Article Highlights:

• Just friends
• Sex friends
• Divine friends

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Dear reader/thinker friend,

After choosing the topic for this article, I was curious and googled “types of friends.” There were many opinions of course.  I was thinking about basic categories but most listed qualities of friends rather than types of friends.

For instance, one list included Fair weather friend, Fake friend, Fickle friend and For-now friend. Another listed: best friend, listener, the fun one, the loyal coworker, the wise one, crazy one, honest one, long-term one, gossipy one. I came across a list that added: fierce friend, family friend, work friend, the friend you admire.  And I found Aristotle’s rather short list of 3 types of friendships: friendships of pleasure, utility and of virtue. (more…)

Article Highlights:

• The Greek word for love between friends
• What is a friend?… your answer
• What is a friend?… my answer
• View the new videos on my website
• My book is available on Amazon

Some of you have been following my weekly article for many years and may vaguely recall a series I did in 2015 called Really Big Love and How to Have It. It was a 9 part series, the first several of which discussed and explored aspects of love, using some of the different words for love as understood in Grecian times.

Among the Greek words for love were Eros: romantic, passionate love; Lucus: playful, flirtatious love; Storge: unconditional, familial love; Philautia: self-love; Agape: Universal Love. 

One that I did not cover in that series was the love called Philia: intimate, authentic friendship.  This is friendship of a duration and type that has developed intimate familiarity – but without sexual intimacy.  It has deepened with time, challenge and attention into real abiding love.  

Relationships with this quality of Philia love offer the level of companionship, commitment, communication and mutual benefit found between life partners, without developing exclusivity or sexual exchange. (more…)

Imagine for a minute that I walk up to you, placing my hands on your shoulders and begin to push against you. Besides surprise, what is your likely response? Most of us shift our posture to brace ourselves and then push forward to keep from losing our balance, right?

This becomes a learned pattern – brace and resist. For some this is a vital survival pattern learned in childhood to avoid being controlled or overrun and it becomes very ingrained. That might be you.

Even if not, most of us still pick up this skill because life so often seems to be pushing at us and we feel the need to resist so we don’t lose balance. We brace ourselves and lean into it.

Now imagine again that I am still forcefully pushing against you, pushing down, and you are braced and resisting. Feel what that’s like in your body:
You set your stance, locking it in.
You set your hips and knees, perhaps crouch slightly,
You lean forward with your shoulders, your neck and back straining.
You pull your core energy into your solar plexus to give strength to both your stance and your upper torso so you don’t fall back, or lose ground, so you aren’t brought to your knees.

In fact as the pusher, I’m doing the same thing. I’m bracing to keep the pressure on. Whether we are more typically the pusher or the resister doesn’t matter, we are usually both at times. But as you know, doing this is fatiguing. Bracing drains the energy we’ve rallied to our core. We also must shield ourselves to conserve energy. (more…)