Category: Tour-Pump Up Your Promo

Today I am honored to have Linda Ferguson stop by to guest post about her book Staying Grounded in Shifting Sand. I will be reviewing her book next week (June 19th) on the blog so be sure to stop by and check out my review.

I want to thank Linda for taking the time out of her very busy touring schedule to sit down and do this for me  and a huge thank you to Dorothy from Pump Up Your Book for arranging this and for being so accomadating.

Staying Grounded in Shifting Sand- Embracing Change

Sometimes we got those cosmic nudges, if not a 2X4 slap across the face, to change. Sometimes what appears on the surface to be bad news, may in the end result in a positive change. Next time you are challenged with a change, stop to ask how the change will serve a higher purpose. Will the change shift you to a better place? The 2X4 slap and subsequent change may be a blessing in disguise.

I faced such a cosmic slap a few times, the hardest ones coming as I lost a job and went through a divorce. Though I didn’t seek out either change, as I came out the other side, I could see that the changes were necessary to get me to a new and better place. I dealt with some deeply buried wounds, cleared some self-limiting beliefs, and found new faith and strength I could never imagined having.

Now I no longer fear change or uncertainty because I know that what I’m going through will get me to a better place.

Depending on how ready you are for change, how much you think the change will help you, and how successful you feel you’ll be making the change, you may welcome or avoid change.

If you intentionally want to change some aspect in your life, you can follow some concrete steps to navigate through the change. I’ve developed a process called Transformational EmpowermentTM to support people making change. These ideas came from working with my coaching clients and my workshops over the last six years. The Transformational Empowerment process uses some basic spiritual principles to support you in making profound and lasting changes.

If you are looking to make a job or life change, and truly want the change to stick, I invite you to use these steps for Transformational Empowerment. Visit my website (www.lindajferguson.com) to receive a free series of handouts and videos that will help you in your change process. You’ll receive a series of emails where I’ll share stories that describe how each of the steps work.

Try out the ideas of Transformational Empowerment and you’ll be well on your way to create a significant life shift, to reach your goals, or to fulfill your heart’s desire.

Embrace the journey. The change may do you good.

Now available!! Linda’s new book, “Staying Grounded in Shifting Sand” – CLICK HERE TO ORDER .

Visit Linda’s website- www.lindajferguson.com to receive valuable handouts and videos to support your personal growth and professional development.

About The Book
Staying Grounded in Shifting Sand provides insightful stories and ideas to support your spiritual journey and help you answer your soul’s calling. Inside you’ll read how to step fully into who you are as an awakened soul being. You’ll read ways to apply spiritual principles for daily challenges and stressors of relationships, finances, work, or family. You’ll learn how to connect with the joy and beauty of who you are as a spiritual being through your various human experiences.

You’ll learn ways to shift how you experience your world using the affirmations, meditations, and visualizations provided in each chapter. A new process called Transformational Empowerment™ shows seven key steps for manifesting your heart’s desire and fulfilling your soul contracts.

You’ve already signed up to be an agent for spiritual transformation, in your own life and in the world. Staying Grounded in Shifting Sand is a spiritual guidebook to help you navigate through your daily stresses, spiritual tests, and challenging relationships. It also is a celebration of the joy you are here to experience as a conscious co-creator. Each chapter ends with concrete, meaningful exercises for you to use immediately!

About The Author
Dr. Linda J. Ferguson is an author, speaker, coach, and seminar leader to support people leading a joyful and awakened spiritual life. Linda’s website, www.lindajferguson.com , contains videos, meditations, affirmations, and other useful resources for spiritual growth and personal development. Readers find inspiring and informative ideas in Linda’s blog to enrich their spirituality for everyday living- www.lindajferguson.com/blog/ .

Dr. Ferguson is author of two books “The Path for Greatness – Work as Spiritual Service” and “Staying Grounded in Shifting Sand- Awakening Soul Consciousness for the New Millennium“. Readers find the exercises at the end of every chapter valuable and practical. They can apply the ideas immediately in their life and see results. Linda has conducted three national book tours, presented at national conferences, and conducted worship services to inspired and appreciative audiences. Linda also leads Shamanic Journeys, spiritual study groups, and retreats for people who want to dive deeper into the insights and ideas offered in her books on spiritual growth and transformation.

Linda has developed a seven step process of Transformational EmpowermentTM, for personal mastery. She developed this powerful process of manifesting and creating positive life changes from her own life experiences, her work with her coaching clients, and her study of mysticism.

She uses the spiritual principles found in her Transformational EmpowermentTM process in her coaching practice so that her clients more effectively move through their important life changes. Her coaching provides a structured and consistent venue so that people can make positive changes in their life easefully and confidently.

Linda has been on radio interviews and has featured articles in Interbeing, a journal of personal and professional mastery. She also writes a weekly blog to support people’s desire to integrate their spiritual life with their professional life- www.managementhelp.org/blogs/spirituality/

Dr. Ferguson earned her Ph.D. from Indiana University (I.U.-Bloomington) in Organizational Behavior with a Masters also from I.U. studying Social Psychology. She has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in psychology and management. Linda did her coach training in 2004 from Coach Training Alliance, completed her certification in Team Coaching, and has CCE credits from International Coach Federation (ICF).

In 1994 she traveled abroad for six months to Asia, Australia, Israel, and Europe before moving to Virginia where she currently lives. Her personal spiritual practice includes daily prayer and meditation, Sufi Dances of Universal Peace, Integral Yoga, Native American Sweat Lodges and other Earth-based ceremonies.

Title: A Boy Called Duct Tape
Author: Christopher Cloud
Pub Date: April 2012
Pages: 188
Publisher: CreateSpace

About the Book:
Pablo Perez is a 12-year-old poor kid without much going for him. His classmates have dubbed him “Duct Tape” because his tattered discount-store sneakers are held together with…you guessed it, duct tape. He can’t escape the bullying.

Pablo’s luck, however, changes after he finds a $20 gold coin while swimming in a river near his home. Pablo later buys a $1 treasure map at the county fair. The map shows the route to the “lost treasure” of Jesse James. Pablo can’t help but wonder: Is there a link between the map and the gold coin? He is determined to find out, and he, his 9-year-old sister and 13-year-old cousin hire an ill-natured cave guide, and begin a treacherous underground adventure in search of treasure.

About the author:
Christopher Cloud admits he came to literature late in life. “I was in my 60s before I developed a real interest in writing fiction,” he said. A Boy Called Duct Tape is Cloud’s debut middle-grade novel. It is a first-person account of three Latino children searching for the “lost treasure” of Jesse James.

Cloud began writing children’s fiction after a long career in journalism and public relations. He graduated from the University of Missouri in 1967 with a degree in journalism. He has worked as a reporter, editor, and columnist for newspapers in Texas, California, and Missouri. His work has appeared in many national publications, including Time Magazine.

Employed by Sun Oil Company, Philadelphia, as public relations executive and later he operated his own PR agency. He created the board game Sixth Sense in 2002 and the game sold at independent bookstores nationwide.

Cloud said his next project is a young-adult novel. “I have written the first draft of a story I’m calling 16 And In Love,” Cloud said. “This story—like A Boy Called Duct Tape—is multicultural.”

Cloud lives in Joplin, Missouri.

Check back for my review later this morning.

Title:The Adventures of Baby Jaimie/Baby Jaimie gets stage Fright
Author: Jaimie Hope
Pages: 24
Pub Date: November 2011
Publisher: Create Space

Source: I received a copy of this book for my honest and sincere review and for my participation on the book tour.

About the book:

Baby Jaimie is in her first year of school. She has made a lot of friends and learned a lot of things. Now she will learn what it means to be a team player when she is in her very first play. Follow Baby Jaimie as she learns the lesson, there are no small parts, only small actors.

Baby Jaimie is in kindergarten and one day her teacher (Mrs Johnson) comes in and tells the kids they will be doing a play. The fun part is the kids get to choose which they want to do and its a tie between Little Red Riding Hood and The Three Little Pigs. Which will they choose?

Jaimie is excited about doing the play but her bubble is quickly burst when her sister, Kelly makes fun of her and basically scares her about doing the play saying things such as stage fright and forgetting lines. When she goes to school the next day what her sister said is in her head and she messes up. She is sad and disappointed.

Jaimie did an excellent job because she hit every emotion on the head. I mean who has faked an illness so they couldn’t go to school on the day of a play or presentation? I know I certainly did.

Now will Jaimie realize her mistake in lying to her mother? While she manage to pull the play off without a hitch? Will she over come her stage fright?

This is a perfect book to read to children because it teaches them that there is nothing to be afraid of, being scared is a normal reaction and that if you try your best it will be okay and honestly as a parent you only want your child to try their best.

I look forward to sharing this with the kids in the school library.

About the author:
Jaimie Hope was born in New York and it was in high school, when she joined the newspaper staff and decided she wanted to be a writer. Jamie received her Associates degree in 1999. Then she moved to Florida where she was an active volunteer in the local historical society and remained active in the arts. In 2005 Jaimie wrote her first children’s book, The Adventures of Baby Jaimie, published in 2006 and Who Says You Can”t Go Home? in 2008. The Adventures of Baby Jaimie: Baby Jaimie Goes to School in 2010. Her Autobiography, Roll With It followed by the third volume in her children’s series, The Adventures of Baby Jaimie: Baby Jaimie Gets Stage Fright, and her first Paranormal Romance, When You Come Back To Me Again were released in 2011.

Today I am happy to be on the virtual book tour for Plant Teacher by Caroline Alethia.  I am happy to showcase her book and have Caroline stop by for a guest post.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Hailed by Huffington Post contributor Joel Hirst as a compelling and powerful story, Plant Teacher begins in 1972 when a hippie in Oakland, California flushes a syringe of LSD down a toilet. Thirty-five years later, the wayward drug paraphernalia has found its final resting place in Los Yungas, Bolivia, the umbilical cord between the Andes and Amazonia.

Enter into this picture two young Americans, Cheryl Lewis, trying to forge her future in La Paz and Martin Banzer, trying to come to terms with his past in the same city. The two form an unlikely friendship against the backdrop of a country teetering at the brink of dictatorship and revolution.

Bolivia sparks the taste for adventure in both young people and Martin finds himself experimenting with indigenous hallucinogenic plants while Cheryl flits from one personal relationship to another. Meanwhile, the syringe buried in the silt in a marsh in Los Yungas will shape their destinies more than either could anticipate or desire.

Plant Teacher takes its readers on a fast-paced tour from the hippie excesses of Oakland, to the great streams of the Pacific Ocean and to the countryside, cities, natural wonders and ancient ruins of Bolivia. It reveals­ the mundane and the magical, and, along the way, readers glimpse the lives of everyday Bolivians struggling to establish equanimity or merely eke out a living during drastic political crisis.

The normal, the unusual, and the paranormal in Plant Teacher

By Caroline Alethia

Cindy, thank you so much for inviting me to your web space.

People have asked me about the novel Plant Teacher and how I made Bolivia seem so real. I was fortunate to live in this remote South American country from 2007 to 2008 when President Evo Morales was consolidating his grasp on power. I say that I was “fortunate” because even though the country was going through an upheaval, I think it is an honor and a responsibility to witness what the Chinese proverbially describe as “interesting” times.

Imagine a country crippled by hunger strikes. The main city plazas are filled with tents, packed with people patiently waiting in hammocks and slowly sipping nothing but water. They read magazines and newspapers. Television cameras have sprung up at every corner. Ambulances wait at the end of the streets.

And what do you do? Because you are not Bolivian and you are not a member of the media, you walk through this spectacle, station yourself at your favorite table at your favorite café, and order a cappuccino and read the news. Inside the café, dozens of other people nibble on cakes and sip their drinks and read and carry on their lives as if nothing is going on outside.

In the evenings, you sit with your landlord and the other guests at your pensión (guest house) while the guests drink beers mixed with sodas and casually talk about the possibility of a civil war. At night, demonstrators crowd the streets with banners and torches and they look ominous. Unlike the passive civil disobedience that is taught in this country, protestors let off firecrackers and the streets, at night, sound as if they are filled with gunshots.

In our pensión courtyard, we continue with our drinks and maybe take a brief dip in the pool.

There is one resounding lesson I learned during my time in Bolivia: Human beings need normalcy. When times are not normal, people will go on as if life is normal—visiting their favorite coffee shops, following their regular routines—to the extent that circumstances allow. The prospect of dictatorship and civil war are so big, that many people can only partially grasp these concepts. They sweep their front doorsteps; they do their laundry; they show up at work.

Martin Banzer, in Plant Teacher, has a South American bad adventure of a different kind. After experimenting with an indigenous hallucinogenic drug, caapi, he must contend with the after-effects of his drug experience. He must teach his English classes and chat with his friends and read emails from his family while he is having flashbacks. While experiencing the paranormal, Martin must appear to be normal.

I wrote Martin’s character and I set him in Bolivia because, despite my cappuccinos and my dips in the pool, I realized I had witnessed a story that I was required to tell. As a country slowly loses its freedom with one nondemocratic act followed by another, and as the world abroad simply ignores or doesn’t understand, the country—my host country, Bolivia—cries for you to tell her story.

Plant Teacher is the story of Martin, trying to be normal, and of Bolivia, struggling in times that should never be considered normal. The story of Bolivia continues. People have been arrested. People have died. The machinery of the Morales regime moves steadily forward. I hope that Plant Teacher entertains, but I also hope that this novel about troubled times reminds us in the North of just how precious and precarious democracy can be.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Caroline Alethia is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in newspapers, magazines, on radio and in web outlets. Her words have reached audiences on six continents. She lived in Bolivia and was a witness to many of the events described in Plant Teacher.

You can visit her website at www.plantteacherthebook.net.

Thanks so much Caroline for taking the time out of your busy tour schedule to do this guest post for me and a huge thank you to Dorothy at Pump Up Your Book for arranging all this.