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!

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.