The Heart & Soul of Sex: Making the Isis Connection

Gina Ogden's beautifully written book, The Heart and Soul of Sex, gives women the permission and encouragement to explore our total body-and-soul female sexuality. With her unique blend of science, sexology, spirituality, and tantric practice, Dr. Ogden offers a variety of resources to stimulate the sexual imagination and realize greater physical and emotional pleasure. For anyone wanting to more fully expand her sexual experience, with or without a partner, into the realm of the magical and transformative, I heartily recommend this informative book.

Gina Ogden's new book gives women unrefutable evidence that they don't have to compromise who they are - uniquely - to have a full experience of who they are as sexual AND spiritual beings. She has the statistics to back up her statements, but the book is not a scientific treatise - it's a flowing and exciting map of new territory for those who have not yet discovered the depth and breadth of their sexual/spiritual connections. I highly recommend this book for any woman of any age, and for any man who wants to learn more about "his" woman.

Dr. Gina Ogden moves the discussion of sex from a quantitative ordeal (how big, how many, since when?) to a qualitative discourse (how deeply felt, how connected, how passionate?) Or let's say that she uses quantity - 3,800 people, mostly women, answered her survey - to get to the quality of their experience as sexual creatures. There have been very few American sex surveys this large and few that concentrate on what Ogden coins the ISIS: the integration of sexuality and spirituality. In fact, the scope and focus of this in-depth enquiry into what women feel about sex challenges the very nature of classic American sex research, which prefers information it can simply count. Much research into women's sexuality has focused in some physiological way on their dysfunction, often with the assumption that women lust after "it" less than men. In the cultural background are the messages that sex is dirty and so are the women who are gagging for it. In fact, Dr. Ogden's review of the previous scientific cannon on sexuality makes you welcome her counter-approach. For example, she sites the University of Chicago's 1994 survey in which 1,500 women were asked to own up to any of seven sexual problems and when 43% checked even one, they were characterized as "dysfunctional." The researchers might have concluded that there are gobs of awkward lovers out there, but instead the 43% figure of sexually "dysfunctional" women has become ubiquitous, even used in ads to sell "solutions." In contrast, Ogden demonstrates that girls want to talk about sex not in terms of how many pulses there are in an orgasm or the length of our clit hoods, but in terms of where sex takes us and what that journey feels like. Ogden's survey has given thousands (33% more than the Hite Report) of women that opportunity. Ogden believes that sexual feelings are with us from birth to death, and wins my agreement in associating dance as strongly to sex as orgasm or penetration. It takes me back to the days when slow dancing was the most reliable foreplay a girl could use on a femme. "The Heart & Soul of Sex" addresses the need of women to take control of their own sexuality through the sex-positive message that all of us have the right to intimacy and pleasure. The book then provides tools (the ISIS Connection) and self-help material to use in connecting spiritual and sexual sensibilities. WHO TOOK THE SURVEY? I couldn't help but turn directly to the end to check out the survey data. Ages start at 18 and reach 86 and 82% of those surveyed identify as female. They are mostly well-educated and work in business or the professions, with only 5% calling themselves homemakers. With 86% checking Caucasian and only 8% African-American, Native-American or Hispanic (and an additional 5% Multiethnic), people of color seem somewhat under-represented. But sexuality better reflects the population as a whole with heterosexual respondents at 80% and 12% identifying as bi, gay or lesbian. Only eleven t

Here is the Book that so many women that I meet and that long for a sex life that works for them must read. Gina Ogden, conducted a survey with close to 4000 women on aspects of sexuality, spirituality and their meeting place. In addition to insightful and fascinating quotes from many of these women, the book explores in depth the emotional, mental and spiritual connections that mean the most in our sexuality. One idea that seemed to answer a question that comes up continuously in my conversations about the question of desire is that when feelings of anger and fear are repressed, desire goes right along with it. It is not hard to see the connection and yet I never really understood so clearly how our repressed feelings cut us off from all our feelings. She quotes "you can't heal, what you can't feel." And it seems that all the places we block, keep us from ourselves. Particularly refreshing is a new formulation which the author terms ISIS - Integrating Sexuality and Spirituality which shifts the focus from classic definitions of healthy sexuality which is dominated by physical performance and ability to orgasm with specific stimulation to a newly and woman defined space of pleasure and satisfaction derived from a whole experience. In this process she explore a variety of energetic sexual models as well as tools for emotional and mental healing from sexual fears and abuses. What I loved was the discussion about how our culture focuses and emphasizes the trauma of our sexuality and its lifelong events, but still offers little or no language to allow for the pleasure of our sexuality which is a primary source of our power, beauty and sense of belonging. We largely cannot allow for the "mind-blowing, self-affirming, emotionally juicy, transformational sexual experience" although more and more women are witnessing the remarkable transformations in their sexual identities and their lives. I am grateful that this resource is available and hope to soon offer it on my website. What a great gift to meet the tribe...

As a sex therapist I often work with couples who want more from their sex lives but don't quite know how. Gina Ogden's outstanding, accessible new book is written for women, and with a tremendous understanding of women's sexual experience, but I think it's a great book for men, too. Ogden expands our notion of sex far beyond the physical and into the emotional, mental, and spiritual domains. She does this with candor, humor, compassion and imagination. She frames sex within a much broader context than we usually understand it and gives women (and couples!) concrete strategies to move their sex lives into the realm of cosmic sex, a path to oneness with self, partner, and the Divine. You don't have to be a religious person or even think of yourself as exceptionally "spiritual" to benefit from Ogden's expertise and heart in this book. It is truly a gift to the soul.