The 5 Levels of Pleasure: How a Workshop on Joy Became a Journey Through Grief, Healing, and Wholeness
I still remember the moment I hesitated before signing up for The Five Levels of Pleasure workshop. It was the summer of 2012, and my father was dying. Every cell in my body told me I shouldn’t go — that pleasure had no place in a time of heartbreak. But something in me, something deeper than logic, whispered: Go anyway.
That decision changed my life.
A Threshold Between Life and Death
A week after I began the workshop, my father passed away. I walked straight from the edges of life and my perceptions of pleasure into the mystery of death — and the teachings I had just begun exploring became my lifeline. They offered me a way to hold both grief and love, pain and joy, contraction and expansion. The 5 Levels of Pleasure weren’t just about sensuality or enjoyment. They were about presence — the art of fully inhabiting life, no matter what it brings.
Level 1: Physical Sensation — Returning to the Body
Honestly, in so many ways I had been living in my head for years, navigating working multiple jobs, decisions, and emotional exhaustion. Earlier that summer I was on my way home from a women’s festival at the retreat center that would be part of what helped me transform my life from existing to truly living when I got the call. My father’s health had suddenly declined. Over the next couple of months he would make the decision to let nature takes its course. Only two weeks before I had spent time with my father saying goodbye.In the first level, we worked with the body — the senses, breath, and simple touch. Coming back to sensation — feeling my breath, noticing the wind on my skin — was the first step in coming home to myself. Grief was just one of the things that pulled me out of my body; this practice brought me back.
I learned that even through tears, pleasure could exist. A sip of water. The warmth of sunlight. The rhythm of my heartbeat. These small moments of physical awareness became anchors when everything else felt like it was falling apart.
Level 2: Emotional Pleasure — Feeling Everything
The second level asked us to explore the pleasure of feeling itself — not just joy or bliss, but the full emotional spectrum. At first, this sounded impossible. How could sorrow be pleasure? But what I discovered was that feeling deeply was its own kind of freedom. To cry without resistance. To ache without judgment. To allow emotion to move through me instead of hardening into pain.
In those early weeks after my father’s death, I sat with waves of emotion that would have once terrified me. But I remembered the teaching: when we resist nothing, everything moves. Emotion became energy. Energy became aliveness.
Level 3: Creative Pleasure — The Flow of Expression
As I began to heal, the third level awakened my creative life. I found myself writing, singing, dancing, and moving in ways that felt unfiltered and alive. Pleasure here was about expression — letting what was inside find form outside. Grief, love, memory, and mystery began to merge into art. What I once thought of as brokenness became material for creation.
This was the birth of a new voice in me — the same voice that years later would give rise to The Elimination Code and my teachings on clarity, focus, purpose, and divine action.
Level 4: Spiritual Pleasure — Connection Beyond the Physical
By the time I reached the fourth level, I began to experience something far more subtle — a pleasure not dependent on circumstances at all. It was the quiet joy of connecting into the universal energy of love I could feel that inner knowing that my father’s presence had not ended, only transformed. In moments of meditation and ritual, I could feel the thread of connection between us and myself in new and exciting ways, like a current of light running through my heart.
The boundaries between life and death, grief and grace, began to dissolve. I started to understand that pleasure and pain were not opposites; they were doorways to the same sacred space — intimacy with existence itself.
Level 5: Ecstatic Pleasure — Union
The fifth level revealed what all the others had been preparing me for: union. The pleasure of being fully alive, fully connected, and fully surrendered. This wasn’t about escape or ecstasy in the conventional sense — it was the bliss that arises when nothing is separate. When the body, heart, mind, and spirit align in one vast field of awareness.
In that space, I felt what it meant to live Tantra — not as a philosophy, but as a living truth. The same energy that moves through grief moves through love, creation, and death. To touch that current is to touch the divine.
Expanding the Meaning of Pleasure
Over the years, the 5 Levels of Pleasure have continued to unfold within me — not just as a set of teachings, but as a living map for how I meet life. They guide how I create, how I love, how I hold others in their own transformations. They remind me that pleasure isn’t a frivolous luxury; it’s a state of deep receptivity — a willingness to meet life fully, even when it breaks you open.
That first class — the one I almost didn’t attend — became the threshold to everything that followed: my healing, my purpose, my calling to teach others how to come home to the sacredness of their own aliveness.
When I share The 5 Levels of Pleasure today, I offer them not as abstract teachings, but as living wisdom born from pain, loss, love, and the courage to stay open.
Because in the end, pleasure is not the absence of pain.
It’s the presence of life — fully felt, fiercely loved, and divinely lived.
This workshop is for anyone who feels that same quiet whisper — the knowing that there’s more waiting to be lived. I can’t promise it will do what it did for me, but I can promise this: pleasure is essential for living. Without it, we’re just existing.
✨ The 5 Levels of Pleasure – A Journey into Connection, Joy & Fulfillment
6 live Zoom sessions • Mondays, October 20 – November 24 • 7:00–8:30 PM ET
$249 | With Jennifer Mark, Creator of The Elimination Code
🌐 theeliminationcode.com