Customer Reviews

Dear Lover: A Woman's Guide To Men, Sex, And Love's Deepest Bliss

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

My hubbie and I took turns reading this book and Deida's "Way of the Superior Man' out loud with each other. WOW, I literally cried as he read Deida's words because it seemed that finally someone understood what I have longed for all my life. Sure, there were things I didn't like hearing, and even disagreed with, but overall wonderful insights and leaps of growth in our relationship directly as a result of these readings.

Tho I have read many many books on the subject of love relationships--these two books are head & shoulders above any of the others.

I've never written a book review before until Deida's work...it is that good!

Shelly

A central question in David Deida's work is: What is sexual love between a man and a woman for? The answer he gives here and elsewhere is that the purpose of sex is to open our bodies and hearts to God, and in fact that sex more than anything else in life is what takes us open to God. "Through entering your heart and body with mine in love's deepest bliss, I open together with you to God."

Deida's distinctive writing style is intuitive and filled with redundancy, so you'll read that message often in this book (which is written as a series of letters from Deida to the reader as his female lover). To me it's attention-getting the first few times he says it but soon becomes mind-numbing. By the end of the book it's enough already!

Still, this book contains some interesting corollaries for women to contemplate. Among them:

* "The secret to unfolding your heart's deepest bliss is to give and receive love fully, with or without a man. . . . You can learn to open your body as if it were a big heart, vulnerable and full of love's radiant life-force. And it is this disposition of openhearted radiance that will gift the world as well as attract and keep a man capable of actually meeting your heart's deepest desire."

* "Whether you are alone or in relationship, your spiritual and sexual bliss require a daily allotment of whole-body pleasure and deep-heart offering, or else your joy will shrivel like an unwatered plant."

* "Deep heart yearning is not a problem to be solved but a divine pull to open as devotional surrender, as wide as all, now. . . . This capacity to offer your open love is indestructible. No amount of rejection or betrayal can destroy this offering of love."

* "Even when you are tense or upset, you can practice surrendering your body and heart to be breathed open by this love that yearns in everybody's heart."

* "Your yearning attracts and inspires love. If you allow your deepest yearning to show through your entire body, you will attract and inspire a deep man."

* You will attract your reciprocal. "Unsurrendered women attract unpresent men."

* "Your secret sexual desire is to be ravished, lovingly forced open in unbearable pleasure, and taken fully open to God by a man of deep spiritual wisdom, strength, humor, sensitivity, and integrity."

* "Few men are capable of entering a woman's heart and opening her body to God's bliss, but few women are capable of offering their heart and body to be claimed open in this way."

* "Men are terrified of a woman's depth of love and the energy that moves as a woman's sexuality and emotions. And, at the same time, men want nothing more in this life than to merge completely with a woman's devotional love and wild energy. Only as a man outgrows his fear can he handle a woman's tremendous love-energy without running. And only such a man is worthy of your devotional offering in a committed intimacy."

* " . . . you settle for a mediocre relationship because you are afraid to be alone. You fill your heart's yearning with an adequate, but not entirely trustable, man. As you grow beyond being dependent on a man, you may choose to settle for an independent life because you are afraid to rely on a man's support."

* "Eventually, you realize that self-sufficiency is a transition phase. . . . Instead of denying your own needs or limiting your love to self-reliant independence, you realize that, more than anything else, you actually yearn to live open as a devotional offering of love."

* "Your concern for career and self-sufficiency is obviously healthy, but your deepest fulfillment may await risking your heart wide open, offering your bright love to all beings, and giving yourself to be claimed - by a man of integrity, by a family of beloveds, by a world that needs your love. Love is the only way to live that won't leave your feminine heart feeling unseen, ungiven, empty, and wanting--no matter how successful your professional life may be."

* "You want him to notice - in fact, worship - your body's radiant beauty and your heart's light of divine love and he wants you to acknowledge and worship his heart's capacity to spiritually and sexually ravish you open to God."

* "If you want to inspire your man's depth of presence and commitment, offer him your feminine heart's deepest yearning, sexually, actively, and devotionally, receiving him into you completely and responding with full pleasure and trust."

* "Men are like trains. They are going somewhere. Choosing and staying with a man is like choosing to get on a train. You will end up going where your man goes, spiritually and sexually, or you will have to get off his train. You cannot change a man's direction to yours without losing trust in his capacity to navigate."

* "A young rigid woman, closed down and energetically dead, is far less sexy than an older woman who offers her heart-open pleasure in surges of abandoned moans and undulating sensuality, whose devotional eyes and mouth and vagina and legs move and open as unquenchable yearning, whose trust is total, who gives her man her deepest heart and every ounce of her own pleasure as a gift for him to feel, worship, and behold--such a woman is agelessly sexy. She is grounded in her heart and generous with love's offering."

* "Besides your heart's pleasure, your heart's pain is also a gift, if given through an open body and heart. . . . But there is a big difference between accumulating your emotions--eventually expressing them in a toxic dump of tense build-up--and being able to spontaneously express every nuance of emotion as the flow opens through you. Spontaneous emotional expression, from your deep heart through your open body and relaxed breath with no closure or tension, is a natural expression of love--even if love is expressed as sorrow, anger, or fear. . . . With practice, you can learn to offer your pleasure, pain, and emotions spontaneously and responsively as soon as they occur, letting go of them instantly, always with your heart open and connecting with your lover's heart."

* "Men constantly crave feminine energy, especially in safe forms that don't demand depth."

* "Men tend to leave relationships too soon, always looking for a better option. Women tend to stay in relationships too long, always hoping that their man will change and grow."

Now for the kookiness. The following little nuggets just seem way, way off base to me.

"Clitoral orgasms are the most superficial orgasms, requiring little if any emotional or spiritual trust--a vibrator can be used to achieve this pleasure. Nevertheless, clitoral orgasms can prepare you for surrendering more deeply." OK, so he's telling us that some kinds of orgasms are more evolved than others. Let's see, didn't we finally get permission some decades ago to jettison the myth of the vaginal orgasm?

The chapter entitled "Choosing Abuse and Refusing Love" is simply bizarre. There Deida asserts that if you choose to wait for a good man, taking care of yourself while your career progresses, your friends grow, and your life improves, you a choosing to be a victim of abuse. Huh? "The mistreatment is not from a man, but from yourself. You are actively closing, protecting your heart from love, shutting down so your body and heart don't ache so openly. You may be damaging yourself as much as any man could damage you. . . . You've grown used to some suffering, and you truly love your well appointed home, your friends, your cat, your garden. . . . you are choosing to play the victim to less love than you know, deep down, you deserve." Oh puhlease!!!

The chapter entitled "On Showing Your Heart's Light in Public" contains this interesting characterization of Deida's own gender: "When your heart is fully claimed by divine love, you have no personal neediness to be seen. Your body is open and flowing, alive with sexual energy, radiant with delight, and resplendent with the shine of love--you don't want to desecrate love's fullness in the oinking barrage of men's psychic grabbing and groping."

A final note. Deida's original contribution to relationship theory is his idea that in our time men and women are working out what it means to be in a stage 3 relationship, with stage 1 being the role-bound relationships of earlier generations, stage 2 being the egalitarian ideal that emerged with the modern women's movement, and stage 3 being based on the understanding that cultivating the male and female polarities in relationship is what keeps sex passionate and bonding. The idea is appealing, but what bothers me in Deida is a subtle flavoring of male dominance, since it's always about "your man's claim," "your man's taking you open to God." Contrast this with the female-pleasure-based paradigm put forth by Regina Thomashauer in *Mama Gena's Owner's and Operator's Guide to Men* and you'll see what I mean. Both Deida and Mama Gena agree that feminine energy is the most attractive force on earth, but I find Mama Gena's ideas more revolutionary.

'Superior Man' is for men, and an excellent book, but this is the companion volume for women, and gives deep insights into how a true man of integrity is able to and really wants to love the woman in his life. One woman, for this lifetime and even into the next. He writes beautifully and candidly, and each time I read it, I see more and more what I am able to share Tantrically with my partner. We have created bliss on a daily basis through skill, determination, discipline, and above all, love, and this from a man who is by no means easy to live with or love! Or who even thought he knew how to love, all his other relationships had failed so miserably.

Deida's advice about loving each other open to the divine even when 'stuff' gets in the way is one we would all do to remember. After all, what is more sublime than living and being in love-having that 24/7, 365 days a year, always, at every moment, is well worth it, so take the advice offered to heart, read his other books, Like Wild nights and Blue Truth, and get Superior Man for your guy, train and practice love, and Tantra, and be happy! It really does work! And as good as it sounds in the book, it is even better in real life!

For me, David Deida unfortunately has some of the qualities of the children's story "The Emperor's New Clothes". There are two reasons why.

The first simply is there are large claims made to what his insights will bring. All his books promise to "guide" us into deeper spiritual understandings in the sexual realm. (And seriously, who wouldn't want that, right?)

The second "new-clothesian" quality of Deida has to do with his form of discourse. The thing about his presentation is, there are copious amounts of spiritual beauty backed up by an subtle but constant wash of judgementalism. The structure goes sort of like this: "you want this, you don't have it, I know why you don't, here is what you need to do."
But what if one does not totally agree with any of these "stepping stones" to understanding? The answer always seems to be that "you are not open enough yet to see it". "There is some blocking element in you".

Very little of his metaphoric insights about "gender" or "essence" or most any of his ideas for that matter, are ever presented as "one can think of it this way" but rather as "this is how it is". He states every belief he has about sexual spirituality with what I consider a totally unwarranted confidence.

And he has a system of "stages of growth" to pigeon-hole "where you are stuck".
So yes, of course, I want to "get it". Yes, of course, I want to have the deep blissful place that is "my potential". Yes, I really am wanting to "see the emperor's beautiful clothing!"

But honestly, while he earnestly and often eloquently gives gifts of insight into the subject, he also is rigid, arrogant, patently condescending, and as a writer, can be deadly dull and repetitive. Most of his core "beliefs" are for me painfully flawed. After reading this book, all I could think was, he really does not have much insight into the depth of the feminine essence nor a "feel for" life as a woman.

I would never recommend this book to anyone.

I liked Dear Lover, but I feel that it's mostly similiar to Blue Truth but written for a different audience. I would recommend the better written Blue Truth instead of this to get most of the same information.

This book has changed the way I see myself and the way that I see everyone. One of the most valuable books I have read. It was not what I expected, but turned out to be better. It's not a black and white, Q&A self help book. Nor does it speak of technique or 'Cosmopolitan'sex tips, etc. It is real. And deep. It is about deep, spiritual love and how to allow it.

Deida has written The Way of the Superior Man for men. In my view, the current book is Deida's attempt to write a similar book for women. The book directed to men deals with life purpose as well as relationship to women. This book only deals with relationships to men. Being male, I can't say how this book resonates with the typical female. So if you are a woman, I would actually mostly look at the reviews written by other women. Having said this, here is my male perspective of the book:

I really liked The Way of the Superior Man (five stars) because it is fast paced and introduce several ideas. The current book is more like the typical self-help book; repetitive and quite unclear when it comes to the ideas. Deida often says that the man can open the woman to God. However, he is not talking about the Christian God and, in fact, it is totally unclear to me what he means with this statement. Sometimes this seems to very physical like when having sex, but most of the time it seems to be with a figurative meaning. There are a number of these ideas being repeated over and over, like the term "opening up the woman". Another term used is "connect with". I understand the vocabulary, but exactly how do you do this? Isn't the self-help books supposed to give practical advice too?

I bought the book because I wanted to learn about some of the advice given to women. You'll get some of this in the book. For instance like the woman needs to amplify her emotions so the man actually sees them. Not faking the emotions, but amplifying them. This seems like good advice. Overall, though, you will not find that many of these specific insights or pieces of advice.

I am giving the book three stars. Personally I didn't like its style (and I don't think it is because I am a man), but the specific advice that is provided seems reasonable to me.

OTHER BOOKS BY DEIDA
Deida has written many books and it is very difficult to know how they are positioned vis-a-vis each other. The book Intimate Communion: Awakening Your Sexual Essence (two stars) was written 16 years ago and introduced the idea that couples, after having reached a relationship characterised by equality, need to move to the next stage of development. That idea is interesting, but I would not recommend this book because it is repetitive. You'll find most of the ideas in The Way of the Superior Man. Since Deida's style of writing has improved in later books (e.g. less repetition, less tentative voice), I would disregard the books written in the 1990s.

Hopefully I get time to read some more Deida books and if I do, I'll update this section of the review.

for a deep blissful spiritual connection with a partner. A tad of redundant mid way, but gets fresh again. I bought several copies to give away as gifts to other women in my life for inspiration. I could not put this book down. Do not hesitate to buy Dear Lover.

For a woman who has any amount of masculine energy, this book will want to make you retch. On the other hand if you are entirely made of femenine energy, you will probably be able to relate well, and may find it helpful.

David Deida has an excellent handle on the differences between men and women. And how to use this understanding to complement one another in a spiritual / sexual partnership. Good information.