As a speaker, award-winning creator, workshop chief and life coach, Patrice Dickey helps others align their imaginative and prescient and values to create richer, extra significant lives on each stage. After having reinvented herself quite a few instances by means of many paradigm pitfalls and life shifts, she is aware of learn how to stroll the discuss!
Her ardour as we speak is her programs and workshops in non secular progress and life transition. Prior to now, for 15 years she was one among fewer than ten feminine Dale Carnegie Gross sales Coaching instructors on the planet, persistently receiving excellent rankings.
She is creator of the inspirational e-book “Again to the Backyard: Getting from Shadow to Pleasure,” its companion audiobook, “Chosen Chapters from Again to the Backyard,” and a collection of DVDs on self- empowerment, together with “Treasure Maps: Charting Your Path to Lifelong Success” and “Affect Made Straightforward: Making Connections That Promote.”
Printed in 2006, “Again to the Backyard” has gained 5 awards in contests together with Writers Digest, the worldwide IPPYs and Finest Books USA in inspirational/non secular classes, in addition to first prize for non-fiction from the Atlanta Writers Membership.
In demand as a speaker for company workshops and keynotes on subjects together with “Assume the Life You Love” and “Affect Made Straightforward: Making Connections that Promote,” she has been an teacher in Atlanta, Georgia, at Emory College’s Middle for Lifelong Studying since 1999. She developed and teaches common courses “Get the Life You Love” and “Yogativity™ (Yoga to Faucet Your Creativity).” She can also be a Registered Yoga Instructor.
PD Communications, her profitable PR consulting agency which she ran for 16 years, served such shoppers as British Airways, among the world’s high surgeons, well being and wellness shoppers, and different excessive caliber, excessive profile organizations.
She nonetheless recurrently contributes articles to nationwide and regional magazines on wellness, well being and high vacation spot spas. (Anyone has to do it! She laughs).
Tyler: Welcome, Patrice. To start, will you inform us how you’ll outline “Again to the Backyard.” Is it inspirational, self-help, autobiography?
PD: Hello Tyler-it’s actually a terrific magical backyard comprising all these parts you point out, with loads of weeds, grime, rocky locations & hard-packed clay; in addition to the hopeful perennials, the colourful blooming annuals, aromatic shrubs and ornamentals. It is a ramble down the Path of Risk, by means of the valley of the shadow and again to pleasure. In different phrases, Life.
In 2006, shortly after the e-book was launched, I used to be interviewed by James Taylor of FGTV on his half-hour present “Writers in Focus.” James has interviewed the GREATS like Frank McCourt, Cormac McCarthy and innumerable others in his profession, and the taped interview he did of me is accessible on my web site at http://www.patricedickey.com
He commented that as an expert librarian he might place “Again to the Backyard” in any variety of classes: the memoir, the autobiography, in addition to inspirational, academic and spiritual-and most of all of the “Honesty Part.” It was a terrific praise to me when he stated, “That is an genuine e-book.”
Tyler: Patrice, why did you select the title “Again to the Backyard: Getting from Shadow to Pleasure?”
PD: For a number of causes. A part of the again story is that it evokes the innocence of the Woodstock era and Joni Mitchell’s gorgeous music (additionally coated by Crosby, Stills & Nash on the Woodstock album) about getting again to that Eden in our hearts & minds-a time after we believed we might make a extremely constructive impression on the world, and we fought for change in society.
Now, we Child Boomers who’ve “had all of it” must step as much as the plate and SAVE the backyard for future generations-by altering a few of our damaging habits like rampant consumerism-those misguided makes an attempt to fill ourselves up by shopping for THINGS-as properly as our dependence on resource-suckers and gas-guzzlers. Additionally by instructing our youngsters to get pleasure from unstructured time in nature in order that they WANT to put it aside.
Another excuse is that, earlier than I actually stepped onto the trail of Self-Consciousness, Self-Acceptance, Self-Respect and Self-Love, which I describe in my e-book, I had the proverbial “black thumb” and could not hold a single plant alive.
My outer realm mirrored the tragedies and self-hatred of my internal life-I used to be not very form to myself or others-including vegetation!
Now, my house within the Enchanted Forest of Avondale Estates helps a gorgeous backyard, quite a few flowers and vegetation, and it’s a place of therapeutic for all. I work with teaching shoppers on my screened porch three seasons of the yr, and for them simply to look out over this stunning expanse is a therapeutic and calming expertise.
But another excuse I selected the title “Again to the Backyard” is that I like the gardening metaphor. The backyard and nature fantastically exhibit the cycles of life. In our rush-rush society, we’re hypnotized (typically by promoting and the media) into considering that when one part involves an finish that now we have to right away leap into the following thing-not true!
After we come to an ending, we have to be keen to spend a while within the void, studying the highly effective classes there and regaining our power, earlier than the following new starting.
Take a look at the best way seeds, when planted, spend a very long time at nighttime earlier than they spring forth into their glory. Then they cycle by means of life as properly, ultimately replenishing the soil when their stays are mulched beneath. There’s additionally the entire drama of the animals, the birds and the bugs within the backyard. All of us have our locations in life and our distinctive, particular roles.
And, getting proper right down to the gardening metaphor, individuals do not relate to the glossed over model of life-they relate to the DIRT! All of us have loads of manure in our lives, and it is our selection whether or not we’ll use it as fertilizer, or simply depart it in an enormous stinking pile. There’s loads of grime on this book-my personal and different individuals’s!
Tyler: Nice metaphor, Patrice. You stated you weren’t form to vegetation previously. What introduced you again to Nature and its capacity to heal?
PD: Tyler, I’ve obtained to inform you, in making an attempt to heal myself of the traditional (and considerably extra dramatic than most) household points, I’ve skilled nearly each type of shrinkage and remedy identified to man. For me it was both heal or die.
I could not stuff it beneath like lots of people select to do with work or intercourse, train or purchasing or meals, playing or alcohol or drug addictions-and since I would seen how habit and psychological sickness labored on my mom, I knew that path was not for me. I needed to discover stability.
When I discovered stability inside myself, and once I believed I deserved to have a happier life, I moved to the Enchanted Forest of Avondale, manifesting precisely what I had hoped for-a pretty, backyard terrace stage workplace in my house, a tranquil, personal house, and a two-level screened porch (the recent tub sits on the ‘Lido Deck’-so dubbed by the workmen).
I had not deserted nature-and it had not deserted me-through all of the years earlier than this. In my earlier houses I might take lengthy walks every day, and observe Tai Chi in stunning public parks and gardens. That is one of many causes I help Park Pleasure, which leads & advocates for parks & inexperienced house all through metro Atlanta. I completely imagine within the therapeutic points of parks, and so does Park Pleasure.
Tyler: You referred to Eden, and gardens are sometimes a Christian image. Is “Again to the Backyard” a spiritual e-book, or will non-believers additionally discover it useful”?
PD: “Again to the Backyard” is extra of a non secular e-book, though I do cite various examples from the Judeo-Christian custom. I additionally embrace examples from many different nice spiritual and non secular traditions together with Buddhism, Confucianism, Shinto, Taoism, Hinduism, Islam and even Greek yoga mythology course online (and doubtless more-I’ve all the time been fascinated by humanity’s seek for which means and internal peace).
Anybody who research world faith will acknowledge that most of the similar tales are reshaped by later generations-and different religions-to lend which means to their present questions.
For many who are non-believers, they’ll substitute the phrases Love, Increased Self, Life Power or Nature for my shouts out to God all through the e-book. It is all the identical factor, primarily, and for my part too many wars are fought over semantics.
Tyler: Why ought to individuals learn “Again to the Backyard”?
PD: I am sharing what I’ve realized over time from a whole bunch of lecturers and the authors of inspirational books who’ve helped me open my consciousness to new potentialities and happier, extra fulfilling methods of residing.
As I inform members in my very own courses and workshops, as soon as your consciousness expands into new worlds, you’ll be able to by no means stuff it again into that smaller field the place it used to dwell. It calls for extra!
In fact it is all the time our selection whether or not or not we’ll take note of the clarion name of our Increased Self to develop into our full expression, into the joyous lives we’re meant to stay. Usually books function guides into these wealthy realms inside us that await our discovery, unlocking and sharing with others.
I provide this e-book as one potential key to the internal world: a unique form of “self-help” e-book, non-linear, with out checklists and workouts, as a result of the trail of life hardly ever shapes up as a straight line.
Nice thinkers all through historical past, together with John Lennon, have shared the knowledge that “Life is what occurs after we’re busy making different plans.” Do not we all know that!
The therapeutic coronary heart doesn’t function by lists and schedules, however by matches and begins, one step ahead and two steps again, treading outdated territory till it abruptly breaks into the clearing of pleasure.