Worldwide, research shows that up to 36% of girls and 29% of boys have suffered child sexual abuse and coercion. According to the World Health Organization, these statistics represent 150 million girls and 73 million boys under the age of 18 who experienced forced sexual intercourse or other forms of sexual violence. That number increases substantially when you include the vast sexual slave trade market that holds millions more children in its grasp. Most shocking of all is that even these numbers are considered to be only fractional because sexual abuse carries such profound taboos that the vast majority goes unreported by the victims themselves.

Recent revelations of the years of child sexual abuse that occurred in the Penn State locker room generated a national swell of outrage in response to the institutional efforts to cover for the perpetrator which enabled the sex abuse to continue. Just days before, Monsignor James Lynn was the first high ranking church official ever to be convicted for  the same crime of protecting and enabling other priests that were abusing altar boys. Unlike the Sandusky case where the perpetrator was also sentenced, the priests were not tried. However, what both these cases share in common is the silence, denial and shame that the victims faced when they came forward.

Sadly, our national conversation about this rampant form of child abuse too often ends with the dispensing of punishment. We refuse to delve deeper into the frequency and prevalence of inappropriate sexual behavior that impact millions of children. Like Sandusky, it is not surprising that many, if not most, perpetrators were once childhood victims themselves. Our collective discomfort with the reality of this situation creates a weighty silence that suppresses and distorts normal human sexual impulses and turns them into a distorted cycle of repeated pain. Jerry Sandusky wasn’t an outright liar in his trial. In order for him to live with his overwhelming shame he had to reinvent what happened with all the boys he abused, just as he had to reinvent the story of his abuse as a child.

He needed help that he couldn’t ask for or even recognize. Many other highly educated people witnessed his need for help but could not overcome the shame and silence surrounding sexual deviance. The abuse occurred in a world in which many shut down the efforts to educate oneself and others about the complexity and mystery of being an erotic human being. When we refuse to host a sexual conversation that is focused on healing, it leads to misinterpretation of the lasting emotional damage for both the perpetrator and the victim. Denial and distortion are as common to the adult perpetrators as to the children being coerced into sexual acts that they do not understand. They create ramifications in all of the other aspects of their emotional and social relationships. Those who have looked the other way in the hierarchy of the institutions are silent not only out of covering up bad press issues, but like many of us, also are clearly unable to language and determine consequences of inappropriate sexuality.

Not long ago, I interviewed ­Dr. David Knighton, a renowned physician and the author of The Wisdom of the Healing Wound and was stunned when he shared the story of his own healing journey. He identified that the source of a lifelong migraine originated from the place where his grandfather had held his head during forced oral sex throughout his childhood. Other adults must have known what was going on during the frequent trips to the basement to fuel the furnace.  Yet, Dr. Knighton revealed that the most painful aspect of his own healing was coming to terms with his memory of his grandfather as the sole member of his conservative family who really loved him. In his career, Dr. Knighton went on to invent several innovative healing tools that revolutionized the treatment of physical wounds, but admitted that had he not had the opportunity for his own healing, this childhood sexual injury would have destroyed his life and his potential.

Indeed, of all of the institutions that need reform, it is the family structure, which accounts for the largest proportion of both reported and unreported  cases of childhood sexual abuse. The injury is made that much worse by the denial of childhood sexual abuse that goes unrecognized for generations. One of the most disturbing aspects of this form of abuse is that the majority occurs with people that the child knows and often trusts. Many adult victims are ostracized from their family or called crazy for their accusations even years later in life. Remarkably, even in the worst cases of abuse where children require treatment, they are often placed back in the home with the perpetrator.

In this context, it becomes easier to understand how both child victims of sex abuse and the adults who know of its occurrences remain silent, ashamed and wounded, refusing to give voice to their suffering or legitimate accusations. Although this context does not excuse the denial of the much larger institutions for not taking responsible measures to protect children, it is clear that culturally we all participate in a culture which lacks the courage and maturity to express the depth and gravity of sexual abuse in childhood. We have grown accustomed to looking the other way instead of facing this invisible epidemic which has stolen the soul of many people’s sexualities.

I was hopeful that opening this national discussion up within the recent trial and conviction would enlarge our national dialogue about this giant elephant sitting in our midst. Instead we focused our extensive commentary on the severity of the punishment to the Penn State football program. This is a critical opportunity to refocus our commitment to sexual education because it is only through education that children will learn how to identify and communicate respectful boundaries of their emerging sexual selves. Likewise, adults whose sexual fantasies converge on potentially abusive behavior will be able to identify appropriate sexual outlets.

So long as sexual revelations are associated only with shame and punishment we will continue to suppress the truth of who we are sexually and refuse to ask the question of how we got here.   What has been happening in our most revered large institutions are not isolated cases of human sexual deviance, they are the magnification of the imposed silence from decades of “just say no” to everything sexual and the historic fears of our own mysterious sexual drives. What is forced underground within the human psyche does not go away; it exerts an internal force that is unstoppable. It cannot be punished out of us. What is required instead is nothing less than a seismic cultural shift towards human sexuality. Replacing the shame and fears of our erotic selves with a deep respect for its powerful capacity to heal us instead of hurt others is where this shift must begin.

“I retired from the elementary classroom last year after 36 years, most of them with 11 and 12 year-old students.  Love that age and the changes that occur during the grade 6 year.  Every year, usually on a drab January or February Friday afternoon, I would hand out an index card to each student and have them put their name on one side.  I collected them. Then, sworn to secrecy, I gave the rules:  1.  you will get a card, not your own, and I want you to peek at the name and then write one compliment on the other side anonymously.  It could be about a strength or anything that makes this person special or unique. 2.  After this activity, try really hard not to tell the person what you wrote, even if it’s a best friend.

Cards were shuffled and I included a card for myself and wrote a compliment with each card that came my way.  I collected all the cards after each of the 3 rounds.  Then I passed the card to the student whose name was on the card.  Every year, without fail, there was this 60 second pause as everyone read the comments.  Then, usually half of the class took their cards and hid it in their desk or a book, done not by direction, but rather they seemed to have a need to hide compliments.  We always had a conversation after the activity with some students offering to share one compliment.

Then I asked:  is it easier to give or get a compliment? Answer almost 100% of the time? GIVE one.  Then we talked about why and there was never a real consensus or compelling reason. Kids had a hard time hearing something nice about themselves.  Always an interesting activity and thought you might find it interesting.  I always enjoyed reading my compliments and have saved them over the years, using them as bookmarks.  It’s nice to read that students thought me funny or I made learning science fun or they appreciated my patience by listening to them.  This to me, was an example of good, clean love…”

Abandonment is usually not the product of malicious intent. Often, it results from competing demands, not enough resources, inability to conceive of consequences and fatigue. We are not, as a species deliberately unloving,  we are more often preoccupied with our own pain and not up to the profoundly hard work to love responsibly.  This is as true in individual family stories as it is on a national level.  The world of diminishing, or at least limited, resources is catching up to all of us.  Promises and guarantees that were made in brighter economic times are no longer sustainable on many levels. Worldwide the question of how we care for each other, how a society sustains itself is being examined. But nowhere is this abandonment being more acutely felt than among returning veterans and their families.

Here is a fact that I cannot get out of my mind. For every young soldier that has been killed on the battlefields of Iraq or Afghanistan, twenty five other soldiers commit suicide upon returning home. This suicidal drain on our returning soldiers and their families goes unrecorded and unaided.   These deaths happen in the killing fields of our own communities, in the bedrooms of  what were once the young, strong boys who initially left home with a sense of mission and invincibility. Their intentions of protecting their country in wars for which they were ill- prepared, left them so damaged and empty of themselves that drug and alcohol addiction was the only means of self medicating their trauma.

My sons are young men, just barely out of their boyhood. They are trying to figure out what it means to be male and working to chart their course in life, not unlike the young men who joined the armed forces. It is hard for me to imagine who they would become and what would be lost of them under the same stress.  The truth is that the human psyche is not built for war, and its effects are profoundly damaging to the soul of growing boys.   This is not news. Collectively, we have witnessed the loss of tens of thousands of lives to the post-traumatic stress disorder cases that are still being treated from the Vietnam conflict. The army has only just begun to recognize the frighteningly high rates of brain injury that the most recent conflicts have left in their wake.

The cost of war for those who bravely commit to fighting in them endures for many throughout their lives.  For as strong as we make our forces, equipping them with billions of dollars of protection and weaponry, we must acknowledge that we are not wired as killing machines. Our nervous systems are not designed for 24-hour combat for months on end. The loose ends of our self esteem and self worth unravel quickly under the strain of constant threat. The emotional healing and forgiveness that is required for a soldier to come home from a tour of service will last at least as long as the tour and, for many people, ten times that long.

If we are going to continue to promote war as a solution to our collective insecurity, then we must be prepared to commit to the rehabilitation of the young boys who come home alive, yet broken and emotionally damaged. Our military budget should without question be committed to the healing at least as much as the killing.  Otherwise, we become our own enemy. The worst abandonment we can perpetuate is on the young men we sent to battle. We are responsible for the healing of the troops we send to kill.

“For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.”  -Rilke

Imagine if we began our relationships with the vow,  “I take you as my burden, to have and to hold from this day forward.”  Call me jaded, but I think if people understood that committing to love someone over time is agreeing to the most enriching burden you will ever carry, we would leave each other less.  We would enter the challenge of relating with our eyes open  and be prepared for the  serious heavy lifting  that love takes. We would not get married expecting it to be a long-term romantic getaway.  We would know that our relationships are the most loving chance we have to grow up.

I was heartened when I heard Dr. Stan Tatkin, author of Wired for Love, echo this belief on my radio show last week.  His book and the therapy model identify that the highest purpose of  any intimate relationship is to build a “couple bubble” whose job is to maintain security and safety for both partners  to grow and develop.  In this scenario, it is the relationship that comes first. This level of commitment has also been referred to as a “conscious partnership,” where you both recognize that your marriage or relationship is not about you or the other partner, it is about itself.

Ironically, it is when you honor the commitment to this third reality, by being more responsible to the needs of the relationship than your own needs,  that real transformation and healing takes place. When you make your relationship primary and your own needs secondary, you produce the paradoxical effect of getting your needs met in a way that they can never be met by making them primary. It is, in fact, where the deep and magical reciprocity of love lives and flourishes. When you pour love into the container of your love with someone else,  you discover a foundation of strength and a space of acceptance that cannot come from a desire to meet your own needs.

The truth is that none of us enter our intimate relationships unscathed. We all bring our own version of high maintenance, unresolved needs that occur throughout our early years of learned attachment. Our pairing later in life is our attempt to heal the broken places inside of us.   Furthermore,  we generally choose well when we find our mates to work on those issues.  What we don’t have is the understanding that this is the work of life.  We get swept up in the romance and forget how profoundly annoying human beings are. We refuse the messy work necessary to grow beyond the early wounds we bring to love.

The miracle of the container,  “the couple bubble,” is that when you can agree to hold the space sacred between you and your partner, when your partner’s sense of security and safety with you is as important to you as your own,  you are transported to a new level of reliable and sustainable presence that transforms your deepest and oldest pain into something workable,  lovable even, just by being held in loving attention.

So, if you want to give something that matters for Valentine’s Day, start here.  Begin by honoring and being responsible to the container of your relationship.  Let its needs guide your priorities and behavior.  Let go of your own needs and trust that they will be met in this container.   And yes, both people have to be grown up enough to want this to work, otherwise it is just another kind of co-dependency.

The reason that marriage, or any kind of relationship that is a closed loop, has been held in such sacred esteem is that two people who are guardians for each other’s hearts is perhaps the most soulful and spiritual love that we have access to.  It is not for the faint of heart or for those who think they are lucky when they find it. This is the truest work of pure creation.

“Courage is not simply one of the virtues- it is the form of every virtue at the testing point.”  -C.S. Lewis

I can’t get the Stanford kicker, Jordan Williamson, out of my heart.  Watching him struggle to maintain his composure with the game on the line, not once but twice and each time coming up short was for me the most heartbreaking moment of the game.  He missed only two kicks in the whole season and I imagine, of the thousands of footballs that he has kicked in his short life, most all of them were on target. He sobbed at the end of the game, the media blaming the loss of the game on the kicker.

My sons have always played sports competitively and I have watched enough heart-wrenching losses to know that it is never one guy on any team that loses a game.  Even when it looks like that and the goalie misses the save, or the kicker misses the mark, or the shooter misses the basket at the buzzer. It was the whole team and the coach that arrived at that outcome together.

True gem of an athlete that he is, Andrew Luck, the Stanford quarterback who was certainly disappointed by the outcome acknowledged as much himself when he deflected any finger pointing asserting that no one player was to blame for the loss.  “Put yourself in that situation,” Luck said. “Yeah, it’s tough. It’s very tough. I know guys will rally around him. He’s got a very bright future in front of him. The media tends to want a scapegoat or a hero, and that’s just not the case in any football game.”

I have witnessed the emotional process of healing after a disappointing performance up close. The kind of courage that it requires to go on and try again is perhaps more rare and important than the athletic gifts themselves.  Having the guts to play where everyone is watching is heroic in and of itself for a guy who hasn’t yet hit twenty. Even in a big high school game,  messing up feels just about as humiliating. Being able to stay with the discomfort, moving beyond the shame is what separates those who go on to win.

In fact, as I reflect on the most important lessons my boys learned from their extensive competition was this- that at the end of the day,  win or lose, being able to hold onto yourself and stay close to the love of the game that drives you to play is the real win.  This is where playing becomes the freedom to be who one really is. It is why we love to watch games way after we can physically play them, because we are looking for the courage that forms the very basis of the athletic skills we so admire.

Jordan’s coach, who was blasted for trusting his kicker, tried to give him this before he went out there, reminding him- “this is why football is fun.” As his friend and teammate Luck said,  he has a bright future. Especially if he realizes the courage he is made of, something that winning probably wouldn’t have shown him.

I have spent the last several months working to perfect our love oil packaging, which has always lived in cobalt blue glass bottles. Our leap to a sleek aluminum bottle with a sexy little pump top is at once a simple, minimalist,  and beautifully improved  delivery system. I tested this bottle in a variety of intimate positions and was heartened to find it wouldn’t spill even if the little pump top got lost in the sheets. We were making a quantum leap from the orifice reducers and slippery disc caps that fitted in glass.

I have an amazing designer. He teaches me about the rules of color, which I promise to never question and through his sensibilities he turns our simple little love business into something that is  so beautifully compelling that sometimes I think our success is really just about him. So our new beautiful aluminum bottles get fitted with tasteful transparent labels, which were delivered just about a week ago. We are all content, joyful even at how things evolve when you stay with them.

Then the mystery begins. We ship the love oils out to our waiting distributors and customers. They leak on the way there. They return the leaky products. We clean them up, we lay them on their sides, we set them upside down.  They don’t leak.  In fact, they refuse to leak in the most ridiculous of positions. Yet when you send them in a box, the oil refuses to stay in the bottle. Leaking love oil bottles is a small crisis for a small business. Actually, I don’t mind a slippery bottle, but it is not commercially viable. The problem is that it is hard to fix something when you can’t identify where it is broken.

While driving my kids to school I hear an NPR story about a package design flaw that is literally a life and death situation. The Cup of Noodles’ small base and wide top is the easiest and most lethal pushover of a container on the market. Who knew that those slippery noodles were also heat conductors and that with the slightest tip were injuring dozens of small children, giving them scars and even, in some cases, permanent disabilities. How can  a product redesign not be required?  How can a company justify selling millions of Cups of Noodles knowing that a single spill can result in so much damage?

I would like to have a word with the manufacturers of Cup of Noodles and share an oily bottle of love oil with them. Package design is critical and costly,  but safety and functionality, are foremost. When it comes to product design, first do no harm and then make sure they don’t leak.

“What if our kids really believed we wanted them to have great sex…What if they really believed that we want them to be so passionately in love with someone that they can’t keep their hands off them?  What if they really believed we want them to know their own bodies?”  -Al Vernacchio

Taking Sex Education out of the dungeon that it has lived in over the last 30 years is an epic step towards wholeness in our society.  One courageous teacher, Al Vernacchio, is doing just that in his class Sexuality and Society, at a small private school near Philadelphia.  He may well be the first teacher in this county that has taken the bold step to go beyond the fear/disease-based instruction model built on the abstinence training which dominates our schools and has allowed pornography to become the only readily available form of sex education for our youth. Vernacchio’s ground-breaking curriculum explores both the depth and breadth of sexuality issues that most teens grapple with, including how to recognize and form your own values, understanding sexual orientation, discussions about safer sex, sex in relationships, sexual health, and the emotional and physical terrain of sexual activity.

Offering these kinds of sexual conversations to our youth is revolutionary and is at the heart of the deepest healing that needs to happen on this planet; making peace with our erotic selves. It isn’t just the kids that need this education either.  The vast majority of adults in this country have never been exposed to the healthy, provocative and open discussions necessary to understand how our mysterious sexuality works,  how we attribute meaning to it, as well as how to experience more pleasure from it. Our collective shame and fear is choking our ability to nurture and sustain healthy intimate relationships and a recent study in the Harvard Medical Review rightly condemns our silence and denial of sexuality as  “a betrayal of our next generation, which is desperately in need of knowledge, conversation and resources to negotiate the delicious and treacherous terrain of sexuality in the 21st century.”

It is important to realize that our current forms of abstinence training are relatively recent developments in the history of sexual education. Interestingly, it was Progressive Era reformers like Sears and Roebuck’s president Julius Rosenwald and the President of Harvard, Charles Eliot, who believed sex education was an essential means of eliminating venereal disease as well as the double standards that kept women from achieving equality. They taught both the rewards of sexual intimacy within a marriage and the hazards outside of marriage.  In fact it wasn’t until the social contract shift in the 1960s that sexuality outside of marriage was widely entertained. The backlash of this opening happened in the 1980s when comprehensive sex education was replaced with abstinence-only education models. Among many other issues that divided the political right and left, the moral majority won the sexuality battle and everyone lost the basic right to sex education.

Imagine what life might look like if we all had a good solid dose of sex education. Imagine shame and guilt, the two constant companions of countless sex drives replaced with curiosity and wonder. Pleasure of all kinds would become a welcome respite and our capacity to combine long lasting relationships with our own personal language of intimacy would thrive.  I daresay, if our kids believed we wanted them to have healthy and vital intimate lives,  parents too might be enjoying the same with more frequency. Great sex could be celebrated as part of the journey of growing up over a life time. Maybe porn would get boring and clandestine affairs seem not worth the price.  A little sex education would go a long way to revolutionizing how we love.  Sign me up.

After watching the film at the recent Bioneers annual conference, which offers the most progressive analysis and solution orientation to the global environmental crises we face,  I decided to become a bee keeper.  Honey bees are one of the few super-organisms on the planet, which is to say that a hive of tens of thousands of bees sacrifice their individual identities to create a bigger whole. The biology of creating beeswax and honey is nothing short of miraculous..  Pollination is the tireless and miraculous process in which the natural world reproduces and evolves. The honey bee’s tireless efforts are literally the erotic glue that produces over 40% of our food supply. There is not a more sacred act of love that exists on this planet, nor one that we more take for granted.

Losing half of all these creatures should be of concern to everyone on the planet. Everyone should want to become  a bee keeper, because the world that is left without them is not sustainable. Not surprisingly, it is our unsustainable agricultural practices driven by corporate profits that has taken us to this precipice. Monoculture farming of tens of thousands of acres and increasingly poisonous insecticides that now act like a nerve gas on bees is responsible for this worldwide collapse of the bee population. The chemicals destroy the natural homing instinct of the bees. They go out to forage and cannot find their way back to their hives.  Millions of bees are perishing, and hives that are full of food and a queen are deserted.

Corporations are willingly and knowingly destroying the ecosystem in which we live.  Monoculture farms of genetically modified seeds cannot support the ecosystem it needs to flourish, so companies truck in bees from all over the world to do their pollination work for a couple of weeks at a time. Entire hives die, shrink wrapped in plastic in holding yards.   They are given high fructose corn syrup to wake them up, filled with antibiotics that they ingest and pass into their honey.  This is how we are becoming immune to many antibiotics.  The same process which is creating super pests that adapt to our poisons.

Honey, is a singular substance on this planet.  It is the nectar of love, the product of capturing light and life that is transformed within the body of a hive.  Honey that was discovered over two thousand years old in an Egyptian King’s tomb was still edible. So precious was this substance that for the majority of recorded human life it was never sold, only gifted with love. Honey is so replete with nutrients that it is a rare restorative to most every aspect of health.

The plight of the honeybees is our plight. There could not be a more direct natural metaphor for what we are doing with our love.  In much the same way as the bees are lost on their way home, we have also lost our way.  Our unwillingness to do the work, to show up and keep our promises to our family and our community is our form of colony collapse.  Dedicate yourself to learning how to love more, yourself, your intimates, and your enemies is the way home. Also consider becoming a backyard bee keeper.

The heart of his message was about figuring out how to love your life.  Finding what you love to do and letting it lead you in both the occupations you take on and the personal relationships that fill your life is the soundest advice you can live by. It is the single thing that all deeply accomplished people share, that their legacies and their contributions were driven by what they love.

A precious few of us create the kind of lives Steve Jobs did- the kind of lives that impact millions and reinvent their lives. His thinking and innovation redefined the ways we interact with each other and the world around us. He transformed our relationship to technology through his deep understanding of the interconnectedness of basic truths. His lasting legacy was one in which beauty, simplicity and function intertwined to make life more meaningful for many of us. What he will probably never know is that his vision will continue to transform the world in ways he’d never imagined.

I have always said that in the last moments of life it is only love that matters to us. Until his recent death I had no idea that Steve had a wife and four children. His demands for secrecy in his company were of legend quality. His need for personal privacy so great, that none of us ever witnessed his wife or children watching Steve deliver another amazing new Apple product. Who knew that his wife had launched a natural product company of her own?  Steve was seen as many things in the media- I can’t remember a single story that called him a family man.

After his death, I learned that the he had agreed to be interviewed throughout the last two years by a biographer. The biography is due out shortly and is anticipated to become one of the bestselling books of the year. Surprisingly, Steve was willing to relinquish control of the book’s content and direction. The interviews took place during his most recent battle with cancer- a cancer he’d previously thought was gone. When his biographer asked him why he would agree to an author’s questions, he replied, “I wanted my kids to know me. I wasn’t there for them and I wanted them to know why and to understand what I did.”

The closer he came to the last weeks of his life, the more devoted he became to spending time with his family. He was not interested in the many offers for recognition, awards and thank you gifts that came to him; he only wanted to get home for dinner. This is the thought that has stayed with me when I think of Steve lately.  It is heartening to know that Life comes to the same conclusion for all of us. Whether we are billionaire visionaries or just an average person, at the end of the day we all count our years by whom we love and who truly loved us back.

I have more memories than I can count of holding my children through the night and knowing that I was healing them. Even in their teen years, my bed is standard treatment when they are ill or overcome with emotion. However, in all these years, I have rarely reached out for the same treatment. Last night something changed; I was able to ask for the care that I have always been so good at giving but have never risked receiving. I woke my husband, curled into his touch and was finally able to rest.

Babies do not thrive without human touch. Mothers everywhere know this intuitively. More and more  medical studies are confirming our intuition- everything from fibromyalgia to Alzheimers improves with the addition of human touch.   Our attention transmitted through our miraculous human hands is the most powerful healing tool on the planet. Even our ability to learn and pay attention are improved when we are touched even briefly. Touch is the universal human language that transforms and heals us.

Physical contact awakens the prefrontal areas of the brain that control our abilities to relax and emote. Being held at any age creates a visceral imprint of trust, which the brain hears more clearly than any verbal message of support.   Touching  is the language that we all crave most. There may not be a more relaxed moment than in the safety of a warm hug or the contact of hands on one’s aching back.

Initiating family hugs every day will transform the intimacy in your home. If you don’t believe it, spend the next few days consciously aware of how many times you are touched throughout the day and how many times you reach out to touch someone else. Notice how even the smallest of physical exchanges impacts how you feel in the moment and with the person you connected with. I envy the European cultures’ ease in leaning forward and brushing cheeks with almost anyone they meet. Becoming more fluent in the language of touch is the key to our healing.