Most aware people I meet are WAY out of balance on the pleasure side of life,
they don’t get enough pleasure.
They seem to spend more time focusing on controlling, constraining and limiting themselves than on exploring with pleasures.
I can speak from personal experience:
I had a time in my 30’s where I realized I had been over-controlling myself and I felt boxed in by all my rules and limitations. I had mastered self-control, but had no skill with letting loose, playing, having fun or enjoying myself.
If you had asked me what I did for fun, I would have been hard-pressed to answer that question. I might have said, I liked working and overcoming challenges… but “fun”… I really didn’t know.
It’s like “fun” is something I left back in childhood and life was no longer about fun, it’s about getting things accomplished. Yes, there were moments of fun along the way, but they seemed beyond my control, they just “happened” on occasion. Little happy/fun accidents in my otherwise controlled and orderly life.
I then spent a decade or so looking to expand my capacity for pleasure and looking to understand how I got so personally over-controlling.
I found my Christian upbringing was the prime culprit.
As I surveyed and explored other religions I found similar messages.
The overwhelming majority of religious and social messaging has a strong glorification of pain, controlling, limitation and suffering as if it’s a normal and “natural” part of life.
Religions promote struggle and suffering as virtuous
while negating the value of pleasure.
While this may help bring balance to some hedonistically focused youngsters, overall, it leaves this heavy overlay on society that over-promotes struggle, suffering and hard work as “the” way to live one’s life.
This focus is likely left in place because struggle, suffering and hard work… benefits businesses and economies.
But does it benefit YOU?
This social over-conditioning has thrown off people’s center of balance.
How most people assume they are:
|————————–[
Pleasure center Struggle
But most people have accepted this social programming and have centered themselves more on the struggle side and have very little in the pleasure side of balance.
So this is how I notice most people actually are:
|—————————B-
Pleasure “center” Struggle
What most people are unconsciously doing by centering themselves more towards struggle, is that they are extending the struggle range deeper into suffering…
How most people actually are:
|—————–normal range—————-|
|—-—-———-———–B-
Pleasure “center” Struggle Suffering
Most people create a “balance” that actually has very little (if any) real pleasure in their life.
Once you recognize that most of society is skewed in terms of how much struggle they allow and how little pleasure they allow, you can RE-BALANCE your life to STAY OUT OF SUFFERING and lean more towards embodying pleasure.
More like this:
|————————–[B]
Pleasure center Struggle Suffering
We’ve become a culture that is almost pleasure-phobic. As if it’s somehow wrong (sinful?) to experience pleasure.
What if this is an indicator of the conditioning we’ve received towards over-controlling, over-limiting and accepting excessive struggle in our lives?
What if YOU can CHOOSE where your center/balance is?
FINDING BALANCE
Having a human body is a cornucopia of different energies and experiences from all sides of all spectrums. There are a HUGE amount of different experiences you can have in these wonderfully dynamic bodies.
So how do you choose what works for YOU?
To me, it’s about finding an INNER BALANCE that excites you. Juggling all the different energies to find the mix that creates the most flow, fulfillment and enjoyment.
The more aware I’ve become, the more I naturally seek to optimize my life to create a flow that works for me personally. But it rarely looks like what other people or this society think of as balanced, it’s what works for ME locally in MY body. It’s MY personal (and every changing) balance.
What if there is no one right answer and no one right balance…
just what works for YOU personally?
==> How much pleasure do you have in your life?
==> How much struggle/control/limitation do you have in your life?
If life keeps bouncing into suffering, I’d suggest you are leaning too close to struggle and accepting that as center.
If you were to die tomorrow…
would you say you had a fulfilling and pleasurable life?
-or-
would you say you had a life of struggle, limiting yourself and hardship?
THE DARK SIDE OF AVOIDING PLEASURE
When you are being authentically YOU and living what lights you up and turns you on… you are NATURALLY HAVING FUN.
When you are being NOT-YOU (not authentic) life is boring, unfulfilling and generally sucks. (oh yeah, and is not fun, too!)
In my own explorations, the more I sought to uncover and explore what was pleasurable, the more I found my inner truth and what I came here to Be and do. I found my authentic self in my search for pleasure.
Was this an accident? Nope.
What if what makes you happy is you doing your thing…
I found that my life sucked so much because I was trying to be what other people wanted me to be and NOT being myself.
I was trying to live a life to make other people happy instead of making ME happy.
It turns out that what makes me happy is VERY different than what other people experience. And I would have never known that if I hadn’t gone exploring and actively seeking what gives me and my body pleasure.
I found that by exploring with:
– dance and body movement (Ecstatic Dance, 5Rythms), my body came more alive and more vibrant.
– conscious sexuality (Tantra) & extended orgasm, I found a deep sensuality I had not known, my connection to all that is, self-acceptance and reclaiming my potency
– many kinds of massage (Watsu, Trager, Feldenkrais), my body became unstuck, fluid, happy, and more able to be sensual
– psychedelics (Mushrooms…), I found the bigger truth of this reality and of my infinite self, more expanded states of pleasure and possibility
– food for pleasure, I uncovered a desire for more vibrant and nourishing foods, unique flavors, more diverse foods and my inner alchemist that enjoys cooking
– music immersion, I found a diversity of rich emotion by my bodies capacity to be moved by music, as well as seeing the mathematical underpinnings that revealed another layer of this world
The process of opening to more pleasure…
repeatedly opened me to more of my authentic self.
You likely have heard me make comments about how this reality does it’s best to limit and prevent you from finding your truth and what you came here to be.
One very large way it does that is by:
discouraging you from seeking to find your pleasures.
As I dove into exploring pleasure (and letting go of my need to control everything) I found a whole new world of energies and delights that all guided me to finding MY TRUTH.
What if what you enjoy is unique to you?
What if finding your uniqueness, brings you alive and more into your gifts?
People will often ask me questions like:
Q: What can I do that will allow me to powerfully step into who I came here to be??
My answer:
Follow your highest excitement and pleasure.
Go after what is MOST FUN to you!
People often react with something unspoken like,
‘well that’s cute Jaden, are you joking?’ or
‘yeah, I know, but what is the most powerful way?’
many people completely dismiss this because we’ve been conditioned to believe that having fun is a waste of time and has no value.
This is one of the biggest and most destructive lies I see in this reality.
I believe that having FUN and exploring PLEASURE
has been deliberately put down
so aware human’s won’t find their potency & inner truth.
Pleasure is dangerous to the establishment. It dismantles limitation and illusion.
Some of the most complex and rigid constructs of limitation imposed on human’s can only be dismantled by frequencies of FUN & PLAY.
I know of nothing more potent.
I would argue it’s NOT an accident this reality conditions people away from fun and pleasure.
Lies and illusions can be clearly seen once you get out-of-phase with the control system and overlay that promotes self-limitation and struggle in this reality.
If you are a master of self-control like I was, and no good at pleasure, then I would argue that you don’t really know your true self yet.
CHOOSING MORE PLEASURE
Pleasure is a skill that takes effort and practice. It’s like a muscle that has to be developed in order to find your personal balance.
And the best way to find your balance is to go BEYOND your center to a variety of pleasure extremes and then allow yourself to ease back to a new center.
[|]————————–
Pleasure Struggle
Deliberately and occasionally throwing yourself OUT of center into the path of “too much” pleasure is a powerful strategy.
Then allow things to settle back and see what you learned.
You want to go into experiences of TOO MUCH to allow your system to re-calibrate and find what your true balance or center is (over time).
And each time you explore, you’ll notice you find more things you’ve never noticed about yourself and this reality. Your world expands and you become MORE of yourself!
How many different pleasures can you dive into?
How much pleasure are you allowed to have?
How much pleasure can you STAND?
In the space of strong pleasure- I find the truth of my Body’s connection to all that is. I feel a tangible union with power and magic that fills me up and shows me more of the truth of what possible in a human body and this reality. Pleasure leads me to repeated existential awarenesses that expand my world.
Exploring pleasure is learning about your body and what energizes your body.
PLEASURE IS A SKILL
There is skill involved in expanding your pleasure ceilings/limits to move beyond how much pleasure you think can accept or allow.
==> Can you relax into allowing your partner to stimulate and pleasure you for hours at time?
Exploring pleasure takes practice, something I learned from Tantra.
Moving beyond pleasure plateaus and letting go into even higher and more extended states of pleasure.
You are building your pleasure muscles, while artfully exploring more pleasurable ways of controlling.
We’ve all done it…
Eating a whole pint of ice cream and realizing that at some point it’s no longer pleasure, it’s gone into numbness or unconsciousness. Oops, what’s that?
How can I learn to stop eating ice cream as the pleasure starts to fade?
What is the smallest amount of ice cream that is pleasurable?
Is it more pleasurable to try many different flavors at one time? or just one?
How can I savor the experience and make one spoon last for 10 minutes?
Is it more pleasurable to alternate between warm (pie?) and cold ice cream?
Would it be fun to have your partner lick melted ice cream off your naked body?
Pleasure is a fertile ground to explore many aspects of surrender & control as well as creativity & pushing your programmed boundaries.
It’s an ongoing practice that requires a commitment to learning about pleasure and what brings you into expanding into higher states of inner delight.
I feel fortunate to have a friend who is an aware pleasure activist who coached me in moving beyond my limited thinking and into exploring my world through greater pleasure.
He inspired me to find my inner balance and bring it out of the closet.
He has a book and website I can recommend:
Stewart Blackburn
This book is about the hidden facets of pleasure and the skills it takes to find the greatest pleasures of life. With great depth of understanding and humor, Mr. Blackburn takes us on a trip through our own psyches finding the buried delights and those places where we pinch our pleasures off. With lots of useful exercises and the wisdom of the ages, this is a book for those who truly want to get good at feeling great.
Here is his website: https://stewartblackburn.com/
Making pleasure a FOCUS has helped me to have a far more balanced and suffering-free lifestyle.
I still push and challenge myself and my Body but it happens through pleasure rather than suffering.
What enjoyment and pleasure is now possible in YOUR life?!
I recently recorded a new program on this topic…
Jaden Fox
July 29, 2021
