Sensuality, resilience and the experience of simple pleasures help you live life with courage, openness and health. Yet, we often deny ourselves the sensual. Too commonly, we think of sensuality as sexual, decadent or even other worldly. So we shy away from it.
Yet, all pleasure is a sensual experience. How you know something is pleasurable is through sound, touch, feeling, hearing, moving – the senses! Importantly, sensual experience gives us resilience.
You see, resilience during these physically, mentally and emotionally trying times is what allows us to meet them without fatigue, pain or discouragement. Habitually, we numb ourselves to all or most feeling because so much of it is bad! Paradoxically, opening up to our pleasurable sensuality helps us to feel without being overwhelmed by negative experiences. We record positive ones instead.
The good and the bad always come together. The question is which dominates us. The senses and our sensuality are a thread of pleasure that strengthens us so we can feel and find goodness in a sore and aching world.
Sensuality is Key to Lived Experience. Lived Experience Creates Resilience
We all know what it is like to “live in our heads”. We feel disconnected and numb. Often, we feel life passes us by. We see our bodies as objects to manipulate and control. Alternatively, you can have an experience “in” your body. You will feel a lot more!
Of course, this is not always desired. Sometimes, feeling life hurts.
Now, no one wants a bad experience. Yet, bad experiences and pain are inescapable. So, it helps to experience simple pleasures that make you feel good in your body. When you feel these little doses of goodness, it fortifies you for difficulty! Think about how a certain piece of music or feel of a fabric can create an oasis. The sensuality of pleasure helps you meet wounds and hardship it in such a way they dont crush you.
I know this because I have had a lot of pain and loss in my life, including the death of my son. And yet, I am delighted to be alive.
The Experience of Simple Pleasures is an Easy Way to Use Sensuality for Resilience
Sensuality is just simply allowing what is pleasing to the senses. Think of an extremely pleasing vacation. You probably felt fortified coming home.
Simple pleasure in your daily life can help you build your capacity for resilience. And remember, resilience is simply the ability to recover from or have a sense of elasticity around traumatic or difficult circumstances. Maybe the resilience came from a pleasure as simple as soaking in water. That is a simple and pleasing. Can you feel it? You are embodying.
Sensual Simple Pleasures are Easy to Find
I was walking today. The breeze was cool. I was amazed by how that cool breeze centered me, My day had been challenging. Yet, that simple breeze offered me resilience. Follow along with me and try it!.
Somatic Movement is a Sensual Pleasure that Builds Resilience.
In my work, I endeavor to make movement helpful so the people I work with develop more ease, less pain, and more capacity for physicality. But, part of what we are doing is making movement pleasurable. And yes, that pleasure comes from our senses. We sense as we move. And, as we move we are feeling sensual pleasantness.
New research is showing how even small doses of sensual pleasure help us recover from pain and trauma. It’s like a underground spring of aliveness that runs through us. This small stream of sensual pleasure carries our resilience..
To recap, Somatic Embodiment is capacity building. It builds your capacity to meet difficult things and live through them. It protects us from defeat and suffering.
Hard things happen but embodiment is a medicine that gives us the strength to feel those difficult things. It supports us in reclaiming, owning and celebrating our humanity.
So please, learn more. And join me. have a helpful playlist for calm on YouTube. I also offer classes and workshops via Zoom, private lessons and maintain resource pages on my website.
Blog, Embodiment, Pain Relief, Somatic Movement, Yoga Therapy