Sensuous Knowledge
- I finally arrived home.
I grew up learning to mistrust my gut feeling and my intuition- like many others.
In the beginning of my counseling career, I studied Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) because it was the recommended method and what was available to study. I learned many techniques to treat the mind and our negative thoughts, our beliefs, and how strategies could help us navigate anxiety, stress, and depression.
When I graduated, I felt strengthened in my calling-to support, heal, and guide people, but I quickly felt that something was missing.
When I later got the opportunity to study Dance and Movement Therapy and Sexology (MSc), I was excited.
Excited.
EXCITED.
Excited, because I knew that there is a secret held at the core of what it means to be human, in our sexual meetings and in the creation of self. I remember when my youngest son wa s born, at a planned homebirth without assistance and painkillers, and how I laid in the bathtub with my white chocolate and candles and listening to Cat Stevens (Lady D’Arbanville) and found myself. While I was moving in the water and focusing on my breathing and the music, images of Brazil flashed in front of my eyes. Images I don´t remember now, but that I knew that I had never seen before, at that point.
That experience changed my life and forever how I viewed and understood sexology - which was why I was so intrigued and excited when I got the opportunity to do the master.
Fast forward to today. I’m once again sitting on my porch in Thailand, surrounded by lush nature, deep in myself and on a spiritual journey. As I listen to the wind and the living world around me, I realize again that my soul has known all along.
It has been calling me home for a long time.
As an Afro-Brazilian, I belong to the religion Candomblé- a tradition I only began reading about a few months ago. Candomblé carries Yoruban philosophy, where the word for wisdom is Ogbon.
Ogbon is divided into two parts.
Ogbon-ori — the knowledge of the head.
Ogbon-inu — the knowledge of the gut.
To be fully wise, it is said, we need both.
I recognize that, because also I felt fragmented without the access to both of these ways of knowing. I felt dislocated, confused about who I am, and know; on the path of continuing to connect these types of knowledge, I find more and more on how I´m meant to show up in the world.
Never again, mind without body.
Thinking without sensing.
Candomblé loosely translates to “dancing with spirits,” and by navigating my life through what brings me happiness, aliveness and excitement - I have finally arrived. Even though I was without any representatives, ancestral connection or knowing my lineage growing up.
I have arrived to myself. I arrived even without all of these things that non-adoptees usually have. That means, that it is possible for every one of us - to find ourselves.
Minna Salami writes about embodied knowledge beautifully in her book Sensuous Knowledge (if you haven’t read it—go and get it).
Like her, I move between cultures and languages as I walk the earth. The transracial adoption part of my story is not only transracial- it also carried layers of assimilation, and a quiet distance from my true self.
Now, with love, trust, and blessings, I am unfolding the many layers of who I am. By reading about the traditions and cultures of my motherland, something inside me softens and remembers.
And I realize something that feels both simple and profound:
I have been here all along.
I just didn’t know how to listen.