7 ways to cultivate your sensuousness

by wpengine | Aug 21, 2013 | Healing

How sensuous are you?

How do you feel about your sensuousness?

Would you like to be more sensuous?

Your sensuousness is essential to who you are. You have an animal body which is primal, with hungers and needs. It feasts through your senses.

The mind-body split

Finding time and ways to connect with your sensuousness in your fast and full life can be challenging. Deadlines, daily pressures, and technology can separate you from your sensuous life.

You may want to be more sensuous. You may want to increase your desire and capacity for pleasure. You may have body inhibitions, addictions, or trauma which don’t let you be as sensuous as you’d like to be.

Chances are, you don’t live close to the land as did your agricultural, pagan ancestors. Rubbing shoulders and hips with animals and nature, their bodies were more free and open to shakti, life energy. The Earth’s fertility, vitality, and abundance was their work and play. But centuries of patriarchal religions, Cartesian thinking, and an increasingly mechanized world have created a mind-body split.

When your mind and body are divided, you:

•  look for happiness and fulfillment in things outside yourself. But happiness doesn’t lie in what’s external; it lies in your experience of them. And that includes your sensory experience.
• objectify or minimize the importance of your body. When you block, repress, or shame shakti, life energy, you’re less sensuous and embodied, which can cause physical and mental disease.
• lose out on the pleasure, wild innocence, and wisdom of your animal body.

Come into your animal body

One way to heal the mind-body split is to come into your animal body. Your senses. And your sensuousness.

The more sensuous you are, the more alive you are. You feel good. You have more capacity for pleasure, desire, body-bliss, and ecstasy. Your life energy, shakti, flows free, clear, and vital. On top of feeling good, being sensuous is actually beneficial for your health.

Sensuousness is the language of your animal body. Free, wild, and instinctual, it has its own wisdom. It’s a simple language: what feels good, alive, and pleasurable? What doesn’t?
{ListIt2Quotations item=’soft-animal-body’ detailtemplate=’blogquote’ action=’detail’}Your sensuousness is unique to you. You’re sensuous in your aesthetic taste, whether you’re decorating your home, choosing the colors you wear, or the fragrances you enjoy. As well as the music, poetry, architecture, or sculpture, or art that please and captivate you.

Sensuousness always feels good. It’s only judgements and beliefs that condemn it.

Although sensuousness is often associated with sexuality, you can be very sensuous without being sexual. It’s a practice and capacity that you can develop.

How to become more sensuous

1. Be aware

Your awareness is everything. Just as your eyes see the world, so your awareness ‘sees’ your experience. Use your awareness as a flashlight or laser to direct and focus on what you want to sense.

The more you develop your awareness, the more rich, nuanced, and textured is your sensory experience. One way to increase pleasure is to increase your awareness of pleasure.

2. Slow down

Your animal body has a different time pulse than your lightning mind. Slow down, tune into your body and sensations, and bring your awareness to each one of your senses.

What do you see? Hear? Smell? Touch? Taste?

Notice how your pulse changes. How your breathing lengthens and deepens. How your body relaxes.

3. Give yourself permission

Getting out of your mind and into your body is part of the journey. The mind-body split has you riddled with no’s, shouldn’ts, and must nots.

Allow yourself to really touch, know, and relish your sensation. Satiate your animal body’s greed and hunger. If or when you stop, get curious about why not.  When you come up against an “I shouldn’t,” or “It’s not okay,” ask yourself, “why not?”

If your sensations seem overwhelming or too intense, you might consider seeing a therapist.

4. Enter your sensations

When you enter your sensations, you go deeper than feeling them. You can feel an ache, a tug, or a clutch in your body and stay on its surface.

When you enter your sensation, you actually merge and tunnel into it. You become one with it and surrender to its flow. You’re carried by its stream of energy. You’re surfing its wave.

You surrender yourself to your sensation.

5. Be curious about how you sense

You meet each moment wherever you are. And with whatever you’re carrying. Which is why when someone touches you when you’re distracted, you barely notice it. Yet when you’re present, you drink in the full sensation of the same warm and caring touch.

How do you meet each sensory moment? What emotions come up? Are you open?  Curious? Reverent? Ashamed? Fearful? In awe? Trusting? Closed? Afraid? Adventurous?

How are you meeting this moment? And this? And this? And the next…?

6. Take up an art form

Engage with an art, aesthetic, or embodied practice. Yoga, music, sculpture, flower arranging, woodworking, or making chocolate are some ways in which to immerse yourself in your senses.

7. Practice

Sensuousness is a practice and self-discovery. You may find the more you practice, the more you discover sensation. Some mantras with which to cultivate your sensuousness are:

• What am I sensing?
• What emotions or thoughts come up about what I’m sensing?
• What gets in the way of my staying with this sensation?

Or you may come up with mantras of your own which keep you sensuous.

Models of sensuousness

I look to yakshis, Indian nature spirits, for their voluptuous sensuousness. Reveling in Earth’s playground, they’re seen entwined or merging with playful abandon into a tree, snake, or vine.

They’re a beautiful metaphor of how your animal body is intimately and inseparably connected to the Earth. They model a luscious sensuousness with all its delight and innocence and without shame or inhibition.

They show the sheer pleasure of just feeling good.

And that’s sacred.

What are some other ways you stay sensuous? I’d love for you to share them here.

Navigating life when everything falls apart

by wpengine | Aug 17, 2013 | Healing

What do you do when everything falls apart?

You know, those times.

A breakup. A death of a loved one. Losing your job. An illness. A mid-life crisis. Or when just about everything in your life explodes.

Yes, those times of crisis.

When the ground you stand on cracks open. When what was secure and steady is now uncertain and chaotic. When you feel out of control. Helpless. Scared. And lost.

You think:  It’s not supposed to!  How will I get through this?

What you try to do

So you try to hold on to what you had. You desperately try to return to who you were. You try to regain the safety and security you felt.

But it just doesn’t work. Because everything’s changing.

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Why change?


When everything in your life changes, it means you’re reaching the limit of who you are now. Like a snake sloughs its skin, you’re being pushed and birthed into a new version of yourself. For that to happen, some parts of you must dissolve, disintegrate, even die.



Without change, you stagnate. Who you are now must give way to who you will be.

Kāli, the dark goddess of destruction, is dancing her dance. The dance of chaos. The dance of change.

The third energy in the life wheel of creating-sustaining-dying, Kāli destroys to make room for new life, vitality, and growth. Just as winter dies so spring can be born, so the old must give way to the new. There’s wisdom at work here.

When everything in your life changes, it means you’re getting ready to transform. You’re preparing for a new identity and way of being in the world. 



When everything in your life changes, it’s an opportunity. Will you take this energy and run with it? Or not?

How to work with change

1. Accept and embrace change

You want to turn back the clock. You want things to return to the way they were.

You want your relationship or job back, and the security and comfort of the way things were. 

It can be really hard to accept change. You feel uncertain, anxious, and afraid. Mostly, you’re not in control.



But at some point you get, really get, that things won’t return to the way they were. The only way is forward and different. 



You’ll get the most out of this period by working with change instead of fighting it.

2. Be present

Stay present with yourself and difficult feelings like fear, anxiety, and confusion.

Allow yourself to feel. When you’re sad, angry, or confused, be with it all. Let yourself cry if you’re grieving.



You may be tempted to do things or distract yourself to regain some sense of control.

 Try staying as close to your feelings as you can without getting overwhelmed.

Breathe. Deeply and often. Especially when you’re feeling something intense.

3. Don’t do —  allow

This time is about letting go of who you used to be, which means not knowing who you’re going to be in the future.



Change can be scary. It can be tempting to distract or numb yourself or return to old ways you used to do things. 



The more you allow change to organically happen, instead of willing or forcing, the more authentic and rewarding it will be.

Trust your feelings, your body, and your heart. 

The best way to birth the new you is to allow what wants to shift and come forward. 

When you ride the wave of change, you get the most out of it.

4. Seek support

It can be really helpful to seek support at this time from a therapist, coach, or healer. Intense feelings are natural and it can be a huge relief to have a safe space and relationship in which to process.

Reach out and connect with friends, family, and community who understand what you’re going through.

Consider joining local groups and communities, or online groups if there aren’t any in your area.

5. Do your inner work

When life falls apart, it’s a clear message that some ways of being, often beliefs and patterns, are outdated.

• What themes are showing up?
• What about you is being challenged?
• What’s being stirred in your unconscious?
• What are you ready to let go of, heal, and transform?

Use this time as an opportunity to clear and release old ways of being and shift to a more authentic you.

Again, work with a therapist or professional to get to the root of what this is about for you.

6. Nurture yourself

Be gentle and compassionate with yourself.

Nurture yourself with self-care.

Do things that are grounding for you, like yoga, tai chi, gardening, or make things with your hands. Do what’s soothing for you, like listening to music, playing an instrument, or hiking in nature.

Maybe meditation, an awareness or spiritual practice, or prayer will feel centering and grounding.

7. Learn to be with not knowing

Learning to be with not knowing can be unnerving, yet energizing. All your fears will come up. But it also holds gifts you’ve longed for.

It’s like being in a dark room, in which you slowly begin to see. You start to see and feel things which you didn’t when the lights were on.

Trust yourself. Maybe you’ll discover something about yourself. Give yourself a chance to explore.

Do things differently. Allow yourself to make mistakes. Fall down. Pick yourself up. Try new ways of being.

What are some other ways you’ve navigated life when everything falls apart? I’d love for you to share them here.