What is Sensuality Anyway?
Every now and then someone will say oh, you run the Festival of Sexuality, right?
Sexuality is an integral part of the festival, no doubt. Almost everyone who comes to the Festival of Sensuality wants to understand their sexual nature better, perhaps explore their sexual boundaries, navigate the feelings that come along with sexual desire, learn how to communicate in a sexual context.
But sensuality is so much more than that.
We navigate this life through our bodies; we watch a beautiful sunset through our eyes, we hear melodious birdsong through our ears, we taste sweet mango through our tongues, we feel the touch of cool water on a hot day through our skin, we can even delight in poetry with our brains…
But to experience life as a sensual person takes practice.
I remember first learning this at school: to our collective disbelief, our teacher announced we would all get a chocolate. The catch (we knew there had to be one) was that we would write about the experience; first she made us look at it on our desks, taking in the shiny wrapping, the promise of sweetness; then we slowly unwrapped it, listening to the crackle of the plastic, catching our first glimpse of dark brown; then, groaning, we were made to pick up the chocolate and feel how smooth it was against out fingers, feel its weight in our palm; then, dying now, we were asked to smell it and observe what changes we felt in our mouths, the stirrings in our stomachs; then we were allowed to place it in our mouths but not to chew it, just to sense the first tinging taste…and so on, until the chocolate was safely in our stomachs.
Never had we imagined we could experience so much from so little.
And that’s the principle at the heart of the sensual life: less is more. We all have sensual appetites that vary in intensity through our lives but we can all experience and appreciate more when we awaken our senses to all that’s going on in our bodies, our emotions, our minds.
Modern consumer culture, of course, attempts to give us more! Faster! Stronger! We’re prompted to consume, to indulge, to glut, and it can leave us feeling saturated, gorged, sickened.
We see this in porn. To anyone with a phone in their hands, instant sexual gratification is just a few taps away but the initial kick soon fades into a listless search for the right image, the right presentation of desires to make us feel something, anything. An excess of stimuli mean that soon enough we become numb.
Why would we do that to ourselves?
The world can be a painful place. Every day we risk disappointment, rejection, loneliness. The selling point of any addictive activity is that it will numb us to the pain. But we can’t selectively numb what we feel and so we find our pleasure also fades away. The quest for pleasure can lead to anhedonia, where we feel nothing at all.
Not all we feel is pleasurable. Maybe pleasure is not the point. A sensual person is open to feeling deeply into all the sensations, feelings, emotions that arise whether having sex or eating chocolates. It’s only by embracing a little pain that we can ever feel the depths of pleasure that this amazing life has to offer us.
