3 Tips from the Song of Songs for Your Love Life 🌺

It's almost Lent! Listen to the voice of the Lord speak:

"I will lead her into the desert, and there I will speak to her heart." Hos 2:14

So many good Catholic married women feel like there's a desert of some kind in their love life. Maybe it's a libido desert, or a postpartum desert, or a menopause desert. Maybe it's the ache of not feeling as desired by your husband as you'd like. Maybe lovemaking just feels humdrum and routine So many different kinds of deserts!

The scriptures can renew our minds and bring supernatural inspiration. In this episode, Sarah shares three lessons from the Song of Songs to help guide your love life. As she reads this scripture through the lens of a Catholic sex and marriage coach, she sees:

1. The Bride's body image is very positive!

2. Great use of words and talking between the Bridegroom and the Bride. More Catholic couples should be talking about their love life with each other and talking while making love. You have a love story. Keep telling the story!

3. Use all 5 senses. The Song of Songs uses vivid language for all five senses. How can you incorporate and highlight the sense of touch, taste, smell, sight, and hearing in different ways to enliven your time coming together? 

Sarah shares just a few examples of ideas in this episode, but more is available in her Bloom in the Desert virtual retreat happening Feb. 18-24. It's free! Learn more from the Song of Songs to inspire your love life, do fun homework, win prizes, enjoy a safe Catholic community of sisters in Christ all committed to growing together. 

Enroll here:

https://canafeast.com/desertbloom

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Free Enhancing Marital Intimacy Guide for Catholic Women: 9 Skills for Body, Mind, and Spirit (for married and engaged women)

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Transcript

1:14

How can the Song of Songs inspire and. Guide us in our married love life. I'm so excited to share more about this, especially as we prepare to enter into advent Ash. Wednesday is this week and I'm hearing the voice of the Lord speak to us. Listen to what God says in Hosea chapter two, verse 14. I will lead her into the desert, and there I will speak to her heart. How is the Lord calling to you, leading you into the desert so he can speak to your heart? Another translation is there. I will speak tenderly to her because the truth is as we enter into the desert of Lent, we have other deserts in our life and for a lot of good Catholic married women, their love life has. A desert in it in one way or another, whether that's pain and intimacy, whether it's feeling like low libido, whether it's feeling rejected, like you have more desire than your husband does and you know, you kind of that ache there, like you wish you were more desired by him. Or maybe it's a postpartum desert or a menopause desert, or a busy mom with lots to do and you're just not sure how to find the time or energy or interest in your busy days and nights for coming together with your husband. So many kinds of deserts. Maybe the desert is. Yeah. Okay. We, you know, we've been married for some time. We, you know, have some sort of regular schedule or regular practice of intimacy of coming together, but it just, it kind of feels same old, same old. We're just like stuck in a rut. There's just this, there's no spark. It doesn't feel special. Maybe it feels more like a chore obligation. This is where I wanna invite you to come to the Song of Songs and see how the Lord can make this desert bloom. The Song of Songs is such a beautiful book of the Bible, and of course it is for sure a metaphor for God's relationship with the soul, how he wants to wed our soul. It's a metaphor for a Christ relationship with the church. But it's also really beautiful love poetry about a bride in a bridegroom who are really in love and really attracted to each other, and who have a beautiful, passionate, love life. So it can inform us and inspire us and guide us. And you know, the Bible is good for renewing our mind, our minds on our own. We tend to just get. Cynical, grumpy, dismissive. That's kind of how our human minds tend. We, we sort of have this like, hmm, mental inertia. And so if we can approach the scripture and get inspired, get renewed, it can be so good for us. This is what can help our desert bloom. I am actually going to be leading a virtual retreat. This lent, on the Song of Songs, and I just wanna invite you all in. It's gonna be so much fun. We're going to go into the Song of Songs And see what lessons are in there for us in our love life. And this is such a great way to just juice up your own love life. Um, this is a great kickstart to anybody who is thinking of joining. My delight, if you go through this, when you join my delight, you'll have a headstart because your mind will already be, you know, starting to think along these lines. You know, maybe you've done my delight already. This is a great reminder, you know, to just kind of cement and renew and remind you of things that, you know, knew, maybe help unlock some new insights and bring you to your next level of growth and healing and, and awareness. Uh, or maybe you're just, you know, you wanna do this on your own and, just. Dive into the Song of Songs and see how God can speak to you directly. So just as a few examples of what I see when I open up the Song of Songs. And read this with the eyes of a, a woman who is a, a Catholic sex and marriage coach. I see. First of all, the bride knows her worth. I am lovely and dark. You know, I'm a, um, rose of Sharon, a lily of the valley. She has a really positive body image, you guys. She is not thinking about herself like, oh, my stomach's too big. I'm too flabby and you know, my breasts are too small or whatever. No, no, no. She knows She is beautiful. She rejoices in her beauty and she rejoices in her. Her lovers gaze at her. She responds, and then she also can appreciate him and has some really, affirming, complimentary things to say about her bridegroom, but that's. A good takeaway for all of us. We need to get over and ditch this negative self-talk that's the voice of the accuser. That is not the voice of the Lord who created you, who made you very good, if you have these negative thoughts about your body or your self-worth. So let the Lord speak to your heart and tell you, you're my beloved daughter. You're beautiful. You're very good. You're a princess. So yeah, just see if you can try on for size. Just try it out as an experiment, thinking about yourself, the way the bride in the song of songs thinks about herself. She is not ashamed. She's not ashamed of her body. She's not dismissive of her husband's compliments to her. She welcomes his gaze and she kind of like adds to what he says about her. That's good. And she goes with it and runs with it. Okay. A second thing I see in the Song of Songs, as I read it with the eyes of a Catholic sex and marriage coach is the, all the words, all the talking between the husband and wife, between bridegroom and bride, and the bride actually has more words than the husband., She's, she's articulate, she's self-aware, she engages with him, invites him. Responds to what he's saying, kind of matches his energy and he, hers, and this is something I see happen a lot in Catholic marriage where that's negative. We husbands and wives make love in silence. They are not talking to each other, they're not sharing their words. And this can really help. A wife enjoy love making more in her marriage if there is some talking. If she can hear her husband's words of compliments and affirmation and desire, and appreciation and affection, and share some words back with him. So all the words of the, the poetry of the story. It's really good. You know, our, brains are minds. They love story, and you have a love story with your husband and every time you come together to make love, why not? Celebrate the story of you two. Why not tell a story? Why not share some aspects of it? Keep writing your story. It's so important. So the words. Really important there. And then another thing I see in the Song of Songs is all the senses are used. We have references to smell, to taste, to touch and textures. Lots of rich visual images of course, but you know, this is really important for helping us enjoy love. Making more in marriage is incorporating all our senses, you know, the sense of touch. Of course, you know, we're often, you know, feeling skin to skin, warm skin on skin, you know, really lean into that. What are all the textures I feel? And can you bring in new textures? Maybe something silky, maybe something really soft, maybe, you know, drape things around each other. You can work on texture, maybe even just some attention to the texture of your bedsheets. If you're preparing and you, you know, that you're going to likely be making love that night, maybe some fresh sheets so you can slip in and just feel the crispness of that. Really leaning into how can we involve texture and touch and all the s senses smell. Can you add in some essential oils in some way? Maybe a massage oil or sprinkle some essential oils or mist, some scent into your room light, a scented candle. And then taste lots of fun things to do there as well. Actually hear true confessions. I don't actually like drinking wine that much. It's very rare that I'll find a wine that I like. I know it's, I'm a little weird that way, but what I do like is when my husband has drunk some wine, especially red wine, and then we kiss afterwards. It's really special and sweet, like there's just a little something extra there and it's kiss because I can, you know, taste the after notes of the wine there. There's a lot of creative ways that you can involve taste into your encounter as husband and wife in this beautiful garden of your married sexuality. So I encourage you to read the song of songs to be renewed. In your mind to let it spark ideas for you, for how you can make your love making more special, how you can change things. And if you would like some guidance, if you wanna continue to join me in seeing what else I see in the Song of Songs, I'd really encourage you to join into this bloom in the desert. Lentin Intimacy Virtual Retreat with me. I'll put a link in the show notes, or you can find it at cana feast.com/desert Bloom. So this will be for seven days, right at the beginning of Lent. It'll be a really fun experience for building a, a beautiful, safe community of ladies in here, sparking ideas. I'll be giving a little teaching each day and then taking your questions and answers in real time. We're gonna have prizes, we're gonna have challenges and little simple, easy to do homework that'll help you, keep growing and achieve some, some nice wins. As you continue this journey of growing and transformation, so I look forward to seeing you there. Cana feast.com/desert Bloom. I hope that you truly know that the Lord delights in you. God bless I.