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WHAT’S YOUR POTION?

LIQUID REFRESHMENTS TO NOURISH BODY, MIND AND SPIRIT

By

     MORWYN

                                                                                                   Publisher: Schiffer Publishing

My latest book WHAT’S YOUR POTION? LIQUID REFRESHMENTS TO NOURISH BODY, MIND, AND SPIRIT. It is chock full of information about the health benefits and lore surrounding scores of potion ingredients. More than half of this cookbook consists of recipes for teas, coffees, soups, smoothies–all liquid refreshments. The book is highly illustrated with a color on almost every page; in fact, most of the photos were shot on site at Dunraven House. This book makes an excellent coffee table book as well as a recipe book for the gourmet’s collection. Although the cover for some reason refuses to replicate itself without being chopped off, here are some photos of a few of the recipes. They are Life Everlasting Juice and Mexican Hot Chocolate. Perfect on winter mornings and evenings, or any time! All of my recipes have psychological benefits as well as physical ones.

In WHAT’S YOUR POTION? I’ve created over 100 liquid refreshment recipes to enhance good health and uplift your body, mind, and spirit. By tapping into my Latin American and European cultural background, I hope to inspire readers with these charming and easy-to-make beverages.

Based on the concept that mindful consumption can help a person attain self-fulfillment and self-realization, I try to emphasize the enjoyment of smoothies, teas, coffees, cocoas, soups and sauces. Like I always do in my books, I include nutritional facts and traditional folklore associated with drink ingredients as well as details of culinary, medicinal, and folkloric attributes of common fruits, vegetables, and seasoning botanicals.

Although I put forth theories behind the psychological effects of potions that I base on folklore, color symbolism, and the four elements of nature—air, fire, water, and earth, you don’t need to subscribe to these ideas to take pleasure in producing some wonderfully spirit-lifting recipes.

I hope you will be able to open your heart to the potion that will nourish your soul!

 

Life Everlasting Juice Life Everlasting Juice Carolina's Mexican Hot Chocolate Carolina’s Mexican Hot Chocolate

Available to Order Now

TEA LEAF READING FOR BEGINNERS:

YOUR FORTUNE IN A TEACUP

By

Caroline Dow

                                                                                                  Publisher: Llewellyn Worldwide

Tea Leaf Reading For Beginners

This enchanting work relates the pleasures and benefits that you can derive from practicing the venerable art of tea leaf reading. In a lighthearted, conversational tone, Caroline both informs about tea and stimulates enjoyment of this versatile beverage. Tea Leaf Reading for Beginners is an eclectic work that also discusses related pastimes, including how to host a tea party to show off your newly acquired teacup divination skills and where to enjoy taking Afternoon Tea around the world. Facts about tea as a health drink, herbal teas, and tea as a culinary ingredient add to the reader’s stockpot of data. Customs, superstitions and legends connected with these diversions add spice to the blend. Whether you just now are switching from coffee to tea because of the health benefits, yearn to return to simpler times by learning tea leaf reading, seek to hone your intuitive abilities by practicing a new art, or see it as a potential gift for mother, sister, or friend, you will find that Tea Leaf Reading for Beginners fits you to a tee. Caroline Dow learned to read tea leaves at her Great Aunt’s knee (well, actually, her skirt), and has been practicing this alluring art ever since. She has delivered tea leaf reading workshops around the world, and has been featured on Consumer Advantage Network TV and at The Rocky Mountain Tea Festival for the last ten years.

EXCERPT

For your enjoyment, here is the introductory chapter to Tea Leaf Reading For Beginners: Your Fortune in a Teacup. To purchase this book, please click on the Shopping Cart button.

Chapter One

Introduction to Tealeaf Reading An Age-Old Art for Today’s World

“There is no trouble so great or grave that cannot be much diminished by a nice cup of tea.” Bernard-Paul Heroux, Basque Philosopher

Start reading someone’s tea leaves at a party or in a restaurant and I guarantee you’ll soon draw a crowd. Everybody wants to know about the current influences on their lives and what the future holds. Tea leaf reading is an easily accessible, relatively uncomplicated and light-hearted way to take a stab at predicting the future. At the same time you can expand your circle of acquaintances and deepen friendships. This mellow art benefits the teacup reader as much as the person for whom the leaves are read. Relaxing over a cup of tea provides quality time that otherwise tends to get consumed in the daily hustle-bustle. Practicing tea leaf divination forces you to slow your own hectic life pace along with that of your inquirer–the person having the reading. The enjoyment derived from the camaraderie of discussing life issues with friends and family can become as important as the actual divination. The heyday of tea leaf reading occurred during Victorian times. With the invention of the teabag in 1908 and modern forms of entertainment, such as television, videos, DVDs and the Internet, the practice of this home-based art slid into steady decline. Now that children’s wee tea parties, tea tastings for adults and other tea-related leisure activities are making a comeback, tea leaf reading is riding a wave of renewed popularity. This gentle pursuit of times gone by owes its regeneration, in part, to a nostalgic yearning for less complicated times. People are rediscovering that when they take time to brew and drink a cup of tea at the dining table–and perhaps serve accompanying little cakes and cookies–they encourage others to share their hopes, fears, accomplishments and challenges. And a cup of tea costs pennies compared to a visit to a psychotherapist. Another perk to tea leaf reading is that it acts as a self-development tool to enhance intuition and promote creative visualization. The images found in the teacup help focus your mind to explore inner worlds. By accessing symbols from your subconscious, you expand self-awareness. Who Practices Tea leaf Reading? There was a time when most families boasted at least one amateur who interpreted everyone’s leaves. When I was a girl, my great-Aunt Lizzie enjoyed a peerless reputation as the family’s resident psychic. On Sunday afternoons, she gathered us kids together in her kitchen around the lace-covered oak table to contemplate the depths of her delicate china cups. My aunt was not an educated woman. She never studied esoteric symbolism, and I doubt she ever heard of Jung or Freud. What she did possess was a keen intuitive mind and the ability to enchant us with the tales she told about what the future might bring. I feel lucky that she deigned to pass some of her knowledge along to me so that I, too, might read cups. It is difficult for me to imagine what my life would have been like without the enriching influence of tea leaf reading. Looking back on the wisdom my auntie communicated, I realize that to be a successful tea leaf reader doesn’t require graduate studies in arcane philosophy, as is the case with some tarot card readers. Nor need you meditate daily, as do many crystal ball gazers. Just follow the simple recipe Aunt Lizzie taught me that includes a tablespoonful of memorized symbols, a dollop of imagination and a pinch of intuition, all presented with a storyteller’s gift, and you’re ready for action. How Tea Leaf Reading Works You may wonder how a bunch of lowly wet leaves left in the dregs of a teacup can show a person’s future. Is it an old wives’ tale spawned on superstition? Some of the mystery surrounding tea leaf reading can be attributed to the reader’s largely unconscious capacity to interpret minute bits of information transmitted by the inquirer. Such data might include nonverbal behaviors like posture, facial expressions, eye movements, gestures and the like. The way a person dresses, accent and speech patterns also reveal information. Yet there is more to the accuracy of tea leaf predictions than what meets the eye. After all, this divination has been practiced for centuries with good enough results that people from diverse cultures around the world keep doing it. So what’s the secret? The fact is, seasoned psychics, and even you, I, my neighbor down the block and a stranger from another town all possess some knowledge of the future. It’s because we are interconnected with each other and to the cosmos. Think of Six Degrees of Separation, only on the mental plane, and you get an idea of what I mean. Some attribute this interconnectedness to a theory rooted in a relatively new science called quantum physics. According to researchers in this field, everything that exists is interconnected. On a cellular level, each cell in our bodies contains all the past, present and future information about us. When we touch an object, our brains use a subtle form of energy to transmit our data through our bodies to the object, where it gets lodged. Some items make better recorders of this energy than others. Small objects like tea leaves, coffee grounds, seeds and even pebbles seem particularly impressionable. In the case of tea leaves, they reveal the stored information by clinging together on the sides and bottom of the cup after the tea is drunk. The inquirer subconsciously impregnates the leaves with the information. The leaves then arrange themselves into images that the reader can interpret using his or her connectedness to the cup and to the inquirer. Such pictures can be construed either literally or symbolically as snapshots of the inquirer’s life. Given the fact that everything is interrelated, you might ask yourself the same question that Scrooge put to the Ghost of Christmas Future in Charles Dickens’ classic tale, A Christmas Carol:  “Are these images of what will happen, or of what might happen?” Psychologists remind us that past behavior is usually the best predictor of future behavior. Images formed by the leaves give a good idea of what is likely to occur if the inquirer follows typical behavior patterns. When the predicted outcome is unsatisfactory, the person can always do something to break the chain of events and change the future. In other words, forewarned is forearmed. This is why people go for readings of any kind, from astrology charts to tarot. Presumably, the reader also brings to the table along with a fresh cup of tea, a fresh eye, free from prejudice. In this way, the most accurate interpretation can be made of what is likely to occur, and the inquirer’s available resources to deal with the situation can be identified. I trust that in a very good way, you will get more than you bargained for from reading these pages. First of all, I hope you discover the joys of tea leaf reading for yourself, friends and family. You’ll learn everything from choosing the right tea to answering your best friend’s question about whether that longed-for soul mate is ever going to put in an appearance. By the time you are finished reading this book, you will know how to prepare the cup, decipher images and make predictions that will astound everyone, including yourself, with their accuracy. Besides interpreting the leaves, you will get ideas on how to throw a fabulous tea leaf reading party and other kinds of tea events. And you will be able to entertain your guests and inquirers with yarns about the history of tea and humorous tea superstitions that have come down to us over the ages. You will even learn twenty ways to use tea besides drinking it and how to cook with tea. Sherlock Holmes’ favorite tea was Lapsang Souchong. In the spirit of detection that he represents, I have just prepared myself a cup of this smoky brew. With teacup in hand, I invite you to settle back in a comfortable reading chair and turn the page as I unravel for you the mysteries of tea leaf reading and more.