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 is key for us to live a long happy life. 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 are now starting to understand the nervous system as an extension of the brain throughout the entire body. 

Releasing your conditioning

Shame is the biggest inhibitor of pleasure. Our relationship to our body and our pleasure are connected to the way we grew up, our culture, and our experiences. In order to be in touch with our desires, we need to understand what is limiting us. 

When we focus on pleasing the other, it can disconnect us from our own experience, and misrepresent us to our partners. Having a regular self pleasure, as a form of daily hygiene, or ritual, allows to build a new relationship with our body, sensation, desires, and our capacity to communicate what we like and want. 

When we are present with our senses, whether through breath, pelvic floor, touch, self-pleasure, smell, taste, it lays down new patterns of regulation.

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 heart, and the other on your lower belly. Feel your hand moving gently with your breath. The belly lifting on the inhale, and dropping on the exhale. Now put your attention to your genitals. Feel that area of your body. Now ask your genitals: 

Can I touch you? Can I place my hand to hold you?

Notice what comes up. If it is a yes? is it a no? Is it a maybe? that's a no, for now.

If the answer is yes, keep one hand on your heart, and add the other delicately over your genitals, cup them, hold them. And continue to breathe into your hand, letting the body surrender to a gentle rocking motion. Inhale hips gently twerking back, exhale, hips gently thrusting forward. 

Stay here as long as it feels good. Once you are complete, put one hand 

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.