This is a YouTube podcast episode (Vishen Lakhiani interviewing Jamie Wheal) exploring how couples can maintain or reignite long-term passion. Wheal gives four practical recommendations: treat sexual fitness as a non-negotiable practice; incorporate daily clitoral/manual stimulation (15 minutes) which the speakers claim produces peak/mystical states comparable to or exceeding high-dose psilocybin; time sexual activity to male testosterone rhythms and the female ovulatory week (favoring afternoons and ovulatory-week getaways); and structure cadence and adventure including responsible use of mood/sex-enhancing compounds. The episode frames sex as a personal-growth practice for relationship longevity.
Chapters
I've been wondering, why is it that there are couples I see like this viral couple on Instagram that well into their 60s, are so madly in love, but for most people, passion dies out between years three and seven? Is this evolutionary biology or are they actual personal growth practices that one can bring in to make your passion last for decades? Think about what that would do for your love and sex life. I brought on Jamie Wheal, the author of Recapture the Rapture, onto the mindvalley podcast, and what he shared with me was intriguing. Here are the four things Jamie Wheal says that if you can bring into your love and sex life, you could be together basically just madly in love for decades.
Step one is commit to sexual fitness as ironclad practice, right? I don't wait until I'm super happy. Ding. Decide tonight's night. I floss my teeth. I don't wait till I just spring out of bed in an awesome morning like today. I go to yoga like I go to yoga, whether hell or high water, because I know in the long term it's better for me, right? So it's first just changing the bucket from bargaining chip or exclamation point into hey. We bow onto this mat on a consistent basis because we believe the accrued long term effects are something we value or even cherish in our life.
Just like we schedule gym time, time to do laundry, you have to schedule time for sex. Now the second gets a little bit more intriguing. Jamie cites a study that shows that clitoral stimulation on a woman, when done well, creates 4 to 5% greater feelings of ecstasy and happiness and bliss than even a drug trip with psilocybin or mdma. And he suggests that men learn to give their woman this unique medicine every single day with no expectation of reciprocity.
Manual stimulation of a woman's clitoris by her partner for 15 minutes, no penetration, no other other stuff, and no reciprocity. The woman wasn't on the hook to do anything on behalf of their partner. Just that alone a created a sort of saturation of parasympathetic nervous system. So instead of being stressed, wired and tired, like in my sympathetic system, with norepinephrine and cortisol and kind of vigilance, the women over time were able to slow down, settle down and regulate their autonomic nervous system. And then, interestingly, they also had peak experiences. They reported mystical states. And they compared that. They used the same questionnaire, the Mystical experience questionnaire, the MEQ 30, which was originated at Johns Hopkins. And they used that and compared it to Johns Hopkins's research on psilocybin. The women just from 15 minutes stimulation of their clitoris had 4 to 6% higher peak states than the maximum dosage of mushrooms in the Hopkins studies.
Wow, 4 to 5%.
Yeah.
More. More peak states. So it's a tiny amount, but it's still significant than psilocybin or mdma. And that was just from stimulation of the clit.
Yeah.
Now, the third tip is to understand timing. And this has to do with the male testosterone cycle as well as the female's monthly cycle. It's not as easy as you think. There's a lot of new signs here. The best time to for a man to truly please his partner is not in the evening. No, it's lunchtime. And there's a particular week of the month where you want to go really adventurous with your woman.
Man wakes up often with an erection. Some of that is need to pee, but the rest of it is a spike in testosterone, right? And then it tapers through the morning and then it comes back up in the early afternoon, which is hence with more oxytocin available. So if a woman just wants, you know, a quick and dirty, your morning man's the guy, right? But if she actually wants relatedness and connection with passion, afternoon delight skyrockets in flight, right? That's the time there's a reason there was the rock song about it. And then from there it's just a slow, slippery slide to the grave. And so after 8pm, a man's testosterone drops off a cliff and you're both exhausted and you're fried. So the biggest move you could possibly make as a couple is beg, borrow or steal time in the afternoon for your practice.
And finally, the fourth step is cadence and adventure. This is where you create not just a weekly cadence, but a monthly cadence at the right time of the month.
There's a 28 day cycle and there is a week in there that is your absolute magic zones. If you're going to plan what you know, in the UK they call your dirty weekend, where you go away to a hotel, right, to make love and have privacy. You want to time it 100% for the weekend that overlaps with the woman's ovulatory week.
You might also bring an adventure by experimenting with sex and other compounds which are currently being tested by science that actually improve mood and improve sensation. MDMA and psilocybin. More on that in the podcast too.
If anybody thinks that combining drugs with sexuality is cheating or it's a shortcut or it's any of those kind of things, we're already doing it. We use alcohol, we use hormonal birth control, and we use SSRIs. The antidepressants, like Prozac, yes, they take you out of the bottom, but they also take off the top. And one of the most consistent side effects, in addition to potential weight gain, is utter tanking of your libido. We're already doing chem sex. We're just doing it badly. So the questions is, what kind? What is healthy, productive, responsible chemical supplementation and priming for optimized sexuality?
So remember, we need to treat sex as a personal growth practice. It's not taboo. It's. It shouldn't be restricted or bound by conservative ideas. Sex is one of the greatest things you can do for your moods, for your happiness, for your biology. It's one of the greatest things you can do to stay in a committed relationship. It is a field of human potential that all of us should be committed to improving ourselves in. Sex is life itself. And if you like these tips, watch the full episode on the mindvalley show. Turn around. I just want. I just want to clap, clap.
