S016 Dr Laura Jurgens on somatics, sex and relationships

Hello, my friend, this is Dex here, and today I'm very happy to say I'm talking with my friend Somatics coach Dr. Laura Jurgens, and Laura is a somatic sexologist and a sex, relationship and embodyment coach who specializes in helping people have joyful and fulfilling relationships with their erotic selves. Their bodies, pleasure, emotions, and partners. And she does this through body based, and also emotional skill, building. So her clients gain confidence and mastery with their erotic nature. solve sexual problems and reach their true pleasure potential her approach, I think, importantly, is inclusive it's de-shaming its sex positive and its trauma informed and she's trained at the Somatica Institute and the life coach school and she holds a Phd in biology from the University of California, and quite apart from that, this is personal opinion. Now she's a lovely human being, so here she is, welcome Laura to the burnout to leadership podcast. Thanks, Dex. I'm so glad to be here. Delighted to have you here. And is there anything you'd like to add to that introduction? Well, you did a pretty great job. You covered a lot of bases. I think we'll get into some more personal stuff, I imagine, over the course of our chat today. So, so I think we'll I think we can leave it at that. That was great. That is, for sure, the plan we're gonna touch on some important subjects here that I think you know a lot of people are not exposed to, perhaps as much as would be helpful for them. So I'm really glad to be covering sex relationships embodiment, and all of that, because it's so so critical for us as human beings to be as much as we can of ourselves. So let's begin here. What do you think sex relationships and embodiment have to do with burnout? Yeah, I love this question so much. So my actuall, not to give too long of a story, But my entree, my journey into coaching really started with having a lot of my own burnout in academia, and what I discovered along the path, and as I went through my coaching journey, understanding my burnout was that I was really quite dissociated at work, and in order to sort of live my productivity worthiness dream which I was trying to achieve my way out of feeling insecure and unworthy. I had adopted a pattern that is very common in our culture of really dissociating from my body and living in my head all day long, and it actually, you know, it does get you pretty far in sort of achievement based metrics in a lot of ways up into a point up into the point where you can't tolerate it anymore. And you start having symptoms of burnout and physical symptoms. Emotional symptoms trouble in your relationships, trouble at home, things like that. So actually burnout itself is really a challenge for a lot of people, not maybe not. Everybody, but for a lot of people. It's in a it's a disembodiment challenge. Because if we're actually really paying attention, if we're living in our full selves, if we're really paying attention to all of the parts of us, including our physical selves, it's very hard to run roughshod over all those signals so when when we get in a pattern where we're really just sort of living in our head all day. We get home, and we think somehow we're gonna be able to turn that off we're somehow gonna just flip a switch and be able to be relaxed and relational with our partners or our family members have good sleep have great sex have the whole rest of our lives. All of a sudden sort of available to us. But it's often times. It's not because we spend so much of our day discounting all of the signals of our body to rest, to recharge, to slow down, to maybe take more time in relationships that we might have it work to be more sensitive to our body, rhythms, you know all of those things really wind up. We kind of take a toll, and then we expect ourselves to sort of magically have this compartmentalized life during the day, and then sort of magically, have that go away at the end of the day, and that's one of the things that has really come out in my work I do a lot of work with people on sex, but I also work a lot with just being in the body, because so many of us spend so much time in our heads that we actually have a hard time. In our heads that we actually have a hard time being in the pleasure of our body, even just the sort of Platonic pleasure of our body, even just the sort of Platonic pleasure of the sensual pleasure of being alive moment to moment. So I think it's actually really closely aligned with burnout. Actually, I secretly agree and I'm kind of smiling at your description of yourself. As an academic being very heady. I've worked with a lot of academics in burnout. Yeah, we have a lot of burnout. Well, I mean it makes sense when when you're very much incented to be almost competitively heady, competitively analytical is this kind of dog eat dog world of funding where everybody has to. kinda express themselves in in a very structured way, and I think that really contributes to burnout, separates us from the neck downwards. But I also would observe that the people I've worked with in academia who have experienced burnout when they receive coaching. They really run with the ball. I've seen some very, very impressive turnarounds in people reconnecting with themselves more fully, which I find very encouraging. I totally agree. And not least in my friendship with you. So I this is what I have observed in you, and it's such a diametric leap, really, isn't it? Yeah. It's very, very possible to change this around. And sometimes the people who are in the worst shape are the most desperate and ready to make the change. And they've seen how they it's just not sustainable anymore to sort of what I call kind of living in the attic when you're just living heady in your brain all day, and you you know there's a whole rest of the house here, and in order to live our best lives and live in fulfillment. We really want to actually be in the we want to inhabit this whole house that we've been given so for those people that have sort of been, you know, academics are a great example of just being sort of competitively heady also there's a lot of Hmm! professions like that. But but it's just one example. And when you get to a point where you realize it's not working for you anymore, I actually think there's a lot of incentive to change it pretty rapidly. Yes, and as you said, so accurately, point out, a lot of people come to me from different professions, and I'm thinking of a whole bunch of them that are also extremely heady. Accountancy, law, medicine. Blah blah blah! You know there's a big long list, and I think in modern society we're very much encouraged to dismiss our bodies in so many social and family context and societal context. Absolutely. Anyhow. So oh, sorry! So tell us then. So you've had this kind of academic burnout, and you've made these realizations for yourself. How did that take you down the path to sex and embodiment coaching? Yeah, so we wound up being really a just sort of the the place that I needed the most support myself. And then those growth myself, and sort of the last place that I was looking. It was, you know. I started with trying to heal my relationship with myself at work, with my worthiness, with burnout. I was really, I had a lot of imposter syndrome. Being a woman in science. And so I was really trying to address a lot of those things and feel secure in myself and confident in myself. And once I got through a bunch of that I realized that process brought me back into my body. I had to learn how to process emotions. I had to learn where my emotions were and how to find them, which was not easy for me. I was one of the people that had a really hard time doing that at first, but I learned, and so can everybody else. So that brought me into my body. And I realized that I actually had quite a bit of sexual trauma. And I really not. I wasn't. I was an adult human woman who has was carrying a lot of shame, and I had a lot of hang ups, or I had thought that I was a sex positive person. But when it came to me I really didn't know what I wanted, and I didn't know how to ask for it. And I had a lot of sort of stuckness around my sexuality. So it was sort of the last frontier for me, and I've noticed that that's really the case with a lot of people that we once we, you know, we are so shamed in our society around sexuality. There's a very sort of strict idea of what's sex is supposed to look like that. We get painted through the media. You know. It's kind of, you know. Five-second montage up against a wall or something, and people don't have a good sense of what are really fulfilling. Relationship is in their life with pleasure, and that felt like a tragedy to me. We are given these beautiful animals to inhabit, and as adults, sexuality is our, it's our playtime. It's our adult way of expressing a lot of emotion and connection. So it felt really important to me to help people find more connection with themselves and with each other. Yeah, and I think that I think it's generalistically very true of society that we divorced from our a body is not creative and play aspect, and our sexuality and all of that. And there is an enormous amount of shame cultivated around that. And I think it like for me when I'm working with people in burnout people in burnout are very disconnected with their bodies from their bodies and their emotions. And all that's good about them. They're disconnected, I think, from their hearts and spirits as well. They've kind of progressively shut down in burnout all the painful bits have just been shut down, shut down, shut down, shut down, until there's very little left to work with, and so I do equally quite a lot of work with feelings, emotions, bodily sensations, connecting with one another in relationship, and all of that, I find it fundamental to probably most recovery from most people. Hey? This is why I love your work. I agree with you completely. Yeah. And that part the heart and the spirituality is also something that's commonly dismissed from sexuality, where we think somehow it's supposed to be separate. And it's not, you know, a lot of us, I would say. Almost a majority of people that I work with what we really dive into, what they want in their sexual life, in their erotic life there's so much creativity there, there's so much heart connection, and there's so many aspects of spirituality to that people find in the pleasure in their body and when we actually tap into all that it also gives us. This like beautiful energy that we can bring into the rest of our lives. And it enlivens are the all of the other things that we do so when we're not all kind of locked down with our sexuality. And it's not. It's not kind of buried, hidden. We have access to a whole, another level of creativity and connection, and all the other parts of our lives. Rather than the way we're trained now, with the prevalence of Porn. And the extremities of Porn, and the way that sex is portrayed in Porn, that we're now these days have a level of access to that we never had. When I was growing up, and I think it's quite funny, because you can tell. How can I put this Australians, When they're having sex, if they've seen a lot of porn, The noises that come out of them are all with an American accent. They say things in American accents. I'm not really. There is so much performance, right? So I mean, it's just. Hmm! It's a perfect example of how much performance people are doing and how little authentic relating and like being present in what you want with another person, and that sort of beautiful sort of mutual consent of being present and really authentic that's what's missing when you're hearing that kind of thing right? That people are performing sexuality rather than actually being in sexuality. Yeah, it's always completely divorced from the experience. It's oh, here's the noises I'm supposed to be making now to turn somebody on. I find the whole concept of Porn being our teacher of how to understand sex and relationships tremendously sad! It is. There's unfortunately, very little sex education in most of modern cultures, and people don't get it at home, because, of course, there's a sort of assumption that well, maybe they're getting it at school. Well, they're not getting it at school, not getting much. Besides a very rudimentary and very male centric version of anatomy, so you know, they're not getting real clitoral anatomy, which we really didn't actually discover until 10 years ago. I mean, this is like the model of the clitoris was discovered 10 years ago. We're talking 2012, and it's still barely taught. Sexuality is barely taught even to medical professionals, you know, if they get 2h of the seminar. Especially to medical professionals. You go to a psychiatrist and talk to them about sex. They want the faintest idea what you're talking about. Yeah, that's like, yeah, exactly. It's very hard to find people who have competence in talking about real sexuality. Hmm! And adult humans interaction in an erotic sense interaction in an erotic space. And yet it's such a place interaction in an erotic space. And yet it's such a place for deep healing for people, for this beautiful creativity. It's so powerful, and it's so powerful. And it's such a beautiful creativity. It's so powerful. And it's such a beautiful part of our lives. More comfortable. So there's so much potential. But there's very few professionals who are really competent in helping people with it, and that's one of the reasons why I'm doing what I'm doing, because I wanna fill that gap. And I wanna be available to help people have the best possible lives that they can. Which I think includes great sex. Yeah, we had an example of that here last week. Of all the so Life Savings Clubs. I'm a member of a Surf Life Saving Club. And last week I saw an email saying the 17 clubs in one of our local districts have said that there we can't have any more nudity in the Change Rooms, even though their single sex change rooms we can't have any more nudity because children may be present and I think? Well, that's understandable in one level, because they're worried about sexual predation. Obviously on another level, it's teaching kids to be so ashamed of their bodies. Anybody's body. It's like UN normalizing having a body. Exactly, and I mean the statistics do not bear out that nudity has much to do with sexual assault of children. So normalizing, you know, human bodies is, you know, kids are curious. And that's okay. And it's okay for them to see nudity, you know, reasonable boundaried situations where there's not inappropriate touching of children. Obviously, or like other inappropriate boundary crossing. But you know, a normal, changing room that does seem like a move in a shaming direction. And it's just a symptom of a lot of cultural shaming and sort of you know, we can't talk about this. We have to hide it. Away, and you're not old enough. Well, kids, as early as 3 start masturbating. That is just normal human nature. And when we start shaming children, who are that young for just exploring their bodies, we just start the cycle very early for a culture that's going to wind up with what we have now, which is rampant sexual assault incredible amounts of sexual violence and people who are massively disconnected from authentic sexual connection. So I think it's all tied together, you know. The more normalizing and deshamifying we are, the easier it is for us to talk about consent and boundaries, and how to respect other people, and how to respect their autonomy, how to have good conversations about what you want and what you don't want and in the absence of that we have people who don't know how to hold boundaries or don't respect other people's background. And who also learn whatever they know from porn. Yeah, people learn a lot from Porn. And I mean, there's some good porn out there. There's some like very, you know. There's some feminist porn, and there's some very educational porn, but it takes a lot to find it. The majority of porn is, does not have those qualities. And there's, you know, all kinds of all kinds of stuff out there that can be can give people really incorrect idea of how human sexual response works. Yeah, I boradly agree with all of that, but I do think it's a shame if we're no longer allowed to teach our children appropriately about any aspect of humanity. But certainly their body is using their bodies, protecting their bodies, enjoying their bodies. Yeah, exactly. All of the above all, the info. And a lot of us. So I work with adults. I typically work mostly with people over 40. Hmm! And many of us have never received sex positive, really inclusive sex education, and many of us are still walking around. as adults in our forties, fifties, sixties, seventies, eighties, who are really struggling still to find our authentic connection with our own bodies. Yeah, it's a bit like you said, like I was related very much to what you said about you. Thought you were sex positive before, and then you realized that in fact, you were disconnected from so much of what that would include. I think I've had a similar experience because in my upbringing there was no nudity. There was also no talk about sex. AOr relationships in my household. There was one book on the bookshelf that I think we were supposed to read a puberty, and that was, and there was nothing at school either back then. It kind of does bring up a lopsided view. I think of myself as having grown up in a rather Victorian inspired environment because of that. Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of different ways that culture sort of manifests in repression and shaming for people. But that's a good example of a sort of quote, unquote, normal relationship in a family to kind of hiding sexuality, and sometimes it's much more overt, sometimes depends on your you know, religious backgrounds can really affect how people's culture relates to their sexuality. But in general most of our modern cultures are heavily patriarchal. They're real. The sex is for a man's pleasure. In the modern world. I mean, this is a little last several 100 years, probably, but we think but you know it's very ingrained in culture, and it's sort of a you know. There's, there's certain expectations for men, people Socialized as men, as what their role is gonna be and what they're supposed to do in terms of performance, and what their're supposed to be entitled to, and a lot of men feel really uncomfortable with that role and how you know I see a lot of people who men who've divorced themselves from their own sexual desire because they're scared of being looked at as predators because that's sort of the role that men are cast in in a lot of our culture, and they don't know how to be good lovers, whether they're partnering with men or with women although I will say more gay men know how to be a little bit, you know. There's more conversation going on there than there is. Men have a tendency to not have any idea how to be good lovers for women. So that's one of the things that I work with people on, but also, then women are very much socialized people who are socialized as women, whether they transition later in life or not. Are socialized, as women are told that sex isn't really for us. It's for our you know. This is a very like heterogeneity culture, where we're told that it's for the male partner, and we're supposed to do it in order to get approval. And you know, status and protection, and those kinds of things, and as much as we might grow up as feminist. We've still been, you know, swimming in that soup and actually internalizing all those messages subconsciously. Anyway, and a lot of people are not really in touch with what their actual authentic desires are, and they don't really feel entitled to them. And so we have to unpack a lot of that and help people learn how to reclaim their own authentic sexuality. But it's all totally possible. And it actually, I think, also helps a lot with balancing the rest of your life. Your burnout, the your family life. When you start prioritizing your own pleasure, it actually will help energize a lot of other aspects of your life. In my experience. Yeah, we can't be disconnected and connected at the same time. Yeah, that's a great way to put it. Become divorced pieces of our live, our human experience, our bodies, our emotions, and still remain connected. It doesn't make sense, but. Yeah, it's sort of trying to go through life very compartmentalized. Just doesn't work very well. We need to be our whole. So, or there's always gonna be a part of us. Hmm! That sort of feeling drained and trying to trying to get out. Yeah. And that's basically the the premise that we work on in recovering from burnout is to reintegrate every single thing about ourselves, every aspect, every part, every every thought, every preference and desire. Yeah, we have to clean them. We have to claim our desires and figure out what they are and give them some room to grow and some room to see to really just even witness our own desires and then you know, that doesn't mean I think a lot of people are afraid that if they look at their own desires it might somehow harm other people. But it doesn't have to harm anybody, and when we we can know our desires and figure out ways to get them consensually met ways to voice them and to negotiate with people who actually want to help us meet those desires that's actually a really beautiful thing and really connecting it takes a lot of vulnerability, though, and that's where some of us get hung up. I know it's hard, because it's hard for me. It's hard for everybody to express desires to other people, but it is really empowering when we do it. And it's really connecting when somebody here's it, and is on board with helping us, helping us get there. And if we do nothing but just embrace our sensual selves, and, like the notion of just walking through like feeling the wind on our skin and noticing how it feels to have our legs move, and you know, feeling all the little pleasures of having food, and drink and clean air, and all of those moments of our life where we have security. If we can really internalize that in our body, regardless of what's happening in our sex like that's even a beautiful place to start. Yeah, I'm not really sure this can all be. Kind of like labeled as sex, because it's. The natural, organic sensuality that we possess, that we're kind of shutting down. But this kind of brings me to the question about. So we're talking a little bit about I mean your full human experience, your physical an emotional experience in the context of of work and being burnt out at work. And I wonder how you, how you speak to people about embodying all of that, and listening to and inhabiting their body more viscerally while they're at work. Yeah, I mean, I think the's exactly what we speak about. Which is that we've been trained, that our sexual selves have to be some sort of kind of performance with somebody, or at somebody or for somebody, but actually, it's really about being with and it for ourselves. So that sensual self, that self that is just fully integrating and living in the body, that is the that is our erotic cell. So we can embody our whole erotic self at work. It doesn't mean we're being sexual towards somebody at work. And it doesn't mean we need to be overtly like sexual in any way that anybody would necessarily notice right at work. But we're present with ourselves, with our energy, with our full, creative and sensual being. We're able to experience our bodies at work. And when we're doing that, we have, it's a relational energy. But we will we. That doesn't mean that we ever step on anybody's boundaries. We don't have to do we don't have to subject anybody to our sexuality right? We don't have to externalize it. We get to use it for our own energy and our own creative enjoyment. And so when I talk to people about embodying their erotic selves at work, it's really this, this sense of having it for you, of being tapped into all the parts of who you are and allowing them to be present and not trying to shut down parts of ourselves in order to fit in to a space. But it definitely, we still want to always respect people's boundaries. We want to respect the consent culture. So we are not sort of oppressing anybody with our sexuality. Those are completely different things. Yes, or projecting harming, but I think there's a difference between our in a sense of ourselves, with that erotic energy and what we, how we act that out or behave that out in public. And I think that that's difficult balance for those of us who've been taught. That's kind of a toxic thing to do. It could easily be people listening to this in horror. Now thinking, Oh, please don't bring your erotic energy to work. Yes, because that's a misunderstanding. Yeah, it's just a misunderstanding of what erotic energy is. So erotic energy is just embodying your full body and being in your full body's presence as an adult human, we have access to our sexuality, but we don't have to put it out we don't have to sort of what we call spill it out. On people. And I think there's a lot of misunderstanding, and it comes from a sense of like a sense that people are some we are somehow entitled to do that. So people who tend to do teaching to spill their sexual energy tend to feel like they are entitled to do that at somebody. So maybe they find somebody attractive at work, and they feel like it's somehow they're entitled to let out sexuality at that person. So that is absolutely not the case. That is, that is, oppressive, and that is can be violent. That can be incredibly problematic. It can be harrassment. There's all kinds of problems with that. And it's absolutely not. Okay. But this totally different. If that person were to own their own feelings of sexuality and say, Oh, I have an attraction. That's okay. That is not about that person. And that person does not have to do anything about it. And it's not appropriate for me to think about that person having to do anything about this. This is just me being a human being who has this feeling, and I'm allowed to just own it for myself, and I'm allowed to just own it for myself and be honest with myself. About it, and I'm allowed to just own it for myself, and be honest with myself about it within my own boundaries, and maybe, like. And when we do that a lot of times when we're very clear with ourselves about okay, I have. I have some indicment of the sunlight on my skin. Right. That's an erotic experience I'm taking a moment to feel the air in my body and I'm taking a moment to feel the where I'm sitting on my seat. Those are erotic experiences, too, and we can just own that energy for ourselves and not have to externalize it on any body. And we actually get access to a lot more aliveness and a lot more creativity by doing that. But we're not asking anybody else to deal with it. It's an experienced. Vitality in the system, but I think perhaps. You might use the term erotic in a way that other people don't use. It. Yeah, I do. And I do that intentionally, because our society has so boxed in what we think about as sexual or erotic. And you know, speaking to what you were talking about before about sort of people having a sense of sex from Porn. We have this very narrow view of what sex is, and what eroticism is. And so I intentionally, you know, expanding our sense of what sexuality, what eroticism is to encompass our full sensory experience as embody humans that have just a light force, energy. Ultimately the end of the day. Erotic energy. What I mean by it is that it's our life, force, energy, and we sometimes, in a human connection with another part person, a partner, or partners, may feel enhanced aliveness, enhanced life force energy in moments, and sometimes those moments, are connected to our genitals. And so we have decided that only in those moments that life, force, energy, is called sex. But when we make that very narrow distinction, it really leaves out a lot of people and a lot of people's experience, because many of us have a much more expansive type of sexuality, there's people who are very turned on bye freezing in a forest there's people who will orgasm from breathing in a forest. That is a beautiful thing. There's people who feel incredibly turned on just swimming through the ocean, or having a hot bath. And who's to say that's not sex right? That is still a moment of life, force, energy welling up in somebody with aiveness, and an oftentimes a connection with their general pleasure, which is just part of our body, with a lot of nerve endings. So we don't have to have these sort of artificial separations. And so I'm intentionally using pretty expansive language for that, because I think it's actually really healthy to think about expanding our views. And it keeps us from getting very getting very sort of narrow and shaming around what we consider sex. Thinking about what's what we view of as normal. I was watching this morning before this an interview with Gina Davis, and she was talking about what to do about the male actors who assumed that if she was playing off opposite them, she would be sexually available to them, and she said she got a tip from Dustin Hoffman, and he said, Oh, just tell him you don't want to destroy the sexual tension, because it will affect your work. Hmm! The sexual tension between you. She tried it with Jack Nicholson. Yeah. She was so excited because it worked. Am I? Just think. Well, that's what so many of us have also learned about sexuality from Hollywood and those kinds of sources of. Yeah. Exactly. So. Hollywood normalizes predatory sexual behavior from men and has for many years. And in it, you know, depicts sex. That is very much for one particular style of male pleasure. Very very rarely do we see the type of typically slower buildup that a woman would want. Very rarely do we see sex that's depicted in ways that's actually for female pleasure. And in that example, with Gina Davis, I mean here she's getting. She's getting a recommendation from, you know, a heterosexual white man of how to deal with other heterosexual white men. That may work, but is completely disingenuous and doesn't have any relationship to actually seeing an honest boundary and holding it and expecting a colleague to respect it. So that's where we're being told that this sort of gamesmanship of like protecting, I mean, what is this? What is this is protecting her male colleagues from knowing that she wants to say No. I find the whole thing... Yeah. Because they can't handle it. I mean, this is absolutely bullshit me like I would never recommend somebody do something like that, because here we who are. Who is that for? It's not really is. Does that feel great to her? And does that actually help the situation at large? No, I mean, that's a system that is fundamentally broken. When a woman has to lie in order to get away with quote unquote, saying, No! Yeah. I find it deplorable. But really it's always pitched as if you say, no, that's your career over, and she is subsequently spent 30 years on changing that dynamic, changing the representation of women in the place of women in film. Yeah, I know. And she's amazing. Or let me just say actually, not just women, not just women, but non man, which I think is spectacular. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Non-sis men, yeah, absolutely. And her work has been wonderful. Okay. And game-changing, and I think is starting to play, you know, a big role and have a difference although it's very slow to change and I think she'd be the first to agree with that that Hollywood has been incredibly slow to change, and it really Harms us it actually harms us because that is where a lot of people are seeing messages about how romantic love is supposed to work about how relational dynamics are supposed to work, about how consent is supposed to work, which is fundamentally that it shouldn't exist, and that if you do want to ask somebody permission to say for example, touch them or kiss them, or escalate that somehow it's not sexy. Just the opposite of reality, it can be incredibly sexy, and it's incredibly important. But you know it's been. It's very slow. So I think the work they're doing is wonderful. The work Gina Davis is doing is wonderful, but that's just a great example of how the ways that we're told to navigate workplace interactions are really problematic. And don't include fundamental skills around consent. Yeah. Well, that's life, and large, as far as I can tell, in all of the sources of wisdom that we're supposed to respect and absorb, I'm so let's look at it from the other point of view, then, if if we were promoting people to be their full. Selves, at work they have their full bodily and emotional and physical experience. Erotic experience at work. I think many people might be a bit concerned that that would be pretty creepy. So can you give us a kind of? And you said, it's an internal experience, and not to be externalized. But I think. Yeah, we need this, yeah, we need to start absolutely. So you're totally right. It can be really could be really creepy. If you don't understand the basics of consent and boundaries, if you don't understand how to create safety for people, and then you don't. Yeah. Absolutely please. Shut down your sexuality at work. If you do not understand, consent. That's perhaps a little bit of a leap for people to imagine that working so give us an example. Principles you absolutely please do shut down your sexuality. But if you know what we need to do. Okay, but it might be a man listening to this, thinking, I can't be like that at work. It wouldn't be right, or it wouldn't be appropriate, or it wouldn't be respectful or something like that. Well, I think that means that there's a fundamental misunderstanding right? The idea is being in your body at work without. Expecting anything from anybody else, or putting anything on anybody else. It's just a sense of presence it's a sense of being present in your body. It does not mean. And now I come from academic science. I come from a fields in which it is not uncommon to hear of sexually predatory male professors who are doing things that they really shouldn't be doing in their office. And then, rather than actually firing them, the University pawns them off on another university, and doesn't tell the student body like this is, we have major issues with sexual harassment and assault in the workplace, and I am in no way advocating that that we relax those at all in fact, the opposite. What I would like to see is that we have more open conversations about how to have consent in general for all human interactions in the workplace. What are boundaries, and why are they great, and why are they okay? Hmm! And how do we support each other in having boundaries and what I'm seeing in terms of erotic energy is just your not being compartmentalized in your head all day and actually being present in the body it doesn't have anything to do with acting out sexually towards anybody else and in fact, the more aware we are, the more present in our bodies. We are more aware we are of where what is going on with our energy. The much earlier we can catch any inkling that we would be actually externalizing it. Reporting it out towards anybody else. So it's really an awareness of our own. Ourselves our own full selves, and that actually allows us to have better conversations and more adult conversations, more awareness around keeping people safe. Which I think is wonderful, but it like in my work. I teach people a lot about boundaries, but, generally speaking, for those of us who have not had good boundaries in a previous life experience the acquisition of good boundary keeping. It not a normal and natural process? It's a lot of trial and error, and I think maybe people to bring that full erotic energy to work. It might similarly be a bit. Bit trial and error, which is a little bit worrying. Yeah, what would you? What would you? How are you gonna suggest? What's an exercise? Yeah, so I guess I'm I'm not seeing that, because I think when we're talking about what I'm talking about is your life force, energy being in your body? So there's no. So as long as that's staying with you, which is where it belongs, right? I'm currently in my body I'm inhabiting my whole body right now, and I can feel yes, I think my pelvis. I can feel my breasts, I can feel myself present here. That's okay. I'm allowed to be this person with these parts. That's all I'm seeing. So I'm allowed to be this person with these parts. I don't have to hide it. A lot of us go into work, and you know, for years I'm a woman with a large chest. I was sitting there trying to like button up and hide parts of my body, so that other people wouldn't think less of me, that I was less competent or less capable as a woman in science, in an academic position, walking through the university trying to be as desexual as possible in case anybody might possibly think that I didn't have a brain in my head or I wasn't capable of doing the, you know, complex math, that I'm doing here right. So there's so that type of shutting down is not healthy, and it is keeping people from being their full selves. So what I do now is I can walk through a college campus, and I don't worry about what somebody I don't worry about myself being a neurotic being. I'm allowed to do that because I have boundaries. I'm allowed to do that, because I know darn well I'm gonna enforce them. And it is really important that we have systems that we have rules and structures in place in our workplaces that support people who do that. That's support people who in force their boundaries, where, if somebody does make a comment to me that that I have a recourse right? So. So that's what I'm talking about about not shutting ourselves down. We're looking at it as if it's from the male perspective of like. Maybe this. Now I can get away with more or something like that's the exact opposite of what I'm saying is, I'm saying, actually need to take it out of the patriarchal perspective. Look at all the people who it's been harming, and actually allow them to have their full expression of who they are walking through the world and create structures that protect them from harassment and harm. Yeah, I hear you. And I agree that the football embodiment of humanity is it's going to be very powerful I just think it might be a little bit of a leap for some of us. Yeah, and those people are, yeah. So, people who've never really the people who've never really owned their body or own their erotic nature or their aliveness inside. For those types of people. It could be quite scary. Even the concepts. Yes. So maybe you can. Maybe you have an exercise you can share with us. Now, that's easy to do in that context. Yes, absolutely. So. I agree completely. It can be scary, and it can be hard to understand, especially that you would keep this for you, that it's not doesn't have to be for somebody else. The idea of erotic embodiment is for yourself, and it is to live in you and give you fuller access to your life, force, energy to support you in your life and for your own enjoyment. So a really simple exercise to help people do that is an erotic breath. And so what we do with that is, we just bring the Breath. We oftentimes, when we do a breath exercise, we'll bring the breath into the chest we'll take some breaths in the chest, some deep breaths. Then we'll bring the best breath into the belly. We'll take some deep breaths into the belly, bringing it in through the nose all the way down to the belly, and then out through the mouth, and relaxing as much of the jaw, the throat as possible along the way, and sometimes we stop there, but what i'm seeing in erotic breath is we're going to invite that breath, balance the way down to the pelvis, to the pelvic floor. And we're gonna take that release of the exhale and actually use it to relax our pelvic floor. Take the inhale and use it to actually tense up the pelvic floor to bring some awareness and some tension, and then release all that tension with the exhale. And while doing this, just bringing awareness to sensations, we have in the body while we're breathing into our pelvis with those little pulling up of the pelvic floor muscle and releasing, we can actually start bringing more full body mind body awareness into all of our body systems we can integrate our pelvic area with the rest of our body when we do that, we actually get some access to what's typically some stored energy in the pelvis. And we can get a little bit more creative energy. We get a little more sensible, and it can actually enhance a lot of aspects of our connections in our life. But it's not external, right? We're just noticing our own body for ourselves. And that's how we tap into our erotic energy. It's not externalizing to anybody else. It's just for our own kind of juicy enjoyment. Thank you for that, and I would encourage everybody to have a go on that one. We've run out of time. And so what I'd like to ask you is, let us know. We'll put your stuff in the show notes. Of course, today. But let us know what you've got coming up that you would like share with people. Sure, so next month, I'm gonna be teaching a introduction to discovery. Your desires and helping people find their core desires. It's gonna be a workshop. You can follow me on my website, my emails to find out about that. Those workshops they usually do are typically very low cost, and about an hour and a half sometime mid May will be scheduled probably this week. We'll get it scheduled. You can find that at my website, which is just my name dot com. So LauraJurgens.com, and I'll keep all that. I keep a usually a monthly monthly low cost 5 to $10 workshop going so that people have some easy tools that they can incorporate into their life on a regular basis. Wonderful. So I'll include that in the show notes. That's all we got time for today. Thank you so much for coming to talk with us today, Laura. Thanks, Dex, this was really fun. Folks. If you wanna get funky in your sex life and your relationships really just, I encourage you to go and have a look at Laura's site LauraJurgens.com, alternatively, if you are burned out, if you want to get Funky in your job and get your work Mojo back come and talk to me at dexrandall.com. By the way, I also include in more in touch with your body, your emotions, your own needs and desires. I'm working directly on improving your relationship skills with partners with family at work. And basically everywhere else in your life. It's always part of recovery. And for those of you who are Lcs coaches. If you want to get funky in your coaching business, I'm running the next advanced burnout coach certification program in June. Applications open. May the Ninth look out for that one! Again the links in the show notes, and I wasn't I wasn't sure I would allow myself to say, get funky. It might be one of those prohibited words these days, but I looked it up like a true nerd, and it said to get a little wild and crazy in dancing or party behavior, not to the point of obnoxiousness but to be a little less inhibited so i'm buying, that perhaps this could be my year of getting funky. Alright on that note. Thank you very much for being here. We will catch you next time. You're amazing if you like. This episode please do rate and review it on your podcast app and i will see you again next time.