Why high functioning women perform healing & wellness and how somatic pleasure changes everything

Podcast Episode

You are functioning, but you are not feeling…

You hold it all together - your life, career, motherhood, relationships. You keep pushing, managing, and people pleasing. A life on autopilot. Underneath all of it, you ask yourself: is this really it? Your mind rarely stops, you move from one thing to another, rest makes you uncomfortable. Your sleep is broken, your digestion is off, and your mood is unpredictable. Your nervous system is stuck in a survival state. Your body has forgotten how to feel safe, how to soften, to receive, and how to feel good.

What is missing isn't more effort. What is missing is pleasure.
Somatic pleasure is your next level nervous system regulation. It is healing. It is your radiance.

I’m Patricia - an ED & DV survivor, former nurse, mother, pleasure explorer, and an award-winning educator in somatic pleasure. I guide high-functioning women from stress and survival to embodying The Pleasurelit Woman - feeling alive, radiant, regulated and deliciously turned on - in life, business, motherhood and relationships.

I am the founder of Pleasurelit®, the bestselling author of The Pleasurelit Way, and host of the top 5% podcast Pleasurelit with Patricia. My trauma informed somatic pleasure approach blends nervous system regulation, tantra, sexuality, breathwork, yoga, meditation, identity shift, and feminine embodiment.

Pleasurelit is your pleasure lit from within.

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YouTube Video

You can have the perfect morning routine, know all the healing tools, and still feel disconnected.

There's a version of me who had it all mapped out.

Supplements. Breathwork. Journaling. Gratitude list. Cold water. Workout. Smoothie. I had read the books, listened to the podcasts, done the courses. I knew exactly what a high-functioning woman on a wellness journey was supposed to be doing with her mornings. I was doing all of it.

And I felt almost nothing.

Not depressed. Not broken. Just... moving through it. Ticking, ticking, ticking. Getting to the end of my routine and checking it off the list like a project that had been successfully delivered. To whom, I still don't know.

This is what I'm sitting with in this week's solo episode. Because I have been back at the beach this week, watching the sunrise before my kids are even properly awake, and I remembered something that I let slip away from me for a while.

What it actually feels like to start my day from pleasure instead of performance.

Here's the thing about high-functioning women. We are exceptional at performing. We learnt it early, in ways that made complete sense at the time. Being the good girl. Being responsible. Knowing the right answer, doing the right thing, because it kept us safe or got us the love we were looking for. Our nervous systems got very good at this. And then we grew up and brought that exact same pattern right into our healing journey.

Which is why you can speak fluently about your self-care and still feel hollow inside it.

Which is why you can understand your patterns intellectually and still not feel anything shift.

Which is why you can have the most impressive morning routine on paper and wake up already exhausted.

Performing is a survival response. But it will never get you where you are trying to go, because healing isn't something you do correctly. It's something you let yourself actually feel.

This is where somatic pleasure comes in.

Somatic pleasure is felt pleasure. And that distinction matters more than anything else I could say in this episode. You can perform calmness. You can perform wellness. You can perform self-care. But you cannot perform what your body actually feels. Which is exactly what makes somatic pleasure so disruptive to these patterns. It bypasses the performance entirely. Your body either feels it or it doesn't.

And when it does, that is your nervous system beginning to trust that it is safe to receive.

This week, for me, it looked like the beach before sunrise. The cold air. The light coming up over the water. Other people there, walking their dogs, drinking their coffee, already soft and unhurried. My daughter joining me one morning. Coming home and cooking breakfast slowly, plating it up like it mattered, waiting until I actually felt hungry instead of eating because the clock said to.

None of that is on anyone's list of optimal wellness habits. But every single bit of it landed in my body. And when your day starts from that place, something ripples through all of it.

That's what I want for you. Not the perfect routine. A different relationship with your own body as the guide.

If you've been performing your healing and wondering why nothing is actually shifting, listen to this episode. That's where we go deeper.

And if you're ready to stop performing and start feeling, join us within the Pleasurelit Woman & Circle.

Support the podcast: Follow/Subscribe to the show, rate it with 5 stars (on Spotify) and share the episodes with others, so we can spread more pleasure into this world. You can also tag me, so I can re-share your love. Thank you.

With love & pleasure, Patricia

For educational and informative purposes only

We would love to hear from you:

• What resonated with your from this conversation?

• What has been your experience with performing healing, wellness or self-care?

• What do you feel called to share?