“Pleasure is the object, duty and the goal of all rational creatures.”  -Voltaire

The new year is a good time to re-orient our experience of pleasure. It is easy to confuse the continuous onslaught of instant gratification that our culture gorges on with the deep healing experience of pleasure. Here are a couple of guideposts to help distinguish and navigate oneself towards the healing experience of real pleasure. True pleasure does not cause harm. True pleasure resets the chemical balances in the brain and body towards centered-ness. True pleasure heals the past in the present, releasing us into a new way of seeing ourselves and the potential in our lives.

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“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”  -Rumi

We are a wounded bunch, we humans, and yet we are entering a new possibility of healing on this planet that is calling all of us to open up our wounds to the light. I know that transformation of our pain is possible, that forgiveness is a real thing and that a single positive resolution is enough to shift the trajectory of your life. The key to allowing the light into our wounds begins with a simple commitment to have the courage to listen to our deepest longing.  Real change is not driven by anything or anyone outside of us. Rather it is a call from your soul to remember who you really are. Three years ago when I began my positivity quest challenge, I knew in my heart of hearts that all that I had tried to accomplish would be meaningless if I couldn’t find and sustain a positive relationship to my life. Now I challenge you to choose from one of these five powerful starting points, each one with the power to transform life, as you know it. Choose the one that resonates most deeply and make your promise to it public. The more people who know about the shift you are intending to make, the more power it has.

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“Few delights can equal the presence of one whom we trust utterly.”  -George McDonald

This holiday season re-think your gift giving rituals by focusing on how you spend your time and attention in your most meaningful relationships. There is no gift you could purchase that will more profoundly enhance the emotional connections in your life than the gift of your focused attention, which explains why most people cannot distinguish between the experience of being deeply loved with being deeply heard. What we remember and what makes up the stories we share years later is rarely found in a box, but rather comes through the moments when we share our full presence with the people we love.

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“Eventually you will come to understand that love heals everything, and love is all there is.” -Gary Zukav

The other day I got a note from a loyal customer who shared the unfortunate story of her husband’s poorly executed penile implant that left him both significantly shorter and with erectile issues. Her request that I address some writing towards sexual healing, particularly aligned with disability issues, has stayed with me. She ended her note saying, “We have been unable to shake the anger and hopelessness and this issue has ruined their lives.”As I thought about the gravity of her experience I remembered one time early in my sex education career when one of the women attending my workshop shared a similar story. Following a problematic hysterectomy, she was unable to have the same kind of orgasms that she had regularly enjoyed throughout her life. I remember her despair also described in the same terms of ruining her life.

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“May the nourishment of the earth be yours.May the clarity of light be yours,
may the fluency of the ocean be yours, may the protection of the ancestors be yours. And so may a slow wind work these words of love around you, an invisible cloak to mind your life.”

- John O’Donohue

Losing everything you have is a reality that is hard to fathom and a fear that drives many.  In the month since Hurricane Sandy, this reality has come to tens of thousands. We all stop to pause at how incredibly fragile and inevitably fleeting the edifices of our security actually are. Natural disasters are so common now, that it is more a question of when than if. And although most people reading this can’t relate to bombs wiping out every recognizable corner of your neighborhood, this is the reality in many places on earth. It is easy to confuse our sense of self with the comforts that we build into making a home, holding a job, maintaining our health, even driving our car. Who are we when all the trappings that define us disappear?

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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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“Three things in human life are important: the first is to be kind; the second is to be kind; and the third is to be kind.”  ~Henry James

I have been thinking a lot about kindness lately because I believe it defines our capacity to show up in our life. The Buddhists teach loving kindness as a fundamental doctrine for both inner and outer peace. In fact, religious philosophy of all denominations hold kindness as central teaching to a life well lived. Most of us learn this expectation in early childhood as we are taught the mechanism of sharing and gentleness with our peers. Yet for all the many ways we have learned kindness and the true simplicity of its execution, kindness is often not our primary or innate response. Read the rest of this entry »

“The important thing is to enjoy the activity for its own sake, and to know that what matters is not the result, but the control one is acquiring over one’s attention.”
― Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

In a love business, the idea of pleasure is a primary theme and as a writer on the topic of enhancing pleasure, I have often freely exchanged the concepts of pleasure and enjoyment, as though they were one in the same.  Recently I have learned differently and now stand corrected.  Understanding  the significant difference between the fleeting experience of pleasure and the focused creation of enjoyment is the difference of being a bystander or an artist in your own life.  The confusion comes in part from our culture which is fascinated with immediate gratification and markets the fleeting experience of pleasure as happiness.  In fact, our pleasure response is brief because it comes and goes with the rise and fall of the satisfaction of our needs, both physical and perceived.  Even the best of meals only satisfies deeply until hunger strikes again and that thing you had to have rarely offers more than temporary happiness. Read the rest of this entry »

“Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them; that only creates sorrow.  Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.”   ~Lao Tzu

For as many euphemisms as there are about how life is always changing, most of us often struggle with the reality of change itself.  It is no wonder, as the skill of holding onto ourselves with nothing solid beneath us remains untested ground no matter how often we experience it.  Intuitively we know that the process of change and where it will lead is not really ours to control, so that even the big life changes we initiate often require a magnitude of surrender that we cannot anticipate.   In part this is because of what we have all suspected, our neurological wiring is geared toward consistency.  Our brains want and need stability so much that we often create it erroneously.  Recent reports demonstrate how our social and political affiliations blind us to our own inconsistencies and misattribute these inconsistencies to our opponents. Read the rest of this entry »

“Pleasure is the object, duty and the goal of all rational creatures.”  Voltaire

The experience of pleasure is how we say yes to life.  Allowing oneself the gratification of our senses is how we embody the joys of life. Think mouthwatering flavors, the first scent of summer evenings, the soft cheeks of a sleeping baby, the refrain of a beloved tune. Our human capacity to sense the world brings life into sharp focus and lessens the distraction that often skews relationship in time and place. Opening to pleasure can be as simple as focusing our attention on what we are sensing in the present moment.

Applying this simple pleasure principle to our erotic selves is a remarkable healing balm for much of our sexual anxiety and accompanying dysfunctions.  One of the founding principles of my loveology journey, was the maxim to trust your erotic impulses to your innate sensory capacity. Our sense of smell is literally the first gateway in our brains which turns on our arousal mechanism. Touch heals us by the laying of a hand on a pelvis and the feel of an oiled thigh gliding under a lover’s caress which never fails to take your breath away.   Read the rest of this entry »