The Tantric Practice That Helped My Husband & Me Fall Back In Love

Remember in that first flush of romance, when you'd catch your beloved's eye across a crowded room and give a knowing smile? That visual contact was so loaded with passion, intimacy, and love back then, you'd have to look away. Probably blushing. Or at the very least excited about what would come later, that night and in life. You could literally feel your heart leap when they looked at you.

Nowadays, if you're like me and my man, not so much. You're too busy to stare lovingly into each other's eyes anymore. Coming up to 10 years of marriage with two children demanding our constant attention, my husband and I were only likely to glare at each other—over a wailing toddler's head, puddle of spilled milk, or a supermarket freezer chest—rather than gaze. And after the hassles of daily adulting, social media came next. We would spend more time looking at our phones than each other.

But if the eyes are the window to the soul, we needed to do better. So we took on a new practice I discovered while researching my book Forest Therapy: eye gazing.

Eye gazing, the practice of mindfully staring into someone's eyes, feels awkward at first—and still feels weird after a few attempts, I found. It kind of takes you back to the playground, to those days of staring competitions and "whoever blinks first is a loser." But practitioners have found it helps them to reconnect with their beloved, and it is easy and fitting to do it when you're out in nature, fueled to focus and think positively by the fresh air and feel-good factors of the outdoors.

I led my husband through the first go-around and kept it less earthy-hippie and more focused on us and our lives. Finding a quiet spot during a hike through a nearby nature trail, we sat back-to-back, and I asked him to close his eyes. "Don't talk. Just think," I said. "Go back in time to a happy memory—our first date, our best holiday, the birth of our children, a funny moment from this morning." After a few minutes, we turned to face each other and looked into each other's eyes. It was surprisingly sensual, staring at the face I loved rather than vaguely tutting in his direction with my face shoved into the light of my Instagram feed. "Keep looking at me," I continued. "And focus on how we work together as a team. Think about why you are glad you had that experience with me and no one else."