“We think fast food is equivalent to pornography, nutritionally speaking.”  ~Steve Elber

As a culture, our diet often suffers from the overwhelming demands of schedule and time constraints; we pick up food on the run and call it a meal. Even when we take the time to prepare a meal at home, we often eat it in front of a screen, eating quickly and mindlessly. Taking the time to taste our food is a luxury many of us don’t know we are missing. We leap to the main course, over eating but never really filling up.

In many ways our sexual drive sadly gets the same treatment. We take the sensuous part of our humanity for granted, forgetting the power that scent has in waking up our memory, sexuality  and emotions. It is well documented that people who become anosmic, suffer not only a significant drop in their ability to taste, but to emote. Thus, sexual drive plummets.

Learning to pay attention to scent and the associated tastes is a form of building a sensory vocabulary.Taking the time to savor our senses makes life rich. Nowhere is that more true than in our intimate lives. Thinking about your sex life like a gourmet meal both takes the pressure off of any preconceived ideas of the main event and opens a gateway to the wonders of what it means to be a sexual being.

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“Sex lies at the root of life, and we can never learn to reverence life until we know how to understand sex.”  Henry Ellis

Who doesn’t want a healthy and satisfying sex life? And yet a substantial and growing percentage of people struggle with low libido and sexual dysfunction issues. Overcoming this challenge in order to benefit from the many emotional and physical benefits of lovemaking should be on the top of your list when you consider that hundreds of major medical studies correlate an active sex life with a longer life, better heart health, a healthier immune response, reduction in chronic pain symptoms, lower rates of depression and even protection against some cancers.

Identifying the top 5 libido killers is a good way to get on track to finding healthy ways to build healthy mental and physical habits to revitalize the passionate side of your life.

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Most things in life are developmental. Human lifespan has programmed continuous growth and maturation into our genetic code, which acts as an imperative that makes skill building one of the richest aspects of daily living. Nowhere is this truer than in our foundational relationship to our sexuality.

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“At times our own light goes out and is rekindled by a spark from another person. Each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flame within us.”-Albert Schweitzer

A long holiday weekend is a great time to consider staying in to create your own fireworks. For as much exhibitionist sexuality that floods our media sources, many couples are hard pressed to find the time and attention that a healthy and vital intimate life demands. The sad truth is that many people do not know how to have sex. We presume that it is an innate skill like love, but the truth is that both of these capacities that define our humanity and our lives are skill based, which means that they respond to education and practice. It is no wonder, really when you consider that on the one hand, we are inundated by an exhibitionist, “anything-goes” sexuality in our pornographic laden culture, and on the other hand there is nothing. This is an empty and lonely place where most of us live with our questions about sexuality and wonder what is normal. Even most “Better Sex” videos are so graphic that integrating the images into practice is a far reach for many. The fiction of pornography is for many the only educations available.

As a purveyor of love products and a loveologist, I spend my days educating about products and relationships, which can enhance the real connection between people. One thing that I have learned over and over is that even though I am completely confident in my product formulations as tools for a longer and more satisfying sex life, the more I recognize that even the best lube in the world is not going to work if you don’t know how to use it. So here’s a little guide to the steps of making a spark turn into flame in your bedroom…
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“Women’s desire for sexual emancipation is very worthy. I fear that it’s being hijacked by a profit-oriented industry that doesn’t really try to understand women and their sexuality.” –Leonore Tiefer

The race towards a pill to cure female sexual dysfunction continues as the major pharmaceutical players vie to create a pill that can cure the symptoms that keep women from the desire and arousal that characterize a vital intimate life. The market for such a remedy is estimated to be worth close to $2 billion; but of those who have already tried and failed, the prevailing sentiment was that female sexuality and its corollary dysfunction is the result of a subtle and complex combination of behaviors, attitudes and emotions. Not easily treatable with a single pill.

In fact, FSD, or female sexual dysfunction is a reality that visits the majority of women on the planet at some point in their lives. On any given day, most clinical studies cite the statistic of 43% of women being affected by a range of symptoms that include vaginal dryness, pain with intimacy and loss of libido. It is difficult to decipher which symptom begets the other and even harder to unravel the emotional, mental and spiritual impacts that this extremely common, yet rarely discussed condition that impacts millions of women and couples.

The most recent application to the FDA came from Boehringer Ingelheim, who actually discovered their recent entry into the field of sexual healing by way of a failed anti-depressant, Flibanserin. The manufacturers themselves are not entirely sure why changing the levels of seratonin, dopamine and norepinephrin work to affect a woman’s libido. Many of those on the review committee felt that the company had not made its case and that the benefits of the daily pill did not outweigh its side effects, which included dizziness, nausea and fatigue.

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“The only thing about masturbation to be ashamed of is doing it badly.” –Sigmund Freud

Whatever else the holiday weekend may offer, don’t forget to honor the fact that May has long been declared national Masturbation Month. Good Vibrations launched the annual celebration of self-pleasure in 1995 to protest the firing of Clinton appointed U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Jocelyn Elders. Conservative members of the administration blasted Elders when she responded to questions regarding safe sex by saying that, “Masturbation is something that perhaps should be taught.” This was a remarkably bold statement at the time, and although masturbation is considered one of the most common sexual acts on the planet, the silence and shame that shadow masturbation have long and deep roots.

Beyond the religious condemnation that has long been associated with self-pleasure, the practice was not long ago considered an affliction for which medical doctors used the cruelest of instruments and techniques to control young boys from experiencing any pleasure at all. So it is not surprising that the self-reporting of this behavior still hovers between 30- 70% depending on gender and age. Even with all of the benefits that this practice can bring to a couple’s sex life; this is still a behavior that many people are not comfortable sharing with their partners.

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The question of whether intimacy and love-making should be spontaneous or planned is one that gets between many couples. There are two issues in question here and it is important to tease them apart if you are going to make sense of either.

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What does sex mean to you? While no one else can provide an intrinsic meaning to the concept or practice of sexuality we all struggle with defining this most basic and integral part of ourselves.
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“How did it happen that their lips came together? How does it happen that birds sing, that snow melts, that the rose unfolds, that the dawn whitens behind the stark shapes of trees on the quivering summit of the hill? A kiss, and all was said.” ~Victor Hugo

As a purveyor of love products, I have had my fair share of conversations about kissing as the gateway to intimacy. A little kissing know-how goes a long way because nothing will doom a relationship faster than a bad first kiss. Some of this is a biological imperative, because kissing is the human form of long standing mammalian behavior of smelling our mates to determine compatibility. The human art form of kissing has developed over millennia when our ancestors believed that the kiss united their souls, as they believed the spirit was carried on the breath.

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Spend a few days consciously aware of how many times you are touched in the day and how many times you reach out to touch someone else. Notice how even the smallest of physical exchanges impact how you feel in the moment and with the person you connected with.

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