photo: brooke lark

Use Habits to Revive Your Love

By developing or strengthening some of the relationship habits that came so naturally years ago, you can reignite old feelings and build a healthier, happier, sexier, and more mindful relationship with your partner. Even if things have grown difficult between you, and there are challenging issues to deal with, it’s possible to learn how to have a healthy relationship. Just adopting a few new positive behaviors or dropping some negative habits can change

the entire tenor of your relationship. Because you are now paying attention with intention to your partner and the quality of your connection, you will see a positive shift in the way you interact with one another. These habits will help you be more present with one another, communicate better, avoid divisive arguments, and understand and respond to one another’s needs in a more loving, empathic, and conscious way. We know the idea of “developing habits” to improve your relationship might not seem sexy or appealing. Most of us think of hard work when we think about adopting new habits and dropping bad ones. We’ve all been through the struggles of trying to lose weight, start an exercise routine, or declutter our homes—only to give up too soon and feel like failures. However, there are three reasons why developing mindful relationship habits or simply knowing how to build a healthy relationship can be a positive and successful experience for you and your partner. First, unlike with other habits that can take weeks or months to see results, most of these mindful relationship habits will improve your connection and closeness right away. Even when you create a very small, positive change in your behavior, you will see immediate results with your partner. A little attention, love, kindness, respect, tenderness, compassion, and thoughtfulness go a long way. Second, we teach you how to develop new habits and release bad ones in a way that isn’t overwhelming or difficult. Steve and Barrie are habit creation authors and experts, and they provide a template for developing habits in a way that ensures they stick for the long term. You won’t have to deal with the feelings of regret and failure that come with giving up too soon. We teach you how to start small and build on your habits to ensure success. Finally, we firmly believe that your intimate relationship is the most important relationship in your life—the centerpiece of your family life, around which all other people and life endeavors revolve. A mindful, evolved relationship translates to a happy, healthy life. Knowing this, you should feel highly motivated to take care of your relationship. This motivation will keep you energized as you work on embracing new behaviors with your partner.

Healthy Relationship Habit #1: Embrace Your Love Languages

It’s natural to assume that what makes you feel loved and happy is what will make your partner feel loved and happy. But the truth is, if you are making a special effort to express your love in ways that feel good for you, you may be missing the mark with your partner. Do you really know what makes your partner feel loved, cherished, and happy in your relationship? If you haven’t asked directly (or been told directly), your genuine efforts in building a healthy relationship might not be having the desired effect. One of the most fundamental aspects of a mindful, intimate connection with one another is expressing and offering what author and relationship expert Dr. Gary Chapman calls your “love languages.” You and your partner should be aware of your own love languages, and you should be willing to show love in the way your partner receives it. Without this understanding, you might end up feeling resentful that your needs aren’t being met or frustrated that your loving efforts with your partner are unappreciated. In his bestselling book, The 5 Love Languages: The Secret to Love that Lasts, Gary Chapman outlines five ways that people express and experience love. Over his 30 plus years of counseling couples, Dr. Chapman has noticed specific patterns in the way partners communicate—and it turns out that most of us express and interpret love in the same five ways according to his observations. These include:

+ words of affirmation + quality time + gift giving + acts of service + physical touch

Chapman asserts that each of us has a primary and secondary love language that is revealed in the way we show love to others. By offering our own love language to our partner, we are actually revealing our deepest needs within the relationship—but not necessarily our partner’s. Observe how your partner shows love to you, and analyze what he or she complains about within the relationship, and you will better understand what your partner needs from you. If your partner is especially affectionate with you, it reveals that he or she craves physical affection from you. Or if she complains about how bored and lonely she feels, your partner might need more quality time with you. Since we all don’t have the same love languages as our partners, we can easily misinterpret or neglect to understand how to give our partners what they most need. Asking your partner directly what he or she most wants and needs to feel loved and cherished is the best way to be clear. By asking and then offering words and actions to support your partner’s love languages, you tear down many of the barriers that undermine the closeness you both want to share. Let’s review each one of these five love languages and what they mean: 1. Words of affirmation According to Dr. Chapman, one way to express love emotionally is to use words that affirm, validate, and build up your partner. Verbal compliments, or words of appreciation, are extremely powerful communicators of your love. They should be expressed in simple, straightforward statements of affirmation, like:

+ You look so beautiful tonight. + I’m always so happy to see you when you come home. + I am amazed by your integrity. + You are the most important person in the world to me.

One of the best ways you can offer words of affirmation is by expressing your respect and admiration for your partner. It shows how much you love the unique individual that your partner is. This, too, is one of the primary keys to a healthy relationship. Positive, loving words hold real value for those who prioritize this love language. So remember that negative or insulting comments cut deep—and won’t be easily forgotten. 2. Quality time This love language is all about giving your partner your undivided attention, which makes him or her feel loved and comforted. But sitting together watching television or surfing the net doesn’t count as quality time. Says Dr. Chapman, “What I mean is sitting on the couch with the TV off, looking at each other and talking, devices put away, giving each other your undivided attention. It means taking a walk, just the two of you, or going out to eat and looking at each other and talking.” We are all pulled in different directions by competing forces and responsibilities, and our time is so valuable. Be sure you prioritize your quality-time-loving spouse in your busy life by setting apart some daily hours just for him or her. 3. Gift giving For some people, receiving gifts, visible symbols of love, makes them feel deeply appreciated and cherished. A physical gift is something you can hold in your hand. It represents that your partner was thinking of you and made an effort for you. The gift itself is a symbol of that thought, but it doesn’t have to be expensive or elaborate. What is most important is the thought behind the gift and the feelings of love it represents. 4. Acts of service With this love language, you do things you know your partner would like you to do; you seek to please him or her through serving. Actions like doing your partner’s laundry, setting the table, getting the tires rotated, cleaning the house, and running errands are all acts of service that show you care for your partner. These actions require thought, planning, time, effort, and energy. If done with a generous spirit, they are true expressions of love. This particular love language also requires a willingness to overcome stereotypes so you can express your feelings more effectively through acts of service. There is no reason a man can’t prepare a meal or a woman can’t mow the grass. If your spouse’s love language is acts of service, then remember, what you do for him or her says “I love you” louder than words. 5. Physical touch If this is your love language, nothing feels more loving and affirming than your partner’s touch. These expressions through touch aren’t just meant for the bedroom—nonsexual physical connections, like handholding, kissing, or cuddling are a big part of this love language. Someone whose love language is physical touch will feel empty and disconnected without enough touching. Touch makes them feel secure in the love of their partner. If you didn’t grow up in an affectionate family, you may find it difficult to express your love this way. But if this is your partner’s love language, you will need to learn exactly the kind of touch he or she desires and offer it more often. Once you and your partner are aware of each other’s love languages, your goal is to offer your partner more of what he or she needs to feel adored and cherished, which makes for a good relationship. You may need to develop some new habits during your day to offer your partner what he or she needs. One thing to remember—because you or your partner favor a particular love language, you shouldn’t stop expressing the other love languages. According to Chapman, even though we tend to favor one language more than the others, we still enjoy expressions of the other languages as well.

How to Develop This Habit

To learn your own love language and your partner’s, take Dr. Chapman’s assessment at www.5lovelanguages.com to find out your primary and secondary love languages. This could be of great help if you are looking for answers on how to build healthy relationships. Your highest score will be your primary love language. Your second highest score will be your secondary love language. Once you know your own primary and secondary love languages, discuss them with your partner and learn what your partner’s love languages are. 1. Discuss how you want your love languages expressed. Now that you know your own love languages, write down a list of specific actions, words, and behaviors you would like your partner to use to express your love language. For example, if physical touch is your love language, you might write down that you want more cuddling in bed, a back rub at night, or more hand-holding. If you are an acts of service person, you might want your partner to surprise you by handling a certain chore or bringing you breakfast in bed once a week. 2. Select one love language behavior for your partner. Once you’ve completed your lists, choose just one love language action or behavior to begin with that you want your partner to offer. Decide how often you want the action to be expressed and the time of day you want it. You might choose behavior that can be offered daily for this first habit. Practicing a consistent, daily action helps your partner develop the habit of offering it to you. For example, you might request a back rub from your partner for ten minutes just before turning out the light, or you could ask your partner to handle making the bed every day before he or she goes to work. These are behaviors that can be offered daily at the same time with a regular trigger. Ultimately, you want to meet your partner’s love language needs spontaneously and creatively, without relying on a habit trigger or planning it for a certain time of day. But for now, just begin with one new love language behavior to get the ball rolling. 3. Offer the love language habit with love. It won’t feel like you are sincere in your efforts if you offer the requested behavior with resentment or passivity. The love language action should be offered graciously and wholeheartedly, showing your partner that you are truly pleased to be pleasing him or her. Reflect on the person you were when you and your partner were first dating. Back in those early days, you would have been thrilled to offer this act of love to your partner. Draw from these memories and try to re-create the feelings you had then. Make sure your trigger for this action is strong enough that you remember to act on it. You may need other reminders in the beginning to help you follow through. For this habit, it’s better if you don’t rely on your partner to remind you, as your forgetfulness can make your partner feel you aren’t truly invested in meeting his or her needs. 4. Add more love language actions to your day. As this first habit becomes more cemented, add another love language habit to your day. Look at your partner’s list of desired love language behaviors and choose another one that you can perform regularly with a daily trigger. However, you might decide to go for a more organic approach and look for opportunities throughout the day to express your partner’s love language. Too many scheduled love habits might begin to feel rote and rehearsed for both you and your partner. Relying on the element of surprise in meeting your partner’s needs can feel more genuine and caring. Performing “variable” habits is harder because there is no daily consistency or set trigger built into the habit. But there are some habits that just don’t work as well on a scheduled routine, and love language habits fit this bill. The trick is remembering to look for natural opportunities to offer the love language behaviors and to act on them. You might put small and cryptic reminders around your house to trigger you to do something loving that you know your partner will like. You don’t need a big sign on the refrigerator that says, “Do something nice for Sue.” Your partner doesn’t need to see what you’re up to. A rubber band on a doorknob or an item put in an unusual place can trigger you without alerting your spouse. 5. Make a game of it. To keep this habit fun, brainstorm creative ways you can express your partner’s love language. Rather than offering the traditional back rub to your physical touch-loving spouse, offer to wash her hair with a luxurious shampoo and dry it for her. Instead of telling your words-of-affirmation partner how much you love and appreciate him, write him a poem and read it in front of the entire family. Look for new ways every day to surprise and delight your partner so that he or she is charmed and thrilled by your loving behavior. What better way to spark your creativity and personal joy than to come up with endless ways to show love to your lover.

Healthy Relationship Habit #2: Initiate Productive Conflict

One of the best relationship tips to prevent a conflict from turning into a full-blown fight is by initiating productive conflict from the outset. We often initiate a conversation with our partner, knowing that the topic has the potential to start an argument. Yet we forge on anyway, arming ourselves to convince or coerce our partner into accepting our “rightness” about the situation. Generally, this tactic backfires. Rather than mindfully working out a problem as a team, we end up seething in our separate corners, assured that the other person is unreasonable and selfish. Empathy, negotiation, and compromise are essential to solving your solvable problems with your partner. As much as we might feel we have the right answer and want things to go our own way, we must put the health and strength of the relationship ahead of our own individual needs. Initiating a conflict or potentially acrimonious discussion with some productive communication skills makes it a whole lot easier to navigate conflict with a lot less pain. Unfortunately, research suggests that most of us are conflict averse, biting our tongue or actively taking steps to avoid conflict even when we long for a specific outcome. When we do engage, we may give in too quickly or compromise, failing to meet our own needs or devise useful solutions. Or if we dig in our heels, trying to persuade our spouse that our belief is the right one, we miss the chance to learn more and to problem solve. To improve communication as couples, we need to get better at initiating a productive conflict. What does that mean? It means understanding how to approach and resolve conflicts in ways that generate helpful solutions while protecting the relationship. A productive conflict doesn’t mean just being “nicer” about fighting. Rather, it means, having an intentional and healthy process for working through differences. And this is where negotiation becomes so important. Negotiating well, which is a part of healthy relationships,  means using a process for creating better solutions—one that meets each partner’s most important needs and preferences. There are specific negotiation habits that make up this process, and these habits will save you a lot of angst and frustration if you practice and learn them before the next conflict arises. Remember, it’s the way we handle conflict that matters—and avoiding conflict is extremely costly in the long run because we get worse outcomes and fail to seize opportunities to deepen our mutual understanding and intimacy. These strategies on how to have a good relationship can help you and your partner create the best conditions for coming up with good solutions while protecting the harmony of your romance.

How to Develop This Habit

Again, this is a habit you can’t practice until the next conflict situation arises. So you will need to be vigilant about remembering and practicing these steps when the situation calls for them. That’s why we believe it’s valuable to set up a system for remembering the steps for a productive conflict and to write down that system so you commit to it. One part of the system could be to post a reminder in a few places around your house so you remember to review and use the productive conflict skills we outline here. Of course, not all of your conflicts occur in your home, so putting a reminder on your phone that pops up every day can help you be prepared when a potential conflict arises. If this is a habit you want to focus on for the next few weeks, put a rubber band on your wrist as a reminder to use these skills and agree to remind each other tactfully if necessary. Before you begin the conversation, be sure to review the nine ways outlined here to keep you on track. 1. Choose the right time for a discussion. We often decide to start up a serious conversation in the evening, when we’re tired. After a long day of work or dealing with the kids, this can be the worst time to discuss a touchy topic. Instead, schedule a time to bring up a potentially difficult conversation when you are both rested and in a good frame of mind. Be sure it’s a time when you won’t be interrupted or distracted. 2. Start with constructive language. If you begin with something like, “I’d like to discuss the way you manage our money,” it sounds like a criticism, as the problem appears to be with your partner. Instead, try something like, “I’d like to see if we can agree on some rules for our budget and money management.” This is a more constructive way of opening the conversation by naming a positive goal rather than implying a problem with your partner. 3. Create mutual ground rules. There are things you or your partner can say or do that will immediately get the conversation off to a bad start. For example, using the words “always” and “never” can make your partner bristle. Talking early in the morning before you’ve had your coffee might not work for you. Starting a conversation with, “You do this” rather than “I need this,” can put your partner on the defensive. These are just some ideas, but you and your partner should come up with your own ground rules together. 4. Listen and validate first. This is an important factor to consider when building a healthy relationship. Remember that letting your partner feel heard and understood is a powerful way to help him or her feel safe and willing to be more generous and flexible in negotiation and compromise. You don’t have to agree with your partner to acknowledge what he or she is saying and feeling. Listening mindfully and attentively, nodding, and making affirmative noises or remarks can be enough. Also, summarizing what you are hearing without judgment and asking your partner if you got it right is a powerfully constructive strategy. 5. Brainstorm several options. When discussing a difficult or controversial topic, you may tend to rush quickly to a possible solution only to argue about whether the idea is good or bad. Before you propose a solution, engage in a short period of brainstorming, where you both present several solutions without criticizing one another. Once you have many possibilities on the table, you may find that combining several of them is easily agreeable to both of you. 6. Seek outside support from others. Often we stew for days or weeks about things that are bothering us, only to let loose with a flood of criticisms that make healthy communication with your partner impossible. Once you feel resentments brewing, find a confidant you can talk to about what is bothering you before you blow up, and ask them to help you. A trusted friend or family member can help you clarify and articulate what is really bothering you and what your goals are. They can help you brainstorm a constructive way to open the conversation as well as think of questions to ask and ways to talk about your fears. As new research on relationships has shown, this kind of support is highly effective in helping us better process information and create solutions. 7. Reframe criticism as a complaint. As relationship expert John Gottman has discovered, there is an important difference between a complaint and criticism. The complaint points to behavior as the problem, where criticism implies a quality or trait of your partner is the problem. However, if your partner opens with criticism like, “You are so sloppy and disorganized,” try not to wrangle about whether this is true. Instead, focus on specifics of the complaint and the behaviors your partner views as a problem. Conversations that begin with criticism tend to degrade into defensiveness and counter-criticism; this makes reaching a solution all the more difficult. Conversations that begin with a specific complaint, like, “I feel frustrated and overwhelmed when you forget to pick up your dirty clothes,” tend to lead to more concrete solutions.  8. Use the phrase, “Is there anything else?” At the beginning of the conversation, invite your partner to completely “empty their pockets” related to their issues with you. For example, if your partner says, “I want to talk about your parents visiting for the holidays,” instead of starting in with your thoughts, ask the question, “Is there anything else?” There might be a deeper concern behind your partner’s comment like perhaps she feels left out when your parents visit. Allowing the real issue to emerge at the beginning of a discussion can save a lot of time and emotional energy.  9. Learn and practice repair moves. Repair moves are words or actions that can lessen the tension if things begin to get heated in your conversation. Four powerful repair moves include:

1. Using lighthearted humor that you know will make your partner smile. 2. Reminiscing about past happy or fun time together. 3. Apologizing for your part in creating a problem or causing your partner pain. 4. Using loving touch and affection.

These moves help defuse the tension so you can move on constructively with the conversation.

Healthy Relationship Habit #3: Use “I Feel” Instead of “You”

+“You are so lazy. You never clean up after yourself.” + “You never pay attention to what I say.” + “You are self-centered, and you clearly don’t care about my feelings.”

Have you and your partner fallen into the habit of pointing the finger of blame or shame at one another when you feel wounded or angry? Have you tried looking for the best healthy relationship tips but none of them helped? If you find yourself telling your partner what he is doing wrong or defining her by the behaviors that are bothering you, you’re not alone. Most couples fall into this pattern after the initial infatuation phase begins to wane. As a couple, you don’t want to get stuck in this phase of deflecting blame and hurling criticism. In a mindful relationship, you need to focus less on criticizing your partner and more on communicating how the behavior makes you feel. Dr. Harville Hendrix is the author of the New York Times bestselling book Getting the Love You Want and the founder of Imago Relationship Therapy. Hendrix sees a connection between the frustrations experienced in adult relationships and our early childhood experiences. Through his work with thousands of couples, Dr. Hendrix has learned that when you understand each other’s feelings and “childhood wounds” more empathically, you can begin to heal yourself and move toward a more conscious relationship. He believes there are three stages in a committed relationship; when our relationship gets in trouble, we get stuck in the second stage and can’t move on to the third. The first stage is romantic love, which begins when you first fall in love with your partner. You feel a sense of oneness or completion that seems like it will last forever. The second phase is the power struggle. During this phase, we begin to get more defensive, blame our partners, and focus more on protecting ourselves rather than engaging in the relationship. We start to dislike many of the things that made us fall in love in the first place. Why does this happen? Because we are subconsciously looking for a partner who can make us more whole and complete—someone who will stimulate our growth. Our partners push our buttons and trigger some of our deepest wounds, usually from childhood. But if we work through these issues, we can achieve enormous personal growth. Unfortunately, many couples get stuck in the power struggle phase—one of the most common relationship problems—and can’t get off the cycle of defensiveness and repeat conflict. For a relationship to reach its potential, couples need to become conscious of their power struggle and begin the journey to the third stage of relationships called real or conscious love. In a conscious and good relationship, you are willing to explore your own issues, so you feel safe enough to meet your partner’s needs. In a conscious relationship, you recognize your own unresolved childhood issues and how these issues are showing up in your current relationship. When you find fault with your partner, you can shine a light on your own dark experiences to see how you are projecting your baggage onto your partner. Just taking a moment each time you have frustration to consider where this upset is coming from can do wonders for easing the conflict in your marriage. Also, as you work toward a conscious relationship, you begin to let go of illusions about your partner and see him or her not as your savior but as another wounded person like you who is struggling to be healed and to grow. You also begin to take responsibility for communicating your needs to your partner without expecting him or her to instinctively know them. You become more intentional in your communication so that you keep the channels of mutual understanding open. Through this process, you learn how to value one another’s needs and wishes as much as you value your own—because this contributes to the health of the relationship and your own happiness. One way to encourage a more conscious relationship is by changing a few simple words in your communication with one another and being more intentional in expressing your frustrations and hurt feelings without divisive criticism or defensiveness. When you express how you feel and what triggered your feelings, rather than blaming your partner, you change the entire dynamic of your conflict from divisive to collaborative.

How to Develop This Habit

Aside from executing all the relationship tips you’ve learned through the years, it’s useful to practice this habit before a real conflict arises that requires the skills involved. You can do this in a role-play situation that doesn’t feel too awkward or stilted. Consider working on it a few times a week for about ten to fifteen minutes so you get the hang of the language involved. As with all your habit work, find a suitable time and trigger to help you remember to work on it. You and your partner will take turns sharing a complaint or concern with one another, focusing on your own feelings and personal history rather than on your partner’s perceived flaws. 1. Focus on your feelings. In preparation for your habit work, think about an issue with your partner in which you might want to criticize your partner’s behaviors or decisions. This could be something he or she said or did recently that is bothering you or making you feel wounded. However, rather than dwelling on your partner’s shortcomings, think about what his or her behavior triggered in you. Was it anger? Embarrassment? Disrespect? Feeling unloved? Anger is often a surface emotion, covering up deeper insecurity or wound triggered by your partner’s words or actions. There may be more than one emotion that was triggered, so dig deep to consider the layers of feelings that might be involved. 2. Consider related past wounds. As Dr. Hendrix’s relationship advice reminds us, many of our triggered feelings relate to childhood wounds or past negative experiences. Your wife’s nagging may remind you of your harsh and critical mother. Your husband’s aloofness may trigger your pain related to a cold and emotionally unavailable father. When your partner better understands how his or her behavior triggers these old wounds and how it makes you feel, he or she will have more empathy and motivation to change the behavior. Not all frustrations are related to your childhood or past experiences, but many are. When you isolate these situations, you have a real opportunity for healing and growth, especially with a compassionate partner. 3. Use an “I feel” statement. If you are sharing an issue, focus on your own feelings in a succinct way without too many words. Start with the words, “When you,” to describe the bothersome behavior, followed by the words, “I feel,” to describe your feelings, rather than assigning blame to your partner. For example, you might say, “When you talk down to me, I feel shamed and disrespected,” rather than, “You are such a know-it-all. Stop telling me what to do!” 4. Use “It reminds me of ” to communicate past wounds. After you communicate the issue and how it makes you feel, share the childhood or past wound that your partner’s behavior has triggered for you (if this applies). Try to share a specific example rather than a general issue. For example, you might say: “When you talk down to me, I feel shamed and disrespected. It reminds me of the times when my dad would criticize me and call me stupid for not making straight A’s.” 5. Ask for the support you need. Receiving support from your partner is, undoubtedly, one of the keys to a healthy relationship. If your partner said to you out of the blue, “Can you please help me heal from a painful experience in my past?” you would likely say, “Of course, I am here for you. What can I do?” When your partner expresses that your behavior has triggered pain, he or she is also reaching out for your help, even though it may not seem like it. Of course, it’s hard to offer that help when your partner strikes back with wounding, critical words. That’s why it’s important for the partner who is sharing the problem to ask directly for what he or she needs in order to facilitate healing and reconnection. After you communicate the issue, how it made you feel, and the past wound it triggered, tell your partner directly how he or she can help you. “I need you to speak more respectfully and kindly to me. This will bring me closer to you and help me feel safe that you won’t treat me like my dad did. Will you do that?” 6. Practice in writing first. It might help to first write out your thoughts about the issue you will communicate to your spouse during your practice sessions using the following template: When my partner _____ then I feel _____. It reminds me of _____. I need my partner to _____. 7. Add active listening to your practice. Listening is, no doubt, one of the best things to do to address all of your relationship problems. Once you both get the hang of communicating your complaints or hurts using the language outlined here, add active listening as part of the dialogue practice. This will give you the opportunity to practice a conscious dialogue in which one partner presents an issue using conscious language and the other listens empathically. Remember these healthy relationship tips for couples:

+ Use “I” words when describing your feelings as the speaker.

+ Describe what past pain the issue triggered for you (if any).

+ The listener should validate the partner with words like, “That makes sense,” or “I can see that.”

+ The listener should mirror the partner’s words, then ask, “Is that right?”

+ The listener should ask, “Is there more?” to give the speaker the chance to say everything needed.

+ The listener should empathize with the partner’s feelings with “I imagine you must feel …”

+ The speaker should ask for what he or she needs to help resolve or heal the situation.

These practice sessions are to help you learn how to communicate more mindfully and empathically, but you may not be able to completely resolve your issue during these sessions. You may need to revisit the second habit about initiating productive conflict for ideas on resolving issues and reaching compromise once you have had a conscious dialogue about a problem or area of conflict. Excerpted with permission from Mindful Relationship Habits: 25 Practices for Couples to Enhance Intimacy, Nurture Closeness, and Grow a Deeper Connection by S.J. Scott with Barrie Davenport.

About The Authors Barrie Davenport is the founder of the award-winning personal development site, Live Bold and Bloom. She is a certified personal coach and online course creator, helping people apply practical, evidence-based solutions and strategies to create happier, richer, more successful lives. She is also the author of a series of self-improvement books on positive habits, life passion, confidence building, mindfulness, and simplicity. Learn more at liveboldandbloom.com Steve “S.J.” Scott is a Wall Street Journal bestselling author with 70 books in his catalog. He also blogs about habit development on his site Develop Good Habits, which provides daily action plans for every area of your life, from health and fitness to personal relationships. When not working, S.J. likes to read, exercise, travel, and spend time with his family. Learn more at developgoodhabits.com

If you have ever experienced being in flow, you know it’s a peak experience. And if, for some reason, you haven’t, here’s what it’s like: Imagine an immensely pleasurable feeling of being connected to everyone and everything around you—in perfect harmony with yourself, your environment and the people in your life. Then imagine that, on top of this blissful sensation, you also feel a wildly expanded sense of possibility, creativity and intuition mixed with moments of joy, laughter and profound moments of inspiration. Time slows down, you are fully locked into present moment awareness, and you start to wonder if this is what it’s like to be enlightened. That’s what flow feels like, and—just like it sounds—it is a truly incredible experience. For most people, it strikes somewhat infrequently and haphazardly, making it unreliable at best, however, there is a segment of society that has spent years studying how flow happens in order to engineer it on command so that the benefits of living in this expanded state of consciousness can be used to better our lives individually and collectively.

HuMandalas: Activating Flow States

One of those people is Daniel Levy—and while he probably wouldn’t call himself a flow expert in the classical sense, he’s found a way to help people tap into these peak flow states at will—through the use of a special type of connection technology called HuMandalas. And more specifically, Daniel is an expert at producing group flow—that is, bringing not just one person into flow, but an entire of group people, which is quite a feat. Daniel Levy began his journey into experiencing and understanding these types of expanded states of consciousness through simple practices like breathing; moving with the waves of nature; and ancient practices like yoga, ecstatic dance and the study of sacred geometrical forms. These flow-activating disciplines gave him great insight into the nature of flow, particularly in groups, and Daniel refined this art through countless workshops and as a facilitator and consultant within numerous communities at festivals, schools and organizations worldwide. After over a decade of real-world testing, the HuMandalas process was birthed. It is a deceptively simple but profoundly effective way to quickly bring groups of people into flow states together. As he describes them, HuMandalas is a form of guided movement meditation for groups that allow participants to get in sync with each other and the environment around them by using special kinds of intentional connection, toning and visualization practices. In order to make all of his knowledge and expertise of bringing people together through movement and formation accessible to all, Daniel created a deck of 52 HuMandalas cards and a corresponding digital app that allow others to drop into the experience of group flow and expanded awareness on their own. Using the HuMandalas card deck trains you to align your biorhythms to the universal flow of nature through guided interactions that mirror the sacred geometry of creation. The practices the cards guide individuals through draw from qigong, yoga, reiki and elements of sacred dance, all of which are known to produce peak flow states in the individuals who practice them.

Bring Your Relationships into Harmony and Flow

So how exactly does this work in real life? Using the cards is a simple but profound experience that is highly versatile for any group experience where flow, coherence and deep connection would be useful. Think company meetings, family dinners, workshops and retreats, before yoga classes, for sports teams before or after games, for musicians and just about anything else involving two or more people. The process goes something like this: one or more people draw a total of five cards for the group—one from each of the five categories: connect, share intention, cultivate energy (with movement and sound), offer blessing and anchor memory. Then you simply follow the instructions on the cards. Easy right? And it is on one level, but on another there is a high degree of wisdom, intention and insight that went into creating each card and designing the deck as a whole, so that you are able to create a seemingly endless variety of experiences that will lead you into individual and group flow like clockwork. Each time you pull cards the sequence is unique and engaging, but each time it reliably leads to a peak experience. Just like in nature, the cards are never quite the same as they were before, and this newness also helps to keep your brain from falling into expected patterns—something that can work against getting in flow in the long run. And perhaps, best of all, the decks are very affordable and a tree is planted with every purchase. To learn more visit their website: HuMandalas.com This article is a sponsored post written in collaboration with Humandalas, whose products and ethos complies with Conscious Lifestyle Magazine’s stringent quality and integrity guidelines.

About The Authors Meghan McDonald is the Co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of Conscious Lifestyle Magazine. She holds a master’s degree in social psychology from San Diego State University where she conducted award-winning research into the nature of human social behavior. She is an advocate for many environmental and social justice causes and a champion of social impact-focused brands and products that adhere to high sustainability and ethical standards. As a regular travel and lifestyle contributor to Conscious Lifestyle Magazine, Meghan funnels her extensive knowledge of natural products, organic living, and consumer behavior into researching and reviewing brands and products that promote health, wellbeing, sustainability, equality, and positive social change. She has traveled to over 25 countries and loves exploring diverse destinations worldwide while documenting the local artisans and businesses offering conscious, healthy alternatives.

photo: zabalotta photocase.com

The Five Secrets of Lasting Love

Here’s the bottom-line truth we’ve discovered from our decades of work with couples in long-term relationships: People can endure long-term relationships in many ways, but they will only thrive if they do five things. In other words, you can grow older with your partner in many ways, but you will only grow closer and more creative through the steady practice of five actions, which are the keys for how to make love last. We believe these five actions should be taught in every classroom in every school, every day. They most definitely should not be secrets we have to seek after or stumble into by trial and error. Yet they are. Almost none of us begin our love relationships knowing how to do these simple things, and our relationships are disastrous as a consequence. Let’s permanently remove the veil of secrecy that has covered these relationship tips and skills, and begin a new era of intimacy in close relationships.

The First Secret to Lasting Love

If you want a close, vibrant, and long-lasting love relationship, you need to become a master of commitment. We teach couples how to make love last by making real commitments to each other. There is an art to commitment, but almost nobody knows how to practice it. The first art of commitment is to spot and acknowledge the unconscious commitments that cause us to sabotage the harmony of our close relationships. In practical reality, the act of claiming ownership of an unconscious commitment changes a troublesome dynamic in a relationship faster than anything else. The second art of commitment and another key for how to make love last is to make commitments you can stand by. Real commitments can only be made about things you have control over. Real commitments are verifiable. If you make a phony commitment, such as “I promise to love you forever,” you set up an impossible situation by promising an illusion. Nobody can commit to loving someone forever, because some days you won’t even wake up feeling loving toward yourself. Love is a mystery—part feeling, part spirit, part mind—and mysteries by their very nature are outside our control. A real commitment would be to commit to telling your partner the truth about when you’re feeling loving and when you’re not. This type of commitment builds long-lasting love and saves relationships while turning on the flow of intimacy and creativity. The Lasting Love program offers a specific set of commitments we’ve researched with several thousand couples. When couples make these commitments, their relationships thrive.

The Second Secret to Lasting Love

If you want a long-term relationship that’s both close and creatively vital, you’ve got to become emotionally transparent. To go all the way to ultimate closeness and full creative expression, you must eliminate all barriers to speaking and hearing the truth about everything. We teach couples how to make love last by listening to the truth about everything from their partners, and we teach them how to speak the truth about everything to their partners. Everything means everything: feelings, deeds, hopes, dreams. We ask them to consider any hesitation about telling or hearing the unvarnished truth to be a symptom of resistance to greater love and creativity. We know this move is radical because it produces huge bursts of creative energy in everyone who tries it. As a practice, it has awesome power. As a concept, it quickly polarizes people—we’ve seen talk show audiences erupt in cheers and boos when we’ve said couples need to tell the truth to each other about everything. After twenty-plus years, though, we’ve still found no exceptions to the truth rule.

The Third Secret to Lasting Love

If you want a long-term relationship that’s both close and creatively vital, you must break the cycle of blame and criticism—it’s an addiction that saps creative energy as surely as drugs or drink. We invite couples to turn their relationship into a blame-free zone. We teach each partner to take full responsibility for everything that occurs in the relationship, especially if it looks like it’s the other person’s fault. Radical responsibility—and the powerful creative energy it unleashes—comes from catching yourself in the midst of saying, “Why did you do that to me again?” and shifting to asking, “What am I doing that keeps inviting that behavior?” In order to build lasting love, we ask couples to go a strict no-blame diet and stick to it. As a practice, this move liberates tremendous energy. In fact, we’ve seen life-altering breakthroughs come about when couples simply went one full day without criticizing or blaming each other. As a concept, the idea of giving up blame and criticism is often greeted with derision. “Impossible,” some say. “How boring,” say others. We have found that it’s actually possible, and anything but boring. The couple who is deeply addicted to blame and criticism has usually come to mistake the adrenalized drama of conflict for the flow of connection.

 The Fourth Secret to Lasting Love

If you want a vibrant long-term relationship—one in which you feel close as a couple and creative as individuals—you’ve have to do one big thing first. You’ve got to take your attention away from fixing the other person and put it on expressing your own creativity. Even one hour a week of focusing on your own creativity will produce results. More than that will often produce miracles. Nothing will sap your vital energy faster than squelching your creativity. Often, couples stifle their individual creativity in order to focus on fixing and changing the other person. Since this seldom produces tangible results, they devote more energy to the other person as a fixer-upper and less to individual creativity. When results are not forthcoming, they complain about the other person to third parties. They enter a dangerous cycle of complaint that has addictive properties—the more you do it the more things there are to complain about. Ultimately this leads to dissipation of creative energy and inner despair, and none of this is helpful as a way to make love last a long time. By contrast, fully creative people don’t have time for complaint. Even if you’re not fully engaged in creativity (even, as our research indicates, if you’re doing only an hour a week of creative expression), you will see quantum enhancement of vitality within the relationship with every increase in creative self-expression.

The Fifth Secret to Lasting Love

If you want to create vital, long-lasting love, you must become a master of verbal and nonverbal appreciation. We teach couples how to appreciate each other spontaneously and frequently. Although this may sound like a simple thing, it most definitely is not. In fact, it’s the last thing we teach in the program because it’s the hardest to learn. To utter a clear, heartfelt appreciation to another person is radical partly because it’s so rare. To receive such an appreciation from another person is equally challenging. Most of us have never seen or heard a rich flow of spoken appreciations in relationships. In fact, many people cannot recall a single instance of clear appreciation in their families of origin. The simple solution is to speak a heartfelt ten-second appreciation to the other person, for no reasons other than to signify a commitment to appreciation and to open the flow of appreciation. In other words, the spoken appreciation is not to get a particular result from the other person. In reality, it produces powerful results very quickly, but it is important that the appreciation not be spoken as a manipulation or in expectation of a reward. We teach couples how to make love last by learning to develop simple and complex appreciations, ranging from “I like the way you did your hair today” to “Throughout our lives together, I have been repeatedly amazed by how generous you are.” Although most couples can learn the art in an hour, they tell us that it takes the better part of a year’s daily practice to savor its full value.

Active Skills to Unlock Long-Lasting Love

Discovering the secrets to creativity, commitment and appreciation has been the most exciting professional and personal journey of our lives thus far. We are tremendously enthusiastic about sharing the secrets of these arts. This set of skills and relationship tips will equip anyone with a powerful and reliable method for enhancing the flow of connection in any relationship. Although we will focus mainly on love relationships, these skills also apply to business, friendship, parenting, and other areas where the flow of connection is paramount. These five secrets have a revolutionary effect in any relationship in which they’re practiced. The five secrets move people quickly through the stuck places so that they can enjoy the profound beauty of genuine and lasting love. Many people wrongly think that creativity, commitment and appreciation are passive states of being. They incorrectly assume that you’re either committed or you’re not, you’re creative or you’re not, you’re appreciative or you’re not. The good news is quite the opposite: These are active arts—skills you can practice from moment to moment—but they will ultimately help you create a long-term relationship and experience long lasting love.

Putting Commitment into Action

Let us show you what we mean with a brief story of the power of the new paradigm:

We’re sitting with a man and a woman in our office, trying to help them out of a marital jam so long in the making and so long overlooked that it felt like death hovered in the room with us. They’d been together fourteen years, and it had essentially been fourteen years of struggle. After hearing their story, we asked them to do something radical: We asked them to declare this marriage dead. “If you will declare this marriage dead, we will ask you a question that will bring a new one to life or help you walk away from the death of this one with fewer wounds.”

They were puzzled, but they went along with us and declared it dead. We paused for a full minute of silence to honor the death of a noble effort that turned awful. When our minute was up, all of us open our eyes. We asked them: “What did you learn from this marriage that you could not have learned any other way?”

The question caught them by surprise, and they answered it candidly. In the years since we first asked that question, we’ve heard people speak their reply in hundreds of different ways. No matter how they word it, people often come down to saying the same two things:

1. “I found out the hard way that I’m more committed to my old patterns than I am to loving and being loved.”

In other words, they gradually put a commitment to an old pattern (criticizing, overdrinking, controlling) ahead of the commitment to the relationship. They didn’t know how to make a conscious commitment to the relationship that was bigger than their unconscious commitment to their respective destructive patterns.

2. “I discovered too late that I didn’t get or give enough appreciation, and I waited until too late to do anything about it.”

In other words, they were unskilled and stingy in the area of appreciation.

Next, we asked them another question: “Given the demise of this marriage, and given what you’ve learned from it, are you willing to make a commitment to a new marriage? Are you willing to create a marriage in which you both feel fully appreciated and you make the relationship more important than your old patterns?”

We asked them to consider the question carefully, in the quiet of their own minds and hearts, then give us a clear “yes” or “no.”

After thirty seconds or so of silence, they spontaneously opened their eyes at the same time. They both nodded and said, “Yes.”

The air cleared. The energy in the room lightened as their faces relaxed. We all sat back in our chairs, knowing there’s work to be done to learn how to make love last but also knowing there was a new possibility that had not existed before.

Next, we asked: “Would each of you be willing to devote the same amount of energy to expressing your creativity that you’ve been using to fuel your conflict?

Again, they were caught by surprise. It hadn’t occurred to them that the exact same energy that’s required to drive conflict can be used to inspire and express creativity.

Eventually they agreed to turn their conflict energy into creativity energy, but they were quick to tell us they didn’t know how.

“Nobody does,” we say, “but once you make the commitment, the exact path always reveals itself.”

The miracle unfolded over the next two months and continues to blossom now. They made good on their initial “yes,” using the new techniques of commitment and appreciation. Within two months they had created something brand new, and during a four-year-later follow-up session, they said it was unimaginably better than their “first” marriage. In fact, they said that because they didn’t understand commitment and appreciation, the first marriage had been doomed from the beginning. Even though their first marriage had lasted fourteen years and this new one only four years so far, it felt as if the first one never existed. That’s the power of commitment, the first principle of the new paradigm of long-lasting love. Now, take a closer look at the appreciation.

Alternating Cycles

Human beings alternate between two ongoing cycles: a cycle of complaint or a cycle of appreciation. The ratio between the two—the amount of time we spend in each—determines how happy we are and how much happiness we inspire around us. It also affects how much creativity we express and inspire in others. It’s also a key ingredient for how to make love last. The cycle of complaint goes as follows: We want or need something from our partner, such as more communication, more understanding, more touch, more freedom. For some reason, however, often lost in the mists of childhood, we’re unconsciously committed to not getting those things. Inevitably our partner fails to give us what we want, so we complain about it and criticize our partner for his or her faults and failures. The situation usually doesn’t improve (or if it does, it improves only temporarily before returning to baseline or worse). We complain and criticize more, which leads to greater awareness of our partner’s insufficiencies. Armed with more detailed evidence, we escalate our barrage of criticism and complaint. We’ve worked with couples who had been recycling the same complaint for decades. Our conclusion—which surprised us at first—is that nobody ever gets better by being criticized, and it certainly doesn’t inspire long-lasting love. Almost everybody who criticizes, though, is convinced that if they keep it up long enough it will have the proper motivational effect on the other person. Let’s look at a better way. The cycle of appreciation, another ingredient for how to make love last, goes as follows: We look for things to appreciate about our partners. We discover new ones or notice old ones anew. We speak our appreciations clearly. We see more things to appreciate, which leads to greater awareness of our partner’s value. Living in a cycle of complaint consumes the very energy needed for creative expression. Living in a cycle of appreciation frees up energy that each person can use for individual and mutual creativity.

Appreciation in Action

What most of us need to know is this: We have a choice about which cycle to live in. What most of us really need to know is how to shift quickly out of the cycle of complaint and into the cycle of appreciation, which has the power to create long lasting love. We’ve been running a large-scale research survey, via our website, on the subject of appreciation. One of our research associates sent Gay a note a while back in which she articulated her own reaction to something that happened at a dinner with us. Here’s what she wrote:

Speaking of appreciation, I remember the first time I ever saw a clear example of it. The three of us were in a restaurant together when we first met. At one point in the conversation Kathlyn said something funny. I vividly remember your turning to her and saying, out loud, casually, as if it was the most natural thing in the world: “One of the things I really love and appreciate about you is your fantastic sense of humor. You make my life so much richer because of how you look at the world. I was just feeling grateful for that and wanted you to know it.”  Kathlyn smiled warmly and thanked you, and then you both returned to our previous conversation.

I sat there perplexed for a moment. Although I’d seen strong, stable marriages before, I’d never seen this kind of communication. It’s not the way most people talk, nor is it really the way most people think, either. Later, I realized that I was waiting for the punchline. I expected you to follow your appreciation with something teasing or funny or even insulting, and when it didn’t come, I didn’t know quite what to think. My mind was thinking: “Wait a minute… so you’re just going to appreciate her? Out of the blue? For no reason? Without wanting anything in return?” I think I learned something brand new about relationships that day.”

Embedded in her observation are important insights into how to make love last and a new paradigm of relationships. For example, it surprised her to see one of us appreciate the other “out of the blue” and “for no reason.” In other words, she witnessed appreciation for its own sake, with no other agenda running as a sub-text of the communication. In addition, the appreciation was spoken “without wanting anything in return.” In other words, it was not designed to produce an outcome or result. This latter observation distinguishes the art of appreciating from the related art of praising. There is no question that praise is a useful and important skill—many books are available on how to do it effectively. For example, in the classic book, The One-Minute Manager, authors Ken Blanchard and Spencer Johnson show how to use praise to reward good performance and shape employees’ behavior in a positive direction. In Thomas Gordon’s books on parent effectiveness and teacher effectiveness, he presents a methodology for influencing children’s behavior by the power of praise. That’s not what we’re talking about. The art of appreciating operates in a different paradigm, which may be why there aren’t many books about how to do it. As we will show later, the paradigm in which appreciation occurs is not linear, nor is it intended to produce a specific result (although it is one of the factors that builds long-lasting love). It does not fit within a reward-and-punishment schema. You shift into the new paradigm by making a conscious decision, a commitment to base your relationships on an ongoing flow of positive energy—of genuine love. You choose to focus on appreciation “for its own sake,” not to influence the behavior of the other person. In spite of this, or perhaps because of it, the skills of active appreciating and conscious committing actually have a profoundly positive effect on other people’s behavior. Things change for the better the moment either of these skills enters a relationship. Here is an example of appreciation for its own sake, drawn from our own relationship:

Gay: One morning I awoke early to do some writing. After an hour or so I took a break to meditate, and during meditation an idea popped into my mind. I wrote “Thank You!” about a dozen times with different-colored ink, and then cut the paper into strips with a pair of scissors. Each strip had a “Thank you!” on it. I put a “Thank you!” on each step of the stairs Kathlyn would take after she woke up. I was upstairs when I heard her sleepy footsteps approach the steps. Suddenly I heard a giggle, and then another and another as she came up the stairs and encountered each of my different thank yous. When she came into the kitchen she was absolutely aglow.

A New Paradigm of Relationships

We believe that concepts such as conscious committing and active appreciating constitute a shift in context that fundamentally alters the way in which people regard intimate relationships and contributes to how to make love last. This new paradigm is what caught our research associate’s attention that night. Prior Contexts Up until very recently, the context of intimate relationships was clouded by survival fears, rather than a desire for lasting love. Although survival is not the main priority for millions of people when they wake up each day, it still is for many others. Fears about hunger, deprivation, and other survival issues still shape the nature of relationships. In times past, our ancestors paid less attention to psychological or spiritual fulfillment. Techniques for problem solving were essentially nonexistent. Things changed as the twentieth century gained momentum. From our parents’ time up until the present, the context of relationship shifted toward “luxury items” such as the fulfillment of potential. Movies, literature, and other arts began to celebrate the transcendent possibilities of relationship—symbolized by the graceful dancing of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. The Freudian revolution promised to offer tools for handling problems when missteps caused us to tread on each other painfully. The New Context It’s a big shift from survival to fulfillment. In the survival context, life is lived in waves with things like fear and hunger as the crests and periods of relief from those things as the swells. In the fulfillment context, life is lived in waves of fulfillment and the hunger for more. We believe, however, that the context is about to make an even larger shift, opening access to a new force field. This new force is electric with previously hidden potential. We believe that relationships in the new millennium will shift toward a focus on appreciation and celebration. The focus will be on the flow of connection. The couples who come to us now want more than traditional relationship tips and problem-solving skills. As people become more sensitive to the flow of energy inside themselves and in their relationships, they are looking beyond traditional therapeutic techniques to truly create long-lasting genuine love. They want life skills they can use to awaken and enhance the flow of connection. The arts of committing and appreciating are the best ways we’ve found to deepen the flow of connection. A single act of skillful committing or appreciating instantly shifts the relationship into a greater sense of flow and creativity. That’s the domain of the new paradigm.

Practically Speaking

It only takes a split second to make a commitment to enhance your relationships. The moment changes everything, though, because you shift out of earlier contexts, such as survival and the search for fulfillment, into a new zone, full of new possibilities and based on entirely on new questions. In the survival context, relationships exist inside the question, “What must we do to survive?” Considerable time is spent shoring up defenses against hostile forces and carrying out chores in the rut of routine. There is little time or energy to search for fulfillment. You are watching and listening for threats to your survival. In the fulfillment context, we live inside different questions, such as “What must we do to fulfill our potential?” and “How can we solve the problems that are the barriers to expressing that potential?” Considerable attention is paid to the past, where the barriers are presumed to have been erected. Considerable energy is consumed in power struggles about which partner bears responsibility for the barrier. You are watching and listening for clues on how to meet the needs of others and whether your own needs are being met. In the new paradigm, the questions are profoundly different than survival or fulfillment. Your relationships live within questions such as:

+ “What commitments do I need to embrace that will allow the relationship to flourish?” + “What do I really admire and love about my partner?” + “How can I best appreciate those qualities and actions?” + “What can I do to make myself more available for appreciation?”

Although you have good problem-solving techniques at your disposal, you do not focus as much on problems. Instead, you look for what’s right in the other person and in the relationship. You embark on a shared quest to experience lasting love by finding each other’s essential qualities so that they may be skillfully appreciated. This article is excerpted with permission from Lasting Love: The Five Secrets of Growing a Vital, Conscious Relationship by Gay Hendricks and Kathlyn Hendricks.

About The Author Gay Hendricks, Ph.D., has been a leader in the fields of relationship transformation and body-mind therapies for over 45 years. After earning his Ph.D. in counseling psychology from Stanford, Gay served as professor of Counseling Psychology at the University of Colorado for 21 years. He has written and co-authored (with Katie) 35 books, including the bestseller Conscious Loving, used as a primary text in universities around the world. In 2003, Gay co-founded The Spiritual Cinema Circle, which distributes inspirational movies and conscious entertainment to subscribers in 70+ countries. Gay has offered seminars worldwide and appeared on more than 500 radio and television shows, including Oprah, CNN, CNBC, 48 Hours and others. Visit his website: hendricks.com Katie Hendricks, Ph.D., BC-DMT, is an artist of life who creates transformational theater events around the world. Passionate about the power of embodied integrity and emergence, she continuously promotes creative expression in service of a direct experience of life, wholeness and evolutionary collaboration. She has been a pioneer in the field of body-mind integration for over forty years. Katie has an international reputation as a seminar leader, training professionals from many fields in the core skills of conscious living through the lens of body intelligence. Katie earned a Ph.D. in Transpersonal Psychology and has been a Board Certified-Dance/Movement Therapist of the American Dance Therapy Association since 1975. Visit her website: hendricks.com

most men never go through any training or right of passage to help them embrace a healthy sense of masculinity. that needs to change. photo: karl fredrickson

Tending the Fire of Healthy Masculinity

Over the past 20 years, I have been fortunate to participate in multiple initiation processes with men. I sincerely believe in the power of ritual and intention to heal and transform men’s lives. I also know from experience, and a bit of maturity, that initiation and inner work are just the first steps along a never-ending path of evolution and discovery when it comes to cultivation healthy masculinity. Many men are becoming aware of a growing hunger within, a fire that burns with the desire for authentic power and deeper meaning. We know, beyond our minds, that something new needs to emerge for the future of our children. As I describe below, tending a fire requires consistency and commitment. Meditation retreats and events like Burning Man can be fabulous catalysts of inspiration and renewal, but even after the most impactful and transformative events of my life, I still come home to my daily responsibilities, work, and relationship. In this article, I am going to share about an initiation journey with a friend and some valuable ways that you can tend the fire of healthy masculinity within you.

Around the Fire

The stones had been in the fire for an hour or so now. It is cold and drizzly as we prepare to enter the sweat lodge. Our brother Rion is on his way down the mountain after four days of vision questing. I am here with Lino, a native elder who has been watching over and praying for Rion, along with a dozen friends and family members. We represent his community and are preparing to welcome him back to the world with a sweat and ceremony. As soon as I see Rion walking toward the fire with his head hanging low, tears come to my eyes. Indeed feeling and processing emotions is one characteristic of healthy masculinity. He looks weathered, pale and beaten down. I am watching his gaze as he sees his girlfriend and father next to me by the fire. His eyes are narrowed and tears are pouring down his face. I imagine that Rion is feeling relief and gratitude to see us waiting for him. That he is moved to have loved ones here who truly care about him after some long days alone on the ridge above us. My heart is beating faster as a wave of emotion is rising from my belly to my throat. I feel a mixture of excitement, fear and pain. For a moment, I vision myself alone up on the mountain in the cold winds and rain storms we have had over the past few days. I wonder about my own strength and courage to face my fears and inner demons as my stomach tightens up. My brief emotional wave fades to the background as I continue to observe my friend walking toward our silent circle around this blazing fire. At first, he looks raw in his vulnerability and thin from fasting. As I tune deeper into him, I feel his unwavering strength and commitment beneath his weathered features. I see wildness in how he is moving and intensity to his gaze that has me stand up straighter and connect with a more primal energy within me. In this moment, Rion represents the characteristics of healthy masculinity and the quality of man that I respect. He has chosen to push his edge in a profound and empowering way, while being witnessed by some of the most important people in his life. He has humbled himself enough to work with a mentor that can guide him beyond his false limitations and love him through the journey in a profound way. An elder like Lino is like an anchor to a wandering mind, keeping the focus and encouraging a deeper journey. Most indigenous cultures have some form of ritual or Rite of Passage that helps boys step into their manhood. There were a few representations of this in my childhood, like Boy Scouts and summer camp, but they lacked something that I cannot explain. I probably received more initiation through after school rebel rousing and playing basketball than any organized group. The men who led the organized events usually lacked the potency of an initiated man. They had good intent and care, but it was obvious to me that they lacked something in themselves. Like my father, they had not been initiated into their power and, as as a result, had no strong characteristics of healthy masculinity to pass on to us. Our busy-minded, face-paced, consumer culture generally raises men to be physically, emotionally and spiritually weak. Even though there is no shortage of male bravado and conditioning, ultimately, men are taught to avoid pain and maximize pleasure. We’ve become soft and dependent on modern comforts, polluted by industrialized foods and distracted by overly stimulating screens. Like me, most men do not know how to tend a fire, sit with their discomfort or face the raw challenges of long-term relationship. There are few maps for the most important aspects of our lives. What men learn in school and through movies and television does not model real masculinity nor what is needed to truly thrive in our lives.

Fire as a Teacher

Rion’s vision quest began with a solo sweat lodge ceremony four mornings ago, and tonight we are ending the journey together as the sun goes down. Rion has not eaten since the opening sweat, which seems like a day or so ago to me and probably a lifetime to Rion. I have been asked to be the fire tender for the night. Building the fire, taking care of the ancestor stones and ushering them into the lodge with deer antlers during the four rounds of the sweat. I showed up for this role with confidence and enthusiasm that has been cooked down throughout the process. Multiple times over the last few hours Lino has schooled me on keeping each of the stones covered with wood and fire, not to let any of the grandfathers be exposed and left uncovered. It seems like an easy thing to do; and, like all true skills, it requires undivided attention and commitment. Every time my mind wanders or someone comes to talk to me, I miss something that is needed to honor the fire and stay true to my task. Lino has been firm with me, and I simultaneously appreciate his direction and feel humbled by my inability to do this job perfectly well. This whole experience highlights what I am lacking and also feeds a deep longing within me to tend the fire of healthy masculinity. This is not my first sweat lodge ceremony, and yet I am experiencing the depth of this tradition in a new and more profound way. Throughout my whole life, I have longed for deeper meaning. I am not a man who gets excited to sit around watching the Super Bowl, I would rather play ball, surf ocean swells or bask in the serenity of nature. I crave connection and participation and feel it is usually lacking in modern-day male rituals like watching sports or hanging out around the BBQ. Being in a circle around the fire with prayerful intent and reverence, reflecting on healthy masculinity, is an activity that feeds me in a way that I can only describe as timeless and mesmerizing.

Going Beyond What We Know

“Few among men are they who cross to the further shore. The others merely run up and down the bank on this side.” ― Gautama Buddha Too many of us have lost, or never known, our passion for facing and overcoming our limits, or how to brave the intensity of our woman’s disappointment without defending ourselves, or what it takes to sit through a ten-day silent retreat. There are men who are stretching the norm by meditating, learning about Tantra Yoga and leaping off mountains in flying squirrel suits. Yet the majority of men are caught in the hustle and insanity of living a life without reverence and meaning—motivated more by fear than by the mysterious pulse of the universe. Connecting with Rion after his vision quest has reminded me of the value of going through a passage into the unknown and then returning to worldly life again. He knows and trusts himself more now and has a fresh energy to bring to his life as a result. Like Rion, I have gone through a few initiation processes and realize that I need to continually cultivate this energy, or the current of modern life will rob me of my instinct to stay close to the fire of healthy masculinity. If I don’t keep challenging my edges and confronting my fears or resistance, something in me goes to sleep. I lose connection to what I value most. I lose trust in my strength and capacity. When I don’t trust myself, I show up less in my work and relationship. I hold back.

Fuel for the Fire

“Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.” ― Kahlil Gibran No matter where each of us men is on our path, our pain, our suffering and our purpose are the fires we must tend to cultivate the characteristics of healthy masculinity. The heat of discomfort or relational frustration is the fuel for healing and expanding our capacity to fully live and love. So many men bypass this beckoning to go deeper by playing with fire rather than burning through the resistance and cooking in the transformational flames of presence. We play with the fire of unhealthy masculinity activities by using alcohol or smoking herb to escape at the end of the day. By watching porn rather than cultivating a thriving relationship. By holding back our feelings or blaming others for the hardship in our lives. We go deeper into transformation by harnessing and utilizing our anger in a healthy way, rather than misdirecting it as aggression toward others or ourselves. By facing our fears and avoidance tendencies with commitment and curiosity. By grieving what is lost with our hearts wide open. All of these represent healthy masculine characteristics and activities and practices. The biggest fuel most men either repress or misuse is anger. I avoided feeling anger for many years. My father struggles with anger, and I received some of the worst of it from him and never wanted to do that to others. So I either held it in or turned it on myself. I was like a raging lion inside and a weak kitten on the outside until I built up enough tension and lashed out in some aggressive way. With guidance and modeling of appropriate expression of anger, I have learned how to run and roar like a lion. Now anger is a positive and motivating force that serves me more than it hurts others or me. When anger appears, it is alerting us to something. It is feedback that we are being mistreated, that we may need to approach things differently, or that something in our life is not working. Anger is an awareness tool, which shines a light on injustice and provides us with the insight and charge to act, to make changes. Ultimately, how we express ourselves and move with the pulse of life is how we fuel the fire. My invitation to you and commitment to myself is to stay close that fire. I encourage you to continually seek out opportunities to face your shadows and lean into the hardships of your life. Not all men need to go on a vision quest to develop the characteristics of healthy masculinity, but I believe that men thrive when they commit to daily practices that ground them deeper into their core and stay involved in some form of conscious men’s work.

Ways to Tend Your Fire on a Daily Basis

The following activities are meant to help you develop the characteristics of healthy masculinity. Activities range from what you can do on a daily to yearly basis. 1. Every day, breathe deeply into your belly for 5 minutes. Few things are more physiologically impactful that deep breathing. Oxygenating your body reduces stress, increases energy and calms the mind. It’s is your best weapon against stress and mundane frustrations. When you feel more centered and alive, your creativity and optimism become guiding forces rather than fear and frustration. 2. Do something that enlivens your whole body. Whether it is a yoga practice or a gym workout, move your body in creative ways that get you out of your mind and into the totality of your experience. We burn up so much vital energy by over thinking and using only our eyes. When you move every joint of your body, your blood becomes enlivened, and your awareness spreads throughout your entire body. This is a powerfully nourishing, healing and rejuvenating activity. It only takes about 10 minutes of deliberate movement to profoundly impact your masculinity and state of being in a positive way. The secret is to diversify your movement to maximize your experience. 3. Participate in some form of regular men’s group. Getting together with men with the intention of supporting and challenging one another, in healthy ways, feeds masculinity in a way that work, friends and family life doesn’t. Many times I have resisted going to my men’s group and then find that when I am there it simply feels really good to be in a circle with other men who are speaking their truth and listening to one another without trying to help, fix or change anyone. 4. Show up for your relationship more fully. Listen to your partner and take the time to be together without watching TV or going out to dinner. Share quality time without an agenda. Practice feeling into your woman from your core and genitals to cultivate healthy masculinity. Appreciate and value her in ways that melt her heart open to you. Surprise her with a blindfolded date night where you take her to a new place and feed her. Don’t remove the blindfold until dinner is over. 5. Bring your sexual energy to your woman and away from any screen. Avoid spilling your life force into the over stimulating and wasteful porn hole. If you don’t have a partner, then simulate and pleasure yourself without all the visual and audio. Learn to be aroused by breathing and touch rather than visual stimulation. 6. Regularly check in with another man to share your challenges, victories and intentions. Cultivate a few male relationships that are centered on being allies and support for one another. Ask a man to hold you accountable to what you are focusing on in your life. This may be a work-related project, personal goal or relationship struggle. Share what you are committed to with another man and ask him to check in with you about how you are doing around your commitment. 7. Take a solo or spiritual journey once a year. Do something that focuses on your inner and outer well-being as a way to maintain healthy masculinity and balance. Even if it is simply one day that you go into the forest or spend on a secluded beach. Give yourself a break from responsibility and outer stimulus to go internal and listen more deeply to your inner voice. Set a strong intention that will guide and deepen the experience. 8. Participate in your community locally and globally. Be a part of something bigger than your own family life. Find ways to contribute to a cause or movement that you feel strongly about. It may be a financial contribution, group meeting or taking action in some way. Whatever it is, think of it as a way to be involved in the larger community of life. To give back to future generations. To have a positive impact on the world around you. Check out Shems’ upcoming course called The Men’s Passage—a three-month powerhouse program that will guide you into a new frontier of healthy masculinity. Where you will learn how to transform anger into usable energy, increase sexual pleasure and vitality, and break free of repeating relationship struggles by learning the three essential skills that will improve every relationship in your life. Find out more at: shemsheartwell.com/the-mens-passage

About The Author Shems Heartwell is a highly experienced couples coach and men’s empowerment facilitator. Shems guides couples into new territories of deeper connection, intimacy and fulfillment together and supports men to harness their authentic wisdom and power in every area of their life. His work goes to the core of what is needed for embodied transformation by integrating the physical, mental, sexual, emotional and spiritual. Visit his website: shemsheartwell.com.

in many ways the ancient rishis and yogi’s that formulated ayurveda knew more about sex , sexual health, pleasure and consciousness than any modern day expert. photo: kristopher roller

Healthy Sex with Ayurveda The Ayurvedic tradition celebrates human sexuality not only because it enhances physical and sensual pleasure but also because it enhances emotional intimacy and mutual respect and can even, in the act of physical union, bring individuals to the experience of their own divinity. One Sanskrit word for sexual intercourse is sambhoga, which brings together samyaka (a word that means maintaining a balance) and bhoga (pleasure or sensual enjoyment). Thus, in Ayurveda, sex and sexual intercourse means that activity by which one maintains equilibrium and also acquires sexual gratification. From time immemorial, human sexuality has been celebrated in India and Ayurveda incorporates sex. The sages who gave us the holy Vedas were usually married and sexually active family men and women with spouses and children. The Hindu gods are likewise depicted to be enjoying conjugal bliss.

Sex and the Divine

Though India also has a strong monastic tradition, there is no requirement that, in order to know the Divine, a person must suppress natural, biologically rooted instincts. In ancient India, the souls who took a vow of sexual abstinence for spiritual purposes were few in number; they were the exception and not the rule. To be celibate was a voluntary choice and was never undertaken by the mainstream. The goal of the Vedas was certainly not to convert a human being into a sexless being in the name of spirituality. Rather, this tradition can help us appreciate the power of our inherent sexuality and—something much needed in today’s world—to temper this sexuality with wisdom and moderation. One word that is often identified with celibacy in India is the Sanskrit term brahmacharya. Translated literally this means “quest for the Ultimate Reality, Brahman.” Within Vedic culture, brahmacharya represents chastity during a time of spiritual studentship. In this sense, it is celibacy but for a limited time and for a specific purpose. In an Ayurvedic sexual context, brahmacharya also connotes the voluntary regulation of sexual energy and desires. In this context, brahmacharya means fidelity in marriage or sexual partnership; it means the monogamous, balanced, and healthy expression of sexuality between committed partners and lovers.

Healthy Management of Sexual Energy

In Ayurveda, brahmacharya is often adopted as a way of life and refers to our acceptance of ourselves as more than just beasts under the control of a frenzied sex drive. Instead, we are asked to celebrate our sexuality and at the same time accept the responsibility to understand and regulate our sexual drive. We accept that our sexuality itself is God-given. Thus, the word brahmacharya beautifully brings together the opposites of sexual indulgence and sexual restraint. The Ashtanga Hridayam puts it this way: “From a disciplined indulgence in sex through brahmacharya, one gains memory, intelligence, health, nourishment, sharpness of sense organs, reputation, strength, and long life.” The Vedic sages were farsighted, indeed, when they conceived of a society that holds its collective sexual energy with transparency, accountability, respect, sensitivity, and care. Human pleasures, such as singing, dancing, playing, enjoying material wealth, and sexual gratification, are seen by the sages as pursuits that play an important role in the overall health and wellbeing of an individual and a society. In fact, when speaking of sex, the Ayurvedic sages go so far as saying that if the sexual instinct is forcefully suppressed, it leads to mental perversions and countless physical diseases. Sexuality (kama) is, thus, recognized as a valid and legitimate human goal by Ayurveda. To aid the realization of this goal, several texts called Kama Shastra were compiled that serve as manuals for engaging in fulfilling sex. The Kama Sutra written by Sage Vatsyayana is one such example. In the context of Ayurveda, sexual desires—along with all of our other personal wants and desires—are seen in relation to the whole of dharma. This context and sexual education within a larger framework of values and ethics gives our sexual desires a healthy outlet and prevents sexual perversions, addictions, and compulsions. Our preferences are not needs; our wants are not gut-wrenching cravings. Established in the spiritual self, auspicious in its intent, universal in its character, abundant in its means, the embodied spirit is encouraged to play out its earthbound desires with its fellow beings and express itself through the joy of sex. Remember, cosmic ecstasy is a natural aspect of our divine nature. 

Keeping Things Balanced and Healthy

To the one awakened to exercising choice, sex is like a magic tool, an inborn cosmic expectation of pleasure, a passion so pure, a permission to play with life and fondle and enjoy this world in which we have chosen to journey. It is, however, quite significant how we choose to indulge our sexuality. According to ayurvedic sexual teachings, when kama, or desire, becomes a dominant force, hiding our own higher purpose from us, then the potential to suffer emotionally increases. Lurid craving, restlessness, emptiness, and bondage to obsessions can descend on us as if from nowhere. A simple sexual desire and its pursuit can take us literally to heaven or hell in a single moment, and all within the hallowed cave of the mind. In the end, it is we who have to decide if kama or sex rules us, or if we rule kama. The Ayurvedic sage Vagabhata described sex as a pleasure of two kinds: instant and delayed. Instant gratification is the happiness that is changeable and is related to the material world. Here is the kind of sexual gratification associated with one-night stands and pleasure with no commitment. Such sex may feel deliciously indulgent, but it is riddled with risks. Delayed pleasure, on the other hand, implies accumulated happiness through self-control, self-respect, and the exercise of restraint and discernment. What one “discerns” is the difference between immediate sense gratification and the actions that lead to ultimate freedom, or moksha. This is the mindful path, the path of balance and moderation. The art and science of divine lovemaking is an important facet of health in the Ayurvedic tradition, and a full treatment of this subject is not within the scope of this. What I would like to do, instead, is to communicate some fundamental Ayurvedic sex principles that you can incorporate in your daily life.

Choosing a Partner: What to Watch Out For

In this modern age, sexuality is treated casually by many, and this casual approach to such a powerful act as sex is not what the sages of Ayurveda ever had in mind. According to ayurveda, sex should be consummated with a partner you like and of whom you approve of mentally—someone who engages in respectful speech, who lives by ethical values, and who honors healthy boundaries. This ensures a healthy state of mind and emotions for both partners. Respect and affection are an important part of sexual consummation, and the ancient sages definitely recognized this. An ancient Ayurvedic text promises that after an “ethical” sex engagement, a person will enjoy “happiness, longevity, renewed youthfulness, improved luster, improved physique, and improved mental and physical strength.” Without question, sex is to be performed with a person you know and love, beloved partners, spouses, and consenting adults with underlying honorable terms of engagement for sex. Ayurvedic texts also stress the importance of not engaging sexually with a child, with someone who is married to another, with someone in your family of birth, with your guru or your guru’s spouse, or with someone who has excessive libido or is sexually demanding. And once the partner has been responsibly selected, Ayurveda recommends enhancing sexual anticipation with the use of fragrances (special desire-arousing perfumes), flowers, special beds, and cosmetics. The various Ayurvedic sex guidelines I outline below will be considered a boon to anyone who is in a long-term, committed sexual relationship. These are rules that will allow you to maintain a sexual relationship without depleting yourselves. For those who have just embarked on a sexual relationship, it’s probably difficult to imagine following rules of any kind in this moment. For you, I suggest that you eat the right foods to support your sexuality and take good care of yourself. You can come back to this full discussion at a later time. The commonsense controls I go into are a strong protection against the loss of something precious: shukra.

The Presence of Shukra: Sexual Essence and Vitality

One of the most important concepts regarding Ayurvedic sex involves shukra, a Sanskrit term that denotes not only the human sperm, ovum, and hormones regulating sexuality, but something more—a matter-based and intelligent potency that is located in every cell. It is because of the presence of the shukra that each and every cell can regenerate itself again and again. It is important to note that shukra is not merely energy, like the Chinese concept of chi or the yogic concept of prana shakti. Shukra is formed from food that has undergone several levels of metabolic transformation. It is an extraordinary tissue. Inwardly it explodes as creativity in all that we think and do, and outwardly it can create an entire human being! While shukra’s presence in our reproductive organs becomes the cause of procreation, shukra’s presence in the rest of the body is the basis for sexual attraction, beauty, and magnetism. Within Ayurvedic sexual teaching, shukra is the generative tissue, and it has the power to create a human being and to endow that being with the capacity for pleasure, happiness, strength, and courage. Shukra’s presence in our minds ties imagination, memory, creativity, and inspiration together into a bouquet of inexplicable enthusiasm and joy. Shukra is present in our cells from birth; and from puberty onward, it becomes a potent force in the body, manifesting through the development of secondary sexual characteristics. The power of shukra peaks in our youth; and then, from middle age onward, its potency begins to decrease with the natural result of a decline in libido, fertility, and alas, youthful beauty, with progressing age.

How to Avoid Losing Shukra and Wasting Sexual Energy

Ayurveda sex principles address this issue head-on by slowing down loss of shukra by following a regimen that directly protects shukra. Through activities like intercourse and masturbation, shukra is lost. Through activities like eating special foods and restoring the body between sexually active periods, shukra can be built up. By following certain rules regarding when to engage in sexual activity—the season, the time of day, the time in our own lives—we can protect ourselves from the unnecessary loss of shukra. This is, in essence, the sexual wisdom of Ayurveda. Increasing age is a natural cause for shukra loss. But time is not in our control, so we need not fret. Fortunately, nature does her job gently and gives us ample time to play and procreate if we wish. Shukra is also replenished naturally from time to time—by nature in certain seasons and by ourselves by eating certain foods. The most telling way to deplete shukra however is solely our own responsibility—and this is our choice to indulge in stress and in negativities like shame and self-pity. Shukra, the sages declare, is the source of inexplicable joy and creativity, of skills and artistic talents, of cheer and poise in the face of life’s challenges. If, however, our minds are especially negative or caught up in rajas and tamas—modes of extreme passivity or extreme aggression—then the mind can have an unfortunate effect on shukra, destroying it, as if through emotional self-poisoning. It sounds harsh, but it’s true. Ayurveda taught the world’s first holistic lesson on sexuality by identifying shukra’s presence, not in the human genitals or organs of reproduction alone, but in each and every cell, as an inherent bridge to the mind. One significant way of seeing our sexuality, according to Ayurveda, is in its cycles.

The Ideal Times For Sex: Diurnal Sex Cycle

The ideal time of day for sex in Ayurveda is between two hours after dinner and before you fall asleep at 10:00 p.m. From the aspect of the doshas, sex at night is optimal as opposed to early morning sex, which is a second choice.

Human Sexuality Cycle by Age

Ayurveda recommends sexual activity from age eighteen to seventy. This means no sex before the age of eighteen. After the age of seventy, a person should engage in sex infrequently or—and this is ideal—not at all. These age restrictions prevent the loss of vital energy that is contained in sexual fluids. The ideal ages to initiate sexual activity, with the highest frequency, are between eighteen to twenty-five; moderate sexual activity should be between twenty-five to forty; and the time to begin tapering off the frequency of sex is between forty to fifty-five, with the time to consider mindfully abstaining from sex (as a self-care practice) at age seventy and onward. Of course, sexual intimacy is made possible by the presence of a partner and the right social situations, but these guidelines can serve as a reminder that sexual frequency cannot and must not remain the same throughout our lifetimes according to Ayurveda’s sexual wisdom. It is best to be realistic and to preserve the body’s vital shukra, whose production peaks in youth and early adulthood and begins to taper off with increasing age.

Women’s Sex Cycle

Ayurveda recommends not engaging in sex during an active menstrual cycle because this can cause dosha problems. This is a complex issue, which I will only summarize by saying that vata dosha can become aggravated in a woman if she regularly engages in sex during her menses. Low back pain, tendency toward miscarriage, and a host of other problems can result. Sex during pregnancy, how much, and when to stop, are questions that are also important, and Ayurvedic texts on sex have addressed such questions in detail.

Digestion-Related Sex Cycle

Digestion is also a significant physiological cycle, and sexual activity is neither a substitute for eating nor a suitable activity to immediately follow eating. The body needs energy for each. Below are appropriate times for sex in relation to when food was last eaten. Following the rules summarized will prevent uncomfortable symptoms such as regurgitation of food, cramps, and fatigue. The key is to allow the digestion to be far enough along in the process so that the body has freed up energy for sex. When hungry and thirsty, abstain from sex. Eat and drink instead. Adverse symptoms if not followed include: dizziness, headache, bloating, tiredness, possible exhaustion during or after sex. Immediately after a meal, abstain from sex. Adverse symptoms if not followed include: indigestion, heaviness in heart region, pain in chest, possible breathlessness during or after sex. Two hours after a meal, engage in sex if you wish. No adverse symptoms related to digestion.

Guidelines for Mindful Sexual Engagement

We can see that Ayurveda does not ban or curb our sexuality as much as connect it to natural cycles. For centuries, Ayurveda has been concerned with how to prolong sexual pleasure and enhance human fertility. Ayurvedic sages found interesting connections between sexual health and the immunological capacity. Sexuality was also found to be important for mental wellbeing and to be connected to creativity. For all of these reasons, along with the all-important reproductive function, sexual health is paramount in Ayurveda. Fortunately, a few simple lifestyle rules pertaining to our sexual nature and foods that replenish sexual tissues can help to ensure our Ayurvedic sexual health with.  These rules, which I share below, are a fraction of Ayurveda’s vast body of sex-related wisdom. Ayurveda cautions that, in ignorance, we can fritter away our shukra and lose our God-given natural sexuality, something that could have been prevented. Perhaps shukra is a prize that only the wise can claim through lives lived in harmony with the material and spiritual laws of nature. So for starters, Ayurveda recommends initiating the sex act only when we are truly engaged—mind, body, and soul—and a genuine interest in sex is present. This is a precondition for sexual engagement. There is no room for obliging another, for faking it, and pleasing another if our own self is not pleased. Immediately after copulation—I’d say within thirty minutes of an orgasm—Ayurveda recommends drinking warm cow’s milk with added cane sugar. This is like a miracle food for shukra. This Ayurveda sex tip may appear like the stuff of sexual fantasy, but the sages predicted that when the body experiences depletion of precious shukra tissue, it immediately attempts to restore it if it has the right ingredients handy. Hence the warm, sweetened milk bypasses regular channels of digestion with much more speed and converts into shukra within minutes!

Post-Sexual Rejuvenation Practices

Many an aging couple who has sought help for post-intercourse exhaustion at our school’s clinics now approach lovemaking with a flask of warm milk at their bedside—and they cannot thank Ayurveda enough. And since milk is a natural sleep aid, it also helps the couple fall asleep like babies, when it is time to sleep, augmenting lost kapha further through restful sleep. After sex, whenever possible, take a warm shower or bath, put on fresh nightclothes, apply fresh essential oils or natural scents, and prepare yourself for bed. If it is warm, then a light breeze through an open window or a fan is great. Moonlight exposure on summer nights is especially beneficial, so sleep with curtains open or sleep near an open terrace or balcony. The sages, I find, are quite poetic about the healing effect of moonlight, known as jyotsna. One says, “It confers coolness, pacifies pitta, as the moon rays enter the body through exposed skin, and relieves our being of sexual exhaustion, thirst, and any pending morbid thoughts.” For the next few days after engaging in sex, Ayurveda recommends that you eat nutrient-dense, rich foods that replenish shukra: goat’s meat; chicken soup; meat and seafood lightly sautéed in ghee; black gram (urad dal) with rice and ghee; recipes including some form of winter melon, pumpkin, okra, sweet potato, asparagus, and avocado; pure sugarcane-sweetened syrups and desserts (rice pudding with cane sugar, wheat pancakes with cane syrup or sugarcane-based molasses); cow’s milk and cream-based recipes; coconut water and coconut cream; unsalted butter; dried fruits, especially figs, raisins, and dates; and of course, seasonal sweet fruits, especially sweet mangos, bananas, peaches, plums, and pears. A spice that purifies the genitourinary tract in males and the uterus in females is cumin. Use cumin along with turmeric (always a help in daily micro-quantities!) and rock salt (a salt that sweetly enhances libido for next time).

Foods and Factors That Deplete Shukra

A strong, vital body that is well fed and well rested is the foundation of healthy shukra, according to Ayurvedic sexual science. Make sure every meal counts and provides fuel to build kapha. Various eating and lifestyle choices are particularly detrimental to shukra. Here is a simple list of things to avoid—nutritional and otherwise—to prevent shukra depletion:

+ Avoid excessive eating of pungent, astringent, bitter, salty, and sour foods.

+ Avoid excessive intake of dry foods. (Fats and oils are required for the manufacture of shukra.)

+ While balanced exercise improves shukra production, excessive physical activity reduces the quantity of kapha, which is required to manufacture shukra. So, do not remain sedentary but watch out for excess.

+ Injuries, especially to the genital organs, do not help shukra—be careful during sports.

+ Do not consume empty calories, such as diet soda.

+ Do not fast excessively.

+ Do not indulge excessively in alcohol (though wine in regulated doses can act as an aphrodisiac).

+ Avoid or minimize habitual ingestion of detrimental substances such as coffee, tea, and soda.

+ Simply abstain from tobacco, marijuana, and other recreational drugs. These substances are anti-kapha, anti-health, and quickly destroy shukra.

+ Don’t stay up late regularly. Try your best to go to bed by 10:00 p.m.—a good night’s sleep restores shukra.

Eating to Enhance Shukra

Shukra can be consciously cultivated and enhanced through foods that increase kapha, but we must also take into account our digestive capacity. Optimum digestion is our best ally here because shukra is the final and seventh tissue formed in the body from the food we eat. (The other tissues are, Ayurveda says, plasma, blood, muscle, fat, bone, and nerve tissues.) Shukra is the ultimate, refined finale of a healthy digestion. If you want to build a healthy stock of shukra, take stock of your daily diet and assess if you are eating adequate kapha-promoting foods. Shukra requires foods that are more nurturing, heavy, moist, sweet, cooling, and fatty in nature. Next, consider your digestion and your elimination with regard to Ayurveda and sex. It is important not only to eat and digest shukra-building foods but also to properly eliminate the physical waste afterward. Now you are set. When shukra-enhancing food is digested well, with maximum efficiency and minimum toxic by-products, then the shukra produced will be high in quality and quantity. You will experience not only higher libido but also a greater sense of well-being. Of course, if the food is laced with toxins, fillers, chemical additives, and pesticides; if the food is overly processed; or if the food has been genetically altered, then your shukra will also be affected. There is no circumventing this issue. I feel, in fact, that these problems with food shed light on why sexual disorders, immunological disorders, and birth defects are on the rise. Our polluted food has damaged our seed. So, for the sake of your own body and the sake of your offspring, I advise you to take any measure needed—even those requiring extraordinary effort—to obtain your food from fresh, organic, non-genetically modified sources. This is a part of showing due reverence for yourself and for Mother Earth and taking a serious approach to Ayurveda and sex.

The Importance of Sweet and Fat for Shukra

Shukra is best enhanced by eating naturally sweet-tasting foods like milk, sweet fruits, and even cane sugar, and also by eating fatty foods such as ghee or clarified butter. With the modern trend of valuing thinness at any cost, sweet and fatty foods like these are considered an anathema to good health. So I think it’s important to mention the perspective on sugarcane and ghee when it comes to Ayurvedic sex. Sugarcane (ikshu) has been researched by the Ayurvedic tradition extensively in its numerous forms: fresh cane juice, treacle, molasses, jaggery, sugar crystals, and powdered sugar. All of these forms are shukra-enhancing. Obviously, there are health issues involved in eating too much sugar. If, however, entire generations of humanity were to reject sugar and ingest instead only artificial sweeteners or honey (which is anti-kapha), then our collective sexual and fertility principle (shukra) would be seriously compromised. Ghee, according to Ayurvedic sexual science, is also considered a major promoter of shukra and of the body’s natural immune principle (ojas). Ghee is cooling in its potency and sweet in its taste. Though there are many forms of ghee available in India, in the West what is found is predominantly cow’s milk ghee, which is the strongest of all in promoting both shukra and oja. Ayurveda does not leap to either “fat is bad” or “fat is great.” Ayurveda prescribes the responsible use of fats, considering with awareness and caution our own dosha requirements and digestive limitations. From a common-sense perspective, it’s better to eat rich, fatty foods earlier in the day rather than in the evening. The season as well comes into play. You can eat more ghee in winter, less in summer and fall, and the least (or even none at all) in the spring. If you suffer from the symptoms of indigestion or toxins, you should abstain from eating ghee or any other fat until you have undergone a physical detoxification. Given all of these considerations with regard to Ayurveda and sex, people who are healthy should eat the amount of ghee that helps them remain healthy; and those desiring shukra, after thinking seriously about their digestion, should eat foods cooked in ghee to the extent that they can—in other words, as many as possible. Besides ghee and sugar, there are other dietary considerations to enhancing shukra.

Shukra-Enhancing Foods

Ayurveda sexual wisdom wants to ensure that depletion of sexual tissue through orgasm (in both males and females) is countered by the shukra-enhancing foods listed here.  Dairy: Milk, cane sugar-sweetened yogurt, sweet cream, sweetened lassi (yogurt drink with cane sugar), ghee, sweet butter, fresh-made cheeses such as cottage cheese (paneer), and mozzarella Sweeteners: Sugarcane and all its derivatives Fruits: Sweet mangos, peaches, plums, pears, fresh or dried figs, ripe bananas, Indian gooseberry preserves or jam (amalaki), pomegranates, sweet and ripe jackfruit, and musk melons Vegetables: Garlic and onions cooked in ghee (never raw), eggplant (fried in ghee), beetroot, sweet potato, pumpkin, okra, yams, snake gourd, winter squash, climbing spinach or Malabar spinach, water chestnuts, asparagus, drumsticks (all vegetables are to be cooked in ghee) Spices: Cloves, carom seed or ajwain, cumin seeds (all of these spices purify the shukra-carrying channels), turmeric (removes toxins from shukra), saffron (aphrodisiac) Meats: Goat and chicken with mildly spiced curry, soups, and ghee-based stir-fry; also meat of sparrow, duck, partridge, deer, rabbit, pig, quail, and grass carp; crab (aphrodisiac) Eggs: Chicken, duck, goose, quail, turkey, pheasant, ostrich Dried fruits and nuts: Almonds, walnuts, pine nuts, raisins, dates, figs, sesame seeds, and apricots Cereals: Rice, wheat Beans: Black gram (urad dal) This piece on enlightened sex with ayurveda is excerpted with permission from Ayurveda Lifestyle Wisdom: A Complete Prescription to Optimize Your Health, Prevent Disease, and Live with Vitality and Joy by Acharya Shunya. Sounds True, February 2017. Reprinted with permission.

About The Authors Acharya Shunya is an internationally recognized spiritual teacher, ordained lineage holder, and authoritative scholar of the Vedic Sciences of Ayurveda, Yoga, and Vedanta. She is the founder and spiritual preceptor of Vedika Global Wisdom School and Spiritual Community in California and the president of California Association of Ayurvedic Medicine. She is also the bestselling author of her newest book Ayurveda Lifestyle Wisdom. Visit her website: acharyashunya.com

finding and connecting with your soul tribe is more important than ever—not just for connection but also to thrive in our modern society. photo: grant benton

Like many of us on a path towards more alignment, expression and purpose, you may also be finding it hard to attract and connect with a strong community of conscious and like-minded humans, affectionately known as your ‘Soul Tribe’. With the ability to connect with anyone, all the time (online) we find ourselves crowded with ‘connections for connections-sake’ and lacking intention or curation with those we spend time with. Maybe you can resonate with this?

“You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.”

– Jim Rohn

Many say we are ‘more connected than ever before,’ which is very true and exciting for the online world. We can see and feel though, that culturally and on the ground we are lacking this sense of connection and community with our soul tribe. As people who are seeking more purpose and a more aligned lifestyle, having the company of aligned people with similar values and beliefs is incredibly important. The human experience is created by the elements of psychology, physiology, sociology and ecology. All of these are required for us to thrive. Some of these we can deal with on our own, but others, particularly sociology and ecology, require that we be in community with and connection to others of like heart and mind. It is said that the environments and the company we keep are two of the greatest influencers on our own experience and behaviors, which very much define the overall quality of our lives and the level of happiness, contentment and fulfillment we are able to achieve. As such, finding your soul tribe is extraordinarily important if you value the above things. But how exactly do we go about finding and attracting our soul tribe? How—and where—do we need to show up in order to align ourselves with those we feel closest to in the jungles of social media and more importantly, in real life time and space? Technology is shuffling the way society functions and operates at the most fundamental levels, especially in relation to forming and connecting with like minded community and our soul tribe. So in this modern world, it’s extremely important to understand the underlying principles and mindsets that lead us to align with and attract our soul tribe. I dive into this topic in significant depth in my new book Modern Tribe which I wrote to address the very problem of finding your tribe in the modern, digital age. Below you’ll find the formula and some simple but powerful practices for attracting your soul tribe effortlessly—as a natural extension of your self expression and who you are.

The Formula for Finding Your Soul Tribe

Self-awareness + Expression + Intention = Attracting your soul tribe without constantly ‘trying’

1. Self-Awareness

Like with most things on our hero’s journey of personal evolution and spiritual growth, we need to start with self-awareness. Ask yourself: + When you envision the future experience you will have, what does it feel like? + What values do you embody? Usually these will be very similar, if not the same as the values your soul tribe holds. Maybe it’s openness, creative expression, adventure and nature or something else. Getting clear on your values and personal vision is extremely important for finding your soul tribe. You want to find the group of people who share these values and vision. No matter what you value and what your vision is, there is a similar-minded group of people out there waiting for you somewhere. With 7 billion people on the planet, you can be sure your soul tribe exists. Sit still in stillness in an environment that inspires you, meditate and visualize what your ideal tribe would feel like. Not seeing what it looks like, but what it feels like!

2. Express and Embody

Now that you are aware of this feeling you would like to experience, your challenge is to actually embody and express these values in your life fully. This is the most challenging step! It is easy to think up some words and values, but it takes a bit of vulnerability and commitment to embody them fully. However, this is crucial to attracting your soul tribe. To help, try writing a personal vision statement about your new story and the new values you are committing to living by. “I am present, listening to my intuition, expressing my creativity and sharing my love of biomimicry,” for example. This is a powerful affirmation that you can repeat to yourself daily to help you stay calibrated to your values and vision. Acting in full alignment with these values and vision is hands down the fastest way to attracting and aligning yourself with your soul tribe. Write this somewhere that you will see it often and make it a habit to read it and feel it every morning before you enter your day!

3. Intention

The next and final step you need to take in attracting your soul tribe is consciously and intentionally placing yourself in the right places and spaces. You can express your values for calmness, presence and sustainability but if you put yourself in bars and clubs where there tends to be a shallow culture, you may be misaligning yourself with where your soul tribe is locationally in the world. Alternatively, you can go to yoga and meditation classes or volunteer at a community garden and experience much higher locational alignment with where your soul tribe is likely to be. Ask yourself, where might your soul tribe hang out? Where would you most likely strike a spontaneous conversation with your next best friend that shares the same values and/or vision with you? Immerse yourself and express yourself in these places as much as possible! Be open to exploring new places to find your soul tribe. Don’t get discouraged if the first few places don’t foster the connection you had hoped for.  Often times they do! But other times it’s a bit longer journey.  Keep at it because soul tribes operate on the network effect, which means once you get connected to a few people in your soul tribe, most everyone in the world is connected to those people within a few degrees of separation. You don’t personally need to know everybody. You just need to know a few people and through the wonders and interwoven web of social media and personal networks you will soon be connected to an international soul tribe of like-minded people.

How to Create Even More Connection and Tribe

I believe that fostering meaningful connection and community is the solution to many of our world’s biggest problems. Many of the planetary challenges we face—war, poverty, environmental destruction—stem from a lack of deep soul connection and community.  We need to reimagine how we live together. There is a new living philosophy based off tribal living and sharing that is emerging that I believe addresses the fundamental issues at the core of our disconnection: I call it the Modern Tribe. For more exercises like this to help you find your tribe and be part of the movement towards a more communal, enlightened future, order your copy of Modern Tribe today at publishizer.com/modern-tribe. Each order is a vote for a new, thriving future for humanity. Join us.

About The Author Al Jeffery is an international speaker, facilitator and impact-entrepreneur, listed in Australia’s Top 30 Under 30. Founder of Base Coliving and Realise Flow, Al is a thought leader on topics around emergent cultural and community development, modern urbanisation, personal performance and human potential. Visit his website: aljeffery.com

mindful sex practices guide us back into the present moment and the feeling sensations in our bodies, which leads to more pleasure, more connection and ultimately raises consciousness as well. photo: bhumika bahtia

Think about the best sex you have ever had. Go on—let yourself really relive the experience! Take a moment to remember what it felt like in your body, what emotions were evoked and what was happening in your mind. Chances are you were really there while you were having it—fully in your body. You were most likely mentally and emotionally connected to your partner, in addition to the physical connection. Now recall some average or lacklustre sex you have had. Again, take some time to recall the physical, emotional and mental aspects of the experience. What was different? What is the difference between sex and great sex?

Having A Mindful Sex Life

At its best, mindful sex is joyful and free. When we are able to stay in our bodies during sex, rather than closing down and tuning out, we are able to stay connected to the physical experience of lovemaking. During mindful sex, we develop what is called interoceptive awareness, which refers to awareness of our physiological and emotional state. Research shows that increased interoceptive awareness improves sexual experiences by literally getting us out of our heads, reducing anxiety, low mood and self-judgement. As we become aware of our own emotional state and express this physically through lovemaking, we become more attuned to the emotional and physical changes in our partner. We start responding to their moans, changes in breathing, subtle physical changes or a momentary glance. Mindful sex becomes a communication from the deepest parts of us and we can literally connect with the deepest parts of our partner. Some people even describe peak experiences of momentarily losing any sense of where they end and their partner begins. They experience a sense of being one organism. The Kama Sutra, as well as Buddhist and Taoist sexual manuals, all point toward this as being the highest form of lovemaking—indeed, the very point of mindful sex. In fact, most experiential religious traditions counsel us toward using sex as a vehicle for transformation and connection. And all emphasize presence and embodiment as the fundamental starting point. Everything we have just said might seem obvious but you have most likely discovered that it is not always easy to actually achieve during your mindful sex practice. It is common during sex to tune out, dissociate a little and even wander off into thoughts. These thoughts might be about our sexual performance, thinking about work or playing out pornographic scenes in our heads. A number of causes can underlie this tendency, including stress, relationship difficulties and watching too much pornography—all of which make it more likely we will get into our head rather than staying in our bodies. We are especially likely to disconnect when the emotional connection with our partner deepens and we start to feel vulnerable. We tend to unconsciously choose partners who reflect unresolved relational issues from prior relationships (all the way back to birth) and our past interpersonal relationships significantly impact the way we show up in current relationships, and therefore affect our mindful sexuality. The anxiety that can arise from the experience of having all of this truly seen by someone we care about and don’t want to lose can activate the fight/flight/freeze response.

Better Sex With Mindfulness

To counteract this tendency towards anxiety and fight/flight reactivity we must activate the mammalian tend-and-befriend circuits. These circuits allow us to maintain an emotional connection with others, even when under stress. By simply remaining present during mindful sex we minimize the activation of the fight/flight response. And by focusing on connection and nurturing when stakes are high, we release oxytocin, which helps us to calm down, focus and maintain emotional connection rather than withdrawing or reacting. This response is seen more often in women than men, but can be cultivated with practice by either sex.

Exercise: Activating Our Tend-and-befriend Circuits

1. Take a moment to pause and sense your way into your body. Notice what sensations are around. Notice any thoughts and simply allow them to come and go. Imagine yourself going through this practice during mindful sex. Tune in a little deeper and become aware of your emotional state, simply noting any emotions that are around without judgement or thinking about them. If you can, name the emotional state you are experiencing. 2. Next, give yourself permission to have the emotion. Recognize that all emotions are normal parts of the human experience and serve a purpose, even in the midst of mindful sexuality. Pleasant emotions like love, joy and so forth show us that we like what we are experiencing and motivate us to seek experiences like this. On the other hand strong, unpleasant emotions like anger and sadness give us very useful information about needs that are not being met and boundaries that might be being violated. 3. Say to yourself silently, “This is [name whatever emotion you are experiencing] and is a completely normal human emotion. It is totally okay that I am experiencing this right now.” Cultivate an attitude of loving acceptance to whatever you are experiencing. During mindful love, bring this same unconditionally friendly attitude toward any physical sensations and thoughts you are experiencing too. 4. Now bring to mind people you love—people you care for and who care for you. Perhaps your partner or children, a family member, a friend, even a pet. Take a moment to really sense them in front of you. See their faces, one by one. If there are lots of people who come to mind, hold each in mind for a short time before moving on to the next. If there are moments of hurt or disappointment in the relationship with the people you are sensing in front of you (which is usually the case), just focus here on the sense of mindful love and support. 5. Tune in to the sense of love and care flowing from you to them and them to you. Take a few moments to really enjoy this feeling. Can you notice the feeling of oxytocin being released? This is what it feels like to be run by our tend-and-befriend circuits. Practicing this exercise regularly when you are calm and relaxed will strengthen the tend-and-befriend circuits. This will then make it easier to activate them when you need them, such as during lovemaking when a button gets pushed and you start to feel vulnerable and reactive. Of course, you can always practice this during mindful sex also—perhaps you and your partner can treat it like a lovemaking meditation. Doing this regularly results in us becoming more relaxed during sex. We become increasingly able to remain connected with our own emotions—and therefore our partner’s—and this increases the depth of intimacy during mindful sex. Making mindful love in this way also ensures the insula remains activated. The insula is the part of the brain most directly involved in functions such as self-awareness, knowing what is happening interpersonally, and controlling our movement. As such, it is an extremely useful part of the brain for intimacy and lovemaking. Thanks to neuroplasticity, keeping it active by maintaining intimacy with ourselves and others results in stronger connections between the neurons there. Research shows that mindfulness meditation also strengthens the insula, so in a very real sense ‘meditators make better lovers’. Making mindful sex in intimate, connected ways—activating the insula and other tend-and-befriend circuitry—literally rewires the brain for deeper intimacy. We become less critical of our (or our partner’s) performance, more aware of our breath and body sensations, and more responsive to our partner’s body. This then becomes a feedback loop as we then become even more connected with ourselves and our partner. Slowing things down with mindfulness amplifies these benefits. In fact, this is one of the main recommendations that we give anyone who comes to see us in our therapy practices for mindful sexual issues. You can think about it as meditating in missionary, instead of lotus, position!

Exercise: Slowing Down And Connecting During Lovemaking

1. Next time you are having mindful sex, focus on foreplay. And here we are not referring to giving amazing head, like some kind of porn star! Instead, we are suggesting you take time to sense your way into your body, getting in touch with your physical and emotional state. You might even like to spend some time meditating (perhaps with your partner) beforehand. 2. Maintain awareness of your breath. Feel your body against your partner’s, really savouring the warmth and softness of the contact. Notice the effect this has on your own body, and see if you can sense the activation of your tend-and-befriend circuits and the release of oxytocin as you experience each other in mindful sex. 3. If you notice any tension or fight/flight reactivity, focus on breathing and relaxing into the mindful sex. You might lose touch with your partner for a moment while you do this but simply reconnect again when you start to feel more relaxed. Keep coming back, over and over, as you would with any mindfulness practice. 4. If you want to take this way of making mindful love to the next level you can even experiment with looking into your partner’s eyes during mindful lovemaking. At first this can be confronting and in some cases even lead to dissociation (where you suddenly feel numb or ‘out of your body’). If this happens, you can close your eyes or avert your gaze. But keep coming back to this and develop the ability to maintain eye contact while in close proximity. When you master this you will open up the possibility of extremely intimate—and explosive—mindful sex. Any time during mindful sex you notice that you are reacting, closing down or tuning out, slow down (or even stop) and bring your attention back to your body. Tune in to your physical sensations, let go of any tension and notice your breath. Then, when you are ready, tune back in to your partner once again—feeling their body touching yours, looking at them (as well as into their eyes) as well as smelling, tasting and hearing them. In this way, lovemaking itself becomes a mindfulness practice. This piece on mindful sex is excerpted with permission from Mindful Relationships by Dr. Richard Chambers and Margie Ulbrick.

About The Authors Dr Richard Chambers is a clinical psychologist in private practice, specializing in mindfulness-based therapies, and an internationally recognized expert in mindfulness. Dr Chambers is pioneering a university-wide mindfulness approach at Melbourne’s Monash University and consults to a growing number of educational institutions, businesses, sporting clubs and community organizations. He is a developer of the Smiling Mind app and co-author of Mindful Learning, also by Exisle. You can find more about him at drrichardchambers.com Margie Ulbrick is a collaborative family lawyer, relationship counsellor, psychotherapist and writer. Trained in Family Therapy, Somatic Therapy, Law and Collaborative Practice, she has many years’ experience working to help people create sustaining and nurturing relationships and work towards maximizing optimum health in families. As a relationship counsellor, Margie works with couples, individuals and families, and teaches the skills of mindfulness to assist in promoting healthy relationships. You can find more about her at margieulbrickcounselling.com.

sexual energy is a powerful force, that when used consciously, can be a great catalyst for spiritual growth and healing on many levels.

The following article is based on Dr. Orloff’s bestselling book The Power of Surrender.

To manifest your full sexual energy you have to surrender. There’s no way around it. You must completely inhabit your body and be in the moment. If not now, when? Holding back, fixating on performance, or letting your mind drift is the end of passion. Don’t go there. I’ll show you how to get out of your head and into your bliss. What is true sexual energy? I define it as proudly claiming your erotic self and mindfully channeling sexual energy. You never use it to hurt, manipulate, make conquests, or get addicted to the ego trip of sensual pleasure at the expense of others. This is bad karma. Nor do you allow others to harm or disrespect you. Sexual energy is not just who you are in bed, though that’s an aspect of it. You also make electric linkages to your body, to spirit, to a lover, to the universe. For me, it’s a turn-on when sexual power is blended with spiritual power. Too many of us in this heady, frantic world lack the rich experience of having a primal connection with someone. Sexual energy can offer us this, a satisfaction you can never get from your intellect alone. As you open to both sex and spirit, whether you’re single or part of a couple, you’ll be a vessel for erotic flow, enjoying pleasure without insecurities or inhibitions. We’ll discuss many fun approaches for letting go that you can integrate into your lifestyle. Don’t worry if you can’t succeed all of the time. Be happy with every bit of progress. Here are some general tips to keep in mind to improve your sexual energy. The more you can practice them, for short or longer periods, the more sexually alive you’ll be.

Basic Strategies of Surrender

+ Surrender your “to-do” list, making time for sensuality and lovemaking.

+ Surrender your overactive, critical “monkey mind” that kills passion and stops you from being present in your body.

+ Surrender to pleasure as completely as possible.

+ Let yourself melt into the ecstasy of orgasm and become one with your partner.

Sexual energy is something to revere and consciously cultivate. You can’t just leave it to chance. When I get up in the morning, the first thing I do is meditate. I want to connect to myself, to every ounce of spiritual energy, heart energy, and erotic energy in me. I do this before any of life’s demands interfere. Meditating in this way fortifies me and lets me be fully present. Being in touch with my sexual self is part of being present, along with being analytical or being kind or listening to the angels sing. Sexual power is not compartmentalized away from the rest of you. It is more present when you’re whole. So, to begin the day, I offer thanks for every aspect of me, then proceed into the great unknown of the hours ahead. In this article, we’ll explore questions such as: How can you ignite sexuality and have more intense orgasms? What makes a good lover? What are the common killers of passion? Do you fear intimacy or do you fake orgasms? What is the difference between healthy bonding and overly attaching to a partner? Are you a sex addict? Do you lose your center around sexual energy or obsess about lovers? Do you resist pleasure? I’ll show you how to surrender if you have trouble letting go or are afraid of losing yourself in someone. Surrendering becomes easier when you trust your partner. Then you’ll feel safer about letting down your guard and feeling pleasure without resistance or fear. There are no limits to where ecstasy can take you as your sexual energy allows you to deeply connect to yourself and a partner.

Claim Your Sexual Energy

Sexual energy has different aspects. In the most basic sense, it’s about reproduction and survival. Nature has cleverly wired us to be rewarded with erotic excitement when we perpetuate the species. The bliss of orgasm is the catnip that motivates us to reproduce. Our choice of a partner is strongly influenced by our biological programming. Research has shown that both men and women are attracted to healthy, fertile mates with good genes. What physical signs indicate this? Science has identified several: a mate’s thick hair, smell via hormones called pheromones, voice tone, facial symmetry, a man’s muscular physique, and a woman’s hourglass figure with a waist-to-hip ratio of 7:10 (which Marilyn Monroe had). Interestingly, when women ovulate, they produce copulins, a scent that attracts men causing their testosterone to rise. Our drive to procreate trumps most other human instincts. The power of this primal consciousness commands respect and awe. channeling sexual energy can powerfully increase the chemistry between two people and raise consciousness when directed to higher chakra centers. Another aspect of understanding sexual energy between two people is emotional intimacy, an instinctive desire to bond to a lover, to feel comfort, to be known. This makes the difference between pure physical sex and lovemaking. Emotional intimacy comes from affection, from sharing feelings, from being vulnerable. By caring, you reinforce each other’s attractiveness and make each other feel special. As friends and lovers, you are fundamentally there for each other which creates trust. You see each other as real people, the good and the bad, not some idealized version. When conflict, anger, or hurt feelings arise you’re committed to working through them. Bring your fears and insecurities to a partner in an undefended way. When you share all parts of yourself, even your secrets, you can truly surrender. Tantric sexuality teacher David Deida says to offer your emotions “from the deepest place of love’s yearnings that you can occupy.” With emotional intimacy, you’re capable of exploring passion on every level. Without it, there’s a limit to where you and your partner can go. In the short run it may seem like less trouble to avoid conflict but your erotic life pays a price. You can’t tap your full sexual power if parts of you shut down. When you habitually hide your feelings, you waste time and opportunities for closeness. If you stay open, however, your emotional love will enhance your sensual love. It’s possible to have sexual intimacy without emotional intimacy but you will be using only a fraction of your sexual energy. Still, as I’ve observed with certain patients, many of whom had alcoholic or abusive parents, they may not feel deserving of love. One man told me, “I really wanted love but I settled for sex.” Sometimes, though, sex is all people seek or can tolerate. Whether they’re aware of it or not, they link emotional intimacy with psychic pain or being suffocated which kills their erotic arousal once they really get to know someone. When they get close to a partner they start feeling overwhelmed and turn off. “Women are always asking for more than I can give,” one male commitment-phobe told me. Surrendering to love feels terrifying to him. Such people have never learned that communication can safely bring you closer to someone than even a sexual energy exchange. Thus, so as not to stir up the beast, they must keep a safe distance from true intimacy which casual uncommitted sex allows. Take my patient Roxie who came from an abusive home and grew up a hard-boiled Hollywood street punk. Strong and determined, she made a new life for herself and built a successful sexy lingerie company. At thirty-five, Roxie was an engaging mix of street-smart, hip, and funny. She had her own brand of sexual energy which she seemed at ease with. During our first session she shared, “My boyfriend is an incredible lover. We keep it fun and light. Getting heavy ruins things.” With this attitude, it’s understandable that Roxie’s relationships never lasted more than six months. Though Roxie wasn’t worried about being single, she’d come to me because of an intense loneliness despite many romances. During therapy Roxie began to grasp that when emotions get real, her sexual energy shuts down. Before, she’d simply rationalize, “I’m just not attracted to that guy anymore.” Intimacy was Roxie’s particular blind spot (everybody has one). She didn’t realize that because of her abusive upbringing, intimacy didn’t feel safe. My role isn’t to judge anyone or to push patients to change before they’re ready. If people are happy with their lives, God bless them. But Roxie wasn’t. Still, we had to tread gently. Long ago, I learned to work with where a patient is at, then go from there. Roxie wasn’t yet ready to share her emotions with a lover. It was too threatening. So, first, to ease her loneliness, I encouraged her to explore other forms of intimacy, such as friendships and getting a puppy—animals are master teachers of unconditional love. Then she could work her way toward intimacy with a lover. Roxie found that adoring her shih tzu came more easily than sharing authentic emotions with humans. But gradually she started confiding in friends and letting down her “nothing bothers me” tough-girl facade to risk being vulnerable. I also helped her see how she’d armored herself as a child so that she wouldn’t feel hurt by her spaced-out crack-addicted parents. Now, a year later, Roxie is testing out her new emotional skills with a caring, slightly uptight college English professor—her complete opposite, which lends the perfect balance. She loosens him up; he centers her. They’ve been together eight months and the sexual energy between those two people is good. I am optimistic. Roxie has started to heal the wounds that stopped her from surrendering to a partner. If you want to discover all the dimensions of your sexual energy, a relationship without emotional intimacy and trust won’t be enough for you. Intimacy involves surrender, a desire to let go of fear. You and your partner will bravely explore the inner space of emotions together. Sharing emotions—not excessively, but as they naturally come up—is part of the flow. Lovemaking is about generosity and giving pleasure to each other. It’s not just about you and your pleasure, important as that is. There’s a playfulness that comes from trusting each other as friends and lovers, not holding back. In all these ways, emotional intimacy only makes sex better and is a balm that sustains couples. If you desire more intimacy but resist it, I suggest journaling about your fears. Are you afraid of being hurt? Betrayed? Abandoned? Do you have painful memories of failed intimacies with parents, friends, or others as you grew up? Were you neglected, not “seen,” rejected, or mistreated? Often abused children associate love and sex with pain and choose partners who will inflict pain. Identify what’s stopping you from surrendering to intimacy. Our upbringing can shape us. For better or worse, we’re born helpless, totally dependent on others. If your parents weren’t nurturing and dependable, you may always be perpetually on guard against getting hurt in relationships—it’s hard to surrender if you don’t feel relaxed and secure. Nevertheless, being aware of your early conditioning will let you compassionately identify areas where you hold back from trust now. If you have a history of abuse, you can heal past and current relationship patterns with therapeutic help. Sometimes issues are too big to resolve alone. Old wounds must begin to mend before you’re safe enough to let go to love. That’s the beauty of reaching out for smart professional guidance to free you from the bondage of abuse or any other trauma. When you feel ready, you can use these steps to free yourself. For instance, experiment with pushing your limits with intimacy, not just a sexual energy exchange. Then address any anxiety that arises to prevent you from surrendering. Here’s where a good therapist can be invaluable. Like Roxie, tell yourself it’s okay to go slowly. First start expressing emotions with friends where the stakes aren’t as high as they are with a lover. Or you can get used to sharing love with animals: a dog, a cat, a bird, a hamster, whatever living being you’re not afraid to care about. There’s no rush. Embracing intimacy is a gentle process of desensitizing fear and getting rewarded by loving. As you gain more comfort and confidence, you can go on to a romantic partner. However, even beyond the biological and emotional facets of intimacy, sexual energy is larger than just your desires. It also involves tapping a higher power. There’s a spiritual instinct that propels all of our body’s primal drives. Nothing about being human is ever just physical despite what our minds or genitals tell us. Sexuality and spirit are intimately related. When you surrender sexually, you enter an open intuitive state, permitting the force of creation to flow through you, similar to how artists are moved. As a result, you may literally create a new infant life or you may be rebirthed yourself. During sex, ordinary boundaries fall away and your consciousness is altered. You encounter the bliss of the transcendent. You can intuitively sense things about each other. When you surrender, you are a conduit. I’ll show you how to practice inviting spirit in which in turn triggers the body’s biochemical pleasure response. With age, spirituality and subtle energy keep sexual power alive. Passion of the body is kindled by the passion of heaven. Knowing this is the beginning of knowing bliss. What makes a good lover? There’s an electric chemistry between couples that is unique to them. Smell, voice, touch, and kissing style all figure in. Technical skills and good hygiene are important as well. But beyond these, here are some characteristics to look for.

10 Qualities of a Good Lover

1. You’re a willing learner. 2. You’re playful and passionate. 3. You make your partner feel sexy. 4. You’re confident, not afraid to be vulnerable. 5. You’re adventurous and willing to experiment. 6. You communicate your needs and listen to your partner. 7. You make time and don’t rush. 8. You enjoy giving pleasure as much as you enjoy receiving it. 9. You’re supportive, not judgmental. 10. You’re fully present in the moment with good eye contact and can let go.

What stops us from being good lovers? Frequently it’s time constraints, self-centeredness, inhibitions, and lack of technique. Our minds won’t shut off which keeps us from being in the moment. Further, many of us resist surrendering to how sexy we really are. Why? We haven’t learned to see ourselves as sexy. We’ve been brainwashed by the “skinny ideal.” Also, sex is frequently viewed more as a performance feat than as a holy sexual energy exchange. Growing up, most of us haven’t been given the right kind of education about what true sexiness is. If only we’d been taught that sexuality is a healthy, natural part of us that we must embody in a mindful, loving way—not something “dirty” or something to be ashamed of. Early on we learn that the words “vagina” and “penis” embarrass people. Except between lovers, they are rarely part of our vocabulary. We are a culture that embraces shame, only there is nothing to be ashamed of! At sixteen, when I was about to make love with my boyfriend of two years for the first time, a life-altering rite of passage, I asked my mother about sex. Looking stricken, as if I’d just torn her heart out, she laid down the law: “Judith, it’s far too soon. Let’s talk about this when you’re twenty-one.” End of story. I guess Mother hoped that by refusing to discuss it she’d deter me. She couldn’t have been more wrong. I felt equal parts guilty, mad, and rebellious, dead set on doing what I’d planned. I didn’t want to hurt Mother, but as I saw it, this wasn’t about her—it was about me. I knew she was concerned for my welfare but not addressing my sexuality wasn’t helpful. I wish parents and authority figures would finally grasp that when you tell teenagers that sex is forbidden, it beckons all the more. It then becomes dangerous, risky, more highly charged. Many sophisticated parents today understand this. They honestly discuss the pros and cons of teenage sex without shaming their children or cutting them off. Spirituality needs to be part of that discussion. Two souls sharing erotic passion through a sexual energy exchange is a way of celebrating spirit too. Knowing that a caring (not punishing) higher power is involved brings reverence, integrity, and responsibility to having sex for both teens and adults. It elevates the experience. Spirit is happy that we love each other. It has many sides, including sexiness. If only we were taught that sexuality complements spirituality by linking us with a greater force of love, that they’re not at war with each other. How different our attitudes would be! Just as baby chicks imprint on their mothers, we imprint on our parents. You were fortunate if your parents modeled a healthy sexuality and taught you to be proud of your body. My patients who’ve been raised like this are more comfortable in their own skin and with surrendering to their sexuality. Regrettably, for the rest of us, such self-esteem about our bodies is hard-earned. However, using the following strategies, you can let go of negative programming. Seeing yourself as an erotic being and embracing your own allure are the rewards of awakening sexual energy. Sometimes, though, we resist our own sexiness or having sex at all because it mirrors our insecurities. Common ones include “Is my body attractive? Is my partner judging me? Am I a good lover? Will I disappoint my partner? Will I be rejected? Suffocated?” When these or other fears take over, even subconsciously, you may resist your sexual energy. Resistance can manifest as legitimate excuses such as “I’m not in the mood,” “I’m too tired or run down,” “I’m preoccupied with work,” “It’s too much effort,” “The kids will hear,” or “I’ve got a headache.” Still, if these excuses become habitual and your erotic life is suffering, it’s essential to examine your resistance to sex. There are practical steps you can take to overcome resistance. You have to want to be sexy and keep passion alive in a relationship. When you’re tired or angry, or if communication with your partner breaks down, passion quickly disappears. Denial and apathy are the enemies of passion. So stay alert to the following deterrents to a good sexual energy exchange. Then you can correct the situation.

Common Killers of Passion

1. Exhaustion 2. Not communicating your needs 3. Losing interest 4. Rushing 5. Lack of creativity, boredom 6. Repressed anger and hostilities

Sexual responsiveness is a sensitive barometer. Intimacy requires self-awareness and a willingness to remove obstacles. Taking action can help you achieve a loving, erotic relationship. On a daily basis, train yourself to be more mindful about getting rest and pacing yourself. It’s not sexy to rush around and be constantly stressed out. Especially when you’re busy, it’s important to remember to breathe—a quick way to reconnect with your body. Though family, work, and other demands can intrude on making time for sexual energy, being dedicated to self-care can help you prioritize it in your relationship. To cure self-doubts, you need to be solution-oriented. For instance, if you wonder, “Is my technique right?” honestly talk with your partner about how you can meet each other’s needs. If you’re bored with the same positions, playfully brainstorm together about exciting ways to experiment. Also, with respect, keep discussing the anger or hurt you may feel toward each other so that your resentments don’t numb passion. For more complex issues such as fear of intimacy, reach out to a therapist or a friend for insight. While exploring your fears, be kind to yourself. Such sweetness allows you to mend wounds and reclaim your sexual power.

Surrender to The Ecstasy of Orgasms: Explore Sacred Play

Orgasm is the crown jewel of surrender. You tap into the primordial flow of life as well as release tension. The more surrendered you are, the more ecstatic the orgasm. Sex and orgasms are an intrinsic part of being human. For me, these are the great rewards of having a body! The World Health Organization estimates that at least a hundred million acts of intercourse take place each day worldwide. (Imagine if even half of these were motivated by love—what ecstasy would surround the planet!) On average, American couples have sex two times per week. The average male orgasm lasts ten seconds and a female orgasm is twenty seconds or longer. I could hardly believe the national polls revealing that nearly 50 percent of women report having orgasms infrequently or not at all during intercourse. Moreover, numerous studies have found that women fake orgasms up to half the time to protect their partners’ feelings. These statistics highlight a glaring reluctance many of us have to be honest with our partners about our sexual energy exchanges. We’ll discuss how surrender, a basic knowledge of anatomy, and a little dexterity can improve communication and enhance orgasms for both sexes. What is an orgasm? How could this miracle ever be just one thing? It involves physical, emotional, spiritual, and energetic surrenders. On a physical level, when you’re sexually aroused, your orgasm discharges tension, resulting in rhythmic pelvic contractions and pleasure, even euphoria. In men, orgasm typically occurs from stimulating the penis; in women, from stimulating the clitoris or the sacred G-spot in the vagina. These parts of our body are marvelously sensitive due to a high density of nerve fibers. Caressing them activates pleasure centers in the brain. Your body shifts gears. You breathe harder. Your heart rate increases. Blood rushes to your genitals, making them swell. At climax men, and some women, ejaculate. Endorphins, the natural “feel-good” hormones, flood your system. You experience waves of pleasure, stress evaporates, and a warm glow permeates your body. Oxytocin, the “love hormone,” spikes, bathing couples in the warm and fuzzy “wash of love” feeling as you bond. Your biology wants you to relax into a blissful surrender through the sexual energy between two people. Emotions play a different role in orgasm for men and women. I am reluctant to stereotype genders, but for women emotional intimacy and trust are often more necessary in order to feel safe enough to let go—though of course physical attraction is essential too. Orgasms are easier when we feel treasured. If we feel criticized, unappreciated, or rushed it can be difficult, if not impossible, to surrender during sex. In contrast, men are more biologically wired to prioritize orgasm over an emotional connection or even trust. Physical attraction may be all that it takes to climax. Thus, over the eons, men have been said to “think with their penises” when they’re turned on, though women can also make terrible decisions based on unruly sexual energy. Expressing feelings isn’t always first on a man’s mind, though the failure to do so may be a deal breaker for a woman. Nevertheless, there are also many loving, sexy men who are emotionally sensitive, responsive, and in no hurry at all.

The Erotic Ecstasy of Foreplay

Foreplay is an opportunity for couples to arouse and nurture each other though women seem to crave it more. It’s a way to build erotic energy rather than simply releasing it. The average man can have an orgasm within a few minutes or less. Women may need up to twenty minutes of foreplay. Ideally, of course, neither partner hears a clock ticking. Many couples I treat are in paradise letting sexual energy tension mount before intercourse without any sense of time. Foreplay lets them feel close, explore, play, prolong the ecstatic pangs of arousal. I liken foreplay to tuning a musical instrument. You need to intuitively feel it, and the sexual energy between two people, discover just the right touch, the right kiss, and sense how you and your partner’s bodies respond. I smiled when I recently saw a man in a café whose T-shirt read, “I will work for sex.” True, it may take more effort for a woman to orgasm but that’s what being a good lover means: knowing how to please someone without rushing, getting pleasure from each other’s pleasure. Then foreplay never just feels like work. In addition, here’s a critical anatomic fact: nature didn’t put the clitoris (unlike the penis) in the direct line of penetration. During foreplay it needs to be manually or orally stimulated unless the angle of your bodies happens to be just right, which is less likely. Most women can’t have an orgasm with intercourse alone. Couples must know this so they can mutually pleasure each other. If a man wants to win a woman’s heart, the time and the tenderness he puts into foreplay help her surrender during sex. She can’t be rushed. A common problem I’ve seen with couples in my practice is that if a man is spent, he may want to have intercourse without much foreplay, then just fall asleep since ejaculating makes him tired. I’m not saying a woman can’t enjoy a quickie at times but in general this practice doesn’t support a passionate relationship. I encourage couples to openly discuss the dilemma of balancing all of life’s demands, to agree to try not to lapse into the rut of quickies. Then they can plan erotic interludes to leisurely enjoy each other during a sexual energy exchange and the pleasures their bodies have to offer. To enhance foreplay, try the next exercise to awaken your senses and let go to pleasure.

Exercise: Surrender to Your Senses

Set aside uninterrupted time to playfully experiment. Begin to relax by breathing deep and slow. We habitually breathe shallowly to temper sexual and other feelings. I want you to sense, not think, to be fully in your body.

Awaken touch. Take a fresh flower or a feather and gently stroke each other’s bodies. (For me, it’s a rose in full bloom with petals about to fall.) Start with the face, neck, chest, breasts, and the heart area, gradually making your way down to the genitals. Repeat delicate, circular motions over these areas. They respond to a light touch. It’ll feel lovely and exciting. Let go. Revel in the sensations.

Awaken taste. Select a few foods, herbs, or spices that have zing. Arrange them on a plate. My favorites are papaya, peppermint, and honey. I have a patient, an engineer with a nonstop mind, who perks up her sexual energy by savoring a succulent piece of watermelon. To heighten your sense of taste, I suggest wearing an eye mask or a loose blindfold, perhaps made from a silk scarf. Then, with eyes covered, have your partner offer you each selection one by one. The tongue is a sensual miracle of sensations. Let the pleasure of taste spread throughout your body. Allow it to arouse every pore.

Awaken smell. Now, explore smell. It is an intimate and important part of sexual energy, one that can turn you off or on. Let a blindfold accentuate your exploration of this sense. One patient, a full-time mom, gets a sensual lift from a few whiffs of lavender or gardenia oil during the day, and she keeps them handy in her desk and car. Test out various scents. See how your body responds to the aromas of different herbs, oils, or perfumes. Use them as a sensual refresher.

Play with movement and rocking. Experiment with moving your bodies together to build sexual energy. Rocking your bodies while holding each other can be extremely sensual. Also, when you first see each other after being apart, a long, silent embrace or hug combined with rocking is arousing. Dancing or spontaneous free-form movements are beautiful too.

Tune in to nature. Draw on nature’s passion to heighten your sexual energy. Thunderstorms, mist, rainbows, wind in the woods—enjoy whatever moods of nature excite you. Let them arouse your body. Be aware of colors, textures, sounds. Absorb them all. For instance, I’ll twirl on my balcony to the sensual tone of a distant foghorn, becoming one with it and the ocean nearby. Sensuality can be transmitted from nature to you, a spontaneous osmosis if you allow it to happen.

This exercise intensifies your own sexual energy and the erotic relationship between you and your partner. Exploring each other is never just a one-time event. Keep discovering the nuances of each other’s sensitivity and aesthetics. Experiment with what gives you both goose bumps, tingles, or surges of warmth. Notice how your body feels, all of it. This lets you experience more pleasure and intimacy.

There Is No Such Thing as Casual Sex

From an intuitive perspective, your orgasm is never just your own during lovemaking. Sexual energy gets transmitted to your partner, affecting his or her well-being. Your energy fields overlap, conveying both joy and despair (even during brief hookups). From that perspective, there is no such thing as casual sex. In fact, my sensitive patient Pete prefers not to make love with his wife if she’s angry about work. Reasonably enough! He’s happy to listen to her vent when she comes home but if she’s still clinging to the anger when they have sex, it gets transmitted even without speaking it. This doesn’t feel good to Pete and drains him. Such energy transfer between couples frequently happens, though most aren’t aware of it. I want you to be. During orgasm ordinary boundaries blur. You’re vulnerable. Your heart opens. In the best of situations, orgasm is an exchange of energy that blesses both partners. The French call it le petit mort or “the little death,” a total surrender that catapults you and your lover into the ecstatic arms of the divine. Tantra is a potent Hindu system that teaches the art of erotic love by combining sex and spirit. Westerners often see sex as linear, the goal being orgasm, but tantra views sexual love as a sacrament and an energy exchange between two people. According to tantra, orgasm isn’t simply a physical release. Using specific positions, you move erotic energy upward from the genitals to nourish and purify your whole being. It’s fun to be aware of sexual energy during lovemaking. Energy is emitted through the eyes: the sensual way you look at someone can arouse him or her. Eye contact is a way to stay connected to your partner. Also during orgasm, when energy rises, you may liberate uncomfortable emotions. I’ve had numerous (mostly male) patients say, “My partner sometimes cries when we make love. Have I done something wrong?” I explain, “In both men and women, crying and laughing are emotional releases, signs of passion, not anything that needs fixing.” Tantric educator Barbara Carrellas calls spontaneous laughing during sex “giggleasms.” Check out these reactions with your partner. Unless he or she says differently, there’s nothing you need to do except rejoice in how free your partner feels to emotionally surrender with you. To experience how knowing about sexual energy can improve your sex life, try the following exercise alone or with a partner. It takes orgasm beyond the short version of “it feels so good and it’s over” to a level of extended meditative bliss.

Overcoming Your Fear of Letting Go

If you want to let go during sex but something is holding you back, it’s essential to examine and heal fears that can undercut your pleasure. See if the following fears are stopping you.

Common Fears of Letting Go

1. Fear of losing control. 2. Fear of not performing. 3. Fear of taking too long to have an orgasm. 4. Fear of speaking your needs. 5. Fear of pain, abandonment, or emotional harm. 6. Fear of losing yourself in a lover. 7. Fear of getting obsessed or overly attached to a lover.

To surrender these fears, envision a new paradigm of sexual energy success. Dispense with old ideas and embrace truer ones. The first switch is to permanently retire the notion that good sex is equated only with performance. The belief that “I’m not a real man or woman if I don’t perform on command with an erection or an orgasm” is obsolete and spiritually ignorant. It’s grim when sex is reduced to a contest to keep proving yourself by how you perform—motivations that also apply, sad to say, to succeeding in corporate America. This leads to performance anxiety, which only prevents good sex and orgasms. Just as trying to fall asleep doesn’t work, trying to perform is doomed. Do you think basketball pro LeBron James is worrying about his performance when he’s going for a slam dunk? Or Aretha Franklin when she’s belting out a song? Or Steve Jobs when he was inventing the iPad? I kinda doubt it. The same goes for sex. Attention should be focused on giving and receiving pleasure, not on expectations of erections and orgasms. I urge couples to be more candid, more innovative, more willing to question and blast apart notions that are anti-passion and anti-love. Emotional wounds can also stop you from letting go. Lovemaking may trigger old hurts, fear of abandonment, or trauma. When this happens to my patients, their first instinct is often to shut down. In psychoanalyst Alice Miller’s eye-opening book The Body Never Lies, she describes the long-term consequences of child abuse in the body such as chronic pain, numbness, and impotence. Trauma lodges in our muscles and tissues until it’s allowed to be released. One of my patients who struggled with low self-esteem spent a decade in an abusive marriage. She told me, “My husband was into having sex during commercial breaks when we watched TV. He’d be finished by the time Monday Night Football came back on. I didn’t want to make him mad, so I faked orgasms.” On those occasions, my patient hated her husband, herself, and the sex. No wonder she suffered from chronic pelvic pain. She loved her husband, but he was hurting her with his abusive treatment and definitely not treasuring her the way she deserved to be treasured. My beaten-down patient had reached that point of surrender. Finally she was ready to let go. During our therapy, she gained the courage to leave the marriage and eventually her pelvic pain disappeared. Techniques that benefited my patient and will help others heal trauma include psychotherapy, bodywork—such as energy healing and massage—and spiritual work focusing on self-compassion and the complicated subject of forgiveness. If you have a history of trauma that prevents you from letting go, I recommend reaching out to a therapist or guide to help you release it. As healing occurs—and it will—letting go during lovemaking will feel safer and the sexual energy will become more pleasurable. Perhaps you hold back from surrendering during sex because you’re afraid of losing yourself in a partner or sacrificing your power. Like some patients I’ve worked with, you may find it difficult to stay centered around sexual energy. You may resist the merging that happens during orgasm because it makes you feel invisible or consumed. Paradoxically, you must be confident in who you are in order to enjoy such profound letting go. Otherwise the ecstatic dissolution of the ego during lovemaking may seem threatening. One college student told me about her conflicted emotions: “It feels like I give my power away when I let go. My boyfriend makes me feel so amazing, I’m afraid he’ll possess a part of me that I’ll never get back. But I’d do anything to keep him.” This speaks to how easy it is to get seduced by bliss, what people are tempted to give up for it. Since Adam and Eve, erotic pleasure has made even the most sensible people forsake their priorities. A related aspect is when one member of a couple too greatly subordinates his or her identity while caring for a spouse or children. What’s been useful for my patients in this predicament is to create a daily life with more individual meaning and also to set clearer boundaries. Maybe that means returning to school, doing charity work, or insisting on private time to meditate and pursue spirituality. If this sounds familiar to you, as you minister to your own needs you’ll feel more centered. Then it will be safer to enjoy the freedom of surrendering, both during sexual energy exchanges and in your relationship

Exercise: Orgasmic Meditation

Relax and unwind. Set aside some time to be sensual. Turn off the phone. Put a Do Not Disturb sign on your door. It’s important not to be rushed. To unwind, take a few deep breaths. Feel your belly rise with each in-breath, become softer with each out-breath. Focus on the sensuality of your body.

Have an orgasm. Stroke yourself. Indulge in a sexy thought. Arouse each other with foreplay if you’re with a partner. In whatever way you like, whether you’re self-pleasuring or making love, bring yourself to orgasm. Feel the orgasm rise, then peak, then explode. Let yourself melt into it. Surrender to the pleasure.

Meditate. A wonderful way to feel sexual energy move is to meditate immediately after an orgasm. A minute or so following climax, sit in an upright position. It’s much easier to meditate when you’re relaxed. Close your eyes: this intensifies any experience. Inhale and exhale slowly. Focus lightly on the lingering bliss of orgasm. Let it spread throughout your body. Don’t force anything. Sexual energy moves through you naturally. Surrender to the sensations as they heighten. Savor the warmth, tingles, or rush. Eyes still closed, you may slip into a state of intuitive awareness. You may see colors, vibrate from head to toe, or even feel God. Spontaneous intuitions about people, work, or health may flash through. Later, be sure to write these down and act on them. There is no time limit for this meditation. Continue as long as you like. Let the orgasmic energy transport you to higher states of consciousness, visions, and pleasure.

The Difference Between Bonding and Overly Attaching to a Partner: Liberate Your Love

Bonding with a partner is a natural part of getting to know someone and of falling in love. But getting overly attached goes beyond healthy sexual energy exchanges and bonding and is disempowering. When you truly love someone, you’re not interested in possessing the person or keeping him or her in your clutches because you’re afraid of losing the relationship. Instead, you respect your partner’s autonomy and spirit. You’re not too entangled; rather you’re standing together side by side. True intimacy is always a balance between bonding and letting go so the relationship can breathe. Take the following quiz to determine your bonding patterns.

Quiz: Are You Overly Attached to a Partner?

1. Do you cling to your partner? 2. Do you want to possess him or her? 3. Are you often afraid of being abandoned or betrayed? 4. Do you get anxious when you don’t hear from him or her every day if you’re dating? 5. Do you constantly think about the person? 6. Do you start obsessing about a partner after you have sex? 7. Does your partner feel you are trying to control or suffocate him or her? 8. Do you feel you can’t live without the person?

If you answered yes to six to eight questions, you are extremely overly attached. Three to five yeses indicate that you are moderately overly attached. One to three yeses indicate that you have a tendency to overly attach. A score of zero indicates that you have healthy bonding with your partner. An aspect of myself that I’ve made progress in healing is my tendency to get overly attached to men. During sex I bond quickly and fuse with a man, but I can’t unfuse with him later. I start yearning for him and thinking about him constantly. Some of this is organic and beautiful but becoming overly attached crosses a line. I can become obsessed and intensely hungry for contact, particularly if I’ve been single for a while. I am a sexual being so if I haven’t had sex for a while, I can become needy. Being in this position makes me (and many women) vulnerable to getting overly attached. For instance, if I don’t hear from the man for a few days, I can get anxious and afraid of losing him or of being abandoned. It’s not good for me, and moreover, most men don’t appreciate this kind of response. So in my tantric sexual energy sessions and in therapy, I discovered how to enjoy passion from a more grounded place. Here’s how:

1. I learned that over-merging with a sexual partner can decrease sexual energy charge. It actually can be more erotic to go in and out of intense connection with a partner rather than sustaining it. This gives both lovers their space and more breathing room.

2. I don’t “root” in a man. I root primarily in myself and the earth. One way I do this before and after lovemaking is to visualize my body developing roots into the soil like a tree. I’m still surrendered to and immersed in pleasure, but I also keep a fuller sense of myself intact. I’m able to separate from him and more comfortably see us as separate beings.

3. After lovemaking, I find it useful to meditate with my partner and then say to each other, “I adore you. I honor you. I release you.” This is a healthy way to bond and produces a beautiful equilibrium of loving.

The solution to becoming overly attached is to focus on strengthening your self-esteem while addressing and releasing fears, including the fear of abandonment, which can cause the need to cling. Working with a skilled relationship therapist or coach can be productive. These will help you develop autonomy and grounding. Being willing to surrender the tendency to get overly attached in favor of a healthier bond will allow you to have more joyous and pleasurable relationships and sexual energy exchanges without the pain of obsession.

Surrender to Bliss

The goal of sexual energy surrender is to keep letting go in healthy, positive ways, at your own pace, in your own time. Lovemaking is an ongoing surrender to bliss. What is bliss? The dictionary defines it as extreme happiness, ecstasy, and the joy of heaven. As I see it, it’s also the bliss of connecting to the body, to a partner, and to God. For me, this is the place where great rivers converge, the intersection of human life and heaven. Bliss isn’t as distant as you might think. It’s always right in front of us, in this moment, when we can open to it. Philosopher Alan Watts wrote, “When you are in love with someone, you do indeed see them as a divine being.” This “aha” moment can raise lovemaking from the physical to the transcendent. Remember: that divine being you are making love with is the same person who forgot to pay the rent last month and who sometimes doesn’t do the dishes. Seeing the divinity in your partner while making love, and always, is acknowledging the miraculous in the ordinary. That’s the secret to bliss. Human bliss is only a sliver of what divine bliss can be. During sexual energy exchanges, you want to touch the eternal. A relationship is never just about two people. Each of you has a direct line to the divine that you can bring to each other. Learning to invite spirit into sex keeps passion high. During lovemaking, your mutual spiritual, heart, and erotic energies blend together as they permeate your body. Your lusty, heartful, and heavenly parts fuse in utter bliss. If you’ve never had the experience of bringing the divine into lovemaking, you have a lot to look forward to. Below is an exercise to practice.

Exercise: Blending Sex and Spirit

Create a sacred space. To set the mood, create an environment that’s sensually and spiritually uplifting: a vase of tulips, some sandalwood incense, candles, perhaps oils to rub on each other. Turn your phones off so there are no disturbances or reasons to hurry.

Hold each other; make eye contact. Spend as long as you like in each other’s arms before you go further. Gaze lovingly into each other’s eyes, a way of non-sexually exchanging energy between two people. For a few minutes, breathe together, synchronizing in-breath and out-breath, becoming intuitively attuned. Feel your energy and warmth blending. Soak up the joy of intimacy.

Allow spirit to flow through you. When you’re ready, go on to intercourse. Inwardly ask, “May the divine flow through me.” Then stay open. Once you invite spirit in, bliss will come through. Bliss is a way of the divine saying, “I’m here. I love you. Let go.” Trust the gift. Let your genitals reach for bliss. Let your heart surrender too. Feel bliss as sexual energy glides up your spine and out the top of your head and back to the heavens.

Relax together. Linger in the moment. Don’t rush out of bed. If it feels right to be silent, fine. If you want to talk with each other, do. Cherish this sacred union.

Igniting your sexual energy lets you surrender more completely to bliss, no holding back, no resisting. From the caress of sunlight on your shoulders to a lover’s sensual touch, take in the bliss, nice and slow. Don’t go on to the next thing too fast. I want to convey how mysterious and sanctified bliss can be, how it’s always been within you to summon. Immerse yourself in the bliss of everyday life and of sexual passion: they are wedded to each other, not separate. Realizing this changes everything. Across many spiritual traditions, erotic poetry celebrates the sacred wedding of body and spirit. Mystics see all love songs as about God. The body, a form of the Formless, is a manifestation of divine love. In Judaism, the Song of Songs, an epic love poem, exalts sensual pleasure and God. Similarly, the Christian mystics Teresa of Avila and Hildegard of Bingen, both virgins of course, wrote rapturous, erotic love poetry to God and used imagery from the Song of Songs. In Hinduism, the world is believed to have been created through a sexual energy act. Thus, the Indian poet Mirabai praises the erotic through sex and creation. The great Sufi mystic poets Hafez and Rumi revere the union with God through a surrender to erotic love, divine love, and the love of friendship. I get chills from the depth of the surrender that Rumi writes about: “I merged so completely with love / and was so fused, that I became love / And love became me.” I suggest reading such erotic poetry with your partner to honor the sensual sacrament of your relationship. One winter I had the privilege of visiting Konya, Turkey, the place of Rumi’s death. The day he died, December 17, is affectionately called his “wedding day,” Rumi’s reunion with the divine. Each year, thousands of people make the pilgrimage to Konya on this date to honor the poet of love. That evening I saw a performance of the whirling dervishes, an ecstatic surrender to spontaneous movement, to passion, to grief, and the divine. Their dance isn’t just for entertainment. The dervishes, dressed in simple white robes, spun in reverence to the unseen, in trance. Watching their radiant faces and the effortless fluidity of their spinning, I was transported into bliss too. I left feeling happy and in love with everything again. When gazing into the eyes of your beloved, you are always looking into the eyes of God. Keep surrendering to the ecstasy of lovemaking. View it as practice for making love with the entire universe. Sexual energy and passion connects you to the joy of heaven, earth, and realms beyond. You’ll be illuminated. Trust the many incarnations of bliss. Once you get just a glimpse of them, there is no turning back. Surrender Affirmation for Sexual Energy I am a vibrant sexual being. I will use this power with respect and care. I will allow myself to fully let go to pleasure. I will delight in the bliss of my sensuality. I will surrender to giving and receiving love. This article on sexual energy healing is excerpted with permission from The Power of Surrender: Let Go and Energize Your Relationships, Success, and Well-Being by Dr. Judith Orloff.

About The Author Judith Orloff, M.D., is an Assistant Clinical Professor of psychiatry at UCLA and an empath who has helped patients find emotional freedom for over 20 years. She synthesizes the pearls of traditional medicine with the cutting-edge knowledge of intuition, energy, and spirituality to achieve physical and emotional healing. Dr. Orloff passionately asserts that we have the power to transform negative emotions and achieve inner peace. Her bestselling books, The Power of Surrender, Emotional Freedom, Second Sight, Positive Energy, and Guide to Intuitive Healing offer readers practical strategies to overcome frustration, stress, and worry. Visit her website drjudithorloff.com

finding an ideal life partner or soul mate is about learning to identify eight core qualities in a person that would make for a great long term relationship. photo: danka & peter

My favorite social experiment in learning to pick an ideal partner can’t be found in any social science literature. Instead, it can be found on your TV, Monday nights at 8:00 pm. It’s called The Bachelor. For those who don’t know, The Bachelor provides one man — the eponymous bachelor — a group of twenty-five to thirty gorgeous women from whom he must choose a wife—for all intents and purposes his life partner. Not a girlfriend, a wife. The goal of the show is to turn the bachelor into a married man. The Bachelor is absolutely brilliant…just not at making marriages. According to Wikipedia, as of March 2015 only five lasting ideal partnerships have come out of the twenty-nine seasons of The Bachelor and its gender-reverse counterpart, The Bachelorette, combined. But the show is genius at a particular aspect of relationships: making people think they’re falling in love. How does the show do this? It’s easy to chalk it up to everyone being ridiculously good-looking, plus the impossibly romantic, expense-free dates. Rappelling down the highest cliff in Bali and then attending a private concert by the biggest local pop star, anyone? Swimming in a cove of endangered dolphins and then dining in a thousand-year-old castle? A little adrenaline, a little romance, and everyone’s in love! But we all know it’s not that simple. Love is a mystery…but it’s not a conjuring act. Perhaps everyone on the show believes they’re falling in love because they really want to be in love. The people who apply to be on the show are certainly a self-selected bunch. If you’re not looking for the experience of love and an ideal partner, there’s little reason to go on the show in the first place. Is it simply wish fulfillment? Maybe. But one night as my husband (who good-naturedly tolerates it) and I sat watching the show, he made an intriguing comment. “Why doesn’t that girl just leave? She doesn’t like the bachelor at all. They have nothing in common.” This gave me pause. In fact, the women almost never leave — they only depart when the bachelor rejects them as a non-ideal partner. On very few occasions has a woman left simply because she wasn’t feeling it. But sometimes it’s glaringly obvious that a particular woman on the show would never be ideal for the bachelor. Why doesn’t she just leave? Her answer is always simple: “I think I could be falling in love!” “I think he could be my life partner…we have such a strong connection…I want to see where this goes!” And this, right here, is what the show gets right. This is why The Bachelor is brilliant. Out of the vast pantheon of feelings, the show understands the specific feeling of attraction. It knows that attraction is vital in finding budding partnerships and has learned to evoke it in complete strangers. Attraction is, in fact, the starting point of all close relationships. As I understand it, attraction is the energy of potential with another person. It is the feeling of being interested in someone, the feeling that this might be something great. The Bachelor may be frivolous, but attraction is not. Attraction is the first draw toward a new, ideal partner…the first step closer.

Understanding The Draw Toward Others

It’s a misconception that people who struggle with loneliness don’t feel drawn toward others. Most lonely people are not recluses or innate “lone wolves.” Most do meet people they like — people they admire or find interesting. The breakdown in connection often happens in the transition from being interested to getting close. It’s this interest — this attraction — that’s the starting point for all close relationships that ultimately lead to finding ideal life partners. The word attraction unfortunately feels like it belongs solely to the realm of romance; we usually hear it in the context of physical attraction. But you have to understand that attraction simply means the experience of feeling drawn to someone — feeling interested in getting to know him or her better. While the romantic versions of attraction — lust and infatuation — can certainly be a starting point for closeness with ideal partners, attraction has a much broader scope. Let’s say you’re in grad school and feel drawn to a particular professor’s intellect. That’s attraction. Or you’ve just attended your first company meeting and feel compelled to know more about the CEO’s backstory. That’s attraction too. Attraction is essentially your intuition assessing the situation before your conscious mind gets the chance to, trying to understand how to find an ideal life partner. Attraction is your subconscious picking up on subtle cues that it likes before your conscious mind understands exactly what it is it’s liking. I find evidence for this in the fact that attraction is often described as a spiritual or psychic experience, as a meeting of the minds or a melding of hearts. Love at first sight. Instant connection. Understand this: attraction is simply a finger pointing toward potential closeness. A former client of mine who worked at a very large company — we’ll call him Julian — struggled to manage a strained relationship with his boss. He found his boss much too harsh. It wasn’t necessarily the critical feedback that bothered him — Julian simply didn’t like the tone in which his boss spoke to him. It was flippant, dismissive. Unfortunately, Julian felt his working environment wouldn’t allow for him to simply ask someone to be nicer. As I worked with Julian to improve his relationship with his boss, I felt we were making little headway. Until, that is, I asked him this: “So, your boss doesn’t speak to you in a way you like. Who does speak to you in a way you like?” He paused. A smile spread across his face. “This is random,” Julian began, “but this one time I was in a restaurant with my wife and the waiter kept calling us ‘my friends.’ ‘More water, my friends?’ ‘Do you want ketchup, my friends?’ It sounds cheesy, but it wasn’t. He meant it. Everyone was his friend.” That, my friends, is attraction. Julian was attracted to the waiter’s friendliness and openness, even if he didn’t immediately understand the attraction. It was the smallest, simplest moment of meeting someone and thinking, “I like you!” Eventually, Julian came to the conclusion that he needed to be around people who were friendlier and more open, and he partnered with a much smaller company—an ideal partner in his business life. Julian’s story helps us understand that there’s no reason why attraction can’t exist — as a powerful force, no less — in all realms, including friendship, family, and professional. Attraction is much more universal than we think. But how do you transition from meeting someone and feeling attracted to recognizing if they are an ideal partner? Let’s look at Julian’s situation. He could have done a few things to initiate understanding the attraction with the waiter he liked. He could have:

+ Come back to the restaurant another day and chatted with the waiter again

+ Made up a pretense for planning to get together, perhaps under the guise of doing business together

+ Made a straightforward statement that he liked how the waiter carried himself and would like to get to know him better

Do these advances sound odd…or even scary? They likely do. Which brings us to the final option. Julian could have done nothing — which is indeed what he did, and most of us would have done the same. It’s quite common to feel uncomfortable approaching someone with the intention of getting closer. But the thing to remember is that these really are the opportunities that lead to closeness, and understanding how to find your ideal partner. Opportunities can be large — like a lifelong bond with a sibling — or they can be very small — like a chance encounter with a friendly waiter. Once you start looking at your environment through the lens of closeness, you’ll notice that these opportunities are all around you. Attraction springs up spontaneously. You might meet a new person or suddenly start seeing an old person in a new light. Attraction happens when it happens. Your job is to be brave and to seize the opportunity.

How to Know If It’s Love at First Sight (Or Not)

The unique quality that makes attraction a great starting point for finding ideal partners — its feeling of potential — is also its biggest stumbling block. Attraction has great energetic power; it can feel like the pull of gravity. It’s not uncommon to hear someone say they were drawn to another person like a magnet. Attraction is exciting, no doubt, but its energy can also yank people right into a full-blown relationship before they actually understand what they’re getting into.. When it comes to picking ideal partners, start with understanding attraction. But don’t stop with attraction. A strong attraction makes it very easy to jump to conclusions, to fill in the blanks of who the other person is with your own assumptions. She started her own company, so she must have her head screwed on straight! He’s a single dad, so he must be really loving and affectionate! Well…you don’t really know if someone is an ideal partner until you begin to understand the attraction. It takes some time and effort — detailed in my book in the chapters on knowing — to get to know someone on a deep enough level to call it closeness. For now you need to hold fast to the reality that even if you really like this person, you don’t really know her yet. In other words, love at first sight may be real, but “knowing at first sight” is not. Knowing at first sight is at best wishful thinking that someone might be your ideal life partner. At worst, it’s a recipe for serious disappointment. Don’t let yourself get close to a fantasy. You may be thinking, “I never do this. I know the difference between fantasy and reality.” But evidence shows that we start constructing our idea of who another person is on first contact. Just one picture on Tinder, one tweet we find hilarious or off-putting, and we think we know who the person is—ideal or otherwise. As The Bachelor proves, no activity is more ruled by fantasies than dating. Researcher Artemio Ramirez, who conducted a study of online daters to determine if the amount of time spent talking online affected real-life outcomes, found that the image we create in our heads about another person is a truly powerful force: The results of the present study suggest online daters create mental constructs of their potential partners by reading their online dating profile, using that information to fill-in-the-blanks of who the ideal partner might really be in the offline world. Daters who wait too long to meet in person, and therefore cross this tipping point, might find it difficult to accept any discrepancies from their idealized mental construct of their partner. Crossing the tipping point should be particularly harmful for daters who developed very inaccurate partner expectations due to the partner’s use of dishonesty, misrepresentation, or even exaggeration on their profile. So how do you cross this threshold into understanding attraction while avoiding the stumbling block of assuming? How do you successfully navigate the waters of liking-but-not-really-knowing-for-sure? This is one of the biggest challenges you’ll face in your journey out of loneliness. Because the first few encounters in a new relationship can be a very uncertain time, I encourage you to hit a few specific notes before committing to pursuing someone as your ideal partner. If you miss any of these notes, there’s a chance you may be moving too fast from attraction to full-blown relationship. (And remember, this applies to all types of relationships, not just romantic ones.) The notes I encourage you to hit when first trying on a new friend, family member, colleague, or romantic partner are:

1. Identify and understand attractions.

2. Meet in person. If it’s a romantic relationship, feel free to ask him or her on a date. If it’s a business relationship, grab coffee together.

3. Ask a few deeper questions. Later in my book you will learn how to ask deep questions. But for now, simply make an effort to probe a little deeper. If your boss talks about enjoying sailing, ask, “What do you like about it?” If your acquaintance is interviewing for a new job, ask, “What do you want out of the job?”

4. Assess for certain skills. You’re not looking for any “right” or “wrong” answers to your deeper questions; you’re looking for skills that indicate whether or not this person will be good at knowing and caring.

Let’s discuss these skills that are the sign of an ideal partner in detail. The first four indicate proficiency in knowing; the second four indicate proficiency in caring. Let’s tackle the four knowing skills first.

The 8 Core Qualities of Ideal Life Partners

Core Quality 1: The Ability to Self-Disclose The ability to self-disclose essentially means being willing to reveal parts of one’s inner world to someone else. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that this is the fundamental ability required in an ideal partner. At its core, self-disclosing means openness and honesty, as well as a desire to share a range of information about oneself — both factual and subjective. A factual disclosure could be as simple as revealing you’re from Michigan. A subjective disclosure would include telling the other person how you feel about being from Michigan. What was your favorite part of growing up there? Do you like going back? These subjective disclosures can be easy to overlook, since we’re trained from school and work situations to focus on remembering the facts. While the facts are important, the feelings behind the facts are more important in creating closeness and forming an ideal partnership. Most people will tell anyone where they’re from. But they will only tell a potential confidante how they feel about where they’re from. As well-known social psychologist Harry Reis described in his theory of intimacy: “Although factual and emotional self-disclosures reveal personal information about oneself, emotional self-disclosures are considered to be more closely related to the experience of intimacy because they allow for the most core aspects of the self to be known, understood, and validated.” Things to Notice

+ Does he avoid answering personal questions?

+ Does he create factual inconsistencies or tell full-blown lies?

+ Does he use deflection or humor to avoid certain subjects?

Core Quality 2: The Ability to Reciprocate The ability to reciprocate, as I define it, means being able both to give someone their moment and to take your own moment. Stated another way, it is the ability to let someone else be the focus (at certain moments) and also to let yourself be the focus (at other moments). The ability to reciprocate in this way matters because if one person in the ideal relationship is always the center of attention, neglect and inequality become inevitable. Those who struggle with reciprocating tend to gather at opposite ends of the spectrum: they are either very self-centered or very self-effacing. Neither of these extremes works well for creating closeness. An ideal partner would see interactions as something of a tennis match — lobbing the focus over to you and then actively swinging at it when it comes back her way. Things to Notice

+ Does she hog the conversation or talk as if you’re not there?

+ Does she send a barrage of questions your way but answer few in return?

+ Does the conversation feel forced?

Core Quality 3: The Ability to Accept New Information Specifically, this means the other person should be able to accept new information about you. Early on, it’s natural for a person to develop a picture of who they think you are, but problems arise if that early picture becomes fixed. For closeness to flourish, the person you are getting to know must be able to reevaluate and reformulate his ideas about you regularly. In other words, if you reveal more about yourself over time yet find he doesn’t believe you because these disclosures don’t match his early idea of you, that’s a problem. That’s a red flag that he’s falling for a fantasy of you, and doesn’t understand how to find his ideal partner. Anybody with whom you choose to create closeness should be able to let go of the mental construct of you he created before he knew you well. Things to Notice

+ Does he retain new information about you?

+ Does he try to talk you out of what you’re saying about yourself?

+ Is he making sweeping assumptions about you?

Core Quality 4: The Ability to Be Present The ability to be present means being in the moment, focused on what’s happening here and now. It can be as simple as disconnecting from personal technology and giving full attention to your partner. But being present means much more than just being able to put down a phone. It means being willing to change with each moment. In other words, someone who is fixated on what has been in the past or what will be in the future is just that — fixated. She’s weighed down with baggage. She’s stuck in some other place and time…somewhere you can’t go. If you can’t both be here and now, an ideal partnership is unlikely to grow. Fundamentally, you will achieve knowing and caring through lots of little moments of being present with each other. Things to Notice

+ Does she make eye contact — one of the primary indicators of present engagement?

+ Does she tend to redirect the conversation to past or future events?

+ Does she use language that casts the conversations in the past or future — using words such as then and there instead of now and here?

Now let’s tackle another important feature of understanding attraction- the four caring skills. Core Quality 5: The Ability to Feel and Express Emotions This one is pretty self-explanatory. It’s impossible to get close to someone who either cannot feel feelings or cannot express them—warning signs that someone will most definitely not be an ideal partner. Whether the other person is actually feeling can be very hard to determine from casual conversation, so I recommend focusing on whether she can express emotion. Look for feeling language of any kind. “I love when this happens…” “I hate when I can’t…” Pay particular attention to any caring language around other people in her life. One sincere expression of love for another person in her life is an excellent sign that she might be a candidate for an ideal partner. Things to Notice

+ Does he use feeling language?

+ Does he use facial expressions and gestures to convey emotion?

+ Does he have a flat affect or seem robotic?

Core Quality 6: The Ability to Respond Appropriately The ability to respond appropriately is similar to the ability to reciprocate. It’s about being able to notice when your ideal partner needs your attention and then giving her that attention. To respond appropriately is to give someone her moment on an emotional level. As the social psychology literature describes, “Intimacy is initiated when one person communicates personally relevant and revealing information, thoughts, and feelings to another person. For intimacy processes to continue, the listener must emit emotions, expressions, and behaviors that are both responsive to the specific content of the disclosure and convey acceptance, validation, and caring for the individual disclosing. For the interaction to be experienced as intimate by the discloser, he or she must subjectively feel understood, validated, and cared for.” This skill matters because picking someone who can respond to you appropriately is ultimately what will make you feel cared about in the relationship and lead you to form a lasting, ideal partnership with this person. Things to Notice

+ Does she respond emotionally in a way that feels good, such as holding your hand when you’re expressing fear or concern?

+ Does she respond emotionally in a way that feels bad, such as laughing while you tell the story of your dying grandparent? 

Core Quality 7: The Ability to Take Responsibility The ability to take responsibility means owning your actions and decisions. It doesn’t mean inviting blame for everything that’s going on around you, but it does include recognizing the part you played in creating a bad situation. Personal responsibility is an absolutely essential skill for both you and your ideal partner. Things will go wrong, no matter how hard you try, and it’s critical to pick someone who will feel some ownership over what went wrong. If not, you’ll end up with all the blame…and blame is a major closeness killer. Things to Notice

+ Does he blame other people or outside circumstances for his disappointments?

+ Does he bad-mouth current or past bosses, spouses, partners, and so on?

+ Is he unable to apologize sincerely?

Core Quality 8: The Ability to Accept Caring Have you ever heard the saying “In every relationship, one person is the flower and the other is the gardener”? There’s probably nothing I find less true. Caring — in the closeness sense of the word — is not the same as care-taking. Getting close to someone does not mean signing up to be his or her nurse or rescuer; nor does it mean signing up only to receive care. You will both need to be the flower, and both be the gardener. The caring abilities listed above should prove a potential ideal partner’s ability to give you the care you need. This one is about making sure he or she can receive care. If your potential partner shuns your caring — for example, “not wanting to talk about it” when you offer to listen — this is a difficult barrier to overcome when creating closeness. Things to Notice

+ Does she allow you to support her emotionally?

+ Does she seem stoic or reluctant to reveal anything too private?

+ Is she unwilling to admit her vulnerabilities?

When you see the hallmarks of someone capable of knowing and caring — get excited! This is a great opportunity. This person will likely make a wonderful ideal partner. The rest of this book will show you how to establish a wonderful relationship. But if, as often happens, you find that though your potentially ideal partner has many of these abilities locked down, a few are still lacking — don’t give up. These abilities can be learned over time, especially if you lead by example. Be patient, and recognize that she may need some practice before becoming proficient at creating closeness.

Things to Watch Out For: Red Flags in Potential Partners

Keep in mind that while you’re testing the closeness waters you absolutely do not need to create closeness with every person you meet in order to reduce your loneliness or find your ideal partner. Remember — becoming just a little closer to one or two people will ease the pangs of feeling alone. In other words, there’s no need to force it. If you have reservations about someone, give it some time, or resolve to simply let that opportunity go. Trust that there will be other opportunities, because there will be. Here I want to note that there are some people whom you really should not try to get closer to. Some of these partners are inappropriate simply because of the situation. For example, it could be seen as inappropriate to make an effort to get close to a friend’s spouse. These are judgment calls — some actions could be seen as overstepping boundaries by some and as perfectly fine by others. Just be aware of how picking this partner or that might make those around you feel. Other less than ideal partners will be poor at creating closeness with you, not because of the situation, but because of their basic personality traits. Two of these personality profiles are well known to be dangerous, regardless of the context: the sociopath and the psychopath. Because the terms sociopath and psychopath are very loaded and often misunderstood, it may be easier to identify these two types of dangerous people based on the descriptions outlined by research psychologists John and Julie Gottman. They categorize the two most dangerous personality types as “pit bulls” and “cobras.” Pit bulls tend to show:

+ Explosive anger

+ Suspicion, distrust, and jealousy

+ A lecturing or condescending attitude

+ Violent tendencies that build over time and are directed at those closest to them

Cobras tend to show:

+ A charming exterior

+ Manipulative behavior

+ An enjoyment of watching fear build in others

+ Violent tendencies that usually come as a surprise and can be directed at anyone

For obvious reasons, people displaying these clusters of personality traits should be avoided at all costs. Who else should be avoided? Because ideal partners will be given so much access to your inner world — in a sense, so much power — if there’s any personality trait or characteristic you absolutely cannot tolerate, you should make it a deal breaker. While the pit bull and cobra personality types are universal deal breakers, it’s a great idea to come up with your own. Here are some of the deal breakers I have been told about over the years that can help you avoid a less than ideal partnership:

+ A sober woman decided not to partner with a friend who drinks. Drinking became a deal breaker for her, and she is now close only with those who are also sober.

+ A man who was raised by a very depressed mom decided not to pursue a woman he was attracted to because she also struggled with depression.

+ A single dad decided not to get close to a fellow single dad at work because he constantly criticized and denounced his children’s mother. In his eyes, this behavior was a deal breaker.

How do you know if something is a deal breaker for you? It usually helps to check in with yourself about your past. Have you experienced something with a previous potentially ideal partner that you absolutely will not allow for again? That’s definitely a deal breaker. Also, use your intuition. Do you find yourself feeling uneasy around a certain person? Do you feel a creeping anxiety when you’re on your way to see him or her? These seemingly baseless reactions probably mean something and can be a warning sign for or against a potential ideal partner. Does his humor sting a little too much? Is her competitiveness turning you off? These are the things to notice. These are the seeds of deal breakers. Picking ideal partners is a personal journey. Not everyone will be attracted to the same people. Allow yourself to be drawn to whomever makes you feel the most seen and understood. These are your closest companions in the making.

An Exercise to Challenge Yourself

Jot down a list of all the people you’ve met this year. Pick one person you’d like to know better. Make the first move, and ask him or her to hang out!

+ Are there any people in your life who are inappropriate ideal partners, either because of the situation or because of their character traits?

+ What are some of your deal breakers when it comes to picking partners? What are some qualities you absolutely must (or must not) have in someone you want to be close to?

This article on how to find your ideal life partner is excerpted from the book Stop Being Lonely: Three Simple Steps to Developing Close Friendships and Deep Relationships. Copyright © 2016 by Kira Asatryan. Reprinted with permission of New World Library, Novato CA. newworldlibrary.com

About The Author Kira Asatryan, author of Stop Being Lonely, is a couples coach and a team coach who trains Silicon Valley startups to work cohesively. She is also a popular blogger on Psychology Today and other sites. Prior to becoming a full-time relationship coach and writer, she ran marketing campaigns across major platforms including Facebook, Twitter, and Google Search. She lives in San Francisco, CA and her websites are stopbeinglonely.com and kiraasatryan.com.

like many things in life, your relationships are a reflection of deeper aspects of yourself. understanding and working with this fact is key to creating conscious, loving relationships that last.

Caitlyn came to us at the age of 56. It was a year since the breakup of her second marriage, which had lasted six years. She was still heavyhearted about it. “Is this the end of the line?” she asked us bluntly. “Should I forget about the whole conscious relationship thing and just settle for what I have?” “Which is?” “I have a really good life, just with no man in it.” Caitlyn’s situation was like that of many single people with whom we’ve worked. She had a good life going on her own, but she was feeling the ache of something missing from it. She was up against a barrier so significant we call it Barrier Number One.

Getting past Barrier Number One: Do You or Don’t You?

The first barrier is when you haven’t landed on actually wanting a lasting, loving relationship in your life right now. Part of you does, part of you doesn’t. Perhaps without your even realizing it, this internal barrier is keeping you from success in the external quest to create a lasting conscious relationship in your life. There is a solution to Barrier Number One—a way of clearing it out of the way. Best of all, it won’t cost you a cent to get a lifetime supply of it. The solution is a special kind of commitment, a vow you make in the sacred depths of yourself. The power of this commitment releases you from the grip of despair and sends you into the future equipped with a foolproof navigation tool for your journey. Picture yourself looking into the mirror and speaking a vow to your deepest self, a commitment that goes something like this: I commit to attracting a loving relationship into my life, a love that lasts and grows over time. Making that statement takes you off the bench and onto the field. That’s where the action takes place. One big problem we’ve found is that single people send out mixed messages about whether or not they really want to manifest an intimate, conscious relationship. The even bigger problem is that most of them don’t realize they’re doing it. When you send out mixed messages, the most unconscious one is always the one people hear. For example, if ten minutes into a lunch date you decide you don’t really like the person across from you, you’re stuck with an unpleasant alternative. You could go radically blunt and say, “I’ve decided I don’t really like you. Let’s finish eating by ourselves.” Most people, though, opt for a more conventional approach: you go ahead and finish lunch in a polite manner, while pretending your attitude of “I don’t really want to be here” isn’t there lurking in the background. The trouble with this approach is that attempting to silence or ignore your genuine feelings often makes the other person perceive them even more loudly and clearly. A sincere commitment to creating a conscious, loving relationship breaks that spell. When you make a sincere vow to your deepest self and the universe around you, something like “I commit to creating the relationship of my dreams in real life,” you come off the bench and onto the field.

Getting Through Barrier Number Two: Settling for Less

Don’t stop there, though. There’s another key commitment you can make to amp up your relationship manifestation power. Picture yourself again looking into the mirror and making a second sincere vow: I specifically commit never to settle for less than what I really want. This sacred conscious relationship commitment is just as important as the first one; settling for less than what you really want in relationships is a virulent plague in the 21st century. To avoid the plague, you’ll not only need to make a sincere vow never to settle for less, you’ll also need to do some clear thinking about what you want and don’t want. We spent the better part of a morning working with Caitlyn on these issues. As we heard more of her relationship history, it spelled out a pattern of undervaluing herself, leading to settling for less. She repeatedly put herself in unloving relationships with men that caused her to lose both self-respect and money. What she had put up with—from bankruptcy to drunk-tank bailouts to catching a new husband in bed with the maid of honor—astonished even us. She also had to face an issue from her past that was causing her to be ambivalent about creating a new, loving relationship. During the whole year since the breakup, she had never simply sat with her grief and felt it consciously. Instead she’d kept herself busy by joining three different singles websites, corresponding with and rejecting “more than a hundred men” on the various sites, and even putting a highly detailed personal ad in the newspaper. To change the pattern and begin the art of creating a deep, lasting, conscious and loving relationship, we first asked Caitlyn to devote a few moments to being with the grief through Full-Spectrum Presencing. “Take a few easy breaths and feel the places in your body where you still feel sad about the breakup.” Once she slowed down to honor her authentic feelings for a moment, her mood visibly brightened. She said, “Oh, wait, I think I just made a connection.” At a certain point in each relationship she would start to bottle up feelings out of fear of causing conflict. Invariably, after a while the bottle would pop, leading to noisy conflicts of the sort she feared most. As she explored the issue she realized it was the central drama in her parents’ ongoing battle, which led to their divorce when she was five years old. Both her parents would hide their feelings until a blowout occurred every week or two. By the time they divorced, Caitlyn had soaked up so much of the pattern by osmosis that she repeated it unwittingly in her adult relationships.

Getting over Barrier Number Three: Placing Your Order

Full-Spectrum Presencing opened the gate for Caitlyn, but she also needed to do some “real world” work on attracting a new, loving relationship into her life. In our work with singles, we have found that in order to attract a quality conscious relationship, they need to identify at least three things they want and three things they don’t want. Most people repeat old destructive patterns that sabotage their relationships because they haven’t made a clear commitment to something better. At midlife and beyond, the pressure intensifies to break free of these patterns and finally create conscious, loving relationship. One common pattern is to know what you don’t want but not know what you want. Another common pattern is the opposite: you’re clear about what you want but haven’t given conscious thought to what you don’t want in your relationships. So if you’re single, check in with yourself. Are you clear on the top three things you want in a close, loving relationship and the top three things you don’t want? If so, take a moment to review them right now. If not, get clear right now by asking: What is the #1 thing that’s important for me to have in a lasting, loving relationship? Perhaps it’s honesty or freedom or a sense of shared beliefs—everyone’s #1 is slightly different from others’. What’s yours? Do the same for your #2 and #3 most important things to have in a close, conscious relationship. If you’ve already gotten clear about the three things you most don’t want to repeat in your next relationship, review them now. If not, start by asking: What is the absolute most important thing I never want to have in a relationship again? Perhaps it’s that you never want to be in a relationship with an addict again, or that you never want to be with someone who doesn’t like kids again. Whatever your three biggest “don’t want’s” are, make a list of them so you’re absolutely clear about them. It’s like when you set off on a trip. If you’re absolutely clear you want to visit Chicago, Calcutta, and Copenhagen, and you also know for absolute sure you don’t want to go to Borneo, Brisbane, and the Bronx, your chances of ending up where you want to be are greatly enhanced. Sometimes you need to be forceful in stating a “don’t want.” Certain relationship problems are toxic and need to be avoided, like an allergen. For example, Gay is allergic to sesame seeds and sesame oil, which he learned the hard way from his first trip to a Chinese restaurant when he was a kid. “Now, when I order in a restaurant, I go out of my way to ask if there is sesame involved. I also don’t handle MSG or peanut oil well, so I usually ask that they not be used either. I eventually even found a Chinese restaurant that caters to finicky people. The first time I went there, I asked my inevitable question to the waiter. He drew himself up in pride and said, ‘Sir, there has never been MSG or sesame oil on our premises.’” We think you should be just that finicky about your love life and your relationships. Ordering up a lasting, loving relationship is like ordering a meal, but with one specific difference; you need to be clear about what you want and don’t want. When you order in a restaurant, you don’t usually need to list what you don’t want, unless you have experienced toxicity in some past relationship with an item. You can just say, “Short stack of blueberry pancakes, two eggs on the side, over medium,” as Gay did on a recent visit to Bonnie Lu’s Country Café, and with three simple, positive commands you can get the breakfast you want. Relationships are different, because for loving relationships to succeed, you need to be really clear about what you don’t want. More strongly put, you need to be clear about what you absolutely will not put up with. You might have a list of more than three things fitting that description, but we’ve found it useful to start with a sturdy foundation of three. Caitlyn’s three positive “wants” for a thriving, conscious, loving relationship were 1) we have respect and admiration for each other, 2) we’re best friends as well as married to each other, and 3) we have fun together. In past relationships she’d had glimpses of those qualities but had never put them all together in one deeply fulfilling, deeply loving relationship. Caitlyn’s three “don’t wants” were simple, straightforward, and obviously based on a lot of painful life experience. She didn’t want anybody in her life with 1) financial problems, 2) addiction issues, or 3) a history of cheating.

The Ultimate Step

The ultimate step in freeing yourself from the past is also the ultimate step opening yourself to a new mate in your life. It only takes a split second to take the step, but it has such power that it influences every one you take from then on. It’s the moment when you love yourself unconditionally, exactly as you are, for everything you’ve done and not done. It’s the moment when you love yourself for being alone, the forgiving gift to yourself of celebrating your singularity. It doesn’t matter if you love the unlovable in yourself for ten seconds or a tenth of a second—once you’ve felt it, even for a moment, you’ve opened the secret door to creating loving relationship magic. Take a moment right now to feel the power of this new state of consciousness we’re referring to. First, let go of expectation: if you’re single, release the idea that you ought to have a mate or need to be in a relationship. Let go of any other future-facing fantasies you might have about your love life. Then, let go of whatever has gone on in the past. Everything that happened is beyond your control now. Nothing you can do can change it. The healing move that allows you to go beyond the pain of the past is to accept it fully, as it is. Release your urge to want it to be different. Let it be. When you free yourself from the future and the past, you are free to innovate now. Your energy is no longer tied up in wanting the past to be different or the future to be any preconceived way. You’re in the present, this very moment, an open opportunity to create your new life and your new loving relationship. Now all you have to do is add a light intention to this open state of consciousness. A light intention is a gentle aiming of your energy in a certain direction. We call it a “light intention” to distinguish it from a heavy intention such as “I’ve got to manifest a mate or else my life means nothing.” All you need to do is nudge the universe in the direction of sending you the right sort of mate and conscious relationship for you. At the same time, let yourself and the universe know that you are going to be just fine without one, that the growing love and respect you have for yourself is big enough to embrace yourself whether you are solo or mated in a deeply loving relationship. This article on conscious, loving relationships is an excerpt from Conscious Loving Ever After How to Create Thriving Relationships at Midlife and Beyond by Gay Hendricks & Kathlyn Hendricks. It is published by Hay House (October, 2015) and available in bookstores and online at hayhouse.com.

About The Author Gay Hendricks, Ph.D., has been a leader in the fields of relationship transformation and body-mind therapies for over 45 years. After earning his Ph.D. in counseling psychology from Stanford, Gay served as professor of Counseling Psychology at the University of Colorado for 21 years. He has written and co-authored (with Katie) 35 books, including the bestseller Conscious Loving, used as a primary text in universities around the world. In 2003, Gay co-founded The Spiritual Cinema Circle, which distributes inspirational movies and conscious entertainment to subscribers in 70+ countries. Gay has offered seminars worldwide and appeared on more than 500 radio and television shows, including Oprah, CNN, CNBC, 48 Hours and others. Visit his website: hendricks.com Katie Hendricks, Ph.D., BC-DMT, is an artist of life who creates transformational theater events around the world. Passionate about the power of embodied integrity and emergence, she continuously promotes creative expression in service of a direct experience of life, wholeness and evolutionary collaboration. She has been a pioneer in the field of body-mind integration for over forty years. Katie has an international reputation as a seminar leader, training professionals from many fields in the core skills of conscious living through the lens of body intelligence. Katie earned a Ph.D. in Transpersonal Psychology and has been a Board Certified-Dance/Movement Therapist of the American Dance Therapy Association since 1975. Visit her website: hendricks.com