Cecily Mak shares her personal journey and paradigm shift around the role of alcohol in her life.
“Whatever you do, don’t tell people you don’t drink. They’ll think you’re weird.”
Last night I attended an international boarding school reunion at a lovely rooftop venue on Park Avenue in New York City. I was among approximately 75 people of many ages, diverse backgrounds, and exotic nationalities, our experiences at a Swiss boarding school at some point in the last seven decades being the thread that tied us all together. I attended the reunion alone and knew nobody.
It’s always interesting to experience these types of events as a non-drinker. Whether it is a professional networking happy hour, a school fundraiser, a milestone celebration, or any of the many other types of professional or social gatherings comprised of mostly strangers there to meet, connect, exchange, possibly meet again, alcohol is almost always the common theme. Let’s face it: Alcohol is an excellent lubricant. A drink or more makes these events easier and often more fun. Our inhibitions lessen. We’re less intimidated by the unknown. We’re more likely to introduce ourselves, open up, share contact information, and sometimes more.
I’ll admit it: Though I still enjoy them,
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Physical intimacy in your relationship doesn’t have to be boring – even if you’ve been married for decades! But if you find yourself getting tired of the same old routine or you’re just looking to heighten the passion you already feel for one another, read on.
Being intimate with our partners is one of the biggest ways we connect on both a physical and emotional level. The oxytocin released during sex is responsible for bonding, building trust between partners, and lowering stress.
Whether you want something sweet and romantic or X-rated and naughty, these 5 tips are sure to spice up your sex life.
1) Do Something Different
One naughty way you can spice up your sex life is to be brave and try something different, and we don’t mean get-frisky-in-the-car different. We mean get entirely out of your comfort zone. This might make you feel awkward at first, but the thrill you’ll get from trying something new and naughty will outshine any temporary discomforts.
Say it. Dirty talk is a great option for spicing things up. Send your spouse a scandalous text telling them all the things you want to do to them when you get home or engage in some dirty-talk during sex.
Role
This article was written for the Tony Robbins blog by Raegan Moya-Jones, founder of aden + anais, and is inspired by content contained in her new book, What it Takes: How I Built a $100 Million Business Against the Odds. One of the most common tropes of the successful entrepreneur is that you must quit […]
The post Redefining Risk appeared first on tonyrobbins.com.
The beginning of February signals that Valentines Day is near. For those in loving, intimate relationships who put a lot of meaning into this holiday, they may be all atwitter about how they will spend time with a partner or how expressions of love will be symbolized in gifts or other loving acts. For people who are single, there might be a weight associated with the impending day of hearts and flowers, as they imagine what “others” are doing. And let’s not forget about those who couldn’t care less about this “fabricated” holiday and are actually a bit annoyed by the materialism and expectations around all of it.
Wherever you fit on the continuum above, let’s toss it all aside for a minute to consider a fresh paradigm.
Self-love.
No, not the narcissistic kind but a state of appreciation of yourself, who you are, your strengths and what you bring to the table for friends, family and intimate connections. Those who have a strong sense of who they are and are clear on their value, tend to radiate this outward.
When you practice loving yourself it is beneficial in that you are better able to:
Be mindful. This helps with clarity around what you really
With Valentines Day approaching, many couples are considering ways to demonstrate their love and affection for each other. What meaning do you attach to Valentines Day? What are your expectations? For me, it’s more about thought and meaning than expensive gifts. However, the reality is some people truly feel loved by expressions of material love; gifts! And that’s ok for them, we all have our “thing.”
For those for whom finances are tight, there are many simple and sweet ways you can show your partner you care about them without breaking your piggy bank. Valentines Day is also an opportunity to get creative.
Here are 8 simple ways to make your partner feel cared for on Valentines Day:
Prepare a stay-at-home picnic surprise complete with blanket on the floor. Leave a trail of candy hearts leading your honey to the spot.
Buy a package of kid Valentines, like the ones you probably passed out in 1st grade and leave them in secret places to be discovered throughout the day.
Write a love letter to your sweetie – by hand. This will demonstrate extra effort make and care for them. Put it in an envelope and stuff it with chocolate hearts in red foil.
Send your mate a loving text at work telling
Linda Graham, MFT and author of Bouncing Back: Rewiring Your Brain for Maximum Resilience and Well-Being, looks at how “unlovability” is wired into the brain and the experience of rejection gets encoded in neural cells around the heart. She offers ways to feel lovable again, as we all should.
When we’re not caught in the suffering of feeling unlovable, it’s fascinating to learn just how those afflictive pockets of inadequacy, unworthiness, failure, shame, get so deeply embedded in our neural circuitry in the first place. In these uncertain times, when we’re especially vulnerable to the fear and self-doubt and second guessing creeping in, it is skillful means to learn how to re-program our body-brain’s conditioning and generate new neural circuits that support our feeling lovable, loved and loving.
Here’s a simple exercise to evoke the sense of contraction we often experience at a cellular level when we experience an unexpected hurt, rejection, or disconnect. I learned this one from Stuart Eisdendrath, M.D. and Ronna Kabatznick, PhD, at a daylong on Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy for Depression at Spirit Rock Meditation Center. They use this exercise in their MBCT groups at UCSF.
Allow yourself to sit quietly for a moment, eyes gently closed. When
Amy Eden offers a deeply personal look at how abandonment in childhood later played out in her relationships. But she learns to deconstruct her “urge to flee” and stay present instead.
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First you’re abandoned, then you live with an urge to flee.
I have spent my entire life anxiously ready for things to fall apart. My shoulders are never completely without tension, same for my eyes in their sockets. There’s always the potential for a need to leave. I have spent my entire life ready to bail out, to get out, to save myself. To run. I’m sitting in the back of the restaurant facing the door and patrons, ready, at all times, for The End.
I should have sought work in a hospital emergency room as something.
I have ended many relationships in an angry flourish that lived up to that anxious anticipation, heaping a longtime on-and-off again boyfriend’s belongings outside my locked apartment door in NYC, walking out of a bar mid-conversation on a man with whom I lived and not returning home that night in Cambridge, or by lashing out in writing, with agony and bile, to end things in San Francisco…in a satisfying manner that justified the hell I’d supposedly
This is incredibly relevant to people all over the world who are losing themselves to their smartphones. Classified as an addiction by many, it’s impacting relationships and likely changing brains of our young generations. This is New York Times author, Kevin Noose’s journey to try to free himself.
My name is Kevin, and I have a phone problem.
And if you’re anything like me — and the statistics suggest you probably are, at least where smartphones are concerned — you have one, too.
I don’t love referring to what we have as an “addiction.” That seems too sterile and clinical to describe what’s happening to our brains in the smartphone era. Unlike alcohol or opioids, phones aren’t an addictive substance so much as a species-level environmental shock. We might someday evolve the correct biological hardware to live in harmony with portable supercomputers that satisfy our every need and connect us to infinite amounts of stimulation. But for most of us, it hasn’t happened yet.
I’ve been a heavy phone user for my entire adult life. But sometime last year, I crossed the invisible line into problem territory. My symptoms were all the typical ones: I found myself incapable of reading books, watching full-length movies
Fear can be the ultimate ruler of your life, if allowed. It can whisper in your ear that you’re not good enough, you’re a fraud, you won’t be able to do it, you’ll be made fun of, you’ll be rejected and abandoned or that bad things will happen to you.
Fear leads to avoidance which leads to pulling away from life. It can also impact the way you see yourself, your self esteem and confidence. It can also prevent you from breaking free of anxiety, depression, and so many other psychological issues.
It’s helpful to know that your nervous system is designed to maintain a certain degree of vigilance— in fact, we’re wired to remember things that go wrong, and fixate on where there might be trouble. Scientists refer to that as evolution’s negativity bias: We are Velcro for difficult experiences but Teflon for pleasant ones.
If you live with a sense of danger “around the corner” you react by mentally and sometimes even behaviorally going into one of three modes: fight, flight, or freeze. So with fear, if you regularly feel like a victim, if you close down and withdraw, or instead if you become angry and judgmental, your reaction becomes part of
I have been in a relationship for almost 8 months. The relationship has been good when we’re together but he has always had trust issues with me whenever I’m seeing my friends or if I’m going out. Somehow I’ve just sort of accepted it and I’ve lost a lot of friends. When we were out together the other night we got into an argument and he was very drunk. I said something to a friend of mine, a guy. My boyfriend then took a hard grip around my arm and started questioning me about this guy. I said he was a friends but he didn’t believe me. He then put his arms around me as if he was going to hug me, but instead he squeezed really hard and it hurt. I got really scared and started crying and screamed at him to let me go.
After about 10 minutes some girl whom I don’t know stepped in and pulled me away from him. He felt really bad about it when we spoke the day after and I accepted his apology. However later that day we were fooling around when he all of a sudden raised his voice. I felt really