Someone once told me that pleasure was a trap, that I should be careful. It felt a bit like a punch in the gut. The way the body goes numb for a moment, you can’t breath or think. Then the blood comes rushing back. “Is all that I know in my body wrong?” “Is pleasure a trap?”

I’ve had many, many experiences like this in various spiritual circles. The bend is overt or subtle, but so often there: The body is not to be trusted. It is too earthly, too gross, too prone to death. Let’s go elsewhere, where we can be sure to avoid what dies.

I get it, we can end up chasing pleasure until we forget to pay bills, and do the laundry, and do the things that scare us, but bring the good growth. The scary things do not bring immediate pleasure, and we certainly do live in a culture of immediate gratification. Pleasure chasing has devastated: addiction, egotism, etc. I understand and respectfully nod to the wisdom of this advice: pleasure can be a trap.

Pleasure, humans of flesh and radiance, can be liberation. These bodies we inhabit are incredible gifts, an opportunity to feel the divine in the body, the infinite within the vessel of the finite. Pure infinite consciousness on its own is boring. That’s why the Infinite birthed form, earth, the finite. Consciousness wants to experience itself through the finite form of YOU. The divine desperately wants to PLAY! What better field than your body?

Do you watch the forest floor this time of year? It’s nearly Beltane, May Day, the celebration of sacred sexuality. The forest feels sunlight. She’s taking her grey brown clothes off and slowly, slowly, the green of her skin rises to meet the golden sun. Shoots of every shade of green that you can imagine push up through the soil, loosening it, letting the once densely frozen earth take its first breaths it has in months. Do you say to them, “don’t bloom! Don’t you know winter is coming in 7 months!?” Of course not. We celebrate. We bend down close to the tiny blossoms and whisper them forward. We run our palms over the fresh, sappy buds. We breath the wet earth into the pores of our lungs, finally quenched from the arid winters.

Pleasure is freedom. It makes every pore of the body an all seeing eye. Fuses open the nerves so we can be nothing but intoxicated by this very moment. This breeze on my skin is all that is needed in this moment. The lover’s touch is the entire Universe in ecstatic motion. That bird’s song is all the mysteries poured into one rush. Spring will fill your senses if you let it. What is really here is so much to hold that past and present must fall in order to make room for this flower, blooming here, next to my foot, perfectly. There isn’t room for anything but this moment.

Pleasure softens us, makes us life giving and green. Wets the earth so it can give birth to the singing flowers. It tills the soil so we can grow the fiddle heads that curl into and out of themselves like little universes. It bring heaven to earth, ecstasy into the flesh, God/dess into human.

Beltane is the time to welcome pleasure. The sacred mystery wants to play, to be known through you, to be sung to. Lean close to pleasure right now (and always, I say). It has an intelligence, and mysteries, and surprisingly within reach heavens. Let your cells light up like flowers in the wind, until you can do nothing but be fully incarnate this. very. moment.