is feeling your pain the key to your pleasure?

the hidden power of connecting with love’s infinite ache

“So it hurts if you don’t feel?” Luke asked me.

It hurts if I don’t feel. 

It hurts if I do feel. 

The difference is in the pain’s source. 

Do I hurt because I resist and so feel disconnected from my spirit? Or do I hurt because as a soulbody, I let all of life, from the highest highs to the lowest lows, course through me? 

Does it hurt because love is shattering my heart open more each day?

Does it hurt because this yearning is endless?

Does it hurt because even in all this expansion, I can never quite touch what it is I’m reaching for?

Does it hurt to feel love’s infinite ache?

Yes.

Yet feeling this pain, this yearning, is my deepest source of pleasure and connection.

That’s the journey. Endless expansion. Opening to and loving through the pain of growth. (The phrase “growing pains” has meaning far deeper than we let on, huh.)

So much of modern advice tries to quell us of our pain with distractions and positive thinking.

So much of modern spirituality focuses on retreating into our minds and  transcending the human body.

Either we seek to fill the space of longing that lives through our bodies with things like shallow relationships, disconnected sex, food, scrolling, tv, self pity…

Or we are told that to achieve happiness, we must essentially leave the body. Sit in a cave and meditate. Retreat from the earthly experience of humanity.

What are we trying to avoid?

All of these empty distractions keep us from connecting with our purpose of being Here, as living, breathing, feeling beings. 

Our sense of yearning - that pull beneath everything - has purpose. It is not to be filled. It is not to be ignored. It is to be FELT.

Let me tell you something from the bottom of my heart. Most of what we consume is bullshit. Love and light? What’s that? Positive vibes only? Fuck off. The point of life is not “happiness.” The point is learning to love more fully, in a way that encompasses the full spectrum of this experience.

It’s an insult to humanity to stay on the surface.

It’s an art to be able to go to our depths and remain connected, conscious, in touch with love, as we feel and express the most painful of experiences. Contrary to popular belief, often it is being loved - which is really to say, being seen in our most vulnerable, open hearted  expressions - that hurts the most. This is the hurt of penetrating our resistance. Letting go of fear. Softening into our ache for love’s presence.

And so, it is the practice of a lifetime to open up, to unfurl, to release the struggle against ourselves and into the arms of love’s embrace… yet most of us won’t undertake it because we are too afraid.

We are afraid we have to be perfect. We are afraid we have to do it all at once (we don’t… we cant). We are afraid that we’ll lose love if we’re honest. We are afraid that if we don’t stay small, everything will change…

And it will change. But that’s the whole point. Change. Growth. Expansion. 

It will hurt and hurt and hurt and we won’t be able to experience anything different if all we do is resist the truth that’s dying to burst through us.

This is us denying our souls’ yearnings. 

Our souls want - need - heart wrenching love. Soul shattering eroticism. Connection that rocks us to our cores and wrings us out reformed.

What I’m not saying is that it’s all pain and darkness and endless hurting. What I am saying is that in order to feel anything different - to feel the joy and pleasure of being in and connecting with the truth  of our bodies - we need to allow ourselves to feel the darkness. We need to welcome the demons. We need to feel all that we’ve resisted.

Resistance isn’t purely mental; all that energy, all the emotion we push away, where does it go?

It lives in the body as tension. Everything unprocessed. Everything unintegrated. All the love we didn’t let move through us. All the half-truths. All the repression. It’s stewing in the darkest corners of our being. In that knot in your back, the pain in your hip, the clenched jaw, the tightening fist, the trembling lip .

We need to love our bodies open. We need to love our pain literally, physically. We need to touch ourselves, and we need our lovers to touch us. The intimacy that heals us - the sex that transcends the moment and transforms our way of being -  happens when we let ourselves be loved in the tenderest places.