150. Pleasure Led Life with Elan Zelenka

This week I've got Elan on all the way from San Diego! She's here to talk about having a pleasure led life, and how she came into sexual empowerment after religious trauma.

Who is Elan?
Elan is a self expression and sexual empowerment coach who specializes in helping individuals embody their most confident selves in life, relationships, and business. 

How did she get to where she is now?
Her parents, while not religious themselves, would force her to go to church because they thought that would give her a good life and allow her to be raised with good morals and ethics and all of that.
As a result from all of these the ways that she was raised, she learned how to really silence her own voice and her own opinions to keep the peace and to be the harmonizer. She would notice that in every romantic relationship she was feeling like she couldn't be herself, and there's so many layers to that;  fear of intimacy, ultimately not knowing how to communicate and coming to these like big, big statements of like, 'Okay, well let's just break up because we clearly are not in alignment.'
She also experienced things like faking orgasms, not being herself, not even knowing that she could orgasm with a partner, not knowing that she could actually experience pleasure with anybody, thinking that she was broken.
Then she entered into a relationship with her now partner Shane which completely flipped her world upside down.  His presence in her life just showed her so much of her own shit and showed her so much opportunity for growth. So here she is today,  a completely different person. She's teaching and coaching and mentoring other women, how to do the same for their life for what feels good for them.

"I think really having the foundation of freedom to be your full self and not feeling that pressure to try to be validated in romantic partnership was huge. Also just having that camaraderie with your partner in being like, let's just like explore together and see where this takes us."

What does living a pleasure led life mean?
It's really important to understand the ways that you, me, we have all been conditioned to believe that pleasure is bad in whatever form or sinful or that having too much pleasure is not a good thing. Just having the awareness around the subconscious stories of sex and pleasure is huge, that's the foundation. Once you have the awareness, once you have that base understanding of where you're at why you've been doing what you've been doing, then you can really start to embrace a new way.
Where are your energy leaks?  When you have energy leaks, you're not in a good space, you're not letting the energy flow through your body and you're not letting that energy flow through. You're not feeling pleasure, you're not feeling good, you're feeling stressed, overwhelmed, anxious, all the things.
Living a pleasure led life doesn't mean that you are avoiding the opposite.
It doesn't mean you're avoiding pain or discomfort. Living a pleasure led life means you really embrace it all. You really embrace your emotions the whole rainbow and the whole spectrum you really lean into your pain because the amount of pleasure that you can allow into your life is respective to the amount of pain that you're able to hold as well.
It's not about pushing all of the shit down we have to work through that, that shit and and shame right to be able to get to the other side of having more pleasure show up in our life.
"Where pleasure is present, shame is not" 

Connect with Elan
Instagram & TikTok: @Elan.Zel