Love is an inside job. Learning to love ourselves is where it all begins. And yet, most of us are plagued with some nagging doubts of unworthiness. It’s almost as though there is some deep ancestral pattern that equates emotional pain to some inherent core deficiency, built into our genetic code. It is how we abandon ourselves. 

The orgasm gap is built into our different male and female physiology. Learning to awaken our arousal mechanism is a required first step for both men and women, and we often mistakenly believe that our genital response is where arousal begins. In truth, the sexiest part of our body is housed in the limbic brain, where memory, sexuality, and emotion awaken. The neurological circuitry for male arousal is more direct and faster than it is for women, and female arousal is a more interior process.

Most of us would love to have a more sustainable lifestyle. But most of us are also very busy and don’t always have time to think about even easy ways we could be more sustainable. So we’ve come up with some easy ways you could start being more sustainable this week! And many of them you’d even save some cash!

For close to two decades now, I have been writing and teaching about how our understanding of sustainability applies to our most important relationships. In much the same way that we have come to understand how conserving and sustaining our current resources wisely applies to the way that we build our homes, cultivate our food, and engage in transport, we must also be committed to preserving and sustaining the vital intimate relationships that are the fabric of our lives.

We are in a state of worldwide rest. Nearly four billion people, or half of the world’s population, are on some sort of stay-at-home order. In this unprecedented time – as we bear witness to what most of us thought impossible – we have a chance to really learn what rest can offer us. Even as the anxiety of world markets accelerates and the weight of our collective capacity to weather the economic ravages of this pause weighs heavily, we all remain suspended in a springtime slowdown.

The place to begin in the mysterious journey to orgasm begins with a better understanding of our anatomy. For people with vaginas, the discovery of the complex and powerful organ system of the clitoris wasn’t revealed until 1998 when an Australian urologist, Helen O’Connell completed a series of MRI studies and named 18 different parts of the clitoral structure which previously had only been known as the external glans. It turns out that two-thirds of our sexual power is internal. I was close to 40 years old before I understood the connection between what was happening inside and outside my vagina in sex.

What is an orgasm and what does it feel like? What happens when the body takes over in ecstatic release? How do we live in that body and conjure the moments that resemble a kind of grace that is bestowed? We know we didn’t make something happen so much as let something happen in us. Anais Nin once described her orgasm like this: “Electric flesh-arrows ... traversing the body. A rainbow of color strikes the eyelids. A foam of music falls over the ears….” 

There might not be a more powerful way to transform your life right now than by learning to receive love. Especially in these days of quarantine, when we are confined not only with our intimate others, but even more so with ourselves. All of our tricks of distraction and avoidance are no longer available in this present. The secret we have guarded so well, that has been buried so long, is now butting its head through the cracks that this new COVID-19 reality has generated.

After nine months of waiting, your baby is finally here. You’re probably feeling a lot of different things – overjoyed, freaked out, and everything in between. On one hand, you made a person! On the other hand, your postpartum body may feel unfamiliar. You’re probably tired and still in some pain. And if you had a vaginal birth? Well, your vagina may look and feel like a stranger.

Here’s the thing about people, even those we love: They are annoying. I tell people this regularly and they laugh; sometimes a nervous laugh, but more often a knowing laugh. We laugh together out of relief, too. It’s not just you or me. Let's face it, collectively we are all pretty annoying.