How to Hold More Pleasure

The smell of his neck after sex.
Fresh lilacs, filling my kitchen with sweetness.
Pungent, fresh-ground pepper. 
The sound of water filling my tub as I sink up to my shoulders. 
Sweet foam on top of my morning tea. 
The song of my grown kids' voices. 
A long, slow exhale. 
Holding my father's hand as we wait for Pho at his favorite restaurant. "
The warmth of my sheets before I open my eyes. 
Hilarious memes on other peoples' feeds ;) 

These are some of my pleasures. It feels good to write them down, helps me feel them more fully, because as much as I write and teach about pleasure, it’s a practice, and feeling pleasure isn’t always easy for me.

Do you feel this way, too?

Tiny pleasures beckon every day, but do we take them in, pause long enough to truly be with what feels good, and alive? 

The programming around pleasure runs deep: superfluous, selfish, etc. One of the costs of our capitalist-consumerist-patriarchal culture is that pleasure (once considered a sacred feminine art by the ancients) has been coded as untrustworthy and unspiritual. Not to mention something we "earn" (ie: I earned it! I deserve it! I'm gifting myself!).

If pleasure is emptied of its potency, situated as reward, rather than prerequisite to productivity, we're more likely to stay self-sacrificing, and compliant. We’re more likely to believe we need what’s being sold, and sacrifice ourselves in the selling.

All of which makes opening to, receiving, and claiming pleasure a whole lot more complicated—and empowering—than we might think.

So, if seeking, let alone receiving pleasure feels privileged and/or indulgent, I hope you’ll read on, and consider instead that it's imperative.

Pleasure matters because it's how we know—FEEL—our authentic desire. 

Pleasure teaches us how to read our body’s wisdom (what's right for us, what’s not), while strengthening our capacity to hold the joy that infuses our field when we act on our authentic desires.

That last part’s worth repeating, with a little more context, because it’s super important:

Context —> 1) We are taught, especially (but not only) as women, to disown and disavow our pleasure. 2) To actually feel pleasure we have to be in a receptive state—our bodies need to be open. 3) To be open is to be vulnerable.  

Which is to say, we need to feel safe in order to receive and experience pleasure.

But so often we don’t feel safe.

We walk around braced, for all kinds of reasons—our unhealed hurts, our heartbreaks, our exhaustion, our giving, our taking-care-of, our doing a million things (even if we know to prioritize rest and pleasure!), and before we know it, our bellies are tight, our throats are narrowed, our breath is shallow, and the though of stopping for tiny pleasures feels, well, irritating, or simply impossible.  

Or, maybe we’ll finally relax enough to be in flow, to lose ourselves in the pleasure of deep presence, only to yank ourselves out after a few minutes, check the phone—unable to stay there for long.

Which means that….

Super important point! —> We need to teach our bodies how to receive and sustain pleasure, because doing so is what prepares us to literally hold the joy—the energetic frequency—of living our full potential, of our desires made manifest.

Or, to put it another way:

Pleasure is a practice, and this practice readies us for the actualization of our true purpose, wherein we re-discover who and what we really are: a state of radical non-resistance, wherein, as Michael Singer puts it in my favorite book of his, The Surrender Experiment, we become ecstatic.

Ecstasy is amazing—and it’s a frequency so crystalline that I find it hard to hold for long periods of time. But for the past year, increasing my capacity for pleasure, and therefore for the ecstasy of true authenticity, has been core to practice.

And low and behold, I’m getting better and better at it!

The practice of pleasure, or what I sometimes call pleasure-fluency, is truly a skill, one we can learn and refine and get really good at.

Through my own practice and study, and my work with others, I’ve come to see clearly that if we can't sustain pleasure in our bodies, we'll sabotage our authentic desires.

This insight is huge! This is why pleasure matters!

I want to shout it from the rooftops: If we can’t receive and hold pleasure in our bodies, we'll unknowingly resist the path we're meant for in this lifetime while searching for a sense of fulfillment that feels evermore urgent and elusive. 

Helping my clients identify this schism in their own lives is sacred work to me: when we see it, really see it, and then learn to grow our pleasure-fluency, our lives change radically, in ways that words often fail to fully capture. Here are some results I’ve experienced myself and seen in others:  

Chronic illness dissipates and in many cases resolves entirely.
Relationships that felt listless revive.
Creativity erupts where we used to feel stuck.

We reverse-age.
Energy amplifies, often dramatically.
Anxiety becomes aliveness.
Purpose and meaning emerge organically.
We experience a spiritual awakening.

Things feel a lot easier.

How, then, do we do it? How do we increase our pleasure-fluency? What does a pleasure practice look like?

I had the honor of exploring these questions in depth with my friend and colleague, Rebecca Mullen, on her wonderful podcast, Habits for Your Happily Ever After. It’s a deep-dive into pleasure, how to create more of it, why it matters, and why we resist it. You can listen to our convo here.

But for now, here are four easy things you can do to right away deepen your pleasure-fluency:

1) Start a Pleasure Journal. Carry it with you in your purse or bag, and challenge yourself to write down 5 - 10 pleasures a day that you notice. As I used to tell my creative writing students, “show, don’t tell”—rather than “the sunset,” you might write instead “seeing (name the sense through which you’re perceiving; doing so immediately amplifies your pleasure) the lavender and orange glow of the sunset.”

2) Give pleasure to your future self (and condition her to expect it): for instance, I always set out my special tea mug, a pretty spoon, and my tea bag on the counter before I got to bed. I fill the kettle with water and I place my favorite local honey next to my mug. When I enter the kitchen in the morning, my body immediately relaxes and opens at the sight of my lovingly-laid out ritual.

3) Create a simple, beautiful altar. Doesn’t need to be fancy. Mine is tiny, so it fits in my living room along a wall. Nevertheless, it’s a powerful pleasure portal, because I adorn it with flowers and shells and stones and other treasures I collect on my walks in the woods or prairie, where I feel most powerfully my place in a sacred geometry.

4) Rest. When your body feels tired, allow yourself to pause and take a few deep breaths, instead of habitually pushing through. This can be hard to do at first, but tiny rests throughout the day accumulate, and have a significant impact over time. You can set a timer on your phone to go off four times a day. When it does, drop what you’re doing for two minutes, and take four deep, long, belly breaths.

Pleasure is the source of your power. It brings you home to who you truly are and what you really want and, most importantly, to the knowing that you're brave enough, strong enough, and safe enough to stake your claim there. 

Imagine the impact on our families, communities, workplaces, schools, places of worship, and world if we work together to reclaim our pleasure!