What Does Your Vagina Have to Do With Your Vagus Nerve? More Than You Think.

As you know, it’s pretty rare in my world for me to recommend a product unless I am absolutely head over heels in love with it.

Which is why I have to tell the women in my world about BOLD by NUMY.

I found BOLD through a Facebook ad that positioned it not simply as a sex toy, but as a device designed to help regulate the nervous system through deep vaginal stimulation and its potential connection to the vagus nerve.

That got my attention.

As a sex and intimacy coach and longtime Tantra practitioner, I’m fascinated by the connection between sexual pleasure, the pelvic bowl and the nervous system. So when some of the videos in the ad actually talked about the vagus nerve and the science behind what they were claiming, I was intrigued enough to plunk down my $79.

A week later, the device arrived.

One of NUMY’s claims is that BOLD isn’t, per se, a sex toy. They recommend using it for about 15 minutes before bed as a way to relax and regulate your nervous system.

The reviews were amazing.

I was still skeptical.

Let me tell you: I’m not skeptical anymore.

FIRST THE PLEASURE PART

BOLD provides very deep internal stimulation through a bending and pulsing motion while simultaneously stimulating the perineal area and the clitoris.

It has a variety of intensities and patterns that I found incredibly satisfying—and, yes, very arousing.

One thing I particularly love is that the clitoral portion is very flexible, so rather than forcing your anatomy to fit the toy, you can position it where it works best for your body.

But what surprised me most was the depth of the internal stimulation.

Initially, I thought I was experiencing really intense G-spot stimulation.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that what I experienced may have involved much deeper vaginal and cervical stimulation. These were deep, intense internal orgasms that felt quite different from primarily  clitoral orgasms.

And all of that would have been enough for me to recommend the device.

But here’s where things got really interesting.

Then I went to sleep

I slept like a log.

And I mean deep sleep—without the usual disturbances that are unfortunately pretty normal for me. No 3 a.m. awakening. No lying there waiting for my brain to decide whether we were going back to sleep.

I just slept.

But the biggest surprise came the next morning.

When I woke up, I could literally feel more openness and spaciousness in my pelvic bowl. It felt as though some very deep muscles that I hadn’t even realized I was holding had finally let go.

And then I noticed my jaw.

I have dealt with a chronically tight jaw and TMJ for years, despite orthodontia and night guards. That morning, my jaw felt amazing. No pain. And I had more range of motion than I can ever remember having.

Which Daren definitely appreciated.😏

So what in the world does my vagina have to do with my jaw?

That was the question that sent me down the research rabbit hole.

And what I found was fascinating.

Researchers Barry Komisaruk and Beverly Whipple have spent decades studying the neuroscience of female sexual pleasure. Their research has demonstrated that sensory information from deep vaginal and cervical stimulation can reach the brain through the vagus nerve, providing a pathway that can bypass the spinal cord.

That doesn’t prove that BOLD “resets the vagus nerve,” and I haven’t found clinical research on BOLD itself demonstrating that it does.

So I’m not willing to make that claim.

But it does mean there is legitimate neuroscience behind the connection between deep vaginal/cervical stimulation and the vagus nerve.

And then there was my jaw.

Emerging research has found an association between pelvic-floor function and temporomandibular disorders—the group of conditions we commonly call TMJ.

One recent study found that treating and relaxing the jaw actually resulted in a measurable decrease in resting pelvic-floor muscle activity.

That study looked at the connection in the opposite direction from what I experienced, so we can’t conclude that relaxing my pelvic floor caused my jaw to release.

But it certainly made my experience a whole lot more interesting.

And then there’s the sleep angle.

Research is also beginning to show associations between sexual activity, orgasm and improvements in certain measures of sleep quality and sleep efficiency.

None of this proves exactly why I slept so deeply, why my pelvis felt so open the next morning, or why my jaw suddenly felt better than it had in years.

But it tells me that what I experienced isn’t nearly as far-fetched as it might initially sound.

Tantra has known something about this for a long time

As a Tantra practitioner, the idea that our genitals, pelvic bowl, breath, nervous system and the rest of our body are deeply interconnected isn’t exactly ground-breaking news.

We’ve been working experientially with those connections for a very long time.

What fascinates me is watching Western science begin to explore the physiological mechanisms behind experiences that embodied traditions have been describing for centuries.

Do I know whether BOLD actually “reset my nervous system”?

No.

What I do know is that I experienced incredibly pleasurable deep vaginal and cervical stimulation, powerful orgasms, one of the deepest nights of sleep I’ve had in a very long time, a remarkable feeling of openness in my pelvis—and an unexpected release in a jaw that has been chronically tight for years.

That’s enough to make me keep using it.

And enough to make this very reluctant product recommender tell the women in my world:

This one is worth knowing about.