654: Importance of Sexuality & Pleasure for Nervous System Health and Wellbeing With Foria

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Katie: Hello, and welcome to the Wellness Mama podcast. I’m Katie from wellnessmama.com. And just a heads up before we jump in that this episode does touch on some adult topics of sexuality and might not be one you want to listen to with your kids around. So just that caveat before we jump in.

But I do think this is an important topic and helpful in a lot of ways for anyone, especially post childbirth or who has any kind of pelvic floor dysfunction or nervous system dysregulation like I did for a lot of years. And we touched on a lot of things under this umbrella. I’m here with Kiana Reeves, who is an educator, practitioner, speaker, and a voice in the sexual wellness movement. And for over a decade she’s been studying sex, embodiment, intimacy, pleasure, birth, and wellness. And this led her to join Foria as their Chief Content Officer, where she’s been for now six years. And her approach is holistic and includes the emotional, biological, social, and spiritual nature of sex and intimacy. She’s a certified Somatic sex educator and sexological body worker, an embodiment and intimacy coach, a certified full spectrum doula, and a mother of two herself.

And in this episode, we go deep on all of these topics, talking about how she was a doula and also got into female sexual health and her work as a Somatic therapist. We talk about the importance of pleasure in our lives and how it impacts well being and relationships beyond just physical pleasure or sexuality. We talk a lot about the nervous system and how it’s a window through which we see the world and how this can make it difficult to identify if it’s dysregulated. We talk about ways to help regulate the nervous system and help the body feel safe. We talk about healthy versus unhealthy methods of nervous system regulation. She gives some ways to work with the nervous system and when to use different methods. She talks about how sexual pleasure relates to nervous system health, the connection between sexual and emotional intimacy, the differences between two types of desire, and what responsive desire is, and I feel like this can be a big key for people in long term relationships.

We talk about why it often takes a female body longer to reach peak arousal and how this is different than it is for males. She gives some exercises we can do to reconnect with our body and with our partners. She talks about sexual polarity and how this is helpful in long term partnerships and how to nurture dynamic tension in partnerships, as well as some specific ways to help the body, especially if there has been any damage from childbirth. So we go a lot of directions in this interview, and it’s a very important topic, especially for moms. So let’s join Kiana. Kiana, welcome. Thanks so much for being here.

Kiana: Hello. I’m so happy to be chatting with you today.

Katie: I am very excited for this conversation, and I think we’re going to get to touch on some topics that are very, very relevant to the women and moms listening and that probably don’t get talked about as conversationally as a lot of other topics that I get to cover on this podcast and for background and to jump in so people can hear a little bit about your story. I have a note from your bio that you started part of your career studying with Kimberly Johnson, who you called the Vagina Practor. And I would love to hear a little bit about that and how that sort of influenced and shaped the work you do now.

Kiana: Yeah, it’s a great question. So when I was just starting out, I was already a doula, and I had two kids, and I was very interested in the female sexual health and wellness space. And I had my own little company that was focused on female health and restorative practices for after birth. And I met Kimberly at a mutual friend space in Los Angeles, and she introduced herself to me, or her friend introduced herself to me as the Vagina Practor. And I was like, I want to do what you do, because nobody was doing it.

And as you know, as a mother of six and I’m a mother of two, any way that you have birth, whether it’s a vaginal birth or c-section, there’s major recovery that has to happen. And a lot of that is with scar tissue. A lot of that is with repair of the nervous system. A lot of that is reintegration of our own experiences as sexual beings. And her work was the intersection of all of those. So it’s a combination of somatic nervous system work, somatic experiencing sexological, body work, and intravaginal pelvic work. And I studied with her and her teacher and her teachers teachers for many years and had a private practice for a long time. It’s wonderful work.

Katie: I didn’t know that you were also a doula. That’s really cool. We have that in common. And I think that alone is such an important topic because, as you said, having had six kids and all of the births pretty much went differently, everything from two breech births and a cracked pubic bone to a C section with one of them. So I kind of had the gamut, and I felt like there wasn’t this is not something that we talk about often, but that kind of body work and very specific help was really impactful for me personally, and it made me realize, I wish we talked about this more. It’s funny that there are still sort of taboo topics for women. I feel like miscarriage is also on that list. But things that are very deeply impactful to us as women that we don’t still maybe feel totally comfortable talking about, which is why I’m excited to go deep on this today with you.

I think also to start broad, I think the topic of female pleasure in general has been historically very taboo, and you make a strong case for the importance of pleasure in our life, and I think that requires some background. So maybe walk us through the impact that has and how it’s more than just sort of a physical sensation that people often categorize it.

Kiana: Yeah. So most people associate the word pleasure with sexuality because sexual pleasure is very, very when I speak to pleasure, we’re talking about the type of pleasure that can come through anything that you do. So this is the way you eat, the way you move throughout your day, the way you get comfortable when you sleep, the clothes you wear. You can find pleasure. And the really special thing about pleasure is that it’s an in the moment experience. And when we’re talking about nervous system regulation and you’re talking about being available for intimacy and relationships in your life, happens in the present moment.

And if you don’t have the capacity to be in the present moment because you have nervous system, chronic nervous system dysregulation, or you’re constantly having to ten to five million other things, you can use pleasure as a regulator because it instantly tells your nervous system that you’re safe and you take time to even just take a breath. That feels good. Your body realizes, like, oh, this is like the great proverbial way that people talk about the nervous system is I’m not running from the saber tooth tiger right now. And so you can use pleasure as actually an active practice to help to get you into the moment, which allows you to be more available for all of the good stuff in your life. It also is a great antidote to cortisol and to all of our stress hormones that kick in when we levels of chronic stress.

Katie: Yeah, I think this topic of nervous system dysregulation is an important one because it seems like we understand that saber tooth tiber concept and that in the past there were these physical threatening things that we recognized as a threat. And I feel like now often people just think of stress in terms of if they feel stressed or not, without realizing there’s this deeper nervous system connection that I personally experienced for a lot of years after some trauma in high school where I didn’t realize I was continually in a state of fight or flight all the time. And it wasn’t actually until I sent those safety signals to my body that I noticed the difference because I’ve become so accustomed to it. So can you maybe go a little deeper on what are some of the ways we can use those experiences to sort of reprogram or let go of that nervous system dysregulation because I think this is such a fascinating concept.

Kiana: Yeah. And you touch on something really important. The nervous system is almost like the window through which we see and experience the world. So it’s not easy for us to identify on our own what’s happening if we have lived that way forever. It’s like if you were always wearing sunglasses, you would never know actually what the colors actually look like until you took it off. So a lot of nervous system stuff is someone might get an inkling that something’s a little bit off or that they’re always feeling a particular way. And it’s not until you start to do some of the deeper nervous system repair work that suddenly you’re like, oh my gosh. It’s been running the show as it’s meant to do. It’s meant to do that. It’s an incredible biological that we have.

But because we live in this the way the world is set up particularly, I think, for mothers because all of the expectation to not only externally focus on our children but also career and partnership and do so without the village that we’ve had historically to support. There is such a massive pressure on moms to be everything for everybody. And at the end of we’re the last on our own list. So ways you can incorporate this, some tools just to notice, right.

Like one of the great regulars of the nervous system is breath. And you can use breath both to up regulate and to down regulate the nervous system. And most people are probably familiar with fight or flight, which is a state of up regulation in the nervous system. Now there’s healthy up regulation, which looks like I’m awake in the morning and I have energy and I’m going to make breakfast and get inspired. I’m going to go on a walk. That’s healthy activation, healthy upregulation. It gets unhealthy when it’s chronically activated. And if you’re looking at a scale and this is like healthy regulation, like at a two or three, and you’re chronically seven or an eight way up here. And what that looks like is anxiety, high levels of irritability, or even low levels of irritability, sleep disruption, things that even patterns. Like when I go into my flight pattern, I’ll want to leave, I want to move away, move everything, change my whole life. That’s an actual flight pattern that lives in me.

And same with fight. You’ll see, you have a lot more tension in your relationships. You’re chronically irritated, maybe even you get into fights with lots of people in your life. That’s a chronic upregulated activated flight pattern. The one we don’t talk about a lot, which I think is really, really pertains to women and mothers in general, is the freeze response.

Freeze response is this whole part of the nervous system that happens without getting too deep into nervous system theory. It’s the part that if you can’t fight and you can’t flee, you go into freeze. And so it’s this really deep layer of feeling like you are incapable of doing something and it doesn’t always come across emotionally like, oh, I can’t do that. It can come across as I feel exhausted, I’m confused, I’m foggy brained. It can just look like chronic depression. And that freeze response actually really happens for a lot of women in low level amounts. And so the two ways to work with the nervous system is one healthy activation if you’re in a chronic state of freeze and healthy down if you’re in a chronic upregulated state.

And both of those can be addressed through pleasure, because pleasure can be activating and upregulating and exciting the body and it can also be relaxing and calming and help you destress. So using breath as a tool for both of these, like breath is the number one place that I work with clients and professionally talk about with people because it immediately impacts the way the nervous system is functioning.

Deep, long, inhales deep long exhales, both work on both branches parasympathetic and the sympathetic branch of the nervous system. And then with pleasure, using sensation. So pleasure is rooted in sensation. So if you can touch your body in a way even like I’m touching my arm right now in a way that feels good, that’s signaling to my body that I can actually pay attention to, feels good. And if you if you start to build a practice like this, where you’re attuned to your breath and you’re attuned to pleasurable sensation in your body starts to bring you more and more into the center moment of nervous system balance and regulation. And you use it like a yoga practice. Use it every day. You build more neural pathways. Your tension is more trained on what feels good and less attuned to all of the other things that you have to pay attention to. So I think that’s like one just basic tool that is great for people to take home with them.

Katie: Yeah, I think breath is so underestimated, but when we think in terms of that, we can go for literally weeks or months without food and days without water and only minutes without air. It kind of puts into focus how important our breath is and how it’s amazing to me how impactful it can be to just have conscious control of our breath for a few times throughout the day and how that can change on wearables, even like an Oura ring. Your breathing patterns during sleep, and I’ve used it to improve sleep. And also I’ve noticed during workouts, if I am able to control my breath, I am able to feel safer in different motions and to usually get better range of motion or stronger lifts by focusing on my breath.

And so I think this is such a powerful tool that we don’t use as often as we could. Also, as a mom, I find it helpful with kids when they’re having an emotional dysregulation to focus on breath. It helps them as well. It helps kind of co regulate back and forth. And you mentioned pleasure is also a useful tool as a partner in this. I’d love for you to talk about some of the different kinds of pleasure so we have context for the next parts of the conversation.

Kiana: Yeah, so like I said in the beginning, there’s so many different ways we can access pleasure. I’m a huge fan of accessing pleasure through sensuality and sexuality because it’s such a core part of our psyche, such a core part of our lives. And if we have partners, it’s such a core part of what makes the relationship feel close and intimate. And so while we can find pleasure in the way that we eat or in the way that we shower, in the way that we move, really, to get a hugely integrated and a big boost of all of those, neural chemicals that feed us and make us feel good, like Oxytocin and Dopamine and all of these incredible cocktail. Sexual pleasure is where it’s at, for sure.

And so many moms because of the requirements of motherhood, energetically put sexual pleasure really on the back burner, especially their own. Right? Because I hear this a lot in my conversations with clients. It’s like it’s just too much work. I just have too much going on.

And there’s two pathways that I’d like to dive into here. One is like pleasure with you. So that’s either through self pleasure or through masturbation or even just sensual and erotic self touch which is such an incredible practice for self cultivation, for cultivating your own energy where no one else is in the room with you. You’re not thinking about your partner’s pleasure. Your mind is not on someone else. Your mind is not on how I look, how I feel, how they feel, et cetera. It can just be with yourself. And that is hugely regenerative both for your emotional state and for your nervous system and for just getting your kind of your sexual energy, your sex drive and your libido, making contact with it and feeding it.

And the studies shows like the more you activate yourself sexually, the more you engage with your sex drive and feed it with sexual experiences, the more it will exist and the more it will want. So it’s a great positive kind of feedback loop for folks if they’re working with libido or sex drive issues.

The second is pleasure with a partner because not all people have this belief that at the core of our partnerships is sexual connection. It’s certainly true that when we have deep, connected, positive sexual experiences with our partners, we feel closer to them and it’s a great space to enter, to have more emotional connectivity. More emotional intimacy is in sexual moments because emotional intimacy isn’t always activated and cultivated just by talk, which is what we think, right? We think emotional intimacy, we have long, deep talks, which is very or therapy, going to therapy and get all out on the table and bringing ourselves closer in that way.

But actually, sexual intimacy, I believe, has this really incredible opportunity to express emotion through the body, which is as a look or as an expression from your heart. Maybe you cry or maybe you sigh, or maybe you just show your partner how much you’re holding. And it’s all through body language. And that’s an opportunity for a type of emotional intimacy we don’t get as much as we need. And that’s what makes me really excited about both avenues of pleasure.

Katie: Yeah, I think there’s so much to go into there. Can you also go deeper on how the nervous system especially relates to this? Because I feel like this might be a big key for a lot of women, and we touched on it a little bit, but I know this is a common thing among women, especially as we get older, especially postpartum, especially in long term relationships where sex drive and sexual pleasure can seem to diminish. And I’m guessing that there is a lot of potentially nervous system puzzle pieces that come into play here.

Kiana: Absolutely. Yeah. So when you look at the nervous system, it was built to keep us safe. It was built to basically look at our environment, see everything that’s happening externally, understand everything that’s happening internally with us, and give us signals of safety or lack of safety. And because of the way and because of all of the things that we really have to chronically and constantly pay attention to, there are low levels of stress, I think, in about just everybody’s nervous system. And this manifests in different ways. Like, there are some healthy levels of stress, but chronic stress actually signaling the body, whether it’s a saber tooth tiger or just that you have to clean the house, your relatives are coming, you have a big work day, and you have to pick up the kids that you’re not safe because it’s just too much to hold. And in that state, then what the nervous system prioritizes is very different than what the nervous system prioritizes in the rest and digest parasympathetic state, which is when you’re relaxed and open and available and sex is highly deprioritized and the sex drive is deprioritized. Because your ancient primal primitive ancestors weren’t going to be mating when they were running away from a predator.

And our biology has not caught up to our modern times. And so it’s a great kind of window for us to look through and understand, like, oh, actually, this isn’t just me. This is a societal issue we’re working with. And I have tools so that I can actually engage in my sex drive, in my sensuality. And the cool thing about engaging in your sensuality, in your sex drive is it actually does turn those signals off or at least down. And so you’ll get an automatic down regulation if you’re chronically experiencing stress. I think that answers your question. But there might have been a second part.

Katie: Yeah, that does. And I think this is why I think sex drive and libido can be a good benchmark for overall health and this has talked about some, but because that’s going to be low on list of priorities if there’s danger that the body or the mind is perceiving. And so, I mean, I hear it put kind of crassly on social media but basically like if you’re not horny, sometimes you’re not healthy. And with exceptions of course, it makes sense that in the postpartum period when we’re up all night and nursing a baby and have all this extra hormone stuff going on, our body’s not going to necessarily prioritize getting pregnant again. And so there would be a natural downregulation there.

But outside of these natural periods of hormones that are built into our biology, it makes sense that this is a good window. Just like women can gain so much data from our monthly cycle and our hormone shifts and our response to them feel like sex drive is at least a good meter of some of those aspects of health. And especially probably very indicative of like you talked about nervous system health and what’s going on with our cortisol levels and if our sleep patterns are good. So much of that comes into play and has to sort of line up in order for us to have probably a strong sex drive. But am I hearing you correctly on that?

Kiana: Is that what you’re absolutely, yeah, absolutely. And I think you nailed it. The way that the hormonal pathway works too is that when prioritizing cortisol and stress hormone production, they deprioritize sex hormone production. So if you’re feeling connected to your sex drive and you’re feeling like a regular turned on just spontaneously, that’s an awesome sign that things are flowing in a good way. I will say though, because it’s more complex than that sometimes our sex drive is also relational, right? If there’s things going on in our partnership that just feel unattended to or there’s some tension there that can also turn off our sex drive in a way. And so really encourage people to do is to decide of their sex drive from their experience with a partner.

Because so often we relate our sex drive to our partner when really it’s something that exists all on its own and it’s all ours and certainly it can show up in relationship. But if you can tune into your sex drive and go like I can connect with my own eroticism and sensuality all on my own, there it is. I cultivate it. I have a relationship of part of my life, it’s part of my well being. I feed it, I nurture it and then we share it in partnership. We’ll have a much better sense of what’s happening that’s biological and that’s potentially emotional and interrelational.

Katie: That makes sense. And at least personally, I feel like that type of energy can be also very well channeled into anything that’s a creative in nature. So it can definitely fuel creative projects or my energy in other areas when I don’t think of it in terms of just in relation to another person. But it also seems like maybe more so for women than men. There are things that can very easily get in the way of that sex drive, of our ability to seek pleasure or to feel pleasure. I know even as a new mom, one that always seemed to come into play for me was feeling so just touched out by the end of the day that I didn’t want any other kind of stimuli. And I know that there’s so many other things that come into play here, but let’s go into some of the things that get in the way of this for women.

Kiana: Yeah, well, let’s touch on this too because desire, we can break apart desire as two different types that they’ve identified in sexual research. One is spontaneous desire and it’s the one you and I were just kind of talking about, which is where we feel suddenly connected to our own sex drive and sensuality and we want sex or sexual connection, very common. It’s the kind we see in movies. It’s the kind that’s depicted across pretty much every type of media.

There’s a second type of desire so important and so valuable and much more common in women. And it’s called responsive desire. And this desire actually doesn’t start in the mind. It starts in the body first and it starts because of a stimulus that activates the body in some way and then eventually turns the mind on. So you might not be a person who leads with mental turn on. You actually might need touch first or you might need to see something that turns on or hear a voice or smell something that actually starts to get your body going and then your mind eventually catches up. And this is the one that I think especially for postpartum moms is the one that we’re most familiar with. That period when your libido just goes underground for a while.

Responsive desire can be your best friend having like a massage from your partner or taking a nice long bath to kind of get in to your body and your senses and then you’re much more available for connection. And in terms of what gets in the way, there’s a lot of things that get in the way. One we touched on already was emotional relational dynamics and also just exhaustion and exertion from all of the external responsibilities you have. So feeling unavailable and having too much stress in your life. Those are two big ones that I see emotionally and kind of biochemically that can get in the way.

The third one, which we don’t talk about at all or a lot as the society which is so important, is pain or changes in the body after giving birth or having a baby that actually makes it painful to have sex or sexual connection. And that often comes from scar tissue or changes in hormones, or you’re breastfeeding for a long time and your prolactin is telling your estrogen to stay quiet and it diminishes your lubrication, your natural lubrication, or it makes your vaginal tissues a little more sensitive and they feel like more raw with penetration.

So all of that, the physical components of sexual pleasure are very real and very, very common and have a lot of wonderful therapies available to work with and a lot of tools wonderful and available to work with. Therapies would be going to see a pelvic floor PT if you’re experiencing any type of prolapse or you’re experiencing any chronic pain, because that can be from tension or chronic inflammation in the pelvic floor. So much of that, as you know, can be worked with diet and supplements, too. So a good combo like a holistic pelvic floor PT, a really good functional MD, is awesome.

Working with the nervous system, too, can sometimes impact those things. If there is scar tissue, for example, if you had an episiotomy or a cesarean section or you tore, you had stitches. Scar tissue is this thing that actually, again, it’s like the intelligence of the body doing what it’s supposed to do. It’s making and strengthening the places where there was injury so that they’re reinforced. But what can actually happen with all of that nice thick collagen is that it restricts blood flow and it actually can either create pain on contact or numbness. And so if you’re experiencing like a low level case of this, the scar tissue isn’t painful, but it’s actually reduced your sensation, so you’re not feeling that type of pleasure you used to sexually. A high level case of this would be it actually is like painful with penetration. So you can’t even engage in sex in the way that you used to. For both of those components. I’d say on manual scar tissue, intravaginal work is great. Find a practitioner locally working with castor oil intravaginally, because castor oil is incredibly, incredibly therapeutic for scar tissue remediation, and it’s great for intravaginal use.

And then, of course, keeping things on hand that support your pleasure, like an all natural clean lube for you. Of course, the company that I work with makes incredible clean formulas, and they’re all for female pleasure. All of them are designed for the way that our bodies work. And some of the primary things we think about in creating formulas are these issues that we chronically run into as women.

Katie: Yeah. I echo your suggestion about working with a pelvic floor specialist, if you have any of those, because I had what would have probably been very low level, like I didn’t have any of the common symptoms of peeing, if I jump on the trampoline or anything like that. But just from the sheer number of babies I had and all the pregnancies and C section and tearing, I had some scar tissue. And also I realized in doing that work, I read the book a long time ago, the Body Keeps the Score. And in that work I realized that the sexual trauma in high school had actually impacted me emotionally a lot more than I thought it had. And I got to reconnect to myself sort of through that work in a way that I didn’t anticipate. But it was a really cool experience to go through that.

I think also what you said about responsive desire is a huge key, especially for a lot of married couples, because it seems like there is a pattern often of desire waning for women throughout a relationship. And I think maybe that’s hard for guys to understand the responsive nature of female desire, especially at certain times of life, because I would guess a lot of guys have a much different experience of sexuality, and they’re much more able to just get to that place immediately, whereas women might take a little bit longer of a time. And so maybe just understanding that can be helpful for a lot of couples, for guys to understand ways that he can help his partner get there gently versus just expecting her to be ready instantly, like a guy can be often.

And it seems like there’s also for women especially, and probably guys too, aspects of sexual shame or stigma and certainly body image concerns that come into play in a big way here. I know that was the case for me at different times, especially postpartum or when I wasn’t comfortable with my body. It made it even harder to get into a place where I was willing to connect with someone else like that. So I would love for you to touch on…..Are there ways that we can start to sort of unpattern and unravel some of those things?

Kiana: Yeah, really good question. And I just want to drop the note in here because most people don’t know this. The same amount of blood flow that a man needs or a person with a penis needs to become fully erect and aroused is the same amount of blood flow w need intravaginally and interval to experience heightened levels of pleasure. And on average, it takes the female body 15 to 40 minutes to reach full heightened arousal, which is different because for the male body, it’s much quicker and it can be turned on faster.

And so looking at that, like knowing that we need this warm up time and we need to understand that the outer labia need to be really full, that’s a signal that your body is actually highly aroused. Arousal is like it is the foundation of being able to experience pleasure. And our G spot, intravaginal pleasure center. It doesn’t even become fully activated or aroused until the rest of our erectile tissue network is full of blood and fluid. And so penetration should happen towards the end of a sexual experience if we want to reach those deep states of pleasure. And I wish that was something that everyone with a male partner knew and every male partner knew themselves, because that’s a huge piece of information that was not given to people when they were young. And it’s so valuable because really, we know our partners want to please us. They do. And they just need the information. So that’s one piece.

The second piece around sexual shame. And this is something I’ve been talking a lot about lately, and it’s such a good question. I had this woman at a conference I was speaking at last week, bring it up too. And she said, I was raised in a religion where my sexuality was absolutely shamed, like openly shamed pushed away. And I feel so far behind in being able to connect with myself. And the truth is, we are growing up in a culture that is on the tailcoats of puritanism and a lot of sexual shame. So even if you weren’t raised in a religious context, no one really escaped that. Even if your family was sex positive, you might have ended up having a better relationship with your body and body image. But we still got it from our peers. We still got it from our culture at large. And it’s something that is probably inherent for every single human, unfortunately.

And in knowing that, I think anyone who’s experiencing any type of body image issue or sexual shame or thinking that their body doesn’t work in the way that it’s supposed to, it kind of takes the pressure off just to know that every single person, even your sexual partner, has some level of sexual shame. And it just presents in different ways. One, to work with sexual shame, which I think is so beautiful and so powerful, is to bring in your solo practice. It’s a really good place to be able to sit with the emotion of shame, which is very vulnerable to share with another person. So if you have self cultivation or self pleasure practice or you’re working with masturbation, in those moments, what you do is you notice the thought as it comes up. So you really pay attention to those sneaky little thoughts that are kind of back in that you don’t always pay attention to. But it’s like, oh, I wish my nipples look different, or I don’t like the look, like how my genitals look, or whatever it is about your body or why am I taking so long? Or any little chatter that comes up.

So the mind to the forefront and really, instead of believing it, you kind of separate yourself from it. And you look at it and you understand that this is a manifestation of sexual shame. It’s something that we’ve been taught we’re supposed to be, that is, we’re thinking that we’re not. And the second you take it out of like, oh, this is me, and this is the truth, that it’s just a thought pattern that you inherited, whether from your family or your culture, then you can just keep it company. Keeping it company means basically, like, there’s a thought, it’s here. Like, I’m seeing it, I’m noticing it very like Buddhist practice where you just pay attention to the thought, but you don’t attach to it.

And usually our thoughts are not true, but the feelings that come with them are true. So the sadness that might come when you actually let yourself feel the feeling that’s associated with not loving how your breasts look, that’s a sad feeling, right? That’s sad. There’s sadness that comes up when I’m like, oh, I really want to love my breasts. And I’ve spent all of these years not enjoying them in the way that I could, or just the shame of not liking them.

So separate from the thought, give it company, give it your company, your presence. But don’t believe it as truth, but trust the feeling and allow the feeling to come up fully. And when the feeling comes up, feeling it through, like, using embodiment tools, breath, sound and movement to express it and to feel it. So crying, breathing, making a sound, making the sound of your it sounds weird, but, like, making the sound of yourself sometimes that’s just as simple as like and it gives you access to the truth. That body you’re talking about, this incredible The Body Keeps the Score. The body is the seat of the subconscious. Every emotional experience we’ve ever had lives in here. It doesn’t live in our mind.

And so when we give the body the opportunity to express itself through breath, sound and movement, and we really allow the motions to come up and clear, new ones emerge, and they’ll start to change. And that is the practice of clearing sexual shame. It’s also a great practice for moving anything that’s in the body that needs to be moved that gets in the way.

Katie: Yeah, I feel like what you just explained is such a valuable thing to understand for every area of life. Certainly helpful here, but also helpful. I’ve done similar exercises in different types of therapy, kind of stemming from that idea of we’re sort of patterned to think that anything we think is true. And so if you can shift into not believing everything you think as truth, but still acknowledging the emotion within it. I know this was really impactful for me to learn how to observe an emotion without judging it and without identifying with it. And even in therapy at different times, to thank that emotion or to thank that experience for keeping me safe, which actually helped me then let go of it and not have to hold on to it.

And you mentioned the Buddhist kind of teaching of this, and I think it runs through Stoicism as well. And just being able to let that go versus making it part of our identity is really, really powerful and helpful in so many areas of life and certainly here as well.

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I’d also love to talk about things that we can do, especially if we’re really busy or disconnected or I would guess a lot of women maybe feel this disconnection from their sexuality or resonate with some of the things you just said about shame connected to that. Are there specific practices? You mentioned breath work being one, but are there other things we can do to help move past that?

Kiana: Yeah. So one piece of this is just reconnecting and staying connected with a regular practice to your erotic self. And that, to me, is the same kind of commitment you would have to a yoga practice or to washing your face at night or brushing your teeth. It’s tending to a part of your psyche and your heart and your emotional and spiritual nature that is inherent to you and so important that we just don’t prioritize.

So the first, very first level of that is just commitment to touching this part of yourself, even if it’s just five minutes a day. Myself, for example, I have a practice a few times a week where my partner goes to sleep, my kids go to sleep, and I use my office both as an office and then as a room where I can do this, where I have a rug on the floor. I put on my favorite music and I move in a way that allows me to touch the emotions I’m feeling. Sometimes I’ll get an underwear, but it’s a time dedicated just for me to feel my body and just to feel my sensuality.

And sometimes it’s very sensual. Sometimes it’s actually a grief practice where I end up crying or expressing rage. But it’s just me in all of my nature. And that practice, more than anything else, has helped me stay connected to my sex drive and to my sexuality, especially as a mom, because I’ve had such huge ups and downs with my sex drive.

And then the second piece would be more around, like body image and repairing and connecting with our bodies in the way that they look. Because so much gets in the way when we’re taught that our vulvas and vaginas are supposed to look a certain way, taste a certain way, feel a certain way. The pubic hair is supposed to look like there’s a lot kind of focused on the genitals. You’re supposed to reach climax, and if you don’t, something’s wrong with you. So being able to be with actually looking, like the practice of looking at your vulva and just looking at what you look like the same way we did with emotions, sexual shame, noticing the thoughts that come up, being with them, letting them clear, and you can start to just notice, like, whoa. All of my subconscious programming, my whole life has taught me this, this, this and this. Because those are the thoughts that come up.

And it’s beautiful because at some point, if you do this consistently enough, you’ll be in the mirror and you’ll just have appreciation and awe or at least like a level of comfort with your body that you didn’t have before. Like, this is how I look. How cool is that? And I find that to be helpful because when we’re talking about sexual pleasure and being able to actually reach deep states of sexual pleasure, you have to not be in your prefrontal cortex and your thinking brain. You actually have to be nervous system has to be relaxed and open and regulated, and you have to not have thoughts where you’re thinking, am I taking too long? Or like, is my partner not enjoying themselves anymore? And once that starts to happen, the places that you can go in yourself are really, really profound. I would say those are the two main ones. Like a good place to start.

Katie: That resonates with my personal experience as well. And realizing years ago now, maybe five years ago for me, that I had gotten out of the shower and I was looking at myself in the mirror and my daughter came in my bathroom and I noticed her noticing her how I was looking at myself in the mirror. And despite as a mom understanding the importance of what we model, I realized this was an area, I was not doing that. And while I would tell my kids all these things that were very positive and uplifting, I wasn’t telling myself the same thing. And I realized it was probably the first time she had noticed someone looking at their body with something other than respect or awe or appreciation or whatever it was.

And I realized, oh, I have to figure out how to come to a place of self love and acceptance to be able to model that, because I can say it all day long, but if I don’t do that, they’re going to catch on. The kids are so wise. And so that actually was one of the big sort of catalysts for my own journey with that and realizing I had this story my whole life of like, oh, I’ll be happy when or if I just look like this, then. And I realized, no, I don’t have to wait until then to love myself and to appreciate my body, how it is. And ironically, when I was able to move into that place of love and acceptance, all of the things that I didn’t like about my body just started to let go anyway. But it didn’t matter anymore because I already appreciated it and I already had that. It came from a place of love.

And I’ve talked about this before, but it was such a paradigm shift from trying to punish my body into looking a certain way or work out really hard to make it look how I wanted it to look. When I was able to just love it how it was, it just started adapting and I had so much more appreciation and I was no longer fighting. I wasn’t trying to battle it into submission. I was working with it as a partner and a friend and it was just such a different experience. I think while it’s easy to kind of separate sexuality and pleasure as its own category, it really does ripple into every other area of life.

And that it can be such a good tool for learning to love and accept ourselves. Especially when you talk about how we can use those experiences to bring things to the forefront and to experience them rather than fight them and keep them locked down our whole lives.

And we’ve touched on it a little bit, but it does seem like especially people in long term partnerships I know entire books have been written about this that there can be mismatched desire or it can seem to go away entirely and that can obviously be difficult and harmful to a relationship. So what are some ways that we got to talk about the self aspect quite a bit? What are some ways that we can nurture this in partnerships? Because I know many of the people listening are in long term partnerships and want to keep those partnerships strong.

Kiana: Yeah, it’s a really important and interesting topic, right? There’s so many incredible folks like Esther Perel’s work is I work a lot in the field of polarity and have been a student of polarity for many years. And it’s the idea that great sexual polarity is similar to a magnet. You have to have a positive and a negative. You need these two different types of energies so that they actually we pull towards each other and putting the polarity kind of to the side because it’s a lineage that is quite complex to describe in this moment. We do need dynamic tension in our partnerships in order to feel drawn to the other.

We actually need to feel both a sense of closeness, which is more in the realm of like we need to have that circle of emotional intimacy clear. So one path towards this is making sure you have at least a weekly or in every other week intentional conversation about what’s coming up, what needs to be addressed, what needs to be ten. My partner and I have this once a week. We’ll meet for an hour. We start with praise for each other and then what each of us needs more of and then tend to some of the life details that get in the way and then do a visioning practice of what our week is going to look like together.

And that alone can just clear a lot of the little things day to day. That get in the way. Like I need you to maybe pay groceries more or if I’m doing all of the cooking, maybe you do the dishes more or you’re just not home enough and I’m feeling really lonely and I want some more time for us to be together.

So that practice of clearing, because I would call it feminine folk and women in general, hearts are very tied to our experience of wanting sex. And if our hearts are feeling layers of emotions that are either resentment or closure or frustration, it’s going to be hard to feel like you want to connect sexually with your partner. The first part of the practice is like clearing anything emotionally that’s in the field that’s preventing you from being close. Having a practice that where hold both of you and sharing.

The second is this dynamic tension piece. And this can actually come from intentional time away from each other. Like sending your husband or your partner out into the wild to go on a hike to go get regenerated so that he can be alone, he can have no demand. And for ourselves, a really deep practice of self care, of being in the bathroom or going out into nature or having time alone to state shift. Because it’s very hard to get into your sexual eroticism when you’re like I just finished putting the kids to bed and brushing and all this stuff and then it’s like the last one on your mind is sex.

So if you both have separate practices that regenerate you and restore you as a personal it’s not a personal person but as your own person, that’s really important. And then the idea I’m bringing the idea of polarity back in because it’s so important and valuable. It’s this idea that we all have sexual needs and these cravings, right, that the deep places in ourselves. That where we really need to be held and to be met. And in general, these are like big generalizations feminine folks. And women want to be in states of surrender. They want their partners like total presence. They want their partners conscious attention on them, pouring their love into them, looking them in the eyes, holding them. And that’s a body language practice. So even a simple practice of breathing together and looking into each other’s eyes can kick off a sense of sexual that we wouldn’t have access to otherwise. Which I think is really powerful.

And the opposite for men and for masculine folks to really feel their partner’s desire and their partner’s pleasure and that they’re enjoying themselves and that they’re really in their body just like being driven wild. And so we can both really in a relationship, it takes two people to work these edges, right? You have the emotional clearing component, you have the restorative practices where you go off by yourself and you really tend to your own personal nature. And then when you’re coming together, you’re tending to like the eye contact, the breathing, the slowing down. For women, it’s like a sharing of our pleasure and our desire and letting our partners see our playful side or our longing for them.

And for male partners and masculine folks, it would be slowing down, opening your chest, grounding, letting her feel your desire and your attention and your hunger for her. And that in itself, you could see this in role play. Like this is one key reason role play really works is because we get to express different sides of ourselves. It’s a little bit of that, but it’s more of an energetic approach where we’re bringing our intentionally, our most erotic selves and showing up the best we can for each other. And that can have a really profound impact on the way that we experience desire for our partners. We’ve been with forever. Otherwise we’re just used to them. They show up the same way all the time, same clothes we’re like in our pajamas. And sex becomes boring because it’s repetitive. And to have a really incredibly interesting and rewarding sex life, it has to be dynamic and it has to be something that you engage from the center of your being, from a place of pure intention and connection, but also you bring in the best part of yourself to those moments.

Katie: Yeah, I think what you just said about the dynamic tension is so important and often overlooked in long term partnerships. Or I can at least say from personal experience this was an issue that now in hindsight not being married anymore, I can look back and be like, oh, that’s a part that we didn’t understand. And we both sort of entered that marriage with, I think the idea that we were supposed to do everything together like the same thing, spend all of our time together, we sort of saw that modeled.

And I know Esther Perel talks about the importance of separateness and togetherness and that back and forth and we really didn’t have the togetherness from working on businesses together, having so many babies, so close together. There was none of that dynamic tension and no separateness. And we were both in a lot of ways kind of exhausted at the end of our rope and just in survival mode for a lot of years. And I can now look back and see how big of an impact that had in hindsight.

I also love that idea of just carving out that intentional time that the focus is to reconnect but also to be able to say the hard things or to ask for what you need and have that intentionality. I think that’s one of those things that can easily slip away in the busyness of life and family. And just like we would prioritize our kids and making sure we have time for those relationships. It seems like it is equally important, if not more so, in a romantic partnership where that’s kind of the cornerstone of that relationship and needing to really nurture it and be able to say the hard things.

Are there any other daily practices you would recommend for moms, for couples, for people in general that can help? Like, I love that tip of just the intentional time each week of making time for separateness and respecting each other’s space. Is there anything else you would add to that list?

Kiana: Yeah, so one thing for moms, because I have two young kids, I was a single mom for nine plus years leading up to my current partner. And so the balance of time is real, even for parents in partnership. It’s insane. And so one thing I like to do is these little micro practices because a lot of times people don’t have time. Well, I don’t have an hour in the day. I don’t have half an hour. And so this would be a tip for people who are like, I want to engage with my pleasure. I want to engage with my eroticism and sensuality. I have no time to do it. This is something you do on your drive to school, on your drive to work, when you’re cooking. And it’s just hips, bring your hips, which is the seat of your creativity. It’s all of your chakra, your sacral chakra, et cetera, but it’s also where your genitals live. So much of our sexual pleasure is concentrated here. Your hips are powerful and they can wake up your pleasure and your sensuality quite easily.

And so rocking them back and forth, tilting them back and forth and side to side, and also in circular motions. Sometimes even I’ll get on my yoga ball during work meetings and I’ll sit on that all day, so that even if I’m on Zoom for 10 hours, 9 hours a day, I’m rocking my pelvis and I’m activating that part of my body. And that way the practice is like continual and it’s throughout the day and it’s feeding everything I do. And everyone has time for that, hands down. And I think that’s one of my favorite little seeda drop in.

Katie: I love that. That’s a great tip. And I know that there have been a lot of practitioners kind of looping back to some of the stuff we talked about in the beginning with trauma release that acknowledge how powerful that can be for the same reason. And how even something as simple as laying on the ground and rocking your feet, which moves your hips and your pelvic floor, can help the body release some of that trauma that often stores there. So I love that tip. And it’s something, like you said, you can do with your kids around, you can do while you’re cooking dinner. It doesn’t have to be something that you separate time for if you are busy, which I totally understand how busy mom life can be.

Kiana: I’ll say actually another one on there because the shaking is so important. Like the psoas obviously, when you’re moving, your hips is getting huge. And we hold so much in our psoas. So the Pelvic rotations are important if you want to take it a step further. And you have five minutes, put on your favorite high energy song and shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake for three to five minutes straight. And the idea of shaking is you’re not shaking from your limbs. You’re shaking actually from your central column, from your spine, from where your nervous system lives. And if you’re watching this on video, I’m like, shaking my shoulders, I’m shaking my belly, I’m shaking my hips all at once. And if you do that, actually, the vibration is deeply, deeply regulating for the nervous system. And there’s tons of studies around trauma, even experiences we don’t identify as trauma that live in our system, being cleared through shaking practices.

Katie: I love it, and we haven’t talked about it up until this point, but I want to make sure that we do. You have worked on creating products that are also specifically beneficial and helpful in a lot of these things we’ve talked about. So can you walk us through sort of the background of how these came to be and then how they can be used in a lot of the ways we’ve already talked about to be sort of enhancing of that experience?

Kiana: Yeah, absolutely. So I’ve been with Foria almost six years, and we’ve developed this full line. Our whole line is specifically for the female body across every stage of life. So we’re really working on menstruation, and we’re working on sexual experiences, sexual pleasure. We’re working on menopause. We’re working all of these stages that we have a lot of that are really important and that are unaddressed and have largely gone unaddressed in society at large.

In particular, our core line is our intimacy line. And everything in our intimacy line is made 100% plant based, 100% organic. And we’re working with plants that have been used for thousands and thousands of years in cultures across the world that really have the power to activate desire, turn off, help the body relax, and all of these very important things that help you experience and access more pleasure. So enhancing pleasure, diminishing discomfort.

And within the line, we really looked at how the female response works because it’s not just our genitals are turned on and our genitals are turned off. As you know, the brain is the largest sex organ. And so we have products that help you actually get in the mood. And they’re working with desire. Like, Awaken is incredible for that. It’s actually working with responsive desire and turning your body on from your body up and then your mind.

We have credible, organic, natural lubes because it changes throughout our lives how much we can produce, but also lubrication, it protects the vaginal mucosa. It’s really important for preventing micro tears. And then we have, one of my favorite products is our suppositories, because so much of our sexual experiences, especially for in heterosexual relationships, do focus on penetration, yet we’re not experiencing the level of pleasure that heterosexual dynamics. And we have suppositories that are specifically for penetrative pleasure that I love and I think are really unique.

And we’re just constantly looking at female sexual response and how our bodies work in designing for that and making sure they’re very friendly for the vaginal microbiome. And just a suite of products I’m really proud of because they’ve changed so many people’s lives. And in particular, we have to reach out to us. That’s totally allowed me to reconnect with my partner or I wasn’t able to have sex after my second child and this change was a game changer for me. So that’s why we do what we do.

Katie: And I will make sure those are linked in the show notes as well for you guys listening at Wellnessmama.FM, along with a couple of the resources we’ve mentioned and the books we’ve talked about. And on that note, a couple of questions I love to ask at the end of interviews. The first being if there is a book or a number of books that have profoundly impacted you personally, and if so, what they are and why.

Kiana: Yeah, I have two that I love. The first, because it’s very unspecific to what we’re talking about today is The Women’s Anatomy of Arousal by Sherry Winston. And if you want to deep dive into how your body works, how to engage with your genitals, how to cultivate more sexual pleasure in your life, that is an incredible book. The second is Women Who Run with Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estes, and that’s a more emotional psychological experience into the archetypal components of ourselves that has impacted me greatly.

Katie: will link to those as well. And lastly, any parting advice for everyone listening today that could be related to something we’ve talked about or entirely unrelated life advice?

Kiana: I love that. Yeah, the thing that comes to me is probably because I need this too, but how important rest is. We live in a time where we’re chronically doing things to either get ahead or to meet our goals or to meet our needs or to be productive. Be productive. Be productive. And actually, our most foundational creativity, the essence of who we are and our genius is resourced by our rest and more easily accessible when we’re in those places. And so if you have a day where you need to lay in bed all day and just reset, do it. We’re constantly striving. And when we take that off of our plate, so much more of our potential comes through and is allowed to exist.

Katie: I love that. I think that’s a perfect tie into some of the things we’ve talked about and an important reminder in a culture where busyness is seen as a badge of honor. And I’m. So grateful. This has been such a fun episode. Thank you so much for your time and for being here.

Kiana: Absolutely. It was a pleasure chatting with you.

Katie: And thanks, as always, to all of you for listening and sharing your most valuable resources, your time, your energy and your attention with us today. We’re both so grateful that you did and I hope that you will join me again on the next episode of The Wellness Mama Podcast.
If you’re enjoying these interviews, would you please take two minutes to leave a rating or review on iTunes for me? Doing this helps more people to find the podcast, which means even more moms and families could benefit from the information. I really appreciate your time, and thanks as always for listening.