“Deep listening is miraculous for both listener and speaker. When someone receives us with open-hearted, non-judging, intensely interested listening, our spirits expand.” -Sue Patton Thoele

I have never been much of a listener. I have always used my ability to articulate as a way to know myself. I am a fast thinker and am often onto the next idea while half listening to the people I love most. I have been working on my listening skills for a long time, although most of my work comes in the form of apologies in the moments when my unskilled ears and deliberate tongue intrude and bring both misunderstanding and shame in its wake.

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“Marriage: that I call the will of two to create the one who is more than those who created it.” ~Friedrich Nietzsche

I love weddings. What is more reassuring than attending a ritual whose goal is to promise to love. Regardless of our knowledge or experience with it’s failure, we all want to believe in love and support the couples who are bold enough to take the leap. Wedding rituals are so universal that there is an element of cliché. Yet, even within the anticipated rituals of cake and first dances, they are also a completely unique experience for the couple that takes the leap to define their life together publicly.

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“Call it a clan, call it a network, call it a tribe, call it a family: Whatever you call it, whoever you are, you need one.”  -Jane Howard

I built my life around making a tribe that I belong to, and like most things in life, now I am often overcome by the power of my intention. Belonging is essential and also exacts a cost. Sometimes the cost feels excessive; sometimes the belonging is everything. The key is being able to hold them both simultaneously, even when one or the other threatens to overwhelm. The practice is not unlike holding what is annoying and loveable about the people in our tribe.

It is easy to get lost on one side or the other. Like tonight when my full clan descended into the small travel head quarters at Embassy Suites. The kids aren’t kids anymore and it isn’t just their physical size that takes up so much room. They each have very distinct personalities, behavioral ticks, emotional struggles and a unique sense of humor.  Mostly we live in peace together, but it is tenuous. One person’s momentary bad mood can easily be misinterpreted and before long an argument erupts out of nowhere.

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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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“The family. We were a strange little band of characters trudging through life sharing diseases and toothpaste, coveting one another’s desserts, hiding shampoo, borrowing money, locking each other out of our rooms, inflicting pain and kissing to heal it in the same instant, loving, laughing, defending, and trying to figure out the common thread that bound us all together”  ~Erma Bombeck

Today I interviewed my kids on my radio show. I asked them how it was for them to have a mother who makes love products and calls herself a loveologist. I asked them their best advice about relationships in families. I asked them how they felt about the boundaries that I crossed every time they came home sad and troubled and I forced them to talk about what happened. I asked them whether and how they felt that all the processing of their feelings impacted their lives today.

We all raise our families with the best intentions and the worst, or at least the most challenging attributes we possess. For me, the issue of boundaries played heavily on both fronts. In my own childhood, privacy was a punishment in an already isolating family structure. I never knew what was really lurking behind someone else’s silence, and often it was untapped rage. Raising my own children, I sacrificed their need for privacy for my belief in the emotional health of disclosure.

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“Money is neither my god nor my devil.  It is a form of energy that tends to make us more of who we already are, whether it’s greedy or loving.” ~Dan Millman

In May, I won a cash investment for my company Good Clean Love from the Willamette Angel Conference. Today, almost 3 months later, I went to deposit the prize in the bank with the company’s new CEO.  It was a joyful moment, the meeting of so many dreams come together in the form of capital infusion. For the many years that I have been bootstrapping this little love company, imagining this day, was like winning the golden ticket.

There were so many days along the way that the weight of money worries almost made me quit. Not knowing how the next product run would come together or get paid, the monthly prayers that payroll and rent would be covered and the small monthly annuities that was all that we could pay to all of our professionals who kept believing in us just because we kept showing up.  That time was a training ground, where I went from being sick and distracted about money to slowly learning to trust that somehow enough money always showed up.

As I stopped fearing the worst about money and came to understand and think about it as the source of energy that it is, I started to learn to forgive myself and believe that what I had been creating out of nothing held way more value than the bank ledger often told. The clearer I got about my beliefs in what Good Clean Love offered in both products and wisdom, the more wealth of experience and trust I collected. Remarkable talents in business management, product design, manufacturing skill, legal and financial help all kept dropping in their two cents, or five dollar bills, or whatever they could afford. Everyone was in it for the same thing, the wealth of offering love.

Even as I write this I know some would consider me to  be naïve enough to believe that people want to invest in love however they can. All these years of relying on more good faith than capital has made Good Clean Love more of a social non profit than a for profit business. But now with this investment, we leap into the world of executive business planning and investors who trust in ROI. How thrilling to be part of a dream that has the chance to fulfill its own destiny.

Carl Sandburg once wrote: “Money is power, freedom, a cushion, the root of all evil, the sum of blessings.” Developing a relationship to money is as complex as our relationship to our sexuality- it includes all that is good and most valuable about us and all that is fearful and needy as well. Conscious and loving choices about how to think about, communicate about and show up for our relationships to both are the legs our life stands on.

“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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“A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood.”   -Leo Rosten

Communication is the essence and primary vehicle for most everything in life. Everyone does it all the time, with and without agreed upon signals, words, expressions. Communication errors are a natural outcome of all of the many forms of communicating going on continuously. We all have our own personal blend of communication errors that we commit, usually without recognition, as they are deeply ingrained in our way being. They impact all our relationships in ways that run deep and oddly are invisible to us.

The new CEO, talks to me frequently about speaking from multiple voices by understanding your audience. I am forced to recognize how rarely I consider the perception of others in my communications. I am too hungry to make my point, I miss the chance to listen for what is behind the words, to hear and be moved by someone else’s feelings and experience in ways that I couldn’t predict.

Thousands of years ago, Epictetus, a greek philosopher said: “First learn the meaning of what you say, and then speak.” It is embarrassing how often I think I know what I am saying, but don’t actually. Our language is so familiar to us,  and our own meaning is so deeply imbedded in us, that we don’t think of the meaning of what we say. When I was learning French years ago and I would translate back and forth between languages,  I spent a lot of time considering the words and meaning I was trying to convey. Some French expressions don’t really exist in English, or have three meanings rolled into one.

I grew up in a yelling house, where my father’s normal range was loud to bellowing. The television was always on loud, I played my stereo at the full strength of the small speaker set to drown out the noise. Maybe I am slightly hard of hearing, because I rarely speak quietly. I often have to have things repeated when they are spoken quietly, as though it is a sound level my brain can’t fully register. It has long been a problem between my husband and I who is introspective and needs silence. I am noisy apparently or at least a stranger to quietness in my speech, my thoughts and my emotions.

This combination of communication errors is probably the basis of my urge to write. I long to be understood, if by no one more than myself. When I write I am listening deeply, truly interested in the space behind the words, trying to make sense of the beautiful and unpredictable, painful and authentic, fleeting and timeless. In my writing, I can master my communication errors;  I wonder what it will take to expand that skill base to my spoken words.

“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, but for some of us, like me, their absence colors every relationship I have ever had, beginning with my relationship to myself. Lacking and unclear boundaries with ourselves take on all forms of self-sabotage, and in our interpersonal relationships runs the gamut from avoidance to codependency.

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“Surrounded by people who love life, you love it too; surrounded by people who don’t, you don’t.” ~Mignon McLaughlin

I began the day at the local grange’s very berry pancake breakfast. The pancakes were homemade and the entertainment was the fiddlers playing old time songs.  We sat with neighbors we had never met and the whole scene felt like I was an extra in a quaint movie scene. It was so basic and pure to eat berry-coated pancakes with strangers that I couldn’t believe I didn’t do it more.

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