Yoga + Pleasure

If this looks like it feels amazing…

That's probably because it does.

It feels amazing to be alive in my body.

So often healthy habits are framed with a future motivation:

So you’ll lose weight

So you’ll be able to move well into old age.

So you’ll be able to live “pain free”

But I don’t think fear of the future is a good or sustainable motivation. Move your body to feel better right now. Doing healthy things isn’t just about avoiding future suffering, it’s about building your capacity for pleasure now. It’s possible to not just “live pain free” but to feel amazing living in your body. Move to build your capacity for sensation. Expand the spectrum of your human experience.

Yoga broadens your awareness, develops your consciousness, expands your being, widens your scope of experience. This happens within every layer of your being, therefore it will also boost your capacity for pleasure.

Of course this is a double edged sword because this also increases your capacity for pain. Often in yoga, we put ourselves in positions that are extremely uncomfortable. But when you are able to learn to find pleasure in the pain, the binary dissolves into bliss. Ultimately it’s not really about avoiding one thing (pain) and craving another (pleasure), it’s about expanding your overall range of perceptivity so that you can see beyond the binary. Rather than being consumed by the experience of pain, you can be fascinated by the complexity of all the nuances of sensation.

I’ve always found focusing on the benefits of what I’ve received in a practice to be far more motivating than sheer discipline or fear. You can also even magnify your capacity to receive benefits by focusing on them, and even imagining the benefits you could receive some day can actually create that result if you practice this repeatedly over time.

It’s possible to fall in love with the feeling of health. It doesn’t develop for a lot of people because they’re not trained to pay attention to it. It takes purposeful effort to train your attention. You don’t get it freely. There’s a lot of nuance to unpack here and this journey will look radically different for everyone. There is no doubt that some people come into this world with the privilege of health and others with significant physical challenges. Or something external can occur that robs you of the health that you might have had.

However, no matter what you’re starting with, no matter what’s happened to you, it’s not only possible, but also inevitable that you will feel different than you do right now. No matter who you are or what the condition of your health is, it’s possible to train your awareness. It’s possible to get curious about sensation. It’s possible to feel more.

By Aleena Glinski