Jouissance - The Evolution of Pleasure
This autumn in Root + Rise, we’re being guided by Oshun, one of the most powerful and beloved of the orishas - the pantheon of 401 deities from the Yoruba people of Nigeria.
As I’ve been with Oshun and the Yoruba creation myth that we’re connecting with her through, waiting and listening for her to transmit the particular frequency of her medicine that she wants to share, I sense a sigh-giggle.
You already know.
And it’s true. I do.
Oshun, Goddess of the Sweet Waters, is many things. One of them is the power of pleasure, of joy, of sensuality.
Of the deep necessity for these things in a world which is dry and meaningless without them.
In a world where Goddess has been driven to the fringes by puritanical misinterpretations of purity, Oshun’s brilliance reclaims purity as something quite different.
Purity is a wakeful presence to the ‘high’ + ‘low’ sensations of Life. It's not found in the cloistered life of the ascetic, and in the fearful renunciation of the body’s deep capacities to feel all that there is to feel.
Our souls didn’t incarnate into these tremendous bodies in order to subdue, oppress and deny them, to hide away from Life.
Oshun unhooks purity from patriarchal puritanical constructs, and expands the experience + understanding of pleasure.
(Which is interesting because having capacity for pleasure expands our nervous systems’ capacity for all sensation, all Life - which is a potent redefinition of success.)
And guided by Oshun, this season in Root + Rise, we’ll be working with the medicine of pleasure, of joy, to evolve and expand our nervous systems’ capacity to receive, enjoy and evolve with Life.
We’ll be creating the space to steward our souls’ authentic desires into the world, free from the dry + rigid infiltrations of our minds’ should-based expectations.
In doing this, we’ll move beyond the surface level understanding of pleasure towards a deeper embodied gnosis of it, through the experiential invocation of jouissance - which is the container for Oshun’s potent honey-hipped medicine.
Jouissance is a French word, except – it’s so much more than a word. It’s a philosophy, an art of living + being, an individual + collective movement, as explored by the radical, rebellious, visionary Algerian-French writer, poet + visionary, Hélène Cixous.
It’s also one of those words that disappointingly falls short when translated directly into English: a full-bodied, sensual blood-red vintage into saccharine sweet, cavity-inducing soda pop.
A tip of the iceberg understanding of jouissance would be plaisir - or pleasure.
But jouissance is more powerful. A person with the capacity for it has more courage, is less repressed, less externally defined, less afraid of the ‘high’ + ‘low’ sensations of Life. They're rooted in the sovereignty of the soul’s felt-sense which is always tuned into the World Soul, the Anima Mundi, the life force of Earth and Cosmos.
As ever, Audre Lorde puts it best:
“The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings…For the erotic is not a question only of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing.”
Lorde’s words are a connection to the vaster, cosmic frequencies of joy, pleasure, bliss or jouissance - which is Oshun’s nourishment, without which the world is but a hollow husk.
Through this we decolonize our psyches + bodies from the oppression of suffering as a “normal” and necessary part of the human experience. As we create space for the non-binariness of all sensation in our bodies through jouissance, notions of suffering fall away. The liberating frequency of choice is revealed, of choosing how to relate to Life moving through us.
Or to quote the Oshun-transmitting Queen, Lorde again:
“when we begin to live from within outward, in touch with the power of the erotic within ourselves, allowing that power to inform and illuminate our actions upon the world around us, then we begin to be responsible to ourselves in the deepest sense…Our acts against oppression become integral with self, motivated and empowered from within. In touch with the erotic, I become less willing to accept powerlessness, or those other states of being which are not native to me, such as resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, self-denial.”
And: why did Oshun say you already know when I was tuning into her guidance?
Because long before Root + Rise was born, I had created a course called Reclaiming Jouissance through which Oshun’s medicine was going to flow. But it wasn’t the right time.
Since then, I’ve cycled through many seasons of embodying the understanding that making capacity for jouissance is a radical + necessary act for our nervous systems, and for the world at large.
I’ve seen how for so many of us, myself included, those frozen pictures of trauma living in our nervous systems have made it mean that allowing in joy is not safe. I’ve become intimately familiar with unhooking those meanings, and allowing those frozen pictures to melt back into wholeness, in their own time.
As we do this individually + collectively, Oshun - as Goddess, as archetype - can (re)enter the world, through our bodies, and bring forth the blessings of her sweet waters, without which the world withers.
This autumn in Root + Rise is an immersion into the medicine of Oshun’s sweet waters.
Registration closes on September 30th at midnight PST.