“Be no longer tender. Cover me with frenzied kisses, – even as I would drench my body in the cruel torrents of the rain. Envelop me from throat to ankle in delirium intolerable….” ~Blanche Shoemaker Wagstaff

Accessing our deepest erotic selves can be as simple as tapping into the power of our own voice, exploring the range of sounds we create in the throes of intimacy and getting comfortable uttering dirty words. Silencing our sexual sounds is an odd and yet remarkably common holdover from our earliest sexual experiences that can shroud our lovemaking for decades. I am a little embarrassed to admit that I was nearing my second decade of marriage before I gave up repressing the noises that wanted to erupt out of me during sex. There is something primordial about the sounds that sex generates, and whether you are with a new partner or one that you have loved for a long time, sounding out in sex brings you to both a new level of vulnerability and intimacy.

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“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” -Margaret Mead

The deep abiding mistrust of female sexuality makes the world go round. For us in the West, we know this space as an inability to orgasm, the loss of desire and the fear of getting too close. But in the cultures that make up Africa and the Middle East this mistrust holds a razors edge over the genitalia of millions of young girls. In these cultures, just retaining the physiological capacity for pleasure makes one unclean, unmarriageable, and unable to take their place in their community. This required and brutal rite of passage, sometimes referred to as female circumcision, or more simply “cutting”, has been performed on more than 140 million women living on the planet.

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“We’re perfectly ordinary people except that we like kinky sex.” -Susan Wright, spokesperson for National Coalition for Sexual Freedom

Sexual freedom is on the rise. Just this past week, several notable Republican law makers came out in favor of the right for marriage equality regardless of gender preferences. The interesting thing about change is how after it is done, we can hardly remember how it was before. Before long, coming out will no longer refer to gender orientation and who we have sex with. According to a recent article reported in the NY Times, ‘coming out’ will increasingly be about how people choose to have sex. Thanks in part to the 65 million copies of Fifty Shades of Grey in circulation, practitioners of kinky sex are now coming out and their numbers are multiplying fast. Fetlife, a website catering to kinky persuasion has added 700,000 new members this year bringing their total membership to over 1.7 million.

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“I know that when a door closes, it can feel like all doors are closing. A rejection letter can feel like everyone will reject us. But a closed door leads to clarity. It’s really an arrow. Because we cannot go through that door, we will go somewhere else. That somewhere else is your true life.”  -Tama Kieves

Rejection might well be the source of our greatest fear and anguish and for good reason. Looking back at our tribal origins, rejection is imprinted in us as a matter of life and death.  We humans were never meant to live alone; we are herd animals. I learned again last week just how deeply this lineage of rejection runs in me when I was “un-invited” to a small business group.  Never mind that I wasn’t sold on the idea of joining this group from the beginning or even after the first meeting walked away doubting my decision to participate; still the call of rejection stung deep and left circles of reactivity around me for days.

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“When in doubt who will win, be neutral.” –Swiss Proverb

One of my husband’s most reliable responses to my often high level of emotionality is: “Can you just be neutral?” He is a psychiatrist, so he has a lot more practice at finding a neutral objective view.  Yet, even before we each chose our respective professions, he would often find his way back to center with more ease than I. Over the years, as I have learned to lean towards this middle space of witnessing reality without the storm of emotions that literally cloud my view, I have witnessed how my relationship has grown up to not only withstand conflicts, but has given each of us the room to really listen to opposing points of view.  Actively seeking a neutral perspective moves relating beyond the knee jerk reactions of right and wrong and adds real time to the challenging exchanges that make or break a relationship.

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“Human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.” -William James

Most people would probably agree that if all they needed to remember about giving and receiving love, they learned in kindergarten, they might also add the caveat that most of what they need to forget is what they learned in high school. I have noticed in my dealings with the many teenagers that I find myself around lately, through the Positivity Club I helped launch in our local high school, as well as the strained relating with my own teens, that there are a few consistent behaviors that disrupt relationships and impede emotional development that are worth forgetting. In the Valentine’s Day spirit of opening up to all the love that surrounds us, here is a short list of useless habits of the heart that will only enhance your feelings of being loveable by letting them go.

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“Judge your success by what you had to give up in order to get it.” -The Dalai Lama XIV

It is an odd and painful irony that often just as things are really coming together successfully in life, we often lose touch with the love that had inspired us to get there. We expect just the opposite. In our longings for whatever we aspire to, we believe wholeheartedly that achieving our dreams and succeeding in our plans will bring us only happiness. The reality is just the opposite. More often than not, great success and windfall opportunity doesn’t connect us more deeply to what we love doing or the people we love. Rather, it increases our stress levels and turns our heartfelt work into a need to prove something or, worse still, a fear of failure.

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“One day a monk spoke bitterly to the Buddha. All he wanted to talk about was the unbearable sorrows of the world. The Buddha remained silent while the monk talked, then a faint smile appeared on his face. He pointed to the ground below his feet and said,“On this earth I have attained awakening.” -Buddhist Mondo

It is easy to become bitter by the weight of so much unresolved sorrow in life. I feel my heart get hard and my attitude towards life turn sour sometimes when I spend too long scanning the newspaper or fixating on the CNN newscasts while at the gym. Bad news travels faster than ever and the continuous in-your-face coverage of the unceasing violence from seemingly endless human conflict and its destructive aftermath can overwhelm me to the point of withdrawal, or worse still, indifference. But my indifference doesn’t stick; over and over I am pulled back into the stories of suffering from around the world with an earnest desire to know what is happening and to find my way into being part of the solution. I know that I am not alone, struggling to find center in this pendulum swing in my relationship to suffering.

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“Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.”   -Fyodor Dostoevsky

As I read the caption “disgraced” under Lance Armstrong’s photo documenting the interview of him finally admitting to drug use throughout his notorious cycling career, I wondered if he would walk away finally relieved of the enormous burden of his deceit or in the planning stages of his next role as the repentant star. Now, after 13 years of denials and false accusations, there is no simple truth that he can share that will reckon the years of aggressive manipulation of the truth in which a single lie became an extravagant lifestyle that he forced onto everyone and everything he touched. Apologies at this late juncture feel puny and almost like adding insult to injury. What we want instead when people are finally willing to speak the truth is a true reflection on the whys; a window into the slippery slope of lies that consume us whole.

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“There is nothing to fear but fear itself.” -Franklin Roosevelt

Insecurity is a natural consequence of our mortal human experience. The most primal hardwired function of our brain is driven by a survival instinct, which is governed, to a large extent, by a negativity bias that operates without our conscious awareness. Negativity bias creates thinking mechanisms steeped in our worst fears and limits our view of the world with rigid judgments.  This natural closing, left unchecked, translates into a defensive posture that impacts our capacity for relating, especially within our most intimate relationships. Re-thinking the source and experience of safety in the world is one of the most powerful shifts of intention we can bring to our relationships to life, as well as to the people we love.

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