A New Twist on Pleasuring Ourselves!

Did I just write that title? Mea culpa. Mea culpa. Of course, I mean "A New Twist to Finding Pleasure in Ourselves."

So I have an important question for you. What if the way you felt about you, when you thought about you, felt just as good as when you were singing in the Big O? Oooooooh. Yesssss. Who wants that?

And what if, whaaaaat if...every time you thought of yourself you just felt really good? I mean realllly, reallly good.

Today I was reading How Pleasure Works, by Yale psychologist, Paul Bloom PhD. In this fairly dense book, Bloom suggests something quite curious: human beings are "essential-ists" i.e., much of what we find pleasure in is deeply affected by "what a person thinks about the true essence of what he or she is getting pleasure from." I'll share more about this in another post.

The thing he didn't seem to get to in this book is our tendency (or lack of it as is usually the case) to find pleasure in the true essence of ourselves. (I'm not speaking of you here, of course. I'm speaking of others having issues with letting it in;) That said, do you have any idea how reluctant most people are to explore their personal magnificence?

Beginning with The Great Weekend and continuing throughout many of our courses at World School as well as You4ia! and The Creator Network, we attempt to explore who we are in our "essence" i.e., as distinct from our "Mind Chatter."

Our belief is that our mind chatter or our anti-mind provides the opposite quality of thoughts that our "essential" mind does. And that our essence, our "Self," our "higher-self," our inner being, our innate intelligence, is continuously sending joy-producing thoughts our way until we slow our mind enough to let them in.

Are you open to letting it in? Really? Wanna know how? You likely already know this. If you said "yes," there are five simple steps that always work.

Step 1: ALLOW yourself to yearn/desire for self-adoration, like those who love you do. If you've got a lot of mind chatter about this, come to The Great Weekend and your inspiration will skyrocket for this.

Step 2: Intend to "live in the present moment" as much as possible and practice meditation on a regular basis to quiet your mind.

Step 3: Practice and develop habits of deliberate and proactive thoughts of gratitude for others. Why? This is important. Because when you practice conscious gratitude for others, your thoughts about you come into alignment with what you see in others. Gratitude practices include frequent authentic acknowledgment of others and writing lists of gratitude for those you care for. Again, we show you how to develop habits of conscious gratitude in TGW, MLC, You4ia! and The Creator Network.

Step 4: Do what you love. That's a world in and of itself. At World School we focus on this in our course: The Great Abundant Life.

Step 5: Create a deliberate co-creative gratitudinous community around yourself filled with others who practice gratitude. You4ia!, The Creator Network and The World School are great places to start.

And when you allow YOU to get out of the way enough to let in who you really are--your essential, caring, generous, grateful, brilliant, loving essence--then you become YOU more fully than you've ever been and the quality of EVERY TYPE OF PLEASURE YOU HAVE IN YOUR LIFE WILL MULTIPLY MANY, MANY FOLD. Your pleasure will become vastly deeper and wider because you have allowed yourself to dream the dream of BEING deeper and wider. Got it? Make sense? Are you open? Let your inner "yes" in. Just say it out loud. OOOOOOh YESSSS!

David Ross