Wendy Strgar, founder of GoodCleanLove, released her first book entitled ‘Love that Works: A Guide to Enduring Intimacy’. Good Clean Love was started by wife and mother of four, Wendy Strgar, with the mission to increase awareness of the experience of love and intimacy in the world. Based on a collection of weekly newsletters and original short stories, ‘Love that Works’ offers a provocative discussion on the personal elements of a loving and sexually satisfying relationship. “This book is the culmination of all my work, everything that I believe and hope for,” says Strgar. “I really think I’ll be helping people.”

In 2003, after 17 years of marriage, Founder and ‘Loveologist’, Wendy Strgar, created the Good Clean Product line to first meet her own personal intimacy needs after being unsatisfied with what was available in the marketplace. Most lubricants available are made with petrochemical-based ingredients and parabens that can have negative side effects such as burning, pain or itching. By developing an all-natural recipe for clean ingredient lubricants, Ms. Strgar claims she saved her marriage by eliminating the pain that occurred with intimacy, allowing her and her husband to restore their marriage. She realized that “physically loving my husband gave us the power to heal and unite as a couple”.

This powerful personal experience inspired Wendy to create a family of products using healthy and natural ingredients that make love more accessible in relationships. Wendy’s mission is in educating women about their bodies to help more them create and sustain stronger families, so as Wendy puts it, “that the world can be a more loving place”.

Excerpt: “Committed relationships work best when we approach them as a method of personal growth. Ultimately our loving relationships are the most gentle and effective education we can engage in to become the person we want to be.  The stories, memoir and sage advice in Love that Works is an essential guide in creating resilient, passionate loving relationships.”

Seven years after launching, the Oregon-based ‘love’ company now specializes in a variety organic and all-natural love products, such as lubricants, love oils and edible candy that are sold in stores and online atwww.goodcleanlove.com.  In May 2010, Wendy was the proud winner of the first ever Willamette Valley Angel Conference, that rewarded Good Clean Love a $160,000 prize, allowing GCL to expand giving Wendy the time to write the book she had been envisioning all those years. Good Clean Love supports the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics and is continuously working to educate women, physicians and retail stores about the importance of clean and healthy ingredients in love or ‘intimacy’ products. Good Clean Love’s healthy intimacy products have found a home in many natural food stores and pharmacies including Whole Foods and Pharmaca, as well as many spas, gift shops and physicians offices.

‘Love that Works’ will be available nationally through Green Leaf distribution and online at goodcleanlove.com and amazon.com

It is said that the game of love is everyone’s favorite game, and yet even with all the new technologies designed to help us connect, more and more people are opting out of the game, preferring to live alone, than to risk another bad relationship outcome.   This preference reflects a deep change in our collective human psyche, for it used be that what lovers feared most was loneliness. Now being caught in a static or unsatisfying relationship is even more troubling.  Wanting to be together, to build a family is no longer enough.

Just in the last couple of weeks, I have spoken with several people who have expressed this sentiment and when I pressed the point and asked if they were to meet a compatible, kind and intelligent partner, would they truly feel like there wasn’t room in their life to accommodate them.   There was a brief pause, and then “I’m not sure” was as close as they would come to an opening.  Our modern age has made it is easier to be passionate and maintain passion about a pet or favorite sports team, than a lover.  What has happened to the game of love?

Memories of childhood games on late summer evenings remind me of what the game of love once meant to us.  As kids we understood that it was the play that mattered. Winning and losing both reflected their original root meanings which were “to desire” and “to be set free.”   Capture the flag in the dwindling light of the sky or a full neighborhood game of hide and seek was an apprenticeship in freedom.   Pretending was rich with  excitement, as we all shared in the wonder of not knowing the outcome. And yet we all knew that no victory was ever final, there was still tomorrow night.

Lovers from our past shared one secret; they all knew that it wasn’t about winning or losing, it was the play that was essential.  Playing allows us to experience freedom from duty and necessity.  It is a primary condition of creativity and allows us the self-conscious delight of living out alternative realities.  It is what makes us so deeply human.

Nowhere does this ring more true, than in our most intimate moments. Adding playfulness to sexual desire invites new friends into the bedroom: imagination and fantasy.   Invite these allies to any passionate encounter with an openness to play, a willingness to pretend, and the freedom to live in the wonder of not knowing the outcome. Saying yes to this game of love, keeps life fresh and while it offers no guarantees of long term winning, it does promise to share glimpses of what we all desire most of the magical influence of love.

Rewarding our instinct to love creates the self confidence to transform a private secret to a public force with the power to renew life and transmute human defects into loveable qualities.  We are, after all, most loveable when we love. Playing this game doesn’t guarantee a life without bruises or the happy ever after story that we all long for.   It will however teach you about all the many ways you can love, and love again…

If love is so healing why does it hurt so much?  This is a good question with  difficult answers.   Love the verb is a constant practice of feeling compassion, giving the benefit of the doubt and struggling to feed our goals and desires, as well as those of whom we love. This aspiration is a juggle even in the most functional of relationships; and the score rarely comes up   50-50.

Approaching our intimate relationships with the intent of an action verb is realistic, if not a bit daunting. The romantic version of the verb, the measure we use for our love relationships, reflects the illusion of love as a vacation.   We sit side by side in some beautiful natural location and the only action required is offered by the love that we feel, washing over us, filling us, just as easily as the nearby waterfall washes over and fills the streambed.  Physical intimacy carries the potential to generate this experience; flush with heightened hormones and released tension; lovemaking seems to encompass all of what is love.

These peaks of love are profoundly healing and sustaining.   However it is unrealistic to expect that these experiences should encompass all that is love.  When we are unable to show up for those we love, the feelings that we bear are the polar opposite of what we feel when we succeed in these relationships.  It doesn’t matter if the slight is intended or a consequence of life’s competing demands.  Generating the love, sometimes is our work alone.   Three thousand miles from home, I am unable to care for my youngest daughter who came down with the chicken pox.  I also somehow managed to have missed the start of the tradeshow that I traveled all this way to attend.

More often than not, there is no malice intended in most of love’s disappointments.  Life frequently tests our ability to forgive the intrusions to our peace of mind and to sustain the pain and longing of someone we love and cannot show up for.    We must be willing to balance the hardships, bear the ache in our heart in our relationships if we expect to experience the vacation of love’s working for us.   If we are unwilling to sustain the work of love, all we ever get is a brief glimpse of a paradise, fading fast enough that it is easy to dismiss.

Illness is as much a part of our human condition as is wellness.  Most of what we do in life can be traced back to the basic human drive to be happy and well.  The times that we feel most fragile are made more bearable when held in love.  Unfortunately, the courage and intention to sustain each other during the daily annoyances is sadly often more than we can bear.  The number of people who report feelings of relief at the end of their long-term relationships continues to amaze me. Loving each other is the hardest work we do and what we do with that work defines our life in health and illness.   Although I feel bad about not being the mother I want to be this weekend, I hope that I return to the work with more resolve to stay with it. 

“Gratitude is the heart’s memory.”  French proverb

I have generally not been a sports fan in life, but living with my husband for over 20 years and raising two sons has trained me in the importance of the game.  Tonight we shared a real loss as we watched the dreams of our star quarterback slip away with a hit to the knee. He stood on the sidelines watching his team lose their chance at a national championship.  This is the game of life we watched play out.  When we predict how things will turn out for our teams and our selves but usually we can’t quite imagine all the possibilities.  It is often the thing that you couldn’t imagine, that you often can’t see coming- even when it is barreling down on you like a linebacker.

We can never imagine the full range of possibilities, if we could imagine all the possibilities it wouldn’t be called a game, which by it’s very nature is unpredictable and exciting -like life.   I always tell my boys, especially after they lose, that you can’t ever win if you can’t risk losing.  The losing is what makes the winning real.

Our personal quests for love and success carry the same risk and excitement.  Sometimes, the cards you are dealt are winners and other times- they lead us into situations that are not that different from tonight’s sad loss.  The boys on the team will have to come home and figure out how to try again.  They will have to be willing to risk it all again, which requires enormous courage after you lose- especially on ESPN.  Even when we lose in private, with no one but you watching it takes great courage to try again.  Finding a way back into a difficult relationship or a challenging situation requires gratitude.

It is through our heart’s memory, the place where we store the love in our life that we find that what we have is enough.  It is through feeling grateful for both our efforts and the efforts of the people that we love that we can turn denial into acceptance, chaos into order and confusion into clarity.  This is what champions must do with defeat and I think the only noble path to live a life that gives as much as it takes.  Having the chance to play in the game is enough, even when the golden win isn’t what we are left with.

This is the week we set aside to be thankful.  This year consider being thankful for your heart’s memory- the inner store of loving thoughts and connections that has given you the courage to keep going.

I have always believed that what we all want most is to be loved.  The feeling of being loved and worthy is a universal gateway to happiness and satisfaction

It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend.

We all long for happiness…  I would say that these things might just be one in the same.  For the sake of argument, let’s just assume that they are. We are happiest when we feel loved and valued and least happy when we feel unlovable and unworthy.

If it is all as simple as that, why then do we so often find ourselves unhappy and dissatisfied with our life and our relationships? In Daniel Gilbert’s ‘Stumbling On Happiness’, learn the scientific research that shows that we continuously miss the happiness and love we want, because we often don’t even know what it is that we’re looking for.

Our imagination of our desired life Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend.

“The world is too dangerous for anything but truth and too small for anything but love.”  W.S. Coffin

Telling the truth in relationships is perhaps the most challenging aspect of relating.  Not doing it makes relationships impossible.  It is difficult because it takes time to know our own truth and because often even as we get it, truth is as changeable as the days we live in.  The wise among us know that there is no truth with a capital T- and yet there is without a doubt, lies.  That the truth isn’t something we can grasp and hold on to, it makes the job of living with integrity deeply intentional.

We all see things as we are, rather than as they are. We all struggle to find the courage to reveal our own perceptions and feelings in our closest relationships.   This is where the world becomes dangerous in relationships; the unexpressed and the lies take up the ground between us.  Even if we can’t articulate why, we feel ungrounded and fill in the gaps with all kinds of drama and elaborate language to compensate.

Recently, I have experienced   the weight and reality of this as I watch the demise of the marriage of some close personal friends.   It is shocking, when the final disclosure of cheating and infidelity comes out.  Usually though, in retrospect, you could see it coming for years.  During the time we spent with our friends during the years when they were” together”, there was always this unspoken space left for the unexpressed- the untruths, and the detachment that grows around it.   It was like there was someone else in the room that no one wanted to acknowledge.   Sometimes after another glass of wine, this voice would spill out of someone’s mouth, leaving awkward silence and a shared recognition of a place to dangerous to tread.  Someone would change the subject quickly.

I would often leave those gatherings feeling slightly off- wondering what I could have said that would have given the truth some air.    I wish now that I could have said something that would have made a difference but I know that making the commitment to live authentically in my own relationship is work enough.   Jamaica Kincaid said “I am not at all interested in the pursuit of happiness.  I am interested in pursuing a truth, and the truth often seems to be not happiness but its opposite.”

Although, I wish it wasn’t so, I am coming to believe that sometimes the work of sustaining a relationship that has integrity over time is not always congruent with our own search for happiness. And yet on the other side of sharing a relationship, which is deeply authentic, there is a satisfaction and comfort to life, which exceeds fleeting happiness.  When I speak to groups, I my first lesson is always to give up the idea that your relationship will be or should be easy, or that it exists to make you happy.   Relationships exist to teach us how to love and be loved.   And while, there are moments when relationships feel easy and make us happy, having those feelings are not a reasonable barometer of whether the relationship is working or not.

A more honest gauge of whether your relationship is working is the measure of trust and safety that the work of telling the truth builds into it.   Because I can tell my husband that  ” I feel lonely in my marriage” and that he can hear it, doesn’t necessarily fix it, but allows me to live it differently.   Feeling lonely in my marriage is an honest place, by saying it and feeling it, I have the chance to let it transform.   It doesn’t mean that it will transform him; it might just need to change me and my relationship to the silence that he is more comfortable living in.    Either way the expression keeps us both honest and in touch with each other and the real struggles that living together entail.    In a small and dangerous world it is truth and love that keeps us safe.

There are many days that being married, or rather staying married is the most challenging thing that I do.   This is still true after 24 years of marriage, no less so than it has been in all of the years of my marriage.   The conflicts revolve around the same issues and although we often succeed in living them differently, when the wounds are opened again, and usually with just a single thought, the thorns cut a bit deeper.

Recently, I took a leap and tried to get my husband to see the places where he is unable to connect and extend himself for our kids.  There is almost no language available to us in this discussion that does not provoke his defensiveness.  Any way I broach the topic, all he can hear is a shrill pitch in my voice; His guardedness setting my tone a notch higher.

Before our four children, we had the same arguments of my incessant planning around his availability and his distancing, internal focus which for so many years felt personal.  I couldn’t get for decades that it had nothing to do with me.

As we had and raised our children, my need for connection was generally saturated with raising them.  I planned and carried out our family plans and he would be present as he chose- the arguments about his showing up to the basketball and soccer games, the school plays and science presentations waned.  It was an argument that never shifted anyone’s ground and only dug the ditch deeper between us.

So I was caught off guard when it came up again around my eldest son’s state tennis match.  I am used to dropping my own plans for my kids’ events and even re-arranging a list of activities for the other kids, but something about the importance of this event that didn’t even strike him, sent me off over the precipice, the one that only takes one thought to slide into a deep abyss. It is a dark hole that deepens over time, requiring more effort each time to shake the old resentments that harden my heart into a hateful place.

If you have ever seen the Star Trek series with Jean Luc Picard’s struggle to become human after he is taken over by the Borgs.   That is what the emotional precipice of life is for most of us.  In almost no time, our own heart is unrecognizable and the easy advice that I give all the time of holding what is most loveable and what is most un-loveable side by side feels impossible.  Worse still is that I can barely discern my feelings of the moment for the truth of my life.   The darkest parts of how I feel can easily feel like the truth I have been hiding from myself.

Even as I gain glimpses of balance and my better sense of all that works in my life tries to regain control, the dust and grime from that nasty slide hang on.   I feel ashamed at the capacity for meanness and unkindness that I hold.   I re-learn how much work it takes to love and that the only way to find balance comes at the moment you realize that your unkindness has nothing to do with anyone else.  It is yours alone.

Claiming my darkness and letting the other person off the hook is in fact the only way back to recapturing your heart.   The act of self-loathing transformed into self forgiveness is the key that makes forgiveness of others possible.   My husband will never be a strong communicator/connector and yet the only way he will ever get better at it is from a place of being loveable and acceptable in how he can connect and communicate right now.

This is the textbook for what sex was made for. Centuries old, tantric practices are part of a much larger hindu/vedic tradition of which sexuality is only part. The full practice is a life long spiritual quest which demonstrates the interconnectedness of everything and includes yoga, meditation, breath work as well as sexual techniques. The Western and more modern interpretation of Tantra has become synonomous with spiritual and sacred sexuality. These tantric books and practices explore and teach techniques which are capable of elevating the sexual participants to a sublime and ecstatic spiritual plane.

Many teachers caution against the confusion associated with “tantric bliss” as a path to intense orgasmic pleasure. In fact the power of the practices is often the sublimation of orgasmic pleasure towards a rising spiritual energy of divine connection.

I am not an expert or even a devoted student of Tantric practices. I have read some popular titles and seen a few videos that teach the techniques and spent some time with on the internet researching the topic. The google resources are so exhaustive. Yet, even with out an exhaustive education the principles behind tantric practice can go a long way in deepening the connection you share with your partner.

There are a few simple techniques that I often recommend to customers and clients with out even situating them in the context of Tantra, which in fact is where they came from.

The idea of making love with your eyes open is one of the fundamentals of deep connection in intimacy. It is surprisingly harder to do than you might expect. Move toward this idea as an intention rather than a rule and be amazed as the collection of glimpses that will reshape how you think about your partner and yourself. It is not easy to be seen, even by the people we love. Truly witnessing the act of love is profoundly transformative.
Becoming conscious about your breath is central to all yogic practices and is foundational in Tantra. An easy way to start this is to intentionally count your breaths together. Associating breath and penetration, both shallow and deep forces you both to find a rhythm and timing that is shared. Slowing down to each other and taking a breath with each connection is incredibly exciting.

Combine these two ideas into one of my favorite intimate activities and see if you can get to the finish line together. The ground rules are first to keep looking into each other’s eyes, and second, to distinguish between deep and shallow penetration. Starting with shallow and moving towards deep penetration in a count that you both follow requires concentration and focus which alone changes the nature of intimacy. The first round is nine shallow and one deep stroke, each one connected through breath and eye contact. The second round is eight shallow, two deep. The pattern continues and then repeats, if you can, although I have rarely gotten through more than one round.

Showering our physical love with intent and attention is the key to transforming love into a force of unity. My first line of products was called Sacred Moments because even without any study of tantra I knew that the closest we can get to the divine is in the act of making love to someone you really love. Have fun.

A promise is a commitment you make with your heart.  Promises are not like other decisions that we make that have open ended options of easy termination if it doesn’t suit our needs or doesn’t make us happy.  The act of promising releases the right to reason on some level, because keeping a promise requires us to go beyond reason. Staying true to our word in spite of the inconvenience and discomfort is the core of a promise.

In the days of Camelot, the Knights of the Round Table made a vow and were sanctimoniously knighted.  They knew their promise was a sacrament. While there were moments of romantic adventure, they were signing on with their lives for the ordeal that the promise would demand of them.

Loving someone carries this kind of promise. Different from the heady falling in love stage or the romantic whirlwind of the love affair,  authentic love that lasts is an  agreement to give up our own personal simplicity in exchange for the continuous yielding that creates and sustains relationships.  This long term commitment to love is also an ordeal of sorts, one that changes the participants each time they agree to keep loving.

Keeping a promise to love is a lifetime of saying yes to your relationship. When it works the partners understand that they are not really giving to each other, but rather to the relationship, which makes the sacrifices of personal satisfaction life building instead of impoverishing.

There are all kinds of commitments in which we make this kind of loving vow.  Marriage, parenting and devotion to a career path all provide a context which require us to go beyond the “reasonable” and to give more than we believe we are capable. It is in these crises that the promises we make are the light at the end of the tunnel.  Sometimes even now after 24 years of marriage, the best reason I have for staying is because I said I would.

Promises are hard to keep for two reasons. Coming up with the constant willingness to stay put and do the work is an act of faith and courage which we don’t always know how to find.  In addition, it is often long after we make a promise that we realize that our promise to one person or situation precludes our availability to everyone and everything else.  Choosing a specific career path is also closing a door to so many others.  Committing to a partner excludes this kind of intimacy with all the other intriguing people we meet.  A huge world of possibility closes with each promise we make.

This may be why there were only twelve knights at that Round Table.  It is heroic work to make and keep a promise.  It is not for the faint-hearted. What most people who quit on their promises don’t know is that the moments when it seems impossible to say yes one more time, or the weight of the commitment is unbearable is the very moment when your  promise has the most to teach.   Each time you pass through this threshold with your integrity intact, the promise and the love grows large enough to hold whatever inside of you wants to break it down.

When I teach about the Ecology of Love and talk about the water that lives between people I often use the term “showing up” to describe the flow that happens in relationships.   In relationships, like the ocean,  there is an ebb and tide to how we are present for each other,  but if the water in the relationship is always out, then both people feel alone more often than they feel like there is someone at their back.   Many people go through years in partnerships where the experience of loneliness is profound.  It is something that I struggle with in my own marriage, each of us having a different sense of what togetherness means and how much of it we need.

Showing up for someone doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with long and deep conversations, in fact usually it is about the small details of life where showing up makes the most difference.   The day I got a flat tire and my husband came and changed it in his nice work clothes,  or the time when he needed a shirt washed and ironed, or the zillions of times when the kid juggling doesn’t quite work and he is willing to stop what he is doing to pick up.   It communicates volumes of love when you are able to give up your own agenda to show up for someone else’s needs.  It is at the heart of what it means to feel safe and loved in a relationship.

Lately I have been witnessing the demise of several relationships with close personal friends.  Affairs and divorces always catch you off guard, even when you can see the breakdown of showing up for years before.   It is easy to confuse co-existing and showing up- they can almost look the same when we grow accustomed to not allowing ourselves to need and be needed.   Co-existing doesn’t have the stickiness factor that showing up for someone does, because it happens as a matter of course- not choice.

Showing up or not translates into all the dynamics of a relationship including how and what you communicate and whether you share a passionate physical love.   It isn’t possible to really open yourself up with either the spoken language or one’s body if you don’t feel safe.   And so little by little, we say less and less of what we really need to say and in our most intimate times we cover ourselves through distancing and not really being present.

Real passion in intimacy is the product of people who can take risks.  It is very different than relying on and replicating how we did it before and it is the biggest way to show up for someone you love.   Human sexuality is a mystery of epic proportions- there is no other single act which can so deeply fuse and connect two people so as to transform them and how they relate so completely.  Which is why, whether my husband realizes it or not, every time he puts down his evening newspaper to join me in the daily grind of putting another dinner on the table he is scoring big in my ability to show up later that night.

Two other important points on showing up- don’t keep score.   It doesn’t equal out like other human equations might and only serves to cut at the backbone of the relationship that you are trying to build.   The point here is that each person shows up as they can and that both people know when it happens. And last, be grateful for however it happens and whenever it does, you are one of the lucky ones.

“You are what you love, not what loves you. That’s what I decided a long time ago.”  I have remembered this concluding line of a conversation between Nicolas Cage and himself (when he played the twin writer brothers in the 2002 movie “Adaptation”) for over five years.  I have many times thought back on it over all the stories of unrequited love that I have heard since then.   Donald knew something most of us miss, sometimes for a whole life- that the love we feel for who or what ever we feel it, is our own.  Loving is not something we are given permission to feel or a feeling that anyone can take away.

This might be one of the biggest misconceptions ever perpetrated about love.  There is this pervasive embodiment of the experience as a coupled experience, it’s legitimacy resting in it’s reciprocation.  When love is withheld, rejected or takes some other form, the one who loved first is belittled, even if only in his/her own mind.   Maybe that’s why I have always remembered Donald, who couldn’t care less whether, Sarah, the object of his love felt that way too.  He knew that the gift of the experience was his.

The stories of unrequited love and the range of tragedy and heartbreak from love unmet has filled the airways since we began to sing or tell our stories.  The universality of the loss experienced by love gone wrong, or never really given a chance, or interrupted too soon by tragedy is something we all share.  The pain is as deep and real as any cut with a knife.  The sadness and loneliness of loving and losing the object of our love is searing like a burn and shadows us for weeks, sometimes months.  This is the story that many of us never get over, sometimes keeping us away from the prospect of loving again for years.

Why we can’t celebrate the love we feel without it being reciprocated has a lot to do with our latent feelings of unworthiness (Don’t worry it’s not you- it’s the whole culture).  As soon as you are not good enough, the original experience of love, which is the highest feeling we can experience degenerates in less than a minute to a feeling of shame.  Or if we are angry, then it is easy to find blame, making the object of our love not worth the feeling to begin with.  Either way, we lose access to the purest and most instructive feeling we can muster.

Realizing that we are what we love and not what love’s you is a revolutionary approach to opening your heart and discovering a capacity to embrace the world that you might not have known you are capable of.   Loving builds emotional literacy and gives you the courage to feel the loss of love with grace and forgiveness.  A loving and compassionate heart begets more love.  The more you practice love with out the shame or the blame,  the more love comes to you.  Guaranteed.