An informed, dynamic exploration of sexual history and energy.
In this guidebook for sexual awareness and enjoyment, the authors deliver narrative stories and explanations to help demystify sex and bring depth and meaning to readers’ sexual lives.
Meuth and Weaver present compelling information about what it means to have sexual experiences that involve mental, emotional and physical engagement. Beginning with a foundation for sexual knowledge, the authors define sexual enlightenment as having two dimensions: The first revolves around “sexual life-force energy, which brings forth life in all that is alive”; The second “involves the human capacity to be self-reflective or aware of one’s own existence, particularly becoming aware and conscious of one’s life-force energy.” Sexual enlightenment also involves an integration of the mind and body, which produces an awareness of the self as it fits into the greater sexual force of the world. Written conversationally, the book dives into not only definitions of an enlightened sexual life but also ways to strive toward awareness, including meditation, conscious breathing and “energy awareness,” which involves becoming aware of the sexual energy that moves around and through us. The book also presents a variety of passages that offer historical context for sexuality, such as the rise of Tantric sexual discovery and the ways in which Puritanism, Hinduism and other ideological institutions have conceived of the sexual experience. Movement and physicality are deeply connected to our emotions, the authors say, which have been trained by experiences, both good and bad. In order to move the emotional body away from anger, victimhood and other negative emotions that stunt sexual energy and life force, the authors posit that one “can make a conscious decision to shift out of this auto-emotional state of reaction and actually invent other interpretations by calling on your ‘witness state.’ ” For example, maybe that driver who cut you off was actually racing to be with his pregnant wife who has gone into labor; such reasoning (even if invented) should calm your senses, the authors say, and thus help return you to inner peace. Elsewhere, drawing from theories involving chakras and energy fields, the authors examine the physical body and the areas of the body that emanate sexual energy. Much like a touch from a lover can be arousing, a cool breeze or heat from the sun’s rays can excite the body, further encouraging the idea that creative, sexual energy comes from within, not from the validation and acknowledgment of others. These kinds of lessons and reinforcements make the book a valuable read for anyone seeking a deeper relationship with his or her sexual self.
An informed, dynamic exploration of sexual history and energy.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4525-8543-7
Page Count: 142
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.
A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.
“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles, I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars. It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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