Good Clean Reads

Lubrication is one of the simplest and most effective ways to make intimacy more enjoyable. And even though our bodies naturally produce lubrication, it isn’t always enough. Hormonal changes, stress, medication, or simply wanting a little more glide are all good reasons to reach for lube!

“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

1. Bathe in your senses

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...

“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...