Riding the Dragon: The Power of Committed Relationship

This no-nonsense book, exactly in tune with the emerging consciousness of the nineties, reveals a powerful new way of understanding intimate relationship. It is, the authors declare, a pathway to personal awakening. Through relationship, we can recognize who we really are and discover the unseen richness of our own soul. Riding The Dragon tells us how.

It's a book about committed relationship. It's for adults, for people who mean business. The tools it presents have life-changing power. Among them: awareness of PROJECTION, how we hide our own unpleasant characteristics, yet see them as part of--"project them onto"--a partner. We learn about MULTIPLICITY, that each of us has many different inner parts -- infants, various children, adolescents, young adults -- who all may be clamoring for attention. The book explains how our partner can be so grown-up one moment and so childish the next. We also discover how to find value in those painful wounds we've carried for years, and why attempts to avoid pain in a relationship are always destructive. We learn how to use the healing power in the Heart Center.

The authors, who have presented this material to seminar participants throughout Europe, in South America, and the Caribbean, now offer their straightforward, realistic viewpoints to readers of this book. Insightful and challenging, Riding The Dragon is a refreshing, look at how increased awareness and attention can bring success to any relationship.

Gawain Bantle, a native of Germany, was 16 when writings of Erich Fromm inspired him to revise his materialistic goals and dedicate his life to "finding and following his soul's bliss."

Drawn at first to an involvement with dance, Gawain studied ballet at the Music University in Cologne for four years and graduated with the equivalent of a bachelor's degree. Before and after graduation, he performed with several European ballet companies. Later, having developed a strong interest in modern dance, he traveled to New York City, where he studied with such notables as Merce Cunningham, Martha Graham, and Alvin Ailey. He also created his own modern dance troupe and staged several successful self-choreographed performances.

In 1980, the life-changing impact of a consciousness-raising workshop caused him to end his involvement with dance and dedicate himself to the development of expanded awareness. Recognizing that he had found the pathway for which he began searching at 16, he spent six years studying and participating in various techniques, trainings, and methods aimed at greater consciousness, enhanced awareness, and deepened experience of the divine. At the completion of this period, he started his own work as a teacher of heightened awareness and personal/spiritual growth.

Rhea Powers, after having fulfilled her youthful ambition to be a "wife, mother, and high-school teacher," embarked on a search for meaning that took her out of her first marriage and -- through various seminars, trainings, and teachers in America, Europe, and India -- into an exploration of spirituality, religion, and psychology.

Following a six-year involvement with the EST organization, Rhea sought more direct ways of helping people. She had begun to have spontaneous experiences of what apparently were past lives, so she drew on her earlier interest in rebirthing to create a regression technique that she applied professionally as a past-life therapist. Her growing practice eventually took her to Manhattan, where her clients included many top executives and celebrities. She also started leading small groups and workshops around the U.S. and in Europe, presenting techniques she had developed.

Rhea's experiences with transpersonal realms of consciousness led to her experiments with "channeling," a phenomenon of which she acknowledges having been skeptical prior to actually experiencing it. She subsequently used that technique to write two books which were published in German and Spanish. These and three other books (also published in German and Spanish) have combined sales of over 100,000. Her first book, A Call to the Lightworkers, was published in English in 1991.

Gawain Bantle and Rhea Powers met in 1986, when he attended a series of seminars she was teaching. They fell in love and began living and working together. The 1987 publication of Rhea's first two books in German created an increasing demand for workshops in German-speaking Europe and the couple moved to Europe. Since then, they have worked with thousands of people there, expanding from weekend workshops to trainings that, having grown in scope and depth, now cover periods as long as six-months. In 1993, after two of Rhea's books were published in Argentina, creating a demand for presentations in that country, Rhea and Gawain started traveling to Buenos Aires to conduct trainings and lead workshops. They have also expanded their work into Australia. Many people they have trained are now practicing spiritual therapists, leading their own seminars worldwide.

Riding The Dragon, of which they are co-authors, is Rhea's sixth book and Gawain's first. Strongly influenced by the thousands of people with whom they have worked, it is a practical guide to success in a committed relationship and is based on their own relationship, which they describe as "the playground and laboratory for our inquiry into what it is to live a fully human life." The book reflects the eight years they have spent together, as their individual journeys toward more conscious living became a shared journey of discovering how relationship can contribute to greater awareness and fulfillment.