The Midlife Woman’s Pleasure Principle

Midlife Pleasure: Ania Grimone

For generations, women have been influenced by a sex-negative culture.

“Pop culture portrays midlife sex mostly as a joke.”

Sex And Culture:

Conflicting messages from religions, media, advertising, and the medical community, simultaneously push the model of a “good, moral woman”, exploit women’s bodies to sell stuff, celebrate them for acting and dressing like porn stars, but shame them for being sexually expressed.

For most women sexuality is tainted by toxic beliefs, and personal, or collective trauma. We are disconnected from our bodies, carry tremendous amounts of internalized shame, unsafety, and judgments. 

Doctors don’t speak about pleasure to older women. Internet articles talk about sexual decline. Pop culture portrays midlife sex mostly as a joke. Our sensuality becomes harder to access, because we have collapsed it with sex, and in everyday life it becomes something we need to earn.

Midlife Woman’s Pleasure Principle Is Essential:

Pleasure connects us to the body. When we disconnect from the body, we suffer. 

Pleasure is anything that feels good to you at the level of body sensation, emotion, or spirituality. 

When we ignore our physical needs, we become ill. When we unconsciously carry trauma in our nervous systems, we become hypervigilant, looking for danger where none exists. Our relationships suffer, and we become increasingly reactive, anxious, and depressed.

Pleasure interrupts this pattern of stress and disconnection. It literally brings us back to our senses. It knocks us out of the constant preoccupation with what is wrong, and helps us notice the beauty, and the value of our own experience. 

Sexual Energy:

Sensuality is the language of the body. Your five senses are completely disconnected from past or future, where worry lives. They bring you back to yourself. 

Pleasure makes you fall in love with what is here right now. Your body, your breath, your aliveness, your worthiness, your joy. 

“Pleasure is nourishment for body and soul.”

In my experience, pleasure is a healing tool. It brings back the essence of sensuality that is inherent to women. We were designed for pleasure. We have body parts that have no other purpose, than to give it to us. Nature doesn’t make mistakes. Pleasure is nourishment for body and soul. 

Sexual energy in Chinese medicine, which is the root of my practice, is the foundation of all life. Its cultivation is as important as breathing, eating, and sleeping. It is a source of health, vitality, longevity, creativity, clear thinking, emotional regulation, and even embodied spirituality. It is our essence.

Change In Paradigm:

I invite you to play. Forget for a moment all that you’ve learned about pleasure, sensuality, and sexuality. Treat it as something you have never heard of. You don’t know what pleasure “should” look or feel like, what delights you, what orgasm is, how long should it take, how to reach it., etc. 

And once you have surrendered all of it, go on a quest to discover YOUR Pleasure Map NOW. 

This exploration will help you learn what delights you. It will also expose where it is not your biology, but your beliefs, traumas, and conditioning that are getting in the way of your ecstasy.   

This is good, it will tell you where you need to look to heal.

Building Blocks Of Pleasure:

Like anything, pleasure has foundational rules that it follows. Start with the basics, and then get creative. Start in non-sexual context to get acquainted with your sensual blueprint.

1. Let go of expectation of what pleasure SHOULD look or feel like, and experience what YOUR body responses are NOW.
2. Practice relaxation by sloooooooowing down. When you slow down, you signal to the body that you are safe, and it opens its ability to take in more information by feeling more. 
3. Engage with your five senses to sensitize the body. Sight, sounds, touch, smell and taste. Play with them all. 
4. Understand that your pleasure has breaks and accelerators, and they are not just the opposites. You may be turned off by a pile of laundry, but clean, and folded clothes are not enough to turn you on. For this, you may need a clean room, warm socks, candle, and tantalizing smells. Find out what yours are, and focus on increasing what makes you feel good, and decreasing what shuts you down.  

“Feeling good matters. My happiness matters.”

Happiness Matters:

When you prioritize pleasure, your life changes. You signal to your nervous system: I matter. Feeling good matters. My happiness matters. Your stress levels decline, so your health improves. Your creativity soars, you feel more confident, more present, and more engaged. It’s easier to create and uphold boundaries, and heal your relationship with yourself and others around you. 

BUT it is not as simple as it sounds. In the world where it still doesn’t seem clear how to make pleasure a tool for empowerment, we need to let go of striving, pushing, and constant proving of our ability, and worth. Instead, we need to support and celebrate each other in our individual pleasure reclamation as an expression of a way of a Woman. Embodied, playful, connected, and oh so sensual…

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