We all find ourselves in one of two buckets right now. Either separated from people we love and can't see them or with the people we love in a non-stop way that we usually reserve for holidays or weekends.Either way, this unprecedented time is testing our ability to show up for each other and forcing us all to reconsider what it takes to sustain the fragile and essential fabric of relationships that we so often take for granted. 

In these days of self-imposed quarantine and the fear of coming close to anyone that is pervading and altering the way we live, we may question the safety of intimate connection as well. 

One of the most important attributes of our humanity is that we crave a sense of fairness and equality the way we do food or sleep. More than just an aspirational concept of governance, like “by the people, for the people”, all of our relationships thrive within the honest intentionality of creating equity between people. It is part of our DNA as we all recognize the plaintive cry of a child’s “it's’ not fair.”

Our heart is hands down our hardest working organ. It never sleeps, beating over two billion times in a life time and circulating 50 million gallons of blood. It is the first organ structure that comes to life in the embryo and holds us until our last breath. It is hard to imagine how we could ever take this life-sustaining organ for granted, but so constant is the heart that we rarely stop to celebrate its function or recognize and listen to it’s needs.

At Good Clean Love, we are big fans of the heart. It's literally the core of our body and life being and, in a more figurative sense, it's the pathway to love and our connections with everyone in our lives. We wouldn't be who we are without it. 

The Buddha famously taught “With our thoughts we make the world.” True wisdom begins when we recognize the extent to which we are a captive audience to the voice inside our head. It is this inner reality and the often invisible relationship we have with ourselves that literally creates our lives. More surprising – and perhaps more subtle – is how this world inside our head also acts as a filter for everything we perceive outside of us. In short, the world happening around us becomes what we tell ourselves it is.

Your arousal response is your body’s natural mechanism for accessing pleasure. Although often confused with the genital swelling that accompanies being turned on, the source and ignition for becoming aroused lives in the sexiest organ of your body - your brain. More specifically in the limbic area of the brain, which is also responsible for generating our emotions and developing memory. Conveniently the limbic brain is co-located with our olfactory bulb, which explains why our sense of smell both heightens our emotional experience and connects us to our memories so powerfully.

As early as 44 BCE, the Romans hosted a fertility celebration called Lupercalia, in which they sacrificed animals and procreated. Romantic? I’m not so sure. It wasn’t until the 14th century that Valentine’s Day as we know it really started to emerge. And no, it wasn’t named after just one saint; in fact, it was named after three!

Most of us are risk averse when it comes to matters of the heart. This is why so many things that need to be shared are never uttered. It also explains why so many relationships expire long before the work is done. Staying intimately connected is only possible through the work of being emotionally courageous. Perhaps the truest thing we can say about courage is that it is the ability to live well with all of the risks that come with being alive.

The benefits of using a personal lubricant for sex are numerous. Lubricants can deepen your pleasure, since they increase the natural slip and slide that go with the best sex, and they can also be helpful in combating conditions like vaginal dryness or pain with sex that often accompany normal hormonal shifts, medical conditions, and age-related changes.