“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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 “Forgiveness is the final form of love.” –Reinhold Niebuhr

Not long ago at a conference, a woman I was sitting with was saying how happy she is to have no contact with her children. The next day, another woman was describing what a relief it was to no longer communicate with her mother. These comments are not unusual. In fact, according to Dr. Josh Coleman, author of When Parents Hurt, the phenomenon of complete dissolution of relating is increasingly common. As a psychotherapist he has counseled people on both sides, but acknowledges that regardless of what side you are on, the termination of the parent-child bond is a seminal one and more difficult than many anticipate.

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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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“Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.” -Carl Jung

It was a curious time a few weeks ago as I moved between the Good Vibrations Sex Summit in the heart of downtown San Francisco to the Science and Non-Duality conference in Marin County. Crossing back and forth over the Golden Gate Bridge, and many moments since, has helped me to reconcile the sexual state of the physical world with the new scientific ground being broken by quantum physicists. Good Vibrations is a beacon of light in the world of human sexuality, standing up for the rights of sexual education and encouraging the exploration of sexual pleasure as a human right. It was more colorful than you could probably imagine. It was Friday night at the Castro theater, where they hosted the International Erotic Short film festival. Many of their guests, as well as the film’s narrators (San Francisco drag queens and Carol Queen), were in sexy Halloween costumes along.

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“We are people who need love, because love is the soul’s life, love is simply creation’s greatest joy.”  -Hafiz

All the great spiritual teachings are founded on love. For thousands of years, the mystics have been teaching the truth of our deep connection to this conscious universe, which is the source of all love and often called God.  Quantum physics has demonstrated the truth of these ancient teachings not only through the interconnection of all living things as energy, but even more deeply in the mirroring of space and time within each of us. It turns out that the vast expanses of energy, of which reality is constructed, exist both in the cosmos and the trillions of synapses in each human brain. To embrace this truth changes everything, for we experience our deepest knowing here- that the source of love is not out there, in some far off distant galaxy, but rather is so profoundly close, closer even than our most intimate experiences.

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“Love is the affinity which links and draws together the elements of the world… Love, in fact, is the agent of universal synthesis.” –Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

We live in conscious universe. I spent the weekend immersed in The Science and Non- Duality Conference, exploring the depths of the ultimate truths of existence. It was quite heady and surprisingly reassuring. The conference featured several panels of world-renowned quantum physicists sharing Powerpoints of the immensity of the universe in which our visible universe that goes on for 100 million light years makes up less than 2% of the whole. This new science of quantum physics and its latest breakthrough of Super String Theory leave no question that our Newtonian conception of the material world only reflects the surface layer of reality. What we perceive as solid matter, when studied closely, disappears on the molecular level into energy waves, which envelope us and even lives through us. Science has proven what mystics have been saying for thousands of years: we are not separate, individual beings; rather we are truly all connected.

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“Tantra loves, and loves unconditionally. It never says no to anything whatsoever, because everything is part of the whole, and everything has its own place in the whole, and the whole cannot exist with anything missing from it.” ~Osho

“Faith is where you hold your heart.” This is what one of the master teachers shared when he was translating the ancient practices of Tantra yoga into a modern life. Tantra means to stretch beyond your limits. The multiple layers of practice that Tantra embodies have a singular goal of preparing you as a vessel that can contain the divine. One of the ancient texts says that our birth, our very life, is a gift so that the divine can know itself through you. And according to the texts there are many powers bestowed on those that actively pursue this faith, which as heady as all this sounds, translates seamlessly into the stuff of making love work on a daily basis. The beauty of focusing on these capacities is that they are at once prescriptive and rewarding, which is to say that they offer a clear measure of how you are holding your heart and whether there is any room for the magic of the divine to settle within you.  The following elements of Tantra can be used and defined in the contexts below.

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