A pleasure pathway is a neural pathway. Every time you experience pleasure consciously, with full awareness, with breath, with presence, you are reinforcing a route in the nervous system. The body learns what you repeat. Five minutes a day does something a single longer session once a week cannot.

What pleasure does in the body

Harvard University's longest running study on adult life concluded that human connection is the most potent factor in a long and healthy life. Not diet, not exercise, the quality of our relationships and our capacity to connect. Pleasure, intimacy, and the ability to feel safe with one another sit at the centre of our wellbeing.

Practice daily for more plasticity

Neuroplasticity is the brain's ability to transform and change. For a long time, we believed the adult brain was fixed and could only decline. Neuroscience has since shown that we can grow and develop new neural connections throughout our lives with repetitive habits.

Curiosity, joy, smiling, voicing, moving, breathing, sensoriality, are tools that support neuroplasticity. Pleasure is not just a reward, it is a process for the body. Practicing feeling physically good is a way to manage stress. It impacts your physiology and psychology.

"We are what we repeat. Bringing intention and attention to our daily habits is a way to attend to our desires."

We have long treated the brain as separate from the body. We now know the nervous system extends throughout the entire body. Becoming more sensitive cultivates love that comes from wholeness, rather than separation.

Releasing your conditioning

Shame is the biggest inhibitor of pleasure. When we rush through it, numb it, or feel ashamed of it, those patterns deepen too. Practicing pleasure, as a form of daily hygiene, ritual, or prayer to yourself, is how we begin to repair that.

When we are present with our senses, whether through breath, pelvic floor, touch, self-pleasure, smell, taste, it lays down new patterns of regulation. A pleasure pathway is a neural pathway that makes it easy for you to shift into it, and use it as a place to restore, release, feel joy in your body.

Try this

As many of these practices require privacy, which might not be immediately available, I invite you to simply imagine the practice. Visualise, sensualise, how you would do this practice, and what it would feel like.

Asking for permission

Setting boundaries, and respecting them is a practice that starts with our own body.

This practice can be done standing, seated, or lying down. It can be done at any time, but especially before you make contact with your own body, and before intimacy.

First connect to your heartbeat, can you feel the rhythm of your heart? Inhale softly and deeply through the nose, exhale mouth relax and open. Sink a little deeper on each exhale.

Put one hand on your lower belly. Feel your hand moving gently with your breath. The belly lifting on the inhale, and dropping on the exhale. Connect to your genitals, breathing with your pleasure, and ask yourself.

Do I have permission to touch you? Do you want to feel my touch there?

Notice what comes. If it is a yes, acknowledge it. If it is a no, acknowledge that too. If it is a maybe, that's a no, for now.

If the answer is yes, place your hand over your genitals, cup them, hold them. And continue to breathe into your hand, letting the body surrender to a gentle rocking motion.

Science check

Eight weeks of daily practice increases gray matter density in regions of the brain involved in memory, sense of self, emotion regulation and stress response. The brain reshapes itself in response to what is repeated.

Daily practice and brain change , Hölzel, B.K., Carmody, J., Vangel, M., Congleton, C., Yerramsetti, S.M., Gard, T., & Lazar, S.W. (2011). Mindfulness practice leads to increases in regional brain gray matter density. Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, 191(1), 36–43.