Hey friends,
This week, I wanted to share another pretty cool thing that I learned at one of Joe Hudson’s Art of Accomplishment retreats (which I’ve been going on about for the past few weeks).
It’s called “The Pleasure Game” – and even though it was just a 10-minute exercise during our 7-day retreat, it’s one of those things that’s really stuck with me.
Here’s how it works:
For the next 10 minutes, you challenge yourself to feel as much pleasure as you possibly can in whatever you’re doing. That’s it. The only goal is to feel pleasure.
When they introduced this at the retreat, I found myself:
- Taking a deep breath and noticing how nice it felt to just… breathe
- Getting up from the couch and appreciating how it felt to move my body
- Walking outside and feeling the warmth of sunlight on my skin
- Touching a tree and experiencing the texture of bark under my fingertips
- Sitting in a nearby chair and noticing how good it felt to just… sit
- Playing with my wedding band and enjoying both how it looked and felt (plus the nice memory of my wife who wasn’t there with me)
When the bell rang to signal the end of our 10 minutes, I had this weird moment of “oh wait, I don’t want this to be over” – which is pretty wild considering I was basically doing nothing. My only goal was to feel pleasure.
But here’s where it gets interesting…
Since the retreat, I’ve been playing this game more and more in my daily life. While washing dishes, I’ll challenge myself: “How can I feel more pleasure in this moment?” When I’m just sitting on the sofa or having a meal, same question: “How can I feel more pleasure right now?”
I’m actually writing this while on a walk (speaking into VoicePal, the app my team and I built to make writing more fun 😉). I’ve been walking for about 20 minutes with my AirPods in, just speaking thoughts out loud which the app transcribes. But even as I’m saying these words, just priming my brain to feel more pleasure makes me notice:
- The wind on my skin
- Getting unexpectedly sprayed by a sprinkler (and how refreshing that feels)
- The ground under my feet
- How powerful my legs feel
- The beautiful scenery around me
Here’s the cool thing about the pleasure game – it’s always available to us. In every moment, you can create this little partition in your brain with just one goal: feel as much pleasure as possible right now.
You can play it:
- While working at your computer
- During household chores
- When eating food
- Even while taking a dump (yep, he went there)
In every moment, there’s so much more pleasure available than what we usually default to. But often, all it takes to enjoy ourselves more is to just set that as an intention. I forget this a lot, but I’m trying to remind myself more and more.
Have a great week!
Ali xx
