Episode 14

May 16

The Feminine Libido - Part 2

the fully nourished podcast | Episode 14

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Transcript

Welcome back to the Fully Nourished podcast. I'm your host, Jessica Ash, Functional Nutritionist and Integrative Health Coach, coming to you with a scientific and spiritual exploration of what it looks like to awaken our feminine radiance by becoming deeply and fully nourished in a world that wants to dull us down. You ready?

As a reminder, everything in this podcast is for education and inspiration only and is not intended as medical advice. Please talk to the appropriate professional when necessary, and please use common sense before making any changes to your diet and lifestyle.

So continuing the conversation from the last episode, you know, we're talking about libido. I find that it's so interesting that libido is the thing that so many women want to know about. I mean, I don't want to say I find it interesting. It makes total sense to me because we women as a whole are hurting for energy. And in the last episode, in part one of this, we kind of talked about the state that we need to be in to truly enjoy a sexual experience, and how opening up ourselves and surrendering ourselves and softening ourselves to someone is incredibly vulnerable. Our body, we can't decide if our body feels safe or not. Our body is just going to tell us and let us know that it's either going to relax and surrender and open up or it's not.

Libido and the Pelvic Bowl

I deeply believe that we as women, have certain biological needs to really be able to enjoy ourselves during a sexual experience. These things build on each other over time. They either add to our energy or they subtract from our energy, they either fill us up or they empty us out. And because our tissues are so receptive, you know, when you look at the vaginal tissues, when you look at our pelvic floor or pelvic bowl, it's really this diaphragm, you know, the typical diaphragm that we think of our lungs that help us breathe, but we also have this diaphragm that sometimes referred to as the pelvic floor. But I've been recently hearing it more referred to as the pelvic bowl, which I think is a much better visual representation. But all our reproductive organs, our womb kind of sits at the center of this diaphragm, the center of our body. And it's where so much of our life experiences the things that have happened to us that some of the most important things are stored.

I'm loving seeing how we're starting to really recognize how much trauma or how much of our experience we hold in our pelvic bowl, and how much of our stress and tension we hold within our tissues within the vaginal tissues and the surrounding tissues and the actual pelvic bowl itself. Those muscles are often so tight when we're experiencing stress and we're in a constant state of fight or flight. We are going to be in a constant state of tension, we're going to be legitimately clenching our buttholes and our hips are going to be tight. Our quads and sometimes our hamstrings are going to maybe be tight or our glutes are going to be numb or weak. This is the core of us and it can also be reflected in our jaw. It's really interesting because in the womb when we're developing, the same cells that make the tissues of the pelvic bowl, the vagina, the labia, the vulva, the clitoris, all of these tissues are made from the same cells that develop our throat, our larynx, our actual jaw, the tissues surrounding our jaw, our mouth tissue. use.

We will often see the tension that we hold within our bodies, you know, the stress that we hold within our bodies, if it's not flowing through us if we're not receptive to life, and we're not allowing things to flow through us, we will often hold all of the tension of our experiences, all of the tension of our stress, all of the tension of our survival in these two areas. How many women do you know that struggle with all types of jaw issues like tight jaw tension?

It's interesting, because we have a lot of estrogen receptors within these places, as well as progesterone receptors. And so you see this a lot when a woman’s estrogen to progesterone ratio is imbalanced, she often holds so much tension in her jaw. And even in the literature, you see that they're starting to explore estrogen's connection to all types of jaw issues. So as we dive into this episode, I bring that up, because I just am always amazed at how differently we as women need to experience life. We need to feel our way through life, we need to allow things to flow through us, we need to be in the words of today's theme be “penetrated by life,” we cannot tight knuckle grip our way through life trying to logically process our way through, because it doesn't allow us the full experience that the feminine needs.

But the reason so many of us are in this place is because we're in a constant state of masculine energy. And this is in turn draining us, taking us out of the present moment. We're expending way too much energy to stay there. And it's also really, on a physical level. So many women have low testosterone because either their testosterone is aromatizing to estrogen in the female body. If you're under a lot of stress, you're going to produce more and more estrogen. It's that hormone of growth and proliferation, and newness. So if you're in that constant fight or flight mode, where you're seeking, seeking, seeking, trying more and more and more, hustle, hustle hustle, your body will eventually start to either create more estrogen by turning testosterone into estrogen, or it will eventually just pull back all together and will finally go into that frozen state. And in that frozen state, we're often going to be very low in testosterone, because our bodies are trying to pull us back, pull the reins back and pull our motivation back. And in doing that, we lose that insatiable desire, or libido, that we get around ovulation that comes in the days that lead up to ovulation and the days that follow ovulation.

The Driver of the Female Libido

But I think where we get hung up, and what I haven't really seen discussed, is that testosterone is not the only driver of the female libido. Whereas in the male libido, you're gonna see a very different type of libido. And, you know, it's so interesting because with the rise of the feminist movement and the desire to displace men within society, I really see how we have started to view sex from a very masculine lens. And we do it at our own demise, right? Like the feminine libido is completely different. The feminine sexual experience is completely different, as it should be. Men are turned on by completely different things than women are. And libido, of course, as we know, goes so much farther beyond sexual attraction, or even physical attraction. There's something more hungry or animalistic about it, there's something primal there. Obviously, we have a lot of pheromones that drive why we're so attracted to certain individuals, and it goes so beyond that kind of shallow lust, like, “Hey, you're a body, I'm a body, let's meet bodies.” That, to me, is lust. It's like I've got a need, and you'll do, whereas when you are in a place of alignment, and your partner is in a place of alignment, and your pheromones are attracting each other, there is going to be an animalistic-type desire there that is unmatched.

This is why what Dr. Sarah Hill says in her book, “Your Brain on Birth Control” – you know, some of her discoveries are absolutely incredible. But the one that really sticks out to me is how, when women are on hormonal birth control, it completely changes their pheromones, and it completely changes the pheromones that their biology is attracted to. So instead of being attracted to pheromones that are a good biological match, that is a great complement to each other's immune systems, because the goal with you know, I guess we'll use the word “meeting.” The goal with reproduction is to create really much stronger babies than you were, the goal is to make babies that are stronger and more physiologically advantaged than we are. But what happens when women are on hormonal birth control, according to Dr. Sarah Hill’s book is that their attraction changes to someone that has pheromones more like their brother. They're attracted to a completely different type of man. And they're often attracted to men that are much more passive or much more what I see as, you know, much more in their feminine energy, but tend to be a little bit more passive, or submissive.

She even goes so far as to say that when women get off birth control, they lose attraction to their spouse. Some of them have even lost attraction to their spouse, and been attracted to much more, almost like what you would think of like masculine or high testosterone type males. I don't know why I just said males, I feel like we're talking about specimens here. Like, I just mean, men, attracted to different types of men.

The Male Hormonal Rhythm

I covered this a little bit more and deeper in Episode Five, but we'll kind of go over the basics again. Remember that men have a 24 hour hormonal rhythm, where testosterone peaks in the morning, or it should peak in the morning. Remember, we're speaking and shoulds, because we live in a society right now where most people's physiology is not functioning how it should be. Men are not having the testosterone that they should, women are not ovulating as much or ovulating as well. And so they're not making as much progesterone. So when I talk about how things are in their optimal state, that's kind of what I mean is when things are functioning, and when things are in balance. This is what's supposed to happen. But men have a 24 hour hormonal rhythm where testosterone peaks in the morning, and then kind of declines or wanes throughout the day because their rhythm really follows the sun or follows the circadian rhythm.

The Female Hormonal Rhythm

Our production of progesterone and testosterone, and estrogen follows our infradian rhythm or our 28 day cycle. I used 28 days, it's just kind of one blanket number, but I know everybody's cycles are a little bit different in length. But, our testosterone production is really going to ebb and flow and is going to be higher and lower at certain parts of our cycle. I kind of already went over that before in part one, but our testosterone really starts to increase a little bit closer to ovulation. So towards the end of our follicular phase, or middle of our follicular phase, we'll start to see a little bit of slow rise of testosterone. And it really kind of peaks with ovulation. Then we'll kind of stay a little bit elevated, but start to wane. And so kind of in the middle of our cycle, we have this little peak of testosterone. What that does is not only stimulates our libido, but it's going to shift our energy and it's going to shift our desire where we're going to maybe become a little bit more proactive in wanting sex or libido is going to shift to be a little bit more, I don't wanna say predatory, but more like, I'm going to go out and find it, rather than I'm going to sit here kind of in my molten lava flow and magnetize and invite it towards me if that makes sense. So I'm going to keep the slow embers burning for the rest of the cycle.

But mid cycle is when that testosterone peak is really going to give us that little bit of motivation and drive, a little bit of that masculine energy, to get up and go and go get it. Or should I say go get some, but this goes deeper, right? Because going beyond that, when you look at men, you know, they can become physically aroused within seconds. They can become physically aroused by the smallest thing, the smallest stimulus, and I absolutely believe - and this is more of just like a personal belief - I absolutely believe that because part of masculine energy is just like extreme loyalty, I do think that sexual experiences shape males too. It teaches them to learn what to crave, that might have come out weird, but it just means that they are given this soft place to land. I'll just put it that way over and over again.

And assuming there is real intimacy and attraction and loyalty there, and then of course, assuming there's like an actual physical pheromonal sharing, partaking, I'll put it that way. I think that the male physiology can be turned on even quicker by just those physical like being able to smell those pheromones or being able to be in the presence of that living, breathing alter, as I said in the last episode, where as we can take a lot longer to become physically aroused. Some people even say that it takes about 30 to 45 minutes for our bodies to actually reach a place of true physical arousal, like true lubrication and true maximum blood flow takes a good amount of time. And so many women, when they hear that they're just like, Well, how does anyone have time for that? Or most men won't do that much foreplay, or which I'm like, Okay. Or, like, how does anyone have time to get fully aroused?

First of all, I think it's incredibly sad. This is the place that we've gotten. I think that the media and porn have really confused us on how women's bodies work on how we are so different. We have such different biological needs to be able to reach a state of true pleasure. And we think that our libido should reflect like in movies, the two minute orgasm where there's such a short, it's like a 30 second clip. And people think that that's possible. For most people, that's not possible. That's just not how women are wired. And they're definitely not wired to be that way with people they don't have safety with, they don't have intimacy with, they don't feel safe to be vulnerable with. There's nothing wrong with you if you don't like how it feels in the first five minutes. And that's where a lot of us, we're not allowing ourselves to become completely aroused, so we don't feel the height or the state of pleasure that we are designed to feel most of the time. I think that can describe a lot of our sexual experiences.

Like I mentioned before, I think that our sexual experiences do build on each other, just like men zoom maybe in different ways, where every time that we feel safe, and opened up and surrendered, and there's a deeper level of intimacy, you know, we're going to stay in a deeper state of openness. And there's going to be this kind of slow burning or almost like slow arousal, just being around the person if we're in our feminine energy, if we are present and in the present moment, and experiencing life. But how many of us are in a constant state of survival, constant state of fight or flight, whether it's because we're really undernourished, we're overworking, we're under appreciated, we're just not eating enough. I mean, I'm sorry, but when I'm hangry, my libido is smashed. When I'm hungry, or I haven't eaten enough all day, my libido is smashed.

I think this is the challenge today of the female libido. You know for most of us, we're living in a state where our libido is very low. It's just staying in this, if we gave it a range from zero to 10, we're like at zero most of the time and then we expect to be able to just jump to a 10 at any given moment at the snap of a fingers or with just like a few neck kisses you know. So beyond our hormonal fluctuations impacting our libido which we need to be aware of if we are not around the time of ovulation. So first of all, you know every woman in my private community when they ask a question, they know my first question is always have you ovulated? Are you ovulating? Because so many women if you can't answer this question, this simple question. I don't know if I'm ovulating. That's really the first place that we need to go to figure out where we're at physiologically, but around ovulation, that is when we should have our most heightened sense of libido or be the most hungry and the most active because this is really the time when an egg is ready to be fertilized.

And our body does have biological drives to get the egg fertilized. But once we shift into our luteal phase, and as testosterone maybe starts to wane a little bit, our progesterone will start to raise. If we have enough progesterone in relationship to our estrogen, it really does kind of calm us down and give us a sort of presence and the ability to experience our life and be at peace. It's an inner contentedness that I just cannot describe. Until you have experienced balanced and robust levels of progesterone, it's really hard to describe to somebody that has not, but progesterone is very pro thyroid, so it's going to be a very pro metabolism. And if you're eating enough, if you're eating enough protein, enough carbs, that is adequate for you enough of the right fats, getting the right nutrients, getting enough sleep getting enough sun, you will often feel like that deep hum or that that metabolic underlying energy behind all of your cells is going to raise. This is why your body temperature raises. This is why different things within the metabolism shift. It's from the impact of progesterone.

Progesterone does stimulate the thyroid, it is very anti stress. And when we have adequate progesterone, it's much easier to remain in the present moment. And it's much easier to stay within our feminine energy. And so if we are eating enough, and if we are not so stressed, our libido can still be really really strong under the influence of progesterone because it does have that kind of lifeforce energy that comes along with it. But the feeling might actually shift from a more frenzied kind of hunger, or almost wanting to go out and get it, to a more what I like to call like warm, melty lava, just a different type of libido.

The Influence of Estrogen

And then it's really interesting because when you look at the influence of estrogen on libido, it usually does one of two things. When it's in excess, when it's in balance, it often will drive libido, and a little bit of a different way as well. Hormones are usually at their lowest during our bleed, but some of us do get a menstrual libido. I know some women have told me that the question comes in like why am I so horny during my period. And honestly, I think for some of us, it takes a little while for our hormones to drop off. What actually stimulates our menstruation to begin is a drop in progesterone. So our corpus luteum produces our progesterone for us during the luteal phase, but it gets reabsorbed by the body. Usually it takes about 11 to 14 days. A good strong luteal phase is 11 to 14 days. And then as the corpus luteum starts to dissolve or disintegrate or get, like kind of reabsorbed, it's not obviously creating as much progesterone. So, you'll see this big drop in progesterone, usually the last 24 to 48 hours of the cycle. And then once it drops low enough, that's when the bleed will actually begin.

But for some women, especially women who are estrogen overloaded or have an imbalance of estrogen to progesterone, they can sometimes feel the residual effects of estrogen, sometimes even more after the progesterone drops off into the first couple days of their bleed. But typically, in a balanced place, our hormones are going to be pretty low, both progesterone, estrogen and testosterone are going to be pretty low while we're menstruating or actively bleeding. Then right after we stopped bleeding, that's really when estrogen starts to rise. And depending on where our tissue balance of estrogen is, meaning how much estrogen we actually have in our tissues, because some of us have stored up quite a bit of tissue estrogen when we are not making enough progesterone, or we're having anovulatory cycles, every cycle that we don't ovulate or don't have enough progesterone that can lead to more and more estrogen tissue storage.

Or if we're in a very poor metabolic state hypothyroid, our adrenals and our minerals are off, we can actually have more of the enzyme aromatase, and aromatase is the enzyme that turns things like DHEA and testosterone into estrogen within our tissues so we can have excessive production of estrogen or excessive storage of estrogen and that's what really can imbalance our estrogen to progesterone ratio, or our detoxification of estrogen is really poor. We're either not breaking it down in the liver, or we're not carrying it out in the bowels and it's getting reabsorbed. So those are some reasons why we can get to a place where we're a little bit more estrogen overloaded, or we have a little bit more estrogen in relationship to progesterone.

Estrogen is interesting because it can do two different things to the libido, it can put a kibosh on it or for some people, it gives them an insatiable need for sex with unsatisfying climaxes. I find that really interesting. So I kind of touched on that before where men, if they're moving into their feminine, you know, they're consuming a lot of pornography, they are in a constant place of their sexual experiences are someone coming to them, it's really easy, and they don't have to do any type of giving, they are going to produce so much more estrogen.And men, a lot of times, this will create a more insatiable need for sex, but the sex is less satisfying, the climaxes are less satisfying. This can happen to women as well. You see this happen to women a lot who are in estrogen overloaded states where their estrogen is imbalanced, they will say like, Why do I just have a constant craving for sex, like it's never enough? This is something that people should kind of look at too, because this is always a possibility. There's a real big difference between a strong, kind of continuous libido and this kind of physical urge.

But at the end of the day, we've really talked about how we as women don't run on thin air. And we definitely do not build another human being out of thin air. You know, healthy children are built from an overspill of energy. And so our lifeforce, our reproductive energy, really does require us to keep our cups full. With nourishment, we want our cups to run over because that's really when females and the feminine actually create. We create from an overspill of energy, which is why we are first receivers before we can be givers. We have to receive first before we can pour out and you can see this broken down into a much smaller level, you know, vaginal lubrication requires us to be hydrated, which requires us not just to drink enough water, like people say, but we actually need the minerals that allow the water to be utilized appropriately within the cell. It also requires fat soluble vitamins. We need enough retinol, we need enough vitamin E, we need enough vitamin K. These are things that actually help us regulate the health of our lubrication proteins themselves.

Vaginal lubrication really comes from tissues that are soft and not hardened by calcification, or hardened by tension, and trauma. If we're holding a lot of tension or experiences within our pelvic bowl, or within our actual reproductive organs themselves, or our vaginal tissues, we're going to have a hard time getting blood flow, nervous system, and nerve communication to the area. It’s going to be cut off, we're gonna have our harder time feeling, we're going to feel more numb or disconnected. And then when you think of even cervical mucus, which cervical mucus – I mean, that stuff is gold. It is what really allows sperm to make it. It's what allows sperm to mature and stay alive. And the interesting thing too, is a lot of women don't know this, the female body actually chooses the sperm that's going to be allowed into the egg. So, you know, I think a lot of basic biology explains it as like the sperm chooses the egg and like the sperm that wins just makes it. But that to me is not the reflection of energy, right. And so when you look at the science, it's actually that the egg chooses which sperm it wants to receive. That, of course, aligns more with the order of nature and our understanding of energetics. Really high quality cervical mucus requires a strong vaginal microbiome which is tightly regulated by both estrogen and progesterone and therefore the minerals behind those hormones like copper and iron and selenium and magnesium and things like that.

But when our estrogen to progesterone ratio is imbalanced, we're going to see a really big shift in the vaginal microbiome. We're going to see a shift in the amount of lactic acid producing bacteria which sometimes allows fungus to become strong, and that's where women will have kind of chronic, even low grade yeast infections, or just full blown yeast infections, or bacterial vaginosis. But behind it all we really do require nourishment, and nourishment does start at the physical level. Our libido is not just a direct reflection of our bodies' access to energy, but also the use of that energy. So, if we're like, well, we're eating enough, I'm eating every couple of hours, I balanced my blood sugar, I eat enough calories I don't over exercise, and my libido is still really squashed. Well, sometimes it's just a burnout. When we're in a place where our body needs rest and recovery, it's not going to want to spend a lot of energy on things that are going to result in reproduction. The more nourished we are, and as we replenish ourselves from a place of burnout, we will see that our body has more energy to put towards things like reproduction, rejuvenation, repair, and our libido often comes with that and follows that.

Libido in a Partnership

We also can't deny, especially if we're in a committed relationship, or we're married, the dynamics of our partnership. The dynamics between two people is going to make a big difference. So that's why I hit both the spiritual side, the emotional side, the energetic side, and the physical side. Because, yes, if we are getting enough protein, carbs and fat, we're balancing our blood sugar, we're focusing on nutrients, right, we're getting enough B vitamins, we're replenishing our minerals, we're replenishing our electrolytes, we're doing kind of all the physical things that we should be doing. And then we're not getting what we want – there's something sometimes deeper that our body is trying to tell us. You know, our body never lies. We can try to lie to ourselves, and we can kind of try to float down the longest river in the world and be in a state of constant denial. But our bodies won't allow us to do that, our bodies won't do that to us. Our body loves us so much that it practices that tough love of I'm going to tell you the truth, even though it hurts. Our bodies are not robots. And when we're overworked, undernourished, under seen, under heard, we feel completely out of alignment with our partner, completely unseen, completely unheard, completely under appreciated, we're full of tension, we aren't going to really want to surrender and open up.

But then on the flip side, we have to remember what type of power we have over our men. And so, you know, obviously, I'm referring to relationships between men and women. But we as women need to be open to receive, if we are not, if we are in our masculine energy, men lose their purpose, they will naturally fall into a more feminine place, produce more estrogen, because that is how loyal they are. Their bodies are almost trained to respond to our energy. And this is a hard pill that I have had to swallow. I think it can be a hard pill to swallow. But if we are not soft, and we're not there to receive, our men lose their purpose, and they're going to be more passive, they're going to be more checked out, they're gonna have less of a desire to please us and make us happy, because they're gonna feel like it's a competition. Because, if there's two people within their masculine energy, it's a constant competition and a constant fight. And true men who are in their masculine energy, are not going to desire to fight with their female partner, they're just not going to do that. True men are not wired to fight their female partner. So they will often back down.

If we're trying to constantly control them, or mother them, first of all, we are not biologically wired to be attracted to the same person we are mothering and caretaking, and nurturing. That's just biology. That's the order of things. And so if you are mothering and constantly controlling and guiding your partner in every different direction, you're not going to be attracted to him. Because there's nothing more physically unattractive than that for a woman. And that's biology. Right? I think we can all understand why that is. But the flip side is where us being in our masculine energy is often the catalyst to this kind of breakdown. Because here we are, we take on all of the burden, all of the control, we're trying to kind of tight knuckle our way through life, physiologically, we're paying the consequences, right? Our hormones are imbalanced, not producing as much progesterone, maybe we're producing a lot of testosterone or we're also producing tons of adrenaline and cortisol. We're having to harden ourselves and build up walls against the stress because it just feels like so much. And at any point we're just going to crumble under the weight of it. Once we're in that place, that's total masculine energy. We will not have a strong libido and we will not be in the mood. It's just nearly impossible.

It is up to us and it's our responsibility to be in our feminine energy. It's nobody else's responsibility, but our own to start practicing awareness around that and to get ourselves into a better place where, we are asking ourselves the hard questions of what do we need for safety? What do we need for stability? What is my body trying to tell me? Because at the end of the day, our body is protecting us by reining in our desire or allowing it out. I almost think of it as a rope that gets pulled in, or kind of lets it out where our desire results in us becoming incredibly vulnerable. Our desire will result in that. And that requires us to feel safe, protected, and cared for both emotionally and physically. Because as women, we have to feel safe in order for our physical body to function the way that we want to. That's just biological facts. That's how we're wired.

So the first step is always nourishment when it comes to libido. You know, play around with food frequencies, play around with meal density, try not drinking caffeine on an empty stomach. But then, if you're eating enough, you're not over exercising, you're not over exerting yourself, then it's time to go deeper. Because at that point, your nourishment and your focus, and all of the things that you've been doing to nourish yourself physically, is now inviting you to go deeper. And it's up to you to listen.

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Jessica Ash Wellness