During a recent morning meditation, there was a moment in which I experienced a deep longing for enjoyment. I don’t believe the longing was because my life is lacking in enjoyment. I think the longing was my soul’s way of nudging me to recognize the pleasure I do experience.
Our culture sets a lot of unrealistic and false expectations about what enjoyment and pleasure should look like. As I have gotten older, and especially in the last handful of years, identifying what I find enjoyable has been rather elusive. What I do know is that a lot of what used to bring me pleasure very often does not.
When I sat with the longing, I noticed some fear and sadness. There was sadness at the loss of things I used to enjoy and fear that I wouldn’t find anything that would bring me the same kind of pleasure. (Thank you, FOMO culture.)
Instead of letting my mind run wild creating stories that weren’t true, I wrote my way through the feelings, having a conversation with both the fear and the sadness. When I did, the path to peace became clear:
Get out of my head and into my body.
This is always the way to peace. I know this. And yet, I forget and lose my way sometimes.
I can’t know what I find enjoyable simply by thinking about it. My mind is too easily influenced by culture and prone to reverting to what was once comfortable and familiar.
The only way I can truly know whether something brings me pleasure is to focus on how it feels in my body. Because therein lies the truth.
Our bodies are always communicating with us. We just aren’t often listening.
If something isn’t pleasurable, I will either experience actual physical discomfort or an energetically heavy and sludgy feeling in my body. When something, someone, or some place is enjoyable, my body feels light and free.
The body never lies. We just have to listen. A lot.
The information our bodies share can change moment to moment because our bodies live in the present, unlike our minds. Just because something doesn’t feel pleasurable to you now, doesn’t mean it won’t in an hour, a day, or next week. Oftentimes I find the answer isn’t “no”; it’s “not now.”
How do you discern whether something is enjoyable? What does pleasure feel like in your body?