The Pleasure Connoisseur

The Pleasure Connoisseur

Back in the Before Time, I never had any fun. I thought I did, with drugs and alcohol, staying up all night, being kinda bad. Fun I couldn't remember. Fun that made me sick. Um. Right.

I once spent an hour with a pal in treatment coming up with things to do that would be fun. That was kinda fun. It’s also kinda sad that I still remember that hour as being some of the best fun I’d had in a year.

Real pleasure, like any other skill, takes some practice.

First, we need to notice what is fun for us. If we are out of the habit of having fun, making that list and keeping it handy, both as a reference, and as inspiration, is a good thing to do. We can add to the list, or adjust it in other ways as we need to.

Next, we need to squish time into our calendars for that fun to happen. We have to treat it with the same respect we do grocery shopping, or getting our prescriptions filled, or fueling our cars. In fact, having fun falls right into that category; things that sustain us.

And, most importantly, we need to follow through with that scheduled fun until we get used to having it, and just do it.

We become pleasure connoisseurs. Isn’t that nice!   

We find the pleasure in easy stuff like a lovely day, or a smiling baby. We taste the pleasure in a delicious soup, or berry, or the air. We hear the pleasure in bird song, or flowing traffic, or the sounds of our bodies in a quiet room. We feel the pleasure in soft warm fur on a creature who loves us, an intense sensation during Qi Gong practice.

We begin to find the pleasure buried in the other stuff. Life is made up of so many different kinds of experiences, and each one has some kind of pleasure. The first time I experienced a really clean, deep grief was profound. It took me some time to recognise it as a kind of pleasure. It did some reframing on my part, a little redefining of what I thought of as pleasure.

Pleasure is experiencing the kernel of life in every moment, regardless of the quality of that moment.

When we bring to our lives, moment by moment, a sense of wonder and delight, every experience is pleasurable. We start to seek the pleasures out, to notice them as they appear. Becoming sensitive to pleasure has another wonderful side effect.

We become more aware.

And, curiously, the more aware we become, the more pleasure we find, the more enjoyment we have, the more often we feel satisfied. We find that we are happier, and being happy, we garner attention from people who want to feel that way, too.

And, curiously, the happier we get, from the inside out, the more we become leaders to peace, and joy, and satisfaction, and pleasure, for the people we encounter.

How have I changed from hardly any fun to being a pleasure connoisseur?

(c) Pam Guthrie 2013 all rights reserved 04302013