The Way of the Superior Man by David Deida

I first glanced through David Deida’s The Way of the Superior Man several years ago. I seemed far out to me. When I saw it recommended in another book (You are a Badass by Jen Sincero), I decided to read it. It’s still far out there.

Deida’s premise is that sexual passion has its source in the attraction of opposite poles, masculine and feminine energies. The book is written as if to a men with strong masculine sexual energy who are attracted to women with strong feminine energy, but he believes that the underlying concept applies to any sex or sexual orientation. The essential polarity is masculine and feminine, not male and female.

Masculine energy is purposeful and giving. Men have gifts for the world and they are only fulfilled when they are giving their gifts wholeheartedly.

Problems arise when men shirk their purpose and put aside sacrifice for the sake of comfort and distraction. If a man allows himself to be diverted, he will have problems in sexual relationships as well as other aspects of life.

Women represent a paradox for men. Feminine energy is focused on relationship, no purpose. However, a woman with strong feminine energy is attracted to a man with strong masculine energy. She wants him to be committed to his purpose as his first priority, but she also wants his devotion and security in the relationship. She will test him in both areas and tempt him to see if he is weak in either.

This may make it seem like women have conflicting desires and spend their days dreaming up ways to drive men crazy. Deida disagrees. What women want is for their men to be all they can be, to be their best selves. A woman can relax with such a man, trust him and allow her own feminine energy to flow.

Deida puts the relationship for successful relationships and satisfying sex on the shoulders of men. If you want it, you have to step up and be the kind of man who can be true to his highest calling and best self even in the face of fear and pain.

Sex is more than an act we perform. It is bound up in who we are, our passion for life and our capacity for  intimacy.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

No More Christian Nice Guy by Paul Coughlin

The Sacred Romance by John Eldridge with Brian Curtis

Deida, David. The Way of the Superior Man: A Spiritual Guide to Mastering Women, Work, and Sexual Desire. 1997. Boulder, CO: Sounds True, 2004.

Mr. America by Mark Adams

Benarr Macfadden was named Bernard McFadden by his parents; he chose the modified name to suit himself. He was born into severe poverty in the Missouri Ozarks shortly after the Civil War. He would become a self-made millionaire famous for his physique, his stunts and his opinions. Mark Adams recounts his story in Mr. America.

Macfadden became fascinated with health and bodybuilding as a youth in St. Louis, where is visited a gym with his uncle. He had been sick much of his childhood, which is not surprising given the poverty, malnutrition and undeveloped medicine of the time. With hard work and a knack for self-promotion, he was eventually able to afford to join the gym (it cost $15 for an initial membership, close to $400 today).

Macfadden pursued a lot of jobs as a kid and young adult, spending very little time in school. In bodybuilding and training he found his way into a career. Particularly, he started to follow a career path that had been blazed by another strongman, Eugen Sandow. Mcfadden saw Sandow’s performances, organized by Franz Ziegfeld, Jr., at the Columbian Exhibition in Chicago. He began doing a version of Sandow’s act and even took it to his distant mentor’s adopted homeland, England.

When he returned from his year in England, he brought back another idea borrowed from Sandow. He began publishing a magazine titled Physical Culture. The magazine was an outlet for him to sell exercise equipment and promote his ideas about fitness, diet, sex, nudity, marriage and other topics related to health and happiness. It was the foundation of what grew into a publishing empire in which Macfadden helped to pioneer true confession (long before Jerry Spring and Oprah Winfrey), celebrity culture and tabloid journalism. He is promotion of health information set the path for American health experts that followed with a mix of quackery and sound notions that turned out to be ahead of their time.

I’d be glad to go on about Macfadden, his accomplishment and his sometimes strange life. Instead, I should just suggest you read Mr. America.

Actually, I had been looking forward to reading Mr. America. I’ve seen Adam’s book referenced by other who have discussed Macfadden in the context of fitness, health culture and popular publishing. Macfadden led and interesting life suitable for a novel. Adam’s biography doesn’t quite read like a novel, but it is entertaining and approachable, and I recommend it to those interested in Macfadden or in the popular culture of the early 20^th Century.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Age of Edison by Ernest Freeburg

Better for All the World by Harry Bruinius

The Fifth Heart by Dan Simmons

Life is So Good by George Dawson & Richard Glaubman

Making the American Body by Jonathan Black

Men of Tomorrow by Gerard Jones

Miss Mizzou by J. B. Winter

The Power Makers by Maury Klein

Rising Tide by James M. Barry

The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore

War Against the Weak by Edwin Black

Adams, Mark. Mr. America: How Muscular Millionaire Bernarr Macfadden Transformed the Nation Through Sex, Salad, and the Ultimate Starvation Diet. New York: It Books, 2009.

Loving in Flow by Susan K. Perry

The concept of flow has become popular over the last couple of decades. According to social psychologist Susan K. Perry, couples can experience flow in their relationships. She describes how in Loving in Flow.

Couples who experience flow are engaged, often in everyday things. The take pleasure in their relationship and want to keep it going. The lose self-consciousness and develop a sense of “us.”

Flow is not a state you can stay in all of the time. You can learn to fall into flow more easily and stay in it longer. Ordinary couples with ordinary problems can experience more flow.

Perry covers a log of ground in this book. She gives advice dealing with conflict, better communication, a happier sex life, protecting your relationship from an affair and other potential areas of problems or improvements.

Along the way she shares stories of her own marriage and of couples she interviewed. She and her husband overcame things that have broken other marriages and moved on to something much better. You might find something to connect to, even hope, in the experiences of these couples.

Because she covers a lot of ground, I sometime lost the thread of flow. Attention seems to be an important aspect of flow working in a relationship. By focusing on you connection to you partner and the value of your relationship, you can keep other things in perspective. You can see what is going on around you and inside of you that may be a trigger for arguments. You attention to and care for your partner’s feelings will make you more empathetic. Focus on your partner can intensify connection during moments of intimacy, such as when you’re having sex. You magnify what you attend to, so give attention to what is best in your partner and the life you share to enjoy it and to fall in love again and again.

Perry provides a lot of practical advice. Readers will likely find several things they can do. The may also find encouragement in the tales of couples that overcame obstacles and gained a source of great satisfaction.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman

Love and Respect by Emerson Eggerichs

Perry, Susan K. Loving in Flow: How the Happiest Couples Get and Stay that Way. Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks Casablanca, 2003.

Women’s History Month Links

I’m coming a little late to Women’s History Month. Here is a selection of books by and about women.

Beezus and Ramona by Beverly Cleary
The Big Necessity by Rose George (also here and here)

The Christian’s Secret to a Happy Life by Hannah Whitall Smith

Doing Work You Love by Cheryl Gilman
Don’t Grow Old—Grow Up! by Dorothy Carnegie
Dreams of Iron and Steel by Deborah Cadbury

The Emotional Energy Factor by Mira Kirshenbaum (also here)

Finding Your Writer’s Voice by Thaisa Frank & Dorothy Wall

Girl, 15, Charming but Insane by Sue Limb
Good Dog. Stay. by Anna Quindlen
Gratitude by Melody Beattie (also here)
The Great Stink by Clare Clark

Henry Huggins by Beverly Cleary
How Much Does Your Soul Weigh? by Dorie McCubbrey
How to Write a Manual by Elizabeth Slatkin
How to Write Mysteries by Shannon OCork (also here)

Idea Mapping by Jamie Nast

Keeping a Journal You Love by Sheila Bender

The Last Taboo by Maggie Black and Ben Fawcett
The Lighthouse Stevensons by Bella Bathurst
Little Shifts by Suzanna Beth Stinnet

The Man Who Loved Books too Much by Allison Hoover Bartlett
The Millionaire Maker by Loral Langemeier

Ramona the Brave by Beverly Cleary
The Relaxation Response by Herbert Bensen with Mariam Z. Klipper

Simple Pictures are Best by Nancy Willard, illustrated by Tomie de Paola (also here)
Stories for a Man’s Heart by Al and Alice Gray
The Success Principles by Jack Canfield with Janet Switzer

True Blood by Charlaine Harris

Walk Away the Pounds by Leslie Sansone
Why Aren’t You Your Own Boss by Paul & Sarah Edwards & Peter Economy
Why Good Things Happen to Good People by Stephen Post & Jill Neimark (also here)
Write It Down, Make It Happen by Henriette Anne Klaus

The Vulnerable Fortress by James R. Taylor and Elizabeth J. Van Every

You Can Write a Column by Monica McCabe Cardoza

I don’t consider the author’s sex when picking books to read or review for this site. I just read what I like. Almost 19 percent of the books I’ve reviewed so far have a woman author or coauthor. They are represented in all the major areas covered on this blog, but seem to be a little more common in fiction and the nonfiction topics of writing and self-help/psychology.

How to Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas C. Foster

Foster, Thomas C. How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines. New York: Quill, 2003.

Some associate learning and teaching literature with an English Lit requirement to read boring books they didn’t understand and being embarrassed by a teacher berating them for not seeing the significance of some obscure symbol. To top things off, the kid who seems to do best is someone they know to bullshit their way through everything (that kid is probably a professor now). So when Thomas Foster promises “a lively and entertaining guide” to reading literature (it says to right on the cover of the book), he faces a skeptical audience even among book lovers.

Foster delivers on the promise. His tone is light, sometimes humorous. His style is conversational. He resorts to only on technical term and it refers to a concept that runs through the whole book so the reader will have no trouble getting it.

What makes reading the book fun is that Foster has such fun reading and thinking about what he has read. He doesn’t want people to stop enjoying what they read to start analyzing. He wants them to keep enjoying novels, stories and poems for the interest, entertainment and beauty they way they always have. Keep the old fun and add to it the enjoyments of understanding a work in relation to the rest of literature.



This is the main point of the book (and that technical term, intertextuality): a book, story, poem, or play is part of the total body of literature and by asking ourselves how it relates to other things we’ve read, using both our intellect and our emotions, we can have a full understanding and enjoyment of it. Each chapter after the first discusses things that appear in literature, such as sex, violence, weather and allusions to other works.

The idea isn’t to give you a bunch of discrete things a reader should always be looking for and doing; Foster wants to enrich readers, not burden them. Instead, each is an example of different recurring themes in literature (intertextuality says it’s all connected) allowing a few concepts to be applied to many different things.

This conceptual focus makes the book easy to grasp. The reader doesn’t have to figure out how to read like a professor by wading through a bunch of dusty old books someone thinks is great. Foster shows how readers (and he as a professor) can get more out of reading whatever they want.

That kid who bullshitted his way to a high grade in your English Lit class is probably a professor now. Fortunately, Professor Foster isn’t he.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in
How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read by Pierre Bayard

Reckless by Chrissie Hynde

As I get older, I start noticing some strange connections. If Peter Parker aged naturally, he’d be the same age as my father. I also learned that Chrissie Hynde, lead singer of the Pretenders (one of my favorite bands), is only three years younger than my parents. I can hardly believe it, though there is an unreliable part of my mind that seems convinced that I’m still in my early 20s.

This bit about Hynde’s age is hardly the most interesting thing in her autobiography, Reckless. You find many things you normally find in autobiographies. For instance, her early childhood in Ohio was surprisingly and pleasantly normal.

Things get more interesting in her teen years. She became a teenager in the 1960s and she was swept up into the youth culture of the time. She had two loves, music and drugs.

Hynde did a lot of drugs. She doesn’t dwell on the term addiction, but she doesn’t hide that she clearly was addicted. She subjected to herself to may dangers and abuses for the sake of getting high. A person would not do that if she was thinking straight, but addicts don’t think straight.

Unfortunately, drugs got in the way of the music. Drugs took the lives of many innovative musicians of the 1960s and 1970s, and Hynde mentions many of them that she knew. Two members of the Pretenders, Jimmy Scott and Pete Farndon, died of drug-related causes. It seems that there are several occasions in her story, before the Pretenders, when her dream of being in a band was interrupted by drugs, either her own pursuit of them or her potential bandmates’.

Hynde was adventurous. She traveled far from her childhood home in Akron to Canada, Mexico and France before settling in London. London became her home, largely because of the music scene. There she finally put together a band, though an unusual British band with an American lead. She met an amazing number of other musicians, famous then or later, who were there. It may seem like name dropping to discuss the Clash or the Sex Pistols, but these were people she knew and she lived their ups and downs with them.

The final section of the book, covering the career of the Pretenders, is surprisingly short. Admittedly, the original line-up did not last long due to the deaths of Scott and Farndon.

Hynde’s tone is not nostalgic. She has nostalgia for a Midwestern urbanism that was almost dead by the time she came along. She speaks frankly about her own days. She expresses a strong sense of agency and does not blame anyone for the way they treated her or depict herself as a victim. She seems to regret that the drugs people thought would set them free did not, and that as addicts they kept using drugs long after they knew it was a trap.

If you’re interested in rock and roll (and rhythm and blues and punk), you’ll likely enjoy this book. Hynde clearly loves this music and was around when it was undergoing much innovation. She was friends with some of the first stars of punk. He story is also an interesting section of the 1960s and 1970s. For instance, she was a student at Kent State University and witnessed the protests and other events that led to the National Guard firing on students.

If you’r interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Professional Amateur by T. A. Boyd

The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hajdu

Hynde, Chrissie. Reckless: My Life as a Pretender. New York: Doubleday, 2015.

Making the American Body by Jonathan Black

In Making the American Body, journalist Jonathan Black explores the history of health and fitness from aerobics to Zumba. Promotion of physical fitness goes back to the founding of the United States; Black notes that Benjamin Franklin praised the use of dumbbells. Franklin was known to be a fan of swimming, too. It began to gain some momentum in the middle 1800s when German immigrants brought the gymnasium (they called it a Turnverein) to the U.S.

I was draw to the book because it has a touch of Missouriana in the person of Bernarr Macfadden, self-proclaimed “Father of Physical Culture.” Macfadden had a classic story of the early bodybuilder. He was a sick, weak kid from the Ozarks who was transformed into a paragon of masculine pulchritude by his commitment to weight training, healthy eating and clean living. Unlike some of his contemporaries, Macfadden believed clean living included an active sex life and he campaigned against prudery. His magazines, headed by Physical Culture, featured photographs of nearly naked men and women in swimsuits.

Fitness promotion is a small world, and many of its leading figures are connected. Macfadden organized a contest (probably fixed) that crowned Charles Atlas the “World’s Most Beautiful Man.” Atlas’ ads in pulp magazines and comic books are probably some of the most well-known ever, especially the bully of the beach ad. The story of this ad, told in comics form, is based on a real event in Atlas’ life when he was shamed by a muscular life guard for his scrawny form and weakness while on a date at the beach.

Macfadden and many others were inspired by Prussian strongman Sandow. They saw him at the Chicago Columbian Exposition, where his show was produced by Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr.

California became a focus of health and fitness trend that would spread across the country. Santa Monica’s Muscle Beach was a place for weight lifters and gymnasts to have fun and show off. Steve Reeves, known for playing Hercules in several films, was a product of Muscle Beach. Jack LaLanne, another wimpy kid transformed, opened gyms, brought workouts to television, and encouraged women to exercise and do strength training.

Other trends gained popularity, especially fitness focused on cardiovascular health. This brought into popular culture Dr. Kenneth Cooper, a physician to astronauts whose 1968 book Aerobics launched an industry. That industry provided a career for Richard Simmons and a second career for Jane Fonda, who was the first to emphasize exercise as a way for women to lose weight (though this was an unspoken appeal long before the 1970s). Bodybuilding made a comeback, though, especially fueled by the popularity of Arnold Schwarzenegger.

I’m not especially interested in the health and fitness industry, but I found this book to be very interesting. It provides a historical context for many of the health and fitness trends that are still part of American culture.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

American Nerd by Benjamin Nugent

Empires of Light by Jill Jonnes

The Fifth Heart by Dan Simmons

The Power Makers by Maury Klein

The Relaxation Response by Herbert Benson with Miriam Z. Klipper

The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hajdu

Black, Jonathan. Making the American Body: The Remarkable Saga of the Men and Women Whose Feats, Feuds, and Passions Shaped Fitness History. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2013.

Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life by Bryan Lee O’Malley

O’Malley, Bryan Lee. Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life. Portland, OR: Oni, 2004.

Precious Little Life is the first in series of critically-acclaimed graphic novels by writer-artist Bryan Lee O’Malley. This comic, like the others in the series, is a paperback book rather than a magazine.

Scott is 23 going on 17. He is immature, dating a high schooler, unemployed, and mooching off his roommate. He is even in a band, Sex Bob-omb. (When I was young, bands were cool and dangerous. Now they can be full of video game-playing, comics-reading nerds like Scott Pilgrim.) He runs from trouble. He is a jerk to nearly everyone he knows. Fortunately for him, they seem to care about him anyway and stand up to help him.


Scott’s immaturity is epitomized by his dating a high-school girl, Knives Chau, who hasn’t even kissed a boy. His friends and sister confront him, but he justifies himself. He seems satisfied with a simple, no-pressure relationship with a girl whose world of school and conservative, Chinese family is even smaller than his own.

His satisfaction with Knives disappears when he meets and falls in love with Ramona Flowers, a woman his own age who has a lot more going on. This is complicated by the fact that Knives is falling in love with him, or at least the adventure and independence he represents to her. In attempting a retreat to a simpler time (he even takes Knives by his childhood home, though is family moved out), he unwittingly open’s her eyes to a new world where she can try things she never imagined doing before.

That is only the beginning of the complications. To date Ramona, he must defeat her seven evil exes. Fortunately, Scott is a good fighter, having learned from video games (his defeated opponents disappear in a “pop” leaving a little pile of coins behind). In this volume, the first evil ex makes his appearance.

The fight may be the main fantasy element of the book, but fantastic things begin with Ramona, who skates through Scott’s dreams to deliver packages because a subspace highway runs through his head—and there isn’t much traffic there. An opposing band knocks out the crowd with lightning and Kirby crackle. Scott’s Toronto is a little bit magical.

One can probably read this book as a stand-alone story. However, it is definitely the start of a series. If you can’t leave something at “to be continued,” you may want to skim the series to see if you’re willing to commit. Alternatively, the movie adaption presents the main story line for the whole series.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in
Maus by Art Spiegelman
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (Film)

Men of Tomorrow by Gerard Jones

Jones, Gerard.  Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book.  New York: Basic Books, 2004.

Reviewing Gerard Jones’ history of the comic book industry makes me feel like I’m pitching a new show to the cable networks.  It’s a little like Mad Men.  There is less suavity, but plenty of smoking, drinking, and womanizing.  There is room for some gratuitous nudity.  Many of the comics publishers came from got started in spicy pulps and nudie mags.  They were hustlers from the street, too, many with mob connections.  So we can have a touch of Boardwalk Jungle, though the violence is contained to the muscular fantasies of young men wanting to overcome a sense of powerlessness.  Of course, there may be comparisono to The Big Bang Theory, especially when you have scenes of young men working side-by-side at typewriters and drawing boards, helping and competing with each other.  Most aren’t geniuses, but plenty are awkward and pretentious.  It even has a great name: Men of Tomorrow.

The book is a mostly chronological look at the development of comics.  It starts with the pulp publishers.  As the pulps declined for various reasons of economics and taste, the comics rose their peak in World War II.  Patriotic superheroes were depicted punching Hitler in the face before America entered the war.  Superhero comics declined after the war, especially due to competition from television, though other genres did well.  Some of them, especially crime and horror, attracted the attention of reformers who wanted a clean and upright media safe for children and a culture longing for conformity and peace.  Comics found a new life as baby boomers came of age, partly because of interest in new dysfunctional heroes of Stan Lee and his collaborators and partly because cheap underground comics were exploring the youth counterculture.  Finally, comics became an almost mainstream medium, especially superheroes who successfully moved into film and other media.

There are almost too many people discussed in this book to mention.  Harry Donenfeld and Jack Liebowitz built a shady distributor of sex stories and porn into a pillar of a major media corporation.  Along the way, their conflict with Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster became the stuff of comics legend that occasionally broke into mainstream consciousness.  In many retellings of this story, Donenfeld and Liebowitz are demonized and Siegel and Shuster lionized.  Jones mostly resists this urge, treating the New York publishers with some fairness and showing how the cartoonists from Cleveland were the cause of some of their own trouble.  There is a host of other notables from trash publishing (Hugo Gernsback and Bernarr McFadden), organized crime (Frank Costello and Mayer Lansky), failed teachers and academics (Charlie Gaines and William Moulton Marston), and finally from comics (Charlie Biro, Bob Kane, Jack Cole, Jack Kirby, and many more).

Many of these people grew up in Jewish immigrant families.  Their successes and failures in the 1920s and 1930s, their readiness for war in the 1940s, and their search for an identity both American and Jewish in the postwar year reflects the journey of a larger community.  In addition to being a story of comics, it is a story of how Jews, immigrants, science fiction, and geeks moved from the edges of American society toward the mainstream—or maybe the mainstream widened to encompass them.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon

American Splendor (Film)

Stan Lee by Jordan Raphael and Tom Spurgeon

The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hajdu

Will Eisner by Michael Schumacher

Google

Song of Solomon

What is an erotic poem doing in the middle of the Bible? The Song of Solomon, or Song of Songs, is a beautiful poem, but some find it hard to reconcile with the more solemn books on either side of it (in most editions, it is between Ecclesiastes and Isaiah).

The poem celebrates the courtship, marriage and continuing union of a couple.  This couple is the King, referred to as the Beloved (Solomon), and the Shulamite, one of his favorite wives. In much of the poem, the Beloved and the Shulamite express their love for each other and the delight they experience in being loved by each other.

Though it is masked in metaphor, there is clearly physical attraction and pleasure in the relationship. The Shulamite compares her husband to a feast, and she is deeply satisfied (maybe pleasantly drunk) from enjoying him. The Beloved compares his wife to a beautiful garden, and he wants to smell every flower and taste every fruit.

Some have taken the entire book to be a metaphor for something else. It has been read at Passover by Jews, who see it as a reference to the God (the King) initiation relationship (marriage) to Israel (the humble and lowly Shulamite). Christian scholars have often taken it as a metaphor of the relationship between Christ and the church, which is often referred to as the bride of Christ in the New Testament.

These ideas no doubt have merit, but I would not want to lose the more straightforward story of the song. Marriage can be full of passion and pleasure. A committed couple can find ways to make that passion last and continue to enjoy each other. God created marriage, and I think He wants husbands and wives to enjoy each other in many way, including sex.

The poem has multiple narrators and take place in multiple settings. In addition to the Beloved and the Shulamite, we here from the ladies of the court, the Shulamites’ brothers, and other possible guests of a wedding feast or similar event. The original text does not readily identify shifts in speaker or setting except through internal clues, such as changes in pronouns. Many editions of the Bible including notes or headers to make understanding the poem easier, but these are the addition of editors.

Song of Solomon. The Holy Bible. New King James Version. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1982.

Dark Nights of the Soul by Thomas Moore

 Psychotherapist Thomas Moore, a former Catholic monk, expressed some unusual ideas about depression in his book Dark Nights of the Soul. I feel I should preface my comments with a caveat. If you have clinical depression, or think you might, please seek help from an appropriate professional in psychology, counseling or medicine. If you need medication, take it. I think you can undertake the kind exploration that Moore suggests without abandoning traditional therapies, especially if you need them to mitigate extreme symptoms that threaten your life and health.

 Moore isn’t necessarily talking about clinical depression, though he doesn’t exclude it. He finds the term depression limiting. If someone is depressed, they have a disease and there is a treatment for it. It is a matter of curing and dealing with symptoms.

As an alternative to this approach, Moore focuses on the opportunities in depression, persistent dark moods and hard times—dark nights may take any of these forms—as opportunities to mature, grow and heal the soul. Instead of rushing to get by depression and get better, sit with it, explore it and learn from it.  It could be a calling from your truest self to examine your life and become deeper, more engaged person. Instead of a curse, the dark night may turn out to be a gift.

Moore draws heavily on religion and mythology. He also discusses dreams. In the mode of Carl Jung, he sees value in symbols to illuminate what is going on in your life, as well as the value of symbolic and ritual action.

For instance, he draws a model from myth for the experience of depression. It begins with a separation or departure. One feels cut off, alone or isolated, especially from normal life. In a myth, this leaving of normal life is the beginning of an adventure. The mythic adventurer enters a new world, often and underworld, where he is challenged and gains a new perspective. These challenges help him discover who he really is. It is helpful to be able to move back and forth between the underworld and night to the upper world and day, to be able to benefit from the darkness without being consumed by it. In the end, the adventurer returns to his normal life, but it is not always easy because he is changed by his experiences in the underworld. Hopefully the lessons of his dark night well help him integrate his new life with the best of his old home.

Perspective seems to be one of the big benefits of a dark night. Everything looks different in the dark. You can reevaluate what things mean to you, the seeming trash that is truly a treasure and the seeming treasure that is truly worthless. It's a chance to clear out the clutter. It pushes you to accept that the darkness is real and part of you. Because the underworld is essentially your inner life, you can find by exploring it those places that are abandoned, ignored, neglected or run over roughshod by your outer life.

Each chapter takes on the exploration of various aspects of life that may bring about a dark night. These include love, sex, marriage, family, art, beauty, anger, disease and aging.

These journeys into darkness need not be undertaken alone. Sometimes you need professional help. The honesty and vulnerability needed to properly explore the dark parts of yourself could help you be a more open person and deepen your relationship with others. To succeed in the journey, it helps to have the attitude toward yourself of a graceful healer participating in your own life, and that attitude can make you receptive to the healing grace of others and your role as a helper of others.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Beethoven Factor by Paul Pearsall

The Last Self-Help Book You'll Ever Need by Paul Pearsall

The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck

Moore, Thomas. Dark Nights of the Soul: A Guide to Finding Your Way through Life’s Ordeals. New York: Gotham Books, 2004.