Renewal: Sensuality

The river is my space for solace.

Whenever I feel disconnected from my body, spirit, soul, and heart, I visit Oshun and I ask for guid- ance. I observe her ebb and flow. Depending on the season, she may be overflowing, seamlessly passing through boulders in her way. Other times she may be more slow moving. She may almost appear stagnant, but if you look close enough you notice the shimmers on the surface of her body, slowly making their way towards the horizon. When I am with her I am completely engaged with my senses.

My definition for sensuality is our own unique and elaborate relationship with getting in touch, and embodied with our senses, usually in the pursuit of physical pleasure. Many of us who may struggle with addictions & dependency issues have either an overactive sensory system, or one which may need a lot of stimulation to feel things. Of course, there is a spectrum & this doesn’t exist in a binary- but in a lot of instances our addictions serve as a way to either numb out these very high sensations we feel or to try to get our low sensory selves to feel more deeply.

It is important to become aware of where we may be in that spectrum so we can become more in touch with our relationship to our senses and the environment around us. It can be difficult to be in touch with our senses when we may have been avoiding a lot of unresolved trauma & pain. It can be difficult to get in touch with our senses, when the environment around us is exuding contradicting energies around what it means to be well & what is fulfilling pleasure. It can be painful to connect with our senses, period!

As QTBIPOC we are living in a world where we are under-resourced in many ways and our desires, let alone our needs, are constantly not being taken seriously on a daily and wide-scale basis. And yet, we need to connect to our senses to be able to connect back with our source, our power, our plea- sure, and our purpose. The more we cut ourselves off from processing the flow of our emotions, the more these will keep impacting our sensory & nervous systems. Emotions left stagnant impact our physical bodies on an energetic level. We each have unique sacred energy to embody and share with our communities, which we won’t be able to fully access if we aren’t processing these emotions and distracting/numbing our way from it.

Although the example at the beginning of this text mentions the river, sensuality for us is really about engaging our physical senses with a source of pleasure which is healthy, stimulating, or sedative, and offers us a holistic sense of physical & emotional fulfillment.

May I embrace my sensual nature and affirm my need for physical pleasure & relief from a world which is constantly invalidating these from me. May I surround myself with those sources which can affirm my divine right in receiving pleasure through my physical senses in ways which are empowering. May I discover the activities and environments which support me in embodying my senses in a true fulfilled way. May I release the shame of reaching for relief and remember I am worthy of pleasure and restoration.