She holds it all together all day, the job, the kids, the house, everyone’s emotional weather. Then she gets into bed and still can’t stop managing. And orgasm requires the one thing she’s trained herself never to do: let go.
This week I sit down with Regina Thomashauer, better known as Mama Gena, founder of the School of Womanly Arts, New York Times bestselling author of Pussy: A Reclamation, and author of the new book On Our Knees. We get into why control quietly costs a woman her pleasure, and why surrender — not submission, not collapse — is the doorway back to her own body.
In this episode:
- Why your nervous system is stuck in “brace mode”, and how pleasure interrupts it
- The medicine-cabinet of chemistry your body makes on its own (and how to open it)
- Why grief and erotic aliveness can live side by side, and heal together
- A live truth-tantrum practice you can do tonight
- Three ways to start a daily pleasure practice, no matter how “boss babe” your life is
This one got vulnerable. Bring a pen — you’ll want to write the practices down.
🎧 Find Regina at mamagenas.com and @mamagena on Instagram. Get On Our Knees wherever you buy books and on Amazon
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Surrender: The Secret to Her Best Orgasms with Mama Gena Talk Sex with Annette Podcast Episode Transcript
Annette: 00:47
Today’s Talk Sex with Annette topic is why she can’t let go in bed and the surrender that unlocks her best orgasms. She holds it all together all day. The job, the kids, the house, the schedule, the emotional weather of everyone around her. And then she gets into bed and she can’t stop. She’s still managing, still performing, still watching herself from the outside and making sure it’s good for him, making sure she looks right, making sure everything’s handled. And here’s the cruel part orgasm requires the exact opposite. It requires letting go. And letting go is the one thing she’s trained herself never to do. Control has a cost, and the place it collects is her pleasure. Today we’re talking about surrender, not as a collapse and not as submission, but as the most powerful thing a woman can reclaim, starting in her own body and her own bed. My guest is Regina Tomishauer, known to hundreds of thousands of women as Mama Gina. She’s the founder of the School of Womanly Arts, a New York Times bestselling author whose book Pussy, a reclamation, the Washington Post credited with taking back the word and turning it into a source of strength. And you all know I love to use that word. Her new book, On Our Knees, makes a bold contrarian argument that surrender is the doorway to aliveness, the pleasure and power we’ve been chasing all along. Regina, welcome to Talk Sex within Net. I will hand the mic over to you in one moment. But before we dive in, I have to remind you all that I’m on OnlyFans and there. I’m sharing my sex and intimacy, how-tos, demos, and audio guided self-pleasure meditations, and so much more. You can find me there and on SubSec with my handle at Sexwithinet. And you can find both Regina and I wherever you want to by scrolling down to the notes section below. And I will have the links free there. I can’t wait to see you at all the places. But for now, Mama Gina, I would love for you to tell my listeners a little bit more about you.
Mama Gena: 02:52
Okay. Basically, you are with a legend. I have been, I had the privilege and the fun and the adventure of running the School of Womanly Arts since the birth of my daughter, Maggie. And she is now 29. So for 29 years. And it started in my living room with a handful of women. And I, because I felt so moved when I gave birth to my daughter. I was like, what am I doing to make sure that the world can hold and know and cherish who and what a woman is? And I realized, whoa, I better start with women. So I started the School of Women, the Arts in my living room with a handful of women, and it’s since grown to thousands and thousands and thousands of women and hundreds of thousands of women with all the books I’ve written. And so I am really, I am a product of female pleasure. I am brought to you by orgasm. I am a woman who has been powered by that life force that runs not only through a woman’s body and a woman’s being and a man’s body and a woman’s body and being, but it’s the life force of the wind and the rivers and what grows the trees and streams from the stars and the sun and the moon. Life force is life force, and all of my work and my practices are in celebration of that divine life force that first flows through all of us and insisting that we access it in our lifetime. It is vital for a woman to own the aliveness that she was born to live. And women were trained away from that. We were taught to compromise before we learned to come. So we often it takes a little bit of running to get back on the pony again, but we can do it.
Annette: 04:52
I acknowledge that the only reason that I’m here able to speak the way I am today is because you set the ground for that. You are you were there before me, breaking ground for it. And I know the struggle it has been for me. So just the fact that you have done all of this work for women and men and every every gender, because it benefits us all, right? It is the life force, it makes the world a better, more alive, wonderful, loving place. I so I’m feel so honored to have you here giving more time.
Annette: 05:31
I’m honored to meet you, you brave wild woman. Pretty, pretty wild.
Annette: 05:37
But again, my predecessors and and women like you who gave us some lessons and trying to continue to spread that lesson. So today’s lesson is really gonna benefit everyone because I think this idea, women, in order to break ground and to move forward and do something new and bigger, which most women are having to do because most of us, you know what? I’m I’m one of the first generations that even could go out and get a job and speak freely, right? It takes having a lot of control and getting shit done, being a boss, babe, if you will. And what we’re gonna talk about today is the opposite of that in a sense. I think you’re gonna tell me, you’re gonna, you’re gonna explain the surrendering and letting go concept and what that means and how we can use it to help us in the bedroom and help us unlock the orgasms that I know when I’m under stress and I’m chasing my professional pursuits or anything, I have a harder time orgasming and being in my sexual energy. In fact, folks, little secret right now, I’m a little stuck in my life. So this conversation is going to help me and it’s going to help you, and that’s why you stayed thin and why I’m excited about the ride in between, because there are these times where women, all people, but women get really stuck. Maybe we were really sexy for a year or two or three. I was like in it, I was like in my power and I’ve been thrown out. So I’m hoping that you’re gonna give me a new tool to unlock that. So by the end of this conversation, we’re gonna be giving you takeaways, things I can start doing, and you can start doing tonight to improve your intimate life, your intimate life with yourself, with your partner, and have better sex and a more whole fulfilling life. I am ready to learn from you, Mama Gina.
Mama Gena: 07:25
Okay, listen, let’s let’s just sister for a
Mama Gena: 07:28
minute. We live in a world where women are experiencing what I would call chronic vigilance. We have work pressure, we have caregiving, aging parents, financial challenges, the world is feeling unstable. And what happens? The female nervous system is in race mode. And we’re like, oh, what’s gonna happen next? And the problem is you can’t really access your intuition or your creativity or your desire when your body thinks it’s surviving. And pleasure, orgasm, or erotic aliveness is one of the few experiences that’s powerful enough to interrupt vigilance. Because when you have an experience of pleasure, it tells the brain that life is not a threat and a woman can hear herself again. So let’s take it out of the orgasm mode for a minute and just play with life force for a minute. So everybody’s watching this podcast, just take your hands and put them together like this. But don’t touch, don’t touch. Okay, good girl. Can you feel anything between these fingers that are not quite touching?
Annette: 08:46
And if so, what please describe electricity, double tingling heat. Yeah, yeah, great.
Mama Gena: 08:55
So that is erotic life force, life force that runs through the trees and the rivers and the wind and etc. And in that electric moment with ourselves and ourselves, we can take these alive hands and create a sense of pleasure, maybe just by doing something so gentle, so sweet, as running our hands across our skin. Just lightly, no goal in mind. Ah, you did so good. How did that feel? I feel more relaxed. Yeah, it’s so true. And as women, we’ve been taught to use our hands to take care of our parents, take care of our husbands, take care of our kids, take care of the world, but we very rarely use them as just a tool to create the experience of pleasure inside of our own bodies.
Mama Gena: 10:00
Why I want to point that out. We are gifted with some researchers say, 8,000 or 10,000 nerve endings dedicated to pleasure, and that’s our clitoris. And so if function follows form, the formation of our body is one that prioritizes pleasure. And pleasure is actually medicine, it triggers this hormonal fireworks that the pharmaceutical industry’s been trying to replicate for decades. It’s the body releases oxytocin, which is literally you just released a little oxytocin that flooded you, which is the bonding hormone. And it also lowers the cortisol, which is the stress hormone, and it calms inflammation and uh oxytocin, pleasure, it teaches your nervous system to trust and to soften. And for someone like me, because I had a history of abuse in my childhood, who and I lived in fight or flight my whole life, it was a revolution to experience pleasure. And then there’s the dopamine, which is a mood elevator, and it’s actually like an antidepressant, it’s a mood booster. And and then the cortisol drops, oxytocin rises, the prolactin, which is deep relaxation that allows us to sleep. The nervous system shifts from sympathetic, which is fight or flight, to parasympathetic, which is rest and repair. And we just all we did was touch ourselves so lightly for one second, and it shifts our chemistry. And why this matters is because chronic stress that most of us experience leads to anxiety and burnout and inflammation and waking and insomnia and all that, yeah, yeah. So when we can create and surrender to experiences of pleasure, we rewire our self-worth. We rewire our motivation, we rewire our creativity, and that’s why women who reconnect with pleasure leave bad relationships, they start businesses, they they speak up for themselves. And we live in a world where we women don’t lack confidence, we lack the biological state that makes confidence possible. So I think it’s super important for women to have a self-touch practice, a pleasure practice, a self-care practice, because it is almost like we have this miraculous medicine cabinet filled with oxytocin, prolactin, and dorphin, stopamine inside of ourselves, that pleasure allows us to access. And if we can create the environment for that to occur, it creates a very different outcome of our experience in the world. So I am a huge fan of a solo self-touched practice, which I know you are too, which delights me.
Annette: 13:25
It’s really one of my favorite regular practices in my life. I love that visual of pleasure as a medicine cabinet. Yeah. What a great and accurate metaphor. And one of the first things women said it was interesting when I announced that I was going, I for listeners who are new, in 2022, I did a 365 days of orgasms journey where I had an orgasm every day for a year. And when I announced it, men’s first reaction was, well, we’ve been doing that since we were 15. Women’s reaction was, oh my God, that sounds exhausting across the board. I mean, there were very few women that were very were excited about it or were like, wow, I’d like to try that, or oh, what’s this about? It was, they instantly shut down and they were instantly like, that’s too much. And and so for you to put it that way, look, this isn’t work. This is opening that medicine cabinet and grabbing what you need to recharge yourself. But women don’t necessarily see pleasure, especially in the sexual realm that way, which is unfortunate, right?
Mama Gena: 14:39
Well, women have not really been educated to experience the vast range of pleasure that our bodies are capable of. And I also want to make a distinction. When I am talking about orgasm or pleasure, I am not talking about climax. I am talking about literally choosing to connect with the divinity that’s living in your body at all times that when we live too much in our head, we fail to notice. But you can see it in a baby or a little kid. If you tickle their little toes, their whole body just giggles and they respond. We lose that connection with our aliveness. And so the purpose of what I like to call self-pleasure practice isn’t necessarily to drive yourself to a climax, it’s to energetically attune to the experience of pleasure inside the human body that’s possible for us to gift to ourselves. And hang with me on this. If we have this consistent experience of pleasure, um you get to experience intensity and safety at the same time, which is how trauma heals. And you learn that big feelings don’t equal danger. Pleasure teaches the nervous system to hold intensity without collapse, which is that’s leadership, that’s trauma healing. And pleasure reduces anxiety, anxiety, and it reduces depression. And it’s it’s people have tried to heal women through, I don’t know, mindset, productivity, therapy, or meds like all those SSRIs are trying to replicate what we have inside of our body naturally. And the female brain heals through safety. So pleasure is one of the deepest signals of safety that our body knows. So if we can continually practice even that simple exercise of creating a little pleasure or feeling that energy between your hands and choosing to touch yourself with tenderness, it creates a huge sea chain in a sea change in a woman’s life. I think that is the place to start a practice that can then eventually, because we as women have been trained to be afraid of our sensuality and our sexuality. And we’ve been taught that don’t be a slut or don’t be too sexy, tone it down. And actually, it’s when we allow that erotic aliveness and that beautiful radiance that lives inside of us to emerge that we create the most boundaries and safeties for our for ourselves. So it’s it’s really time for a woman to put the key and her own ignition, turn that baby on, take it down the highway, because then you can safely invite passengers.
Annette: 18:11
I love them.
Annette: 18:12
I want to move into talking about surrender and what that means in the context that you’re now sharing it. The idea that surrendering is a way for women to actually become more sexually empowered. They sound like opposites when you say them. And so I’d love for you to take me on that journey that what what this looks like.
Mama Gena: 18:40
Okay. When I’m using the word surrender in my brand new gorgeous book, On Our Knees, don’t you love that cover? I do love that cover.
Annette: 18:51
I love that cover too. And I love the name. I love the name.
Mama Gena: 18:55
Oh, thank you. There’s so many moments in a woman’s life where we’re actually brought to our knees. Whether it’s at the hospital room when the monitor flatlines, and we know we’ll never hold our beloved again, or we’re on our knees when we pray, or when we lose connection with God goddess, and we’re lost, or we’re on our knees in childbirth. We’re on our knees at awe in awe at Mother Nature and a sunset that undresses the sky. And we’re on our knees in sexual surrender to our beloved. And the surrender of that. Why I wrote the book is I wanted to invite women into the surrender into the erotic aliveness that is our birthright, not submission to another person, not giving something up, but surrendering to that alive, erotic life force that beats inside our body with every breath that no matter what happens in a woman’s life, she can connect to okay, this is the biggest loss. I have lost my beloved. And can I still surrender to loving my life, no matter what is happening, even in this loss? Can I find the aliveness even in this moment of such devastation? And that’s the surrender that the book architects and because one of the things I found through 30 years of teaching women about pussy and about pleasure and about orgasm, etc., was that almost as soon as you open the doorway to expand your pleasure, and you know this from your own research, as soon as you open the doorway to expand your pleasure, the grief, the heartbreak, the trauma, the sexual trauma that maybe we haven’t dealt with. As soon as you open the door for expanding the pleasure, the trauma just marches in saying, Hey, you didn’t mean to leave me behind, did you? We are here for a little reclamation, and then it becomes, okay, here I think this you describe this as six months into your self-pleasure practice, you got hit with a breakup, and you had to deal with all of this exploding trauma. It doesn’t take you away from the practice, but your practice says, yo, Annette, you’re gonna have to widen to include the erotic aliveness. That’s present in the drama as well. Where is the pleasure, the erotic aliveness in this breakup, this all that once reclamation? And in the current model of spirituality in the world, in the patriarchal world culture, it’s like the ascension model, or it’s the Abrahamic religions where we’re saying, God, why hast thou forsaken me? Have mercy on me so that I can ascend to heaven. And the goddesses aren’t like that. And I write about 10 goddesses in this book. Goddesses are the holy is here right now. The holy is in you wherever you are. The holy is in this seat you are inhabiting, my love. The holy is in the wind, the rain. All weather patterns contain divinity. And so now, with this, whatever the rupture is that emerges with our erotic expansion, let’s find the sacred there. And that’s the divine feminine. She finds sacred everywhere, even in the most mundane, most mundane, most extreme moments. That’s where she lives. If we move out of our head and into this gorgeous, glorious body that’s ours.
Annette: 23:33
Yeah, I it so resonates with what I’ve had had to learn over MNSA, especially in the last three to five years. When grief comes, you kind of have two choices, right? You can, which most of us, we just we want to lock it up, we want it done, we want it to go far away, we bruise against it, we appreciate it. Or you can let it move through you and be in it and feel when people say feel the heel, it’s like it’s true, it’s very simplified, but allowing grief to be in your body and to feel feel the erotic aliveness in it. We think of erotic, of course, as this like happy. I would say people would connect it with happier joy, but it’s not. It’s it’s a it’s an energetic experience and it can be in any emotion. And to let it be in you and process it and let it have its moment and move when it wants to add. And I would say, in my own practice, definitely using deep orgasms to help it sort itself out and let go of its grip on me. People just don’t know how to do that, don’t know how to let it be there and feel it. And I really decided I was gonna, all right, we’re doing this. You and me, grief. Let’s get let’s get connected and real. And that is a transformation, right?
Mama Gena: 24:56
Okay, this is so exciting, Annette. Do you want to do a practice right now that people can do at home? And we could we could just demo it together if you want to. Absolutely. Okay. So do you have an on-your knees moment in your life right now?
Annette: 25:13
That I’m in right now? Yeah.
Mama Gena: 25:15
Yeah. Okay, tell me everything.
Annette: 25:18
Okay. So
Annette: 25:19
one thing I’ve started sharing is I’m a childhood rape survivor. And about 17 years ago, I uh ended up having to estrange myself from my family because of things that had happened in their ability, inability to process it with me. My dad is currently dying, and he has hospice in home. And I hadn’t talked to him in 16 years. He reached out to me before it got really bad, and we were trying to talk, but then got cut off. So I gathered my children up and I drove without announcing, showed up on the front doorstep to see him, which I was able to. It was incredibly, I don’t, I, I don’t know how I haven’t processed it. I’m in it. I’m on my knees right now, if you will. And then left and was immediately cut off from him again. And so I’m living, I am daily managing the A when well I find out if he’s passed.
Mama Gena: 26:20
Can I just stop you there for one second? Wow.
Annette: 26:26
Yeah. It’s a wow, it’s kind of a daily journey of wow. Yeah. Wow. So in it, I have the the beautiful thing is that I held so much anger toward him. Unfortunately, we got to communicate via social media for a while. But and in that I found so much forgiveness and love that I hadn’t felt for him in years. And and so it’s beautiful. It’s the first time in my life I have felt I have felt forgiveness at that level.
Mama Gena: 26:57
Yeah.
Annette: 26:58
I’ve never experienced that. And when it hit me, the forgiveness and the the I don’t know, it’s it’s hard for me to talk about because I haven’t fully processed it.
Mama Gena: 27:09
What I want to do with you, can I jump in it with you for a moment and do a small practice that I think would be so beneficial for so many women who love you, trust you, and follow you for their next steps. Because that’s one of the privileges of the work that you and I get to do is through our heartbreaks, we break a small piece of the pathway open for the women who we have the privilege of touching. So I so feel you in the heartbreak of that. I come from a lineage of abuse in my own family, and it marks a life in a very deep way. And the fact that you have included your kids and opened the portal to communication with your dad at this particular time is so courageous of you. So there’s a practice that I call the on our knees move, and it’s there’s two parts of it. The part one is I call the truth tantrum, and part two is the tender tantrum. And and I choose the word tantrum because it takes us back to our childhood where we didn’t have so many filters on expressing ourselves. The practice is to just play literally 30 seconds of a song that resonates with the emotion, which for me, as you were speaking, I I suddenly heard that Kate Bush song, This Woman’s Work. Do you know that one? Yeah. Oh god. So if we and and I figured out a way to do this on podcasts, it’s not easy. Usually the best way to do it would be literally to drop to your knees, throw on a song that vibes with the deep emotion that you’re feeling. Give yourself 30 seconds or a minute. Today we’re only gonna do 30 seconds. In our case, you can push on the edge of your desk or grab the railing of the chair that you’re sitting in to just let the emotion of the music trigger the emotion running through your body to allow your body to feel its truth. So let me just see if we get pick up any sound on this. And we’ll see if it’s gonna work. All right, you can hear it on your end. Okay, I got mine playing on mine. Let’s go for 30 seconds of just letting this music move through that grief inside of our bodies and from the pelvis to the shoulders to the head, just allowing the luxury of 30 seconds of that body, feeling the lifetime of grief that has been lodged inside of you. That you have had the courage to say yes, yes to feeling all of so good, good, good, good, good, good. Oh, you are gorgeous. Okay, let’s take a tiny break from this. Just a little pause. Okay, and now I’m gonna add, ask you to add one extra element to it, which is within the grief, within the feeling. I want you to add a drop of tenderness towards yourself. Just a drop of tenderness in the feeling, and we’re gonna go for another 20 seconds together. Ready? Great. I’m gonna talk us through. Good, good, good. And tenderness means you are acknowledging yourself for how brave you are or the courage that it took for you to step forward in this life and to hold yourself in the heartbreak. So beautiful, even bigger, maybe let that neck boost, let the shoulders, yes. Oh my god, there you are. That tenderness of the woman that you are in this lifetime, yes, yes, so gorgeous, just honoring every step of your journey. Beautiful, beautiful. Oh my god, you’re magical. Yes, yes, okay. Now we’re gonna come back together again for one moment, and I’m gonna just check in with you. How’d that feel?
Annette: 32:16
I definitely feel the embodied grief in me. Yeah, it’s it’s close, but it also feels okay. It feels like it’s not in control of me necessarily, but with me in a way I can hold and and it almost feels like a friend, I guess.
Mama Gena: 32:43
What I saw happen to you is I don’t I I don’t know if this was your thought or it was my projection, but I I thought I thought, oh my god, she’s finding herself beautiful and brave and radiant in her grief. Where it’s like almost like a gorgeous garment that you are wearing and you have deserved to wear for having set foot on the pathway in exactly the way you have, and honored what was most defiled in your life with your life. It’s it’s a real herrow in this journey.
Annette: 33:21
Absolutely. And I I think what I felt felt the most is this love for myself within that situation, yeah. And and in that, then I feel love for myself now, and loving myself when those things happened, and going, oh, it’s oh, this was so hard. And you did this hard thing. Yes. And by loving myself then, it makes me love myself even more now.
Mama Gena: 33:55
Yeah, gorgeous. And that is the gift of that erotic aliveness that we as women have this special connection to within our bodies that we were talking about a few minutes ago of that medicine cabinet. Like when you pour pleasure into the heartbreak, pleasure into the grief, it releases the oxytocin and the dopamine, it releases the endorphins and the prolactin. We uh we get changed by our own chemistry because it’s when we have that experience of pleasure, which I use interchangeably with erotic and orgasm, when we have that experience of pleasure in this body, that’s where we connect to our divinity. That’s where it happens. Absolutely, and then you realize, oh shit, you know what?
Annette: 34:55
I’m basically holy, and that’s awesome. What I I hear you saying, and I think it’s a hard concept for people to understand, and and 365-day journey that I’m taking people on now, and trying to teach this, is that the pleasure that exists in, let’s say, smelling a flower that is your favorite scent or perfume. You know how you I am very scent-oriented, so I have a perfume I put on, and when I just breathe in that scent, I’m an ecstasy. Yes, right? That that pleasure is the same energy that the orgasm you have, the climax, and I want to, I I love that you separate orgasm from climax, but that the pleasure you have in the climaxes, they’re both the same. Yes, they’re just experienced differently, right?
Mama Gena: 35:49
Yeah, yeah.
Annette: 35:50
And that, but they they both are the same thing. Yeah. It’s so true. People have a hard time with it. And and in our society, we label one as beautiful, that the flower, the the perfume is gorgeous, the the orgasm, unless under unless it’s done under a very specific circumstance, now that pleasure is bad.
unknown: 36:12
Right.
Annette: 36:12
You have to make it good by being married and being whatever, right? But they’re the same thing.
Mama Gena: 36:17
Yeah.
Annette: 36:18
They’re they’re the same thing.
Mama Gena: 36:20
Yeah. Yes, yes, yes. And what the reason I wrote the book on our knees is because they are the same things, and you can actually connect with that erotic aliveness no matter what is happening in your life. You can connect with that erotic aliveness when you’re on your knees pushing out a baby or collapsing or in awe at the privilege of being alive. It is not disconnecting from that erotic aliveness, disconnects a woman from her sense of her own power and potency. And so, how do we stay turned on in all the facets of life? Because there’s a lot of life that we might not have chosen. And that’s why the subtitle of the book is loving your life even when you hate what’s happening. There’s a way to love your life.
Annette: 37:28
Is when something bad or hard or even horrific is happening in your life, uh good you’re going through loss, that that’s all there is is that badness. And the truth is that two things can exist at the same time, right? The grief and the erotica life. Yes. Things can be difficult from small difficulties. Like I talked about at the beginning, just a woman feeling like in charge of everything, and life feels hard because I’m working and I’m doing all the things, and I get into bed at night and like how and and and I’m in bed, and now he wants me to have sex, but I’m in this work mode.
Mama Gena: 38:06
Yeah.
Annette: 38:06
You can be in that space, that work space, but allow yourself to also be sensual and erotically alive at the same time. You can be in grief, like right now, every day, every day of my life is filled with some level of grief because that situation is happening, but I’m able to also embody joy and sensuality and that let that sexual energy power me, right? Yes. But
Annette: 38:38
the question for many women and their partners listening right now is, and this is where we do get to our takeaways, is what are things if if you are someone listening and this resonates, like right now, life is hard, or I’m going through grief, a breakup, or I am I’m in a relationship, but we have a parent who’s dying, or how do they start to surrender to that grief and allow for that gorgeous feeling to exist as well and that pleasure, pleasure and grief to exist at the same time, side by side, side by side at the banquet table.
Mama Gena: 39:15
That I wanted when I wrote this book, I decided to put in at the end of every chapter an initiation because pleasure is a practice, erotic aliveness is a practice, orgasm is a practice. You want, you want, if you do nothing, if you if you you will live a mediocre life. But if you want to have a turned-on life, a life that’s fueled by all your aliveness, it requires practice. And so the book has rituals and initiations and practices so that we can begin playing the scales of our own aliveness. Because when you think about it, what are we mostly taught to say when somebody says, How are you, Annette? What’s the response you’re taught by this culture?
Annette: 40:11
I’m fine.
Mama Gena: 40:12
I’m fine. I’m fine. I’m fine. I’m great. And I mean, I’m never fine. I I’m sure you’re not either. You’re something. You’re filled with complex feelings of joy and grief at the moment. You’re excited about some new adventure, you’re fearful of the phone call that’s about to happen that will change your experience of yourself as a woman. You’re many, many, many things, but we’re hardly ever fine. And so it’s almost like living in this culture, we have to fight for our own aliveness every day. Stand for our own aliveness. So, for example, anybody who’s listening to the podcast who’s like, damn, I want to fight for my aliveness, then I would say play with your iTunes, play with your Spotify. Find a song that reflects your inner emotional truth and give it to yourself fully, whether you sing it or you dance it or you move to it or you self-pleasure to it, that you tune your instrument to truth every single day. I also think it’s important to have a daily pleasure practice, whether that is touching yourself, doing a self-stroking practice, or it that might not be the road you want to go down right now. It could be a practice of making sure that you have a gorgeous bath at the end of the day, or that you surround yourself with plants, if that’s what you love, or you put gold wallpaper behind your hot pink couch in your office because the when the sunlight hits that gold wallpaper is so gorgeous and it just lights me up. Making little decisions that will contribute to the pleasure that you experience as a human being, so that you’re living the fullness of what it means to be a woman. Pleasure doesn’t have to be expensive. You don’t have to buy wallpaper. You can get pleasure from the dollar cup of coffee that you buy from the guy on the corner in New York City who always says hello to you when you walk your dog. And it’s an or just a self-touch practice. So it’s, but it has to be a choice that we each make to include pleasure because otherwise we’ll end up with lives that aren’t commensurate with the miraculous women that we’re each born to become. Absolutely.
Annette: 42:52
Absolutely. I think like a simple thing that I do sometimes when I’m really in it or stuck, or you know, whatever it may be, all the different things is just stepping outside my front door onto warm cement and looking up at there. There are like yeah trees outside that are hundreds and hundreds of years old that tower over my little tiny house. And then just take them in. That is that can be the beginning or the full of a pleasure practice. That can be where you start to feel it again. Because I think there are a lot, I know there are many women walking around in their late, especially in their late 30s, some of them in their 30s during the child rearing ages, 40s, 50s, and up, who don’t feel pleasure at all throughout their day. Right. And when you talk to them about a pleasure practice, they’re just like, I don’t even know how I do where to start where you want me to start. That’s where I want you to start.
Mama Gena: 43:52
Yeah.
Annette: 43:52
I want you to go out and just feel it and soak in it for a moment. Yeah. Because you deserve that. And that can that can be the Spark that makes them go, I want more.
Mama Gena: 44:02
Yeah. I want more. Do you know in this book? I have an entire initiation ritual with trees. Because I have really deep relationships with trees too. Whether they’re city trees or country trees, I just have so much reverence, love, off. There’s a wisdom in trees. That did you know that if you move energetically, like close to like maybe that far from leaves on a tree, that the leaves will come forward and touch you. They will energetically feel your love and attention and they’ll move towards you. You should just try that today and then text.
Annette: 44:46
Definitely. I will definitely try that. It doesn’t surprise me. I was I was raised in the country. It surprises people when I tell them I was raised on a sheep farm in the country. And wow. And I think that oftentimes when I’m looking to be a more embodied sensual person, that’s where I return in my head to just because I was so in touch with I didn’t know any difference than to be one with the nature around me, right? And so that is a great place for women to start, even if you’re in the city. Look, a city tree and a country tree, they’re the same. They’re the same the same. So yeah, I think whether you are a woman or someone who loves a woman and is like, man, we can’t connect in pleasure at all anymore. Help her find the space to experience pleasure every day. Yes. If you have young children, take those young children and say, Hey, whatever it is she likes to do. If she likes to eat ice cream, get her favorite ice cream and take the kid and walk out of the room and say, You eat that ice cream. I want you to eat it nice and slow and really enjoy it.
Mama Gena: 45:55
What’s your favorite ice cream in that?
Annette: 45:58
I like I like I like the chocolate and cherry, cherry Garcia, I think is one of them. That’s one of my favorite flavors is chocolate and cherry. I’m not a big ice cream person, but that I do that one.
Mama Gena: 46:12
Yeah. Mine is mine is fish food, Ben and Jerry’s fish food.
Annette: 46:17
Oh, if you ever had it.
Mama Gena: 46:20
Listen, it’s got like marshmallow and butter scotch or caramel and these little tiny chocolate fishes. It’s very, very fun. You should try it. It’s so good.
Annette: 46:34
I will give it a try as part of one of my pleasure practices. I’m a pleasure speaker. I’m a pleasure chaser. If you tell me something is going to be pleasurable, I’m like, I’ll give it a try.
Mama Gena: 46:46
You have to take it out of the freezer for a couple minutes so that it ever so slightly softens so that the gooey parts get really gooey.
Annette: 46:53
I like that. That’s one of my favorite things you get it into the bowl and then you just let it get it get like creamy, gooey, not like too melty. And then that’s when the that’s when the moment happens. That’s when you dive in, if you will.
Mama Gena: 47:04
Yes, that’s when you dive. Yeah. And by the way, this is how accessible pleasure is. We didn’t eat ice cream, but we just released oxytoce and dopamine endorphins and prolactin by talking about it.
Annette: 47:19
Because your brain doesn’t know the difference between the visualization and the actual experience. That’s true. That’s that is why I often tell partners to learn to talk erotically to each other because you don’t even have to touch each other. You can just talk about. Remember that one time we were in bed and you were just running your hands up and down like thighs, and I started to get turned on. Like that conversation starts the visualization, and the brain doesn’t really know the difference. So you’ll start to feel get that oxytocin release. Yeah.
Mama Gena: 47:54
It’s so true. It’s so true. It’s fun, it’s fun to play with fantasies with your partner or with your lover. It just expands the pleasure with your creativity. And absolutely. My lover
Mama Gena: 48:09
was over yesterday, and I pretended we were having some sensual time together. And I was my fantasy was that I was in seventh grade and he was my math teacher. So I was I was calling him Mr. Thompson, and it was hot. It was utterly silly, but it was hot.
Annette: 48:29
I I totally I have to tell you when you were like my lover was over the other day, and we were having a sensual time. I’m like, that is exactly what I would expect you to say. I love that. That’s that’s hot, and that is the above. That’s it who I aspire to be all of the time. Oh, my lover was over the other day. That we were playing, we were role-playing. I love it. That is that is the the the centrally empowered life, right?
Mama Gena: 48:55
Exactly. Exactly. Thank you so much. Yeah, this was a blast, Annette. You’re so amazing.
Annette: 49:04
You are too. And I feel like, listeners, there are a lot of this is an episode that is worth listening to on your own with your partner. Get your pen and paper out, write down the practices. I got pretty vulnerable. Pretty vulnerable. But that’s what it takes to that’s what we live for.
Mama Gena: 49:26
That’s what we live for, is that vulnerability. And we know we’re really alive and connected and in sisterhood. You know.
Annette: 49:36
And if you want to be alive in any part of your life, but specifically in the bedroom, it takes that vulnerability to get there. And remember, regardless of how you’re feeling right now, how busy you are, how boss babe mode you’re in, you can be both in that mode or in grief, or in both of them, plus erotically energized and joyous at the same time. All of that can live in you and have space and time and focus in you, right? That’s the lesson that you gave us and how to access it. So take notes, write down the practices she shared, get the book, because the grief and moments that bring us to our knees are going to happen all throughout your life. I’m sure you’ve had many of them. I’ve had many of them, and there will be many more.
Mama Gena: 50:24
Yes.
Annette: 50:26
So can you tell my listeners not only not only where they can find you and everything about you and follow you for more wisdom like this, but also where they can get your book at and learn more.
Mama Gena: 50:39
Okay. First of all, this is such a great time to connect with me because pre-order on our knees, and you do this on my Instagram, which is Mama Gina, M-A-M-A-G-E-N-A. If you want to find out about my courses, I teach incredible courses, and I have some free courses available on my website, which is mamagenas.com, M-A-M-A-G-E-N-A-S dot com. And it’s a great way to be introduced to my world. So join me for some on our knees and beyond at the School of Womanly Arts. And and and I love responding to people on my DMs on Instagram. It’s just so much fun to connect with people that you’ve never even met anywhere. And you connect on Instagram. It’s a I love it. I love it.
Annette: 51:41
Very exciting. So check that out. So, listeners, there is a lot, and thank you so much for joining me today. What an honor to have this conversation and to get to do a personal practice with you. I feel so lucky. Thank you for doing that with me. Uh, to my listeners, until next time. Until next time, Karen. Cheers, cheers.
Mama Gena: 52:03
Thank you.
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