Episode 214 — Savoring August: Rituals for the Last Golden Days of Summer
Welcome to August.
A month of hazy days and the last sweet nectar of summer.
Today’s episode is a peek inside the Come to Your Senses Sanctuary with a monthly magazine called Savoring August: filled with seasonal rituals, recipes, and reflection for savoring August.
In this episode, you'll find:
🌾 An opening letter on the golden, syrupy light of late summer
🕯️ A visual altar to the leisure and contentment of August
🍞 A recipe for the ultimate summer snack
✨ Three of my top August simple luxuries
🧘 Shifting from to a harvest mindset as the earth herself does
📝 An original closing poem, "In August"
You can also download the beautiful PDF version of the magazine here:
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Creative Afternoon Pleasure Breaks
Hello, beautiful beings, and welcome to today's episode on creative afternoon pleasure breaks. So I think we can all identify with the experience of getting to 3 or 4 in the afternoon and thinking, hmm, I'm tired, I'm fried, I'm overwhelmed. Oh, there's all these wellness things that I know I could do — I could go for a walk or stretch or meditate. And what often ends up happening, if you're like most folks, is that you face plant into your fourth cafe of the day, or you face plant into a doom scroll. Because what is often missing is the inclusion of pleasure. Pleasure creates desire.
It makes a lot of sense to me that if you've been working and your brain feels fried, you might not want to sit down with your thoughts and meditate — particularly if you've gone beyond your window of tolerance into a stress response, a state of fight, flight, freeze. You need something that's going to kind of pull you out of consciousness, such as a doom scroll, or something that's going to keep you performing, even if you don't have the energy reserves, like a fourth cup of coffee. Everybody's caffeine tolerance is different — I don't mean that as a judgment, I just know if I had four cups of coffee, because I have a very low caffeine tolerance, I'd probably end up at urgent care.
But whatever your coping mechanism is in those moments, today's episode is going to offer some shifts — not only in terms of what you do and how you fuel yourself in the afternoon, but also how you think about pleasure — shifting your relationship to pleasure from something that is simply a way to recover from or reward yourself for hard work, to a rich resource to keep life force energy in flow throughout your entire day and keep your creative energy feeling abundant and plump. So without further ado, let's dive into our gems.
On timing and the nervous system
And so where we'll begin is a place that I really don't want to begin, because I don't want it to be true. And that is the place of timing. So at the start of the episode, we talked about how challenging it can be sometimes to take a break that actually restores and replenishes instead of just kind of knocks you out with numbness. And the reason behind that, from a nervous system perspective, is that when you become overwhelmed, exhausted, beyond your threshold, you have left something called your window of tolerance.
Your window of tolerance is this healthy wave that your nervous system undergoes throughout the day. Activation — the use of your sympathetic nervous system — allows you to get out of bed. It allows you to stop when a car zooms through a stop sign in front of you. It's a healthy rise in energy when you feel excited about something. And just like we have this rise, we also have this down-regulation, the parasympathetic nervous system, which is often known by the phrase "rest and digest." When our body prepares for sleep at night, when you yawn, that can be a signal of parasympathetic energy and states coming on board. And throughout the day, we all naturally swim through the spectrum of these states.
A memory that happened recently is over 4th of July — I met up with a friend, I was going through some heavy emotions, I shared with her, and it was like I got the sympathetic activation of crying and expressing, and then the parasympathetic activation of "she hears me, she's not trying to fix me, I don't have to do anything, I'm being seen" — just the completeness of that. And then we went to a lake in the neighborhood, and we had a little beach picnic, and we laughed and we walked around and, you know, there's this beautiful balance of relaxation and laying in the sun and then standing up and moving our bodies and breathing more deeply. And it was just such a great day for the nervous system.
And the point of being human isn't to stay always within our window of tolerance and be in a state of constant calm, but it is to navigate disruption and be able to come back to baseline. And I share this because it's an important piece of understanding why, if you get to 5pm and you're taking a break and you're like "I can't do anything but go crawl under the covers and watch Masterpiece Classic for four hours" — which is my personal coping mechanism — and maybe you do that, and maybe you give yourself permission to do that, and you feel zonked. But you don't feel rested. This is the thing: when we go so far outside our window of tolerance, we sometimes need an experience of equal or greater intensity to bring us back to baseline.
And so the reason I say I don't want this to be true is because I know that all of us, myself included, want to experience more pleasure, more joy, more flow, without having to change anything, without having to do anything — because we're overwhelmed to begin with. And here's where I want to offer you a simple reminder that if you desire a different outcome, it requires a different action. And if you require a different action, what precedes that is a shift in consciousness and a shift in where you place your body, and where you place your pleasure in your value system.
On culture and intimacy
I don't know your life, but I do know that we live in a capitalist, white supremacist patriarchy — that is what I would call pleasure and intimacy averse. And I use pleasure and intimacy together because, looking at American culture, where I live, an outsider might say "pleasure averse? Are you kidding? Look at the consumerism, look at the size of the portions of your meals, look at the treat-yourself culture." And all of that, in my opinion, can actually be an avoidance of true pleasure, because true pleasure is inextricably linked with presence, and presence is inextricably linked with intimacy — intimacy with self, with spirit, with one another, and the impact that we have on one another, intimacy with our capacity.
Which is why it might feel good sometimes to swan dive into a podium of food, but if you find yourself going past those cues of satiety and into that zone of "ooh, I feel nauseous, oh, this doesn't taste good anymore, but oh, I can't stop" — there is an avoidance of intimacy there with self and with impulse. And that's not because you're bad, it's not because you are too ambitious or have too little self-love or too little self-discipline. You avoid it because it hasn't been safe to be intimate with this part of yourself. And one of the ways your body has found safety in life is to shut that part down and shut that part out.
And one of the ways you can restore intimacy and connection and trust with that part is by courageously challenging the other, more programmed parts of you that say "don't listen to that, don't listen to that body signal to get up and get a glass of water, you're on a roll here, you don't have time to go out for lunch today, are you crazy?" And how we challenge that programmed voice is we plan for it.
Gem two: planning for pleasure
So everything you've heard so far has been one big fat jam on the nervous system, and on timing, and on resistance, and on all of the things that I just talked about. And the second gem, when it comes to replenishing yourself with creative afternoon pleasure, is to plan for it.
So I remember when I was working in a corporate job, I was a corporate trainer, and we'd have breaks at 11:30, at 1pm, and then at like 4. We'd wrap the day around five, we'd start at ten. And every day at those breaks, I'd go have my snack with my fellow instructors in our office. And then I'd bring my iPod — because this was 15 years ago — I'd bring my iPod and I'd turn on "Drunk in Love" in the single-stall bathroom. And I would just, at the time I was taking pole dancing classes, and I would just let my hips roll, and I'd let my heart loose, and I'd let my neck unravel. And I would interface with the erotic, at 11:30am, and that would really fill my cup.
And on teaching days, we'd often go to just like a local salad bar for lunch — you know, Midtown Manhattan office culture kind of place. But on Fridays, when we'd have office days where I wouldn't be teaching and I'd just be catching up on admin and such, I had a lot more freedom with my time, and so I would take myself to a beautiful restaurant, and I would sit down, and sometimes I would even have more than one course, and I would read a book. At that time I was on a BlackBerry, so we didn't have our phones as much in our hands all the time. And I would bring a book on, like, Natalie Barney, who was a legendary 1920s aristocrat who was an openly gay lesbian and would have Sapphic rituals in her backyard, and was an intellectual — just a fascinating creature.
I had a rule for myself — if someone had asked me to be the model for their demonstration, it was a skincare company, and so sometimes we would ask fellow instructors to be the client when we'd be demonstrating how to do a certain facial technique. It was such a perk of the job, and you got to lay down on a massage table and get a facial once in a while. And every time that would be offered to me, I would say "oh, I wish I could, I'm too busy." And that voice would come up around taking myself out to lunch too — "oh, I could just order in," or "no, I should be frugal, I should save the money, I shouldn't go out."
Trust the tangle
Listen, sometimes these voices speak the truth. But if you are wanting more pleasure in your life, you will likely have to undergo a period where you test out the voice that says "don't do it," or the voice that says "that's too much," or that says "you don't have time," and see if that is actually your intuition, or if it is your fear of expanding into a different, broader capacity, or how good it can feel to be in your body and your life. And the way that gets tested is through action — through doing the thing and getting the information, instead of ruminating on it in thought loops, afraid that you'll choose the wrong one. Because that is the definition of staying stuck.
Clients often ask me about building their intuition and developing a stronger relationship with the body's voice, and presence practice and somatic practices that we do in our coaching work are a really important part of that. But the ultimate way to trust your intuition is to listen to it, and to feel for that quality of prickle in your belly. That's what it feels like for me when I feel the excitement of change, and I'm like "oh god, I'm doing something different, this is a little scary, but it's also kind of exciting." And even though I don't want to do it, and even though I don't know what's going to happen if I do it, there's something in me that knows this is what's going to move me forward. And that's very different than the prickle of dread and repetition of the stuff we know keeps us stuck.
And so, trust the tangle, my friends. Trust the tangle. That's gem number two.
The four truffles
So these first two gems have been about clearing away some of our resistance to pleasure, and retraining those neural pathways that cause us to resist pleasure. And now we've gone real deep into the why and the what, and now we're going to talk about the how. And I have four delicious truffles on the tray here to offer you today — really practical, small things that you can do to bring more pleasure, beauty, flow, and aliveness into your afternoon.
Truffle one: Passeggiata
The first is something called a passeggiata. This is an Italian word for a leisurely evening stroll. And for this truffle, I would like to read to you from my book, Sensing the Sacred, which is a guided journal of 20 tiny rituals — 20 creative pleasure breaks that you can take. Some of them are even guided through audio or video that you get free when you purchase the book. I'll share the details about this at the end. But this one is called "An Evening Passage":
Tonight, my friend, you have a date. You are cordially invited on a stroll with the sacred, as it shimmers and winks at you through an enchanted evening walk. Passeggiata is the Italian word for a leisurely evening stroll. It is a beloved tradition of putting the day to rest, opening to the pleasures of evening, connecting with neighbors, and moving the body for the sheer purpose of its own delight. Tonight you are invited to wrap a shawl around your shoulders and set out down the path. Imagine the day melting off your shoulders like warm candle wax. Leave your devices at home, or silenced in your pocket. And let your intuition guide you on where to turn and where to look. Listen for the enchanted music of crickets and owls, possums and toads, the drumbeat of your own footsteps, the flute song of your own breath. To make this even more of a feast for your senses, add in the layer of seeking scent — allow your nose to bend towards whatever it feels drawn to: the bark of a tree, rain on pavement, the heart center of a flower. Be sure to bring your nose somewhat inappropriately close to at least one thing you desire to know more intimately through its scent. Stroll and savor, and keep your scent notes in mind to turn to the prompts on the next page.
And then on the next page is a collection of beautiful journaling prompts. And that's the layout of the entire book — these enchanting rituals followed by reflection. You can find out more at Mary Lofgren Book.
And I wanted to share that because you already know, friend, that at the end of the day, you already know you can go on a walk. But the invitation to toss a shawl around your shoulders, to listen to the crunch of gravel beneath your feet, to touch rain on pavement — it is the sensory details, and really this intimacy, that transform this from a rote self-care chore into an oasis of sensual satisfaction.
And let this be an example of the way that we can stuff ourselves with, quote unquote, "pleasurable experiences," but if our sensual sensitivity isn't dialed in through the quality of our presence, it will only make us more frustrated — because here's this super pleasurable thing that we can't even feel, and then the self-criticism starts in: "what's wrong with me that I can't even feel this really pleasurable thing?" And so if I could offer one pearl of wisdom — we've got gems, we've got pearls, we've got truffles today — one pearl of wisdom is that being a sensual creature isn't so much about being an extravagant hedonist. It's actually quite a practice in simplicity and participation in the living world.
Truffle two: French lunch
And that takes us to our next gem, which is something I call French lunch. So I remember one time my niece — her mom was going into the city, this was when I was living in Brooklyn, and normally her mom would feed her lunch, and I remember her mom saying to her daughter, "you're going to have a French lunch today, Daddy's gonna feed you cheese and grapes." And I love that, because the times I've been in France, there is this beautiful tasting-plate tradition where, again, this theme of simplicity — some delicious fruit, creamy cheese, a delicious baguette, peppery radish, a succulent olive. The possibilities are simple, yet limitless, and when you don't have a lot of time or a lot of energy to prepare a meal, a tasting plate is such a decadent way to give yourself a variety and simple luxury in the afternoon. And bonus — almost everything on a tasting plate you can typically eat with your bare hands, which really maximizes the pleasure.
Truffle three: Afternoon erotica
And the final truffle is of the more spicy variety, and that is afternoon erotica. So if you've ever had an afternoon pleasure break ritual where you think "maybe I'll go paint watercolors" or "maybe I'll go take a walk" — all these things that you can do — but if somebody said to you, "hey, would you like to have a hot afternoon make-out session on that roster?" — you might be like, ding ding ding, yes, I would like that one please, order up.
And one of the ways that you can contact that energy of Eros — which I love, the definition of eros as simply love of life — that conjuring of life force energy within the body, through that specific flavor of sensual arousal, really greases the wheels for the rest of the day, to say the very least. Because when I think of that energy of being kind of overworked or really stuck in our heads, Eros is the opposite of that. From a scientific perspective, when we're in that state of overthinking and rumination, we're often involved in a loop that's very self-referential, and very much either imagining the future or replaying the past. Whereas the erotic brings our attention into a direct sensory experience.
The experience of overthinking, and working, and intellectualizing gives us an experience of life that's a little bit watching from afar. Whereas the erotic is the drive to participate in life through experiencing it, tasting it, touching it, falling in love with it. And so, of course, everyone's erotic recipe is going to be different, but something I really can't suggest enough is picking up a few books of erotic stories. Of course, you can search by whatever turns you on — if you want queer erotic stories, if you want kinky erotic stories, you want sensuous erotic stories, whatever you want, it's out there, my friends.
And there's something about reading, especially in the afternoon, that engages the eyes in such a different way than when we're looking at a screen, and is something physical and tangible to hold in the hands. It also inspires and awakens that part of our brain that's able to listen to a story, which is very different than the part of our brain that's processing information. And so that's a vote to visit your public library, and to read anything in the afternoon — but particularly if you want your afternoon to be infused with something a little more heightened and a little more animated than tea and watercolors, erotica is your friend.
Truffle four: the free gift
And lastly, in honor of today's theme, I would like to offer a free resource, which is called "A Five Minute Return to the Secret Garden Within Yourself." It's a free audio that you can get by going to Mary Lofgren dot com. That link will be below this episode, and it's a five-minute audio that is designed for those moments when your shoulders feel crunchy, when you're looping in thoughts, and where you just need five minutes of sanctuary to reconnect with your inner compass. So head to Mary Lofgren dot com, or click the link below this episode.
Outro
And my loves, thank you so much for listening today. If you enjoyed this episode, I would be so grateful to hear from you in a five-star review. Your reviews really help move this podcast further into the world. And even more than your reviews and your ratings, though those are greatly appreciated — if you know someone who could use a little bit more creativity and pleasure in their afternoon, please text this episode to them, or email it, or tell them about it, because it's moving our circle from the inside outwards. That is most interesting to me in growing our community, and I would be so honored to meet and take great care of your friends and loved ones. And as always, thank you so much for listening, and I will see you in our next episode.