My mother says, “I’d rather share a bowl of noodles with someone I love than a feast with someone I don’t.” That’s her comment on love. But looking deeper, it’s also about the feeling of satisfaction. Let’s define that because it’s so important to being human.
Satisfaction by definition means 100% fulfillment.
Satisfaction is not a concept but a physical experience in your body. There’s always a visceral gut component. The body registers even the smallest satisfaction as a peak experience of YES that cascades down your nervous system in tingles of good brain chemicals. Satisfaction feels like meaning.
Have you noticed that we can go days without feeling that? It feels like starving.
Many of us work hard and feast hard but are still mildly to very dissatisfied. Why? Something or someone crucial always seems to be lacking.
So it’s worth the effort to dig into your nervous system and memory bank to remember what truly satisfies you. It’s great that the breadcrumb trail already exists, even if we have forgotten where it leads and how to feel satisfaction in the grind of life. We just need to be curious enough to follow it.
Feel It for Yourself
Close your eyes and remember a time when you felt completely satisfied.
Enter that memory with your whole your body and immerse yourself in all those feelings once again as before, noticing where the satisfaction anchors inside you and if warmth, light or waves of emotion fill you.
Then release the memory, but hold onto the feeling experience in your body. Consciously amplify it into every cell of your body. This is how satisfaction feels to your system. It takes some deep concentration, but hold the feeling of 100% satisfaction for as long as you can to imprint it into your muscle memory. Like a pin in a map, you can return to this place of satisfaction and seek out experiences that feel like it.
When I tried it, my benchmark memory was the birth of my first child. It was a cesarean, and when they pulled her out, this tiny purple human, the whole world suddenly went quiet. She was abstract, and then she was real.
I felt a deep sense of YES and a warmth of life force in my pelvis. Satisfaction still feels that way in my body, always like a little miracle of manifestation. It feels good, very good.
The Opposite of Satisfaction
Some try this exercise and find that it leads them to grief, confusion and anger. If that’s you, it is not your fault. Who in our culture has taught us to feel satisfied? There is a skill set around achieving this satisfaction.
On the contrary, Western culture teaches us to feel dissatisfaction. That way we keep chasing or buying whatever elusive carrot they’re selling on a stick. It is a futile infinite loop.
Advertisers and marketers use dissatisfaction to keep us coming back, never giving us the satisfaction of satisfaction. Over a lifetime, we internalize that behavior and do it to ourselves. So the first step is knowing that the power of satisfaction is in your hands and no one else’s.
Satisfaction Is True Closure
It’s crucial to feel satisfaction because it closes the loop. It gives the signal that you have completed something important in your spirit.
Once you receive that intuitive signal, you can naturally move onto the next thing without force. When you don’t feel satisfaction, you keep returning to the scene of the crime, coming back again and again looking for the satisfaction of closure.
Feels Like Wholeness
So what does satisfaction feel like? It is an unmistakeable feeling of wholeness and significance. It could be large or small, a moment of being seen, a moment of something falling into place, where you feel complete. It is the very experience of peace.
To me, it feels like winning a very personal internal victory. There is a sense of pride in it and a sense of resolution. There is an orgasmic quality to it, a feeling deeply imbedded within the emotional fiber of oneself.
You recognize satisfaction immediately in someone’s face, manner and energy. And they will sense it in you, too. I have my clients re-learn satisfaction by starting with satisfaction at the smallest things. It’s a nervous system practice that involves receiving goodness.
It’s strange how we’ve gotten so spun around in our culture that our own satisfaction is no longer intuitive, possibly even doubted. Yet you can build your own vocabulary of pleasure, abundance and love. That is the best tasting carrot ever.
As satisfying as a bowl of noodles shared with someone you love.
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