Synopsis
Hidden just below the surface of ordinary everyday reality lies an abundance of delight. By learning to look beyond your daily challenges, to ease your stressed mind and body, you can rediscover the magic, mystery, sensuality, and joy that is possible in everyday life.
Taking you through a step-by-step sensual journey of healing and transformation, Julia Hollenbery explains how pleasure is all around us and explores seven easily accessible spiritual “medicines” or pathways to discover more pleasure in your body, relationships, and way of being. She details each of the seven medicines: slowing, embodying, deepening, relating, pleasure, power, and potency. For each medicine, she presents reflections, practical somatic and breathing exercises, meditations, and energetic transmissions to help you reconnect body, mind, and soul and reclaim your innate source of pleasure.
The Healing Power of Pleasure combines modern science with ancient spirituality, insight, humor, and poetry. A visionary call to action to inhabit your universe of deliciousness, this book presents an invitation to reconnect with your body, realize the web of relationships within which we live, and embrace the pleasure, power, and potency that arise when we look inward as well as confidently relate outward with the world around us.
What if we put our own pleasure higher up the list – instead of at the end of the long days of work, or as a reward for toil? Julia Paulette Hollenbery asks, and elegantly and practically answers this in her new book “The Healing Power of Pleasure: Seven Medicines for Rediscovering the Innate Joy of Being”.
This is a poetic and kind book made from a life of learning and experience. It brings together science, spiritual tradition, embodiment and philosophy — many many references and ideas, into a pleasure and body-centred way of being.
It was a joyful read for me. As I read, I enjoyed feeling the connections come together — practices I knew, ideas I believed, ways I’d learned to help myself — converging into something bigger. Pleasure as a birthright, a force, a way into my body, a way into relationships, a way to see the world.
Julia starts with Mess — the way we are in the world around us, right now, then proceeds through the seven “medicines” we can use to shift ourselves and our world in the direction of pleasure. Each “medicine” can be seen as an antidote for the crazy disconnected way we all seem to live . There are practical exercises for each medicine to bring home the ideas, maybe to adopt as personal practices for bringing out the pleasure in life.
I like this book a lot. It champions our right to pleasure. It gives practical ways in. It does this in a gentle, inspiring and poetic way. It reminds me of all those wise things I ought to remember about how to enjoyably take care of me.
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