Well, that was fun. My current time-for-reading matrix works really well with books that have lots of little bitty sections, and I was pretty much able to knock down this one with 10 "reads" of 12 pages each! Why did I pick out Shakti Gawain's Creative Visualization? Dunno. Although I will tell you that I had two little synchronicities involving the book over the first couple of days I was reading it (one in an L.J. post and one with something going in to my LibraryThing catalog). Frankly, I was expecting to not connect very much with this book (I've spent too long "on the Dark Side" to see much more than silliness in most "newage" stuff), however, it IS a very good primer for folks with no background in psi workings, with most of its exercises being both "classic" and reasonably useful (although there were some points when I'm thinking "uh, but what do you do when somebody in the group starts having seizures and channeling Nyarlathotep?", not a subject oft dealt with in Fluff Bunny books!).As folks out there with a creepy stalking mental file of all my historical details will no doubt recall, I started out in the "psychic game" fairly early in life ... having affiliated with the Foundation Church of the Millennium very soon after their schism with the (somewhat notorious) Process Church of the Final Judgement. The Process/Foundation was big into psi/healing stuff, and had several classes a week in this area. They discovered that I was a "natural" channel, and was used for "distant healing" quite a bit (where I'd "bring in" the person to be worked on). So, I was amused to find very familiar exercises for various healing things in this book.
I would actually recommend this book to folks looking for an introduction to "tapping into" universal forces. While I, personally, have issues with some of the low-level stuff (are there really people out there whose life goal is to have a new pickup truck with various accessories?), it has simple exercises for clarifying one's goals and focusing energy towards achieving them. Heck, I even picked up a new "affirmation" that I'm going to be working with!
It amuses me to think how much of this sort of stuff has "bled out" into the general consciousness, as so many of the "goal setting" sorts of exercises are all over the network marketing industry ... and, frankly, a lot of that sort of thing goes back to Napoleon Hill in the 30's ... but I'd probably point somebody new to this stuff to Creative Visualization for it's "easy to get" systems before steering them to the "more difficult" Think And Grow Rich!
