What Do You Want?

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What do you want? This is such a simple question, yet one that can be so hard to answer, especially in the erotic realm.

What do you want? This question emerges in all arenas of our life – from the biggest picture questions about family, career and lifestyle to the micro moments of everyday life.

How easy is it for you to answer the question “What Do You Want?” How do you take space from all the “musts” and “shoulds” in life in order to create enough space to even ask this question?

In this episode we explore how to play with this question “What do you want” in order to start feeling into your embodied truths about your life. We share a simple (but not easy) process of paying attention to your body while actively fantasizing in order to access your embodied wisdom and knowledge to help you understand what you really want.

The process of tuning into your embodied knowledge is a lifelong process and one that takes practice – but here’s a quick introduction to how we can bring our body into the conversation when we sit with the question “What Do You Want?”

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Other Speaking Of Sex Episodes To Explore:

Rethinking Libido Mini Series

Peak Erotic Experiences

What To Do With Desires Unfulfilled

Podcast Transcript:

Podcast transcripts are generated with love by humans, and thus may not be 100% accurate. Time stamps are included so you can cross reference or jump to any point in the podcast episode above. THANKS to the members of our Pleasure Pod for helping make transcripts and the rest of our free offerings happen! If you love what we offer, find ways to show your love and dive deeper with us here: SHOW SOME LOVE

Chris Rose: 00:01 Welcome to Speaking of Sex with The Pleasure Mechanics. I’m Chris.

Charlotte Rose: 00:05 I’m Charlotte.

Chris Rose: 00:05 We are the Pleasure Mechanics, and on this podcast, we have honest, soulful, explicit conversations about sex, love, relationships and connection. Come on over to pleasuremechanics.com for our full podcast archive, and go to pleasuremechanics.com/free to get enrolled in our free online course and dive in a little deeper with us right away. That’s pleasuremechanics.com/free. This is going to be our last episode of 2019. We’re kind of skidding into December and hurdling towards the holiday season as a family, so we thought we’d give ourselves the gift of wrapping up the podcast season and looking forward to coming back in January.

Chris Rose: 00:55 We are going to California for the holidays, and I bring that up because we’re going to talk about what that trip has opened up in my head and heart a little later in the episode. Yeah, so we are moving towards … My birthday is coming up. We’re going to spend my birthday weekend at the Zen monastery as a family, which has become a beloved tradition of our family. Then, a few days later, we get on a plane to California, so this will be the last episode of 2019, and I just want to quickly say how grateful we are for you, our podcast audience. This year, we’ve almost doubled in size this year, so if you are new with us and just a few episodes deep, welcome and thank you, and have fun exploring the archives.

Chris Rose: 01:43 I just got an email from someone who just recently discovered the podcast and fell in love with it, and also has a new relationship, so they’ve been sending each other episodes back and forth and having long conversations about them, and I thought, “What a wonderful way to start a relationship.” Like you’ll get to know each other really well right out of the gate. Welcome to all of our new listeners and big love to all of you who have been with us for two, three, five years. Some of you have been with us as Pleasure Mechanics for 10 years now on your erotic journey, so as we move towards 2020 and this new decade together, thank you and love to all of you, and I’ll almost miss you this holiday season. I will be thinking about you, and we will be in touch with those of you on our Patreon community.

Chris Rose: 02:35 We’re doing a live call next week for our patrons. You can join that at pleasuremechanics.com/love. Find all the ways to go deeper with us, and yeah, we will be back in January with new episodes of Speaking of Sex.

Charlotte Rose: 02:52 We are so grateful for you all in our world and that we get to have these conversations with you and share ideas, and then hear how they land with you. It is really such a joy to be in community with you all, so thank you, thank you, thank you.

Chris Rose: 03:08 It really does feel like this conversation, when we broadcast out to the group, and then we hear back from waves of you at a time about how the episodes land, how these themes show up in your life, and then we roll that wisdom back out into the future episodes and courses as we build them, and over the 10 years, this is how really the Pleasure Mechanics body of knowledge has been woven, and it’s been so deeply in dialogue with all of you, so love to you guys. Welcome. All right. This episode, one more episode for 2019, and I thought we would talk about this question, “What do you want? What do you want?”

Chris Rose: 03:54 “What do you want?” is a question that comes up for a lot of people at the holiday season. “What do you want for the holidays? What do you want on your gift list? What do you want from Santa? What do you want for the New Year? What do you want to do for the holidays?”

Chris Rose: 04:09 It’s a season of want, which gets turned into all sorts of toxic mimics, but we won’t go into that. A season of want, but also, this question shows up for us in so many different arenas of our life, right? It’s a very internal question of, “What do I want? What do I want with my life? What do I want with my career?”

Chris Rose: 04:33 “What do I want out of a family? What do I value?” It’s a deeply relational question. It’s a lover’s question, “Tell me what you want.” It can be the beginning of a beautiful, erotic exchange.

Chris Rose: 04:50 “What do you want? How can I serve you? Tell me what you want. Tell me what you desire.” Then, it can also be kind of a demanding question.

Chris Rose: 05:02 Sometimes when we receive this question, it feels more of like a demand like, “What do you want? What do you want from me?” It can be a question on, that comes in a waves of desperation sometimes, so I thought this question would be an interesting one to explore, what is being asked of us when we hear this question, “What do you want?”, and how do we answer it? What is the process of answering it?

Charlotte Rose: 05:25 It’s such an interesting question because it’s relevant in a huge range of time. It’s relevant when you look at your entire life, when you look at the decade ahead, when you look at the rest of your life, or when you look at an afternoon or an hour, or 20 minutes after your kid is in bed. This question of what you want is so relevant at every scale.

Chris Rose: 05:49 And being able to answer it, having a process, having a trust in a process that you can ask yourself that question and get reliable information back, what a gift that would be because I think we all know this question and how it has shown up in our life in the big and the small moments, and we know how shitty it feels when we’re asked this question, and the answer is like, “I don’t know what I want.” We hear this from people all the time in different iterations, but not knowing what you want does not feel good, and it doesn’t serve you, and it doesn’t serve the people you love. How do we know how to live? How do we know how to fill our time, how to make love if we don’t know what we want, what we desire, what would be pleasurable, what would bring us more joy, and spark, and vitality, and pleasure into our lives? What do you want is such a generous question, but it demands specificity.

Charlotte Rose: 06:57 And self-knowing. It demands being able to feel inside your body and know what might feel good, and fulfilling, and satisfying, and that is a whole skill set.

Chris Rose: 07:09 Why make that connection? I totally agree, but tell me more about why do you have to be able to feel inside?

Charlotte Rose: 07:17 We have to be able to think of an idea and feel for a response inside our body, or we think of a feeling state that we want to experience, and then we can verbalize it. I think different people will have different ways to respond to this question. Some, it will be a body longing first, and then we articulate it, and others, it will be an idea, and then we listen for a body response.

Chris Rose: 07:45 Okay. We’re going to dive more into this. I want to say a good episode to listen to if you haven’t already is the one about desire, the pleasure of wanting, and that was part of our libido series, so if you go to pleasuremechanics.com/libido, you’ll find our entire libido series. In this episode, we talk about how sex is not a drive. We are not driven towards sex, we are pulled by desire.

Chris Rose: 08:12 It is a motivational system. Another way to think about this question, “What do you want?” is, “What are the motivational systems that are pulling you into your wanting? What is motivating you? What would motivate you into action?”, because, “What do you want?” also is a question that demands action. To go from fantasy, to desire, to action and lived experience, what do you want, you have to translate from a feeling or an idea into lived experience. That’s, I think one of the reasons that we’re a little bit afraid of this question because it demands something of us.

Chris Rose: 08:53 It asks something of us. This connection between, “What do you want?” and deep feeling, let’s go there for a second. “What do you want?” is a question that goes beyond needs, because as human beings, we all need food, we all need shelter, we all need relationality, and it also goes beyond shoulds. What do you want, sources, a certain kind of agency, a certain kind of sovereignty within the question? Like what do you, there’s a you within that question.

Chris Rose: 09:27 Want is a desire, so what do you as a specific person want specifically? I was thinking a lot about how specific this has to get recently because in our planning for our holiday trip, we’re all going as a family out to California, we’re spending some time with Charlotte’s extended family, so excited to see the uncles, and then there’s this period of time where I as an individual get to peel off and have four or five days alone in California. The certain plan was made that would take me up to San Francisco, and I’d be connecting with old friends, and my exes from before Charlotte, and I was maybe going to go to a sex party on New Year’s Eve, and this whole series of events started being scheduled, and I started noticing my body and how my body felt as I was making these plans. The more I paid attention to it, the more I was like, “Whoa, no, no, no.” Like, “This is not right. This is not actually what I want to do.”

Chris Rose: 10:31 I gave myself permission to cancel those plans and open up this wide open space of like, “You are alone in California for four or five days. What do you want? What do you want to do? What do you want to experience? What do you want to feel? How do you want to use that time?”

Chris Rose: 10:49 Like, “What would be most nourishing, most exciting, most pleasurable? Are we going for comforting and calm, or are we going for exciting and thrilling, or maybe a mix?” It’s like in the fantasy, like I, as in our day-to-day life, four days in California, I’d be like, “Yeah, I want that,” and then as soon as it’s a reality, it has to get specific. The specificity of your wants matter, and when you give yourself the opportunity to answer this question in the macro, “What do I want from my life? What are my values?”, are in the moment-to-moment. Like I literally have 20 minutes before I get in bed.

Chris Rose: 11:31 “What do I want right now?” If we really start dropping into this question, and as Charlotte said, and we’re going to explore this, that deep felt sense in the body when we start thinking about these options, when we start thinking about this question, when we start feeling into our desire, and we’re going to give you some tools to do this, so it’s not just abstract, but when you start feeling what your body is telling you, all of a sudden, these very specific things can start emerging, and we can start asking for what we want and we can start getting more of what we want. This is another big secret of this, is the more we ask for what we want out loud, the more likely we are to receive it, and it’s a snowball effect and it can be really beautiful and magical if we start allowing ourselves to have very specific wants, and then say them out loud to people who love us, and support us, and care about us.

Charlotte Rose: 12:34 Though this may sound simple, it is of course not so easy. There are so many factors that get in the way for many of us to be able to easily ask for what we want and know what we want, so let’s look at the context. Let’s look at some of the pieces that get in the way. The idea of feeling into our body and feeling what feels like a yes, what feels like a no, how do we do this practically? We need to slow down enough so that we can actually feel what we’re feeling.

Charlotte Rose: 13:08 Our culture encourages us to move so quickly and at such a pace, and we are inundated all the time with the shoulds, what we should be wanting, what we should be buying in order to feel happier. To be able to actually distinguish and separate that from what we actually specifically want as individuals is a skill set, and it is a practice and a skill to cultivate intentionally.

Chris Rose: 13:36 A lot of this depends on a trust of the brain in your gut, so a lot of traditional knowledge systems have known this for thousands of years. Modern science is just confirming and mapping this, but your gut, your viscera, your digestive system is full of neurons and is intimately connected to your heart, and to your brain, and to the hormonal system. We’re one big organism, but the neurology of the gut, the vagus nerve, we can geek out on this, but the short of it is our body has feelings, and when we listen to those feelings, there’s really good knowledge and information and wisdom within those feelings. If you can get onboard with that idea that our body has feelings that are valuable parts of our knowledge system as individuals and as a species, as humans, a lot of this relates to the mammalian neurology. Yeah. This is a whole [crosstalk 00:14:45]-

Charlotte Rose: 14:45 Save this for another time.

Chris Rose: 14:46 Yeah. This is a whole … I’ll drop some links again in the show notes page if you want to geek out on this, but this idea of the brain in your gut, your gut feelings, how you feel about a situation versus what you think about it. I’ll give you an example as we go into the holidays. Think about going home for the holidays, whatever that means to you, and if you paint that picture in your head and you feel into your body, perhaps there are people in your life that when you think about seeing them, you feel open, and warm, and cozy inside. You feel a yes. You feel an openness and a receptivity to that idea, that anticipated experience brings you pleasure and joy and a desire.

Chris Rose: 15:37 Perhaps there are people in your natal family or in your community that if you think about going to a holiday party with them, there’s a sense of constriction, contraction, a disgust or of a repelling feeling, and you’re like, “Ugh, I have to do that?” Notice those sensations. These are the feelings underneath the rational thoughts. These are our feelings in our body, our wisdom in our body, and we can tap into this in all sorts of ways for our erotic advantage. We’ll talk about this way more next year.

Chris Rose: 16:12 It comes a lot out of our study of mindful sex and our framing of what we do with massage, but this idea that we have wisdom and knowledge in our body beyond our brain is really important for this next piece. When we have to answer the question, “What do you want?”, you can think about that question and come up with things like a gift list on Amazon. Like I can think about what I want. If you start feeling into the question, “What do you want?”, a whole other galaxy of ideas and options become available to us, to feel into what do you want, because this is beyond the material. This is, “What do you want to feel? How do you want to live?”

Chris Rose: 16:58 “What kind of experiences you want to have, what kind of relationships you want to have, what kind of sex you want to be having?” We have to remember more and more to bring this back to sex, my dear. What kind of sex you want to be having, how you want to be touched, how you want to be fucked. Do you want to have rough sex? Do you want to have gentle sex?

Chris Rose: 17:17 Do you want lots and lots of full body touch? Do you want to have your hair grabbed and be spanked? The whole range is available to you, but to get what you want, you have to be specific and identify it. Here’s my process for identifying what I want in my body, and I started taking myself into this with this California trip, and in doing that, kind of recognize like, “Oh, I have this system I use when I think into potential options for things,” so the system is going into fantasy, unlocking the realm of fantasy, while paying attention to how your body feels. That’s the simple version of it.

Chris Rose: 17:59 We’ll be rolling some of this into the work we do next year, but the simple version is you’re going to really think through ideas, options, you’re going to fantasize, and then pay attention to how your body responds, and start identifying for yourself what feels like a yes, what feels like a pleasure, what feels like a desire, and what feels like a no, of repulsion, contraction, and you’ll learn for yourself how these things feel in your body, and you can access this quickly by starting with things that have already happened in your life. Get in a safe space, try to be relaxed, take a shower, go for a walk, and then lie down and spend a few minutes thinking about a peak erotic experience. We did a whole episode about this. Again, it’ll be in the show notes, but a peak erotic experience, one of the best erotic sexual experiences of your life. Think about it.

Chris Rose: 19:03 Go into deep sensual detail, the more specific you can be, and remember those details and the context of it, and how you felt in that moment. Think really deeply about it so you’re activating your brain, those neural networks in your brain, and then feel into your body. Notice how your heart feels, your breath, your stomach, your loins, your pelvis. Feel into all of that, and then notice. Notice, map it out. You might take notes for yourself or make a picture if you’re more of a visual person.

Chris Rose: 19:40 Feel it, install it. Okay. Shake that out, and then another day, do this same exercise and you want to be feeling like safe and resourced for this, but do this same exercise, thinking about a time where something didn’t go well, that it was a no, but you did it anyway, or a no and something was done to you, and I’m not recommending you relive your deepest trauma here. I’m inviting you here, just like we went to a peak erotic experience, go to a valley in your life. Like go to something that felt awful and shitty, and then start noticing how that feels in your body, and even talking about it right now, like going from that first peak erotic experience with you into this valley, I’m feeling my body change as we talk about this.

Chris Rose: 20:23 I’m looking in Charlotte’s eyes and watching her body change, feeling her breath contract. You might have heard that in the podcast. This is the secret sauce. Like this is the wisdom of your body speaking. When we pay attention to how we feel, we know how we feel about things. Again, the simplicity of this, but when you know how you feel about something, you start knowing what you want, what you want more of.

Chris Rose: 20:52 Before we move on, just to wrap up my story about California, like as I started feeling into like, “What do I really want? Do I want to be at a sex party on New Year’s Eve, 2020 alone?”, like, “Do I want to be in San Francisco?”, like I started calibrating my thoughts towards what I want, and I got a really clear picture of what I want. It turns out, it’s not at all San Francisco and it’s not at all a sex party alone, and I’m going to cultivate and shape a new experience, guided by this embodied feeling of yes, this embodied feeling of, “That’s what I want right now. That’s what would be most pleasurable.” I invite you into exploring this, and notice what you notice along the way.

Charlotte Rose: 21:41 Can I just go back to the piece where we’re encouraging people to really think about what their no feels like?

Chris Rose: 21:48 Yeah.

Charlotte Rose: 21:49 As a survivor, do you have recommendations for how to complete that for people if they have been really feeling into that, and then they are registering and learning what that shows up in their body as, and then what do you recommend after that?

Chris Rose: 22:07 Right. I mean, you can be gentle with this. You can titrate it, and this is why I say feel safe and resourced going into this, and you can choose your valley. Like you can choose just to think about how it feels when your mom demands something of you on Thanksgiving that you don’t want to be demanded of. You don’t have to go to your assaults, so thank you for that reminder, but within the realm of fantasy and playing with fantasy, one of the things I’ve done is if I get triggered or if I start thinking about a violation, or an assault, or some of my childhood abuse, or my family abuse, or I talk to a family member and that stuff is stirred up or whatever, I can change the narrative in my head and like recalibrate and come to a more embodied sense of power, so instead of leaving myself in that valley, I can imagine.

Chris Rose: 23:00 I can use my fantasy and my imagination to like write a different ending to the story, or to be like, “What would I have said to stand up for myself in that moment?”, and sometimes even having those words like saying out loud like, “No, I don’t want to do that,” or, “No, I’m not available for that.” This is also the opportunity to start pre-loading some of that language into your psyche, and this is, especially with like ongoing stuff, with like family members or relationships, feeling that no and feeling into the pattern of how a no feels, it might feel like you’re taking yourself into the ringer, but by having that aware, having that conscious in your mind of like, “Oh, that’s what I feel like when I’m being violated, when my boundaries are being crossed, when I’m doing something I don’t want to do,” then I can feel the first flickers of that feeling when I’m being asked to do something I don’t want to do, and I can preempt it. When you’re being asked to join a committee at your kid’s school and you feel that flicker in your belly, that’s like, “Ugh, really?”, you get to say, “No, I’m not available for that right now. I’m sorry. This is what I am available for,” or if your lover is pressuring you to do that sex act that they really want that you just do not want to do, you can finally come up with the language of, “No, that really, it doesn’t feel like something I’m into, so no thank you.”

Chris Rose: 24:31 “We’re going to explore where the yeses are.” What it does, it gets us out of that vague feeling of feeling the no, because we feel it whether or not we’re identifying it anyway. We feel it whether or not we are identifying it as a no, that sensation in the gut, the difference in the circulation and the respiratory system. Our bodies feel these feelings and they’re there, being circulated through our systems, and if we come into like dialogue with them and we can start identifying what we’re feeling and why, and in the mindful sex course, we call this like embodied emotions and having practices to access that and to notice how we’re feeling, it gives us such a huge range of intelligence about what we’re wanting, what we don’t want, what our motivations are, what we’re driven towards, what we’re repelled by, what we’re repulsed by, and it’s just such this well of intelligence so we can start changing our experience and saying yes to the things we want, asking for the things we want, receiving the things we want and saying no thank you to that, which will not serve us at this time. To bring it back to this question of, “What do you want?”, what do you want?

Chris Rose: 25:50 What do you want to experience this holiday season? Like a lot of us go into this holiday season with a ton of shoulds, and a lot of stress, and to-do lists, and it’s just crazy that as a culture, we’re like, “We’re going to give everyone time off so you can really stress out.” Like how do we calibrate a holiday season towards one that’s actually nourishing, and nurturing, and connecting, and replenishing, and resources us to go back into the New Year? What would that look like for you, and is there any way to bring some of those feelings into action to give yourself more of that experience? What do you want in your erotic life? You’re listening to this podcast.

Chris Rose: 26:35 You are here with us. We are grateful for that, and we want to know, we want you to feel into, “What do you want from your erotic life? What do you want to experience more of? How do you want to play? What do you want to feel and experience sexually, and in connection with another human being perhaps?

Chris Rose: 26:58 I’d love to know some of the answers to that question that come up for you, and then maybe what do you want out of some solo time? If you had five days in California, what would you do? Like how would you get specific with that, because I’m amazed at the options, you know. Do I want five days in the museums, or five days in the meditation hall, or five days in the dungeon? Like, “What do I want?”, or some mix of it all. Asking ourselves these questions, “What do you want for an afternoon?”, take one hour and fill it with your deepest wants, and nourish yourself by giving yourself what you want, instead of just defaulting to your shoulds, or your to-do lists, like the demands on you, and notice what it feels like to be in dialogue with this question, “What do you want?”

Charlotte Rose: 27:49 It requires separating from the obligations and the shoulds, and sometimes it is hard to carve out that time to really intentionally push up away the things that you should be doing, because that list is endless.

Chris Rose: 28:06 She says as a tired mother.

Charlotte Rose: 28:10 Yeah, and this, I knew so much what I wanted before having a kid. That was a very easy question for me to answer. With the new context of being a mother, I do find this question much more challenging and I’m really having to push against my own internal shoulds. I have a lot of ideas about what it means to be a good mother, it turns out, and I am challenged to make more space and time for myself, and I know I’m not alone in this. There are a lot of ideas that we integrate from culture about what is good, and what is correct, and we do this in the bedroom all the time, so we all have different areas where this shows up.

Charlotte Rose: 28:56 I feel that less in the bedroom and more in relationship to my time in mothering, so it’s a valuable question to explore no matter what phase you’re in, no matter what is available to you right now. Looking at reality, and then how can you make small or big adjustments with what is available for you, because not everyone is going to be able to take five days in California, we know that, but can you take two hours to yourself where you are saying no to obligations and you’re carving out just time to nourish you and what you want? It’s all about taking micro moments. Recently, I was remembering that before I had a kid, I would have like candlelit showers on my own often. I was like, “Why did I put that? Why did I stop that?”

Charlotte Rose: 29:50 Like I’m not going to a spa for three days and these moments where I’m taking a long, luxurious shower, feel really indulgent, and delicious, and nourishing to me.

Chris Rose: 30:00 Well, this is important. You stopped it because with an infant, candles aren’t safe.

Charlotte Rose: 30:05 Yeah, that’s right.

Chris Rose: 30:06 This is the thing, context changes.

Charlotte Rose: 30:08 And our bathroom was really small and there was no room for her in that bathroom when she was a baby, and then I forgot.

Chris Rose: 30:13 Totally. Context changes, and then it changes again, and sometimes we have to kind of shake ourselves awake enough to even look around and understand what our context is, what we have agency over, what we can change, and then take those opportunities, and sometimes little changes in our life make huge watershed differences in our life experience, and even the mental freedom.

Charlotte Rose: 30:39 Yeah.

Chris Rose: 30:39 This is the thing, we did a whole episode about what to do with desires unfulfilled. Again, I’ll link in the show notes page. This is going to be a long show notes page, but there’s so many related conversations here, but we all have way more desires than we can make happen in our lives, and that’s just so important to know as you’re going into asking yourself this question, “What do you want?” As soon as you start dropping into it, you might be flooded with what you want, and then how to understand how to shape that into your day-to-day life is a big process and it’s a process of imagination and translation. When you identify the themes, you want to feel a spa-like experience, great, that experience for yourself. Candles are really easy to buy.

Charlotte Rose: 31:27 Yeah.

Chris Rose: 31:27 I would buy you a candle the next time at the grocery store.

Charlotte Rose: 31:29 No, but I did this. I had a longing. I was having a longing for more nourishment, more of that kind of delicious, “I have all the space for myself,” and so I rearranged the bathroom and brought a candle in, and put more of my massage lotion back in there, all these things that were not, because they were like kids’ toys there. I rearranged it, and it was such a simple thing. It was such a small thing, and now the experience of having a candlelit shower, and then with a massage, and then I massage my feet after, I massage my body, and it feels really freaking good, and it didn’t take a lot of shift in my material reality, and it is a bit of time, but the output is so nourishing.

Chris Rose: 32:14 But that process you’re describing started with paying attention to yourself long enough to notice the longing, identify the longing, get specific with it, shift what we already had in our home apparently, and then you created a context to give yourself that experience over and over again. I think that’s also good to remember, is some of this work is upfront and some of the harder conversations with your partner about, “What do I want?”, well, let me really tell you, will create watershed changes that over many years, you will benefit from, and will create the skills to ask yourself this over and over again because we noticed that both our desires change and context changes. I think your example of like the context of early motherhood, being really important, because you have now shifted out of that we’re in a different stage of parenthood, but we have to pay attention enough to change our behavior with that.

Charlotte Rose: 33:13 Remember that the context has changed, and then shift ourselves to get bigger again or just different, instead of those limitations being perceived.

Chris Rose: 33:26 Then, how to be honest with ourselves and real with ourselves about what is available to us, because more is available to us than most of us ask for. We are not trained to ask for things out loud. We’re even trained as you blow out your birthday candles to keep your wishes a secret, but how does anyone know what you want? How can people give you what you want if you don’t say it? Just notice that. If you say your wishes out loud, if you hand people your wishlist, it is so much easier for them to give you that gift, and I’m not talking about the stuff under the tree.

Chris Rose: 34:03 I’m talking about what we want from our life. “I want deep friendship with you. Can you show up for this with me? I want a sense of adventure in our relationship. What will that look like for us? I want a little more freedom to explore my interest in music.”

Chris Rose: 34:22 “Can I go out once a week or once a month? What is realistic for us?” When we identify our wants, we can start changing our behaviors, and therefore, our lived experiences.

Charlotte Rose: 34:33 Right.

Chris Rose: 34:34 This is true in bed, out of bed, micro, macro. Just start playing with this, giving yourself permission to want and trusting what comes up there, and knowing you are wise enough to adapt that to your life circumstance, and that acknowledging wants is not going to take you off the deep end. As we practice answering this question, as we practice asking out loud for what we want, as we practice shifting the context, as you were beautifully saying about making that translation from fantasy to desire, from what is possible to what I actually want in my real life, that’s fantasy to desire, and then from desire to action, what can I do? What can I do in my real life because I can spin off in California and be like, “Well, I’ll go hiking for five days. Maybe not the best, most possible option for my body right now, but what does that desire speak to, time outside, long walks? We don’t have the budget to like go to a retreat center for five days, but maybe I can get a small room somewhere and create that space for myself.”

Chris Rose: 35:45 That translation, I think is so important, and in our conversations about fantasy, again, we’ll link to some other conversations about this. We talk about how important it is to go from the realm of pure imagination where anything is possible. Feel into that. Like feel into your fantasies. Translate that into desires, what you actually want, and now we’re translating that into actions. What can you do given your current context, given your current agency in your specific situation right now? That’s where the rubber hits the road, as they say or the latex hits the lube.

Chris Rose: 36:26 I just made that up. Think that’s going to stick, but that’s where it gets real because that’s where if your lover’s saying, “What do you want?”, and in your belly you’re saying like, “I want to be tossed around and roughed up and spanked, and dah, dah, dah,” like getting from that feeling and identifying that desire, which can be hard enough to translating that into the context of you and your husband on a Tuesday night, like that is where a lot of the hard work is and where the baby steps are, and where you can start asking for small pieces perhaps, and building capacity and building trust together, but it starts all from this honesty of, “What do I want?” I’ll tell you what I want, so tell me what you want what you really, really want.

Charlotte Rose: 37:16 What you really, really want.

Chris Rose: 37:16 Oh, wow. I wish we had the license to that song. I would fade out into glory. Tell us what you want. Be in dialogue with this question. Ask yourself, “What do you want?”

Chris Rose: 37:29 “What do I want to feel? What do I want to experience? What do I want to … What values do I want to live my life through? How do I want to be fucked?” All of these variations of the question of what do you want, and then let us know.

Chris Rose: 37:45 Go to pleasuremechanics.com/love, pleasuremechanics.com/free. Drop in deeper with us, be in community with us, and be in dialogue with us. As soon as you join our free course or our newsletter, you’ll start getting emails from us and you can reply to any of those emails and reach us directly. Be in dialogue with us. Share your stories.

Chris Rose: 38:08 We’ve gotten so many amazing emails recently. Thank you so much for sharing with us your experience, how you’re using this podcast, how you’re using the courses in your relationships. It is thrilling to hear how this work lands for you. If this work has made a difference in your life, if our presence in your life week-to-week is a good thing, if you want more of us, show us the love at pleasuremechanics.com/love so you can drop in deeper with us and support us in this work so we can keep going.

Charlotte Rose: 38:45 Yes, and thank you again for those emails that you send us. It is so nourishing to hear how our work is supporting you. Thank you so much for being a part of our world, for listening to this podcast, and we hope that this has given you a little inspiration to really think and feel into what you’d like more of. What do you want more of, in big ways and in small ways, and then give yourself permission to just have a little bit more of that, whatever that is, and see if it makes you feel fulfilled and satisfied, because that’s the other piece is then noticing how it makes you feel once you experience it. There’s so many parts to this, but playing and stretching yourself in any part of it is valuable and useful for all the other areas of your life, and we hope that over this holiday season, that there are some delicious moments where you get to ask for and receive what you most want, and that you get to carve out a little bit more space for that, and then it feels good.

Chris Rose: 39:56 Happy holidays, dear ones. We will be back in January of 2020, and we look forward to another decade with you. Another decade.

Charlotte Rose: 40:09 No. That one doesn’t have to stick.

Chris Rose: 40:12 We look forward to another decade with you here at pleasuremechanics.com. Thank you so much for listening to Speaking of Sex with The Pleasure Mechanics. I’m Chris.

Charlotte Rose: 40:22 I’m Charlotte.

Chris Rose: 40:23 We are the Pleasure Mechanics.

Charlotte Rose: 40:24 Wishing you a lifetime of pleasure. Decades and decades of pleasure. No.