Hi everyone! Thanks so much for being here. This is the 3GenWell biweekly email where we explore the rich tapestry of women's health, ancestral wisdom, and holistic living from my perspective as a public health professional, herbalist and woman on my own journey.
This week I’m coming to you from Savannah, GA where I’m on a work trip. It’s certainly a city replete with small pleasures. Scrumptious seafood, long walks by the river, cobblestones, the flowers, the flowers…the flowers! Today’s offering is a short reflection on how pleasure can serve us in times of challenge + an invitation.
I don’t remember the name of the band that was playing or what I was wearing.
I do remember sitting in the trunk of my friend's SUV and a realization shaking me to tears:
I cannot selectively numb.
When I numb to pain, I also numb to pleasure.
The walls I erect block both, in equal turn.
This realization broke my heart. My life was beautiful and I was missing it. My way of ‘protecting’ myself was to feel less.
My independence and self-reliance–always a point of pride, now felt like walls. I was too scared to fall apart. I had blocked out the pain, and the price was my pleasure. Nothing was penetrating me. I had built a beautiful life with friends, in a place rife with natural beauty. I had a job filled with possibility. I had people who loved me. I had all these things, and yet I could barely feel them.
The price I’d been paying to avoid pain was too high. I was missing too much of life.
That night at the festival was nearly 6 years ago, but I’ve been thinking about it a lot recently.
There are hard macro things happening in our world at large (democracy being tested, capitalism over humans, genocides, climate change…), and macro things in our own lives and those of loved ones (job loss, death, ending of relationships, financial uncertainty).
In the face of these hard things, going numb can be a protective mechanism.
It brings to mind a practice I learned through tantra called vaginal or yoni de-armoring. The idea is that parts of our vagina and cervix are often numb or desensitized. Numbing occurs because of common, everyday things and big traumas–having sex before our body is fully ready, stored emotions, stress, contracting, sexual violence and trauma.
De-armoring is a process of intentional, gentle touch to bring back sensation.
Through de-armoring we increase our capacity to feel.
When we can feel more sensation we can feel more pleasure.
What if de-amoring applies to more than our yonis? Where else have we put on armor as protection? Where else might we de-armor to feel more?
Pleasure is subjective and multidimensional. When I think of pleasure I think of engaging the senses and being susceptible to small joys. The touch of skin, a whiff of lilacs on the breeze, the first sip of morning tea, kind words that penetrate….pleasure is a state of mind, a feeling in our body, and a way of being in the world.
Do these small joys touch you? Do you let them penetrate, or are your walls too high?
That night at the festival, I wasn’t crying because of the pain, though I certainly felt it. I was crying because I’d been cracked open and saw how pain had numbed me to pleasure. I was crying because I was missing out on the day-to-day, uniquely human experience of feeling the highs and the lows and simply letting life in.
So I wonder, during times of collective and individual challenge, might we use pleasure to stay present in our feeling bodies, hearts and minds? Might we use pleasure as an antidote to numbness that threatens to swallow us and leave us hollow?
An invitation: If you’d like to play with this prompts related to Pleasure as Resistance, please join us May 9th. Casual, free, and hopefully somewhat intimate. We’re not teaching anything here–just holding space for exploration and community.
Register: https://tinyurl.com/pleasuretopower