Shame Slayers, Unite! For the all-new 25 minute video teaching on how to effectively slay the shame and reclaim fearless belonging, please join us for free in the Pleasure Pod! Participate in our Shame Slayers Survey here Thanks To Our Episode Sponsor: * Get fresh, healthy ready to go meals delivered from Factor Meals, and use the code PLEASURE50 for 50% off your first box and 20% off your second! * Find all of our sponsor offerings at PleasureMechanics.com/Toolbox Shame is one of the most common sexual struggles. Shame is a social experience of feeling unworthy, unlovable, not belonging or lesser than. Shame tells us we have to hide parts of ourselves to fit in, get along or avoid rejection. Shame tells us we are broken, sinful, gross or otherwise unworthy of belonging. I define shame as the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging – something we’ve experienced, done, or failed to do makes us unworthy of connection. ~ Brene Brown Shame tells us if we were to be truly ourselves, we wouldn’t belong. Shame lies to us, and holds us all hostage in an invisible web-like grip of cultural myth and misinformation. While not all shame is sexual shame, almost all of us struggle with some form of sexual shame – from body shame to faith-based shame, from kink shame to genital shame, almost everyone holds some form of shame around their sexuality. A goal of shame resilience is to help those who feel shame feel empathy, connection, power, and freedom instead, emotions that can be considered the opposite of shame.

Mapping your Peak Erotic Experiences is a powerful practice to mine your personal history for clues to creating a better sex life for your future! Love the podcast? Ready for more? Join The Pleasure Pod & Get The Interactive Worksheet & More of the Best of Pleasure Mechanics! The Peak Erotic Experiences Practice comes to us from the late great Dr. Jack Morin, author of The Erotic Mind, who suggests that we use our own Peak Erotic Experiences, our sexual “highlight reel” to look for clues about who we are as erotic beings. He proposes that what worked best for you in the past is very likely to work again in the future. This simple but powerful tool puts you in control of naming what turns you on most authentically. In this exercise, we invite you to use memories of your Peak Erotic Experiences to create a map of the elements of what makes sex hot and memorable for you specifically. This is a quick interactive experiment that will help you reveal the landscape of your authentic desires. We recommend repeating this exercise at least once a year, and anytime you feel stuck or unsure of what you are craving from your lover. Map Your Peak Erotic Experiences 1. Spend some time and scan through your erotic history. Then pick one or two Peak Erotic Experiences – these are the moments when sex was the hottest, most satisfying, most fulfilling for you. Allow yourself to focus on those “off the charts” memories – even if they were with an ex, even if they were a long time ago. 2. Remember these experiences in vivid detail. Recall the situation that led up to the encounter, the environment, the mood, the smells. What were you wearing? What language did your lover use? What happened? The more vivid your memory, the more effective your map will be to creating more sex like this in the future. 3. Pick 3 qualities that you want to experience more of. Write them down. Then, you can share with your lover or not, your choice. What is important now is to actively create the conditions that will allow more fulfilling sex in the future. By naming what worked for you in the past, you are poised to recreate those turn-ons in the future. Now you are ready to begin examining your peak erotic experiences. Think of them using two seemingly mismatched metaphors. Peak turn-ons are precious jewels. To fully appreciate their glittering facets, it is necessary to gaze at them from different angles. Yet peak experiences are also onionlike. As each layer is peeled away you uncover additional information not visible on the surface ~ Dr. Jack Morin, The Erotic Mind

Erotic Touch Activation is our Pleasure Mechanics process to awaken your touch, activate your hands as erotic tools and sensitize your sense of touch. Erotic Touch Activation allows us to shift out of “working hands mode” where we use our hands for functional touch and into using our hands as erotic tools of sensing, feeling, listening, and creating pleasure. Ready for an Erotic Touch Activation? Join us on Sunday March 24 for a live community call and experiential practice session in Erotic Touch Activation practices – enroll for free at PleasureMechanics.com/live Why wait to ignite your erotic touch? Get started tonight: dive into our erotic touch training here – or go all in for a lifetime of erotic exploration with us with our All Access Pass. Thanks To Our Episode Sponsor: * Explore Dipsea Stories for an immersive erotic soundscapes, explicit stories and more. Use the code PLEASURE for an extended 30 day FREE trial! * Find discounts and offers from all of our sponsors at PleasureMechanics.com/Toolbox

The Five As of Erotic First Aid : What To Do When Good Things Go Wrong As Chris recovers from a recent sex injury, we share the five steps of offering Erotic First Aid. From broken bed frames to thrusting gone askew, we share stories of sex injuries and accidents and offer a reliable framework for responding with care, getting the help you need, and staying connected. Big thanks to our episode sponsor Factor Meals for keeping us well fed this week! For ready to eat, restaurant quality meals shipped directly to your door, go to FactorMeals.com/Pleasure50 , use the code Pleasure50 for 50% off. No matter what kind of sex you are enjoying, sex accidents and sex injuries can happen in any moment – often when we are deep in pleasure or high on arousal! Accidents happen, and HOW you respond to the moment is crucial. A little preparation can go a long way to create a calmer response in the heat of the moment, so tune in to equip yourself with our five-step framework for providing your lover (or yourself!) with Erotic First Aid. The 5 A’s of Erotic First Aid are: * Awareness * Assessment * Action * Aftercare * Accountability Want to share your story of a sex accident or injury, or what kinds of Erotic First Aid have been most useful to you? Record us a voice memo here and share your story with the Pleasure Mechanics community!

Praise can feel like loving strokes that go right to our soul’s sweet spots, giving us the affirmation, acceptance and encouragement that so many of us crave – but can also cause embarrassment, discomfort or even humiliation! Some people love being praised for their physical appearance, and others find this distracting. In this podcast episode, we explore erotic praise, praise kink and the full range of emotions that receiving praise can evoke. Get to know your specific relationship with praise, discover if you might have a praise kink, and learn how to praise your partner just how they like it, all in this free episode of Speaking of Sex with The Pleasure Mechanics! Thanks To Our Episode Sponsor: * Explore Dipsea Stories for an immersive erotic soundscapes, explicit stories and more. Use the code PLEASURE for an extended 30 day FREE trial! * Find discounts and offers from all of our sponsors at PleasureMechanics.com/Toolbox

Emily Nagoski shares the game-changing tool from her new book, Come Together: The Science (and Art!) of Creating Lasting Sexual Connections. The Core Emotional Floorplan is a framework that allows all of us to more clearly see and share their own unique emotional experience, and find pathways back home towards Care, Play and Lust. Join Chris for a guided video practice in mapping your own emotional floorplan and mapping your own paths to lust – it’s included in your FREE first month of Pleasure Pod membership. Thanks To Our Episode Sponsor: * Explore Dipsea Stories for an immersive erotic soundscapes, explicit stories and more. Use the code PLEASURE for an extended 30 day FREE trial! * Get fresh, healthy ready to go meals delivered from Factor Meals, and use the code PLEASURE50 for 50% off! Listen to part one of this interview here: The Surprising Science of Lasting Sexual Connection: An Interview with Emily Nagoski

In this intimate interview, Emily Nagoski shares her insights from authoring her new book Come Together: The Science (and Art!) of Creating Lasting Sexual Connections. We dive into the common misconceptions about long term erotic relationships, and what really works when it comes to creating a sex life worth wanting. For a bonus interview and guided practice on Mapping Your Emotional Floor Plan and finding your specific pathways back to LUST, join us in The Pleasure Pod Thanks To Our Episode Sponsor: * Explore Dipsea Stories for an immersive erotic soundscapes, explicit stories and more. Use the code PLEASURE for an extended 30 day FREE trial! Books by Emily Nagoski: * Come Together: The Science (and Art!) of Creating Lasting Sexual Connections * Come As You Are – REVISED and UPDATED * Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle Pleasure Mechanics Interviews with Emily Nagoski: * Episode #079: The Surprising Science of Sex With Emily Nagoski, Part 1 * Episode #080: The Surprising Science of Sex With Emily Nagoski, Part 2 * Episode #330: Burnout: The Stress and Sex Connection – An Interview With Emily Nagoski * Episode #389: Come As You Are Interview with Emily Nagoski, Ph.D. More Resources Mentioned In This Episode * Why Good Sex Matters by Nan Wise * Mediated Intimacy article by Meg-John Barker, Rosalind Gill, and Laura Harvey

When we Touch To Feel, we unlock boundless potential for sensual, emotional and relational pleasures. Touching To Feel is a lifetime practice of waking up our bodies to FEEL more, feeling the true depth and range of our own emotions, expressing ourselves through touch and touching with purpose and intention to create a wide range of extraordinary erotic feeling states! All of this, in three simple words: Touch To Feel * Join us for erotic touch training at PleasureMechanics.com/touch * Explore Dipsea Stories for an immersive erotic soundscapes, explicit stories and more. Use the code PLEASURE for an extended 30 day FREE trial! This episode was inspired by a voicemail from a listener. Thanks Andrew! You can leave your own message for us, sharing your wins, stories or questions at PleasureMechanics.com/hello “So she thoroughly taught him that one cannot take pleasure without giving pleasure, and that every gesture, every caress, every touch, every glance, every last bit of the body has its secret, which brings happiness to the person who knows how to wake it. ― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

Tend The Tender is a phrase that invites us all to bring more loving attention to our most tender places, and to allow others to care for us when we are feeling a bit raw. To be tender is to be human, and yet many of us struggle to ask for care when we need it most. If we learn how to tend the tender, we can bring more compassionate care to ourselves and those we love the most. Get Equipped With These Generous Offers From Our Podcast Sponsors: * Get ED medications and at-home STI testing from ShamelessCare.com and use the code PLEASURE for $30 off your first order! Continue The Conversation With These Speaking of Sex Episodes * Episode 423: Just Hold Me * Episode 467: Touch Hunger

What happens after your lover discloses their fetish- or you discover a fetish or kink and need to talk about it? In this episode we discuss how to bring more compassion and curiosity to conversations about newly disclosed kinks and fetishes. Want more guidance into kink? Join us here. This call was inspired by a listener’s voicemail – share your questions, wins or aha! moments with us at PleasureMechanics.com/hello Get Equipped With These Generous Offers From Our Podcast Sponsors: * Get ED medications and at-home STI testing from ShamelessCare.com and use the code PLEASURE for $30 off your first order! * DipseaStories : Explore an audio library of immersive erotic soundscapes, explicit stories and more. Use code PLEASURE for 30 day free trial