Our pleasure can be the fuel for abundant, sustainable work, service, and play throughout our long lives. Our sexuality can be a wholesome pillar of our daily experience. Our marriages can be fueled by desire rather than duty. Monogamy can be the hottest place on earth. It’s a confusing time to be a heterosexual, monogamous couple. The love and passion you desire may be more an inner urge than something you really see people around you living. But there are a growing community of devoted couples creating monogamy as a conscious spiritual crucible. There are couples using their marriages to fuel their leadership and service and activism. Welcome to Sex. Love. Power. where we convene the conversations that unlock new possibilities in your life and relationship. I’m your host Michele Lisenbury Christensen. Over the past 26 years, I’ve helped thousands of couples create the love and sex they desire. Kurt and I, in 23 years of marriage and adventures together before that, have suffered, avoided, dared, and triumphed in countless ways. Now, I’m here to help you get more peace, more connection, and more passion in your days and nights, so you’ve got the energy and attention left over to be the change you wish to see in the wider world. Everything you want in love and sex and beyond starts with YOU, and it starts right now. Let’s tend your flame.
So many women come to me wanting to turn up their libidos and experience more and better orgasms. I start by asking them 11 questions that, on the surface, don’t seem directly related to erotic desire. But the answers that women give me tell me a ton about their relationships with themselves, their turn-on, their bodies, their sensations, and with their capacity to contain embodied experiences, both desired experiences and not des...
The term “gaslighting” has become a buzzword in recent years and, because of its widespread use, the meaning of this term has become a bit murky. In a nutshell, gaslighting is when you are experiencing something and endeavoring to talk to the other person about it, but they flip it around on you so that you wind up questioning yourself, your own character, motivations, and even grip on reality. Today, I want to talk about what I ca...
You may have heard the term “patriarchy” used to describe a social and political construct, but, as my mentor, Terry Real, explains, it is also a psychological notion. The way that patriarchy defines rigid gender roles becomes subconsciously embedded in the way we think and behave, which has deep implications for both partners inside a relationship. How can we recognize when psychological patriarchy is at play and what can we do to...
Kurt and I have been married for almost 23 years and we're planning on another 50 to 75 together. We think, in terms of taking care of our bodies, minds and spirits and given the way technology is going, we could each live to be well over a hundred which gives us an amazingly long time to grow in love together and to contribute in so many other parts of our lives. Today's episode is about how we think about what I call, f...
At 50 or 60 years old, you don’t have the same career, health, finances, or family life that you did when you were 30. Why should your sex life be the same as it was 20 years ago? As we age, our bodies go through natural changes that can affect our sexual experiences and desires. This leads people to believe that they are no longer able to have the sexual experiences they used to. I’m here to tell you that fulfilling and pleasurab...
Kurt and I just enjoyed celebrating our 25th Valentine's Day together, but, truthfully, we try to live like every day is V-Day. We know that love is a habit and a skill set that requires effort and practice 365 days a year. If you want a love that gets better over time, you need to intentionally date your partner all year long, not just on holidays or anniversaries. In today’s episode, I’ll give you a year’s worth of date idea...
Whenever I say that I help couples create Legacy Love, the people I’m talking to light up because they're the kind of people who have a vision for their whole life. They want to leave a legacy in this lifetime and creating a love worth kind of handing down, something that goes far beyond just the couple to bless others, appeals to them. But, as great as that sounds, a lot of people ask me, what do you really mean by Legacy Lov...
In this episode, I'll walk you through a couple of the ways that I've been helping clients for more than 20 years to review their old year and vision their new year. Visioning together is one of the foundations of Legacy Love; creating a relationship that's not just good, not just great, but builds your impact in the world, the legacy you want to leave behind, for not just you and your beloved, but your family, your ...
How far are you willing to go to create the passionate marriage you want? Are you ready to try anything? If you’re like many of my clients, you’re willing to do whatever it takes to create a connected, turned-on relationship. And I believe you can do it. Unfortunately, there’s no silver bullet that will resolve your conflicts and create closeness. You may have already tried many different strategies but still don’t see the desired ...
If you feel like you are wasting your time and energy being upset about the same things month after month, year after year, the good news is that there’s a way out. You can break the cycle of hurt and resentment that keeps you from living the life you want. Sound good? Today's episode will equip you to free yourself from any grudge, irritation, frustration, resistance or anger that you may be carrying and take your power back.
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In my coaching practice and in my life, I hear so many questions about family planning; how to decide, when to start, and how many kids to have. The list goes on. There are strong societal expectations around becoming parents that can keep us from realizing what we really want and what’s best for us and our relationships. In this episode, I decided to round up my thoughts on some of the common questions I get around children and th...
While I’m not a clinical psychology professional, I often work with couples who have discovered that their brains are wired in completely different ways. This realization often arises when one partner (or both) consistently behaves in a way that creates friction between them, totally baffling the other. As humans, our brains are wonderfully diverse and have unique strengths, but it’s hard to understand what’s going on in your partn...
If it feels like you're in a dry spell- your desires don’t match up, you’re not that interested, or it’s hard to transition from your everyday life to a really fulfilling sexual encounter, this episode is for you. Today I want to talk with you about what I think of as "nano sex." It's those little microscopic, erotic connections that create a lubricant in your day-to-day experience together to help us get to ful...
Something your partner did cause you pain and frustration. You want to tell them what hurt you, but you seem to always end up in a fight when you bring it up. Sound familiar? In this episode, I get into the specifics of how you can deliver feedback about something your partner did and what you'd like them to do differently in a way that actually gets results. Every single couple has to have these conversations, but you can dev...
These past few weeks have been tough on our nervous systems. Many people are hurting and bewildered. I wondered how I could best help through the podcast, and what came to me was that this popular episode, recorded with my friend Jessica Pullins, PhD, is the best set of tools I can give you to help you pull yourself and others through when your heart and mind are reeling.
If you have a nervous system, you need this episode.
And p...
Do you find yourself saying, "We're so busy, I feel like roommates?” Or maybe you say, "We know we need to go on dates, but we never seem to get around to it. And then if we do go, a lot of times we get into a fight." Today on Sex. Love. Power., we're talking about spending more time together. Whether that's talking, having fun, or getting naked together. We're going to cover how to recognize the ...
Do you feel like you're always in charge, like you're always handling all the heavy lifting in your shared life? Or do you ever feel your partner can be so controlling or perfectionistic that you tend to hang back? Both of these situations are issues of what I call polarity - the interaction between dominance and submission (and, no, I’m not just talking about in bed). If you want to go from frustration and jockeying for ...
I want to devote a whole episode to the topic of defensiveness: how we engender it in each other, and why we get defensive ourselves. This is one of the biggest things I see stopping couples from communicating effectively, from connecting more deeply, and from experiencing more turn-on and erotic charge in their relationships. So if you've had defensiveness on either side of the conversation, this episode is for you.
As you lis...
This week, I'm bringing back the most popular episode of the podcast for your listening pleasure.
The 12 Elements of Power framework is more relevant now than ever for for us as feminists who don't want to think about power in an essentialist sense, don't want to think that there are particular qualities that we don't have access to because that hasn't been our lived experience. What we know is tha...
This is a different kind of episode. Often, I record podcast episodes about things that have come up with clients recently or I initiate out of conversations that I feel like we need to have in the culture that we haven't been having. Today's episode is about a topic that is blowing my mind right now, because I didn't think of it this way until I was reading this amazing book, "The Audacity to Be You" by Br...
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations.
If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people.
NFL.com's "Around the NFL" crew (Gregg Rosenthal, Dan Hanzus and Marc Sessler) break down the latest football news, with a dash of mirth.
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Listen to 'The Bobby Bones Show' by downloading the daily full replay.