The Second Bucket List

When a coffee mug slips out of Celeste O’Connell’s hand and shatters on her tile floor, she realizes something is terribly wrong with her. The recent stumbles on the stairs, the deepening of her voice, the growing weakness in her right arm and leg, are part of a mysterious pattern of frightening changes in her body.

Celeste is diagnosed with a terminal illness. She struggles to accept her fate and the loss of everything she loves — her husband, her college-age children, her work, and the rugged, spectacular Montana environment in which she lives. She creates a bucket list and tries to complete everything on the list, but as her symptoms worsen she finds she cannot. A startling dream leads Celeste to a therapist who helps her explore her dreams and long standing beliefs about life and death.

“As much an act of devotion and healing as a work of fiction, Connie Myslik-McFadden’s novel takes a thorough, clear-eyed look at living with a terminal diagnosis. The novel’s heart is in Celeste’s acceptance of her approaching death, and Myslik-McFadden renders this emotional and spiritual journey with clarity and power.” BookLife Prize Review

Available in preorder now at Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble and other distributors. Release date is January 5, 2021.

Willow’s Gift

In Willow’s Gift, Connie Myslik-McFadden introduces us to modern heroine Willow, who has just survived a heartrending near-death experience.  In the days that follow Willow discovers a new, telepathic bond with the animals around her and soon realizes they are to become her greatest allies and teachers.

When a forest fire threatens to destroy her family and the wild canyon she loves, Willow is forced to replace her anger and resentment with love and responsibility.
Claiming her new identity and sense of belonging, she steps into her role with bravery and maturity.  In this moment, Willow understands that she is not alone–and her journey has just begun.
Set in the majestic Montana wilderness, Willow’s Gift is a poignant, heartwarming story of openness, resilience, and triumph.

-On Amazon, Kindle, and as ebook after December 1, 2015-

Imago

In Imago, the themes of separation and loss, reunion and reconciliation, and the right to choose when and how we die, are woven into a multilayered fabric that is “unforgettable and whole”. Serious in tone, with flashes of humor and irony, Imago Is a story about mother-daughter relationship and the human longing to heal the past and transform the present.

Maria Morrison’s mother, with whom Maria has had little contact since childhood, has just told Maria that she is intending to commit suicide rather than die a painful, prolonged death from lung cancer. Maria, shocked and frightened, flies to be with her mother, hoping to intervene. She meets her eccentric half-sister, Gwen, for the first time, and they struggle to deal with their mother’s illness and dramatic decision. Synchronistically, Maria has with her the manuscript for a novel she has written in a creative attempt to understand the traumatic separation from her mother when she was a child and its impact on her life. It includes an imagined version of her mother’s life, of which Maria has little real knowledge. Rich with dreams, this contemporary novel illustrates how we use imagination to fill in the spaces where we do not know the truth of our experience.

Available on Amazon.com in paperback and on kindle, as well as at the Country Bookshelf in Bozeman and directly from Connie (autographed!). See Amazon.com for recent reviews.

Gathering The Soul

Gathering the Soul is a true story of spiritual healing. Told in alternating chapters – one in the author’s voice, as psychotherapist, and the next in the voice of her former patient, Mary Ellen – who later changed her name to Ariel – it traces Mary Ellen’s recovery from the effects of childhood abuse, including a severe eating disorder and a prolonged physical illness that rendered her for a time almost completely disabled.

Gathering the Soul is an honest portrayal of Connie and Mary Ellen’s therapeutic relationship over a nine-year period, during which time Connie moved from working as a more or less traditional Jungian psychotherapist to learning about and working directly with the human energy field as a hands-on healer. The book includes many details of this evolution, including the help and guidance both author and patient received through channeled guides and many other experiences which from a traditional psychotherapy perspective would be seen as extraordinary.

What many people seem to be longing for today is spiritual healing – healing that encompasses mind, body, emotions, and spirit. The old models are falling away, and a more holistic paradigm is taking their place. The relationship and the work this book describes represent the cutting edge of this new paradigm, where the therapist/patient relationship is one of partnership rather than hierarchy, and where everything that happens within that relationship is seen as opening up the possibility for a deeper connection to Self and the Divine, where we are all seen as spiritual beings on a human path.

Gathering the Soul deals with the healing that can take place directly through the human energy field, and with non-ordinary reality, subjects that have rarely been written about within the context of traditional psychotherapy. Although most of the names and places have been changed, and the author created some dialogue, much of the manuscript is drawn directly from Connie’s and Mary Ellen’s tapes and journals. Mary Ellen has reviewed and contributed to the manuscript and has written a prologue as well.

This book is written as a story, and as such will be deeply inspiring to those whose life experience may be similar to Mary Ellen’s, but who may not yet know that healing of even the deepest wounds is possible. It is likely to appeal also to those in the healing professions, especially those interested in the integration of depth psychology and hands-on healing.

Gathering The Soul can be purchased online at Amazon.com, xlibris.com, or directly from Connie (autographed!).

Bad Gramma

Six-year old Lulu loves her Gramma. But when Gramma comes to take care of her and her puppy, Pearl, she makes lots of mistakes. Mischievous Lulu teases her and calls her Bad Gramma each time she does something wrong, like forget to put the chocolate chips in the chocolate chip cookie dough. But when Lulu can’t find her blankie at night, there’s a real crisis, because Gramma can’t find it. Then, to Lulu, she really is a Bad Gramma. Gramma saves the day when she asks Pearl to find the blankie, and Pearl knows just where it is. All is well, and Lulu knows what a Good Gramma she has.

Available on Amazon.com in paperback and on kindle, as well as at the Country Bookshelf in Bozeman and directly from Connie (autographed!).