The heart is perhaps the only muscle in our body that is stronger when it is soft.  Firmness, strength and the ability to harden are key to core vitality throughout most of the body including our sexual organs. Hardening our heart whether it is in response to a political reality or a difficult relationship turns us into our own personal brand of fundamentalist. It is a slippery slope from the tightening in the chest to a self righteous stance about how the world should be. It happens even before we see it happening. 

If our language is an extension of our soul, then how we talk about things reflects our ability to feel and know them.  Rigid positions accommodate a narrowing of our language and support a limited view of the other side.  It can be painful to let in the depth and nuance that allows other people act irrationally, even seemingly against their own self interest. This is another disadvantage of relating to the world with a hardened heart, it is hard to tell when you are winning, because both sides lose something when the relationship is stuck in polar positions.   

A vital heart is key to a vital sex life, because polarized positions make deep intimacy impossible. The physical dive into another person is at once an abandonment of our higher reasoning and an open yawn of the heart. It is in the softest vital core of our being where the “other” becomes a mystery and that we witness ourselves beyond our self-perception.  

Developing a vital heart is about learning to soften. It is the practice of insight and bearing witness so that in every conflict, we take a moment longer before our position is hardened,  before what we believe at that moment is more true than the person in front of us. I am no exception. For all of my study, it is incredulous to me how quickly I go from open to rigid, so rigid that whether my position is correct or erroneous the battle is lost. My children look at me with fear and sometimes that is enough to come to and back track. Sometimes we can create irreparable damage without even seeing the heart slide closed. 

When you consider the degree to which human culture is currently divided into polar positions and that there are many people who attribute their existence to the strength of their army,  it is not surprising that our ability to soften our hearts are unpracticed. The business and busyness of making a life is founded in the relationships that open your heart. In places of eternal conflict and irrational violence, giving yourself over to this purpose is revolutionary. The people we love are not given to us, they are loaned. We have the joy and agony of loving them uncertainly in a world that resorts to weaponry over conversation.  

Having the guts to soften and develop our capacity for love in face of the odds can take super human strength. Remind yourself often that what you love most and struggle with most are usually embodied in the same person and that ultimately the time you have to love them is brief.  

We take our vitality for granted.  The strength of our life force impacts not only our overall physical health, but often acts as a primary filter for our emotional life and how we interpret the events that make up our days.  Often we also bear witness to the strength of our life force in our sexual lives.  When we are feeling vitally alive, colors are brighter, our thinking is more acute and our emotional life is stable.  Our sexuality is heightened and readily available for exploration. 

Many things eat away at the life force that makes us who we are.   Stamina and energy can start to feel like a zero sum game as the demands for our attention mount and the resources that we have to deal with life’s challenges diminish.  Our bodies reflect this waning energy in physical weakness and strange symptoms from a range of heretofore unknown illness.   Our thinking and decision making process gets stuck more often, without the energy to re-think and re-imagine life obstacles.   We are emotionally off, sometimes without knowing why.   It is no wonder that our sexual life mirrors the life force we are working with.  And no wonder too, when you consider the sexual dysfunction issues that plague at least one third of our population, both male and female.

Yet it is rarely our withering sex life that generates the commitment to change our lifestyle, well except perhaps for the knee jerk way we leave our partners in response to lacking sexual vitality.   While relationships often bear the brunt for our collective sexual dysfunction, in truth, our sexual energy and capacity is founded in our overall vitality.     More often, meaningful changes in diet and exercise routines are linked to an urge for survival.   Illnesses, symptoms of continuous fatigue, and ongoing pain and weakness remind us of our mortality.    

Last year, when I started exercising regularly, I was afraid.  The long years of bearing and raising children and my new foray into aging combined to remind me daily of my physical weakness this would translate into one back injury after another. It got to the point that the smallest of movements could trigger an injury that would have me lying on an icepack for days.  I was often exhausted when I woke up. And my emotional life was a rollercoaster that reflected my body.  I knew that I had to find a way to strength or perish.   This is sadly I think, not a unique experience.   So many of us suffer from the toll the years take on our bodies without committing to giving that energy back to our core.

 Doing the work of regaining my core strength came from my urge to stay alive. Bodies are designed for motion and as hard as the work of building muscle can be, it beats the alternative of chronic pain and facing the world with weakness.  I have since become addicted to the wonder of a strong and solid inner core, and also my Pilates studio.   I revel in my physical strength and I draw courage from it for the other challenging parts of my life.   

The connection between our physical and sexual vitality seems like it would be obvious.  Yet interestingly while many studies emphasize how increased and regular intimacy impacts physical well being, the reverse is even more true.   I didn’t anticipate how building my core strength would transform my intimate experience.    Yet, after years of cautious love making and limited ability to perform the sexual acrobatics shown in many books, my pilates bridging exercises held new meaning.   For the first time in my life, I actually have the stamina to move towards sex like the body contact sport that it is.

We all want to have better sex.   So here is a great tip to get there-move your body deeply and often.   Consider your physical workouts an invitation to your sexual vitality.

In a recent radio appearance, I was asked a question that caught me off guard. I am accustomed to and barely miss a beat for the normal inquiries about achieving orgasm or frustrations with inconsistent libido but no one has ever asked me before which way to vote for sexual health. The caller wondered which political party or candidate was more sexually healthy and promoted values consistent with sexual health. My political views are probably not a secret to anyone who reads my columns and knows that I make my home in the most liberal of small towns in the northwest. Yet regardless of your political affiliations, considering sexual health, your own and our nations as you cast your ballot this week, may not be such an unreasonable consideration.

Anything repressed tends to disfigure and take on a life and personality more akin to the repression than the thing itself. This is an accurate and tragic testimony about the state of sexual health in our nation. “Just say no”, the current administration’s policy on teen sexuality education denies the vital truth about our human identity as sexual beings. Our sexuality is a part of who we are, not just a reflection of what we do. Worse than the increase in sexually transmitted diseases that could be controlled through education, or the rise in teen pregnancy rates during this “just say no” policy, is the empty space that we have left to be filled by pornography and the adult entertainment industry as the sole source of available sexuality education for both kids and adults. I don’t know about you, but this is not the basis of intimacy and sexuality that I want my children to model their futures on.
Obama was attacked earlier in the campaign for suggesting that young children be educated about appropriate touch. Here is another, let me jump out on a limb, educational effort that might actually revolutionize the sexual health world we inhabit. The rate of incest and sexual abuse among young children in this country is reported between 10 and 20 % depending on the study with a recognition, that many cases of familial incest is never reported. How utterly revolutionary to give children the permission, the skills and the language to protect their sexual identities.

Sexual health is not just for kids either. Recent reports of the impact of the depressed economy’s affect on the public’s intimate life are grim with both adultery and divorce on the rise. Economic uncertainty and stress magnify the challenges of building and maintaining a healthy intimate life. There is little education or cultural recognition that a solid relationship is actually the very best of life and preservers when the going gets rough. Hundreds of medical studies confirm the increased physical, mental and emotional health benefits of a vital intimate life which reduces the experience of stress and worry.

Sexuality is a complex experience and members of both political parties have demonstrated poor judgment and had their bad decisions about their intimate lives publicly exposed. These experiences reflect the truth in the rhetoric of overcoming our differences and realizing that in our sexuality and in our humanity that we are more similar than we are different.

“Misdirected life force is the activity in the disease process.” Kabbalah

My husband is a man of very few words but this is what he said to me when I told him that sometimes I don’t know what I am fighting for in my life. Often when I return home from time away, the reentry is full of rebellion. The multiple demands of a complex family life feels like an intrusion rather than the life that I chose. Sometimes I can slide so deep into the rejection of these demands of marriage and children that the outcome of the story I am envisioning becomes unrecognizable. Spinning an internal story that blames your relationship repeatedly for some personal unresolved issue, or even for the frustrations and transitions that arise from aging will create a failed relationship.

The story that we spin about illness is no different. Cancer has always struck me as some weird mutation of the self. The same cells that have always inhabited us suddenly start making mutated and bad decision. Cell replication gone seriously wrong and suddenly our healthy cells are creating tumors and white blood cell count nightmares cleaving us in two. The treatment of choice - to kill the bad replicating cells either through radiation or chemical toxins is a little bit like destroying ourselves.

Sustaining your life through serious illness forces you to make sure you know what you are fighting for. Reinventing your attachment and commitment to both your life and your identity in the process of life and death treatments is nothing if not clarifying. The eloquent voices of cancer survivors and their families on the stories of the reckoning with life choices and relationships is the silver lining of the experience. We realize we have no more time to lose and we love more fiercely, we live with more intention in however much time is left us than for a whole lifetime before. The story conforms to the outcome and blaming illness for a failed life begets itself.

Knowing and naming our feelings is one thing. Like storm clouds that move through over head, they fertilize the ground and cleanse. Feelings should not be allowed to define our story. They are too impermanent for that kind of responsibility and yet this crossover in not uncommon. My own recent urges towards my own identity showed me how quickly my feelings, legitimate as they might be, can spin a story that annihilates the relationships that I worked for years to build.

Disease can give you the opportunity to redirect your life force and to invent a story that can transform the health of your body and relationships. Begin with expanding your experience of love in the world. Let the wonder of natural things dominate your senses. Be generous with the love you feel for yourself and others. Smile when you see other people laughing. Watch funny movies or crazy political satire. Invent a story that lets you take nothing small for granted and opens you to the largeness of the present moment.

If love is so healing why does it hurt so much?  This is a good question with difficult answers.   Love the verb is a constant practice of feeling compassion, giving the benefit of the doubt and struggling to feed our goals and desires, as well as those of whom we love. This aspiration is a juggle even in the most functional of relationships; and the score rarely comes up   50-50.

Approaching our intimate relationships with the intent of an action verb is realistic, if not a bit daunting. The romantic version of the verb, the measure we use for our love relationships, reflects the illusion of love as a vacation.   We sit side by side in some beautiful natural location and the only action required is offered by the love that we feel, washing over us, filling us, just as easily as the nearby waterfall washes over and fills the streambed.  Physical intimacy carries the potential to generate this experience; flush with heightened hormones and released tension; lovemaking seems to encompass all of what is love.  

These peaks of love are profoundly healing and sustaining.   However it is unrealistic to expect that these experiences should encompass all that is love.  When we are unable to show up for those we love, the feelings that we bear are the polar opposite of what we feel when we succeed in these relationships.  It doesn’t matter if the slight is intended or a consequence of life’s competing demands.  Generating the love sometimes is our work alone.   Three thousand miles from home, I am unable to care for my youngest daughter who came down with the chicken pox.  I also somehow managed to have missed the start of the tradeshow that I traveled all this way to attend.  

More often than not, there is no malice intended in most of love’s disappointments.  Life frequently tests our ability to forgive the intrusions to our peace of mind and to sustain the pain and longing of someone we love and cannot show up for.    We must be willing to balance the hardships, bear the ache in our heart and in our relationships if we expect to experience the vacation of love working for us.   If we are unwilling to sustain the work of love, all we ever get is a brief glimpse of a paradise, fading fast enough that it is easy to dismiss.

Illness is as much a part of our human condition as is wellness.  Most of what we do in life can be traced back to the basic human drive to be happy and well.  The times that we feel most fragile are made more bearable when held in love.  Unfortunately, the courage and intention to sustain each other during the daily annoyances is sadly often more than we can bear.  The number of people who report feelings of relief at the end of their long-term relationships continues to amaze me. Loving each other is the hardest work we do and what we do with that work defines our life in health and illness.   Although I feel bad about not being the mother I want to be this weekend, I hope that I return to the work with more resolve to stay with it.