Time to Reclaim You: A Call for Pleasure
You are a miracle. Act like it. Don’t waste it.
-adrienne maree brown
What I realized this morning as I sat with my vision for 2022, is it all comes down to:
PLEASURE
We can use any number of other words:
Fun
Play
Enjoyment
Satisfaction
Rest
Joy
Embodiment
Wholeness
Full
Alive
Happy
Natural
Nature
Acceptance
Abundance
Connection
Community
Ultimately, Pleasure is about freedom. Not freedom in the - god fearing/loving ‘Merica -sort of sense.
But freedom as the right to be you, full of worthiness and love. You who is connected to every other Being on this planet.
You who is reclaiming yourself so that you can be a part of the collective awakening and healing of social and political change.
[My guide in this connection and the author whose books are piled next to me is adrienne maree brown. If you aren’t familiar with their work, please become so.]
As adrienne maree brown states that, “pleasure is a natural, safe, and liberated part of life.” Brown presents us with the concept of
Pleasure Activism, which “includes work and life lived in the realms of satisfaction, joy, and erotic aliveness that brings about social and political change.” (P.13)
Check out their book Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good.
As a cis woman, pleasure as freedom means to me, the ability to embrace my whole body and all of my sensations and inner wisdom as personal power to use for the collective good. Freedom is the unlearning of the suppression and oppression of my body and being. It is the embrace and shining out of inner power and wisdom.
I’ve talked a lot lately about healing, which for me is about reconnecting or connecting - being Embodied. In the somatic sense, embodiment connects our over-analyzing thinking brains back into our physical body, our emotions, our sensations, our real lived experience. In the words of generative somatics - an org transforming social and climate justice activists -
“somatics is the practice-able theory of change that can move us toward individual, community and collective liberation.”
(Re)learning how to be embodied has been a focus of my personal healing from childhood and higher ed. All the ways I was taught to hide and disassociate from the body.
All the ways pleasure has not allowed in higher ed with dictating that professional dress looks like a gendered misplaced love of matching polos and logo-ed wear. Not to mention, a backlash on leggings not being ‘pants’ but trousers are and other restrictions many on non-cis male bodies. Being judged as sexy or not sexy - rather than comfort in one’s body and clothing.
The late great feminist/activist/scholar Audre Lorde wrote about this energy - joy, pleasure, creativity, power - as deeply feminine and spiritual. She called it erotic power and argued that the erotic is actually our life vitality - life force. Not only the both and contradicting desired and feared simultaneously women’s sexuality. [You can listen to her reading Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power (1978) on YouTube here. Reading her work, years ago planted the seeds to Pleasure.]
Okay, one short story, I’ve told when teaching about the politics and gendering of women’s bodies in the academy. When I was a student affairs administrator in Arizona, a more senior administrator told me to talk to one of my GA’s about her clothing. He was uncomfortable with seeing her cleavage. He even admitted that she wore perfectly professional clothing. It was as a larger chested individual, v-neck clothing still showed a woman’s body, which was deemed inappropriate in the workplace. The belief that professionalism is neutral is code for masculine/bodied. For the record, I said no, I wouldn’t have that conversation with her.
Pleasure, like rest, is resistance to patriarchy and social norming and living a hollow life. Through Pleasure we can experience an embodied connection to our deepest, wisest self, that connects to and brings us in community with like minded lovers of life and Earth. As adrienne maree brown states,
Pleasure is a feeling of happy satisfaction and enjoyment…pleasure activism is the work we do to reclaim our whole, happy, and satisfiable selves from the impacts, delusions, and limitations of oppression and/or supremacy. ( p. 13)
Pleasure is doing what feels good and feels like self and collective love. It is not about harm and excess and numbing. It’s about accepting ourselves AS Nature with a connection TO Nature. So when I want to hug a tree, I hug a tree and she hugs me back. Be you. Reclaim You!
Your reflection turn:
What does Pleasure mean to you?
Where in your day, life, work do you want to invite more Pleasure in?
What are you (un)(re)learning about Pleasure this year?
How do you want to show up as a whole human embodied with all the wisdom and sensations?
How are you integrating purpose and pleasure into your work? And if you work in higher ed, where can you find Pleasure in academia?
New Reclaim You Workshop upcoming
With that as a foundation, I created my upcoming Reclaim You as an 8 week group workshop series for folks who want to reconnect to their joy of living and reshape how to infuse that into their days and work. Reclaim You is a group coaching program in a psychoeducational format guided through mindful, somatic (body), and nature-based activities.
Live sessions are scheduled for Sunday mornings 8-930PST/9-1030aMST/10-1130CST/11-1230EST on Jan 23, 30, Feb 6, 13, 20, 27, March 6, 13 with recordings available for missed time except for breakout group time. Register this week and I’ll honor my bday discount code of 45suntrips because I want folks to have access to self-healing within container of caring community.