Julie Hoyle’s affirmative self-help trilogy, the Honoring Your Sacred Self series, guides readers on a progression of spiritual development. The books don’t need to be read in order, you can dip into them when the need for inspiration strikes. Hoyle’s work draws on ancient yogic texts and personal experiences to introduce and develop concepts like lucid dreaming, astral projection, and shamanic practice into an everyday spiritual framework.
A Journey of Transformation
As for many, Hoyle’s personal chronicle begins with inspiration. In this case she watched the physical feats of senior yogis on a National Geographic documentary. The show was like a gateway to an interest in the profound: the ‘call of [the] soul’. The first book in the series details a dismantling and rebuilding of one woman’s identity, taking in everything from a low-key encounter with a homely clairvoyant to more expansive meetings, with a range of teachers and yogis.
Living an Awakened Life
Exhorting her readers to dig deeper into the work of living a spiritual life, Hoyle offers ‘..an invitation to view your life’s difficulties from a higher perspective so that you can embrace what these lessons are here to teach you.’
This book is structured as a series of essays, covering a range of disciplines. Some of the topics include: finding ways to express and articulate physical pain to aid healing and learning to sit with, rather than suppress or numb out, more difficult emotions.
Wake Up & Say Yes!
An alternate title here might be ‘Lucid Dreaming for the Novice’ or perhaps the nervous – Hoyle’s workbook brings a bracing, cheerful practicality to the genre that might go some way to placating the skeptical and those anxious in seeking enlightenment. Hoyle also takes time to explore and acknowledge the roots of her favored practices, the history and veneration of dream states in a variety of indigenous cultures. As in the preceding books, she illustrates her lessons with anecdotes drawn from her own life and writes lyrically of empathetic and imaginative leaps, the hunger for experience.