Introducing Awakening Desire: A New Series with Sexologist Paula Giroday
It took eleven days before anything happened.
I'd picked up a breathwork practice through the Somatica Institute's material — five or six minutes every morning, attention down in the belly and pelvis, no goal, nothing to achieve. For the first week and a half it was one of the more boring things I'd ever committed to. I kept doing it mostly out of stubbornness.
Then on about Day 11, my solar plexus started pulsating. Not as a metaphor. An actual physical sensation in the center of my chest that had simply not existed in my body for the previous forty-some years of having a body.
I remember thinking two things almost at once. The first was: this is real, and nobody told me. The second was more frustrating. I had only found that practice because I'd gone looking — because I'd started working with a somatic coach, because I'd read my way into a corner of this field most people never hear about. Practices that can genuinely change how a person inhabits their own body were sitting behind a private coaching room and a few hundred dollars an hour, and almost everyone who needed them was never going to get in that room.
That gap is, more or less, why Coelle exists.
So I'm genuinely glad to tell you about this one. Today we're launching Awakening Desire, a new series of four guided audio experiences created with sexologist and somatic sex coach Paula Giroday. It's live now, and it's included with every Coelle subscription.
Why Paula Giroday
I want to explain this partnership rather than just announce it, because the choice wasn't incidental.
Paula Giroday is a Certified Sexologist through the American Board of Sexology and a Somatica®-Certified Sex and Relationship Coach. She's the founder of Sensual Heart Wellness, where she works with individuals and couples on building intimate lives that are more connected and, in her framing, shame-free.
That Somatica certification is the piece I want to dwell on. The Somatica framework — developed by Celeste Hirschman and Danielle Harel — is the single body of work that has most changed my own intimate life. Their fourteen core desires are how I finally understood that what I'm actually after underneath almost everything is Being Seen, and why eye contact does more for me than most physical technique ever has. Their material is where the breathwork came from. I've written about all of it here more times than I can count.
I should add something that isn't in the press release: I've been Paula's coaching client for the past five months.
That's the actual origin of this partnership. I didn't find her through a search process or a list of credentials — I found her by hiring her, and I spent five months on the receiving end of her work before it occurred to me that it shouldn't stay confined to one room at a time. I'm not going to get into what we've worked on; that part's mine. What I'll say is that I know precisely what her guidance feels like from the inside, which strikes me as a better basis for building something together than any résumé.
It also means I'm not a neutral party here. I'm a client recommending my own coach, and you should weigh what I say about her with that in mind. I'd rather tell you plainly than have you work it out later.
The other thing about Paula, and this matters more in audio than people expect: she comes out of theatre and acting. A guided session lives or dies on voice. You can write a technically perfect script and have it land as a corporate training module, because the person reading it is performing calm rather than being calm, and a listener's nervous system can tell the difference instantly. Paula can hold a room with her voice. In this format, that's not a nice-to-have — it's most of the product.
Here's how she put it:
"So much of intimacy coaching happens in a private room with one couple at a time. With Coelle, I can guide someone through the same somatic practices from wherever they feel safest: the breath, the presence, the act of claiming what you want. My only goal was to sound human and real, and to help people feel more at home in their own bodies."
That's the whole brief, and she hit it.
The Four Sessions
The series is built around a premise I believe completely, and which took me until my late thirties to understand: confidence and desire are not things you perform. They're states you cultivate in your body.
That's not a wellness slogan. It's the most practical thing in this post, and I know it from an unlikely direction. I have a master's in sport psychology, and one of the first things you learn working with athletes is that you cannot think your way into a state. You act your way into one. You build the physical conditions and the state arrives. Waiting to feel ready is how athletes stay mediocre — and waiting to feel desire before doing anything about it is how couples stay dormant.
All four sessions work on that principle. Here's what each one actually does.
Own It — a sexual confidence breathwork session for men.
This is the one I'd hand to a version of myself ten years ago. Men get performance culture and essentially nothing else: size anxiety, erection anxiety, duration anxiety, and the unspoken expectation that male sexuality is a reliably high-performing engine that never needs attention. Nobody teaches men to be curious about their bodies rather than demanding of them. What this session builds is the grounded, physical kind of confidence that comes from below the neck — not the kind you talk yourself into on the drive home.
Open — a confidence breathwork session for women.
Where Own It builds ground, Open works on reconnecting the body to sensation and to ease. It sits in a real research tradition: Dr. Lori Brotto at the University of British Columbia has spent two decades running clinical trials on mindfulness-based approaches to low desire and arousal difficulty, and her consistent finding is that the capacity to be present with physical sensation is trainable, and that training it improves sexual function. Not through technique — through attention. This session is attention training with a body in it.
Speak It — a desires meditation.
Most adults genuinely cannot answer the question what do you want sexually? They can tell you what they're supposed to want, or what their partner wants, and go blank on their own. That's not a character flaw; it's what happens when a question goes unasked for thirty years. This session guides you to find the answer and then — the part that matters — say it out loud. I've written before that an awakening only becomes real when it leaves your body and enters the room. This is a rehearsal space for that.
Between Us — a partnered breath circuit.
The one for couples, and the one that's most distinctly Coelle. You and your partner build and share erotic energy through synchronized breath. The reason this works is co-regulation: two nervous systems coming into resonance with each other, both of you arriving at the same time rather than one person waiting for the other to show up. That shared arrival has been the thesis of this whole company since Brittney and I tried our first guided session and felt something in the room change about ten minutes in.
What This Is and Isn't
A word of honesty, since I'd rather undersell this.
These are not a substitute for working with a coach or a therapist. If there's trauma in your history, a somatic practice can surface material without any of the support required to process it — that's not a reason to avoid this work, it's a reason to do it alongside someone qualified. Paula sees clients. So do I.
And they are not a one-session fix. Day 11 was Day 11 for a reason. The whole premise of somatic practice is repetition — you're training an autonomic response, and autonomic responses don't take instruction, they take evidence. Do Own It once and you've had an interesting twenty minutes. Do it three times a week for a month and you'll notice something in your body that wasn't there before.
Give it longer than you want to. That's the only real instruction.
How to Get It
Awakening Desire is live today in the Coelle app on iOS and Android, included with any Coelle subscription. Subscriptions are $49.99 per year, and new members get a 7-day free trial — which is long enough to work through all four sessions and decide for yourself.
If you want to know more about Paula's work, she's at sensualheartwellness.com.
One Last Thing
I keep coming back to the arithmetic of that private room.
A coach working one-on-one, at full capacity, for an entire career, might reach a few thousand people. The practices themselves are not scarce. They're not proprietary. They're just gated behind access — behind knowing this world exists, finding the right person, affording the hour, and being willing to sit in a room and say the thing out loud to a stranger.
Audio removes almost every one of those gates. You can do this at home, at whatever hour, with nobody watching, in the place you feel safest. The practice doesn't get diluted in the translation — that's the part I didn't expect when we started building Coelle. A well-made guided session does something a book can't, because it moves at the pace of your body instead of the pace of your reading.
I spent a long time wishing someone had handed me this material at thirty instead of letting me find it at thirty-nine. This is the closest I can get to doing that for somebody else.
Thank you to Paula for making it with us. I'm proud of this one.
Awakening Desire is available now with any Coelle subscription — four sessions, iOS and Android, and a 7-day free trial if you're new.
And if you want to go deeper than a guided session can take you — mapping your core desires, working through inherited shame, or getting unstuck as a couple — that's the work I do one-on-one. Book a free discovery call here.
