The Annihilation of the Subtle Body & Resistance to Pleasure

Pleasure Distortion

Everyday I try to find a small but true pleasure and to actually receive it.

Sometimes a quiet moment with my green-eyed cat, other times a silent morning gaze into the rolling clouds.

The challenge comes when in the moment I am receiving this pleasure, I run into agitation because I have been taught to fear receiving and being still.

I have lived my life in a place (New York) and era (now) in which desensitization is a pillar of culture.

Our sensory receptors have been manipulated to make us want more. In other words, our senses have been trained to feel constant unhappiness with what we already have.

In some ways, the instantaneous nature of our commercial culture and technology has robbed us of the feeling of satisfaction that comes from wayfinding.

(Remember looking for a CD or ordering it on a catalog and your friends being so excited that you had it. That was deeply satisfying.)

Maximalist Island Roots

I was raised in the maximalist culture of the Philippines.

In the Philippines, you don’t just sing, you sing for hours, and if you want you drag your karaoke machine to the tennis courts for all to hear. (Yes my uncle did this. He is good at having fun.) If you’re going to eat, eat until you can’t. If you’re going to enjoy, then imbibe without limitation.

I find a lot of love and levity in this culture.

I also find a sort of numbness within me from being raised within a vibrant sensory explosion or colors, tastes, sounds and smells: a television at max volume, 7 dishes from different days, homemade, readymade and takeout littering the counters and tables, and at least three people talking at the same time.

I love this chaos, it tends to be a space without judgment,

but/and also:

I am a deeply sensitive person.

I actually think would be true for many of us if we weren’t raised in a culture of sensory overload.

You can say that sensory overload comes from living in a culture where so much of what we interact with is unnatural, but I have a feeling that even without modern technology, the people I come from would still have a proclivity for the disorganized sensual pleasure so many island cultures seem to share. But I digress.

Going back to pleasure, I wonder if the manipulated reality we live in- with heavy bass, color psychology marketing and food that’s been engineered in a to light up our taste buds - has robbed us of experiencing the forms of pleasure that our ancient ancestors had.

The pleasure of starry nights.

The pleasure of the leaves rattling in the wind.

The pleasure of tracking the behavior of small birds from the window sill, noticing the life cycle of baby crows and nests.

I wonder if we have been chronically exposed to the message that somehow this is not enough, and somehow this is boring,

that somehow one lacks sophistication, knowledge and experience if they are too entertained by what occurs on a daily basis.

I wonder if these ideas, this programming has even separated us (just a little) from our natural ability to sense and perceive what the most ancient parts of us cherished deeply, collectively revered, and filled us with a sense of abundance.

From Newsletter - Start Here

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From Newsletter - Start Here 〰️

The Annihilation of the Subtle Body

This is a dramatic subtitle, but I really feel called to call things what they are.

We are magical, intuitive, celestial earth-born beings.
We live in all the dimensions at once. Our minds are incredibly flexible, diverse and mysterious.

And so much of our power lies in our subtle sensing and emotional capacity.

When we feel like we aren’t connecting to our intuition, it might be because the subtle body is constantly talked over.

A lifetime of desensitizing the most sensitive and ancient parts of us, (the parts of us that know the cosmos), causes us expect something from our subtle senses that they cannot gives us :  the clear answers, prescriptive plans, and stories we can easily understand. Those are the expectations of the desensitized mind, not the innate senses.

This is what consumption and consumption-based education has done to annihilate the subtle body. 

We are looking for what doesn’t exist in the subtle realm: a one-dimensional answer that never changes spoken in the language of the analytical mind. 

We are looking for what does not exist and so we are missing what is available right there. 

For me, sometimes it is nothing but a feeling I should pick up a book, or write a song. Sometimes it’s just a beautiful warm buzz moving around my body or the colors becoming a rainbow behind my eyelids.

I know some people can see your aura, or hear your guides speak, and that is really beautiful, but I wonder if somehow, we are looking for our spirits to talk to us in ways that they are not, and missing the art, the poetry, the connections, the moments and synchronicities they keep sending. The ones that are presently available now, 

and now.

and now.

While You’re Busy Building What Doesn’t Exist

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While You’re Busy Building What Doesn’t Exist 〰️

While You’re Busy Building What Doesn’t Exist

While You’re Busy Building What Doesn’t Exist

Will you take a moment to lick the air

To notice the fourth phase of water

Lives in your body.

Theres a song you’re already singing.

A ray of light you are already omitting, 

A bird nearby singing to you, 

A feather falling out of the sky to greet you. 

Will you see what has already landed 

In your reality all around you. 

Will you look at your body, its cells renewing 

At the way your ears curve like a sculpture made of the earth,

Will you receive the sounds you can make from your lips

And the way your throat vibrates when you sing. 

There is so much we don’t know

And also so much we have already met.

The dew drops, even the aching of muscles

After a long walk. There is so much richness

Available to us in this moment, 

I wonder who has taught us

Life is unbearable,

Now is not enough,

You are not enough,

The sand, the ocean, the beaches

The fossils of whales,

The sharks near the shore, all of this is not enough.

HA! This is only true

Because of the culture 

We have built to protect 

This lie and keep it alive. 

A lie so massive it has caused us

To forget everything. 

To make it so we cannot

See what is there,

and instead yearn for what is not.

This lie will wear you down if you do not root it out.

It will make your hope seem like it does not have a home.

It will ruin your insides with its untruth

And sabotage your relationships when you cannot believe

You are enough and they are enough and we have had enough. 

This lie makes you work so hard to be loved.

This lie makes you feel like you must ask permission to be alive.

This is the lie that life is not enough.

What a hilarious thing.

Look at a beetles wings.
Look at what a butterfly does for love. Just to exist.

Look at the millions of small furry animals living with us indoors sleeping in our beds. Look at the way they make us melt just by wagging their tails and lying down on pillows.

You can’t fool us.

We are loving, 

Tender, ephemeral, mortal, immortal 

creatures capable of, born of and and 

surrounded by art.

Trees, rocks, hives, 

Sunsets, rivers, moss. 

We are undeniably made by the imagination of this universe. 

Knowing this - that you are

An anomalous miracle designed to be interdependent

With other precious anomalous miracles makes

Aspects of the world we have created

Feel ridiculous: business casual, customer service

Menus, clicking and clacking indoors with no light

To prove you deserve to be kept alive, 

That you have a right to exist. Ha!

You are the beetle’s wings,

You are the river. You are the mountain, the sunset

And sunrise. The waves and the quiet small oak patiently growing Into its own forest.
You are designed in and among these 

Beings because you are them. 

And they are you.

And you are enough.