Exploring GAteways to radical pleasure

Have you ever thought about how severely limited you have become in your actions to avoid looking weird?  

Have you ever wondered how something would smell and been stopped by the thought, “I can’t just stick my nose in this, this piece of fresh cut wood, this seashell, what would people think?” The spreading wide of the nostrils, nose hairs peeking out, certainly it’s impolite. Although you may not have known that your nose is full of erectile tissue, perhaps there is a part of you that senses there is something naughty about over enthusiastic smelling.

Have you ever wanted to move your body in a way that was something other than sitting, standing or walking and thought, “but not here, this is not a space designated for such movements, I’ll have to go to a specific place wearing yoga pants and be with other people who have all agreed that it’s okay to stretch or bend”.  Perhaps the process of tuning out these simple desires is so embedded in your skeleton from years of shutting down all of your impulses to run and jump and play that the inclination no longer occurs except in the deepest caverns of your body. 

The capacity to intake sensory pleasure through your touch can be indulged in regularly by circling your finger along the rim of your ceramic mug, running your hand down the bark of a tree or rolling your entire body on a sandy beach. For many of us this capacity, of experiencing pleasure through simple touch, has been shut down. It might feel like something is missing that we can not quite put our finger on. 

Meanwhile, most people are aware of existing within a culture that both taboos and obsesses over sex. We have also taken sex and made it synonymous with pleasure. In a place and time in which we have self-imposed massive limits on our sensory experience in day-to-day life we have simultaneously created expectations of a sex life that is the source of epic pleasure. We are led to believe that if you are not achieving these heights of erotic experience the solution is to buy toys or sexy lingerie or learn an esoteric technique. 

Here is the magic, amazing sex is not about what you do, it is about the presence with which you are able to do it. Are you conscious from within your flesh and bones and drinking in this experience with your senses? If so you will notice you access pleasure through all the cells in your body in little instances throughout your day. For many of us layers of trauma are inhibiting this access. Be gentle with yourself, take joy in noticing small moments. You may pause at the smell of freshly baked bread wafting through the street or to listen to a birdsong. As you begin to pause more you can practice expanding these pauses, staying a bit longer in that moment of pleasure. 

Meanwhile, you can be dressed in your sexiest lingerie with a magazine cover lover and in the midst of penetration be experiencing almost no pleasure at all, or pushing to squeak out the tiniest orgasm caught in a swirl of frenzy and fear that you will lose this moment of erection or excitation. Many people are shut off from their body at this very moment of great potential intimacy. Is it a surprise that we can not access deep pleasure in this moment once you begin to realize that you have consistently, in the accumulation of tiny instances throughout your life, been shutting down your access to sensory pleasure? If you do not feel like you deserve to stop and savour a gentle breeze, how can you believe you are worthy of deeper and more intense ecstasy?

One could ponder how we came to be so good at self-policing our own pleasure. The loss of easeful access to all the free and simple pleasures right in front of you is helpful encouragement for you to strive, to work, to consume and to still feel like it’s all not enough. 

Instead, perhaps, take a moment today to pause, in the street, in public, at work, wherever you are, take a moment and feel into how your body would like to move and then make the brave and vulnerable decision to do just that, a little shake or shiver, a stretch, a secret squeezing of your pubococcygeus muscle, a deep long sigh. If you would like to go deeper in your pleasure try this, slow down & then slow down some more. Learn to pleasure yourself. Notice the sweet soft kiss of a breeze when it’s the perfect temperature outside and then stay in that moment of noticing just a little longer, pause before you rush onto the next thing. Welcome to radical pleasure.