Do you love or hate the holiday season?

That might depend on what’s happening with your spouse or lover, right?

If you’re married or with a partner but you still feel empty and unfulfilled, then the holidays are just a swamp of piled-on activities, plodding tasks, pressures, expectations, and overlapping dramas – and it all feels so….mandatory, and inconvenient, and intrusive.

Is that you?

If your holidays are a stressful slog, but you can’t put your finger on the problem – well, I just might know:

Dopamine.

It could be that you’re hooked on the stuff, and you don’t even know it – and this hidden addiction is all that stands in your way, between you and the holiday spirit.

Here are the facts you need:

Dopamine is a brain chemical that helps control the brain’s reward and pleasure centers; it also helps regulate emotional responses.

So when you’re longing for something, or even just wanting – a toy, a sushi roll, a social interaction, a loving touch – that whole process consists of flooding your brain with dopamine:

First the neediness, then the anticipation, and then finally: the attaining…getting a present, expecting a phone call…planning for sex…

These endless perpetual overlapping cycles self-generate all day and all night, through even the most mundane life activities.

Social media is a perfect example: whenever you keep checking your phone compulsively for new messages, or “likes,” or just scroll endlessly looking for something interesting – that’s you fiending for that dopamine “hit.”

In other words, dopamine is associated with addiction: the whole compulsive activity-reward-activity-reward-over-and-over mindless wanting…and you probably know that once the addictive cycle starts, it takes more and more to satisfy that endless black hole…

But even more importantly, this whole dopamine cycle isn’t just about the moment of reward – it includes the “build-up” as well: the act of driving to the “reward’s” location, or preparing the food before you eat it; of taking the works out of the secret drawer; of getting your chips and claiming your seat at the slot machine…or of looking down at your phone before you pick it up to check it….

In other words, not living in the “now” but in the future…and then – once the reward is delivered –  experiencing sensation as a form of absence –  an escape from being fully present and alive, letting this autonomous dopamine process take on a soul-destroying life of its own – again, not really being “now.”

But what does this have to do with you, and the holidays, and your love relationship?

Everything.

Our society, our culture, has trained us to base our sense of fulfillment, of “rightness” on external phenomenon: on acquiring experiences and objects, on checking items both big and small off the list…

The stuff of life, right?

No – the stuff of living.

One of my great teachers, Barry Long, often spoke of the difference between living and life.

Living is activity. But life is love:

Love as fully present consciousness. Love as your nature, your essential state of being.

Love as the energy and the stillness that you and your partner share with each other, through expressions of touch and vocal tones, and radiating energy of attention, and awareness, and admiration, and appreciation.

All the holiday gatherings, all those to-do lists, and activities – if your life is full of them, but you do not feel the love inside of you, glowing peaceably like a pilot light – then you are stuck on a cycle of positive or negative reward that will endlessly occupy you but never truly fulfill you –

Even if your partner is right by your side the whole time.

And so right now, you need to call or text or grab your partner and say “Thank you for being in my life! I love you!” And from there keep opening more deeply, more sincerely, then ever before…

If this is something that is hard or unusual for you, then try this:

Think of a way that you love, or admire, or respect, or are grateful for your partner…find the place within you that feels that way…and speak from that place, put it into words:

“I am so thankful that you…”

“That is so cool that you…”

“That is so awesome that you…”

And feel the real feelings – the vulnerability, perhaps the awkwardness, perhaps the melting away of your hard defenses…

Touch them from that place, be with them in that space…

But if this is something you simply cannot comfortably do, please know that you will find the solution to feeling unfulfilled when you are ready to take the inner journey to create this connection with your partner, which is a process that people like me can help you with…

And which starts when you find the real love that is hidden like a treasure within your being – the deepest truth of who you are…

Which is also something I can help you with…

And when you find this, then all the infinite spinning hamster wheels, of dopamine-seeking, and never-quite-rewarding rewards, will break down and burn in the fire of your freedom, and wash far away in the ocean of love…

Meanwhile all the pressures and strains of the holiday season will dissolve in the light of your radiant essence…as sex becomes, not an activity in the future that you need, but an expression, in the now, of the living love that you always feel within…and that you and your partner share each moment, always together, even when physically separate…