The Pleasure Principle - Amy Waterman
Transcript
Speaker 1
Make love not war has joined pateon. What's Patreon? You ask. It's an amazing website where fans like you can directly support an artist like an Italian prince would do during the renaissance era for artists such as Leonardo Da Vinci or Michelangelo. You don't have to donate a bag of gold and silver like a patron prince to be awesome. Simply go to www.patrion.com/make love not war and click become a patron. It takes about three minutes and it's very easy. If you feel like a wealthy Italian prince after donating a few bucks, well then you go ahead and own that feeling.
Speaker 2
Today we interview Amy Waterman, author of the pleasure principle, how pleasure wins you health, happiness and love. We all have a bad girl inside of us all who knows what she wants, who knows? It's okay to be selfish and who knows that her pleasure is important and if we can connect with that inner bad girl and ask her what she wants to do, every once in a while we can make better choices and we can be more alive and vibrant in our lives. What I am saying is you need to prioritize your own pleasure and by carving out time for yourself to do what turns you on, what makes you happy, you become that fun person who naturally brings fun to everything else. We have two modes. We have chill mode and freak mode. Chill mode is your. Is Your parasympathetic nervous system where you relax.
Speaker 3
Yes.
Speaker 2
Freak mode is the mode that most of us live in it and it's when it's fight or flight, it's when the cortisol is pumping, you're ready for action at everything shuts down because you are ready for battle. One of the problems is one of the things that shuts down when you're in freak mode is sexual arousal.
Speaker 4
Okay?
Speaker 2
Why are we waiting for them? It's nice if a man brings you flowers or chocolates, but, but you should be doing that for yourself about him. That's great. If he does it, you can do whatever he wants. You want those flowers? Can you go get those bars for yourself?
Speaker 4
Okay,
Speaker 2
your pleasure, please. As the people around you. The best way to make your house can feel pleasure. The best way to have happy kids is to feel total unselfconscious, exquisite pleasure and happiness yourself. This material is for self sacrificing, people pleasing women who need to embrace their selfish side to become more balanced.
Speaker 1
Let's get started.
Speaker 1
Hi and welcome to make more love not war. This is Terah Harrison, a licensed professional counselor and relationship expert. This is her husband, Jeff Harrison. Have no qualifications whatsoever. Just a normal dude. We are here with Amy Waterman. Amy's dating and relationship advice has been featured in over a dozen books and online courses. She has an amazing website, your brilliance.com that has all kinds of advice for women. The best way for me to describe it, you're brilliant. Dot Com is if sex in the city where a website, this would be it. Her latest book, the pleasure principle helps women find more life affirming choices that focuses more on pleasure instead of simply avoiding pain. Most women find themselves working for others pleasure and they forget their own. Let's learn more about the pleasure principle together. I love to start off with asking someone about their story, so what I would really love to know is what inspires you to do research and write about women's pleasure.
Speaker 2
Well, the story starts way back in 2005 and I ended up working for a small internet company in New Zealand and what had always dreamed of up to that point, and I'm sure everybody my age, it was being Carrie Bradshaw in sex and the city. She's my best friend, so it was great and the company had a need for a dating and relationship products and so I jumped in and started writing books and it really gave me the excuse I needed to go and do the research and it helped that I was single and I could go out and like practice all this stuff myself and I was young. Two thousand five was very young back then. So fast forward, what has been 13 years now and my life has changed a lot. I have a daughter now who's six at the moment and my life is not look quite as fun as it did back in 2005. I work a lot, I'm always busy and one of the things that happened to really start me on my pleasure seeking journey was I was walking by the Sofa where my daughter was watching youtube and I had my arms full of laundry and I said, honey, are you okay? You're good. And she got mad at me and she turned around and she said, mommy, we never have any fun anymore.
Speaker 1
Oh, oh. And that just gets you right in the heart. She was right. Like that's the worst thing. She was absolutely right. Yes. And you know, you're so right because just the other day as I'm running around doing all the things around the house and I think this is definitely a common experience for. I can speak
Speaker 2
for mothers that my daughter said the same thing. She said, mommy, you always have so many chores to do. You're so busy. So I, yeah, I get that feeling and some. One of the things that is so wrong, but it's so true, is that we think that we're caring for our families by making all the lunches, making sure we buy healthy foods. I'm making sure the laundry done by tidying up the house and the worst thing is especially our little children goes over their heads. That's not what they want from us because what they want us to do is they want us to play with them. Yeah. They just want our time there. Just want to be with us [inaudible] and to be with fun. Mummy, not stressed out, busy ordering, demanding mummy, but fun mummy and and fund mummy is the mummy who is not thinking about, oh my goodness, if I take 10 minutes to play, I'm not going to get all these chores done and we're not going to get to bed on time and then she's going to be tired tomorrow and that she is going to be great.
Speaker 2
That's not fun. Fun. Mommy is the mummy. She gets on the weekends. We're right. We have a whole day just to have fun and be ourselves and so that was my wake up call, but it wasn't the only wake up call. I started to think back about previous relationships and I saw a really interesting pattern. The pattern I saw is that in the beginning of a relationship, you're dating and what's dating? Having Fun, it's pleasure, it's great. It's fun. Not Fun, mummy, but fun. Whoever you are, you know that's when you're your fun person. You're not stressed, you're just having a great time and then maybe you get married or you live in together. Those are the two triggers. Suddenly life is just this, you know, hamster wheel of going to work and getting the car fixed and who needs to do this and scheduling that and paying these bills and that's all it is.
Speaker 2
And maybe a couple things, right? They have date night but they're so tired and they're so stressed and I don't think it's any surprise that the first two years of marriage are the most danger there. The danger zone where divorce is concerned. That's where a lot of divorces happen because the fun life was dating and then the reality hits and it couldn't survive without the fun because then you're pairing each other with drudgery. The drudgery of just the day to day life instead of pairing each other with fun and so you don't see each other. Is that oasis of fun that you did when you were dating? And then we do something worse. We start to hone in on all the problems. Well, the reason I'm not happy is because he does this well. If he just didn't work so hard, we'd have more time together.
Speaker 2
Then we'd have more fun. Well, maybe we need to go to therapy and we need to fix our problems. So you're trying is good, right? You're trying to solve your problems and you're trying to restore your relationship and restore the love, but you're doing it by focusing on all the ways your relationship causes you pain. And so in the pleasure principle is a complete turnaround of all that. The pleasure principle says that what we need to create connection and what actually feeds love is pleasure is fun, joy, and if we don't have those things and we think that focusing on fixing our problems, gonna solve our marriage is going to go downhill. Because what's gonna happen is being in that relationship will feel like pain and that pain won't feel temporary. It'll feel like it's always going to be hard work, and that's when people think about separating
Speaker 1
so true because the other person is a reminder of the pain and the hard work without a reward. And how long is this gonna go on and it just feels overwhelming
Speaker 5
and then
Speaker 1
I won out because I don't see an end to this.
Speaker 2
Right? And so here's the great thing. When, when I, as a woman, think about that. I think how incredibly unfair it is. We work our butts off for our families. We work all day, we come home and we put in our second shift doing all the domestic work and nobody appreciates us, right? No, we appreciates the work we put in. But the thing is what we need more than our partners more than our children, even what we need is that pleasure for herself. And so what I'm saying is that you need to go out on date night with your partner and make sure that he has fun. Because if he doesn't have fun, he might leave you. What I am saying is something different. What I am saying is that you need to prioritize your own pleasure and by carving out time for yourself to do what turns you on, what makes you happy, you become that fun person who naturally brings fun to everything else. So it's not true that I'm saying, right, well, in addition to all these jobs you're doing, you also need to make sure your husband and your kids have a fun time. I'm not saying that what I'm saying is right. It's time to forget about all the stuff you do for other people. What are you doing for yourself to give yourself the joy and pleasure of being alive?
Speaker 1
Yeah, because you are your own instrument. So if you're not feeding yourself,
Speaker 5
then
Speaker 1
you can't do anything for anyone else. And so I talked to women about that a lot as well in the sense of, you know, a lot of it's sometimes hard to convince women that you know, the self care is necessary and so that Kinda helps them along. You know, like you're not responsible for your children's fund, your husband's friend, anyone else's fun, but there's no way that they're going to have fun around you if you're not feeding yourself, not caring for yourself, not giving yourself what you need.
Speaker 2
Pleasure [inaudible], and here's another reason why, why women need to on their own pleasure so much. It is essential for health. Now the studies haven't been there. This is very in the beginning stages of research, but Dr. Christiane Northrup, who is an ob Gyn, has found research suggesting that pleasure can actually cure certain health, chronic health conditions, and the way it works is through this molecule called nitric oxide, and nitric oxide is interest in me. The mechanism behind Viagara because what it does is it relaxes your blood vessels so blood flows through more, more easily, and so you could take Viagra to get this, but another sure fire away to turn on that spigot of nitric oxide is to experience pleasure but not the kind of pleasure. We're not talking about sexual pleasure. It doesn't have to be that and we're not talking about the pleasures you're supposed to like.
Speaker 2
Like I'm going to have a very expensive dinner and that's going to give me pleasure, the pleasures that are unique and intrinsic to you, the things that really turn you on inside, and those may not be things that cost any money. They may be things that everybody else thinks is stupid, but the only thing that's going to give you that nitric oxide boost is something your body recognizes as your pleasure. It relaxes you. You stop worrying. You're just totally focused on the present moment and there's no pain and there's no guilt. There's just that something we can learn from children, right? They, they don't have the obstacles we put in front of ourselves to seek their own pleasure. They're very good at it and you notice how healthy they are, how quick they bounced back from sickness. The middle. Either bodies are new and fresh, but I think a large part of that is they're not carrying the worries, are not carrying the stress and they can find joy in everything.
Speaker 6
So true. So Tara talks a lot about how women will have a lot of things on their mind. You know, all the lists of things that they have to all these boxes open that have to be checked and all this stuff. How do they get to have the pleasure? I mean cause it seems to me like the way Tara talks about it to me as he always says, I have to have all these boxes, boxes checked and everything done, then I can have the pleasure or something like that. So how do they get to that point?
Speaker 2
That is a super question because what I can tell you is once you're a master, you can snake moments of pleasure in anywhere. But for, for beginners and for I think most people, you've got to schedule it and what you've got to do is say right, every night between this time and this time I'm going into the bedroom and I am not bringing my phone in the bedroom and I'm putting a do not disturb sign on that door and I am completely, utterly uncontactable for 15 minutes, 20 minutes. Whatever you think you can get away with. Now your family's not gonna like that because nobody likes it. When Mommy is not available. You're going to do that because you need to get connected back with yourself again and you're going to do inside that bedroom what ever you darn well want to do. You could just lie on the bed and just go, oh, you can do anything, but this is your time and this is your time to rediscover what it is you really want.
Speaker 2
Now, in my book, I give a whole bunch of practical exercises to help you develop your pleasure muscle and one of those exercises which I really love, and this doesn't come from me. This comes from a lot of people suggest this is the idea of a pleasure jar and what you do is you get a glass jar and you write down on little slips of paper activities that you really, really enjoy. And you write one activity per per little slip of paper and you put all the slips of paper and your pleasure chart. And then you decorate the pleasure jar so that when you look at it, there's a big smile on your face. And then once a day or once a week or whenever you can manage, you say, right, this is my time, and you reach into that pleasure dart and you pull something out and whatever that activity is, you do it.
Speaker 1
That's very powerful and it doesn't take a lot of time and you can put it in your Google calendar. So the whole family knows, you know.
Speaker 2
Do you have to. Sometimes in the beginning I think you do have to make sure that your bought your chew. You're by yourself. You're not available to other people during that time. Because I think as women we tend to think our pleasure comes from pleasing other people and I'm going to meet a lot of my pleasure does come from pleasing other people. I think that's one of my main sources of pleasure is making other people happy, but we're not necessarily doing the things that feed our own soul. And sometimes we don't even know what our soul craves and yearns for. And that's why I think at the beginning it's good to have that space where it's just you and you're figuring out what in the world do I want?
Speaker 1
Yes, for sure. And making that time for yourself. You're telling yourself that you're worthy of the time you're modeling for your family, that you're worthy of the time under respect moms boundaries or whoever is taking the time for themselves and that they also can do that for themselves. And so you're really teaching everyone in the family how to be able to focus on the pleasure by doing it for yourself. What a great way to know that we're raising, especially our daughter. There's
Speaker 2
two value themselves because if they see their mother taking time for themselves, they'll realize, hey, that's just what mothers do. All mothers go and take 15 minutes a day for themselves. So when they become a mother, they're gonna say, right, well I guess a better do the thing mothers do, which is I'm going to take time everyday for ourselves. So we really do need to model this, especially for our daughters. And I noticed right now already I'm passing down to my daughter and she's only six. The people pleasing tendencies. So unfortunately part of my character is I really like doing nice things for other people. It really makes me happy and she loves doing nice things for other people. But one of the things I've noticed recently is her saying, I'll ask her a question, do you want to do this? So then she'll say whatever makes you happy, mummy. Oh, and it's beautiful, but it's so awful.
Speaker 1
Okay that I love that. But at the same time, I want to know what makes you happy and I want you to know what makes you happy is the key. And has your husband ever said to you, what do you want for dinner, honey? Oh, whatever you want, honey. Yes. I have an intervention. I call the Chinese food intervention, which, which is when I'm working with women and I'm working with them on making their own choices for themselves to check in with what they really want with anything. And so a really concrete way to do that as checking in with what do I really want to eat and if you're going out together and like say a couple is going out together, that is so classic where he will say, well where do you want to go? And she says, oh, whatever you want. And then he'll name all these places and she won't want to go to any of them because in the end she wanted Chinese food, but she knew he didn't want Chinese food and so she didn't suggest it. But then it's like, well, he's asking. So he wants to know what you want because you feeling pleasure and pleasing yourself makes him happy too because he sees you happy. It's a win win.
Speaker 7
Let's take a moment to stop and take a quick break. We'll be right back.
Speaker 1
Do you look at your wedding pictures and wonder, how did things go so wrong? Have you given up on your relationship? Are you going to let what you've built together crumble to dust? If not, let me work with you to get your connection back on track. I'm opening my private practice up to a limited number of listeners that are serious about fighting for their relationships. Don't let your relationship, your family, your life fall apart because you let your pride hold you back from asking for help. Call me at six, eight, two, six, five, one, five, seven, five, two, or email me@makelovenotwaratGmail.com. Today we can turn this around together.
Speaker 7
Okay.
Speaker 2
And it's really hard for women to get in touch with her. Pleasure. So one of the great parts about this pleasure journey is that I've been learning about all the amazing pleasure teachers out there. You know, women like Mama Gina, who has a school of womanly arts in New York and there are so many teachers that are dedicated to helping women experience full bodied pleasure. And I want to distinguish between what I call pseudo pleasures and genuine pleasures. So many of us think that pleasure is just something nice like going for a movie or maybe having a glass of wine, but the kind of pleasure I'm talking about is a very specific pleasure, is the kind of pleasure that engages the sympathetic nervous system, so it's actually a bodily reaction. It's not an assessment in your mind whether something's pleasurable, not if it is pleasurable, you'll have this bodily reaction, and if it's not, she won't.
Speaker 2
So pseudo pleasures are things like watching a movie or having a glass of wine. There are things that make you check out of your body, so when you're drinking, you may think this is great. I'm drinking and I'm having a great time, but you're not in your body. You're kind of floating in that place. Alcohol takes you similarly. You're watching a movie. Oh, that's great. I'm relaxing with my family, but where are you? You're not your body. You're not in the present moment. You are in your head in this world someone else created and those things are great. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with those things, but what I'm saying is they're not filling your pleasure quota, so I want to talk a little bit about what is then pleasure from this perspective I'm taking, so I talk about we have two modes. We have chill mode and freak mode.
Speaker 2
Chill mode is your is your parasympathetic nervous system where you relax and it's called rest and digest, and it's where your, your food starts. Starts doing this in your body knows it's safe. It's okay. Freak mode is the mode that most of us live in it and it's when it's fight or flight, it's when the cortisol is pumping, you're ready for action and everything shuts down because you are ready for battle, which is great to face life's challenges, but one of the problems is one of the things that shuts down when you're in freak mode is sexual arousal and that makes a lot of sense. You don't want to be. You're running away from a saber tooth tiger and see a handsome cavemen there in the distance. A, Ooh, that looks nice. You got to forget about that guy and you gotta run and escape. That's not a time to think about sex.
Speaker 6
For some people, I feel like some people feel like if they are not feeling that push to just keep accomplishing all these things, that they're either being lazy or they're. They're wasting their time or any of that kind of stuff.
Speaker 2
Right, and that is. That is why we are stuck with bodies that are wearing down. We are literally stuck with freak mode the whole time because we're pushing, we're pushing, we're accomplishing, we're achieving, we gotta, we gotta meet those goals. We got to do this, but unfortunately your body needs to switch into rest and digest bode. Chill mode. Every so often you've got to digest your food. You got to repair and maintain your body, and also you got to feel sexy. And how often do you feel sexy when you're stressed? I can't think of a time doesn't happen. Exactly. So if you want to get sexy with your partner or if you want to go out on a date and you have lived and lived your life and freak mode, right? GotTa do gotta achieve, got a. When you're going to go out on that date and you're going to be a walking ball of stress and he's going to pick up that stress and say, Oh, you're not going to be feeling very sexy, and he's gonna be like, she isn't very sexy and it's a failure.
Speaker 2
But what if you go to that date having just done something that made you feel really good, whatever that is for you and you're relaxed and you're in chill mode and you come and say hi, nice to meet you. You know, would you like to go sit down? Whatever you want to say. And he's like, whoa. I feel good just being around that woman, man. She's hot or not because you change what you were wearing, but because you switched from freak mode to chill mode. So freak mode may get you things in life, but it's not going to get you what you want, which is connection with other people and love. Yeah, and I also see freak mode is that hustle for worthiness. You know, like you're just trying to. You're trying to get that the golden ring, you know, at the I'm thinking of catcher in the rye or he's always going for that golden ring, but you're, you're just trying to get something that proves your worthiness, but you know what, you never get there.
Speaker 2
Instead of being able to just love you for who you are and know that other people will love you for you, which is going back to getting in touch with yourself and being able to feed yourself, which is going back to the pleasure principle of I'm worthy of feeling pleasure and I don't have to do something to get it. I can just give it to myself. And here's another great thing about pleasure. Now we do tend to think that that hustling for worthiness is gonna. Get us the, as you said, the golden rule. We think it's going to work, but what the pleasure principle is, it is a very root is, is a choice between two ways of living. Either you can live your life trying to avoid pain, trying to avoid being fired, try to avoid being rejected, or you can live your life pursuing the things that make you feel good.
Speaker 2
The pleasure. So let's take for example, going for a promotion at work. You can either say, right, I'm going to work really hard because if I don't, I'm going to be left behind and that person's going to get promoted over me and I'm going to fail and I'm going to be 50 and I'm not going to have a retirement fund and I'll be humiliated because I'll never have done anything in life. I mean, that all would definitely make you work hard to get the promotion right. There's another way to do it and it's to apply the pleasure principle. Say, right, you know what? I really love this job. I'm, I am so in love. The work I'm doing and I really enjoy trying to attain excellence and I can't wait to see what I can contribute to this company and how I can be of service and you fill up with the excitement of what it's going to be like to contribute and serve in a bigger way. That's the pleasure principle at work and I believe 100 percent, both of those will get you to where you want to go, but only one of them will make your life fun.
Speaker 1
Definitely. And just thinking of that example and being able to redirect and reframe for couples of, of instead of focusing on the problems, thinking about you know, about how, how wonderful this relationship is going to be. As we continue to grow together and as even going through difficult times together. That is going to bring us closer because it's an opportunity for us to connect and support each other. Instead of thinking, oh, we're going through this really hard time. It's terrible. I just, you know, I, I'm so stressed and you know, it's really being able to see as an opportunity to be able to be more connected instead of disconnecting and when you see it that way, you make it that way.
Speaker 2
It is so true because what happens when couples start to struggle is they focus on their problems. They're mad at each other. They don't want to spend time together and a couple that eventually splits, thinks one thought above everything. They think, you know how awful it is, is going to be this awful forever. That's what eventually leads them to separate or get a divorce. Successful couples, on the other hand, have a different view. Yes, is just as terrible for them. They go through terrible, hard, awful times, but they take breaks from yelling at each other or whatever they're doing to reconnect in the little ways to make each other a cup of tea, to go out for a walk on the beach, to visit their family, whatever makes them happy and they know that if they can just get through the pain, there is a lifetime of those peaceful, happy moments that they'll get to enjoy, so they see that pain is temporary and they motivate themselves to keep working through it because they see those beautiful, wonderful times they can still have together as being the price has been the goal. They're going after the pleasure rather than avoiding the pain. Yes,
Speaker 1
and even knowing that the pain going through the pain together, there's a reward with that because you get so much closer to each other when you're holding hands through it instead of pushing each other away through it
Speaker 2
and so many couples do don't think that I think is the hardest thing for me. Now. I've done a lot of work with marriages. Remember, it was saved my marriage today and one of the hardest things for me is to see couples believe that because they're fighting because they're struggling. It means they picked the wrong person and it can't work out because if this was a healthy good marriage, they wouldn't be fighting and they wouldn't be struggling and you and I both know that's wrong. These all temporary situations that as long as you've got that commitment to growth and the knowledge that that pleasure is around the corner, you can make it through there and you may go back to the pain and you'll come out of it again. You just have to persevere.
Speaker 1
Well, it's kind of like the idea that, you know, when you take your two year old, two year old to the pediatrician and you're saying, oh, he's just throwing all these tantrums and, and testing my boundaries all the time and it's just driving me crazy. And your pediatrician says, well, that's really healthy. In fact, that is developmentally where your child should be. I'm so glad to hear that. You know, and it's the same thing with having conflict in relationships because that's really healthy. When I see couples who come in and say, we don't fight at all, that's what I'm really worried about them because it means that they're not truly connecting because conflict comes with as part of a true connection and and working through it together really in the end feels good.
Speaker 2
It does, and I think one of the reasons sometimes there's no conflict is because women especially have been taught to people. Please, please others instead of pleasing themselves. And I know I've definitely been guilty in this in relationships, if there's a sticking point, if there's a topic that always makes a fight, I will just refuse to think about it. Pretend it doesn't exist and just say it'll all be okay and I'll be okay and I'll deny reality. And that's not how a healthy, successful relationship works. It doesn't work by you denying your needs and denying your values to keep things smooth. And I hope this is one thing that the pleasure principle can teach women, is that when you prioritize your pleasure, you're better able to set boundaries, you're better able to tell him exactly how to please you, and your relationship may feel different at first, but it will feel so much better because you're both being honest rather than trying to keep it all on an even keel.
Speaker 1
So true. And when you're, when you know that you're able to give yourself the pleasure, you don't feel like you're depending on someone else for pleasure, when someone else is giving it to you, it's icing. That's great. I mean obviously we all, we all enjoy that too, but you don't need that. And so then you're really truly complimenting each other and of depending on each other to have those needs met. And that's just an even stronger couple.
Speaker 2
So true. It's the switch from codependency to inter dependence, which I think is a journey. Most women, at least in my era, make because we were brought up to serve our men and to serve our families. And we need to learn that actually we need to serve ourselves.
Speaker 1
It's so true, and our families will be so much happier because we're not going to resent them. I know,
Speaker 2
and it is going back to, you know, my daughter saying, mommy, we never have time anymore to play. And it's been a real challenge for me because she is 100 percent right. I did an amazing course of therapy with her. That was this parent child interactive therapy. We're literally all we do is we learned to play with our children in a way that satisfies their need for attention and quality time and the goal of it is you're supposed to be able to satisfy their need for quality time and only five minutes a day never worked for me like that. But one of the wonderful things I have learned so much about relationships for my daughter because she forces me to get really conscious about how I'm interacting. And one of the things I learned from this was to focus on something. Again, a technique I'm sure you know about when you are in a situation where you're not sure what to say or what to do, you try to repeat back what you see them doing or what you see them saying, so your partner comes to you and says, oh, work was just so terrible today.
Speaker 2
Instead of saying, oh honey, you know, let's just get over it and put a smile on your face. You always complain. You can say things like, wow, I can see that your face is red. You're sweating and you know you look really stressed or I hear you. I hear that your work must have not been very good today. Would you like to talk about it more? What you're doing is it sounds when you start doing it, it sounds really stupid. You sound like, I'm just repeating back when they just told me. It sounds kind of funny, but this is what makes people feel heard. This is where they really know that you're giving them attention and with children, it's something as simple as saying, I see you're playing with the blue blocks instead of the red blocks, or I see that you're building an amazing console.
Speaker 2
Whatever it is you are trying to show them that you are present and you're paying attention. Yes. And being heard is powerful at any age. And I've noticed, um, when I, when I work with adults, I talked to them about their inner child or you know, that the fact that as adults we have the same needs as children to feel heard, to feel understood. And you know how kids will repeat the same thing over and over again. And sometimes all they want you to do is just say, yes, the block is blue. You know, and that's what we're doing as adults with each other all the time. The same thing comes up over and over again because that person is not feeling heard. The person is not trying to annoy you or nag you or just, you know, continue to harp on you. They, there's something they really need you to know.
Speaker 2
And that's why they keep repeating it and also we don't have to fix our partners moods. When our children are sad, when our partners are upset, we don't have to make them happy again. Yes, because they need their struggles. It's not ours, it's theirs they needed for themselves because going back to how struggles make you stronger, it's going to make them feel higher, self efficacy and and be good for their self esteem. So, and it's troubled or good research has found that if you don't allow yourself to feel your negative feelings, you also cut off your ability to feel your positive feelings. So when you allow yourself to have that moment of grief or to spare or upset and really feel it and you can witness it for someone else, it passes through much more smoothly and crazily enough enables you to feel joy much more intensely. Because one of the really interesting things about pleasure research, he's how uncomfortable we are with intense pleasure. We just don't want to be that happy. It makes us kind of freak out a bit. Maybe we think that if we're to happy then the pendulum's gonna swing and something bad's going to happen, or maybe we think that people will look at a strange if we, if we really express our joy,
Speaker 2
so why not get a little bit more comfortable everyday with feeling really, really good? How do I not baby steps, right? Yeah, and give yourself permission to feel good because you have the power to do that. Why do you think
Speaker 6
most people don't feel like they should have pleasure? Like what was the hold up?
Speaker 2
I think it all goes back to our American roots. I think that our puritanical for fathers came over to this country bringing an anti pleasure and anti joy philosophy that is embedded in American culture today and I say American because I don't see other countries necessarily having the same struggle we have. I see the French, you know when they're seven course meals. I see the siestas and in Spain and there seems to be a very American thing about working hard and driving yourself to the very end and not necessarily.
Speaker 2
If you have pleasure hiding your pleasure, like not showing it to other people, doing it in private because you don't want people to know that you actually relax every once in a while. I think it's very, very part of our culture. Oh yes. Uh, it's a, it's a competition of WHO's busier. People just go and in the way that we communicate and connect is talking about how busy we are and all the things we have to do. And I love Arianna Huffington. I just think she's doing such great work because what she's trying to do is make companies change their culture so that it's not a badge of pride to say I worked in 80 hour week last week or I only functioned on four hours sleep. She wants companies to shift their culture so that people can take care of themselves and stay healthy while still delivering great work. And I think hope her message is getting through
Speaker 2
well and it makes total sense. If your body is healthy and your parasympathetic nervous system is activated, then you could be much more creative and you have much better problem solving. I think that's where a lot of wisdom comes from. Our wisdom comes from those moments of peace and those moments of relaxation where we're just not thinking about anything else and we're not doing anything. We're just sitting there and I'll tell a funny story. I, I know more than one person who's had brilliant ideas sitting on the toilet. Yeah, you can't really go anywhere. You need to stay there. You need to relax. Hopefully. I mean, that's the only way it's going to come out. So really a nic. Silicon Valley is changing a lot. There's a lot more interest in where ideas, where do innovative great ideas come from. They come from having a mindset shift and ability to see something that you haven't seen before and so how, how do we get that mindset shift?
Speaker 2
We have to get out of our normal environment. We have to. Maybe you know they're all going to burning man or they're all doing new IOWASCA ceremonies in the rainforest, but what they're seeing is that the hustle and the grind is not going to get them to innovative disruptive ideas that are going to create the technology of the future. Only getting out of that, and I've, I've seen a lot of entrepreneurs arguing for shorter work weeks. One just came out recently last week saying we should do the four by four week, which is four hours of work a day for four days and that should be our work week as entrepreneurs because with the time that we have free, that's where we can research where we can maybe look at things that aren't immediately applicable and that's where our great ideas and innovations are. Gonna come from the time off. Not the time at work.
Speaker 6
Yeah, but wouldn't you also say that some of what you're talking about there is also just due to overall society from a of a macro view? I mean, so let's take it back. A hundred years ago, most people were, you know, you, you go 200 years ago, everyone was working in farms and you worked and worked and worked and worked and it was just constant and then they went to factories and the industrial revolution, so you had. It was just, it was really just a grind, just show up and punch the clock, work this thing, make it and you just. The more you, you know, it was literally just down to time. The more time and the more people you put at it, the more you can produce. Whereas now we're kind of in a position where you're, it's more of comes from your mind. Your ideas are the major value. It's not the amount of time you can spend on a press or doing something. It's the amount of ideas that you can create and that's similar to what you're talking about there. To have the time to actually sit back and think is very similar to where artists would go. You know, musicians. We'd go to some remote area where they could just sit back and just have no distractions and work on making music. Absolutely,
Speaker 2
absolutely, and I do realize that what I'm talking about here is, is really for people who are on the very top end, in other words, they're making a lot of money. What I unfortunately also see, like in my community where I live is a lot of people stuck in the grind and there's they're, they're just, they, there's not the high income jobs. The jobs are based on labor and how many hours a day and it's work and work and work and work and I don't know how it's possible to break out of that. I recognized how lucky I am to make a living based on my ideas and to be able to say, right, I'm going to go take a break in the middle of the day to go for a run because running is where I just. That is where my mind gets fried and I can write an entire article on my run, come back and then I'm done. That's a luxury. That really is something I am so grateful I can do because my family works in agriculture where we. I live on a ranch and is from some, you know, dawn to dusk there working and working and working and they'll only make a certain amount of money, whereas I have a lucrative idea. I could make a fortune, but he on one moment insight. So I, I hope, I hope things change. I hope we do get more time off and that we use that time for pleasure rather than trying to get ahead.
Speaker 1
Well, I think even with the reality of that being, um, a lot of people's lives, they can still use the idea of pleasure and giving, giving yourself permission to have it. Even though, yeah, I have to work two jobs because that's what I need to do to pay for my family and that's just how it is. But even when I'm commuting from one job to another, I can instead of just stressing about the traffic and trying to get there and all of that kind of stuff, it's going to take however long it's going to take and I can give myself permission to focus on my pleasure just in the car while I'm driving.
Speaker 2
Yeah. And that's one reason I recommend starting to pleasure posy and a pleasure policy is a group of women who hold each other accountable for each other's pleasure. So if you are working too hard, your pleasure policies is going to come up to you and say, you know what, girl, you need time off. We're taking you away for the weekend because we as girlfriends can really see when the women in our lives are struggling and they're burning out, and sometimes us saying something is what they need to give themselves permission to relax. So the whale, we'll change. Culture is not by having our pleasure moments in private, but by then communicating that to the world like one of the things I I include in my book or some fun hashtags you can use like a I suggest a pleasure challenge where you take a photo of yourself, a Selfie of yourself doing something that you really find pleasurable.
Speaker 2
Hashtag it pleasure, challenge, and then invite your friends to take pictures of their own pleasure and spread it. So we really want to make this a movement. This is something that starts with you and starts within your own heart and your own home, but if we're going to make it okay for people to be happy and not just work all the time, we want to spread that movement. We want to get the word out. We want to share this with our girlfriends. Um, and I think the robot be a better place if we pursued our pleasures. I love that. Kind of makes me think of the free hugs movement, you know, of just being able to share that. Share the love, you know, but sharing, sharing the permission to have pleasure and normalizing that. That's something that we do. Yeah, and the funny thing is, the way most of us women get our pleasure is through romance.
Speaker 2
Romance is the one time in our lives, neither the only time in our lives where we gave us sales permission to eat. As much as we want to dance as late as we want to drink and laugh and giggle and be like a little girl again because there is something about dating and new romance that says this is just about pleasure and you are totally free to do whatever because you are in love and that's what lovers do and we get so filled up with this and then of course we ended up. We ended up in a relationship with this person or and then the funds over the romance is over right back to life as normal, but we miss it. We remember what it was like when we were newly in love and I don't think any woman who forgets what it was like in the beginning of that relationship.
Speaker 2
Why can't we keep that up? Definitely why we can romance ourselves. Let's say you brought up sex in the city earlier and I think that's why that show was so popular because we love to watch other people going on first dates and everything because of the magic of that. But we can. We can recreate that with our partners so we could also romance ourselves, but what we can do is wait for our partners to offer it to us. So what a lot of women do is they think, oh, you know, maybe he'll take me out, surprise me with dinner on Valentine's date. Maybe he'll bring me flowers for my birthday. Maybe he'll do something nice for me that all then get to enjoy. Are you sure? Maybe they'll do this or are they better? Do this. The problem is we're waiting for them. Why? Why are we waiting for them?
Speaker 2
It's nice if a man brings you flowers or rose is our chocolates, but. But you should be doing that for yourself about him. That's great. If he does it, you can do whatever he wants. You want those flowers, you go get those flowers for yourself and don't make that second best say, Oh yeah, they're just flowers. I got for myself. No one gave them to me. Say I got these flowers for myself because I love myself and I wanted to give myself a treat for all the hard work I've been doing or another thing I love this one. Why do we wait for men to give as diamond rings? Come on girls, get your own diamond ring thing. You can get the one you want, the perfect one, the beautiful one, the one that he would overlook because it's not like his. He thinks it should be.
Speaker 2
You can get that box of chocolates. You can get what you want to show your love for yourself and I think if we do this, if we do these wonderful things for ourself, we stopped putting pressure on our partners to be the ones to give us pleasure and we start owning and claiming our own and I think our partners look at man, she gets so happy when she gets herself flowers. Maybe I better step up. Maybe there's some things I can do because men want to please us. They do want to please us, but when we're not pleasing ourselves, they can't see how to do it well. And also,
Speaker 1
if we're expecting them to do it, then it just feels like pressure to them and that doesn't feel good to them. If I feel pressured into something that doesn't reinforce them wanting to do it, it makes them feel like they have to check a box. So being able to please yourself, romance yourself fills your need, and then everything else that he's doing is just something that really complements it, but it's not a need, so he's not feeling that pressure. So it really is best for the whole relationship.
Speaker 2
And here's an amazing thing that I didn't know until I did this research. One very important reason to start a pleasure practice now is that your pleasure turns men on Dr Christiane Northrup calls it virtual Viagara. She found a study where men who had been experiencing difficulties in the bedroom there wise embarked on a pleasure program where they simply did things that made them feel good and we're not talking about sexual pleasure per se. Anything that made them feel good when they saw their wives experiencing pleasure, they suddenly magically had their problems in the bedroom resolved. Now, this is really interesting because we tend to think as women that what turns are men on is the things we do for them. I'm going to look sexy for him. I'm going to bake him a nice meal. All these things I'm doing for my man is going to turn my man on and then it'll all be great. Actually no, because if you do things for yourself and you feel happy and overjoyed, like, oh, this is just so amazing. That's what turns him on watching you experienced joy and pleasure. So true.
Speaker 1
Yeah, and I think that that's really relieving message for both men and women to know that gives women permission again, to be able to focus on themselves and be able to give themselves permission because they're so worried about making sure that their husbands are okay. Making sure their families are everyone else's. Okay first now, but knowing that truly you taking care of you makes him feel good. Again, more permission,
Speaker 2
more reinforcement of how important the pleasure principle is. [inaudible] and one of the things I talk about in the book is I use the metaphor of your inner bad girl and we all know about the bad girls. We all had them in high school and those were the girls that were naughty. They were selfish, they did things that they want to do and they didn't follow the rules, and of course all the guys in high school loved backgrounds and we as grown up women. We love bad boys. We love bad boys because bad boys give us permission to indulge that Adi, selfish, hedonistic protect ourselves. So in my book I suggest that you have. We all have a bad girl inside of us all who knows what she wants, who knows? It's okay to be selfish and who knows that her pleasure is important and if we can connect with that inner bad girl and ask her what she wants to do, every once in a while we can make better choices and we can be more alive and vibrant in our lives.
Speaker 2
Oh sure. Because that's definitely a part of, of all of us. We have that and if we just open the door and let her come out of her once in a while where you're really experiencing the whole of yourself that way you are. And you know what's so funny though is that one thing that really stops a lot of women. Well I think women get their inner bad girl a lot of attention when they're in their twenties. I think that's a good age for unleashing her, but I think once we get to your thirties, forties, fifties, that's just not what's done. It's embarrassing. Women of a certain age don't act like that and I think we need to change that. We need to stop thinking that we have to to decrease our pleasure just because we're getting older and we should be satisfied with left because, well, you know, we're in our forties or fifties.
Speaker 2
That's just not what's done. We need to actually reclaim that youthful girl inside a soul. Yeah. She's just in there lonely. She wants you to let her out. I know. And you know, things like amusement parks are great. The inner child stuff, parks, ice cream, those kid pleasures that you really liked as a kid, but you don't allow yourself now because Oh, you know, it would put on the pounds if you had an ice cream or amusement parks, you can go there at your age because you don't have any kids or that sort of thing. I can't tell you how many people have told me, well I can't do that because I don't have children. And people would look at me strange if I went to an amusement park or something like that. Not True. Nobody noticed. And the good thing to know, yeah, as most people are only thinking about themselves so they're not really even looking at you. So just go big kid family. Well and it's so important for adults to play. We forget to do it and you know, playing with children is one thing and that's kind of gives us and it, you know, like you said an excuse to, to do that, but even you don't have
Speaker 1
kids, your kids aren't around or anything. It's fun to just go play. Like on a, I have homework that I give clients no matter where they are in their relationship and you know it's pretty standard date, night kind of homework, but I tell them, go do something playful. Go do something you would have done when you were a teenager. Go just go do something fun. Don't do anything serious. Go play Putt, Putt Golf, go to an amusement park, go streak. I don't know, whatever the things he did when you were in high school because that, that is still a part of you and when you let that out and get and give yourself permission to be that person, then you, you just allow yourself to live fully
Speaker 2
and there's a reason we see executives have little Gulf putting things set up in their office or you know, Ping Pong tables or you know. Now again, looking at looking at Google and some of these bigger companies, they're recognizing that heart of an effective workforce, the workforce who has time to play because it's in that play. We have the creative spark and there's been amazing research done. I wished I remembered the name of the book, but there's been some amazing research done about how human kind has evolved through play. Play has been a major part of our lives up until very recently and so we need to give ourselves permission to do it and again, our children Polish to account, why don't you play with me anymore? Well maybe it's time to do that.
Speaker 1
Yeah, and the first, the first step to doing that, it's allowing yourself to play for you.
Speaker 6
You say that talking about going to amusement park and everyone's going to look at you and they're gonna judge you and all this kind of stuff. It kind of reminded me of. So there was a, it was a dance teacher and they were talking about, you know like I think a dance class and you have the mirror in the front and you can see yourself dancing and everything and they go. People were like embarrassed about wanting to go dance and everything for the same reasons you were talking about there. And they go, don't worry about it. Everyone's only looking at themselves in the mirror.
Speaker 2
I think the next generation's gonna be so much better than us. I keep, this is my belief that every generation is going to outshine their parents and one of the things I really see about this generation is they're so comfortable looking at themselves through their selfie sticks. You know, it's amazing. Whereas I am of the generation where if you put me in a dance studio and had me learn to dance, I would be mortified. I think, oh, look it, look it. I just don't look right. But I think, I think our kids, I think our kids have a lot to teach us about that.
Speaker 1
Well, and, and talking about the generation comfortable looking at themselves. They're also, I love working with my clients that are in the early twenties because they're also so open and willing to look at themselves emotionally at their thoughts and their feelings. And I mean there's so much more open than our generation, which takes a lot longer, more time to warm up to be able to talk about deeper things. But uh, it's, you know, all of that. Looking at yourself, it's not just external. A lot of people are worried about all the selfies and everything, but they are looking at themselves internally as well and very willing to do that. So I think that's an amazing strength.
Speaker 2
I think you're right. I think a lot of it comes from a generation we grew up in. We learn attitudes about this stuff from our parents and so I grew up with a, I think a very typical family of the era. We did not go out and do fun things. We worked. We had our jobs. We came home, we. There was a full meal that had to be cooked and cleaned up and then maybe we had an hour to have television at night and then we all went to bed and today parents do fun things with their kids all the time. You know, what are we going to do this week in? What are we gonna do on holiday? What are we going to do on our vacation? I think parents today are expecting to treat children like children and to really embrace the fact that this is the time in their lives where they can just be kids and they can have fun and they don't have to make it to the adult world, and so this is our healing process as parents, our kids are helping us unlearn the things we learned from past generations, which is keep your head down, work hard, don't speak up.
Speaker 2
We're our kids are helping us unlearn that and I think it's a good thing. I think they're going to have this sorted. I think. I think once these kids grew up, the world's gonna be so hard, everything's going to be great. Well, the thing is is that there also
Speaker 1
and so much more empowered than our generation was to have a voice. They order in restaurants like our, our daughter, she orders everything that whatever she's going to order, she orders it herself. Nobody speaks for her, but I don't remember doing that when I was her age. You know, it's like your parents ordered for the table, you know, like you didn't get to order your own food. Um, and I, I see that as, as them knowing that their voices are important and what they want is important too.
Speaker 2
Isn't that great? It is. It's beautiful and we can learn so much from children. Yeah, we can, but our most important thing is not to like. My big concern right now is not some to model the people pleasing and the self sacrifice and I'm very concerned about passing those things down. My daughter because they are such a part of not just me but my family culture. I come from a family where the women served the men and the women did all the work and they didn't really ever take breaks because the men were working hard and the women couldn't take breaks while the men were working hard and I would love my daughter to be a kind good person, but also the person who takes herself into consideration rather than working so hard that your health gives out. I want her to say, you know what?
Speaker 2
I'm giving just as much as I can give and then I'm going to take some time for me and that will enable me to be more generous because I will have filled my own myself inside and I'll have more to give. I don't think. I don't think our generation understood that we had to fill ourselves inside to give more because what I see from my background is that the women who gave and gave and gave and gave and gave the. Either the health got worse, they kind of got smaller and grayer or they became resentful and they resented men so much. The men come in and they eat meals and they go out. Again. When you give too much and you don't set healthy boundaries and you don't feel yourself up, you start to resent the people you're giving to and then it doesn't work.
Speaker 1
It's not good for anybody that resentment. It eats you up inside in an eats everybody else up to and the antidote to that is self care and knowing that you're worthy of Karen Worthy, worthy of pleasure, and when you're giving that to yourself, your, your children are watching you model it, which is, you know, obviously modeling is the most powerful thing. Children see what we do and when they see you doing that, then you're carrying it on into the next generation and you're changing all of these patterns. So it's hugely powerful. You're so right.
Speaker 6
Why do you think that our parent's generation, and even before that it had, it's almost the whole martyr thought process. Like if the more I martyr myself, the better it's going to be. It's. Do you, do you see any connection with women doing that with their families and also through some religious type thought process as well that, you know, we, if we, if we do all this work now, the pleasure is going to come when we get to heaven. Sort of the baptists thought process
Speaker 2
or retirement. Well, I just see. I think it's come from a, from an economic standpoint. Our parents knew that if they got a college education and got their first job, they would be sorted by the time they're in their fifties and sixties. They would have a good retirement. They would have committed to a company, they would have grown with the company that had been at the highest level. They knew that keeping their head down and working hard and sacrificing was good at payoff for them eventually because it has. Most people from that generation have done quite well. Starting with gen x and and full flourishing generations. After that we go, we go get her college education. There's no job. We get a job. The company folds. We now realize, you know, I'm working in a job that did not exist when I was in college
Speaker 6
job for 30 years anymore. I mean 30 year jobs. That's just not even a thing.
Speaker 2
It doesn't happen. So they knew that if they sacrificed, they would have a reward. We don't know that there's actually no benefit really for us to sacrifice in that way. So what we have learned now is we have to set healthy boundaries. We've got to live her life partially for because the payoff isn't going to come and in 50 years we've got to be able to survive today and I think you really see that in the millennials. They want to have their pleasure now. They're not willing to wait to retirement to have it
Speaker 1
and all you have is now, so I mean it really just and and any sense whether you do get retirement or you do go to heaven or you do get that reward at the end, well great at the end, but you can also get it all the way through to so why not?
Speaker 2
One of the complaints women have about this, they say, well, if I do this, how long would it become selfish and I'm going to be about a person like those selfish people. I don't like who just do things for themselves and don't think about other people. And that's a fair question. And what I would say to that is all I am talking to those women out there who need this information. I'm not talking to the women out there who have already mastered pleasure. I'm talking about the women who work really hard and sacrifice all the time and give, give, give, give and get nothing in return, and I think if those women learn to be more selfish and to put themselves first, I don't think their personality is going to do 180 and they're going to suddenly become selfish, self centered, terrible people. I think that they're going to become balanced. Yeah. I. This material isn't for the people who've already mastered a pleasure. This material isn't for an narcissist. This material is for self sacrificing. People pleasing women who need to embrace their selfish side to become more balanced,
Speaker 1
so true, and we're all worthy of pleasure.
Speaker 6
One of the things that I really like about what you're talking about here is, is you're putting it with what I'd like to see the reticular activating system in the brain that's keeping the subconscious and the conscious. That's the gateway between it and by just putting it at sort of top of mind in a way to look at it is by having a gr that's there, that's talking about pleasure by you thinking about pleasure and all, and in all these steps is if it's in your. If you could thinking about it, you're going to do it, and so if you're thinking about problems will you're going to find more problems. If you're thinking about not having enough money, we'll help you. That's all you're going to think about it. You're just going to be money. Whereas if you're thinking about pleasure, you'll start to notice it in other places. You'll start to notice other things that people do that is pleasurable. Whereas if you're thinking about things that people do against you will, you'll always notice those. So just putting it at people's top of mine makes a big difference too because you kind of, you know the whole. You think what you think is what you become.
Speaker 2
That's so true. You don't have to change your lifestyle. You could practice this and not change a single thing about life. It's just your attitude, but then attitudes are hard to change. I had a friend who tried the program and she said, wow. She said, what I really see about this program is it's a lifestyle change. It's how I live. My life has to change because the way I'm living my life right now is I'm thinking about problems. I'm thinking about sacrifice. I'm thinking about for going present luxuries for, for future luxury. She said, what I've realized now is that I actually have to claim my pleasure every day and I've got to do it consistently for a month or however long until I rewire my brain so that now I'm focusing on the good and not the fat.
Speaker 6
I was reading in the book that Scott Adams wrote where he was talking about how when he was in high school or college, I think it was, he was in college and you know, you partaked in some drugs at that time and he started noticing that when he was on drugs people, he thought it was the drugs that was making everybody treat him better. He thought that was the deal and it took years for him to realize that. He was like, wait a second. I was just a nicer person. When I was doing that. I was. I was putting out basically a more cheerful person were as whenever I wasn't doing that. I was just on edge. I was working, I was trying to get through college. I was trying to do all this stuff and it took him a while to realize that just by me changing my attitude changed other people's attitude. It just basically just bounced back at me.
Speaker 2
That is so fantastic and you can imagine the effect on dating to make this shift. If you make the shift from freak mode to chill mode and you consciously practiced that before a date, you say, right. Instead of going on the state and thinking, oh, it's going to be such a time waster. Oh, he's going to be just another one of those men. Oh, I just. There's no good men out there and I know this is gonna be terrible. What have you think about things like, oh, this is fun. It may not work, but I'm going to meet someone new and I'm going to be able to practice my conversation skills and regardless of what happens, all have been able to say, I went on a date and that's gonna. Make me feel good about myself. You're switching your attitude and when you show up on that date with that positive feeling about what could happen that might be good, he is going to notice and you'll be amazed that date, even if the guys at for you will go so much better than the date with the amazing guy that you weren't looking forward to because you were looking, looking for all of his flaws and faults.
Speaker 6
Well, they talk. I remember in the book the game, they were talking. It was all about pickup artists and they were talking about how one of the problem they're trying to teach these guys not not good looking guys. Guys who really have never been good picking up women and one of the things they really try to push for them is to really explain to them their whole attitude towards the whole thing. Has they just have to change it completely? It was mainly what they. What they kinda got to the point was it had nothing to do with any looks that had nothing to do with any of this stuff. It was really just down to your whole attitude and a lot of the attitude that a lot of the guys were trained to, the women they were trying to pick up or whatever was it before they started doing this was just desperate that you're just came across as desperate and so one of the things they really try to push them is you need to come across as desireless completely. You need to be excellent and you need to be gone. Those are the top three things that they kept telling them, so you give that. It's just completely changing the way they came across to the other person that they didn't need anything.
Speaker 2
That's a huge part of the puzzle and it's all part of what women intrinsically know. That's what the inner bad girl knows, right? The inner bad girl does what she wants without it doesn't care about the consequences. She claims it now and she's not attached to the outcome and that is, that is one of the crucial key pieces about this is when you are going on a date or let's even say going to marriage therapy and you need a specific outcome to happen, you're going to be stressed, you're going to be focused on getting what you want and it's not going to turn out well. Whereas if you show up relaxed, able to let whatever unfold as it unfolds and look for the good and the experience, it's amazing how different things turn out. Yep, and just even the whole process, being in the process and knowing that even like the process of a date or the process of marriage therapy, what can I learn from this? What can I gain from this for, for myself, it doesn't have to be what is this other person gonna do that's gonna help me in this situation. It's what can I get from this? And if you're thinking you're going to get something positive, you will.
Speaker 6
Yeah, and the other thing is I remember in James out the chair talks about this a lot where he's, he will do things where when he was the most successful it was whenever he would come up with ideas for other people and just give it to them and with no with no intentions of anything coming back. And that worked so great for him and I, I've always, I've thought about that and I've actually used that myself and it's worked out amazing because if you go in with something like, Oh, I'm going to bring this guy a deal, but man, I got to get 20 percent of this thing or I'm just not going to even bother so I'm going to get it. No, just go in there and go, no, no, this is great for them in the story. I know they can do this and you just do it. And whenever the other people realize that, hey, he's not being. He's not coming in here with some agenda. That completely changes everything too because then other opportunities come. They may bring something to you that, that you didn't know about. So he kind of just sort of flows.
Speaker 2
One of the great things that pleasure teaches you is to stay in the present moment and not get lost in your head because to really experience pleasure, you've got to be in your body and you got to feel it down to your toes. And one thing that a lot of us do, and this is men and women, I don't know, I think he's probably one of the biggest problems with dating, is that we get into our heads and whatever's happening in front of us, we're providing this running commentary in our heads about what's happening. Like he just said this, does this mean that he likes me? Does that mean to you wants to go, or Gosh, you just said this. Does that mean that he's going to want to have children? Or maybe I need to ask him another question. We've got all this stuff going on in our heads.
Speaker 2
So one of the side benefits of the pleasure practices is to get you to stay in the present moment and to experience what there is to experience and not let yourself talk. Change the experience for what it is for you because we can, we can tell ourselves, you know, all of that was a terrible date. He hated me and then he's, he's texting you in an hour saying I loved it. When can I see your, each other, you see you again. So we really need to stop believing in our heads and start listening to our bodies. I think our bodies know quite a lot.
Speaker 6
Tara was, has been telling you about the Bernay Brown and she had a story with her swimming with her husband and.
Speaker 1
Oh, okay. Yes. So what you're. There's a great story that Brenae Brown hasn't one of her books and I just, I love her because she has wonderful stories, but it's very similar to what you're talking about that she was talking about in her relationship with her husband where they, they go swimming together and it's been a long time since they've gone swimming in there in Lake Travis and Austin. And so they're in the middle of a lake and it's kind of a busier season. And right in the middle she looks at him and she just feels really connected to him. And she says something to illustrate that and he says, oh, okay. And, and then he just keeps swimming and then herself talk around. That is like, oh, well, he just, he thinks I'm a terrible swimmer. He thinks I look really bad in my swimsuit and it's just all very negative about her.
Speaker 1
And um, she, she just really feels very rejected by him in that moment. And um, and then she finds out later after they've talked that he was having this moment of panic because he had had this dream about his children drowning in that. Like the night before and trying to save them and all of this stuff and so it was a great illustration of what you're talking about, of where you tell yourself some story about something and I'm in and looking at someone else's reaction in trying to write a story about it. They may not even be true. And just really being able to in with how
Speaker 2
you feel about the situation. Yes. And I think everybody should read the gifts of imperfection and um, Brenae Brown, you know, one of the great things about my work is I get to just research tons and tons of great people and I've always had my favorites, but recently I've really noticed, I think brenae brown should run for president. I love her. Anyone more switched on and who understands belonging and community better than she does?
Speaker 1
Yes. And I love her. Um. Oh, I just forgot the name of her recent book about community and belonging. Braving the Wilderness, the wilderness. Thank you. Oh, I loved that book so much. I was at two years. I listened to her books when I'm driving because I love her voice. It's just like I feel like my best
Speaker 2
friends in the car with me. Oh, so he is part of the journey to, to loving yourself at a self care might be. To explore Bernay Brown's work. Yeah, absolutely. There's another, another aspect to this, which again, pleasure helps you with. One of the things that we become very self conscious about is when you experience pleasure, you surrender to it for a moment, then you immediately stepped back. And how must I look? Experiencing pleasure, right? Everybody must be looking at me. I must be making a funny face. Um, people are gonna Stare. Pleasure is something that we really have to surrender to and we can't be very conscious, self conscious to really enjoy it. Self consciousness kind of snaps us out and it's similar when you go on a date and when you're dancing, when you're doing anything, when you are in your head and you're thinking, I wonder how people are going to perceive me. You can't feel the pleasure of the moment. So one of the great things your pleasure practice is going to help you to do is to let go of that self consciousness and let go of that worry of how people are going to perceive you and let go of that analysis and surrender to how you feel regardless of how you choose to express that. You know, I was thinking I didn't want to say this in your show, but that orgasm face. Oh, that's okay. It's
Speaker 1
totally okay. You can say that in the show. You might not have also to our wines, wine with wine episode. Um, but yes. So true. And the thing. Well, going back to your example about dancing and having to face when you're dancing or maybe your face when you're doing yoga or anything that's bringing you pleasure that you're really in your body is that even though we may feel like someone is judging us when they're looking at us, most of the time when people are looking at us, they're mirror neurons are mirroring that feeling for them. And it makes them feel good too. And so I mean, that's something I think that we can reassure ourselves about when we're worried about our faces, is that you know, a face of pleasure is as a face that is going to make other people feel good when they see it too. But going back to just knowing that even if you're making funny face, it's
Speaker 2
okay because you know that, that you're okay with yourself and you feel more like that when you're, when you are taking care of yourself and giving yourself that pleasure, you feel more worthy of it. And that's one of those things that I love. With the recent research on mirror neurons, we now understand exactly why we pick up on other people's feelings. We've got mirror neurons that fire in our brain that mimic whatever we're watching. So again, going back to your pleasure, pleases the people around you. The best way to make your husband feel pleasure. The best way to have happy kids is to feel total unselfconscious, exquisite pleasure and happiness yourself. Exactly that. That said beautifully and one of the at the end of the book, one of the analogies I bring, a lot of people might listen to this and think, well, you know, there's bigger things in life than pleasure.
Speaker 2
There's like world hunger. There's all these big issues. Really is the world being served by me focusing on my own pleasure, and the analogy I give is I say, what is really the greatest pleasure of all is love, isn't it? That's really our ultimate pleasure. What's the greatest pain of all was probably fear. So when we talk about choosing between pleasure and pain on a spiritual level, we're talking about choosing between love and fear and love. And fear is the great dynamic. That's the great fight. Spiritual fight, the forces of darkness and the forces of good. So really when you choose pleasure, this isn't just about you doing something nice for yourself and this is about choosing love is about choosing the forces of good and that does matter. Yes, I mean just a feeding, feeding love. I'm giving yourself pleasure is the most unselfish thing to do because you are putting more love into the world when you're showing yourself love.
Speaker 2
Yeah, and I, I hope, I hope the women listening to this are maybe thinking of it differently about about their lives and the way they do things and what I will say is it's not easy. It's not easy to change. I've been doing this work now for several years specifically on pleasure, the research I know through and through, but in my own life I thought this would be easy. I thought, right, I've got, I've got a plan, I've got it figured out. I'm going to do this thing and what I have found is that I do well for awhile and then I slipped back well for while and then I slipped back. I'm finding it very hard to overcome lifelong patterns of self sacrifice and people pleasing and putting other people's first and so this may sound something that, oh right, I can do this perfect, but don't be surprised if you do it for a little bit and you get resistance or you think you don't.
Speaker 2
I don't have time for pleasure. You know this, this pleasure thing, stupid. I don't have time for it anymore. I've got to go this tough. It's going to happen and just be prepared for it. Yes, and I, I love that, that you brought that up because resistance is a normal part of the process. If you're not having resistance, then you're probably not really trying, so just expect that that's going to come up and it's okay. And the other thing is get your pleasure posse together. Having people holding you accountable is so important and I do recommend that it be other women because I think the challenge for women surrounding pleasure is different from the challenge for men. I think men find it easier to go after their own pleasure. I don't think they understand what a struggle it can be sometimes for women. So do get a community of women share these ideas and help each other.
Speaker 2
Yes. I think that's amazing support and just being able to connect through that. You know, a lot of women, we find it very easy to connect through complaints, but how powerful would it be to connect through pleasure and encouraging each other to seek it? What does shift? Yeah, and having that girl's night out once a week makes such a difference. Oh yes. I love it. Well, so I will, I will. How, um, how can our listeners find your book and learn more about the pleasure principle? Well, we have got a free gift for your listeners. If you go to your brilliance.com/free-gift, you can get a chapter of the book, it's called the three a's of attraction. And just enter your name and your email address. We'll send it straight over to you and you'll get a taste of some of the techniques I talk about in the book and you can see if it's right for you.
Speaker 2
And then if you get the, the free report, it will then have a link to the book at the end. Otherwise, if you just want more information about pleasure and you want to see some of the other things we offer, go to your brilliance.com and in our little tag cloud on the right hand side, you'll see pleasure. Click on a pleasure tag and you'll get a list of articles for me and from other people talking about the importance of pleasure and I do strongly recommend that you see this as the beginning of a journey. Checkout Regina Thomashauer his work. She's Mama Gina and she has written some fabulous books and there are so many pleasure teachers out there who can help work with you one on one. Get you into your body. Hello, awaken that sensual goddess inside. Um, so please don't just listen to this and say, right, I, that was nice, but I'm going to forget about now.
Speaker 2
Let this be the beginning of your journey and you also another great resource. You also mentioned Christiane Northrup, who wrote goddesses never age, right? And that, that's an awesome classic book to read too. Oh, it is. It's fantastic. That's where the research on pleasure and health comes from. Yeah. So if I mean for people who want, see how it's going to benefit them physically, that would be a great book to read and you may feel a bit young if you're reading it in your forties. She really is talking to to maybe older women. I kind of IRA, I'm 40, 42 and I read and I thought, well maybe I'll need to focus on this stuff when I get a bit older, but hey, you can never, never be too soon figuring this stuff out.
Speaker 1
Exactly. If you're starting to focus on this, this now, then you're, you're only going to be more prepared and age less
Speaker 2
ageless. And this isn't. We're not just talking about your happiness, we're not just talking about your family's happiness. We're talking about your health too. If you're struggling with chronic health issues, maybe pleasure could make a difference.
Speaker 1
Yeah. It will lower inflammation for sure. And who doesn't need a little less inflammation. I mean, that's right. That's right. Well, amy, thank you so much for your time today. I had a wonderful time learning about this with you and uh, it's, it's been, uh, it's been also a good challenge to me to remember to be able to focus on that more because again, talking about having that reminder in that community support with your pleasure, posy, you know, that we all need to be reminded of it.
Speaker 2
Fantastic. Thank you so much for having me on your show. And ladies out there listening. Just remember your pleasure. Pleases everyone. So claim it.
Speaker 1
What a fantastic interview with Amy Waterman. I don't know about you, but I could always use more pleasure in my life and I love the tips she gave, like the pleasure jar if you'd like to read her book. The pleasure principle, how pleasure winds you health, happiness and love. Go to her website, your brilliance.com. I will also include a link on our website, make love not war.com. As always, if you have any questions, comments, or would like to be on the show, go to our website, make love not war.com, and send us an email. Be sure to subscribe to our show on either itunes or stitcher to make sure you get our shows as soon as they're available. You can also donate to this show at Patrion.com/mate. More love not war. Thanks for listening.