Good Clean Reads

The holidays are just about over, so you have a good excuse: relax. In fact, you always have excellent excuses to relax — you’ll be calmer and more at ease, and you’ll feel more in control of your life. Yet, as we all know, relaxing isn’t always so easy. If it were easy, we would likely spend a lot less on all of our addictions — food, alcohol, cigarettes, shopping, sex, and everything else we...

“When one realises one is asleep, at that moment one is already half-awake.” ― P.D. Ouspensky

Forget about the typical New Year’s resolution this year and instead begin by celebrating all that is right with you and your life. This is truly the only emotional space which can generate the motivation to do something differently. We change effortlessly to increase more of something good, whereas...

This holiday season; re-think your gift giving rituals by focusing on how you spend your time and attention in your most meaningful relationships. There is no gift you could purchase that will more profoundly enhance the emotional connections in your life than the gift of your focused attention, which explains why most people cannot distinguish between the experiences of being deeply loved with...

“There would seem to be nothing more obvious, more tangible and palpable than the present moment.   And yet it eludes us completely. All the sadness of life lies in that fact.”   -Milan Kundera

Often, when we hear the phrase, “There is no time like the present…” we are admonishing ourselves or someone else about seizing the day, getting something done, and stopping the procrastination. Although...

“The way you make love is the way God will be with you.” -Rumi

There are times after I make love to my husband that I wished I had made a video so that I would always be able to remember how crazy and intense and out of our minds we made love to each other. Even a few hours later, my sexual memories take on the quality of dreams, where describing the sensation or even the sequence starts to feel...

“You take it all in. You let the pain of the world touch your heart and your turn it into compassion.”  -Gyalwa Karmapa

Part of the daily Buddhist meditation that is known the world over is “May you be free from suffering…” The tradition teaches that suffering is as much part of life is as love and joy, certainly you don’t have to dive too deep into world current events or even probably the...

“When it’s over, that’s the time I fall in love again…” -Sugar Ray

The more deeply I accompany my grief of late, the more resounding are my feelings of gratitude. When we allow ourselves to befriend loss and know it for the lifelong companion that it is. You would have to be a fool to not recognize how blessed you are – for all the many ways life is working right in this moment and, even more...

“The work of the mature person is to carry grief in one hand and gratitude in the other and to be stretched large by them….how much sorrow can I hold- that’s how much gratitude I can give.”  -Francis Weller

I have been crying a lot lately. Negotiating my new empty nest and learning how to live in the silence and space created by my kids’ departure has brought me to a new relationship with grief....

“He brought up the fact he likes to rape little boys…He’s telling me how he likes to use a knife on them.”  -Cpl Travis Schouten

What happens when the core sexual attraction of men to women is so tainted with terror that it disappears? It’s practically science fiction to imagine living in a culture that has so effectively terrorized the natural desire for sexual union between men and women, one...