Life, Death, and the Possibility of Pleasure
My Story
The memory is like a short clip from a movie: cue the rising earnestly fervent piano music as the camera pans a sunlit Southern California beach zooming in on a young Black woman, arms raised to the sky as she exhales gleefully into the ecstasy of the morning rays bathing her naked body as ocean waves crash before her. True bliss.
Having been raised in the aspirational culture of the Black professional middle class in LA, I was taught to worship the hard work and sacrifice that is inherent to being part of the upwardly mobile and thoroughly oppressed sector of American society. Most anything pleasurable was viewed as a distraction from representing an entire group of people with every success and failure.
In this context, the exploration and cultivation of pleasure outside of prescribed boundaries was highly discouraged. It thus wasn’t until I was in college at Seattle Pacific University, hundreds of miles away from home and isolated from traditional culture, that I was exposed to ideas about the natural world, feminism, and the sacred intersection of the two. These ideas were life-changing for me.
When I returned home after completing my Bachelor of Arts in political science, gone were the plans to attend law school. Instead, I was filled with subversive ideas of personal freedom and the sovereignty of my body.
Like many liberal arts majors, I returned home the summer after graduation essentially unemployable — except as a waitress. When a co-worker mentioned a mythical nude beach called Sacreds on the coast in the southern region of Los Angeles County near my home, I felt compelled to find it. I thought it might be a fun place to find more people who were living closer to the Earth and who enjoyed more personal freedom than anyone I knew.
I failed to locate the beach based on my coworker’s sketchy directions; but I did happen upon a couple on an adjacent beach who brought me directly to it. It turned out that Sacreds was surrounded by cliffs and required a quarter-mile hike down a steep worn path which contributed to its privacy. You had to really want to be there, and I would later discover that the people who came down regularly were fiercely protective of each other, and especially protective of the women.
The next time I traveled to the beach, I found it easily, and with the exception of one person off on the far side of the beach, I had it all to myself. I sat for a few minutes on my towel, simply taking in the beauty of my surroundings and the sound of the waves crashing to shore and settling into the place. When I felt ready, I walked out to the edge of the water…and then, almost without thinking about it, I slipped out of my dress, and the sun kissed my body for the first time. The moment was shattering and liberating and ancient and true. I became embodied.
And then, counter to all of what my conditioning had trained me to believe…nothing bad happened. There was just the sun, the sand, the sea, and me, and my body. For the rest of the summer, when I wasn’t waiting tables, I was on that relatively secluded nude beach soaking up the sun and conversation among the regulars who exposed me to new ways of thinking and being.
Because there was a shortage of teachers in Los Angeles County, I obtained an emergency teaching credential and began teaching middle school English in the fall. My memory of my time on the beach lingered, but I decided it was time to focus on adulting. So over the course of the next three years, I continued teaching and got married. And then, with my husband, I moved to Seattle to get a master’s degree in Organization Development from Seattle Pacific University.
Something, though, was missing. My classes were going well enough, but they weren’t filling…something, a nameless need I had. And my marriage, which was never great, was slowly disintegrating. I found a group called “Diving Deep and Resurfacing,” which was based around a book by feminist writer Carol Patrice Christ. The premise of the group (and book) was that by diving consciously into your sorrow and pain you could re-emerge with a reclaimed sense of yourself; and the idea of doing that work in the exclusive company of women was new to me and offered safety and resonance.
We met every other week for three months. There were eight women in the group, plus two group leaders, who helped us communicate honestly about where we were. Through several embodied activities like guided meditation, journaling, ritual and walks in nature, they created a solid container that allowed us to safely explore the soft rich power of the stuff of the shadow (the hard stuff) and the feminine.
This class imparted to me the valuable practice of keeping sensual things in one’s space — things that spoke to all of one’s senses — candles, music, fragrant oils, and the like — that elicited a sense of grounded beauty and well-being. This practice remains an integral part of my pleasure practice.
I finished my graduate program a year later and moved to the San Francisco Bay Area for a job at Hewlett Packard. I was still married and still focused on my career — it takes time to undo society’s definitions of success and happiness, after all! Nonetheless, I was still using the tools I’d learned in my women’s group: occasional nature walks and bath salts, candles, and fresh flowers.
And don’t underestimate the power of such simple sensual tools, friends: they were doing their work on me. I was going to work every day at Hewlett Packard, but those bath salts and such were continuing to help me uncover who I really was. Also, this was all occurring during the time of my Saturn return. Gradually, the realization was dawning that my goals were changing. I was no longer compelled to orient my life around who other people thought I should be but rather the kind of woman that I wanted to be.
As this new point of view took hold, I departed the familiar path and left my career and my husband behind as I started another graduate program and another women’s group, one that met monthly for nine months. This one was very earth-based and ritually focused on eco-feminism. It was full of all kinds of sensual exercises designed to help us reclaim our feminine bodies. We harnessed the power of our connection to the earth to fuel our ability to re-imagine our lives. It was an extraordinary class, one that ignited all our senses. I’m still friends with some of those women.
This work intersected beautifully with the study of psychotherapy at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. What a fun romp! I moved into a studio apartment overlooking the beach and immersed myself in a lovely season of reclamation and self-exploration.
Eventually, though, I needed more income. I left the beach scene and returned to work at Hewlett Packard for a few years and then eventually landed at Levi Strauss. It turned out the company was in the midst of a cultural shift so there wasn’t much work for me to do. Intellectual stimulation and personal growth came in the form of workshops I was taking in my off-hours in the area of meditation and spirituality that eventually led me to Lafayette Morehouse.
And so began my 20-year study of responsible hedonism.
***
It was in this context that I discovered what some might call “the secret to happiness,” which is remarkably simple: Look around your world, and focus on what makes you feel good.
In other words: put your attention on your life, and find the things in it that exist right now that gratify you, that make you happy, that make you feel good. This action is all the more important if you have little that makes you feel good; for the act itself, your attention itself on what is feeling good, expands that very feeling.
And here’s what I learned about happiness: it’s much more inclusive than we’ve been taught. Real happiness actually includes life and death, sorrow and joy, the fabulous and the dumb shit. It includes the mess of real life. Welcomes it, actually. Embraces it. And real life, yours and mine: it’s all right now.
By embracing it, you’re taking responsibility for it on some level. Once you claim responsibility, you have the power of creation. The current dominant culture that many of us were born into and inhale daily, wants you to think happiness can’t include “right now.” It tells you that after you have better clothes, a more svelte shape, a younger face, a better job, more money, a gorgeous partner and 2.5 perfect children living in a huge house in the best neighborhood — that then, then!, you’ll be happy. The only problem is, this faux happiness requires that you never stop getting more: more and better clothes, a leaner body, an ever younger face — and God forbid your huge house ever gets messy.
The truth is, you get to say when you’re happy, when it’s enough. More importantly you–and only you–gets to say what makes you happy. Not because you’re settling but because you are truly gratified by what you have presently, and have some ideas about what might gratify you next.
On the playground of this experimental community, I learned that happiness meant pursuing a life that actually gratified me. A life that I actually wanted.
***
Discovering what pleased me took some time. This is because figuring out what you actually want, versus what society tells you you should want, means confronting yourself. Your true self.
I started by writing in my journal. Just writing my thoughts as if no one would ever read them. I also asked people I trusted to tell me when I seemed happiest.
And periodically, I’d pause, turn my gaze inward, and ask myself, “What do I want? In the beginning I had to develop discernment. After writing down my first response, I’d ask the question again, and I’d answer again for a total of four times.
Here’s what an answer for me may have looked like:
I’d like to go to the pool now.
It would be even more fun to have a couple friends join me.
And wouldn’t it be great if we had some music and snacks.
Yes, that is what I want.
That would make me happy right now.
In this particular moment, here is what happiness feels like: a beautiful cup of coffee in my hands as I sit on my sofa with my dogs at my feet.
What would make it even better would be some music.
So I’ve just turned some on. Now, I’m even happier. Even more pleasured.
***
Two years ago, I found out my mother was dying. I wasn’t ready. But I applied all I’d learned along the way, and I made the experience gratifying for my mother, my brother, and myself by looking around our world, noticing what was feeling good to us, (which I could discern from practice) and leaning into that.
After my mom passed I began a new inquiry: How can a person — myself, in this case — grieve well? Grieve pleasurably?
I discovered that what felt good to me was to feel the grief in my body, through my body; which I’ll explore more in the next chapter.
However, I’ll say this, the tools I used weren’t new to me. I’d learned them on the nude beach, in my women’s groups, in my psychotherapy classes, dozens of workshops, and living in community. They simply were re-purposed for this moment in my life. And they were effective. I was able to ground myself in my body as I was grieving, experiencing my body as a good place, safe space, as I witnessed tremendous emotion roiling through it. And I was able to embrace the experience, as sorrowful as it was, with some amount of awe and joy. Because if you can ground yourself in your own body, and thus, in your own experience, you will discover, as I did, that even within deep sorrow and grief, joy is there too.
Even through the pandemic and a move from California to Washington, I continued to grow my vocation as a midwife of sorts in the realm of death and grief, from a pleasure-based perspective. For just as pleasure is a most honorable and helpful orientation in life, so it is the same in death and grieving.
Sometimes when I go outside and take in the gorgeous view of the trees in the backyard, I remember the young Black woman who raised her arms to the sky all those years ago on that nude beach, and I luxuriate in the morning rays caressing my skin the way she did as the ocean waves sang their song of celebration, seemingly all for her.
And I know I fulfilled her dream. To know herself. To be herself. To be evermore embodied. True bliss.
