Pleasure medicine

Contents: 
1. Pleasure and eros
2. Damiana monograph
3. Other herbs that connect us with pleasure
4. Recipes
5. Shop updates (BIG shop update)

1. Pleasure and eros
 

Sensuality and sexuality are often treated as if they’re the same thing, but this is a misconception. Sexuality is of course, the fundamental basis of why we’re all here: without sex, no creation happens, and nobody is born, and life grinds to a halt. Sensuality, on the other hand, is our ability to feel pleasure through our senses. It is so much bigger than sex (and sex is already big) because sensuality is the basis of our physicality.

Andreas Weber, in his book “Matter and Desire” says: “The Eros of reality begins with touch. There is no life without contact. Without touch there is no desire, no fulfillment— and no mind. When a light wave changes the structure of my retina, when I stroke the skin of my beloved, or when a nerve cell sends out an electrical impulse by spilling calcium ions, this is always an act of physical seizure.”

All of our senses are heightened by touch, and touch is the way we interpret the world. It is through FEELING that we become aware, our perception of the world various interpretations of our ability to touch and be touched.

We are taught, for the most part in society, to restrain both our sensuality and our sexuality. Sexuality is seen as lewd, promiscuous, and dangerous (or a sign of one’s virility and celebrated, depending); and sensuality is seen as a representation of our capacity for sexuality. Thus, if a person is naturally sensual they are often treated as though they are being overtly sexual, and have to deal with the judgements and advances that come along with that. Because sensuality and sexuality are lumped together, our natural sensuality, which is in and of itself a thing that needs nurtured and expressed, only really gets expressed with a sexual partner. And if we express it towards someone who is not our partner, it is assumed that sex has to be on offer too. 

So we tend to restrain our natural sensuality as much as we do sexuality. And while I don’t agree with either, and think we’d be a lot happier as a society if we didn’t have so much shame tied into sex, I think that restraining our natural ability to feel pleasure in our senses is very dangerous indeed, for two main reasons:

1. Our senses are how we interact with the world around us, so restricting our ability to use them is restricting our ability to interact with the world.

2. Pleasure isn’t this wicked, immoral thing— feeling pleasure doesn’t mean that the world is going to shit and everyone is going to stop working and we’re two steps from devolving into apes who do nothing but sit around and eat and live in one giant orgy all day while the kids go hungry and society crumbles around us and the few remaining moral people sit and wring their hands over what degenerates we've all become. 

Really the worst thing that happens when you feel pleasure is that you start to interact with your own body, and start to experience the world around you, and maybe start to feel good about yourself. Feeling pleasure connects you with your own sense of joy: because pleasure reverberates through the body, like one happy, wiggling cell passing on its joy to another.

In order to feel pleasure, one has to *allow* pleasure. In the same way as we have more muscles in place to close our eyes than to open them, our energy has the same thing: we have more muscles in place to protect ourselves than we do to open ourselves up (I'd argue that this is because our *natural* state is open, so we don't need a lot of muscles to make it happen): it’s the ancient game of survival and we need these protections. But sometimes we learn these protections really young and they’re for no reason: sometimes its simply because to be a sensual child scares adults, because sensuality AND sexuality, especially in Western culture, are not freely expressed (see above about world falling apart). So maybe a small child starts playing with their own genitalia or maybe they just exhibit their natural sensual inclinations in other ways, and maybe they aren’t even told not to, but they feel something change in their parents, because so much of what we learn is through the most subtle cues: a tiny bit of tension, a small frown. Energy changes when we disapprove, and it is through disapproval that we learn how not to act. Maybe what so many of us learn earlier than we can even think it through rationally, is that to be sensual means we won’t receive the love we need (or think that it is this part of ourselves that makes us receive unwanted attention). So we stop it. It’s self-protection.

And then we carry on doing this, because everyone else in society is doing it too.
 

Learning to allow pleasure is a rebellious act.

Believing that you deserve pleasure is an act of self-love so great that it shatters barriers.

Believing that you deserve pleasure, and allowing yourself to feel it, teaches other people that they are worthy of it too.
 

Tied up in this are all the societal implications, the things that are wrong with how we approach sexuality and the human body and our senses. There are all kinds of religions where a healthy approach to sensuality is seen as morally corrupt. There are spiritual communities in which sensuality is accepted if it fits within the confines of what’s seen as ‘pure’ but outside that is still seen as ‘wrong’.

I don’t know why all of this got so messed up, but I do have theories: I think it ties in with the way we treat the earth, and the way we treat ourselves. I think that self-punishment as a form of trying to be ‘good’ is so rampant in the Western world, and that we beat ourselves up in so many different, insidious ways. And its socially acceptable to beat ourselves up, because everyone is doing it. It is not as normal to forgive ourselves, forgive others, and move on.

I am going to make a bold statement: I think self-hatred is at the core of so many of the ills in our society, and that it is destroying us as a species, and the planet as the result of our actions.

I’m going to make another bold statement: I believe that we all deserve love, and pleasure, and that it’s not something we need to wait for permission for, or to be told by others that we can have. 

2. On damiana medicine (an excerpt from The Wonder Sessions)
 

Damiana // Turnera diffusa

Aromatic. Warming.
Carminative. Nervine. Aphrodisiac.

Courage is an interesting word. Derived from the Latin ‘coraticum’ which translates to ‘heart’, it is used in modern life to mean bravery, when in fact it is so much more. You see the word ‘corage’ refers to the heart as being our innermost feelings— our innermost, truest selves. And courage is the quality of mind that allows one to meet danger without fear. So really, courage is, in a way, the ability to meet the world with your innermost self.

For so many, modern life is an overstimulating, threatening place. I don’t know a single person who hasn’t experienced trauma, often significant, and I don’t know a single person who isn’t driven to retreat deep inside themselves at some point or another, in response to the reminders that life throws at us.

Damiana is courage medicine, drawing us out, into our bodies, into inhabiting ourselves, so that we can meet the world head-on. More fully. With our whole hearts.

It takes courage, in this day and age, to come out to the surface, to let our nerve endings touch the world and to be touched in return. It takes courage to express ourselves fully. And it takes courage to allow ourselves to feel pleasure, to deserve pleasure, especially if it’s trauma that has driven us away from the surface in the first place.

Damiana’s energetics are warming and aromatic. It is stimulating to the circulation, but relaxing to the nervous system. But where damiana is the most well known is with regards to sensuality, and sexuality.
 

Damiana and sex

Damiana is often toted as an aphrodisiac, which leads to thousands of pounds of it being wasted as people try to pump more of it into themselves (or their partners) to ‘get in the mood’. But, I’m sorry to say, damiana, and any herbal aphrodisiac, will not make somebody horny, make them want sex, make them into someone they’re not into.

But, say you do have a partner, and it’s someone you have enjoyed being intimate with in the past, and for some reason right now you feel as though there’s a layer between you and then. Maybe it’s sadness, maybe you’re just not into it, but you don’t want to be touched. Want to be left alone. Want to retreat deep inside and maybe stare into space for a bit, or escape in a book.

This is where damiana comes in: It warms the path back to the surface, enlivens it, makes it ok to feel again.
 

But also, damiana stimulates blood flow to the pelvis, and brings with it that awakened awareness and sensuality. Which is anther way of saying that damiana can actually help dramatically with sexuality, and the ability to feel and engage and experience pleasure during sex. That drawing of energy towards the pelvis also helps a person ‘get out of their head’, if they have a tendency to start overthinking during sex (even if enjoying it). The overall pattern here is that damiana is helpful if the lack of desire for sex is borne of a sort of depression: a disinterest due to existential malaise, lack of interest, lack of energy or inclination to meet the world at large head-on, and an inability to get engaged or excited enough to feel.

Damiana and trauma

Another reason for a lack of interest, or inability to meet the world with all of ourselves is the result of trauma.

When we experience something that scares us, our bodies will go into ‘fight or flight’ which is an activation of the sympathetic nervous system, which gets us ready to, well, fight, or run, or deal with the stressor in whatever way we know best. But when the stressor is too overwhelming, far too scary, or, maybe we cannot fight or flee, then our sympathetic response is overridden by an older, more primitive response: we freeze. At the same time as we freeze, we often leave our bodies a bit, hovering somewhere nearby, become outside observers into our own trauma. It’s an amazing mechanism that protects us from psychologically breaking. And it has a name: disassociation.

Disassociation is an amazing survival skill, but what often happens is that once we’ve started to disassociate, it’s very hard to get back to our bodies. It’s difficult because we don’t want to feel the trauma in the first place, but also because we want to avoid any possible pain in future. Because the trauma happened in and [usually] to our bodies, we start to see our bodies themselves as an unsafe place to be.

Damiana starts to warm us from the inside out, effectively dismantling, sometimes even shattering that deep freeze. In coaxing us back into our bodies, back into our nerve endings, and back into feeling, damiana reminds us of how beautiful it all is: life, colours, touch, connection, other people, intimacy, even the painful parts of it all. In a way, it reminds us that to *feel* is what we are here for, and it helps us feel safe to do so.

Now, a disclaimer here, and one that’s very important:

There’s a time and a place for this. This isn’t always what a person *wants* after trauma— one of the reasons we withdraw from ourselves is so that we cannot feel: with feeling comes pain, often deep, searing, soul-level pain. Alongside that often comes pleasure. Sometimes experiencing pleasure can be worse than experiencing pain. It’s not anyone else’s place to say whether a person needs this or not, so please never force this on someone. It is not our jobs to tell anyone else when or how to process their lives. Some of us want to, others don’t.

Damiana and digestion

Lets go back to that deep freeze, the inability to feel sensual pleasure again. Because, food is immensely pleasurable (or it can be). One of the ways that we punish ourselves is to deny ourselves pleasure and nourishment.

All the aromatics have some action to stimulate digestion, and damiana is no different. When we withdraw from ourselves, we also withdraw from our bellies, and bellies love full, active consciousness. They love to be inhabited and received. They love to talk to us, and tell us their feelings, and are usually among our most sensitive (both emotionally and energetically) parts of us.

And yet, in our society we have so many issues around food and eating. And eating for pleasure, when it’s not accompanied with ideas of excess and the things we despise about excess, isn’t done very often. We have a very puritanical approach to pleasure: often we feel as though we don’t actually *deserve* pleasure or nourishment, but get a sense of self-satisfaction about this at the same time. As if to say ‘aren’t I good, I’m beating myself up before anyone else can get to it!’. As a result of this, we withdraw from ourselves and that includes our ability to receive pleasure and nourishment. Which means that food isn’t going to be digested very well or easily.

If you think about our interaction with the world around us as things touching other things, exchanging energy with other things, and being changed by them. Have you ever hugged someone who didn’t want to be hugged? Or been hugged when you didn’t want to be hugged? You know how it feels when someone doesn’t meet your energy with theirs, right? Where there’s a layer in between that’s held back. We don’t just do that with other people.

To fully inhabit ourselves is to invite intimacy with the world around us. With other people, with the earth, with plants, but also with the things we ingest: our food, our water, the air we breathe. To touch and be touched is a gift. And when we withdraw, we refuse that gift. As a result, things become a lot harder to digest.

Eating with gusto involves saying yes on every level. Not ‘ok but I shouldn’t be doing this’ or ‘no but I should eat so I’ll force myself’. It starts with our other senses, and saying yes to those. And it continues as we chew, and swallow, and let our bodies receive food in our bellies, and let our bellies receive the nourishment from that food. Gratefully.

Damiana softens that layer of resistance in our bellies, inviting in the pleasure, and on its heels the nourishment. Its warming, aromatic and carminative, which means it soothes digestion for those who are bloated and gassy, and it helps digest (and assimilate) foods when they’re sitting heavy.

If you like the sound of damiana, check out the Unfurling & Eros surprise box, where you'll get to dive deep into an exploration of this incredible medicine. 

3. Other herbs that connect us with pleasure
 Rose // Rosa spp.
-When you want to experience pleasure but feel tied up in, or bound by your protective barriers
Wild rose softens the areas that we tense to protect ourselves, unraveling emotional tension patterns that get locked in the body. Rose naturally works in places where 'flow' is impeded. The roses I gather grow along the sides of mountain streams, so I love to picture this: their roots tapping into that which flows steadily, this water which is utterly free flowing. The roses (in my mind) somehow imprint this expression because it's what they're exposed to. Or maybe they grow by the water because that's what they are drawn to in the first place. Who knows how these magics work. Regardless, that's what rose brings to the body: a softness, a flow. And with that softness, the world, held at bay by all that tension and all that protection, can finally flow in-- we can interact with the world around us, experience it through our senses. 

Of course, one of the things that often happens when we soften our hard bits is that we start to feel the things that made us want to harden ourselves in the first place. It’s not that wild rose makes people cry, or makes them angry, its that if you’ve been protecting yourself from a deep well of grief, or a deep well of anger, then rose, in softening that protection, will bring to the surface what was there all along. So keep in mind that a person has to WANT to experience this-- its not our place to force feed wild roses to everyone who’s a bit thorny... 

Wild rose excels at moving stuck anger. Imagine how you feel if you’re angry about something but don’t express it.Anger as an energy is that of boundaries and of forwards movement: you get angry because something violates your boundaries, and then anger has you moving TOWARDS that which violated you. Except even in situations where we are actually safe to express our anger, we live in a society where very few people are actually raised and taught to do so healthily, so we don’t express it. And then it festers, digs deeper, becomes something different, darker, less mutable. Anger that’s held inside and not expressed becomes a hard lump over time. But it’s the same with anything that’s meant to be moving and can’t: it has to go somewhere, and when locked in the body it turns into a festering stagnation. 

Similarly, when you have a stress reaction, your body is flooded with adrenaline, and the purpose of that adrenaline is to give you the energy to MOVE (away from the tiger, away from the source of stress; towards the tiger to fight, because you’re a badass). Except, in modern life, the source of stress is not always something we can run away from or fight. Stuck in traffic, we get stressed because we want to be somewhere: we might be late, we might have ice cream melting in the shopping bag. We are flooded with the adrenaline to make us move and then we have to sit still. This happens at work, when you have a deadline and you’re aware of this ticking clock behind you metering out the time that is running out (in fact, just thinking about time running out at all makes me start to feel this tension rise up, which is one of the reasons I cover the clock on my computer!). This movement energy has nowhere to go and so we hold it in our bodies, and it makes us feel like we’re going to explode. 

Rose unwinds the stuck-ness that is often rooted in old grief, old trauma. These are things that get locked in our body when they happen, because we don't know how to process them, or are unable to process them: feeling pain is rotten; why wouldn’t we block it off to hold it at bay? Every time these patterns are triggered, however, we live them out, again and again. I've seen rose help with this so many times: to slowly and gently start to ease the tension holding these traumas in place.

With trauma, we grow up not really able to trust the world around us, and not really able to trust ourselves either. This creates a deep underlying sense of fear that comes out in lots of ways (panic attacks, anxiety, depression being the most common). It doesn’t even need to be the kinds of trauma that most people think of as deep trauma. Losing our favourite teddy bear at just the right age for it to damage you can damage you, and our own traumas are our own. But when we do, you create this low-level underlying tension, like we’re constantly bracing for the next blow. This tension makes us alert, but at a cost, because it uses a LOT of energy and we end up feeling unsafe all the time. And rose, gently, patiently, softens it. At its core, rose is a medicine of deep trust, deep vulnerability and deep softening—allowing us to deeply trust ourselves and our bodies, and to trust the world around us. As a result, we can reach out and touch the world around us, but even more importantly, let it in to touch us back.     

Read more: Kiva's article
Found in: Wild rose elixir, wild rose & sandalwood body oil, wild rose & sandalwood bath soak, 

Kava // Piper methysticum
-when you're too stressed for pleasure

jim mcdonald and I were chatting about kava and how uniquely itself it is. All plants are uniquely themselves, of course, but some actions can be approximated with combinations of other herbs. Kava, however, is in its own place entirely. It's one of those otherworldly, mind-altering relaxants that does something so magical to your body, brain and energy that there's nothing else in the world like it. 

In his article, jim says "What is so distinct about kava kava is that it's so promptly and significantly relaxant; mental stress subsides as a result of relaxation, not sedation.  In fact, while the body lets go, mental acuity remains...you can definitely take kava and still be cognitively functional."

And I agree, though for me, it's a form of relaxed that makes me want to MOVE, dance, create, explore. I think, what kava does is unwind whatever tension there is that's holding us back from our creativity, our sensuality, our exuberant enjoyment of life. So many of us would be much more creative and carefree if not for the giant stress loads we carry around. Kava doesn't take the things away (it doesn't put you in a bubble like, say, cannabis does) but it does relieve your tension so that you can shine through regardless of the stress load. 

Anxiety: 

This 'easing' of tension applies to other areas too. Anxiety for example. Anxiety, the way I see it, is fear energy getting stuck somewhere (and often for long periods of time). What I mean by that is, fear is a reaction to a stimulus that's supposed to get us moving. We release adrenaline, we get ready to run, or fight. For many of us, life is so stressful that we're constantly in a place where we experience fear and yet we're stuck in place and have nothing to fight against except ourselves. That energy that gets released to get us moving gets trapped in the body, often in the chest, and that's when we start to feel anxious. If we do this over long periods of time (or say we have a trauma or series of traumas in life that cause us to continuously experience lots of fear and we don't know how to, or don't have the option to express it), then it builds and builds until the tiniest trigger can cause a cascade of fear-reactions which in most peoples' language get translated to anxiety, panic attacks, etc.

Kava can really help with this. By relaxing the tension that's holding all that old fear in place, you can start to move the fear out. It'll stop anxiety in the moment, of course (I'll never forget my first class EVER, where I was so scared, I took way too much kava, and the first, incredibly high words out my mouth in public were 'ah f**k I took too much kava'), but over the long-term, using it to help relax and release old fear can be really magic. 

Aphrodisiac: 

Another area that kava works really nicely is as an aphrodisiac. It's not the kind of thing that you can hand to anyone and they're all of a sudden magically turned on. It's not going to make up for not being attracted to someone, or having no chemistry. But, where kava absolutely excels with regards to sex is with people who are too stressed for sex. If going on vacation puts you in the mood to get it on with your partner. If half a drink at the end of the work day all of a sudden turns your mind off spreadsheets and onto bedsheets (I just came up with that one and am pretty proud, btw). If your partner giving you a glass of wine and a massage, or a foot massage (!!!!!) is the biggest turn on ever, try kava kava. A neck and back massage with kava infused oil will pretty much lead to the best sex ever. Or a hot kava bath, followed by a kava massage. Or kava infused coconut oil as lube. Or, well, there are lots of possibilities here, and I recommend trying them all. Also, you're welcome :). 

Read more: jim's article
Found in: Deep roots bath salts, deep roots body oil, kava hot cocoa

Ocotillo // Fouqieria splendens

-when there is trauma, preventing pleasure. 

Ocotillo stands like a sentinel in the desert, blending into the background for much of the year until the rains start and then its leaves sprout within hours, a magnificent show of greenery.

Ocotillo is a deep energy mover. It moves energy in the pelvis, in the blood, in the deep, old energy of the body. It dredges it up gently, softly, calmly, bringing it to the surface, moving it through the liver so that it can be processed (in the case of toxins) and through the consciousness so that it can be processed (in case of grief and trauma). Ocotillo teaches us about who we are in an interesting way: helping us to dredge up that which is stuck or buried, helping us to see who we are underneath all the crap we carry along with us for the ride. Covered in thick spikes that you have to navigate carefully in order to touch the it, ocotillo’s thorns act as a protective barrier and yet, the real secret of ocotillo is that its thorns are made from its soft, waxy, open leaves. Ocotillo teaches us that it's entirely possible to remain open and yet have boundaries, and that our softest parts can become our strengths. 

With regards to eros and pleasure, Sophia Rose writes about ocotillo medicine, saying that "Ocotillo puts us back in touch with our wild instincts. For those who have experienced trauma, sexual or otherwise, and have lost their sense of agency and self ownership, or perhaps never known it to begin with – there is no better remedy. Ocotillo helps you to reclaim your creative power and your right to truly feel. It is a plant which governs the fluids of the body as well as the fluidity with which we move, and move through the world."

Read more: On ocotillo

Found in: Ocotillo + Rose heart center elixir, wild rose & sandalwood body oil, wild rose & sandalwood bath soak, 

4. Recipes

Damiana infused honey

1 cup of damiana
2 cups of honey

Add both ingredients to a jar, and store somewhere warm (I keep on top of my stove, where its always warm-ish but not hot). After a month, strain through a sieve (you might need to warm the honey a bit more before straining). Store in a jar and use in teas, drizzled over desserts and just eaten on a spoon. 


Damiana + Kava bath

Mix one cup of damiana and one cup of kava in a stock pot full of water. Bring to a boil and boil for 20 minutes, then strain into a hot bath. Soak for as long as needed. Extra nice if you can follow with a massage from someone who's touch you enjoy. 


Damiana smoke blend
(inspired by a gorgeous smoke blend my friend Shana makes)

1 part damiana
1 part tulsi
1 part rose

Combine in a bowl and store in an airtight container. Can be smoked in a pipe or rolled into cigarettes.