I must admit that I got a little distracted while visiting Bliss Connection’s online romance store to write this article.  I can’t say that I am all too familiar most of these the products but, that does not mean that I don’t see their value… Indeed, dear friends of ours have recently gone through the harrowing experience of prostate cancer. Although he now seems to be cancer free, the experience most definitely affected his ability to perform. Friends of theirs bought them a gift certificate to purchase, shall we say, enhancement products to help. And help it did! It brought me to a whole new level of understanding the value of ‘props’.

Sex is healthy for us women and our partners. It relieves stress, strengthens our immune system and our heart, helps us sleep better and burns calories! We are not talking about a marathon sexual encounter. Studies show that we can have great sex in seven minutes! However, as we age, the ability to ‘get the job done’ takes a bit more time and energy, so why not bring a bit of help into the bedroom.

Using Naughty Dice for foreplay can have you laughing and brings a playful intimacy to the bed. At our, ahem, age, a little lubricant goes a long way! Pjur Original Bodyglide Personal Lubricant, the crème de la crème lubricant from Germany is made with a premium silicone formula that lasts as long as you do. And just in time for Valentine’s Day, The Enchanted Evening Kit brings all the paraphernalia needed for a passionate evening. Just add the bubbly!

To view Bliss Connection’s wide range of products just click on this link and use coupon discount code VAL2012 to receive 15% off plus free shipping with purchases over $45. Should you need helpful information in this specific area, Bliss Connection has an iTunes podcast channel that answers questions that we may not really want to ask. Plus you can also check them out on Facebook and Twitter.

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The beginning of a new year, ahhh, a time for fresh starts and new fresh energy. Time to move forward with grace and improved health, strength and vitality. The holidays were a time to indulge, and did we enjoy that! Now we have a choice to implement new healthy habits. It’s time to take exquisite care of ourselves, really show lots more self love.

It’s a time for reflection as winter draws us into this special time of year. The days are shorter, the weather gets colder. Your body really needs some nourishment right now. So, what can you do?

I believe in adding in new practices and then the old habits and patterns melt away. January and February’s snowy (or rainy!) days and nights beckon for hot baths, a cup a tea, a little nap. Our bodies need nourishing especially in winter. Warm soups, stews, a little 10 minute break here and there…..these all so simply nourishing to your body, mind and spirit. Notice how you really feel after taking care of You!

Upon rising, try enjoying a large glass of filtered water with a squeeze of lemon or lime, some grated ginger, and add a dash of cayenne pepper: fire water! You re-hydrate after sleep, refresh and warm yourself with ginger for circulation and its anti- inflammatory qualities, and the cayenne wakes up your digestion! This practice is very energizing, try it for a week and notice how you feel.

I received a beautiful new year’s card with some inspiration I’d like to share with you:

Thoughts for a Happy and Successful 2012

Plant a tree for your birthday
Don’t postpone joy
Demand excellence and be willing to pay for it
Don’t take your good health for granted
Think big thoughts, but relish small pleasures
Be kinder than necessary
Take time to look at the stars
Swing for the fence
Live life as an exclamation, not an explanation
Reread a favorite book
Do things in the order of their importance
Leave everything a little better than you found it

Have a joyful, energized and healthy 2012!

Questions? Email me at Margaret [at] FocusedWisdom.com for more health inspiration and ideas!

It was the day after Christmas. I stopped in the grocery store to pick up some necessities and was confronted with the Season of Love.

Giant pink and red hearts filled the aisle. I was surrounded by heart candies and heart cards and everything one would need to create the Season of Love. And yet, what is truly needed to create love in your life doesn’t come in a box, bag or card. It comes from within.

Most relationships fail because we are looking to that individual to complete us, to fill an empty hole that was created by some wound or painful experience. If you are interested in creating a new season of love, a relationship that is based on a solid foundation and in any relationship you are yourself, well here are my suggestions.

Take Time To Feel Complete and Whole

The truth is that you are complete and whole. The truth is that you are perfect just the way you are and in knowing and feeling this you won’t try to change yourself or anyone while in a relationship. Here’s my suggested exercise (and I will admit it is a tough one).

Look in the mirror each day and state out loud the following, while looking yourself in the eye.

• I am whole and complete
• I am perfect just the way I am
• I am love
• I am loved
• I feel safe giving and receiving love

Notice how you feel during this exercise. Even if it is tough, keep conducting it once a day for 10 days. Then see how you feel on the eleventh day conducting it. I would venture to bet you feel more confident, more loving and more your true self.

How Do You Express Love

Often we are under the impression that our mates and family don’t love us because we are expecting the expression of their love to look a certain way. Gary Chapman, author of The Five Love Languages, has determined that there are five ways people express love (and see Audrey’s review of the book here). They are: words of affirmation, quality time, receiving gifts, acts of service and physical touch. Your love language might not be the same as your mates. To start communicating with your loved ones with their language of love, first determine your love language and then discover what languages your family and mate speak. You can learn more about Gary’s book here. What you will become aware of is how much your family and friends do care and love you.

Trust and Be Vulnerable

How many times have you screamed at a movie screen and said, “Just tell her how you feel”? Most people don’t express their feelings or their truth because they feel unsafe being vulnerable. Today is your opportunity to take a chance and trust yourself to pick the right person to be you with. An exercise I always do is this: Ask your body to place you in a feeling and expression of trust and feeling safe being vulnerable.

What you are doing in this exercise is creating a new pattern in your body and you will start attracting circumstances that reflect this feeling of trust and safety in your everyday world.

There just isn’t one day to express your love or a season. It is up to you to create each moment of love within yourself.

Greetings from my after life.

I’m not dead yet, by the way, but I had a glimpse of my death recently and I realized, upon considering it, that I was completely unprepared to have it arrive so soon. Why is it that sometimes we need a good kick in the teeth every so often to get us to sit up and pay attention?

My kick came in the form of cancer on a routine mammogram. There’s nothing like a good cancer diagnosis to push you into a state of acute awareness. Hello, this is your WAKE UP call!

Suddenly there I was, crying until I couldn’t cry any more, scared like I’d never been scared before. I spent many hours sobbing through such thoughts as, “but I was supposed to live to be 90!” And, “This is the end? I’m finished? How can this be true?” I wondered why, why? I’ve always been healthy. I don’t fit the profile of a person who typically gets a cancer diagnosis. For goodness’ sake, my best friend from college still likes to tell everyone about how I once offered her pea pods as a snack.

What followed the diagnosis was a whirlwind of medical tests, biopsies, assorted painful things, surgery, then the inevitable sickness of chemo and the weariness of radiation therapy. I lost my hair, I gained nearly 20 pounds. But strangely, what emerged from the whole experience once it was finally over was a metamorphosis of sorts. I re-emerged as if I had been living in an alternate world. I saw so many things clearly now. I deserved a really beautiful pair of butterfly wings.

Because I had been so sick, I now understood how wonderful it is to feel well. I had been so complacent before. I had so easily put things off for some later time. Now, because I had to face that I could die, I found the strongest desire to live life, to go, to do, to experience, to see things!

Maybe the thing to appreciate about the whole experience is the metamorphosis: the rising of oneself from the depths of feeling sick and sorry for yourself and unable to move, to the heights of just feeling good again. Just plain ol’ every day good. It’s a metamorphosis of appreciation and surviving, of body and really of self too. It’s cliche and it’s profound.

So what’s your situation? Huh? Waiting for those kids to get older before you take that trip? Feeling like you can’t spend a little money to learn to tap dance, even though you think you might be pretty good at it? Geez, do you need me to grab your shoulders and shake you up? I hate to have to say it, but life might be shorter than you are anticipating. Now is the time my friend. Now.

These days, when I wake up, I focus on how good I feel, how lucky I am to be feeling that way, and it truly makes my heart soar with happiness. I’ve learned so much, and realize that so many good things have emerged from the bad. Life is good. This is my after life. Life AFTER cancer. There’s lots of living to do. Gonna go get myself a pair of tap shoes!

Happy New Year!  I am very excited about this year! I am turning 50 and I am truly embracing it! Here is a video about my plans for this year:

Click here to view the embedded video.

The t-shirt I am wearing in the video was given to me by ndy (Not Done Yet) creator, Carol April. I LOVE this t-shirt because this is exactly how I feel about turning 50 – I am generation-ageless! And, as Carol says “We are the generation that brought you Rock ‘n Roll, Earth Day and put the man on the moon, but we are Not Done Yet!”

We are the generation that, at this midlife age, has never looked or felt better. We have dreams and goals that challenge us and we plan on accomplishing them. Plus, this truly is the time in our life when we want to have fun. So, why not wear your new mantra on a t-shirt that says – among some of the clever choices – ‘Not Done Yet’, ‘live-agelessly’ or ‘Not Dead Yet’.  Each t-shirt, thermal or tank top, is manufactured in the USA and, for every shirt sold, a portion of sales proceeds goes to support Cancer and Alzheimer’s research.

So, go ahead, make a statement and let everyone know that you are Not Done Yet!  To purchase your t-shirt got to the ndy online store. These make a great milestone birthday gift. I know I am stocking up!

One of the things I did was join the Taproot Foundation, an organization that matches business professionals with nonprofit organizations, providing them with essential business services on a pro-bono basis. For example, my team’s “client” was a statewide housing coalition that advocates for the availability of decent and affordable housing (such an essential service in these times). Their challenge was that their original brand message was quite complicated and did not translate well to their audience. Our Taproot team’s mandate was to re-engineer the brand strategy so that the organization could more easily explain its purpose and mission to its audience and thus facilitate its ability to raise funds and attract and retain members.

Click here to view the embedded video.

It was definitely a very gratifying experience to put my professional experience to work in order to help our client’s very worthy cause. In the process, while working with my Taproot team members, I also connected with some people that became true friends and enabled me to get grounded in my new community.

The Taproot Foundation provides non-profit organizations with access to the “luxury” of business services that are not ordinarily financially available to them in the areas of marketing, human resources, strategic management, design, or information technology. Obtaining these services, or I should say, the result of the services obtained can have a huge impact on how these nonprofits can increase their efficiencies and their reach to multiply the good of the work they do in their communities.

The Taproot Foundation is always on the lookout for professionals to help. Typically, a project will take about 6 months to complete and require a personal time contribution of about 3-5 hours a week. Quite doable. Go here to apply. It’s a rich and satisfying experience plus it looks really good on a resume.

P.S: You might want to search for other such organizations in your area or in your specific line of work. For example, Epic in Chicago pairs professional creative volunteers in the areas of design & advertising for its nonprofit clients.

It’s so cliché to do an article about the New Year, and yet clichés are clichés for a reason – because of the wisdom those formulas hold.

As the year draws to a close, you will find yourself naturally reviewing the year and remembering what you “wished” to accomplish. I believe review and reflection is good for the Soul. Judgment is not and we tend to judge what we did or didn’t do this year.

The first step of transformation is to make a different choice. So let’s help you create some different choices around how you close one year and start another one.

Year in Review

Let’s start with the highlights. Create a list of the following:

• What are some of the moments that make you still smile when you think about them?
• What were some of your accomplishments this year?
• What are some of the compliments that you received this year?

Search your memory banks and how you were feeling just before or as those big moments were happening? Some of those emotions could be joy, confidence, love, full of fun, happy, etc. (see chart below).

Feelings and Experience

We tend to think that the experience creates the feelings, but the big spiritual concept is the reverse – the feelings create the experience. Whatever you wish to experience this year, the key is to start with the feeling of that experience and you will attract situations that reinforce those emotions.

The big question for 2012 is, “What do you wish to experience, love, joy, abundance, prosperity, etc.?” Most of us answer this question with our minds, when the real answer lies is in the heart.

I suggest conducting the exercise below to really determine what your Soul and Heart truly wish to experience in 2012.

Take a deep breath and focus on your tailbone (this allows the mind to follow the heart) and write the answer to the question below:

“What does my Soul and heart wish to experience in 2012?”

Co-creating with the Divine

Now, ask yourself how committed you are to this experience. Do you believe it is possible? Are you willing to feel joy, love, and prosperity everyday in every tiny occurrence to create this experience?

Often there isn’t room in our lives for more joy, love, abundance because we tend to think and feel in limitations. So the question for you about 2012 is, “What are you willing to let go of in order to make room for more of what you truly desire (some examples are: fear, doubt, struggle)?” Remember, you don’t have to know how you are going to let go. Just by bringing awareness and writing it down, things are already changing. (see chart)

Creating Your Commitment to Yourself

I suggest you start the New Year with an affirmation, a saying that you can turn to when you are wavering in your commitment to experience the year that you desire. An affirmation is a statement that starts with I AM and is in present positive tense. Some examples are below:

I am experiencing a year of joy and harmony

I am experiencing a year of prosperity and joy

I am experiencing a year of love and balance

It’s Your Year! Your Choice!

Your life is your own.  Each moment is a new option for you to experience actually what you desire.  It’s up to you!

If you follow my video posts here at The Succulent Wife, you know I’ve been having a midlife crisis. But hooray! As 2011 winds down, I now declare it officially over. Yes, my big 5-0 birthday creeps ever nearer and my son is heading off to college in the fall, but since I’ve addressed many of the issues that come with this age and life stage, I have to say I’m feeling damn good.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Middle age can be a sweet, sexy, and liberating time of life. Check out this short video where I pass on a few straight tips (including one about hormones) to make your midlife transition more satisfying – whenever it occurs. In the meantime, have a happy New Year!

Editor’s Note: To follow Marjie’s “My Midlife Crisis” adventures, visit her Midlife Crisis posts right here on The Succulent Wife or read more of her midlife-centric trials & tribulations on her blog at FortyFabulous.Blogspot.com.

Thank you to 2nd.MD for providing me with a $200 stipend to test-drive this revolutionary online medical service.
Some of the best ideas stem from personal necessity and 2nd.Md definitely fits this criteria. The founder, Cliff Phillips, and his wife needed to speak to an expert regarding their youngest child’s health issue when she was only four months old. They had to wait six agonizing weeks to meet with a specialist. It was because of this experience that Phillips knew that there had to be a way for patients to immediately ‘meet’ with a specialist one-on one via the internet. As he explains in the video, this is how 2nd.MD came to fruition:

Click here to view the embedded video.

I was intrigued to discover this for myself.  Having suffered from Perimenopausal symptoms for almost a year now, I have been looking for solutions for my insomnia, night sweats, weight gain, irritability and just plain moodiness. I have done some research on hormone replacement therapy (HRT) and, the more I learned the more confused I became with all the conflicting information out there. I jumped at the offer to speak to a Board Certified Gynecologist who specializes in perimenopause and menopause. I chose Dr Kent Bruice who was knowledgeable, easy to talk to, dispelled some myths and gave me enough information to confidently talk to my own doctor about HRT.

Although 2nd.MD is only a year old, the list of hyper niche experts in the various medical fields is, to be quite honest, impressive. Some of the top US doctors are listed. More than 150 nationally recognized specialists from top medical institutions such as the Mayo Clinic and Johns Hopkins have been selected to join 2nd.MD.

It is easy to book a 20 minute appointment and talk to a doctor, from anywhere, through an online video or by phone, without delay. Simply state your medical issue, whether it is a disease, medical procedure or symptoms, and a list of doctors will be suggested for you. Each Doctor shows their curriculum vitae, allowing the patient to whittle down the list to the one doctor that would best fit their needs. If you are not sure which doctor would best advise you, you are able to ask them a question for free. Once you have decided make an appointment, you can send your medical history documents to the chosen doctor prior to the appointment in order to them to understand your needs by the time of the appointment.

Although medical insurance is not accepted and the second opinion is out-of-pocket, you are one-on-one with some of the most knowledgeable specialists in their field. A very small price to pay. One patient was told by his doctor that he was going to lose his eyesight. He spoke to one of 2nd.MD’s doctors who specializes in vision loss and received this timely second opinion that saved his sight.

Thank you again to 2nd.MD for sponsoring this blog post. Please click here to learn more about 2nd.MD.  2nd.MD is also on Facebook and Twitter. I was selected for this sponsorship by the Clever Girls Collective. All opinions are my own. #Clever2ndMD #spon

	UNICEF – Every year my mother would buy UNICEF Christmas cards as a way of supporting all their global efforts. UNICEF has changed a great deal since then. They now also offer a beautiful array of gifts such as as this Genuine Pearl Necklace ($48.00), this Men’s Alpaca Scarf ($40.00), Children’s Gifts and unique Christmas Ornaments ($22.00). See their entire line of beautiful gift ideas here. In addition, companies, such as, Disney, Gucci, and IKEA are also doing their part to end preventable childhood deaths and have partnered with UNICEF this holiday season. Check out their gifts here.
	Fair Trade USA – When something as simple as the purchase of a chocolate bar, a bag of coffee or a bar of soap can send a child to school or bring clean water to a village for the first time, why would we even look at buying these products anywhere else? Fair Trade USA is making a difference in the lives of farmers and workers around the world. Shop here for great gift ideas and here for the people that are hard to buy for.
	Sustainable Kids – Buy an item (or two) from Sustainable Kids and it will arrive in a gift box which then can be filled with items such as, toothbrushes, tooth paste, flip flops, books and so on, for kids in Haiti. The box is postage-paid, so once it is filled just drop it in the mail. This is a great way to teach our children the importance of giving back.  Shop here.
	Prosperity Candles – We mention this organization in last year’s Fair Trade Gift Guide, but they are worth mentioning again. Prosperity Candles has expanded from just candles to candle accessories and gift baskets. Buy a gift and change a women’s life who has been displaced by war, political unrest or natural disasters.

And, here are some other companies that we love to support as they endeavor to each make a difference in the lives of people in need:

Laga Bags – Each bag is unique and hand sewn by Tsunami Survivors in Indonesia.
SchoolBagforKids – With every school bag purchase, another school bag with supplies goes to a child in need.
SittingTallerKids – With every purchase is one step closer to ending human trafficking.

Need more ideas? Take a look at last’s year’s gift guide titled “Impossible-to-buy-for Gift Guide“. In it, we mention organizations such GlobalGirlfriend.com (liberate a girl from a lifetime of servitude), Kiva, and Heifer International, all of which work at improving our world in their own way.

It does not take much to make this planet a better place. So, what did you buy?