The one I remembered today was about pleasure. I have always associated pleasure with wants or thought of it somehow as a secondary need. The second chakra corresponds to pleasure, while the first chakra corresponds to basic needs. It's like how you need rice and beans but you just want a cupcake, or you need sleep but you don't need to sleep on a feather bed. I thought this for many years and used it to rationalize what I did and did not allow myself.
And then I saw Hayden. Little infant Hayden took visible pleasure in drinking his milk. It was a basic instinct to nurse - he started at it immediately after birth and he needed it to survive. But he also enjoyed it. I heard an interview with a recovering tongue cancer patient describing the return of his taste - and he said sweet came back first. In the same interview he mentioned that sweet is the first taste that develops in infants. Why sweet? You would think that for pure survival we would taste bitter or spicy first, so we could detect and spit out dangerous foods. But no, we taste sweet first - the one that gives us the most pleasure.
So I started to think about pleasure and basic needs as being more intertwined - and I think it's closer to the truth. If you feel no pleasure, you don't want to live. If your life is full of pleasure, you really want to live. Just like our infants who drink in their most basic food to survive, but also to enjoy.
This became long - I will post more lessons throughout the week as I remember them.
