I have a client at the moment who recently took a ‘marriage sabbatical’. At least, that’s what she and her husband called it.

A work sabbatical is traditionally when you take a break from your job to study something else for a while. The idea is that regular work is too full to focus on the study, so you have some time away, and come back to the job both with new and useful knowledge and a fresh spirit.

That’s what this client is doing with her marriage: she’s taking a month off to be away from her husband and all the expectations and pressures she feels (rightly or wrongly) from being in the marriage, in order to have the space to learn more about herself and what she wants and needs in her life and in her marriage.

(This is copy of a blog I wrote five years ago, hence some of the historical references.)

Here I am sitting in the depths of the jungle in northern Thailand, spending some time at a permaculture farm. Last weekend I was studying spiritual healing. Over Easter I attended the Xplore festival on alternate sexuality. Three quite different experiences, but all united: the sexuality, the spirituality and the connection to the environment.

What unites them? You, one, the individual. The individual is the basic unit and it is only through you that change happens, or doesn’t. It’s up to the individual to find their spiritual connection, their connection to the environment, and their connection to their sexuality.

The basic sexual unit is one.

You’d hardly think so, given our society’s obsession with couples. Not that I have anything against couples, pair-bonding is a normal human activity, and it is the social norm. The problem is two-fold:

The first is that people feel that they need to be in a couple to feel complete. This places enormous pressure on the other to live up to this expectation. Even the archbishop who married Will and Kate last week in his sermon said that one of the problems with modern... read more

Happy loving parents make for happy loving children, so it’s vital that as parents you make the time and space to be loving with each other.  A lot of people seem to feel it’s all too hard when you have children, so they have infrequent sex, if any at all.

It doesn't have to be that way though, not if you train your children to know that Mummy and Daddy need “Cuddle Time”.  

 I was honored once to give the reading at a friends’ wedding. They’d chosen a reading they liked, but wanted it ‘sexed up a bit’ - and who better to ask? Like most wedding readings it was beautiful and poetic and spoke all about love and commitment and sharing and respecting - all good and important aspects of marriage - but nothing about sex and intimacy. As my friends rightly said: “It’s our sexual connection that brought us together and it’s what makes our relationship unique - so we want that celebrated in our wedding ceremony too!”

So, in the reading, I pointed out that a marriage (or any long-term relationship) is like a tripod. It has three legs: friends, partners and lovers. When all three are strong, you have a strong relationship, when they’re wobbly or missing, so is your relationship. 

I’m back from running another gorgeous Couples Retreat in the Blue Mountains last weekend. I’m feeling all loved up myself from being surrounded by couples celebrating their love and honouring their sexuality as an expression of that love. It really is such a wonderful experience that I want to tell you all the good reasons to attend.

I was going to write this myself, and then I received this feedback from one couple who attended - and so I figured that rather than me waxing lyrical about it, it’d be much better for you to hear from the participants themselves!