Come To Your Senses with Mary Lofgren

Embracing The New Year With Purpose & Pleasure

• Mary Lofgren • Season 1 • Episode 168

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In today's episode, I’m spilling the Lady Grey on how to turn down the volume on bettering yourself in the new year (because you’re already pretty great), and align your intentions with what helps you most radiantly be yourself. 


P.S.  If you’re ready to take this practice of seducing your dreams to a deeper level, join my Word of the Year Mastermind—a small group study to anchor your intentions, devote to your desires, and grow your magnetism over 12 months. Enrollment closes in just 8 days.  Click here to join us! 


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

Mary:

Hello, beautiful, and welcome to the Come to your Senses podcast. I'm your host, award-winning certified feminine embodiment coach, licensed esthetician and enthusiastic foster dog mama to animals across the land, mary Lofgren. Here we explore how to bring more richness, radiance, peace and pleasure to our lives, homes and hearts through the joy of beauty, the wisdom of the body, the warmth of connection and the splendor of the senses. I'm so glad you're here. Pull up a poof and let's dive in. So glad you're here. Pull up a poof and let's dive in.

Mary:

Hello, beautiful beings, and welcome to today's episode of Come to your Senses, which is the final installment, in our word, of the year deep dive that we have been exploring over the last several weeks as I prepare to deliver the beginning of a year-long journey in the sanctuary called the word of the year mastermind, and this is the final week to enroll. Enrollment closes on January 8th, so I'm really excited. To those of you who have already signed up, welcome. I know that you're out there doing the pre-workshop journaling exercises and choosing your word, and I cannot wait to hear about them at our first retreat. And if you're interested in being a part of this year long journey into sacred relationship with the essence that calls to you. We have made it really easy to join with a 12 month extended payment plan so you can get started today for only $95 at schoolofsensuallivingcom slash sanctuary, and with that we will now venture into our gems for today, which is centered around the inevitable and natural tendency to resist change and how some really simple and soft adjustments can help you melt resistance and reveal radiance. So whenever I choose my word of the year, I always choose one that challenges and scares me and scares me.

Mary:

However, after years and years of embodiment work, I have become quite literate with my body's messages of the kind of fear that's going to grow me in a positive way, versus the kind of fear that comes from shame or punishment or resolve. You know, I like to say that embodiment work is not so much about bettering yourself, but it's about learning to be with yourself and be yourself in relationship with other people, in relationship to your desires, et cetera, et cetera, in relationship to your desires, et cetera, et cetera. And even though I feel really confident in that flavor of fear that I know is going to grow me in a positive life affirming kind of way, I am a soul inside of a nervous system and to our nervous systems. Any kind of change, even if it's good change, is unsettling and takes time to adjust to. You know, the nervous system is designed, and when I say nervous system, what I'm really talking about is the messages that we hear in our brain that are a response to stimulus and information received by the body.

Mary:

So, to give you an example, perhaps your word of the year is grounded and in the morning, whereas you normally go straight to your phone and your coffee, you have the idea. Or maybe the night before you planned oh, I'm going to light a candle and drink some tea and write in my journal, and you might notice that, even though that is a positive, healthy, prosperous practice that is probably going to make yourselves very happy in the long run, there is the natural tendency to stay with what you know and for your brain to tell you you don't have time for that or that's not going to get you anywhere. Get on your email or, ugh, stare at a candle flame and feel your feelings. What are you crazy? These, uh, asking for a friend. These are, you know, not thoughts that I'm familiar with at all. Kidding, I face these thoughts all the time, but I have sometimes learned how to orient to them not as messengers of the truth but more as messengers of something is changing and that feels uncomfortable because change requires energy.

Mary:

One of my mentors used to say even positive changes of behavior are exhausting. New behavior is always tiring because new behavior requires energy and our nervous systems whole design is meant to protect and preserve our energy, our energy. And so that feels like soft, melting candle wax, as opposed to holding our spear over our heads and letting out a war cry, because heaven knows, if we're talking about conserving energy and we try to meet resistance with bigger force, we are just going to exhaust ourselves. And that's often why in the beginning of the year, you know, you'll see the stock of gold's gem, I imagine, inflate tremendously, whereas by June inflate tremendously, whereas by June it's deflated. And that's because often at the start of the year people will set goals around health and fitness that are rooted in resolve. But resolve takes a tremendous amount of energy and by softening into and softening the resistance itself we have a much greater chance of creating long-term sustainable change.

Mary:

And I've looked for the author or the originator of this concept. I have not been able to find a name, but it's talked about in psychology communities, and if anyone has a source that would be worth crediting, I would love to hear it. Please feel free to send us a message. Pleasure linking is a way of tapping into the brain's reward system, which encourages us to approach our practices and our habits not out of a sense of obligation but out of a sense of seeking pleasure, and so one of the ways that I do this with my clients either in the mastermind or in the sanctuary, or in my coaching or in my retreats in this podcast really anywhere is using the principles of seduction to soften the experience of change. I believe that growth and inner work and the courageous exploration of meeting one's subconscious eye to eye is a process that can and must be fun, fun and beautiful and joyous and pleasurable, which is why every time I release a workbook to clients or a worksheet, it is decorated to the nines. You know the brand of Come to your Senses always contains a tremendous amount of luscious imagery, because I want you to feel like you could just jump into the page, like it was a Mary Poppins pastel chalk drawing on the sidewalk by Bert.

Mary:

Another thing that we'll do around word of the year in the mastermind is some really pleasurable exercises to make it really easy and enjoyable to do the practices that support you being in relationship with your word of the year. So an example of this would be, like vision boarding If you're a vision border, if you're a vision boarder, making a playlist around your word and some other really special and beauty filled devotional practices that we will practice in the mastermind to link your sense of pleasure and seduce you in a really healthy, delicious, sacred way into relationship with the essence that calls to you to be embodied. This year the second gem has to do with that very word, relationship, and our last episode really centered around this topic of the difference between relationship and resolve and, especially as it relates to new year ideas and desires and intentions, the difference between being in relationship with and being in resolution energy. So if you haven't listened to that episode, it's a really great one and I highly recommend it.

Mary:

But one of the practices that has changed my life that I talk about a lot on this podcast is letters from love. This is also referred to as two-way prayer, where you might write a question or write a letter to unconditional love. I learned about, or at least I started doing this regularly at the invitation of Elizabeth Gilbert, who has a sub stack around this practice, but it's a widely known prayer practice to be in conversation with the divine, with the universe, with unconditional love. Be in conversation with the divine, with the universe, with unconditional love. And one of the practices that I love to do is writing to your word of the year, asking a question, even something as general as insert word of the year what would you have me know today? I just did this this afternoon where I was in a little bit of a collision with my scheduling and I just stopped and put my hand on my heart and asked my word of the year what would you have me do right now? How can I be right now to embody your essence? And I got a really clear answer. And so two-way prayer is a way of directly consciously communicating with your essence in relationship.

Mary:

So again, where resolve or resolution might require you to summon a ton of energy and conform yourself to some outside definition of what that word or essence looks like, being in relationship encourages you to communicate with and be in partnership with that essence, which really melts and grinds down the resistance, folks, because when you're in relationship with something, the resistance is actually welcome that's what I find is that when I put my hand on my heart this afternoon and I tuned in with my word, it's like my word is it expects resistance and it says nothing is wrong. Sweetheart, this is just a opening for you to connect with me. This is actually what it's all about. I don't expect you to be perfect from the outset. That's not what this is. This is about you and me partnering in these moments where you feel disconnected to me or like I am out of reach, and by your reaching I can come in to your life and guide you in how to do things differently, in a way that feels intuitive, rather than forcing or punishing. Thank you, word of the year.

Mary:

And that brings us to our last gem, which is a gem that is, I think, a product of being willing to meet our resistance with an open heart, and that is the gem of radiance with an open heart. And that is the gem of radiance. So I talked a little bit and used the word previously in this episode soften. One of the invitations that I have around, moving from a place of tense, tight resistance to a place of open, spacious radiance, is to soften into your word, like. I invite you to just feel that word in your body right in this very moment, softening into your word.

Mary:

You know, one of the things in our last episode that we talked about was this difference between dedication and devotion, and that dedication is a word that, just by definition, is rooted in commitment, whereas devotion is rooted in love. Whereas devotion is rooted in love, devotion is centered in the love and loyalty that you feel towards that which you are devoted to, and I truly believe that all sustainable change it has been not just you know, folk wisdom that I circulate, but my real lived experience that when I make changes in my life that are rooted in a sense of love and devotion and softening into these essence, that call from the deepest caverns of my intuition, from the deepest caverns of my intuition, and that have a lesson and are aching for me to devote myself to them. You know, this is something that I experienced with clients and in my own journey all the time, which is that it's never a case of me not having the answers case of me not having the answers. It is almost always a case of me going faster and louder than the answers can be heard or thinking that the answers are too simple and therefore just riding a John Deere lawnmower right over the answers and getting on to the next busy task. You know, this is the nature, I think, of the human experience in our culture today. And radiance, meeting your word, your goals, your desires with this energy of love and softness is a total change in the frequency and is a partnership with the messages, the whispers, the answers and the truths that emerge from those deepest parts of yourself if you are willing to meet them. So it's not easy meeting these parts of ourselves, which is really why I created the word of the year mastermind, was to have a year long container, to pursue this journey in a supported way, a guided journey in community, led by me but really fortified and activated by the experience of journeying together. And the final day to join is January 8th. So head to the link below this episode. As I shared at the start, we have a 12 month installment plan, because I wanted to make it as easy as possible to join.

Mary:

And one other thing that I want to say is that, in addition to the word of the year mastermind, the mastermind is folded in to the experience of the sanctuary community, and the sanctuary community is a place where soulful feminine beings gather to soften stress, awaken intuition and cultivate a life of beauty, enchantment and wonder together, through these tiny doses of delight that are delivered to you every single week. So if you are a fan of this podcast and of the vibration that you feel in your body as a result of listening to this podcast, come and string your charm bracelet with practices, rituals, tools, delights, inspirations. There's so much abundance in the sanctuary, and so I hope to see your face at our upcoming word of the year kickoff retreat and, as always, thank you so much for being a listener and a part of this community, and I will see you in our next episode. As you prepare to step into a new year, take a moment to pause.

Mary:

What is calling to you when we choose a Word of the Year? What is calling to you when we choose a word of the year? It is more than setting a resolution or even naming a desire. It's a vulnerable step into a living relationship with the essence that whispers from your soul. My new year gift to you, for annual members of the sanctuary, is the word of the year. Devotional mastermind, anchor your intention into your body, breathe life into its essence and be supported in community schoolofsensuallivingcom sanctuary. To learn more.