Free Video Course Part 4 of 4- Expanding Your Capacity For Pleasure
Your body unconsciously pushes away what you want unless you expand your 'zone of comfort' by expanding your capacity for pleasure.
Buckle up, because today is another very special day of the course (as well as the last day!)
We are going to learn how to expand your capacity for pleasure!
(For seamless viewing pleasure of today’s video lessons, if you are receiving this post in email format, I recommend heading to the Substack website or app so that you can view the videos within the post instead of breaking away to YouTube.)
This is just as important as expanding your capacity to alchemize pain. I guarantee you that the reason why you don't have the thing you want in your life is because your body pushes it away. Your body is always trying to keep you within it's zone of comfort.
But first, let’s review what we learned in Part 3 so we can build a nice bridge to today’s lesson.
In Part 3, we learned how to stop telling stories about our sensations.
Shining our presence on sensations without trying to fix them or judge them, is what alchemizes them into neutral or even pleasurable sensations.
It is when we ANALYZE, JUDGE, and try to AVOID our sensations that they get lodged into our bodies. This creates pain, and repetitive loops of destructive behavior.
Remember, true pain doesn't come from feeling the sensation itself, it comes from RESISTING feeling the sensation.
It's like a Chinese finger trap. The more you pull away, the more you get stuck, but the more you push in, the more room and freedom you create.
There is a world of difference in this seemingly tiny nuance. Even when it comes to sensations of physical pain itself! If you open into the pain and let it discharge through your body (let it shake, groan, breathe deeply, yell, etc.) it isn't as painful as when you try to shut it down and run away from it.
But don't just take my word for it, test it out for yourself! Start with 'low-stakes' situations where it doesn't feel too scary to feel the sensations in your body. Then, slowly expand your capacity to feel bigger and bigger sensations. The key is to be gentle with your nervous system and take baby steps, just like we practiced in the video.
Can you tolerate opening into the sensation just for 15 seconds? Then 30? then 45? Then a minute?
If you take on too much all at once, you put yourself at risk of re-traumatizing yourself. It's important to ask for help from a coach, a therapist, or a trusted friend if you find that it's too scary to open into the sensations yourself. The remedy to many years of a lack of presence with your body, is ADDITIONAL presence from someone you trust. Think of presence like a car battery. If your 'presence' battery is dead, you need to get a jumpstart from a working battery (aka somebody else who can hold presence nicely).
Keep expanding your capacity to hold sensation! It's so important on your journey to mastering the art and science behind transformation.
If you have the power and nervous system resilience to confront and digest any sensation, there is literally nothing that you can't transform, create, or manifest, because you're not at war anymore within your own body.
MOVING ON TO WHAT YOU WILL LEARN TODAY
We are going to learn how to expand your capacity for pleasure!
This is just as important as expanding your capacity to alchemize pain. I guarantee you that the reason why you don't have the thing you want in your life is because your body pushes it away. Your body is always trying to keep you within it's zone of comfort.
An abusive relationship, for example, is not a comfortable experience to be in, but if it's what your body is used to, it will normalize it, and it will become something you expect to experience within your 'zone of comfort'.
In contrast, a healthy experience might be pushing the edges of your 'comfort zone' and feel scary to you.
You might not consciously think that is the case... but if you take a closer look, you might notice that you don't let compliments in because the vulnerable open-hearted feeling is too scary. You might notice that even though you want people's attention, it's actually hard to hold eye contact and you compulsively avert your gaze! You might notice that when you are intimate with your partner, some unconscious shame starts to shut you down from feeling THAT much desire. You might notice that when you are in public and want to laugh loudly or hoot and holler with delight, that a self-conscious nervousness starts to kick in, and you suppress your joy volume.
When you practice expanding your capacity for pleasure, you are practicing RECEPTIVITY.
Most people think that if you want something, you have to GO AFTER it with a penetrative force (aka goal setting, hustling, productivity, etc.) which is only one half of the equation. RECEIVING what you want is the equally important, other half of the equation.
If you don't know how to receive, you will spend your whole life chasing after something while simultaneously repelling it, and then wallowing in miserable stories about why the world is against you and just doesn't want you to have the thing you want.
But, my dear, that's just not true! The world DOES want you to have what you want (which is why you have those seeds of desire within you), it's just patiently waiting for you to learn how to receive it.
So how do we train our bodies to receive pleasure? One way to do that is through "make-believing" aka training your body to receive what it wants by pretending it is HERE NOW.
Let me be clear, however, that this is NOT another goal setting, vision boarding, cookie cutter manifesting technique.
There is a huge difference between visioning and make-believing. The former doesn't involve the body, and the latter DOES.
The former is less powerful and leaves room for the mind to muck around and create doubt, fear, and unnecessary stories/details about how and why that thing will or won't come to you.
Make-believing is more powerful than visioning because it pulls you away from your mind into another reality, where your body can BATHE LONG ENOUGH in the kinds of sensations necessary to re-pattern it, without interference from your mind. When you bypass your mind and allow your body to marinate in the energy of already having what it wants, it can more easily notice, magnetize, and match with the things that it desires.
I love make-believing because it is an incredibly intelligent and NATURAL transformational impulse that young humans and animals are all born with. Make-believing and playing is as natural as breathing air and eating food.
Sadly though, like many other incredible body intelligences, we are conditioned away from it as we get older. Make-believing is minimized as irrelevant child's play that serves no purpose, when it is in actuality, one of the most powerful manifesting/transformation techniques embedded in our evolution in my opinion!
In this video, you will learn more about why it is so important, how to reclaim it, and how reclaiming it will expand your ability to hold pleasure aka RECEIVE more of what you want.In case you need access again to the workbook for the entire course, click on the link below.
Video 3.1
Unless You Train Your Body To Receive Pleasure, It will Reject What You Want
(Watch Time 8 minutes)
VIDEO 3.2
Demonstration Of How Make-Believing Will Train Your Body To Align With The Frequency Of What You Want
(Watch Time 9 and a half minutes)
VIDEO 3.3
Congratulations! You Completed The Course. What’s Next?
(Watch Time 2 minutes)
Congratulations! You are restoring one of the most natural impulses you were born with- the ability to make-believe. You also just completed the entire course on transmuting any obstacle with 3 potent embodiment tools.
Are You Interested In Accelerating Your Transformation & Receiving 1:1 Expert Support? If so, I encourage you to learn more about my Somatic Transformation Coaching Program HERE & Schedule A Free 40 Min No-Pressure Consultation With Me HERE
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Thank you for letting me guide you! I hope you experienced a small shift today, and I look forward to seeing you in the next Substack post.
Warmly,
Annika Knepper
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