Pleasure for Peace

We cannot control the way the world moves towards us, where we were born, what we were born into, the conditions of our suffering. Yet life is a conversation and we make choices in every moment, choreographing our own personal experience of the dance, the music, of being alive.

Knowing we have choices is how we walk empowered in the world, we can choose to move in grace and harmony, or we can choose to move in resistance. We can choose to hold on to the pain of our past, or we can choose to forgive, let go. We can choose to conjure stressful stories from the wild unknown of these times and our futures, or we can choose to arouse wonderment, curiosity and pleasure from the wild promise that the future is a place of pure potential.  

With earth as our church, in her wild enchanting beauty, wonderment and pleasure should naturally be at the altar of our days. Celebrating life and the tiny miracles happening all around and within us, the mysterious intelligence of our galaxy and our place within it. This enchanting planet, an ever changing canvas of birth and death, of pain and pleasure; is a playground of opportunity. If we eliminate the illusion of needing anything else but our own minds, our own bodies, to experience pleasure; we are can realise our inherent wealth. That we are each rich in the capacity to experiencing pleasure.

Pleasure is a state of mind.

Like the nature of all feeling, pleasure is an ephemeral state. It is a sister to slowing down. Relaxing our bodies, making space, giving time to appreciate and celebrate the little wonderful moments of mortality, pleasure is a state of openness. This is why it can seem humans have become so disenchanted, closed off from one another, for our natural rhythms have been altered by the ages. The waves and generations of war, politics and oppressive systems have disturbed the depths of our wellbeing. When we are stressed, our nervous systems are overrun and we can't feel pleasure. And within this present global reality, post people are living with long term stress. In stress, we are sick, we forget that our life has meaning and we miss the beauty of our sensual, sensory, erotic existence.

Our physical body is like a beautiful plant pulsating with such sensitivity, millions of nerves, tiny, sensitive cells; our mental body an endless landscape of imagining, our emotional body a space of rich, raw and wild emotionality, our auric selves in total, a tantric playground of pleasure. All we have to do is feed our minds with the good stuff and reawaken our imagination. 

For how often do we truly taste our food? Smell the salt in the ocean air, the wet moss skin on a passing stone, how slowly, soberly, do we dare make love to ourselves, to another? How present are we to the beauty and grace of another's generous presence of their heart? The essence of beauty beyond the clothes of physicality? Do we drink in the corners of their smile, revel in the mystique of the unique and enchanting eyes of strangers? Do we steal moments from the day like lovers stealing a kiss, just to tap in to the pleasure that is always present, always inviting.  

Pleasure and pain give contrast, depth and meaning to our lives. Even in love, the intensity of our hearts broken open, stretching and cracking the ever expanding capacity to love. The beauty of suffering metamorphosing into wisdom; generating more pleasure from the fullness of the human experience. 

Collectively, 2020 has been tumultuous, swollen with grief, a raw and blistered pilgrimage through chaos and change that has not yet ended. We have seen too many of our brothers and sisters taking their lives, too many children, too many broken hearts in despair and desolation. We must dare to rise again and open to feel, open to each other, open to enchantment and make time for pleasure. Counterbalancing pain with pleasure is an embodied rebellion against a fear based existence. For we all unified in our journey forward, the small choices we each make ripple out and touch one another. If we allow it to, pleasure can hold us and shape us.

We need pleasure, so we can build this earth anew.