“The supreme happiness in life is the conviction that we are loved – loved for ourselves or rather, loved in spite of ourselves” -Victor Hugo

Serious scientific inquiry has proven this quote to be true. By all measures of health and well being, the single most significant predictor of life time happiness and longevity is being involved in an intimate and loving relationship.  It is true across seventeen cultures and in longitudinal studies of historic events that the people who fared the best even through traumas like war and the Great Depression were the people in stable partnerships and families.

Yet even with all this evidence of the power of loving bonds, we are caught in a culture that throws away relationships as though they were used up convenience foods. What is the deal? Are some people just lucky in love?  Some of it may be luck. If you grew up as a wanted and beloved child of someone then the chances are good that a positive and secure romantic style is on your side. If you didn’t have these advantages then chances are you fall into the avoidant or anxious romantic styles. All of these profiles or personality traits are linked to a child’s ability to attach early in life. New research suggests that these early childhood patterns go a long way in explaining people’s life long struggles with relationships.

Read the rest of this entry »

The expo closes down and in minutes, the scenes of so many natural product companies become crated and ready to ship to the next business conference. Three days of meeting new people and greeting old friends goes by in a blur, our senses are overloaded with new tastes and smells, and we are caught continuously in conversations with fuzzy lines between important product education and perfect marketing pitches. Every now and again we connect, truly, deeply and without question with someone we have known briefly or someone we really needed to meet.

Finding those connections is the gift of our work. They make all the follow up calls meaningful and make sense of the drive to close the sale. We realize in these moments that the goal of the work is more than the bottom line results, and/or that the bottom line results are often the fruit of the real connections that we make. So many people have now tried our Good Clean Love products and been inspired by our sustainable love newsletters, that I felt more at home in this community than ever before.

Read the rest of this entry »

Flying out of New Orleans, I am seated next to a gynecologist that I didn’t meet at the ACOG yearly meeting. I share my story about love products and my work about making love sustainable. He shares his story about how limited his time with each patient is and how awkward it is to discuss sexual intimacy. We talk about how little education and language we are given in our childhood and youth to understand our sexual nature and honor this part of ourselves. We even talk about masturbation and its dirty history of torture and shame and how difficult it is for so many women to touch themselves or in turn, to allow themselves to feel pleasure when someone else does. We talk about how important it is to honor your partnership as the center of your family and not to let your children’s needs overtake your marriage. He shares the pain of the early divorce he lived through in medical school. I share how much I struggled in my own marriage while my husband was in medical school. We talk about the incredibly high statistics of failed marriages in medicine- and then in life in general. I share my dreams of making a chair of loveology at a university. We have a real conversation.

Read the rest of this entry »

“The greatest mistake in the treatment of diseases is that there are physicians for the body and physicians for the soul, although the two cannot be separated.” – Plato

Our breasts cover our heart. If you have ever nursed a baby, it is clear that our breasts are not there for adornment, they are a primary organ of nurturance and sustaining life. They are enervated directly to our sexual center, one of our primary sensory organs to awakening libido. Their attraction, often confused with size or shape, is truly about how they connect us to our heart and the pieces of life that are most life affirming.

The rate of illness in this region of our body is mind boggling. Breast cancer affects one in eight women everyday. Heart disease kills one in four women. Just last spring, when I was called back to re-image a lump in my own breast, waiting in the hospital gown for a “better view” of what was happening in my breast, the truth of these numbers hit home. Any of us can become part of these statistics at any moment. And I knew, sitting there, that for the one woman out of eight who gets the unfortunate response of cancer, everything in her world and relationships shifts at that moment.

Read the rest of this entry »

‘Who we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we love.’

Aristotle once wrote, ‘What a society honors will be cultivated.’ How fortunate we all are to finally have the value of love and commitment raised into the embodiment of our leadership. The photos of the new president and his wife sweeping the dance floor at the inaugural ball with only eyes for each other sent a message into the hearts of all of us. Love matters, and in fact was probably one of the single most significant factors in the success of our most unlikely of presidents. Certainly President Obama is brilliant, but he has also been brilliantly loved.

Read the rest of this entry »

The heart is perhaps the only muscle in our body that is stronger when it is soft. Firmness, strength and the ability to harden are key to core vitality throughout most of the body including our sexual organs. Hardening our heart whether it is in response to a political reality or a difficult relationship turns us into our own personal brand of fundamentalist. It is a slippery slope from the tightening in the chest to a self righteous stance about how the world should be. It happens even before we see it happening.

If our language is an extension of our soul, then how we talk about things reflects our ability to feel and know them. Rigid positions accommodate a narrowing of our language and support a limited view of the other side. It can be painful to let in the depth and nuance that allows other people act irrationally, even seemingly against their own self interest. This is another disadvantage of relating to the world with a hardened heart, it is hard to tell when you are winning, because both sides lose something when the relationship is stuck in polar positions.

Read the rest of this entry »

It seems incredulous to me that I am grieving a goldfish. My past experiences of gold fish were always short lived and I warned my young daughter that her new fish probably wouldn’t last a week. But as week after week and month after month went by, she loved to tease me about Bubble’s longevity. A year into his tenure on the kitchen counter, we gave him some little frog friends, who he never took to and who didn’t nearly match his longevity. Watching him circle his little world, I often contemplated life in a fishbowl, but as he would always come to the side of the bowl I was standing near with his fish pouting looks, I often wondered who was watching who. Bubbles’ life was a long one in fish time; I was informed by pet store experts as I searched for a cure to his life ending illness. It was his time.

Animal friends live on a different time line than we humans. They teach us about the pureness of presence and their love for us is immediate and unconditional. We need them at least as much as they need us and not just for their companionship, but for the chance they give us, in their brief intervals on earth to let go. Their departures whether premature or timely given their size and breed are some of the most gut wrenching good byes that we have the opportunity to grieve. It is easy to love animals; they see the best in us and are devoted in their distinct and primitive ways. If you are lucky, you get to keep your own animal heaven in your heart which can call forth smiles and tears easily.

Read the rest of this entry »

“Misdirected life force is the activity in the disease process.” -Kabbalah

My husband is a man of very few words but this is what he said to me when I told him that sometimes I don’t know what I am fighting for in my life. Often when I return home from time away, the reentry is full of rebellion. The multiple demands of a complex family life feels like an intrusion rather than the life that I chose. Sometimes I can slide so deep into the rejection of these demands of marriage and children that the outcome of the story I am envisioning becomes unrecognizable. Spinning an internal story that blames your relationship repeatedly for some personal unresolved issue, or even for the frustrations and transitions that arise from aging will create a failed relationship.

Read the rest of this entry »

I read this survey that was included in the Ladies Home Journal the other day asking a wide variety of questions about intimacy and relationships. I was in the doctor�s office with my two teenagers and was sharing the results of the survey with them. The question that still stays with me and shocked them as much as me was �If you had to choose between conversation and sex with your guy for a month what would you give up?� Can you believe a whopping 80% would give up sex?

Read the rest of this entry »

Censorship is defined in the dictionary as an official with the power to examine movies, books, television programming and to remove or prohibit anything considered obscene, politically objectionable, etc.  There is some general agreement about what constitutes sexual obscenity and objectionable sexual content.  I have in the course of my work been faced with situations and people who have very different views of appropriate sexuality. I have had conversations about issues like censorship with these same people and listened openly to their fight to have their content not be banned or even made illegal, which the government has threatened.

Read the rest of this entry »