If you enjoyed “Eat, Pray, Love-You will love this travel memoir!”Millions of people around the world suffer from fibromyalgia; the majority of them are women. As yet, there is no cure.In this memoir, Brigid P. Gallagher shares her experiences on:
The busy life she followed before succumbing to this debilitating disease
Stopping and soul searching for answers to her vast array of symptoms
… soul searching for answers to her vast array of symptoms
Drawing on her knowledge and experience as a Natural Medicines therapist, she seeks out therapies to aid her healing and integrates a variety of self help techniques and lifestyle changes. She also unearths a love of solo travel including Egypt, India, Rome, Lourdes, Carcassonne and Bali…
Brigid learns many insights about LIFE on her journey, the most valuable being:
“First learn to love thyself.”
In 2006, she began a new career in Organic Horticulture eventually teaching part time in schools. Although she has now retired from teaching, she continues to pursue her lifelong passion for gardening and watching the daisies.
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Brigid Gallagher’s Watching the Daisies (2017) is the soul-baring experience as an active, hard-charging woman’s life is turned upside down by a disease she doesn’t know how she contracted, has no cure, and only gets worse the longer you live. Gallagher starts her story with her completely normal childhood in Scotland as the daughter of loving parents who raise their family to be moral, ethical, and self-responsible. We see Gallagher’s everyday life in school, with her family, and in daily activities, as she grows into a productive and successful adult, made more poignant by knowing what was coming in her future. As luck would have it, maybe even before the first hint that her body carried this nasty disease, she develops a passion for alternative methods of healing. I was fascinated to read the depth of knowledge required for her to be considered capable of serving in this new career. In the midst of her success in this important field, a panoply of misdiagnosed physical ailments prevent her from working (not uncommon for this horrid disease). Gallagher’s disease is finally diagnosed correctly but that’s the only good news. Fibromyalgia is a life-long disease where treatment can improve quality of life but never cure it.
In all of this, Gallagher shares her insights, her experiences, steps she took to try to resolve her physical problems, ranging from drugs and medicine to diet and exercise. She ends the book with her top tips on self-healing illnesses.
This book is highly recommended for anyone with any chronic disease as a real-life example of how to live through it with grace and a positive attitude.
Watching the Daisies by Brigid P. Gallagher is an autobiography that recounts various experiences of dealing with grief, depression and healing through spirituality,
natural medicine and self help techniques like electro-crystal healing and color therapy. She even obtained a diploma in Electro-crystal Healing and color therapy that she acquired at the International Association of Color Therapists. I am amazed at how much a person could learn in one life time despite the misfortunes that she had faced and how much could she absorb in the name of faith in crystals, feathers, feng shui and herbs! The traditional healing methods were put together by her to deal with her mental and physical pain.
Brigid’s story exemplifies how life flows and passes by if we accept its trails and change our direction accordingly. On the way she became stronger and discovered her true self. Her love for music, travel and gardening kept her spirits high. Written in a detached style, without any emotional touches despite the distress that she keeps to herself, she doesn’t pause to dwell on her misery. She conveys many profound lessons in a subtle way – be positive and face life boldly.
I began following a blog entitled Watching the Daisies earlier this year shared by Brigid P. Gallagher and discovered she’d also written a book, Watching the Daisies: Life Lessons on the Importance of Slow a few years ago. I purchased Ms. Gallagher’s holistic memoir last month and dropped it into my reading queue this week. It came at a great time and helped provide a few clear reminders we should all remember when things get too complex or tough.
Life can be difficult, especially when we encounter illness, pain, and death. It can also be wonderful when we meet new friends, fall in love, or share our days with family. Ms. Gallagher covers it all in this ~50 year memoir of many key events that occurred in her life. One of the biggest impacts I felt from reading her personal insights and history is an acute awareness of how lucky many of us are to have little to no physical pain or be raised by two loving parents who hadn’t died young. The author spent lots of time in hospitals, surgeries and doctors trying to diagnose symptoms that ultimately took a rather long time to discover. Along the path, Gallagher shares her home remedies for dealing with the pain, both mental and physical, as her career develops and she travels throughout the world studying and learning about different medicines, approaches and healing powers. I enjoyed reading about the path she took and felt sadness and happiness with each of her own ups and downs.
From losing family members she loved, to moving back and forth from Ireland and Scotland, to adopting and saying goodbye to many pets, Gallagher shares all the occasions in life that help craft who we are as people. We can face our obstacles with our head held high or sneak away letting no one help us. Gallagher teaches us about medicinal, herbal and other holistic healing options, teases us with trips we want to take in the future, and offers ideas to explore in our own lives on how to be happier and healthier. I next saw the bravery in this woman for not only living through many of the ordeals she’s experienced but in sharing them with readers like me who may have little or no knowledge about the difficulties of a disease or the unknown forces impacting our bodies.
The book is an easy-read with memoir moments, teaching opportunities, and whimsical thoughts. Some hit home for me, others were just a laugh or a nod of my head in acknowledgement of what the author’s been through. In the end, it’s the kind of book where you have a few hours to breathe the same air as someone else, learning how she would deal with all the curves and fun being thrown at her. Stepping out of my own shows is always a good thing as it helps provide perspective and alternative opinions and ideas. Kudos to Gallagher for sharing such a wonderful life journey with us… I can only hope she’ll share the second half of her life sometime in the future as it sounds like she’s got a lot more planned as accomplishments.
“Watching the Daisies,” is an autobiographical, holistic memoir dedicated to the art of mindfulness and to the artistry of learning how to slow down the pace of one’s life. It is also the awakening of a woman as she blossoms and finds her true calling in life.
An intuitive spiritualist, the author shares her journey from childhood through adulthood, meeting life’s obstacles head-on. Through trial and error and countless hardships, she learns how to cope with the debilitating illnesses, fibromyalgia, and rheumatoid arthritis.
I found the author’s spiritual journey to be enlightening, and I grew excited at how she bent conventional religious borders to seek out new ways to heal her mind and body. Not only does she search for new approaches to healing, she becomes a practicing professional, teaching and sharing her gifts with others.
I was enthralled when Brigid revealed the gift of a sixth sense, where she can detect health or illness by the individual’s aura colors.
In addition, Brigid’s affinity for using the healing power of crystals, aromatherapy, reflexology, herbs, gardening, and feng shui lead the reader on a magnificent trip of discovery with the author as your personal guide. Brigid’s travels take her around the globe which she shares with a refreshing candidness.
This is a positive, uplifting book. After reading, anyone suffering from debilitating illnesses will find the courage to try alternative methods of healing as the author shares enough details for others to seek treatment.
Watching the Daisies is a very personal account of how the author, Brigid Gallagher, brings herself, her work and all the rest of her busy life under control to the point where she is able to more fully appreciate the day and the hour – the ‘now’ of her existence.
Her elegant, straight-forward prose carries the reader through a mostly happy existence from her early life in rural Scotland to her varied professional work in Edinburgh and eventually to her more restful and more centred life in the Ireland that her mother and father left seeking opportunities in Scotland.
Readers who are unfamiliar, as I was, with the less traditional (at least for the British Isles and Ireland) approaches to spiritual and physical well-being will find much to gain from Watching the Daisies. Brigid not only explores many of them but becomes a practising professional with a flair for leadership, innovation and success.
Although plagued by a chronic and sometimes debilitating illness, this is a happy book written by a happy person who at all times is able to take as much or more control of her life than many of us in order to come to a most satisfactory peace with herself.
As inspiring as the story Brigid Gallagher has to tell are the life lessons that she draws from each chapter of her life. Any reader will benefit greatly from reading this busy yet peaceful, analytic yet satisfyingly holistic memoir.
Absorbing Read
I finished this absorbing read in two sessions.
Brigid Gallagher’s memoir is a well-written book, full of beautiful descriptions, and tells of a life full of trials and tribulations. These include the childhood tragedy of losing her mum and the untimely deaths of her dad along with other family members in later life. She also experiences serious health struggles and learns how important it is to slow down.
The author’s travels in Egypt, India, Rome, Lourdes and Bali were of special interest. I also enjoyed her descriptions of the many homes she lived in and the way they represented different phases of her life. In addition, I felt a close affinity through her love of cats and the way they played an integral part in her life.
There were many other things I learned that I knew little about. The book shed a new light on areas such as auras, spiritual healing, crystal therapy, colour therapy, reflexology and aromatherapy. These played an important part in the author’s life development and working career.
Born in the same year as me, I found it interesting to read how her life progressed compared with mine. There are lessons on life and coping mechanisms she has learned to use I now want to apply to my life. I was left with a sense of positivity when I finished reading her story.
Thank you for sharing your life with us Brigid Gallagher. Many of us will learn that key lesson of the ‘Importance of Slow’.