How Pleasure is helping me heal chronic illness

It seems paradoxical: pleasure and chronic illness. Even the word illness has a stench to it. A heaviness that lingers. It invokes images of hospitals and pills and hopelessness. And I have had to contend with a lot of hopelessness in my healing process.

To be sick, for an extended period of time, weighs on you. It gets you down. It is easy to feel hopeless.

As a healer, I often noticed thoughts of: “But how could I get so sick? How did this happen? Aren’t I supposed to be helping people heal but now I am the sick one?”

It can be very easy in the self-development world to internalize the teaching that “you create your reality” as “you control everything that ever happens”. It’s very easy to fall into this because so many of us have buried wounds that say, “it’s all my fault.”

It’s not my fault that I became sick. My experience with illness is not some sort of punishment.

If anything, I have had to learn to see that my illness is actually an opportunity for deeper healing. Maybe it’s not that I did something wrong to deserve this punishment… but more that I actually was exactly on my path, uncovering a deeper layer of healing for myself.

Healing my relationship to my body the last number of years has felt like peeling an onion. There is always deeper to go. There was the unconscious under-eating and then came a seriously burdened immune system. There is always more to uncover, and my body has more to communicate with me. It was disheartening in some ways to finally feel like I was starting to listen to her, and then boom- she has so much to say about what has been a building imbalance for so long. It took me aback.

But it makes so much sense.

I, like so many of us, followed the mainstream norm in our culture of squashing any communication from my body, not trusting her wisdom, and basically telling her signals to shut up and go away for most of my life. Once she was finally given a voice, she had A LOT to say!

This is how I have come to see my experience with illness recently. My body finally expressing things that I couldn’t quite hear before, and it’s not even just messages from my current reality and life. I have come to understand health as soooo deeply intergenerational. My physical body is finally getting permission to express and resolve generations of toxicity and imbalances. No wonder it has felt like a lot!

So where does pleasure come in?

Pleasure; a word used to describe all different kinds of things. To me, when I use the word pleasure here, I am evoking not simply a sexual context, but an experience of feeling good. This is more erotic in nature; in that it doesn’t have to involve my genitals at all. It’s a state of feeling good, which usually arises in me when I also feel safe.

The feeling of a breeze across my skin on a warm day. The sound of the birds at dawn, greeting the day. The feeling of my lover being close by. The smell of mint tea. All of these experiences bring me sensations of pleasure.

The truth is I have had to retrain my body to feel good. As someone with sexual trauma, I have had to learn how to feel pleasure again. Any kind, not just sexual. When you have sexual trauma, your body shuts down in order to survive. You go numb or you get stuck in pain. This is actually a healthy response to a horrible event. To unravel this, slowly, gently, requires careful attention. Consistent attention tuned towards safety creates the conditions through which pleasure can bloom again.

For feeling pleasure is truly just being open to feeling the sensations of being alive. Opening to feeling good will mean that you will also sometimes feel “bad”. This is the nature of being human, and there is a poetic beauty in this to me. Grief is the doorway to love, and pleasure is a bedfellow to all other sensations that are possible in a human body. Allowing yourself to feel good really just opens your ability to feel in general.

This is huge for any kind of healing process: feeling. When you are, finally, feeling — what has not been felt, what has been buried and forgotten, what is yours that was cast away… you are healing. It is vulnerable to feel the rawness of our own feelings, instead of covering them up with defense mechanisms or worries about other people. But it also really sets you free.

Feeling sets you free, and when you are living life with a chronic illness, you can be wading through so much death. Death of who you used to be, of how your life used to look, of what you used to be able to do, of the looming feeling of sickness. Living with chronic illness made my world smaller. It was challenging to experience all of those limitations and not shrink underneath them. Not succumb to the worries that this would be my life forever.

And succumb to them I did sometimes. As the process goes. But through the healing power of pleasure, of putting my attention on what was still feeling good… I was able to remember my way to life again.

Pleasure helps you touch life’s sweetness. It reminds you of the beauty in the world, even amidst the challenging times.

I have learned through my somatic practice that a way to regulate my nervous system is to pendulate or titrate between the sensations in my body that feel overwhelming and the sensations that feel soothing or connecting. As I weave my awareness back and forth between these two, I create a bridge that connects them. This bridge, between the resource and the trigger, establishes regulation in my nervous system which could be summed up in its feeling by the sentence: I can do this. I have got this, and I will be okay.

There have been so many times during my journey of healing where I have had to remind myself of that. Where I have had to take a stand for my own pleasure and hold it like a match in front of me through the dark night. I can still feel good. And I will find safety and feel good, again and again.

A lot of people can fall into using pleasure as a means to escape reality. They fixate on sensations that feel good and don’t want to put their attention to what hurts, to what needs healing. In these cases, I don’t think they are experiencing true pleasure. They are chasing a phantom of pleasure, her ghostly half-sister. Because to me, true pleasure opens you to everything that is there. True pleasure is feeling, and feeling includes it all.

Something else that I have experienced as an anchor during this time of healing imbalance in my body has been how my body naturally wants to heal. I simply often have to just get out of the way.

My body naturally knows exactly what she needs in order to heal and repair and restore balance. I really just need to get good at listening. Trusting. Remembering that my body has a natural wisdom that knows how to heal inside.

As a psychic, I know this practically to be true in the sense of how kundalini energy works in my body. I know through my psychic and spiritual practice that my body has a unique physical energy (that some people call kundalini) that can be used as a very unique healing elixir for my specific body. This life force or kundalini energy activates during moments of birth, death, orgasm, and trauma. And the nature of this energy is incredibly healing.

In this way, my experience of sexual pleasure becomes something that heals my body too. As my kundalini runs through my body, it gives all of my cells an energy healing that helps restore and balance them. Pleasure is naturally healing.

Now, I do not live in a fantasy that if I orgasm enough, my illness will be completely gone. I mean, they definitely help!! But I am always a big believer in a holistic approach. Sexual pleasure just being one of the ways pleasure is helping me heal.

Maybe pleasure and chronic illness are not so paradoxical after all.

Maybe they are actually some kind of perfect fit for one another.

Two opposites that balance each other out. Maybe the path to healing doesn’t have to be full of pain and suffering, even if it is incredibly hard and dark sometimes. Maybe I can have moments of pleasure, no matter what. And maybe that means that you too, dear reader, wherever you are, whatever you are going through… can as well.

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Article photo by Matthew Smith