Layla Martin is the creator of Sexy Revolution, a website and a community made by and for women with the purpose of fully embracing sexuality.
Layla experienced massive sexual trauma and abuse growing up, and because of that, she came to value enormously the importance of embracing herself as a woman and the importance of living her sexuality fully and without compromise. She studied the Tantric and Taoist tradition designed especially for women. Her life journey is about offering women practices and inspirations so that they could embrace their sexuality as well. Sexy Revolution posts weekly articles with videos, stories, interviews and more.
The community counts as of today, more than 25’000 women. You can catch her weekly transformational videos with super exciting sex tools at www.LaylaMartin.com.
She sat down with us for a conversation about one of the topics he knows best. Here it is in it’s entirety. Enjoy!
Question 1: which percentage of American woman are not sexually satisfied? why?
I have absolutely no idea what percentage – but it’s in the tens of millions for sure!
Satisfaction varies from woman to woman, but generally it means that a deep level of sexuality is being accessed – meaning powerful orgasmic states and a vulnerable and expressive emotional intimacy between the partners.
Many women aren’t anywhere near their full orgasmic potential for a number of reasons: either their partners aren’t taking the appropriate amount of time, the women themselves don’t understand the potential of their own body, there is still so much deep guilt and shame around feeling fully sexually expressed, couples don’t talk openly about sex and what they want, many women experience pain in the vagina and during sex and very few couples know how to address and heal that pain…the list goes on and on.
Question 2: which percentage of American man are not sexually satisfied? why?
Again, I have no idea, but it is less. What is happening to American men isn’t an epidemic of satisfaction – it’s an epidemic of disconnect from their own deep sexuality. A culture of pornography and fast-paced masturbation is actually priming a man to respond sexually to fantasies and getting off quickly. This is a damn shame because a man is capable of massive and lengthy orgasms of deeply fulfilling sexual sensations and emotions, but most men aren’t cultivating this sexual capacity.
Question 3: what would you recommend they do as couple and as single?
Couples usually wait until something is “wrong” sexually to work on their sexuality. That’s like waiting until you have diabetes to eat healthy – it’s much, much better to just eat healthy all along. It’s the same with sex: couples ought to train in sexuality, to learn new things together and be constantly pushing their own sexual edges when it comes to orgasm, intimacy and sexual pleasure all along. That way, the sex never gets bad!
As for singles: there isn’t a culture of sexual training in America. People are encouraged to always keep improving their mental states, their careers, their intelligence, their ability to love, their physcial bodies, their health and even their spirituality. But when you suggest to work on sexuality, people are like, “Oh, that should come naturally.”
It doesn’t. Eating comes naturally, but most people still ended up eating horribly for a long time until we started recognizing the importance of diet to everything else.
So, having a conscious masturbation practice and doing cool things like self-testicle massage or having a Jade Egg practice as a woman is really essential if you want to have an awesome sexuality. You wouldn’t expect to be in top physical performance if you didn’t work out, and yet people do nothing to train their sexuality and then expect it to just happen. So, work on it!
Question 4: why is sexual energy important?
An awareness of sexual energy can take sex from an everyday experience to a mind-blowing level of awesomeness.
It takes a lot of sexual energy to have an explosive orgasm or the kind of love-making that you remember forever. This happens naturally at the beginning, when you’ve got a lot of lust, or sexual energy going as a pair. However, most people totally ignore sexual energy, or the fact that you can create it and so they are leaving a lot of potential pleasure on the table, so to speak!
Question 5: can you expand on what you do?
Yes, you can expand it. That’s what a sexual self-practice is all about. Basically, slow, full breathing and having an awareness of it will grow it. You can also become much more connected to your vagina or your penis. Awareness of those parts of you throughout your day and the sensations in them will expand your sexual energy.
Question 6: how is meditation helping? how is Tantra a mindful practice?
Mediation is focused awareness. If you can put focused awareness of your sexual sensations and your sexual pleasure, then you can grow them exponentially.
Tantra is a mindful practice because it’s all about getting real. Most people hide behind huge masks sexually, or try to fit themselves into a tiny pornographic or Hollywood box of sexual experience. Tantra would be about unleashing who and what you really are – and it takes a lot of mindfulness to do that!
Question 7: how can people use sexual energy to heal childhood trauma?
Trauma is a stuck pattern from the past – usually one that isn’t of service in the present moment. A sexual childhood trauma is just the way that you learned to protect yourself when you were young from pain or fear of death. Most of us stay locked in our sexal traumas, becasue almost no one is using sex to heal.
What it takes is to feel the pain and fear inside of your body, really feel it, and breathe into it and accept that it’s there. Then – gently allow yourself to express – scream, cry, kick, say “no,” curl into a ball – whatever your body needs. After that – you restore goodness by deciding how you want to feel and gently guiding yourself into that place. Over time, your body learns to recognize that you can stay safe and not die even with a whole different sexual response. That’s sexual healing in a nutshell.
Question 8: what do you think about polyamory? swinging? BDSM?
I don’t really think of them! What’s important to me is that each person is living their truth fully, in each moment. For some people that looks like marriage, for others it looks like polyamory. For some people that’s being single, for other people it’s swinging.
Polyamory has the excitement of being able to be with who you are super attracted to and to get over old conditioning around jealousy and love. It has the potential for a deeply satisfying sex life with multiple partners while still having the deep love and commitment to a primary partner – it can be a dream!
On the other hand, a lot of people are in Poly relationships that aren’t serving them – they feel jealous, insecure and in a lot of pain. Poly isn’t for everyone and it takes a lot of excellent communication and delicate care for your heart and relationship to make it work.
BDSM can be a huge portal to altered states of sexual consciousness. Some people use the heightened experiences to have fabulous sex. Other people are playing out abusive sexual addictions through BDSM and are just looping in pain. Each part of life can be a blessing or a curse depending on how you use it. Vanilla sex can also keep people in painful sexual habitual loops. It’s not about what it looks like on the outside, it’s all about how it feels and what it means to you on the inside.
Question 9: do you believe in monogamy?
I know that for some people, their edge of growth is in a devotional love to one person and that the safety of that takes them far deeper than a poly relationship could.
Right now, I love monogamy and it’s the container of my relationship with my boyfriend.
However, it can also become a comfortable trap and kill all of the excitment for some couples. It’s really just about finding out what works for you given your current desires and lifestyle.
In some ways I love monogamy because it can take a lot of energy, discussion and time to have a healthy poly relationship and I’m a busy person – it’s just not where I want to put my current resources!
Question 10: who are your teachers? the teachers you admire?
I’m currently studying with a wonderful Tantra teacher called Sarita and I admire her very much. My best friend, Shashi Solluna is also a great Tantra teacher as well as Minke De Vos.
Most of my other main Tantra teachers I’ve found to be corrupt in some way and doing unconscious or sometimes conscious damage to their students. It’s a complicated path that seems to create some very unhealthy student/teacher relationships. It’s actually not specific to Tantra – there is a power dynamic in all spiritual paths that seems to offer the potential for great abuse – so it’s your responsibility to choose wisely! There are certainly great and loving teachers out there, but there are many, many terrible ones as well.
At mangu.tv, we are fascinated by these topics since we produced the documentary Monogamish
Why are relationships so hard? Monogamish is an exploration of sex, love and monogamy throughout history and into the 21st century.
If the topic interests you, subscribe to our Youtube channel or follow the Monogamish page on Facebook.
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