Pleasure

Flower essences that support the experience and reality of gratification, enjoyment and amusement

How much pleasure do you experience in your life? Is it stymied by your attitude about yourself, your relationships, or your work? Does it seem to be an elusive concept or a daily occurrence? What do you think is required to have pleasure?

Pleasure can come through the five senses, through sensual touch and sexual interaction. Pleasure can be the fulfillment of an intellectual challenge, an emotional interaction, or a spiritual experience.

Pleasure is an important part of living. It is derived from activities in which you allow yourself to let go of concerns and simply revel in joy. It is a feeling of happy satisfaction and enjoyment. It can come from carefree interaction with others or simply relaxing on your own.

The word pleasure is from an old French word that means “to please”. There is no doubt that when you experience pleasure you please yourself. Whether you create the situation in which you feel pleasure or it seems to just happen, your interior stance must be one of carefree receptivity.

One definition of pleasure is that it is enjoyment and entertainment, contrasted with things done out of necessity. Do you let yourself play? Can you let go of everything for periods of time and simply be silly? Or do you find yourself more often holding your nose to the grindstone, putting the need to get things done ahead of simply playing? Are you sometimes afraid of appearing silly or stupid to others and hold yourself in check?

Following is an exploration of a few desert flower essences that can help with positioning yourself to allow pleasure in your life.

Intending Pleasure

It requires an involvement of personal will to experience pleasure. Do you simply wait around, hoping that you will happen into a pleasurable situation? Are you hoping that someone will notice your desire for pleasure and fulfill it?

If you want pleasure to be a real part of your life, you must set your intention to experience it. Cliff Rose is the flower essence to use to do so. This flower essence helps you bring into manifestation the desire for experiencing pleasure through helping you define and remember your intention.

The Stance of Pleasure

There are a number of mental stances or emotional causes that keep us from allowing pleasure. An important part of experiencing pleasure is in allowing ourselves to receive it. Being vulnerable and allowing ourselves to simply receive can be terrifying. Yet it is impossible to really feel pleasure unless you are willing to receive its simple sensations, whether physical or emotional.

Spineless Prickly Pear Cactus can help you if you fear being vulnerable to receiving. Patterns that have kept you from feeling pleasure are probably ones that kept you alive at some earlier time in your life. Hardening yourself to certain things in life might have allowed you to feel safe. Changing these patterns once they are no longer helpful can feel terrifying. Spineless Prickly Pear Cactus can help you clear out the fear, terror, or other emotions that keep you from being able to receive pleasure.

We must allow ourselves to be vulnerable in our lives if we want to grow and evolve. It is only by allowing ourselves to be reshaped that we can move on to a new consciousness. Spineless Prickly Pear Cactus helps us be willing to be vulnerable because it supports us in finding a deep power within ourselves, the power of adaptability.

Pleasure vs. Necessity

The over-serious individual, who believes that she must keep her head to the grindstone, often has difficulty allowing herself to receive pleasure. White Desert Zinnia can pull you out of an overly serious approach to things and simply let go. It helps effect a shift in thinking that allows you to experience the play of life and not take things too seriously or events too personally.

Pleasure is contentment and there is no quicker path to contentment than a good laugh at yourself. When you need to lighten up and let go, this flower essence is the one to use.

Making Room for Physical Pleasure

One great inhibition to feeling physical pleasure is when there is an accumulation of old trauma in the cells of the body. Physical abuse, whether it is from sports injuries or someone’s intention act, causes a build-up of trauma that becomes locked into the cells of your body. This accumulation of trauma may tighten your cells in tension, making it difficult or even impossible to experience physical pleasure.

If you were physically abused at any time, there may be a conscious or unconscious association of physical touch with abuse.

Cellular Joy Formula gently releases the effects of trauma held in the cells of the body. Many people have remarked that it brings a feeling of lightness and “champagne bubble-like joy” at the cellular level. When the cells of the body are free from old trauma, your body loosens, and you can cultivate a new relationship to sensuality and experience pleasure through touch.

Sensual and Sexual Pleasure

Damiana is for those who need to establish, or re-establish, a relationship with physical touch and sensuality. Whether due to lacking physical touch when growing up or prolonged periods of aloneness, Damiana can help you open to the need and desire for physical touch. It supports you in discovering the pleasure and fulfillment that comes through the five senses.

It is wonderful for those who spend too much time in their heads, those who judge sensuality as bad or inessential. It is often an important stage in recovery from sexual abuse. It is excellent for those who have spent a great amount of time ungrounded and dissociated from their body.

Mutual Pleasure

Klein’s Pencil Cholla Cactus is for a different aspect of pleasure. This flower essence can help you clearly see what you need physically in an intimate relationship. It supports you in communicating your need to your partner so you can both revel in emotional and physical pleasure.

This flower essence also helps those who tend to focus on their own pleasure and disregard other’s sensual or sexual needs.

This essence is also excellent for resolving feelings of lust. When we focus on satiating our passions for the sake of our own satisfaction alone, Klein’s Pencil Cholla Cactus can awaken our consciousness to the feelings of another.

Feeling Pleasure Regardless of the Reason

Sometimes the reason we experience great pleasure from something is a bit of a mystery. Our associations with somethings often can stem from past lives or from our soul purpose from this lifetime. It doesn’t really matter why we take great pleasure from something, only that we allow ourselves to do so.

The Water Element Formula, from our Plants & Planets set of flower essences, is excellent for helping you have great appreciation for what causes you pleasure, whether or not you understand why that particular action brings pleasure.

Your pleasure may stem from a feeling that is collective in nature, such as the joy that arises from being able to serve unconditionally. Or, you may feel great pleasure from doing something that relates to something that caused you great pleasure in a past life.

The Water Element is excellent to use to help you uncover what causes you pleasure, regardless of the reason. The element of water relates to your ability to experience the world through your feeling nature, so it can be supportive for all issues related to allowing yourself to fully feel pleasure.

Selecting the Most Appropriate Flower Essences

Not every flower essence mentioned above will be appropriate for every person’s specific needs. Usually, careful self-examination can clearly show you which of the above flower essences are most appropriate for your particular needs.

Though you can use more than one flower essence together, you probably will not need to use all of the ones mentioned here. After contemplating your relationship to this issue, select the flower essences that apply for you, or use an intuitive method to select among them. (For more information on how to do this, see The Art & Technique of Using Flower Essences.) A general guideline is to use four drops at a time, four times a day, in water. However, it is fine to follow your intuition and use them as often as you like. Most people find that they tend to use them more often in the beginning and less often towards the end of the cycle. Unless otherwise indicated, a cycle is usually two to four weeks. [more]

For information on how to clearly evaluate the effects of the essences you have used, see The Art & Technique of Using Flower Essences.

List of the Flower Essences Mentioned in this Article

Cellular Joy Formula

clears out the effects of trauma on a cellular level so that you can develop an unhindered relationship with pleasure; releases associations of abuse with the physical senses

Cliff Rose

for remembering to set your intention to experience pleasure

Damiana

out of touch with, or dissociated from, your sensual and or sexual needs

Klein's Pencil Cholla Cactus

for focusing solely on your own pleasure in a sexual relationship instead of caring about your partner’s pleasure

Spineless Prickly Pear Cactus

for the fear of vulnerability and receiving pleasure

Water Element Formula

an inability to understand why something causes you pleasure keeps you from fully experiencing it

White Desert Zinnia

for those who identify with struggle and limitation and do not allow themselves to experience the pleasure that comes through play