Spiritual Growth: Pleasure vs. Pain

"This, then, is the human problem: there is a price to be paid for every increase in consciousness. We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain."

- Alan Watts

As human beings, we are hard-wired to seek pleasure and avoid pain. From a basic survival point of view, this makes sense; our ancestors needed to seek comfort and avoid threats in order to survive. From a spiritual point of view, however, seeking (unhealthy) pleasure and avoiding pain can actually stifle our growth. In order to grow spiritually, we need to understand healthy vs. unhealthy pleasure, and the healthy embracing of pain as part of the human experience.

Pleasure

The kind of pleasure that is healthy vs. unhealthy will vary greatly from person to person.

Eating an ice cream cone on a hot summer day is extremely pleasureful. The contrasting temperatures and flavors and the silky sweetness are oh-so delightful. For someone who doesn't overindulge in sugar, eating ice cream can be a healthy dose of pleasure and reward. For someone with a sugar addiction, perhaps not so much. 

Treating yourself to an extravagant pair of new shoes as celebration for a promotion or for a very special occasion can be an act of self-love. Purchasing pricey new shoes when you're living paycheck to paycheck, are drowning in debt, or are using shopping to cope with stress---not so much.

Reveling in an orgasm during sex can make you come alive, awaken your senses, and connect you deeper in intimacy with your partner. Experiencing orgasm through unprotected sex with strangers, during a one-night stand that leaves you feeling dirty, or with a partner who otherwise makes you feel like shit---perhaps not so much.

You get the idea. 

To share a bit of my personal journey, I have always struggled with sugar addiction, for as long as I can remember. I have used sweets as a way to numb uncomfortable feelings, avoid boredom, or to feel more alive instead of actually engaging in healthy activities that involve risk and would require me to put myself out there in the world. After 20+ years of struggling and failing to self-moderate, after extreme periods of binging and restriction, weight fluctations and intense feelings of shame, I've made the personal decision to quit dessert for good. I am finally able to recognize that sweets are not something I have control over, and it's better for my physical and mental health to cut them out entirely. Dessert now joins alcohol on my list of "can't haves". Alcohol is the first thing I gave up, and I've been sober for 3 years now.

When it comes to habits where we lack self-control, or that cause us to spiral out of control, sometimes abstinence is only way.

Signs you are seeking pleasure in unhealthy ways:

• You lack self-control

• You are addicted

• You feel ashamed or guilty afterwards

• You are using the pleasure to avoid or run from something

• You are using the pleasure to numb your feelings

• The pleasure you are seeking negatively affects your bank account and puts you in a finacially stressful situation

• Your habit leads to extreme unhealthy weight gain or weight loss and creates risks to your health 

• Your habit negatively impacts your relationships and the people around you

• Your behavior or habit exposes you to diseases

• You seek pleasure in order to self-harm

• Your habit affects your confidence and/or causes you to lose self-respect

This kind of pleasure can leave us feeling hollow inside. Or, more likely, we are using pleasure to avoid feeling hollow, but it only ever works temporarily, and often leaves us feeling even emptier. On the worst-case end of the spectrum, our pleasure habit can cost us our health, our financial security, our relationships, even our life.

If we want to evolve spiritually, we have to become aware of the blocks to our growth, and take steps to heal or remove them.

Through my own experience, these are the steps I have found to be helpful in overcoming toxic pleasure-seeking: 

1. Acceptance and acknowledgement. Addiction and bad habits thrive in denial and darkness. Acceptance is the first step to overcoming them. Recognize that your habit is causing you harm, and take full ownership.

2. Mindful awareness. Witness the behavior from a place of nonjudgment. Pay attention to the patterns, the triggers, and study your habit from a place of curiosity. Take notes, keep a log, or journal about it. 

3. Love and compassion. Beating yourself up over your habit will only cause you to spiral further into shame and self-loathing. We all struggle and make mistakes. Chances are, your pleasure habit has roots that go much deeper than you may be aware of. It does not matter what you did, are currently doing, or will do---you are still worthy and deserving of love and care.

4. Be committed to getting better. Healing rarely happens in isolation. Seek help, do research, find healing practitioners to assist you if needed. Once you've made a commitment to changing, tell someone. Make it public. This will give you accountability and will make it harder to back out. Notice how I announced my decision to quit dessert in this article? I did that publicly for a reason. When I decided to give up alcohol back in 2018, I made a post about it on social media. I still had a few slips, and didn't manage to fully quit drinking until 2021, but making it public meant I made a promise to get better. You don't have to go that public if you don't feel comfortable, but tell someone that loves you, or better yet, a few people.

5. Be patient. Progress and recovery are rarely ever linear, and they don't happen overnight. Forgive yourself for any slips, but stay determined to get better.


What healthy pleasure looks like:

• Feeling alive, without negative consequences

• Promotes healthy stress-relief, relaxation, and calms the mind

• Self-care that leads to feelings of wellbeing and self-respect

• Engaging in creative activities

• Feeling more connected to the people around you in ways that feel healthy

• Taking time to appreciate the small joys in life

• Being able to exert self-control and moderation

• Appreciating beauty

• Reveling in and being fully present with your five senses: sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch (enjoying beautiful music, a soft blanket, the flavors of a ripe strawberry, the bright colors of a painting, etc.)

This kind of pleasure is balanced, and results in feelings of greater peace, wellbeing, connectedness, and vitality.

We usually indulge in unhealthy pleasure when we are in pain. Numbing pain can negatively affect your ability to feel love, joy, and happiness, and it can stunt your growth. 

That said, let's move on to talk about why feeling our pain is important if we want to experience true pleasure and love...

Pain

The antidote for pain often resides within the pain itself.

I will share a personal story of pain. I mentioned above that I struggled with sugar addiction and alcoholism in the past as a way of coping with negative feelings. To share a bit of my personal astrology, I have my Moon conjunct Pluto in Scorpio. Needless to say, when I feel, I feel deeply and intensely, and it can be extremely overwhelming at times. Sugar and alcohol were my coping mechanisms.

Flash back to when I was married to my now ex-husband. We had recently moved to Dallas for his job, and I was thousands of miles away from family, had no job in place yet, and had spent my entire savings to help finance the move (oh, the joys of being young and naive). Quickly after we arrived, our marriage fell apart. It was clear then that we had moved in order to save a marriage that couldn't be saved. 

I was devastated.

My entire future collapsed in front of my eyes. More than that, I felt like a complete idiot, like I couldn't trust my own heart, and that maybe I had no idea what love really is. 

That was when my sugar and alcohol habits were at their worst. That was a dark time, and I came close to the edge of taking my own life. Very very close. 

Fortunately, God always surrounds in our darkest times. There is always a blessing somewhere if you look for it. Shortly after arriving in Dallas, I got a job working in a dog boarding facility. BEST JOB EVER. I got paid to play with dogs all day. The best job I ever had was during my darkest moment.

During one of my evening shifts, I was sitting in the dark next to my favorite dog, a husky named Kaia. I was petting her while listening to music on my headphones, trying to ease the pain and helplessness I was feeling over the disintegration of my marriage.

Then something magical happened that I will never forget. The song "Both Sides Now" by Joni Mitchell came on. Now I had heard that song before and thought it was decent, but I was never a fan of Joni, or any of the "melancholy female sirens" as I would have called them. Punk rock, classic rock and motown were my genres. But then I heard these lyrics:

"I've looked at love from both sides now
From give and take and still somehow
It's love's illusions that I recall
I really don't know love
Really don't know love at all"

And in that moment, my chest cracked wide open and the tears flowed. Where my heart had previously resided within a small cave, now a huge canyon opened up. The music was more beautiful than anything I ever heard, the melodies more profound, the words struck a deeper chord. And that's when I realized: my pain had expanded me, opened up a greater depth of feeling, and I heard that song with new ears, as if for the first time. I knew then that I had unlocked a whole new palette of colors that didn't previously exist in my reality.

Now I can say I'm a big fan of Joni Mitchell. I appreciate the female singers who share their deepest emotions through music, it is an emotional maturity and catharsis that I can fully appreciate. 

That is the reward of feeling our pain fully. In doing so, we learn how to feel and experience everything more fully. Life becomes richer. Art becomes more breathtaking. The small joys have even greater power to brighten our day and bring us happiness. And yes, the heartbreak feels deeper too. But I learned that day, that by turning towards my pain, I became stronger, and I learned to value the whole spectrum that is this human existence.

Every emotion is our teacher. We incarnated on this planet, as human beings, for a reason: to experience this life fully, with all its storms and rainbows. 

Allow your pain to open you up and soften you. Each time you do, you'll unlock new colors, new melodies, new capacities for love.