self sacrifice Archives ~ Stephanie Golden

Self-sacrificing women: free tipsheet for you

August 15, 2016 StephanieGolden inspiration, self-improvement, social issues

An issue that hasn’t gone away How many men would eat food they don’t like because their wife likes it? Or wear clothes they don’t like because she wants them to look a certain way? Women do these things all the time. I did them with my former husband. In my book Slaying the Mermaid: Women and the Culture of Sacrifice, which uses Andersen’s Little Mermaid as an image of the ultimate self-sacrificing woman, I investigated why so many women feel obliged to put other people’s needs first—even when they don’t want to. I discovered that the self-sacrificing impulse comes[…]

Tech warrior: putting a book on Kindle

April 21, 2011 StephanieGolden ebook publishing, writing

Slaying the Mermaid: Women and the Culture of Sacrifice is now an ebook offered through Amazon. A triumph, for I did it all myself. Years in print publishing had worn deep grooves in my brain, so it took some effort to wrap my mind around the basic ebook concepts: No pages. No fancy fonts for display type. No artful white space before and after chapter titles and subheads (but enough space and sufficient variation in font size so the reader knows that a new section is beginning). No index! On the bright side, endnote reference numbers are links. Click and[…]

The sky of mind: vast like space

April 20, 2011 StephanieGolden buddhism, inspiration, meditation, writing

Buddhist meditators practice experiencing the mind as a vast, clear sky, through which thoughts, feeings, and all other experiences pass like clouds, appearing and then vanishing in an open space of awareness that’s not limited to the inside of the head. (Meditation teacher Jack Kornfield describes this practice here.) Wassily Kandinsky’s painting Blue Sky combines that image of the mind as vast open sky with an experience I’ve had when writing at a very deep level. Part of the conceptual work for my books about homeless women and about self-sacrifice was simply discovering what they were actually about. I came across[…]