Hello Love!
If you missed it, please go read part one of this post here!
Now onto today.
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Missing The Pleasure To Try To Get To The Pleasure:
When we’re so focused on the end goal, when we’re so focused on what life is going to be like ‘over there’, when we’re so convinced that the pain we’re in or the pleasure we seek can ONLY be had once we ‘arrive’ - we make it impossible to EVER enjoy our lives. We rob ourselves of learning how to have pleasure in what IS - even when what is, isn’t ideal. We lose sight of all that’s good, all that’s working, all that’s meaningful in THIS moment, in THIS phase, in THIS embodiment. We lose the capacity to measure progress, to celebrate little change, to be in our mess and not go into a spiral believing we will NEVER get out or that the ONLY hope of any sense of joy is ‘over there.’
When we’re so focused on the goal, we often WON’T allow ourselves to notice what we love about here.
We will be resistant to any acknowledgement of the good in this moment - not because we want to be depressed or because we’re ungrateful - but because with the narrative that we HAVE to get to the ‘over there’ before we can have ANY pleasure, we will feel UNSAFE finding any joy in our present, thinking that if we DO we will lose motivation and then get ‘stuck’ where we are forever. We fear that if we allow ourselves to acknowledge what’s good, what’s working, what’s pleasurable here - we will stop fighting for better. We will surrender to the pain of THIS and that is the worst thing we can imagine. We lose sight of being able to enjoy the journey due to the feeling of THREAT that comes with enjoying the now.
We will also feel like if we let ourselves have ANY moments of pleasure in our current situation that when the PAIN of our current situation is re-felt, it will be too devastating. We have to pin all of our hopes onto that perfect future where the pain is totally eradicated, and we have to disallow any feelings of pleasure or release in the here and now, lest the pain consume us. We will have this promise of getting to a perfect place, and this will actually cause us to shut down to anything good in the here and now, because the here and now will ALWAYS be a mixture of pain and pleasure. When we feel like the ONLY pleasure that’s safe to experience is PERMANENT pleasure - we will cut ourselves off from ALL pleasure.
This last piece is tricky. It’s complex to learn how to enjoy our lives even in the midst of pain. It’s scary to allow ourselves to feel good when we KNOW we’re going to feel bad again. It’s hard to let those walls of protection and projection down. It can feel like a big risk to let ourselves enjoy what is, even among what’s painful, again because we feel like that’s going to cause us to surrender to this, getting stuck and never finding that bliss ever.
This is normal.
Learning To Feel Pleasure Is A Practice:
Learning to allow ourselves to feel the pleasure of what we’re in is vitally important though. Just as pain is a guide helping us navigate what’s out of alignment/a part of the human experience we learn to love ourselves within - so too is pleasure. Pleasure is also a guidepost. If we resist allowing ourselves to experience the pleasure in what is, we have nothing to FOLLOW.
Pain shows us where NOT to go - but simply knowing where NOT to go is only half the puzzle.
Pleasure shows us where TO go.
We need to be connected to our pleasure so we know what we want MORE of.
So that we can tap into the information of what IS working so that we can build on that. Because remember - building to what we want doesn’t look like just stepping into what we want. It’s a whole winding journey with lots of different steps, phases and stops along the way that are all VITAL for getting us to the end goal.
Like taking a trip from New York to Las Angeles - you don’t get in the car and take one turn and arrive in California. You have to drive through countless towns, many highways, several rest-stops - all places on the PATH that look nothing like the destination. Iowa looks nothing like California - but if we don’t pass through Iowa there’s no getting to California.
When we build a house, we don’t start with the decorations. We don’t start with painting and snuggling in our new beds. We start with a foundation of concrete in a deep hole. We start with a skeleton. We build on that skeleton with insulation, wiring, plumbing. None of these initial steps look like the cozy dream home - but without them, we have no dream home.
A life of joy isn’t one where we simply constantly work to avoid misalignment - we have to be equally - if not more so - focused on building what’s IN alignment. It’s not all destruction. There has to be construction as well. Building a life that works is dependent upon our capacity to acknowledge and follow the pleasure signals - as these pleasure signals tell us what to build on. Tell us when we’re headed in the right direction. Help us open our perception. Help us see the magic that exists even within struggle. Pleasure is important. Without it we only have half the puzzle. Trusting that what feels good is a part of the path - even if we can’t figure out how or why in this moment. Even when it looks nothing like our goal. Even when it seems irrelevant.
We must allow ourselves to enjoy the process of our lives, the unfolding, because there’s never going to be a peak where all pain is gone. Where it’s only pleasure. If we can’t allow ourselves to enjoy IN the journey, we will NEVER enjoy, because our whole lives are going to be a journey.
We may arrive at our goals. We may find that arriving at our goals DOES make us HAPPIER than ever. We may find that over time all the progress we’ve made DOES create a much more joyful life experience. This is all true. But this comes with the PATH. This comes with practicing joy. This comes with building the life. It’s not an ‘after’ - and it’s not that life will continue to feel how it feels right now forever either. PROGRESS will be made. CHANGE will happen. Just not into PERMANENT bliss. There will always be things to work through and challenges to face AND there will be improvement and life getting better and better every year. BOTH of these exist in REAL reality.
Better and better WITHIN the reality of the messy, human life.
There Will Always Be Both Pain And Pleasure:
It’s true - there will always be pain. And there will always be pleasure. We’re never going to melt into permanent pleasure. We have to relax and allow ourselves to have pleasure knowing it WILL go away, and then it will come back, and then it will go, and then it will come back. Not allowing ourselves to feel it until we can promise ourselves it will never go, means we will never feel it. We have to love ourselves safe enough to take the risk of allowing for the inevitable pleasure of this journey - the pleasure that’s ALWAYS available on some level - knowing it can be a lifesaving reprieve and guidance - rather than something we avoid because the crash is too painful.
We have to make room for the pleasure of now. This is how we know what’s working and what to follow. It’s how we consistently build a life that’s a little better, a little better, a little better. We must allow ourselves to risk the allowing of pleasure even though we know it will wax and wane - settling into the idea that it’s always going to be a ride. Pain doesn’t have to be so painful when we know we can access pleasure when we want it. When we know nothing is permanent. We don’t have to protect ourselves from temporary pleasure - it won’t stop us and it won’t crush us - when we can dance with it. Allow for the joy of PROGRESS as we release the idea that there’s ever a PERFECT. Progress feels amazing. I promise you.
Which I can validate, is really hard. Harder for some than others. This is a big piece. It requires a lot of time, compassion and testing of the waters. Don’t rush this - but do allow for the unfolding to take place at whatever pace and speed you can.
Most of us don’t want to embrace the idea of journey, because to us that just sounds like ‘pain forever.’ It sounds like if we’re never going to ‘arrive’ then we’re always going to have pain. We can’t imagine a life of LESS pain. Incrementally less pain. With incrementally more pleasure. We have a hard time imagining PROGRESS - usually because we’ve never really seen progress in ourselves OR in others. We’ve only seen people staying stuck, or people who profess to have found IT and then were forever in their after. We don’t see a lot of people saying ‘my life has simply gotten better over time.’ Which is, for the most part, the actual reality of anyone who truly commits to a transformation path.
It’s not glamorous.
It’s not quick.
There’s no moment.
There’s just steps. A lot of time where it seems like nothing is happening, where it feels like no progress is being made, where it looks like we just keep re-visiting the same traumas/triggers/reactions/responses over and over never being able to do or be new.
Then, one day, we look back, and realize how much has changed. We see how far we’ve come. We can finally zoom out enough to be able to observe all the tiny steps and the massive progress that’s happened due to their accumulation. We see that our capacity to enjoy what’s good has increased. We will see how much of our lives we’ve built around those pleasures that all LED us to something even greater than we thought we were headed for. AND we will still have things we want. Challenges we’re facing. Hurdles to overcome. All of it will exist - and we will have an easier time navigating and enjoying when we embrace that this is reality.
We will find more and more joy. We will trust pleasure as a guide even as we learn to trust pain as a guide. We will learn to FOLLOW what feels GOOD, to build on it, evolve it, invest in the things that cultivate it, in equal measure to where we are moving away from/restructuring what’s painful. We will see pleasure as the other half of the map - the pain being what we don’t want, the pleasure leading us to what we DO want. What we want to build and construct.
This path is for those who are willing to chop wood, carry water. It’s for those who are ready to live the boring life of true transformation. Who are willing to show up day in and day out, for the little steps, the seemingly no progress, for the repetitive lifting.
The moments where we SEE the transformation - that’s the last 5% of the journey. The other 95% is usually invisible.
Let’s allow for this to be true, so we can walk our path and find our way.
<3
