Play: the Ultimate Seduction

Opening to Intimacy – 

That’s what Nicolai and I were calling these monthly events.
Twelve of us had spent all Sunday afternoon playing.

Laughing.

Dancing.

The day had been about letting in a bit of real connection and fun with others…
and dropping the patterns we habitually hide out in,
the ones we think keep us comfortable and safe,
but really just block everyday joy.

Walking like orangutans, bumping into one another for the sheer fun of it.
Playing with personal space and the edges of where we’re most comfortable.

We had just a few minutes left.
Time for one final exercise.
Actually as I created it, it became more like… a seduction.
A seduction with one.

You are your own closest intimate, aren’t you?
What if you treated yourself like you wish a lover would?
Really attentive.
Totally there.
No distractions.
Taking in every touch as the gift it can be?

You see, in any particular moment, we rarely feel all that’s there.
We’re in a rush or preoccupied.
But when it comes to pleasure,
ANY kind of pleasure, I assure you…
it’s the subtlety and surprise that take us into those realms we most long for.

So… are you in?
Yes? Great!

Then first…
go find some small delicious thing from your fridge or cupboard.
Or even better, close your eyes first and ask someone else to chose for you.
It can be anything, really. You’ll see. Click here to listen…
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You can do this practice anytime, with virtually anything!
Try a pomegranate seed.
Or a slice of onion.

Perhaps gift someone you adore the experience.
I promise, it’s very effective foreplay.
The question is –
just how willing are you to maximize your birthright of pleasure?
​Or would you rather just fill your belly?

Work vs Play

There’s nothing like talking to a farmer to get a first-hand picture of work lived in harmony with life’s pleasures.
Since earlier this Spring, Dom Polumbo of Moon on the Pond Farm, has been instructing me on the finer points of raising chickens… like how to get them to come in at night!

Dom proudly toured me around his farm a few days ago.
Turkeys and chickens, eggplant and heirloom tomatoes, barns and tools, all a part of one interconnected web.
His love of this life was obvious as he effervessed on how the most nutritious weeds in his fields just happened to be the tastiest to his animals.

Of course that was our entrè into the subject of pleasure. A farmer doesn’t have time off.
And since there’s very little cash to show for the work, life on the farm must bring its pleasures in small doses throughout the day.
Dom finds moments of happiness walking out to a distant field to bring in his pigs or snapping yellowing leaves from the base of a pepper plant.

It’s the practice of seeing each day for the moment-to-moment delights available to us,
living in these bodies on this Earth, that’s inspired my  summer as well.

A gaggle of teen-age chickens cluck me awake each morning.
The seasonal cycles of iris, poppy, lily and zinnia grace my view from the breezy screened porch/office where I’ve had the joy to write and counsel my private clients.

It’s been a great summer.
I’ve been at my desk working each morning, creating the book, Your Erotic Life, that just won’t stop writing itself.
My days have never been this focused on my creative joy, so immersed in work and wonder, purpose and flow!
But now that fall is here, the real practice begins.

So here’s a tip I’ll be using to keep the pleasure a part of every day.
Look for little surprises at odd time during the work day.

Wake up your sense pleasure by noticing contrast: bright against dark, soft or rough, crunchy and smooth.
​Allow yourself to be seduced by the pleasure that’s here all along, living in the body!

Coming Back

The whistle from this morning’s tea kettle took me for an unexpected dive into the Divine. Not its usual message of hot water ready for my teacup. No, I was taken off guard by the sound itself. I almost laughed at the joy of it, the sudden arching pitch, the resonance, the beauty.

I wouldn’t normally consider the whistle of a tea kettle beautiful. Not in the same way I might be struck by the perfection of Kiri Te Kanawa’s soaring high notes in a soprano aria. But my experience was the same. It wasn’t some distant intellectual analysis of the quality of the pitch or its timbre. It was the sound itself — the unexpected way it enlivened something inside me.

Is that why we‘re so entranced by beauty? Why it moves us? Is it because it actually gets inside us? That, more than just seeing it with our mind, we feel it? Does what we experience as beautiful actually become a part of us? And even more radical a thought, do we become a part of it?

Is that what stops us in mid-sentence when we are awed by the stark beauty of a winter’s bare branch trembling in the wind? Or the sun’s sudden appearance, infusing us with its warmth and light, on a gray day? There’s something about letting the sun breath into us, and giving ourselves back to it. Allowing it to warm more than skin or muscle or bone. Permitting the sun to infuse the entireity of us with sun-ness. Becoming sun; becoming Divine.

But we rarely let ourselves be touched by such intimacy. There’s really so little time. We’re just too preoccupied to notice. Too encased in buildings and cars and our hectic lives to prioritize that kind of joy, that connection to what is most sacred, most Divine in life.
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But when we do . . . when we allow ourselves to feel the beauty, the deep subtleties, even for a moment — to really let them in — we’re renewed. Our very being is reconfigured. Awakened. And we come back to ourselves.