Episode 205 - Beyond Regulation Into Radiance

Do you ever feel like you're doing all the right things to relax and regulate – breathwork, meditation, sound baths – but some part of you still always feels on?

In this episode Mary Lofgren, certified feminine embodiment coach and host of Come to Your Senses, breaks down the way traditional nervous system tools often don't meet the feminine nervous system with what it truly needs for support.

You'll hear about the six pillars of a Woman's Way of embodiment, and how to move beyond regulation into radiance. 

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Episode Transcript

Below is the full transcript of this episode on how you embody the truth that your nervous system is wired for pleasure.

• Episode 205 Transcript: Beyond Regulation Into Radiance

  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 today's episode that I am so excited to share with you, because not only is today's episode full of gems, but it is also an introduction to a brand new offering which is called The Woman's Way of Embodiment, which is a new four month coaching program that just opened for the first time today. And while it's a new program, it is also a culmination of my 20 plus year career in the embodied arts and my ten plus year career as a professional coach. And you can learn more about it at the link below this episode or at Marie Lofgren. And where I sit today is at my desk. The California sun is streaming through the windows. It's uncharacteristically hot here in Northern California this week, and I am wearing a strapless well, it's a skirt that I made into a dress with these beautiful turquoise and gold earrings and a turquoise necklace. And I just wrapped teaching a class on the resplendent feminine nervous system. And that's really what today's episode is about, is moving beyond resolution and regulation as an approach to embodiment and moving into what our systems are really designed for, and particularly the feminine nervous system, which is a state of radiance and resplendent in the body. And one of the things that we talked about in the class is how, until the 1990s. The feminine nervous system was almost entirely left out of scientific research because of the hormonal fluctuations that presented a confounding variable. Wouldn't that make a great name for a book confounding variable? I would like that in my eulogy, she possessed a confounding variable, and so therefore it was like the data couldn't be reliably depended upon with the fluctuations of the cyclical beauty of the feminine system. And why this is important is because what that means is that everything that we think we know about stress and about how we find our center, and about how we discharge activation from the body, how we find relaxation in the body is all centered on male data and has been handed to us as universal truth when in reality. The differences in the feminine body and the feminine nervous system create an entirely different code of regulation. And you probably know that already. If you have experienced doing lots and lots of self-care tools and breathing and stretching and doing somatic exercises, and even though you're doing all these things, there's still this feeling in the body of bracing and being on. Or maybe you can identify with feeling activation rise and you take the route of calming down. Calm yourself down. Don't go out of control. And these might be helpful in the moment, but for a system that is designed to express and to create with emotional charge and that doesn't go. Acceleration to discharge to rest, which is the typical trajectory of the more circadian, more masculine system. That style of coping as of meeting activation with calming down can feel like overriding, and eventually, over time, leads to the inability to decipher and to trust your body signals, and therefore a feeling like you can't trust yourself. And why. I say that this new coaching program is really the culmination of my work is that, you know, I have been teaching and practicing embodiment for over 20 years. My first career was as an esthetician. I've been working in schematics and in the sensual and in the connection between the body and the spiritual and the feminine experience for over a decade. And while I love somatic embodiment. Sometimes with there being such an emphasis on healing and resolving trauma through semantics. And in case you're not familiar with that term, somatic is a derivative of the word soma, which simply means body. So it's a way of healing and expressing through the body rather than just through the intellect or through the mind. And I've loved this dimension of my work, and I've loved teaching embodiment. But there has always been this kind of nagging feeling in the back of my heart that something doesn't feel like the complete picture. And a couple of years ago, something really clicked into place where I lived in New York for almost 15 years, and I went through a divorce and I needed a fresh start, and I decided to move to Asheville, North Carolina. Now, if you've ever been to Asheville or you live in Asheville, I know we have quite a few Asheville listeners, some of whom are my close friends. Hello my loves. You know that Asheville is a kind of wellness hub where there's yoga studios everywhere and farm to table restaurants and farmers markets and small community and mountain biking and hiking and, you know, sound baths, a go go. And just it's really wellness coming at you from all angles. And after my divorce, I was like, okay, this is what I'm here to do. I'm here to heal. I'm here to regulate my nervous system. And I signed up for a yoga teacher training, and I would go to sound baths on Friday nights and do all sorts of, you know, somewhat kooky fringe things. And friends, with all deep respect to that style of healing and living, I was growing more and more and more miserable and detached from myself every single day. And you know, when you're dysregulated and when you're under stress and when you're feeling depressed, well, what do you do? You take better care of yourself. So I brought in more healing modalities, and I brought in more yoga classes. And something really shifted for me when I needed to go back to New York for an event, and I flew back into the city. I took a cab into Midtown, and all of a sudden, my body started to feel like itself again because I realized that my nervous system actually didn't need more healing. It needed more living. And it's interesting write that word regulation. Because when we think about regulating something like regulating gas pressure, I don't even know if that's a thing. It sounds like a thing. But, you know, when I think about regulating, I think about like looking at a gas meter, making sure it's not too high, not too low. It's in balance. And that is really important as a baseline for moving through our lives to be able to find that place of foundational balance. But if you have a nervous system that orients towards the feminine, things, like detaching from your thoughts and from sensation may actually send you into a greater state of activation, because your system is oriented to merge with life through your senses and through sensory pleasure, not just to suspend the experience of mind chatter. You may find that you do all sorts of things to take care of yourself. Maybe you buy yourself chocolate covered strawberries and you give yourself an everything shower, and yet you go to bed at night. And if you've spent the entire day by yourself, you might still be bracing in your nervous system. Because the presence of oxytocin in your system means that you find safety in other people, and that is not a sign of codependency. And it is not a character flaw. It is how you are wired. And so the question becomes, how do we move beyond these more traditional known ways that are typically based on the masculine model and male data and embrace a more feminine, more resplendent way of being? Well, that's exactly what we're going to talk about next is. In the woman's way of embodiment coaching program. There are these six pillars of embodiment that are specific to the feminine experience. And one thing I want to clarify is that when I use the term woman and feminine, that is inclusive of all women, including trans women, it's inclusive of people who don't feel that they resonate with the gender binary, but who resonate with having feminine characteristics to themselves, their bodies, their minds, their experience. And I, Emma, cisgender woman, and I teach from that perspective and that orientation. So I want to name that and own that. But biology is one fragment of how our nervous system orients towards these energies and identities of feminine and masculine. When we talk about the fact that the feminine nervous system was left out of nervous system study for its confounding variable of menstruation until the 1990s, research on the gender variant nervous system is even more far behind. And that. Won't stop us now. We're having such a good time. We're learning our systems. We do not need science to catch up with us, to know what we know in our bodies. So if being a woman, if feeling a feminine orientation is something that resonates with you, this is for you. So that brings us to our gems. I mean, we've already been holding lots and lots of gems up to the light here today, but the gems that I want to offer you today are ways to locate that regulation and resplendent in ways that meet the needs of the feminine wiring. But rather than just things to do, because Lord knows we do not need more things to do, even pleasurable things, I'm sure may feel like stress on an already full to do list. What I want to share with you are something that, or is something that we learn in the woman's way of embodiment, which is these six pillars of embodiment that are not just about how to be in your body, but about how to embrace and enjoy and fall in love with your feminine nature and your womanly wiring. And so the first pillar I call meet your body, meet yourself. So I imagine you can relate to the experience of wanting to connect with the voice of your body, or wanting to heed the messages of your body. But when you tune in with that voice of your body, it can feel impossible to distinguish. Is this the voice of my body, or is this the voice of my conditioning? Is this fear or is this intuition? Is this a call to be compassionate with myself, or am I being dishonest with myself about some ways that I'm self-sabotaging? And just the nature of these questions themselves are really insightful about the way that when we are so accustomed to over identifying with the thinking mind. Feelings, sensations knowingly all get smuggled together and it can feel impossible to know what are the voices swirling around in my head that are just everybody else's? And what is the voice that I know that is my own? And the way that we discover that is by embracing the gift of sensitivity. So the way that your body is wired is that you have a tremendous capacity for sensory richness. Women have more nerve endings per square centimeter of skin. We have a stronger olfactory sensitivity. We have stronger neural connectivity. And what that means is that we are taking in more of the world. We are able to perceive more. You are able to feel more nuance and pick up on subtle changes and shifts. And I know I'm not alone in having had the experience of working in corporate America and crying in a meeting and being like, oh God, I've mortified myself. I'm humiliated. And looking back on that now, sitting in such a different seat. I am so proud of the way that my body refused to shut down. And so meet your body. Meet yourself is a way of meeting and learning and becoming acquainted with these different voices within yourself that emerge from this network that we call the body, and that naturally folds into this second pillar, which is embodied intelligence. So I love the show. Homeland and homeland is a show on Showtime about the CIA and this one CIA officer who's named Carrie Mathison, and she's an intelligence officer. And one day it occurred to me, oh, she is out there gathering intelligence. And then she brings it back and they look at it and they analyze it, and they discover its meaning, and they discover if it's a threat or not. And this is a metaphor for what our body is constantly doing, the feminine system. You know, this is a simplification of the nervous system. But our nervous system has evolved to survive in the world through two modes. Protection and connection. Protection is what we know of as the fight or flight, the fawn or freeze response. It's how we scan for danger and respond to danger. And that, from an animal body perspective, has gotten us very far in life. And this is where my stress reduction and nervous system awareness meets us, is helping us not live in a perpetual state of threat. But there's this whole other dimension of intelligence, which is the way that your body naturally craves and needs connection. And so listening to our bodies isn't just about heeding its cues for staying safe or going to the bathroom when you need to and eating when you need to. But it's also this reach for the splendens of connection with others, and with the planet, and with beauty, and with animals and with spirit. The third pillar is beauty and the senses. So I know I don't need to tell you about this one, because you're drawn to a podcast called Come to Your Senses. But this is really a deep heart of the woman's way of embodiment, and see if you can identify with this experience. So have you ever been out with a friend or on a date? And the candle between you? The little votive at the table goes out. And you physically cannot continue with the conversation until you can call the server over and relight the candle. And for a lot of women, this gets judged as being high maintenance. You also might judge yourself for how much you love your thinness, like how much you love a certain pair of shoes, or how much you love a throw pillow. You might dismiss these things as being superficial, but these are actual ways that your body anchors into a sense of safety. And that's true for all of us across the board. You know, beautiful environments help us ground into a sense of safety because it sends a message to the nervous system. There's room here for beauty. There's energy here for beauty. There's not just constant survival mode, fight or flight. There's extra energy and attention to devote to beauty. But for feminine systems particularly, you might experience this as going beyond and nice to have into a need to have. And that doesn't make you high maintenance or superficial. It means you're listening to the natural appetite of your unique wiring, and there are a few other pillars. You can visit the website to read about them and learn about them. But there's one in particular that I want to close with today, and it is, in my opinion, why so many of us are buying books and courses and oracle decks by the dozens and experiencing moments of relief, but still feeling like all this information is trapped up in our heads and is not making its way into a change in our felt sense. And that missing ingredient is the ingredient of relationship. So have you ever been at a festival or a place where there's porta potties and you're like, hey, could you just come with me to the porta potty and just stand outside and watch the door? And this is a little bit of a weird metaphor, but that is a metaphor for the way in which we naturally need the anchor of another person to feel safe becoming vulnerable. You know, when I'm working with a client, I have had over the years many group programs, many self-study programs. And when I started doing one on one coaching with clients, I couldn't believe the changes that I was seeing before my very eyes. One Klein in particular used to say, this feels like sorcery, like it feels like there is an alchemical process happening. And the reason for that, there is a depth of vulnerability that we can get to in relationship that we simply cannot get to when we are on our own, managing everything. And so, in the woman's way of embodiment coaching program, there is a real layering of relationship where you receive five one on one in-depth coaching sessions with me, and we build relationship over time. A deepening of a sense of safety and a deepening of the parts of yourself that are able and willing to surface because you're receiving personalized attention. You know, a lot of times where being in groups might not take us as far as we want to go is simply because we are not one size fits all beings. We have personal stories and patterns and beliefs and unraveling. This is a process that requires more than just words on a page or an exercise, but a really deep personal relationship. And in addition to the one on one sessions that you and I will have, there are also group sessions and practice partnerships. And what I love about this is, you know, again, I've worked with one on one clients for a long time, and there is this tremendous, beautiful alchemical change. But having the combination of one on one with a group, a small group, and this course is limited to ten women. It's almost like there's a mycelium network that reaches beyond your personal experience, and it's just magic. Everybody. And I'm so excited. You know, I was telling a friend recently that sometimes I would feel like there's the embodiment coaching element of my work, and then there's the come to your senses part of my work, and that they are kind of different, you know. Embodiment is about becoming embodied and, you know, resolving and releasing emotional tension. Whereas Come to Your Senses is about like pedestal bowls and tea roses and the woman's way of embodiment. Finally, after many years, is this beautiful dovetailing and merging where both of those worlds not only get to exist inside one another, but support one another. And so I'm really excited to share this new iteration of my work with you, and you can once again find out more and apply. It's not really an application, it's more just a conversation. For those who are drawn to the program to ensure that it's a great fit for you and for this time in your life. And you can find out more at Marie Lofgren. There is a $500 early bird savings through March 31st, and the program begins April 9th. I adore you. Thank you for listening. Thank you for being on this journey with me, and I will see you in our next episode. 

The Woman’s Way of Embodiment

A four month coaching immersion to trust your body, know yourself, and fall in love with your feminine design

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New Cohort begins April 9th