Permission for Pleasure
A podcast to educate and equip women with the information and confidence they need to express, experience and enjoy their sexuality. Cindy Scharkey RN, BSN, brings her 35+ years of experience as a healthcare professional to open the doors to healthy conversations about sex. This is a community where you can listen and learn to give yourself permission for pleasure. Visit www.cindyscharkey.com for educational blogs and newsletter.
Permission for Pleasure
The Truth About Desire: Part 2
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“Attention training through mindfulness may be part of the recipe for cooking up sexual desire.” Dr. Lori Brotto and I continue our conversation about desire. Part Two gets practical, providing helpful tools to cultivate desire. Our discussion includes: the power of attention training and mindfulness, why sexual communication is essential, and the value of variety in encouraging arousal and desire in women.
Dr. Lori Brotto is a Professor in the UBC Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, and a Registered Psychologist in Vancouver, Canada. She is the Executive Director of the Women's Health Research Institute of BC, director of the UBC Sexual Health Laboratory and author of Better Sex Through Mindfulness: How Women Can Cultivate Desire.
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None of these phenomena are fixed. They can all be learned in the same way that we can grow muscles and we can lose muscles. The same would apply to interoception and to desire.
SPEAKER_01Welcome to Permission for Pleasure. I'm Cindy Sharkey, your host, and you're joining me for part two of our desire episode with Dr. Lori Brato. We are discussing how attention and mindfulness impact sexual desire. And in this part of the episode, it gets practical. So let's jump right back in. So let's let's give like a just a could we just do a role play of what this would look like in just an everyday scenario situation? Maybe something you you present to your workshops or or something where people listening, if they have no framework for attention training, what this would look like.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, for sure. And and um it's important uh to note that when I present our mindful sex program, that I I usually recommend that people start with practicing mindfulness in their non-sexual life. Um, and so a very popular practice is the body scan, where a person might be guided, so they might be listening to an audio tape, but they can do it self-guided as well. They would close their eyes and they would be guided to pay attention systematically to the different parts of their body, beginning from the big toe on the left foot, and then gradually moving up the leg, the torso, swinging across down the right side of the body, the right toe, the right leg, up to the hips, the abdomen, the back, the shoulders, the chin, the face, the head. And the invitation, the instructions are simply what do you notice? What sensations are arising in this moment? And when you get lost in thoughts or find yourself thinking about these body parts, guide your focus back to the bare sensations, the temperature, the texture, the vibrations, the increasing and decreasing intensity in those areas. And while you're doing this, don't judge how you're paying attention. How you're paying attention is perfect. Guide your attention repeatedly. And when your mind takes off, as the mind does, as all of our minds do, you just notice and you say, Ah, there you've gone. Come back and come back to the present moment. A body scan in my recordings is about 30 minutes, and I do recommend people uh adopt a structured daily mindfulness practice in their life for a few weeks, for several weeks, even depending on sort of what the personal experience is. And then we gradually integrate the skills, the present moment non-judgmental attention skills into various sexual activities. And so, in that domain, I often start with the person doing this on their own in a in a sexual context. So maybe using a handheld mirror and observing their genitals while paying attention to visual sensations, touching not for the purpose of creating a sensation, but rather touching for the purpose of observing bare sensations. Touch, temperature, vibration, heat, etc. And then from there we can gradually move it to progressively partner-focused activities through touch, through kissing, through sexual activity, et cetera. So it's very progressive, but the skills that that we're practicing are identical. So paying attention on purpose with compassion.
SPEAKER_01Paying attention on purpose with compassion. We don't often pause and just pay attention with compassion. And so doing that in everyday life, like you're saying, outside of sexual situations, allows us to train ourselves to then bring that to our sexual situations. Yes, and you you said in uh your research that research consistently shows that women are typically unaware of their body's sexual responses or perceive them in a very muted way. And so, as people are listening to you and saying, I need to pay attention to my body, how does that that come into play here for women?
SPEAKER_00It's this phenomenon called interoception, and it's been studied a lot in the psychological literature. And interoception is that ability to know what's happening in my body. It's the person who senses changes in their heart rate or who senses increases in blood pressure. Some women can feel when they ovulate, for example. And in general, women compared to men have lower interoception. We're simply more kind of cut off with what's happening on in those internal body sensations. Mindfulness is one way of increasing that, right? Essentially, because that's what we're doing in mindfulness. We're paying attention, we're deliberately moving the attention into and following those internal body sensations. So, yes, it is the case that following mindfulness-based programs, people become much more interoceptively aware. And in my work, um, increases in interoception as a result of mindfulness directly translate into improvements in desire. So it's likely the case that as people are noticing the subtle changes in arousal, the very subtle early signs of excitement and pleasure, that that is potentially a trigger for sexual desire. And then the more they pay attention, the more that response happens. And that then we get back into that feedback loop. So it really suggests that desire is emergent, sexual arousal is emergent, and that they influence one another. There's sort of like two side, two sides of the same coin.
SPEAKER_01I I'd be curious to hear your answer about why do you think women have lower introsperson?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I don't know. I think um it's that's not my area of research. Other, it it um other people have looked at the kind of gendered nature of this. I mean, if we get back to some of what we were talking about earlier around heteronormativity and scripts, and you know, is there a tendency to just kind of get through the to-do list? And we know that women are also less likely to put themselves at the top of the to-do list and less likely to engage in self-care unless everyone in their world is already taken care of. So is it a is it a product of that or is it something more kind of physiological and and um related to the body processes or the brain processes that result in a bit more of that kind of disconnection? So there's probably lots of reasons why.
SPEAKER_01What I want women to hear is you can cultivate, you can um work toward with these tangible practices towards having more of introspection, more of that connection between your brain and body, right?
SPEAKER_00Mm-hmm. Yeah, absolutely. None of these phenomena are fixed. They can all be learned in the same way that we can grow muscles and we can lose muscles. Um, the same would apply to interoception and to desire.
SPEAKER_01Yes. You say that another factor that can increase attention is, and then arousal, of course, is novelty. I think this is so important for women to hear. I'd love for you to speak to that based on your research.
SPEAKER_00Mm-hmm. Yeah, so um, Esther Perel has, you know, written and spoken about this very articulately and would encourage any listeners to watch her TED talk. It's essentially um describes the very common phenomenon that over time in long-term relationships, it can be common, it can be normal for desire for towards a partner to wane. And part of that does relate to the fact that things are no longer novel. And you know, what does novelty do? Well, first of all, in the brain, novelty taps into the dopamine system, the reward system. When something is shiny and new, we have firing and those dopamine receptors in our brain, and when that shiny object is no longer shiny or becomes familiar, we simply don't have that. Um, when it comes to sexual novelty, it works in the same way that we see different brain patterns that can actually trigger desire for things that are novel. So, in the context of a long-term relationship, you know, a 30, 40, 50-year relationship where there is no more novelty, where do you find novelty there? Well, that is the challenge. Um, how does a couple find novelty in a very familiar relationship? I think we're probably back to communication, which we talked about earlier. Can we discuss and talk about subtle things we can do differently? Even just having sex at a different time of the day than we normally do, or with the lights on versus the lights off, or you know, changing up the scene or what the couple does in any particular way can infuse some of that novelty, which turns out to be really important for desire.
SPEAKER_01Yes. And in the groups you run for low desire, you also bring up fantasy. And I think so many women, well, especially the a lot of women in my community, they they don't have a lot of framework for fantasy or just the the normalcy of having you know sexual fantasies and how that can play out in keeping your your mind engaged. Could you talk a little bit about how that works in your in your workshop, your groups for women?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so mind uh so fantasy is about creating um um sexual response in the body through the mind, right? So fantasy might be a memory of an actual sexual encounter that happened, or fantasy might be all the way on the other spectrum, something very made up, things that you would never do in your life with people you would never have sex with. So there's a there's a huge range in what constitutes fantasy. Um, in our mindfulness groups, so to be clear, fantasy is not mindfulness. Fantasy is very much about imagery and conjuring up a sexual scene. Um, but in our groups, what we do, and this is usually around session six of eight sessions, is we invite people, we invite women to um go home, elicit a sexual fantasy that is very pleasing and arousing to them. They're doing the things that bring them pleasure, they they imagine seeing themselves in a way where they're embodying sensuality and sexuality and confidence. And they we ask them to do that for about 10 minutes so that the brain becomes really kind of sexually primed and tuned in. And then we present them with a mindfulness recording that involves now tuning into the body sensations. And what we've found, and we've actually tested this on its own as a separate exercise independent of the eight-week program, um, what we've found is then when they do that mindfulness exercise, all the sensations in their body are way more intense and they're picking up sensations in the body that they normally don't when they're kind of going into the mindfulness practice more sexually neutral. So it suggests to us that um women can actually pair fantasy with paying attention and mindfulness as a way of boosting um the sexual response and pleasure in in the moment.
SPEAKER_01It's amazing just how how tangibly you see the difference. I mean, that that you're saying these tools uh you've at you're actually you're watching it work. So I think there's so for some women there's such a a negative context to fantasy, and yet it's really it's just really using your senses of imagination, and like you said, not not always what you exactly want to do, but what you imagine. And it could be like the hottest sex you had with your partner. I mean, I love that. Why, you know, that idea of priming, of, of just uh setting ourselves up for pleasure is that's a beautiful idea.
SPEAKER_00I agree. Yeah, and your your point, Cindy, about you know, a lot of women maybe having some resistance around fantasy. And I often hear in the groups a concern that having a fantasy is tantamount to being unfaithful to a partner, or maybe worrying that if they enjoy a fantasy too much, that they won't enjoy sex with a partner anymore. Um, these are fears, they're anxieties, they're not based in truth. Um, we know my great colleague and friend uh Justin Lay Miller wrote a book, Tell Me What You Want, which analyzed the fantasies of 10,000 Americans. And we know number one, a lot of people do fantasize, and number two, for a lot of people, the contents of their fantasy don't reflect what they do and what they want to do in their life, and that's okay. It's okay for it to stay in your imagination. Um, and my sort of spin on that is can we use that as a way of really helping you to pay attention and get more out of the sexual encounter by increasing desire and arousal?
SPEAKER_01Right. I love the framework for that. Thanks for sharing that. In your workshops, you also bring up erotica and vibrators as two tools. Could you speak to that a little bit?
SPEAKER_00Mm-hmm. Yeah, so the exercise that I just discussed, this sort of pairing of fantasy, and then um the actual meditation that we developed is called sexual sensations awareness. Um, it's about a 10-minute uh recording. Um, we offer to our group participants um the choice of either using a fantasy plus the sexual sensations or a vibrator or uh watching some audiovisual uh erotica. And they all work a little bit differently. Of course, the vibrator is really focused on the body's response. Um, the audiovisual erotica is sound, it's visual, it's fantasy altogether, but it's not tactile, it doesn't involve the body. Um, and so it's just a way of offering some variety. We we definitely frame erotica, vibrators, and fantasy as tools, as sexual aids, in the same way that you use an alarm clock in the morning to wake up in time, um, or other handy appliances and tools in your life. These can also be viewed as sexual tools, as a way of really dialing up the sexual response, either in the mind or the body, and then pairing it with mindfulness. So, used in that way and kind of framed in that way, it can be really helpful for people who might have some resistance to watching erotica or, you know, getting lost in the whole world of porn and unethical porn. And it's not an unimportant point. It is an important point. And we know that what is depicted in films can be very gendered with women preferring more erotica, more of a storyline, more realistic bodies, more realistic depictions of what the couples are doing, and maybe less focus on male pleasure and more kind of egalitarian pleasure, etc. Sorry, that's a whole tangent about erotica and pornography, but it's but it's I bring it up simply because we're we're framing this as a tool that really can be used to benefit you and help you to understand your own sexual desire and response.
SPEAKER_01Before we wrap up, Dr. Brato, we talked about mindfulness techniques, attention training, um, cultivating that wanting and desire. And you told them about the body exercise. And I just want to do just a simple say you're in a sexual situation, and let's just bring this down to brass breast tacks here. You're in a sexual situation, and you think you hear your child cry, or you think there's a uh, I don't know why I'm thinking of this, a fireworks going on down the street, or you hear a fire engine, or I don't know. All the all these sounds or anticipated sounds, those kind of things are just normal thoughts or intrusions that come. And what we've been talking about here is that we can say, oh, like you said, I see you're worrying that the you're you're worrying that the kid might be coming in your room. You're worried that the your child's gonna wake up, or you're worried there's an emergency going on. Okay, that's all right. It's we can see it's not. We can let that go and reorient yourself to the present. Attention training can allow you to do that exact thing uh over and over again, possibly if needed.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and the and the trick is really how do you kind of acknowledge the thought without getting wrapped up in the content of it? So, you know, if you hear the fireworks, you might you might say, fireworks. Is it Halloween? Is it Fourth of July? Is it is there a celebration? Is it this? Oh, I thought fireworks were now illegal. Who's setting off those fireworks? I'm gonna call the city, or you kind of get down this rabbit hole of thoughts. Rather, we actually have a mindfulness of thoughts practice that guides people how to get some real concrete skills around how do you watch thoughts from a distance. And we use John Cabotson's analogy of sitting at the bank of a stream. The stream represents the thoughts, and you can see the thoughts from a distance without taking a step in the water and getting wet. So, one way of doing that is rather than kind of getting caught up in the thought, you might say worry thought, planning thought, memory thought. Um, so you kind of categorize it, package it, and then say, okay, memory thought, come back. What do I sense in my fingertips right now? What temperature do I feel in my belly right now? And you anchor yourself in the bare sensations of the body in that moment. The mindfulness of thoughts practice is is a tricky one because we do get wrapped up very quickly, almost instantaneously in thoughts where one thought leads to another and leads to another and leads to another. And it happens during sex all the time, all the time. So um it just um bears out the point I made earlier about the importance of doing these practices outside of the bedroom first and and gaining some skill there before we then take those same skills, the exact same skills, into the bedroom.
SPEAKER_01Perfect. That's a wonderful tangible example to leave the listeners with. And also just a reminder that you've said these are all skills that anyone can learn. We're all just not wired and and trained and conditioned to do these kinds of things that will help us cultivate desire, but we can learn to do them. Uh, you know, in our community here, like I said, we try to stop and notice what brings us delight. I'd love for you to share something that brings you delight day to day.
SPEAKER_00Um, well, I'm about to get a puppy. So I'm uh right now we're feeling all sorts of anticipation around that and making space in our home right now. And I know when the puppy arrives in a few weeks that there will be plenty of delight and kind of seeing the world through the puppy's eyes, which is mindfulness, right? And I think I often say this about kids and watching my own kids as they were growing up, is they see the world in a mindful way, right? They can look at that daffodil and all the petals on the daffodil and be fully, fully immersed in it. So, what brings me delight is the many, many instances of mindfulness just in our day-to-day, mundane lives. There are there are many, many instances and moments of of mindfulness if we just pause and pay attention.
SPEAKER_01Pause and pay attention. Thanks so much for being with us on the show, Dr. Brodo. I'm grateful for your time and your expertise and you bringing research-based information to us everyday people.
SPEAKER_00Thank you so much, Cindy, and thank you for uh creating this platform to have this important conversation.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. So, community, I hope you will continue to stop and notice and pay attention. Start there as you learn to give yourself permission for pleasure.
