On Anhedonia, Tashlich, and Direct Planets

The Pleasure of Fasting and Casting Off Trauma

(Image courtesy of Maisie Cousins)

Anhedonia, defined as “the absence of pleasure,” is a concept that’s been on my mind a lot since the pandemic began in 2020. We’ve mostly cast off our masks now and accepted “the pandemic is over” as a cultural norm, despite Long Covid, even though the virus is still greedily mutating and still killing our elderly, despite the millions of immunocompromised people unable to safely return to “normal” life.

This is in part because of how we ached for pleasure when it was inaccessible to us (it’s also because of capitalism, but that’s for another essay). In the almost three years since we were locked down and denied human contact and other pleasures, I’ve noticed that many clients and friends have a broken, halting relationship to their own pleasure. From inability to orgasm to low desire, there is a lot of work for a clinical sexologist to do right now. Collectively, we’ve forgotten how to feel good, but a lot of us are adept at faking it. So many don’t even acknowledge their trauma, and there is an epidemic of dysregulated nervous systems out there. What’s good for that? Pleasure, of course. That’s the hamster wheel we’re on.

I’m rushing to finish and post this before sundown, so I’ll be brief as we enter the holiest day of the year for my ancestors. As a mostly secular Jew, I participate in the high holy days in my own creative way. One of my favorite rituals of this time of year is called Tashlich – which translates to “cast off.” It involves throwing your ‘sins’ (you can substitute ‘sins’ with regrets, harms, or anything you want to leave behind in the previous year) into a body of water. As you throw pebbles or bread into the river or sea, you meditate on what you’d like to let go off. It’s typically done on the 1st day of the Jewish New Year, but I try to do it sometime during the Days of Awe – the period between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur when our objective is to get written into the Book of Life for another year.

At this somber, reflective moment, I’m thinking about what it means for our relationship with pleasure when we pause it with intention. For hedonism enthusiasts like me, for those that experience the divine in states of sexual ecstasy, for those who recognize pleasure as a kind of medicine for the mind, soul, and body, the idea of purposeful restriction can be confusing.

Mercury is direct, and soon Pluto and Saturn will follow. People are talking about the flirty state of sweetness and light inherent in Libra Season, and sure, that’s here for us on the surface. But October is a far more complicated month than we’ve seen in a while, with a searing Solar Eclipse in Scorpio on the 25th and Mars stationing retrograde on the 30th. (I wrote a bit about Mars in Gemini and the retrograde here). Our human instinct is to see a green light (the end of a retrograde) and rush into the breach without having contemplated the nature of our pauses – whether they’ve been forced by circumstance (like a pandemic) or intentionally taken, like when we choose to take a social media fast or observe a spiritual fasting ritual.

I invite you now, as I step away at a sundown, to pause for a moment and let that pause inform how you feel the next time you experience pleasure. Tell me how that feels in the comments – I’ll read them after sundown on the 5th.