Tag — Flock
New Spaces, Reduced Price
Hello Magpies! Big news under the big top! My online community, Flock: soulcare with Magpie Girl, now has 20 15 12 10 8 spaces for new members. AND it’s at reduced introductory price!
Flock is regularly priced at $45/month. With all the expert advice and friendly support, that’s a fair price and a good value. But in this economy it is proving to be a hardship.
So I’m offering you Flock at $20/month.
I’m not going to lie to you. I’m nervous about reducing the price. Will I continue to break even? Is this going to work? But I am THAT dedicated to getting the people who need us the most through the doors. So hold onto your hats kids, here we go!
Register now to get the reduced price through the end of the year.
In January the introductory offer will end and the original price will go into back into effect. As always, I am dedicated to helping you find a spirituality that fits. If Flock isn’t scratching where it itches, you can cancel at anytime. No Worries.
In order to make sure Flock doesn’t get flooded with too many new members all at once, we limit the number of people who can join each month. We are also capping the total number of Flock memberships at 150.
This month we have just 20 15 12 10 8 spaces open. Once these are full, we will close our doors for awhile to let people get to know each other.
Click here to subscribe and reserve your space.
If you like what you’ve read here at Magpie Girl, you’ll love the creative, supportive community in Flock. Check out our current course offerings and meet our staff of expert soulcare providers. (Flock has it’s very own Life Coach, Sexologist, Spiritual Director, Therapist, Dream Counselor, Personal Chef, and Wealth Coach!)
You’ve be flying around for a long time now. It’s time you come in for a landing. Flock is ready to welcome you home. See you there!
-Rachelle
Flock: a special offer for our ideal match.
Update 5/18/2010: The discount offer below is now full. Click here for more information.
I’m working through an excellent free series right now from Sonia Simone about creating Remarkable Communication products. One of the first assignments was to write about your ideal client, and then to write only for her. The premise is that writing for a highly focused audience will focus your energy and create solid content that really scratches where it itches.
This is my description of my ideal client for Flock. Maybe you recognizer her? If so, we have a special treat waiting for you below. (Hello, you!)
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My ideal client for Flock is interested in standing in her own power to create her own spiritual path. She probably has some sort of religious background, but has already stepped away somewhat from the Institution. If she still attends it is on her own terms. She probably has secret beliefs she does not share with her religious community; or she stands out as an outspoken outlier.
She is not afraid of a little bit of “woo woo,” but probably does not think Burning Man is the end-all-be-all of spiritual experience.
She communicates well and on-topic and writes with emotion. She can self-edit her writing in order to make it accessible to others in the Flock.
She looks for places to “connect the dots” between ideas and topics. She likes to “dance in the overlap.” She is more concerned about finding places of commonality then shinning a spotlight on places of disagreement.
She has committed to make time to practice her spirituality and is willing to give stuff up (time, institutions, status) in order to create a spirituality that fits.
She does not give up at the first thing that doesn’t work, and can see failure as progress.
She is willing to invest in the process. She understands why paying for services is valuable and honorable.
She is willing to share her ideas and talents with others in ways that are healthy and not overly taxing for her. She looks for opportunities to collaborate. She offers support to others and to the community in small but meaningful ways.
While she is not interested in an all-consuming, time-intensive community, she is willing to notice and support her peers. When asked a question she tries to answer. She is free with compliments to those around her and eager to ask for input.
She’s okay with a diversity of beliefs and practices and likes learning from other’s traditions and perspectives. She is curious.
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Update 5/18/2010: The discount offer below is now full. Click here for more information.
Did you hear a little (or a lot) of yourself in that description? We have a few $5 introductory offers available. Click here for more info. Flock is a private membership site dedicated to “finding a spirituality that fits.” Like a spa for the soul, Flock offers conversations, learning opportunities, and ways to practice your unique brand of spirituality.We can’t wait to welcome you home!
Flock Sampler: SoulFood with J.Renee
Did you know Flock has a personal chef? JRenee comes to us the first Saturday of the month with a delicious, health-filled, gluten-free recipe. She serves it up with a lovely table blessing, suitable to most spiritual persuasions. It’s food for the soul. Here’s an example…eat up!
Late Winter Warmth in Shades of Gold and Green.
originally posted in the Flock 03/06/10
By J. Renee
I don’t know about you guys, but the winter, as mild as we have had in Seattle, has really worn on my strength. Classes and commitments have been overwhelming me. I’ve been wondering where to turn for the peace I’ve needed. The obvious place for me is always the kitchen. It’s a place where I can create something and then enjoy it and hopefully watch others enjoy it as well.
This week a group of us got together to discuss the neighborhood pea patch and what we should plant in our part of the garden. What better way to discuss planting produce than by eating produce? So I settled on one of my earthiest dishes. It’s full of life and warmth and color and usually involves silence during the first few bites (that’s always my favorite part…).
It counteracts all the stress I’ve been feeling by restoring my body and mind. In fact, I’m pretty sure this Irish meal blessing describes it perfectly.
Irish Grace
May this food restore our strength,
giving new energy to tired limbs,
new thoughts to weary minds.
May this drink restore our souls,
giving new vision to dry spirits,
new warmth to cold hearts.
And once refreshed,
may we give new pleasure to You,
who gives to us all.
Broccoli Beet De-lish.2 tbls Olive Oil
1 Shallot, sliced
2 cloves garlic, minced
4 strips of bacon, crumbled (optional)
1 large golden beet, cut in ¼ inch slices
1 Large head of broccoli, chopped including the stem
a handful of pine nuts
salt and pepper
Peel and slice beet, boil until soft. Drain and set aside.
Bake bacon in the oven on 375 until crispy, let cool and crumble.
In a frying pan, heat oil on med heat. Add shallots and garlic and sauté for about three minutes.
Add broccoli and sauté until bright green, about 4-5 minutes. Add salt and pepper.
Add beets bacon and pine nuts and sauté for another 3-5 minutes.
Remove from heat and enjoy.
Might we suggest that you celebrate your bountiful table today by making a donation to our sisters? BEST is a good place to start — they help women in Tanzania with seed capital and business support. See a beautiful image of the results here, as Praise stands in her rice paddy, which is now providing for her family. Or click here to donate directly.
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Flock: Soulcare with Magpie Girl is an online soulspa full of support, guidance, inspiration and community. This private membership site creates a safe haven dedicated to “finding a spirituality that fits.” Please stop by to learn more about our current offerings, meet our professional soulcare providers, or to join us in the Flock.
Flock Sampler: Ask an Expert, Dream Counselor
What kind of questions do the Flock experts answer? When you have a Life Coach, a Sexologist, a Mental Health Counselor, a Dream Counselor, and a Money Healer on staff, the answer is almost anything. Here’s an example…
Originally posted in the Flock, February 3 2010.
Hello, Flock! Welcome to our first dream session with Karen Mori Bonner, MS, LPC. This month, a Flock Dreamer sends this dream:
It’s a recurring dream I’ve had for as long as I can remember and it always involves being in a big, dark, warm and comforting house full of rich wood and soft lamplight, lots of windy corridors and nooks and crannies for curling up and reading. I know it’s my house and I always marvel as how I can afford such a gorgeous, large home. But…at some point there’s a party happening downstairs and I go along and try to join in. It’s a work-related party with people I hate and I can’t figure out whether I’ve invited them or they’ve just turned up. I think from the conversation (which I can never remember) that they’re all much more intelligent than I am. I get really annoyed that they’re in my house and I can’t work out why. At some point then the house disappears and we’re in some kind of open-air venue that feels alien to me. Then I wake up!
Karen Replies:
Thank you, Dreamer! First, a reminder: I can’t (won’t) interpret the dream; I will make suggestions and comment on themes and larger symbolism found in the dream. It’s the responsibility of our Dear Dreamer to try these on and discard anything that doesn’t fit and produce that “a-HA!” moment.
Recurring dreams – Dreams come as pictures or little plays from our unconscious to tell us something about ourselves we do not already know. Think of a recurring dream as a blinking neon sign – you haven’t got the message yet.
Big dark warm comforting house – Often (not always) houses represent the psyche itself – where we live in our heads. This is especially true about “dream” houses that we don’t know from waking life like this one. A common theme is to discover a downstairs or an upstairs or more rooms than we thought – our psyche is bigger than we think and we’re only conscious of a limited area.
Party/downstairs – There is always a party going on in the unconscious! References to downstairs, underground, under water can be about deeper, not yet conscious places in our psyche. The party may refer to the dynamic elements in our psyche – our complexes. Don’t get excited about complexes. They are not necessarily positive or negative – they are just constellations of psychological energies that make up who we are based on our experiences and the emotions that accompanied them. (Say that three times fast!)
Work-related – the dream may be a comment on your work life, Dreamer – but not necessarily. However, that’s what I’d consider first if it were my dream.
People I hate – Ahhhh…. Here it is. Remember! Every thing and every one in our dreams are parts of us. Oh, NO! These “people I hate” are our Shadow. Parts of ourselves we’ve disowned, disavowed, devalued. Yet Psyche is always moving to reunite us with our split off selves so we can become conscious of them. Why? So we don’t project that shadowy stuff onto other people! The work for this Dreamer is to examine carefully the “people I hate” and come to see what part of that is her. We are selectively blind about ourselves but greater consciousness is called for in the world and it starts with us. Yikes! No wonder Dreamer (dream ego) is annoyed! Such an examination and call to consciousness may call for – brace yourselves! Change!
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Flock: Soulcare with Magpie Girl is an online soulspa full of support, guidance, inspiration and community. This private membership site creates a safe haven dedicated to “finding a spirituality that fits.” Please stop by to learn more about our current offerings, meet our professional soulcare providers, or to join us in the Flock.
How I Started an Online Soulcare Community: Flock
A few months back I was honored to give an interview at Kristin Tennant’s excellent blog, Halfway to Normal. (I LOVE being interviewed!) Kristin asked such good questions, I thought I’d run it again here for folks who want to know more about the process behind Flock: Soulcare with Magpie Girl. I hope you enjoy it. And do stop by Halfway to Normal, where Kristin is ”Daily defying what it means to be a divorced-Christian-liberal-remarried-Midwestern-mommy-writer.”
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How did you come up with the idea for Flock?
I’ve been a soulcare provider and community builder for many, many years. Two years ago we moved to Copenhagen, Denmark, and a consistent community base has been hard to come by. I miss having a physical soultribe to turn to, and in its absence I am grateful for the online tribe that has formed around me while I lived abroad. I am fan of Ecourses, but wanted something that was more ongoing, something where we could all sink a little deeper into relationship with others. So I decided to try forming an online soultribe.
Flock has several components. Did they all come to you at once, or did the idea begin as a specific component and then grew from there?
Everything I offer in the Flock has emerged organically from topics and practices that have been in embryo at Magpie Girl. I wanted to start with the High Holy Days, to provide an anchoring rhythm to our seasons. The Ask an Expert feature emerged out of the guest interviews I’d been organizing at Magpie Girl. The rites and rituals in Priestessy Things are part of the work I’ve done ever since my days as the Urban Abbess. And the Read-a-Longs…well, who amongst us doesn’t have a stack of books they’d like to talk about with their friends? You know that saying, “Nothing is ever wasted”? I’m finally seeing the truth of that as my seemingly random blogging matures into what is now being offered at Flock. Someone recently said to me, “At Magpie Girl, you feed us great stuff, but the Flock is where the real meat and potatoes happen.”
You have been blogging and interacting with readers for a long time. Are you able to pick up on certain questions and needs that lots of people seem to have? How did those themes translate to the creation of Flock? [Read more →]
Grand Opening: Flock, Soulcare with Magpie Girl
After much hinting and scheming, dreaming and hard work….I’m happy to announce that Flock with Magpie Girl is now open for registration!
Flock is an on-line soulcare spa dedicated to ”finding a spirituality that fits.” On our private pages, Flock members can participate in soulcare courses, make monthly soulcraft projects, join book clubs, and ask advice from a team of professional soulcare specialists.
Unlike short-term Ecourses, the Flock is open all year long, allowing you to form ongoing connections with your virtual soultribe. Participate a little, or come by every day — it’s totally up to you.
Here’s what soulsister Jen Lemen of Mondo Beyondo & Picture Hope has to say about the Flock:
“Few people know how to tend the soul like Rachelle Mee Chapman. A curator of everything exquisite and salvageable from the spiritual traditions, Rachelle understands how to craft a nest where comfort gives way to calling, where self-care reveals with compassion your finest, truest self. I am honored to say I know first hand what it means to be in Rachelle’s circle of concern and care, and I can only imagine what good things await those who will join the amazing community of learners ready to fly in the Flock.”
This is a novel approach to soulcare, so please feel free to stop by. Our doors officially open January 1st, but our lobby is open now for visitors! (I’m especially excited about our great collection of soulcare providers.)
In effort to balance fair-pay with accessibility, all this soul-spa goodness is offered to you for $45 a month — or about the cost of just one yoga classes a week. (Ready to jump in? Join here.)
I know you’ve been searching for your place for a long time. Now you can flutter in for a landing. You’ve finally found your Flock.
Welcome Home,
Rachelle Mee-Chapman
Soulcare Specialist, Flock
How to Hatch a Flock
The publishing and writing schedule for Magpie Girl and Flock…as scribbled out during the kid’s gospel choir rehearsal last night. (Work where you can.)
I am on pins and needles waiting for my designer to upload the finalized version of our new endeavor – Flock with Magpie Girl. Flock is “a nesting place for restless souls” with lots of courses for spiritual nurture, all offered at one monthly price. Think of it as a spa for your soul! The bonus to this method is that it creates an on-going place for a soultribe to gather, and it allows for the kind of teaching-learning process I so adore. We can really fill up the giant pool of wisdom with the Flock!
I like knowing how artists and other creative people work. If you are intrigued by that too, here’s a peek into the process of starting our Flock.
Initially Flock started out as an idea for two Ecourses. But as I worked through 31 Days to A Better Blog and started on the elevator pitches for my Ecourses, I realized what I really wanted was an ongoing on-line soultribe. I’d already done some vocational work with my amazing life coach, Jena Strong, and knew that community building was a skill I’d been practicing for a long time. The short-term nature of Ecourses wouldn’t scratch my community building itch. Since reading Chris Guillebeau’s Art + Money, I had been thinking about opening a membership site. But I had allowed the outside voices of Conventional Wisdom and Fear to negate my intuitive pull towards that option. As I embraced the membership site as a viable choice, things started moving into place.
Jennifer McGuiggan helped me move through the wheel of work, which made me realize I needed a partner to get through the bottom half of the wheel – the execution half. So I scraped my money together and hired Neil Sittler of Stickflower Design to help me get a website ready. This was important because my work with Jena had already shown me that “beauty” was high on my list of guiding values, and that if I didn’t have a esthetically pleasing site, I wouldn’t be able to tap into the right energy to sustain a long-term project such as an online soulcare community.
While Neil worked on the site, soulsisters Lisa Alexander and Jamie Ridler coached me on values-based pricing, so that I would not consider my pattern of chronically under-charging. I was still struggling with setting a price that truly reflected the value of my work, when Jen Lemen suggested I do muscle testing to connect with my inner wisdom on the matter. After a truly amazing round of muscle testing with my daughter Eden, I finally came to a place of confidence with my pricing choices.
I also decided to face my fear of asking for help so I asked a few soulcare providers I know and adore to come on board as expert advisers for Flock. And while I cannot announce who quite yet, I’m happy to say that my dream team of (therapist, life coach, and dream analyst and more) is starting to come together for our “Ask the Experts” column.
Finally, yesterday I sat down and wrote out a schedule of what I’m going to be posting each day both at Magpie Girl and at Flock, and what day I’d have to write it in order to get it posted professionally, on time, and well-edited. Because my health is a bit of a crap shoot, I included a day to write “stockpiled” posts so I have something to keep the goodness flowing when chronic pain sets me back for awhile.
Now I’m just waiting for the last odds and ends to get done on the website, and before Christmas we will have sign ups ready for our New Year’s launch! (Join my mailing list for a grand opening discount.)
As I write this post I realize once again how blessed I am to have this (almost entirely virtual) community around me. Those mentioned here, and others as well, helped me get past my sticking points and uncover the “ah ha” moments I needed to get through this process. I’m also struck by how Jen Lemen’s advice to “write to the tribe you’re starting to form”; and my mentor Ed Cook’s adage “you always preach the sermons you need to hear,” have both been proven true. All of the links embeded in this story were written by myself, or by Magpie Girl guests, because I needed to hear them, and so did my tribe. Now I can see them as the work The Muse and The Universe were doing to get us where we need to be — that is, together.
So thanks you so much, dear Magpie Girl reader, for being a part of this process. Your comments and visits have encouraged me more than I can say. I cannot wait until we are all gathered together in our Flock! Thanks for being here.
Much Warmth,
Rachelle
What’s Afoot at Magpie Girl?
Eden and Cate’s amulet for their bedroom: rock salt, favorite polished stones, and a card from Jen Lemen.
It’s been a good couple of days over here in Magpie Girl world.
Monday Cate and I went through all our rooms cleansing and blessing the space we live in. Suzie Ridler gave us some ideas, and we picked the ones we liked best: holy water, a blessing of light involving a candle, and making little amulet bags to hold our intentions for each of the rooms in our home. It was really meaningful to me and I definitely felt the energy shift within myself and within our house, bringing in fresh hope and inspiration.
The night of the cleanse I woke up with a start, and free-wrote an entire plan for how I want my ecourses to work. Oh friends, I am so excited about this! I really think it’s coming together. Instead of short-term ecourses, my new offerings from Magpie Girl will be offered at a sister-site, Flock: a soul spa, with magpie Girl
(What do you think? Something like that? Other ideas?)
Flockwill be a membership site, with one price covering the cost of a number of soulcare options. Sort of like a spa health club with one membership fee, but lots of services and classes. Both of the soultribes I’ve been working on– the High Holy Days series and the Soulcraft Circle — will be there, along with a collection of Priestessy Things to do alone or in a group, and once we get rolling I hope to add something for the DO LESS Revolutionaries, and a book club. Oh, the possibilities are so inspiring!
The creator of the SoulFood layout, Neil Sittler of Stickflower Design, is working on the Flock site now and it will be ready in December for sign-ups and a January start. I’m wildly curious to see how Flock’s on-going groups will help create lasting Soultribes for spiritual misfits like us! Can you feel it? It’s got good mojo.
Now don’t worry. There will still be great stuff, FOR FREE, here at Magpie Girl. I plan to continue Monday’s guest post series with fascinating artists and coaches.( In fact, I’m booked through January!) *8Things will defintely be featured at both sites. And all the choice little tidbits and “ah ha” moments that don’t fit into the on-going offerings at Flock will still be incubating at Magpie Girl. I’m also cooking up a way to offer a few reduced-price memberships, and of course, I’m always open to trades and swaps and all kinds of creativity.
Keep in mind that I offer discounts and special treats to people on my mailing list. So with the SoulRetreats book this close to being done, and Flock on it’s way, you really should hop on the mailing list so you don’t miss a thing.
Alright lovelies, give me all your feedback and ideas! I’m off to work on a delightful joint project with Rowena Murillo for awhile and then it’s time to draft an essay for Jennifer McGuiggan’s holiday collection. Oooh…I love do so love it when like-minded souls come together!
Much Warmth!
Rachelle
