Learn how to discern healthy pleasure from unhealthy “pleasure”

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Learn how to discern healthy pleasure from unhealthy “pleasure.”

Pleasure is a beautiful thing.

Pleasure is built into our bodies.

Pleasure is part of our power as humans.

Pleasure is feedback.

Pleasure is our birthright.

And, there needs to be discernment around when healthy pleasure tips over into unhealthy “pleasure.”

There is a difference between seeking real pleasure—things that nourish, replenish, enliven, and satiate you—and unhealthy pleasure, which is a bottomless numbing mechanism for pain, rather than a movement towards health.

Healthy pleasure satiates and replenishes us—it is balanced.

Unhealthy pleasure is a detour to distract us from pain—which it can’t ever actually fulfill, which is why we always crave more of it. When imbalanced, it can turn into addiction, numbing, distraction, or overindulgence in an attempt to self-soothe.

We do need to self-soothe, but we need to get to the root of just what it is we are actually trying to soothe and address it directly, rather than trying to tamp it down. This is where deep inner work comes in, dealing with our shadows and trauma, and learning new skills for healing and balance.

And, we need to learn to choose healthy, balanced pleasure SIMPLY BECAUSE IT IS PLEASURABLE.

We don’t have to justify it. We win no extra points at the end of the game of life for denying ourselves true pleasure. Healthy pleasure is a tool for self-balance; without it, it’s hard not to fall victim to unhealthy pleasure in some way.

How do we discern balanced pleasure from imbalanced gratification?

Imbalanced gratification leaves us wanting more—it is never complete. It never has enough, so we don’t feel lit up by life. We feel anxiety about not getting the thing we’re craving. When we get it, we feel let down—if we don’t numb that feeling, too.

Healthy pleasure makes us feel ALIVE, energized, and connected to life, others, and ourselves. Healthy pleasure is tied to our values, gifts, and deep desires.

Healthy pleasure fills us up WITH OURSELVES, so we feel generous—healthy pleasure wants to be shared. Which means healthy pleasure is healthy not just for you, but for others, too. That is a beautiful thing.

Come back to your senses. Literally.

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If the world looks like it’s lost its senses, maybe it’s because… it has.

Literally. 

Our senses aren’t irrelevant afterthoughts to human life.

Sensory information is data; our bodies and our brains interpret that data to create our lived experience.

In one aspect, our senses are overwhelmed: by constant screen use, noise pollution, light pollution, exhaust fumes, pop-ups, traffic noise and exhaust, artificial flavors, overstimulation. 

On the flip side, we’re starving for rich, true sensory connection—for pleasure.

Pleasure, too, is data.

What if the craziness in the world is pointing to a primal need to return to… pleasure?

To take in data that soothes our nervous systems because of its evolutionary familiarity?

We forget, sometimes, that we evolved along WITH everything else. We are wired from our reciprocal connection with all that is—through our senses.

What might pleasureful senses feel like?

Sound: Birdsong, crickets, crashing waves, raindrops, wind rising and falling in the trees—sounds we’ve evolved along with, but don’t always get to hear, nowadays.

Touch: Dirt underneath our feet, the way different earths talk to our toes in different tongues. Human touch: playful, sensual, familiar, warm, safe. Co-regulating our nervous systems in community through safe, healing touch.

Taste: A palate rehabilitated from the onslaught of artifice, that can taste with delicacy the wholeness of whole food, discern seasonings, know satiation that comes from food as an immersive experience, not just fullness. The tentative touch of tongue to the unfamiliar. The knowing taste of tongue to sun-kissed skin after emerging from the sea.

Scent: The million different scents of earth after different types of rain. Fallen pine needles toasting in the summer sun. The varied terrain of our human bodies. Wet dog. Dry dog. Ocean. Trees in the morning. Night blooms.

Sight: Beauty. Horizons. The billion shades and patterns of ocean waters, sweetwater brooks, puddles, tide pools. The Milky Way, unadulterated by light pollution. A newly-fledged cardinal chasing its parent, vibrating its wings and chirping to be fed. A baby anole wagging its tail as it stalks bugs. Cumulonimbus clouds. The humble pinecone.

All of these sensory experiences speak to us; they remind our bodies what our life is about, how life feels through pleasure, where we find pain.

To come back to your senses, try feeding yourself with conscious pleasure.

This is how we re/member ourselves, and remember our place here on this planet.

This is how we come home.

What it means to rewild

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What it means to rewild

In ecology, rewilding is a movement that allows the natural world time to replenish after cultivation: time to rest, enrich, and realign with her innate intelligence, patterns, and rhythms.

What if humans allowed ourselves a similar process of rewilding? Of rediscovering our true nature?

This could look like…

• Learning how to tune into our intuition

• Rediscovering our instincts

• Learning how to listen to our bodily wisdom

• Naming our strategies for getting our needs and desires met

• Expressing ourselves authentically

• Taking off our masks so we can connect fully and freely

• Reclaiming our passion

• Claiming our truest power

• Creating: a gift, an idea, a poem, art, a project, a paradigm… whatever wildly unique offering you have singing beneath your skin, ready to surge through you. 

When we untangle ourselves from outdated conditioning, stories, and habits, allow ourselves space to sieve through our own rich soil, then plant seeds for a new vision and nourish our deepest desires… we bloom.

Our blood remembers how to sing.

I developed the Creative Rewilding journey as a regenerative process to restore ourselves to our natural state of curiosity, creativity, and vibrancy.

To reignite our fire.

To wander between our inner and outer landscapes.

To tune in to our unique gifts and values, align with patterns in nature.

To fall in love + lust with our own lives—so we can use that as scaffolding to “code” our life force and create what only we can create. 

To fire up our own life force so it can surge through us.

This is generative activism: We transform the world by aligning with its natural rhythms and patterns. And our own.

You know you have a gift you’re meant to offer the world.

The Creative Rewilding process will help you clarify what that is and shift limiting perspectives, so you can GIVE IT. It's needed.

Your greatest gift is someone else’s deepest desire. Will you give it?

The surprising power of play

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The surprising power of play.

Playing is basically evolution that works well for our nervous systems—not the kind of evolution that requires us to starve, mutate, exhaust ourselves, inflict pain, render ourselves extinct, all that fun stuff. 

• Play is experimentation. 

• Play is iteration.

• Play is pushing past our boundaries.

• Play is creative.

• Play is co-creative.

• Play is strengthening.

• Play helps regulate our nervous systems.

• Play is fun.

• Play strengthens social connection.

• Physical play strengthens our muscles, body language, connection cues.

• Play laughs in the face of judgment--and invites it to play.

• Play dares itself to take it one step too far.

• Play is a way for us to grow and evolve with low stakes. The outcome doesn’t matter—which means we can be open to any possibility arising, rather than trying to control and manage the process so we achieve a predictable process and outcome.

Play is growth mindset.

Predictability, control, managing—these are all excellent things in certain circumstances. And unbelievably boring in others.

You know the phrase, “If you want to make god laugh, tell her your plans?”

I think this is basically the universe’s way of telling us that we are not the boss of her—but she would love to play with us, because she loves a good laugh and loves creating things. 

If you want to grow, PLAY.

If you want to be creative, PLAY.

If you want to evolve, PLAY.

Play answers a surprising number of questions.

How else could the world have ridiculous things like blue-footed boobies and hammerhead sharks and hot-magenta dragonfruit and sloths? There’s a tiny bug on my gardenia with fuzz coming out of its butt—it’s ridiculous. You think these were the a result of serious, controlled work?

No, clearly these are manifestations of the mindset of, “I wonder what happens if I do THIS?”

What if we let go of trying to manage the process, and played through it? Together?

What if we outplayed play?

Want to up the ante?

Practice ridiculosity: ridiculousness at high velocity (I like to make up words, because I love to PLAY).

Don’t underestimate the power of ridiculousness. Go play.

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There’s been a lot of research over the past several years about the importance of play. And one of my favorite books is Deep Play by Diane Ackerman. I highly recommend it!

Learn from nature’s patterns: spiral

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Learn from nature’s patterns: spiral

Have you ever noticed that spirals are everywhere?

Snail shells.

Pinecones.

Galaxies.

Flower petals.

Hurricanes. W

hirlpools.

Cabbage.

DNA.

Fingerprints.

Clearly, it’s a pattern that works—physical matter somehow knows how to organize itself this way.

In my mission to NOT recreate the wheel, again, that’s good enough for me.

This is the heart of Creative Rewilding, my sanctuary/launchpad for paradigm shifters:

• Exploring macrocosmic patterns and applying them to our individual circumstances.

• Realigning with the universe’s natural intelligence so we can tap into our own true nature and create what only we can create.

Our desires are what inspire us to journey. Patterns in nature are our guideposts.

There’s a theory of evolution called spiral dynamics that states that growth occurs along a spiral, not a straight line.

A spiral implies movement, but also expansion—it’s not a line drawing over itself, it’s a line expanding incrementally outward as it moves. Over and over again.

The spiral creates itself through repetition. One trip around isn’t a spiral. It needs to repeat the motion—while also expanding.

This pattern helps explain why we as humans repeat patterns—as we move along the spiral, we revisit the same spot, over and over.

BUT—we’re see that spot from different perspectives.

We’re not backsliding, we are seeing the same thing from a different vantage point.

It’s a great lesson in perspective-shifting.

When we can learn how to consciously move along the spiral with curiosity and compassion, examining it can give us incredibly rich information—about ourselves, and about life.

I invite you to play with spirals in your life.

Where are they showing up?

Where are you repeating a pattern, and how could that inform you if you were to look at it from a different perspective?

How are you expanding, even as you repeat motions?

Where are your desires leading you?

If you’re willing to share your insights, I’d love to hear about them! Share in the comments.

Learn from nature’s patterns: ebb + flow.

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Learn from nature’s patterns: ebb + flow.

One thing I’m clear on is that we don’t need to change the world—we need realign with its natural intelligence.

We are the ones who need to regain our balance.

If we can return to our true nature as creatures who are meant to live in a symbiotic relationship within an ecosystem called Earth, we’ll naturally create healthy, healing communities, practices, systems, environments, and psyches.

Nature’s patterns are guideposts for us—they are feedback for us as we seek balance.

• The reciprocity of ebb and flow, like our friends the tides, the breath, vibration.

• The self-nourishing, regenerative torus, like our friends the trees.

• The spiral of growth and focus, from the snail’s shell to spiral galaxies.

• The fractal of iteration, like the fern’s fronds.

• The exploration and delivery system of branches, like our rivers and arteries.

• The radiance of the radial throwing energy in all directions, from our friends the dandelions to the life-giving sun.

These patterns are repeated, over and over, throughout space and time, from macro to micro.

If these patterns work that well at every scale, for billions of years, I figure they’re good enough for me.

We really don’t need to recreate the wheel, just look around to see what patterns already surround us—and embody them.

One of nature’s most basic patterns is the simple dynamic of ebb and flow.

Growth + rest.

Give + receive.

Spend + replenish.

Day + night.

Yin + yang.

Expansion + contraction.

Summer + winter.

Let’s not fall into the trap of thinking of these as polarities. They are simply different parts of a circuit, a self-healing cycle that balances itself as it moves through the journey. A beautiful balance of reciprocity and symbiosis.

What if we could embody the full pattern ourselves? What if we didn’t shame the contraction, the need for rest, the shadows in the dark as enemies locked in battle with their opposites, but rather saw them as integral parts of an ongoing process?

Not saboteurs, simply agents of balance.

Try it out: play with ebb and flow.

Where is your life in flow?

Where is it in ebb?

Where might you need to spend more time or energy in order to find your own balance?

Honor your cycles and seasons as journeys you get to walk, not fixed destinations—there is simply no such thing in a universe as dynamic as ours.

Rediscover your true nature by reconnecting to nature’s patterns. Tell me how it goes? I’d love to know!

Dare to meet life intimately

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Dare to meet life intimately.

Life will only be as fulfilling as the depth with which we’re willing to meet it.

Surface-level connections will fulfill us… at the surface.

But our depths crave intimacy and sharing. Intimacy craves depth, not masks and walls.

What if we stopped holding life at arm’s length?

What if we entered into an intimate relationship with all that is?

What if we were willing to walk through life…

… holding everything with care and protection

… seeing fully

… being seen fully

… open

… being opened

… sharing

… embracing what is, not what we think should be

… releasing masks and performance

… touching and being touched

… loving wholeheartedly

… being moved by life?

The tragedy is that we’ve narrowed down the idea of “intimacy” to something that only happens behind closed doors. (Another tragedy is that sex does not necessarily include intimacy—sometimes, it’s anything but.)

But why not be intimate in every realm of our lives? 

Why not share deeply during lunchtime?

Why not be willing to be moved by a random conversation in line at the drugstore?

Why not hold with care what you see on your walk?

Intimacy is everywhere, if we have the courage to meet it: a type of quantum entanglement that thrills in knowing us—as we know ourselves—more and more fully.

An intimate life is a gift to humanity.

Why not live life as if it were a love letter to the planet?

Laugh until you snort on a regular basis

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Laugh until you snort on a regular basis.

I think this one’s pretty self-explanatory.

But in case you’re not convinced laughing can actually shift a paradigm, consider this:

• Laughter can actually help the nervous system shift out of a fight or flight response.

• Laughing releases endorphins.

• Laughter enhances social bonds.

If a story elicits a laugh, it’s probably because we’re seeing something from a different perspective, opening up other possibilities.

What do all of these have in common? They help us grow.

So, really, laughter is evolutionary. 

That’s the paradigm shift: we can evolve through laughter, not pain.

Welcome to The Pleasure Paradigm: choosing pleasure IS the paradigm shift.

Go forth and get your laugh on.

Don’t you love it when homework is easy?

What if choosing pleasure IS the paradigm shift?

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What if choosing pleasure… IS the paradigm shift?

Our senses are starving and overwhelmed at the same time.

We’re inundated with noise, traffic, screens, pop-ups, feeds, inboxes, polyester, 7,000 varieties of everything. These choices may be convenient, but they’re not truly pleasurable.

At the same time, so many of us are starved for fresh air, feeling moss beneath our feet, the smell of earth after rain, the taste of foraged greens, simple human touch. Things that seem so simple, but which bring us satiating pleasure.

All of the simple ways to feed our senses have health benefits—being outside, eating fresh, touch—which makes me wonder…

What if pleasure is actually homeostasis?

Here’s my POV:

-Systems seek balance through action, feedback, integration, and iteration.

-Humans are systems: our bodies, relationships, communities.

-Human feedback includes pleasure, pain, sensation, emotions, intuition, and instinct.

-We’ve created A LOT of narratives that glorify pain (No pain no gain! For your own good! What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger! Pay your dues! Do the math!)

-We’ve created narratives that denigrate pleasure (Laziness! Overindulgence! Hedonism! No napping!)

-These stories trained our nervous systems to believe pain = good, pleasure = bad.

WTF. 

Let’s flip the script.

What if healthy pleasure is a virtuous path?

What if pleasure is homeostasis?

Not addiction, overindulgence, nonconsensual, imbalanced, unhealthy pleasure. Definitely not nincompoopery.

(BTW, these aren’t actually pleasure, they’re numbing mechanisms for pain—which is not the same thing. True pleasure satiates us. False pleasure feeds us the promise of satiation as a way to dull the pain, but we never actually get full—because it’s a numbing mechanism, not a nourishing one—which is why we overindulge, form addiction, etc.)

Healthy pleasure honors our individual and communal feedback systems and their need for balance, healthy, connected growth:

~  Sensory, sensual experiences

~  Authentic connection with ourselves, with others, with nature

~  Vibrant health in body, mind, and heart

~  Nurturing

~ Generosity

~ Creativity

~ Generativity

~ Kindness

~ Peace

~Feeling our own healthy power and life force

~ Joy

I believe healthy, well-balanced humans don’t spend much time oppressing, warring, and hoarding because they know they could be having ecstatic sex, dancing, cultivating a beautiful garden, snorkeling with amazing marine life, making art, baking tart cherry pies, having coffee with friends, playing with their dogs/kids/lovers/whoever.

When we allow ourselves healthy pleasure, we don’t really have time for nincompoopery.

AND THAT IS BY DESIGN.

The brilliant human design that comes packaged with pleasure receptors—even the nincompoop base model.

Let’s use them as they are meant to be used: to steer us towards vibrant health + happiness, for ourselves and for each other.

That’s the pleasure rebellion. No rebelling required—just prioritize pleasure.

Why value emotional intelligence?

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Intelligence is a good thing. Thinking is a good thing. Intellect is a good thing. Reason is a good thing. Thoughtfulness is a good thing.

Here’s the thing: emotions have intelligence.

They are also a good thing.

When we develop the skills to listen to them, rather than tamp them down, we are actually amplifying our intelligence.

Emotions are information. They are data-conveying states that arise from the body’s experience of life.

If we dismiss our emotions in favor of our “rational” thoughts, we are dismissing half of our body’s own lived experience. Basically, it’s like gaslighting ourselves.

Not so intelligent.

Emotions exist for a reason: to communicate to us what we need and desire, and as part of the elegant human feedback system.

Emotions try to get us to course correct when needs and desires aren’t being met (fear, grief, anger, e.g.), and to feel satiated when they are (joy, pride, awe, e.g.). 

When emotions work in tandem with our reason, they are an elegant alignment system. 

To attempt to reason our way out of feeling emotion is to shut down a major line of communication—all of that rich information.

Our bodies have their own natural intelligence. When we learn to tune into it all, we give ourselves more awareness, which equals more ways to navigate ourselves and our lives.

That is powerful. That is power. That is human power. Why not use it all?

Why not be human and love humanness?

What could change in the world if we acted more human, not less?

From where I sit, we are living in an increasingly anti-sensory, anti-human world.

So much of life asks us to show up as brains, with bodies in tow as afterthoughts or inconveniences.

Emotions, exhaustion, illness, inconsistency, injury, are considered liabilities.

Have you ever asked yourself: liabilities to what?

Our humanness is a liability to systems that require relentless productivity, predictability, replication, perfection: all those things machines do so they can keep feeding a bigger machine.

But we are bodies.

We are soft around the edges. We intake life, and that affects us physically, emotionally, spiritually—as individuals, and as a collective.

We output life, and that affects us physically, emotionally, spiritually. We have needs and desires that must be met.

But we’ve lost sight of the true needs of humans in an attempt to model ourselves on machine-like perfection.

Humans need healthy connection with other humans. We need to be held. We need healthy pleasure. We need joy and rest and to feel our own fire. We need purpose and community. We need a healthy environment. We need to feel sunlight, clean water, rich soil.

But we’ve treated these as negotiables, afterthoughts, non-essentials—in service to our brains.

Somehow, that became “reasonable.”

The idea of perfection is lovely. Productivity can feel good. Consistency is a fantastic skill.

But there is no movement in perfection—if it changes, it is no longer perfect—so it holds itself rigid and impenetrable until it cracks under the strain.

Perfection cracks because life is change. Life is movement, fluid, sensory, material, and messy.

Our bodily intelligence is what takes in all of this data and feeds it to the brain so it can discern how to feel and act—but we’ve been getting this backwards, assuming it’s our brains that should instruct our bodies. 

Unknowingly, we’ve pit our beliefs against our nervous systems.

What if we flipped the script? What if we knew the body held prized intelligence?

What if we could learn to tune in to our bodily and emotional intelligence and then combine that with the knowledge and beliefs in our brains?

Then, we get to fulfill our purpose—not to be just really smart disembodied brains, but to be wholly human.

Humanful.

Then, feeding our brains with new knowledge and skills becomes an amazing asset to building happy, healthy lives—together.

Let’s do that.