Your ability to experience pleasure is your greatest asset.
So, what is your relationship to pleasure these days?
To be totally honest, I’ve never been someone who has had an easy time orienting my life around pleasure.
Having started competitive ice dancing at age 7, discipline, precision, and intense training were at the very foundation of my daily life.
And, having struggled with body image issues and a bout of anorexia as a young teen, I got way more habituated to deprivation, punishment, and restriction than I did with indulgence, fullness, and pure enjoyment.
For a variety of reasons, we have become quite skilled at limiting our capacity to fully enjoy the pleasures
of being alive.
I’ll be going much deeper into this topic in my upcoming FREE MASTERCLASS – “Excavating Pleasure & Liberate Your Untapped Potential As A Woman” , which you can learn more about HERE.
But for today, let’s look at one of the ways this can show up for us as women:
This tendency to put productivity before over pleasure.
We’ve been conditioned to believe that we need to prove our value and worth in what we produce, create, and accomplish into a visible, tangible concrete form. That way, others can see it, recognize it, and evaluate it as a measurement of our success, which translates into our significance and worthiness….or so we believe.
So if we want to be enough, to be successful, to belong, to get acknowledged, then it makes sense that we might be reluctant to take time for pleasure for fear that it would impede our productivity, right?
In this way pleasure and productivity can seem mutually exclusive.
We fall into this trap of postponing pleasure until we’ve produced what we believe we need to in order to be worthy and enough OR until we’ve pushed, deprived or restricted ourselves and our bodies enough to feel that we deserve to relax and actually enjoy for a change.
It then takes getting to the point of feeling totally run down, burnt out, depleted and drained to empty to remind us that we are meant for so much more than we are allowing ourselves to experience and to wake us up to why we are here in the first place and what our purpose is….Which is to know joy, feel good, and experience the full range of pleasure on all levels.
Which brings me to the next point.
Without the fuel of pleasure, you will not fulfill your purpose.
Every woman I speak to is hungry to fulfill her purpose, to unleash her gifts, and to make a profound difference and contribution in this world. She is desperate to get out of her own way to let go of limiting fear and blocks, and to do whatever it takes in order to do so.
While each one may have her own unique version of the gifts and contribution she desires to express, the end result is similar if not identical. It is the fulfillment of your purpose – her soul’s unique destiny in this lifetime.
The fulfillment of our purpose is, in and of itself, an experience of ultimate pleasure.
While we all have different words to describe it – peace, joy, lightness, ease, freedom, connection, love, radiance, wholeness, deep satisfaction, bliss, fulfillment – it all comes down to some form of pleasure – emotional, physical, mental, and spiritual.
Would you agree?
So would you agree then that you don’t have to wait another second to fulfill your purpose?
How?
By giving yourself permission and allowing yourself to experience pleasure right here and right now
Because the moment you let more pleasure into your experience is the moment when you collapse (the illusion of) time and allow yourself to move towards your end goal and allow for your end goal to come closer to you.
Pleasure is magnetic to everything that you desire.
Why?
Because you desire the very things you desire because of the pleasure you believe they will bring you.
Which means that every time you deny yourself the pleasure available to you in this very moment is keeping every desire you have at arm’s length and pushing them further away.
Do you really want to continue repelling and delaying your desires from coming to you?
If not, then it’s time to start making this practical:
The next time you’re faced with an opportunity to feel good, use it an opportunity to begin exploring your relationship to pleasure.
Because your relationship to pleasure is the most powerful gauge to determine where you are in relationship to your desires and to any experiences you’re feeling deprived of right now.
So start asking yourself this week…..
“What is my relationship to pleasure?”
“And, what’s the pay-off for not making time for pleasure?”
Stay tuned for Part 2 of The Hidden Power Source of Your Pleasure coming soon