Episode 134 - From Ice Queen to Sensual Reveler: Erotic Rewilding with Meena Bhasin
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Hello, gorgeous beings, and welcome to Come to your Senses.
00:48
Welcome to today's episode, which is all about how to create an embodied, feminine based spiritual practice. So when I would hear feminine spiritual practice, often the first place that my mind would go would be to goddess worship and worshiping of the feminine as it expresses itself through deity, which is awesome. But what we're going to be talking about today is not necessarily the worship or devotion to a certain deity or a certain lineage, but more how to build some of the values that we associate with feminine energy values such as beauty, pleasure, embodiment, ease, art, creativity and more into your spiritual practice. So I grew up a super Catholic. I like to say that I wore a cape around with a big SC on the back and I loved the ritual of church and I would go to stations of the cross for fun. When I made my first communion, you had to kick me out of the joint. I just would go every morning so that I could go through this special ritual. And when I was a little kid, people would ask me what do you want to be when you grow up? And I would say a priest. That was always my dream and my goal. And, of course, as I grew more into myself, I found that the curves of my soul and my spirit no longer fit neatly inside the straight lines and linear angles of the faith I was brought up in, and the last 25 years of my life and of my professional career have really been about walking the labyrinth, of coming home to my body as sacred ground and sharing that with others. And so today I am going to share with you some of the principles of a feminine, embodied spiritual practice, and then, from the foundation of those principles, we will talk about how to build a sustainable practice into your life. Today is going to mainly focus on these foundational principles, not so much on the how. Our next episode is going to give a bit more detail into that. But before we dive into the how of anything, you know and this is a feminine principle in itself before we go into drive and action, we first must settle and snuggle in to depth, and so today's episode is going to walk you through those core principles, or at least some of them.
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I have many in my years of collecting these gems and jewels along the passage of the labyrinth of feminine spirituality, and that these may be the seeds that get planted into your consciousness through thought, feeling subconscious, knowing, intuition, and then later blossom into your practices and into your behaviors. So, without further ado, let us dive in to our gems. And so where we're going to begin is actually, at the end, we're going to reverse engineer these feminine principles and go to the result of a feminine based spiritual practice, which I believe is an experience of radiance. So inside of every living being is a divine spark, and there are things that bring that spark alive and allow it to be visible, and there are things that diminish our spark. Whenever you tell the truth and make yourself vulnerable and open your heart, there is a glimmer of radiance Whenever you lean into true, authentic pleasure, as opposed to a performative kind of pleasure. Radiancecom when you reach higher than you think you deserve. 1-800-radiance when you go slow. When you taste, touch, walk without rushing, feel and engage with life, your divine spark and spirit awakens.
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Some of the things that we know tend to diminish our radiance are things like tension in the neck and shoulders. You know, tension in the neck and shoulders not only diminishes our radiance because it just kind of sucks, but also because that pinching in this region of the body inhibits flow of circulation of lymph and nourishment through the blood from the body to the face. So when you've been hunched over a computer, it's not just the blue light or the long hours, but it is an actual physical obstruction to your physical body's radiance. People pleasing Instant radiance killer With holding Lashing out. You know, there's our emotional constellation of radiance Otherling, real radiance crusher.
07:44
And I share all of these things with you because radiance is billed as something that we can buy in a bottle or something that we'd have if we just did better or made more money or lost weight, or. And true radiance is not something that can be bought, but it is something that can be awakened, and that's exactly what the principles that we're about to go through now are going to open up for you. And I also want to share something I'm so excited about, because a lot of the time we can't even see what is blocking our radiance. And I don't know about you, but I sometimes feel like I am drowning in a sea of information out there in the world, like there is no lack of ways that you can change your life or things that you can do to transform. And while I would just be so delighted if my little inner isolator could actually create change from an infographic so that I could avoid all the messiness of vulnerability, what I know deep in my heart and deep in my bones is that real transformation happens when we are seen and supported.
09:22
And last week I cut the ribbon on the Come to your Senses Coatory, which is my six-month body-led immersion to reignite your radiance through artful, embodied living. I am so excited about it. I've literally been working on it, massaging it, writing it, perfecting it for a year. We open the Coatory once a year starting at this time, and I know for myself that when I am considering working with someone, I love reading their copy, I love checking out their emails and sniffing through their social media, but there is just nothing that compares to sitting across from someone and feeling that resonance in my body and experiencing the kind of service that that person can offer. And so, in celebration of the Coatory now being open for enrollment, one of the things that I am offering is something called Radiance Renewal Sessions, and these are 40-minute coaching sessions with yours truly that I am performing at a reduced rate for people who are Coatory, curious and want to get a taste of the kind of support and relationship and sensory style of coaching that I offer. That is an essential part of the Coatory experience. These sessions begin with a radiance assessment that you do on your own and that you submit to me and I review it before our session so that we can have a full, rich, thorough time together. And there are a limited number of these sessions available. So if you go to schoolofsensuallivingcom slash radiance R-A-D-I-A-N-C-E there's also a link below this episode you can book in for one of those reduced rate sessions. This is a one-time only offering and I am so excited to support you in building radiance throughout the entire holistic wheel of your life.
11:58
So with that, my loves, let us now dive in to some of these principles of an embodied feminine spiritual practice that centers radiance. And so I'm going to introduce these in contrast. First, sharing kind of the more traditional, more religion-based, dogma-based approach that I know I was dunked into like a strawberry into a vat of ganache, having grown up in the church so deeply and gone to 13 years of Catholic school. And whether you grew up around religion or not, whether you currently have a delicious religious practice or not, what we're really talking about here is some of the patriarchal foundations on which our spiritual practices and, by virtue, many of our systems tend to be based upon. That can be toxic and harmful. So the first has to do with the ultimate temple, which is your body. So in the old paradigm there is a dissociation and a disownership and even a discarding of the body, and in an embodied spiritual practice the body is exalted. The body is called a temple for a very good reason.
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If you place your hands on the belly and press, you can feel the shape of your ribcage like butterfly wings or like a cathedral. If you place your hand on your heart, you can feel the heart thrumming and pulsing, just like the heartbeat of the earth. When you place your feet in the grass, if you place your hands on your hips, you will notice that your pelvis resembles that of a bowl, like a singing bowl or a sacred vessel of water or nourishment Hmm, throw some gingerbread in there. Needed around. Oh, every time I do a drop in with a client, there's always this spicy, gingery aliveness that awakens whenever we drop into the pelvis. I can feel it expanding my pelvis as I talk about it.
14:43
And in certain spiritual traditions there is this concept of eminence, eminence being that radiant light that shines from within, and the idea that God, the divine, the high priestess, sky daddy, whatever you want to call it is radiating from within us, through every cell of our body. This is an idea around spirituality that also puts heaven right here on earth, and so, in contrast to some of these more patriarchal, father-based, masculine lineages, where heaven is something that we're trying to get to and something that we're constantly being judged on, and where our spiritual condition is based on an outside source of dogmatic rules, those are very different from this idea of God, higher power, the divinity within you radiating from every cell of your body. And a way to see your body and to start to implement this principle right away is with something that I call the reframe game, and I've already been playing it with you a little bit in those descriptions that I gave of the different parts of the body, but I remember being in my 20s, hating my body, just such a tortured relationship to it, and making all sorts of comparisons that were degrading and deprecating and that allowed me to connect with people through my self-loathing. So things like my skin is the color of uncooked poultry, or my belly looks like Java the hut, or, you know, you hear things like my butt is flat as pancake all these things that we have in our culture, and you might draw some of those comparisons too, and I urge you to play the reframe game, which is where you look at those parts and you compare them to something holy and sacred. So, for example, I'm looking at the bones on my hand, and they stretch out like rivers branching out from the sea. I'm looking at the arch of my foot, which resemble the arched windows at Lincoln Center, which is holy ground for me as an art lover. I just paused this recording so that I could look at my belly and find an angle that reminded me of something gorgeous and sacred, and I noticed the way that the curve on my oblique resembles the curve of a cello or a violin, and so this is just one way that you can reclaim and retrain the gorgeous Taj Mahal that your body is one millimeter at a time.
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The second principle of a feminine embodied spiritual practice centers around pleasure. So when I was a kid, we had this cookie jar and it was in the shape of a Franciscan monk and it had, like the brown robes and a bald head, and etched into the robes was the commandment thou shalt not steal, and I actually loved it. I thought it was so charming. We had many members of clergy in my family, in just different parts of my family, across my moms and my dad's side, and so it was a very common thing to have laying around the house, you know, a Franciscan monk cookie jar. And I remember when I went to make my first confession, which is one of the sacraments in Catholicism. When you're seven years old, you go into a priest and you confess your sins, and everything that I confessed to was something that caused pleasure in my body so eating too many cookies, doing a cartwheel in the kitchen when no one was looking, because I wasn't supposed to do cartwheels, you know. I'm sure that that rule was in place for my safety, but what is fascinating to me is the way that that was conflated with an active betrayal against God.
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Something that brings me a lot of comfort is knowing that the etymology, one of the roots of the word sin is separate. And so, in embodying a more feminine spiritual practice that feels abundant, nurturing, body-based indulging of the senses and uses the instrument of the body to play the song of your own divinity, you are not only encouraged but it is considered of virtue to experience and to receive pleasure, to nourish your little nerve endings as a gift from the divine. It is what you were designed for. And the last principle that I'm going to share just for today. We'll be revisiting these again in future episodes, but the last one we'll share for today is sensual gratification.
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So this past weekend I was watching the movie Elvira, which is a Halloween movie all about this woman who is very gorgeous, seductress, mistress of the dark, with luminous pale skin in these luxurious breasts and gorgeous red lips and wit that's sharp as a tack. And she comes into this country town in Massachusetts and immediately the townspeople are threatened beyond belief because of the erotic aliveness and charge that she brings with her. And women who prioritize their erotic and sensual gratification have been magnetically scandalizing the planet since Eve took her first bite of the apple. You know, there's that Cole Porter song. You got that thing you got that thing.
Speaker 2
Host
22:05
You got that thing. The thing that makes birds forget to sing. Yeah, you've got that thing. That certain thing, Karen Fitzgerald, this is for you. You got what Adam craved when he, with love for Eve, was tortured. She only had an apple tree, but you, you've got an orchard. You got those ways, those taken, ways that make me rush off to car TAs for a wedding ring. You got that thing.
Mary
Host
22:42
See, that is my erotic aliveness coming through the airwaves into your sweet little eardrums. It's taking a risk, it's celebrating my life through song, it's being vulnerable with my perfectly imperfect voice, and all of that translates into my sensual life. I won't go into too many details, but recently I have been oh, what shall I say here? Exploring relating to I'm being very vague I have been having marvelously satisfying sensual experiences that are so genuine and authentic and vulnerable and open, and it's all because of years and years of devotion to that radiance inside myself that shines even in its darkness. So let us not confuse radiance with prettiness. Of course there's nothing wrong with prettiness. I live for prettiness in my everyday. However, beauty and erotic aliveness and the face and radiance of someone who has seen the face of God in their own eyes through their sensual body, that, my friends, is something different. That is the goddess herself animating the human body. And with that crescendo of an ending, we are going to stop there for today's Gems. And if you are ready to feel your radiance, expand to access new levels of your intuition, to elevate your beauty, own your magnetism and flourish in your body, head to SchoolofSensualLivingcom. Slash radiance. It's a mouthful, I know. You can click the link below this episode to just go directly there. Conciergelink awaits you To schedule one of these reduced rate coaching sessions with me that I have never offered before, and there are only a handful of them available, so make sure to snap one up, because I would love to sit across the screen from you and support you in relaxing into your fullest radiance.
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Thank you so much for listening. It has been a pleasure, as always, and I will see you in our next episode. Do you ever wish that you could have a day at the spa with a facial and manicure and a massage? But for your own spirit and soul, do your nerve endings feel dull, frayed, even deadened, and you yearn to feel animated and livened and invigorated from within? Your radiance is precious, magnetic and is who you are. All the layers of stress, obligation and overperforming have been stripped away. In a Radiance Renewal Coaching session, you'll be given the tools to identify the true blocks to your full radiance and discover how to melt tension in your body and mind to reveal your most luminous light. Sessions are available for a limited time, so head to SchoolofSensualLivingcom or hit the link below this episode.
Meet one of my inspirations, the Sensual Reveler, Meena Bhasin. A violist, mother, and pleasure activist who is rewilding and reclaiming her erotic aliveness, and sharing her journey of discovering radical self-love and pleasure as guiding forces in her life.
Discover the power of listening to your intuition and reclaiming pleasure as an essential aspect of your true self. Together, let's imagine a world centered around tenderness, nurturing life, and embracing authenticity.
