O.K… so you’re curious or wondering what that means?
How much good can you accept in your life?
Did you know that your ability to accept pleasure determines how much good you will let in your life?
If you can’t tolerate pleasure you won’t let your life get too good! This means that you won’t allow yourself to become too successful at something…business, relationships, sports etc.
What is Pleasure? Is it Safe?
Pleasure is misunderstood by many and has been given a nod of dismissal by most. How often do you take the time out of your day to indulge your pleasures?
PLEASURE is an essence that supplies the fuel of being blissfully alive in your life. It opens you up to being awake and fully engaged in life.
INDULGING IN PLEASURE CAN KEEP YOU FROM DESTROYING YOURSELF.
Your body was designed for pleasure. It is scientifically proven to have a positive affect on your body.
When you allow yourself to feel pleasure, your body responds by releasing hormones and chemicals that strengthen your immune system and lift your mood, to say the least.
This immediately reduces the stress in your body and begins the process of undoing its ravaging and affects.
Pleasure also releases chemicals that dull pain and create feelings of euphoria.
Indulgence in your pleasure over time causes aches and pains to disappear, panic attacks to decease, depression to lift, and chronic fatigue to subside.
Pleasure get the creative juices going and gives birth to ideas and insights.
It unstucks you…if that’s even a word.
When you are able to handle intense feelings that feel good, you are better equipped to hear the voice of your true self clearer.
When you deny yourself the beauty of pleasure, you weaken your immune system and delay fulfilling your purpose.
You become less resilient and susceptible to emotional pain, mental anguish, physical illness and disease.
A pleasureless life is a life disconnected from your well being and highest good.
SUCCESS OR STRUGGLE PLEASURE CAN MAKE THE DIFFERENCE.
Pleasure intolerance is being able to only accept pleasurable sensations up to some point. This self made limit won’t allow your life to get too good.
If the feelings you feel, that ones that feel good, intensify beyond your limit, you will find a way to stop or decrease the sensation. You also have a pain threshold/barrier, I’ll address that at another time.
When the sensation of the feeling goes beyond what you are comfortable with, you find ways to decrease the intensity. Suddenly you will, for example, want to get up and look out the window, or want ice cream, need another cup of coffee or lose interest in the project, etc.
You will automatically put up a resistance to receiving more because you can’t handle the energy contained at that level.
This is you upper limit. Once you have reached your threshold, your subconscious mechanisms will be activated to bring the level of pleasure back down to your acceptable level.
This detection and reaction occurs with everything that feels good to you.
Intolerance to pleasure isn’t a way of being that will benefit you. The anabolic energy (positive energy) in pleasure builds your confidence and improves your mindset likewise attracting positive people, situations and experiences.
You will need to increase your ability to tolerate pleasure so that you can increase the good that can come into your life.
SOME THINGS THAT CAUSE INABILITY TO TOLERATE PLEASURE.
In Childhood the behavior modeled before you could have set your expectations. Implied ideas that you not O.K. and that something is wrong with you, that good things don’t come easily or are for other people.
Over time, that idea could have further developed into you feeing that you don’t deserve good things to happen to you.
Religion’s teaching that pleasure is the same as lust, stamps it as a disobedient and sinful act punishable by death.
This idea sowed into your subconscious will cause you to automatically resist and turn away from anything that strikes close to feeling good. Sensations for which you have created images of and attached feelings to.
Fear of damnation is commingled with the sensations of pleasure and you instinctively pull the trigger when you reach that level of feeling.
Society teaches that feeling good is non essential and can be dismissed. We instead are encouraged to value and use logic to navigate our lives. Pleasure is perceived as goofing off and we get to play around after we have taken care of the essential business of living.
We are also taught that it is selfish to do what we please and to consider others first. Extreme self-care is not encouraged in most world cultures or societies.
INCREASE YOUR TOLERANCE LEVELS.
How do you increase your ability to tolerate pleasure? You have to raise your ability to feel good. The best ways to do this is to directly challenge your feelings when you are experiencing pleasure.
Another way is to intentionally pursue actions and experiences that you know bring you pleasure. In each experience, get into the pleasure and take as much of it as you can stand. I’ll be expanding more on this in upcoming articles and videos.
WHAT IF I DON'T KNOW WHAT BRINGS ME PLEASURE?
Become an archaeologist of your pleasure. Make a list of what you like and what you enjoy, then go and do those things.
When engaged in these activities, feel your feelings, feel deeply into them. Record what happening to you in a journal. Keep the things you like and toss the things that don’t light your fire and explore on.
Don’t resist the negative emotions that come up, let them reveal themselves, feel into those feelings too, interview those feelings, asking them what they want to tell you.
Be compassionate with yourself as you go through this process. Know that you are not weird and certainly not alone in going through the process of getting to know yourself. We all will have to do this to improve our lives.
Whatever you do feel, feel the emotion in as much detail as you can. Let it work it’s way through you.
The wave of emotion will generally works it’s way out of you in 8 – 10 minutes if you allow yourself to feel it and don’t resist it.
Examples of My Pleasures
Examples of what I find pleasurable are: warm scented baths, smooth jazz, walks in nature, delicious food, a good cup of hot coffee, a good movie, NBA games, and heart to heart talks.
For others I know it’s making jewelry, the touch of a massage, an exhilarating run, baking, painting and viewing art.
BUILT IN SAFETY OF PLEASURE.
What you want, desire and need not only was designed to feel good to you but to be good for you. True pleasure has it’s own fail safe switch in it. It knows just how much is needful and your body knows this language.
Your wants really are in balance. When you honor the sensation of pleasure it will dissipate on its own signaling that enough has been had. This gives you the power to take in pleasure consciously and not under compulsion or with excess, protecting you from entering into a cycles of deprivation and over indulgence.
Your sharpened ability to sense the inner wisdom of your true self and the skillfulness gained by using your intuition to excavate your pleasures will direct you in making wholesome choices.
The beauty of this is that only really true goodness will satisfy your soul. True pleasure satisfies without the cost to your health and soul.
Magnificent beings we most certainly are. You can trust yourself. Excavate your pleasure and recover the true you and become Free 2 Thrive.
Lana McMurray, Self Recovery Mentor, is Owner and Founder of Free 2 Thrive Coaching LLC, www.free2thrivecoaching.com, a Company helping people to break out of their self made prisons and free their REAL Self! She assist clients with getting out of their comfort zones and their own way. As a result of their work together, clients depart from people pleasing, codependency and paralyzing fear and become aware of themselves and awaken into being bold, confident and fully alive. She enjoys working confidentially with people on issues that have been troubling them for a long time but they just didn’t know who to talk to about it.
To schedule a complimentary Get Acquainted Sessions Click HERE or email her at: info@free2thrivecoaching.com
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Love this post! I needed to read something like this that reminds me that you have to welcome pleasure in your life to keep things balanced!
Thank you Lori. Yes, we all need reminding of the benefits of pleasure. What is something that you lights you up and brings you into balance?
What a great post and a great reminder that we were meant to receive pleasure! In all of the hustle and bustle of my everyday, I am sorry to say, I frequently put pleasure on the way back burner.
Hi Michele, thanks for commenting. May I ask, what is one way that you can remember to allow yourself to receive pleasure this week or one thing that you could do that would be pleasurable?
Great post, Lana! Hard to add anything… You’re absolutely right! Pleasure is the seasoning of life after all and we all need it to live the life to the fullest.
I like that Silvia…”Seasoning.” So let me ask, what is a pleasurable seasoning for you? Thanks for posting.
This is such an important topic! I so agree with the statement that our ability to receive pleasure is directly related to our ability to receive any and all good things! Love, success, friendship, support, money… you name it. We all need to work on our ability to HAVE, to let in and receive “the good stuff.”
And I love that photo of the woman with the violin!
So with you Nancy. We too often focus on the pain/terror barrier as the block to growth when in fact it could be that we can’t handle the delicious feelings of pleasure. Many of us have associated the feeling of pleasure with shame. Pain is a signal that something is out of order and needs correcting. Pleasure is a sign that you are on the right track. Doesn’t that photo rock?!? Thanks for your comment.