[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="576" caption="Our last family picture on Ivy & Hunter's last day with us."][/caption] Well the time came this past weekend. Our two dogs, my wife’s and my first “children”, graduated to the dog park in the sky. Ivy (16 year old Blue Merle Australian Shepherd) and Hunter (14 year old Black Chow Shepherd mix) lived long, relatively healthy lives, and in the end we felt that we had to assist them along their journey to allow them to leave with dignity and not wanting them to unduly suffer. Both Ivy and Hunter were adopted after an early life...

I am dedicating this blog to a great man, Gorman Fisher, aka Big Daddy. I grew up with a dad who worked a lot. His work was important to him, but it wasn’t until later that I truly realized why. As I kid, I wanted him to play with me, be at my baseball games, soccer games, scouting events, and while he made some of them, his attention to his work seemed to take precedence. I remember that when we did play pool together, he would beat me again and again, and was amazed that I would come back for more....

It has been a long road, but this will be the last post in my series about sex and how we treat our bodies, and just look where our fling has taken us. We started out in Part 1 with the sex talk, in Part 2 talked about love, Part 3 became lost in the throws of passion, Part 4 took a road trip with Vanessa in our guest post, had to stop and do our homework in Part 5, became distracted by the TV and media in Part 6, our real, feel, and ideal in Part 7, and now...

(I will return to Your Body Is Not a Disneyland in my next post.) What a truly inspiring week for the sum of humanity who witnessed the miraculous rescue of the Chilean miners. Whether one was involved personally or was riveted to the television, this event went a long way to redefining how we can all witness a news event as a positive outcome and challenge us to seek a more peaceful world. And my being an On-Air consultant to CNN Networks during their climb to earth was a once in a lifetime gift. Perhaps the most synchronous part was that the...

I often talk about our real, feel and ideal with people. These three terms have to do with how people see us and our actions (our real), how we feel about ourselves deep down inside (our feel), and how we want to be seen by ourselves and others (our ideal). Often people have wide gaps between a few of these concepts, if not all three. The more separation between our real, feel, and ideal, usually the more distress a person feels in their life. When it comes to how we treat our bodies, there are often wide gaps between our real,...

Welcome back. In my first installment, I discussed the nature of our relaxed attitudes toward sex. I feel that we are in a precarious position, and our children are in danger of suffering from our lack of self-respect. So let’s pick it up from here. What I always tell people is that even though we may have roots that connect us to the animal world, we also have a brain that functions at a higher level. The gift of our frontal lobe is that we can use our ability to reason to help manage our unavoidable more primal and animalistic...

You don’t have to look too far today in our society to see that sex has overtaken many aspects of our culture. It is on the television, on the covers of many magazines, in almost every corner of the internet, and our children seem to be immersed in innuendo and direct sexual content. I would not call myself old-fashioned, nor would those who know me, but I feel that our culture’s attitudes and behaviors about sex are out of control, and we seem to be more and more desensitized the more we are exposed to this. I will say that I...

I had an interesting talk with a client once about judgment and the influence that it had on their life. It really got me thinking – and it doesn’t take much to get me thinking. The discussion we had headed toward the concepts of Love versus Judgment. Through this discussion I felt that we came to some powerful insights, for them and for me. Perhaps the most powerful insight was the conclusion that Love is the opposite of Judgment. Let me help explain how we came to this conclusion, and why it is important. For many of us, we have been...