My mother would say, “I’d rather share a bowl of noodles with someone I love than a feast with someone I don’t.” It’s her comment on love but looking deeper, it’s also about the feeling of satisfaction. Many of us work hard and feast hard but are still dissatisfied. Why? Something or someone is always missing. Who you feast with is not necessarily an other. It is first and foremost yourself.
Satisfaction is the sister of abundance and the source of joy. Try this exercise to feel it for yourself:
Close your eyes and remember a time when you were satisfied.
Enter that memory with your whole your body and immerse yourself in all those feelings once again as before. Notice where the satisfaction lodges in you, if there is warmth or light or waves of emotion. To me, I feel a deep sense of yes and deep muscles contracting in my gut and pelvis. It feels good, very good.
Then release the memory, but hold onto the feeling experience in your body while you consciously amplify it. Deliberately send that feeling into every cell of your body. It takes some deep concentration but stay with it and hold it for as long as you can.
You can see that satisfaction is not a concept but a physical experience of pleasure. But some try this exercise and find that it leads them to grief, confusion and anger. If that’s you, it is not your fault. Who in our culture has taught us to feel satisfied? There is a skill set around achieving this satisfaction. On the contrary culture teaches us to feel dissatisfaction. That way we keep chasing or buying whatever elusive carrot they’re selling on a stick. It is an futile infinite loop. Advertisers and marketers use dissatisfaction to keep us coming back, never giving us the satisfaction of satisfaction. We internalize that behavior and do it to ourselves.
So the first skill is knowing that the power of satisfaction is in your hands and no one else’s. It’s crucial to feel satisfaction because it closes the loop and gives the signal that you have completed something important for your soul. Satisfaction is true closure. Once you receive that intuitive signal, you can naturally move onto the next thing without force. When you don’t feel satisfaction, you keep returning to the scene of the crime, coming back again and again looking for the satisfaction of closure.
So what does satisfaction feel like? It is an unmistakeable feeling of wholeness and significance - could be large or small, a moment of being seen, a moment of something falling into place - where you feel complete. It is the very experience of peace. To me, it feels like winning a very personal internal victory. There is a sense of pride in it and a sense of resolution. There is an orgasmic quality to it, a feeling deeply imbedded within the emotional fiber of oneself. Hard to translate in words words yet you recognize it immediately in someone’s face, manner and energy.
By practicing satisfaction, starting with satisfaction at the smallest things, you can build a vocabulary of pleasure, abundance and love. It is the best tasting carrot ever. As satisfying as a bowl of noodles shared with someone you love.