I refuse to succumb to February doldrums. Instead, I proclaim that February shall be LOVE MONTH here at p & s headquarters. 
Lest you think that this is going to be some extended parade of superficial Valentine’s Day silliness, let’s remember that love is a powerful force for transformation and healing. This month-long celebration will give us the chance to explore hot topics like herbal aphrodisiacs and medicinal chocolate—but it will also give us a chance to dive deeper into practices for self-care and stress relief that go way beyond superficial strategies. So, with no further ado—
Welcome to LOVE MONTH!
The love we’re celebrating this month is not sentimental. It’s not necessarily romantic. It’s certainly not heteronormative, affiliated with any one religion, or an act of new-age lip service paid through empty affirmations.
The love we’re celebrating is the force that helps us to heal, to connect with one another, to create meaning in the world through our words & work, and to make life worth living.
We’ll start the celebration and the practice by tuning in to ourselves.
The Sweet Practice of Self Love
In Sacred Pleasures, Riane Eisler begins by comparing a romantic dinner to a religious ritual. With her anthropologist’s eye, she notes that similar artifacts are present at both events. At a romantic dinner the beloved is greeted with flowers, or a bouquet is set at the table. There’s soft light from flickering candles. There is wine, soft music, food. At the Catholic church of my youth, there were always flowers on the altar, candles, ritualized eating & drinking, and music. Coincidence?
As it turns out, the neurobiology of love & sexual ecstasy has substantial parallels with the neurobiology of religious experience. Love is not just a spiritual principle taught by the world’s religions; it also seems to be the essence of religious experience itself. For our purposes, let’s simply allow ourselves to re-cast the practice of self love as a spiritual practice. Self love is a way of tending the soul. It’s no more cheesy or frivolous than any other devotional practice like meditation, yoga, prayer, running, religious observance, or tending a garden.
This week, I invite you to play with a new way of loving yourself up. The practice is all about slowing down and getting present in the moment by engaging with your senses. Sensory work is an antidote to the cultural messages that tell us that pleasure, softness, human needs, and the body are frivolous or untrustworthy. Your senses are also a key to unlocking your intuition—especially about what foods and herbs are right for you in any given moment. Before we can get into anything fancy, we have to start by getting back in touch with our senses and our bodies.
The Doorway of Your Senses
One of the best ways to bust through stress, tension, and emotional overwhelm is to, quite literally, come to your senses. I’ve found that mindfulness feels cold and difficult when I try to practice it in my head by watching my thoughts. My thoughts DON’T feel like clouds passing in the sky! I get frustrated. I start feeling my butt go numb on the meditation pillow. I get more and more uptight. Similarly, when I spend my day living from the neck up like a disembodied brain attached to a computer, I lose touch with some of that internal sweetness. I end up feeling achy, annoyed, and disgruntled.
It’s a totally different experience if I mindfully engage with my senses and my body.
To kick off our celebration of LOVE month, I’d like to challenge you to start engaging with your senses. This step that we’re practicing today is the foundation to everything else we’re going to explore this month.
Try This: Sensory Immersion
This week, I want you to play with putting your full attention on the information that’s coming to you from your senses. Pick at least one of the following exercises to try.
Important: after you try the activity, make sure that you describe the experience to someone. (If you don’t have anyone to talk to about this, come back here and leave a comment.) This is a VITAL step in the learning process. The act of putting an experience into words helps to etch the learning into your brain. It doesn’t matter if your description is “good” or if it even makes sense at all. What matters is that your brain went through the process of translating a wordless experience into words. Don’t skip this step!
Here are some ideas for sensory immersion:
- When you wash your hands, really focus on the feeling of the water. Notice how the soap feels on your skin. Notice the way your hands feel against one another. Pay attention to the temperature of the water, the quality of your touch, the way your hands feel before you dry them off, the way the towel feels on your skin. Put your full attention on the sensations that arise as you wash your hands.
- Eat something mindfully. Choose a food you like—maybe a piece of chocolate or fruit, maybe a few bites of a favorite meal at a restaurant. Take a moment before you eat the food to look at it and really see it as if for the first time. Spend some time smelling the food, then, when you finally take a bite, really put your full attention on the taste. Notice what you feel in your body as you chew and swallow the bite of food. Feel the texture of the food in your mouth. Give your full attention to the sensations that arise. (You don’t need to eat a whole meal this way—a few bites is a great start!)
- When you’re out walking, take a moment to give your full attention to what you see around you. See everything as if for the first time—the people, the sidewalk, the buildings, the traffic. Let go of your thoughts and plans for the next thing that’s happening in your day and really SEE everything around you. Notice the details. Stay alert and awake for the unexpected.
- Close your eyes and give your attention completely to the sounds that you hear around you. At first, you may only hear sounds that are coming from very nearby sources, but as you deepen your focus, you may find that it’s as if your sense of hearing has grown more acute. If you find yourself telling stories in your head about the sounds, or thinking thoughts based on them, just let those thoughts go and return to listening.
Next Week: Herbal Aphrodisiacs
Make sure to complete your experiment before next week. You’ll need the practice of tuning in to your senses in order to get the most out of our exploration of herbal love potions and aphrodisiacs.
