Ageless Vitality

Susan Bratton

Hi Jana, thank you so much for having me and I, when I heard that you were doing a summit about the mindset of medicine and health and wellness, I was really pleased to be part of it because I have had long haul Covid where I was very, very, very ill, never hospitalized because I refused to go. But there were days when I wondered if I would make it, I had about 18 months of chronic fatigue and brain trauma. Covid infected my brain and swelled my brain and also ravaged my body, ravaged my skin, ravaged everything. My recovery was lying flat in the bed too sick to even listen to a podcast or watch television. It took me over a year to begin to read little snippets of text again, I still am not really reading books or anything like that anymore. And there was a time, once I knew that I wasn’t going to die that I wondered if I would ever have my faculties back again, if I would ever get out of bed and walk again. I got out of bed and couldn’t walk a flight of stairs in my house. I couldn’t make it to the top of my driveway. I had lost my balance, my skin was a wreck. My brain was a wreck. My level of fatigue was unbelievable. I spent an entire four or five months of the summer just sitting outside in the sunshine, which was the only thing that made me feel better. I was weak. I had muscle muscle wasting and I never knew if I would even be able to work again. Fast forward about a year and a half later, after I began to feel like I could recover, I’ve had two subsequent bouts of covid since then, the first of which I was able to get monoclonal antibodies for which helped suppress it. The second of which I was able to get packs loaded for which helps suppress that. But I would, I’ve been hammered three times all the way down, beaten down to the ground, not knowing if I would live or ever, ever get myself back again. Hammered again, hammered again. 

I’ve had flues. My immune system is so delicate. But what did I do? How did I come back from it? The number one thing that I did was I used mindset strategies. My mindset strategy was that no matter what I’m able to do, I will do it to the best I can with the joy that I have and I will just take it one day at a time and work on improving every single day knowing that there will be days that I will be flat out in bed and I can tell you that I am now doing some of the best work of my life. The best work of my life. I have gotten most of my executive function back. I still can’t find things to save my life. I open a kitchen drawer, look for a spatula and it’s right there and I can’t see it. There are, there are definite things that have happened to me. The second thing that I did was I started getting up every day and I know that movement is a very, very important part of your event here today. And the benefit of movement. And I started when I could stand, I started trying to walk around the house. I held onto the walls when I could walk, I started trying to walk without looking down at the ground because my vestibular system had gotten so damaged from the covid. When I could walk a block, I hired a trainer to start coming to my house to essentially rehab me. He came every single day. 

Now somebody’s like, oh God, it must be nice to be able to afford a trainer to come to your house every day. And it is, it is nice and it’s actually not that much money, especially when you compare it to the cost of literally losing your life and becoming basically a potato that can’t do anything. Like I have companies to run. I have to take care of my health. My number one one thing, I can’t take care of anybody else and you don’t become the intimacy expert to millions without taking care of millions of people. That’s what I do. I am a sex advice expert. I answer people’s questions if I’m not there for them, what am I doing? I’m not living my purpose, I’m not living my life. So I had a trainer come to my house and we just worked on getting me standing on my feet, walking up a hill, you know, lifting small weights, rebuilding my muscle loss. I mean, I was just from zero. I came from zero, so weak, so debilitated. And now I’ve built my muscles, I have stamina, I can run the beach stairs 1000 steps. I lift weight. I do high intensity interval training. I do ball smashes and mountain climbers and things that I’ve never done in my life at 61 I’m doing things in my physicality that I’ve never done in my life. I went back to yoga last just last week for the first time since before Covid. And last night I went to a yoga class that was intermediate to advanced and I could not do a lot of it. They were doing warrior poses with their legs raised and balances and all these chattering Congas and all this stuff. And what did I do? Did I feel bad about it? No, I did what I could do and I rested through what I couldn’t. And the yoga instructor came over and she’s like, are you okay? And I’m like, oh yeah, I just haven’t done yoga for years because I was ill. I’m coming back from illness. She’s like, great, thank you for being here. So I think the point is that I have a lot of empathy for people who feel like shit, who feel like they have been so sick that they may never come back from it and I want to let you know that I believe that you can come back from almost anything better than ever. 

That’s the belief that I hold in my mind now, what do I do with that belief? I eat super well, I cook and eat a lot of vegetables. I get up every day whether I feel like it or not and I do my movement, whether it’s riding my bike, going to yoga or going to the gym, I do something sure, I take a day of rest here and there, we all need a day of rest, but I fuel my body with nutrition and I give it the momentum that it needs. And I hold the belief that my best days are still ahead of me, that I have my gifts to give. And I’m dying to give them and I want to have the energy, the vitality and the lust for life and my passion for passion, which is what my passion is, my passion is passion teaching people how to have intimacy and connection that feels so deep And so life giving that they couldn’t imagine a life without that kind of loving connection. So that’s really just what I wanted to start out with is that I’m not here telling you something, not having walked in your shoes, I was dead in bed for 18 months flatlined and I’m coming back.

Jana Danielson

Okay, There’s just, there’s like so much in there that we could, we could tap into and you know, one of the things that came to mind for me was, and obviously I’m sure you’ve heard this out of some of your clients, most to that. I’m off the wagon, I’m off the wagon like right. And some days I’m like, there’s no wagon, it’s not a matter of being on the wagon or off the wagon. And so for our audience here today, who feels like they’ve been living in this perpetual hamster wheel world where on december 31st they’re cleaning out their pantry. They have their new running shoes ready to go and fast forward to, you know, mid February and they’re like, well shoot, here’s Jana again, all these great intentions, trying to change how I feel about my body, how I feel about my confidence, how I feel about my sensuality and once again, I’m off the wagon, let’s talk about that roller coaster and how you help people, whether it’s women or men coach through that mindset that I’m either all in and if I’m not, it means I’m out. Is there a middle ground?

Susan Bratton

Well that’s why I have a personal trainer. I look at the, you know, $150 that I spent a day on that and I add that up over the course of a month and I do it six days a week, five days a week. You know, you can’t do it every single day. There are things that come up or what have you. And I look at the cost of that versus the cost of buying any new clothes, driving a brand new car, any of the other things that I could acquire or do, going out to eat at a dinner, which is shitty food that’s going to kill me. And I look at that and I’m like, there are two things I won’t live without. The first is my hormone replacement and the second is my trainer. Everything else, I will just scrimp and save and go without if I must to have that, because I can’t make myself get up and exercise if I don’t have a trainer coming that day, ain’t no way any exercise is going to happen. I mean, I might ride my bike. Honestly, I do like to get out in the sunshine now that I feel good once you, once you get over a hump with exercise, there’s a point at which you feel so good and have the energy that you actually enjoy going out there. 

Now I ride my bike and I can feel the strength in my quads and as I’m pedaling and I want to accelerate and I have the power to do. So it fills me with joy to know that my body can be that responsive, but I would not have felt that if I’d had to rely on myself to train. So when I hear people say, you know, I, I’ve fallen off the wagon, I’m like, oh God, I never even be on the damn wagon if I didn’t have accountability, I do feel for me personally that accountability is the number one thing. If I’m gonna, if a guy’s showing up at my house, I gotta go work out and it could be going to the gym. I have two locations where I go at one place, I go to the gym and at one place he comes to me and if I have an appointment and I know I’m gonna forfeit the money, I gotta go to the gym and no matter how bad it is that I don’t want to go and I’m all like, yeah, I have to go and when I get there and I walk out, I feel great again and I’m like, why didn’t I want to go? 

It’s, that’s what exercises like and other than good nutrition, you have to start with good nutrition and layer exercise on top of it and good nutrition, what that means is eating organic vegetables, learning how to cook vegetables, vegetables taste delicious when you don’t eat them in restaurants, restaurants, murder vegetables, restaurants should be called vegetable murdering locations and you can’t be healthy without vegetables. I know that sounds good. It’s easy to get meat, it’s easy to get bread. It’s easy to get dairy, but it’s super hard to get vegetables. Even in restaurants, their vegetables are just terrible. So what I recommend is that you learn how to cook vegetables and you hire someone who makes you accountable in whatever way you can afford and that could be a buddy system. It could be anything, figure it out. That’s the answer. If you feel shitty, if you are sick, there’s nothing that you can do above, below, beside around eating well and getting your body moving like it’s literally that simple and you have to do whatever you have to do to make yourself do it till you start liking it so much that you miss it when it’s not happening and you get there pretty quickly. It’s interesting when I started working out, I started working out with Syria. That means sun in Sanskrit. Syria is a wonderful man. He’s actually the bodyguard to Amma, the hugging guru. And because of Covid, he wasn’t his body guarding needs weren’t needed because she wasn’t on tour because there was a pandemic and I got the most beautiful man as my trainer and what I found is that trainers are, they want to help you so badly. They are in the healing arts and about 10 weeks into it. And he was really just working on getting me my balance again because you know, one of the hallmarks. There’s these like there are these things about aging. There’s this thing called the Dunaden Pace study where they studied people who were by a lot Logically younger than their age. So there’s your chronological age and your biological age. My chronological age is 61 according to my report. My true diagnostics report, which you should definitely get a link for true diagnostics. That’s a really good report for people. My true diagnostics report says that I’m 43. 

I’ve gone through three rounds of Covid. I’m 61 years old. But I am a 40 in a 43 year old body because of doing this exercise. And I said to Surrey about 9.5, 10 weeks into it. I was really feeling good and I’m like, my God, I can’t believe how fast this is working. I mean going from where I was when the day we started where I could barely walk up the hill to where I am now. And he’s like, babe, that’s why they call it a 12 week transformation. It really doesn’t take that long. And so that was one of the things that surprised me was how much Progress I made in a little time. That is super motivating. And I’ve got my eye on that 43 year old score. I want to get that down to 40. I want to feel 20. I want to be physically 20 years younger than my chronological age. And the way that you do that is you have to work on your grip strength. You have to really be strong, which means your whole body has to be strong because that comes through into your grip. You have to be able to stand on one leg, you have to so balance is super important.

If you can’t stand on one leg, you are not going the right direction, you gotta bring that back. Which is why I went back to yoga, because yoga is about balance and flexibility and working out is often about cardiovascular health and strength. And those are the four quadrants of good health. And then the third one is your mental cognition, which I’ve really struggled with. But I keep myself I keep pushing myself to do better and forgive myself when I forget stuff or when I’m having a brain fog day. I’m like, all right, You know, you’re not thinking today, it’s OK, take a rest. I rest. When I’m having those days, they come and they go you’re crawling your way back to health and you’ve got to give yourself rest. And then the fourth one is how do you facially look. How do you, how does your body look compared to people your age? And I can tell you that at 61 when I look at my cohort from high school or from college, they look like my grandparents, they look like my friggin grandparents. I got people 10 years younger than I who are dying now because they’re not taking care. They got big bellies, they’re drinking too much. How you stay young is going back to getting your body moving and fueling it with healthy organic vegetables and good fats and proteins. And I mean, my God, it’s that simple to do, but it’s hard to get started because you feel like crap. So that’s why having someone who takes you from wherever you are, how bad it is and works on your balance, your strength, your cardiovascular health, your stamina. These are what David Sinclair, who is a longevity expert from Harvard who has a book out about it says are the most important things. You’ve got to keep yourself up and it really fuels your energy and your life. But then that brings me to your sexuality, which I stand for ageless sexuality. I’m a Sex pert. I teach sex. I teach people how to transform having sex into making love. And a lot of people in their forties, they start to realize, oh, my mortality. I see it in the distance, wow, I really wanted to be a sexual person and have a good sex life. 

But my thirties was devoted to my family and my career. And if I don’t do something about it now, I’m never gonna have it. And almost every woman I know in their forties goes through a massive sexual transformation, those are the women who believe that it’s still possible and they wanted enough to pursue it. And then when women get to their 50s, they look at themselves and go, well, I’ve started to have some really good experiences. I know that I’m getting older, but it actually doesn’t seem to matter. I’m having better experiences than I ever have. I guess how I look isn’t the most important thing. I guess it’s okay to have some fat, it’s okay to have some cellulite. It’s okay if my boobs sag, they still my nipples still feel great when he plays with them. And then by the time you’re in your sixties, if you believe that you can be sexual your whole life long, which is true. And if you don’t, it’s simply a limiting belief. 

You can be great in bed and better in bed every decade till the day you die with extremely satisfying sex. People in their sixties are having the best sex of their life because they if they’ve taken care of themselves at the nexus of a law, lot of good experience, not worrying so much about the physicality of their bodies and the aging, but just having the connections and the pleasure and the slow sex and the sensual sex and tantric sex that they’ve always wanted to have. So when you’re in your forties, looking ahead, your best sex and your best intimacy can be ahead of you right through your seventies and your eighties till the day you die.

Jana Danielson

Okay, so I’m glad I was, that’s where I wanted you to go. I wanted you to go in to this bridge into the intimacy and the sensuality and sexuality and Susan help us understand how when we allow ourselves to feel that like it loops back into our immunity are like can you can you talk about that backward loop?

Susan Bratton

Yeah. And it’s interesting because when we talk about things like our immunity and our vitality, your vitality and your libido are one and the same if you don’t feel well, you don’t have libido and I don’t know what kind of illness you have as you’re listening to me now, but I often think that a large majority of the illnesses that are out there, whether that’s anxiety and depression or Crohn’s disease or I. B. S. Or restless leg syndrome or you know, let’s just keep going and going and going and going. I asked reflux the list of things that people are struggling with. I would say that probably 85% of them come back to your gut microbiome and your gut microbiome, if it is off, it is going to suppress your libido, You can’t make your neurotransmitters, your serotonin and dopamine, which 90% of get made in the gut, you can’t make your hormones because they get made with your adrenals and your enteric nervous system in your gut and you’re not going to feel like having sex till you heal your gut no matter whether that’s your disease or your issue or not. 

And there are so many times when you I literally went to the doctor yesterday because I have a little cyst in my ear and I said I like I’m a daughter looking there, she’s the one with the best eyes in our house. I’m like what’s in there? There’s a bump. She goes it looks like a little cyst. So I went to the doctor and he said well you have two paths number one. You can just try these drops you, I can give you this prescription, you could try these drops and you can see if you know if it it shrinks it, it’s inflamed or you could just go to an E. N. T. And they could probably just take it right out and I’m like I’ll just take it right out. Like let’s just get it handled. I don’t need a prescription for something. I’m like allergic to prescriptions. So much of what’s happening to us is actually starting in our microbiome until we get that fixed. We’re not going to feel well and that includes having great sex and great sex.

Actually people think about sex and the minute I say sex people think that means intercourse penetrative penis in vagina experience and that’s a part of sex, but that’s not sex, let’s redefine what sex is? Sex is long languorous holding of each other, conjoined soothing of each other. It’s sensual massage. It’s orgasmic massage. It’s looking in each other’s eyes, it’s talking to each other and the bedroom being close to each other and really sharing what’s going on with each other and soulful ways. It’s stroking our hair and kissing our cheeks and rubbing our bodies together and squeezing each other. It’s manual pleasuring, oral pleasuring, it’s all of those things. And so when people A don’t feel well and B. Aren’t getting all the things instead of just, hey, let’s have sex. Women don’t get the opportunity to get aroused. Our arousal ladder is very different than the male body. And so for women, we’ve been having sex on men’s time schedule, which is fast. They’re horny, er they have testosterone, they masturbate every day. They get fast acting him, oh, dynamics that makes their penis hard really quickly and they’re ready to go and they want to have intercourse. Women need all of the other things before their bodies say, oh yes, I’d like to be penetrated now. And so when women over and over and over and over four years for decades have sex. By that, I mean, intercourse, intercourse too quickly on the man’s schedule then they don’t want it anymore. So when you don’t feel well and you’ve had a lifetime of crappy sex where you never got fully aroused or you never had orgasms from intercourse because you never were aroused enough because it always happened too fast. You never got the stimulation that you needed to have pleasure. Then you wonder if you’re the man, why doesn’t she, why is her libido so bad? Why doesn’t she want to have sex with me? And as a woman, you’re like, God, I feel so bad. I just don’t want to do it. It’s not that great for me. And it’s because you haven’t been doing it in a way that serves you both. You’ve been doing it in the way that our culture says it should be done, which is freaking wrong. 

And I’m here to change that. And that’s my mission. And that’s why I get up every day and get my energy back so that I can be in opportunities like this with you, Jana. Being able to explain to people like, oh wow, I never thought about it that way. We need to slow down. And what I find is that when we slow down, men are more sexually satisfied to their premature ejaculation problems go away, they start to feel more pleasure. They start to connect their heart to their penis. They start to have more full bodied, more passionate, more pleasurable experiences that nurture them in ways they’ve never been nurtured. So This is all learn able there are 20 kinds of orgasms. The body can have both. Male and female and we are barely tapping the surface of what is possible for us. And this is what ageless sexuality allows you to do the time to explore your own pleasure potential. And that’s why it’s so important to take care of your health so that you can have a great intimate life as well. So you have the energy and the vitality to have all those wonderful endorphins and hormones coursing through you from pleasure and orgasm.

Jana Danielson

Well, and you know, as we wrap, I mean to things that I wanted to touch on. First of all, like I’m sure people are like 20 types of orgasm. Like I thought there was one, I thought there was two. And can you just touch on quickly if someone is without a partner how this part of their life doesn’t have to be non existent. Can you touch on that? And then can you share with us some of your own personal mindset hacks or tips that you use in your life?

Susan Bratton

Yeah. So the best thing to do is to find out about the 20 kinds of male and 20 kinds of female orgasm. It’s just to go to my website at personallifemedia.com Will you put the link with it for me Jana. Because people won’t remember that personallifemedia.com actually, you can also go to betterlover.com. That will lead you to it as well. and that’s videos where I go through the 20 kinds of mail and the 20 kinds of female orgasm. So you got a better lover dot com. You’ll see me lead you through a video that explains the 20 kind of female and the 20 kind of male orgasms I describe and explain it there. And then yeah, it’s me and the 20th one is wild card. I mean there are ways that people are having orgasms that I don’t even know, but I’ve documented all 20 and the mind, the hacks or the mindset stuff that I use, and I want to do the solo pleasure to let me let me do solo pleasure first, which is that most of the pleasure that you can create does not require a partner. And for women, I like to tell them for men and women, I like to tell them to orgasmic lee cross train essentially use a lot of the tools that are available that our sexual technology tools, vibrators, pleasure sleeves, all those kinds of things to cross train using different tools that way, you are expanding your orgasmic potential and then when you do that and you are with a partner, you’re just able to have orgasms more easily.

You have less performance anxiety and their stimulation helps you get to orgasm quite easily because you’ve already trained yourself to be very orgasmic in lots of ways and for example, the five types of toys that that we use as women would be air stimulators, like the womanizer thrusters and pulse eight hours from Fun Factory is a good example of it, kind of in and out type of a thing. G spot, wands and vibrators. What are the other ones? I’m, I’m hurrying because I know we’re running out of time? It’s all on betterlover.com, the orgasmic cross training for men and women and just go there so that I can finish this up for you because I know you’re busy and you need to get back to your life too. I just like go over there and find it, it’s a lot easier. And then finally, the hacks that I use are that I think I am always, I’m always believing in myself. I always know that I have so much to give and that what I want to do is stay healthy so that I can give my gifts because that’s what gives me joy when I was a little girl. I was very, very lucky that my mother said Susie, you’re a smart, smart girl and you always know the right thing to do if you’re ever confused. Come to me. 

But you know how to make good decisions, Go with your gut. Your intuition is strong. You are an amazing young girl. Trust yourself. Don’t listen to what other people say, listen to what you think go with what you think, you will be right. And I did that same thing with my daughter and it really empowered her to be an incredible young woman. And she is giving her gifts helping indigenous people preserve their ecosystems in coral reef areas. I mean talk about important work and what I want to leave you with is trust yourself. What you have to give as gifts are important, you are of value, You are loved, you must love yourself and take care of yourself and get through whatever is happening to you right now and come out the other side and give those gifts because you do know what you are doing. Follow your own internal guidance. It is inside you what you need to do.

Jana Danielson

Susan, thank you so much for taking us on this beautiful journey with you over these past 35-40 minutes. Ladies and gentlemen ageless vitality, I think that is a term that we need to have on our radar and just be grateful that you know what it is, define it for yourself and take the steps to absolutely live it. Susan, thanks again everybody. I will see you on the next episode of the Medicine of Mindset Summit