HEADS UP! Faeriedaughter is moving – head on over to priestesstraining.com for our new home! I am going to stop posting here on 21st September, so there is time to switch!
Summer McStravick
I heard about Summer McStravick though Leonie Dawson World’s Biggest Summit a couple of years ago. I liked what she had to say and she seemed really nice too, so I went investigating.
Her business is selling meditations of what she calls Flowdreamings. She hearts Flowdreamings. Basically they are Law Of Attraction guided meditations, where you use feelings to manifest stuff by creating a blueprint for the future. She does it by going into what she calls “The Flow”.
I had been meaning to create an audio meditation for a long time based around my dreams to get vibing with them, but I never got around to it. So I bought one instead.
This one is called Attracting Clients, Customers and Sales, I listened to it on the bus to work every morning for about two weeks.
It took me a while to get used to her voice – think over-enthusiastic American Broadway musical (my personal voice kryptonite). But after a couple of listens I was over it.
She keeps talking about “your Flow” all the time, which does kinda make me giggle because in England “your Flow” means your period, so it was as if my period wanted all these lovely things for me. Hee hee hee.
The point of the meditation is to get you projecting good feelings into your future so you can create a future awesomeness. It’s meant to be lovely and feel great. However I found that initially everything Summer said I responded to with fear, telling myself it’s lies, that it can’t happen, I don’t deserve it, and feeling worried about all this imaginary money coming to me in my Flowdream – I felt worse and more hopeless after the meditation than before.
Summer does say on how website somewhere that anybody working with her personally is required to use the banishing fear meditation before going on to anything else and on reflection that is a very sensible suggestion, because my fear and issues were seriously tripping me up.
I found a way around it though, so it felt good – this might be really useful for you Goddess peeps out there.
I think the idea of “The Flow” just wasn’t working with me. I eventually switched the idea of the flow to the idea of surrendering to the Goddess and opening to receive from her and this TOTALLY worked, and it was lovely – I left the Flowdream feeling really positive about the future.
Lotsa reviews on the site of the Flowdreams say stuff like “I did this money meditation and then two days later I earnt an unexpected $200!” which may be true for other peeps but deffo not for me, so I’d be wary of treating it like an instant magic spell thing – better for a change-your-attitude kinda thing I think.
So that’s my experience with Summer McStravick. HEADS UP – you can get a freebie Flowdream from her website right here if you wanna test it out.
On a wonderful adventure in Devon last weekend I picked this book up in a bookshop on discount. £4.99! Get in.
It’s Goddess Bless: Divine Affirmations, Prayers and Blessings by Sirona Knight.
I’ve seen it online before, but never bought it because my other adventure with this kinda book – Be Blessed by Denise Dumars – really left me cold. I didn’t like the tone (really conversational, which is usually win – didn’t work on me this time though), or the way it jumped pantheons exclusively and non-stop, or the stuff in it really. I just didn’t find it useful, or beautiful, or steeped in the divine, which is what I’d want from a devotional book. I gave it away in the end.
So I was really put off the idea of buying another devotional book.
This one rocks though. It’s just full of prayers, beautiful prayers, to goddess, and some pantheon goddesses too – Anu pops up a lot (She’s a fave), Aphroditie too, a bunch of Nordic goddesses, but mostly the prayers and affirmations are just addressed to the Great Goddess. It’s wonderful, especially since I suck at writing poetry and beautiful divine things. The prayers are wonderful, and the affirmations are really really great and uplifting, and there are some lovely ideas in here of how to use prayers in your life, and what to use them for. And there are prayers and devotionals in here for everything, dude.
It feels like how you’d imagine a prayerbook ought to feel.
So huge thumbs up for this purchase. Recommended!
I bought myself two new books for Yule! Yay!
I bought Magical Housekeeping by Tess Whitehurst, which I was really keen on as I’ve been really getting into the domestic vibe of late, and The Way of the Sea Priestess by Louise Tarrier, and being that I am the target audience being dually obsessed by the sea and priestessing I had no choice but to buy it. It was inevitable.
I’ve started reading both of them, and I’m a chunk through, but I am a bit sad as they are not quite what I had hoped for or expected.
Magical Housekeeping is pretty alright – it’s really revving me up to clean, and de-clutter, and maybe even apply some Feng Shui to me little ol’ house – but it is very, very lightworkery and new agey, almost too much for me. When people go on constantly about the amazing vibrations and how powerful they feel crystals and white sage and all those things are without any other explanation or anything to back it up, I get a bit suspicious. The book’s got a real light-and-angel-healing vibe. I’m not sure what I expected – I first read about it on a blog which is one of the white-lightest, new-ageist, and dare I say it, fluffiest sites I frequent (and do I struggle with frequenting it and calling stuff fluffy), so really I should have been more prepared and just got out Sacred Space by Denise Lynn from the library, because that book rocks.
The Way of the Sea Priestess has been very, incredibly disappointing so far. Sorry Louise. Either I got a dud copy or Louise got an appalling editor because the book so far is chock full of awful, awful grammatical errors – apostrophies in the wrong place, incorrect word tenses, lack of commas and full stops some really, really clumsy sentences. That’s the other thing – clumsy writing. Louise is just not a natural writer – things are not explained, sentences are badly put together and stuff comes out of nowhere – for example, a grounding exercise that suddenly asks you to connect with your Mother Star with absolutely no explanation anywhere of what that is, or a ritual that I had to go back and read through again just to work out what the point of it was. At first I suspected maybe the author was trying to write in a mystical manner that made all references to Goddess seem sacred and honoring-y, but round about page 60 I realised that she just can’t write.
Stuff is not explained in depth, or at all. She tells you things are important, but doesn’t tell you why: this drives me mad. It reads like she is just parroting what she’s been told in the past. without coming to an understanding of it herself. The thing is, she may understand it and be very wise about it, but with her writing skills it just doesn’t come across at all.
This is all really sad as I was very excited about reading this book.
I think she’s said it’s meant as an introduction to the practice of a sea priestess, which explains why a lot of the stuff in it so far has been really repetitive and basic. But I think a key point here is that people seeking to become priestesses are not novices in this pagan moonbaking stuff. I reckon anyone picking up this book will be like me and will have a background in a combination of either modern paganisim, witchcraft or devotional practices. A wish for priestessfulness is something you discover when you are already in something pagany, rather than your introduction to the world of pagan-ness.
As I said, I haven’t finished reading either of them yet, so this is a bit of a cheeky pre-emptive review, and I am jumping back into the Sea Priestess as often as I can forgive it’s abusive treatment of the quotation mark as I hope it gets better after the half way mark.
I’m also gonna look for the original Sea Priestess novel by Dion Fortune and see if it informs my reading of Louise’s book at all. And check that I didn’t actually get a dud copy of it, as the editing is truly shocking.
And get all high on clutter-clearing and blitz the house for winter!
I was REALLY excited about reading Mermaid Magic by Lucy Cavendish and Serene Conneely, as in case you hadn’t guessed, I freakin’ LOVE mermaids and wanted to learn new ways of incorperating them into my spirituality.
I was REALLY disappointed to find that this book was pants.
What I find in Lucy’s writing style is that there is a lot of talking without saying anything – I guess it could be described as poetic writing, which is nice if you are into that sort of thing. I am not. I found that so, so little was actually said about mermaids in this book.
The last 150 pages of the book (almost half of the book) talk about healing springs, different kinds of whales and turtles. Lots of disjointed listed facts about springs around the world and whales and dugongs and Japan’s fishing habits, and a lot of romance about dolphins of course. Nice enough, but NOTHING about mermaids.
There is a 13 page chapter about connecting to your Inner Mermaid, which is very nice, an interesting 6 page chapter on Sea Priestesses, and a nice 20 pages or so about sea witches, connecting with mermaids and singing. The rest of the book is mainly made of generic lists of stuff – lists of oceans, lists of mermaid-related crystals, lists of famous mermaids, lists of sunken continents, lists of divination methods, lists of mermaid history, lists lists lists, and a little bit about mermaid legends and goddesses.
This book starts with three full chapters of lists – chapter one, paragraphs from around 20 different people saying what they think mermaids are, chapter 2, a timeline of everything mermaid related that the authors could find, and chapter 3, a list of pop culture mermaids.
I read this book, and it felt to me that the authors had nothing to actually say about mermaids, so they gave us a load of facts about the ocean instead. I thought – no, maybe I was reading it wrong, there MUST have been lots of good stuff about mermaids in this 360 page book – so I skimmed it again. Nope. Lists, dolphins, sea-related divination, but almost nothing about actual mermaids.
I understand that magic with mermaids would intertwine with sea magic, as they are the personification of the sea, and the book’s full title was “Mermaid Magic: Connecting With the Energy of the Ocean and the Healing Power of Water”, but I didn’t realise when I bought this book (it was pretty pricy) that it was going to be a book that was 5% mermaids, 95% ocean related stuff and that it’s content would be 5% practical information to apply to spirituality and 95% lists and facts.
I did like the interviews with mermaid people (one of the reasons I was so keen on the book) and it was very interesting how people from different walks of life ( writers, artists, surfers, professional mermaids) are affected and inspired by mermaids, though I would have been happier if the interviews were actually interviews with probing questions rather than the interviewee giving a brief overview of their work/business and what it has todo with mermaids.
So chaps, this is not really a book about mermaids at all. Pick it up if you see it at the library, but otherwise, don’t bother, unless you are after stories about dolphins and whales and stuff, and if so I’d still recommend that you visit the Animals and Zoology section of your library and rent out a book or a DVD from there instead.
Sad faces all round 😦
Sometimes it’s really cool being a blogger. Especially when people send you free books to review! Mega win!
Random House sent me The Source by Ursula James to read and review on the blog, which could have been kinda dicey for them had it sucked.
They very wisely sent me a copy without a picture of a moth on the front. Eugh.
First off, if I had not been sent a copy, the cheesy title The Source would have both put me off and compelled me in equal measure (lurve new age nonsense books). On reading it, the talk of The Source throughout the book really pushed the cheese boundaries. It makes me think of the Source of All Evil in Charmed, and it’s a bit weird when every other sentence you get a mugshot of Julian McMahon in your head.
Hello, Source of All Evil here..
Moving past the I-know-something-you-don’t-know marketing ploy(I am sure cleverly employed to convert all the Secret peeps to witchcraft), I thought this book rocked, and I will tell you why –
Ursula’s magical journey begins with the reader confronting their own death. Yup. And I was sold.
What it doesn’t do is tell you to ignore all the crappy bits of your life and only think of the good things and what you want (thank GOD). Surprise! I was surprised by this approach in something that looked so like The Secret. Ursula wants you to confront your shadow, and understand it, and through facing it move through it to better things.
It works through lots of simple rituals, meditations and actions full of magic to firstly clear out that in your life that isn’t working for you and then make space to welcome in your dreams. I liked it so much, and the techniques outlined in it were so simple and full of common-sense (like a proper witch!) that I am right now activly working through the chapters of the book, and usually it takes a lot to persuade me to get ass my ass and actually do what a book tells me to do.
So, well done Ursula James and Random House. I really dug this book, and if you are into simple witchcraft with a whole total-life-transformation aim, read this book.
I take the bus too and from work and, hey presto, my work is 2 minutes away from a library. Woohoo!
I’ve been a-reading, after a looong time of not reading. I got into a rut of reading just witch books, and man did those get dull. Anyway, I just finished reading What God Wants by Neale Donald Walsch. He’s a mighty famous fella in the bookshop lands of spirituality. In a review sense I am not sure what I think of it – it was a bit showmanish and he definately tried to build lots of DRAMATIC TENSION before revealing his answer, and his concept of what God wants is pretty sane and similar to what I think she wants, so no biggies there. But I will talk about what did reach me with this book.
It got me thinking about What God Wants. Well, duh. But, my reality is not the same to Mr Walsch’s, so I thought about what I thought God wants.
I have always been convinced that God wants nothing but the best for me, and she knows best what will bring me the most happiness. If she wants me to do something with my life, she has programmed it that those things are the things I want to do with my life anyway and things I have talent and passion for. How else am I going to do it properly? If I want to do it without her help, she’s cool with that. If I want to connect with her and get her to help me do the things I want to do (being the things she wants me to do) she’s cool with that too and will help me along. The thing that confuses me sometimes is if my general life is my spiritual work, then is there any point in doing the other overtly spiritual stuff? Hmmm. It’s a core belief of mine that everyone, even atheist people connect with god lots in their lives, though they don’t call it god, they just call it life. Could they be the same thing!? Dun dun DUUUUN!
Also, he talks at the end how to reach people with this new knowledge – it reminded me of Switching To Goddess in a lot of ways – get out of old hierarchial religeons that talk crazy self destructive power-over talk and into the new, freeing way, man. And this is how to do it. He talked about God being completely part of the world, so much so that we are god, and everything is god, so we are everything. Heavy, man. And yes, heard it all before, but this is the bit I liked.
Peeps get nervous about the “we are one” concept. I don’t want to be one! we say (I am included here, most definatly) I want to be me! Independent! Unique! Special dammit! I don’t want to be like everyone else!
But here is the awesome bit – being one does not mean that we are all the same dull dull thing. You and me in this scenario are one with God. We can all be one, but we can all be gorgeously different at the same time and still be part of each other, and the great goddish biomass. If you look at your fingers, they are all part of the same hand. But are they the same? Hells no. I have a particularly ladylike little finger and a mannish first finger. Your fingers may be different, I dunno, perhaps we all have gender specific fingers. But the point is, We are all part of God, but we are like her fingers. One but different. Many different bits. Hurrah!
So I
Faeriedaughter 