Pleasure is not the assignment. Presence is.

When you hear the word pleasure, what happens in your body?

Do you feel a subtle contraction? A little flutter of excitement? Does something soften? Does your mind immediately go to sex, orgasm, or some deliciously indulgent experience you haven’t allowed yourself to have in a while?

Or does your mind go somewhere else entirely?

Perhaps there’s a quiet voice that reminds you of everything you should be doing instead. The emails waiting for your attention. The laundry that needs folding. The people who need something from you. The endless list of responsibilities that somehow always manages to take precedence over your own enjoyment.

Maybe the idea of pleasure feels wonderful in theory, but when you’re actually invited to experience it, you have no idea where to begin.

For a lot of us, the answer is a brace.

A subtle tightening in the belly. A holding of the breath. Shoulders that creep toward our ears. A jaw that’s been clenched for so long we hardly notice it anymore. Sometimes it’s not even a sensation we can identify. It’s simply an inability to settle, an underlying restlessness, a feeling that there’s something we should be doing other than whatever we’re doing right now.

And then the mind arrives.

Am I doing this right? Do I look okay? Is this allowed? Am I taking too long? What if someone needs me?

For many women, this constant self-monitoring has become so familiar that we mistake it for our natural state of being. We’ve become extraordinarily skilled at anticipating other people’s needs, managing expectations, and pushing through our own discomfort. We’ve been praised for our resilience, our productivity, and our ability to hold everything together.

Somewhere along the way, a lot of us learned to manage ourselves instead of feel ourselves.

Which makes me wonder: How much of what we call an inability to experience pleasure is actually a lifetime of conditioning that has taught us to prioritize everything else?

We’ve made pleasure another thing to accomplish.

A lot of us have been taught to understand pleasure through a very narrow lens. We think pleasure means being turned on. We think it means orgasm. We think it means intensity. We think that if we’re doing a pleasure practice, we should be feeling something pleasurable, and if we’re not, something has gone wrong.

And isn’t that fascinating? We’ve managed to take something as natural as pleasure and turn it into another thing we’re supposed to be good at.

Another experience to evaluate. Another expectation to meet. Another opportunity to wonder whether we’re doing enough.

But that’s not what I teach.

Pleasure isn’t the assignment. Presence is.

Because cultivating pleasure isn’t about making ourselves feel good all the time. It’s about developing the capacity to notice what we’re actually experiencing, without immediately trying to change it.

Sometimes that’s pleasure. Sometimes it’s discomfort, grief, anger, or numbness. Sometimes we don’t feel much of anything at all.

And all of it belongs.

Pleasure is our birthright. It’s not something we have to earn, achieve, or work hard enough for. We can chase pleasure, push for pleasure, and seek pleasure, but we can also learn to recognize the pleasure that is part of our natural state of existence.

The Radical Act of Belonging to Ourselves

And no wonder the patriarchy and all this conditioning is built to turn a woman against her own pleasure. For generations, women have been conditioned to measure their worth through their appearance, productivity, desirability, and capacity to care for others. We’ve learned to see our bodies as things to improve, discipline, and manage rather than places we get to inhabit and enjoy.

And when a woman spends enough of her life looking at herself through someone else’s eyes, she can lose touch with what it actually feels like to be herself. Because if she knew how good it felt to be in her body, to be in pure pleasure, it would signify that she has freedom, liberation, power, and presence.

Perhaps that’s what makes a woman’s relationship with pleasure so powerful. When she begins to recognize what genuinely feels good to her, she also begins developing a relationship with her own authority.

She begins recognizing what she wants, what she doesn’t want, and what she’s no longer willing to tolerate. She becomes less dependent on someone else to tell her what’s desirable, acceptable, or worthy.

And that kind of self-trust has implications far beyond the bedroom.

It changes how we relate to our bodies, our relationships, our work, and the choices we make about our lives.

Audre Lorde understood this when she wrote about the erotic as a source of power. Not simply sexuality, but a deeply felt experience of satisfaction and aliveness that allows us to recognize the difference between merely enduring our lives and genuinely participating in them.

We’ve been so conditioned to look at ourselves as a problem to fix and a problem to solve, instead of a masterpiece to create and explore.

And I wonder what might change if we began approaching ourselves with curiosity instead of constant criticism.

Pleasure as a resource

So here’s what I’d offer instead. What if you started with the idea that pleasure is a resource?

Not just sensual or sexual pleasure, but the everyday experiences that allow you to feel good in your body. The warmth of sunlight against your skin. The satisfaction of stretching. The comfort of your own touch. The pleasure of being genuinely seen and understood.

One of the practices I teach my clients is what I call microdosing pleasure. Rather than waiting for some extraordinary experience, we begin noticing and savoring the small moments of enjoyment available throughout our day.

Of course, this isn’t always as simple as it sounds, especially when we’ve spent years living in a state of stress, hypervigilance, or constantly anticipating what might go wrong.

Our capacity to experience pleasure is deeply connected to our sense of safety.

And I don’t mean safety as something we simply tell ourselves to feel while our bodies are communicating something entirely different. I’m talking about the felt experience of having enough safety to soften, receive, and be present with what’s happening.

When our bodies are accustomed to bracing against the world, even slowing down to notice something pleasurable can feel unfamiliar or uncomfortable.

But here’s where things become particularly interesting: while we often need some degree of safety to experience pleasure, pleasure itself can also help us cultivate a greater sense of safety.

A moment of enjoyable touch, a deeply satisfying breath, or a genuinely nourishing connection can offer our nervous systems an experience that differs from the stress and vigilance we’ve become accustomed to.

And when we intentionally create opportunities for these experiences, we’re practicing new ways of relating to our bodies.

This doesn’t mean pleasure magically heals trauma or that we should force ourselves to feel good when we don’t.

Being on the pleasure path doesn’t mean we only feel pleasure. It means learning to be with all of ourselves, including the uncomfortable parts, while remaining open to the possibility that pleasure can exist alongside them.

I’ve come to understand this most intimately through grief. Some of the most painful periods of my life have also held moments of extraordinary tenderness, connection, and even joy. Those experiences didn’t erase my sorrow, but they reminded me that sorrow wasn’t the entirety of what I could feel. Grief and pleasure, I’ve learned, can be companions.

The Creative Power of Pleasure

There’s something else about pleasure that fascinates me. Its relationship to creation itself.

I believe pleasure is one of the fundamental forces of creation. Alongside awareness, desire, and intention, it’s part of what moves something from possibility into existence.

And when I speak about pleasure in this way, I’m talking about something much deeper than feeling good. I’m talking about the delight of being alive, the creative energy that moves through us, and the capacity to imagine and bring something into existence that wasn’t there before.

Think about that for a moment.

What if pleasure wasn’t simply something we experienced after creating a beautiful life? What if it were part of the very energy through which life creates?

This is why I believe pleasure is so much bigger than feeling good. It’s connected to our capacity to desire, imagine, choose, and bring something into existence.

And perhaps this is why our disconnection from pleasure matters so much. When we’re disconnected from our capacity to feel, we can also become disconnected from our desires, our creative impulses, and our ability to imagine possibilities beyond the lives we’ve been conditioned to accept.

Pleasure is about liberation, truth, and the freedom to be radically alive.

An Invitation to Practice Pleasure

There’s only so much we can understand about pleasure through reading about it. At some point, we have to give ourselves the opportunity to experience it.

That’s why I created Coming to Our Senses, an intimate body-led workshop for women and femmes ready to slow down, soften, and reconnect with their sensual selves.

Through guided breathwork, gentle movement, ritual, and optional self-touch, we’ll explore what it means to slow down, soften, and listen to the wisdom of our bodies. We’ll practice welcoming sensation, whether that’s pleasure, tenderness, emotion, or even numbness, without the pressure to feel anything in particular.

​We’ll practice using breath to restore the nervous system, awaken subtle sensation, and allow safwepleasure to move through the body like liquid golden honey.

You don’t need to arrive feeling sensual, relaxed, or connected to your body. That’s part of what we’ll explore together.