META-PLEASURES

It was early in the days of the development of the Meta-States model that I got interested in meta- pleasures. Why? How did that come about?

Strangely, it arose from the study of resilience. I say strangely because the state of resilience arises when there is pain, when there is a disappointment, a set-back, a trauma. I researched the literature of people who had been through hell and yet bounced back to participate fully in life, to contribute, etc. What I found was that they were able to enjoy life as part of the resilience process.

This was the surprising thing to me. The great majority had learned to find pleasure and joy even during the time when they were in the process of bouncing back. That is, it was not the case that they bounced back to life and vitality and then rediscovered joy in their life. It was rather the case that while in the midst of their pain, trouble, trauma, set-back, knock-down, they had rediscovered pleasures.

The most radical example that I can give you is that of Viktor Frankl. Even in Hitler’s death camp, he and his colleagues were able to find and enjoy humor. They were able to take pleasure in the smallest of things, to appreciate, and to acknowledge value. By grim jokes, small acts of human kindness, the smallest delights they were able to experience a kind of meta-pleasures even in the concentration camp.

Nor was this the exception. The people with the most robust strategies for resilience, for bouncing back to life with vitality, those who were able to powerfully return to living with purpose and passion, were those who were able to experience pleasure even in the midst of their pain. As they were able to keep the hurt, pain, or evil out by refusing the three p’s of learned helplessness (personal, permanent, pervasive), they were also able to bring in joy, pleasure, and value.

It wasn’t enough that they could protect themselves from taking a distress and making it about themselves (personal), forever in time (permanent) and about every facet of life (pervasive). They were able to do more. They were able to positively fill their minds, hearts, and lives with joys. And in doing this they were able to take the simplest of things and endow it with rich and robust and significant meaning. And that is the structure of meta-pleasures.

That led to the Meta-Pleasure Pattern that we run in the Meta-States training, Accessing Personal Genius. We begin with a simple pleasure: walking on a beach, listening to music, baking break, walking, running, reading a good book, enjoying a conversation, watching a sunrise, etc. and we begin asking the semantic questions as meta-questions: What does that mean to you? How is that valuable to you? What pleasure do you get from that? How is that enjoyable?

Meta-pleasures are the pleasures that we get from our pleasures. For example, with taking a walk in nature. People typically will say that the pleasure, meaning, value of that is time alone, relaxation, renewal, in touch with nature, etc. And when we take each of these as a meta-state of pleasure about the first level pleasure, we get even higher level pleasures: connection, rejuvenation, sense of purpose, alignment, etc.

In APG we typically encourage people to run this pattern on ten activities that they find easy to do, for which they are naturally motivated, and which create positive results for them. The reason? To model out their own unique meta-pleasures, meta-motivations. We say that this is a motivation pattern in that it uncovers the person’s intuitive and natural higher values and how he or she can add semantic pleasure or value to something. The significance of that? If you know how to meta-pleasure yourself around some activities, you can take charge of this process and begin to spread the pleasure around in your life.

We do this in accessing personal genius because genius is characterized by joy. The totally absorbed state is one of “flow”—delight, fun, enjoyment. And when you semantically load an activity with meta-pleasures, you answer the motivation question. That is, you don’t have to “work” on your motivation. Motivation is built in.

Long before I came up with that using Meta-States, Abraham Maslow described meta-motivation as the level of motivation that naturally occurs when we gratify the lower needs and move into the growth or self-actualization level of experience.

“Once we’ve solved the lower problems, the material problems, empirically I insist on the tremendous role of the meta-motivations— the search for truth and excellence and perfection and beauty and justice and ultimate order and ultimate simplicity and harmony and species-hood and brotherhood and the like.” (A Memorial Volume, 1982, p. 37)

What Maslow specified as the specific meta-motivations that enable to be at our best and unleash our deepest potentials are the very things that most people naturally talk about when they explore the pleasures-of-their-pleasures: Truth, excellence, perfection, beauty, justice, order, simplicity, harmony, love, compassion, cooperation, collaboration, etc.

Interesting enough, these are also our values, our highest values. Maslow called them the being- values. He used being for the realm of life that operates by abundance, growth, self- actualization, and non-insrumentalism. That is, we seek such for themselves. They are not mean-values, but end-values. They are valuable in and of themselves; they are inherently desirable and delightful. They are their own reward.

So, how’s your meta-motivation? What have you semantically loaded with so much meaning, significance, value, and pleasure that you naturally and inevitably and intuitively give yourself to it and it’s “no problem?” What would you like to meta-pleasure so that you have more pleasure in your life, more vitality, more enjoyment? How’s your pleasuring and meta-pleasuring skills? How competent are you at meta-pleasuring yourself and keeping yourself in a delightful and appreciative state even when things aren’t going your way?

Here’s a key secret about unleashing your potentials —load it up with lots of robust meta- pleasures. Do that and you’ll have all the motivation that you’ll need because it will be inherently fun, enjoyable, and delightful no matter how much effort and energy you have to put into it!

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