As a teenager, I was fluent in French. I hardly ever practice these days and it is starting to slip. This weekend I made it my mission to buy a french language book on energy healing. I'd love to learn about healing and practice my French in one go! We walked all over Paris today and eventually found ourselves outside an esoteric bookshop. It was part of a chain. Each location has a theme, so if you're looking for something in particular you need to find the store before you set out. It can be annoying to walk past 5 or 6 stores before you find one that covers what you're looking for, but there are benefits too. When you finally find your store, there will be tons of books on the topic.
If I walk into a Waterstone's, the Mind Body Spirit section might be one or two bookshelves. At the Esoteric shop, all of the books are on topics like personal development, spirituality, divination, occultism, Kabbalah, astrology, channeling, magic, buddhism, hinduism, tantra, meditation, animal communication, dream interpretation, and numerology. I spent forty minutes browsing and left without buying anything. There were way too many choices, and more than that, the energy in the shop was too much for me to handle! Most of the books were used. Maybe that is why I felt confused and overwhelmed when I was in there. They had too much energy lingering on them. Lots of energetic gunk.
I couldn't find a single one that I wanted to read. At first I thought it was my rusty French that made it harder to relate to the descriptions. Then I started wondering, who were all these authors and where did they get their information? Why should I read their books? I have too many ideas in my head already. Still wanting to practice my French, I started looking for English or American author's whose work had been translated. There were lots of Doreen Virtue, Neal Donald Walsh and Wayne Dyer books. I couldn't bring myself to buy any of them. It wasn't the first time I left an alternative shop empty handed.
The same thing happened when I went to a store near Covent Garden in London. I had to leave that one because I got a bad stomach ache. One of my friends was waiting for a reading and I started getting very anxious. It took a while for it to wear off. I think picked something up in there. I only felt like myself again when I walked into a public loo and told it to flush itself. LOL. That was an experience I don't want to repeat.
Today I bathed myself in a white light when we left the store. It is just dawning on me that I could have protected myself when I went in there. Esoteric shops can be full of gunk. I still prefer my mainstream book stores. And when it comes to crystals, I will stop by the Natural History Museum for "mass produced crystals". I'd rather buy something that has been handled by dozens of tourists, and not healers, psychics and spiritualists. The place feels clearer because they haven't been used.