Oana
Hello and welcome to a brand new episode of our Uncut The Feminine Podcast. As usual, I’m Oana, founder of The Feminine, an online platform dedicated to women all over the world. And for the last 14 years, I’ve been a transformational coach, focusing the last seven years of my life on empowering women, to find and trust their voices, follow their hearts, and embrace all that they are as women. The Feminine is the embodiment of my coaching method, and it brings together really tried and true practices of coaching and spiritual practices, a full body of work with the intention of meeting all your questions and concerns and even curiosities regarding what makes a woman the feminine universe. And every Tuesday, we knock at your door with stories and exercises and tips and tricks that are meant to help you better understand who you are and what you can actually express in the world as a woman. Since our first episode, we’ve gone through a lot of inner Chambers that compose the feminine universe. Passion, sensuality, intimacy, emotions, ritual, feminine spirituality. And today, we want to take a brief pause and come back to a very important topic, sensuality.
Why? Well, you kind of all the time have, like, a second thought in your head that sensuality might actually be that secret weapon that will make you so magnetic, so fully alive, so present, that will just energetically open all the doors for you, and you’ll just have your red carpet. It’s kind of true. But yet again, we never take the time to explore our sensuality in a safe way, in a relaxed way, maybe in a free of guilt or shame way. And we want to explore on this episode of The Feminine Cat podcast today, together with my colleague Ioana, how are we going to dive into the deep waters of sensuality. What awakens us? And what are the benefits if we take it to the next level of practice? Hi, Ioana.
Ioana
Hi. I’m laughing now, and I was laughing while you were reading your intro because I was thinking, even though I know you already for some long time and I’ve been listening and watching, attending actually your workshops and your free events and watching you doing webinars. I never get bored. I never, ever get bored. And I usually get bored very easily. I don’t know if I’ve ever told you this.
Oana
But no, not really.
Ioana
Why? Because I’m totally fascinated by you. I am fascinated by you. And I noticed attending your workshops that all the people are fascinated by you. You’ve got something that French people call helicopters. It’s sort of a charm. It’s in the way you speak, it’s in the passion you put in the words you are addressing to your audience. It’s even in the way you love. And every time I’m thinking, what secret? What’s her secret? Everybody has a secret. What’s your secret?
Oana
Well, I think it’s passion, passion for being alive. I really don’t engage with the conversation that your life should be miserable and you should be feeling miserable, even if you have miserable moments and stages in your life. So the passion for aliveness. I think that’s the secret. And the secret that made this probably such a very self-expressed way of being was sensuality, actually for me, was practicing my sensuality as a way of becoming fully present in my body, fully alive right now, right here.
Ioana
It’s not random that I started with this question and with this confession because even though I’m learning what you say about sensuality being very methodological, I always had that impression. That is the key to that. It’s not necessarily in doing the right steps, but in the way you’re feeling, the way you were doing it.
Oana
And I would really like you if it’s possible to walk us a little bit through how essentiality can be part of every single second of our life by understanding that it has to become a way of being. And when you take sensuality and move it from a theory or a word or something that you connect like a way to seduce something, because usually, that’s how we tap into adolescence with sensuality. All you have to seduce cement. You have to become sensual and seductive and charming and attractive, and everybody likes you. But actually, sensuality is so much about how I feel and how much I feel and how that turns my passions and my feminine energy alive that it has nothing to do with how I look on the outside for somebody looking at me back when I’m central. And I think this is one of the things that when you tap into, you can never go back. It’s like a drug because sensuality is really a very fundamental, intimate part of who we are as women. And it’s very connected to the body, and it’s very connected to relaxing and being at ease in your body and having the vulnerability to open all your senses up.
Oana
And just that flowering inside the blossoming that happens when you practice sensuality makes you become fully present, fully alive in your body. So you experience life at an intensity that becomes very fulfilling.
Ioana
Is it a skill you developed or is it a skill you were born with, or is it both?
Oana
It’s not a skill. It’s a way of being, and you cultivate it. And I think all women, all little girls have it, and then we lose it because we are not surrounded by wise women who cultivate it so we don’t learn the actual rituals and practices that do cultivate sensuality and do make it blossom. And we lose it because we face our environment, and the environment we face is very aggressive, very masculine, very bombarding us with a lot of information, a lot of energy, mixed energy, mixed information that in a way abuses our senses. So we gradually, slowly shut down and we get our channels that are connected to our senses clocked. And sensuality. Yes. At a very exterior level, you feel it as a magnetic pool, as an attractiveness, as a charming experience of somebody, but at a very inner level, in your own inner experience. It is the art of being alive. It is the art of being in your body.
Ioana
The way you make it sound is more like sensuality can be healing. It’s not like you need to heal yourself from whatever bad or past experience you have so that you can be sensual. You make it sound like sexuality is healing.
Oana
Yes, exactly. You just captured my thought. I was in a taxi today coming towards our podcast, and I was actually thinking that for all of us businesswomen who have a lot of charged, intense careers, and we all think that we have to make it like the men and we tend to become so aggressive. And actually, I think practicing your sensuality cultivating, is that secret weapon not only to become more charming but to feel so good. And it is in your body all the time that you are able to run all those eight to 12 hours a day of work without feeling burned out. Because it’s so unnatural for women not to be sensual. And the moment you start practicing it’s not a healing, it’s coming back to who you are, which can occur as a healing because sometimes we are so disconnected that it feels like a healing. But it’s just the most natural way of being. And when we are tuned in with our natural way of being, we perform in ways that just burst performance charts completely off normal standards because we are aligned. We’re through, we’re in tune with who we are.
Oana
So we just flow.
Ioana
Can you tell us more about the practices you are talking about the practice for practicing your sensuality?
Oana
Well, sensuality in ancient times was the art of femininity. It was one of the ways in which you would honor the feminine energy. And I think the philosophy behind that is very important for us women because we need to understand living a feminine way is not just about honoring how you look or, you know, giving yourself respect or going to the spa it’s even more than that. It is a way of living and flowing with life, which includes allowing space for the things that make you blossom and make you all the time more connected to your body, more connected to your emotions, more connected to this fluid and flowing like the moon faces or the waters way of being so sensuality in ancient times was a way for young girls and women to always connect with who they were on a core level as women. And it was embodied through the practice of tuning in with your emotions, sharing your emotions in a circle of other women because that would flow. It would be flowy of your inner waters. It will always be about awakening your senses and respecting the intensity that they bring. So every time you’re connected with a sense, whether it’s hearing, smell, or touch you’re actually cultivating and developing your sensuality because it’s a practice of feeling more, of becoming more aware.
Oana
So it’s a practice that enhances the observer, enhances the quality of your life while you’re living your life every time you touch your body with complete smooth awareness and loving embrace with no need to judge it or try to make it perform in a sexual environment just like easily touching your body and most of the times not through somebody else’s hands but through your own hands because this is a more intimate way of inner feeling yourself and just being like a cat and don’t feel that, that’s weird. And spend time cultivating that cat Meow kind of energy with your moods and your swings and your sensations so that you give yourself permission actually give the body permission to move the way it feels moment by moment and it is first a way of being and then it is whatever practice you create around it and then it is something you become.
Ioana
Something you first have to learn how to touch yourself and you don’t necessarily need somebody else to activate your sensuality which remembers me of a quote. I don’t remember exactly the movie where I heard it. It was something like you cannot expect to make love with somebody else if you cannot make love with yourself. Is it the same with sensuality? You cannot expect somebody to come and just make you feel sexy. It’s something you have to grow on your own yes.
Oana
Sensuality for me is a gate into sexuality and I want to take a little bit of time to explain and explore the differences yes.
Ioana
Please because we always made this confusion.
Oana
Sexuality, especially in our Western culture is really something that takes five minutes, unfortunately, and it really is something very located to our passion area or genitals or our naval and it’s very direct, it’s a very shortcut. You go there, boom, boom, you have it and that’s it and there’s nothing else involved except your pure sexual being or animal. When do I say sensuality is the gate into sexuality on a very full, open, fulfilling expression of it because sensuality actually is the first step into the awakening of a full sexual self what does that mean? In sensuality, we do not engage with sexuality. We touch the body from toe to head just because we adore the body and just because we want to feel every inch of the body being awakened. So the experience is not sexual and we’re not looking for a sexual outcome, we’re just connecting with our inner self and maybe with our partner but not to arrive somewhere in ancient times, this was done to little girls by women they were learned through the dancing, through the touch how to connect with their whole body so that their whole body was on a live instrument that could create music.
Oana
It would touch the inner being of that person. It would anchor the soul into the experience of touch so that then when somebody would touch you or you would touch somebody, it would be with your soul, not just your body. It would be a very profound awakening slowly, slowly of all the subtle layers of one being, which is different from a five-minute Bank Bank. If I were to be very direct. So that is sensuality and then full-blown sexuality is what Awakens inside of that touch, inside of that environment which is your full sexual energy and moving that sexual energy through your body from toes to the head in full-blown ecstasy. Well, that’s a different kind of story.
Ioana
It sounds like the fundamentals of sensuality lie in vital energy because if I’m thinking now all the time when we cannot feel awakened enough or connected to our senses enough so that we can feel Sandra is because we are tired or gloomy or bored and this links to vital energy, is it true?
Oana
Yes. Or numb?
Ioana
Yeah.
Oana
I had a participant in one of my workshops last week saying, yeah, but I don’t feel anything. You keep sending me to this party of senses. They had the assignment to do a sense awakening party and I was like, I hate it, I don’t want to go to this party. You make me go to this party but I don’t feel anything. I feel numb, I want to quit. And I’m like, honey, you feel numbed because that’s exactly how everybody feels in the process of awakening their senses if they’re living with an uncultivated way of sensuality or uncultivated senses. And she was like, what? Really? Yes, because we’re living in such an environment that is not connected to our senses. That part of who we are right now in the present moment is more connected to feeling numb, to feeling depleted, to feeling tired, or overburdened because it’s directly linked to our senses. It’s directly linked to how much we’re not using our senses in the way we live life. We’re mostly using our mind and our mind has a very anxious way of being. So all the time we’re cultivating our anxiety, our anxious self through the mind, the moment we tap into our sensual self and we start awakening senses step by step we start cultivating and living the present way of being.
Ioana
So it’s important to not get discouraged. If you start a process and you start to activate and to work with your senses step-by-step like tasting something sweet or smelling perfume or some essential oils. And if we don’t feel anything or if our experience of not so intense, what we feel it’s there. It’s important to not get discouraged and to keep going. Baby steps, one step at a time.
Oana
It grows, it will grow and at first, it may show up as a detox stage numbness and negative emotions are detox it’s your body flushing out what has been accumulated through the stress and through your anxiety, and through the overburn and you need to flush that out and your senses are doing this amazing work without involving your mind into it flushing it out and the moment you actually get cleaned from an inner self point of view you start being so alive that you start picking up on details and you never saw before and that’s amazing when people heal or activate their sensuality they become aware of little tiny details of life passing through them that they never saw before can activate your sensuality become from a point also a spiritual experience? Yes it can become because the moment you cultivate your senses long enough through a devoted practice, through a devoted set of rituals they become extra sensorial channels of communication with the outside world and with your inner world and that also can be very linked to activating your prophetic abilities your capacity to feel, see, hear the unseen what’s not really visible on a matter level so women through their sensuality in the most pleasant way possible were actually cultivating their wisdom and their capacity to feel through their intuition through their senses that were getting more involved what has yet to come, what is not yet fully presently embodied in matter what is going to come and they would be feeling the future through energy through their intuition hearing it, seeing it in their visions because their senses were in a way receptacles going ahead of time out of their body connecting to the future and bringing that information in the present it’s totally
Oana
a spiritual path I know you are working on a master class for the feminine on sensuality more specifically and I was wondering if you can give us some small insight even a small practice that we can take with us home and do on a daily basis so that we can get to the point you are talking about working with our senses so that we can arrive to the spiritual experience of sensuality go outside in the park and make this funny exercise of sitting on a bench and close your eyes for two minutes and then open your eyes and look at everything 360 degrees just look with nothing else and then close your ears and feel the silence and then just open up the noise and try to tap into all the noises in that park or forest or garden then look at the flower and look at every single detail of that flower and close your eyes and look at it again and see what do you see? It’s a few very refined subtle ways of connecting with our environment that develop our senses and in such a way awaken our sensuality and I promise you if you do that for 21 days it takes ten minutes a day something radically shifting in becoming present it’s a very ecartolla experience.
Oana
It’s a very full-on but very feminine way experience of coming in the present out of your mind here in the now I’m laughing again because this was one of the first talks you gave me when we met and started working together.
Ioana
And it was like, what is she talking about? No, I’m not going to go in a park and just trust, okay, I’m doing this. But I cannot expect to radically change my life. And I did not do that, of course, on a daily basis like your advice, but I did it from time to time, skipping classes and homework. And funny enough is that after a few months, I found myself. I swear I’m joking. I found myself automatically going to the park whenever I felt down, gloomy, tired, and anxious things we feel all the time. And I realized that only after a while. And I said, oh my God, this is actually working. And I wasn’t even aware of it. Yes, it’s working and it’s like this, but you just have to do it.
Oana
It’s working and you become dependent on it because it is your access to shifting whatever negative experience sensation you have going on in your body, which is normal as everybody does into something positive. So it becomes a spiritual practice of always saying, hey, life, you bring to me all this stress I give you, wellbeing, this is my commitment. I give you well-being. And it enhances in time through devoted practice, your capacity to not tap into stress anymore, to become relaxed in your inner universe. And it’s an amazing experience of living life that way. Totally amazing. And for those of you who are still not grasping the concept, the easiest way is when you do something healthy, like a yoga class or you drink a smoothie that’s green, fully green or I don’t know, you go into a park and you stay there for 45 minutes, something very fresh and you feel good all the time. At some point in the process, you feel good, your body kicks in with aliveness that’s sensuality.
Ioana
But is it important to do it consciously to drink a smoothie while being aware that we are doing something healthy for our bodies?
Oana
Well, if you bring awareness to it, it just enhances your spiritual practice. Awareness enhances everything. It’s just like a boost. So yeah, it totally works. But I think what’s different between feeling your sensuality in a yoga class and taking time to become sensual as a way of living life is that you will feel like in the yoga class all the time, which is a different way of living life, totally worth it. And you’re just practicing something that makes you pleasant and feels good all the time. So that’s not such a bad thing.
Ioana
And you don’t have to live in Bali to be able to do that. Ain’t it true?
Oana
No, you don’t have to live in Bali and I think Bali works, but not all of us will move there. And it’s not about that. It’s not about being exotic. It’s about feeling alive. You can feel alive right now, right here.
Ioana
So it’s important just to start doing it and to keep doing it.
Oana
Yes and yes.
Ioana
And now can you tell us something more about the masterclass?
Oana
The masterclass I’m preparing, and we’re going to launch it soon. So stay tuned. It’s totally created as an experience that helps you make a profound shift, energetic shift into awakening yourself on a very deep level as a woman. That’s the intention. It is about awakening your senses, healing all those layers that we sometimes put on our inner being as a way to protect ourselves from pain or from hurt past or future. It is a way of dear Mooring, in a way, the layers that numbed us because we experience sexuality or sensuality in our adolescence or through our teenage years in a way that wasn’t fully honoring our body and our soul. And it is a way of tapping into that art of being sensual and magnetic as a woman period, whether you use it for manifesting abundance in your life or you use it to feel good in your own skin, or you use it to have vital energy to do the work you’re meant to do and pursue your career, or you use it to have amazing men in your life chasing you and wanting to be around you. I’m saying men because most of the time what happens when you cultivate your sensuality is that it will be a list of men, and then you pick up one or two or three.
Oana
I’m joking, but it really is being alive. And the benefits of that and the ripples of that in every aspect of your life beyond men and totally including men.
Ioana
See, that’s the way you’re speaking about passion and sexuality. That’s what I was saying at the beginning. But I want to add something because I have a little bit of access in backstage. And it’s important to mention that I know that you started developing this workshop because many women who attended your live workshops kept on asking you, but don’t you do something that you can take with us at home meditation practices that we can do on weekends or when you are not doing the live workshops? Is it true?
Oana
Yeah, it’s true. They were requesting that. And I think it’s good, a program, and it’s better than a live event because you have it all the time. It’s going to be videos and lessons and meditations. And it’s amazing because you can take those meditations and do it again and again and again. And they create an environment that can sustain your evolution in your sensuality. And I decided to open up our coaching programs on the platform with sensuality because there are so many sexuality programs out there. Everybody is doing sex work at this moment, and it’s good and it’s amazing. But I think for women, it’s the second stage. And I think we need to address sensuality because it is the awakening moment, the blasphemy moment of womanhood. And yes, we will become sexual beings, amazing country cars, and wild beasts in the bedroom. And not only but once we tap into the purity and the innocence and the fully awakened capacity to feel confident in our body and relaxed in our senses, then we become this very grounded, very confident, very mysteriously enigmatic women who can be a bit in the bedroom or have an amazing orgasm but have a broader experience of life.
Oana
And that’s very enticing for men because it taps something into their unconscious mind. I’m not going to get bored here after all those orgasms. I’m still going to want something from this woman because there’s a mystery going on behind the scenes, and that’s very enticing and sensuality does that sensuality brings the mystery into your life, into your body, and it makes the men want more again and again.
Ioana
I think I’m going to be the first buyer of this program. And it has an added bonus of Privacy because many women are a bit shy to open up to their sensuality in public workshops or in online workshops. And this program, I imagine, gives them the Privacy they need.
Oana
Yeah. And we’re totally there supporting them and helping them through their own ride and their own inner process. I totally recommend it. You can definitely see I love the subject, which is true. I do. I have a personal attachment to it because it brought so much to me, and I think it brings a lot in our womanhood. So, yeah. Join us. Stay tuned.
Ioana
Okay. And this is my last question because I know you are able to speak about sensuality for many hours. I know this from my own experience with you. So just tell us at the end of the podcast. When is the master class going to be live and available for anyone who wants to enroll in March?
Oana
So stay tuned. The first week of March, we’re launching it, and you can have all the information for the newsletter. And we’re preparing some webinars and some live events that can help you and educate you. And you can bring your lover to those events also with you. And you can buy it as a gift for yourself. So it’s going to be full of surprises and very carefully chosen information.
Ioana
Okay. Thank you, Oana.
Oana
Thank you, Ioana. Thank you also. So thanks for tuning in. Don’t go before subscribing to our weekly newsletter so you can be the first to get our fanciest stories and best tips on womanhood. You can also jump over to the feminine. Comstarther and find us on Facebook at World of the Feminine. And please, if you’re a woman and you’re living a most extraordinary story or challenge about being a woman right to us. And we’re here as a tribe to totally enhance your story and express it in the world. So write to us at [email protected] and we’ll get your answer and support you fully. Thank you. Have a great day until our next podcast.
