How pleasure opens the door to healing

In my journey to healing one of the most simple and effective interventions was learning to become a pleasure seeker!

No, I’m not talking about the quick thrill of stimulating activities, like shopping, drinking, eating, drugs. I’m not casting shame on these…but the pleasure they give us can be short-lived and leave us with a price to pay.

I’m talking about seeking out moments where you sense your whole body open-up, where your shoulders drop, chest opens, that exhale comes with ease and you feel your heart unfurl like a flower in full bloom.

∆ I seek these moments out
∆ I let them fill my body
∆ I savour them, so that they expand like tiny galaxies exploding in my bloodstream

Sometimes pleasure is obvious, is awe-inspiring, (like my sunshine walk this morning) and I feel physically grateful for the opportunity to be witness to its magic and unfolding.

Other times it’s harder to find, to feel what’s good and I have to get creative; to look a little harder, to listen in to my needs, to find the pleasure that’s already living deep within my body, and might be lost if not for me seeking it out.

…but it almost always exists and can be contacted and when I find it, I wrap it around me like a blanket.

For many, many years pleasure seemed like the holy grail, something that we find if we’re “lucky”, that some people were luckier than others (I wasn’t one of them) and that it was limited to sunny days, holidays and the precious first moments of love.

Little did I know that with these beliefs and lack of knowledge of my body, I was blocking so much of my own joy.

But of course it wasn’t really my fault…

We have been told for so long that joy will come when we buy a new car, new clothes, get thinner, buy a house, have kids….it goes on…

But pleasure is always with us. It belongs to us. It lives inside of our bodies.

Not only that, but stress simply cannot exist at the same time as feelings of pleasure – it’s like a natural kryptonite for dysregulation!

Training my being to seek out pleasure, to call it in has been one of the fundamental ways I’ve worked to shift my nervous system so that I can receive more of what’s good and stay rooted when I’m surrounded by things that don’t feel so.

I must say, this comes with a caveat. When people have experienced high levels of stress or trauma, pleasure itself might not feel safe and the body might find itself in fight or flight or even freeze. In these cases we work with the body carefully to introduce new levels of stimulus by working through our channels to take in biological information and slowly open up it’s capacity to receive and hold. We start to build new levels of safety in the body first.

I absolutely love the simplicity of this work and how available it is to everyone, it is in fact empowering to know we can so easily transform our experience without needing the knowledge of complicated scientific systems or trying to remember specific movement practices.

If you’d like to learn how to work with pleasure or understand more about stress, burnout, trauma or nervous system regulation, why not book a call here and see how I can help.