Shamanism Books

A story-based guide to the techniques of shamanic healing

• Details indigenous medicine tools and soul healing techniques, including diagnosis and energy cleansing with plants, stones, fire, flower essences, and sound

• Offers protection and self-defense techniques for confronting negative energies such as spirit attachment and possession

• Shares healing stories that each address a specific condition, such as panic attacks, PTSD, depression, cancer, chronic pain, grief, and relationship problems

In Discovering Your Spirit Animal, shamanic healer Lucy Harmer presents a practical approach to understanding spirit animals and applying their power to specific situations in daily life. Written in clear, simple language and featuring compelling stories and anecdotes, the book explains what a spirit animal is, describes its purpose, and shows that understanding the “medicine” of one’s spirit animal—assimilating its qualities and characteristics—allows one to apply the lessons and messages they convey and use them for personal transformation. Lucy Harmer notes that particular animals that cross one’s path or appear repeatedly nearby probably want us to share in their medicine, their teaching, their energy, and their spirit.Discovering Your Spirit Animal provides guidance for meeting and getting to know one’s spirit animal through easy exercises and shamanic techniques. Lucy Harmer explains how to discover the strengths, qualities, and skills one shares with one’s personal spirit animal, enabling one to learn how to reinforce this connection and access innate wisdom and inner power, overcome fears, increase natural healing capacity, and improve relationships.

This book is a practical how-to guide for living your own unique conscious and awakened life, and becoming the powerful manifestor that you are. It is a map leading to the doorway opening to the other side. Awakening and becoming a Spiritual R-Evolutionary is the most powerful personal and political act. Individually, we can change the planet. You may laugh, you may cry: you will come away transformed.

Learn to prepare yourself for healing work, communicate with spirit guides, free your voice and seek your power song, safely explore your shadow side, and partner with your drum to create healing. The author also covers practical ethical matters such as taking payment and working with friends.

Psychedelic Shamanism presents a useful guide to the cultivation of psychedelic plants and their use as catalysts for exploring the structure of human consciousness and imaginal realms of reality as described by Eastern and Western spiritual traditions, modern depth psychology, and indigenous cultures throughout the world.

Building on the principles found in his father’s bestselling book The Four Agreements, don Miguel Ruiz Jr. invites us to gauge how attached we are to our own point of view. In The Five Levels of Attachment, he will help you gain awareness of the agreements you have been implicitly making all these years that shape your reality and affect your future and show you how to release the attachments which no longer reflect who you really are.

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.

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.

A distinguished anthropologist–who is also an initiated shaman–reveals the long-hidden female roots of the world’s oldest form of religion and medicine. Here is a fascinating expedition into this ancient tradition, from its prehistoric beginnings to the work of women shamans across the globe today. Shamanism was not only humankind’s first spiritual and healing practice, it was originally the domain of women. This is the claim of Barbara Tedlock’s provocative and myth-shattering book. Reinterpreting generations of scholarship, Tedlock–herself an expert in dreamwork, divination, and healing–explains how and why the role of women in shamanism was misinterpreted and suppressed, and offers a dazzling array of evidence, from prehistoric African rock art to modern Mongolian ceremonies, for women’s shamanic powers.

One of the most astonishing and intimate accounts of spiritual transformation ever written, this is the true story of an African's shaman's initiation--a remarkable sharing of living African traditions, offered with compassion for those struggling with our contemporary crisis of spirit.

Drawing on a global survey of ethnographic reports, direct teachings from shamans of many continents, and experiences from his own shamanic practice, the author presents a wealth of useful ways that shamans have developed, around the world and across the ages, to connect with ancestors in both our realm and theirs. These include spirit-plates; effigies; pilgrimages; walkabouts; and trips with plant-spirits.

In this comprehensive cross-cultural survey, Dr. David Kowalewski, scholar and practicing shaman, offers several techniques for engaging the Old Ones the old-fashioned way. Although modern people have largely lost this tradition, the ancestors are coming back strong, along with the shamans-a welcome happening that may reverse our ancestor-deficit disorder.

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.

Shamanism is an ancient spirituality rooted in the belief that all matter has consciousness and that accessing the spirit in all things is part of what keeps the world and people healthy and in balance.

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.

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.