Author: Todd Vickers

How to question love ideals | By Todd Vickers at Vivriti.org

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Love ideals

Intimate relationships and love ideals are a touchy topic anywhere, but the consequences of marriage, relationship breakups, and vengeance for rejection should make us willing to scrutinize our beliefs.  Ideals should not blind us to facts. In some countries, divorce is almost impossible due to the force of custom, but custom itself does not make any belief true. Love ideals tend to hide when the ideals are merely self-serving and when they, in fact, don’t serve us We forget concepts are mental and treat love… Read More

4 reasons a sense of wonder is important in a beautiful life

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Wonder

Wonder in a beautiful life | Todd Vickers via Vivriti.org “1. There can be no surprise without discovery. Discovery is like a free fall; a new understanding of something previously taken for granted; a surprise affection, something beautiful or new knowledge. With discovery we are thrust into the moment. The experience is vitalizing, it awakens our senses. Think of a child who first sees a butterfly, they chase it, its colors are so beautiful, it’s dance is so erratic. We can envision the child laughing… Read More

How to truthfully have intimate relationship | Todd Vickers via Vivriti.org

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intimate relationship

Excerpt: “…To be unaware of how we conceive intimate relationship leads to treating our questionable beliefs as fact. Let’s look at some problems and then solutions. Don’t become cynical in intimate relationship. Find those people who value the truth. On one hand, the hope for something better drives human discovery; meaning trial and error. On the other, unrealistic expectations suck the life out of our love. We can’t ignore the valuable experience of the past. But if we mistake our beliefs as evidence about ourselves,… Read More

Sex Impact – Indian Youth Suicide | Published at Vivriti.org

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Youth Suicide

Youth Suicide; more educated young people kill themselves in India, why? Todd Vickers looks at one part of the problem, the stifling of sexuality to conform with tradition. Remember the problem is youth suicide, not the emotional discomfort of  those who adhere to a custom. Let’s keep the priorities straight. “The truthfulness needed may go far beyond what our parents ever imagined. Every human advance today came about as an alternative to what went before, that process of advance is still ongoing. The conventional mind feels certainty… Read More

Sex Power – Media Offering Vicarious Pleasure

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What is sex power? It’s no trivial fact that almost every human being you meet  longs for sexual joy, and those who understand that fact have power. Unfortunately, shame, possessive-ness, questionable beliefs and the tendency to use people as a means place sex power in the hands of advertisers, religion, and people who are willing to take advantage or deceive. Our instinctive joy gets repeatedly associated with products like food or deodorant. To take back the usurped sex power requires more than talk, it requires risking an innovation, an… Read More

How to Find Your New Life | Todd writes for Vivriti.org

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Finding New Life

“How to find new life? You follow the impulses toward a better life, even when it’s hard. That is what I do, and it’s not easy but the alternative is a prison of routine and amusement seeking to avoid feeling dead. Remember the sprout struggles out of the seed. The chick struggles out of the shell, the bud struggles to open, the fledgling struggles on the edge of the nest, for the sky beckons. I’m sure it’s terrifying, those wings have never had the chance… Read More

Understanding Relationships Nurturing Love | Todd Vickers writes for Vivriti.org

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Understanding Relationships

Understanding relationships means understanding pain. This is vital if we wish to bring relief to useless suffering. To reduce useless pain is nurturing to love.  But what does that actually mean? Understand two sources of suffering. One source is fact based, some event like a toothache, the loss of someone loved, an abuse etc. The other suffering our mind generates, we make stuff up and believe it, like the real fear created when imagining you’ve lost your wallet when you’ve put it in another pocket and… Read More

Slut Shaming Cultural Differences | Todd Vickers writing at Vivriti.org

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slut shaming

Anyone involved in slut shaming does not want girls to have freedom, to wear whatever they want, to like whoever they like (including boys), to speak boldly etc., whatever excuse these ‘perhaps’ well-meaning people offer, they indulge in power over girls when they use shame. This shame is an abuse. We can train a cat to fear a mouse by shocking it with loud noise when we expose it to a mouse. A cat becomes conditioned to expect the shock and fear, it learns to run away from a mouse when it sees one…. Read More

How to improve our love

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No Shame in Sex

How to improve our love? First let’s begin with a short alagory to set the tone ‘When born into a den of thieves, a Buddha learns to steal.’   We’re born into a Machiavellian world of love songs, stories, religion, ads, movies, half-truths and falsehoods about love. How to improve our love after we’ve tasted so much failure? If there were no creativity in love, we would be loving like our ancestors. When expectations arise from the past, the pain of any flawed beliefs we must… Read More

Todd Vickers writing at Vivriti.org – Freedom – Women’s day

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What is Freedom A donkey chooses to pursue a carrot dangled in front of its face and thereby pulls the farmers cart. That isn’t what we mean by freedom. The donkeys choice is constrained by bondage. The denial of alternatives let’s us know it is something far less than freedom…. Read more at Vivriti.org   Read More

Love wants to live

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We want love. Many of us will say that it’s one of the most important things in our lives. Love wants to live! When we distinguish what we see in relationships from our sentiment ABOUT relationships, it seems that a great deal of what passes for love rests on fear: practical fears, fear of the unknown, fear of being alone. People confuse agreeable circumstances with love. We like sex, money, amusements, and leisure. Those things are worth having, but they are not love. Sometimes, people… Read More

Renouncing the limits of love | Todd Vickers on Vivriti.org

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Why aren’t we renouncing loves limits? “Who do you know who does not place a boundary around his love? We are afraid others will use us and that our desire for love makes us foolish. In deference to this fear, we try to be smart and use others in the name of love for our own ends. We become what we fear and keep things hidden from our mates, especially the secrets that…”  Read more at Vivriti.org Read More

Leaving dead relationships

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Let’s start leaving dead relationships. Some people hold love hostage. Hiding behind a mask, they threaten to kill love if another doesn’t submit to spoken or unspoken demands. Sometimes a piece of love is cut off, a warning, just to prove that they are serious. Only the mind perpetrates such terrorism, mind with its boundless expectations. Such people will never set love free. Any love that once was alive will probably be killed. Regardless, such a relationship might continue to last, even for a lifetime…. Read More

Slut shaming on social networks

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Since the January 21st Woman’s March, I’ve seen a lot of slut shaming on social networks. Memes with scantily clad celebrities who might hold views on non sexual issues like the scientific consensus on climate change or the US accepting of political refugees. They may also state opinions on the right to comprehensive sex education, birth control, and legal abortion. Such women in the limelight were often also insisting on defending sexual consent after the ‘grab em by the pussy’ scandal with Donald Trump. Such… Read More

Lovers in friendship vs. being a player

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I use the phrase ‘friendly sex’ because the term ‘casual sex‘ is cliché, and leads to confusion. I suggest a lovers friendship in consenting pleasure is better when we include higher qualities in the affection. These qualities are not a function of time, they can happen quickly, slowly, or not at all. More on this later. Such love exists outside of what many of us know from past experiences. Lack of experience limits our understanding – but NOT our capacity. We often hear love reduced to an stratagy for… Read More

My ever changing sexuality

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My ever changing sexuality really began as a teen, I grew my sexual legs in a free love community of spiritual seekers, my views of this ever changing sexuality are quite non-traditional. I know the world is far bigger than many people imagine it and that we need not be drugged to break out and experience it. That big world requires intelligence and extreme truthfulness to be harmless in the midst of changing sexuality. Some risk we can’t avoid, like handling food, if we’re not careless,… Read More

An allegory applied to relationships

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Imagination is risky when we fill in the unknown. Below is an ancient story I use as a relationship allegory that exposes the mistake of thinking we know when we don’t. “A man awakened before the sunrise. He decided to walk the path to work in the forest along the river in the dark. He walked the same path for years and he believed he knew it well enough to imagine the path in his mind as he walked. He began walking and it was beautiful listening to the river… Read More

Christians cut off a young girls clit in USA

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The reason to scrutinize religion is because religion can be terribly harmful. The example and it is not unique. The irrational fear that some religion instills around sex harms countless people. “A Christian doctor removed my clitoris when I was three years old as a ‘cure’ for masturbation, writes Renee Bergstrom”… Read more at The Guardian Read More

Bias in love

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If we’ve felt great pain in past relationships, we probably have some strong beliefs or biased love based on those impressions. How can we go beyond our past conclusions in new circumstances? If we believe ‘this’ about women and ‘that’ about men, the real events around us we see through those beliefs like a colored lens. If we don’t understand ‘my side bias,’ we won’t know when we create our own evidence e.g. questionable matters seem proof of past conclusions. Such beliefs often continue when contrary facts prove the beliefs flawed… Read More

Revenge porn | a betrayal of trust

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First Person Convicted Of “Revenge Porn” In Oregon Gets Jail Sentence “A 31-year-old Oregon man is going to jail for six months for revenge porn after he published sexual videos of an ex online. He’s the first person in the state convicted and sentenced for “revenge porn.” … Read more. Revenge porn is in part why I wrote. What we’ll do when we’re ‘turned on.’ Read More