What’s most important in life?
Health, hard work, success, love, family, pleasure?
Of all the items on that list, pleasure is the one fewest people would choose. Pleasure is nice, but it’s not a priority. Not like food and water. We can live without it.
Your Brilliance expert author Amy Waterman disagrees.
She talks to Melany Oliver of “Heart to Heart” about why most of us aren’t meeting our basic requirement for pleasure. When we don’t have enough healthy pleasure in our lives, we struggle to feel happy, fulfilled, and energized. Our relationships become stale and lackluster. Our health can even be affected.
On the other hand, when you do make time for pleasure, your life can shift in some pretty amazing ways.
So sit down, relax, and take some time for yourself. Consider this your invitation to embark on a journey of rediscovering life’s joy.
Get your copy of The Pleasure Principle
What You’ll Learn
Pleasure has been underestimated.”
We get rewarded for hard work, discipline, and sacrificing the fun things. That’s what makes us successful. That’s what earns us praise.
But is it worth it, if the cost is having fun, enjoying yourself, and taking time to be silly with those you love?
That was the wake-up call that got Amy Waterman thinking about the lack of pleasure in her own life.
In committed relationships, it’s so easy to postpone pleasure. You’ll have fun on the weekend. You’ll have fun when you go on vacation. You’ll have fun when you retire. But pleasure is what keeps you motivated to stay together. You can’t survive as a couple without it.
It’s easy to dismiss pleasure as mere entertainment. But everything in our bodies has a purpose. And Mother Nature put our pleasure system in us for a reason: to promote behaviors that make us thrive.
When you have a life filled with pleasure, your entire body works better.”
But normally we don’t think of pleasure as something healthy. We think of it as a vice. Pleasure comes from doing things we know we shouldn’t be doing, like eating the wrong foods or drinking.
This is where Amy’s definition of pleasure is different.
“For most of us, pleasure is a thought,” she says. “We think we enjoy something.” But for Amy pleasure is a full-bodied response. It’s a flood of feel-good chemicals you can feel down to your toes.
This genuine pleasure can provide a reliable guide to the life-affirming activities that will enrich your life. Especially when it comes to love!
We motivate ourselves in one of two ways: by moving away from pain or by moving towards pleasure. In your love life, you don’t want to motivate yourself by moving away from pain. If you imagine worst-case scenarios or worry excessively about your love life, you start to associate pain with dating.
What if you made the decision to try motivating yourself with pleasure instead? Instead of frightening yourself with negative consequences, you chose to imagine positive rewards.
The result, Amy says, is a life filled with more fun, joy, vitality and excitement.
This shift can create magic in your love life. When you motivate yourself by imagining all the fun you’re going to have, all the people you’ll meet, and all the experiences you’ll enjoy, then your body relaxes and you feel incredibly sexy. That sets the stage for a successful date.
“Your pleasure … turns him on.”
So make time for pleasure. It truly does make EVERYTHING sweeter!
Amy has developed a course to lead you step-by-step through cultivating the habit of pleasure. Find out more.
Jump to Topics of Interest
01:29 Amy’s personal story, why she became a pleasure evangelist
02:55 How the lack of fun impacts a relationship
04:38 Why Mother Nature programmed us with pleasure
06:59 Why pleasure is a virtue, not a vice
09:48 The metaphor of the carrot and the stick
12:41 Chill Mode vs Freak Mode
About Amy Waterman
Amy is an old-timer in the field of dating and relationships. Her work has appeared in over a dozen online courses. With two decades of international travel under her belt, she knows that the search for love is at the heart of the human experience. Get your copy of The Pleasure Principle.
About Melany Oliver
Melany is the creator of “Healing the Broken Heart” and “Complete Heart Attunement.” With over 10 years of experience with healing deep emotional wounds, she leverages her expertise to help women who are wounded by their childhood traumas and past negative relationships heal themselves and find true love. Watch Amy’s interview with Melany.
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