Are You a Leech in Bed?

Leech love takes and steals. You can’t feel pleasure when you’re stealing. Pleasure comes when you let yourself receive with an open heart.

A leech hides in the mud of ponds or lakes. When they sense movement, like your foot wading through the water, they attach to your skin and with their 100 or more tiny teeth, they begin to suck your blood.

Leeches are uninvited. And they drain you of precious life force.

You do not want to be a leech with your lover.

Leech love happens when you don’t know how to receive pleasure, so the leechy part of you comes out to TAKE what you want instead of allowing yourself to receive love that is freely given.

Leave the leech. Take the massage.

Want an example of leech love?

Your lover has been distracted lately and isn’t paying attention to you. You get out the massage ball, walk up to your lover with that stern look in your eyes, thrust the massage ball into their hand and present your back for rubbing.

After your lover gives you a five-minute massage you say, “Thanks for finally paying some attention to me!”

This is leech love. You took the massage, but didn’t receive the affection.

To truly receive the pleasure you long for, you need to first acknowledge what you want, then be willing to receive what your lover has to offer.

Example: truly receive the pleasure

“I’ve got this massage ball because I know you’ve been really busy lately. I miss you. Would you touch me for just a few moments so I feel connected again before you dive back into work?”

Then, as you’re getting the massage you let your lover know how good it feels. “Thank you. I needed that. It feels good to be close even if it’s just for a bit.”

If you’re struggling to truly receive what you desire, let a four-year be your tutor.

Have you ever seen a four-year-old want a lollipop? The giant kind that are as big as their face? I want it. I want it! Give it to me! Give it to me!

If you are lucky enough to give that 4-year-old the lollipop, you’ll be filled with the joy of watching them gobble up all that pleasure. This is how your lover feels when you’re willing to want and receive the affection they have to offer.

It feels good when someone receives what we want to give.

But imagine what would happen if you gave that 4 year-old the lollipop and they wouldn’t take it. They beg and beg, and then, when you give them exactly what they want, they turn away. They won’t receive the thing they’ve been asking for.

That would be frustrating, right?

Reasons you resist receiving pleasure

Let’s look at some of the reasons a four-year-old might be hesitant to receive a lollipop, because, like a four-year-old, we’ve all been trained to be hesitant when it comes to receiving pleasure.

Imagine you’re that four-year-old and the grown up in your life stretches out their hand to give you the lollipop and you can almost reach it when the grown up pulls their hand back and says, “First say please.”

Did you ingest this message as a four-year-old: Before you’re allowed pleasure, you must be NICE.

Your desire hates being controlled like this. Your desire wants what it wants and wants to be free to want without being nice and polite and controlled. Your orgasm lives in your animal body and your animal body doesn’t relate to NICE.

When do you tell yourself to “Be nice?” and how does this get in the way of pleasure?

When you notice a desire creep up how do you smush it down saying, “Oh, I can’t have that. It wouldn’t be nice.”

This is one of the ways we stop ourselves from receiving pleasure.

The irony is that desires don’t just disappear. They dive down into the mud, and you’re even LESS nice when they leap up and attack: just like a leech.

Deserving pleasure

There is a second way we learned to defer desire and refuse to receive pleasure. Can you hear a grown up saying to your four-year-old self, “Before you can have that lollipop, you need to eat all your vegetables.”

Many if not most of my clients, when they’re brave enough to articulate what they truly want aloud, will quickly say to me, “But I don’t deserve that.” This is the vegetable message. I haven’t done the thing that comes before desire, so I need to wait to receive desire. Have you ever sensed a desire lurking deep inside you and then heard that VOICE that admonished you, “You don’t DESERVE that!”

Every time you hear yourself say the word “deserve” you are putting conditions on the pleasure you can receive. You’re sending a message to your future self that desire has to be earned.

My Darling, if you wait until you’re worthy, you won’t ever let yourself feel all the pleasure that awaits you.

And you will miss out on the most wonderful pleasures: those pleasure that go so far beyond anything that could ever be earned.

My clients are stunned when I say, “What if you ate the lollipop first? Desert before veggies?”

Stunned, they fight me, “But then I’ll NEVER eat veggies again.” Say my clients.

This is simply not true. It is one of the least true things I’ve found in my coaching practice.

Over and over when I give people permission to indulge their desire first and they really and truly go for it, instead of getting out of control and turning into the hedonist they fear they’ll become, they feel more control. They feel an honest desire to “eat their veggies,” or do their taxes, or make those sales calls. Or whatever it was they were SUPPOSED to do before they deserved pleasure.

This is because when your animal body is fed with pleasure, it relaxes and lets you turn your focus toward fulfillment or ambition or health or whatever else you might call the veggies in your life.

Dessert before veggies

Let me tell you quickly how I experienced this dessert before veggies phenomenon in my own life.

One of the things I really, really want in life is gorgeous paper. I am a fiend for gorgeous paper. But I was always limiting myself.

I’d go to the paper store and see tons of paper I wanted, then buy a measly one piece of paper and leave the store and my longing for more paper, stranded there: abandoned.

I repeated this pattern for years. Taking only the most minimal pages of paper and regularly abandoning all the beauty those stacks of paper had to offer me and my life.

Interestingly, anytime there was paper given away, I’d grab it up. Old used notebooks? Yeah! Give it to me. I had so much junky paper in my closet, but none of it was beautiful. This was the leechy, grabby part of me taking whatever I could get my hands on instead of what truly pleased me.

Imagine how this practice was affecting my orgasm. Have you ever done this? Taken the most paltry serving because you just didn’t feel worthy of taking more?

Pleasure is a muscle. It wants to be exercised.

You exercise your pleasure muscle by first wanting, then receiving.

When my best friend named this paper-wanting-part of me Greedy Girl and suggested I take Greedy Girl back to the paper store and indulge her, I flinched.

“You don’t understand,” I said to my BFF, “There is no end to how much paper GG would buy. I’d go broke.” She handed me a $50 and challenged me to match her investment in the experiment.

$100! Do you have any idea how many sheets of paper you can buy with $100?

Hundreds!!

And I spent all $100 on paper. It was fun to feel Greedy Girl so awake! Man was she having a party in that paper store!

My challenge, as agreed to with my friend, was to return to the paper store within a month of the $100 visit. But each day that I could, I was to fondle the hundreds of pages I’d previously purchased.

Guess what happened when I returned to the paper store? I bought exactly, precisely, definitively 31 pieces of paper.

When I tried to get myself to want other pieces of paper, GG looked, appreciated them, but didn’t want to buy them and take them home.

Part of the reason you hesitate to let your desire run wild is that you’re certain you’ll never contain it again.

But this is not how it works. Desire quenched brings calm and peace. Desire caged brings restlessness and fury.

Please don’t wait until you feel worthy of your desire. Instead, indulge your desire and watch yourself grow into a person you feel proud to be.

People who feel pleasure are generous and productive

Before the Greedy Girl experiment, I had stacks of paper in my home for decades because any paper that managed to come my way was captured and held captive. I didn’t let myself use the paper, because then it would be gone.

Now I ask you, where’s the pleasure in that?

But once I indulged my paper desires completely, do you know what happened? I began giving paper away and sharing paper like crazy.

I was once at a workshop with elementary school kids and I brought stacks of my gorgeous paper with me for the kids to use. One of the parents cautioned me as she saw the paper, “Are you sure you want to let them use all this gorgeous paper?”

Receiving is at the heart of intimacy

Remember the feeling of the four-year-old who will receive the lollipop you’re freely giving? Remember how that feels when that kid’s face lights up? Receiving is at the heart of intimacy.

Those kids made such gorgeous art that day.

And I had a fabulous time making love with my husband that night.

When you let yourself receive pleasure, you’ll want to give pleasure with abandon. And when you get caught up in this cycle? Your orgasm will grow.  And so will your intimacy.

When you don’t give yourself what you want your desire doesn’t disappear. It hides. Your desire hides just like those leeches in the mud.

And when your animal body gets magnetized to any possible peripheral pleasure. Then, like a leech, your animal body leaps out and TAKES the pleasure its been denied.

This leechy-love doesn’t quench your desire. Instead, it takes it captive. And holds on TIGHT.

Learning, or re-learning from your inner four-year-old how to receive pleasure is an inside job.  But wouldn’t it be great if your orgasm became unincumbered? Became ready to receive so freely? Without hesitation?

What is that thing you’re constantly rationing? You won’t allow yourself to indulge because you’re terrified you’ll never get your self-control back? What is it you crave but feel you don’t deserve? Indulge this desire.

 One word of caution: I don’t see the same results when this exercise is done with food or drink. Anything you ingest into your body changes your biochemistry. Try this exercise with a sensual pleasure that doesn’t your sense of taste, but rather something sound, or touch, smell, or sight.

What will you choose to indulge?

Soft things against your skin? Socks, blankets, towels?

Containers? In your drawer, on your desk, in your fridge?

Twinkle lights? What would happen if you put up so many twinkle lights you had no use for lightbulbs?

This habit is designed to feed your desire and to assure your desire it will be heard. When your desire feels heard, it has no need to go deep diving into the mud and become leechy.

I want to know about your experiment. Please text me at 970-210-4480 and tell me about your experiment to indulge your desire.

Have you listened to my podcast about receiving pleasure?