Good Clean Reads

Avoiding emotional escalation with your partner is an excellent and often successful way to invite a loving passionate response. It is so easy to get caught up in each other’s bad moods that not doing it takes real effort and clarity. Habitual patterns of negative communication feed on each other. One person makes a sniping comment, volley and return with the other person’s pent up rage. Throw a...

We all love to be loved. We long to be touched and our basic human drives towards physical pleasure is almost as strong as our drive to alleviate hunger or thirst. It may even be stronger, as it has been demonstrated that babies who are provided basic needs but are not touched and handled do not survive. It is central to our functioning and yet often in direct conflict with the relationships that...

It is a great gift in life to act, to give, to learn, to love without needing any recognition. Tonight was the awards ceremony at the local high school where like in all the high schools across the country, the same 15 kids were recognized over and over for achievements in sports, academics and volunteering. When you aren’t one of the 15, you can’t help feeling at least a little invisible. My...

Working on a relationship when it hits rock bottom has little chance of success, a fact that is not surprising, but was recently proven in research studies. By the time that you have nothing left to say to your partner, reversing the negative spin in your relationship takes such significant effort that few people have the courage to try it.

Just like tending a garden, working at your relationship...

Here is a lesson that I learned again about keeping love sustainable in life. Most of the arguments that break a relationship exist for the life of the relationship. The big three that most of us deal with in some form or another are money, sex and family. In addition there are qualities of a relationship that often create real conflict as well- mutual respect, need for personal space,...

Here is a fact about eagles that inspires me to believe in love. As eagles prepare to mate, they lock talons and free fall through the sky. It is a do or die proposition, as it is with us humans, or at least it feels that way as we project ourselves forward, heart wide open, hoping to be loved back.  This act of free falling can be seen as a love metaphor for emotional intimacy, where vulnerability and trust are essential. I don’t know if there is a sign that the eagles give each other so they know the...

I was happy to learn that the Sun is here to stay in all its radiance for another 5 billion years. That even as we are unsure about the land formations that will remain and how we will ensure enough drinking water for the population, I feel somehow reassured to know that the sun will rise and set as it always has, reminding us that there is always another day to try again.

The heat and power that...

What is that “mood” thing anyway? I know it is in me somewhere- this secret passage that sometimes feels like a dark and narrow hallway with no windows or air and other times is like throwing open huge windows to a beautiful summer morning. Finding this space, where I am more in my body than in my mind is a journey. It is as unpredictable and changeable as I am. But I have been paying attention...

Nothing teaches us as much about the brevity of this life as it’s ending. This weekend our community witnessed a boy in my daughter’s graduating high school class take his life. This occurred on the same day that a man recently married to a single mom I had known for years, fell to his untimely death. There are no words that express the loss, shock, sadness, anger, disbelief that course through...