Books

One of the world's leading authorities on Zen Buddhism, D. T. Suzuki was the author of more than a hundred works on the subject in both Japanese and English, and was most instrumental in bringing the teachings of Zen Buddhism to the attention of the Western world. Written in a lively, accessible, and straightforward manner, An Introduction to Zen Buddhism is illuminating for the serious student and layperson alike.

In Sacred Light Prayers of the Divine Heart, Ronen Divon captures the essence of the human condition, illuminating the full range of felt experience, from strength to suffering, gently guiding the reader towards acceptance, true healing, and spiritual growth.

Designed to resonate with the universal truths of life, this collection provides sacred space for introspection and a deeper understanding of the self.

This book includes 70 interfaith prayers accompanied by artwork by internationally acclaimed artist Orit Ben-Tov. Inspired by all the religions of the world, it includes references to a variety of religious figures, deities, and symbolism.

In a tale inspired by Peru's Andean cosmovision and earth-centered spirituality, Call of the Owl Woman is a gripping coming-of-age story for people who like to immerse themselves in other times, places, and cultures, people who love adventure, and those who are drawn to the mystical and magical. 

In sixth-century Peru, the Nasca people have flourished for centuries, their faith and ingenuity keeping the desert valleys green in a land where water is scarce. But a prolonged drought now fuels dangerous unrest. Cunning sorcerers and brutal priests vie for control, and Water Guardians like Patya's father, who refuse to favor the powerful, are under attack. 

Devastated by her grandmother's sudden death, fifteen-year-old Patya retreats into dance and music. She does not want to become a healer like the long lineage of women in her family before her. Even her grandmother had hinted she was born for something else. But, in the wake of a deadly earthquake, Patya must not only help the healers, she must do things she never thought possible. As she begins to conquer her self-doubts and trust her own sense of justice, she will also have to outwit men of power to keep her little brother from being sacrificed by religious extremists at the coming solstice. 

As Patya begins to realize and grow into her own power, she also discovers her grandmother's secret legacy and prepares to step into an unexpected destiny. 

Centuries of colonization and other factors have disrupted indigenous communities' ability to control their own food systems. This volume explores the meaning and importance of food sovereignty for Native peoples in the United States, and asks whether and how it might be achieved and sustained.

Unprecedented in its focus and scope, this collection addresses nearly every aspect of indigenous food sovereignty, from revitalizing ancestral gardens and traditional ways of hunting, gathering, and seed saving to the difficult realities of racism, treaty abrogation, tribal sociopolitical factionalism, and the entrenched beliefs that processed foods are superior to traditional tribal fare. The contributors include scholar-activists in the fields of ethnobotany, history, anthropology, nutrition, insect ecology, biology, marine environmentalism, and federal Indian law, as well as indigenous seed savers and keepers, cooks, farmers, spearfishers, and community activists. After identifying the challenges involved in revitalizing and maintaining traditional food systems, these writers offer advice and encouragement to those concerned about tribal health, environmental destruction, loss of species habitat, and governmental food control.

After 2 decades in the study and practice of medicine, Sarah Seidelmann took a 3-month sabbatical to search for a way to feel good again. Having witnessed human suffering early in her career and within her own family, she longed for a way to address more than just the physical needs of her patients and to live in a lighter, more conscious way.

Swimming with Elephants tells the eccentric, sometimes poignant, and occasionally hilarious experience of a working mother undergoing a bewildering vocational shift from physician to shamanic healer. During that tumultuous period of answering her call, Sarah met an elephant who would become an important spirit companion on her journey, had bones thrown for her by a shaman in South Africa, and traveled to India for an ancient Hindu pilgrimage, where she received the blessing she had been longing for. Ultimately, she discovered an entirely different way of healing, one that she had always aspired to and that enabled her to help those who are suffering.

Epics of ancient India rank with the timeless myths of classical Greece and Rome in the power of their language and the underlying moral lessons. The Ramayana and Mahabharata, both originally written in Sanskrit, contain vibrant stories of kings and princes, sages and tricksters, demons and gods, damsels in distress, and mighty heroes. Ganesha Goes to Lunch collects some of the most vivid stories from these and other early Indian folklore and spiritual texts including the Vedas and the Puranas.

These stories feature the gods of India in their celestial and earthly abodes, hapless humans struggling with life's many problems, and gods and humans interacting. Assembled by Kamla Kapur, these stories illustrate the great spiritual and practical themes of the human condition. Kamla Kapur brings her poet's eye and ear to the retelling of these stories, recreating and dramatizing them to illuminate their relevance to modern times.

Robert Moss helps countless people live more enriched lives by working with the energy and insight of their dreams and becoming conscious dream journeyers. One of the greatest dreamers of all time was Harriet Tubman, who personally escorted three hundred slaves to freedom along the Underground Railroad. On the eve of the American Civil War, Tubman was guided by specific dreams to safe houses, river crossings, and friendly helpers she had never encountered previously.

As Moss explains, our own dreams run like an Underground Railroad through our lives, offering us paths to creativity, healing, and mutual understanding. He shows us how to dream true the way Harriet Tubman dreamed true: how to dream the future, how to go back inside our dreams to clarify their messages and use the information to make wiser choices, and how to bring through life-helping guidance for others.

Fueled by the music of revolution, anger, fear, and despair, we dyed our hair or shaved our heads. Eating acid like it was candy and chasing speed with cheap vodka, smoking truckloads of weed, all in a vain attempt to get numb and stay numb. This is the story of a young man and a generation of angry youths who rebelled against their parents and the unfulfilled promise of the sixties. As with many self-destructive kids, Noah Levine's search for meaning led him first to punk rock, drugs, drinking, and dissatisfaction. But the search didn't end there. Having clearly seen the uselessness of drugs and violence, Noah looked for positive ways to channel his rebellion against what he saw as the lies of society. Fueled by his anger at so much injustice and suffering, Levine now uses that energy and the practice of Buddhism to awaken his natural wisdom and compassion.

In this uniquely personal account of the lives and healing arts of female shamans in northern Peru, the author alternates diaristic writings about her own experiences with ethnographic description. Her analytical essays explore the concepts of sorcery, shamanism, and witchcraft, case studies of Peruvian women and their ritual healing techniques, the healers' religious and symbolic space, and the healing attributes unique to women. They alternate with chapters in which Glass-Coffin describes her introduction to Peru as a high school student, the traditional roles she adopted in her host family, the crisis that rocked her identity, her first ritual contact with a female healer, and her own tumultuous but ultimately rewarding healing journey under two female shamans. Male shamans, she concludes, sally forth into the spirit world to do individual combat with the sources of spiritual illness, whereas female shamans try to involve their patients more directly in their own healing.

Buddha said he could move backward through time, observes theoretical physicist Fred Alan Wolf. Time travel is not just science fiction; it may actually be possible. Wolf draws on yoga and quantum physics to show that time is a flexible projection of mind. Cheating time, he says, is an ancient metaphysical idea from the Vedas having to do with moving through meditation to a place where time stands still.

If you suffer about your relationship with food -- you eat too much or too little, think about what you will eat constantly or try not to think about it at all -- you can be free. Just look down at your plate. The answers are there. Don't run. Look. Because when we welcome what we most want to avoid, we contact the part of ourselves that is fresh and alive. We touch the life we truly want and evoke divinity itself.

Since adolescence, Geneen Roth has gained and lost more than a thousand pounds. She has been dangerously overweight and dangerously underweight. She has been plagued by feelings of shame and self-hatred and she has felt euphoric after losing a quick few pounds on a fad diet. Then one day, on the verge of suicide, she did something radical: She dropped the struggle, ended the war, stopped trying to fix, deprive and shame herself. She began trusting her body and questioning her beliefs. It worked. And losing weight was only the beginning. She wrote about her discoveries in When Food Is Love, her first New York Times bestseller. She gave huge numbers of women their first insights into compulsive eating and she changed huge numbers of lives for the better. Now, after more than three decades of studying, teaching and writing about what drives our compulsions with food, Geneen adds a profound new dimension to her work in Women, Food and God.

She begins with her most basic concept: The way you eat is inseparable from your core beliefs about being alive. Your relationship with food is an exact mirror of your feelings about love, fear, anger, meaning, transformation and, yes, even God. But it doesn't stop there. Geneen shows how going beyond both the food and feelings takes you deeper into realms of spirit and soul to the bright center of your own life. With penetrating insight and irreverent humor, Roth traces food compulsions from subtle beginnings to unexpected ends. She teaches personal examination, showing readers how to use their relationship with food to discover the fulfillment they long for. Your relationship with food, no matter how conflicted, is the doorway to freedom, says Roth. What you most want to get rid of is itself the doorway to what you want most: the demystification of weight loss and the luminous presence that so many of us call "God." Packed with revelations on every page, this book is a knock-your-socks-off ride to a deeply fulfilling relationship with food, your body...and almost everything else. Women, Food and God is, quite simply, a guide for life.

This is a story of an amazing life, the life of an extraordinary healer. In What Wants to be Known, Paul recounts the thrilling, often perilous adventures he embarks upon as he set out to increase his esoteric powers and fulfill the demands of two very different traditional healers. Born in the 1940s, Paul becomes heir to his Orthodox Jewish grandmother Gussie's Central European esoteric warrior lineage-hours after his birth. Gussie teaches him not only to heal those in need, but to do battle in the spirit world and to protect himself on the violent streets of the 1940s Bronx.

Years later he ends up in a tiny village in the Andes, where he is initiated into the Q'eros lineage by Don Manuel Quispe, a high priest who directly communicates with the natural world. As Don Manuel's last and principle student, Paul must continue the unfinished work of the lineage-whether he wants to or not. Don Manuel tasks him with healing the damage humans have caused in the highest realms of consciousness and in the natural world. That commitment takes him on a series of adventures-the likes of which we've not seen outside the fictional escapades of Carlos Castaneda.

What Wants to be Known is also an invitation for readers to experience the sacred themselves-without the perils. Paul offers a collection of traditional wisdom teachings, gleaned from the silent transmissions he received from Gussie and Don Manuel. The practices invite us to move outside of ourselves and to extend ourselves reverently to a visible manifestation of the sacred: the natural world. Through listening to what wants to be known, we enter into a reciprocal relationship with All That Is, open up to the deeper wisdom available to us all, and begin to understand how we can help heal the planet.

In this era of government gridlock, economic and ecological devastation, and seemingly intractable global violence, our future is ever more ripe for -- and in need of -- fresh, creative re-imagining. With her clear-eyed, inspiring, and sweeping vision of a possible global renaissance in the new millennium, Barbara Marx Hubbard shows us that our current crises are not the precursors of an apocalypse but the natural birth pains of an awakened, universal humanity. This is our finest hour. Conscious Evolution highlights the tremendous potential of new found scientific knowledge, technological advances, and compassionate spirituality and illustrates the opportunities that each of us has to fully participate in this exciting stage of human history. As we do, we will bring forth all that is within us and not only save ourselves, but evolve our world.

Having been prepared by two years of astral journeys with an extraterrestrial guide, eight-year-old Tanis asks her parents for a family vacation in Peru's Sacred Valley. As a result, Tanis and her family visit sacred Inca sites and find that ancient wisdom traditions are still being practiced in the Andes. In the context of Andean prophecies and practices, the book suggests how readers both young and adult can cope with our unsettling times. During her family's journey, Tanis comes of age spiritually as she encounters talking stones, shamans, spirit apparitions, spirit guides, ETs, and UFOs. Because of her open heart, curiosity, and generous nature, she is initiated into the wisdom traditions of the Andean people and connects with the mystical essence of Self beyond self, the healing power of Mother Nature, and the truly magical power of love.

Each of these four take-along booklets contains 30 topical affirmations that guide us as we work to improve our relationships. People recovering from codependency, adult children of dysfunctional families, and those seeking healthier relationships will find welcome wisdom and inspiration in the first hour A Moment to Reflect booklets, Hazelden's newest inspirational series for Twelve Step living. Each of these four take-along booklets contains 30 topical affirmations that guide us as we work to improve our relationships. The first four booklets in this series address setting boundaries, letting go, accepting ourselves, and living our own lives. When we learn we can't control others' lives, we can turn our attention to our own. We concentrate on our responsibilities and choices. We learn to take care of ourselves physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. We learn to play a starring role in our own lives.

Dr. J. E. Williams gives us an unforgettable story of the sacred way of the Q'ero, an indigenous people of the Peruvian Andes. In the highest mountains and heartland of the Q'ero, and at immense personal risk, he is taught a beautiful, inexorable value system that goes back to a time before the Incas. The mystical landscape of the high mountain wilderness fosters personal transformation. As he ascends to the roof of the world, Williams weaves the true secret of the Andes into the archetypal personal spiritual pilgrimage, an authentic journey of the heart, and brings back the message for our times.