You may associate Valentines Day with St. Valentine, but, many cultures celebrate this day in various ways - from animal sacrifice as a symbol of fertility to the giving of wooden spoons! Tune in as we explore these interesting aspects of Valentine Day.

It's an age-old question? And it's a struggle many face today. How can we maintain friendship status having been lovers? Listen in as we do a deep dive on this most interesting topic.

I On today's episode of the Pleasure for Health podcast, I do deep dive on how much time should we really be spending with our partners, in light of the pandemic, and for when we return to 'normal time'.

Are we afraid of intense emotion?

This question was raised recently in a discussion on how we tend to equate all high emotional states with sex. This seemed to be especially true of men.

Our culture has forbidden men to show much real emotion at all, and quite often this ‘shutting down’ of their emotion, has led men to categorize and box up intense emotional states with the physical act of intimacy.

This box, we put our sexuality into, is then also labelled taboo and shut up inside another box, just like a set of Russian dolls.

No wonder then, that many of us have either too many feelings about sex or lack feelings altogether. We try desperately to separate one from the other, but end up just feeling frustrated or numb.

I’ve been pondering the idea of how we are all connected. Not just in the usual way we might talk about connection in the present time, but connected throughout history.

We have been asked by the indigenous people of this country, to have an awareness of the ancestors, the people that have walked on this land before us, the tribes of indigenous people who lived where today we have built our towns and cities.

How do we honour these people? How do we create relationships or connections with them?

How do you get a black belt in life and why would you want to?

I was sitting in the cafe pondering on my last few years, and since this month, we are dealing with self esteem and how this either makes or breaks our pleasure and our relationships, I decided to write about getting a black belt in life.

Why do we suffer from this crippling feeling of never being good enough? Where does it come from? And more importantly, how do we get rid of it?

Whatever you need to do, divorce the story and marry the truth.

This saying struck me recently as being a great mantra to live by. We make up so many stories, about ourselves, about why we are in the place we are, about what people think of us, about what we are destined to do. Most of us live in our stories all of the time!

Ok guys, this one is for you.

Let me tell you a little story and you see if it sounds like something you have experienced.

It’s your wife’s birthday (sub in ‘girlfriend’, ‘partner’ if needed ) and you, thinking you are ahead of the game, smugly ask a week or so in advance, what she’d like as a present. Score one for you right? You’re on the ball, you are thinking of her, you are asking what she likes. What could go wrong?

I recently had a friend who has been blessed with pretty great physical health for most of his life; a couple of small day surgeries, a minor motorcycle incident, a bit of a struggle with keeping a healthy weight and exercising regularly, but overall, in pretty good shape; ‘suddenly’  struck down with severe pain. He couldn’t remember doing anything to cause this sudden onset, and he was pretty shaken with how much of life became intolerable, due to this pain.

I see this happen, again and again, in my practice, people who have never had an issue physically, suddenly get sick, or experience pain, and they don’t know what to do. It’s as if they have been living with a body all these years but never paid attention to it.

Sound like a familiar relationship pattern?