Good Clean Reads

“The pleasure of living and the pleasure of the orgasm are identical. Extreme orgasm anxiety forms the basis of the general fear of life.”
~ Wilhelm Reich

One great benefit of owning a love product company is that I get to study and teach about orgasm. I was blessed with a proclivity towards the experience and remember finding this unique release valve as a small child. Growing up, I only knew how...

“The power of mindfulness is that it can literally sever the link between negative thoughts and negative emotions.” Barbara Fredrickson, Phd

Mindfulness is a Buddhist practice that has been handed down for millennia. Buddhism is both a historic spiritual tradition and a philosophy of life. Working with what is, the practice aims to the practitioner into a full experience of the present moment....

The sun was out in Eugene today. Sometimes a sunny day in the northwest is like an epiphany. After days of dulling gray, an open blue sky makes your shoulders feel like they are an inch higher. Actually everything seems to lift and nature’s small details are all tiny miracles assuring you of the permanence of life cycles. The buds are already showing on the trees and tiny blades of grass dare to...

“In a time when nothing is more certain than change, the commitment of two people to one another has become difficult and rare. Yet, by its scarcity, the beauty and value of this exchange have only been enhanced.” ~Robert Sexton

One of the first questions people ask me when they find out what I do is “How did you get into love work?” My usual answer is “to learn to stay in my own...

“For a list of all the ways technology has failed to improve the quality of life, please press three.” ~Alice Kahn

I am not what you would call tech savvy. I live with technology and am curious about it because in business, especially an online business, you have to know something about how technology leads our lives. I love my new kindle because I can carry 50 books with me at once and be...

“There are certain people you just keep coming back to…

…And all at once the crowd begins to sing

Sometimes the hardest thing and the right thing are the same” -The Fray

My relationship with my oldest son has always been steeped in a complex attraction-aversion. The deep emotional parallels we share play out as opposing forces and have since he could talk. I am not sure if it is the deep divide...

“Love is the condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.” -Robert Heinlein

It turns out that showing up for your partner in the happy moments of life might create more staying power in your relationship than being a reliable support in hard times. While we all need someone at our back when things are rough, it is actually having someone truly celebrate our...

“We are all only mortal…we do only what we can do. All the Elemental priests have certain teachings in common: one of them is that everyone, every human, every bird, badger, salamander, every blade of grass and every acorn is doing the best it can. This is the priests’ definition of mortality: the circumstance of doing what one can is that of doing one’s best. Only the immortals have the luxury of furlough. Doing one’s best is hard work; we rely on our surroundings because we must; when our surroundings change we stumble.” -Robin McKinley “Chalice”

I have read and re-read that passage many times this weekend. In this beautiful story of people trying to fulfill their tasks despite their limitations, the master in the story tells this to his chalice after having just come back to himself. I won’t say more, because it is a lovely read, but it has made me think of the moments when I have been able to truly come back to myself. The times when I have had the ability to accept the outcome of a situation, win or lose, because I knew deep down that I had done my best.

I have also noticed how and when I am unable to come back to myself. I have been paying attention to the moments when my doing what I can does not feel like enough. The places where I cannot witness the best I can do happen, not surprisingly, when I stand next to someone who seems to be doing better. Yesterday, my son played a tennis match against one of the top junior players in the world. My son is a good player and yesterday was his first match in six months due to a stress fracture.