100 Days of Pleasure
On the Winter Solstice, I committed to 100 consecutive days of self-pleasuring. I invited people to join me, offering them guidance and community, and proclaimed that I was going to share my process daily.
100 days (and then some) have come and gone, and here’s the truth: this experiment didn’t go exactly as I planned.
Self-Pleasure every day. Share something about it on Instagram. Get people engaged and sharing about their experiences in a private Facebook group. Create and share a guide for them to deepen their relationship to themselves and pleasure. This is stuff I do everyday with myself and with clients. How difficult can it be?
I started 100 Days of Pleasure because I needed to do it for myself as a way to reconnect, cultivate aliveness and connection in my body, and fill myself in.
I’ve learned over the last year that I’m rather sensitive and permeable. I hide it well (or at least, used to), but I am deeply impacted by so many things. Sounds, smells, sights, touch, stories. I feel it all. Some might call me an empath. If you really knew me, you’d know that I’m just starting to not vomit in my mouth a little when I come across that word.
The word “empath” as I’ve seen it used in my community – both physical and virtual – feels overly connected with a victim mentality, a need to wall off from the word and protect from everything and everyone, while making claims about the need to clear energy because I picked something up from so-and-so and my pure white light is now tainted. It feels like a lot of fear-based bypassing combined with arrogant assumptions. And yet, I cannot argue with the fact that we are way more permeable and interconnected than we usually allow for. And the fact that we pick up on the energy of those around us can’t not be true.
100 Days of Pleasure, for me, was a way to cultivate a practice – self-pleasuring – that would fill me up with me, with my eros, my life-force, my creativity, so that other people, things, ideas, circumstances, stories, and energies couldn’t take up the space that was mine. I knew I would need accountability, so I put it out to the world. I figured I might be able simultaneously get the word out a bit more about my work in the world by sharing this process. Win-win.
After a few weeks, I realized that the energy output of sharing my process, creating guidance for the people who had signed up to participate along with me, and connecting with the other participants in this experience in the Facebook group I created, was more than I could handle. Even more problematic, rather than filling me up with me, my practice became about creating something for everyone else. I began to notice while I was self-pleasuring that I was thinking about what I was going to share, how I was going to share it, and wondering what these 160 other brave souls needed to further their process along. In short, it was creating the opposite of what I originally intended.
And this is so often exactly the thing that I do. I sacrifice my own needs for the sake of a bigger vision. Rather than speak up, I get quiet, small, slowly slipping away, and building up resentment. After a few weeks of this, I shared that I wasn’t going to post anymore. I was still practicing, but I wasn’t going to share about my process.
I’d like to be able to say now that making my self-pleasure practice only about me changed everything, filled me up, lit me on fire. It didn’t. I learned quite a bit about pleasure and my relationship to it (more on that below), but things did not get easier. I felt like I was sinking, like I was dead inside. No inspiration, very little motivation. Life was handing me challenges and disappointments, and I wasn’t sure where it was going to end up. What’s strange is, I’ve faced much more challenging time periods than I did in those months. Nothing major or life-altering happened – no deaths or major heartbreaks or health challenges. And yet my insides felt like a desolate, barren tundra, all but devoid of life.
Slowly, I began to thaw.
It happened as the seasons began to change, winter to spring. A little more each day, and sometimes a little less, much in the way spring happens: a warm sunny day, followed by rain and snow, and back again to sun. Desire came back online, as did creativity and inspiration. I fed them slowly, helping them grow, listening, waiting patiently and without expectation or attachment. They’re still growing, they still require support and care, and I’m learning, every day, what exactly they need to flourish.
Pleasure is a part of that. And I’m so grateful to this practice of 100 days that carried me through this. An orientation to pleasure, and the willingness to look for, make time for, and cultivate it on a daily, even moment-to-moment basis likely kept the small seeds of desire, creativity, and inspiration alive through the dead of winter.
And with that, I want to share with you a few things that I learned while self-pleasuring every day for 100 days:
Bringing attention and intention to pleasure, every day has me notice it more outside of the intentional time. All day long, I find myself tuning into what feels good in my body in this moment or the next. When I have a migraine, or feel stressed or overwhelmed, “what feels good?” I find myself asking. I use the parts of me that feel pleasure to support the ones that might be uncomfortable or in pain.
A friend said to me a few weeks ago, “self-pleasure is misleading.” By that, she meant that when you make time and space for more pleasure, there’s suddenly more of everything else too. Grief. Fear. Sadness. Anger. You get the whole spectrum, from agony to ecstasy.
Variety. I (and probably you) need variety. I don’t want to eat the same thing everyday, why would I self-pleasure the same way everyday? I began to access a level of creativity in my love-making with myself that I didn’t know before. Mostly, it included pleasure opportunities that were quieter in nature, slower, less oriented toward an orgasm or even my genitals.
Tuning in to what my body wants can be rather surprising. I often entered into a practice session feeling sure that I knew what I wanted, and would quickly find that in fact the opposite was true.
Go slow. Nope. Slower. Yes, slower still. We miss so much when we go fast. How slow can you go? Until you can’t go slow anymore? I love going slowly, except for when I don’t.
I feel more in tune with my body. The sensitivity that I spoke to above has increased with this practice. My nerves feel awake and alive, and they feel everything. My relationship to this is mixed. Sometimes it feels like a beautiful gift, other times, a heavy burden. Of course, it’s both.
People are hungry to talk and learn about pleasure and their bodies. If you dare to start a conversation with someone about it, whether it’s your partner, friends, your kids, you’ll likely find them uncomfortable at first, and then curious and interested. Take some risks and share.
If after reading all of this, you want to give it a try, start today! Leave your email and you’ll get instant access to the 100 Days Guide, full of practices to try that will take you deeper into your pleasure.
Here’s to finding, cultivating, and sharing pleasure, every day, for the rest of our lives.
