The Pleasure Zone: Why We Resist Good Feelings & How To Let Go And Be Happy

While writers including Paul Pearsall, Deepak Chopra, Bernie Siegel, and Joan Borysenko have recently identified the benefits of pleasure, to a large extent they have been concerned with positive mental attitudes and visualizations. Dr. Resnick advances the exploration of pleasure further by linking optimism, physical health, emotional fulfillment in love, deeply gratifying sex, and positive aging to our ability to fully enjoy eight core pleasures. These are: primal pleasure, pain relief, the elemental pleasures of play and humor, and mental, emotional, sensual, sexual, and spiritual pleasure. In this ground-breaking work, Dr. Resnick discusses each core pleasure, pointing out subtle and not so subtle ways we deny ourselves and how each core pleasure is relevant to our health, emotional well-being, and interpersonal relationships. Complete with inspiring stories of people who have learned to reclaim pleasures they had cut themselves off from, each chapter concludes with a set of simple personal experiments designed to aid readers in gaining skill at enjoying that pleasure more completely.

Dr. Stella Resnick has been concerned about how to help people stop focusing on what's wrong in their lives and start noticing what's right since 1978 when she wrote a ground-breaking article for New Age Journal that turned the therapy world on its ear and prompted hundreds of letters asking for more. Now she has distilled her years of work and collected extensive corroborative research to show that when people don't fully enjoy their lives and loves, it is usually because they actually resist their good feelings and have a fixed ceiling on how much pleasure they can tolerate.

While writers including Paul Pearsall, Deepak Chopra, Bernie Siegel, and Joan Borysenko have recently identified the benefits of pleasure, to a large extent they have been concerned mostly with positive mental attitudes and visualizations. In this groundbreaking work, Resnick takes the exploration of pleasure further by linking feeling good about ourselves, experiencing good physical health and emotional fulfillment, enjoying deeply gratifying sex, and positive aging, to our ability to fully enjoy eight core pleasures: primal, pain relief, play and humor, mental, emotional, sensual, sexual, and spiritual.

Complete with inspiring stories of people who have learned to access these pleasures, each chapter concludes with a set of personal experiments designed to aid readers in gaining new skills to enjoy that pleasure more completely. The Pleasure Zone is designed to help anyone achieve a lifestyle based on positive motivation, vitality, spiritual nourishment, and loving relationships.