By Kathleen Nicholls, author of Go Your Crohn Way
Living as I do with Crohn’s Disease and a myriad of other chronic illnesses, it can be exhausting just getting up in the morning. Without meaning to sound melodramatic, often everything is a struggle. Life is exhausting.
So when I can I like to do things to make it easier. Better. Less ‘all-about-illness’. Continue reading
Here I am looking at my book, still holding the packaging.
It’s April 2016 here on Gabriola Island, British Columbia. The flowers are blooming, and I am looking for the first time at my new book, Embroidered Cancer Comic.
“How did I come to write a comic?” I’m glad you asked. As soon as my husband Bob Bossin was diagnosed in 2011 with prostate cancer, we started making cancer jokes. Every time we could laugh about the situation, one of us would say, “That goes in the comic”. At this stage the comic was completely imaginary. But eventually I picked up my needle and stitched and stitched until I had over sixty embroidered squares… Continue reading
Here at Singing Dragon, we’ve asked Production Designer, Emma Carroll if she wouldn’t mind us jumping into her shoes for a day. Luckily, she agreed, and below is the result: a day in the life of an Production Designer at Singing Dragon.
Emma Carroll, 5th February 2016
By Stephen Rath with Marcia Rath, certified Qigong instructors and writers of Qigong for Wellbeing in Dementia and Aging
The author Frank Herbert observed in Dune that when we ponder choices in the future we see doors, perhaps many; but when we peer into the past we see a long corridor. And so it seems with the journey that my wife, Marcia, and I took as we traveled through the corridor that led to the publication of Qigong for Wellbeing in Dementia and Aging. Continue reading
As a new author to Singing Dragon, Giuliana Fenwick’s first book, Indian Head Massage For Special Needs, sees the pinnacle of her work so far in a very short space of time. However, it is very much the beginning of the platform as she continues work as an author, public speaker and fundraiser for special needs, helping to give a voice to those who so often do not have one. Hear her story below…
Continue reading
Here at Singing Dragon, we’ve asked Assistant Editor, Jane Evans if she wouldn’t mind us jumping into her shoes for a day. Luckily, she agreed, and below is the result: a day in the life of an Assistant Editor at Singing Dragon, by Jane Evans. We hope you enjoy it! Next, we’ll be jumping into the shoes of Production Designer, Emma Carroll, so keep a look out!
Jane Evans, 16th October 2015
Many of my friends and family are under the impression that being an Assistant Editor means I get to sit around reading all day. While that (unfortunately!) isn’t the case, the reality can be just as much fun – quickly getting my head around a new topic to write attention-grabbing blurbs, searching for potential cover artwork, or helping an Editor brainstorm title ideas.
I get into the office at 9.30am and, with an obligatory cup of tea in hand, start reading emails received overnight. I respond to anything urgent immediately and flag others to reply to later in the day. Handling priorities is the key to your survival as an assistant, and I usually have at least two to-do lists on the go – one for long-terms tasks and another for that day’s particular priorities.
We are currently preparing for a sales conference in December, so I am in the midst of working with the rest of the assistant team to draft AI (Advance Information) sheets for all of our Spring and Summer 2016 titles. This includes writing blurbs, highlighting key sales points and ensuring our author biographies are up to date. For me, it is one of the best parts of the job and a chance to be creative, especially with our children’s books. I recently had great fun writing the blurb for Michael Chissick and Sarah Peacock’s Seahorse’s Magical Sun Sequences, which teaches yoga to children of all abilities and features an octopus on crutches and a starfish with a bad back!
Singing Dragon is constantly evolving and growing in new directions and I love working on our new list of comics. As I write, I am eagerly awaiting the final files for Steve Haines and Sophie Standing’s Trauma is Really Strange, which follows the success of Pain is Really Strange and promises to be just as informative, witty and beautifully illustrated. Once the files arrive, I will help with the handover to our production department. This process varies from book to book, but includes meticulous checking of our database records against the final manuscript and applying for permission to use any copyright material taken from other sources.
I attend a number of weekly meetings, including our Covers and Titles 
meeting. This is an opportunity for the Editors to discuss any potential changes to a book’s title and present draft cover designs for feedback from our Sales and Marketing teams. We consider everything from whether the design is appropriate for the market through to whether the title will be legible when the cover appears as a thumbnail image online. Some of our covers go through several rounds of draft designs until they are perfected, whereas others get it right first time. Damo Mitchell’s White Moon on the Mountain Peak, a comprehensive explanation of Daoist internal alchemy for Western practitioners, was one such cover. It is atmospheric and resonates with both the title and the book’s content perfectly. We all loved it immediately.
Finally, I have recently started to acquire my own titles so whenever I have a free moment in the day, I read and comment on new proposals. It is always exciting to have a rummage through our submissions pile to see what hidden gems I can find! If you are interested in submitting a proposal to us, you can do so here.
My day usually ends by writing a to-do list for the next morning to give me focus as soon as I get into the office. However, after two and a half years at Singing Dragon and JKP, I have learnt that I can never really know what the next day will have in store!
Ten reasons why authors Lawrence Pagett and Paul Millward want you to read this book…
When Singing Dragon agreed to publish our book on EFT, Principles of EFT, we were excited. And here’s why:
It’s not easy to find the words to do justice to this work. This book is a must for anyone in the healing profession who wants to provide their clients with an easy but effective method of helping themselves in-between sessions and also for those wishing to take action to restore their own sense of wellbeing or equilibrium.
EFT – Emotional Freedom Techniques – is a huge breakthrough for humanity. Before EFT, we were afraid of emotions – of other’s and, most of all, of our own own…I would lay these pages to follow close to your heart and invite you to an exploration and an adventure like no other – to find out what life can be like when we live in emotional freedom.
That’s nine reasons for you getting Principles of EFT. What about the “tenth” reason?
If you’re still not sure, why not check out these FREE extracts and find out for yourself:
Foreword from Dr Silvia Harmann (Chair, The Association For Meridian and Energy Therapies).
The Emergence of EFT – an extract
You can find out more about the book, read reviews or order your copy here.
The Singing Dragon Complete Catalogue is now available. With full information on our expanding list of books in Chinese Medicine and Acupuncture, Qigong, Yoga, Aromatherapy, and a variety of other disciplines, our catalogue is an essential resource for complementary health practitioners and anyone interested in enhancing their own health, wellbeing and personal development.
To receive a free copy of the catalogue, please fill out the form below and press subscribe:
In this interview Steve Haines, author of Pain is Really Strange, discusses the topic of pain, he explains the reasons behind his choice to write a book about it using the graphic medium and tells us what people can do to manage pain.
Read the edited interview here:
Why do a book on pain?
There’s an awful lot of pain around. There was a huge survey done in Europe: 1 in 5 people experience chronic pain. They have persistent or severe pain for more than six months. For many of them, the median time was a number of years.
People manage large amounts of pain. Pain is a universal human experience; everybody knows what pain is.
The really exciting news is that there is a revolution in how we understand pain. The goal of the book is to try and explain that. How pain works is actually a little bit counterintuitive, a little bit strange. Some of the things that people think cause pain actually turn out to be not quite as central as folklore would have it.
Why do a graphic book on pain?
Education is a central tool in changing pain. The goal of using images it to make it light and really accessible. A good image can communicate an argument and idea very quickly. The book emerged from lots of lectures and talks I’ve given over the years. I have been endlessly trying to find creative ways of explaining how pain works to my clients and students.
I was incredibly lucky to meet Sophie Standing. I have really enjoyed how she’s visualized the work. She surprised me sometimes about how she took an idea that I’d been familiar with for a number of years and just showed it in a very different way.
I think that graphic novels can be very powerful tools. Pain Is Really Strange is short and sweet, 36 pages, but there’s an awful lot of information packed into the book. The images try and really crystallize ideas into something simple.
Who is the book aimed at?
The book is for everybody. Everybody experiences pain, and I think everybody can learn from the new science. The current research can really help us change our idea and experience of what pain is, even really difficult chronic pain.
I would offer that everybody should be able to stand, walk, sit, and sleep, without issues. You might not be able to run a marathon anymore, and you might not have the best tennis serve that you had when you were in your 20s, but ordinary movements of sitting, standing, walking, lifting your shopping; it’s actually often possible to get people to a place where they can do those everyday functions with ease reasonably quickly. That makes a huge change in happiness and vitality
What is the central message of the book?
There is something that you can do to change your pain experience. There’s always a change in behaviour, a change in how you think, feel, move that can be used to creatively stimulate your brain to do something different.
The really central message is: think of pain as a bad habit or an alarm system that has gone wrong. Short-term it was very useful, but long-term chronic pain serves very little purpose. We can unlearn the pain habit. We can train our nervous system to respond differently to the information that’s coming in.
What is the hardest thing to explain about pain?
By saying: “Pain involves the brain,” people often feel that you’re saying that it’s their fault. That’s really not what I am saying. I like to talk about the mind, the brain, and the body. The mind is our consciousness, our awareness, our sense of self. The brain is in between the mind and the body. Pain is an output from the nervous system, not an input.
The brain can make mistakes. It gets into habits or reflexes. Evolution has taught us to respond to the threat of danger very, very quickly, and sometimes in those quick responses, we go down fixed, hard-wired, old patterns that are hard to break out of. But, and this is the important bit, reflexes and habits are responsive to new learning; we can learn to respond differently.
There’s no one answer to pain. For me that’s very exciting, but it can feel overwhelming and confusing. It implies that creativity, learning to do things differently, is possible. A complex nervous system will benefit from a multitude of responses. Culture, society, family, stress, how we eat, emotion and metabolic activity in our body are all deeply relevant to the pain experience.
What can people do to manage pain?
Mostly, it’s about being creative. Do something different. Whatever you’ve been doing, if you’re still in pain, it’s not working. Try a new approach. We can move differently, understand differently, feel differently, describe ourselves differently. The book explores some simple hints about how we might do those things, but the essence is change and creativity in response to the danger signal, and not going down fixed, hard-wired responses.
Understand that reflexes that were useful when you really needed to protect the tissues as they repaired are no longer useful after the tissues have repaired. Tissue repair takes no more than a few months. In chronic pain the nervous system needs recalibrating.
For me, the book is a very hopeful book; there is something you can do to change your pain experience. Pain isn’t about tissues. It’s about an alarm system in the nervous system that’s exaggerated and is no longer accurate about the state of the tissues.
Steve Haines, June 2015
Or listen to the full interview here. Linda from Singing Dragon asked Steve Haines some questions…
Steve Haines has been working in healthcare for over 25 years and as a bodyworker since 1998. He is the co-author of ‘Cranial Intelligence’ and author of the short graphic books ‘Pain Is Really Strange’ and ‘Trauma Is Really Strange’. Understanding the science of pain and trauma has transformed his approach to healing. He has studied Yoga, Shiatsu, Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy, and Trauma Releasing Exercises (TRE). He is a UK registered Chiropractor and teaches TRE and Cranial work all over the world. His treatments now use education, embodied awareness and light touch to help people move more freely and be more present. Steve lives and works between London and Geneva.
Treatments: www.stevehaines.net Teaching TRE: www.trecollege.com Teaching Cranial: www.bodyintelligence.com Graphic Books: www.painisreallystrange.com
by Jennifer Rhind, taken from A Sensory Journey: Meditations on Scent for Wellbeing
It is midwinter. It is cold, water has crystallised into ice, the land has frozen over and the power of the sun has diminished. Nature is dormant – the animals are hibernating, everything has slowed down, conserving energy for future survival.
You are standing at the edge of a forest. It has been snowing; the landscape has been covered with a blanket of snow. Focus on your ears, and sense of hearing. All sound has been deadened – this is as close to silence as you have ever felt.
It is almost sunset. You slowly emerge from the wood and stand at the edge of a wide, sandy bay. The sea is dark blue, reflecting the late afternoon sky, and the wind is capping the waves with white foam. The tide is coming in, and you walk up to the edge of the sea where the waves crash on to the shore. The roaring of the sea as it drags on the sand fills your head.
You breathe deeply, drinking in the salty air, with its tang of seaweed. You become aware of the power of the sea – and feel a strange combination of fear and excitement, an overwhelming exhilaration.
You watch the waves that break on the shore at your feet, and become one with their rhythms and patterns.
Now look to the horizon. The fading sun, now a dull red, is low in the sky, its light turning the sea foam to pink. You notice that some of the waves are becoming larger, rising above the water; these are the mythical white horses. As you watch, you wonder what it would be like to ride the waves.
As the white horses draw closer to the shore, you merge with the illusion, and find yourself riding the waves. The roar of the sea is all encompassing, white foam blows all around, and you are moving with the swell of the ocean, diving into the troughs, and rising over the crests… the experience is exhilarating, natural and flowing. You notice dolphins and porpoises all around, and then you too become a creature of the sea.
Your white horse carries you back to the shore, and you watch as it disappears into the sea foam. You are standing, looking out over the sea, which is now very calm and quiet, little ripples caressing the sand at your feet. The sun is now very low in the sky; you watch the red disc slip over the horizon, its light reflected in the calm water.
Now your senses are anchored. Your experience has allowed you to realise that you have abundant courage, judgement and will. You now turn and head back to the forest. Ahead, the snow brightens the scene, and your pace quickens. You reach the forest and, in the fading light, retrace your tracks back through the trees.
You are heading back to your log cabin, where the fire will be burning. The fragrance of wood smoke lingers in the still air. This is your midwinter haven. As you walk, you reflect and review. This is the season to rest, be still, and listen to the wise person within. You are your own catalyst for growth in the coming spring. Now is the time to plant the seeds of your dreams. It is a time for being, not doing.
Jennifer Peace Rhind is a Chartered Biologist with a Ph.D. in Mycotoxicology. For thirteen years she worked as a therapist and partner in a multidisciplinary complementary healthcare clinic.. She was a lecturer on the B.A. Complementary Healthcare programme at Edinburgh Napier University for fourteen years, and remains involved in scent education. A Sensory Journey is a set of cards and booklet exploring different fragrances and giving guided meditations on scent for wellbeing and spiritual growth.