Author: Christiane
Northrup, M.D.
The Secret
Pleasures of Menopause is a groundbreaking book that is long overdue!
Christiane Northrup, M.D., delivers a breakthrough message that will help
millions and millions of perimenopausal and menopausal women just like you
understand that at menopause . . . life has just begun! It is the beginning of
a very exciting and fulfilling time, full of pleasure beyond your wildest
dreams!
Dr. Northrup
believes that it’s time for you to step forward and learn to enjoy the best
years of your life! Even though studies show that menopause doesn’t decrease
libido, ease of reaching orgasm, or sexual satisfaction, the majority of
menopausal women aren’t experiencing the pleasure and sexual satisfaction that
is their birthright. It is a long-held misconception that menopause signals
"the beginning of the end," and nothing could be further from the
truth.
In this fascinating
book, Dr. Northrup candidly guides you toward experiencing life after 50 as the
most pleasurable time of your life!
The recent post
presents an excerpt from the book – the chapter, dedicated to the topic of
discussion.
Experience
Unlimited Pleasure
We humans were born to experience unlimited pleasure and
joy. It’s our birthright. Pursuing pleasure and also allowing ourselves to
receive it on a regular basis are absolutely essential to creating and
maintaining vibrant physical and emotional health. That’s right—the pursuit of
good feelings is not an indulgence. It’s a life-affirming necessity! Pleasure
in all its many forms literally stokes our life force (our chi or prana) in the
way we’d stoke a fire by throwing another log onto it.
Think about the last time you really steeped yourself in
something pleasurable—when you took that positive feeling right into your bone
marrow. Maybe it was savoring a bite of gourmet chocolate, the smell of salt
air at the beach, or an exquisite back rub. Everyone has a distinct pleasure
profile, and you can count on your senses to let you know when you’ve dialed
into yours. Remember the intensity of your pleasure. (If you can’t remember
what it feels like to lose yourself in bliss, hang around a two-year-old for
five minutes.) When you’re lost in the joy of pleasure, you are, in that very
moment, renewing your cells, increasing your blood circulation, and creating
health on all levels—body, mind, and spirit. In fact, you’re probably getting a
healthful boost right now just imagining that wonderful experience all over
again!
Another way to understand how potent pleasure is as a
health enhancer is to imagine what happens when you aren’t feeling any of it.
Think about a time when you were totally burned out. You probably felt like you
were running on empty, right? Guess what? You were! It wasn’t just energy you
were lacking; it was vital life force. Compare them in this way: Energy is what
it takes to get through the day. Vital life force is what it takes to put
spring in your step as you get through the day. See the difference?
Because pleasure fuels your life force, you’re naturally
drawn to it by Divine design. Your body is actually programmed for joy! But
before I go any further, let me explain what pleasure is not. Pleasure isn’t
getting drunk or high and doing things that will embarrass you the next day;
and it doesn’t mean renouncing your family and job to go live in a spa or
escape to a desert island. Even though cutting loose once in a while can
provide you with a temporary high that relieves tension, getting high, drunk,
or going on a sugar binge won’t provide you with sustained pleasure—or vibrant
health. Most likely, you’ll end up feeling worse. Avoiding responsibility and
being physically, emotionally, or even financially reckless actually undermines
your ability to maintain positive feelings.
When I recommend the pursuit of pleasure, I’m talking about
learning how to recognize and value the things that bring you lasting joy, and
then bringing them into your life deliberately on a regular basis. Think of it
this way: Your body itself was conceived in orgasm—the most exquisite pleasure
humans are capable of experiencing. From that perspective, how could pleasure
not play a vital role in the optimal functioning of your body?
Why Pleasure and
Health Are Related
Just as any piece of machinery works better when it’s
properly lubricated, your organs (and the rest of your body) work better when
you’re thinking thoughts and feeling emotions that bring you pleasure or when
you’re pursuing enjoyable activities. That’s true in several ways.
First of all, experiencing pleasure improves blood flow.
Healthy blood flow is important because the bloodstream brings nutrients to all
of your body’s cells and carries away the cells’ waste products. It’s like
stocking the fridge and emptying the garbage at the same time.
All of this happens by virtue of a gas called nitric
oxide. When you’re experiencing pleasure or feeling calm, vibrant, and healthy,
nitric oxide is released in little puffs mostly from the lining of your blood
vessels. Because it’s a gas, it diffuses rapidly in all directions—right
through cell walls. It’s equivalent to e-mail blasts occurring almost instantly
all over your body. Not only does this result in increased circulation, but
nitric oxide also turns on the production of special chemicals in your body
called neurotransmitters. Neurotransmitters carry myriad messages between the
brain and nervous system, helping your body work and feel better.
One of the neurotransmitters that pleasure increases is
called beta-endorphin, which acts sort of like morphine—it dulls pain and
creates feelings of euphoria. This not only improves your mood, but it also
helps you deal more effectively with the stresses of life. Another
neurotransmitter that pleasure boosts is called prolactin (which is also known
as the hormone of bonding). Prolactin is released when you nurse a child, have
an orgasm, or even get together with good friends. It makes you feel bonded to
the person (or people) you’re interacting with at the time. Prolactin supports
loving feelings between mothers and their infants, women and their mates, and
even between friends.
Speaking of orgasm and sex, perhaps the most obvious
proof that our bodies were designed for pleasure is the existence of the
clitoris. This fleshy little budlike organ, which is connected to deeper
erectile tissue in the pelvis, sits right above the vaginal opening, partially
covered and protected by a hood of skin. Despite its small external size (it’s
no bigger than a pencil eraser), it contains 8,000 nerve endings that increase
sexual excitement and ultimately bring on orgasm.
Although some people mistakenly assume that women urinate
through this organ, thinking it does double duty like a man’s penis, this isn’t
the case. Instead, women urinate from a tiny hole located between the clitoris
and the vagina. The clitoris has nothing to do with urinating—or even with
conception or reproduction. It’s actually the only organ in the human body
whose sole purpose is pleasure. (Talk about being hardwired for good times!)
Every time you feel pleasure in your clitoral area,
you’re also flooding yourself in nitric oxide, which, as we’ve just seen,
radically improves the health of your whole body. We’ll talk much more about
the life-enhancing effects of nitric oxide in the next chapter, including how
you can increase the levels of this miraculous molecule in your body. But for
now, just know that this is yet another way that pleasure enhances your health
on many levels and in many ways!
If you’ve ever read my other books or heard me speak, you
know that I talk a lot about the fact that your body has wisdom to share with
you. If you listen to the language of your body through the various physical
symptoms you experience, you’ll be better able to understand your heart’s true
desire and create vibrant health both physically and emotionally.
Well, ladies, the truth is that our orgasms have wisdom
to share with us, too! Female orgasms are, in fact, a metaphor, illustrating
how pleasure works both in our bodies and in our lives.
Let me explain what I mean by that. To begin with, you
can’t experience orgasm when you’re tense and upset. And it’s not even enough
just to be relaxed. To climax, nothing less than total surrender to pleasure is
required. You must give yourself over fully to the sensation of pleasure, or
the bell doesn’t ring. It’s as simple as that!
This requires getting out of your head and into your
body. You can’t force yourself to have an orgasm by willing it with your mind,
but when the frontal lobes in the brain are turned off during sleep, it’s not
only possible, it’s also normal to reach climaxes while dreaming. This is proof
that your body knows how to receive such pleasure! You just have to learn to
allow those 8,000 clitoral nerve endings (and the other pleasure circuits in
the body that are connected to them) to do their job so that you can experience
as much pleasure as possible. There’s no ceiling on sensual delight. You can
even learn how to become multiorgasmic!
It’s the same way with cultivating joy in your life. If
you really desire the rejuvenating magic of pleasure, you have to open up to
it, trust it, and allow it to flood your being. The journey starts by simply
noticing and enjoying the sensation of a gentle breeze on your skin!
Because women often need time to become sexually aroused
and climax, some feel like there’s a flaw in the system or that the design
doesn’t work quite right. But exactly the opposite is true. What your body in
its infinite wisdom is trying to tell you is that it’s okay to take your time!
Your body was designed to take the slow route, not the fast-track shortcut. You
deserve all the love and attention that it takes for you to get there. In fact,
the key to experiencing more orgasmic pleasure is, ironically, learning to enjoy
every stroke and sensation along the way without even thinking about the “goal”
of orgasm. You reach your optimal peak of both pleasure and health not through
the quick fix, but through a long-term, sustained attention to cultivating
pleasure. This is as true in life as it is between the sheets.
Why We Push
Pleasure Away
But this isn’t the message we’ve been getting from
society, is it?
Unfortunately, most of us are used to thinking of
pleasure as a dessert we can eat only if we have the time, money, and room for
it, instead of as one of the major food groups. The majority of us don’t make
pursuing pleasure a priority in our lives because our pleasure-starved culture
talks us out of it. We say that we don’t have the time and that other things
are far more important. We’re made to feel guilty for even thinking about doing
something solely for our own pleasure. (Where do you think the expression
"guilty pleasure" came from?)
Our culture (or sometimes our family) definitely gives
people bonus points for pain and suffering. In fact, many individuals try to
outdo each other in this regard. ("That’s nothing," someone says
after listening to a hair-raising tale. "Listen to what happened to
me!") After all, we’re living in a society where one of the major mottos
is "No pain, no gain."
Society teaches the belief that there’s a lot of value in
blood, sweat, and tears; and suffering and playing the martyr are holy. That’s
half right. Hard work and effort can indeed be good for anyone. When you push
yourself to be all you can be, going past what you thought were your limits,
you benefit enormously. But suffering has never been a necessary part of the
equation. Making it a way of life or wearing it like a badge of honor does
nothing but attract more misery to you. And being a martyr never made anyone a
better person (except maybe Joan of Arc, and look what happened to her!)
The key is balance. Too much of anything isn’t good for
you, and that includes hard work and effort. When you work too hard, push
yourself too far, and allow yourself to become stressed over everything you
think you have to do rather than giving serious consideration to what your heart
is longing to do, you’re doing yourself a grave disservice. When this imbalance
continues long enough, the results are often disastrous to your well-being.
The effect of denying yourself pleasure or pushing it
away is sort of like what happens when you hold your breath. At first it feels
uncomfortable, and then it gets downright unpleasant as your body screams for
what it needs. You can easily imagine what would happen if you denied your body
air. But what you might not realize is that by denying yourself pleasure,
you’re doing something that is similarly damaging.
Damage Report
Here’s how the damage happens: When you lead a stressful
lifestyle and don’t concentrate on bringing pleasure into your life on a
regular basis, your body makes stress hormones that restrict blood flow and
your nitric oxide levels plummet. As a result, so do your levels of the
neurotransmitter beta-endorphin (that’s the one that’s like morphine). You’re
likely to feel sad, depressed, and maybe even edgy or angry. You get irritated
easily. And chances are, you reach for something to make you feel better.
Often what you reach for is a quick ecstasy fix through
sugary junk food, alcohol, coffee, cigarettes, or drugs. You might even tell
yourself that because of how hard you’re working or how much stress you’re
under, you deserve this little treat. And because you really do feel better
momentarily after you eat the doughnut or drink the wine, you convince yourself
that it really does help. But what’s really happening when you indulge in
overeating, smoking, drinking to get drunk, or taking drugs to get high (or
even such practices as sadomasochistic sex) is that you’re numbing yourself out
so that you don’t have to feel any of your unpleasant, or even downright
painful, feelings. And the more you turn to those quick fixes, the more numb
you become over time.
That kind of "help" backfires in the long run
because your body gets used to your mood-altering substances of choice. And
then you need more in order to achieve the same effect. It becomes a vicious
cycle—not the best route to optimal health! In fact, that’s how addiction and
disease get started. Pursuing pleasure and allowing yourself to receive it in
your day-to-day life, on the other hand, produces significantly better and more
long-lasting results.
Saying Yes to
Pleasure
So how do you invite joy and pleasure into your everyday
life? By bathing your brain and body in a constant supply of nitric oxide! And
there are many ways to do this that don’t involve drugs, alcohol, or sugar.
These include anything that gives you sustainable pleasure and creates vibrant
health in your body. In addition to following your bliss, the list includes
exercise, meditation, and orgasm. (At the moment of orgasm, there’s a blast of
life-giving nitric oxide—which also bumps up levels of all the other feel-good
neurotransmitters.)
Regularly engaging in any or all of these activities
keeps your nitric oxide levels high. But the trick is the word regular. It’s
like putting money in your retirement account: If you only make a deposit once
in a while, it won’t really do much for you, but if you’re disciplined enough
to make annual contributions, you’ll be surprised and pleased by how much your
money has grown! So that’s the good news: Pleasure (including sex and
specifically orgasm) isn’t just a good time. It’s part of the way your body
resets its electromagnetic grid to maintain vibrant health and well-being.
