Good Clean Reads

"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 and I was told to use straw to augment and lighten the heavy clay soil. The straw turned out to be hay and seeded itself heartily throughout the space. I was overwhelmed with weeds that I had inadvertently planted.

Last week when I was immobilized from an emotional neck injury that required me mostly to lay on my back, to move slowly with great attention and to embrace how painful living in a body can be, I learned a few things that I feel determined to hold onto now that my body is fully functional. The first and most important lesson is the utter and complete sense of gratitude I have for all the millions...

“Be no longer tender. Cover me with frenzied kisses, – even as I would drench my body in the cruel torrents of the rain. Envelop me from throat to ankle in delirium intolerable….” ~Blanche Shoemaker Wagstaff

 

Accessing our deepest erotic selves can be as simple as tapping into the power of our own voice, exploring the range of sounds we create in the throes of intimacy and getting comfortable...

Stop Female Genital CuttingThe deep abiding mistrust of female sexuality makes the world go round. For us in the West, we know this space as an inability to orgasm, the loss of desire and the fear of getting too close. But in the cultures that make up Africa and the Middle East this mistrust holds a razors edge over the genitalia of millions of young girls. In these cultures, just retaining the physiological capacity for pleasure makes one unclean, unmarriageable, and unable to take their place in their community. This required and brutal rite of passage, often referred to as female genital mutilation or female circumcision, has been performed on more than 140 million women living on the planet.

“We’re perfectly ordinary people except that we like kinky sex.” -Susan Wright, spokesperson for National Coalition for Sexual Freedom

Sexual freedom is on the rise. Just this past week, several notable Republican law makers came out in favor of the right for marriage equality regardless of gender preferences. The interesting thing about change is how after it is done, we can hardly remember how...

“I know that when a door closes, it can feel like all doors are closing. A rejection letter can feel like everyone will reject us. But a closed door leads to clarity. It’s really an arrow. Because we cannot go through that door, we will go somewhere else. That somewhere else is your true life.”  –Tama Kieves

Rejection might well be the source of our greatest fear and anguish and for good reason....

I wrote this piece years ago, and it still feels like the truth to me.

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Here’s the thing to know about love. Sometimes it feels great, like a sunny day in the Northwest after 26 days of rain; but sometimes it feels like the early stages of flu- unsettled, achy, and a loss of appetite. Okay, well maybe not as bad as the flu, but love lives can be irritating, like an insect bite that keeps...

“When in doubt who will win, be neutral.” –Swiss Proverb

 

One of my husband’s most reliable responses to my often high level of emotionality is: “Can you just be neutral?” He is a psychiatrist, so he has a lot more practice at finding a neutral objective view. Yet, even before we each chose our respective professions, he would often find his way back to center with more ease than I. Over the...

Dr. Ian Kerner, certified as a sexuality counselor and a New York Times best-selling author, educates us on the arousal-desire connection

TheOpeningDoor.org to listen to the full interview Saturday.