00:07.47
Matt Dahse
Um, in this episode, we'll unpack the 3 shadows many men have with self-pleasure: porn, fantasies and releasing guilt.
01:07.14
calltocourage
Yo yo yo welcome to episode 6 out of 6 in our clear relating miniseries I'm Gareth Pickering and I'm joined by Matt Dazzy how you brother.
01:17.76
Matt Dahse
Doing great a man.
01:23.19
calltocourage
So jazzed to be getting into this final topic in the series and we have left 1 of the most juicy topics till the end and this is the second time we're recording this version because this topic is so gnarly and so beautiful that um. We decided that we were going to leave out certain parts of it because ah this would end up being a 2 hour long episode but I would like to jump straight in to recognizing the importance of self-pleasure as a practice for a man and for a woman as well actually as well as how important it is to be.
01:44.20
Matt Dahse
Is.
01:58.45
calltocourage
Cultivating a healthy self-pleasuring practice even when you're inside a committed partnership. So I want to dive right in and talk about one of the most challenging parts about a self-pleasuring practice is first of all most of us haven't been taught anything about self-pleasuring. Stuff that we've learned we maybe got from the internet or we learned it from friends or other kids at school or it sort of just showed up in our life and in a world where the average age of our sexual conversation hovers in the early teens I think it's pretty clear that most of us. Can't have an open and adult conversation about a healthy self-pleasuring practice first ofly for what it is but second of all realizing just some of the places where we fall into I would say bad habits with regards to self-pleasuring because we don't know any better and. I want to start off by talking about the labels that we use for our intimate practice with ourself we in the first few minutes of this podcast have've been talking about self-pleasuring that wasn't a word that I used for masturbation or jerking off when I was growinging up I don't about you Matt.
03:07.58
Matt Dahse
Yeah, now like I definitely called it jerking off. Yeah.
03:12.20
calltocourage
So we have this this act that we that most men and women do as well which is really a release and for many of us. It's something that stays in the shadow. It's something that we hide away from our. Ah, partners if we're in relationship. We definitely don't talk to our parents or siblings about it and it's definitely not recognized for the beautiful act that it is and so I think first of all is recognizing.
03:41.80
calltocourage
As babies in the womb self-pleasuring is something that happens on an ongoing basis. It's pretty clear that pleasure is inherently part of the human experience when you're born into a world that has got layers of sexual guilt and sexual shame around it. The moment a young person touches. Their genitals. Makes their parents feel really uncomfortable and they normally get a smack on the hand or ask not to do it and then we just repeat the pattern of creating awkwardness around one of the most natural things that we have which is which is Self-pleasuring. So I Think the first thing we need to talk about is recognizing that self-pleasuring.
04:08.35
Matt Dahse
We felt.
04:16.30
calltocourage
Is just that it's coming into greater alignment with your own body and your own pleasure and letting go of any of the guilt and shame that we've been conditioned with with regards to exactly what this act is so I know the answer but I'm going to ask you any. Any indication from your parents or conversations around masturbation or or self-pleasure when you were growing up Matt.
04:35.85
Matt Dahse
You know it's amazing How we're just not taught that we're not taught it I I learned about it on the ride home from school. There was a kid in the carpool talking about it and then I went home and tried it and it worked and like that was it and then I had an awkward conversation with.
04:49.61
calltocourage
Ah, ah.
04:54.98
Matt Dahse
My dad after I had fallen asleep watching a porn so they had come home from like being out and here's me laying on the couch. Ah with ah a porn playing and I'm snoring on the couch and so the next day my dad and I had the had the conversation and yeah, we're not taught.
05:01.28
calltocourage
Um, ah.
05:13.66
Matt Dahse
About this stuff and as a result I felt ashamed I kept it in the shadows and it stayed in the shadows really until my current partnership.
05:18.46
calltocourage
Ah.
05:22.80
calltocourage
So I Think the the place to to move with this is like what is the purpose of a healthy self-pleasuring practice and where do we give our power away in using self-pleasure while engaging. First of all by feeling guilty or ashamed of the practice upfront Secondly using pornography to help us get off or to live a fantasy either past or future-based fantasy in these moments of self-pleasure and why that is not necessarily aligned. To the the actual practice of being self-pleasured and I think the word there is self for many of us if we are engaging in masturbation while we are watching Pornography. Or running a fantasy of our past levels that we've been with or some fantasy of somebody that we still want to be with when we do that We're actually outsourcing our pleasure to the fantasy or the pornography that we're watching and many of us don't know this like we don't I didn't work I didn't know that this was how it worked but essentially. Most of us are completely unable to be self-activated when it comes to pleasure. So What that means is when I want to get aroused and I want to have an ejaculation or an orgasm. It's either up to the fantasy that I run in my head. It's up to the pornography that I choose to watch.
06:47.99
calltocourage
Or it's up to the lover that I connect with it's their responsibility for me to get aroused and get turned on so that I can go through this dance and that's actually it's not really an act of self-resp responsibility if you're outsourcing your pleasure to any one of those um fantasies pornography or your or your past lovers and so much like we spoke about. In the episode before this with regards to authenticity. You're not authentically yourself if you don't arrive at your sexual connections with a healthy self-pleasuring practice knowing that you can get yourself turned on without it being the responsibility of your partner or the porn that you're watching so that's that's one of the reasons. The second reason I think a healthy self pleasureuring practice is so important is many men want to have deeply transformational meaningful lovemaking sessions that I think this is true for me I would like most of my lovemaking sessions to have been longer in the past. And in order to the best analogy we have for this is this sprint and marathon analogy we want to run a marathon in the bedroom we'd love to last half an hour an hour two hours in a lovemaking session but the practice or the training that we're doing is really doing the sprints because most of us have a love make ah um, self. But. Pleaasuring practice or a masturbation practice that looks like a very quick practice that lost 2 to 3 minutes with the goal of ejaculation being the end of it and then we hope that when we go into lovemaking that it's somehow going to last longer but we don't spend any time practicing this stuff and so recognizing that.
08:23.37
calltocourage
You can cultivate understanding and rolling with your sexual energy through a healthy self-pleasure in practice is the way to improve your lovemaking so that you can last longer when you come to your lovemaking practice with your partner have you solved any of those challenges have you noticed that in your. And your lovemaking practice is met.
08:44.52
Matt Dahse
Um, well I I definitely have been outsourcing my pleasure around around fantasy I've been doing a really good job in the past couple of years of eliminating porn and yeah, one of the things as you're talking this shit comes up for me is. If I don't have porn in front of me and I have eliminated the ability of of recalling past love affairs or fantasies for the future. What am I thinking of what's what's in my head at that moment. What am I supposed to do.
09:17.85
calltocourage
So there's 2 things here. That's a great question I love it. Um, we don't know this stuff. We're basically going through life as you said finding whatever we can to get turned on but really the act of self-pleasuring is an act of self-love. And in the context of partnership when you're looking to cultivate partnership the frame of this mini-series is cultivating partnership really the recognition is that your soul mate is the 1 person that you're going to be with for your entire life and for all of us that's ourselves. And so to cultivate a deep love with ourselves first is the only way to be able to come into full alignment and to show up fully for our partnerships and so recognizing the physical act of self-pleasuring as an act of self-love is really the starting point for this and so. I want to give you a practical example of what this could look like and then I'm going to touch on something called sex magic as a way to be able to use these moments and conscious awareness to use pleasure to link to things that you're calling into your life. But really the exercise for self pleasure. Is to let go of any of what your current masturbation or self-pleasuring practice looks like and so what I mean by that is that many of us have a very specific thing that we do. We know it feels good. We know how to drive our bodies in a way that gets us to the goal that we want.
10:47.74
calltocourage
But very often that's being driven by our minds and not listening to our bodies and so the invitation and the way to practice a healthy self-pleasuring practice is to give yourself 20 minutes to give yourself the opportunity to explore your body through touch through.
11:06.43
Matt Dahse
Are.
11:07.43
calltocourage
Feeling through awareness and listening to what it is that your body wants that can include gentle touch on various parts of your body. It can include some genital touch. It can include some genital stimulation. It can include whatever feels pleasurable for your body. But not dictated to by your mind but more by listening to your body and recognizing what it is that your body wants so that you can feel the emotions in your body so that you can start to feel what makes you aroused and really recognize that it cultivate that in a practice that as I said it could include some genital touch. It could include ejaculation if that's part of it but really going through this process of recognizing that you're with yourself as you're moving through your body feeling What you're feeling touching your body in a way that feels good for you and for your Body. You're then not allowing your mind to run to fantasies or to pass lavers but to just genuinely be with yourself and in many ways it also becomes a meditation to notice what comes up in your mind at those moments as a way to recognize that you're genuinely just being with yourself. So.
12:13.82
Matt Dahse
Are.
12:15.77
calltocourage
I'm gonna share this myself ppleasuring practice with you now as to what this looks like mine is genuinely most often done after getting out the shower in the morning I'm putting coconut oil on my body to hardrate my body and I use that time looking at myself in the mirror and just. Giving myself a huge amount of love for my body for the fact that I'm alive for the fact that I'm healthy touching myself as I'm putting cream on I do move into some genital touch I am practicing um a journey of semen retention. So my self-pleasuring practice. Very often doesn't include ejaculation because I'm working on cultivating that marathon top um experience that I want in my lovemaking by genuinely moving through these experiences in my self-pleasuring practice. So that's Microsoft graging practice. Sometimes it's 10 minutes sometimes it's 20 minutes it depends on my time allocation. But in that time I'm I'm genuinely just being with myself and I'm not running any stories about anybody else. So does that make sense before I'm moving to the the self-pleasuring for sex magic stuff.
13:19.12
Matt Dahse
Yeah, yeah, and I Love how you touched on. Yeah and I Love how you touched on how it's almost like a meditation because you know you you find your mind start to wander to these fantasies and it's It's a moment to to bring yourself back to the present moment to focus on the sensations that you're feeling and just just be here as an observer. While you're you're running through that I Love that.
13:39.23
calltocourage
So that's it. It's it's the awareness that you have in that moment and cultivating that practice with yourself because when when you're able to be self-activated when you can love yourself enough to turn yourself on. It's no longer the responsibility of the pawn the fantasies or even your partner to have to turn you on you arrive at your lovemaking sessions and your match day if you want to call it that having trained and practiced yourself so that you can show up fully in in that engagement. So that's that's the first part of this and. It goes into a lot more depth I mean even the whole theory behind semen retention which I just briefed over there is something we're going to talk about more on this podcast for the sake of brevity I want to move to the second piece of self-pleasuring which is linked to something that you might have heard called sex magic. And for Matt and I this process of understanding how our thoughts and our focused attention show up in reality as manifestation Matt do you want to give a high level on that and then I can talk about how it's used in in sex magic.
14:48.98
Matt Dahse
Yeah, it's this idea that your thoughts become things that where you put your awareness in your life starts to show up in the reality around you. So if you're calling in opportunities around your business and you do the work to identify and and.
14:59.89
calltocourage
Ah.
15:07.20
Matt Dahse
Clear your baggage and and call in those things you'll you'll see that in your world through this magic practice called manifestation. That's what we're focused on here.
15:16.93
calltocourage
So exactly with that recognition that the focused attention that you hold for long periods of time manifests as your reality there is a powerful powerful place to recognize that when it comes to the creative life force. There's probably nothing more miraculous than the ability to use our own law force to create another human being our sexual energy the engagement in sex with our partner that results in the creation of another human being has got to be 1 of the most. It's nothing short of a miracle what happens in that process not even being a parent I just think it's completely magical to recognize that in that powerful portal that moment of creation. We have the ability to create another human being. As I started to understand just how strong that moment was that moment of pleasure that moment of release the sexual energy that moves through you in that moment through the lens that Matt shared now of recognizing if we're holding old fantasies. We're holding any guilt or we're watching porn in that moment. We're essentially using that most focused and most precious creative life force on something that most of us don't actually care about like I don't care for guilt most of us don't care for the porn that we're watching.
16:41.20
calltocourage
And for many of us the past relationships that we have. It's probably best left letting those go rather than rerunning old fantasies. The sacredness of this particular moment and this life force energy that we have can then be used to cultivate self-love through a Self-love practice.
16:53.25
Matt Dahse
Um.
17:00.39
calltocourage
But also to be able to hold intentions of things that we genuinely want to call into our life in those moments of going through self-pleasuring and so that can look like I will share this very openly my self ppleasuring practice at the moment I am embodying and feeling what it feels like. When the men's work that we're bringing into the world has got thousands of people resonating with our work and going out into the world that for me feels like the type of attention that I want to bring to my sacred moments when I'm with myself and when you move into lovemaking and you have the ability to be able to communicate this type of stuff with your partner. You can actually set the intentions of things that you and your partner want to call in together and hold those intentions in your lovemaking as a way to harness the sexual energy to speed up and really anchor in the process of manifestation. So that's that's really the the second piece of why a healthy self-pleasuring practice and. Conscious awareness of what you focus your attention on combined with this powerful creative love force and your sexual energy is absolute dynamite when you line it up with the things that you're wanting to call into your life. So Matt I know you're going to share how you've navigated actually practically installing this. In your relationship but I want to just tie one last bow on that and that is recognizing if you don't have a healthy self-pleasuring practice. You're outsourcing your pleasure to porn or to past fantasies or to your lovers or you're running old stories.
18:32.91
calltocourage
You're really leaking energy to things that you don't actually want to call into your life and so even when you're in partnership. It's really important to make sure that you maintain a healthy self-pleasuring practice. But that's not always easy because. There's a very good chance you could take this idea to your partner and she could catch you self-pleasuring and feel like you're maybe cheating on her or that she doesn't feel that she can meet you in some way. So Matt how do you see that you can bring this conversation into your relationship and frame it as. The gift that it is to your partnership.
19:07.24
Matt Dahse
Um, well first of all, it's essential It's essential that you have a conversation with your partner about your self pleasureure practice because the more that you hide it the the further you go in the the direction that you don't want to go so. Having a conversation with your partner is essential and you frame it by saying hey can we drop in and have a conversation around self-pleasure you're going to take it right out of the shadow and put it on the table and 1 of the things that comes up in this conversation is an articulation of the role. It plays. In yourself in your self-confidence and your ability to show up to lovemaking the way that you want to be as well as being able to support the partnership in a way that your sexual connection is healthy. Your communication is healthy and that there's alignments in.
19:55.53
calltocourage
Ah.
20:02.33
Matt Dahse
2 of you calling each other out and pulling each other to better healthier versions of each other and so I think the way that conversation goes is you you make it clear that self-pleasure is an important part of. Both this relationship and your individual practice and you ask for it to be um I don't want to say aloud Gareth. What's the word you ask that it be out in the open you ask that it be out of the shadow like. For example, when I'm when I'm going to go.
20:25.21
calltocourage
Um.
20:34.51
calltocourage
Exactly.
20:39.13
Matt Dahse
Have a moment to self- pleasureasure I Let a Toana know hey I'm going to go Self-pleasure. So I'd like some privacy or maybe there's an invite to come join me. Um, but there's there's that piece of it becomes part of the conversation. It's not.. It's not me going into the other room. Ah self-pleasuring and and being worried if she's going to come in and you know maybe be made fun of or whatever the the story that I might hold connected to the shame of masturbation from my youth clearing all that out so that we have a supportive place to have these conversations and to. For you to be able to go and and do your self pleasureure practice in a wholesome welcoming supportive environment essential.
21:26.57
calltocourage
It's exactly what you said there this needs to be positioned as a gift to the relationship. My self-pleasuring practice is a gift to myself and when I show up more fully I'm also showing up more fully in my relationship and once you can articulate that to your partner and it needs to be received.
21:29.91
Matt Dahse
Are.
21:43.40
calltocourage
You can get to a place where you can genuinely have it out in the open as Matt said and use it as ah as a tool to support yourself and to support your own lovemaking and the deepening of your own partnership. So yeah man, thank you for sharing that and I'm yeah grateful that you have this. Practice anchored and in your life and that you and Naana are using it.
22:01.43
Matt Dahse
And also one more piece on the tail end of that is the invite for her to express her practice and for you to better understand how she gets in touch with her own body and to encourage the safety and the support. And the environment necessary for that practice to also grow and flourish and be a healthy part of your relating dynamic. Exactly.
22:23.32
calltocourage
And to make space for her to do. It's such a good point. Thank you Nice one such a juicy topic. Um, we could spend a lot more time unpacking this and we will be doing that inside the care relating program.
22:37.55
calltocourage
Clear relating is a six week training container for men that starts on the thirteenth of March in 2023, you may be consuming this podcast after that. Um it's still going to be valuable for you to work through all 6 episodes of the clear relating miniseries go through all the various tools and techniques that we've. Taught you here in this ah in this series as a way to be able to support you through all 3 phases of a relationship many of us don't even realize that relationships go through phases and we just sort of fall from one relationship into the next without recognizing that.
23:04.19
Matt Dahse
Are.
23:13.10
calltocourage
If we don't do some of the decluttering and integrate some of the lessons from our past relationships that they are likely to repeat with different people but similar themes in our new relationships. So if you're interested in finding out more about our 6 ix-week training container this container happens to be for men only and um. We will supply some details to that in the show notes for this podcast for the rest. It's been an honor going on this journey with you I appreciate you taking the time to work through this and we would love to hear some of your thoughts on what you think about this podcast if you've been consuming. It. Please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts and drop in and and share what you learned from this podcast and if you think it would resonate with other people in your life please feel free to share it with them. I know we haven't dived very deeply into some of these topics and. There's lots of layers that are built on top of specifically some of the sexual stuff. Um, as we start to dive deeper into this. It really does feel so liberating to be able to get rid of some of these old stories and to be able to move freely in our partnerships without any of the guilt and shame that we have around around intimacy. So. Appreciate you listening to this Matt thank you for your input brother. It's been such a wicked journey being on this. Ah this path with you I know what we've shared in these 6 episodes is probably hundreds of hours of
24:36.50
calltocourage
Personal development retreats and unpacking and sharing books and knowledge and I appreciate what you've brought to this co-creation bro.
24:40.70
Matt Dahse
Man it's been a full trip I go back and listen to some of these episodes and I'm just like wow the the version of me from ten years ago would never say any of the shit out in the open and it feels great.
24:51.77
calltocourage
And I wish the version of me from ten years ago knew this stuff because some of the communication frameworks the radical honesty stuff self-pleasuring. It would have made a lot of my previous relationships flow a little bit easier had I had some of these tools.
25:07.39
Matt Dahse
Um, absolutely.
25:09.10
calltocourage
Thanks for checking out this miniseries. It's been a pleasure creating it for you and we'll see you soon much. Love.
