Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Episode 21: Eroticism in Midlife- with Justine Dawson
77 Plays1 year ago
This is a clip from a Menopause Symposium I hosted in the fall. Justin Dawson was one of six speakers.
In this episode, Justine talks about eroticism in midlife and the possibilities that open to us during this time to go deeper and tap into our eroticism. She talks about 3 key ingredients. Justine offers insight and practices!!
Justine is hosting a six-week women's coaching circle that begins on January 29, 20204. It is about intimacy, embodiment, and insight. It is for women who want to bring more aliveness and insight in midlife. If you have questions about intimacy, the erotic, and embodying spiritual wisdom, this group is for you.
Learn More: https://www.justinedawson.com/womenscircle
Justine Dawson (she/her), Teacher and guide of Intimacy and Awakening. Trauma-informed erotic aliveness for singles and couples.
www.justinedawson.com
IG: @JustineADawson
Thank you for listening! Reach out if you have any questions. @lisette.ostrander
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Podcast Purpose
00:00:03
Speaker
This is Lisette Ostrander and this is my kind of pleasure podcast where we will explore topics of sex, pleasure, desire, mindset, and emotions, and use the information learned to live the life we want and have the sex we want. My hope is that what you learn will expand and challenge the way that you think about sex, your body, desire, and menopause so that you can bring more pleasure and aliveness into your life.
00:00:32
Speaker
Hey friends, I hope you are doing well.
Menopause Symposium Clip: Justine Dawson
00:00:35
Speaker
Today I'm going to share with you a clip from a menopause symposium that I hosted in the fall. The symposium featured six speakers. And today I'm going to feature a clip from Justine Dawson, who was one of the speakers.
00:00:50
Speaker
And to let you know, I'm putting the final edits of this three-hour symposium together in a way that it's nice and digestible for everyone. I'm making a workbook with key takeaways and having individual videos for the speakers. Next week, I will send you more information if you want to sign up and get free access to this menopause symposium. Justine Dawson, who I'm featuring today, was one of the speakers
00:01:18
Speaker
At the symposium, Justine Dawson is a teacher and guide of intimacy and awakening, trauma-informed, erotic aliveness for singles and couples. In this clip, Justine talks about eroticism and midlife, and really how midlife is this invitation for us to go deeper.
00:01:39
Speaker
and tap into our eroticism. She talks about three key ingredients to do
Justine's Coaching Circle Promotion
00:01:45
Speaker
that. I love the way that she holds space, the way that she asks questions, and the practices that she offers. I will put Justine's information in the show notes below, so if you're interested in working with her, doing some coaching, learning more about what she does, she's also starting a six-week women's coaching circle, meeting once a week,
00:02:07
Speaker
It begins January 29th. I just signed up and I am looking forward to it. So if you're interested in learning more, check the show notes below. And this circle is about intimacy, embodiment, and insight.
00:02:23
Speaker
And it's for women that are searching for more aliveness and insight at midlife. So if you have questions about intimacy, if you have questions about the erotic, if you have questions about embodying spiritual wisdom, this coaching circle is for you. So again, I'll put the information in the show notes below and I hope you enjoy this clip of Justine Dawson.
00:02:50
Speaker
teacher and guide of intimacy and awakening, trauma-informed erotic aliveness for singles and couples, a 25-year practitioner of insight meditation. She completed training as a teacher under Jack Kornfield in 2012.
00:03:07
Speaker
In addition to her training and practice in traditional meditation and Buddhist psychology, Justine has devoted over 15 years to engage practice and teaching in the realms of the erotic, sex, desire, self-expression, and connection. Such an honor to have you here. Thanks, Lisette. It's good to be here.
00:03:32
Speaker
All right. Well, hello, everyone. Really wonderful to be here with you. And I can see the list of participants here. So there's a number of people even though I can't see your faces, I can see your names.
Midlife as Exploration of Eroticism
00:03:45
Speaker
And I'm so happy to be here and to share with you all and
00:03:50
Speaker
really to be a fellow on this journey of midlife of Perry menopause for some of you for menopause and the exploration that is available inside of that. You know, I was thinking as I was preparing for this class that I work with people across the lifespan from teens really through 70s, my youngest client to my oldest, I work both
00:04:17
Speaker
one-on-one and with couples as well as classrooms teaching. Ultimately, the things I teach today could be true at any age. There's something that happens at midlife that gives us a special opportunity to turn towards them. In the short period of time that we have today, I really want to talk about the possibility of eroticism at midlife.
00:04:44
Speaker
You know, certainly if you go online, Instagram, YouTube, anything like that, if you're looking at midlife sexuality, sexuality, perimenopause, menopause, you might feel kind of despairing.
00:05:00
Speaker
because there are challenges at this point in life. I'm 48, so I'm entering into this period. There are real challenges. And what we don't often talk about are the incredible opportunities that can come with this change that we all go through, both physically, but also emotionally and spiritually.
00:05:25
Speaker
And so that's what I'm going to focus on. It's something I work deeply with, with my clients who are in these mid years, forties, fifties, sixties, and later of, Oh wait, my life is changing. My life has changed.
00:05:42
Speaker
And what do I want now? What do I want to make it about now? So that's what we're going to do. We're going to dive in there and explore this deep realignment that's possible.
Eroticism as Life Force at Midlife
00:05:56
Speaker
And maybe before I go too far, I just want to briefly mention when I say erotic, it can mean different things to different people. And the way that I refer to it is really a life force energy that we all have access to. It's an embodied aliveness.
00:06:19
Speaker
that we often experience through sex, but it also comes through us in creativity, in relationality, often in very intense moments of life through our self-expression. And as long as we're alive, there is some of this eroticism moving through us. It could be very subtle.
00:06:39
Speaker
It could be very intense, but as long as we're alive, there is life force. And Audre Lorde, who was a very brilliant African-American feminist scholar said it so well, so I often use her words, that the erotic offers a well of replenishing and provocative force to the woman who does not fear its revelation.
00:07:07
Speaker
So that replenishing and provocative force to the woman who does not fear its revelation. And what I especially love about these words is she's speaking to how the erotic is also a force of wake up.
00:07:24
Speaker
which midlife often is as well. I'm sure many of you are finding that, you know, there's this midlife moment where it's like, oh wait, my body is changing. Oh, my mind is changing. My family is changing. And maybe even like,
00:07:42
Speaker
Oh, I'm not going to be around forever, that sense of eternal youthfulness that we could feel in our teens and 20s maybe even our 30s, suddenly can feel like wait, that feels different, certainly this is true for me.
00:07:57
Speaker
I have aging parents, they're in their eighties with health issues and it's really brought it home to me. Like, oh, you know, we are on a conveyor belt that's heading in one direction. My parents are a little bit ahead of me, but we're all going there. And with that, it could feel very somber or it also can feel very sober in a way of like, wow, I am sobering up to life. I'm sobering up and actually, you know, in the works of Audre Lorde, she goes on to say.
00:08:27
Speaker
Once we begin to feel deeply all aspects of our lives, which is part of what can happen here, we wake up and we start really feeling, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life that they are in accordance with the joy we know ourselves to be capable of.
00:08:48
Speaker
So that's this moment, right? Like, oh, wait, am I living as I want to live? Am I expressing myself as I want to express? Is my eroticism being experienced in the way I deeply desire? If not, this is the moment.
00:09:06
Speaker
And one of my great influences is Carl Jung, who was a psychologist, psychiatrist, many decades ago now, but he really had brilliant insight into this midlife shift of understanding that
00:09:22
Speaker
in our youth that we could be so driven by hormones. It just carries us, right? There's a certain energy that just comes through us and it can really carry us through decisions and actions. And as those hormones begin to shift, we begin to shift. And either we can feel like life is drying up as those hormones change, or what we could find is that we need to go deeper.
00:09:53
Speaker
that where a life energy just carried us forward, now we actually need to go deeper into a more deeply aligned space for our energy, for our eroticism, for this life force. So we need to be more deeply aligned.
00:10:12
Speaker
And ultimately, that's what I see as the amazing thing about these mid lifetimes is that it is an invitation. Sometimes it can feel like a demand from life that we actually look at what is misaligned for me.
00:10:32
Speaker
I just can't keep pushing. I just can't keep going. It's not just going to carry me. If it is, it's going to exhaust me. And what that means is that I have to get a hell of a lot more intimate with my desire. I can't just check out. So, you know, as I'm talking about this, you might actually want to think, Oh, where in my life
00:10:56
Speaker
have I been out of alignment? Where has maybe just the busyness of family, of career, of drive just carried me? But over time, it might have carried me away from some things. And certainly, I meet with a lot of women who experience this. They come and they say, wow, I suddenly woke up one day and I realized my husband and I are not at all connected. Or I woke up and realized, wow, I've never actually
00:11:26
Speaker
really expressed and been connected to my sexuality. And if I don't do it now, when am I gonna do it? Or it could be food or alcohol, codependency, all of these patterns that have consumed energy and that feel like they're reaching a breaking point. So you could even just reflect like, okay, where in my life am I not in alignment? And it feels like it is grinding me down.
00:11:55
Speaker
What am I tolerating? You know, often I hear in sex, it's like, wow, I just can't tolerate it anymore. I'm just, there's not enjoyment there. I'm not experiencing what I want to experience. And before where I could do it, I just can't do it anymore.
00:12:14
Speaker
So if you just can't do it anymore, what do you do then, right? What do we actually do? And this is where I want to talk about what are some of the possibilities for how we can reconnect to what is more aligned.
Reconnecting with the Body
00:12:28
Speaker
How do we get in with that deeper well of energy that Jung points us towards that Audre Lorde is talking about? How do we actually feel more that we're in alignment with ourselves, especially if we've gone really far out?
00:12:45
Speaker
The first thing that I come to here and that I often work on with women is to simply come back to the body and all of the busyness of planning, thinking, judging, you know, being in the world that requires that level of thinking. What is it like to actually return to our body to some simple pleasure? So,
00:13:13
Speaker
that can actually look like and you might think like wow this is not directly connected to sex or eroticism but actually if you start doing some simple practices what you might find is your your eroticism welling back up to speak to you.
00:13:30
Speaker
So getting in nature, that's a big one for me. Every week I make sure that I go out for a hike and not just to get to the top of a mountain, but really much more of letting nature soak into me. Having baths or swimming, massage. I also really love working out, going to the gym. It really brings me deeply inside of my body.
00:13:54
Speaker
But it could also look like really taking in beauty through your eyes, not just aesthetics, like objectively it looks good, but what is it like to really take in the deep red of that flower? What is it like to allow that to penetrate me and to really take it in?
00:14:14
Speaker
And so this kind of embodied nourishment is really the beginning, the simple pleasure. And of course, we have to be able to feel our bodies in order to receive it. And so, yeah, I hear Lizette saying there, please ask questions. I would love to hear your questions. And because we're going to get to those in a second, I'm going to invite us even right now really briefly to tune into our bodies and notice, oh, how does my body feel from the inside?
00:14:45
Speaker
Maybe as I pause, what do I notice? Can I feel the rising, expanding, stretching experience of my in-breath? Can I feel the relaxed softening of my out-breath? Maybe you can feel where your clothes are really gently touching your skin, like I'm aware of the collar of my shirt, how it's warm and soft against my neck.
00:15:15
Speaker
I can really take that in. Or where my hand is contacting my thigh. There's also a warmth there, a light tingling. Maybe you feel in your mouth a wetness, a vibration. Maybe there's a subtle pulsing in your lips. And also, I want you to check in with your genitals.
00:15:44
Speaker
Oh, maybe they're very quiet. Maybe there's a subtle buzz. Maybe they're throbbing and they're quite expressive. But tuning in and noticing right now, if you bring your attention inside of your genitals, that there is the erotic alive right there, even in the most subtle.
00:16:12
Speaker
So I invite you to practice like that, coming into your body. And with that, bringing some curious attention. This is really the second ingredient. It's like, can I be curious? Can I be attentive with curiosity like we were doing just then? Can I tune into subtlety? What is my body saying?
00:16:33
Speaker
You know, often, regardless of the age when people come to me, one of the very first instructions I could give to almost anybody around sexuality is try going slower and lighter than you've ever thought you should go.
00:16:49
Speaker
because as we go slower and lighter, rather than the force and pressure and pumping that we might be used to, which may no longer work at midlife, what is it like to go incredibly slow and light? And what might we start to feel if we do that? You can even try right now in your hand, like, oh, just like I'm doing, what if I go incredibly slow and light? What do I start noticing? Do I start to feel this uprising, bubbling energy?
00:17:19
Speaker
Do I start noticing things, a warmth or a coolness I hadn't noticed before? We really bring a beginner's mind. It was Suzuki Roshi, a Zen teacher who said, in the beginner's mind, there are many possibilities, but in the expert's mind, there are few. So how do we return to even our own body? Or with a partner that we've had sex with for many years, how do we bring a beginner's mind?
00:17:48
Speaker
giving up our formulas and discovering there, what's there in a new way. And that leads us to the third ingredient, which is desire.
Aligning with True Desires
00:18:00
Speaker
When we start paying attention with a curious mind,
00:18:05
Speaker
What do we discover about what we actually want? And like I said, you know, Jung pointed this out that at midlife, it is an opportunity not to just be carried by the energy of life, but energy comes.
00:18:20
Speaker
not from that hormonal drive, but from deep, deep alignment with our true desires. So we can't get by just overriding desire anymore, not without exhaustion and a great toll. We actually have to really listen.
00:18:37
Speaker
So a question I would ask you, just like I ask a lot of my clients, is what is wanting to come through you? And are you willing to listen? I have a little mantra that it says, I am willing to hear you. And I'll say that to my own desire. I invite my students to say that to their desire. I'm willing to hear you.
00:19:02
Speaker
You know, the desires might not be rational. They might not be logistically possible. You might feel like, wait, I don't even know who I am anymore. You know, or I'm not supposed to want that. But what if you're at least willing to listen and hear, Oh, in this moment, what is desire asking for? Get curious about it. Talk about it with your partner, but start by deeply listening to yourself and
00:19:32
Speaker
One thing, if you find it really hard to get in touch with desire, that I often ask is, if you knew it would all work out, if you just knew that your desire would work out, what would you allow yourself to want? So you can consider that. What would you allow yourself to want if you knew it would all work out in sex, in life, in desire, expression,
00:20:02
Speaker
and then see how the erotic starts speaking to you.
00:20:07
Speaker
So I'm gonna give you one more before we go to questions. And that is that probably even as I say those things, you might notice what rises up is fear. Maybe it's or apathy or resentment or despair. This is a lot of the work that I do with people because when we start realigning, when we start actually listening to desire or feeling what our bodies actually want, fear can come up.
00:20:32
Speaker
like, Oh, what's the impact going to be? What are others going to think? What will happen if I start going for that? And we want to have a friendliness with our fear. So I really invite you to be friendly with your fear, not to be a servant to it, but to get to know it so it doesn't run you. You know, this is the kind of work I do parts where
00:20:54
Speaker
to get to know what's happening there. And ultimately we become friends with our desire. We become friends with our fear. And so that we then can hold it all and be in a deeper alignment with what's true. Maybe I'll send to Lizette and she can send out to everyone one of the practices that I do to be friendly with fear and to work with it so that it doesn't just run you.
00:21:18
Speaker
So I know in a moment we're gonna move to questions and maybe I'll just finish with one last Audrey Lorde quote. And what she says is that our erotic knowledge empowers us. It becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly, in terms of their relative meaning within our lives.
00:21:46
Speaker
And this is a grave responsibility, especially at midlife. Not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.
00:22:04
Speaker
So yeah, what is this, you know, she says responsibility, I would say possibility that comes at midlife. If we're willing to face our fear and drop into our bodies and be curious and attentive to feel our desire, what might actually be possible for this next era of our erotic being and expression?
00:22:31
Speaker
I hope you enjoyed that as much as I did. Check the show notes below to learn more about Justine Dawson and her work. And if you're interested in joining the women's coaching circle that begins on January 29th, check that out below. And I will be in touch next week to let you know how you can sign up to get a recording
00:22:53
Speaker
of the Menopause Symposium that I hosted in the fall. Justine was one of the speakers. It's a free recording and I will let you know that information next week. Thank you for all that you do and thank you for tuning in. I'll talk to you soon. Bye.