If you've been trying to figure out how to want sex more and nothing is working — this episode is going to explain why. And it's probably not the answer you've heard before.

A lot of people struggling with low desire or low libido have already done the reading. They understand the concepts. Their body still hasn't gotten the memo. That's not a character flaw. It's the wrong sequence.

In this episode, I cover:

• Why desire and arousal are not the same thing — and why the order they happen in matters more than most people realize
• What responsive desire actually is, what the research says (including Rosemary Basson's work on how desire really works for most women), and why the model in most medical textbooks is wrong
• What your nervous system has to do with low desire — and why this is the piece that's almost always missing from mainstream advice
• How cultural conditioning and shame get wired into the body at a level that thinking simply can't reach
• Where your mind actually does help with desire — and what most people are doing with it instead that's actively working against them

If you've read the books, done the therapy, and you still feel stuck in your head, this one is for you.

Resources mentioned: Episode 5 (core desires and erotic emotions) | Free guide: Get Out of Your Head at laurajurgens.com/guide | Substack: laurajurgens.substack.com

Get my free guide: Get Out of Your Head: A Starter Guide to Releasing the Pressure, Shame, and "Shoulds" Around Intimacy at https://laurajurgens.com/guide

Find out more about my offerings and read the blog: https://laurajurgens.com/

Copyright notice: All content in this podcast is copyrighted and copying, scraping, data mining, or using the content to train AI is prohibited.

Most people carry sexual shame so quietly and for so long that it starts to feel like a character trait rather than something that was handed to them. It isn't. Every flavor of shame — about wanting too much, too little, taking too long, not taking long enough, about your body, your history, your desires, your "low libido" — came from somewhere specific. And that somewhere is not you.

In this episode, I go through the full inventory of sexual shame I see in my somatic intimacy coaching practice, explain exactly where it came from (the culture, not your character), and go deeper into why shame lives in the body and nervous system — not just the mind — and what that means for how you actually release it. This is about a somatic, body-based approach to understanding and releasing sexual shame — and it goes where most intimacy advice, and even therapy, doesn't.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• The most common sexual shames — about desire, low libido, body image, sexual anxiety, sexual confidence, and what it takes to orgasm — and why every single one makes complete sense given the culture we inherited
• Why shame is stored in the nervous system and body as implicit memory — and why thinking or talking your way out of it rarely works
• What shame actually does behaviorally — why it makes you hide, avoid, and stay quiet, which is the opposite of what heals it
• Why speaking your shame to someone who stays in full somatic connection with you is the most powerful antidote — and why that's so hard to find on your own
• What somatic healing of sexual shame actually looks like in practice — and how it differs from traditional therapy or mindset work
• My own shame story — the things I carried for years without knowing I was carrying them, and what shifted when I stopped trying to think my way through it

The culture handed you this shame. You don't have to keep carrying it — but getting free of it requires more than understanding it. This episode is where that starts.

Get my free guide: Get Out of Your Head: A Starter Guide to Releasing the Pressure, Shame, and "Shoulds" Around Intimacy at https://laurajurgens.com/guide

Find out more about my offerings and read the blog: https://laurajurgens.com/

Copyright notice: All content in this podcast is copyrighted and copying, scraping, data mining, or using the content to train AI is prohibited.

Have you ever followed the "right" advice and ended up further from yourself?

That's what this episode is about — and it's also why we're now Pleasure Uprising: Desire, Attachment, and the Sex You Actually Want. The evolution of this show mirrors what happens in my practice all the time: when you stop trying to fit yourself into the frame someone else handed you, something truer emerges.

In this episode:

• What the desire gap framing got right, what it missed, and what the shift reveals
• Why the disconnection most people feel from pleasure and desire is fundamentally a cultural problem, not just a personal one
• The full scope of what we're doing here: somatic and nervous-system-based work, secure attachment, and creating the most pleasurable relationships possible
• Why trusting your own experiment — over conventional wisdom — is the foundation of real desire and genuine connection

If you're curious about what's possible when you stop performing and start pursuing your own pleasure, desire, and genuine connection, you're in the right place.

Get my free guide: Get Out of Your Head: A Starter Guide to Releasing the Pressure, Shame, and "Shoulds" Around Intimacy at https://laurajurgens.com/guide

Find out more about my offerings and read the blog: https://laurajurgens.com/

Copyright notice: All content in this podcast is copyrighted and copying, scraping, data mining, or using the content to train AI is prohibited.