Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Sex, Love and SuperPowers Podcast show. I am your host, Tatiana Berindei, and I am here today with Miriam Elyse. We are going to be talking about a very juicy topic, sex as medicine, the spiritual power of sexual practice. Miriam Elyse is a licensed acupuncturist and sexual health coach. She’s also the founder of Pleasure As Medicine. She began practicing yoga and meditation at the age of 13 as a way to find peace and power in her body at a time when she was dealing with sexual harassment and emotional abuse. This is how her passion for healing began, focusing on releasing sexual shame and trauma and healing the body-mind connection. Her background is in psychology, traditional Chinese medicine, and herbalism, women’s sexual health, tantra yoga and energy medicine. Today, Miriam teaches pleasure as medicine workshops every month all over California and leads group retreats to help women and couples embrace their bodies, feel connected to their sensuality and deepen intimacy in relationships. Welcome to the show, Miriam.
Thank you so much for having me.
Absolutely. Thank you for coming and joining us. We’re going to start off with our classic question, because it’s always a fun one to hear about different people’s superpowers, and would love for you to take a moment and share with our audience what are your superpowers?
My strongest superpowers is turning struggle into gold.
What are my superpowers? That’s a great question. Being that I’m in the field of sexuality and health, I’d say that one of my strongest superpowers is turning struggle into gold. That’s something that I’ve had to learn overhears of trials and errors of being a human on this planet at this time, but finding a way to make something that even something that seems very difficult and challenging, something that leads you towards your highest growth.
I love it. That’s so beautiful. I got this image of Rumpelstiltskin when she’s spinning straw into gold when you said that. Yes, it’s a big important superpower to have to be able to find the gold in the struggle. It’s so important. I was actually just talking to somebody about this on an interview how we’re going to have our struggles, and we’re going to have our challenges in our lives, but if we can … It’s all about how we relate to them and how we’re able to find the medicine within them.
Right.
Beautiful, beautiful, and speaking of medicine, I love the title of your business, Pleasure Is Medicine. We’re talking today about the spiritual power of sexual practice. People don’t often relate medicine and spirituality, and I definitely do. I think the healing journey is a very powerful spiritual journey, and I know with my own personal practice that sexuality is a healing practice as well. I’d love to hear what your work is like in that arena and how you really weave the spiritual power of sexual practice into really elevating it as medicine and uplifting us in our consciousness.
Yes, great question. When you said … You’re saying that you don’t necessarily connect medicine or healing spirituality, and to me, that’s so much of what spirituality is about. My superpower is the meeting point of healing and spirituality to me being able to use anything as growth. To me, that’s the true spiritual journey.
Yes, absolutely. I was saying that I think most people in our culture don’t look at it that way. I absolutely do view it that way as well.
Yes, yes. Yes, you’re one of the awakened, one of the awakened few.
I think there’s more. I think there’s more. I like to think there’s more of us than as shown in the media.
We’re a growing number. We’re a growing number.
Yes.
Thanks to things like this where we can spread the word, more people are having access to this information and this way of life, so it’s really, really beautiful work to be doing.
Tell us how you work with people. Who comes to you? Why do they come to you? For what, and how do you work with them?
Yes. Well, I’d love to talk a little bit about the concept of sex as medicine, pleasure as medicine and take it from there.
Let’s do it.
Yes. This idea that everything, everything is spiritual. Everything gives us the opportunity for growth, of spiritual growth. Oftentimes, spirituality is seen as only the light-chasers, only the ones who don’t wear black. They don’t get messy. They don’t have wild, raw, animalistic sex or drink alcohol. They don’t eat meat. All these things. I think it’s a personal decision of how you want to live your life, but there’s something that’s innately not spiritual about avoiding any part of yourself.
I love that. Thank you for this.
Yes, and for so many, sexuality is something that they have either avoided or been ashamed of or been taught to repress due to religion or society or their parents, their friends at school or whatever. It’s such a shadow for so many of us. Doing work around sexuality is less about having those full orgasms and having the best sex of your life even though that happens naturally through doing this work. I like to look at sexuality as a way to heal the parts of yourself that you were told wasn’t good or weren’t okay. A lot of people, a lot of women have trouble. A lot of men and women have trauma, sexual trauma, be it abuse or harassment or even growing up with really heavy religious influences. It’ going to start to darkly color and make your sexuality dark and murky. That affects everything in your life. The way that you relate to your sexuality is really the way you relate to yourself.
Absolutely. I agree with you. I agree with you entirely, and I think that’s why this work is so important in this time right now. I’m all about going to the root cause. I think that if you can clean it up between the sheets with the way that you relate to yourself, the way that you relate to your partner or others that you are engaging with sexually, you can line that up. Everything else in life tends to line up too.
Yes, and it’s counterintuitive because people … Oftentimes, people see sex as being the last thing they need to fix or take care of. It’s seen as a frivolous or hedonistic pursuit when in reality, it’s actually such an incredible part of the foundation of who you are, of how you relate to people, how you relate to your work and how you feel about yourself on a daily basis.
Absolutely, absolutely. Let’s talk about that a little bit more. How have you found the sexual practice to be … How do you guide people, I should say, is a better question through their sexual practice to some of these higher spiritual places?
Mm-hmm, yes. Well, the first step with all this is clearing out any judgments that you have, anything in your mind, basically, that you notice is autoimmune. It’s acting against yourself. It’s acting against your true nature. There’s a lot of shame that comes up around sexuality, so it ends up being this autoimmune voice that is attacking us from within. Noticing that, noticing where we have those internal judgments, this self-reflective judgments, first clearing those away so that the real work could be done. Then, I like to get into working with people’s ability to turn their senses inward. Making the experience of even imagined sensation in the body bigger, so taking something that you feel.
Maybe you feel a feather stroke on your forearm, a very light brush of a feather in your forearm. At the surface, you feel a tickly sensation on the forearm. Then, a little bit deeper, you might feel a warmth spreading out throughout your whole arm and down to the palm of your hand. On an even deeper level, you might feel calm and comfort and maybe even feelings of love in your heart just from that one sensation. That’s one example of how we can take sensation and go deeper beneath what’s actually happening, and how sensation, be it touch or smell or what we hear, actually affects us in such deep subconscious levels.
I love that. You described that in such a really beautiful way. I think it’s truly … What I’m seeing your gift is, is like uncovering the layers and being able to go from what seems like a much more surfaced superficial layer and find the depth, and find the meaning. It’s really beautiful, really beautiful.
As children, we feel everything.
Yes, yes, thank you. It’s something. It’s so much more than about that practice itself. It’s about in numbing us, in numbing the adult. As children, we feel everything. We sense everything. We’re awake and alive in all of our sense, and it tends to happen that as we get older, we shut down, and our experience of life gets more and more narrow. We compartmentalize everything. A lot of this work with sexuality, sacred sexuality, the way that I work is about becoming more sensitive to who you really are and what the world is really offering you.
It’s so beautiful, and it’s so … I mean in alignment with the tantric understanding, the tantric way. We need to take a quick break. We’ve been talking with Miriam Elyse about sex as medicine, the spiritual power of sexual practice. Before we go to break, Miriam, will you please let everybody know where they can find out more about you.
Sure. You can go to my website at miriamelyse.com. I also have a Facebook group called Pleasure Is Medicine where I post my workshops and educational material, also on Instagram is PleasureIsMedicine, all one word. I love posting a lot of inspired material and beautiful pictures on that site as well.
Beautiful. Thank you. Check her out at her website. Follow her on social media. We’re going to dive a little bit deeper into this conversation about sex as medicine and the spiritual power of sexual practice when we get back, so stay tuned.
To listen to the entire show click on the player above or go to the SuperPower Up! podcast on iTunes.
Music Credit: All instruments played by Amanda Turk. Engineered and produced by Tatiana Berindei and Daniel Plane reelcello.com
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