Oxytocin counters cravings for sweets

One day while in a retreat center snack bar I heard a woman say, "Brendan, you give such great hugs that we should just put you by the chocolate section. That way, whenever we get chocolate cravings we can just get a hug from you instead!" She may have been on to something scientifically valid....Now there's research demonstrating that oxytocin limits consumption of sweets....

Letters from the Trenches

More than 80 percent of Taiwanese women who are physically abused by their husbands have a tendency toward depression, with one quarter considered to be seriously at risk of committing suicide, according to the results of a recent survey.

Surely, the results are not surprising. A good newspaper article, however, would explain the biology of our sexuality and the effects it has on the harmony of the couple.

I am certain that many more women are being abused than the article suggests, depending upon how one defines abuse. Add to the abuse problem, rampant adultery, a thriving porn industry, etc., and one cannot help wondering what is wrong in our intimate relationships. I'd like to see newspapers writting less about the various unfortunate symptoms of the problems that plague our world, but more about the numerous solutions that exist....

The Quest for Spiritual Orgasm

Sexual love can be one of the most powerful human experiences. Over the past two thousand years, certain Daoist and Tantric cultures sought to tap the power of sexuality to cultivate elevated spiritual states of awareness and achieve immortality. These practices appear to have originated in China and India and later spread to Tibet and elsewhere in Asia. Daoism and Tantrism are both experiential approaches to life, and share similar microcosmic and macrocosmic theories of the human body as an inner mirror of outer Nature. The body-centered cosmology of each has led to a spectrum of sexual practices that range from ritualized physical sexual intercourse to celibacy accompanied by conscious subtle-body love making....

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