Our physical pain gives voice to all that we refuse to hear and say. On a recent visit with my mother, our emotional truce was based on an agreement to not say our real feelings or expect to be heard or understood. Before her arrival, I was convinced that I was over my need for anything from her. A couple of days into the visit, I slipped on icy stairs and fell squarely on my butt...
A recent article (December 31st) in the New York Times titled “The Graying of Naughty” chronicles the entry of several older women, i.e. 40-50, into the pornography business. Yes, even the porn industry is responding to the aging baby boomer population, offering all kinds of stories that include older women and younger men, apparently an easily marketable niche.
The upside of the story is that...
Here is a good book for any of us who wonder what it would take to improve your relationship. The actual title is “The Sex Starved Marriage” by Michele Weiner Davis, but the content applies to any intimate relationship. I was particularly struck by the section of the book on real giving.
The premise of giving in a relationship is that when you do it, it can’t be based on what you would want or...
“Love is always revolutionary…It is the only thing worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don’t risk anything, you risk even more.”
Twin Flames
"Embers of night flare up afresh
when you ignite the morning in my arms
and kindle the familiar hearth of love
Year after year we have warmed our lives
around the mystery of mutual fire
that heats our domain of risk and rapture
Whenever scorched however scarred
we hearten heal reconflagrate
Twin flames ever in blissful blaze"
by James Broughton
I learned this powerfully sad lesson again today. It has happened before, but it’s been a while. A relationship that has no air in it, where one or both people refuse to communicate, is dying. The currency between the people is cut, and there is nothing to build, nowhere even to begin a reconstruction. The relationship is stuck- beliefs are entrenched, feelings numb or too hurt to approach, the...
The conference for the Society of Sexual Scientists was fascinating. The people who research, teach and counsel around sexuality are as diverse as the topic itself. It taught me all over again that the human experience of sexuality is far broader, wider, wilder than most of us let ourselves imagine. The fact that this is true and not just true about other people is the source of our own private...
Tonight I learned a physics lesson, live, in my own oven. I added a bit of warm water to a pyrex glass pan, and shattered it to pieces. I still don’t fully understand the power that warm water has to shatter glass, no more than I understand the rate at which relationships all around us are failing. Maybe I am drawing a metaphor that doesn’t hold up, but...
I read this survey that was included in the Ladies Home Journal the other day asking a wide variety of questions about intimacy and relationships. I was in the doctor’s office with my two teenagers and was sharing the results of the survey with them. The question that still stays with me and shocked them as much as me was. If you had to choose between conversation and sex with your guy for a month...
Just back from the 17th annual Bioneers conference. What an incredible exciting group of individuals with so many do-able and sustainable ideas for a world that works for everyone. It is very inspiring to be in the presence of so much hope and intention. I myself, talked and talked and talked about making love sustainable. Here’s the short version…
The question that comes up most often when I suggest that we give up this idea that we should be in the mood to engage in or respond to an invitation for intimacy is, How do you do it? So I know it is not much of a response to say, well just do it… but here’s the thing, a lot of people actually really enjoy the closeness and the sensations of intimacy once they get started. Leaping over the mental...
Censorship is defined in the dictionary as an official with the power to examine movies, books, television programming and to remove or prohibit anything considered obscene, politically objectionable, etc. There is some general agreement about what constitutes sexual obscenity and objectionable sexual content. I have in the course of my work been faced with situations and people who have very...
