“I always thought pleasure was somehow bad, something I wasn’t meant to be having,” my workshop participant, Martine, told me.

I understood immediately — I was also raised to consider pleasure a greater reason for guilt than pride.

“But now,” she went on, “you’ve shown me a whole other side to pleasure. I’ve realized it’s not shallow or selfish, as I was led to believe. On the contrary, I’ve learned that moving towards pleasure, rather than being shallow, is deep and soulful. It’s so far from self-centered, it is actually a giving act where everybody benefits.”

In this era of revolution, where people around the world have been taking to the streets demanding change, from the Middle East to our own Occupy Wall Street in NYC, I’m going to suggest another revolutionary occupation — for you to occupy your pleasure.

Pleasure is sadly misunderstood. While yoga has become mainstream and garnered a positive rap for connecting you to your higher self, pleasure’s reputation is the opposite — that it’ll drag you down to your lower self.

Reclaiming the Divine Pleasure

This widespread myth, that pleasure is at odds with higher values, is simply not true. Although, in recent times, pleasure has had what I’d call a “shitty PR campaign,” it hasn’t always held such a low status. Before the current attitudes towards pleasure took hold, and the sensual became snubbed as profane, pleasure was widely recognized for its connection to the sacred.

In her acclaimed book Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Goddess, Starhawk documents the beliefs and practices of Earth-based religion. She writes of the pagan philosophy that, “all pleasure, harm it none, is in worship of the divine.”

In those times, acts of pleasure, harm they none, were considered no less than prayer. Physically blissful acts, where you were enraptured in the senses were seen as honoring the source of all sensation. Appreciation for the feeling of aliveness imparted by pleasure indicated an appreciation for the sacredness of life itself.

Because Earth-based religions, rather than envisioning divinity to be ruling over the Earth, envision the Earth itself as divine, they also consider our bodies–an out-cropping from the Earth — to be equally sacred.

Imagine how it would change your day if, instead of your body’s desires for pleasure being tinged with guilt or shame, you were raised to think of them as a sacred offering or gift.

Imagine if all delights to your senses — music, texture, laughter, food, conversation, touch, sensuality, eroticism — were untainted by negative associations and instead were understood as praise for the majesty of life itself.

Would that change what you felt you had permission to enjoy, desire or take pleasure from? I bet it would.

Liberated from implications of shame, pleasure is returned to its natural state of innocence. When freed of the burden of being morally questionable, pleasure starts to really show its true colors as an intelligent guiding force.

The Science of Pleasure

Biology 101 tells us that all organisms, all life forms small or large, from the simplest single-celled amoeba to the complex human animal, share the trait of instinctively moving away from pain and moving towards pleasure.

For an amoeba, the experience of pain may equal death. To the best of its ability, even without arms or legs, the amoeba will back away from the threat of death, innately motivated to seek the safety of pleasure instead.

We human animals are highly sophisticated amoebas — shamelessly moving towards pleasure and away from pain has been central to our evolutionary path.

And to be clear, we should not confuse pleasure with addiction. I distinguish between true pleasure and counterfeit pleasure with this question:

Will this act give me pleasure right now, an hour from now, a day from now, a week from now, a month from now, and a year from now?

When the answer is yes, then this act of true pleasure undeniably spreads positive ripples across your life. Using this true pleasure filter question as a compass in life promises for a richly fulfilling existence. On the other hand, devote your life to counterfeit pleasure and you’ll have a whole other story.

True pleasure has a built-in intelligence that knows when you are satisfied, when you’ve had enough, and when it’s time to stop.

As soon as you start paying attention to pleasure you discover that eating too much, drinking too much, smoking too much, shopping too much, or doing too much of anything that you thought was pleasurable, doesn’t actually feel like pleasure anymore.

And let’s not forget the spiritual connection. The key to experiencing true pleasure is being present–one of the most widespread spiritual maxims. When it comes to the experience of pleasure, being present is an absolute prerequisite. Without your presence, pleasure is purely conceptual. Thinking something feels good is very different from feeling good right here, right now.

The direct experience of pleasure requires you to occupy your body. If you’re not directing your attention and your consciousness to your tongue when you eat, your fingers when you caress, or your lips when you are kissed, then you are absent from your body, and by virtue, unavailable for true pleasure.

Occupy This Moment and Seize Your Power

As the author of Women, Food and God, Geneen Roth writes, “it’s when pleasure ends that overeating begins.”

When you refuse to listen to the parts of yourself that are clamoring to say, “hey, I’m actually not hungry anymore,” or “I’ve had enough to drink now,” or “what I truly need is some deep breaths and a moment to relax,” you’re doing the opposite of occupying your pleasure — you are abandoning it.

When you ignore the voice of your intuition that’s always talking to you, it starts to scream and yell. When mild symptoms like being bloated or having a hangover don’t get the message across to you, your body will resort to more serious measures–such as weight gain or panic attacks — to get your attention.

Until you occupy your pleasure, by feeling what you feel in this moment, and listening to the voice telling you not only what you need, but how much and when enough is enough, you will live forever with a body in conflict. The conflict arises because a fundamental instinct being ignored.

Once you understand pleasure as a positive force in your life, and make occupying your pleasure a priority, you will discover your incredible power: you are creating it.

Truly occupying your pleasure means having a relationship to pleasure where you do not just sit around and hope it will magically descend upon you, you engage with pleasure as a choice.

As Regena Thomashaeur, author of Mama Gena’s School of Womanly Arts, and founder of the school by the same name says, “pleasure is the highest form of responsibility.”

By definition, to be in pleasure means that you are not caught up in a “poor me” victim story. Instead, you are holding yourself accountable. This means having the awareness that, as much as you feel like a character in your own life story, experiencing ups and downs beyond your control, you are also the author of this story and it is up to you how the chapters will unfold.

Being accountable means owning that when you are not having a good time, it’s not because of circumstances created by someone else, it’s because of you. The beauty of this approach is it gives you the chance to do things differently.

“The pursuit of pleasure requires a willingness to reach for the good, no matter what the circumstances,” states Thomashaeur, revealing one of the seldom appreciated aspects of the art of pleasure.

For example, rather than bitching that your sex life is a disappointment, or your mother ruined your body image when you were a teenager, a commitment to pleasure will force you to bring imagination and creativity to the table instead of despair. You’ll ask yourself, “how can I be cause in the matter, instead of a victim of circumstance?”

How You Can Be Guided by Your Pleasure

My client Barb, entrepreneur, wife and mother of two was indeed in despair when she sought me out to be her weight loss coach. Her body image was in shreds and for long stretches of the day, self-loathing voices would hijack her mind, distracting her from being fully engaged in her life, whether personally or professionally. She wanted to lose weight but felt powerless to do so as any attempt at food restriction would backfire, triggering her to eat compulsively all the more.

My first move as her coach was to have her attend more to her pleasure. To her delight, as she took a leap of faith and rather than trying to control her body or her cravings, she took my advice and started seeking to savor more pleasure in her daily experiences in life.

As she worked through the voices in her head that said she shouldn’t be having pleasure–because it was too indulgent, not appropriate with kids around, too much to handle for her husband, and not responsible enough for her business — she finally surrendered to pleasure as an intelligent guiding force and her life bloomed.

She made a point to truly enjoy food without guilt, to only do exercise that gave her enjoyment, to dress in a way that made her feel beautiful, and to take more risks sensually with her husband. To her surprise and delight, as she made pleasure a priority, her food compulsions and then her excess weight, simply melted away.

By occupying her pleasure, she got to the root of years (if not decades!) of struggle, and emerged feeling radiant and empowered. Her self-esteem and level of joy sky-rocketed. Her life reflected that she’d made pleasure a choice.

Your unique struggles may take a different flavor to Barb’s, but my challenge to you is the same. Occupying your pleasure will revolutionize your life, but it can only be done by you. Let your innocent impulse and curiosity for pleasure tap you into the power of this unstoppable force of nature and connect you with this sacred act that, by bringing you into presence with your senses, brings you into presence with the pulse of life itself.