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“The Pomegranate Seed” By: Cosy Sheridan
Reviewed by Kelly Coutee RN, MA, LMFT, LPC
Eating Disorders Today: Winter 2007
As an eating disorder therapist and music lover, it has been a pleasure for me to review and strongly recommend to you Cosy Sheridan’s CD, “The Pomegranate Seed”.
A folksinger, Cosy’s resonate voice and profoundly insightful, highly personal lyrics is like Judy Collins crossed with Joan Baez, mixed with a Buddhist Monk in recovery. Listening to these culturally significant songs backed up by Cosy’s atmospheric acoustic guitar is a moving experience. It made me feel as if I had actually taken a healing journey of discovery and renewal with Cosy, leaving me feeling uplifted and refreshed.
Cosy is an award-winning artist with 7 CD’s to her credit. She tours 200 days per year and has performed in diverse venues from universities and coffee houses, to Carnegie Hall.
The 16 songs on the CD is an exploration of appetite, body image, and myth in modern culture. Originally created as a project for a psychology degree, it became a solo two-act narrative telling the story of one woman’s spiritual journey into the symbolic underworld and her emergence as a vibrant, whole, and more healed person. Dealing with the intense subject matter of eating disorders, Cosy uses humor and honesty to deal with the effects of cultural messages, the media, cultural icons and the family on self-esteem and body image.
Using stories from Greek mythology, Cosy tells stories of the many ways our culture can sacrifice us, requiring us to disown our truths. “Iphigenia” deals with the pain of father loss. This Greek myth is retold as a young female anorexic, hospitalized, getting thinner and sicker. In the myth, Iphigenia is sacrificed to the gods so that her father could have the winds needed to reach and attack a foe. “I am Iphigenia/the daughter you lost/for all you earn/I am the cost/Ruling the world has a very high price/I am Iphigenia, the sacrifice.”
“The Pomegranate Seed” deals with mother loss, “I swallowed a seed in the dark long ago/a girl who needs her mother will do anything she’s told.”
Using humor in one song. Cosy writes a letter to Mattel about a Barbie’s unlifelike proportions and asks if “it’s really so demanding to want a role model who is capable of standing?” “All alone with a bathing suit” is woman’s experience in a dressing room, “I gave myself a pep talk the other night/ I said it’s just a bathing suit, you will be all right”.
Perfectionism is explored in “The Little Train” who says “I think I can, I think I can”, while “The Losing Game” exposes our culture’s tendency to continually ask for more, never being content with our best.
In “The Underworld”, the message is that a journey through darkness serves to make us stronger, and through loss and wounding, we become whole; “It’s a long way in, it’s a long way down/ there’s a lot of loss, before the found”. “Demeter’s Lost Daughter” gives us permission to go in and stay down until we’ve found what we came for; “I think I found the answer/it’s a bit of a surprise/ we are blessed when we are fallen/ we don’t always have to rise.”
“Sharp Objects” one of the most beautiful songs on the CD explores a culture that withholds the tools needed to become whole. “We need a child proof cap on the big wide world/ don’t sell it to minors, or nice little girls.” “My Mother’s House” deals with coming home. The point being that we can always come home again after a journey and leave stronger than before.
For all men and women who have felt shame and fear about their bodies and have gotten the impression that somehow their bodies are wrong, this CD us gives hope and healing.
Cosy Sheridan can be contacted at http://www.cozysheridan.com
Kelly Coutee can be contacted at Here
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