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We all develop pleasure ruts – our most reliable pathways to pleasure, arousal and orgasm. How do we break out of ruts and find new pleasure pathways? How can we encourage exploration in our relationships – without losing any of the reliable standbys that we might depend on for accessing pleasure?
This is an encore presentation of Episode #127: New Paths To Pleasure: Here’s How
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Podcast Transcript:
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Chris Rose: 00:01 Welcome to Speaking of Sex with The Pleasure Mechanics. I’m Chris from pleasuremechanics.com and on this podcast we have honest, soulful, explicit conversations about all arenas of human sexuality. Come on over to pleasuremechanics.com to explore our resources. A great place to get started is pleasuremechanics.com/free. That will get you enrolled in our free online course and you can become part of our community of pleasure seekers all around the world.
Chris Rose: 00:37 On today’s episode we are taking a little time travel back into our archives. I chose this episode out of our archives because we’ve been in this conversation over the past few weeks about savoring pleasure, finding micro pleasures within our days. This episode is all about shaking ourselves out of ruts. How do we interrupt the patterns, the operating systems of our pleasures, that were laid down when we were perhaps children, things that have become habituated and even have become invisible to us that might be really limiting our pleasure?
Chris Rose: 01:13 I thought this was a great conversation to encore. We hope you enjoy it. We will be back with you next week with another episode of Speaking of Sex with The Pleasure Mechanics. Don’t forget to subscribe on the podcast feed of your choice. That way you will also be able to explore our archives. If you love the show, be sure to leave us a rating on the podcast app of your choice. It really helps other folks find the show and join the conversation. Here is an encore presentation of episode 127 originally aired in 2015 where Charlotte and I discuss laying new paths to pleasure. Cheers.
Charlotte Rose: 01:55 Hello and welcome to Speaking of Sex with The Pleasure Mechanics. I’m Charlotte.
Chris Rose: 02:00 I’m Chris. We are The Pleasure Mechanics and in this podcast we offer our expert advice so you can have a stunningly pleasurable sex life. You can submit questions for future episodes by heading over to pleasuremechanics.com and hitting the Ask Us Anything button. While you’re there, get on our newsletter for a free weekly dose of erotic inspiration delivered straight to your inbox. When you’re ready to master new erotic skills, check out our online courses designed to help you master everything from couples massage, who wants a foot massage, to erotic spanking and so much more. Use the code speaking of sex for 20% off the online course of your choice. On this episode we’re going to be talking about how to break out of routines and ruts to expand your arousal. Charlotte’s going to get us started by reading a question submitted by a listener.
Charlotte Rose: 02:59 He writes, “Hi there. I recently discovered the podcast and hope you might be able to help me on an issue. My wife really only orgasms when her legs are locked tight together. There have been a couple of exceptions where she has orgasms while straddling me and using a toy. I’d like for her to be able to orgasm with legs spread to allow for a variety of positions. I have read using the wonderful world of Google… Sarcastic he says in brackets… That this would just take practice. Supposedly leg locking was what she learned at a young age. I’d like to know if practice would really affect this. I don’t want to encourage her to change something that can’t be changed. I’d hate for her to feel like she’s doing something wrong. Do you have any guidance or could perhaps point me in a direction for reliable information. Thank you so much.”
Charlotte Rose: 03:52 We totally get that the wonderful world of Google can lead you all sorts of strange places and this is partly why we do what we do and we want to offer you free sex advice week after week.
Chris Rose: 04:07 We’re the reliable information.
Charlotte Rose: 04:07 Yeah, we want to be a reliable source of information.
Chris Rose: 04:10 That said, when we don’t know something, I will point you in the right direction for trusted resources when it’s beyond our scope of experience. For example, medical issues I tend to pass on. For this kind of thing, here we are, doing what we do. There’s a question within this question and we’ll address both. This idea of locking your legs together to orgasm is actually quite common. A lot of women have that pattern around their orgasms. The question that is relevant for all of us is, can you train your body to build arousal and have orgasms in a variety of positions? Can you expand the possibilities beyond your trusted routine towards orgasm? The great news is yes. Without giving anything up, you can unlock new pathways to pleasure. That’s what we’re going to talk about, is how to break out of your ruts and expand your arousal repertoire. I love that word, repertoire.
Charlotte Rose: 05:15 It’s true that the way that we start masturbating as kids often does stay. It’s sort of incredible. If you reflect on your own style of masturbation and notice if you are doing what you have been doing for many, many years, many of our foundational masturbation practices are set up from a young age and often that wants to be quick and quiet and we want to be done before we get caught. This pattern really stays for many of us for decades. For all of us, this is a great subject to look at, to reflect on and we can all benefit from shaking up our masturbation routine even if it’s going well for you.
Chris Rose: 05:59 It doesn’t even affect just your masturbation as an adult. It affects the way you want to be stimulated by your partner as an adult and how you reach orgasms as an adult. Early childhood masturbation patterns affect your entire sex life. This is why it’s so important to work on sex positive parenting and dialogues about masturbation because so many of us started masturbating under really dire circumstances. The fear of discovery, the shame of it, not having freedom to express yourself.
Chris Rose: 06:31 I’ve even met women who started masturbating with the plastic nose of a specific teddy bear that they would put between their legs and rub their clitoris with. They are still as adults, on the quest of finding that same feeling so they buy stuffed animals with different plastic parts to masturbate with, or people who only masturbate lying face down legs tightly clenched around a pillow and muffling their sound into another pillow. This is the only way they can experience pleasure with our partner as well. They end up having a sex life totally from behind, smothering their pleasure into a pillow.
Chris Rose: 07:10 First of all, reflect on your patterns. What patterns in your sex life have been established by early childhood masturbation practices? Now on a bigger level, think about your routines and patterns in general. The biggest question here is how can we slowly but surely expand our arousal patterns so we can feel pleasure, we can enjoy sensation and build towards orgasm in as many ways as possible, we have an expanded repertoire, our palette of colors has just expanded, our spice rack has grow.
Chris Rose: 07:49 A quick little anatomy lesson here. The way things are interpreted as erotic is this basic interplay between your nerve endings and your brain. Your nerve endings are responsible only for registering stimulation and sending a message to the brain, sending a signal to the brain where it is interpreted and it’s in the brain that something gets sorted into these erotic, non-erotic, threatening, non-threatening, buckets and are interpreted and then messages are relayed back. Hormones are released and our experience of the sensation happens. These pathways establish themselves over time. If a signal is sent to your brain and that signal has led to orgasm a hundred times before, the brain is very quick to say, “Ooh, goody, orgasm stimulation, lets go,” and releases that flood of hormones and sets your body on the track towards arousal and orgasm.
Chris Rose: 08:49 These are the routines that work for us. These are the kinds of stimulation, the precise strokes, the location, the positions, that we’ve been in when we’ve had orgasm after orgasm after orgasm. Usually by volume, that’s masturbation, which is another interesting thing here just to pause and reflect on, is that most of your orgasms of your life have probably been with yourself? Isn’t that true for most people?
Chris Rose: 09:13 Charlotte’s like, “Well, I don’t know.”
Charlotte Rose: 09:15 I mean I think it depends. I think there’s a range, but certainly a large amount, hopefully for many people, are from solo sex.
Chris Rose: 09:24 Especially for people who start during their childhood. I guess that’s what I’m thinking is, from ages six to 12 or whenever you started masturbating, for many, many years, a lot of kids did it a lot.
Charlotte Rose: 09:38 Yeah, I think that’s certainly true.
Chris Rose: 09:40 Then during long phases of adulthood when some of us are single for long periods of time, and then even when we’re in relationships, we’re masturbating. I don’t know. I would be interested by the numbers, what percentage of orgasms are through masturbation?
Charlotte Rose: 09:53 All the more important to do it well then.
Chris Rose: 09:55 Right. We have to relearn that because no one, as a kid is rooting you on, saying, “Go masturbate well. Be creative and do a variety of things and explore your body and your sounds.” We don’t give kids that coaching, of course. The surgeon general was fired for even suggesting that masturbation be taught as something that’s healthy. Geez. We have a long way to go. That’s why, as adults, we need this kind of sex education that we’ve dedicated our life to, is to undo so many of the patterns we’ve established that is limiting our pleasure and our expression.
Charlotte Rose: 10:33 With that, I love Mr. Anonymous, I don’t know your name. I love that you’re saying you’d hate for her to feel like she’s doing something wrong. That is very attentive and very thoughtful. I think that it’s important that when you discuss this with her to really make sure you’re letting her know that you don’t think there is anything wrong. You’re merely wanting to expand the pleasure that she can experience and that you guys can explore together by being able to explore different positions. Making sure that you’re framing it as an expansion of pleasure, that you don’t have to give up what she already knows and how she already generally cums. You just want to play and experiment and is she up for doing that with you? Absolutely she’s not doing anything wrong.
Chris Rose: 11:19 Right. That’s this attitude we all need to take on. We’re not doing anything wrong. We’re not fixing anything that’s broken. We’re expanding our repertoire of pleasure, our capacity for arousal, starting from wherever you are now and knowing that there’s no end in sight. No matter where you are now, if you can orgasm one way or three ways, or you’ve never had an orgasm in your life, or you orgasm at the site of a beautiful flower on the side of the road, whatever your pleasure capacity now, you can always expand it. It’s the perfect time to begin.
Charlotte Rose: 11:55 Yeah. I love what you’re saying that there’s never any limit. That really no one has ever found a limit to the amount of expansive pleasure we can feel. May we all remember that and may we all continue to increase what we can feel. It is infinite. Let us keep going.
Chris Rose: 12:11 Yeah, your life might be committed to that, my dear. How do we do this? The simplest solution, the simplest recommendation, is to slowly and with a spirit of curiosity, expand your repertoire. Think about the positions you pleasure yourself in, the strokes you use, what parts of your anatomy you’re stimulating, your pace and pressure, and what you’re thinking about in your head or what you’re focusing on in your body. Switch all of those things up in different combinations and you’re going to expand your capacity for pleasure. That is the most basic suggestion here, is mix it up. See what feels good. Do more of that. Be willing to explore things that might not feel good at first and then slowly warm up as an erogenous zone. Don’t you think that happens a lot? You’ll try something once and you don’t feel it the first time.
Charlotte Rose: 13:06 It’s totally true that sometimes we have to do the work of waking up our anatomy. For instance, if you get used to stroking one side of the clitoris using your dominant hand, that location on the clitoris gets sensitized and then is more responsive. Perhaps the rest of the clitoris, you don’t feel as much when you explore it, but if you start including it and stimulating it on a regular basis, even though you might not feel as strong at first, over time it will get sensitized.
Chris Rose: 13:40 I just want to highlight that point that a pattern can be established simply by, where your dominant hand falls when you reach down and touch your genitals.
Charlotte Rose: 13:49 Absolutely.
Chris Rose: 13:49 You reach down across the clitoris, that spot is where you touch most often, therefore it’s most sensitized to orgasm.
Charlotte Rose: 13:57 And becomes quote unquote your spot.
Chris Rose: 13:59 Right.
Charlotte Rose: 14:00 Really all of it can become your spot if you stimulate it. It just takes sensitizing it, which takes time, which takes attention, which takes effort. We’ve mentioned changing positions, changing your strokes, changing way you’re stimulating on your penis or clitoris or vulva. Pace and pressure is also a valuable one to pay attention to. We often are in the same place doing this at the same pace and-
Chris Rose: 14:27 Same place, same pace.
Charlotte Rose: 14:29 Totally. Play with slowing it down.
Chris Rose: 14:31 Right. Everyone does things too fast.
Charlotte Rose: 14:34 Or we go really fast so that we can get to orgasm quickly. If we want to just play, slow everything down. Make it lighter. Make the pressure deeper. Play with that. It’s another place to bring your attention to, to get out of your habits.
Chris Rose: 14:52 The same nerve ending can be stimulated with featherlite touch, right on the surface of the skin or even just stimulating the hair above the skin or you can then sink deeper into the skin itself or deeper yet into the muscle and the bone and all of these create different pressure points and different kinds of stimulation in the same square inch of your body. Really the combinations here are infinite.
Charlotte Rose: 15:17 Right. Which is just sometimes hard to remember when you’re in the throws of it because the habits are so strong and we just do what’s routine.
Chris Rose: 15:25 Hear our voices in the back of your head your are in bed. Be creative.
Charlotte Rose: 15:29 Play a little.
Chris Rose: 15:31 Go deeper.
Charlotte Rose: 15:31 Switch it up.
Chris Rose: 15:32 Slow down.
Charlotte Rose: 15:35 Only if that doesn’t feel funny.
Chris Rose: 15:37 That might be a total boner killer or it might work for you. I’m not sure.
Charlotte Rose: 15:42 Then the other piece to pay attention to is where your attention is within your own body. Are you focusing deeply on the sensations or are you running fantasies in your mind? You can explore either end of that spectrum.
Chris Rose: 15:57 Right, and the same thing applies to the positions you’re in and how you’re stimulating yourself. This also is really relevant with sex toys. A lot of people find a vibrator that works and they find their quickest route to orgasm and lock down on that vibrator and have that pattern. This, over time, really starts to limit the kinds of pleasure you’re capable of feeling and the strength of your orgasms. It’s just really important to diversify. You can do this in your masturbatory life or with your partner. I think it’s actually really liberating and fun if you go into sex with your partner being like, “Let’s try to find three new things to do to one another. Let’s try to stimulate parts of our body that we usually ignore.” Getting out of your routine together and just putting it as a challenge, a creative process, and saying, “Let’s take a little adventure and try to do something new on purpose.” Not knowing what the outcome’s going to be. You might not reach orgasm and that has to be okay, but at least you’ve shaken things up and aroused new nerve endings and gotten creative together, which is part of the erotic process.
Charlotte Rose: 17:06 Right, and with this couple, for instance, as you’re exploring new positions, as Chris was saying, it’s totally possible that no orgasm will be happening for awhile because she will have to retrain her neurology to associate those positions with high levels of turn on and eroticism. That’s what you want to be focusing on, seeing how much arousal you can bring to her body in those positions, not necessarily with the goal of orgasm.
Chris Rose: 17:34 I will mention as a sidebar here, there can be a certain level of avoidance when routines become routine. Meaning, she might not want to explore certain positions because they trigger something from her past that her body would rather not remember. Other people avoid entire bodily regions because of past trauma or an association with pain or unpleasant and stimulation. That has to be okay. You have to be willing to have that conversation that’s like, “Yeah, no, I’d really not rather explore that area or that position or that kind of stimulation because it doesn’t feel good to me.” At least you know, and are identifying the reason and putting it in context, so it’s not just a avoidance that becomes routine and really creates this electric fence in your sex life. It’s more of a gentle boundary. You can choose to explore it over time with real care and compassion and start reclaiming those areas of avoidance. Don’t let avoidance dictate your patterns in general, because then you’re really giving them too much power.
Charlotte Rose: 18:40 I like the electric fence idea. That’s a useful one. We should explore that more in a later podcast.
Chris Rose: 18:46 We will.
Charlotte Rose: 18:47 Okay.
Chris Rose: 18:48 It is a really great metaphor.
Charlotte Rose: 18:50 Yeah.
Chris Rose: 18:51 [inaudible 00:18:51] about that. All right.
Chris Rose: 18:52 We hope we’ve given you some insight and some motivation to expand your arousal capacity to locate alternative pathways to pleasure. I’ve got another metaphor.
Charlotte Rose: 19:05 Go for it.
Chris Rose: 19:06 The GPS metaphor.
Charlotte Rose: 19:07 Oh yeah, always good.
Chris Rose: 19:08 Okay. So just like you have your trusted path to orgasm, when you plug an address into the GPS, it will give you the most direct path. Yet, we all know that you could go to the grocery store the same way for 25 years and you’ll get there. If you start exploring the side roads, you will discover untold pleasures. You’ll find that cute pond with a beautiful willow tree. You’ll find the gorgeous expansive views that you’ve never seen before. You’ll go by that little rickety house that pleasures you each time with its charm.
Charlotte Rose: 19:41 It might take longer. You may get lost looking at the view and never actually get to the destination, but you’ve had an adventure and that’s part of it.
Chris Rose: 19:53 There will be some days where you go the GPS route, the most direct path, and that’s what makes total sense for that day. Other days, you have time to wander and enjoy the scenic route.
Charlotte Rose: 20:02 You can also do the exploring and then come back to the GPS to get back, if you want to be playing with all of the options and then have your trusty orgasm at the end.
Chris Rose: 20:12 Recalculating. Recalculating.
Chris Rose: 20:15 All right, so you get the point. We are here to guide you every step of the way as you expand your erotic repertoire. Our online courses are a great way to do it. Gentle reminder, if you want to explore erotic spanking say, come on over to Pleasure Mechanics, sign up for our course, and we will guide you every step of the way. The same goes for things like anal play and prostate massage and expanded foreplay and even couples massage. All of these are ways of expanding your repertoire and come over to pleasuremechanics.com, explore our resources and be in touch. I’m Chris.
Charlotte Rose: 20:53 I’m Charlotte.
Chris Rose: 20:54 We are The Pleasure Mechanics.
Charlotte Rose: 20:56 Wishing you a lifetime of pleasure.