Episode 175: How To Be An Everyday Sensualist

If you’ve ever looked at your calendar and thought, “Where exactly am I supposed to be a sensually alive woman in all of this?”... this one’s for you.

In this episode, we’re talking about a topic very near and to my heart: everyday sensualism. 

People can get real bent out of shape about the word "sensual", but I define sensualism as a way of moving through the world, guided by the aliveness of your body and the richness of your senses.

You can be a wild sensualist, even if you have no desire for s*x.

In fact, I recently saw a video of a Catholic nun smelling a sleeping baby's forehead and thought, "sensualism in motion right there."

In the episode, I share some tender stories of how sensualism helped me heal from early childhood trauma, and gave me the tools to carve new, life-giving stories where paralyzing shame and fear used to dwell. 

You don’t need a new job, a new body, or a new life to feel more connected.

You just need a way in. 

Let me to hold the door for you, Madame.

Wishing you a weekend full of love, Parisian jazz, and velvet ribbons of luxury,

Mary

P.S. If you’re craving more ribbons of sensualism threaded through your days,  join me June 14th for a new, live workshop: The Everyday Sensualist. Just $27 for a sensory reset, with a replay included. Click here and pull up a pouf.

• 175 Transcript. How To Be An Everyday Sensualist

  Hello, beautiful beings, and welcome to today's episode of the podcast where I am so excited because today's episode is like the runway that Miss Piggy walks down and lands in the fountain. If you've ever seen the movie The Great Muppet Caper, one of my all time favorite movies. It is a big reveal, a big debut of something I've been working on for quite a while, which is a live workshop. Coming up on June 14th called The Everyday Sensualist. And I'm going to tell you a little bit more about it in this episode, but really, this episode is devoted to sharing something that both personally and in my body of work, I've gotten a lot clearer in and a lot more cozy in the pocket of which is defining what we do here. Come to your senses as a way of living in sensual ism. And so in today's episode, we're going to define what is essentialist. Are you essentialist? Hint, hint. If you're breathing and your heart is beating, you are most likely essentialist, because anyone who's in a body in a way is essentialist. The sensual ISM spectrum and how to embrace and embody more of your magnetism, your presence, and your sense of aliveness through the power of your senses. And let me tell you, my friends. This is the tip of the tassel. The tip of the, uh, Italian villa. Pulled curtains, tasseled tie back of what you were going to learn in the everyday sensualist, which is really the first workshop, the first live workshop I've done in over a year. I have been taking a step back a bit in my business and in my offerings to just nurture what I have, and our sanctuary community is flourishing so beautifully, and my coaching clients and those relationships are flourishing so beautifully. And I'm so, so grateful that I get to do this work and that I feel finally ready after a big move this past year to open up the doors of Come to your Senses a little bit wider. That will start with this workshop on the 14th. So if you are interested and you're a yes already, which those of you who are fans and followers. I get emails every week of people who listen to this podcast obsessively. I'm really excited to share that this workshop is only $27. It's two hours. There's all sorts of things included that I'll tell you about today, but run, don't walk, my friends to the link below this episode. And with that, let us dive into today's gems on what it means to be a sensualist. So, as you might know, if you're a listener to this podcast, I'm a big lover of etymology and words and language as this source point of understanding what it is we are doing, what it is we're moving towards. Whenever we talk about or wish to embody a concept, for example, the word glamour is a word where the root of that word means light and enchantment. And so when we talk about glamour, in the more surface definitions, there's this kind of idea of lipstick and furs and dramatic accents. But what we're really talking about is a bigger sense of expression of the light within, and maybe not first. So first, come on, it's 2025. Why did fur even become a thing in the first place? Well, I guess our primal ancestors. But anyway. Essentialist. When we look at that word sensual, you know. I don't know about you, but in our culture, when you're in a conversation, I experience this all the time because this is the essence of my work. And you bring up the word sensual. Or if you bring up the word pleasure, there tends to be this immediate shift in the frequency. And I used to find this really provocative and fun and interesting, and I frankly gleaned a lot of my identity from pressing those edges of comfort and etiquette in conversation towards this end of the spectrum. That is a flavor of sensuality, where it is, shall we say, spiked with sexuality. When I tell people that I am an everyday sensualist and that's what I teach in my work. There's often this perception that I'm a sexuality coach or an orgasm educator, or a kink educator, or all of these other things having to do with sexuality. But in my opinion, essentialist is someone who seeks to live not just from the mind, but through the radiance and the fullness of their body and their senses. I think we can all relate to the experience of being on the opposite side of sensual ism in life, where there's a lot of white knuckling, there's a lot of overthinking, there's a lot of constant distraction and a lot of disconnection from the body. And if you're wondering if you're a sensualist, I have a little quiz for you today, which is, have you ever slowed down to savor the flavor of a cool sip of lemonade on a sweltering day? Have you ever sunk your teeth into a piece of dripping watermelon and enjoyed the sound of the crunch as it enters your mouth? Have you ever buried your face in a pile of sheets after they come fresh out of the dryer? Have you ever laid down in the grass, with or without a blanket, to feel the heartbeat of the earth sink with the back of your own heartbeat? Have you ever gone to a yoga class and gone in with multiple suitcases full of racing thoughts in your mind, and after a good sweat and being led through a process, being able to take your hand off the steering wheel of the process that you're in. Moving your body. Drinking in fresh oxygen. Stretching your muscles. It's like the thoughts completely rearrange. Simplify. And you're reminded of what's matters because you're no longer crammed into those tight corners, you have the full expanse of your body. I mean, I could go on and on, as we know. I love poetry, I love language, I love describing the sensations of smelling a newborn baby's head that has that downy, fluffy hair and rubbing the tip of your nose on their forehead. Ah! There are just so many ways that life loves us back through our body and our senses. And the reason that sensual ism is so important to me. I mean, there are so many reasons that, again, I could fill a textbook. But for me personally, there's two stories I want to share that have led me to my lifestyle of essentialism, and they're kind of personal, and there's always a little bit of discomfort in sharing vulnerably on a public scale, but it helps to name that. And right now I'm making some figure eights with my chest and my shoulder and wiggling. And just like I was talking with the yoga class, are baking a little more space in my breath and in my body to drop out of story and into my sense of why this is so important to me. And I use that word very deliberately. Because when we hear the senses, we often think sight, touch, smell. You know, our externalized senses. But there's also a sense of vulnerability. There is the sense of danger. There is the sense of safety. There is the sense of anxiousness. There's the sense of calm. And just recently, I was in a coaching session with my good friend Renee Searles, who's an amazing embodiment coach, feminine embodiment coach, and is a member of the sanctuary community. She's kind of a godmother in the community, caring, helping me care for our members with love and with attention, and with just great deep care. And I'm very grateful for her. And and she was giving me a coaching session, and I was sharing about these deeper desires within me that I've not been able to fully name. And, you know, they're just not at the place where I can bring language to them. And she said, is there a sense of them? And I was able to share some moments where I've felt that sense of this essence that I'm being called forward by. And it was like a whole world opened up. And so I share this. I start here because for me, as a little one, you know, my parents were amazing parents on so many different levels. And growing up in a capitalist diet, culture driven patriarchy. There was a lot of disharmony and particularly when it came to the needs of the body. My parents were both chronic dieters, so there was often, you know, fat free meat and fat free yogurt and fat free cookies. And I just remember as a kid eating and eating and eating this fat free food and then diagnosing myself as an overreach eater because I would just eat and eat and eat and not be able to get full. And that was one early, powerful example of calling myself wrong, saying there's something wrong with me when in reality my body's needs were not being met. Therefore, my body was guiding me to do something that while it was maladaptive and somewhat dysfunctional, you know, it wasn't actually meeting my nutritional needs to keep eating, eating, eating. It was a way of keeping me safe and alive. I also, you know, my parents worked really hard and particularly my dad worked sometimes, you know, 28, 29 days a month, 12 hours a day. And I saw the impact on him and his mental health and on his sleep and on our entire family system. When the needs of the mind and the drive towards this supposedly land of safety, aka the American Dream, was made the focus of our lives, as opposed to the experience of loving presence and actually being able to be here in life. And so as I grew up and as I moved into my own sense of adulthood, some of these factors of early childhood, along with growing up in a very patriarchal religion, going to Catholic school my whole life, you know, yada yada yada. There's so many layers to this trifle of trauma that, uh, impacts the constellation of our psyche. And for me, the golden thread of my entire life is that all of these experiences growing up created layer upon layer upon layer in my body of armoring against life. By shutting down my body and my senses. And of course, the consequence of that is that we may stay more, quote unquote, safe from harm, because undoubtedly armor can keep us safe from certain types of harm. But armor is made of steel. And so while it keeps things from getting in, it also keeps things from getting out. And all of that angst and all of that shame and all of that pain stayed in my body and stays in our bodies and continued to circulate until it began to turn inward. And as I've shared on this podcast before, resulted in an eating disorder and a dysfunctional relationship around addiction. diction and all sorts of bouquets of coping mechanisms that were unhealthy and self-destructive. And one of my coping mechanisms that really helped and in some ways saved me was exploring the land of personal growth. And I would listen to speakers, and I would go to teachers, and I would learn to meditate and all of these ways, not of dissolving the armor like this is I think the most important thing is that those things didn't help me dissolve the armor. They helped me better organize what was going on in my inner world. And I think they helped me lift the armor for exhaust a few times, vent it out a little bit in there. You know, certainly those aspects of my journey helped me find some relief. But I always felt like some part of me was either spilling out the sides or I could never get it, you know, could never get the manifestation, could never get the mindset work to meet the depth of what I was holding inside. And it wasn't until I began to explore a more feminine, more sensual, more body based method of healing that my life and my identity and my sense of freedom in the world really started to change and to open up. And one of the things we'll talk about in the workshop, something I have lined up that I've been kind of dropping here and there in the podcast, but I'm really excited to debut a whole new curriculum around is the art of meeting the unique needs of your feminine nervous system. And so when I say feminine nervous system, you may have been born into a body that was assigned female at birth. You may be someone who was born into a body, not assigned female at birth. And yet you know that you are a woman and that you are feminine. You may have been born into a body assigned any gender at birth, but don't resonate with those binaries. And yet, there are aspects of this energy that we sometimes call the feminine that resonate with you as a homecoming. And if you are one of the things someone who identifies as having a masculine oriented nervous system is that when your body is designed, regulation to regulate what we're really talking about is the ability to either withdrawing and detaching from the intentional bodies experiences, our bodies and our minds from vigorous exercise and activity to discharge cortisol and mindfulness, and increase the oxytocin of letting go of some of this tension. to have a more feminine orientation. If you have ever been perched on as your system trying to get yourself to meditate wired feeling is a different meditation cushion for any practices. Feeling like you're not get you get to some like your. But ultimately these may also activate some of your symptoms that straight posture because your system you may be a person designed to find passion to this not body. Detaching from life and detaching from different but merging with modern mindfulness bodies are based expressing emotion rather beautiful teaching or trying to just mindfulness and presence rather than solitary practices that were sold. Method or the masculine by the masculine, feminine and masculine. But the monastic and verbal processing and through community experiences. And so what does all of this have to do with being a sensualist? You might be asking yourself, I share all of these stories and all of these layers with you and all of these distinctions, because living and embodied lifestyle. Is about so much more than bettering your days. Living and embodied lifestyle is about being here. And so in the workshop we are going to look at and practice not just filling our lives with more things to do, but actual regulation and presence methods designed specifically for the needs of the feminine oriented nervous system to help you ease burnout and stress, revive your sense of magnetism, and move through life more powerfully by being connected to your full system of intelligence, intuition and embodied presence. And embodied presence is how we center what's meaningful and what matters. And so my love's. If that sounds like a picnic basket that you would like to pick up and bring to the park and unpack and savor, bite by bite. I invite you to join us at the everyday Sensualist June 14th. You can sign up at the link below this episode and I cannot wait to see you there because presence looks so good on you! Thank you so much for listening. See you in our next episode.