Episode 216 — Soft Presence & The Magic of Candlelight
In this episode of Come to Your Senses, Mary explores a softer path into the present moment through ripe summer cherries, fragrant roses, candlelight, and the tiny sensory pleasures that make life feel sacred.
You'll learn simple ways to weave more candlelight into everyday life, from gloomy mornings and nighttime rituals to the surprisingly satisfying art of rescuing a wax-covered candleholder.
Enjoy this little invitation to stop working so hard to be present, and let beauty bring you there instead.
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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, journeying through the senses as a gateway to soft, sacred presence.
In many spiritual and more traditional mindfulness practices, there is often a common thread of spirituality being defined as the ability to override or rise above our instincts and our sensory impulses.
I've often been in a meditation class where the invitation is to not fidget. So if you have the urge to itch your nose or shift your posture, the practice is to actually ignore it and just keep coming back to stillness.
I remember growing up in the Catholic Church and the real renunciation of pleasure as a symbol of...
And there can be great wisdom in restraint and in stillness and a diet of bread alone. But the deprivation of pleasure and the avoidance of the senses—or making an enemy of the senses when it comes to our spiritual development—can really lead to a state of disembodiment and chronic crankiness, in my experience.
And so here we are, exploring our senses as part of what makes us both human and divine.
I want you to imagine for a moment a ripe summer cherry.
I just came from the farmers market before I recorded this and was marveling at the deep scarlet of the flesh, the shiny exterior, the turgor of the stem, the pith of the center, and the texture, which just explodes juiciness and invades every taste bud with the sensation of sweetness.
If that is not an experience of Holy Communion, I do not know what it is.
The senses allow us to merge with this great mystery of creation, and the senses are also great portals to the present moment.
We know that part of our language is to stop and smell the roses. And I will tell you that every time I pass a rosebush—it's early summer where I live, and so I haven't smelled a rose in maybe four to six months—I walk by and just nestle my nose right into the center.
And I go, "Oh."
I drink it in, and I make a vocal exclamation of the pleasure that my body is experiencing. And not just the pleasure, but the wonder of the miracle of the aroma of a rose.
So the next time you pass by a rosebush, just tell passersby that you're doing a homework assignment when you get right in there and fill up on the intoxicating fragrance of a rose.
I remember two times recently when I did this. Once was when I was out walking the dog, and the other was when I was walking into a doctor's appointment.
What's interesting to me is that on a normal day, I probably wouldn't remember walking from my car through the parking lot to my doctor's office. But because it was punctuated by the pleasure of this fuchsia rose, all of a sudden it's marked in my memory.
And in this way, our senses are a pathway to soft presence.
I say soft presence because sometimes when I put pressure on myself to be in the present, to be present, it feels very rigid. Like, "Oh God, I gotta be present."
And sometimes the present moment is just not something I want to be a part of.
If I'm feeling cranky, if I'm feeling irritated, if I'm feeling whatever, the pressure to become present can actually only intensify my anxiousness and irritability and desire to escape the present.
But a sensory experience of a rose caressing my nostrils with its scent, or the slow melt of a soft cherry still warm from the sun, or holding the giant head of my current foster dog against my heart—sometimes against their will—these are all ways in which I can seduce myself into the present moment.
Rather than straightening my spine and trying to be disciplined enough to become present, I am instead enfolded into a feminine experience of nurturance that delivers me into the present.
And so I am so excited to share with you some gems on how to bring the joy of candlelight more deeply into your life to reveal a soft, radiant presence to your days.
Candles are something that you probably have sitting all around your home and your living space.
And the thing about candles is that they hold such a spiritual significance.
Across cultures and religions, candles are this symbol of the meeting of the spiritual and the material world.
When we light a candle, something awakens in us as a remembrance of our ancestors gathered around a fire.
You may light candles when you take a bath or when you lay a fancy dinner, but I want to offer you some suggestions to layer candlelight into your day as a small gesture of inviting in that soft presence of the sacred.
One of my favorite rituals in the morning, especially on a dark, gloomy day, is when I go out into the kitchen and light three or four candles without turning on any lights.
I'll turn on some beautiful music, and I'll go about my morning making my coffee, writing in my journal, doing my two-way prayer, doing some meditation.
I mean, these are all on a good day. Lots of mornings I just speed through the morning like the rest of the population.
But that is what is so amazing to me about candlelight. It's an elemental way of invoking the spell of the sensuous.
So I love my morning candlelight ritual.
I also will use the symbolism of candles whenever I start something where I want to bring in the presence of the sacred, and especially when I'm working on something that just chaps my ass.
Like if I've fallen behind on my bookkeeping and I need to do a whole backlog. I really like doing my bookkeeping, so it's not really a problem for me on a regular basis. But if I've gotten behind on it, then it just builds and compounds.
And I light a candle as a reminder that the things I do to keep a tidy business are just as sacred and meaning-filled as when I'm coaching with a client.
Think of all the ways that we use candles to mark significance, like lighting a candle for a loved one who's passed, or placing a candle on a birthday cake and accompanying it with song.
These tiny rituals are marked by bringing in this mystery of fire.
And so, in the absence of a ceremonial fire, a candle is a great substitute.
I also love candle sconces.
So if you have used tea lights in your bathtub, for example, rock on. Good on you, my friend.
And I want to invite you to an unbelievable experience of romance by up-leveling to a sconce that you put on the wall and that you put either a pillar candle or a taper candle in.
Personally, I recommend taper candles when you are lighting a space where you want, like, light light.
A pillar candle is lovely for romance, but it doesn't produce as much light because the flame is not exposed. Whereas a taper candle—especially a sconce that has a mirror behind it that reflects the flame and basically doubles the candle—produces extraordinary light.
And in addition, having it higher up—if you think of Versailles chandeliers, those chandeliers were very high up because the higher up the candle, the more light is reflected.
I cannot recommend enough candle sconces in the bedroom for reading at night.
Having a sensual encounter is unforgettable with the accompaniment of candle sconces. And in your bathroom, they're wonderful for your baths, but also just for your nightly rituals.
That brings me to my next gem on layering more candlelight into your life, which is to keep a book of matches nearby.
I usually buy the little packs of 12 matches, and I keep them in an inconspicuous spot near the places where I have candles.
Because I think we can all relate to just passing those suckers by, and all of a sudden dog hair collects in the wax.
Having matches nearby means that at night when you're washing your face, you grab the lighter and it's two seconds. I know for myself personally, I'm not going to exit the bathroom and go get a book of matches from the kitchen.
And then the final gem that I want to give you on candlelight is a tip from my dad.
A little-known fact: my dad was actually in the Catholic seminary on his way to be a priest from age 13 to about 28, and he stepped down from that path a step before he was about to make his final vows.
And so one thing my dad really knew was candles, because often he was put in charge of candle making and candle distribution.
He taught me that when you have a candleholder and there's wax buildup or there's a candle stuck in the bottom, all you need to do is heat up your tea kettle or boil some water on the stove.
You pour it into the candleholder and let it sit for a few minutes.
I usually pour the water out into a trash can as opposed to my sink because the wax will build up, and I don't want wax building up inside my drain.
Then you just take a paper towel or a rag and slide that sucker on in there.
It is so satisfying to just lift the melted wax right out.
And now you have a bright and shiny new candleholder.
You can also reuse beautiful candleholders. A lot of them come in these gorgeous glass containers, and I repurpose those as vases.
I'll do a floral arrangement, or I'll even sometimes use one as a container for my pens in my office, or even as a container for my toothbrush or a guest toothbrush in the guest bathroom, to add a little panache and a little punch of beauty to these unsuspecting places.
And so, my friends, that brings today's episode to a close.
Wishing you a beautiful week bathed in candlelight.
And I'll see you in our next episode.
Feeling dangerously low on whimsy?
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Head to Mary Lofgren for a tiny little book about taking life lightly and delight seriously.
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The Book of Tiny Delights
A whimsical collection of tiny pleasures, beautiful ideas, and everyday curiosities.