The V-Word

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 nothing more than to live a sustainable lifestyle – to give ourselves and our loved ones the very cleanest products, to leave a small footprint, and do our part to help our local and global ecosystems thrive.  But, most of us are also very busy. We don’t always have time to think about the ways we could adopt more sustainable living practices. Or we may not have the budget to choose a higher priced, sustainable product. With all of this in mind, we’ve come up with some easy ways to start being more sustainable, eco-conscious, and inspired this Earth Day.

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.

Mastering the Mystery of Orgasm Series – Week 3 Voltaire once said, “Pleasure is the object, duty and the goal of all rational creatures.” And truly, regardless of the many...

During this great pandemic slowdown, statistics show that our sex lives are also slowing down – from both a ban on new sex partners, and the ways that surging anxiety and depression impacts our libido and ability to connect. Depression and intimacy issues are common, yet, for all kinds of health reasons there might be no better time to focus on our ability to both give and receive pleasure from our partner than right now. I have long grappled with the dismal statistic that the average amount of foreplay that couples engage in is between one and four minutes.

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….”