Making Love Sustainable Tagged "love"

Five Things to Talk About on Your Next Date with Your Significant Other

April 11, 2019

How to Weed Out Negative Thoughts Before They Overtake Your Mind – And Your Relationship

April 04, 2019

“You must weed your mind as you would weed your garden.” ~Terri Guillemets

I learned about weeds before I learned anything about gardens. For my 40th birthday, my husband built me a beautiful, secure deer fence to make my first garden. Someone advised me to add straw to augment and lighten the heavy clay soil. Unfortunately, what I thought was straw turned out to be hay and seeded itself heartily throughout my new garden. In no time I was completely overwhelmed with weeds that I had inadvertently sown.

View full article →

Spring Forward – and Start Over – with Only Five Percent

March 21, 2019

Usually by the time we “spring forward,” most of us have long forgotten our New Year’s resolutions and not because we don’t want to change, but because the big sweeping ones we plan for after our third glass of champagne are so hard to get our hands around in the day to day. While the desire for change is earnest, what most of us miss is that real change is found in the small steps that we do consistently.

View full article →

3 Ways to Impact Your Intimate Life

January 10, 2019

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.”

View full article →

The Wisdom We Hold in Our Hearts

October 25, 2018

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.

View full article →

Courage Becomes Grace

September 27, 2018

I used to think I knew about courage. I would often write and talk about it as a defining attribute that allowed you to explore and wonder about your life. And referred to it as the backbone of what gives relationships the strength to evolve. Those things are true, but in a more fundamental way for more people than I probably ever recognized before this massive loss, our capacity for courage is actually proportional to our will to keep living.

View full article →

Losing Ian

September 13, 2018

I lost my son Ian and life has become a deep haze of grief. Time is meaningless except for the vast swaths of the future that is lost to us. All the plans, all that was saved and counted on dissolving like salt in a watery broth of tears. And the inability to reconcile reality – the immediacy and permanence of death seems impossible for my beautiful 26-year-old boy.

View full article →

Basically Good

July 26, 2018

Many relationships suffer from a lack of self-esteem. A relationship’s self-esteem is connected to that of the partner’s, but it also has a life of its own. Genuine esteem is founded in the courage to see oneself truly, both the positive and negative aspects of who we are and how we function and malfunction in the world.

View full article →

It Gets Better

June 13, 2018

I remember one of the fathers of a little girl on a soccer team I was coaching years ago who came out to me and told me he was going to go through a transgender process. We were friends, so I was able to ask him about his motivations to go through the painful and expensive process. He said he wanted to finally look how he felt.

View full article →

Mature woman sitting by a window reflecting positively on life.

Three Easy Ways to Show Up for Your Life

April 26, 2018

Most of us don’t realize how frequently we are checked out of our life. We struggle to stay present in the day-to-day with the never-ending onslaught of digital feeds and new devices that offer superficial connectivity at best, but we lose out on the true contact that feeds our soul and makes us human. More and more scientific research is showing how much we give up when we trade the voyeurism of social media for the real-time relating that makes us feel seen and heard. Even more disturbing is how we are losing the muscle memory to do the messy and gratifying work of truly showing up, risking our heart, and communicating. It is in the trenches of our life, in the mess of people’s feelings spilling over onto us that we are really connected and that we can offer our best self. Start today with one of these tips and see how different life can feel when you fully show up!

View full article →

Couple in love holding hands in front of greenery.

Three Ways to Make Your Love Container Evergreen

April 19, 2018

Usually, when we think about doing things for Earth Day, we ask ourselves: “How can I impact the environment around me?”. Rarely do we consider how powerful an inner cleansing can be to our external circumstances. This has been especially true when it comes to my intimate relationships – the more I have tried to push change on my partner or my kids, the less impact it has. Conversely, when I re-focus to the noise in myself and bring some light and compassion to my own inner struggles, the relationships start to shift by themselves.

View full article →

3 Ways to Cure Valentine’s Day

January 30, 2018

There is a cure for the Valentine's Day debacles, and starting now might be a way that you could plan ahead with your partner to make it a day of healing instead of strife.

View full article →