Looking back on the past few weeks, we've had more than our fair share of "I can't even" moments. We've been riding the waves of love & business, as we navigate the ever-changing terrains of our internal and external environments.

 

What is an "I can't even" moment? 

 

According to our trusted friends at Urbandictionary.com, it's the complete, sudden onset of the cessation of brain activity, brought under the presence of acute stress, which fully affects the person only a short time after it strikes them. Said person, under the duress of the symptoms, demonstrate their affliction by alerting to others that they "can't even," in reference to their inability to deal with the symptoms, or their inability to perform simple actions which have been made impossible by their afflictions.

 

Basically, it's a feeling of overwhelm, a lack of desire to deal with something, or a disbelief about something or someone to the extent that you "can't...

 

Have you ever stopped to think that you're playing a game where you might not know the rules? 

 

What do we mean by this? 

 

From whom did you learn "the rules" of relationship, that is, how to relate to yourself, others, and everything around you? Are your rules yours or were they passed down to you from someone or somewhere else? 

 

Most of us learned how to relate to others and the world from family, organized religion, society, etc. While we may have learned valuable things from each of these bodies, what most of us did not learn was the foundational concept of masculine and feminine energy. 

 

When we refer to masculine and feminine energy, we're not referring to the gender identifications male and female, we're referring to an expression of qualities. While most men tend to...

Finish the sentence: "in order to feel loved and supported, I need ___________."

 

Were you able to finish the sentence? 

 

Maybe? Maybe not? If not, don't feel bad...most people have no clue how to finish that sentence and have never really given it thought. Hell, for a long time, I didn't. And to be honest, there are times when I still feel challenged with understanding my needs and stating them. 

 

What I've found in myself and in clients is that the suppression of our needs is one of the biggest contributors to burnout, i.e stress, resentment, residual emotions, expectation, health issues, exhaustion, etc. 

 

I learned this lesson after suppressing emotions for nearly 30 years. 

 

I couldn't seem to figure out:

Did you or someone you know play video games as a kid? 

 

If so, then you know a thing or two about "boss battles."

 

Boss battles occur when you've made it to the end of the level and you've gotta fight "the good fight" against your character's enemy. 

 

 

Why is this relevant? 

 

We, as characters in our own game of life, experience and prevail through our very own boss battles. They may not look like a half-balding orange-haired man with an unusually large mustache (or maybe the do...).  

 

They look like challenging conversations with loved ones, maintenance issues in your home, a difficult co-worker, not getting the job you really wanted, plans falling through, etc. 

 

Sometimes it feels as if it's one thing after the next, which is exactly how it has felt for us and countless others we've spoken to recently. If this is you too, know that you're...

Each of us have (or have had) a major behavior, pattern, mindset that, at one point in our lives, kept us safe and protected and may have even served in helping us to receive and keep love (usually from our primary caretakers). 

 

Yet...

 

As evolving adults, the patterns that worked to keep us "safe" as children usually don't serve the evolving nature of our relationships. 

 

Many of us, until we learn to question said behavior, continue to play out the same patterns in our relationships, and wonder why life feels like the movie "Groundhog Day," where we keep re-living the same day over and over again, feeling like we've gone a little crazy. 

 

These protective behaviors range from getting defensive, deflecting conflict, denying your own or your partner's experience, projecting your experience onto your partner (or vice versa), or not taking radical responsibility for your contribution to a conflict or not being present with your needs or your...

During these odd times of Corona, many of us have been riding the waves in our relationship...

 

On some days we're riding the top of the wave or surfing through the barrel like pro surfers and on other days, we find ourselves crashing over and over again, while getting caught in the rumble of the undertow.

 

Ani brought up a great point today which perfectly summed up what we've been creating and experiencing...

 

We've been stuck in habitual thought about our relationship and various parts of it, like our sex life, INSTEAD OF creating fresh thought around how we want things to look, feel & be.

 

We've been operating (in some ways) as if there's a "big problem" to solve INSTEAD OF operating from the premise that there's no problem at all; there's just another way we'd like things to be.

 

We'd noticed that since we left NYC (and have been living nomadically), the frequency of our sex has dramatically decreased, as has our connection to our individual...