The Weave of Health and Pleasure.
What does it mean to be healthy? So often, the rhetoric of health is liberally peppered with classist, ableist, ageist, racist and phobic rhetoric that creates narrow windows of acceptable selfhoods. Often the bodies who don’t experience themselves as fitting into these windows are left with an individualized burden of shame and blame, which nourishes a destructive feedback loop of depression, anxiety, and wash of damaging chemicals that are anything but ‘healthy’.
We all live with the burden of body shame and health shame to some degree or another, and, instead of continuing to deepen the neural groove of expectation that each person can access perfect bodies with enough grit, diets, and plastic surgery, perhaps it is time to dream into new cultures. Making manifest explorations of what orienting to health would feel like if it were an opportunity to orient to pleasurable and nourishing experiences.
Perhaps this means inventing new language to speak to cellular and cosmic wellness. Perhaps this new idea of health holds in it that wellness is far beyond an individual project - the wellness of our communities and planet is also held in the arms in this new culture. Perhaps this new idea of health holds that anti-racist activism, gender expansion, and economic justice work is part of what it means to prioritize wellness. Perhaps this new idea underscores that the health and movement of our food systems is as important as the health and movement of our bowels. And, that in both instances, focusing on cellular wellbeing and nutritional density are a key component to surviving and thriving.
Perhaps this means creating art, porn, films, poetry, music, and children’s books with people in them like ourselves. Where we honour ourselves as beautiful and worthy of celebration as the expansive and perfectly imperfect beings that we are. Weaving empathy, compassion, common humanity, and kindness into our storytelling is an act of magic and manifestation in defiance of the shame and blame saturated in current media content of health and bodies.
Perhaps this means mapping out a diet of pleasure. Diet comes from the Greek word diaita, meaning ‘manner of living’. If our current model of diet, health, and body care is rooted from a place of self-denial and shame, that’s no ‘manner of living’ that is going to result in a life worth living. Instead we might ask ourselves “what are the seeds of joy within my pleasures?” “What is the true pleasure within this pleasure?” Through this we might learn more about what our diet of pleasure would entail. An attachment to high risk behaviours might indicate a seed of desire to cultivate extraordinary experiences. A love of sweet foods might indicate a seed of desire for the sweetness of life. Porn addiction might indicate a desire for transcendent ecstasy.
In this new culture idea of orienting to health as choosing pleasurable and nourishing experiences, perhaps we can hold the dynamic and tension of sometimes choosing ‘maladaptive’ or ‘harming’ pleasures, and that there is no ‘bad’ in that. And, with a steady and curious gaze, plus a willingness to deepen into the ‘whys’ with curiosity, we might find our way into deeper states of pleasure, with greater clarity about a new culture ‘healthy’ that is exciting, blissful, interdependent, and complexified.
With thanks to Caffyn Jesse’s The Science of Sexual Happiness.