The Cuddle Sutra” & the Benefits of Touch Therapy.

Via elephant journal

Source of the Below: The Snuggle Buddies. “a “professional snuggling” company on the east coast that will come, “platonically snuggle,” with you in your home for up to 10 hours at a time.

The Benefits of Touch Therapy

“Do you find yourself depressed at times? Do you ever feel lonely and wish that you could just talk to someone that would genuinely listen? Do you find yourself suffering from stress, anxiety, or sleep loss? If you answered yes to any of these questions, then you are not alone. Many people lack the companionship they want in their everyday life.

It has been found that people, especially in the United States, have higher rates of depression and aggression compared to most other countries. This could be due to our fast-paced lifestyles, or our mentality of constantly telling ourselves that we just don’t have time. We seem to forget that in order to boost our own morale we need to make time for human interaction.

Studies have shown that the lack of human touch is an enormous factor towards causing depression. Platonic human touch releases oxytocin (chemical in our brains), which is why touch therapy and professional cuddling services have been so successful. Oxytocin has a major role in lowering blood pressure, lowering stress levels, reducing social anxiety, helping to relieve pain, and protecting against inflammation, which is said to make us age faster! Snuggling is an extremely important part of life that is considerably undervalued. It helps us grow mentally and physically because of the chemical changes it causes in the body.

Human beings thrive on contact. The Snuggle Buddies, an alternative therapy company specializing in professional snuggling, was created with the sole purpose to help relieve everyday stress, depression, and anxiety by the simple act of human interaction. Whether it’s through cuddling, or conversing, we feel that all individuals deserve to experience happiness.

Below is a comprehensive list of the benefits that occur from snuggling, which are caused by its ability to release oxytocin, dopamine, serotonin, and inhibit cortisol.”

List of Benefits

• Decreased stress and increased relaxation
• Lessened depression
• Lessened anxiety and social anxiety
• Improved social skills
• Improved self-esteem Improved sleep
• Lowered blood pressure and heart rate
• Reduced risk of heart disease
• Improved immune system and faster recovery
• Protection against inflammation and oxidative stress
• Pain relief and raised pain threshold
• Reduced drug cravings
• Lessened PTSD

The Truth About Marriage, Monogamy & Long-Term Partnership.

via Elephant journal

Everyone around us struggles in marriage.

But you wouldn’t know it because most people feel bad about their struggle, so they hide it.

I have yet to meet a couple who were not challenged to some degree.

As a couple’s coach and relationship specialist, I work with this all day, every day.

If you are married, or you are going to get married, it’s important to read this thoroughly. It may help you be more realistic.

The media and our culture inundate us with misinformation about how relationships are supposed to be. Many of us still think that when we find the one all will be well and they will complete us. Or maybe some of us think a “conscious” relationship means that we somehow transcend our issues, triggers and neurosis.

When we finally do commit to a long-term relationship and the warm fuzzies of the honeymoon stage wear off after six months or a year or two, we finally get to the goods of a real relationship.

One of the first things we discover is that it is challenging.

We struggle, blame, judge and even hate. We shut down, we distance, we run away. We do and say mean things or we just freeze in fear. We do all the things that we did as a child, (but probably don’t remember) or we act like our parents—the thing we’d swore we’d never do. We then suffer because our fantasy of what we thought a relationship was supposed to be doesn’t match our lived experience of the real relationship we are in now.

We discover that a relationship is full of pleasure yes, but that it is also full of pain. It’s not just happy, but it’s sad. It’s not just blissful, it’s depressing. We don’t just experience warm fuzzies, we also experience cold iciness and rage.

Then, we judge ourselves against the one-sided marriage paradigm that was sold to us. We get depressed thinking that perhaps we made a mistake or something is wrong with us. Or, we blame our spouse and hold them accountable for our pain, which is also depressing.

Some of us might feel alone and struggle to tell anyone about what’s really going on, perhaps because we don’t have those kinds of friends. And, even if we did have friends that would accept us in our funk as we fumble through marriage, our culture trained us to hide our relationship struggles so we put on our upbeat face and continue hiding. We unconsciously embrace the game everyone plays in this culture to be a half-version of ourselves.

But when it’s quiet and no one’s looking, we might be courageous enough to look in the mirror and acknowledge that we are in pain, that we don’t know how to get through it, and that we are in unknown territory.

We might take the next step and admit we can’t do it alone, so we finally reach out to someone for help. We might first talk to a close friend, a pastor, a therapist or our parents to get their councel. But often what we receive is not what we need. The most common response we can get is advice, problem solving and fixing—all well intentioned with the agenda of getting us back to “normal,” which translates into getting us back to our happy place.

This lack of validating our experience has us feeling more alone and even stupid. Remember, other people don’t want us to suffer. Our suffering makes them uncomfortable. So, if we are not careful and we want their approval/acceptance, we might abandon our true feelings and take their advice and try to get back to being happy again. But meanwhile under our mask, our suffering ensues.

Next, if we are religious or spiritual, we may look to our texts and self-help books to support us. We might even pray to God to make our suffering go away. We might even meditate and try to pseudo-embrace our pain all the while secretly wanting it to go away.

Yikes!

This entire process is common, normal, and I see it every day.

In my experience as a relationship guide, people finally get into a marriage and have no idea what’s at stake and no idea how to proceed. It’s like being lost in a thick forest in a far away place with no map.

Add kids to the mix, years of financial stress, miscommunication, less and less sex and an inability to do real conflict, and we have a recipe for affairs, divorce and stuck marriages. If we are honest, we finally start to admit we have few to no skills in the long-term relationship department.

The feelings we bottled up or tried to hide begin to leak out, sometimes as a slow drip, and other times as a raging mountain torrent. Or we feel afraid to move one way or the other, so we stay frozen in inaction, unsure of how to proceed. Meanwhile our body bears the burden as we compartmentalize our pain in silence, all the while we get sicker and sicker year after year.

Eventually we start to see that we learned what was modeled to us. We realize there was no relationship class in school. We just digested what was modeled to us.

We look around, compare ourselves to others and think, “they seem like their marriage is great, so what’s my problem?” But remember that under the masks of everyone around you is a hidden layer, a layer they, like you, would rather hide.

Read the whole article here.

How we end up marrying the wrong people

Via The Philosopher's Mail

Anyone we could marry would, of course, be a little wrong for us. It is wise to be appropriately pessimistic here. Perfection is not on the cards. Unhappiness is a constant. Nevertheless, one encounters some couples of such primal, grinding mismatch, such deep-seated incompatibility, that one has to conclude that something else is at play beyond the normal disappointments and tensions of every long-term relationship: some people simply shouldn’t be together.

How do the errors happen? With appalling ease and regularity. Given that marrying the wrong person is about the single easiest and also costliest mistake any of us can make (and one which places an enormous burden on the state, employers and the next generation), it is extraordinary, and almost criminal, that the issue of marrying intelligently is not more systematically addressed at a national and personal level, as road safety or smoking are.

It’s all the sadder because in truth, the reasons why people make the wrong choices are easy to lay out and unsurprising in their structure. 

They tend to fall into some of the following basic categories.

One: We don’t understand ourselves

When first looking out for a partner, the requirements we come up with are coloured by a beautiful non-specific sentimental vagueness: we’ll say we really want to find someone who is ‘kind’ or ‘fun to be with’, ‘attractive’ or ‘up for adventure…’

It isn’t that such desires are wrong, they are just not remotely precise enough in their understanding of what we in particular are going to require in order to stand a chance of being happy – or, more accurately, not consistently miserable.

All of us are crazy in very particular ways. We’re distinctively neurotic, unbalanced and immature, but don’t know quite the details because no one ever encourages us too hard to find them out. An urgent, primary task of any lover is therefore to get a handle on the specific ways in which they are mad. They have to get up to speed on their individual neuroses. They have to grasp where these have come from, what they make them do – and most importantly, what sort of people either provoke or assuage them. A good partnership is not so much one between two healthy people (there aren’t many of these on the planet), it’s one between two demented people who have had the skill or luck to find a non-threatening conscious accommodation between their relative insanities.

The very idea that we might not be too difficult as people should set off alarm bells in any prospective partner. The question is just where the problems will lie: perhaps we have a latent tendency to get furious when someone disagrees with us, or we can only relax when we are working, or we’re a bit tricky around intimacy after sex, or we’ve never been so good at explaining what’s going on when we’re worried. It’s these sort of issues that – over decades – create catastrophes and that we therefore need to know about way ahead of time, in order to look out for people who are optimally designed to withstand them. A standard question on any early dinner date should be quite simply: ‘And how are you mad?’

The problem is that knowledge of our own neuroses is not at all easy to come by. It can take years and situations we have had no experience of. Prior to marriage, we’re rarely involved in dynamics that properly hold up a mirror to our disturbances. Whenever more casual relationships threaten to reveal the ‘difficult’ side of our natures, we tend to blame the partner – and call it a day. As for our friends, they predictably don’t care enough about us to have any motive to probe our real selves. They only want a nice evening out. Therefore, we end up blind to the awkward sides of our natures. On our own, when we’re furious, we don’t shout, as there’s no one there to listen – and therefore we overlook the true, worrying strength of our capacity for fury. Or we work all the time without grasping, because there’s no one calling us to come for dinner, how we manically use work to gain a sense of control over life – and how we might cause hell if anyone tried to stop us. At night, all we’re aware of is how sweet it would be to cuddle with someone, but we have no opportunity to face up to the intimacy-avoiding side of us that would start to make us cold and strange if ever it felt we were too deeply committed to someone. One of the greatest privileges of being on one’s own is the flattering illusion that one is, in truth, really quite an easy person to live with.

With such a poor level of understanding of our characters, no wonder we aren’t in any position to know who we should be looking out for.

Read the entire article here.

Expectations - A Big Yes!

Many a times I have read thoughts, articles, posts,quotes and what not on how to make life better by not expecting anything from it. For a very long period of time I conditioned myself thinking if I am expecting too much from life, people, job, relationships than I am actually doing more harm to myself. I am making myself miserable by doing so, but my perspective changed, my husband changed it all for me and when I took the oath of marriage I realized that expecting is my right in real sense.

I have all the right in this world to expect from life, If I have expectations of a good, happy, abundant life than it ain't bad, I am not hurting anyone in doing that and if imagining about these expectations gives me happiness than voila I am on the correct path. My husband has made me realize that expectations in a relationship is a must, he expects me to love him unconditionally, to stand by him in his thick and thins, to take interest in his interests and off-course vice-verse is also there. My point here is that expectations helps in blossoming the heart, expectations makes life beautiful, you shout it out loud and declare it to the universe your demands and you get what you want, it's the actions and the same actions are required in any sort of relationship you are into. You do expect from your brother/sister, from friends. Our parents expect us to do certain things, and they are not wrong in doing so, they all can expect because we are the ones who have given them the right to expect.

So, next time somebody tell you to expect nothing, tell them expectation gives happiness, it's important for any relationship to flourish and it's ok to not be able to fulfill all the expectations, you fail but that is a part of life and it shouldn't stop you from expecting. If the other person is not able to match your expectations than create a dialogue, tell them what they mean to you and how you want the relation to be like, drop that ego and speak with your heart. Love with all your might and see the change.

Expect all the good things from life, people and relationships because each one of us is worth all the happiness the universe has to offer.