From "belly laughs" to "gut reactions," people acknowledge the power and wisdom within our body's center every day, yet many women sabotage their bellies with tight clothes and shame. This book demonstrates that by celebrating their centers instead of trying to reshape them, women can tap into their source energy to boost vitality, release stress, spice up sexual pleasure, and unleash creativity. The Woman's Belly Book helps women rejoice in their womanly center. The book takes a soul-powered approach to building confidence and better health, presenting simple exercises and movements to help women awaken their core. Lisa Sarasohn presents the concepts with humor and insight, and the movements -- which incorporate techniques such as yoga, breath work, belly dancing, qigong, and tai chi -- are fun and invigorating. Reclaiming the belly as honorable, even sacred, the book also provides a foundation for a body-centered spiritual practice that invokes the presence of the sacred feminine.

The story of the enslaved West Indian women in the struggle for freedom The forgotten history of women slaves and their struggle for liberation. Enslaved West Indian women had few opportunities to record their stories for posterity. In this riveting work of historical reclamation, Stella Dadzie recovers the lives of women who played a vital role in developing a culture of slave resistance across the Caribbean. Dadzie follows a savage trail from Elmina Castle in Ghana and the horrors of the Middle Passage, as slaves were transported across the Atlantic, to the sugar plantations of Jamaica and beyond. She reveals women who were central to slave rebellions and liberation. There are African queens, such as Amina, who led a 20,000-strong army. There is Mary Prince, sold at twelve years old, never to see her sisters or mother again. Asante Nanny the Maroon, the legendary obeah sorceress, who guided the rebel forces in the Blue Mountains during the First Maroon War. Whether responding to the horrendous conditions of plantation life, the sadistic vagaries of their captors or the “peculiar burdens of their sex,” their collective sanity relied on a highly subversive adaptation of the values and cultures they smuggled from their lost homes. By sustaining or adapting remembered cultural practices, they ensured that the lives of chattel slaves retained both meaning and purpose. A Kick in the Belly makes clear that subtle acts of insubordination and conscious acts of rebellion came to undermine the very fabric of West Indian slavery.

Happy Belly Guide is your personalized roadmap to rediscover the joy of having a healthy relationship with food while enjoying the benefits of efficient digestion. Using the wisdom of Ayurveda, mindfulness and psychology, Nadya Andreeva created the Happy Belly guide which is designed to help women heal their digestive issues, find foods that address their body's unique needs and change habits that are destructive to the body. Happy belly is jam-packed with practical living and eating tips, journaling exercises, and ancient knowledge of Ayurveda that will help you create a personalized approach to food based on combing outer and inner wisdom. This book is not a diet plan, not a cookbook. It is a manual on how to create a better relationship with your body and your digestion through building awareness, understanding, and an open dialogue. Using her own experience and knowledge gained from working with hundreds of women in her private wellness coaching practice Nadya Andreeva encourages readers to find their own balanced approach to eating that helps their digestion. This personalized approach stems from an open communication and collaboration of our logical intelligent mind and our wise intuitive body. You will discover: · How to reduce and prevent post meal bloating and help your stomach be regular. · Overcome emotional eating, overeating, and binging that are overloading digestion and create a negative internal dialogue · Easy to digest foods that help to soothe a sensitive and irritated gut while providing nutrient-rich source of energy and satisfaction · Tips for treating food with love and being able to treat yourself to any food as long as you know how to balance it out · How to use your mind and emotions to help your body heal · How to deal with one of the main enemies of an efficient digestion - stress You will also get access to multiple materials online available for a free download with the books purchase

Explains the causes and cures for women's most common digestive ailments as well as more serious, life-altering conditions, providing the latest information on such topics as probiotics, heartburn, medications, and special diets.

In the surreal world of Buffy Cram's stories, someone or something slips beneath the skin of her already beleaguered characters. Stealing into their worlds, it rearranges the familiar into something strange and possibly threatening, making off with their emotional and even physical goods. A smug suburbanite becomes obsessed with the 'hybrids,' the wandering mob of intellectual vagrants overrunning his complacent little cul de sac, snacking on pate and reciting poetry; a father and daughter's post-apocalyptic Pacific island civilization, built of floating garbage and sustained entirely by rubber, is beginning to fray, literally, revealing something disastrously like moss beneath its smooth synthetic skin; following an appendectomy, a young woman's belly starts transmitting what sound like Russian radio signals. Inhabited, occupied, possessed--suddenly, the world as they knew it is no longer quite recognizable, not to mention safe-if it actually was safe before. But it's the surprising, often revelatory ways in which Cram's characters navigate through these strange new landscapes that imbues these stories with complexity, grace and luster.

Soon to be a major motion picture starring Dakota Fanning Like Brick Lane and The Kite Runner, Camilla Gibb’s widely praised new novel is a poignant and intensely atmospheric look beyond the stereotypes of Islam. After her hippie British parents are murdered, Lilly is raised at a Sufi shrine in Morocco. As a young woman she goes on pilgrimage to Harar, Ethiopia, where she teaches Qur’an to children and falls in love with an idealistic doctor. But even swathed in a traditional headscarf, Lilly can’t escape being marked as a foreigner. Forced to flee Ethiopia for England, she must once again confront the riddle of who she is and where she belongs.

If it can be said that Native culture is hidden behind the facade of mainstream America, there is a facet of that culture hidden even to many Native Americans. One of today's generation of outstanding Native writers, Esther Belin is an urban Indian. Raised in the city, she speaks with an entirely different voice from that of her reservation kindred as she expresses herself on subjects of urban alienation, racism, sexism, substance abuse, and cultural estrangement. In this bold new collection of poems, Belin presents a startling vision of urban California—particularly Los Angeles—contrasted with Navajo life in the Four Corners region. She presents aspects of Diné life and history not normally seen by readers accustomed to accounts written by Navajos brought up on the reservation. Her work reveals a difference in experience but a similarity in outlook. Belin's poems put familiar cultural forms in a new context, as Coyote "struts down east 14th / feeling good / looking good / feeling the brown." Her character Ruby dramatizes the gritty reality of a Native woman's life ("I laugh / sit / smoke a Virginia Slim / and talk to the spirits"). Her use of Diné language and poignant descriptions of family life will remind some of Joy Harjo's work, but with every turn of the page, readers will know that Belin is making her own mark on Native American literature. From the Belly of My Beauty is also a ceremony of affirmation and renewal for those Native Americans affected by the Federal Indian Relocation Program of the 1950s and '60s, with its attempts to "assimilate" them into the American mainstream. They have survived by remembering who they were and where they came from. And they have survived so that they might bear witness, as Esther Belin so powerfully does. Belin holds American culture accountable for failing to treat its indigenous peoples with respect, but speaks for the ability of Native culture to survive and provide hope, even for mixed-blood or urban Indians. She is living proof that Native culture thrives wherever its people are found.