Episode Transcript
Speaker 1 00:00:16
Hi, I'm your host Justine Aksoy, and this is The Pleasure Hood Podcast. A podcast where we explore what it means to be a mother, a leader, and a all around badass from a place of pleasure, empowerment, and turn on. I am here to revolutionize how humans experience sex, pleasure, and motherhood by normalizing self-care, normalizing mothers having desires and normalizing mothers as sensual and sexual beings. Quick side note, you don't have to be a mother in order to listen to this podcast, though I create my work with mothers in mind, this conversation is truly for everyone. I believe that pleasure is one of many paths of healing, and I'm here to highlight how to walk that path no matter who you are. It is my deepest desire that wherever you find yourself on this amazing journey we call life, you can experience your power, your turn on, and of course, orgasmic pleasure.
Speaker 1 00:01:49
Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Pleasure Hood podcast. This is the final Body Love series episode and the final episode of Pleasure Hood Podcast Season three. I had so much fun doing the solo cast this season. I actually had intention of doing all these different interviews on different topics, but doing solo cast felt more in alignment of what I wanted to give you, what I wanted to talk about, what I wanted to say. And this Body Love series was a huge part of that. So I'm so excited that we are ending on the final episode of the Body Love series, and I'm leaving you with some really powerful takeaways of how to bring everything that we've discussed. In the last three episodes of the Body Love series, we have discussed how to have a healthy relationship with your body in order to have more ecstatic, juicy sex with yourself or your partner.
Speaker 1 00:03:09
We've also discussed how to create safety in our body and also understanding the sensations of our body and what our bodies are trying to communicate to us. And now we're going to bring all of those concepts together in order to create a self-love, body love ritual for every day. Now, first of all, if you've heard my voice crack a little, I want to apologize. I am just getting over a cold, and so my voice is not optimal. So please bear with me. Thank you for your patience. And before we get into this Body Love episode, I want to start with the question of what is your self-love language? Now, if you're not familiar with the five love languages in relationships, I invite you to go check that out. It is a book written by Gary Chapman, and basically he talks about five love languages that people use to either show their love to their partner or how they like to receive love from their partner.
Speaker 1 00:04:44
And the five different love languages very quickly are words of affirmation, acts of service, receiving gifts, quality time, and physical touch. And in the past few weeks, I've really been delving deeply into what it means to love yourself. I've been on this healing journey of understanding how to heal my self-worth, how to heal my self-respect, and how that ties into how I love myself. And as I was journaling one day, I was like, what is self love language? And I didn't wanna like create a new list of what self-love language is. So I decided just to go to the the five love languages that already exist that were already written about, and really think about how do I like to show love to myself? What feels the most aligned with where I currently am in life and my relationship with myself? I mean, this could change in the next few weeks, but how do I love myself?
Speaker 1 00:06:07
How do I want to love myself? And what came up for me was not so much how I wanna love myself, but where I desire to heal my love relationship with myself. And the biggest area I would like to heal is words of affirmation. I don't think I affirm myself enough. It's always in my language for myself when I talk to myself, when I talk about myself is always from a place of I could do better, I could heal more, I can fix this. Instead of affirming all the things that more of like all the qualities that I like about myself. I love the fact that I am incredibly compassionate and empathetic. I am always willing to see the other side of what another person is going through before I go into blame, shame, or judgment. I'm not perfect at it, but it's something that I continuously try to practice.
Speaker 1 00:07:23
I love the fact that I am kind. I love being a kind person, smiling to people. I love holding doors for people. I love complimenting people. Another thing that I absolutely love about myself is just the this desire to learn, to grow and expand on things that honestly, I like information I would probably never, ever use again. Like I went down a rabbit hole of learning how to do wigs because it pleased me so much to learn how to properly put on a wig and do an incredible job at it. These
are like little tidbits about myself, about my personality, about how I show up in life that I absolutely just love about myself, but they're also things that I have a tendency to overlook and not affirm and say, yeah, these are amazing things about you. These are things that make you an incredible human being and things that should be celebrated.
Speaker 1 00:08:40
So I really encourage you to do the exact same as we begin to talk about what it means to create a self-love ritual, and especially what that entails when it comes to loving the totality, the wholeness of who you are, what is your self-love language? And I want you to, if you feel called to pause this and think about it, look at the the five love languages. Look them up and see which one that you resonate with the most. And maybe it's not so much the one that you already do for yourself, like I already do plenty acts of services for myself. I already spend quality time with myself. I give myself gifts all the time. I use physical touch as a way to show myself love and nourishment. So words of affirmation felt like an area that I wanted to grow and expand when it came to my personal relationship with myself.
Speaker 1 00:09:54
So perhaps explore what you desire to cultivate when it comes to your self-love language. So with that, I'm gonna go ahead and get into today's episode. Body Love as a ritual, self-love as ritual. Alright, so before I get into it, I just want to start with, I know how buzzworthy and buzzy and popular self-love is nowadays. Everyone is talking about it, especially in self-development, self-empowerment, spiritual spaces. People are always talking about how you need to love yourself more, how you need to practice self-love, what self-love looks like, what it doesn't look like, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And I don't wanna come from like <laugh>, you have to love yourself in order to, I don't know, live a more powerful life. Even though I do find that to be true, and I personally practice it, I know that it's easier said than done and that there's a lot of healing that goes into finding love for yourself, creating an intimate, loving relationship with yourself.
Speaker 1 00:11:22
It is so much easier to do it with another person, with someone outside of yourself because it's easy to see the qualities that you love and admire about another human. It is really difficult to find the things that you love and admire about yourself and to name it and to not feel like it's coming from a place of ego or self-centeredness or you know, you think you're the shit or what have you. But I want you to kind of throw that belief out the door for a moment. And I just wanna say this idea came to me like a while ago while I was jour journaling about, I don't know, probably self-love, self-respect. And one thing I wrote, something that came to me was, if you're not full of yourself, then what's like, who else are you gonna be full of? You have to be full of yourself, big self, higher self, spirit, soul, whatever you wanna call it.
Speaker 1 00:12:37
But you have to be full of that because who else are you supposed to be but yourself, but the ex, ex full expression that you were brought to this earth to be? So yes, you should be full of yourself, and yes, you should be your biggest hype person because to be honest, no one is going to, and I know, I know love you the way that you love yourself. And I say that in a sense of if you require a certain type of love, if you desire a certain type of love and you're not willing to give it to yourself first and foremost, how are you expecting someone else to show up in the way that you truly desire if you're not willing to show up for yourself in the way that you truly desire? So often we look outside of ourselves for the love that we yearn, for, the love that we desire, because it's really scary to look for that within ourselves. And to be honest with you, we're not even taught that that type of love is even possible with ourselves. We're taught that romantic love involves another human being and romantic, sensual, spiritual love. And my deepest humble opinion starts within.
Speaker 1 00:14:14
And in that process, it's about getting to know yourself deeply, intimately, the nooks and the crannies of who you truly are. Digging, excavating, finding, restoring parts of yourself that have been missing or that you've been covering up because you're afraid that if you show it or express it, you won't belong or you won't be loved or someone will leave you. But I always come back to this question of is it worse for someone to abandon you or is it worse for you to abandon yourself? Is it worse for someone to say that they don't know you anymore? Or is it worse for you to walk through this life not knowing who you are and trying to shapeshift and be what you think you need to be in order to be loved, but still coming up empty, still feeling lonely because you feel like you're not fully understood because you don't fully understand yourself.
Speaker 1 00:15:25
These are questions that must be answered before you decide that you are going to practice self-love and body love as a full on ritual every single day. It doesn't have to be perfect, it won't, I don't get it perfectly. I forget to make time for myself because life, as I always say, life be life in and things come up, you get sick, kids get sick, your partner gets sick, family members get sick, or the job gets in the way, or other relationships get in the way. But it's not so important to reflect on like where you haven't been showing yourself self-love. It's about how you can start right now. And today it is a sacred union that you have with yourself. The first union that you should be worried about is the union you have with yourself, your higher self, your soul, because that union and your body, your body is a part of that union because that union is what's going to carry you through life.
Speaker 1 00:16:55
It's that union that's going to tell you to say yes, to say no, to go left, to go right, to accept the job, to say yes to the proposal, to say yes or no, to creating a family, to saying yes or no, to mo up and moving to a new place, to say yes to yourself time and time again. This to me, is a part of the ritual. Yes, I am all about the ritualistic part of actually sitting down and creating sacred space with yourself. Whether that looks like exercising, doing yoga, lighting a candle, praying, meditating, breath work. I am here for all of that. But I am also here for the everyday moments that you are met with the choice to either say yes to yourself or abandon yourself. Because in those moments, those are the moments that stack up and show you the path of, all right, I'm on the path that I actually desire to be on, or where the fuck am I and how did I even get here?
Speaker 1 00:18:17
And you have to look back and see like what choices you made, how you've ignored yourself, how you've abandoned yourself, how you've disrespected yourself, and in order to have a sense of love and belonging outside of yourself. And until you get into right relationship with yourself, with self-love, with self-respect, with self-worth, you're gonna continue to walk down a path that is not in alignment with the truth of who you are. And that is a part of this sacred ritual as I delved into what it means to have self-love as ritual to create sacred union with my body, I realized that my choices were the conduit for that. It was the container for me to practice self-love, self-respect, and self-worth every single day. It was in my choices. The question came to, am I gonna live up to my my personal standards or if I'm gonna live up to other people's standards and happily give away my power?
Speaker 1 00:19:38
Well, not so happily I should say. And that's where having a union with the body, having a communion with the body, listening to the body sensations so deeply important. Because when you have a relationship with your body and you can actually listen to what it's trying to communicate, it will always steer you in the right direction. Even if you're scared as fuck and you're like, oh my gosh, I like this is going to blow up my life. But it feels right. It fe like my body is sending me the sensation of like I am in the wrong place at the wrong time and there's something better for me. But am I brave enough? Am I courageous enough to say yes to that desire that wants me to start anew, that wants me to walk away? Don't get me wrong. I've been in these situations where I'm like, no, I'm good.
Speaker 1 00:20:42
I'm just gonna keep doing what I'm doing because it's comfortable, it's safe or it safe at the time, and this is what I'm gonna do. Don't get me wrong whatsoever. I've done that before plenty of times. But those times that I said yes and was like, nah, this ain't it, and I like walked away, those were the times where my life changed exp explanation like I can't say that word, but like it changed in such a grand, grandiose way that it was undenying, that being in alignment with what my soul and my body was telling me and saying yes to soul and myself, like those were the times my life transformed in ways that I couldn't have even guessed, like jobs being placed in my lap, literally opportunities coming my way. And sometimes it didn't work that way. I would say yes to soul or I say yes to my highest self and I'd be like, Hmm, where's the thing?
Speaker 1 00:21:50
It's not showing up. But it wasn't to get to somewhere. See, sometimes we expect our, we expect to say yes to ourselves, to our higher selves, and we expect like doors to open and like angels to come down. And sometimes that is not the point. The point is to build trust with ourselves, to build trust with our bodies, to build trust with our inner knowing, with our inner self, with our soul, and to let those parts know that we're actually listening. So when the time does come that we are so dialed in and we're like such a huge yes or a huge no to something that those are when the doors open that that's when life changes,
then that's when things begin to expand and grow in ways that we weren't expecting. To me, this is a part of the self-love ritual. I feel like so often, especially in like personal development, spiritual development spaces, we get so caught up in the doing.
Speaker 1 00:23:03
We have to do something in order for to receive something, we have to do an actual ritual, we have to do the actual meditation, we actually have to do the breathwork practice. But when you get into a ritualistic space, you find that you are always constantly practicing. And it's not about doing anything. It's about being and becoming. That's why I love so much teaching about bringing the sacred into the mundane, bringing pleasure into the mundane because it's in the mundane moments that life is happening and you get to choose how life unfolds for you in most situations.
Speaker 1 00:23:55
I'm a stand for this so much because I am tired of seeing like spirituality and self-development taught in such a linear way that if I do X, Y, and Z, then I get this result. But spiritual growth, personal growth, personal development does not work like that. It doesn't work like that. It is like a big squiggly messy line. So when things start to feel messy, when things start to feel cloudy, we start to think that we did something wrong. You didn't do anything wrong. I remember I was listening to Michael b Beckwith, his podcast, and he was talking about how I am so paraphrasing here, but he was basically talking about like so often we say like, oh, we're doing all the things right, like why isn't anything coming into fruition? And he was like, because healing this development process is not linear. It's kind of like all over the place.
Speaker 1 00:25:01
And sometimes when things seem like they're not moving or they're stuck, that is actually when your body, your molecules, your cells are actually changing and preparing you mentally, physically, spiritually, energetically for something so great, for something that is in alignment with who you're becoming, not who you are in that moment, but you have to become it first. You have to allow, like you have to allow the slow lulls to happen because that's when things start to shift and to move. And it's actually in those moments that you are coming into full alignment with yourself. But what happens is we get so caught up in the linear journey that we think we have to do more and we think we need to read more. We think we need to meditate more, and we need to do more and more and more and more. When actually in those moments when we feel stuck and we feel like nothing is moving, that is when to slow down and to do nothing, allow life to be mundane.
Speaker 1 00:26:13
It's still fucking magical <laugh>, even in the most boring, mundane moments. I mean, you are on a rock floating through time, through space, through God knows what. Life is magical. It's not boring at any, on any level, on any level. Life is not boring. That is also the mundane is also a part of the ritual. The boring is also a part of the ritual of creating union with yourself, with learning to love even the parts of yourself that are not moving or quote unquote manifesting. Can you love yourself even when you're messy? You feel messy? Can you love yourself even when you feel super stuck? Can you love yourself even when things seem less than perfect? Can you love yourself when things are freaking mundane as hell? Can you keep that relationship with your body when you're feeling less than good in it? Can you keep that connection, that relationship with your body when like right now, I'm so sick and I don't wanna be sick anymore, but I'm like, but can I keep that relationship with my body even though it's not at its optimal?
Speaker 1 00:27:43
Can I still love myself? Can I still love my body? Can I love it so much to allow it to be sick, to go through the process of healing, to nourish it, to allow it to be, that is a part of the ritual. So I know I went on a tangent and I hope this makes sense, but I guess where I'll wrap things up is in my humble opinion, always humble opinion because it's coming from my lived experience, and it's gonna be different for every person who listens to this, but you are the ritual. The ritual doesn't really have to be created because you are the magical ritual. Everything you do is ritual. Getting dressed is ritual. Taking a shower, is ritual drinking your coffee? Is ritual eating your food? Is ritual walking, driving, biking to work? Is ritual working? Is ritual. Spending time with your family?
Speaker 1 00:28:53
Is ritual moving through your emotions? Happiness, sadness, grief, joy, ritual, washing the fucking dishes is a ritual. Cleaning your home ritual. You are the ritual. The ritual does not live outside of you in this magical realm because you are
the magic. And if there's anything I want you to walk away with today is that the ritual does not live outside of you. And if you can take the time to sit down and explore what it means to love to practice, loving every part of you to building a powerful relationship with your body, no matter how slow or painstakingly difficult it might feel to finding magic in the mundane and to living life as ritual, and that it gets to be at your pace and that this is a lifelong journey, this is a lifelong practice. And that if you slip up, if you mess up, if you fuck up, it's okay. There's nothing wrong with you. Those would be my biggest takeaways for not only this series, but for this whole season of the Pleasure Hood podcast.
Speaker 1 00:30:31
I just so grateful to have these conversations and I love for everyone who shows up. I love that everyone shows up and listens to my musings, and I'm just so eternally grateful to be able to share these thoughts of everything that I've learned about sex, spirituality, sensuality, somatics, neuroscience, the nervous system, and try and bring that understanding and share it in a way that is palpable and easy. Because to me, I feel like it is easy and it's something that should be incorporated into our lives because it will not only bring us closer to ourselves, but also one another. So anyway, I'm not going to <laugh>. I'm not gonna go on another tangent, but I do wanna say thank you so deeply for listening to The Pleasure Hood podcast, season three. Thank you for I hope my voice wasn't too crackly and giving out too much. I love you. I look forward to connecting with you more in season four, which to be honest with you, I'm not sure when it's going to be sometime later this year, hopefully, but I'm sending you all of my love, magical, wonderful creatures, sending you so much love.
Speaker 1 00:32:15
Thank you for joining another episode of The Pleasure Hood podcast. Catch new episodes every other week on Spotify, YouTube, and Apple Podcasts. The Pleasure Hood podcast is now on good pods, and if you're not familiar with Good Pods, it's a podcast centric social network app where you can follow friends, influencers, and of course other podcasters to see which shows and episodes they're listening to and engage with them. Join me on good pods, subscribe, and let's stay connected for more of my musings on pleasure, motherhood, power, and sex, head over to Instagram and follow me at @justineaksoy or @pleasure.hood. And if you are ready to take your Pleasurehood game to the next level, sign up for my newsletter where you'll receive words of love, encouragement, and support. As you take your pleasure, practice a little deeper. You can sign up in the show notes, and that's all final. Now at Owens, I can't wait to go deeper with you on this path we call pleasure. Until next time, stay wild, sexy, and free.
