You are wired for pleasure. You’re energetically designed to desire it.
Your chakra 2 seeks out those things you find beautiful and desirable and drives you to passionately pursue them. It’s part of your ‘earthly journey.’
However the ‘sweet’ in pleasure can quickly turn into a ‘sting’ if we’re not careful.
Without pleasure our lives are a perpetual white-washed grey, dull and repetitious. We don’t desire change, and we don’t feel alive. Our creativity has died and left us in the shadows.
With too much pleasure though, we lose ourselves in a hedonistic pursuit of instant gratification.
For a while, the ecstasies of the ‘high’ carry us through the ‘low.’ We experience a climax, a flooding, an explosion of our creativity that feels like re-birth, and the spiritual discovery of self, but really, we’ve become attached to ‘other things and substances’ to light our fires, and after too many crashes, we come to know that pleasure has its price – addiction.
For me it’s akin to eating ice cream: that one scoop of caramel-toffee has become ten. The initial savouring of it’s exquisiteness has turned into addictive binge-feeding, and it’s sitting fat, rancid and rotting in my gut.
Pleasure is a two-edged sword, and we must be mindful to treat it carefully. But did you know that many addictions are created through our rejection of desiring pleasure?
Rejecting what we innately desire creates an internal schism. It creates a ‘good-bad’ paradox within us.
Most of us are conditioned to believe that it is sinful to want what we desire, and because of this, we get trapped in a pleasure-addiction-cycle. We are eating our caramel-toffee ice cream with large serves of guilt and shame.
The most destructive emotion is self-hate, and self-hate’s counterparts are shame and guilt.
We all know the pain of our well-kept secrets, that ‘inner ache’ about the things we deny doing or thinking about: eating sweets, being jealous, rage at our friends successes, wanting to seduce our brother-in-law, masturbation, our sexual preferences, expressing our true opinions.
The reason we get trapped in the world of addictions is not only because the external stuff seems to fill the internal gap, it’s also because addictions thrive on our shame and the way we ‘guilt trip’ ourselves.
The most delicious meal you can serve up for your ego would be self-hate. It loves your self-hate. It thrives on it. It wants you to hate yourself so that it can survive through you and exist!
No, the ego isn’t the villain but it is the dark side of your soul. It is your inner tormentor and persecutor.
If you want to stop doing those things that make you feel bad, stop judging them as bad. Stop shaming yourself and others, and step out of the guilt cycle. You can release yourself from the power of addictions by being kind and refusing to allow self-hate to spin you into its ugly web.
It isn’t sinful to desire pleasure. It is normal and natural and enables you to have a life of beauty and wonder. It only becomes a sin when your ego attaches itself to pleasure, extracting ‘you’ from the bliss of your real self and perpetuating self-hate.
The key to life is enjoying its riches without needing its richness to make you feel rich.
When you feel aligned, are whole and ‘rich’ within you, the entire world becomes a palace of plenty.
You don’t need anything anymore. You’ve made it.
in White Light + Love,
Belinda
Dear Belinda,
I didn’t know in advance what you would be writing about this week (my “inspiration” was that you would be writing about the White Light — totally missed it!), but I must confess I loved this article, it gives me relief and it’s so “humane”. Addiction, shame and guilty create a vicious circle of endless suffering. It’s great to know that we can heal it and have a life of freedom, right now.
Much love to you.
Working through my 2nd chakra this past week has given me such an opportunity to completely accept the pleasures my soul – and BODY! – crave!
Indeed, it is that awareness of the richness already within that has kept me from the brink of addiction and allowed me to play with the gentler side of pleasure without “losing myself” to it.
Thank you for these beautiful reminders, always intuitively inspired, and always exactly what I need to hear on my path.
Beautiful!
You are an inspirational writer. Great piece, struck a cord with me.
This subject (and side-subjects) was and is the concentration of my thoughts from last week and many therapy sessions. Good or bad. Right or wrong. True or false. Heaven or hell. Yes or no. Who are we to judge that or put yourself in the judgment cycle or worse, to think these thoughts of others.
Thank you for connecting with my spiritual side and helping me. Desire is not the work of the devil or is dirty and I will not be damned for desiring things in life. Even though I love mysterious, alternative and devilish things, I am not a sinner or a bad person. But I do desire the positive things life can give, with a hint of self-deprecation to make it funny. However, this is all my thought process and for so long, no one could or wanted to or cared to understand me so I stood proud and silent to prevent trouble. This only caused me to be oppressed, suppressed and depressed as a youth into adulthood. I don’t think life needs to be that serious and I don’t allow others thoughts, guilt, shame, ego, judgment, beliefs, hate or anger to always penetrate my life. I just say or think, ‘thank you for being so thoughtful but I don’t want your gift. I would rather desire pleasure in all its abundant forms.’
So thank you again for putting so eloquently what I wish for human kind. If not for everyone, then for the few of us seeking, searching, learning and teaching… alternatives.
Much love and light,
TR
Love this post! & needed it! You seem to know where I’m at on my spiritual journey. I recovered from drug addiction by complete abstinance (which was necessary). But as so many do, I found myself in the same cycle using other people or things outside myself to change the way I feel – to make me feel better, because I had so much shame and guilt. Now I see it more clearly: the more I resist a natural desire, the more I over-indulge when I finally give in; then the more I beat myself up and the worse I feel, which leads me back to needing something to make me feel better even more than in the first place. I am learning to love myself. You have given me another key to give myself permission to desire and enjoy my desires. I can already feel the tight grip of the resistance cycle lifting. Thank you.
Exactly. Pleasure is not wrong but our religion/culture/society have turned pleasure into an evil.