Hey lovers and warriors!
Welcome to Episode 11!
Be sure to check back every Wednesday (#humpday – how appropriate) for a new episode, and head over to iTunes to subscribe!
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WHAT YOU’LL LEARN
‘Don’t touch it!’ ‘Sex is bad.’ ‘I’m afraid he’s going to think I taste bad.’ ‘I’m feeling dead down there.’ UGH! Why so much shame around our bodies and sex? In this episode, Dr. Cat and Di share with you the common experiences they hear in their practice that are ruining our sex life and our body health. They give you their top strategies for rebuilding your relationship with your body to be more free in your skin.
In this episode you’ll hear:
- How cultural and familial messages growing up contribute to shame and inhibition
- Sexual trauma is held in muscle memory and can be contributing factors to painful sex, vaginismus, and dysparenia
- Fear you taste or smell bad? You may be ignoring your body’s signals for attention and preventing yourself from yummy pleasure
- How odor-fighting products and tampons are impacting the health of your lady garden and healthy options for you!
THIS WEEK’S FREEBIE
Download Dr. Cat’s FREE meditation to help you drop down into the body and out of the busy brain. This meditation helps bring awareness to your pelvic region and the muscles used for sex, so you can take back your power and strengthen your orgasm.
WHY YOU’LL LOVE THE SHOW
Real life stories and expert interviews to help you improve your sex life, by addressing mental blocks, nourishing your body, and balancing your hormones. This podcast will feel like you’re sitting down for coffee with your two best girlfriends to chat about the most erotic and embarrassing things you’re dying to share and get advice about. The best part? They’re the experts. Sex expert, Dr. Cat Meyer with hormone and detox expert, nutritionist Diane Kazer reveal to you what works (and what doesn’t) in the most entertaining way, encompassing all things sex and sex hormones such as self-love, sex toys, bedroom play, body shame, libido, frisky food, PMS, hormone balance and anything else sex-blocking you from the sex, life and body you deserve and desire. Each episode will give you simple steps and sexy strategies you can implement NOW to leave you feeling empowered, courageous, playful and motivated. Eat Play Sex is YOUR guide to all things sexy, healthy, and fun to rock the body of your dreams and help you get back in the playground with those you love. Because…#sexmatters
ABOUT US & HOW WE CAN HELP
LEARN MORE ABOUT DR CAT
LEARN MORE ABOUT DI
Dr. Cat Meyer: Hey, beauty!
Diane Kazer: Hey, beauty 2.
Dr. Cat: How was your weekend?
Diane: Super orgasmic—and I mean it by every sense of the word. It’s pretty colorful actually, like rainbows.
Dr. Cat: Like your hair?
Diane: Yes! My hair is just one, giant, pink rainbow, but it’s holding steady.
Dr. Cat: You know, we always talk about our weekends. How about our weeks?
Diane: Oh, that’s true! Okay, okay… Well, Thursday night, I had the most swollen eyes ever. And I’m not sure if it’s because I’m doing a detox right now with some really nasty heavy metals…
Dr. Cat: Wait a minute! Wait a minute. What eyes are we talking about?
Diane: What?!
Dr. Cat: What?!
Diane: Yeah, the ones that are on your face that everybody can see. So I was super insecure. And I had like three video shoots scheduled on Friday. We cancelled all of them because I had swollen eyes and I was real hard on myself.
Dr. Cat: Isn’t that amazing, how we can be hard on ourselves?
Diane: So hard!
Dr. Cat: This is the body, this is the person that we’re with every single day. I wake up to myself every single morning.
Diane: If you walked into my house, and I saw you, I wouldn’t be like, “Cat, who did you get in a fight with over the weekend. I mean, look at you. You look horrible!”
Dr. Cat: Oh, my God! Don’t make me cry.
Diane: I know! But that’s what I said to myself.
Dr. Cat: Oh, wow!
Diane: How mean to me.
Dr. Cat: Yeah, yeah.
Diane: How mean…?
Dr. Cat: And we don’t do that to ourselves.
I actually recently put a post up. It’s so cute. It says: “I am the woman of my dreams.”
Diane: Oh, wow!
Dr. Cat: Isn’t that powerful? Yeah, I am! I am…
But how many women has struggled with that on a daily basis, being able to look themselves in the mirror and struggle with being able to say something kind to themselves.
Diane: So, I’m leading a really powerful group of mostly women right now. There’s about 50 of us. And it’s the hardest thing for them to do. They can drink a protein shake. They can do a workout. They can dry brush their skin. But it’s really, really hard for them to compliment themselves.
I gave them one thing—one thing to compliment. Wake up in the morning, write down a post-it, “one thing I love about my body, and why.” And they go, “Oh, it’s really conceited. I’m having a really hard time doing that.”
Dr. Cat: You know what though? Given even 60 years ago, I probably would’ve said the same thing. “That’s really selfish. That’s really conceited. I’m full of myself,” which is such a bizarre mentality to have. How did we develop that relationship with ourselves?
And even beyond that, think about the relationship that we have with our vulvas or with our lady gardens or however you refer to her.
Diane: I just thought of something really funny.
Dr. Cat: Tell me.
Diane: You know, there’s Volvos. There’s cars, a brand of cars called Volvos.
No, it’s true. And we’ve talked about this in other shows. And today, we’ve got quite a colorful episode for you guys. We’re going to be talking about both the science side, the nutritional side of what makes up our beautiful vagina, and also, what to name her and what to call her, what to refer to her as; and then, also, how to care for her from the mind, from the heart.
So, it’s just Dr. Cat and me today. We never run out of things to talk about. But when you mentioned “we’re the hardest person to compliment,” it just always brings you back to: “If I have a hard time complimenting myself, I’m going to have a hard time receiving compliments from someone else.”
Dr. Cat: Wow! Receiving…
Diane: Receiving…
Dr. Cat: That’s such a hard thing.
Diane: Everywhere… in the bedroom, physically, emotionally. “No, no. I don’t need help. I’ve got this.” And then, we used to complain about having packed schedules. We don’t have enough energy, and we don’t have enough time. And we just don’t have enough of whatever it is because we just can’t receive.
So, yeah! Today is going to be quite a colorful episode. I’m pretty stoke!
Dr. Cat: What creates shame that takes you out of your game? And how can you rebuild your relationship with her? That’s what we’re going to be talking about today.
And in fact, you brought up something earlier about this playful weekend that you had. I’m so thrilled for you! Can you share? Share more because we just barely touched the tip of it.
Diane: Yes! We play just the tip games now.
And I know we’ve got female and male listeners. So I hope that you guys all find this episode intriguing. I like our shows together sometimes—just us. It allows us our space to dive deeper into the elements of the people that we help, that we see the common issues with.
And for me, Friday night, I had an amazing business meeting with Kiran Krishnan. He’s the developer of Megaspores. You guys know, we’ve interviewed him twice about the gut’s impact on your sex health.
And that’s really what you brought me on Playboy Radio for to talk about that time, nutrition’s impact on our health and nutrition’s impact is the gut. It’s all about the gut.
If you’re not adjusting the gut, you’re in a sex rut with respect to nutrition.
So, we had a really amazing meeting. And it was actually kind of the foreplay that became my Saturday night because we had an amazing dinner on the beach in Huntington, me and my two business partners (one of them is a doctor, and one of them is Kiran, he’s a microbiome researcher). And we all just talked for two hours about this amazing lubricant that we’re creating. It’s sitting right in front of us, the sample, right now.
It’s designed for vaginal health, and also, of course, for the men’s enjoyment. And it also can be used for men-and-men or whatever. It’s multidimensional.
Dr. Cat: It’s really satiny, the touch of it. I love it!
Diane: Yeah, I love it too! I loved it so much that I was like, “I have not even taken this lube for a test drive yet.”
Dr. Cat: In your vulva?
Diane: Yeah, in my vulva!
Dr. Cat: Yes!
Diane: Oh, my God!
Dr. Cat: So, you took it for a test drive…
Diane: Well, before I even get to the story of this amazing sexcapade I had, I learned from Kiran that they created this synthetic vagina in another country, and that’s what we’re going to be testing the lubrication on. I’ll talk more about that later on. But we were like talking about vaginas. We’re talking about how most lubes destroy the tissues. And I literally put my cape on for women everywhere and thought, “I need to take this for a test drive.”
Dr. Cat: I bet you did put a cape on. Did you put a unicorn cape on? That’s what I imagine…
Diane: I need to have one made.
But I literally took one for the team. I was like, “I need to have sex.”
Dr. Cat: You poor thing!
Diane: I know, I know.
Dr. Cat: What a martyr.
Diane: I know. I’m totally a martyr. I was totally a victim.
I started to feel a little bit of shame for feeling the desire to have sex randomly with someone I didn’t have an established relationship with. And I was like, “No! No.” We have masculine and feminine traits about us. I’m just going to put a little bit of my masculine, initiate the sex. Cape on… and I’m going to take this for a spin as well as the new toy that we got. We were at the Sexpo, right?
Dr. Cat: I love that toy.
Diane: We love our toy. We’re going to interview them soon in the show. Don’t worry, lovers. So, I just texted him, this is a guy that I’ve known for six years. We dated six years ago. And we’re sort of reconvening now. I said, “I am coming over with a few toys, a few things.”
Dr. Cat: “So, clear your schedule…”
Diane: “So, clear your schedule… and your bedroom.”
So then, I got there. We’ve never had sex before. But it was just pretty much like the moment I walked in the door, I was just seducing him.
Dr. Cat: Ta-dah!
Diane: And he’s a celebrity. I can’t say any names. But…
Dr. Cat: Oh, okay. He’s a celebrity, don’t worry about it.
Diane: Yeah, don’t worry about it. And he has his own radio show too. So, he might even be talking about me on his own radio show. I don’t know… but he might just say unicorn.
But he’s an amazing guy! We used a lube. And it was amazing for him. And it was amazing for me. It was so amazing that it was the best orgasm that I’ve ever felt. It was also the toy that I think had played a part because this specific toy has an app.
Dr. Cat: Yeah, I know.
Diane: You know? You downloaded it before? Did you use it on yourself or did you have other people, from a distance, play with it?
Dr. Cat: I use it with myself.
Diane: Okay, cool! So, I thought about doing that. And I thought, “Well, I want someone else to play with the app.”
I found it. I downloaded the app, and I handed him my off. I said, “You have control now. You’re driving the vulva.”
So, he was playing with it. And it has like this heat thing. It makes you warmer or cooler. And then, you can change all the speeds. There are actually names that are like yoga terms on there.
Dr. Cat: I know, yes.
Diane: So cool! And I was like… I realized things because there was no shame whatsoever. That experience, in the past, I would’ve carried a lot of shame into that game. I would’ve been closed. And I probably would not have been able to—I’ve experienced the orgasmic release that I was.
And I didn’t know that my body liked those different rhythms that the toy generated. And then, also, with the lube, I just felt so warm, and my tissues felt so healthy. The whole thing was just amazing. I was just giggly the whole time.
Dr. Cat: I’m vibing with this story so hard.
Diane: Don’t vibe so hard.
Dr. Cat: No, but what I’m hearing is that you are taking charge of your sexuality. And not only are you saying, “This is what I want. Who cares about what society thinks or what my girl friends think or what anybody else think. I want and deserve pleasure. I’m going to get it. And I’m going to tell you exactly how I receive pleasure and what it is I want.”
Diane: Yes… yeah!
And you know, that, even a year ago, I couldn’t have done that without saying to myself—the mean girl inside would have said, “Argh, who are you just to initiate that? You’re supposed to be the girl. You’re supposed to wait until he… you surrender to him.”
And all these talk on our shows about the different roles we play—at one time, you could be in your masculine, you could be in your feminine. We are all of those things, both genders.
So, of course, do you think that he loved the fact that I initiated that?
Dr. Cat: It took the pressure off him… sure!
Diane: Yeah! It took the pressure off of him. And then, of course, he got to love it.
So, I too one for the team, ladies and gents. I took those for a test drive. The combination was amazing; them, individually, was amazing.
And today, we’re going to talk about these very things—the tissues, the fluids, the thoughts, the actions…
Dr. Cat: …the emotions…
Diane: …the things you withhold, the reactions.
So, we’re going to talk from Dr. Cat’s perspective on the thought and emotion side. And we’re going to talk on my side too which is the bacterial side, the nutritional side, et cetera. So you’re in for a treat.
Dr. Cat: Mine was actually slightly different than that.
Diane: Slightly different?
Dr. Cat: Okay. So, I went to this ceremony, right? And it was about men and women just celebrating each other and honoring each other. And the guys gave the women these beautiful, white roses.
So, one of the guys handed me the rose, so I’m holding this rose. I just started looking at it like, “Oh, my God! I’m literally holding a vagina right now.” I take my fingers and I’m like playing with the petals. So I’m pulling back the little petals. I’m like, “Wow! This looks like the folds of my vagina.”
Diane: Yeah!
Dr. Cat: And then, I’m like playing with the rose, and placing it against my face and over my eyelashes and over my lips because the silkiness of the rose felt so good.
And so I’m literally just pleasuring myself with this rose all over my face and my arms and everything.
Then I realized, when I was younger, playing with flowers, or when I would be given a flower, being told by my mom, “Don’t play with the petals. Don’t touch the petals because it will turn browner quicker”—did you remember your momma telling you that?
Diane: Yeah! Selling roses on the side of the road was my first job. I was six years old. We’d take flowers like that, and we’ll wrap them in foil. But we’d first wrap them with a wet cloth, like a paper towel.
Dr. Cat: Lube!
Diane: Yeah… yeah!
Dr. Cat: So, I would literally be smelling the roses or I’d be just looking at the roses, but I would never touch them because I didn’t want to cause it to die faster.
But here I am in this moment, taking in as much pleasure as I could—and feeling on it, and smelling it, and looking at it, and placing it all over my body. And I realized how much we prevent ourselves from the full experience of pleasure.
Diane: Wow! I just thought so many different things too. I mean, first of all, full-va. That’s like a full-va experience. You want to experience the entirety of the rose—which there are many layers of it.
Dr. Cat: Yeah.
Diane: And then, I also observed like a beautiful woman. I happen to think that both of us are beautiful.
Dr. Cat: D’oh?
Diane: We kind of walk in, and we fill the room with our energy and our smiles and our auras and our love and our confidence. And I want all women to feel that and own that.
Dr. Cat: Yeah.
Diane: And that’s what the show is about. It’s not about boasting what we are. It’s about inspiring you guys to own your beauty.
And I just imagined this beautiful unicorn or a beautiful rose walking into a room, and everybody is looking at her like, “Oh, my God! She’s so beautiful. But what do I do with her? I can’t touch her. I can’t approach her.” And it can be like a lonely world unless you’re played with.
Dr. Cat: Wow! That’s powerful, yeah. Enjoy the whole pleasurable experience, whether we’re talking about a rose or whether we’re talking about your own vulva or even your own body as a vessel.
Diane: You mean “down there?”
Dr. Cat: The “down there.”
Diane: Ah, let’s talk about that.
Dr. Cat: That brings me to my next point… creating the shame to take us out of our game. And one of those is that how do we refer to her? How do we refer to our vulva? There are so many names that we call her. And some of them are less than kind.
Diane: And when I see people say “down there,” there’s this face of shame. There’s like this disgusted face where they’re like, “You know… down there.”
Dr. Cat: “Down there…”
Diane: Yeah! It’s like this, “Oh, okay…” And then they’re going to draw an arrow “down there.”
And this is something I’ve been using for a long time. I love the words “goddess garden.”
Dr. Cat: “Goddess garden,” I love that.
Diane: Yeah! It’s our goddess garden. If you think about it, are we planting weeds or are we planting seeds? Weeds would be things like—I definitely want to call attention to in today’s episode which is the stuff that we spray, that we insert, that we cream all over ourselves that are not healthy. These are synthetic things that are taking us away from the truth of who we are which is our vaginal microbiome.
Dr. Cat: So, coming back to the name piece, I’m thinking of how many of my friends refer to it as “down there,” but also, how empowering some of our names can be. Some of my girl friends gave her a name. I heard Veronica or Gigi.
Diane: Victoria!
Dr. Cat: Victoria!
Diane: Gigi…
Dr. Cat: Or even the word “pussy,” how “pussy” has such a negative connotation to it or it could have such a very empowering connotation to it where it’s “This is mine. And she is very powerful. And I’m going to reclaim that name for myself.”
Some people prefer to call her “vagina,” some people prefer her to call her “Hey, gorgeous!”
Diane: Yeah, whatever you want to call it. You and your partner can come up with names for it. And it’s even funny if you think about…
Gosh! If you were to draw a picture, if I said to you, “Draw a picture of what you feel as though your goddess garden looks like, what would it look like?”
Would it look like a barren wasteland? Would it look like a beautiful, plentiful field of pineapples and flowers and trees and unicorns and hummingbirds and rainbows? What would it look like… a venus flytrap?
I mean, who’s story is it of what you believe it is, what it feels like, and what it appears as?
Dr. Cat: And how do you take care of her.
Diane: Yup! Today, we’re going to talk about how to take care of your goddess garden—in more ways than one. We’ve actually got four different topics for you all. And you can share this with your lovers. Or if this is you, and you are female, you’re going to get some pretty big eye-openers today.
So, shall we start with the biome?
Dr. Cat: Yeah, tell me more, tell me more. How do we plant the seed?
Diane: Okay, okay. So, planting seeds or planting weeds. I want you to always, always, ladies, always think about this. And then, men, if you’re being sent to the store to buy things for your lady friends or your sisters or your lady partners, you might even bring this to their attention too.
Right now, I know that one of the biggest shame pieces that women experience are two things: it’s a taste thing, and it’s a smell thing. That’s the first.
Dr. Cat: Yeah, I hear that a lot.
Diane: That’s the first, yeah.
Dr. Cat: And how often women prevent their partners from going down on them because they fear that their partner is going to think, “They taste bad” or that they smell bad.
Diane: Yeah! Yeah.
And so, it’s “Oh, my gosh! The last time I went to the bathroom, I smelled awful. I really hope I don’t smell bad.” And so what do we bring in? We bring in like the Bath & Body Works, the petroleum-based chemical, fragrance-filled items that we are using to cover up the smell.
But ladies, I got to be honest with you—and this is what I used to do—if there’s someone inside of us, of course our fluids are mixing together. So, you can’t get rid of the smell from within.
And I remember back in the day when I used to actually wonder, “God! I don’t feel like I smell good right now.” And so I wouldn’t have sex because I was like, “I bet he can smell it.” And I want to talk to you guys today about the biggest invaders of vaginal flora.
Dr. Cat: Who are those?
Diane: So, one of them, the number one thing is tampons.
Dr. Cat: Tampons?
Diane: Yeah, tampons.
Dr. Cat: What’s going on? A lot of us use them.
Diane: I know, +95% of us use them. Tampons were an improvement for our aesthetics because pads are thick and diaper-like.
Dr. Cat: Oh, yeah.
Diane: Like, “Oh, man!” I remember when I first started using pads, I was like, “These things, they slip and slide everywhere, and then you got to pull them off.” But I do like the fact that you have to look at the color of your blood. You can see everything. You could see clots and everything too.
But pads, what is cotton today? Think about where they come from?
Dr. Cat: Yeah. Today, they have a lot of pesticides in them and stuff like that?
Diane: Yes! GMO’s, genetically-modified organisms, right? And so, the science is still out. The jury is still out on whether or not GMO’s are catastrophic to our health—although, I would say, being on the inside of health, I see that GMO’s, they’re genetically altering the protein structure of all of these plants, and it’s not native to the human body. The human body is like, “Wait! I can’t digest what is not made by nature.” So the body goes, “I don’t know what these things are.”
So, it’s not just that it’s +90% of cotton; it’s genetically modified. That’s number one.
The second thing is that on these cotton fields, they’re spraying, like you said, tons of pesticides—like tons and tons of pesticides. And dioxin is a bleach that they use on cotton. If the cotton is not all the way white, they’re going to spray dioxin, a bleach, to make it look beautiful and white before we put it on our vagina.
Dr. Cat: Oosh…
Diane: Yeah!
Dr. Cat: All about that purity.
Diane: Yeah, it’s got to look white. Exactly, it’s all about that purity, exactly. Why can’t it just be a little off-white. That’s fine. It’s going to be red in a few minutes anyway.
Dr. Cat: I’m a little off-white.
I don’t even know what that means.
Diane: I don’t either!
So then, there’s the other part of that too. The different kinds of chemicals they’re putting on there—the bleaches, the pesticides, the GMO’s, and then the packaging, the plastics, the parabens—these are all things that are not native to the vagina. The vagina goes, “What?! Why are you invading our beautiful goddess garden? Why? Why don’t you just love on me? Why can’t you use a white rose instead?”
So, ladies, the alternative to that—and I will share this blog on the shownotes. And then, this is also going to be coming in Dr. Cat and my ebook that we’re going to be sharing.
Dr. Cat: Oh, I’m so excited.
Diane: Yeah, we’re both really excited. We’re going to share a ton of amazing, gluten-free nuggets and crumbs of love with you guys to improve your eat, play and sex lives. And in it, I’m going to have a lot of information about instead of using tampons, consider using something called the Diva Cup.
Dr. Cat: I have one!
Diane: So do I! What’s your experience of it?
Dr. Cat: So, I actually really like it for a couple of reasons. One, I know that I’m not creating more waste in the world because I re-use it every time. But also, it almost makes me more connected with myself. You literally see what comes into the cup.
Diane: Yes!
Dr. Cat: And it’s like, “Oh, wow! That is me. This is my life-giving blood.” And it’s not so much like, “Ewww… this is something gross to throw into the trash can and be done again and go on.”
Diane: Yeah, yeah. I think about that we also are contributors to Xanadu which is a local clean-up crew. We’re very conscious of plastic and waste. I’ve seen a lot of tampon applicators on the beach. Isn’t that gross?
Dr. Cat: Isn’t that bizarre?
Diane: Yeah! Those things don’t degrade for tens of thousands of years.
So, literally, straws, these tampon applicators, if you guys care about wildlife—I know, sometimes, we want to cover our eyes like it isn’t happening. But it is happening! These tampons, these pieces of our tampon waste and other things that don’t degrade, they end up in the nostrils of seals and kill them—and turtles.
Dr. Cat: Oh, my God!
Diane: Yeah, it’s not okay.
It’s a big thing. It’s being more mindful about what’s coming out of us. There are a lot of things. And I posted this in the Unicorn Wellness Warrior Group if any of you ladies are interested in becoming a part of that. Dr. Cat and I moderate. We give you guys a lot of amazing health tips that you are not going to hear from the average American doctor. We’re talking about what your blood should look like, what a normal period should be, what your flora should smell like, what you should taste like.
Dr. Cat: Because a lot of us don’t know our body. We don’t know.
Diane: No!
Dr. Cat: This is so shocking to me, how many women don’t know the parts of themselves and how it operates and how they’re—I’m going to use “vulva” because that’s one of my favorites, or yoni. I love the word “yoni.”
Diane: I like “yoni” too.
Dr. Cat: “Yoni” is also Sanskrit for “sacred temple” just to let you guys know. That’s why I love it.
So, knowing how your yoni functions, so that we don’t shame or think that “It’s broken” or “Something’s wrong with it.” No, if you learn how it functions and how to treat it, then you can create the optimal pleasure that it’s designed for.
Diane: And you just said something right there about it’s not that we’re broken, there might be something dysfunctioning though that your body is trying to talk to you and call your attention to.
So, if you don’t smell good, if you’re afraid that you’re going to taste bad, then your vulva, your goddess garden, is trying to say, “Hey, we’ve got some weeds down here. We’ve got some weeds that are growing out of proportion to the seeds.”
Dr. Cat: “Pay attention to me.”
Diane: Pay attention to the weeds. Let’s do some weed-trimming. And it’s kind of a funny visual, but really, it’s the seeds or weeds thing.
So, at that point, now we’re talking about bacterial vaginosis. There are seven different types of flora (seven to eight now that they’ve discovered) that make up our vagina microbiome—you could say the she-biome.
And what happens is these are very important strains to have in the vagina. And guess what the number one inflammatory that women experience? Bacteria vaginosis (BV’s).
It happens to a huge percentage, like in excess of 50%.
Dr. Cat: A lot of my girl friends call me asking about it.
Diane: Yeah! And they don’t know what to do, so they end up in a doctor’s office, and then they give them antibiotics, anti-fungals which further disrupts the flora of the vagina.
Dr. Cat: Whoosh!
Diane: Exactly! And half of us women—and I say this because I’ve had UTI’s and all kinds of other infections too myself. So ladies, you’re not alone. We’re not perfect vaginas. But we just know how to listen to them now. We want to empower you.
I used to be afraid of smelling down there as well. But then, I eventually learned why. And so, it’s important. Probiotics are important. A good diet is important. Keeping the toxic chemicals away are very important. But half of women don’t even know they have BV when they have it.
Dr. Cat: Wow!
Diane: We’re asymptomatic.
Dr. Cat: What do we do about it when we do find about?
Diane: Well, let’s talk about first a few things that actually bring on BV.
Dr. Cat: Yeah, like preventative.
Diane: Preventative stuff, yeah.
For sure, douching is something a lot of women do when they experience the scent that they don’t smell optimal. They’re like, “I will do anything!” And so, I imagine, literally, the comparison of this, Dr. Cat, is like putting a Glade Plug-In in your goddess garden.
Dr. Cat: Eeesh…
Diane: Yeah. Glade Plug-Ins, we think about it, we think like, “Oh, it smells so aromatic. It makes the room smell better.” But it is the most toxic thing that you can expose your family and your children to that creates allergies and asthma and all sorts of congestion in the head more than anything else in our home—Glade Plug-Ins.
Dr. Cat: Oh, my God! I didn’t even know that.
Diane: So, using some of these douches, also using—have you ever heard of FDS?
Dr. Cat: No, what’s that?
Diane: Feminine spray, feminine deodorizing spray. In my early 20’s, I used this stuff.
Dr. Cat: Yeah, back when we just didn’t know. We were little nuggets.
Diane: We were just little nuggets.
Dr. Cat: We just didn’t know.
Diane: I was a financial planner at the time. I was a professional. I could swear, they could smell my vagina. I’m like, “I hope they can’t smell my vagina.” I wasn’t that bad. But you know how we used to get so insecure.
Dr. Cat: Yeah.
Diane: And so that’s the last thing I would do before I left the house. I’d spray myself with FDS.
Now, ladies, I want you guys to listen to this. You may have heard of the Environmental Working Group, EWG.org. Have you heard of that, Cat?
Dr. Cat: No, definitely not.
Diane: Okay. And there’s also an app that you guys can download too. And I’ll put this all in our e-guide, so it’ll be a lot easier for you. You also have transcription notes at the bottom, you guys, every episode. If you have not yet been on our website, just type in EatPlaySex.com. If you’re listening to us on iTunes, you can go on to Eat. Play. Sex. and you can just scroll through all the different episodes, and you could actually see the transcriptions of everything we’re talking about. So that’s good news.
But anyway, I digress, Skin Deep is an app that you can download on your phone. If you’re at the store, and you’re in question of a specific product, what kind of toxicity it poses, you can go check to see that specific item. You could scan the barcode, you could type in the name, and it’s going to tell you. It’s going to spit out a number, a number from 0 to 10. Anything that’s a 10 is the most highest toxic anything that you could buy.
Dr. Cat: Wow!
Diane: So, FDS—this FDS that I used to spray on my beautiful goddess garden—it has a 7.
Dr. Cat: Oh, my God!
Diane: A seven.
You could see right here—and I’m showing Dr. Cat, you guys, in front of the computer. Allergies and immunotoxicities is super high (the risks for allergies and immunotoxicity). The restrictions is also really high. It’s got all kinds of stuff in it.
Basically, the number one ingredient in it is petroleum.
Dr. Cat: Eesh… I don’t, I don’t get it.
Diane: Yeah, isobutene.
Dr. Cat: Ay!
Diane: Isobutene is the number one ingredient in it. And basically, imagine walking backwards into a Shell station and saying, “Fill me up!”
Dr. Cat: I know! I was going to say… isn’t it petroleum, what you fill your vulva… Volvo?
Diane: Don’t mistake the wrong letter. You bought the wrong vowel.
Dr. Cat: Put petroleum in your Volvo, not your vulva.
Diane: Exactly!
So ladies, this is one of the biggest issues that we’re having. We are literally band-aiding our beautiful vulvas with these things that we’re supposed to be putting in our Volvos.
If you can imagine, the list just keeps going. You’ve got the Bath & Body Works products. You’ve got having a bath with anti-septic liquids.
Having different or multiple sex partners also, you want to make sure you’re being careful (although, sometimes, we’re asymptomatic, we may never even know).
Perfume bubble baths, big time! Huge on different soaps that say fragrance on it. It’s always typically going to be a synthetic fragrance. There’s like 500+ chemicals that could be in these things. One ingredient will say “fragrance,” but it could be 500+ different chemicals in that one fragrance ingredient.
Dr. Cat: Oh, my God!
Diane: And they’re all synthetic. All of them are synthetic. Even some that say “essential oils,” those could be totally synthetic too.
Smoking also, ladies, you guys may have heard me talk on my YouTube channel about using an IUD.
IUD’s can bring a lot of inflammation. And that could be plastic. They’re the plastic, they’re copper. They’re hormonally also driven.
And then, also using the washes, the douches that are super synthetic. And then, the strong deodorants. We’re using all these, the Tide’s and the really toxic things to clean our clothes. And then, we put that right next to our beautiful goddess garden.
And then, also, the number one thing that is recommend to women today who get bacterial vaginosis is taking antibiotics. And it goes time after time. And then, they end up taking three, four, five, six. And then, they end up on a permanent one.
Dr. Cat: Oh! Oh, my God!
Diane: They can’t have sex. They can’t have children. And their marriages suffer.
Dr. Cat: Wow! And you know, I’m looking at this list, and one that’s standing out to me is… tight clothes. How often we wear leggings? Or those of us who do yoga, like 20 times a week, we wear our wet, sweaty pants home or we wear them all the rest of the day. We don’t know what’s growing as a result of those things.
Diane: There are some companies that are trying to invent yoga pants that you can wear them to yoga, and then you can wear them out to a club after that. I say, “Whoa! Well, wait a second. Do you want to get laid later that night?”
I mean, not just the smell, but the feel. You don’t want to feel super inflamed in your beautiful goddess garden.
The common things, like I said, are the itching, the smell, the taste if you hear that from your partner—which you’re not always going to. But hopefully, you’re open to kissing your partner after they go down on you because then you get to learn what you really taste like.
Dr. Cat: Yeah. And no shame for any of these. These are signs and symptoms to look out for. But don’t let that become a fear not to enjoy all the pleasures, the full-va, of your experience.
Diane: The full-va, yes.
Dr. Cat: And one way to help this is to be in contact with her. Pay attention to her. I’m thinking of those times when we were younger where we were caught masturbating or we were caught exploring ourselves or when we’re hearing messages from our parents or from school or outside sources that say: “Don’t touch it. Don’t go there. Don’t talk about it. It’s not there.” Or they don’t even refer to it anything at all.
There’s a lot of women that I see as clients or as friends who said they didn’t even talk about their vulva health at all. It just was referred to as “down there” or something not to be talked about.
So, giving her attention—not only giving her a name, but placing your hands over her in the morning or throughout your day and just recognizing “You’re here. I’m here. I’m connecting with you.”
Diane: Yeah, yeah.
Dr. Cat: Or during a shower or after you take a shower, one thing that I encourage women to do is just honor her, recognize her and say, “Hey, beautiful!”
Diane: Yeah! Yeah. You can compliment yourself in more ways than one. And giving her attention is one of them. Guys, they can see themselves giving because they’re an outie. Not to be confused with a Volvo, I have an outie, but you know what I mean. They can see themselves playing with themselves. We can’t really see that. So, I think it’s also where you get a mirror.
Dr. Cat: Yeah, a small, little mirror. Really explore yourself. Spend time down there. Learn what is pleasurable for you because if you know what pleasures you, then you can share that with your partner, so they don’t have to play this guessing game. You’re helping them. It’s like a quick roadmap to your pleasure. It’s like a treasure map.
A treasure map!
Diane: I love that!
Dr. Cat: And you’re showing all the secret passageways and the quicker ways to your own pleasure, so that you guys aren’t fumbling around or guessing or having the bad sex, not enjoying yourself.
Diane: Here is the treasure map to my pleasure trap.
Dr. Cat: Ooh…
Diane: Not to be confused with the Venus flytrap. I mean, that’s another good analogy.
Dr. Cat: And speaking positively to her. You know, we talk about giving positive affirmations to ourselves, but speaking kindly to her. How many of us from past experiences have trauma or have negative relationships with her? Or maybe we see her as being ugly. There are many forms and shapes of our vulvas. And sometimes, we hold shame that one labia or the lips; one is asymmetric than the other.
Diane: Ooh, darn!
Dr. Cat: We’re like, “Oh, my God! She’s so ugly” or we compare ourselves to other pictures that we see.
But no, she’s so beautiful. And if you spend the time giving attention and affirmation to her, you will literally see her change her form and become more beautiful.
Diane: Mm-hmmm… and full!
Dr. Cat: And more receiving of pleasure.
Diane: We hear a lot of things, derogatory terms like “meat curtains.”
Dr. Cat: What?! I’ve never heard that.
Diane: Or camel toes.
Dr. Cat: Yeah, I’ve heard the camel toes.
Diane: Yeah, or baloney phonies. I’ve heard all these.
Now that we’re doing our show and I’m more conscious of words and trying to defend women against absorbing some of these things, I hear these terms and I’m just going, “Hold on a second!”
I mean, I heard it the other night and I just wanted to “Excuse me… no!” I don’t care who says it. You’re monkey seeing, monkey doing. And if women hear this, it’s just going to feed into the fact that they’re just another meat curtain.
Dr. Cat: Yeah. Wow!
Diane: No, absolutely not. You are not a meat curtain.
Dr. Cat: And if you spend time giving these negative messages or negative names, you are not going to be able to have higher potential of pleasure, your optimal pleasure. You’re literally inhibiting it.
Think about if you’re referring to yourself as ugly or misshapen or whatever it is. Your body is going to tense and contract. And when your body is contracted—I’ve said this in other shows—you’re not fully open. Your sensory receptors are not open to receive the pleasure that is possible.
Diane: Yeah.
Dr. Cat: So, change your language. Change your mindset. And you can have a fuller full-va.
Diane: Full-va, yeah!
You may have heard the book, Change Your Thoughts, Change Your Life.
Dr. Cat: Yeah, I have.
Diane: Change your thoughts, change the shape of your vulva. Wait! Change your thoughts, change your sex life.
Dr. Cat: Yeah, because you will open to receive more.
Diane: Absolutely!
So, I think we’re almost pretty much covered with all our material, yeah, for today?
Dr. Cat: No, I wanted to talk more about what else causes us that shame, that shame piece that takes us out of the game.
Diane: Yeah.
Dr. Cat: And I mentioned about all these different experiences like trauma or negative messages and what literally happens to our vaginal tissues and to our hips.
Did you know that in our muscles, we hold the memory of trauma?
Diane: Yeah. Like in Chinese medicine, we say that we store fear in our kidneys and we store anger in our liver. And so, when someone is being irritable and angry and quick to judge, that’s someone who’s being liverish. So, I would imagine it’s very similar.
Dr. Cat: Yeah, absolutely.
And I’m talking about traumas as in big traumas, little traumas. It can be even just something that somebody said at one point in your life that caused you to contract or start a response or stop a moment.
Diane: Yeah! Like the one time when somebody told me I had one boob that was bigger than the other.
Dr. Cat: And then, it caused you to inhibit yourself and be more self-conscious about it moving forward.
Diane: Yeah! And every time I take my shirt off, I was like, “I bet he’s looking at my one boob that’s bigger than the other.” Who cares?!
Dr. Cat: So, when we go through traumas, it’s as if our central nervous system starts up and our fight-or-flight response kicks in to protect us for survival mode. But there isn’t a full resolution of that, so it gets stuck.
And we store this in our muscles…
Diane: Trapped trauma.
Dr. Cat: Yeah, trapped trauma. And our brain does not process through it emotionally. So, it gets stuck in our brain. It gets stuck in our thoughts and stuck in our muscle memory.
Diane: Pelvic floor inflammation, I would imagine too.
Dr. Cat: Huge, huge! There’s such a mind and body connection here.
And I’m talking of things like vaginismus or dyspareunia or pelvic floor pain in general.
Diane: Yeah, pelvic floor disease.
Dr. Cat: Yes, yes.
Diane: Infertility.
Dr. Cat: So, our muscles are literally holding those memories and conditioning a response against penetration.
For any woman who’s experiencing pain, painful sex or inability to have penetration, now while the cause doesn’t have to be trauma, there’s a lot that can be a result of the traumas. The body has learned to expect and anticipate pain upon penetration.
So these PC muscles, the pelvic floor muscles flinch or they contract to protect against the potential of intercourse pain. It’s like, “Oh, my God! It’s going to get painful again. I’m going to contract. I’m going to save myself. I’m going to protect myself.” But as a result, we can’t enjoy pleasurable sex.
Diane: That’s really sad to me because the highest amount of oxytocin that we experience is during orgasm.
Dr. Cat: Yeah, yeah. So we’re preventing ourselves from that experience.
Diane: Yeah. I work with a lot of women who have interstitial cystitis. And I just see all of these as like a totalitarianistic approach. It’s trapped trauma. It’s trapped toxins. It’s the flora of the vagina that is not in balance. It’s in disharmony.
There’s more alkalinity than there is acidity. Our vagina is supposed like to be like a pH of 4. It’s supposed to be pretty acidic. And for a lot of us, it’s higher than that, which means it’s more alkaline, and it can’t kill any of the bad stuff.
And sperm is very alkaline, so it could actually disrupt our flora as well.
And this is why I’m so huge on probiotics. There are a few strains that actually can cross the barrier from the digestive tract into the urinary tract, so that we can absorb them in our goddess garden. But those strains are very unique.
And that’s part of what we’re researching for the healthy lube and the vagina vitamin. But what I hear you say is that there is a combination of it too. It’s like, “Which one brought on the other one?”
Dr. Cat: Yeah!
Diane: And who cares? We’re just going to address both.
Dr. Cat: Yes. And when I work with clients who struggle with this painful sex, I’m teaching them mindfulness skills. I’m teaching them how to drop down into their body and out of their busy brain.
I work with them to process through their trauma of course. But it’s a lot of using positive affirmations, changing the relationship that they have with their vulvas.
Breathing techniques help so much. Learning how to relax the muscles because we’re probably too tight, too tense in our pelvic floor, so teaching them how to drop down release those muscles using diaphragmatic breathing, using these guided meditations.
In fact, all of you listeners, I’m going you a free meditation for you to use at home that helps you to do just this drop down into the body, breathe, and relax into the muscles, and bring your attention, your awareness there.
In fact, I want everybody right now to drop down into your genitals and just pay attention. Notice how tight you’re probably holding there.
Diane: It’s such a hard thing to describe, isn’t it?
Dr. Cat: Yeah, yeah. But probably, right now, you’re like, “Oh, my God! I’m actually tensing up down there.”
Diane: Yeah, in the garden…
Dr. Cat: And you can actually release. You can relax it. You can relax it.
Diane: The garden…
Dr. Cat: The garden…
Diane: What kind of advice would you offer, Dr. Cat, for let’s just say—I know that there’s a lot of women (and even men) who associate—you know, there has been some sort of a molestation or there has been some sort of a sexual abuse. The people that I know are able to talk about it, they’re open about talking about it, but they still carry that reflex.
So, it’s like, “Oh, I’m not worthy. Someone thought that I was worthy of being mistreated, then I must be worthy,” and they own that.
So, what’s the best advice that you would give to someone like that, so they can redirect away from that thought and into the thought of “I am beautiful” and all these other affirmations we talked about today.
Dr. Cat: And that’s the hard part because by the time people are sharing that story, they’re probably disassociated from the story, meaning they’re disconnected from it.
They’re disconnected from the story, and they’re disconnected from their body. But they don’t realize that they’re disconnected from both of those things because by the time they’re sharing their story, they don’t realize how disconnected they are from not only the story, but from their own body.
Diane: Ooh… that’s a coping mechanism, right?
Dr. Cat: It is a coping mechanism. We call it dissociation. So, there is this disconnect from it where we can space out or be able to talk about something, but not feel like we’re in the story. It’s as if it’s happening to somebody else, but not to us.
Diane: So, how would we know if we’re resolved from it or if we’re still carrying it around and we have just buried it?
Dr. Cat: There are a couple of things. There are symptoms like flashbacks, startle responses, emotional outbursts. There can be where you’ll find yourself sort of space out. You’ll find yourself, in sex, not being able to enjoy sex or these painful sex symptoms that I was just mentioning. There’s a whole bunch of different symptoms that can happen.
I would highly suggest that people work with a professional, a mental health professional, specifically somebody who specializes in trauma or sexual health to be able to help them process through the trauma because it is a complicated thing. It is not logical at all. It is emotional, and it is mental.
So, working with somebody who knows that aspect, helping you to move through, you can find yourself opening up to more sensations, to be able to become less inhibited—hopefully, be less inhibited in your sexual play—to be able to be in your body, which is huge.
A lot of people don’t realize how much they’re not in their body.
Diane: It’s huge! For me, if I’m feeling not present, I’m wondering where I am. If I’m not here, where am I? Am I in the past? Am I afraid that the past is going to repeat itself? And so do I feel myself recoiling, defending myself from a past that I’m afraid will re-surface—that 99% of the time never does?
Literally, that is a statistic. I’ve heard this said by Dr. Mark Hyman whom I met. I think it was when he and I spoke about this. He said that 98% or 99% of the thoughts that we generate in our mind never happen.
Dr. Cat: Yeah.
Diane: So, I know that there’s going to be some future episodes that Dr. Cat will offer some other therapeutic things that you can try—and I, myself.
I think that the summary of what we just went over is: what is the source of your pain? What is the source of your shame where you are out of the game? Is it in your tissues or in your issues?
Dr. Cat: Oosh…
Diane: Which is it?
And I think pretty much, for all of us, it’s both. It’s both.
Dr. Cat: Yeah, yeah. So, it’s time to reclaim our body as our own. Reclaim and change the relationship we have around sexuality and our vulvas.
I encourage taking this whole holistic aspect—the mind, the body, all of it, the emotional, the mental.
Diane: That’s what this show is all about.
Dr. Cat: Because sex matters…
Diane: Sometimes, a lot!
Dr. Cat: You matter…
Diane: And so does your vulva.
Dr. Cat: And so does your vulva.
Diane: So, we will leave you with that. And of course, you guys, thank you so, so much for following us. We’ve had thousands and thousands of downloads so far—which I think is pretty good for only having about eight episodes by the time we’re recording this. And we definitely are always, always, always listening.
So, this show is driven by you. This show is for you. And this show is so that you guys can charge of your nutritional life—eat, play, sex.
And if you have not yet, please head on over to iTunes, and leave us a review. And also, on EatPlaySex.com, you’ll also see that Dr. Cat has a free download. I also have a free download where you can take charge of all of these things with a few, simple steps.
And then, from there, once you implement them, then you can send us a quick love letter. Let us know what you’ve been doing, how it’s been working, and what roadblocks you might be hitting at the time.
So, until the next episode, lovers, do not forget…
Dr. Cat & Di: Sex matters!
