"Completing the cycle requires that, instead of hitting the brake on our stress, we gently remove our food from both the accelerator and the brake and allow ourselves to coast to a stop. To do that, you create the right context and trust your body to do its thing."
"Physical activity is the single most efficient strategy for completing the stress response cycle and recalibrating your central nervous system into a calm state."
"If you change only one thing in your life as a result of reading this book, make it this daily two-minute practice. The practice grants the opportunity to 'cultivate deep respect for emotions,' differentiating their causes from their effects and granting you choice over how you manage them."
"Love, according to the parable, is the pursuit of our own wholeness. We wander the earth in search of our lost half."
"As infants, our lives literally depends on our adult caregivers coming when we need them. As adults, that's no longer true, but our bodies don't know it. Our bodies are pretty sure that if our attachment object doesn't come back, we'll die."
"In practice, humans build important social connections with multiple people, and our sense of wholeness emerges both from our own inner sense of wholeness and from our connection with our friends and family, as well as with our partner."
"Secure attachers have more positive emotions during sex, more frequent sex, higher levels of arousal and orgasm, and better communication about sex."
"People with anxious attachment styles are the most likely to engage in anxiety-driven 'solace sex' - that is, using sex as an attachment behavior - which can make sex intense without making it pleasurable."
"People with avoidant attachment start having sex later in life, have sex less often, with fewer noncoital behaviors. They have more positive attitudes toward sex outside committed relationships, have more one-night stands, and are more likely to have sex just to fit into a social expectation rather than because they really want to."
"Each of you is 100 percent responsible for your own feelings."
"Sex is an attachment behavior. When your attachment is threatened or when you and your partner share a stressor, sex can be a powerful, pleasurable way to connect in the face of the 'I'm lost' signals, so that you can find your way home."
"Also: You're too fat and too thin; your breasts are too big and too small. Your body is wrong. If you're not trying to change it, you're lazy. If you're satisfied with yourself as you are, you're settling. And if you dare to actively like yourself, you're a conceited bitch. In short, you are doing it wrong. Do it differently. No, that's wrong too, try something else. Forever."
"Women have cultural permission to criticize ourselves, but we are punished if we praise ourselves, if we dare to say that we like ourselves the way we are."
"In the Judeo-Christian ethic, bodies are low and spirit is high, animal instincts are low and human reason is high, and very often human reason is high, and very often women are low and men are high. Sex draws attention downward to the base, the animal, the contemptible, and it therefore triggers the disgust response."
"No matter what was planted in your garden, no matter how you've been tending it, you are the gardener. You didn't get to choose your little plot of land - your SIS and SES and your body - and you didn't get to choose your family or your culture, but you do get to choose every single other thing."
"Genital response doesn't always match experience, so buy some lube?"
"What this research suggests is that a woman's emotional experience is more likely to line up with her facial expression and her vocal inflection."
"But women aren't broken versions of men; they're women."
"Women are not liars, in denial, or otherwise broken. They are women, rather than men."
"Desire is arousal in context. And then we'll talk about what desire is not - it's not a drive, not a 'hunger' - and why that matters so much. Which will bring us to the surprising truth about what desire is: It's curiosity."
"But I do know that men's sexual entitlement is a primary reason they sexually assault women. It seems to me that if you believe your erection means you have a 'basic survival need,' then the sex-as-drive myth - combined with long-standing cultural attitudes that women aren't allowed the same sexual agency as men - turns toxic, fast."
"The little monitor and her opinions about how effortful things should be is the foundation of a wide range of frustrations and satisfactions, sexual desire not least among them."
"And curiosity, like sex, is deprioritized when you're stressed. If you're anxious or depressed, you are less curious about novelty and are more interested in being in a comfortable, familiar environment."
"We want love, which is about security and safety and stability, but we also want passion, which is about adventure and risk and novelty. Love is having. Desire is wanting. And you can want only what you don't already have."
"Don't just decide to have sex, try on this identity of a woman who loves sex."
"Put simply, the best way to deal with differential desire is: Be kind to each other."
"When you welcome someone new into your garden, remember, that person is used to working in their own garden, and that garden is different from yours."
"And what a men-as-default, puritanical culture expects, wants, and likes is pleasure for men and babies for women."
"But all you need to remember is that peak sexual pleasure happens when the whole collective works together, when all the birds are flying in the same direction, when all of your motivation systems are coordinated and attuned to the environment in a way that gives rise to every system moving collectively toward orgasm."
"The most pleasurable orgasms happen when every part of you is present and collaborating in pursuit of one shared goal: ecstasy."
"Pleasure is an emergent property of the interaction of multiple systems - it's a process, not a state, an interaction, not a specific area of the brain or the body. Pleasure is the whole flock. Pleasure is all of you."
"Feeling okay about how you feel - even when it's not what you expected - is the key to extraordinary sex."
"'Don't chase, don't push or pull. Be like the person with the broom on a curling team. Clear the path to sex.'"
"What these two rules mean is that your best source of knowledge about your sexuality is your own internal experience. When you notice disagreement between the terrain and the map - and everyone does, at some point - always assume your body is right. And assume everyone's body is different from yours - as are everyone's maps."
"In other words, nonjudging allows you to feel what you feel, whether or not it makes sense to you, whether or not it's comfortable, whether or not it's what you believe you should be feeling. Nonjudging is neutrally noticing your own internal states."
"In other words, emotion coaching teaches you that feelings are tunnels, and you can allow yourself to go through the darkness to get to the light."
"You belong in your body. You belong in the world. You've belonged since the day you were born, this is your home. You don't have to earn it by conforming to some externally imposed sexual standard."
"It's not how you feel. It's how you feel about how you feel."
"I wrote this book to teach women to live with confidence and joy. If you remember even one of the ideas in this book - no two alike, brakes and accelerator, context, nonconcordant arousal, responsive desire, any of them - and use it to improve your relationship with your own sexuality, you'll be helping me with that goal."
"Practicing ecstasy is practicing living outside all of those things, learning how to release them. It's as good for you as vegetables, jogging, sleep, and breathing."
