April Pride: This podcast discusses cannabis and is intended for audiences 21 and over.

Kiana Reeves, Foria: The female sex response is so complex. It’s emotional, it’s biological, it’s psychosomatic, it’s relational.

April Pride: Welcome back to How to Do the Pot brought to you by April Pride.

April Pride: During the month of February, we’re covering the Hig Guide to Sex. A series dedicated to all things possible with sex, intimacy, desire, pleasure, and dare I say romance when you just add cannabis.

April Pride: Off-air you can follow along in our newsletter. Sign up at dothepot.com and on social. If you like How to Do the Pot, please share it with someone and if you could take 30 seconds to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, it makes a huge difference, a huge difference in how likely others are to find our show.

April Pride: Plus, we do read all the reviews and I’m going to start sharing my favorites on each episode like this one from frustrated to the max. “April and Ellen have created a judgment free zone.” Yes we have. “For exploring and educating on all things pot.” All things pot. “They cover topical issues and provide useful advice while consulting experts and providing various points of view. I like that their message is focused specifically on women. It feels like I’m taking advice from a girlfriend,” and you are, we’re your guides.

April Pride: Today’s episode is a topic we’ve all opened up to our girls about, stoking the flames of desire and enjoying sex without mental distractions. We’ll cover how cannabis helps you be more present, and relaxed, and why women and men who know a lot about sex really love cannabis for sex.

April Pride: For questions about how cannabis helps improve your physical sensations, plus the best pot products for sex, check out the first episode in this series, episode 52.

April Pride: Curious about all the rave reviews about weed and sex, but still feeling a little uncomfortable about bringing cannabis into the bedroom? Carlen Costa, a clinical sexologist, psychotherapist, cannabis advocate, and best-selling author gives her tips for how to talk about it.

Carlen Costa, Sexologist & Psychologist: I would never start the introduction of cannabis in a partnership with sex first. I would start it as like a social thing. Like, “Let’s watch some Netflix chill. Let’s eat a bunch of junk food and popcorn and let’s see how we feel about this.”

Carlen Costa, Sexologist & Psychologist: I think if you’re going to introduce cannabis to our sex lives it needs to be a very aware conversation, very transparent conversation. It needs to be potentially a second, third step, not the first way that you use cannabis is not in the bedroom because that is when you are your most vulnerable. That is one of the hardest times to introduce something that is going to alter your state of body, mind, soul, whatever it is.

April Pride: Carlen shares a story from one of her clients who had been using alcohol to relax before sex.

Carlen Costa, Sexologist & Psychologist: I have this one patient in particular that is coming to my mind right now where she had always been a drinker. She had always been. Like, “I’m just going to have a glass of wine at night to relax.” She was feeling that that wasn’t working anymore or you know what I mean? She was worried about alcoholic dependency or that kind of thing.

Carlen Costa, Sexologist & Psychologist: I said to her, I was like, “Well, what about cannabis? Have you ever used cannabis?” She’s like, she’s a lawyer. She’s very successful. She’s a beautiful human and her husband actually also happens to be a doctor.

Carlen Costa, Sexologist & Psychologist: What I did is I helped introduce cannabis into her life to help her with some of her anxieties for example. To help her get back into a relaxation and presence space. With the wine and stuff it was just making her kind of sleepy and just disassociate. Not to say that that happens to everyone at all, but it is a potential. I love alcohol. I drink alcohol, but I find that it is easier to disassociate with alcohol and with cannabis, I find that it is easier to be more present.

April Pride: Having a few drinks comes up a lot when women talk about sex, but what isn’t always mentioned is that alcohol is a depressant and decreases the ability to orgasm.

April Pride: Matthew Gerson, the co-founder of sexual wellness company Foria and Kiana Reeves, a sex educator and chief brand officer Foria, you talk about what to expect from alcohol and from cannabis in the bedroom, and how to think about consent when under the influence.

Kiana Reeves, Foria: I think alcohol is interesting because what we’re talking here with alcohol is a state change and essentially why people love cannabis and why people love alcohol is for very similar, at least to get in the mood is because of the state change. It brings you out of your head, brings you into your sensation, into your body.

Mathew Gerson, Foria: Alcohol’s been an ally to humans in so many ways forever to deal with stress, to deal with crisis, to deal with trauma. It’s [hops 00:05:08] specifically it’s plants. They’ve helped us and they’ve also harmed us and they actually bring you into your senses, but then you quickly go unconscious. On the way down you have like no sensation or no self-awareness.

Mathew Gerson, Foria: I’d like to think idealistically that the era of alcohol is fading. The era of this new plant is going to be more emergent and more available to people to use conscientiously and consciously both medicinally and recreationally to enhance their lives and to get that state shift that humans always have seeked.

Kiana Reeves, Foria: When it comes to consent, particularly with new partners and using different types of psychoactives or alcohol to create a state change, you also have to be aware that that creates a state change for consent, and boundaries, and that experience too.

April Pride: Carlen’s anxious client had a very happy ending.

Carlen Costa, Sexologist & Psychologist: She’s like, “I took an edible and it didn’t feel weird. I told him, and it was really great. He took a little bit with me.” It became this thing because she felt so safe and empowered in her use that she was able to then open up and share that with her partner.

Carlen Costa, Sexologist & Psychologist: Then it was great because then one day she came to session because we had worked on using that intentionally. She came to session one day and she was like, “Oh my goddess.” She’s like, “I can’t wait to tell you about the sex I had with my husband on the weekend and we fucked for hours.”

April Pride: We asked Carlen, how does cannabis support women’s confidence in the bedroom?

Carlen Costa, Sexologist & Psychologist: We can talk at length about this. The patriarchy and glass ceilings and how that definitely has a huge impact on how women are socialized to love others, but it also has an impact on how we choose to love ourselves and the reconciliation that we have as women to be worthy and deserving of feeling good.

Carlen Costa, Sexologist & Psychologist: Just that simple concept of you are allowed to feel good, and to be loved, and to love yourself. That permission in and of itself is just the one thing that so many people need to hear. So many women need to hear to start to unlock that disconnection that they have to truly being able to receive sensuality, and pleasure, and love, and medicine of all kinds that really does unlock our potential and lead us into a place of personal power.

Carlen Costa, Sexologist & Psychologist: Cannabis brings intentionality back into our daily lives. It brings the mindful use of medicine and of healing ourselves through our choices and decisions. Through our relationships and knowing, and understanding with our bodies, and bringing the power back to us to be able to choose.

April Pride: Episode 51 talked a lot about how THC and CBD products work physically for sex, but what about the mental effects?

Carlen Costa, Sexologist & Psychologist: CBD we use for relaxation, pain relief. THC, however, exalts you. THC is the one that brings in the blood. That brings in increased sensations. That allows you to feel things better, deeper. Like when they say, “When you consume cannabis, everything better, everything smells a little bit better.” That is mostly because of THC that brings in that euphoria.

Carlen Costa, Sexologist & Psychologist: You have to be aware and use cannabis, if you’re going to use cannabis for the first time, don’t do it with the intention of like, “I’m going to have this crazy orgasm.” Do it with the intention of I’m going to connect and learn what this does and how my body responds to it.

Carlen Costa, Sexologist & Psychologist: If you don’t know how to achieve pleasure with yourself, you cannot expect someone else to meet you there. No one gives you an orgasm and if you don’t self-pleasure or know how to touch your body and how your body likes to be touched, or if you don’t use your words and express to your partner when things feel good or they don’t, and you keep faking orgasm, after faking orgasm, after faking orgasm. Let me tell you, the only person that’s suffering is you, not them.

April Pride: Carlen shares how she brings cannabis into her own life.

Carlen Costa, Sexologist & Psychologist: I’ve always really enjoyed using cannabis with my intimate lifestyle, with my sexuality. Not every time, but I really do enjoy it when I want to kind of amplify my experience.

Carlen Costa, Sexologist & Psychologist: I’ve done sacred sex training, I’ve done that work and just through breath work alone can stimulate many parts of your body that can exalt you and amplify you. Cannabis is just, it’s the intention, it’s the ritual for me. It’s like, “I’m going to smoke some weed. I’m going to watch something or listen to something that turns me on and then I’m going to allow my body to feel the sensuality.” It becomes the ritual.

April Pride: Matthew talks about the complexity of women’s sexual response.

Mathew Gerson, Foria: As much as I’d love to be prescriptive, it rarely ever works. We’re used to that. We want a specialist to be prescriptive and to sort of give me the linear path to the better sex or the solution. Cannabinoids are offering so many solutions to so many people, but in such a variety of ways and they’re also personalized.

April Pride: But there is one variation that no one is thrilled about. Kiana shares how stress can dampen the desire for sex.

Kiana Reeves, Foria: We have like a huge role that stress and emotions and life experiences play in our availability to intimacy. That is really unique to each person, but I think the key factor is what’s happening in your nervous system. If you’re constantly up regulated or you’re constantly like in a freeze state, it’s hard to access intimacy in a safe way.

Kiana Reeves, Foria: Then of course you have the biological physiological response. Those are factors that are endometriosis, menopause, postpartum, chronic ongoing tension in the pelvis. A lot of that is hormonal. A lot of that can be because of inflammation. A lot of that can be because of trauma.

Kiana Reeves, Foria: The female sex response is so complex. It’s emotional, it’s biological, it’s psychosomatic, it’s relational, and so there’s so many different factors. You can talk about hormones, which absolutely are impacted by stress. Our sex hormones get deprioritized when we have constantly running cortisol.

April Pride: How have the lockdowns during COVID impacted people’s sex lives?

Kiana Reeves, Foria: Some of us right now are feeling very alone and wishing we could have more intimacy and feeling very like, “How do I date during this?” Maybe learning more about self love and self pleasure and exploring our own bodies.

Kiana Reeves, Foria: Then some of us are finding ways to keep connection and intimacy alive in very close quarters in being isolated or in a space with somebody almost all of the time.

April Pride: For today’s high five, How to Do the Pot to do the sex.

April Pride: Number one, foreplay. Don’t start with sex. Arousal and desire start in the brain, the other head, and the state change that cannabis brings is different than alcohol. Start with a night in by yourself or with the partner and add weed so you know how it makes you feel, but don’t put pressure on yourself to go straight to the main event.

April Pride: Number two, relax. THC and CBD work together to calm the mind and physically relieve pain in the body. Many cannabis consumers experience slower and quieter thoughts. Cannabis is a great alternative to alcohol for those who have performance anxiety. Alcohol is a depressant and decreases the ability to orgasm.

April Pride: Number three, try THC. THC can act like an aphrodisiac. It increases libido and stimulates mood and arousal which can lead to heightened senses and more intense orgasms. Check out the 12 essential cannabis strains for women on dothepot.com and stay tuned to next week’s episode, where we’ll guide you to the best strains for sex.

April Pride: Number four, lose your mind. Meaning the mind that keeps you on track. The to do list, the schedule, the deadlines. THC interacts with cannabinoid receptors in the brain and creates the illusion of time slowing down. Being so in the moment that you lose track of time is a great start for a sexy night.

April Pride: Number five connect. When your mind isn’t racing and distracted women feel more relaxed and better able to engage with sex with yourself or a partner.

April Pride: For today’s podcast picks. I like Death Sex Money hosted by Anna Sale. Open and honest conversations about the things that we quote, “Think about a lot and need to talk about more.”

April Pride: Ellen Likes Sex With Emily hosted by Dr. Emily Morse. For 15 years, the Sex With Emily podcast has been liberating sex, pleasure, and you. And To Do the Pot, Brave New Weed hosted by Joe Dolce episode 72. An extraordinarily intimate conversation about cannabis, sex, and aging with two extraordinary elders.

April Pride: In place of our regular strain recs stay tuned next week for an entire episode dedicated to the best weed for sex. Strains for sex and we have great picks to share with you from some of our favorite guides.

April Pride: Thank you for listening to How to Do the Pot brought to you by How to Do the Pot. Let us know what you think. Find us on Instagram @dothepot, and you can follow me @aprilpride and for lots more information about cannabis and women, visit dothepot.com. Thanks to my co-founder Ellen Scanlon, Madi Fair, our brand manager, and our producer Nick Patri. I’m April Pride, and we’ll be back soon with more of How to Do the Pot.