Blissexology – Reset your nervous system, restart your pleasure system

The Bliss Reset

Recharge your pleasure, recharge your life

I don’t know for sure how it’s been for everyone else, for the past two and a half years, but I suspect that we’ve all been deeply stressed. A pandemic and planetary trauma have affected all of us in some way. It’s been a war on our nervous systems.

It’s time for peace, pleasure and balance now. It’s time for a reset. Often, we don’t recognise the actual point on the timeline when pleasure disappears from our lives, as the experiences that replace it tend to be all-consuming; they are generally about trauma and survival.

As an intimacy coach supervisor and trainer you’d think I’d be the last person to lose libido, or have to deal with the stress of a dysregulated nervous system. However the past two years have shown me that, no matter what our logical specialities are, without the regulation of the body and nervous system you get stuck. You can’t think your way into changing things, there are physical practices required.

It’s not enough just to understand the work logically, it has to go deeper into the somatic practices to hold deep impact.

So many of us have been battling with our intimate lives, with work stress and world systems changing, our intimate relationships being put under heavy stressors.

Stressors don’t have to hold a negative connotation, in fact, some stressors can be the momentum to inspire great change, yet continual, ongoing crisis and survival mode is seriously detrimental to our health and, by default, our pleasure, connection, intimacy and happiness as human beings.

The problem with repetitive ongoing stress, is that the adrenaline in your system eventually oversteps its purpose of keeping you alive (in an immediate life-threatening situation) to keeping you from living life fully, as you become adrenally fatigued, run down and burnt out.

This often means sex, libido, conscious touch and intimacy can become a battlefield to get needs met, instead of a field of pleasure and connection possibilities.

A dysregulated nervous system eventually runs into total burnout, brain fog, crisis and catastrophic thinking, and often prevents you being able to practise gratitude, reframing and learning, hijacking the body’s resources for crisis, not balance.

This ability to polarise your nervous system for survival keeps you alive but, when overwhelmed, becomes so unbalanced it just doesn’t really work any more.

You start feeling less alive; Less of everything really. Exhausted. In dire need of better sleep, relaxation. Yet these are states of being in your body that your nervous system won’t allow, because it’s scared you’ll die if you relax. After all, adrenaline is sending the message that your very life is in danger!! It’s keeping you alive!  Until it isn’t any more.

To be able to allow our bodies and beings to be in states of gratitude and joy instead of just staying on high alert for danger, involves a reset and restart of the nervous system.

If our nervous system is running on high alert, we also don’t have access to the connection we would normally have with other human beings, whether that’s social or even sensual. This is because we disconnect from the nervous system that produces oxytocin (the connection chemical) that also enables social decision making.

The body that keeps you alive in danger, is the same body that prevents connection when it’s is running in unbalanced overdrive.

• This is also why I believe we really haven’t been getting along so well as humans lately.
• Play and pleasure for adults, often involves things that are not actually beneficial to us.

Many adults ‘relax and play’ by socialising and drinking, eating junk food, gambling and indulging in addictive behaviours, which are often adrenaline hiding itself in a different place, not really relaxing and resetting your nervous system.

Most of us as adults don’t use our bodies to play any more and even sex and Intimacy can be difficult in highly stressed environments.

It’s almost impossible to ‘think’ your way out of this imbalance, it needs a balance of practices that activate the parasympathetic nervous system. There are many practices that can do this: Yoga, laughter, singing, chanting, praying, community socialising and even gargling can activate vagal toning and balance in the parasympathetic nervous system.

Or you can play with pleasure.

You can reset and rebalance through the exploration of deep somatic pleasure.

Most of us don’t really know what’s possible in the body through pleasure, deep relaxation and bliss states, because we don’t have the technical knowledge on how to access these states. I have personally experienced a two-hour orgasm.

It’s pretty mind-blowing, was intensely spiritual with my husband and it isn’t something we have as a daily practice, but having the techniques to be able to play with pleasure is deeply healing.   

Nothing wrong with a quick physical release, it’s just limited in what it can do in the body.

Deep states of pleasure release the chemicals and hormones that can balance and regulate our nervous systems to be able to make changes in other areas of our lives, our decision making, our community life, our parenting, our careers. These aspects of ourselves are all deeply impacted positively by having a regulated and balanced nervous system.

We can use playful and relaxed pleasure to access the body’s own pharmacy to bring our lives into balance.  It feels like a weird idea until you experience it. There has to be a conscious decision to learn, because adrenaline will not release you easily from its clutches; it’s almost like an overprotective parent by this point! But you can choose differently.

You can choose to discover the pleasure and deep connection potential within your own body.

It’s not about sex per se, it’s about the pleasure systems in the body being in balance, producing the chemicals and specific relaxation in the nervous system that lead to a balanced and blissful existence!

There are a few paths that can do this, and Neo Tantra is known as the ‘lightning path’ as it directly ties in the entire life-generating system into the life-preserving system!

Most people are excited and curious about what is possible beyond basic sex, the levels of consciousness and deep connection and awareness that can arise and every journey is individual, the journey into bliss and intimacy.

Anne-Marie has appeared on 702, Radio Today, Power FM and Kaya FM talking about Conscious Sexuality and Neo Tantra. She has been a guest columnist for the Saturday Star, been featured in Woman & Home Magazine and has appeared on ETV’s ‘Great Expectations’ speaking on regaining libido after childbirth. Anne-Marie can be contacted via her website: https://www.intimacycoachinternational.com/