This dear friend always kills it - enjoy <3

"While sometimes this romancing is meant for one night or just for the building of a short-term connection, frequently it can be seen as the beginning of a tender dialogue, a period of mutual intimacy and knowing, setting the stage for deepening relationship and affection. It can potentially lay the seeds for love, or for the transformation, redefining, or recontextualizing of love through sensual awakening. And while I’m not a fan of models that paint long-term commitment as the only valid framework for relationship, or that privilege romantic and sexual relationships over deep, intimate, meaningful friendships, I do believe we can learn self-love from the ways in which we conceive of romance as an awakening, arousing, and blissful bathing of the senses.

For those of us who learned to love ourselves from an early age, romancing ourselves can be self-care, giving us needed moments of solitary contentment and relaxation. And for those of us who never learned how to love ourselves, who were never taught our worth or value, or who still struggle on the daily with how to love what we see in our mirrors and minds, maybe romancing ourselves is the key to allowing tender, sweet love to seed itself. Maybe in showering our bodies with lush luxury and our senses with safe, pleasurable experiences, we can fall in love with ourselves, with the one taking the time and making the effort to bring us nourishing warmth, sensual touch, and renewing awareness of our bodies as sacred, valid, and praiseworthy."
​
- Christy Croft

medium.com/@christycroft/romance-yourself-71ff17a845a?fbclid=IwAR1nAjXSxPWPJ6_wMR91ukDC1awPlGl91_TxlVKBmtAL8ZxnPaKfFDmbWYk

Conversations often go awry when strong emotions arise. How can we best work with difficult emotions, both our own and the other person’s?
​
"This is such a huge area of practice. Again, the foundation is mindfulness. We need to develop the capacity not only to be aware of our emotions but also to tolerate the discomfort of strong, unpleasant emotions. For meditators, we train in this everyday—sitting with knee pain, restlessness, or boredom. If we’re really paying attention, we learn how those moments of patience, tolerance, energy, and letting go apply to the flow of our everyday life and interactions.

But we also need wisdom. We need to understand where our emotions come from, to recognize the meaning they often carry. If there’s emotion, something matters. Emotions are deeply rooted, biological signals that point to something that matters for us. When we get the information underneath an emotion—what we’re valuing, wanting or needing—the intensity of the signal can settle and we can go about attending to the situation. That might mean working internally with our relationship to a specific need or desire, or engaging external to explore the possibility of meeting that need with another.

...Communication is a learnable skill. We each have the capacity to communicate better. Second, conflict can be a source of creativity, discovery, and even intimacy rather than pain and disconnection. And last, that it’s not separate from our contemplative practice. Communication and relationship can be the source of profound and transformative insight."

- Oren Sofer, dharma teacher and SEP

www.dharma.org/right-speech-in-a-post-truth-world/

Ajahn Brahm is the best. And if you're a control freak like I am - this is a good approach.

"Treating your mind like a best friend involves approaching it with a warm, engaging attitude: “Hey buddy! Do you want to meditate now? What do you want to watch? How do you want to sit? You tell me how long.” When you treat your mind with kindfulness, your mind does not want to wander off anywhere. It likes your company. You hang out together, chilling out, for far longer than you ever expected."


tricycle.org/trikedaily/ajahn-brahm-control-freak/?fbclid=IwAR35YIIcvvml1rtN2fiDdiCMXpSfFl5ouP6lzsMFTip5p8JyIxBuqO0RSYE

"Here’s the deal. The human soul doesn’t want to be advised or fixed or saved. It simply wants to be witnessed — to be seen, heard and companioned exactly as it is. When we make that kind of deep bow to the soul of a suffering person, our respect reinforces the soul’s healing resources, the only resources that can help the sufferer make it through."

​onbeing.org/blog/the-gift-of-presence-the-perils-of-advice/?fbclid=IwAR3HHzIc7qV7zYuud3ftj9vLcDcWG-aQ3g0NzORJ_-m6Ec9s5HU7UIfOB_c

Can we just get over the idea that there is something morally good about being thin? Because it's awful and it's not true and it ruins peoples' lives.

highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/everything-you-know-about-obesity-is-wrong/