"Slow Pleasure" in a Fast World

Pleasure as a dial, not a switch

“What are some sensations that feel pleasurable to you?” My somatic therapist asked.

“I… I don’t know.”

This question was posed to me early on in my somatic journey last summer. The question (and my own answer) both hit me over the head. I realized how very little I have been able to focus on pleasurable sensations throughout my life. For a long time, I thought any moment where I didn’t feel, or was at least not hyper-focused on what I was feeling, was pleasurable. I am all too aware of sensations that feel “bad” or “negative” or “uncomfortable.” I can recognize and list those off immediately. Pleasurable sensations, though? I had to sit with that and think about it.

I finally came up with some:

• being in my bed with my heating pad on my belly and my oscillating fan blowing cool air on me

• touching ice, snow, or anything cold

• drinking water

• laughing with loved ones

• sex (when I can actually be present)

Recently I was gifted the book, Slow Pleasure: Explore Your Pleasure Spectrum by Euphemia Russell. Reading this in conjunction with my personal journey in somatic therapy has been incredibly beneficial. If you are, like me, someone who also struggles with identifying and feeling pleasure, then you may want to pick up this book.

Russell discusses pleasure as a dial, not a switch, writing:

I prefer to move away from seeing our pleasure as a switch, and instead think about it as a pleasure dial… The pleasure dial is a reminder of the vast spectrum of options and choices for pleasure that we can feel in each moment when we remember to slow down and check in with ourselves. Your pleasure dial is your reminder of how to tap into your pleasure.

In somatics, and in any type of healing from trauma, pace and accessibility are incredibly important. Trauma is something that typically happens too fast, too much, and too soon. It’s overwhelming to the nervous system. The antidote to this is slowing down; it’s reclaiming your ability to decide the speed and amount of how much of something you take in. Thus, reframing pleasure as a dial instead of a switch, as Russell has done in their book, is brilliant. The dial imagery allows a person to feel into their own unique edge; knowing full well that they can turn the dial up or down at any time they choose.

Russell believes we’re currently experiencing a “crisis of pace.” Slowing down is rarely an option we give ourselves, nor is it an option our white supremacist society gives us. With the onset of hustle culture, productivity overload, and corporate busyness and greed, we have no sense of pacing—or rather, we only have a sense of “fast” pacing.

In a world where everything is considered “urgent,” how do we rebuke this and slow the fuck down? Russell writes:

Slow pleasure is the lifelong cycle of building our embodied awareness, practicing and prioritising pleasure, and then deepening the experience by savouring the moment. It’s stopping, even for a brief moment, to listen to yourself and your body, your sensations and senses. It’s feeling the world slowing down, even for a brief moment, to tend to your needs and desires.

It’s unfortunate that we are in the phase of late stage capitalism where tending to our own needs and desires is a radical idea. The ability to slow down is sometimes discussed as a privilege. This might be true in some ways. However, I do think we all have access (on most days) to stop and take at least one big inhale and exhale. That alone may not feel like a lot, but it’s a starting point to pacing our lives and allowing some pleasure in.

Often we may think of pleasure as sexual and it certainly can be, but it’s also not the only thing. Sex may not be pleasurable for some people for a variety of reasons. Pleasure can exist in so many spaces and sensations. Broadening our idea of pleasure can only help us. We can find pleasure in a multitude of ways. Colors can give us the sensation of pleasure, so can food or moving our body.

As part of a “pleasure practice,” Russell writes:

Ask yourself: what can I do to tend to my body, or a particular body part, right now? How could I bring more pleasure, ease or comfort into this area of my body right now?”

I started doing a similar practice in my somatic therapy sessions. It incorporates techniques from Somatic Experiencing such as titration (slowing things down) and pendulation (shifting between body sensations that feel uncomfortable and those that feel neutral—or even pleasurable). Russell says, “These small doses can make it easier to inhabit your body.” For me, this looks like focusing on the sensations I feel in my in my fingertips, for example, because that sensation feels neutral to me. For someone else, focusing on that particular sensation could be difficult, so they might want to focus on a body part that feels less activating. Russell’s book incorporates many different somatic exercises that any reader can do to gently play with their sensations of pleasure.

As someone who often doesn’t feel safe in their brain nor their body, I have to utilize an external focus to give myself a reprieve sometimes. I have too much interoception happening and need to instead focus on exteroception. I work with this by pendulating between the internal and external, slowly, and maybe only staying internal for 1-5 seconds. It’s an ongoing practice.

The goal, like with most things, is not a destination or mastery. The goal is integration; to tap into a felt-sense of pleasure in your day-to-day life.

Dear Reader, where do you feel a pleasurable (or neutral) sensation in your body right now?

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