Attuning to pleasure and reconnecting with your body

Your pleasure can help heal the world!

Why We Become Disconnected From Pleasure

When we're used to being stuck in our minds, we become disconnected from the inherent pleasure of life. This is one of the clearest signs of feeling disconnected from your body, when thoughts take over and sensation fades into the background.

When trapped in thought, we are disconnected from our body, our senses, and the present moment. Somatic healing exercises help you find your way back into your body when this happens.

If we aren't living in the present, we are living in some distorted reality in our minds, shaped by the pains of the past, constantly scanning for more pain, therefore creating more pain.

Because we live in a very thought-based society (that also glamorizes suffering), we need to make a conscious effort to practice pleasure – to practice feeling and sensing – so we can come more fully into our bodies and take in all the pleasure life has to offer us. Learning how to be more present in your body doesn't require anything dramatic. It starts with small, repeatable moments of noticing.

Since we are programmed for survival, we're usually unconsciously searching for what is either currently making us uncomfortable and looking for ways to get rid of it, or searching for things in the future that could potentially cause discomfort and how to prevent them from happening. This is the nervous system doing exactly what it evolved to do, but it can leave little room for actually feeling safe in your body.

However, most of us have the gift in this lifetime of getting to evolve beyond surviving, and into thriving.

And a key to thriving is becoming more aware of pleasure than of discomfort. Understanding survival mode vs. thriving is often the first step in this shift because one keeps us scanning for threats, the other opens us up to feeling.

To create this new way of being, we must train ourselves to create the habit of pleasure, rather than the habit of suffering.

Pleasure Treasure Hunt

One easy way to create this new habit of pleasure is by being on the hunt for those simple pleasures throughout the day and taking just an extra 5 seconds with them.

Of course, you may help yourself to more if you'd like, but we want the commitment to feel very, very small so it feels easy and enjoyable, and is something you actually want to keep doing. This kind of pleasure practice works because it's low-effort. The goal isn't a big ritual, just a brief pause.

So I'm inviting you to find those simple pleasures throughout the day that can so easily be missed. Soak them up as thoroughly as possible for just 5 seconds.

Savor a bite of food and see how much pleasure you can receive from the flavor and the textures, for just 5 seconds. Learning how to savor the moment like this is a form of sensory awareness practice. It trains your attention to slow down and land in the body.

Go on a walk and take in the beauty of the light shining through the trees, or the song of the birds, or a cute little flower. These are some of the simple pleasures in everyday life that are easiest to miss when the mind is busy.

See how many little 5-second blips of pleasure you can collect throughout your day. Just one is worth celebrating. Over time, these small acts of self-care add up to a genuinely different way of moving through your day.

Over time, you will expand your capacity to feel more and more pleasure, presence, and aliveness, and you will evolve into a being who thrives rather than survives.

Pleasure is an act of service

Do not underestimate the healing power of your pleasure. Not only for yourself – your mind, body, and spirit – but also for the collective.

Your energy ripples and impacts others more than you know. The world needs more pleasure. It needs more beings focused on thriving rather than surviving.

When we are in survival mode, we are looking for threats and unconsciously creating false threats in the form of other people. This often looks like being judgmental of others –seeing them as bad, wrong, less than, and ultimately separate from ourselves– all in an unconscious effort to make ourselves feel less threatened and safer.

The world does not need more survival, fear-based energy. It needs more thriving. More pleasure. This is part of why pleasure activism has become such an important framework. It reframes joy as a form of resistance.

You are not helping anyone by blocking yourself from enjoying your life just because there is so much suffering in the world right now.

This doesn't mean you should never tap into the collective pain, deeply feel for others, send love to those who are suffering, and contribute to the world in meaningful ways. Expanding our capacity for empathy is incredibly important.

But if you are consumed by the pain of others, or consumed by your anger at corruption, you are giving away your power and simply adding to the collective suffering.

You enjoying your life is actually what will do the most. Because when you are enjoying life, there is a natural urge to spread that joy.

When you are surviving life, there is a natural urge to protect yourself, which means you're less able to clearly see what will truly serve the whole beyond your ego's need to survive the false threats it has created to maintain the survival-based reality it has become so comfortable with.

So, long story short, you can help heal the world through your pleasure. This is really the heart of how pleasure heals trauma, not by ignoring pain, but by giving the nervous system consistent evidence that safety and joy are possible too.

Go smell a flower and savor the scent for five seconds.

It's doing more than you know.

Yay for pleasure activism!

Coming Home to Your Body

If you're feeling disconnected from the inherent pleasure of life, and ultimately from yourself, I deeply understand. I would be honored to support you through the journey of falling back in love with yourself and coming home to your body, where your aliveness, pleasure, and deepest wisdom live.

If you're curious about what working together might look like, I'd love to meet you. You can schedule a complimentary consultation call below.