Radical Intimacy


Book Description

A practical step‑by‑step methodology for nurturing and sustaining our intimate relationships through first focusing on self, extending to partners, and the world We can apply the law of attraction, love languages, and every hack in the world. We can do all the yoga, spa days, workshops, and retreats we can make time for. But without an underpinning of intimacy, our experience of ourselves is soft and dreamy and lacks the kind of specificity necessary to truly know ourselves through and through. With intimacy as the foundational principle of our existence, we can build a life based on what we truly need, not what have been told we need, think we need, or what we think we should need. No matter who you are and who you like to have sex with, my intention is to arm you with a new toolkit and consciousness for cultivating the deeply connected relationships you desire and the life you deserve. Zoe Kors draws on her experience as an intimacy coach, workshop leader and sex and relationships writer, sharing her powerful--and practical--step‑by‑step methodology for nurturing and sustaining our intimate relationships over time. It addresses the essential truth that is almost universally missed in discussions of sex and intimacy: We can meet each other only to the extent that we can meet ourselves. Kors guides the reader on a five‑part journey through nine areas of opportunity for deepening intimacy with themselves, their partner, and their world, inviting them to embrace emotional, physical, and energetic self‑mastery, which is required to skillfully relate with others. Voice-driven, accessible--with the right amount of tough love--Radical Intimacy rewrites the rules (and The Rules) by: Introducing the concept of "Energetic Intimacy" as a real thing. I talk about concepts like presence and energy, in a way that is accessible and makes sense to the mainstream market (not woo-woo!) Defining and busting "The Attachment Myth"--my term for the rampant and erroneous belief that women emotionally attach to their sexual partners--rewriting the common narrative, giving women freedom and agency to own their embodied sexuality without guilt or shame. Shifting the vocabulary around sex and intimacy to feel real, organic, and unapologetic by speaking with ease and confidence about sex and sexuality--no euphemisms, no air quotes, no beating around the bush (so to speak). Telling the truth that sex is not effortless. Great sex is cultivated over time through practice. Evangelizing intimacy as an ongoing and life-altering practice that happens not just between two people, but on an individual level first. Dismantling porn-culture's stronghold on the misperception of women's bodies and sexuality so that we may respect, revere, and fall love with women (and ourselves) for the magical and varied creatures we are.




Radical Intimacy in Contemporary Art


Book Description

Radical Intimacy in Contemporary Art focuses on practices that operate at the edges of sexuality and its socially sanctioned expressions. Using psychoanalysis and object-oriented feminism, Keren Moscovitch focuses on the work of several contemporary, provocative artists to initiate a dialogue on the role of intimacy in challenging and reimagining ideology. Moscovitch suggests that intimacy has played an under-appreciated role in the shifting of social and political consciousness. She explores the work of Leigh Ledare, Genesis P-Orridge, Ellen Jong, Barbara DeGenevieve, Joseph Maida and Lorraine O'Grady, who, through their radical practices, engage in such consciousness shifting in elegant, surprising, and provocative ways. Guided by the feminist psychoanalytic canon of Julia Kristeva throughout, as well as being informed by the philosophy of Luce Irigaray and the critical theory of Judith Butler, Moscovitch situates these artists in the emerging lineage of feminist new materialism. She argues that the instability of intimacy leads to radical and performative objecthood in their work that acts as a powerful expression of revolt. Through this line of argumentation, Moscovitch joins a growing group of philosophers exploring object-oriented theories and practices as a new language for a new era. In this era, the hegemony of subjectivity has been toppled, and a new world of human ontology is built creatively, expressively and in the spirit of revolt.




Radical Intimacy


Book Description

A narrative guide and practical methodology for nurturing and sustaining our relationships with ourselves, others, and the world. “With intimacy as the foundational principle of our existence, we can build a life based on what we truly need, not what we think we need or have been told we need. By embracing the practice of radical intimacy, I can confidently promise my readers a personal revolution of self-acceptance, appreciation, vitality, and confidence. And without fail, mind-blowing, soul-stirring, earth-shattering sex follows.”—Zoë Kors Part practical guide, part client stories, part personal narrative, Zoë Kors draws on her experience as a sex and intimacy coach, thought leader, and relationship writer in sharing her powerful and practical methodology for nurturing and sustaining our intimate relationships over time. She addresses the essential truth that is almost universally missed in discussions of sex and intimacy: We can meet each other only to the extent that we can meet ourselves. Kors guides the reader on a five‑part journey through nine areas of opportunity for deepening intimacy with themselves, their partner, and their world, inviting them to embrace emotional, physical, and energetic self‑mastery, which is required to skillfully relate with others. At the conclusion of each part, there are a collection of experiential exercises which support the reader in embodying the concepts they’ve just read. Voice-driven, accessible, and with the right amount of tough love, Radical Intimacy takes the mystery out of human connection. From academia and science to mysticism and self-development, Kors delivers a rich and varied understanding of human sexuality and intimacy through the lens of the body, brain, heart, spirit, and culture.




Intimacy and Mission


Book Description

Is radical discipleship really possible today? With all the competing demands we face, can the church empower us to fully respond to God's call? Can the church rise far enough above the demands of institutional survival to live out a radical gospel? Intimacy and Mission invites readers into Christian communities working at answering such questions. The author offers a carefully researched yet accessible study of five religious communities--Church of the Messiah, Koinania Partners, Patchwork Central, Sojourners, and Voice of Calvary. He shows how the experience of these communities can help local congregations discern possibilities for radical discipleship. By revealing not only the strengths of intentional community but also the struggles experienced by each of the five communities, Smith has also created a fascinating human-interest narrative.




Heart Radical


Book Description

Wanting to understand how her path is tied to her mother tongue, Anne, a young, multiracial American woman, travels through China, the country of her mother’s birth. Along the way, she tries on different roles—seeker, teacher, student, girlfriend, artist, and daughter—and continually asks herself: Why do I feel called to make this journey? Whether witnessing a Tibetan sky burial, teaching English at a university in Chengdu, visiting her grandmother in LA, or falling in love with a Chinese painter, Anne is always in pursuit of intimacy with others, even as she is all too aware of her silences and separation. For two years, she settles into a comfortable routine in her boyfriend’s apartment and regains fluency in Chinese, a language she spoke as a young child but has used less and less as an adult. Eventually, however, her desire to know herself in other ways surfaces again. She misses speaking English, she feels suffocated by urban, polluted China, and she starts to fall for another man. Ultimately, Anne realizes that to live her truth as a mixed-race, bilingual woman she must embrace all of her influences and layers. In a world that often wants us to choose a side or fit an ideal, she learns that she can both belong and not belong wherever she is, and that home is ultimately found within.




Six Secrets to a Powerful Quiet Time


Book Description

Are you enjoying the closeness with God you desire? Are your prayer times transforming your life from the inside out? Are you sensing God speaking to you through your Bible reading? Now you can join Catherine Martin on an exciting 30-day journey to discover how to really have a quiet time. She provides effective, practical steps you can take to go deeper with God as you discover how to organize your quiet time, learn the revolutionary P.R.A.Y.E.R. Quiet Time Plan, experience interactive quiet times with God, practice journaling and studying God's Word, and find other helpful resources for enriching your quiet time. Listen to the longing of your heart. Begin your own journey to a renewed, life-giving relationship with God today with Six Secrets to a Powerful Quiet Time.




The Transformation of Intimacy


Book Description

The sexual revolution: an evocative term, but what meaning can be given to it today? How does 'sexuality' come into being and what connections does it have with the changes that have affected personal life on a more general plane? In answering these questions, Anthony Giddens disputes many of the dominant interpretations of the role of sexuality in modern culture. The emergence of what the author calls plastic sexuality - sexuality freed from its intrinsic relation to reproduction - is analysed in terms of the long-term development of the modern social order and social influences of the last few decades. Giddens argues that the transformation of intimacy, in which women have played the major part, holds out the possibility of a radical democratization of the personal sphere. This book will appeal to a large general audience as well as being essential reading for students and professionals.




Relative Intimacy


Book Description

Celebrated as new consumers and condemned for their growing delinquencies, teenage girls emerged as one of the most visible segments of American society during and after World War II. Contrary to the generally accepted view that teenagers grew more alienated from adults during this period, Rachel Devlin argues that postwar culture fostered a father-daughter relationship characterized by new forms of psychological intimacy and tinged with eroticism. According to Devlin, psychiatric professionals turned to the Oedipus complex during World War II to explain girls' delinquencies and antisocial acts. Fathers were encouraged to become actively involved in the clothing and makeup choices of their teenage daughters, thus domesticating and keeping under paternal authority their sexual maturation. In Broadway plays, girls' and women's magazines, and works of literature, fathers often appeared as governing figures in their daughters' sexual coming of age. It became the common sense of the era that adolescent girls were fundamentally motivated by their Oedipal needs, dependent upon paternal sexual approval, and interested in their fathers' romantic lives. As Devlin demonstrates, the pervasiveness of depictions of father-adolescent daughter eroticism on all levels of culture raises questions about the extent of girls' independence in modern American society and the character of fatherhood during America's fabled embrace of domesticity in the 1940s and 1950s.




Tortilleras Negotiating Intimacy


Book Description

Tortilleras Negotiating Intimacy: Love, Friendship, and Sex in Queer Mexico City is the first ethnography in English to focus primarily on women’s sexual and intimate cultures in Mexico. The book shows the transformation of intimacy in the lives of three generations of women in queer spaces in contemporary Mexico City, as their sexual citizenship changes, including references to same-sex marriage and anti-discrimination laws. The book shows how these individuals reconfigure relationships through marriage, polyamory, friendship, and sex. Tortilleras Negotiating Intimacy suggests that “new” intimate cartographies are emerging in Mexico City, ultimately redefining relationships, gender, and mexicanidad. Building on ethnographic data collected over the past decade, including forty-five in-depth interviews with women between the ages of twenty-two and sixty-five participating in LGBT spaces, Tortilleras Negotiating Intimacy shows how lesbian women (mainly cis, but some trans) negotiate friendship, same-sex marriage, polyamory, and sexual practices, reinventing love, eroticism, friendship, and ultimately the social organization of Latin American societies.




Igniting Intimacy


Book Description

A sex magic playbook for personal, relational, and planetary transformation Master the art of sex magic and forge radical new relationships with yourself, your beloveds, our planet, and life itself. This groundbreaking book invites you to develop intimacies that are as creative as they are consensual, as playful as they are profound, and as transformative as they are ecstatic. It offers fresh and accessible inspiration on topics such as self-love, conscious communication, and sacred sex, as well as practices and rituals for erotic shapeshifting, ecosexuality, ecstatic breath work, and so much more. Igniting Intimacy demonstrates that the only tools you really need to master the erotic, meet god, and make magic are the ability to breathe and a willing imagination. This is an essential manual for pleasure pioneers hoping to change themselves—and the world—one orgasm at a time.