3 Easy Ways to Enhance Your Capacity for Pleasure

Written by Deonesea La Fey, Relationship and Intimacy Coach

Deonesea is a Relationship and Intimacy Coach who helps driven, high-powered women bring themselves out of the burn-out of masculine overdrive into the relaxed lusciousness of feminine receptivity. She guides women to embody their own personal pleasure and to create deeper connections. As a result of working with her, women learn how to embrace their feminine energy, reclaim their sexuality, and receive the love they long for.

In the busyness of life, we can easily lose track of our pleasure, touching it only in moments at the end of the day or the end of the work week, and not really focusing on how much more pleasure we could be having in our lives. And because we don’t prioritize it, and we don’t stop to question why we don’t prioritize it, we grow accustomed to a particular setpoint around pleasure, and we stay there. We don’t even realize that we could be having so much more of it.

What does ‘capacity for pleasure’ mean?

Capacity is about how much we can hold. If we come to realize that our pleasure is a source of nourishment and life fulfillment, then we can benefit from learning how to expand our capacity for how much pleasure we can hold. In doing so, we can experience greater satisfaction, better health, a more vibrant sense of self, and deeper connection with our lovers, as well as with other relationships in our lives. So, here are my top three tips on how you can hold more pleasure in your life.

1. Focus on your breathing

Breathwork, and all the ways we can use it to feel more grounded, centered, and present in our lives, has been at the forefront of mindfulness and personal growth for several years. Because it has become more mainstream to recognize the importance of breathwork practices, we can easily gloss over or underestimate the real value of placing our focus there.

The most fundamental thing to understand and remember about our breath is that it's always with us, we always have access to it. When we train ourselves to be conscious of our breath and our ability to move energy with it, we can turn to it as one of the simplest, most accessible ways to enhance our pleasure, as well as our overall well-being.

Consciously breathe into body sensations

One of the ways we most often leave or limit our pleasure is by getting into our heads. This happens a lot for women during foreplay and sex, as we get invested in the thoughts running through our minds rather than staying involved in the sensations in our bodies. We start thinking about our to-do list and how we look in the moment, or we start posturing and being performative. But if instead we learn to breathe into our sensations, we can help ourselves stay fully involved in our pleasure experience.

As we become practiced at staying with our pleasure sensations, we can learn to make them bigger by consciously breathing into them. For example, if you are feeling tingling in your breasts and you inhale, thinking about your inhalation going directly into that delicious sensation, you'll expand the feeling of pleasure there. With each exhalation, imagine that your body can absorb that amount of pleasure. Then, with each next inhalation, expand the sensation further.

You can practice this while having a massage, while self-pleasuring, and while being with a lover. You can also practice this while sipping a lovely cup of tea in the morning before you start your day. The practice is to find a pleasurable sensation in your body and focus on breathing into it to make it bigger.

Explore different types of breathwork

Because breathwork has been such a hot topic for so many years, we now have access to variations on breathwork that yogis have used since ancient times. We can really up our pleasure game by learning to incorporate some new breathwork patterns that are meant to help us feel our bodies more and to help us expand our pleasure. Among the many forms of breathwork to explore, my personal favorites are Kundalini breathing and breathing through the Microcosmic Orbit.

By investing time in learning a breathwork pattern that works for you, you're building in an easy pathway that you can use throughout your day-to-day life, and for the rest of your life, that will help you feel more embodied and have greater access to your own pleasure.

Related article: Breathwork Unveiled – Bridging Science and Mysticism

2. Expand your nervous system setpoint

We know from neuroscience that our nervous systems have plasticity, meaning that they can change. We also know from our own personal experiences that sometimes we can feel a lot of energy moving in our nervous system, and other times we can feel really dull in our bodies. That has to do with how our nervous system is communicating to our brain, and how our brain is communicating to our nervous system.

In the realms of pleasure, it is good to know that we can actually identify how our nervous system is moving and integrating pleasure, and to know how we can help it do that more smoothly and to a greater degree.

Determine your upper limit

In his book The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level, New York Times bestselling author and founder of the Hendricks Institute, Gay Hendricks, describes the Upper Limit Problem as the notion that we each have a subconscious limit on how much success and happiness we can allow ourselves to have.

To apply this to your relationship with pleasure is to understand that throughout your life, whatever experiences you’ve had involving pleasurable feelings, whether they were welcome or unwanted, exciting or shameful, trained your nervous system to cap the amount of pleasure you can have. Once you’ve reached that cap, you will unconsciously do something to bring yourself back down from that limit so as not to stretch beyond what feels safe to your nervous system.

There are several sabotage patterns people use to get back into the safe zone. Commonly, one first starts to think worrisome thoughts or feel the building of an unpleasant sensation, like irritation or annoyance. That is followed by an action or experience, like getting sick, fixating on a problem, or picking a fight with your partner.

You can help this situation by identifying what your upper limit around pleasure is, simply by taking some time to think about your pleasure experiences throughout your life. Note how much joy you can experience on your weekend or holiday, how much enjoyment you get out of having a massage or through lovemaking, and look for the thread that runs through your experiences.

Pay special attention to instances in which you were having a great time, then suddenly everything changed. You had a fight with a friend a few hours into your holiday and couldn’t stop thinking about it the rest of the time you were there. You checked your emails as soon as you walked out of the massage and encountered a huge problem that spiked your stress levels right back up. Or you started thinking about all of the things you didn’t finish from the day while you were making love and completely lost touch with the pleasure you were in.

From there, identify what uncomfortable thoughts or sensations you feel when you’ve reached your limit, and what kinds of things you do to come back into safety.

Take the rise and plateau approach

Once you've identified what your upper limit around pleasure is, and what the thought or sensation is that signals you've reached that limit, then you’re empowered with knowledge about your own nervous system. And you can become empowered with knowledge about how to change it. Once you have this information, the thing to do is learn how to rise and plateau.

Intentionally create an experience, like going for a massage, having a self-pleasuring session, or taking a weekend getaway, and pay close attention to yourself in that experience until you notice that sensation or thought pattern that tells you you’ve reached your upper limit.

When you feel yourself at the limit, gently shift into doing something more active with your body, like dancing strongly or shaking your body. This will help your nervous system adjust and rise a bit beyond your limit. Once there, hold that level of newfound pleasure sensation. Plateau at that new level for some time before you try to achieve a next greater level of sensation. If you keep using the rise and plateau technique, over time you'll expand your capacity for pleasure to a much greater degree.

3. Discover your personal pleasure map

Sadly, because of the way most of us learn about sex, either through sex education at school or through our earliest sexual experiences, we tend to learn that sex has to do with our mouth, our breasts, and our genitals. What we don't learn is that we can actually expand into sensation throughout our entire body, as well as into our energy fields.

The idea of the pleasure map is based on the knowledge that your entire body contains your nervous system and therefore has the potential to have sensation throughout all of your body parts. So you want to learn to pleasure map your body and find all the places and all the ways that you can feel sensations of pleasure.

Pleasure lives in your body, and it also lives in your heart and in your mind. To fully embody pleasure, you want to intimately know your own desires.

Enjoy a pleasure ritual

Create a ritual, for yourself or with another, by carving out uninterrupted time and setting a space that’s designed for exploring pleasure. Make sure things are clean and tidy in the space and visually appealing. Make the room temperature comfortable, be warm enough, light some candles or turn on beautiful lighting, have yummy sheets or blankets that you can feel on your skin, burn incense or use aromatherapy to light up your sense of smell, and have some honey, berries, or chocolate on hand that’s appealing to your taste buds. Think of the ways you can engage all of your senses.

Once the space is set, use your breath to slow down and immerse yourself in the beautiful setting you’ve created. If you’re solo, start to move your hands all around your body, first softly, then more strongly. Caress and massage areas of your own body: your face, your torso, your belly, your inner thighs, behind your knees, and start finding the places where it feels nice for you to touch.

To share this with a lover, you can take turns discovering each other's pleasure maps. Begin by breathing together, then massaging one person at a time. One person receives, and the other gives through a full-body exploration, then trade places. You can incorporate things like feathers, rose petals, and soft fabrics with which you can caress each other's bodies. Get creative. Let this be about play, fun, and exploration. Communicate a lot with each other about any area that feels especially pleasurable, and add those to the pleasure map.

Related article: Sensual Massage – A Journey to Female Fulfillment and Well-Being

Focus on desire

We tend to lead very busy lives full of all kinds of things, and pleasure is often not at the top of the list of priorities. Whether we're having a lot of it or very little of it, we tend to come to sex from being busy and hurried, such that the sex we’re having is routine. While having a routine with ourselves or with someone else can be really wonderful, the human psyche also wants variety and adventure. We thrive on the feeling of desire, it’s akin to our feeling of aliveness.

What kind of pleasure do you desire?

Ask yourself that question regularly, then take the time to fulfill the desire.

Seek immersive experiences and coaching

Find weekend or retreat immersions that are geared towards leading you through explorations of your pleasure. Or engage with coaches who can provide guidance, support, and insights based on their own experiences and expertise. Look for experiences that can both meet you where you’re at and expand you beyond that.

More pleasure for you

Learning to be fully available in our bodies is one of the foundational pieces of being an embodied woman. You can expand your embodiment and capacity for pleasure by immersing yourself in one of my online courses.

Feeling disconnected from pleasure altogether? Reconnect to your desire through Igniting Pleasure.

You’re connected but wanting to take it further? Enjoy breathwork and embodiment practices through Cultivating Pleasure.

If you’re the kind of woman who is ready to go all in, join me for a 13-day journey into the sacred heart of pleasure through this summer’s Pilgrimage to Avalon.

Feel like you’d prefer a more personal exploration? Let's work together to create a personalized roadmap tailored to your unique desires, and to overcome the obstacles standing in your way. With my expertise and support, you'll embark on a transformative journey toward an embodied way of being, one that brings you into the fulfillment of living as your greatest pleasure.

Book a complimentary Discovery Session to discuss whether coaching with me would be a good fit for you. Women empowering women to be in our feminine fullness is the wave of the now.

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Read more from Deonesea La Fey

Deonesea La Fey, Relationship and Intimacy Coach

Known as an insightful mentor, a potent ceremonialist, and an inspirational speaker, Deonesea is a recognized expert in teaching women how to improve the quality of their intimate relationships and to enhance their sense of pleasure in their day-to-day lives. As a result of 20 years of teaching women how to restore their natural femininity, Deonesea has developed a unique approach that combines practical principles, feminine wisdom teachings, and empowering techniques to guide her clients through a transformational journey of restoration and reconnection to themselves and to their intimate others.

Sources:

1. Gay Hendricks, “The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level” (HarperCollins, 21 April 2009)