If you’ve ever got involved in a Twitter spat, been targeted by a nasty troll, or worried about walking home alone late at night, this book will give you the energetic arsenal you need to align yourself with positive outcomes and ward off negativity and danger.
Since time immemorial spiritual traditions have given us tools to enhance personal protection. Here you will learn how to work with charms, symbols, chakras and talismans and your own energy field to empower yourself and create your own luck. Also included are comforting rituals and ideas that ensure you deal with conflict and anxiety appropriately, feel in control of your reactions and enjoy the sense of personal power and protection that comes as a result.
A warm, knowledgeable guide that will calm even the most frazzled soul. – Poorna Bell, author, In Search of Silence.
Actively working with rituals and your senses to create daily practices that you can draw on to relieve stress is an easy, everyday way to work with your body. This book will enable you to create simple rituals that will allow you to work with your five main senses to ensure you have a first aid kit of emotional associations that will calm you down when you are beset with a racing mind, insomnia or general worry.
Rituals featured include: Vision boards, mindful listening, smudging, self-massage and tea ceremonies. The book also includes daily, weekly and monthly rituals which you can easily integrate into your life.
A History of Courtship: 800 Years of Seduction Techniques
From being unable to ever consummate your love in the medieval tradition of amour courtois to the Victorian insistence on chaperones, society has always attempted to thwart over-enthusiastic wooing. Yet, love will find a way, as Tania O’Donnell proves in this lively exploration of the courting rituals of yesteryear.
Discover how our ideas of desirable qualities in a mate have changed over time. Assets such as wealth, attractive features and the ability to give tokens of love and admiration remain in high demand. However, our beliefs about the level of wealth we can marry into, good looks we can acquire, and the tokens of love we exchange, have not remained constant. Today you might expect flowers and jewellery from your beloved, but in the past you might have been given a ribbon for your hair, a decorative wooden spoon, or a personalised knitting stick.
Using examples from letters for the aristocracy and landed gentry, and oral folk wisdom for the peasantry, this book builds up a picture of love and romance through the ages.
• The Roman poet Ovid warned women against having a ‘goat below the arm’, but, by the Middle Ages, excessive attention to one’s appearance was deemed sinful.
• Fourteenth century dandies wores poulaines, shoes with pointed toes so long they had to be secured with whalebone – proving that size does indeed matter.
• Love letters can end lives – just ask the Tudor queen Katherine Howard.
Declutter Your Life: From Chaos to Calm
Clutter can damage your health and affect your wealth. Think we’re exaggerating? Here’s the thing: everything you own needs to be kept clean or you will be breathing in dust and creating an environment loved by icky pests. The more useless things you have, the more useless stuff you have to clean. Clutter also affects you financially because if you don’t know what you have because it is hidden in among the clutter, you go out and re-buy it. Plus there’s the hidden value in junk (defined as something you don’t love or need) that’s not in your pocket because you haven’t gotten round to selling it. Clutter can also lead to despair. Instead of feeling like you’re home, you feel like you’re in a stranger’s (messy) home because you haven’t had the courage to make decisions about your things and really put your stamp on your own home. It seems like such a mammoth task that you get exhausted before you even start. Clutter saps energy and makes you feel overwhelmed. But before you hire a skip and chuck everything away, do bear in mind that clutter isn’t just having a lot of things. So getting rid of stuff is an important activity, but where do you start? Declutter your life is here to help. It will help you to make the commitment today to tackle your clutter, make those vital decisions about what is to go and unlock the brilliant new stress-free life you want and deserve.
For most of us, trying to find a moment of peace in our hectic schedule is like searching for a needle in a haystack. When faced with a crisis it’s more likely that we’ll fly into a panic than calmly assess the situation and formulate a plan to deal with the problem. With the help of The brilliant book of calm you can take charge of your life like never before, so that when push comes to shove and the proverbial hits the fan, all you need to do is take a deep breath before you deal with whatever life has thrown at you. Packed with advice on how to slow down, calm down and find your inner Zen master, The brilliant book of calm will help you find and maintain a balanced perspective on life, so that you can deal with anything. Whether you’re permanently stressed-out or just in need of a bit of a push in a calmer direction, Tania Ahsan’s road-tested advice will enable you to live a calmer, richer and happier life. Simply brilliant.