Why the Fuck Don't Adults Play?

How to Let Your Body Sing & the Magic of Pleasure Practice | Creative Expansion Challenge Day 0

Part personal story, part philosophy, part science. This one is for all of you who find a sense of trust in knowing the WHY underlying a practice (such as those we’ll be doing in the Creative Expansion Challenge starting tomorrow!!!!!).

On the last morning of my recent trip with Luke, we skipped hand in hand across a parking lot for all to see. It was euphoric. I couldn’t wipe the smile from my face if I tried. Do adults not skip because it feels so good? I have a suspicion that yes, this is exactly the reason. It’s not so much that we’re afraid of looking stupid, though that’s what we tell ourselves, or that we’re being immature or goofy or in some manner inappropriate. It’s that it feels too good and we can’t handle the sensation. 

It’s not surprising in this cultural age founded on the belief that productivity and appearances are the most important thing. But you know that’s not true, right?

As kids, we explore curiously, following our intrigue toward what lights us up, what makes us tingle, feel things. Good things. Pleasurable things.

As we grow older, we’re taught from many angles that our job is to work hard and suffer through life. To wait til retirement or death and then it’ll all be over. We won’t have to suffer anymore. Finally, we can enjoy the fruits of our labor. But that, frankly, is a crock of shit. 

We simply haven’t developed the capacity and skill to experience the depth and spectrum of sensation and pleasure available to us in Every. Single. Moment. 

Good news! Experiencing this infinite well of pleasure (eros) is a many layered process, but it’s also simple. And we don’t have to do it all at once. Phew. 

It goes something like this. Breathe and notice and release the tension against whatever is coming through your body.

Something is always moving within you: gentle harmonies, wild cacophonies, sometimes rising, sometimes falling, sometimes all of it simultaneously. The practice is to pay attention, to be with it, whatever “it” is,  and to swing with it. To play the game, and learn to enjoy it. 

Enter: pleasure. 

When you think of pleasure, what comes to mind? 

Many of us likely think of a climax.¹ A grand finale when pleasure, at last, comes.² Does that mean we perceive the rest of the journey as an obligatory build up to the main event, which is… wait, the ending? That’s the moment we’re fixated on? How strange. 

Eros and Thanatos

One way to consider this is through the lens of polarity. If eros is the life impulse, its opposite is thanatos, the death impulse. Ideally, these poles, like yin and yang, would be in balance. But in our society, thanatos tends to rule. The seeking to end things. The quest for domination. The fixation on winning so the game can be over…

I propose that we only want the game to be over because we don’t know how to enjoy the ever living fuck out of it. It is a game, after all… have you ever seen squirrels play? Or the way the breeze plays with the trees? Or the way you can’t help but smile as a lover teases you relentlessly? 

Lack of awareness and ability in the energetic realm of joy is the issue not only when it comes to sex, but in how we experience our lives as a whole. We can turn this on its head with a pleasure practice. A ritual of inviting pleasure into our lives with gratitude for the moment, without expectation of it looking or feeling a certain way, and without attachment to reaching a climax. Listen, I’m not saying climax is a bad thing, but it is not necessary to the experience of pleasure. However, in believing the climax is the only place pleasure happens, we tend to force it.

When it comes to pleasure, my advice is: let it happen; don’t make it happen.

Using Structure to Transcend Structure

When learning to write poetry, it can be useful to learn structures — certain forms within which to express — to a point. 

Structures are great developmental tools, but they’re not the end goal. 

We get tripped up thinking that once we master a form, we must stay within its confines. The purpose of practicing within a container is to learn the art of structure and rhythm, and then to let go, like the savasana at the end of your yoga class. 

It can be scary to let go of the practice, the constraints, the container, and enter the wild, wiggly abyss. We like to have an edge to lean into. Eros thrives with a bit of friction to fuel her fire. And maybe we fear if we let go of the friction we know, the fire will die. But that's not how it works. Cause guess what… 

The fire is within you. 

Eventually, if you let yourself transcend the form you know, you notice the rhythm actually comes from you. Through your body. Through the way it feels. You notice your body is container enough. 

Your body, your cauldron, contains both the heat of desire and the edges of erotic friction. And your senses are the superpowers that help you discern your rhythmic, pulsing magic within the monstrous mystery.

Eros: the pulse of desire that animates all things, breathes life into words, music, paintings; wiggles the leaves on the trees; makes our skin tingle and our mouths water; makes us buzz with anticipation; magnetizes us toward our lovers. 

So how do we tap into this universal pulse? 

We start feeling. And when we start feeling, especially after we’ve made great efforts to avoid feeling, we begin noticing things… namely, our upper thresholds for sensation often experienced as energetic “blocks” or edges.³ With this awareness, we can start leaning into our edges and feeling them dissolve, like magic. 

Actually, it’s not like magic, it is magic.  

As we become keenly aware of what is happening in the realms of mind, body, and spirit, we may also begin to notice they are all the same thing. Embedded within each other. Different expressions of the fundamental polarity of the universe that composes us: energy and consciousness. 

The Process

The process of dissolving our self imposed thresholds is not linear, yet there are a few bits of structure that can make it easier. 

Stillness and Non-Judgement

First: stop moving, just for a little while, in the ways you usually move. Why? Habits are generally ways of distracting ourselves from whatever it is we don’t want to feel. Practicing stillness, which is an expression of consciousness, yang, or the masculine, helps us hone our attention a bit before we proceed to the next layers where we begin playing with our energy (eros, yin, feminine), in which our attention is of utmost importance. You’ll learn that always, your attention is the thing.

Next on our list of skills? The art of noticing. Specifically, the art of noticing where we habitually focus and fixate our attention, and learning to shift our attentional habits if they are not serving our intentions. 

Take this example: if we intend to experience more joy, yet we fixate our attention on negative thoughts, unnecessary dramas, and things that otherwise perpetuate our self imposed state of suffering, we can practice:

1. not judging the thoughts we’re experiencing because that just creates more distress (judgements are just more thoughts, by the way)

2. intentionally noticing what brings us pleasure

This doesn’t mean ignoring things that are important yet unpleasant, but noticing when we are actually creating, through our self-narrative, more distress than is actually present in our lives. 

Of course, merely noticing in the mental plane isn’t enough. Because if we train our minds to fixate in one realm (e.g. suffering), our bodies & spirits are stuck there, too (they’re the same thing, remember?) holding onto both old emotional experiences we identify with as the feeling of who we are, and creating new emotional experiences (through false narratives) that perpetuate the story and sensation of our suffering. Hence the reason so many people go to the gym to suffer on purpose. Don’t fight me on this. It’s called a sufferfest for a reason: it’s socially acceptable torture. It’s also why abusive relationships are so prevalent and cyclical. 

If our bodies don’t know a different reality is possible, we’ll keep chasing the same one, fooling ourselves into believing it’s different when the only thing that’s changed is the mask it’s wearing (new boyfriend), or we’re wearing (new makeup). 

This trick works for a while… the initial jolt of excitement in a shiny new object. But when it subsides, we’re back to our suffering. Cue fancy new workout classes or toys in the gym. Cue another relationship that only kinda hits the mark. 

Notice the Tension; Release the Tension

The next practice is to begin:

1. noticing the physical habits that perpetuate our suffering 

2. unlearning them

There are bajillions of practices to help with this… which I’ll be sharing plenty of. But first: why do we get stuck in patterns in the first place? 

The human soma (the first person perception of the body) is both self regulating and self sensing. This is how it creates homeostasis, aka a sense of safety. Homeostasis doesn’t mean pleasurable - it just means what we’re accustomed to. Which also means if we experience more sensation than we’re used to and we haven’t trained our nervous systems for that experience,⁴ we’ll likely enter fight or flight or collapse, because to the soma, this means we might be in danger. Crazy, right? 

Pleasure, creativity, and curiosity are actually ALLLLL about mastering your nervous system. Specifically, understanding how to anchor into a state of safety and connection through your ventral vagal system… which is how we’ll begin the challenge… tomorrow. But stick with me, cause this information is paramount to your trust in the process of transformation. 

Practice Makes Permanent 

Our movement patterns and habits (e.g. working out and not listening to our bodies, eating mindlessly, disconnecting through alcohol/drugs/etc) create the sensations and emotions that underlie our impulses to recreate the environment we are used to feeling in our bodies (maintaining homeostasis). So if we habitually experience and seek (aka practice) distraction and suffering, we’re bound to recreate those states through the entirety of our lives… unless we break the cycle.

Again, this is where pleasure comes in. To break the cycle of suffering, we need to practice a new way of being that moves the homeostatic needle toward pleasure. 

Of course we can practice pleasure sexually (which I highly recommend, and which, when done with purpose, can be profound) but we can also practice pleasure in every moment.

As in traditional meditation, where we come back to the breath or some other point of focus, we can make pleasure our home base. We can practice noticing what feels good in the moment.

The pleasure piece is most potent when it happens in tandem with unlearning the habits that reinforce our suffering, because our mind is always looking for something to grasp; if it doesn’t have a new framework or purpose to guide it, it will revert to the old one. So let’s replace the purpose of perpetuating suffering with the purpose of creating and experiencing pleasure, shall we? 

This comes down to noticing body feedback via sensation and allowing ourselves to respond to that, versus following a prescriptive routine (in movement, sex, relationships, work, etc) that ignores the body’s sensational desires & impulses (aka eros).

We can think of this way of curiously listening and responding to the body as play. Yes, like the way you explored as a child, but with the added benefit of lived wisdom. You no longer need to stick your finger in a socket to know it’s not a great idea. Just like you no longer need to torture yourself to know the outcome will be the same as it was before…

Sophia Wake

Play = Expansion for the Rest of Your Life

The practice of noticing your self imposed limits and dissolving them through pleasure, play, and curiosity can be your process of expansion for the rest of your life. It really can be that simple. 

There are infinite layers to go through, and that’s the fun of it. Cultivating a sense of joy and turn on in the endless horizon of becoming.  

When we commit to the path of eros, which is the path of receiving the pleasure and wisdom of life, we commit to the mystery. 

The details of the process will look different for everyone, but fundamentally it incorporates the principle of allowing the movement of life — eros — to come through us, not controlling it, but actively receiving; being in conversation with the universal pulse of desire, our bodies becoming  eros’ instrument.

Expanding Emotional Capacity is Expanding Sensational Capacity 

I want to come back for a moment to the judgement of emotions, because when we let eros in, we begin to experience more emotions, and our habit is often to judge/shame/fear and suppress them when they become uncomfortable. 

Remember, judgements are just thoughts, and thoughts aren’t necessarily true. We can simply observe the thoughts about the feelings, and proceed with feeling. Because here’s the real real: there are no wrong feelings, no matter our preference. 

As for the sensational aspect of emotions? Well, we’re pretty good at distracting or numbing ourselves. But what you need to know is this: true ecstasy and freedom come with allowing ourselves to be filled with the sensational experiences of all emotion. This may not make logical sense. Which is why we practice. I promise you, crying and writhing in eros’ mystery can be as orgasmic as Samantha Jones’ escapades with New York’s sexiest men (and a woman). Or whatever tickles your fancy.

Emotion, an expression of eros, is energy in motion. That means it wants to move. It doesn’t want to be pushed down and ignored. Eros pulses as the desire to feel and express. She longs to move us and move through us in infinite ways — through dance and sex and writing and painting, connection through deep conversation, eye contact, soaking up the sunshine and letting out a deep sigh, enjoying a piece of chocolate melting on your tongue, the yearning for your lover’s touch.

As is the rule of polarity, opposites compose life. If we want to experience the depths of our pleasure, we must also be open to the depths of our pain - the grief and sadness and longing. The key is not to hold onto any of it, but to feel it, express it and let it keep flowing. 

If we can learn to let go of judgement and just be with what is, we open our perception to an entirely different experience of our selves, our lives, and the world. And further, when we practice moving the homeostatic needle toward pleasure as our baseline, everything, and I mean EVERYTHING, changes. 

It’s a Big, Juicy Experiment

As we go through the creative expansion challenge and challenges in the future, I’ll be sharing practices, containers, and edges to lean into that may or may not rub you the right way. Take what works and leave the rest. 

What I want you to remember is that the point isn’t to get it “right.” It’s to be curious and open to the experiment. Because that’s what this all is. An experiment in creativity. An invitation to feel what is.  A dance with eros. And as we know, the point of a dance isn’t to get anywhere, it’s to be present for the journey. To let your body sing.

Welcome, I’m Faye, resident muse, mentor, and devil on your shoulder. Here, we get a bit naughty on the journey to personal empowerment. And we do it through the realm of eros. We move from prescriptive to expressive. From obedient to deviant. From copied to embodied. 

I’d be so grateful for your support of this community through a paid subscription. With a paid subscription, you’ll have access to the full archive of essays and poetry, plus monthly challenges to cultivate and expand your practices of pleasure, creativity, and love. ❤

1. we might also think of getting drunk or high, which is just a different sort of “peak” experience)

2. there are too many cheeky jokes to make here

3. the realms of pain (not the same as suffering), pleasure, joy, curiosity, and mystery are especially potent to expansive states

4. the nervous system is best trained through a process of titration, which is like a slow drip method of introducing sensation to the system