“If you tell a true story, you can’t be wrong.”   -Jack Kerouac

I would bet that for every couple that falls in love each day there are at least two couples who leave each other in deep and hurtful ways. Just this week, I was caring for one of my teenage daughter’s oldest friends whose boyfriend, who had been her friend since elementary school, broke up with her in a text that read“I just don’t have that warm love feeling anymore.”This experience followed one earlier in the week as I listened to a longtime business friend who had recently managed an incredible feat of agility, courage and perseverance to save his business from an investor group gone bad, speak  in a hopeless and uninspired tone about losing the feelings required to do the work to revive his 33-year marriage.

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"Stir" Janice Porter

“And in the end, the love we take is equal to the love we make…” -The Beatles

I have come to say good bye to my friend as she enters the hospice phase of her cancer journey.   During the long 6 hour drive to get her, my memory of our meeting came back to me as though it was 20 days ago and not 20 years. She is an artist and most of my memories over the years with her are punctuated with her work- drawings for our almost card company landed on t-shirts and  long narrow canvases with the moon rising, illustrated children’s books and homemade games when our kids were smaller. In the midst of these memories, I welled up in tears, wishing I had been a better friend. I wished that I had looked for another way to reach her when our lives pulled us in different directions. Of all the friends I have known in my life, she is one of the very few who always had nothing but love for me.

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Media stories of childhood sex abuse have filled the airwaves of late; from the Penn State trial of Jerry Sandusky to the ongoing Catholic Church scandals to the first conviction of a high ranking church official. While these stories stir our outrage, their telling and re-telling truly only reflect the tip of the iceberg when it comes to both the enormity and secrecy surrounding childhood sexual abuse. In fact, childhood sexual abuse makes up more than ten percent of the millions of reported childhood abuse cases in the US.

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.

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“All it takes to feel loved is to love. We always have the power to feel love. As soon as we stop loving we often don’t feel loved anymore.”  -Betty Peralta

For all the years that I have thought and written about love, it is remarkable to me that I only just recently learned how my own thinking has prevented me from seeing the love in my own life for decades. We all create a storyline that our life mirrors and although it is hard to tell whether the events and circumstances of our life create the story or whether the story attracts the events, the story line becomes so deeply ingrained in our personal history that we often don’t witness its operation. For me, as for most of us, this history began in childhood with my emotionally dysfunctional family, which only grew more overtly unhappy as I aged. By the time I was 13 and the divorce escalated the collective pain into impenetrable defense mechanisms my storyline was set and the filter of my experience of  life was measured by an ever present sense of being excluded, abandoned and alone. These emotional drivers of my life were powerful forces of attraction, as well, and it took years for me to see the choices I continuously made to keep the filter intact.

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I have been studying gratitude as a the open door to a positive life and one of the most profound vehicles to love for some time. As part of my research, we have had an ongoing contest asking our readers to share their own stories of how gratitude has transformed their own lives and relationships. Here is an unforgettable story of gratitude.

I embrace the gift of how my life has developed from birth to now. At an early age, I was very visual. Reading books came easily to me by age 3 and is still one of my first loves. I am an accomplished writer with several books just sitting there for me to finish.  By the early teen years of my life, I became very accomplished at sketching. I especially enjoyed observing all the shadings of hands and faces and duplicating what my eyes could see on poster boards, a wall, chalk board or just notebook paper.  I have spent countless hours appreciating nature, down to the slightest detail like: how the leaves on a tree swaying in the breeze captures light and seem to sparkle in the sunlight; the perseverance of the ant who carries a crumb all the way across a wide driveway to the ant hill; the personality of birds in the morning with their unique chirps of urgency, joy, fear; the various smells on a country bike trail; the feel of clean flannel sheets in the bitter winter months,  the taste of kiwi in season. It seems that my whole life has been a festival of senses that I can have in memory to live over again as I please.

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One of the greatest gifts of the work I do is hearing the inspiring stories from our readers about how they make love work in their personal lives and career.  Learning how to receive the goodness and love surrounding us is a lifelong process and, even as children, we must learn that we are worthy and loveable.  Here is one fine teacher’s method which could be adapted to your own family.  Thanks for sharing it with us…

“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.

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 “The act of smelling something, anything, is remarkably like the act of thinking. Immediately at the moment of perception, you can feel the mind going to work, polling one center of the brain after another for signs of recognition, for old memories and old connection.” – Lewis Thomas

Our sense of smell is ancient; primal as well as the source of our most powerful emotional memories. This is also the sensory pathway which is the key to sexual attraction and compatibility. These facts belie the little attention that our sense of smell evokes- partly this is because we have so little language for scent. Our scent language is often limited to “it smells like…” and our recognition of scents is often clearly delineated between pleasant and unpleasant.  But there is a world of scent cognition that goes unrecognized every day and new research into the remarkable olfactory processing of life is demonstrating how seemingly invisible forces actually color what we see and hear as well.

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“Time is a created thing. To say ‘I don’t have time,’ is like saying, ‘I don’t want to.”  -Lao Tzu

How we spend our time is what our life is made of and our intimate relationships are a clear reflection of the time we invest in them. Relationship growth is a capital investment in time and without it, deep connections wither on the vine. It is easy in this era of instant connectivity to lose sight of what it means to commit to the real face time that love demands. Arguably, making time for making love is a deeply meaningful measure of the health and sustainability of your relationship. This is especially true when you consider the outrageous scheduling demands that we agree to without hesitation for our work lives, our children’s activity calendar or our favorite online social media connections.What makes scheduling the best hours of our intimate life so difficult?

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The best moments in my life are the ones that I am connected to the people around me. They are the moments when I am not wondering about anywhere else or worried about what comes next.  This place of full presence is a magical one because when you find yourself in it, life is good.  Even in a crisis or emergency when clock time is meaningless,  we are left only with what is and we have only now.  Rich, deep, long-lasting memories form in this space when you are fully present and, like a magnet, you can pull people into your space of fullness.

Working with cancer patients  lately has shown me how powerfully healing our presence can be. One of the members of the group recently shared a story of her sister who is a flight attendant sharing the tender words of one of her youngest passengers. The little girl was a “Make-A-Wish”  patient on her way to Disneyland and the magic that awaited her was all that was real in that moment.  Her sister talked about how deeply moved she was by the child’s clarity and joy,  and her sister, the cancer patient, reminded her that the little girl was probably equally moved by hers.

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“In every man’s heart there is a secret nerve that answers to the vibrations of beauty.” -Christopher Morley

Beauty is one of the essential graces of living a human life on earth. Beauty is around us everywhere and entraining our own capacity to notice and recognize its presence and its power to transform us begins in our heart. Culturally, we are constantly being mis-directed to a specific, and arguably, limited type of beauty, which parades as fashion in youthful perfect silhouettes, airbrushed wide-eyed models with chiseled features and long wavy flows of hair. This commercial beauty is the kind that drives us either to despairing feelings of not measuring up or seduces us into buying this one more thing that will bring us closer to that exclusive experience of beauty. Yet, most people when asked about where they witness beauty rarely mention Glamour’s cover of the month. Instead, what we hear is about how the evening light transforms the trees in their yard, or how the scent of fresh bread wafted around a corner or the remarkable rose light that canvases the skyline before dark.

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