Just when you thought you lost your sexual edge, this topic snaps you back to your prime. Join Tatiana Berindei as she interviews award-winning author and teacher, Sheri Winston, to discover secrets to unleashing your inner orgasmic goddess. How could something so natural as orgasms during sex require technique and skill to master? You’ll learn this and so much more in this can’t-miss discussion with celebrated orgasm expert, Sheri Winston. Join us to unleash your inner orgasmic goddess.
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Sex, Love, and Superpowers podcast show. I’m your host, Tatiana Berindei, and I am so excited to be here with Sheri Winston today. She’s one of my dream guests, so I’m just really thrilled to interview her. We are going to be talking about unleashing your inner orgasmic goddess, because yes. Sheri Winston is a holistic sexuality teacher. She is a groundbreaking, award-winning author and teacher who offers empowering and entertaining erotic education for everyone. She’s the author of the award-winning Women’s Anatomy of Arousal, Secret Maps to Buried Pleasure, and Succulent Sex Craft, Your Hands-On Guide to Erotic Play and Practice. Sheri is also the founder of the Intimate Arts Center, and I am so thrilled to have her with us here today. Welcome, Sheri.
Oh, thank you so much for having me. I’m delighted to be here and chat with you about pleasure, orgasms, and just some of our favorite topics, I’m sure.
Yes. So, before we launch into some of that yummy goodness, I want to hear from you what are your superpowers?
I can have these really super, outrageous orgasms.
Well, when we set this up you asked that question. I, of course, thought about it and the first thing I thought was, “Well, I can have these really super, outrageous orgasms,” but then I thought, “That’s not my real superpower.” My real superpower is that I can help other people learn how to have them as well, and so that’s what I’m going for. So, super orgasm teacher is my superpower.
That is such an amazing superpower. I mean, that’s … I mean, really that … Can you give someone a better gift than teaching them … It’s the whole give a man a fish, teach them to fish kind of thing.
Give a woman an orgasm, yeah. Exactly.
Right.
And still be happier for the rest of your life.
And healthier and all those things. I mean, aren’t those just base level importance.
Yeah.
I would love to hear how you came into this work. I mean, this is not your average, run-of-the-mill, your guidance counselor tells you in your career coaching, “This is what you’re gonna do with your life.” How’d you end up-
I don’t think anything I’ve ever done would have been advised. So, I … I started out as an artist, actually, and then very quickly realized that I didn’t have the drive and ambition to be a professional artist. I then became a massage therapist, so this is before I was 20. I was very drawn to the world of birth, and so I was studying pregnancy massage and I had a pregnant client who invited me to come to her home birth as a support person. And I went and oh, my gosh. It was like the heavens opened up and I was like, “I’m gonna be a midwife.” It was really an amazing experience. So, I became a childbirth educator, I started assisting and apprenticing with home birth midwives, and then I wanted to be legal in New York state, which many states would have to be a registered nurse. You have to have a bachelor’s degree in nursing before you can go on to become a certified nurse midwife. So, I did that.
I jumped through all those hoops and became an officially certified nurse midwife and gynecology practitioner, and I did birth work for about 25 years. That was really the focus when I was also teaching. I was also being a childbirth educator, and during that first 10 years, so through my 20s I was teaching my clients how to have awesome births, and so I was learning and then teaching things like how to use sounds to help open you up and the connections between the mouth and the genitals, and how to use visualization and movement and touch. Obvious, wonderful things to help women have really amazing births, and sometime around 30 I had another epiphany, another light bulb went off when I realized that I had unconsciously been using all of those techniques to have better and better sex.
So, I knew that my arousal had gotten deeper and better and it was easier to have orgasms and I could have more of them and I could have them in more ways. So, I was aware of that progress I had made in my orgasmic proficiency, but I just thought … “Well, everybody just gets better at this, this is just what happens,” and like I said, around 30 suddenly I had the light bulb go off that was like, “No, it doesn’t just happen. I’ve been training myself.” So, at one point I said, “Well, what would happen if I started learning this stuff on purpose,” and then I started going to tantra classes and sexuality classes and I did some studying with some Native American people and reading about contemporary sexology, and really studying sex, and at that point I thought that was for me.
Women need to know about the ecology of the vagina.
That was just for me to have better sex and then my lover … And yeah, what I found myself doing was bringing the things I learned in the sex world back into the birth world, and that was helping me be a better midwife, and I also really started to realize how the two worlds are actually just different parts of the same world. I think getting on about 18 years ago now I retired from birthing babies, got burnt out on the hours and the politics and so forth, and I was doing gynecology, working part-time doing gynecology, but really being like, “What’s the next calling, where’s my next passion,” because that’s really always what I’ve thought of and at that point I was teaching … Beyond childbirth classes, I was teaching what probably would have called women craft classes, which were things like menstrual health and vaginal ecology. The things I was telling my patients about in the office, I started realizing, were all women need to know about the ecology of the vagina.
So, I was teaching those, and at that point, I added one class for women about how to have better orgasms. It was so much fun, you can’t imagine. It was so much fun, and then my guy friends said they wanted to come to that class, and I was like, “No, you can’t come to that class. That’s just for women,” and they’re like, “Well, we want to know. We want to know how to help our partners have amazing orgasms.” So, I was like, “All right, I’ll teach a class for guys about female sexuality,” and so I added that one and oh, that was so much fun.
And one class led to another, really, because once you started doing that and then you start teaching everybody about how to have better sex and then you start realizing they need sexual communication, and then I start teaching that. It just kept expanding and quickly became really clear to me that this was my next calling, and that now I think of my 25 years in the world of birth and women’s health as my apprenticeship for being a sex teacher. And then I came to doing what I do.
That’s so beautiful. I love that arc of the story. Thank you for sharing it. I have a little bit of a similar … I didn’t go as deep as you did in the birth world, but I was studying midwifery and was a doula for a while before I came to this work. It’s true, they’re so interconnected, and of course what gets the baby in there is what’s gonna get the baby out, too, but you don’t seem to talk about that enough. I think in our culture they’re related. Sex and birth are related.
It’s this big secret. It’s this big, dark secret that actually, birth is part of sex and sex is part of birth, and even though the western medical system has done its best to separate them, and it’s actually been very effective at separating them to the point where when I tell people I’m a holistic sexuality teacher. I say, “I teach pleasure centered sex ed for grownups.” Most people are like, “Whoa. That’s wacky,” or interesting, or scary, or whatever, and then they ask, “How did you do that?” And I say, “Well, I used to be a midwife,” and most people look so puzzled when I say that because there’s the culture we live in has done such an effective job of making people think the one thing has nothing to do with the other, which is why we have such appalling birth experiences in our culture and outcomes.
Yeah.
People don’t understand those connections.
It is shocking that … I mean, it’s logical that they’re connected, right? You’re right, the current medical model’s done a very good job of disassociating the two, which a week ago into that conversation, I’m sure, for hours with our shared background in midwifery, but that’s not-
Maybe we should have another conversation, I think, where we talk about that because that’s actually a topic that I’m very passionate about also.
Me, too, and I think it’s a really valuable one. But today we’re talking about orgasms and I want people to hear more about that. We do have to go to a quick break and when we come back from the break we’re gonna dive deep into the topic of unleashing your inner orgasmic goddess. I just want to say before we go to break that Sheri’s book, Women’s Anatomy and Arousal, the Secret Maps to Buried Pleasure, this is in my humble opinion the most important book on female sexuality that exists, that I have seen, that I have come across, period. If you have a woman’s body or you like to pleasure a woman’s body, this book is a book that you have to have. I recommended it to so many people. It’s just … It’s a book that you have to have, period. I’ll end there. I could just say more about it, but it’s a pretty strong promotion for that book. I mean, thank you for writing it. I think it’s just so hugely valuable and important, and the information shared in it is … It’s like there’s so much information but there’s also so much fun in it and this beautiful artwork, and it’s just one of my favorite books. It’s so good.
Thank you. I’m very proud of it.
And it’s usually-
I’m delighted that it is that to you and to others because that certainly was the intention of putting it out there.
Yeah, it’s amazing. Okay, so we’re gonna go to break, but before we do will you please tell people where they can find out more about you and your work.
Sure, the easiest way is to go to my website, which is the … The URL is intimateartscenter.com. You can find out lots more about me and online classes and books and there’s tons of blog posts and all kinds of stuff on there for you to enjoy and learn from.
Awesome. All right, we’ve been talking with Sheri Winston about unleashing your inner orgasmic goddess, and when we come back we’re gonna go into what are the main obstacles to orgasm and how to overcome them. 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
Podcast: Play in new window
