Cultivating Mindful Intimacy for Deeper Connection and Pleasure - Rebecca Ferguson

What happens when you bring mindfulness into the bedroom? Join us for an enlightening conversation with Rebecca Ferguson, a sex and relationship coach who transformed her life from a sexless marriage to experiencing the joy of a multi-orgasmic existence. Rebecca shares her personal journey and offers practical insights into the power of presence and mindfulness in enhancing not just sexual pleasure, but emotional connections as well. Together, we explore how setting a vision for your sex life can be as impactful as setting goals for your career or personal development. Rebecca even introduces a unique approach to personal growth by tracking intimate experiences through data, providing valuable insights that can elevate your intimate journey.

Tackling the often challenging path of overcoming intimacy issues, we emphasize the importance of addressing unresolved sexual trauma with professional help and fostering self-awareness. Rebecca and I dive into the societal taboos and shame that can hinder women's sexuality while advocating for a broader understanding of one's body. By cultivating mindfulness and embracing spontaneity, we debunk restrictive myths and encourage a playful approach to intimacy. Learn how setting clear goals and creating a pleasure plan can transform your intimate relationships, opening doors to a more fulfilling and connected life with your partner.

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Chapters

• 0:06 Mindful Intimacy and 3000 Orgasms
• 14:44 Embracing Intimacy and Pleasure

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:06

Hey everyone, welcome to Pleasure Principles. I'm your host, avik, and today we are diving deep into the art of mindful intimacy. Yes, you heard it correct mindful intimacy. So let's talk about how, being a fully present mind, body and the soul that can transform not only your sexual experiences but your emotional connections as well. So joining us today is the incredible Rebecca Ferguson. So welcome to the show, rebecca.

Speaker 2: 0:37

Thank you so much, Avik. It's great to be here.

Speaker 1: 0:40

Lovely, lovely. So, rebecca, before we start our conversation, I'd quickly love to introduce you to all of our listeners. Dear listeners, rebecca is a sex and relationship coach whose journey from a sexless marriage to a multi-orgasmic wonderland has inspired countless women to reclaim their joy, intimacy and pleasure in their lives. So she is the author of upcoming book 3000 orgasms, where she blends personal transformation with the insightful data-driven advice. Yes, so get ready for no holes barred conversation packed with practical tips, bold truths and maybe even a little controversy. So because, hey, it's, isn't that what growth is all about? Absolutely Exactly so. Welcome to the show again, rivita.

Speaker 2: 1:47

Thank you very much.

Speaker 1: 1:47

It's great to be here. Lovely, lovely thanks for joining today. So Rebecca will uh to start with. I mean, mindfulness sounds really, really great, but how does it actually translate to a better intimacy, if you can share?

Speaker 2: 2:09

Sure, if I can give a little bit of my own background with mindfulness.

Speaker 2: 2:11

I started learning about it when my marriage ended and I was coming to terms with the trauma and difficulty of that time, and I read a really fantastic book which my therapist recommended, called Get Out of your Mind and Into your Life by Stephen Hayes, and it's about acceptance and commitment therapy, but there's also a whole lot about mindfulness in there, and so I started working on learning how to become more mindful in my day-to-day life.

Speaker 2: 2:47

It hadn't occurred to me to apply those principles to my intimate life, but when I found a new partner after my marriage ended, it became clear that he was in that space and I was very much into enhancing my pleasure and enhancing our level of intimacy through deploying some of those mindfulness techniques in our sexual sexual relationship, and so that was the start of of what became our relationship, and that culminated in the year that I had 3,000 orgasms in a year. So it really did pay off playing, paying attention to the moment and the physical sensations and being right there, present, with my mind, body and soul, as you said in your introduction, and letting that, uh, really enhance our pleasure that's awesome.

Speaker 1: 3:55

I'd say thanks for sharing this and also, uh like, uh. What, according to you, does mindful intimacy look like in practice during a busy or maybe a chaotic life?

Speaker 2: 4:10

I think there's a few components to it. One of the major things that I think you need to be intentional about is actually having a vision for your sex life, actually having a vision for your sex life. So at this time of the year, I think a lot of us start thinking about the new year and making resolutions and making plans and strategies for our finances, for our careers, maybe for our family life, for our health, but very few people really get intentional about crafting a vision for their sex life, and I think that's a really critical part of being mindful about your intimate side of things. And the other is actually employing the principles of mindfulness when you're engaging in times of intimacy with your partner, or whether that's a long-term relationship or if you're with a new partner. Having that vision, having the discussion about the vision beforehand, is really critical because it opens up a conversation about what you both want out of sex and what you want it to be for both of you, not just each of you thinking about your own desires and pleasures, but coming together and saying how do we want to feel, how do we see this playing out as an important part of our lives? Playing out as an important part of our lives, and then in the moment.

Speaker 2: 5:48

For me, it was about really getting focused through my breath, work, through actually putting my attention on the connection between our two bodies in the moment. So, rather than allowing myself to get distracted by, you know, what's going on with the kids, or what I've got to do for work, or the shopping list or whatever, actually focusing my attention on and what I what I do is I I think about the square millimeters of our bodies that are touching each other at the time. So, whether that's in a hug or during intercourse, I think about those parts of our bodies and I focus my attention on what sensations I'm feeling from the touch, from the connection, and that enables me to really feel deeply what is going on right in the moment and, I think, to enhance my pleasure and to enable me to be multi-orgasmic, because I'm not letting the distractions of day-to-day life get in my head and take me away from what's important in that moment exactly, I totally agree on this.

Speaker 1: 7:18

Yeah, and also when we're talking about mindfulness, but before we do that, so you, I mean tracked 3,000 orgasms.

Speaker 2: 7:29

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 7:30

So I mean, why and how did that data change your perspectives on the intimacy?

Speaker 2: 7:39

Yeah, it was. I think I've always been a data nerd. I remember when I had my children as babies, I found an app to track how often I breastfed them, and I got really into tracking that. And then, when I found out about this app that could track your sexual encounters, whether they be on your own or with a partner, I was really keen to download it and find out what it could teach me about what was going on in my sex life. And so it was actually 3079 orgasms in the year, but I round it off to 3000, and I didn't know that there were so many until it got towards the end of the year and even into the following year when I actually looked back on the data.

Speaker 2: 8:36

But what I was doing during that year was analysing the data.

Speaker 2: 8:41

It was telling me what hours of the day we were having more sexual encounters together.

Speaker 2: 8:50

I did some analysis of variants, just using Excel and playing around with some statistical tools to find out whether particular times of the day were more likely to result in more orgasms, and sure enough, I found, yeah, there was a particular time of day, and so that meant that we could shape our sex life.

Speaker 2: 9:16

And, remembering, this was 2020 when this went on. So this was the year of the pandemic and so we were at home together a lot in lockdown um, so that created a bit of a perfect storm as well, that we had this opportunity to spend more time together and really enhance things by making those connections, um in the bedroom. And, yeah, the tracking, as I said, it gave me insights into what time of day, it gave me insights into what types of play that we engaged in resulted in more orgasms. It was a really insightful exercise to go through and I'm still tracking. So, five years, years, four and a half years down the track, I'm still tracking um and and learning from those insights on a regular basis, and I really encourage people if they're that way inclined to do it, because it's it's fascinating to look back on.

Speaker 1: 10:21

Exactly, I totally agree on this and, yeah, that that actually happened. Yes, so, uh, from the listener side, something like uh, some people might say that focusing on intimacy too much can make it uh feel like a chord. So what's your take on this?

Speaker 2: 10:43

yeah, I think this comes back to just striking the right vision between yourself and your partner, and I know in a lot of relationships certainly with the couples that I talk to there can often be a mismatch between the interest levels in engaging in regular sexual activity. Or it might not be about quantity, but it might be a qualitative aspect of it. So one of the partners may wish to be a little bit more adventurous and explore a few different things and the other might not be into that so much much um I. I had to be careful not to get too focused on quantity and um um, but it was hard not to when we were locked down in the house together and we were having a really good time and we were on the same page, and so in that way I feel fortunate that that we had that connection and I'd had those conversations about what we wanted from our sex life.

Speaker 2: 11:47

But I recognise that not everyone's in that position and I think it's a matter of starting slowly, particularly if you've perhaps been in a long-term relationship that started out with a really abundant, adventurous, exciting sexual connection and perhaps years later you've had kids or you've had health issues and things are not quite what they want to be. It's a matter, like all things in relationships, of having the conversation, having the communication, and it's a cliche, but it's the only way to work these, these, these issues out, and sometimes it's. It's not that you can have the conversation together, it's that you need a third party to help guide you in those conversations and getting professional help to, to, to guide those conversations, to bring you both to a point of agreement. Because I see I mean the last, as you said in the introduction, the last two years of my marriage was sexless, there was no intimacy at all. So I know what it's like to be in that situation. But not everyone's in a position or wants to end their relationship or end their marriage because of the lack of intimacy, and so it can be recaptured.

Speaker 2: 13:07

But it's a matter of again taking that intentional approach, I think, raising the issue outside of the bedroom, using cues from popular culture, whether it's a book like mine, for example, saying, hey, this woman had 3,000 orgasms, why don't you know, can we try for 300 or 30?

Speaker 2: 13:33

Or, you know, let's try and make something for ourselves. Or if you see a movie together and there's something in that that interests one of the one of the partners to use that as a non-confrontational way to raise the issue of talking about your sex life together. And I think, as I mentioned, this time is a great time of year to set intentions for the new year and think about what you really want from an important part of everyone's life. I mean, as human beings. It's, you know, a big part of what we're on earth to do right, to procreate and to make love and be intimate with each other and connect in this way, and so setting intentions, setting goals and a vision for the year ahead is a really important way and a great opportunity to raise this issue with your partner, if if they haven't been receptive in the past understood, I totally understood, and also because, uh, your journey is empowering.

Speaker 1: 14:44

But what would you say to someone who feels like too broken to fix their intimacy issues?

Speaker 2: 14:55

I think it depends on what the brokenness stems from. I think if there's some unresolved sexual trauma, I think that is absolutely something that needs to be addressed by a medical and or mental health professional. You have to work through that trauma, and certainly a book like mine and the work that I do with couples as a sex and relationships coach, I can help guide people to the sort of advice that they need to get in that space. But if it's a matter of them just feeling like things have gotten off track, there's no particular trauma in the past that needs to be processed and properly dealt with before they can move forward. It's just a a sense that you're stuck. I think it comes back to getting to know yourself and what you really want and starting starting out really creating a vision for yourself before you even engage in a discussion with your partner about what that vision is.

Speaker 2: 16:06

So for women, I think our sexuality is often something that we're discouraged from or being enthusiastic about. I think we can be put into a position of shame and embarrassment about these topics, and what my work is really designed to do is to show women that they can have an expansive vision and reality for their sex lives, that even my editor one of my editors for my book she said she just didn't believe that these sorts of numbers were possible until she read my book. And I was in that position too. I just thought that in every encounter maybe if I was lucky, I had one or two orgasms. But I got to the point where I was having 8 to 15 in every episode, you know, with my partner, and I think the maximum I had was 25. So that was about being intentional. It was about having a vision and not having a narrow perspective on what your body might be capable of, to actually let things flow and let your body experience those levels of pleasure that's right, that's right.

Speaker 1: 17:43

So also like are mindfulness or maybe the spontaneity contradictory, or can they exist or coexist in the intimate moments also?

Speaker 2: 18:02

I think so. I think that's a myth that's created, that mindfulness has to be something that means that you're planning or scheduling sexual encounters. I think that can be an important part of getting back into a rhythm with your partner scheduling time, because if it doesn't get scheduled it doesn't happen. But you can still be mindful and intentional in your encounters and in your connections, even when things happen, when you know suddenly the kids pop out somewhere, you know up to the shops or whatever, and you know you've got half an hour free without the kids in the house and, taking that opportunity, you can still tune in in the moment and let your body guide you.

Speaker 2: 19:04

I think, coming back to that idea that I talked about of focusing on the millimetres or inches, or you know the space between you as a couple where you're touching, where you're being pleasured, focusing right down onto those parts of your body in the moment. And it does take practice. It doesn't. It's not something you can listen to this podcast and then start doing and and be perfect at straight away. It took me years. It took me years to to work up to it, years of work, of mindfulness in my day-to-day life, which then prepared me for mindfulness in my intimate life so okay, like so.

Speaker 1: 19:56

When we talk about intimacy, uh, mindfulness, or maybe pleasure, so one word comes as myth. So what's one myth about intimacy or the pleasure that you wish would disappear forever? I mean, if there is something, yeah.

Speaker 2: 20:18

I think I mean the myth I just mentioned I think is one of them that you can't be spontaneous and mindful at the same time. I think that's a myth that's out there. I think there's myths around sex being awkward and difficult to discuss and I think sometimes you have to lean into that awkwardness and make sex playful and have a laugh in those awkward moments as a couple, when things don't go quite right or there's a, you know, a part of the body that's not doing what it's supposed to be doing or whatever. You can actually use those moments to have a laugh and increase the intimacy, increase the connection through the awkwardness.

Speaker 2: 21:13

I think a lot of people get shamed into thinking and you know porn has a lot to do with this People have unrealistic views of what sex should be like and, of course, in the real world it's not like that, it's not choreographed, it's two people doing their best and trying to connect in the best way. They know how, and just trying counts for a lot. I think being there, being as present as you can and making time for those connections is a huge part of making a great life of pleasure for you and your partner.

Speaker 1: 22:01

Understood, so any suggestions or advice you'd like to give to the listeners.

Speaker 2: 22:05

So any suggestions or advice you'd like to give to the listeners. I think the visioning exercise is really powerful. I've written about that on my sub stack and I've had really amazing feedback about that that people just don't think about setting goals for their sex life, whether they're single or or in a relationship, and, um, that would be my number one tip for people to actually sit down um, that post on on my blog is is free to read. People can actually have a look at and get it. Get the tips, um on how to create a vision, how to even doing a vision board you know, like you would do for your life generally, is a really um fun step as well to uh creating a pleasure plan, I guess, uh, for you and, um, if you've got one, your partner as well.

Speaker 1: 23:07

Wow, lovely, that's great, I would say. And thank you so much, rebecca, for sharing your story and the wisdom and passion for helping people rediscover the joy and the connection in their intimate lives. So definitely, your journey is such an inspiring reminder that it's never too late to reclaim our pleasure and rewrite our stories. So for the amazing listeners, uh, remember that intimacy is, I mean, isn't just about physical, uh connection, but it's all about being fully present with yourself and with your partner. So smart and so I would say like, uh, smartly, if I have to say like, start small, start, uh small, stay curious and embrace the journey. So if you love this episode, do not forget to rate, review and share it with someone who needs a little more joy and mindfulness in their life. So until next time. This is your host, abhi, signing off from Pleasure Principles Keep exploring, keep growing and, most importantly, keep enjoying the ride. So thank you so much.

Speaker 2: 24:20

Thank you.