October 30, 2025
Article highlights:
- Born to enjoy
- Pleasure = deep nourishment
- The body’s quiet yes
We are built for pleasure. Our bodies come equipped with pleasure centers and pleasure receptors. We are wired to feel good — to register delight, satisfaction, ease, even ecstasy. It’s an elegant design, really, this capacity to experience pleasure and to have it ripple through our whole being.
Yet pleasure has long carried a questionable reputation. Food can slip into gluttony, touch can turn to excess, desire can morph into addiction. The problems of pleasure have often overshadowed its gifts. Religion, East and West alike, has treated it warily: in the West, sex became permissible only for procreation; in the East, desire itself was viewed as a tether to the material world — something to transcend. Across cultures, restraint was praised, and pleasure quietly demoted to the realm of the suspicious.
Still, pleasure-seeking persists unabated. Despite centuries of denial, it remains irresistible — woven into every human longing. In our lives we pursue it in our relationships, our food, entertainment, substances, our over consumption. It’s as if the more we’ve tried to suppress it, the more determined it has become to express itself.
Could it be that pleasure simply will not be denied? Is not meant to be? That it is a vital part of our design? Perhaps we are born not merely to avoid pain, but to satisfy pleasure.
That notion might sound indulgent, even radical, yet stay with it a moment. What is pleasure, really? Not this or that indulgence — not the chocolate or the champagne or even the lover’s kiss — but the feeling itself. That unmistakable wave of warmth, of opening, of “ahhh.” The inner sigh of contentment.
Science tells us that pleasure releases beneficial neurochemicals — dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin — the body’s own elixirs of connection and well-being. But even without the science, we know it. The feeling that accompanies pleasure softens the nervous system. It opens the heart. It nourishes our humanity. Pleasure may be not only helpful but essential to our best mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual function.
If that’s true, then we are not suffering from an excess of pleasure, but a deficit of it. I suggest that we are starving for small, honest moments of delight. Pleasure is embedded in joy, in love, in laughter. It’s there in a warm hug, a deep breath, the spark of an “aha!” that lights up the body from within. Notice the next time it happens — how the insight itself carries a shimmer of pleasure through you.
Pleasure ripples when we dance or sing or play. It hums quietly in pause and rest, when we create, when we notice beauty. Perhaps art, music and dance — have endured across human history precisely because they feed us this invisible nourishment. They awaken our inborn biochemistry of joy, our subtle inner pharmacy that keeps us whole. In fact I’d suggest that pleasure is intrinsic to joy.
So I ask you, what is your pleasure? What brings that subtle surge — the one you may not even notice in the moment, though your body does?
For me, one of the most reliable sources is creativity. Making something with my hands. Drawing, painting, doodling, arranging color and form until they begin to hum. It doesn’t matter if the art is “good.” The pleasure lies in the process itself, the creating. Creativity is inherently pleasurable.
Researchers now tell us that art calms anxiety, lifts mood, regulates hormones. I suspect the art isn’t doing those things for us; it’s simply giving pleasure. The body takes it from there — releasing floods of well-being through the pleasure receptors scattered throughout brain and body.
Music can do this as well. So can gardening, cooking, walking in the rain, taking time to read. So many things offer gentle pleasure. Of course, stronger stimulants — falling in love, eating too much, chasing the next high — also bring pleasure, but they often come as a surge, a crash, or with cravings for more.
What is needed is the cultivation of steady simple pleasure — the kind that comes in small, sustainable doses, and leaves us whole instead of over-stimulated.
So yes, I make things. I get arty. I create. I let my hands and mind join in making. It feels me, offering a banquet of moments of deep enjoyment and satisfaction. And I remember what my mind sometimes forgets — that pleasure is sacred, necessary, life-giving.
What about you? What quiet, everyday pleasures wait for your attention?
The warmth of sunlight on your face? The scent of coffee? The sound of your dog’s sigh? The feel of soft fabric, the rhythm of your breath, the curve of a melody? Foster these by noticing how your body responds with a subtle feeling of pleasure.
Your body knows what you like.
It is asking, gently: Feed me with delight. I need this for health and well-being.
Look. Feel. Touch. Listen. See. Express. Make. Dance. Garden. Sew. Sing.
What are the small ways you experience those subtle waves of well-being?
And might those — simple, steady pleasures — be some of the most spiritual experiences of all?
A nice thought for our day. Perhaps being here has been a small pleasure, I enjoy thinking it might be so.
With delight,
Love, Mayet
PS — the photo is my art area, ready for making.
