Letting joy and pleasure be our companions in life

Pleasure is such an important part of our well-being, health, ability to recover, to connect and to prosper.

Pleasure can be a part of many activities. It is a state in which we are able to let go, to be fully present in what we do, be touched, be in restful mode and bathe in trust. Trust in ourselves and in life.

Do you know these moments when everything is good, everything is quiet, everything seems to be just fine, but you are worried? You can’t really enjoy the moment? You are busy with the idea that it will soon be over? That it is not real and you are looking for the “bad stuff”?

Experiences of all sorts come and go. Nothing stays the same. Everything is in flux. A quiet moment will move into a turbulent one. A turbulent one will move into a quiet one.

When we are connected to our power, to the natural trust in ourselves, then we are able to join this flux. We do not need to be obsessing over the future or to be constantly looking back and fantasizing about the “innocence” of the past.

But the way we worry and can’t rest or relax when all is good, is connected to past experiences that have engraved in us a fear of not being able to meet a difficult moment. It may be connected to the way we were growing up, where pleasure was not allowed. Where joy, restfulness and playfulness were constantly reduced and attacked.

At times we used pleasure as a way to disconnect from what was troubling us. It may have been also these moments we had to hide and indulge in, secretly.

This is why often times pleasure is being vulgarized in our culture. It is being reduced to sex, eating and consuming things.

Even these activities are (ab)used as an escape. A way to numb other parts of our lives.

This is why we may get obsessed with them or complicated with them.

Our experience of pleasure, and the way we relate to pleasure is intertwined with attitudes of compensation, of helplessness, of trying to numb other parts of ourselves and our experience and escaping our lives and some complexities and pain we are afraid to confront.

Let’s give pleasure its true power. The power that is within us. The power of being a constant companion in our lives.

Pleasure is part of having no fear(fullness). A state in which we can be living in the whole of ourselves. When we are able to expand to the whole of who we are.

It is available to us when we are able to meet within us difficult and unpleasant experiences like pain, fear, loss and so on without fighting them through dissecting parts of ourselves, numbing or controlling them.

These are unconscious efforts rooted in old helplessness. In traumas. In our past inability to confront, resist or express what we needed.

Efforts which were understandably needed in the past, but today are trapping us and distancing us from pleasure.

It is also understandable that it is not an easy choice to undo those efforts.

1. These efforts seemed to have kept us safe. So why risk it?

2. For years we have feared the feelings and sensations they have controlled. So, what is the good in feeling them?

3. Our society is pushing us to control more and more. Distance ourselves from the body and hide in a part of our mind that gives us the feeling we are “untouchable”. What if we will not function anymore and will not be able to part of “normal life”?

Are you willing to make a little leap of faith?

Are you willing to risk it for a moment for an opportunity to have more pleasure and joy in your life?

You are wired for joy and pleasure. It is something your whole being recognizes and tries to find in life. All we want to do is to enable the path towards it to be free of any twists, abuses and dependencies.

We want to remind ourselves the simplicity of it again and dare to allow the depth and wholeness of it.

If you simply start with breathing in a way that will enable you to feel what is now, you will be able to connect to pleasure.

We have trained our breath to be such, that reduces the intensity of what we feel and sense. These are structures that are rooted in an old need to endure what we could not have changed or did not learn how to trust ourselves to move through and manage with.

Taking conscious moments to breathe, having patience and courage to meet what comes up in our experience, and still keep on breathing deeply, is the base line.

Now choose a part of your body to focus on.

Start with a part that carries no complications or pains for you. A part you like and are in peace with.

Put your hands (or a hand) on that area. Breathe to bring more attention, relaxation and flow into that area and your hands.

You can move your hands on that area, massaging it gently and stroking it. Do that to awake the sensual experience and all other layers of experience, memories and awareness it can unfold.

Feel what emotions come.

What experience of yourself you have?

How do you perceive the moment and the space around you?

How does life seem to be?

Allow that “area” to speak. To express itself by the sensations it brings and the way you become.

Feel the kind of pleasure and joy you sense.

Now let’s move to a different part of the body. A part that you may have pain or discomfort in. A part that you may carry shame around. A part that got hurt. A part that you would not associate pleasure and joy with.

And like before put your hands on that area.

Breathe deeply and attentively to bring awareness, warmth and flow into your hands.

As much as you can to that part of your body.

Be ready to meet whatever that part may carry. Keep on breathing and choosing to sense and feel it. Know that your mind will try to protect you by either making you “feel nothing”, get bored, fall asleep or maybe provoke a light panic.

Whatever tries to pull you away from feeling and touching that area, choose to continue. Know that these are old alarms and inner structures that are not based anymore of your abilities, capabilities nor on the ability of your body to heal, let go and transform.

If you need to stand, do so.

If there is a wave of a deep emotion like sadness, despair, fearfulness, pain, shame, dark anger…. or anything else, stay with it. Keep on breathing with your hands resting on that area of your body. Keep massaging that area lightly or striking it. With your hands reconnecting to that part of your body and the choosing through them to “listen to it”. To what it needs to express, move through and release.

If at any moment it seems “too much”, take a break, stretch, move, change your position and then get back to it.

Find your trust. Choose to trust yourself, your body and your ability to confront what you sense, as you actually have no other way in life but to reconnect to that trust.

As much as you can, keep on breathing and touching the area.

Try to continuously reconnect to the space around you. Usually when we feel something that seems unpleasant or “frightening” we tend to disconnect from the space and shrink inside of us.

Try to do the opposite. To move, to expand. To connect or not ignore the space around you.

There will be a moment when something will shift.

When something will subside. When there will be more ease and acceptance.

Feel that in that moment there is more joy and pleasure.

When that part of your body, of yourself, can be reconnected, can be felt, can express itself, and you are allowing the experience to flow and not react to it with fear, you will gain back the power of that part of your body. Of that part of yourself.

Reconnecting in this way means taking back your power of who you are. The power that you thought you gained by disconnecting, was actually how you gave it away.

Once you have that power back- a power of vitality, you will have the power of joy and pleasure. You will find them in all life’s circumstances.

Now put your hands on both areas you trained with.

And with attention, choice and breath, connect them.

Connect them with pleasure and joy.

Feel what is the difficulty you experienced in the 2. area you have trained with in relation to pleasure and joy. In relation to being connected, healed and accepted?

In yourself choose and “declare” to that part, that you will stay with it. You will take it back, no matter what. Give to that first area of your body (the easy part) you trained with, the “job” to take care of the other area. To always make sure it comes along.

Then take a last deep breath, let go of your hands and give yourself a time to just sense yourself and the space around you. Choose to connect and find pleasure and joy at this moment in time. Listen to the sensation within you and try to identify what do these experiences and areas of your body ask from you? How can they guide you through difficult moments?

Here will lie the answer to understanding which parts of yourself are needed to be more present need in order to increase and create pleasure and joy around you in your life and in the lives of people you interact with.

I wish you the deepest pleasure and the most delightful joy,

Anna

Photo by Mohamed Nohassi on Unsplash