Learning how to really relish and savor pleasure is a learnable skill that can dramatically shift the dial on baseline happiness.
Relishing pleasure is a skill that can be learned (a separate to sensitivity and receptivity to pleasure).
Here is an exercise you can do to learn the art of relishing pleasure:
Step 1: Connect to what it feels like to relish a pleasant experience
Examples of things you can do here include:
- Bring to mind the feeling of sinking into a warm bath after a long day, focusing on the moment you touch the water, with a big inhale and a big exhale
- Imagine scratching a really bothersome itch and connect to the feeling of relief at the moment the itch is satisfied
- Imagine your favorite food and taking the first bite of it, then leaving it in your mouth to savor it
- In general learn to pay attention to these experiences and how they feel when they happen in real life too
Step 2: Learn how to relish micro-pleasures in a similar way
With enough practice of Step 1, you will start to get a sense of the mental movement involved in relishing / savoring a pleasurable experience.
Now, throughout the day, try to be very observant about whenever any little sensation of pleasure arises.
Don't wait for more macro-pleasures like the ones described in Step 1.
Instead notice things like:
- The pleasure you feel when the sun touches your skin or the breeze blows in your hair on a warm day
- The feeling of taking your first breath in the morning
- Little warmths you feel when you glance at someone you love
- The shape of the vibrations in your laughter when someone makes you laugh
When you notice these little pleasures, exercise that mental movement you learned in Stage 1 of how to savour and relish.
Step 3: Discover & Relish Causeless Micro-Pleasures
As you become more sensitive and receptive to micro-pleasures, you may start to notice types of pleasure that have no cause.
You can become sensitive to the simple joy of being alive.
The vibrancy of your heart, the nourishment of your breath, the background buzz of your nervous system.
Random little pockets of joy in your body that can be tuned in to at any time.
You can learn to apply your newly learned mental movement of relishing / savouring to them too.
Eventually, you'll find that little pleasures are everywhere ready to be relished and savored at all times.
Not only does life become more ecstatic but the need to seek out joy and ecstasy from external experiences becomes a lot less pressured too.
In turn you are free to pursue the actions that are most meaningful and purposeful to you rather than the ones that bring short term pleasure.
Safe in the knowledge that pleasure is something you always have access to.
Cultivate the mindset and the spirit you want to inhabit. Remember the days you felt the best in your life. Remember it vividly and incorporate that feeling in todayβs reality.
There is a world where life is genuinely fucking interesting, fun and ultimately mesmerizing.
Having a child and enjoying the kids moments is genuinely of the most blissful nature of existence. Kids in of itself are already just a well of purity and absolute presence. Allowing the flow of their existence to illuminate our own true nature is humbling in a God like degree.
First world citizens often fail to realize the tremendous amount of freedom and dignity that Bitcoin can offer in places where hyperinflation and/or totalitarianism is a reality. Many souls and families were literally saved by Bitcoin.
This value tends to only increase actually, because the natural order of any given state is to increase itβs own power in detrimental to the power of the individual.
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First world citizens often fail to realize the tremendous amount of freedom and dignity that Bitcoin can offer in places where hyperinflation and/or totalitarianism is a reality. Many souls and families were literally saved by Bitcoin.
This value tends to only increase actually, because the natural order of any given state is to increase itβs own power in detrimental to the power of the individual.
Buy Bitcoin
What is the nature of evil?
Doing harm and causing suffering intentionally is certainly evil.
Doing it unintentionally is somewhat evil?
One thing I know: evil exists objectively. It is everywhere and inside us all, just as benevolence and the sacred.
@davidpattersonx Oversimplifying a whole human being and classifying him as evil because of one frivolous habit is of a couple magnitudes orders higher in terms of evil significance than smoking is.
I feel that the degree of depth and profound sacredness a human being possesses is increasingly being overlooked by this tech and results only based modern society.
Delegating the capacity to understand reality to machines and instead substitute that capacity for a capacity to direct machines we ourselves donβt understand seems like a very distorted way to move forward as a species.
@PeterDiamandis Do we want to understand reality ourselves or do we want the reality to be understood in general? They r not mutually exclusive, but if they were I would side with the flesh because flesh is best
By achieving the desire to be free from desires, what state would you realistically be in? This is empirically and objectively total bullshit. There is no life without desires. How would you get up from bed or eat a fruit without desire? The degree of quality and morality in our desires are the more appropriate frame to think about it
@davidpattersonx Oversimplifying a whole human being and classifying him as evil because of one frivolous habit is of a couple magnitudes orders higher in terms of evil significance than smoking is.
Them the follow up should be:
How can I grow my capacity and preference for truth?
How can I grow my capacity to act and use truth to base my actions
I can see the trait of being able to see the truth, not run away from it, and yet not act upon it. This is more common than weβd like to think, specially with the overwhelming state of modern society
By achieving the desire to be free from desires, what state would you realistically be in? This is empirically and objectively total bullshit. There is no life without desires. How would you get up from bed or eat a fruit without desire? The degree of quality and morality in our desires are the more appropriate frame to think about it
@DigitalJoe808@Innerdevcrypto Take a deep breath and read it all again. You'r projecting stuff that were never said. It was never said that this war is not valid or should never have started. What was said is that the way it is being carried on is kind of stupid and naive, at least it seems that way.
@DigitalJoe808@Innerdevcrypto Those are justifications on the reasons to get into the war, not excuses to not plan properly for the war itself and its consequences, which was the point of the OP.