Attention is the gateway to pleasure and power

Feed the Muse January 2025

The thing about pleasure - or any energy for that matter - is that until you bring awareness to it you cannot know it’s there, even if it’s wafting into your nose, or slithering up your legs, or humming through your ears, or… well. You get it.

AWARENESS is the key… to pretty much everything.

ATTENTION is the practice.

As Simone Weil famously said, “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.”

Attention is also power; it is only in our awareness of where we are, right now, that we can move with precision. Our internal GPS system, intuition, gnosis, depends on our awareness. To know what feels just right in this moment depends on our awareness.

So: to experience pleasure, which is a form of power, requires awareness.

Simple enough, right?

It is simple- but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. Which is why…

Rather than load you with lots of extraneous information to process, this month we’re going to create space to focus on exactly where we are.

Below you will find journaling prompts and two simple practices which, if done with consistency, will transform your pleasure-power awareness, and become part of the foundation through which you connect with and experience life more deeply.

Yes. Life. Not just sexual pleasure, not habitual, forced, extractive pleasure — pleasure experienced through the deepening into the moment’s offerings. The more we learn to enjoy our somatic, felt, embodied experience, the more present, engaged, and open we are with all of life.

If you’d like to dive into these transformative practices, consider becoming a paid subscriber to theia•mania. As a gift to you in this new year, I am offering of a lifetime rate of $11.11 for an annual subscription when you sign up by January 11th.