There was a stretch in midlife where I thought my libido had quietly packed a bag and left the building.
Not dramatically. Not with a slammed door. Just… diminished. Blurry. Harder to access.
Seven years post-menopause, a few recent hormone tweaks have absolutely helped. Thank God for science. And for doctors who don’t gaslight women into thinking dryness and disinterest are personality flaws.
But hormones weren’t the whole story.
My Aussie man and I finally started getting real language around desire after reading Miranda July’s book All Fours and realizing that what we were feeling wasn’t “broken.” It was unspoken. There’s a difference. Once we had words, things shifted. Not instantly. But honestly.
And then I got introduced to Jana Danielson - movement educator, author of The Sacred Woman’s Guide to Moving Better, pelvic floor advocate, and founder of Bloom Better and the Cooch Ball - by Andrea Claire of the Fxck You 50s podcast and Dr. Trina Read, sexologist, author of The Taboo Show, and host of the Sensational Sex and Pursuit of Pleasure podcasts.
When women I trust start talking about pelvic floor health, empowerment, and actually feeling again, I pay attention.
Because here’s the truth: midlife sex doesn’t have to be dead. But it does require us to stop pretending we can think our way back into desire. We have to feel our way there.
Jana is here to help us take even more control…not just of our pelvic floor, but of our pleasure, our presence, and the narrative that says this part of life is supposed to shrink.
Let’s get into it.
1. Midlife is often framed as a time of sexual decline. From your work, what actually changes—and what wakes up—when women stop performing sex and start listening to their bodies?
Jana: I LOVE this question! I am 52 years old and a few months ago was talking to my friend Amy St. Germain, the Founder of Oboo, and she was telling me that she saw a stat that said that 50% of women over 50 do not have any form of intercourse or self pleasure! WHATTTT! For someone like me whose tagline is “Waking Women Up One Cooch at a Time” that stat made me sad at first, and then it motivated me to make an impact on women and decrease this number!!
What changes physiologically is real, hormones shift, tissues change, nerve sensitivity fluctuates. But what wakes up when women stop performing is self-awareness. They start noticing what they actually feel, what they actually want, what has never actually worked for them but they did anyway. That’s not decline. That’s data.
And here’s the piece that almost no one talks about: the ability to receive.
Dr. Mindy Pelz speaks to this beautifully in Age Like a Girl, when a young woman first encounters her hormones and gets her period, her brain literally reorganizes itself. It shifts from a “self-first” orientation to one where she feels most validated, most seen, when she is caring for others. That’s not a flaw. That’s biology. But it means that for decades, most women have been wired to give, to tend, to anticipate everyone else’s needs, including in the bedroom.
Then midlife arrives. Hormones reset. And for the first time since adolescence, the brain begins returning to self. It’s a biological invitation to come home to your own experience. But here’s the thing, you can’t just flip a switch after thirty years of conditioning. Unlearning takes time. It takes practice. It takes someone saying out loud: your pleasure matters.
Not as a reward. Not as a bonus. As a birthright.
So many women have quietly filed pleasure under “optional” or something to get to if there’s time, if everyone else is okay, if they’ve earned it. Midlife is the moment to cross that out entirely. Pleasure isn’t optional. It’s physiological. It’s psychological. It is, in every sense, your right and reclaiming it starts with finally being willing to receive it.
2. Many women come to midlife disconnected from their pelvic floor, often without realizing it. What are the most common myths you see about pelvic health and desire that keep women feeling broken or “past it”?
Jana: The biggest myth? That Kegels are the answer to everything. They’re not, and for many women, they’re actively making things worse. Here’s why that matters.
Most women arrive at midlife carrying decades of holding. Holding stress. Holding grief. Holding the weight of being everything to everyone. The clothes and the shoes that we wear very much impact the pelvic floor in a less than optimal way and we do not even realize it! And so much of that holding lives in the pelvis and the pelvic floor. When we guard, protect, and brace through this part of our body for years, we tap directly into the sympathetic nervous system. Fight. Flight. Freeze. The brain starts operating as if we are constantly running from something. And when that’s the baseline, we can’t even meet our most fundamental need: safety.
So the pelvic floor becomes a rock wall. Tight. Armored. Holding onto stress and emotional residue that has nowhere else to go.
And then we cough. We sneeze. We laugh too hard. And we leak. Our rational mind immediately says, okay, do more Kegels. But that’s the trap. The traditional Kegel of ‘stop the flow, start the flow, squeeze and hold’ only adds more tension to a muscle that is already over-tensed. And here’s the truth that changed everything for me: a tight muscle is not a functionally strong one. Tension and strength are not the same thing. I learned this early in my life, at 21 years old when I was on 11 medications for gut pain, headaches and joints that felt like the Tin Man from the Wizard of Oz after a heavy rain, I peed my pants everyday and I was not a new mom nor was I in menopause. This turned out to be a gift as it was the inspiration that brought me to create the Cooch Ball over 20 years later (but I digress, let’s get back to this answer!).
So before we strengthen these 14 muscles, we have to release these 14 muscles. Pelvic floor physiotherapy is one of the most powerful ways to begin that process. So is the Cooch Ball, a pelvic floor fitness tool that I created! It works with movement and breath to create the kind of dynamic, functional engagement that actually restores the pelvic floor rather than gripping it tighter. When I discovered the research from Dr. Bruce Crawford showing that 90% of pelvic floor dysfunction is a movement and fitness issue, not a medical one, that was the moment I knew I had to create a fitness solution. Not another squeeze-and-hold protocol. A movement practice. The Cooch Ball was born!
The second myth is that disconnection is just “getting older.” No. Disconnection is the result of decades of not being taught to acknowledge and love this part of our body. We were taught to manage it, contain it, or ignore it entirely.
And the third myth, the one I want to dismantle loudly and clearly: that leaking, pain, numbness, and pelvic floor dysfunction are normal. They are not normal. They are common. Those are two completely different things. Common means many women experience it. Normal means it’s supposed to happen. It is not supposed to happen. It is simply what occurs when a whole generation of women was never given the tools, the language, or the permission to care for this part of themselves. That changes now.
3. You talk a lot about sensation, presence, and embodiment—not performance. How does reconnecting with the pelvic floor change the way women experience desire, pleasure, and even confidence outside the bedroom?
Jana: The pelvic floor is the physical center of the body. It’s connected to your breath, your nervous system, your posture, your core, your voice. When it’s tight, guarded, or numb, that energy doesn’t just stay in one place, it radiates outward. Women feel it in how they carry themselves, how they show up in meetings, how present they feel in conversation. Embodiment isn’t a concept. It’s a felt experience. And once you feel it, you can’t unfeel it.
But let’s go even deeper because this is where it gets both scientific and revolutionary.
According to Dr. Sara Reardon in Floored: A Woman’s Guide to Pelvic Floor Health at Every Age and Stage, in order to orgasm, the pelvic floor muscles need to contract and relax (turn on and off) anywhere between 2 and 32 times. That’s not passive. That requires intelligent, responsive, well-trained muscles. Which means orgasm isn’t luck. It isn’t reserved for a special category of women who somehow won the genetic lottery. It is a physiological capacity that every woman has and like any capacity, it responds to awareness, practice, and training. When I say we need to know our bodies, this is exactly what I mean. We don’t just want strong pelvic floors. We want smart ones.
And then there’s the piece that stops me every single time I talk about it, the pudendal nerve.
The pudendal nerve is the primary motor and sensory nerve connecting the brain to the genitals and pelvic floor in both men and women. It carries everything sensation, pleasure, pain, signal, response. It is the communication highway between your mind and your most intimate self.
And its Latin root? Pudendal means an area of shame.
Let that land for a moment. The main nerve responsible for bringing pleasure from the pelvic floor to the brain is literally named after shame. And according to Dr. David R. Hawkins’ research on emotional frequency, shame is the single lowest-vibrating emotion a human being can carry. It sits at the very bottom, below grief, below fear, below anger. It is the heaviest thing we hold.
So when women feel disconnected from desire, from sensation, from their own bodies it is not weakness. It is not dysfunction. It is, in many cases, the accumulated weight of shame that has been layered onto this part of us for generations. Culturally. Religiously. Relationally. That shame lives in the nerve itself, etymologically, historically, and somatically.
Reconnecting with the pelvic floor is therefore not just a fitness practice. It is an act of reclamation. Every breath that softens this area, every intentional movement that restores sensation, every moment of curiosity instead of avoidance, it is a woman choosing a higher frequency. Choosing herself. Choosing pleasure over shame.
That is what changes outside the bedroom too. When a woman stops carrying shame in her center, she stands differently. She speaks differently. She takes up space differently. That’s not a metaphor. That’s the body, finally free to move.
4. Menopause and perimenopause can bring pain, numbness, or fear around sex. What do you wish more women understood about what’s happening physiologically—and what isn’t actually permanent or inevitable?
Jana: I wish women knew that dryness, discomfort, and numbness are physiological responses not punishments, not the end of the story. Estrogen decline affects vaginal tissue, yes. But tissue responds to blood flow, and blood flow responds to movement, stimulation, and hydration. We can influence this. More than most women realize.
And I wish more women understood the fear cycle because this is where so much unnecessary suffering lives. Fear creates tension. Tension creates pain. Pain creates more fear. It is a loop, and it is absolutely breakable. Breath work, pelvic floor release, proper lubrication, and when appropriate, hormone support can interrupt that cycle at any point. None of this is inevitable. Some of it is just unaddressed. There is a massive difference between those two things.
Which brings me to the tool I wish every woman in perimenopause and menopause had in her hands immediately: her own breath. Specifically, her diaphragm.
Here’s what most women don’t know, the diaphragm and the pelvic floor are biomechanical partners. They move together. When you inhale and your diaphragm drops, your pelvic floor gently descends and lengthens with it. When you exhale and your diaphragm rises, your pelvic floor naturally lifts. They are in constant conversation. But the vast majority of women are neck and chest breathers, short, shallow, upper-body breaths that never reach the diaphragm and therefore never reach the pelvic floor. The partnership goes silent.
When we learn to breathe diaphragmatically, fully, slowly, letting the belly expand on the inhale and soften on the exhale we are doing several things simultaneously. We are directly activating the parasympathetic nervous system, pulling the body out of fight-or-flight and into rest and restore. We are taking in 600% more oxygen into our cells. We are increasing blood flow to the pelvic region, which is exactly what tissue needs to stay healthy, responsive, and lubricated. And we are creating a gentle, rhythmic release in the pelvic floor the kind of release that no Kegel, no gadget, and no supplement can replicate on its own.
For women experiencing pain or fear around sex, diaphragmatic breathing is often the very first entry point because it is safe, it is always available, and it begins to rebuild the conversation between the brain and the body before anything else is asked of either one.
You don’t have to fix everything at once. Start with a breath. A real one. All the way down.
5. There’s a big difference between “having sex” and feeling desire. For midlife women who say, “I don’t want sex anymore,” how do you help them untangle whether it’s hormones, resentment, exhaustion, conditioning—or something else entirely?
Jana: I always start by asking: When did you last feel desire for anything? Not just sex but anything. A meal. A conversation. A creative project. If desire has gone quiet across the board, we’re usually talking about nervous system depletion. The body has nothing left to give. That’s not a libido problem. That’s a load problem.
But if desire shows up in other places and just not here then that’s important information. That points to something relational, or historical, or rooted in how sex has been framed for her entire life. Was it ever for her? Or always for someone else? Untangling that honestly, without shame, is where real change begins. Hormones are one chapter. They are not the whole book.
And here is the framework that I come back to again and again when working with women on desire because I believe the pelvic floor is not one thing. It is a trifecta.
The first layer is the physical - the muscles, the fascia, the nerves. This is where most conversations about pelvic health begin and, unfortunately, end. But it is only the foundation.
The second layer is the emotional - this is where we hold. Where we protect. Where we store what we never processed, never said, never let go of. Decades of stress, grief, resentment, and unmet needs don’t just live in our minds. They live in our tissue. The pelvis is one of the body’s primary storage units for emotional residue, and until we acknowledge that layer, no amount of physical work will fully unlock what’s possible.
The third layer is the energetic - and this is the one that changes everything for women who have tried everything else. The sacral chakra sits in the pelvic bowl. I call it the sacred chakra because that feels more true. This is the energy center where sensuality lives. Where creativity lives. Where the capacity to feel, to flow, to generate and receive lives. When this center is blocked, stuck, or simply ignored, the impact ripples far beyond the bedroom. Women notice it in their creative life, their joy, their sense of aliveness in the world.
So when a woman says I don’t want sex anymore I don’t just hear a libido question. I hear a woman who may be physically tight, emotionally guarded, and energetically shut down in her center. And the path back isn’t a single solution. It’s tending to all three layers with curiosity, with patience, and with the radical understanding that desire isn’t a luxury. It is life force. And it lives right here.
6. Cooch Balls are often misunderstood as just another wellness gadget. How do you explain their role in healing, pleasure, and nervous system regulation—especially for women who feel intimidated or skeptical?
Jana: I get the skepticism. The wellness industry has handed women a lot of things that promise transformation and deliver very little. So let me be direct: Cooch Balls are a tool for proprioception which means helping your brain reconnect to a part of your body it may have lost the signal to. That’s not a gadget. That’s rehabilitation.
But before I explain what the Cooch Ball does, I want to talk about what it restores because that’s the real story.
Blood flow is Queen.
I mean that with every ounce of conviction I have. Blood flow is our body’s life force. Oxygen-rich, nutrient-rich blood is how tissue heals, how nerves communicate, how muscles function, how sensation returns. Without it, everything downstream suffers quietly, gradually, and in ways we often chalk up to aging or bad luck rather than stagnation.
And here’s the reality for so many midlife women: the pelvic floor is one of the most blood-flow-deprived areas in the body. We sit for long hours. We hold tension without realizing it. We stop moving this part of ourselves intentionally or we never started. Over time, fascial restrictions build up around the pelvic floor muscles like shrink wrap, slowly suffocating them from the circulation they need to stay healthy, responsive, and alive. When we believe this is just my life now and we stop engaging, that stagnation becomes the new normal. And the whole body’s systems feel it.
This is exactly what the Cooch Ball was designed to address.
Sitting on the Cooch Ball which has been specifically engineered to work with the body’s tissues and nervous system, not against them for just three minutes a day begins to melt through those fascial restrictions. It creates gentle, targeted blood flow back into a region that has been starved of it. The pelvic floor muscles receive nourishment. Sensation starts to return. The brain and the body begin talking to each other again.
The gentle weight and movement also create proprioceptive feedback, your pelvic floor has to respond, adapt, and engage in a way that passive Kegel squeezing never achieves. And because the pelvic floor is so intimately connected to the vagus nerve and the parasympathetic nervous system, that engagement has a regulating effect on the whole body. Women tell me they feel calmer. Clearer. More themselves. That’s not marketing. That’s nervous system science.
It is done at home. Fully clothed. Three minutes a day.
I call it CPR for your pelvic floor because that’s exactly what it is. You are bringing something back to life that was never meant to go quiet. You are restoring circulation to your center. And from that center, everything changes.
Start with curiosity. You don’t have to commit to anything more than that. Three minutes. That’s all. Your body will do the rest.
Bonus Question
7. If a midlife woman feels disconnected from her sexuality but isn’t sure she even wants to “get it back,” what’s the smallest, least-performative place you’d invite her to start?
Jana: Breathe into your belly. Slowly. On purpose. Right now.
That’s it. That’s the first move because breath is the fastest bridge between the thinking mind and the feeling body. You don’t have to want anything yet. You don’t have to fix anything or reclaim anything or show up for anyone. Just breathe. Let your belly soften. Let your pelvic floor release on the inhale.
Do that for two minutes a day for two weeks and tell me nothing shifts. I’ll wait.
Connection always starts smaller than we think. And it almost always starts with breath.
And here is what I also want every woman reading this to hear, the reclamation is real. The reawakening is real. Women experience it every single day and it moves me every single time. But so is the disconnection. And here’s the thing about that: it’s okay. More than okay, it’s necessary.
That’s the contrast of life. If we were always turned on, always connected, always humming with aliveness we wouldn’t actually know what any of it meant. We need the quiet seasons. We need the moments of I don’t even know what I want so that when the signal returns, we can feel the difference. We can actually receive it.
So if you are in a season of disconnect right now please don’t freak out. Don’t make it mean something is broken or gone or your fault. Ask instead: what is this season showing me? What am I being invited to release, to rest, to reconsider?
Disconnection is not the end of the story. It is often the very thing that makes the reconnection so profound. You are not behind. You are not broken. You are in contrast and contrast is how we learn what we truly desire.
Breathe. Begin there. The rest will find you.
The Bottom (no pun intended) Line:
If you’ve been waiting to feel like yourself again, this is your reminder that nothing about you is missing. Midlife doesn’t take desire away. It asks us to participate in it differently.
That shift can start small. With breath. With awareness. With learning what’s actually happening in your body instead of assuming the story you’ve been handed is the only one available.
Jana’s work gives women practical ways back into sensation, strength, and connection… not through performance, but through presence. If this conversation sparked something for you, here are a few easy places to start:
Start with the basics - Explore the Terrain Fitness Bundle here.
Learn about the Cooch Ball - A simple daily tool to restore pelvic floor connection https://bloombetter.life/angela.
Join her guided membership space at The Bloom Room community.
Explore menopause-specific support programs and education for this stage of life here.
And if you want ongoing insight into pelvic health, embodiment, and what’s actually possible in midlife, follow Jana on Instagram; she shares practical education there every day.
Midlife doesn’t always take desire away… it changes how we learn to find it again.
#RealGirlsGuidetoMidlife, #Midlife Desire, #MidlifeSexDrive #Libido #RGG
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Love this whole conversation!!!!