September 19, 2007
Greetings, Pleasuristas!
I’ve had the great good fortune of two wonderful events transpiring the same week: my birthday, and the immense pleasure of co-facilitating a three day spiritual retreat outside Los Angeles.
How good can a birthday get, in the company of playful, deep, silly, wise and loving men and women in beautiful surroundings?
Many thanks to all you pleasuristas who have sent in your pleasure ideas for my upcoming ebook, Pleasure in a New York Minute. There’s still time to send in more! I see this as a celebration of our collective pleasure-wisdom.
May your days be crisp and sweet at this turning of the seasons.
With love and pleasure,
FEATURE ARTICLE: A BIRTHDAY WISH
For my 53rd birthday last week I gave myself a wish.
Here ‘tis: that all women over 45 experience the luscious delights of their own powerfully pleasured selves. That from this sweet pleasure they blossom into the world, perfuming it with their own delicious generosity and compassion.
I’m adopting the lotus, the flower on my masthead, as my symbol for the year. Besides being sensually gorgeous (and for me, all women are sensually gorgeous), I love the lotus’ cultural history. Buddhists see the lotus as a symbol of the spiritual journey, arising from the mud of this world, blossoming into the exquisiteness of our awakened selves.
I love that the Divine is not set apart from this sweet world: that moving deeply into its delights and challenges awakens us into embodied spirituality.
But wait - here’s my favorite part of sister lotus’ rich history! She goes even further back. Women in ancient Egypt celebrated lotuses and painted them on their frame drums. This elegant flower was for them a symbol of a woman’s genitals, our sumptuous second hearts.
For this birthday gal the lotus is the full flowering, in this sweet and muddied world, of our gorgeous feminine selves. I’m thinking--from my own personal experience and from 25 years of coaching and counseling women--that this flowering takes about a half-century to happen (there can be an awful lot of mud to move up through)...
So here we are in our post-50 glory, blossoming forth from the muck of what has gone before, the fertile muck of our pre-menopausal lives.
We can offer the love, pleasure, and glory of our lotus-selves to the world.
So this is my 53rd birthday wish for myself, and for all your pleasuristas as well. I vow, con gusto, to do all I can in a deeply pleasured way to help this dream come true.
ABOUT Pleasure and Soul
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This newsletter and all content within it is Copyright(c) Melissa Gayle West 2007 except where otherwise noted. All rights reserved. I encourage you to share this newsletter or reprint material from it in other electronic or print publications, provided a link to http://www.MelissaGayleWest.com and copyright information are included in the credits. Please send a copy of the publication.
COACHING SESSIONS WITH MELISSA
If you would like to:
- Experience deep and authentic pleasure in your life
- Create a life that sings for you, free from struggle and efforting
- Free yourself from damaging cultural myths about growing older that limit your aliveness, creativity, and unique genius
- Making a meaningful difference in this time in your life
- Deepen your spiritual journey in a way that reflects who you are now
- Reclaim curiosity, gratitude, and wonder for your journey
Read more about how you can benefit from private coaching with Melissa: http://www.MelissaGayleWest.com
If you're interested, contact Melissa at Melissa@MelissaGayleWest.com, or 206.427.1325
Melissa Gayle West
106 NW 104th St.
Seattle, WA 98177 |
