“The only thing about masturbation to be ashamed of is doing it badly.” –Sigmund Freud
Shared pleasure depends on one’s capacity to pleasure themselves, which is why most sex therapists refer to the practice of masturbation as the foundation of sexual health. And just for the record, masturbation is the most common sexual practice on the planet. It is not just for lonely people either: surveys...
“Pleasure is the object, duty and the goal of all rational creatures.” Voltaire
Pleasure is entirely dependent on our physical capacity to experience the world through our senses. We open to pleasure when we become deliberate about learning more about our capacity to see, hear, feel, smell, and taste. Doing this is easier than you might think: just by adopting the practice...
The night of my fiftieth birthday party in late October was unseasonably warm. I wanted to be sure and remember the night, so the festivities included magic and fire dancers. My four kids had been planning something special, and I hoped that it wouldn’t be a crazy rap verse about my quirks. Instead they started by silencing the room. Then, when it was quiet, each of them shared their most personal...
“The spirit down here in man and the spirit up there in the sun, in reality are only one spirit, and there is no other one.” The Upanishads
The freedom to pray and worship and believe in whatever form of God is meaningful, to us, is a freedom that we often take for granted. Yet, in fact it is this freedom, above all others, that has drawn the vast diversity of people and religious beliefs that...
“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” MLK, Jr.
All of the things in life that we have no language for recede from view. And yet our inability to express the feelings and experiences that happen to us don’t make those feelings disappear entirely. Instead they take up residence in our body, manifesting in everything from anxiety attacks to unexplained physical...
“Joy is being willing for things to be as they are.” -Charlotte Joko Beck
I am not much of a planner any more. Even as my tiny homespun love company has finally moved into the growth stage of being able to track and predict sales data, I still balk at making plans. For most of my adult life, I have witnessed my best laid plans for how things will go, from the dozens of business plans I have...
“Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty.” -Frank Herbert
We often confuse the idea of doing whatever we want with true freedom. Following our every whim without a sense of responsibility for the consequences is not really freedom, but rather a poor facsimile that ends up entrapping us in unintended patterns of damaged relationships and long-term...
“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror… Just keep going. No feeling is final.”-Rainier Maria Rilke
We can’t choose which feelings we want to experience. What most people don’t realize in their selective attention to their feelings is that as we block our ability to feel any particular emotion, it actually impacts all of our emotional capacity, not just the things we are trying to...
“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” Albert Einstein
I was watching the Warriors get killed in game 4 when suddenly I felt a lump develop in my left ear. It was the middle of the 2nd half of the game. I was fine in the first half of the game and then suddenly I wasn’t. Throughout the evening, my ear...
June is Pride month, a nationwide celebration of the contributions gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people have made to our lives and culture. We wanted to learn more about gay pride history, so did a little Google self-educating.
Here are some interesting bits of information on the history of pride month:
“I was not only told that I was assaulted, I was told that because I couldn’t remember, I technically could not prove it was unwanted. And that distorted me, damaged me, and almost broke me.” –Stanford Rape Survivor
Sexual assault is so common that it occurs every two minutes in this country to one in six women (and one in 33 men). Until this week, it’s rampant existence has remained largely out...
For me, learning to feel means learning to relax.
Sometimes when I feel rushed or busy, I try to pull myself away from the edges of my body, of my life, into a narrow zone where nothing, especially emails, can reach me. I’m protected there, but I’m also contracted and tense because trying to block things out. I feel like I already have too much to do — experiencing my own sensations would be too...
