The Forbidden Temple
Letter seven | Moon seven | Desire, pleasure, and the body’s yes
Dear You,
“You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”
Mary Oliver
There are temples we’ve been taught to avoid. Rooms inside ourselves that have been locked, shamed, or whispered about, rarely entered. Desire is one of them.
We were taught that desire would lead us astray and that pleasure was selfish.
Hunger, especially feminine hunger, was something to control, shrink, or cover in shame. The unspoken rule is to override our bodies and close our mouths, cross our legs and apologise for our appetites.
Question: What might happen if we see desire, not as excess, but as a compass?
There is a sacredness to allowing and saying yes. For me, the body ALWAYS knows long before the mind does - which can be a little disconcerting at times. It’s a learning and process that is always with me. I find myself in seemingly very ordinary situations and suddenly the skin remembers, my breath changes, belly tightens or softens.
Desire arises like a tide, not always sexual, but always sensory.
It can be a longing for connection, beauty, touch, nourishment, movement, intimacy, smell, truth…
I’ve come to realise that to feel pleasure is not to abandon the sacred, but it’s to meet the sacred through the body’s language, not the through the minds.
Question: Why do we think that pleasure is a luxury we haven’t earned?
I often tell myself I’ll rest when ‘it’ is done. I’ll soften when it’s safe, nearly internalising the idea that desire is dangerous. That pleasure might make me less credible, less serious or useful. It’s not always easy to receive beauty without guilt and to say yes to softness, to slowness, to sensation, without thinking you need to earn it first.
For me, pleasure is not about performance or about pleasing others. It’s about presence. About being fully here, fully alive, and fully in my skin. Desire is my teacher and direction. It shows me what I care about, what stirs me and what brings me home.
We’ve often been warned about the woman who wants…
She is the Siren who lures.
She is the Witch who touches and transforms.
She is the Wild One who says yes on her own terms.
…Well, you know what? Yes she is.
The only reason these archetypes were seen as dangerous is because they wouldn’t suppress their wanting. Because they didn’t ask permission. They were sacred disruptors. We need all the sacred disruptors we can get right now. The sacred feminine doesn’t live in denial, she lives in a body that feels.
Thank you for reading
Claire
Postscript: More pleasure from my pleasure love Adrienne:
