Waking up to pleasure

I was laying in bed 20 minutes ago after snoozing my first alarm, and noticing how intensely pleasant my body felt as I allowed it to drift back towards sleep. There’s something in that deep relaxation that allows the simple pleasure of feeling to come to the foreground. Many people know this moment: do I allow myself to go back to sleep or do I get up? For many years, people would describe me as “disciplined” because I found it easy to get up in the morning. I didn’t feel “disciplined”. I simply enjoyed the morning so much that I wanted to get up. At least, that’s what I believed. And there is a deep truth there. But I was missing how to embrace this pleasure. Actually, it was how to embrace pleasure entirely. I had conditioned and trained myself thoroughly for so many decades that I didn’t even notice when I was skipping over pleasure. There was often a subtle (or sometimes a very loud) thought driving me towards what I quote “should” do. So I got up. Repeatedly. And getting up served me quite well, particularly in Medicine. All the while, I was missing the simple pleasure of having and feeling my body. It’s been quite remarkable to come back to my body and notice the simple pleasure of feeling.

You know those videos when young children who had been deaf their entire lives suddenly get a device/procedure that allows in them to hear? They beam at the sounds of their parents voices. The deep pleasure of simply hearing is overwhelming. It’s so powerful that we feel deep pleasure just watching a child hear and appreciate hearing. The inherent meaning of hearing bursts through. This is true for every sense we have. At its base, when stripped away of all judgment and evaluation, it is simply pleasant to feel, hear, see, smell, or taste. I would venture that it’s also simply pleasant to experience thoughts and emotions. The background experience is pleasant. Eastern wisdom traditions call this bliss.

Many of us were brought up to be skeptical of or even to fear pleasure. In my Christian upbringing, the message I received was that I can’t trust myself (a message deeply reinforced by my sciencific and medical training). The message was that if I “give into” pleasure, I’m simply going to want more and then more and then more and there’s no end into it. I was afraid of being lost or stuck or alone, so I learned to turn away from pleasure. Fortunately, the need for pleasure is not far from such needs as to breathe so we all find ways to experience pleasure. The way in which I experienced pleasure until recently was a shadow of what it truly can be. Turns out, the runaway chain reaction of pleasure overtaking my life hasn’t happened. It’s much more like hunger. I get hungry. I eat. I’m not hungry for a while. And then, when it’s time. I eat again. So simple. Our ability to tell what we like and what we don’t like, our ability to pursue pleasure with a refined, adult capacity, is an essential skill on our journey. 

The life we want to live can only be found through learning to trust ourselves with pleasure. 

Pleasure is the felt-sense of love.