205. From Food Freedom To Sexual Freedom: Pleasure, Desire, & Presence With Diane Mueller

Written By Kayla MacDonald

205. From Food Freedom To Sexual Freedom: Pleasure, Desire, & Presence With Diane Mueller

If you’ve ever wondered why your libido feels like it’s on vacation—or why intimacy feels more like a chore than a delight—this episode of The Embodied Writing Warrior Podcast is for you.

In this juicy and deeply empowering conversation, I’m joined by Diane, sex educator, relationship expert, and author of Want to Want It, to talk about the often-unspoken journey many women take from food freedom to sexual freedom.

We explore:

  • The Harvard study that revealed relationships (not green juice) are the key to longevity and happiness

  • How pleasure is a practice of presence—and how most of us have been trained out of it

  • What self-pleasure can teach you about healing, body confidence, and emotional regulation

  • Why desire mismatch is more common than we think—and what couples can do about it

Diane also shares her Three Pillars of Passion: Physical (hormones, pelvic health, etc.), Personal (shame, confidence, trauma), and Relational (communication, novelty, feedback). Her work is an invitation to stop treating libido like a performance metric—and start honoring it as a sacred connection to self and partner.

She offers:

  • A 60-second daily self-pleasure challenge (yes, just 1 minute!)

  • Her bestselling book + $200 in bonuses at WantToWantIt.com

  • Free quizzes and resources to help you identify your root cause of low libido

Whether you're in a long-term relationship or reconnecting to your own body, this episode is your permission slip to stop faking it and start feeling it—fully.

Connect With Diane (Resources, Discounts, Trainings):

Embodied Activation Challenge: The 60‑Second Self‑Pleasure Practice

This week’s invitation from Diane is simple, short, and deeply transformational.

For the next 30 days, give yourself just 60 seconds a day to come home to your body.
That’s it. One minute of sacred attention — no pressure, no goal, no agenda.

Here’s how to do it:

  1. Set the tone.
    Find a quiet moment — maybe after your shower, before bed, or while your morning coffee brews. Take a deep breath and tell your body, “I’m listening.”

  2. Touch with curiosity.
    For one minute, explore your body through gentle, loving touch. This might mean tracing your legs, stroking your arms, cupping your breasts or chest, or softly grazing your hips or belly. You can include your genitals if that feels aligned — or not. Follow what feels natural.

  3. Notice.
    Pay attention to what happens.
    Where does your body melt? Where does it resist? Do certain areas feel numb, alive, or even uncomfortable? Every sensation is information — there’s no wrong experience.

  4. Close with gratitude.
    Whisper a thank‑you to your body.
    You just completed a micro‑ritual that begins to rewire your nervous system for presence, safety, and pleasure.

Do this daily for a month and notice what shifts — not just in the bedroom, but in your confidence, body awareness, and energy throughout the day.

Remember: this isn’t about reaching climax.
It’s about returning to connection.

Transcript

Kayla: Hello Diane, and welcome to the Embodied Writing Warrior Podcast.

Diane: Thank you, Kayla. I'm so pleased to be here with you.

Kayla: I am excited to have you because one of the pivots this show has recently made, we still talk about food freedom and all of that, but I'm realizing is that the path to a woman's food freedom is often through reclaiming her sexual.

Power her. Agency her turn on and you are an expert on that. So can you share a little bit about the work you do in the world?

Diane: Yeah, absolutely. And I'll share about this for through a couple angles of, first is like one of my areas of motivation with this, which is. Related to many things, but in one part, the easiest thing to describe is this 2023 study that Harvard did.

And in this study, what they, what Harvard looked at was from a longevity and happiness perspective, because like so much time and like wellness, right? We're like talking about like, okay, well how do I age better? And all these things. But we're oftentimes leaving out the the question of like, how do I age better, but also experience life in a more happy.

And so that was a really, key part of this Harvard study was looking and saying, okay, well, of all the things we're talking about in health and wellness, what is the most predominant thing that doesn't only lead to living longer, but actually leads to living better, happier lives? The number one thing that Harvard found was our relationships.

And of course this applies to a lot of different relationships, but for many people, their predominant relationship is the relationship with their partner, with their spouse, girlfriend, boyfriend, et cetera. And so that's tied into what the mission of my work is, which is to improve a million relationships.

And I do that. Through educating people around communication, around how to keep passion alive, around how to deal with desire, mismatch and repair desire mismatch when one person wants sex and wants intimacy a lot more than the other, and it's creating problems as well as how to bring a lot of novelty and excitement back into long-term monogamous relationships.

So, you know, that's really my passion. I got into this initially just outta curiosity. It took decades before I decided. To make a career out of this. Initially it was just that I was experiencing crazy vulvar pain and I went to the doctor and like this was before I got into medicine and nobody could tell me what was going on with me.

So it was just basically for people that don't know the term vulva, that's basically the exterior part of the genitalia. So it's exterior part of the woman's vagina and I was having pain here and the doctors were like, well, you're fine. There's no problems. And I was like, well, this is keeping me up at night.

Clearly there's a problem, and I was handed a book by a friend of mine, it's called Sex for One, by Betty Dotson. And in this book, Betty talks a lot about how pain is relieved when females and men self pleasure. And so it was like this aha moment.

I had never done anything like that in my life. I had a lot of stigma and belief around that being wrong and problematic, but I tried it. And it alleviated my pain. And so it really opened up a lot of questions for me around what is the purpose of pleasure? Why are we given this gift as humans?

What can this really heal both internally in our relationships? And I think it's a perfect segue into what you're talking about feeling into your own body, there's a deep connection with how people feel in their body, how confident they are, how comfortable they are, and their ability to experience pleasure.

And it's a circle, right? It's like when we're in our body, we can experience more pleasure, but we also see that when we are experiencing more pleasure, body confidence goes up, self-esteem goes up and on and on and on and on.

Kayla: Thank you so much for sharing all of that. And I think an interesting point that you make is that many times in the wellness world or the diet culture world, it's all about the appearance and how you look and again, the aging well and all of that.

But you've made a very important point that. It doesn't matter how good you look, if you're miserable or your relationships are unfulfilled, or you're so hyper-focused on how you look, you're not actually in your body. So this work you're doing is incredibly important.

Diane: One of the things I love to say is the capacity for pleasure is directly related to the capacity to presence.

So I use food as an analogy of this because I think it helps people. It's just an easy thing to understand. Imagine sitting down for a meal, and I'm sure everybody has done this. Sitting down and doing work or something like that, and you scarf through your food so fast and you look at your plate and it's like, well, I don't really even hardly remember eating that

and not a lot of pleasure in that. Right? So that's an example of like eating non mindfully, right? Where we scarf our food down and it's just gone and we're not even remembering how it tasted, how it smelled, how it looked, how it felt when we were chewing at any of it, versus sitting down with. Friends or family and having a delicious meal and eating slowly and having an experience that last two hours, et cetera.

And obviously we can't have a two hour, at least in the States. It might be different in countries like France. I imagine Canada's similar to us in this way, that there's not like that long, luxurious lunch. Do you guys have that in Canada? We do not. Okay. So we're similar that way. So there's like, so obviously there's a culture thing, but the point here is that those long extended, pleasurable food sessions, right, where we're like, yes, we are having, not just having a meal, we're having this pleasure experience.

It's really the same thing in the bedroom. We can get into the bedroom and so many people. Feel like they don't have any desire and they, they can't feel anything. And it's not that interesting. And it takes some effort to actually drop into the body to actually feel the sensations. And sometimes it takes 20 minutes of effort around like, what does this touch feel like on my skin?

What does this kiss feel like on my lips? Oh, there my mind wandered to the list. I bring it back, I bring it back. What does it feel like here? What does it feel like there? And we need this long, kind of like warmup period that I don't even like to call foreplay. 'cause we're not even really talking about foreplay yet.

Here we're really just talking about dropping in to actually being present enough in the body to experience. To that pleasure and it is, I have asked many people this, I feel like very sure about what I'm gonna say is true. That is basically virtually impossible to have an orgasm while you're thinking about the grocery list, right?

Like you have to be present in, in your body to. Experience those changes to experience what feels good in order for your body to kick out all those chemicals of love and passion and those sorts of things. So it really is, when we're talking about pleasure, we're talking about being back in the body

from a fairly large, background of meditating. I've done 36 day meditation retreats, a lot of 3, 7, 10 day meditation retreats, meditated on and off for 25 years now, roughly, and. That being said, I still think from a standpoint of a meditative like activity, passion and sex and pleasure is the most fun way of having that type of experience and bringing that value into the health.

I love

Kayla: that you have both the meditation background and you bring that into the bedroom because you're absolutely right. If there's not that intention or there's a lot going on in your life, it can be. Very tricky to stop yourself from any of the mind wandering about like what's next on the to-do list.

So when you do have clients that are very brains don't like to turn off and they're all over the place and they're finding themselves mind wandering in the bedroom, what are some of the best practices you share with them to help them stay in that super pleasurable, super present place?

Diane: It's a great, and I think very important question and.

The, the first step is practice, not self like releasing any self-judgment, right? Because it's so easy in these situations, just like with meditation, right? So many people in meditation think like, well, my mind wandered, so I can't meditate. Meditation is the practice of realizing your mind is wandered and bringing it back.

So the moment with meditation, if you have realized that your mind wandered. You actually are successfully meditating. And a lot of people don't realize that. And so we take that same concept and we apply it to pleasure. And the idea is as we're starting to say, okay, well I am actually gonna set aside this time for myself, for my lover to be present, we realize that.

Like anything, this is a practice skill and the more we tend to be stressed out and overwhelmed, which is most people in a modern society, the more the mind is going through the task and the list and women do have a harder time compartmentalizing than men, like just based upon how our brains function.

Men are much better at a focus level of awareness. Women were so good at that multitasking, diffuse level of awareness, which is why like that typical stereotype that we see is like man's watching some sports game and women's trying to get his attention, and she's like, this is so annoying. He is not paying attention.

He is like, no, that's like the power of the masculine focus. It's harder for us to understand that as women, because we can do these things where it's like we're seeing that the pillow's outta place, the picture's crooked, the. Pot of water's boiling, our cell phone needs attended to the baby's crying and we're like, you know, giving our partner a hug all at the same time.

Point being we bring that into the bedroom and all of a sudden it's very easy for the mind still to be in. Like that list, that to do thing, that thing out of balance. So like, oh, I don't feel comfortable in my body, and the brain is firing on all cylinders. So the first step, you know, an answer to your question is really to realize the.

How normal it is for the brain to wander, and that if you recognize, if you're experiencing a moment of pleasure with your partner, and the next thing you find is that your brain is wondering and you're like, oh, I forgot to do that for my child, or something like that. Then not judging yourself and just realizing like that's actually part of the practice and the fact that you recognized it and then return back to the moment means you're already being successful at this.

And the more we can have those moments of saying, okay, my mind wandered, but I'm bringing out back to the moment and making that a practice. The more natural it gets. Just like with meditation, it's a practice. One of the most important things with it is deciding that this is important enough for you to commit to.

Because what can happen is the mind can wonder and you know, go on. Its its journey. And if we don't have that commitment to say. You know what? This is my sacred time for me and my partner and I am giving my all to this time. It's so easy to not even draw oneself back in and we can get lost in la la land and not even realize it and go through sex by having just the motions because we're not committed to saying, Hey, this is my sacred time.

I care about my relationship enough where I am going to continue to work on. Letting go of my other things and not judging myself for when I fail at that, but when I notice it, just bringing my attention back to here's my partner, here's myself, here I am in the present, and I'm gonna get sink into what's happening in my body in this moment and let go of everything else.

Kayla: I love that you emphasize the. Compassion and allowing someone to be a beginner because that is so important. And then also having that intention of a strong why of like, yes, this matters. This is so important for my relationship. And I think, I imagine that would be something that really helps to keep passion alive, even in those longer term relationships.

Diane: I definitely think the commitment does. You know, it's really interesting, Kayla, like one thing that comes up so often when I am asked like, okay, well give me your first few like intro steps on how to bring passion back. One of the things I say a lot is we have to schedule it and it is like some people are like, oh, that sounds great.

But it is one of the things that I say that I get the strongest amount of pushback to because people want it to be spontaneous. And you know what's really interesting about that is back when our relationships were new, when there's that new relationship energy and we're like, are they gonna call, are we gonna have our first kiss?

And like there's those, all those like fun thoughts where you're just like in that like euphoria. Of that new love. Right. Well, we're always really scheduling, you know, sex and intimacy back then. We might not say it just like that, but we're gonna have a date on this night and that was our first kiss. And you know, it progresses to a point where we are making love so we really still kind of schedule like, well, we're probably gonna have sex that night, so I'm gonna, you know, wear, I'm gonna shave my armpits, or whatever the thing is.

And so it's interesting then that it's. Soon as we move in together or we share keys or we combine our lives in these ways, that that's actually when we decide that all of a sudden it's supposed to be spontaneous. 'cause we see each other more and we say scheduling's bad. But it's also when some of that passion dies.

So scheduling, all it does is it just guarantees. That there is sacred time on the calendar for you guys. People can still have as much spontaneous sex as they want, and I also encourage that. But what it's saying is like, just like putting a child's sports game or a child's theater, recital on the calendar where we say, this is so important that I show up for this person.

I love that I'm actually going to block and give my calendar dedicated space for that. And that's what we're saying with scheduling because. It's really hard when life takes over. One of the amazing things that I have found that putting sex and putting a intimate date night on the calendar does is it helps then on those other nights where sometimes it's like, oh my goodness, I'm tired, but like, I know we need to do this and this is good for the relationship.

What we see in studies is that couples that have sex once a week. That's where they report the most relationship happiness. When it's less than that, then the relationship happiness tends to go down. Most commonly when it's more than that, additional sex provides other health benefits. But from a relationship standpoint, there doesn't seem to be any additional relationship gains, at least in the average relationship from surveys.

So if we have that once a week where we're saying, Hey, this, I'm dedicated to my relationship for this intimate time, and we have that once a week kind of guarantee that is Then on those other nights where it's like, goodness, like I would love to do this, but I'm really too tired. And sometimes people can feel this like.

Push, pull this like bedroom, push, pull, pull of like, do they want it? Do they want it? I'm tired. Do they know I'm tired? Are they tired? And this can be this like silent internal like push, pull, struggle. It allows people to like almost let go of that around. Like, if we're into this and we have the energy, great, but if not, we know our relationship has a space and this has a, has a space in our week.

So we can kind of start to let go of like that struggle, that internal struggle that I know. So many couples report to me that that happens around like, well, I'm not really in the mood, but I feel like I should. Do they want it? Do I want it? And we can take all of that off the table.

Kayla: Hmm. It eliminates a bit of decision fatigue in a week where people are already making so many decisions, and I imagine that also helps with the communication aspect of a relationship as well.

Diane: It does. And you know, another thing that it allows is so much of the time we've forgotten how to like flirt. Right. And that's like something too, that is as relationships go on. And my specialty really is in long-term relationships. And as relationships go on, it's very, very common that. Most of our conversations are around logistics.

You know, how was your day, honey? What did you do? Who's taking the kids here? How are you picking them up there? You know, what are we having for dinner? It's like, you know, those kind of conversations and those are necessary and those are lovely, but. We oftentimes get stuck in just like the tyranny of the urgent, as I say, and that we forget how to flirt.

So when we have date night, it starts to peel back the layer of the bandaid, where it's like, oh, this is kind of scary to flirt again with, a partner when that hasn't happened in years and decades many times. And it gives information that you can flirt about. So for example, when you start to schedule date nights.

You know, just like in the beginning of relationships where people are like, what am I gonna wear? When it's scheduled, then it allows for a little more intentionality around like, oh yeah, maybe I will actually end my workout 15 minutes early so I can go put on that cute pair of lingerie.

And you know, we start to think those things and then as we're thinking about those things. We start to get more ability to flirt because now it's like, oh, I'm so excited for this thing that we're gonna do, and it gives us that information. And I do actually have a good gift for your listeners on that.

I have a yes no maybe checklist, which is basically a novelty checklist. So this is a really fun date night activity to say. Do these checklists and then have a conversation around like what things have we maybe not talked about, that were both in alignment. There's gonna be things that, you know, one person is into the other person's not, but what kind of things on the checklist are we both in alignment That might be fun to try in the bedroom, so you and people can get that@mysexdoc.com.

Kayla: Okay. Thank you so much, and I'll include the link in the description as well. So we've talked about scheduling, we've talked about flirting as two ways to keep passion alive. Are there any other things you'd recommend or are there any big blocks that tend to deplete the passion in a relationship?

Diane: Lots.

From the standpoint of keeping it alive. So we'll talk about that first and then talk about blocks second, from the standpoint of keeping it alive, if we go back and look at the chemistry, the brain chemistry of early in the relationship, right? So that new relationship energy I mentioned earlier. If we look at what's happening there is a lot of that passion.

Driven by dopamine, by the brain. Chemical dopamine. And so what a lot of people don't realize is, is dopamine. For anybody that knows dopamine in this way, the most common like understanding of dopamine. Is reward. Like, oh, we eat a piece of chocolate cake, that was yummy, and we get a huge dopamine burst. Like that's kind of like that reward chemical that makes me feel like amazing after I got that piece of yummy chocolate cake.

And what's interesting about dopamine is there's actually a huge surge that we get of dopamine, not just at the reward, but almost through that component of leading up to it. So if I'm like, okay, you know, thinking like, like for me, my favorite dessert of all time is Flowerless chocolate cake.

And let's say I'm gonna go out this weekend and get my favorite piece of Flowerless chocolate cake. Then all of that anticipation leading up to it is actually going to be driving dopamine. So in the sex relationship component of things, it's the same thing as like date night. So if it's like Monday and we have date night on Friday, and I know that and I'm thinking about him and I'm wondering if this is gonna happen and we're gonna do that, and what we're gonna go, where we're gonna go, and if he's gonna hold my hand, all the things right.

Are they gonna text, are they gonna call after all those things. All of those little things are driving our dopamine up. And so with the idea of that, then how do we create that? 'cause in the beginning, that novel, what that is, is like novelty around like, well, I don't know about this.

All of that is created through novelty and distance. So then how do we create, how do we use our, that same science and that same chemistry when we're in long-term relationships, when we are oftentimes living, raising families, co-working with our partners. Well, it's a, we have to understand that same basic thing.

So that's also where like that novelty checklist that I just mentioned@mysexdoc.com comes in because that some of it right, is like, okay, well here's the novel thing. Now we're gonna spend a week, two weeks just flirting about it, which creates the distance of, hmm. What's that gonna be like? I haven't had that yet.

What's that gonna be like? So that's how we start to create that distance another really important thing right, is other areas where we have distance, you know, throughout our days we're working in different places, maybe somebody's on a trip. All of those things, starting to utilize that more and to bring in that flirt so that when we're, you know, apart from each other, we're actually not just talking about the logistics.

We are actually talking about, oh, these sexy things that we want to do. Right? One of the caveats there that I would really recommend if people are starting to flirt again, is what can go very, very wrong is when somebody puts their neck out and they're like, okay, I'm gonna try this.

I listen to this podcast, I'm gonna try to send my lover this sexy flirt, this sexy text. And then they wait and there's nothing and there's nothing and there's nothing. And oftentimes this is simply because a partner. Is busy. They saw it. They can't even like think of what to respond. They put their phone down and maybe seven hours goes by and they haven't responded, and sometimes they just forget all together.

So it's really important that people are on the same page with this. Anytime we're bringing something new like this in, it's often helpful to be like, Hey, I listened to this podcast and I really am interested in trying this thing and I would like to try flirting.

And, you know, here's what can happen. Like if I try flirting and then saying something sexy, and then if you don't say anything back, I might be hurt. So we actually have a conversation advance around like how do we take care of each other in that? So an example might be, okay, well let's say my partner sends me something sweet and sexy and I look at it and I'm in the middle of a bazillion things.

If I have a two second moment, then I wanna say. A message received. I'm in the middle of something. I can't wait to read this and fully take in, you know, everything sexy about you or something like that. And I make a quick note to myself somewhere visible that says, make sure you respond to that text.

Right? So that's one strategy. That's not gonna be the strategy for everybody. It might be, um, a, somebody might, if they are the person that is flirting, maybe their agreement is, Hey, if you haven't responded in an hour. I actually do want you to start, you know, sending a few text bombs, like, Hey, don't miss this.

Like, we do wanna have a plan going into it. We don't wanna have the backfire of putting ourselves out there to really repair this and then have it backfire and then we can find ourselves pulling away even more. So the more we have a communication ahead of time, the better that we.

Can do with that. And then your second question was on like, what's the breaks, right? As far as like what turns the breaks down on, on sexual health and or on, on desire? Was it on desire? Yes. So there's a lot of different things, and the way I talk about these are in three pillars. So as far as like, like what's driving us towards sex and passion, there's really three pillars and each pillar has a lot of different.

Subcategories, we could say, so first we have our physical pillar, and this is everything going on in our physical health. So how good is our circulation? What is our hormone balance? What is our stress level like? What is our neurological system like? Is it. Are we full of toxins and infections and other things that are gonna cause a lot of inflammation?

What's the health of our pelvic floor? You know, women were told to do Kegels, but oftentimes we're not even told to do them well, and they can sometimes make the problems worse if we're not doing them correctly. Men aren't even told to do this, the healthy pelvic floor functioning can hugely relate.

To erectile dysfunction. If the pelvic floor is not working very well, if the 14 muscles that we're talking about of the pelvic floor are too tight or too loose, that's actually potentially going to lead to ed. So we gotta talk about these things for both women and men. So all that's kind of in like the physical root cause.

So we wanna look and do the right lab test. I'm just gonna give you one link at the end of this for so you don't have to memorize all these, but if you go to libido quiz.com. so@libidoquiz.com, you will find a test. That little quiz totally free, and when you take it, it's gonna spit out your top likely root causes from.

Physical pillar and then it's gonna give you a list of lab tests that you should ask for your doctor for so you can self-advocate for yourself. 'cause oftentimes doctors are sadly not running complete enough labs to really evaluate for some of these things from a root cause perspective. So then the second pillar, really, which all is related to low desire, lack of passion, all of that crumbling, putting the brakes on it, that is the personal pillar.

So the personal pillar is all about everything that is non-physical that really pertains to us. So these are gonna be things like body confidence, how well we're able to stay present in our body. Do we have any shame? Do we have any shame around sex? Do we have any shame around masturbation?

And you know, some of these things are like small amounts of shames that are microtrauma. Sometimes it's childhood or sometimes it's as simple as maybe a past lover or partner said something to us while we were making love or while they were giving us oral sex and it didn't feel very good.

So there can be some shame out of those kind of situations. Body shame is under this category that can affect things. Genital shame, you know, genital shame doesn't get talked about enough, but we have a very, unfortunately maladapted belief around like, what? Female and male parts should look like.

And you know, for men, oftentimes it's as simple as like how big they are. You know, that's one of the big concerns. But also like, what do the testicles look like that can come up for females? I find that. Many females have never even looked at their own vi vagina and vulva. And for those that even have, it's like so easy for women to look at themselves and think this looks weird or bad or abnormal.

There's some photographers out there that do really cool projects you can find online. Of tons of vulvas just like lined up and you'll see like a hundred at a time, you know, sometimes. And it's really cool from that standpoint to see how dramatically different this part of the female body looks and to see so many different shapes and colors.

And some lips are bigger and some lips are smaller, and some lips are curvy and some lips are straighter. It really shows like all of it is beautiful, right? That this whole thing that we see in like porn that is like the porn industry has done around like this is the one way it's supposed to look, is just ludicrous.

Also in that personal side of things is how well do we know our own body? Because it is very difficult to explain to a partner how to give us more pleasure if we don't even really know ourselves. So we also have that, you know, responsibility as humans to understand ourselves.

And then for men, oftentimes what comes in this category too is what is their capacity to hold back orgasms and last longer so they can be better lovers. The average time a man lasts is between two to five minutes. But men can last for, you know, sometimes even hours. But that is a very, very trained skill and it's very normal to like hear this and be like, well, I can't do this.

But it is a trained skill that can be learned. So again, like. How well do we know our body? How well can we control our body? Those sorts of things. And then the final pillar, pillar three, also in our root cause conversation is really looking at what is our communication like, what is our inner relational life like?

So that is all about our capacity to come together as lovers and be creative. And say, Hey, this feels good, or That doesn't feel good to know that our bodies change day by day and what's going to feel good one day might not work for us the next day, especially as women and our ability to actually have that inner relational ability to be able to kindly.

Give and receive feedback, and this is where like the better we get, especially at number three. At pillar number three. The more we're with. Somebody, the more we've developed these and fine tune these skills of like knowing exactly what to do when, and knowing that if it shifts exactly how to communicate that quickly to our partner so that this, it is this beautiful.

That's where it really becomes this depth of like souls making love to each other versus just sex is because there's this interplay, this communication of the bodies of the spirits. And that is something that develops after many years of practice and has to be, in many ways, practiced and not just taught because it's gonna be different with every single lover that anybody has ever had.

Kayla: Mm-hmm. Thank you so much for sharing all of those, because you're absolutely right. All three of those pillars need to be addressed. This is gonna shift gears just a little bit, but you mentioned this and I'm curious about it 'cause I know this is something that comes up for many people.

How do you approach mismatch desire in long-term relationships? So one partner libido's way up here, the other one not so high.

Diane: I actually have a six week and growing course on this. So it's sadly not something that we can fully, cover in the amount of time we have today, but it is a very important thing.

So one of the foundational skills. I give people is also related to communication because in order for this to be repaired and get back on the same page, people have to learn how to communicate. So that's usually kind of the intro scale and intro actionable step that I give people. And so with that, how to start communicating.

It is important. One of the foundational things to know about communicating, communicating with sex and around sex is that we want to start with only telling our partner what we love or really like. It's very interesting that when we look at hard conversations between couples, not sex related, just like con regular conflict, that what we see in research is there's.

Three threats to the relationship in this scenario, the threat to one partner, the threat to the second partner, and that threat to that shared space, and that what we see in normal conflicts is those three threats all are about equal and the level of threat they're under. But when it comes to talking about sex, we still have those three threats, but there's one of those threats that is much greater in its say, danger.

As far as being hurt, and that is a threat to the self. So if I bring up something to my partner and I say, Hey, I don't really like this thing that's happening in bed, and I do not advise you, say it in that way ever, but let's say I do. I am immediately. To be so hyper-focused on protecting myself, he's immediately going to be so hyper-focused on protecting his self, which means that we are both in survival mode

'cause that's what self-protection really puts us in is like, oh, I am not safe. There's something about this is not safe. So we go more into that, that nervous system fight or flight protection mode. When we are in that particular realm, we're not listening typically very well.

We're not coming at this from curiosity, our emotions, right? Like start to overwhelm us. We're not thinking with our prefrontal cortex, where we reason and logic, because we're like literally feel like we're under threat, even if it's subconscious. So we start by actually practicing just saying things that are awesome and being as specific as possible.

So, we can say, start by saying thing like, wow, I love the way you made love to me last night. Okay, that's not bad, but it's a lot more effective to say, I love the way you grabbed my hip at this moment and pulled me in. It sent tingles down my whole body. I felt like you were just one with me, and I just completely felt myself melt into you.

That is like, it's a very different experience as a human to receive a compliment in that way, and it's going to help the partner do like two things are gonna happen out of this one. Is it starts to prepare the nervous system and program, the nervous system for sex and talking about sex our safe, right?

So we start to teach the nervous system that this is not something that it has to be under threat for. And then secondly. The more that we tend to do these positive things and say these positive things that we love, some of the things that maybe we don't like so much, sometimes they just fall away and we never have to mention them because we focus so much on the good.

It also brings in the concept that the Gottman Institute. Teach, which is in their surveys. They have shown that for every, in order for a relationship to be successful, for every one negative thing that is said, we need a minimum of five positive things.

So similar to that, we want to build this relationship sex conversation bucket. So. High, that talking about sex feels like so good and that people are feeling so good about what they're doing. That when we do bring in something that we want to change, and it is important to talk about those things, that it's not going to make somebody crash down.

It's not gonna make somebody go immediately into fight or flight because they already have their confidence built up so much about. What they provide as a lover. So that's usually a good foundational place to start to really begin the conversations. We don't wanna get into like, well honey, I don't think we're having sex enough.

We just wanna focus on, here's what I love.

Kayla: That makes a lot of sense. So even if the challenge is, I don't feel I'm getting enough coming to your partner with, do you remember that time we did X, Y, Z? That was so nice.

And then really bringing all of that positivity and the specificity in to actually make it something that the other partner wants to do instead of something they feel like they're kind of being pressured to.

Diane: And all of that. Yes. And the other thing I would say is, and making sure that they're not feeling they're doing something wrong.

You know, it's like, yeah, it's human. Sometimes like there is a tendency for anybody that's growth oriented. If they're like not doing something awesome growth oriented people oftentimes do wanna do it better, but. The best approach for most humans doesn't tend to be, Hey, you're making love to me in this way.

That may feel really wrong. It's just, that feels incredibly bad. So we want people to feel in many ways, like, yeah, they are good lovers. They are doing a lot. That's right. And we build upon that. And in order to go further, hmm. Absolutely.

Kayla: Thank you so much for that. And I did wanna talk to you briefly about your book because we are the Embodied Writing Warrior show, and you have a book coming out very shortly.

So can you share a little bit about

Diane: the book that you have coming out? I can, so it's called, want to want it, it is already bestselling in four categories while it's in pre-release, but as of the date of, this video, it is officially out for sale. So I would encourage people to go get it right away because this week, only for the next few days, we are giving a ton of bonuses away for free.

Almost $200 worth of bonuses away for free for people that buy it and then leave an honest Amazon review for us. So that's a really easy way. So if you go to want to want it.com, you'll find all the information about how to buy it, as well as how to get those bonuses. All of that is on that page and in this book I, the subtitle is How to Have More Sex, how to Want More Sex, and How to be Better at It.

And it's really going through, it's focused a huge amount on pillar one. We definitely focus a lot on the physical root causes, but I do talk in there as well around communication, around novelty, around dopamine. So some of that stuff is also in there. Some of that stuff will be coming out later in, books, two and three.

I wrote this as a three part series because what I have found in my work is that sometimes it's so easy to just like consume a lot of content at once and then nothing changes. So I decided when I was, writing this, that my biggest goal is to make this actionable for people. That's how we actually change our lives.

So I give, it's. Action packed with steps and things to do and things to try. So I gave that to everybody in this first book, so that people have the opportunity then to say, okay, I'm gonna take a rest. I'm gonna go apply these things and then I'm gonna come back for more. But again, all of that is at want to want it.com.

Kayla: Thank you for giving us a little teaser. I am excited to check it out. And you're right that so often we'll read a book and it doesn't turn into that embodied change. So I love that. That's a huge. Part of the books you're creating. And on that note, I always get my guests to give the listeners an embodied challenge of sometimes.

So it can be a journal prompt. They can, you can challenge 'em to go self pleasure, something that they can take away and do. After listening to this conversation,

Diane: I'm definitely gonna bring in some of self pleasure to this. So, you know, so the challenge is to get to learn your body. And I'd like to, I always would.

These kind of things. I always like to refer back to the research on habit change. And what we see on the research on habit change is it's better to give very, very small activities, that people can have success with. So I'm gonna give you a. 62nd a day challenge for one month is your challenge, and I give you that because 60 seconds is attainable.

I am not expecting that in 60 seconds you are going to reach orgasm. You could, but the whole point is just to spend 60 seconds. With your body. This can be stroking your legs. This can be touching your breasts or your chest. This can be stroking your genitals. The idea of this is just to wake up your body and to practice actually learning.

What happens if you're harder one day, if you're softer, if you use your nails, what happens if you're faster, slower? And just be curious. And for 60 seconds, just take a note of, huh, this part of my body really likes this. That part of my body really likes that. Take note, if there's any part of your body where when you touch yourself, you feel a level of constriction.

If it feels like, Ooh, I don't like this, you know, sometimes that's a sign that, okay, your body just doesn't like that. Sometimes that's a sign that you're holding trauma or a memory or something that needs to shift, or maybe you're not feeling good about that part of your body. You need to practice kindness.

So just spend that 60 seconds. No judgment and just learn more about your own personal likes, preferences than dislikes.

Kayla: And I can only imagine how much 30 days of that is gonna change a person's body awareness, body confidence, level of presence, and all of that is just gonna improve all the things. So health, relationships.

Yeah. So thank you. That was an epic challenge.

Diane: Great.

Kayla: Is there any other places where when listeners wanna learn more, they can connect with you?

Diane: So easiest place to go is just have hot sex.com. So if you go there, you're gonna see at the top, you're gonna see a ton of products that I recommend vibrators, these things discount codes for, I get discounts codes for as many things as I can get, but if you scroll to the bottom, then you're gonna see just a list of all of my freebies.

So that's a easy one. Play stop. I mentioned a bunch of freebies on the show, but if you just go to have hot. sex.com, you'll see my freebies and a whole lot more in just one easy place.

Kayla: Thank you so much. And I just have to say that you have some of the coolest domain names, anyone I've ever heard of.

Diane: I spent a lot of time on naming, so thank

Kayla: you.

Diane: Yes,

Kayla: Thank you for having me.

Kayla MacDonald
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