49 ~ The Desire Quad Practice (Tool Box Edition)

Have you ever wondered how to transform emotional struggles into stepping stones for personal growth?

Join us on this episode of Desire as Medicine, as Brenda, a seasoned practitioner from the Mama Gena School of Womanly Arts, reveals how the Desire Quad practice can revolutionize your journey of intimate desire exploration. Since 2011, Brenda has masterfully incorporated this practice into her daily life, evolving the original trinity of brag, gratitude, and desire to include the crucial element of swamping. This episode uncovers the secrets behind acknowledging what's hard, celebrating personal victories, appreciating the present, and safely expressing heartfelt yearnings.

Discover the transformative power of "swamping" to navigate and process emotions, even during life's toughest moments. Catherine and Brenda both demonstrate the Desire Quad practice's structured approach, which includes swamping emotions, bragging about achievements, expressing gratitude, and stating desires.  

The practice offers a roadmap to form a deeper relationship with yourself and your desires. This episode is your guide to creating a safe space for self-expression and fostering a supportive community through shared practices and mutual encouragement. 

Chapters

• 0:08 Tools for Intimate Desire Exploration
• 10:00 Practicing Gratitude and Desire

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:08

Welcome to Desire is Medicine. We are two very different women living a life led by desire, inviting you into our world.

Speaker 2: 0:16

I'm Brenda. I'm a devoted practitioner to being my fully expressed true self in my daily life. Motherhood relationships and my business Desire has taken me on quite a ride and every day I practice listening to and following the voice within. I'm a middle school teacher turned coach and guide of the feminine.

Speaker 1: 0:36

And I'm Catherine, devoted to living my life as the truest and hopefully the highest version of me. I don't have children, I've never been married. I've spent equal parts of my life in corporate as in some down and low shady spaces. I was the epitome of tired and wired and my path led me to explore desire. I'm a coach, guide, energy worker and a forever student, even after decades of inner work.

Speaker 2: 1:00

We are humble beginners on the mat, still exploring, always curious. We believe that listening to and following the nudge of desire is a deep spiritual practice that helps us grow.

Speaker 1: 1:12

On the Desires Medicine podcast. We talk to each other, we interview people we know and love about the practice of desire, bringing in a very important piece that is often overlooked being responsible for our desire. Welcome, friends. So happy to be here again with my lovely co-host, brenda. Hey, brenda.

Speaker 2: 1:36

Hey Katherine.

Speaker 1: 1:38

Great to be here today for another Toolbox episode. Yes, today we are bringing another Toolbox episode to our Toolbox edition. We do call them minis because for the most part they're usually short. We do them quick and dirty. So the toolbox additions are mini episodes with tools and practices that we bring to you so that you get to play with desire, become more.

Speaker 1: 2:03

I'm going to say informed, but that's not the word I'm looking for. Intimate with your desire? Desires is I mean. We have a whole podcast on it. We're in the 40s and we have barely scratched the surface, even ourselves that we've been studying it for many, many years. We still consider ourselves beginners.

Speaker 1: 2:28

And on the mat, brenda has this gorgeous practice that she does daily. That's one of the things that we're bringing to you today, and she didn't create it. It's a we're going to call it the desire quad, but it comes from the Mama Gina School of Womanly Arts. It's originally a trinity which brings one brag, one gratitude, one desire, and Brenda has so creatively made it a quad now, adding in a swamp, and I'm going to be passing it over to her so that she can bring us in and talk to us all about her creativity and how it helps her. I know she does it every day, so clearly, anything that we're doing every day must be bringing us some kind of joy. So I'm really excited that today she's going to let us know how she does it so that we can join her in her daily practice.

Speaker 2: 3:22

Thank you, catherine. Just to put it out there, I did not really create the quad. I think it was a community thing. I think that Mama Gina brought the Trinity the bread, the gratitude and the desire and then somehow, throughout the community or maybe she did create it, I really don't know it felt like it was created organically through the community, adding a swamp at the beginning, and so I didn't create it, but I've been doing this practice since 2011.

Speaker 2: 3:51

I've been doing quads, a swamp, a brag, a gratitude and a desire, and I love that we're bringing in this here today Because, like you said, it helps us become more intimate with our desires. It's like we're in relationship with our desires and I do this practice every day because I'm really committed to it. We have a whole episode on commitment. I think it's 46. I love that episode. So the practice is such a great one and you could do this by yourself and you could do it with a friend, you could do it with a group of people.

Speaker 2: 4:27

So the swamp is acknowledging something that's really hard, acknowledging something that basically sucks ass, that you don't like it the way it is. It allows you to go into the darkness a little bit and acknowledge what's hard for you. I think that we have to do that because we can't ignore that. And then we move in, then we go up a little bit and we go into a brag. A brag is something that you're celebrating about yourself. Now don't get confused. This is not boasting. This is not putting yourself above somebody else. This is not putting yourself above somebody else. This is celebrating yourself. This practice of a brag is the antidote to the epidemic of women putting themselves down and not claiming the truth of the outrageous gorgeousness and creativity and amazingness of our life and our celebrations and our achievements. So we brag, we say something that we want to celebrate about ourselves, and there's always something, and there's always a swamp as well. And then we have a gratitude, something that we're truly grateful for. Just feel into your heart and tap into what is it that you appreciate, and then we move into desire to close out the practice.

Speaker 2: 5:52

Something that you desire, what is it that your heart wants? You could say one, you could say many. It's really a lot of fun. So that's the practice and it feels. I love the quad because it feels so well-rounded. You know it really starts somewhere. It starts in the dirt, it starts in the grime, it starts with the darkness and then and then we come up and then it brings us into desire, brings us into the future, and I love it because it has us be present and it has us be in our body and then it's so fun to be witnessed in this practice. So any questions about that Does that, how does that land?

Speaker 1: 6:42

I don't have any questions. I think that I would tag or I would add. I guess I would add somewhere where you, when you were talking about being in the dirt, when we talk about the swamp, talk about what's going wrong or air quotes, as you say, what sucks ass? Um, and then you said, oh, we kind of go back up a little bit to give people a visual. It's sort of like a heartbeat, like it goes up, down, up, down, up down and heartbeat is going rather quickly and let's say we were on a roller coaster, it would also go rather quickly the up downs.

Speaker 1: 7:21

But sometimes when we're just sort of walking and you're just going like uphill, it's a little harder than when you're going downhill sometimes. Sometimes when we're having a hard time, we can go down really, really fast and it's like just really treacherous to come back up. And sometimes in our own physicality, our own body, when we are feeling into something that sucks, we feel low and low energy and just not really into it. We're not kind of motivated by life. That would be like the non-Disney world. And then when we feel great right, it does feel like you're on a roller coaster or whatever version of that there is for you and we have a more euphoric existence, a more like this is so amazing up here, Like the way I am looking down at all the little trees, versus when you're on the ground and you're looking up at the tree, everything looks so much bigger.

Speaker 1: 8:20

We use this analogy of going up and down to represent our mood or our ability to be with what is, and when we're in the swamp, when something is really sucking, often it's hard to be with what is. But I agree with you. I think it's so important, brenda, for us to acknowledge and to share what's going badly, not from a place of exalting it, not because we need to give in a medal or a trophy because we've been through something hard, because we can do hard things and hard things help shape us and help give us range and power, for sure but just to acknowledge it, because often we can sometimes find ourselves somewhere where we're oh I didn't know it was going to be this hard, right, and it kind of catches us by surprise and being able to just put it out there and say it out loud can really sort of take the scary feels off of it, off of being in the swamp.

Speaker 2: 9:22

Yeah, thank you for explaining all of that. That's really beautiful and I love, I love, I like being the swamp, because we do go up and down, we do go up and down. The more I'm willing to go into the swamp because we do go up and down, we do go up and down the more I'm willing to go into the swamp or into the darkness or into the down, whatever it is that you want to call it. I'm just being present with what is actually true in my personal emotional landscape and in the world and I find that when I do acknowledge it and I'm willing to go into it and and speak it and feel it, I come out pretty quickly these days. I had a pretty big down last night. I spent the evening in tears and I really leaned into it and I did some writing, I reached out to friends and I came up and this morning I just I felt I still feel it in my body, but I was more clear. I was able to come up a little bit, and so there's something really beautiful about that and you can you can brag from the swamp, even when you're in the dirt, even last night when I was in tears and I had like a trigger in my body. There's still a brag in there, you know. The brag is I reached out to friends. I knew I didn't have to do it alone. The brag is that I took out my journal and I did some writing. The brag is that I let my man see me crying and I let him comfort me. The brag is that I went swimming in the lake this morning to be in nature. So a brag doesn't have to be some highfalutin thing where it's like, oh, this is all the thing that happened. It's, it's just what's true in the moment. So how about we try it? Great, so I do this practice every day and I'm going to give you a demonstration of what it looks like when I do the practice.

Speaker 2: 11:24

Okay, I swamp the madness in the world right now. The madness in the world right now. I swamp so many different opinions. I swamp the fear that comes with it. I swamp the fear that's in my body at times. I swamp that. I brag that I reached out to friends last night. I brag I let myself cry over my dinner. I brag I received the love from two different friends last night and I am grateful that I slept well last night. I am grateful that I was able to swim in the lake and the water could hold me, and I'm grateful to be doing this podcast with you, catherine, and to talk about these things and bring them out to other people so other women can benefit. And I desire benefit and I desire. I desire peace. I desire for all humans to be wise, wild and free, to be felt, to have a voice. I desire for myself to feel my feelings and be seen and be honest and to be creative and be loved.

Speaker 1: 13:15

And that's my quad. Thank you so much for sharing that.

Speaker 2: 13:17

You're welcome, and I want to also say it doesn't have to be that fancy, and by fancy I mean I gave multiples. It could be really quick and dirty.

Speaker 1: 13:26

I can try.

Speaker 2: 13:27

Great, you want to give us a quick and dirty one.

Speaker 1: 13:29

I've never done it before.

Speaker 2: 13:32

Great.

Speaker 1: 13:36

Go for it. So I swamp that. I'm 50 and a half and I definitely have some changes happening in my life, and I would say they're not just physical changes as in like hormonal or things. I thought I feel like the way my brain sees the world or the way my brain is working is different. So I swamped that because I don't like it. I don't know what's happening and it's weird and uncomfortable. I don't want to label it bad, it's just different and it's not recognizable really. And there's a part of me that's like W2TH is happening. It's kind of like what is happening.

Speaker 2: 14:14

I'm going to add this in, I'm going to say well, swamped, because that's how you respond to a swamp.

Speaker 1: 14:19

Well swamped, okay great, I didn't know I had to do that when you did it, okay great, thank you. And then the brag To celebrate myself. I would say that I caught it, that I've been able to notice, oh, this is happening, and that I I I brag that I do have friends that are over 50 and that I've been able to turn to different people and ask them like, hey, what do you think? And I've gotten many different angles, and so I've been sitting with a lot of different things and I brag that I have the ability to do that. I've recognized that not everyone has potentially the same pool of people to pull from to be able to look at something from all different angles, whether it's medical, medicinal yeah, just therapeutic, somatic mindset, like from. I've been able to look at this from so many different perspectives that I feel very grateful for that. That was kind of brag and gratitude, so my gratitude is that that I know people.

Speaker 2: 15:21

Sometimes they just mix together. So I'm gonna say, well bragged, and thank you for your gratitude.

Speaker 1: 15:26

Yeah, oh, so cool. The comebacks Okay. And what I desire? Desire for myself to continue to have more and more self honesty and more transparency so that I can always be in this level of conversation where there is tons of curiosity and permission, not just for myself but for others. May I continue to walk the walk, hopefully giving others permission at the same time.

Speaker 2: 16:02

Well, so it is, and so shall it be, and maybe even better than you can even possibly imagine.

Speaker 1: 16:09

You guys have the best comebacks.

Speaker 2: 16:13

They're just from the community and they are and they're and I want to say they are good comebacks and, if you notice, they're really clean and potent. Yes, you know, like I was just acknowledging yours but not getting involved in what you were saying, I'm not adding to it. We're not having a conversation. This is an actual practice and I'm holding space for you and receiving it.

Speaker 1: 16:39

Yes, so if I heard you correctly, you said well swamped, well bragged. I think you thanked me for the gratitude right. How was that for the gratitude? Thank you, thank you, thank you, right. How was?

Speaker 2: 16:54

that for the gratitude, thank you.

Speaker 1: 16:55

Thank you, thank you and then for the desire.

Speaker 2: 16:56

Yeah, you could say so, shall it be? So it is even better than you can even possibly imagine.

Speaker 1: 17:06

Yes, I love it. Some version of that.

Speaker 2: 17:07

There's no right or wrong. Don't get stuck on the words, but it is a beautiful practice and we would love to hear from you, our listeners. We would love to hear your desire quad. So send them in to us your swamp, your brag, your gratitude, your desire. Post them on our Instagram. Post them in your stories. Tag us Desire is Medicine podcast on Instagram. Email us. We want to hear from you because this is a really fun practice to do together. Thank you so much for tuning in and until next time. Thank you for joining us on the Desire is Medicine podcast.

Speaker 1: 17:56

Desire invites us to be honest, loving and deeply intimate with ourselves and others. You can find our handles in the show notes. We'd love to hear from you.