What is emotional health? How does it relate to the health of our tissues, our bodies, our hearts, and our entire lives, and of course, to our Artistic contributions?

I watch social media trends and self help reaching a cruscendo, everyone wanting to be on tip top form, look our best, feel our best all the time, and worry about what this says for authenticity? Do we want unending high vive? That seems pretty boring, inauthentic and uncourageous to me. 

Frida Khalo wrote 'You deserve a lover who wants you disheveled, with everything and all the reasons that wake you up in a haste and the demons that won’t let you sleep. You deserve a lover who makes you feel safe, who can consume this world whole if he walks hand in hand with you; someone who believes that his embraces are a perfect match with your skin.

What this time needs is the courageous authenticity of the artist soul. Not another perfect morning routine, not another perfect passive income scheme or five ways to this and that. What this time needs is genuine authentic soulful human beings with a genuine perspective on things, a perspective that comes from the courage of our feeling being here, in our unique circumstances.

Watch the incredible Mariza sing Gente de Minha Terra live in Lisboa, a timeless vortex of restorative healing deeply human energy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2Ip-uUhaoI

When I consider the people I meet and know who seem to have a radiance of activity, participation, contribution and generosity, these people have an astonishingly clear set of characteristics in common. 

It's so important to ask ourselves what we're doing with our attention, what  we're cultivating. We're in a culture saturated with distraction and entertainment, externally projected ideas of success, yet very few people seem to really be able to plunge into their gifts, nurture them, be on a learning path and develop robust and consistent self esteem. 

Part of the many consequences of late stage capitalism is that so many people have this phenomena of 'low self esteem', this is a modern concept. We've been programmed to believe we gain 'self esteem' from beauty, a fashionable body, a large house and many luxuries around us, yet we actually gain self esteem from being in participation with our environment, and through learning.

What is learning? What is the learning zone?

What is play? How does this differ from entertainment?

Where does a sense of meaning and satisfaction, challenge and contribution really come from? 

How can we bring ourselves back to the very centre and grit of our lives? So we experience a deep sense of creative control that doesn't seek to diminish challenges, or to retreat from life into a permanent zone of comfort and ease, essentially lobotomising ourselves,  but to have a robust enough spirit to view challenges  as the path itself, and to come alive in the real, raw, messy participation with the world.

Solo episode that explores how play, learning and creativity are evolutionary adaptations that feel good in order that we keep doing them, and how most adults are living on autopilot, without genuine learning environments since 'school' 

How to get back into the learning zone, out of entertainment and distraction and take our very real power back, for the arts, for culture, for embodiment, for our lives.

Today is Halloween, or All Hallow's eve, day of the dead in Mexico, which is well known. The Romans also celebrated this thinning of the veils as an opportunity to honour their ancestors, as well as make offerings to what we might now call ‘ghosts’, unrested spirits of dead souls who still try to communicate with the living.

 Many people I know in different spiritual traditions, Neo melange traditions as well as traditions of in tact lineage, mark this time of year, by taking pause from the busy goings on of worldly life in order to acknowledge, in ceremony, in thoughts, in deeds, those who have died. 

In modernity, we see everything as what we can get from life, we look at life with an extractive view and want to squeeze everything we can for the sake of our own enrichment. Traditional cultures, of which we all come from, whatever our skin colour, whatever we’ve come from, coloniser or colonised, we come from small, local traditions that varied depending on landscape, customs, materials available, climate, food and so on… modern humans all thinking and believing similar things is a very recent occurrence, evolutionarily speaking. 

Thousands of years ago, the sun was worshipped, the first glyphs of all culture, long before formalised writing, centred around the symbol for the sun, if that was impersonated into a god or goddess, or simply worshipped as the sun, respect was paid daily to simply being here. 

Modernity has us in a choke hold of thinking if we get everything we want we will be happy, and I so rarely hear people, at the institutional level or the individual level, considering what we can in fact GIVE. Isn’t it the act of sharing our gifts , of plunging all we have of ourselves and offering it to this life, isn’t that the point?

Isn’t that what feels incredible, knits us into a wider geography of life, of the elements, of appreciation? The people I know who are the happiest are those who give daily from their gifts, who do what they do regardless of the money, and if it ends up with them being rich, great, but it was never what they taught. 

Being rich is the natural state of being alive, having a body is such a rich experience, like ghee, or cream, its alive, thick, responsive to its environment. 

Happy all Hallow's eve, you beautiful soul.

With love, 

Loren

Secret Activations is an audio coaching feed for daily invitations to vivacity and embodiment in your art, life and emotional world. Musings and encouragement from speaking with clients, life and my own incessant path of trying to create more authentic artistic work in the time I have on this planet. more details are below 💋

https://loren-lewis-cole.mykajabi.com/the-embodied-vessel-secret-activations-audio-coaching

Beauty lifts us. Pleasure lifts us. Though this lifting isn't an up and out of, it's a simultaneous deepening and embodying. A growth in all directions, and perhaps most importantly, a growth downwards into our being rooted in this life.

To have the audacity in this day and age to be rooted in the unseen, and create from there, bringing our worlds and visions, gifts into this world.

We can get our behavioural reinforcement from the pleasure networks of the brain physiology and be less and less defined by the trauma networks.

Learning happens in the pleasure networks, understanding this, I believe, will change the future of mainstream healing. 

The pleasure vortex is waiting for us. Pleasure doesn't mean only wild sexual abandon, it can be the complete sensual absorption of our focus networks, bringing all of our attention into a state of flow and presence. 

I share my podcast episodes for The Embodied Vessel first with the community of women in Secret Activations Audio Coaching, two weeks before I release them to the public. This, and daily coaching to keep you in line with potency, artistic fire and passion, in a culture that profits from our depressed mediocrity and identification with being only a consumer  🔥🌹

https://loren-lewis-cole.mykajabi.com/the-embodied-vessel-secret-activations-audio-coaching

For more information about Nina's upcoming container Wild Queen you can see here 

https://www.ninapowell.com/event-details/the-wild-queen-experience

You can join Nina's email family and get VERY JUICY updates and teachings from her

https://nina-powell.kit.com/3da97d9a41

She also has a very generous free private podcast here Free private podcast - https://t.me/+SCNF0ybkJjs3ODkx

Like the metabolising of food, the creative process has phases, energetic properties we can support and cultivate, allowing us to embody the challenges, boundaries and explorations that characterise each phase. 

These are the stages I live through and by, and support people in recognising in their own experience so that we can genuinely move through these natural phases and express our contributions and gifts, without stalling and making an identity out of a phase we can't seem to move through.

Emptiness, Inspiration, Play, Articulation, Doing the Work, Cutting the Ties, Delivering the Work.

What's needed on one phase is counter productive in another. I've found this naming of the phases to be deeply helpful in maintaining a robust creative inner life, filled with passion, execution and the essential cutting of ties needed for us to deliver our work into the world.

People aren't laking creativity, insight or contribution, but most have not been given, or give themselves the space to embody and integrate each phase of the process. 

To dive into this deeper, join my explicit and soulful, juicy deep dive into these themes and many others on my private caching feed, The Embodied Vessel Secret Activations, where you can get daily audio on the somatics and permission on living a fully expressed creative life, that brings all of you, not just the juicy bits.

🌸🌹🌸🌹🌸🌹🌸🌹🌸🌹🌸🌹🌸🌹🌸🌹🌸🌹🌸🌹🌸🌹🌸🌹🌸🌹🌸🌹🌸🌹🌸🌹🌸🌹🌸🌹

https://loren-lewis-cole.mykajabi.com/the-embodied-vessel-secret-activations-audio-coaching

Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche

If we don't value the person to person transmission of skills, held in the human nervous system, cellular memory, deepest of kinaesthetic intelligence, we will think it's ok to hand over everything to AI. This cannot be an option in a future where we become  more deeply resourced in our humanity, our dexterity, sensitivity and unique communication style. 

The future is in our hands. WHEN WE WAKE UP OUR HANDS WE WAKE UP OUR PURPOSE. Any embodied skill we practice, will never be a waste of time. 

Not when we have this incredible electromagnetic human body that can store and accumulate skills and abilities that will keep going even if we lose our memory. the body keeps the score.

There are gifts in you that are waiting for your courage. They're packed and ready to be excavated, that must be sacred work.

Dr Roxanne partridge works and celebrates women in the waters that our culture seeks to deny, let alone venerate. 

 She says 'I’m here to show you how to alchemise psychic gold from the shit of your experiences, rapture found on the other side of rupture, and a Queen’s radiance sourced from depths of our encounters with all that seeks to diminish our life force. If you hear the call to more or other, you are more ready than you think you are to transform.

I’ve crossed the thresholds of initiation in countless forms: violations of the body and autonomy; ecstatic bliss of being fully alive and orgasmic, persona deaths, devotion to estuaries, dancefloors, soul retrievals, the full-body rocking held by many hands of women in sacred baths over cliffs beneath the moon, tantra, befriending the archetypal figures who show up in my dreams, mediations, and through my blood. I’ve learned to dance in the flames. Embodying the sacred numinosity of body-mind-heart-spirit-soul as the path through, up and out from the underworld, wings extended.

I mean, COME OOOOOONNNNN!!!!

Join us for this deep and juicy conversation.

Find out about the work Roxanne does here ..  https://embodyperiod.com/about/

on IG https://www.instagram.com/embodyperiod/

Join my Secret Activations Audio Coaching Portal for daily juicy, activating soulful encouragement, straight from my heart. Unfiltered, raw, potent activations!!!

https://loren-lewis-cole.mykajabi.com/offers/FiffGBFL

I'm floored by what happens when we hold a space for another or ourselves in the ritual container of our attention, and nourish the most potent and alive aspects of ourselves. 

Introducing a place I've been in for many years in conversations globally with women I know and love, VOICE NOTE ACTIVATIONS!! I've had it reflected to me many times that my UNHINGED voice notes are inspiring and permission giving to women, and I feel the same with the ones I receive. It has taken me SO LONG to realise this is the thing, the place I've never been able to find - here it is. I am at home in the unhinged deeply honest and expressed spaces of being, and this audio coaching vortex is a place to explore themes that come up in my life and the life of women I connect to. This is a really juicy place- parental guidance warning, we're going to explore embodiment, somatics , healing and taking up space from the a full spectrum experience of sensuality. That means yes our aesthetic practice, and it includes our connection with our skin and bones, all of our bodies and their sexual experience. 

This is the motivational, inspirational, unhinged, juicy and galvanising place I've never been able to find. I am deeply impatient by nature so you can guarantee I'm getting straight into the juice and bones of the subject in each episode, not wasting any time at all, I want to inspire the magical creative weird genius you already are, in all of your manifestations. 

I am BEYOND EXCITED!

See you on the inside 

https://loren-lewis-cole.mykajabi.com/the-embodied-vessel-secret-activations-audio-coaching

Dòri Varga is an interdisciplinary artist who is as deeply sensual as she is intelligent. She has a mind sharp as a razor and an appetite for the edge, which she explores with hunger and courage in her work through her instantly recognisable page Blood of Aurora as well as her work as a solo and collaborative artist. 

Dòri truly has died many artistic and personal deaths in the time I've been following her work, which is about a decade. This woman is sharp and deep and sexy and funny and just has a MASSIVE aura that I know you're going to love. Throughout all of her themes and explorations, the nucleus has been exploring the often hidden experiences of women who birth, bleed, renew, create. Dòri has a distinct artistic signature that pervades everything she does from her exquisite writings and poetry to her sensual self portraits, her explorations of childbirth and sexuality. This woman is here to fully feel and that's expressed in everything she does.

Our conversation was 3.5 hours and goes far and wide. We discuss the courage of being an artist, how this is truly our time as society is crumbling, as it always does, mothering as an artist and getting deep into creative zones whilst being in a family and the challenges of switching states, sexual intimacy, getting into THE ZONE, authenticity, female relationships and so much more.

You can find Dòri's here https://www.instagram.com/dor.ottya/

Blood of Aurora https://www.instagram.com/bloodofaurora/

You can read the article she was working on at the time of this conversation here- 

 https://bloodofaurora.substack.com/p/m-othering-as-erotic-intelligence?r=3990r5&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=post-publish&fbclid=PAZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAadl_QCegjBtT_H9z9RvyKSD5vzYTSn5Oxc5brjrx1pEoZQrv-S8-UhvRu3J-w_aem_Cz5-Wy3PMv_wMf0PFNnr2w&triedRedirect=true