Hello everyone. Welcome to SLSP, the Sex, Love and SuperPowers podcast show. I am your host Tatiana Berindei, and today I am really excited to have with me Lorina Manzanita. We’re going to be discussing using your body to practice transformation. This is going to be a really juicy interview. Let me tell you a little bit about Lorina and why you have cause to be excited for today’s episode. Lorina Manzanita has been professionally helping people get comfortable in their own skins since 1998. She is a Somatic Sex and Relationship Coach and Certified Somatic Experiencing Trauma Resolution Practitioner, a writer, teacher and workshop facilitator. With Lorina, intimacy skills are learned in an embodied way in real time with compassionate support and guidance.
I’m so happy to welcome you to the show today Lorina.
My pleasure and honor. Thank you for welcoming me.
I’ve always kind of seen the big picture in the small pieces.
Absolutely. So before we dive into this conversation about how to practice transformation through the body, will you tell our listeners one of your super powers?
Happy to. I was a little like, “Whew, what are my superpowers? I’m not quite sure,” and so I took some time to just meditate a bit on that question and see what came up. One of the first pieces that came up was connecting the dots, or you can say pattern recognition. Yeah, and I know that resonates with you in reading some of your interview prep material around the connection between the macro and micro. It’s just this ability, skill, of seeing how different patterns in larger spheres and intimate spheres, and interpersonal and intrapsychic patterns mirror and echo each other. I know I’ve always kind of seen the big picture in the small pieces. Yeah, that shows up in how I love to work with people as well.
Beautiful. Yeah, we were talking a little bit before we hit record about sort of this macro and micro concept, especially as it relates to the earth and the body, and our body being sort of a microcosm of this body of earth. I think it’s so fascinating with the work that you do, and the work of somatics really. I would love it if you would share a little bit with our listeners, what we were talking about before we came on, about this exploration of the water cycle. ‘Cause I feel like it is such a beautiful depiction of that relationship between bodies and how sort of the larger systems that we inhabit mirror that.
Right, yeah. I recently traveled to Portugal where I visited an intentional community called Tamera, and they call themselves a Peace Research Center. One of the most inspiring lectures I was present to during my time there was a discussion on the global water cycles and how if you look at a normal water cycle, the ocean evaporates, sends water up into the sky via clouds, and then the clouds rain down upon the land. This is where it felt particularly resonant for me, where they differentiated between how water that lands on you could say receptive earth, cultivated earth, differs from water that lands on earth that hasn’t been cultivated, and it kind of quickly bounces off of it, if you will, and runs.
So there’s a difference between water that has an opportunity to land on earth that has plants and green things and a porous nature, and is cultivated and really receives the water, and sinks down below and is informed and matured by all that the earth has to receive in its depths. Water that sinks in deeply when it’s tapped into and then shared again with the ecosystem, it has more of a generative, life-enhancing quality to it. Versus water that hits the earth that isn’t cultivated and isn’t receptive, it moves quickly and has an erosive and destructive quality to it.
The act of just pausing and letting somebody’s impact really sink in and be felt.
Once I heard that, that just totally reminded me of how sexuality, Eros, emotions, are shared between us humans. An emotion that gets shared with a body that is receptive, you could say porous, and allows these desires or emotions, impulses from another human being to just kind of land on the body and slowly sink in and go deeper, and nourish and be nourished by our interior. For me that’s the act of just pausing and letting somebody’s impact really sink in and be felt. There tends to be a much more mature expression of our connection or sexuality, our Eros, together. Versus destructive sharing of sexuality where it just kind of, okay, we can all have these high-intensity stimulation, but it doesn’t really sink down into the body.
And it doesn’t have the generative quality because of that.
Correct.
Yeah, I mean I think you and I both share an understanding of how healing sexual energy can really be. Just like how nourishing … I mean water is required for life, right? And yet water can be destructive if it comes in a torrent and it’s not received by the earth and it creates the mudslide, that’s creating. But water can be very destructive in that sense, and yet we need water in order to survive. I think that sexual energy is definitely very similar, in the same sense it’s like, it is such a regenerative energy. I mean, it is the only energy on the planet that has the power to create life, and yet it also, as we see time and time again, can be so destructive when there isn’t … I think oftentimes the role of receptivity is placed on the woman, and I think you and I, we’re going to dive deeper into this, we do have to take a quick break here before we can really dive into this concept, ’cause I think it’s a very juicy one, and how to really bring it into the body.
Before we go to break will you tell our listeners where they can sort of find out more about you and your work?
Yeah. They’re most welcome, you guys are most welcome, to visit my website lorinamanzanita.com, pretty simple. You’re welcome to check out some of my writings there, videos, sign up for my mailing list and you get a little gift, be great, to stay connected.
Beautiful. Beautiful. So we’ve been talking with Lorina Manzanita about using your body to practice transformation, and more when we get back. We’re going to really dive deep into a little bit of how you can bring this into your life. So stay tuned.
To listen to the entire show click on the player above or go to the SuperPower Up! podcast on iTunes.
Music Credit: All instruments played by Amanda Turk. Engineered and produced by Tatiana Berindei and Daniel Plane reelcello.com
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