My best yoga teachers have always stressed that the strength of Warrior 1 is finding the balance between grounding the back leg while stretching the front forward.  In order to rest in the center we are literally holding ourselves fully in the present moment.  Finding this central alignment both lengthens and strengthens muscles in the legs, shoulders and arms, while opening up space for your heart and lungs to expand.  It is said that the full expression of this pose is “to honor the highest self” which in the best of worlds is the same reason we love each other.

It might seem an oxymoron of sorts, to use the words love and warrior in the same phase, but the truth is that for real and lasting love to flourish and thrive in life, it takes a warrior’s heart.   Practicing the Warrior 1/Virabhadrasana forces us to simultaneously rely on our strength while stretching into the limits of our flexibility.   Our stability comes from these efforts merging.  The same can be said of the work of intimacy.  Beyond the initial euphoria of falling in love, finding the reasons to keep your promises takes both the strength of belief in the basic goodness that the container of your relationship holds and the willingness to stretch your emotional boundaries into new spaces of vulnerability.

Our relationships wobble beneath us when we don’t bring both of these qualities to our ability to love.   It is easy for us to lose sight of our basic faith in ourselves and to not offer the benefit of the doubt to the people we love.   It is such a small quarter turn of vision that brings us back to this place where we fundamentally trust that we are doing the best we can and that the people who love us are doing the same.   Building this kind of trust into our relationships as basic as it seems gives you the foundation to be steady when things don’t go as planned.   People’s shortcomings and even our disappointment with our self can be contained and even create compassion for the striving and failing that is inherent in our efforts to love.

Opening our heart and even our breathing to wider spaces of vulnerability is how relationships evolve and grow.   What we are not willing to share, to disclose and express doesn’t just keep our relationship shielded from our full self, it keeps us at a distance from what is really happening inside of us.   In either case,  this defensive mechanism designed to keep us safe, often without our recognition, accomplishes the reverse by cutting us off from the heart connection that we long for in love.

So next time you rest into Warrior 1, consider all the spaces that are opening and becoming stronger in your body, preparing you to become a warrior of love, which is the truest battle we have the honor of fighting for in this life.

“The hunger to belong is not merely a desire to be attached to something. It is rather sensing that great transformation and discovery become possible when belonging is sheltered and true.” 

-John O’Donahue

I have been working on my capacity for receiving for some time. Teaching myself the ways of opening to love and affection, learning how to sense the feel of love in my body and noticing how it lasts or dissipates with my attention. The ability to receive manifests itself in everything from our capacity for sexual pleasure to our sense of financial security. It also lives in the endless human transactions that make up our days, not only within our most intimate relationships but in the ways we meet strangers, participate in groups large and small and generally experience belonging and isolation in our lives.

The need to belong is hardwired into our neural networks as a survival mechanism, being forsaken by the tribe meant certain death. Although the high degree of independent functioning that characterizes our relationships belies this ancestry, the feeling of being excluded still ignites deep emotional wounds of shame and unworthiness. I have known the truth of this trauma since early childhood, as our primary imprinting of belonging happens within our families. When the early give and take of family life is skewed toward isolation, we improvise to find connection as young children. The anxiety responses that form to protect us create patterns of interactions that are so deeply ingrained; one could convincingly argue that there is little separation between the pattern and the person.

Usually, these patterns carry both costs and benefits. I have grown into an inspirational teacher and leader, unafraid of teaching to large groups, yet stubbornly unable to relax into being a quiet participant. Some odd yet persistent linking of being quiet and unsafely invisible is so deeply enmeshed in my neurology, that most group participation triggers such high levels of anxiety that my default leading takes over before I recognize what happens. While being a leader in some situations is a gift, in others it is alienating for everyone. This anxiety that I have come to know as myself does not allow me to receive anything around me. My knee jerk patterned reaction to fill the space and ease my anxiety prevents me from ever feeling the deep relief that happens in belonging to community.

Thanks to a dear friend’s compassionate insights, I was able for the first time to witness this lifelong pattern as something distinct from who I am and actually stay with the shame and anxiety that compels my behavior. As I have always said, our most painful realities only demand our attention to find their healing resolution. Holding the moments we feel like we belong beside our times of isolation speak volumes about our ability to receive the love that is always available, just by sharing our full presence, even with strangers.  I feel like I have cracked a window on the persistent and painful isolation that I have long accepted as part of being who I am. I am finally able to witness a new possibility of community that has long eluded me. As Maya Angelou famously said, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

Dealing with my long standing anxiety about belonging may be as simple as focusing on how I most want to be remembered by others- by how they felt when I was near them.

“It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.” - E.E. Cummings

I have been making love with the same man for some thirty years, and although I can honestly say it has gotten amazingly and increasingly better over the decades, it is important to add that this improvement was in direct proportion to the work and willingness we brought to growing up sexually. To be fair and honest, my earliest memories of sex hold as much frustration as they did passion. I longed for the romantic, sexual combustion that would not only fill me up, but also unite me with my partner/ However, without any real skills to get there, much of our sexuality became an exercise in approach- avoidance.

Most of us don’t know much about sex when we first start doing it. If we are lucky we have correct names for body parts and, these days, have probably seen enough free porn online to have an idea about the fiction of sex, but the actual vulnerable exchange of our sexual selves remains shrouded in mystery, or worse still, shame and embarrassment. Even though we may still reminisce about youthful sexual exchanges that literally took our breath away, though we may long for the passion of ripping clothes away, and desire the carnal hunger that gave us no choice but to submit to the will of our sexual body, we forget how often the magic imploded.

We repress the memories of when someone came too quickly or someone else’s passion dried up with not enough lubrication and burning genital tissue. We did not know why it worked when it did or how to make it work again. Often times, just to approach our sexuality, we relied on substances to reduce our inhibition that also inhibited our ability to remember and learn. Our sexual immaturity made us pout, blame each other and wait angrily in another room for the other to apologize. Initiating sex and keeping score about who said “no” more often took us far from the connection we both longed for. Moving toward our sex life felt risky even with the random good orgasms we happened upon on this bumpy path.

We were green not only with each other, but even more within our own sexuality. Growing up sexually happened in my marriage as we stopped holding each other responsible for both generating and fulfilling our sexual desires. When I stopped expecting my mate to make me feel sexy and committed to finding the sexy place in myself, I stopped saying no when the conditions weren’t like the perfect ones I held in my imagination. As I became more willing to meet him in the mystery of what might happen, he became more willing to, as well. Even more important, was when I began learning about the many ways that I didn’t know about my own sexuality. As I found the erotic spots that sang for me and what kinds of touch made me light up, I had a language to share how I wanted to be touched. As I took responsibility for the sexual discoveries that were mine to make, I had the epiphany about how much more successful penetration was after an external clitoral orgasm.

This practice also helped me get over the shame of touching myself in front of my partner.  Getting over the fears about saying what I liked, asking for what I wanted inspired the same in him. A new freedom was breathed into the narrow routine of sexual behaviors that we limited ourselves to. Even though we were relying on sex positions and practices that worked, our inability to go beyond them made our sexual times predictable and rote. This is how people unwittingly get stuck in sexual ruts- they limit themselves to a few safe moves and avoid expanding their repertoire out of their comfort zone.

These immature ways of dealing with our sexuality and the various mythologies that pervade about passionate sex that overwhelmed us in our youth persists for many people late into adulthood. We continue to resist the idea that we have to take responsibility for tapping into our sexual desire and that someone else does not have the magic to make us feel sexy. We delude ourselves into thinking that real love is supposed to feel like falling in love all the time. Not only couldn’t we physically sustain the intense out-of-our minds euphoria of early biological attraction, but it distracts from the more mature forms of loving. Discovering our capacity of arousal and finding a safe haven to comfortably push our boundaries is how sex evolves into the amazing and transformative relationship glue that it is. It is also the path to finding out who you really are.

“The only way that we can live is if we grow. The only way that we can grow is if we change. The only way that we can change is if we learn. The only way we can learn is if we are exposed. And the only way that we can become exposed is if we throw ourselves out into the open. Do it. Throw yourself.”  -C. Joybell

I am coming to the end of an era in my life as my youngest daughter celebrates her 15^th birthday this week.  Mothering my four children has been my primary occupation for the last half of my life and now, as I near the end of this growth cycle, I am coming to see what has yet to grow in me. Somehow as I was having all these babies I never realized how old I would become when the job was done.  I remember a few random moments pushing a swing, when I would calculate how old I would be when this last little girl would graduate from high school, but then the idea of this time so far in the future felt like fiction.  Imagining my two–year-old at fifteen was as unimaginable to me as my then 37-year-old self turning 52.

There is little growth that we participate in life that compares with the facilitating the remarkable development of a baby into a  young adult. Nothing marks time more accurately or vividly than the physiological, emotional and mental development of children. In some weird way, as the parent witness, I never really saw my own development quite as clearly. This may explain why seeing my own reflection still catches me off guard. Especially when I am standing next to my fifteen-year-old daughter looking in the mirror her metamorphosis from child to young woman is less startling than witnessing my own face transforming into the old woman I will become.  How has my own growth not been recorded internally, the way it has for my children? In my mind’s eye, I am still that young mother pushing a toddler on a swing.

James Hillman refers to this phenomenon when he talks about how it takes your whole life to grow into the face and to actualize the person you become. On one level, it is easy to lose track of our own growing up while swept up in the process of raising our next generation, and yet, this neglect is not always benign. Sometimes it only shows up in the deepening lines on our faces, but not uncommonly it can also lock us into developmental ruts that impact our ability to keep adapting to the continuous cycles of change within our intimate relationships. This explains the often shadowy breaks that occur between growing teens and parents, or even the outgrowing of lovers that we accept as inevitable. Growing old with someone is no less a work of art than growing a child through their teen years, it’s just that the gifts are more interior. You have to look inside to see them. When it works, they are reflections of sustained youth, shining out of us through our eyes and the way we learn to listen so that others feel heard.

For me, what is most challenging about facing the next stage of growth is partly that it is a continual exercise of letting go. Not only the bittersweet release of my kids as they make their way into their own lives, but also of the way I lean towards acceptance of the new face I see looking back at me. Learning how to live with myself and in partnership without the kids at this stage of life is a letting go of all the ways that life isn’t exactly what I expected. It is learning to embrace reality exactly as it is and respecting our place in the life cycle without longing or regret.

 “Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.” -Carl Gustav Jung

It is that time of year again, when the garden performs its ritual magic of re-creating itself anew. Regardless of the challenging and changeable winter weather conditions, the perennials in the garden re-emerge each spring, a blooming demonstration of what it means to weather the storms of life. Perennials for me are the defining feature of an evolving garden, because we trust them year after year to sustain the shape of our garden. Finding the source of perennial sustenance in our selves is how we shape our own evolution. For me, after years of searching outside of myself, I am finally waking up to the singular truth of life that has been articulated by way smarter people than me- that our world is created from the inside out.

Our thoughts do truly make the world, and they are composed of both our capacity for attention and for relationship- mostly to our own experience. I have spent most of the first half of my life working to make the external conditions conform to the internal picture of how I thought it should look. It trained me well in resisting how it was and often this externally driven reality left me coming up short, unable to see the goodness and abundance in and around me. As much as I claimed to be an original thinker, identifying as an inventor or entrepreneur of sorts, in the most deeply affecting way, I was conforming to the path cut out by our culture of seeing myself through the eyes of others. I bought into the system, believing as we all do, that once I got to this revenue goal… won this award… achieved this … or owned that…. Then I would feel fulfilled, content, and successful. This is not how it works.

Instead, it is in tuning into and sensing our body’s wisdom and entraining in listening for the quietest voices inside, where life truly manifests. In fact recent scientific research confirms that we have what has been referred to as an enteric brain, which is a vast set of neurons in our core that has the same capacity to perceive, think, learn and decide as our cranial brain. Our hunches and intuitions are fueled by this brain and can inform our thinking capacity and infuse our sense of reality with a grounded, heart centric view of who we are and what is possible for us.   Because we are so dominated by our cerebral brain, learning to sense and listen for our enteric wisdom takes focused practice. Meditation is an open door to this perennial sustenance.

Sometimes when my kids, who are mostly young adults now are completely overwhelmed with the vast demands of growing up and bereft of themselves they will be open to me guiding them in a meditation into their center. (I actually made a CD of these meditations). As I guide them to feel their breath, the weight of their body, relaxing the belly, the jaw, the forehead, I take them on a journey to a pool of golden light behind their hearts. They will attest to the fact that when we practice quieting and listening on the back side of our hearts, there are voices of younger versions of ourselves, or teachers waiting there for our attention. We truly do have the answers we are looking for outside of us, waiting for us to just turn our attention inside. The more you practice thinking with your enteric brain, the more powerful your skills at sensing will become.  Soon gratitude is not just a word that recalls a mental state, but rather a physical sensation of opening in your thoracic vertebrae. Even fears and anger change shape under the gaze of your sensing intelligence.

I have entirely given up the idea that I have any control over the world around me, and as soon as I get worked up and over wrought about the many spinning balls in my universe feeling out of control, I go to a place where I can get quiet. I stop thinking about what to do and turn on my sensing brain. Because I do it so often now, I can fall deep into the pool of my heart in moments and like magic, the truth of what is going on around me is revealed. Mostly it is just the peace of letting things be what they are, but when you sprinkle that with the feeling gratitude of this very moment, the outside circumstances conform to the truth of your deepest abiding intelligence.

“The soul of sweet delight can never be defiled.”  -William Blake

We all have a sexual soul, or more accurately, a piece of our soul is reflected deeply in our sexuality. This sexual space that inhabits the deepest recesses of our consciousness is one of the most meaningful ways that we know ourselves, and, as the Bible suggests, is truly a garden.  Yet, the metaphor of our sexuality as a garden is, in fact, way more mysterious than the simple judgments attached to taking a bite of an apple. Heeding the inner calls to explore and attend your unique garden of sexual delights is a direct route to self-discovery, self-expression and arguably, the essence of our soul’s ability to keep our life pro-creatively inspired.

Each of our senses as William Blake suggests are windows to the soul, as well as opportunities to awaken libido. Whether it is the scent of a freshly opened peony, or the velvet brush of lambs ear on the cheek, our senses offer us visceral gateways to experiencing the pleasures of the body.  What kind of garden does your sexual soul inhabit? This is a worthy metaphor to entertain, because it will offer clear indications of your comfort level and curiosity about your sexual self.   Are you drawn to the highly manicured gardens often surrounding public buildings, or consider the mazes of sharp shrubbery that surround palace walls? Or perhaps your garden is a field of wild flowers with no clear borders except a meandering river. For many of us, the gardens we keep in our backyards offer meaningful clues into our deeper relationship we keep within the garden of our sexuality.

The language of our sexual gardens is fantasy. This is how the mind weaves a texture that incorporates the many sensory windows of the body into a wholeness that either invites us deeper into or shuts us out of our capacity for orgasmic pleasure. This is the terrain of our inner lives that nourishes our capacity for risk, passion and connects us most intensely to our life force. When we are erotically shut down and the language of our fantasies is met with repression, fear and shame, we are left only with the ability to judge sexuality – which not only distances us from the people we want to be most intimate with, but more tragically with our own ability to feel. Relationships that hit a dead end emotionally have also likely been stalled in that space physically. There is no shutting off the sexual soul without draining our joy for life.

Curiosity and wonder are the two necessary companions for a walk into our wilds. Listening for the language of your sexual fantasies requires only your full attention. Just as in the work of tending a garden- we learn to notice the relationships between things, not limiting our focus to our preferences because as any experienced gardener will tell you, to create a thriving ecosystem, it is not about having our way, it is about seeing how it is. This is the truth about your sexual fantasy life as well. Trust that its brilliance has taken all of the most erotically charged sensations your body has recorded over time and turned them into a reliable invitation to your own deepest desires. Water the garden of your sexual soul with your attention, feed the soil of your desires with curiosity and allow the winds of your mind to pollinate the mystery freely.  Voila, the path to orgasm is organic.

“You must weed your mind as you would weed your garden.” ~Terri Guillemets

I learned about weeds before I learned anything about gardens.  For my 40^th birthday my husband built me a beautiful, secure deer fence and I was told to use straw to augment and lighten the heavy clay soil.   The straw turned out to be hay and seeded itself heartily throughout the space.   I was overwhelmed with weeds that I had inadvertently planted.   Later, after the hay crop was removed, as a novice gardener, I planted several varieties of plants that I was told had “magical” properties.  Although I didn’t know them as weeds, they infiltrated throughout the flowers and vegetable beds with their sticky seed pods.  For many years, weeding and gardening were synonymous.   Removing the weeds was the prerequisite to creating the space to grow the garden I had envisioned.   It also became a worthy metaphor for working on my marriage.

Even after 29 years of living with the same man, I still need to do the work of weeding out the thoughts that pull me away from experiencing my marriage as it is.   As in my gardening, often the worst case of weeds comes from an error in judgment I make within.  In fact, over the years the single most threatening conflict to the stability of my marriage has been an inner one, which often arises when I have made some leap in my own development.  Ironically, it is the moments when I have come through some challenge with my voice in tact and I feel really sure of myself, when the judgments about what my relationship isn’t most often overtake my thinking.   This voice is familiar and compelling, resounding in my head like the truth with a capital “T”.   Not unlike some of the weeds I have planted, these thoughts pollinate quickly and completely alter the landscape in what seems like days.

Often before I know it has even happened, my perspective on my relationship is completely altered and the smallest encounters between my husband and I become triggers, confirming my doubts about him and fueling my sense of entitlement about how I should be loved.  I am unable to witness how my thoughts on what my husband doesn’t provide overshadows all that he does.  I am unaware of the ways that I hurt him and the marriage that I have worked so hard to build.    This inner weed dominated the early years of my marriage, almost to its demise.  I spent so much time comparing what was to what I though it should be that, not only could I never appreciate the ways that my husband was giving to me, I could never trust the ways that my marriage truly worked.

I know I am not alone, wrestling with this deep inner conflict of comparing what we want and what is, which inevitably grows between most partners over the course of their relationship.   Years ago as I worked to right my perspective of the relationship I was in, I had to make myself turn my head from the thoughts that made my relationship unworthy.   Pulling weeds in the garden was a worthwhile activity at that time as I came to realize that the garden’s failings were also it’s beauty.

Too many relationships end because they cannot perceive and accept the ways that love is coming to them.   As I learned to expand my sensing of what love feels like to include the ways that my husband’s silent presence didn’t leave me alone but actually held me, I got closer to  experiencing my real relationship, not the one I longed for in my imagination. This is the natural maturing process that real love demands, this continual vigilance of being present to what is.

Standing in my garden, partially weeded, plants needing pruning or more fertilizer, these are the acts that make a garden an ecosystem of its own design.   In my marriage,  this growing acceptance of what there was between us, rather than what was missing translated into an appreciation for my husband that he could feel.  In turn he became more responsive.  As my skills of holding what was both loveable and challenging about him and our relationship side by side grew, so did my understanding that relationships do not exist to meet our needs, a perspective that our very wise marriage counselors  had once tried to teach us.

Bob, our therapist used to refer to this as grown up love, this holding of the difficult with the loved is a way to see the relationship as its own ecosystem.   As such, it became easy to recognize that the needs of the relationship are different from and more important than the needs of either partner.   Keeping the relationship safe was the job of both partners, which meant not only accepting the ways each person showed up, but also taking responsibility for meeting our own emotional needs.  While it isn’t unreasonable for me to want to feel beautiful or interesting in my marriage, it is unfair to everyone and to the relationship itself to have those feelings become a measure of our marriage.

Lasting relationships are not a stroke of luck, they are the collective efforts of  vigilantly weeding your own thinking to stay with the relationship you have, not the one that lives in your mind.  I married in the spring so that I would always be reminded of new life that is always at hand when you have the clarity to look for the good in what you are living.   Pull some weeds, it will be good for your relationship.

“The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your belief in injustice and tragedy. What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the Master calls the butterfly.”

I recently learned that the transformation of the caterpillar to a butterfly isn’t just about the effort of spinning their cocoon. Once inside, the caterpillar literally liquefies in its metamorphosis to its adult form as a butterfly, which, while short lived, optimizes the astonishing feat of beauty and freedom that most all living creatures aspire towards.  In humans, I would argue based on recent life events, the transformation to our fully free and beautiful selves is no less epic. Yet, instead of spinning a cocoon of silk, we transform through forgiveness, through our courage to feel and dismantle the stories that have defined us and remarkably re-make our cellular memory.

Married to my psychiatrist husband for 29 years this month, I have heard hundreds of stories of traumatic healing crises that are triggered by anything and everything from the scent of a certain pie, a storm at a particular time of year, a face that resembles someone else or most commonly, a re-occurring physical injury. I had never experienced that kind of spontaneous traumatic memory until recently when a pain that began in my back, behind my heart, during a recent weeklong visit with my father steadily moved up into my neck and worsened with every chiropractic adjustment.  The pain became so intense, persistent and resistant to every effort to heal that it occupied my full attention and took constant vigilance not to slip into desperate fear. In these moments when living in a body is only pain, I learned again how compassion grows in us, for those whose lives are dominated by illness and injury that has no relief. The entire space of our mental universe is owned by the density of pain in our body.

On my third visit to the doctor he told me that sometimes when treatments go awry and the body’s response intensifies with a splintering protection, (and by this time, my neck muscles were like steel cords affording me zero mobility from side to side) there is often an emotional component involved. He reminded me of the offhand comment I had made about a challenging trip with my father on my first visit:“It’s something to think about…” he said as he cradled my head seeking some space between skull and vertebrae. Tears welled up in my eyes as I lay there trying to breathe, praying for relief.

This most recent visit with my father was planned to celebrate his 80^th birthday. My family flew to escort him on a cruise that he said he always wanted to do. Unlike many aging people I have heard of, my father’s anger and bitterness has encased him. He has lost all of his bulk but none of his bile and there is nothing softening in his ability to relate. His mean-spirited commentary was still as sharp as his mind, although he could hardly make it into a wheel chair. It was a confounding experience of compassion and disgust that I wrestled with pushing him through the Carnival Ecstasy.

I had gone on this trip with prayerful aspirations of forgiveness. I wanted release of the anger, shame and resentment that my father provoked in me. Each day I leaned toward letting go of my attachments and my kids applauded my self control, as this time there were no retaliatory outbursts to his disrespectful remarks directed at everyone. I also found no release. Quietly, I seethed and felt like a failure in trying to forgive, except for a few moments on the Serenity deck when I had enough to drink and distance to see him compassionately. My husband consoled me with the truth that forgiveness comes into us in moments.

Yet, as I walked out of the doctor’s office, the pain in my neck even more acute by the gentle opening, the memory of my father’s hands around my neck, choking me against the dining room wall when I was fourteen years old, came back in full color. I had said something- called him a failure or a loser and something in him snapped. His violence towards me was persistent but moderated throughout my childhood. But this injury on top of my mother’s coarse departure, the door closing behind her comment of never loving him was too much. He could have killed me and that moment has been living in my 1^st cervical vertebrae for 36 years.  I couldn’t stop the sobs; the memories were as vivid as if they were yesterday. Gratefully, I was held and guarded by the family that I had the courage to create over my adult life. There was no one to save me back then, but now there was.

I had asked for this memory; I had prayed for release. I just didn’t know that I would have to go through the fire to get there. This I think is the liquefying of forgiveness. When we are finally strong enough to feel the abuses we endured, then we can forgive. We can forgive ourselves for allowing ourselves to be mistreated, for the mistreatment we have passed along in our own life.  Sometimes it takes half our life to grow up enough to witness and protect the child we were.   But there is no getting away from it. The body is a living record and life will offer up continuous triggers to get us to release if we are willing, if we are seeking forgiveness.

Monarch butterflies require three generations of caterpillars to liquefy to make the astounding journey half way around the world every year. For us humans it takes only one lifetime to end the suffering that preceded us for generations. It takes the courage and willingness to walk through the fire and liquefy our painful past. It is easy to medicate away or ignore the triggers.  Consider how many caterpillars never get into their cocoon. I am grateful for this pain, for the courage to feel my own pain and to understand that forgiveness, like love is not for someone out there, it is an internal job of making peace with the entirety of who you are. Although I am still not at 100%, my neck muscles are returning to functional and I am excited to open up the space in my 1^st cervical and in my heart to make room for the person I have been aspiring to become.  I know this; our ability to sustain loving relationships depends on this transformation, just as the courage of the caterpillar keeps the butterfly amazingly crossing thousands of miles of ocean.

Love your Body. 

Our sex life lives within our physical body, so how you feel about and treat your body is a direct reflection of the respect you hold for your sex life.  For many of us this must start with a decision to stop comparing your body to the myriad  of photo shopped images of models that even models don’t look like. Don’t sacrifice your access to pleasure in the patently false belief that sexual satisfaction will find you when you are more fit or more beautiful…  Actually, studies have shown the reverse relationship to be true: opening yourself up to more sexual pleasure will make you recognize the beauty in your body as it is and inspire you to treat it better.  For me, the dictum that “bodies are designed for motion” is a good place to start.  Get moving more often and find ways that offer you the experience of both building strength and discovering flexibility, both of which are critical for more pleasurable and long lasting intimacy.  Dedicate yourself to finding ways to live more deeply in your body, which is easy when you don’t take your five sense for granted.  Exploring the range of scent, taste and touch that surrounds us but we often overlook by being overly focused on visual and auditory stimulus will ground and nourish the richness of living in your body.  Resolve to treat your body with a little more attention and  loving kindness  and it will reward you by revealing its capacity for pleasure- sexual and otherwise.

Be Playful.

In childhood, no one had to teach you how to play.  Even the most serious street games of capture the flag were won with just your natural curiosity and eagerness to play. Having fun was second nature and treating your quest for more satisfying sex with this same spirit can help free your imagination (ie. Read fantasy life) to silence the external voices, whether they be the experts who are supposed to know or the insidious cultural messages of shame and fear surrounding sexuality. The key to rekindling this kind of playful spirit is to recall how our youthful spontaneity came riding on the tails of the youthful abandon and freedom that came from not worrying about how we were being seen. Playfulness by definition excludes issues of right and wrong. Playing fair mattered, but this we could spot a mile away. Sexually speaking being able to play fair and with abandon is the perfect equation where we can blossom into our hidden erotic selves.  Playfulness in bed is where we can have fun pushing the edges of our comfort zone and know that no matter how it comes out, we will laugh and build trust in our ability to be in the game.

Talk about Sex

For most people, talking about sex is the most taboo topic to discuss.  This overbearing silence not only keeps us from creating the sex lives we want, but worse still, keeps us from maturing into our erotic selves.  Partly we don’t talk about sex because we are frightened by what we don’t know and partly we are afraid of what we do know.  Consequently, it is more common than not to retreat and to limit our sexual vocabulary to the lowest levels of discomfort.  Tragically what is lost is the opportunity to both, learn who we are as a sexual being, and who we could be as a sexual couple.  Here are a couple of topics that you could take turns sharing about that will open your sex life in ways that will amaze you:  talk about your desires, tell your partner what you really want to do, share a recurring fantasy, even if you would never want to do in real life.  As you begin to broaden your sexual vocabulary, make sure you can distinguish between sexual education and entertainment.  There is a wide gap between some fun ideas you can gather from sexual entertainment videos or magazines and the knowledge base and expertise of a qualified sex educator, counselor or therapist.  There are no shortage of resources to grow your ability to have a sexual conversation with someone you love.  Taking the leap to create a sexual conversation will open up your capacity for pleasure and enhance the trust in your connection.

This season give the back to school idea a revitalizing and healing twist by focusing on rethinking your sex life.  This month we will offer all kinds of new and inspiring ways to make love making  a transformative force  in your life.

“Conservatives say teaching sex education in the public schools will promote promiscuity.  With our education system?  If we promote promiscuity the same way we promote math or science, they’ve got nothing to worry about.”  ~Beverly Mickins

Most of what matters and gets better in life happens through education; yet remarkably, when it comes to sex, many people were not only deprived of sexual education in their youth, but have carried the ignorance is bliss thing way too long into adulthood.  In fact, when it comes to cultivating and sustaining an erotic life, persisting in not knowing may well be the kiss of death.  Usually what we don’t know about is shrouded with our fear, which can easily turn sexual encounters into regretful decisions with risky consequences. Consequently, three of the most powerful predictors of an evolving and passionate erotic life include cultivating a natural curiosity about your sexual self, opening up to the vast expanse of sexual experiences that live inside of you and discerning true sex education from sexual entertainment.

Curiosity is curative; a natural and beguiling capacity that defines our humanity through its urge to understand, to explore and to go beyond our own limits. As the mother of four, I witnessed over and over how little I actually taught my kids, but rather how much of their education was about me keeping them safe to explore their curious wanderings. When it comes to sex, our curiosity to one of the most essential and mysterious aspects of our personhood was stunted, shamed and through religious dogma or family culture taken away. The opposite of curiosity is judgment, which explains why so much sexual behavior that we don’t understand is not really questioned as much as it is judged. It also explains how so many people get to a place where they deeply believe that there is only one way to have sex- the way they know, which is a guaranteed path to sexual disappointment.

Education, erotic and otherwise, is only possible for a mind that is open. Being open to learning about the countless ways there are to express and experience your sexuality is a creative act, perhaps one of the most procreative aspects of living in a human body. This does not mean that you give up your values or relinquish all your boundaries to have better sex, but it does mean that the view gets more expansive. Creativity is another rung on the ladder of curiosity and it is the opposite of being narrow-minded. Making something new out of what is in front of you when it comes to our sexuality can be as simple as paying closer attention and being more present.  These practices don’t apply only to your sexuality and in fact the more you begin to employ wonder and expansive thinking to what you eat, what you wear, and who you spend time with, the more that your sexual life will bloom alongside the rest of your life. Too often, we sequester our sexual life as something unique and distinct from the rest of who we are. Our sexuality is a mirror into the way we live. Being more creative and open minded about your entire day will change what happens in your bedroom.

Using sexual entertainment as a guide for a better sex life is like eating junk food as a primary source of nutrition. A little sex entertainment can be fun, like the occasional hit of junk food, but it isn’t education or nutrition. Sex entertainment can add a little spice to a sex life that is already open and curious, but it is not curative when you are stuck in a place of judgment and fear.   There are so many incredible resources for real sex education in video, books, virtual and live therapy and counseling that there is no excuse not to seek out real help. Some of the most memorable and important moments of my life happened in a therapist’s office, in part because when I got there, I was truly curious and interested in learning how to think differently so my mind was totally open. Even in the most distressing moments of recognizing how we have made our own boxes that limit our life experience, there is the light of education that cuts away at what has kept us from our best life, our best self.

Learning about our passionate and erotic impulses is a curative, maturing and freeing education that will not only bring more pleasure and aliveness to your nights, but will trade the limits of your judgments for the light of curiosity through your days.