1. What is The Secret of The Alchemist about and why did you write it?

I’ll answer with a short story. In 1993 I was part of the team at HarperCollins that published The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, with sales to date of over 86 million copies in 70 languages. When I met Paulo, however, he was an unknown Brazilian author, with his books only in Portuguese. At that time no one in the firm had predicted what a global bestseller he would be – until I read the manuscript.

I read his story of Santiago the shepherd boy, who follows his dream of finding treasure in the desert, and instantly knew – because of my own spiritual journey up to that moment I read the manuscript – it would be a global sensation. I persuaded my colleagues to give the book the highest level of marketing spend we could afford and the rest, as they say, is history!

When I met Paulo in person, in those early days soon after the book was released, he said he wanted to thank me with a gift, in gratitude for my passion and vision for his book. The gift was not what I expected and you can read a full account of our ‘magical’ encounter in the preface of my book. The gift he gave me was to change the course of the rest of my life and ultimately led to my writing The Secret of The Alchemist which is my account of the deep and life changing spiritual lessons I discovered – including ‘the secret’ – buried within Paulo’s novel.

2. What sort of effect did your meeting with Paulo Coelho and his book The Alchemist have on your life?

The immediate effect was amazing and was manifested through two distinct outcomes. On the one hand, Paulo challenged me to decide what I really wanted in life, and once I made that decision, he said it would happen! I learned very quickly to be careful what you wish for because the first obstacle to success is fear. I wanted to start my own business and yet to achieve that I had to face my fear of failure. 

As I began to dig for the secret buried in The Alchemist, I unearthed a new found courage to face my fear and follow my dream and within a short space of time I founded a successful advertising agency.

On the other hand, the effect was to restart an inner spiritual journey that I had put on pause for many years and led me to begin to value the uniqueness of what I had to offer the world – I found my inner treasure. 

3. You write that Alchemy is all about transformation and draws upon the greatest power of all to convert seemingly insurmountable obstacles into life changing experiences. Can you give an example of a seemingly insurmountable obstacle you faced in your life and how you converted it into a life changing experience?

Great question! I do talk about Alchemy a lot in my book because when I read The Alchemist I found a new mythic metaphor that gave shape and sense to most of my personal spiritual quest over the last 50 years. 

Yes, Alchemy is all about transformation – and that’s not about changing who we are into someone else or a perfect version of ourselves we think we should be. True personal transformation is about becoming our real self – the ‘self’ that is often hiding deep within our unconscious waiting for us to allow love, acceptance and nurturing to release the full potential of who we are – this is the meaning of the metaphor of the ancient alchemists who were striving to turn lead into gold.

My best example of overcoming an obstacle to my living life to the full – and believe me there are plenty to choose from – is when I discovered my inner child in the cupboard of my unconscious. When I was a toddler I had a real life Harry Potter experience of spending time locked in an understairs cupboard. The consequence was an angry and frustrated inner boy who was controlling my thoughts and emotions as an adult. His power was so great that he had my life set on a path of self destruction. 

By using the process outlined in the ancient wisdom of Alchemy, as interpreted by Carl Jung – a devoted alchemist – I found a way to give voice to the inner boy and give him the attention and love he had been denied. Slowly and gently I experienced a healing of the pain he had encountered and finally – instead of being an obstacle to my emotional progress he became my greatest asset. It’s that boy who became the writer I am today. My greatest weakness become my most treasured strength.

The power that made that happen, and what I refer to constantly in my book, is the power of unconditional Love.

4. In The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho writes about omens. What are your thoughts about omens or serendipity or synchronicity. Have you experienced any sort of synchronicity or omens in your life or with the publication of The Secret Of The Alchemist? If so, what happened?

Whenever I think about the many synchronistic omens throughout my life I burst out laughing, especially since I began writing The Secret of The Alchemist. What I love about omens is the fact they are usually so outlandish and unbelievably coincidental – you cannot make them up.

I have written about many of them on my blog: colmholland.com/blog – but here’s one I hold particularly dear. Soon after I finished writing The Secret of The Alchemist I was on a train to London, England, on the first leg of a long journey to Nashville. In my hand luggage I had an early proof copy of my book and a copy of Paulo’s latest book ‘Hippie’ that I started to read on the train. I was excited that my book would be published soon and was wondering how readers would react to my story. Would people want to buy it?

Just then a voice from the seat behind me said, ‘I’m on page 34 – what page are you up to?’ I turned to see a man holding up a copy of ‘Hippie’ and we both laughed.

I invited Peter, whom I had never met before, to sit next to me and straight away we joked about the coincidence and how Paulo would have laughed too that we are both reading his book on the same train, in the same carriage next to each other at the same time.

I call that an omen – not simply because it was an amazing coincidence – but because it held a special message of encouragement for me. Peter asked me what I did and I showed him my book, The Secret of The Alchemist and he instantly said he really wanted to read it and gave me his email address so he could buy a copy when it becomes available on August 1st 2020.

5. What advice do you have for someone who is trying to fulfill their dreams, but has become afraid to move forward in their life for fear they are wasting their time?

I can only share my own experiences and as far as fulfilling dreams and ambitions is concerned I learned a very important first lesson by reading the story of Santiago in The Alchemist: most of us have buried our dreams deep in our unconscious and for some reason have given up dreaming altogether. 

Anyone reading this may think they are alone in feeling it is better not to dream at all than to fail. You are not alone – that’s exactly what I thought too until I read this passage in The Alchemist:

” Everyone, when they are young, knows what their destiny is.They are not afraid to dream. But, as time passes a mysterious force begins to convince them that it will be impossible to realize their destiny. To realize one’s destiny is a person’s only real obligation. It’s your mission on earth. And, when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.” Paulo Coelho.

This is the experience of my life through an encounter with power of unconditional Love – that surrounds me and is within me – leading me on to fulfill my dreams. This can be your experience too and to assist you in unearthing and believing again in your dreams I have made this blessing for everyone who reads my book:

“As you read The Secret of The Alchemist, I have asked the magical power of Love to give you everything you need to be the alchemist in your world.” Colm Holland.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), about 10 percent, or 6.1 million, women in the United States have difficulty getting pregnant or staying pregnant each year.

In The Ayurvedic Guide to Fertility: A Natural Approach to Getting Pregnant (New World Library, May 5, 2020), author and Ayurvedic practitioner Heather Grzych offers a gentle, holistic approach to understanding the physical, emotional, and psychological aspects of fertility based on Ayurveda, an ancient form of medicine that originated in India that means “the science of life.”

We hope you’ll enjoy this Q and A with Heather about the book.

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What is Ayurveda?

Ayurveda is a holistic lifestyle medicine and self-care system that seeks to cure the emotional, environmental, and behavioral aspects of health. Ayurveda is like learning how to garden – except you are the plant. It teaches a person how to live in line with cycles of nature, including changes in climate and season, and how to eat, live, work and love according to their very specific mind-body constitution. Ayurveda, meaning “the knowledge of life,” actually originated as a practice in India thousands of years ago and it’s often referred to as “the mother of all healing” because it’s influenced so many systems of medicine in the world.

What are the reasons that so many women are having difficulty with fertility today?

Once a woman decides she wants to have a child, it doesn’t always happen quickly, nor is it guaranteed, so women get frustrated, disappointed, sad, resentful, etc. While it’s certainly true that women are now starting much later in life to become a mother, and this is causing them to miss peak fertility windows and experience a lot of challenges, the fertility problem is at its root a deep neglect of the feminine on a cultural level. I don’t think women have fully come to grips with the unique challenges they are dealing with that their grandmothers and maybe even their mothers didn’t have to deal with. Just one example: Over 70 percent of mothers are working mothers, mostly full-time, and while it’s a norm that many women seem to have gotten used to, it’s a lot to ask a woman to work full time, commute two hours a day, take care of her own health, and to try raising a child well. There is a real lack of the space element in everyone’s lives, and space is one of the elements needed for creation. The stress levels, plus digestive, sleep, metabolic, and mood issues that are so common in our culture are key indicators that women and couples do not have the kind of clear, flowing, supported health that leads to optimum fertility, or what we call ojas in Ayurveda. People tend to focus so much on the goal of becoming pregnant that they forget to create the conditions for health and fertility.

Tell us about the Four Fertility Factors of Ayurveda.

This is an example of the real poetry of Ayurveda. There are four factors that influence optimum fertility: Seed, Season, Field and Water. They are the same principles that apply to planting a garden, and I think any creative endeavor, really. In this case, the seed represents the sperm and the ovum. The season represents the time of the month, as the body changes in its cycle; the time of year, because the body changes in response to the weather and climate; and the time of life, as the body changes in each of its stages. Field represents, at a basic level, the place where a new soul will take form in the physical realm – the most specific location of this is the uterus where the seed is implanted, which is impacted by the larger macrocosm – the whole body, the environment one lives in, the people around, the sensory input, and even what happens in the cosmos. Water represents the care of the seeds and the field, including the fluids that carry hormones and nutrients, and keep tissues juicy.

Tell us about the role that diet plays in Ayurveda and fertility.

Fertility in Ayurveda is considered the outcome of proper digestion and metabolism, and that depends on what, when and how you eat, as well as what, when and how you put out energy. Each food you take into your body has certain qualities to it that will drive how your tissues are made and the level of each dosha in your body. Imbalanced doshas will affect menstrual cycles and can impede conception. The way you metabolize your food – whether your digestive fire, or agni, is too weak, too strong or just right – will either allow your body to use the nutrients, release them through wastes, or get clogged up with improperly digested food, ama, which will redirect your doshas and cause disease patterns. Many people will blame their poor health on a diagnosis of a disease, but the opposite is actually true: a disease process leads to a disease state, and we have a hand in this process. It’s not just what you eat. The whole context matters – when you ate last, how much you are eating, how the was food prepared, and what it was combined with. Did you go running or do crunches or have sex right after you ate? Small dietary nuances matter too. For example, a lot of women don’t know that adding a certain spice to their food can have an impact on how they digest, thus impacting their health and fertility.

What is the most important thing that you would like someone who is over 35 to know about getting pregnant?

Drop your expectations and keep your curiosity. Some women have difficulty after 35 and some don’t, so it’s good to learn about your particular body. How you are living your life will impact your health and fertility. My own fertility journey is a testament to this. When I was 32, I unsuccessfully tried to get pregnant. Years later, I easily conceived naturally and had a healthy child just before turning 40.

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Heather Grzych is the author of The Ayurvedic Guide to Fertility. A board-certified Ayurvedic practitioner, she bridges the worlds of conventional and alternative medicine to help women and men heal their physical and emotional lives. Heather is on the board of directors for the National Ayurvedic Medical Association and has consulted with doctors, governments, and insurance companies. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Visit her online at http://heathergrzych.com.

1. What is your book about and why did you write it?

My book is about developing the mindset to meet a challenge and grow stronger so that you can feel optimistic even when the situation doesn’t support optimism. I wrote it because I believe that it’s important to transform good ideas about how people work into practices people can use to live better.

2. How would you define resilience? Many psychologists define resilience as an absence of depression or absence of struggle during difficult circumstances, do you agree or disagree? Why?

I disagree. I think resilience is making the choice, over and over, to learn and keep going. It’s a lot like grit: and it is also an act of self-possession. It’s a refusal to have one’s identity or experience determined by circumstances outside one’s control. It’s not an absence: it’s a creation of oneself that reaches beyond the current moment and toward a better moment.

3. How can people become more resilient, especially right now given everything people are going through?

Essentially, I think there are three ways people can support their natural resilience. The first is to use their memories to remind them that while this is the first pandemic they have experienced, it’s not the first time they have experienced uncertainty or loss or loneliness. Becoming really curious about what pulled them through in the past will give them good ideas about what is possible today.

The second is to recognize that other people are hugely important to human beings. The pain that is caused by social isolation is as real as physical pain and sometimes you have to be gentle with that. You also have to keep reaching for connection even when it is not perfect or not easy.

The final thing that people can do every day is to connect to whatever sense of purpose or direction requires them to keep acting in support of something outside themselves. Whether that something is faith or family or a long-term goal, they need a point on the horizon that helps them keep their bearings as they move through this time.

4. What advice would you have for people who do not feel resilient or just are not resilient. For example, they may get fired from a job and go into a state of deep depression or feel so overwhelmed with everything that is going on in their life that they can not function?

There are lots of resilient people who don’t feel resilient. The heart of resilience is the relationship between our conscious minds and the full strengths and resources contained in our bigger selves. Those bigger selves include our brains (which are super-processors), our bodies, and the network of social connections we have internalized. Some people would include a spiritual dimension to this. In any case, the whole self is much bigger than the voice in your head that is telling you that you are in pain and that there is no hope.

Hope is not something you discover outside; it’s something you glimpse when you realize that there are strengths and values and possibilities in you that you are not yet using. And it grows in tiny steps at the edges of awareness. If you are connecting to memories to find evidence that you will survive, and you are connecting to other people, and you have a sense of purpose or direction, then you will find your resilience one choice at a time.

But resilience does not feel good. It feels like getting hit by a bus and then getting back on your feet. Feeling terrible does not mean you are not resilient: it means you have been hit hard and you might need to give yourself some time and connect to some support to get back on your feet.

5. Why do you think some people are resilient during adversity and other people are not. What do you think distinguishes the two groups?

It takes a lot of willpower to keep making good choices in bad situations. Willpower is a function of different circumstances. Are you lucky enough to eat well and exercise and look after your physical energy? Do you have a history of surviving and succeeding to give you good models for getting through? Do you have people who are kind and challenging and believe you can be better tomorrow than you are today? We too often think of willpower as a virtue: it’s better to think of it as a fuel. If you have it, you are both making good choices and you are lucky. If you don’t have it, you will need to be kind to yourself and to find enough support and enough space to build it a little at a time.

6. What is one experience you have gone through in life where you felt like you were not resilient and what is one experience in life where you felt like you were resilient. What were some differences in those two experiences and what did you learn from them.

I don’t think that I accept the terms of this question. There are no times I have not been resilient but there have been some losses that slowed me down longer than others. My Ph.D. exam was a bit of a nightmare. My examiners passed my thesis, but hated what I had to say. In the context of academics at the time, that meant that finishing my doctorate was also the end of my academic career. Two things helped me keep moving: one was that I had babies at home and realized that meant I had the gift I wanted most. The other was that I didn’t like the values my examiners had shown and so I was not sorry to leave their politics behind me.

Fast forward ten years, and I was still looking for a new path forward.. I’d had four consecutive miscarriages before I went back to school to become a minister. That was not a good time. I was hitting walls everywhere: no babies, no funding for a very expensive degree, and no support from my church. I was desperately busy without moving forward. And that was when I went to an NLP course and decided to take a huge risk. I decided to become part of a flaky, unprofitable self-development business against the best advice of pretty much everyone. And it was the choice that gave me traction and self-knowledge and resilience. I’ve spent the past 17 years building an amazing learning community and teaching things I always believed were unteachable.

So in many ways, my worst moments led to my best moments. It makes it very hard for me ever to be sure that things are not going to turn around. I learned that uncertainty can be a necessary precursor to resilience.

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For more information about Linda Ferguson and Resilience: Grow Stronger in a Time of Crisis please click here.  Her book is currently part of a Resilience Book Series. For more information about the Resilience Book Series please visit https://www.resilience-books.com.

Energy healing is based on the premise that energy is our essence and that while our bodies appear to be solid, they are in fact a constantly swirling set of energetic exchanges.

In The Language Your Body Speaks: Self-Healing with Energy Medicine (New World Library, May 5, 2020), author Ellen Meredith, an energy medicine practitioner with over 35 years of experience, teaches readers how to speak the energetic language of the body, mind, and spirit through simple experiments, exercises, and practices.  We hope you’ll enjoy this interview with her about the book. 

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Your book is called The Language Your Body Speaks. Please tell us a little bit about what this language consists of and how we can learn to speak it.  

In a word, the language your body speaks is Energy.  Subtle Energies form your body, fuel the operations of your body, and organize the functioning of your body. Subtle energies are not neutral. They are extremely intelligent!  They carry and express meaning.  

Our equipment for learning to perceive this language is not some special psychic ability – it is our senses: whatever we use to bring in information and process it.  This includes not only sight, sound, feel, smell, and taste, but also our direct knowing, instinct, radar, and recognition of pattern.  And when we speak “energy”, we can use all of these to communicate with the body.

Your book’s subtitle is “Self-healing with Energy Medicine.”   Can you say a few words about what Energy Medicine is?  

Your body communicates using chemical messaging and energetic messaging.  Energy Medicine uses energetic messaging to assess and influence your well-being.  You may be familiar with practices such as yoga, acupuncture, MRIs, Eden Energy Medicine, or Qi Gong. These all use energy to assess what is happening and to promote well-being.  

A good story, an evocative image, a dance, a spiritual ritual, a nutritious meal, and other experiences that influence your body can act as energy medicine. They can fuel and influence the subtle energies that run your body, helping them to work better.

Can anyone work with energy or do you need to be extremely intuitive or psychic to do so? 

The ability to “speak energy” is built into us, just as is the ability to learn English or French or Chinese.  You do not have to be intuitive or psychic – we each have some or several forms of perception that work well for us – our senses, our thinking brains, our physical ability to express ourselves.  Learning to work with energy starts with recognizing and building on what you already know that enables you to understand and communicate meaning.  

You talk in the book about shifting the conversation from, “What’s wrong?” to “What is needed to bring well-being to my body, mind, and spirit?” Please tell us more about that. 

Usually, when something has gone wrong, it also means that what might be “right” is not happening adequately.  But when we are focused too intensely on the problems, the body tries to fulfill your expectation, showing you more and more about what is wrong.

When we shift the focus to cultivate what is needed, our energies move to support that.  This, in turn, activates the body’s in-built healing capacity, while focusing on what’s wrong will not.

I have friends and family who have been to doctors and either been told nothing is medically wrong with them, or that there is no treatment for what they have.  What does your book offer to people who want help with these complaints?

In some ways, being liberated from the medical model is a blessing!  Our bodies don’t tend to go out of balance because they crave medical intervention.  They mostly want us to show up and listen and respond appropriately.  They want us to really address the issues, not just “treat” them.  And my book helps you learn better ways to do that.  

If someone wants to use energy medicine to heal something, how do they start?  

Start Simple.  Rub your hands together, then ask each hand, in turn, where it wants to land on your body.  Hold there, until one or the other feels called to move.  I call this exercise “Healing Hands”.  There is so much intelligence in our hands that we can learn from following their inclination for a time.

In the book I offer lots of exercises and explorations that can serve as entry points into using energy medicine to heal.

What is the main message you hope that readers will take away from The Language Your Body Speaks?  

Energy is our first language.  We already have some ability to speak it, but the more fluent we become the more we can participate in our own healing and our own miraculous creation of self.  

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Ellen Meredith, DA, EEMAP, is the author of The Language Your Body Speaks. An intuitive and energy medicine practitioner with over 35 years of experience, she has served on the faculty of energy medicine pioneer Donna Eden since 2010 and teaches energy healing techniques all over the world. Ellen lives in Marin County in California. Visit her online at www.ellenmeredith.com.