042 - The Power of Pleasure

Do you want to learn how to integrate pleasure into your business? You've probably been told that you need to work hard and sacrifice your pleasure for success. But if you're not getting the results you want, then this episode is for you.

Do you feel like you're chasing pleasure but it always seems to be just out of reach? Have you been told that in order to experience pleasure, you need to take action X, but it just isn't working and you're feeling frustrated? If any of this resonates, then

In this week's episode, I cover:
1. What is the true definition of pleasure? Yes, it's more than just sex and the erotic
2. The 4 different forms of pleasure we can all access
3. How can pleasure save you from having a meal that could be laced with food poisoning?
4. How you can completely change your perception of pleasure and make it more accessible to you in any given moment.

Connect with me:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ainslieyoung/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/blogstartingwitha
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCi4nhjn_5hdQb4RM7jQFILg
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ainslieyoung/
Website: https://startingwitha.com/

Connect with me:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ainslieyoung/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/blogstartingwitha
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCi4nhjn_5hdQb4RM7jQFILg
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ainslieyoung/
Website: https://startingwitha.com/

Transcript

[00:00:15]
Hi, you're listening to the Feminine Business School podcast asked and I'm your host, Ainslie Young. My work is all about creating a wildly pleasurable and successful business without burning out your body and selling out your soul. I'm also really passionate about ditching the cookie cutter marketing strategies and finding what feels good to you when when it comes to marketing. Join me as we talk all things online business, feminist marketing strategies, feminine embodiment, conscious leadership and pleasurable productivity. Hit.

[00:00:48]
Subscribe now and let's get started. And to learn the secret to fitting more pleasure into each day while ticking off your todos, download my free Pleasure and Productivity Weekly Planner head to starting with a.com optin.

[00:01:09]
Hello, hello and welcome to season four of the Feminine Business School Podcast. I am your hostess, Ainslie Young, and it's a bit of a surprise that I am back behind the podcasting Mike, because I had no intention of starting season four. But I have a lot to say about pleasure. A lot has been going on behind the scenes and me diving into embodying pleasure, taking my clients on the ride and spreading the message is brought up a lot. And I really, really want to share, particularly on this platform.

[00:01:44]
Well, first I want to share more about why I'm super angry and I guess what it is that I'm super angry about when it comes to pleasure. And then I also want to expand upon the definition of pleasure and share the four different forms of pleasure. I also want to share about an experience I had with a new friend yesterday and her kind of definition of pleasure and how just our conversation has expanded that. And I also want to talk about it from the nervous system point of view and how pleasure actually has a huge, huge impact on your life and on your business.

[00:02:25]
Okay, all right, so let's just jump straight in. So I mentioned that I'm angry, and the reason why I'm angry is because so many people do not know what the true definition of pleasure is. So often when I speak about my work, I say that I'm a pleasure mentor. I help women access deeper states of pleasure so they can grow successful and sustainable businesses. And I kind of get a blank look or a shocked look.

[00:02:56]
And I know that people turn away from my work. They scroll past my content on Instagram and they're saying things like, that's just not for me, or like, what does pleasure have to do with business? And I get it because when I first came across, really the concept of pleasure was in my feminine Embodiment coaching certification with the School of Embodied Arts. And I've told this story before, and I also told this story when I accepted the award earlier this year from the School around Coaching excellence in Leadership. And my work is all about pleasure that I nearly skipped the whole module on pleasure when I saw it.

[00:03:33]
I was such a great student, I dived into everything. I was like, this is great, great. Then it came to module it might have been module five or something. And I was like, yeah, I just skip that. That's not for me.

[00:03:41]
But something made me go back because I knew I had to look at it. But it's what sucked me in in the most delightful way into the wonderful world of feminine, embodiment and embodied pleasure. And this is where my idea of pleasure centered leadership comes from. And this is what I really want to do. This is the movement that I want to create where all of us, not just women, and not just women in business, we're centering our pleasure on a daily basis, and we're not coming from a place of pain and suffering.

[00:04:12]
And now, going back to why I'm really angry, going off on a tangent, there is around this definition of pleasure and how it has been sexualized. And it's been sexualized thanks to the patriarchies, thanks to toxic capitalism, thanks to mass media and even the word sensual, people are like, oh, and they relate that to sex and the erotic. Now, yes, sex and the erotic is a part of pleasure, an important part, but it's not the whole part. And it's not what I focus on in terms of the work that I do with clients. I'm going to share a little bit more about the different forms of pleasure.

[00:04:47]
But because pleasure, the word, the definition, has been sexualized, we shun it because of shame, particularly women. And the thing is, when a woman is coming from a place of overflow in her pleasure, she is so freaking powerful, so freaking powerful and potent. And this is perceived, or was perceived as a threat by men, particularly back in the patriarchal days, but still now. And so that is how and this is a whole other episode, but just for the context, there's so much shame and guilt attached to pleasure because of the sexualized definition of pleasure. So I wanted to share that first, because really what pleasure is is the enjoyment of a particular experience.

[00:05:37]
And you're enjoying this experience with awareness because you cannot be in a state of pleasure unless you're present. So there's no pleasure without presence. And the thing is, pleasure is just when you're tuned into an experience that feels really, really good. Okay. Now, pleasure is our birth right.

[00:05:59]
And I went into this in episode one many years ago when I started this podcast. And particularly as women, it is our birth right. And it's not something that we actually do. It's a state of being, and we can access it at any time in our body. I've become really, really good.

[00:06:15]
And if I could just click my fingers, I can drop into a state of pleasure in my body. Doesn't matter where I am or what's going on. I've trained my body to be able to do that. And the good news is that essentially, attuning your body to pleasure is just a skill, okay? It's just something that we can build, and that's what I do with clients.

[00:06:35]
But pleasure really is your internal guidance system if we want to kind of zoom out and look at it from that perspective. And pleasure can actually be lifesaving if we're attuning to our five different senses, okay? So, for example, pleasure can save you from having a meal that could be laced with food poisoning. So you might look at a meal that's presented to you, and it might look a little bit off, like, the colors don't look very appealing, look funny. And you're like, that doesn't look very good.

[00:07:07]
And you could smell it as well. You're like, that just doesn't smell right. There's something wrong. So the pleasure there in the physical aspects, the sensory aspects can help you, right? Pleasure is always helping you.

[00:07:19]
It's your internal guidance system, and you cannot go wrong when you're following the path of pleasure. Now, I want to talk a little bit more about these four different forms of pleasure. And I came across this from Debbie Ward. So I want to give devi credit here because I feel like she's beautifully encapsulated the different forms of pleasure that I've been experiencing, but I couldn't really articulate it in a way. So that first form is what we're just talking about in terms of the sensual, the physical pleasure, where we're tapping into our five senses.

[00:07:52]
And I did go into this in depth in episode one, but our physical senses is like the gateway to our sensual aliveness. And so often we skip past this, right when we're babies. This is how we explore the world, always putting things in our mouths and, like, touching things, and that's how we grow and develop and learn. But as our lives have become more complex, more busy, and just full on, we're not in the present moment, and we don't necessarily need to learn so much. And so this is why we really need to slow down and awaken our senses.

[00:08:29]
Last week, I actually spoke at a private club here in Singapore with one of my dear friends, colleagues, and past clients, kareem Conrad Colder. And we were talking about the secrets of success without burning out. And one of the things that I was talking about was pleasure. And I had a lady come up to me, and she was saying that she doesn't know how she could weave it in to her work. She works in corporate.

[00:08:53]
She's very senior at a multinational firm. And she said she's just attached to her laptop all day, every day, and she could have three cups of coffee and not even realize that she's had her three cups of coffee. She'd look down below, oh, my gosh, my coffee is finished. And I was saying to her just one way would be for her to just pull herself away from the screen and sit and admire the beauty of the cup. For example, say she's got a really beautiful coffee cup and then to feel the heat from the coffee, and then to smell the aroma of the coffee.

[00:09:24]
And then to sip it mindfully to be present and open up her senses and see as she's drinking her coffee if she can expand the pleasure that she's receiving from the coffee. And that's very, very simple. I even know in the morning sometimes when I'm running around getting Zamp ready for school and James and I will have coffees. He makes us a coffee every day. We have two little piccolo lattes and sometimes I'm like, oh, did I get my second coffee?

[00:09:48]
And it's like savoring those moments. And the more you do it each and every day, the heightened your senses are going to be and the more pleasure you're going to receive. So the second form of pleasure is emotional pleasure. And this is where you're receiving pleasure from your interactions, often with other people. So for example, maybe your little one will give you a hug and say like, I love you Mummy, and there's so much emotional pleasure.

[00:10:17]
Maybe you're having lunch with a really great girlfriend and you're having the most delicious conversations and just really enjoying the experience, the connection and being with your friend. That's emotional pleasure. Maybe your boss gives you some amazing feedback and some praise and you receive that and that feels wildly pleasurable to you. So that's emotional pleasure. The third form of pleasure is sexual and the erotic, which is what most of us associate pleasure with.

[00:10:48]
And it's a really important part of our state of aliveness and bringing through the shakti energy, which is our divine life force. And then we have the fourth type of pleasure, which probably gets me the most excited, and that is spiritual pleasure. And this is what people often refer to as that sense of bliss, that sense of transcendence. And I feel like I can access this now quite quickly. When I am doing any body movement practice, I am meditating and even when I am laying down on the bed and I'm calling all of my energy back into my body for like 20 minutes or so and I'm in that deep state of rest and relaxation and I just love, love, love that.

[00:11:32]
And I feel like this is where the quantum lives in this type of pleasure. And this is just a state of oneness, it's like a state of awe and you're just at peace with everything. This kind of takes me back to what I wanted to say earlier, actually, in terms of knowing that pleasure is a spectrum. So we've got at one end pain and the other end pleasure. But I feel like at the end of the pleasure end of the spectrum.

[00:11:57]
There's a spectrum within the spectrum. Okay, so I recently ran the Pleasure Portal, which was a ten day experience where I was sharing with the wonderful women who joined me about how we can weave pleasure into the DayToday of our business in different aspects of our business. Something that came through really clearly was that some of them still didn't have that definition of pleasure, where it's on a spectrum. And a lot of us think that pleasure is this wildly orgasmic state that we should be in and this state of aliveness. But I believe at one end there's this state of aliveness, maybe it's orgasmic, and that the other end, there's this deep peace and relaxation and contentment, and that can be wildly pleasurable too.

[00:12:40]
And I get so much pleasure out of doing like nothing, being in deep rest. So it's really important to know that in some situations, pleasure might be like this sense of excitement and aliveness that you're doing. And other times it's like when you're just laying on your bed in the dark with nobody around and just that sense of peace and I get to relax. And the thing is, when it comes to our nervous system, we access pleasure via our parasympathetic nervous system, okay? So often we are in fight or flight.

[00:13:12]
This is a very general explanation. And because our reptilian brain has not caught on that the perceived threat of our pending deadlines, our massive to dos, just the general chronic stress that we undergo on a day to day basis, thanks to the type of lives that we're living, is not going to kill us, right? So we're still in that caveman cavewoman days where our brain still thinks that we're being chased by a lion and that essentially is a threat. But of course we're not. We've just got these really hectic chronically stressful lives.

[00:13:44]
And so we're continually worried about our survival. We're feeling under threat. We're moving into fight or flight or there's others, there's freeze or form, but we're just going to be talking about those. And this is how burnout happens. And this is what I was speaking to last week on the panel discussion.

[00:13:59]
But what we want to do is we want to move into the rest and digest system, the parasympathetic nervous system, where our body can restore and relax. And this is where pleasure is found. So that is why it's so important to really prioritize rest and relaxation, and I mean deep rest and relaxation so you can access those states of pleasure far easier and grow your pleasure capacity from there. And then finally, I just want to share this story from my lunch experience with a new friend. Yesterday, here in Singapore, we met through a particular course that we're both doing here, and we hit it off and we're like, let's go and have lunch together and learn more about each other.

[00:14:40]
And she was telling me more about her work, which just sounds divine. And then I was just sharing about my work. And then we did get onto the topic of pleasure. It's not what I started with and the instant reaction of being sexually in nature, it's kind of not for me. We ended up talking about this other workshop that she went to and it was all about sex toys and she was kind of interested, kind of nod, and I listened and smiled and said, yeah, that's one form of pleasure.

[00:15:04]
And then I just essentially said everything that I've just said in this podcast to her and her eyes were lighting up and she even said, tell me more, tell me more. This is really, really exciting. And then I shared about find deep pleasure and just laying on the bed for 20 minutes and doing like a selfsourcing practice and she's like, so you mean when I go into my room and I shut all the blinds and I shut the door and I lock my children out and I lay there in the dark? That is classes pleasure. I was like, yeah, absolutely.

[00:15:30]
Because if her nervous system is in that rest and digest state, yes, absolutely. If she's getting enjoyment from laying in the dark on her bed with the door shut, yes, that is pleasure. And then I was up at the shops and I just saw that she tagged me in a post on Facebook and she was recounting our lunch and she then recounted her morning. And her morning was that she woke up at 05:00 a.m. And it was pouring buckets here in Singapore and she opened the window and she just enjoyed the sheets of rain and that was pleasurable.

[00:16:01]
She then jumped on a bike and she went down to the beach and she did meditation with one of our mentors here on the beach and that was wildly pleasurable. And then she got on a bike, went to a remote part of the beach, saw all these beautiful orange butterflies and she was sitting under the FIR tree and she was journaling and that was pleasurable. And then she was looking at the clouds and the different formations of the clouds and that was pleasure. And it gives me so much pleasure and joy hearing just that one conversation has expanded her definition of pleasure. And what gets to shift now that she gets to embody that pleasure on a DayToday basis, moment by moment basis, because there are so many benefits of pleasure, particularly when it comes to business.

[00:16:49]
And this is where I talk about my four part pleasure portal framework, where pleasure really helps you to expand your power, step into your power fully as a woman in business, it helps you to activate and expand your sense of purpose within your business. Pleasure is key. It's integral to your productivity. And I find that the more pleasure you're in, the less you do, but the more productive the better. The outcomes.

[00:17:18]
So the less you do and the more you receive. And finally, pleasure helps you open up the portal of prosperity across all areas of your life. And I see that with my clients, I've seen that with myself. And this is like a whole other podcast. I can go into this framework.

[00:17:34]
But a woman who is coming from a state of overflow with her pleasure, she is so, so powerful. Watch out world. Okay, I'm going to wrap it up there. And I really hope that my impromptu podcast and my ramblings and different shares around pleasure has sparked something within you. And if you know anyone that you feel needs to hear this expanded definition of pleasure or someone who might need a little bit of extra pleasure in their life, please share it with them.

[00:18:07]
And if you could leave me a five star review or just a review in general would be amazing because it really helps show Apple that this is a podcast worth listening to and it will help me on my pleasure centered leadership mission. OK? And if you've got any feedback or any kind of AHAs, please feel free to get in contact. I'm over on Instagram at Amesley Young and I would love to have a conversation with you in the DMs. Okay, stay safe and I will speak to you soon.

[00:18:46]
Thanks so much for listening to today's podcast episode. Hopefully you enjoyed it and you received some tips and takeaways or maybe a major AHA. And if you did, please leave me a quick fivestar rating and review in Apple podcasts. I'd be so, so grateful. And if you'd like to connect, just just come and say hi.

[00:19:05]
DM me over on Instagram. You can find me at Ainslie Young. I'll speak with you soon.