"Pleasure Heals"

Well, yes it does. And no, it doesn’t.

I hear that slogan tossed around, along with the self-descriptor “pleasure activist.”

Both phrases almost invariably leave me skeptical. Not because healing doesn’t sometimes come through pleasure, but because what brings the healing is lot more complicated and subtle than an experience of feeling good, or great, or even mind-blowingly amazing.

It’s healing to be seen for who you are, honored for who you are, loved and encouraged to be who you are. It’s healing when someone witnesses your longings without judgment. It’s healing to be in the presence of someone who rejoices in the pleasure you’re feeling. It’s healing  when you feel the freedom to rejoice in your own pleasure without self-judgment or self-doubt.  

All this can come with great pleasure. But what heals us is the experience of being held in safety and love. What heals us is being reminded that we live in a web of relations. We need healing in the first place because we fall into believing that we’re alone, that we are only for ourselves, that our lives are not sustained by something bigger in which we live and move and have our being. We need healing because our love and compassion for ourselves has been blocked.

So pleasure, to borrow a Zen phrase, is a finger pointing at the moon. If we get hooked on looking at the finger instead of the moon, we’re missing the main event. If we imagine that pleasure can fix us while we go on feeling profoundly disconnected from others, while we still can’t love ourselves, while we go on believing we’re on our own, then we’re putting the cart before the horse. If pleasure becomes the thing we’re always chasing for its own sake, instead of welcoming it when it comes and accepting its passing as also part of the inevitable cycle of things, then it becomes part of our entrapment rather than a gift of our liberation.