The Root Cause Medicine Podcast · Rupa Health

How Embodied Practices May Help You Navigate Daily Stress with Dr. Saida Desilets

·37 min·2 clips

Dr. Seda says beauty, oxytocin, and body awareness can help shift stress toward pleasure and downregulation.

1. The Root Cause Medicine Podcast episode centers on Dr. Seda Desilets and embodied practices for daily stress, low libido, and nervous-system regulation. 2. Dr. Keri Jones hosts Dr. Seda Desilets, described on-air as a thought leader, educator, and pioneer in women’s psychosexual health. 3. The episode asks what pleasure can do for women’s bodies when stress, shame, and disconnection dominate daily life. 4. Keri Jones cites research that 40% to 70% of women struggle with low libido and a 2023 American Psychological Association survey showing 27% of women at stress levels of 8, 9, or 10. 5. Desilets defines “embodied” as lived experience through the body, not a conceptual idea, and says sex therapy and talk therapy often miss the body issue. 6. She describes “limbic imprinting” through a mother or other primary caregiver, saying a woman learns whether body experience is “okay,” “shameful,” “yummy,” or “painful.” 7. She says women can “re-imprint the system” because the body is plastic, but first have to identify the original imprint and the soil they grew up in. 8. Desilets links menstrual cycles, fertility, birth, and the “power stage of life” to the same factors, including nature, hydration, movement, and pleasure. 9. She connects telomeres to the episode by comparing them to the plastic tip on a shoelace and saying certain factors can lengthen telomeres. 10. She argues that beauty is missing from longevity conversations and names sunsets, forests, rivers, sounds, smells, textures, and a child’s smile as inputs that help the body downregulate. 11. Desilets says the nervous system tracks “owies” and “yum,” and she names the “pleasure pathway” as a storyline that society often underuses. 12. She says pleasure is not frivolous and claims it supports immune function, hormones, digestion, and social engagement. 13. She says she wants to do clinical research on arousal and pleasure because current markers focus on cortisol and stress rather than pleasure-based change. 14. Keri Jones describes patients who can name stress but struggle to identify “yummy” moments, sunsets, or joy in daily life. 15. Desilets responds that women carrying stress or trauma need a daily, non-negotiable practice that can increase plasticity through oxytocin and make story-rewriting easier. 16. She says the goal is to create “a sense of home within our own body” and to move from dissociation into safety. 17. She explains the CUV complex by describing the clitoris, the urethral sponge, and the vagina as a functional pleasure system, with breathing that lets the vulva “poof out” on inhale. 18. The conversation is interview-based and practical, with Keri Jones pressing for definitions, examples, and clinical relevance throughout. 19. People interested in menopause, libido, nervous-system regulation, and body-based practices for women would likely benefit from this episode. 20. People wanting a purely pharmacologic discussion or anatomy-only overview may skip it.

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from The Root Cause Medicine Podcast