September 14, 2018
All About Tantra (Bringing Dr. Jess to Tears)
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Amina Peterson joins Jess to discuss the practice and philosophy of tantra. What is tantric breathing and meditation? How can a body scan improve your sex life an overall well-being? It’s not all about sex, but sex is certainly enhanced by the practice. Amina closes the episode with a brief body scan that moves Jess to a state of deep vulnerability.
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Rough Transcript:
This is a computer-generated rough transcript, so please excuse any typos. This podcast is an informational conversation and is not a substitute for medical, health or other professional advice, diagnosis or treatment. Always seek the services of an appropriate professional should you have individual questions or concerns.
Participant #1:
Welcome to the Sex With Dr. Jess podcast. I am your host, Jessica O’Reilly, your friendly neighborhood Sexologist. And today we are going to be learning all about tantric sex. Joining me is Amina Peterson. Amina is the founder of Fearless Giving Atlanta. Tantra, formerly the Hawaii based Tantra in paradise and the host of the Fix Your Sex podcast. Thanks for being here. Thank you for having me. So tell us a little bit about Fearless Giving. Okay. So Fearless Giving was born because I watched the Ted talk. So the name was born because of that where there was a Ted talk where a woman was talking about learning to give without the fear of not getting something back. And I thought, Well, that’s what I’m doing. I like that. That’s the whole point of this. That’s the whole point
Participant #1:
from the sex side of Tantra is that we’re offering something so beautiful to someone and we don’t have any hangups around whether or not it’s going to be reciprocated in a way that we needed to be reciprocated, that we actually get from the give. And so I said, that’s going to be my name, Phyllis Gifting. And I was transitioning from Hawaii, and I had to kind of figure it out when I got here from Hawaii to Atlanta, from Hawaii to Atlanta, a bit of a transition. And I moved here for family, being 11 hours in the middle of the ocean for almost twelve years, it starts to get old and you get missing my nieces and nephews and the family and the love and the community and the Southern fried food and the Southern fried food, raw fish is good for me. I really would like some of that. Yeah. Good old green fried tomatoes. Well, I haven’t had that. We’re actually here in Atlanta right now. I haven’t had those fried green tomatoes yet. I guess I need to have that you do before I leave. I can make some recommendations before I leave. That’s a great place. Not too far from here. I’m on a food mission. So tell me how you got into Tantra to begin with. Okay. So I actually started off when went to massage school after my second divorce in my 20s. How much you call a quick study? After my second divorce, I had a restaurant. I sold it, and I went to massage school because I had a wonderful massage and I’m a true Aquarius. Oh, yeah. So I go off and I finished my massage school and I start hustling on the side. I’m divorced. I’m not really working full time and kind of just wondering. So I started doing massage therapy, and this was before the Craigslist killer. This was back when it was totally normal. I thought, anyway, in my naive state, not even somewhat sketchy or sexually oriented at all to put an ad on Craigslist and say, I have a massage, come by my house and get one stranger. And so I started doing that. And during that time, all of my men clients were all male clients were pitching tents. Right. There’d be these erections. And I was, like, found out that you could make a little bit more money if you rubbed on them. And so that’s what I did. I transitioned from therapeutic massage to therapeutic massage with a happy ending pretty quickly. The happy ending came quickly, or you translate both. I’m very good. That’s interesting, though, because when we think about a happy ending coming quickly versus what you’re doing now, yeah, it’s totally the opposite. Like, now we don’t even focus on orgasm at all. And Tantra is really prolonged. Yes. And slow. It’s very slow. And there’s a build up. Yes. And that’s the beauty. So I moved to Hawaii. When I was doing this work, I found Hawaii, and I fell in love with the scents and the aromas. And when I got there, I started learning about Tantra. I started meeting people that were doing tantric yoga and practicing different forms of Tantra, and it’s kind of opened my eyes to it. Okay. So I want to ask you about Hawaii and the roots of Tantra. But first, what is the practice of Tantra? How do you define it literally means the weaving. So it’s the idea to me. And what I’ve learned is that this philosophy, which comes from both Hindu and Buddhist traditions. There’s this idea that you are able to fully become human by exploring all of the aspects of humanity. So you don’t deny things like pleasurable experience because you think that they’re going to remove you from divinity or Holiness or away from whatever you see as a God or a higher being, that instead that you kind of embody them somewhat and you learn about them and you address them. The meditations are a bit different that you experience what’s happening instead of like you have more mindfulness in your meditation, around your thoughts and around your desires and around what you need, instead of trying to clear your mind from any thoughts. And that type of meditation, which I think can for some people, put shame around the ability that you can’t clear your mind. It puts shame around the ability that you have. Or it puts shame around the idea that you are having thoughts when you’re trying to tell yourself not to or that you’re desiring things. This is not the right space for desire. And in Tantra, it’s different. Your existence is the right space for desire. You get to have desire and seek pleasure, and it brings you closer to divinity. It makes you more divine. You have access to your higher power through access and your pleasure. And so it’s a spiritual practice. It has its roots in these Eastern religions and philosophies, but it is nondenominational in practice for you. Or is it specific to Hinduism and Buddhism? It is nondenominational to me. But to me, I see Buddhism as nondenominational. It’s a philosophy. It’s a way of thinking and existing. And so that’s different. Hinduism obviously, is a religion. And so the roots are both. They kind of cross over. I think it’s important to talk about Tantra’s roots in the east, because in many ways, it has become a commodity. Some people would say it’s been bastardized. In the west. Of course, you can practice what you practice, right. But in terms of marketing and packaging, we see Tantra practitioners who maybe don’t acknowledge its Eastern roots. Right. And I think there’s some very serious costs in that because it’s a practice. I just asked you what Tantra is. And you didn’t use the word sex. And a lot of people think Tantra is just about sting lasting however long it is, he lasted with his penis. Right. Like, 48 hours or something. It’s not just about prolonging sex. No, it’s absolutely not. And I teach classes and workshops and in my classes, my students know when they come in the first five weeks of my ten week class, it’s just about understanding Tantric philosophy. Chakra, we don’t even get into sex. We may have some discussion, but the first five weeks, we’re just going into alignment, aligning ourselves with a philosophy that shows us that we’re worthy of something bigger than what we’re giving ourselves. So, yeah, it’s absolutely not just about sex. However, the sex is great. It follows as you become more mindful. Yes. As you feel more connected to yourself, to other people, to the Earth, you’re going to have more pleasurable physical experiences, whether that’s a massage or a session of breathing or sex. Exactly. I have to ask you this because I love my food. Does it affect the way you eat? Yes, it does. And I eat vegan. I eat really good vegan, though. People come to my house that eat meat all the time. Like, what are you cooking? But it changes the way to me, it changes the way that things taste. It changes the way that food feels in your mouth. Because we are so disconnected as a society, we just kind of move somewhat wovenilly through life, trying to get these things that we have considered our landmarks. Like, I got to get this. I got to get the house, the job, the wife, the kids, whatever your personal goals are. And because of that, we move away from ourselves. We’re not in touch with our own bodies. We don’t listen to what’s going on. We don’t appreciate and enjoy things because it’s a part of listening to what’s going on. And Tantric meditation. Tantra as a philosophy changes how you appreciate things like food, like flowers, like you’re on a hike and all of a sudden, you can smell we’re looking around recently, we were on a hike and we were looking around like it smells like grape koolaid. And there was a grape vine that was somewhere kinda nestled in the back. But we stopped our run, and we were like, you smell that like it changes. I like that you went to grape Koolaid because I probably would have gone to wine. It smells like wine. Smells like the beginnings of wine. I don’t know why wine wasn’t first for me, either, actually. So the practice of contract, what does it entail? Well, it can entail a variety of things. Right? There’s tantric breathing. There’s tantric yoga. There’s tantric sex. There’s tantric meditation. I teach all of them for me. My main part of my practice is and was born from touch. So I’ve incorporated the movements of what I perceive as the movements of Tantra into my massage practice. So very slow, loving, nurturing, giving touch in a way that’s also arousing and that fosters a space where you can experience desire and bliss and be okay with it, not have shame around it or guilt or any negative thoughts. Really? That’s what I really work towards is kind of removing anything that we have that are blockages to our access of pleasure. And that must include performance pressure. It does. Let me ask you about that. And then I want you to help me, maybe with some what tantric breathing might look like. Okay. So how does Tantra help with performance pressure? Because I think we all experience performance pressure because sex has shifted from, I think, a hedonistic act to a performative one in which you have to last a certain amount of time or move in a certain way or contort yourself into specific positions or give your partner a certain number of orgasms or have a number of orgasms yourself. There is so much pressure just even around the frequency of sex. You’re supposed to have sex two, three, however many times per week when maybe that’s not really what you want, right. So how does Tantra help to address performance pressure? Well, a couple of things for me, and I say this with every client you’re off today when they come to see me. Nothing about this experience is about you pleasing me or about you lasting for a long time. It’s not about your orgasm. It’s okay if you come. It’s okay if you don’t. This is not the space for it. I’m not going to work for your orgasm. I used to do. And I wish this was video you could see. I used to do, like, the Jack camera movement when I was doing hand jobs, right? We don’t do that anymore because I just want you to actually start to feel what it feels like to have your okay to have your Dick touch. You can say whatever you want. Okay, good. Just checking. It really removes that part, right? This idea that I’m on now, and it takes people a while to get do that, like after maybe the third or fourth session. Sometimes people are finally able to say, oh, no, she really meant this. She’s not going to do that. This is what we’re doing okay. And it’s around that time they start to really work through the breath and really feel connected with their body through breathing, through touch, through the experience of pleasure. And then they can start moving towards what it feels like to truly have a full embodied orgasm. A lot of people, especially people with penises, are used to ejaculatory response to orgasm. They don’t really feel oftentimes that inner like, oh, well, what’s that wave of pleasure for your body, right. Because there are different types of orgasms. And I’m not talking about, like, nerve endings or the way specific parts communicate with the brain. But sometimes an orgasm is a sense of relief. You remember, Dr. Ruth described it as a sneeze. I mean, I never had a sneeze that good, but it feels like a relief. And sometimes it just feels like your whole body is overtaken, right. And the French call it liquid more. Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. No, I’m not that kind of Canadian. No, just kidding. You said Toronto, but I do speak French. The little death. Yeah. So it’s like, yeah, you get a chance to kind of leave your body but still be in there. It’s beautiful. And from a neurological perspective, there’s some evidence suggesting that the part of your brain right behind your left eye shuts down momentarily at orgasm. And that’s why, if you are, as you said on, that can’t happen, right? You can have all the pleasure in the world. They can do all the techniques. They can do, all the things you love. But if your mind is on and you can’t let go, how do you reach that orgasm? Right. How do you get into the MOA? How do you get that part of your brain to let go for a moment? Right. So that’s what we do? Well, it’s interesting. I think about coming to you as a client and there’s a monetary exchange and being willing to let go and say, okay, I don’t have to give pleasure to you. I don’t have to worry about my pleasure. I don’t have to perform for you. I just have to be in this experience now, if I’m not paying you and we’re sexual partners, I personally, I don’t know if everybody feels this way, I would have a harder time getting over the feeling that I have to do something for you. So how do you help couples learn to be takers as well as givers? I teach that you switch roles. Okay. My favorite exercise and I do it with my lovers is that we draw carts. You can draw straws if you want to. Straws, straw, paper, straws. Who’s going to be the giver today and who’s going to be the receiver or in this moment? Not today because we can switch by lunchtime. But right now for this breakfast session, you have a nice day plan. I got three minutes, and then I have to hit the market. Yeah. No, we have an hour and a half of connection in the morning. Sometimes it helps that I’m self employed and that I get that out of the way. Get me taken care of. Hang on, though. You’re an entrepreneur. You make the time. Yeah, exactly. I can joke about three minutes, but people always ask, Well, how do you prioritize sex when you’re really busy? And Western folk have all the excuses in the world why they’re more busy than the next person, why their job is more demanding, why their kids are more demanding, like, oh, you only have two kids, and I have three or, well, I have this kid who’s high needs you make the time. I mean, there are things you can do, but you either choose to make the time. So when I complain that I don’t have time, which is something my partner and I are both very guilty of as entrepreneurs. It’s not that we don’t have the time. It’s that we haven’t made the time, right. And Tantra is about slowing down, not just in the bedroom, but in life, so that you find the time because you’re giving it to things that don’t necessarily serve you. And one of the things that we chant is I release things that don’t serve me. And my orgasm is important. Your orgasm is important. Your pleasure, your bliss, your joy. It should rank really high on that hierarchy of needs. So how do we get to that point if we’re doing things and we’re indulging in things that don’t necessarily serve us? Yes, we do. The Netflix binge was great, right. But there was time in that that could have been served. They could have been serving you. Here’s one. How about just saying yes to things that we don’t want to do because we feel we can’t say no. Does the Tantrum philosophy help with that? I’m just thinking the chance of I let go of things that don’t serve me. I think that’s something I need in the morning, right? Yeah. And I think it does teach you to. It gives you space. It doesn’t teach you right. It allows you to find space where you can say no, because you start to learn that through communication with your lover and with yourself, that no one dies from the communication process. We all recover in my class. I see it all the time. No one has ever died from hurt feelings. And so you get to a point where you are okay saying no, saying this is beyond. I don’t have time. We don’t do it because we’re afraid that the person is going to feel rejected. Tantra lets you look in. Where is that fear coming from? Is it because you feel rejected when someone tells you that address, that that way you can go out and you can say no. I don’t like that. I don’t want do not want. Yeah. I guess two year old can do that. And I struggle with that. Yeah. Exactly. Okay. I like that letting go of things that don’t serve me. I feel like three repetitions of that in the morning would be really helpful for a lot of people, especially if you’re the type of person who says yes to things when you want to say no and says no to offers when you want it, say yes. And as Aquarius, we are doubly guilty. Oh, is that so? Yeah, we’re like, we’re free Willy people. But we’re also people, pleasers. And so usually you said maybe it’s a worry of the person feeling rejected. I want to say that for me, it’s more selfish than that when I say yes, even though I wish I was saying no, it’s because I don’t want somebody to think poorly of me. I don’t want them to be mad at me. So it’s a little more selfish, right than worrying about them. Yeah. And I think there’s a lot of things that come into it, right. And as you work to heal perceptions of yourself and perceptions or the way that you think other people perceive you, you heal yourself around those kind of ideas through meditation, through pleasure, through bliss, through love. It changes how you are able to move. You’re able to communicate better. Your throat Chakra is fully aligned. You can say what you want and say what you need and not have guilt or shame or worry at all around it. Well, that has come to speaking your truth. How does Tantra? I don’t want to say teach, but create space. How does Tantra help you to speak your truth? I think the first step is being able to be off so often when we’re on, like, okay, now we’re having Tiffan sex. Right. Right. You do this. I do that. You do this. I do that. There’s not a lot of room for truth there, because there’s a debt you feel that you have to pay. We remove that debt. Now you can kind of be a little more honest, like. Well, I don’t owe you anything in this exchange. So can you do this instead? It also allows your partner to seek honesty and to be okay with it. And so it’s these little baby steps of opening up our ability to speak our truth first with our trusted partners. Because if you can’t do it there, how are you going to go out there and do it if you can’t do it in your love space, in your sexual space, how do you go out in the world and be honest? You couldn’t even tell the person that you love that you don’t like it when they do, flick your clip with their tongue, you have to find. Oh, I do like that. Let’s be clear. Bad example. But not everybody does. But not everyone does. Yeah. Well, I think it’s interesting if you can’t be honest with your partner, I always wonder what kind of trust underlies that relationship? Because for me, when I look at my relationships, the people I can be most honest with are the ones that I really trust are going to stick with me, right? The ones that I’m fearful of upsetting or fearful of having them judge me harshly. It really speaks to how I feel about that relationship, right? It does. And bigger than that. How do you trust your communication with yourself? And what does that say about your relationship with yourself? Are you lying to your own self about the pleasure that you want and deserve? Right? Are you telling yourself that you’re not worthy in some way, shape or form to experience bliss? Do you have any issues around your pleasure? Self? Pleasure is really guiding for that. Like you get to see, am I doing this performative act even for myself, right? Am I racing through it? Like most of us when we masturbate, we are so focused on expediency. And some of that comes from sexual shame. Some of that might come from your schedule, right. Some of that might come from training growing up because many young people train themselves to masturbate really quietly so their parents wouldn’t hear and really quickly. So you can go back to being normal. Exactly. Yeah. And so that you wouldn’t get caught. Yeah. That fear translates so significantly in our partnered adult relationships, even if we feel we’ve given ourselves permission. Right? Yeah. So masturbation must be a huge part of your practice. It is. I actually encourage tantric masturbation. I teach a class on tantric masturbation, which is my favorite class because it’s a room full of women masturbating and discovering their bodies. That’d be a lot of people’s favorite class. I know you would not be surprised how many offers I get for security. I know. I’m like, no, we’re good. Thanks. Yeah, I meant for me. I wasn’t thinking about the Voyagers, but everyone finds out. Oh, you’re teaching a blow job class. Do you need a demo model? I’m like, you know what? I have carrots. I can buy carrots in many colors, many sizes. I can shave them down. I do not need a human demo model, but I practice tantric masturbation on a daily basis. I do what I call masturbation, so it’s a masturbation meditation practice. I lie with myself, and I focus on what goals I want to get accomplished for the day. I think about all the things that you would usually think about. That would come up during sex. Did I do this? Do I need to do this like the busy mind? Right. And I think about all that first, and I get that I give space for all of that process while I’m lying in my bed. And then I go into an assessment for my own body. Check in, and then I start masturbating and I allow myself to masturbate meditatively again. I’m not on. This is what I teach when I teach my classes, that if you make yourself orgasm? That’s great. But can we take a break from the constant vibration on our clitoris? Or can we take a break from the G spot stimulator, which I love both. But I want to feel at my fingertips what my labia feels like. I want to maybe check in on my cervix and see if it’s sensitive. Today. I want to know what’s going on with my body. I want to feel pleasure. I want to offer myself pleasure in a healing way that’s allowing me to check in with my body and love on myself without any of the shit we carry around masturbation. And so even the word masturbation has, like, a negative connotation. Yeah. It’s not a beautiful word. I sometimes use the word self pleasure. Yeah, that sounds kind of prettier. It does. Masturbation almost sounds clinical. It does. It kind of is. I think I use masturbation, though, because when I say self pleasure or solo sex in different communities, it doesn’t resonate as well. And that’s one of the reasons also why I feel so strongly about the work that I’m doing is because living in Hawaii and going to classes and workshops, I’d always be the brownest person in the room and oftentimes the youngest person in the room. And so when I’m talking to people who may not have been around sex positive communities or had proper sex education, which is, like most people, then the word self pleasure or solo sex might not resonate as well with them. They know what masturbation is. Yeah. We all figured that out when we were very young. Yeah. I remember when I was teaching sex Ed, and I said that we had to talk about masturbation because it’s safer sex because it’s healing sex, because it’s sex that allows you to get to know your body and take pride in your body. And I remember people saying, well, we don’t want to teach them that masturbation feels good. Yeah. They’ve got that figured out, right? They know that already. I used to teach high school sex Ed also in Hawaii. And I will say that the Pacific Buddhist Academy in Hawaii made me realize, if you have children, send them to the Buddhist Academy in your neighborhood because the kids there. First of all, the teachers were, like, teach them what they need to know. And then the kids knew it all already anyway. And they were like, twelve years old, 13 years old. I was asking them about sexual fluids and body parts, and they were, like, got that one know that one. Look at this group of enlightened students. Where are they learning it? I don’t know. I’m just thinking that Buddhism might be the only way. Have you read The Art of Happiness? No. I think that’s a really interesting kind of interview style book with the Buddha. And then the other book I was thinking, which is definitely not in line with Tantra, but in line with your brand, and your inspiration for Tantra is Give and Take by Adam Grant. Okay. And it’s a business book, but it references givers, takers, matchers, and how the people who give sometimes when you’re a giver, you can feel like you’re burning out like everyone’s taking advantage of you. You might have friends or family or partners who say, Stop saying yes, stop giving. But he looks at the data around Givers and Takers and ultimately concludes that it’s the givers who rise to the top when you give within limits. When you give fearlessly, right. It’s definitely not a book related to Tantra or sex or anything like that, but it was a really shaping book for me in business. Okay, I’m going to check that one. I’m on book punishment right now. Oh, what happened? So I go on these book trains. When I moved to Hawaii, the only thing I shipped was books. I’m a nerd. I like books I like to read. They’re my children, my books and my plants are my babies. And recently I realized that I had, like, 40 books that I haven’t gotten to, and I’m still ordering something like, you are not allowed to order anymore. But maybe Give and take might be the exception. You do. Your books can wait. So I want to talk a little bit about checking in with your body because you said that you lie there and you think of all the things that might interfere with a sensual or sexual experience, and then you check in with your body before you mindfully. Touch yourself. Do you do a body scan? I do. Yeah. So what I do is I do circular breathing where I inhale, and I start inhaling to my toes and on my left foot. I just move it up and around and check in everywhere because our muscles have memory and we hold stuff and we hold memories. And there are things that are going to come up when we’re being touched, even when we’re doing the touching. And I want to give myself space to have those emotions, but also be free of them in an allowance for bliss. Like we would like to be pleasured right now. So check in and see where everything is at so that you know what that is. And that way, as I move into self pleasure, I’m not like, what is that? I’m not trying to figure out what’s happening on that side of my body or thinking about whatever memory is sitting over there. I’ve already gone through that. I’ve given myself space around that. And now it’s time for me to focus on what feels good. So we’ve basically missed a step of what in our culture we call foreplay here because we think of foreplay of as don’t touch the genitals, touch some other areas, or do touch the genitals, but only with your tongue and your fingers, not with another person’s genitals or your vibrator. So this piece is foreplay, right? I tried to live a life of foreplay like my whole life. I’m working every day to make my whole existence feel like foreplay. Just because, first of all, it’s nice. And I think that I just finished my first book. It’s a workbook, but it’s called Big Clit Energy. And the idea that Big Cliff is an aroused clip that we move in the state of arousal. Foreplay is not just touching. There’s a lot of checking in for play. And I think if we hadn’t screwed it all up, then the touching would have been a time to check in. But somehow we let Hollywood convince us that we’re supposed to be quiet during that part and not tell each other what feels good and what feels bad or not. Ask questions. There’s so many people that say this is running the mood. Don’t ask me if this feels. I just do it. And whenever I hear that, I just think, oh, we’ve been failed. They let us down. Well, they’ve conditioned us to believe that if you’re great in bed, you just know what you’re doing so crazy. I hear a lot of women in particular say that like, I don’t want to have to teach him. It doesn’t matter if your partner, regardless of gender, has had 100 partners or had sex 10,000 times. What you want today in this moment could be totally different than their experience might dictate. Right. My lover can be a great lover to me because they allow me to choke them and slap the shit out of them. But does that make them a great lover to the next person? No, there are all of these things. Hang on. Am I the next person? Because, yes, that works for me, too. No, you’re right. I do this exercise when I’m with a group and we’re talking about how to play with the balls. And I’ll hand the microphone to people who have brought their balls. And a guy yesterday said that he really likes his bit. He likes his balls bit and tugged on. And then the next guy is like, don’t you dare bite and tug, right? Yeah. So great. Sex is great is so subjective when it comes to sex. And so people are out here doing I always say you’re bringing that junior high school sex game to College. I don’t want it. So you go get some lessons and sit with yourself and learn and ask the questions that need to be asked. And you can have sex with someone a thousand times. And the next time they want something different. That’s fine. Especially if you want it to be exciting. Yeah. Right. I always joke that like I’ve got this money move. I know with my husband it’s like left nipple, right ball, left nipple, right ball. And he can be done. And sometimes it’s fun to go to that. But if I did that right away, we wouldn’t take the time to connect. We wouldn’t have the time to learn new things. Right. And discover new pathways to pleasure. Right. And that’s just I think it’s reflective of how we move as a culture and that we like shortcuts. Yes. We want the easy button. Yes. And I’m definitely guilty of that. Yeah. And sometimes I only have time for the easy button. I wish I could say I had time for this amazing two hour sexual ritual every day. I don’t, right. Because sometimes people make you get up early and come to their hotel room on a Sunday morning. I would get up early to come to your hotel room anytime. Just so we’re clear. And you had a big party last night, too? Yeah, I did. But I was like, all right. Yeah. It’s midnight. Let’s be adult. Oh, yeah. You are much better than me. Yes. I was like, just one more. I have a day full of clients tonight. Can I ask you, is there a way for you to walk us through either some tantric breathing or circular breathing or a body scan? So wherever people are right now, they can try it so nothing sexual because they might be on a bus? Sure. Or they might be listening in public somewhere. Even if you’re on the bus, the person next to you is probably going to be like, what is going on? Put a hat out. Right. So what I usually start with is just an assessment of your breath, right. This is probably the easiest thing to do. If you can lie down, do and you place your hands on your belly and you start to breathe, you start to pay attention to where breath is moving in your body. So first, let’s just look at where we’re breathing, too. A lot of times we puff our chest up and away from our body, and we don’t want to do that because of a couple of reasons. But one, if you study anatomy and physiology, you know that the lung cage doesn’t really move out that much. And so you’re not allowing full expansion of breath. But if you move your belly out, then your diaphragm pushes down and your lungs can expand downward and fill up way more fully with fresh air. As you release that air and you pull your belly button kind of in towards your navel to make sure that you push that effort back up and squeeze out all the air that you can. And you start to continue to breathe in this way, focusing on making your hand rise and falling your belly. If you catch yourself moving your shoulders up to your ear, that’s fine. Just letting mine go. Yeah. Let it go. Allow your breath to be where it’s supposed to be for this moment. As you start to continue this breath breathe, start moving your breath in and out of your nose, but you’re not opening your mouth and you’re creating heat inside of your body you’re letting your whole body warm up from the inside. This is great breathing for creating sexual fire in your sex organs as you start to move energy around. But right now we’re just breathing and then you check in. Start with your feet. Breathe fresh oxygenated air to your toes, maybe wiggle them around, see how they feel. Have you paid attention with your eyes closed? Can you identify your third toe? Oftentimes? It’s easier if I touch my toe. I can identify it, but it’s there. So just try to focus on just the third toe for a little bit, because that little piggy stands alone a lot and check in. Move that energy up so you move from your toes into your ankles. Maybe you move them around and rotate them so you can remember where they are. You allow your breath to continue to move up into your shins, flexing your calves, relaxing them into your knee caps. You can move each muscle. Isolations are a great way to reexamine and reconnect with your body so you can pull up on your hamstring a little bit or in your quiet a little bit, and it will shift the way you feel things in your knees. So pay attention. Continue to move. Breath up. We’re in the root Chakra. Your limbs are an extension of your root Chakra. So as you start to move your energy up, you can breathe your fresh air to your perennium. And now you’ve done a scan of your legs all the way up to your perennium. You’re grounded.
Participant #1:
Yes. You continue to breathe. And this is a very fast version. She wants to do this nice and slow, but you continue to breathe. You feel the warmth into your sexual organs and you pay attention to them. How do they feel? Do you feel moisture? A slight erection. We have erectile tissue too. Do you feel blood rushing to that area? Would you like to? Can you direct some there? Continue to breathe. Now your breath is coming up to where your hands are on your belly and you continue to move that breath. Play with it there in your belly and listen to your organs. They should be getting a nice massage from the way that your diaphragm is pushing down on them as you inhale. And they should get a nice release as you exhale. Are you doing that? Can you feel space there if you’ve just eaten? Does it feel tighter? Did you eat too much? These are all things that we start to pay attention to. Are we hungry? Do we have to pee all of these things right. We have all these organs here that are talking to us, sending signals to the brain and we’re too distracted. So we shut them down. Now we’re going to pay back attention. You continue. You move that breath up into your heart and you can move your hands up. I like to touch my heart area. It just feels warm and loving when I put pressure on my chest and I focus on that breath. And I think what all this area offers to me and to my lovers, to my friends. Continue to inhale up into your throat, where you find gratitude for your voice, for your breath. As it moves and vibrates in your throat, you continue to move your breath up to the center of your forehead, checking in with your whole face. Are your muscles in your face relaxed? Is there a furrow in your bra? If so, relax it. Sometimes I have to take my finger and rub it out, rubbing one out of my face. And then at this point, you can also find more relaxation while your eyes are closed, pointing towards your nose, like you’re trying to make cross eye that relaxes that top part. As you continue to inhale and check in, move your breath, your energy, your flow up and out to the top of your head. Whatever thoughts are crowding up in there, I see them acknowledge them and then move on back to your breath.
Participant #1:
At this point, what I like to do is allow my breath to move back to my inhale and flow all the way back down to my toes and on my exhale. Move back up and out. And I continue that breath really deeply. I like loud breathing. I like my breathing to make noise and vibrate sound. That humming really creates vibrations, which we pay a lot of money for vibrators when we can do a lot of vibrations ourselves. So as you start to inhale and continue to make vibrational noises in your thriller, now you’re ready to start touching yourself. Don’t do it. If you’re on the bus, though. Don’t do it. If you’re supposed to be the podcast interviewer, right? Yeah. I keep getting to it if you want me to. That’s another time. My body is actually tingling. Yeah. You’re ready now. And when I put my hand on my chest, as you advised, I felt so safe, not just with you, but with myself. You can see that there are some tears in my eyes. There’s something that moves me about that experience. And I have some stuff right now that I need to let go. And I’m not sure exactly what it is, but I’ve experienced it, spending some time here in Atlanta and going through some of the exercises at this conference. I’ve started crying spontaneously and not really understood why. And sometimes going through these exercises just communication exercises with poor strangers who are like, what did I do to make this right? And if you know me or if you’re in the field in the field, people know me. And I was the keynote speaker, and I’m loud on stage, and I’m confident on stage, and then you get me one on one and they’re like, Dr. Jess, that’s not Dr. Jess. So that’s part of the reconciliation of stuff. I need to let go. Thank you. But it’s good to have the space where you get to see it, right. Like you’re like, oh, wait. I am holding on to something. And I think so much of what we do is just not giving ourselves space to be human. Like, we just don’t get to be human. Yeah. And in our bodies and Tantra gets us back to humanity. Yeah. I literally have tears running down my face here. And it’s the exercise you’ve provided. It’s the space that sex down south provided where I feel. For once. I’m not the only person of color in the room. In fact, I’m one of the people with the most passing privilege. And so I called my husband, and I was like, I found my people. I feel so lucky to be here. I want to suck in every ounce of this because we get this so seldom, right? Yeah. I don’t know if people listening were able to follow through that guided it’s. Okay. Play it again. Play it again. That was really great. And I know that it was a bit of a truncated version, but can you imagine if you started your day with that just for 1 minute? Some people are going to have ten minutes. Some people only have one, and one is better than none. Yeah. And I tell people all the time. Your song averages about three minutes, right? Average songs find a song that’s just like some meditative music and work through that. Give yourself one song. Okay. I love that you got time for one song to be playing one song. Drake says. One drink. Yeah. We sang one before last night, says one mic, one song. I think that that’s really important for us to just do that. And if you can do that with your partner and you get to check in and have that kind of like one of you can guide the other. You get to work on your ability to guide your lovers to healing, and they don’t have to be lovers. They can be your friends. A lot of posts that come to my classes. I hear about them having groups of friends over and practicing breath, or you can move into touch at that point. If you with a partner or a friend, where now as you start to breathe and connect that they are touching you as you move breath through. And that’s detachment massage kind of allows that to happen, and you can really check in and let go of things. And all you have to focus on is breath and feel so good because somebody’s taking care of you and you deserve to be taken care of. You deserve to be taken care of. There are a lot of people, and I think maybe a lot of my listeners I know a lot of powerful people, people who maybe are entrepreneurs and are always in charge of things or they’re a parent and they’re always worrying about their child. Don’t take the time to be taken care of. Put your oxygen mask on first. Yes. I remember the first person I heard say that is Dr. Jessica Shepard. She’s an OB GYN. You all should check her out, too. Who does a lot of work in sexual health and women in particular. Fem folk are always told, always putting the oxygen mask on everyone else first. Right. And not only women, I know my partner is a guy. Brandon does the same, really looks out for everyone else before he looks out for himself. And we share some of the same foibles, right that we have to work on. Well, this is really amazing. People can find you on your Fix Your Sex Podcast. You can find me on Fix Your Sex Podcast. It’s available on pretty much all the mediums that podcasts are on now, so you can find me there. You can also find me atltantra. Com, atlta and people can come down here and see you. Let me tell you, I feel like it’s worth the flight. I think so too. It’s definitely worth the flight. I travel quite a bit. So you can always. My travel calendar is always on my website and I teach classes and a lot of them are live streamed. I would imagine. So I think you would be absolutely impactful digitally. Yeah, I have students that are right now up and out throughout the East Coast. I still have some students in Hawaii that are a six hour time difference, but we make it work. And I have students that are all around the South Alabama, Tennessee, South Carolina, North Carolina, Texas. So it doesn’t matter where you are. If you would like to attend a class, it’s 2018. You can still be here. If we can attach a dildo to an app, you can get help online. So thank you so much. Amen. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate you. Really amazing. Yes, and I too. And I wish I had more time with you. I actually don’t usually go this long. The podcast listeners. No, I didn’t realize where the time went, so thank you for listening. I hope you can rewind if you didn’t get a chance to be walked through that body scan and breathing exercise with amino because really, I was tingling all over in different places, feeling a lot of fields and I’m really appreciative. Good. I’m glad. Thank you. Before we go, I want to mention that Reese Malone and I have created a mindful sex video series, of course. So that will be available on the website Sexwooddoctorjust. Com and happiercouples. Com as well as Reese’s site very soon if it’s not up as of yet. And it’s a series of videos that walk you through being more mindful in life and then being more mindful in the bedroom. But I’m sure I mean, I can attest to the fact that there’s no point in learning to be just mindful in the bedroom. You have to develop those skills outside the bedroom. If you try and do it right before an orgasm, your brain. Good luck. Yeah, exactly. You can ask me anything. I’ll give you anything, right? Yeah, mindful. Sure. You can have my car. You can have my car. No problem. The only thing I wouldn’t give away is my dog. Well, thank you again. Thank you to all of you for listening. Listening. And we’ll be back next week. Every Friday morning at 09:00 A.m. With a new Sex with Dr. Jess. Podcast Episode Have a wonderful week. Wherever you’re at. I’m.
