Come To Your Senses with Mary Lofgren

3 Ways to Make Everyday Valentine's Day 💋

• Mary Lofgren • Season 1 • Episode 150

Share episode

Today's episode takes you on a sumptuous tour of the courage it takes to love, the richness of self-care, and the electrifying joy of life's sensual pleasures. From nurturing romance in cherished friendships to the tender moments of affection with our pets, we celebrate the bravery in each loving gesture.

You'll discover: 

  • The sensual legacy of chocolate and ability to awaken our life force
  •  How to breathe new life into your daily routine
  • How to cherish the fleeting moments of beauty that make life so radiant  

LINKS FROM TODAY'S SHOW: 

Free Audio Collection: The Enchanted Path of Beauty • Discover beauty as a devotional path, a healing practice, and source of the sacred.

Speaker 1:

Hello, beautiful beings, and welcome to Come to your Senses. At the time that this episode is published, it is Valentine's Day 2024. Happy Valentine's to all who celebrate, and if you are a Valentine's Day anarchist because you're going through a heartbreak or a breakup or a loss of some kind, I have something in today's episode for you as well. So stay tuned. This week's episode is joined by Bo, my foster dog, who you might be able to hear smelling and licking the microphone at this moment. Thank you so much, and Bo has been with me for about two weeks. He is named Bo, as in boyfriend, and Bo has had a whole litany of health challenges, including an ER visit this past weekend, so he's been a little overly attached. So he'll be joining us this week as our Valentine's emotional support dog. So today is Valentine's Day and I was doing some thinking before the episode about the connection between the word Valentine and Valor, valor meaning courage, and the courage that it takes to love another, whether that's a romantic partner, a dear friend, a beloved pet, and also the courage that it takes to take loving actions towards oneself. And, as those of you who are regular listeners know, here at Come to your Senses, we oh, my heavens, someone wants my peanut butter rice cake, which is part of today's episode. Actually, we practice self-love with not just our thoughts and our attitude towards ourselves, but with gestures of romance and beauty and the infusion of Eros, which today, valentine's Day, is really a holiday of, and this episode is modeled around one of my heroines, which is the character Viandrushé in Chocolat. If you have not seen this movie, do you even know who I am? That's what I would say to someone I've known for ages who maybe has not seen that movie. I said that to my friend Allie recently when she confessed that she had never seen the series Twilight, which I own all five installments of. But anyway, chocolat is a movie about a woman who moves to a small provincial town in France and goes from town to town dispensing her medicinal chocolate recipes and essentially bringing this energy of the erotic which, as we define it here using Audre Lorde's magnificent definition, is simply our fully feeling self, that our erotic energy is simply our life force embodied. So I told a story on my Instagram about how this weekend I experienced arrows in taking a gorgeous, intuitive, erotic movement dance class at my beloved studio S Factor. Shout out to Sisters in Motion in San Francisco they have classes on Zoom, highly recommend. And I also experienced arrows when I was holding the oxygen nozzle up to Beau's little nostrils when his little pneumonia-ridden lungs couldn't breathe. And arrows is most often confused, or conflated, rather, with lustful sexual love, and that is certainly a part of it, what I would describe as a climactic experience of arrows. But ultimately arrows are those moments where it's like oh, here I am, I'm alive, there's life force pulsing through my body right now. And all of this is temporary and let's make the most of it while we can. So I experienced arrows when I was at my friend Faith's house recently having a dinner party with her daughter and we broke out into a dance party to the song Timber and got out these fluffy ribbons and were waving them around. And it was a moment in a day of autopilot where we got to feel our senses and create and express and go wild. And this movie Chocolat to go back to my original point, beyond the lead character, is really the bringer of this aliveness and its healing properties and the way in which our spark of radiance that is often buried under an encasement of autopilot comes alive through sensory and sensual experiences. And so, my loves. Let us now dive into our gems on the valor of self-love through romance, through beauty and through being your own Valentine. And so our first gem has to do with the theme of the entire film chocolate, which is, of course, chocolate. So chocolate is something with such a rich legacy around sensuality and seduction and this origin, form of erratic energy which is simply life force. So cacao I once took a tour of a chocolate farm when I was in Kauai, hawaii, and it was this orchard of cacao trees. It was magnificent, and they told us the story about theobromide, which is translated as food of the gods and has these magnificent capabilities to improve blood flow to the brain and to the heart and improve the entire cardiovascular system. These are just some of the more biological benefits, but the spiritual benefits and the more mystical benefits, as we know, the Mayan cacao ceremony of deeply heart opening and sacred ceremony is something that some might turn to when they want to drop below the noise of the mind and into the deeper, richer waters of the heart. And I have been enjoying increasing my cacao and chocolate intake in such delicious and subtle ways. So one of my favorite things to do in the morning is I shmere a little almond butter on a rice cake and then I'll take some dark chocolate chips and sprinkle them on top. Sometimes I'll even melt them a little bit in the microwave, because what I then put on top of that is some cool fresh raspberries. And chocolate really ideally tastes its best when it's melted at your body temperature. That softness brings out the cocoa butter and the fullness of the flavor, which is why sometimes, if you keep chocolate in the refrigerator or I don't know you maybe find a Hershey's miniature in your car in the middle of winter and decide to have a snack, you might notice that it tastes a little dry because it needs that meltability to really deliver the fullness of its texture and flavor. And so I'll put these softened chocolate chips and then drop plump raspberries on top, and it is so incredibly delicious and decadent and beautiful and helps me feel so loved. You know, chocolate is this gesture of love for a reason, and there's something a little naughty about it too. You know, I remember when we would go to the International House of Pancakes when I was a kid and I would get the smiley face pancake where they put whipped cream and chocolate chips on it and it just felt like. I mean, it felt like a tick or tape parade on a Tuesday afternoon. It was just loaded with excitement and celebration. And my friend Marianne makes a really delicious chocolate sauce out of just simply cocoa, maple syrup and oat milk and she'll mix that up in a pan and she'll drizzle it over a plate of fresh strawberries or banana. And just chocolate in all of its forms, I think, brings such luxury and decadence to our everyday, particularly when it is regarded as a food rather than just a treat. And that, I think, also speaks to normalizing the inclusion of the erotic in our everyday, where it's not just something that happens behind closed doors or in relationship with another, but a deep inhale of crisp mountain air is loaded with Eros and that aliveness when we can be present to it. And similarly, the decadence and luxury of chocolate doesn't just belong after a meal or as something you sneak when no one's looking. I'm always so what's the word? It's not mystified fascinated by the way in which women especially have this relationship with chocolate and the way in which that mimics women's relationship with their own erotic aliveness. And when I used to work in hair salons and there would be a chocolate dish, people would take from the chocolate dish and there would just be this announcement around the salon about how they shouldn't, or how mean the salon owners were for having this nearby, and blah, blah, blah. And meanwhile all we're doing is we're drinking from the cup of life force that the Obromide and nature so generously provides. So I highly recommend bringing your chocolate out of the shadows of the pantry and into the light and even having it be the very first thing to touch your lips in the morning. Our second gem inspired by Vian Rocher is outfits and wardrobe. So there is this scene in the movie Chocolat where Anouk, vian's daughter, runs home from school crying because she's being bullied because Vian is this bringer of sweetness and chocolate and sensuality to the town and of course the town is scandalized and labels her as satanic. And one of the things about Vian is that she's always wearing red shoes and Anouk is crying because the kids are teasing her and she says to Vian why can't you wear black shoes like the other mothers? And I was married at the time and I remember watching that scene and saying to my husband this is my life goal, this is my goal is for our children to someday make that complaint to me. And we didn't have children. But you know what I mean. And red shoes have the power. It's just like a rice cake Once you add a little chocolate to it it completely changes the energy, and it's the same with red shoes. So tonight I am actually going to a Valentine's Day event, a comedy show, and my whole outfit is centered around my red suede block. Heel pumps and red shoes are just one way to bring your feminine flair and fanciness into your wardrobe, so another might be a long fringe shawl that's another thing that Vian wears in the film is this gorgeous shawl that she wraps around herself on cold days and that has these gorgeous layers of feminine fringe moving and swaying as she walks. She wears a lot of pencil skirts with a cinch belt, and so she's accentuating the curvaceousness of her body in a very subtle way. What I love about Vian's style in this film is that it teams with a covert sensuality, and she communicates her sensuality through texture, through shape, through the use of color. But I wouldn't describe her style as necessarily sexy. It's just very sensory and sensual and luscious. So red heels, long fringe, shapely garments and subtle sensuality are just a few ways that you can elevate your style to be your own Valentine every single day. And the final gem, once again relating to Valentine's and the word Valor, is any act of courage, I believe is an act of self-love, and in this film, the character of Vian has tremendous courage to liberate the townspeople in a way that seduces them into their own liberation rather than forcing them. And what I also love is that there's this scene, you know, where Vian is, this pillar of freedom and expression and cheering everyone else on. And then there's this scene where she and Johnny Depp's character, rue, are, you know, flirting and have this delicious seduction going on. And then there's a moment where she has to be vulnerable and you can see that it's the hardest thing for her to show her heart. She loves bringing out the heart and soul and richness of everyone else, but showing her own heart takes a kind of courage that we don't typically see in other areas of the film. And if you are someone who has been both broken open and broken down by the act of loving, I wish to share a quote with you from the great Maya Antelou have enough courage to trust love one more time, and always one more time. And if heartbreak is something that you are in a season of either actively and acutely, or you have some deep residue of past heartbreaks that seep into your present moment which of course you do, because you're human and that's just how the human heart works and you'd like some support in pouring honey into the cracks to hydrate the garden of your heart. One of the things that I've created is something called the Healing Heartbreak Support Kit, and it's really designed for anyone who's going through a breakup or a loss or something that tests the fortitude of their ability to love and be loved, and it is a beautiful audio of non-toxic positivity affirmations. I wrote this album, these affirmations, over a series of years and weathering many heartbreaks, and just what I needed to hear in those moments. There is that affirmation track. There's also a Healing Heartbreak Support Journal where I share some of the most precious practices and resources that have gotten me through deep heartbreak, and there's also a Honey Heart Meditation to bring some healing and some softness and vitality to the perhaps broken, bruised corners of your beautiful human heart, and so you can check that out at SchoolofSensualLivingcom slash heart. I will also put a link to it in the show notes. It's only $25 and it's a wonderful thing to have in your back pocket for any time your heart could use support in the very human process of expanding and contracting and healing and repairing and revealing herself to you inside and outside of a relationship. So SchoolofSensualLivingcom slash heart. And as we bring today's episode to a close, I'll close with one more quote from the legendary Rumi, who says Love is the whole thing. We are only the pieces. And so, with so much love from my heart to yours and to all the people and creatures and beings and projects that you love and romance on a daily basis, I thank you so much for walking this path of coming home to ourselves through our bodies, through beauty, through the senses and through love by my side each week. And if you enjoyed this episode, it would be my absolute delight to receive a Valentine from you in the form of a review written on iTunes or if you press the five star button wherever you get your podcast. Thank you so much for listening and I will see you in our next episode.