How to Nuture Your Relationship with Pleasure

First off, get your minds out of the gutter! This is a “G” rated post!

I was chatting with a friend recently about my Word of the Year, endure, and revealed that my 2011 word has already selected me. I am not going to reveal the word just yet, but it is so good, I can hardly stand it.

My purpose in continuing to select a Word of the Year is to nurture more pleasure into my life. I want to live on purpose, not just exist and go about the motions of living, then dying. When I meet my Maker, I want to stand before Him knowing I exhausted every single talent He gave me, hence my reason for starting the life list.

In doing some research on pleasure, I found that we all seek it and what brings pleasure for one is often different for another. What we all have in common is we continually seek more and greater kinds of pleasures because of how it makes us feel. I read an article in Yoga Journal (Wishful Thinking, March 2010, p.55) that said dissatisfaction fuels our pleasure seeking. The more I thought about, the more I started to agree with that assessment. After all, who doesn’t desire to feel good? Something else the article pointed out was how unpleasant feelings linger longer than good ones. I guess this explains why we so desperately seek things that elicit some kind of good feeling. In my effort to nurture more pleasure in my life, I have come up with a few things to help me along my journey:

• Keep looking skyward. I am currently obsessed with cloud formations. Seriously, when was the last time you really paid attention to how amazing they look and how they are never the same two days in a row? Plus, looking up means you are keeping your head up. Hard to be in a funk when you are looking upward and onward.
• Listen to soothing music. I have a few iTunes playlists I only listen to when I am certain moods. Sometimes, I forget how deeply a good song stirs me and how it relaxes me.
• Indulge in some comfort food. Last night, I fixed a meal I have not prepared in quite a while and it hit the spot in all its fried, greasy glory. I can not eat like that all the time, but yesterday, I could not think of anything else I wanted for dinner but that.
• Watch something that makes you laugh. Tuesday nights is Wipeout night in my home. It is the perfect stupid, funny show to watch when you want to experience a deep, belly laugh.
• Try something new. You never know what you are going to like if you never take a chance and find out. I am so bored with status quo living. I look for opportunities to try something new.

I am going to add working on my life list as another thing to help me along in my journey. So, tell me, what are you going to do to nurture your relationship with pleasure?