Pleasure - the felt experience of delight - has a profound ability to heal so much of our human experience. Pleasure is a whole body, whole mind, whole spirit, whole everything, experience. It’s when your external environment and your internal environment are engaged in a harmonious rapture towards something positive.
Chemically/hormonally speaking, when we are on the pleasure bus, we release dopamine and oxytocin, and these two secretions make us feel amazing. In fact, dopamine and oxytocin signal to the body, which then tells the nervous system, which then communicates with the mind that it is in a blissful experience of Love.
So, if you’re asking me, Pleasure is the experience of Love. And, as we may be aware, Love is not just a feeling…it is a practice. Something we work towards and at for our entire lives.
And as with Love, the opposite of Pleasure is the experience of fear.
Although we are Pleasure seeking creatures by nature, because our tendency as humans is to protect, we tend to spend more time focusing on what could go wrong than what is right.
Which creates a problem for us, because this negativity bias arrests us into a state of “fight or flight”. And that arrested state causes us to produce a steady flow of adrenaline and cortisol. And because of this, our bodies become addicted to our stress hormones and actually go into physical withdrawal when we feel good for too long.
So we actually become chemically reliant on stress in order to feel normal.
Sounds like the worst double bind in the history of double binds…
But there’s a way through, and the way through is: PLEASURE.
Join me in The Source Salon for Pleasure As Medicine and learn all about the fascinating and supportive practice of Abhyanga massage, the Ayurvedic practice of warm oil self-massage.
All you need is a good quality oil, a towel and about 20 minutes to transport yourself into a world of bliss.
This simple technique calms your nervous system, nourishes the entire body, soften and smoothes the skin, moves the lymph, helps you detox, increases circulation, aids in improved sleep…it even helps improve your vision.
It’s the perfect way to deepen your experience with Pleasure into a lifestyle instead of a moment-by-moment blip.
Creating a Pleasure Practice is one of the most healing and empowering things you can do for yourself, and it is also…pleasurable.
The deeper you go into your pleasure practice, the more you understand it to be foundational to your human experience. Through feeling into your individual experience of pleasure, you learn to leverage external stimuli to become the master of your internal landscape.
And that is what I find so fascinating.
What I continuously explore and practice are all the ways I can use Pleasure to change my life, and the lives of others. And I am driven to understand this in a way that can be applied to every person in every situation. Which means I take a trauma informed approach to pleasure. Which means my focus on not on sex, or even the body, but rather on the little, simple moments that you can accumulate all day, everyday, if you bring your attention to it.
Put simply, I want to backdoor my way into healing not just our nervous systems and our bodies, but also helping people release the chains that keep them bound to pain, anxiety, fear, sadness, grief, etc. And I want to use Pleasure to do it.
Consider this my contrarian response to the “Healing Through Pain” model. We are done with that now…
It doesn’t have to be a lonely experience. It doesn’t have to be an experience where you rake yourself over the coals of shame and criticism and endless blame until you shame yourself into an unsustainable state of being different or better. You don’t even have to lose all your friends or hide your process from anyone.
It’s kind of brilliant. And it’s available to us all, regardless of any circumstance.
Join me in The Source Salon to explore some of the facets of Pleasure As Medicine. I am so excited to share one of my most favorite techniques to bring Pleasure into your life as a devotional practice.
Abhyanga Massage
Abhyanga massage is the Ayurvedic practice of warm oil self-massage.
All you need is a good quality oil, a towel and about 20 minutes to transport yourself into a world of bliss.
This simple technique calms your nervous system, nourishes the entire body, soften and smoothes the skin, moves the lymph, helps you detox, increases circulation, aids in improved sleep…it even helps improve your vision.
Join me in The Source Salon for Pleasure As Medicine and learn all about this fascinating, supportive practice that will help carry you through your day in the experience of Love.