– Heartwood Path Waypoint 1.101 –

Octagon Of Joy

Play With The Eight Forms Of Pleasure
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The Pillars Of Happiness described previously apply to the eight forms of pleasure: primal, pain relief, elemental, mental, emotional, sensual, sexual, and spiritual.  Without each of these forms of pleasure one will not have the steadfastness to endure the pilgrimage to Gladandgreen Junction. Instead of being carried forward by your pleasure, one will likely become weary, distracted, or disinterested.  Without pleasure any endeavor becomes a tedious chore and the positive results are left to those who, instead of focusing on the languor and length of the pilgrimage, find some sort of delight in each step along the way.  

Here are our substitutes for longueur (fatigue from lengthiness) ––our ways to keep any pathway of growth from seeming to be protracted, dragged-out, or interminable: Primal pleasure is feeling good by going with the flow; walking on air; and feeling buoyant, elated, exulted, and high. Soothing aches and pains through therapeutic or emphatic touch is the pleasure of pain relief. Elemental pleasures include play, movement, and making pleasing sounds. Curiosity, the craving for information, and learning are all mental pleasures. Love, avoidance of fear, and moving away from threats as a result of anger are the components of emotional pleasure. Love moves one toward what promises emotional nourishment. Love sires all positive emotions: including liking something or somebody; feeling thankful, hopeful, trusting, eager, and enthusiastic; and feeling exultation, awe and bliss. One experiences sensual pleasures when one lingers over and enjoys a stimulus. Spiritual pleasures need not be limited to relating to God or cultivating the immortal Soul.  While religious fervor can certainly be a form of spiritual pleasure, what is really producing the pleasure is the feeling of being a part of or connected to something that is larger than one’s self. Fulfillment comes from coming to terms with deep spiritual matters such as life; death; one’s place in the whole scheme of things; and being a part of something good, larger than one’s self, and divine.  

Limiting your capacity to experience any one of the eight forms of pleasure will, in turn, limit your capacity to enjoy all the other delights. Also, cultivating your capacity to enjoy some of the more basic forms of pleasure—such as laughing or feeling buoyant—adds to your ability to heighten your response to more complicated forms of pleasure—such as sexuality.

​Laughter creates the shortest bridge between two individuals. It does so because it brings forth the kind of joyousness that counters contempt and indignation. When you are sad you attract emptiness. When you are happy, the world laughs with you.

To Eight Forms Of Pleasure...

​HumaNatureConnect Activity
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If this is not a day when you prefer to spend time in nature without an agenda, do the following activity:
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Start-up Protocol
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• Read The Text — Use your literary sense, your mind sense, and your reason sense to read your way towards happiness and sustainability but also go outdoors to the back yard or to the back woods, where the higher levels of negative ions in the air will improve your mood and wellbeing.
• Attention Restoration — With a pen and journal in hand, go to a natural area that is attractive, has a variety of plants and animals, and is tranquil enough to leave room for reflection. 
• Attractive Natural Being — Once you are in a natural area (the wilder, the better), look around to find a natural being that is attractive to you and remain near that being until the end of the activity.​
• Consent — Once you find an aspect of nature that is attractive to you continuously for at least ten seconds, think of your continued attraction as your consent to have a connection experience that will help you function optimally and establish in your mind a more helpful egalitarian relationship with the natural being.
• Appreciation And Gratefulness — After gaining consent to enter into a connection experience with the natural being, appreciate it with your inhalations and give it gratitude with your exhalations.
• Use Your Natural Senses — Beyond seeing, hearing, and the three other commonly recognized senses, use as many of the fifty-four Natural Senses as you see fit and document the ones that you use in your journal.
• HumaNatureConnect Activity — Wander without an agenda in a natural place or do the prescribed HumaNatureConnect Activity.

Assessing How You Are Supporting (Or Not Supporting) Your Pursuit Of Pleasure

For this activity, determine how you are using authenticity, courage, excitement, and challenge to support your pursuit of the eight forms of pleasure. Do so systematically by recreating the table shown below in your journal and filling in your responses.

​​​​Follow-up Protocol
Natural Systems Reflection Process
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     For best results, write down your impressions of this activity in your journal using as many of the following components as you see fit, afterwards, share your interpretations with others.
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Journal Components
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• Date — Write down the date of your outdoor nature-communing experience.
• Activity — Write down the waypoint title and number each time each you do an activity.
• Location — Write down the location of your outdoor nature-communing experience.
• Natural Being Indicator — Draw a picture or write down in your journal a nameless way to remember your chosen attractive Natural Being; for example, call it your “____  ____ Connection Experience.”
• The Natural Senses Used — Write down all of the Natural Senses you used for this activity.
• General Description — Write a general description of how you did the activity and what happened.
• Freeform — Write, in freeform, what you found attractive about your natural being.
• Three Qualities — Write down three qualities you found attractive about your natural being.
• Three Learnings — Write down three things you learned from this activity.
• Self-esteem & Trust — Write down how, if at all, this activity changed your self-esteem or trustfulness of NNIAAL (Namelessness, Now, Intelligence, Alive, Attraction, and Love).
• Changes To Self — Write down what aspects of your Self, if any, were changed by this activity.
• Honor Yourself — Praise yourself and your commitment to making another stop along the Heartwood Path good for yourself and the world.
• I’m A Person Who. . . — Write down three different so-called “G/G Statements” using the following format: “This connection experience tells me that I am a person who__________.”
• Feelings If Activity Taken — Write down a sentence about how you would feel if you lost your ability to experience this connection.
• Nature Compared To Self — Create a sentence that reads: “I love this (insert words that identify the attractive natural being) because it is (insert words that refer to the qualities you like about the natural being); then, create a parallel sentence that reads: “I love (insert the word “myself”) because I am (insert the same qualities as before).”​
• Integral Immersion — Improve your journal writing by addressing what is, what could be, and what ought to be.
• Love Letter — Write a letter of gratitude to and from a natural being.
• Two-word Summary — Write down two words that summarize your response to this activity.​

The Heartwood Path Exchange:
Swap Your Ideas, Impressions, Photos, And News With Others
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• Comment — Post your impressions and photos in the Comments section of this waypoint—the place for on-going discussion regarding this waypoint.
• Join — Engage with others in a Heartwood Path course or salon.
• Create — Start your own Heartwood Path salon that meets regularly online, by phone, or in person.
• Talk — Share your impressions with trusted family members and friends.
• Network — Post your impressions and photos on our EartHeart Networking Forum.
• Post — To see what conversations you can ignite, upload on social media your photos and impressions about anything pertaining to your journey down the Heartwood Path.
• Connect — Follow our account on Instagram, Like our Page on Facebook, Subscribe to our Channel on YouTube, and use hashtags such as “#heartwoodpath”, “#eartHeart”, and “#waypoint(insert course)(insert waypoint number) i.e.“#waypointkosmos5”).​

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Your input is vital. Enjoy sharing!

Heartwood Path Axioms:
Key Assertions From Waypoint 1.101

1.101.1.
Laughter creates the shortest bridge between two people.

1.101.2.
Love sires all positive emotions: including liking something or somebody; feeling thankful, hopeful, trusting, eager, and enthusiastic; and feeling exultation, awe and bliss.

1.101.3.
While religious fervor can certainly be a form of spiritual pleasure, what is really producing the pleasure is the feeling of being a part of or connected to something that is larger than one’s self. 

1.101.4.
Fulfillment comes from coming to terms with deep spiritual matters such as life; death; one’s place in the whole scheme of things; and being a part of something good, larger than one’s self, and divine.  

1.101.5.
Limiting your capacity to experience any one of the eight forms of pleasure will, in turn, limit your capacity to enjoy all the other delights just as cultivating your capacity to enjoy some of the more basic forms of pleasure—such as laughing or feeling buoyant—adds to your ability to heighten your response to more complicated forms of pleasure—such as sexuality.

Dreaming Time Activity

For best results, write down your impressions of each night’s dreams in your journal, a vital part of your EartHeart Chronicles. Make your Dream Tending elaborate (so you get the most out of it) but do not make it cumbersome (as this could prevent you from continuing). Use as many of the following components as you see fit. Afterwards, where appropriate, share your Dream Tending with others.
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Before Dreaming Protocol​​

• Dream Prep — Prepare yourself for productive dreaming by decluttering your mind before sleeping. ​
• Journal Ready — Prepare to record your dream impressions by placing your journal so that you can make initial recordings in it without changing your dreamtime sleeping position.

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Dreaming Protocol​

• Remember This — Look to your dreams to tell you what you need to remember.​
• Open To Dream — Be receptive, fluid, interactive, and grounded as you dream.
• Wake-Back-To-Bed — Wake up after six hours of sleep, staying awake for twenty minutes, then go back to sleep.
• Shape-shifters — Watch characters that change in your dream to see into the possibilities of your own transformation.

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Nocturnal Pilgrimage 1.101

It is often difficult to remember your dreams. Elsewhere in this course there are suggestions for how to increase your chance for dream recall. Here is one tip not mentioned elsewhere:  “ . . . try switching sleeping positions. Lie on your side, roll on to your back, go to your stomach, but do so slowly. You can often recall the experience (of the dream) more easily by lying in the position in which you had the dream” (Tucillo, Zeizel & Peisel, 2013, pp. 55-57).

With this in mind, sleep, dream, when you wake up get back into your sleeping position to help you remember your dream. Then record your dreams in your journal. Whatever your intentions were for your dreams, phrase them in the present tense. If you are looking to, in effect, wake up in your dreams while you are asleep, and thereby become aware that you are dreaming and possibly control your dreams, have the intention (before falling asleep) to have such a lucid dream and state that intention in the positive, using a phrase such as “I am lucid and aware in my dream” (Tucillo, Zeizel & Peisel, 2013, pp. 57-68).

After Dreaming Protocol​

• First Off — Recall your dream by staying in your sleeping position as you make your first attempt to remember your dream.
• Book Of Dreams — Create an entry in your dream journal using the following linguistic tools: 1) talking in the present tense, 2) using verbs ending in “ing,” 3) removing articles such as “an” or “the,” and 4) using capital letters when naming the Dream Characters—which can be any notable people, places, or things that show up in your dream.
• Title — Give your dream a memorable title. 
• Date — Write down the date of your dream. 
• Description — Write down a short, general summary of your dream.
• Mood — Write down how the dream affected your mood upon waking.
• Life Event Affecting Dream — Write down any events in your life that may have influenced your dream.
• Dream Characters — List all remembered notable “actors” in your dream, whether they are people, places, or things.
• Setting — Describe the location of your dream.
• Statement Of Problem — Write down the complication, challenge, predicament, situation, obstacle, plight, quandary, or misadventure presented in your dream. 
• Culmination Or Response To The Problem — Describe what you or another Dream Character did in your dream to respond to the problem presented in the dream.
• Conclusion — Describe how your dream ended.
• Beings Revealed — Write down how your dream seemed to be, if at all, linked in some way to your chosen attractive natural beings.
• Freud’s Approach —  Associate the actions of your Dream Characters with latent, infantile, repressed, or sexual drives.
• Jung’s Approach — Amplify your Dream Characters into Archetypes that are global in scale, symbolic, pervasive, positive, and helpful.
• Hillman’s Approach — Recognize your Dream Characters as animated, living beings by honoring their presence, place, and body.
• Right Information — Ask yourself the two main questions for Dream Tending: “Who is visiting now?” And “What is happening here?”
• The Richest Treasures — Do not force narrow interpretations upon the natural being impressions that reappear in your dream by condensing them into limited signs when it is more fruitful to simply engage with them as living beings that reside in your dream, possibly with infinite symbolic value.
• Privacy — Store your dream journal in a safe place and, where appropriate, share your dream with others.​​​

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Dream Council Protocol​

• Create Dream Figures — Periodically create physical representations of select Dream Characters using natural materials, give them some form of identification, and gather them together.

​When ready, move to the next waypoint: “Sound Wellness.” Keep heading to Gladandgreen Junction.

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Leave your phone behind and bring the printed Heartwood Path Course One, Kosmos: Universal Principles Of Integrity, with you into nature as you complete your daily outdoor activities.
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You have now completed 101 out of 117 waypoints in Kosmos.