These are sorrowful and bewildering days. It is hard to get our bearing in place and time. Mary Oliver's poem Love Sorrow offers so many beautiful ideas about how we can use our agency and intention to embrace our own pain and sorrow.

Perhaps the most transformative experience we can offer to our relationships is in the gift of deep listening. This is often confused with the surface listening most of us are trained to do, where we focus our attention on the words being said and prepare ourselves while someone else is speaking with our response. Listening in this way makes a couple of big presumptions: that we are able to say what we mean with our chosen words and that the other person can get our meaning through those words. This often leads to miscommunications where it is easy to jump to conclusions or veer the conversation into an entirely different trajectory than was intended. 

What has become clear in recent days is that the rights of all oppressed and marginalized people – whether by race or sexual identity – have always been inextricably linked. We are one people and our ideals of freedom are honored only when they become universal. Sharing in this year's Pride Month celebrations is recognizing and celebrating the most precious human right of all: the freedom to live and love as we choose.

Bacterial vaginosis (BV) is one of the leading vaginal infections amongst reproductive aged women in the United States. While up to 29.2 million cases are recorded annually according to the CDC, the percentages by race vary widely. 

Love is an action verb with a specific skill set that is developmental – which means that we can learn it, practice it and get better at it. That said, it is easy to become overwhelmed by the efforts of keeping our loving relationships vital, and to lose sight of the many emotional and physical benefits we experience from loving over time.

Our habits become us. Our lives are arguably the net sum of the behaviors that we repeatedly do. One could even argue that our personalities are molded over time out of the habitual ways we behave influenced most strongly by the thoughts we think. This is partly due to our dedication to the known and familiar which helps us manage the overwhelming busyness of life, and evidenced by the fact that although our brain receives thousands of sensory signals every day, it can only process dozens. In the same way, of the thousands of random thoughts passing through our mind every day, over 90 percent of them are repetitive and for most of us, 80 percent of those thoughts are more negative than positive. 

This month marks the 25th anniversary of National Masturbation Month, launched in 1995 by Good Vibrations to protest the firing of the U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Joycelyn Elders, appointed by President Clinton. Dr. Elders was fired for responding to questions regarding safe sex by saying that “Masturbation is something that perhaps should be taught.” Conservative members of the administration were not pleased.

Love is an inside job. Learning to love ourselves is where it all begins. And yet, most of us are plagued with some nagging doubts of unworthiness. It’s almost as though there is some deep ancestral pattern that equates emotional pain to some inherent core deficiency, built into our genetic code. It is how we abandon ourselves. 

Most of us are risk averse when it comes to matters of the heart. This is why so many things that need to be shared are never uttered. It also explains why so many relationships expire long before the work is done. Staying intimately connected is only possible through the work of being emotionally courageous. Perhaps the truest thing we can say about courage is that it is the ability to live well with all of the risks that come with being alive.

Curiosity is one of the most curative traits of our humanity. It is this natural and beguiling capacity that defines us through our urge to understand, to explore, and to go beyond our own limits.

We are proud to be partnering with Equality Federation this month. Read about their work connecting LGTBQ activists across the country and how you can support gay rights in your community. 

We have known for decades that babies will not thrive without physical holding and affection. There is little that will comfort and settle small children as much as the warm embrace of their family. Yet it is still not uncommon for parents to stop hugging their kids as they reach puberty. And for many adults, the amount of physical nurturing we receive declines as we age, even as medical studies confirm that the health benefits of physical touch extend throughout our lives.