My Spiritual Teacher Told Me To Indulge More
It led to my biggest revelation of the year
Hi! I’m Danielle. A writer and artist from the US based in Berlin. Thanks for stopping by! This newsletter is free for all to read. If you’re interested in supporting my work, feel free to subscribe or share what moves you. You can also donate some coins below. Much love.
Recently, I had a session with a spiritual medium, an Irish woman I met in New York nine years ago who taught me the art of reading tarot. Once every year or two, I meet with her for a reading of my own to get more clarity about my path, to see where I need to focus, to get some grease on those wheels, even if (and it’s usually the case), the grease is her acknowledging something I already know to be true packaged in a slightly new way, sprinkled with some extras. It builds momentum.
She told me my life was lacking spontaneity, that I need to indulge more, get more into my senses. Just be more indulgent, she says about forty more times. She’s an obsessive one.
Yes ma’am , I think.
Then I wonder, but how so?
At the moment, I’m doing a stellar job indulging in food and wine, save the dark chocolate which I recently put in time out. Sometimes that method turns south, where indigestion kicks in, mood and stomach spoiling unhappily together.
Moderation is key, experts say.
Yeaaah but, didn’t my spiritual medium just say indulge? I’m confused.
You need to get out of Berlin — she continues. I haven’t told her this yet but I’ve applied for a writing residency in Provence, in a fancy, French chateau on a vineyard, absolutely certain it exists just for me, and others in Paris, New York City, New York’s Hudson River Valley and Switzerland. Lately, I’ve been fantasizing about having another rendezvous with New York City, not to move back, just to experience it anew for a few months. Though it’s harder to see myself in Paris, what I can see — the free apartment, the monthly stipend for six months….
The freedom.
Then she says — Something like France, how Paris used to be but not Paris, it’s lost its zest. She also says, cutting me off abruptly as I start to talk about how I need to exercise more, move my body and blah, blah, blah — It’s not about your body. Just be more indulgent.
Well, alrighty then.
I found out a few weeks ago I got accepted into the Provence residency, Château St. Pierre de Mejans, ten days living in the lap of luxury, with fancy rooms, local wine, (the food, I’ll have to make), in nature tucked away on the countryside to do what I love to do best — write, wine, dine. Repeat.
Maybe she’s onto something. But I don’t know about this word, indulge. It’s too caught up with food, indigestion, moving too fast, guilty un-pleasures. Pain. Recently, I took out a new credit card to transfer a balance, having indulged in and un-regrettingly, a few (not too many) travel adventures. The credit card’s name: Capital One — Savor.
Savor.
Now that’s a verb I can get behind. Moving too fast is my Achilles heal, an age-old theme I’m slowly learning to tame.
Being a word person, also, I’ve been told, a master manifester, in 2017 I started the practice of picking a word for the new year, one that symbolized the energy and state of being I wanted to embrace.
Space was my word for 2017. Breathe and stay examples from other years.
I smack the word on my wall, also my computer, places I can easily see, where I’m reminded of what I want to feel, embody or achieve. I started using my wall as a vision board back in Brooklyn, tacking up everything I wanted to create in my life, moving the pieces around like a puzzle — words, ideas and images — in different configurations, building with their presence and my growing relationship to them, like the session, a momentum. Nearly everything I put up in my brownstone bedroom, I made happen, some materializing in New York, others when I moved to Berlin.
Still a bit stumped by the instruction to indulge, I ask my pal, Google what the difference is between savor and indulge. According to Oxford Languages —
Indulge is to allow oneself to enjoy the pleasure of.
Savor is to taste (good food or drink) and enjoy it to the full. Or, to enjoy an experience slowly, in order to appreciate it as much as possible.
They sound sort of similar, pleasure in both cases being the end result, but their flavor feels different, this nuance (potentially but not necessarily) lying in the speed in which the state of pleasure is achieved — indulging, being an action where things could go more easily awry, morphing into something like pain (and indigestion).
Potentially, addiction.
Savor also implies a type of pleasure that lasts longer, a pleasure we experience by paying attention to the nuances, the result of taking one’s time. It’s a word I don’t use just for food. I can savor a moment, a book, a person.
Alas, I find momentum starting to build around this five letter word brought to me by Capital One. I haven’t been resting enough, the jack rabbit pace at which I’m moving through life, preventing me from feeling the one thing I definitely want more of — pleasure.
My spiritual medium was wrong.
Savor, I proudly think, will be my word for 2025.
But then my good friend comes on the scene with her long, thought-out text message in response to my long and thorough word investigation, putting a wrench in my game. Right off the bat, she says — Savor sounds pretty boring. I’m irked. I put on my gear and prepare for a word war. Savor is my word and it’s going to save me.
My armor gets dropped rather quickly though as I read on. Indulging, she writes, is doing something you’re not “supposed” to and doing it unapologetically, like napping when we should be working or like my trips which I didn’t have enough money for but went on anyway. It got me thinking about all my shoulds, assessing the areas in which I might be wearing a moral straightjacket — What in my life could I be doing more of that I feel I’m not supposed to be doing?
At first I couldn’t come up with anything tangible but then this glorious thought swam through my brain: I could allow myself to make mistakes, be imperfect and care less about it. I could indulge in my humanity unapologetically.
Be flawed like a champ.
This thought triggered a cascade of excitement, perking my body up as its energy ran through my veins and a mischievous grin shaped my face into one, big wholesome dare as I thought about how perfectionism had been cramping my style, insidiously, and at times imperceptibly showing up in different areas of my life.
Take pleasure in my imperfections? Now that’s something I could get behind. Categorically way more compelling and interesting than the boring, self-help kind of stuff I sometimes dabble in, like reciting banal and overused mantras, which I’ve come to find, more often than not, facile and utterly meaningless, this idea of indulging in my humanity, I began to realize, had a special energy to it.
While messages such as “I am perfect as I am” or “It’s okay to make mistakes” are inherently valuable and constructive, they lack, at least for me, wit, an air of mischief, a creative subversiveness, the kind of punch needed to deal with the fierce and stubborn energy of rusty, old beliefs and the toxic ambition pervading our success-driven culture. What I mean is, when it comes to our egos, we need to be smooth operators.
I don’t want to be robbed of my humanity, that right to be a beautiful, dynamic, breathing mess of a being forming, unforming, reforming into eternity. Life’s a game and I want to play it on my terms, making my way through the “should’s” with my playfulness as I secretly and ever so cleverly undermine every single voice that’s taught me to be something I am not.
It’s double pleasure to deceive the deceiver, said Niccolo Machiavelli.
Yes, indeed. In 2025, I’m going to be a trickster.
My spiritual teacher nailed it.