How stress works in your body
First, let’s break down the biological basics of stress. Knowing how stress works in your body will empower you to use it to your advantage.
There’s nothing like a stress-free life. Stress is a natural part of a meaningful, fulfilling life. It’s when we lose the ability to regulate it, to bounce back, that it spirals out of control and can be detrimental to our mental and physical health.
Understanding your nervous system
Our nervous system is what’s regulating how we respond to stressors. It can be divided into the somatic nervous system, which is conscious and controllable, and the autonomous nervous system, which is unconscious and cannot be controlled.
The somatic nervous system enables us to consciously perceive our environment through our senses and to perform voluntary action through our muscles.
Our autonomous, unconscious, nervous system controls vital functions like heart function, breathing, digestion, and sexual functions. That means our well-being and our sex life depend to a large extent on unconscious processes in our body.
Our autonomous system is divided into two parts that work together as a team: the parasympathetic and the sympathetic nervous systems.
The sympathetic nervous system is activated during stress or strenuous physical activity, enhancing our body’s performance. This results in a quicker heart rate, faster breathing, and increased adrenaline production.
The parasympathetic nervous system, on the other hand, lowers stress levels and helps the body to relax. It ensures we sleep, eat, digest, cuddle, breastfeed, and enjoy sex.
The long term effects of stress on your body
Stress is tension that puts our body into flight, fight, or freeze mode via the activation of the sympathetic nervous system. This not only releases stress hormones and slows our digestion, but it also changes our posture and muscle tone.
If this stress response happens often, without the corresponding release and relaxation, the tension becomes chronic. In other words, we start to embody our terror.
Our body posture, as you know, has a direct effect on our psyche, so over time we enter a vicious cycle. The chronic activation of the sympathetic nervous system can lead to long-term changes in our organs, which in turn can generate psychosomatic illnesses.
Sex and stress are antidotes
Sex and intimacy are very important for our physical and mental well-being because they balance our autonomous nervous system; they are the ultimate stress soothers.
That said, in order to have real intimacy and good sex, we women absolutely require the right mood and a feeling of safety. Our autonomous nervous system needs a certain balance to allow arousal.
Only when we feel safe in intimacy can our body release oxytocin, the love hormone, which enables orgasms.
If our body feels stressed, it prevents this release. All of this happens unconsciously; you can’t simply flip a switch inside your autonomous nervous system. However, you can indirectly influence your nervous system with conscious relaxation, as you will learn through Pussy Yoga or the Sensuous Dance Workout.
How stress is killing your sex life
The biggest killer of a satisfying love life isn’t lack of technique. According to science, it’s stress.
Usually, we rush through our lives, moving from one task to the next, barely even noticing we’re stressed. This is something I have to keep reminding myself of as well because, like most of us, I was raised with the attitude that life is full of obligations to be met. Having checked one thing off the list, the next one is already waiting until one day everything is perfect, and we’re allowed to rest at last.
Resting before we reach this perfection is laziness, and it doesn’t work anyway because our guilty conscience plagues us, preventing us from truly letting go.
What’s worse, whenever we dare to relax for a minute, we’re hit with motivational quotes about leaving our comfort zone to keep growing because, as we all know, standing still is regressing. In reality, this is the wrong kind of motivation. It puts the cart before the horse, and as I’m sure you know from your own experience, it’s doomed to fail. Then we stress out even more as we beat ourselves up for our lack of discipline.
After all, stress is not only caused by actual threats like impossible deadlines, but also by negative thoughts that we turn on ourselves.
Stress has been proven to weaken our pelvic floor. It disrupts our hormonal balance and causes sleep disturbances, which in turn increases stress levels. It’s a vicious cycle.
How can we break free? Timeouts are all very well and good, but the effect doesn’t last long. Before long, we’re caught in a negative feedback cycle again.
How Puss Yoga gets you out of the hamster wheel of stress
With Pussy Yoga and the Sensuous Dance Workout, we can escape this hamster wheel by learning to consciously relax and then act from a state of ease. Studies show that our true power comes from a rested state. When we’re relaxed and centered within ourselves, we can access passion, inspiration, and the motivation and energy to pursue our goals.
That said, even Pussy Yoga can create stress if you pressure yourself to obtain perfect pelvic floor mastery and mind-blowing orgasms within a specific time frame.
Simply put, if you forget our motto that “the journey is the destination,” and turn your pleasure sessions into tasks that you have to do — so that, at some point in the future, when you’ve really earned it, you’ll be allowed to have some real fun — you’re going into the wrong direction. As the piano pedagogue Rudolf Kratzert states, “Strained practice produces poor skill.” That is true in all disciplines, but it especially applies to Pussy Yoga.
Take the focus off performing and focus on sensing and experiencing
So please take the focus off performing and instead concentrate on sensing and experiencing. Sensing is more important than doing. If you consistently practice sensing inside yourself, you’ll have better results from the book, and you’ll learn an invaluable skill for life: you’ll be able to control your mind and relax in every situation life throws at you.
As with so many things in life, Pussy Yoga isn’t about knowing what is right intellectually. As Derek Sivers puts it, “If information was the answer, then we’d all be billionaires with perfect abs.” The key lies in our ability to use information and act accordingly. In our case, that means consciously cultivating a relaxed, sensuous attitude in our lives.
WHAT’S THE NEXT STEP?
If you want to deepen your mastery of your nervous system and your stress response and learn how to facilitate it for yourself and for others, I recommend joining our ESSENCE OF BELLYDANCE™ teacher training. It's not only a professional education, it's an embodied transformational experience for yourself.
If you want to start a daily guided practice that will show you how to consciously relax and tune into your sensuous power, get my Sensuous Dance Workout.
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