Blog Book Tour | “My Good Friend the Rattlesnake” {stories of loss, truth, & transformation} by Don Jose Ruiz (with Tami Hudman)

Posted Tuesday, 20 January, 2015 by jorielov , , , 0 Comments

Ruminations & Impressions Book Review Banner created by Jorie in Canva. Photo Credit: Unsplash Public Domain Photographer Sergey Zolkin.

Acquired Book By: I am a regular tour hostess for blog tours via Cedar Fort whereupon I am thankful to have such a diverse amount of novels and non-fiction titles to choose amongst to host. I received a complimentary copy of “My Good Friend the Rattlesnake” direct from the publisher Plain Sight Publishing (imprint of Cedar Fort, Inc) in exchange for an honest review. I did not receive compensation for my opinions or thoughts shared herein.

Inspired to Read:

In the mid to late 1990s and a page or two afield into the early 2000s, I was a reader who loved joining book clubs! Yet, these weren’t the book clubs where you would sit around and have thoughtfully enriched bookish discussions about what you were currently reading! No, these were the mail-order book clubs where you could purchase hardback novels and/or non-fiction titles at a discount. I must’ve joined nearly every club that was available as I am such an eclectic reader my tastes are quite diversified as you can gather a bit of the scope of this statement by visiting my Story Vault!

One of the clubs I had joined back then was “One Spirit” where you could gather books on Spirituality & Metaphysics as well as healthy eating, self-help towards self-fulfillment of a better balanced life, as well as other curious books such as the long lost art of ‘old world arts & crafts’ and a variety of other specialty niche areas of literature. They had a lovely selection of World Religions and Philosophical non-fiction releases as well, which truly interested me.

Around the time I was participating in the book clubs, I came across Don Jose Ruiz’s father, Don Miguel Ruiz and the book The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom of which I am quite certain I received through my club membership of “One Spirit”! I had it in mind to follow-up with new releases as much as keep an eye on what would come next out of his career, however, as life has a funny way of ebbing you away from things that you care about, I somehow managed to lose track of the Ruiz family! When I came across this particular blog tour, it felt as though I received a second chance to re-connect with them and pick up from whence I had left off!

 Don Miguel Ruiz’s Favorite of The Four Agreements | Super Soul Sunday |

Oprah Winfrey Network via OWN TV

As I have mentioned several times throughout my blog on different posts, I have a strong connection to Mexico (as I spent a considerable amount of time exploring ancient ruins) as much as I do to Native American culture, traditions, and spirituality. I had previously disclosed that I appreciated the friendship a Cherokee Indian had given to me as a young girl whilst browsing his art gallery and book shoppe. His stories are not as clearly remembered now as they were then, but his kindness to share his spirit and his culture with me has endured the most. There are cross-similarities between the cultural traditions and spiritualities I found in Mexico to the Native Americans in the United States, which keep me quite wicked happy to continue to read and expand my knowledge of both!

Blog Book Tour | “My Good Friend the Rattlesnake” {stories of loss, truth, & transformation} by Don Jose Ruiz (with Tami Hudman)My Good Friend the Rattlesnake (Stories of Loss, Truth, and Transformation)
by Don Jose Ruiz
Source: Direct from Publisher

Every Life is a New Journey

Navigate your personal path with spiritual advisor and bestselling author don Jose Ruiz. This collection of short stories teaches how to find your way and discover yourself in the process.

From Rattlesnakes and Rebellion to swamis and shamans, these stories will shape how you see the world around you and your own road through it.

Genres: Inspirational Fiction & Non-Fiction, Non-Fiction, Spirituality & Metaphysics



Places to find the book:

Borrow from a Public Library

Add to LibraryThing

Published by Plain Sight Publishing

on Halloween, 2014

Format: Paperback

Pages: 120

Published By: Plain Sight Publishing (@PlainSightBooks), an imprint of Cedar Fort Inc.
Converse via: #MyGoodFriendTheRattlesnake
Available Formats: Paperback, Ebook

About Don Jose Ruiz

In 2010, don Jose Ruiz released his first book, The Fifth Agreement, in partnership with his father, don Miguel Ruiz. Following its publication don Jose began travelling around the US, Mexico, and South America. Don Jose inspires people in many different ways, including book signings, lectures, seminars, and hosting journeys to Teotihuacan and other sacred sites around the world.

Among the highlights, don Jose has been asked to speak at conferences such as Conversations Among Masters, Celebrate Your Life, and the Conscious Life Expo. At these conferences, he has spoken alongside Dr. Wayne Dryer, Reverend Michael Beckwith, Caroline Myss, and Gregg Bradden. He has been interviewed by many notable media publications, including the Los Angeles Times , Univision, Fox News, and Eckhart Tolle Television. Don Jose has also inspired many corporate entities by using the five agreements to enhance positive rapport among employees and inspire creativity linked with common sense.

Don Jose's message has been heard all over the United States, Mexico, Europe, Israel, Japan, and South America. His journeys to sacred sites have also been translated into many different languages, including Spanish, French, and German.

Don Jose's message and The Fifth Agreement are growing rapidly and being shared around the world. His message changes lives and brings people closer to themselves than ever before. His passion is to help children stay away from gangs and drugs by developing healthy outlets, such as music, as well as other creative avenues. He will continue to share the wisdom of his family lineage through his own life experiences. Don Jose enjoys working with people of all faiths and cultures. He sees all men and women as equals and feels it's a blessing to be alive.

A beautiful prologue writ out of a father’s love for his son:

My Good Friend the Rattlesnake opens quite uniquely from Don Miguel Ruiz’s perspective on how his son entered his life and changed his world all at the same time! As I had recently blogged about my own close-knit family whilst embracing Andra Watkin’s journey through Not Without My Father I must confess, whilst reading this elocution of a father’s love for his son, echoes of my own Mum’s fond reflections on behalf of myself stirred inside my spirit!

I appreciated getting to become re-acquainted with the Ruiz family whilst seeing that my own family is not the only one who has survived a major accident without any repercussions except for what the mind remembers and what the soul has learnt outside of the moment it occurred.

My Review of My Good Friend the Rattlesnake:

I hadn’t realised that by blogging my experience in Teotihuacan ahead of reading the opening chapters of My Good Friend the Rattlesnake would in effect, be my own way of including an antidote that strikes a direct chord with one of the affirmations Don Jose Ruiz is sharing about his own life and experiences! About how to live through a moment where fear might strive to overtake your mind and how you can choose the outcome of that moment by the actions that stem out of your reactions to how what is happening is affecting you. 

A cardinal truth I have known about since I was quite young is that it is the will of what we can accomplish can create a daring ability to achieve what might at first be felt as being impossible to do at all. The will we have to create necessity out of moments in our lives where fortitude of spirit, heart, and mind act to enable us to achieve what we need to do rather than to succumb to impossibility of what cannot happen at all. A lot of life is taken on faith and perceived with a mindfulness to notice the little measures of where grace and faith intercede on our own paths.

Whilst Ruiz was relating to his father’s determined will to continue to live the life he felt was his path to lead despite having less capacity physically (he had a heart ailment which led to transplant) proves that our strength of will can defy in the logistics of medicine. Attitude in our spirit can help us conquer and convey the will power we store inside ourselves because if we approach what we first thought we could not achieve or give in to what others perceive as an impossibility for us to do; than we are allowing our attitude to bend towards the will that is not of our doing. We first have to have the confidence to believe our own living truths before we can find a way to forfeit the perceptions of others; if their perception acts to hinder what we have already resolved as being true. (this is partially referencing the Agreements both father and son previously published)

Rather than talking about mindfulness (from Buddhist traditions and beliefs), the art of living intentionally and projecting your will through your intentions is spoken about by Ruiz. It is one of the same, a different approach towards revealing an intuitive thoughfulness of seeing your life through different lens per each moment where clarity comes out of a keen awareness of self. It is a keen concept to explore, as it evokes a willingness to be forthright in what is that you want to draw into your internal world and externally convey your declared passion for what interests you the most. It is not merely about what to accomplish in the totality of where your life will lead you, but rather what your heart, mind, and spirit can fuse in connection to your will.

The title keys into the main lesson of how the life of a human can be related to the cycle of life of a rattlesnake, from young to old — it is how the person accepts the cycles of life through the discipline of growth through knowledge. The younger self might be a bit too impulsive to eclipse the state of accepting what cannot be controlled or fully understood; as humans we have the tendency to carry with us a barrage of baggage for things that either were too hurtful to release outright or too painful not to remember consistently. It is how we strive towards releasing ourselves from the threads of our past that are not necessary to walk into our future that I think we all work towards the most. There are pieces of ourselves and our paths that were lessons of growth or relationships that were not meant to carry forward, yet pieces of those years or memories become stuck to us like glue, rather than melting away from us like a snake shakes off their discarded skin. If we were to purge a bit of what holds us back from progressing forward in our lives, we’d feel cleansed and freer. The walk we take on Earth is co-dependent on our perception and awareness of what helps or hinders our overall growth.

What is transformative and empowering about My Good Friend the Rattlesnake, is taken out a niche of your everyday hours ruminatively inclined to re-examine where you are. To give yourself a moment of pause to recollect your thoughts on where you are and how you feel about where you are right now. To see if you need to adjust your mindset or to see if your frowning more than your smiling; are you giving yourself the joy of random discoveries of happiness or focusing on the darker shades of stress? It is a journalling of insight through one man’s walk and experience in owning his own story whilst inspiring others to seek out more joy out of accepting a heartful cup of love.

If we can give joy, love, and peace freely to ourselves, we have already given back more to the world by expressing kindness rather than any type of animosity. Light goes to Light.  

A notation on Teotihuacan:

I had quite a powerful experience on the Pyramid of the Sun if you consider the fact I climbed to the summit of this beautiful pyramid whilst a severe thunderstorm was on fast approach! I was caught up on the journey I was taking and a bit oblivious to my surroundings because the climb itself took all of my body and spirit to focus on the crumbly steps whilst gathering distance from the ground to the sky! I reached a point where I could look out across Teotihuacan — embracing the moment of where I was and comparatively seeing everything my eyes could muster within a short breath of realising if I took longer in my observations my present situation might turn a bit dicer!

My explorations throughout Mexico were taken with a tour group for high schoolers except to say, I was predominately on my own and living by my wits for most of the trip! The fact that I was the sole person who wanted to attempt the impossible – to climb the Pyramid of the Sun set me a part, as I had not prepared ahead of time, not physically and surely not mentally! To climb a pyramid in Mexico, you really ought to take a few things into consideration rather than the larkspur spark of courage you felt you had inside you, like I had!

My memories of my travels have never left me, even though I travelled there nearly 20 years ago! Portions of my trip have etched themselves into my heart and into the fabric of who I am now; even as a writer, as one poem in particular was crafted out of how my mind reflected back on where my feet took me at Uxmal in the Yucatan Peninsula. There are moments inside all of our lives where our heartprints and our soul collide to give us a stronger impression of ‘where we are’ and ‘what we’ve learnt’ through the experiences that create our legacy of where our life took us on our path.

All of my personal photography from that moment in time are packed away, and yet when I went on YouTube to find a video that could make up for this discrepancy I discovered something quite odd! All the videos of the Pyramid of the Sun show you can reach the very top of the pyramid? This was not the case when I was there in 1995! In fact, a portion of the pyramid looks a bit differently to me now than what I remember of it then! Including the fact they did not have a rail or a guiding path to where you were going back then; it was step after step but without anything to hold onto except the step ahead!

It still feels like only yesterday I was there — I conquered my fear of heights (not that I had them until I met the Pyramid of the Sun!) but more to the point, I conquered the moment of creating a memory out of doing the impossible. I even fell at one point close to the top of where you can climb (or at least back then, you could go until you could nearly touch the top!) as my legs gave out on me. I had to sit halfway down, whilst lightning magnified the danger and a chillness to the air felt comforting to the fact I had a swirl of darkened clouds over my head! It was a moment where I defied the logic of what to do during a lightning storm — a girl who grew up with severe lightning and natural disasters, quintessentially found herself ‘stranded’ on an ancient pyramid during a Summer storm! Part of what saved me was my ability to remain calm and to keep alive the curiosity of ‘living inside that vacuum of time’ to see what it would reveal to me later.

I still remember insisting a photograph was taken of me prior to leaving the ruins, where I made sure the Pyramid of the Sun was behind me and the smile of my face conveyed only a bit of the joy I had in realising I hadn’t given into fear but I had used fear to inspire courage.

Fun Stuff for Your Blog via pureimaginationblog.com

This book review is courtesy of:

Cedar Fort Publishing & Media

on behalf of their

My Good Friend the Rattlesnake blog tour via Cedar Fort Publishing & Media

Please take note of the Related Articles as they were hand selected due to being of cross-reference importance in relation to this book review. This applies to each post on my blog where you see Related Articles underneath the post. Be sure to take a moment to acknowledge the further readings which are offered.

{SOURCES: Book Cover of “My Good Friend the Rattlesnake”, the Cedar Fort badge, the Book Synopsis, and the Author Biography were provided by Cedar Fort, Inc. and used by permission. Ruminations & Impressions Book Review Banner created by Jorie in Canva. Photo Credit: Unsplash Public Domain Photographer Sergey Zolkin. Post dividers badge by Fun Stuff for Your Blog via Pure Imagination. The interview with Don Jose Ruiz via Super Soul Sunday via OWN Tv had either URL share links or coding which made it possible to embed this media portal to this post. Tweets were embedded due to codes provided by Twitter.}

Copyright © Jorie Loves A Story, 2015.

Related Posts & Articles:

+Author Guest Post+ The author of “City of Promises” examines what implored him to write about Mexico City in the 1940s! – (jorielovesastory.com) Where I spoke about my own explorations and connection to Mexico prior to sharing the author’s guest post

+Blog Book Tour+ The Duel for Consuelo by Claudia H. Long – (jorielovesastory.com) Where I continued to talk about my curiosity to understand more about Mexico & South America

_+ #atozchallenge _+ 26 Days | 26 Essays [epic journey] Today is Letter “E”. Hint: The World is a Melting Pot – (jorielovesastory.com) On my own personal beliefs about how interconnected the world is in modern times and how much we can learn by embracing those who are different from us.

Pyramid of the Sun (Teotihuacan) – (en.wikipedia.org)

About jorielov

I am self-educated through local libraries and alternative education opportunities. I am a writer by trade and I cured a ten-year writer’s block by the discovery of Nanowrimo in November 2008. The event changed my life by re-establishing my muse and solidifying my path. Five years later whilst exploring the bookish blogosphere I decided to become a book blogger. I am a champion of wordsmiths who evoke a visceral experience in narrative. I write comprehensive book showcases electing to get into the heart of my reading observations. I dance through genres seeking literary enlightenment and enchantment. Starting in Autumn 2013 I became a blog book tour hostess featuring books and authors. I joined The Classics Club in January 2014 to seek out appreciators of the timeless works of literature whose breadth of scope and voice resonate with us all.

"I write my heart out and own my writing after it has spilt out of the pen." - self quote (Jorie of Jorie Loves A Story)

read more >> | Visit my Story Vault of Book Reviews | Policies & Review Requests | Contact Jorie

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Posted Tuesday, 20 January, 2015 by jorielov in 21st Century, Animals in Fiction & Non-Fiction, Balance of Faith whilst Living, Bits & Bobbles of Jorie, Blog Tour Host, Bookish Films, Cedar Fort Publishing & Media, Compassion & Acceptance of Differences, Cultural & Religious Traditions, Equality In Literature, Indie Author, Inspirational Fiction & Non-Fiction, Interviews Related to Content of Novel, Modern Day, Non-Fiction, Post-911 (11th September 2001), Spirituality & Metaphysics, Vignettes of Real Life, World Religions




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