Review
Review
Review
Review
Book Description
Product Description
About the Author
Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1955, and now residing in the United Kingdom, author Lynn Serafinn is a Personal Transformation Coach, teacher, motivational speaker and talk radio show host. Owing to her long and diverse professional history in the music industry- from symphony violinist, to opera singer, to east-west fusion artist, to a number-1 electronic dance artist in the 90's- Lynn's writing is lyrical, rhythmic, colourful, highly visual and undeniably metaphoric. She was the ghost writer and editor on several published books on Vedic spirituality and philosophy, and is the author of the eBook The Path of Least Resistance to the Self. The Garden of the Soul is her first full-length book.
Lynn was educated at New England Conservatory of Music, University of Texas at Austin and University of Phoenix, and holds a B.Mus. in music history and an MAED in adult education and distance learning. Awarded the National Defence Foreign Language Fellowship in 1980-81, Lynn journeyed to Calcutta where she began her long-term studies of Indian music and religion. A fully qualified teacher, she taught music and music technology for many years, and was the recipient of the Microsoft UK Innovative Teacher of the Year Award in 2005. She holds a CPCC through the Coaches Training Institute and is a graduate of the Co-Active Leadership Programme. Now living on her own in Bedford, England, Lynn is the Founder/Leader of the Global Wellness Circle, a thriving community-based holistic education project spread throughout the United Kingdom. She has a grown daughter, who is also a writer, and a young grandson.
Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1955, and now residing in the United Kingdom, author Lynn Serafinn is a Personal Transformation Coach, teacher, motivational speaker and talk radio show host. Owing to her long and diverse professional history in the music industry- from symphony violinist, to opera singer, to east-west fusion artist, to a number-1 electronic dance artist in the 90's- Lynn's writing is lyrical, rhythmic, colourful, highly visual and undeniably metaphoric. She was the ghost writer and editor on several published books on Vedic spirituality and philosophy, and is the author of the eBook The Path of Least Resistance to the Self. The Garden of the Soul is her first full-length book.
Lynn was educated at New England Conservatory of Music, University of Texas at Austin and University of Phoenix, and holds a B.Mus. in music history and an MAED in adult education and distance learning. Awarded the National Defence Foreign Language Fellowship in 1980-81, Lynn journeyed to Calcutta where she began her long-term studies of Indian music and religion. A fully qualified teacher, she taught music and music technology for many years, and was the recipient of the Microsoft UK Innovative Teacher of the Year Award in 2005. She holds a CPCC through the Coaches Training Institute and is a graduate of the Co-Active Leadership Programme. Now living on her own in Bedford, England, Lynn is the Founder/Leader of the Global Wellness Circle, a thriving community-based holistic education project spread throughout the United Kingdom. She has a grown daughter, who is also a writer, and a young grandson.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
You are already the hero of your own life. You did not earn this title. You did not have to. You were born the hero. It is your birthright. If you do not take up your birthright, no one else will do it for you. If you leave it unclaimed, the universe will remain bereft of something it passionately desires. The world will continue to long for that which only you can fulfil. It will dream of you again and again. It will call to you repeatedly. It will cry for you.
Then, one day, in this lifetime or the next, or the next after that, you will finally take up the path of least resistance to the Self, and simply become the person you were always meant to be. And on that day, ever so easily, you will see that you were always the hero of this story--your story--and that all you ever needed in order to be the hero, was to look within the simple stories of your own life.
This was the message I brought to a group of young entrepreneurs in South Africa when I delivered a workshop on the four principles `Give-Receive-Become-Be' for the very first time. While I never stood up and read these exact words, throughout the course of the workshop, this message emerged organically. At the end of the workshop, several of the entrepreneurs came and told me and my co-leader that the four principles had enabled them to see just how powerful and important their lives already were. Some of the attendees even told us the experience had actually changed their lives. When I heard how profoundly this message had impacted them, I was astonished. The book was not even finished. This was the first time I had ever shared these principles with the public, and I had no idea whether I could translate my own spiritual model, which was still evolving, into something meaningful within a workshop setting. Of course, I was pleased that the principles themselves had blossomed so naturally and easily, months before the book was even published, but more than that, I began to realise how key this very process of natural unfolding has been to the writing of this book itself.
`Organically' is the word I would use to the way this book has grown since its inception. I didn't originally plan to write a book. I never sat down and decided I was going to define a set of spiritual principles. I never even thought I had a message to give to the world. All I knew was that I loved to write. I had written poetry since I was a teenager, but had lost connection with my poetic voice for many decades. Then, one day in 2003, a totally random comment a friend made sparked the entire story of `The Very Good King,' which is now the prologue of this book and the foundation for all that follows. After years of poetic silence, I wrote that story in a single sitting. When that story came to me, it was more like `listening' than writing. I `heard' it and simply wrote it down, and just could not stop writing until the story itself decided to end. This, I discovered, was to become the primary method of my creative receptivity.
I found it extremely odd that `The Very Good King' took the form of a fairytale. I had never written in such a style before. I knew, of course, that the story was full of metaphors that even I myself did not fully understand. I could sense that the Four Flowers in the story represented some lost parts of myself, but I couldn't quite put my finger on exactly what these parts were. I just knew that, taken together, these were the parts of me that longed to speak to the world, but I had no idea what they wanted to say. And this is what the story of `The Very Good King' tells--the process of going from voicelessness to complete freedom of expression. And so, in a kind of lovely artistic irony, that story which itself is about finding one's voice, also began my own journey towards finding and claiming my authenticity.
But being able to `hear' a whole story wasn't something that happened every day. Sometimes I would go for months without writing. But over time, the spirit to write came more and more frequently. I wrote dozens of short stories, all very different from each other with no seeming connection. At this point, I started to dream about what it would be like to have written a book, but still I could not imagine what I possibly had to say to the world. I went for four more years like this, and throughout that time, `The Very Good King' seemed so unlike anything else I was writing, that I simply put it aside as a nice little piece that had no real purpose in the `real world.' But my life was changing radically during those four years. I didn't realise that `The Very Good King' had taken root in my Garden, and that the book was already growing, even without my awareness of it.
Just as we wake one day in early spring to find that our garden is sprouting new life without our intervention, as I lay asleep in bed one morning in March 2007, I suddenly `heard' what my book was about. I sat up excitedly and shouted, `Of course! That's it!' And in one flash of insight, vision or whatever you want to call it, I saw the Four Flowers and the Four Principles. I saw the attributes of the Four Principles. I saw how all the stories were linked. I saw how `The Very Good King' was actually the seed of all the other ideas...
