Sangha of the Senses
How often do you give yourself permission to love what the soft animal of your body loves? To really take in the pleasure of that juicy, ripe peach? Or the cool shower flowing over your overheated summer skin?
Instead too many of us are enslaved by efficiency… always getting on with whatever is next?
Join me for in person or online practice to bring more reverence to your sensual self… as the poet Mary Oliver suggests, to the animal part of you that loves what she feels and makes no apologies for it!
You can expect thoughtful discussion, inspiring meditations, and invigorating writing prompts. These will help you create an individualized plan for a month of practices to activate and expand the vital beauty of your own juicy sensual life.
AND we’ll have a great time!
If you're curious to know more, here's why
I'm so inspired to share this work.
Most of us are more than a little embarrassed to take the time to let ourselves really love what the animal part of us loves. These are sense pleasures. It can feel vulnerable to admit (even to ourselves) just how much we love that first whiff of coffee on a rainy morning.
How igniting a lover’s touch can feel on our most delicate skin.
Or how much we delight in a warm cuddle on a cold winter night – not unlike the way a fawn must feel snuggled next to her mother deer?
Why is it so important to receive the beauty
and joy our senses are here to give us?
- Because as humans our senses have evolved not just to sense danger and keep us safe, but to give us the opportunity to enjoy an unlimited multitude of delights to balance the trials life will inevitably dish out.
- Because our culture has trained us so completely to deny our animal nature, we need to more fully develop our sacred and devalued skill of nurturing our sensual receptivity.
- Because anytime our senses stop us long enough to notice what's there to be experienced, instead of the plans and anxieties running around in our minds, the simple act of noticing drops us into the now, where holy moments of wonder and awe can take us deeper.
This is sacred work. If a woman wishes to live fully alive – fully human – I believe she must deepen her reverence for her sensual and intuitive self.
For millennia our Western spiritual traditions viewed women’s bodies as the source of sin. Religions were established when men ran the world and women, as potential temptresses, were suspect. Remember Eve? Her sensual nature was to blame for humanity’s fall from Eden. Half the human race has lived this misogyny for thousands of years.
But now – finally – a more embodied approach to spirituality is re-immerging. Instead of emphasizing a spirituality based on writings in a book and some future reward – too often a top-down and intellectual approach to a distant God – we are watching spirituality change to honor a deeper trust in the now, our bodies’ somatic wisdom, and a more caringfeminine approach to living and loving this Earth.
We are all products of our culture. We were brought up to believe that feelings and the body were suspect, somehow a proof of our weakness or insufficiency as women. We may think we’ve liberated ourselves by rejecting the restrictive religions of our ancestors, but will still live under their spell of shame. We still buy products to fix the bodies the culture has convinced us are just not right enough.
So we put the word “sensual” into way too small a box, alienating it from its soul-nourishing essence. Now is the time to reclaim our right to the pleasures our senses offer, not as an escape from life, but to live it more fully.
This is why we need a sangha… a community of trusted friends to help re-imagine a new world where we revere the body’s pleasures as much as any book. Where we begin to recognize and release what still stands in the way of a reverence for the life-giving aspects of our feeling nature. Where we support one another to hold all the vulnerable parts of ourselves with compassion and tenderness. And where we move toward a wholeness that embraces all of what we feel and enjoy!
I believe this is the time to reimagine a spiritual practice that values how things feel to us, instead of how they look or conform to someone else’s standards. I invite you to welcome with me a more all-inclusive, intimate experience of the divine, and a deeper trust in and reverence for the wisdom of your body and the natural world.
This is why I am initiating this Sangha of the Senses. And why I want you to join me!