October 22-24, 2004
Riane Eisler began with questions: “What in the past led to the present? What in the present are we doing to prepare for the future? How do we create the conditions to promote our highest potential?” Old categories like Left and Right, Believers and Non-believers didn’t offer answers, so she turned her keen mind to pre-history and cross-cultural studies. The resulting synthesis became the international best seller, The Chalice and the Blade, one of those rare books that changes lives. Ashley Montagu called it “the most important book since Darwin’s Origin of Species.” Riane described the partnership model, symbolized by the Chalice, which relies mainly on pleasure and personal connections to maintain social cohesion, and the dominator model, symbolized by the Blade, which relies mainly on pain, fear, and violence to motivate behavior.
After her breakthrough work, she turned her Viennese born, scholarly, Phi- Beta-Kappa mind to exploring our intimate relations, challenging our most basic assumptions by offering a cohesive vision of the evolution of pleasure, pain, sex, consciousness, politics, spirituality, and love. Our most profound human yearning is for connection: for sex attached to love, for understanding and acceptance forged by trust and caring. The self cannot be helped in isolation from the web of relationships around us.
Daniel Quinn, author of Ishmael, says, “Nothing can vanquish anxiety like clarity, which is what Riane Eisler delivers abundantly.” One of the most original and wise thinkers of our time, Dr. Eisler makes abstract words like “national,” “global,” and “ moral” catch fire. You will ignite, too, when experiential exercises, discussions, visioning, and plans for action open opportunities to act in the world to create a partnership-based society — and at the same time fulfill your deepest yearnings and realize your highest potentials.
Dr. Eisler’s life work is a call to construct for ourselves and our children a world where pleasure rather than pain is primary. We have the awakening consciousness of a species struggling to survive, offering us the opportunity to break the vice grip we’ve been in for 5000 years. Human creativity is poised to create new ways of living. We aren’t as far from realizing our goals as we think, which is why the resistance is so strong now. People will leave this retreat empowered and renewed.
Evolutionary and cultural historian Dr. Riane Eisler is the brilliant, infectiously warm, original thinker and internationally acclaimed author of The Chalice and the Blade, translated into 20 languages and in its 25th printing. Her other books, Sacred Pleasure, Tomorrow’s Children, and the award-winning The Power of Partnership, have addressed sex, myth, evolution, families, children, and education. Dr. Christiane Northrup calls her “the right medicine for virtually everything that ails our society and planet.” Now she’s actively exploring chemistry and neurology. A dynamic and charismatic speaker, Dr. Eisler is president of the Center for Partnership Studies and gives keynote addresses at conferences worldwide. We’ve been inviting her to Rowe for 19 years, but she rarely does weekend retreats. This is only her second visit here, and we hope you’ll join us for this rare opportunity. Visit her website at: http://partnershipway.org/