Creating Goddess Dreams with Peggy O'Toole

In this episode we get curious about:

Peggy O'Toole's transition from a clinical lab manager to a writer.

• Introduction and overview of "Goddess Dreams".
• The significance and impact of the Goddess Life Network.
• The importance of personal rituals in the creative process.
• Discussions on the societal roles and significance of women.
• Intimate spiritual experiences and connections with departed loved ones.
• Book recommendations and insights into Peggy's future ventures.

To learn more about our guest:

Website: MyGoddessDreams.com

FB: Peggy O'Toole

IG: Instagram (@peggyjotoole)

LI: https://www.linkedin.com/in/peggy-o-toole-b9a5b8b3/

Recommended Book: Goddess Dreams by Peggy O'Toole

Recommended On-line Community: Dolphina GoddessLife | Mighty Community

Credits

Audio Engineer: Sam Wittig

Music: Where the Light Is by Lemon Music Studio

Photography & Design: https://ashamclaughlin.wixsite.com/tejart

To learn more about Laurin Wittig and her work: https://HeartLightJoy.com

Copyright 2024 Laurin Wittig

Interview Episode with Peggy O'Toole

There are so many people around you that love you. You have parents that love you, kids that love you, friends that love you, siblings that love you. You're a lovable person, you know, just live your life. You don't need anybody to, for your happiness. Just enjoy your life.

Laurin: Yeah.

Laurin: Hi, friends, and welcome to Curiously Wise.

Practical spirituality and action. And I am Laurin Wittig, your host. And I have Peggy O'Toole with me here today. I met her at Potapalooza not too long ago, and we had so much fun with the little interview we got to do there that I've invited her back. Today, we're going to talk about her book, Goddess Dreams.

I think I got that right. Yes. Goddess Dreams. And let me tell you a little bit about her and then we're going to have a Bookathon here in terms of having fun talking about books and writing and all that stuff. Cause that's, that's part of my jam too. So Peggy is a first time author thrilled to share her imagination with the word and inspire women through storytelling to silence their inner mean girl and be radiant in their.

Peggy has a master's degree in clinical science. Now she's excited to finally be actively creating. It is something she loved doing when she was growing up, but put on the back burner as so many of us do to better support her family. Her book goddess dreams was realized and was released and realized in November of 2022.

It is a collection of magical stories, resembling fairy tales, celebrating the often underappreciated qualities and strengths of women healing. motherhood, intuition, seduction, and more. She hopes women will recognize themselves or other women they admire as the protagonist in the stories, and that parents will want to read them to their daughters to illustrate how wonderful being a woman can be.

So we're going to talk about that as well as the book itself today, because I love process. Stories about stories. That's the best kind of process story. So welcome, Peggy. I'm glad to have you here again on Curiously Wise.

Peggy: Oh, thank you, Laurin. I'm so excited to be here. I just spent a very interesting hour or so listening to some of your previous podcasts and it's really exciting to be here.

Peggy: Well, it's, it's interesting. I've always been interested in the arts ever since I was a little kid. I really loved him, and I was good at him. I could write. I could draw. I could do all of those kinds of things. And then, as you said earlier, I put all of that stuff on the back burner and became a microbiologist and spent many, many, many years working at a job.

And that part of that was to just really start enjoying those things that I had loved doing as a child. And I you know, I didn't start writing right away. I actually started more in the arts. I took a, a course, 52 week course through a museum where I was creating art.

Laurin: wow.

I wasn't one of the lucky ones chosen, but it was great fun creating the art.

Laurin: Yeah,

Peggy: And then during the pandemic I was lucky enough to be invited to join a group that was called the Goddess Life Network. And. I had always been seeking a group of women, like minded women, and unsuccessful in finding them.

I had tried different kinds of groups that were charitable and things like that, and they were great, but they just... Weren't women that had the same, we weren't on the same kinds of kind of energy, I guess. And this, and this group was really great. It was women who were into things, some things that I didn't really know a lot about, like crystals and chakras and things like that, but I've, I've been learning about

Laurin: yeah.

And her name is Marcy Darling, and she's a published author. She has four books on Amazon. They're all mysteries. And I think one is called Divorce Diva. That's a really great book. And at the end of her belly dancing classes, She would give a writing prompt

Laurin: Mm-hmm.

Peggy: inspirational to me. They were magical.

And after I had about 40 or 50 of them I went, you know what, I've got a book.

Laurin: How cool is that?

Peggy: But I couldn't just do it on my own, because of the fact that she had written the writing prompts. So, so I had to go to Marcy and, you know, here's this published author and I'm a, you know, I've never written anything and ask her if she would be willing to be my co author.

Laurin: Mm hmm.

Some stories, if you would be willing, to the same writing prompts,

Laurin: Mm hmm.

Peggy: so that we could show them side by side to demonstrate how coming from the same place, you could go to entirely different places in your imagination.

Laurin: Yeah. I, I got to read the first story of yours and then most of the second one, I was just looking at the sample, so it didn't let me go all the way, but it was really fun to see how the same prompt resulted in two very different stories. It was really fun.

Peggy: Yeah, yeah, because we have two different voices. So it really is, is very interesting. So when I designed the book, I really wanted it to look like an old time fairy tale book, the kinds of book that I read as a kid. And so that's why I also came up with the idea of having it illustrated with, with pictures for each story to, to

Peggy: Kind of give a visual image of the, of the short story they're reading.

Laurin: Nice. Yeah. A long time ago, I wanted to learn to do creative writing when I was in like middle school and I was given pictures. And then write a story about the picture. So you kind of got the prompt and write the story and then found the picture that goes story. It's a little bit the other direction, but it's a very powerful way to bring the symbol of, of the picture into the words of the story.

It's, I really liked that. So I didn't, I noticed that cause the pictures are different too, even though the prompt is the same. So,

Peggy: Right.

Laurin: and it's, I know you, I think you have the copy, a copy of your book there. Front of it. The cover of it is gorgeous. So would you please just hold that up for the camera?

Peggy: I don't know if you can, can you see it there?

And I thought that was really interesting too. I think we all have to find our way to get quiet enough. To let that flow through us. And for me it's been music. Music is the thing that, that sort of quiets. I wrote my first two, three books to the same three classical music CDs. Because back CDs, that's when it was that long ago, but I had a three CD turntable.

In that quietest, quiet state to let the creativity flow through you with ease. And I love the belly dancing. That's a great one.

Peggy: you. Yeah, well, the for me, I really I have a space I go to that's it's in my bedroom and it's it's quiet and I close the door and I'm just

It's just there with my iPad propped up on my lap and just let my imagination flow. And to be honest with you, it almost seems like my stories write themselves. It almost seems like I'm not even writing them.

I also recruit other people to help me because I'm not the most self disciplined person. So I've actually had a friend and we've just, I've just started meeting with her again and a couple of other people for years, we met in coffee shops for an hour or two. Several times a week to write together, not writing the same thing we'd bring our computers, we'd sit down, we'd have our tea or coffee and we do it.

We realized that the synergy of that energy was powerful and it was, it was the two of us creating it, but it was also just the routine of arriving in a place, agreeing not to say more than, Hey, see you in an hour, you know, kind of thing. And just holding that space together was really for me was really useful.

So there's all kinds of ways to come at, you know, whatever works for you and it may change over time. We, we meet by FaceTime now.

Laurin: Oh, that's cool.

Peggy: Yeah, so it's fun. And I have can just put those writing prompts together and then complete stories.

And I've already got my book started. So I'm trying to do one a week. And pretty soon, I'll have enough to where I can really start writing or finishing that second book, I probably have about maybe half of it put together. But it's

Laurin: way to do it. I mean, writing a novel, you have to hold this big story in your head for a long time and it's, it's hard and I don't write them anymore because of that. I don't have time for that. So I, I'm also looking for these sort of quicker writing in chunks that are, you know, don't have to, you don't have to hold the whole thread of the story and characters and stuff at once.

Peggy: No, I was just going to say it's, it's also fun when you're writing short pieces like I, I've been writing that you get to travel in many different worlds, you know, that's, I like to bring people into that world. And I've had a lot of people that have commented on my book say that that's so cool. That's so cool. Something like maybe they should, I should do it like a almost like a calendar, you know, and have a weekly calendar and have a story and then so that they can write about it or journal

Laurin: Yeah.

Peggy: about it.

Peggy: absolutely.

Laurin: not always a good idea, but But it's really nice when they're doing the brainstorming for you

Peggy: Absolutely.

Laurin: So do you have a favorite story in the book?

Peggy: I think one of there are so many. They're all different. And I think one of my favorite ones is is about two women that just happened to meet up by chance at where they're dancing together. They, they, they see each other, they start dancing, and then they have that communication during the dance.

And then after the dance. It's even though they're perfect strangers, it's almost as though they become sisters.

Do you just let it flow through you?

Peggy: I honestly just let it flow through me. Sometimes the, well, now I'm writing prompts. So sometimes something will, will spark me to, to think about what I'm going to write for the prompt. I wrote one recently that was inspired by A book that I had recommended for a book club on the Goddess Life Network, and it's about it's a novel about a community where all the women suddenly become dragons. So,

Laurin: That sounds like my kind of book.

Laurin: So, so let's talk about the prompts a little bit more because I know when I've tried to do that for myself, it's an effort. So, but you're getting inspired from different things. Are, are there times where you think I need to write a a prompt and it's just doesn't come?

So

Laurin: That's

Peggy: having fun doing that.

Cause I didn't understand that. What an amazing. Opportunity. It is to be in a, in the company of women in that way.

Peggy: It absolutely is. It's, it's so women are so generous. I'm, I'm always amazed at how generous they are. And, and this group is so empowering because all of the women there are encouraging each other and lifting each other up. There's no competition. There's, there's, it's just amazing.

Peggy: Yeah, there's a, there's a woman on the network who lives in the Netherlands and she's been very generous. She's so knowledgeable about Egypt and history and she shares articles on there all the time. And so she was unable to get my book in the Netherlands. It's, it's available there, but there was some, some financial.

Issue. So I just sent her one of my books and and with it, I had written in inside it and she was so excited to get it because he really wasn't expecting it. So that was

Peggy: Well, I think that that there is more of that starting to happen a little bit as women start to resonate in their own radiance and their own power, and they aren't so worried about what they have to look like or who they have to be. And, and hopefully, my book will accomplish one of the things that I'm hoping and that is for women to read the stories and see themselves in the stories.

Laurin: Yeah. It's been devalued over generations, maybe eons that what, what women bring to the party because we're powerful. And you know, I, I, I, the world doesn't work without women. Where was it? It was was it Ireland? I can't, or maybe it was one of the Scandinavian countries. I can't remember, but they decided to have a women's walkout a one day.

Event and something like 80 or 85% of the women in the country participated. They didn't do anything. They didn't take care of the kids. They didn't go to work. They didn't do laundry. They did nothing. And the country ground to a halt for 24 hours. And it was such a powerful, I wish I could remember the details.

Gifts.

Peggy: Yeah, there's a synergy between women and men that that has to happen for the world to function really.

Laurin: Right. Yeah.

Peggy: You were

Laurin: balance.

Peggy: Yeah, you were actually reminding me when you were talking of the woman's walkout day of an ancient story called Lysistrata. Did you ever hear that one?

Laurin: Yep. I did a report on it for a women's study class in college paper.

Peggy: Yeah, where all the women decide to, to, I think they wanted to stop a war or something, but they, but they decided to withhold sex. And so all the,

Laurin: very effective.

Peggy: it was, it was.

Peggy: You must have had an interesting father.

Laurin: had a very interesting father.

Peggy: That's wonderful.

Laurin: Yeah. So yeah, so it's, it is I love that you, that you really are intentioning this book to empower women to be ourselves, to be, to own ourselves.

Laurin: I don't doubt that at all.

Peggy: and then we all start to change ourselves to be safe.

And we play small or we become people pleasers or somebody tells us we're not a good artist so we. Give up on our idea that we can can do art, or there's so many stories that we tell ourselves. And that's what I call your inner mean girls. They sit there on our shoulders and they say, No, you're you're there's something wrong with you.

And I was just feeling like, you know what, there's something majorly wrong with me. Nobody loves me. And then I. Sort of had an epiphany and I went, you know what? You're being crazy. You're defining love so narrowly just by thinking that you have to have a man to love you. You know, look around yourself.

There are so many people around you that love you. You have parents that love you, kids that love you, friends that love you, siblings that love you. You're a lovable person, you know, just live your life. You don't need anybody to, for your happiness. Just enjoy your life.

Laurin: Yeah.

You know, it wasn't long after that, that I met my third husband and we knew almost immediately that we were meant to be together.

Laurin: Mm hmm.

Peggy: Yeah, he used to make this silly joke. He's he was exactly one year, one month and one day older than I was. So he always used to say that meant I was the one for him.

Laurin: I love that! That's awesome!

Peggy: yeah, he was a great guy. I just lost him last year. So yeah, so I'm but I know he's still here. I see him. Yeah, I actually see him in rainbows.

Laurin: Oh, nice.

Peggy: Yeah, I, I keep crystals in my, my, I keep crystals in my windows

Laurin: Me too!

Laurin: Mm hmm. Mm hmm.

Peggy: Yeah. Thank you for helping me with my day.

Laurin: Right. Yeah, because they are still there. I mean, they're just not in human form anymore, but the spirit is there and they, they do seem to want to come back and make sure we're good. We're okay. Or help us if we need it or comfort us when we need it. And yeah, I've, I've experienced, I've experienced that with my dad

Peggy: Mm hmm.

Laurin: because he passed.

20 years ago now, or longer. Wow. 22 years ago. But he's come back a couple of times when we were having hard times. It was just when my father in law died, who I adored. And my dad showed up in the middle of the night. I got up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night and he had a very distinctive scent and it was old spice and cigarettes.

Peggy: Oh yeah. I know that one.

And it still kind of, you know, makes me a little teary cause it was such a comfort. And it's, and to know that he's still around if I need him,

Peggy: Yeah.

Laurin: so I know, I know that your, your husband is still there for you too.

Peggy: Absolutely. I don't feel alone, you know,

Laurin: Yeah. It's, it's one of the gifts of being open to that. Instead of saying that can't happen, which I think our culture kind of teaches us because we really are surrounded by by spirit that loves us. So,

Peggy: Yeah.

Peggy: Well, I was thinking about one earlier, and that was I believe it's called Letters from the Earth. It's, it's by Mark Twain, and it's not at all the Mark Twain that you know from Tom Sawyer and, and Huckleberry Finn and those books. It's a book of his philosophy. And it was very, he was very forward thinking and very original philosopher.

And I, I think it's well worth reading.

Laurin: Okay. I haven't read that and that sounds really interesting. He was such an interesting person. So I appreciate you, you bringing that to my attention and it will go on the book list for this season. And your book will be on the book list this season too.

Peggy: Yay! That's so wonderful.

Laurin: So let everybody listening know where they can find you and where they can find your book.

Peggy: Absolutely. Well you can find my book on Amazon. And all you have to do is look for Goddess Dreams and my name, Peggy O'Toole, and you will find it. So just put that into the search. Bar and you'll you'll find the book and it'll pop right up for you. People can contact me at my email address, which is Peggy J O tool at gmail.

com. So it's very simple. Just my name with a J in the middle for my middle name, which is Jane and I, I do have a website, but it's under construction still. So I don't want to send you there yet. I'm hoping that that people will contact me and because I would love to share some writing prompts with people and send them my freebie.

Laurin: Nice. Thanks.

Peggy: As a guest author. So

Laurin: Okay, great. That's awesome. I might have to try that myself.

Peggy: I hope you do.

Laurin: All right. Well, thank you for that offering because that's that's a really, really good one. All right. I think that we have come to the end of our time together. All of the things, all the ways to get in touch with Peggy and get the freebie and those sorts of things will be in the show notes. And we'll get her website in there too, as soon as it's available.

And I hope that you'll come back next time and join me on Curiously Wise. In the meantime, thank you so much, Peggy, for being here with us.

Peggy: Oh, it was a joy.

Laurin: And for the rest of you, please stay curious

Please head over to my website. www.heartlightjoy.com. Curiously wise is a team effort. I am grateful for the skill and enthusiasm. Arlene men brought our producer and Sam Wittig. Our audio engineer bring to this collaboration. Our music is where the light is by lemon music studio.