Good Clean Reads

Immortality comes through love. This is what I just recently learned at the passing of my own father’s life. It had been close to 40 years since I felt love towards him. His wounded heart only knew one language- anger, and over the years it hardened into a bitterness that made it unsafe to love him. But now that he is gone, I am struck often, and forcefully, with tears of missing him, the father...

I was born a middle child between an elder sister and younger brother. We were never close, and now that my father has died, I am able to see not only my relationship with my father more clearly, but also with my siblings, as well. It was a dear friend who shared with me a poem called “Elder Sister,” which described all the ways that she, as the first one, had to break through the barriers and...

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

Everyone knows the power of makeup sex to sand down the remaining rough edges and offer a soothing balm of acceptance after painful breaks in relationships. Yet, rarely do we consider sexual intimacy as the transformative healing force in dealing with the overwhelming grief that comes with death. It hadn’t really occurred to me...

One of the things that death clarifies like a magnifying glass on a dying leaf in the summer sun is the regrets that collect inside of us over a lifetime. These regrets are kind of like soul missions that we missed the cues on. They require an immense capacity for forgiveness. I began to understand the quality of these regrets while listening to the outpouring of love for a young woman who...

“The art of love… is largely the art of persistence.”  ~Albert Ellis

If we could learn just two things about love that might just cure us of our broken relationships and dissatisfying sex it is this- that love does not come made to order and that we must be willing to ask for what we want. These two misunderstandings about the limits of relationships wreak havoc in the development and maturity...

When I believe that I am unlovable, the world closes in. This is true for all of us. The only real opening any of us can work towards, pray for and believe in is our own inherent loveablity. For this we need only practice being loving. Most difficult, especially when things are not working is to love ourselves. I have been praying and chanting and suffering these last days, waking up anxious,...

“To set up what you like against what you dislike, this is the disease of the mind.” -Sengcan

What we most love about someone, given enough time, we usually come to find repulsive. It is an odd but insistent phenomenon that moves through most all intimate relationships, usually at regular intervals. One useful way to think about this swinging attraction- rejection response is as an energy wave...

You have to have bad days, even bad weeks sometimes. You know the good ones in comparison to the bad ones. This is what I am reminding myself this week as things anticipated are not happening and things that I thought were fine are completely broken. Making mistakes in a product business is really costly and generally takes a significant effort to dig out of. It is almost always the smallest, most...

“Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone – we find it with another.” -Thomas Merton

Ashley Madison founder, Noel Bidermanonce told me that the biggest day of his year is the day after Valentines day. More women sign up to cheat on their marriages on this day than any other, which is no small thing coming from a guy whose website generates $25K every hour...