Sadly, it’s common for people to experience tremendous guilt about feeling good.
Pleasure is one of the primary reasons we are here, and yet many anti-pleasure religions and organizations, cultural ideas and belief systems, and even our families teach us to suppress our desire for pleasure, or to judge our desires so harshly that we do not allow ourselves to bust out and bask in the joy of feeling good.
Our culture teaches us to work, work, work and push hard, and so many of us create lives that leave little room for experiencing pleasure.
In my work, a lot of what I do is help people to experience pleasure, to play, and to be free. I give them permission to do all of that without guilt. To do it just to do it.
Most of us need the permission to step out of the confinements of whatever limiting behaviors we have been taught, and when we do, we find parts of ourselves that were there all along, wanting expression.
Sometimes the guilt is even for the very desire of wanting pleasure. Why feel bad for wanting what you want?
Because someone told you you couldn’t want or have it, or that you should desire a different way.
Stop judging yourself because you have desire. You are supposed to have desire. We wouldn’t feel moved to do anything in the world without desire. We’d spend our whole lives stuck without desire.
Desire is beautiful and Pleasure is our birthright.
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Whether you believe in a “God” or not, no God would be so cruel as to give us the ability to feel pleasure and desire, to have orgasms, to experience ecstasy and then point a finger at us and tell us “NO! Don’t do that!”
That would be ridiculous. We are meant to use what we have and experience the ecstasy that is possible in nature, in love, in sex, in orgasm, in the divine, in creativity. How wonderful that we have such an innate capacity for pleasure.
Give yourself permission for pleasure. As long as you are not hurting yourself or someone else, there is nothing wrong with feeling good…in fact, there is everything right about it.
Give your self-judgments a break and release the tightness that keeps you from pleasure.
Touch your body. Engage your mind. See beauty. Eat deliciousness.
Pleasure is your business, your birthright, your calling. Be a pleasure activist.
Whatever it is that does that for you, take a bit of time for it today, and everyday. Otherwise, really, what’s the point?
We are not here to suffer. If you need some permission, here it is. It’s GOOD. It’s part of what makes you whole and connects you to all that is.
And then hopefully, you’ll learn to just give yourself permission, because you really don’t need it from anyone else.
You get to decide when you “go” and when you want to say “yes.” If it’s what you want and hurts no one, it’s game-on, yes-to-pleasure.
