Embracing a pleasure-filled life is not just about indulgence or instant gratification—it's about cultivating a life filled with joy, fulfilment, and empowerment.
Despite its importance, many of us grapple with barriers that hinder our ability to embrace pleasure fully.
In our pursuit of pleasure, we often feel confined to narrow definitions offered by societal conditioning and misconceptions about the truth of our feminine power.
Whether it's due to externalised beliefs of what pleasure should look like, feeling numb, or navigating internal tensions and constrictions, entering into the waters of pleasure can sometimes feel murky.
Today on the podcast, I'm extending an invitation — one that turns you into the realm of your pleasure so you can infuse your life with more joy and satisfaction.
In this episode, I share:
🔥Taking pleasure beyond the narrow definitions we are sold
🔥Pleasure as an act of devotion
🔥How reclaiming your pleasure is an essential part of reclaiming your feminine power
🔥Some of the biggest barriers to having a pleasure-filled life
🔥Why having self-awareness around your barriers is not enough
🔥My best strategies for cultivating more pleasure in your life
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💃 get to know me, visit my website
Hello and a very warm welcome to another episode of the Untamed and Embodied Show. I'm delighted to be back here on the podcast and I'm delighted to welcome you. Thank you so much for joining me. Today's episode is going to be a really juicy one. We going to get into everything pleasure. And specifically I want us to explore how we can begin to create pleasure filled lives. Our feminine expresses beautifully when we embrace the power of our own pleasure, and that's what I want to dive into today. Of course, there are also many things that get in the way of us experiencing pleasure and orienting ourselves to a life that is filled with pleasure. So we'll look at some of those things and then finally, I'm going to share with you some of my best strategies and tools for you to begin to implement and practise so that you can have more pleasure, joy, fulfilment, and satisfaction in your life.
Bringing pleasure into our lives and into your world is a central theme of my work. And often when I ask women, what does pleasure mean to you? What do you think of when you think of pleasure? Often the first thing that so many of them speak to is this social conditioned idea of what pleasure is. That pleasure looks like black lace and red lipstick or that pleasure looks like eroticism, pleasure is naughty and that pleasure is only sexual. There are some ideas around pleasure means instant gratification. Pleasure means only doing the things that I want to do and not caring about anything else. So you can imagine and you can hear from these definitions and explanations that entering into the waters of pleasure can be quite murky. And it can be a challenge for us to unravel these different beliefs that we have around pleasure so that we can infuse our lives with more of that. Without pleasure
our lives become very dry. Our lives become empty, our lives feel unfulfilled, and we get filled with resentment. We get filled with bitterness. We lose our sense of purpose and our sense of meaning. It's one of our human needs to feel joy and satisfaction. And if we can't source this satisfaction and the sense of wellbeing and joy from within us, what we'll do is we will go and find it in our outside world. We'll look for things outside of us to give us that sense of pleasure. And more often than not, the things that we end up doing aren't necessarily good for us. And I'm thinking of the three S's. We shop, we sugar, or we sex. So the reason why pleasure is such a big theme in my work is because when we centre pleasure, this is how we turn on our power. This is how we turn on our potential.
And to reclaim our feminine power, we need to reclaim our relationship to pleasure. If we walk around with these outdated and not our beliefs of what pleasure means, can you see how challenging it is to bring that into your life? Because if this is your definition of pleasure, if you see pleasure as just something that is only sexual or something that only is for instant gratification, can you see the internal conflict that it causes when you try to bring more pleasure in your life? So I'd like to share with you my definition of what pleasure is, and I see pleasure as sensual aliveness. I see pleasure as enjoying something, feeling good on the inside, feeling good in our external world, having enjoyable experiences. Pleasure is an energy. And the more of this energy we can bring into our lives, the more expressive, the more confident and the more powerful
in our own right, we will show up. What pleasure asks of us is our devotion. So often when we want to change our lives and we have new habits that we want to bring in, we tend to use willpower and discipline to make it happen. But when we bring pleasure into our lives using our masculine strength of discipline and willpower, it becomes a to-do list. It becomes a task. It becomes something that you have to do in order to achieve a certain outcome. And my invitation to you is if you are new to the path of pleasure, if this is not something that you habitually orient yourself to, is to begin to devote yourself to your pleasure, take a stand for your pleasure, no one else is going to do that for you. It's up to us, each and every individual woman to reclaim our pleasure, to heal the relationship that we have around our pleasure and also to heal the relationship that we have with ourselves.
Now, there are a few things that get in the way of us stepping into this role of magnificent pleasure filled women, and I'll share a few of these with you. Now, by no means is this list complete and it is possible for you that you will identify with some of these more than with others. So the first thing on my list is conditioning. Now, most of us, if you are alive in this world today, chances are very good that you have been exposed to some kind of conditioning and we've really been conditioned into this role of good girl. So the good girl is the one who always puts the needs of others before her own. She takes care of others. She is the nurturer. And because we tend to then focus so much on others, we're not very good at asking for what it is that we need.
We are not very good for taking care of our own needs. And often in this good girl dynamic, we can slip into blame where we expect others to know what it is that we need. And when we don't receive that, we feel resentful. Often we don't even know the extent and the depth of our own needs because we are so in tune with the needs of our partners or our children or our bosses or our friends. And it's become second nature. And then when we try to take time for ourselves, when we begin to change these habits of always putting others first, and we instead turn the focus on ourselves, we begin to struggle with things like feeling guilty or feeling ashamed, or we have this internal conflict of not even being able to rest. So you make some time to book a massage or you make some time to spend with yourself reflecting, but even while you are busy doing it, your mind can't let go of maybe how much it's costing you or of all the other things that still need to be done.
So we still continuously have this inner conflict that happens inside of us. A second thing that could get in the way of you and your pleasure filled life is that we feel numb, right? We have learned to avoid our feelings because ever since we were little girls and boys, we've begun to believe certain things about our feelings and our emotions. Some of them are appropriate, some of them are not appropriate. Some of them are allowed in small doses, but don't let the feeling and the emotion get too big. Don't let it get too untidy. And often these emotions and feelings are simply inconvenient. So these are the messages that we get throughout our childhood and our parents and caregivers probably got the same messages given to them, so it's no one's fault. But we have internalised this idea that emotions don't really have a place in the mainstream world because they are untidy, because they are inconvenient.
And so we shrink the bandwidth of allowed emotions and allowed feelings. But in the process as we turn our feelings and our sensations down, we don't only turn down the uncomfortable ones or the ones that we don't enjoy feeling. We also turn down the more enjoyable, the more pleasure infused feelings and sensations. You cannot only turn down a little bit of who you are. When we begin to dampen ourselves, when we turn down our own internal volume, it's like a blanket downturning that happens. And so when we limit this range of our own inner world, the experiences in our inner world, typically what we do is the moment that something might pop up its head, we distract ourselves. And we do that by either keeping very busy always finding something to do. We work too much, we solve other people's problems. We are too involved in other people's lives.
We spend our money on things that we don't need. We lose ourselves in the lives of celebrities and influences and even our friends on social media. What might be helpful for you here is to understand that we all have this mental pattern that play out. And the mental pattern says, if I can only understand my pain, if I can only understand what I'm going through, if I can only understand the discomfort of my experiences, if I can only understand the depth of my anger, then I will be able to solve it. I will be able to make it go away. And so what we do practically is we think about our feelings and our emotions instead of feeling our feelings and our emotions. And that is what numbs us. This is what I mean when I say we've become numb. A third condition or pattern that could potentially be in the way of you embracing a more pleasure filled life is that you have become addicted to your own pain and your own drama.
And I'm using the term addiction very loosely here. What this looks like is you have so identified with the role of what is wrong with you that it's very difficult for you to imagine yourself to be anything else. How I also see this dynamic play out is you are very good at being able to connect the dots between what is currently manifesting in your life and what that has to do with what has happened in your past. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with having this level of self-awareness. In fact, self-awareness is the first thing that we need. It's the most important ingredient for any kind of transformation to happen. The problem is when our self-awareness doesn't go any further than that, we are only sitting in the knowledge of what happened. And then we are also caught up in this mental pattern of thinking about our experiences trying to make sense of them instead of actually going in and feeling this.
In this instance though, your self-awareness has become a trap where you identify with this pain body person, you don't know who you would be without that. And I'm speaking from experience here. I used to be in this boat where I so identified with this version of myself who had a painful past and who had low self-worth and low self-esteem. And my pain body was front and centre in my existence, and I didn't know who I would be without that. And so a big part of my work is to support women to disconnect from this pain body, to disconnect from this blame victim outlook that we have in life. And the entry point for me into that is to work with our inner child. Your inner girl is the one who is experiencing that pain as if it is happening to her right now. She is the one that's trying to keep you safe and making her feel safe, letting her be the child instead of the adult so that she doesn't have to run the show anymore,
this is one of the ways that we reclaim our power. This is one of the most powerful ways that I know of that we can begin to break through this hold of having a low self-worth and having problems with your self-esteem. We invite our mature feminine to step in and to re-mother all parts of ourselves, including our little girl that we've banished into the dark and that we feel shame for, that we have disowned and that we deny. The next potential barrier when it comes to living a life that's more filled with pleasure is the relationship that you have with your body. So pleasure, first and foremost is experienced through the body. And so we have to be in our bodies in order to experience the pleasure. And if you don't have a good relationship with your body, if you don't feel safe in your body, or if there are parts of your body that you wish were different or that you reject, can you see that
that also makes it difficult to deepen into any kind of pleasurable experience. If you invest time and effort into your appearance, you will feel more empowered. If you feel fabulous, then you will act fabulous. And if you begin to heal the relationship that you have with these parts of you that you don't like these parts of you that you wish looked differently, if you change this negative self-talk that you have about your body, you'll find that you not only begin to change the relationship that you have with your body, but by extension, it also begins to change the relationship that you have with yourself. And there's a very small little practise that I can recommend to you to start doing now if you have a bit of a dodgy relationship with your body and that practise is to find one thing about your body that you like, one thing about your body that you love as it is now, not the body that you want to have, the one that weighs less or the one that has a different shape, but the body that you have as it is right now, find one thing to love there and devote yourself to loving that part of your body.
And as you continue to do this practise, as you deepen into it, what you will find is you are able to find more things that there is to rejoice. There's more things to love about yourself. And if you begin to love your own body, then other people will start to see your body as you see yourself. The world is a mirror, and what we get reflected back to us is a sign of what is inside of our inner world, what is going on in our inner world. So I'd love to share with you now some thoughts around how you can begin to cultivate a pleasureful life. And the first one is to begin to use your senses, right? Bring your senses online. I said earlier that our bodies is where we experience pleasure, right? And your senses are the most magnificent and free access that you can get to your own internal pleasure.
So we usually have one or two senses that we prefer. We tend to rely on these senses all the time, and we're leaving out some pleasure potentials when we do that. So the invitation here is to bring all of your senses online. If you use your senses, what you are actually doing is you are training your body to become more sensually alive. And these are really very simple things that I'm speaking about. So for example, for sight, look at things that you enjoy. Make sure that your surroundings are appealing to you. For sound, go into nature or listen to nature sounds on a playlist. Play some music if you live in a place where it's very noisy outside, I lived in the city for a few years and we always had sirens going up and down past the apartment, and it was horrible and distracting and it jarred my nerves. And I found that if I played soft music, then this impact of the sirens wouldn't be so big. Thinking about just the different textures. When we talk about touch, there are so many different textures that you can experiment with. You can touch hair or fur or pebbles. Something
else you can consider with touch is how does the fit of your clothes touch your body? Do you prefer things that are more soft and flowy, or do you prefer things that are a little bit more structured and tight? I always have this idea that flowy and soft works for me, but when I wear clothes that are soft and flowy, it feels like there's too much fabric around me and I actually get irritable. So I prefer to have clothes that are more fitted to my body and clothes that have more structure. So there's absolutely no right or wrong way to experience your senses. It's really about what gives you pleasure. When we talk about the sense of smell, when you eat before you just put the food in your mouth, take a breath first. First smell what it smells like. When you drink some tea or some coffee, first, inhale it and let the smell infuse your being before you take that sip. If you have unpleasant smells in your house, if your drain stinks, then get something to pour into the drain so that it doesn't smell anymore. If you can tolerate perfume or if you enjoy essential oils, then that's a beautiful way to activate your sense of smell. And you can even open your windows to let some fresh air in from outside. And then taste. So taste your food deliberately when you taste. Notice what it is that you are tasting. Notice where in your mouth on the front of your tongue or on the back of your tongue, where on your tastebuds are you actually tasting this? And all of these will activate your sensual aliveness. The second tip that I have for you is to begin to relax your nervous system.
When we spend so much time overthinking, planning, getting on with life, being busy, being distracted, avoiding our feelings, what happens is all our energy is pulled up here and there's not really much going on in our bodies. We don't really have access to what is in our bodies. And as our energy pools here, our nervous systems also get constricted. We have all of these internal conversations going on, and this puts our nervous system into fight or flight. So it's not only the busy world out there and the demands of your boss and the traffic and the noise that's putting your nervous system into fight or flight, but also the internal conversations that you have and the relationship that you have with yourself. And this is another big thing that we explore in my work, is healing that relationship with yourself also supports your nervous system to be more regulated.
Now, if your nervous system is totally tensed up and bunched up, there's no place for pleasure there. It's not even interested in having pleasure. And even if you tried, you won't have the capacity for pleasure. So pleasure is not accessible to us in this state. What you want to do is do things that can regulate your nervous system. Do things that can bring your nervous system down, that can increase and open your capacity to experience pleasure. And again, these can be really simple things that you do at home. It can be things like petting an animal or giving someone a hug or getting a massage or even getting into water. When we get into water, any body of water, it helps our nervous systems to relax. And being in nature is also a wonderful way to relax your nervous system. Number three is to welcome all of your feelings.
So we spoke about feelings a little bit in the previous section, and when we are habitually avoiding our feelings, because we are turning down the dial on our ability to experience any kind of feeling in our body, not only do we turn down the uncomfortable feelings, we also turn down the more pleasurable feelings. If we avoid these feelings, typically what happens is we flee out of our bodies, right? We go into our minds, we go and think about our experience instead of being in the experience. And so learning how to feel what is happening inside of you, learning how to feel, what your thoughts feel like, what your emotions feel like, what your energy feels like, getting all of the information that's available in your inner world provides you like a rich landscape to begin to cultivate a life that is infused with pleasure, that has pleasure running through it all the time.
We turn from simply being a simple melody to becoming a beautiful symphony when we allow ourselves to feel and express our fullest range. The fourth practise for bringing more pleasure into your life is to move for pleasure. Don't move for losing weight. If that's what you want, then that's a bonus. Don't move for getting fit, although that's also a bonus. But move for pleasure. Move your body in a way that feels good. And as I share this, I invite you just to check in with yourself when I suggested that you move for no other reason simply than experiencing pleasure, simply than devoting yourself to your pleasure. What conversation or little voice or thought came up for you around doing that? Did it sound exciting? Did it sound like something that you want to try out? Do you feel a longing or a yearning for that? Or did you
have a little voice that says, oh, what a waste of time? Why would you want to do that? So just have some self-awareness around what is your relationship towards pleasure in this way, to gifting yourself pleasure in this way? One of the practises that I teach all of my clients is how to move your body in a way that gives pleasure. But you can do that with any kind of daily rituals like going for a walk or stretching or even dancing. Dancing is a beautiful way to connect with your pleasure, and it is a way to connect with yourself. The next one that I want to share with you is to create coherency in your life. This is another way in which we can begin to introduce more pleasure and have more pleasure filled experiences. So declutter your home, declutter your relationships, declutter your diary.
Get rid of all of the things that are taking up unnecessary space. So use some discernment here. Don't burn your life down, but see, where can you create more space? Where can you create more harmony? Having a tidy sink and a tidy kitchen does wonders for your nervous system. I can promise you that. So what new actions can you do, what little tasks can you do in the evening before you go to bed to make sure that there is coherency in your life? What conversations do you need to have with the people in your life to bring in coherency to create the sense of ease in your nervous system? When there's incoherency, our nervous system goes into overwhelm and we go into fight, flight, or freeze. So we want to create this sense of space and coherency. Number six I think is the one that we are on now, and that is to surround yourself with things that bring you pleasure.
So these can be things like candles or scent. It definitely is something like clean spaces like we've just discussed in decluttering your space. You can bring pleasure into your every day by having pleasure breaks. And this is what I learned from one of my mentors. Set your watch if you have to, set and put an alarm on your phone every hour. Take a short little break, even if it's only two minutes or five minutes, to stretch, to breathe, to drop in your body, to wiggle your hips a little bit to go and stand in the sun, to walk with your bare feet over the grass. Gift yourself little moments of pleasure throughout your day. It's easy for us to get stuck in work mode. And once your awareness and your attention has been pulled into your mind to get all of the things done, it can be very challenging to get out of that state.
It's very seldom that we can automatically go from our mind space back into our body space. We have to do the practises. We need to learn how to switch our energy from our masculine thinking drive into our feminine feeling drive, and these practises that I've shared with you now, and doing something like pleasure breaks is going to do that for you. So you can go for a walk, you can take a power nap. You can read a chapter from a good book, you can put a song on and dance just for the length of a song. And just, if you are in your workplace now listening to this, wherever you are actually, take a look around you and see what can I shift or change? What can I do to make this space that I'm in more pleasant for me to be in, more enjoyable for me to be in?
We want to shift this uptight energy that we have from only being up here in our minds into a softer, more expansive energy. And then the next point is to slow down. I've forgotten what number we are on. So the next point is to slow down, to start doing things slower. Instead of rushing from work to yoga and then rushing to bed, stop multitasking. Start doing things in a slower way. There's a possibly good reason why we tend to be so frenetic, and we tend to always be so busy because when we slow down, we actually have time to feel what is going on inside of us. And of course, if you're not skilled in navigating through your feelings, if you're not skilled in learning how to be with whatever it is that you are feeling, without feeling or thinking that you need to change or fix that, of course when we begin to slow down, this is another challenge that we experience.
It's hard for us to slow down, but there's so much gold in learning to slow down in savouring the moments instead of always rushing to the next point. This is the work: feeling our feelings. This is how we connect to our feminine power. So a final practise that I will leave you with is to right now, as soon as it feels pleasurable for you to do so, take a pleasure inventory of your life. Look at all of the areas of your life from work to your relationships, to your wellbeing, to your self-care, your finances, and see where can you bring more pleasure into those areas of your life. Which parts of you in those areas are yearning for pleasure, they're thirsty for some pleasure, and then begin to take small little baby steps to bring and infuse more of this pleasure into your life. Your future self will thank you for it.