Spiritual Sensuality: the Unexpected Key to Black Women’s Wellness

There is a need for wellness that is culturally relevant to black women and that addresses the challenges we face in our lives. Challenges like chronic stress and lifestyle disease are completely ignored by the mainstream wellness industry which is mainly focused on superficial pampering that provides no relief or change in our lives, families and communities. Revealing the connection between sensuality, spirituality and health was designed to highlight achieving wellness from the inside out, with the ultimate solution to design a lifestyle that makes wellness easy and sustainable on a substantive level.

What is Spiritual Sensuality?

Spiritual sensuality is the merging of mind, body and spirit, through the pathway of our senses to access (divine) individual power. Often, religion requires the separation of  body and mind to achieve spiritual growth. Spiritual sensuality actually values and honors body and mind through pleasure, joy and fulfilling soft life experiences to open up to inner wisdom, creative potential and the strength of manifestation. 

Why spiritual sensuality now?

There’s been a lot of movement with LifeBliss recently, and we’re just getting started! Part of this movement is getting back to its very roots. For those of you who have been here since way back in the mid 1990s, tantra and spiritual sensuality was a big part of the LifeBliss practice. It was named, “life coaching from a tantric perspective”. 

LifeBliss website archive Courtesy: the Wayback Machine

LifeBliss slowly shifted the focus away from spiritual sensuality and tantric teachings because of the craziness that resulted from most people thinking of tantra as tantric sex. At the time there was a cable tv special about tantra that was just all kinds of wrong. The LifeBliss message of everyday sensuality for wellness kept being misunderstood. It may have lacked clarity, but also the timing was off. The last straw was when someone hired me to teach them sex magick (which I don’t know and made that clear) to win back an ex-lover… lordamercy. Sensuality and sex/sexuality are NOT the same.

Well, LifeBliss never fully left spiritual sensuality and tantric teachings behind, it was lurking in the background or even maybe watered down and pushed to the side for a minute and perhaps took a few steps backwards to finally move forward. 

Everyday sensuality for health and wellness

Let’s talk about how sensuality in daily life is essential to overall wellness. Sensuality is the basis for conscious living, mindfulness, and how we experience our bodies. Sensuality can help reduce anxiety and inflammation, promote better sleep and food choices, and create and maintain an overall feeling of happiness and well being. So practicing sensuality is not limited to savoring life, it is a very important tool for the practice of mindfulness, and enhances the benefits of mindfulness and meditation exponentially. This is because sensuality can be experienced in every single part of our lives, 24/7. There is no need to be seated with crossed legs and closed eyes and is not limited to the familiarly patriarchal rules of spirituality.

Everyday sensuality is at the core of the wellness paradigm that centers black women with:

• Food & lifestyle freedom from diet culture
• Minimizing the personal, family and community effects of anti-blackness
• Stress management and self care
• Mastering mindfulness, intention and intuition for self discovery and independence
• Body neutrality and respect
• Creativity and artistic pursuits
• Purpose and clarity to guide decision making
• Joyful healthy living without fear and rules

But what is sensuality, really?

In many ways we are taught that sensuality takes us away from our spirits, our divine existence, and is something bad to be avoided. We need to allow ourselves to forget the sexualized depictions of sensuality written in dictionaries or admonishments against sensuality framed as indulgently wicked debauchery, with a focus on self gratification and promiscuity found in various religious texts.

At its neutral base, sensuality simply means of the senses, our connections to our physical world. It’s the sensation of a balmy breeze on our cheeks on a summer evening. It’s the aroma of the flowers on a honeysuckle bush. It’s the beauty of the glow of our melanated skins. It’s the warmth of a sweet baby cradled in our arms. It’s the dazzle of the stars in the sky at night. It’s the delightful sweetness of our grandmother’s peach cobbler. 

Sensuality can be pleasurable but it is also practical. We need our senses to survive and to thrive in the world. Sensuality is a connection to our deeper selves and higher powers. Audre Lourde, American writer, womanist, radical feminist, professor, and civil rights activist, on sensuality, which she calls the erotic (When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.)

THERE ARE MANY kinds of power, used and unused, acknowledged or otherwise. The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling. In order to perpetuate itself, every oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for change. For women, this has meant a suppression of the erotic as a considered source of power and information within our lives.

~Audre Lourde, Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power

My personal experience with sensuality as a spiritual practice

It began decades ago, when I was working as a professional bellydancer. I was looking for a way to create a deeper way to express myself through movement. My research led me to stumble upon tantra. What is tantra? Tantra is a spiritual path, a set of practices, and a way of living in authenticity– learning to fully accept what is good, bad, cute, and ugly about yourself. The word is Sanskrit, and it means to weave, as to connect the mind, body and spirit as one.

Tantra as a healing medium

Each one of us has a physical body and an energy body. The energy body has been known and documented by ancient yogis for centuries but only recently discovered by modern scientists and quantum physicists. Tapping into these energy centers (chakras) presents a gradual ascension to self determination and independence. The practices of tantra help us to detect these extremely subtle but important energies and allow them to move throughout the body freely. The universal energy is also called spirit, life force, chi, prana, or creative energy.

Tantra“… is a rich, active practice of sensual stimulation with music, art, movement, breath work, visualization, and the worship of the divine in others and the self. Tantra inspires a lifestyle that goes beyond form and integrates a spiritual practice fully into our entire being and daily experiences.”

~Ipsalu Tantra International

“…Tantra is a spiritual philosophy that originated in the Indian subcontinent and dates back to at least the 8th century AD. Meaning “to weave” in Sanskrit, tantra has since found its way into everything from Hinduism and Buddhism to western pop culture. The tantric belief sees the world as imbued with a divine feminine energy – “shakti” – that we must access if we are to transcend our own ego and reach an enlightened liberation”

~Ammar Kalia, The art of tantra: is there more to it than marathon sex and massages?

Black women and sensuality

I began to adapt my everyday life to incorporate tantric teachings and later, a more individualized and authentic spiritual sensuality practice that phased out the teachings that felt like cultural appropriation and whitewashed imitation of a south Asian tradition, albeit well meaning. What I was left with was very practical and effective ways to live well, on my own terms. It was so freeing to be able to identify and create a meaningful practice that allowed me to tap into my own unique sensuality to become more aware and present and connect with a higher spirit. That higher spirit includes myself, and gives me the clarity and knowledge to take care of myself without the need for external sources’ guessing games.

Black women, no matter where we are, are inherently sensual beings. Our deep richness, beauty, roundness, emotions, and love are all things to be experienced through vision, touch, sound, smell, taste, and body awareness, et cetera. One can argue that everyone is sensual but this is one of the areas in which sistas are just, extra. And I mean that in the best possible way, and I so love that about us. It’s hard to imagine a coincidence that anti-sensuality, like diet culture and mainstream wellness as not also deeply anti-black woman when the common narrative is of us being unattractive, immoral, unhealthy and ungodly when the whole exact opposite is true. Anti sensuality is anti black power and anti woman power, and must be overcome if we are to reach our true potential.

Sensuality and the future of black women’s wellness

Right now we are seeing a need for spiritual sensuality because we are redefining wellness for black women. Wellness, in its recent iteration, is something that doesn’t speak to many black women and the everyday challenges that we face. It’s just a mish-mash of whitewashed feel good stuff that’s expensive and has very little to offer in terms of  far reaching benefits. It’s time for black women to tap into their feminine spirits and sensuality to create their happiest, healthiest lifestyles on their own terms. LifeBliss Wellness is here to lead this transformation.

What does it look like? You don’t have to be into yoga, meditation or bubble baths to bring wellness into your lifestyle. We begin with mindfulness and presence. Paying attention to what’s inside and around you is the first step to defining what makes you shine. For this, we rely on our senses while deliberately letting go of external influences about what mainstream culture thinks wellness looks like. Health and happiness go hand and hand and look different for each person. Gaining the courage to explore your world through your own senses and intuition is an extremely invigorating and powerful experience. You are invited to begin your own spiritual sensuality journey starting right now. Sign up for the LifeBliss Wellness (sorta) weekly messages for more.