I talk a lot in my workshop about how to live a conscious, mindful life, and a lot of that “teaching what I’m learning” involves how to live on this planet with less impact on the environment. The more closely I look at “walking my talk” in this area, however, the more I realize how far we are from how we would ideally like to live.

A friend of mine runs a non-profit educational group called the Post Carbon Institute, based in Vancouver. When we visited him last year, I hadn’t seen him for several years. We met at a restaurant. He and his wife and baby son arrived on bicycles. It turned out they are now vegetarians, not for ethical reasons, as many are, but more for environmental/energy conservation reasons.

Sex. Possibly the most loaded word in any language, and with good reason. Sex reaches deep down into who we are at our core, and tells truths about us that are undeniable. Freud tapped into this over a century ago, and his insights still reverberate across the decades, and did a lot to break apart the rigid taboos against talking about sex that are a legacy from the Victorian culture.

And yet most of us grew up with very little honest talk about sex, and very little guidance from our parents in this area. This is a real shame – it means we have to fumble around (both literally and figuratively!) learning about this most basic of energies all on our own.

This is one of the toughest things for me to do, and since the whole thrust of the Lifetools venture is to “teach what I’m learning”, I thought it was time I shared with you my thoughts on driving. In these days of “road rage”, I think it is more important than ever that we drive with civility, and that we are “in flow” when we drive.

Since I live in Sedona, a tourist town which is also a retirement community, I’m often stuck behind slow-moving cars, driven either by tourists oblivious to anything except (a) natural beauty and (b) the fact that they don’t know where they’re going or (c) they can’t find a parking space, or old folks who feel unsafe at speeds higher than 20 m.p.h. This is a great test of patience.

Sometimes, I find myself feeling actual ...