When I think of health, I think of whole health. What makes us healthy beings stretches far beyond nutrition and exercise and down to the depths of all the parts that keep us in balance.

Recently, I’ve been pondering how the pieces of the whole health puzzle are so interconnected. I think of Dr. Lissa Rankin’s whole health cairn. A cairn, if you aren’t familiar, is one of those rock figures like the one to the left where each stone rests on the next. In Lissa’s model, our inner pilot light (the heart of who we really are) is the base and sexuality is nestled up a few levels next to creativity. As I move through each day making every attempt to address each of the stones in the cairn in my own life, it occurs to me that sexuality is a subject I’ve never written about here.

I’m not entirely sure why other than it just hadn’t really factored into my idea of what whole health means. I think I thought of it as separate–something to be considered outside our daily health program. The more I think about it, though, the more I think it deserves our attention and can get lost in the hustle of the rest of the list. We are sexual beings so it only makes sense that our sexuality factor into our daily regime.

At one point about ten years ago, I told my husband we were way behind the French because I had read some study that said the French had sex way more than we were doing it. We tried to keep up. It was exhausting. Or then there’s the woman I recently saw on “Good Morning, America” that made it her goal to have sex every day for a year, wrote a book, then drug her husband on GMA to discuss it. He looked wiped out.

That’s not the kind of daily attention I’m talking about.

Not like the way I grew up necessarily either. Mine was the house where everybody came to find out what felatio meant because my step-father insisted on showcasing Everything You Want to Know About Sex But Didn’t Want to Ask in our livingroom along with his Playboys. I thought everybody did that for the longest time and didn’t figure out it was creepy until my teens when he had moved out. I still remember my friends reading Judy Blume’s sexuality breakout middle grade novel and running to my house to crack open the big blue book. We were the best sexually educated kids around.

I’m also not talking about toys and tools necessarily, though no judgment there if you like that sort of thing. When I was in New York last year at a media event, I made friends with a woman named Ellen Eatough who is a Sexual-Spiritual Teacher and Counselor in Mill Valley. I helped her with her pitch for her sex cds. I coined the term “auditory pheromones.” She liked that so much she gave me a 4-CD collection  called 4 Keys to Sexual Ecstasy which culminates in “entrainment” music which claims to intensify lovemaking. My husband and I listened to the techniques of the various parts, but honestly it’s like taking dance lessons: unless you practice those steps right after class, you’re likely going to forget them at the wedding. It was a thoughtful gift, but mostly we’re just making sure it’s not sitting out when my son’s friends come over to the house.

What I think I’m talking about is consciously understanding that sexuality (played out alone or with a partner) is a component of overall health that can’t be ignored and that we would do well to embrace. Our bottom chakras (root and sacral) are what ground us to the earth. Known as the energy centers concerning sex and creation, it’s important to keep these bad boys open and flowing. When we do that, we’re happier, healthier, and more able to do the things we came here to do.