Let's talk about one of the most prominent libido blockers that is happening in your life and your business and intimacy.
Before you do another leadership programme, mastermind or another business programme or sign up for something that has to do with your professional growth, I want to let you know why that might not be the course of action that actually optimises you.
What I know to be true with the work that I've done with women for 11 years is that smart women, switched on women, intelligent women…powerhouses have a tendency to get addicted to stress or be in a co-creation with stress and find that they need it in order to get things done.
I feel like a big part of why I'm here on this earth is to address this so that women can live in more powerful and empowering states. And I'm talking across the board.
When I use the word LIBIDO, I'm talking about the holistic definition of it. It's not just what happens in the bedroom and if you need a point of contact for a definition I really love by Alisa Vitti is:
Your Libido is you ability to give and receive pleasure, enjoyment and acknowledgment.
The biggest blocker, the biggest threat to your libido to been totally turned on in your life and business is your relationship with stress - your love of it, your secret love of it. Your need for stress to act as fuel for your fire.
You don't actually need stress as fuel for your fire.
All that's happened with you is that you've learned very early on that that is the pattern and that's how things play out.
All that's happened with you is that you've been conditioned to respond and react that way.
There's nothing inherently wrong with that - there is a dopamine hit that you can get out of stress that’s always been there for you to ignite the flame.
What you're probably coming to realise in your 30s, 40s and beyond is that there's a cost to it and that it's this time in our lives, where we start to experience revelations about what works for us and what's inhibiting our growth or blocking our desires from materialising and manifesting.
It’s a question of: What's getting in the way of us getting what we want?
And for me what I see and what I've personally experienced is this addiction to stress, this dependence on stress and this enmeshed relationship with it as the igniter of what you want and the thing that you need to get to success.
It's a sticky, tricky one. And it isn't the whole truth.
You are so much more than who you are when you're stressed and you are capable of receiving and experiencing so much more when you realise that there are other pathways that you can take to get to ecstatic feelings and sensations.
Stress is not your only pathway and it’s not your only option to getting what you want.
All that's happened for you is that everything has just been playing out on a loop and you've not ever really had or created the opportunity to experience who you are outside of that stress loop or what happens when you gently step away from that stress loop and take another course of action through the power of your body.
Stress acts as a libido blocker and so many smart women are in a tend and befriend relationship with it. They say: stress has gotten me to this point. And striving has gotten me to this point. And it's given me a certain degree of success.
It's that old adage of what got you here won't get you there.
What our brains do is go: I'm here these are all the things I did to get here in order to get there, I'll just double-time those original efforts.
I'll just put in more of those efforts and I'll push because there is no other way to get there.
Then the Alpha rhetoric kicks in…
It requires hard work.
It requires being all in.
It requires everything being higher stress and higher challenge.
And what you'll notice is that when you start double-timing it…
when you start always pulling on stress and calling on stress as your motivator and as your igniter and as you're everything…
What you'll notice is you'll start to get you'll start to get drained and in that drain you'll start to detach from your femininity.
You'll be detached from your libido.
You'll start to feel like what you want the gap between you and what you want is even further away.
That's where stress works as an addiction.
Not ever having closed those stress loops in the first place, you simply think you need to double-time it again.
Your head says: I must just have to work harder to crawl out this time.
I must just have to put the pedal to the metal I must just have to push even harder because I'm not doing enough and if I'm not doing enough, I'm not enough.
So with smart, intelligent women, what so many of us learn early on is that our worth is intertwined with productivity. And that if we're not being productive, and we're not feeling that stress, then we mustn't be doing enough and if we're not doing enough, then we mustn't be enough.
How on earth can any of us get deeply immersed and surrender in the bedroom when we struggle to even gently release that control in a non intimate situation?
That's where the work starts. It starts with your libido outside of intimacy and it all starts with you and your relationship to yourself and getting radically honest with how you and that relationship to your self interact.
One thing that you can do to take the power back is personifying stress. Start to see it as a person who is a permanent fixture in your life.
What does stress want me to do right now?
What's it asking of me?
What's it demanding of me?
Why is it pushing me so hard?
What is it think that I'm going to get from pushing everything to the utmost degree?
It is a classic power drain and what we need to work out is: where and how can we harness stress through the power of our mind and our body?
We're talking cerebrally and somatically - access all areas.
And how can we understand the occasions where we can take a different course of action for our highest good?
That is the most important lesson that smart and intelligent women are here to learn in this lifetime. Because the twist is, we think we're more powerful when we're pushing, striving and achieving.
When in actuality, we're incredibly powerful when we’re out of that mode.
When we take moments to lean back and we take opportunities to lean back.
And that increases our productivity in incredibly surprising, unexpected ways.
If you start to gently course correct your relationship with stress, you will experience a better libido for everything in this lifetime. You will start to experience what it's like to have true unbounded mojo for what it is that you're here to do and what it is that you want in this lifetime.
You cannot press override on this. You cannot bypass this and you can't just hope that it magically improves itself without any concerted or concentrated effort.
Before you do another course for your business, another programme or another mastermind that is there to inject more strategy into your work, I would implore you to choose something that's just for you and only about you.
That's another lesson that high performers, leaders and business owners are here to learn - curbing this over investment in the business and taking the power back by deeply investing in themselves.
Investing in their operating system, investing in creating a new relationship to stress.
I see you, going all the way up and then collapsing.
All up, collapse, all up and collapse and there's this middle band where libido operates. The up and the down is welcome as well – we're not demonising them.
But if this swinging pendulum of all switched on collapse or switched on collapse, is sucking the joy out of your life, I want you to know that the lush middle is totally accessible to you. To be certain, it will require you to do things differently from the way that you've always done them and that can actually be fun and exciting in itself.
Most importantly, it can turn you on.
Exploring these possibilities in yourself definitely doesn't have to feel like a threatening venture.
You're not going to lose your identity in accessing this, in fact, you’re going to find yourself.
There's a fear of and focus on loss for women.
But if I'm not this, who am I?
The way that I’d answer that is: What if you go from only seeing yourself as the stressed, high performer that gets sh*t done and instead created a whole other tapestry of colours, sensations, experiences feelings?
What if you started to feel your aliveness?
Don't be scared of that.
Be scared of just operating all UP and collapsing and that being the memoir that you write about your life.
Your aliveness. Your Libido. Your turn on. It all awaits you when you address the pendulum swinging up and down…the climbing to the top of the mounting mountain and then collapsing at the bottom and not really enjoying the view and all of the sensation that lies in beyond that heightened state and that deep, deep drop down.
There's infinitely more that's available for you and it's there already inside of you.
If you approach this with your personal life and your intimate life in mind, your leadership and your business will benefit.
Before you even consider signing on to another business programme, address this personal problem first within your operating system and you'll get so much more out of what is possible for you in intimacy, in your libido and in your business.
Lauren xo
P.S. Want a better Libido by way of your Pleasure? White Hot Pleasure On-Demand Experience is here via my Store.