Bookshelves In Color: Nikeema Lee, Author and Intimacy Coach

Welcome to the FIRST Bookshelves In Color interview! Nikeema Lee is an amazing woman with an equally amazing story about how she came to be the renowned intimacy expert and author that she is today. I talked with her about how she got started in her career and the books that helped her along the way:

NN: Back when I met you, you were doing Upscale Desires (a sexuality magazine) and now you do the Sweet Spot Tour (sexuality and relationships speaking series)…how did you get into intimate relationship coaching?

NL: I got into relationship coaching because back in 2008 I was going to a lot of bachelorette parties and passion parties where they have the passion party toy representative come in. She would talk to the people and would be in the seats talking to my friends like “girl you don’t need that” “that’s not going to work for you” “you need this, you need that”. A lot of my friends would say “how do you know so much about toys?” And I would say because I’ve been using toys since I was 16 years old, so I’ve kind of got a history. So one of my cousins-in-laws said you should start your own business, I’d come to your party because you have more information and I was like whatever and I didn’t think about it.

I had my corporate job with Miller Brewing Company, the beer company, and one day I was just sitting at home taking my daughter to the dentist and I heard something say, “you should start a toy company”. I didn’t want to do passion parties or Pure Romance, so I found a wholesale distributor, went to downtown Greensboro, got my business license, opened a bank account and contacted my cousins like “Hey, I’m having a toy party at my house”, and before I knew it, I had booked four toy parties in one day.

So fast forward to the very first toy party that I have and I do well and I get to the back where people actually want to buy the toys because they want to do it privately, and people started asking these questions: I’ve never had an orgasm, how do I give a blow job, how do I tell my husband that I want him to call me a bitch and spank me, how do I go about having that conversation, and I was like “you’re 40 years old, you’ve never had an orgasm?” And I’m like where they do that at? I didn’t think too much about it, but by the fourth party that I had and I kept getting these same in depth questions, it dawned on me that the information is so much more valuable than the product.

Even if I sell you a product, it’s still not going to do anything for you if you don’t know how to use it mentally, spiritually and emotionally. If all of that stuff is messed up, it doesn’t matter what the product is. So I started to get more in tune with spiritual sexuality and intimacy and about what love is, and in the process of that, I discovered that there were some things in me that weren’t completely whole and weren’t completely healed. I come from being abandoned at 11 years old and living on my own since I was 14, so I had a lot of abandonment issues, rejection issues, and having sex to please other people not pleasing myself.

When I started to tap into that, it took me into a really dark hole and a really depressed hole, and in December of 2009, I attempted suicide. In the midst of all of that pain that I was in, I realized that what was really fueling my sexual exploitation was an abandoned 11 year old girl that was screaming for attention and screaming for help. During the year of 2010, I took that year to really discover who I was and what I liked and disliked about myself and what I liked and disliked about life. I just learned and sat at the feet of the greatest teachers out there like Tony Robbins and Napoleon Hill and I immersed myself in their theology and I really discovered who I was. So by the end of 2010, I wrote my first book, 30 Days To Freedom: Becoming Authentic because this was the first time I was truly myself.

[I tried to figure out] how can I take that information and teach women that if you become yourself and be yourself, the sex part of your life then becomes like the icing on the cake, it becomes the cherry on top. It’s not something that you have to do, but it is something that you do with a creative spirit. That’s how I got into intimacy coaching.

NN: Are you writing more books? If so, what do you think you’ll write about next?

NL: Yeah, so I’m absolutely writing more books. I’m starting a series on my life. The first one is a novella called Get Intimate. It goes back to the story of when I was 17 years old and sort of revisits how I get to this stage in my life. It’s written from the perspective of an undereducated 17 year old, so there’s a lot of misspelled words and misuse of grammar, so it’s difficult to read because I wanted to really put people in this space of here’s a girl who was abused at seven years old and abandoned at eleven years old and really tried to figure out herself through the world of sex, through the world of men.

I talk about in one year having had 28 different sexual partners and what that really felt like and what that really looked like. And then, the story ends pretty abruptly, so you don’t know if the main character, her name is Mecca, you don’t know if she transitions to a better place by going off to college or if college is really where she falls. The next book will be about the escapades and things that happen in college. It’s really a lifelong book and it will come out in series and in stages. So that’s what I’m working on now.

I also have another book that I’m working on, I’m co-authoring with a really great friend of mine, and it’s along the lines of “he’s not him” and it will give women the tools to move on from bad relationships by not bringing them into the new one and [the book will help women] realize that the guy you’re with now is not the guy you were with a month ago, two months ago, five years ago. So that’s really, really exciting.

And then my latest is a sexual book that I have. It’s called Dr. Lee’s Ultimate Guide to a Rockstar Sex Life and it covers what I call how to become a made sexual rockstar. [It allows you to be] able to become mentally, spiritually, and emotionally clear so that you can really elevate your skill set when it comes to sex and sexuality. And once you find that out, being rockstar is so much easier. So I have a few books out there. And I’ve got a couple other ones out there as well, such as  7Love Blocks, which is about what we do to block love from our lives. Writing is something that I enjoy. It’s not something that I do well, but I enjoy it. I definitely have a team of people who help me edit and stuff like that, but I do love telling a good story.

NN: Could you talk about some books about sexuality or business that have shaped you into who you are as an intimacy coach?

NL: Well there’s…the one that I truly enjoy, which is Think And Grow Rich (by Napoleon Hill). That book not only changed me from a sexual perspective, because it does talk about sexual transmutation in the book, but really it allowed me to believe that I can be successful. When you come from a background where you’re told that you’ll never be anything, you’ll never be more than the sum total of your parents, you don’t have the aspiration to be more, so Think and Grow Rich really helped me to face my fears and get focused and this new wave of life. I felt that I could do anything. I read that book after the suicide attempt and it really helped me to change my perspective about myself and learn how to love myself.

Another book that I think that every woman should read is Sacred Woman by Queen Afua. It is by far the best book ever when it comes to learning your body, learning who you are, understanding your femininity, understanding your vagina. That book is like the bible for women in my opinion, other than the Bible.

And then finally, I thought about it, I’ve read a lot of self-help books like The Millionaire Mind and a lot of stuff from Tony Robbins, so I was like they were all good, but I really do believe in 30 Days to Freedom: Becoming Authentic because I love the way that you’re able to walk through 30 days as you really put forth a valiant effort to change your perspective about yourself. My philosophy is that sex is just a physical manifestation of what is going on inside and if you’re broken bruised, battered, depressed, whatever, fighting for everything for yourself, it’s difficult when it comes to sex. Sex is just a byproduct, so sex will be bad if you’re depressed inside no matter who you’re with. You can be with the best person in the world, but it will still be unfulfilling because you’re unfulfilled internally. I think that 30 Days to Freedom allows you to find some self-fulfillment, and when you’re able to come to the table with that, it makes your relationships much better.

NN: What is your all-time favorite book that has contributed to your philosophy on life?

NL: That one’s easy. That’s The Purpose Driven Life (by Rick Warren). The Purpose Driven Life is the one book that I’ve read cover to cover. I read books…some books I skim, some books I listen to on audio, but The Purpose Driven Life was the first book that I read and wrote in and digested and it was just so impactful to me because at the time that I read it, I was a single parent, I was divorced, I was living on my own and life for me was really, really tough, so it really helped me to find out what my vision was going to be.

I always knew I’d be a teacher, I just didn’t know I’d be a sexual teacher, and it helped me to really figure out that being a vessel of learning is something that I enjoy. I enjoy bringing new information to people because I feel like in my life, no one told me this and nobody showed me that so I learned a lot of things the hard way. To be able to really teach somebody and they get that ah-ha moment in their eyes and they finally get it, that to me is pure joy. The Purpose Driven Life is definitely my all-time favorite book.

Nikeema is currently traveling for her Sweet Spot Tour. Check out her website for more information about dates and locations.