Dhru Purohit

Really carving out both your individual erotic space as well as the erotic space that you are sharing with your partner, right?

And so, realizing that you need to close off what Masters and Johnsons termed spectatoring during sex, which means so many of us, it's just so tempting to start

judging yourself during the sexual experience itself, whether you are, you know, I've had my students, for example, show me TikToks of social media influencers who will show you the particular positions that you should assume during sex so that you are hiding your stomach or your flabby thighs, which is, you know, these body image issues just really feed into our sex lives in ways that are profound and that are often not talked about.

So I tell women, especially, look in the mirror each day, look at yourself and find something that you love.

Maybe it's your breasts, maybe it's your eyes, maybe it's your fingers.

But the idea is that if we can overcome our tendency to want to rip ourselves apart from

we enable ourselves to achieve something called mindfulness, right?

And so sexual mindfulness, lots of research about this from Dr. Lori Brotto, is this ability literally to bring the kind of mindfulness that we have in the rest of our lives into ourselves during sex.

So that means focusing on your breath, focusing on the sensations in your body, how you're feeling.

how your body is responding to the touch of your partner.

And then also being present in a way where you're looking at how your partner is responding during sex and using those sexual cues to guide what's coming and what you're going to be, the direction that you're going to be taking the experience.

Right.

So again, so many of us just get so in our heads, we're literally turning on the prefrontal cortex, that part of our brain responsible for judging and decision making that needs to quiet in order for pleasure and orgasm to occur.

But in order to lead into that area, that ability to achieve sexual mindfulness, we need to address things like body image issues.

We need to address things like mental load and different types of stressors that are impacting us.

We need to influence things like sleep, like we talked about.

We need to make sure our body is getting regular doses of movement and activity, which is so important for our

well-being, all of those things are going to lead us to carve out that erotic space in our minds, in our bodies that allow us to be truly present during sex so that we can experience pleasure to our utmost ability.

And then there's the carving out the space with your partner, like we talked about, which is this idea of planning intimacy, right?

Having sex earlier in the day, getting the nanny to come earlier so that you can have time and perhaps fit in some intimacy before you go out for the evening.