When we have gained a deep understanding of the body and soul, there often follows a desire to reach out, to grow, and to change. In the Vedic texts, the second chakra, the energy center between the navel and genitals, is the seat of life and the house of change. It is a point where opposites come together in sympathy, guiding us toward a balanced existence. The choices that help us evolve are often a product of the second chakra, which, when charged with neither too little nor too much energy, rejects rigid control and embraces creativity. Associated with taste and sensuality, the second chakra or Svadhisthana (which means sweetness) can be visualized as a brilliant sunset orange. Like its element, water, the second chakra is ruled by the moon.

A weakness or imbalance in the second chakra can lead to feelings of extreme empathy, which can cause you to be ruled by the emotions of others. To fail to focus on this chakra leads to the opposite: an utter lack of emotion and dwindling passions. A balanced second chakra embraces both sides of everything, giving you a healthy understanding of your emotions as well as those of others. Nurturing it through dance, laughter, and pleasurable movement will help you embrace your own sexuality, which is the main aspect of the chakra. Stimulation of the second chakra can be achieved through the use of orris root, gardenia, or damiana incense; practicing tantra yoga; or exposing the chakra to moonstone or coral. These methods of opening and energizing the chakra can be performed individually or in tandem for greater effect.

The second chakra may appear a route to indulgence to some, because of its focus on the feelings of the body, but it is also the dwelling place of the self. A fully functioning second chakra, working in a balanced way with the body’s other chakras, is a source of self-knowledge and understanding.

A leading group of pediatricians says teenagers need access to birth control and emergency contraception, not the abstinence-only approach to sex education favored by religious groups and President Bush.

The recommendations are part of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ updated teen pregnancy policy.

“Even though there is great enthusiasm in some circles for abstinence-only interventions, the evidence does not support abstinence-only interventions as the best way to keep young people from unintended pregnancy,” said Dr. Jonathan Klein, chairman of the academy committee that wrote the new recommendations.

Teaching abstinence but not birth control makes it more likely that once teenagers initiate sexual activity they will have unsafe sex and contract sexually transmitted diseases, said Dr. S. Paige Hertweck, a pediatric obstetrician-gynecologist at the University of Louisville who provided advice for the report.

It updates a 1998 policy by omitting the statement that “abstinence counseling is an important role for all pediatricians.” The new policy says that while doctors should encourage adolescents to postpone sexual activity, they also should help ensure that all teens — not just those who are sexually active — have access to birth control, including emergency contraception.

Wade Horn, assistant secretary for children and families at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, said counseling only abstinence, preferably until marriage, is the best approach because it sends a clear, consistent message. Teenagers who are sexually active should have access to contraception, but making birth control available to teens who aren’t sends a contradictory message, he said.

The academy’s recommendations “to some extent confuse prevention and intervention,” Horn said.

Citing 2003 government data, the academy’s report says more than 45 percent of high school girls and 48 percent of boys have had sexual intercourse. While teen pregnancy rates have decreased in recent years, about 900,000 U.S. teens get pregnant each year.

Moreover, U.S. teen birth rates are higher than in comparable industrialized countries, which may be partly due to greater access to contraception in some countries, the report said.

The Medical Institute for Sexual Health, a nonprofit group that has worked on pro-abstinence programs with the Bush administration and faith-based groups, opposes the academy’s policy shift.

“I don’t think it’s a smart move at all,” said group founder Dr. Joe McIlhaney Jr., an obstetrician-gynecologist.

However, Karen Pearl, interim president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said the academy “is to be applauded … for having medicine trump ideology.”

HHS’ Horn also said advising pediatricians to ensure that teens have access to emergency contraception is problematic for doctors and parents who morally object to the pills. He faulted the report for lacking guidance on what to do when pediatricians’ moral views differ from their patients’ parents.

Emergency contraception, sometimes called the morning-after pill, blocks ovulation or fertilization and can prevent pregnancy for up to three days after sex. Opponents consider it a form of abortion because it is thought to also help prevent fertilized eggs from implanting in the womb, and some pharmacists have refused to sell it.

Emergency contraception was not mentioned in the old report because it was new and relatively untested, Klein said.

The academy supports making morning-after pills available without a prescription, Klein said.

This book is not meant to be read in only a linear manner. It often offers an experiential process. It is as much poetry as prose. Absorbed phrase by phrase, image by image, it allows healing to enter the heart, the mind, the body.

We share the process from which we are learning daily for the benefit of all who wish to use relationship as a path of self-discovery. This work is not to be taken lightly. This is a book about co-commitment, not co-dependency. These techniques are not applicable to anything that resembles the old-style dominant/submissive relationships which have for so long perpetuated our all-too-human suffering.

When true hearts truly join there is a mystical union. An inter-connecting of whole human beings which, is the foundation for great insight and growth. It is a collaboration in healing.

Although we often speak in terms of merging, or becoming one, or dissolving into oneness—-this is not a giving up of one person to another. It is not – as the great German poet Rilke fears of such commitments, “a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both of their fullest freedom and development..”

Indeed, if two people attempt only to become one, they certainly may get lost. But if the oneness just beyond such concepts is their ultimate concern–if each heart is committed to the universal heart, our birthright, our original nature–neither stops. And the ongoing aerial act is spectacular.

Indeed, when Rilke says that the most that can be expected is that “two solitudes protect and border and greet each other,” he is speaking of the best of the ordinary way. They do not burn for the Beloved. They do not love the truth even more than each other. They refuse to give it all away. To be blessed surveying new frontiers.

The distance from your pain, your grief, your unattended wounds, is the distance from your partner. And the distance from your partner is your distance from the living truth, your own great nature. Whatever maintains that distance, that, separation from ourselves and our beloveds, must be investigated with mercy and awareness. This distance is not overcome by one “giving up their space” to another, but by both partners entering together the unknown between them. The mind creates the abyss but the heart crosses it.

A conscious relationship teaches us to treat ourselves and others as our only child. And to do it mindfully. It does not break the heart. A conscious relationship is as healing and life-affirming as an unconscious, old-style relationship is at times harmful and life-denying. The harmful effect of an unconscious relationship is that it keeps us so small, dependent on external circumstances for our happiness. More needs than gifts are brought to such an entanglement. But a conscious relationship, offers the possibility of relating across the gulf of I and other all the way into the heart of our beloved. A conscious relationship shows us to remain conscious while in relationship. It’s a whole new ball game.

A few years ago Ondrea and I were scheduled to give a talk about healing on what turned out to be Valentine’s Day. Coming from the stillness of our mountain retreat to the commotion of the “big city,” we were deeply touched by the care and kindness exhibited as the meeting hall filled. So many couples aiding each other. Those alone helped to their seats by the loved ones of the recently departed. The weary, nearly translucent faces of patients, friends and colleagues. So many others drawn with illness or gray with grief. So many returned for healing with their families. Their lovers. Men and women of every description—teen-agers and octogenarians, janitors and physicians, car salesmen and poets: black, brown, yellow, and white; gay and straight; sick and well–the loved, the loving, committed to a mutual process. So much buzz and affection. Five hundred gathered for an evening in this beautiful old stone church in an investigation of healing.

These open faces, and the exceptional, nearly initiatory, day we had just had, overwhelmed us with waves of loving kindness.

And we thought what a perfect day to speak about human kindness and maybe even share that term we love so in private but rarely used in groups: the Beloved. A word that incorporates the heart of the sacred into a profound appreciation of our deepest nature. A word that is a “bonding responder” for the way our relationship has become our spiritual practice. And how our practice, our work on ourselves, has become the central core in our connectedness.

And we asked ourselves whether we needed to talk about healing or could just effuse about the Beloved a few times before we realized there was no question. There was no difference. As healing progresses deeper, a more tangible sense of being ensues. From that sense of being there constellates the quality of “being present.” Being present we come into “the presence”: the space in which the process floats: the Moved.

We find the term “the Beloved” quite functional for many reasons including the obvious parallel between the hearts affinity for such an idea and the draw of the personal toward the universal. And, of course, because it is our practice to meet our beloved as the Beloved.

It is a term used in many spiritual traditions and is particularly well served in the Sufi tradition, whose mystical, devotional aspect seeks the “hidden mysteries,” yearning for the direct experience of the one they call “the Beloved.” In perhaps the greatest of all devotional poetry, in the spectacular longings of Rumi, Kabir, Miribai, and Rabia, the Beloved is all that is sought. The Beloved is the context into which the wounded and dismayed may enter, as the ever-injured and uninjurable vastness embraces. their pain and transmutes it to mercy. But to all who seek their own true self, whether Sufi or Buddhist, Christian or Jew, Jain, Native American, or agnostic, the Beloved is the ever-experienceable vastness of our true heart, our original nature. And for all, it is the possibility of freedom, the divine capacity to transform our pool of tears into the Ocean of Compassion.

The Beloved is neither a person nor a place. It is an experience of deeper and deeper levels of being, and eventually of beingness itself–the boundarylessness of your own great nature expressed in its rapture and absolute vastness by the word “love.” It is not for the concept, but for the experience, that we use the term “the Beloved.” The experience of this enormity we falteringly label “divine” is unconditioned love. Absolute openness, unbounded mercy and com-passion. We use this concept, not to name the unnameable vastness of being–our greatest joy–but to acknowledge and claim as our birthright the wonders and healings within.

As we began to speak on that Valentine’s evening, the words “the Beloved” exited our lips with a sigh–a gentle bow to those gathered in the room and to that within each of us, which is only love and boundless being.

It wasn’t the detailed diagrams of the female reproductive system, or the drawings of six different types of hymens that captivated me. Nor was it the righteous, womyn-power assertions such as, “We are learning to live our sexuality on our own terms.” No, it was the book’s explicit, unflinching description of fantasies: real women revealing their most private erotic imaginings about horses (ew) other women (less ew) and men (totally awesome, as I may actually have said in 1986). I read the scenarios over and over in the privacy of my locked bedroom, until I finally left for college, where the logistics of living with a roommate promptly put an end to that.

The eighth edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves arrives in bookstores this month. Touted as one of the most lasting contributions of the second-wave women’s movement, it has been called the definitive women’s-health reference of the last 35 years. But ask the daughters of its original intended audience — the women who now call themselves the third wave — why they love it, and they’ll confirm it wasn’t the advice on healthy eating or bicep-building that mesmerized them in their youth.

“I definitely remember reading the sex parts, especially the lesbian parts, and being like, this is amazing, they’re real people talking about sex,” says Liza Featherstone, the author of Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Workers’ Rights at Wal-Mart. “It must be like a teenage guy discovering Penthouse Forum. Except better, because these aren’t stories about people having sex in airplanes that are probably made up. It must be the way that people experience amateur porn now.”

It’s true: reading OBOS isn’t entirely unlike watching a jiggly, implant-free woman and her paunchy, real-life boyfriend wrestling naked in front of their home cam. The fantasies in OBOS weren’t airbrushed, and neither were the people. And though one friend of mine claims that a childhood viewing of “the crazy picture of two fat lesbians, one of them in a wheelchair” led her to temporarily resolve that sex was absolutely, unequivocally grody to the max, most of us felt deeply, intuitively comforted by the knowledge that we could think our dirty thoughts and look like our less-than-centerfold-worthy selves and still get some action (eventually).

Hell, you wouldn’t even need a lover. (That’s the book’s very “Saturday Night Live”-sounding term, not mine.) In fact, OBOS picks up where Gloria Steinem’s “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle” maxim leaves off. Every edition devoted an entire section to sisters doing it for themselves, sexually speaking. From the story about the gym teacher who feels up her female students to the girl who imagines sleeping with her brother because he’s “19 and groovy and looks just like me,” OBOS provided plenty of things to think about while doing the deed. “I don’t remember a lot about the rest of the book,” says Marisa Meltzer, a freelance writer who was given OBOS by her mother one Christmas. “I was like, let’s get back to the masturbation scenes.”

I’m pretty sure that when the book was first published in 1970, its feminist authors weren’t attempting to recruit young ladies to their cause with a bait-and-switch — get ‘em with the sex stuff, then pump ‘em full of women’s lib. But it worked anyway.

“The book definitely politicized me,” says Christine Cupaiuolo, online editor of Ms. magazine. “It made me more aware of the issues. It showed me a paradigm existed that I could work and live in.” OBOS illustrated that women could (and should) march in defense of abortion rights, fight the inadequacy of the American health care system, and tell their husbands to shove it when they skipped the foreplay — but still have a threesome or fantasize about being spanked. In the OBOS worldview, political action was an easy bedfellow of un-PC sex.

And by inadvertently appealing to pre-pubescent girls’ hormones, it provided a much-needed corrective. “One of feminism’s jobs has always seemed to be about giving women sexual agency and acknowledging they’re sexual people, and yet that’s not feminism’s identity,” says Jennifer Baumgardner, the author of Grassroots: A Field Guide for Feminist Activism. (The North Dakota native confesses to a penchant for a certain OBOS scenario involving a bathtub and warm running water. “It was cold in Fargo,” she explains.) As far as OBOS readers knew, feminists weren’t man-haters — they seemed to love not just men, but also women, bondage, polyamory and water sports.

And all this free-to-be sexuality wasn’t just appealing to girls. “I was first exposed to naked women in Our Bodies, Ourselves, well before Playboy,” says Mike Carnegie, a 30-year-old graduate student and artist in L.A. “So any titillation would have always been wrapped up in some kind of awareness of feminist body-image concerns.” OBOS may have stealthily made a generation of men more feminist, though Carnegie isn’t convinced his experience with OBOS was entirely positive. “On the dark side, it contributed to a kind of imperial guilt in my teens — like jerking off to natives in National Geographic.” But he admits that when the time came, “I probably knew my way around a vagina better than I might’ve otherwise. Or so I like to think.”

To me, OBOS has exhausted its usefulness as a pornographic accessory. The scenarios don’t give me the same spark they did, back when I wasn’t just like a virgin. But the newest edition sits in an exalted position on my bookshelf, and not just because I’m nostalgic. Now, OBOS is what everyone says it’s supposed to be: a kind, tender, essential how-to manual. The new edition covers all of the old sexual stuff, plus more recent health-care issues — there are sections on plastic surgery, antidepressants and menstrual suppression, not to mention a misguided anti-Brazilian-bikini-wax diatribe — but the fierce feminist analysis, nowhere to be found in the average reference book, remains.

It’s a good thing, because our sex lives may be even more embattled now. With TV gays making network execs rich while real-life queers can’t even get a tax break, OBOS’s loving — and lusty — depiction of lesbian sex, coupled with its explorations of institutionalized homophobia, remains nothing less than radical. And as abstinence-only advocates tout the value of technical virginity — and their young charges comply by substituting unprotected oral or anal sex for vaginal intercourse — OBOS continues to provide comprehensive sex education without a hint of compromise.

Kara Jesella is a freelance writer in New York City. She is currently co-writing a book on Sassy magazine for Farrar, Straus & Giroux.