The V-Word

“The greatest mistake in the treatment of diseases is that there are physicians for the body and physicians for the soul, although the two cannot be separated.” – Plato

Our breasts cover our heart. If you have ever nursed a baby, it is clear that our breasts are not there for adornment, they are a primary organ of nurturance and sustaining life. They are enervated directly to our sexual center,...

“Gratitude is the heart’s memory.” – French proverb

I have generally not been a sports fan in life, but living with my husband for over 20 years and raising two sons has trained me in the importance of “the game”. Tonight we shared a real loss as we watched the dreams of our star quarterback slip away with an injury to the knee. He stood on the sidelines watching his team lose their chance at a...

Wind power is one of the fastest growing alternative energy sources available. What could be cleaner than capturing the power of the moving air and turning it into energy? This is a powerful metaphor on a personal level and in our work to make relationships sustainable. The air in your relationship flows from the communication that passes between you and your partner. It is the currency of your...

The expo closes down and in minutes, the scenes of so many natural product companies become crated and ready to ship to the next business conference. Three days of meeting new people and greeting old friends goes by in a blur, our senses are overloaded with new tastes and smells, and we are caught continuously in conversations with fuzzy lines between important product education and perfect...

The things you talk about with the people that matter in your life are the air in your relationships. This seems a timely discussion in light of the conversations that are bound to take place in the next several weeks as our family structures, past and present, collide back into full view. We call them holidays. Give yourself a new gift this time – pay attention to what you say.

There is an...

“I no longer expect things to make sense. I know there is no safety. But that does not mean there is no magic. It does not mean there is no hope. It simply means that each of us has reason to be wishful and frightened, aspiring and flawed. And it means that, to the degree we are lost, it is on the same ocean, in the same night.” – Elizabeth Kaye

It is the holidays, the time of year when we are...

The heart is perhaps the only muscle in our body that is stronger when it is soft. Firmness, strength and the ability to harden are key to core vitality throughout most of the body including our sexual organs. Hardening our heart whether it is in response to a political reality or a difficult relationship turns us into our own personal brand of fundamentalist. It is a slippery slope from the tightening in the chest to a self righteous stance about how the world should be. This can affect our emotional wellness and happens even before we see it happening.

In a recent radio appearance,I was asked a question that caught me off guard. I am accustomed to and barely miss a beat for the normal inquiries about achieving orgasm or frustrations with inconsistent libido but no one has ever asked me before which way to vote for sexual health. The caller wondered which political party or candidate was more sexually healthy and promoted values consistent...

If you have ever wondered what happened to your active sex life or can’t even remember what it feels like to have a sex life, then the recent books “Just Do” and “365 Nights” will either inspire or depress you. Two couples took up the challenge to refresh their marriages with daily doses of sexual intimacy. Successfully combining an active and satisfying sex life with a married lifestyle is the subject of volumes of books and a frequent focus of my own writing. It is epic to achieve the same with kids in tow and worth noting that neither of these couples have any which makes their achievement noble but not quite heroic.

Kids or not, the author of the Study of American Sexual Behavior rightly states, “There’s a strong relationship between rating your marriage as happy and frequency of intercourse. What is harder to say is what the causal relationship between the two is. We don’t know whether people who are happy in their marriage have sex more, or whether people who have sex more become happy in their marriages, or a combination of the two.”

The truth is that intimacy begets intimacy. Sexual intimacy creates a singular connection that paves the way for better communication and emotional closeness and physical release that is unparalleled in any other activity that we share. This is no truer than the fact that couples who communicate well and show up for each other regularly are more apt to be drawn together physically. The experience of the couples in both the books both bear this out, their experiments did bring them closer together in every way and also gave them the space and frequency to develop a broader and more comfortable language for sex which not surprisingly improved their sex lives, even after their daily marathon ended.

Frequency of sex is not really the point of the story as even all the authors will attest, people’s needs and capacity for sexual intimacy is variable. Sustaining the emotional space that leaves you feeling interested and safe enough to be vulnerable and open to great sex is in and of itself a remarkable kind of intimacy to live in. This article was particularly interesting to me as I have been living in a pretty dry spell of physical intimacy of late, what with broken bones and poison oak frequenting my home life. The tension and stress between us wears more deeply and the lack of physical closeness turns the edges of all our encounters brittle. The longer it goes, the more challenging it is to open up in the ways that bring our physical intimacy into daily view.

So why not do your own experiment, this weekend. It is summer after all and we are celebrating love oil; see what happens with three days in a row. I know that I plan on falling deeply under the the spell of some serious love oil therapy this weekend, poison oak or not. Check out our love oil giveaway contest and share a story to inspire.

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