Summary
Joe reframes presence: it’s not a “should” or an attempt at being spiritual—it’s pleasure. He discovered this reading Thich Nhat Hanh describe the pleasure of warm water while doing dishes. The difference between “being present” as rigid spiritual performance vs. actual presence is enjoyment.
Pleasure signals safety to the nervous system. When we feel pleasure, we can rest. This simple pleasure—awareness of sensation moving through the body—is available at any moment. But most people can’t maintain it for more than a minute or two because we haven’t learned to rest.
Key Concepts
Key Quotes
“Presence isn’t a trying. Presence is the pleasure.”
“When we feel pleasure, we feel safe. We feel like we can rest.”
“The best description I’ve heard for it is the awareness of sensation moving through your body.”
“There’s no time when a breath in isn’t pleasurable.”
“People can’t actually stick with the pleasure of just breathing in and out usually for more than a minute or two.”
Transcript
Here’s something that nobody talks about that pleasure is actually the gateway that you need to heal. And the wild thing about it is that this pleasure is available to you at any moment actually in this moment right now. The thing is that most people can’t maintain it for like more than a minute or two. And so in this video I’m going to talk about how to maintain it and how to use exactly that mechanism to make it so that when you’re in a traumatic response, you can get out of it really easily. When I was just first starting meditating and this whole spiritual self-development journey, I was trying to be as spiritual as possible, you know, and I was like eating really slowly and being very present and and I was, you know, trying to show everybody that I was very controlled. I think I probably just looked like stupid and rigid and and I felt like there was this idea of presence is like a presence is a should something that I needed to do to become good enough or some version of that. And then a little bit later I was reading Titchen Not Han and he was talking about doing the dishes and how pleasurable the warm water was and how it was like such an enjoyable experience for him to do the dishes and I hated doing the dish. I still to this day I’m not like yay dishes until I think about oh wait I can have a lot of pleasure doing the dishes. And it’s true. It’s just like if you do the dishes in this very slow way and it’s a very sensual approach, all of a sudden it’s this very pleasurable experience. And so I’m doing the dishes and I started to think about this experience I had where I was eating slowly and being all spiritual and I and there I was doing the dishes and I was doing them really slowly. The only difference was I was enjoying myself doing the dishes and I wasn’t enjoying myself while I was eating in this place. And wait a second, hold on. Like the pleasure of the experience is what’s actually in the presence. Presence isn’t a trying. Presence is the pleasure. And so then later on when I was studying the nervous system and and I heard about the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous system, what I started to realize was that when we feel pleasure, we feel safe. We feel like we can rest. And pleasure is such an incredible like incredibly important part of allowing ourselves to rest so that we have energy, so that we’re not stressed. It’s not pleasure like, oh, I’m having sex pleasure or I’m getting drunk pleasure. It’s a it’s a very simple pleasure and the best description I have I’ve heard for it is the awareness of sensation moving through your body. Okay, let’s try our first experiment. Take a moment, make yourself comfortable, and give your body just a little shake into a little more comfort. and close your eyes. Doesn’t matter if you’re lying or sitting down. Just close your eyes and notice that there are sensations in your body. Little tingles here and there. Maybe feeling of numbness here or there. Maybe some pulsing here and there. And then notice whatever sensation you choose, notice that there’s movement to that sensation. All your sensations are moving. Maybe just a little bit, maybe a lot. And your job is just to focus without straining, without trying, just focus. Putting your attention gently on the movement of your sensations. Don’t forget to breathe. Just as a matter of fact, take a nice enjoyable breath in. And keep on noticing how your sensations move. You don’t try to get them to move anywhere or be anywhere. You just notice there are sensations in your body moving. and see what it’s like to enjoy these sensations. Just enjoy them. This is accessible to us at any moment. There’s no time when a breath in isn’t pleasurable. And people say, “Oh, I want to feel good in life. I want to feel joy. I want to feel pleasure.” But what I’ve noticed is that people can’t actually stick with the pleasure of just breathing in and out usually for more than a minute or two. And it’s because we have not really figured out how to rest well that it’s a little overwhelming for us to actually allow ourselves to rest because the mind starts kicking up all sorts of dust, right? All sorts of, oh, we got to do blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. and immediately takes us away from the pleasure of just that simple pleasure of being alive. As if we couldn’t do the stuff and still feel pleasure. As if typing on a keyboard is any less pleasurable than doing the dishes. As if doing the dishes can’t be And it’s such a profound experience to reduce stress, to reduce anxiety by just getting in touch with the simple pleasure that’s available to us all the time. And it’s such an incredibly important part of transformation. Totally. Meaning, if your nervous system can’t relax, it’s really hard to see through limiting beliefs. It’s really hard to have emotionally transformed experience. It’s it’s really hard to let go of trauma. The way I like to define trauma is when you are experiencing the present as the past. So, think about it like um a guy who went to Afghanistan and now he’s in Ohio and a car backfires and he thinks it’s a bomb and he’s down in the corner covering so that he doesn’t get wiped out by an IED or whatever it is. That’s trauma. You’re in the past. You’re taking the present. You’re making it the past. And so that often means we’re treating our husbands and wives like our mothers or fathers or we’re hearing what somebody’s saying as if it resonates with the way that our brother used to make fun of us. Whatever it is, it’s it’s that pattern that we’re living in. And when we’re in that pattern, the trick is and the trick for me with my wife was that’s the great moment to downregulate. just take that breath or put attention into the way that your fabric feels underneath your knee or whatever it is. You just immediately downregulate and then that gives you enough space to act as if it’s the present because what you’re literally doing is reminding yourself I am here right now. There’s a way that people do it by just literally looking around putting all of their attention into the senses of their eyes. So they either coming to their senses or they’re um bringing in some breath so that they can see oh I’m here right now and now I have a different choice. I can make a different choice. And it is a wonderful way to deal with trauma or the other way of saying trauma a pattern that you keep on repeating that you say I got to stop yelling at my blah blah blah or I have to stop being defensive or I have whatever those things are that you’re telling yourself. These patterns that you know you’ve been in your whole life. Those are the times to really downregulate. Let’s get into experiment number two. Take a moment. Close your eyes. Take another deep breath. Big inhale. Long exhale. And I want you to just feel your body right now. What is it to be in your body right now? How does it feel in your feet and your knees and your eyes and your jaw? Like what does it feel like? And just bring awareness to you here right now. And now just do this simple little experiment without going into the past or to the future. Don’t look for evidence from something that has happened long time ago or in the last minute. And don’t look for evidence for what you think is going to happen, what you imagine is going to happen in the future. test with only the evidence that is right here, right now. Find out if there’s anything wrong with you in this moment. What’s wrong with you in this moment? being only with what is happening right now. You might feel discomfort, but does that mean there’s something wrong with you? No. In this moment, the only moment that has ever existed is this moment. What’s wrong with you? 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