Pleasure and the feminine.
Pleasure awakens the feminine.
In our longing to heal and awaken our feminine energy, pleasure is a divine key.
Upon our healing journey, we can ache for our healed state of joy, happiness, empowerment, and liberation, but if we don’t spend that much time pleasuring ourselves (and I’m not talking about our genitals), it’s like trying to win the lottery without ever having bought a ticket. We can do all the self-work, and all the self-growth we want to reach happiness, but if we are hyper-focused on what we are undoing, shedding, and letting go without prioritizing acts of pleasure — joy isn’t going to come.
Oxytocin, dopamine, and serotonin are all physical things that physiologically bring more joy to our lives. Our physicality, pleasure, and joy go hand in hand. If we are not embodied — inhabiting our physical body, doing things that physically make us feel good, we are cut off from the potential of joy available.
Pleasure is what physically feels good.
It can be getting massages, or going to the spa, but it's also being surrounded by beauty, smells, and colors that we love. It's eating food that we enjoy. It's wearing clothes that feel good on our skin, and having self-care rituals that we can't get enough of. Pleasure is also tied to honoring our physical boundaries not burning ourselves out or living in stress, and honoring the process of our creativity, and our becoming allowing the ebb and flow to lead instead of pushing ourselves with angst and contraction. Pleasure is having reverence for the yes of our bodies.
Pleasure is following the pulse of yum in our bodies. It's tracking where our lust in life is luring us every breath of the way.
I talk a lot about the liberation of shadow work and becoming deeply aware of what’s happening within — the cycles, habits, thoughts, and patterns that are keeping us stuck, but when we over-fixate on shadow work we can get stuck there.
What we need to do, is fill the void with pleasure.
When we hear the word pleasure, it’s so often associated with sexual pleasure, and though our sexuality is an aspect of pleasure, it’s one aspect. What if we could awaken all of our senses, and the entirety of our body as an erogenous zone? The pleasure I am talking about is in the sense of enjoying and relishing every ounce of life there is as a conscious, energetic, spiritual being in a physical, mortal body in this finite moment, in this finite world.
I have spent so much of my life almost addicted to self-healing and self-growth, self-excavation, and shadow work, and don’t get me wrong I love this work. It is of great service, it’s saved me and has granted me so much freedom and so much life I did not have access to before, but if this is not balanced out with pleasure we are missing the point.
As counterintuitive as it may feel, we often have a resistance to pleasure that we are not aware of.
It's not uncommon to have resistance to do things that feel good or to struggle to stay with it for very long, and the resistance is largely a limitation in our capacity to feel. We actually have to build our capacity to feel pleasure, and to feel pleasure we have to be able to feel everything — and it’s not all comfortable. The sensations of big emotions and big experiences can be so intense that it’s challenging to be in the stillness, slowness, and sensuality that pleasure thrives in. Stress hormones also counteract our body's ability to access pleasures grounded state of juicy arousal. We end up either holding our breath in the rush of life, and/or we are rushing and angsty to get to the climax, success, or our healed state without being able to really enjoy the journey of getting there.
Our capacity truly needs to be nurtured to be able to live in more pleasure, and this is what feminine embodiment work does — it brings us deeply into our body, deeply into our senses, sensations, and feelings, and it brings us deeply into pleasure.
Common talk of the divine feminine can put our spirituality on a pedestal but our bodies, and embodiment, are how we access the power and empowerment that the patriarchy does not want women to have. If we tapped into our sex, sensuality, pleasure, and erotic nature that was not confined or limited to sex or anybody else, that is a force that cannot be reckoned with.
Our bodies are divine.
And pleasure is divine.
Start asking yourself on a daily basis, does this feel good — a full fuck yes good, and notice how much of your time is spent in pleasure, or not. Summon the Goddess of pleasure that lives within you. Our bodies know pleasure, and they are waiting for us to commune with them.
With Marigold love,
Abby
