Why pleasure?

Pleasure is a political act. It is the opposite of frivolity. In fact, feeling good could be the most important political stance you take. Pleasure is the ultimate statement of sovereignty, belonging, and your right to be alive. A pleasure-filled community is a just and supportive community. When we orient towards pleasure, we orient towards reciprocity, equal representation of all, and vitality for everyone.

When we lose access to our pleasure and step on the hamster wheel of success, materialism, and limitless generation of wealth, we lose our sovereignty. When we are taking constant action born out of the need to do, even and especially when the doing doesn’t feel good, we lose our autonomy. We are in a battle to feel the most burnt out, tired, and over-worked. When in the world did success come to be defined as what sounds more like misery when viewed out of the context of an anti-sensuous society? To treat your body as only an instrument for change, an instrument of production, to deny yourself the sensations of pleasure, satisfaction, and ease is to treat your body without personhood. In denying ourselves pleasure, we become our own oppressors. When we lose touch with our pleasure, we lose touch with our aliveness, we lose touch with our right to be, and our right to be loved and valued simply because we exist.

When we buy into our bodies as commodities, as objects that need constant maintenance to be kept up with expensive products, as tools to manufacture enough success based on the maximum production output per day, we are buying into external governance of our personhood. When we buy into the glorification of the grind, even when we are fighting for justice, we are subscribing to the current system of objectification of the person that has led us to where we are today.

Pleasure is a political act. It is radical acceptance and love of all people. And, as adrienne maree brown (author of Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good) says, you can’t feel love unless you can feel.

When we regain access to our pleasure, we realize that we are enough. In orienting to pleasure, we feel that we have value, because every action turns to honoring ourselves, to honoring the miracle that each of us are just in being alive. We start to be able to access wonder, to marvel at the beauty in experience. We gain fuel to fight for ourselves, and we naturally begin to fight for others, because we can’t help but see their beauty too. We begin to build communities that assume our right to a fulfilling life, that define success based on happiness.

Our communities become amazing hubs for the biodiversity of the human experience, and, in turn, they naturally begin to foster the reciprocity inherent in any healthy ecosystem. When we orient ourselves towards vitality, we orient towards vitality for all. We stop buying into the illusion of scarcity of resources, because pleasure is our biological imperative. We stop fighting against other people and start creating communities where there is enough space, belonging, resources, and love for all.

This is the seed of regenerating energy we need for advocacy, to experience love even when it feels scary and too vulnerable, to continue to create things that have never existed before even when it feels like a risk. Pleasure is how we make change, it’s what fuels us forward. And the even better news is, pleasure is limitless. When we learn how to increase our capacity for pleasure through somatics, sexological bodywork, and other body-based techniques, we gain access to feeling again. Through slow, trauma-informed, and client-led practices, we gently massage the nervous system’s ability to process sensation. The more capacity our nervous system has, the more pleasure we can feel. In somatics, we increase our capacity for diverse sensation, and we experience what it feels like to have safety, to experience dignity, to know our boundaries and to be able to express them, and we begin crafting a life that perfectly suits us. We begin to feel purpose, passion, and pleasure in everything that we do.

This content was informed by pleasure activist, adrienne maree brown, the work of Staci Haines, and generative somatics. A huge thank you to my teachers.