Episode 176: A Softer, Sensory Approach To Overwhelm

The road to meeting overwhelm with productivity hacks is well worn. But do you ever feel like it’s a wagon rut that just takes you in circles?

What if the answer isn’t getting better at handling overwhelm, but instead, finding a deeper presence with your body?

In this episode of Come To Your Senses, I’m weaving you a tale that includes mid-day naps in the coat closet, being saved by geranium, and other early stirrings of a sensualist spirit.

You’ll discover:

✨ Why so many of us meet overwhelm with more doing, and what to try instead
✨ How a single inhale of scent can bring you back to center
✨ What it means to be a sensualist, not just in stressful times, but as a way of life
✨ Three powerful gems to ground you when life feels like a bite too big to chew

Plus, you’ll be invited to join me this weekend at The Everyday Sensualist: a 2-hour live (or on-demand) experience to help you slow down, tune in, and live with more presence and pleasure.
Get all the juicy details and reserve your spot here: marylofgren.com/workshop

• 176 Transcript. A Softer, Sensory Approach To Overwhelm

  Hello, beautiful beings, and welcome to today's episode, which is the Sensualist way through overwhelm. And so I want to start with a story, which is that when I was a little kid, sometimes my parents, bless them, would give me a foot massage before bed. They'd tuck me in at night and I'd say, Will you rub my feet? And they would. And sometimes in the morning when I would wake up, I'd say, could you rub my back? And my sweet, loving parents would honor my requests. And then I'd go to school. And I was the first to be picked up, last to be dropped off. So I'd be picked up at some ungodly hour, like 645 in the morning, and then sometimes wouldn't get home until like 4 or 430. Because we went to school kind of far away from where our home was. And I remember being in my scratchy uniform, sitting at my little wooden and metal desk wearing Catholic school tube socks. You know, these navy blue scratchy socks, knee socks and fantasizing, like, around, you know, 1 or 2 p.m. after lunch that I could stop time, go into the coat closet, lay down on my jacket, take a nap, and have someone massage my feet. And I look back on this memory so tenderly because what I see is really part of my origin story as a sensualist, which very simply is just someone who seeks to live life more fully through experiencing life, through the senses and through the body. And what I also see is the origin point of the disconnect from my body and from. Honoring the body's needs as a necessary fuel for flowing through life, rather than forcing life and forcing myself. And I imagine that even if you're a first time listener to this podcast, that you can probably relate to similar stories where the needs of your body were just aching to be met. But due to some externalized pressure, you had to compartmentalize, cut that off, and retreat into your mind. And so today, I'm going to share with you three of the ways that I personally and that I guide my clients to structure your days from a place of sensual, sensual ism and living from the body in the senses has unlocked the deepest chasms of my creativity. Such a frequency of self love and kindness that weaves through my day as a golden thread and an ability to ground into presence in a way that meets the unique needs of the way that my body is wired. And if, as you're hearing about this, you feel an exhale coming through. This sounds like something you are magnetized towards. And most importantly, this sounds like an approach that you'd love to layer into your life, not just as a stopgap for intensity and overwhelm, but more as a lifestyle and a way that you want to unfurl through life. I would love to invite you to join me this Saturday at a workshop that I'm hosting called The Everyday Sensualist, and it's a two hour workshop. There will be a replay. We are going to deep dive into understanding the unique needs of the feminine nervous system, how to layer more small rituals of peace and pleasure into your days, But even more than what you do, because there is certainly no lack of information in this world on ways we can do things and things we should be doing different ways of thinking your way through life as essentialist ways to redefine and reclaim the essence and nature of your sensuality, as simply being in your body on a more frequent basis through the magic and the power of your senses. And so this is a one time only workshop happening this Saturday, June 14th. It's two hours. It's $27. It will be recorded. It's a super accessible way to work with me and to take a deeper dive into some of what we explore here on the podcast and once again, make it less of an idea and an abstract concept and more of a lived experience in your being in your body. And you can join us for this workshop at the link below this episode. Or if you go to Mary lofgren.com/workshop and I would love to see you there. And now on to today's gems. The Sensualist way through overwhelm. So where do I want to begin? Is by inviting you to think about and reflect on how you currently approach moments of overwhelm and no right or wrong here. We're not assessing if it's good or it's bad, but when you get overwhelmed, when you start noticing yourself going really fast through life, when you start noticing yourself numbing out because life is too overwhelming and, you know, essentially going into a state of unconsciousness, whether that's through hyper doing or withdrawing from life, how do you currently meet that experience? And so for some of you, it might be organizing your tasks into a to do list. For some of you, it might be kind of bingeing on productivity and then going into a state of under doing or under being to manage the ways that your energy has gone beyond its window of tolerance and its boundaries, to get in that sprint of productivity. You might go the route of learning where you buy a book on time management, or you buy a course, or, you know, all these other kind of outside in strategies for organizing. My friend Mo calls it moving around the boxes of life and getting better at keeping them organized and making room for new boxes to be added in, as they always will. And. You know, I want to be really clear that in no way am I calling this a wrong way to do it. But as a listener of this podcast and as someone who's drawn to the approach of a sensualist. What I want to encourage you to do is rather than treating the boxes and the tasks and the strategy, and I just need to be better at this, as our method is to divert your attention entirely Early towards focusing on your presence. And one of the most powerful ways we can impact our sense of presence is through our space. And so just before recording this episode, I did a little ritual of tidying my desk. I filled up two mason jars with water with a squirt of lemon in each. I lit a stick of incense. I opened the door to my office, which goes to the outside to let in some fresh air, and I set some intentions which were not just what I want to say and what I want to teach you, but really how I want to be of service to you. In this episode, and the feeling I wanted the episode to have, and the stories I wanted to layer in because as I've shared before in this episode, you know, there's no lack of information in the world. You don't need me telling you more things that you can do to treat your overwhelm, which is just going to make you feel more overwhelmed. What I believe we need more of is personal stories and stories that affirm and validate that the reason we experience these things isn't because we're wrong or bad or inadequate, but it's often because we've been taught and conditioned to place our awareness on the red herring rather than the matter itself. So in Doctor Anita Johnston's book eating in the light of the moon, she explores mythology and mythology as a way of better understanding the feminine psyche, particularly as it relates to people who have eating disorders. And one of the stories she tells is that of the red herring. And you hear that expression sometimes in our language. And it's this idea that the red herring and I forgive me, I'm forgetting the myth in this moment, but that the red herring is kind of the distraction from whatever is the actual issue. So in the case of disordered eating, the red herring is your nutrition and your exercise and how many calories you burn. And, you know, all these kind of insane ways that we manage the body, but that the deeper issue is our relationship to our sense of self and to desire and to nourishment and to appetite. And so focusing on the red herring is focusing more on the visible symptom than the actual, less visible underlying cause. And this approach does take more work. It takes more time. It probably would have been, I don't want to say easier, but less time consuming for me to just prattle off the thoughts in my mind and spill them onto the audio track. But by taking the time to organize not just my thoughts, but my presence, my intention, my heart's real longing of bringing this piece of art into the world, which is what each of my podcast episodes are to me. I know deep, deep, deep in my soul that the impact of that is going to have a greater ripple on my audience, a greater ripple on my community, a greater, greater ripple on my sense of success and a greater ripple on my ability to move through the rest of the tasks of my day. Because my attention in all of its facets has been poured into this task. And there's no parts of me hanging out wondering, should I have done this better? Should I have done this more fully? It's like I'm all in. I'm all here. And so that is your first gem. The second gem is isolating one of your senses. I think the most powerful sense for creating a sense of focus, particularly moment to moment. And that is your sense of smell. So just this past weekend, I was at a workshop. And it was a workshop on intimacy and connection. And I just noticed my circuits getting a little blown. My system getting a little flooded. And I started to sense myself going into some dissociation. And so I took a break and I stepped outside. And I have a toolbox of ways to intercept this experience. When my system starts to go offline after it's encountered something that feels like more like too much too fast, like something more than I have the capacity to digest in the moment. So I stepped outside, felt the cool air on my skin, felt the earth beneath my feet, sees. And it was helping, but it wasn't really quite cutting it. And I noticed a pot of geranium flowers, which have a very strong scent. And I walked over and I took a deep whiff, and the smell of geranium flooded my senses, and I could instantly feel my nervous system start to calm down. The tremble of hey, I'm not okay. Started to recede, and it was just such a powerful remembrance of the way that smell is. Our sense that is most deeply connected to to memory, to emotion. And when it comes to a sense of overwhelm. Smell can be one of the quickest, most reliable inroads to presents. And so some practical ways that you might bring that into your life are keeping essential oils on your nightstand first thing in the morning. Last thing of the day. One of the rituals I'll have my clients do in the sanctuary, which is our membership community, is something called the rosette ritual. And if you've ever noticed that on a bra in the space between the cups of the bra, you'll see a little satin rosette. And it's thought that that is a historical nod to our corset wearing ancestors who would place flowers and fresh herbs in their corsets for an aromatic effect. And so the rosette ritual is to sprinkle some fragrance or some essential oil onto a tissue or a piece of cotton, and to tuck it into your bra so that all day you might pick up the aroma and the fragrance and use it as a cue to melt. Open through the heart and to sink the shoulder blades down the back. And to use this sense of hypnotic, intoxicating aroma to come back to your body and come back to your sensuality and allow your sensualist ancestors to pass down their vivacious wisdom through your ancestrally connected sense of smell. And that brings me to our final gem. Which is as I'm preparing for the everyday sensualist this weekend. One of the things that I'm going to be teaching about is that there's two approaches to sensual ism, and this more embodied way of life. One is as a stopgap to plug up holes in the dam of your overwhelm. And the second is centralism as a way of dismantling the dam and creating more of a river of flow for this way of life to actually change your life. So one of the most common questions I get is, how can I possibly be essentially a live person when I work in a really masculine field? Or I have three sticky faced children hanging off of my body day in and day out? Or I have to work like a dog in the grind just to get by. And these are very personal, tender questions that I, nor anyone else I believe can really answer in a podcast episode or even in a workshop, because they're unique to each person's life and each person's circumstances. But what I will say is that when you center your senses in life, you wake up your body. And in doing so, you wake up your instincts and your intuition. And it is those things that provide answers to those questions that only you can know. And this is where we circle back to the red herring, is that, you know, we can throw productivity hacks and time management methods at our sense of overwhelm. But when we center our own sense of presence, instincts and intuition, our body naturally reveals the answers that are unique to us. By strengthening and fortifying the roots of our system to create healthier branches, rather than constantly having to outsource an arborist to come and trim and maintain and health ify. And you know, I hope that metaphor makes sense, makes sense in my brain. But I think, you know what I'm saying? It's a bottom up rather than top down approach. And. This shifting towards a lifestyle of sensual ism is something that happens gradually. One small ritual of presence at a time. And so, my loves and friends. I am so grateful for your listenership and if what you heard today moved something in you. Come and join us at the everyday Sensualist. Saturday, June 14th at 1 p.m. eastern. It will be recorded and the replay sent out. You get a two hour workshop, a bonus tea sipping guided five minute audio meditation called SIP Like a Goddess, which I am particularly delighted to deliver to you. And you get that the minute you enroll. It's a pre-recorded ritual to invite you into sensual ism as soon as you sign up. And so join us June 14th at Mary Lofgren Workshop, or just head to the link below this episode. And thank you so much for listening. Onward to your next adventure in sensual ism.