You know that post-orgasmic feeling? Open, soft, radiating, present, momentarily whole, in-love-with-the-world?

What if you could walk around like that? With a sense of your own aliveness, your own life force. What if you laughed more easily. What if you could reach for pleasure as a tool even when life is hard.

Especially when life is hard.

I show you how to live this way. That post-orgasmic feeling isn't magic. It's chemistry your body already knows how to make. I teach you how to make it on purpose. So that you can feel alive. At work, with the kids, alone in the car.

On a Tuesday. At the DMV.

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There are many ways to get to a turned-on life. Therapy. Meditation. Plant medicine. Twenty years and a good teacher.

Working with me is one of the fastest. It's also the most pleasurable.

It’s fast because we work with the very essence of life itself. The energy that creates new life. Your orgasmic energy. My clients learn how to activate that energy and direct it in ways that create more radiance, vibrancy, joy and magnetism.

I work through guided breath, somatic awareness, gentle movement, and nervous system regulation. Sessions are fully clothed, consent-based, and confidential. Over Zoom, or in person if we’re in the same city.

That’s the short version.

Here’s the long one.

Who Do You Work With?

People come to me because they sense there’s more available to them than they’re currently living.

Three kinds show up:

The first is carrying more sexual charge than they know what to do with. They love touch. Giving it and receiving it. They love sex. They walk around most days in a low-level state of arousal. They may want more sex than their partner does. The problem isn’t the energy (as they may have been told). It’s that they have no idea what to do with it. Often there’s shame wrapped around it, so they keep a lid on it. And they spend their lives feeling like they’re hiding a huge part of who they are.

The second is the opposite. The volume got turned down and they can’t figure out how to turn it up. Or turn it on again. Low libido. No libido. Or sex that’s just… fine. Life got in the way: kids, health, deaths, age. They remember what it felt like to lie there afterward, wrung out and wide open, the whole world softened at the edges. They just can’t find their way back, if they ever felt it at all.

Neither of them only wants better sex. They also crave a deeper level of intimacy with a partner, and with themselves.

The third might surprise you.

Nothing is wrong at all. Good sex life. Maybe a solid personal pleasure practice. Nothing broken.

But they suspect there’s something more to their sexual energy than what they’re experiencing. And they sense that I know what it is. And they want in on the secret.

And they’re right. Keep reading…

Why Do People Come to a Sex Coach?

Some of it is what you’d expect. Men and women driven by high sex drive and don’t know how to manage it, people addicted to porn, humans who want to experience deep intimacy and feel like they are having shallow sex. People who struggle to perform in bed due to physical challenges or performance anxiety or resentment or fear or, or, or….

But a good majority come to me because they know their sexual energy is tied to something greater. They sense it’s tied to flow state. To joy. To how they walk into a room and what happens when they do:

An talented entrepreneur who knows how to make money and can’t hold onto it. He generates money. His challenge is in receiving. Every time something good arrived some part of him pushed it back out the door. We are using eros to move the stagnant energy and open his capacity to take things in.

A CEO entering a new stage of her career. She wanted to show up differently. No more ending the work day exhausted. She wanted to walk into the room radiating pleasure and power instead of performing authority. We work with archetypes and full-body energy orgasm and owning her sexy so that she can light up any room she is in.

A professional speaker who was already very good at his job. He knew that if he could speak from a fully embodied place instead of from his head, the message would land harder. It did. His confidence went up. So did his bookings. So did his fee.

How Do You Work With People?

First we find out whether we’re a good fit. That’s a complimentary call, no charge, no pitch.

I’m not for everyone. And neither are you.

Some people need a rope teacher. Some need a body worker. Some need a therapist who knows trauma clinically, not just somatically. Some need a practitioner who shares their orientation or their history, because sometimes that matters more than anything else.

If that’s you, I’ll tell you. And I’ll tell you who to call.

If we’re a fit, we get clear on your goal. That goal becomes our north star for everything that follows.

Most clients work with me in a package of ten sessions followed by a two-day personal retreat. If that’s more commitment than you’re ready for, I offer individual sessions.

In the sessions, we find where the tension lives by feeling the sensations in your body. You learn to sense (not talk about) the protective patterns. Then we use breath, sound, and movement to move the energy that has walled off your access to pleasure, intimacy, and presence.

You leave with practical tools. Not concepts. Things you can use in a meeting, in an argument, in bed.

What Do You Actually Teach?

Emotional fluidity.

Emotional fluidity is the capacity to let an emotion move through you to completion, rather than managing it, suppressing it, or observing it from a safe distance.

I teach my clients to meet every emotion as sensation in the body rather than something to avoid. We work to slow down, build internal resources, and practice staying present while the emotion moves to completion.

This is important because suppressed emotions don’t just disappear. They can show up as tension, unconscious reactions, resentment, or emotional numbness. Often blocking our ability to enjoy pleasure.

This matters because emotional fluidity restores choice. Clients can feel the full weight of an emotion and still act from what they want rather than from what the feeling dictates. When we allow an emotion to run it’s course it clears the way for greater aliveness, turn-on, and joy.

Accepting your sexuality as part of your humanity.

Religious and cultural conditioning taught us that our sexual energy is something to hide. Something shameful. A large part of our work together is simply normalizing your sexual energy as the most innocent and natural part of who you are. Whatever your particular thing is — the fantasy, the desire, the shape of what turns you on or doesn’t turn you on — I promise you it is more common than you think. Working with shame is core to this acceptance.

Learning how to Circulate Your Orgasmic energy.

Orgasm does not have to be a genital release.

We have been taught that releasing this energy outwardly through ejaculation or sexual action is normal: Build. Peak. Discharge. Done.

There is another way. And I have made it my life mission to spread the word (cue the pulpit I am about to stand on):

For thousands of years many religious traditions have taught a very specific practice to a select few: Sustained orgasmic arousal, with the practitioner moving the felt sensation of their life force through the body rather than discharging it.

It’s a practice where orgasm stops being located solely in the genital region. The sensation climbs up your belly. Your chest. Your neck. Waves of pleasure instead of a peak. You don’t come back down and go to sleep. You come back down and you’re lit up for days. (Please note: I am not teaching semen retention.)

The sustained arousal state does something that the quick peak cannot.

This is the practice that teaches full-body orgasm. (for men and women)

This is the practice that teaches multiple orgasm. (for men and women)

But that’s just the side benefit.

What the religious traditions know is sexual energy can be transformed into Spiritual Awareness: If ordinary orgasm gives you one second of ego-lessness, sustained arousal stretches it out. People weep. People see light. They feel a deep sense of unity. People report the boundary between themselves and everything else going soft, and then going away. (Non-dual is a technical word for it.)

I don’t have science to back this up (yet!), but I have witnessed that people who use this practice are more radiant, vibrant and alive. They have sharp mental clarity and a magnetism that draws life into them rather than them striving and driving toward a goal.

Learning to Source Your Own Pleasure.

Mama Gena says it best: "Pleasure is not a prize you earn for good behavior. It’s a muscle you activate through choice. "

Most people wait for someone to hand pleasure to them. We think that we have to perform for it or work for it. Most of us have a tremendous capacity for pain.

But pleasure?

Not so much.

The truth is you can generate joy, ecstasy and dare I say rapture in your own body, on your own.

What I want most is to hand my clients the tools to generate pleasure in their own body. And then to walk outside and find it in the world. In the light. In the food. In the way the air moves on their skin.

So….You Teach People How to Have Great Sex, Right?

…and despite all of the pontificating above it always comes back to this question.

Yes. After all of the above. You will have mind blowing, epic, sex.

But not because I taught you about toys, or techniques or positions. Because I taught you how to be in your own body, in your own pleasure. In your own rapture.

"For a solid foundation of healthy sexuality, we need examples of people who have discovered genuine rapture and who are capable of showing us how such rapture is attained. In short, we need initiation and transmission"

Ma Ananda Sarita

That’s the word. Transmission.

You can’t read your way into rapture. Someone has to show you the door.

That’s what I do. If you want to talk more about it, I’m here.

“Hi Tracy, I enjoyed reading your article. As you mentioned, the men in the article seem like seasoned pros when it comes to emotional and physical connection. Meanwhile, I'm still trying to figure out how to undo a bra clasp without turning on the light.”

There’s a question underneath that comment. He didn’t ask it, so I will:

What do these men know that I don’t?

I’m going to answer it using his exact scenario. The bra clasp. In the dark.

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First, let’s just acknowledge that the bra clasp is not easy. Even for those of us wearing bras. Heck, I don’t even need a bra, and yet I have one that has six sets of clasps. I’m locked into the thing like it’s a chastity garment that even I cannot get out of.

Buy hey, It’s super cute.

So how does a master lover handle this maneuver, fraught as it is with clumsiness and possible mishaps?

Those are “the moves” of a master lover unclasping the dreaded bra.

But trust me, if you try to copy these moves she will know. Just like we know when you try to do the ABC’s with your tongue (if you know, you know, and you can stop doing that right now).

A master lover isn’t running better technique. He’s built four capacities most men never build. He can be present, because he learned to be present with himself first. He follows his own desire instead of waiting for permission. He isn’t afraid of emotion — his or hers. And he moves slowly. Slower than you may think is necessary.

The playbook is not the secret. Here’s what these men actually know:

A Master Lover Knows How to Be Present

In each moment there is only her skin, his touch, the sound of her breath. Nothing else exists.

He isn’t managing her. He’s meeting her. Nothing in him is elsewhere.

He can only be this present with another human because he has learned to be present to himself.

It’s true. Can you sit in silence with yourself? In stillness?

A master lover can match the depths of her being. His attentiveness to her body and his undistracted focus makes her feel as if time has stopped and nothing else in the world exists.

That level of presence means that he can be completely attuned to her body. That’s what lets him respond, moment to moment, to what her body is asking for.

PRACTICE: Sit. In silence. Alone. For five minutes. No phone. You don’t have to meditate. But practice being still with yourself. What happens?

A Master Lover Operates from an Inner Authority

The master lover has deep trust in himself. He’s not with her because he needs something from her. He isn’t easily moved by outside forces. He’s driven by his own desire, and he trusts himself to want what he wants.

She feels that. In how sure his hands are when he turns her around. In the moment his desire drops all the way down into his balls and a low growl escapes him.

She knows he wants her. She also knows he has the patience not to take her until she’s ready.

PRACTICE: Say what you want out loud. Where in your body are you speaking from? Your head? Try again. From your heart? Now try again, dropping your intent down to your sexual center. There! Practice speaking from your root.

A Master Lover Isn’t Afraid of Emotion

A master lover occupies himself fully. He can do this because every emotion that comes up in his body he meets head on. Nothing is stuffed down waiting to explode. He can laugh as easily as he can cry. He understands what it means to unleash his anger and with this understanding he understands his own power.

He also knows that his attention and his touch will elicit emotion out of her body.

She might cry. Perhaps nobody has touched her so tenderly before.

She might laugh. Perhaps nobody has touched her so tenderly before.

She might rush, try to help him along. Perhaps nobody has touched her so tenderly before.

And because he isn’t afraid of emotion — his or hers — he doesn’t rush her through it.

Are you able to sit with your own emotions as they arise or do you stuff them down? If you can’t stand feeling your own emotions it will be very hard for you to be present for hers.

PRACTICE: Name the emotion you avoid most. Anger. Grief. Whichever one it is. Next time it shows up, don't fix it and don't explain it. Find where it lives in your body — throat, chest, gut — and try to feel the sensation. Tightness? Burning? Numbness?

A Master Lover Moves Slowly

A master lover moves slowly. Slower. Slower still.

Then he slows down again.

PRACTICE: Whatever speed you think is slow enough, cut it in half. Then cut it in half again.

Most people who come to me arrive asking a version of the bra-clasp question. How do I do it right? What’s the technique?

We never work on technique. We work on whether you can sit still with yourself. Whether you can desire with confidence. Whether you can stay in the room when she/he cries. Whether you can slow down.

That’s the work. It takes time and it changes everything. I promise.

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The women were asked exactly the same thing, in a separate room, at the same time. Neither group heard the other’s answers until afterward.

I expected the two lists to look similar and they were. The thing that surprised me was the specificity that arose from the women.

What do women say makes sex great?

Presence.

That was the first answer, and it was the men’s first answer too. Word for word. Whatever else you take from these two pieces, take that.

But the women were far more specific about what presence actually looks like in practice.

Presence, they said, is when he’s attuned to my body. When he’s attuned to the moment. When he has taken the time and the attention to light candles and make sure the environment is clean. When he sets aside hours for making love, not an evening slot between other things.

It’s devotion and reverence. Worshipful touch. Sacredness. It’s when he lights up on seeing me.

One women said “I like a balance between reverence and ravishing”. The entire room of women moaned in agreement.

It’s a fine line for men… should I be gentle with her, or should I take her? A skill that I will write about in a post in the future. Reverence alone becomes precious and careful and slightly dead. Ravishing alone becomes the thing on the lousy list. Held together? Magic. (I’ll write a post on this soon)

Where the men and the women said the same thing

Not surprisingly, the men and women’s lists were mostly in agreement.

On having no goal. The men said great sex is “when there is no direction of we are going here.” The women said it’s “when there is no goal and we are just with each other, following the energy.”

On the slow build. The men described the tension building over days. The women described “when we take the time to allow the energy to build until we both are in a state of desperately wanting to join together.” Either way, both groups agree that a key ingredient for mind blowing sex is the little touches and whispers in the day or hours leading up to your time together.

On dissolution, transcendent states, and sacred sex. The men said “we are absolutely one” and described merging into one consciousness. The women said “when our selves disappear and we enter a single consciousness together.” and “spiritual sex that brings me to transcendent places.” Keep in mind this is a group trained in using sexual energy to reach higher states of consciousness. Also keep in mind that this is exactly what my clients learn when they work with me.

On play. Both wanted laughter. The women named respectful creative play together; the men described sex as a dance, unpredictable, following the same rhythm.

And on what makes lousy sex, the two lists are nearly interchangeable: rushing, performing, dissociating, drunk sex, mechanical sex, being controlled rather than met.

While it appears that both men and women want the same things in bed, the women added some things that are very specific to their experience. Men, this is where you should pay attention:

What only the women said

These appeared on the women’s lists and not one man mentioned any of them.

Hygiene. Bad hygiene was named directly. So were dirty fingernails, and nails that hadn’t been trimmed (ouch!).

The room. A messy bedroom made the lousy list. A clean environment and lit candles made the great list. For the women it was near-universal that setting the scene is important to them.

The ending. This one is so important: “an attuned ending, where he very slowly and gently leaves my body.”

Go back and read the men’s answers. Every one of them ends at the peak, or dissolves into timelessness, or simply stops. Not a single man described what happens after. For many women, how a man leaves post-coitus is as significant as how he arrives. This period after sex is really important. Again, go slow.

Her capacity. “When he understands how orgasmic I am and that one orgasm is not normal.” And on the lousy list: thinks only one orgasm is enough. Remember, we all are multi-orgasmic - but many women are particularly multi-orgasmic. Don’t assume she’s one and done.

Kissing. No kissing appeared twice on the women’s lousy list.

Sound. Stifling my sounds - or his own.

Emotional safety, named precisely. The men said they wanted trust. The women named the exactly where they stop trusting: when he says “don’t get attached.” When he’s scared of emotions, mine and his. When he has something to prove (no self esteem). When he feels needy.

Consent. Lack of consent was on the women’s list. So was non-consensual ejaculation — him coming inside her or on her without agreement.

The one place they seem to contradict each other

The women’s lousy list includes: passive, and he doesn’t make the moves.

The men’s lousy list includes: when she’s controlling me and telling me exactly how it needs to be and there’s no relaxation into the flow.

Initially, I read this as a contradiction: she wants him to lead, he doesn’t want to be directed, somebody has to lose.

But it’s actually the same request from both sides. She isn’t asking him to take charge of her. She’s asking him to bring himself and his confidence. And he isn’t asking her to go passive or submit. He’s asking for gentleness and spaciousness and trust. Learning to guide a man without him getting into his head is an art. (Just as the art of balancing reverence and ravishing is for men!)

Both are asking for the same thing: he leads, she shapes. And, the women’s own list tells him how — controlling rather than flowing with me was a complaint, and he appreciates communication and can communicate what he likes and dislikes was on the great list. She wants him flowing and talking. Not silently deciding.

The takeaway, for both

For the women reading this: most of what’s on the lousy list, he most likely has never been told. He does not know that the ending matters. He does not know that one orgasm isn’t the finish line. He genuinely does not know about the fingernails.

Almost every item on that lousy list is a five-second fix for a man who is told. But if you choose to be silent, he will never know. So, say it out loud, outside the bedroom, when neither of you is naked.

For the men reading this: the women’s list is not a longer version of yours. It’s your list with the addition of specifics requests that will make you even better than you already are.

FAQ

What do women say makes sex great? Presence above all — a man attuned to her body and to the moment. Then: unhurried time measured in hours, a clean and prepared environment, reverence balanced with ravishing, emotional safety, genuine communication, laughter and play, no goal, and an attuned ending.

What makes sex bad for women? Rushing, goal-oriented sex aimed at orgasm without attunement, poor hygiene and uncut nails, a messy room, porn-style sex, going too fast for her body, no kissing, performance, drunk or dutiful sex, being treated as an object, having her sounds stifled, emotional unavailability, and lack of consent.

Do men and women want the same things in bed? Far more than either group expects. Both named presence first. Both wanted slowness, no goal, dissolution of self, laughter and the sacred.

Why does the way sex ends matter to women? Multiple women described wanting an attuned ending, where he leaves her body slowly and gently.

Is one orgasm enough for a woman? Many women are capable of multiple orgasms, and several named the assumption that one is the finish line as a source of unsatisfying sex. The relevant knowledge is her anatomy and her capacity — not her partner’s stamina.

Read the companion piece: what twenty men said great sex is.

Before I divulge, let me be very clear about something: These were not ordinary men. This particular group of men have been trained to use their sexual energy to reach higher states of consciousness. Many have also been trained in what it means to make love.

These are men who know how to be open and vulnerable. These are also men who, with a deep growl and firm grip can gently pull your hair and make you submit in ways that you didn’t even know you desired.

…and despite these extraordinary men, some of the things that they said still surprised me.

Here’s what they said.

What do men say makes sex great?

The first man set the tone, and half the room ended up echoing him:

“Great sex for me is when you’re so much in the present moment that there is no direction of “we are going here.” We’re moving towards an orgasm, which is kind of always subtly in the back of the mind of both parties. So the more aware you can be in that moment, and not rush towards the outcome — for me, that is when it’s most magical.”

Read that again. The orgasm was named as the interference. The thing men are supposedly single-mindedly driving at was, in that room, the thing they were trying to get out from under.

Others found it through the body’s own rhythm:

“I feel like I have total control of my ejaculation. I can go on as long as I want to, and I can feel the energy building up in me and my partner — more and more and more, staying in the high. And then being able to go into the valley and just be there. That is so wonderful. And then go back into the high again and just play with the energies. That is amazing sex for me.”

Some reached for music:

“Great sex to me is like dancing. Music. Feeling unpredictable — the next step. We are deeply connected with the same rhythm. There is trust, vulnerability from both sides. And we are absolutely one.”

Some reached for God:

“For me it is a connection to the divine, in the merging of bodies into one consciousness — the full range, the full totality of the human experience.”

“Time disappears. It can be so intense, diving into a multi-dimensional portal that’s beyond physicality, beyond everything we know. And we just melt. It can be very short — it can be like an hour. Or it can be the whole night, or the whole day.”

That last line got the only laugh of the session. Short is an hour. Nobody else in the room found it strange.

The men who described the best sex took the longest to get there

This was the pattern I hadn’t expected. The most vivid answers all involved an almost comic amount of time spent not having sex.

“For me, great sex is when I clear my calendar for days, if not a week, and I just melt into my lover. And we start so slow. First I set the scene. I create the temple for both of our senses — our touch, our taste, our smell, our sound, our sight. And then we just go so slowly. So slowly, until she is just screaming with desire, and her whole body is melted and juicy. And then when she experiences bliss, she pours her love and caring onto me, and then I get to submit to her. And it’s insane.”

“It’s the beginning of the seduction. The early play of are we going to do this, are we going to do this, are we going to do this. The tension that builds over days. And then the capturing in the corner — okay, we’re going to do this. It’s that buildup, but it’s also that desire on both sides. I want to be here. I want to be here with you.“

And one man gave the physiology of why the slow build changes the event entirely:

“I really like tension, and building things up really, really slowly. Whenever we do that and don’t just rush into things, there’s already so much serotonin and oxytocin and dopamine and readiness in the body that by the time we start to make love, it’s like a psychedelic state of consciousness. It turns into a shamanic healing ritual, where all emotions come to the surface to be held and felt. All parts of us get to be held and felt and healed and loved. That medicine of pleasure is just so deeply healing for me.”

“We go super slow, and then we enter into the unknown, and some processes come up. That’s completely mind-blowing — when she starts crying.”

What men need in order to open

One thing came up that I don’t hear discussed anywhere else, and I think it’s super useful for women to hear.

Men want to be desired — visibly, unmistakably.

“There’s a strong physical attraction and mutual desire — that the woman truly desires me, and I desire her. And then there is no mind. There is no thought about how am I going to perform. I’m just being in it, and things just flow, because she desires me. I don’t need to worry. It’s like feeling I’m back in the womb. I just feel that love, however I am. I can just relax into it. That’s really beautiful for me.”

What do men say makes sex lousy?

Almost none of it was about her body. Nearly all of it was about absence. His, hers, or the connection’s.

The mind arriving to supervise:

“My mind just keeps coming in. Am I performing? How long am I going to last? That really kills.”

Going mechanical:

“When I disconnect myself from me. I start becoming mechanical, just making a movement. But then I come back to my body, and it’s good again.”

Being directed:

“Bad sex is when she’s controlling me and telling me exactly how it needs to be. Not like this, not like this, yes like this. And there’s no relaxation into the flow.”

Being pressured:

“Bad sex is when my lover pressures me and says: you haven’t fucked me enough, and you’ve got to fuck me more, and you’ve got to fuck me now.“

The absence of trust:

“Lousy sex would be the absence of trust. If I can feel that the trust is not there — definitely, it’s a no. Surrender is absolutely the essence.”

Alcohol:

“Even if there’s a connection, the alcohol overcomes it. It helps us get there, and then it fizzles. And even that connection, if it was strong — it fizzles.”

Sensation without soul:

“Bad sex is whenever it slips out of that experience of deep connection and listening to the other, and it turns into sensation play — where there’s just something happening that creates a pleasurable sensation in the body, and there’s not really any deep heart or soul or yearning or dance happening.”

And the one that silenced the room:

“Bad sex is being inside someone and knowing: I shouldn’t be here. This is not what I need to do.“

What men actually want in bed

The group of men shared this conversation with the women at the retreat. Three things I took away from that circle.

One: presence is the whole variable. Every man’s account of great sex was an account of being fully here. Every account of lousy sex was an account of someone having left — usually him, usually into his own head. Not one man said the problem was that he wasn’t attracted enough.

Two: what ruins sex for men is thinking. Thinking about the next step or thinking about his performance. Which means most of what would improve men’s sex lives isn’t sexual instruction at all. It’s whatever lets a man stop watching himself.

Three: men want to be wanted. Obviously, achingly, and far more than they say. One man described being desired as feeling like being back in the womb. That is not a small thing to admit in a room full of other men.

The takeaway, for both men and women

First — and this is for the men — women don’t have sex the way you do.

If a women wanted to cut the amount of foreplay and move immediately to his genitals, most men wouldn’t mind. That could work for a man. That hot, heavy, fast, sweaty sex that we see on the screens is how we have all learned to have sex. But that’s not the way women have sex naturally.

Most sex is too rushed for her. Not slightly. Substantially.

So slow it down. Then slower. Then slower still. At first you may feel uncomfortable. And that’s ok. That discomfort is a lifetime of conditioning that you are unlearning.

Yes, there is a time and a place for hot and heavy and hard. There absolutely is. Just not all the time.

Second — and this is for the women — he is receiving too.

He needs to feel wanted. He needs his energy to be taken, not deflected. He needs to not be managed and corrected mid-flow. And when he is in his head, performing, measuring himself, it is almost never because he doesn’t want you. It’s because he has been taught that sex is something he does to you well or badly, and he is grading himself in real time.

The fastest way out of that for him is the same as the fastest way in for you: slow down, stay here, want him out loud.

Twenty women were asked the same two questions. I’ll write about what the women said tomorrow.

FAQ

What do men say makes sex great? In this group of twenty trained men: presence, slowness, mutual and visible desire, trust, and the absence of a goal. Physical specifics were almost never mentioned.

What makes sex bad for men? Performance anxiety, dissociating or going mechanical, a partner who can’t receive his energy, being micro-directed, being pressured, alcohol, and the absence of trust.

Do men care about emotional connection during sex? Overwhelmingly yes in this sample. Multiple men described sensation without emotional connection as the definition of bad sex, and used words like divine, temple, portal and healing to describe good sex.

Do men want to orgasm quickly? Several described the pull toward orgasm as the main obstacle to great sex — a destination running subtly in the background for both people that pulls them out of the present moment.

I once told a lover that it felt like he was fucking a hole in the wall.

He was so disconnected from my body, and perhaps more disconnected from his own body, that after having sex with him I often felt cheap. Sad even. It was confusing because I was experiencing orgasm. So in my mind that meant the sex should have been “good”.

But climax does not equal great sex. And a great lover does not strive for climax.

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Honestly, I’ve been on both ends of this. I have been the one checked out, not fully engaged, going through the motions. And my lover could feel that as well.

IN SEX AS IN LIFE…

Sometimes we don’t even understand that we are performing. It started so young, as a way to survive, that we can’t see it when it’s happening.

This is the gift the bedroom gives you.

Let me explain.

The bedroom is one of the only rooms you walk into having been told the armor is supposed to come off. So when it stays on, it can be painfully obvious. Perhaps not to your lover, but eventually to you.

To uncover where you may be performing, ask yourself the following:

1. Am I an active participant? or watching life/sex happen to me?

   In sex it’s tracking how you look or performing desirability instead of truly feeling desire.

   In life it’s the meeting where you’re more aware of how you’re coming across than what’s being said. The dinner where you are more concerned about how you look for the social media photo than you are about experiencing joy with your friends.

   You are rarely fully inside your own experience, because part of you is acting as an outside witness.

2. Am I rushing to the finish line? or enjoying the ride?

   In sex it looks like racing to achieve the orgasm.

   In life it’s a relentless focus on the numbers and what they “should” be (name your number; quarterly results, calories, hours of sleep)

3. Am I managing the other person’s experience instead of having my own?

   In sex it’s making sure they’re having a good time as the whole point: their satisfaction as proof of your skill.

   In life it’s the host who never sits down to actually visit, or the friend who hides behind their generous and helpful nature but whom always feels a bit out of reach.

4. Am I able to receive fully?

   In sex it’s the inability to relax and receive pleasure without feeling like you have to give anything back.

   In life you deflect the compliment, wave off the offer, carry it yourself.

   This is a big one for high achievers who have survived by being capable, and something easily exposed in the bedroom.

5. Am I already thinking about the next move while still in this one?

   In sex never landing in this moment, right here, because you’re managing what comes next?

   In life it’s the conversation you can’t actually hear because you’re already thinking of your response.

MOVING FROM PERFORMING PLEASURE TO EXPERIENCING PLEASURE MEANS CREATING SAFETY IN YOUR BODY

Once you become aware of ways you are performing (in sex. in life.) How do you change?

First, ask yourself “Do I feel safe connecting to my own body?

There’s a direct connection between how you relate to your body sexually, and how available you are to love and intimacy. People who are afraid of really tapping into their bodies and self pleasure, often struggle deeply connecting with others.

Try this exercise and see how you feel:

Start in the morning when you wake up or right before you go to bed. Using an intentional, gentle, loving touch run your hands slowly down your body. Start with your head, move to your neck, shoulders, stroke the skin on your arms…all the way down to your toes.

For many people even reading this feels uncomfortable. Try it. If you can’t be with yourself in this way don’t worry. This just means we need to start in a different way and work more slowly toward deeper intimacy with your own body.

If the first exercise made you feel anxious or unsafe try this instead:

During the day, pay attention to the sensations in your body. Not the feelings. The sensations. Take a minute right now. Start with your feet and scan your body. Name any sensations you feel (if you can do it aloud this is a great way to keep the brain-body connection).

That’s the first step. The second is being brave enough to ask for what you need.

The simplest way I know to practice this: set a 20-minute timer, take penetration off the table, and one of you gives while the other receives. The receiver’s only job is to ask for what they want — kiss my thighs, hold me, rub my feet. The giver’s only job is to listen and follow. And if the giver can’t meet a request, they say so, plainly, and offer another way.

I broke the full practice down step by step in How to Talk About Sex in a Way That Actually Leads to (Better) Sex.

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WHY THIS MATTERS

Can you think of a moment you were absolutely and completely thrilled witnessing an unguarded moment in another person?

I can.

The loud, unabashed laughter of the eight-year-old in seat 12B. Headphones on, head tipped back, laughing so hard for so long at Monsters, Inc. that he unknowingly had the whole plane chuckling along.

The employee, always reserved, who looked me in the eye and very quietly shared the real reason he was struggling at work had everything to do with the death of his beloved friend.

and yes, watching with joy as my lover experiences long, rolling, full body orgasms for the first time.

So be brave. Be real. Because it is these moments of deep authenticity that draw us in and remind us of the very best parts of the human experience.

A low and gruff…”Aww, I’m too old. I gave up on that a long time ago.”

Cue the quick change of topic. “Looks like it’s going to rain”

I sit there every single time this happens in social situations. Trying to keep my heart from taking the action it craves. It craves taking him by the shoulders. Looking him straight in the eye. And with the fiercest of love telling him.

“You still have it in you. You are not too old.”

I know he won’t believe me. He’s been through medical trauma, or divorce, or war. His heart has been broken one too many times in so many different ways. He’s tired. His body is tired.

If it was appropriate, I would speak of the man who showed up at a tantra retreat, struggling to have an erection and embarrassed about it. Only to find the initial practices awaken his body. And then he was embarrassed because he couldn’t get rid of his erection.

I would speak of the 70 year old man who, despite his aging body is experiencing full body orgasms - without penetration and on a regular basis.

I would speak of the statistics showing vast numbers of people in their 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s with strong sex lives.

Of course I don’t say it because the flicker of sadness in his eyes told me not to. It’s too tender to talk about.

If you are on that precipice of believing your days of pleasure through sex are behind you, let’s talk. Are you ready?

Because you are not sitting directly in front of me with your tender heart exposed I am not going to mince words:

First, I’m sorry I didn’t catch you when you were younger to tell you this, but, what you were taught about having sex is most likely not serving you well now.

Your sexual playbook most likely has looked the same way since you first had sex: You kiss, you touch, you use friction to create more arousal, you have intercourse, you have a short big release. And you are done. I’m sure there is some kind of variation in there. Of course there is. But if you are really honest, you most likely have been using the same moves for a long while.

I recently heard an incredible analogy by the famous sexologist Jaiya (if you have not taken her erotic blueprint quiz I highly recommend). She said;

“It’s like we had a master symphony and instead of playing this beautiful symphony with all of the instruments we are hitting one note over and over and over again. And we are not hitting that note with awareness. And we are hitting it hard. And we are hitting it loud. And we are just banging this one note over and over and over again.”

Do you want to experience the symphony? Let’s give you some more notes:

1. Soft lingam practices.

Lingam means penis.

You do not need to be hard to make love. Let me say that again. You do not need to be hard to make love.

Truly understanding and embracing this can be a game-changer.

Did you know that a soft lingam can be exquisitely sensitive? The nerve endings light up differently. The energy moves differently. The pleasure is different. For many men, the pleasure can be more profound than anything they’ve felt with an erection.

You have to stop deciding that soft means failure. She has to stop wondering if she’s doing something wrong. The vulnerability of being soft, and being received soft, is where the medicine lives.

Play with it:

Let your partner take you into their mouth. Press you gently against the roof of their mouth. Hold you there. What does that feel like?

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Allow her to take you into her body while semi-hard. Can you imagine the ecstasy of that soft warmth growing inside of her?

I promise that if you can let go of what you think about being fully erect doors will open for you in the most beautiful way.

2. Build your energy stores.

Your sexual energy is not running out. It’s stored differently than it used to be.

There are practices that build your reserves instead of draining them. That circulate energy through your whole body instead of dumping it out the front door every single time.

When you start cultivating instead of depleting, you will feel more alive. I’m not just talking about your lingam here, you entire body will experience greater vitality.

This practice is one that I love teaching my male clients.

3. Slow. Slower. Slower still.

Your body is not broken. It’s just different. It has changed and it’s asking you slow down and it’s asking for you to draw your self into presence.

Slow down.

Then slow down more.

When you think you’ve slowed down enough, slow down even more.

Most sex happens too fast to feel. Stop chasing arousal (you are too old to chase!) instead slow down and feel the pleasure in this stroke, this touch, this sigh. You’re trying to get somewhere instead of being here.

Take one stroke. Feel it. The skin against skin. The temperature. The micro-shifts in pressure. The way the breath catches or doesn’t.

4. Sex does not equal penetration.

Penetration is one note in the symphony. Remember?

There are so many others.

Give each other a massage with no agenda. Hands. Feet. (The feet! I could do an entire article just on the feet). The space between the shoulder blades.

Lie naked together and breathe in sync. Skin to skin. No goal.

Look at each other. I mean really look. Eyes locked, breathing together, until something cracks open between you.

These are not consolation prizes for when penetration isn’t on the table. This is sex. Real, full, embodied sex. The kind your younger self never had time for.

5. Quality over frequency.

The good news is, your timing may be perfect, because the changes to your body (the lack of erection, the need for more time) contain just the ingredients to access a deeper kind of sexual intimacy.

You don’t need to have sex three times a week.

You need one encounter your body remembers for a month.

One night where you actually saw each other. Where time slowed. Where you came back to yourself and to them.

That’s worth more than a hundred quick releases.

The body changes and sex changes. That part is true.

But the changes are not losses. I believe your aging body is giving you the incredible opportunity to have the best sex of your life

The opportunity to slow down. To feel more. To stop performing and start being present. To discover the kind of orgasm that moves through your whole body .

Sex doesn’t have to decline with age. It can deepen.

If you want help learning how to reconnect to your aging body in a new way, contact me. In sessions my clients are fully clothed and experience the utmost safety. I hold deep reverence for your unique body and for your confidentiality.

If you are someone who can’t sit still. Who can’t stand to be alone in a quiet room. Who reaches for the phone before your eyes are fully open in the morning. If you are someone who keeps reaching to social media or to porn even when you don’t want to.

I made this playlist for you.

I made it for all of us, really.

In our striving to create perfectly sticky and addictive “things to consume” I fear we have succeeded. And now most us are stuck in some form of dopamine addiction.

And because of that we don’t know how to sit and be present.

And telling someone in dopamine addiction to "just be present" doesn't work. Here’s why:

Dopamine is the chemistry of wanting and forward-orientation. It pulls attention toward the next thing.

With porn, for instance, many of my clients notice that they love the “chase” for the perfect type of video. They also note that their need for different stimulation escalates. Meaning they need more extreme, taboo, or specific material to reach the same level of arousal.

It’s because big dopamine spikes (created by social media and porn) are depleting your baseline below where you started, causing you to need MORE to feel normal.

So what’s the answer? Be Present.

Isn’t this frustrating?!

If the antidote to dopamine addiction is presence and telling an addict “just be present” doesn’t work, what’s the answer?

You literally cannot have attention pointed at “the next thing” and attention pointed at “this moment” at the same time. They’re opposite orientations.

The answer is that this is going to take a conscious effort on your part to slowly retrain your brain.

Consistently practicing presence lets your baseline recover, so you stop needing the next hit just to feel okay. So you can stop the roller coaster of escalating stimulation you are on.

And that’s why I created a playlist for you. It’s for you to retrain your brain.

Your brain has different wave states: Beta, Alpha and Theta .

When you are scrolling, seeking, scanning for the next hit your brain is running hot in beta. Beta is the brain wave of active, outward-focused engagement. In its higher ranges, it’s where anxiety and compulsive seeking live.

Alpha and theta are the opposite. Alpha is the brain wave of relaxed, present awareness. Theta goes deeper, into meditation, into the edge of dreams.

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A dopamine addicted brain has lost easy access to these Alpha and Theta states.

The simple act of dropping into THIS moment. this breath. this body. this song. interrupts the forward pull. And when you stop spiking, your baseline can finally recover. Eventually, you stop needing the next hit just to feel okay.

So I made you a playlist designed to drop you into the alpha and theta brain states. Consider it a training program designed to give your brain a guided path back to being HERE.

Each song is backed by science (ish) — some peer-reviewed, some less so.

Here’s the playlist:

Because your ability to be present with yourself is the first step to great sex. Great sex with yourself and with another human.

The more present you are in your own body, the more you can feel the body across from you. That type of attunement isn’t just about being a better lover. Your capacity to be with yourself mirrors your capacity to sit across from a colleague, a friend, your kids and to truly connect with them even in the most difficult moments.

Let me say that again.

Your capacity to be with yourself mirrors your capacity to be with anyone else.

A few things, if you want to try the playlist:

Use headphones. Binaural beats need both frequencies to reach your brain so without headphones, you lose the 3D effect.

Be consistent. Even a single session produces measurable increases in alpha activity and reductions in anxiety. Repeated listening compounds the effect. One session is lovely. A practice is what changes you.

Set the environment. Eyes closed. Comfortable position. Phone in a place you can’t access it easily. Let your thoughts float like clouds.

Start with one song.

There is nothing to do but sit and listen.

If you are interested in the science behind the songs:

• Weightless — Marconi Union. Composed with the British Academy of Sound Therapy around a 60-to-50 BPM heart rate entrainment glide, this track reduced anxiety by 65% in a 2011 Mindlab study and matched the sedative midazolam in a 2019 University of Pennsylvania randomized clinical trial.

• Watermark — Enya. Ranked among the top ten most relaxing songs in the Mindlab study, with the slow tempo and harmonic warmth shown to support the alpha brain state that signals the body’s relaxation response.

• Clair de Lune — Debussy. Slow classical piano has decades of peer-reviewed evidence for activating the parasympathetic nervous system, lowering cortisol, and inducing the present-moment attention that opens the door to deeper states.

• Mellomaniac (Chill Out Mix) — DJ Shah. Another Mindlab top-ten track, with sustained chill-out structure shown to consolidate alpha brain states, slow respiration, and ease the transition from thinking to feeling.

• Dream 3 (In the Midst of My Life) — Max Richter. From the album Sleep, composed in consultation with Stanford neuroscientist David Eagleman around documented principles of slow-wave brain rhythms — engineered to carry you from alpha into theta.

• Deep Theta 4Hz, Pt. 1. Binaural beats at 4 Hz fall within the theta range, which research (Jirakittayakorn & Wongsawat, 2017) has shown can induce a theta brain state within 10 minutes — the same frequency band associated with deep meditation and the edge of dreamless sleep. (Headphones required.)

• Drifting into Delta — SonicAid. Delta-range entrainment targets the brain’s deepest frequency band (0.5–4 Hz) — the territory of dreamless sleep and full bodily restoration — continuing the descent from theta into the slowest, most restorative state. (Headphones required.)

  ---

  If you recognized yourself in any of this and want support, please reach out. The first session is on me.

This time, they listed me on their website as a Health and Wellness Coach.

That’s not my title.

My title is Sex, Love & Relationship Coach.

I emailed and asked them to correct it. Here’s what they wrote back:

“I do not think it would be appropriate for a technology leadership event to list you as a sex, love & relationship coach. …don’t you agree?”

I did not agree. I am highly trained, highly specialized, and highly trauma-informed in Sex, Love & Relationships. Not health and wellness.

They cancelled the round table. We wished each other well.

Then I sat down to write them a letter.

I started with what it is I actually do as a sex coach:

My work is teaching people, mostly men, how to access their erotic energy in ways that make them feel alive. Rather than in ways that cause them to extract from others.

In my client sessions, we practice the radical act of paying attention to what is arising in your body. We meet it bravely and gently. What that looks like is confronting

• Your need for validation.

• Your need for power over others.

• Your shame of not feeling desired. Of not being enough.

• Your inability to tolerate rejection.

• Your sense that wanting something means having a right to it.

Most men who see me carry one or more of these in their bodies and have never once named it out loud. This is the work no HR training will ever touch. It’s the work that actually gets at the root of why you are scared of the word Sex in my title.

Last week, a CNN investigation exposed an online network of men teaching each other how to drug their wives and rape them in their sleep. Two US congressmen resigned over sexual assault allegations from their own staff, a third is under investigation for violence against a girlfriend, and a former lieutenant governor once accused of sexual assault murdered his wife before killing himself.

One week. This is after Weinstein. after Epstein. after Pelicot. After every reckoning that was supposed to change something.

I hear you. Not you. Not your members. Not all men.

Let me break this down for you:

Your organization has roughly 5,000 members. Around 4,000 are men. If you use the most conservative harassment data we have, somewhere between 400 and 600 of them will be formally accused of sexual harassment over the course of their careers. If you use the honest data — the data that accounts for the 90% of incidents that never get reported — the number is closer to 2,000.

Half of your membership. Half. Will statistically be accused of sexual harassment even if it’s not reported.

and you’re telling me that the word sex in my title is inappropriate.

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Let me tell you what’s inappropriate.

It’s inappropriate that the tech industry pays out millions in harassment settlements every year, and you can’t print a three-letter word on your conference program.”

It’s inappropriate to sand the edges off my title in a room of men running the industry with the ugliest harassment record in modern business.

It’s inappropriate that we have built a culture where the word sex is more offensive than the behavior we refuse to confront.

…then, after typing that last sentence, I stopped writing.

I realized I was arguing a point the organizer had already made.

I had to ask myself.

If the word in my title is too uncomfortable to digest, how am I going to make the impact I actually want to make?

Does the word Sex need to be in my title?

What do I lose if I keep Sex in my title?

My work is about erotic energy.

The aliveness that pulses through a body. Awake. Connected.

Most of the men I work with have not felt that ever.

They built careers. They don’t know how to build a relationship with their own bodies.

The tech industry does not need another harassment training. Another code of conduct. Another NDA. Another HR department quietly cutting checks while the same men get promoted.

It needs its leaders to come home to their bodies.

So here’s where I’m actually sitting in this moment.

If I am the person who can help our leaders come home to their bodies.

If I can help them face the demons inside them causing harm, do I soften my title to get in the room?

Or do I stand my ground and reclaim the word that’s been tarnished?

The work is bigger than what I call myself. I’ll call myself whatever gets me in the room — if that’s what this takes.

So tell me.

Do I stay a Sex, Love & Relationship Coach?

Or do I call myself something else?

I honestly don’t know what the right answer is.

I’m sharing now because what I learned about how to manage my nervous system feels like something we should be teaching all kids in grade school. Because it’s the skill that would have made me a more emotionally aware and empathetic CEO, parent, and spouse.

What a Darkness Retreat Actually Is

A darkness retreat is exactly what it sounds like — and nothing like what you imagine.

You enter a space of total darkness. No light. No phone. No books. No clock.

You are alone. You eat. You sleep. You sit. Alone. Just you. With yourself.

I went to Skycave Retreats in southern Oregon — an underground bunker built into the earth, designed specifically for this kind of immersive sensory withdrawal. The cave doesn’t let in a single photon of light. After the first few hours, the sensation of your eyelids touching the lining of your eye becomes the only evidence that your eyes are in fact closed.

This practice is ancient. Cultures across history have used darkness, silence, and solitude as portals; vision quests, monastic retreats, cave meditations. What they all know, and what I quickly understood, is that in the sensory experience of being a human we are always responding to something. Something we see. Or hear.

For me there was a moment of panic when I realized that in the dark, I had nothing to respond to, nothing to mirror myself or my own experience off of.

This was the very first time I had ever experienced myself. Just me.

It was terrifying.

Bootcamp: Understanding My Animal Body

The trick to being in the darkness is to understand your own somatic response when your body is stressed. SkyCave does an impeccable job prior to your entry into the dark of helping you understand common responses and what they feel like:

• Flight: Your body floods with urgent, restless energy. You may experience an overwhelming impulse to escape the darkness by moving, leaving altogether, or disappearing.

• Fight: Your system charges with heat and force. Perhaps your jaw is tight, thoughts looping, looking for something to push against.

• Freeze: You are bored. Tuned out. Perhaps you feel flat, numb, and disconnected from the room.

Here’s the game. You constantly check in with your body. What sensations are you feeling? And with each sensation you take time to completely feel it. You allow it. You don’t distract yourself or push it down. You meet it head on.

It’s hard work. But the better you are at doing this, the more softly you will sink into your own self. And the more you can sink in, the deeper you will go and the more magic you will experience.

Day 3: Fighting On Loop

On day three (I think. At this point, I have no idea what time is and I’m also obsessing over it) I find myself fighting in my head with my husband and his former wife. Looping conversations in my head. Talking to them out loud. It’s exhausting. Why am I so angry? I thought I had processed all of this stuff? It takes some hours of anguish until it dawns on me — could this be my nervous system response to being in the dark? Am I actually that angry? or is this my nervous system protecting me?

So I take a deep breath and I move out of my head into the sensations in my body. Not without effort, mind you. But I do it. I get really still. I silence my very loud thoughts. I can feel my heart beating.

A scene arrives. It’s a holiday. I am in the kitchen with my husband and his ex. They are both active, talking, being big. I watch as I shrink back and get really small. I feel that familiar response that I have had since I was a little girl when others around me get big.

I sit with that feeling. Perhaps for the first time in my life.

…and then I see it clearly. I see how their busyness, their incessant chatter, their bigness is their own nervous response to a stressful situation. Just as my response is to freeze and to get small. And in that space, something shifts. I feel a deep compassion for all of us.

I take a deep breath. I relax even further into my body.

My awareness centers on a place in the center of my being. It feels tender. I become aware of a subtle flicker of movement in my heart — a small flame. So tender that if I move it will disappear from me. So gentle. Yet, so strong. I sense that it will take a lot for this flame to extinguish.

I know immediately, with an internal knowing, that this is my core Self. Before personality. Before any reflection of the world has me responding to it. Before the adaptations and the armor and the learned behaviors that accumulate over a life.

This is the part of me that existed before all of that.

And a moment of deep clarity: this is what I can turn to when the external world is chaotic. This quiet flame. This wise and discerning observer that lives beneath everything else.

I hear — not as a voice, more as a knowing — Watch. Watch. Watch. Let others play out what they need to play out. Observe. Witness. You do not have to respond to everything. You do not have to be moved by everything. There is something in you that is not moved; and that unmoved thing is the most reliable part of you.

I have carried that flame with me ever since.

As a felt sense that permeates most days of my life with calm clarity and unconditional presence. The darkness gave me access to something that was always there, that I had simply buried under layers of protection.

Day 4: Erotic as Transcendence

I am lying on my back in bed. Bored. There isn’t a thought in my head.

I can feel sexual energy gathering in my pelvic floor. Low, thrumming, insistent.

I consider entertaining myself for a hot minute and releasing it the “old fashioned way.”

My very second thought? I don’t have time for this.

I laugh out loud. Wow. Talk about a habitual response: dismiss it, move on, don’t go there.

I mean, what else do I have to do? I am literally underground in a cave with nothing to do and nowhere to be.

Instead I slide off of the bed — the way a large dog would (if you know you know) — and sit on the floor.

Criss cross applesauce.

I lay my hands on my knees and sink into the sensation in my pelvis. I let the energy build. Placing a gentle awareness on it. Not willing it to do anything.

That warm thrumming grew.

Into a larger, full, presence. Powerful. Alive.

My hips felt tight all of a sudden; like they were doing their job of holding it all together and keeping me safe. I gently shifted my awareness to the holding in my hips.

In an instant the energy rocketed up the center of my body. I felt it rip through my heart. My head was thrown back involuntarily. There is a reason yogis tell you to keep your head straight during this kind of work — I learned the hard way. The energy with no other place to go escaped through my throat, and I made a sound from somewhere so deep inside me that I will never be able to recreate it. I “saw” a bright white flash of light. And then…

Bliss.

Awe.

There are no words to describe the ineffable. A moment of ecstasy that moved outside of the boundaries of my body entirely. Unity.

The moment was probably seconds long, but it still feels “outside” of time. All the time and no time at all.

I sat on that floor for a long time afterward.

What Has Stayed With Me After 18 Months

What I learned in the darkness I have turned to almost every day since.

I have tuned into that small flickering presence inside me. Even if it’s not as potent as it was in that moment. I know it is there and it is me. My very essence.

What I practice — and what I teach — begins here. With the radical act of paying attention to what is arising in you rather than managing it. Just feeling it fully and noticing it. Of relaxing the animal body rather than bracing against it. Of trusting that the energy that moves through you, when you stop fighting it, knows something your analytical mind does not.

This is the work. Unburdening ourselves and softening into our bodies to uncover what we have spent our entire lives covering up. And this is the magic that connects us to and makes us human.

I’m going back into the cave next month. I’ll be writing from the other side eventually.

If this resonates, and if you’re curious about working together, reach out.

I turn my focus inward, descending into the depths of my being. Her words gradually become a distant hum, a backdrop to the rich nothingness I encounter within.

In this state of hazy bliss, I sense a presence.

In my mind’s eye, my Grandmothers appear on either side of me—Ruby Gwendolyn Perry Peterson to my left, and Shirley Thompson Roberts to my right. Their ethereal forms starkly contrast the heaviness I carry within my own body.

I get the sense that these two women, who I think only met a few times in human form, are now intimate friends. It’s as if they have emerged from an afternoon of sharing and laughter, their playful sparkle still lingering in the air. There is an undercurrent of momentary seriousness as they turn their attention to me and focus on the task at hand.

They are each holding the opposite ends of a large, luminous cloak. As they drape it over my shoulders, I hear a voice:

“This is a cloak of joy. It shielded us in our darkest times. Your joy is what will protect you. Use it well.”

I nod slowly, accepting the gift, silent tears trailing down my cheeks. I am struck with a profound realization—my Grandmothers have gifted me the very fabric of joy, but at thirty-six years old, I don’t know how to wear it.

This visitation marks the first of many encounters with the matriarchs of my family. Over the next decade, they visit me regularly. Sometimes when I’m immersed in deep meditation, and other times I can feel their presence at my desk at work or folding laundry as I go about my day.

They stand by my side, patient, as I shed layer upon layer of familial pain and suffering buried deep within my physical and mental being.

It is my Grandmothers who witnessed my journey of reconciliation with myself most intimately. They alone understand the profound truth I am confronting. They know the darkest secret haunting the women of our family (of every family) isn’t simply the mistreatment by men, but a more profound internal struggle—one that runs like a thread through Western civilization itself.

It is my Grandmothers who believe that if I have the courage to confront what lies within me, within all of us, I can do more than merely wear the cloak of joy. I can weave joy into the very fabric of my being.

Sixteen years later, I think that the cloak that they bequeathed me finally fits. Learning to wear it required me to unlearn everything I thought I knew about success, about power, about my own body.

But here I am.

In Joy,

Tracy Allyn

“My wife says our intimacy is growing and she really enjoys our time together more than before (we have sex about once a week). I am like — so why don’t you want more of those moments? Why aren’t we having more sex? I have expressed my desire over and over. I have changed my health and stopped porn addiction, making her the only object of my desire. All the things I have done have led to better quality sex but not quantity. Maybe I am just being too needy in this department, but I am a sexual being and I need fulfillment.”

My response:

First: you are not needy.

But I want you to feel into something with me.

There’s a difference between desire that comes from fullness and desire that comes from emptiness.

Desire from emptiness feels like hunger. Like grasping. Like you need something from her to fill a hole inside you. It has urgency. An edge of desperation, even when you try to hide it.

Desire from fullness feels like overflow. Like you’re so lit up, so alive, so connected to your own life force that you naturally want to move toward her. It’s generous. It’s playful. It doesn’t need anything back to feel okay.

She can feel the difference. Her body knows.

When desire comes toward her from fullness, it feels like an invitation. Like warmth. Like something she wants to pull toward her. When it comes from emptiness, it feels like demand. Like pressure. Like something is being taken, even if you’re asking nicely.

You cannot communicate your way out of this. The energy you are projecting is sending the clear message.

You said you’ve made her the only object of your desire. I want to sit with that for a moment. Because what you may have done — with the best of intentions — is transfer the full weight of your erotic life onto her. What was once distributed across many outlets now lives entirely with one person.

That’s a lot to carry. Esther Perel is famous for saying “Desire needs space.” It arises in the gap between two separate people. Right now, there’s no gap. You leaning in constantly, expressing, tracking, monitoring collapses the very space her desire would need to arise.

I invite you to ask yourself:

“What am I actually hungry for?”

Sometimes high desire is just high desire, and you may be experiencing a difference in how desire arrives in your bodies. And sometimes it’s a younger part of us trying to get something that sex represents. Like many of my clients, you might be turning to sex when you really want to feel:

• Like you are enough

• That you are still chosen

• That your body is desirable

• That you matter to her, not just as a provider or a father

• That the relationship is okay. Sex as a barometer. If she wants you, everything is fine. If she doesn’t something must be wrong with you or with the relationship

• Safety. Sex. is the closest thing some men have ever felt to being held.

• Alive. The one place your body gets to be fully awake.

• Validation of your masculinity. That you are man enough. Powerful enough. Good enough in bed.

• Vulnerable. Is this the only time you can be vulnerable and not have to explain it?

Do you see what I mean here?

It may not actually be about sex at all. You may be unconsciously trying to get her to fulfill and heal this part of you that is missing. Even if she had sex with you every day, this part would still be hungry. Because it’s not hungry for sex. It’s hungry for something that you needed long before you met her.

So here’s what I’d offer.

First, stop monitoring. Completely. No more tracking. No more counting. No more waiting for her to come toward you as proof of your worth. Let go of the surveillance. It keeps your system in hyper vigilance and she can feel it. (I cut this part of the question for this article for sake of length but wanted to address it all the same for his sake).

Second, getting to the root of your hunger can be tricky. Your mind will want to answer the question logically. To justify. To dismiss. And even if you do have the awareness to understand where the hunger stems from what do you do with that information?

This is where a good sex coach can help you to move slowly through this territory without letting your mind run the whole show.

Because the work is at the body-level.

Once we find what it is you are really seeking through sex, we can help you learn to source that in yourself. Rather than reach for her. or porn. or any other external source.

When you’re sourced in your own energy the whole dynamic shifts. You become magnetic instead of grasping. She moves toward you in ways that will surprise you. Sex will feel more intimate and more fulfilling.

I’m here if you need me.

With Fierce Love,

Tracy

Do you have a question you’ve never dared to ask out loud?

Submit it anonymously. I’m a certified Sex, Love & Relationship Coach. And nothing you send will surprise me.

And he was telling me that the very skills that built his success are the same ones that cause him to struggle in his intimate life.

Same. Same, my friend. Me too.

Think about what made you successful in business.

Driving. Pushing through resistance. Persistence. Making it happen regardless. Convincing others to see it your way. Orienting everything. every. thing. toward a goal.

Now think about what makes someone extraordinary in bed.

Waiting for the opening. Heeding the invitation. Patience. One touch, then feeling for the response. One stroke, then feeling into the next move. Being fully present in the moment with no goal at all.

Read those two lists again.

They are almost perfect opposites.

I spent decades developing one side of myself; the side that knows, produces, drives. And I left the other side; the side that feels, attunes, connects less developed.

For most of us who built our careers in business, this is the case.

We are lopsided humans. Why?

Because to be successful, the system we work in demands only one side of us.

Also. Because of a chemical called dopamine.

Dopamine is the molecule of wanting. It fuels ambition, drive, anticipation of reward. It's what made you successful. But the brain cannot produce the here-and-now chemicals, the ones that create sensing, intimacy, calm, while dopamine is running the show.

The result of our dopamine addiction and the habits we’ve cultivated is sex that draws on external sources (Porn, toys, other people, fantasy).

It also creates a need for us to “push” toward the big finish. The climax. Do you know how many women sit in my office because sex isn’t enjoyable, only to realize that they are the ones who have been rushing their own bodies during sex? It’s ingrained in all of us to the point that we don’t even know we’re doing it to ourselves.

Rather than feel what’s actually happening, we find ourselves driving toward what we think should happen next.

I see this all the time:

One person wants sex so they push, cajole, “make the move” in an attempt to try and make it happen. To the point that one day they are in the kitchen and he comes up behind her and touches her arm and she recoils.

That’s a hard place to be because nobody is wrong but inevitably he feels confused and she feels rigid and they both are frustrated.

I’ve been there. And here is the first step I took to cultivate that other side of myself. The one that has a depth and a softness, the one that feels, waits, and attunes.

It’s simple (but not easy at first). It’s not sexy (but it works):

Bring some awareness to the fact that you’ve spent decades building one side of yourself. The side that drives, pushes, wins.

Sit down. Place both feet on the floor. Close your eyes.

Take a deep breath deep into your belly. Below your navel. Feel your belly push out against your hand. Exhale deeply.

Bring your breath back to normal. And then. Just sit. First for sixty seconds. Then perhaps for three minutes. And then five. There’s no rush. No goal. Other than building the capacity to be with yourself.

And your capacity to sit with yourself mirrors — almost exactly — your capacity to be with another person in the most intimate moments of your life.

At home, at work, and in every room you walk into after that.

Today, please take a moment to read what Audre Lorde wrote in her 1978 paper “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.” I have included the essay in full below.

It’s urgently relevant. Because Audre Lorde drew a crucial distinction between the erotic and the pornographic. The pornographic, she wrote, “is a direct denial of the power of the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true feeling. Pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling.”

What the Epstein files reveal is pornographic power. Power that uses, exploits, and discards. Power that treats human beings as objects of satisfaction rather than subjects with their own desires, boundaries, and dignity.

I plead for you to try to understand what Audre Lorde was telling us in 1978: the answer to this abuse is not to further suppress or distrust our own erotic depths.

This is precisely what keeps us powerless.

The erotic, for Lorde, was not merely sexual. It was “an assertion of the lifeforce”. It was the knowledge of what genuine satisfaction and connection feel like, which then becomes a standard against which we measure everything else.

“In touch with the erotic,” she wrote, “I become less willing to accept powerlessness, or those other supplied states of being which are not native to me, such as resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, self-denial.”

The men in those files operated from a pornographic framework. Sensation without feeling, use without consent, power over rather than power with.

They could do so partly because we live in a culture that has systematically separates us from our own erotic knowledge, leaving us unable to recognize or demand anything different.

Please. Do. Not. Look. Away. from that most innocent and most powerful part of what it means to be a human being. Do not allow the people in those files to make you believe that the erotic is the problem here.

Do not allow the distorted views of predators to define what the erotic means. Their abuse is not evidence that desire is dangerous—it is evidence of what happens when desire is severed from feeling, from connection, from respect.

Lorde’s invitation remains: “Recognizing the power of the erotic within our lives can give us the energy to pursue genuine change within our world, rather than merely settling for a shift of characters in the same weary drama.”

Audre Lorde: Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power

[Paper delivered at the Fourth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Mount Holyoke College, August 25, 1978. Published as a pamphlet by Out & Out Books (available from The Crossing Press).

THERE ARE MANY kinds of power, used and unused, acknowledged or otherwise. Theerotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling. In order to perpetuate itself, every oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for change. For women, this has meant a suppression of the erotic as a considered source of power and information within our lives.

We have been taught to suspect this resource, vilified, abused, and devalued within
western society. On the one hand, the superficially erotic has been encouraged as a sign of female inferiority; on the other hand, women have been made to suffer and to feel both contemptible and suspect by virtue of its existence.

It is a short step from there to the false belief that only by the suppression of the erotic
within our lives and consciousness can women be truly strong. But that strength is illusory, for it is fashioned within the context of male models of power.

As women, we have come to distrust that power which rises from our deepest and
nonrational knowledge. We have been warned against it all our lives by the male world, which values this depth of feeling enough to keep women around in order to exercise it in the service of men, but which fears this same depth too much to examine the possibilities of it within themselves.

So women are maintained at a distant/inferior position to be psychically milked, much the same way ants maintain colonies of aphids to provide a life-giving substance for their masters.

But the erotic offers a well of replenishing and provocative force to the woman who does not fear its revelation, nor succumb to the belief that sensation is enough.

The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women. It has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation. For this reason, we have often turned away from the exploration and consideration of the erotic as a source of power and information, confusing it with its opposite, the pornographic. But pornography is a direct denialof the power of the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true feeling. Pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling. The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honour and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves.

It is never easy to demand the most from ourselves, from our lives, from our work. To
encourage excellence is to go beyond the encouraged mediocrity of our society is to encourage excellence. But giving in to the fear of feeling and working to capacity is a luxury only the unintentional can afford, and the unintentional are those who do not wish to guide their own destinies.

This internal requirement toward excellence which we learn from the erotic must not be misconstrued as demanding the impossible from ourselves nor from others. Such a demand incapacitates everyone in the process. For the erotic is not a question only of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing. Once we know the extent to which we are capable of feeling that sense of satisfaction and completion, we can then observe which of our various life endeavours bring us closest to that fullness.

The aim of each thing which we do is to make our lives and the lives of our children richer and more possible. Within the celebration of the erotic in all our endeavours, my work becomes a conscious decision - a longed-for bed which I enter gratefully and from which I rise up empowered.

Of course, women so empowered are dangerous. So we are taught to separate the erotic demand from most vital areas of our lives other than sex. And the lack of concern for the erotic root and satisfactions of our work is felt in our disaffection from so much of what we do. For instance, how often do we truly love our work even at its most difficult?

The principal horror of any system which defines the good in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, or which defines human need to the exclusion of the psychic and emotional components of that need - the principal horror of such a system is that it robs our work of its erotic value, its erotic power and life appeal and fulfilment. Such a system reduces work to a travesty of necessities, a duty by which we earn bread or oblivion for ourselves and those we love.

But this is tantamount to blinding a painter and then telling her to improve her work, and to enjoy the act of painting. It is not only next to impossible, it is also profoundly cruel.

As women, we need to examine the ways in which our world can be truly different. I am speaking here of the necessity for reassessing the quality of all the aspects of our lives and of our work, and of how we move toward and through them.

The very word erotic comes from the Greek word eros, the personification of love in all its aspects - born of Chaos, and personifying creative power and harmony. When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.

There are frequent attempts to equate pornography and eroticism, two diametrically
opposed uses of the sexual. Because of these attempts, it has become fashionable to separate the spiritual (psychic and emotional) from the political, to see them as contradictory or antithetical.

"What do you mean, a poetic revolutionary, a meditating gunrunner?" In the same way, we have attempted to separate the spiritual and the erotic, thereby reducing the spiritual to a world of flattened affect, a world of the ascetic who aspires to feel nothing. But nothing is farther from the truth. For the ascetic position is one of the highest fear, the gravest immobility.

The severe abstinence of the ascetic becomes the ruling obsession. And it is one not of self-discipline but of self-abnegation. The dichotomy between the spiritual and the political is also false, resulting from an incomplete attention to our erotic knowledge.

For the bridge which connects them is formed by the erotic - the sensual - those physical, emotional, and psychic expressions of what is deepest and strongest and richest within each of us, being shared: the passions of love, in its deepest meanings.

Beyond the superficial, the considered phrase, "It feels right to me," acknowledges the
strength of the erotic into a true knowledge, for what that means is the first and most powerful guiding light toward any understanding. And understanding is a handmaiden which can only wait upon, or clarify, that knowledge, deeply born.

The erotic is the nurturer or nursemaid of all our deepest knowledge.
The erotic functions for me in several ways, and the first is in providing the power which comes from sharing deeply any pursuit with another person. The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.

Another important way in which the erotic connection functions is the open and fearless underlining of my capacity for joy. In the way my body stretches to music and opens into response, hearkening to its deepest rhythms, so every level upon which I sense also opens to the erotically satisfying experience, whether it is dancing, building a bookcase, writing a poem, examining ai idea.

That self-connection shared is a measure of the joy which know myself to be capable of feeling, a reminder of my capacity for feeling. And that deep and irreplaceable knowledge of our capacity for joy comes to demand from all of my life that it b lived within the knowledge that such satisfaction is possible and does not have to be called marriage, nor god, nor an afterlife.

This is one reason why the erotic is so feared, and so often relegated to the bedroom alone, when it is recognized at all. Fo once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of.

Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in
terms of their relative meaning within our lives. And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.

During World War II, we bought sealed plastic packets of white, uncolored margarine, with a tiny, intense pellet of yellow colouring perched like a topaz just inside the clear skin of the bag/ We would leave the margarine out for a while to soften, and then we would pinch the little pellet to break it inside the bag releasing the rich yellowness into the soft pale mass of margarine. Then taking it carefully between our fingers, we would knead it gently back and forth, over and over, until the colour had spread throughout the whole pound bag of margarine, thoroughly colouring
it.

I find the erotic such a kernel within myself. When released from its intense and constrained pellet, it flows through and colours my life with a kind of energy that heightens and sensitizes and strengthens all my experience.

We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings. But, once
recognized, those which do not enhance our future lose their power and can be altered. The fear of our desires keeps them suspect and indiscriminately powerful, for to suppress any truth is to give it strength beyond endurance.

The fear that we cannot grow beyond whatever distortions we may find within ourselves keeps us docile and loyal and obedient, externally defined, and
leads us to accept many facets of our oppression as women.

When we live outside ourselves, and by that I mean on external directives only rather than from our internal knowledge and needs, when we live away from those erotic guides from within ourselves, then our lives are limited by external and alien forms, and we conform to the needs of a structure that is not based on human need, let alone an individual's. But when we begin to live from within outward, in touch with the power of the erotic within ourselves, and allowing that power to inform and illuminate our actions upon the world around us, then we begin to be
responsible to ourselves in the deepest sense. For as we begin to recognize our deepest feelings, we begin to give up, of necessity, being satisfied with suffering and self-negation, and with the numbness which so often seems like their only alternative in our society. Our acts against oppression become integral with self, motivated and empowered from within.

In touch with the erotic, I become less willing to accept powerlessness, or those other
supplied states of being which are not native to me, such as resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, self-denial.

And yes, there is a hierarchy. There is a difference between painting a back fence and
writing a poem, but only one of quantity. And there is, for me, no difference between writing a good poem and moving into sunlight against the body of a woman I love.

This brings me to the last consideration of the erotic. To share the power of each other's feelings is different from using another's feelings as we would use a Kleenex.

When we look the other way from our experience, erotic or otherwise, we use rather than share the feelings of those others who participate in the experience with us. And use without consent of the used is abuse.

In order to be utilized, our erotic feelings must be recognized. The need for sharing deep feeling is a human need. But within the European-American tradition, this need is satisfied by certain proscribed erotic comings-together. These occasions are almost always characterized by a simultaneous looking away, pretense of calling them something else, whether a religion, a of mob violence, or even playing doctor. And this misnaming the need and the deed give rise to that distortion which result in pornography and obscenity - the abuse of feeling.

When we look away from the importance of the erotic in the development and
sustenance of our power, or when we look away from ourselves as we satisfy our erotic needs in concert with others, we use each other as objects of satisfaction rather than share our joy in the satisfying, rather than make connection with our similarities and our differences. To refuse to be conscious of what we are feeling at any time, however comfortable that might seem, is to deny a large part of the experience and to allow ourselves to be reduced to the pornographic, the abused, and the absurd.

The erotic cannot be felt secondhand. As a Black lesbian feminist, I have a particular
feeling, knowledge, and understanding for those sisters with whom I have danced hard, played, or even fought. This deep participation has often been the forerunner for joint concerted actions not possible before.

But this erotic charge is not easily shared by women who continue to operate under an
exclusively European-American male tradition. I know it was not available to me when I was trying. I adapt my consciousness to this mode of living and sensation.
Only now, I find more and more women-identified women brave enough to risk sharing the erotic's electrical charge without having to look away, and without distorting the enormously powerful and creative nature of that exchange. Recognizing the power of the erotic within our lives can give us the energy to pursue genuine change within our world, rather than merely settling for a shift of characters in the same weary drama.

For not only do we touch our most profoundly creative source, but we do that which is
female and self-affirming in the face of a racist, patriarchal, and anti-erotic society.

Our deeply respected teacher, Dharmaraj, tells us.

His words hang in the air. Someone audibly gasps. We all lean forward a bit more.

“Because when I hear her speak her no, I know I can trust her yes.”

Understanding what you don’t want is such an important part of knowing what you want. A full-bodied yes.

At work. In bed. In life.

David Whyte, in his book The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America, calls it the via negativa. The “negative road.”

He says: “The via negativa is the discipline of saying no when we have as yet no clarity about those things to which we can say yes. We take the via negativa when there is not yet any sign of the via positiva. But in the continuous utterance of the no is a profound faith that the yes will appear.”

(I suspect anybody who has used online dating apps can relate.)

“We create, in effect, a kind of energetic vacuum into which something we recognize can appear.”

That vacuum works both ways.

When you never say no, you don’t create space. You fill it. With obligation. With performance. With whatever the other person wants.

And slowly, you dilute your very self. You lose the essence of who you are by saying yes until you don’t know who you are or what you want anymore.

You allow yourself to be shaped by the world rather than turning inward to find out who you authentically are.

I had an employee once who was the ultimate yes-man. Anytime I asked him anything at all, he was in immediate agreement with me.

As a leader, this disturbed me. I started dreading our one-on-one meetings because I felt like I was pulling teeth to get solid information from which I could make decisions. In so many words, I expressed this to him, only to understand that he had said yes to the world for so long that he was literally incapable of forming his own opinion—even when it was based on his own expertise and knowledge.

He felt like a corporate shell of a human.

As a result, I didn’t trust him. And I started turning to others to get the real answers.

I now understand there was something in him he was projecting onto his workplace relationships. Perhaps he grew up in a household where disagreement meant being hurt emotionally or physically, and as a result he would kowtow to any authority figure. Another reason to do your inner work. But that’s an entirely different article.

The point is: I never heard his no. So I could never trust his yes.

And here’s the other thing we all know: we can’t fake it becausethe person receiving the false yes knows.

A male client told me recently, “I’m so tired of being shut down when I make a move. And the times she agrees, it feels like she’s giving me sex. It doesn’t feel good knowing she’s just going through the motions.”

He could feel it. The hollow center of her yes.

It didn’t make him feel wanted. It made him feel alone.

I see this often with clients who have said yes to sex their entire lives when they really weren’t in the mood. Just wanted to keep the peace. Keep the connection. Keep feeling like “the man”. Keep from being too much trouble.

This pattern runs deep. Many people have never fully learned what they desire in the first place. They don’t know what feels good and what doesn’t because they never gave themselves a chance to find out.

And if they don’t start understanding what they want—if they keep enduring through someone else’s needs—their bodies will eventually “help” them.

The body keeps the score (sorry, I know that line is overused). And eventually, it starts to refuse. It shuts down. Penetrative sex becomes painful or physically impossible.

Because your body doesn’t trust you anymore to know what’s best for you.

There comes a point where trust has eroded so much that everything starts breaking down.

This happens at work too.

I’ve watched teams slowly collapse under leaders who never asked what people actually thought. Or who asked but were only looking for the hollow yes, so disagreement felt dangerous.

I was part of a leadership team like this once. I watched everyone perform agreement until they quietly disengaged—or left.

I wrote an email to the COO with ideas on how the leadership team could better integrate new acquisitions. He called me into his office. HR was present.

“I understand from your email that you think leadership here is wrong.”

“Yes,” I said. “That’s correct. As part of the leadership team, I think we could—”

He cut me off. His eyes blazing “I am leadership here.”

I wanted to laugh. But I knew his next move was to fire me.

In a relationship, this kind of rupture is scary. For her. For him. For everything you’ve built together.

A man recently described this to me. His relationship had ruptured. They had stopped having sex entirely.

When they came back together, they made an agreement: they would only have sex when they were both a yes.

(And a yes doesn’t mean “wait until I’m horny.” This takes some education on what Emily Nagoski calls “brakes” and “accelerators.”)

At first, it was scary. There’s grief in that kind of separation. Fear. Old stories about what it means if one person doesn’t want the other.

But he told me the sex they have now is better than it ever was before.

Because when she says yes, she means it. Her whole body means it.

And he can feel the difference.

I hear you.

The word “sex” makes you uncomfortable. You think it has no place in business. That it’s unprofessional. Inappropriate. Maybe even dangerous.

But hear me out. Because what I’m about to share might be the most important thing you read this year.

I’ve sat across from executives after HR gets a sexual harassment complaint. Talented men. Terrified men. Men who genuinely don’t understand why they did what they did.

Here’s what happens:

He crosses a line. Attorneys rush in. They slap a “bad” label on him. Tell him to stay quiet. Ship him to an HR compliance training.

The harassed person is paid to walk away and be quiet.

And nothing changes—except now you have a shamed, confused man with the same wounds still in the workplace. And another victim who is silenced.

Research shows that men who feel incompetent—or believe others see them as inferior—try to compensate by making themselves feel superior. Sexual harassment becomes a tool for restoring social status.

Research also shows that we have growing “worthiness epidemic” among men, often manifesting as deep-seated feelings of inadequacy, a lack of purpose, and a “silent crisis” of mental health.

This tells me that as things stand now, it’s only going to get worse.

We have raised generations of men who measure their worth by what they produce, what they achieve, what they conquer. They have been taught to always be doing: giving, pushing, proving, performing. They struggle to be receptive. They don’t know how to generate validation from within rather than constantly extracting it from others.

So they take. From employees. From colleagues. From anyone who might make them feel, for a moment, like they are enough.

Men are 3.5 times more likely to die by suicide than women. We are watching our brothers, fathers, husbands, and sons suffer in silence.

And then punishing them when that suffering leaks out in destructive ways.

What if, instead of labeling these men as monsters and shuffling them through compliance trainings, we actually helped them find the internal authority they’re so desperately seeking through external means?

What if, as counterintuitive as it seems, the very energy driving the problem—sexual energy—is the same energy that can heal it?

You were taught that sexual energy remains “down there.” That it should be controlled, suppressed, discharged quickly and quietly.

But what you weren’t taught is that the same presence that opens the body to pleasure opens us to deeper vitality. To flow states. To the kind of internal authority that makes a leader magnetic.

When we all can learn to circulate this energy through our bodies rather than discharge it or suppress it, something shifts. We stop needing to take power from others because we have learned to generate it from within. We move from constant production to receptivity. We become the kind of leaders others want to follow. We become magnetic and therefore don’t have to grope and grasp and cajole.

This is what we’ve forgotten. And this is why I insist on giving a “sex talk” at work.

I know this conversation makes you uncomfortable.

But people are being harmed. And our current approach isn’t working.

If we want to stop the harm, we have to address the worthiness wound directly. We have to give men someone they can talk to. We have to teach them a different use for their energy.

So yes, I will keep talking about erotic energy to business crowds.

I will keep showing up for the men who have been told they are bad, and helping them find the good that lives beneath the wound. To help them see just how good and how worthy they are.

Because nothing will change unless we confront this reality head-on.

With fierce love and a ton of hope,

Tracy Allyn

Curious about my workshop “From the Bedroom to the Boardroom: How Being a Great Lover Makes You a Great Leader”? I work with individuals and leadership teams ready to discover how erotic energy can become a source of vitality, presence, and authentic power.

Even in long-term relationships, partners report only partially knowing what their partner finds pleasing/displeasing—highlighting why explicit communication matters.

Why Talking About Sex Feels So Difficult

People come into my office saying things like:

• “We only have sex every three months.”

• “We’re in a sexual rut. Sex just isn’t the same as it was.”

• “I like sex. I just don’t like sex with my partner.”

• “I’m embarrassed to share what actually turns me on. It’s outside my partner’s comfort zone.”

• “I’ve been pissed off for so many years, I don’t even know where to start.”

Almost all of it ends with the same question:

How do I broach the conversation?”

Because sex conversations are rarely just about sex

The conversation feels overwhelming because it’s carrying far more than sexual technique or frequency. It can quickly turn into “we never have sex” or “you never want me,” even though the real issues are much deeper.

When you talk about sex, you’re revealing desire, fear, preference, vulnerability, and need.

You’re risking disappointment.
You’re risking hurting someone you love.
You’re risking discovering that what you want doesn’t fully align.

With long-term partners, the stakes are higher. If a stranger misunderstands you, it stings. If your partner misunderstands you, it can feel like rejection of your core self.

Many people stay silent not because they don’t care, but because they care so deeply.

There is also the performance layer. We live in a culture that treats sex like something you are supposed to be good at. Wanting to talk about it can feel like admitting failure. Needing guidance can feel like inadequacy. Asking for something different can feel like criticism, even when it isn’t.

So what to do?

First. Be brave. Have the conversation.

Here’s a three-step process to guide you:

1. The first helps you ask for the conversation.

2. The second gives you the questions to ask.

3. The third helps you communicate physically.

Step 1: How to Ask for the Conversation

For many couples, the scariest part isn’t the conversation about sex.

It’s how to even say you want to have the conversation without burning th house down. Before you talk about sex, you need to name why you’re asking for the conversation.

Try something simple and honest:

“I’m bringing this up because I miss feeling connected, and I don’t know how to get there without talking.”

“Would you be willing to set aside some time this week just to listen to each other? No fixing. No pressure. Just understanding.”

This does two important things.

First, it lowers the threat level. You’re goal is to ensure that your partner knows that this isn’t a performance review or a demand for more sex.

Second, it gives their nervous system time to prepare. Surprising someone with a sex conversation almost guarantees defensiveness.

If your partner says no, don’t push. Say:

“Okay. I don’t want to force this. I just want you to know this matters to me, and I’m here when you’re ready.”

That alone is progress.

Step 2: Questions That Open a Real Sex Conversation

Send these questions to your partner beforehand. Agree on a time to sit down. Take a minute to look them in the eye. Ask:

1. Why do you have sex? What is the benefit to you?

2. Do you think we are having the same sex we did when we met? Or trying to? Are we stuck in a sexual pattern?

3. How can I be a better lover for you? Or if you are not having sex ask them…if we were to make love again what would that look like to you?

Together, I want you to expand your sexual script. Most couples are working from the same playbook they’ve used for years. Come with a beginner’s mind. Take penetration off the table. Ask yourselves what intimacy looks like without it.

Your job here is to listen.

Take notes if you need to.
Do not interrupt.
Do not explain.
Do not defend.

When they’re finished, say one thing only: “Thank you.” Reverse roles.

Then walk away and reflect.

Do not try to have sex afterward. If you do, you’ll turn this into pressure instead of safety, and you’ll undo the entire exercise.

Step 3: A Guided Receiving Practice for Better Sex

Talking about sex helps. Showing helps even more.

This guided receiving practice retrains your nervous system to experience intimacy without pressure, outcome, or performance.

The goal is attunement, not arousal. Pleasure may arise or it may not. Both are valid outcomes.

This practice is also a way to break sexual ruts and create new patterns of connection. It’s a way of exploring what sex can look like without penetration.

Step 1: Set the Container

This is not foreplay. It is a structured intimacy practice.

Set a 20-minute timer. Penetration is off the table.
One person gives. One person receives.

The receiver’s only job is to ask for what they want.
The giver’s only job is to listen and follow.

Step 2: Guided Physical Touch

Take a full minute to look each other in the eyes

Giver asks:

“My love, how may I serve you?”

Receiver responds with what they desire in that moment. This could look like:

“Please rub my feet”

“I would like a long embrace”

“Kiss my thighs”

If the giver cannot give in that way they simply respond

“I cannot fulfill that request at this time, is there another way I can serve you?”

The receiver gives moment to moment instructions and the giver fulfills those desires.

This is how couples learn what kind of connection their bodies want now. It is also a terrific way of practicing saying “no”.

If you try this exercise, I'd encourage you to follow each step as written, even the parts that might feel a little awkward at first. My husband and I did it last week, and it turned into something genuinely nurturing and connecting. Let me know how it is for you.

“I wish you could see yourself through my eyes right now”

Because at some point in almost every session, I can see their essence.

Generally, I feel like I am capturing a glimpse of who they were right before they were hurt.

At eight years old: building entire worlds from his imagination. Fearless. Boundless. Creating without limits, without care for what already exists, or what anyone thinks.

At five years old: laughing with wild abandon at something silly. Joy pouring out of her, effortless and free.

As a toddler: Furious that someone put the wrong peanut butter on your sandwich, and letting the whole room know it. Unapologetically honest.

I can see the part of them that is full of wonder, joy, and ease. The part that dares to be silly, playful, wild. The part that is honest and true and raw. The part that hasn’t been taught to hide.

In that moment, I’m reminded of the Zen koan:
“Can you remember who you were before your parents were born?”

I then I think “when was it that you started to armor up?, When did you learn to hide that part of you?”:

• Was it the sibling who was too rough with you?

• The teacher with the sharp tongue?

• The peers who teased… until it wasn’t funny anymore?

• The first love who shattered your heart?

• Was it the box you were forced into—labeled “man” or “woman”—when what you really were was human, whole, wild?

In these moments, I pray a silent prayer, that in this session their body feels safe enough to loosen that armor just a little bit.

And in that opening, perhaps they will remember that part of themselves that they have forgotten. Or perhaps that they never knew in the first place.

And in that softened state, underneath all the strategies and titles and tension, we will find something astonishing:

The seeds of their deepest, truest self.

Not the version they’ve been taught or that they have polished to perfection.

But the version that feels perfectly, authentically… you.

And sometimes, just sometimes, that small remembering is simply where the real work begins.

Well… kind of.

Let me tell you a story. My own story. About using the erotic to heal physical pain and deep emotional wounds.

It starts here.

The holidays were rough this year. They felt like a test of sorts for me. Can I actually practice what I preach? When things get hard, can I use what I know to process, to heal, and to move forward instead of bypassing myself?

It started with someone who has made it very clear that I offend her. By this I mean, my very presence feels like an afront to her. She has told me that I am “wildly inappropriate”.

Part of me feels strangely at peace with this. I mean, I’ve worked hard to live in alignment with who I actually am, and I trust that being myself will always unsettle some people.

So when a casual comment at Christmas dinner upset her, why did it land so hard in my body?

For the rest of the night I felt disassociated from my body. I sat there, my heart racing, my stomach tight, my whole body buzzing with something I couldn’t name. By the time everyone left the house the next day, I was exhausted.

It was then that I could feel the rage start to bubble. Old rage.

Directed at people from my past. People who had projected their shame onto me and then walked away clean while I carried it. I could feel myself building stories, sharpening blame, rehearsing anger.

How can one young woman, with her own issues, stir up this much in my body?

The next morning, I was running through O’Hare, sprinting under that neon rainbow tunnel to catch a connecting flight. As I reached the gate, my left hip started to ache. By the time I reached my seat, I could hardly walk.

Yes, it was a physical injury. And also, I knew better.

Because I know that often physical injuries are masking an emotional pain I was too scared to feel.

I sat down, closed my eyes, and decided that I needed to get brave. Brave enough to ask “What is underneath this hip pain? What’s underneath this anger?”

Her emotional charge clearly lit something up in me that had nothing to do with her and everything to do with me. And I could feel that whatever it was, I was storing it in my left hip. It needed to be released.

So the next morning, I ran a hot bath and dropped a bath bomb into the water. Before that fizzy ball was even half dissolved, I was holding my left hip with both hands. Not to fix it. Not to stretch it. Just holding it.

Like you hold something that hurts and needs to be witnessed.

Like you hold a baby kitten.

That’s when the images came.

Not memories I chose. Not stories I tried to tell myself. Just flashes. Scenes from my life that still carried charge because I had never fully let myself feel them.

I didn’t analyze them. I didn’t even think. I let my body feel what it didn’t get to feel at the time.

I cried quietly at first. Then louder. Then without any attempt to be polite or contained.

At one point, something moved through me that had no image at all. No story. Just sensation. Just sound. Just release.

I wailed.

I didn’t care if anyone heard me.

I stayed in that bath for almost an hour. Feeling. Releasing. Feeling again. Letting my body do what it clearly knew how to do if I would just stop trying to manage it.

I got out, wrapped myself in a towel, collapsed into bed, and slept hard.

When I woke up, the pain in my hip was mostly gone. About 80%. At least I could walk without limping.

But I knew I wasn’t quite finished.

Thank you for indulging me up until this point, but this is the part of the story where we talk about sexual energy as healing energy.

I’m exhausted. But it’s Sunday. and on Sunday we participate in ENRG Tune with Sasha Cobra. I am grumpy. I am not in the mood for Sasha’s cheery banter. But I stay because I know it’s important to Tom, and begrudgingly, I know it’s important to me.

We lay down, fully clothed, and welcome our own innate energy with breath. I focus on my heart area, opening myself to receive the frequency of love. Of Eros.

I can feel the energy slowly build from my pelvis. I move with it, letting it rise. I breath it up into my heart. I breath it up into my head and circulate it down again. As I circulate the energy I can feel the heat in my body rising. I am dripping in sweat. Every cell awash in this wildly beautiful energy that I cannot explain.

There is no climax. This is not orgasmic.

This is wave after wave after wave of soft, powerful, healing, energy coursing through my body.

I allow myself to release what needs to be released:

I cry.

I laugh,

I moan.

This is not pretty. This is not spiritual theater. This is my body doing what bodies do when they are finally allowed to finish a stress cycle.

Toward the end, my husband (who has been on his own journey) placed his hand on my left hip.

That touch cracks something open one last time. A deep sob comes out of me. Cathartic. Honest. Like something heavy finally dropping.

Then my body goes quiet, and I sleep.

Later, I get up and walk downstairs.

No pain.

A little tenderness, maybe. After all, there was a physical injury. But no pain.

Today, I feel subdued. A little melancholic. The way I always feel after a big emotional release. I feel proud of myself for using the knowledge I have to heal physical and emotional pain, and deeply respectful of what just happened, even though I don’t fully understand it.

This is what people mean when they say the body stores emotions.

This is what I mean when I talk about erotic energy as healing energy.

This is the work, you guys. It is not polite or sweet. It is brave. I had a choice: pop Advil and sit with a hip in pain, or be brave enough to meet head-on what that hip was storing. Those were the options.

I am in awe of the human body and how willing it is to work with us when we actually allow it.

The erotic isn’t something we use for pleasure alone; it is the intelligence that knows how to bring us back to ourselves.

Of reading posts written.

In short.

Consumable.

Sentences.

Written by code trained to mimic emotions, in turn controlled by an algorithm.

I just want to get really f*&^%g real. Do you know that almost every human that sat in session with me this week, is trying to figure out how to be brave enough to soften themselves so that they can receive care and tenderness? Each one of them crying out for a depth of intimacy that requires them to trust that if they show themselves fully that they still will be accepted and loved?

How can we get softer and more authentic if every time we log in we are

Reading.

In.

Staccato.

Rather than being led into the flow of authentic wisdom that another human has to share? I am reading remnants of original thoughts and feelings veiled in perfectly curated words punctuated by -em- dashes (of which I cannot find on my damn keyboard I use them so infrequently In Real Life).

And this morning, my own soft and open heart is shrouded in anger that we (me) are allowing ourselves to be locked into a system of control that is slowly undoing all of our work to stay soft and connected and human.

I am a sex and intimacy coach that helps people shed the layers that block them from receiving and giving the deep, tender intimacy that they crave. If you want to see what sex coach may bring to your life I offer a “get to know you” session. I promise that all of your ugly and all of your beauty will be fully and completely accepted.

Also, I won’t speak in staccato with you.

“I love this man so much. I want to feel ease in my body… but it tenses up. Then I feel guilty. A sense of obligation.”

Some weeks as a sex coach carry a clear energetic theme, and this week was a doozy with stories from both sides of partnership:

“I’m so tired of being shut down when I make a move,” one man said. “And the times she agrees, it feels like she’s giving me sex. It doesn’t feel good knowing she’s just going through the motions.”

It reminded me of a time in business when we needed to close a deal to meet our bottom line. I didn’t like the client. I didn’t trust him. My body didn’t feel at ease around him, yet I felt obligated to say yes so I pushed the deal through.

The woman who would manage the project came to me and said,

“Tracy, I have a bad feeling about this. I’m not sure we should say yes.”

I ignored her.
I ignored me.

The team delivered beautiful work, on time, within budget, with their usual excellence. But I knew that they were just going through the motions and waiting for the project to end.

And when the project ended everyone breathed a sigh of relief.

We agreed from that point forward to always honor our gut feelings.

But I needed to take steps to rebuild trust with my team.

The steps I took to rebuild that trust are almost identical to the steps two partners take to rebuild trust in intimacy.

When the Mind Says Yes and the Body Says No

I often talk about leaders understanding the subtle energetic shifts in the room. To sense the unspoken NO even when everyone is nodding YES.

But, what happens when your logical mind is saying YES;

• YES. I love this person and I want to connect with them.

• YES, this business helps our bottom line.

But your body is very clearly telling you NO.

Do you go with the logical data or with the feeling? It’s a YES AND…

Research backs intuition. A 2024 study on top management teams found that intuition “plays a vital role in strategic decision-making, enabling executives to cut through complexity and navigate uncertainty.”

When you’ve spent years in an environment, your body has already assimilated patterns your mind can’t yet explain. Use that information in combination with the other logical data you may have.

Listening to your felt no isn’t irrational. It’s advanced pattern recognition operating beneath conscious awareness.

The same intelligence that guides leaders through complexity also guides lovers through vulnerability if we learn to listen.

Why the YES of the mind and NO of the body Feels So Confusing

Loving partners are often horrified at the thought of overriding the NO of the person they love:
“Can’t they see how much I love and respect them?”

Others are confused:

“Why does my mind say yes to connecting with my love, but my body says no?”

For generations, women have been conditioned to say yes when their bodies screamed no. We learned that love, safety, and belonging could be taken away if we didn’t comply. Our nervous systems adapted to survive by disconnecting from the body’s truth.

Even now, in safe relationships, our bodies can carry the imprint of old violations. Your partner may be kind and trustworthy, but your nervous system needs time and proof to know that this love is different.

The Sacred NO in the Bedroom

When your body says no during intimacy, it isn’t rejecting your partner. It’s revealing where trust still needs to grow inside you, between you, and within your relationship to pleasure itself.

Your no is holy.
It’s your body’s way of saying,

I’m not ready yet.
I need to feel safe before I open.
I’m complete for now.

When we override that pause and when we push through to please, we betray the very foundation of pleasure: safety and trust.

Re-patterning Trust in the Body and in Business

Here’s a simple practice to begin restoring trust with your body:

1. Lay quietly on your back and take a few slow, deep breaths into your pelvis.

2. Butterfly your legs open gently and say aloud, “This is my yes.”
   Feel what happens in your body—warmth, openness, aliveness.

3. Close your legs and place your hand over your womb or lower belly.
   Say aloud, “This is my no.”
   Notice the sensation in your body is it dense? Grounding? Is there a contraction?

Let your body teach you the difference. Over time, this practice restores the innate wisdom to trust your inner signals again.

In business, re-patterning happens the same way; by proving through consistent action that their NO will be honored. When leaders model this, teams relax into trust, creativity, and flow.

Honoring the NO together

Invite your partner into a gentle conversation. Let them know that your body carries memories. Both ancestral and personal, and that you’d love their help rebuilding trust within your body.

Explain that honoring your NO is not rejection of them; it’s an act of reverence. It’s how they can help your nervous system learn that pleasure and safety can coexist.

Invite them to join you in holding sacred space for your NO at any moment during intimacy. Let them know that sometimes you hesitate to even begin because you fear that once you start, you’ll be expected to keep going.

So when your body says no or not yet - at any time in the cycle of intimacy:

You both know to pause. Breathe together. Let them hold you, caress you, or simply stay close with no goal beyond connection.

You practice voicing your no without guilt or apology.
They practice meeting it with love, without withdrawal or disappointment.

This is sacred work.
It re-educates the nervous system that pleasure and safety can coexist.
It restores the erotic as holy ground and invites both of you into deeper intimacy.

In business, honoring the NO in others also restores that trust.

Over time, your YES will grow stronger, fuller, and more embodied. Together, you will begin to experience the deep trust, aliveness, and freedom that sacred sexuality is built upon.

Your No Is the Gateway to Your Most Powerful Yes

I eventually learned in business that by saying no, I was creating space for bigger and better projects to come to us. Projects that the team loved to work on.

In love, ignoring your body’s NO costs you the aliveness of your erotic truth.

When you and your partner learn to honor and trust your NO, your yes becomes a FUCK YES.

And from that embodied yes comes trust, creativity, connection, and freedom.

In the bedroom and in business.

If something in this story stirred something inside you, know that you don’t have to explore it alone. I am a sex and intimacy coach who helps people gently release the armor and expand their capacity for pleasure.

You’re welcome to book a complimentary session with me. Book your session here →