Episode 222 - Sensuality, Reimagined
From mud squishing between your toes to speaking your truth when it scares you, come learn how to make sensuality a practice of presence, delight, and intimacy with life itself.
What's on the menu to explore:
What sensuality really means, and how to reclaim it as a natural part of being human.
How capitalism, patriarchy, and cultural conditioning shape our relationship with pleasure
How embodiment and somatic practices help you move beyond overthinking and trust your body’s wisdom
Expanding your definition of pleasure beyond comfort and ease to include anger, boldness, and speaking your truth
Reclaiming the parts of yourself you’ve been taught to suppress, and reconnecting with your intuition and life force
Simple ways to cultivate sensory pleasure, mindful presence, and deeper intimacy with yourself and everyday life
Come to Your Senses is a podcast about embodiment, sensory living, creativity, beauty, and human connection, hosted by Mary Lofgren, certified feminine embodiment coach.
LINKS FROM THE EPISODE
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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 Sensuality Reimagined. So the very first episode of this podcast, back in 2020, I remember it very clearly. I was sitting at the table in a breakfast nook at my friend's Airbnb. We were in the midst of the pandemic, the very start of the Covid 19 pandemic. And I thought to myself, well, I've been getting the nudge to start a podcast for many months, and if ever there is a time to do it, confinement seems like the time. And since that time, we are now at our 222nd episode. That is this episode.
Which is mind boggling to me that we have concocted together as a community, because it's not just me chatting into my microphone in what used to be my closet. I remember in the early days, me and my laundry hamper. The closet was the most acoustically optimal spot in the house. It's not just me in the closet talking to you, but we have a global community for hundreds of thousands of listens in over 186 countries. We're in the top 5% of Buzz Sprout Podcasts, which is our podcast host. We're on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, overcast, and I am so grateful.
I am so grateful that these seeds of ideas and possibilities to living a more embodied life through the beauty and the pleasures of the senses is something that resonates in the chambers of your heart. So thank you so much for your listenership and in celebration. I wanted to just circle back and come full circle on this concept of sensuality reimagined, which is one of the hearts of this podcast. You know, come to your senses as an expression means to awaken from a trance and the trance that I see us all awakening from. Those of us who are drawn to this path of embodiment and this path of sensory aliveness. Is the trance of separateness and dullness when it comes to life.
The trance of living, of virtual life, as opposed to a real tactile, felt like the trance of avoiding our emotional body and avoiding our bodies from the neck down and living entirely from our intellect and our heads. You know, these trances are not just human nature. They're human adaptations to oppressive systems that do not support human life force and connectedness, and that seek to numb our body, knowing so that a select few can stay in power. And the reason I feel so passionate about reclaiming our sensuality from some of the limited perspectives of sensuality simply being a precursor to sexuality, the harmful images of a woman's sensuality being depicted through the eyes of the white male gaze.
Of course, the harmful messaging around our sensual innocence being equated with sinfulness and separateness from the force of love that some call God, and the gatekeeping of capitalism, where sensuality is this thing that you somehow lost or never gained the right access to in the first place. And you can get it back with the next purchase of prescription cream, or this set of lingerie, or this next course, and the kind of sensuality that I am interested in that I know our community is so drawn to and deeply knows is our inherent birthright, is the sensuality of feeling mud squish between your toes, and the sensuality of taking a sip of your favorite latte and feeling foamy milk. Kiss your nose. Tip.
The sensuality of invigorating in invigorating. Is that a word? The invigorating sensuality of speaking up about what's true even when you feel like you're going to die if you do it. This is the kind of sensuality that brings us from an experience of surface enjoyment to deep intimacy with life and with who we really are. And so, as we reimagine our relationship to sensuality, let us now dive in to ways that you can take what is in this imaginal, beautiful realm of new perspective and drop it into the tangible, lived experience of your own life and in how you spend your days. And so we're going to begin where we often begin in this podcast, which is taking our topic du jour and tracing it all the way back to its origins, all the way back to the original use of the word.
And sensuality, obviously, is rooted in the word sense, and the etymology of sense means to feel, perceive and know. And I love this etymology because just this morning I was working with a coaching client, and this is the primary turn that we make when we do schematics and embodiment. Coaching is going from wandering through the echoing halls of our intellect and the parts of our mind that are just so desperate to figure things out, to find a place of safety. And instead accessing the wisdom of the Soma. And Soma is a word that means body. But my experience and understanding of the soma is something beyond just the squish and bone of the physical body, and that takes into account the fullness of our body, which I would describe as our being. All the different layers that make us human and make us a part of nature. A good example of this would be the heart. You know, so we have this physical squishy ventricle, ball of muscle. And there's something very real, very scientific and very biological about that. But there's also a great mystery to the heart. The heart beat and the way it's connected to the mystery of life and living. The infinite layers of wisdom in the heart. The way that the heart and its electromagnetic field actually extends beyond the physical body, and the way that in our language, we have these timeless pieces of wisdom. Trust your heart. Follow your heart. Listen to your heart.
And it's why I so appreciate that sense, is to feel and perceive and know because there's a reason. Trusting our heart often feels like a risk and why. It often goes against the logic of the mind, because the intelligence of the heart doesn't speak in the language of reason and pros and cons. It speaks through the language of intuition, sensation, and knowing. And often when I'm in a coaching session with a client, I'll ask that what does your body know about this? Now what do you think about this? But what does your body know? And so that's our first gem is as we reimagine and rebuild our relationship to sensuality, we start by boiling it down to its most elemental nature, and that is the simplicity of sensing itself. And in preparing for this episode, you know, I looked up the etymology, but I also looked at the definition of sensuality, which is the expression enjoyment or appreciation of pleasure through the physical senses. And that brings us to our next gem, which is to reimagine our relationship to sensuality. We must broaden and deepen our understanding of pleasure. And this could be and has been episodes all their own. You know, I have many episodes about shifting our relationship to pleasure and deepening our experience of pleasure. And I'll pop a few of those in the show notes if you'd like to deepen your study there. But for today, what I want to invite you into is one simple shift in your orientation that can help make pleasure feel less like one. Buttery yellow rose in a bouquet of fluff and filler, and more like a lush, abundant array of calla lilies, marigolds, tea roses, eucalyptus and where pleasure becomes less like just that one strawberry mousse chocolate in the box that I personally gravitate toward, and where it becomes this rich spectrum of different flavors, textures, and ways to experience delight.
And all of these metaphors. What I'm really trying to say is experiencing pleasure, not just as that which is pretty comforting, easy, or even numbing, which sometimes pleasure can get coupled with things we might do to numb, and exploring some of those textures of pleasure that we may have been conditioned are not supposed to be pleasurable. And a story from my own life to illustrate that is, this weekend I got into a bit of a confrontation with someone on a dating app, someone I've never met, somebody I don't know their last name. And my ordinary response in these situations is just eye roll and unmatched. But in this situation, I felt like doing something different. And when this person was saying things that were inflammatory and just kind of gross and. Instead of flee. You know, I felt safe enough. I felt like this was a safe enough place in myself and in the world where I could explore instead of just lashing out at this person or unmatched completely and running away. What would happen if I asked them more questions? What would happen if I got curious and more curious about their experience? And even though I felt so bad and so much pushback in my body. And these are sensations that for me historically are very unwelcome, anger has not been a safe emotion in my toolbox of emotions to feel throughout my lifetime.
And that may not be true for you. You might be somebody who really enjoys getting angry, but for me, it's like siren, siren, danger, danger. And yet there was a moment where I stopped fighting the sensation in my body, or labeling it wrong or dangerous, and instead I simply welcomed it. And all of a sudden I felt this shift from, you know this expletive. Expletive, expletive. Person to ooh, I want to wrestle this guy. And I felt this, like, healthy arrogance and urge to attack in my body. And it was really pleasurable.
And this is another question I'll sometimes ask in a coaching session, is what would you do if you could be a bad girl? And my clients always get this huge, warm smile on their face when they stop accepting the trance that I must be good, even if it means I suffer, and where they give themself permission to unlock the life force that's trapped in the parts of themselves that they've been taught, are bad and are therefore unwelcome. And so that one shift in orientation from unwelcome to welcoming can open up a whole new spectrum of sensation, and therefore a whole new experience of your sensuality. And her final gem in this collection is just let it feel good. Just move towards what feels good. You know, I can get real up in my head around the societal implications of pleasure and widening my pleasure spectrum and de sexualizing sensuality to make it more available. But at the end of the day, you know, all of those things create a really strong foundation of the why. But it's also okay to just do things that feel good, because I think my greatest hope for you and for all of us in reimagining sensuality is that it's just easy. It's just easy to be a sensual being, to choose what nourishes and delights your body, to say no to and set boundaries with what doesn't. we're trusting your gut is second nature, and where everything from an orgasm to a plate of glassy olives glistening in the sun is included in your experience of sensuality. And so may this episode open up new avenues of possibility, pleasure, presence, and power for you on the embodied path. If you're interested in deepening your experience of body led living and making changes towards a more present, more connected, more fully lived life, head to Mary Lofgren Coaching to learn more about working with me one on one and episode 222, in the library in the Register.
I am so grateful for your listenership. I am so grateful for every review. For every time you've shared this podcast with a friend, It truly makes such a difference. You pollinating come to your senses. Out in the world is the primary way that we grow. So if you haven't left your review yet, we would be delighted to hear from you. So until next time, may your olives be glassy. May your bouquets be abundant and may your wrestling be fierce. Thank you for listening. See you next time. Do you ever feel like life can get so serious? Sometimes? Like everything has to be productive to lead somewhere, and that it's not enough to just savor the little things that make you happy. If so, I would like to invite you into a world of sugared champagne, glasses, poetry, and tasting plates in The Little Book of Tiny Delights, yours free at the link in the show notes or at https://marylofgren.com/delight