Episode 180: Cultivating Quiet For The Feminine Soul
In this episode, you'll explore the art of creating more quiet in your life, without needing to retreat to a cabin in the woods or swear off technology forever. You’ll discover three simple, soft practices that invite more peace into your days and spaciousness into your mind.
From small sensory rituals to bold moves to clear space, these practices will help you soften the edges of armor and return to your own sanctuary of center.
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Cultivating Quiet
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 this episode, which is all about cultivating quiet. So I know I don't need to tell you that. The world is loud, particularly in this moment. Politically. Socially. Governmentally. Technologically. There are more ways to gather and cultivate information than ever before. And one of my favorite quotes that inspires me around the rise of technology and the noise that it creates, comes from Herbert Simon, and it says a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. And so today's episode, ironically, is happening where there's lots of construction happening outside of my home, which is not normal. And so that may show up in the background at some point as a helpful little. Invitation from the universe to deepen our quiet practice right here in the podcast episode itself. But in today's episode, we are going to explore a relationship to quiet that is more than just the sterility of quiet, but the magic and the wonder and the relief that comes from small pockets of quiet in your day. And when I say sterility, what I mean by that is, you know, sometimes when we relate to quiet, we might notice that we're stressed and life feels loud and noisy and fast. So as a solution, we might bring in more quiet. And some days that might work like a charm, and some days it might feel like putting clear rubbing alcohol on a wound. You know, it can be such a drastic change to go from extremely fast in life to complete silence. And that's really why we don't do it, I think, is because that whiplash effect creates a flinging in the face of everything that we've been trying not to feel. By staying in the armor of busyness. And so today's episode is about how to cultivate quiet again through small pockets, rather than how I used to think about cultivating quiet, which was obtaining a perfect meditation practice, or moving to a monastery at the top of a mountain. And how to bring in a quality of quiet to your day that is comforting and feels a bit more like a soft landing than a sudden jolt or change. And so let's dive in to our gems on Cultivating quiet. And so one of the ways that this episode came to be is last week I was recording a guided journey for the members of our sanctuary community, which is our membership community here at Come to Your Senses. And it was a journey all about the art of savoring. And when you hear that word, well, let me speak for myself here. When I hear that word, I often think about a crispy, herbed piece of chicken melting into my tongue. I might think of the aroma of fresh lavender growing in the California sun, and really drinking in these sensory experiences and savoring them in my body. And in this guided journey, there was certainly elements of that. But one of the things that I talked about is that savoring has multiple phases to it. So there's the preparation for savoring. There's the anticipation of that which is to be savored. There's the moment of contact. There's, you know, all these different phases to this sensory journey with that which we wish to savor. That make the experience what it is more full and complete, rather than just kind of a drive by chicken wing. It is a rich experience from start to finish, and I share that because I find that it's a similar journey with cultivating, quiet, savoring, and the energy of this comforting kind of quiet I find are very similar. They're like sisters to one another, and particularly for feminine oriented nervous systems. There is a strong need to ease into quiet. And so that's our first gem for today, is that for masculine nervous systems and masculine oriented nervous systems, which regardless of gender identity and regardless of sex. And chromosomes. All of us have these energies that we have labeled masculine and feminine in our systems. And while certain aspects of biology can have an influence over that orientation, it is widely proven that our orientation to these energies is quite fluid in our neural wiring. And so a masculine oriented nervous system is a system that tends to find quiet through stillness, through contemplative practice, through moments of solitude. And one of the reasons for this is because the way that masculine energy locates regulation and safety is through controlling the environment. So if you think about looking outside, looking around for threats, making sure that the environment is safe, that's one trait of a masculine oriented system and just how it's naturally wired for systems that are more oriented towards the energies that we call feminine. The feminine system finds quiet and regulation, not through detachment from the body and from the senses, but through immersion in sensory experiences. We really need that connection to the body in order to come back home, rather than solely looking around at our environment to locate a sense of safety. The feminine finds its strength and its sense of safety through connection to others. And so you might find if you have a feminine oriented system, as I did just yesterday, for example, is I was experiencing a difficult interaction and I needed to call my girlfriends and get their take on it. And in the past, I may have seen that behavior is something that was codependent or I couldn't trust myself. But after working for many years on accepting the differences in my feminine oriented system as the way that I'm naturally wired to thrive rather than crazy as it's often presented in a patriarchal culture, I. It didn't last forever, but for a couple of weeks, it really, really reset my rhythm. And so that's one example of a softer pathway into the experience of quiet, rather than just dropping right into stillness. Another way to soften your senses and ease yourself into quiet is reading a physical book. I mean, this practice or, you know, I don't even want to call it a practice. It's really a delight. Being able to read a book gives your consciousness a chance to focus on something that isn't your thoughts, but that still engages the mind in a different way than, say, watching TV or scrolling your phone. And so sometimes in the afternoon, if I'm like, oh, I should meditate or I should, you know, do some self-care behavior that helps bring my system into a downshift. But all I want to do is scroll my phone and watch Nashville reruns on Disney+. I will grab a fiction book, and I'll just give myself 10 or 15 minutes of reading. And it's so incredibly soothing and just creates this new pathway in my consciousness for relaxation and for quiet. And the second gem. So that's our first gem. Easing into quiet through softening your other senses. The second gem has to do with specifically the experience of silence and silent meditation. That is the one thing that has helped me relate to the rabid squirrels that wander around my brain, especially when I'm at it. Meditate. And that is one simple word. Inking. So my meditation teacher, Susan Pifer. She has an extraordinary collection of meditations, and she's an extraordinary Buddhist meditation teacher. And you'll find this tip amongst many lineages. Lineages, lineages, lineages. That's a word, right? And Husserl, you'll find this direction, I think, in many meditation practices. But it's this idea that as you're in seated meditation, that the idea is not necessarily to stop thinking or even to quiet your thoughts. It's to let the thoughts go. And that one of the ways to do that is when you catch yourself thinking, you simply label it thinking. And that has been so tremendously helpful for when I interface with the squirrels in my brain, and I noticed myself in some catastrophic situation or another in my mind's eye. Labeling it thinking helps my body orient. Oh, that's what I'm doing. I am not dying alone with no retirement or not enough retirement. I am not, you know, reliving some horrible memory from 20 years ago of embarrassment. It's like I am thinking. And by labeling it thinking, it gives the opportunity for your system to orient. Oh, what my body and being are doing in this present moment is sitting quietly. What my brain is doing is thinking and dropping us a bit further out of that realm of intellect and mental processing, and a bit deeper into experiencing the present moment and the final. Gem for cultivating quiet is actually one that encourages you to increase the volume by expressing yourself, and not necessarily increase the volume on the mental chatter, but increase the volume in the sense that perhaps what you need in order to cultivate a space of quiet isn't necessarily to get more quiet, or to slow down more. Perhaps what you need is some expression to make room and space within your body for quiet. So this past weekend, I had several opportunities to practice setting boundaries, and it was kind of like being at a boundary rodeo. I mean, I just couldn't believe the way that, you know, the universe was just pelting me with opportunities to set boundaries. And what was so extraordinary about it is I had so much energy, and I felt so much more present because there was no longer this mental clutter of what I had withheld or was holding on to. And, you know, of course, on an intellectual level, I know that, but it was a really powerful experience on a somatic, energetic, physical level to take out the compost in my brain by addressing some things that needed to be addressed. And by taking some of this energy of frustration and putting it in a proper place where it belonged, which was through. Some functional, albeit messy communication. And, you know, this is also a way to engage that masculine aspect of our nervous systems. I, during the pandemic, got really into weight training, like strength training, and I couldn't believe how good it felt in my body. After many, many years of detoxing from diet culture and fat phobic aerobics VHS tapes, you know, which I did dozens of when I was a teenager, I did a lot of slow, soft, trauma informed yoga to try to just find my center again after so much aggression from a diet culture informed perspective on exercise. And that was very healing until my system kind of lost contact with a healthy fight response. You know, I am definitely someone who leans towards the frieze and Faun, as opposed to fight or flight side of the stress response spectrum, and it was really helpful for me to experience growing my muscles and lifting heavy weights and squatting and grunting. My coach at the time, Roderick Covington, used to say, the worse you look in here, like, the uglier you look in here, the better you'll feel out there. And just expressing some of these trapped feelings of aggression, like healthy aggression, was so incredibly helpful for my mental state, which, frankly, had become a little too soft and a little bit, shall we say, delicate and fragile, which I'm wired that way to begin with. But without any contact with that healthy aggression and healthy expression of strong energy. I lose all boundaries, and then I just become this porous amoeba moving through life and can't find my center. So that final gem in cultivating quiet is, you know, in addition to our practices of creating sanctuary in our home and in our life and meditating and reading and all these more soft practices is to consider, is there enough space in your system and in your mind for this quiet to take up residency? And if you find that it's too cluttered within to find even a moment of quiet, perhaps it's not that you're not practicing hard enough. Perhaps you might need to take out some of that compost and ask yourself what boundaries need to be set for me to reclaim my power and my center. And so, my friends, those gems. Easing into quiet, softening your other senses. The tool of labeling your thoughts. Thinking so that your body and soul can have a different experience than being lost in thought. And then setting boundaries as a way to create a container for quiet. Those are our basket of gems for today. And if you enjoyed this episode, I would be so delighted to hear about it by leaving a review either through iTunes or if you listen on Spotify, you can follow and give a five star rating. And I just want to give a special shout out to Kimberly Danielle, who recently wrote us a review on iTunes and said, new listener here. Just wanted to say I love everything about the show. It is so relaxing and has quickly become my comfort. Podcast. Kimberly. Danielle. I'm delighted to hear it. As I'm recording this, I'm wearing what I call a blanket sarong, which is where you take a fuzzy blanket and you just tie it around your body like you were wearing a sarong at the beach, and tuck it in kind of under your arm and around your chest. And it's my definition of comfort wear. And so I'm so delighted, Kimberly, Danielle, and to all of our listeners that this is a comforting and relaxing podcast for you. And it would bring me so much joy to read your name on the air if you feel so moved. Dear listener, to leave a review and we'll close with a quote from the legendary Mark Twain. The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause. Wishing you a beautiful week of pauses and quiet moments. And I will see you in our next episode. If you enjoy what you hear on this podcast. You will love what you find at Mary Lofgren. Com. There you can check out our free library of Rituals and resources, as well as check out our award winning coaching services and programs. Head to Mary Lofgren to bring beauty, embodiment, wisdom, and wonder to life.