Interview With Patrice Dickey, Author of "Back to the garden

Flavors - Interview With Patrice Dickey, Author of "Back to the garden - Getting From Shadow to Joy"

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As a speaker, award-winning author, workshop leader and life coach, Patrice Dickey helps others align their vision and values to originate richer, more meaningful lives on every level. After having reinvented herself numerous times straight through many paradigm pitfalls and life shifts, she knows how to walk the talk!

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Her passion today is her courses and workshops in spiritual increase and life transition. In the past, for 15 years she was one of fewer than ten female Dale Carnegie Sales Training instructors in the world, consistently receiving outstanding ratings.

She is author of the inspirational book "Back to the Garden: Getting from Shadow to Joy," its companion audiobook, "Selected Chapters from Back to the Garden," and a series of Dvds on self- empowerment, along with "Treasure Maps: Charting Your Path to Lifelong Success" and "Influence Made Easy: manufacture Connections That Sell."

Published in 2006, "Back to the Garden" has won five awards in contests along with Writers Digest, the international Ippys and Best Books Usa in inspirational/spiritual categories, as well as first prize for non-fiction from the Atlanta Writers Club.

In ask as a speaker for corporate workshops and keynotes on topics along with "Think the Life You Love" and "Influence Made Easy: manufacture Connections that Sell," she has been an teacher in Atlanta, Georgia, at Emory University's town for Lifelong studying since 1999. She developed and teaches beloved classes "Get the Life You Love" and "Yogativity™ (Yoga to Tap Your Creativity)." She is also a Registered Yoga Teacher.

Pd Communications, her successful Pr consulting firm which she ran for 16 years, served such clients as British Airways, some of the world's top surgeons, condition and wellness clients, and other high caliber, high profile organizations.

She still commonly contributes articles to national and regional magazines on wellness, condition and top destination spas. (Somebody has to do it! She laughs).

Tyler: Welcome, Patrice. To begin, will you tell us how you would define "Back to the Garden." Is it inspirational, self-help, autobiography?

Pd: Hi Tyler-it's assuredly a great magical organery comprising all those elements you mention, with abundance of weeds, dirt, rocky places & hard-packed clay; as well as the hopeful perennials, the colorful blooming annuals, fragrant shrubs and ornamentals. It's a stray down the Path of Possibility, straight through the valley of the shadow and back to joy. In other words, Life.

In 2006, shortly after the book was released, I was interviewed by James Taylor of Fgtv on his half-hour show "Writers in Focus." James has interviewed the Greats like Frank McCourt, Cormac McCarthy and innumerable others in his career, and the taped interview he did of me is available on my website at http://www.patricedickey.com

He commented that as a expert librarian he could place "Back to the Garden" in any whole of categories: the memoir, the autobiography, as well as inspirational, educational and spiritual-and most of all the "Honesty Section." It was a great compliment to me when he said, "This is an authentic book."

Tyler: Patrice, why did you pick the title "Back to the Garden: Getting from Shadow to Joy?"

Pd: For some reasons. Part of the back story is that it evokes the innocence of the Woodstock generation and Joni Mitchell's striking song (also covered by Crosby, Stills & Nash on the Woodstock album) about getting back to that Eden in our hearts & minds-a time when we believed we could make a assuredly distinct impact on the world, and we fought for convert in society.

Now, we Baby Boomers who have "had it all" need to step up to the plate and Save the organery for time to come generations-by altering some of our destructive habits like rampant consumerism-those misguided attempts to fill ourselves up by buying Things-as well as our dependence on resource-suckers and gas-guzzlers. Also by teaching our children to enjoy unstructured time in nature so they Want to save it.

Another guess is that, before I assuredly stepped onto the path of Self-Awareness, Self-Acceptance, Self-Respect and Self-Love, which I relate in my book, I had the proverbial "black thumb" and couldn't keep a single plant alive.

My outer realm reflected the tragedies and self-hatred of my inner life-I was not very kind to myself or others-including plants!

Now, my home in the Enchanted Forest of Avondale Estates supports a gorgeous garden, numerous flowers and plants, and it is a place of curative for all. I work with coaching clients on my screened porch three seasons of the year, and for them just to look out over this gorgeous expanse is a curative and calming experience.

Yet other guess I chose the title "Back to the Garden" is that I love the gardening metaphor. The organery and nature beautifully exhibit the cycles of life. In our rush-rush society, we're hypnotized (often by advertising and the media) into reasoning that when one phase comes to an end that we have to immediately leap into the next thing-not true!

When we come to an ending, we must be willing to spend some time in the void, studying the remarkable lessons there and regaining our strength, before the next new beginning.

Look at the way seeds, when planted, spend a long time in the dark before they spring forth into their glory. Then they cycle straight through life as well, eventually replenishing the soil when their remains are mulched under. There's also the whole drama of the animals, the birds and the insects in the garden. We all have our places in life and our unique, specific roles.

And, getting right down to the gardening metaphor, people don't relate to the glossed over version of life-they relate to the Dirt! We all have abundance of manure in our lives, and it's our selection either we'll use it as fertilizer, or just leave it in a big stinking pile. There's abundance of dirt in this book-my own and other people's!

Tyler: Great metaphor, Patrice. You said you were not kind to plants in the past. What brought you back to Nature and its potential to heal?

Pd: Tyler, I've got to tell you, in attempting to heal myself of the excellent (and somewhat more dramatic than most) family issues, I've experienced just about every form of shrinkage and therapy known to man. For me it was either heal or die.

I couldn't stuff it under like a lot of people pick to do with work or sex, rehearsal or shopping or food, gambling or alcohol or drug addictions-and since I'd seen how addiction and reasoning illness worked on my mother, I knew that path was not for me. I had to find balance.

When I found balance within myself, and when I believed I deserved to have a happier life, I moved to the Enchanted Forest of Avondale, manifesting exactly what I had hoped for-a lovely, organery terrace level office in my home, a tranquil, incommunicable space, and a two-level screened porch (the hot tub sits on the 'Lido Deck'-so dubbed by the workmen).

I had not abandoned nature-and it had not abandoned me-through all the years before this. In my previous homes I would take long walks daily, and convention Tai Chi in gorgeous social parks and gardens. That's one of the reasons I preserve Park Pride, which leads & advocates for parks & green space throughout metro Atlanta. I totally believe in the curative aspects of parks, and so does Park Pride.

Tyler: You referred to Eden, and gardens are often a Christian symbol. Is "Back to the Garden" a religious book, or will non-believers also find it helpful"?

Pd: "Back to the Garden" is more of a spiritual book, although I do cite a whole of examples from the Judeo-Christian tradition. I also comprise examples from many other great religious and spiritual traditions along with Buddhism, Confucianism, Shinto, Taoism, Hinduism, Islam and even Greek mythology (and probably more-I've always been fascinated by humanity's quest for meaning and inner peace).

Anyone who studies world religion will recognize that many of the same stories are reshaped by later generations-and other religions-to lend meaning to their current questions.

For those who are non-believers, they can substitute the words Love, Higher Self, Life Force or Nature for my shouts out to God throughout the book. It's all the same thing, essentially, and in my belief too many wars are fought over semantics.

Tyler: Why should people read "Back to the Garden"?

Pd: I'm sharing what I've learned over the years from hundreds of teachers and the authors of inspirational books who have helped me open my awareness to new possibilities and happier, more fulfilling ways of living.

As I tell participants in my own classes and workshops, once your consciousness expands into new worlds, you can never stuff it back into that smaller box where it used to dwell. It demands more!

Of procedure it's always our selection either or not we'll pay attention to the clarion call of our Higher Self to grow into our full expression, into the joyous lives we're meant to live. Often books serve as guides into those rich realms within us that await our discovery, unlocking and sharing with others.

I offer this book as one possible key to the inner world: a separate kind of "self-help" book, non-linear, without checklists and exercises, because the path of life rarely shapes up as a right line.

Great thinkers throughout history, along with John Lennon, have shared the wisdom that "Life is what happens when we're busy manufacture other plans." Don't we know that!

The curative heart does not control by lists and schedules, but by fits and starts, one step transmit and two steps back, treading old territory until it suddenly breaks into the clearing of joy.

It grows into wholeness straight through hints, suggestions and the sudden flash of recognition-the Aha! epiphanies that it is not alone in its struggles. "Back to the Garden: Getting from Shadow to Joy" is an amble straight through the sorrows that darken our lives back into the light of full creative expression; of discovering who we assuredly are; of seeing ourselves, finally, "at home."

It is a stray straight through the lives of many commonplace people whose distinct outlooks, inner power and genuine,sincere glory in life itself have made them my heroes and sheroes. May their heroic journeys serve as inspiration.

This meditative journey straight through my garden, into nature and straight through this world and the next with many beloved teachers is meant to help reassure, calm and guide any hurting or fearful souls who are in the curative process themselves, and all those who are seeking to pull themselves up to the next level.

In my studies of the workings of the subconscious mind, which believes anyone we tell it, good or bad, I have discovered that in conveying similar messages in many separate ways, resistance begins to melt away and subtle, remarkable distinct shifts occur.

As people read, they too will shift in many wonder-working, remarkable ways. Each individual's wellbeing does make a variation to the world.

Tyler: Why did you resolve to write and release this book?

Pd: This book (and others) have been calling out to me for my entire life. In fact, I recently found one of my early "journals" (in which my mother wrote what I dictated when I was about four and couldn't write). It was the story of a petite flower at a luau. I couldn't believe it-it had a joke at the end; I will immodestly say I chuckled when I re-read it!

Actually, I have written two other books before this one-both were "fiction" but of procedure we know fiction is often lots of thinly disguised fact!

I wrote those the hard way-a page a day-using the laptop computer. It's like breaking rocks, scrutinizing each word as it comes out; reshaping sentences until my head ached. I haven't done anyone with those yet because of the weighty editing they still need.... But some day perhaps.

On this third one, I decided that I would write a non-fiction incorporating the stories of people who have attended my "Get the Life You Love" class which I've taught at Evening at Emory since 1999. Now more than 19 classes-and lots of success stories! Over the years I collected the ones that assuredly resonated and wrote them in my journal.

Then when I had the longhand stream-of-consciousness "framework" that I employed to write this book, I was able to insert vivid examples of people whose lives have assuredly shifted using the ideas I teach.

I decided to release it because, after having had a successful Pr vocation for 20 years, I was ready to move on to the next thing, speaker and author-and it's always nice to have a platform-that's my book.

Tyler: I understand the book has many short stories in it. Would you tell us a bit about these stories-are they non-fiction or autobiographical?

Pd: One is the story of the empty nester who appeared in my class straight through some uncanny bits of synchronicity-she had no clue what to do with her life, and she was in deep grief over the modern death of her sister from brain cancer. She completely reinvented herself by doing the assignments such as the Treasure Map. She followed the sychronicities and power to evolve into her new life as a holistic chef. What a victory! She is an inspiration to me.

Other stories comprise the broke graduate student who was able to build a swimming pool in her back yard. "This is all because of that insane rehearsal you made me do, Patrice," she said when we sat by her pool four years after the class-it was the exact photograph she had described in the vision Vivid exercise!

Another is the story of my great friend Janet Smith, an artist in Memphis, whose head injury as a teenager, I believe, Helped her invent her art-plus the story of her parents who owned Justine's in Memphis-a landmark restaurant-what great bon vivants they were!

Many others are sprinklings of poetry and song, mythology from Greek or Hindu or other religions, as well as my own stories about some of the uplifting, and some of the very harrowing experiences in my own family.

Part of my own story involves the many times I have used the techniques I teach in class to scrape myself up off the tarmac, after my mother paralyzed herself in an alcohol-fueled rage.

Tyler: Tell us a petite bit about yourself and the path you've taken to reach where you are today. Your introduction is very impressive, but what has motivated you to be so successful and especially to inspire others?

Pd: With all I've learned in dragging myself back from the brink of self-destruction, and with story-telling being one of my gifts, it's only natural for me to share these ideas that have been life savers for me. One of my beloved quotes in the class is: "Learn from the mistakes of others. You can't live long sufficient to make them all yourself!"

Tyler: Patrice, I understand you have a background in education. How has that influenced you in your writing?

Pd: people tend to remember stories or vivid examples good than facts or expository writing-and so I make my points come to life by sharing how these ideas have helped real people in real situations make real changes.

In fact, I'd given a talk at the International Congress of Esthetics shortly after my book was published-a thousand skincare specialists and hair stylists in a convention hall in Dallas. Afterwards I sold hundreds of copies of my book-the people were thrilled to have a road map of how to "get the life they love!"

Several months later I Googled the book, and was amazed to survey that a young woman had put "Back to the Garden" by Patrice Dickey on her MySpace as her beloved book-this is a 21-year-old esthetician in Broken Arrow, Ok, who calls herself "SlapMeAndCallMeNorma" (which of procedure made me guffaw out loud!) Her comment, and this is probably the biggest compliment I could receive, was this: "Most breathtaking self help book I've ever read. It assuredly works!"

Tyler: I understand you are also very active in a whole of other ways along with being a motivational speaker, life coach, and yoga instructor. How do you balance these activities with your writing-do you find they fuel one another?

Pd: They all fit together. Yoga keeps me sane and balanced and in good condition; plus I use a lot of yoga wisdom in my talks and workshops to help people who are very stressed. I comprise many of my realizations from yoga practices in the book as well.

Tyler: Patrice, your book is designed to help people transform their lives. What do you think is the main guess that holds people back from having the life they want, and how will "Back to the Garden" help them?

Pd: As I survey whenever I ask this ask in the "Get the Life You Love" class, it's Fear. We can view Fear as False Evidence Appearing Real, or maybe even amiable power Announcing Resistance!

We discuss that Fear can be handled in some ways-we can Flee all and React or we can Face all and Recover. Fear assuredly is an illusion; people can convert their opinions of it-and this often takes a lot of inner work, which sometimes people are afraid to do!

Tyler: What do you think it is that people fear most, and what do you think is the incommunicable to overcoming that fear?

Pd: We took a survey in one class and people chose fear of failure and fear of rejection (public speaking was way up there too).

Basically, failure and rejection spell annihilation. This can be traced back to our earliest days on earth when rejection assuredly Did mean annihilation. The Neanderthals banded together to face wild foes-and if they were rejected, or outcast, they would be destroyed in the wild.

There are many techniques to overcome fear-systematic desensitization (with the help of a expert counselor) is one.

Hypnotherapy has helped me overcome many of my fears of failure and rejection-for example while the process of writing "Back to the Garden" and stalled more than once, I used hypnotherapy to get jump-started.

Tyler: Is it true you are working on a workbook to go with the book?

Pd: Yes, the workbook, as well as the series of Dvds, some of which are on my site at http://www.patricedickey.com -and the Cd Audiobook of prime chapters. Plus I now have individual chapters available as mp3 downloads on my website for only $.99 apiece!

Tyler: What kind of reaction have you received so far from readers?

Pd: people who take the time to Tell me their reaction say they assuredly Love it. some people have bought ten or more copies to give to all their friends and loved ones. They say they laugh and cry over the tales. No doubt there are abundance of people who kept their opinions to themselves!

I recently attended a party where a lovely woman whom I'd never met told me she periodically recycles all her books-but that mine is one of the few that she cherishes and intends to keep.

Lots of testimonials are on my website at http://www.patricedickey.com.

I also yield a complimentary Ezine called "Your Guide to the Life You Love" which comes out at the right time, on a regular basis; it's filled with tools and tips, perspective shifts, and always some cool mind candy with that hopeful flavor! Folks can look at archived issues of the Ezine on the site.

There's a complimentary Ebook as well, entitled "101 easy Ways to Kick the Depression Habit & Get Happier Without Prozac"-I've used these very techniques more times than I can tell you to scrape myself up off the dirt and start all over again. Whenever I'm assuredly down, I take a look at my book again and remind myself just to do some of the things I suggest!

Tyler: Patrice, what are your time to come projects, dreams and goals? Will there be more books?

Pd: Right now I'm partnering on some breathtaking transformational workshops; people can learn more about what I'm up to at http://www.patricedickey.com. I'm also developing more uplifting electronic material like Dvds & mp3s.

As far as my next writing project, you know an author is never supposed to relate what's next-it's like spilling the juju (wink!)

Tyler: Thank you for joining me today, Patrice. Before we go, would you tell our readers where they can find out more information about "Back to the Garden" and how they can purchase copies?

Pd: It can be ordered at any bookstore, and if you assuredly want to preserve the author, puh-leeze go to my website at [http://www.patricedickey.com!] (Did you know that when you buy a book from Amazon, the author eventually gets maybe about a nickel?)

At my site, if you like you can subscribe to the complimentary Ezine "Your Guide to the Life You Love" with tools and tips, perspective shifts and Cool Mind Candy with that hopeful flavor! There's also lots of articles and informative free interviews on the site if you're seeing for something uplifting right away.

I have some great specials going right now too, where people can get the book & Cd combo for about 1/3 the bookstore price.

Tyler: Thanks, Patrice. I'm sure readers will visit your site to learn more. Thanks for being with us today and giving us so much inspiration.

Today, Tyler R. Tichelaar of Reader Views is pleased to be joined by Patrice Dickey, who is here to talk about her new book, "Back to the Garden: Getting from Shadow to Joy," Pd Communications (2006), Isbn 9780977086511.

I hope you will get new knowledge about Flavors. Where you possibly can put to use in your life. And most importantly, your reaction is passed about Flavors.