Buy the paperback 

Quantity: 
Imprint: Triarchy Press 
Published: December 2022
112pp. ~ 15.2 x 22.9 cm ~ Paperback
ISBN: 978-1-913743-68-0
Price: £12.50

Tags: Desire, longing, dramatherapy, poetry.

Read more:

The Author

Other Triarchy Titles you might love:
See our other titles in:
Fiction, Drama & Poetry
Movement & Somatics
Mythogeography & Walking
People in Society

Readership

If you work with others with issues of desire and longing, or are exploring them for yourself, Touching the Flame will offer new approaches, ideas and insights for your personal, creative or professional practice.

Touching the Flame
 An Enquiry into Deep Desire

Mary Booker


Moving on from her ­ first enquiry into fear and vulnerability (described in her book Nothing Special) Mary Booker here offers a guide to the roots and nature of desire.

She draws on her autobiographical writing, movement art, poetry, Buddhist practice and dramatherapy skills to explore the origins, impact, constraints and blossoming of desire in her own life. Amongst the questions she considers:

• If desire is for something other, does a sense of lack always accompany it?
• Does one desire always point to a deeper desire?
• Does desire always lead to suffering, as suggested in Buddhism?
• Desire is highly motivating. How can we best access that energy?
• Is desire by nature insatiable? Does it always seek more?
• Is desire essential to life?
• Why do illness and depression remove desire? Are they too absorbing?
• What is the relationship between desire and vulnerability?
​
Touching the Flame includes 40 of Mary’s poems and has chapters on Needs and Desire; Lack and Longing; Buddhism and Desire; Greco-Roman Views of Desire; Desire and Creativity; Women and Desire; and the Sumerian myth of  ‘The Descent of Inanna to the Great Below’.

The REFLECTION

"Desire is an outflowing of the imagination. Understanding its imaginal quality is what makes it ever possible – the imagination allows desire and its 'filling up of the senses' to occur whenever you open to it.

When you bring this understanding into the material realm and the physical touching is tender, the other, be that a person or a rose, will be allowed their otherness – desire will be alive and the contact open, in the imagination and in the physical touching.

Both love and desire grow with understanding and allowing the otherness of the loved one – and opening to them."