12 Categories of Pleasure

Is life a chore?
When was the last time you had some fun, true fun, laugh out loud, hold your sides fun?
Pleasure is with us everywhere, we often get too busy to notice.
Today’s 12 categories can help you tap into finding pleasure today.

Hello My Friends,

I’ve had the pleasure of visiting a few galleries this week.
The curator of one of these galleries has an eye and flair for simplicity and elegance.
I love the way she has arranged different aspects of the display to produce an emotional response from us.
Sometimes the most dramatic things are the simplest things styled in a way to capture and delight our attention and our senses. Today I want to talk about pleasure.
This topic is an ongoing theme in my life.
I tend to let the joy of slowing down and savouring the moment, slip from me as I rush and bustle to get things done.
Having grown up in an environment where pleasure was frowned upon, it is taking me a lot of concentrated focus to extract the joy from my activities.
I believe life is meant for living, and adding joy and fun into the activities we do, creates a lightness of energy which brings happiness to play. However, for this mind and body, I call home, it is a constant reminder game. Being too intense sucks the joy from any activity. Pleasure is very complex, it has many facets and can be defined in many ways.
Since pleasure is subjective and dependent on your history, your perspectives, your environment and your personality, I will categorise pleasure into 12 broad categories, with a brief description about each one. Beginning with the most well known and easily recognised pleasure.
1) Physical Pleasure: This includes the sensations from your five senses. The joy of touch, the satisfaction gained from eating delicious food, engaging in sexual and sensual activities, experiencing physical comfort, and the sensations of aroma, music, a loved ones voice, all the sensory experiences.
2) Emotional Pleasure: Emotional pleasure involves positive feelings and emotions. Things like joy, elation, happiness, contentment.
Emotional pleasure fills your body with sensations of love, and well being. Emotional pleasure can feel like a comforting blanket on a cold night, something that you look forward to enjoying.
3) Intellectual Pleasure: Creating an environment that stimulates your mind and your intellect. Trying out new things to see what will happen.
Solving problems gives your brain a challenge to focus on. Your brain loves a challenge. Intellectual pleasure can also include creative endeavours, hobbies, crafts, art created and appreciated, literature and music.
4) Social Pleasure: Engaging in social activities, interacting and forming meaningful connections with others can be a huge source of pleasure.
As humans we crave human interactions and connections. Spending time with family, friends, and loved ones help to contribute to our experiencing a sense of belonging, which gives us social satisfaction and pleasure.
5) Aesthetic Pleasure: Appreciating beauty, style, form and colour in all its magnificent glory. This can include nature, the beauty of an expansive vista.
Or man created art, architecture and designs. Aesthetics is anything you find as a visually pleasing experience.
6) Experiential Pleasure: This can include things like travel, immersing yourself into new cultures and experiencing total immersion of all the unknown and unfamiliar have to share with you. Exploring all forms of new things come into this category, like bungy jumping, water skiing, sky diving, swimming, things that absorb all your senses.
7) Spiritual Pleasure: Engaging in practices that can be classed as spiritual, nurturing for your soul, can bring a lot of pleasure and create a feeling of connectedness with a higher purpose or beliefs.
This may look like quiet meditation, or moving meditation, prayer, journaling, contemplaton of who you are and how you fit into the scheme of life.
Spiritual pleasure is as diverse as the people who use it or seek it, giving the feelings of peace, harmony, and fulfillment.
8) Altruistic Pleasure: This pleasure comes to you from your giving and sharing of yourself to others. This could look like coaching a sports team, volunteering for a club, taking someone under your wing as a mentor/mentee relationship.
You may feel pleasure from knowing you are making a difference, a positive impact on the world, in your community, in your culture.
9) Nostalgic Pleasure: The joy of remembrances, reflecting on past experiences and memories, especially those that bring joy and happiness.
Nostalgic pleasure can remind you how far you have come on your journey in life. Creating a feeling of well-being and hope.
10) Playful Pleasure: For me personally this is one type of pleasure I want to add to my life more regularly. This is where you engage in playful activities.
This could look like board games, riding the swing, or bouncing on the see saw with a child. Children have this type of pleasure sorted, it seems to come naturally to them, before it is trained out of them.
Hobbies, and non competitive sporting games can foster this carefree and joyful kind of pleasure.

11) Sensory Pleasure: This is one step up the ladder from our basic senses, this involves the subtle art of feeling, feeling the nuances in an experience.
Such things as the gentle breeze across a garden of flowers, creating a scented aroma that bathes you in love.
The warmth of the sunlight on your bare skin, or the coolness of stepping into a pool of water on a scorching hot day. These add depth to the sensations of physical pleasure.
12) Achievement Pleasure: This type of pleasure is one of my strong attributes. I love to achieve goals, to have the joy of ticking them off my list.
An achievement pleasure is meeting challenges, growing into new skills and abilities, realising you can do what you didn’t think you could.
It’s realizing personal goals, career goals, financial goals, travel goals, parenting goals, any goal you care to set to stretch yourself from where you are to where you want to be.
When you achieve a goal, take the time to bask in the sense of accomplishment and feel the pride and pleasure in yourself for your achievement. These are 12 categories of pleasure, remember these categories will and do overlap and interact with each other, and what brings you pleasure may not be a pleasure to someone else.
That is why it is so important to find what gives you the most pleasure and add it to your day, and also to select one area of pleasure that is more difficult for you and begin to add a little more of that to your life.
Adding pleasure brings a dimension of energy and health to your life that generates a lighter feeling of peace and harmony. Your challenge for this week, is to select one form of pleasure that is new to you and include it in your week, notice how weird it feels, and what the feeling is.
If you’d like to tell me about it, I’d love to hear your experience.

Leave a comment below, I”d love to connect with you.

oxoxo Linda.

As a certified Life Coach, I help you to help yourself, so you can create a well lived life your way. 

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