The way we show up for anything is the way we show up for everything. Which is why showing up for sex is as important as showing up in the boardroom because it reflects character, personality and attitude. Intimate communication expert Jamie Thompson teaches her clients the Wheel of Desire where there is the light and the shadow of the mind and the body. The shadows of the mind is where the fantasies reside, whether you’re a man or a woman. Your primal desires lives in the shadow of the body. Jamie explains in full with her own experiences and distinguishes the differences between man and woman.
I’m with my new friend, Jamie Thompson talking about the way we show up for sex. Our presence, our availability, what works and what doesn’t work. Jamie is a coach I met in Colorado, an amazing human being. I had so much fun with this interview talking about her experiences and how she works with her clients to get past those blocks, those places we’re not honest and how to be more and more real in our sex life. I’m excited to have Jamie Thompson on the show to talk about her work and her concepts. The topic of the show is the way we show up for sex, which I think is interesting to pretty much everyone because all of us want more sex, better sex, more sensational sex. Also, to know basically, how we’re viewed during sex, which I think is an interesting part. Welcome to the show, Jamie. I’m so glad to have you.
It’s so good to be here, Robert. Thank you for having me here.
Jamie and Arielle Brown, who most of you know are starting a six-week series called Six Vulnerable Conversations Between Two Women. I’m going to watch and be a voyeur for that one for sure. The recordings will be found here on Tuff Love as well. Here we are, the way we show for sex, say more about this basic concept. What does that mean to you?
I’m a firm believer that the way we show up for anything is the way that we show up for everything. I think that sex specifically is an area where a lot of our shadow can show up if we aren’t really present and aware. I think it’s an area where we can really dive into looking at some of the ways that we show up in life, how we can be more authentic and if we can be authentic in the bedroom, then we can be authentic in the board room. I really like to help people to dive in, in that specific area. As well in my own life, this is something where no matter what’s happening in life, I want to still show up authentically and that’s just really important to me. I feel like the bedroom is a really good place to start as well as the challenging place to start for this, but a very juicy, juicy place to go.
Before we go a little deeper into that, could you define shadow? What it means to you? That’s a term that some people know but not everyone knows. Things in your shadow, what is that?
Our shadow consists of the parts of ourselves that we might not want to look at. Our light would be the parts of our self that we really like, that we might share with the world freely because they’re the traits and the aspects of the self that we really like. Whereas the shadow is the parts of our self many times that contain both the greatest parts of ourselves and the parts that we don’t really want to look at. It contains both of those. The shadow can be a lot of times where our power is. Somebody once told us, “That’s too much,” or “You shouldn’t be like that.”We’ve now put this section of ourselves into what I call the shadow. In other words, it’s just something that we might not normally want to look at. All of the parts of our self are amazing when we can see them and bring them back into the light. Sexuality is an excellent place to do that and to start looking at some of these places that we might not normally look at for ourselves.
The way we show up for anything is the way that we show up for everything. Click To TweetThat’s a lot of basis of my work and a lot of things I see is we have such judgment about ourselves. We also swim in the society of disapproval that says, “This part is bad and this, you have to keep secret and these we have to withhold and a lot of the cancer of relationships has to do with letting those parts out and letting those parts be seen. Let’s just hypothetically, I’m sure in yourself, in your relationship or in a couple that you’re coaching, you noticed or you sensed or there’s a shadow in one person, what do you do to eke that out? What do you do to give them permission to show that? What’s your technique?
I’m going to go a different route with this. I have something that I call the Wheel of Desire. It essentially breaks into four places where our desires live. There’s the light of the mind and the body and then there’s the shadow of the mind and the body. I like to normalize for people that we all have shadows of the mind and the body, just like we all have light of the mind and the body within our erotic desire. I like to create almost like, let’s write down what our desires are that are in each of these areas and normalize what your desires are and actually create like, “My desires of the shadow and the body are I have a rape fantasy.” I had a couple that the woman had a rape fantasy and I know that’s a really sensitive subject for some people and something to be really, really careful and sensitive when moving into but there was a way in which she got to explore and express that with her partner feeling completely safe. He was like, “I don’t know how I could even do this,” was his initial thing because of all the societal programming like you mentioned.
With an area of sensitivity for both of them and as they got to explore that, she actually did some sexual healing and got to heal some past experiences that had happened with her. He got to know her so much more as far as what she actually wanted in the bedroom and that it was more in the world of being dominated and that he got to feel that. He got to feel something completely different in his own sexuality through exploring the shadows and really normalizing them. I think that’s the first most important thing with the shadow material is if it’s a desire that feels like, “I feel a little bit wrong about this with my partner,” or “I wouldn’t necessarily want to do this with my partner because they love them so much.” I hear people say that and then when they actually begin to explore it, it brings in so much more connection in a completely different realm.
Showing Up For Sex: The shadows of the mind, that actually would be where fantasies would fall in.
What’s the difference between the mind and the body? When you said rape fantasy my first thought was, “That’s a mind-generated fear or value judgment.”To the people who are here, hopefully, this will spark some concepts, how would you differentiate between light and shadow for the mind and the body? What’s the difference between the two?
The shadows of the mind, that actually would be where fantasies would fall in. The shadows of the mind would be the area of taboo. If you essentially draw across going up and down and you put light at the top, shadow at the bottom, and then the mind on the left and body on the right, then in the bottom left is where you would have the taboo. Then the bottom right is where you would have your primal desires. The difference between those are many times, like you said, taboo desires, they’re of the mind. It’s like, “What can your mind dream up?” Domination and submission, any kind of fantasies, any kind of bondage and role-play or even any kind of power play or role playing, those kinds of things are of the shadows of the mind.
Whereas the shadows of the body, are more like your primal desire. This is where sometimes I have couples, I’m thinking of one in particular, where the husband, this man had this fantasy. He’s like, “I just want to come in and I just want to do it. I want to skip all the foreplay. I just want to be able to feel like you’re hot and ready and then we can just dive in,” and that was his fantasy. We set up this scenario where she was that. She was in lingerie and it was like she was ready for him and he came in and it was primal in the way that it they just dove right in.
Primal a lot of times is just about like, “What does your body want right now outside of your mind? What is your body really wanting to have?”It’s much of the time when you shut the mind off and it’s like the caveman, the physical body experience. It’s very grounding. The gift of the primal area would be that it’s grounding. Whereas the gift of the taboo, the shadows of the mind area would be that it’s integrative. You get to integrate shame through going into your taboo desires, whereas you get to experience grounding for going into your primal desires.
How did you end up in this line of work? Did you grow up thinking, “I want to help people with their sex lives,” or what was your motivation to migrate to this kind of coaching?
For me, Robert, I have always felt like I had a very complicated sexuality. It was difficult. I felt it was hard for me to be happy. I felt I always wanted a lot of different things and I felt I had a lot of desire and I didn’t so much know how to talk about it. It always felt I was somewhat assertive in everyday life, but had challenge with being assertive in my sex life and with my desires. Through a lot of work in personal development along the way, I initially started out coaching people in dating and that was ten years ago. Along the way, through my work, I became much more embodied in my own sensuality and sexuality and realized how valuable communication is.
Now, I always say that I’m an erotic desire and intimate communication expert. Specifically, that’s where the world I really love to play in with singles or couples is learning how to really express what it is that we want in a way that can be heard and in a way that we are able to be seen for what we want. In a way that giving us what we want occurs as an opportunity for the other person. I think that’s another key with it. In my own journey, this dismantling what I thought was a very complicated sexuality has been really valuable in discovering what I wanted and being able to share it with people. That’s how I ended up here specifically in this realm of coaching versus other realms of coaching. Along the way, there are a lot of different stops along the way of coaching people with different things.
I know there are all different types of genders and different types of gender relationships, but in your experience, what is one thing that men do not tend to understand about women?
Their desire feels more linear and this is all generalizations because everyone has varying degrees of masculine and feminine energy within them. In general, it seems a lot of men have a desire and it’s like linear this is what I want and I know what I want and I want it and I want it frequently and I want it all the time and it might not change that much until it changes. Then it changes and I want something else. Women, it seems like in general, their desire exists more if you imagine a tangled Christmas lights were the desires are in the lights and the light bulbs are over here and they’re over there and they’re intermingled and they’re tangled up with these other desires.
The desires exist as a mass that’s more consistently changing and evolving all of the time. I’ll use myself as an example here, sometimes the moment after saying a desire, now it’s completely shifted. Sometimes, giving voice to something that I want or something that I don’t want now shifted. I have to actually stop in the middle of a conversation and then be like, “Actually, that’s just shifted,” and being really in tune with it as it’s constantly changing. In the bedroom, that can be challenging for men because sometimes men are like, “We’re doing this and this is what we want,” and then that can shift for a woman rather quickly into something a little bit different.
Showing Up For Sex: The desires exist as a mass that’s more consistently changing and evolving all of the time.
I know that is one of the largest learning experiences I had in my own life was just not to think so, “A, B, C, D” or if they shift, I think I took it on that it was, “Something’s wrong.” I think that was a big piece of my masculine pride was, “She always liked this in the past and am I not doing it right this time or is she bored of me,” and all the judgments that are attached to the change. I know speaking to women, that’s a big piece as they want the freedom to change, but they don’t feel safe enough to change. You’re with a couple, a linear masculine guy, a woman who likes change, how do you teach her to say, “This is what I want, this is how I want things to change.” What’s the communication technique to inform her man that she wants something different?
In the bedroom, it’s always really important I find to set up the communication you want to have in the bedroom before you go into the bedroom. It can feel a little jarring if in the bedrooms, suddenly you’re shouting orders when you’ve never done that before. It’s something where I feel like it’s a really valuable conversation to have beforehand and just set it up so that it’s as smooth as it can be transitioned into beginning to be more vocal about what you want in the bedroom. I’m going to start there because I think that’s equally as important as this beforehand setup conversation. A setup conversation might look like, “I love our sex life and I feel like it can go to the next level. I’m really curious about what it would be like if we experimented with being more vocal in our sex life and telling each other more frequently what we want more in the bedroom. Are you open to that? Will you go there with me? Do you want to play with that?” Bringing it up in some way like that. Bringing it up as an experiment. I always like to look at our sexuality as an experiment instead of a math problem. Like you said, it’s not A plus B equals C. It’s actually a constant experiment that’s changing. When that can be embraced, many times men start to also discover the different new aspects of their own sexuality as well.
Now, bringing that into the bedroom that’s where I feel like it’s really the thought and feeling that I want to embody and that I help people embody when they’re giving feedback in the bedroom is the embodiment of “yes.”That if I’m giving you a piece of feedback or asking you to a little bit lighter, “Can we actually just like stop and just look each other in the eyes for a moment?” Like bringing it up with the experience of, “yes,” I think is a really great frame to ask for things from in the bedroom because then it’s not militant or commanding, unless that’s what you’re setting up. Unless you’re having a role play where that’s what you’re doing but where I feel like that really helps really manage the ego of the other person. We have to accept that our egos come into the bedroom with us and they can be very sensitive and much of the time they can be very present until the ego learns to relax. One of the ways that we can help that ego part relax is by bringing, yes. “This is really great, but can we shift into another position right now?” Bringing a bit of sweetness and playfulness or flirtation into an adjustment so that the adjustment doesn’t become your partner is doing something wrong.
You and I are on the same page with that. I think those conversations, those communication pathways, the keywords, “How do you want me to adjust to you?”These are the questions that I’ve always really recommended couple’s find. Let’s shift a little bit again and the world is changing from my perspective very rapidly. With the Me Too, the Weinstein effect, things are changing between men and women and on some level, dramatically. I’ve talked to a lot of men who are scared for the first time on some level. They’re afraid to be masculine. They’re afraid to be aggressive, they’re afraid to trample or the ramifications of a miscue. In your coaching practice, what have you noticed and how do you help both men and women stay aligned in this changing time?
To be brief with it, one point that I like to bring with this as a woman is the reverse, what has happened to every day good men because of, as you said, the Weinstein effect and of course the Me Too Movement. While there’s so much validity to the Me Too Movement, it’s really amazing and we could talk about that. I want to talk about the shadow of that. I love to just talk about like what I see happening with men with their own masculinity and how it seems like many men are now afraid. I’ve seen this in working. I was just working with a couple in person the other day and she was like, “I want to feel your masculinity more.” Like, “What’s going on?”“I can’t feel you as a man showing up. I want to feel the energy of you.”
She was pushing. She wanted to feel him pushing against her. I had them stand up and I said, “I want her to come towards you,” because she’s losing attraction for him and wanted this from him and was asking for it. “I want her to come towards you and I want you to push her away. I want you to actually push her and use a little bit of force.”Getting him to the place where he could actually apply a little force against her was so challenging even though she was giving him permission and like begging and like saying, “Do it. Do it.” I was giving him permission as their facilitator. It was finding that place in him where he could express masculinity, it was buried. It was like he couldn’t access it. He stops the whole thing and he got upset and he said, “Isn’t this wrong? Isn’t this what I’m supposed to not be doing right now?”We were all in tears and we all just have this moment and it was this really beautiful moment of him, her, and me as the facilitator, giving him permission as a man again to step into that seat of masculinity and that seat of force and understanding that when it’s asked for, then it’s wanted and it’s juicy and it’s what she actually wanted.
Look at sexuality as an experiment instead of a math problem. Click To TweetWe played with this a little bit. We played with him in a safe container. Throwing her up against the wall in a way and her lighting up, her whole world lighting up and him being like, “With the Me Too Movement, I feel like apologetic around women. I’m like, “Yes, a lot of men have and it’s a natural progression of it and it’s a natural shadow that can come out of something like a feminist rising can bring about, where the masculine has to then balance and find, “Wait, how do I still show up as a man for my woman and still be respectful?” We were really working with that line of creating a respectful way of showing up. That’s one thing I find with my clients a lot is women wanting more of that some people might call old school masculine. It’s not new age, but it’s like bringing a new, modern attunement to the masculine is what a lot of women are craving right now. I’ve seen that coming through more and it’s been really exciting to see men balancing and finding a new equilibrium with the Me Too Movement.
I think a lot of men have taken awareness for granted or they’ve relied on their formulas or past experiences to guide them, but it really is attunement as you say, on a moment-to-moment basis to realize what’s the best way to be and interact. I love the image of throwing him, throwing her against the wall. That was like very sexy in itself because I was just like, “Ah.” I can’t imagine throwing Morgan against the wall, but I could imagine Morgan liking it on some level. It’s that balance between the two. How do people get in touch with you? What’s the best way to contact you and find out more?
One way to contact me is through my personal Facebook. I do live videos and that’s a great way to kind of keep up with me. My Facebook link is Facebook.com/MissJamieThompson. Then also my website is a great place to find me as well. That is JamieThompsonCoaching.com. I have a lot of things going on there. I have a course coming up, I’ll just mention here. I’ll be talking about it more with the Six Vulnerable Conversations with Arielle. I specifically have a course coming up that is an erotic activation course for couples where we actually go through the Wheel of Desire, which we touched on to explore each of the four sections of desire and see what your home base is as a couple, what you want to expand on, what’s missing and help create a more full and exciting erotic experience in your relationship.
For more information about the Six Vulnerable Conversations, you can go to TuffLove.Live/Six. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it and I look forward to hearing more of you from the Six Conversations, you and Arielle, I think are going to wax poetic and have some pretty intense insane conversations.
Yes, I’m looking forward to it.
That’s it. I will be back next week with a show just me and as I’ve been mentioning, if you’d like to be coached live on the show, please visit TuffLove.Live or email Summer, my associate, Summer@KandellConsulting.com. Thanks so much for listening. I appreciate it. Thanks to my regulars for showing up and being patient with us. Go forth. Have a great day. I love you. We’ll see you next week.
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About Jamie Thompson
Jamie Thompson is an Erotic & Intimate Communication Expert and founder of Relationship Flow State. She specializes in creating a safe space for conscious couples to have open communication while exploring a new edge of passion, depth, and erotic flow. Jamie combines study of the Quantum Field, communication techniques based in Neuroscience, and somatic movement reprogramming with 10 years of coaching experience to help clients harness their erotic intelligence. She also has an online program to help couples and individuals become fluent in the four ‘Erotic Desire Languages’. Mention this podcast to be considered for a complimentary strategy session and receive a discount code for upcoming programs. Email support@jamiethompsoncoaching.com for details. Follow Jamie on Facebook for more Exquisite Eroticism: www.facebook.com/missjamiethompson. Find out your ‘Erotic Desire Language’ on Jamie’s Website: www.jamiethompsoncoaching.com.
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