Hello friends.
Thank you to all of our founding members and early subscribers. Wow. I am beyond thrilled by your response!
The Pleasure Report is more than a publication, we are building a community. I invite you to join in the comments below. Let us know, What brings you here? What is your relationship to pleasure? How has it changed with all the seismic shifts in our culture? What would you like to see in this newsletter? Join us in shaping TPR.
Dance Floor Downloads
For the past four years, I have been going to a dance class called Five Rhythms. It is a moving meditation and anyone can do it. There are only two rules: no shoes, no talking and one suggestion: never stop moving.
Because we can’t talk, we communicate with our bodies. If you want to dance with someone, you might start by making eye contact, acknowledge them with a nod or a smile. You might begin to mirror each other’s movements. If that is going well, you take a step closer, riffing with their dance. Maybe add some counter movement, a punctuation to their sentence. And so it goes — acknowledge, mirror, play. It’s not unlike children on the playground. Or dogs in the park.
Some people dance with their eyes closed and never engage with anyone else. Some dancers end up In big circles. It’s different every time.
During the pandemic, we have taken to dancing outdoors. And now that the sun sets early, we dance outside in the dark. This changes everything. I can’t recognize dancers by their faces or their movements. It makes me realize how much I have favored visual input. Now, it’s all about energy, how it feels to be in the orbit of another person. I may never know their name or be able to recognize them later to thank them for the dance.
We have all been experiencing a bit of this with our new mask culture. Suddenly we are reading eyes, looking at entire bodies for signals. Maybe we are all learning to feel one another.
It strikes me that this is helpful for all of us at this moment in time when our country is starkly divided. When the dust settles next week, we will be looking for ways to connect with people who have very different beliefs, experiences and backgrounds. If you are like me, that includes family. Might we dim our focus on those differences, drop into our bodies and attend to the feeling of each other? Would we end up dancing with the people we already know and love? Or is it possible that we would find connections that surprised us?
INVITATIONS:
We Write Truth
To celebrate our new beginning of TPR, we are hosting a live, communal writing event, Sunday November 8th @ 6:30 EST, over zoom. We will read each other published work on the subject of The Truth, host a series of structured writing prompts on The Truth, and have the opportunity to share that writing with each other. It's a salon, a sanctuary, a literary foxhole. It just might be a communal, cathartic scream.
Please join us. There will be music.
A human being is amazing, miraculous. They are standing in front of you. What is the appropriate response? The appropriate response is a question mark.
We can put each other in boxes, these are the good boxes, the bad boxes, these are the cool boxes. #*@k it. Be fascinated. — Gabrielle Roth, creator of Five Rhythms.
FROM THE INSTITUTE OF PLEASURE STUDIES:
Check out this beautiful little trailer for a documentary about Five Rhythms.
Geek out with me on this science about biomagnetic communication between humans (and humans and animals)
Find a dance community. Tons of zoom offerings like Qoya and Afro-Carribean and The Get Down and my favorite, Five Rhythms.
Next week, I will introduce you to our amazing team who have been researching and writing alongside me and who are helping to envision this endeavor.
If you haven’t yet subscribed, we invite you to be a founding member. Or join monthly or annually for special reports, interviews, features and invitations.
And if you know someone who would love a little dose of pleasure in their lives.
It’s a new day.
Here we go!
Sue Jaye Johnson
