You Can Feel Pleasure Right Now

Preparing to write about pleasure tonight began with a small ritual. It’s rare that I’m alone these days and I admit with sadness that my rituals have suffered with the consistent presence of my spouse at home. For this reason and many more, I’m looking forward to reconnecting with this side of myself in our Eros, Ceremony, and Belonging mini retreat coming up in November.

I light a few candles and lift my sage bundle. It smells sweet, pungent, ashy. Touching the flame to its leaves, I drop into a deep breath and blow into glowing orange embers, entranced by their dancing light. Smoke swirls up and around my body, bathing me as I move from a feeling arising within. I’m present to the heat, the light, and the smoke transporting the dayworld into the mystical. 

My dance with Eros has begun and I drop to all fours. I feel curious to explore and take a conscious breath. I claw the shaggy carpet and press my hips all the way to the left, my spine arcs in response. A pull from my inner thigh and splitting open ribcage tell me I’m at the edge of my pleasure/pain threshold. I begin to travel around my body - pressing, bending, pulsing in and out of the tension with organic movement. I let myself be taken for a while.

I’m in a deep relationship with my embodied wisdom. When words fail me, my exploration leads me here. I breathe, move, and make sounds - sighs, tones, growls and howls. A little self-touch and I’m ever so slightly aroused. I look around my candle-lit room, smoke beginning to fade, and my eyes come to rest on a rose quartz heart softly resting on a tiny pelt of fur in a wooden treasure box. The sight warms me and I feel ready to write...

I wonder what it was like for you to read about my moment of embodied pleasure. Do you feel pleasure stirrings of your own? How about discomfort? Have you started comparing yourself, imagining that what I've described is what pleasure should look like?

Whatever is happening for you, I wonder if you’d be willing to stop reading for a few minutes and drop your attention into your body to discover what’s there for you right now, with no expectations that it look or feel anything like mine.

Find your breath and explore the edges of your physical body – how your breath moves you, how your muscles, tendons and bones stretch and press into your skin, the different ways your body contacts surfaces and the qualities of your environment. Move towards what feels good and allow yourself to follow your curiosity as long as you feel it. 

What we’re engaging here is a version of erotic pleasure and it’s available to us any moment we’re engaged with the world through our bodies. It looks and feels all sorts of ways and certainly not all of them look like what we’ve been taught is ‘pleasurable’.  
 

Feeling the pleasure that comes from something as simple as stretching into the tension of our edges, whatever they are, makes us more available to sensations of all kinds and greater magnitudes of pleasures. Conversely, we take ourselves out of pleasure potentials when we put expectations on it, and when it comes to realms of sensuality and sexuality, we often do just that.

I’ve heard from dozens of clients and friends who feel like they’re failing pleasure when they don’t have access to peak experiences or orgasm. But peak experiences are not a marker that we’ve ‘made it’ and striving too hard for them leads to diminishing returns while we lose sight of what’s already well in us.

Our upcoming class on Reclaiming Erotic Pleasure focuses on deeply nourishing pleasure, the kind that leaves us resourced to care for ourselves and the world. When we start with our own embodiment and engage with the world from there, we become responsible for our own life force and we can trust the ground beneath our peak experiences.

We’ll spend four weeks discovering the radically rooted pleasure that comes from the inside out, that begins with noticing and curiosity, that can unfurl into our unique and ever-evolving dances with Eros and meaningful activism. We really mean it when we say that the world needs us in our pleasure now more than ever.