Challenge of the Heart: Love, Sex, and Intimacy in Changing Times

By John Welwood

Book Overview

This powerful collection of essays by such notables as D. H. Lawrence, Robert Bly, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, and Rainer Maria Rilke focuses on the challenges of love between men and women, addressing the questions and difficulties arising for people in relationships today. Anyone who is, has been, or hopes to be in an intimate relationship with a person of the opposite sex will find this book "must" reading.

The first group of essays deals with the contradictions and possibilities inherent in erotic love, leading to the question posed in the next section: What do men and women really want? The contributors ten explore marriage as an ongoing path of personal transformation. That opens into a look at sexuality itself as an especially vivid meeting of two different worlds. The book closes with a group of writings that consider relationship as a vehicle for developing power, wisdom, and inner truth.

Carefully selected, threaded together by Welwood's insightful commentary, the essays presented here approach the challenge of intimacy with bravery and gentleness, inspiring the reader toward becoming a "warrior of the heart."

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0394742001
• ISBN13: 9780394742007
• Release Date: October 1985
• Publisher: Shambhala
• Length: 300 Pages
• Weight: 1.04 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Absorbing reading

This is a reader that John Welwood compiled when writing his excellent 'Journey of the Heart'. As he says, helpful writings on relationships are relatively rare, and I found this collection most absorbing. Sometimes successive authors have messages that seem to contradict each other, and yet each has something helpful to say and I find myself agreeing with both! D H Lawrence is as Welwood says 'annoyingly polemic' but is worth reading, and Rilke's passages from 'Letters to a Young Poet' are classic. Welwood ranges wide. I was interested to find a piece by J K Bennett, an English 'guru' whom I met once, in 1963, and I was moved by the contribution of Elizabeth Bugenthal.I sometimes lend this book to friends and it takes a long time to get it back!