How to Keep Small Conflicts from Getting Big: An Embodied Communication Course (In Person & On-Line)
I hope you will join me for ~EITHER~ a live class on Sunday June 2nd in Port Hadlock or a virtual session on the afternoon of Tuesday June 4th to learn how addressing conflict directly and from a grounded place can actually deepen and grow the trust across all of your relationships. Email DrTartaro@gmail.com to register.
All Ears On Deck: A Simple Tool for Listening In Times of Sorrow
This week, in light of the recent school shooting and the abundance of pain, frustration, and horror that has cloaked our country like a gritty silt, I wanted to revisit one of my favorite topics: how to listen to one another. Think of this show like a “how to” for a basic building block of listening.
How to Free Up the Flow When Your Relationship Gets Stuck
This week I’m going to explore the experience of relationships getting “stuck” and how to come back to flow. By “getting stuck”, what I’m referring to is when you have things unsaid from a moment in time that came before and you can’t fully move on from that previous moment. That’s the sticking agent - the unsaid thing.
No, You Can’t Have My Tangerine: The Dance of Boundaries
While I was in Hawaii, I paid a lot of attention to my boundaries, including where they were respected and where they were not. Which I do normally anyway. Learning to set and honor my boundaries is a big part of how I've been healing my history of trauma. From my travels, one particular incident stands out.
Why Transitioning Gently Back to Connection Matters
“Just moving on '' after the worst of the pandemic poses major risks to our quality of life and capacity to connect. When you have the courage to slow down and honor what you just went through, you can retrieve and re-integrate the parts of you that got “stuck” in the stressors of the last two years.
Self Pleasuring Your Way to Freedom Part 2: My Body Is A Fiesta
In this blog, I delve into the importance of a self-pleasure practice and specify steps you can take to create or deepen your practice. It takes courage to talk about this - and read about it! I'm grateful you're here.
Masks Coming Off
Since the mask mandate was lifted in Washington on March 11th, the world is slowly beginning to re-open. It would be tempting to put the stressors of the last two years behind us. Yet when we "forget" we do a great injustice to the health of our hearts and minds. How do we transition gently while honoring what just happened?
Self Pleasuring Your Way to Freedom: Part 1
Most people feel some shame about masturbation. Yet self-pleasuring is a powerful way to know what your body wants. In this blog, I tell the story of how I met the Grandmother of Masturbation and invite you to reflect on your earliest messages about your body’s pleasure.
So What Exactly Do I Do When I’m Feeling Overwhelmed?
In the moments when your feelings are bigger than you can handle, it’s important to have options. In this blog, I share three “go to” principles to practice both when you most need it and especially in the times when you don’t.
You’re Not The Only One Who Is Feeling F*cked Up
When we only show our outsides to each other, we can feel alone. In this blog, I show you my insides and give you permission to do the same and to feel how connected we truly are.
Gratitude Is Not For Sissies: The Power of Saying Thank you to Love
Opening with gratitude when love touches you can shake you to your core. Gratitude is not for sissies. In this blog, I explain why and offer you practices for growing your capacity to use the embodied "thank you" to let love deeply in.
Let’s Get Married! / This Will Never Work! What the Roller Coaster of Early Relating Is Showing You About Love
When you start to get what you want in love, a whole new challenge arises – the opportunity to learn to live life at a higher voltage. In this episode, I offer you practices for expanding gradually so you can receive what you want without getting in your own way.
Can We Find Compassion for Even The Worst Behavior – In Them & In Us?
The ability to respond with forgiveness and understanding in a world that is teaching us to fight and condemn feels Divine. In this essay, I reflect on what it means to me to become better than my own history of trauma in order to heal myself and the world around me.
How to Have the Best 2-Minute Make Out Ever
This practice is totally about making out, but about so much more, too. It’s about allowing yourself to be in full pleasure with what is, rather than finding what’s missing and focusing on what isn’t. Be warned, this is an advanced practice. And the more vulnerable you feel, the harder it will be. It can also multiple the happiness quotient in your relationship by one hundred-fold. I’m excited to show you how.
Healing Your Desire So That You Can Ask for What You Want
I’m going to begin by stating the obvious. In order to ask for it – whatever “it” is - you have to have some clue about what you want. For example, when placing an order at a restaurant, you are expected to specify, “I would like beef curry, spice level 3 with a side of brown rice”. If you don’t know what you want, when the waiter shows up at your table, you’re going to have a very tough time getting fed that evening.
What Happened When Some Guy Recently Tried to Flirt With Me
It’s exceedingly rare these days that I get hit on. Between infrequently leaving the house, a steady decline in my hygiene since 2020 and the fact that I broadcast “happily married” in my every step, I’ve almost forgotten what it feels like. So yesterday afternoon when the guy in the co-op parking lot started flirting with me, it was like a lost art waking from a winter slumber.
Why Telling Your Partner the Truth Can Be So Scary
Across my private practice, I have recently been hearing about your hesitation and sometimes outright paralysis when it comes to telling your partner what you actually think, feel and need. In this show, I want to normalize why that can feel so scary as well as explore the impact of withholding truths on the aliveness of your love.
Hands in the Dirt: How to Grow Community
In this episode, I’m going to share with you two, simple practices I have been honing for years on how to start community in the hopes that you will join me in rolling up your sleeves, getting your hands dirty and getting to work filling some of those gaps.
More Together Than Alone: The Role of Community in Healing Change
Individual therapy is important. But it will never alone fill the needs that community so powerfully meets. We need the village more than ever. In this episode I explain how being a part of a healthy community, in addition to doing your personal work, is key for activating our blueprint for health.
Why Words Are Essential to Love Making
This episode is about the importance of talking to one another during love making and all the many ways that communication in sex is vital for increasing the pleasure and deepening the connection. Something most people never learned.
It’s Not If You Get Triggered, It’s How You Clean It Up
Happy new year! I pray the new year has begun in peace for you. Though I happen to know, because you have told me, that for many of you it hasn’t. This episode is about all the friction that has been happening lately - in couples, in families and across community.
My Anti-Climactic Sexual Secret Revealed
This episode is my fiftieth installment of “Under 10”, marking a full year since the birth of this podcast. You could certainly call this a climactic moment. In celebration of the momentous occasion, this week I’m going to reveal to you a personal sexual secret.
How to be A Friend to a Therapist: Life One Year into the Pandemic
If you have therapists and other mental health professionals in your networks of friends and family, there are a few things worth keeping in mind about how to be a friend to the folks who are quietly holding together the sanity of our country, one video session at a time.
Since I Want to Live Fully, I Must Learn to Die Well
"Fall apart fast and die well", she urged. All I could do was jot the phrase down in my notes and breathe.
LET’S TAKE RISKS TOGETHER THIS VALENTINE’S DAY
Though I am not a fan of the commercial holiday, I like the idea of using February 14th as a loving kick in the pants to inspire us to take emotional risks. To try out saying what's true, to admit our vulnerabilities and to reveal our insides more to the outside world.