Why We Have Sex: The 4 Core Motivations & The Deeper Drive Toward Oneness

Hello. Hello, everybody. I’m Catrina. I am an intimacy coach, I’m a tantra teacher,
and today we’re going to talk about the four main reasons that we go to sex as humans.
Is this like a finite system and classification? Nah. But it’s a wonderful framework
that I find to be very helpful as we’re starting to get or cultivate some sort of clarity
around our relationship to self and our relationship to others as regards our sexual
energy and our sexual experiences.

So let’s go ahead and dive on in. Hello, hello, my loves. Welcome to my podcast.
I’m Catrina Armendariz, and I’m your host. I’m also a somatic therapist sex and intimacy
coach, and I’m the founder of Esencia, an online subscription platform launching this
fall with sex education, sensual yoga, and other embodiment practices to support you
in feeling fully alive in your body again.

Meditation, breath work, movement, you name it. In this podcast, I invite you into my
journey through sexuality and all things alive and evolutionary in my heart. Join me
as I open the door to my most intimate and vulnerable moments and share some of the
wisdom I’ve gained through over 30 years of tantric and embodiment practices.

This is, disclaimer, a shame-slaying podcast. So if you’re not quite ready to get rid
of that shame, this might not be the podcast for you. But if you are ready to step into
that fire transformation, this is the place and this is a space for you. This will
nourish your heart’s blossoming, your reclamation of outrageous pleasure, your fuck yes
energy, and your transformation into your most empowered self.

Are you ready for this? If you are enjoying this podcast, please rate and review so we
can get this out to people all around the world desiring to dive into this beautiful
experience along with us.

Let’s dive in. Hello, hello, my beautiful loves. So, it’s a lovely sunny day here in
Pahoa, and today I want to share with you a quickie episode on the four types of sex.
There’s so many different types of sex that we can engage in, but the four types of sex
is a beautiful framework that classifies our main motivations for going into our sexual
activities, whether it’s in self pleasure or shared with a partner or partners.

Many of you know, I’m an intimacy coach. I’m also a tantra teacher. So a lot of the
work that I do is really about a deep connection or cultivating a deeper connection to
our hearts and experiencing the joy and the play and the depths of the depths and the
ceilings of our emotional capacity in this body, in this meat suit.

So that being said, there actually is, interestingly enough, a spiritual reason that
we all run to sex. There’s a word in Sanskrit we call shuniya. And it refers
to this eternal Void. It’s this experience that we get — and this is an experience
that we have in that fleeting moment of orgasm — where we are beyond our body and
beyond our mind. And we’re beyond this limited expression of ourself. And we are
experiencing our boundless self. We’re in a boundless state of consciousness.
And this is love. This is unconditional love.

This is where we experience the unity of us and everything else. The separation is no
longer what we identify as. Separation is simply a distinction, and something that’s
discernible within the relative field of our existence. But we get to slide beyond that
play and that movie for just a moment in orgasm. And we get to see it as a true witness.
And we get to experience ourselves as it and beyond it. It’s beautiful.

So this is actually the biggest reason why so many of us — and this is a very subtle
but very strong reason — why we’re all magnetized towards sex. And more specifically,
to that orgasmic peak experience in sex, in self pleasure or with another person.
We want to experience this deep sense of connection.

Now, it’s easy for us as humans to chase that connection with another person, to seek
externally, to resource externally. But we have so much capacity internally within our
own mind, body, spirit mechanism to be able to access this boundlessness and this
boundless nature that is always with us.

Now, having addressed that very fundamental reason, let’s get into the four types.

We have one: reproduction. This is the most widely accepted reason
to go to sex. Because there’s still quite a bit of shame and stigma around sex amongst
families, communities, cultures, religions, countries, nations where sex is not as
widely embraced in very traditional mindsets. It’s seen very much as something that
we can embrace when we’re looking at baby making.

So that’s one reason. Then we have two: recreation. Less widely
accepted, but probably the most popular reason that people run to sex — arguably.
Recreation: we want to have a little bit of fun. Pleasure seeking, experience seeking,
sensation seeking, something new, something different, or something to explore with
yourself or with another person that offers sensational experiences and pleasure.
We’re pleasure seekers by nature, a lot of us.

Then we have number three: regenerative. This is where we look to
our self pleasure, masturbation practice, or sex with another person as an opportunity
to relieve a bit of stress. How often have you ever said, or have you ever heard
anybody else say, “Oh, my God, this was such a stressful day! I really need to go rub
one out.” Raise your hands, say “Amen!” “Hallelujah!”

Right. We turn to masturbation, self-pleasure, or to sex as a quick means to offload,
to off-stress, to reset the nervous system, to take the edge or to take the bite off
from our daily or weekly accumulation of stress. It’s also an opportunity for us to
experience a quick release and flood of feel-good hormones throughout the entirety of
the body — this beautiful cascade of pleasure hormones moving through in that experience
as we start to reach orgasm and as we reach our climax and as we are in our climax
and descending back down.

So we have reproduction, recreation, regenerative, restorative. And then we have
transformative, which is where we’re looking for not just a transitory
experience of healing or relief, but we’re experiencing mind blowing, life changing,
pattern shifting, orgasmic state of being.

This is where sex becomes more. This is where sex begins to transcend the mundane for
us. And we begin to experience ourselves as infinitely evolutionary beings. We get to
experience progressive evolution in our sexual activities. So sex becomes healing, not
just in the moment, but healing, long lasting.

And what does that look like? Well, on one level, I want to talk about the ancient
Taoist practices, tantric practices that have been incorporated into many different
modern sects of intimacy practices as well as yoga practices. And these techniques
include visualization, breath work, meditations, different ways of working with our
different senses and tuning into the subtlety of our experiences in our mind, body,
spirit mechanism to facilitate mastery over our nervous system, but ultimately over
energy.

And these ancient systems break down the cosmology into elements. The five elements
system is very popular: earth, water, air, wind, fire. And we’re learning to, in these
practices, become more conscious and aware of how these different elements are
expressing at any given time.

If there’s an imbalance of fire, it can turn up as anger, irritation, lack of patience,
impatience. If there’s really strong fire, that could look like ambition, and someone
can just keep going — someone has endless energy and a reservoir of passion to pursue
their goals or the motivations.

Water, earth — someone in the beautiful expression of earth is someone with whom you
can feel very grounded, with whom you feel very much in tune. You can feel safer in your
body and more present in your body. And on the other end, earth in its imbalance could
be too stuck — stubbornness, inability to be moved.

And so we start to gain mastery over it with these simple techniques of working the
mind and the body. Breath is a nice way to work with these elements, to bring balance
into our system, and also to experience the intensities and the extremes of those
elements in our systems — to grow our edges and to understand our capacities.

And so this is where we start to master our erotic energy in so many ways. We can call
all energy erotic energy. We can call all energy sexual energy. But when energy is
focused and felt somatically in our genital region, we think of it specifically in
terms of sexual energy. Because when we feel that sensation of arousal in our genital
region, it’s activating pleasure centers in certain areas of our brain, that causes us
to behave in certain ways, that chase certain experiences. And we label all of that
sexual.

But ultimately, that energy is vivifying and animating all areas and facets of our
life. And we want to keep that flow and that fluidity — and the mastery of being able
to direct it in one area, whether that’s sexual or whether that’s beyond sexual or
whether that’s an integration of sexual and all else.

So, transformative: the cervical orgasm can be very transformative. The transcendental
and energetic orgasms, full-bodied — where these are experiences that last longer than
just a matter of seconds, and you’re in a non-ordinary state of consciousness, and
you’re expanding your awareness. These are transformative orgasms.

Now, there are so many frameworks that you could find as regards love languages or your
arousal patterns, the arousal code — which I’m going to talk about soon enough — and
then sex types or sex reasons or sex archetypes. Why do these all matter? What’s the
utility in them? What’s the essence of what we can pull for our own benefit?

It’s that we can get clarity over what we’re desiring and what we can receive and what
we can benefit from within any situation we’re entering into.

So let’s say it’s a sexual experience. Well, we can have kids. We can try for that.
We can open up to the experience of what it means to bring life into this world and to
share that responsibility with another and to begin a family, or a community.

Or we can look at it as recreation, play, and find, wow, I really just want to let go
and let flow and experience what life has to bring me in this moment and have an
adventure or have something new to stimulate my senses and to bring me into a very
awakened state of being in my body in that moment. To feel something. I want to feel
something. I want to feel alive. I want to feel wanted. I want to feel desired. I want
to feel sexy. I want to feel like I am a desirable being in this body, whatever it is.
All of that — recreation.

And then we have regenerative, restorative — where, you know what, my partner is
really needing some love in this moment. I’m not feeling like I want to have sex, but
I love my partner so much that it’s something that I don’t feel like I’m abandoning
myself to do, to please him, her, them, to be with them in a way that’s going to allow
them to feel desired sexually right now.

Compliant sex, we call that — when you’re having sex not necessarily because you’re in
the desire and arousal for it with your partner. This is where you’re consensually
deciding, I’m going to have a sexual experience. Or you can do it for yourself: I’m
stressed. I need this. I need a break from being stubborn in my head, feeling out of
my body. And I need to ground back into my body and feel some sort of a sensational
experience that’s going to regenerate me and restore me into a more neutral state of
being, that’s going to reset my nervous system or give me some sort of a release.

Then we have that transformative — and we can have it all in one. We could actively be
working towards building a family and enjoying and having so much fun and play in our
sex, as well as experiencing the healing benefits that sex can bring us in that moment.
And then we have the transformative experiences of, wow — a lot of this has to do with
how open are you to receiving your life as an invitation and an opportunity for either
of these.

So frameworks — they’re beneficial for us because they give us structure to identify
and to communicate within our own selves as well as with our partners what we’re
desiring. They also give us an opportunity to find pleasure or enjoyment or satiety,
some sort of benefit, some gain through either of these classifications when we start
to expand beyond our preference.

So we don’t want to be rigidly attached to the frameworks. Love languages, whatever
it is — it’s great to first identify wherever you are in this moment today, what has
been your habit by nature throughout your lifetime, and to challenge yourself to grow
your edges and to expand into the possibility to be fully alive through all the
classifications.

Of course, not all of us are looking to have babies, so we can push that one to the
side, but we can have transformative experiences that are regenerative and restorative
as well as fun and playful. And we want to aspire to have all three in one. And if
we’re having kids, we absolutely want to have all four in one. We want that child to
be birthed into this world in this experience of pleasure and complete invitation on
all levels of our mind, body, spirit mechanism.

Okay, so this was supposed to be a quickie, but I think this ended up being a bit of
a longie. Go ahead and leave a comment if this resonated with you in any way — I’d
love to know, where have you found yourself on your path to sexuality? Have you found
yourself in either one of these categories predominantly? And where do you find
yourself today, and where would you like to expand towards? Have you found any
challenges with experiencing sex in either of these categories or classifications?

And what would you aspire to personally, in your own sexual journey, in terms of the
reason you go to sex — or the gain, the evolution, the benefit and liberation, whatever
positive thing you can pull away from your sexual experiences? Even empowerment can
fall into healing and transformative and play. Even kids — yeah, all of it.

Okay, thank you so much everybody, and tune in for more. I love you all.