Tag: change

What you do every single day when you interact with your partner is either helpful or not helpful in creating a happy marriage. You are either doing things that support what you want or keep it from you. Maybe that’s over simplifying things, but keeping things simple saved my marriage. It’s easy to get caught up and overwhelmed with all the details of disconnect that can happen when you are struggling to find happiness with your spouse.

Change is inevitable: relationships and roles end, jobs disappear, business deals fall apart, finances become strained, family and friends move away, illnesses or disabilities erode health, loved ones die, and life as you knew it can transform overnight. Mine did as I navigated through chaotic times for many years when my husband was stricken with a mysterious, disabling illness.

Keeping your energy up and stress level down through these shifts is vital for your well-being, health, and peace of mind. Let these strategies guide you through times of change.

Although it is most often in our relationship to our sexuality that we struggle to figure out what is "normal," the weight of normal also impacts other ways we perceive and think, often obliterating our ability to see all the good that is happening in our lives. For me, the beginning of autumn has always felt like the real beginning of the new year; with the last days of summer and the start of school, it’s time to re-think our connection to maintaining normality in our lives. Perhaps how we think about normal is really how we live it.

Allow me to introduce you to your Inner Witness.

First, through the study of neuroscience, we understand that we each develop patterns of thinking, also known as neural pathways. We can also learn about neural plasticity and our ability to create change around these neural pathways.

Without this awareness, our thinking, our reactions to life events, and our internal dialogue can become habitual, with routine responses to external stimuli that are triggered automatically, without our conscious awareness.

All of us want to have an awesome sexual life with our partners. Unfortunately, many of us may have one of the three major roadblocks before us that can keep us from having awesome sex lives if not addressed.

The roadblocks I am focusing on here are not interpersonal, communication issues, and so on. Those would be joint issues both partners would work on together (though I will get into that to some degree). The roadblocks I will focus on here are the two biggest individual roadblocks I have seen in my office over the past 25 years that keep individuals from experiencing a maximal sex life with his or her partner.

"Often, it’s not about becoming a new person, but becoming the person you were meant to be, and already are, but don’t know how to be."  ~ Heath Buckmaster

Jarring is the mildest descriptor I can use to describe the space that is left with the departure of my last child. I feel lost in our home with only photos to fill the spaces that were not long ago embodied with the noise and mess of growing up. I cry intermittently at almost anything and struggle to imagine how to go from here, back to some sense of normalcy. But the truth is that there is no going back, only forward into a space that I cannot yet see.

While we are all living in a mixed up, turned upside down world, there is a silver lining to the chaos. It is from the chaos that new dreams, breakthroughs and (r)evolutions will emerge. "Necessity is the mother of invention," as they say.

No matter where you are right now, whether you are riding the waves, so to speak, or being tossed around by the waves, change is happening. There has never been a time more ripe for a collective and individual renaissance. With so much up in the air, and so much structure broken open, you can choose to look for the opportunities within those cracked open spaces to step into a new life for yourself that is even more fulfilling and in alignment with who you are at your core.