Turn on Your Marriage

I am here to tell you that pleasure is absolutely possible at any age and beyond possible. It's absolutely worthy and beautiful and it is our birthright. You can get what you need and desire here in this life in exactly the body you have with exactly the history you have. Quite possibly, I can't guarantee it. But the story that you can't have it with the partner that you have is probably not well examined. Having already taken care of the other beliefs, it's likely if in the past with this partner you have not been getting what you wanted, it wasn't because it's not possible with them. My guess is it's for some other reason. So look underneath it. Hi, welcome to Sex Love Power. I'm your host, Michelle Lizenberry Christensen. This podcast is where I convene the conversations about love and sex that help powerful women and those who love them to create the intimacy and intensity they really want in bed and in life. Together we navigate the tensions between our desire and our devotions, between our wildness and our security with our eyes wide open. This podcast is designed to help you create more closeness, ease pleasure and justice in your relationship. And we do it by blending wisdom from the fields of sexuality and spirituality, trauma and self regulation, and intersectional feminism. I'm so glad you're here. Hey, so I know you're listening to this episode because you're curious about how to bring more turn on into your marriage or your long term committed relationship. So I don't have to sell you on turn on itself, right? You're pro turn on. But in our culture there are few people whose consciousness hasn't been poisoned by all the goofy messages that are out there that hold us back from building turned on lives and especially turned on marriages. So how do we have more pleasure, more desire, more turn on in our marriage is a question I get a lot. And the way that I always start is with the five beliefs that you need to create for yourself in order to throw off that cultural conditioning to have a belief system that is a strong enough container to hold the level of turn on that you can imagine that your body and your heart yearn for, but that maybe you haven't seen out there in the relationships around you and therefore you maybe doubt is even possible. These five beliefs are beliefs that every truly turned on couple holds and they're beliefs that without which you're never going to become one. So I'm excited to share these five with you and then we'll talk about how they fit into the process of creating a truly Turned on marriage. So first, you need to believe that passion and pleasure are worthwhile centerpieces for your life together. You need to believe that it's okay to put pleasure feeling good and being passionate about one another. Not just warm, friendly, good partners, adequate roommates, good co parents, that you get to have passion and that it's worth working for, it's worth sacrificing other things for. It's worth creating even if other people don't understand. It's worth prioritizing even when you don't see other people prioritizing it. You need to believe that it's okay to want and to dedicate resources to having a turned on marriage. Second, belief. You have to believe that you're the authors of your lives, that you don't have to lie down before the steamroller of our culture. The reason you have to believe this is that I hear from so many people, wow, we have kids. Well, we have big careers. Well, we've just been so busy. You know, we're in the sandwich generation and so we taking care of our kids, but we're also taking care of this parent or that parent, or more than one parent. And we're just inundated with other commitments. So our marriage kind of has to be on the back burner. Those are very plausible arguments. They're really easy to buy into, so you get to buy into them. But if what you really want is to meet those commitments and have a turned on marriage, you're going to have to stand up to that steamroller and look at how having a turned on marriage can actually fuel your other endeavors, can give you the juice and the resilience and the sense of humor, frankly, that are required to walk through all of these other adventures with the other people in your lives. So you can either sacrifice your marriage and your intimacy and your passion to the vagaries of the rest of your life and your other devotions, the other things that matter to you, that you care deeply about, that are nourishing and finding fulfilling for you. Or you can say, nope, my marriage is going to be the the well from which I draw in order to then go out. After we've drawn from the well of our marriage, then we go out and pour ourselves out to our work, to our children, to our parents and our extended family, to our community. We are activists and we are business owners from the wealth that we cultivate in our bedroom and, and in our relationship. The third belief that you have to hold in order to create a turned on marriage is that energy poured into Intimacy, pleasure and connection pays dividends. It multiplies and allows you to nourish the rest of your life. If you think of your relationship as one more tick box on your to do list, it will fall off the bottom week after week after week. If you perpetually say, yeah, we've been meaning to do date night, but we tend not to, we're like, yeah, I wish I had more time to, like, actually talk with my husband about things that really matter to us, but we're just so busy just like, handling logistics that we never have those deeper conversations like we used to. Or if you say, yeah, sometimes I'm in the mood for sex, but not usually at the same time he is. And so it hasn't aligned in weeks or longer. That tells me that you're thinking of your relationship and the deeper intimacy that you desire in it as an expense, as another to do, as something that won't pay dividends, but is just kind of a nice to have. And the truth is that turned on couples really know that any amount of energy, any amount of time, devotion, commitment, sacrifice that we give in order to have that deeper connection, and even, frankly, the hard work that we wind up doing in order to bust through some of the limits to our intimacy, all of those pay us back better than just about anything. You know, I know that having a more organized house pays dividends. And that's something that Kurt and I are working on together this year. Our whole family is. And I know that my health pays dividends, that if I am eating well and getting plenty of sleep and exercising and staying hydrated, that energy that I put into that pays me back. But at least as much as any of those things, energy poured into the closeness and the heat between me and Kurt contributes to my physical well being. It contributes to my emotional well being. It stretches me and nourishes me spiritually. And it makes me into a version of myself that I cannot be when I'm not really held and turned on and juiced up and filled in the way that I only can be through intimacy. So recognizing the singular nature of what erotic pleasure and deep connection with another human being can give us, when we hold that belief, when we recognize the singular power of intimate connection, then we prioritize it. Then we can turn on our marriage. And until we're refusing to see the singular power that it holds, we will not prioritize it. Because life's moving too fast. There's too many other demands on you. It's not a survival level need. It's deeper than survival. It is a foundational, vibrational, soul level need. And that's why it's so relentless. That's why it won't go away if you haven't been getting that need met. That's why you periodically sort of come to and, you know, shake off the fog and go, what? Why have I been living without this when I've known at least some days that I really need it? And I've been through that cycle myself, knowing that I need this and then not getting it and remembering, wait, this matters. This matters to me. Even if I don't see it echoed in the culture, even if I'm not getting a lot of validation on it mattering as much as it does. It really does. It's who I am. It's how I'm wired. And I want this inside my marriage. I have no judgment against others having polyamory, multiple relationships and different places, you know, kind of, I call it the portfolio effect. You know, different places that they can get different kinds of connection. That's beautiful for some people and for my energy level, for the fact that I work a recovery program and Parent 2 Kids and Run a business. I don't have the bandwidth to deal with more than one relationship. My brain's not wired that way. So I need to cultivate my erotic fulfillment inside one relationship. And maybe you're the same way for reasons like mine or reasons you think of as moral reasons. Whatever it is, if you will honor both that notion of monogamy that I'm imagining you have been honoring and the notion that erotic fulfillment is a core need of yours, then you can create both. The fourth belief you need to cultivate in order to turn on your marriage is that you deserve and are worthy of love, compassion and pleasure. Couples who have cultivated a truly turned on marriage have done the work to release their own individual blocks to that belief. You deserve and you are worthy kids, no matter how they're brought up, no matter how loving their parents are or how attuned and attentive, you don't have to have a train wreck of a history to have made some choice at some point in your past, some decision based on something that happened to you could have been a little thing, but you decided, oh my gosh, this must be happening because I'm no good. Maybe you were 4 years old and it was something on the playground. Maybe you were 6 years old and you broke something and a parent grew angry with you. Whatever it is, there may be a dent or a scratch in your sense of worthiness. And deserving and it will come out in the arena of intimacy. But if you go and look for it, if you look for where you don't agree with my statement, you, you deserve and you are worthy of love, passion and pleasure. If you look for your conditions that you've placed on it, no, I don't get to have love because no, I'm not somebody who can have a lot of passion because I'm to this or I'm not enough of that, or I would have to be this other thing that I'm not in order to be worthy of it, in order to get to have it. I don't get to, I'm not allowed to. These are other forms that these limiting beliefs take. Is it okay for you to have the pleasure you're hungry for? Would that be good? Or is there some level in which you believe that it would be bad to have as much pleasure as you like, or that it would make you incapable of doing the other things that you're committed to in life? Are you afraid that you'd never get out of bed? Are you afraid that you would become someone you don't want to be if you had abundant pleasure and passion? Are you afraid it would melt your brain and you wouldn't be as smart or focused? I'm here to tell you none of those things are true. That you can examine the beliefs, the stories, the superstitions. You know, we have so many superstitions about self pleasure and about what happens. And they were all stories designed to keep women from their power for one thing, and to keep people out of trouble with sexually transmitted infections and unwanted pregnancies and simply to control people. So it's up to us individually to throw off the messages that we could have absorbed from just the media, you know, kind of absorbed from nowhere at all that are limiting our willingness to have what we really want. So check that one out and then let's talk about the Last 1. The fifth belief that you have to hold in order to create a turned on marriage is that you can get what you need and desire from your imperfect human partner and from the divine and from your own practices. That what you need and desire is available is possible for you to have. Because so many of us, myself included, at times believe that we can't get what we need, that we can't have what we want. And that might show up as a story about your partner. This is never going to happen with this person. Hmm. Or, well, God or the universe or life itself, or however you think of the divine or something larger, doesn't want me to have it this way or that way. Even though that's what I want, or given who I am, given what I have done, I don't get to have this or I'm not capable of this because of my body size, because of my age, because of my shape, because of my particularities of my anatomy. I can't have it. All of those stories are the things that hold you back. None of them are true. I have worked with people in every decade of life up through the 80s. I haven't had any clients over 90 yet, but I would love that. And I'm here to tell you that pleasure is absolutely possible at any age and beyond possible. It's absolutely worthy and beautiful and it is our birthright. You can get what you need and desire here in this life in exactly the body you have, with exactly the history you have. Quite possibly, I can't guarantee it. But the story that you can't have it with the partner that you have is probably not well examined. Having already taken care of the other beliefs, it's likely if in the past with this partner, you have not been getting what you wanted, it wasn't because it's not possible with them. My guess is it's for some other reason. So look underneath it. These are the five beliefs that you need to hold in order to create a turned on marriage at any stage of the relationship. And one that gets deeper and sweeter and hotter as the years go by. I want this for you so passionately. Part of my purpose for life is to help every couple that wants it to create legacy love. A love that takes what they were given earlier in life, the examples that they're given in our culture takes all of that straw and turns it into the gold of a delicious, nourishing soul, stretching, fulfilling, close, warm, intimate partnership that's not without its conflicts, it's not without its problems, but it keeps getting better and it keeps strengthening and deepening both partners through the years. That's what I'm creating in my marriage. We've been at it 21 and a half years, since July 2000 when we got married and a couple years before that. And we have every intention of continuing to deepen despite the very human tendencies we both have and the challenges that we continue to face together. And I love to help other couples to ask these questions, to dig into the hurts and the limitations that seem to block us by, but in fact are only the things being brought up to be healed. That's what's so Cool is love brings up anything unlike itself. And the purpose of relationship is to wrestle with these contrasts, these gaps, these frustrations, and walk ourselves into the next version of who we came here to be. So that's why I always work with these beliefs and more with my clients. And in the GPS now navigation system for lifelong love, GPS stands for great passionate sex. This is part of the foundation in step three of my nine step program. We look at your vision. You choose the life you want to have. You get to write your own beliefs, you get to decide what's possible for you. Most couples are not operating from a conscious choice. They're operating from two different belief sets. And so when one partner invites the other one into something deeper, says, I'd like to be closer to you, or I'd like to have sex more frequently, I'd like to have deeper, more meaningful sex, the other partner hears that through the filter of their beliefs, of their stories about what's possible, and they respond from that place. And so if you've been wrestling for years with not being on the same page about what you're even up to, what you're trying to create together, let alone being on the same page about creating it, you know, let alone being successful in creating it, then this might be why, because you haven't surfaced the limiting beliefs, and you haven't gotten clear on my vision, your vision, and our shared vision. And when a couple gets clear on that, then they can get out of the limbo of wondering why they haven't been able to overcome some of the limiters on their intimacy. So I could teach you sex tricks all day long, but they wouldn't do you any good if you weren't on the same page, if you didn't have this shared vision. So that's why we do this first before assessing and addressing the obstacles. That's phase two of the GPS program. So I help couples create a vision individually and then together, and identify these limiting beliefs, look at where they came from and what you want to have instead. So it becomes this chapter of really growing up in a way that we haven't. Many of us are in our 30s, 40s, 50s, even 60s, and haven't declared independence from the middle school locker room, from mom, dad, the neighborhood, church, wherever we grew up or didn't grow up and got indoctrinated into a set of beliefs that might not have been purposely imparted to us. It might have been purposely imparted, but that really hasn't served us well. Perhaps not in other relationships, perhaps in other chapters of life, but isn't serving us well now. So we get to rewrite them. I hope this episode helps you to do that, to just start to examine some of these and to embrace the notion that you've had limiting beliefs about eroticism, about love, about passion, about what a marriage can be. And if you'll examine that, you don't even need help from me, you can begin to rewrite your story all by yourself. But if you'd like more help, My great passionate sex system is designed for couples who are ready to create heaven on earth to build the kind of relationship that gives them both toe curling pleasure and side splitting laughter and sweet content companionship through every day of their lives together. I want that for you and I'm here to support it. So I look forward to hearing from you if that's something you'd like to talk more about. I'm going to leave you today with two thoughts. One is an image of yourself. You are the hearth of your home to the extent that your home, whoever resides there, spouse, children, parents, pets, everyone draws light and warmth and energy from the fire in your hearth. If your fire is not blazing as brightly as it can be, then everything in your home is robbed of that heat, that light, that energy, that safety that your fire provides. So it behooves you to cultivate that fire. And inside your relationship is a beautiful and delicious and appropriate place to cultivate that. The second thought that I want to leave you with is a question. And this is the most fundamental sort of existential question. What do you really believe your life and your relationship can be about? What is the noblest form your life and your love could take? I dare you to pursue that shining vision of what you can be, have, enjoy and experience. I want that for you. You deserve it. You are worthy of it. It is possible and it is of deep service to the rest of the world. So thank you for having the courage to listen to this episode and then for having the courage to go for it. I'm right here behind you applauding all the while. I'd love to hear what you're taking away from this episode and what questions you have. Where do you feel this conversation in your body? My free conscious couples circle is the place to continue our conversation. You can share your experiences, ask questions and get more actionable ideas for creating the love and sex you deeply desire in ways that evolve you both. It's all happening@society.lizendary.com that link is in the show notes for you. You know new listeners need to hear what you're taking away, too. Podcast reviews are what really help others recognize how this podcast is different from other relationship and sex podcasts. So thank you in advance for leaving a review right now in your podcasting app while you're thinking of it. Before you forget, with just a few words about what this show gives you. And hey, have you subscribed to the podcast? You're going to want to, so you never miss an episode. Please go to the app where you listen, hit that subscribe button, and then you'll always get notifications of new episodes when they drop. Thank you so much for listening. I'm Michelle Lizenberry Christensen, and this has been Sex Love Power. I will see you on the next episode, and until then, may the light within you illuminate the world around you.