LETTERS FROM LOVE — With Special Guest Emily McDowell!

Delight yourself back to your senses

Dear Lovelets,

In the English language, when we talk about a person recovering from a wave of insanity, foolishness, or craziness, we say that somebody has “come back to one’s senses.”

It’s an old expression, dating back to the early 17th century. Back then, when they talked about “senses” they were talking about a kind of emotional prudence or reasonableness or deep stability.

“Coming to one’s senses” meant that somebody was being “sensible” again — with no more room for nonsense. The mind had settled and could be productive, moral, and normal once more.

But what if the best way to settle our troubled minds is to LITERALLY come back to our senses — back to an awareness of our senses of smell, sight, hearing, taste, and physical touch? What if the reason we become so stressed and strung out is that we are too much in our heads, and not enough in our bodies?

Our special guest this week is the wonderful Emily McDowell — a dear friend of mine and a creative powerhouse, who reached tremendous success in her profession by living a life of the mind: creating, strategizing, working, producing — and all in a way that seemed very “sensible,” until the stress became unsustainable.

Emily has recovered her spirit in a large part by recovering her senses — by learning how to feel her body, by dancing unselfconsciously (sometimes without her shirt on, woo-hoo!) and by surrendering to the deep physical JOY of being alive.

This week, my beautiful Lovelets, let’s explore our senses. Let’s remember to delight in things — not just intellectually, but physically. Let’s ask the spirit of Unconditional Love what it has to say about full-bodied joy.

Onward,
Your Lizzy

Dear Love, what would you have me know about full-bodied joy?

Oh, little honeyhead.

We like that you included the modifier “full-bodied” in this question. Because, yes, let us talk about full-bodied joy! And if you hadn’t used the modifier “full-bodied,” your mind might have thought that this question had something to do with IT . . . and it doesn’t.

Because we are not talking about the joys of the mind today — although they are many, especially for a creative little beehive mind like yours. We aren’t talking about the joys of solving problems, or doing research, or completing a project. Or the joys of earning regard or reward. Or the joy of relationships of any kind. Those are all joys of the mind.

But today you asked about FULL-BODIED JOY! Oh honeyhead, this is what your body is FOR, my dear. Your body isn’t just a machine designed to carry your head from place to place, you know, so it can do chores and strike things off lists. Your body has an entire life of its own — a life that has nothing to do with your thoughts, plans, worries, ambitions, fears, shames, dreads, regrets, or personal daily itineraries.

Organic, thriving, vivid, responsive, warm, alert, animalistic, unimaginably complex, fascinating and fascinated — this is the body when it responds to its joys.

Remember when you lived in Miami for a while, and you used to run barefoot on the beach every morning and then, when you got too hot, you would dive into the ocean, straight into an oncoming wave? Do you remember during covid lockdown, when you and your pod — Cat, Suleika, and Carmen — used do wild feats of breathwork for an hour each day and dive into the Delaware River, sometimes amongst floating chunks of ice? Do you remember the shouts of exquisite, powerful LIFE that you would all shout?

Do you remember when you were grieving Rayya and you couldn’t sleep and you would get up in the middle of the night and make Kraft macaroni and cheese, and then draw a warm bath, and sink down into it in the dark, and eat the entire bowl, while crying but also laughing because it felt so good and it tasted so good to eat cheap orange macaroni and cheese in the dark, and who was going to stop you?

Do you remember yesterday when you arrived at your Airbnb in Sydney, so jetlagged and tired, when you saw that someone had left behind an orange in the refrigerator — a perfect orange — and you thought, “When was the last time I ate an orange?” and you sliced it up into perfect chunks and you ate every bit of it, and it was so cold and delicious and bright that you had to lean against the kitchen counter and groan with pleasure — what planet, what universe, is this, where a person can get off a plane on the other side of the world and find and enjoy a cold orange?

Do you remember all those times you felt your newly shaved legs sliding against cool, clean sheets? Do you remember all those times you pressed your face into an armful of warm laundry? Do you remember every bite of buttered bread? Do you remember every smell of a puppy’s feet?

This, all of this, is full-bodied joy.

A joy of the senses, joy of the living.

Have you noticed, my love, that since you stopped having sex six years ago, your senses have become more alive than ever to the infinitude of pleasure that is contained within having a body? All that attention you once paid to the pursuit of sexual pleasure — I mean, dear one, there’s nothing wrong with it, but it’s so OBVIOUS. And in your case, it distracted you from all the other joys that are available to a body. Sexual pleasure, for you, is like putting rose water in your baked goods: it becomes all you can taste. It’s like putting beets in a salad. Suddenly it’s all about the beets.

Honey, honey — there is so much other kind of joy. Joy is here for your entire body, and we want you to know it. We want you to know OF it. My darling, you have millions of nerve endings. You have fingers, you have eyes, you have ears, you have feet, you have a belly, you have a big old beautiful honker of a nose that loses its mind (if a nose can be said to have a mind and it does) — that loses its mind every time it smells cinnamon. If all you did was sit in a chair all day in a patch of sunlight, running your hand back and forth across the velvety bristles of your freshly buzzed head, that would be enough joy and wonder to keep your body happy all day.

Nobody knows — not even we know — how long you will have a body, how long this planet will be here, how long there will be cinnamon and oranges and rivers and dogs.

But honeyhead, honeyhead — dive into it, while you’ve got it. Celebrate it. Leave your mind on the shore of the ocean, and throw your body straight into the waves. Fully, completely, joyfully.

As long as you have even one sense left to be delighted, let’s delight it.

Don’t forget to be alive.

We love you. Every cell of you.

Let’s keep going.

Prompt

When was the last time your body registered happiness before your brain got the news? Does it seem to happen less and less often as you tend to the necessary tasks and responsibilities of adulthood? Or did something light up your senses in recent days? This week, join me in writing down this question: Dear Love, what would you have me know about full-bodied joy? I can’t wait to read your letters!