26. The "aliveness" flavor

Today. I wanted to talk about the feeling of being alive.

We could go on a philosophical rabbit hole, but I wanted to offer a way of seeing things. Because defining aliveness can be a challenge. As usual, take it with a grain of salt. Your definition can be very different. So many of us yearn for more. But what is "more" exactly? More meaning in our lives? More success? More fame? More wealth? I'm not going to give you the " but, you know, these things are not real life and they truly don't feed your soul". Because I'm sure you've heard it somewhere else. And it's not helping. Have you ever tried to tell yourself to calm down when you are angry? Usually, it doesn't work. We'll see today, what I discovered under this "I want more" feeling. Under this yearning for more joy, more a likeness in myself and in my coachees. And don't worry, you'll get a recap at the end because there's so much going on, under "I want more". Along with a few practical things to do on the way. So if you're ready, let's dive in. 


[: 00:02:06

How do you define aliveness? It's like writing an essay about the biggest question of life. . So, how do you define aliveness? You have four hours. Let's start first with what it's not, it's easier. 


So many of us, myself included before I started the journey, are stuck on autopilot. Sleepwalking through our own lives, half asleep and half awake, stuck into this feeling of things being blurry, gray. You're not unhappy. You're not miserable. You're just not happy. Even if you do or have done a shit amount of work on yourself. So what if the aliveness was stepping out of this autopilot? Starting to feel something again. To feel like you inhabit your body again. To actually feel something different than the few glimpses of joy sometimes, usually less and less as time goes forward or only during vacation. - So maybe that's the first step. Stepping out of autopilot and feeling something again. Feeling it. Deep in your bones. 


Yes. And. Our beautiful human brain is amazing. And is a hundred percent working against us. It reaches out to what feels good. And wants to get away from what feels painful. And yes, even if kink is your jam, I'm sure you don't like pain all the time in your daily routine, do you? Like when you touch something too hot, out of the blue. I'm not sure it's really enjoyable. 


Roughly that's called motivational salience. It's a cognitive process that makes you go towards a stimulus

. " It feels good. I want more." That's called insensitive salience. Or " get away from me. You nasty spider wasp beetroot or anything that I hate". That's called aversive salience. And yes, you can shine in society on your next dinner with this concept. It works. I promise. 


So our beautiful brain is designed to make us naturally go towards what feels good. So more feeling good and less feeling bad, please. Yes. And. We tend to apply this motivational salience to our emotions too. "Come with me great emotion of happiness, joy, fulfillment, and orgasm bliss". "Get away you anger devil, sadness monster that will ruin my life". No, I am not dramatic. The thing with emotions? You cannot selectively numb as we've discussed several times. So if you suppress your anger at some point, Everything will disappear. 


Any correlation with how society teaches women to stay calm, be good girls, be quiet, and shouldn't get angry, even if it's a hundred percent justified is coincidental. No, it's not. If you suppress your sadness and compensate it with a fake joy, soon enough, you'll start numbing yourself. And if you do that or have done that, first of all, there's nothing wrong with you, if that's where you are. However disconnected physically and sexually numb, you might feel, it has an explanation. It sucks, but that's how we work. We want more of what feels good and less of what feels bad. 


[: 00:05:54

Before we get back to feeling it all, let's take a step back and check something else. What true aliveness isn't, is going around, being constantly exhausted, being always tired, and having no energy for anything. True aliveness is when you have the energy to do stuff. And also know that deep down, "now it's not the moment to do anything". But you have the energy. If you're not doing something, it's because you need rest. Not because you're chronically tired.

True aliveness is knowing you have this source of energy available for you to live your experiences, to create what you want to create. To feel a deep human connection with the people you're meeting. And all of that, that requires energy. And the feeling of having this energy available is also what makes us feel alive. Because we feel ready to experience being alive. And we know we have the resources available to face whatever is coming our way. We feel alive when we are resourced enough. Or we feel more alive than when we are in a depleted state of energy. And guess what kills any type of energy available? Maintaining under the rug, all of the emotions we are scared of, haven't processed and all of our conditioning, perfectionism and bullshit. 


Let me tell you something. Keeping yourself stuck requires a lot of energy. Let me say that again. Keeping yourself stuck requires a lot of energy. Maintaining the status quo in your personality. Or pretending to be someone you are not takes a lot of energy. If you remember previous episodes around emotions: emotione are just sensations given meaning by our brain. And they just want to pass through your body, so that it can self-regulate and get back to a state of balance. Just like when it's really way more efficient to express a hot anger and have your heart rate decrease naturally, than trying to control your anger by breathing and forcing yourself to control your breath and then your heartbeat. Doing that requires so much effort and pain that you don't need if you just truly allow yourself to express this anger.

And that's completing the stress cycle. When you control instead of letting things go through, you, the stress cycle isn't completed. The sensations are just stuck. And a lot of energy is consumed to keep things under control. And you get tired. And once again, there is an explanation. There is nothing wrong with you. If you've been keeping that for so long, if you've been sitting on your anger for so long, Keeping it stuck and under the rug, that requires so much. And let me tell you something, you are amazing at doing that. This is not really optimal and you could definitely do something else. You have so much energy available, imagine if it was available for you, how things would change. 


[: 00:09:40

We discussed how aliveness is actually being able to feel something. And we also said it's having energy available. And what consumes energy is not allowing yourself to feel, quote-unquote, "negative emotions". There are no negative emotions, but we'll talk about that. So allowing yourself to feel only the good won't work in the long run. 


Just a disclaimer here: acknowledging something is good and that you want more of it, is different from only allowing you to feel the good and suppress everything else because it scares the shit out of you because you're going to lose control over your anger sadness, or whatever. There is a difference between the two. 


That being said. We could say being alive is the possibility to feel it all. And let it come through. Feel the greatest joys fully, knowing you can have that also because you will allow yourself to feel the pains too. The anger, the sadness. The shame. Isn't it possible to feel it all, deep in your bones, all of the motions of energy, the emotions, the palette of life flavors available... isn't that the definition of being alive? Having access to the whole palette of your life experiences... Isn't that the definition of a life worth living? And isn't a life worth living the definition of aliveness? 


And as usual, this is just an idea and your answer can be totally different. 


"Hold on a minute. You're basically saying, feeling all the shit that we've been avoiding, consciously or not, for a long time is the definition of being alive? Um, pass, sorry, I don't want that". I understand. First, it's a hundred percent your right. If you're good with where you are and good with how you feel, as I usually say, there's nothing wrong with you. Go you. You know what's best for you. Take what do you need leave what you don't. 


I just have one question is it "I don't want to do that"? Or is it because you don't trust how you will react to it? 


Let me ask that question again, it can be a little bit meta. When you feel "I don't want to do that. I don't want to feel at all"... Is it really because you don't want to feel at all? Or is it because you actually don't trust how you will feel, when you experience it. 


FoR example, if you take anger. Do you really don't want to express anger because you don't feel anger? Or are you secretly afraid of destroying the world around you and hurting the people you love, if you let that go and let it out? The same goes for sadness. We can be so afraid, myself included, to go down and meet sadness. Because we're so used to being happy, be cheerful and we are super scared people won't like us anymore if we're not happy and cheerful.

I want to acknowledge how it's okay to feel this. The lack of trust in how things will evolve and the "I don't want to do it" that goes with it. HOw could you want to do something when you don't feel strong enough inside to handle the consequences? It's like going to the gym for the first time in a long time. Knowing you will end up out of breath with muscle pain and frustration because you cannot do what you want to do. And even if that's what everyone tells you this is what you should do. You can be like "ah, hell no. I feel physically in danger when I do that. I know I'm not, but that's how I feel." And it's really hard to go against that. And that's okay. It makes sense. As usual, you're a smart being. You don't do anything stupid. You're not going to do anything that would jeopardize how you feel about the world around you. That's okay. 


[: 00:14:15

When we are on autopilot, we are disconnected from our inner resources. That's the definition of it. Because we live in a state of half-consciousness, . Of course, you can feel disconnected from your inner resources and your inner strength. And... maybe that can give us clues regarding what true aliveness is. It could be the connection to your inner resources. The trust that they are here and they will be here, whatever comes your way. Even if you feel challenged by a situation, know you have the tools to come back to your balanced state. That these tools will always be there for you. That trust that you don't have to fear your own body and your own life. That you have what it takes to meet it. To live it and to feel at all. The epic goodness and the messy shit. You are strong enough to feel that. You have the resources. To feel that 


[: 00:15:24

One of the characteristics of numbness is how it's hard, to feel pleasure. At the beginning of my self-exploration, one of the many things that made me so mad was "Do what brings you joy. Bring more pleasure to your life. Do what you used to do when you were a kid" Thank you for this big speech, but how about getting some real help for all of us down there stuck at the beginning of the journey. Yeah. It can be a little bit sassy. 


Being truly alive is allowing yourself to experience pleasure. And let's be real, at the beginning. It comes with a big mountain of bullshit to deconstruct: shame, fear, guild. Pleasure has been shamed for so long because it's one of the most powerful tools that we have. Because real pleasure, conscious pleasure, the one feeding your soul, suffers no bullshit, conditioning and things like that. There are no match from the deep waves of pleasure from your soul. They bring you to the present moment. In the purity of being alive moment. That's freaking powerful. And pretty scary too. 


All the sources of pleasure are valid. Just checking with yourself, if it's a true pleasure that feeds you deep inside. And yes, chocolate can feed your soul. Or if it's just something that brings you a mind pleasure that one last really long. 


[: 00:17:07

All of this can be the secret to finally feeling whole inside. To stop feeling you have lost a part of yourself. That something is missing. That there is this yearning inside for something, even if you don't know what it is. Personally, I've tried a lot of things, and seen many people telling me they will bring back parts of me that were lost for whatever reason. Maybe I saw the wrong practitioners, but... when I allowed myself to feel it all, to allow pleasure in my life, just a little bit, nothing fancy. I started to feel whole from the inside. And that's when I met my saucy highest self, that first suffers no bullshit, and then comes and say "ah, duh, how do you want to feel whole, if you pay someone to get the pieces of yourself lost in time and space and bring them back to you? They're never going to stick because they don't have access to your own glue. So. Pointless." If you've been here for a while, you know my highest self is a little bit sassy.




All the cliches that made me mad about how you're supposed to love yourself, things that feel inaccessible when you start. They made sense when I started to reclaim feeling it all. And my pleasure. You know that type of moment when you're like "ah, I wish that cliche wasn't true". I'm not going to lie, it's a messy ride. And I'm getting back right into my head way more often than I'm ready to admit. But it's a journey that I love sharing with you. 


Pleasure helps you feel connected to your resources. Because pleasure is a resource that we tend to forget. So when you reclaim it, oh, surprise the connection to the other works as well. How curious. 


[: 00:19:13

Another part of the emotional numbness autopilot thing that we can discuss is how. For many of us, it's associated with self-hate. Or at least some inner voices who have a lot to say. And usually mean things, I call them the SM dungeon of my head. And when you feel whole, well, you're never going to hear from them again. Nope. That was a lie. These voices are still here, I'm not sure they ever go away, but there is actually way less space for them to take. So less chances they will come yelling in your head that you suck, you little piece of crap, useless, unworthy in anything and incapable of liberal blue, blue. Yes, as you can see, I still have many in my head. When you feel whole, they become part of your inner world, but they're not in the driver's seat. Because there's less space for them. Because there are so many more things with you. You have your pleasure. You have your resources, you have the whole palette of emotion. So if there's less space available because you feel whole, you can get in a healthier relationship with these parts of you. So, yes. Feeling alive is also stepping out of self-hate and allowing yourself to be kind to yourself. Even when you mess up and could have done better. With something. 


The best part that comes with all of this? The feeling hole, that connection to the resources, the pleasure, the end of self-hate... inner peace. Real inner peace. Inner spaciousness. Knowing that you will be okay. Whatever comes. It will be bumpy. It will be messy, but you will be okay. And because you will be okay, you feel resourced enough to experience it all. And isn't that the definition of being alive? Stepping out of autopilot, previous versions of yourself that are not helping you anymore, and being ready to experience life. At least that's my wish for you. 


[: 00:21:28

So let's recap, you want to know the secret? Start with pleasure. Why? Because pleasure helps you feel alive again. And pleasure is your friend in feeling it all. The angergasm, the disgustgasm, the sadgasm... pleasure is an amazing resource. The one that nourishes you from the inside. So that you have more energy and can digest whatever you have been avoiding consciously right now. And when you connect to this powerful resource, this pleasure, you actually can recognize your other resources, your strength, your wisdom, your capacity to let go. They're all here. And they will always be. 


With your pleasure, you reclaim your true nature. Reminder the clitoris has no other purpose in bringing you pleasure, so if that's not proof you're designed to have it, I don't know what is. You build safety in your nervous system. You can step out of self-hate and find some inner peace. And also be ready for times when this inner peace will be challenged, knowing that you have access to it. And in my opinion, The mix of all of that is the definition I have found of being alive. At least for now. 


And if you have no idea where to start, because pleasure feels foreign to what's available for you at the moment. I would invite you to download my free ebook in the show notes. It's called essence awaken your census to reclaim the pleasure of feeling alive. I can't wait to hear what you think about it. And there you have it, my friend. 


h it too. And also it's still: 2023