“The act of smelling something, anything, is remarkably like the act of thinking. Immediately at the moment of perception, you can feel the mind going to work, polling one center of the brain after another for signs of recognition, for old memories and old connection.” – Lewis Thomas

Our sense of smell is ancient; primal as well as the source of our most powerful emotional memories. This is also the sensory pathway which is the key to sexual attraction and compatibility. These facts belie the little attention that our sense of smell evokes- partly this is because we have so little language for scent. Our scent language is often limited to “it smells like…” and our recognition of scents is often clearly delineated between pleasant and unpleasant.  But there is a world of scent cognition that goes unrecognized every day and new research into the remarkable olfactory processing of life is demonstrating how seemingly invisible forces actually color what we see and hear as well.

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“Time is a created thing. To say ‘I don’t have time,’ is like saying, ‘I don’t want to.”  -Lao Tzu

How we spend our time is what our life is made of and our intimate relationships are a clear reflection of the time we invest in them. Relationship growth is a capital investment in time and without it, deep connections wither on the vine. It is easy in this era of instant connectivity to lose sight of what it means to commit to the real face time that love demands. Arguably, making time for making love is a deeply meaningful measure of the health and sustainability of your relationship. This is especially true when you consider the outrageous scheduling demands that we agree to without hesitation for our work lives, our children’s activity calendar or our favorite online social media connections.What makes scheduling the best hours of our intimate life so difficult?

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The best moments in my life are the ones that I am connected to the people around me. They are the moments when I am not wondering about anywhere else or worried about what comes next.  This place of full presence is a magical one because when you find yourself in it, life is good.  Even in a crisis or emergency when clock time is meaningless,  we are left only with what is and we have only now.  Rich, deep, long-lasting memories form in this space when you are fully present and, like a magnet, you can pull people into your space of fullness.

Working with cancer patients  lately has shown me how powerfully healing our presence can be. One of the members of the group recently shared a story of her sister who is a flight attendant sharing the tender words of one of her youngest passengers. The little girl was a “Make-A-Wish”  patient on her way to Disneyland and the magic that awaited her was all that was real in that moment.  Her sister talked about how deeply moved she was by the child’s clarity and joy,  and her sister, the cancer patient, reminded her that the little girl was probably equally moved by hers.

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“In every man’s heart there is a secret nerve that answers to the vibrations of beauty.” -Christopher Morley

Beauty is one of the essential graces of living a human life on earth. Beauty is around us everywhere and entraining our own capacity to notice and recognize its presence and its power to transform us begins in our heart. Culturally, we are constantly being mis-directed to a specific, and arguably, limited type of beauty, which parades as fashion in youthful perfect silhouettes, airbrushed wide-eyed models with chiseled features and long wavy flows of hair. This commercial beauty is the kind that drives us either to despairing feelings of not measuring up or seduces us into buying this one more thing that will bring us closer to that exclusive experience of beauty. Yet, most people when asked about where they witness beauty rarely mention Glamour’s cover of the month. Instead, what we hear is about how the evening light transforms the trees in their yard, or how the scent of fresh bread wafted around a corner or the remarkable rose light that canvases the skyline before dark.

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“When I have been listened to and when I have been heard, I am able to perceive my world in a new way and to go on.  It is astonishing how elements which seem insoluble become soluble when someone listens.”   -Carl Rogers

Lately, I have had the honor and privilege to create and deliver a workshop on love and positivity for a handful of cancer patients and survivors. Our weekly curriculum is a combination of my years of love contemplation layered with the positivity training about which I have become passionate. It is the most deeply rewarding work I have done in years. I have given up the idea that I have anything to teach anyone, finally understanding that there is no telling anyone anything that they do not wish to know. Instead, I am in awe of the learning that happens within the shared intention of listening deeply both to ourselves and to the sacred intimate connections that emerge without effort, even among strangers when we ask authentic questions about who we are. Increasingly, I am convinced that any idea of planning how things will go is nothing but fiction that I busy my mind with and which ultimately distracts me from the moment at hand.

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“Three things in human life are important: the first is to be kind; the second is to be kind; and the third is to be kind.”  ~Henry James

I have been thinking a lot about kindness lately because I believe it defines our capacity to show up in our life. The Buddhists teach loving kindness as a fundamental doctrine for both inner and outer peace. In fact, religious philosophy of all denominations hold kindness as central teaching to a life well lived. Most of us learn this expectation in early childhood as we are taught the mechanism of sharing and gentleness with our peers. Yet for all the many ways we have learned kindness and the true simplicity of its execution, kindness is often not our primary or innate response. Read the rest of this entry »

“The important thing is to enjoy the activity for its own sake, and to know that what matters is not the result, but the control one is acquiring over one’s attention.”
― Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

In a love business, the idea of pleasure is a primary theme and as a writer on the topic of enhancing pleasure, I have often freely exchanged the concepts of pleasure and enjoyment, as though they were one in the same.  Recently I have learned differently and now stand corrected.  Understanding  the significant difference between the fleeting experience of pleasure and the focused creation of enjoyment is the difference of being a bystander or an artist in your own life.  The confusion comes in part from our culture which is fascinated with immediate gratification and markets the fleeting experience of pleasure as happiness.  In fact, our pleasure response is brief because it comes and goes with the rise and fall of the satisfaction of our needs, both physical and perceived.  Even the best of meals only satisfies deeply until hunger strikes again and that thing you had to have rarely offers more than temporary happiness. Read the rest of this entry »

“None of us knows what might happen even the next minute, yet still we go forward. Because we trust. Because we have Faith.”   -Paulo Coelho

It’s easy to trust when life is giving us what we want, when our relationships are stable and communication flows. Leaning toward trust when our health is broken, our relationship connections are tattered and we can’t find the words to express our own needs is where trust becomes our capacity for resilience. In the moments when life is falling apart, when our best laid plans are dashed and lying in a heap of disappointment that we have the opportunity to grow more resilient. This deep inner work is one of the highest forms of love. It is the work that transforms us into our most authentic and compassionate selves.

I often tell my kids that life is first a problem solving adventure. Watching as they can easily become overwhelmed with life’s adversity has shown me time and again that the outcome often has less to do with the external life circumstances than what we bring to the challenge from inside. I have tried to teach them by example that what transforms all life challenges into something that makes us more whole is our capacity to not give ourselves away. This is a kind of radical trust, tapping your inner resilience, which keeps you present to the truth about yourself and doesn’t allow you to make the situation worse with a downward spiraling story line of victimization and blame.

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“Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them; that only creates sorrow.  Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.”   ~Lao Tzu

For as many euphemisms as there are about how life is always changing, most of us often struggle with the reality of change itself.  It is no wonder, as the skill of holding onto ourselves with nothing solid beneath us remains untested ground no matter how often we experience it.  Intuitively we know that the process of change and where it will lead is not really ours to control, so that even the big life changes we initiate often require a magnitude of surrender that we cannot anticipate.   In part this is because of what we have all suspected, our neurological wiring is geared toward consistency.  Our brains want and need stability so much that we often create it erroneously.  Recent reports demonstrate how our social and political affiliations blind us to our own inconsistencies and misattribute these inconsistencies to our opponents. Read the rest of this entry »

“Pleasure is the object, duty and the goal of all rational creatures.”  Voltaire

The experience of pleasure is how we say yes to life.  Allowing oneself the gratification of our senses is how we embody the joys of life. Think mouthwatering flavors, the first scent of summer evenings, the soft cheeks of a sleeping baby, the refrain of a beloved tune. Our human capacity to sense the world brings life into sharp focus and lessens the distraction that often skews relationship in time and place. Opening to pleasure can be as simple as focusing our attention on what we are sensing in the present moment.

Applying this simple pleasure principle to our erotic selves is a remarkable healing balm for much of our sexual anxiety and accompanying dysfunctions.  One of the founding principles of my loveology journey, was the maxim to trust your erotic impulses to your innate sensory capacity. Our sense of smell is literally the first gateway in our brains which turns on our arousal mechanism. Touch heals us by the laying of a hand on a pelvis and the feel of an oiled thigh gliding under a lover’s caress which never fails to take your breath away.   Read the rest of this entry »