Celebrate & Cultivate Deeper Pleasure This Valentine’s Day

This post was written by Community Partner, Pleasure Coach & Sex Educator Andrea Bertoli

I’d like to reclaim Valentine’s Day as a celebration of REAL pleasure! I invite you to ditch the greeting card version of this holiday and instead focus on real connection and pleasure that will help you make this holiday (and every day) more fulfilling and pleasurable!

My little anarchist heart has always fought against the commercialized version of Valentine’s Day, which encourages overconsumption and performative romance over deep connection. What if we took it back, choosing instead to focus on pleasure practices and true connection (with self or others). In this article, I’ll share some of my most powerful tools to help you create deep connections and build a holiday that is truly romantic.

Who are you as a sexual being? Try this gentle self-inquiry.

So often we begin our sexual and relational journeys without much self-reflection… many of us have fallen into romantic and sexual situations that don’t really work well for who we are, at our core. I invite you to take a peek behind the curtain of your sexual self and ask, who am I as a sexual being?

This gentle self-inquiry about sex and pleasure can help you better understand what you need, what you desire in your relationships, and what’s most valuable to you in your sex life.

You can spend time journaling with that question alone, or you can dive deeper using my Sexual Values worksheet. This worksheet offers questions and reflections to help you contemplate your past, present, and future sexual self. This is homework I often give my coaching clients, and now it’s a gift to you, dear readers.

You can download the document and fill it out, or journal about the questions. You can enjoy the contemplation in service of your own erotic expression. Or, once it’s filled out, you can use it in sweetly intimate conversation with a loved one to learn more about each other.

Explore your Desires: Play with a Yes, No, Maybe (& Fantasy) List

The first worksheet offers a gentle, inquisitive approach to your sexual self so that you can better understand who you are. If you want to take a more direct (and more sexual) approach to what you want, I invite you into another fun worksheet called a Yes, No, Maybe list.

A Y/N/M list can help us think through lots of different sexy activities, and decide how we want to play. There are so many versions of this type of list available for you to explore, and I’ve combined a range of delicious activities (and my own wisdom) into a unique version that includes the element of fantasy, too. This is super important, because sometimes we want sexy stuff to exist in our brains—but we don’t want it to happen in real life. But that doesn’t mean that these fantasies should be dismissed. Rather, I think fantasies are valid and important to your sexual self-discovery!

Furthermore, this Y/N/M list can give you a window into your edges: what are the activities on your Maybe or Fantasy list that invite you to push your edges just a bit (always with consent and safety as the foundation)? Just like our brain has neural pathways to keep us ruminating in similar patterns, so too we have рlеаsure pathways that can be expanded—this is why self-pleasure practices are so important. Grab this sexy list here.

Big Time Sensuality

(I hope my 80’s babies here appreciate the Björk reference!) Here’s the thing about sensuality: your deepest, wildest pleasure isn’t OUT THERE. The deepest, most expansive pleasure you can imagine is already inside of you. It takes self-inquiry (like the two exercises above) and practice to help us find our deepest expression.

One of the ways I invite people to feel more of their sensual, sexual selves is to slow down. And then, slow down again. Revel in the stillness, the breath, the lingering gaze, and the sweet touch (of self or other). Learning how to settle our nervous system, practice the slow burn, and experience more subtle sensations are the keys to a deeper and more expansive sexual experience.

True exploration of our sensual selves is a lifetime of work—this is my own path that I’ve been on for a decade, and it’s your path to explore at your own pace. You are a beautiful flower, with thousands of layers to explore and expose, when you’re ready. If you want to explore further with a sexuality expert, I invite you to my ongoing classes with Conscious City Guide. Each month I teach free classes about mindful sexuality (for everybody) and host conscious sexuality gatherings for men.

More About the Author: I help people build stronger relationships, create intimate communication, explore their desires, and practice sensual connection in a grounded, holistic way. My approach to coaching and teaching uses tools from Tantra, mindfulness, and yoga to help you find new ways of relating to yourself and others, and will create space for you to rethink sex and pleasure.