Fast confession – sex coach Julie Gaia Poupětová: If you relax, you can breathe yourself to orgasm
We are approaching a time of evenings longer than days, when we will once again start spending more time in our living rooms or bedrooms. Thanks to coronavirus lockdowns, this will be basically nothing new for us. This time around, however, we might try to spice up our time at home after all, and with something else than just a new Netflix series. That's why we at LP-Life.com decided to interview the most famous Czech sex coach Julie Gaia Poupětová, who has been developing sexual skills in individuals and couples for fifteen years. We asked not only about ways of getting the intimate life out of the ordinary, but especially about the correct breathing, which, according to Gaia, can even get you to orgasm.
You lead classes on how to breathe properly during sexual activity. How important is that in this area?
It's not so much about breathing properly as it is about becoming aware of other things through the breath. To use the breath as a tool to guide my attention, for example, to better receive stimuli from a sensitive zone on the body, or to guide arousal through the body somewhere – we can talk about the chakras, the emotional heart – to use different visualizations and add the breath within that.
What is important is that there are different types of breath, there is no single right one. We use the standard breath. The first thing the clients learn is what I call the endless breath. That’s when we breathe a little bit faster than our normal breathing rhythm so that we don't fall asleep, because when we breathe slower, we start to fall asleep. We go through the breath without much pause between inhalation and exhalation. I usually breathe with clients when we do, say, a couple of breathing sessions with a goal, an intention. Within a minute or two, I'm able to pick up from their breath a lot of things that are bothering them in sex, how they experience their sex life. It's like having some kind of a sampler.
This is a very intimate activity, as the breath is near the centre of sexuality in the brain. If I want to talk to the part of the brain that deals with sex, I don't get much of a conversation through words, much more through breath. It's like reaching where you have to, to help the client manage it better. The breath also provides a certain anchor for guiding and managing arousal, either increasing it, or letting steam off. So it is a multi-purpose tool.
Your courses take a full day. What does such a course include? Do some clients achieve any pleasure during it, even if they are among other people? Is that even possible?
It's like with sex and a lot of other things. Sometimes, in order to achieve something great, you have to wade through all the muck before. Family issues, inhibitions, setting up how much we can allow ourselves to show emotion. For example, it's very difficult for people to make a sound when they breathe. That's tied to some emotional threshold they have set from their parents. When they breathe in circular breaths, sound can be a problem. So they learn to relax gradually, and only when they dissolve the blocks that are preventing them from relaxing, then comes the second stage. A lot of people breathe quite strenuously, and we see them suddenly go from laboured breathing to a phase where it’s much softer. Sometimes it's that they breathe softly, then they start breathing normally for a while, then something kicks in.
What we're really doing is also changing the brain waves, what's going on inside, the so-called internal context that I'm talking about. The biochemical soup that the brain swims in during different activities. It can be done through the breath, we can get into a state where suddenly the effect of certain stimuli is many times stronger. By stimuli I mean tactile, auditory, visual sensations or the perception of a partner, which may then be different. A slightly different reality. Sometimes one gets to a different reality just by allowing oneself to be gentle and accepting. Some very interesting things start to happen there.
Do people come to you in couples or individually?
Some people come in pairs, which is interesting because they take away a guide, how to breathe together at home during certain activities, what to focus on, how to move energy between each other. Some come alone, then we put them in pairs for one or two exercises.
How long does it take to learn how to bring yourself to orgasm with your breath?
It happened to me on about my third breathing exercise, but I already had a lot under my belt from yoga. However, I want to emphasize that yoga breath is something completely different from what we use. What I teach on the course are collected techniques from various other courses, that I've just brought up, but there hasn't been time to try them out at all. So there are techniques that I can use to strengthen my auto-erotic practice, focus better on how I'm stimulating myself, and then maybe come to more interesting results with less arousal. Or they are techniques where I can focus on my partner through breathing, even give my partner more interesting sensations in the vagina. These are all things that can be done. There are things you learn in yoga with a completely different goal. "This is what you do it in this position and that position". I was actually brought into this by yoga, my body learned some breathing techniques during yoga. In sex, it started to kick in automatically during certain experiences, and it started to amplify certain situations, certain types of experiences.
That’s what you know during the experience. Does your partner perceive it as well?
Some techniques are perceived by the partner, too.
Do you tell him that up front? That this and that is going to happen because I start breathing this and that technique?
Of course, there are techniques where it's good to tell your partner that you're going to be breathing in a certain way. For example, when a man is trying to delay arousal or ejaculation, it's good to tell your partner. Or maybe put on some music so that you don't feel so embarrassed about breathing a little bit louder, because a lot of people deal with feelings of shame during these breathing techniques. So at the same time, you can work with shyness. With some techniques you don't need to do that, you can take a big breath, create a big vacuum with the muscles that control breathing, and it will manifest in the abdominal cavity, or other cavities.
And then you reach orgasm?
You can have an orgasm from that, and you can have an orgasm from just breathing alone.
Since you told me that it can be achieved on your own, without help, I would love to experience it.
I would recommend, from my own experience, doing it in the presence of someone else, because whatever is stacked in there from before will kick in.
What do you mean by that?
Some people come straight to orgasm, some don't. Some people have childhood trauma, relationship trauma set off.
How is sex coaching perceived by society today, in 2021? Compared to, say, three years ago, when we last spoke?
It's shifted a little bit. In 2014, I got my first trademark on the phrase sex coach, and as of the summer of 2021, the phrase sex coaching is trademarked as well. This means that in the Czech market, for the Czech consumer, this unique service has a certain specific character and value. People already learned to perceive it in a certain sense, they don't think a sex coach is just a seller of erotic aids or an erotic masseuse. It's a certain kind of quality that I'm going to somehow keep passing on here as well, as the training for it is being created.
Many people who come to me expect this kind of service. They expect support in development, they expect support in problem-solving. They already know a little bit about what coaching is in the professional field, for example from experience at work, in a company setting, and so on. They have some idea that it should be a coaching conversation, there should be skill development and through that they can start to address relationship issues or individual sexual issues.
When I told you that I'm in a relationship with my current partner for a year, you replied that it was high time to learn about sex. What do I picture under that?
In all of the studies that I have, especially the few long-term ones that follow relationships for twenty or thirty years and assess how much partners perceive they are sexually satisfied in their relationship, either directly or indirectly, it's evident that developing partner-intimacy skills is a key component of being able to be satisfied in the relationship at all. Trying new environments, activities. It's worth learning new ways of communicating, new ways of touching, kissing, to try new things, environments, activities. We need to do all of this continuously, one way or another, in order to even have a chance of being sexually satisfied in a relationship in the long run. Otherwise, an autopilot kicks in, causing that there basically won't be no sex over time.
It's just that when you say people should learn to have sex, most imagine the actual coitus. There's an awful lot to learn there to make it work, too, especially for a woman at different stages of her cycle, but it's not just that. There's a whole range of couple-intimacy competencies.
Like what, for example?
Oral skills, manual stimulation, touching, which, though not erotic in nature, can lead to arousal. Seduction in general, creating desire in a partner, ways of speech that can create this. More advanced are, for example, some dominance-submission experiences, but we're not talking about BDSM here, rather a certain kind of psychological game that partners can start to try. For example, the division of control within an experience, who will lead and who will submit, who will receive. These dynamics can create an awfully interesting polarity.
For the last two years, we have had a relatively new course on intimate dominance, where partners learn about these psychological aspects. There's a lot of courses focusing on bondage, rope work, really mastering something technically. That's great, but I've always been attracted to the psychological game aspect of it. I've found a lot of different sources for that, we play with it in different ways. These things really make sense to develop.
People can also find more inspiration in my book "Intimní štěstí" ("The Intimate Happiness"), which might be a good tip for a Christmas present.
Which of the courses would you recommend taking first?
Out of the live courses, I would definitely recommend "Umění potěšit muže" ("The Art of Pleasing a Man") or the one-day course "Orgasmická žena" ("The Orgasmic Woman"). Both are ideal for getting started. If you're a little more shy, try my monthly Online School. You'll get access to 19 online courses on a variety of topics for 30 days, and you can choose what you're really interested in.
Are people interested? Are you booked up?
Tomorrow I'm doing the course "Umění ženské svůdnosti" ("The Art of Feminine Seduction") and I've got 15 people there. That's the cap right now, given the pandemic situation and all. On Sunday there'll be eight or nine people, which is just the right amount for a small, intimate breathing workshop. I don't do mass events, I try to really interact with people participating in the course. It's definitely good to have space for that at a breathing workshop.
Does it ever happen to you that clients are dissatisfied? Like they’re expecting fast progress and scold you for not teaching them that?
It hasn't happened to me yet. What people usually take away from the courses are skills they have practiced in a, so to speak, "dry run", to try them out privately at home, during arousal, either with a partner or on their own. An exception is the breathing workshop, where the participants are also in for an experience as such, if they allow themselves to relax a little. Otherwise, however, there is a lot of fun and a pleasant atmosphere in the courses, even during the teaching, even if we are dealing with very intense and surprising techniques. I'm actually very happy that we get such easy-going clients.
