What if the key to reclaiming pleasure starts with reclaiming your body?

In this episode, Kayla explores how patriarchal systems have weaponized body shame to keep women distracted, disconnected, and disempowered. She traces the cultural programming many of us absorbed growing up — the mall brands, the impossible beauty standards, the male gaze we internalized — back to predatory systems designed to make us feel unsafe in our own skin.

Kayla shares her own moment of reckoning while dancing alone in her kitchen, realizing she was still judging herself through someone else's eyes. She invites listeners to shift their relationship with their bodies from one of scrutiny to one of reverence — honoring what your body does for you, not just what it looks like.

This episode offers pathways to body reclamation through gratitude, cycle awareness, rest, and witnessing the beautiful diversity of real bodies in real life.

In this episode, we explore:

1. How patriarchy uses body shame to control and distract women
2. The insidious influence of mall culture and brands designed to prey on young girls
3. Recognizing and releasing the male gaze
4. Shifting from appearance to function: what does your body do for you?
5. Creating new narratives and identifying whose voices are in your head
6. Tracking your cycle with the moon and honoring rest
7. The power of witnessing real bodies in their natural habitat

This is for anyone ready to stop shrinking and start reclaiming their sacred body.

If you’re feeling called to stay in touch with Kayla:

1. Join my Newsletter Community + Get My FREE Sacred Body Workbook: A Guide to Healing Body Image and Embracing Pleasure
2. Support this podcast and leave me a tip!
3. Join the waitlist for the Sacred Desire course
4. Book your Liberation Wisdom session
5. Book 45 minute consultation
6. Email me at kayla@connectedpleasurecoaching.com with any questions

Welcome, beloveds, to the Connected Pleasure Podcast.

I am your host, Kayla Moore, certified sex therapist turned pleasure priestess and feminine liberation coach.

This is a sacred space where we

burn down the old narratives and rise into a new way of being, one led by intuition, pleasure and embodied truth.

Together we explore sexual healing, feminine liberation, and the reclamation of your sovereign power in a world that benefits from your disconnection.

In every episode, we peel back the layers of indoctrination, remember what is ours, and weave pleasure back into the collective consciousness one brave conversation at a time.

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If you're wanting to explore pleasure more fully for yourself, I invite you to go deeper with me through the offerings linked in the show notes or through the offerings of my guests.

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Welcome back, beloveds, to the Connected Pleasure Podcast.

I'm Kayla, your host.

I go by she, her, hers, pronouns, and I am here to talk to you today about the body.

I think the body is such an important aspect for us to talk about when it comes to pleasure, when it comes to where we are in the world right now.

The body is everything to our experience and to how people are trying to experience us and control us.

So let's dive in.

The body is sacred in my view, and so many of us have a hard relationship with our body, but this is not inherent to the human experience.

This is something that was created by our patriarchal structure.

I had a conversation earlier this week with a client around how so many women right now are in a space of trying to shrink themselves again because of the patriarchal structures clamping down.

There is direct correlation between when patriarchal structures really try to clamp down on its control of the people and women starting to shrink themselves to a point of malnutrition.

Bodies are a way for the patriarchy to gain control over women by scrutinizing our bodies, by making us afraid of our bodies, by making us feel like our bodies are unsafe to be in.

They are not enough.

They don't meet a certain standard that has been placed on them and it turns women against themselves and against each other and puts them in a place where we are focusing a lot more on what we look like, than anything else going on in the world.

And they want us to be looking away so that they can quietly, or right now, not so quietly, do the things that they are doing in the world.

They want women to not feel the power that we have inside of us so that they can control us and they can do what they want to do.

They can take over the world.

They can bomb different countries.

They can jockey of who is the best and brawniest and most the biggest bully in the world right now.

Meanwhile, there are a lot of women suffering in themselves and in their bodies.

And I am here to help you turn away from that.

Turn away from that propaganda and decide to do something different.

Decide to actually reclaim your relationship to your body.

And that leads to so many things, but it also leads to pleasure.

It also leads to you being able to accept and release and receive pleasure in yourself and in your body and with a partner, if you so choose to have one.

So what does it look like to reclaim the body?

There are so many different things that we can do.

There are so many different ways of showing up for your body, listening to your body, honoring your body, finding the softness and love for your body.

I've been posting, I think my algorithm on Instagram is just full of body positivity right now for my Connected Pleasure podcast Instagram account, because I get so many just like amazing, real women talking about their bodies, showing their bodies online.

And there's a big trend right now, at least in the corner of the Internet that I am in, around really reclaiming older bodies as well and not allowing this pervasive obsession with youth to take away our dignity and our wisdom as we grow older.

There's so much that I could say around this.

We are, you know, knee deep, maybe waist deep or as tall as I am deep, which is 5, 7 in the Epstein files right now.

And, you know, the word pedophilia is, or pedophile is being thrown out, like, you know, every five minutes, which, honestly, I kind of love.

I love that we are finally able to just say the thing and just open the can of worms and not look away.

And something interesting that has come out of that, too, is.

I mean, just everything is absolutely horrific.

I'm not going to go into what is in the Epstein files, but something that I personally found was very interesting about this conversation that I, you know, had no understanding of until all of this started coming out was how influential these people were in creating the culture that I grew up with.

The stores that were marketed toward young women when I was Growing up when mall culture was very high and everybody was, like, hanging out at the mall all the time, so many of these stores, like Victoria's Secret and Victoria's Secrets, Pink and Limited two and Hollister and Abercrombie and Fitch, like, all of these stores that were catered to young kids, but especially young girls and like young adolescent girls were really tailoring what the expectations were around bodies to a very, very detrimental place.

I mean, I. I kind of had to stop and think because somehow I evaded really getting so deep into it that, you know, I developed an eating disorder.

I know so many people that did.

We.

I went to an all girls Catholic high school and we actually had eating disorder awareness.

And I think there was a month out of the year that we would talk about eating disorders and what that looked like.

And it was very pervasive in our culture.

And I had to stop and wonder, like, why that wasn't something that I experienced.

And I think personally, I mean, I definitely felt shame around my body.

I did.

I remember doing a diet with my mother growing up.

My mother was definitely part of that diet culture too.

But somehow I think because my body had always been a little bit bigger than the standards of bodies growing up, that.

And I didn't always really fit into those clothes that those stores were carrying at the time, that I think somehow I kind of avoided the intense scrutiny around my body because my body was always a little bit bigger than that.

And I felt deep shame that I could never actually live up to that standard and be in, you know, those clothes and be the little doll that was parading around.

I mean, even thinking back to, like, Juicy Couture and how much my friends and I, like, loved Juicy and having Juicy on the butt, I mean, now in the context of what we know about it, it just is gross.

But I'm thankful for myself that somehow I was able to, like, move through it and move out of it.

And I think it was because I was a little bit on the outskirts of what it meant to be in those beauty standards.

But a lot of girls were not that lucky.

And a lot of girls and women still today very much struggle with the standards that were set.

And these standards were created so that these men could easily prey on these girls, that they created a culture where girls were primed to be preyed upon.

And that really gets into the male gaze.

I wanted to touch on the male gaze.

I wrote in my newsletter for this week that I had A moment last week where I was dancing in my kitchen and I just had a night where I just.

This eclipse season has been very emotional for me, so I just had a night where I just needed to, like, dance out my emotions.

I needed to feel a little bit of power in myself and go back to my pop divas that I love so much.

And while I was dancing, I had this realization that I, Even though I'm enjoying myself and I was having so much fun, I was still thinking of myself based on what somebody else would be thinking about me if they were in the room with me.

And specifically, what a man would think about me if they were in the room with me.

I felt, even though I'm happily married, I thought about, like, what would somebody think of me if they saw me?

Am I pretty enough?

Am I good enough at dancing?

Am I sexy enough?

How would they feel?

And I realized that I was viewing myself through the male gaze.

And I have had my adolescent self kind of show up for me throughout this eclipse season, which has been the last 4ish weeks.

It starts, I think, a couple weeks before the first eclipse, which we had on February 17th, and ends a couple weeks after our second eclipse, which was this week, March 3rd.

And I just had this realization that, again, this was, like, my adolescent self coming out and really viewing myself through this honestly, like, pedophilic male gaze that has been created for us.

And I stopped, and I was like, I don't want to think of myself this way anymore.

I don't want to feel this way about myself anymore.

And I really had a moment where I just decided, I'm.

I'm gonna let it go, and I'm gonna work on allowing myself to be me and to not pursue things in my life or think of myself based off of what other people would think of me.

That from now on, moving forward, I want all my successes and the things in my life that I'm pursuing to be about me and about me only about how much I love doing what I do, about how much I want to make a difference in the world and show up for the people in my life in the way that I want to show up for them.

I really want this to be something that we all collectively continue to think about is how do we work on letting go of viewing ourselves through the male gaze?

So, again, what are ways that we can do that?

I first like to look at.

How can we look at our bodies from the lens of what it does for us versus what it looks like as a mother, as somebody that has created life in my body.

You do not have to have created life in your body to experience gratitude for what it does for you.

But for me, the ultimate thing that my body has done for me is brought me, my son, has created actual life within itself.

And it is absolutely the craziest process you will ever go through because it's something that your body is doing, but you're not like, prompting it to do it.

You're not telling your body, make a heart, make an arm or a leg today.

It just does it.

It's just encoded.

It just knows how to do it.

And all you have to do is surrender to the process and kind of like get out of its way, which is its own thing in itself, but it's beautiful.

And there's a million things that our body does for us every day.

Our heart beats every day.

It never stops.

From the moment we have a heartbeat in utero to the day, we die.

Like, our heart is constantly beating.

That's also mind blowing to me that we just have an organ that just goes and never stops because if it did, then we would die.

And that's insane.

But it's there, and it's constantly keeping us alive and constantly keeping us connected to each other in the vibration of our heart, going ba boom, ba boom, ba boom, ba boom.

We are a living drum that is beating every day, and that's amazing to me.

We have hands that we use to touch, to write, to type, to create, to feed ourselves, to bathe ourselves, to hug, to embrace, to gesture, to, you know, anything under the sun, we can do with our hands.

We have legs and feet that carry us to wherever we need to go.

Obviously, there's total variety in here and so many different people with so many different, you know, ways of their body being and disabilities.

And so if I am saying something that you do not have, I totally understand and want you to know that I, I hear you.

And, you know, there are people that use wheelchairs, there are people that use crutches, all the things to help our bodies move in the way that they can.

So please know that I, I am holding you in this space, too.

We have eyes that see for us, that take in the beauty of this world.

We have ears that also get to hear sound and noise and music.

Music is one of my loves, and so I love that about my body, that I get to take in music or take in people's words and listen to podcasts, listen to other people, think and create and share their knowledge with the world.

I get to hear My son's laughter.

I get to experience him in all the different senses that I have.

I get to eat really yummy food.

And even though with my autoimmune disorder, I have a really hard time digesting food, no matter what food it is, I still get to eat, still somehow gets processed, Even if it's not in the best way that it could, but it still gets processed and disseminated into my body to give me whatever nutrients I am actually getting from it.

There's just endless things.

There are endless things that our body does for us on a daily basis.

And so making a list for yourself of what are the things that you are grateful for, that your body does for you, that you can become reverent to and honor and really appreciate about your body and bringing your soul into this world.

Our bodies are a vessel for our soul to experience this life, this ability to be human on planet Earth at this moment in time.

And I personally believe that our souls are eternal and will move on after this body is ready to go.

But while we're here, this body is what carries us through.

It's what helps us experience pleasure.

We get to experience pleasure through our bodies and be able to surrender and enjoy that pleasure.

So that is one way that you can start to reclaim your body.

Another way, I think, is just creating a relationship to your body, a positive relationship to your body.

Again, thinking about the narratives and the scripts that you have learned that we've kind of already gone over some, but really getting clear for yourself on what are the things that I have been taught about my body and from who.

Who are the voices that ring in my head when I look at myself in the mirror and I say, I don't like my stomach, I don't like this roll of fat.

I don't like this wrinkle or cellulite.

Where are the.

Where are those voices coming from for you?

Who is saying those words to you?

And really getting clear on what do you want your voice to say?

Who are you?

And what do you want your voice to say?

And how do you continue to say no to the other voices that are coming through and developing a daily practice for yourself through yoga, through, I would say, doing some type of movement that isn't about losing weight, it's not about becoming smaller.

It's not trying to make our bodies more optimized.

It's not trying to push your body further and harder than it needs to.

It's just about honoring where your body is at and allowing your body to be in the space that you're in and connecting to your body, feeling safe and whole in your body.

I find that in dance.

I find that in yoga, even in doing breath work or meditation.

Like connecting inward to my inner state and really sitting within my body instead of thinking about the external of my body, really helps me to connect to my body and start to build a more positive relationship with my body.

And I will say, like, I am not perfect.

I am not like I am woman.

Hear me roar.

I never have a bad thought or negative thought about my body ever.

That is definitely not it.

But I constantly, every day, try to remind myself of the positives, to be grateful for my body and to honor my body in the ways that I can.

Another way is rest.

If you are a womb owner that still bleeds, rest is absolutely essential.

It is essential for everyone.

And I also love really tracking my cycle, tracking it with the moon.

And you do not actually have to bleed to be bleeding, to like actively bleeding, actively moving through cycles to track yourself with the moon.

If you are going through menopause, if you are like well beyond that stage of life, or if you don't have a womb for whatever reason, or if you are a male that doesn't have a womb, you can track yourself based on the moon cycles, from the new moon through the full moon and then to the next new moon.

So new moon to new moon is a full cycle.

And for those of us that do bleed, we go through a cycle of the menstruation phase or menstrual phase.

Then we go into the follicular phase where our, our ovaries are preparing the egg to be released during ovulation.

Then we go through ovulation and the egg gets released.

And then we go through the luteal phase where we are kind of coming inward and our body is preparing for menstruation if the egg does not get fertilized, and then we go into menstruation again.

So there are four phases, but these line up with the phases of the moon as well.

And a lot of these phases also we see everywhere in nature and in our world.

This is a cycle that goes around and around and around.

And this is the cycle of creation.

So it is everywhere.

It is everywhere from the seasons.

If you mapped it along the four phases of the menstrual cycle that I just said, it would be winter, spring, summer and fall.

And we just, we see this cycle all over creation.

So being able to come to a place where you are looking at, where is my body in relationship to the earth, in Relationship to the moon.

The moon is very feminine.

She is leading us.

The sun is masculine and the moon is feminine.

We always have the divine masculine and the divine feminine coming into harmony.

And so the moon is our guide in the feminine throughout the month.

You have lots of other guides, and you can dive into that more deeply.

But the moon is really a central figure for a lot of us in how we are moving through the feminine energy in a month.

And that is a really important piece, I think, in the way that I work with the body and the way that I work with my clients and being able to find reverence in themselves and reverence in their bodies and really understand what their bodies are going through throughout the month.

So that is another way, I would say the final way, this is not the final and only way, but the final way that I will give you is to really pay attention to other bodies out in the world.

I know this could feel like, well, shouldn't we just, like, not be paying attention to bodies?

Yeah, I don't want you paying attention to them in the way that you were, like, scrutinizing them.

But I had a realization after my son was born and we started going to the Y M C A for his swimming lessons.

And I, you know, I had so much shame around my body after my son was born.

My body was the biggest it's ever been in my life.

I, you know, looked different, I felt different, my clothes were different.

It's.

It's been a journey after motherhood to also, like, come back to a sense of, I feel okay in my body again, even when, you know, I. I may still want to change things about my body, but right now, my body is the way that it is, and I'm okay with where it is right now, But I really started to stop and look at other women that were in the pool playing with their children.

And I would say, like, 90% of those women, if not more, were way outside the standard of beauty in our culture, and yet they were out there doing it.

They were wearing bathing suits.

They were in the water with their children, and.

And same with men.

I mean, there are tons of men out there that are absolutely not the standard of beauty for men either.

But they were out there enjoying their children or swimming for the love of swimming or, you know, going in the hot tub and taking care of their bodies.

People are out just living their lives in their bodies.

And if we are going to allow the patriarchy to shame us so much that we don't want to go out in public and show our bodies, but risk then not experiencing things that are really important for us to be able to experience.

Like going swimming with your child.

I just don't accept that.

And I think seeing the variety of real bodies in real life instead of what is online, on your phone or in a magazine or on a billboard is so important.

We have to get out of the bubble of what has been curated for us to consume, to really understand and see the full variety and the full, full breadth and beauty of the bodies that are in real life and know that most people in real life do not actually look like what we are trying to look like.

That that actually isn't normal life.

And a lot of the people we already know this has been broken down for a long time.

But I think it's always worth reminding that most of these women that are in these pictures are also photoshopped and don't actually look the way that they look in pictures either.

And so I think it's so important to be able to just experience bodies in in their natural habitat, in real life and experience people that are just living their lives and being in the body that they have and experiencing life through that body, no matter what it looks like.

So that has been a lot.

I am so glad that we are having this conversation.

I hope it resonated with you.

If you want to keep going on this, I have a Sacred Body workbook that is a guide to healing body image and embracing pleasure for yourself that is free with a subscription to my newsletter.

So in my outro you will hear more about it.

But I just really wanted to tell you here that if you are interested in continuing this journey or this conversation around your body, that workbook is a really great way to keep going on this and to start that conversation and that work with yourself.

And that is a great precursor to any container, any sort of coaching that you could do with me.

So I really encourage you to go to the link below to sign up for my newsletter.

You can unsubscribe at any point in time and still have that workbook for free.

So if you want to subscribe to my newsletter and go through a couple cycles in my newsletter, see if it's something that you like and enjoy.

That's great.

If you want to unsubscribe at any time, no worries.

But that workbook will be there for you to have and to use whenever you feel like it.

So with that, I so appreciate you being here and I will talk to you in my next episode.

Take care everyone.

Thank you for joining me for this episode of the Connected Pleasure Podcast.

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