May is National Masturbation Month and this episode features Rebecca, a sensual researcher who recently made a candid and unique female masturbation video entitled A Guide to Your Orgasm. Listen as she takes us through how deliberately exploring self-pleasure affected many areas of her life.
Rebecca on How Masturbation Effects my Life:
One of the things that I have noticed over this time that I decided to be deliberate, masturbate and take care of my body on a regular basis is that I don’t have to feel any particular way to start out with.
There have been many times where I could feel this energy in my body. I would feel like, what’s the word? belligerent about it, dug in. “I’m not going to touch myself. I’m not going to masturbate”. I would feel that feeling, and because I had made this choice, “Okay, I’m going to masturbate on a regular basis. I’m going to masturbate everyday.” Just having made that decision, I got through some of those places and I masturbated at times that I wouldn’t have normally masturbated.
I noticed that those times made a really big difference in my life, made some of the biggest differences in my life because I really could change the direction that I was going in. I could be going in a direction that I was just getting tighter and tighter and more dug in about something or my mind would spin on something. But if I made the choice that I’m going to do what it takes just this one simple thing, I’m going to take care of my body. I’m going to masturbate. I’m going to have it feel good, have my body feel good.
When I would do that everything else smoothed out. You know, sometimes it was a process over time but I could make choices from feeling good instead of choices from a different place. I could go, “Okay, I don’t feel that great right now. I am going to make this choice to make my body feel good, to do what it takes to have my body feel good.” Then when my body feels good, I am going to make the next choice from there and the next choice from the next place. I feel like that has made a very big difference in my life.
It spreads out to other areas of your life. I mean other areas of my own life because being deliberate like that, deciding to be deliberate to feel every stroke when you’re masturbating, to have it feel good. That is what it takes in my life for anything that I’m doing.
I cook a lot and when I’m cooking, if I do the steps to have it feel good I know what my intention is. I’m going to have this turn out really well. I’m going to slow down. All of the things that I do to be deliberate about being a sensual person and taking care of my body are the same things that I do in other areas of my life to have my life be good and to have it feel good to other people. When I feel good, other people feel good about me. When I’m turned on by myself, other people are turned on by me and that’s fun.
For me, it was important to do the things that it took to like how my body looked. And for everybody, that’s different. But for me, it was important for me to exercise, to eat the kinds of foods that felt good in my body. The amount of food that felt good in my body. I decided a little while ago I wanted to lose a little bit of weight, so I did what it took to do that.
Sometimes it’s just getting into agreement with the way your body is, what you like about your body. I’m never going to be tall, I am short, but I like that about myself. There are plenty of things to enjoy about that. That’s just something I cannot change and I would not change. There are things that I could change and I wanted to change and I did.
I really enjoy my body, enjoy the way it looks. I put my energy into having it be the way I wanted it to be and enjoying it the way it was. It’s really fun when I look at myself in the mirror because I can feel that. I feel how much I like my body and it’s fun. It’s fun to be turned-on by the way I look and by the way I feel in my body, to see the changes that are occurring or to see the changes over time.
I take time to look at my body pretty much every day. I look at parts of my body and I just appreciate them. I also touch my body in different ways. I notice that there are times when I like one kind of touch or another kind of touch more. Sometimes I like very light touches. That’s just the way I feel. And sometimes I want heavier touches. It’s fun to feel the way it changes. It’s not always the same.
I used to think of myself as a person who likes blah-de-blah and that would be the information I would give to my partner, whoever I was with. I like light touches on my breasts. But I noticed when I started touching myself just to feel what it felt like in this moment that it was always something different. Sometimes I like pinching myself. Sometimes I like scratching myself. Sometimes I like touching myself with light fingertip pressure. Sometimes I like massaging my muscles. And that’s fun. It’s fun because there are so many things to experience. There are so many things to feel from a different place each day or each moment in time.
You can always experience something different. That’s how you can expand or how I expanded in what I felt. I just started with right now. How I feel is right, what I like is right and then I could experience different things than what I expected I was going to like.
When I’m touching myself it’s sensual research. It’s finding out what I like right now, something that I want to feel now. So it is always different. If I come to it open to what I will experience in this moment, I find out something new and different every time.