Understanding Sensuality

Article Tools

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

I don’t mean to imply that our sexual encounters and precious days off are failures because they include a little anxiety or goal-setting or windsurfing. I just want to suggest how sneaky our resistance can be to real sensuality. Sensuality is a form of giving up: of our goals, hopes, agendas for the next five years or five minutes. A surrender of our purposeful, planned, care-taking, self-improving personas to the sheer presence of the world. Being sensuous means being endowed with senses, and that taking voluptuous pleasure in them is enough. Enough, at least, for this moment, which ought to feel like forever.

There is, of course, a great deal in our American heritage that makes us run away, screaming, from this proposition. Puritan holiness and our long-running business culture both abhor idleness, the only true prerequisite for sensuousness. Idleness can seem at the same time too aristocratic and too plebeian for our relentlessly middle-class outlook: Only the most effete exquisites, says the anxious striver residing inside most of us, have the money and the time to savor the difference between five different kinds of green tea. Only the hopeless ne’er-do-well, with nothing left to lose, can afford to spend an afternoon on the public beach, happy for the lukewarm water between his toes and the sun on his back. Drunks, junkies, and those who can’t handle life as we know it are the ones who surrender to their senses.

And it’s not just mainstream Anglo culture that frowns at sensual indulgence. Recent immigrants, wherever they may hail from, are strivers. And they see folks who take too many sensuous breaks from the demand for bustle and uplift as letting down the team.

The biggest block to sensuous enjoyment may simply be the strange painfulness that many of us feel when our minds are not occupied. This is more than a socio-historically induced sense of guilt. It’s visceral: our intolerable inner voices, a restlessness we can’t explain, an emptiness we think we need to quickly fill. And even deeper inside, there’s what Buddhists call the monkey mind, the endless, buzzing productivity of the psyche: memories, dreams, reflections, fantasies; all manner of mental flotsam, churning endlessly upward from some inexhaustible source. We swerve, almost by reflex, away from this experience of chaotic psychic activity. We may fear, too, that we will be overwhelmed by feelings—that will swarm over us like an army of ants if we try to open up to the sensuous by simply sitting back, exhaling, and being here now in blessed idleness.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print