Sommer Seitz: 00:02

Hi, welcome to Breaking Free Podcast, a body, mind, spirit approach to mental health. Today, I have a special guest, Naomi Slater here. Welcome.

Naomi Slater: 00:10

Thank you so much, Summer. It's a pleasure to be here.

Sommer Seitz: 00:14

Naomi is a beautiful intimacy and relationship coach who I personally sought to do some work this last year, last summer into the fall. And how long was our course together, Naomi? Was it nine weeks?

Naomi Slater: 00:26

It was three months, twelve weeks.

Sommer Seitz: 00:28

Twelve weeks. Oh wow, wow. It was a huge commitment of like self and time, yet highly, highly recommend that journey to anyone. We'll talk more about that here, but I'll tell you a little bit why I sought Naomi and then I'll let her tell some more about herself. I'd love to do that, like just for the podcast.

Sommer Seitz: 00:48

Breaking Free Podcast, for those of you who've following it, has been like a personal journey of personal healing by a therapist, and I have been gone for a while. And this is kind of me relaunching a new era of this podcast. Where Breaking Free Podcast has been has been this journey of like healing trauma. I'm a trauma specialist and doing my own work. But you know what is beautiful as on the other side of doom, our work is reinstating.

Sommer Seitz: 01:12

It's like instead of this, what are we going to replace it with, right? And you know, and that's really how the mind works, right? We need to give it, when we leave an open space, you know, it just goes back to the old pattern. So we release something and we replace it with, you know, the higher frequency vibration that the new practice, right? The new pattern.

Sommer Seitz: 01:31

And so I was looking for after I did a ton of, let's be honest, like spiritual religious trauma work with myself. I did a lot of work around homosexuality and the trauma elements. Like I kind of took a break and all honestly that time I was just doing a lot of personal work. I do the work that I teach, and then I was like what do I want to be instead? Wear my movie.

Sommer Seitz: 01:53

And I really was like, I really would love to have a healthy relationship with pleasure in my life. I feel like I had kind of a taboo relationship with pleasure in in some of my upbringing and growth. Like, pleasure was something to maybe be feared or misunderstood, that pleasure or sexuality and divinity weren't one. Right? Like, sometimes spirituality and sexuality are, like, divided in people's minds, and they have a history of being divided in religion actually, right?

Sommer Seitz: 02:22

And so in many religions. And so I was like, No, I really believe that sexuality and spirituality are one. They're meant to come together in this beautiful marriage or relationship of oneness. And so that's what led me to you. Honestly, Naomi, it's a true story, you don't know this, but I had done a deep clearing meditation.

Sommer Seitz: 02:40

I also meditate and I just felt, Go to your Instagram! And so I typed in, I can't remember what I typed in, but something around human sexuality and like, you popped up. I had never seen you on Instagram before. And I listened to you for a minute and it was like, she's your teacher. So I really felt guided to you.

Sommer Seitz: 03:02

I looked at a few other people, and it just kept coming back to you. And I just felt like, no. And I love that when the student's ready, the teacher shows up. That happens in my life so often. And because I was open and I was willing and I was ready.

Sommer Seitz: 03:16

And I think that's also part of this journey. So I'm just marrying that to other people. If you're open and you're willing and you're ready and you ask God, universe, whatever you believe in to bring you the teacher, like, it will show up for you. Right? We're here to evolve and grow.

Sommer Seitz: 03:28

And so Naomi showed up. I signed up for the course, and the rest was history. I love working with her. We will talk about some of the results of that journey here, but thank you for being here. Thank you for doing what you do so I could heal and I could return to pleasure.

Sommer Seitz: 03:44

I really appreciate that.

Naomi Slater: 03:46

Well, is my passion to do this work and I'm so happy that you joined the course and I'm so grateful to be having this conversation with you. Yeah.

Sommer Seitz: 03:56

Can you tell us a little bit about your journey background to do what you do?

Naomi Slater: 04:00

Yeah, I started out as a yoga teacher about twenty years ago. I traveled India pretty extensively. I was meditating a lot, doing lots of yoga, having some very deep spiritual experiences through those practices, and actually also being exposed to tantric ritual and tantric knowledge, not the sexual aspect, but Tantra is a very wide philosophy, which actually includes yoga. So I was learning to move my energy. And many years later I taught yoga for many years, eventually met my current husband.

Naomi Slater: 04:33

We've been now together for eighteen years, but after our second child, I lost my libido. It's not that I didn't love my partner. It's not that I wasn't attracted to him. It wasn't that at all. It was something internal, but was also a reflection of our relationship and the dynamics in the relationship that we also needed to work on.

Naomi Slater: 04:54

But I had completely lost my libido and my desire for sex. And we were looking for answers and we found Tantra. And I started doing work with the Yoni egg, which is a pure nephrite jade stone. It comes from the ancient Chinese Dao philosophy. And it's an incredible tool to really just reconnect you with your own energy and teach you essentially that your desire, your passion, your energy is yours.

Naomi Slater: 05:29

It's not your partner's responsibility to turn you on and move your energy, but rather it's your responsibility to know your body, to know your energy and to actually be responsible for cultivating it and activating it and storing it and releasing any trauma that needs to be released and working through emotions. All of that is part of what makes us activated and awakened sexual beings. So that was a big part of what I learned through this process. And then of course, navigating the relationship, emotions, new ways of making love, And of course how to activate our energy in different ways and how to maintain the passion and understanding polarity. So a lot different things went into that.

Naomi Slater: 06:17

Of course boundaries, which I know we're going to talk about also really has a profound effect on sexual energy. So it was through this journey that I experienced, which is essentially what brought me to doing this work. Because once I found myself on the other end of this journey, I had healed so many deep parts of myself that I hadn't even realized were broken, you know, and my relationship healed in so many ways and we became way more authentic and the sex became so much more, I mean, wasn't routine anymore. We were exploring. Intimate.

Naomi Slater: 06:57

There was more intimacy, there was more emotion. It just very different from what we had been doing before. We were exploring more desires, talking about things more openly. So yeah, I ended up deciding to dedicate myself to this work. I have an academic background in psychology and conflict management and resolution, but really what brought me to this path was my own personal journey of healing.

Sommer Seitz: 07:26

It's always the best way to come, isn't it? I think the heart knows and me as well. I think sometimes I venture off, but the heart's like, actually this is where we're headed. I felt that in your journey, and what I love about working with Naomi is the authentic story that she weaves, you know, I think as many know, I believe in narrative. Think narrative is an important way we heal to tell our stories.

Sommer Seitz: 07:48

I think we learn from other people telling their stories, and it intersects with our stories, and it creates a sense of safety like I'm not alone. There's a safe community of, in this case, women, our group is all women, working together to have a safe place, which also had skills, you know? So I think it's the combination of a safe place with helpful information and skills to kind of help us rise and keep these intentions that we all together. It was a really eclectic group. Only two of us were married with long term partners, myself and one other woman, and a lot of other women were single.

Sommer Seitz: 08:26

I thought that was interesting, right? Because I had originally like, oh, oh this is going to be a bunch of people that are in a partnership and they're wanting to, you know, tantra I've always thought was like for couples, I want it in the sound of whoever's listening, tantra is for women that are single, you know, however old. Understanding how your body works and your sensuality works is like this lost art to women that used to be taught and became so taboo in many cultures, right, that we stopped understanding our own sexuality, we stopped having access to it, we became ashamed of it even, and didn't know how our own bodies worked. And we have a deep history, and Naomi goes through some of that history in the course, that history of sexuality, for those of you that are wanting to understand more of like, how did we come to this place of woundedness? But we're gonna kind of dive into parts a bit, because it's obviously twelve weeks.

Sommer Seitz: 09:28

So it's a long course. I was looking at what really spoke to me for the people in The Sound of Our Voice that have no idea what is Tantra. Could you explain a little bit more what from your perspective is Tantra and why is that such a beautiful, because I was actually particularly drawn to Tantra for the skinning work. Yeah,

Naomi Slater: 09:50

if I could summarize Tantra in a nutshell, a number of things. Tantra really asks of us to develop deep, deep presence and what that deep, deep presence essentially creates is noticing all of the small sensations, all of the small noises. It's really kind of a form of meditation. What your body feels internally, the flow of energy, all of these things you can only really tap into deeply if you're present. So that's the first main thing that Tantra really wants to teach us.

Naomi Slater: 10:31

Tantra is really a form of meditation. You can't have Tantra without meditation. So it's creating this presence and you create that presence through sound, through breath, through movement and through really tapping into what is now, what is happening now, not thinking about what's, you know, what this person said to me or the meeting that I have to have later on in the day or this checklist that I have in my mind. No, it's about really, really developing deep, deep presence. And that of course has a profound effect on how we are sexual beings, how we are when we make love.

Naomi Slater: 11:12

So that's one aspect. The other aspect that I really love about Tantra is that it doesn't negate any aspect of what it is to be human. So we oftentimes find that in spiritual paths, there's this kind of negativity surrounding negative emotion or different ways of behaving or reactions. So in Tantra, everything is seen as divine, including the ugly, the beautiful, of course, the bad. Everything is essentially a reflection of divinity and nothing is to be negated.

Naomi Slater: 11:54

No part of the human experience is to be negated. And with that comes the processing of some very, very deep emotions, which the majority of people oftentimes don't see as legitimate. So oftentimes people try to avoid anger, sadness, grief, rage. These are all things that people try to avoid. And these are natural human emotions, you know, that we're meant to feel.

Naomi Slater: 12:25

And if you negate those emotions, they kind of get stuck and they prevent the flow of energy in the body. But not only that, if you're not experiencing anger, rage, pain, grief, you're also not going to experience the full capacity of your joy, of your happiness, of your laughter, of your, you know, peacefulness. So you have to be able to experience all of it if you want to experience life fully. That is a big part

Sommer Seitz: 12:59

of what Tantra I'm very right? Like the ability to experience this is the ability to experience this. Like shadow and light work hand in hand with each other to make beauty together, right?

Naomi Slater: 13:09

Exactly.

Sommer Seitz: 13:11

I think what you're describing, a lot people have heard this as like spiritual or emotional bypassing, and I think this is really common in society and religious traditions, like the idea that we need to come and be happy all the time. If you're a spiritual person, you would be happy and grateful all the time, right? You wouldn't have these deeper emotions. Or only people that are truly mentally experience these types of emotions. That's another thing you see, truly.

Sommer Seitz: 13:38

You you have an anger problem, right, instead of you just are experiencing anger, and anger usually means that somebody has violated a boundary. Actually telling you that something needs to change in your life, right, that you need to create better boundaries. We're going be talking about that, so this is a really good intro to that from a mental health perspective. And yet, you know, I'll raise my own hand. I really struggle, Naomi, with my own anger.

Sommer Seitz: 14:03

That was kind of the last emotion to truly be accepted in my journey. Before You, I got to go to a very embodied seminar around homosexuality work, and I remember the practitioner being like, Okay, we're gonna bring our anger in. I was like, I'm not angry. Not angry. I was totally not in touch with it.

Sommer Seitz: 14:22

And she's like, Well, like, just, you know, just kind of feel into it. We had this woman that was in full pads and we could like, you know, and I'm telling you what, this just rage came up in me, and I'm like throwing words and talking about the violations, and not to this woman, but to myself, and I'm just physically, you know, having this Peter Living with, you know, I had to like bring the energy up and let it move through, and so I did. Was letting this come through me, and it was the biggest release because it was embodied releasing of all of it, and this is the kind of things that Naomi teaches and safely allows, right? And that's an important aspect, like I was in a container, I had safety around it, was able to safely embody my anger and move it through and have a different result. Because I think a lot of people, let's be real, we all have anger, but we have responses to anger in the negative in our lives, and so we learn to shut it down to earth it in our bodies.

Sommer Seitz: 15:15

It literally is earth in our womb space oftentimes for women. We'll talk a little bit about that coming up here. And it creates disease for us and lack of health for us to hurt our bodies.

Naomi Slater: 15:28

It also creates a lack of libido. Repressed anger will shut down your libido. It's so interesting when I work with women that have a lot of repressed anger and the truth is that pretty much all women have repressed anger. It's not like something that's uncommon.

Sommer Seitz: 15:45

It's transgender trauma at the very least, it's in your life. Yeah, yeah, if it's not in your life, for sure.

Naomi Slater: 15:50

And when that anger starts to come up for processing, and of course, as you mentioned, Summer, this is such an important piece is you have to allow for it. You have to be willing to allow for that anger to surface and then do it a safe environment, in an embodied way. But you have to be a willing participant in your process. So allowing for that anger to show up and to give expression to that anger. Once you do that, from my experience, the libido starts to awaken.

Naomi Slater: 16:20

Women start to feel turned on again. And it's very, can kind of feel a bit strange. Know, it's like they're both angry and then they feel turned on. And actually in experiments, they've done experiments with, I think it was rats. I was treating a very well known neurologist and his wife.

Naomi Slater: 16:39

And he told me of this experiment where they kept, they were doing this experiment on rats where they were giving them some sort of a charge to see what would happen with their levels of anger. And at a certain point that anger turned into sexual energy, into strong sexual energy.

Sommer Seitz: 17:03

Love and hate are kind of close to each other.

Naomi Slater: 17:05

So it

Sommer Seitz: 17:05

kind of makes sense that they're both.

Naomi Slater: 17:07

Yeah, they're like on the same continuum, anger and sexual energy. So yeah, anger is an important piece of awakening, sexual energy. It needs to be done in the right way. So of course we don't want anger turning into sexual violence. But anger needs to be processed in order for there to be healthy libido.

Sommer Seitz: 17:29

Is it okay for women to express their anger around what has happened to their lost sexuality?

Naomi Slater: 17:36

Yeah, yeah. I know that for me expressing my anger was a big part of me reclaiming my libido. There was grief there, there was anger. Some of that anger was definitely projected outwardly. But some of that anger, when I started to do the deeper levels of this work, I realized that on many levels I was actually angry with myself for not setting up boundaries.

Naomi Slater: 18:05

So this is taking us now into the boundaries talk.

Sommer Seitz: 18:07

Probably where we are. Yeah, I think that's, then we'll talk about what inhibits the boundaries as well. It's great because I think the second piece will talk about tools. Right? We're kinda like, do we how do we get here in the second piece?

Sommer Seitz: 18:19

We'll make this two podcasts today, but I think that it's it's and at least for me, I just wanna share, you know, that anger is a second emotion if you look at it in terms of mental health. It's like the tip of an iceberg, right? So underneath it is these much more vulnerable, more repressed emotions in our subconscious, things like grief, you brought that out, shame, sadness. And so when I would work with people in my office around anger, I would always be like, Can you show me what's underneath the anger? And I think a little bit that was a rookie mistake early on and not learning that we kind of need to explore this anger just in its rawness, and it'll take us where it's going, right, to the grief of others underneath Because I think if you say, No, no, no, you're not really angry.

Sommer Seitz: 19:02

You're just sad. They're like, No, but I'm actually angry.

Naomi Slater: 19:04

Right? Yeah.

Sommer Seitz: 19:06

And there is this need to release that tip of the iceberg to really get underneath it. So I have learned to be present with the anger and not to bypass it both within myself and my clients because I didn't realize that was also my programming. No, I'm a lot of us are afraid of anger. Right? We have fear responses to anger.

Sommer Seitz: 19:27

Like, having somebody angry with you, depending on how much violence you've seen or your previous experiences with people that have been angry, it can be really difficult to hold space for anger for a lot of people. And like we said, we need to safely embody it. This is not about letting your partner scream and yell at you, Go ahead, or, you know, It hurts you. They got to get their anger out. We're not promoting that anyway in this podcast.

Sommer Seitz: 19:51

We're saying somebody who's consented to hold space for you and they are safe. Yeah. To hear you and hold space for you, and you're not directing your anger necessarily at them. They're just a space. They're a holding person.

Sommer Seitz: 20:05

Like, they're a mirror, if you will. A safe mirror. And I think that can be a therapist, can be a friend sometimes. It can even be a partner. We'll talk about a model communication a little bit as a tool, but there's a consent involved, right?

Sommer Seitz: 20:18

We don't just start. My son and my husband have done it with each other, you know, and he is yelling, Hey, I'm actually angry at you. Okay, well I'm consenting to hear that, right? It's different to consent to hear something than have somebody just bombard our nervous

Naomi Slater: 20:34

system. Offload on you.

Sommer Seitz: 20:35

Yes, absolutely. So yeah, let's talk about boundaries. That was actually one of

Naomi Slater: 20:39

the

Sommer Seitz: 20:39

first classes that we had, and there were a lot of light bulbs that went on for me in realizing what I had seen, patterns with couples I have worked with over the years, my own journey. So but I'll let you share a little bit what you teach about boundaries that you have found so profound. Desire?

Naomi Slater: 20:59

So first of all, boundaries are a really important part of us maintaining our energy and our health. So I just kind of want to start with that. It's not just like creating a mental boundary in our mind that is in some way imaginary and perhaps disconnected from the body in the somatic experience. What I teach is actually quite different. What I teach is how do we actually go into the body somatically and learn from the body what our boundaries are somatically, not in the mind, because we have all sorts of crazy ideas around what we think we should and shouldn't do, or what we should and shouldn't say, or what this person will think of us if we do this or what this person will say if we do that.

Naomi Slater: 21:43

This is just the monkey mind. So that's not what this is.

Sommer Seitz: 21:46

That egoic chatter for sure.

Naomi Slater: 21:49

Yeah. This is about understanding what our body is telling us in relation to different scenarios. Maybe it's a sexual scenario, but it doesn't have to be. It can be a coworker who's doesn't asking us to do something and maybe they're a bit out of line or, you know, and then we have a response in our body which most people will ignore. And they don't even know how to tune into that response.

Naomi Slater: 22:18

It's not something, even if they have the response, they're not used to actually listening. So I know that for myself, was a process. I had to train myself to listen to my body's somatic responses to things. And

Sommer Seitz: 22:33

then

Naomi Slater: 22:33

when I actually learned to listen, I had to train myself to respond. So it's not enough to listen. I mean, that's the first stage, but then you actually have to respond to what your body is telling you. And that means you have to actually value what your body is telling you somatically. Right?

Naomi Slater: 22:51

You have to value the fact that, okay, like I'm feeling my heart is contracting or my stomach is churning or I'm shaking inside like I'm having some sort of a somatic response, which means that I need to set a boundary here. Whatever that boundary might be, depending on the circumstance, right? It might be that your boundary wasn't super violated, but violated enough for you to say, okay, this is a boundary for me. Or maybe your boundary was really violated and then the response is going to be much greater.

Sommer Seitz: 23:27

So let's talk about why, because from a trauma perspective, I find most people come in, like you said, most people are out of touch with their bodies. They're what I would call disembodied, right? They live somewhere near their bodies, not in them. And when I ask them to do like a basic body scan, I'm amazed at how people can't even sense their own bodies. I have to do things, Can you feel your hands?

Sommer Seitz: 23:50

Okay, can you feel your arm connected to your hands? And we have to do things to just get them into their bodies at all. Or sometimes I've had people be like, They can't even close their eyes to go into their body. I'm like, Can you just bring your awareness near your bodies? And that's because there's so much history of shutdown, right, overwhelm that has happened that they've learned to just numb this whole body out to not feel that, and that's actually an adaptive response, and that's not something to be upset at your body about.

Sommer Seitz: 24:20

It's a good thing. It actually helped you survive your situation. In my case, I've seen a lot of it related to people in systems where it's a family system or a religious system, they're like, There was something that was being violated and I couldn't leave. This was my life, you know, I love these people. This is my family.

Sommer Seitz: 24:37

This is my community. And I'm having a response that's saying, No, no, no, but I still have to stay here, I have to be here. That can happen from a very young And so I was amazed at how when I first started doing somatic work, in case I'm like everyone else, I was completely disembodied and yet so aware in my mind. Like my mind's like a sharp knife, you know, always has been very clear, but like hearing the wisdom of my body was difficult. There was a lot of crying.

Sommer Seitz: 25:10

There was a lot of shame. Like how did I just completely abandon myself? How did I choose things that truly go boundaries, like as a human being, I and my core just don't agree with that. And yet I had to, there's a lot of fawning and or pleasing behaviors that happen for people to stay in relationships with things that cause us to adaptively disembody ourselves.

Naomi Slater: 25:40

Yeah.

Sommer Seitz: 25:41

So it's very normal and natural for that to happen, and it's an adaptive response that like most people are having. So that's you. Yeah. Know that that's where most people start when they start somatic work is just starting to come into the body and just letting it be whatever it is. Just feel the heel, Just be with what is.

Naomi Slater: 26:00

Yeah, and I also just kind of want to add to that for people that are listening and thinking, you know, they might be in this fawning trying to please their partner position. That doesn't necessarily mean that the whole relationship needs to go up in smoke if that's your position. Both people can work on creating awareness around that and the relationship itself can really transform. It doesn't mean that if you're in this pattern that the relationship is over.

Sommer Seitz: 26:29

Yeah, people are in this pattern until they learn it. Yeah, both sides, right? He may be doing the same with and a lot of women's women are like, well men are all embodied and empowered, but that's actually not true. Men are very disembodied. In fact, people like Eckhart would say they're even more, there's like an extra layer of disembodiment because they've been taught not to connect to their feminine energy, their emotional world.

Sommer Seitz: 26:52

So it's like an extra layer for them to even be safe with feelings sometimes.

Naomi Slater: 26:55

Correct. Yeah, I would agree.

Sommer Seitz: 26:58

Yeah. So you help couples like navigate this journey and I know she does this coaching with couples as well, like private coaching for people who are looking for a coach. I highly recommend Naomi for that. But can I bring up a piece that you taught in Boundaries and Please Tell Us More that really hit for me hard with this course, and when I listened to it again today I was like, yep? So I grew up with a lot of purity culture, and so I believed that, you know, first of sexuality was off the table or something I needed to kind of guard against.

Sommer Seitz: 27:29

Pleasure was something that on some level felt dangerous and or at least taboo, right, until marriage, in my case. Not everyone has that. That's how it was for me. And so then coming into marriage, both of us having had that same perspective, you know, you can imagine two people who've not been allowed to experience their own pleasure, pleasure, learn their own bodies, have that self mastery at these developmental stages that are kind of normal and natural. I actually have a lot of memories of like 14 having a natural process and then somewhere shutting it down and truly numbing out, like, till, like, 18, 19.

Sommer Seitz: 28:07

So there's this period of time where it's just like I'm numb to all these things, and now I can look back and go, oh, Eric, this was a trauma response, right, because I was naturally exploring, and then I had to shut it down in order to please and to to to get along, right, with the system that I was in and to to follow the rules, if you will, right? And so, you know, coming into marriage, then I'm believing that I am responsible and also my partner is responsible, for making all my sexual dreams come true. And there's no information for either of us. And I know that's true for, like, I literally didn't know, and I'll share this in this voice, I was three years into marriage before I even knew I had a clitoris. So that should tell you how little I knew.

Sommer Seitz: 28:58

Nobody had ever mentioned to me that I had pleasure organs ever in my life. I had no classes understand what are my own pleasure organs in my body. I knew men had a big penis and they feel pleasure there, but I had no idea. I also had something of the same in my own body, and that I actually had more pleasure centers than any other man had. Believe it or not, I was actually designed for more pleasure.

Sommer Seitz: 29:21

That was blowing my mind when I learned these things before you think, you know, but I was not taught that I could seek this education because the sources that I would seek it would be pornography or unhealthy, right? So there was no place to seek it, and nowadays I think, I look at, you know, my daughter's 18. I mean, they just Google, like their access to information has changed, right? So I think that people can follow sex therapists now or watch videos, and I think it's a little like, so maybe this younger generation didn't have that trauma because the access to information has changed, but I was taught to not look it up even, right? Because that could be dangerous, and so I'm 47.

Sommer Seitz: 29:59

It's been a while, And I got married at, you know, 23, so I was pretty young. So you look at that journey, and so for me, this idea that I needed to be responsible for my partner getting what he needed sexually, And my partner has always been very fabulous this way, he was like, I want you to want me. I actually want you to want me, not just you're here to give me what I need. Like he never loved that ever in our entire marriage. I know that's not because I've sat with men like, No, need her to meet my needs so that I don't like look at pornography or you know do other things.

Sommer Seitz: 30:35

So there's all these dynamics that I've seen with couples over the years, but I feel like this is the setup, right? People not knowing how to manage their own pleasure, that they can respond to their own pleasure. And you mentioned that in relationship to boundaries. And so I just thought maybe you could teach us all for those that are in the sound of that understanding, like what were your learned boundaries through Tantra about sexual pleasure and who's responsible for that?

Naomi Slater: 30:59

Yeah, so first of all, I think it's important to know that as human beings, we are all responsible for satisfying our own sexual needs and desires. You never wanna dump that on someone else because what happens then is you come into a sexual encounter being all needy and clingy and the response is oftentimes that, whether it be that physically or an energetic kind of where you become less and less likely to really truly want connection with this other person. So what does that even mean? What does it mean to be able to satisfy your own sexual desires? So first of all, means developing a self love practice.

Naomi Slater: 31:44

And that looks different for men and women, but it means becoming familiar with your energy, with your body, with your emotions. First of all, on your own. In the privacy of your own bedroom with the door locked, having that curiosity and courage and openness and vulnerability, first of all, with yourself. Because if you don't have that with yourself, it's going to be really difficult to create that with another human being.

Sommer Seitz: 32:16

Seems like the process, Start to have the self knowledge and then be able to share with partners, right?

Naomi Slater: 32:21

Yeah, exactly. And once you know your body and your energy, first of all, you're way more in tune with what it is you want and don't want in any particular encounter. And that may change daily. It's not necessarily something that has to be consistent. It's learning to tap in and being like, this is really what I want right now.

Naomi Slater: 32:43

And actually this is really what I don't want. It's being able to say both of those things. And if you can really tap into what you want, what you really desire and what you don't want, that's when you can really awaken sexually. You know, that's when you can really learn to move your energy because if you're not being authentic with your sexuality, if you don't know what you like and what you don't like, you're not going to be able to open up, the energy isn't going to flow. So the boundaries piece is like I said, it's about saying what you want, what you don't want, creating consent around touch is something that I advocate for and that I teach of course, both in my course with women and of course when I work with couples.

Naomi Slater: 33:32

But when you create consent around touch, what you're essentially doing is allowing for yourself to fully relax and surrender into the act of lovemaking because you know that you're not going to be violated. You know that somebody isn't going to jump on you and do something that you really don't want to be done to you. You know that you've spoken about it, you've communicated, you know what this person really wants, or you've told your partner what you really want to receive and that this particular part you don't want to receive, you're not ready for that right now. Maybe you'll open up to it as the encounter progresses, maybe something will open up and then you'll be like, yes, I'm ready for that. Actually, I'd really like to receive that right now.

Naomi Slater: 34:16

But it's not, you know, a bag full of surprises necessarily. Not always a part

Sommer Seitz: 34:24

of that conversation. It's ongoing.

Naomi Slater: 34:26

It's ongoing. It's ongoing. And that also leads to, for some people that they're like, well that doesn't really sound sexy, talking about sex and like talking about what it is you want and don't want. Some people are like, doesn't that ruin the flow? And actually when you start to experiment with it, what you realize is that not only does it not ruin the flow, it actually opens you up to exploring things that you never were open to exploring, you know, because you've been given the legitimacy to talk and to say, and to dive into your body and be like, this is what I really want or this is what I wanna do to you.

Naomi Slater: 35:07

Will you let me do that to you? Can I take from your body what my body desires? So there are all of these dynamics that open up for people when they start to communicate and create consent around touch. Yeah, it creates vulnerability, which of course creates intimacy. And it creates this curiosity and deep sense of exploration and tapping into our internal boundaries is really, really important too.

Sommer Seitz: 35:34

What's wonderful about this too, is that vulnerability and authenticity also melt away shame. Yeah. And so for so many people who have been taught that, you know, we don't talk like that, you know, girls don't talk about things they want. Right. And you start to see, at least like I did, I was like that.

Sommer Seitz: 35:53

I was like, I don't want to talk about those things or just just do what you need to do. I'm here, right? You know, and You should just know. I shouldn't have to ask for want and read my mind and I hear that from women all the time. He should be able to read my mind but you know what?

Sommer Seitz: 36:06

He doesn't. And they so want the feedback. And what I also hear, and I know this from my own partner, is I mean they have their own anxiety, right? So as they know what you want and that you're able to express pleasure to them, Think that I love what that you did right there, can you do more? They're like, yes!

Sommer Seitz: 36:27

Our pleasure! They truly, I really feel that across the board with the masculine. Their pleasure is not complete if they don't believe that we are very satisfied and pleasured. Like it's really the young boy, and I'm going to say this, that just wants to have his own pleasure. A man really wants to have communication.

Sommer Seitz: 36:45

I would say my partner, and we've been married twenty four years this next month, he's like I don't even He's like actually when you're very well satisfied, he's like that's actually so much satisfaction for me. Sometimes I don't even care if I have an orgasm because there's just so much pleasure in that and knowing that I'm a good lover, right? And that's how a lot of, I'm sure you've heard your partner say the same thing. And of course with Tantra, they don't always release, right, when you have sex. There's a health in men not releasing all the time.

Sommer Seitz: 37:19

They actually learn how to have more self mastery. So that's something women, men will have to look into, but my husband studied some tonkra and he's just like, no, it's actually wonderful for my health to not have to have a release every single time. And I've learned to have this kind of internal release that's actually more powerful.

Naomi Slater: 37:35

And

Sommer Seitz: 37:36

so there's a lot of beautiful growth work that can happen and men and women can learn this beautiful sacred dance of sexuality together. So I'm grateful for you, I'm grateful for all the teachers out there that have brought these, Let's be real, these Eastern traditions to Western tradition, because our Western tradition, we come from a puritanical base in our country. And, you know, we don't have to look too far to see how unhealthy sexually that was. And so we are healing transgenerational trauma really across the board for most people in Western tradition around the healthiness of sexuality and spirituality as one. It's going to be an ongoing process for people and systems because it's kind of entrenched in our history.

Naomi Slater: 38:21

Yeah, so sexuality and divinity and spirituality are one. And what it requires, I mean, traditionally speaking, this knowledge was not mainstream in Eastern cultures, because of course you always run the risk of somebody taking advantage, which happens, it still happens. It happens actually quite a lot where people will present themselves as tantra teachers or sex coaches, and they have this kind of shadow underlying desire to fulfill their own sexual desires through doing this work, which is of course awful and shouldn't happen. But the truth is that it does. And that's why this knowledge was kept secret for so long.

Naomi Slater: 39:09

But when you are solid in your foundation and especially when you have a loving partner, you know, to do this work with. Again, you said you can do it on your own. Women can practice these practices on your own. But when talking about relating to another person, when you have a foundation of trust, then you can really begin to open up and awaken the kind of more subtle energies that we're looking to awaken when it comes to this type of lovemaking, which is not just wham bam, thank you ma'am, everybody has an orgasm and then you know, it's over. So in Tantra, you actually take the goal of orgasm out of the equation.

Naomi Slater: 39:56

We're not trying to reach orgasm because that would essentially take you out of presence. We talked about presence in the beginning. So if you come into the act of lovemaking, trying to get to the end, it's an absurd thing if you really think about it. Like making love is the one of the most pleasurable things, perhaps the most pleasurable thing that we can experience in a human body, and we're trying to get to the end of it, it makes no sense. So Tantra is teaching us no, stay present with these sensations, try and make them longer, try to pull them out, drag them out.

Naomi Slater: 40:31

There's no rush, you don't need to reach orgasm. The orgasm if it comes, it comes, but it's certainly not the point of all this. The point of all this is deep connection, spirituality. It's presence, it's feeling all of the sensations, it's creating this divine connection, whether it be with yourself if you're practicing alone or with your partner. So the divinity is a very important piece to this, the spiritual aspect of it.

Naomi Slater: 41:02

And there is quite a bit of spiritual bypassing around this when it comes to people claiming that they're making love to another person to teach them. The teacher is trying to teach the student by No.

Sommer Seitz: 41:17

Yeah, that's a big red flag, right? I mean, truth is that I always say to all of my clients and anyone I coach, I have different modalities, is that the heart is the guru. There is no guru other than the heart. So when anyone else and every religious tradition in the world on some level teaches that, so you may have teacher that's pointing you back to your own heart, your own inner wisdom, but ultimately if someone says that they're making choices for you instead of returning you to your own internal wisdom understanding, to me that's the biggest red flag. So just always be aware.

Sommer Seitz: 41:51

Like, you know what I mean? Like, it's an internal choice of what's best for me, and then there's a complete honoring of that choice. Right? Because you know what's best for your body, for your path, for your growth and development. In general, I've never found that that's not a true truth, you know, and so I think that's an important understanding, like what does your heart say?

Sommer Seitz: 42:09

What does your body say? What does your intuition say? And it may not match the intentions that somebody else has for you, And part of boundaries is being okay with their disappointment.

Naomi Slater: 42:21

Yes, fully agreed. Yeah, when we start to place boundaries in our lives, we cannot take control over other people's reactions to those boundaries. And we shouldn't be afraid of other people's reactions to those boundaries because that's no longer ours, that's someone else's. Of course, when you're in a relationship, you need to kind of mitigate that. And there's going to be, if you're changing the boundaries when you've been with somebody for twenty years, that's like a bit of an earthquake in the relationship.

Naomi Slater: 42:54

So that requires a lot of moving through.

Sommer Seitz: 42:58

A lot of empathic listening, we'll get to some of that here in Mago, right? To understand how it makes you feel.

Naomi Slater: 43:03

For sure. Yeah, there's empathic listening, there's a lot of communication around it. And yeah, there's a bit of an adjustment there. If you have this new boundary or if you've had no boundaries for your entire relationship and all of a sudden you're like, oh, okay, I actually do have some boundaries and I think I'll feel much safer and happier and satisfied if I start to communicate them and enforce them. Then the other person is like, hey, like who is this person?

Naomi Slater: 43:27

I've been with you for twenty years and now all of a sudden, I have to ask if I want to enter you, for example. Yeah, yeah, you do.

Sommer Seitz: 43:36

And you might even need to get me desires before you enter me. We learned that, you know, one thing that was really a powerful learning, and she talks about these different gates of entering the body, but it was interesting for me to understand, and again we won't have time in this podcast, like how my own womb space work, my own yoni works. Like, feel like your uterine space, right, your inner space. But to really understand that there's like series of openings, right? And to listen to that part of my body, you know, No, it's actually not open.

Sommer Seitz: 44:09

I'm not pleasured enough. I'm not turned on enough, right, to have intercourse yet and to realize that I'm actually harming that space to force, you know, something that it's not ready for and that that actually causes trauma. And I've seen that in a lot of somatic work I've done with women who've had many sexual encounters where they were just kind of like, here's my body, go ahead and take it. They do have a lot of trauma in that space that needs to be released, and so learning to be like, of course, I want to have intercourse with you, but like, I'm going to need to work with you on that so that I am actually pleasured. You know, don't think a lot of people know this, but if you study sex therapy, it takes a woman fifteen to twenty minutes to fully lubricate and have that space.

Sommer Seitz: 44:56

Again, for those people who didn't acknowledge, I didn't have to actually have that space fully ready. That's a lot of touch of like all types of the body. You taught us that we go from the heart to that space, so touching the breast, touching parts of the body, and then entering that space would be kind of the last spot. This is something I had to learn, and so I'm sharing that little tidbit for people. Like, you work from, you know, the extremities too, and so a lot of times the novice, you know, the inexperienced sexual partner will just be like, Alright, I'm going go right down there and I'm here, I'm naked, and you should just be turned on, and that's actually not how anybody's body works at all.

Sommer Seitz: 45:33

Yeah, and actually People are wrong. You see a movie where like men will enter super quickly actually Unpoint on. Right. Believe in movies will teach this, right? Sometimes that's people's only understanding of sexuality is what they've seen in the movies.

Naomi Slater: 45:46

Yeah.

Sommer Seitz: 45:47

R rated movies, if you will, but that's actually not how it works. It's something that's very it takes time, it takes communication, it takes safety, it takes opening, so that both bodies can meet each other in pleasure and then equally have pleasure. And so I think that a lot of times we just don't even know what's normal there.

Naomi Slater: 46:09

Yeah, and I think another important piece to that is understanding that women's bodies and men's bodies need different things. A woman's body awakens in a different way than a man's body. And that's getting into polarity and kind of how energetically we function and we are different. And it's important to understand that because sometimes men will approach a woman thinking that she wants what feels good to him, which is not the case and vice versa, you know. So it's really important to have that basic understanding of how men and women get turned on, which is it's different.

Naomi Slater: 46:55

It's not the same. Our bodies function in different ways. So that basic understanding, I mean, there's really a lack of education when it comes to how we function sexually as human beings. The majority of men don't know that they can separate between ejaculation and orgasm. They don't even realize that they have that biological capacity.

Naomi Slater: 47:16

And we oftentimes say that women, this knowledge of our bodies has been hidden from us, which is true. But I think that in many ways the same is for men. Yeah. People have that knowledge, that they don't

Sommer Seitz: 47:33

have a podcast on sexual trauma for men and I could feel it because I've been a therapist to these men over many years and I'm telling you

Naomi Slater: 47:41

there's of course performance anxiety and a lot of other stuff that's in there for men too. So we're talking about trauma on both sides, it's not just women, they're just different issues. They're different issues.

Sommer Seitz: 47:54

They're afraid to be rejected too, right? They do need feedback, So it's like if they try something and you say nothing, talking to a brick wall that you're supposed to open up like a flower, it doesn't work that way, right? And I think that, again, we could do podcasts for podcasts, but you have a beautiful course, you know, that teaches these things in sequential learning and it's embodied practices and breath work and somatic work throughout. So what I'd like to do, because we only have a few minutes left here, is to maybe share the one skill that I think will really help people to begin this journey, which is like the Imago communication. Just share a little bit about that.

Sommer Seitz: 48:39

And then as we finish up, just telling people where they can find more about your course so they can have this whole journey. But just to give them a breath of like, what are some of these tools that are available to them that exist? Imago communication, I've taken Imago therapy training, so it's also a very well known marital development, marital counseling theory, or it's a tool of marital counseling. So I actually had training in Imago therapy before I met you, and I would highly recommend it as well.

Naomi Slater: 49:06

Yeah, thank you. Yeah, so Imago has been a really incredible tool that I use for working with women and couples, of course, but I guess I would say that it's a bit different from the traditional Imago way in that we do a lot of somatic preparation before we actually go into the communication, which creates more calmness somatically in the body, connection with your partner, feeling into the body, first kind of connecting to what you're feeling both physically, emotionally. So there's a bit more that's been added to these.

Sommer Seitz: 49:38

It's an embodied communication, which the mind, we were just talking about that, the mind is both in and between. So your mind is never just your mind. Your mind is also connected to who you're talking to. Absolutely necessary.

Naomi Slater: 49:52

Yeah, And the Imago communication is based on sharing what we feel about something, about sharing our emotions. So a lot of times when couples argue or debate something, they're trying to prove to their partner that their version of the story is the right one and that their partner's version of the story is incorrect for whatever reason. So this is how most couples argue. And of course that goes nowhere because we all have different perspectives on things. Even if two people were in the same scenario experienced the same thing externally, their internal response will be different.

Naomi Slater: 50:32

And so when we try to fight about the details of what happened, we're not going to reach agreement. And then you have two frustrated people that just get further and further away from each other. When you learn to take responsibility for your emotions, when you learn to identify value and communicate your emotions, something different happens in the relationship. You feel seen, you feel heard. And of course, on the other end of that, you feel that you can actually empathize with what your partner is feeling, even if you don't feel the same way.

Naomi Slater: 51:06

This particular thing made them feel this. And something really beautiful happens when you start to learn to communicate in that way. You find yourself, if you're in a relationship, in a loving relationship, you find yourself wanting to try to better accommodate your partner's emotional needs. Even if you're not signing on a contract or deciding that that's what you're going to do, it kind of happens naturally from my experience. And of course our emotions when we begin to communicate and share them with our partner, that translates into our sexuality and our intimacy.

Naomi Slater: 51:47

So of course, intimacy is not just sexuality, it's much greater than that. And the beginning piece of that is the emotional bit. So once we connect in that way, once we start to share our emotions more deeply, that creates a flow of energy, it creates vulnerability, it creates connection. And that of course translates into sexuality. So that's kind of a bit of the imaginative

Sommer Seitz: 52:15

practice. I mean, I asked you to do the impossible, which is to explain what we can needed to have. A whole podcast could be done on Imago and maybe we'll do another one. We'll talk about that. But I think that one of the pieces I love out of Imago just as a tidbit for people is that, you you can't live enemies of someone that you can't see into, right?

Sommer Seitz: 52:36

If you don't have radical honesty with someone, you don't actually have intimacy. You're just kind of with this stranger. And I know I listened a little back to your actual course, it's beautiful about this today, and I thought that is so true, at least in my experience. It was sharing what I thought, and my partner would say the exact same thing, sharing those, I actually really want to try this with you, and that's not horrifying, you know what I mean? Like, or I really love this and I actually don't love this.

Sommer Seitz: 53:05

Is that okay? You know, Yeah, thanks for telling me. I didn't even know, right? And yet we feel like we can't share the honest truth, or you know when you do that, the way you're entering sexuality with me doesn't turn me on at all. But this would.

Sommer Seitz: 53:21

This is what it is, and now you kind of start to learn with each other what helps each other's pleasure along.

Naomi Slater: 53:31

And you also stop getting triggered by that. So a lot of people, because they don't communicate, if someone says something, they take it personally. Like you think I don't know how to turn you on. You think I don't know how to do this, you know. So you kind of move past that when you start to communicate more openly.

Naomi Slater: 53:48

In the beginning it can be triggering. It's not always roses, there's some thorns there and that's okay. It's a part of the process of opening up to sharing and being more authentic. Sometimes you hear something that you actually didn't really want to hear, but you find a way to incorporate it and be like, you know what, this is actually helpful. Even though it's hard for me to hear, I can see how this will lead to something that's better for both of us.

Sommer Seitz: 54:15

Starts to work out what's those resentments that are getting in the way of that intimacy happening. And so you and I both have, like, grown children. We've had multiple years of marriage, right? So we're coming from spaces of, you know, kind of many years with the same partner, you know, and and I think that that is something to be said. I I love mature women sharing their journeys with women who maybe have not had as much journey here, right?

Sommer Seitz: 54:44

Because I I try to now, I have an 18 year old daughter. We talk really openly about these topics and the healthiness of curiosity and exploration and trying to create a sex positive relationship, you know? So important. Yeah, because it's it's an important journey because I'm hoping to release her from the trauma, you know, thought forms that I had and help her know that that's her body and she gets to have boundaries and she gets to choose how she wants to experience sexuality. But but that is beautiful and it's not something to be feared necessarily, right?

Sommer Seitz: 55:21

There's going to be we're all human and divine, so there's going to be this like, there's going to be some falls along the way, right? It's not perfection, and I think that we need to understand that, right? That it's a journey, not a destination. I think Tantra is a beautiful teacher of that. So if people want to learn more about how to work with you, because I really think that would be, you know, if someone is like, hey, I'm a student and I'm ready and Naomi may be your teacher.

Sommer Seitz: 55:44

So where could they find you and what have you got going on?

Naomi Slater: 55:48

Yeah, so one place to find me is my website, which is NaomiSlater.com. There you can schedule a call with me, whether it be for private coaching with your partner. You can also join my next round of Awaken Your Desire, which is the course that you took summer. Yeah, next one is launching March 11.

Sommer Seitz: 56:11

Oh, so perfect. Because it's February. Love it.

Naomi Slater: 56:14

Yeah. So March 11, you can find that on my website or you can go to awakenyourdesire.com, which will take you straight to the landing page for the course. You can still find me on Instagram.

Sommer Seitz: 56:28

Yeah, yeah. I love her on Instagram. She's got some great stuff. Naomi has had lived experience and she's vulnerable, authentic, and real, and I think that's somebody that you want in this journey. That was important to me.

Sommer Seitz: 56:39

I think there's a lot of people acting as if they're just essentially ready all the time and this perfect bodied life, And I talk about this a lot, you know, with my assistant and people that I work with, like awesome, but that's not the life I live, you know? My dog's gonna come barking in, and I got kids, and they're gonna have their stuff, and you know, our lives, we're having to do pleasure and sensuality in real lives. And so I think we've been able to bring that up in groups, and Naomi's like, I get you, absolutely, you know. We've got to carve space into our very busy lives and our very real pressures, and I think Naomi's a wonderful coach for that real woman. He's wanting to have real pleasure in real life.

Sommer Seitz: 57:20

And so I just want to poke at that and say she's a great teacher and I'm particular at who I recommend, just so you know. I don't recommend anyone on this podcast.

Naomi Slater: 57:29

Thank you so much, Summer. I appreciate it. I hope we can

Sommer Seitz: 57:33

do more together and keep talking to our audience. But for now, I think we're concluded. Is there any last thoughts you'd like to share?

Naomi Slater: 57:40

For all you mamas listening, if you want to share this with your girls or your boys, the journey starts with you. It's, you know, sometimes I get people turning to me saying, me what to tell my kid. I'm like, well, if you go through it yourself, you'll know exactly what to say.

Sommer Seitz: 58:00

Can't teach what we haven't lived. Absolutely. Yeah. Thank you so much. That's important knowing.

Sommer Seitz: 58:05

Well, thanks for being on the podcast. I love talking with you and we'll talk to you all again soon.

Naomi Slater: 58:10

Yeah, thank you so much. I appreciate you.