Tag: courage

"The secret to happiness is freedom… And the secret to freedom is courage." ~Thucydides

Fear is the driver for many people’s sexual and erotic lives. One of Freud’s students, Otto Rank, was quoted as saying, "People vacillate between the fear of living and the fear of dying."

In some ways, our fears about our sexuality encompass both. We are equally terrified of what might happen if we gave into our erotic fantasy life and that we might never experience the pleasure we know that we hold in us.

Life is challenging for us all. We are in the constant flux of change and rearranging ourselves around life to be able to go with its flow. Life is challenging us all to grow each and every day, as there is always some obstacle that will present itself to us which will create fear and anxiety. If we run away from our challenges life will continue to get harder, not necessarily because the lessons get harder, but because we are not developing the skills we need to deal with the challenges. Each challenge we face gives us the opportunity to run from it or we can choose to get deliberate about it, take it seriously and look it in the face. This is a great way to develop courage.

Grief is one of the most humbling and challenging experiences we go through as human beings. It is also one of the most transformative. Grief changes us; we are no longer the people we were before that loss. We see through new eyes. Since grief works so deeply and slowly within our psyches, we often need inspiration to stay with the process of healing.

I used to think I knew about courage. I would often write and talk about it as a defining attribute that allowed you to explore and wonder about your life. And referred to it as the backbone of what gives relationships the strength to evolve. Those things are true, but in a more fundamental way for more people than I probably ever recognized before this massive loss, our capacity for courage is actually proportional to our will to keep living.

One of the meditations that my spiritual teacher taught me to use during this time was the classic practice of Tonglen—except, using myself and Ian and all the mothers who have ever lost their children as the subjects… Visualizing and breathing in my own pain and the pain of my son is searing, and I am often at the reaches of my faith as I breathe out the felt sense of being held by the divine…

When our friends at Dame recently appeared on “Megyn Kelly TODAY” to talk about the pleasure gap, we knew the term had officially gone mainstream—and for good reason. The statistics on how often women reach orgasm compared to men are striking, especially in heterosexual relationships.

Monica glanced past the computer screen in front of her to her husband, Will, at the other side of the room. The distance she felt between them was like a vast ocean. She blinked and looked back at the movie show times on her screen. Tomorrow was Valentine’s Day and it had been their tradition since they were first dating to go catch a flick together on this day. She wondered how she could be so close to another person but feel so far apart.

Was he thinking the same thing?