Productivity Publications

Merinda and the Magic Mirror: A Tiny Tale of Transformation for All Ages

by Marjorie Baker Price

Enter into the  transformational world of Merinda and the Magic Mirror. See how you can empower and heal yourself to become who you really want and need to be! This fable teaches how to find your voice and your authentic self. Merinda discovers that bullies don’t have the power to rule her life. Like Merinda, you can embrace the amazing freedom that comes from really
understanding how being true to yourself can transform your life.

Your Magic Mirror, the special journaling  and guided meditation section, guides you through this journey of self-discovery.

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Bios

Author: Marjorie Baker Price

Marjorie Baker Price is a psychiatric and community health nurse, author, coach, trainer, certified hypnotherapist, intuitive/spiritual counselor, shamanic healer and Reiki Master based in Rochester, NY.  In 1987 she founded Centering Tools for Self-Healing and Development, a holistic healing and counseling practice that specializes in meditation and visualization practices, journaling, energy healing, empowerment and wellness coaching, women’s spirituality, grief and recovery therapies, inner child work, dream therapy, motivational and goal achievement including unleashing creative potential, and spiritual development classes.

Her focus is to support individual and community wellness transformation through self-help practices that are uniquely shaped to meet individual and community needs and support corresponding development. She works with children and adults, and presents numerous workshops on a variety of related topics.

In 2008 she founded Centering for Wellness, Inc., a not-for-profit organization, whose mission is to offer transformational wellness educational programs to at-risk populations, health care providers, the general public, and as part of corporate wellness initiatives.

Marjorie has created multiple intuitive and lifestyle balancing courses, and self-healing and empowerment guided meditation and hypnosis audios. Her blog-centered website, http://www.centeringtools.com, contains complete product listings, including downloadable audios, as well as information on how to book sessions and upcoming classes.

Visit http://www.centeringtools.com to purchase products, to get continuing news about Merinda, to sign up for the free Centering Tools email newsletter with how-to guided meditation and journaling articles, downloadable audios,  and related workshop announcements.

Illustrator: Colleen Porter

Colleen Porter has been an artist her whole life.  She began her own inner journey of magic, healing and transformation nearly twenty years ago by accessing her inner child through utlizing many of the concepts of Merinda.  Her artistry and imaginative spirit has for many years shone through the amazing gardens she’s created in upstate New York.  She lives in Buffalo, NY with her husband and two young children.

Contributor: Kay Whipple

Kay Whipple holds a BS in Computer Science, Large Scale Systems Engineering, and Industrial Management from Purdue University and an MBA in Marketing and Economics from the University of Rochester, Simon School. She is a long-time writer, business consultant, and student of energy. Her publishing company, Productivity Publications, offers resources celebrating adventure, personal and spiritual growth, business effectiveness, health, and energy. She also owns Webs and Wings, a company that provides business and computer consulting along with a wide variety of workshops and trainings, including multi-sensory events and workshops which combine the labyrinth with journaling, art, and a variety of technologies. She is on the board of directors of The Labyrinth Society, an international organization that supports all those who create, maintain and use labyrinths, and serves the global community by providing education, networking and opportunities to experience transformation. Kay has been a writer since she could hold a crayon.

Interview with Marjorie Baker Price

This book has an interesting history. Tell us how this book came to be.

I wrote the basic story of Merinda and the Magic Mirror in 1992 to include as a handout for a women’s self-healing and empowerment workshop with a primary focus on inner child recovery that I presented through my Centering Tools practice. Within a year I was moved to self-publish it as a children’s and inner child recovery story with drawings from my daughter and son, who were 9 and 7 at the time.

In addition to distributing it through my practice, I offered the book through eBay and then Amazon. Then I made tapes to sell with it: one of which was a guided meditation for children on reducing stress and improving self-esteem, and one was for adults on recovering your inner child. I was surprised to receive increasing numbers of letters from people all over the country about how important its message of recovering self-acceptance and personal power was, both to the women who bought it and the girls with whom they shared it.

In 2006 I wanted to look at Merinda again with an eye to extending the story. I worked with Adele Mockevicius, children’s librarian, to include a more specific focus on bullying and developing greater insight. I began to think about having Merinda published through a publisher with international distribution capability, having been keenly encouraged through contacts in the publishing industry to do so. Although it was solicited and strongly considered by an agent and some large publishers, it was not accepted.

I then began to think more about going through a small, preferably local publisher, where I could fully participate in the process of bringing it to fruition. To that end, over the next couple of years I solicited artwork (photographs and drawings), and chose the illustrations by Colleen Porter that are now in the book.

My work with Adele also inspired adding a Part II, which I envisioned as a workbook section for children, the significant adults in their lives, as well as professionals who work with children, and adults. After reading the story, this section would help people to further understand, develop, and integrate the lessons of Merinda into their lives, fully taking advantage of its concepts that support recovery and empowerment. In the fall of 2011, I met Kay Whipple, a local publisher who expressed a keen interest in publishing it. It took more than two years for us working together in what became a wonderful collaborative and creative relationship for us to bring the book to fruition. Kay and I collaborated on the workbook section, called “Your Magic Mirror.”

What is your vision for the book now? 

Merinda and the Magic Mirror is a book that is deliberately simple and presented as a fable with whimsical illustrations. It leads readers of all ages into realizing that they can and must rely on their sense of being and become their own authentic self. This realization is potentially, within all developmental challenges, the source of “real magic” in their lives–as well as their core support, higher guidance, personal power, self-healing, and success. We are all meant, and need, to become our own heroines, and in so doing, to embark on a heroic odyssey where conditioned familiar rules no longer apply, like in The Wizard of Oz.

In this magical/transformational universe, we so greatly grow that when we return to our usual lives, we are able to meet previously impassable challenges in a new way that creates right outcomes that we feel truly good about. Merinda is a story about how we can, and do, gain greater understanding through self realization, transformation, and overcoming our life challenges.

Our lives can mirror to us what really challenges us, not only in the circumstances we experience, but with ourselves. When we develop the courage in the face of loss to really see, not only our fears and limitations, but a greater vision of our relationships, we recover empowering insights and responses so our inner and outer world can change.

My vision is to inspire healing, recovery, and empowerment for women and girls, to rekindle the “light” I experienced when I came of age through the feminist movement. In our current troubled times, women still experience discrimination and abuse, not only in many third world countries, but in our own, albeit in subtler, perhaps sneakier ways, including rampant eating disorder among teenage girls and the continuing epidemic of domestic violence. We continue to be seduced to be “good little girls” at the cost of growing up and trusting in the power of our own earned freedom to create our own satisfying and responsible lives in a world that continues to objectify and pressure us to give ourselves away to no good end.

Merinda can be used

• in classrooms, especially to teach effective ways to not only cope but prevent bullying;
• in shelters for victims of domestic violence;
• in clinics for girls and women with eating disorders;
• in organizations like the Girl Scouts and others whose mission is to empower girls;
• in self-help groups and clinical settings for recovery of codependency . . .

The potential is endless for “coming of age” interventions for girls and women of all ages.

Is Merinda only for women and girls?

We live in a disempowered, abusive, dependent, externally-focused, and increasingly stress-ridden world. It has cost us a lot on all levels of being and function, most especially in sacrificing our authentic, empowered, free, and greater selves. Merinda, as a simple, childlike fable, can be easily used to offer a universal message of transformation. I hope men and boys will also find their way and personally relate through their own key life challenges to Merinda’s great maturational shift, as well as have a caring desire to help the significant women and girls in their lives.

What impact do you see this book having on the world? 

My ideal vision is that as individuals become empowered and free, so will the world they live in correspondingly transform. For example, we cry for peace in our world, which is perpetually shattered by war and violence. I believe we must discover authentically how to recover peace within ourselves and our own lives, as well as a core confidence in our sense of who and what we really are. Then we can viably offer and be peaceful to those we care about and the world.

Then we can effect what we call “the greater good” in any and all possible ways of response beyond fear, mistrust, lack of confidence and dependency – all of which dictate agendas that force manipulation, denial, and abuse. Merinda is a story about self-healing and recovery. I see a direct extension of self-healing, recovery, and extended resultant empowerment across all relationships and environments for women and girls as revolutionizing the world, one person at a time, truly like the “hundred monkey” theory.

We can only give who and what we are. Merinda is not only a fable about regaining personal freedom and insight through discovering that all the “magic” (power to transform within and without) exists within us; but how to equalize and unconditionally accept ourselves and each other. Individuals make up the world and women literally seed subsequent generations. That is global and perpetuating change!

What is next on your own horizon as you bring this new version to the world?

I see the book as a key “handle” to self-healing, recovery, empowerment, and transformation. It is a simple metaphor that can be easily applied through talks and workshops to women and girls seeking real solutions to life challenges through learning to develop greater selves.

Bullying has finally become a key topic and recovery focus for our times. Merinda is fundamentally a story about understanding that bullying only continues to occur when we believe ourselves to be victims, which directly creates an inner “giveaway” of ourselves along with a covered-up “inner bully.” Like Merinda, we “please to survive.” Dysfunction creates and perpetuates unending power struggles in relationships endlessly ricocheting between dominance and submission. I am excited to tell Merinda’s story in all settings that commit to teambuilding, interdependence, new leadership skills, and healing partnerships. There is additional significant applicability for conflict resolution and self-directed initiatives.