By Lawrence Lanoff · The Naked Press

The Pleasure Mindset

Retrain Your Nervous System for Pleasure — and Feel Good Without the Guilt

Nothing is wrong with you. Not "nothing is wrong with you, but." Nothing is wrong with you. Whatever shame you carry about pleasure, about your body, about wanting what you want — you weren't born with it. It got installed. This book is the plain-language version of taking it back out.

Here's the one sentence the whole book hangs off of: the opposite of pleasure is not pain. The opposite of pleasure is more pleasure. Most of us were handed a version of reality that runs like a pendulum — swing up into something good, and the universe comes to collect. Lawrence Lanoff has tested that belief directly, for real, for twenty-five years, in his own life and in decades of sitting with other people's. It doesn't hold up. You're not on a pendulum. You're on a spiral — every real expansion becomes the new floor you stand on for the next one.

The Pleasure Mindset is the wide front door: fifteen short chapters, one principle each, a tiny practice for each one. No prior spiritual reading required. No vocabulary you need walking in. If you've never done a single practice in your life, you can do the ones in this book. If you've read every self-help book ever written, you can still use this one — because it's not selling you concepts, it's handing you a short list of basic principles and something small to actually do with each one.

Feeling good is not the problem. It never was. It's the point — and it was never something you had to earn, explain, or feel guilty about in the first place.

What's inside

• Chapter 1 — You Were Never Broken. Nothing is wrong with you — and the one question that actually matters (where did I get this idea, and is it mine?).No baby comes into the world ashamed of its own body.
• Chapter 2 — The Opposite of Pleasure Is More Pleasure. The one sentence the whole book hangs off of, and why you're on a spiral, not a pendulum.Every real expansion becomes the new floor you stand on for the next one.
• Chapter 5 — Find Your Breath. The one practice in the book worth actually learning — low breath, long exhale, jaw and shoulders and belly going soft.It costs nothing. It requires no equipment, no privacy, no permission from anyone.
• Chapter 7 — Your Own Naughtiness Scale. A private, imagination-only practice built specifically for permission — your number two is not the same as anyone else's.Visiting isn't the same as acting.
• Chapter 11 — Ritual Is Where the Power Is. Why a container makes you safer to go further inside, not smaller.The body trusts what you repeat, not what you announce.
• Chapter 12 — Relax Your Ass. One of his own named teachings, on the tension nobody notices they're carrying — and the bigger question underneath it.Who owns your genitals?
• Chapter 14 — Pleasure Is a Path to Transformation. The book's climax — the session that showed him pleasure and pain can move together, and what transcendence actually is.Not a metaphor about spiritual growth. An actual place, available to you.

Illustrated

Original illustrated plates woven through the book — not decoration, a second language for what the words are naming.

About the author

Lawrence Lanoff has spent thirty years stripping the mythology off of sex so regular people can actually have it. He was introduced to Tantra at eleven, directed eleven feature films for companies like Showtime, Paramount, and Playboy Entertainment Group, worked alongside Betty Dodson's organization, co-authored material on male sexuality with Carlin Ross, and wrote A Course in Freedom in 2007. Neil Strauss called him "a new-age Ben Kingsley" in The Truth. This book is decades of teaching, distilled into the shortest, plainest version he's ever put on the page.

You are not on a pendulum. You're on a spiral. There isn't a ceiling on that — just how far you're currently willing to go. — Lawrence