Notes on Sensuality
Unfortunately, it is likely, you are like me.
It is likely, you have been told its okay to like your body, only when it performs. When it looks good or run the fastest, or fit into those jeans or keep up with eight, ten, fifteen hour days. When it can keep up with workout schedules, less designed for health and wellbeing, and more for beating ourselves into submission, into some strange half version of ourselves we think we’re supposed to be.
Maybe you’re like me and have, for most of your life, prided yourself on being low maintenance. Prided yourself for not being indulgent. For not needing luxuries or spending too much time preening in the bathroom. For choosing the banana when you wanted the chocolate cake. For pushing through when all you wanted was to switch off.
It is wonderful, important and necessary to take care of ourselves. To move, to eat well and to learn how to get hard things done.
But.
When did the purpose of doing all that shift so dramatically? From simple foundational practices and habits so we can, hopefully, continue to enjoy the beauty of life for years to come — to means within themselves to pin all our happiness and worth on? To hold ourselves hostage beneath?
On interpretation of sensuality, for me, is our ability to actually derive joy from our lives. From the food we eat, from the trees we walk past every evening on the way home from work. Sensuality is cultivating a loving relationship with our physical vessel, taking pride in tending to it, listening to it, touching it, living fully within it — not controlling it, dismissing it, forcing it into submission.
The practices of yoga and meditation are, obviously, practices I have an endless, extreme amount of gratitude for. But what I’ve witnessed in myself and many, many others, is that often in the pursuit of these practices, we forget the healing power of enjoying ourselves, listening to our desires and our inner whispers, giving all too much power away to rules created by often very flawed men, for a world we no longer live in.
For the past two years, sensuality and femininity has been a huge focus in my everyday practices and healing. I’ve explored yogic techniques along with body oiling, breast massage, moving away from restrictive diets and so much more.
October in The Daily Rest Studio we explore the theme of sensuality, with a daily practice, if you so choose to participate in it, for reconnecting to your physical being, and re-remembering the beauty, the intelligence and the healing power of what is physical, real and felt.
The Daily Rest Studio is both a library of over 100 classes of different traditions and lengths, as well as a monthly live workshop container. Each month we have a Human Design Q&A circle (the BEST way to learn more about Human Design in general) A Full Moon Rest restorative workshop, a New Moon breath-work and meditation practice and this month — a special themed workshop on sensuality and sacred adornment as I share all I have been diving into over the past two years.
And so, even if you are, unfortunately, like me, the more than fortunate part is, we can always start to walk along a slow, meandering path of change and be curious and hopefully, a little delighted by what happens along the way. I’d love to see you on that little forest path in the studio next month :)
PS. If you’re asking yourself the question, how could I POSSIBLY run a business while embodying my most feminine, sensual side? Then make sure you check out The Capsule, taught in collaboration with my dear Projector friend Sophie, and the one who taught me about wearing perfume to bed in the first place ;)