Listening to Ecstasy

Listening to Ecstasy
Author: Charles Wininger
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 342
Release: 2020-10-20
Genre: Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN: 1644111179

A personal narrative and guide to the safe, responsible use of MDMA for personal healing and social transformation • Details the author’s 50 years of responsible experimentation with mind-altering substances and how Ecstasy has helped him become a better therapist • Explains how he and his wife found Ecstasy to be the key to renewing and enriching their lives and marriage as they entered their senior years • Describes what the experience actually feels like and provides protocols for the safe, responsible, recreational, and celebrational use of MDMA for individuals and groups In a world that keeps us separate from each other, MDMA is the chemical of connection. Aptly known in popular culture as “Ecstasy,” MDMA helps us rediscover our own true loving nature, often obscured by the traumas of life. On its way to becoming a prescription medication due to groundbreaking research on its use to treat PTSD, Ecstasy can offer benefits for all adult life stages, from 20-somethings to seniors. In this memoir and guide to safe use, Charles Wininger, a licensed psychoanalyst and mental health counselor, details the countless ways that Ecstasy has helped him become a better therapist and husband. He recounts his coming of age in the 1960s counterculture, his 50 years of responsible experimentation with mind-altering substances, and his immersion in the new psychedelic renaissance. He explains how he and his wife found Ecstasy to be the key to renewing and enriching their lives as they entered their senior years. It also strengthened the bonds of their marriage. Countering the fearful propaganda that surrounds this drug, Wininger describes what the experience actually feels like and explores the value of Ecstasy and similar substances for helping psychologically healthy individuals live a more “optimal” life. He provides protocols for the responsible, recreational, and celebrational use of MDMA, including how to perfect the experience, maximize the benefits and minimize the risks, and how it may not be for everyone. He reveals how MDMA has revitalized his marriage, both erotically and emotionally, and describes how pleasure, fun, and joy can be profound bonding and transformative experiences. Revealing MDMA’s versatility when it comes to bringing lasting renewal, pleasure, and inspiration to one’s life, Wininger shows that recognizing the transformative power of happiness-inducing experiences can be the first step on the path to healing.

Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy

Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy
Author: Robert Jourdain
Publisher: William Morrow
Total Pages: 410
Release: 1997
Genre: Music
ISBN:

At the evolution of music and introduces surprising new concepts of memory and perception, knowledge and attention, motion and emotion, all at work as music takes hold of us. Along the way, a fascinating cast of characters brings Jourdain's narrative to vivid life: "idiots savants" who absorb whole pieces on a single hearing, composers who hallucinate entire compositions, a psychic who claimed to take dictation from long-dead composers, and victims of brain damage who.

Ecstasy: The Complete Guide

Ecstasy: The Complete Guide
Author: Julie Holland
Publisher: Inner Traditions / Bear & Co
Total Pages: 470
Release: 2001-08
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 9780892818570

Written by the world's leading experts on MDMA, "Ecstasy: The Complete Guide" takes the first unbiased look at the risks and the benefits of this unique drug, including the science of how it works; its promise as a treatment for depression, post-traumatic stress disorders, and other mental illnesses; and how to minimize the risks of use.

Ecstasy and Terror

Ecstasy and Terror
Author: Daniel Mendelsohn
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Total Pages: 385
Release: 2019-10-08
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1681374056

“The role of the critic,” Daniel Mendelsohn writes, “is to mediate intelligently and stylishly between a work and its audience; to educate and edify in an engaging and, preferably, entertaining way.” His latest collection exemplifies the range, depth, and erudition that have made him “required reading for anyone interested in dissecting culture” (The Daily Beast). In Ecstasy and Terror, Mendelsohn once again casts an eye at literature, film, television, and the personal essay, filtering his insights through his training as a scholar of classical antiquity in illuminating and sometimes surprising ways. Many of these essays look with fresh eyes at our culture’s Greek and Roman models: some find an arresting modernity in canonical works (Bacchae, the Aeneid), while others detect a “Greek DNA” in our responses to national traumas such as the Boston Marathon bombings and the assassination of JFK. There are pieces on contemporary literature, from the “aesthetics of victimhood” in Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life to the uncomfortable mixture of art and autobiography in novels by Henry Roth, Ingmar Bergman, and Karl Ove Knausgård. Mendelsohn considers pop culture, too, in essays on the feminism of Game of Thrones and on recent films about artificial intelligence—a subject, he reminds us, that was already of interest to Homer. This collection also brings together for the first time a number of the award-winning memoirist’s personal essays, including his “critic’s manifesto” and a touching reminiscence of his boyhood correspondence with the historical novelist Mary Renault, who inspired him to study the Classics.

The Listening Book

The Listening Book
Author: W. A. Mathieu
Publisher: Shambhala Publications
Total Pages: 386
Release: 1991-03-27
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0834827670

The Listening Book is about rediscovering the power of listening as an instrument of self-discovery and personal transformation. By exploring our capacity for listening to sounds and for making music, we can awaken and release our full creative powers. Mathieu offers suggestions and encouragement on many aspects of music-making, and provides playful exercises to help readers appreciate the connection between sound, music, and everyday life.

Ecstasy

Ecstasy
Author: Michael Eigen
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Total Pages: 126
Release: 2001-11-15
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780819565310

"Ecstasy is a force to be reckoned with--sometimes creative, sometimes destructive. Eigen argues that there is an ecstasy that comes through the ever-necessary confrontation of our psychic cores with suffering and degradation and he shows that when we can learn to be present with these feelings, they add to the tone and texture of our lives, and help us to feel real."--Page 4 of cover.

Altered State

Altered State
Author: Matthew Collin
Publisher: Profile Books
Total Pages: 369
Release: 2010-12-09
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1847656412

From its first publication in 1997, Altered State established itself as the definitive text on Ecstasy and dance culture. This new edition sees Matthew Collin cast a fresh eye on the heady events of the acid house 'Summer of Love' and the rave scene's euphoric escalation into commercial excess as MDMA became a mass-market narcotic. Altered State is the best-selling book on Ecstasy culture, using a cast of memorable characters to track the origins of the scene and its drug through psychedelic subcults, underground gay discos and the Balearic paradise of Ibiza, to the point where Tony Blair was using an Ecstasy anthem as an election campaign song. Altered State critically examines the ideologies and myths of the scene, documenting the criminal underside to the blissed-out image, shedding new light on the social history of the most spectacular youth movement of the twentieth century.

Radical Ecstasy

Radical Ecstasy
Author: Dossie Easton
Publisher: SCB Distributors
Total Pages: 179
Release: 2011-08-02
Genre: Self-Help
ISBN: 1890159905

For millennia, seekers have used physical and emotional extremes to achieve transcendence and exaltation. Today, many BDSM and leather practitioners are discovering the potential of SM practice to reach personal, interpersonal and spiritual goals. In Radical Ecstasy, bestselling BDSM/sexuality authors Easton and Hardy document their own journeys into the transcendent realm of kink. With their trademark frankness and humor, they share their own stories and philosophies. They also share techniques that have worked for them - techniques which combine tantric breathing, visualization and movement with a combined half-century of BDSM experience - to create states of transcendence during solo and partnered sexual and BDSM practice. As outrageously revolutionary as any sex book published in the last decade, Radical Ecstasy sets the stage for the new millennium in BDSM and sacred-sex practices - a "must" for any kink, tantra, pagan or sacred-sex practitioner. "Amazingly mindful exploration of that which cannot be easily put into words... the ecstatic experience from sex to sadomasochism, from trance to intuition to archetypes and spiritual awakening. Totally real and personal. Not a 'how to' but a nurturing 'can do' book." - Fakir Musafar, father of the modern primitive movement. "Progressive, deliciously honest, and HOT HOT HOT! Dossie and Janet ask difficult questions about the nature of sex, intimacy and ecstasy, then they actually manage to answer the questions, plus turn us on when they do. These two erotically gifted women have a way with words - and sex. They raise the bar on erotic writing and sex education to new heights. I'm in awe." - Annie Sprinkle, Ph.D., prostitute/porn star turned sex guru/sexologist "Fascinating, heartfelt, honest, real stories of the heart/spirit/energy connection experienced in the passionate rituals of intimate consensual power play. These two courageous women write brilliantly of how erotic energies connect us with the big love we all seek from the source." - Cleo Dubois, educator, ritualist, video producer/star

Ecstasy

Ecstasy
Author: Irvine Welsh
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 292
Release: 1996
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780393315813

A bestsellig romance author suffers a paralyzing stroke and her philandering husband wonders how this will affect his gambling and whoring budget; two young lovers must come to terms with their chemically induced deformity; Lloyd from Leith transfigures his passion for an unhappily married woman. These three tales confirm Irvine Welsh's position as a master of the "chemical" romance genre.