Permission for Pleasure
A podcast to educate and equip women with the information and confidence they need to express, experience and enjoy their sexuality. Cindy Scharkey RN, BSN, brings her 35+ years of experience as a healthcare professional to open the doors to healthy conversations about sex. This is a community where you can listen and learn to give yourself permission for pleasure. Visit www.cindyscharkey.com for educational blogs and newsletter.
Permission for Pleasure
Learning to Listen to Your Body
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Dr. Hillary McBride joins me for a conversation about embodiment or as she defines it, “Our experience of being a body as it’s shaped by culture.” She provides tools to help us untangle the cultural scripts we have taken in, along with gentle guidance for how we can reframe and choose a healthier way to be in our body. You’ll hear how you can learn to listen to your body, embrace your sensuality and give yourself more permission for pleasure.
Dr. Hillary McBride is a registered psychologist, a researcher, and podcaster. She is the author of: Mothers, Daughters, and Body Image: Learning to Love Ourselves as We Are and The Wisdom of Your Body: Finding wholeness, healing and connection through embodied living. She was the senior editor of the textbook Embodiment and Eating Disorders: Theory, Research, Prevention, and Treatment. www.Hillarylmcbride.com
Learn more about these topics:
Mothers, Daughters and Body Image
Dating Your Body
The Body is Not an Apology
My Letter to Young Women
ORDER my Book: Permission for Pleasure: Tending Your Sexual Garden
JOIN my Newsletter: Good Education for Good Sex
FOLLOW on Instagram @cindyscharkey
VISIT my website and blog
It's a way of conceptualizing what it means to experience ourselves as a body and not just experience the self as a head or ideas walking around, floating, carried around. Embodiment being that we actually experience our body as the place where our self is.
SPEAKER_01Welcome to Permission for Pleasure. I'm Cindy Sharkey, your host. Thank you for listening and learning alongside of me. I have a beautiful episode for you today, so I'm really delighted that you're here. If you haven't found my newsletter yet, I want to encourage you to join me in that community. I call it good education for good sex. It comes out once a month. The link for that is in the show notes. If you've been around a little while in this listening community, you've probably heard that I've been on a journey with my own body, how I talk to her, how I treat her, how I feel about her, how I call her her now instead of it. And you may have heard a little bit about my story in episode 17. I talked to Aurora and we called it dating your body. That might be a good uh episode for you to listen to if you enjoy this conversation today. My guest today is Hilary McBride, and she has been uh probably the most influential teacher in this journey with my own body. Her books and interviews, her sacred feminine retreat, which I've attended, have just provided a nourishing mix of science-y smart and thoughtful, practical. She's just my kind of gal. And I was delighted that she could spend a few minutes with us and I could share her with you today. She's written two books, Mothers, Daughters, and Body Image, which I have a book review for on the website. You can find that the link in the show notes, and her newer book, that's The Wisdom of Your Body. These are really nourishing, gentle guides if you desire to re-examine the old scripts over your body and maybe learn to navigate new ones. I highly recommend both these books. It is just my pure delight to introduce Hilary McBride to you. Hilary, welcome to the show and thanks for joining us.
SPEAKER_00I'm so happy to be with you today. We have waited so long for this. So thank you for your persistence and patience. I'm so delighted.
SPEAKER_01Yes, I told my listeners a little bit before we jumped in how important you've been in my life. And so that's probably why I persisted. I wanted my community to hear from you. Your work is really important and meaningful and needed. Thank you. Perhaps you would just introduce yourself in your own words and your work in the world.
SPEAKER_00Mm-hmm. Well, I think there's a few different ways of doing that. And it really depends on what mood I'm in and what space you catch me in that will determine how I answer that question. But I think of myself as having a few different roles that I play socially, professionally, where I'm a psychologist and I research and I teach and I write. But the thing that feels like it unifies all of it is that I feel like a person who's interested in what it means to be human and what it means to navigate the complexity of the world that we're in, the challenges that we face, the sorrow that we feel, the big questions about what we're doing here and the pain that we experience and carry because of that. And if there's anything that we can do about that, to tolerate it more, to heal it, to prevent it, to negotiate with it in a way that brings us into more fullness and into more meaning. You know, the more that I practice the work that I do, the more that I see that I am a psychologist, I'm a therapist, I'm a writer because I'm interested in being a person and not the other way around. So it really comes from, at least as I experience it, from this place inside of me of curiosity and marvel. Like that it's a pretty wild thing that we're here and that we're alive and that we're even meta-aware of our aliveness and that we can talk about it in this way. And that blows my mind every time I think about it.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Wow. I love that. Oh, and you also are a new mama. Well, not brand new, but still a new mama, yeah.
SPEAKER_00That's right. And you've had a chance to meet my sweet baby Audrey. Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_01She is so darling.
SPEAKER_00She is. I'm just totally obsessed with her. But yeah, that's another piece of this, right? Becoming a parent for me has again reawakened my curiosity and my interest in the human experience because it feels like all of a sudden I have the insight to see what I couldn't see when I was a baby. And I get to see this person I love emerge in the world. And it feels like it's giving me such awareness about some of the universalities of being human, the kinds of ways that we come into the world and the things that we need. And in that way, that I think being a parent does for so many people, it's showing me myself, meeting her, encountering her, loving her is showing me who I am and what I deserve and what's true about all of us. So that's a it circles back to all of these things that I'm interested in.
SPEAKER_01And you have definitely been my teacher on embodiment. So many of us struggle, Hillary, to accept our bodies where they are, to feel whole and connected, to be embodied. And even when I use that language, so many look at me with a blank look as if to say, Well, what are you talking about? I think it would be really helpful if you in your words would kind of describe that whole idea.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I'm so glad that you asked that question. And it's not so different from what I was just saying about the being human that we're all trying to figure out and do here. Because to be human is to be in a body. There's no experience of being human that is not enfleshed. We are incarnated. This is a central place where our life happens from the from the location of our body. So being human and embodiment, they hang together in the literature, conceptually, in philosophy. Like, what does it mean to experience the range of human experiences? And where do those happen? Well, it turns out they all happen in the body. So the body is, you know, is a really central part of our existential journey. The way that I'm talking about embodiment when I write about it, when I talk about it, when I practice it, is a little different than maybe some of the language we've heard about embodiment culturally. So it's not unusual for us to hear embodiment as a way of referencing somebody, you know, really, really doing the things that they say. They're enacting the things that they believe. It's kind of like the things that are abstract or ideological become tangible through the person's actions. And that gets us part of the way there. But the way that I'm thinking about embodiment has a little bit of a different slant to it. And it comes from a mix of different psychologists, researchers, theorists, philosophers. It's a way of conceptualizing what it means to experience ourselves as a body and not just experience the self as a head or ideas walking around, floating, carried around by this kind of the meat taxi of our body. But embodiment being that we actually experience our body as the place where our self is. And then the second part of that definition is how we experience ourself as a body is shaped through the dialogue between culture and us and the context that we're in and how we respond and feel and the interchange of ideas and experiences that lend themselves to this series of interactions that subtly shape us over time. So, for example, if you drop me as a ciswoman, able-bodied, a mother, midlife, fits within straight sizes, into a different context with bodies that look and move differently, it's probably going to feel different to be in my skin based on what's valued, what's privileged, what's considered powerful, what's desirable. So there's something about our experience of being a body that's not just an individual phenomena, but it's also shaped culturally. And often the things that we feel about our bodies, including the difficulties we have inhabiting our skin, maybe the disgust we feel about how we look, maybe the sense of power and fortitude we feel, maybe our sense of competence, accomplishment, and uh groundedness, all the way to feeling insignificant and small and devalued. The reason we might feel that way is probably a mix of our individual lived experiences as they've met culture and what culture has said about which bodies are valuable, whose body is safe, whose body is powerful, and what that means about the space you get access to, what you're allowed to do with your body and whatnot. So think about all of that. If the only thing that you take away is embodiment is about the experience of being a body as it's shaped by culture, that's what I would want for you to hear.
SPEAKER_01I'm sitting here thinking about all the loud and ruthless messages we hear from the culture about our bodies, right? Like these just nasty seeds that just grow into weeds. I'm always using garden metaphors, but it's like because they just suck the life right out of us. I mean, that's how I came into your work of feeling like so over that narrative and how to start changing that for myself. That's right.
SPEAKER_00You're talking about something really important that I think a lot of people don't understand. We feel awful in our bodies, or we have critique about our appearance, or we feel shame or embarrassment or dissociative. Something in our body does not feel good. But because it's housed in the place where our existence is, you know, the only place that we know to occupy in the world, we think that it's about us. And we don't often do that extra step of analysis to realize what wait a second, our bodies are enculturated. Maybe if I feel awful in myself, it's not actually because there's anything wrong with my body, but because the messages that I've been marinating in have made me feel so far from myself and feel so at odds with what is actually good and safe and trustworthy that I feel all tangled and confused. And I experience that tangledness as a felt sense in my body, which then reinforces that maybe my body isn't an okay place to be. And it's really easy for us to lose sight of the fact that this water that we swim in culturally has a very loud note that we're constantly picking up on that's shaping the way we feel inside. But when we're so used to hearing it, we don't realize that it's probably one of the dominant things that shapes how we feel about ourselves. And it takes a lot to be able to separate that out and realize well, I don't feel good in myself. But maybe again, like I'm saying, maybe that's not because there's anything wrong with me. Maybe it's because actually I'm in a culture that keeps telling me stories that make me fragment from myself.
SPEAKER_01Yes. And I'm thinking we could go a lot of different ways with this, but that example of that fragmenting, I just see this so often, especially when I work with women who feel so fragmented from their body sexually, sensually, that it's so apparent to them in that space. And yet it's hard for us to recognize the big picture of this.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, you're right. It feels so individual, it feels so granular, like, oh, this is just my reality. And we often haven't been taught early enough how to do cultural analysis, media literacy, consciousness raising and practices to help us see that the awfulness that we feel in our body or the way that our sexuality feels like a place of pain or shame or, you know, dissociation might not actually be because there's actually anything wrong with our body. In fact, that's likely the case. But but the stories that we've heard that have made us feel like our body is shameful or dirty or bad or a sexuality or a pleasure need to be controlled and they're damaging and sinful. Those messages have a real impact, not just on the ideas that we have about ourselves, but also the sensory experience of being in our body. There is a direct correlation between being told that your body is bad and dangerous and it feeling painful to have a sexual experience. Those are not completely disentangled from each other.
SPEAKER_01Yes, it all bleeds together. And could I read a few words from your wisdom of your body book saying, you know, exactly what you're saying here, which is denying the goodness of pleasure and bodies has left individuals and communities without the skills and understanding necessary to negotiate what constitutes safe, mutually enjoyable, consenting, and pleasurable sexual activity.
SPEAKER_00That's right. Say it again.
SPEAKER_01I see this over and over again. I was so delighted in your latest book that you had a whole section on sensuality and sexuality, a section about the purity problem, which is such a problem. This is a big conversation. I'd just love for you to speak to that a little bit based on you see clients all the time. I'm sure this comes up regularly, and how to frame opening this conversation for people with themselves.
SPEAKER_00A way that I like to think about it is to zoom out for a moment and think about our body as constantly communicating. Our bodies are saying things all the time, and they don't necessarily say things verbally, although sometimes people kind of superimpose language onto sensation, and you know, maybe a tight ankle says, ouch, right? A pang in the heart or the belly says, I'm sad, right? Sometimes we can assume what our body is saying, but sensation is communicative, and it's one of our body's favorite ways of saying this feels good or this doesn't feel good. I want more of this, I want less of this. Do this again. That doesn't feel safe. And when we haven't been taught how to listen to those messages, they become foreign to us. It's almost like we get separated from our mother tongue. And the things that our bodies are saying need translation. It's like noise coming at us, but we don't really know what to do with that noise because we don't know how to hear and interpret it. And so because that noise can get really loud, sometimes we try really hard to get distant from it. And then when you add on top of that, that many of us have grown up in cultures where we were told that that information was actually something that would fragment us from ultimate goodness or love, that that information about what feels good or what doesn't feel good needed to be mistrusted because it was leading us into more danger or astray. It added another layer, a wall or a block or something in the way of us being able to hear and interpret our mother tongue, what our language of our body is saying. So then you get adults in their adult life navigating sexuality and sexual relationships or kind of their own sense of pleasure and exploring their own body. And things feel scary and foreign and confusing because it's really hard to tell a difference between what is the message that my body is saying about what feels good, and how do I disentangle that from the message that my body is saying about what I have learned to hate or fear because I was told it was bad. So, for example, a person, you know, that I might see in my practice would be with somebody who is saying, I want to have a sexuality. I want to have a connection to my sensuality, to my body in an erotic way, and maybe to a partner. When I think about that wanting, that wanting feels good. There's a desire that's emerging. I can sense that and experience it. It's located in me somewhere. It's not just an idea. Desire feels like it has an energy to it that I can feel in certain parts of my body. But I'm also noticing at the same time that I feel desire, I feel fear. And the fear, I can't tell. The fear, you know, where does that come from? But it seems to override the ability to sense into the wanting. The fear makes my body tight, the fear makes me mistrust the situation, the fear makes me want to close down and avoid and shut off a sexual exploration with myself or with a partner. So being able to tell the difference between, you know, what is healthy fear like, for example, if I was about to step off the curb and there was a bus coming, and my body activated the fear response as a way to help me step off the curb and jump back onto the sidewalk so that I could be in safety? How do I tell the difference between healthy fear and the fear that comes from being shamed and told that my body was dangerous and being taught something that isn't necessarily actually objectively true? It's really confusing when as adults we carry the soup of all of those reactions inside of us and they're all interacting with each other. And what do we do with the fear? Is it is it trustworthy? Is it not? What do we do with the fact that we're carrying that all inside of us? So when I say stepping back, realizing that our body is communicating is a really good place to start. Noticing that all of that sensation is messaging. It's our body's way of saying something. Then what we do is we start to ask, what is it saying? And what might it be telling me, not just about what I want, but also how I've learned to belong and create safety in a culture that's told me that there is one way of being in a body. Because if you come back to the definition of embodiment, these experiences that we have in our bodies, again, are not just individually derived. They're derived based on what we've learned about how to belong and how to be safe. And so it's our job as an adult to tease out, and this is hard work, it's not meant to be done overnight. And usually with trusted others who can go, oh, you know, that that sounds like this, or here's what I'm noticing, or I can feel that reaction in you. And it seems like it comes from that thing that you learned, the kind of discerning that often happens with a therapist or coach or skillful attuned other. That being able to separate out what is kind of my mother tongue saying about what is actually true about me. What have I just picked up from the cultural dialogue that's harmed me? And that's a big chunk of the work of figuring out how to discern the two. It's not something that again happens right away. It comes through building trust with relationship with yourself and noticing sensation and honoring it and learning to really slow down and pay attention. But I think that the original step of recognizing, hey, my body's talking. What is it saying gets us so far in this process.
SPEAKER_01A hundred percent. You know, I'm thinking back to what I heard you say early on. People don't really realize that our body is sending messages to our brain. Our brain is not just sending messages to our body. You talk about this research a lot, right? And that people think that it's just our brain messaging our body. And you're saying, listen to all these messages from your body that are coming to your brain, because this is happening.
SPEAKER_00Right, right, exactly. And then being able to notice, like, oh, my body impacts the way that I think. You know, if I experience anxiety or tightening, kind of a fear response in my body, it changes my thoughts. What that means is that actually we can do different things in and through our body to give us a different kind of mental experience of ourselves in the world. So something as simple as changing our posture, right? If we I notice for myself, if I feel afraid, I get small. And then all of a sudden, you know, there's this stuff that comes along with that. I'm small, I can't do this, I'm incapable, I don't have the confidence. There's all sorts of dialogue and mental chatter that goes along with it. But to be able to say, okay, wait a second, no, let me practice taking up as much space as possible. Let me stretch out, get big and wide. Let me feel my feet rooted into the ground. And then asking myself, what do I know when I shift my posture? What do I know when I do something different in my body? If this relationship is bi-directional, what we can do is we can manipulate one to change the other. So if we're feeling scared, that might manifest in our thoughts or it might manifest in our body, but we have two routes of entry to be able to shift that feeling for ourselves.
SPEAKER_01Two roots of entry.
SPEAKER_00That's right.
SPEAKER_01Our messages from our brain to our body and our body to our brain.
SPEAKER_00You got it. Nailed it.
SPEAKER_01I love when you talk about this, but there's actually more messages coming from our body to our brain than our brain to our body.
SPEAKER_00That's right. Many of us think of ourselves, again, because of our culture, we've over-identified ourselves with our minds. So we think of ourselves primarily as thinking beings. It probably doesn't surprise anyone listening to this to hear me say that the words of Descartes, I think, therefore I am, have deeply impacted our cultural values. That's kind of how we come to know ourselves as thinking beings. And yet the neuroscience is been out for a while that actually we're much more sensing beings than we are thinking beings. And in fact, our thinking is probably the end result of sensation, the end result of what is happening in our nervous system. If we have a regulated nervous system, we think regulated thoughts. If we have a dysregulated nervous system, we think dysregulated thoughts. So we have some research to show that there's about nine times more information going from body to brain through the vagus nerve than there is brain to body. So if you think nine times more pieces of data, nine times more routes of entry, nine times more potential insights available to us. If we do different things with our body, we can take up and make good use of that real estate to have actually a better kind of thought life, a better way of thinking about ourselves and the world around us.
SPEAKER_01And knowing that will help us recognize too. I'm going to circle back to sexuality, our arousal too. And so that's why I wanted you to flesh that out because I just want to keep encouraging people to pay attention to our bodies. And I've heard you say arousal is a waking up process. Right? Shame causes us to shut down.
SPEAKER_00That's right.
SPEAKER_01I'm flipping gears here because this is such a common theme, but it goes along with this idea of you saying these are fundamentally incompatible. That's right. Arousal, which is a waking up our sensuality, our desire, and shame, which is a lot of this cultural messaging that we're talking about here, is a shutting down.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you're saying it so well right there that these are opposed in terms of how they operate and their function, the light switch, you know, opposites that we are presented here with this, you know, this idea is that there's an on-switch and an off-switch in a way, or there is something that wakes up, something that activates, or something that's energizing, then there's something that shuts down. And it's really hard to feel and press both sides of the switch at the same time. It's really hard for them to be activated at the same time. The shutdown response and the activation response. And sexuality and sensuality and arousal and eroticism, if we take those words and we expand them to include so much more than just, you know, thinking genital stimulation with another partner, when we think about them as these things that are housed within our bodies, within our own bodies and belong to us, they are fundamentally energizing forces that are accessible throughout the day. The kind of I'm turning on, I am leaning in, I am waking up, I feel a sense of pleasure in my body. That doesn't have to be something that involves a partner or even, you know, masturbation. This could be something as simple as, oh, I see this delicious food and I can't wait to feed myself, or wow, I see that beautiful, you know, flower on the tree and I feel drawn to go, you know, I put down whatever I'm doing and go over and bury my face in the petals of the flower to really enjoy the senses through my body of connecting with nature. I think that our definition of sexuality and arousal is much too small. And it cuts us off from our fundamental life source, from this energy that is saying, wake up, move towards, engage, feel, enjoy, take pleasure in being a human, take pleasure in being a body. There is opportunities throughout our day all around us in every moment for us to sink into feeling good. And I think it is our arousal, activation, sensual energy that is saying, look for those, choose them, move towards them, enjoy them, and really when you are engaging with what feels good, really let it feel good instead of bypassing it or trying to make it over or rush past it or forgetting that it exists altogether. But that is really hard to do when we are in a culture that says your body is bad, don't listen, shut it down, don't trust it, it will lead you astray, it is dangerous. Or for people who've had experiences where their body and their sexuality has been misused and violated by other people because it feels like, oh, that thing that was inside of me, that this place in my body is going to create fear, danger. It's going to threaten my life source. It's hard for us when we have trauma and traumatizing cultures and sexually objectifying cultures and patriarchy and misogyny, these ways of really dehumanizing the bodies of women in particular, it's really hard to feel like that pleasure and sensuality is a good, safe thing for us to go towards because we haven't actually been shown that that's the case very often. So I want for us to, in this conversation, remember again that if we have a hard time believing the things that you and I are talking about, Cindy, that the reason we're having a hard time believing those things is not because they're not true fundamentally, but maybe because we're in a culture that hasn't protected and honored our bodies in the way that's deserved, in the way that is warranted.
SPEAKER_01Beautiful. And it's a perfect way because to wrap up our time, because on this podcast, I always ask guests to share what causes you to stop, to pause, to notice and take delight. And you were describing a few things, but perhaps there's something that always comes to mind for you related to that you might want to share.
SPEAKER_00There's this alleyway near the house that I live in that is lined from one end to the other with the most beautiful roses of every color you can imagine. And what I find so fascinating about this alleyway is the people who tend to these roses live on the other side of the fence. So they actually leave their home and come around the other side and clip and prune and water and mulch. And they can't actually even see the roses from where they live. You know, they're on the other side of this fence. And they do this just as an offering to the community. And so I love that part. I take my daughter for walks and we make sure that we always go past that alleyway with all of the roses, and we smell the big ones, and we bury our faces in the petals, just like I'm talking about. This is a very real example for me. And when I think about it, I think about the pleasure that I get from the smell and the color and sharing that with her. But I also think about the pleasure of feeling like this is this beautiful act of love that these people give to our community just for our pleasure, just for us to be able to enjoy these flowers. They do this. And to me, that feels like there's a kind of Eden quality to that, like something right when I am present and I'm with my daughter, and we are taking joy in nature and we are enjoying the sensuality of the fragrance, and it has come from this gift of love from these neighbors of ours. It just oh, it feels so sweet for me to think about. It's my highlight of my day to go walking by them.
SPEAKER_01That is a delight for sure, and giving yourself permission to do that and to demonstrate and model that for your daughter in giving herself permission to enjoy and enjoy the sensuality and be in community about it.
SPEAKER_00That's right. And I I think about the significance of roses too, in terms of what they mean around the sacred feminine and what they mean often symbolically about women's pleasure and the vulva. There's all sorts of imagery around roses and feminine sexuality, feminine spirituality. And I love this idea of what it means to show her from a young age the goodness of slowing down, feeling in our bodies and taking delight in the fragrant multi-layers of each flower. And I think that what that means about being human and kind of seeing, seeing ourselves held in the multiple layers of love that surround us, the fragrance and the goodness of being a woman, the fragrance and the goodness of pleasure and sensuality. I mean, there's so many layers to why this feels meaningful, but I love that I get to share it with her.
SPEAKER_01Love that. Thanks for sharing that. And thank you so much for being with us, Hillary, and for your work in the world. Will you tell people how they can find your books and your work?
SPEAKER_00And you absolutely. So I've got a couple books out. The most recent one is called The Wisdom of Your Body. You can find that anywhere books are sold. It's always my preference if people can purchase a book from an independent bookseller or from a black, indigenous-owned, or woman-owned community bookstore, a great way to return the principles of the book to members of the community whose bodies have often been marginalized and oppressed. I think that there's a really cool thing that happens when we can talk about bodies that have been marginalized in a way that also honors and privileges bodies that have been marginalized. My website's hilarylmcbride.com. You can find me on Twitter at Hilary LMcBride and on Instagram at HillaryLeanna McBride. I've got a couple other books out too, and I'm always doing different kinds of things: retreats and talks and events. And so if you're interested in any of my work, please check out my social media and my website, and hopefully we'll see you at an event at some point.
SPEAKER_01Beautiful. Thanks again and community. Let's wrap up with this quote from Dr. Romani, who says, Our narratives are not fixed in stone. They can be re-rendered and revisited. Acceptance is rarely about perfection, it is about compassion. And that may be the most important health message of all. Keep giving yourself permission. Permission for pleasure.
