Not My Grandmother’s Pleasure
I come from a family with a bias towards comfort and pleasure, and a downright avoidance of pain. I often recall having to set aside any feelings of discontent growing up, especially at my Nana’s house. When she caught me with a frown or in a bad mood, she’d send me upstairs until I changed my attitude and came back down with a smile.
Over time, I pruned away negativity and buried my loneliness from not feeling seen. Instead, I sought and found pleasure in the swimming pool, cookies, TV, climbing trees, and friends. Until my mid-30’s, I built my identity around being attentive, amiable, flexible, comfortable, and conflict averse. My positive attitude opened personal and professional doors and I was generally accepted, I just had to remember to keep smiling, no matter how I really felt.
But with the safeguards I’d put in place, I wasn’t available to the intimacy I longed for, with myself or with others. My threshold for discomfort was practically nonexistent and I became prone to unfair and hurtful outbursts that I didn’t know how to clean up. I enjoyed the things that brought me pleasure - music, friends, sunshine, mountains, orgasms, pot, laughter - but it all felt shallow and not actually satisfying. Finally, I realized that the deep ache of my unexpressed emotions needed my attention if I were to live into my fullness. From then on, life got a lot more interesting.
I began to lay down my defenses and open myself up to the peaks and valleys of my life. I started paying attention to and expressing what my body and my mind were actually feeling, moment to moment. I felt turned on by life’s unfolding, and pleasure came alive in new and surprising ways. I found it in raw vulnerability, by following my heightened sensations, saying yes, saying no. I found it through caring about others and slowing down. More awareness brought more capacity to lean into everything, including exciting opportunities, tough conversations, and even death.
These days, I often wake up in pain. The ache of my aging back is the first sensation to greet me. A flood of heartbreak rushes in with the myriad of social, health, and environmental devastation enveloping the U.S. and the world right now. Sometimes I find comfort in the contours of my husband's body, other mornings, roaming hands arouse me. I curl, stretch, tighten, wail, wonder, and pray, meeting my ever-evolving reality. And whether my first thoughts bring a smile or a furrowed brow, I stay in bed until I feel a sense of gratitude for the gift of being alive – the thing my Nana was really trying to point me towards so many years ago.
Each one of us has our own narratives around pleasure that limit our experience of it. If you're ready to discover what else is there for you, consider joining us this October for a live, online four-week dive into redefining and reclaiming pleasure. In it, we’ll explore the remarkable change that’s possible when our pleasure becomes larger than a personal quest to simply feel good (or not feel bad). Learning to allow the full range of our feelings and sensations is ultimately about making ourselves present and available to impact and be impacted by the world, and does wonders for self-acceptance and our sense of belonging. Learn more and sign up here.