Intimacy and connection enable us to express our love to our partner and foster our feeling of being truly loved by our partner. Intimacy implies 100% trust. With the walls and barriers down, we can be comfortable being who we are. But, unless we are exactly who we are, how can we connect?

It won’t feel true unless both partners are authentic. One cannot be an actor. Impersonating another preferred version of yourself will make it impossible to form a connection. To connect, we must let the mask we wear for society slip off and show our true faces and feelings.

Once we have put our devices down and looked into our partner’s eyes or touched their warm skin, our connection has a fertile ground to grow in. We may begin our loving practice by looking deep into each other’s eyes.

That gazing into the other may evolve into a long, still embrace. This could possibly keep moving towards a place where having sex feels like the perfect expression of our feelings of intimacy. Or perhaps we just gaze into one another’s eyes, and that’s enough. Whatever is true for us in that moment.

Your Practice of Loving can progress and grow in a variety of ways. Whatever you decide to practice, the main goal is to feel loved by your partner and for our partner to feel loved back. The end result is bringing more love into your life and relationship.

...our digital life has crippled us in our ability to connect with a living, breathing human. Sometimes, the situation seems more accurate and valid than we would like to believe. Looking at our phones, we can appear to be present, but in actual fact, we are somewhere else, disconnected, in our own digital world.

Because of our lost ability to create physical and emotional intimacy, the way forward to having beautiful connections again is to start with some tried and true Practices of Loving. Then, we can put down our mobile devices, end our starvation, and bring more love into our lives if that’s what we want.

It’s essential to think of them as everyday actions, not as optional, once-in-a-while things. These Practices of Loving are equal to, if not more important than, our daily necessities of brushing our teeth, eating, or taking a shower. Doing these practices – a few minutes here, a few minutes there – will help you the most if you keep them a top priority in your daily life.

When beginning the Practice of Gazing, it’s helpful to understand that gazing differs from staring. Staring is focusing on a point. Gazing is a soft, liquid focus. It’s the way we look at the night sky without really focusing on one point. Or, during the day, we sometimes gaze at the puffy, white cumulus clouds as they float across the deep blue sky.

An excellent way to start your gazing practice is to just gaze at yourself in the mirror. As you gaze, drop into feelings of love, appreciation, or respect. Let these feelings make you feel good about yourself.


Then do the real thing and practice with your significant other. Ask or invite them to receive your gaze of love for a few moments and let themselves feel loved. That’s all.

This Practice of Caring Touch is recommended because we humans ALL have a core need to feel a quality touch from one another. This is about a fundamental human need and not about sex.

We are talking about a moment when a warm hand lands on your shoulder and begins to caress you, with no expectation. Or a caring touch, lightly caressing your neck, perhaps lifting your hair just a little. The kind of touch that feels warm and loving.

As you become more adventurous in this practice, you can try things like warming a little olive or coconut oil for 5 seconds in the microwave. Then, rubbing your partner’s feet as their feet lay on a towel in your lap.

There is no need to be a professional. Put your caring heart into it and you both will feel more connected.

If you want to really deepen the connection with your partner, you can try this when they’re just waking up in the morning and lying on their side. With their back towards you, take some warmed up oil, and start massaging their back. Let them wake up to 5 or 10 minutes of a back and neck rub. They will feel the connection to you all day after that!

The idea is to give your beloved’s body, heart, and soul the physical, tangible message that they are loved. Expressing that in words is great, but the words don’t come close to the actual physical feeling of being loved.