Raising the Bar of Indulgence

In a wonderful indulgent evening last night I had a great discussion about feeling good. One of my core values is to feel good and pure indulgence makes me feel fabulous. Recently I am exploring how a one day retreat acted as a springboard into pure indulgence and feeling fabulous. I also think that one of other factors that made me feel good the first week of the challenge was that I raised the bar. I shared this with my husband and he brought up an excellent point. He stated that we only feel good when we are having a shift, when something is different. In his opinion if I wanted to feel good all the time not only would I have to take consistent action, that action would also have to intensify; either in length or in strength. His theory mirrors the idea of having to take more pain medication, alcohol or drugs to get the same effect if you do so on a regular consistent basis. "What about exercise ?", I challenged him, feeling smug. He stood by his previous statement backing it up by adding the idea that yes you can maintain your health by doing the same exercise everyday but in order to feel good you have to do more.

All of this when I stepped back made complete sense. Raising the bar is the same as doing more. So now the question is how far can I raise the bar without that itself becoming a "should" and losing it's feel good quality? Maybe there is a way around this, of course I want to raise the bar but it just feels wrong to make that a constant action, perhaps I could find a few different things that represent pure indulgence and make me feel good and sprinkle different ones into different days and approach each one fully conscious so that is is always a new experience.

All of this seems like a lot of talk and no action! But it is fun to explore. All this talk of raising the bar makes me think of boundaries and raising personal standards. We put boundaries and standards around our core values. When I felt good and raised the bar what core value or values were involved? Something to meditate on I think.

Another theme today seems to be that pure indulgence does not contain intoxicants. It is essential to be fully present, conscious to experience pure indulgence. This brings me back to a question I am also still contemplating. In Buddhism one of the precepts is not to become intoxicated and I have been contemplating where and when I am intoxicated. The precept is referring to intoxication from drugs, alcohol or negative situations but I wonder what the stance is for intoxicated situations, like feeling good. Perhaps the precept is addressing that too. For now I am going to focus on negative or unhealthy intoxication. There are times when I can have one glass of wine and feel intoxicated and other times when it takes several glasses, still other times I am so numb I don't feel the intoxication at all. What is the boundary around intoxication, where is the border for me? I think more contemplation is in order.