Episode 133 - Body Worship: Transforming Daily Routines Into Rituals of Reverence
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Mary
Host
00:00
Hello, beautiful beings, and welcome to come to your senses. Oh, am I excited to be here with you today to talk about one of my absolute favorite topics, which is body worship. So you might have a desire to enjoy your body, to love your body. Maybe you find loving your body full of pressure I know I do and you aim for more of an experience of body neutrality, where you're not seeing the body as good or bad, but you just hold a neutral, curious charge about it and you're not defined by a overwhelming experience of love or an overwhelming experience of dislike. And all of that is awesome and great, and what I'm talking about today is something that has vastly changed my life, which is developing a relationship of reverence with our bodies. So love, body love is, I think, really an emotion or a feeling, Because worship is more of an action that can lead to a feeling. Worship is a devotional practice of appreciation and awe. And when I began doing body worship which I'll talk a little bit about today, kind of the craft of it, you know, I have one main practice. It's called naked body worship ritual and it is the ritual that I teach everyone, basically who will be within your shot of me at any time, because I think it's the most profound and just awe-inspiring experience that a person can have with their body, and on my retreats, I've taught this experience, or this ritual, live. We've practiced it as a group in the Come to your Senses Coterie, which is my group coaching program. This is really the core practice that defines the experience of coming to our senses. It's having this relationship of reverence and rapture as we relate to the body, and yet this is just one way to relate to your body. We are having opportunities to participate in worship all day long, and in today's episode, I am so excited to share with you three gems on how you can take things that you are already doing, like dressing, putting on perfume, putting on your moisturizer, looking at yourself in the mirror, looking at social media. As we know, things like passing by a mirror or looking at social media can be like booby traps for self-criticism or self-loathing or comparison when it comes to the body, and today we're going to reclaim that. We're going to shift our orientation to these being portals to seeing God made flesh, which is what your body is. And so, without further ado, let us dive into our gems.
04:00
And so where we're going to begin today is with the word worship. For many of us, that word might have a lot of attachments, especially based on our religious conditioning, but worship as a definition is an acknowledgement of worth. Let me say that one more time in case you didn't hear me Worship is simply an acknowledgement of worth. So if you grew up anything like me, where there was a lot of messaging around not worshipping false idols and keeping the focus of one's worship externalized towards a God that existed outside of us, and not a lot of confirmation of the way that the divine is reflected in the curve of an elbow or the way that a menstrual cycle is reflective of the moon's cycle, exactly the same as the ocean itself, I mean, what the shit that is so freaking cool? We're not even going to talk about our ability to reproduce. Okay, the fact that a uterus and a body with a uterus can grow another heart, liver, toenails, even eggs inside the womb Not even going to talk about it. Take that. Fishes and loaves, just kidding, I have nothing against fishes and loaves or the Bible in general, but actually that's not true. We're not going to go there.
05:52
The miracle of the human body. There's a reason that we call it a temple. And this episode is the first in our exploration of the six portals to a body renaissance, and we're, of course, going to be exploring these much more in-depth and experientially at renaissance of the body, which is my free annual version of the Met Gala that's coming up on October 24th, so you can go to schoolofsensualliving.com/body to join us for that. But the first portal to a body renaissance is taking the body as beloved, and this aspect of body worship is really just one fragment of that concept, and so an exercise that I invite you to try on right now. If you're listening to this, while you're working or doing the dishes, I invite you to pause for 30 seconds and imagine what it might be like to receive worship, perhaps imagining being on an altar surrounded by flowers and candles, with pilgrims who have come to worship at the miracle and the revelation of the divine in the curves of your own flesh, and where everyone in that audience could take a turn on that altar to receive worship. Whenever I am with a lover, I love to learn more about the parts of their bodies that they might feel some insecurity about, because those to me, are just the best parts, being able to kiss and even lick some stretch marks on their thighs and just make love to that physical marker of the person's story. And so that is our first invitation is simply by imagining the experience of being worshiped and worshiping the human body, new pathways of perception begin to open up.
08:30
I remember being 21 years old and when the movie Frida starring Salma Hayek came out, I saw it three times in theaters. I worked in Brooklyn at the time at a spa and there was this tiny little movie house across the street, on Court Street, and every day after work I would go over there and I would just buy another ticket and I was so overcome by the sensuousness of that movie. And there's one part in particular where a young Frida Kahlo is at a party and she meets Diego Rivera's ex-wife and they are marveling at how Diego is surrounded by just a flock of women and Lupe says it's the way he looks at you and finds beauty in all your imperfections. It's irresistible. And I remember seeing that and thinking my God, at that time I was at the height of my eating disorder and gosh. I also remember a very tender moment of walking down the street.
09:43
It was the middle of summer and I was wearing a cardigan, like I always did, because I was so ashamed of my body and it was so hot oh my God, it was so hot, beating midday sun in New York and I remember just being like fuck it. And taking off my cardigan and wearing a tank top underneath and like being genuinely surprised that nothing else had changed around me. Like that nobody had like run screaming or you know, that the sky had not fallen genuinely surprised. And that movie really just shook up my brain cells about the possibility that someone could look at your imperfections and find them beautiful. And so I offer you that invitation to even imagine an experience of worship.
10:43
Whenever I go to a burlesque show, I'm always amazed at the spiritual arousment of the audience when a glove comes off. You know we're not talking about full on nudity or anything like that. We're talking about the wrist and the upper arm, and it might be a real stretch for you to imagine being worshiped in your naked body. And so if that's the case, no problem, you can take just your index finger and knuckle and imagine placing that on an altar. Or if there's a particular part of your body that you're especially fond of, like, say, your clavicle or your butt or your hair, place that on a marble altar, kick up the puccini and let's go.
11:40
So that is your first gem is, first of all, worship being the acknowledgement of worth, and opening up that portal of possibility to worship, even in your mind, makes it more possible and more seekable in your reality. The next gem and I have a whole list of gems here, I'm really trying to hold myself back because I don't want to give you the full truckload of Ruby's Emeralds, diamonds and topaz that I have here awaiting you, because I'm actually pulling from the Renaissance of the body curriculum. But the second gem that I want to offer you is a portal that you may already be doing, which is the portal to worship. That is, your beauty rituals. So I would imagine that on a semi-regular basis, you might put perfume on your body, you might shampoo and condition your hair, you might apply lotion to your body and all of these. If we think about just even Cleopatra alone and how she was famous for parading the streets and her gilded adornment and cold-rimmed eyes to embody the goddess Isis and instill a confidence in her people that she was once again acknowledgement of worth, worthy of the task of her queendom.
13:30
Beauty ritual is an ancient invocation of the divine Beauty, and beauty ritual is actually one of the portals to a body Renaissance as well, and so if you think of something that you might hold sacred, that could be another person, like a child, or it could be one of your favorite photos. You know an important talisman that you have in your home. I would imagine that you clean that child, you clean that talisman and maybe you put it in an important place and you treat it with tenderness and similarly with your body when you apply your perfume. You know I have an entire episode that's dedicated to the art of fragrance that I'll pop in the show notes. But anointing is an ancient practice of blessing Across so many religions.
14:35
Oil placed on the body plays a very holy role, water as well, and so a very simple anointing ritual. If you have a fragrance that you apply with your hands, and even if you don't, you could place it on a cotton bud if it's a spray, so that you don't overdouse. But placing your fragrance behind your earlobe behind the earlobe is such a tender, special spot, and so perhaps, as you caress behind those earlobes, you take a moment to say oh, you are so tender and beautiful. I'm touching my own behind the earlobe right now, remembering and realizing that this is also a huge point of passage for our lymphatic system. It's a place where the exchange of fluid and nutrients and circulation happens between the face and the rest of the body, so it's like this sacred portal to flow. I adorn you with this holy oil. You can place your fragrance between your breasts like you could gild the gates of the garden of your heart. One of my favorite things to do is take essential oil and place it at the base of my spine, just like I might offer a prayer of admiration to the roots of a tree and feel it move up the tree and extend through the branches, just offering a blessing to nature. So there are so many ways that you can use anointing as simply a declaration of your own holiness.
16:32
And the final gem one of the things that we're going to talk about at Renaissance of the body is widening our aperture of beauty. The modern perspective of beauty, particularly as it pertains to women, is so incredibly limited. It's like if you went to the top of the Empire State Building and you looked through a pinhole at the expanse of the entire city and both rivers, and it's something that I feel so passionate about is helping people widen their ability to appreciate and admire the beauty of the feminine, and one of the things that we'll talk about is the distinction between true beauty, which is limitless, and learned beauty, which is conditioned. And one of the ways to practice this distinction is to have in your home an appreciation mirror. So there's a mirror in my home that is set up at an odd angle and the lighting is bad, but I'm not allowed to make any decisions about my body or my appearance from that mirror, from the data received from that mirror. And an appreciation mirror is a mirror in your home that is a mirror you only go to when you are ready and able to see through the eyes of appreciation.
18:19
And so I have a mirror like this set up in my home. There's a salt lamp next to it that emits this golden glow. It's nice and big, it has a gorgeous frame, and the first thing I'll do when I stop at it is get really close to the mirror and look deep into my own eyes. The more deeply I look at my own eye contact, the more I sense and see the presence of my soul and the less likely I am to fall into that thought pattern of habitual objectification that is so common in our culture. That separates us from our bodies.
19:04
And looking through the eyes of appreciation is something I have really trained myself how to do, and I'm going to keep humping the leg of renaissance of the body and come to your senses, coterie, which is essentially like going away to a three-month summer camp on that very topic. So with that we are going to close our pouch of gems for today, and if this episode opened up some new prisms of awareness and possibility for you, please know that this is the tip of the emerald of what you can and what you will experience when you join us for a body renaissance, October 24th, 5 30 pm Eastern. It will be recorded this is also the official ribbon cutting for the 2024 coterie cohort, also known as the Coho, and I would be so delighted to have you as we nurture a relationship of reverence and rapture between you and your body. schoolofsensualliving.com/body, or just click the link in the show notes below this episode. And thank you so much for listening. I will see you next week.
Earlier this week I announced my exciting new Met Ball of an event called Renaissance of The Body, where I'll be sharing with you the my six phase approach to a feminine, embodied Renaissance.
We're kicking it off with another chapter in this week’s episode on the most essential practice of Coming To Our Senses: Body Worship.
What does that phrase inspire in you?
Does it make you wish you could ease down the temple aisle clad in a velvet cape, with Pilgrims come to worship at the wonder of their Priestess?
Does it scare you a bit, the idea that divinity might not be outside you or up in the heavens, but instead, emanating and radiating from every cell of your beautiful body?
Body Worship is THE core practice at the heart of everything I do.
There’s a specific, transformative ritual I teach to clients that has life changing effects.
Every single day we speed through routines that can be transformed into portals of divine rapture, and today’s episode will teach you how to do just that.
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