Building pleasure awareness

How much are you able to pay attention to what really feels good in your body?

Most of us have received ideas of what pleasure ‘should’ look or feel like, but they don’t always tally with what our bodies really enjoy.

Many gay guys think that the key to having more pleasure is to learn lots of strokes or techniques, but actually one of the most powerful foundations for accessing more pleasure is to build your capacity for where in your body you choose to place your attention moment to moment.

What does pleasure awareness mean?

We often talk about ‘giving’ and ‘receiving’ pleasure – but pleasure is actually an experience that happens in your own body as a combination of 3 separate elements:

• Sensation or Stimulation: this is the sensory data that comes into your body. We have the least control over this – there’s always stuff happening around us or to us; sometimes we can move away from it, but often it’s just there.
• Context or Meaning: this is the story you attach to what’s happening. We often don’t have much control over the situation (context) we’re in, but we do have a little more control over the meaning we give to it in our thoughts or imagination.
• Focus of awareness or placement of attention: we have the most control over where – and how much – we choose to place our attention in any given moment because we can choose to consciously shift our focus whenever we want.

So because you have the most choice over where you focus your attention this is the element that’s most useful when it comes to being able to increase your experience of pleasure.

For example, imagine you’re having a massage and there’s a noisy drill outside the window; if you focus your attention on the sensation of the touch happening on your skin you’re likely to enjoy the massage more than if you focus on the sound of the drill!

Tune into the subtlety of pleasure

When many people (and gay guys are no exception) hear the word ‘pleasure’, particularly in an erotic context, they can have a tendency to think it has to mean some kind of intense peak experience – bliss, or fireworks (if you’ve ever seen that scene in the movie When Harry Met Sally you’ll know what I mean!)

But think of the times you’ve got great pleasure from scratching an itch … or drinking some water when you’re thirsty … pleasure can be really simple!

Tuning in to pleasure actually means being able to tune in to subtle shifts between when something just feels ‘ok’ and when something feels like a ‘yes’ (but not neccessarily like a ‘YES!’).

Slow down, and let go of expectations

Most of us aren’t used to noticing details when it comes to touch, or bodies – partly because we tend to move fast, focussing on trying to achieve certain outcomes for how we think something should be.

So one of the keys to building your pleasure awareness skills during gay sex and intimacy is to slow down, and give yourself more chance to actually notice how things really feel, and particularly what really feels enjoyable.

Part of this is also about learning to let go of expectations or goals and become present to ‘what is’ even if that’s surprising. The best sex and intimacy experiences generally happen when you’re fully engaged in the moment, rather than wishing something were different.

What happens when you develop pleasure awareness?

When you start to build pleasure awareness you start to approach pleasure from a different perspective than how you might have grown up believing it ‘ought’ to be.

It may feel strange – moving away from conventional ideas of how pleasure should look or happen.

Pleasure doesn’t have to be all about softness – for lots of people a certain amount of pain can be pleasurable!

But, a bit like going to the gym, the more you start to practice and build your muscles for noticing what pleasure means for you, and becoming aware of what creates pleasure in your body, the easier – and more pleasurable – sex and intimacy will get!

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Build your skills for better pleasure awareness with my Pleasure In Yourself coaching