Episode 173: 5-Minute Pleasures To Rewire Your Whole Day
Who needs a weekend retreat when you’ve got chocolate, an open window, and Spanish guitar?
In today’s episode I’m sharing some of my most cherished 5-minute rituals to drizzle pleasure into your day like honey on a fig.
We’re taught to strive for transformation through big shifts. But the truth is, the whole trajectory of your day can change with a single, soulful moment of pleasure.
Why yes, I would like my days to feel more like honey drizzled over a fig. 🍯
And if you’d love more ways to cast a sensory spell over your life, great news – the garden gates of The Sanctuary Community are opening very soon. Keep an eye on your inbox!
With honeyed fingertips,
Mary
P.S. Craving more presence and pleasure? The Sanctuary opens soon. Your invitation is on its way.
Free Audio Collection: The Enchanted Path of Beauty • Discover beauty as a devotional path, a healing practice, and source of the sacred.
-
5-Minute Pleasures That Can Transform Your Day
Hello beautiful and welcome to the Come to Your Senses podcast. I'm your host, award winning certified feminine embodiment coach, licensed esthetician, and enthusiastic foster dog mama to animals across the land. Mary Lofgren Here we explore how to bring more richness, radiance, peace and pleasure to our lives, homes and hearts through the joy of beauty, the wisdom of the body, the warmth of connection, and the splendor of the senses. I'm so glad you're here. Pull up a pouf and let's dive in. Hello, beautiful beings, and welcome to come to your senses. I am delighted to be here with you today to talk about one of my favorite topics. Which is the way that tiny moments and rituals of pleasure can reshape and rewire our entire day, especially in the personal growth industry. There's I find, such an emphasis on big, sweeping change and reinvention, and I love myself a good wrecking ball. Just Miley Cyrus into my life. Ride that thing like a mechanical bull and completely reinvent and reconstruct. I've done that many, many times. And yet those big, sweeping changes have often had a whiplash blowback effect and made me feel even further from where I wanted to ultimately be. What has truly changed my life and changed the frequency of my days is the way that I layer in. Like raspberry jam layered between two pieces of soft sponge cake with a layer of buttercream, layering in soft sensory presets that ask almost nothing of us except for our presence. And so, in this episode, I am very excited to share with you some of my favorite five minute ways to reset, rewire, and re ignite your magnetism through small five minute pleasures. So for our first gym, we are going to globe trot over to the land of winding dirt roads and towering cypress trees and vine ripened tomatoes, and visit the place where pleasure is not just a reward or a place we visit in life, but it is really the whole point of life. And that is the country of Italy. So I've been to Italy several times. I have taken groups of women to Italy to explore sensuality and pleasure on my retreats. It's really my signature. Come to your senses retreat. Because Italy itself is such a teacher of pleasure, and it's woven into the fabric of the culture, of the history, of even the stone walls inside an ancient apartment building has, you know, tiny altars to the Virgin Mary and red geraniums pushing up through the sidewalk cracks and cobblestones. And it's an exquisite place, and something that the Italians do really well is the art of savoring. And this first gem Jim is something practical in the sense that it can be applied to anything that you do to create an oasis of pleasure in your day. Whether it's a cup of coffee or espresso. Today, this afternoon, I had a craving for chocolate truffles, and so I went to this little chocolate shop in my neighborhood and picked up a few and picked up a marzipan strawberry. And as I was driving home, you know, this is one thing that you rarely see in Italy, especially amongst native Italians, is like you rarely see someone bustling down the street with a cup of coffee in one hand and a pastry in the other, and there is a profound respect for the body and the senses and the sensory experience. And as I was driving away from the chocolate shop, I took a bite of this amazing raspberry truffle. And I realized that as I was driving, I was like, I actually can't taste a thing. And so I pulled over under a willow tree and I turned on Spanish guitar, and I rolled down all the windows, and I put my little tootsies out the window, like, kind of propped my calves up on the the window of the car. And there was so much that I would have missed. Had I just had my attention on the road and on the music and on driving while I'm trying to enjoy these truffles, I would have missed the delicious way that the chocolate melted into my fingerprints and left that sumptuous stickiness behind. I would have missed the little flakes of dried strawberry on the top of one of the truffles. I would have missed the gorgeous color inside the truffle, the delicate sugar crystals outside this marzipan strawberry. I mean, there are so many ribbons of rapture present in every moment when we can slow down and allow our senses to actually experience the moment, rather than continually trying to optimize the moment. And this idea that savoring is the ultimate optimization without having to change anything, without having to make anything more efficient or multitask. The thing that we're chasing, which is presence, is right there in every moment. And so whether it's a marzipan strawberry or a chocolate truffle or a first bite into your sandwich, you know, maybe you take your salad that you normally eat at your desk and you bring it to the park instead, and you take your full lunch hour. I remember when I was working in corporate America, how often we would zoom to the deli to get our salads, these meager, unsatisfying salads, and zoom back to the office and shove them in our face. I was a corporate trainer, so I only had a short time between classes and. But on Fridays, like when I started to explore and expand into my pleasure capacity and the fact that. This way of going about life was not only not sitting right with me, but it was actually eroding my health and satisfaction. I started taking on Fridays. I didn't teach, so I would take myself out to a three course meal with a aperitif, and where I would sometimes have a glass of champagne, and I would have a glass of coffee with my dessert. And, you know, the Italians, it's like you have stages to the meal, and the pasta is its own course. The meat is its own course, the side plate is its own course. The cheese and fruit is its own course. The dessert is its own course. The coffee and the digestive is its own course. And, you know, this is so different than where I live in the United States, where we are so oriented towards efficiency that, you know, looking at a magazine stand, it seems like every cooking magazine is how to make this in five minutes and how to make 20 servings of this so that you never have to cook again, you know? And so this first gem is more of a mindset shift than go do this to have a five minute portal to pleasure in your day. And yet, you know, I think about the Mediterranean diet, which in the 90s, I think when I was a teenager, this came out and it was like, eat olive oil, eat fish, eat all these fatty acids and you'll feel and look amazing. And what I think was perhaps left out of that equation is that the Mediterranean diet is often consumed slowly, and the vine ripened tomato comes from a vineyard, one town over, and was plucked merely hours ago. You know that there are so many elements and aspects that go into the way that our bodies metabolize experiences, and slowing down to savor is one of the ways that we can, for lack of a better word, hack. Oh, earmuffs. Cover your ears. I can't stand that word, but for some people, they're really into it. And so, you know, the greatest hack that I know is to actually slow down and look around and receive the pleasure that's already happening, rather than running a marathon to chase it. Our next gem is another simple pleasure that requires very little of you, and that is reading in the sun. So lately I've been reading as the first thing that I do when I get up in the morning. I notice that I have no problem at night unplugging and after a full day, cuddling into my bed with my sheets that feel like sleeping in a tub of Cool Whip and reading a book until I fall asleep. And that in the morning. I'm often gripped by this compulsion to make my mornings. This ritual of like, shutting myself up powerfully for my day. And I bring that voice in because there is this energy, this thread of like, conquering what's ahead. Like summoning my energy, clearing my energy to set off on my journey and be as productive as possible. And I've realized lately how that idea of hustle culture and this again, orientation towards pleasure being something I can have after a long day versus something I can swan dive like Scrooge McDuck into his gold mill of coins first thing in the morning. And so, to rewire that my latest morning ritual is I wake up, I grab my yoga mat, I pad out to my patio, which is really more of just kind of like a little cement slab. But I roll out my yoga mat, I grab a. Container of fresh strawberries and my lemon water and my Earl grey tea. And I lay down on my belly and I read my book until I'm full, until I'm satisfied. And I let the strawberries get warm in the sun. And there have been so many times where I've woken up and thought, okay, a 15 minute block of yoga. Okay, ten minute meditation. Okay. Make my high protein breakfast. You know, and just the ways that diet culture has squeezed its Python grasp into even the things that we do for our mental health and wellbeing. Anyway, I could go off on a tangent there, but we will roll it back to the topic du jour. And instead, what I notice is that when I sprawl out on my yoga mat and I give my mind the delight of feasting on a real book that is not. The glare of my phone, and when I'm taken into the portal of a story, it's like my brain gets to. I think of it as like a kid getting to, like, sit on the couch with Cheerios after they get home from school. It's like a little bit of a breather and a little bit of restorative pleasure. And what's ironic is that then I want to stretch my body, and then I want to go in and I feel ready to leap into my day because I'm already full. My cup runneth over with Earl grey, Strawberry Delight. And so whether it's the morning time or when you take your salad to the park ala Auntie Mary's recommendation, and you decide to plop a delicious book about a love affair in France in front of your eyes instead of some report or your social media scroll, sinking your mind up with the sweetness of a story and your hands on the realness of a page is such a profound way to rewire your day and reorient yourself towards relaxation and pleasure for the rest of the day. Our final gem for bringing more small moments of pleasure into your day is not so much one that is of the variety we've been talking about so far, which is slowing down, savoring, taking breaks. This gem is a five minute pleasure that can help to energize you in moments where your energy is really low. And what's ironic is that when our energy gets really low. Our minds tend to tell us it's time to go to sleep. It's time to do nothing. Go to bed. Completely. Shut down. Shut off. And usually when that happens, that can be a sign that we have simply gone past the barometer of our body's capacity. And the only way to get back to baseline, after we've gone out of our window of energy and capacity in the direction of intensity, is to have a period of shutdown. And so that's a fancy way of saying, at the end of the day, you might want to slink into bed. And if that feels like true medicine for you. Rock on. But something that I find is that often what is an even more nourishing medicine for me is to do something that gives me life. So what ends up happening is that when the barometer of our energy is already really low. We are going to have an even harder time getting back to baseline if we meet that low place with an even lower place. And so this is in support and advocacy of the simple things that give our bodies energy, such as a mason jar filled to the top with delicious cold water and a Meyer lemon squeezed in, or a gorgeous walk, or you see a stream and you remember that you are alive. This happens for me a lot when I go on a walk, because I look at nature and I think, oh, I'm in a body. Oh, there's the smell of eucalyptus in the sound of rushing water. Oh. I'm alive. Another thing I'll do to give myself energy is to eat something that has a lot of crisp lifeforce, like a cold Persian cucumber, or the snap of a baby carrot, or the pepper of a spring radish. So delicious and colorful and fragrant. And for more ideas on these sweet, simple pleasures that can help to rewire and revitalize your day, I'm going to link two episodes in the show notes. One is a recent episode called The Sensualist Guide to Spring, and that is specific to the season that we're in in the Northern hemisphere is the unique code of pleasures that spring delivers through its nectarine blossoms. And I'm also going to pop in an episode on Italian inspired tips for health and happiness that I did recently. And if you enjoyed this episode and you're craving more tiny rituals like these woven into your everyday life, I am also delighted to say that in just that very soon the sanctuary, which is our membership community for women who want to live with more softness, more presence and more pleasure, will be opening its garden gates again. So stay tuned for that. Or you can head over to https://marylofgren.com/sanctuary. Sanctuary to join the want list and be the first to be notified when we open that rose petal strewn path to walk into the sumptuous sanctuary. Thank you so much for listening today. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving us a review and I look forward to seeing you in our next episode. Ciao, ciao! For more gems on how to awaken the sacred within and around you through the beauty, wisdom, and wonder of the body, head to https://marylofgren.com/sanctuary Com. There you'll find a Candyland of resources. You can also check out my award winning coaching services or flirt with stepping through the garden gates of the sanctuary community. Come explore how to live with more slowness, sacredness, and sensory luxury at https://marylofgren.com/sanctuary