108 | Midlife, Sobriety, And Returning To Yourself With Ashley Kelsch

What if the question is not why can't I quit, but what is this doing for me?

In this installment of the Return to Her series, Gabriela sits down with Ashley Kelsch, writer, coach, and somatic practitioner who helps midlife women change their relationship with alcohol and reconnect with themselves. Ashley spent a decade running a sexual wellness shop in Austin, where women quietly confided things in dressing rooms they were not sharing with anyone else — and underneath it all was the same thread. Disconnection from their bodies, their desires, and their needs, often soothed with a glass of wine.

This conversation explores what women are really reaching for when they pour that glass, why alcohol can feel like relief, confidence, freedom, and connection, and what happens when we discover those things were never in the wine to begin with. They talk about the difference between being uninhibited and truly inhabited, why midlife often feels like a crisis when it is actually an awakening, and why women's sexual pleasure is their birthright, not something to wait for or outsource.

This conversation is not really about alcohol. It is about what happens when a woman stops outsourcing her aliveness and starts coming home to herself.

Are you ready to awaken your sensuality and feel more empowered in your body? Access the FREE Pleasure Upgrade Bundle at https://www.pleasureinthepause.com/gift.

Ashley Kelsch is a writer, coach, and somatic practitioner who helps midlife women change their relationship with alcohol and reconnect with their bodies, desire, and aliveness. After a decade running a sexual wellness retail space in Austin, Texas, she became a life coach focused on dating, sex, and relationships before discovering the common thread connecting so many of the women she worked with — gray area drinking as a way of outsourcing relief, confidence, and connection. She has been alcohol-free for over four years and recently was accepted into the Somatic Experiencing Institute to deepen her trauma-informed work. 

Highlights from our discussion include:

• Why Ashley believes women don't have a drinking problem, they have an aliveness problem
• What women are really looking for when they pour that glass of wine — and why it is an exhale, not the wine itself
• The four-part framework: reveal, reclaim, rewire, rebuild
• The difference between being uninhibited and being inhabited
• Why alcohol affects women's bodies differently in midlife as hormones decline
• Why pleasure and sensuality are self-care, and why a glass of wine is not
• One simple practice — pause before you pour — to start reconnecting with what you actually need 

Sobriety is not really about stopping. It is about what you find when you do. Ashley's story is a reminder that so many of the things we reach for outside ourselves — wine, distraction, escape — are often pointing us toward something we have been taught to disconnect from. The work is not abstinence. The work is coming home. 

If you're seeking to reclaim your pleasure and vitality, join Gabriella at⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.pleasureinthepause.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ for this enlightening journey into the heart of female pleasure and empowerment.

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Episode 107 — From Survival Mode to Self-Connection

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The information shared on Pleasure in the Pause is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as medical advice. Always consult your healthcare provider before making any decisions about your health or treatment. The views expressed by guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the host or Pleasure in the Pause.

Transcript

Introduction to Return to Her and Ashley Kelsch

Gabriella Espinosa 0:00

Welcome to Pleasure in the Pause, a podcast dedicated to empowering midlife women to connect with their bodies, pleasure and power in Perimenopause, Menopause, and beyond. I am your host, Gabriela Espinoza. Each week I sit down with leading medical experts, thought leaders, and trailblazers for bold, thought-provoking conversations that educate, inspire, and challenge the myths we've been taught about our bodies, aging, and sexuality. I also share solo episodes with evidence-based insights and real talk to help you feel informed, supported, and in charge of your health and pleasure in this season of life. Because your pleasure matters in and out of the bedroom. So take a deep breath, settle into your body, and let's begin. Hello, beautiful listeners. Welcome back to Pleasure in the Pause. Today I'm sharing another intimate installment of Return to Her, a series where I sit down with women I admire to explore what it means to come home to themselves in this season of life. Not too long ago, I came across Ashley Kelsh's work on Substack, and something about her writing immediately caught my attention. It was the raw honesty, the way she writes about midlife, sobriety, desire, and embodiment in a way that feels both deeply personal and universally true. And underneath all of it, she's exploring a question that I think so many women are asking. How do we cultivate aliveness within ourselves instead of constantly looking outside of ourselves for it? Ashley is a writer, coach, and somatic practitioner who helps midlife women change their relationship with alcohol and reconnect with themselves in a much deeper way. I recently had the pleasure of meeting Ashley in person here in Austin, Texas. One of the first things I noticed was how alive she feels, grounded, present, and completely herself. It made perfect sense why her work centers around helping women reconnect with that same feeling within themselves. In this conversation, we talk about her own journey with sobriety and the season of life that led her to question her relationship with alcohol. But what I found most compelling is what she discovered on the other side of it. We explore what women are actually reaching for when they pour that glass. We talk about why alcohol can feel like relief, confidence, freedom, and connection, and what happens when we begin discovering those things we're never really in the wine to begin with. We also talk about pleasure, desire, nervous system regulation, and the difference between being uninhibited and truly inhabited in your own life. And perhaps most importantly, we explore what happens when women stop trying to change the way they feel and start learning how to be with themselves instead. Because ultimately, this conversation isn't about alcohol. It's about what happens when a woman stops outsourcing her aliveness and begins coming home to herself. Here's my conversation with Ashley Kelch. Welcome, Ashley, to Pleasure and the Pause. I am so glad you're here.

SPEAKER_01 3:25

Oh, thank you so much for having me. I feel like I've been watching your work and listening to you, and I really feel like there's this great intersection that we have that we're working with the same women about, and this conversation has been needing to happen.

Gabriella Espinosa 3:38

We met here in Austin, Texas. And the moment I met you, I knew we had to have this conversation. And then I started reading your Substack. And then I said, Oh my goodness, I have to have these conversations with you. So let's start at the beginning. Tell us a little bit about your story and what led you to this beautiful body of work that is yours.

Ashley's path from sexual wellness retail to coaching

SPEAKER_01 4:00

I moved to Austin in 2008. And when I came here, I'd already had started a little baby business on Maui where I moved here from. But when I came here, I wanted to open up a retail space where I sold lingerie and sexual wellness items and objects. And I ended up doing that. I opened up in 2009. And at the time, I had very little awareness around the stigma around sexuality here in Texas, maybe the South. And I would just say generally overall in our culture. Being in that space for 10 years here was very eye-opening. The conversations I was having with women in the dressing rooms on the daily about their bodies, about their lives and their relationships, their struggles, they were sharing things with me that they were clearly not sharing with anyone else. They felt very safe to be vulnerable. And the common theme throughout that was there was this disconnection from their bodies and their desires and their needs. The more I listened to that, the more I thought there's something major here. There's a gap here that needs something. And that something to me was to be able to hold space for women to hear more of that and then also help them move through that. After 10 years of working in that space and owning my shop, I closed it and set out to become a life coach. I primarily started with dating, sex, and relationships. It was a lot of fun. I was writing a column for Tribeza for about three years. And the conversations were like we're talking about women and men who wanted more. And how could they get that? And then I started to notice another theme that 80, 90% of the people were struggling with wine. And I don't want to say struggling like in addiction or crisis mode, but there was this common conversation of I keep drinking every night and I don't want to. And this was coming up almost weekly on these conversations about dating, sex, and relationships. And what I started to put together there was like, oh, wait, the same women who are disconnected from their bodies intimately or sexually and their desires and needs, they're outsourcing it with wine or alcohol. That's their way of solving for this problem. They can't stay in their bodies even on the daily. They're organizing their evenings around that glass of wine, that opportunity to relax. And so I've set out in the last year or more as I was working with women in midlife to pivot more directly to women who are finding that they need that escape, that they need that glass of wine, and that they can't feel into their bodies. They don't have access to those parts that they're using wine to get.

The turning point at 40 — anxiety, identity, and the wake-up call

Gabriella Espinosa 7:00

And I'd love to get into all of that with you. You write about it so beautifully in your substack column. But you've gone through your own personal journey in your relationship with alcohol. You write about a time when everything was shifting at once. Denesting, hormonal changes, questions about who you were becoming as a midlife woman. What did it actually feel like to be living inside that version of yourself?

SPEAKER_01 7:27

I just literally got the chills because to hear it reflected back, it still brings it up. I started writing around the time I turned 40. And I was what we would just consider a normal wine drinker or cocktail drinker, rose, what have you. And I started to experience a lot of anxiety and a lot of waking up in the middle of night and ruminating. And there was just this feeling of this feels so wrong in my body. And yet, this other, like, but this is just what we do. In all of that, this identity shift of my kids are moving out. My hormones at the time, I had no idea what they were doing. I didn't even know about perimenopause at this time, but they were fluctuating all over the place. I was newly into coaching and I was like, who am I? And what am I doing? And it felt like this knocking on the door, like my soul knocking on the door, like, wake up, wake up, what are you doing? And after a couple of years of that, because I didn't really open the door right away, I woke up one morning and I just knew that alcohol was a dead end for me, that I wasn't able to truly embody or go the direction that I was meant to if that was there, because it was really bringing me down. And not in a rock bottom way. No one would have looked at my life and thought she has a problem or she's a mess. None of that. It was a very internalized downward spiral. That day when I decided I'm done was actually probably one of the most difficult but alive days that I had in a long time.

Gabriella Espinosa 9:04

People often imagine sobriety begins with a dramatic rock bottom, but your story feels different. Was it just that confluence of all those things happening all at once and that inner voice saying something has to change? What finally made you decide to stop?

SPEAKER_01 9:25

Yeah, so the irony in that was that I was writing at the time about wanting to live an erotic life. I wanted to be present in my life. I wanted to feel the sweat on my back when I was running and the cool breeze contrasting that. I wanted to notice the steam coming off my copy. I wanted to see the sunlight hitting my lover's body. I wanted to be so present in my life and engaged with it. And that wasn't happening when I was drinking. And so that was a very big turning point. But also the I can't sleep. I wake up at 3 a.m., massive anxiety, this feeling of doom. And I know now that a lot of that has to do with hormones. But also for me, it was almost like, is this it? Is this my life? And that was the question I had because again, that also that identity piece of what is my purpose now? What am I doing all this for? It was like something really needs to change. And the only thing that looked very obvious was the alcohol piece. I didn't have a relationship to change. I had a new career. I had friends, my kids were out of the house. It was like I had changed all the things the last 20 years, if I'm being completely honest. I changed the husband. I had changed where I lived. I was doing all of the things externally to solve for this thing, including drinking. And when I couldn't change that anymore, it's actually when the feeling started to change within.

Gabriella Espinosa 10:51

So it sounds like the alcohol was pointing to something deeper.

SPEAKER_01 10:58

Yeah. And I think that's what I want everyone to understand is this isn't about abstinence and complete sobriety. It's about really understanding that wine is functioning for something. I don't think of this approach as like a habit or behavior breaker. I think of it as it's doing something for you. So the question isn't why can't I quit? It's what is this doing for me? What is it accessing for me that I'm not able to access on my own? For me, I was just wanting to escape or numb out. And then there was times where I was like, oh, I have to go out and be social. I feel introverted or I don't feel like it. So I'll drink and I can access that part of myself. And so it's learning how to access those parts and even have permission to relax at the end of the day, especially as women. Learning to access that on our own before and being able to embody those parts of ourselves and not exile them is for me the work.

Gabriella Espinosa 11:53

You often say that women don't have a drinking problem. They have an aliveness problem. What do you mean by that?

Women don't have a drinking problem, they have an aliveness problem

SPEAKER_01 12:02

So again, it goes back to that functional piece. When we think of aliveness, in not a like a formal definition of it or anything, but like it's feeling the full range of the human experience. It's the capacity to feel into your joy and your grief, all of that. And when we are using alcohol to bring that on, to either dampen it or bring it up, it's just a manufactured experience. It's not a real experience. And then when the alcohol wears off, sometimes we're left with a hangover or maybe some shame, but we're still left with those parts of ourselves craving to feel into those things. We haven't learned, and this is not anyone's fault. It's very much a part of our society is like we're not taught to feel into our bodies. We're not taught to process and digest our emotions. We're taught to just put on a happy face, show up, and just keep moving forward and act like you're feeling the things, but don't really feel the things.

Gabriella Espinosa 13:03

You say that what women really are looking for in wine or alcohol, they're looking for an exhale, and that when they pour that glass of wine at the end of the day, what does that exhale represent?

SPEAKER_01 13:20

I think it does represent to them finally the bookend of that day. I think a lot of us women, we are carrying a lot. We are homemakers, we're mothers, we're wives. There's a lot of emotional labor. Look at our society and just how quickly it's moving and the news and the media. We're just bringing in all of this energy. We wake up in the morning and it's just go time. And I myself, by like noon, some days was like, oh, I just can't wait to be on my sofa having a glass of wine and relaxing. I think that it's just very commonplace now and very excusable. The alcohol industry is marketing to women purposefully because they know we are maxed out, burned out, and overwhelmed. And they're tapping into that message, that need that we have, and saying, But you need your wine. It's luxurious. It's going to bring you that exhale. And it does. I will say, it does work. It can work for a while. That first 20 minutes, you feel the warmth. You know, you feel your body, that tension just melt away. And that can last for years. You can get away with that for a long time. But there will come a point where it stops working. And then what do you do?

Gabriella Espinosa 14:34

You wrote a piece about that, about your kids following you with their backpacks, and you were walking in the door and you were already starting to think about that glass of wine. I remember having that same feeling. I was mothering young children and that bottle of wine, it was red wine that was sat on the counter. The kids, the dinner, the glass of wine. You're in this hyper-vigilant state. The kids, wine, the dinner, all the things.

SPEAKER_01 15:01

Homework, all the things, emails. It's just this never-ending to-do list that we have on ourselves. And that first day that I quit, when I said it was like one of the hardest days, but most alive feeling was I actually took a wine glass and I put sparkling water in it. And I went outside and I made this conscious decision that I was going to sit and feel whatever was there. And I was instantly aware of what was there. I'm wound so tight, Gabrielle. I'm just wound so tight. And it was just like this clenching in my body and this low-grade anxiety in my mind. And I was like, oh, no wonder. No wonder you've been reaching for a glass of wine, which by the way, as being sold to all of us as self-care when I'm talking about the way that they're marketing. It's like, that's been my way of taking care of myself because this feels so toxic and icky in my body right now. And I just sat there and I decided I'm going to breathe into this. And I did that every day for about three weeks, 15, 20 minutes, consciously sitting there, riding the waves of my sensations and emotions that pull and negotiating of I'm not going to drink, I want to drink what is here. That part has gone away from me. Like at this point in my life, I don't have any desire to drink. However, I still have emotions and sensations that I have to face and meet every day, or I should say I get to. I continue to develop the skill and the capacity to regulate my nervous system, allow for what is there, and choose my responses rather than reacting to my life.

Gabriella Espinosa 16:46

How many years has it been since you've last had a drink?

SPEAKER_01 16:50

It's been just over four years.

Gabriella Espinosa 16:53

Wow. Congratulations.

SPEAKER_01 16:56

It feels really great. And my work isn't about shaming anybody or making them think they need to be abstinent or sober. It's not that. It's just an opportunity for us to learn how to come back into our bodies. And your work revolving around women's sensuality and sexuality, a lot of that's being numbed out. And some women, some of us, would rather sit on the sofa and have a glass of wine than go have sex with our partners or go have a pleasure practice because A, we feel somewhat disconnected from that. And then B, alcohol is just shutting a lot of those hormones and chemicals down anyway.

Inhabited vs uninhibited explained

SPEAKER_01 17:32

It's just important to me for women to understand that this is less about quitting forever and more about can you attune to your body and access those parts without that first? I ultimately believe our desires, our voice, the things that we want in life are just being doled down. I think a lot of it, especially in midlife, is when we reach the shift in hormones, it feels like a crisis when it really is an awakening of I'm ready to have the life I want. I've been living my life for 20 plus years for others, being the good daughter, the good wife, the good mother. And it's like, when is my chance? But what is that and what does it look like? And I personally wasn't able to access that when I was numbing out and escaping everything that was going on in here. A part of my program or my modality, if you will, is reclaiming those parts of myself, coming back to them and almost like conversing with them, right? And getting intimate with these parts of myself and then also rewiring. And how long did that take you to do? It's an ongoing practice because we're always going to be unlayering and facing new parts of ourselves. At least that's what I believe. I believe as part of the human experience, you're going to come in contact with different parts of yourself at different times and always have some work to do. And a great example is I got into a relationship about a year and a half after not drinking. And you want to talk about anxiety out of the roof, which I was a dating coach. So I had all these tools, all the mental tools. I knew what to do, but I didn't have a lot of embodiment tools. I didn't have somatic practices. And I found myself just sitting there again with this anxiety of what am I supposed to do? Where is he? What's going on? Is he going to call? Is it just the panic? But I also had the ability to know that I would be okay and that I could sit through that. And then over time, it just dissolved. It went away. I've learned how to meet those parts of myself with love, care, nurturing. My big one recently, as I wrote about my daughter graduating and deciding to stay in New York, I was floored to find that I had this unfelt sensation in my body. I had no idea that I was repressing grief that she wouldn't be moving back home. And it was like this cutting of an umbilical cord. And I mentally went up there, you know, very excited for her and celebrating this amazing victory of five years of living in New York in a double major and thought I'd grieved when my kids moved out. You know, it's been five years without them living at home. This was something entirely different. And because of these practices, my awareness, I was able to allow that contraction I was experiencing in my solar plexus and pelvic area. I was able to allow for that, let the emotion come up, release it in my tears and verbally, breathe into it, and then it was gone, just done. And that's gonna constantly be happening to us because life life.

Gabriella Espinosa 20:51

Yeah, and then that example of empty nesting and seeing the next iteration of your daughter take off and be on her own after graduating from college. There's so many layers of it, right? You think, okay, she's gone to college and you're dealing with that part of it. And then another door opens up. And yeah, we're not prepared for it. And it does catch you off guard.

SPEAKER_01 21:16

I have to admit, there is another part of it though, where I was like, oh, I'm also a little bit more free to step into me. When I talk about being a good mother, there's a part of me that I'm not resentful of having, quote unquote, to be that. It's my greatest purpose and greatest joy is to show up for my kids. But like I said, there is this part where I've been like, what about me? And there's the, oh, it's both now. It's yes and I get to step into my next phase of life and celebrate that too. But I have to first acknowledge there was pain there and some grief. And then it was like easier to walk through this that door of, but this is gonna be great for me too.

Gabriella Espinosa 21:56

It seems like for you, it's about really allowing yourself. To feel what there is to be felt. Good, the bad, the ugly.

SPEAKER_01 22:04

Yeah. And being able to regulate our and self go into our own nervous systems and just start to rewire a lot of preconditioned ways that we are. I just got accepted to the Somatic Experiencing Institute. And I'm really looking forward to diving into that program because it's trauma work. And we have so much energy and emotion and stories stored in our bodies, sexually, environmentally, religiously, all of that. And to be able to work with women to help release those messages and the things that she's carrying that aren't really who she is, I just want to help liberate, because I want to liberate myself. And I also want to help liberate women from these conditioned ways of being that aren't really who they want to be or who they are. And they feel the tension within themselves. They feel their bodies, they're reaching for something else. We just don't know how or what to do with that.

Gabriella Espinosa 23:03

So when a woman comes to you, what does she usually believe her problem is? And what do you come to understand her problem actually is?

SPEAKER_01 23:14

I think she feels at first scared and nervous that she doesn't want to talk to people about it because she doesn't feel she's an alcoholic and she's afraid of what does it mean that I say I'm not gonna drink tonight, and then there I am drinking that night. What does that mean about me? And there's some sort of feeling of a moral failing or flaw within her about that. And so there's shame around it. And the work there is quickly explaining like there's a physiological and cultural part of this that's at play that is dominating your psyche and your nervous system. What I also teach my clients and we get into so the first part is we're identifying what this is, this function, what's going on here. And then the second part, like I said, is that reclaiming. And it's really about getting into understanding how our bodies are working. When we say we use our prefrontal cortex, our thinking brain, when every day we're like, I'm not gonna do this. And then we do it, it's like, well, how does that keep happening? That doesn't add up. I said I wouldn't. And it's because what's really happening is the desire is in your limbic and primitive brain, and it's in your subconscious. It's in the space in the unfelt, it's the places that we don't know consciously about. And that's gonna always override your prefrontal cortex. It's a much stronger part of our desire and urges. Carl Jung talks about your subconscious, it's always gonna be making these decisions, and you'll keep doing the same thing over and just call it fate. But it's really these stored parts of your emotions and stories and things that have happened that you're just repeating, basically. So I work with my clients to get into that space and place to show them those parts of themselves, like we talked about, of what's really going on.

Gabriella Espinosa 25:03

And so, how do you see in working with a woman, how do you see alcohol impacting her relationship with her body, with desire, with sensation, with aliveness?

SPEAKER_01 25:14

Here are some of the facts. Alcohol-related deaths for women have risen 255% since around 2000. We do not have the enzymes like men do to break down alcohol. And when we reach midlife, like the body that in her 20s and 30s, we had the hormones that we had, the testosterone and the estrogen, and what little enzymes, we were able to break it down away. But when we hit midlife and those things are declining, we don't have the body to do it the same way. And so that that's a very real fact of what's happening physiologically. Unfortunately, those kind of facts, again, the subconscious is gonna override that, the desire, the need to have it to regulate the nervous system. It's the only way sometimes we know how to relax. It's not gonna care about those facts, but it is shutting down those systems in our body. And then without the estrogen, we're already starting to feel, you know, that was the happy hormone. We're starting to feel a little more edgy, a little more overwhelmed faster. And so then we have this need for it more. But again, we can't process it the same way that we once did.

Gabriella Espinosa 26:25

So when you work with women, what does that work actually look like? And what becomes available to them on the other side of it?

SPEAKER_01 26:35

The work, it's in four parts. We start with revealing like what is the function of this alcohol? Is it to help you escape? Is it to help you connect? Then we reclaim. We've talked about those two parts. We're reclaiming those parts of ourselves, we're engaging with those, then we rewire, and that's where the body work starts to come in. And we're learning a new way to show our nervous system of relaxing and being. And then lastly, we rebuild. And a lot of the rebuilding portion has to do with this is a new way to be in the world. The things that start percolating are the real true desires that you have, and that identity shift of who am I and what do I want, it starts coming up in a very natural way, like somatically, not in a I have to dig in here and find it. It's just like these things start rising and coming forward. So that's the foundation of the work. And it's a really beautiful process, actually. What she finds is that when she learns how to do these things and learns the things that she wants, and that she can be in her body and that she can reclaim her voice, reclaim her sensuality, what have you, she has less instinct or impulse to reach outside of herself to feel better. She actually just naturally stops drinking as much. Because, like for my example, that feeling of being wound up so tight, I've learned how to unwind that. So I don't need this thing outside of myself to do that for me. You learn how to do it yourself. And so that desire to drink more just kind of goes away a little bit. And a lot of my clients, they still have some wine here or champagne there. They're not going full-blown sober or absent. That's not it at all. But they don't have this, I can't stop. I say I'm not going to, and I can't, I still do it. There's really none of that. There are a few exceptions. I will say occasionally, I do have a client where it's like, this is actually a problem beyond, you know, this is like an actual substance abuse or addiction that we're dealing with. And that's a separate conversation and approached in a different way. And then other resources and tools are brought into the picture for that. But that's very rare with the women I'm working with. It's mostly gray area drinking, just everyday drinking. So that's what it looks like. And the thing is, is that most of the work out there for people around gray area drinking is day counters, willpower, and sober October, dry Januaries, and attempting to do it that way. And it doesn't work because you're not finding the reason why you're drinking in the first place. You don't know what that function is driving it. So the abstinence without understanding what it is you need is really white knuckling it. It's very uncomfortable. It's really uncomfortable if you just quit something and then you don't resolve what's going on in the interior that needed that thing to make you feel better.

Gabriella Espinosa 29:42

You wrote something in your essay that I want to read back to you because I think it's one of the most precise things, speaking to what you just said that I've read before. You write that you can't be truly uninhibited in a body you've abandoned. The woman reaching for wine to feel free isn't more herself with a drink in her hand. She's less present to herself. Inhabited is the work. Uninhibited is what becomes available after the work. So you make a distinction between being inhabited and being uninhibited. I love that framework. Can you dive a little bit deeper into that with us?

SPEAKER_01 30:34

That was what kind of felt like an odd epiphany that I had one day where I was just thinking about those two things because you know, alcohol is sold to us like loosen up, have a drink, let your inhibitions go. And it implies to be inhibited and sober is to not be free, to not say the things, to not be fun and wild. And actually, the origin of this is I see online very often these posts, and I'm sure they're just trying to get engagement, but should I be wild and crazy this weekend or should I be sober? And for me, it's like, why are they separate? It could be both. When you're drinking and you're accessing that part, you're actually numbing out your like maybe putting alcohol in the anxiety, but it's still there, it's not going anywhere. Uh, you're using alcohol to use your voice, but it's just all again manufactured. And it's just one of the biggest lies that we're being sold is that alcohol will allow for you to do that because you're not actually doing it. And if you can't inhabit your body, if you can't feel present and truly feel what you feel, when you feel it, and how you feel it, there's no way that you can be uninhibited. You have to have both. And to have both is beautiful because then you will allow what you are experiencing internally to come out externally. You will feel that you can say what you want to say. You can dance how you want to dance, you can be who you want to be. You won't feel that inhibition, right? You'll feel the uninhibition and be able to be your authentic self. I don't know if you've experienced it. I've certainly had some mornings where I've woke up and thought, oh my God, what did I say last night? And there's an element of like, yeah, I went out to to be social and have fun. And so I drank, and then I acted in a way that I actually that's not who my real self is. Now I don't feel good about it. And it's a little bit of a shame spiral. And so learning how to access that voice being embodied, that's the goal for me.

Gabriella Espinosa 32:38

That's such a beautiful way of putting it. And as I'm hearing you speak, it just reminds me a lot of the ways we talk about sexual health here a lot on the podcast. And when women are trying to access desire, right? They feel like they've lost their desire, it's nowhere to be found. They want to get it back. And so they think something's wrong with them, they're broken. They want to have that feeling of being uninhibited and just feeling free in their bodies and during intimacy with a partner. Perhaps the first person they go see is the doctor or their gynecologist who tells them, just have a glass of wine, right? Just have a glass of wine. I remember my doctor telling me, I was living in the UK at the time. So there it's champagne. Just have a glass of champagne. Do you I feel like going back to that doctor and saying, do you know what a glass of champagne does to you? Doing into it, you just completely numb out. And you do things like you probably wouldn't want to do, either perform, fake it, or just give your power and your pleasure away. The worst piece of advice I've ever heard. Yet I continually hear women being told that. And so it's not only reinforced by, say, the social media ads or ads on TV or culture in general, but by our own healthcare professionals who are supposed to be in the business of making us feel better.

SPEAKER_01 34:02

One of the greatest struggles that women have, again, like that thread I noticed, or that that theme was women aren't comfortable in their bodies sexually. And then we have society saying just have a drink and lose something. Even currently, I don't know if you've noticed this in social media, but there's a lot of hot takes about how Gen Z, who's not having a lot of sex, they should just, and they're not drinking, they should just get drunk and have sex. And I can't think of a disempowering message for any of us or the young adults or young people in our lives, because why aren't we treating sex or sensuality as self-care? That's actually the part of life that will increase hormones that will make us feel good. It's a chemical release of all the true hormones that we need. And yet our society doesn't offer that as a solution. And in my mind, I'm like, I can't believe we're telling young kids to get drunk and have sex and not. Why don't we learn how to spend time in our own bodies? Why don't we learn how to feel pleasure? And first and foremost, with ourselves, especially as women, we're taught to learn our bodies by the way of other people's hands most of the time and their wants and their expectations. And we don't have a voice in that always. And we're not giving ourselves or younger people that I say younger people because I myself can say around teenage years, when I started becoming sexual, I didn't have anybody telling me that. And as a mother now, it's like I see what society says, and I'm like, wow. And I had women in my shop in their 50s and 60s who had never masturbated, never used a sex toy, and had no idea and would whisper to me about it. And that's a problem with our culture. It's disconnect from your body to feel good instead of learn to connect with yourself to feel good. I'm sad there's so much shame around pleasure and women touching themselves, and there's so much social acceptance around us drinking. Because I know we see how damaging it is, but we don't really see how damaging it is. And the last thing I'll say about that, I think another thing about the younger people, or even us not wanting to be in our bodies or be maybe sexually driven, is because we are stressed out. Things are crazy, right? Of course they're not turned on by life right now. You're like, what is going on? There's just so much messaging hitting all of us, and it's numbing us all out.

Gabriella Espinosa 36:38

You also have the thing in your hand, right? The phone technology that's numbing us out. Talk about the biggest buzzkill. There is that.

SPEAKER_01 36:48

Yeah. Yeah. I actually wrote about that. It might have been something about body

Pause before you pour — what to do instead

SPEAKER_01 36:52

before business, and just how there's a phrase being touched out, which was first named for mothers whose children are just all day grabbing at them. And then by the end of the day, they're just like literally touched out. And I was like, wait, this phone thing, like, we are touched out as a society. We are touched out from the phone because we're just holding it and scrolling. And there's just so much else that connecting to ourselves and what's present with us and around us would be far more beneficial for our psyches and our bodies and frankly the collective.

Gabriella Espinosa 37:25

What do you think women are getting wrong about true self-care?

SPEAKER_01 37:30

There's no healing done unless we're at present. And self-care is being sold to us. It's like take long baths and light some candles and have a glass of wine. And I believe the baths and the candles, all of that is wonderful, but it's not actually solving for what's really going on in our interior. We're not going to heal in those moments. No one profits off us knowing our own body's wisdom. We have the answers. When we need actual self-care to go inward, we have all of that right here. But we're being sold this idea that self-care is, you know, just fill in the blank of the candles or the wine or the hot baths. And it's not actually processing and digesting what you're dealing with.

Gabriella Espinosa 38:16

And then for a woman who's listening, who's coming to the end of the day, feeling exhausted, overwhelmed, and reaching for that glass of wine because she just feels that's her version of self-care and she just needs the day to end. What's one thing she can do instead?

SPEAKER_01 38:36

I invite women to pause before they pour. And maybe this sounds silly, but I would place a hand on my heart and ask myself what I really need in that moment. What is it I really need? Because it probably is a deep breath. It might be just a quiet moment. Sometimes it's like I remember with motherhood, and just I was like, kids, mommy needs a timeout. I have to go to my bedroom and take a few minutes to just breathe into my body, relax my mind, and get very present, grounding and anchoring. And a great way to do that is just start with the hand on the heart, fill your bottom on whatever seat. And then if you want to orient, just look around the room, like how far am I from the curtains? There's a TV, just like really bringing it all in. You can just titrate that. It doesn't have to be, and then you never drink again. It's and just taking that little moment. And then if you feel the need, go have that glass of wine. But just starting with what is it that I really need? You'll find you're looking for permission, probably, to relax, to unwind. I will say, I know when talking about the self-care, the baths, and some of those things, I believe those are very ritualistic and they do give you an opportunity to just slow down. A shower is a nervous system reset. If you're being conscious about that, but there is just like this deeper thing that's going on that the wine is functioning as something for you. And so when you can sit in those moments and ask yourself, what is it that I need, you will start to discover your body is incredibly wise and intelligent, and she's gonna tell you.

Gabriella Espinosa 40:21

You go on to write that sobriety isn't really about stopping, it's about what you find when you do.

SPEAKER_01 40:29

Yeah, it's just the beginning. It really is. It's the start of discovering who you are and like I said, the desires you have and what you want in life. I am constantly amazed every day to get to meet these other parts of myself and get to know myself so intimately and to know also that I can carry myself through the difficulties of life, that I don't need this thing outside of me to help me do that. I don't need to escape it anymore. I don't need to numb it away, that I can provide a sense of safety for myself internally and the love that I need for myself to meet myself in that space. That's all there for me now. I can't think of a greater gift to give myself than that personally, after years of not being present in my body and not understanding what I was feeling or who I was or why my life was unfolding the way that it was. Now it really is that, like I said, that erotic feeling that I was craving. I get to tap into that a lot more now. And I actually really like who I am. Dare I say, I love who I am. I'm able to embrace myself in a way that I just desperately needed.

Gabriella Espinosa 41:42

Yeah, that is the return to self that I often talk about. And this conversation is part of the series that I have titled Return to Her. What are the practices? What is the journey of a woman to truly return to herself? And I think you've named it and identified it so beautifully. So thank you so much, Ashley, for the work that you do, for sharing your voice. I'd love to share with our listeners how they can access your work and all of it.

SPEAKER_01 42:17

Yeah, so my Instagram is the Ashley Kelsh. And then my Substack is Ashley Kelch. So it's very straightforward. And you can sign up there on that newsletter, which is just really wonderful. And it drops into your inbox whenever I post something. And those are just the two spots. I have a website, of course. And if anyone wants to just talk more about this, there's an opportunity on that page to just book a call. It's not a pitch, it's just for you to be able to stay where you are and I can listen and have that conversation. So those are the two spots I can be found, or three.

Gabriella Espinosa 42:49

Thank you so much, Ashley. It's been such a pleasure sitting with you and holding space for your beautiful worldview, I think, around this topic of how do we cultivate aliveness within ourselves without looking outside of ourselves for it. So thank you again for being here, and I so appreciate you.

SPEAKER_01 43:11

Oh, thank you so much. This was such a great time. I really enjoyed it as well. Thank you.

Gabriella Espinosa 43:15

Hi there, it's Gabriella again. I hope you enjoyed this return to her installation with Ashley Kalsh. I wanted to share a thought I've been sitting with. The more conversations I have with women in midlife, the more convinced I become that so many of the challenges we think are about hormones, alcohol, sleep, stress, motivation, or even pleasure are deeply connected to the state of our nervous system. This idea came up again in my conversation with Ashley. And if you listen to last week's solo episode, From Survival Mode to Self-Connection, a nervous system reset for midlife women, you'll know it's something I've been thinking and talking about a lot lately. What struck me in this conversation is that so many women aren't necessarily looking for a drink. They're looking for an exhale, a way to soften, a way to feel safe enough to finally let go. The question I'm becoming increasingly interested in is this How do we create that sense of safety, connection, and aliveness from within, rather than relying on something outside ourselves to provide it? It's a conversation I'll continue exploring here on the podcast. And I'd love to hear from you what part of Ashley's story resonated most? What questions do you have about the nervous system, stress, overwhelm, or feeling more connected to yourself? Send me a DM on Instagram at Gabriella Espinosa or email me at hello at Gabriella Espinosa.com. And if you have your own story of returning to yourself, a season that changed you, challenged you, or brought you home in an unexpected way, I'd love to hear that too. The inspiration for this series comes from real women and real stories, and you never know who might need to hear yours. I'd love to know what's coming up for you. Thank you for joining me for this episode of Pleasure in the Pause. Want to help me spread more pleasure in the world? Please hit subscribe to the podcast and share this episode with a friend, a sister, or any woman you care about. Because when we share these conversations, we remind each other we are not alone. Together, we create ripples of empowerment and support that reach far beyond ourselves. Your support means the world to me. Thank you. Remember, your pleasure matters. The information shared on this podcast is for educational and informational purposes only, and it's not intended as medical advice. Always consult your healthcare provider before making any decisions about your health or treatment. The views expressed by guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the host or pleasure in the pause.