SHE Asked Podcast

Sexuality, Sensuality & Somatic Healing: A Conversation with Adena of Unbounded

• Anna McBride

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In this episode of SHE ASKED, Anna sits down with somatic sex & relationship coach Adena to explore one of the most misunderstood topics in women’s lives: pleasure — what it is, why it matters, and how it becomes a portal to deeper self-trust, confidence, creativity, and freedom.

Adena shares her journey from painful intercourse and body disconnection to reclaiming her erotic aliveness, and explains why so many women secretly believe they’re “broken."

SHE ASKED ADENA OF GET UNBOUNDED

You’ll learn:
✨ Why pleasure is not a luxury — it’s a pathway to self-intimacy
✨ How our relationship to sex mirrors how we show up in LIFE
✨ The difference between sensuality vs. sexuality
✨ Why somatic work unlocks emotional patterns talk therapy can’t reach
✨ How to rebuild safety, expand your pleasure capacity, and dissolve shame
✨ What long-term relationships really need to stay alive and connected
✨ Plus: Adena’s favorite embodiment practice that you can start today

Whether you’re in a long-term relationship, dating later in life, healing from trauma, raising kids, or simply craving more joy and connection in your body — this episode will expand the way you think about pleasure forever.

🔗 Connect with Adena

Website + free practices: unboundednyc.com
Instagram: @get.unbounded
Learn about The Turned-On Woman™ program — launching soon!

✨ Schedule your Free Call with Anna

💌 Join Anna's Newsletter

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Anna:

Welcome back to She Ask: Tools for Practical Hope. I'm your host, Anna McBride, and I'm so excited that you're here. Lately, on our program, we have been covering topics that are designed to help our listeners expand their minds, deepen their connections, and live their best lives. Which is why I was so intrigued with your website, which we'll talk about in a moment. But on today's show, we have a sex and relationship coach and the founder of the Turned On Woman program. A program that helps women reclaim their pleasure as a source of freedom. I love the sound of that. And I can't wait for this conversation to begin. Welcome, Medina.

Adena:

Thank you so much.

Anna:

Glad that you're here. And we like to start our program with a story. And so I would really like it if you could share with our listeners a bit of your story and how it led you to do the work that you're doing now.

Adena:

Thank you so much. Yes, so excited to be here. Thank you. I never thought I would be here. Not in a million years. I'll be honest. I come from a very religious, traditional, conservative background. So I think I would not be alone in not seeing this for myself, not seeing myself talk and teach publicly about sex. It certainly was not a big part of my upbringing. But I came to this work because I needed it myself. When I've been married for 15 years now, together with my husband for 17 years, we always had a beautiful relationship. And what I thought was a really amazing sex life. And when I had my first daughter, sex became painful for me. And doctors just chalked it up to low estrogen while you're breastfeeding. It's fairly normal. But it didn't resolve for several years. And like many women, I quickly learned how few medical providers actually specialize in female sexual health. And so it was really hard to get into the right care. And so I went for years trying to find assistance and also getting really bad advice from doctors, like you have to push through it in order for it to resolve, or just drink a glass of wine, use it or lose it, right? All things that my whole system knew was not good advice, right? And I ignored it for a really long time. But after I had no other resources, at a certain point, I threw my hands up and I was like, I guess this is all I have to go by. And in violating my body's truth, in pushing past my body's signals, I trained my body to associate sex with discomfort instead of pleasure. And so when I finally got into the right hands of a phenomenal healthcare provider who I am forever indebted to, and she resolved my hormonal issues, the standard of care at that point, right? The medical standard is resolution from pain. Great, you're a success. But I still was totally disconnected from pleasure. I was numb. I had no sensitivity. I had no access to orgasm. I had no libido. I couldn't even remember that I liked sex. And I set off on a journey. I felt completely alone. I didn't know people like me existed at the time. And I set off on a journey to really reconnect to this part of myself for me. And it absolutely blasted my life open. What happened, what I learned about myself, what transformed over the course of like just starting the first year totally shifted everything in my life. My level of confidence, my marriage, the way I walk down the street, the way I hold myself, the way I feel about my body, the negative self-talk just totally dissolved. And at that point, I realized that this journey is not just about sex. And that when you bring women through the journey of exploring sexuality for them and understanding what's in it for them, it can totally shift the trajectory of a woman's life. And that's when I knew I needed to bring it to other people.

Anna:

Wow. Wow. That's really a great, powerful story and very true. Like we have to listen to what our body is telling us in order to heal. Yes. And make our experience our own. Which is what I loved about reading up on you on how you were really connecting this idea of pleasure being personal. And so you describe pleasure as a portal. Right? Tell me what that means. And also maybe a little bit more about how we become disconnected from pleasure.

Adena:

Yeah, absolutely. So pleasure is a hundred percent a pathway to deep self-intimacy. And I always like to say that how you have sex is how you do life. So if you think about that, what I mean by that is that often our experiences in the bedroom and with intimacy mirrors the things in life that keeps us small, right? It shines a light on the elements that are holding us back from living the freest, fullest, most authentically expressed version of life that is for us. And there's something about somatic work, and I should probably explain a little bit more about what that means in a moment, but somatic means of the body, right? And there's something about this experiential approach that you could in talk therapy, you could like go in circles around things and be in your story a lot. But when you're in the body, meeting your body, hands on, there's no dancing around it, right? It's like when I practice being with my body and something is holding me back, or I feel a wave of shame, or I start to cry. It's like the body doesn't lie. The body is going to speak directly to you about what is coming up. And so that's why things can shift so quickly. So let me pause before I get into how women disconnected from this energy source and from this potent kind of portal into their deepest self, just to backtrack and explain a little bit more about what somatic work is and specifically somatic sexuality work. Somatic just means of the body, right? So what I do is I teach women how to understand the language of their body, the language of their sensation, their turn on, their boundaries, their truth, right? We are, especially in our culture, we're taught to live in our heads. And so we are constantly discounting the signals that our bodies are telling us. We're not taught to be hungry women, right? We should count our calories and we pop some caffeine pill or another cup of coffee so that we can keep showing up and pushing past these signals. And in many ways, we're detaching from this potent information source all throughout our lives, right? And we're silencing the parts of us that we feel we need to protect, the parts that we've been told are too much or too burdensome or too needy. And this work, even though people are coming specifically, usually they start because they have an issue around low desire or difficulty with orgasm or low libido or connecting to their partners. We quickly see that it's actually not about sex at all, and that sex is just the doorway. And it ends up showing us the information that we need to clear.

Anna:

I see. So what gets revealed is the probably the story behind what they're struggling with. And I think, like when you think of it as a portal, as you said, it reveals the real truth or what they're really struggling with. And I think as a society, we've intellectualized everything, or we were trained to intellectualize everything, even though women are feeling creatures. And you can't intellectualize the body. You can't do this work. It sounds like you have to really be experiencing it and therefore feeling it, all the sensations, all the parts.

Adena:

Yes, a thousand percent, right? We can't think our way into having great sex. It's the experience of being in the body. And what's interesting is so many of us think that we're feeling, right? So I'll sit with clients all the time and they'll come in and they'll tell me a story of something that happened. This is how it differs from maybe talk therapy. I'll pause them and I'll say, the story is less important. I won't use those words, but I'll pause them and I'll say, What are you noticing in your body in this moment? For so many of us, it's just so hard to stay with what's there because we're jumping into the head to the story. It's so fascinating when you see a woman notice the moment where she's, wow, all this time I thought I was feeling my feelings, but I'm just thinking about my feelings. It's a completely different experience. And that is what I call self-intimacy, becoming intimate with whatever experience is present. And through that process, learning about yourself and also building capacity, learning like I can hold myself through this. Actually, I won't dissolve into the abyss if I let myself grieve, or if I let myself feel this pain, or if I feel this shame. And that's where so much of the healing happens is when we allow ourselves to be with the experience.

Anna:

Yeah. I think it's fascinating that you touched on how when somebody's telling you a story, that the power of storytelling, you know, for those of us that are struggling with anything, is that we forget that we're not the character in the story. We may be the character in a sense, meaning the situation, we're a part of the story. However, people forget they can be the author, that they can shape things. Yet I believe, as you're describing, it all begins with their willingness to feel, really feel it in their body what's going on. You know, the impact of the story or the impact of what they're struggling with. And yeah, that's great to hear that this work is helpful that way. Because so many people that I've talked to and worked with, they forget. They live from the neck up instead of from below the neck.

Adena:

Yeah. And it gets to be both, right? Because there's so much power and potency to our thoughts and to knowing that we can create our thoughts and we can envision future thoughts and work towards something. Absolutely. That's imperative, right? Like we don't want to discount the power of the mind. But as a society, we've completely, to your point, we've cut ourselves off from the neck down. And when we work in tandem, I can tell myself I want to experience 10 orgasms. I want to experience deep love. But if my body, if my nervous system feels unsafe around that, it's not gonna let that happen. So I will self-sabotage, I will get in the way. Something will happen because my mind is not the only one in control.

Anna:

So it's I'm just gonna ask this question since you brought it up in terms of when they're talking to you about a problem, what gets revealed, I'm wondering, is the history, the trauma, the initiating effect. Do you get into that with them, or do you stay primarily with the body? Because when we talk about safety, so much of this could be trauma related in terms of a thousand percent challenges, yeah.

Adena:

Yeah, it's actually it's fascinating. I think it's the most extraordinary journey when you tap into the sensations within your body, you access deep subconscious information. And I never know what's gonna come. And my clients never know what's gonna come. And it's always beautiful and rich and profoundly awakening. And so sometimes it will be a deep trauma, right? Noticing that a certain sensation feels familiar and it feels really old, and this reminds me of the moment the way my father looked at me or didn't look at me, whatever that story is. But yes, because the body does store memory. And sometimes it's trauma, but sometimes it's just about actually detaching from the story itself and just allowing the emotions to move through us as energy and to actually clear our channel, to clear the pathway just so that we can release what's keeping us stuck. And sometimes that's actually completely detaching from the story and just saying, I feel safe to just trust my body knows how to heal. If you look at a dog that just barks, barks, barks when something's threatening and then shakes it off. Right. It's like that. Can I trust myself to go through an emotional experience and then that I will be okay at the end? Because my body intuitively knows how to heal. And most of us have just disconnected from that knowledge. So it's a relearning.

Anna:

Yeah, that's great. That's wonderful. Deep work. Now, I want to ask you about the relationship between sensuality and sexuality. I know you make that distinction. So tell us a little bit about for our listeners the difference between sensuality and sexuality, as well as how they can begin reconnecting with both of these qualities. Yeah.

Adena:

I love this. So many of us get really tripped up on this because sexuality, it's a little touchy. We have complicated relationships with it. We're a little more receptive to sensuality. And the two get confounded, right? When we say sensuality, it really just means of the senses, sight, smell, sound, touch, taste, right? And so to be a sensual being in the world, that just means to be so deeply present in the moment. And I love this for so many reasons, right? Because as women in this particular moment in time, the last thing we need is more to do. And in this wellness culture, right now, it's like all the things we have to do, all the hacks we need, all the treatments and supplies and skincare, right? It's like the last thing we need is more. And when you connect to your sensual being, what you're doing is you're not doing more. You're actually just shifting your perspective. So you're just choosing to take on a different lens. So for example, it means when I'm waking up in the morning and I'm taking a shower before I go to work, I'm pausing just to notice how good it feels to have the hot water running down my scalp and back. It might mean I pause as I walk out onto the street and I let my skin notice that the sun feels really good. And it's not just about noticing, but it's also one step further is registering it as pleasure.

Anna:

Okay.

Adena:

So many of us have this very specific experience of pleasure and definition of pleasure that is so limiting. So we think of pleasure, especially in the realm of sex, as this like one thing that happens for 30 seconds between our legs, and we're constantly chasing this one thing. And if it's not particularly mind-blowing, we're like chasing that thing that everyone else has. When we're chasing this one type of experience, we're often totally missing all of the pleasure that's available to us everywhere. And so the practice of just attuning and noticing the pleasure that's available to us and allowing it to be important, allowing it to register what I like to say is like banking the pleasure. Not only are we regulating our nervous system, so we don't have to make time for 30 minutes of meditation every morning because we're just constantly banking these moments because pleasure actually teaches your brain that you're safe. So you're not only regulating your nervous system, but you are sensitizing your body to subtle pleasure, which can not only make sex more pleasurable because you're not just enjoying 30 seconds of climax, but you're actually able to enjoy a full-bodied aliveness and everything, everything becomes rich and sensitive and alive. And the whole experience, you can go for two hours feeling like so delicious and orgasmic in your body. Everything in life starts to feel good. You become a pleasure body. And so you're not just waiting. It's like saying we all just want to live for that one week we get a vacation a year. No, we all want to live feeling amazing all year. That would be the dream. So this is similar, right? Why wait for this one peak experience when we can feel these moments, right? A breeze blowing across our back, giving us chills and making us feel really juicy and alive, right? Why wouldn't we want that?

Anna:

Of course. Actually, what I'm hearing you say is that you're helping your clients to expand their experience of sensuality in their bodies by noting how their different senses could be connected to throughout their day, not just when they're having an intimate moment with their partner in bed. They could have it all the time. It almost seems like it would create more safety for their body experience. Is that what you're finding your clients are experiencing?

Adena:

A thousand percent. It creates more safety. It also creates like there's this weird paradigm that we live in where it's like we're not allowed to be sexual beings out in the world, but when it's go time, we're supposed to flip a switch. It's not how our bodies work, right? So this is a way of keeping the pilot light lit, right? We stay alive and connected to our senses all the time. We're so available for pleasure anytime, right? And it can feel amazing. It doesn't mean that we're having a genital orgasm, but it means that we can still be pleasure bodies. And yeah, that's a big piece of changing the way you walk through the world and feeling more alive and connected to your erotic energy. And it's also about, it is a foundational way of expanding our capacity to hold pleasure during sex itself, right? So making the whole experience richer and also expanding our, we all have a bliss threshold, a certain point where pleasure feels like too much. We might distract ourselves or we might push it away, or we might disconnect. And this is a way of expanding our capacity to hold big amounts of pleasure in our body.

Anna:

It also sounds like it's a mindfulness practice when you are really being mindful of what you're experiencing throughout the day through your body, through your senses. As you described, expanding your capacity to be in the moment for any one of those experiences, and then that would translate to more available capacity for being present during sex, which is great. I love this types of tools that people can do, and we'll get to that shortly. Now, what I want to hear from you is about your turned-on woman program. I love the sound of that. Yes. So, what inspired this program and what kind of transformation do you see in your clients that go through the program?

Adena:

Yeah. I'm so excited about this program. I've been dreaming about it for years, and I'm finally going to be launching it in the new year. And it's essentially the same work that I do one-on-one, essentially, with my clients, but brought to a group setting. So it's primarily a journey of reconnecting to this erotic energy, this erotic aliveness, right? I hope it's starting to become clear the way that this translates, right? That our erotic energy is not just for sex, but it actually is a really powerful, potent source of energy that we can tap into at any moment. It helps us go through life with so much greater ease and creativity and flow and connection as opposed to this sense of fighting with life that we all do. And so it's a 360-degree approach to clearing what's getting in the way of us knowing and feeling this erotic aliveness. And it integrates somatics and neuroscience and sacred sexuality. And the idea is learning both through education, right? Understanding how our bodies work, because most of us don't have that information, and then also clearing and giving real embodied practices to learn and to practice being in your body. So it's movement and breath work and expression and sounding and the education. And I'm particularly excited about the group because obviously there's a limit to how many clients you can work with. So I'm excited to bring this to more people. But also, specifically with sexuality work, there's so much shame. And when you get a group of women together, I can speak till the cows come home and tell women that what they're experiencing is so normal and they're not alone. But when you get a group of women together in the same room to say, wow, me too. It is so powerful. Yes, the shame can dissolve in an instant. And that's what I'm really excited about. I'm also excited to bring play and joy, which feels a little bit different in a one-on-one space. So this gets to be playful. Healing doesn't always have to be so heavy. And so I'm excited for that element as well.

Anna:

Oh, I love that. I love that. I think what I'm hearing you describe is an embodiment practice. And so, what's one embodiment practice that the listeners for our program might be able to start practicing today that would start creating this within their lives?

Adena:

A thousand percent sure. I'd love that. So just to clarify what embodiment means, it means like, how am I present in my body? So, to your point, this mindfulness, right? How do I actually treat my body and take up space within my body and get really present with what's here? And so a lot of the work that I do is teaching women how to be in their bodies, right? For themselves, in their pleasure, for themselves, not necessarily with a partner yet. And so I'd love to share a little bit about one of my favorite practices. So I teach a practice I call intuitive movement. I call it a practice because it evolves, but the idea here is to teach, really retrain us to allow our bodies to move us instead of us moving our bodies, right? We take exercise classes and dance classes and yoga classes, and we're constantly dictating to our body how we want them to move. And so this is a practice in listening to our bodies and understanding how to do that, right? And so it's it taps into all of these juicy things we've talked about, about playing with pleasure and learning how to experience subtle pleasure. Okay. And so I'll just give you a taste of this because the way I really like to do this is we turn on some sensual music that gets in your body. Maybe you get on a bed or a floor, get on all fours, and you close your eyes and you move to the music. And the only idea, the only goal here is to listen for where in your body wants a little attention, wants a little more spaciousness. Where can we bring just 5% more pleasure to practice this just to get a feel for it? I want to invite you just to take a big stretch, like you're just coming out of bed in the morning, like really stretching your arms and getting to that sweet spot where it's almost like your whole body size. And then rather than coming out of it, I want you to see if you can linger there just for a minute longer. Let it be important. If I told you that this was the portal to full orgasmic, full body orgasmic bliss, treat it with that level of importance. Yes, yes, you would. And so the idea is to be in that delicious moment and then treat it like it's important, and then say, okay, how can I bring just one percent more to this, more of myself, more of my presence? Maybe I bring some breath into it and really indulge it. It's so uncomfortable for us. We're so itchy to get out of it. Yeah, yeah, and so the idea is you just feel what that feels like, allow yourself to register that as pleasure. And then you pause and you say, What else does my body want right now? What else? And this is a practice you could do for 10 minutes, and it's such a great way of regulating the nervous system. It's such a great way of sensitizing your body to full body pleasure and just rewiring what it is we think of as pleasure.

Anna:

Yeah, I love that practice. That sounds like something I'm definitely gonna start tomorrow morning when I restart my day. So let's talk about long-term relationships. A lot of our listeners are in long-term relationships, they're mid-life and age, and long-term relationships, as you were describing, uh, maybe with your clients or yourself, can hit these uh moments where the passion fades, where the attraction fades, or because they've gone through childbirth, they have certain situations which interrupt their intimacy with their partner. How do you help couples to address this and work through this?

Adena:

I love this question. I love this question. This is the top question for everyone, I think, right? I think we need to start by understanding that sex in long-term monogamous partnership is going to look different than it is at the beginning of a relationship. Full stop. The nuance that I want to add here is that it doesn't have to be worse. It actually can be better. I'm together with my partner for 17 years. I am having better sex than we've ever had, and it's only getting better. And the reason for that, when you have new relationship energy, the hormones are raging, there's so much mystery and curiosity, and there is an element, there's a lack of safety there, right? Are they gonna call me back? Are they not? Are we together? There's that mystery that builds Eros. And the truth is we often trade that mystery for safety.

Anna:

Okay.

Adena:

And so we think that's the end of Eros, right? We think that's the end of our eroticism, but that's not true. We actually can have a different type of sex that is exploratory, that is deeply vulnerable, that can only come from deep safety. And so the problem is we never get to see this. This isn't modeled, right? All we see in the media and porn is like this hot tear off your clothes, impromptu sex. And really truly, when you start to treat sex differently, and people get turned off by the idea of saying we schedule sex, okay, it's not about scheduling sex, it's about ritualizing it, making it important, treating it as sacred. It's something that we so deeply value because the intimacy that we get to experience or the aliveness that I get to feel in my body, it nourishes me as if I just went on a two-week vacation. And so the way we get there is only through this deeper type of intimacy. And what I would the kind of the pathway there, how I help people get there, is first and foremost, I teach women how to turn themselves on. We all yeah, yeah. This I could scream this from the rooftops because can we even listen to these words? I don't want to rely on someone else to turn me on. First of all, I want to be on. I want to be on all the time. I want to be on. Yes, but what we're saying about to being turned on, it's I feel alive in my body. Hell, I want to feel alive. My body all the time. And I certainly don't want to rely on someone else for that. I want to do that. What I do is I teach women how to turn themselves on, how to know what kind of touch do I like? What kind of sex do I like to have? What do I come to sex to feel? Because it's not an orgasm. We all love an orgasm, but underneath it, we come to sex to feel something so much deeper. And how to light ourselves up, how to connect to this amazing energy inside of us that is uniquely ours. And something drastically shifts in a woman when she discovers this for herself. Wow. Something drastically shifts.

Anna:

I love the idea of that and the clarity that you're helping them get towards because once you're clear on those things that you're describing, there's no need to outsource it, so to speak, to your partner because they reclaim it, as you've said.

Adena:

Yeah. A thousand percent. And it's not to say that we don't want to share it with our partners, but we have to recognize that over the course of a many decade-long relationship, our partners' bodies are going to change. So are ours. We are going to go through different seasons, we're going to go through different stressors, we're going to go through periods where we're feeling more or less desire and to rely on someone else to tend to that kind of a need. Just it's, it doesn't make, it doesn't add up. And so what happens when we learn to turn ourselves on is then we can access that by ourselves and then choose to play with that and exchange that with someone else. And we can also discover, teach our partners that too, learn our partner's unique blueprint. And then we can find ways to satisfy each of our own needs. And there are infinite ways to play within that space once we know what it is that is most enriching, most fulfilling, most connecting for each other.

Anna:

I think what I'm hearing you say, which is mind-blowing to me, is that you're teaching couples on how to become so open and honest about what they are experiencing or what their form of pleasure is, and then find ways to be able to share that together. That's a high level of intimacy, I think. Which is fantastic. This kind of begs the question that pleasure isn't just a problem for women because I imagine most of my listeners are women of a certain age, and we can certainly carry the story that as our bodies are aging, we are losing our access to pleasure, and it's our problem to fix. So tell me, what would you say to someone who thinks that way?

Adena:

I it's it couldn't be further from the truth. It couldn't be further from the truth. I find as women age, they just start living. We let go, we let go, we finally give up on this unreasonable standard to be perfect, to be this artificial thing for everyone else in the world, and we finally start to feel comfortable asking for what we want, being shameless about our bodies, just saying, Here, I'm here for me, finally.

Anna:

Permission to really live the whole part of parts of you. Um these stories, these paradigms, these limiting beliefs that are around that create this shame paradigm and the way people can get obstacled out of having pleasurable sex. So, how do we begin to shift that from sexual shame?

Adena:

Yeah, yeah, so important, so important. So I think there are two brands of shame that I come across. Shame is such a big piece of the puzzle, right? I think there's one experience of shame that is this very common experience that women have where we wrong our bodies in some way, right? We have been conditioned to believe somehow that whatever we are experiencing in any given moment is somehow not right. It's not enough, it's imperfect, we're broken, we're taking too long, we're asking for too much. And so we wrong ourselves and we wrong our bodies. And so there's a shame around the truth of our experience. And so we repress it. And so this is speaking to that concept before of when we were overriding our body's signals, right? So our body's wired for pleasure. It's always telling us what it wants to get present, to relax, to enjoy the moment. That's what it wants. But we're constantly, we have this image of what sex should look like, what our bodies should look like, what we should smell like. All of we have such a very specific opinion and image of what we should be and the experience should be that we're completely missing all of the inputs and the signals that our bodies are telling us. And a beautiful example of this, I had a client who came to me and she had been married for 10 years, and she she was in her early 60s. She'd been married for 10 years, and she had always had so much anxiety having sex with her partner. And she had been to sex therapists and it helped her manage her anxiety somewhat, but it was like a band-aid. It was helping her manage it so that she could tolerate it for him, but she wasn't experiencing any pleasure. And literally, after our second session, when all I did was debunk the myths around what sex is supposed to look like and give her permission to be radically honest about what she needed in the moment. She came to me and she said, Adina, I just had this most extraordinary full body orgasm without him even touching me. I don't know how that happened. Literally, she would have she used to have panic attacks. How did that happen? That wasn't any voodoo I did. All it was giving her the permission to say, oh, I actually all I need is just this gentle hovering. And that just gets me so excited. She's such an energetically sensitive person that all that pounding and friction was overwhelming her system. But because that's what we think sex is supposed to look like, she was forcing herself. So that's a one of the ways that shame gets in the way here. Okay. Another piece of the shame puzzle is this often like religious and cultural conditioning around sex being sinful or shameful. And to that, I would say the first thing we can do is get in the room. To your point about awareness is just one piece of the puzzle, but surround yourself with people who believe different things than you. It becomes osmosis. It's like the difference between climbing the mountain and getting pulled up the mountain. Can I surround myself by people who are unabashedly shameless in their sexuality, who they are defining their sexuality as something that is beautiful and empowering and sacred and worthy? And just by being in the room, just by being surrounded by those people, you will start to notice subtly things shift. So that's one of the easiest ways to start is to find communities of people who are of the mindset that's important to you.

Anna:

Okay. You mentioned religious or coming from a conservative home. So if you're a woman from that context, how do you address the shame from that? Is it by getting into different communities with people with different mindsets? Or is there more?

Adena:

Yeah, so I think that's just one piece of the puzzle because I think sometimes we just have to expand, right? Our minds are limited with what we know. And so sometimes it's helpful to expand. But a lot of what I teach is working with the body to rewire our neural programming. So if I have this idea of how our brain works, right? Neurons that fire together wire together. So if I grew up and every time I had a sexual experience, I am feeling shame because that's what I was taught, then those neurons are associated. And every time I have sex or allude to sex, I feel that shame, right? But we know now with neuroplasticity that our brain can learn new things. And so that's not gonna be just a cognitive experience. What happens now is I need to create new experiences in my body with a new narrative in order for a new neural connection to be formed. And what's gonna happen is the more I repeat that new lived experience in my body, a new neural network will be formed and I will repeat it until that becomes the automatic way. And that old programming fizzles out and dies down. And so we do that by giving ourselves intentional pleasure, intentional, intentional, very well-curated experiences in our body. I give my clients guided self-pleasure practices where they can have the experience of being in their body and pairing it with safety and pairing it with love and compassion and acceptance or whatever their new narrative is, the more you practice that and embody that, your body gets a new experience. And the kind of the fun about pleasure-based work is that however much we know about neuroplasticity and our brain's capacity to rewire, when you add a layer of joy and pleasure and play, our brain learns even faster.

Anna:

Okay, I love that. I love that. I you mentioned the client that was over the age of 60, which I am myself. And I'm wondering by somebody from that category, and coming from a conservative religious family, which I did as well, I'm thinking that we never even talked about sex. Certainly, the idea was suggested to us through our religious training was that you would wait till after you got married. And it wasn't something that you would explore on your own, like ever. And there's a lot of limiting beliefs that people of a certain age group have to face. How much of a challenge is that obstacle when you're working with clients?

Adena:

I think we're all given a different set of limitations. So for some people, this is their limitation. For other people, they have childhood trauma, or a mother who had trauma who internalized this message for them or programmed them the message that sex is dangerous, right? So we all have really challenging beliefs. And it all comes down to safety. The nervous system, it's complex and it's also quite simple, right? It's we're either open to connection or we're in a mode of protection. And so many of these beliefs that we've internalized is a way of protecting ourselves from getting ostracized from the group, of the danger that was associated either with physical danger or a sense of being slut-shamed or being ostracized from the group and abandoned. And so the opportunity gets to become, just like any work you do on yourself, we can no longer, as an as adults, rely on other people to do that work for us. Our parents can't come back and heal old wounds, our ex-boyfriends can't come back and heal old wounds. It's on us. We get to be the adults in the room, we get to reparent ourselves, and we can taste the sense of agency that we have to build a new narrative for ourselves. And again, it's the difference between telling ourselves a new story and actually embodying the story, living the story in our bodies. And that's what creates the shifts. Okay.

Anna:

Wow. I love that. This is in my ballpark other ways, in terms of just learning to be able to rewrite the narrative. And you do it through your work, through the body, which I think makes great sense because there's a disconnect that could happen again if you just are telling yourself the story as opposed to actually supporting it with rituals and practices that are helping you embody it so that there's connection, mind, body connection. Yeah. That's fantastic.

Adena:

Yeah. And to that end, I think just the last thing I would add to that is, you know, and this idea that we now have the agency, it means that we get to be the source of safety.

Anna:

Okay.

Adena:

And so that's where what I spoke earlier about the embody, like not being able to avoid the things when you do embodiment work, is because if I sit down, if I say, okay, I'm going to try this new self-pleasure practice that Adina gave me, and it feels so awkward and uncomfortable, and I'm naked and I'm by myself in my room. And that's so weird for me because I have so many feelings about this. We have to meet that. And we meet the voices that come up. And so we go slowly because we can only go as fast as the nervous system is ready to go. But we learn to be the presence that we needed. We learn to meet ourselves and to talk to ourselves in the way that we always needed, right? It's okay. I'm not gonna push. Let's go slow today, right? I'm not gonna force you. This feels uncomfortable. I see that. I'm gonna get curious about it. And so through the process of becoming a lover to ourselves, the same way we would want anyone to be a lover to us, to be our own best lover, that's how we heal so much of this is becoming the love we always sought from other people, becoming the safety we wished we had, that's how we create healing. Wow, I love that.

Anna:

That's such great agency that you're advocating for your clients. Now, you often say that women reclaim pleasure and that it ripples out into the other areas of their life. So tell me some examples of what you're noticing in your clients that as they start to reclaim the pleasure, how their lives are changing.

Adena:

Yeah. So I see so many different things. I see women, of course, have so much richer sexual experiences, be able to experience more pleasure in their bodies, have more fulfilling, richer intimacy. I see women who are so much more embodied and confident in their dating journeys. I see women who there's an overarching theme of women who are really connected to desire for the first time in their lives. So they know what they want. They haven't known what they want. Now they feel and they get clear on what they want, and they're not afraid to claim it. So that comes out in so many different ways. It can come out in stronger boundaries at work, or asking for time away from the kids, or recommitting to an old hobby that brought them joy, or saying no when they need no. So I've seen people take greater risks in their creative lives and careers. I've seen them, I deal with people with chronic pain and pelvic pain. I've seen so much of that resolve. It's kind of really wild because it's a very gentle approach. And it's not pushing, it's not excruciating, it's not hard. It's sure, there's some moments of hardship for sure. But what it ends up opening for people at the end of the day, the biggest theme is it's this, it's a connection to their authenticity so that they're willing to live and claim and demand a life that's truly theirs. Wow, I love that.

Anna:

That's like enlivening, enlivening and enriching. Fantastic. So what do you wish more women knew about their personal pleasure?

Adena:

I really wish people could understand that pleasure is not a luxury. It's not a nice to have, it's not indulgence. So many of us are wired this way and are so uncomfortable around claiming pleasure for ourselves as necessary, but it's absolutely essential. It's a direct path to liberating us from the narratives, the stories, the voices, the conditioning that keep us small and get in the way of us living our fullest, freest, most authentic life and feeling this sense of vibrancy and aliveness that I think so many of us are hungry for. Yeah. And I think the last thing I would add is just this sense of for me, the pleasure work is less about the pleasure itself, although that gets to be amazing. It's actually less for me, it's less about the orgasm and it's more about the woman you become on the journey to learning how to hold that much pleasure in your system, right? Someone who feels safe in her body, someone who knows what she wants and isn't afraid to ask for it, someone who holds her boundaries, someone who is comfortable receiving, someone who feels safe being seen and being witnessed and taking up space, someone who is shameless in her body and her body's shape and smells and sounds and all those things, right? Someone who talks to herself with kindness, right? These are the things that end up shifting because they're getting in the way of your orgasm. So for me, it's more about who I become on my way to accessing that pleasure.

Anna:

I love that idea. Are there any final questions or things that you would want our listeners to think about as they start navigating, exploring the idea of pleasure?

Adena:

Yeah, I think I would really invite people to notice as they were listening to this conversation, to notice their body.

Anna:

Okay.

Adena:

To notice where did you feel a little twinge of discomfort? Where might you have contracted? Where did your head go? Oh, yeah, that'll never happen. Because I was you, right? When I first stepped into these spaces, I told you I didn't even think I liked sex anymore. And so I really didn't feel like I belonged. And all of it felt outlandish, these conversations people were having about what they were able to experience. And I stuck with it. I don't know why, maybe a hope, a wish, a dream. But I just want to invite people to notice how their body's responding and to allow that to invite them into curiosity. Just curiosity, no shame, no judgment. But how can I come to starting this journey from a place of understanding that whatever resistance I'm feeling was probably wise and necessary and adaptive. And so, how can I show up to myself the way I would want a lover to with curiosity, with patience, with questions, with compassion. And that to me feels like a really good place to start.

Anna:

Yeah, definitely. I'm curious just expanded my understanding of pleasure and the role, it's almost like a high form of self-care. And a way for us to really it's an invitation for us to shift our perspectives around the role that pleasure can play in expanding our lives. This has been incredible. Thank you so much for joining me today with this great conversation about pleasure and agency and how women can take back their pleasure and their lives. Thank you.

Adena:

Thank you. Thank you. So much fun.

Anna:

Thank you. So tell us for our listeners how we can get a hold of you, how they can find you and what's going on for them with you.

Adena:

Yeah, sure, of course. So you can find me. My website is unboundednyc.com. You can also access, I have a couple of free practices and workbooks. You can start to explore some of this and get a feel for the work. And you can find me on Instagram at get.unbounded. And like I mentioned, I'm launching this group program in the start of the new year. So all that information is on the website. You can always reach out to me and happy to share more.

Anna:

Great. Wonderful. I'm sure you have certainly piqued the curiosity of our listeners. I hope that they come rushing forward to reclaim their pleasure through your practices. Thanks again so much, Adina, for joining us at She Asked, where healing meets practical hope. And until soon, we're gonna say all our listeners, we always tell them to be well, and hopefully we can reconnect again soon. So thank you.