Riane Eisler shows us how history has consistently promoted the link between sex and violence—and how we can sever this link and move to a politics of partnership rather than domination in all our relations.
Crystal Healing and Sacred Pleasure is your guide for health, well-being, sexual therapy, and opening up the chakras to love, using the power of crystals.
Traces European encounters and use of tobacco and cacao and its eventual commodification into a major business from the earliest period through the seventeenth century.
Spas have become self-care oases for millions of people living busy, hectic lives. And while your skin may be smoother when you leave, the relaxation response sparked by a visit to the spa is an equally invaluable gift. Pleasure Healing will help you give that gift to yourself every day by bringing relaxation and present-moment awareness into your life. As you incorporate mindfulness techniques including meditation, healing breath work, conscious movement, and other pleasure-healing rituals into your daily routine, you'll notice the spa ethos transforming your mindset, calming stress, and enriching your life.
Gary Thomas, one of this generation's most trusted writers about the spiritual life, explores what it means to build a life of true pleasure - one that will liberate your spiritual life, marriage, family, community, and outreach. Many Christians assume "pleasure" and "sin" are synonymous. Others define godly pleasure so narrowly that they drastically minimize the powerful and holy role that pleasure can play in their lives. Still others feel guilty even thinking about how to build a life of pleasure. For all of them, Pure Pleasure provides an entirely new paradigm. It invites Christians to embrace a life of true pleasure as a pathway to obedience, worship, and service. Building on his bestselling books Sacred Pathways, Sacred Marriage, and the ECPA Gold Medallion-winning Authentic Faith, Gary Thomas takes readers to a new level of faith by providing a theological and inspirational framework to help them cultivate the kind of life that pleases God. Abounding with spiritual insights and practical exercises, this book invites you to shake off the shackles of misunderstanding about sin, provides the freedom to approach life in Christ with new wonder and joy, and challenges you to experience life as God meant it to be: overflowing with pleasure. Also available: Pure Pleasure small group video study and study guide, Spanish edition, and more.
Now in paperback, a romantic love story by the great Brazilian writer Lóri, a primary school teacher, is isolated and nervous, comfortable with children but unable to connect to adults. When she meets Ulisses, a professor of philosophy, an opportunity opens: a chance to escape the shipwreck of introspection and embrace the love, including the sexual love, of a man. Her attempt, as Sheila Heti writes in her afterword, is not only “to love and to be loved,” but also “to be worthy of life itself.” Published in 1968, An Apprenticeship is Clarice Lispector’s attempt to reinvent herself following the exhausting effort of her metaphysical masterpiece The Passion According to G. H. Here, in this unconventional love story, she explores the ways in which people try to bridge the gaps between them, and the result, unusual in her work, surprised many readers and became a bestseller. Some appreciated its accessibility; others denounced it as sexist or superficial. To both admirers and critics, the olympian Clarice gave a typically elliptical answer: “I humanized myself,” she said. “The book reflects that.”
Return to the world of the FBI’s Krewe of Hunters as they try to stop a resurrected evil from taking more lives, in book 3 of this thrilling series from New York Times bestselling author Heather Graham. The details of the crime scene are no coincidence. The body—a promising starlet—has been battered, bloodied and then discarded between two of Manhattan’s oldest graveyards. One look and Detective Jude Crosby recognizes the tableau: a re-creation of Jack the Ripper’s gruesome work. But he also sees something beyond the actions of a mere copycat. Something more dangerous…and unexplainable. As the city seethes with suspicion, Jude calls on Whitney Tremont, a member of the country’s preeminent paranormal investigating team, to put the speculation to rest. Yet when Whitney and Jude delve deeper, what they discover is more shocking than either could have predicted, and twice as sinister… Previously published in 2011
Starting with Bad Behavior in the 1980s, Mary Gaitskill has been writing about gender relations with searing, even prophetic honesty. In This Is Pleasure, she considers our present moment through the lens of a particular #MeToo incident. The effervescent, well-dressed Quin, a successful book editor and fixture on the New York arts scene, has been accused of repeated unforgivable transgressions toward women in his orbit. But are they unforgivable? And who has the right to forgive him? To Quin’s friend Margot, the wrongdoing is less clear. Alternating Quin’s and Margot’s voices and perspectives, Gaitskill creates a nuanced tragicomedy, one that reveals her characters as whole persons—hurtful and hurting, infuriating and touching, and always deeply recognizable. Gaitskill has said that fiction is the only way that she could approach this subject because it is too emotionally faceted to treat in the more rational essay form. Her compliment to her characters—and to her readers—is that they are unvarnished and real. Her belief in our ability to understand them, even when we don’t always admire them, is a gesture of humanity from one of our greatest contemporary writers.
Few belief systems are more open to diverse sexual expression than Paganism. So how can Pagans practice healthy, sacred sexuality in a society that often devalues such intimacy? In Rites of Pleasures, Jennifer Hunter takes a candid, in-depth look at different practices and gender roles within Paganism, from monogamy and marriage to sexual gatherings and polyamory. The result is a book filled with true erotic inspiration for those who wish to remove the mental obstacles that can prevent full and pure sexual pleasure.