It’s All About Pleasure

By Elisa Novick

In one week, I leave for Europe. My love and gratitude goes out to Eric Francis for letting people know about The Thriving Planet World Tour. I thought today, to share some of my process. It is what keeps me going — no matter what. The way in which spiritual contact engenders pleasurable sensations is something I’ve pondered many times.

This week I experienced some severe eyestrain and exhaustion from spending months in front of screens handling the thousands of details of creating the Tour, to the point of having to remind myself why I was doing this. We’ve scheduled seven workshops in four countries in six weeks, and when I arrive home from Europe at the end of May, I head directly into teaching at the Omega Institute on the East Coast and then to The Fairy and Human Relations Congress on the West Coast and then to a conference.

I’ve never done anything like this before. It forces me to step up, work harder, bring more of myself to bear, overcome endless obstacles. (Did Mercury ever go out of retrograde?) There are many challenges and risks involved, physical and financial.

Yet there is also something inexorable and irresistible drawing me. When I check inwardly, this project has a distinct sound to it as well as a hint of pattern and color. The sound seems to encompass a combination of attractive forces in Europe, the largest component being the love of the people welcoming me as well as the compelling sense that I will be taking another big step in fulfilling what I’m on Earth to do. It represents the opportunity to share my heart and whatever wisdom I’ve gained and leave something more behind when I leave this realm. But the essential feeling is — pleasure.

Our core group from France and Holland, meeting weekly via Skype, came together very beautifully. Though our styles are distinctly different, when I said that first prayer to call us into our first meeting, the harmony we formed was immediate and delicious, peaceful yet brimming with excitement and potential.

Then as the sound-sense widened, more enthusiastic people came in from Belgium and England, and others supporting me, here in the United States and in Australia and Scotland. The photographs of the places I’m traveling to were coming alive in me. I have always enjoyed beautiful architecture and landscape.

In one of those moments when I was getting concerned about my symptoms, I reviewed the list I’d made back when we were first exploring the idea of this Thriving Planet World Tour. Why would I do this? After all, I love settling into home too, and traveling is not easy on my body. I realized “The Tour” might actually take the rest of my lifetime. Knowing I couldn’t cover the planet physically all in one trip as I can do in Spirit, this might entail many trips.

I wrote about why I was the one uniquely qualified to do this and why we would want to do it. But after I’d done all that, I asked my guidance, what was most important in my list, for me. The two things that showed up were: to have adventures and to find new friends/colleagues/playmates.

I sat in amazement and then remembered that, when I first developed my muscle test for spiritual guidance, I asked whether I was here to heal people or save the planet, or to complete my karma, or some such noble intention.

You are here to play and dance and laugh and sing.
—The Inner Master

I was dismayed, because I spend far more time working than any of those. But I realized that the work I do is all of those for me and more. One reason I train people to do what I do is because that is the level I like to play at; that is what forms the frequencies that give the most pleasure. I just like having playmates! Want to live from your soul? Travel in the high realms of spirit? Heal and harmonize the sound of the planet with the galaxy? I’m your girl!

I had just moved to the country, sitting in a field of wildflowers on a beautiful summer day, when I had the epiphany that the world was created to smell good to us and our noses were made to enjoy the smells of the world. That was just wondrous to me. Attuning to Spirit, and doing it ‘in concert’ with people, trees, and others, is ‘designed’ to give the most exquisite pleasure.

The Laboratory of Life is the spiritual work that lights me up the brightest at this time. I feel as if I am doing what I came to do, realizing my purpose on Earth. My own personal transformation is being achieved at warp speed, blocks from my true being are removed layer by layer. I gain insights and subtle but profound learnings for my life. My favorite part of the Labwork is when the group intention and energies create energetic geometric forms that build a matrix for new patterns of consciousness on Planet Earth.
–Stanley W., healer, artist

Everything in us is “wired” to seek pleasure. Our senses, neuro-endocrine system, heartbeat, and even the colors in our auras all transform when we are in pleasure (as well as other states of consciousness). But why do we seek one experience over another? Even the one-celled creature moves toward what it wants and away from what is noxious to it. Does it experience pleasure when it moves towards?

Pleasures can transform over a lifetime. When I was younger, I took pleasure (or at least sought it, whether it worked out well or not) in all the usual things most of us seek pleasure from, and to some extent I still do. But I noticed an unusually high level of pleasure for me came through sensing (close-to-perfect) harmony, whether being in oneness with a lover, a dance partner or playing chamber music. Now I call it “alignment,” but the word doesn’t truly convey the pleasure that it holds.

There is something inside me…some kind of unfathomable joy that has started to grow in me as a result of being with the trees.
–Francis, violinmaker

In New York in the early ’80s I first experienced the pleasure that flows directly from Spirit when I am in service. I was beginning my spiritual studies and soon thereafter, opened my private practice as a healer. Someone on the street stopped me for directions and I was able to assist with only a few words. A flush of happy energy came through me.

Another afternoon, sitting in the bus terminal after missing my train, I entered a conversation with one of the young men living in the station who had a bad cold. I ended up spending a couple of hours dosing homeless people from my homeopathic first aid kit. Watching their symptoms subside as we talked was gratifying — pleasurable. This was getting good!

I then decided (was it me who had that thought?) that I would offer to pay the registration fee for a woman to take an Insight Transformational Seminar. She was the ex-wife of my then sweetheart and though we’d never met, I knew she was bitter and resented me. She accepted the check from him and attended the training and never thanked me. Yet at the moment that the training began, a flood of joy came through me and stayed with me for the five days of the training.

Our notions of what is spiritual and what is pleasurable have largely been cleaved apart by the negative thoughtforms on the planet, many of them institutionalized and even written into law. We’ve suppressed pleasure or become addicted to lower-frequency forms of pleasure.

These are beliefs and actions, possibly different for each person, that don’t serve who we truly are as human-spiritual-cosmic beings living in love. They’ve taught that self-denial is spiritual, so we don’t have the ecstasy and peace of knowing our Divine selves, and so that we won’t transcend into the higher realms of Light.

There are also teachings that say we should not treat any experience as better than any other. And in this I agree, at least in part. We are here to have all experiences and to extract the gold from them. Yet once we know that, can’t that make it all pleasurable?

I learned this one day while driving home in pain from a tooth extraction. For no obvious reason, the joy of the soul came bubbling up through me. I looked in the rear-view mirror and saw my eyes sparkling through the suffering.

As a child, I used to hide the smile that came unbidden to my face when I learned that someone had died. I questioned whether I was a bad person, but there was part of me that knew something about what death truly was that could not be denied. It wasn’t until many years later, when I began assisting people who had died, that I learned why I felt such happiness in those moments.

So if you want to know the real reason I’ve been facilitating the Laboratory of Life and the Godwork Meetings all these years, it is that there is an intense pleasure, love and gratitude that comes forth for me when we are going through these transmutational movements, and especially when we come into precise alignment or harmony with each other. There is pleasure in co-creating with God, angels, masters of Light. It can be peaceful or thrilling or just a sense of simple clarity. It can be subtle, sublime, emotional or engender a mind-blowing realization.

Yes, I love to see people come into their souls and I do want to create a thriving planet, but if I were to say why I love that, I’d have to say that it is because I so enjoy the pleasurable gift of contact with the Divine.

I felt transported through time, aware of places in time/space that had long since passed but which felt immediate and present in the room. It was powerful, liberating and truly magical!
–Brett Bevell, The Omega Institute

That’s why I’m busting my…to get to Europe next week. I’m opening to have more of my kind of thrills — creating the space for, welcoming, healing and training more people to play in the spaces I like to play in so we can dance and sing and laugh. And if we create a new thriving planet while we are at it — more pleasure!

The energy felt wide, expansive, carrying the fragrance of powerful blooms. The night finished in a crescendo. All I wished was for this moment to last forever. Body tingling, 50 trillion cells wide awake, I was one with the group and with myself.
–Mado, author

You are welcomed to participate in the Thriving Planet World Tour. To listen to and read past conversations with Elisa Novick on Planet Waves, plus her articles, please use this link. You’re invited to visit her website and Facebook page.

Elisa Novick, MSS does profound work as a healer, teacher, counselor, coach, minister, and facilitator of workshops and trainings in personal, professional, and spiritual development. She can assist you to clear personal, karmic and genetic patterns that have limited you and teach you exquisite attunement skills so you can become the magnificent master of life and Light that all of us are destined to be. Elisa has been assisting people in their growth since 1982 through her counseling practice and in facilitating over 1,000 workshops in holistic health, human development, family constellation, systemic constellation, organizational dynamics, planetary healing and spiritual awareness. You may email her directly at elisanovick [at] thrivingplanet [dot] org.