Blissfulness
When you were a kid you had a sense that life was an adventure, that you were an explorer, discovering, learning and searching for more of the deliciousness of life.
As babies, we are pleasure seeking creatures, looking to enjoy the bliss of a warm milky embrace, or losing ourselves in the exquisiteness of high pile carpet or playing with food.
In some way you could say that we are wired for bliss, that we are bliss seeking souls, pleasure seeking animals because deep within us, that is our very deepest sense of being.
It could be it’s an evolutionary trick, that all creatures, all life seeks to avoid pain and increase pleasure. Freud penned the ‘Pleasure Principle’ to attempt to describe our core animal need for pleasure as need for sexual fulfillment.
But pleasure isn’t limited to mere sexual gratification, because we as Human Beings can get and experience genuine, deep pleasure and life satisfaction from an almost endless verity of sources.
Not only is our brain wired for pleasure and bliss but our entire body seems to be hardwired for it. Dr Bruce Lipton in his book ‘The Biology of Belief’ explains that almost every cell in a Human body has receptors for opiates (feel good drugs), even though there seems to be no need or evolutionary need for them to be there.
However, as we grow older, we are socially programmed to delay our gratification, we learn that we have to act like boring adults, to ‘grow up and stop enjoying ourselves too much’, and that’s a real shame and potentially one of the main reasons why adults are almost all mildly depressed.
You see, as children we get pleasure for loads of different places, we’re interested in everything, we’re fascinated by how everything works and how we can enjoy it by jumping on or off things, or sticking our fingers in to stuff or challenging our bodies to do fun things they’ve not experienced before.
But as adults, we have three or perhaps four things we get genuine pleasure from, and they usually are:
- Primary Relationship
- Job
- Vice of some shape
That’s because our predominantly Christian Western Culture has made all pleasures a Taboo.
We have collectively embraced ‘Delayed Gratification’, and we live in the misery of a job we at best tolerate during the week, because we’re looking forwards to the weekend. We punish ourselves, getting up in the dark, commuting in the rain and freezing cold, remind ourselves that we’ve booked a holiday somewhere warm in a couple of months.
We self-medicate by getting drunk at any opportunity, watching mindless TV, trivia and titillation, buying things we really don’t need, because deep down we’re dying of quiet desperation. And as a culture we’re miserable because we’ve stopped all of those thousands of avenues of pleasure coming into our lives and flooding our brains with endorphins.
To combat this slippery road to hell, well-meaning New Age therapists, the mildly Buddhist inclined yoga mat carrying, meditation explorers, invented the new cult of ‘Mindfulness’, as a new way to sell their merchandise and help liberate the corporate types imprisoned by suits and constrained by having too much money.
But Mindfulness is a trap, which re-enforces the Western world-veiw and keeps almost everyone stuck in their heads and detached from really enjoying and rediscovering the Blissfulness of being in our body.
Most Human Beings have Five Senses and with a little bit of attention, fun and desire, each of our five senses can become a channel of genuine Blissful, almost orgasmic pleasure.
The Five Senses Exercise takes Mindfulness to the next level!
Each day of your working week, focus your attention on one of your Five Senses.
Monday could be Sight, Tuesday could be Sound, Wednesday Touch, Thursday Smell and Friday could be Taste.
Give yourself permission to really enjoy that one sense. Schedule at least 20 mins of your day to enjoying that sense, where you don’t do anything else, (try to block out your other senses).
You might want to listen to your favorite album, try a new food, touch plush upholstery, watch a beautiful sunset, rip oregano under your nose.
As you get used to allowing yourself to enjoy getting new pleasures from your senses, let yourself get into it deeper, give yourself permission to really get excited and lose yourself in the sensory experience.
And it’s at this juncture of fun and pleasure, just beyond mindfulness that you’ll learn to experience Blissfulness.
Eventually with practice you’ll become a fully integrated childlike spiritual hedonist, a genuine blissful lover of life. You’ll be a little kid in an adult body, jumping to experience everything life has to offer.
You’ll realize that life is here for you, that blissful pleasure is your souls’ true nature, that the very substance of the Universe is love and bliss because you can taste it, you can feel it in every cell of your body.
