Menopause Is Not A Disease, So Why Do We Treat It As Such

Why do so many of us believe (& behave like) our desire and our pleasure is not something of great value?

After 2.5 decades of hearing women’s stories, it’s become clear to me that we’ve been led astray and that it’s vital we come back into right relationship to our female bodies, especially if we have any negative views or experiences with menopause.

In our society at large, there is a general sense of sexual ageism, as though turn-on, orgasm and pleasure are things for the youth.

To make matters worse, we are actually funding a multi-billion dollar industry that profits off our insecurities and belief that menopause is a ‘disease’ that should be addressed both with prescriptions and surgery.

How did this happen and what can we do now?

There are many factors at play here, including how we are socialized as little girls and young women, but for the scope of this article, I’m only highlighting three points:

  • First of all, the advent of birth control enabled women to experience new found sexual liberation in ways never previously possible. However, just because we could have more sex, doesn’t mean that it was great sex.
  • Then there’s the argument of Vaginal vs. clitoral orgasms, as if we need to choose one over the other and ignore the full spectrum of our erotic range.
  • To add fuel to our growing fire, some ‘unknown’ age limit was placed on sex, as though it has an expiry date.

So lack of skill, confusion about pleasure, and fear of aging has left us in quite a quandary. One that leaves us giving up on our pleasure rather than rebelliously investigating our untapped erotic potential.

All biological creatures have a simple program: expanding towards that which feels good and contracting away from that which feels bad. This is also true for humans, except that we can consciously choose to investigate things that feel bad and move towards them. That said, it is still not conducive to move into pleasure when our systems are in fight or flight. Furthermore, generally our modern lifestyle is stress, stress, and more stress along with an eternally growing to-do list that we use to keep ourselves from feeling the complete range of our sensitive, wild, emotional and sensual selves.

Our sexual education warns us about the dangers of STIs and pregnancy, ignoring the crucial part about understanding our own pleasure and sensuality. Fast forward many decades of putting everyone else’s needs first on top of layers of self-criticism, heartache and loneliness, and we have the perfect formula to ‘shut down’.

Menopause, unlike popular consent, is not an end. It is an invitation, a second chance, to claim our sexual sovereignty, once and for all.

3 Radical Steps to Sage-ing Gracefully:

1. Rebel. Rebel. Rebel. Do not believe what you hear and read, just because it’s common as an idea doesn’t mean it’s the truth. Question everything you believe about yourself, desire, and sexuality.

2. Desire can’t die, but she does hibernate. To wake up our desire is to say YES to life, YES to living, YES to enjoying all of our remaining moments. It means understanding that life is precious and that the pure act of breathing alone is a gift. And when we connect with ourselves and life consciously, an entire new world of beauty and abundance offers itself up to us. Be willing to let yourself DARE to desire because what you yearn for matters.

3. If you don’t use it, you lose it. Even if you are in a sexless marriage, that’s not an excuse to let yourself dry out and atrophy. Our pelvic floor and hormonal well-being requires attention. Doing simple self-care practices on a daily basis can rejuvenate our genitals and rekindle our pleasure pathways. Pleasure is not optional. When we feel good, we are healthier. When we have regular orgasms, alone or with another, we are less depressed and more naturally joyful and creative.

Just because our current society doesn’t value or support the sexual maturity process doesn’t mean we can’t choose to do so for ourselves.

Tending to our hearts and bodies is like tending a beautiful garden. Regular care means light work and the enjoyment of great beauty. If we abandon our garden, it’s much harder to get things flourishing again. It is possible, but it will take loving determination.

If you have said  you are too old, too fat, too skinny, too this or too that, it’s time to bust free from these limited ways of perceiving yourself and time to delight in the cultivation of a gourmet relationship with yourself and your amazingly alive and intelligent body.

To learn more on the truth of menopause as well as gain simple practices to support your life-long libido and vitality, check out my Sexy Menopause training where Dr. Wickman, a luminary Ob-Gyn and myself share the best of our wisdom to support you to enjoy your power stage of life!

What is your pain or discomfort trying to tell you?

“He will leave me if we can’t have sex, but I’m in so much pain, I really can’t”.

“I’m confused by my recurring issues with my vagina, it seems like there’s always something wrong and I really just want to relax and feel good.”

“I feel ashamed by the changes in my body. I just want to be orgasmic, why is it so hard?”

No matter what the complaint is, the truth behind all of them is that when our body isn’t well, we feel betrayed and frustrated.

Yet when our body is in a state of imbalance, it’s attempting to speak to us. the problem is two-fold: we don’t know how to listen nor do we understand what is being said.

Recently, in interviewing a leading Ob-Gyn about women and sexual health, she stated that there is always a psychological connection with every issue.

This affirmed what I already discovered over 10 years ago when writing up my PhD: we are psycho-sexual beings.

This means that what we think and believe is not separate from our body.

Now although this can be an intriguing idea, how is it useful when we are suffering from on-going sexual imbalances?

Personally, I healed my vagina of an ‘incurable’ imbalance. The truth was that I was in pain, I couldn’t have sex, I thought my partner would leave me, and I couldn’t find the answer through alternative and traditional medicine alike!

I was left with only one option—go within and listen.

So I did. But that was not enough. I needed to trust what I was hearing and act accordingly. And what was afflicting me for 1.5 years healed overnight, never to reoccur again.

Since that moment, I became well aware of the immense power we each have to heal ourselves and to bring imbalances back into vibrant wellbeing.

3 Keys To Getting To Know Our Psycho-Sexual Self:

1. Contemplate that it’s possible. I have witnessed incredible transformation for women who were willing to consider the idea that their body was just simply misbehaving and that there may indeed be a deeper learning available through the imbalance.

2. Admit what is obvious. This can be as simple as “I’m in pain” or “I’m angry” or “I’m scared”. Through being able to ‘get real’ with ourselves, we are able to orient ourselves to the actual current reality we are experiencing. For example: I’m feeling like I’m getting a bladder infection. I must be pissed off. Oh! I am pissed off. 

3. Take action. Using the above example: I drink a few liters of water, own my anger, and apply tea tree diluted in coconut oil to the opening of my urethra. These are steps that I know work for interrupting a bladder infection. Action is normally pretty clear, the problem is that most of us don’t really want to face what we need to face to actually heal. 

By being willing to fully embody our sovereign space (our physical body) and to meet what is emerging for us with as much courage as we can muster is an act of deep self-respect and self-love.

There’s no need to suffer unnecessarily or for prolonged periods of time. It may require of us to put on our ‘big girl’ panties and face reality. Good. It’s time we take our own power back into our own hands. We may have to have temporary discomfort, but it will be worth it in the long run.

The impact of shifting our perception from victim (things that happen to us) to sexually sovereign (states of being that we move through) cannot be underestimated.

If learning to hear and heed the messages from your body is important to you, I’d love to invite you to consider exploring my Your Yoni Never Lies Deep Dive video training.  

I always love to hear directly from my readers, so feel free to leave me a comment or question in the comments section below.

Breaking the Bonds of Shame

Breaking the Bonds of Shame – Creating More Confidence For Ourselves

If you are are a Brené Brown fan, then you are part of a small percentage of people who are willing to have a look a the impact of shame in your life.

However, for most of us, shame is not something we willingly explore or spend time contemplating. If anything, we hide it when we feel it and we avoid it when we see it others.

Yet shame is everywhere, and although it’s not inherent to our nature, we still undergo a powerful process of learning shame through our conditioning.

“You should be ashamed of yourself!” Does this statement sound familiar? It’s something often said to children when we want to influence their behaviors, yet we don’t realize the lasting impact of those powerful words. In fact, shaming others is so prevalent, it’s rare to meet someone who hasn’t been on the receiving end of those words at least once in their life.

Once we’ve learned shame, we self-propagate it: we shame ourselves. Self-shaming is so ingrained that we barely notice it. What is noticeable is the erosion of our confidence and ability to learn and grow from the mistakes we make.

That’s a big problem with shame. It means something is fundamentally wrong with us, so there’s no way we can actually do something about our condition. We give up and stop trying.

Making mistakes is necessary. It’s how we grow our wisdom, learning to discern how our choices are impacting our lives and adjusting our behaviors according to the insights we gain from these awkward and often painful moments is crucial for healthy maturation.

But it’s not all bad news about shame. Because we learned shame, we actually can unlearn it.

There are 3 ways we can interrupt shame and start to reclaim our lives and rebuild our confidence:

1. Name The Shame: When we are in shame, our tendency is to hide. Yet shame thrives in isolation. So the first step to interrupting the pattern is to recognize when we are in shame and to name it. If we can identify when shame is present, we have a chance to transform it. In the beginning, this isn’t easy, but the more we practice, the stronger and more agile we become when handling our shame. For example: I feel shame about my body, I’m not beautiful enough.

2. No More Blame: Once we have identified the presence of shame, we then have the opportunity to turn our attention to how we are using blame to avoid the responsibility of transforming our lives. We may blame ourselves, others or circumstances. When we do this, we assign our power to the blaming rather than the transformation.

This step is more like taking honest stock of all the contributing factors in our situation and then shifting our attention to transformation, what we’d actually love as an outcome. For example: I haven’t actually been loving my body or doing the things that allow her to thrive.

3. Fan the Flame: What we’d love is no small thing. What matters to our heart is crucial, consider it like a form of inner guidance. Even if we have no idea how what we’d love is possible, it is viable as an option because it exists in your heart.

When we ask ourselves: What is the outcome that I would love? We mobilize our creative genius. We shift our power from what felt like an impossible and horrible condition into the limitless realm of possibility. For example: I’d love to feel vibrantly healthy and switched on in my body. By fanning the flame of what we’d love, we become aware of what is possible and can mobilize ourselves in that direction.

It takes great resilience to choose to face shame head-on and to reclaim lives. We will be faced by this choice, not once, not twice, but possibly many time every day.

The good news is that through exercising the 3 steps outlined above, you’ll be using your will in new, powerful and creative ways and this builds confidence!

If this article has been helpful, please share it. I’d love to invite you to join me for my 6 hour Shameless Surrender training. where we not only look more deeply at shame, we also explore the importance of shamelessness and surrender, especially with regards to creating more sensual and sexual confidence. Together, we can do this.

A Simple Remedy For Holiday Burn-Out

Have you felt completely overwhelmed with meeting the demands of work, family and creating a beautiful life for yourself?

Maybe you’ve been under a stressful dead-line and unpredicted things have created delays, causing you to push and overwork in order to keep your business thriving?

Or perhaps it’s been so long since you’ve been relaxed and playful that numbness has taken over and you don’t remember what it’s like to have fun?

Or worse, you’ve been feeling alone and isolated, even when surrounded by people?

Disconnection is real. Stress is real. Trying to live up to our ideals is real. And learning to transform our stress is not only an essential part of reality, it’s a must.

No matter what the scenario, living in a stress cycle creates a lot of wear and tear on our body and spirit. And to add fuel to the fire, the more we are stressed, the less we are resourced to transform our stress.

So how do we break this pattern?

Oxytocin.

It’s one of the amazing secrets of our regenerating bodies!

Not only is it a powerful connection hormone, it’s also a very important neurotransmitter that assists in creating more brain plasticity which is essential in creating new healthy habits and giving us greater access to our creative genius.

Deeply embedded patterns lead to rapid aging and illness. To transform those patterns, we need to be able to change our habits and to learn new ways of being and living. Having a boost to our ability to shift and grow has very powerful and lasting results in our well-being.

To break our stress patterns, we must engage in a pleasure-based hormonal cycle which is most easily induced through direct connection with others. Not the ‘online-through-an-app’ connection, but direct human contact, where we give and receive physical touch.

Yes. This means getting off our devices and seeking out personal time with others, preferably playful, sensual contact such as the kind experienced through partner dancing or snuggling.

But what happens when we don’t feel safe enough for connection of this kind or don’t have access to other people?

If we do not have access to others or we don’t feel safe to connect physically with others, we can still induce an oxytocin state within our own body. This can be a huge game changer, especially for those of us who are under a lot of stress such as having young children and/or running our own businesses.

Steps to transformation stress into vitality:

  1. Recognize and admit we are stressed. This is important so that we are aware of our need for connection and relaxation.
  1. Break our habits. This means literally doing something different every 50 mins or so during our work day. For example: get up and move if we sit all the time or reach out if we have a tendency to isolate.
  1. Breathe more deeply if we tend to shallow breathe. Breathing is key, especially if we can combine it with gentle, yet firm contact with our own body. Let your out breath be slightly longer than your in breath.

If learning more about Oxytocin and how self-inducing oxytocin can benefit your relationships and well-being, you’re invited to join my oxytocin training and start to harness your own self-inducing skills: Transforming Holiday Stress Into Connection

Kavanaugh’s Wildfire: The Rise of Sacred Anger

Thanks to the recent Kavanaugh event, we have added more fuel onto the already spreading wildfire of outrage—a fierce call igniting within each of us an opportunity to look at how we perceive women’s bodies and sexual rights, along with the larger issue of human dignity.

This is an unprecedented time when the full spectrum of change and possibility is alive for each of us. Some of us are the rising storm itself, while some of us are the storm-riders, attempting to make sense of how we feel and how we can affect change in the climate of overwhelm and confusion. Thankfully, there are stages to this storm that we can map out and use to our advantage.

Three Stages of Transformational Storms

 

Stage One: Turning Righteous Anger into Sacred Anger

Before we get creative, we must feel what we feel or risk numbing out, or worse, deepening our own trauma and pain. Anger is a good sign. It means we are no longer willing to be frozen and numb. It means we are waking up to all the ways in which our own sovereignty as individuals has been overridden and disrespected.

The only trap to look out for is that of feeling righteous in our anger—where our own experience is viewed as more important than that of others, and where we, in turn, disrespect others through how we react to our challenges. This kind of anger can feel good after feeling helpless, and as it gathers momentum and power, it can move through a greater and greater number of us. Yet this kind of anger, like a wildfire, seeks only to obliterate whatever is in its way, no matter what the cost.

This is where sacred anger comes in—the clear, focused anger that’s the cornerstone of catalyzing a transformational and effective end result. When we harness the intensity of our rage with lucid clarity, mobilizing ourselves and others to create the change we believe is needed, we become powerful change agents.

So yes to our collective anger, and rather than wasting it through emulating the behavior of those who enrage us, we have the opportunity to rise together in sacred anger—a force more powerful than imaginable. It’s in service to the common good of everyone: one in which our sovereignty is seen, respected and heard.

Are you willing to let yourself feel anger and focus it into sacred anger?

Stage Two: Moving from Assumptions to Clarity

Rather than throwing tantrums kindled through assumptive reactions, we must put our genius to work and attain clarity. It enables us to create lasting change in which the choices of each individual within the greater collective are upheld and considered. We are not a one-size-fits-all world.

Assumptions can only take us so far, often at a great cost. By allowing ourselves to integrate our feelings with our capacity to use our intellect, we start to engage in the clarity needed for us to move forward with integrity.

This includes recognizing the essence of human dignity: that only WE can be the true authority of our own choices. We’re not children needing mother and father to patronize us into proper behavior.

Up until now, we have put conditions on our healing and reclamation, deferring our power to an external authority. Yet both the #MeToo movement and the recent Kavanaugh hearing have clearly shown that although conditions are not what we’d like them to be, we no longer buy into the idea that those conditions pre-determine the trajectory of our own lives. In other words, the full reclamation of our power isn’t dependent on any conditions, including the ones we are currently facing.

Are you willing to get curious, letting go of assumptions, to have a deeper look at issues through the lens of your own sovereignty?

Stage Three: Creative Action

Structures help us function better, however, when they shift towards tyranny, it’s natural to be ignited with sacred anger—anger that arises from noticing injustice and offering forward-moving solutions. It’s time for a structural upgrade.

As we address many large issues that impact humanity, and we work together to improve the conditions for all people, we are realizing that we cannot leave behind the issues that surround our body and sexuality. The dissolution of existing paradigms about sexuality makes the idea of sexual sovereignty an important one to consider.

Sexual sovereignty is a new possibility, one that will be fleshed out not by the few, but by the many. What would it look like to live in a world where each of us feels safe to be in our body, we enjoy our body, and we naturally take on the responsibilities of being a sexual being?

Establishing the profound respect for oneself naturally allows this same respect to flow outwardly to others. No longer can we stand for slavery, serfdom, the sex trade, and all manners of outdated ways in which we treat each other’s body and sexuality.

Kavanaugh’s recent rise to the Supreme Court need not predetermine the outcome for all American women. This is a unique opportunity to laser-focus the fire in our belly to moves into right action and to co-create a world where sexual sovereignty is established as a true human birthright.

Now’s the time to come deeper into our body, to let the rage flow through, leaving us crystal clear that what we stand for does matter and is worthy of our continued attention. We are setting a precedent for the future generations, one in which, against all odds, we come together in common purpose for the good of everyone. One in which we stand so fully in our power that we no longer regard men as our enemy, but are finally willing to invite them to stand with us as our allies.

Our sexuality isn’t a commodity, a weapon, a thing to be used. It is who we are. By learning to heal ourselves of our traumas and wounds, by taking a stand to fully abide in ourselves, by using our voices, sharing our stories, we become the change we desire and we open the invitation for others to do the same.

It is time for each of us to heal, to speak, and to contribute to creating more of what we’d love in the world. What is one thing you can do today to take creative action towards what you’d love?

To discover more about the impact of desire, explore Dr. Saida Désilets’ newest book, DesireDesireTheBook.com

Jade Eggs, Lawsuits & Throwing Out The Baby With The Bath Water (or not!)

In the light of world events, a lawsuit about jade eggs may seem rather contrite and of little importance. However, when we look a little deeper, a greater issue is revealed: the abject disrespect for women’s erotic intelligence.

As the founder of the modern Jade Egg movement and creatrix of a powerful psycho-sexual method, I’m not at all surprised by the recent lawsuit against Goop. For years I’ve been speaking up against the outrageous claims made about the Jade Egg, taking a stand for the fact that it’s the woman herself that creates her transformation, not the Jade/Yoni egg.

This fact was revealed while during the research for my dissertation—the functional model (do a certain technique with the Jade Egg and get a particular result) was only 1/2 the answer. The more important part of the equation was being left out: the deeper meaning and purpose of our sexuality.

Every time we make promises based on a technique or a thing, we disrespect a woman’s inherent erotic intelligence. We actually propagate her social conditioning, anchoring further that we are not enough as we are, broken and in need of fixing, and must have the guidance of a expert to activate our sexual powers.

Sadly, this industry is profiting from women’s pain and insecurity. And the only solution to this is for women to claim their sexual sovereignty and for professionals to treat them as such.

Jade eggs are not sex toys or gym equipment. We can use them that way, but we won’t get what we are really looking for: ourselves and a confident relationship with our sexuality.

A woman’s body and psycho-sexual health is not something to joke about or to treat like a commodity.

I realize we live in a culture that likes the quick fix, but when it comes to our sexuality, we deserve to invest time and energy in learning high quality education, steering away from wild claims.

There isn’t a quick fix or a pill that will solve our deeper healing. Each one of us has our own journey, one that deserves our high standards and due diligence.

Maybe this incident with Goop will encourage us all to rethink our approach to this practice, and more importantly, how we treat women’s erotic intelligence.