Episode 135: Interview with Anna Marti

This week's episode has been sponsored by Oh My Bod, shifting the evolution of pleasure. Hi, this is Suzanne Noble, and you're listening to Sex Advice for Seniors. And today I'm talking with a woman— you're in Oregon, aren't you? What, are you in Oregon?

I am in Portland, Oregon.

Portland, Oregon. I'm always— I always love hearing where people are while I'm in the Grand Canaries. Anna Martí, we've spoken— we spoke ages ago, actually, way before, uh, the political uprising. And she's an intimacy coach. And yeah, we're going to talk about the work that she does, and some of it is related to a a topic that probably is very familiar to people at the moment. So one of the things I read about was the fact that you got started with all of this after being in a relationship with someone who struggled with trauma. Do you want to tell me a bit about that? Because we didn't talk about that before.

Yeah, I don't remember if we did. Yeah, it's interesting. I was raised in the Jewish tradition and I had 3 Catholic husbands. And my third Catholic husband, who happens to be my housemate and dear friend and dear kin— if some of your listeners, certainly in the States, know what the ACE scale is, Adverse Childhood Experiences, I think there are 9 of them if a physician perceives there might be some kind of trauma, and he had all of them. What's noteworthy is sexual trauma through the Catholic Church.

Wow.

And also as a young boy with older neighborhood girls growing up in the Bronx, and addiction, lots of, lots and lots of trauma. And back when we got married, trauma wasn't, wasn't the buzzword. No. And I remember kind of early on, I don't know if it was a therapist, someone had when I was talking about what he'd experienced, they said, he's— it's amazing he can get up and tie his shoes in the morning. So on the other side, he's incredibly talented. He's a dancer. Um, he's a beautiful man. I mean, if you saw him dance, you'd think, oh my God, I would love to have sex with that person. That is the sexiest person I've ever seen. And the truth is, you know, it's not a comfortable room. It's never been a comfortable room for him. But initially, when we got married and we connected on a lot of other, a lot of other threads, um, you know, I initially got into investigating this material for— because I wanted to bring some resonance into my marriage. Backing up to mentioning the Jewish girl thing, In Judaism, being sexual is actually considered a mitzvah, a blessing. It's a blessing to be sexual. And generally, those who grow up in Judaism do not have sexual shame or guilt.

That's so true. And you know what, Anna, we've never spoken about this, and I've certainly never spoken about it. But when people ask, like, how can you be so brazen? And how can you do this? It's because I wasn't brought up to feel any sense of shame shame around it. Not that my parents— I don't know what if yours were the same, but my parents didn't really talk about sex very much. But I wasn't ashamed of my— I didn't feel ashamed to talk about sex. And I think there is that— I've never actually heard somebody before say that it, it's a mitzvah. Yeah, I know, a mitzvah, gift for Jewish women to be sexual. But certainly a lot of other Jewish women I know also have expressed that. And, you know, a little funny aside was many, many, many years ago, this is really giving too much information away probably, but anyway, many, many years ago, I was with a man who was not Jewish and someone said, who was Spanish actually, she said, "Have you ever had your cock sucked by a Spanish woman?" And she was saying it like, "Ooh la la," you know? And he said, no, but I have by a Jewish girl and it doesn't get better.

Yeah, I knew that was coming because it is in the lexicon of Jewish storytelling. But there's actually a very well-known sex and relationship therapist, actually David Snarch, if you've heard of him. He was the one that actually began kind of changing the conversation around relationships. But he researched it more and he said, you know, there's actually Talmudic text that states you will have to answer to God to the things that came before you that you did not take pleasure in.

Oh, very interesting. There you go.

There you go. Wow.

So anyway, trauma, which, and what is it about, just again, an aside, I am also drawn to people, right? Who have really struggled in life, like I, and they're drawn to me as well. Like I'm the sort of bright ray of sunshine shine with the stable family background and all this other stuff. And I tend to attract people who have the exact opposite, who are looking for— looking, maybe they're looking for family, maybe they're just looking for some semblance of like normalcy, I don't know. But you know, sure, stability, structure, stability. So I attract people that also have, have gone through significant trauma and Yeah, when I say significant, I mean like really significant. So yeah, anyway, so you'd met this lovely man who—

Yeah, actually I'd known him for years and years through the dance community. So I've studied dance for a long time. And when we got together, he was willing for me to schlep him to workshops and therapists because I wanted to, I wanted to bring this connection, this sexual connection, which had always been a place of easy connection for me. And I like being in a body. I've always enjoyed being in a body. And again, I said, like, as a dancer, he can inhabit his body in that way. So I remember the very first workshop we went to. We hadn't been married very long. This was probably in the late '80s. And it was called Follow Your Heart. The workshop was called Follow Your Heart, and I said, well, that sounds pretty accessible. And I— and we didn't have any communication skills at all, and I called the facilitators and I said, is this about sex? Because I knew I couldn't get him to go if it was about sex. And they said, no, it's not about sex. It was all about sex, Suzanne Noble Noble. And, and one of the first exercises they had us do was you had sit facing your partner and you was to ask your partner, how do you like to be touched? And so he asked me first and I was like waxing on about how I like to be touched. And then when it was my turn to ask him, he gave voice to what I knew intuitively in my body. When I said, how do you like to be touched? He said, I don't.

Oh, wow. Wow.

And it was the beginning of a 3-day weekend workshop. And I remember going into the bathroom with the facilitators and weeping, and— but it was an open door, you know, it was an open door. The whole weekend was an open door. They had us do exercises that were about connectivity. They gave us a framework to begin to have conversations, and, you know, that's kind of a segue into why I do what I do, is I want to create an environment where people can build their capacity for discomfort because these are, for most people, really awkward and uncomfortable conversations.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. And, you know, you've studied with so many amazing teachers, including the wonderful Esther Perel and Body Electric and all sorts of other people. What did those studies teach you about yourself?

Oh, well, You know, it was for me actually being able to enter this room because I thought there was something wrong with my partner. I wanted to fix my partner. What became very clear through all the people and all the training that I've done is that kind of self-examination. It's like, you know, looking at all the ways I would use sex. I would use sex for attention, for affirmation, for manipulation, and, you know, not in horrible, horrible ways, but I could, I could really begin to see it more clearly as this unexamined ground of how I organize myself as a woman and as a sexual being. Yeah, and also about the kind of sex that I want to have, which, you know, as, as an older woman, first of all, we get kind of picky anyway. And I was trying to find it before our call, but a lot of, uh, I, I hadn't heard this, but I saw someone writing about it on, on Substack, which is patriarchal sex. Yeah. And a lot of And a lot of female-identified people begin to withdraw from erotic contact. And actually, this is interesting. I have a female client that I work with who's in her 70s, been married for many years, experienced, you know, a lot of infidelity from her partner, a lot of trauma. And she said to me in one of our last sessions, she says, you know, I think I'm asexual. And I said, I don't think that's true. I don't think you've ever had any sexual experiences or erotic experiences that focused on your pleasure or been able to have a conversation, either of them. And I've met her partner, he's a good guy, but they didn't have any, any tools, any skill. And it was, you know, her mother had said, this is what you have to do. It's very You know, we're talking this, we're taking this seniors here. Yeah, this is a, this is the environment for many, many people our age and older.

Yeah, for sure. And I think that, as you say, that we've been indoctrinated. I was just writing something today for a client about the fact that when we were younger, a lot of the messaging I remember specifically was about the fact that men need sex more than we do. They need it. So, you know, when they get an erection, you have to do something about it. Otherwise, otherwise it's painful, right? It's painful.

That's what I was—

that's what I was— I was— yeah, I learned from the grapevine. And, and so it was all about serving their needs. It was all about serving their needs, and our needs came second to their needs. And I think a lot of women have, as a result of that, especially older women, have decided, I don't want to serve your needs anymore. I want to serve my needs, and my own needs are not around serving yours. And if the man suddenly goes, well, I don't even know what serving your needs looks like, they're like, well, great, let's just agree that we'll serve each other's needs then, and I'll go off with my vibrator, and you can go off with your hand and pornography and carry on, you know, as, as before. But I think we've had— we haven't grown up with the vernacular to talk about sex with with, with our partners generally. And that's why people like you and others that I've spoken to are so essential for people who do want to learn how to move beyond patriarchal sex or beyond sex where one person gets pleasure and the other person gets no pleasure at all. But, you know, it's for a lot of people, they've just made the choice of just like your client just saying, you know what, I don't, I don't want it, instead of considering where that voice is coming from, right?

Or, you know, I mean, it would be, it would be a long road for her and her partner to begin to kind of come back to zero. It's like, okay, yeah. I also, I've come to like using the term erotic rather than sex because again, specifically for older people in that mostly your audience. Sex really means one thing. It often means, you know, genitally focused. Somebody has to have an orgasm. And I like to open that room, enlarge that room, so that's erotic. And erotic can be like this portal for transcendence and connection. I mean, a meal can be incredibly erotic. And sometime you'll get to eat with me, Suzanne, because people, people talk about like having dinner with you is like, like one of the most erotic experiences I've ever had.

Maybe we should start the erotic supper club.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Uh, so yeah, you— one of the other things that you say is that, um, You describe your work as bridging body and spirit. And how do you help people navigate that connection in their lives?

I don't know if anyone's asked me quite like that before. So I'm a traditional tantric student, which means— and traditional tantra is just— I know you've had lots of people on, but it's a spiritual technology. Not a religion, so it involves meditation and those kinds of practices that on a good day begin to unwind my identities to, I'm a woman, I'm this old, I'm, I do this race, gender, all those things, and so that I can kind of live more with more freedom. And so with my clients, I bridge it more not necessarily from the word spirit because I don't, you know, I want to respect whatever their traditions are and their languages, but from a place of freedom and learning how to actually have an experience, you know, that their thoughts are not who they are, that they can have an experience maybe more sensation-focused, be able to experience what comes up from that, notice when there's reactivity. Yeah, so it's a process, but it really is somatically centered, um, and to be able to sense, you know, sense what's happening in their bodies at any time. I think we touched that briefly the last time we spoke, um, yeah, and that discomfort that people have is in their bodies even though they think it's a story.

Yeah, it's on the, on the weekend someone re-engaged with me that had screwed me over a year ago and, and was at a, was at a tantric workshop, which, um, I found both hysterical and, um, and also kind of curious about because I thought this is a person who doesn't appear to be in touch at all with any part of their spirit side. And suddenly they're going for a weekend retreat with a tantrika.

They still may not have any connection with their spirit side.

Well, he's not speaking to me now, so I guess I'm never going to find out. But the thing that struck me about this is that— and I've said this before to various people— is that Tantra has become this catch-all phrase, right? It's become, it's become used in this very loose way. It means totally different things to every single practitioner I speak to. It means something totally different. It's got— it, it's, it's almost lost its meaning entirely. And the fact that this city guy was going to this tantric retreat for 3 days. I thought, this is kind of, for me, the epitome of where we have got to with this, is that people who have really very little spiritual sense, from what I can see anyway, are going— I suspect, maybe I'll go meet a hot chick, a hot yoga chick. I think this is what I think was probably going on. And then he said to me, yeah, You know, he phoned me up and said, this is really not my thing at all. And, and I'm finding this—

Surprise!

I'm finding this very difficult. And he had to start the day with meditation and, and all of this stuff. So, you know, I think there is, there is something to be said about bringing this back to its roots and working with people who perhaps really do understand when they're going into this experience what it's all about, rather than this kind of mainstream concept that we've all—

Yeah, it's a real appropriation. It's an, you know, and again, not disparaging some of my colleagues who do really good work, but, you know, the way it's been appropriated in Western culture is, you know, oriented toward things that aren't, you know, oriented toward more consciousness and erotic expression, which is not a bad thing. More consciousness and erotic expression is not bad. That's what you do. That's what I do. We want to— but putting it, you know, I feel like it's convenient to put it under this kind of pseudo-spiritual language because there's been such a split in Judeo-Christian culture.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. And yeah, next question is, you know, people have lots of misconceptions about intimacy and connection. And how do you help them to unlearn some of those beliefs that they've got, which kind of actually does relate to this whole tantra nightmare that it is?

Yeah.

A lot of people also have to consider what that actually means.

Yeah. So intimacy and connection, the first piece is with themselves. And Are people willing? We spoke briefly before we started the recording about what an intimacy coach does, and, and hopefully what I do is create an environment, because at the end of the day, Suzanne Noble Noble, I have no idea what somebody should do with their lives, but I have, I have confidence in a part of them that does know. So I want to create an environment where they can get in touch with their own wisdom. You know, which we all have. Yeah, we all have. And, and then of course getting in touch with it is one thing, and then being able to act on it is another. And that's when people come up against, you know, habits, patterns. I'm thinking of some people I know that, you know, have grown up with a sense of having to please other people. Yeah. And having a low capacity for people being mad at them or disappointed. So even though one might have like a sense of what's right for themselves, when they come into contact with the people they care about, or it's very difficult to begin to turn that barge another direction, which is a metaphor that I use, you know how, you know, it's like it feels just, you know, it's like, oh, a half a degree. Oh yeah, it's like, it, it's hard. It's really hard.

Yeah. And I, and I also think that as older people sometimes as well, we're our own worst enemy because we have— we're taking all that belief out there that either we shouldn't be sexual or we shouldn't want this and we shouldn't have that. And oh, you know, we're too old to try this thing over here. And, and we have to we have to reject all of that. I mean, I, I get a lot of that just generally from people saying, oh, most older women don't want sex anyway, you know. And, and I, and I think, well, I'm not sure that's necessarily true. I think that lots of older people have— older women especially have had sad, you know, sad to say, but disappointing and unsatisfying sexual experiences. And so they're maybe not as forthcoming about wanting sex as they would be if those experiences were more positive.

Absolutely, absolutely, absolutely. And I think I mentioned a book to you before which I really like, The French Woman's Guide to Sex After 60. Oh, I know that one. Oh, it's fantastic. It's written by a French woman, The French Woman's Guide to Sex After 60. But what it does is it really illuminates the, you know, the kind of the infinite number of erotic expressions that women can inhabit, whether it's, you know, sex with themselves, you know, sex that doesn't involve orgasms, all kinds— there's all kinds of erotic experiences. And one of the things I brought up before our call, Emily Nagowski, who's quite well known, she wrote the book Come Together, and she talks about the 3 most significant factors in creating sustainable eroticism within committed relationships, which we all know can be hard to do. And one of them is that the couple really finds their own way of connecting, and they don't give a darn about what magazines said they should have, or sex therapists. This is what we like to do. This is what's nourishing for us. And so it can be very individual. Yeah, so, but the first piece is having them build a stronger relationship to that inner wisdom, to themselves, and then being able to hold on to it, you know, when the outside world is pushing up against them.

Yeah, absolutely. And, and, and developing, I think also Esther Perel talks about you know, the eroticism around distance, breeding desire, some degree of mystery in your relationship so that you don't disclose everything to the other person. They don't need to know absolutely everything about you. Do you think that it's possible to develop that erotic capacity in your relationship when it hasn't been there previously?

I, I think there's some distinctive aspects. One is, has it ever been there? So, and I remember being at a professional conference and they asked the room, if it has never ever been there, it's very difficult to awaken. If it was there, it's interesting. That's a longer answer. And I'm thinking of a couple that I'm working with now that are about to get married., and they are having a very difficult time finding that erotic connection. And, but as I get to know them, I'm learning, I'm learning more about them. And perhaps the kind of sex they had when they first met was the kind of sex that is fueled by drugs, basically serotonin and dopamine, and those don't last. So the kind of sex you might be willing to have because you felt in love with a person, you can't find your way back there. So there's— it depends. I guess the answer is it depends. If both individuals have, you know, have good skill in communicating and are willing to practice, just like anything, just like anything, yeah, if you're willing to practice, you can get better at it. But Yeah, I don't have a magic bullet for anybody. That's— there's that.

I think for me it's like, if there's, um, it's— it sort of goes back to the very beginning of our conversation. If there's been any shame around sex and, um, in your life, then there's the unwinding of all of that that needs to happen, right? And then it— for me it's like, is a person willing to be playful That's— I think if somebody's willing to be playful, even if they've never been playful in an erotic way before, but they've been playful in other ways, so maybe they play an instrument or they're a musician or they're an artist, you know, there's some element of creativity or some way that they play that they can just like be creative and imaginative. Then when you give them the space to play in the bedroom or wherever you choose to be erotic, then it's a familiar place for them because they know what playfulness looks like. And I suspect if you've never been playful and everything has been quite structured and regimented, then maybe being playful feels quite scary. It's just, this is just something I've just come up with right now, by the way.

Well, yeah, it's funny you should mention it because one of the things One of the things that Emily Nagoski writes about, and I also got to see her speak when she was on the book tour for this book, Come Together, was an adjacent room. She calls it an adjacent room. So rather than think about we need to get back to having sex, it's like, what's an adjacent room? Perhaps we can, you know, play together or paint together, or, you know, so you're You're on the 100th monkey of it, Suzanne Noble. Yeah, it is really about finding that sense of play that's not necessarily, and then we're gonna have sex. It's more about finding what's pleasurable together.

Together. Yeah, yeah, because when I've been with— I had a partner, sadly he's no longer in this world, but he— the thing that, that we came together with to start with was both getting back to our creative passions in our, in our 50s and 60s. And I went back back to singing, and he went back to drawing and painting and art. And we were so encouraging of each other when we were in that. We built a studio in my back garden, and we were creative, you know, we were individually creative and individually supportive of each other's creativity. And that then led to being more playful when we were, you know, when we were, um, being sexual or erotic or whatever you want to call it. Um, and he was a person who really hadn't experienced that before. Because he wasn't with somebody who was like that before. He was with people who were, you know, not— they didn't have that creative outlet. So I think that that was one of the things that we found attractive in each other, was the being able to support each other creatively led to creative expression in other areas of our life— cooking and, and etc. You know, just, just having fun. But I think that had he not had gone back to that creative passion of his, I wonder if that would have been the case now that I reflect back on that. If he'd just said, "Oh, I'm giving up on all of that," and he'd just been the guy who went to his job every day and did his job and didn't really enjoy his job. And, you know, so I think you need to have fun. Right? You need to have fun. And if you can't find a place of fun, then it's hard because sex should be fun. Like, being, being with people should be fun.

Yeah. And if it's pleasurable— yeah, pleasurable. Yeah. Enjoyment. Yeah.

So if you could leave listeners with one key takeaway, Anna, about intimacy, connection, or healing, what would it be? That's a typical end of podcast question.

Okay, um, boy, find, find environments where you can really be yourself, you know, uh, and really grow on that. Perhaps create communities if, you know, small groups of things that you're interested in, book clubs, um, being in nature. But prioritize connecting with yourself, and that will grow that part of you that will be able to connect more with other people, or actually give less fucks about connecting with people that don't honor and respect who you are and want to be with how you feel like that real intrinsic self is. So that would be my takeaway.

I think that's a really great takeaway. I love that. Really resonates with how I'm feeling right now about life.

It's always a pleasure to talk with you, Suzanne Noble. I hope we get to meet in person sometime.

Oh, I hope so. I was actually in the Napa Valley in August, which isn't like a million miles away from you.

No, it's not.

No, but it was still, it was still too far. If I could, maybe one day I'll do a tour of all the people that I've spoken to on the podcast. That would be so fun. I'd love that.

That would be really, that would be a book.

That would be a book. I'm writing my next book, so maybe that's what it should be. Who knows?

Yeah, yeah, take your book tour and do it.

Yeah, that'd be great. Thank you so much.

Thank you, Donna.