Christmas holidays are coming up and for many people it’s a time for family, friends, parties or just having a quiet break to restore and recharge after a busy year. Why not use this time to reignite your intimate life, whether you are single or partnered? Here are 5 Tips for Your Intimacy recharge.

Our sexual energy and intimacy are natural and beautiful aspects of our human life. Sadly, if sex and/or intimacy becomes difficult, or a source of conflict or shame we start avoiding it, finding excuses to do other things. “I’m way too busy to go on dates”.  “I’m just too tired to have sex”. “They are not so attractive to me anymore.” “I have family staying and need to look after them”. “It’s school holidays…”

Many of these excuses are really protection from past hurts and disappointments, or not knowing what to do to improve your intimacy.

For couples who are together for many years, it is common for the sexual spark to lessen. There can be deep love, but things can get very functional, and you can start to drift apart. As hard as it can be to face, it’s worth prioritizing a pathway back to that wonderful closeness and passion.

Many singles are happy with their full lives, so the effort and time needed to start a new relationship can be daunting. Or deep-down there is discouragement which creates cynicism. Be honest about what you really want and align your actions with that. Don’t wait for love.

What do you do to cultivate intimacy in your life?

Here are 5 Tips that will help you recharge your intimacy:

1. First up

Couples: Plan regular time slots just for you two, no matter how busy you are. Put it in the calendar and guard it fiercely. Because you do matter. Make some of this time where you are in a private comfortable space and can lie down and bring your bodies together, whether sexually or just touching and breathing gently together. Reconnect, with little talking, more feeling. Check in afterwards with other.

Take a risk with some silly sex play… dressing up, new places to make love or go on dates, whatever feels good. Laugh.

Singles: This is a great time to meet new people as many singles are on holidays and wanting to connect. But do you have space for that to happen? If you are into online dating, go search, click, swipe, whatever and make coffee dates. If not online dating take time to be where people can see you and approach you. Ask your friends to look out for you and make introductions.

2. Release the armour

Let go of body tensions, stiffness and soreness with massage, stretching, yoga, summer swims etc. This destressing makes you more alive and relaxed and you can bring this to your intimacy and connection. Without your body “armour” you will feel more open and ready for love. Do it at the beginning of your holiday if you can.

3. Goodbyes

As the year ends, it’s a good time to reflect on what’s ending for you and create space for new intimacy in your life. No forcing, just acknowledging what you are letting go of, what has come full cycle, and let it dissolve. With your favourite drink late at night or on your yoga mat at dawn – make some notes and feel it. And the space that opens as a result.

4. Dream and discover 

Spend some quality time alone to nurture your own essence. Connection with yourself becomes the offering to your partner or future partner. Get to know what you truly want and are ready to give. What are your fears? Listen to your dreams, meditate, journal, share, dance it out, whatever your method of reflection and strengthening the channel to your inner world. Surprise your beloveds, take some sexy risks when appropriate. Get ready for the new year to come.

5. Rsvp please!

Be fearless about your invitation into intimacy. Be open to others invitation too. This may be a partner, friends or family. People who are coming together for connection and fun can also go home feeling their intimate lives have been enriched.

love

Cynthia

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The post 5 Tips for Your Intimacy Recharge  appeared first on Living Love | Relationship Workshops & Coaching for Intimacy, Connection & Growth.

I am writing this blog leading up to Christmas in the midst of a new wave of COVID and for many people living in Australia our restrictions have relaxed, while in other countries they are ramping up again. We are each finding our way in amongst the changing nature of the pandemic, the heartache, the safety versus risk decisions we are all individually making. Love Your way at Christmas is timely.

Yesterday two friends told me they have cancelled their festive invites and are now staying home alone with a bottle of champagne and treats. They are among those more vulnerable. Others are choosing different options. That’s why I say Love Your Way, do what is right for you, and what is right for the community your live in. We are not seperate and isolated beings, we are one.

Here are 8 Tips and suggestions to enrich your holiday season:

1. Make it your own, love your way!

Decide what you want to feel and experience this season. Let your imagination run free for a moment. Get clarity for yourself.

How can you nourish yourself and others in the most rewarding way this year? What is your best form of celebration and joy, relaxation and loving connections? What do you need and what can you initiate?  Make sure it does no harm to others and go for it!

2. The Good is Very Good.

Find a quiet space and make a list of all your openings, breakthroughs, positive changes and achievements during 2021. Savour the good experiences in your life. We are making it through a global pandemic!

Recent brain research shows that savoring even one good thing primes us for happiness and increases our self worth.  Dwell on these moments, expand them and breathe them in. Start now and continue in the days ahead.

3. Intimacy.

At this time of the year we can get stressed trying to live up to crazy expectations that leave us feeling a lack of intimacy, even with those close to us. Instead, if you value and prioritise intimacy and love, you will have a much more fulfilling time. This can be with a partner, friends, family. It can be done in-person and on zoom. What matters most, after all?

If you are in couple and spending time with others, it’s vital to make time to be alone to nourish your love. If you are single even more important to favour intimacy with beloveds. Intimate moments with strangers can also be nourishing when mutual.

4. Turn it around

At Christmas time we are flooded by the media with the ideals of the perfect family, happy days and fabulous relationships. The reality is many people are lonely, fight with their families, or exhaust themselves trying to ‘get it right’.

If you are struggling this year, you can turn it around. Join a gathering or start one yourself. Let your friends or family know what you need. Don’t try and handle it all on your own. Many people enjoy an ‘orphans’ Christmas lunch with friends.

And if you blessed in this area, who can you include?

5. Endings lead to new beginnings

As the year comes to an end it’s a good time to reflect on what’s ending, and let it go as you wish. No forcing, just acknowledging what’s ending and feel it dissolving back into existence. With a glass of wine or herbal tea late at night, or on your yoga mat at dawn – tune in and choose your deepest most powerful time to do this ritual.

6. Give the gift of you.

The best present you can give is yourself. How can you gift others this Christmas? Perhaps deep listening and masculine presence, a poem or a kind word or gesture. Feminine connection, care and cookies. Making time for someone who needs it. It’s your unique contribution that matters.

7. Say yes to what is!

What we resist tends to hang around so if you find yourself gritting your teeth over the commercial jingles, the cultural expectations, the family patterns, the drunken squabbles, then practice the way of the Tao. Be like water that flows around obstacles and keeps swishing its own merry way. Breathe and create afresh. Be who you want to be.

Deal with what is here and now, and don’t worry about the future.

8. Celebrate like you mean it.

Holiday time means time for you to celebrate. What’s your thing? Cooking delicious meals with all your senses alive and zinging? Making music with your friends and stirring the soul? A beach adventure, having lots of great sex or simply winding down at home? (or all of the above!)

Go for it – no guilt, be total!

Love

Cynthia

The post Love Your Way at Christmas appeared first on Living Love | Relationship Workshops & Coaching for Intimacy, Connection & Growth.

The greatest gift of love you can give to others at Christmas is to be fully engaged and lovingly present with them. To receive this is also a treasure. However, not everyone gets to experience this loving connection and Christmas can sometimes be fraught with stress and strained relationships.

So I want to share with you 8 effective ways to bring the Gift of Love to your Christmas.

1. Celebrate

It’s time to let-go, loosen up and take a holiday. Join in the party, or make your own, even with two people. Celebrating is like love making as it requires us to let go of our boundaries, be vulnerable and open up. Delight in being deliberately more wild and sharing your heart freely. How do you like to celebrate?

2. Prioritise intimacy

At this time of the year we can get stressed trying to live up to crazy expectations that leave us feeling a lack of intimacy. Instead, think about what and who you value and love, and what you love to do with them. Cooking delicious meals for your beloveds? Having lots of great, noisy sex with your partner? Or an extreme sports adventure with your kids?

If you value and protect who and what brings the most intimacy to your life, and prioritise it, this will increase your happiness immeasurably. And this means pausing, breathing, choosing moment to moment. Say ‘I’ll get back to you’ before you commit to things and take time to consider what matters to you the most.

3. Turn it around

At Christmas time we are flooded by the media with the ideals of the perfect family, happy days and fabulous relationships. The reality is many people are lonely at Christmas, fight with their families, or exhaust themselves trying to get it right. Depression can take hold and escalate.

If you are struggling this year, you can and must turn it around. Change the picture. Let your friends or family know what you need. Ask for help. Join a gathering or start one yourself. Any little shift you can make will be significant, and will open the door for love to waft in. As the Dalai Lama says, ‘Choose to be optimistic, it feels better.’

Book in for a course or workshop in the New Year that advances your growth.  Even a simple thing like listening to music that is personally nostalgic for you can boost your mood and feelings of loving connection to others.

4. Savoring the Love

Recent brain research shows that savoring even one loving moment in our day rewires us for happiness and increases self worth.  Dwell on these moments at Christmas holiday time, expand them and literally breathe them in. When you notice something wonderful happening, don’t rush though it, stay with it a little longer to savour it.  Even thinking about a loving memory can make a difference to how you feel.  Start now!

5. Give your real ‘gifts’

How can you gift others this Christmas? The best present you can give is yourself. Perhaps through deep listening and clear presence, a poem, dancing or a kind word or gesture. It’s your unique contribution that matters, not the amount of money you spend on gifts. When giving presents you can also make that a deep experience by tuning into the person and giving them something that stretches them in the direction of expanding their masculine or feminine essence.

6. Breathe deeply

The breath is our life-force. When stressed we contract into shallow breathing mostly in our upper chest. This can make us more anxious or disconnected. Focusing gently on your breath, expanding it fully in your belly and chest, will allow your breath to go deeper. You will feel more, but also be more resilient. This will come in handy when your uncle is drunk and deadly, your kids are tired or you have had one too many cocktails. Breathe!

7. Say yes to what is!

What we resist tends to hang around so if you find yourself gritting your teeth over the commercial jingles, supermarket queues or  family squabbles, then practice the way of the Tao. Be like water that flows around obstacles and keeps swishing its own merry way so you don’t become stuck or frozen in resistance.

8. Above all, express love. Really…

with love

Cynthia

The post The Gift of Love at Christmas appeared first on Living Love | Relationship Workshops & Coaching for Intimacy, Connection & Growth.

1. Make it your own

You decide what sort of Christmas holiday season you really want to have. Let’s make it a time of real Intimacy and Love, your way.

This season of the year can be great fun but also it can be challenging.  We may find ourselves following the herd, or acting out our old beliefs.  Let your imagination run free for a moment. Who do you want to be? A loving, free being or an over-indulged complainer? On holidays we often step out of familiar routines and discover some hidden parts of ourselves. Not all are love and light either. Check in with yourself in some quiet moments. Lots of opportunity for spiritual practice!

How can you nourish yourself and others in the most rewarding way this year? If you just give out you will burn out, and that is not fun.

What is your best form of celebration and joy, relaxation and loving connections? Is it having time in nature with friends, or intimacy with your partner.  Or catching up with the family?  Taking your children on adventures?  When you can make space for this everyone will be happier.

If you are alone at Christmas or in a difficult situation this year, how can you turn it around?  At Christmas we are barraged with the ideals of the perfect family and relationships, and we feel inadequate, then depression can escalate. Change the picture. Initiate, and let your friends or family know what you need.  You are not alone if you reach out. There are many forms of intimacy.

2. Growing the Love

Recent brain research shows that we need to savour the good, positive loving experiences in life. Dwelling on these experiences, instead of quickly moving on, rewires us for happiness. Happiness creates the conditions for love, abundance and a deep sense of self-worth. It also makes it easier to achieve our heart-goals.

Savouring even one positive moment in our day has more value than we know. The brain is wired to notice the threats, the negative, so that we will survive. Deliberately putting our attention on the good counteracts this automatic orientation.

Practice 1: When good things happen to you, expand, breathe, feel the flavour, shape and texture of the love. Even if it’s a small thing. If you are in a relationship, do this with your partner – drink in and enjoy the loving moments, savour and celebrate them inside you.

Practice 2: Find a quiet corner and make a list of all your achievements, wins, openings, breakthroughs and positive changes during the past year. This creates your essential ‘launching pad’ for next year’s heart-goals. You can share your list with a friend, and expand it together. Notice if you have any resistance to focusing on this. It’s not possible to create afresh in the new year without acknowledging what we have already done.

3. Breathe deep to expand your life force, inhale life

The breath is the our key to life. If our breath is shallow and contracted we are keeping life out and thus our feelings pushed down. It may feel safer initially but eventually it becomes the opposite, keeping us isolated and protected from all the meaningful moments of this precious life.

The art is to allow your breath to drop deeper into your body while you relax. Not to force your breathing or strain to achieve technical breathing patterns as this causes tension itself. Rather you can notice over the day if you have contracted your breathing and then deliberately relax it. See what happens and when and why your breath changes. Spend a few minutes focusing on the breath being full in your belly and chest, expanding your body with the breath, but then let the technique go and relax, allowing your breath to go deeper.

Is it easier for you to inhale or exhale deeply? If we are afraid, we don’t inhale fully, if we are stuck we don’t exhale fully. By deliberately increasing our inhale or exhale we change our relationships and our life.

This deeper breathing will come in handy when your uncle is drunk and deadly, your kids are tired, you have a headache, your partner has a headache (in bed), you had one too many cocktails or your new lover decides he needs to be santa claus. Breathe!

4. Resolution and endings – breathing out

As the year comes to an end it’s a good time to look inside, pray, do your sadhana, reflect on what’s ending, and let it go as you wish. No forcing, just acknowledging what’s ending and feel it dissolving back into existence. Choose your deepest, most powerful time to do the work. Perhaps with a glass of wine late at night or on your yoga mat at dawn…..

5. Say yes to what is!

What we resist tends to hang around so if you find yourself gritting your teeth over the commercial jingles, the cultural expectations, the family patterns, the drunken squabbles, then practice the way of the Tao. Be like water that flows around obstacles and keeps swishing its own merry way. Breathe and create afresh. Be who you want to be.

Love and a desire to be appreciated lies underneath everything, so if we can say yes to whatever experiences are presenting themselves right now, then we have the opportunity in the next moment to be creative and shift the reality. If we say no to what is, we become stuck and frozen in resistance, and that Christmas jingle will be playing in your head all year.

Be with what is here and now.

6. Exercise, rest and water

You know what to do.

7. Celebrate with passion

with love

Cynthia

The post Nine tips to increase Intimacy and Love this Christmas appeared first on Living Love | Relationship Workshops & Coaching for Intimacy, Connection & Growth.