The Pleasure Portal
Reclaim your superpower of feeling good and transform your life
Pleasure feels good. And it is good for us!
It improves our physical, emotional, and mental health.
Humans are wired to receive immense amounts of pleasure. We have the capacity to feel amazing every day! Yet for most of us, pleasure is hard to access and even harder to maintain for longer than a few moments.
Does this sound familiar? You work really hard to achieve something - your dream job, partner, promotion, new car, etc. And then, when you finally get what you want, you feel joy and pleasure for a second and then...POOF! It disappears before you can really enjoy it? And instead you are left feeling vaugely disappointed?
If this has happened to you, you aren't alone! This is a common human experience.
Why?
We can only experience what we are able to open up to and receive.
This applies to pleasure, as well as all of the good experiences we desire - love, freedom, abundance, joy...
And most of us humans are really bad at receiving what we truly desire.
We aren't taught how to focus on what feels good and soak up those good feelings. If anything, we are trained to dwell in unpleasant thoughts and feelings, and to not trust or value feelings of pleasure.
We may have gotten the message that pleasure is a waste of time, or that we should feel guilty when we enjoy something. We may even believe (consciously or unconsciously) that we don't deserve to feel good or we need to “earn” the right to be happy.
How does this happen?
Due to the stress of living in a fast-paced, traumatized culture, as well as our personal past trauma and the values and beliefs we took on as children from our parents/caregivers, we learn to disconnect from our internal guidance system - our emotions and our bodies - and end up living mostly in our minds. And the mind cannot feel pleasure. It is like a computer – it analyzes and processes information. It does not feel anything.
In order to feel good - really good – not just the surface level “I'm good” default reply we give when someone asks us how we're doing, we need to be able to feel what's going on below our neck – to notice the subtle (and not-so-subtle) changes in the way our body feels. This is where we feel our emotions.
This is our true guidance system!
When we live mostly in our minds, we are unable to feel much pleasure. Instead of being able to enjoy our lives, we are busy listening to the chatter of our mind, which is always encouraging (or demanding) us to chase the next thing that it thinks will make us happy. So we end up obsessively trying to control our external world in the hopes that if we make it "just so," we will be able to feel better inside and finally be happy.
But until we address the underlying issue - learning to actually receive and feel good period, we won't ever be able to truly enjoy our human experience. We will continue to run ourselves ragged on the hamster wheel to the next best thing that will "make" us happy. And we will continue to feel horrible when things don't work out the way our mind tells us they are "supposed to."
When we step off the hamster wheel & start reconnecting with ourselves - discovering how we actually feel & what brings us pleasure, then we can learn to feel good - no matter what.
We are then able to enjoy life on a deeper and deeper level - and this changes everything! Our health, our relationships, our whole life is infused with well-being.
Unhealthy patterns of addiction, co-dependance, and "numbing out" will fall away, because instead of reaching outside of ourselves in order to feel better, we can always access an infinite source - a bottomless well - of wellbeing.
And we are able to navigate life from a place of clarity and connection because our inner guidance system is on-line!
