|
|
|
The Be Fully Alive Podcast On Patreon
|
"We all carry the potential to realize, in real time, that the vibrant energy we experience
when we feel truly loved, seen and met, is who we actually are." Dawn Cartwright
|
|
Episode 339 . Sensing & Feeling
|
The Be Fully Alive Podcast
Do you know what's truly extraordinary about longing?
What we long for longs for us even more than we long for it.
Longing reveals new vistas of ourselves — now within reach.
This. Is. Delicious. And. Deep.
Deeper than outer appearance. Deeper than a specific person, experience or thing.
Absolute.
There are some key points to keep in mind as we delve deeper . . .
#1. Wanting & Receiving Are Separate Systems - Longing Isn't Absence, It's Orientation
- There's neuroscience to back it. Berridge's dopamine/opioid research — shows that wanting and liking (receiving) operate on separate circuits.
- When we tune in, sense and feel, we aren't producing arousal, we are opening to receive what's already present.
- Many of us spend our lives "wanting" through analysis while never developing the capacity to actually receive.
- Longing is a beckoning, pointing toward something real and already here; the gap is in our capacity to receive it, not in its absence.
#2. Our Bodies Have Never Been Separate From Ceremony, Intelligence, or the Sacred - The Split Is Habit, Not Truth
- In this week's episodes we trace this across cultures — Karahöyük, the Plains Cree, Hawaiian aloha ʻāina — cultures where sacred and ordinary have never been divided.
- This union between our bodies and the sacred erotic current is literal and physical — breath, sacrum, pelvic floor are sites of ancient intelligence, present in our anatomy.
- The split between us and the erotic current that flows through everything happens when our mind and body disconnect - sensing and feeling reunite the two. Somatically. Emotionally. Immediately.
#3. Our Erotic Energy Isn't Accessed Through Effort or Technique — It's What Happens, Naturally, When We Sense and Feel
- Our erotic energy is a current that moves through our entire body — this is the circulation of our sexual energy, allowing our body to be filled with whatever is present.
- Descartes' cogito ergo sum is often read as a defense of analytical thought. Descartes himself defined cogito as awareness — doubting, feeling, imagining — beyond reasoning alone.
- In this week's practice episode, we explore what appears when we allow breath, sound, and movement to happen to us — inviting the erotic current to lead.
- Pausing — sensing — feeling — not technique — are what deepens intimacy.
- What looks like absence — longing, disconnection, a ceiling in intimacy — is actually unreceived presence. Our bodies are and always have been the place where we receive one another — the sacred — all along, in every culture, at every scale.
Enjoy listening.
Dawn
|
|
|
 |
|
|
"In Tantrism, the first thing is having the experience of touch, of profound contact with things, with the universe, without mental commotion. Everything begins there: touching the universe deeply. When you touch deeply, you no longer need to let go. That occurs naturally."
— Daniel Odier .Tantric Quest: An Encounter with Absolute Love
|
|
|
|
| Episode 340 . Body Erotic Practice
|
The Be Fully Alive Podcast
This week's practice begins with sensing and feeling — breathing experienced as something that happens to us, rather than something we do. Something we open to and receive.
Sensing and feeling the breath.
Research in somatic sex education shows this kind of breathing stimulates our vagus nerve, shifting our body from a sympathetic, activated state into the ventral vagal state Stephen Porges associates with genuine receptivity.
Then, we explore the pelvic bowl — our belly, our waist, our sacrum and pelvic floor.
Our pelvic floor holds some of our body's highest concentrations of nerve endings and is a primary site where unresolved emotion is stored as chronic tension — something Peter Levine calls somatic amnesia.
Our sacrum, considered the seat of kundalini in Tantric tradition, is released into small involuntary movements — rocking, undulating, spiraling. Somatic movement researcher Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen identifies this as activating primary movement patterns that predate learned, culturally shaped movement.
And then, at the peak of the practice — sound. Humming, toning, groaning, growling. Our voice travels through fascia connecting throat, chest, and pelvis. Increasing our capacity to sense and feel the erotic truth that exists in our own body.
Episode 340 . The Erotic Body Practice
|
|
|
|
|
 | Episode 341 . Lin’s Story
|
The Be Fully Alive Podcast
Lin, 38, is a neuroscientist at Northwestern who has published 43 papers on how the brain processes sensory information. She grew up in Shanghai, moved to the Boston area at nine, and has spent her adult life operating primarily through analytical thought.
In her four-year relationship with David there was a "ceiling" in intimacy. Places they longed to explore for yet had no map for.
Later, Lin's relationship with Marco brought something simple and new. In lovemaking, Marco placed his hand on her chest to feel her breathe — and stayed there with her.
And Lin met him from inside her body, not from her mind.
She experienced a gap. A few minutes of just being.
Sensing and feeling.
Touch and connection, emotion and meaning.
The intimacy she'd been longing for, now within reach.
Later, when her analytical mind came back on line, Lin saw the correlation to everything she had studied . . .
- Neuroscientist Sarah Garfinkel's research links higher interoceptive awareness to greater emotional intimacy and sexual satisfaction.
- Psychologist Wendy D'Andrea's research similarly connects interoceptive accuracy to the capacity to be genuinely moved by another person.
The culmination of all her academic work — and her longing — now present in her body.
Episode 341 . Lin's Story
|
|
|
|
|
| New 8-Week Series: Ceremonial Lovemaking
|
The Be Fully Alive Podcast . 8-Week Series
A living exploration of the ceremony that naturally emerges when we allow ourselves to be fully absorbed in the sensory sunrise that is sex.
Monday we explore the concepts — science, poetry, psychology, and the personal story that connects them.
Wednesday we practice — embodied NeoTantra practices that bring the week's teaching directly into the body.
Friday we meet a real-life character whose inner world carries the week's discovery into lived, recognizable, human experience.
⬥ ⬥ ⬥
NEW 8-WEEK SERIES . CEREMONIAL LOVEMAKING
WEEK 1 . THE LONGING — Discovering the secrets of longing
So many of us are waiting. Waiting for the right moment, the right era in our lives. Longing for the time, space, permission to be ourselves. As lovers.
WEEK 2 . THE ATMOSPHERE — Attuning to our needs
We put a lot of pressure on ourselves to be intimate. Without first tuning in to what we need. Down-time. Rest. Space in our busy days. A time to feel ourselves.
WEEK 3 . SENSING & FEELING — Shifting from mind to body
Most of us are accustomed to working hard to get results. Even when it comes to our relationships. What happens when we shift from working hard — to sensing and feeling — who we are as lovers.
WEEK 4 . IN & OUT OF THE BEDROOM — Sex that never ends
Sex doesn't begin or end in the bedroom. Everything we do is an expression of who we are as men and women who crave connection. And pleasure. And closeness.
WEEK 5 . SELF-PRACTICE — Ecstasy drills
Mapping the body for ecstasy and connection is a practice that never ends. Our capacity for intimacy is infinite. And it begins with our relationship with our body. Our pleasure. Our exhaustion. Our stability.
WEEK 6 . ATTRACTION — Torching our preferences
The world tells us that attraction is something we seek — a very draining proposition. What if attraction is something we radiate, instead.
WEEK 7 . THE MEETING — Down-to-earth connecting
There are so many ways to connect, really connect, sexually. Some of those include physical contact. Some of those do not.
WEEK 8 . THE CEREMONY — Life becomes ceremony
Life as a ceremony of meeting and being. Making love from that place of connection that already exists between us. Relaxing into our natural rhythms. Allowing our longing new space to express.
⬥ ⬥ ⬥
I look forward to welcoming you into the Be Fully Alive Podcast community. We're diving deep into the elegant systems that transform complex lives into embodied aliveness.
Join The Be Fully Alive Podcast Community
See you there.
|
|
|
|
|
 | Making peak experiences a way of life.
..................................................................................................................
The Be Fully Alive Podcast
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
