Pain and Pleasure

The other day I had my first session with a somatic practitioner. As she was doing an initial evaluation, she touched part of my leg and I mentioned that it lit up a nerve on the opposite side of my leg. She asked me to do a body scan and see if I could find part of my body that was easier to be with and it turned out to be my right ear. She asked why the right ear, and I realized it was because she was on the right side of my body. Since I was face down, my right ear was doing the job of making sure I was going to be safe. To which she replied, is it okay that I’m on the right side of your body?

Automatically, I was like, what do you mean? Of course. Do whatever you need to do. To which she replied, Amy, is your body okay with me being on the right side of your body?

Ohhhh right. That’s literally the reason I was there. Because most of my life, I’ve just ignored what my body had to say and pushed through even when my body was literally screaming at me to stop. And I’m working with a somatic practitioner to learn to stop and listen to my body. It’s amazing how quickly I forgot.

Pleasure, or even just making sure something feels good before I do it, has never been a motivator for me. Most of what I do in my life has almost always been motivated by pain:

• I chose a lot of the classes I took in high school and college because I thought they were the only way to have a secure future rather than take the classes that interested me
• I’ve pushed myself through a lot of my work throughout the years because I’m scared of being fired rather than tackling work that excites me
• I’ve used tv, social media, and sugar a lot to numb the painful effects of all that pushing rather than using these sparingly as treats or something fun to indulge in
• I’ve only ever been consistent with exercise when I’ve neglected my body for so long that I end up needing to strengthen my muscles to stop my chronic pain rather than working out because it makes me feel good or because I like the feeling of being strong
• I clean the house because I feel bad that I can start to see dust collecting rather than cleaning because being in a clean space feels nice
• I do my taxes so I won’t get in trouble for tax evasion rather than… well, I suppose not everything has a pleasure-motivated option

Even with this blog—which I started because I love to write—sometimes I realize I haven’t written for awhile and I  panic because I made a commitment to write consistently. No one’s calling me out on this or shaming me, but I still scramble to find a topic to write on lest someone end up judging me. Funny enough, I will spend days on those posts and ultimately decide not to publish them because they aren’t coming together the way I want them to, whereas posts like these where I write because I have something to say come together in a couple of hours and get posted almost immediately.

I don’t know if I believe that there’s a way to live a life where we only do the things we want to do and avoid the things that bring us pain—see taxes above. I would love to think that there is, but I feel like realistically there will always be some tasks that get done because they have to be done.

But I do think it’s interesting that 99% of the time, I don’t even think to ask myself the question, “What would feel good right now?” It’s like I don’t believe something is worth doing if feeling good is the only benefit to come out of it. There’s something scary about letting myself have a life that feels pleasurable most of the time.

I’m sure I could attribute this to many things: the pull yourself up by your own bootstraps mentality of our society, the lack of safety nets for people who take risks, watching so many adults in my life push themselves through jobs that they hate to support themselves and their families, adults telling me that the things that made me feel good weren’t good for me. Our society is wired to squash your feelings, have you focus on achievement at all costs, and terrify you into submission if ambition alone doesn’t work.

Maybe in the end it doesn’t matter what caused it. What matters is that I recognize the pattern and recognize how strange it is that I don’t really know how to motivate myself outside the context of pain or fear.

I haven’t made new year’s resolutions in years, but something tells me this is going to be the big theme of 2026 for me.

• Can I shift my perspective so that I’m focusing on how a task is going to make me feel good rather than why I’m a bad person if I don’t do it?
• Can I let myself do the things that feel good just because they feel good?
• Can I prioritize the things that make me feel good over the things I’m scared will bring me pain?
• Can I make changes to my life in a way that supports my health and wellbeing and not see those as threats to or distractions from the things that I’ve always prioritized because they bring me security?

2026 is supposed to be a year of momentum and change, so I suppose this would be a good year to explore all of these things. If this is something that resonates with you, perhaps this could be an interesting theme for you to explore this year too.

Let’s bring more pleasure into our lives and into the world this year.