Exploring Intimacy

Offering simple mindfulness and reflective exercises, Robins helps readers learn to integrate ideas from both Eastern and Western approaches into everyday practice that is intended to both open and protect our mental, physical, emotional and spiritual health.

Building off the idea that when we are happier, we tend to be healthier, Robins explains the phenomenon of how our intuitive knowing fosters healthy relationships that contribute to our physical, mental, and emotional health. Readers learn to utilize a variety of pathways that will change their responses to others and will produce lasting, more rewarding, and closer relationships in all areas of their lives. This book is designed to aid readers in looking inward and experiencing how their intuitive sixth sense informs their ability to be intimate without the negative triggers of past experiences. Through a considered and thoughtful approach, Robins offers insight into cultivating a truly integrated self so that one may lead a more fulfilling and healthful life.

Sex Work Matters brings together sex workers, scholars and activists to present pioneering essays on the economics and sociology of sex work. From insights by sex workers on how they handle money, intimate relationships and daily harassment by the police, to the experience of male and transgender sex work, this fascinating and original book offers new theoretical frameworks for understanding the sex industry. The result is a vital new contribution to sex-worker rights that explores the topic in new ways, especially its cultural, economic and political dimensions. Readers weary of the sensational and often salacious treatment of the sex industry in the media and literature will find Sex Work Matters refreshing.

This integrative book is like having a wise supervisor in the room with you. Stop "fixing" your clients--engage them in their own healing through the Four-Dimensional Wheel of Sexual Experience. Gina Ogden guides you in helping your clients explore the full range of their sexual issues and challenges—including couple communication, erectile dysfunction, vaginismus, low desire, affairs, trauma, religious proscriptions, pornography use, and more. Part I offers strategies that correspond to the core knowledge areas required for certification as a sexuality professional, while Part II puts these innovative approaches into action through following five case examples from seasoned practitioners. The numerous user-friendly elements, such as quizzes, worksheets, and "hot tips," will help you see the larger picture of an issue, become fluent with a diversity of sexual identities and behaviors, and expand your ability to offer safe, ethical, evidence-based therapy.

Intimacy, expressed through the feelings and sensations of the researcher, is bound up in the work of a feminist geographer. Tapping into this intimacy and including it in academic writing facilitates a grasping of the effects of power in particular places and initiates a discussion about how to access and tease out what constitutes the intimate both ethically and politically throughout the research process. This collection provides valuable reflections about intimacy in the research process - from encounters in the field, through data analysis, to the various pieces of written work. A global and heterogeneous pool of scholars and researchers introduce personal ways of writing intimacy into feminist geography. ​ As authors expand existing conceptualizations of intimacy and include their own stories, chapters explore the methodological challenges of using intimacy in research as an approach, a topic and a site of interaction. The book is valuable reading for students and researchers of Geography, as well as anyone interested in the ethics and practicalities of feminist, critical and emotional research methodologies.

Case studies offer insight into how to make relationships work. Each chapter contains such exercises as breathing exercises, making a timeline of the relationship, and thoughts to ponder.

A critical appreciation of close relationships in the modern American movie, looking in detail at contemporary Hollywood films which explore intimacy and the connections of characters, their surroundings, and points of film style. Peacock's close readings provide a fresh approach to understanding the big American film.

The concept of intimacy puts forth important challenges to contemporary cultural psychology. Intimacy refers to a felt experience of interiority that although is intuitively comprehensible, does not have rigorously defined limits. Intimacy can refer to a content, an object, a person, ownership, or even a part of one’s own body. A potentially problematic issue for cultural psychology is that acknowledging intimacy seems to bound the Self to areas disjointed from the social sphere. In a globalized world, we witness a developmental process where social life becomes sectioned, where people are involved in an identity search by foregrounding certain social roles. With this backdrop in mind, people redefine and rebuild their intimacy spaces and the ways they roam from these to the public and collective realm. Exploring the current historical situation leads us to consider intimacy as culture in the making; certainly, in the way it manifests itself, but particularly in how we approach and understand it. The lived (experienced) dimension of intimacy becomes truly important, since it casts new light on what we mean by intimacy in different spheres of the self’s life, as well as life with others.