Reclaiming our Right to Pleasure
Connecting with our bodies' rich, intrinsic wisdom is a radical and revolutionary act in a world that hijacks our attention, marginalises our bodies, and values productivity over pleasure.
I did a 3 HOUR sensual embodied dance immersion this past weekend, and my god did my body 'need' it. I rolled around on the floor, I roared, I twirled my hips, shook my head and legs, and stuck out my tongue. I felt alive and tuned in, as I felt every inch of my body and experienced the pulsating creative energy within me. {Shakti}. It reminded me to not practice dance when I 'need' it, but to make it a regular part of my life again. To immerse and devote myself to PLEASURE my wise body was asking for, even if my mind was making a checklist of all the things I *should* be doing instead.
There's been a few personal challenges on my end lately - family deaths, never-ending travel restrictions, frustrations, grief, sadness, rage. The messiness of life, and the messiness of human emotion.
As I have learned through feminine embodied practice - I can practice compassion, kindness and hold my pain, AND still lean into pleasure. This doesn't negate the emotional pain or is a way of bypassing it. No. It is holding the capacity for whatever arises and contact the pleasure that I am already am, that already exists inside our bodies (because we all have a body).
Connecting with the fullness and aliveness of my sensual feminine body, in a way that we have been denied and that is essential for our wellbeing as women and femmes, is liberatory. Despite the generational stories of a 'wild, bad, loose, slutty woman' that is so deeply ancient, especially in my culture, spanning generations and generations of patriarchal-colonial dysfunction, I believe is unravelled and re-written every time we connect to experiencing pleasure in our bodies.
Our pleasurable bodies are not a dysfunction of design. We are not here to be limited to living in a perpetual state of survival like our grandmother's did, in hyper-vigilance, or grief or anger. Our grandmother's experienced pleasure too, through dance, folk songs, ritual, prayer, food, community, textiles, herbs, dreaming and meditating. Pleasure through devotion to our ancestral practices, pleasure through devotion to God, pleasure through using sacred hands that ground aromatic spices or by oiling their hair.
We deserve a pleasureful, joyful, tantalising, toe-tingling human experience. After all, why do we have a body with 5 senses? The tantric philosophy that underpins feminine embodiment, is to sense, feel, welcome, express and ultimately embrace the full spectrum of our human emotional experience and dance with life. Our ancestors understood this, with every sense being filled and embodied through our rituals. Absorbing the feminine beauty this world has to offer us through our sensuous body. The whole world is a sensual experience this way, with lasting and fleeting moments flowing in and away like water.
To savour the grief and release it, to savour the pleasure and release it. There is flow in our emotional state too, it is impermanent.
This is our ancestral, spiritual wisdom. The tremendously vast and detailed technologies of our indigenous heritage(s), that allow the wisdom of the body to unfold spontaneously. Our ancestral spiritual paths offer a roadmap to freedom through this divine portal - our bodies - and freedom can only be felt.
Do you desire to experience more pleasure, joy, freedom, flow, and ease in your body? Let’s chat.
I am rooting for the unfolding of our embodied feminine wisdom and collective body liberation in this world.
May we reclaim our bodies' rich, intrinsic wisdom.
May we reclaim our pleasure + freedom through our ancestral lineages.
May we value our divine right to feeling pleasure in our bodies and experience more of this wondrous, pleasure-filled world!
With much love always,
Sharandeep x