Hi everyone, this is Colleen’s husband Jeff writing a special feature and serving as a co-host for an upcoming book club we are offering through BellaOnline.
If you have watched an episode of Oprah in the past month, you may have heard her advertise her latest book club pick: A New Earth, Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose by Eckhart Tolle. Not only is this a book that she is highly recommending, but she has also taken it a step further. Along with Eckhart Tolle, Oprah is hosting a 10 week live online book club beginning Monday, March 3, 2008 at 9:00 pm EST. As of February 25, there were over 360,000 people signed up for the class. You can find out more and register for the class by going to www.oprah.com.
In addition to committing to 10 weeks at a specified time, Oprah has also encouraged participants to form local communities/book clubs to support the learnings of the live event.
We approached others in our community if they were interested, however, we are in a rural area and affordable high speed internet is available to a very few people. The only reason we are able to get it is because we are located high enough on a hill to have line of sight to a tower in a different city!
In researching options further to see if we could help our colleagues, friends, and neighbours participate, we learned that although the book club that Oprah is hosting is a fantastic opportunity to become part of a massive movement toward change, anyone who does not have access to high speed internet is not able to participate due to the live broadcast of the live event.
Therefore, given the technical requirements and the hundreds of people who have been posting to Oprah’s forum asking for a dial up alternative, we decided to create our own virtual book club targeting many others, like us, who have limited internet access, aren’t able to attend the Monday evening event for all 10 weeks, or are only able to connect using dial up.
Using the discussion boards here on Bella we will create our own book club on A New Earth. It will be based on the discussions that Oprah leads through her class, and will be accessible each week for the 10 weeks on Sunday evenings beginning on March 9th.
We won’t do this live because, as you can imagine, it would be painful on dial up. We know the forums and Bella interface will be fine for our purposes, as we had been on dial up for two years.
What we will offer every week is:
- a summary of the Monday night courses offered by Oprah and Eckhart posted every week following the show.
- a series for questions related to the chapter for each week. Some questions will be excerpted from Oprah’s workbook and others will be designed by all of us as a community as we go.
- a place where we can all store our favourite quotes from the book.
- a general discussion area for our community where you can post any of your comments or questions from that week’s book club readings.
If you happen to be on high speed and want to join us anyway, please do! We are trying to create a group without any limits or boundaries.
On a side note, although the technology Oprah is using requires high speed, she is doing something great for all of us. For those of you who may have some frustration around not being able to get on Oprah's site, consider this: if not for her doing what she can, Colleen and I wouldn’t be able to connect with so many others out there and we never would have met you in the first place!
For those of you who would like to learn more about why we are doing this and get a better sense of the book and how this all relates to living naturally, please read below. Otherwise, please email us to sign up and we’ll get you started on your first ‘assignment’.
Why are we doing this and how does it relate to Natural Living?
As you may know, normally the articles that are written in the Natural Living site give information on different things that you can do to live more naturally.
After watching Oprah a few weeks ago, Colleen and I decided to check out the book, and pick up a copy for each of us. Because one of the ‘jobs’ that I do is life coaching, I find this book to be extremely powerful, appropriate for my journey in life, and timely for what I believe the earth needs at this time.
Through our book club on Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth, Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose, we are going to look at it a bit differently, and focus on natural living by examining who you are. I believe that this is the essence of Natural Living, to break free of what the ego and society say we ‘should’ do or be, and move into a space of choice. I feel that A New Earth is a profoundly spiritual manifesto for a better way of life – and for building a better world and a perfect opportunity for all of us to live more naturally as ourselves.
