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Hollywood film director and author Elizabeth Blake-Thomas on overcoming personal challenges to write her new book, ‘Living With Intention’

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Elizabeth Blake-Thomas is a film director, author and founder of mental health practice Medicine With Words. Elizabeth, who is British but based in Los Angeles, directed this year’s release ‘Hunt Club’, starring ‘American Pie’ star Mena Suvari alongside Casper Van Dien and Mickey Rourke, as well as the new film ‘Caralique’, which is out now. Over her career she’s worked with many well-known actors including Tony Todd, Natasha Henstridge, Jodie Sweetin, Malcolm McDowell and Lou Diamond Phillips. Elizabeth’s new book ‘Living With Intention’, published on 19 December 2023 by Wallace Publishing, aims to help people find clarity, purpose and peace in their lives. Her previous books are the novel ‘Arabella’ and the helpful guide to Hollywood, ‘Filmmaking Without Fear’. Elizabeth is also a monthly contributor to Health & Wellbeing magazine, offering insight into how to live a more purposeful, healthier life. 

You directed the new film ‘Caralique’ – tell us all about it.

“It’s about a young, determined fashion designer who wants to bring more colour into the world. The story came to me in a format that required a lot of rewriting, but I was immediately interested because it was a mother-daughter story, and because these were people who had faults and flaws. I always enjoy telling stories with these types of characters. It’s an inspirational film, because against all odds, Caralique manages to live her dream. It’s a special film for me too, because it stars my daughter, Isabella Blake-Thomas. It was great to work with my daughter in real life and do something with her that she’s incredibly passionate about.” 

Photo credit: Isabella Blake-Thomas

What was your experience directing Mena Suvari in ‘Hunt Club’, which was released earlier this year?

“We filmed in Mississippi in a big park. All the crew stayed in cabins and we filmed for 15 days in various places around the park. I loved working on the stunt fight scenes, as well as the intimacy scenes with Jessica Belkin. The story is based on the premise that a daughter is trafficked and murdered and her mother seeks the people out who did it, to get revenge.

“I’m an ambassador for child trafficking awareness. So even though this is a horror movie, it still has a message. It’s just a different way of getting it across.” 

You’re a storyteller – not just as a film director, but also as an author. Can you tell us more about your new book, ‘Living With Intention’?

“This is my third book and it means so much to me. I was bullied as a child and also on set a few times – it made me realise that I had to transform my life. The book is called ‘Living With Intention’ because I have clear goals, and I make very definite decisions on how I live my life; I have a strong belief in finding purpose while maintaining peace and clarity. This book guides others to live in the same way, using the tools and exercises I created to teach the methodology.” 

Photo credit: Isabella Blake-Thomas

How will the book help those who read it? 

“It aims to teach the reader how to become self aware, by looking after themselves and maintaining clarity and a healthy mindset.”

“The world is filled with so much noise that I always encourage others to take time for themselves.”

“With tools such as ‘pyramid of purpose’, cabinet cleanse’ and the ‘kintsugi technique’, the reader will really begin to transform their lives.”

Who do you think should read this book and why?

“The exercises in this book never really end. It might be that you fill it out every six months or every year. Maybe you can leave it for as long as five years, or use the exercises daily. It’s great for the individual as well as for the people around them, because it can help families to bond. The exercises are fun as well as creative – it doesn’t matter how old you are, you can still get something out of each exercise.” 

Featured photo credit: Isabella Blake-Thomas

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Howard Bloom – The Case of the Sexual Cosmos: Everything You Know About Nature Is Wrong – New Book Coming in 2025 

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The Case of the Sexual Cosmos is the latest book of paradigm-challenges from Howard Bloom, the man Britain’s Channel 4 TV calls the Einstein, Newton, Darwin and Freud of the 21st century.  And the Case of the Sexual Cosmos: Everything You Know About Nature is Wrong just may turn your existing view of yourself and of the universe you live in upside down and inside out.  

The Case of the Sexual Cosmos says that we’ve got nature all wrong.  The Sexual Cosmos tells the tale of the universe from the big bang to what’s going on in your brain as you read this sentence, unmasking a startling face of the evolutionary saga.  Nature is green in tooth and claw.

In The Case of the Sexual Cosmos’ meticulously-researched telling of the evolutionary story, life does not live in harmony with nature. Far from it.   Life does not take nature lying down.  Life is obstreperous.  Life is uppity. Life is impertinent.   Life is not a mere survivor.  Life is a doomrider and a catastrophe tamer.  Life takes nature apart and puts her back together in whole new ways.  Nature uses life to reinvent herself.

What’s more, The Case of the Sexual Cosmos proposes a scientific paradigm shift. The book argues that it’s time to toss out one of science’s most cherished concepts, The Second Law of Thermodynamics.  The law that all things fall apart.  The Case of the Sexual Cosmos proposes that the Second Law be replaced by The First Law of Flamboyance.  The law that things do not just fall apart.  They fall together.

And The Case of the Sexual Cosmos shows what this means to your life and mine.

MacArthur Genius Award winner Richard Foreman says The Case Of The Sexual Cosmos is “a massive achievement.  Wow!”   BBC-TV producer of seven science series including Connections, James Burke, calls The Case of the Sexual Cosmos “a triumph…full of surprises, unexpected connections, [and] complexifying outcomes ”  Fellow of the British Interplanetary Society Gregory Matloff calls The Case of the Sexual Cosmos “a masterwork.”

Conrad Labandeira of the Smithsonian Institution says that The Case of the Sexual Cosmos is “enjoyable and compelling.”  And Harvard’s Ellen Langer says that The Case of the Sexual Cosmos is “a fascinating read…….[Bloom] argues that we are not savaging the earth as some would have it, but instead are growing the cosmos.”

Concludes novelist Helen Zuman, The Case of the Sexual Cosmos pulls “us out of Greta Thunberg’s self-hate machine” and shows that, “The true tragedy is not war or climate catastrophe.  It’s rejecting the exuberant flamboyance of exactly who we are.”

More About Howard Bloom:

Howard Bloom of the Howard Bloom Institute has been called the Einstein, Newton, Darwin, and Freud of the 21st century by Britain’s Channel 4 TV.  One of his eight books–Global Brain—was the subject of a symposium thrown by the Office of the Secretary of Defense including representatives from the State Department, the Energy Department, DARPA, IBM, and MIT.  His work has been published in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, Psychology Today, and the Scientific American. A former Visiting Scholar at New York University’s Graduate Psychology Department, a former Core Faculty member at the Graduate Institute in Meriden, Connecticut, and the current Kepler Space University Professor of Practice, Bloom has been published in journals or has spoken at scholarly conferences in twelve different scientific fields, from quantum physics and cosmology to neuroscience, information theory, and biopolitics.  He calls this multi-disciplinary approach “Omnology.”  Concludes Joseph Chilton Pearce, author of Evolution’s End and The Crack in the Cosmic Egg, “I have finished Howard Bloom’s [first two] books, The Lucifer Principle and Global Brain, in that order, and am seriously awed, near overwhelmed by the magnitude of what he has done. I never expected to see, in any form, from any sector, such an accomplishment.  I doubt there is a stronger intellect than Bloom’s on the planet.”

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