How to Increase the Pleasure in Your Life
Donna Schilder, PCC Life & Business Coach
Increasing your skill in experiencing pleasure in life can enhance your romantic experiences, creating a stronger emotional and physical connection you feel with your partner.
What is pleasure? Pleasure is raw fleeting emotion that is brought on by social, environmental, and physical factors. We experience pleasure at happy social events such as parties, family dinners, and weddings. We experience pleasure through the environments of Yosemite, the beach, or sitting by the fire at home. Physical factors that bring on pleasure include tasty foods such as ice cream or cookies, a warm blanket, or a hug.
Pleasure is in the moment. We experience it through our senses: sight, sound, touch, taste, smell. Pleasure is a Van Gogh painting, the sound of the waves breaking on the beach, the fur of a soft kitten, the taste of chocolate or lavender’s scent drifting on the breeze.
The pitfall of pleasure is that it habituates easily. This means that if you imbibe in the same pleasure too much or too often, it has less positive impact on you. I like to use the example of chocolate. When you take the first bite of chocolate, you feel it melt in your mouth and you taste the bitter and the sweet. You may say, “hmmm.” In the subsequent bites, the taste has less impact on you.
It’s easy to get into habits that reduce our pleasure. We go to the same restaurant, eat the same thing, take the same route for our walk, listen to the same music, light the same scented candle.
You can avoid habituating pleasure by:
-Spreading out the instances of a specific type of pleasure
-Seeking a greater variety
-Savoring it
Putting thought into the different types of pleasurable activities you can experience will help you build more variety into your romantic time with your partner. Alternating pleasurable activities such as candle lit dinners at a new restaurant, walks along a different beach, snuggling up by the fire, walking in a beautiful garden, soaking in a warm tub, listening to soothing music, eating sweet Crème Brule, can all build romance and connection.
Learning to savor pleasure by creating a conscious focus and sharpening your perceptions can additionally enhance the romantic connection. Savoring requires attention to the present and to our senses. To savor your experience at the beach you would notice the breeze on your face, the warm sand under your toes, the sound of the waves crashing, the smell of the salt air, and the vastness of the blue sky. You can help your partner savor the pleasure by pointing out these delicious sensations or by asking them to consciously focus on their current environment. Talking about the pleasure with your partner will further enhance your intimacy.
Do you deserve a deeper, more visceral connection with your partner? If so, create variety and involve your senses to fully experience the pleasure that is all around us.
Donna Schilder, PCC, is a Professional Certified Coach whose clients experience amazing improvements in productivity, interpersonal skill development, leadership skill development, goal attainment, stress reduction, and work/life balance. You can learn more about her and her services at www.donnaschilder.com.