Sex in Midlife: It Doesn’t Have to Fade (and Can Even Be Great) | Susan Bratton

0:00Jonathan Fields: So most people assume that midlife often shepherds in the slow death of sex and sensuality. But sex doesn't have to fade in your 40s or 50s or beyond. It can actually get better, more soulful, satisfying, and more connected than ever. Today's guest, Susan Bratton, reveals the frameworks, the language, and the practical tools that turn shame and often shutdown into intimacy, helping you build a sex life that grows with you instead of disappearing over time and with age. If you ever thought, well, maybe this part of my life is over, this conversation will flip that script. Today's conversation is also guest hosted by a dear friend, acclaimed author and coach, Cynthia Morris, who also brings her own late in life curiosity and honesty and reinvention into the discussion.

0:48Jonathan Fields: And together, they unpack why so many couples get stuck in duty and frustration and silence and how to move back towards pleasure play and honest connection. You'll discover things like why libido, desire, and arousal are completely different and why confusing them keeps couples stuck. How shame, fear, trauma, and performance anxiety quietly kill intimacy. You'll learn about the sexual soulmate pact and how it creates safer, more honest bedroom communication. You'll hear about why women often need more time and safety and surrender to arouse and how partners can work with that instead of against it.

1:27Jonathan Fields: and how solo pleasure, sex tools, and experimentation can expand what Susan calls orgasmic capacity at any age. Susan also shares the turning point in her own marriage, from platonic distance and unmet needs to a radically more honest, pleasure-centered relationship. A little more about Susan Bratton. She's a trusted intimacy expert and author of numerous books and programs on lovemaking techniques, intimacy communication, and regenerative intimacy. and she's the founder of betterlover.com and has spent decades helping people move from fear to pleasure. So excited to share this conversation with you.

2:04Jonathan Fields: I'm Jonathan Fields and this is Good Life Project and we'll be right back after this short break.

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3:18Jonathan Fields: Good Life Project is sponsored by Nature Race Farm. So if there's one thing I have learned after 14 years of deep conversations about living well, it's this. At some point, you get tired of overthinking things that shouldn't require a decision tree. And somehow, the chicken owl just never got that memo. Too many labels, too many claims, too many things to squint at before you can just make dinner. That's the problem nature-raised farms set out to fix. It's no antibiotics ever, free from gluten, dairy, and soy, no seed oils, nothing artificial, good source of fiber. So whether it's a fast lunch between calls or a Sunday dinner with people you love, you're not trading taste for trust.

4:00Jonathan Fields: Nature Ray's Farms believes chicken should meet a higher standard. Chicken that's just chicken. No trade-offs, no second guessing. Look for Nature Ray's Farms chicken in your freezer aisle and get back to simply enjoying dinner. I love talking about sex and money because no one does. And we'll get to that. Let's start with this feeling or this idea that a lot of people arrive in their 40s or 50s in their sex life, the flame just kind of dies away, or so they think. And they just decide, well, that's it. And that was definitely me. In my late 40s, I was like, I was single for seven years. And I was like, this is it.

4:38Jonathan Fields: It's just that's it. But you think that we have that backwards. Can you tell us why? yeah sure how's your sex life now it's super great i found i found my husband and at yoga which i love because embodied man's place i expected and he's older he's a bit older than me and so i was like for sure it's over for sure there's not going to be any sex life and it turns out i was completely wrong it's the best sex life i've ever had so um that's why i was It's like, this is, Susan knows this, and Susan has evidence, and we can hear about it. Yeah, it's funny. It really seems like the 40s are kind of a fork in the road for a lot of people, especially female-bodied people.

5:30And I'll use men, women, penis owners, vulva owners. I'll use all kinds of terms because we're seeing a great shift in the matriarchal, patriarchal roles in our culture right now. We're examining that because we're collectively dissatisfied with what's going on. And there's a great surge of gender spectrum and all of those kinds of things. And so I just really want to acknowledge support of all people on their journey, wherever they are in whatever container they live in. Because one of the things that I really like about the work that I've done on myself in my own life is living completely into what one might have in the old days called my masculine versus my feminine.

6:20And it really has a lot of impact on our sexuality. And one of the interesting things about kind of the stages of your sex life is what I've seen over the years, the decades that I've been an author of passionate lovemaking techniques, bedroom communication skills, and intimate wellness, or what I like to call regenerative intimacy, is that your 20s are kind of like the blind leading the blind, ever hopeful. Some of us had some fun. And some of us had some brief glimpses of the possibility. But almost to a kid in my daughter's cohort of the 20s, now she's hitting the end of her 20s, they would sit with me and they'd be like, Suze, can I ask you a question?

7:09And it was like, how come it seems like all my friends are having good sex, but I'm not? Is there something wrong with me? You know, that's a really common scenario in your 20s. In your 30s, you're in it in your career. If you're going to have children, that's generally a lot of when these generations have had their children a little bit older. We're not doing it the same as our mothers did in their 20s. They're pushing to the 30s. So they've got this confluence of kids and career, and they're just trying to make it through. A lot of times I talk to couples who have children in the home, and I teach them how to get through that era.

7:46I call it planting the seeds of your future sexual potential. Because with all those things going on, it's actually hard to get a lot done, but you got to keep the experimentation going. Then in your 40s, you're kind of getting a little break from raising children. Some are pushing it even longer and they still have little kids running around. But you either think, man, I'd like to have good sex and I'm not. or I don't know, maybe it's over for me or I'm ready to be done with it. The be done with it often happens even later in your 50s where it used to be in our parents' generation, you know, for us, Cynthia, that our moms would have kind of been like, well, menopause is the end.

8:37That was kind of the cultural moree was, once you can't have babies, why would you want to have sex? because of the culture that we live in, which is so repressive. There's a lot of shame. There's a lot of trauma. There's a lot of just issues that people go through. And it's easier because sex education isn't a thing. There isn't really sex education. There's fear-based scare tactics, but there's not a lot of like, we're going to teach you how to pleasure each other. And the sexperts, and I'm an early generation of sex experts, and the 50-year-olds, the 40-year-olds, the 30-year-olds, and the 20-year-olds who are coming up behind me, we're all censored, but there's a lot more of them now.

9:31They're harder to whack down because so many people are now sexologists, sex therapists, embodiment coaches, There's relations. They want to talk about sex, but it's censored. So in your 40s, it is the most common story, which is I had a renaissance in my sex life. I just decided I'm just going to go for it. I want to learn things. The people who are growth mindset people, which very much are your listeners and viewers, You are teaching people reframes, new ways of approaching insights, competitive edges, those kinds of things. And sex falls right into that category. The less you know, the more fear you have, the easier it is to give it up because it's just not going to be good.

10:22Because we are born knowing how to procreate. We can figure out tab A into slot B. But beyond that, we get nothing. So it really is the blind leading the blind behind closed doors. And that's where the couples who are growth mindset or the people who are growth mindset, they'll take that fork in the road where sex can keep getting better because they're willing to learn things, your listeners, or they're going to be, this is the way it is. I don't like it. I'm going to give it up. That's the fork in the road that leads to a loss of health span, a loss of happiness span. I mean, intimate pleasure, what I like, I don't like to call it sex.

11:07I like to call it orgasmic intimacy because sex, people think, is intercourse. They think they equate the two when sex is so many other things. And so if I say sex and the people who are like, I don't want sex, they'll give up. But if I say, how about orgasmic intimacy? How about pleasurable intimacy? They'll be like, okay, maybe I'd be open to that. So we can save a few people by just changing the language, which helps a lot. But generally, orgasmic intimacy is the fourth factor of longevity. A long, happy, healthy life, literally lengthening your health span. Two years for every 10 years, you stay intimately, orgasmically active.

11:53Jonathan Fields: Oh, I love that. So I'm curious about something you said. There's a certain sense of, okay, I just want to be done with it. What are some of the things that are showing up in someone's life to have them just want to give up on sex, specifically? duty booty mercy sex coercive sex sex that is not pleasurable for them painful sex uh frustration with the partner inside and outside the bedroom i like to give people a lot of structures to think about or like maps to the territory around our sexuality because then they can be like, oh, I see. It helps you pinpoint what the problems are. There's libido, desire, and arousal.

12:42And they're somewhat used interchangeably, but they're very different things. So the way to think about libido is it's the other side of the same coin as your overall health. You know how when you don't feel great, you're not really interested in making love, but when you feel good, you're like a little hornier, a little lustier. That's libido. right there.

13:06Jonathan Fields: It's our vitality, it sounds like. Big part of it. And then desire is more of the emotional body. How do I feel about myself? What's your self-talk? Is it self-love or is it self-loathing? So many people have a core wound of not being worthy of love or fearful of love, never having been loved well, not knowing how to love. Love is a learned skill and a practice as well. That little heart of ours is a door and a muscle. And that muscle needs to be worked to swing wide open. But when it swings wide open, and then it slams shut, it hurts. And there are some people that would rather not love than be hurt.

13:48And that's a shame too. So the desire goes both ways. It goes into how desirable you feel about yourself. And it goes to how you feel about your partner. and often the people who want to give up intimacy, it hasn't felt good to them in their heart, their soul, their spirit, nor their body. And then arousal is often what leads to that problem. You know, it's so funny, the nature and nurture of the masculine and feminine, what I would call like the penis-owning testosterone-dominant human and the estrogen-dominant, vulvovaginal-owning human, we have the same parts. He's an outie, she's an innie.

14:37We have the same erectile tissue. But because of the way it fits in our body and blood flow, hemodynamics, how fast it flows into the erectile tissue in our systems means that often our male body partners are ready to go at a moment's notice. They're kind of like laying in wait for the moment. They have testosterone.

15:02Jonathan Fields: And it's obvious. Yes. And that's great. I mean, they're holding the torch for us in so many ways. I really appreciate that. You know, they're the ones that are ready to go. and they get a lot more testosterone. And so they also have more of that libido-y horniness feeling all the time. They generally masturbate more often as well, which is really healthy. I really like it when partners encourage their men to masturbate a lot. And vice versa, it goes both ways. Solo pleasuring is a very important part of keeping the parts working and expanding your orgasmic capacity as you age. You can come better and have more kinds of orgasms as you mature, if you understand that and you have that mindset.

15:47Where the female body, it's, you know, being an estrogen living woman, we live in a world that is fraught with danger. We have never in our society been more aware of how dangerous it is to be a woman walking in this earth. We do not walk safely. So for us to even think about becoming relaxed enough to allow the arousal to rise in our body, we need a lot of time, touch, safety, surrender. and often our partners if they're men they don't understand they take a rejection of sex as uh like a rejection of them or because they ask for sex and we're not there and they're making these big offers that that are like i mean i don't know babe i don't i'm not sure you know because it takes us time to feel safe and let down, literally let our hormones allow us to kind of let down and let our mouth water and let our vagina lubricate and the things that have to, you know, the little domino effect of arousal.

17:00And our arousal ladder, if you visualize it, it's one of those ladders that goes straight up and it's got these, at the bottom, the rungs are really far apart and it's a heavy lift. For a man, it's more like, similar more to like an escalator.

17:22Jonathan Fields: That's a great visual. And just like, yeah, at the beginning, it takes a lot, it's a lot more effort. I love the map of libido, desire and arousal. I do think those maps help us to understand where we are there. You said that there are all these things that are in the way, like it doesn't feel good. You're not into it. You're not really connecting. But then why does this seem to be an area in couples' lives that they just don't want to talk about? What has us not able to communicate about those needs? Shame. Number one, I'm ashamed of my desire. I'm ashamed of my lack of desire. I'm supposed to.

18:01I want to want him, but I don't. So something's wrong with me?

18:06Jonathan Fields: Does it go back to that? Always for women, they think it's their fault. And so does their male partner. Yup, it's her. versus this is being human and being human at 50. Yeah, it is. And when men come to me and they say, she just never wants sex. And I say, well, what, what are you doing? Are you offering her sex? Yeah. And she always turns me down. And I don't think she wants me anymore. And I feel and they get angry, grumpy, and they have a victim mind mindset, right? They feel like the victim. And it's like, okay, well, let's kind of rewind all this. What are you doing romantically with her?

18:49Are you just touching her sometimes without trying to get sex? Does she trust your touch? Are you making her smaller offers? Are you paying attention to where she is mentally? Is she upset? Is she hungry? Is she tired? Is she frustrated? Is she somewhat turned out? Is she relaxed? Like, what can you do to take the load off her so she can enter into relaxation so that she can begin to build arousal? So her ladder starts to become an escalator and then an elevator because once she gets going, she's fine. But there's this big lift in the beginning for most women that because men don't experience it as much.

19:32And this is a bell curve thing, right? I mean, statistically across humanity, there are people who are very, very, very, very horny every day. They want sex all the time. And there are people who are completely asexual, never wanted at all, not interested. What I'm really speaking to are the typical cultural norms and the average dude and his lady across the big bell curve of time in our culture. because we really have a lot of mores that we are dealing with as well as the physiologic, emotional, physical issues around sexuality. So once I teach a guy to, and I don't meet one-on-one with anyone, I have books and programs, 35 of my own and another 10 of my mentors whose lineages I carry forward because they are so extraordinarily beneficial And I'm very lucky to do that.

20:31I feel truly honored to be someone who carries the lineages that I do for heart-connected, passionate, conscious, love-making techniques. That's what I'm really focused on is helping couples move away from everything that we see in our world that is through the male lens, pornography, movies, television, even women's erotica is still, we're swimming in this soup that is much more patriarchal in its construct and also very repressed. So people don't talk about things because they don't have the words and they've never seen what they want. If you've never even seen a thing that shows the pleasure a woman has, that isn't just something to titillate men, what is it that the female body needs?

21:24Like a lot of times what I like to teach people is orgasmic intercourse techniques that feel good to the vagina, not just the penis, because all we see is penis techniques. That's what we see. And so it really helps to get the information, which is censored. So we're really caught in this cycle. And what's great about it now is that, and thank you for having me on your show, because podcasts and vidcasts are currently the only uncensored medium where we can actually deep dive and have honest and real talk about things like orgasmic intercourse techniques. So when men begin to learn how to make her smaller offers that match her mood, How to move her toward pleasure with integrity rather than coercion or expectation.

22:15How to understand the female arousal ladder and work with it instead of against it. How to make love to a woman so that what they're doing feels exquisite to her. There is no need for an orgasm gap. The orgasm gap exists because of a lack of knowledge, not because women come any less than men. The human body has over 20 kinds of orgasms it can experience. Gender doesn't matter at all. Your parts don't matter. We have the same parts. When you know essentially the recipes for how to get to each of these kinds of experiences and you try it a few times, you begin to have it. You activate the neural pathways that create the pleasures that you're trying to have.

23:00You've got to connect the brain to the body. And so much of our bodies are shut down in shame and pain and numbness rather than pleasure. Add to that the stress of modern living and the anxiety we live in and all the cortisol we're carrying around. Intimacy is the best solution for all of those problems. Because what does intimacy do? It creates oxytocin. What is oxytocin? A cortisol modulator. Intimacy, and I like to call it orgasmic intimacy. very specifically because I want people to understand they have massive pathways to orgasmic pleasure. I have a friend, she's a sex educator, and she said, I'm doing an orgasm challenge for a year.

23:47Every day I'm having one, I'm having an orgasm every day for 365 days. And I texted her back and I was like, well, can we talk about how I can have 365 orgasms in a single day? Once you learn how and everybody can do it, it's just how do you learn? How do you become massively orgasmic? Because every orgasm you have generates hormones, neurotransmitters, it reboots your nervous system. It's a vascular event, it oxygenates your brain, it lights up your somatosensory cortex, it, it, it, it launches a whole bunch of extra natural killer cells, the NK cells that gobble up those zombie cells, those senescent cells that are running around in your body, beginning to create chronic disease.

24:33That's why you get two years of health and happiness span for every decade. You keep having orgasmic intimacy.

24:40Jonathan Fields: I love that. It's like big vitamin O. Yeah. Oh, I like that. That's good. And we'll be right back after a word from our sponsors.

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26:06Jonathan Fields: Wayfair, every style, every home. Good Life Project is sponsored by Bombas. So not just my entire family, but actually our entire Good Life Project team has been Bombas fans for I think about a decade at this point. And Lindsay, our executive producer, the person who keeps this whole operation from falling apart, just got a pair of Bombas women's nest slippers and she will not stop talking about them. It's the classic backless house slipper, but re-engineered. Four layers of actual structure support memory foam, gel cushioning, a double layer of EVA underneath. It's lined with a soft terry that somehow works in every season and it's got a rubber outsole so you're not sliding across the kitchen floor at six in the morning.

26:44Jonathan Fields: Easy on, easy off. Her exact words were, easily the best slipper I have ever owned year round. That's kind of the whole Bombas thing. Comfort that's actually engineered, not just marketed that way. Same goes for the compression socks if you're someone who really is on your feet all day or logging a lot of travel miles. And here's another part that I really genuinely love. For every single item you buy, Bombas donates an essential clothing item to someone facing housing insecurity. One purchase, one donated. Over 200 million donations and counting. It's a good product attached to a good idea. So head over to bombas.com slash good life and use the code good life for 20 % off your first purchase.

27:22Jonathan Fields: That's B-O-M-B-A-S.com slash good life code good life at checkout. Okay, say someone gets one of your books and it's like, okay, here are some things that I'd like to try. How do you advise people? What do you recommend to have that first conversation with their partner without it being like, here's what I want you to do or you're doing it wrong, so do it this way? What makes it easy for them to get into that intimate conversation? Yeah. It's interesting that, you know how I said there's three pillars of great orgasmic intimacy that keeps getting better in your life. One is knowing passionate lovemaking techniques, hot sex techniques, the recipes.

28:06One is bedroom communication skills. and the other one is this regenerative intimacy, how to keep your parts working in good order over time so you can keep having great orgasmic intimacy until the day you die, hopefully going out with the big vitamin O. That's a good way to die. Wouldn't that be awesome? I love that. So, hey, hashtag goals, right, Cynthia? So what I explain, again, here's another map for you. Here's another strategic map to the pleasure. if you want to learn sex techniques, it's popcorn style. It's the same as trauma healing, which is like, just pick what will work for you that you think intuitively might be the process that would be right for you now.

28:52You're going to learn a lot. You're going to do a lot of different types of healing. It could be somatic therapy. It could be EMDR. It could be a talk therapy. It could be anything, hands-on, Dakini G-spot, de-armoring, whatever it might be. And you can try whatever you want. That's the same with sex techniques. I want to get better at oral pleasuring. I want to learn those orgasmic intercourse techniques. I want to do this. I want to do that. I want to learn how to hold and be held, whatever it is. But bedroom communication skills has a very specific ascension model. You need to build a foundation and that all of the best sex techniques in the world won't do a darn thing if you don't have a free-flowing, really truthy, interactive connection with your lover.

29:42And the foundation is something that I wrote as a pass along from my mentor, Dr. Patty Taylor. And I called it the Sexual Soulmate Pact, like an agreement pact, P-A-C-T. and it's really solving these problems. I don't know what I want. I just know what I'm getting, isn't it? But I don't know what I want, so I can't really speak up. The second one is, I'm afraid to speak up because every time I do, my partner has an emotional crash out and sex is ruined. And so I'm stifled by my fear of their emotional response. or what I want may be too kinky and I'm ashamed of it. And so I'm afraid to even talk about it.

30:36These are very, very common things. The other thing you run into in partnered couples who've been with each other for a while is they get in the groove, right? They get in that groove and it gets boring. Good sex is a combination. This is the work of Dossie Easton. Good sex is a combination of trust and safety, but that gets boring, so you have to have novelty and variety. So where you start is two parts. The first part is learning how to know what you want, ask for it, have your partner receive it graciously and appreciatively and encouragingly and simply. Got it, baby. Thank you. How's this?

31:20A little harder, a little softer. Oh, you like that? Oh, sure. No problem. That worked last time. Not good today. Tell me what you want. And allowing especially the feminine to be very capricious in her desire. You know, the kitty cat to lioness range is vast with us. And so we can go from kitty cat to lioness in a single lovemaking session. And so our partners being there to really hold space for the true sexually self-expressed person makes them feel safe doing so and makes it sexy. And the Sexual Soulmate Pact, I know we want to cover a vast conversation rather than go into all of these things.

32:07I think we're better off there. So you can download that. It's a free downloadable PDF. It's at sexualsoulmatepact.com. So once you get that going and your partner looks at everything you're asking them, and this goes both ways as just feedback to do a better job. Like, I'm not failing, I'm winning. Because what does our male-bodied partner want? He wants to win and do a great job. He doesn't like to be wrong. In his world of our cultural miasma, he lives in a pecking order. If he's not up, he's down. And he doesn't want to be down. That hurts. So it's a way to get him to understand he's winning by having these conversations.

32:51And for the men listening who are like, no, that's actually my partner who won't talk to me. It doesn't matter. It really doesn't matter as much gender as it does creating the environment where it's safe for both of you. So once you've got that, then the next step is essentially, and you can do this explicitly or implicitly. I prefer explicit conversations and not the like dirty explicit, but just the direct and informative kinds of conversations about where my desires are at this moment. Because every single day and every single moment, you are changing and evolving. And that affects your sex life, your desire, your appetite, what things turn you on right now, what things you're kind of bored with.

33:37It's a moving target. And when you look at it that way, like there's no end is a journey, and you're lucky to have a journeyman with you, then that makes it really nice. So what you want is essentially a sex life bucket list. You want to have things that are your like go to your favorites. Oh, I love it when we lie down together, and we make out. And you lather up my breasts with some breast oil. And I stroke you while we're kissing. And sometimes I just like it if you just tell me how beautiful I am and how sexy I am. And I tell you how much I love you. I like that encouragement and those words like, I love to do that.

34:17And sometimes it's, I want to try that new position, headboard daddy or chingalinga or yob yum, or whatever it is. I like great names. Aren't they so cute? I love to create sex positions that stimulate multiple erogenous zones at the same time, because I like to get people to really be able to hold a lot of pleasure and sensation. Feeling sensation is a practice. And you get better and better at that too. All of these things are practices. So once you have a sex life bucket list and you're like, let's do Chingalinga or let's do that thing that we always do. And it's our go to, you know, we start with a yoni massage, and then I climb on top of you and drive you crazy and tell you a little dirty story.

35:04And then I just tantalize and tease you and I get off on it. And it's so much fun. And then we go to sleep. Whatever it is. I mean, I got a million of those, right? I like to think up sexy bedroom date ideas. And so once you have a sex life bucket list, and you go through your list, and you compare your notes, and you have A's, B's and C's, like, my A's, here's my A's, these are the things I want to learn. I want to de-armor my G spot. I want to try female ejaculation. I'd like to try that intercourse couples vibrator. Okay, well, what I'd like to do is I'd like to start using a prostate massager because I've heard it's really healthy and I want to become a multi-orgasmic man.

35:44And I've heard that male multiple orgasm without ejaculation is possible and that using a prostate massage tool actually helps me feel up inside my body and hastens my discovery of that. So I'm going to start experimenting with that. And I'd also like to use a penis pump, a vacuum erection device, and not be ashamed to do it because I'm feeling I'm getting a little soft. And I'd like to start reversing that atrophy that I can see with my aging. And so, okay, great. So these are things that are on our A-list. Some of them you're going to do with me. Some of them we're going to do solo. We're going to learn these things together.

36:17So let's, instead of having like dates for sex, let's strike that from our vocabulary. Let's not schedule sex because that just feels like a forced thing. Let's schedule erotic play dates, pick something from our bucket list, and do it together.

36:34Jonathan Fields: Let's have a lot more fun. A lot more fun. What I love about what you're saying is you're talking about how we naturally are changing. And that's okay. And let's make the most of it. It doesn't mean a decline. And I do think you're right. Good Life Project listeners are growth-oriented. They are. do like to learn and try things. But this whole kind of black hole of information, you're bringing this enthusiasm and lots of ideas, even just when you're naming some of the positions and some of the things to try. It just sparks this sense of, ooh, that sounds fun. Let's try that. And it seems like that might help any of the disinclination to talk about it or let's get too talky.

37:24Jonathan Fields: And we'll be right back after a word from our sponsors. Good Life Project is sponsored by Hostinger. So Good Life Project started as actually a year-end blog post. That's it. No plan, no big vision, just me kind of trying to work through some questions about what it actually means to live well and hitting publish. And it took a while before I built anything close to a real website, design, code, hosting. It felt like a whole separate project, something for later. Except later is when someone hears an episode, gets curious about you, and goes looking. And what they find either builds trust or it doesn't.

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40:27Jonathan Fields: and Kohler has been doing it, refusing to accept that every day has to be ordinary for over 150 years. Discover Kohler Smart Toilets at Kohler.com. Tell us a little bit about your path. You said that your best sex came in your 60s, and I'm wondering what shifted in you at that point in your life to allow that to happen. Yeah. When I was 42, speaking of the 40s, I had been married to my husband for 11 years, and I had never had an orgasm from intercourse. I'd had an orgasm from a vibrator, but I'd never had an orgasm with my husband. And I was tired of having mercy sex and doody booty. I was avoiding him for sex.

41:16He was miserable. We were in a platonic relationship. We had a beautiful little daughter at the time, and he was having an affair to get his needs met. And he came clean with me, and we thought, what are we going to do about this? And it was really the fact that I wasn't enjoying intercourse. We didn't have much skill. We really didn't know how to do all of the other things that are pleasurable. We hadn't learned yoni massage or expanded orgasm. I'd never even been really aware of my G spot. I didn't understand female ejaculation. He didn't understand how to be a multi-orgasmic man and have full body heartgasms, braingasms, energy orgasms, things like that.

42:02and we thought it was me you know I just guess I can't have orgasms from intercourse what are we going to do at the time we went to a marriage therapist and she said well you know this is just kind of what happens and you know you just you can still be close and was it was it were you

42:17Jonathan Fields: thinking oh it's me and it's because I'm 42 not that I was 42 just that I'd never had yeah because I think at that point you still feel like to me that's a peak time when you're like I am still young enough, I still have a desire. But I'm hearing neither of you really, like you said, no skills. You didn't know. We didn't know. We didn't know. Blind leading the blind behind closed doors. That was us. We live in the San Francisco Bay Area at the nexus of the sexual, you know, movement and human potential movements. And so we had access to, we were living in the Silicon Valley at the time, we had access to Human Awareness Institute, sex, love and intimacy.

42:57We had access to ecstatic loving Tantra workshops. We had access to orgasmic meditation. We had access to everything. And we went to our first sex workshops. It was so hard for me, Cynthia. Oh, gosh. I would have to, I would almost have like an emotional breakdown in the car on the way there. I was so nervous. So back up a step.

43:19Jonathan Fields: What had you go? You're like, our marriage is important. We're not willing to let it go. We're going to go do something difficult. What had you take that step? Two things. One, we're like your listeners. We're like, if we don't understand it, we got to go learn about it. Right? We just don't know. So we got to figure it out. So that was one. And the second thing is that we are really good partners together. I mean, we're fantastic parents. We've been business partners together. This is the 20th year of my company, Personal Life Media. and that 20, we've been together working in our businesses together for 20 years.

44:01He's brilliant. He's kind. He loves my ambition. I love his brain. He's sweet and good to me. He's the wind beneath my wings. He's a beautiful man. I didn't want to lose him over this frustration. and I thought we don't know we don't know what we're doing let's go learn because the therapists weren't getting us where we needed to go with the pleasure piece right and that's what had us decide to enroll it was very very very hard I had and oh I look back at this Cynthia oh my gosh it's so funny at 65 I turned 65 on Sunday and gosh I love my body right now it's strong I work out Do I have crepey skin?

44:50Do my boobs sag a little bit? Yeah, but I really feel beautiful. When I was 35 and 40, I thought I was fat and ugly. I didn't know why anybody would want me. It's crazy what our culture does to women around our body image issues.

45:06Jonathan Fields: So how much of that perception or self-perception of how we feel about our bodies interferes with this orgasmic intimacy? Tons and tons and tons and tons. And it's also for men too, especially around penis size shame and erectile shame and premature ejaculation shame, performance anxiety. That hurts everybody too. Everybody's got a lot of performance anxiety. And anxiety is the killer of arousal, right? So I remember the first time I went to a workshop and we had to do this workshop where everyone was supposed to sit in our little backjacks and they guided us through this visualization and we were supposed to remove articles of clothing if we felt comfortable.

45:57And I didn't feel comfortable. And the age range of that workshop was 20s to 70s. So we were in a wide-ranging workshop, gender-balanced 50-50 male and female presenting. And I hadn't taken anything off, and I peaked. Everybody in the room was naked but me. There's fat people, skinny people, old people, young people, tall people, short people, wrinkly people, smooth people, dark people, white people. And I'm like, oh, my God, they're all so beautiful. What was I worried about? It was edgy for me, Cynthia. It was so edgy, but, boy, was it so expansive. Now I'm happy to be on nude beaches. I'm happy to be in nude, you know, like saunas and with mixed gender, right?

46:39It's like all of us are beautiful. All of us look different. We are perfect exactly how we are. We live in a body bag. We got the luck of the draw on that stuff. If you can't love yourself, how the heck is somebody else going to love you? That's RuPaul, right? I mean, so it really fixed me of all that stuff. Early in my 40s, it fixed me of those issues, which allowed me to take more risk with things like not worrying about does my butt look too fat in this sex position and learning how to, when those thoughts entered my mind, to let them go and love who I was. Those practices are very, very important.

47:27And that's the desire, the self-love, the love of partner.

47:31Jonathan Fields: Yeah, it sounds like, you know, when you described that scenario, I was like, talk about intimacy and vulnerability. And what I'm hearing is, in a way, it starts with us first. How do I be intimate with myself, respect and love what I've got, and vulnerable enough even in my own self to say, here's what turns me on. And I'm admitting it to myself. And now I want to own it and share it with my lover. Yeah. So an intimacy and vulnerability is kind of seems required in so many areas of our lives, but it's we're absolutely shut down around that. So I can see how people could take this in other areas of their life.

48:11Jonathan Fields: Where else have I been intimate and vulnerable? And it's been a great thing. I know how to do that. I can bring that here with my clothes off. It's so juicy. It's so juicy. Vulnerability and truth telling. Yeah. Once you break yourself of withholds, walking on eggshells, stuffing your feelings, covering it up, dismissing it, all the things that our culture has taught us, which is toe the line, behave, don't say these things. Once you actually move into, that was one of the things that really helped my husband and I was learning the expanded orgasm practice, going to these workshops, and starting to just tell each other the real truth about everything.

48:53And I have to say, my husband is so solid in himself and his confidence that I was able to say anything. one of the things I had to tell him was that when he entered me, it took my turn on down. Being penetrated made me go, ugh. And that's because I'd had sexual trauma as a child. And over the years, I've learned a number of coping mechanisms that really helped me in my lovemaking partnership. One of them is that I take the insertion role. I actually put myself on my partner rather than expect him to come inside me. That little bit of control stopped that trigger I had about being penetrated and coerced into penetration.

49:47And so many women have that.

49:49Jonathan Fields: Susan, that is just such an exquisite awareness of yourself. And that's what I mean by you got intimate with yourself. You learned your own part. And it sounds like you and your husband, And what so many of us, I think, need to do is get that cultural narrative out of the room and get into the actual intimacy, the conversation, the real thing. And I love that when you said a minute ago, like the truth and like how sexy that is. That is exciting to me for us to be able to get real with our own erotic nature, our own orgasmic and regenerative intimacy. Yeah. So I have a couple more questions. Good.

50:32I like your question, Cynthia.

50:34Jonathan Fields: Well, you know, I keep thinking about those seven years when I was single before I met Steve and how awful it was. And just my sex life was just not happening. And so I'm wondering, you've given us so many great things for couples. What if you are solo? Yeah. How do you start this regenerative intimacy with yourself, bring your own sex life alive? Yes. Well, the first thing is solo pleasuring. And I really like sex tools. And I like them for a number of reasons. The first reason that I like them is that there are over 20 different formats of sex tools. So I mentioned the intercourse vibrator. It's hands-free.

51:23It sits on the mons. And there's a little ring that goes on the penis that as he enters you and gets closer to you, it kind of makes the vibrator go up and come down, up and come down. And that toggles your sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system in a way that intensifies your orgasms and stacks them and gives you multiple orgasms. That's a neat couple's toy. There are oscillators, air stimulators, thrusters, wands, vibrators of all kinds. There are prostate stimulators, strokers, suckers. You know, there's just like, oh, so many. And half of them now are like doing three things at once to you, which is good.

52:07Because what that's doing technically, physiologically, is it's activating all that tissue in your genital systems. Even the penis, when you see a penis go from flaccid to erect, you're witnessing fast-acting hemodynamics shooting blood down three little tubes in the penis very quickly so that it fills and locks off. When a woman is beginning her arousal, she has to wait for the blood to flow into her pelvic bowl and then seep into the nooks and crannies of the clitoral, urethral, and perineal sponges, which are essentially wrapped around, it's almost like if his penis is a banana, 50 % of it sticks out, 50 % of it goes down and toward his testicles.

52:58It looks like a tongue. The penis looks like a tongue. It doesn't look like a pole. It doesn't look like a rod. And that's why one of my orgasmic intercourse techniques, it's called the heart-tongue method. You bring your heart into your penis and you imagine it's a tongue instead of a piston. And it really changes how you interact with the vaginal cavern or the vaginal pocket, which is a flat thing, not an inside out tube. It's not an inside out penis. So giving people these pictures in their mind of kind of what they're going for and what they're doing with their bodies really helps. When you have all of this bananas worth of tissue, like wrapped like a teardrop around your vaginal pocket in all these nooks and crannies, it takes a minute for the blood to flow in there.

53:46You have to relax, get out of your body, get out of your head, get into your body, and let the arousal begin. It's about a 10, 15, 20-minute process. For most couples who are on that, sex is intercourse. I've got an erection. I'm supposed to penetrate her. I'm supposed to pump away, I have an ejaculation, we pray she comes, and we're done. And now I'm snoozing or eating a sandwich. That's kind of what a lot of people have in their sex lives. And that's really how you make a baby. It's not lovemaking. And so when you allow the time for all these nooks and crannies to get activated, and you use these different stimulatory tools.

54:32The genitals have mechanoreceptors that like this tissue to be pulled and stretched and moved. They have thermoreceptors, which like warmth and heat. They like vibration because it's more of a surface sensation. Oscillation goes a little deeper into the tissue. You've got the outer labia, the inner labia, the mons, the vestibule, the introidal sphincter, the vaginal cavern. You've got the urethral sponge, the perineals. We've got all this tissue. It might feel like shame, pain, or numbness right now, but you play with it a while and it transforms into pleasure. So solo pleasuring really allows you to optimize your orgasms, become multi-orgasmic, have different kinds of orgasms from different locations, different techniques, different objects of desire like these tools.

55:28So one of the best things to do as a solo pleasurer is to explore that cavern, expand those orgasms, plump up those lips, do all of those things repeatedly so that you're carving those neural pathways into that somatosensory cortex so that your brain is lighting up and going, oh, that feels good. Oh, that feels even better. Like all of a sudden it's all feeling so good. Now, if you end up being lucky enough to have a partner and remember there's different kinds of partners, there's, there's the booty call partners, there's your neighbor who's really hot and good in bed, but you'd never want to have them as a boyfriend.

56:10There's research partners. I want to learn the expanded orgasm practice or things like that. Will you have that practice with me. And we learn the steps together. But I don't want intercourse with you. I don't want other things. Can you hold a safe container with me? Right? There's that kind of a relationship. There's all kinds of relationships that you can have with intimate partners.

56:36Jonathan Fields: What I'm hearing, so here's just to kind of put this back and how I'm framing this. You're really offering just two things I'm thinking, just very creative, like try things, Get the tools, have fun with it, be playful, even if it's just you. And the second thing is, you know, when you talked about the benefits of this, of sex and keeping that part of our bodies well oiled and in good shape, that together is really motivating to me when I think about, I'm thinking, I'm going to just tell you something that I'm shocked by. I never had a sex tool, sex toy until I met Steve. Even all those years of being single.

57:21Jonathan Fields: And I think of myself as a pretty courageous, brave, try things, go out there, do things person in some ways. So I bring that up because I imagine there are some people listening who might be like, oh, no, I'm not going into a sex store. I'm not going to do that. But you make it seem really fun and creative and like, oh, okay, this is not to make it, I don't know. like I'm kind of a workout. I'm going to work on this and work on my pleasure as something I deserve to have and I want to have. And then imagine you're kind of lit up and attractive and bringing more of that into your life. Sexual vitality is so just attractive and magnetic.

58:06Yeah, your sexual vitality and your overall vitality are two sides of another coin in your life. The more orgasms you have, the more you light that all of those systems up. It doesn't matter whether you're partnered or solo, you get the same benefits of orgasmic intimacy with yourself as you do with a partner. There's one thing that goes a little missing. And that is the oxytocin production is much more amplified with a partner. But if you have a dog or a cat or a horse or a pony or, you know, whatever, and you pet your animals and you hug your friends, you can really generate oxytocin from that as well.

58:47Jonathan Fields: Susan, you know, one more thing I want to say before we wrap up, when you just talked about these things that for longevity, and it sounds like you're, you have an agenda or a purpose for longevity, but you're the first person I've heard talk about longevity that makes it appealing. It's like, why live as long as you can? Because you're having fun, like you are, and you're learning, and you're growing, and you're not done. You're just such a great example of that life vitality, the sexual vitality, a full range of vitality. And it feels like a lot of the things you've talked about are just really something I can't wait to learn more about.

59:27Jonathan Fields: the Soulmate Pact and the Sex Bucket List. Thanks for those resources. We could talk for so much longer because you've already given us so much just to get us going. Thank you for that. In this container of Good Life Project, if I bring up the phrase to live a good life, and I think I might know what would come up for you, but what comes up for you to live a good life? Oh, gosh. One of my mentors was Dr. Deborah Annepole. She wrote a book called The Seven Laws of Love. She's passed away since then. But what she taught me, the heart is a muscle in a door and it needs to be worked. And one of the things that I have loved about my 60s is the wisdom that I have and how I can really help so many people live a happier life.

1:00:20They trust me. They ask me questions. They come to me for advice and guidance. And that's my love. That's my love is how I love is I love to help people and activate them and move them from fear to pleasure and help them with their lives. And so I think that's probably what it is.

1:00:41Jonathan Fields: That's wonderful. Thank you. So there's one image from this conversation I haven't been able to shake. Susan talked with Cynthia about arousal kind of like a ladder with the first few rungs set really far apart, a heavy lift before anything gets easier. While for a lot of men, it actually works more like an escalator. Once you see intimacy that way, a lot of frustration between partners, it stops looking like rejection and starts looking like timing. Three other things from this one are staying with me. The first is the arousal ladder itself, right? That early stretch takes real time. It isn't a sign anything's wrong.

1:01:15Jonathan Fields: The second is what Susan called the sexual soulmate pact. This idea that you can't use any technique in the world if your partner and you haven't built a foundation to actually say what you want. And the third is her reframe of the sex life bucket list, turning we should have sex into erotic play dates that you actually choose together. So here's what maybe you want to try this week. Pick one of the things off your own list, something you've said that you'd get to eventually, and just name it out loud to your partner or to yourself, or if you're solo, not a plan, just start with the naming side of it.

1:01:51Jonathan Fields: And hey, before you leave next week, we're sitting down with Scott Harrison to talk about how 20 years and one story told the right way turned into a movement that has brought clean water to tens of millions of people who never had it. And also how it's affected him and his family along the way. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss that or any upcoming episodes. And do me a quick favor, share this episode with just one person who you know needs to hear what Susan and Cynthia talked about today, or leave us a review wherever you get your podcast. It helps us get discovered and bring more people into the conversation.

1:02:26Jonathan Fields: This episode of Good Life Project was produced by executive producers, Lindsay Fox, and me, Jonathan Fields. Special thanks to Cynthia Morris for guest hosting today's episode. Editing help by Troy Young, Chris Carter crafted our theme music. And of course, if you haven't already, go ahead and follow us wherever you get your podcasts so you never miss a conversation. Until next time, I'm Jonathan Fields signing off for Good Life Project.

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