A Path to Sensual Aliveness
In the moments when life feels heavy with heartache, loss or longing, it can make us want to shrink into ourselves, harden around our hearts, and retreat from the world. Yet, in those same moments, beauty is often waiting to meet us with its soft, subtle insistence.
During a recent quiet afternoon in my garden, missing my mum and my dog terribly I lay on the grass, allowing tears to flow freely, feeling the ache of their absences in my chest. As I wept, I noticed the roses swaying gently in the breeze, their petals catching sunlight. That simple, tender moment of holding grief and the beauty together allowed me to soften into the experience rather than harden against it.
This is what it means to hold contrast. To allow yourself to feel deeply, to meet pain with presence, and to let small pleasures or beauty enter alongside heaviness. It’s not about forcing happiness or distraction, it’s about cultivating a capacity for sensation. Every time we do this, we teach our nervous system that we can handle more and expand our ability to hold aliveness, pleasure, and presence, even in the midst of challenge.
Meeting yourself this way, feeling and noticing fully, is one of the most profound spiritual practices I know. It’s a gentle inner work that doesn’t require adding anything extra to your life, but instead is an invitation to lean into what is here, the textures, movements, and sensations of your body and your environment.
If this resonates, I invite you to explore it in a guided way with my free sensual embodiment experience, Coming to Your Senses. Over 25 minutes, you’ll be invited to slow down, connect with your body, and explore various ways of accessing and feeling the aliveness that’s already inside you, softening into yourself and discovering what subtle pleasures and wisdom your body has been waiting to reveal.
Sometimes the deepest work we can do is simply meeting ourselves where we are, with our full humanity, our tender hearts, and our embodied senses. When we allow this, we open a doorway to sensation, aliveness, and a more profound connection to our own lives.
