Episode 182: Creating A Life Worth Swooning Over
Recently, I was out to dinner with friends when I took a bite of a perfectly crisp French fry. Without thinking, I let out an audible sound of rapture.
The friend sitting next to me laughed and said,
“Someday I want to enjoy anything as much as Mary enjoys everything.”
Swooning: an experience so rich and deliriously lovely, it can knock you flat.
Finding your swoon is more than just pleasure.
It’s a metaphor for your deepest YES, and your certain NO.
And that, my friends, will take you places.
From the sensuality of a wax-sealed letter to the voluption of bamboo sheets, today’s episode offers stories and practices to help you melt into presence, and let life love you through your senses.
Do like Auntie Mary Oliver, and let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Fully, and vocally.
Fluff the chaise, she’s goin’ down,
Mary
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Create A Life Worth Swooning Over
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 called A Charmed Life Worth Swooning Over. So the other night I was out at dinner and I was eating with a group of about six people, and I was eating these French fries. And as I often do in life, and here on the podcast, I exclaimed, oh, these fries are amazing! I am an extremely vocal and enthusiastic pleasure connoisseur. And my friend said to me, someday I hope to enjoy anything as much as Mary enjoys everything. And it made me think of this word that I just absolutely love and that I use all the time, which is swooning. Swoon. My friends, I love to swoon. And so swooning. The technical definition is to faint, to be so overcome and overwhelmed by something in a good way that you lose your state of consciousness. And some might say that coming to our senses is an act of swooning. It's allowing ourselves to be overwhelmed by melding with scent, with music, with fabric in a way that melts you into presence. And so today we are going to talk about some of the ways to romance different areas of your life that are so simple and yet often go neglected in favor of our cultural obsession with productivity and achievement. And yet, no matter how much achievement we have in our lives, if our bodies are not on board, it slips through our fingers like sand. And so today's episode, it's not just about how to bring more pleasurable, swoony things into your life, but it's also about how to beautifully sensitize your system to the art of the swoon. And with that, let us now dive into today's gems. On a swoon, Abel. Charmed life. And so where we'll begin is with what I think is a pretty common experience, which is being in a dressing room or being at a store and seeing things and thinking, oh, that's nice, I can wear this for work, I can make this work. And then you try on an item. And all of a sudden, without any prompting, your inner voice goes, God Almighty! Yes. This is yes, this is an absolute yes. I had this experience not long ago, probably last weekend. And it's like this recognition where everything clicks into place for a loud, enthusiastic, again unprompted zing of yes! So that's what swooning feels like in my own body. I notice sometimes my eyes will roll back a bit into my head. Eh, like I said at the start, and oh, we'll escape my lips. That's the sound. And if you're not as expressive of a swoon, or your experience of swooning might feel more tender, more inward, more of a melting across your chest and your shoulders, there is a whole bouquet of ways that swooning can express itself. And so this is your first gem is to know your unique expression of the swoon. For me, swooning is kind of an exaggerated expression of love. The other day, I was in a group and one of my dearest friends here walked in and she didn't look at the group. She was going to get a chair and I just saw the back of her, and I just felt this rising up in my being, like this warm. Not even cozy, like an almost pleasantly aching feeling of like, oh, I just love her. And that to me is like a mini swoon. A full throttle swoon might be those crispy French fries, and an easy way to start to explore your swoon is by thinking about what are your top five or top ten swoon tables? And truth be told, these are often kind of superficial. I mean, there's tremendous depth to them as well, but I recommend starting with the more superficial aspects, because that's going to be a little easier to access. And the idea here of identifying your expression of swoon, your top ten swoon tables is not just to have, again, more swoon able things and objects and experiences in your life, but so that you can get to know more intimately your full. Yes, and by virtue you're full. Know your soul. When I think about my top ten, swoon not just to have again, those things make me objects and experiences in my life, but so that you spontaneously know dogs intimately. Very wonderful food and virtue. Your soul. The other day I was walking behind this woman at Trader Joe's, and I swear to God, I was like Pepé Le Pew. Like just intoxicated by her fragrance. Clothing is a big suitable for me when I find the right thing, like I did in that dressing room that day, you know, you will think, uh, scandalous things are happening behind closed doors in that dressing room. Cleaning is assignable for me, like when I have just spacious time. And I did this last night. Actually, I just moved into my house almost a year ago, and I'm still in the process of getting things organized and getting nestled in a way that feels cozy and comfortable. And I organized my jewelry drawer and oh my God, the pleasure when I open that drawer, the pleasure of spraying down a countertop and really getting into the corners and then leaving the room and then coming back into the kitchen later and noticing the countertop just clean and spacious and smelling great. Oh, swim for me, making art and painting watercolors so swimmable. Right now I'm working on my peach slice in my watercolor practice and how to blend those beautiful colors of, like, buttery egg yolk with orange, tangerine, and a touch of scarlet where the pit of the stone fruit touches the flesh. Seeing a beautiful human and not just beautiful in the sense of symmetrical features and what we would call traditionally beautiful or attractive, but a human that expresses through the way that they dress, a human who takes the time. Like I remember one time I was in Florida and there was this woman. I still have a video of it that I visit now and then. She was the essence of what I would call a femme VTOL, where she is just a walking expression of feminine life force and feminine resplendent. And she was probably, I don't know, late 70s, early 80s. And she had this down to her lower waist, white gorgeous hair and this beautiful olive toasted crescent skin, and she was wearing a black jacket with a black skirt and these black tights and these gorgeous high heels and beautiful jewelry. And actually in the video that I have, she's opening a freezer drawer and I just had to capture, for my own reference, this explosion of beauty and swoon ability. Walking through the grocery store and you see there's a guy waiting at the deli counter and you see him do like what would be the dictionary definition of a double take? It's hilarious. So a person who is clearly devotional in their relationship to beauty and adornment, so symbol. And so those are just some of my top spoonbills. And one of the easiest pathways to locating your spoonbills is, of course, through your senses, because the simplest of pleasures are often the most accessible for our full body to experience. You know, I think about in my experience of taking tantra classes. I have done some very advanced, I would say sensual training in my life. And during that time, you know, this was in my 20s and 30s. It's like I wasn't in a state of sovereignty, like full sovereignty around my yes and my no. And so I was just kind of constantly chasing intensity as a substitute for real pleasure and always going to the next level. And, you know, now that I've had ten years or so of embodiment and semantics and sobriety, frankly, under my belt, it's such an interesting saying under my belt, like, what are we stuffing under our belts? Um, let's say in my clutch handbag, I now go to tantra workshops, and it's like, I do not want to advance. I just want to linger in eye contact and hand on heart and experience that same flooding of intensity but through such subtle means. And so there are two areas of sensory, simple pleasures that I want to share with you today, and that is the swoon ability of food and the swoon ability of touch. So food is a ritual that if we're lucky, we are participating in every single day. And our sense of taste is unique in the sense that, you know, touch. There's a bonding element hearing, there's an element of delight and sensory awareness. But taste is one of the only senses that transfers from the outer to the inner. You know, when we taste something, we are not just observing it, but we are actually becoming it, and it is becoming us. So there's so much to savor in that process. And one of the quotes that I just love about food comes from Francis Mayes, who wrote Under the Tuscan Sun, and she says A plate of figs, still warm from the sun, is enough to make you feel that you could never desire anything more. Uh. And you know what I love about that quote so much, first of all, is that it invites us less into a transactional relationship with food and more of a transformational relationship with food. But also the way that it brings in not just the food itself, but the elemental quality of food, that a plate of figs is beautiful and delicious and voluptuous, but still warm from the sun. I mean, it's like making love to nature in the elements and letting it make love to you. And a way to practice swoon ability here is to expose yourself to other people who swoon around that thing. Like Nigella Lawson, I love watching vintage Nigella Lawson videos and TV shows from like the 90s. It is so charming and she is so funny and quirky and sensual and adorable. I love watching Samin Nosrat salt, fat, acid heat. There's a documentary on Netflix. And the way that that woman eats pesto. I mean, it's like me in the dressing room that day. Like she is unabashedly in love. And it's so inspiring. And so putting yourself in the gaze of food, memoirs, cooking classes, movies and documentaries. There's this great movie called The Taste of Things with Juliette Binoche and her ex-husband, who I can't remember his name right now, but he's a famous French actor. I mean, if you want to fall in love with things like sauce and things like the crispy skin on a piece of meat and things like random eggs and ovum from animals that we will never know or see. Watch this movie. It's an amazing love story. I really love all of the characters that Juliette Binoche plays. She always plays these very sensuous and also very independent female lead characters. And I can't recommend it highly enough. We'll pop a link in the show notes. And one of my favorite ways to swoon with food. You know, I'm a snacker. I wish that I was the type who lingered in the kitchen over a six hour shank. But in reality, I get so much pleasure out of opening up the refrigerator and seeing hard boiled eggs with salt and pepper and fresh cut veggies ready to be dipped in red pepper, hummus, and wedges of avocado sprinkled with flaky sea salt. If I ate cheese back in the day, I my tummy can't really tolerate it anymore. But a great cheese. There's this amazing cheese that they sell at Whole Foods called Naked Goat. It's one of those cheeses that's like semi-hard and has like little salt crystals in it. So it's like a little crunchy, but it's also creamy. I mean that with some figs and honey. Shut it. So, you know, again, these are very, very simple ways to indulge your taste buds. You don't require necessarily a seven course meal at French Laundry. You just have some cut veggies in the fridge, and all of a sudden you're swooning over your plate of hummus with drizzle of olive oil and a few sprinkles of black sesame seeds. Come on and swoon a little touch. So you know, the area that I wanted to focus on when I was thinking about this episode, and what's been really making me swoon lately, is the touch of fabric on my skin, and all of the beautiful varieties of fabric and textiles that there are in the world, particularly those that are friendly to the environment and that have a lower footprint on the impact of the environment. You know, there are so many microplastics and synthetic fibers, and a great movie is called by now I think I saw it. And it's a documentary about consumerism. And I was just so struck by the impact of clothing consumption. And, you know, these fast fulfillment centers like Amazon and the impact that that has on the environment and on people, and particularly countries that have been ravaged by colonialism. And if you're like me, when you see imagery of tons and tons of clothing literally being moved around by the waves in the ocean onto the shores of Ghana, that really impacted me and really affected some of the choices and decisions that I make around my shopping and reusing items and repairing items. But anyway, swoon a little touch with fabric. You know, examples of fabrics that are more friendly to your skin and more friendly to the environment. And biodegradable are. Linen. Cotton. Bamboo. Tencel. Cashmere. L.L. bean makes these exquisite cotton socks. Are like, they just feel like putting on a hug. From like a mother bare wearing an apron, stirring Coco by the fire. They are so cozy. And I have a set of bamboo sheets from the company. Quince. Quince is a company that's not fully transparent, even though they say, you know, we cut out the middle person and, you know, we use all reusable things. I have been watching Quince, and I want to just name that. They're not fully transparent about their sources and their impact, but they are affordable, and their bamboo sheets feel like sleeping in a tub of Cool Whip. It is extraordinarily soft, and every time I slip into my bed at night and wrap myself in my down comforter sustainable down. I don't mean to be a total nerd, and I really hope that when I. Share these resources. It doesn't in any way feel like policing you or anyone on your choices. But I do feel that as someone who speaks to a few thousand people every week on this podcast, that there's a responsibility to educate you in the way that I have been educated and educating myself about the impact of my purchases. As someone who loves stuff, you know I am. I'm a stuff lover. People who are like, I would rather hike the Himalayas than now give me my responsible down comforter where those little geese have been lovingly tended and respected in their lives any day. Anyway, so these are just some of the ways that once again, just like food, we are participating in the ritual of touching our bodies with fabrics all day. And some of the ways that you can give yourself a bit more swoon ability from the inside out with that which touches your skin. And so that, my friends, brings today's episode to a close. But before we depart, I want to say a very special thank you to Lavender and Mint, who left us a review on Apple Podcasts this week that said Pure Ear Candy under five stars. They said this podcast is absolutely divine. Feels like sitting down with a cup of tea across from a dear friend and letting her pour wisdom and light into your cup. Oh, lavender and mint. Thank you so much for pouring so generously into our teacup here with a review. And reviews are such an important way of how our podcast grows. So if you enjoyed this episode and you would like to hear your name read on the air, you can head to Apple Podcasts to leave a review. And you can actually also go to Marie Lofgren. Com slash review, where we have a tiny 32nd video instructing you on how to do that if that idea overwhelms you. We love and ease full, graceful experience with anything and everything. Here at Come to Your Senses. And so with that, I am wishing you an easy, full and graceful week ahead and I will see you in our next episode. For more gems on how to celebrate life through the richness of your senses, head to Mary Lofgren. There you'll find an abundant library of free gems and resources. You can check out my award winning coaching programs or flirt with stepping through the garden gates of the sanctuary community. Come and learn how to make beauty, presence, and everyday luxury a lifestyle at Mary Lofgren.