Good Clean Reads

The benefits of using a personal lubricant for sex are numerous. Lubricants can deepen your pleasure, since they increase the natural slip and slide that go with the best sex, and they can also be helpful in combating conditions like vaginal dryness or pain with sex that often accompany normal hormonal shifts, medical conditions, and age-related changes.

I was out recently with a friend, and we started talking about sex. She told me about how, in her current relationship, she wants sex more often than her boyfriend does. We laughed about how this never would have happened when we were in our twenties. "We're in our sexual prime now," she said, and we laughed again. We hear this a lot: that a woman's sexual prime – or sometimes the term is sexual peak – happens during her thirties.

When we consider the efforts that women have made over generations for equality, it humbles you. Today while interviewing the president of Planned Parenthood of Southwestern Oregon, I learned that the early beginnings of the organization began with women sewing diaphragms that they procured in Italy and Japan into their petticoats. Many women were arrested when they were handing them out on the streets in New York. 

Expanding the language of your nose and thinking through your sense of smell is mind expanding, first and foremost because concentrating on the scents around you brings you fully into the moment you are in. Because smell, more than any of our other senses, is processed alongside our emotional center with our arousal mechanism a close cousin.

The ability to orgasm remains one of the most coveted and yet misunderstood human experiences there is, partly because we wrongly believe that it is an experience of the genitals. In fact, our ability to climax reverberates throughout the body and initiates deep in the brain. Below is an easy-to-use guide to the order of operations that, with a unique blend of practicing and letting go, will help move you from arousal to orgasm.

The most unique and universal expressions of our humanity occur in the moments when we are most keyed in to our animal nature. Whether curled up in our sleep beside our lover or child, or ravaging a perfectly prepared meal, our most basic human needs show us as the animals we are.

Our sense of smell is ancient and the source of our most powerful emotional memories. It is also the primal sensory pathway to sexual attraction, making it a key sensory experience in intimacy. And yet, we often give little attention to all that our sense of smell can evoke, in part because we have so little vocabulary for scent. Often we're limited to “it smells like…” and delineated only between pleasant and unpleasant. But, the truth is that the world of scent cognition that so often goes unrecognized actually colors all of our interactions – especially our most intimate moments.  And there...

I was having lunch with one of the students from my old positivity club the other day when he surprised me by telling me that what means the most to him now is learning how to feel. I asked him what he meant, and he said, “I used to think my feelings. I thought I was ‘sad’ or ‘angry’, but it never quite registered in my body. Now, I know I am feeling when it happens in my gut or my chest. When I feel most alive is when I can’t not feel what is happening.” 

We believe we are making it better by shielding ourselves from our own pain. This is a fool’s errand, for the pain we refuse to feel and acknowledge doesn’t dissipate from our lacking attention, but rather collects in our heart center with a weightiness that we often cannot name or discern. So fearful are we, of the potential of a broken heart, that we inadvertently refuse to open our hearts at all.