful for us as women when it comes to how to embrace your sexuality!
The way Erika describes self-pleasure is by comparing it to sexual yoga, and masturbation to simple stretching. Stretching isn’t full-fledged yoga, but it could play a role. Self-pleasure is like yoga because it’s about consciously getting to know yourself. It’s connecting through mind, body, and spirit and there could even be healing involved, because it’s very holistic and rooted in embodiment.
Erika explains that if you think about the male turn-on pattern like a pot of water reaching a very quick boiling point in a snap, the female turn-on pattern is much more a slow burn (especially if we’re staring at the pot and waiting for it to boil). But once it’s hot, it’s intensely hot and stays hot for a long time. Self-pleasure can keep you at a steady simmer. Not boiling over, but warm enough that you can heat it up more easily when you’re ready.
Self-pleasure further establishes the belief that sex is for you.
Sexual fantasies
Remember how your brain is your biggest erogenous zone?
Erika says, “The stimulation that you receive peripherally in the body, physically is coded and interpreted in your brain. Your thoughts and your fantasies are products of your brain, so you want to get your brain on board. You can experience fantasies as a very beautiful aspect, like the romantic books that you’re reading.”
Erika is a big proponent for fantasizing and using fantasy as a kind of fertilizer for your sexuality. And embrace whatever fantasy, again, vibes with you. It could be kinky, romantic, sexy, erotic, taboo, naughty, raw, whatever. We agree that you should trust your inner wisdom on what inspires and delights you!
If you need external resources, you can always find erotica that speaks to you. There’s written erotica of course, and these days online, there’s audio erotica that’s amazing. And then of course there’s visual erotica or porn. That’s a topic for a whole other episode, but I believe there’s a place where porn can be super useful, nourishing, and create a connective experience within the relationship.
And also some people do not find it to be something they want to explore. Either one is fine and perfect, as long as it truly suits you. Erika reminds us that “there’s so much unnecessary suffering for couples in how they experience porn and their relationship to a partner watching porn, and so much trauma around porn.”
We’ll have to have her back for another episode just on the topic of porn!
Body love
Erika says, “Acceptance is a deep, deep practice. What you can accept, you can eventually love. There’s a loving aspect in acceptance. But if your mind is preoccupied with judging and bashing your body and how it looks, constantly criticizing it and being completely disembodied because you hate it, you’ve rejected it, you cannot stand it, then you’re not going to have the feeling capacity that’s actually available to you, because you’re not at all embodied and perceiving your body’s sensations because you are preoccupied in your mind.”
Mic. Drop. Moment.
If loving your body feels far away, what if you just respected your body? What if you thought about how in this body, the heart beats, the tummy digests, the legs walk, all the different things your body does. How can you just cultivate appreciation for the body you have?
A very profound spiritual teaching Erika mentions from Eckhart Tolle is “you don’t have a body, you are a body.”
Because when we separate it, our mind goes, “this body of mind that I have, that I own, I can criticize it, I can violate it, I can abuse it with my thoughts.” But when you realize that you are your body, it can profoundly shift how you think about it, because you wouldn’t speak to the thing that you are in that way.
We live in a body that does amazing miracles every moment of every minute of every day.
It reminds me of work I’ve been doing with a client of mine to help her love her body and be in loving presence with herself. When she looked at old pictures of herself, she said “Whenever I look at me in the past, I think, that wasn’t as bad as I thought it was then. I look super cute.”
And she gave herself homework that from now on, she’s going to look at her current pictures with the same mindset as she did with the past. I’m pretty cute. That’s pretty good. She’s choosing to start thinking that now.
Give yourself the tools to learn how to embrace your sexuality today
Waiting is something I’m constantly coaching on.
We live in a society that tells us the next thing is always better.
But now is all you’ve got. You can turn yourself on now. You don’t have to wait for your partner to initiate – you can recruit your partner to be a team with you and practice some of these things today.
If this feels like step 4 of a plan you love but you’re looking for step 1, check out my free resource, The 5 Power Questions Every Woman Should Know. The quality of our questions matters, and these are my favorite questions to ask that will unlock the doors to whatever is missing in your life.
RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE: