Why sensuality will save your midlife

No fancy knickers required.

Apr 03, 2024

My lake swim at a recent writing retreat

It’s not often you find yourself blindfolded in a stranger’s apartment, thousands of miles from home, whilst intentionally trying to step out of your head and relax into your body.

In most circumstances, this is exactly when you need your head to jump right in there please, and run through all worst case scenarios to get you out before you end up as a viral video and you have to move country.

But while I hadn’t exactly signed a waiver, and had forgotten to check for hidden cameras, I felt strangely safe with this strange experience. I was here exactly because I lived too much in my head. I was here to connect to my body which was now being touched by said stranger**.

This wasn’t a sexual adventure gone wrong (or gone right, depending on your perspective); it was a therapy session specifically designed to give my brain a break, and let my body do the talking.

As a now Recovering Perfectionist, this used to be a place I lived full time. My brain was a tornado of thoughts, most of them I now know, not useful or helpful at all. Putting myself in a situation were I was blindfold in a strange man’s apartment had come about because I had found myself in that particular place that midlife reserves for some of us once in a while - the place when everything has imploded and you barely know your arse from your elbow, never mind your misery from your mojo. I’m sure many of you have been in that place.

My challenging marriage had ended in spectacular fashion when I discovered my husband was gay, and my lovely mum had recently died after years of needing 24 hour care following a massive stroke, just four days after my third baby was born. The previous few years had been what is sometimes known in the psychology world as A Total Shit Show.

Once the initial shock of being cast adrift from both the family I’d been born into and the family I’d created, I had started to try and pick up the pieces of my life, and figure out how to grab the controls again to stop this plane called Life from heading into a total tailspin. Even if I did that, I also had to decide on a destination. The course I thought I’d been on had hit serious turbulence, and I had to course correct, adjusting to the new altitude of being a motherless single-mother.

Somehow, part of that process had brought me to Buenos Aires to learn Tango (apparently the ultimate experience in living in your body, not your head) and part of that experience was to have a Tango-therapy session. Yes. that’s an actual thing. Thus I found myself blind folded, in order to see how disconnected I had become from myself. I’d had my head barrelled down in survival mode for so long I had lost all sense of myself. Reconnecting to my body in this session was just one way I retrieved myself from the tornado of emotions and thoughts that had hijacked me for so many years. (Others have included yoga, sea swimming, and walking).

It happens. It happens all the time to women in midlife. You start off full of a sense of centered-ness about who you are and who you are going to be. But as you gather up roles and responsibilities faster than you can acclimatise to them, you can very easily become disconnected from yourself. I always liken it to the Russian dolls… you start of as your unique core, and then take on a layer from your family and culture, then another as your career perhaps, another as a partner, perhaps another as a parent, until the outer doll is the one you present to the world. The trouble comes when those layers have smothered your innate core, rather than be coloured by it.

You can move full time into your head, becoming caught up in the Tornado of Turmoil - perfectionism, imposter syndrome and people pleasing (I’ll write more about this next week). The weight of outdated conditioning that women must be all things to all people before we can be anything to ourselves pushes down on us, and you can lose a sense of who you are to yourself, only who you are in relation to others.

Which is why it’s so important at midlife (many times over in this now-extended decades-long midlife) to check in to see who, how and even where you are. To reconnect, to retrieve a sense of yourself, to connect sensually to you, amid the merry mayhem around you.

When I talk about sensuality I mean in its purest form (not the hijacked sexual form). I mean being connected to your senses.

We’re ageing in an Age of Anti-ageing Propaganda but we have to try and redefine the narrative. Getting older is not a sin. It’s a privilege and something we need to do powerfully not apologetically; gratefully not gracefully. We need to stop focussing just on the external, but connect energetically to our internal.

Sensuality is like the lube of life, it is connection to other - humans, animals, nature - but most of all; it is connection to self through your senses.

It is listening - to your own voice whispering its wants and desires, the sounds of nature around you slowing down your pace, to balance out the endless beeps and alerts in your mile-a-minute midlife dictating your pace.

It is tasting - your own needs and desires and getting a taste for living life on your terms. (This does not mean you become a bitch or a witch - unless that is something you revel in. Personally I think we could all do with tuning into our inner witches who ultimately were women who lived by intuition, who rejected the male-dominant structures, who were at one with nature and who were vilified because they didn’t toe the line). It is opening your mouth in loud laughs to taste the sea air or the falling rain.

It is touching - your body with love and appreciation, another’s skin with connection, the leaves on the trees as you walk among them, the Spring sun on your skin after a long winter.

It is smelling - the fear of living more of you and doing it anyway, the vibe of your body responding to what it wants. Following your nose and seeing where it takes you, stopping in a moment of surprising fragrance to just enjoy a simple pleasure.

It is seeing - clearly what you want and how to get there. Seeing you have more agency than you think, seeing the support that is there for you if you only ask for it, lifting your head up from being bent in survival mode and seeing the beauty around you in whatever small, surprising forms that takes.

It’s literally being connected to your senses, having the quality of life where - regardless of the roles and responsibilities you have - you are connecting each day to this day, and the things that matter. That you are here while you’re here… smelling the cooking, tasting the food, hearing those birds, seeing the sky and the trees, touching the ground in a downward dog.

I know how easy it is to wake up already hostage to the day, hijacked by all those external demands and expectations, barely conscious of the decisions you are making or the mood you are dwelling in. I have been that soldier, and still can be that soldier when the days are tough, and the never-ending to-do list feels relentless. Which is why I consider Intention to be one of our midlife superpowers… an intention to matter more in my own midlife, while doing all that I do, and being all that I am.

As I write this my cat is beside me. It’s so easy to miss her subtle, almost imperceptible pleasure purr, to not reach out for a few seconds to stroke her soft fur because I’m always in a rush, to watch her stretch in such a profound and pleasurable way it makes me want to do get up and do some yoga stretches so I can luxuriate in my own body, to smile and connect with another living thing; it’s so easy to walk past a tree on my morning dog walk, my head caught up in the news in my earpods, my brain already at work despite not being at my desk yet…. Rather than listening to the symphony around me, to smile at the hidden singers in the high up branches, to touch the bark of a gnarled tree that has continued to grow and thrive in all kinds of weather, bending in the storms, reaching for the sky in the sun, and knowing it and me are the same, to smell the nurture in the nature around me.

It’s so easy.

It’s so easy to let the overwhelm strip us of ourselves and leave us senseless.

Which is why waking up every day, even the really hard ones, and commiting to connection with self is the difference between living and being alive.

It is being sensually aware, grateful for this moment, feeling alive in this life - it is remembering your goal in life is to be as much as do, to find meaning in the meaningless, and purpose in being purposeless. The greatest expression of love is giving something or someone your attention. Self-care is paying attention to yourself, being sensually aware.

I am in the midst of my next book, Midlife, Sensuality, Sex & Relationships redefined and I’d love your opinion on some issues. I have a survey here if you’d like to give me your thoughts (and read about others).

In the meantime, I hope you have a sensual day.

**Keep your thoughts clean please. All clothes remained firmly fastened. He would randomly touch an arm or a part of my leg and I had to move the part he touched. At first it was really awkward as I tried to predict his and my movement (that’ll be the brain there clutching onto control for dear life), but eventually I started to inhabit myself and let my body respond, giving my brain the moment off. It felt revelatory. We eventually went on to dance some slow tango and without sight I had no choice but to surrender to my body working out what to do. It’s like flow in yoga, or a deep cold plunge into the sea, where you allow your brain to step away and you just be. It is beautiful.

I’d love to know how you connect to sense of self, so please join me in the comments below (if you’re reading this in an email, please click on the link below to go through to the website to join the conversation.)

Why sensuality will save your midlife

No fancy knickers required.

Discussion about this post