Cultivating Sexual Wellness with Kate Moyle

We've taken huge steps in moving the conversation around female pleasure and female sexuality forward, but there is still a long way to go. Improved sexual wellbeing really looks like women being comfortable in their bodies, comfortable in their sexuality. Welcome to Headspace. I'm Kate Moyle, I'm a psychosexual and relationship therapist, and today we're gonna be talking all about how to improve sexual wellbeing. One of the things that's always fascinated me the most is that we don't have the conversations around sex that we do about everything else. It's never made any sense to me. We're still catching up with the fact that history has left sex out of the conversation. We still hold onto the taboos, the negative feelings, the shame. We see a lot of gendered messages when it comes to sex, and a lot of these narratives are about how the different genders should behave. We often follow a sexual script rather than actually following our intuition about what we might want to do or what feels good for us. So improved sexual wellness is actually about shedding some of those narratives and working out what works for you. We cannot separate the psychological and the physical elements of sex. Sex is a multidimensional experience. We see that when people are struggling in their sex lives and relationships, it has an impact on their mental health. We also see that particularly for women, they go through different life stages and phases where sex changes, and that it's really important that we're almost checking in with ourselves as we go. Sexual wellbeing is made up of multiple factors or pillars. The four pillars of sexual wellness are pleasure, body confidence, communication, and mindful sex. One of the first pillars of sexual wellness is pleasure. Historically female pleasure hasn't even been a part of the sex education conversations or the body education conversations, so we are massively playing catch up. What we need to empower women to do is to move towards pleasure, and we need to learn how to receive pleasure in our bodies, how to give pleasure, how to feel positive about pleasure, and also how to learn about our bodies. A really basic way of starting this as a practice is keeping a pleasure journal. This isn't just about masturbation or about self-pleasure, but noticing the little things. It's making a note, maybe a couple of things a day of things that give you pleasure. So whether that's the first cup of coffee in the morning, getting into clean bedsheets, or a hot shower, it's noticing what's happening in your body and how it's making you feel. The second pillar of sexual wellness is body confidence. Now, when we are struggling with things like body confidence, what we are is preoccupied by how we think our body looks, and we're not focusing on how it feels. So what we need to do is to learn how to get back into our bodies and out...