Pleasure and Pain

Tune into your heart deeply enough and you’ll find that you’re always running a spectrum of feelings simultaneously. Your salvation is in the excruciating awareness of it all.

Pleasure is messy, dirty, pungent. And the heart is complex, with layers upon layers of emotion, all of them necessary to bring us alive, fully.

Pleasure doesn’t always come in a pink box. It’s not a frivolous indulgence, like a luxury vacation or a promise of orgasms. It lives side by side with the realities of life. Pleasure can mean feeling that whole mind-boggling spectrum so acutely, that you actually discover ecstasy through it.

It’s a commitment to loving yourself and all your messiness, and to walk the path you were born to, however difficult it might be.

Pleasure can be a volcanic upheaval that threshes you naked. A devastation that robs you of all the ways you hide. A crisis that forces you to ask, or beg, God to walk beside you. It can mean crying so hard that a sort of euphoria befalls you and you soar into the stars – have you ever done that? I have.

You might dance because you have to. You might feel your breath more exquisitely because there is nothing left to hold on to. You might let a friend in, because they love you enough to insist (Anah).

Now more than ever I’m accessing a broader practice of pleasure – in yoga, dance, prayer, rest. 

PLEASURE GIVES US THE COURAGE TO FALL APART.

When you’re in pain, what do you reach for?

“Even the ache in your heart is holy.” – THE RADIANCE SUTRAS, translated by Lorin Roche.

We’re in this together. I love you ❤