Everything has pleasure because the nature of life force itself and the generative property that we're even alive has so much pleasure there.
- Kimberly Ann Johnson
Episode 192 orgasmic birth® the podcast
Your Pleasure Pathway: Unlock Your Desire, the Nervous System & the Art of Feeling Good
with Kimberly Ann Johnson
Welcome to Episode 192
Postpartum pleasure isn’t something you earn. Learn why ‘touched out’ often hides unmet desire and how a slow, sensory practice brings you home.
Postpartum Pleasure: How to Reclaim Desire After Baby
Postpartum pleasure is often treated as something that disappears with motherhood. Kimberly Ann Johnson, a sexological bodyworker, somatic experiencing practitioner and author of The Fourth Trimester, sees it differently. She says pleasure is not lost. It is already in the body, waiting to be noticed.
Why “Touched Out” Often Means Something Else
New mothers are often told that being touched out and having low libido are normal. Johnson has found that these phrases usually cover something more specific. Most women still want intimacy. They just don’t want the kind they were offered before, and they haven’t had a chance to work out what they want now.
She suggests a different question. If sex were a gift you received, what would you want it to feel like? That question moves the focus from giving to receiving. It also opens the door to forms of closeness that are not centered on penetration.
Naming what is happening helps too. Saying “I want closeness with you, but I don’t recognize this body yet” lifts shame and gives a partner something real to respond to.
How to Find Postpartum Pleasure Without Pressure
Johnson warns against making pleasure another task. Nothing kills desire faster than being told you should feel it. Instead, she points to the sensory world that is already there. Taste your drink. Feel the water on your skin. Watch the leaves fall outside your window.
One simple practice takes under a minute. Trace the outline of one hand with the fingertips of the other, moving at half your usual speed or slower. Notice any change in your breath or any new impulse in your body.
Why Life Transitions Are “Wet Clay”
Johnson describes postpartum and menopause as wet clay periods, times when the body and nervous system can be reshaped. With support, that shaping can move toward pleasure. Without it, many women are rewired toward pain and depletion.
Slowing down is hard when the nervous system has never practiced it. Many women also lack inherited guidance, because mothers and grandmothers went through surgical births, twilight births or early hysterectomies. Reclaiming that knowledge means remembering what lives in the bones and tissues.
The Takeaway
Postpartum pleasure is not about adding one more thing to your list. It is about noticing what is already there and speaking honestly about what you want. Small sensory moments, practiced slowly, can start to rewire the body toward feeling good.
Meet Kimberly:
Kimberly Ann Johnson is a sexological bodyworker, Somatic Experiencing practitioner, birth doula, international teacher, and culture worker whose work centers on women’s sexuality, embodiment, birth, and the nervous system. She brings together somatic practice and a deep interest in how life transitions can shape women’s relationships with their bodies and pleasure.
Johnson is the author of The Fourth Trimester, a widely read book on postpartum recovery and early motherhood, and Erotic Seasons, which explores female sexuality, spirituality, and embodied wisdom. She is also co-author of Reckoning with Stephen Jenkinson, creator of the Reclaiming the Feminine series with Sounds True, and host of the Sex Birth Trauma podcast. Through her teaching and Jaguar methodologies, she has trained more than 18,500 women and teaches internationally on women’s health and embodied power5
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