“Survival is the ultimate act of creation in a world that has reduced us to the road of fascistic arithmetic, of being a quantitative statistic, not a human soul. We still found a way to care, love and create- isn’t that art?… how am I going to create the world that I want to see?…how can I practice the way that I want people to relate to me with how I relate to other people? Every crisis, for me, is an opportunity for compassion, is an opportunity for creation.”
-Alok V. Menon, For the Wild Podcast: Episode 245
Y’all. Shit is heating up. Not that the clusterfuck of extractive-world-“governing”-systems we inherited were ever based on anything other than oppression, exploitation, violence, and genocide, but more of us are feeling more aware of it, and seem to be at direct risk of its vicious thrashing. Suffice to say, it’s a weird time to reflect on pleasure.
As I’ve asked myself the question: “what place does pleasure have in my / our lives right now?” My most honest answer is: I don’t know. I want to be honest about this at the outset. I am not writing from outside or above the difficulties; I am writing from within the belly of the beast. My words are an invitation to reflect for yourself, to step into not knowing. I do believe that uncertainty can be a good place to begin.
I want to say that pleasure is enough, that the right choice is to feel good whenever you can, and that we can close the gap between the world we are in and the world we desperately wish for simply by sticking to what feels good. That pleasure is a portal which brings us closer to justice, equity, and sustainability.
In part, I do think these things are true. Some part of me knows them to be. But another part of me insists that pain is the price of caring. That giving a shit, about more-than-human creatures, about “strangers” on the other side of the world, about friends and loved ones, about myself, means being intimately connected to their suffering.
So how do we balance these things? I don’t know.
What feels important is that we try.
Because of a sophisticated and survival-based combination (and perhaps gift) of socio-biological conditioning, ancestral knowledge, and nervous system reflex, we tend to pay more attention to what is threatening and dangerous. This is important. If a tiger were to appear right in front of you while you were reading this, it would no longer matter what these words say. What would matter is that you get away from the tiger.
But many of the crises we are currently facing are simultaneously abstracted and ever-present. We experience them through the news, social media, word of mouth, (generally) more than in our immediate environment through our direct senses. And they aren’t isolated occurrences; we continue to wake up to them as a part of our daily reality. As such, there may be little “relief” for our nervous systems. Unlike a tiger, which you could escape from, “shake off,” and re-regulate, there is no “running away” from most of what currently plagues us.
As a result, we can confuse what is important with what feels heavy, threatening, and scary. And conflate what feels most difficult with what seems most important. The problem with this is that we can become trapped in cycles of fear, paralysis, and resignation. We can forget our capacity for pleasure, possibility, and imagination. Not knowing can be a space of both fear and possibility. And in order to be open to one, we have to find ways of being open to the other.
This makes for a weird, arrhythmic balancing act. Like riding a bike, where our weight shifts to one side, then the other, maintaining a wobbly momentum. Or like meditation, where our attention is not frozen in stagnant immobility, but remains capaciously aware of the multi-faceted and contradictory unfoldings of experience.
In order to feel pleasure, we need to be open to this imperfect balance, and we need to be open to feeling. We need to welcome cycles of both difficulty and pleasure, contraction and release.
Many of us recognize the clearest “no”s that our body gives; this often is communicated as pain. But if the only feelings you have bodily-language for are painful, your body will begin to protect you by limiting your capacity to feel. Furthermore, as a result of the systems we are trying to survive, many of us are disciplined out of the spacious, possibility-making “yes”es that our body holds for us. And it can be hard to feel deep pleasure if you have a diminished capacity for feeling.
Okay, so what now?
If you find yourself reading this and can’t remember the last time you felt afraid, concerned, or activated, either for yourself or on behalf of the well-being of someone else, then you may want to begin with cultivating deeper empathy, or holding emotional space for difficult feelings in order to expand your capacity for pleasure and connectedness.
If you are more imbalanced in the direction of: things feel more difficult than pleasurable, well, these are the pleasure-encouraging thoughts I have to share with you for whatever way they might resonate, from my own place of deep uncertainty.
Pleasure is a wayfinder.
That is, pleasure points the way to the things that make us “come alive.” In the midst of a time when so many things feel like hopeless dead-ends, pleasure can remind us that there are other ways of doing things. Recognizing what is horrible, unsustainable, and unjust in our world is vitally important, but its flip-side task is to pursue things that are sustainable, delicious (in all senses), delightful, beautiful, and mutually empowering.
Pleasure is in your own hands.
No one can do the work of finding what you love for you. And “pleasure” is not an excuse to demand that people give you some things they don’t want to give. Pleasure begins with listening to and connecting with your body, just as it is. And honoring what you want and need as it evolves over time. The possibilities for pleasure exist all around us, and it is up to each of us to find ways of opening to them.
Pleasure is relational.
At the very same time, pleasure exists in the spaces we share, at the edges of our bodies, when we encounter something new and different than our selves. Pleasure builds connections, not only within ourselves, but with creatures of all kinds in the world around us. Pleasure reconnects us. We depend on others for pleasure, and others depend on us. Follow and trust mutually pleasurable connections.
Pleasure is sensational.
Not only in the sense that pleasure feels like a “fuck yeah,” but also in the sense that it is mediated by our senses. Pleasure comes to us through touch, taste, smell, sight, sound, and any other ways we might (re)connect to what is happening in the world around us in any given moment. Sometimes, all we need to cultivate pleasure is to shift our attention to sensory experiences that are already there.
Pleasure transforms.
As we delight in the things we want, we sharpen the relief between the world we want, and the world we don’t. When you know what feels good, you are less likely to say “yes” to something that feels bad. Unfortunately, many of us do not know what we want, and are repeatedly taught to not ask this question. We can also be shamed, coerced, judged or disciplined out of following pleasurable sensations.
So what can we do?
Get clearer.
Cultivate a relationship of curiosity with yourself, your body, and your desires. Mindfulness (and contemplative mind-body practices of any kind) are a fabulous place to start. Identify the difference between the things you actually want, and the things you have been told to want (by corporations, authority figures, social pressure, etc.). Relearn the paths of desire again and again. And recognize when what you want may come at the expense of someone/something else. Minimize that harm where possible; hold deep gratitude and grief in the places you cannot.
Get queerer.
Queer is not only an identity category. It’s also an intrinsic capacity to move toward pleasures which are unique, stigmatized, and potentially disruptive. The queer voice inside you asks the question “what if things were different?” and the queer voice values the parts of yourself that have been (often indirectly) ignored, cut off, buried, or hidden. However you do, or do not, identify, look at the norms you have been conditioned into and listen to the parts of yourself that are dissatisfied with them. What parts of yourself have been lost, minimized, or abandoned over time? What kinds of pleasure might reconnecting with those parts make possible? This is worth asking because “normal” is not working.
Consider this an invitation to (re)learn the language of your body and its desires. Do it for you, and for me, and for everyone else.
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Joss runs the Adventure Time Meditation Series, but somewhat anonymously. So feel free to check it out and share it with others, but be cool; don’t blow their cover.