Posted by Lady Suite on
This Lady Lowdown article is by Stef Osofsky-- writer + coach whose work focuses on sex, pleasure, intimacy, and relating. Follow her work and connect through www.prideandpleasure.co
Before we go any further, go ahead read that word a few times. Feel how it lands on your body. Notice what is triggered in your mind when you take it in. What involuntary reactions are set in motion simply by reading this eight-letter word. No matter what your automatic response to it is, the fact that there is a response as all should come as no surprise. Anything from the snicker of a pre-pubescent child to flushed cheeks and a stirring between your legs, to full-blown anxiety fits the script. We’ve made pleasure mean something very specific. In short - bow chicka wow wow. You feel me?
I have people from far and wide, from all walks of us, reaching out all the time asking how to approach their sex lives more consciously. There are so many collective narratives we come up against when we start to press into these parts of ourselves. Often I find that there’s a dismantling that wants to occur where the “old beliefs” break down in order to make way for something new to form. And I keep finding that in order for us to zoom in, we have to first zoom way, way out. I also keep finding that so many people don’t actually know what makes them feel good. Forget turned on, sexually stimulated, and hard/wet/whatever kind of excited - just good. Period.
The idea of deepening our relationship to pleasure can be both exciting and intimidating as f%^k. But what if we stripped this word of all of the inference we’ve applied to it and just look at what it actually means? Hey Webster...pleasure
1: a state of gratification
2: frivolous amusement
3: a source of delight or joy
That changes things, doesn’t it? If I can derive pleasure from many, many different channels of experience in this wild human ride, then maybe I already have a relationship with it and I just can’t quite see it yet.
The moral of the story is this, take the damn pressure off, babes. Focus on giving yourself permission to define what feeling good means in your dictionary. Give the world back its definition, its projection, and its stories. What does pleasure mean to you?
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