Three Ways to Savor The Splendor of Autumn
Are you starting to feel the cool breeze of Autumn kiss the back of your neck and tip of your nose?
Have you noticed the leaves starting to transition towards vibrant yellow, red and orange for nature's version of Fashion Week?
Are your coziest sweaters, fuzziest slippers, and spiciest candles started to beckon your name?
In today’s episode, we are hopping on the Pumpkin Pleasure Express and exploring all the ways we can indulge our senses through the pleasures of Autumn.
Some of today’s gems include:
How to align with your sensuality, spirituality and style with Autumn’s splendor
How to fully embrace the allure of Fall through food
The #1 Autumn style statement piece that can instantly turn even yoga gear into an Yves Saint Laurent ensemble
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Hello, beautiful being, and welcome to Come to your Senses. We have a cornucopia prepared for you today, as the wheel of the year here in the Northern hemisphere turns towards the magnetic, magnificent inward pull of autumn. So this episode originally aired a few years ago and is a horn of plenty of gems, gems pertaining to how to use your senses, your expression through style and nature's explosive beauty as a way to connect with a feminine, embodied sense of spirituality. And so I'm so excited to share it with you again today, and I also want to announce that, as autumn's magnetic pull draws us inward, it's really natural this time of year to feel the pressure starting to kick up, pressure to end the year on a high note to finish strong, to make the most of the next three months. And that pressure can really deflate the soul like a rubber whoopee cushion, in my opinion, and really steal from us all the joy and holiness that awaits us as the year winds down. And holiness that awaits us as the year winds down, and I shared this with my newsletter subscribers this week, and I wanted to share it with you too, that now, through October 28th, I am doing a one-time only sale on my coaching packages and created a special mini package called the Luminous Unwind. And so, with all that this year has held and all that is on the horizon over the next three months, I felt a deep call to make embodiment coaching support more accessible during this time, and so if you click the link below this episode, you can also go to schoolofsensuallivingcom slash luminous dash unwind. But it's more than a mouthful, and so you may just want to take a shortcut and click the link, but you will find a link to a special year end embodiment experience where you can book a single session with me to gently reawaken your embodied aliveness, or an ongoing three session package for a gentle unfolding of support and unwinding over time. These packages are being offered at a reduced rate and there are installment plans available, and a percentage of each purchase is being donated to Hurricane Helene Relief and Restoration in my beloved hometown of Western North Carolina. And so, again, click the link below this episode and, without further ado, let us now sink into the splendor of the pleasures and treasures of autumn.
04:20
Welcome to today's episode, which is loaded with nutmeg and clove and candy corn. As the first cool whispers of autumn begin to caress the backs of our necks, we are celebrating alignment with the seasons through rituals to savor the season of autumn. My good friend Elise Marie, also known as the beauty witch, likes to say oh, it's everyone's favorite time of year, time for the national orgasm. That is pumpkin spice and it's cozy sweater time, it's stew time. And while I love and appreciate the more commercial aspects of autumn as they're celebrated in our culture, what I really love about this season is the way that it heightens our senses. Here in the mid-southeast, the leaves become this kaleidoscopic color. You know, I'm up in the mountains and there's sprawling forests and just it's an orgasm. It's nature's orgasm. It's the harvest. And so during that season of the harvest there's abundance, there's an inner shift and change. The winds begin to change on the inner, where our energy goes from the outwardness of summer and spring and begins to turn more inward in these seasons of autumn and winter.
06:12
And in today's episode we're going to talk about three areas where you can delve into an experience of deeper savoring of the season through sensuality, spirituality and style. These three S's are really what's at the heart of my particular flavor of embodiment and, just like everything here at Come to your Senses, it's not just about things we can do on the outer, which certainly help drop us into a more sensory experience throughout our lives, to help open our senses and our spirit to not just more deeply savor this time but have an experience of the timeless through this season. So let's dive in to our gems on savoring the season of autumn. You know, coming to our senses is a way of harmonizing with the body, particularly in a world that really encourages that we fall out of harmony with the body in order to do more of what the brain expects of us or has been conditioned to expect. And so we're going to take a look at three things that you are already doing and how to bring more of that magic and sensuality and celebration into your everyday.
08:02
So the first is around your sense of taste. I hope that in naming some of these delights it will inspire your taste buds and help calibrate your compass towards consuming some of the treats of the season. But root vegetables, slow roasted with fresh thyme, slowly made soups and stews that has meat that just falls off the bone, gorgeous and, dare I say, even stylish acorn squash I always think acorn squash has such a quiet elegance about it. But the rich, gold, fleshy delight of acorn squash, the golden warmth of butternut squash, slow roasted and pureed with butter and fresh sage, or perhaps placed in a soup with yummy turmeric and cinnamon, a cup of fresh cacao blended with maple syrup and a few shakes of ginger, powdered ginger oh my God, can you imagine like all these yummy, warming, delicious treats that are decidedly not complex?
09:33
You know, in Tamar Adler's book, an Everlasting Meal which is all about romancing the simplicity of food and just the majesty of something as simple as an egg on toast, and how to prepare delicious, satisfying, nourishing meals in this kind of one, two, three way, without the aggression of a quick cook culture. You know she talks about seeing something on the cover of a magazine that was like five minute omelets. And she was like well, that's ironic, because all omelets take five minutes to make. You know, in American culture in particular, no-transcript a strong. I would call it a row of sweet teeth, like not just a sweet tooth but like a whole row.
11:00
And so something I'll do is at the farmer's market on a weekend I'll pick up beets, golden and red parsnips, potatoes, all these yummy carrots, delicious root vegetables, all these yummy carrots, delicious root vegetables. And I will do a giant pan of roasted vegetables. And with the spices. So I love fresh thyme, delicious flaky sea salt, fresh ground pepper. And you can even take fresh herbs and sprinkle them over the sheet of roasted vegetables and blow some intentions or a magic spell or gratitude, just like you might sprinkle an ingredient into your witch's cauldron. A good friend and client of mine does this every morning with her coffee, where she speaks her intentions into her coffee mug and stirs her intention into her coffee like it's a magical brew. And with those roasted vegetables, you know, I'll eat them on buttered toast, I'll put them atop a salad, I will have them alongside a plate of eggs. There are just so many different things that you can do with just one sheet of pan-roasted vegetables. So bon appetit, enjoy.
12:35
There are so many other things that I could say about all of the different senses and the way that they are enriched through the delights of autumn, but next what we're going to go into is spirituality. So we started with the sensuality of food. We're now going to talk about a way to savor the season through spirituality. So, as I mentioned at the start of the episode you know autumn being this time of harvest there's a lot of focus during this time on gratitude and personally I don't totally resonate with the word gratitude. I talk about this a lot on the podcast. I probably like, actually I'm remembering, oh my God, oh, I just had a flashback dream. Oh my gosh, I'm just going to leave this in if there are any dream analysts out there. I had a dream that I was eating a donut and it said she has a problem with gratitude on the donut. So any Jungian analysts want to pop me on their sofa? I am ready and willing.
13:49
But anyway, gratitude I think, because of my Catholic conditioning, gratitude just doesn't ring true for me in my relationship to the divine. But appreciation deeply resonates with me. It's kind of like complimenting someone's work and something that I do when I walk my foster dogs is I usually get foster dogs that are way bigger than what I would normally adopt, so I don't have a total foster fail and adopt them all. And so, because they're so big, they need a lot of exercise and I'll take them on morning walks and there's this little trail that I often go on, and sometimes in the morning I'll make it an appreciation walk. And so, with this common mindset of never enough, autumn and this season of harvest is an opportunity to sink beneath the frenzy of not enoughness which, if your spiritual journey has been anything like mine, getting more doesn't always necessarily satisfy. That itch kind of often makes it more scratchy and urgent. But turning our awareness and really kind of rewiring the body and the nervous system's tendency to scan for danger and lack, and taking a 20 minute walk. So when I'm on this walk I speak my appreciations out loud for just everything that I appreciate in my life. Sometimes I'll do this in the shower too. I call it a gratitude shower, and there's something about having that container to perform the practice. I'm not a big list maker of gratitude and appreciation, but there's something about having my body in motion, my senses engaged and this sweet meditative container of being out with the pup that really helps lay the stones of gratitude and appreciation deeper into my being. And so that's your second gem. We looked at sense, we looked at spirit and now my favorite, the cherry on the sundae, which is style.
16:27
I live my life for the joy of an autumn coat. I swear to God, I look forward to it every year. I don't get a new fall coat every year, but I think about it all year. An autumn coat is just such an opportunity to bridge the gap between the nudity of summer and the absolute hermetic experience of the parka in winter. Fall coats just team with style, and spring coats too. But I just have such a fancy for fall coats. And what I also love about fall coats is that I can be wearing yoga leggings and a tank top and I throw a fall coat on with a little felt cloche and some leather gloves. Ah, instant style, maven. So I highly recommend. I love shopping on Etsy for all things, but especially for things like vintage coats. I like, in the fall, wearing like a Stetson style wool hat. I like wearing brightly colored or uniquely colored leather or pleather gloves, a charcoal gray fall coat with a royal purple beret and some turquoise like New Mexico turquoise leather gloves or faux leather gloves Could even pop a orange ring on top of that turquoise glove for a real pop of color. Oh my goddess, so heavenly, so highly recommend.
18:22
I have an episode that I'm going to put in the show notes of this episode called Simple Autumn Indulgences, and it's an episode similar to this one, but it's really about how to get the most out of this season, and there's a whole section on style in that episode that, personally, I so enjoyed creating for you and I think you'll enjoy as well, and so my loves. This brings our gems to a close, and if you enjoyed this episode, I am always so grateful to receive your appreciation through hitting like, subscribe, review, whatever love beam you want to send in the direction of the podcast. It's one of my desires to have a hundred reviews for the podcasts on Apple and Spotify by the end of the year, so I would be so grateful for your help in making that wish come true, and I will see you in next week's episode. Ciao, if you enjoy what you hear on this podcast, you'll be besotted with what you discover in my brand new audio collection In Celebration of Beauty.
19:41
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19:41 / 20:25
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