“Lack of activity destroys the good condition of every human being, while movement and methodical physical exercise save it and preserve it.” ~Plato

The best part of my day is when I exercise, and the truest thing you can say about the mystery we call a body is that it is designed to work at its optimal level in motion. Even when I am painfully facing my physical limits in my early morning Pilates workout, I thank my lucky stars to be feeling the pain of strengthening my muscles as opposed to feeling my strength wane. It took me a series of long unfortunate back injuries to finally face up to the fact that the only choice I had was to learn how to get strong.

At close to fifty, I am as physically strong as I have ever been. I tell near strangers to feel the abs and oblique muscles that I have so proudly built over the last few years. I never have back pain anymore. I am strong enough at my core to hold my body up pain- free all day. These are triumphs that little else compares to in my life.

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“Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under the trees on a summer’s day, listening to the murmur of water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time” -John Lubbock

I am changing gears at work and releasing much of the day-to-day responsibilities of the business that has defined my days for as long as I can remember.  I have hours at a time now when my mind is free from the multitude of details that constantly needed tending and the many complex relationships that required attention.  I am finding myself strangely unhurried and feeling the weight of the exhaustion that I have not had time to acknowledge.

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“My imperfections and failures are as much a blessing from God as my successes and my talents and I lay them both at his feet.” Mahatma Gandhi

The other day on a visit to our family doctor, I asked him to remove a couple of small warts that have popped up on my fingers. I don’t think anyone noticed them but me as they were very small. He obliged with a quick freezing treatment of liquid nitrogen and now I have a huge raised black blister that is so awful to look at, not to mention painful, that I have to keep it covered with a Band Aid.

It is easy to get stuck on our imperfections and focus so much energy on eradicating them that without knowing it, we often turn minor issues into problems. Consider the number of businesses that have been built on TV infomercials alone to correct our physical imperfections. As overwhelming as this is for our physical bodies, our preoccupation with our mental and emotional faults can come to dominate a life.

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“Lovely female shapes are terrible complicators of the difficulties and dangers of this earthly life, especially for their owners.”  ~George du Maurier

I was caught by a news headline that showed, in a recent Nutrisystem poll of one thousand people, approximately 50%  of  female participants say they would rather go without sex for the summer than gain 10 pounds. One quarter of the male respondents agreed. The poll was supported by recent European research with 12,000 participants.  This study found that obese women were 30% less likely to have a sexual partner than normal weight women. Interestingly, this did not hold up for obese men.

How we imagine other people see our bodies and how we perceive ourselves when we look in the mirror, or touch and smell ourselves, has a significant yet complex impact on how we think about ourselves sexually. Body image doesn’t just include our estimation or our shape and weight compared with the ideal cultural body type, it also often includes our feelings about specific body parts. Our feelings about our bodies are a learned response based on the messages and images of ideal beauty that our society and families value. Growing up comparing ourselves and being compared to a specific type of beauty is how our feelings about our bodies grow in us. Think about how different these beautiful body ideals have been across culture and time.

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“Don’t find fault, find a remedy.” -Henry Ford

My kids play sports and they get hurt. Sometimes injuries happen in the most unexpected ways that catch you off guard. Other times, it is in the heat of an intense play at the climax of a tournament. Injuries are the leveler in the playing field of life. They are the place where achievement and humanity meet to remind us of our cellular structure and the truth that even in our greatest strength we are also and always vulnerable.

Today was another moment in the long chain of  that discovery when the wrong turn during an untimely leap landing too hard on a single thumb joint. We don’t know the net result yet, but we are hoping that it won’t cost too much time. In the meantime, I am grateful for the healing protocol that I have learned over literally hundreds of injuries. Living with an MD, my alternative treatments have been compared with placebo, but I have seen too many miraculous recoveries to listen.

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“Whatever you are willing to put up with, is exactly what you will have.”-Anonymous

It is never too late to learn about your boundaries. I am coming to believe that it is perhaps one of the aspects of living that most defines our maturity and facility for accomplishing our goals. Boundary issues are common to most of us; in fact, our personal boundaries are the basic, yet often invisible rulebook that guides all of our relationships.   Our boundaries define how and what we communicate, what we give and receive, and even, in the most basic sense, provide the parameters for what we expect from others and life itself.

Boundaries reflect how we love ourselves and what we value most deeply. They impact our capacity at work, with authority, with our money and our sexuality. Knowing when we want to say yes, when we want to say no, what feels like self-respect and where our own needs start and end are the foundations that build the sense of boundaries that control our lives. Mine have long been porous, which is a generous way of admitting that my lines between myself and others, in family and even more so at work, have been fuzzy.

An old friend once told me that our boundaries are the truest measure of how we love ourselves. I thought I understood the meaning at the time. Raising four children should have bestowed on me a mastery of setting limits and protecting my personal space over the last two decades. It hasn’t. I am not alone in my struggle for healthy boundaries. Learning to define our boundaries is challenging for many people because they are fluid and change with our sense of ourselves.

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

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

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

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“Chemistry can be a good and bad thing. Chemistry is good when you make love with it. Chemistry is bad when you make crack with it.” -Adam Sandler

Welcome to our newest writing adventure, “Chemistry without Chemicals,” the official Good Clean Love product blog. Look here to find great tips on how to make your love life more passionate and exciting. Learn new and different ways to use the wide range of Good Clean Love products. Get up-to-date information about why a healthy sexual life can benefit your overall health. Hear about the exciting new products and services that Good Clean Love will be offering in the future.

Product reviews and testimonials will be shared here so feel free to send your opinions about what you love about our product line and company philosophy. If you have suggestions for how to improve our product line, let us know. Real relationships work best when they are transparent. This is what we are hoping to offer in this blog, our personal stories about why the world needs more love products.

We will also be giving tips: product tips and love tips. So here is a golden one to start with:

Give up the idea of being in the mood or feeling emotionally satisfied as the impetus for intimate contact. Think of it, instead, as a health resource. There is no other physical act at our disposal that carries the physical, emotional and spiritual benefits of making love, especially with someone you love.

So stay tuned and tell your friends about the best little love company in the world that keeps getting better…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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