Flesh and Spirit [Paperback]

Jack Zimmerman (Author), Jaquelyn McCandless (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 1998

WARNING! Flesh and Spirit is dangerous to the health of your old ideas and expectations about intimate relationship. Reading this revolutionary book dissolves the age-old dispute between sexuality and spirituality and will forever transform the way you and your partner relate. The authors invite you on a journey that embraces everything from ecstatic erotic communion to slogging it out in the trenches of daily life. The journey is at times illuminating, humorous, informative-and, ultimately, profoundly inspiring.

Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Bramble Books (January 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 188364707X
• ISBN-13: 978-1883647070
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #972,323 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Journal of Family Life, October 27, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Flesh and Spirit (Paperback)

Flesh and Spirit
The Mystery of Intimate Relationship

By Jack Zimmerman and Jacquelyn McCandless
Bramble Books, 1998

Reviewed by John D. Lawry
Journal of Family Life, Vol. 5, No. 4 2000

Ever since my divorce in the early 70s, I have been a relationship-book junkie. After all, I failed at marriage as much as my spouse did; maybe I didn't know it all about relationship and marriage in spite of a Ph.D. in psychology. And so I read Creative Divorce and Learning to Love Again by Met Krantzler, Pairing by Richard Bach, The Shared Heart by Barry and Joyce Vissell, Getting the Love You Want by Harville Hendrix, Journey of the Heart by John Welwood, The Art of Sexual Ecstasy by Margo Anand, and yes, even Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus by John Gray, and a host of other titles that are no longer memorable.
Imagine my delight when I discovered Flesh and Spirit: The Mystery of Intimate Relationship. I had just finished reading and reviewing Zimmerman's other recent book, The Way of Council, and received a flyer about the new book from The Ojai Foundation in Southern California where Zimmerman is the director. Having read his other book with great appreciation, I just knew Flesh and Spirit was going to be worthwhile and I was not disappointed.
The theme of the book is captured by the cover photograph of "The Lovers," a piece created by Beatrice Wood, the celebrated potter. Zimmerman, educational consultant and councilor, and McCandless, his wife and a board-certified psychiatrist, go a long way in helping us to understand the "force" of sexuality in love and relationship.
The authors state at the beginning that this book "is written primarily for committed, spiritually oriented, mature couples," with emphasis on the "spiritually oriented." As they say in the preface, "together we discovered the ancient wisdom that opening the heart allows spirit to inhabit the flesh." It is this emphasis that makes the book so radical and so precious to me. Nowhere have I read such wisdom about what the authors call "sexual communion," which is light years beyond what we call "chemistry"; in fact, it is a "transformation" of chemistry.
The book is the interweaving of the authors' personal stories of how two divorced, courageous people came together in their early forties and explored the "mystery of eros" honestly and sometimes painfully, and how they discovered "an unseen (third) presence...who guided, confronted, nurtured, and inspired us to describe the unlimited possibilities of two people loving each other." This "third presence" is defined as "an expanded state of consciousness that is co-created by two partners together with something unconditional and ultimately mysterious that is not of the ordinary world." Who has been in relationship for an extended period of time and not experienced this presence, which the authors liken to a "later-in-life version of birthing a child"? Much of the book is about acknowledging, cultivating and "harvesting" this third presence on the way to becoming "divine lovers."
For couples who have felt the call of "the spiritual path of primary partnership, " this book will provide a map of the terrain that I suspect many couples have already begun to explore and intuit. Zimmerman and McCandless are trustworthy and experienced guides and I, for one, am grateful for their pioneering.