The power of pleasure: a pathway to healing and joy
This blog post is inspired by the podcast episode Pleasure is Your Human Right: Don’t Put It on Hold - to listen to it, click here.
Oh, my friends. It feels like it's been far too long since we last connected.
As I slowly work on creating Season Five of the Reframing Chronic Illness Podcast, I've realised that I've made it into a big project and am procrastinating big time. So, I've decided to press record and send you a bonus episode on a topic inspired by a member of my program, Your Chronic Illness Ally.
Today, we delve into the significance of pleasure as a pathway to healing and explore ways to find it - and as an extension of pleasure; ways to connect with joy, happiness, ambition, and our vision for life - even during challenging times.
Finding pleasure during low energy days
The question raised by the member of YCIA, was about the difficulty of finding pleasure during flare-ups or low-energy days.
It's true that pleasure may require a level of effort and focus and when energy is low, it can be a step too far. But I really do believe that it’s so important to incorporate it into our lives as a practice.
I’m the first person to talk about to honouring our bodies' needs during the more difficult times of our chronic illness experience - and I want to be clear that we don’t need to do anything when we’re low on energy or flaring - but we also need to consider where this leaves us when those challenging days feature heavily in our lives over extended periods of time.
I myself spent close to a decade of my life in this state and I rarely experienced relief from my symptoms. They weren’t at a level 10 all the time, but they were always there and they really got in the way of me living my life in the way that I wanted to. Something I do NOT advise!!
We can’t put pleasure and our dreams on hold until we're “healed”. Instead, we need to find ways to weave pleasure into our daily lives, at a level that aligns with our capacity at any given moment.
Identifying pleasure in the everyday
The question that inspired this episode was all about how to call in the energy needed to experience pleasure when energy is in low or zero supply.
Here’s what I think: discovering pleasure doesn't need to require extra effort or energy.
How?
We can find joy in the ordinary activities we're already engaged in. It's not necessarily about recognising and embracing pleasure within the small things, but more about looking deeper into what’s around us and what we’re already doing. Identify where pleasure, joy and happiness are already in existence, and dive in deep.
Slow, deliberate.
Whether it's savouring a hot chocolate that’s made with the creamiest milk and just the right amount of chocolate, or relishing the feel of soft materials against our skin, we can tap into pleasure in unexpected places.
By paying attention to the textures, flavours, sights, sounds, and aromas around us, we can uncover the potential for pleasure in our daily experiences. Engage your senses to their full capacity!
But what happens when you’re trying to switch off your senses because you’re in pain or discomfort?
For me, it comes back being able to be and sit with those the ‘less desirable’ experiences. When we can sit with them and allow them to be within us - without trying to change or lessen, or distract ourselves from - we create space for other things, such as pleasure, to come into the picture, too.
Pleasure becomes a choice—a deliberate action we can take to enhance our lives. By slowing down, we create space to identify and insert pleasure into any given moment. It's like expanding the frames of our lives, allowing us to luxuriate in and revel in the simple pleasures around us.
In terms of ‘taking away’ from giving our body what it needs from a shutting down perspective, it’s about holding more than one thing in the same embrace. Pleasure and joy needs to be able to coexist with, it needs to be a part of, the rest, calm and peace.
I was actually practicing this when I was lying awake with pretty intense period cramps early one morning. What I settled on was ‘I accept my pain as it is now, I allow it to be here, I allow myself to experience it’ It didn’t quite melt away, but it eased up, and it was in that easing up that other things were allowed to come into the picture. I was able to once again feel the softness of the sheets against my skin, I was able to enjoy the heat from my heat pad, and before I knew it, I was calmly drifting back to sleep.
Why pleasure matters
When engaging in things as a response to living with chronic illness - as part of a healing journey - it can become so easy to get charmed and start thinking ‘I should do this because science said it’s good for me’ or ‘I need to find a way to do this because it’s worked for all these other people’
There are of course very practical reasons why experiencing pleasure is good for our health. Pleasure triggers the release of oxytocin and dopamine, which increases our experience of pleasure, and that is good for ALL sorts of things.
But for me, experiencing pleasure goes far beyond scientific justifications and research-backed reasons.
Pleasure is a basic human right. Joy and happiness should be integral to our lives, regardless of our health or circumstances. But when living with chronic illness, it’s really really easy to believe we’re not worthy of such things until we’ve ‘healed’ (thanks Capitalism, thanks patriarchy).
Repeat after me: you get to experience deep pleasure, joy, happiness, joy, success, elation, WHATEVER, no matter how your chronic illness is expressing itself.
There’s a conversation to be had here about this deep state pleasure and the kind of pleasure we seek from quick fixes. While quick fixes may provide temporary satisfaction - and they’re probably the thing we reach for when we are in that ‘unworthy’ headspace - that pleasure state often doesn’t actually feel that good or last that long. Don’t get me wrong, they have their place, but I invite you to explore more deep state pleasure over quick release!
Pleasure has the power to transform our experiences, even during challenging times.
It's not about finding pleasure in extraordinary circumstances but rather recognising the joy within the ordinary. By incorporating pleasure into our lives, we reclaim our basic human right to happiness and fulfilment. Pleasure becomes a pathway—a stepping stone toward healing and realising our dreams. So, let's slow down, embrace pleasure, and infuse our lives with the deep sense of joy and well-being we deserve.
Hey! That’s me, Alana.
Wanna know what I believe?
We get to experience incredibly rich lives, not 'despite' chronic illness, but by embracing it as a valuable part of us.
We can use our ambitions to help us heal, and we can use our chronic illness/es to help us achieve our ambitions.
Let's celebrate rallying (heaps of) support for living a life that lights us up.
Don’t know how to get on the support train? Take my quiz to find out…