Tag: book recommendation

Book Review: Electric Body, Electric HEalth

Posted on by Laura Lee Gabelsberg in Books Recommendations, education, health, Life Hacks

Electric Body, Electric Health: Using the Electromagnetism Within (and Around) You to Rewire, Recharge, and Raise Your Voltage by Eileen Day McKusick

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

McKusick’s second book conveys a broad explanation of the body as an electrical entity living in an electric universe. It is divided into two main sections. The first deals with this general paradigm shift in thinking, and the story of how she came to work with subtle energy fields. The writing style is easy to read and easy to understand.

In the second part, one chapter is devoted to each chakra where she discusses how to optimally maintain the vibrancy of that energy center through affirmation, choices, habits of speech, thought, and attitude.

As another reviewer already pointed out, this book explains more of the what and why, but almost none of the how. If you want a taste of the the “how”, check out her first book, Tuning the Human Biofield.

Biofield Tuning training classes are currently sold out on McKusick’s website. Foundation classes of this healing approach are going for about $1600 with an additional $1600 for the complete practitioner training.

After reading McKusick’s first book I was curious enough to contact a local practitioner for a session to try it out. I was really surprised by how different it felt from say, a Reiki session, or other kinds of energy work. It felt powerful and yet I was at a loss for words of how to explain it other than saying, “it definitely rearranged some stuff energetically.”

Many questions remained for me. Would recorded sound waves work just as well? Can people effectively treat themselves using tuning forks? Do different frequencies have any negative effects?

Though many efforts are made to call this a hypothesis, much more research will need to be done to validate it and understand it fully. Still, it certainly opens some new doors of possibility.







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Book Review: Pronoia

Posted on by Laura Lee Gabelsberg in Astrological Education, Books Recommendations

Pronoia is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World is Conspiring to Shower You With Blessings by Rob Brezsny

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Playful, witty, and eccentric, Brezsny gives readers a compendium of “888 tricks for becoming a wildly disciplined, fiercely tender, ironically sincere, scrupulously curious, aggressively sensitive, blasphemously reverent, lyrically logical, lustfully compassionate master of rowdy bliss.”

Brezsny is the author of one the most widely syndicated astrology columns, Free Will Astrology.

This is not the kind of book you would read in a linear way. I purchased this book a few years ago when my father’s best friend mentioned he went to high school with Brezsny. Short, 1-2 page themes are woven together which makes for great bathroom reading. Brezsny is does a wonderful job at putting his tips together with quotes, original writing style, and interesting and funny factoids.

Rigid or sexually repressed folks will likely not enjoy this book, as he does not exclude words like orgasm and masturbation, though he carefully avoids the four main expletives so common in our lexicon and considers the elevation of our common vocabulary as an important goal we all should contribute to. His main message is one of optimism over cynicism.

He quotes from a variety of religious traditions, historical and cultural figures, as well as pop culture. This is an uplifting and optimistic book, at times completely silly, and at other times ingenious. Readers will either love it or hate. It is not your typical book.



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Realizing our Calling and Re-Humanizing our Education System

Posted on by Laura Lee Gabelsberg in education, Teaching, Uncategorized

If you are a teacher, and you get a chance, pick up and read James Hillman’s On Soul, Character and Calling. In it he explains his “Acorn theory.”

In one interview Hillman commented, “It’s important to ask yourself, ‘How am I useful to others? What do people want from me?’ That may very well reveal what you are here for.”

For teachers, Hillman gives a reminder for why we may have gotten into the profession in the first place, namely, to place ourselves in the path of young people to help them develop their potential. It is a reminder to get down to what is real and have more humility. “We need to get back to trusting our emotional rapport with children, to seeing a child’s beauty and singling that child out. That’s how the mentor system works — you’re caught up in the fantasy of another person. Your imagination and theirs come together.” The image is of lighting fires.

Hillman in an interview: I think the first step is the realization that each of us has such a thing. (a calling) And then we must look back over our lives and look at some of the accidents and curiosities and oddities and troubles and sicknesses and begin to see more in those things than we saw before. It raises questions, so that when peculiar little accidents happen, you ask whether there is something else at work in your life. It doesn’t necessarily have to involve an out-of-body experience during surgery, or the sort of high-level magic that the new age hopes to press on us. It’s more a sensitivity, such as a person living in a tribal culture would have: the concept that there are other forces at work. A more reverential way of living.

http://scott.london/interviews/hillman.html

That life of reverence is so closely tied to the work of teaching. I could not describe that better than Hillman and it makes me feel at peace about being a teacher who is studies the destiny question, or what Hillman calls the acorn theory. Teaching really is all about paying attention to the other human being, and developing a deep respect, love and curiosity for the mystery of another human being and the potential of their calling, helping them uncover that despite anything else, including: what your own picture of them might be as their teacher, or what you would wish to mold them into, or even what you might have them believe.

I would like to see our educational system become more reverential of the mystery of each person, and less rigid, prescriptive and injurious to the outliers who don’t fit the mold. Perhaps this can’t be implemented in a structural way, perhaps it is just something which must be shared from person to person. Either way – we should try to do it more in whatever ways we can.

It all leads to many more questions, like how do we teach in a way that is respectful to another person’s divine blueprint? We can’t cast or stamp out each person from the same mold, in a one-size-fits-all approach. We need to leave a certain part in freedom. This is where when it comes to standardized testing or standardized anything I have bones to pick. Our society is in its infancy in terms of our ability to develop human potential respectfully. This is where and why I wonder whether and how astrology and education intersect in fruitful ways.