Is pleasure the ultimate state of acceptance?
- a multidimensional shift beyond our pain points
I gotta confess, yesterday I was NOT in a midsummer solstice mood. I started off well, getting straight into painting after the school run, and honestly I really could have stayed there all day.
But other duties called, and practicalities.
And the day spiralled from there. By afternoon I went for a nap and found myself wanting to stay there. We’d planned a firepit and some ceremony time as a family, but nobody was in the mood for that either.
So weird. I felt a perverse kind of satisfaction in going against the grain of the day, in what “everyone else” was doing.
Hmmmm that perverse streak is definitely on point, and it had a big message for me, which I woke up to today.
See, I’ve also started a new health flare - allergies and eczema. And my cPTSD kicked in hard - envisioning myself in a full-blown flare and all the pain that entails, whilst also panicking at seeing and feeling my eczema spread from a few red dots to bigger patches. I know the signs, and I know how to look after myself, but I quickly found myself spiralling into victim consciousness.
And contraction.
When I’m painting, all of that ego-led contraction disappears, and I enter a wholly different state of full, embodied, and ultra-sensual acceptance - and enjoyment.
I enjoy who I am being on the canvas, the energies I am embodying and allowing to flow through me, and my physical body for allowing me and even urging me to move in this way.
There are no limitations, no judgement, no anxiety; my cPTSD appears to go offline entirely. Like magic.
And today, I remembered that magic also works in real life too! During the pandemic, I was pretty much practicing this every day out of necessity, because if I didn’t I knew I’d implode.
It’s so easy to forget or let go of practices which help us through hard times, when those hard times have lessened or gone away temporarily. But coming back to them is like a rebirth.
I have known for a few years - known experientially - that there are several layers to embodiment.
The one that is most often understood is the mechanical aspect, of using our body to perform poses and exercises. The breath may also come into it, but it is again, mainly mechanical - a means to an end. This is how I practiced embodiment when I first became serious about yoga and really got into astanga. I loved that it made me feel in control of my body, that I could make it do things or set goals to achieve certain ideals - like specific poses, toned arms, a flat belly, feeling strong etc.
In this phase of embodiment, there is a strong desire to push - both mentally and physically. I notice myself slipping back into this phase when I am in a flare and I want to “stretch” the pain out of my limbs. That becomes my focus for my practice, unconsciously. As soon as I find some relief in the stretching-out, I stop or move on. Even my meditation and breathwork practice becomes quite perfunctory and mechanical, simply trying to achieve a goal of slightly less anxiety/discomfort/disconnection.
Where we can surrender, even just a little, in our embodiment practice, we begin to enter the phase of acceptance. Doing this consciously and willingly is a lifetime practice - and some days it’s easier than others. Embodied acceptance usually begins in the body but not always. Some days I can find absolute peace in my mind and emotions, but I’m still at war with my body in mostly subconscious ways.
Typically, I waver in and out of embodied acceptance. If I’m really in the zone, I can stay there for a few minutes at a time - just feeling total peace, gratitude and a kind of bliss being in this human form and all that entails, in this moment. And I can consciously bring myself back to that during the day by tuning back into it and breathing the feeling-memory back into my embodied present.
This is the peak for most embodiment practices that I can see at this time. Embodied acceptance, and a kind of suspended animation, even just for a few moments. This acceptance can also bring in our connectivity to all other beings and energies as naturally, those form a great part of our own individual embodiment.
But the problem with this being our ‘peak’ is that acceptance isn’t enough. It’s not really much better than numbing out, except you hopefully feel more connected and whole within yourself.
And even as I type this, the last thing I want this to sound like is a hierarchical format! This is not the “3 steps to true enlightenment”.
You can absolutely enter all of these states (including the one I’m about to cover) at any time - and one is not a prerequisite for the others (though given our ego and human-social constructs, it is typically more accessible to us as a layering process).
What society has forgotten - through deeply insidious, deliberate programming - is that the body is not here just to be tolerated or even accepted. It is here to experience the vastness of human sensory awareness.
Where soul and spirit meet matter.
We are SO indoctrinated into the belief that pleasure (of any kind, even enjoying our food, or a nap, or a hug!) is somehow obscene, highly indulgent and even dirty.
And even when our ego-mind says, “Well fuck them, I’m going to really enjoy every slurp of this ice cream”, there’s always that incontrovertible embodied, mostly unconscious part of us, that nags and detracts from the experience. Typically we feel this afterwards, like a guilt hangover.
And worse (in my opinion), we automatically downplay the experience: “Yeah that was ok I suppose”, “It didn’t quite hit the spot tho”, and even “Why was I so excited about that?”.
So pleasuring (aka really enjoying, being fully present and 100%-openly-lovingly-honest in and with our sensory experience) automatically becomes a challenge for us. And so often, too challenging to bother with.
I’m reminded of all the jokes (still) directed at the Stings’ tantric sex lives… Fill in the gaps here yourself!
Why bother?
Because if mechanical embodiment is the musculoskeletal core, and acceptance-embodiment is the skin, then pleasure-embodiment is the energy and aura of our being here on earth.
And if you’ve been with me any amount of time, you know that expansion is a common theme. Embodied expansion.
This is not egoic. It is not an “achievement”, or an “upgrade”. It is simply and most frustratingly, our whole human self, in its intended form.
And no, you can’t orgasm your way to pleasure-embodiment, using your body as a tool. It is a highly intentional state of being.
Where does this leave pain though? How can we be in a state of pleasure-embodiment when we are in pain - especially chronic pain?
And my answer to you is straight from my own experience (and one I have just relearned again):
Because it releases your attachment to your pain through the highest possible form of embodied acceptance -
Pleasure.
And unlike the other forms of embodiment, the effects of pleasure-embodiment are long-lasting and far-reaching. They ripple out into your day, week and month. They deeply nourish, rebalance and rejuvenate. They radiate.
Because pleasure (if this word triggers you, think enjoyment, sacred presence, self-love) directly taps into our highly connected, energetic self. In pleasure-embodiment we switch from individuated basic survival to holistic, collective-oriented thriving.
In the simplest of terms, pain creates intense contraction. But embodying our pain to the point of pleasure-acceptance creates infinite expansion…
… which releases the pain (or at the bare minimum, our constant attachment to it).
Because living as a human in this world necessitates nuance, I am dedicating myself to a month of this practice.
The practice of pleasure-acceptance embodiment: physical, mental, emotional and spiritual.
Be sure to keep following here on Substack for all my highs, lows, illuminations and finding out what really works for me!
And let me know in the chat if you’ve played with this part of yourself recently, and what you discovered 😍.
Ah thank you lovely. Timely piece as I haven't "allowed pleasure" as am not sure I know what it is in this new phase of my life. Survival mode and trauma seems to have dominated for way too long.