Reclaim Your Pleasure

I don’t use the word pleasure to mean sex.

I don’t mean “it’s a pleasure to meet you”.

I don’t mean the kind of travel that isn’t business.

I don’t mean the kind of “my pleasure” the Chick-fil-A young people are trained to politely respond.

Each of these kinds of pleasure has their time and place. But I am talking about the kind of pleasure that can happen to each human. Your body sends a message, “this feels good!” and your mind agrees with “ahhh yes!”.

A great example of pleasure is spontaneous laughter when you hear or see something that gives you joy. You don’t stop to think, it just bursts out and joyful laughter springs from your whole body. But it’s more than laughing.

Each cell and part of your body says, “ahhh!, this feels good!”

Think of your own moments of pleasure in your body and mind.

Like diving into cool water. A coffee break. Going into the exhilaration zone while you are exercising. Something you’ve never told someone else about.

Pleasure happens when your mind is paying attention to the present and you are aware of how your body feels. Mind-body connection.

We can deliberately connect our mind and body.

Try it now. Take a breath. Take another deeper one. Pause. When we direct and watch our breath, we are immediately connecting the mind and body. To deliberately focus on and take a breath is your mind and body partnering up. The calm that comes after the exhale is the best place to receive messages of enjoyment from our body.

If there is something you want to really enjoy, you can enhance the experience by this mind-body connection. Take some breaths and then take it all in. How your body feels and the message to you about the delight before you. Savor the moment that is feeling so enjoyable.

There are many examples, here are a few:

Hugs from your children or a beloved
Eating or drinking something wonderful
A project accomplished
The wonderment of a creature or nature, the awe of a tall building, a mesmerizing pattern.

What is pleasurable to you?

Here’s another question to further support your success at reclaiming the word pleasure from usually meaning sex.

What might pull you out of practicing your own moments of pleasure?

Answer: Spending a lot of time in the unbody-mind connection.

By “unbody-mind connection”, I mean that we are not paying attention to our body, but are in the experience mostly in our minds.

Here are four unbody-mind connections:

Our phones. The time we spend on our phone is practicing the unbody-mind connection. Put another way, our minds are so engrossed in the information on the phone that we ignore our surroundings and our body.

Our phones are amazing computers, but not as amazing as the mind- body connection. Our phones give us dopamine hits which is the chemical that keeps us wanting, motivated for more. This wanting comes from our minds and we leave the awareness of our body and its messages behind.*

Pleasure is a message generated from inside of us when we are fully in the moment. With phones we seek external inspiration to feel good.

A sex life that isn’t going well. Because our negotiations about sex are not going well with our partner, we unconsciously and consciously guard ourselves especially when our partner is around. We tamp down even things like affection for fear of what it might start.

Unbody-mind sexual understandings and meaning stories. We may think the best sexual experience is when we go deep into exotic places in our minds. This focus on the trip in our minds usually makes us unavailable to the moment and our body and of course to connection with a partner.

Our default ideas of sex are like train tracks in our minds that we tend to follow every time we have sex. It is arousal that comes from outside of us that we process in our minds as we build up speed on our train tracks.

Past or ongoing trauma. Trauma harms us by separating the mind from the body and we get in an endless loop of protection from further harm.

Read more about Sexual Trauma in this article.

Sexual Trauma?

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February 18, 2025

If you have experienced sexual trauma, I want to help you take a step towards healing or maybe begin a small step towards resolving the harm that was done.

Reclaim Your Pleasure continued:

If you want to be more savvy about pleasure in your life, don’t pursue or settle for any experience that is touted as pleasurable but isn’t really pleasure for you.

Be wise about yourself. Reclaim your wonderful mind and body connection, it will tell you what feels good. In regards to sex, the mind-body connection will help you figure out how to have internal pleasure, not just the story of pleasure.

Reclaim your pleasure. Nothing fancy. Just breathe.

Reclaim and practice this connection and you will begin having more pleasure.

I hope this newsletter will help you get a more accurate picture of your authentic mind body connection.

*Yes, this applies to sex! I will be discussing the difference in wanting and motivation for more sex vs “proactive desire” in future posts about sexual arousal patterns.