“There are moments in moist love when heaven is jealous of what we on earth can do.”  -Hafiz

Moist love, as opposed to dry love, is a container where the partners adhere to each other.   Think of garden soil and how fecund moist soil is literally the root of anything that wants to be cultivated.  Any gardener will tell you that water alone is not enough to heal dry, cracked land and will instruct you on the seasons of amending the earth you are cultivating.   This metaphor goes a long way in describing how to moisten the intimacy in your relationship as well.   Tantra is actually the process of amending the foundation of your love.   Even though its most immediate results are often measured in the passionate heat produced in awakened lovemaking, these moments are nothing but fleeting fireworks if the very same practices are not levied deep into the foundation of your love.

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“A flowering of orgasm, an expansion of orgasm into endless full bloom in the whole body.” -Yogani

I have been swimming in a sea of tantra this week at the Yoga Journal pre-conference Tantra intensive in the Rocky Mountains. There are Elk crooning, calling their mates outside my bedroom window. The scene is breathtaking, like living inside a postcard. The program was a true intensive, with a wide range of lectures, asana, mantras, yantras, fire ceremonies, and trance dancing filling twelve hour days and opening me to the vast landscape of some of the earliest recorded spiritual doctrine in human history. My previous encounters with these ancient teachings have all revolved around the mysterious sexual rituals that many people associate with the meaning of Tantra. Over the years of building Good Clean Love, I have received multiple invitations from Dakas and Dakinis whose practices were limited to what was identified as the “Left Path” of Tantra, which focuses on elaborate external practices including sexual rituals that are described in great detail in the earliest Vedic teachings.

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“His expression pulls at that dark part of me, buried in the depths of my belly- my libido, woken and tamed by him, but even now, insatiable.”  -E.L. James, Fifty Shades of Grey

The story that has shifted the mainstream consciousness of sexuality is about a young beautiful virgin, who doesn’t recognize her own beauty and a deeply troubled young man, that channels his childhood pain and extreme wealth into a fringe sexual lifestyle that verges on violence. The plot twists and turns around submission and dominance, one of the oldest and most common fantasy themes in human history. How this story shifted the sexual landscape of our culture and has captivated the attention of millions reveals the singular most significant truth of our collective human sex drive:  our access and witness to our fantasies is where our sexual motor either revs up or languishes. The dynamics of sexual dominance and submission has been transacted throughout our ancestry so many millions of times; it is no wonder that Fifty Shades of Grey taps this deep nerve of our collective sexual history.

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“Sex is not the answer. Sex is the question. ‘Yes’ is the answer.” -Swami X

Sexual dissatisfaction is one of the top reasons cited when we leave our relationships. It is also one of this life’s most worthy challenges to take on; not only for the meaning and pleasure it can bring to our relationships, but also for the very real health benefits that a satisfying sex life bestows on our well being. I also believe that learning how to satisfy our sex drive and grow our comfort with our erotic selves is a window which reveals our deepest humanity. It is no surprise that a massive consumer market designed to offer a quick fix for our sexual desires has ballooned into a billion dollar industry, but despite the millions of options available, there is no magic pill (even those that manage to sustain erections), toy or DVD of new sexual techniques that is going to bring you the kind of passionate intimate connection that we all long for. There are however some pretty straightforward shifts in focus and attention that will lead you towards more satisfying sexual experiences and a comfort with who you are as an erotic human being. Here are a few ideas, which are not listed in order of potency. Even if you only try one at a time, take note on how your intimate life responds.

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“If you tell a true story, you can’t be wrong.”   -Jack Kerouac

I would bet that for every couple that falls in love each day there are at least two couples who leave each other in deep and hurtful ways. Just this week, I was caring for one of my teenage daughter’s oldest friends whose boyfriend, who had been her friend since elementary school, broke up with her in a text that read“I just don’t have that warm love feeling anymore.”This experience followed one earlier in the week as I listened to a longtime business friend who had recently managed an incredible feat of agility, courage and perseverance to save his business from an investor group gone bad, speak  in a hopeless and uninspired tone about losing the feelings required to do the work to revive his 33-year marriage.

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"Stir" Janice Porter

“And in the end, the love we take is equal to the love we make…” -The Beatles

I have come to say good bye to my friend as she enters the hospice phase of her cancer journey.   During the long 6 hour drive to get her, my memory of our meeting came back to me as though it was 20 days ago and not 20 years. She is an artist and most of my memories over the years with her are punctuated with her work- drawings for our almost card company landed on t-shirts and  long narrow canvases with the moon rising, illustrated children’s books and homemade games when our kids were smaller. In the midst of these memories, I welled up in tears, wishing I had been a better friend. I wished that I had looked for another way to reach her when our lives pulled us in different directions. Of all the friends I have known in my life, she is one of the very few who always had nothing but love for me.

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Media stories of childhood sex abuse have filled the airwaves of late; from the Penn State trial of Jerry Sandusky to the ongoing Catholic Church scandals to the first conviction of a high ranking church official. While these stories stir our outrage, their telling and re-telling truly only reflect the tip of the iceberg when it comes to both the enormity and secrecy surrounding childhood sexual abuse. In fact, childhood sexual abuse makes up more than ten percent of the millions of reported childhood abuse cases in the US.

Worldwide, research shows that up to 36% of girls and 29% of boys have suffered child sexual abuse and coercion. According to the World Health Organization, these statistics represent 150 million girls and 73 million boys under the age of 18 who experienced forced sexual intercourse or other forms of sexual violence. That number increases substantially when you include the vast sexual slave trade market that holds millions more children in its grasp. Most shocking of all is that even these numbers are considered to be only fractional because sexual abuse carries such profound taboos that the vast majority goes unreported by the victims themselves.

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“All it takes to feel loved is to love. We always have the power to feel love. As soon as we stop loving we often don’t feel loved anymore.”  -Betty Peralta

For all the years that I have thought and written about love, it is remarkable to me that I only just recently learned how my own thinking has prevented me from seeing the love in my own life for decades. We all create a storyline that our life mirrors and although it is hard to tell whether the events and circumstances of our life create the story or whether the story attracts the events, the story line becomes so deeply ingrained in our personal history that we often don’t witness its operation. For me, as for most of us, this history began in childhood with my emotionally dysfunctional family, which only grew more overtly unhappy as I aged. By the time I was 13 and the divorce escalated the collective pain into impenetrable defense mechanisms my storyline was set and the filter of my experience of  life was measured by an ever present sense of being excluded, abandoned and alone. These emotional drivers of my life were powerful forces of attraction, as well, and it took years for me to see the choices I continuously made to keep the filter intact.

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I have been studying gratitude as a the open door to a positive life and one of the most profound vehicles to love for some time. As part of my research, we have had an ongoing contest asking our readers to share their own stories of how gratitude has transformed their own lives and relationships. Here is an unforgettable story of gratitude.

I embrace the gift of how my life has developed from birth to now. At an early age, I was very visual. Reading books came easily to me by age 3 and is still one of my first loves. I am an accomplished writer with several books just sitting there for me to finish.  By the early teen years of my life, I became very accomplished at sketching. I especially enjoyed observing all the shadings of hands and faces and duplicating what my eyes could see on poster boards, a wall, chalk board or just notebook paper.  I have spent countless hours appreciating nature, down to the slightest detail like: how the leaves on a tree swaying in the breeze captures light and seem to sparkle in the sunlight; the perseverance of the ant who carries a crumb all the way across a wide driveway to the ant hill; the personality of birds in the morning with their unique chirps of urgency, joy, fear; the various smells on a country bike trail; the feel of clean flannel sheets in the bitter winter months,  the taste of kiwi in season. It seems that my whole life has been a festival of senses that I can have in memory to live over again as I please.

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One of the greatest gifts of the work I do is hearing the inspiring stories from our readers about how they make love work in their personal lives and career.  Learning how to receive the goodness and love surrounding us is a lifelong process and, even as children, we must learn that we are worthy and loveable.  Here is one fine teacher’s method which could be adapted to your own family.  Thanks for sharing it with us…

“I retired from the elementary classroom last year after 36 years, most of them with 11 and 12 year-old students.  Love that age and the changes that occur during the grade 6 year.  Every year, usually on a drab January or February Friday afternoon, I would hand out an index card to each student and have them put their name on one side.  I collected them. Then, sworn to secrecy, I gave the rules:  1.  you will get a card, not your own, and I want you to peek at the name and then write one compliment on the other side anonymously.  It could be about a strength or anything that makes this person special or unique. 2.  After this activity, try really hard not to tell the person what you wrote, even if it’s a best friend.

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