August 2, 2007

Greetings, Pleasuristas!

The lovely, indolent dog days of summer are upon us. I take a break every afternoon with a big bowl of cold fresh black cherries...ahhh....

This week’s newsletter is the shortened form of my newly released Pleasurefesto: The Twelve Pillars of Pleasure for Women over 45 (and anyone else who loves pleasure!).

To download the unexpurgated, Free full version, visit the Pleasure page on my website, or just click here. Feel free to send the Pleasurefesto far and wide!
 
Write me at Melissa@LusciousBodhisattva.com and let me know what you think. This is a manifesto in progress: Raves, rants, ideas, and suggestions all welcome! Your suggestions and feedback are truly helping to shape this wonderful project.

And, in response to your requests, a new feature: Pleasuristas Talk Back. I’ll include a pleasure suggestion from one of y’all in each issue. Please send in your pleasure practices and suggestions. We’re all in this learning together.

I love this growing community of luscious, pleasured, bountiful women over 45! Stand back (or is it Come hither), world!

Pleasuredly yours,

FEATURE ARTICLE: The Pleasurefesto

Pleasure and Soul’s

So you'd like more pleasure in your life?

Pleasure and Soul says, go for it! Play with these Twelve Pillars of Pleasure and watch your life light up with lusciousness and overflow with bountiful generosity.

Give this to your girlfriends, your mother, and your daughters. Give it to the men in your life so they can romp in your field of pleasure. (Just don’t alter it in any way.)

Let’s uplift and inspire each other to be the pleasure-filled, gorgeous, bountiful women creation intended us to be.

It's free. It makes your skin glow, your hair shine, your eyes sparkle. It clears your head and gives you a new lease on life. If we could bottle this, ladies, we’d have people standing in line from here to next week to buy it, no questions asked.

Pleasure is how you define it, any way you wish. After 45, you’ve richly earned the delicious right to delight in being the first rate version of yourself, rather than a second rate version of anyone else.

Start a list of what lights you up. Come out of hiding! Become a detective hot on the trail of your own voluptuousity.

It’s not that complicated. It’s yours, all yours. Sashay on up to the banquet and feast on your life.

Pleasure is sooo different than distraction. Distraction is anything we use to go numb and check out of our own lives and souls. There’s a place for distraction, but a small one: if we overuse it, our wattage dims.

Pleasure reigns 180 degrees from distraction. Pleasure wakes us up, makes us more alive, more happy, more generous.

The difference between pleasure and distraction isn’t so much what we do, as how we do it. We can approach almost anything as pleasure or as distraction. I can garden — or even meditate — as a way to duck and cover, or as a way to renew, open up, and ahhh my way into my pleasured self.

Pleasure unveils your inner and outer beauty. Pleasure purges the gunk that obstructs your radiant delicious aliveness.

This poor, ignorant culture equates physical beauty with airbrushed anorexic teenagers. No wonder so many of us over 50 feel washed up and over the hill!

Allow me to let you in on The Secret of the Ages: A deeply pleasured woman is a deeply beautiful woman.

Pleasure — lovemaking, dancing, gardening, laughing with dear friends, curled up with a special book — fans our all-too-often overworked and undernourished midlife spark into a luscious luster. Discover the ultimate beauty elixir: deep, authentic pleasure, administered daily with love.

Pleasure makes us better partners, parents, and daughters. After decades of caring for children, partners, coworkers, and now, often parents, we can get cranky, martyred, and dried up.

And when we dry up, how are we to those around us? Anyone care to ask them how it is to be around our worst selves? Remember that If Mama Ain’t Happy, Ain’t Nobody Happy.

The finest gift you can give those you love is to fill your sweet self with pleasure. From there you can’t help but radiate love and generosity from overflow.

Saying Yes to pleasure can bring some surprises.

Opening our internal pipes to deep pleasure, gals, usually means that whatever’s been clogging those pipes needs to get cleared.

What often comes through first is not pleasure, but the stuff that’s blocked it. Old painful feelings and memories, beliefs about not deserving luscious lives, guilt over being happy when others aren’t, fear of judgment of others — our plumbing can get pretty cruddied up.

Listen, ladies: it’s really great news. The clear and glorious water of pleasure is worth whatever it takes to clear the pipes.

As this stuff gets flushed out, what follows right behind is the clear, life-giving waters of our own glorious, delectable, pleasured bodies and souls.

Pleasure makes you more generous, magnanimous, and bountiful. What lights you up lights up the world. Buddhist scholar Howard Thurman writes, "Don't ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive and then go do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive."

Here's my version:  The world urgently needs us magnificent, lit-up older women. From the epicenter of our pleasure we can rock creation.

No telling how far the ripples of our own radiance spread out into the world. Isn't it a wonder that just being our own deeply pleasured selves can help the world in ways we will never know?

Lights-on living is truly win-win, gals. We get to feel great, and we then get to offer ourselves to the world from that bounty. I ask you, how good can it get?

Pleasure not only nourishes our bodies. It also elevates our spirits and reconnects us to the Divine.

Pleasure brings you fullhearted right into the Now, into this precious, one-of-a-kind moment, which, if I read it right, is the aim of most spiritual disciplines.

And if the mystics and cutting-edge physicists are right, this physical world—all of it—is nothing but the magnificent efflorescence of spirit itself. Why not open to this world as the holy place it is, and commune with its pleasures as an act of worship?

We are literally wired for pleasure. How lucky can we get?
We are voluptuously endowed with countless organs of pleasure (and not just sexual ones): our eyes, our skin, our ears, our minds.

My favorite organ of pleasure is my heart. The sweetest pleasures I know center around loving. Not just family and friends: Trees, animals, strangers: how endless pleasure is when everyone, and everything, becomes the beloved!

We’re pan-pleasureable. That means we’re capable of deep pleasure at almost any moment.

How much time do we spent fretting and saying No to life? How much precious life energy do we use demanding that things be different than they are?

Pleasure is all about now, not yesterday or tomorrow.

After 45, mortality rears its powerful head. The days we have left on the planet are less than the days we’ve already spent. We no longer have the foolish unconscious luxury of thinking that we’ve got all the time in the world.

I used to believe that I had to have all my ducks in a row in order to be deeply happy. Now I don't even worry about the ducks (too much like herding cats). The joy, the deeply erotic pleasure of my 53 year old life is mine to say an unreserved Yes to, no matter what the damn ducks are doing.

This is it, ladies. Pleasure opens us up to full-hearted, full-breasted living right now, no matter what might be going on around us. Surrender, deliciously, to the Yes of this moment.

Don’t settle.

Don’t get me wrong. There’s a heap of delicious pleasure we can enjoy solo.

But pleasure just multiplies like rabbits in the company of other pleasured folks, women and men.

By playing with pleasure, we’re swimming upstream in this culture that glorifies working ourselves to death and dragging our almost-corpses to the mall.

We need others to remind us, to pleasure us, to inspire us. Talk pleasure with your friends. Light each other up.
Let’s create a wave of pleasure among midlife women that circles the globe many times over. Just think how different the world might be!

Now that you’re awash in all this pleasure, create your own principle here!

Play with this, sister. Fire up your own audacious curiosity.

Invite yourself to know what you know in your own belly and heart about pleasure. What’s the most important thing you know about pleasure? What helps you stay in pleasure, and return to it?

Remember Pleasure Pillar #2: Pleasure is what lights YOU up. This lovely journey is about coming home to your own delicious self, not becoming some vapid version of anyone else.

Invoke Dorothy’s (she of the to-die-for red sparkly shoes) special mantra:
There’s No Place Like Home.

The copyright in this work belongs to the author. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License.

PLEASURISTAS TALK BACK

Pleasurista Alana (Alana@DelightfulButterfly.com) writes, “One of my favorite activities is to ask myself, "If I could have anything I want right now, what would it be?"  This magical question helps me be fully present, tune into my whole being, conjure pleasure, and expand my ‘possibility creativity.’  The next time you want to up your pleasure quota - be it standing in the line at Starbucks, applying for a new job, or on a date with a potential beau - I invite you to ask this lovely question!”

RESOURCES
Each issue I’ll recommend resources. They’ll have the exclusive and highly coveted pink lotus rating, 1-5, depending upon the amount of pleasure they offer.

  http://www.tut.com Tut’s Adventure Club
I love the daily “Notes from the Universe” that show up in my inbox: short, insightful and sometimes humorous reminders of life's magic and our divinity.

Tut’s statement of purpose is that everyone's special, that every life is meaningful, and that we're all here to learn that dreams really do come true.

 ABOUT Pleasure and Soul
ANY QUESTIONS, comments, feedback?
Contact me at Melissa@MelissaGayleWest.com

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This newsletter and all content within it is Copyright(c) Melissa Gayle West 2007 except where otherwise noted. All rights reserved. I encourage you to share this newsletter or reprint material from it in other electronic or print publications, provided a link to http://www.MelissaGayleWest.com and copyright information are included in the credits. Please send a copy of the publication.

COACHING SESSIONS WITH MELISSA
If you would like to:

• Experience deep and authentic pleasure in your life
• Create a life that sings for you, free from struggle and efforting
• Free yourself from damaging cultural myths about growing older that limit your aliveness, creativity, and unique genius
• Making a meaningful difference in this time in your life
• Deepen your spiritual journey in a way that reflects who you are now
• Reclaim curiosity, gratitude, and wonder for your journey

Read more about how you can benefit from private coaching with Melissa: http://www.MelissaGayleWest.com
If you're interested, contact Melissa at Melissa@MelissaGayleWest.com, or 206.427.1325

Melissa Gayle West
106 NW 104th St.
Seattle, WA 98177