
Last week I made a wreath. I’d had the idea of making a rainbow wreath since I saw one on Instagram last year, so when I was asked to design a wreath to be auctioned off for a charity event, I knew immediately that I wanted to try a gradient of berries and dried flowers.
I went out to Quail Hill one day before Thanksgiving and foraged holly, bittersweet, and pink gomphrenia. Amber Waves Farm had dried statice and strawflowers for the purples and yellows, and Marders Nursery came through with quince slices for the orange. The whole process was very intuitive and organic. I just visualized what I wanted and then gathered little bits here and there over the course of two weeks. Then last night, I laid everything down on the floor and it just worked!
This process was very different than how I usually tackle creative projects, with strict planning and meticulous organization. I think I don’t always trust myself or my vision, so I try to control all the variables. I realized that when I do this, I’m creating out of fear — of failing, of getting it “wrong” — and the result is that the final product feels tight or tentative, and the process turns into a total slog.
Why did it go better this time? I’ve been working on trusting myself more, listening to myself rather than assuming the answer is somewhere “out there.” And one of the things that has unlocked this for me is healing my relationship with pleasure.
Why Pleasure is The Secret Path to Self-Discovery
To put it bluntly: I think our f’ed up relationship with pleasure is a barrier to creativity and self-knowledge.
Why We Feel Guilty About Pleasure
Our society has a deep distrust of pleasure. This attitude dates back to classical antiquity, where philosophers like Plato and Aristotle promoted the idea that the body and its pleasures needed to be controlled and denied — ideas that influenced early Christian thought. By medieval times, this evolved into viewing pleasure as sinful, while sacrifice and abstinence became markers of virtue.
The Protestant work ethic further complicated this relationship by establishing a clear moral hierarchy: work became virtuous while leisure was suspect. This ideology perfectly aligned with capitalism’s needs, creating a system where human value became tied to productivity rather inherent worth. Modern work culture reinforces these historical threads, linking self-worth to constant busyness and treating idle time as wasteful. Even today, we often justify pleasurable activities only through their productive outcomes, transforming hobbies into side hustles and self-care into self-improvement.
During the Enlightenment, Descartes deepened this disconnect by cementing the division between mind and body. We’ve inherited a worldview that privileges rational thought over bodily wisdom, treating our physical sensations and desires as less trustworthy than our intellectual judgments. This creates a perpetual state of alienation from our own embodied experience.
Understanding Pleasure as Inner Wisdom
If you believe that your impulses toward pleasure are indulgent or a distraction from the important, meaningful aspects of life, then every time you crave or feel pleasure, you experience cognitive dissonance. It feels good, but it makes you feel bad — you feel like you haven’t earned it, or it’s taking your attention away from something more worthy or purposeful. So pleasure becomes a source of guilt or shame.
The problem is that pleasure and joy are the most primal instincts we have for guiding us toward things that make us feel alive. Feeling good is a clue to something essential and vital in our nature. When we learn to distrust our body’s pleasure signals, we are hobbling our own intuition. Cut off from our inner voice, we have no choice but to rely on the heuristics and codes that society offers us, and no way of knowing whether those choices will actually make us happy.
Intuition isn’t a logical, verbal mode of knowing. It speaks in images and sensations. So if you feel cut off from your intuition, which many people do these days, ask yourself how you handle sensations of pleasure. Do you deny yourself pleasure even if you can afford it? Do you postpone pleasure until you’ve done everything you have to do? Do you struggle to receive pleasure without feeling like you have to give in return? Do you call the things you enjoy “guilty pleasures”?

How Pleasure Shapes Identity
Pleasure is a tool for learning about ourselves because when we do things that make us feel good, our brains encode those experiences into memory and this becomes a part of our identity. The more we do things that we love — whether that’s painting or playing soccer or having sex — the deeper these become etched into us. We become artistic or sporty or sexy. But if we don’t trust that pleasure, then it’s very easy to get caught in a cycle of working and optimizing and one day realize we don’t actually know who we are.
The popular narrative in psychology is that our identity is forged in struggle — that we discover our true selves by facing down hardship or taking on challenges and conquering them. Don’t get me wrong — I believe there’s value in getting out of your comfort zone, reaching for exciting goals, and learning your own resilience. But there’s a huge piece of who we are that isn’t just a response to what we’ve overcome. It’s rooted in our natural curiosity, our attractions, our desires, and yes, our joy.
Breaking Free from Pleasure Guilt
This time of year is a good one to assess your relationship to pleasure and joy. ‘Tis the season of joy, of course, with plenty of excuses for feasting, dressing up, and making merry with friends. But it’s also a time of reckoning, when we measure the year we had against the year we aspired to. So, in this time, we may find ourselves both reveling and atoning, and how we do this can tell us a lot about our deeper pleasure patterns.
There’s a remarkable power in a person who is completely unafraid of pleasure, who knows what they love and sees themselves as fully worthy of receiving it. When we trust pleasure as a valid form of knowledge, we open ourselves to a more authentic way of being, leading to deeper creativity and truer self-expression. Ultimately, as we lean into this way of living, our lives grow richer and our contribution to the world naturally expands.
Discussion (5 Comments)
The wreath is beautiful!
Wonderfully written & such a helpful perspective this time of year! And oh wow does that wreath bring joy!!!
Wow, wow wow, that wreath is just fabulous! Well done! Thank you for your wonderful writing, I always get so much out of your posts. Happy holidays!
Ingrid, I love this topic whole-heartedly! I had a moment earlier this year when I caught myself capping my pleasure and glee for no good reason other that it felt like too much goodness (what?!). So I ultimately chose the experience, and it turned out to be one of the best nights of my life. I still get tingles thinking about it! That changed everything for me. Follow the bliss and pleasure and curiosities, it’s so worth it.
It is truly powerful once in sync with my inner self. I have gained much more insight in things beyond the physical requirements I used to have. Pressure of life has designed this benefit to me a straight week I’m now on week 2. I’m an amazing individual with so much on my plate stress isn’t the word anymore. I’m zen with myself ways out of this world and I’m managing it I work with it and I love it all the same.i love my wife and family too but differently. I’m exploring deeper into myself each day finding new concepts blowing my mind away with ease. I hope we talk more. I’m trying to expand further into this aybss of energy it’s surreal.