Books

Science is beginning to prove what ancient cultures fully embraced: your voice can become one of the most powerful agents of transformation in every facet of your life. Free Your Voice offers you the liberating insights and personal instruction of music healing legend Silvia Nakkach, whose four-decade immersion in the voice as a creative force makes her a uniquely qualified educator. With co-author Valerie Carpenter, Silvia shows how to reclaim the healing potential of your voice (regardless of training or experience) through more than 100 enjoyable exercises that are steeped in spiritual tradition and classical vocal technique and backed by the latest science.

Merging Buddhist mindfulness practices with the Twelve Step program, this updated edition of the bestselling recovery guide One Breath at a Time will inspire and enlighten you to live a better, healthier life.

Many in recovery turn to the Twelve Steps to overcome their addictions, but struggle with the spiritual program. But what they might not realize is that Buddhist teachings are intrinsically intertwined with the lessons of the Twelve Steps, and offer time-tested methods for addressing the challenges of sobriety.

In what is considered the cornerstone of the most significant recovery movement of the 21st century, Kevin Griffin shares his own extraordinary journey to sobriety and how he integrated the Twelve Steps of recovery with Buddhist mindfulness practices. With a new foreword by William Alexander, the author of Ordinary Recovery, One Breath at a Time takes you on a journey through the Steps, examining critical ideas like Powerlessness, Higher Power, and Moral Inventory through the lens of the core concepts of Buddhism—the Four Noble Truths, the Eightfold Path, mindfulness, loving-kindness, and more. The result is a book that presents techniques and meditations for finding clarity and awareness in your life, just as it has for thousands of addicts and alcoholics.

How To Practice is a major inspirational work, by one of the world's greatest spiritual teachers. It is broken down into the basic steps to enlightenment: how to practice morality, how to practice meditation, and how to practice wisdom, whilst simultaneously delving deeper into His Holiness' more general teachings, his spirit, wisdom and sense of humor. The book, meant to be used as part of daily practice, is easy to understand and filled with anecdotes. It includes guidance on peace of mind, generosity, compassion, and much more besides. Beautifully packaged, this is the ultimate gift from the Dalai Lama, and a wonderful gift to give to anyone interested in having a richer, more fulfilled life.

An introduction to the spiritual source of the beliefs and practices that have so profoundly shaped African American religious traditions.

Most of the Africans who were enslaved and brought to the Americas were from the Yoruba nation of West Africa, an ancient and vast civilization. In the diaspora caused by the slave trade, the guiding concepts of the Yoruba spiritual tradition took root in Haiti, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Brazil, and the United States.

In this accessible introduction, Baba Ifa Karade provides an overview of the Yoruba tradition and its influence in the West. He describes the sixteen Orisha, or spirit gods, and shows us how to work with divination, use the energy centers of the body to internalize the teachings of Yoruba, and create a sacred place of worship. The book also includes prayers, dances, songs, offerings, and sacrifices to honor the Orisha.

Connect to the Earth and Embrace Its Teachings

From animals and plants to landscapes and seasons, the natural world is a phenomenal teacher. It guides and supports you in improving your relationships, finances, health, and much more. Packed with practical exercises, meditations, and new perspectives, Wisdom of the Natural World empowers you to find balance in life and realize your importance to the planet.

Join Granddaughter Crow on an illuminating journey to become your most authentic self. Explore how the seasons and weather cycles affect your four bodies--physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual. Discover how to create your own medicine wheel and work with your shadow side. This enlightening book helps you communicate with nature and apply its concepts to your day-to-day life, giving you a deep sense of purpose and understanding. Wisdom of the Natural World is your key to finding connection and feeling like you belong.

Foreword by Michael Smith, PhD, author of The Complete Empath Toolkit

Stepping beyond the shape of a footprint and into the unseen story of the track, veteran wilderness guide Tamarack Song takes you inside the eyes and mind of an intuitive tracker, with intimate stories where Frogs show the way out of the woods, scat reveals life histories, and Bears demonstrate how to find missing people.

New and updated edition (2020) of this classic book first published in 2004

REALITY introduces us to the extraordinary mystical tradition that lies right at the roots of western culture.

This is the true story of Parmenides, Empedocles, and those like them: spiritual guides and experts in other states of consciousness, healers and interpreters of dreams, prophets and magicians who laid the foundation for the world we now live in. REALITY documents the excruciating process that led to their work and teaching being distorted, covered over, forgotten. And most importantly, it presents these original teachings in all their immediacy and power -- revealing their ability, just as vibrant now as at the dawn of the western world, to awaken us to what reality truly is.

Shamanistic practices involve ancient traditions that have been found in similar cultures around the world. The roots of shamanism in practices of healing, prophesy, group leadership, art, and mythology reflect neuropsychological basese that underlie the often surprising effectiveness of its practice.

The Book That Will Help You Believe in Miracles!

“Unique and captivating!”

Shaman Stone Soup is a collection of beautifully written and heartfelt stories in which Shaman Elizabeth Herrera brings miracles to life through her personal experiences and as a healer for friends, family, and clients. Inside you’ll find stories about the ghost who overstayed her welcome, the spirits of ancient wise men who provided a miraculous cure from cancer, a conversation with a hurricane and its unintended impact, the man who got out of his wheelchair to go hunting and fishing, healing the karmic ties of a young college boy, a vivid dream of a pastor who needed guidance, the transformation of a schizophrenic, the loving contact from her mother who died unexpectedly, and more.

Shaman Stone Soup offers a multifaceted view of miracles that is not limited to shamanism, A Course in Miracles, religion, spirituality, or lack of faith, but rather emphasizes that miracles are natural occurrences experienced by everyone.

Respected kamasqa curandero Oscar Miro-Quesada teaches shamanism as a tradition of healing, power, and wisdom that sees all life as interconnected and sacred. Understand the shamanic art of a noble death, becoming a hollow bone, traveling through the three worlds, and how to embrace the imaginal beauty of a living, sentient, and ever-evolving cosmos.

Feel soul-animating moments with Creation itself as don Oscar and our sacred storytellers share their transformative experiences, including those of:

• a woman who meets a sister she never knew-child to child, soul to soul
• a man whose animal ally gives him the gift of unconditional love
• a woman who connects with the Amazigh women who served as oracles long ago
• a granddaughter who conquers her fear and completes her first vision quest
• a woman whose reverence and songs to Gaia bring much needed rain
• a man who is protected from harm by sacred plant allies

You must live the path to understand it. Cultivate spiritual discernment, learn how to consecrate your shamanic ceremonial space, practice an ancient Andean earth walk ritual, internalize the soul-nurturing beauty of Mother Earth with the Pachamama Renewal Process, work with the five principal animal allies of Universal Shamanism, and discover the loving grace that sparked the emergence of shamanism as a universal path of healing service.

SHAMANISM is the medicine our world needs for seven generations and beyond.

In this carefully curated selection of everyday reflections, Richard Wagamese finds lessons in both the mundane and sublime as he muses on the universe, drawing inspiration from working in the bush--sawing and cutting and stacking wood for winter as well as the smudge ceremony to bring him closer to the Creator. Embers is perhaps Richard Wagamese's most personal volume to date. Honest, evocative and articulate, he explores the various manifestations of grief, joy, recovery, beauty, gratitude, physicality and spirituality--concepts many find hard to express. But for Wagamese, spirituality is multifaceted.

Within these pages, readers will find hard-won and concrete wisdom on how to feel the joy in the everyday things. Wagamese does not seek to be a teacher or guru, but these observations made along his own journey to become, as he says, "a spiritual bad-ass," make inspiring reading.

Activating the Heart is an exploration of storytelling as a tool for knowledge production and sharing to build new connections between people and their histories, environments, and cultural geographies. The collection pays particular attention to the significance of storytelling in Indigenous knowledge frameworks and extends into other ways of knowing in works where scholars have embraced narrative and story as a part of their research approach.

In the first section, Storytelling to Understand, authors draw on both theoretical and empirical work to examine storytelling as a way of knowing. In the second section, Storytelling to Share, authors demonstrate the power of stories to share knowledge and convey significant lessons, as well as to engage different audiences in knowledge exchange. The third section, Storytelling to Create, contains three poems and a short story that engage with storytelling as a means to produce or create knowledge, particularly through explorations of relationship to place.

From the author of The Teachings of don Juan. The legendary Yaqui Indian sorcerer don Juan returns, and through his mesmerizing stories readers learn the vital secrets of belief and self-realization that are transcendental and valid for us all--that wisdom, strength and power lie within ourselves.

So many books have been written about the meditation side of Zen and the everyday, chop wood/carry water side of Zen. But few books have approached Zen the way that most Japanese actually do--through ritualized arts of discipline and beauty--and perhaps that is why Eugen Herrigel's Zen in the Art of Archery is still popular so long after it first publication in 1953.

Herrigel, a philosophy professor, spent six years studying archery and flower-arranging in Japan, practicing every day, and struggling with foreign notions such as "eyes that hear and ears that see." In a short, pithy narrative, he brings the heart of Zen to perfect clarity--intuition, imitation, practice, practice, practice, then, boom, wondrous spontaneity fusing self and art, mind, body, and spirit.

Herrigel writes with an attention to subtle profundity and relates it with a simple artistry that itself carries the signature of Zen. --Brian Bruya

A set of ancient inscriptions on marble found forty years ago in southern Italy, recording details so bewildering that scholars have kept silent about them.

Strange evidence about a tradition of people who were mystics but who were so intensely practical that, two and a half thousand years ago, they shaped our existence and the world we live in. And yet they did this with a purpose we've completely forgotten.

These are just two ingredients of this extraordinary book, which uncovers an astonishing reality that lies unsuspected right at the origins of the western world. Our dramatic failure to acknowledge or come to grips with that reality is what has been responsible for so much of the emptiness -- of the sense of something missing -- in our modern lives.

In the Dark Places of Wisdom is no work of fiction. The documents, the discoveries, the people that it describes are all as real as we are. But the story it has to tell is far stranger than any fiction, because this is the story of ourselves.