Killer Pleasure

     I believe we need to reconnect to the simple pleasures in life. Health will flow when we connect to the simple and pleasant. Our constant push, push, push for more and more is stressing us into illness. Health flows from our inside relationship to life. Simple pleasures are built from who we are inside reaching out and participating with life around us. Illness comes from believing we are empty or insufficient inside and trying to grab life and stuff it into us to fill the void. This is not real and trying to do this makes us sick. We chase excess and excitement to cover our lack of two-way genuine relationship with life.

     Easter is an opportunity to let that unbalance go and meet life fresh and new. The illusion of “I am not enough” is cleansed and we can engage life as “My participation with life has value; I belong”. We can let go of the unhealthy pursuit of :

Killer Pleasure

     Once upon a time human beings had a very simple job to do to ensure survival – pursue pleasure and avoid pain. Life was clear and straightforward. Pleasurable activities helped not only you survive, but your entire species. Painful activities were not good for you and avoiding them served your best interests. This worked for many, many thousands of years. We roamed planet earth following the seasons scavenging for food wherever we could find it. We lived in family groups and small tribes because there simply was not enough food around to support a large group of people all foraging in the same locale.

     Sweet foods were ripe foods. Sweet foods were not poisonous. Meat was a sweet food that was highly prized both because of its scarcity and because it made you strong. Especially prized was the fat from the meat. Fat meant big calories that enabled you to survive the frequent times with no food. Sitting around and “chewing the fat” was the height of consideration when elders would meet. Offering to share a precious chunk of fat to a stranger was a way of showing honor and respect.

     Autumn fruit was greatly valued because it helped you store fat on your body just before the winter. People did just what bears do today before the winter – cram as much fruit and meat as you can find down your throat in the autumn so that you can survive the starvation of winter. As a forager you could not afford to save and carry food around with you, so you converted it to fat and stored it in your body. Nature taught us to find these foods to be highly pleasurable. Cramming every bit of food you can find into your mouth is likewise pleasurable, as you never knew when your next meal would happen. Pleasure is part of our survival response…or at least it was.

     Our pleasure response was created over 100,000 years of food scarcity. Suddenly a mere 10,000 years ago we discovered crude agriculture. Now instead of wandering and foraging, we committed to staying in one place and growing food. There is still not enough food to go around and most people are hungry most of the time as crops mature in the late summer and autumn. Not much around to eat the rest of the year so people invent the domestication of animals. This provides another source of food. By 5000 years ago – a tiny blip in time for the development of survival instincts and drives – some humans were growing enough food that often there was plenty to eat.

     Now we have a problem. Our whole instinctual pleasure response is designed for living in a food scarcity environment and now there is plenty. The very activities that have provided for our survival are now starting to kill us. Up to this point degenerative diseases were virtually unknown. People died from injuries, starvation, and elemental exposure. Infectious diseases were rare because people lived in small groups and moved all the time. Sanitation was not an issue. There were no cancers, no heart disease, no osteoporosis, no arthritis…none of that.

     As chronic disease rates climb to stratospheric levels, it is time to reassess our original operating rules for eating…pursue pleasure, pursue excess. It does not work in an environment of abundance. We are no longer desperate for food. Our biologically programmed hunger rules no longer apply. Overeating no longer aids our survival. Our belief that “getting enough” will make us ok is no longer true. That belief was built for a time when no one could ever “get enough”. The pursuit of “getting enough” has turned into the pursuit of excess and has become a national addiction. We need a better way.

     An analogy that may demonstrate this is breathing. If you were drowning in the ocean during a storm you would gulp for as deep a breath of air as you could possibly hold and not let it out for as long as possible because you could not be sure when your next chance at air would happen. The ocean waves keep dunking you under the water. You definitely would not feel ok as you are fighting for your life. Now imagine you are on land and trying to breathe the same way. You gulp deep breaths of air and don’t let it out until you have to. You would not feel ok because holding on to the air in your lungs would actually mean you are not going to get enough air. But because you don’t feel ok you are more convinced than ever that you must gulp air and hold on for dear life. But the truth is there is an abundance of air and you don’t need to be air greedy. When you don’t have enough air you feel you need to have all the air there is and you don’t let go. Entitlement and justification for your “right” to the air pop up as a natural response to your fear. But the whole belief on needing more and having to get enough is a lie…no matter how real it feels to you. You are creating your own scarcity by your acting out of your belief in scarcity.Relax and just breathe.

     My suggestion is that we shift focus from “getting more than enough” to feeling good. Feeling good was actually the whole point of “getting enough” in the first place. It was a means to feeling good. Skip the getting and go straight for the feeling. Feel your body – how does the food you are eating make your body feel?

     We can’t use pleasure or our hunger for more as our guide anymore. It doesn’t work for our modern times. Feeling good, strong, supple, energized, and at ease will give us health. Unfortunately these days food pleasure primarily creates slow pain, disease, and death.

     I know this is a painful truth. I don’t like it any more than you do. But not liking it doesn’t change it. The foods that give us the most intense pleasure are killing us. We are dying of pleasure excess. We need balance. We need to align with what is really happening and stop lying to ourselves that we can get it our way and not have to pay the price. It is time to tone down trying to fill ourselves up from the outside and instead focus into the center of our being for our good and at ease feelings.

     This is achievable. Shifting from pleasure excess to feeling good as our motivator can be done. Now that you are aware, start feeding your brain with all the ways excess is killing you. Make your excess no longer appealing and substitute feeling good as your desire. Your mind hates a vacuum so you must put feeling good in the place excess used to occupy in your brain. Center inwardly and find how you can participate with life to generate good feelings within you. Expand yourself. Try new things. Experiment. Enjoy!