The Pleasurable and Revolutionary Act of Navel Gazing
Wisdom from pleasure activist Maggie Marie
Maggie Marie is a mama, word witch, eco-feminist, pleasure activist, devotee of love, and pole dancer living in the mountains. I have gotten to know Maggie through our shared activism. She is a soul sister and she writes a beautiful Substack newsletter Tea & Truth about motherhood, sexuality, creativity and pleasure activism. Maggie is taking the helm this week. Next week she is launching Deepening The Erotic Through Owning Your Story, which is 4-weeks of writing and sensual movement (online). I will be there and I hope you will join me. — SJJ
The Pleasurable and Revolutionary Act of Navel Gazing—by Maggie Marie
I like a good long slow navel gaze. I like to indulge in the stew of my life until I can synthesize it into something authentic and therefore transcendent of my own personal predicament. Our over-culture, polarized as it is, full of brooding shadow, and misplaced angst has somehow managed to make, “navel gazing” derogatory. Where would we gaze? If not at that funny little hole that connects to our ancestors, our mothers, and our own progeny, if we have them
The OED (Oxford English Dictionary) says this about navel gazing: self-indulgent or excessive contemplation of oneself or a single issue, at the expense of a wider view. And I couldn’t disagree more with that.
To navel gaze is to behold what is alive for us, like we would gaze at a celestial entity. When in the right container, and practice, it is an act of self-love not aggrandizement. It is an act of nourishment and digestion and not a spew of uselessness. To navel gaze is to look at both the sun and the moon in one pulse, alive within the very organ meat of our lives.
I came forward pre-me too. There were very few maps that gave anyone permission to tell the truth of their lives. There was Anita Hill, and clearly we would be in a different place in this country if America had listened to her. So often we think of truth as inconveniently square to the pleasantries of our daily lives. Al Gore proposed An Inconvenient Truth that US politics has yet to embrace the realities of, and downright denies the effects of fossil fuels on the future of our planet.
The Buddha said, “There are three things that can not remain hidden for long: The Sun, The Moon and The Truth.” And yet we have such a hard time digesting truth. Truth sort of drips out slowly into the over-culture only to be shadowed again, besieged, and driven down into the underworld. We are living in underworld times and with great skill we must learn how to start seeing well in the dark. In my humble opinion, we are at a point in our evolution as a species where if we don’t do some serious navel gazing we may not make it. We may not change how we live on this planet. The core of any good navel gazing practice is to look so deeply at the muck that we rise out of it like a lotus. Nichiren Buddhists exclaim this with the chant Namyohorengekyo.
As a child, I spent a great deal of time with a jolly Zen Master named Seung Sahn. He would say to my mom, “Human beings, number one bad animal.” We shit where we drink. We poison what is life giving and we put profit over our shared humanity.
I propose that the revolution is actually pleasurably self-indulgent but in the way that we ask the questions, “Why are we here? Why have we come here at this time? How can we be of service in a burning world?”
When I luxuriously contemplate these questions, I come back to love. I come back to remembering my body as not just on Earth but of earth. I come back to the sensuously delicious indulgence of being bare breasted on a rock in the middle of a river—yes, you guessed it, navel gazing. I come back to feeling alive with the elements, soaking moonlight into my eyes, being in awe of the stars, the heat of our star, the sun, and letting salty ocean love me a little more whole than I was before I communed with her. I come back to the trees and the rocks so effortlessly present and knowing.
I come back to the center. The navel. The mother. And am anchored again in this holy mystery of a life.
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If you are interested in working with Maggie, she has launched Deepening The Erotic Through Owning Your Story, a 4-week (online) writing and sensual movement in a radically supportive and inclusive setting using somatic-based writing and narrative medicine practices.
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