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Reviews for Arousing The Goddess by Tim Ward From Spirit of Change Magazine by Alec Franklor Journey with Tim, an emotionally vulnerable, twenty-something, ex-evangelical Christian from Canada, as he travels through India in search of enlightenment, connection to humanity, love and meaning. As one of the few non-monks at a Buddhism conference, he meets Sabina, a blonde Austrian researching art in the Buddhist ruins in India. Tim must then confront his raging hormones in the face of his desire to maintain the cool detachment of his recent Buddhist training. The two eventually become lovers and begin having Tantric-like experiences. Through these unexpected and mysterious encounters Tim attempts to unite his opposite cravings for sex and for God, as well as his understandings of the masculine and the feminine. Tim's emotional journey is played out as we witness his meditations and often humorous hallucinations as he grapples with the nature of desire and its relationship to sex. We also witness and sympathize with Sabina and her unique difficulties in traveling and conducting research in India because she is a young blonde woman. Part travel log, part love story, part spiritual text, this work of autobiographical fiction is full of information on Buddhism, Hinduism, life and culture in India. If you are considering making a pilgrimage or trekking through India, this story will introduce you to some of the joy and pitfalls of what awaits you.
From The Midwest Book Review - November 2004 Arousing the Goddess: Sex and Love in the Buddhist Ruins of India is the personal memoir of one man's sexual and spiritual awakening in India. Author Tim Ward traveled throughout India and the far east for two years, and fell in love with a beautiful Austrian Indologist on her own search for knowledge. The energy harnessed the power of tantric sex to achieve a sublime plateau of bliss, color, sensation, and awakened truths amid their passion. Their journey is one that pursues enlightenment as well as spiritual wisdom, and the heat of their unions recalls echoes of the ancient sex practices of the mysterious Tantrics. An enthralling true story of physical, carnal, and spiritual exploration as witnessed, lived, and recorded by Tim Ward.
At age 26, Ward (What the Buddha Never Taught) left the woman he had lived with for two years in his native Canada and entered a Buddhist monastery in Ladakh, India. After three months, he left to travel throughout India, with the purpose of finding out how poverty and spirituality coexist there. Instead, he fell in lust with Sabina, an Austrian doctoral student. They had a sexual encounter so intense he believed that it might have been a Tantric experience, a complete spiritual union of the male and female poles of existence. In this chronicle of their travels together, three threads are developed: Ward's obsession with Sabina and his desire to turn sexual desire into spiritual attainment, a discourse on the purposes of Tantric sex and of the goddess Kali's meaning in Hindu spirituality, and a travelog depicting the poverty and human degradation he finds in India. On one level, this is an entertaining story of sexual desire set in an exotic locale and based on the spiritual eroticism of Tantric practices. On another, it suggests that both the horrors and the blessings of life are to be accepted equally and that such acceptance is vital to real spiritual growth. This memoir-part of publisher Monkfish's debut list in spirituality-is recommended for public libraries.-Jerry Shuttle, East Tennessee State Univ., Johnson City Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information. FROM Ashe Journal - http://ashejournal.com/index.php?id=17 Arousing the Goddess, Tim Ward (Monkfish) This is the mystical and erotic story of the author’s two-year journey through India and the Far East. Ward spent three months in a Himalayan monastery before falling in love with an Austrian Indologist, Sabina. The two travel together on their joint spiritual quests through the Buddhist ruins of India. During the course of the journey, they begin to experience a new energy in their sexually charged relationship—a energy with all the hallmarks of ancient Tantric symptoms. Arousing the Goddess tells this true story of two lovers walking amidst the ruins of Buddhist India while wrestling with the truths being awakened by their passionate and surprising tantric practices.
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