What Happens in the Brain During Pleasure

The body learns what you teach it

Each time you slow down, breathe into a sensation, and choose to be present with what feels good, the nervous system learns it. The next time comes more easily. The opposite is also true. When you rush through pleasure, dissociate from your body, feel ashamed or your body, or override it, those patterns deepen too. The body learns what we teach it, it learns what we repeat.

What I have found, in my own practice and in working with clients, is that the changes happen slowly, and then all at once. There is a threshold to work through, that is more or less resisting, based on conditioning, cultural context, tension or trauma. It is connected to the plasticity of the body, to create new pathways, we need to do things daily. 

Once we build more awareness of the body's states and sensations, our capacity to feel pleasure increases. Not just sexually, but in how we experience everything, we feel more alive, more connected. The body stops bracing. It starts to open.

Pleasure is the fastest route back to balance, to homeostasis. It is what we have in our system as a way to naturally overcome stress. When you feel sensorial pleasure, you begin to move out of the state of alert and back into the body. You go from doing, to being, from thinking to feeling. 

Our habits define our behaviours 

If stimulation has always been fast, hard, always the same pressure, always the same motion, with vibration or a lot of friction, the body encodes that as the pathway. It is expecting exactly what it has been trained to do. The way you masturbate determines the way you have sex.

When you vary pace, pressure, location, and breath, you are asking the nervous system to pay attention in a new way. The areas you bring conscious attention to become more alive. Because we are so stuck in our head al day, we becomes desensitised from our senses.  The practice of resensitisation is a way to wake the body up by bringing attention to areas that have been overlooked, where there is pain, shame, or numbness. 

While using a vibrator can be a great tool for sex discovery, using fingers is essential as it is an opportunity for biofeedback, it allows you to map out your pleasure by visualising your anatomy through feeling sensations. 

When visual stimulation becomes the primary condition for arousal, the other senses become less developed. The body trains itself to need images as a stimuli for arousal, and that can create disconnection during intimacy. When the stimulation is slower, more nuanced, and sensorial rather than visual, it opens the body to more attunement, and connection. 

Sexuality is our life force, it is meant to circulate upwards inside the whole body, rather than escape through a quick genital release. When we consciously practice pleasure, we are not indulging, we are working with one of the most powerful processes the body has for healing, presence, and for knowing ourselves. This is the foundation of self love, vitality, and aliveness.