Making Love Sustainable

Sustainability is the catch phrase of this generation, it means learning how to use current resources in a way that does not harm the future. We hear about this in terms of building homes, cultivating food, and rethinking our natural and energy resources. Basically, we are finally being compelled to listen to the voice of indigenous wisdom to our lives in such a way that we can meet the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

This wisdom is rarely applied to love, which, I believe is the source of energy from which all else springs. Why then is it so difficult for so many of us to maintain our loving relationships? What skills and insights can we bring to our love relationships to allow them to flourish and sustain our lives into perpetuity? These questions are at the core of the mission of Good Clean Love - we exist to increase the awareness and experience of love in the world.

We need to begin to appreciate that being in relationship, having a family and history with someone is a precious resource. If we could understand that the huge amounts of trust, time and loving intention that we invest in our early relationships are actually renewable resources, the currency of our future health and well being we may be motivated to create new strategies to maintain them.. Sustaining your relationship with loving words and actions not only keeps your own intimacy vibrant, it becomes a living education of what love is for future generations.

A significant and yet, often misunderstood part of sustaining love is in making love. Sexuality is such a seriously repressed and misrepresented part of our identity and culture, that it is often the place that suffers first when the going gets rough in difficult phases of relationships. This is a shame on several levels- not only because more and more medical studies are supporting strong correlations between better mental and physical health and a strong sex life, but also because human sexuality has a transformative power that heals emotional issues by creating a bond in the deepest parts of ourselves.

Besides all that, Making your love sustainable is fun good clean fun, in fact.

Our need for love and intimacy is a basic human need, as basic as our need for clean food, water and a decent night's sleep. In fact, when push comes to shove, I know that I will often sacrifice sleep for love and still wake up feeling better for it. Do your own experiments - Feeling stressed, make love, see if it helps. Feeling under the weather, try a little intimacy I don't want to be accused of over simplifying life here, and yet I feel compelled to remind you that human babies who are not physically loved, even if they are provided with their other basic needs, tend not to thrive. There is a baby, there in all of us, that needs to be held. Trust the instinct.

Join the discussion at the Good Clean Love Blog! 

Initiation

In this season of giving and receiving, it is a good time to look at how and why that happens with love, or for many of us doesn't. This is a bit of a pandora's box but I am going to simplify if only for the sake of trying to rein in the topic a bit- Sexual desire, is the result of a complex range of internal experiences that includes everything from hormonal stimulation to a prehistoric form of communication. Our ability to feel sexual is at least partly influenced by the culture and family we live in. Between couples, it is deeply affected by the communication that forms the basis of the relationship.

Often times these complex issues boil down to arguments about who initiates and what response the initiator receives. The classic, "I am not in the mood" or "I am tired" creates a cycle of defensive and offensive reactions that is almost like a pre-patterned dance. It's a scenario that many couples just don't have enough language to find their way out of..

This issue plagued my own marriage for many years. The shame of rejection is really no better than the guilt of turning away. The pain is equal,. Two things transpired in my marriage to lift this issue and allow us to experience sexual desire with out the burden of fear and unmet longing.

I always tell everyone I know that the first secret to a healthy relationship is to agree to not say anything mean to each other- It is incredible, how often we will say things to our partner that we would never even utter to a friend. These little comments break down the fabric of trust and take a long time to mend. So for Christmas this year give each other the promise to not say anything mean to each other- you can think it, don't say it.

For me, this safety agreement, made a huge difference in my self esteem- and also that of my husband. The issues around initiating lost their power as we both began to feel safer and more loved. That Christmas, my husband also gave me lingerie for the first time. A gift wrapped invitation to explore my sexuality without the pressure of the old dance. The more we laughed and explored the new space, the more the old space disappeared by itself.

There are still times when one of us, might not feel in the mood when the other does, but now it doesn't mean anything more than what it is, bad timing.

Here are a few other great ideas for shifting the initiator discussion so that you can

Enjoy the moment-

1. Offer to love someone with no expectations.- love oil massages of the back, feet and neck can ease tension not just in the body, but between each other.
2. Agree to just kiss for a few moments, - love oil is good here too.- or better yet suspend the moment just before the lips touch and feel how close you can be without touching.
3. Try a new venue, if you are always inside, go outside and hug, Try a chair instead of a bed to cuddle on, hold hands while eating dinner, even if its leftovers.

 

Please share any great ideas you have about how you turned the tables to get the love you want.

Pain and Pleasure

It is Valentine Day- our sanctioned holiday of love. Loaded with memories-both good and bad of longing and romance that makes our lives what they are. It's a good time to visit the Pain/Pleasure principle that informs sexual desire and romance as well.

There is an indescribable, yet palpable reality of sexual intimacy wherein the ecstatic release of deep pleasure balances and ignites an equal experience of pain. Every time I have sex, I try to understand the relationship between these forces that seem to live at my very center. The experience is so profound, it feels at the time, almost life changing and yet, even with my partner of over twenty years I struggle to find a language to describe the sensations without feeling like I am crossing a line into pornographic exposition.

We have in fact discussed how challenging it is to find language to explore our intimate relationship and how awkward and inadequate much of the language feels. Part of the problem is that so much of the language has been used and abused by the pornographic industry that it is hard for us to feel safe in the same milieu. Still, once over the discomfort of sharing the limited vocabulary, the discussion about the lines between pain and pleasure are worth exploring.

On a biological level, the anatomy of a woman's pelvis includes not only organs but musculature and spinal connections that enervate around the organs. I have long been prone to low back issues and having had four babies, I believe that there are neurological messages between the muscle release of the area and uterine contractions. This explains some part of the physical pain/ pleasure experience of sex, but doesn't really illuminate how the physical experience is mirrored in an even deeper way in the emotions and soul of the relationship.

This is my hypothesis. Loving someone emotionally creates the same pain/pleasure experience as making love to them does. The moments of deep connection and intimacy, sharing the vulnerability and utter nakedness of who one is with a loved one opens the door to what seems the opposite experience of feeling deeply hurt by your lover- either because of what was said or just as often, not said.

In fact though this experience is no different than the simultaneous pain/pleasure of sexuality. Although the timing may be more distant, the act of loving in whatever form requires a willingness to experience both sides. This is the piece of sustaining loving relationships that most of us miss, and tragically the place where we walk away from the heart of what we want most.

Wishing you a valentines day with as much pleasure/pain your heart can hold.

Wendy

Appreciating Everyday

Here's the thing to know about love, sometimes it feels great, like a sunny day in the Northwest after 26 days of rain, but sometimes it feels like the early stages of flu- unsettled, achy, loss of appetite. Ok, well maybe not as bad as the flu, but love lives can be irritating, like an insect bite that keeps itching. This is good to know about love because it allows you to have reasonable expectations, that love will not fix you or your life- it will keep you interested in life and if it is good, keep you honest and trying to be yourself.

I bring all this up because it is Valentines Day, the day we set aside once a year to honor and express our love. This is a good time to assess what are reasonable expectations of such a holiday, it is a good time to recognize and acknowledge what you love about love and about your lover.  It is also a good time to realize that even the best Valentine in the world cannot fill in the space of not communicating or appreciating in the day to day of life. So be reasonable.

I spent many years waiting for just the right gift, or the right words on the right card to show me how much my husband appreciated and loved me- I believed then, that single moments or holidays done right could heal the long standing differences between us. The years that worked the best, were the ones where we were already on solid and intimate ground. The years when we were estranged or exhausted, Valentines day served only to illuminate our distance. The good ones and the bad ones both taught me about reasonable expectations in relationships and for Valentines Day.

If time has brought us any wisdom worthy of passing on, it is this- that we try to celebrate our love as if it were Valentines Day, as often as our busy life will allow. It stabilizes and anchors all the rest of our life and brings meaning to the mundane. We are no longer surprised that our love life, even with regular attention, is still sometimes like the sun after a long rain spell, or like the early stages of flu. Knowing this has taught us to focus on the small things and to stop looking for the big epiphany. It has taught us to stop and witness what makes each other uniquely us-

So here is my great idea for Valentines Day, that won't cost anything more than your attention. Think of the two or three things that really makes the world special for you and your partner and bear witness to them in a short poem. It doesn't have to be really poetic, it just has to reflect what you both love- here's a few examples that work for my guy- who loves great food, fires of all kinds, and astro physics.

If I could give you what mattered most
I would give you the smell of all the wildflowers
the fresh savory sweet salty flavor of all your favorite foods
the crackle of wood burning under a starlit sky,
the mystery and science of the stars themselves.

Here's wishing you a Valentines Day with less expectations and more love.

Push-Pull

Do you understand the push-pull phenomenon that drives most relationships? Do you even know what side you're on? This basic principle in the dance of intimacy can sometimes feel like a strategy game, but in long term relationships can also become a dangerous pattern that drives lovers apart.  Here are some ideas to begin to relate to the pendulum swings and follow your heart to balance in love.

We all remember the late evening strategy sessions with friends, the endless tracking of who called first, the weighing in of when it was ok to call back, what could you do or say to show you were interested but not too interested.  This balancing act that characterizes most early dating scenes and not just in high school, often evolves into romantic patterns that plague many ongoing relationships.

In my own marriage, we suffered through years of what often becomes one of the most hurtful and significant battles in a relationship- the initiation question. On the surface, the question is playful- "How about a date tonight?" or "Have any plans around midnight?"  But when the requests come continuously from one partner and are rebuffed continuously by the other partner, the question is no longer playful, and the responses begin to reflect all that remains unsaid.

Feeling wanted sexually carries so many meanings, and has a great deal of emotional baggage attached, a lot of it unspoken even to ourselves. The weight of these unspoken messages can start to feel like there is an invisible third person at the party. Shame of rejection is not a lot easier to bear than the shame of chronic lack of desire. We all know this story in some form, and we continue to analyze it, trying to determine responsibility, placing blame is the easiest way to find a way to live with the pain of unrequited desire.

The first thing that helps to stop this cycle is to identify it. Find a neutral time to bring up the topic and agree to look at the issue from a distance, almost as though you were talking about people you both knew. This can be difficult to do, especially if the conversation is overdue. The moment you can both see the patterns that your intimacy falls into, there is a peace that comes from not being alone with it. This doesn't solve the problem, but it allows you to create a new relationship to it- one of witness and investigation rolled into one- it makes you take the time to learn to separate your feelings from the event.

Once you have both seen the issue from both sides, slowly you can unpack your feelings and start to see, what it means to you and to your partner to be sexually desired, as well as to feel sexual desire. It is really important to keep these discussions in the present tense. Don't be tempted to justify your behavior and feelings from before, because that will remove the possibility of healing the moment- and keep in mind, by healing the present moment, you automatically heal the past.

This is not a quick fix solution and it doesn't alleviate the push/ pull roller coaster of living in a relationship, but by working to take out the sting and pain of rejection, abandonment and whatever else has been attached to these swings, you allow yourself the joy of exploring them.

Twenty two years later, my husband and I still pass the weight of relating and intimacy back and forth, on a squeaky but functional pulley that we have both come to understand and appreciate. It's a relief now that we have the freedom to invite an interlude without the fear that saying no will start another battle. Allowing yourself and your partner this freedom is a gift that will repay you many times over in discovering the joy and spontaneity of taking turns.

Waiting for the Spring

The goal of making a relationship sustainable should not just be to stay, but rather, to find and cultivate the places in the relationship that are worth staying for. Re-imagining your commitment into a healthy curiosity about the mystery of the other person and allowing for the ebb and flow of intimacy that is a normal part of loving relationships. Here are a few thoughts to help you explore where to look for what can sustain your connections.

The other day I ran into an old friend while dropping off my son for a basketball practice. The last time we talked had been over a year ago, when she was celebrating her first anniversary to her second husband. After a tragic ending to her first marriage, she seemed radiant- they both did. Her boys were in transition but welcomed having a father again.

Now just a year later, she was in the final stages of divorce. I asked her what had happened- she said, it was a difficult transition for him- He wasn't happy not long after they were married, marriage and her ready made growing family had taken a toll on his music career, and they both decided it would be easier to split. I expressed my sorrow for her, but she replied, almost cheerfully, she was fine, better actually than when they were struggling to make it work.

I left that encounter with sadness and resolve. What could I learn from all the leaving that I see going on around me? When should relationships be ended? What amount of time and work constitutes enough? These are the questions that encircle many of my conversations with friends in various stages of leaving their relationships.

Two things come to mind when I talk to my friends about these endings- First, the quote I have hanging on my wall- "You never fail until you quit." This has been a primary premise in maintaining all of my relationships. If communication is the currency of relationships than walking away from the communication is certainly it's death. My husband and I went for years to counselors who taught us to speak to each other so we could hear one another. It is not a skill that most people have- especially across genders, each sex having entirely different ways of communicating and hearing. (For more info on this read "Why Men never remember and Women never forget" by M. Legato). Painful as it can often be, the work of learning to listen and speak lovingly is at its base the promise we make to stay.

The second thing that occurs to me, all the more so, at the onset of spring, as all of nature's little miracles show themselves, reinventing the cycle of birth and renewal is that sustaining love, and not only romantic love- requires acknowledging and accepting all of the "seasons" of a relationship as they come to you. It isn't reasonable to walk away from the winters in love- not the snuggly by the fire winter, but the barren emptiness of wondering how you could have said yes to this...Sustaining love is about learning to wait for the spring- trusting that it will come, sowing the seeds that will help the thaw to begin. Largely, this is a decision to give up the fantasy that relationships exist to make us happy- they have moments of deep and profound joy- like a jump in the lake on a hot summer day. But that is not what they are there for. They exist to teach us to love.

Communication

Language is the metaphor we use to communicate our deepest feelings. A couple's sexuality is the most profound vehicle of communication of all. The words we use and our physical language of love define our love experience.

Penetration is the word often used to describe the culminating act of sexuality. It's a word I often use when describing the best use of good lubricant. But it was just this week after using the word in conjunction with the act, that I wondered what I was saying.

The verb to penetrate has six different definitions in the dictionary and as in the power of any metaphor, the meaning one attaches to the term may deeply influence our relationship to the act.

A lesbian friend of mine once told me that it is not uncommon for many of her friends to maintain a no penetration relationship, and among my heterosexual friends, it is not a small minority who avoid penetration with their spouses. I never asked them but I wonder if for them, the meaning of penetration feels like this definition of a military force entering into enemy territory or the depth of projectile into a target. Certainly the idea of women as a target for a man is rampant and so the deep need of self protection is also deeply held.

To penetrate also means to have an effect throughout, spread through; permeate, move deeply, or imbue...Applied again as a metaphor for sexuality this penetration is an act that transforms, that has the potential of changing everything. This sexual act has the force of inspiration, the possibility of being completely saturated with love.

The act of penetration is a force of nature that is loaded with meaning and mystery. Not surprisingly, to penetrate also means to gain insight and to have a marked effect on the mind and emotions. Our language about our sexuality is as layered as the act itself, and knowing what you mean when you speak about love and sex can only be helpful.

Sexuality is a metaphor for many things in life. The language, attitudes and opening that we share in our sexual encounters has a long reach into the depth and closeness of our day to day relationships.

Consider your relationship to penetration- the word, the idea and the act. Penetration means all of these things all at once. But if I were to make a leap, in the name of making love sustainable, it would be that couples who build a strong and consensual relationship with the meaning and act of penetration are much more likely to have a strong and consensual relationship to each other...

A Conversation Without Words

A Conversation without Words

I have many friends who not only rarely sleep with their husbands, they can't even talk about it. I would go even further and suggest that most of their conversations probably move them further away from intimacy than towards it. Connecting with our verbal language has it's limits- especially since men and women, don't just speak differently, we also hear differently. This is why I urge all of my closest friends to explore an entirely different dialogue, one where the spoken word is left outside the door, and the conversation is lead and answered with what some would argue is our true intelligence- the body.

Our bodies do have a profound intelligence that we rarely give them credit for . Emotions are not actually thoughts running around your brain, although this is how we often describe them. Actually emotions are visceral experiences that live in one's body, as true as chills on a windy night or burning skin in a late spring sun.

A conversation without words is often times the only answer in a conjugal life. It took me a very long time to learn this. The countless ways that I would rephrase my frustration with my husband's silences and perceived lack of interest was continuously lost on deaf ears. I'm not sure the messages ever even reached his ears, my expression and body language was loud enough for him to get my negativity toward him with out needing to hear a word.

Contrary to popular belief, these wordless conversations of the body, have nothing to do with being "in the mood"�. In fact, if you haven't been physically intimate in a while, then the mood concept is a moot point. A physical conversation requires a willingness to be vulnerable enough to be touched. To allow your body to truly feel someone with you, has nothing to do with sexual arousal, and yet with out this permission, sexual arousal is impossible.

Listening and asking questions with the body are skills we mastered as children. Some of these conversations will culminate in sexual pleasure, some may provide a physical reflection of the borders that keep you separate- in either case, the journey of opening up to your own body will change the conversation. I guarantee that by taking the conversation to the body you will hear something that words could not communicate. Physical conversations can only help to make the subsequent verbal conversations kinder and more meaningful.

As Summer moves into Fall and the nights get colder, take advantage and explore a physical conversation with your partner.  

Green House Effect on Love

The earth's atmosphere is stabilized by a very thin ozone layer which keeps temperatures on the planet in check. If you haven't already seen Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, I urge you to do so. It crystallizes the fact that the fragility of our atmospheric conditions requires a renewed commitment to a sustainable way of living. It has changed how I think about what really matters on a daily basis.

The green house effect and fragility of our atmospheric conditions provides a sound metaphor for how the language of sustainability translates to the concept of Making Love Sustainable. The atmosphere in which love thrives can be defined and cultivated. Just as is the case with global warming, small daily changes can make a huge difference in our planet's well being- the same is true about daily loving acts in a relationship.

Sustaining an atmosphere for love to grow starts with how we think about our partner, both when we are together and apart. Our thoughts set the tone for the time that you share as a couple. In turn, the quality of your time together is influenced by your ability to talk to each other. Taken together, these factors coalesce and define the quality and quantity of touch and intimacy in a relationship.

Our thoughts are incredibly powerful, they keep us connected or they drive us apart. When was the last time you monitored the emotional quality of your thinking about your partner? Giving people the benefit of the doubt, giving up the need to be right, and looking for what is loveable in your partner will help you to choose thoughts that sustain a loving atmosphere.

The art of conversation is yet to be fully discovered between the sexes. Men and women have very different ways of expressing and listening to each other. Begin your work in this area with this sensitivity and don't take missteps personally. The goal of talking should be to develop a sense of communication; and sometimes that means engaging in conversations that may not be particularly interesting to you, but promotes an atmosphere of togetherness.

Being together doesn't mean constant dates, but every now and again, it is nice to take time away to really be with someone. However, on a daily basis, creating an atmosphere of togetherness can be accomplished through small acts: Instead of reading the paper, offer to help with dinner. Share a funny story, recount part of your day, or offering to listen to your partner's day is a more sustainable choice than putting on the television.

While it's true that happy couples share a satisfying intimate life, the reverse statement- a satisfying intimate life doesn't necessarily imply a happy couple is also true. Touching- the sharing of your physical body with your partner opens both the height and the depth of a what a loving relationship can offer. It is the glue that holds couples together during their most challenging moments, and yet it is not the answer to a troubled relationship, rather it is the response to the work of sustaining a relationship.

Sharing physically intimate moments requires a leap -- a leap out of our normal day to day physical boundaries and a willingness to go deeply into ourselves and another person. Creating a sustainable love environment of kindness and respect provides the safety net for the leap.

Making Time

Making time for love is an important barometer of the commitment and sustainability of your relationship. When you consider the outrageous scheduling hoops we agree to without qualm in our work setting, or even more intensely in managing our children's activity calendar, it makes you wonder how the idea of scheduling intimacy could still be so taboo.

Yet, taboo it is, with an overriding belief that sex and intimacy are somehow tainted if they are not spontaneous and immediate. This belief system is connected to the shame and guilt we carry around from our adolescence when we could only describe a make-out session if we could first say, "I don't know how it happened, but suddenly we were just doing it!" We can only fully embrace our sexuality if it just happens to us. Planning for it forces us to claim the most unpredictable, and to some degree uncontrollable, part of our life.

There are a lot of good reasons to start including love time in your regular schedule. Leaving love to the spontaneous in a life that is overbooked with commitments to family and careers, means that our love often gets the lowest ebb of our energy. Most of us arrive at our bedrooms exhausted, finally turning away from the last email, the last bill to be paid, the last dish to be washed, the last light turned off. Even the most spontaneous among us can barely muster the energy of imagining a wild interlude at that moment.

Planning love dates can add excitement to the rest of the week. Looking forward to an intimate time, which can but doesn't have to include full-on sex, can be both relaxing and stimulating. Couples that are struggling to find physical connection may find it easier to agree to mutual massages than to envision hours of lovemaking. Either way, setting aside time and energy for your partner sends a message that sustains commitments. While my husband and I don't have set days of the week, we do agree to "dates" either later in the day or the next day. Setting this time for lovemaking becomes part of the foreplay and gives permission to entertain thoughts that might come in handy later.

Inventing a shared language for intimacy connects partners. Revisiting the art of flirting can spice up even the most common of conversations, "What's for dinner?" suddenly has multiple meanings. We are more playful with each other when we are waiting for our date time. Unfulfilled or, even worse, conflicting expectations about intimacy are often the most difficult ground for couples to maneuver. This is where communication is the currency of the relationship on every level.

Learning to schedule time for love requires that we acknowledge and are willing to talk about our sex life together. This is challenging because the taboo is so strong against speaking honestly and openly about sex. Yet developing a language for love is one of the strongest predictors of having a good sex life. Couples who can talk about what they want or prefer in their physical lives, may actually be able to get it. Code words are ok, they may even add some excitement to the game. First and foremost, make time to play.

It is with great pleasure that I invite you to visit our brand new, rebuilt, completely secure, beautiful and highly functional website. A true labor of love that has taught me a great deal about patience and process, and trusting myself!


We will be adding the "perfect gift for someone you love" section soon, and offer daily opportunities for conversation about making your love sustainable. Share the site with your friends and tell us what you like. Join the discussion at the daily weblog at www.makinglovesustainable.com

With love, Wendy

Celebrating an Inner Holiday


This holiday season I want to find a quiet connected space for myself and my family. I want the time to rest and breathe and wonder. I am sick to death of shopping for things to make me or someone I love happy. I want someone to look into my eyes and hear my confusion and sift through my feelings with me.

Lynn Jericho has been studying and writing about this search and has called it the Inner Christmas. This year she made a lovely little computer movie which actually brought my breath back and reminded me what I want to give and receive this holiday season. Here is the link http://www.theinnerchristmasmovie.com, you won't be sorry you took the time.

The search for this inner celebration is at the very core of what it means to make love sustainable in your life. It takes time to feel the ground of your life. Listening for the thoughts that you build your life and relationships with is the first gift you can give yourself and those you love. Creating a meaningful flow of communication and giving permission to yourself and your loved ones to speak their truth and feel heard is at the very heart of connection.

Make time for intimacy, a gentle and tender space where both partners feel safe, loved and accepted for what they are able to bring to the partnership. Celebrating this inner holiday might actually provide a whole new understanding of the idea of burning the yuletide fire. As we all know, it is in the mystery and transformation of the fire that we are born and reborn.

The Gift of Presence


It's easy to get so lost in the momentum of holiday activities and the seemingly endless to-do lists that we forget what the holidays are for. There is always more to do than there is time for, and probably never quite so acutely as during the holidays. Gift giving drives a lot of the frenzy and although we can point to all the cultural mania driving us to purchase our good holiday feelings, for many of us there is a legitimate desire to really give something that feels meaningful and is a true reflection of our love.

Every now and again we are fortunate enough to know of a particular thing that is desired. Better still when we have the exact make and model number! But short of those golden opportunities where the desire matches our ability to give, there is precious little that we can offer in the way of material goods that can communicate our deepest feelings. The power of advertising further complicates this by making us believe that certain gifts will speak volumes about our love- diamonds, flowers and fine chocolate are a few that come to mind.

While those are all nice gifts, I don't know if I have ever gotten a more authentic sense of my partner's love for me than when he has taken the time and gotten over the inconvenience factor to show up for me. Some years this has been in the small mundane tasks of trying to get gifts wrapped for our four kids late into the night. Other holidays, it was night after night of drawing a bath for me and reminding me to give myself the attention I so readily give away to others. A couple of romantic holidays ago, it was making a romantic bed by the fireplace. The best gifts have always been him giving himself.

Giving the gift of our presence is the best because what we all want most is to know that we are not alone in the world. What this looks like in a day-to-day way is that our partner is committed not only in words but in actions as well to helping meet our needs. Feeling like there is someone at your back who cares enough to help, makes our lives and our relationships sustainable. It's a gift that keeps on giving and is never the wrong size or color. It is the most precious gift of all.

Conversations We Keep


The things you talk about with the people that matter in your life are the air in your relationships. This seems a timely discussion in light of the conversations that are bound to take place in the next several weeks as our family structures, past and present, collide back into full view. We call them holidays. Give yourself a new gift this time - pay attention to what you say.

There is an extraordinary power and grace in calling a thing by its right name. This applies to oneself as much if not more than to a situation. It is the foundation for believing yourself. A few critical instructions are essential here - first, stop repeating or making up a story. Pretend that you are a reporter, objectively describing an event. Don't attach the event to a lifelong history. Bear witness to it as a singular moment in time. Does this change the view? Experience a brief moment where judgment is suspended and we see with fresh eyes the people that we have known from our lifelong stories.

Try not to experience the world from the gut reactions that are so automatic that often they occur before we are even aware of our own feelings. Moving away from reaction requires time and space. The first response is the one that lives deep inside of you, that has been in memory since you had a memory. It might not be the thoughtful response that has grown in you over all these years of building a life of one's own. A good way to create the time you need to develop a thoughtful response is to actually take a deep breath. Feel it going in and going out. Remarkable what can change internally with even three small breaths.

If your relationship to your partner feels fragile, or for that matter if your relationship to yourself feels fragile, make agreements before you enter the larger conversations about what you believe about love. This is LOVE in the largest sense - because if you are walking into a conversation where family does not have a shared definition of LOVE, then it is easy to quickly feel lost and alone. This is fertile ground for losing connection to one's own beliefs, or the connection to your partner, or worse still to yourself. Keeping your agreements about LOVE, with yourself and your partner, will not only transform the larger conversation at the dinner table, it could even release the story line long enough to enjoy the company through dessert.

Trust me that we teach what we most need to learn, and the next several weeks will give me many opportunities to practice these skills. I know that this will be practice, and at moments will feel successful and at others, a total mess. My husband and I already have engineered a schedule of physical bonding to keep our conversations true. It is a good agreement to make before the conversation gets too difficult.

Building a Fire


The fire has always been a strong metaphor for the depth, passion and intensity of physical intimacy. It is nature's energetic equivalent to our sexuality. Fire is the energy of life, providing light, heat and the ability to transform the physical world. Fire in intimacy is the force of attraction that keeps relationships dynamic and whole. Statistically, we are not a nation of fire builders. Couples in our country struggle profoundly with this piece of their relationship with over 68% of happily married couples reporting problems in their sex life.

Building a fire in your relationship requires first the ground to build it upon. The ground in a couple is how you think of each other and your relationship. While there are often moments of frustration or anger in any relationship, if your primary mode of thinking about your current partner or relationship is negative then consider the ground of your relationship. Are you are trying to build a fire on barren land, maybe even a volcano?

Any fire, once built, requires air to feed it. The air in your relationship exists in the communication between you. The quality and frequency of your conversations and ability to self disclose is the food for your fire. It is not uncommon for members of a couple to have very divergent interests and ideas, this can actually be a great gift, but not if the result is a tuning out and disengaging. How do you listen to your partner? It is the act of love that fuels your sex life.

The smallest of fires can become a wild fire without water nearby to keep it in check. The water of a relationship exists in the ebb and flow of the time you share together. Togetherness means different things to different people, and not having a shared definition can make the relationship both unsafe and unsatisfying for both people. This fact is essential in building a fire, because where there is no safety people can get burned.

Good sex then, is both the result and the gift of positive thoughts in your relationship, a steady flow of together time and open and honest communications. If the fire in your relationship is not holding; before looking at the problems with the sex itself, look to see if any of these other elements could be improved. I bet you will be amazed at how it affects the fire.

Need tools to build a fire?  Check out our web site at www.goodcleanlove.com  
Join the discussion on our blog at http://www.goodcleanlove.com/blog/.

Fighting for Your Love


Some times you just have to fight about it. As human animals, conflict is not only a natural outcome of partnerships and family units; it is an essential part of building unity. Our differences may make life more interesting, but learning to deal with them effectively and with love is a challenge for which we are often not well prepared. Learning to speak authentically even if it creates conflict is a basic skill to sustaining relationships. Likewise, developing the insight to see through someone else's eyes and have disagreements that build instead of undermine our relationships require both courage and a real commitment to stay.

Generally conflicts share similar roots. We fight for power; for freedom, for belonging and sometimes for fun. I was introduced to these categories through my conflict resolution work with elementary and middle school children. While the urge to explore power and deal with issues of exclusion was often fodder for conflicts, I was astonished at how many kids owned up to creating conflict because it was entertaining. Actually, most conflicts are a mix of more than one of these categories and often are difficult to discern, even for adults. In many long term adult relationships these issues morph into the big five classic control issues around money, family (in-law) relationships, sex, housework and childcare.

Gender issues also affect our reactions to conflict. The male flight or fight response can create biological changes in moments and given free reign can clash dramatically with the more classic female response to conflict of tend or befriend. While there is huge variation in personality styles and family history of dealing with conflict, it is easy to see how couples easily fall into the habit of avoiding conflict at all costs. Sadly, they don't realize that the avoidance of the conflict only fuels internal resentment and cuts off any chance for authentic communicating. Making more and more room for conflict to live between you only makes less room for real connection.

“People hurt other people the most when they’re trying to kill their own pain, real or imagined.� - Frank J. Page

This quote summed up our early years of marriage, as our arguments were more often intended to hurt the other person than solve a difference. All of the rules you have ever heard about fair fighting should be basic coursework in middle school. Going after the issue and not attacking the other because of your own pain is the mature response to conflict. The other kind only tears down what you spend months or years to build and almost certainly precludes coming to any agreement at all.

Perhaps the most exciting benefit from learning to have the courage to fight with your partner is that honest and fair fights actually fuel your ability to express the fiery passion that makes intimacy sizzle. If you can’t disagree safely about day to day matters, it is pretty unlikely that either partner will feel safe allowing their aggressive sexual energies to show. Passionate sex happens between two people who aren’t hiding anything.

Besides all that, after 24 years of marriage, I can tell you this, all those couples that seemed so happy together because they never fought? They aren’t together anymore.

The Benefit of the Doubt


Here's a New Year's resolution that anyone can keep. Give the people you love, starting with yourself, the benefit of the doubt. Generally speaking and almost without exception most of us are doing the best that we can at any given moment. We are being as loving as we can be, as kind as we can be, as generous as we can be, even though our best might not make it, even and especially in our own eyes.

This was brought home to me in a deep and personal way as I spent the holidays with my original family. Although the visit did not include any storming out or other traumatic arguments that suggested the end of the relationship, the very lack of them and what was left over made the reality of the relationship clear. It was a bittersweet departure, with this realization of what was left between us, and our agreement to not try to be understood or provoke a healing in all the old wounds.

My fifteen year old son commented that my mother did not bring out the best in me. He loves his newfound wisdom and I could not argue the point. Sometimes the love we can express doesn't bring out the best in us, and although we may wish to be kinder and more loving the reality of the past and all the baggage that is visceral in us allows only the benefit of the doubt to protect us.

It is a humbling realization. To see the limits of one's own capacity to love so clearly and still try to come to a place of loving oneself. This is actually our only choice and in the words of Martin Luther King, Jr. in his speech "Where do we go from here?" He calls this creative redemptive love ultimately the only answer we have as a human family. This redemptive love, which is far from the way we idealize loving relationships, is what we are given to build family and community with. It has to be enough.

With many people in my life, loving them brings out the best in me. I am inspired by my ability to give generously of my time and resources. It is comforting and easy for me to accept even my weaknesses when I am with these heart connections. I don't have to think about giving the benefit of the doubt so much in these relationships because they make me feel strong and, on good days, confident.

But what this new year taught me is that until I can embrace the relationships where I am weakest, and meaner than I want to believe, I can't fully embrace the rich heart connections because all those parts of me live in me and can't be neatly separated by the quality of the relationship. In fact the more complex the relationship the more likely that the benefit of the doubt is the only thing that can sustain us living on this little blue planet spinning in space.

Venus Favors the Bold

Making Love Sustainable

Volume 17

“Venus favors the bold.â€� 

 

Ovid made this statement about the boldness of love thousands of years ago.  I would say that it has never been more true or necessary.   Let this year’s celebration of love be a bold statement of love, beginning with yourself.  Start by feeling worthy of your own love.  Give yourself a break and trust your instincts.   Watch  your favorite romantic comedy and laugh out loud or cry when the mood strikes you.   Allowing our emotions to exist in the world is a profoundly loving act that opens life up to new possibilities.

 

If you’re lucky enough to be loving someone else this Valentine’s Day- celebrate your gratitude not just with store bought gifts, although a small measure of those is always nice.  Take time to write a list of all of the remarkable qualities that your relationship brings to your life.  Don’t expect that your partner should know.  Even if they do, seeing it in your handwritten prose makes those thoughts real in a way that you can hold.  Just so you know, money is not the issue here, a single rose or chocolate heart can speak volumes with a well written note. 

 

If at all possible, pull out all the stops and actually invite someone into a candle-lit physical conversation.  Change the sheets, rub each other with sweet smelling oils and feel the transformative gift of human touch soften the tension in your muscles as well as some of the hard edges that live between you.  Breathe together and feel the weight of arms holding you, the warmth of bodies touching. 

 

If you are living among the lucky few of us who have an arousal function in working order, be bold and try it out.   Allow desire to course through you and wonder at the chemistry that exists, so often out of sight, but usually close enough that it can surprise us with both its sudden availability and intensity.  The power of sharing sexual arousal and climax is unparalleled in this life.  It heals our physical body, our emotional connections and transforms our deep sense of connectedness to both our loved one and life itself.   

 

“I tell you, the more I think, the more I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.â€�  Vincent Van Gogh said this hundreds of years ago.  Think of his bold acts of love, almost every painting a testimony to his witness of love in nature and among couples.  How desperate was his love at the moment he cut off his own ear.  We all share a little bit of that larger than life desperation about having a fulfilled love life.  There is nothing more satisfying in life than feeling loved, nothing that makes us more courageous, more generous, more fully alive or able to express our deepest selves.  

 

So whatever your relationship situation this Valentines Day, approach it with boldness and give it all the love that you have.  It will come back to you as it comes through you. 

Have a sweet Valentines Day.

 

 

Two Feet In

Two Feet In

Although I don't remember the exact day that I pulled the one foot that I had out the door back into my marriage, Today, celebrating 24 years of marriage, I can't remember the last time that it occurred to me that I would ever leave. It seems like I should remember when that change took place as it so profoundly changed the very fabric of what we were doing together, but like most things in life that are daily, we don't see them as they are happening. They are clear as we look back.

We never had a fairy tale marriage, and in fact anyone who claims to have one is probably either not really present or honest. Our love for each other was uneven and the common issues of attraction and initiation- who wanted who, first and more, plagued our ability to connect for years. The classic, "I am not in the mood"� or "I am tired"� responses create a cycle of defensive and offensive reactions that is almost like a pre-patterned dance. It's a scenario that many couples just don't have enough language to find their way out of.

In hindsight, I know now, that there is no winning side to that argument, but whichever side is your familiar view can color your lens so completely that the other side seems like a holiday. The shame of rejection is really no better than the guilt of turning away. The pain is equal. I have read that the rejecting partner is the more powerful of the two, but having been on both sides, I don't think its true- both sides make you unable to connect and leave you feeling equally powerless in having the relationship that you really want.

Two things transpired in my marriage to lift this issue and allow us to experience sexual desire with out the burden of fear and unmet longing. The first one was choosing my relationship without reservation. Being in my marriage with both feet in the door,

I had a lot more balance and flexibility that gave me more room and ease in dealing with the issues that kept me distant and disconnected. When I gave myself permission to truly stay, to not be looking for the reasons to leave, it changed my relationship to both the issues and my husband.

True forgiveness is when you have no memory of how it was before. The past loses its grip on your memory and suddenly there is room for a new way of relating. It's an odd phenomenon because it isn't an experience that you can will to happen, it is something that happens to you, seemingly without you- when you have an open heart and a true intent to find what there is to stay for. Choosing to stay in a relationship is tied to the belief in the power of forgiveness to change life completely. It is the singular pathway we have at our disposal to make things new between people. Having an excellent memory and needing to be right are not helpful in developing this quality in your life.

The other important agreement we made was to stop saying anything mean or disrespectful to each other. Couples often have subtle sarcasm, jokes that aren't really jokes that pepper a conversation and slowly but surely eat away at the positive feelings between them. Taking note of how often we might say things to our partner that we would never utter to a friend or even a stranger might surprise you. Becoming conscious of the words we use in our daily relating is the door to making a partnership safe. With practice, the hurtful ways we communicated were planted over by the two of us actively trying to stay. Over time, even the negative unspoken thoughts we were trying not to say were replaced with small kindnesses. Connection happens by itself when we feel safe.

Then seemingly suddenly, we began exploring our intimate life with a whole new curiosity and openness. Our sex life became the glue to hold the rest of the more challenging places together. The safer I felt in the relationship, the more risks I could take in the bedroom. The more our physical love flourished, the more that our relationship thrived. There are still times when one of us, might not feel in the mood when the other does, but now it doesn't mean anything more than what it is, bad timing.

Although it took us years to get here, sharing the kind of deep intimacy which is the reward for all the communication work that you put into years together is an extraordinary blessing. There is nothing like the "take your breath away"� power of loving someone who loves you back, with their eyes wide open. There is no place in life that is more satisfying, healing and trans formative.

 

 

Take the Time


"There never seems to be enough time to do the things you want to do, once you find them. I've looked around enough to know that you're the one I want to go through time with" Jim Croce's last love song still brings tears to my eyes whenever I hear it, the truth of it becoming clearer with each passing year.  

Almost every great love story shares this common theme of the brevity of love, whether it lasts for a year or fifty years.  The moment you become deeply grateful for the gift of love you share with another person, the more fragile and ethereal the love becomes.  This year's Valentine's Day celebration was a personal testimonial to that experience; our cards to each other this year a testimony to all the years we have spent learning to love each other, and the grace, strength and courage that the work of staying bestows.

I am reminded often lately of "the tender intervals in this perpetual departure." A recent news story about a tragic accident resulting in the untimely deaths of young musicians in our community has awoken us again to the fact that we never know the last day we will have with someone, the last smile we will share, the last hug.  Even without tragedy, I bear witness to this impermanence which is the essence of life.  The cliche of seasons passing and time slipping away has never felt as real as it does now, as I help my oldest child prepare to begin a life on her own.

I wonder how I could have missed enough small moments to have this rushing sensation of "Where did the time go?" Where are the days that seemed to stretch out endlessly in front of me, the periods of time when life would just drag on? They are gone now. As I have finally realized the brevity of it all, I could just kick myself for the time that I wasted on petty small arguments, impatience over minor incidents, and all the other dozens of ways that we give away our most precious gift; of the time we are given to love one another.

What if today were the last day you had to speak with someone you love?  What would you say? This is a good exercise to try sometime when you think you can't stand another minute of whatever it is that is driving you crazy with another person: actually take a minute and try to imagine your life without it.  I have practiced this often, maybe too often, because sometimes even as I am leaving those I love most for a short time, I can often get teary imagining what I didn't just tell them. 

I don't want to lose any more of the small moments and so I try not to get distracted by the noise and the clutter of our busy life.  I work to stay focused on what is essential and I am pretty sure that the only thing that fits in that category is love.  Each time I leave them I say "I love you" in as many different ways as I can imagine.  Just in case, I want it to be the last thing they will remember from me.  Although I don't know for sure, I believe that at the last moments of our life we remember the love.  Don't take the time you have for granted, love as much as you can while you can.

Go On Anyway



This is the quote of the day or, well, the week for me lately. Sometimes words can help you find the courage to go on anyway, to be willing to come back again and again. I realized today as I continued to struggle with maintaining a positive mindset to the challenges in running a small business, that really if I could just apply the hard won lessons of how to sustain a relationship to my work, it might feel totally new or at least doable.

Learning how to stay when things are difficult in families is great practice for working though obstacles to other dreams. In the same way that I would never think of leaving my family, even at the most painful of moments, I long to have that same whole-heartedness for my work.

A lot of us live with one foot out the door in some area of our life whether it be personal or professional. The thought dancing behind every set back: "I don't have to stay with this, I could be happier if I just quit!" For me these thoughts don't happen much with my partner or my family anymore. Yet they are a reoccurring theme for my dreams of building a meaningful love business. This is definitely not good for employee morale and damaging to the efforts of building a sustainable vision.

I remember the years that "the foot out the door" was true in my marriage. This safety hatch actually is a silent destroyer. Relationships and dreams are not safe if failure and setbacks become the justification of endings. Thomas Edison said "I have not failed. I have found ten thousand ways that won't work." It is this kind of commitment to a process in building a relationship, a business or a dream that allows you to find the way to the light. Keeping one foot out the door does not allow you to ever fully give yourself to the process which can take you to the other side. To succeed, to sustain requires 100%. Doubt is not a leader.

And yet for not being a leader, doubt surely leads many of us away from our real desires and our sense of purpose. I think we don't realize how we are all on the verge of making the slight changes in our life that would make all the difference. We are not quiet long enough to hear the courage in a quiet voice at the end of the day that says "I will come back tomorrow and try again." We give up too easily on ourselves and our will. We are afraid to trust our own efforts as being enough.

Really the question of quitting or staying is always a question of love. Trusting in the strength of our own heart to keep going, while all the time being willing to fail and know that our heart is strong and resilient enough to try again.

Wired to Connect


Sustainable love, the kind that we use as a compass to keep us connected to a vital, healthy and happy relationships are now being recognized as skills that might just save our species.

We finally have the scientific equipment to verify what we have always known: our drive to be social, to be connected to each other, is actually hardwired. Our need for connection and drive towards empathy is not a result of environmental influences but rather a function built into the brain itself. Daniel Goleman, PhD, a New York Times science writer and bestselling author of Emotional Intelligence, has taken his research to a whole new level and has published Social Intelligence.

Advances in neuroscience now allow us to observe brain activity while we are in the act of feeling. We can now witness that we are continuously forming brain to brain bridges- a two-way brain traffic system. In the same way that we can "catch" a cold from someone, we can "catch" their bad mood- or good mood. The significance of the relationship indicates how deeply we are affected and will stimulate actual physical consequences: hormonal response that magnifies stress (cortisol) or induces happiness (oxytocin).

Positive interactions and being surrounded by loving people actually works like a vitamin for your entire being. Negative relationships and interactions don't just make us angry; they make us ill. As in other brain functions, this one also reflects our amazing neuro-plasticity. This is to say that our brains are continually building new connections- and no matter how young or old, anyone's personality can be affected by other people. We literally heal each other through our social connections.

This news couldn't come at a better time, as we continue to replace real interaction with techno-driven reality. Is it really dating when it is virtual? Are we connected to others when we only share words on a screen? More than any new technology, what we truly need is to develop a lifestyle which encourages deeper human connection. Overwhelmed with digital connectivity, it is easy to become oblivious to the people surrounding us. How often have you witnessed someone at a check out stand absorbed in some deep conversation on a cell phone and entirely oblivious to the person in front of them.

Real intimate connections don't happen on the phone, in a text message or on IM: they require a real-life presence where we pay full attention to the people we live with. Empathy grows in our brain through eye contact, voice recognition, and touch - all of the time-intensive ways of knowing another person well enough that we can't objectify them. Empathetic connections are the prime inhibitors of human cruelty. Scientists agree that the survival of our species depend on our ability to grow and develop this innate ability and a culture which encourages deep and true human connections.

So next time you're feeling blue about the state of the world, turn off your electronic gadgetry and go for a walk, preferably holding hands with someone who loves you. Sustaining your love is not only good for you, but you may also be saving an endangered species!

Habits of Love


"Love and intimacy are at the root of what makes us sick and what makes us well, what causes sadness and what brings happiness, what makes us suffer and what leads to healing...I am not aware of any other factor in medicine- not diet, not smoking, not exercise, not stress, not genetics, not drugs, not surgery- that has a greater impact on our quality of life, incidence of illness and premature death from all causes." --Dr. Dean Ornish

These words began a revolution of thinking about the critical connections between our physical well being and our level of connection in life. As a heart doctor, Ornish paved the way in demonstrating not just a mind- body connection, but a heart connection which determines our well being, ability to heal, our most basic ability to enjoy life. That our physical heart is deeply connected and influenced by our relationships is intuitive and has been understood in this light since ancient civilizations, so in some ways the scientific studies only underline what we have always known. Love is the cure as well as the illness in our world, and evolving our ability to love, increases not only our chances of survival but creates a depth and meaning in life that only happens in relationships.

The healing affects of intimacy and connection extend deeply into the physical act of lovemaking. Hundreds of major medical studies have shown that an active sex life leads to 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. Men who have regular sex (only twice per week) have half as many heart attacks as men who only have sex once per month. In fact, a regular garden variety sex life has been shown to extend life by as much as ten years. People who enjoy a meaningful sex life are less anxious, fearful and inhibited.

If you are looking to green your lifestyle, why not start here. All the habits that you develop about sustaining your environment and home apply to your relationships. Feed your relationship with the same energy that you bring to the selection and preparation of your food shopping and cooking habits. Giving your time to composting and recycling is no different than finding the space to air out your feelings. Making commitments to simplify your life and reducing impact on the environment requires the same amount of mental energy as constructing the space and time for deep and meaningful touch in your days.

And just look at the sustainability benefits- Not only will you be happier and more optimistic as you take on the challenges of dealing with our quickly-changing biosphere, but you will likely be healthier and have more time to make a real difference. Greening your love has the power to extend out to the world in ways that we can barely imagine. It's a worthy practice that can only make life more sustainable.

First Love Yourself

Making Love Sustainable  Volume 46

First, Love Yourself

I have been thinking about self love lately, and not just the emotional kind.  I just recently learned that the month of May was recently named National Masturbation month.   Certainly it is a topic that could do with a little airing out, if based only on its checkered history alone.  It wasn’t all that long ago that boys were tortured with all kinds of strange contraptions to stop them from experiencing the terrible act of masturbation that was sure to make them blind or insane.   Hard to believe, but the most educated people around perpetrated these myths in the form of medicine for years.   It has been ugly indeed, and the church damning anyone who ever thought of self-pleasure to eternal hell didn’t help. 

Cultural myths die hard and the history of abuse that has long been attached to the practice of physical self love still carries a heavy doses of guilt, shame and anxiety with it for many people.   Even without much religiosity in your life, the act of self pleasuring carries an enormous silence. As I have been studying the topic, I can tell you it only takes saying the word out loud to silence a crowd. 

 Feeling isolated and alone with our sexuality is standard in this country.  The little sex education that is provided through adolescence, is an exercise in naming body parts at best and in some institutions is a drawn out diatribe of abstinence theory and the sinfulness of sexuality in general.   Historians have suggested, that “the forbidden fruitâ€� that is referenced from Adam and Eve is the experience of orgasm, so it is not surprising that this first gate of knowing and loving ourselves through masturbation has been continuously affirmed in most religions as sinful.  

Yet, this is not the state we are born into- if you have ever watched a small child explore their own body and the look of happy surprise when they discover the highly enervated erogenous zones that have no other meaning than pleasurable sensation, it is clear that the shame and discomfort that replaces this healthy curiosity is part of our collective education, to which we are all subjected, even as it ranges in severity depending on your own family’s reaction to sexuality in general. 

Anna Freud famously wrote that “sex is something you do, sexuality is something you are.â€�  Imagine the dinner time discussions in her home.  This distillation of her father’s lifelong inquiry into sexuality is meaningful in this conversation about masturbation because it recognizes the essential truth, that we are all sexual beings.  The degree to which we are driven by this part of our nature is as variable as is the way each of us interprets and acts on this part of our human nature.  But between the recent scandals in the church between priests and kids, and the damaging sexual relationships that so many people live victim to, I think it is fair to say that we have come to the point where we might rethink and embrace the idea and practice of  healthy self pleasuring. 

Indeed, there are many sexual educators and therapists that consider the ability to self pleasure as the cornerstone of sexual health.   It’s not really a stretch to consider that a large percentage of the sexual dysfunction that so many people suffer from might easily has begun with the shame and anxiety about touching oneself.  There is a clear correlation between the degree of guilt that early physical curiosity met and the ability to experience sexual pleasure in adult life.   Finding comfort with our sexual selves is one of the most genuine, intimate and life affirming ways we can know ourselves.  It is the first gate of understanding for both the raw experience of pleasure and the root of our primary sexual identity which is so basic as to be prerequisite to a fulfilling sexual relationship with others. 

Just for the record, masturbation is the most common sexual practice on the planet. It is not just for lonely people either.  Survey research shows that people of all ages masturbate both in and out of relationships. Kinsey’s survey found that almost 40% of men and 30% of women in relationships masturbated. A study of Playboy readers found that 72% of married men masturbated, and a study of Redbook readers found that 68% of married women masturbated.  Even given those statistics, many people feel they have to hide this behavior from their partner. 

One of the best reasons to let go of all the judgment and history surrounding this normal  sexual behavior is because having access to your own pleasure and orgasm teaches a profound inner lesson,  which is that your orgasm is your own.  No one else gives it to you or has power over you having it.  Having the knowledge and confidence to know what feels good to you allows you the space and courage to share that most intimate information about yourself with someone else.   Accepting the full responsibility of our own sexual nature, needs and preferences is the gift you bring to a healthy sexual relationship with someone else. 

 So take the time this month to love yourself, feel your body and be grateful for all the sensations that you experience.  Just for this one month, see what it feels like to call this part of yourself normal and welcome in the comfort of being a sexual human being.  To learn more about this topic, take a look at http://sexuality.about.com/b/2006/05/01/may-is-national-masturbation-month.htm.  Another great resource which outlines the origin of vibrators and women’s orgasm is a video we sell called Passion and Power, an amazing chapter in the history of women’s sexuality and search for a relationship to their own right to pleasure.  

 

Lovingly Annoying

Here's the thing about loving people: They are annoying. I tell people this regularly and they laugh, sometimes a nervous laugh, but more often a knowing laugh. We laugh together out of relief too, it's not just you, or me, but lets face it, collectively we are all pretty annoying. A recent study of thousands of couples sited the most frequent cause of breakups and divorces were rarely about big issues, but rather the build up of small gestures or lack of them that caused people to leave their relationships. Certainly a look back through our collective human history is nothing if not a testimony to how incredibly annoying we all are- and how little things can turn bad and ugly on a big scale.

Even within our own tribes and families, our similarities and genetic ties are challenging to grasp and hang onto. With both partners and children, appreciating how we are related is something that we have to learn and re-learn. It takes separating the essential loveliness of the people around us from all of the incredibly annoying traits that fill the din. Overwhelming our sense of connection are the small things- how people chew too loudly, or swing their knees in their sleep, or drip food from the corner of their mouth, or talk while they are chewing---the noises we make when we brush our teeth, or the crumbs we leave on the counter, or the socks we can't turn right side out. In my house these lists are infinite and trivial and weighty. Learning to sustain our relationships and choosing to stay happens in all the small moments of the everyday mess of life.

I write this at a time when I am struck by just how often and how hard I have to work at loving people and accepting them as they are even when they are so annoying. This coupled with almost a continuous chorus of people I know who can't quite commit to their relationships, the old one foot out the door syndrome, because living with them is so excruciatingly trying. We all want our own space, and order to prevail as we would have it, but rarely is that the nature of living with other humans. It all comes down to admitting just how annoying the whole business is and realizing that I am just as annoying as the people who annoy me. These issues surfaced frequently in the early years of creating a family and the most important takeaway lesson of our years in marriage counseling was this one- that if you can hold what is deeply loveable about someone in one hand while holding what is most annoying about them in the other- side by side; balance, patience and choosing to forgive and love in spite of the difficulty is possible.

Taking that lesson to the world at large is in some ways more challenging because strangers by definition are well, strange, (at least to us), and so holding what is loveable about them with what is annoying about them can sometimes be hard to imagine. Last weekend I was in the midst of some 30,000 of them, which even under the best of circumstances is a lot of strangeness. As a vendor of love products at the natural products show, I strived to see the loveable, but I would be a liar if I didn't admit that I was frequently faced with the dilemma of how annoying we all can be.

Among strangers we face a different list which separates us- how people dress, or smell, ignore us, talk over us or interrupt (one of my big weaknesses as a stranger) and here again the list can be lengthy. Yet, the results are universal - all of these annoying qualities make it easy to make these unknown people "other" than us, and taken to the extreme, it is not that big a jump to seeing how many of our serious social ills are the unfortunate and increasingly disastrous consequence of our inability to see past what is annoying in all of us.

 

You get what you need

The Game of Love


It is said that the game of love is everyone’s favorite game, and yet even with all the new technologies designed to help us connect, more and more people are opting out of the game, preferring to live alone, rather than to risk another bad relationship outcome. This preference reflects a deep change in our collective human psyche, for it used to be that what lovers feared most was loneliness. Now, being caught in a static or unsatisfying relationship is even more troubling. Wanting to be together, to build a family, is no longer enough.

Just in the last couple of weeks, I have spoken with several people who have expressed this sentiment. When I pressed the point and asked if they were to meet a compatible, kind and intelligent partner, would they truly feel like there wasn’t room in their life to accommodate them. There was a brief pause, and then “I’m not sure� was as close as they would come to an opening. Our modern age has made it is easier to be passionate and maintain passion about a pet or a favorite sports team rather than a lover. What has happened to the game of love?

Memories of childhood games on late summer evenings remind me of what the game of love once meant to us. As kids we understood that it was the play that mattered. Winning and losing reflected their respective original meanings, which were “to desire� and “to be set free.� Playing capture the flag in the dwindling light of the sky or a full neighborhood game of hide and seek was an apprenticeship in freedom. Pretending was rich with excitement, as we all shared in the wonder of not knowing the outcome. And yet we all knew that no victory was ever final, there was always tomorrow night.

Lovers in the past shared one secret; they knew that it wasn’t about winning or losing, it was the play that was essential. Playing allows us to experience freedom from duty and necessity. It is a primary condition of creativity and allows us the self-conscious delight of living out alternative realities. It is what makes us so deeply human.

Nowhere does this ring more true, than in our most intimate moments. Adding playfulness to sexual desire invites new friends into the bedroom: imagination and fantasy. Invite these allies to any passionate encounter with an openness to play, a willingness to pretend, and the freedom to live in the wonder of not knowing the outcome. Saying yes to this game of love keeps life fresh and while it offers no guarantees of long-term winning, it does promise to share glimpses of what we all desire most of the magical influence of love.

Rewarding our instinct to love creates the self-confidence to transform a private secret to a public force with the power to renew life and transmute human defects into loveable qualities. We are, after all, most loveable when we love. Playing this game doesn’t guarantee a life without bruises or the happily ever after story that we all long for. It will, however teach you about all the many ways you can love, and love again.

Our goal is to provide you the inspiration and skills to recognize and cultivate the renewable resource that is love in your life. We look forward to your feedback and hope you will share this site with the people you care about.

The Promises That Matter


A promise is a commitment you make with your heart. Promises are not like other decisions that we make that have open ended options of easy termination if it doesn't suit our needs or doesn't make us happy. The act of promising releases the right to reason on some level, because keeping a promise requires us to go beyond reason. Staying true to our word in spite of the inconvenience and discomfort is the core of a promise.

In the days of Camelot, the Knights of the Round Table made a vow and were sanctimoniously knighted. They knew their promise was a sacrament. While there were moments of romantic adventure, they were signing on with their lives for the ordeal that the promise would demand of them.

Loving someone carries this kind of promise. Different from the heady falling in love stage or the romantic whirlwind of the love affair, authentic love that lasts is an agreement to give up our own personal simplicity in exchange for the continuous yielding that creates and sustains relationships. This long term commitment to love is also an ordeal of sorts, one that changes the participants each time they agree to keep loving.

Keeping a promise to love is a lifetime of saying yes to your relationship. When it works the partners understand that they are not really giving to each other, but rather to the relationship, which makes the sacrifices of personal satisfaction life building instead of impoverishing.

There are all kinds of commitments in which we make this kind of loving vow. Marriage, parenting and devotion to a career path all provide a context which require us to go beyond the "reasonable" and to give more than we believe we are capable. It is in these crises that the promises we make are the light at the end of the tunnel. Sometimes even now after 24 years of marriage, the best reason I have for staying is because I said I would.

Promises are hard to keep for two reasons. Coming up with the constant willingness to stay put and do the work is an act of faith and courage which we don't always know how to find. In addition, it is often long after we make a promise that we realize that our promise to one person or situation precludes our availability to everyone and everything else. Choosing a specific career path is also closing a door to so many others. Committing to a partner excludes this kind of intimacy with all the other intriguing people we meet. A huge world of possibility closes with each promise we make.

This may be why there were only twelve knights at that Round Table. It is heroic work to make and keep a promise. It is not for the faint-hearted. What most people who quit on their promises don't know is that the moments when it seems impossible to say yes one more time, or the weight of the commitment is unbearable is the very moment when your promise has the most to teach. Each time you pass through this threshold with your integrity intact, the promise and the love grows large enough to hold whatever inside of you wants to break it down.

Keep your promise by focusing on the love. Your comments and feedback are very important to us. Please let us know what you think! Join our ongoing conversation about this and other topics on sustainable love at www.makinglovesustainable.com. The highest compliment you can pay us is to pass this on to the people you love the most.

No Going Back

Making Love Sustainable - Volume 27

 No Going Back

  "No, no, there is no going back.
Less and less you are that possibility you were.
More and more you have become those lives and deaths that have belonged to you.
You have become a sort of grave containing much that was
and is no more in time, beloved then, now and always.
And so you have become a sort of tree standing over a grave.
Now more than ever you can be generous toward each day
that comes, young, to disappear forever and yet remain unaging in the mind.
Everyday you have less reason not to give yourself away."         - Wendell Berry

There is a great relief to accepting where you are in life.  Letting go of all the might haves or should haves and seeing what is left is where one's real life begins.  The idea that hindsight is 20-20 doesn't really respect the fact that when that moment was fully present, you did the best you could.  You made the best decision that was available at the time; you loved as much as you were able to.  Giving up this looking back is how to step into the days that you have.  

 This wisdom of "No Going Back" is useful in learning to embrace our current relationships as well as our relationship history.   Bearing witness to the grave of our past loves, the lessons learned, the promises kept and broken, the path that lead you to where you stand today is an act of generosity that gives you the freedom to be open to this moment.   

 My parents have been divorced twice as many years as they were married, yet the stories of the pain and suffering they inflicted on each other remain as fresh in their minds as the days they were happening. My relationships with them served a shaky bridge between them.   By contrast, a new friend recently divorced after her husband left her for his secretary- not long after she gave birth to their third child bears no ill will.   She told me "We are friends."    She doesn't share the story of blame with her kids.   She didn't give up her belief in her ability to love, she cried for her loss, but she didn't throw herself in the grave.  

 Anyone who has worked on a long term relationship can tell you that the grave that they stand over is no less empty of the losses that love incurs. Holding onto what should have or might have been in your relationship is as destructive as it is after a divorce.   You cannot go forward from the past, only from the present.   Finding the courage to let go is the primary act of loving.

 Learning to become the tree standing over the grave is key to not going back or staying stuck in a story that has no more life in it.   Letting go of the past gives you a very clear view on how fleeting this present moment is.   Like flowers in the summer garden, we begin to understand how brief is the time we have left to love.   What a gift to realize that "Every day you have less reason not to give yourself away."

Happier In Love

Making Love Sustainable – Volume 28

 Happier In Love

  "The supreme happiness in life is the conviction that we are loved - loved for ourselves or rather, loved in spite of ourselves."   - Victor Hugo

Serious scientific inquiry has proven this quote to be true.   By all measures of health and well being, the single most significant predictor of life time happiness and longevity is being involved in an intimate and loving relationship.    It is true across seventeen cultures and in longitudinal studies of historic events that the people who fared the best even through traumas like war and the Great Depression were the people in stable partnerships and families.   

Yet even with all this evidence of the power of loving bonds, we are caught in a culture that throws away relationships as though they were used up convenience foods.   What is the deal?  Are some people just lucky in love? Some of it may be luck. If you grew up as a wanted and beloved child of someone then the chances are good that a positive and secure romantic style is on your side.  If you didn't have these advantages then chances are you fall into the avoidant or anxious romantic styles.  All of these profiles or personality traits are linked to a child's ability to attach early in life. New research suggests that these early childhood patterns go a long way in explaining people's life long struggles with relationships.  

As the names suggest, avoidant and anxious romantic profiles can make it difficult for people to learn the very different skills of being able to both receive and give love.   If your childhood experiences didn't give you many positive memories and experiences of trust, it may be very difficult for you to approach your current relationships with any level of confidence that you will be loved.   Because our expectations and our beliefs about our relationships form the basis for how we communicate and behave in them, it becomes easier to see how many people continuously make bad decisions about the relationships they choose.   

And yet the story does not end there. Many neglected and not well loved children of the world have gone on to heal their belief systems and live out loving stories.   I am among them.    It doesn't happen easily, but learning the skills of loving is possible for all of us.   For many of us the key is learning to believe that we are worthy of love.   Having compensated for so many years, we may be experts at the skills of loving others, but until we do the hard work of realizing "in spite of ourselves", we are lovable, we may never have a moment when our relationships feel secure.    

If there is any key to this work it is that love is a verb and seeing ourselves as loveable is an act that must be a part of every day.  

Fighting for Your Love


Some times you just have to fight about it.  As human animals, conflict is not only a natural outcome of partnerships and family units; it is an essential part of building unity.  Our differences may make life more interesting, but learning to deal with them effectively and with love is a challenge for which we are often not well prepared.  Learning to speak authentically even if it creates conflict is a basic skill to sustaining relationships. Likewise, developing the insight to see through someone else's eyes and have disagreements that build instead of undermine our relationships require both courage and a real commitment to stay.

Generally conflicts share similar roots. We fight for power; for freedom, for belonging and sometimes for fun.  I was introduced to these categories through my conflict resolution work with elementary and middle school children.  While the urge to explore power and deal with issues of exclusion was often fodder for conflicts, I was astonished at how many kids owned up to creating conflict because it was entertaining.  Actually, most conflicts are a mix of more than one of these categories and often are difficult to discern, even for adults.  In many long term adult relationships these issues morph into the big five classic control issues around money, family (in-law) relationships, sex, housework and childcare.

Gender issues also affect our reactions to conflict. The male flight or fight response can create biological changes in moments and given free reign can clash dramatically with the more classic female response to conflict of tend or befriend.  While there is huge variation in personality styles and family history of dealing with conflict, it is easy to see how couples easily fall into the habit of avoiding conflict at all costs.  Sadly, they don't realize that the avoidance of the conflict only fuels internal resentment and cuts off any chance for authentic communicating.  Making more and more room for conflict to live between you only makes less room for real connection.  

?People hurt other people the most when they?re trying to kill their own pain, real or imagined.? - Frank J. Page   

This quote summed up our early years of marriage, as our arguments were more often intended to hurt the other person than solve a difference. All of the rules you have ever heard about fair fighting should be basic coursework in middle school.  Going after the issue and not attacking the other because of your own pain is the mature response to conflict.   The other kind only tears down what you spend months or years to build and almost certainly precludes coming to any agreement at all.  

Perhaps the most exciting benefit from learning to have the courage to fight with your partner is that honest and fair fights actually fuel your ability to express the fiery passion that makes intimacy sizzle.  If you can?t disagree safely about day to day matters, it is pretty unlikely that either partner will feel safe allowing their aggressive sexual energies to show.  Passionate sex happens between two people who aren?t hiding anything.

Besides all that, after 24 years of marriage, I can tell you this, all those couples that seemed so happy together because they never fought?  They aren?t together anymore.

Love and Balance

Making Love Sustainable: Volume 30

Love and Balance

  "To lose balance sometimes for love is part of living a balanced life."  - Elizabeth Gilbert

Sometimes we give up one kind of balance for another.   Our work lives take over our personal life, new families take over old exercise routines, and sometimes our love life can take over all of it.   Losing our balance over love can be fun. Actually that "in love, out of control craziness" of deep connection can be like a drug, blurring our vision so that the world has a rosy hue and commitments to any thing other than our beloved are hard to keep.   

Losing our balance when love disappoints us can be just as confusing.   Relationship endings rank as the number one stressor in life for over 60% of a large national survey and for good reason.   It isn't just a partnership that ends. For many people, basic identity and beliefs about family and promises are also shattered.   Losing love blurs our vision of ourselves and what the world can be.   Keeping up with other commitments during this painful life re-construction can make love feel like a disease.  

Sustaining a loving relationship requires remarkable balance.   Because no one is easy to love all of the time, thriving relationships not only demand healthy boundaries which respect each partners individual needs but also the ability to hold what is lovable alongside what is most difficult about each person.   Striking this realistic balance in love is daily work and can swing between that rosy in love feeling and darkness descending.

This pendulum swing in relationships can be clocked sometimes in as brief a period as minutes.   Not uncommonly I barely remember how good I was feeling about my mate or marriage, just days later.   Developing the skill to step back and watch your own feelings change is a useful tool to finding balance.   On a good day, the witnessing can create enough space to not react immediately and give you the time to find the center again, where you are holding the lovable and difficult side by side.  

Lately I have been studying Pilates and doing the physical work of finding balance.   Building my core pelvic muscles in this way has deeply changed not just how I live in my body, but also my life.   Better even than the end of lifelong back pain, is the emotional stability that has come with a new found strength in my physical center.  Working on the body and getting out of the mind is a direct and visceral route to feeling balance.

Living in your center also provides an entirely new and way more exciting access to experiencing an entirely new balance in physical intimacy.     Orgasm is the single act that simultaneously releases tension and restores fullness to the mind, body and spirit, creating moments of perfect balance.    Finding and maintaining balance in relationship to ourselves and others is worth all the effort it requires. Sometimes it's just a willingness to surrender to the imbalance that sets things right.  

If you happen to be in the San Francisco area this weekend, take a moment to visit Wendy at the following locations:

  Saturday, September 15, 2007
11:30 AM         Elephant Pharmacy, San Rafael
1:30 PM          Pharmaca, Mill Valley
4:30 PM           Elephant Pharmacy, Berkeley

  Sunday, September 16, 2007
11:00 AM         Pharmaca, Berkeley

  Monday,   September 17, 2007
11:00 AM         Whole Foods, San Ramon
2:30 PM           Whole Foods, Walnut Creek
4:30 PM           Elephant Pharmacy, Walnut Creek

  Tuesday, September 18, 2007
2:00 PM           Whole Foods, Los Gatos
4:30 PM           Elephant Pharmacy, Los Altos

Showing up

Making Love Sustainable - Volume 31

Showing Up

When I teach about the Ecology of Love and talk about the water that lives between people I often use the term "showing up" to describe the flow that happens in relationships.    In relationships, like the ocean, there is an ebb and tide to how we are present for each other, but if the water in the relationship is always out, then both people feel alone more often than they feel like there is someone at their back.    Many people go through years in partnerships where the experience of loneliness is profound.   It is something that I struggle with in my own marriage, each of us having a different sense of what togetherness means and how much of it we need.

Showing up for someone doesn't necessarily have anything to do with long and deep conversations, in fact, it is usually about the small details of life where showing up makes the most difference.    The day I got a flat tire and my husband came and changed it in his nice work clothes,   or the time when he needed a shirt washed and ironed, or the zillions of times when the kid juggling doesn't quite work and he is willing to stop what he is doing to pick up the slack.   It communicates volumes of love when you are able to give up your own agenda to show up for someone else's needs.   It is at the heart of what it means to feel safe and loved in a relationship.  

Lately I have been witnessing the demise of several relationships with close personal friends.   Affairs and divorces always catch you off guard, even when you can see the breakdown of showing up for years before.    It is easy to confuse co-existing and showing up.   They can look almost the same when we grow accustomed to not allowing ourselves to need and be needed.    Co-existing doesn't have the stickiness factor that showing up does, because it happens as a matter of course, not choice.   

Showing up or not translates into all the dynamics of a relationship including how and what you communicate and whether you share a passionate physical love.    It isn't possible to really open yourself up with either the spoken language or one's body if you don't feel safe.    And so little by little, we say less and less of what we really need to say and in our most intimate times we cover ourselves through distancing and not really being present.    

Real passion in intimacy is the product of people who can take risks.   It is very different than relying on and replicating how we did it before and it is the biggest way to show up for someone you love.    Human sexuality is a mystery of epic proportions!   There is no other single act which can so deeply fuse and connect two people so as to transform them and how they relate so completely.   Which is why, whether my husband realizes it or not, every time he puts down his evening newspaper to join me in the daily grind of putting another dinner on the table, he is scoring big in my ability to show up later that night.  

Two other important points on showing up - don't keep score.    It doesn't equal out like other human equations might and only serves to cut at the backbone of the relationship that you are trying to build.    The point here is that each person shows up as they can and that both people know when it happens. And last, be grateful for however it happens and whenever it does, know that you are one of the lucky ones.  

Making Love Sustainable

  Making Love Sustainable - Volume 32

Telling the Truth

"The world is too dangerous for anything but truth and too small for anything but love."
 - W.S. Coffin

Telling the truth in relationships is perhaps the most challenging aspect of relating.   Not doing it makes relationships impossible.   It is difficult because it takes time to know our own truth and often, even as we get it, truth is as changeable as the days we live in.   The wise among us know that there is no truth with a capital T and yet there are without a doubt, lies.   That the truth isn't something we can grasp and hold on to makes the job of living with integrity deeply intentional.    

We all see things as we are, rather than as they are. We all struggle to find the courage to reveal our own perceptions and feelings in our closest relationships.    This is where the world becomes dangerous in relationships.  The unexpressed and the lies take up the ground between us.   Even if we can't articulate why, we feel ungrounded and fill in the gaps with all kinds of drama and elaborate language to compensate.

Recently, I have experienced the weight and reality of this as I watch the demise of the marriage of some close personal friends.    It is shocking when the final disclosure of cheating and infidelity comes out.   In retrospect, you could see it coming for years.   During the times we spent with our friends when they were together, there was always this unspoken space left for the unexpressed - the untruths, and the detachment that grows around it.   It was like there was someone else in the room that no one wanted to acknowledge.   Sometimes after another glass of wine, this voice would spill out of someone's mouth, leaving an awkward silence and a shared recognition of a place to dangerous to tread.   Someone would change the subject quickly.   

I would often leave those gatherings feeling slightly off and wondering what I could have said that would have given the truth some air.     I wish now that I could have said something that would have made a difference but I know that making the commitment to live authentically in my own relationship is work enough.    Jamaica Kincaid said;  "I am not at all interested in the pursuit of happiness.   I am interested in pursuing a truth, and the truth often seems to be not happiness but its opposite."    

Although, I wish it wasn't so, I am coming to believe that sometimes the work of sustaining a relationship that has integrity is not always congruent with my own search for happiness. And yet on the other side of sharing a relationship which is deeply authentic, there is a satisfaction and comfort to life which exceeds fleeting happiness.   When I speak to groups, my first lesson is always to give up the idea that relationships will be or should be easy, or that it exists to make us happy.    Relationships exist to teach us how to love and be loved.    And while there are moments when relationships feel easy and make us happy, having those feelings is not a reasonable barometer of whether the relationship is working or not.

A more honest gauge of whether your relationship is working is the measure of trust and safety that the work of telling the truth builds into it.    Because I can tell my husband that "I feel lonely in my marriage" and that he hears it, doesn't necessarily fix it, but allows me to live it differently.    Feeling lonely in my marriage is an honest place. By saying it and feeling it, I have the chance to let it transform.    It doesn't mean that it will transform him; it might just need to change me and my relationship to the silence that he is more comfortable living in.     Either way, the expression keeps us both honest and in touch with each other and the real struggles that living together entails.     In a small and dangerous world it is truth and love that keep us safe.  

Nothing Left to Give

Making Love Sustainable - Volume 35 Nothing Left to Give

This is the ironic feeling that happens in many of us as soon as the radio stations start playing Christmas songs non-stop. Rather than that giddy, most wonderful time of the year feeling, a vague pre-holiday fatigue sets in, with both the weight of expectation and memory of disappointment that feels so familiar you could almost sing it. This is not a humbug thing, most of us actually long for the light, connection and giving that the holidays are supposed to offer. But often the experience is so diluted by the endless to-do lists, the expenses, and the guilty feelings that we should somehow be happier about it. We aren't just tired about the holidays; we are tired because of all the work and weight of getting to these holidays which we celebrate at the darkest days of the year.

I am burnt out on giving. There I said it, even though I feel like I should quick back-space it out of there before anyone reads it. I am burnt out and simultaneously feel like I should be giving more to more really needy people. I suppose some would call this burn out normal- what with a husband, four kids, two cats, a dog, employees, creditors etc.  It isn't that surprising that I feel like I have little left to give. But this is not the place that I want to live in, and certainly not when I should be singing Christmas songs. But alas, here I am.

I recently read a moving account of the story of a woman who reconciled with her ex-husband after she was diagnosed with cancer. The husband so wanted his wife to believe he is in love with her still, actually falls in love with her again, as he recognizes each small act of kindness as possibly his last one with her. The realization that the highest order of human existence is to love others as though we are all dying all the time. In these moments when we truly feel the gift of each moment, the brevity of holding a small child's hand as they grow up before your eyes, the steady breathing or even snoring of the man you love, even the daily demands that so easily can turn to burn out have this other-worldly feeling - and we stop and feel grateful.

So this time of year, take each day and live it like it is the last holiday you will have to love someone. Do it with all your heart and watch how the world changes from the inside out. This is where the real giving comes from. Stay tuned, we are happy to announce the new, better, more beautiful Good Clean Love website coming alive in early December. Use the coupon code gclnf07 to take 10% off some incredible, not to be forgotten holiday gifts that keep giving.

Learning to Feel

Our feelings are like weather patterns. They are changeable and act on the environment with great power. They inform and distract with their intensity. They reflect the nature of the moment with great accuracy. Our ability to experience and share our feelings in meaningful ways is one of the profound marks of our humanity. Yet feelings are for many people a locked box, an experience that overwhelms and is difficult to express. We are taught in a variety of circumstances and for a variety of reasons to suppress our feelings. We learn to silence our feelings so well that the messages in our bodies are not even discernable. Suppressed feelings are not as invisible as you might think. They take on a life in our dreams and eventually become diseases in our bodies. Our inability to express our feelings cuts us off not only from our own experience but limits the connection we feel with the people we love most. Part of the reason we disconnect from our emotional life is because we are afraid we will be overtaken by our feelings. Small children are frequently shaken by the enormity of their emotional experience. When was the last time you witnessed a temper tantrum in the grocery store- what better metaphor for a giant storm raging inside a little body? What happened when your feelings were too big to hold when you were a child? What happens now? Jim Carrey was quoted in a Playboy magazine interview last year saying that “Heaven is on the other side of that feeling you get when you’re sitting on the couch and you get up to make a triple-decker sandwich. It’s on the other side of that, when you don’t make the sandwich….It is about giving up the things that basically keep you from feeling. I am always asking myself “What am I going to give up next?� Because I want to feel.� Learning to feel begins with a choice and the realization that authentic living demands the maturity to open up to your full experience, as messy as it might be. This is, in fact, the do or die work of relationships; to have the courage to feel the full range of emotions that comes with intimate connections. It is literally the fuel for the fire of passion, the air that keeps a relationship breathing, the stuff of transformation and growing up. Just as our weaknesses and frailties are wedded to our virtues and strengths- the ability to express uncomfortable emotions creates the possibilities of discovering the love and passion that we want most. How then do we make this choice to live a feeling life, to physically experience the internal storms of growing up and growing old? It is a practice, no different than learning a new musical instrument. Some days you hit the right notes, other days there is no melody at all. In agreeing to the practice, something opens and each moment gives you an opportunity to try again. Slowly you become comfortable with the weather systems of your emotions. Some days it is even comforting to know they are there.

Clearing the Air

Wind power is one of the fastest growing alternative energy sources available. What could be cleaner than capturing the power of the moving air and turning it into energy? This is a powerful metaphor on a personal level and in our work to make relationships sustainable. The air in your relationship flows from the communication that passes between you and your partner. It is the currency of your relationship. It has the power of a wind generator to capture the essence of what it is to be intimate. It is the source and fuel for physical intimacy. Taking into account significant gender differences in communication styles and comfort is an important beginning. Women communicate with about ten times the number of words as men. Knowing this fact will hopefully allow for differences without letting anyone off the hook. Everyone needs to stretch themselves when it comes to learning to communicate. Our willingness to share of ourselves in breadth, openness and depth reflects our ability to be intimate. Self disclosure is literally a breath of fresh air for many relationships which limit most conversation to dealing with the mundane tasks of managing a life. It is easy to fall into this place where discussions remain on the surface; our busy lives often leave little time for processing our own feelings or the complex work of expressing them. Having conversations of depth require not only time, but trust. First, we must trust ourselves. Low self-esteem is hard on relationships because we cannot really build a bond of trust with another if we are not comfortable with ourselves. Issues can easily become confused and communication easily muddled when it is continuously layered with a lack of self confidence of one or both partners. For many of us, developing the skills for meaningful communication include not just being willing to express ourselves but also a genuine effort and interest in listening. There is little that makes us feel as deeply valued and loved as someone taking the time to truly be present and hear our story. It is an art that is often overlooked in all of our dealings, but is particularly damaging in intimate relationships. Learning to listen actively and respectfully adds miles to the life of your relationship. Trusting your partner enough to share true, central and meaningful aspects of oneself is a true aphrodisiac. It creates a continuous cycle of deepening self disclosure and safety that is at the heart of thriving relationships. Consider building a wind generator inside your home if you are really committed to a sustainable life. The air is good in there and who knows how much energy you might be able to store up for some cold winter night.

Gratitude is the Heart's Memory



"Gratitude is the heart?s memory."  - French proverb

I have generally not been a sports fan in life, but living with my husband for over 20 years and raising two sons has trained me in the importance of "the game".  Tonight we shared a real loss as we watched the dreams of our star quarterback slip away with an injury to the knee. He stood on the sidelines watching his team lose their chance at a national championship.  This is the game of life we watched play out; the winning and the losing that defines our lives. I always tell my boys, especially after they lose, that you can't ever win if you can't risk losing.  The losing is what makes the winning real.  

We can never imagine the full range of possibilities that can befall us in the games we play or the relationships that we live in. By default our imagination is limited by our experience and we shape the future pictures of our lives by what we hope will happen, rather than what could likely happen.   It is often the thing that you couldn't imagine, that you often don't see coming, even when it is barreling down on you like a linebacker, that ends up to be the defining moment.   Not being able to accurately predict our future and the outcome of the game, is what makes life so exciting and risky.  

Recovering from loss takes great courage, especially when it happens on ESPN.  The young men on the team will come home today and figure out how to try again.  They will have to be willing to take the risk again.  Losing in private, when no one else is watching is not a lot easier.  Finding the courage to try again in the game of relationships, careers or athletic endeavors depends on our ability to access our heart's memory.  

It is through our heart's memory, the place where we remember gratitude, that we find that what we have is enough and that we are enough even when we fail.  When we experience gratitude for both our own efforts and the efforts of the people around us, we can come back from our losses with courage.  This grace is the energy that is able to turn denial into acceptance, chaos into order and confusion into clarity.  Using the heart's memory is what champions do after defeat and I think the only sustainable path to live a life that gives as much as it takes.  We realize that having the chance to play in the game is enough, even when we are left with less than the golden win.

This is the week we set aside to be thankful for the gifts of life and well being that is so easy to take for granted. This year consider being thankful for your heart's memory - the inner store of loving thoughts and connections that has given you the courage to keep going.   Communicating your love is the essence of gratitude.  And gratitude is the essence of turning a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a day into a celebration of thanks.   

We give thanks for the community of support and love that we share with all of our customers and friends.  Please send this to your friends and invite them to join us at Good Clean Love, where we work every day to Make Love Sustainable.  Use coupon code GCLNF07 for a 10% discount on any of our love products.

Gift of Presence


Every now and again we are given the gift of true presence.  Usually it is when we are faced with the stark reality of life ending, whether it is through the death of someone or something beloved.  The details that we often think of as life itself, fall away and the mystery of our frail human form and relationships that make life meaningful is all that we have, and all that we ever really had.  

This naked place of pure presence is not an easy one to live in- we know in these moments of pure love and connection, pure loss and loneliness, that our emotions are not thoughts in our head, but physical weighty forces that fill our physical body so completely that they have the power to alter our senses.   Falling in love is a full body experience, one that alters how we see everything- a more powerful drug you can't find on the planet.  

The same is true for grief, especially grief that we don't allow ourselves to experience.  Feeling the weight of our own sadness is frightening.  There is no deeper emotional access to the present moment than our sadness and grief.  Yet feeling the full force of these emotions often reminds me of my kids when they were three years old, just old enough to get their experience but without a big enough body to contain it or a language to express it.  Witnessing the trauma of a full on tantrum is enough to make any sane adult choose to repress it, the power of the feelings are as large as any force of nature.

When it?s over, I want to say:  All my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.  - Mary Oliver

Giving yourself or someone you love this gift of pure presence is the most amazing and life changing gift you can offer.  Here's the truth, it doesn't work to repress our feelings. Our experience of life deserves to be witnessed and shared. All that is not given the air and space in the world around us will like any force of nature so transform and alter our internal landscape that we can't find our presence- with ourselves and not with the people we long to love the most.   

Eternity is not waiting to happen after you die, it is happening right now- and the meaning and love that you have the chance to make in your life is the only gift that will really count when your days are over.   So instead of just exchanging physical gifts this holiday season- open your arms wide to the stories and feelings that make our presence real and our relationships sustainable.  

My gift for the season was launching our new website www.goodcleanlove.com.    As far as I can tell, it now actually works although as with all great works in progress, I won't be offended if you email me mistakes that I missed.  But I think you will like where we are headed - to be your home for all that you need to make your love sustainable and bring the gift of presence to your heart.   Use this limited time coupon through the New Year to ring it in with love NEWSITE08 for a 15% discount on everything in the shop.

All our holiday best to you and yours.  Xo  Wendy

The Five Percent Rule

When it comes to resolutions, think small and work to remain consistent.  Someone told me a long time ago that if you can change any area of your life by a consistent five percent, the effects will be remarkable.   The truth of this is mirrored in the reality of global warming.   Even changes of a single degree can change everything.  Just a few years ago what was imperceptible even to scientists, was altering the landscape of our collective future.   This 5% rule applies to our personal ecosystems as well.   The smallest of changes in how we communicate in, show up for, and think about our relationship can and does alter its course.

Bad things happen fast, good things take time.  This is the caveat about how the five percent rule works.   Accidents, illnesses, forces of nature like hurricanes or tornadoes arrive in a moment, often with no warning.   Personal catastrophes like divorces can fall into the middle of your world like a tidal wave.  How is it possible that we could not see these things coming?   Relationships are fragile eco-systems and just as in the aftermath of a storm, rebuilding and recuperation is a process which takes the time and patience that is the daily work of sustaining.

It is easy to get burnt out in this daily work of relating, it is the hardest work that we are asked to do.    People are annoying, even the very best of them and especially when you live with them and are charged with their care.   This fact can apply to growing families or aging parents as easily as it does to our primary partner.    Keeping relationships healthy and being willing to heal the ones that are ailing is not a quick fix solution, it is a resolution to keep the five percent rule in action.   It is being willing to do the one extra act of kindness each day.  It is taking the time to listen even when you have heard enough.  It is finding the energy to be intimate even when you don't feel connected.  It is the laundry and the dishes and one more trip to the grocery store.  

The five percent rule is a good resolution to take on no matter what your life situation.  Another way of thinking about it is the continuous improvement plan, where we agree to remain vigilant to our own attitude and willingness to participate.  It acknowledges that we aren't going to be perfect or expect perfection, but rather with realistic intentions, we strive to be just a bit better than yesterday.   It respects the time that it takes for small, seemingly imperceptible changes to be felt and experienced.

Making a resolution to live with a five percent improvement plan is a heroic act.  Not only do you courageously embrace the unpredictable and certain falling apart that happens in every life, but you simultaneously hold your heart open to trying to make the small acts of living softer and more bearable for the people you love.    It is a resolution that you can keep because it commits you to a process rather than an outcome and gives you the freedom to miss the mark some days. 

So go ahead, resolve to get better at whatever you choose- or what the heck, just resolve to get better in your whole life, but just go for five percent.  It's plenty.    
Please take a look at our new website, www.goodcleanlove.com and use coupon code
NEWSITE08,  to enjoy a new year 15% discount.   If you like this, share it with a friend, if not share it with me.

You are What You Love


"You are what you love, not what loves you. That's what I decided a long time ago."  I have remembered this concluding line of a conversation between Nicolas Cage and himself (when he played the twin writer brothers in the 2002 movie "Adaptation") for over five years.  I have many times thought back on it over all the stories of unrequited love that I have heard since then.   Donald knew something most of us miss, sometimes for a whole life- that the love we feel for who or what ever we feel it, is our own.  Loving is not something we are given permission to feel or a feeling that anyone can take away.  

This might be one of the biggest misconceptions ever perpetrated about love.  There is this pervasive embodiment of the experience as a coupled experience, it's legitimacy resting in it's reciprocation.  When love is withheld, rejected or takes some other form, the one who loved first is belittled, even if only in his/her own mind.   Maybe that's why I have always remembered Donald, who couldn't care less whether, Sarah, the object of his love felt that way too.  He knew that the gift of the experience was his.  

The stories of unrequited love and the range of tragedy and heartbreak from love unmet has filled the airways since we began to sing or tell our stories.  The universality of the loss experienced by love gone wrong, or never really given a chance, or interrupted too soon by tragedy is something we all share.  The pain is as deep and real as any cut with a knife.  The sadness and loneliness of loving and losing the object of our love is searing like a burn and shadows us for weeks, sometimes months.  This is the story that many of us never get over, sometimes keeping us away from the prospect of loving again for years.   

Why we can't celebrate the love we feel without it being reciprocated has a lot to do with our latent feelings of unworthiness (Don't worry it's not you- it's the whole culture).  As soon as you are not good enough, the original experience of love, which is the highest feeling we can experience degenerates in less than a minute to a feeling of shame.  Or if we are angry, then it is easy to find blame, making the object of our love not worth the feeling to begin with.  Either way, we lose access to the purest and most instructive feeling we can muster.  

Realizing that we are what we love and not what loves you is a revolutionary approach to opening your heart and discovering a capacity to embrace the world that you might not have known you are capable of.   Loving builds emotional literacy and gives you the courage to feel the loss of love with grace and forgiveness.  A loving and compassionate heart begets more love.  The more you practice love with out the shame or the blame, the more love comes to you.  Guaranteed.

Watch for our new 2008 Sustainable Love Minutes- weekly notes on love for your life.  
Feel free to request a topic and send them on to your friends.   We are preparing for Valentine's Day and have a fantastic contest on our website with our friends at Playa Viva, the sustainable Mexican Resort.  It is easy to enter to win, just subscribe a friend to our email list and you are entered!  If you haven't seen our new site, there are many new exciting categories of products we are excited to be offering.  Use the NEWSITE08 coupon code to receive 15% off a Valentine's Day gift that will keep on giving.  

The Nose Knows


The scent of desire, it turns out has more to do with our biological imperative than we might have ever imagined.   That magical x factor in seeking and connecting to your special someone is actually right under your nose- or at least in it.   Author Rachel Herz's new book The Scent of Desire will be the first of many volumes on the often overlooked olfactory system that will forever change how we think about our relationships.  And even though I have long been promoting smell as our primary sexual sense, I had no idea that its reach went to the very core of the species regeneration.  

Our sense of smell and what attracts or repels us,  is blueprinted in our immunological gene structure called the MHC.  Every individual's own genetic scent makeup is as unique as their fingerprint.  What's more, when it comes to reproduction, the healthiest progeny comes from two individuals whose MHC is most distinct and different from each other.  This assures that any offspring has the widest range of immune function and therefore is the most disease resistant.   This actually makes perfect sense in terms of our biological imperative to go forth and multiply, but it also profoundly affects the whole courting process, as well as the likelihood of making your love sustainable.  MHC compatibility is a predictor of not only bearing healthy offspring, but relationship longevity and frequency of cheating on your partner.

Even more remarkable than the biological compatibility of scent between partners is the new recognition that our ability to smell is completely intertwined with our ability to feel.  
Recent research on people who suffered anosmia (scent blind) usually from a traumatic injury to the head, shows that they also became unable to feel a wide range of emotions.   "Our sense of smell and our emotional experience are fundamentally interconnected, bi-directionally  communicative and functionally the same."

Suddenly the axiom to "Wake up and smell the roses" is not just good advice but actually may save your life.  Without scent, we lose the texture and depth that makes life the rich and varied tapestry that it is.  Imagine not being able to smell or taste not just a ripe melon, but your lover, it would make the experience almost inaccessible.  Practice smelling, indulge in scent and taste and bear witness to the emotional response that accompanies this.  It will surprise you.

I have been promoting the use of  true scent products that enhance your own natural chemistry for years,  intuitively knowing that products made chemically are not just bad for your most sensitive tissue, but also covers up your own natural odor and may just interfere with our ability to find and smell our true mates.   So take this message to heart and as you breathe- inhale deeply, build your vocabulary and experience of scent especially around the people you love most.  It will make you feel better.    

A great review of this topic can be found in the article Scents and Sensibility  in this month's issue of Psychology today
(psychologytoday.com/articles/pto-20071228-000001.xml ).  The book is definitely worth the price.  And don?t forget about all our scent enhancing love products for Valentines Day such as Love Oils, Personal Lubricants, Flower Essences, Flower Perfumes and more.  If you haven't checked out our new and improved web store, indulge and use the NEWSITE08 coupon for 15% off.  

The Life Cycle of Love


Well it isn't just in your head anymore. An international study of two million people from over 70 countries confirms what is a remarkably common experience, yet little recognized as the life stage that it is. It turns out that the happiest times in our life span make a "U" and are situated at our early and late adulthood.

Researchers from Dartmouth and Warwick found this true across cultures and irregardless of income, marital status, family size or job satisfaction. Middle age consistently makes up the bottom of the curve, a time where happiness and satisfaction are hard to come by. Unexplainable except as something deeply human, this challenging time of coming to terms and making peace with life is as basic to our life cycle as the uniformly tumultuous adolescent years that pull us down or push us forward on a trajectory that becomes our life.

Relationships, which are ultimately the truest mirror of our life, reflect this life cycle. Early love relationships carry an urgency and immediacy that supersedes all else in life and regardless of the outcome, the experience is nothing, if not life lived to its fullest. We invest ourselves completely in these first forays into love and, in both its height and depth; we allow these relationships to transform us. Love teaches us through brute force to believe in what is most lovely and human in us.

The mid-life dip is real and it takes a serious toll on our primary relationships. All the competing agendas, the exhausting joy of raising progeny whilst trying to be our own personal best, the cost of things, and our tired aging bodies all converging on hours that just aren't quite long enough to fit it all in. Sign me up, I am in the mid life dip club- big time and yet struggling everyday to give voice to the reasons to stay, to keep loving, to not let the bad moods that are so easy to over take, dictate our life choices. Bailing out of love feels easier in this time, maybe it is easier, and yet I know leaving the foundation that you invest in doesn't get you any closer to the peace in ourselves that we so long for.

This becomes clearer too, both in the study statistics and in life itself as we move towards the latter part of our life. Finally given up the struggle and the tension of defining who is right or less imperfect, nothing is left to be taken for granted, least of all the time or comfort of sharing a history with someone. A companion through the years that has come to accept our foibles and weaknesses, holding them along side the most loveable parts of us is a gift beyond measure. Loving someone long term and being loved is the proof of the single most significant predictor of longevity. We know finally what this life is for- the slower we go, the more that love is the only balance worth striving for, the only paths with enough heart to help the rest of life make sense.

So wherever you are in your life cycle, this Valentine's Day recognize your relationship as the perfect mirror for this time in your life. If you are in the wild throws of falling in love, thank your lucky stars and spread the love in the constant smile that only that state can embody. Feel the intensity in every cell of your body so that you can create the visceral memories that can get you through a mid life dip. If you are still lucky enough to be loving someone who has seen you through the highs and lows, treasure it and share it. Love and gentleness are as contagious as its opposite.

If, like me, you are knee deep in the mid-life dip - Imagine your relationship and your capacity to love as tools to stretch out the curve and soften the bottom of this bumpy life transition. Remember the intensity of the love you invested in easier times and bank on it now, even if you can?t always feel it. The initial investment is still there. Take the time out of the busy schedule to listen, take a walk, or have a physical conversation. Reach forward in time and realize how golden this will all feel when looking backwards. Admittedly sometimes I can?t imagine it ever feeling golden, but I do know that there is a tenderness and connection that replaces and restores the bruises of moving through hard times.

Whether this Valentine's Day is romantic or routine for you, commit yourself to finding the love that surrounds you.

Sustainable Love

Recently, after I reviewed another book on greening the fashion world, the publisher sent me a note saying that she had seen my site www.goodcleanlove.com and was going send me another new book she thought I would be interested in: Sex Secrets of Porn Stars.

I wondered if she had actually read anything on my site.

After years of attending the big Vegas "Sex Shows," it had become increasingly clear that my corporate mission, brand identity and personal beliefs about the connection between love and sex was a universe removed from both the intent and content of the adult industry.

Giving into curiosity, however, I opened the book to the first page, where the author compares the women we emulate, like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Margaret Mead, with the famous women of the silver screen, the ones who bare it all: the stars of pornography. The author suggests that if we emulated these women (instead of great women's rights leaders?) we would all enjoy the pleasures of the flesh. The plot thickens, as the author details everything from the hair, make up and costume choices of porn stars, to their borrowed positions and scripts, suggesting all of this in order to spice up one's own love life.

Ironically on the same day, I got a lengthy email from a New York literary agent with whom I had been corresponding about publishing my work in book form. Having made contact with her through an editor at a large publishing house, I was anxious to hear her thoughts on how best to position my work. She said that although she liked my work, the idea of the work involved in building and maintaining sustainable relationships just wouldn't sell nearly as well as a cute book about discovering and enjoying a more passionate life. "Couldn't you just write a book about finding more passion? After all, you have this cute company that sells sex products.... Just downplay all the hard work in relationships, people don't really want to read about that."

It occurred to me to send her Sex Secrets of the Porn Stars.

I do sometimes feel that my tag line – "Making Love Sustainable" – is a little like pushing a big rock up a steep hill. We aren't really a culture that applies the wisdom of sustainability to our most important relationships. Often when I use my tag line, there is a thoughtful pause, as though the idea were completely new. It isn't just about promoting green and healthy products (although the adult industry could certainly do with a green washing of its standard ingredients). It is also about the deeper possibility that we might be willing to give up momentary happiness or the ease we expect our relationships to provide and actually commit to the work of making our relationships sustainable and lasting - perhaps with the same effort we might put into our homes, businesses and personal health.

How far our collective reality is from this sustainable love model is evidenced in our society's demographics: from rising divorce statistics, to the trends of young people who choose to "hook up" or to be "friends with benefits" rather than engage in committed relationships, to the commonness of pornography in our lives. The percentages of people who participate in the on-line pornographic universe, for instance, are startling. One in four adults spends four or more hours per week in sexual experiences that are cut off from the relationships that define their lives. Many actually prefer these virtual relationships to the real ones that fill their homes. In a time when there has never been more opportunity and technology to connect to each other, we have never seen the incidence of this many people living alone.

That we don't choose to stay in real love relationships is not that surprising, as loving another person is one of the most challenging and elevated skills that we are demanded to develop as human beings. Most of us come from families which gave us little useful information on how to love with longevity and commitment. And if you graduated from any public institution in this country, then you know how little relationship skills are provided in the standard K-12 curriculum. Even skills as basic as conflict resolution are rarely standard for children, compared with say, geometry. Given our collective history of warring and pillaging, you would think it might occur to our society that loving each other is not an ingrained quality in the human makeup. Rather than a sideline activity, it could be that teaching the skills of loving, relationship-building and conflict resolution could be something for which we try to achieve mastery.

Still, as complicated and messy as loving relationships can be, they are also the only avenue available to us that can provide the kind of mind-blowing, wow-that-was-amazing sex that we all long for most. Making love with someone who you deeply love is a singular experience that so unites the intimates involved that it transforms them. It is the proverbial glue that keeps the rest of the mess intact and inspires people to a compassion and kindness that they may not even know they are capable of. It is the truest part of what it means to be human and the act of love that accompanies it has the power to change the world.

And change the world it does. Loving someone is the largest single predictor for health and longevity. As Dr. Dean Ornish says: "Love and intimacy are at the root of what makes us sick and what makes us well, what causes sadness and what brings happiness, what makes us suffer and what leads to healing...I am not aware of any other factor in medicine - not diet, not smoking, not exercise, not stress, not genetics, not drugs, not surgery - that has a greater impact on our quality of life, incidence of illness and premature death from all causes."

Love is the cure as well as the illness in our world, and evolving our ability to love increases not only our chances of survival but creates a depth and meaning in life that can only happen in relationship.

The healing effects of intimacy and connection extend deeply into the physical act of lovemaking. Hundreds of major medical studies have shown that an active sex life leads to 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. Men who have regular sex (only twice per week) have half as many heart attacks as men who only have sex once per month. In fact, a regular garden variety sex life has been shown to extend life by as much as ten years. People who enjoy a meaningful sex life are less anxious, fearful and inhibited.

So now that you are sold on the benefits of love and intimacy, let's also reveal the unspoken truth about sustaining love over time: loving someone else and allowing yourself to be deeply loved is an act of heroic patience, intention and commitment. After the honeymoon wears off (and I promise it always does) we humans are all as annoying as we are loveable. Accepting this as fact and then building the skills to undertake the daily problem-solving of loving, is not only wise, but is also a prerequisite for enjoying the kind of sex that can change your world.

Stay tuned here as we continue to explore new regions of the heart and the delights of sustainable love. Please share your stories of keeping your love vital and healthy too.

This article was written for our new partners in providing sustainable love content. Check out our exciting new feature blog on www.realitysandwich.com/sustainable_love

The Real Work

“It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go we have come to our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.� - Wendell Berry -

This little poem speaks volumes about what it takes to stay committed to our relationships and our dreams. More often than we would like to admit, and often accompanying a significant loss, we confront the brutal truth that we really don’t know where we are going or what to do. It is a disquieting realization. This moment of not knowing will show us more about ourselves than all of the days we spend certain of the next step.

Living with ourselves during the groundless moments of pure bafflement is not easy. All of our critical inner voices seem to shout louder and small inconveniences have the weight of real problems. Stepping out of our stories to gain a truer perspective feels like a steep climb up. This is a time when I cut myself while chopping vegetables or stub my toe on a couch that hasn’t moved in years. I seem to attract the impediments like a magnet. Keeping the mind focused on routine chores requires effort. It is especially hard to maintain the caretaking of others when we feel lost to ourselves.

So it is not surprising, but it hits like a double whammy when our relationship falters under the strain of holding ourselves on the edge of the unknown. This is by definition a lonely time, and often requires a language of emotions that is as unfamiliar as the experience itself. Distancing ourselves from our loved ones does not help, but it is easy to do. All the more so when our bafflement comes from the relationship itself. Relationships go through these same places of groundlessness and, precisely when we need to lean in and learn how to love more, we pull away.

“Goodness suffices and endures forever; on this throughout its years true love depends.� - Ovid

Here is the solution to the moments of groundless, up against the wall, no place to turn kind of time - be kind to yourself and practice goodness with everyone you love, or better still everyone you know. Watch for goodness around you and feel happy that you were there to bear witness. It sounds simple, but it isn’t. It requires vigilance and practice and a willingness to let go of the habitual thoughts that trap us.

Love is the antidote to fear. Fear is often the emotion that holds us tightly in our moments of loss. So try to love more when you are lost, beginning with yourself. I recently read that altruistic behavior actually heals. We feel better when we help other people because in the act of offering love, we are given a true perspective. A perspective that provides a wide enough view to lead you back to a path with heart.

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Belonging and Renewal

For most of my life I have lived away from my native home and my husband has always said "You can take the girl out of New York, but you can't take New York out of the girl." Being a Jewish girl from New York has been a part of my identity as basic as my blue eyes. Yet for all of the space that this cultural identity has taken up, and the personality attributes that accompanies it, I have found very little comfort in where I come from. Functional though it may be in getting things done, it has always required some kind of explanation or excuse.

Recently I returned to New York for a business show. Walking the cold wintry streets of the city, I searched for how I belonged to this place and how it had so solidly planted itself in me. Most of my memories of New York are tied up in the dysfunctional family that I grew up in and was mostly an experience of isolation. The harshness in my tone and demeanor was the language I was raised in. My ancestors though were solidly Russian immigrants, living on the lower eastside; my great grandfather was a tailor and an orthodox Jew. By the time I knew him he was close to 100 years old. He spoke only Hebrew and Yiddish, both languages that I knew by sound, but little else. He lived out his life in an old hotel on the Atlantic shore of Long Island and I remembered thinking that he was taken to temple to pray more regularly than he was taken to bathe.

On this trip, a friend brought me to a Jewish renewal service, where for the first time in all my years of being a Jewish girl, and for all of the hundreds of Jewish services that I have attended over those years, this one finally taught me who I am. A language barrier was crossed and the Yiddish and Jewish words of my history fell into ancient songs and chants that moved the whole room. People I have never met engaged in a deep search for connection and meaning had familiar faces. I was at home for the first time.

It is when our heart is cracked open wide that the lessons we have learned, that have stacked up in us over time sinks in. Ancient Hebrew chants cracked open my heart that had spent all its years searching and yet never quite belonging. Unmet needs of belonging, lives in us as deep longing, which has been a driver in my life. I married into a family whose identity can be traced to the same land for over seven hundred years. Each trip we made to my husband's homeland, Slovenija (where they don't buy vowels) cemented my children's sense of identity and yet left the gap for me wider still. It was a longing that created a schism between us, I couldn't quite imagine the loyalty and connection he felt for his family and history, and he couldn't grasp how separate and lonely it was for me to witness it.

Family is the vehicle for creating a sense of belonging and identity. They are our first tribe. Having four children was how I made my own tribe and even as I have watched them grow into confident individuals with a clear sense of identity, I never could quite name my own. Finding one's tribe is often how we come to grips with our identity.

Attending that service last week was a watershed. In ways that I don't even fully understand I left that renewal service fully renewed. The experience created a context for my long history on these city streets. Being a Jewish girl from New York is far more than the dysfunctional family I grew up in or the bits of orthodox practice I witnessed as a child. It is connected to centuries of devoted prayer and joyous soul searching celebration. I am not sure what this revelation will create in me or in my life, but I know that this new connection to who I am has changed everything. Seeing myself as a member of a tribe has given me the ability to see myself with gentler eyes. It is not from out there that we find love and acceptance, but from within ourselves. It is in truly having what we have and being who we are, where renewal begins.

It is spring, the season that reminds me that we get another chance. That's what this story is for me, a new beginning and the first time that I can feel the long line of people behind me. I am sorry if it is taking advantage of editorial privilege to share it here, but I hope it inspires you to bear witness and gratitude for the tribe that has created your identity, or at least gives you hope of tracking them down. All the tribes at the beginning taught the same message to survive- love one another.

 

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Nothing Left to Give

This is the ironic feeling that happens in many of us as soon as the radio stations start playing Christmas songs non-stop. Rather than that giddy, most wonderful time of the year feeling, a vague pre-holiday fatigue sets in, with both the weight of expectation and memory of disappointment that feels so familiar you could almost sing it.

This is not a humbug thing, most of us actually long for the light, connection and giving that the holidays are supposed to offer. But often the experience is so diluted by the endless to-do lists, the expenses, and the guilty feelings that we should somehow be happier about it. We aren't just tired about the holidays; we are tired because of all the work and weight of getting to these holidays which we celebrate at the darkest days of the year.

I am burnt out on giving. There I said it, even though I feel like I should quick back-space it out of there before anyone reads it. I am burnt out and simultaneously feel like I should be giving more to more really needy people. I suppose some would call this burn out normal- what with a husband, four kids, two cats, a dog, employees, creditors etc. - it isn't that surprising that I feel like I have little left to give. But this is not the place that I want to live in, and certainly not when I should be singing Christmas songs. But alas, here I am.

 

So this time of year, take each day and live it like it is the last holiday you will have to love someone. Do it with all your heart and watch how the world changes from the inside out. This is where the real giving comes from.

Stay tuned, we are happy to announce the new, better, more beautiful Good Clean Love website coming alive in early December. Use the coupon code gclnf07 to take 10% off some incredible, not to be forgotten holiday gifts that keep giving.

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The Language fo Love

Language is the metaphor we use to communicate our deepest feelings. A couple's sexuality is the most profound vehicle of communication of all. The words we use and our physical language of love define our love experience.

Penetration is the word often used to describe the culminating act of sexuality. It's a word I often use when describing the best use of good lubricant. But it was just this week after using the word in conjunction with the act, that I wondered what I was saying.

The verb "to penetrate" has six different definitions in the dictionary, and as in the power of any metaphor, the meaning one attaches to the term may deeply influence our relationship to the act.

A lesbian friend of mine once told me it is not uncommon for many of her friends to maintain a no penetration relationship, and among my heterosexual friends, it is not a small minority who avoid penetration with their spouses. I never asked them but I wonder if for them, the meaning of penetration feels like this definition of a military force entering into enemy territory or the depth of projectile into a target. Certainly the idea of women as a target for a man is rampant and so the deep need of self protection is also deeply held.

To penetrate also means to have an effect throughout, spread through, permeate, move deeply, or imbue...Applied again as a metaphor for sexuality this penetration is an act that transforms, that has the potential of changing everything. This sexual act has the force of inspiration, the possibility of being completely saturated with love.

The act of penetration is a force of nature that is loaded with meaning and mystery. Not surprisingly, to penetrate also means to gain insight and to have a marked effect on the mind and emotions. Our language about our sexuality is as layered as the act itself, and knowing what you mean when you speak about love and sex can only be helpful.

Sexuality is a metaphor for many things in life. The language, attitudes and opening that we share in our sexual encounters has a long reach into the depth and closeness of our day to day relationships.

Consider your relationship to penetration - the word, the idea and the act. Penetration means all of these things all at once. But if I were to make a leap, in the name of making love sustainable, it would be that couples who build a strong and consensual relationship with the meaning and act of penetration are much more likely to have a strong and consensual relationship to each other...

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Regenerating your life - Start in your bedroom.

Walking into your bedroom should make your heart rate slow down. It should be the place where you sigh deeply and your whole body relaxes. The bedroom is your nest. A singular space that both regenerates you on a cellular level every night as you sleep and provides the environment and impetus for physical intimacy. As the place where we love deeply, procreate our next generation and regenerate ourselves our bedroom is deservedly the sanctuary for our sanity.

Don't let the world into your nest. Guard the sanctity of the space by keeping the world at bay at the door. I know there are many late night TV lovers who will argue the point here, but I still say that a television in the bedroom is one voice too many, especially if you are in a committed relationship that is fragmented by the busyness of life. Same goes for newspapers and news magazines. Watch and read in the living room, the kitchen, the bathroom if you must, but leave the bedroom to the wonder of silence and soft voices. (OK, I will give into a little night music sometimes, but not a radio). The older I get the more convinced I am that life must provide a retreat or we wither on the vine. There are numerous sleep studies that back me up on this- screens and sleep are incompatible and of little help in jump starting an intimate life.

There are an abundance of resources on greening your home, so if you are already in that groove, then I apologize for preaching to the choir. But if you are just beginning to apply the benefits of sustainability to your living space, there is no more satisfying place to start than your bedroom. Your bed is the place that you spend almost as many hours as any other place in your life. If you are up for a new one, look for all those cool natural materials that don't off-gas “ like wool, organic cotton or natural latex. It's pricey but you're worth it. Also if you are going to spring for any luxury in life, make it cotton sheets- organic preferably, but truly the difference over time of beloved cotton sheets compared with the poly-cotton versions are dream worlds apart. (Check out the options at www.ecobedroom.com)

Without beating a dead drum it is worth repeating what most of us already know: We are one of the most exhausted cultures of all time; so much for all the leisure time that our new information age/economy was going to provide. Celebrate the gift of rest and how incredible it feels to wake up refreshed. The world really does look different through fresh eyes, although admittedly this is a practice that I wish I was better at.

For many of us, it is challenging to feed our need for intimacy and physical contact with the same energy that we bring to the selection and preparation of our food shopping and cooking habits. Giving your time to composting and recycling is no different than finding the space to air out your feelings. Making commitments to simplify your life and reducing impact on the environment requires the same amount of mental energy as constructing the space and time for deep and meaningful interactions in your days.

The healing affects of intimacy and connection extend deeply into the physical act of lovemaking. Hundreds of major medical studies have shown that an active sex life leads to 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. Men who have regular sex (only twice per week) have half as many heart attacks as men who only have sex once per month. In fact, a regular garden variety sex life has been shown to extend life by as much as ten years. People who enjoy a meaningful sex life are less anxious, fearful and inhibited. Greening your love and your bedroom has the power to extend out to the world in ways that we can barely imagine. It's a worthy practice that can only make life more sustainable.

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The Real Conversation

Flying out of New Orleans, I am seated next to a gynecologist that I didn't meet at the ACOG yearly meeting.   I share my story about love products and my work about making love sustainable.   He shares his story about how limited his time with each patient is and how awkward it is to discuss sexual intimacy.   We talk about how little education and language we are given in our childhood and youth to understand our sexual nature and honor this part of ourselves.  We even talk about masturbation and its dirty history of torture and shame and how difficult it is for so many women to touch themselves or in turn, to allow themselves to feel pleasure when someone else does.   We talk about how important it is to honor your partnership as the center of your family and not to let your children's needs overtake your marriage.    He shares the pain of the early divorce he lived through in medical school.   I share how much I struggled in my own marriage while my husband was in medical school.  We talk about the incredibly high statistics of failed marriages in medicine- and then in life in general.   I share my dreams of making a chair of loveology at a university.  We have a real conversation.

Then we start talking about the recent election.  We are in opposite parties about everything.  He thinks global warming is propaganda-   "Al Gore, the Nobel prize winner is just trying to make money"� he says.  He thinks that welfare destroys black families.   He believes that increased CO2 will help grow more plants.   This guy is a doctor and the longer I talk to him, the more I realize that even if I had every fact in the world at my disposal, I wouldn't convince him of anything.   He is a product of his culture and I mine-and even as we fully agreed about everything essential to loving and intimacy, we couldn't agree about anything else in the world.  

If we'd begun with the political we would never have arrived at the personal, which is how we are different.   We even discussed at the beginning how easy it is to profile someone, to believe you know who someone is by how they look or speak.   Certainly if he had told me the propaganda thing about global warming to begin with, he would have been this other southern republican who I wish would make their own country and leave mine.   Instead, he was a guy who had his heart in the right place, but only got information from one source, which I am sure he would say about my own progressive leanings.

I am trying to hold onto the first conversation as the real one,   but I watch myself waiver to disbelief and judgment about how he could possibly be so stubbornly misinformed.   It is easy to become partisan and separate ourselves with our differences.  It is harder to do that with someone who has shared their real story with you.   Connecting to the real story is our only hope of building a bridge to each other- not because we will or could ever change each other's mind, but because there has to be enough room for both to exist simultaneously.  

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Love and ACOG

We were the only love company at this year's American Gynecological and Obstetrics College Meeting.  There were a lot of medical technologies and pharmaceutical cures for problems that you never heard of and hope you never have.   I went   to meet some cool doctors who are faced with a third of all their patients complaining of painful sex.   A complaint so common and so impossible to diagnose that the fact itself ought to be driving millions in research.   There are some pharmaceutical companies searching for a biochemical change that could be induced by a daily pill, but anyone who suffers from the problem could tell you that it is a pill that will never be found.  

It is a complicated problem, where the physical, mental and emotional aspects of being human and sexual converge.   Even our most highly educated professionals have little or no language about this convergence, sticking to the medical and sanitary aspects of hormone levels and organ function. The discussion of  how and why these functions get interrupted have everything to do with how we think and feel about love, our bodies and the possibilities of experiencing deep and trans formative sex.

A lot of the docs were impressed with my explanation of female sexual dysfunction, maybe because my solution came out of being a test case from the demographic.  I had pain with sex for more than half my marriage.   I went to doctors complaining of pain that no one could diagnose - I knew I wasn't imagining the pain with sex.  I spent too many hours in the tub trying to soothe my burning and swollen genitals for hours to believe it was in my mind. 

It was no comfort to be told there was nothing wrong and having so much pain that my husband would just sleep through after our infrequent sexual interludes did not endear me to him.  I must have bought 20 different products during my childbearing years- searching for something to make sex palatable.  I was lucky;   I knew how to have an orgasm, even during the years that my sex life with my husband was strained and brief.   So I kept wanting to try.  It wasn't until years later that I learned that all the products that I was buying were essentially the same product, made with the same ingredients.   Petrochemicals are a bad idea for mucous membranes and they were probably invented by men who fell asleep while their lovers were soaking in the tub.    There is no more important area in the body to apply the wisdom of natural ingredients than the human genitalia, and none that is more undeveloped. 

We don't use petrochemicals or parabens in our products at Good Clean Love.   Our lubricants continuously respond to internal moisture and don't get sticky and gummy.  They feel like the kind of lubrication I had in my twenties and they have allowed me to explore a sexual relationship that has healed my pelvic pain and many of my marital strains.  

Good lubricant is not the answer to sexual dysfunction.  It is a good tool to allow a physical discussion to exist which of course predisposes the assumption that you have to be having other discussions that engage both your heart and imagination.  Yes, we women need to feel connected to find libido.  It's a neurological function in the brain- Memory, emotion and sexuality are all mixing it up in the limbic part of the brain.   Finding our way to those connections is how we find our arousal mechanism.   It's a journey.    Interestingly this arousal mechanism is linked or rather synonymous with our olfactory system.   What we smell goes directly to the limbic center of the brain- which is why all of the great lovers in history combined the power of scent with the sensuous.    I learned all this during our early product development phase with the love oils which started our company line.   Accessing the limbic in the brain is a bit mysterious, although I can't give you the neurological specifics, I can tell you that true essential scents can actually change your brain chemistry and that you might find a store of passionate fantasy that you didn't know you have and that, while useful in the act of  love making, you might not want to admit to- at least I don't .

Still, I am the first to admit, that even the best products will not solve sexual dysfunction problems that have origin in estrangement, judgment and abandonment.    Our sexual lives can only be healed in a context of loving relationships where people show up for each other, struggle with the challenges of authentic communication and vigilantly weed out negative thoughts of each other.     Given that, it is not hard to see how thirty percent of women have pain with sex. 

The buzz was spreading around the ACOG floor about this distinctly un-medical company selling love products.  Many of them, when they came over in groups, laughed, "You're the only one here talking about sex.'"   "Well love, actually,"� I corrected, spreading the lube around.  

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Tantra for the Un-initiated

This is the textbook for what sex was made for. Centuries old, tantric practices are part of a much larger hindu/vedic tradition of which sexuality is only part. The full practice is a life long spiritual quest which demonstrates the interconnectedness of everything and includes yoga, meditation, breath work as well as sexual techniques. The Western and more modern interpretation of Tantra has become synonomous with spiritual and sacred sexuality. These tantric books and practices explore and teach techniques which are capable of elevating the sexual participants to a sublime and ecstatic spiritual plane.

Many teachers caution against the confusion associated with "tantric bliss"� as a path to intense orgasmic pleasure. In fact the power of the practices is often the sublimation of orgasmic pleasure towards a rising spiritual energy of divine connection.

 

I am not an expert or even a devoted student of Tantric practices. I have read some popular titles and seen a few videos that teach the techniques and spent some time with on the internet researching the topic. The google resources are so exhaustive. Yet, even with out an exhaustive education the principles behind tantric practice can go a long way in deepening the connection you share with your partner.

There are a few simple techniques that I often recommend to customers and clients with out even situating them in the context of Tantra, which in fact is where they came from.

The idea of making love with your eyes open is one of the fundamentals of deep connection in intimacy. It is surprisingly harder to do than you might expect. Move toward this idea as an intention rather than a rule and be amazed as the collection of glimpses that will reshape how you think about your partner and yourself. It is not easy to be seen, even by the people we love. Truly witnessing the act of love is profoundly trans formative.

Becoming conscious about your breath is central to all yogic practices and is foundational in Tantra. An easy way to start this is to intentionally count your breaths together. Associating breath and penetration, both shallow and deep forces you both to find a rhythm and timing that is shared. Slowing down to each other and taking a breath with each connection is incredibly exciting.

Combine these two ideas into one of my favorite intimate activities and see if you can get to the finish line together. The ground rules are first to keep looking into each other's eyes, and second, to distinguish between deep and shallow penetration. Starting with shallow and moving towards deep penetration in a count that you both follow requires concentration and focus which alone changes the nature of intimacy. The first round is nine shallow and one deep stroke, each one connected through breath and eye contact. The second round is eight shallow, two deep. The pattern continues and then repeats, if you can, although I have rarely gotten through more than one round.

Showering our physical love with intent and attention is the key to transforming love into a force of unity. My first line of products was called Sacred Moments because even without any study of tantra I knew that the closest we can get to the divine is in the act of making love to someone you really love. Have fun.

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A Slippery Slope

There are many days that being married, or rather staying married is the most challenging thing that I do. This is still true after 24 years of marriage, no less so than it had been in the early years of my marriage. What is most interesting is that the conflicts we have revolve around the same issues and although we often succeed in living them differently, when the wounds are opened again, and usually with just a single thought, the thorns cut a bit deeper each time and the climb up after the fall is a bit further each time.

Recently, I took a leap again and tried to get my husband to see the places where he is unable to connect and extend himself for our kids. There is almost no language available to us in this discussion that does not provoke his defensiveness. Any way I broach the topic, all he can hear is a shrill pitch in my voice; his guardedness setting my tone a notch higher. Before our four children, we had the same arguments of my incessant planning around his availability and his distancing, internal focus which for so many years felt personal. I couldn't get for decades that it had nothing to do with me.

As we birthed and raised our children, my need for connection to him was replaced with the demands of caring for them and over time the needs I had seemed to become saturated with the intensity of raising four kids. We stopped arguing over his participation and I planned and carried out our family activities and he would be present as he chose. Over time, the arguments about his showing up to basketball and soccer games, the school plays and science presentations waned. It was an argument that never shifted anyone's ground and only dug the ditch deeper between us.

So I was caught off guard when it came up again around my eldest sons state tennis match. I am used to dropping my own plans for my kids' events and even re-arranging a list of activities for the other kids, but something about the importance of this event that didn't even strike him, sent me off over the precipice, the one that only takes one thought to slide into a deep abyss. It is a dark hole that deepens over time, requiring more effort each time to shake the old resentments that harden my heart into a hateful place.

If you have ever seen the Star Trek series with Jean Luc Picard's struggle to become human after he is taken over by the Borgs, which is what the emotional precipice of life is for most of us. In almost no time, our own heart is unrecognizable and the easy advice that I give all the time of holding what is most loveable and what is most un-loveable side by side feels impossible. Worse still is that I can barely discern my feelings of the moment for the truth of my life. The darkest parts of how I feel can seamlessly turn into "the truth"� I have been hiding from myself.

Even as I gain glimpses of balance and my better sense of all that works in my life tries to regain control, the dust and grime from that nasty slide hang on. I feel ashamed at the capacity for meanness and unkindness that I hold. I re-learn how much work it takes to love and that the only way to find balance comes at the moment you realize that your unkindness has nothing to do with anyone else. It is yours alone.

Claiming my darkness and letting the other person off the hook is in fact the only way back to recapturing your heart. The act of self-loathing transformed into self forgiveness is the key that makes forgiveness of others possible. My husband will never be a strong communicator/connector and yet the only way he will ever get better at it is from a place of being loveable and acceptable in how he can connect and communicate right now.

We are almost back on solid ground again. At least we can see each other eye to eye. It is a relief, as I ponder how steep is the precipice that can come up between us with a single thought.

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It all Started With a Bottle of Love Oil

It all started with a bottle of love oil... This summer marks the fifth anniversary of my discovery of love oil. For years since the birth of my third and fourth children, I had been looking for some kind of product to bring the pleasure back into my intimate experiences.

 Then almost like a prayer answered, I found a random bottle of love oil being clearanced at a small shop in town. I had my first pain free sex in years. Not only that, but some kind of crazy passion was awakened that I hadn't even known was there. After the bottle was empty, I understood the link between the amazing sex and the love oil. It took months of research and study to figure out how to make it myself, and so the beginnings of Good Clean Love were born.

I turned our guest bathroom into a love oil lab of sorts and that summer my husband and I tested dozens of formulas. That was also the summer that I got that the more I physically loved my guy, the more he turned into the guy I fell in love with. Even as I spent more and more money on purchasing exotic essential oils and organic oil bases, he never complained. Our lovemaking was better than ever. I, of course was continuously motivated to test out a new formula, it was summer and my kids actually still had bedtimes.

Later that summer picking raspberries, the idea of making a company to sell love oil appeared in my head. Blending and pouring thousands of bottles by hand seemed simple compared to the Children's Peace Academy that I had been working to launch. Like most great entrepreneurial ideas, the passion (literally in this case) of the need and the satisfaction of a solution is enough to keep you learning and going. Origins is the love oil that started it all and is still the bottle that I reach for each and every time we agree to dive into the mysterious connection of sexuality.

For me now, the scent of Origins is so deeply linked to the feel of my husband's kiss that even when there hasn't been a mood in sight for days, the memories of release and satisfaction that accompany the scent bring me back to the journey and opening to the part of me that has nothing to do with all the other hats that I wear all day. Love oil is my ticket to a journey deep inside myself to uncover that sexy woman living undercover.

Join us as we celebrate five years of Good Clean Love by sharing your love story in our summer of love oil contest. I am grateful that I always had the best reason in the world to keep this business going- Our love products have enabled us to have great, better than ever sex almost every time. And as our tag line developed of Making Love Sustainable, so too has my capacity to stay with the hard places and trust the courage of heart that makes love real, even when you can't feel it.

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Is It Ever too Much?


If you have ever wondered what happened to your active sex life or can't even remember what it feels like to have a sex life, then the recent books Just Do � and 365 Nights� will either inspire or depress you. Two couples took up the challenge to refresh their marriages with daily doses of sexual intimacy. Successfully combining an active and satisfying sex life with a married lifestyle is the subject of volumes of books and a frequent focus of my own writing. It is epic to achieve the same with kids in tow and worth noting that neither of these couples have any which makes their achievement noble but not quite heroic.

Kids or not, the author of the Study of American Sexual Behavior rightly states that "There's a strong relationship between rating your marriage as happy and frequency of intercourse. What is harder to say is what the causal relationship between the two is. We don't know whether people who are happy in their marriage have sex more, or whether people who have sex more become happy in their marriages, or a combination of the two."

The truth is that intimacy begets intimacy. Sexual intimacy creates a singular connection that paves the way for better communication and emotional closeness and physical release that is unparalleled in any other activity that we share. This is no truer than the fact that couples who communicate well and show up for each other regularly are more apt to be drawn together physically. The experience of the couples in both the books both bear this out, their experiments did bring them closer together in every way and also gave them the space and frequency to develop a broader and more comfortable language for sex which not surprisingly improved their sex lives, even after their daily marathon ended.

Frequency of sex is not really the point of the story as even all the authors will attest, people's needs and capacity for sexual intimacy is variable. Sustaining the emotional space that leaves you feeling interested and safe enough to be vulnerable and open to great sex is in and of itself a remarkable kind of intimacy to live in. This article was particularly interesting to me as I  have been living in a pretty dry spell of physical intimacy of late, what with broken bones and poison oak frequenting my home life. The tension and stress between us wears more deeply and the lack of physical closeness turns the edges of all our encounters brittle. The longer it goes, the more challenging it is to open up in the ways that bring our physical intimacy into daily view.

So why not do your own experiment, this weekend. It is summer after all and we are celebrating love oil; see what happens with three days in a row. I know that I plan on falling deeply under the the spell of some serious love oil therapy this weekend, poison oak or not. Check out our love oil giveaway contest and share a story to inspire.

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Lighting the Spark

Lighting the Spark

A lot of people do not know how to have sex.   On the one side, we are inundated by an exhibitionist; anything goes sexuality in our pornographic laden culture and on the other side, there is nothing, an empty and lonely place where most of us live with our questions about sexuality and wondering what is normative.  Even most "Better Sex" videos are so graphic that integrating the images into practice is a far reach.    I sell products which I assure will provide the tools for a longer and more satisfying sex life,  but the longer I do it,  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.

 Step one- Desire and Arousal or Arousal and Desire

Desire does not always precede arousal.  Often times if you give yourself a chance to explore the purely physical sensations of scent and touch, the body itself will open up by itself to desire.   Many a night, we have a pre-set agreement for an intimate rendez- vous and I arrive exhausted with no desire in sight.   This is where love oil comes in.   Scent is experienced by the olfactory and registered in the limbic part of the brain- where memory, emotion and sexuality is waiting to be stirred.   Discovering desire is about waking up arousal, it is lighting the fuse.  For me it feels like a process of falling deep into my body, a journey that awakens feelings of a thousand tiny fireworks just under the skin.  Each and every time,  I take this journey of arousal, I realize again how cutoff  I am from really feeling my body through most of my day.  Good sex should always begin with this journey, where the goal is learning to feel everything. 

Step two- Exploring fantasy

The body is now awake, so whether you have private fantasies that you would never repeat or enjoy visual candy in books or video together, or actually plan out and try on roles together, healthy sexuality lets us abandon our normal reasoning self for brief moments to let the bodies cravings lead the mind.   Whether orgasm is easy or challenging to achieve has a lot to do with your ability to let go and experience the odd and fascinating part of being a sexual human.   Experiencing the pleasure of intimate touch without any fear of being somehow abnormal (which pretty much most people fear about their sexual selves at some point)  is how you move towards orgasm.   You can't demand it, you can only make room for it.  This is the place to experiment, see how different tactile surfaces and vibrations change and enhance your experience, the flame builds.

Step three- Penetration and Lubrication

I never pull out the lubricant until I can't stand it anymore, until I can't wait another minute.  It wouldn't do its job in step one or step two, it wasn't made for those places-   it relies on your imagination and your willingness to do its job.   Accepting anyone into you as deeply as intercourse provides for is a sacred and life changing moment.   Lubrication eases the entry and creates a dynamic smooth gliding of tissue against tissue. Healthy lubricant ingredients not only soothe and heal during their use, but also build the elasticity and integrity of the tissue over time. There is nothing more explosive and deeply satisfying than sharing the fireworks of deep intimacy and connection of our most private selves.  So take the holiday to make your own fireworks and don't hurry to the explosion- lighting the spark and fanning the flame are what makes the light in the sky so exciting.   

Pain and Pleasure

 Pain and Pleasure  

The relationship between pain and pleasure in human sexuality is as profound as it is complex.  Each time I have sex I am struck by the ecstatic release of deep pleasure which ignites an equal experience of intense pain.  I have long wondered what begets what, if it is actually the intensity of the pain that arouses the pleasure or the other way around.  I have come to believe that the pain/pleasure of the sexual act is one in the same.  The tunnel of orgasmic faces at the Amora London exhibit (www.amoralondon.com) bears out this connection in what the French have long called "le petit mort"� or little death of orgasm.  Orgasmic release exists in a place that is solely its own and I know I am not alone in identifying it as both pain and pleasure.

Love, sex, pain and violence all stimulate the release of similar chemicals and hormones in the human body.  Endorphins that are released in painful experiences are often perceived as pleasurable.  Stress and pain can also stimulate the serotonin and melatonin production in the brain which transforms painful experiences into pleasure.   The release of epinephrine and nor epinephrine in pain can also cause a pleasurable 'rush'. Normal human biological response actually supports the complex and mysterious link between pain and pleasure. 

So it is not surprising that the practice of combining painful techniques with sexuality is ancient.  Roman poets, ancient tribal drawings and even the Kama Sutra all refer to safe practices of what has become known as BDSM.   This acronym refers to Bondage, Domination, Sadism and Masochism which reflect the ancient sexual rituals of sexual dominance and submission that has qualified sex throughout history.   For more reading on this see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BDSM#Origins.      

The medical analysis of this form of sexual behavior is as checkered as the practice itself.  Never fully understanding the human urge towards giving and receiving pain in the context of sexuality, it has been thought of as both disease and mental illness through most of the development of psychiatric practice and even dating back to the early 1800's.  Although these kinds of sexual practices were taken out of the diagnostic mental health codes in the mid 1990's, there are still many people who struggle with their own relationship to the urge to explore and experience pain with sex. 

Sexual studies in both the US and Europe have estimated that the overall percentage of BDSM related sexual behavior in the general population ranges somewhere between 5 and 25 percent depending on sexual orientation, age and nationality of the study demographics.  There is a significant subculture of BDSM practitioners throughout the world and clubs or "dungeons"� are established in most large cities in the world.   BDSM practitioners make an important distinction between their sexual choices and sexual abuse, as everyone involved must agree to be safe, sane and consensual.  This includes the use of "Safe words"� and other boundaries of consent and safety.

The connection of pain/pleasure has existed for most of recorded humanity and there are many people for whom this form of sexual behavior exclusively defines sexuality.   Getting a glimpse of both the history and current sexual practices helps me understand the yin/yang of my own sexual response.   Feeling like our sexual arousal mechanism and desires are normal is a big concern for most of us.  In fact, it is usually the first question people will ask when they go to see a sex therapist.   Finding a language to talk about your sexuality and desire is not always easy, but it is the first step to meeting your physical desires and creating the emotional intimacy that makes sex meaningful.  

Much of the sexual language available feels awkward and inadequate because it is used and overused in pornographic contexts that distance instead of approach my sexual experiences. Still, once over the discomfort of sharing the limited vocabulary, the discussion about the lines between pain and pleasure are worth exploring.

 For many couples, just giving themselves permission to have the discussion can be simultaneously liberating and shaming.   It all adds up to taking responsibility for our sexual selves and building relationships that allow them to thrive.

Recognizing how our sexual experience is mirrored in the emotions and soul of our relationship is illuminating.  Here's my hypothesis: loving someone emotionally creates the same pain/pleasure experience that physically making love to them does. There are moments of deep connection and intimacy, vulnerability and nakedness. And with them comes an open door to the opposite experience: feeling deeply hurt by your lover, by what was said, or, just as often, what went unsaid. 

The act of loving “ in whatever form“ requires a willingness to experience both the pain and pleasure. This is the piece of sustaining loving relationships that is easy to miss, or at least misunderstand, and tragically the place where we walk away from the heart of what we want most.

 

 

 

Broken Hearted

Summer days slow down time. The sun hangs high in the sky for hours and the midday heat stretches to dusk. Summer is as close to timeless as most of us get in our busy schedules and it is a relief to lose track of what time or even what day it is. We are just here, right now, warm.

This week, time stood still for many of us in our small community when the lazy afternoon heat invited tragedy. We knew this young man who jumped into a cold river and drowned. Many people knew him, he was a star high school athlete and shined with all the glare of our beloved Duck football heroes. In a moment, the unthinkable, the unimaginable destiny that awaits us all suddenly changed the world. Possibility extinguished.

The very next day, the impossible struck again, when a very dear friend, too young to think of the end, didn't wake up. A lover of all that was bigger than life, he filled up a room by walking in, and laughed heartily at himself and all the wondrous and strange parts of being human. I can't actually believe that he will never show up again at my door, exclaiming and strangely costumed. It seems impossible.

The unfathomable losses of life that crack your heart wide open and leave you looking at the world broken hearted are a gift. We get in those moments that all the petty and small disputes that can dominate our life and relationships are nothing. We are awake and realize we have another day to tell someone I am sorry or better still, I love you. With a broken heart we come to life wanting to figure out how to love it all, the loveable and the irritating, the easy and the difficult, the happy and the sad.

We never know the last day. So act like today is it. And say the "I love you's"� that have been waiting to fall from your mouth. Give in, give up all that matters least and take this time to do what we are put here to do- love everyone you can.

The Mysterious O

 

Exactly how or why yesterday was named "National Orgasm Day"� remains a mystery, but I am happy for the occasion to unpack the dialogue about one of the most coveted human experiences on the planet.   Like many sexual discussions which rarely or never happen in the midst of our most intimate relationships, yet proliferate the airwaves and video content of adult entertainment, most people have an extremely limited language to work with when it comes to orgasm.  This collective silence about the mystery of orgasm and how it affects our well being and our relationships impacts a stunning percentage of the population.  Many studies, including a 2001 global study (30 countries) of sexual behavior with over 27,000 participants reveals that orgasmic dysfunction is more the norm than the exception.  One third of all women have never experienced orgasm and the second third experience orgasm only rarely.    Orgasmic dysfunction is not just a woman's story; equal numbers of men suffer from a range of issues that hinder their ability to experience orgasm. 

The word orgasm is derived from the Greek word orga which means explosion.  This makes sense because the experience of orgasm often feels like a burst of pleasure, bliss, emotional and physical release.   In fact, the moment of orgasm creates such a complete letting go, that the brain center that controls anxiety and fear is switched off.   Orgasms are as unique as each individual who experiences them.  The wide variety of intensity, location and stimulus that contribute to and create orgasm plays a big part of the mystery that many women experience in identifying what an orgasm feels like.  Interestingly, studies have found that the confusion about experiencing orgasm goes both ways-  some  women claim having an orgasm and show no bodily response, while other women who do have classic response like vaginal contractions and heart racing believe that nothing has happened.  The modern mythology and (dare I say; pornography) of orgasm looms so large that many of us are not even sure how to identify our own. 

The good news is that the more orgasms you have, the more orgasms you're likely to have in the future.  Learning about your own sexual response and developing your orgasmic potential will bring both immediate gratification and long-term satisfaction.   As with any skill based human motor function, all bodies come equipped with the tools for orgasm, yet without the proper education and opportunity to practice, many people never successfully achieve the synergy of mind, body and spirit to release this very unique and revelatory experience.  It is a quest worthy or our time and attention. 

The first step on this journey is taking the conversation about sensation, pleasure and orgasm out of the adult entertainment industry and into the privacy of our bedrooms.  This may seem like stating the obvious, but actually intimate sexual conversations are harder than you would think to come by.  Your sense of safety in yourself and in your relationship is key to expressing your desires and living in the vulnerable place that opens to sexuality.  This is a tall order given the combined impact of the lack of sexual knowledge we're raised with, our shared cultural anxiety, and how little scientific knowledge is available about sexual response.   

Orgasm is the human expression of life force and whether you are among the lucky few who know it as the height of intimate relationships or are among the many who are looking for the gate to knowing it better, it is a currency that affects us all.   This month we will explore the variety of experiences and techniques available for accessing your own pleasure responses.  This month's Summer of Love contest asks you to share the strategies you have used to open a conversation with yourself and your partner that leads you to pleasure. We will be sure to share any great answers with everyone. 

 

The Mysterious O - Take Two

Everyone wants to orgasm.  This is just a fact of life and nature.  Long ago, before pornography was everywhere, desire and lust still held a formative place in our human sexuality makeup, but we all had a little more room to imagine orgasmic experience and less to compare ourselves to.   With the advent of internet pornography, you can witness orgasm on demand, but that doesn’t mean you can make yourself, or anyone else have one.   There in lies the conundrum of orgasm.   

Of all the coveted human experiences, what makes orgasm so elusive is that it cannot be forced.  Even many methods of cajoling seem to backfire. Desperation and orgasm are strange bedfellows.   Here we only need to unleash our imagination for a moment and it is clear how much sexual behavior lives in this odd coupling- faking, purchasing, role playing, submitting, dominating, what we will not do for an orgasm is somewhat astounding.   Several great sex therapists that I know, tell me that the quest can cost many people their relationship.   Orgasm almost becomes the oxymoron in this situation when it is the relationship itself which is given as the fertile ground to grow and nurture the comfort with our sexuality which opens the door to orgasm. 

It isn’t that surprising then, that statistically, your chances of having an orgasm are much better on your own than with a partner.    Letting go of your judgments about sexuality, yours and others is easier to do for many people than digging deep into the fears and insecurities that most of us carry about our sexual history, preferences and behaviors.  Many people spend their lives married to people with whom they can’t even say the word “masturbate” let alone imagine sharing the act.   When we can’t disclose our sexuality, it holds both us and our orgasm hostage.  

Being able to orgasm with someone, or for that matter by yourself, requires safety.  It is the most exciting letting go available to us.  Where could we be more vulnerable than in the ecstatic release of one’s center?  Being able to find a language to explore the kinds of touch that are stimulating, allowing the strange fantasies that lurk in all of us, and letting your body lead you into feelings that you don’t and can’t control are all essential to experiencing orgasm that transforms. 

It doesn’t work to focus on orgasm as the finish line.  Aiming for it makes the journey anxiety ridden and makes you forget that you are on a journey.   Often times it is the smallest of details that can push you to a place that you didn’t know was in you.  But you can’t feel that place if you are looking for something big ahead of you.  Presence is nothing if not the key to our sexual selves. 

There are probably as many different types of orgasms as there are people who experience them.  Great books abound on the many techniques that can facilitate them. 

Certainly there are literally millions of opportunities to witness them.   For me, orgasm is a journey that always brings me back to my center. 

 

The Mysterious O - Getting There

 

Having an orgasm starts with feeling aroused.  No arousal, no orgasm.   Arousal begins in the brain, specifically the limbic area of the brain where our sense of smell intersects with our emotional process, our memory store and our sexuality.   Vibrations of arousal and eventually orgasm live in the body and are triggered in the brain.   Trust your sense of smell and indulge your olfactory in whatever scents turn you on.   Napoleon was well known for requesting his wife to not wash for a week when he was coming home, whereas for other people axe body wash is the ultimate in sexy smells, whatever it is know that our olfactory system has always been foundational to the art of mating and use it to your advantage. 

Arousal is a visceral experience and bodies are built for motion. Nowhere is this more useful than in sexual exploration.  Although this may seem like stating the obvious, it is not a small percentage of people who tense up and stop moving around in their sexual activity.   There is more than hip thrusting to experiment with.   Experimenting with moving all of your limbs, rolling your neck and stretching into new positions can trigger arousal points that you didn’t know you had.   If you can think of no other reason that wanting to understand more about your orgasmic potential, try and fit in a little bit of core strengthening exercises into your life.   Being able to hold onto someone you love from the inside will make you feel both strong and sexy.

Arousal is expressed through our breathing.  Becoming aware of breath in sexuality will bring life and orgasm into focus like nothing else.    Whether you tend towards long and slow breaths or short, fast inhalations, stop and notice how your breathing affects your connection to your body, your lover and your orgasmic possibilities.  Try changing your breathing pattern and see how it transforms the experience.  Making an agreement with your partner to synchronize your breathing and movement is a remarkably simple step which has profound impact on lovemaking.  Refocusing your breathing will not only deepen your connection, but may also expand your idea of orgasm.

Extending the space between arousal and orgasm is the art of lovemaking.   Do your own solo experiments so you know the sensations and buildup that lead you to the point of no return.  Practice pulling back from that line and introducing another form of touch or breath and move towards it again.  I have long been an advocate of waiting as long as you can to surrender into your orgasm.  The longer you wait, the more power and energy is built up and the sweeter the release.  Some spiritual techniques suggest moving up and down this arousal tunnel, coming close as close to your orgasmic edge without going over as a spiritual practice.  Sounds like a worthy form of meditation, and I don’t question it’s incredibly powerful results.

Arousal messages come through our body as genital secretions.   As many as a third of all women do not have a strong natural lubricating response.  This easily turns into feelings of low libido and disinterest in sex.   After years of birthing and nursing babies,  I never have natural wetness so I was heartened to discover that a small application of great, clean lubricant will kick start the arousal cycle as well as my memory of natural lubrication did.   Not only that, but adding healthy lubricant ingredients ensures pain less friction, more time to experiment and is a critical companion to experiencing orgasm.    I would be hard pressed to not admit to making the best lubricant on the market, but many people enjoy other types of lubricants- so find what is best for your body.

Fantasy can either be helpful or harmful to your orgasmic journey.  Having fantasies that conjure up guilt and take you out of your physical experience and away from your partner are generally not going to move you closer to orgasm.   However, imagining other illicit relationships for you and your partner, and here, you only need to read a small bit of sexual history can be seriously passion producing.  I can never repeat the strange and fantastical thoughts that go through my head afterwards, but as I have come to bear witness to them, I have experienced whole new levels in my orgasmic potential. 

So go forth, flirt with arousal, don’t judge your experience or compare it to anyone else’s and enjoy the ride.   If there is any journey worth taking over and over again, it is the one to our most innate and miraculous human pleasure.   

The Mysterious O - Extending Life and Love

Having regular orgasms will extend your life and provide the basis for more long lasting relationships. Recent studies have confirmed the link between longevity and orgasm frequency. We know that people who enjoy a regular, satisfying sex life (ie. regular orgasms) are less stressed, less depressed and generally more well physically, mentally and emotionally. This level of satisfaction and well being is reflected in the partnerships in which they are shared. The depth of connection and the bonds of trust that shared orgasmic experiences builds into a relationship is a visceral insurance policy for long term commitments.

The majority of people who leave their relationships site sexual incompatibility as a primary impetus to leave. It is so common as to be cliché that many people in long term relationships reach an impasse of sorts about their individual and connected sex drives. The pulley of sexual attraction and arousal is not static, the swing between feeling desirable and connected in a relationship is in continuous flux and reflects the health of the entire relationship, not just it’s sexual side. Overcoming the initiation argument begins when both people stop keeping score. Agreeing to harness the frustration and apply it towards building solutions is much more likely to move you towards shared pleasure.

One of the most common blocks to a shared orgasmic experience is the strangely common practice of faking orgasm. Studies site as many as 60% of women have faked an orgasm and this practice is not limited only to women. The reasons for faking orgasm are complex. Whether it is because you feel like you can’t perform, or that you can’t open up to that level of vulnerability or that by faking you feel like you can end the intimacy, what results is the most serious of breaches in trust. Faking orgasm is a lie and it leads the person who is trying to love you and bring you pleasure to feeling like s/he cannot trust the messages s/he is hearing. Breaching trust at this deeply naked level of vulnerability cannot help but seep into the other aspects of the relationship.

Many women mistakenly believe that their pleasure doesn’t matter, or they don’t want to burden their partner in their own frustrated search for that mysterious and powerful orgasmic release. Real conversation about these issues is sexy. It communicates that you are invested and trust your partner enough to be vulnerable about this most deeply held desire. Just for the record, most men get more pleasure and sense of mastery from helping a woman they love to orgasm than their own climax. Working together to find the path to individual orgasm is the most intimate sharing that exists. It changes everything in a relationship.

Finding a language to talk about your sexuality for most people is the stumbling block. It is one area in life where taking responsibility for the problem is shaming, so we often go into a default mode of blaming. With that slip, it is easy to believe that change is impossible and to feel caught in a no-win situation. As in any other area of personal development, clarity is everything. Take the time to think about or write down your own personal sexual history including orgasmic experience. Share these notes with your partner and often even unwilling partners will often begin to open up. Set a couple of shared goals, mysterious as our sexual selves may be, they respond to dialogue as any other part of our life. For many couples making efforts to de-stress their lives can have remarkable effects on their ability to be intimate.

Discovering pleasure together is like pouring cement into a foundation. Physical touch that leads to ecstatic release not only releases hormones and endorphins that promote health and longevity, but also serve as the basis of biological bonding. Knowing that you have the ability to reach someone in this most intimate of ways is one of the most significant sources of self esteem that relationships afford. There is a strange coincidence between the percentages of people who don’t orgasm and the percentage of people who divorce. While, sharing orgasm is not enough to keep a relationship alive, the inability to move towards it, is enough to kill it. There is no other single work in life that will repay you so profoundly each and every time you share it.

The Mysterious O - Lifting the Mystery

“Sex-positive, a term that's coming into cultural awareness, isn't a dippy love-child celebration of orgone – it's a simple yet radical affirmation that we each grow our own passions on a different medium, that instead of having two or three or even half a dozen sexual orientations, we should be thinking in terms of millions.”      Dr. Carol Queen

 

Orgasm is a product of a sexually healthy lifestyle and sexual health is derived from positive sexual education. Imagine if we believed that we all had a basic right to sexual health and instead of a shame and fear based explanations of sexuality, which mostly focus on avoiding sexuality, we were all privileged to a comprehensive sexual education which was both non-judgmental and focused on the life enhancing aspects of human sexuality.  Imagine if we grew up believing that pleasure was a normal and healthy part of maturing sexuality.   The world could not stay the same. 

 

The term sex-positive has been floating around since the early 80’s and developed in response to the anti-porn feminist movement.  This idea tried to make a space for respecting and creating healthy sexual identities and relationships.  Working to redefine our culture that makes us fearful and ignorant about sexuality – others, and ours is a process of education and intent.  It means that going beyond the limited view of “normal” and recognizing our sexual   prejudices for what they are, much as one would work toward an awareness of racism, disability-phobia, or other forms of systemic prejudice that influences our judgments and our actions.

 

Many companies have adopted the term sex-positive to differentiate themselves and to emphasize their belief in providing the products, education and resources to create a healthy sexual society for everyone.   In addition to paying attention to the quality of their products, they also normalize the huge range of interests and identity that make up our collective sexuality.   They serve as reminders and inspiration for all of us as we continue the steep climb out of the sexual dark ages as governments, including our own, continue to legislate our sexuality and morality.    

 

“Sex is something you do, sexuality is something you are…”  These words by Anna Freud have yet to be integrated into our sexual education and help us move beyond the compartmentalizing of our sexual selves.  Establishing healthy boundaries around our sexuality is different from the prisons we build for ourselves by continuously denying our sexual longings and feeling ashamed about our sexual identities.   Unlocking the door between who we are and what we choose for our sex lives is fundamental to building a life that includes intimate pleasure. 

 

School is back in session this week.  Take the opportunity to re-educate yourself about what healthy sexuality means to you and decide what you want your children to know about their own sexual development.  Build a curriculum for yourself and the people that you love that allow you to expand your ideas about your sexuality and experience pleasure without shame.   We are sexual beings, and this instinctive procreative urge has the power to transform all aspects of our health. 

 

Feeling your sexiness in not only your body, but your mind and spirit as well will not only open up your experience in your bedroom, but may also make you feel more beautiful as you walk down the street or even more articulate in a dinner conversation.   Allowing your sexuality to penetrate your personality and add color to your daily life will not only enhance the days, but may well bring the power of your whole self into focus.   Giving yourself permission to witness and interact with the world through your sexuality is the first step in understanding the depth and connections that live in us between our physical, psychological and spiritual experience of sexual selves. 

 

 

 

The Next Sexual Revolution

 

Sarah Palin’s daughter is not the only one for whom abstinence education didn’t work.  Despite the millions of dollars invested in “abstinence-only” education for youth, both teen pregnancy and birth rates have jumped up in the US after a 15 year decline.  Just as our sexual attitudes and beliefs were stretched wide open by the younger generation of the 60’s, our children are demanding and creating a new kind of sexual dialogue to fill the void that our sanctioned teach them nothing approach has created.   Education is the path that the future is built upon.   We cannot expect different results when we keep providing the same or less information.  

 

The World Health Organization refers to sexuality as an intrinsic part of human experience. Human sexuality is one of the primary ways that we define and know ourselves.  Understanding our sexuality and being able to make decisions that enhance our life experience are two sides of the same coin.   This is as true for adults as it is for our youth.  To the degree that we have not sorted out these questions for ourselves as adults, we are both uncomfortable and unable to help our children with these same questions.  And for many of us, the facts and language to help us make the vital connections between our sexuality and the relationships that we form (or don’t) has been long left out of our educational model, even prior to the current vogue of “just say no”.  

 

The good news is that we are on the verge of a new sexual revolution that has the potential to provide the comprehensive sexual education that we all have been missing.    Across the country, from Chicago to New York, teens and young adults are demanding changes in school system policies to provide comprehensive sexual education as part of their basic and required curriculum.   Even more exciting is that they are benefiting from their access and the reach that online technology and  social communities offer to organize and extend their efforts,  disseminating accurate and research based information about the physical, social and psychological aspects of sexual behavior.    

 

Although the internet has been largely a venue for sexual entertainment purposes, this new sexual revolution has the potential to re-educate us all.  These new teen inspired websites elevates sexuality from the pornographic content which currently doubles as most teen’s basic sex ed., while providing the framework and direction for age-appropriate, non-discriminatory and open dialogues where real questions can be asked and answered.   The rule of thumb in my home is that if you are old enough to understand and ask a question, then you are old enough to be given the truth about that question. 

Not providing real answers to legitimate questions about who we are, sexually and otherwise leaves room for whatever is the loudest voice to fill the void.  

 

Comprehensive sexual education is revolutionary because it provides both access to information and normalizes the language and discussion of the powerful force that human sexuality exerts on our lives and culture.   Giving ourselves permission to explore and discuss our intimate needs and sexual identity is the foundation for offering this to the people we love the most.   Visit www.sexetc.org or sexed4u.googlepages.com to see where the next generation is leading this sexual revolution and commit to asking or answering the questions in your relationships that will create a sexual revolution in your own life.  

 

The Step Past Fear

“Taking a new step, uttering a new word is what people fear most.”

 

Let’s just admit it, sex is kind of scary.  Even those of us who love it, sometimes cower at its power and consequences.   Sex has the power to catapult and end a relationship almost simultaneously.   Sex can unite and divide in the same moment.  Sex defines our identity and confuses our relationships.   Sex has the power to create life yet can with inappropriate use, destroys it.   How do we teach about the drive, the wonder and the many dichotomies of this most human of acts without terrifying the students?   This question has been asked and answered a million ways.  Is there actually a right answer?

 

The right and wrong of sex and its education is a profoundly personal choice.  That it has taken center stage in our public political forum only makes the partisan sides of the argument dig in their heels deeper.  There is no proving anyone right or wrong and no convincing anyone of your point of view when it comes to sex.  There is just your personal relationship to your own sexuality, which opens or silences the conversation.  To the degree that discomfort, shame and silence characterize your relationship to sex, abstinence education is the only viable sexual education.  Creating an educational model which forbids access to information, alienates sexual differences as deviations, and limits value choices to a single morality is a solution to quiet our worst fears about ourselves as sexual beings. 

 

You can perhaps imagine the scene in my home, where my four children are not afraid to ask anything about sexuality or most anything else….  They use stupid lines from Borat to tease us about our own intimate relationship and they have completely integrated our values that sexuality and love are integral to each other.   Having sex with someone you don’t really love cheapens the experience, sometimes even to disgust.  Physical intimacy demands emotional connection.  These are the sexual education lessons that come through in the answer to every question.   “How could you think of someone kissing you there- if you don’t even like them”….point taken. 

 

I don’t tell this story to intimate that my answer is more right or true than those who educate their children that sex is off limits until marriage.  But from experience I could say that most forbidden things –whether it be tv, candy, or sex tend to turn into obsessions.  We want most what we cannot have.  Additionally, in the absence of real information, kids will take whatever they can get and so we have a generation receiving their sex education through internet pornography and rap music videos.   The statistics on this just say no methods of training the next generation are dismal. Just read this article, Whether it’s sex or drugs, abstinence only education simply doesn’t work

 

 There are no winners in a partisan battle when we make an example of teen pregnancy as a model for failed policy.   Of course it seems like stating the obvious that a minimum of contraceptive education would have gone a long way to re-imagining her future and it forces us to recognize that as humans, our sexuality is not expressly linked to reproduction.  I think it is safe to say that the pleasure of intimate connection drives more teen curiosity than their drive to reproduce.  

 

One way we might approach the development of a non-partisan sexual education program would be to  continuously ask ourselves whether we want our curriculum to reflect our fears of sexuality or our trust and belief in the wisdom of the next generation.  Imagine if our first thought about sex was the recognition that our sense of sexual selves is an intrinsic part of our identity and is developmental in the same way our ethnic, racial and religious identity expands and shifts as we grow and experience the world.  If we knew that our sexual selves were a work in progress, like the rest of our life, maybe we could give up our collective fear of not being normal as we explore what it means to be sexual as we grow up.

Lost, losing and loss…

I lost this week. After months of preparation, documents and samples changing hands, interviews scheduled and rescheduled, the grant committee at the Eileen Fischer program for Women choose five inspiring women run companies to recognize and reward with $10,000. Although we made it to the finalist round, we were not among the lucky winners. We were edged out by the Goat Patrol, a company that uses goats to clean up weeds on people’s property. As a former goat owner myself, I am in no way demeaning the virtue of the business, but compared with my mission of spreading the word of sustainable love….I was hurt. Demoralized perhaps doesn’t even do justice to the emotional fallout from that email rejection.

Recent images of swimmers and runners in the Olympic competition of a few months ago came flooding back to me. As the camera would always zoom to the winners face, I would always search around the edges to see the utter despair of the losers. Here I use the word loser, almost as a joke; all of the athletes sweat, trained and worked until they dropped as winners. The actual winning was often decided by tenths of a second or less. One swimmer lamented clipping her nails the night before, so close was the contest. A hundred years ago, they would have called it all a tie, which is probably closer to the truth.

One of our most significant human frailties I believe is our devotion to the winner. It is a running conversation in my home, inspired by the ongoing sports and musical competitions that make up my children’s world. “There is no losing when you have given everything you have, when you have tried your best.” I repeat like a mantra. For me, the win is in their courage and not giving up on themselves. The rest is the game, luck and wind and bounces off one side of a net…. But this is little solace as the other player or team goes away in celebration. Our personal best is not always enough and yet to live our life and to keep risking our heart and courage it has to be. This is a difficult lesson when you are 12. And I realized on the day I lost, still hard to bear in my mid 40’s.

The same day that I suffered my loss of perspective, self-esteem and general sense of direction, I walked with my friend who just nine weeks ago lost her husband. She recounted a recurrent nightmare that she had throughout her marriage and which had surprisingly showed up again. In the dream, she would be somewhere with her husband and he would disappear. In real life this was a reflection of what happened to them frequently when they travelled. Her husband was full of wanderlust and even in the midst of big foreign cities would often be guilty of not looking back for his wife. She told me that she realized that now in death, just as in life, she had to forgive him, let go of him, and find her way home by herself. We wept.

Loss defines life- percentage wise way more than winning, which is perhaps why we are all so obsessed with the winner. Winners somehow seem to beat the odds and share some magical and elusive quality of living and playing that allows them to somehow walk above the rest of us, who struggle for each and every win. Even amongst the very best winners, the time inevitably comes where losing happens. Like the rest of us, they are forced to rely on their own inner strength and sense of purpose to keep them steady.

Dealing with loss, whether it is at the end of a relationship or the end of a game requires love. When you win, everyone loves you, or so it seems. Finding the love for the one who tries and fails is the basis of loving anyone and for the courage to love life itself. Maybe it was good that I lost, because as much as I would have loved the prize money and a few celebratory pats on the back, what I want most is to keep learning how to love.

Meeting the Need

 

Even after 25 years, there are still days when I blame my husband for not meeting my needs.   These moments catch me off guard.  There is usually little warning as I am going along, doing the next thing in my non-stop routine of growing our four children’s lives, along side the fledgling small business.  Then somewhere between mailing the day’s orders, violin lessons, hip-hop pick up and paying for the ingredients for dinner something snaps in me.  

 

The unfolded laundry, the incessant homework help, the moody response from my teenage son when asked to clear the table all build into an inner crescendo that overwhelms me.  The sight of my husband, sitting in his study, feet up on the desk, reading through a recent New Yorker magazine, seemingly unfettered is all that it takes to send me over the top.  Mind you, I haven’t asked for help, I just can’t stand that he hasn’t offered any. 

 

This is a familiar scene in homes across the country where women don’t ask and are angry that they have to and men wonder why they didn’t just ask.   I actually am mostly over the idea that if he doesn’t volunteer the help, it is somehow less worthy, but I have many friends who still feel like the love offered in response to a request is less worthy than the same act unbidden.   This is a useless, lose –lose.   Just because it doesn’t occur to him to get up and grate the cheese for dinner doesn’t make the macaroni and cheese taste worse, except sometimes it does, but usually only for me.

 

This cycle of unmet needs is not limited to my husband; it creeps into my relationships with my growing children and even sometimes into my friendships, as well.   Do I really have to ask for the table to be set or the dishwasher to be emptied every single time?  On the unmet needs days, an offense as small as neglecting to put their dishes in the sink feels like parenting failure and a friend’s last minute cancellation for a walk, becomes a measure of my self-worth or lack of it.  The little things go from being a blip on the screen of our relationships to defining the entirety of it, and it doesn’t look or feel very good to any of us. 

 

I think I may be actually be a need-aholic, which is to say that by looking at the way I have organized my life, it seems that I am addicted  to being continuously in need of responding to the needs of others.  This is in direct contrast to my husband, who rarely has needs that he will voice and is even more rarely looking for random needs to be met.  Relationships generally hold people with complementary, if not diametrically opposed needs makeup which is one of the aspects of relationships that makes them all unique and interesting.

    

A friend recently told me, “Your kids don’t even know they have the need before you are already acting on it.”   Sadly, this is how astute and over compensating my need-aholic style can be.   The mood sensor and stabilizer in me is on constant overdrive which is helpful in fostering healthy dialogue, averting stupid bickering and generally keeping the peace with children, but is exhausting and mostly serves to distract me from myself.  

 

Even after all these years, it is still like a block to the side of the head.   I am blindsided when I am struggling and unconscious about my own emotional needs.   It seems incredible that my overdrive sensitivity should just be on full only for others, but it isn’t really that unusual.   Many a competent and seemingly self contained adult is unaware of their unmet needs that lurk beneath the shiny veneer of getting it all done.   It is hard to be needy anyway.  There aren’t that many places to take your needs that are politically correct.   It isn’t my children’s job to care for my needs although when my oldest daughter  recently emailed me a poem that reminded her of me from her newly appointed college digs, I wept for what she saw in me.   

 

It isn’t my husband’s job to meet my emotional needs either, but I wish he would just think of it sometimes.  Or notice how many things got done that he never had to think about.   It is a running joke in my family about how I “take the credit” for both big results and menial tasks.  Constantly meeting needs anonymously and with out notice is a kind of prayer and difficult to sustain, which is why many mothers should be nominated for sainthood.  In fact, I realize again, that it is not sustainable to be selfless, and actually I am more for others when I am first for myself.  

 

 Unmet needs can wreak havoc on the relationships that hold them and it is easy to point the finger at the offending partner.  But actually it is rarely the other person that didn’t meet your needs- first it is you that couldn’t recognize or articulate them, and then it is the agreements built into relationships that need to change and evolve with life. It is easy to keep things going the way they always have and then be forced out of the relationship by the resentment and bitterness that comes from never adjusting and re-balancing.  It is more challenging to hold the relationship accountable for meeting a little bit of everyone’s needs and it actually provides alternatives for healing needs that have been long unmet.   We are able to renegotiate our relationship when we take the guilt off of the people involved. 

 

Besides all that, figuring out ways to meet the need is sexy, anyway way sexier than not, where statistically, nothing kills a good intimate life and ultimately the relationship itself more frequently than living out years of unmet needs. Best of luck to us all.

The Heart of Breast Cancer

The Heart of Breast Cancer

"The greatest mistake in the treatment of diseases is that there are physicians for the body and physicians for the soul, although the two cannot be separated."    Plato

Our breasts cover our heart.   If you have ever nursed a baby, it is clear that our breasts are not there for adornment, they are a primary organ of nurturance and sustaining life.   They are enervated directly to our sexual center, one of our primary sensory organs to awakening libido.   Their attraction, often confused with size or shape, is truly about how they connect us to our heart and the pieces of life that are most life affirming.   

The rate of illness in this region of our body is mind boggling.  Breast cancer affects one in eight women everyday. Heart disease kills one in four women. Just last spring, when I was called back to re-image a lump in my own breast, waiting in the hospital gown for a "better view" of what was happening in my breast, the truth of these numbers hit home.  Any of us can become part of these statistics at any moment.   And I knew, sitting there, that for the one woman out of eight who gets the unfortunate response of cancer, everything in her world and relationships shifts at that moment.

The physical illness that we aggressively treat with an incredible range of toxic chemotherapy or radiation therapy moves the focus to the symptoms and complications that these treatments exact.  Life is consumed by the physical battle to sustain during these life challenging treatments.   Many patients are left to deal with the emotional battles on their own.  

This work of the heart is complex and layered.  Whatever issues existed prior to the diagnosis have often yet to be understood and articulated, but now the more pressing fears and coming to terms with mortality and loss can overshadow everything.    Few doctors who plan the medical attack on the cancer are equipped or have the time to explore this critical side of the illness.   Even fewer recognize how much this work impacts recovery. 

That sexual dysfunction issues are often ready companions to this difficult situation is not surprising considering the interruption of normal hormone production that the treatments precipitate.   The results on a physical level are frequently the early onset of menopause, vaginal dryness and loss of libido.   Combine this with the psychological damage of losing a breast, and the feeling of sexiness feels about as faraway as the days pre-diagnosis. 

The irony of the situation is that the heart of the matter for most women is that serious illness of the heart region can often be linked to emotional distance and inability or unwillingness to share one's emotional life.   Love and intimacy are how we connect most deeply to our lives, our relationships and our life.   The millions of reasons that we cannot or will not open up are as unique and individual as each woman's struggle with disease.    As we take time to honor the women who both survived and were lost to this disease, let us also give ourselves to the heart of the matter- choosing to love ourselves, our lives and the people who live with us.

Cushion for the Heart

Love is the one treasure that multiplies by division. It is the one gift that grows bigger the more you take from it. It is the one business in which it pays to be an absolute spendthrift. You can give it away, throw it away, empty your pockets, shake the basket, turn the glass upside down, and tomorrow you will have more than ever.

Our breasts cushion our heart. As our hardest working organ, our heart never sleeps, beating over 2 billion times in a life time and circulating 50 million gallons of blood. Impossible to think that one could ever take this organ for granted, but so constant is the heart, we rarely celebrate its function or recognize it’s needs. Hearts perform best that are dosed with generous amounts of love and can bear the thrill of new romance as well as the tragedy of loss with equanimity. They strain under repressed emotion and isolation. Studies show both more stable heart health and increased longevity in the context of sustained loving relationships. Hearts need to be heard.

A couple of days after my last column, I was walking my dogs in the nearby park when I passed another woman walking her dog. We exchanged greetings and decided to let our dogs off leash for a run together. I noticed her cap covering her bald head and asked if she was over the treatments yet. Hers was ovarian, though most people assumed she had breast cancer. More insidious still, with almost no symptoms to alert the victim, she shared her history and illness. “Last month was national ovarian cancer month, most people don’t know” she added.

I talked about my last column and the responses I had just gotten from people I had known over the years of my business who had gotten in touch because they had the illness and wanted me to know how much my writing had touched them. The conversation warmed the brisk morning fog and the dogs ran. Having already revealed my occupation, I asked her if she was having an intimate life, adding that it was perhaps the most life affirming activity she could pursue. She laughed and said her doctor had already prescribed the same at least once per week. Both physically, to remind the tissue how to relax and open, and emotionally, to soak in being deeply loved, we agreed making love was curative.

I offered our organic lubricant solutions and shared how her sense of smell could help to awaken her libido. Giving her a handful of products felt like a privilege. It was a moment when giving felt like receiving, a place that I search for in life. After spending the day fasting yesterday, on the Jewish high holy day of Yom Kippur, (the day of reckoning for Jewish people everywhere), I realized that the places which both nourish me and block me have everything to do with generosity. The moments when my giving is automatic and easy feed me. When I want something back for what I give, whether it is recognition or advantage, usually do little to nourish me and probably don’t feel much like giving to the recipient, just ask my kids.

The connection for me between receiving and generosity is crystal. Giving on empty isn’t really giving at all. I was troubled during my introspection to admit to myself how much of my daily doing falls into this category. The spiritual paradox that Mother Theresa embodied and espoused is true: “If you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love.” Finding this place where generosity is true, without judgment about the receiver’s capacity or intention enriches us even when we give up our time and resources because momentarily it transforms and deepens our connection to what is most human in all of us. Being generous is like weight lifting for the heart. An exercise that keeps us all well.

Vol. 80 Culture of Love

“Who we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we love.”

Aristotle once wrote “What a society honors will be cultivated.” How fortunate we all are to finally have the value of love and commitment raised into the embodiment of our leadership. The photos of the new president and his wife sweeping the dance floor at the inaugural ball with only eyes for each other sent a message into the hearts of all of us. Love matters, and in fact was probably one of the single most significant factors in the success of our most unlikely of presidents. Certainly President Obama is brilliant, but he has also been brilliantly loved.

The love that developed and shaped him fosters not only his relationship to his wife and family, but this more peaceable administration. It is discernable in every decision he makes, whether it concerns humane conduct or respect for environmental needs. His voice and messages are compassionate and inclusive. He genuinely wants to make amends and do better and he feels the pain that our long coming economic meltdown is inflicting on us all. Every day he attempts to balance our collective fear of the future with the promise of renewal born of community and service. In current events every day, we can bear witness to the fact that love can and is changing the world.

While many might scoff at the suggestion that love can in fact reinvent our world, recent scientific advances have proven the effects of love on human consciousness. According to three University of California MD’s in their groundbreaking work, A General Theory of Love, “Who we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we love.” Through careful explanation of brain development and the wonder of being both Mammalian and neural beings, we humans have the capacity for “neural revision.” This capacity provides the power to remodel the emotional parts of the people we love. Long lasting togetherness actually writes permanent changes into the brain’s open book and our relationships both pull us into the gravitational force of our loved ones’ emotional life at the same time as we mold them to our own.

This fact is both a gift and a burden because unlike the technological efficiencies that our modern existence has come to depend on, the life of the heart and its relationships live on in time. Relatedness is a physiologic process that like digestion or bone growth, cannot be rushed. The skill of becoming related to another person and attuned to their emotional capacity and rhythm takes years and requires continuous attention. Unlike other skills or things acquired, relationships are always in process and require the same amount of attention in midstream that they do in the beginning. Single moments of disconnect wedged between hearts can and do turn into weeks, months or years of distance.

Relationships die every day from inattention and neglect. Many couples cannot love simply because they don’t spend enough time in each other’s presence. People mistake text messages and emails as togetherness, yet screen exchanges or even a voice over a line lacks the life connecting substance of time spent side by side. If this is true for adults working to sustain their relationships, it carries even more weight for the developing hearts and limbic brains of children. There is no substitute for the daily presence and attention that families offer the next generation. If any single thing is ailing our culture, it is this; the utter disconnect that broken families leave in their wake for the children who are left to learn how to connect and build lifelong relationships for themselves.

Family is the foundation that community and culture is built on. Resolving to give the relationships that make your life meaningful their due is a gift that you give not only to the ones you love and yourself, but the culture we collectively create. I hope the Obamas’ find ways to keep the connections between them strong as the weight of the world falls on this young family. It is in our interest as well as theirs that the love that made Obama who he is-continues to shape who he will become.

In Sickness and In Health

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.

The Story Conforms to the Outcome

“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.

A Vote for Sexual Health

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.

 

 

Core Vitality

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.

 

Core Vitality of the Heart

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.

The Vitality of Sleeping...Together

Sleep is our most basic human need.   Some thirty million of us will attest to the impact of insomnia on well being.  Indeed, unlike fasting from food which humans can survive for weeks, being deprived of sleep can kill you in days.  The impact is so severe, that it not only precipitates physical disability, but also insanity which it is why it was one of the cruelest and most inhumane torture methods ever devised.  Considering that complete lack of sleep is fatal, it is not really a stretch to realize that consistent late hours and a growing sleep debt we all share is responsible for a wide variety of illness, injury and disease. The ability to rest and rejuvenate is at the essence of our vitality.

Under the best of conditions, maintaining loving relationships is one of life’s biggest rewards and challenges. Many of us don’t realize how big role exhaustion plays in our relationship skills. The patience to nurture the bonds of intimacy in our relationships is not strengthened through fatigue, rather it is often one of its first victims. The struggle between sleep and sex is a common one for most couples in long term relationships. Tiredness is one of the most commonly cited reasons for not being intimate.  

With or without sex, the act of sleeping with someone you love is a bonding act in itself.   The soft sweetness of shared quiet and the silent moments of drifting off to sleep with the scent of someone dear nearby is healing.  Over sixty percent of Americans share their bed with a significant other and although sleeping with a partner can sometimes challenge your ability to sleep, more than 2/3 of those polled said they prefer sharing a bed to sleeping alone. 
 
Having shared my bed for my entire adult life, I know the problem solving and conflict resolution that goes on about sleeping habits; who joins us in bed, the weight of the blankets, the amount of light in the room, the window open or closed... How we work through this most intimate part of sharing a life is a deep reflection of our relationship.  The most successful sleep arrangements, like the most enduring relationships rely on the couple's sensitivity to each other's needs and willingness to compromise.  Sleeping next to my husband, even with the accommodations we both need to make for it to work, is the most extended time I share with him daily and even asleep, we connect and recharge the places that keep us together.

Giving up sex for sleep is a good idea when just lying side by side is all you have in you.  But if this becomes the routine, then we lose the powerful source of vitality that comes with a meaningful intimate encounter. Sexual energy that is stored in the body is a force that can be used to revitalize even the most exhausted among us. Often times I have been cajoled into intimacy when I thought I was too tired, only to find myself feeling better than I had in days. 

It helps to plan your intimate times when you are not tired because you create the mental space in your day which helps you to both conserve the energy for your rendezvous and anticipate with revived memory how great it was last time.   As you begin to get tired in the evening, remind each other about the hour and your date.   If you can shut the bedroom door even by 10pm the chances that you might have a great time and reasonable amount of sleep is pretty good.  Prioritize sex with the person you love as highly as basic hygiene. You wouldn't go a week with out a shower... Even if the main event isn't a daily experience, the compassion and interest you show your partner daily leaves room for this to happen. Be nice and understanding about the need to sleep, and realize if you are sleeping side by side, it’s a win either way.

Gifts That Keep Giving

It is that time again when we are all faced with finding the perfect gift for someone we love. With the economic turmoil and its associated fears coming to bear on all of our purchases, I offer this series of holiday gift ideas that have the potential to give back to your physical, emotional and mental well-being throughout the year in hours of intimate connection. Adding useful and innovative tools and accessories to help you enjoy a reliable and vital sex life is actually like putting money in the bank. Researchers at Warwick University concluded that a healthy and sexually satisfying partnership is like having a nest egg of $100,000.

Buying gifts that remedy the primary issues that compromise most long-term sex lives is a good place to start. When a sex life is down, it is likely due to pain with intimacy, vaginal dryness and lack of libido. Often any one of these symptoms can generate the others. Recognizing and treating these symptoms with love and creativity instead of turning them into a negative relationship story is one of the most loving gifts you can give this holiday season.

 The BASICS

Love oils actually change your brain chemistry while you kiss and the essential oil formulas travel swiftly through the nose to the limbic center of the brain. Love oils are natural aphrodisiacs that wake up your arousal mechanism through scent. Learn more about how your nose can wake up the sexiest organ in your body…your brain. Give all the lovers on your list our Good Clean Love Oil Gift Pack with enough diversity of scent for everyone to find something they love. To design your own personal love oil, just pick up a bottle of good, organic base oil such as jojoba, sweet almond or apricot kernel and then blend in a 1% dilution (about 10-15ml per 4oz of base oil) of your favorite essential oils.

 Amazing personal lubricants can change everything when it comes to intimacy. Erase dryness issues and much of the pain of intimacy also goes away. Sometimes creating moist smooth gliding tissues allows libido to peak out around the corner. Many ingredients in the standard lube formulation are petrochemical based and can cause irritation, itching and burning with use. If you have any of these symptoms, check out the ingredients in your lubricants. There is no better place to invest in organics than for the most sensitive tissue in your body. In addition to Good Clean Love lubricant, try Firefly or Sylk- you will feel the difference.

LIBIDO Solutions

Products to enhance libido are a billion dollar industry not even counting pharmaceutical solutions. I came across Maca products at one of the industry shows I attend and have been using these products daily ever since. Maca is a Peruvian herb that has been used since the time of the Incas, and is gaining widespread popularity among the green organic community for the wide range of hormonal balancing and libido enhancing properties that it conveys. Testimonials report revived libido, sexual abilities and stamina, making 60 feel like 16 again. Many women, soothed by the calming effect that Maca provides, claim than Maca can ease hormone irregularities, improve the functioning of the endocrine system, restore muscle tone, add moisture and give a youthful glow to the skin.

 Innovative SHAPES

Adding innovation to intimacy is easier when you add supportive shapes to help you experiment with and hold new positions that most of us don’t have the ability to maintain ourselves. Liberator makes a variety of foam shapes, most popularly, the wedge and the ramp which you have probably seen in a movie or two. The added height and new angles that become available with the help of these foam pillows (which are available in a range of sexy colors from deep purple, deep blue and red) can help women achieve more satisfying penetration and also take the pressure off their partner’s knees and back.

 The use of props for lovemaking can make all the difference in the world for couples who struggle with physical disability. Even the slowly aging with weakened muscle tone will feel younger with these product aids allowing us a more athletic approach to our intimate times. The company also sells other larger items that affirm the bedroom as the love den but even having the wedge or ramp waiting in its black silk covered pouch is a great reminder for love making. Another company that is worth looking into is Canadian based www.lovebumper.com which carries a similar line with rounder edges. I have not been lucky enough to secure a tryst on those yet. I will keep you posted though.

 Adding IDEAS

In the name of innovation, give one of our best selling series: 101 Nights of Great Romance and 101 Nights of Great Sex. Each page is a sealed gift that you give to each other with great ways to spice up your date nights and add a little romance into the tedium of sustaining busy lives. Some of my favorite writing directions come from Dr. Ian Kerner, who writes intelligent and translatable prose on the joys of really great oral sex. I also like that he is smart enough to realize the She Comes First and He Comes Next is the appropriate order of things for the best results for all.

 Another book which is sure to revitalize both your sexual understanding and skill is Tammy Nelson’s Getting the Sex You Want. Applying Harville Hendrix’s Imago therapy communication techniques to build a sexual language really works in the exercises provided and I guarantee your understanding of sexual anatomy will be enhanced. A worthy reference guide no matter what your level of experience of sexual comfort.

 Green TOYS

If the person you love does not yet own a Lelo pleasure object, then consider spending your whole budget on this gift. It will become a trusted companion throughout the years. Our favorite model the Gigi, which is good for opening up a sexual dialogue and doing some anatomical research on the g-spot response, has 17 speeds and 5 remarkable patterns (truly change the pattern and you change the entire interaction.) This pleasure object is on the Gifts that keep giving special for the holidays. While they last, use the GTKG coupon code for a $30.00 discount on the Deep Rose Gigi. This product isn’t called a pleasure object for nothing. Packaged in an elegant black box with its own electric recharger (the charge lasts for 4 hours) and silk storage pouch, truly a gift that will return its cost to you in pleasure ten fold. New from Lelo are some male toys that are sure to liven up his holiday experience in ways that he hasn’t yet imagined. Check out the Bo and Bob on our site.

 Another amazing gift to consider, especially for the more adventurous is the NJoy

Fun Wand. Made of surgical grade stainless steel, it is an heirloom pleasure piece that will last for decades to come. Although it doesn’t have a lot of electric options, it is surprising how a cold smooth piece of metal in between the sheets can heat up and even electrify sexual relations between long term consenting adults. Sometimes the tool helps you to imagine an interaction that you might not have considered before.

 As the owner of Good Clean Love, it is a slippery slope between education and marketing, so with a risk of compromising my unbiased integrity, I offer the resource that is Good Clean Love for healthy, natural and organic solutions for a sustainable love life. All the products mentioned in the review are available at our website www.goodcleanlove.com. Check out our new Secret Santa program where we will ship products anonymously or with a gift card anywhere in the world.

Bring the Heat Back Home

 

 

I have been fascinated by sex workers since I learned that the most ostracizing act that prostitutes can commit is finding pleasure in the act. The world of sex workers is a huge underground mega structure that encompasses millions of lives. It makes more money than the entire 10 largest technology companies combined, (think Microsoft, Google, and Amazon.) On the internet alone, sex work and related sales and content occupies at least 12% of all internet traffic. Every second 28,000 people are viewing adult content. A new pornographic video is being released every 39 minutes. The pornographic industry earns over $97 Billion dollars per year world wide, with the US reporting close to $14 Billion.(check out more statistics).

 

If this hidden economy is not mind boggling enough, consider how many women make their living in sex related industries. Between street prostitution, strip clubs, phone sex, legalized brothels, high priced call girls, pornography players and models, sex clubs, sex parties, and internet sex workers, we are supporting millions of lives with our collective consumption of sex. If this proves only one thing, it is that we, as humans are driven by our sexuality and that many of us are driven to this underground megalopolis to have our sexual needs met.

 

The stories of sex workers is as far reaching and varied as the population of people who make their livelihood, selling their bodies for sex. Call me naïve, but I could never have guessed that a woman’s husband or mother-in-law would place her into a brothel and act as her pimp. I would never have imagined that young, wealthy Ivy League graduates would pass up jobs in their chosen fields for the “power and excitement” of high end tricks.

On Second Life, a computer game of avatars where people buy and sell things as though they are real, sexual favors sell for anywhere between $2- $20 real cash. With six million players in that game alone, it has altered the concept of fidelity. “I think people who have online sex don't see it as cheating. It's morally okay, a pocket they can put those desires into where they won't threaten their real-life relationship." Even if it costs $20 bucks. 

 

The sex workers of all these levels reflected on their work as a customer service profession. They feel responsible for the people who come to them, and often bad for them too. They believe that the people who come looking for sex with them have nowhere else to go. One of the $3000/hour girls reflected on how she was being screwed in this man’s penthouse apartment with a photo of his blond wife and two small children looking on. Sex workers are perhaps the most skilled customer service professionals in the world, many boasting the ability to fake orgasm and bring any man to climax.

 

I have met many men probably just before they go on to their internet trysts or whatever sexual compensation they can justify in the context of their relationships that are desperate for their women to make love to them. “What can I do? “ they implore me, looking at my wares and wondering if there is some secret magic bullet up on my shelf that will bring them the physical connection they crave. I have heard this same lament from women. While I do have some good products that can help recharge the libido and wake up the arousal mechanism, they will do nothing without the will to succeed at physically loving.

 

Without question sex work is probably the single largest paid profession for women worldwide. Although hard to track, in this country alone, sex work has probably impacted close to one in ten of us. A recent modern love column, gives an insight into what it is that drives this industry. The author laments that there is not much to like in sex. That its fascination quickly falls to boredom and that really there are much more interesting things to do. I feel for her husband, but even more for her, because to not have any deep connection to our sexual nature and this mysterious bond that continually transforms relationships is a loss beyond measure.

 

My twelve year old asked me, “Do you think she really doesn’t like it, or is she just afraid of it?” By her admission, I think it is fear. “Except one time, on a May night, through the open window, warm liquid breezes poured over our naked bodies, and then he touched me just so and I tipped into the orgasm and was grasped. This was different from whatever I’d achieved on my own. This was softer, gentler, full of a wide-open love, a deep falling-down love. When it was over, I hated him. I hated that man (that boy, really). The intimacy was too much, too wrenching and shameful.” Fear of intimacy is what makes sex work the viable industry that it is. It is easier to buy the energetic release that comes from nameless un-attached sex than to give ourselves over to the depths of being seen and known in our most vulnerable, animal state.

 

My fascination with sex work has had some unforeseen benefits, it has helped me turn up the heat in my own relationship. Granted, this might not be as challenging for me as for women who are not interested in sex, but fantasizing about the millions of ways that women earn their living with their sexuality has surprisingly fueled my own ability to access desire and willingness to act from this primary relationship between us. Of course my marriage’s multi layered responsibilities, history and common ruts invade our sexual relationship. Yet, owning a small part of the sexual worker in each of us might just satisfy our relationship in ways that nothing purchased will.

 

All In It Together

“I no longer expect things to make sense.  I know there is no safety.  But that does not mean there is no magic.  It does not mean there is no hope.  It simply means that each of us has reason to be wishful and frightened, aspiring and flawed.  And it means that, to the degree we are lost, it is on the same ocean, in the same night.”  Elizabeth Kaye

It is the holidays, the time of year when we are once again asked to recognize how we are all in this together.   How truly, we are all adrift in the same big ocean of life and under the same dark sky.   We are more similar than we are different as human beings, and yet our lives are nothing if not a testimony to the long list of our differences and how incredibly challenging it is to tolerate other people’s weaknesses and flaws. 

Finding the love and patience to sustain our relationships is the magic in life.    A recent study of thousands of couples sited the most frequent cause of breakups and divorces were rarely about big issues, but rather the build up of small gestures or lack of them. Certainly a look back through our collective human history is nothing if not a testimony to how incredibly flawed we all are- and how little things can turn bad and ugly on a big scale.

Especially at the holidays we see how even within our own families, our similarities and genetic ties are challenging to grasp.  Hanging around our extended family, perhaps even more acutely than with our partners and children,  demands we learn and re-learn how we are related. It takes separating the essential loveliness of the people around us from all the irritating traits that fill the din. 

Overwhelming our sense of connection are the small things- how people chew too loudly, or talk over other people, or drip food from the corner of their mouth, or talk while they are chewing…the perfumes we wear or antiperspirant that we don’t,  or the crazy things we offer as gifts that get taken the wrong way,  the hurtful “jokes”  that pass as conversation at the dinner table.  In my house these lists are infinite and trivial and weighty.  Learning to sustain our relationships and choosing to stay happens in all the small moments of the everyday mess of life. 

I write this at a time when I am struck by just how often and how hard I have to work at loving people and accepting them as they are so annoying.   This is coupled with  a continuous chorus of people I know who can’t quite commit to their relationships, the old one foot out the door syndrome, because living with them is so excruciatingly trying.   We all want our own space, and order to prevail as we would have it, but rarely is that the nature of living with other humans.  It all comes down to admitting just how difficult the whole business of love is and realizing that I am just as annoying as the people who annoy me.  These issues surfaced frequently in the early years of creating a family and the most important takeaway lesson of our years in marriage counseling was this one- that if you can hold what is deeply loveable about someone in one hand while holding what is most annoying about them in the other- side by side;  balance, patience and choosing to forgive and love in spite of the difficulty is possible. 

Taking that lesson to the world at large is at the heart of the holiday season.  Yet in some ways it is even more challenging because strangers by definition are well, strange, (at least to us), and so holding what is loveable about them with what is flawed about them can sometimes be hard to imagine.  Among strangers we face a different list which separates us- how people dress, or smell, ignore us, talk over us or interrupt (one of my big weaknesses as a stranger) and here again the list can be lengthy.  Yet, the results are universal – all of the human flaws that make it easy to make these unknown people “other” than us, taken to the extreme, are at the heart of many of our serious social ills.

In the holiday giving spirit, let’s go forward admitting how annoying and flawed we all are, so that we aren’t surprised that living together is so challenging.  Embrace the time we have with people we love and go in knowing we choose to get over it, so that we can experience the brief yet life changing moments of holding on to what we all want the most- each other. 

Happy Holidays!

The Edge of Forgiveness

To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover the prisoner was you.—Unknown

Forgiveness is giving up the possibility of a better past. It is the path of redemption where life can move forward from the present moment, where the past fades with memory and we have the internal space to accept the daily imperfections of life with those we love as they are. It is a true forgetting, this forgiveness that frees the victim as deeply as the perpetrator. The relationship is new, starting fresh, without the burden of selective memory. This is not a path that we command; it is one that we serve.

Forgiveness does not come easily and for many it is an unknown emotional story. It requires patience and is rarely a hasty proposition. It cannot be forced but it is a way of thinking that has to be chosen. The most arduous and sometimes insurmountable part of forgiving is that one must fully feel the injury and acknowledge it before anything can be forgiven. This is why so many families never heal; the children don’t have the language and emotional maturity to express themselves. The parents, often suffering with their own unresolved childhood pains, have little insight into the damage they have done. As a parent myself now, I often and painfully bear witness to the enormity of the task and even with my best intentions I fall short. Some days there are too many unmet needs and not enough resources and it is impossible to not inflict some harm on the way to raising another human being.

I have been working toward forgiveness, which has been called the final form of love for much of my adult life with my original family. I knew it was a real and promised place from the forgiveness that had transformed my marriage but still on every family reunion it has eluded me and inevitably something in me would crack, destroying the tentative approach we were all making. I haven’t had the heart to love the most broken places in me that are so loudly mirrored in these interaction.

Each meeting becomes more poignant and urgent as all the participants age and each time together has the potential for being the last. I long for the freedom to open my heart in these moments but mostly am faced with all of my worst and ugliest character traits that are mirrored and louder in the previous generation. As I witness the source of all my most unwanted behaviors; the ones that stick to me regardless of how much or for how long I push away the relationships they came through, I understand finally that all of this brokenness is not about them anymore, my brokenness is mine alone.

Still the crass and unforgiving language, the negative spin on whatever is happening, the fear of lack which precludes any real giving- these traits that I know intimately bring up a deep revulsion in me. My children see me wince at his casual disregard for one of my own children which is at once so blatant and so comfortable for him that he is not even aware of it. They hear the tension in my voice when I try calmly to instruct him on the etiquette of sharing a meal with a family, of something so basic as limiting your portion so there is enough for everyone. They hold their breath wondering if this will be the trigger that leads to the explosion that generally accompanies our rare family reunions. My twelve year old son slides in next to me and gives me his knowing smile at yet another oblivious blunder. My eldest daughter cues me to breathe.

Then there is the glimmer of goodness as my father teaches my son about the stock exchange, a piece of my own education that has stayed with me for decades coming through direct to my kids. He starts recounting stories from his own broken childhood that I remembered fragments of, but now I get the missing details, the names and places that made him who he is. Tenderness catches me off guard around my father; it has rarely been safe to have my heart unprotected near him. I sit, waiting to serve forgiveness, to have the chance to be free of the years of not good enough that I have lived out far from his sight.

There have been no explosions on this reunion and it is thanks to my own family that I can inch closer to the edge of forgiveness. My eldest son, who knows me well and is unaffected by my father’s offenses told me the other day that he thought “it was refreshing to hang around grandpa.” In response to my incredulous face he offers “He has no idea how he affects anyone else, it’s funny.” I can see his point, but stubbornly remain attached to the small girl that I was at the receiving end of his lack. My son acknowledges how that would have sucked to be the kid and something softens in me.

This is perhaps how forgiveness happens; a few strands of a thick cord tying you to your wrongs are worn away through the courageous process of feeling and acknowledging until you can see that the injury holding you has less to offer you than the freedom of carrying your brokenness tenderly on and away. It is a real beginning for the New Year.

 

Forgiveness - The Action Verb

Love is an act of endless forgiveness.
-- Peter Ustinov

If love is a verb, than forgiveness is the action verb. It is the highest form of love and the single behavior that most distinguishes our human potential. In an ancient tale from the Kaballah, God told some angels in training that the capacity to forgive is the most excellent gift in the human experience, more essential to the continuity of life than the courage to sacrifice your own life for someone else or enduring the pain of giving life. God explained to the angel “Forgiveness is the only reason my creation continues. Without forgiveness, all would disappear in an instantaneous flash.”

Certainly some might suspect this true with a quick glance to the Middle East. What would it look like if the rule of power and force was replaced with a mandate for the strength and courage of forgiveness? The comment by Desmond Tutu that "Forgiveness and reconciliation are not just ethereal, spiritual, other-worldly activities. They have to do with the real world. They are realpolitik, because in a very real sense, without forgiveness, there is no future” speaks volumes about the state of things.

And yet we don’t have to look that far, for most of us, right in our own homes we struggle with hurts, real and imagined that separate us from the ones we say we love. The smallest of details in sharing a life with someone can easily and often with out notice turn into a story line about the person you love. For years, my disregard of my husband’s need for order and cleanliness and in turn his disgust at my laissez faire approach to house cleaning came to mean everything. We weren’t talking about behaviors where we dramatically differed, instead each housekeeping incident was a personal insult that with just a small push inflamed to fury about the other weak points in our relationship.

Before Christ was born, Marcus Aurelius said “our anger and annoyance are more detrimental to us than the things themselves which anger or annoy us.” The petty arguments of life are the cracks in the foundation of the relationships we are building and left unresolved often fall into the established patterns of retreat and attack which impact both partner’s ability to be emotional available and vulnerable. It is not that big a stretch to see how these behaviors adapt into the extremely common, no-win situation of the sexual initiation complex. The questions of who asks and who says no are salt in the wound and all the small disagreements come to mean everything about being both loveable and loving.

And what of all the broken hearts in the Middle East? Anyone you would ask on any street on either side, would tell you that they want the shooting, the bombing, the killing to end, and yet probably each and every one would also tell you why it must continue… for the cousin, the brother, the lover, the parent or the child who was maimed, killed, forever injured. Every person living in that region has a story to be forgiven and a heart so heavy with grief that the courage to open to the pain and loss is often more than they can bear.

I have only experienced the deep life changing balm of forgiveness in my life one time. Right at the moment when my marriage hung on the precipice of its end, we decided instead to forgive. I can’t say who initiated it or even exactly how it happened, all I can say of that moment is that I couldn’t remember any longer what it was to not be wanted, that all the years of fighting over who we weren’t for each other evaporated and what was left was a space to love someone for who they were. My intimate life, very much at the core of my marriage reinvigorated itself with a curiosity and genuine interest that had always cowered behind our relentless arguments. I was blessed and have since that time tried to understand just how that could have happened and how I can do it again.

I think that forgiveness is an act of the imagination. It embraces the child’s heart which is always ready to risk for a better moment and give up the hurt of the last one. Forgiveness is an innocent place where your hurt and pain does not have the final word. Yet there is little wisdom or strength that has more power to transform the world than the courage to bear witness to your pain and let go of it.

Sexual Forgiveness

“Love is an act of endless forgiveness, a tender look which becomes a habit.”
Peter Ustinov

Sexual healing is only possible through forgiveness. The injuries and betrayals that we sustain as we negotiate this most mysterious human interaction of sexuality are as diverse as life itself. How these injuries imbed in our identities defines our sexual relationships, sometimes for life. While this is also true for other emotional injuries we sustain, the pain associated with sexual encounters is deeper by definition and encodes itself on us viscerally. Because sexual education is almost non-existent and sexual topics mostly taboo, most of us have very limited language to express our sexual experiences, good and bad.

The hidden scars and unhealed injuries from our intimate past often don’t even show themselves until a new lover has breached a body memory that we didn’t even know we had. The transformation of grief that occurs when a hidden injury is met with the light of expression and the warmth of a loving ear is life changing. The courage to expose events and self deprecating thoughts that attach to sexual betrayals of all kinds is both heart wrenching and heart opening. Deeply loving someone through this process can feel almost as hard for the partner. The feelings of powerlessness and empathy that sharing sexual injuries provokes can be almost equally intense. Yet, like all storms, after the raging emotions are vented, there is a calm space of refuge. Something is made new in the process. The emptying leaves room to begin again.

There are times when talking about it provides nothing. The words are all inadequate to the experience and it is actually only through the tenderness of touch that injuries can be felt and released. This is human alchemy, impossible to describe even after you have experienced it and even more impossible to instruct someone else in finding this path. The ancient quote by roman emperor, Marcus Aurelius “The sexual embrace can only be compared with music and with prayer,” provides a hint into this process. Among its profound mystery is the power of intimacy to heal and often it is enough to move forward with the right intention and an open heart.

These are the most fragile and tender of exchanges that we humans are capable of sharing and so it is easy even with the best of intentions to hold too strongly, to let go too soon, to not feel the other person’s response in a timely and sensitive way. To err is human and oh, how human we are. Yet to forgive in this process is divine and the only way to stay together. Feel the pain with someone who loves you, even imperfectly because that is the only way to feel the love. One of my all time favorite singers and heartthrobs, Bono of U2 sings “Of science and the human heart, there is no limit. There is no failure here sweetheart, just when you quit….”

We are not trained well in love or sex or forgiveness and they are the trinity of a life well lived. Each impossible to understand or live without the others. Here is to a truly new year of release and rebirth.

Growing an Organic Orgasm

Most often, the term organic applies to our food. Sometimes it is there to certify fabrics or product ingredients. Rarely is it applied to our sexual appetite. To be called organic, the food must be produced without any chemicals to induce or sustain its growth. The process relies on old fashioned techniques of good soil, clean air and decent weather. Small local farmers making food the old fashioned way is in vogue now because the chemical driven industry farms that go so far as to change the genetic make-up of food itself is all too sci-fi. And who wants to eat science fiction food anyway, even if it is cheaper. The more we know about the synthetic and petro-chemical process of producing food, the more we want the real stuff, the food that comes from nature and we willingly pay more for it.

Meeting the needs of the human sexual appetite is also a multi-billion dollar industry. Not unlike the chemical companies vast holdings of genetically altered rows of corn, stand the millions upon millions of cheap porn DVDs, all clipped and re-clipped from the standard sets of bio-engineered overlarge breasts, tummy tucked women and engorged male sexual organs. This crop of sexuality is available anytime, day or night, on almost any form of digital transmitter from the TV to the computer to the smart phone. The adult industry that promotes it makes more money than every big technology company you can think – combined. Yet in spite of the enormous spending on the virtual orgasms that are readily available, I still believe that most of us would pay more for real, organic sex, the kind that you can feel change you from the inside out. This rare breed of intimacy is the one we sing about and write movie scripts for, it is the kind of sex that grows out of a relationship where you are as deeply connected in life as in the bedroom.

Growing intimate relationships that have the potential for organic orgasms to ripen also requires a healthy ecosystem. In this ecosystem, I often use the metaphor of fire to describe the passion and intensity of physical intimacy. It is nature’s energetic equivalent to our sexuality. Fire is the energy of life, providing light, heat and the ability to transform the physical world. Fire in intimacy is the force of attraction that keeps relationships dynamic and whole.

The foundation or ground of your relationship is in your thoughts. Any accomplished gardener will tell you that the abundance (or lack of) their crop comes from the quality of their soil. So it is, in the relationship. Couples, who add healthy thoughts to the mix compost the garbage with care and pull out the stubborn rag weed, will have more success in every aspect of their relationship, including organic orgasms. Consider the soil you are building your relationship with and whether you are trying to build a fire on barren land.

Without light and air, the best soil in the world will be unproductive. The air in relationships rests in the communications that feed it. The quality and frequency of your conversations and ability to self disclose is the air that fuels your fire. Sexual self disclosure is most challenging of all. Creating a language and building the trust to describe what kinds of touch are pleasurable and/or painful is one of the most transformative conversations that a couple can invest in. Sharing stories of sexual history and exploring sexual anatomy together will not only provide real access to shared organic orgasms but will enhance the safety of the whole relationship.

Without water, even under the best conditions, nothing can grow. I use the metaphor of water in relationships to describe the ebb and flow of time and presence that a couple shares. Togetherness means different things to different people, and not having a shared definition, can make the relationship both unsafe and unsatisfying for both people. This fact is essential in building a fire, because where there is no safety, people can get burned.

Doing the daily work of tending the ecosystem of your relationship will pay dividends in cultivating the organic orgasms that come out of loving relationships. Cultivate a rich and complex soil that allows you to think about and evolve your sexuality. Test the limits of your communication abilities to express both the fantasies and fears that may live silently in your relationship. Make regular dates for physical intimacy and show up for each other like it is the most important thing on your schedule.

Discovering pleasure together is like pouring cement into a foundation. Physical touch that leads to ecstatic release not only releases hormones and endorphins that promote health and longevity, but also serve as the basis of biological bonding. Knowing that you have the ability to reach someone in this most intimate of ways is one of the most significant sources of self esteem that relationships afford. There is a strange coincidence between the percentages of people who don’t orgasm and the percentage of people who divorce. While, sharing orgasm is not enough to keep a relationship alive, the inability to move towards it, is enough to kill it. There is no other single work in life that will repay you so profoundly each and every time you share it.

 

Vol. 81 Love Drills

Love takes practice. Love is an action verb that is skill based; our capacity to love is the source of our genius, the inspiration for our creativity, and the essence of what roots us to the earth. Seeing our relationships in terms of a practice of love drills is a helpful approach that can keep your heart open and willing to try again, even after the inevitable hurts that define human relating. Rilke said that “the ultimate, the last test and proof of our humanity, the work for which all other work is but preparation, is for one human being to love another.” So in preparation for Valentine’s Day, commit to the truth that you were born to love and know that you have the capacity to love more skillfully, more courageously and with more tenacity than you ever imagined.

 

Drill 1 “To be loved, be loveable.” Ovid

 

The first skill in loving is to believe in your love-ability and then act in accordance. Kindness, generosity and all that is good in us comes from this place of feeling loveable. Sometimes just by adopting loveable behaviors, we increase our own perception of our own love-ability. Getting to our own love-ability can be a challenge for those of us who are filled with weighty old tapes that we are not worthy of our own love. Most of us have known a time when these kinds of messages hung over our heart like an axe poised to fall. Turning away from these old messages in ourselves is a contagious practice which benefits wider and wider circles of people. Like any practice, the more you look for what is good, the better you get at seeing it. Identifying the positive repetitively normalizes it.

 

Drill 2 “The greatest science in the world; in heaven and on earth; is love.”

Mother Theresa

 

Approach the loving relationships in your life as a cherished science experiment. Think of the universal requirements for success in any loving relationship and objectively evaluate how these are reflected in your own relationships. Is there enough communication shared to feel heard and hear your partner’s feelings? Are you having mostly positive thoughts about the intimacy and process in your relationship? Do you show up for the important, sad and celebratory moments of each other’s lives? These questions are most effective as guide posts. If you know where you want your relationship to go, then answering these questions with intention and action in each hour of our days is the active science of loving. It is a work in progress.

 

Drill 3 “Can there be a love which does not make demands on its object?”

Confucius

 

People die over broken hearts every day. Last week a beautiful young local girl killed herself over it. Suicide is not the only way that we die from a broken heart. There are many more slow, silent deaths around us as we refuse to love anyone again in a committed way for fear that we will be hurt. Someday there will be some scientific test that can measure the scar tissue in the heart. Just like every other muscle in our body, tears in our muscles repair, but not always in an orderly way. This explains why many of us live with a variety of body aches that transform over time, but never really go away. Living in our body demands that we work with our tightness and re-build our strength. Dealing with the pain of broken heartedness, which is pretty much guaranteed in loving humans, is no different. Really feeling the sadness and loneliness of where love doesn’t work can also live in us as deep appreciation for the people we practice loving.

 

Drill 4 ”The day will come when, after harnessing the winds, the tides and gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of Love. And on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.” Teilhard de Chardin

 

Here is a prophecy that feels optimistic. With our new mandate from the government on renewable energy sources, we may soon be charging our lives on the power of wind, sun and water. So maybe the time has come where we will harness the energy of love for what it is, our access to a fire that can warm us from the inside. Commit to building an ecology of love in your relationship that nurtures the fire of sustainable love. Choose the thoughts that ground you to your love. Communicate and self disclose what is most difficult to say and feed the fire with the truth of who you are. Show up in the small details as well as the important celebrations of living with someone, so that there is always a flow of time and energy between you. Bask in the rare, mysterious alchemy of making love to someone who loves all of you. This is a fire that can and does change the world.

Vol. 82 The Exchange of Self

The supreme happiness in life is the conviction that we are loved – loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves. Victor Hugo

Holidays magnify the best and the worst of our relationships. There may be no holiday that reflects this more brilliantly than Valentine’s Day. I spent many years in my 25 year marriage waiting for just the right gift, or the right words on the right card to show me how much my husband appreciated and loved me - I believed then that single moments or holidays done right could heal the long standing differences between us. The years that worked the best were the ones where we were already on solid and intimate ground. The years when we were estranged or exhausted, Valentine’s Day served only to illuminate our distance. The good ones and the bad ones have both taught me about reasonable expectations in relationships and for Valentine’s Day.

Collectively we are heavily invested in this holiday of love. Worldwide spending is over $28 billion and here in the US sales are expected to top $13 billion. That is a lot of love to be celebrating, given that so many of us are broke and afraid for how long it will take to prop up our ailing economy. This is a testimony to the fact that our need for love, both giving and receiving it, is as basic a need as our needs for food and water. Humans thrive on love, our existence without meaningful relationships is a shadow of what we were put on earth to do.

The origins of the holiday have something to teach us about what the holiday is for. Our day of love, originated from early pagan fertility rites that were adopted by the Christian church, St Valentine was thought to be a 3^rd century Roman priest who married young lovers in defiance of the law. Locked up for his misdeeds, he fell for the jailer’s blind daughter, sending her notes “from your Valentine.” One story says that his love for her restored her sight. The day was named to commemorate his memory.

We all need a saint of love to open our eyes to what really matters in our lives and to show us that the imperfect nature of loving each other is enough. If St Valentine can bring you anything that will not wilt or shatter with time, it is this- that loving people is not a whimsy and although the early stages of deep lust and infatuation is the best love drug on earth, it is not love itself. The real love that St Valentines went to prison to promote is the kind where people promise a lifetime of support, a ready ear and a willing heart, day after day. Real love is not for the faint of heart or for those who think that a bunch of roses will make up for months of not showing up in the trenches.

The fertility rituals the Christian church has been trying to purify since 478AD is also at the heart of this holiday. Physical intimate love is the most mysterious and life changing experiences available to us mortals. Sharing deep and passionate love with someone that you also negotiate daily chores with is a miracle and wonder that goes beyond our capacity to language. Frequently I am overwhelmed with the divergent women who live in me, as the sexy one, though sometimes hard to find, amazes me with her ability for imagination and risk taking. Without any overt exhibitionism I know I would be happier if I could get the responsible me to let go like the sexy me a little more often.

Whether or not you plan to boost our economy and your relationships with gifts and flowers this year, celebrate your love this year by bringing St Valentine’s wisdom of eye opening love into every day. Decide what you need love to be in your life and give that to the people that make your life meaningful. Life is made precious by the exchange of ourselves, not our stuff. Give the real thing and be surprised by what comes back to you. May your heart be pierced and opened wide.

Vol. 83 Tender and Brief

It seems incredulous to me that I am grieving a goldfish. My past experiences of gold fish were always short lived and I warned my young daughter that her new fish probably wouldn’t last a week. But as week after week and month after month went by, she loved to tease me about Bubble’s longevity. A year into his tenure on the kitchen counter, we gave him some little frog friends, who he never took to and who didn’t nearly match his longevity. Watching him circle his little world, I often contemplated life in a fishbowl, but as he would always come to the side of the bowl I was standing near with his fish pouting looks, I often wondered who was watching who. Bubbles’ life was a long one in fish time; I was informed by pet store experts as I searched for a cure to his life ending illness. It was his time.

Animal friends live on a different time line than we humans. They teach us about the pureness of presence and their love for us is immediate and unconditional. We need them at least as much as they need us and not just for their companionship, but for the chance they give us, in their brief intervals on earth to let go. Their departures whether premature or timely given their size and breed are some of the most gut wrenching good byes that we have the opportunity to grieve. It is easy to love animals; they see the best in us and are devoted in their distinct and primitive ways. If you are lucky, you get to keep your own animal heaven in your heart which can call forth smiles and tears easily.

Losing loved ones, animal or human, is there to remind us how tender and brief our time to love is. Grasping the permanence of death, even with our pets can catch you off guard.

Years after my first big yellow dog passed away, I would still sometimes mistake another dog for her in the distance at the dog park. This has proven even truer for a dear friend who died last summer. I get that he is gone and yet still miss his lascivious joking and surprising costumes at every gathering we have. I was talking about how hard it is to wrap my head around the forever quality of death with his wife last week while sharing the beauty and tragedy of the funeral of a dear friend of hers. She said “I can’t think about the enormity of the whole future. I can only think, today he is not with me.”

I flew into New York City yesterday to spread the word of love (products) to a conference of Integrative Health professionals. I walked in on a break up of sorts while ordering a pita sandwich for lunch. The girl taking my order was trying to hang up and yet not wanting to, saying “there is nothing to talk about.” When actually there was everything to talk about, which she did with her co-worker upon hanging up the phone.

Not long after, her young man walked in with his heart on his sleeve. I know this because it was also hanging out there for the whole place to witness in a balloon that said I love you attached to a bouquet of flowers. She would not look at him as he waited and finally spoke to a regular customer standing there and her co-worker.

It is too hard in such a big city with so many millions of people wandering around to say nothing when you see people miss the love that is right in front of them. So when I went up to get a glass of water I also gave her my love counsel credentials. I told her this- “Think about what you are fighting for. - is it actually getting you closer to the love you want in your life.” Human love is as imperfect as each of us but deserves all the chances our heart can bear to give it because it is so very brief and tender. Whatever else may be non-functional about that boy, a heart that is courageous enough to show itself at a lunch time rush on a busy city street is worthy of its efforts. Heart break is supposed to teach us to love more while we can.

 

Vol. 84 Love is a Direction

“It is only necessary to know that love is a direction and not a state of the soul. If one is unaware of this, one falls to despair at the first onslaught of affliction.”

~ Simone Weil

Something snapped in me tonight. I didn’t see it coming, although the fog of exhaustion and the kink in my low back should have warned me. I should have gotten take-out and left the laundry in the washing machine, and lay down; but instead, I moved through the daily list of chores, attending to the pets, the kids, and the house before myself. Then like a tornado spinning up from nowhere, I was screaming and all of the grievances that I usually keep neatly filed for discussion at some later date flew out of my mouth with a force and fury that shocked even me. So much for a nice family dinner… The tenuous peaceable bridge to my teenage son, who often simultaneously wants everything from me and nothing to do with me, is hanging by a thread again.

Perhaps I can blame this breakdown on my simultaneous raging and disappearing hormones. According to a multiple of accounts, I am not alone with unprecedented exhaustion, flaring tempers and an inability to focus. But even if there is a sound biological reason and legitimate bad chemistry for my mini -break downs, the fissures in my relationships that go with them are mine to mend. Claiming brokenness does not get you off the hook because somewhere we are all broken.

Knowing that love is a direction and not a state of the soul is the only ground I have to stand on, especially when I am overcome with a biology that is reinventing itself. My feelings of being done are as real as my commitments to love my family and they wrestle in me, continuously seeking balance or at least solace. I don’t really want to give up on the promises that I made earlier when I was flush with regular hormones and seemingly endless energy, I want to learn how to keep the promises without losing myself.

A dear friend once told me that “your boundaries are how you love yourself.” This is uncharted territory for me and millions of women who grew up learning who we are by who we love and how well we are loved. My new biochemical mix forces me to find what is mine alone and honor it. For many people, this time ushers in the end of many old relationships and promises.

I don’t want to believe that relationships have an expiration date, although I have heard the concept more than once of late. Culturally, I am in a minority here and not infrequently have to defend my position that we don’t know what a relationship has to teach us if we don’t stick around through the painful, conflicted and difficult stretches. One friend recently told me that six weeks is long enough to know if someone is capable of loving. Our ensuing argument was a testimony to the different kinds of pain that we each choose for ourselves. I am not convinced one is better than another in the painful parts, but I keep choosing how to learn to stay. Each time the connection that grows in my relationships only deepen. I need to have someone on my side in life even if I can’t feel it each and every day. Coming back to relationships, even when you don’t want to, is the art of sustainable love which requires great humility and courage. T.S. Eliot once said “For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.” We cannot guarantee our results in life; we can only step forward with love as our direction and hope it is enough to get through the afflictions that come from being human together.

The Stimulus of Intimacy

“I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to maintain one’s self on the earth is not a hardship but a pastime- if we live simply and wisely.” Henry David Thoreau

 

Franklin D. Roosevelt is most famous for his statement “there is nothing to fear but fear itself.” He uttered these words in a scratchy radio broadcast to a terrified nation when, like now, all of the systems we had come to rely on were failing. Anxiety is the new norm in most homes today, as bad news seems to only get worse. The foundations of life have cracked for millions and our young government is taking decisive action to shore up the economic disaster, to stabilize people’s living situations and create work opportunities. It is the new, New Deal. Stimulus plans of this magnitude are incentives, designed to incite us to action. They will not work if we all sit back and expect them to cause a response of their own accord.

 

The need for a stimulus plan in our lives is not just national, it is personal. It is in our individual lives where we must begin to reinvent ways of consuming, learning and loving that are sustainable. In times of fear and anxiety, we must harness our human instinct of fight/flight to our advantage. The statistics of wellbeing and happiness in the context of thriving families carries even more weight during difficult societal crises.

Often this is precisely when many relationships fail. Our fight response, which should galvanize us to search for better living conditions or new employment, can turn inward toward the people who are there to love you. Blame is the least helpful of all responses. The thought which works to keep me authentic and honest in my relationships during these stressful times is this one: In the last moments of my life, I know the only thing that will have any meaning and that will fill my mind and heart is the people I loved and those who loved me in return. It always helps me remember what matters most in my life.

 

Another more reliable measure of your economic wellbeing is right in your bedroom. Good sex is worth more than money. There is no other activity with such great impact on your physical, mental and emotional well being available to you during hard economic times. The Money, Sex, and Happiness: An Empirical Study, performed by two economists at Dartmouth and the University of Warwick, analyzed data on the self-reported levels of sexual activity and happiness of 16,000 people. The report concluded that sex "enters so strongly (and) positively in happiness equations" that they estimate increasing intercourse from once a month to once a week is equivalent to the amount of happiness generated by getting an additional $50,000 in income for the average American.

 

In fact, the economists calculate that a lasting marriage equates to happiness generated by getting an extra $100,000 each year. Divorce, meanwhile, translates to a happiness depletion of $66,000 annually. People who consider themselves happy are usually richer in sexual activity. So you see there are many ways to count your wealth and given that the old standard of stocks and bonds is so shaky. Using the real metrics of love and intimacy, which is what we are here to accumulate anyway, makes good economic sense in these troubled times and will provide the basis for a stimulus plan that can last.

 

Vol. 86 Third Dimensional Stimulus

"Stimulus is the missing third dimension in all theories of motivation."

David Freemantle

With all the discussion of economic crisis going on today, there is little recognition of the even deeper poverty of heart which like a creeping malaise impacts the very core of our wellbeing, our life and the meaning we derive from it. Recent studies by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago found that over the last twenty years over one in four of us have no one with which to discuss important life issues or to confide in compared to only 7% in 1985. Loneliness doesn’t get much air time because it is still so stigmatized. Many people cannot discern loneliness from depression or anxiety and feel like describing themselves in this context describes them as social outcast or worse.

Actually loneliness has more in common with the physiological human functions of hunger, thirst and pain. The impulse for social connection, which is built in to our neural wiring, is rooted in the basic urge to survive. We are not wired to live alone, researchers say. “The need to deal with other people is so great, says Cacioppo, author of Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection that, in large part, made us who and what we are today." Most neuroscientists agree, he said, that it was the need to process social cues that led to the expansion of the cortical mantle of the brain. And yet loneliness grows in the midst of more social connecting devices than we may have ever imagined twenty years ago. This is in large part due to the confusion we all share about what constitutes real relationships. The “friends” and “connections” that we may be adding up online often serve to only distract us from the few real friendships and intimate connections that fill our real 3D time. It is easy to see how this happens, our busyness and the ease with which we conduct those two dimensional relationships favors them.

Real relationships are three dimensional. They use all of our senses and exist in real time. Not unlike the difference of playing basketball on a screen, or getting out and using your whole body. The real game is intensive and can be demanding. We are wired to play and relate with our whole being. The relationships that share your kitchen, your bedroom and your heart are the ones that make your life whole and full. Yet they also often require us to give of ourselves in ways that make us stretch and grow. Friendships and intimates often demand us to give up the need to be right and give in to the need to be related to the people we love. The give and take of keeping things real is the work of love and the satisfaction of being right is not nearly what it is cracked up to be. The number of relationships that have and continue to be sacrificed to our idea of how others should behave is both tragic and shredding the social fabric of our time.

The same three dimensional comparisons could be drawn about our sexuality. The numbers of people who pay for two dimensional sexual contact is staggering. Virtual sexuality carries none of the physical benefits of the act in 3D and often leaves you feeling lonelier than when you began. While the secrecy and clandestine fantasy that virtual sex affords might titillate, it will never heal. Demand the real thing in your intimate life and don’t give your life energy away to stimulate a screen.

If the economic crisis has any upside, it is that it might just make us more aware of the wealth of friends and loved ones that have gotten lost in the speed and intensity of life in the fast lane. Shifting our energy back to the heart of our life relationships has the power to re-invent how you spend your time and how you think about your life goals. Reach out to the people in your life that you may have only been texting and share a meal. Call and chat with an old friend that you haven’t spoken with. Re-focus your days with true 3D relationship time and enjoy a lasting stimulus in your life work.

Stimulus Understanding

 

“A man doesn’t learn to understand anything unless he loves it.”  Goethe

 

There is a guy banging his head against a brick wall. When asked why he is banging his head against the brick wall, he pauses and says because “it feels so good when I stop.”  It is a silly story of truth for millions. We continue to bang our heads against the same brick walls, partly because it feels good when we stop, but also because we don’t know how to do it differently.  More often than not, our response to life stimulus remains the same.  In order for any stimulus to really move us into a new place we have learn how to think in a new way and risk giving up the old brick wall.

 

In one of my favorite reads of late, Stumbling on Happiness, author Daniel Gilbert

gives a thorough understanding of the way we are fooled not just by our memory of what has happened but also by our imagination when we project what will happen in the future and how we will feel about it.  We humans don’t really learn from each other. Whether it is planning to have a child or starting a new business, we simply refuse to believe that other people’s experience will inform our own.  I remember distinctly the advice I got from another local small business owner when I was starting out and I was convinced at the time that my experience would be different.  Same for parenting; questions answered from more experienced parents just sounded jaded; little did I know how soon my own responses would resemble theirs.  

 

The reason that we can’t learn from other’s experience is because it is the experience itself which is the teacher. We retain less than 5% of what we are told, (lecturers take note), 10% of what we read, 30% of what we are shown, but what we teach we actually own.  This of course begs the question; what is the point of education – to learn or to teach?  As far as life lessons go, the answer is one and the same. Our education in life is at once student and teacher.  This too is the rub, for how do we expand our capacity to imagine and re-think our life and relationships in a new way, when our personal experience is not broad enough to help us out of where we are stuck?

 

Learning is a two step process- discovery and mastery. We all have innate capacity for both.  Keeping our capacity for discovery vital is one key to lifelong learning and the ability to make different choices with the same stimulus.  Children have a penchant for discovery: that is what their days are about.  Adults can lose sight of this part of the learning process as they strive for mastery in their life, which is the other half of learning.   Mastery is essential; it is where our experience teaches both ourselves and others.  It builds our sense of self and as adults defines our identity. But without the openness to discovery, mastery can turn into a short walk to a brick wall.  In relationships it often looks like how we leave.  Love demands that we continuously discover the other and our relationship over and over again.

 

President Obama was quoted recently on what keeps his relationship with his wife so vital.  “Sometimes when we’re lying together, I look at her and I feel dizzy with the realization that here is another distinct person from me, who has memories, origins, thoughts, feelings that are different from my own. That tension between familiarity and mystery meshes something strong between us. Even if one builds a life together based on trust, attentiveness and mutual support, I think that it is important that a partner continues to surprise.”  Recognizing the mystery that exists in every relationship is another way of defining a learning life.    

 

It is true that we don’t really understand anything until we love it, which is the continuous dance between discovery and mastery in the hours we spend at what matters most to us. 

 

 

 

 

 

Social Brain Stimulus

Communication leads to community, that is, to understanding, intimacy and mutual valuing.

Rollo May

We are wired to connect to each other. Daniel Goleman’s new book, Social Intelligence, has uncovered new research on social neuroscience has identified brain cells, termed mirror neurons, which actually link us, brain to brain in social interaction. The complex neural circuitry that activates in the brain in every social interaction from the smallest exchanges with a store clerk to the complex negotiations with our life partners not only helps you know what is happening in the interaction, but also cues you on how to respond to keep interactions civil and functional. This also explains why other people’s emotional life is as contagious as the common cold. Studies have shown that a single individual who is either happy or sad can change an entire group’s collective mood for better or worse in a matter of minutes. So it is not your imagination that you start feeling bad shortly after your partner or kid walks in shrouded in gloom. In my household of six, many of whom are growing adolescents, the mood factor is anything but stable. So while I might be wired with a social brain as part of my biological imperative, maintaining strong social connections is hard work and requires practice.

I think our relationship avoidant nature might have been one of the unstated impetuses for the Internet revolution. The digital communication devices that have come to dominate our social interactions don’t ask anything of our social brain, which explains why people will do and say things on their emails and text messages that they would never do in a face to face interaction. Parental concerns over the obsessive texting that dominates teenage life with kids continuously splitting their attention from the people they are with and the continuous inane conversations that are buzzing the phones is just the tip of the iceberg. Research suggests that the idea of becoming a “crackberry” is not just a psychological phenomenon. The continuous rush of dopamine during instant communications can actually create a physical addiction with the classic withdrawal symptoms.

Ironically, it is our need for social interaction that drives our obsession to connect digitally. Continuous messaging makes us feel good and important, even if most of the communications that are exchanged is just banter. Flirting has taken on new meaning for the younger generation where instead of a look, they get a text message. The devices that we believed would enhance our ability to communicate and connect actually interfere with the real relationships we crave. The ease of two dimensional, digital communications make it natural to prioritize them over our real relationships, because they don’t engage your social brain the way face to face encounters do. But the danger and risks of substituting digital relations for the real thing is deep and pervasive in our culture. The number of relationships that have been terminated by text message is a small marker for the lack of practice and skill building that the new millennial generation is cultivating in developing full relationships.

Sexuality too, is impacted by our new and growing dependence on digital communications. The new phenomenon of “sexting” where over 30% of more than 1200 young people reported sending nude photos is another manifestation of technological “connecting” without the wisdom of the social brain. The same girls, who would send their naked body over digital technology, would never consider stripping in front of the same eyes. Even more disturbing is the social brain asleep at the wheel, with a recent survey showing over 66% of 18-24-year-olds reported texting while driving, which is provoking many states to institute laws prohibiting cell phone use while driving.

Boundaries need to be drawn, distinguishing between the work of relating and the convenience of chatting or texting. We need to be vigilant to the human moment when we are right next to someone and create a virtual boundary around the machine in our hand. The skill of being present to the moment and the activities that develop our social brain functioning happen in the midst of attending to our primary relationships, face to face. Most of the messages that take us away from the people we love most are inconsequential and can wait.

Our relationships mold not just our experience, but our biology. The mirroring that happens in human interacting shapes us in ways as subtle as sharing humor and as profoundly as how our immune system activates in the continuous battle against bacteria and viruses. The social interaction we crave heals us. Now more than ever we need to teach and learn that the relationships that fill our real time, real life are the priority. They are the only means we have to learning that life is a social event, not a virtual one.

Masterpiece of Nature

"A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.”  Emerson

Our friends hold us to the earth. They show us the best of ourselves, forgive us our frailties and keep us awake to our dreams. Emerson once said that "A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.”  Not only does our own nature improve in the companionship of friendship, but we come to see the wonder and interconnectedness of nature more clearly in the embrace of the people who know us heart to heart. It is not surprising that building and maintaining friendships is one of the most important things you can do for your wellbeing.   Research also shows that those of us with friends live the longest.

"It is not so much our friends' help that helps us as the confident knowledge that they will help us."  Epicurus

Friends make us well. Whether dealing with depression or anxiety or even in going for a medical procedure, spending time with friends guarantees better results.  Although science doesn’t know exactly how friendships boost our immune response and reduce our negative emotional experience and degree of illness, it is possible that having friends, both near and far is the most profound insurance we can invest in. Just knowing that our true friends are there, even when separated by thousands of miles is enough to sustain us and make us stronger.

"True friendship is a plant of slow growth, and must undergo and withstand the shocks of adversity before it is entitled to the appellation."   George Washington

 And yet true friendship is a rare gift. Most of us are only blessed with just a handful of true and deep friendships in our life and the mystery and longevity of those connections become the folklore of each of our lives.  Our oldest friends watch us grow and change and often outlive many other relationships in our life. For many people friendships are like a second family that we get to choose to be related to. Going through hard times with our close friends actually roots us to the relationships in ways that just good time friends might not understand. But the laughter over the years with our dearest friends is probably one of the most healing aspects of friendship.  Our good friends get us, and they always get our jokes, sometime even before we do. Losing them is like losing a part of oneself.    

"My friends are my estate."   Emily Dickins

I know that I would be lost without my friends to anchor me to my life and what it means to me.  They are often the ones that I call on, when it stops making sense and yet I am often astonished at the weeks and sometimes months that go by since we have spoken.  I realize over and over again what I have been missing as I settle into the conversation that seems like it ended just minutes ago. I am not alone in the conundrum that many women share, where we defer our most important friendships to deal with the stress of work and family. Yet it is precisely at this time when we need lean in closer to our friends and realize that the rest of our life work rests on the estate of our heart. If you only do one good thing for the earth this month, make it for your friend: carve out the space to connect and love your true friends.