 Hi, my name is Danny and welcome to Esoteric Moment. Today, I wanted to do a video review of Obad's BARD course. When I first started thinking about purchasing the Obad course, I was really overwhelmed by the cost involved with the course. There wasn't tons of information out there about was the course worth the money. Now, that's a tricky question to answer. There's already a lot of talk online about whether one can charge or should charge for magical services. There is conversation about whether you should charge for magical teaching. And I definitely fall on the line of if the work, if the teaching is valuable, one way that I can show I am committed in today's world, which uses lots of money in lots of different ways is to commit some of my financial resources towards that work and towards that teaching. However, my budget is limited, so I had to save up for the course and I wanted to make sure that I would get what I desired out of the course. One thing that I desperately had wished I could have seen was more about what the course really entailed and to see that in video form. If you are considering joining Obad, overwhelmed by the cost and you want to make sure it's going to be worthwhile for you, I hope this video can help answer that question for you. Let's start with some basics. Obad or the Order of Bards, Ovates, and Druids is an organization based out of the UK but functions worldwide. There are also local groves in many areas, some of which have public meetings that anyone can attend and many of which you must be a member to even know that they exist. To become an Obad member, you must purchase the BARD course. This is the first course that will send you materials that introduces you to druidry and really starts to develop the tools that the order considers to be useful. If you don't belong to an order, you might still be a druid and that is 100% okay. This is just one path that you can take to enrich your practice. The BARD course will send you for one year a packet once a month. This packet comes in a brown envelope. These envelopes do not handle international mail super well. Most of mine come to me very beat up and a few times I was a little worried I had lost materials and frankly I lost one of my packages one time before it even got to me. However, the Obad office was incredibly responsive and really great at fixing that error when it came up so I would say that the customer service quote unquote of this course was really great and in the envelope you will every month get a few things. You're going to get four Gorsies. Now the BARD courses are blue. These are the Ovate ones which are green. You'll also get the monthly Touchstone magazine which I'll talk about in a minute. The BARD course will also give you the next ritual book so they have pamphlets that talk about each of the eight festivals, how you can live that in your life and then it gives both a solitary ritual, outline, script but also a group one. I think this is one of the most valuable parts of the course and especially useful for those who perhaps haven't developed their own yearly practices. It was really great. Let's talk about the Touchstone for a minute. This is my biggest complaint about the order and the course. The material in the Touchstone, great. It's submitted from different members. It has a list of upcoming events on the back. There's artwork, there's poetry, there's useful kind of article-ish stuff. It's great. Except, it looks like it was put together with a photocopy machine in 1982. I am flummoxed as to why there isn't in this very large order some folks who can volunteer their time to kind of design the magazine better. It makes it very difficult for me to read because the font is small, everything is smushed together. I just, it's not my thing. For me, I ended up, after finishing the course, after receiving all the materials and stuff, I actually learned all of my lessons in a book. Now this was really fabulous because I work in a library so I knew of a local bindery, Grim Bindy has the title on the end in a little ribbon. The lessons are actually designed so that if you bound them or put them in one of the boxes that the office offers, the page numbers are on the side. So it's actually set up that you can keep it all as one set as a resource later on in your practice. There's an index and I thought that was a really fabulous touch. I did the audio and the text version. The audio version is beautiful. The readings are really well done. There's gorgeous music. It was lovely. For the OV8 course, though, I decided to just stick with the text, mainly because the CDs are getting harder to just use in my life. My laptop doesn't have a CD drive, but I really recommend the audio version. There is something about that oral lesson and the beautiful way that they did it. Different readers, different accents. Releaning towards one or the other and you really like podcasts or things like that, I would probably go the audio version. If you're someone that wants a permanent version that you can reference back or you just read a lot of materials and that's the way you learn, then the text version is probably the way to go. Or spoil yourself, like I did, and do both. Each lesson is set up pretty much the same. It is kind of design that you can do on once a week. There will obviously be weeks where you don't get it done or weeks that maybe you're really on top of things and you get more done. And there's no rush or time frame that you have to get it done. But it takes most people roughly a year and it took me roughly a year. You're going along in the barred course, you can ask to have a mentor. I recommend you doing this at the beginning of your journey. I didn't utilize mine as much as I could have or should have. But I did appreciate what we did correspond with. My mentor was fabulous and at the end of the course, your mentor is who you will send your barred review to. Basically when you get to the end of the course, the OBOD office asks you to write up or create something that summarizes your journey. And specifically they have some questions that correspond to different elements of the course. When I wrote my review, it was really lengthy and I thought it was good. But I wasn't like, this is exactly what I want. But I was kind of reaching a dead end and I was a little bit stuck. So I just send it off to my mentor thinking, well, what the heck, we'll see what happens. And she wrote back the best response I've ever gotten to any writing previously. She said exactly what I needed to hear to really flush out some of the questions I hadn't approached and handle some topics and questions about my life and my journey that I hadn't really been completely honest with myself in this project. And that was a beautiful process. I think it was actually that whole process of writing a review and reflecting on the course and having this interaction with someone was probably one of my favorite parts of the course. I really appreciated the weekly lessons and I'm so glad that I finally saved up money and dedicated myself to doing the Bardock course. It enriched my practice in a way I hadn't anticipated. It introduced a community that I'm thrilled to be a part of. It inspired me to be a bit more consistent with YouTube videos and join this community in a more active way. Overall, I am thrilled with the Bardock course and I would recommend it for anyone who has been eyeing the course, has been thinking about Druidry, but is really struggling to delve in. You know that there's some meat, some juicy awesomeness waiting around the corner, but you can't quite find it. I think this course will help push you in that direction. If you have any specific questions about the course or are on the fence and trying to figure out if this is for you, please leave comments and I am happy to respond. I know that there are other people who watch my videos who are members of this order or a different order who have done similar practices and their perspective might be really useful too. So ask away and we'll see what we can come up with you. Thanks for watching and as always, may you find peace in the sacred grove.