Nothing Feels Good Anymore? Why Women’s Pleasure Isn’t a Luxury

I was sitting with a woman at the beginning of her first 1:1 session last year. I could tell she was feeling exhausted and deflated.

When I asked her, “Is there anywhere in your body that feels good right now?”

She replied, “Nothing feels good anymore.”

I wish this was a rare occurrence, but it’s not.

Some days it feels like there is a bottomless pit of people who

a) are worried they’re not good enough and/or that they’re a bad person — for sending their kid to private school, pitching their work, going on a retreat, making “too much” or “not enough” money, not fitting into a political box, not being with their kid every second of the day, etc.

and

b) have little-to-no experience of anything feeling good in their body, and they feel disconnected from their body even when nothing is technically “wrong”.

These two symptoms are… related, and my work helps you rewrite, rebirth and heal from this whole pattern.

For symptom A — not feeling good enough — you can read or listen to anything I published last year for more on “goodness” and how it’s keeping you stuck. (Start here and here). Or, you can purchase my masterclass VIRGIN if you’re ready to stop reading and get transforming.

For symptom B — the State of Nothing Feels Good — this article unpacks some common patterns operating below the surface of this state.

Pleasure — How to Take the Temperature (and Why It Matters)

It doesn’t matter how you use the bit lip emoji or how much smutty fiction you read. To quickly understand how well pleasure and the erotic are going in your life, all we have to do is look at the quality of your relationships.

Yes, those relationships — your relationship with your body, with your partner/spouse, with your time, your money, with sex, with Life, with Desire Itself and with God Herself.

Double yes — how you relate to the Divine/the Infinite one hundred percent informs how/if/when you enjoy your life. I know most somatic people and psychology people (and even spiritual people) would like to keep these separate, but… they’re not.

Why Feeling Disconnected From Your Body Isn’t Normal

Though it is common, Nothing Feels Good is NOT normal.

It’s a disconnection, disembodiment and lack of life force. If you feel disconnected from your body more often than not, this is what’s actually happening underneath it. So it makes sense that it coincides with feeling drained, depressed, anxious or like you’re getting left out of something important (even if you can’t put your finger on what that is exactly).

When we’re living in this impoverished state, we’re unable to heal, expand and create in meaningful ways. This blocks your ability to take action towards your goals and desires. It inhibits your ability to feel satisfied and enjoy what you already have.

The good news is Nothing Feels Good is not a permanent state.

Pleasure is something you can learn, cultivate and amplify. The flame of pleasure, desire and aliveness is always trying to kick on inside of you — even if you’ve neglected it for years, been hurt, have no idea how to untangle the massive ball of resentment and annoyance with your spouse or can’t remember the last time you felt good (if ever).

Pleasure is not a Luxury. It’s a Sign of Life.

But how can I feel good in my body, my day, my life when THIS is happening?! {gestures to the world or the latest social media outrage}

You Don’t Have to Earn Pleasure

Contrary to popular opinion, pleasure isn’t something you have to earn or deserve. Everything doesn’t actually have to be perfect in order for you to access and amplify feeling good.

Louder… for the people in the back…

YOU DON’T HAVE TO DESERVE FEELING GOOD.

YOU DON’T HAVE TO EARN PLEASURE.

EVERYTHING DOESN’T ACTUALLY HAVE TO BE PERFECT TO FEEL GOOD.

Feeling Bad is not a penance that gets you anything meaningful. It doesn’t help the world. It doesn’t make anyone else’s life better. Your feeling bad doesn’t alleviate anyone else’s suffering.

It is a sign of dissonance and disconnection. It’s a sign that something wants to be healed.

The story that you aren’t allowed to feel good unless everyone else is on their best behavior and the world is doing what it “should” is bullshit. Because it will never happen.

When we orient to pleasure as if it’s an exceptional, extraordinary luxury — for when everything is all right everywhere else — rather than a lifeline, we stay locked in a cycle of endless postponing and waiting that drains our capacity to be alive all the way right now.

When you stay locked in feeling bad, your ability to grow, sustain and nourish others is also low. You aren’t helping or healing anything in this state. Because you aren’t connected to the regenerative web of life needed to do those things.

We think we’re being “responsible” when we deny the fun things, the pleasurable things, the Beautiful. We’re being “mature” when we always prioritize productivity over pleasure.

But it has a counter-effect.

When pleasure is consistently denied, it limits the amount of nourishment and life force running through your body, ideas, relationships.

Without it, healing, creativity and relationships stagnate. There are more obstacles than there were before. You keep having to generate more and more willpower to keep going on an ever-decreasing supply. Your giving becomes obligation instead of overflow. You start running on empty that keeps getting emptier. Cue: the martyr complex and massive backpack of resentment and frustration.

If we were to flush these tactics of transactional living — earning and deserving — down the toilet, most people would be left dazed and confused. Yet, this is the belief operating system for most people’s whole life and values.

Pleasure Is a Cause and Effect of Being Alive

But if feeling good isn’t dependent on perfect weather, everyone else being ok or making good grades… then what is it?

Pleasure is a cause and effect of being Alive.

It’s an effect of wholeness, support, intimacy, love and presence.

It’s also a cause that co-creates these things.

When we’re attuned to our desire…

When we have access to our presence and embodiment…

We feel Alive, and Aliveness feels good.

Wholeness feels good.

So does desire, intimacy, love, presence.

From here, pleasure feeds the Desire for Life itself.

If Nothing Feels Good, the desire to be alive weakens and wanes. And vice versa. It is not a luxury. It’s your actual life.

When it feels good to be here, you are here in your body on the planet in your actual life… Now.

The sensations, emotions, and experiences that much of society deems “a waste of time for a Monday” are actually what keep you human and here, entrenched with Life itself.

Think of a tree (always).

The farther down its roots reach into the beautiful, rich, dirty, soil full of bones and history, endings and everything that has happened before… the more resilient the tree is.

The more nourishment it has access to. The taller and wider it gets. The more fruit it bears. The more it can regenerate and replenish. The more it can create more of itself. The more resources it has, the more birds can nest in its branches and the more trees it can support and communicate with.

But you have to reach down in it. Down HERE into the dirty, rich, alluring soil of What Is Here. Now. Feel good inside of it. Go down deeper. Allow it to resource you, nourish you, connect you to the web of support and life that’s already all around you.

The more you enjoy reaching your hands, your body down here on the planet here and now and derive pleasure from it… the more this cycle sustains the deeper your roots go down into the alluring and endlessly regenerative plane(t).

Pleasure is not a luxury. It’s nourishment.

Pleasure Is Not an Idea or Ideal — It’s Embodied

Dissociation and disembodiment stem from a log of things. Frequently, they are the result of a transcendent spiritual belief system, inherited patterns, a skillful trauma reaction that’s no longer current — or a combination of these and more. In these states, our sense of self and reality are hovering around us, outside of us, rather than inside of us. We’re experiencing life from the mind, from the outside like an autobiographer and not as the protagonist feeling the journey.

As we discussed in the earlier section, true pleasure asks you to get into your body and down Here. Inside your experience, rather than narrating it from the outside. When we try to relate to pleasure without healing our way into this embodiment, pleasure stays stuck in the land of ideas and ideals. It becomes unattainable, compartmentalized, distant. This is the real difference between chasing an idea of pleasure and building embodied pleasures you can actually feel in your body.

But embodiment isn’t an ideal. It’s messy and imperfect, unpredictable, uncertain. Life is a world of Beauty, sure. But also a world of teeth and sweat, blood and dirt, death and hunger. It’s not ideal. But it’s real.

Spiritual people in particular tend to resist this. They are endlessly holding themselves and everything else on the planet up to some standard of perfect, transcendent ideals — how things should be. And they won’t commit to being here or having a good time until someone fixes everything that’s wrong.

Staying stuck in these ideals keeps you dissociated and living in the abstract, the mental. Once again, pleasure is stuck in a story of waiting and postponing until everything’s perfectly safe, certain, and everyone is on their best behavior. A lovely ideal, but not what life in a body actually is. This is pleasure’s biggest invitation and Her ultimate ask: come all the way into relationship with your self and What Is… As It Is with all of you.

If we’re stuck in the idea and ideal of pleasure, rather than embodied reality, our actual life and relationships stay at bay. Pleasure becomes something we try to access or understand mentally. In ideal land, pleasure often shows up in the form of escape. It stays compartmentalized in our projections of other people’s lives, fantasy and something we can only experience alone or away from all that is not yet ideal. Pleasure lives in the book but not the actual bedroom (or dinner table, afternoon walk or waking up in the morning). It’s stuck in the idea of your partner not your actual partner. It’s in the idea of sex rather than your experience of it. It’s in the idea of your day not your actual day.

If we stay in this escape mode, pleasure stays just that… an idea, an escape. A private, hidden, fictionalized fantasy of who we are and how life “should” be — well protected and justified by fortresses of our values and ideals. But it never becomes an embodied, integrated reality in how we actually experience life. It never becomes something that actually nourishes, feeds and fills you, which is what’s needed to find your own strength and resilience to meet your life as it is (and even enjoy it).

No One Taught You How to Feel Good

If these patterns sound familiar, it’s nothing to be ashamed of. I see them all the time, and you are definitely not alone.

Very few people were taught to orient to what feels good in a life-giving, embodied way.

Maybe you didn’t have enough touch and affection as a child. Maybe you were scolded when you were caught self-pleasuring or making out with your high school love interest. Maybe your religious upbringing shamed it out of you with talk about “sin” and “impurity.” At the very least, most children were (are) not around adults who are actually enjoying their embodiment and accessing pleasure. So as a kid, you didn’t have it mirrored back to as a possibility.

School certainly didn’t teach you. Your parents probably had no idea themselves so they weren’t able to pass it on to you.

Most learning environments foster chronic stress and reinforce a negative bias that trains you to search for fear, negativity and pain, which leaves you exhausted. Your body confuses pleasure with numbing out which leaves you even more tired and depleted rather than rejuvenated and resourced.

Pleasure gets cut off, scheduled out, deprioritized as we’re trained to be busy, obedient, kind and accommodating.

It’s easy to see why so many of us inherited systems that had little capacity for pleasure or feeling good.

Effort? Sure! Panic? 100%! Fear? Of course! Busyness? Since kindergarten! Everyone is doing these.

The reasons are endless. This developmental lack creates a massive deficit and limitation in your system. Pleasure feels foreign, out of reach or even scary. The minute you start feeling good, your body and your brain start talking you out of it or waiting for the other shoe to drop and finding a reason to be afraid. This is a pattern that you are used to.

Though it is common, that doesn’t mean it’s normal or natural. Regardless of what your reasons are. It is just that…a pattern. It’s not permanent. Patterns can be healed and remade.

If your current pattern is wired around fear, being upset, relating to life in ideals or anything else… it can heal. It can reweave around pleasure, feeling good, presence.

This Is Where Somatic Healing Comes In

This is exactly the work of somatic healing. What I love about my work is that I get to watch people heal into a state of being and feeling they didn’t know was possible before — states of power, enjoyment, intimacy and freedom. And it’s not because they’re special. It’s because they had the courage to learn a new way of being, embody a different story, feel something new and move closer to their beautifully imperfect life.

Pleasure Is Nourishment

Your current experience of pleasure is a pattern. A pattern that you inherited, learned, evolved on the way to right Now. To change these (often deeply ingrained and entrained and enculturated) patterns, you need more than a one time meditation and inspirational Instagram post.

You need a sustained orientation that keeps teaching you, feeding you and inviting you, all of you, into a new way of being.

Pleasure is nourishment that sustains you. Frankly, it’s not optional if you want to do this human story and you would like to play a part besides the martyr or the grumpy one.

Remember our tree analogy?

It takes effort and energy to grow down and reach up, becoming the Mother Tree of the forest of your Life. Where does that energy come from? Well, it’s not coming from the patterns and paradigms that leave you depleted, sad and afraid. It’s coming from the desire to be here and experience it with pleasure.

Not only does pleasure and enjoyment nourish your physical body, your relationships and your environment, it also feeds your energy body — the part of your system that interfaces with the unseen world, navigates with cosmic wisdom and creates with interstellar intelligence.

When all the layers of you — seen and unseen — are nourished, fed and radiant, the more you experience support, synchronicity, attraction, intimacy and inspiration. The more you “just know” what to do next. The more you feel on your precise path which it becomes your gift to unfold.

Is your current pattern nuanced, complex and multi-faceted? Of course it is. We all are.

Working With a Somatic Coach or Somatic Sex Coach

This is the heart of somatic coaching — and specifically, the work I do as an erotic healer (some might call this a somatic sex coach). That’s why, in my work, we don’t just take a somatic and physiological approach. We don’t just try to meditate it away or positive think to the other side. We take a magical route. We follow a path that invites all of you to the table, all of your roots in the ground, so you can flourish, navigate, create and thrive.

I promise, inside any desire you have to experience more pleasure is an invitation. An invitation to embody a more real, liberated, ecstatic version of who you are — a you who is more nourished, radiant, resourced, creative, devoted and empowered.

Something in you is already, naturally, oriented to feeling good and feeling pleasure. That’s why you feel its pull or wonder where it is. It is your actual natural orientation NOT the state of Nothing Feels Good.

Even if nothing feels good anymore right now, that spark hasn’t gone anywhere — it’s just waiting for permission. And that version of you is already inside, waiting for you to come home.

It’s up to you to decide if the wait is over.

Courage.

If Something in You Just Woke Up

If some part of you softened while reading this — even just a flicker, even just a quiet “well, damn, that’s me” — that’s not a coincidence. That’s the flame doing exactly what flame does the second it senses permission: it starts to catch.

You don’t have to figure out how to feel pleasure again on your own, and you definitely don’t have to earn your way back to it. That’s quite literally the work I do — helping women stop thinking about pleasure and start living inside of it again.

EROS is the first FREE step where that begins. This class is not a fix, and it’s not one more thing to optimize. It’s a doorway back into your body, your desire, your life force — the parts of you that never actually left, they just went quiet, waiting for it to be safe to come back.

If you’re curious what that could feel like, I’d love to have you there.

Join EROS →