🎙️The Wood Wide Web of Pleasure: What Fungi Teach Us About Turn-On (Mycelium Knows: The Quiet, Wild Intelligence of Your Erotic Body)

Beneath every thriving forest is a hidden network—the mycelium—silently carrying messages, sharing resources, and sustaining life.
What if your body worked the same way?

In today’s episode, we explore the erotic wisdom of the mycelium network and how it mirrors your nervous system’s own self-organizing intelligence. You’ll learn why numbness, disconnection, or low desire aren’t failures—they’re reallocated resources in response to survival. And the path back to pleasure isn’t forcing yourself to “relax,” but supporting your system’s natural rhythms, defenses, and desires.

If you’ve ever felt like your body is withholding pleasure, this episode is your invitation to meet yourself in the soil—quietly, wildly, and with deep respect.

🧠 In This Episode, We Explore:

• What the mycelium network is—and why it’s the perfect metaphor for your pleasure pathways

• How your nervous system reallocates energy away from turn-on (and why that’s actually brilliant)

• Why chronic stress, body shame, and subtle disconnection shut down arousal

• The true impact of sexual shame on your body’s sense of safety

• A sexological bodywork approach to healing: not by pushing through, but by honoring your survival strategies

• How to support your body’s impulse to close, protect, and then re-open again

• What it means to ride the full wave of erotic regulation
  
  

🚨🔥 HOTTEST DEAL OF THE SUMMER 🔥🚨

Reset Your Erotic Rhythm is at its lowest price EVER—August only! Price doubles in September and ever month until December!😳💦

https://www.bodycompass.me/self-paced-course-rese-erotic-rhythmcouples 

Free Erotic Body Reconnection Kit (Previously 3 Best Sexological Bodywork Practices)

The 3 most impactful practices from My Erotic Literacy Vault—
field tested in sessions, and personally loved by yours truly—
to Melt Freeze, Rebuild Trust, and Restore Erotic Aliveness.

Free Download | Created by a Certified Sexological Bodyworker®

🔥 Free Download: Download our ultimate FREE erotic symptom decoder: 

The DSM-XXX

🌀 Desire & Somatics Mythos

✨ 100+ page reference guide: a RADICAL RECLASSIFICATION of what our culture calls sexual dysfunction—and what your body knows as sacred. 🌿
👉 DOWNLOAD HERE

DSM-XXX: Desire & Somatics Mythos is our 100+ page reference guide for anyone who’s ever been told their sexuality is dysfunctional—when really, it’s just been misinterpreted.

Inside, you’ll find:
✦ Reframings of so-called “sexual dysfunctions” like pelvic pain, vaginismus, anorgasmia, through a trauma-informed, pleasure-centered lens
✦ Somatic context for things like low libido, pain, dissociation, and numbness
✦ Radical translations of what your body might actually be saying when it doesn’t follow the cultural script
✦ Alternatives to diagnosis culture that honor nervous system rhythms, safety, and truth over performance
👉 DOWNLOAD HERE

🔥 Join the pleasure rebellion

Sacred sex ed, somatic rituals, and a radical return to your body.

👉 www.bodycompass.me

💌 Stay Connected

If this episode made something bloom inside you:

• Subscribe to The Nature of Pleasure for weekly explorations of embodiment, intimacy, and erotic wisdom

• Leave a review—it helps us reach more bodies who need this

• Tag me on Instagram @yourhandle and share what landed using #NatureOfPleasurePodcast
  
  

Your pleasure isn’t lost.
It’s underground, quiet, waiting—
just like the mycelium.

🌀🌿✨

---

Full Transcript Here:

     I want to center today's episode on a metaphor 'cause y'all know I love my metaphors. And if whimsy and storytelling is not your vibe, you might wanna skip to the next one. So today we will be. Spending a little bit of time with Mycelium, the Mycelium network, um, and hidden pathways to pleasure. Just to paint a little bit more of a picture of how awesome your body is, how much your body's made for pleasure, and to give, um, a little more color to how it works and what it might feel like in your body.

So what if I told you that been deep beneath your feet and the soil of forests? There's an invisible network, one that allows trees to communicate, share resources, and even warn each other of danger. This hidden web known as the mycelium network is what keeps entire ecosystems alive and the craziest part, your potty works the same exact way.

Okay. Right now you have pathways of pleasure inside you that are waiting to be activated. Maybe you felt blocked, numb, or like pleasure just isn't accessible to you. But what if I told you that like my CA, your body already has the connections. It just needs the right signals to wake them up. Okay, so we're going to explore how the secret world of fungi can teach us how to access more pleasure, more connection, and a deeper relationship with our bodies.

So I'm gonna introduce you to the world beneath the forest floor. When you walk through a forest, what you see, trees, plants, flowers, is only a fraction of the story. What you don't see is the vast underground network of mycelium, tiny thread like fungi that connect the roots of trees stretching for miles.

These fungi create what scientists call the wood wide web, a massive communication system that allows trees to share nutrients, to warn each other of threats, and even help weaker trees survive. Gorgeous. Totally gorgeous. Okay, so if one tree is struggling nearby, trees will send it nutrients through the mycelium.

If a predator starts eating the leaves of one plant, the others receive chemical signals to prepare their defenses. The mycelium network ensures that the entire ecosystem thrives, not just individual trees. So what does this have to do with pleasure? Oh my gosh. This is such a powerful metaphor for for pleasure.

So your nervous system operates in the exact same way. Your whole system, your self-organizing system, has this same mechanism. There's networks of sensory pathways throughout the body, connecting your skin muscles, deepest tissues to pleasure and just like. When one of those trees, um, is in trouble and we, the forest reallocates nutrients, your body does that exact same thing.

So if you are not feeling safe or respected in your house, in your home, your body will reallocate your resources away from pleasure. So a, a really. Important piece to tying this entire metaphor together is that pleasure and reproduction are the, the last priority on the evolutionary ladder, uh, of your body.

And so if other things are off, your body is going to tend to gonna knock pleasure off the list. First. It's gonna knock reproduction off the list first, which is why, when. We go into a sexual healing container, we really need to nurture the whole system, the whole body, all of the awareness so that your body can feel like it's safe and logical to send resources to your erogenous zones, to your pleasure, and to your joy.

So here's what happens when we experience chronic stress or uh, chronic. Um, or continuous sexual shame or a lack of attunement in our lives or our relationships. Our nervous system and our whole body organizing system, uh, will prioritize what it understands as survival. And I am gonna bring a metaphor in here that, um, my beautiful teacher, Katie Rah, uh, shared with me during my sexological body work training program when she was describing what sex, what shame feels like to the body, what shame feels like it, the, the survival mechanism that it is, um, activating.

Can be understood by, um, the following imagery. So imagine a mouse running through the forest, a tiny, tiny mouse. That mouse knows that if it differentiates itself, if it stands out, if it makes a lot a, uh, a loud noise, that mouse is going to die because it will alert predators that it's there. And they will, uh, attack.

And so that's what shame feels like to our bodies. Shame is like knowing deeply in our bodies, not cognitively, but feeling deeply that if we differentiate ourselves, if we share an opinion that is different to the people surrounding us, it feels like. We would do so under the, uh, with the threat of death looming over us.

So it really is like a true survival mechanism and it's not something that you consciously decide. It's something that your body feels and makes the decision to either, uh, cloak your, your. Truth, your true expression, um, or to flee, you know? And so if we ex, if we live with sexual shame or we live with anything in our daily lives, it's going to feel, um, not, not aligned with our thriving.

Our systems will prioritize survival, which means that pleasure is gonna get knocked off of the priority list. And so this metaphor of the mycelium network can illustrate really well. What I mean when I say over and over again, and I may have said this in every episode so far, um, that your body is a self-organizing system.

It will, um. Regulate it, it has a logic. Um, just like the network underneath the soil, it will reallocate resources will bring more awareness to different plants depending on how it feels. It needs to respond to the environment around you. And so how do we do this? How do we foster that network? Allocating resources to our pleasure.

So often people think at this point, oh, I just need to relax more. I need to learn the right breathing to relax. I need to go to the right yoga class to relax you. You know? And what I actually create space for in my sessions at this point is. Not trying to kind of, what I would call appease the system of the body by.

Distracting it into relaxation or coaxing it into relaxation. That's not what we do at this point. So what I have found to be way more effective and transformative for the people that I work with is what we do is we actually support and encourage whatever survival technique is happening in your body at that time.

So let me explain what that means. So let's say that we are attempting to re-pattern your response to intimacy, let's say when a spouse is, um, proposing sex and trying to initiate sex with you. And what you notice is your body gets real, real, real tight and closed off. What we do is we don't try to breathe through that tightness.

We don't try to loosen your body up. What we actually do is we support that tightening and that closing because the body needs to know that the signals that it is sending to you are going to be listened to and respected and loved and allowed to do their job. 'cause that tightening is happening for a reason.

And so we. What we do is we even lean into the tightening more by maybe you, um, like embracing yourself, allowing yourself to go into a cocoon, maybe the fetal position, and like totally closing up. And if, um, like body work is helpful, then hands-on work, I can even add to the pressure. On your back to make it feel like you're even more in a cocoon.

And then your body realizes and feels and knows deeply that it's allowed to defend itself. It's allowed to, um, close, it's allowed to say no, um, and it's allowed to complete the cycles of intimacy. That it, it needs to have, and it always goes in cycles. We open and we close and we open and we close and we are activated, and then we follow the wave back down into regulation.

And so we have to learn how to ride those waves of the system. And the best thing to do when they're happening is actually to support them, not to try to coax the system into relaxation. We need to treat our bodies. Like they have the intelligence of that mycelium network underneath the ground because they really, really do.