Connecting as a couple

Ways to connect as a couple in your relationship~ 1. Soul Gazing To engage in soul gazing, face each other in a seated position with your knees close to touching and hold eye contact for 3-5 minutes. Yes, you are allowed to blink. Yes, it may feel slightly awkward for the first 1-2 minutes if you’ve never tried this before. And yes, you should avoid talking during the exercise. If the quiet is too uncomfortable for you, choose a 4-5 minute song and commit to holding the eye contact for the duration of the song. In a world that is increasingly trying to grab our attention and distract us, this connection exercise is sure to efficiently re-spark the home fires. Doing this a few times per week will give you that slowed down connection you and your partner are looking for. 2. Extended Cuddle Time So simple, yet so often ignored. What is your bedtime routine? Do you distract yourselves with cell phones, laptops, or books? Do you rationalize that using those things helps you get to sleep? Well, the happy chemicals that get released in your brain from cuddling and/or sex help you get to sleep even easier. Whether it’s close to your collective bedtime or not, having an extended cuddle session a few times per week does wonders for your intimate relationship. A few of my clients cuddle to a certain music playlist that they know is a specific length of time (often 20-30 minutes) as their daily required minimum of physical affection. But that’s what works for them. What would you like to see change in your bedtime routine? Think about it, talk to your partner about it, and then incorporate it into your lives as a non-negotiable connection habit. 3. The 7 Breath Forehead Connection Exercise This one sounds slightly woo-woo, new-agey… but trust me… IT. IS. AWESOME! Whether you’re lying on your sides or sitting upright, face each other directly and gently touch your foreheads together. Put your chins down slightly so your noses aren’t quite touching (it’s okay if they touch a bit but touching noses is not necessary for this exercise). With your foreheads touching, breathe seven deep, slow breaths in sync with your partner. Similar to the eye contact exercise the first one or two breaths might feel like they’re taking up a lot of conscious thought, but by the third or fourth breath it will feel like a very natural thing to do. This exercise isn’t limited to seven breaths (you can keep going for several minutes if you’d like) but I find that seven breaths is the perfect minimum number of breaths for couples to really drop in to the moment and feel connected. If you and your partner are overachievers who like extra homework you can absolutely do this exercise for several minutes if you feel so inclined. How can eye contact create that kind of intimacy? A Japanese study published in the journal Neuroimage provides a clue be looking inside the brain during a staring contest. It seems that eye contact actually synchronizes brain activity between two people. The researchers (who, it should be noted, were examining what's going on in the brain during normal face-to-face eye contact—the kind you grant your manager when she's talking to you, and less the deep getting-lost-in-your-partner's-eyes) paired up 96 strangers and had them maintain eye contact under various conditions while MRIs examined their brain activity. They found that people synchronized their blinking and fired up their right inferior front gyrus once they'd established eye contact. The findings suggest that mutual eye contact binds two people into a "singular connected system," the authors write. "Based on the enhancement of behavioural and neural synchronization during mutual gaze, we now know that shared attention is hard to establish without eye contact," Norihiro Sadato, senior study author, told Psych Central. In other words, when you and your partner share a loving look, you don't just feel more in sync—your brains are literally syncing up their firing.

How Sweet is connection 💚

Ps the photo shows a Tantric pose I teach in my Tantra sessions. ❤️