3 Powerful Reasons to Choose Pleasure First
What if you had a treasure map that led directly to a life of ease and flow? Would you wait to use it?
Pleasure is that treasure map.
Here’s the dilemma: The only person who can give you permission to use it anytime you want is you.
I see it every day in my office. As a consciousness design guide, I’ve spent the last two decades helping people use the treasure map they already have in their hearts. My clients often land with me when they feel stuck, exhausted, and even lost.
The first thing I say is, “The emotional math works out, awesome one.” Our pleasure-rationing culture indoctrinates us to put pleasure last, and we are damn good at it. A pleasureless life will suck us all dry of lifeforce if we let it.
You know how that feels. We wait for weekends and dread Mondays. We white knuckle life until we get to vacations. We only allow ourselves the good stuff as rewards we must earn for persevering through everything else.
Consider this your invitation to unlearn that moderation absorbed from your indoctrination and get after your pleasure. Claim that pleasure map, if you will.
It seems like a pretty simple proposition, but this is usually when the resistance starts to show up: ‘What about my job? Who would care for my family? I can’t just chuck it all and, gasp, do what I want.’
That’s the pleasure-rationing culture talking. No one wants you to chuck it all. The provocative paradox is when you infuse pleasure throughout, you don’t want to chuck it all because living feels more easeful and lighter, and you feel more in the flow.
The provocative paradox is when you infuse pleasure throughout, you don’t want to chuck it all because living feels more easeful and lighter, and you feel more in the flow.
After thousands of sessions, I know there are, in fact, thousands of reasons to put pleasure first. Here are the three most powerful reasons showing up big, not only with my clients but also in my life right now.
1. Pleasure invites connection to your intuition.
Infused in your preferences is an intuitive guidance toward what moves you most about life. There is a unique wisdom in your pleasure. Tune into that for a moment. Why do you like what you like? Why do certain skills and capacities come easy for you and not others? Why are you drawn to certain people, places, and experiences as compared to others?
Your preferences arise from your pleasure, from the path that helps you feel flow. Through what we find easeful and pleasurable, we are led to give our distinctive gifts to the world. Some of us love to make art, others get a buzz from creating spreadsheets, and even others of us love to dig in the dirt and grow food. That is not accidental. That is human physics. Our paths of least resistance vary so that each face of consciousness contributes something a bit different to the collective.
When we attempt to override our pleasure map, we create dissonance within. I, for one, am emotionally allergic to spreadsheets. It makes no sense to me. I have zero intuitive wisdom to call upon, but my sweetie is a spreadsheet genius. On the other hand, most people panic at the thought of public speaking. The mythology is that people fear it more than death itself. Not me. Give me an audience of a hundred, a thousand, a hundred thousand, and I just get more fired up the higher the number goes.
If we each choose to follow that pleasure map, the dissonance we self-create becomes resonance. The feeling of yesssssss in our bodies, minds, hearts, and energy is the sign that we are on our path.
2. Pleasure makes you more adaptable.
When we follow our yes energy, our body settles into ease. When don’t have to buck up, steel ourselves, or grit our teeth through experiences, our nervous system relaxes. When we are more relaxed, we have greater capacity to think creatively.
I can feel some resistance creeping in here, as it often does with clients in the office. It sounds like, “Yeah yeah, Krista, but not everything is pleasure. Some tasks just suck, like taking out the garbage.” And I hear you on that, but even those less desirable tasks are actually connected to our pleasure. In this case of the garbage, you likely love having a nice-smelling home, yeah? So taking out the garbage is connected to the pleasure of the delightful scent of your home. Not every task is pleasurable, but through following your yes energy you can see how those tasks are necessary contributions to your pleasure.
When we can inhabit that full understanding of our yes energy, we can say yes with more ease and no with more clarity. We can also expand into the full adaptability that our nervous system allows. We own our power of choice rather than feeling bullied into choices by resentment or flight-or-flight rigidity. Our pleasure map becomes an adventure of choices making many paths where before we noticed few.
3. Pleasure reminds you of your why.
Life is indeed an adventure, and with adventure comes ups and downs. Our pleasure-rationing culture domesticates us into thinking that sometimes in life there is no room for pleasure, that sometimes everything is just plain hard. You may be able to call upon times in your life like that: illnesses, job loss, break ups, deaths. We all have them. There are certainly times when accessing pleasure is a straight-up challenge, and yet think now about what helped you move that difficult emotion. Likely it was opening into the pleasure you could find in the moment, slowly but surely.
I remember in 2016 when my partner, my sweetie since I was 19, had a nearly catastrophic health experience; he had multiple strokes out of nowhere due to a rare genetic disorder called moyamoya, which we didn’t know he had. A life-saving brain surgery put him on the path to relearning to walk and talk. In the time leading up to the surgery, survival was tenuous at best. Even during that time, the small pleasures like ice cream and reminiscing about camping created a much-needed light in the darkness. We remembered together the why of living this glorious adventure.
Gratefully, after years of intense focus, life feels more easeful, pleasurable, and deeply in the flow. And yet, it was pleasure that led us here all the way along. Little by little, turn by turn, we followed our pleasure map as it emerged.
Your mission if you choose to accept it.
Throw off the pleasure-rationing culture. Claim your pleasure map. Know that the unlearning will take time. Your bliss is attainable choice by choice when you follow your pleasure. The cornerstone of the path of consciousness design is embracing pleasure as not a path, but the path. Let pleasure be your path, awesome one. I’ll see you there.
*This article was originally posted on Medium on February 11, 2024.
