11 Surprising Libido Killers

I'm Michelle Lizenberry Christensen. Since 1997 I've been coaching powerful, purpose driven, world changing leaders who are ambitious in every area of their lives. My Sex Love Power podcast and my YouTube channel are the go to resources for couples and individuals who want the vision of love they see in their hearts to manifest every day in the ways they collaborate, communicate love and make love. Let's go. Today we're talking about your capacity for turn on, for being in touch with your desire and then letting in the experiences of receiving or the experience of not receiving what you wanted. If you want more sex, more satisfaction in the realm of pleasure or anywhere in your relationship, or if your partner wants more sex so you're trying to be more into it for their sake at least this episode is for you. We're not talking directly about what happens between you and your partner at all, but the questions I'm going to ask you in this episode will give you a ton of information about how to unlock your pleasure and desire right inside yourself. So many women come to me wanting to turn up their libidos, wanting to experience more orgasms, better orgasms, wanting to know what they want, what they really like most. I start by asking them these 10 questions. Now, they're not going to seem directly related to erotic desire, but the answers that women give me tell me a ton about their relationships with themselves, with their turn on, with their bodies, their sensations, and with their capacity to contain embodied experiences, both desired experiences and not desired experiences. So in this episode I'm going to ask you those same 10 questions and then I'll explain why I ask them and share a little bit about what I see in other women and in my own lived experience about each of these telltale signs that a woman either is or is not in a robust, joyful relationship with her own desires, her receptivity, and her pleasure. Once you have this information, your entire day can be peppered with opportunities to practice attuning to your desire. Your yes, your no, your receptivity. If you devotedly practice this kind of attunement, you will create a fertile ground in which you can cultivate the kind of steamy, intimate sex life that you want with your partner, even if you can't really imagine that happening today. So many people think that desire is this mysterious thing that sort of shows up on its own early in relationship and then disappears when kids come along or after some number of years together again mysteriously. But the truth is, most women are silencing their desire in a number of ways throughout their day disconnecting from their body. And it's no wonder that libido goes silent and women wind up feeling lukewarm about the sex they do have or they stop having it very often at all. Imagine now that you're sitting with me in a coaching session early in our relationship. I'm going to ask you some questions and I invite you to consider each question for yourself as you hear me tell about how other women answer this question and what their answers tell me about them and their pleasure quotient. When I'm working with a couple who wants to unlock sexual frustration or desire discrepancies in their relationship, I find it's helpful to look at each person's relationship with their own desire and their capacity to know what feels good, to ask for what they want, and to let it in when it arrives. So each of these questions I'm about to ask you is simultaneously a diagnosis and a prescription. You'll hear that over and over that I get information from your answer, but the question itself gives you information about where you can look to unlock more of your pleasure quotient. What I don't want you to do with this episode of these questions is to beat yourself up. This is not a 10 point scoring system. This is not another thing to put on your to do list, another way to achieve. And there is no shame in having many of these show you like, oh yeah, there's another limit. There's another way that I'm not connected to my body or a way that I don't stay with myself and my desires. Because our culture has taught you all your life to disconnect from your body, to say yes when you mean no, to say no when you mean yes, and to be confused about all of these matters. So no wonder this evidence shows up in many places for me as well as for my clients and you. So we are not here to use this to beat ourselves up. We are here to use it as a doorway to more freedom. More freedom to enjoy these singular lives we get to live in these gorgeous bodies. So please use it as that doorway one question at a time. Do not overwhelm yourself and do not shame yourself. And I'm here if you have questions or need some help implementing what you discover. So let's jump into the questions. Question 1. How quickly do you move through your day? What parts of your life are slow? So when I ask a woman this, she starts to tell me about all the things she does from the time she wakes up on through her day. And I'm not Saying that we can't be really productive. The people I work with are really powerful, capable people, and they do do a lot. They're big in their work and in their communities, in their sister circles, their friendships, their extended families. A lot of them are moms, and they cultivate the intimacy with their partners that they can, but that sometimes gets stuck. It sometimes feels like we don't have enough time together, or I'm still in my head when we get to the bedroom. And this is why I ask, well, where is there more than enough time? Where do you feel luxuriant? Where do you feel sort of like leaning back and slow in your day? This is a big learning curve for me. I have spent years digging into what in Japanese is called utori. So picture an ikebana floral arrangement. You've got the blooms, and then around each of the blooms there's space. The arrangement is more about what's not there than about what is there. Because it's in that space that we can really see what's there. So I've worked to build white space into my day, to build little times of transition that aren't structured, when I don't know what I'm doing, to actually slow down and feel my sensations, to be with my senses. The way that the light is playing over the trees outside my window, the sense of the palo santo and the candles in my office, the feeling of lotion as I rub it onto my hand. So this question shows me how much a woman builds receptive, slower, embodied time into her day. And some of us diligently meditate every morning for half an hour and then pop out of our chairs. This is so me, you know, jump out of quiet time and into full tilt. And they don't stop until we, like, drop into bed. So this is an invitation to look at where you have those pockets and to begin to practice receiving it when life gives you an opportunity to pause. Because that's what helps us build the capacity when we are in an intimate space, to turn within and attend to and notice what we like, what feels good, to let it land. If we haven't been doing that all day. It's a long road from in our heads moving a million miles a minute into turn on. Bodies take time to move through that space, but if we live a little closer to it, it's easier to get there. Question 2. What do you do with your body's signals? The signal that you're tired, the signal that you need to go to the bathroom, the signal that you need to sneeze or cough, how attuned are you to your body's urges other than sexual? When I've asked this of audiences, hundreds or thousands of women in the room, and I say, how many of you wait sometimes hours to go pee? And most women raise their hands that we might feel this urge, but we put productivity or what we're in the middle of and ahead of listening to our body and responding to it. Can you imagine if you did that to a child? You know, said, hang on, we got other stuff going on. You know, eventually they would lose control of their bladder. But it's almost like a badge of courage for many women, a mark of pride that we can control our bladders for that long, long time. You know, you're just clenching up and sort of numbing out, turning something off. So listening to other signals like thirst, hunger, need to use the bathroom, fatigue, little aches and pains, and adjusting your ergonomics, going to the bathroom, taking a minute to breathe and stretch is a way of cultivating that relationship with your body and its yeses and no's. And if you're a long way from listening to those cues, that's a place you can begin right inside the day you're already having to deepen that relationship. Come back to yourself. Question 3. How do you wake up? So when a woman's connected to her own pleasure and is right with her turn on, that usually causes her to start her days in ways that are pleasurable and that are intentional. She sets the tone for the kind of day that she wants. First thing in the morning, she sets her alarm clock at whatever time she needs to to be able to front load meditation, pleasurable movement, prayer, a review of her vision, giving herself nourishing thoughts, affirmations, and often sharing pleasure with her partner first thing, or pleasuring herself right at the beginning of her day, she infuses her day with sensations right from the start. And a woman who isn't deliberate about doing those things, who starts her day willy nilly, starts her day with her phone, starts her day with her to do list, is immediately on, or waits, and sort of lets her day start itself with children waking her up or other things coming at her, will often feel jarred, not enthusiastic about the day. I often ask women, what's the sound that your alarm clock makes? What noise do you use to wake yourself up? Because my nervous system hates me in alarm. You know, not waking up to that kind of noise makes a huge difference in my whole day. And I even had my husband get a Fitbit watch. So that his wrist wakes him up by shaking rather than his alarm. Sometimes his alarm goes off first, sometimes mine does. So now I usually wake to him making me tea. I can sometimes hear him in the kitchen, or I wake up organically because we've eliminated those things that send my nervous system into a kind of a fear reaction state. So just check, you know, does the beginning of your day clench up your sphincters, or does it have you in a relaxed. Even if you're very intentional and engaged, does it put you into your Highest state? Question 4 How do you put yourself to bed? A woman who's connected to her turn on and her pleasure may or may not have an orgasm or four as her sleeping pill, but she also doesn't push herself in ways that are numbing and disembodied. So many women I've worked with use wine or marijuana or THC to wind down at night. Their nightly glass or two is the most pleasurable thing that they have to look forward to. They never have to tell the wine what they want. They never get frustrated with it or resentful toward it. But that, as a bedtime practice, is sedating quite literally. So I'm not opposed to wine or on any kind of soapbox here. But what I'm saying is when we're connected to our turn on and our pleasure, we use substances and medicinals in deliberate ways rather than as medication. As a way to knock ourselves out at the end of the day, we learn to wind ourselves down and to go into the down, the receptive state, the submissive space. Other bedtime practices that I've seen that don't contribute to a woman's aliveness and pleasure, her sensitivity, include binge watching until we fall asleep, falling asleep with children, neglecting our own mindful bedtime routine, neglecting the connection with our partner in the evening, using sleep as an escape, or going to bed lonely because your partner stays up later than you do, and then you don't say, I'd love to be tucked into bed. I'd love for us to connect before I go to sleep. By all means, you go on with your evening after I go to sleep, but come be with me for a bit when I go to bed. Cultivating that connection in that way tends to keep women more connected to themselves and then keep them more connected to their partner as well. So question five what are you wearing? I'm kidding, but that's sort of a proxy for tell me about how you dress and how your clothes make you feel. What are you wearing? Right now. And what do you feel like in it? You know, I'm in joggers and a sweatshirt today, but it's a little off the shoulder. And the colors that I choose and the textures and the shapes, you know, it's not just any sweatshirt. And it feels fantastic. So that combination of sexy and relaxed, sensual and easy is fabulous for me. And like, I'm not wearing makeup today, but I did a little lip. Cause that feels good. So it's really not about the stereotypical. Like, do you dress in sexy ways? If you are sexy, you will feel better because it's also subjective. And what really matters is how you feel. How do your clothes, how does your hair, how does your adornment, your jewelry, your makeup or not makeup, all your routines make you feel? And are you feeling them? You know, I know a lot of women who have a really. They've got it down, They've got their routine. They look like a million bucks, but they don't feel it. They're not using that morning time to celebrate their gorgeousness. So that's the question, is, do you treat you like the exquisite queen you are? And can you feel that? Does it leave you joyful in your body and in your essence? Like, I get to be me. I get to live as this creature today, because that's possible. And it doesn't actually even take more time. It's just a different place of being with it. And if you're not feeling turned on, if you don't know what you want and you don't want what your partner wants, this is a clue as to an on ramp to have more of that. So another note on that, dressing sexy, you know, we've got a lot of messaging and conditioning about how we're supposed to dress. And so on the one hand, you may feel like, oh, to be sexy, I would have to show more cleavage or more leg, or I would have to be a different shape or size. Not true. Sexy is a presence. It's how we feel inside ourselves. Are you aware of yourself as a central creature? And sexy starts with these other senses, smell and taste. And, you know, how intimate are we with all the sensations throughout our day for our whole body and our whole sensory and energetic system? And on the other hand, away from like, oh, I would have to dress in stereotypically sexy ways, we've gotten a lot of messages of like, you're not supposed to. And so part of the question here is about how much permission you have to do what juices you. If you see other women who are more expressive of their femininity, of their joy. How do you react inside? And if I invited you, like, what would it be like if you wore that outfit? What arises for you? So this kind of inquiry as you go around and look at other women or picture your partner looking at those people, or picture how your partner would react. If you dress that way, you'll start to see some of your conditioning and some of your concerns. You know, many women in long term relationships make sure that their comportment and adornment doesn't make their partner nervous. If you dress in a way that juices you, you may juice some other people too. And if neither you nor he trusts or your partner of any gender trusts, that you getting attention is safe, that you know how to conduct yourself, and that you will make conscious choices in accordance with your relationship agreements, whatever those are, that lack of trust tamps down your connection to yourself and to really feeling yourself. And in my book, that level of aliveness is way too high a price to pay for reassuring someone else inside their insecurities. There are lots better ways to be a safe person for your partner than tamping down your own aliveness. One more piece about appearance and how we put ourselves together. Many of you who've been in my audience for a long time know that during COVID I chose to stop coloring my hair. I had started going gray in my early 30s and had covered that for many years. And then when I couldn't get to a stylist during COVID I stopped and grew it out and cut it off, did a number of things. And I'm loving the way that my magical silver highlights, as my cousin calls them, are coming in and it's a choice. So for you it may be coloring. For me it's not coloring, but what are you doing with everything you've got? What are you doing with the beautiful. I love the way the lines are coming in on my face. Elizabeth Gilbert has talked about that in a way that was so inspiring for me. Like, look at these. They're magical. Delighting in the way that maturity is showing up and my experience on this planet is being reflected in my physical appearance. I'm getting wilder and wiser year by year and I love it. So how do you feel about and how do you work with the physicality of who you are is the real question here. Question 6. Tell me about your last belly laugh. So it's not so much that turned on women have a better sense of humor. It's that when we take ownership over our own pleasure, we seek pleasure. We make sure that we surround ourselves with people and experiences that delight us. And laughter and tears are both frequent products of that delight and that aliveness. So if you can't remember the last time you had a deep belly laugh or the last time you cried, you might have been neglecting that aspect of your delight. And then it's possible that you've been neglecting other aspects as well. That your life is maybe built around something other than your aliveness. And if so, what is it? Is your life built around comfort? Is it built around productivity or duty? Is it built around what you think your children need? And if so, and that's causing you to have some distance from your aliveness. This sexual question may be the wake up call that invites you back into more aliveness and may actually transform your relationship with that thing that you think you're devoted to. You know, the reason why you've been saying you were disconnected, the reason, the justification for why you needed to be. Even that interest may be better served by more aliveness. Question 7 How much time do you spend away from digital devices? Now this one's a super tricky one for me. I have practiced with my family and I teach in my five core habits for love. The skill. I call it Love Unplugged. The skill of putting everybody's devices away, of being together and fully together. So no dings, no hey, let's Google that will come up because we've got a specific time where we're not on our devices. And doing that when I'm alone is also really valuable to me. And I really prize living at a time when I can run my entire business from a device that sits in my hand and when I can have a lifestyle where I'm totally available to myself and my husband and my kids first thing in the morning and then I work during a very limited period of the day and then I'm available for my kids again. And part of how I do that is weaving certain responses to clients or creative acts or administration tasks into other parts of my day. So my melange of being here and running that means that I'm often context switching and I'm forever evolving in how I do that. And some parts of it work really well and other parts I'm refining. And I may be in a completely different place with it a year or two from now, but this question, as you can see from how I relate to it, has a lot to do with how we are with our bodies and how the connection feels between us and our partners. So endeavoring to be mindful as I am doing, is a pretty good sign that you're working with it. The women I've worked with who've been most disconnected from their turn on are the ones who are most automated in their engagement with their phones or their computers. They're mostly present to their work or their social media and not so much with themselves. So this question tells you a lot about how that piece of it is impacting your connection to your desire and pleasure. Question 8. Give me three examples of how you said no recently and what that felt like for you. So when I ask women this, sometimes they can't remember the last time they said no because they're so in the habit of pleasing other people, of responding to whatever's coming in with their kids, schools, things their kids want from them, things their partner wants, things their friends or their mom or their sister ask of them, that they don't have a strong no muscle. Other people have a relationship with saying no that is gracious and light and loving. They know that the purity of their no is what informs the purity of their yes. So they are wholehearted and whole bodied toward the things that they say yes to. Because they say, oh, no, thanks or no, that won't work, or thanks for asking, but no, and they don't feel the need to explain no is a complete sentence. And even in little things like do you want another coffee or would you like broccoli at dinner tonight? They know. They listen to themselves well enough to know what sounds good and what doesn't. And they speak that. And this is like an onion that never ends. There's layers and layers and layers to this. And the deeper curtain I go in intimacy, the more I see places where in the past I thought I was a yes and I find, oh wait, there's another little slice on this where I'm a no to this and I'm going to yes to this. Just little sensations. And so I practice everywhere I can with little things like ordering food or mom, can you take me here? You know, can I take them here right now? Or when would work well for me. And my kids will tell you, like, you always feel like you have to finish your lunch before you can do something for me. Like, yeah, absolutely I do, because I've made the mistake of like leaving in the middle of a meal to take care of my kids and then not finishing my own nourishment. And so I'm sure you've heard that phrase, like put your own oxygen mask on first on an airplane There are lots of ways that we need to have our own oxygen masks on. And just the intimacy with the question, like, something's being asked of me here, what would really work for me? That level of self attunement is crucial to real desire and erotic fulfillment, and we can practice it all day long. Question 9. Where did you eat lunch yesterday? This question is also representative of a larger conversation about how do you feed yourself? I used to mostly eat standing up, and I mostly ate like handfuls of either things I thought were healthy, you know, nuts and fruit and working on protein. I thought I knew a lot about nutrition, but because I wasn't truly devoted to nourishing myself, I would not eat for many hours at a time, probably while needing to pee. And then I would scarf something down right when it was time to go pick up the kids. I was trying to be productive and I just didn't think it made sense to take a break in the middle of the day to prepare myself beautiful, fresh food and eat it. But now, like the noon hour is pretty sacrosanct and I nourish myself like clockwork. And in between comes my life. So that relationship with food, you know, do you eat off a plate? Do you eat with a fork or a spoon or, you know, whatever's the right utensil for the food you're eating? Many women are way ahead of me on this. You know, didn't have a problem with that in the first place. But for other women, you're more like I have been with just neglecting the timing and the situation. Do you sit down and take the time to eat? How often do you eat at your desk? And in particular, you know, if there's nobody else around, you're only feeding you. Does what you serve change? Do you think more about the nutritional needs and the beauty of the food? If it's for other people, and if so, why is that? These are clues as to what's going on with you and desire. Question 10 how do you talk about the gap between what you have and what you want? How often do you complain? Do you complain to friends when you're talking about what's going on in your life? You complain to your partner about things you'd like to have be different? Do you complain to yourself? Do you tell yourself that it's a problem that you want something that you don't yet have? We so often have that orientation that is either my failing or somebody else's letting me down. That's why I don't yet have what I desire we lose respect for the organic process of unfolding. You know, nature's not mad when the first little shoots are coming up out of the ground that are going to become amazing, vibrant, multicolored flowers. Right where we are right now in the process is always perfect. And that kind of approval of both our desire and the gap between here and it's total fulfillment is crucial to really enjoying every aspect of sensuality and therefore to being available for whatever wants to happen with our partners and with ourselves in our bodies. When we have a complaint approach to relationship, it ensures that our partner feels unsuccessful. And most men's reaction to feeling chronically unsuccessful is to get defensive or withdraw. I think millions of years of evolution have taught men who were, you know, over much of that time, they were hunters, they were trained like, you go into battles you think you can win, you go into hunts where you're going to be the predator, not the prey. If you can't win, don't go, because your life depends on it. So men have to be able to predict whether they can win. And a complaining woman makes a man feel like prey. He feels like he can't win. He's going to get eaten. He's not going to be the one doing the eating. But men are so devoted to making us happy. Their deepest desire and their deepest fulfillment come from being successful at pleasing a woman. So if you show him how to please you, even if the object of it is the same, you know, I want the dishes done, I want you to call me by 5:30 to tell me what time you're going to be home. If you share that desire in a way that conveys that you want him to be successful and that you believe in him, you trust him to come through on it, rather than ragging on how he hasn't done it in the past, he's inspired to do it. So this is an interpersonal piece, but now translate that over to yourself. Are you complaining to yourself about what you don't yet have, that you want to have, what you haven't yet achieved, ways that you desire for some aspect of your life to be different? Are you putting yourself down around it, or are you inspiring yourself? Are you making yourself feel like you, you can be successful at it? Are you encouraging or discouraging to yourself and to those around you? It's a wild thing about our sexuality. That pleasure goddess inside every woman that you know, whether we're talking about your physical clitoris or your overall turn on, she wants to come out and play. She is wild and full and you know, coursing with joy and aliveness and fluids. And she's also a good barometer of your level of safety. If she doesn't detect safety, she contracts, she dries up, she hides. So this piece of our relationships with ourselves and others, are we in approval or disapproval? Are we requesting and painting a picture based on our desire and our vision and our affirmation of what's possible? Or are we painting a picture that is punitive and reflexive and looks backward at how badly things have gone in the past? Because the former creates safety and the latter creates pain? And question number 11. I thought there were 10, but there are 11. How are you with discomfort? Talk to me about what happens for you when you feel uncomfortable. And what happens for you when someone you're close to is having a difficult emotion. The answer to this question tells us a lot about how you hold on to yourself when sensations are coursing through you. Our capacity for pleasant sensations is always conscribed by our capacity for unpleasant, unwanted sensations. The things we fear, the things we're angry about, the things that we have grief about. When you build your ability to stay steady through like for me, my greatest teachers are my husband, my son and my daughter. When I can stay steady, if one of them is uncomfortable, my husband is having a flare up of being stressed out about something. My son is irritated with me for asking something of him. My daughter is overwhelmed by something she's working on with school or memorizing lines for a play. When they are uncomfortable, I am uncomfortable. Do I rush to fix that, to change their feeling about it? Do I want to get away from them so that I can feel more comfortable? Or can I stand still and hold my shape, hold on to myself, nourish myself in that moment, contain myself so that I can be present to the intensity of their sensation and present to myself at the same time? It's high art. There's a learning curve that seems to keep going and going. Always more capacity to build there. But those are the exact same capacities that let us stay in the moment in intimacy when the last stroke was not exactly the way we would have liked it to have been. When feelings come up, you know, our arousal tissues store so much of what we've been through in the past. And every person I've ever worked with has pain stored in the tissue of their erotic parts. It doesn't really matter who you are, what gender you are. Something in our cultural conditioning, in your family of origin and what they taught you in your past sexual experiences has stored Some pain, some fear, some anger. And those things will come up as you go deeper into intimacy with your partner. And if you can't hold steady when you feel something more sensational, you will back away from it. So if you're wondering why your libido has gone to sleep, it may have something to do with having bumped up against one of those tender places and then not having had the capacity to stay with yourself in it. So we practice this capacity throughout the day. When we encounter discomfort, we practice staying with ourselves, holding ourselves, containing ourselves inside those experiences. I use lots of tools myself and I teach clients lots of tools to work with inner parts, to self regulate our nervous systems, to welcome a whole range of experiences and really to thrive, to get off on, to enjoy all of them. Because I think that's what the Divine really does is it kind of sends us here and says, you know, I'm kind of infinite, so I experience everything all the time and without differentiation, I can't really feel it. So I want you to go into a body and I want you to get down there and I want you to go through heartbreak and fatigue. I want you to feel outrage and fear. I want you to feel orgasm and delight. I want you to feel freedom and constraint. And I'm just gonna be right here enjoying all of it through you. So I think that the Divine says, yay. No matter what we're experiencing, and the more intense, the better, honestly. But we are also human. And so survival is the number one imperative of the organism. So the nervous system goes trouble, trouble, trouble. When it feels intensity, it thinks that that's something to get away from and we gotta like, come back to stasis. So working with both of those, like the delight in all that sensation and the need to feel safe enough means that we are, we're always building capacity, like blowing up a little water balloon and then making sure it doesn't like squirt when we get to the next level of sensation. So I Hope that these 11 questions help you see where these capacities are, are either being exercised or have been neglected throughout your day in all kinds of different situations. And how you could just pick one and start doing it a little differently, with the intention of deepening your relationship with yourself, your body, your felt sensations, your yes, your no, your desire, and thereby building more capacity to come together with your partner, to know what you want, to ask for it, to cope, when that's not exactly what goes down, to ask again and to open, to receive it when the things that you have been desiring and maybe even better, hotter, wetter, juicier, harder things come to be willing to be with the full tsunami that intimacy can be and still feel safe, like a priestess who knows how to walk through fire and walk through ice. You are she right here in the body you have and the busy day that you have. I thank you so much for taking this time with me. It's so fun to talk with you about these things that are so near and dear to my heart and body and pussy and I can't wait to hear your questions and your responses. I'd love to hear what you're going to take away from this episode and what questions you have. Where do you feel this conversation in your body? Drop me a DM on social media anytime. Links are in the show notes. You know, reviews are really what help others recognize how this podcast is different from other relationship and sex podcasts. So thanks in advance for leaving a review right now in your podcasting app before you move on with your day. And hey, have you subscribed? Hit that subscribe button in the app so you'll always get notifications of new episodes when they drop. Thank you so much for being here. I'm Michelle Isenberry Christensen and this has been Sex Love Power. I'll see you on the next episode. And until then, may the light within you illuminate the world around you.