Lana grew up with a mother who talked about sex more openly than most. On her wedding day, her mom’s advice was simple: take care of your marriage, and don’t neglect closeness.

So she didn’t. Until, in her thirties, it started to feel like one more thing on the to-do list.

Then her mother gave her another piece of advice. Good sex is like a game of tennis: stop performing and focus on the ball. That’s when it became about connection, with her partner and with herself.

In her early forties, something changed again. Sex didn’t feel the way it used to, and no one had prepared her for that. Her search for answers became her life’s work, and eventually her new book, HERgevity™.

In this conversation, Lana and I talk about the messages women inherit about sex and aging, and why so many of us still can’t say the words out loud, even at the doctor’s office. I share my own experience after a partial hysterectomy at 37. And we talk about why the goal isn’t to shout “vagina” from a stage, but to talk about our bodies as calmly as we’d talk about an elbow.

We also get to know the woman behind the work: a planner who launched her first business at 14, a mother who never flinched at her sons’ questions, and a woman approaching 56 who calls this her butterfly stage.