The Paula Gordon Show |
Conversation 1 Psychologist Stella Resnick tells Paula Gordon and Bill Russell how to combine being hardworking with life's pleasures. Pleasure, Resnick believes, is the life force. She explains how being tense affects the human body and cultivating pleasurable states can help a person access deeper regions of being, including intuition. She offers enthusiasm, interest, curiosity and excitement as forces which can propel a person forward with a sense of direction. |
Conversation 2 Sexual energy, says Resnick, is bioenergy, bioelectricity. She describes "oceanic streaming" and urges people to be in touch with their sexuality, starting with a sexual relationship with oneself. She describes traditional psychotherapy and her personal experience focused on anxiety, fear, shame, guilt and narcissistic injury. Her response was to search for ways to develop skills for overcoming learned resistance and fear of pleasure. Wilhelm Reich, an associate of Sigmund Freud, offered insights. Resnick's mind-body work is based on her belief that thinking differently is not enough because habits, patterns of anxiety and fears are embedded in the muscles and tissues of the body. She describes the central role the breath takes. |
Conversation 3 Resnick describes "conscious breaths" which enable positive choices rather than automatic reflexes. She describes being in touch with one's experience based on breathing. Success is "being able to relax in challenging times." Resnick describes the physiology and effects both of adrenaline -- the body's fight and flight chemical -- and endorphins, associated with celebration. She urges a balance between the two. With all emotions located somewhere in the body, courage has a particularly important role, which Resnick articulates. |
Conversation 4 Building on her idea that there are eight core pleasures essential to being fulfilled as a human, Resnick describes the importance of being "in the moment" and present-centered. Resnick believes people want to be challenged. It is how we respond that enables us to find our deepest resources. Relationships are at the heart of most challenges. One's relationship with oneself is the foundation for all other relationships. A positive relationship with oneself requires we be able to feel emotional pleasures. Resnick describes the importance of the expansive emotions -- love, gratitude, faith, and intimacy. She believes we are too likely to share weaknesses and vulnerability instead of what she believes are more positive emotions. She describes the process of bonding between people, drawing from her experience as a sex therapist. |
Conversation 5 Resnick describes the importance of having a physical and spiritual relationship with one's immediate personal environment and with the larger world. She offers suggestions for both. Resnick believes sex is much bigger than intercourse, which tends to end intimacy. She offers a range of suggestions for enhancing one's sexual responses, focused on sexual excitement, not sexual release. |
Conversation 6 Resnick maintains the body is an important part of growth process, that we cannot look at changing attitudes without incorporating those changes into our bodies. She describes therapies which have sprung from Wilhelm Reich's ideas. She reiterates ways to break through patterns, make conscious chooses and find the courage to reach out. |