Episode 187 - The Art of Being Satisfiable

Written By Mary Lofgren

Have you ever noticed how, when you’re bone tired or overstimulated, your mind craves something extravagant, like a two-hour massage, a pint of ice cream, or a week in Italy? And yet, what the body often longs for is something more simple. Something nourishing that doesn’t intensify, but simply satisfies. 

Welcome to the art of being satisfied.  In this episode I’ll show you how to recognize when your nervous system has slipped beyond its natural boundaries, and how to return to the fertile ground of enoughness. We’ll explore mind, body, sensory, and spirit based practices that invite you into a deeper intimacy with your personal sweet spot of satisfaction.

Pull up a pouf and join me for this exploration of what it means to live in the radiance of enough.

LINKS FROM THE EPISODE

  • Ep 187. The Art of Being Satisfiable

     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 on the Art of satisfaction. So as I was thinking about this episode, you know, I am always amazed at how I can be just careening through a day and it gets to like, 4 or 5:00. And, you know, I'm often tired. I've been on the computer for a long time, and the very last thing I want to do is go for a walk or drink a mason jar full of water. You know, these really basic, small things that help restore a sense of harmony in my body and. What my mind tells me is that I need a two hour hot stone massage and an evening of Ben and Jerry's with a Nashville marathon if I want to feel even a shred of relaxation. And usually when I have those thoughts, it's a sign to me that I've gone beyond my body's boundaries. You know, the more extreme the fantasies of what I need in order to relax, usually the more extreme my nervous system is beyond its window of tolerance and its window of healthy activation. And yet 100% of the time. For almost 45 years on this earth, I forget that what actually leads to deeper satisfaction and deeper satiation isn't more extremes, but it's slowly bringing my body back down to that window of healthy arousal and activation so that I can feel and sense more. And today's episode was inspired by an amazing author, Adrienne Marie Brown, who has a number of books, one of which is Emergent Strategy, which is an extraordinary book. Another is Pleasure Activism, another extraordinary book. And one of the things that she talks about in pleasure activism is are you satisfiable? And particularly in the landscape of consumerism and the way that capitalism and just so many of our systems. Require the hungry ghost to be in the driver's seat of our experience. It's like there is no litmus for what is enough. I think we can all relate to the experience of yearning for a desire, longing for a desire, having it on the vision board, doing meditations about it, you know, all this yearning and longing. And then when it finally comes to pass, we barely give it any attention until we're on to the next one, the next expansion, the next thing. And so today we are going to talk about both mind and body based methods to locate yourself on the satisfaction spectrum and to have more acuity and agility in, again, moving beyond the intensity of extremes and deeper into intimacy with your own sense of enough ness. And so we're going to begin with a quote from Salvador Dali. There are some days when I think I am going to die from an overdose of satisfaction, and I'm looking at an image of Salvador Dali right now, looking completely eccentric, with a handlebar mustache in that signature upturned, waxy position that he was so famous for. And when I think of Salvador Dali, I think of someone who is deeply, deeply expressed in the most. Wild, uninhibited places in his being. And there's a lot of satisfaction in that. A another quote that I'll share from Adrienne maree Brown. Exactly is a friend asked me today how I am, and it amazes me how good I am right now. I could point to external factors, good news or accolades, but that would be an act of misdirection because what I want to point to is within me, deep in the folds of my mind and the muscles of my body, deep in the love discipline of my spirit. I mean, enchantment or bust. Come on, that is just so incredibly gorgeous. And I feel it in the folds of my own muscles and mind. And so where we're going to begin today is with, first of all, the definition or the etymology of the word satisfied. So satisfaction satisfied. All of these words stem from the word satis or satis. Not sure exactly, but it's a Latin word satis, and it is a word that means. Enough. I mean, let's just let that land on our systems. Like butter melting in the sun. You know? Enough. I mean, I encourage you, just as I taste that word on my own tongue and lips, it's like. I encourage you to say it out loud if you're able to. Enough. Enough. Like I feel in my own body, this welling up of what feels like when an envelope is sealed with candle wax. You know, in like a wax stamp. Like there's just this totality to it and a sensuality to it. And like, I can actually feel in my own pelvis and belly, like a dropping down sensation. This is a peek into my own inner landscape, and I encourage you to notice what happens within your inner landscape, because your experience will likely be will be different than mine, but may be completely different than mine. That word might irritate you, or it might make you sad or angry. And those are all very worthy. Paths of power to walk down and explore. But when I looked at this etymology, it reminded me of the etymology of the word luxury, which comes from the word lux or Lexus. And the etymology of that word means excess, which I think is just fascinating and so interesting. The play between these two words, and I like to reframe luxury as simply being more than enough. You know, when I have a moment of simple luxury, it's very interwoven with a sense of satisfaction. And that kind of brings me into our first gem, which is that just like all things in our world and in our inner world especially, satisfaction is a spectrum. So. Again, things like marketing and advertising often want to sell this idea that satisfaction is a switch. You could turn on and off with the right product, or the right exercise plan, or the right book about attachment styles or whatever, you know, and the illusion that satisfaction is this resting state we can arrive at and never leave. But the reality is that what satisfies you today may not be what satisfies you tomorrow, and may not be what satisfied you yesterday. You know, in that quote by Adrienne Marie Brown, I love how she redirects from an externalized experience of feeling really good in her life to an internal experience. And that satisfaction can really be a practice of allowing life to saturate us. And so one way that you can explore this in your own life is to go back a bit to that exercise of what does enough feel like in your body? What does satisfaction feel like? And as my friend Rochelle Chihuly says, sometimes the best way to study something is to actually study its opposite. Rochelle is the founder of Coya inspired movement, where every time we dance. Koya. Koya is a movement method that's a weaving together of dance and yoga and intuitive movement. And every Koya class has a theme. So, for example, every week in the sanctuary, I teach a 30 minute embodiment practice that is often informed by Koya or a practice of Koya and the sanctuary for anyone who doesn't know, is our online practice community of feminine presence. You can learn more about it at Mary Löfgren Sanctuary. But some examples of themes from the Sanctuary Spa recently are moving from center, the sacred pause, moving at the pace of pleasure. And so in a quiet class, it's like every movement. Is an expression of an an exploration of that theme. And often what we'll do is a contrast dance where if, for example, the theme is finding your center, we explore through the body and through intuitive movement. The stories that the bodies holds are round. What is it like when you can't find your center? What is it like when you lose pace with pleasure and maybe you feel numb? Maybe you feel shut down. And I'm sharing all of this because sometimes satisfaction, especially if there's areas of your life where you're not really satisfied, it can be a hard sensation to locate. And so an exercise or a practice is to explore what that feels like in your body. Where do you feel it? Does it have a color? Does it have a shape? Does it have characteristics? And not necessarily to get rid of it or to figure out a way to. Not feel it, but more as a way to be more intimate with yourself and with your body and with the experience of being fully human. And that brings me to the next gem, which is another exercise that can help you understand and relate with your sense of satisfaction more deeply, which is making a list of five things that you're dissatisfied with. Or it could be three. Or it could be ten, you know. Five is just a starting point, and you put that on one side of the list. So I'll invite you to just ponder that now. Three areas of life where you feel like you could use a little more satisfaction. And then on the other side of the page, you'll draw a line between dissatisfaction and this other half of the page. And at the top of that half you write desire. Because underneath every rock of satisfaction is a pearl of desire. And we are so accustomed to the sensation and the state of dissatisfaction. There's a lot less vulnerability with dissatisfaction. You have a lot less to lose. So it's a bit of a comfort zone for the mind. And so it's a lot easier to focus on what we're dissatisfied with than to go a bit deeper below that static and that tension into what is it that I do want? So let's say, for example, you're dissatisfied with going on dates with people who don't ask questions. That's the common one for me, and I'm learning a lot about it. Actually. I'm learning a lot about how people communicate and connect and that, you know, I always thought that people who don't ask questions are just kind of self-centered assholes. But I'm learning a lot about different styles of communication, and that for some people, sharing about themselves is a reach for connection. And anyway, so that is an area that I feel sometimes dissatisfied about and what I really want. What's beneath that desire is a sense of genuine connection and reciprocity on dates. And, you know, the question then follows, like if we were in a coaching session together. The question might follow what is mine to attend here? So in an embodiment coaching session, we go through a much more in-depth process of unraveling emotional and physical tension around some of these beliefs and some of these frustrations. But even just right now, a powerful question to drop into your body and into your experience is when you look at this dissatisfaction and its parallel desire. What is mine to tend? So when I look at this desire on dates, I have the responsibility to state my desire to not just sit there with arms crossed, frustrated. I also have a responsibility to work through some of the internalised fiddlehead fern wound up into a tight little ball. Because, you know, especially being raised Catholic, being socialized as a woman, it's like you're not supposed to insert yourself into conversations. You wait to be asked. You know, these were messages that I grew up with. So it's like I have a responsibility to tend to that in myself rather than projecting that onto another person. And actually, just last night, I was communicating with a fella and we had a conversation about this. And I was feeling frustrated, feeling frustrated, feeling frustrated, and. Talking about it and learning more about his communication style and sharing more about mine. Wouldn't you know, I got the exact thing I was wanting, which was genuine connection and reciprocity because I opened up where I was feeling vulnerable and stated my desire. And so this area of dissatisfaction suddenly went to a deeply nourishing sense of satisfaction in my being, because I took a risk to shed that husk of dissatisfaction and reach for my desire. So dissatisfaction on one side, desire on the other. Really powerful exercise. And the last is a thread that I've been weaving throughout this entire episode. But the last is that, you know, when I think of satisfaction and this satisfaction spectrum, satisfaction is both an active and a receptive experience. And so that conversation would be an example of an active experience of moving towards satisfaction and being willing to risk never speaking to this person again if they got super offended or, you know, whatever, that wild place of vulnerability and honesty and authenticity. And then there is this other side of the spectrum, which is slowing down to feel and let the body experience that satisfaction. So one of the things that we often explore in the sanctuary, in our content and in our community gatherings is this paradox that the anxious, fearful, consumptive mind is often telling us more and more, more, you got to get more, you got to get more, you got to get more done. You got to get more money. You got to get more love, whatever. More time. And just the paradox that if we want to feel more and expand our capacity to allow more to flow through our lives, the path to that is actually slowing down, to sense and to notice. And so this gem in your satisfaction practice might be to train your body and not just your mind. You know, I mean, I know y'all love your gratitude lists. Those of you who've been long time listeners, you know, I just kind of can't get down with the gratitude list. It feels too mental, too mechanical to me. But training the body to slow down, to recognize, to savor and to expand that felt sense of enough ness so that instead of a mental checklist of satisfaction, it becomes something that you can practice sensing and receiving and anchoring into your body and into your being. And you can start that right now. You know, if you wanted to sit or lie and bring some awareness, calling your awareness back home, letting yourself soften into the support that's beneath your body. These are two just really simple ways to get into an embodied state. If you're in a place where you can be an embodied state, you know, kind of the first pillar of embodiment is safety. So if you're on the subway, your system might not be totally receptive to this practice at that moment, but you trust your own inner guidance on that and to just drop into the body. Where do I feel? The hint of satisfaction in this moment. So, like, right now, I'll just do this exercise with myself right now. A little demo, love a little demo. I'm staring at the San Francisco Bay and the sun has just lowered below the top of the window, so it's really illuminating my eyes and it's reflecting off the water. And behind it are these, I would call it like, cerulean mixed with midnight blue mountains and this rich, yummy. I mean, there's no other way to say it. Like a rich sky blue in the sky. Anyway, the light reflecting off of the bay is just really. Sending some ripples of delight and satisfaction into my cells. And so what I might do here is give myself the chance to pause. And, you know, once again, rather than saying, oh, the bay. How nice. Like really slowing down to let it in to the body. Not just to stare at it as a witness from the outside, but to notice. Where does this reflection pierce my heart? Where do I notice that sense of awe stirring in my body right now? I feel it at the back of my heart, right at the bottom of my ribs. And it's like, can I inhale and exhale from and as that place to allow it to move and ripple through my being. And I'm guiding you through what I might do with you in a embodiment coaching session, which I offer. And, you know, again, this experience of taking what is typically mental in our day to day experience, which is just looking around at our environment and really slowing down. It's like when I look up from my desk now after taking my eyes away, it's a totally different experience. It like strums a chord so much deeper in my being than when I was just admiring it from far moments ago. So my friends, this concludes our gems for today and if you enjoyed this episode, I would be so honored if you felt inspired to share it with a loved one, to share it with your community on social media or elsewhere. And a really beautiful way that you can support the podcast is by leaving a five star review on Spotify. You can hit the five star button on Apple Podcast, you can write a review, and I would be so delighted to read your words on the air next week, and I am wishing you a moment of satisfaction today that you don't just notice, but that you experience and drink in to your cells. Thank you so much for listening. I will see you in our next episode. For more gems on how to celebrate life through the richness of your senses. Head to Mary Lofgren comm. There you'll find an abundant library of free gems and resources. You can check out my award winning coaching programs or flirt with stepping through the garden gates of the sanctuary community. Come and learn how to make beauty, presence, and everyday luxury a lifestyle at Mary lofgren.com. 

Mary Lofgren
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Episode 186 - How To Revive The Lost Art of Lounging