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The colors flooded across the sky in spirals. Their bright reflection in the quiet river amazed my heart. It was just as sensual an experience as the sensation when my lover came up behind and slipped his arms around me in a hug. I was in bliss! On my front I had the warmth of the sun, and on my back the loving touch of his chest, and the strength of his encircling arms. The moment was so wonderful, that we we kissed, other greeting the glorious day in front of us.

Birds were hopping from treetop to treetop pecking at nuts and seeds. Seagulls and pelicans were gliding over the beach with complete freedom, squawking joyfully. The wind blew the palm fronds one way, then another, creating a moving carpet of green all along the shore. I felt so connected to nature, and really centered and fulfilled in my heart.

Because I took those 10-15 minutes to connect with nature before jumping into work, my whole day was more productive and much less stressful.

What happens to you when you take time to connect with nature? Have you taken a moment lately to see the beauty around you? Are there ways you can work in just a few minutes a day to slow down and ‘smell the flowers’ – maybe even the real ones?

Blessings,
Carla

Are you conscious of when you start holding back emotional truths and thus clouding the clarity of consciousness? Clouding the clarity is only the beginning of the damage you do to your relationship. When you hold back your emotional truths, such as fear, jealousies, insecurities, and resentments… you create coolness in your relationship that slowly freezes the love that you have for each other, turning it into an iceberg.

The problem with having this iceberg lurking under the surface of the ocean of love, is that you never know when you are going to hit it and sink the ship. Even such a powerful ship as the Titanic could not survive the hit against the ice block. When you express what you are afraid to express, you melt that iceberg. Yes, you are making yourself vulnerable, but you are ensuring that the formation of an iceberg, the greatest danger to a relationship, does not happen.

We all would like to be perfect, to never make mistakes, to be smart and to make great decisions, to be always completely honest and open… However, sometimes even the best of us fails in some of those areas. When that happens, the tendency is to isolate and hide the imperfections, but in doing so we are starting to close off our heart.

Are you awake enough in that moment of perceived “failure to be perfect” to overcome the instinct to hide it by taking a deep Ocean Breath? Connecting to your core with the Ocean Breath will allow you to remember that now is the best time to reveal “your failure to meet your perfection quotient” to your lover and ask her or him to help you feel love. You could ask your lover to hear you without criticizing you and offer you understanding, reassuring you that you are still loved.

You might end up actually making love. For most of us, it is easier to love a vulnerable flower than a rock.

Have you ever experienced a similar reaction from your lover when you shared your vulnerability?

I would love to hear what your experience is.

However, for many people festivities like Christmas bring up lots of emotions, and for lovers who are on the verge of break-up, festivities usually are very stressful and breakups can be precipitated by expectations that the lover does not fulfill.

“Why buy an expensive gift for a girlfriend I don’t respect?” a young man asked me the other day in a counseling session. As he described her, she sounded like someone no one would like to spend his life with her. Not an idea of her own, no preferences when she was asked what movies she wanted to see or what restaurant to go to. He originally fell in love with her because he thought she was very good-hearted and caring.

Later on he found out that she did not respect herself. She thought she was unworthy of love just being who she is. She actually could not stand up for herself if verbally or emotionally abused, which he confessed he did several times. She seemed to like being put down, and the healthy part of him did not like her behavior. She even complied with unusual demands . . . He had been watching her become a classic doormat, a spineless women. Having lost his respect for her, sex became dull and boring.

He dumped her just 7 days before Christmas! I felt sad for her, but I also understood the guy’s point of view. I did not agree with his abusive behavior, but admired the fact that he came for help. Some part of him did not like his abusive behavior either. Apparently, doormats attract abusers. I hope for her that she finds the help she needs to gain self-esteem so she can attract a nice man.

A nice person likes and respects herself and would never do anything that diminishes her self-respect. She tunes into her heart, but also into her power as a woman and into her intellect to discern what would be the most appropriate behavior in each case. After that, she would express it kindly and clearly to her man.

When I read a blog on “Four Reasons You’ll NEVER Get Dumped” at www.thefrisky.com, one of the four reasons that some of us give to explain to ourselves why the relationship ended is being “too nice.” However, being “too nice” is not a true reason for a relationship to end. “Nice” is a desirable quality. Whereas “doormat,” “pantywaist,” and “milquetoast” are not. Too many people mistake the latter for the former, and there’s a world of difference. . .

I know you feel that difference in yourself when you go from being nice and accommodating someone, to neglecting your own need in the process. It is something we must all watch out for, because noone can respect us unless we respect ourselves first.

Blessings,
Carla

Healing means becoming whole. Healing happens when we are in pleasure. When we connect with ourselves or with our lover in pleasure, we integrate the sometimes incomplete, unfinished experience with our higher mind. When that integration happens, the knowledge of what we have learned and experienced is transmitted to every cell of the body and we heal on a cellular level.

However, on some days a traumatic experience such as a betrayal or abandonment might have happened that is so powerful that it cannot be fully integrated when it happens. The rational mind cannot deal with that alone. In fact, often a powerful experience actually stirs up additional previous betrayals or abandonment experiences that you did not fully integrate when they happened the first time.

When we fall asleep in pleasure, the rational mind is satisfied and relaxed just enough that previous unintegrated hurtful experiences can come up from the mental storage we send them to when we are not safe enough to feel them yet, and now they can be dealt with in our dreams. When you fall asleep in pleasure, healing can happens whether you remember your dreams or not.

In dreams, the walls of time we have created are collapsed and we can go back to even preverbal times when we used our own intimate form of proto-language. An example of this type of personal self communication (proto language) could be described as the preverbal sounds gestures or drawings that children use to express themselves and create during play. They use it to create connections that fulfill the mind’s need for integration to contextualize emotions and experiences that arise during the day.

These types of proto languages are also at the basis of art therapy.

For instance, if children see their parents fighting they might react emotionally using a form of proto language. Dreams can also use this and the symbolic language of the collective unconscious, which Carl Jung made us aware of.

That is why it is important to go to bed relaxed, having dealt with your day as best as you can. Taking a shower, communicating with your lover if something is left unexpressed, drinking water so the body can be functioning smoothly during the night, all of this contributes to preparing the space for sleep to be fully refreshing and healing.

Tantra, the art and science of conscious living and loving, suggests that before going to bed we also connect with our sex center. After communicating and soul gazing with your lover, it’s good to honor each other genitals, which can be lingam or yoni massage with your hands or with your mouth (kissing) or just gently touching each other’s bodies.

If you are alone, make love to yourself or do a Mudra, which is: place one hand on your genitals and one on your heart, thus establishing the connection between pleasure and love, the greatest healer of all.

What she said came from a rehearsed circular thinking in her head. She did not allow herself time to feel. She told me she hated herself and especially her body. She grew up with a self-righteous alcoholic father and a Catholic mother who did NOT allow herself or her children to feel feelings, especially those of pleasure.

She complained that she had a dark secret: she was 49 years old and she had never had an orgasm! All her friends were telling her of their great lovemaking, ending in earthshaking orgasms. . . Whether they were telling her the truth or not, she believed them and guessed there was something wrong with her.

Talking to Jane did not seem the best approach, because her rigid belief that there was something wrong with her would just filter out my words. I had to try something more direct.

I could see that Jane was breathing high, shallow breaths, lifting her upper chest while her lower chest remained immobile ,and her belly pulled in tightly as though she had to save her back from the strain of lifting a heavy weight. She was in a state of high stress. Although her muscles were quite tight, giving the illusion of strength, she was pale, and lacking inner strength.

So I empathized and created a safe space for Jane to feel her feelings. I started her off with the Ocean Breath, a breathing technique I have developed over the past 40 years. The Ocen Breath is a gentle, powerful breath that takes people out of their minds and into their bodies in a very short space of time. Although the Ocean Breath is easy to learn, the resistance to it can be great. One of the skills of a relationship or intimacy coach is to create a safe space where one can feel supported in discovering emotional truths we are hiding from ourselves.

Jane’s first fear was that she might be swept away by her emotions, and then succumb to some terrible, life threatening attack from outside. We looked at it together with kindness without buying into it, and the fear started to diminish enough for her to achieve a relaxed state she had never felt before.

After I encouraged her to do the Ocean Breath for a while, her body started to soften. Her cheeks became rosy and the constant movement in her eyes slowed down. She was afraid of falling asleep when she reached a peaceful place. Wanting to fall asleep is another defense, so I invited her to continue the Ocean Breath. Then another fear emerged, the fear of liking pleasure so much she would stop working and then . . . starve! A series of fears came up, including that she would be punished or even raped if she allowed herself to be playful.

We calmly addressed those fears one at the time. After a while she finally surrendered to enjoying the feeling of pleasure in her body and a sense of acceptance that she never felt before. By the end of the session, she had transformed her urgency to have an orgasm into a calm confident acceptance that having orgasms is natural when we allow ourselves to just feel and be present to those feelings, riding on the waves of the breath.

She called me after a week of practicing the Ocean Breath for 20 minutes a day, and told me that she had experienced a great orgasm with her boyfriend.

By the way, the Ocean Breath works for men as well. By focusing you in your body, it helps you relax your mind and escape the relentless self-criticism we all struggle with. This helps you to overcome premature ejaculation, to relax enough to feel more pleasure and have greater orgasms (including full-body orgasms), and take the women to her greatest pleasure!

So, today I want to share with you 5 easy things I do that contribute to my joy, and can work for you too:

1. Start the day with at least one thought of what we are grateful for.
2. Sit in silence for at least 10 minutes each day and pay attention to our breathing. Notice when it starts slowing down and become deeper when we pay attention to it. Then inspiration has a space to come in
3. Smile as often as we can, even for no reason other then to increase our happy hormones. Smile is the ultimate anti-depressant. And it is contagious.
4. Taking a walk paying attention to how our bodies feel. What muscles are involved in the walking? Is the body loose or rigid? The moment your notice rigidity, it usually melts and you can enjoy the walking more.
5. Call a friend who might need support. That nourishes the relationship and ourselves.

What contributes to your joy?

Most women at the beginning of foreplay love having men look into their eyes and show their attraction and longing to “take them”, yet also appreciate a man who takes time to gently kiss the woman’s lips gradually, increasing the intensity by sucking them one at the time and even both together. Most women don’t enjoy having lovers stick a tongue in their mouth without having given them a chance to wet their own lips in response to that longing . . .

Both women and men like a tongue that is not too stiff, or too loose, and a tongue that moves with confidence. It’s a real turn-on when a lover knows the art of kissing and adapts their technique to the person they are with. For instance, I don’t like the lizard-like fast flicking of the tongue, but another woman may appreciate it. You must be ready to make the change to suit your current partner.

How do you adapt? By observing and connecting with the breath of your lovers.

Often your lovers hold their breath because they don’t like something about the kiss, and they don’t know how to communicate about it. They are reticent about communicating either because they don’t know how to express it, or because they want to protect their lover’s ego. They might be in their heads figuring out what to do. However, by not communicating, they sabotage a possibly amazing sensuous relationship… and the pain of a relationship ending is most often worse than the risk you run when you communicate what you want and gently guide your lovers to give it to you, thanking them all the way for approaching what you want.

The worst kiss I ever received had his saliva was dripping out of my mouth like it would from a dog salivating. Having to wipe myself off was a huge turn off.

The best kiss I ever had lasted a long time, and my lover and I were alternating looking in each other’s eyes and seeing the hot facial expression of our lover, and closing our eyes to integrate that passion.

What is your favorite way of kissing?