Good Clean Reads

“You must weed your mind as you would weed your garden.” ~Terri Guillemets 

I learned about weeds before I learned anything about gardens. For my 40th birthday, my husband built me a beautiful, secure deer fence to make my first garden. Someone advised me to add straw to augment and lighten the heavy clay soil. Unfortunately, what I thought was straw turned out to be hay and seeded itself heartily throughout my new garden. In no time I was completely overwhelmed with weeds that I had inadvertently sown.

The percentage of people impacted by infidelity is somewhere between 30 and 60% of all married couples, depending on the study cited. More interesting than the differences between men and women are the different patterns of infidelity for each gender. Cheating men are more likely than cheating women to have an affair with someone younger than their spouse. On the other hand, cheating women are more likely than cheating men to have an affair with someone better educated than their current spouse.

Necessity was the mother of invention when I began Good Clean Love. I reacted very badly to the petrochemical ingredients that make up the majority of intimacy products and, after nursing through four children, I had vaginal dryness all the time. The products that my doctor recommended only made a bad situation worse.

Our sense of smell is ancient and the source of our most powerful emotional memories. It is also the primal sensory pathway to sexual attraction, making it a key sensory experience in intimacy. And yet, we often give little attention to all that our sense of smell can evoke, in part because we have so little vocabulary for scent. Often we're limited to “it smells like…” and delineated only between pleasant and unpleasant. But, the truth is that the world of scent cognition that so often goes unrecognized actually colors all of our interactions – especially our most intimate moments.  And there...

What is daily care of the vagina? We know how to take daily care of our face – we cleanse it, we balance our pH with toner, we moisturize it. But what’s involved with taking care of our vagina? And why take care of it every day? Let’s first address why you want to practice daily care of your lady business.

With Valentine’s Day just around the corner, here is an idea that not only promises to make the holiday more enjoyable, but also has the potential to benefit your relationship for months afterward: working with the contradictions in your heart by finding balance and even synergy between seemingly opposing emotions.

Most people are unaware that Valentine’s Day is one of the biggest break-up holidays of the year. It seems like an oxymoron that the holiday of love would be the one that often breaks the camel’s back, but that’s what happens when we expect a single day to make up for the benign neglect that our relationships are too often steeping in. 

I was having lunch with one of the students from my old positivity club the other day when he surprised me by telling me that what means the most to him now is learning how to feel. I asked him what he meant, and he said, “I used to think my feelings. I thought I was ‘sad’ or ‘angry’, but it never quite registered in my body. Now, I know I am feeling when it happens in my gut or my chest. When I feel most alive is when I can’t not feel what is happening.” 

According to U.S. News, 80 percent of us give up on our New Year’s resolutions by the second week of February. That’s a blight statistic for those of us who want to pursue growth in our lives. But I don’t mention this statistic to bring you down or to try to pop your dream bubble. I personally have loved New Year’s resolutions for as long as I can remember.