Books

A personal story of Black Elk and the teachings woven into the narrative. Wallace Black Elk, a Lakota elder and shaman, was born on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota. He traveled widely throughout North America, Europe, and Asia, addressing large groups and conducting healing ceremonies. 

"An unprecedented account of the shaman's world and the way it is entered." -Stanley Krippner, PHD., coauthor of Personal Mythology: The Psychology of Your Evolving Self and Healing States

There are worlds of healing, protection, and insight available to you just beyond ordinary reality. The knowledge to simply, powerfully journey to these worlds, to connect with your spirit guides, to build a vision of yourself as healthy, intuitive and psychically alive, is within this book. Whether you are just beginning to seek a truer and more meaningful existence, or you are an experienced traveler of worlds, this book provides a reliable, straightforward, friendly and practical guide to basic shamanic practices, including more advanced instruction in past life healing, shadow work, and soul retrieval.

A dazzling work of personal travelogue and cultural criticism that ranges from the primitive to the postmodern in a quest for the promise and meaning of the psychedelic experience.

 

Breaking Open the Head is a passionate, multilayered, and sometimes rashly personal inquiry into this deep division. On one level, Daniel Pinchbeck tells the story of the encounters between the modern consciousness of the West and these sacramental substances, including such thinkers as Allen Ginsberg, Antonin Artaud, Walter Benjamin, and Terence McKenna, and a new underground of present-day ethnobotanists, chemists, psychonauts, and philosophers. It is also a scrupulous recording of the author's wide-ranging investigation with these outlaw compounds, including a thirty-hour tribal initiation in West Africa; an all-night encounter with the master shamans of the South American rain forest; and a report from a psychedelic utopia in the Black Rock Desert that is the Burning Man Festival.

Breaking Open the Head is brave participatory journalism at its best, a vivid account of psychic and intellectual experiences that opened doors in the wall of Western rationalism and completed Daniel Pinchbeck's personal transformation from a jaded Manhattan journalist to shamanic initiate and grateful citizen of the cosmos.

Thich Nhat Hanh brings his gifts of clarity and poetry to an explication of the basic teachings of Buddhism--the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path. These teachings are the time-tested means to transform our suffering into mindfulness and joy. Original and very accessible, The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching is a profound introduction to the practice and insights of Buddhism. For longtime practitioners or those newly interested in the way of understanding and love, as presented by one of today's most beloved teachers.

 Marriage should be based on love, right? But does it seem as though you and your spouse are speaking two different languages? New York Times bestselling author Dr. Gary Chapman guides couples in identifying, understanding, and speaking their spouse’s primary love language—quality time, words of affirmation, gifts, acts of service, or physical touch.

From two of mindbodygreen's top editors comes an essential companion for anyone seeking a deeper spiritual life.

 

Taking time to nourish yourself and connect to the rhythms of the Earth can feel like a tall order when your days are packed to the brim but this beautifully illustrated handbook can make it a whole lot easier. The Spirt Almanac provides readers with potent, accessible rituals they will want to call on again and again throughout the year to feel more grounded, aligned with their purpose, and in touch with their own innate sense of knowing.

 

Readers will be invited to practice and personalize dozens of routines incorporating science-backed techniques like breathwork, meditation, and aromatherapy, as well as more esoteric offerings like astrology, crystals, and tarot. Along the way, they will learn the fascinating history of ritual and trace these ancient spiritual practices through the ages to modern day applications from several true masters--from reiki healers to psychologists to sound therapists--who live and breathe this work. Divided by the four seasons, this book features dozens of ideas for spirit and soul enriching rituals including:

 

- Honor the quiet of winter and the start of the year by setting new intentions with a seed planting ritual
- Come spring, try a breathwork ritual to release blocks and move forward
- Celebrate summer with a forest bathing ritual to clear your mind or a crystal ritual for an open, receptive heart
- Wind down in fall with a self-soothing full moon ceremony to reflect on the year

 

The Spirit Almanac will infuse your life with more joy, gratitude, and a deeper connection to yourself and our Mother Earth.

Active Dreaming is a way of being fully of this world while maintaining constant contact with another world, the world-behind-the-world, where the deeper logic and purpose of our lives are to be found.

"Long before ayahuasca tourism became a pastime for rich gringos, Peter Gorman was knocking around Iquitos and the Amazon. He's traveled the rivers and quaffed the brew with the best (and the worst) of them and been way, way beyond the chrysanthemum on many a dark jungle night. This is the intensely personal story of an old-school jungle rat for whom ayahuasca is not just a hobby, but a life-long quest." -Dennis McKenna, Ph.D, co-author of The Invisible Landscape.

The Archaic Revival: Speculations on Psychedelic Mushrooms, the Amazon, Virtual Reality, UFOs, Evolution, Shamanism, the Rebirth of the Goddess, and the End of HistoryCited by the L.A. Weekly as "the culture's foremost spokesman for the psychedelic experience," Terrence McKenna is an underground legend as a brilliant raconteur, adventurer, and expert on the experiential use of mind-altering plants.In these essays, interviews, and narrative adventures, McKenna takes us on a mesmerizing journey deep into the Amazon as well as into the hidden recesses of the human psyche and the outer limits of our culture, giving us startling visions of the past and future.

This fascinating book by psychologist and medical anthropologist Alberto Villoldo, Ph.D., explains the practices for healing outside of ordinary time and space. It shows how to enter the timeless "now" to heal events that occurred in the past, and to correct the course of destiny. Dr. Villoldo discusses ways in which you can heal yourself and your loved ones by employing intention through practices used by shamans of the Americas--which, until now, have been inaccessible to most of the world. The shamans of old called this "journeying."

In this book, you'll discover that you have a four-chambered heart in the same way you have a four-chambered soul. In the first chamber, you store away the memory of a wound that derailed your destiny. In the second, you keep the limiting beliefs and soul contracts that you entered into at the time of your loss. In the third, you recover the grace and trust that will make you whole again; and in the fourth, you remember the calling and mission that you choose to unfold in this lifetime. "While everyone has a future," Villoldo says, "only certain people have a destiny." This book shows you how to find and manifest yours.

Neelou Malekpour brings us a gorgeously illustrated, essential guide to the energy rituals that will help transform your life. 

Learn how to cleanse and protect yourself and your space, tap into your intuition, and elevate your frequency through sacred smoke, candle, stone rituals—and more. Neelou Malekpour is here to support you for all occasions, whether that’s:
  •  healing heartache, relieving anxiety, and dispelling bad dreams;
  •  cultivating focus, receiving support during travel, and prepping a space for meditation; or
  •  calling in love, blessing others, and connecting to your highest self.
 
With The Art of Sacred Smoke, Malekpour is ready to share the rituals that are essential to aligning and calibrating your energy. Learn how to use the natural ingredients she employs in her practices—and in her frequency-raising business, SMUDGED—from rose petals to palo santo, and how to source them responsibly.
 
At a time when many of us are looking for mindful solutions to the chaos of modern life, The Art of Sacred Smoke offers an empowering new way to connect to nature and to your best self.

Drawn from the author's more than four decades of working with ancient shamanic wisdom, spiritual practice, cutting-edge psychology, energy healing and quantum discoveries, this volume presents groundbreaking techniques for resolving trauma, embedded pain, enigmatic illness, inherited dysfunction and more. It offers readers tools to help free both themselves and others from myriad ailments, allowing underlying resilient wholeness to emerge again. The book teaches the interested reader to use each of the healing modalities presented, which provide non-invasive, drug-free methods to address and resolve core issues from which illness arises. Included are practical, step-by-step guidelines for practitioners and individuals to address physical, psychological, emotional, mental, and spiritual concerns; the volume embraces a holistic approach to restoring robust, vibrant good health. It includes an appendix listing all of the processes for quick and easy reference.

Enriched with numerous case studies and processes, this comprehensive guide takes the reader on a journey that encompasses procedures for the setting and opening of sacred space, cleansing the auric field, stone extractions, shamanic hypnosis journeys, cord removal, and the clearing of ghosts/spirits. You will learn alternative and complementary healing methods that also foster lasting personal transformation and insights.

This "how-to" book on energy healing with spirit guides and the quantum field allows one to access, understand and resolve illness and deeply buried material, including:

• Discovering Root Causes of Illness & Dysfunction
• Healing Inherited, Past-Life or Childhood Trauma
• Locating and Healing Hidden Inner Wounds
• Working with Spirit Guides and Higher Beings
• Removing Troublesome Thought Forms & Entities
• Harmonizing with Celestial/Healing Light
• Reintegrating Archived Emotions
• Releasing Energetic Baggage
• Healing Addictive/Toxic Behaviors
• Retrieving Dissociated Soul Fragments
• Extracting Harmful Energies
• Ancestral Healing

Paperback, 226 pages

Native shamanic traditions tell us that there are cords, strands, threads, and filaments of energy that flow to and through us, connecting us to everyone and everything in the Universe. Some energy strands make us feel vibrant and alive. Others deplete and weaken us. Most of us are unaware of these energy strands, but they are extremely powerful forces that surround us every day.In her latest book, Energy Strands, Denise Linn shows you how to release the cords that bind you and strengthen the ones that heal you. She shares methods she’s personally practiced over the years to help you achieve peace and balance in your life, including how to:

• discover attachments to family, friends, lovers, past-lives, and pets
• cut energy strands with toxic people and unhealthy relationships
• activate specific techniques to protect and shield your energy field
• use space clearing methods to create harmony in your home

Energy Strands explores the connection between the chakras, breath, meditation, visualization, sound healing, and more. Using a variety of tools, including dowsing, smudging, singing bowls, crystals, and much, much more, you’ll begin to renew your energy, replenish your inner sources, and magnify the cords that empower you.

This redemption story of Native American healer Bobby Lake-Thom invites the reader to enter a world of authentic indigenous traditions and ceremonies. Bobby, also known as Medicine Grizzly Bear, didn't recognize his shamanic calling at first. He didn't know that his vivid dreams, psychic abilities, and visitations by wild animals and ghostly figures were calls from the Great Spirit.

According to Sandra Ingerman and thousands of years of shamans before her, it is not what we do but who we are and what we are willing to become that affects our happiness, the health of our communities, and ultimately the planet itself.

The Shaman's Toolkit teaches us how to root out the beliefs that are limiting us, how to heal our inner lives and become the people we most want to be, and how to utilize ancient shamanic principles of manifestation to help shape the world we want to live in.

This is shamanism with a kind of social change agenda. It's about having the happiest and most fulfilling life possible and becoming a truly effective world citizen and change maker.

This book was originally published in 2010 as How to Thrive in Changing Times.

For thousands of years hand mudras have been used in India for healing, storytelling, emotional expression, and to evoke and convey elevated spiritual states. For the first time, the elaborate system of mudras - as applied in yoga and Indian dance-has been organized into a comprehensive, fully-indexed and cross-referenced format that allows readers access to this still esoteric body of knowledge. 'Mudras of India' presents over 200 photographed hand mudras each with detailed instructions on technique, application, health and spiritual benefits and historical background. The authors have extensively researched the usage of mudras and their significance in the larger context of Indian spiritual systems, and taken painstaking efforts to ensure each mudra is rendered with correct Sanskrit name, transliteration and translation to English. The book will appeal to spiritual seekers, students and teachers of yoga and Indian Dance, scholars and lay people, and anyone interested in the rich cultural heritage of Indian mudras, and the transformative effects of these powerful hand gestures.

New Paperback Edition. Includes a key new chapter that comprehensively explains the benefits of hand mudras, covering major health concerns as well spiritual and psycho-energetic categories.