"As the power of fear and hatred threatens to drive me back over the edge, I desperately try to focus on the positive. The harder I try, the faster my head vibrates, about to explode...Something suddenly cracks, followed by a rushing sound... I vomit again and again. The stench of death fills the air.Seconds later, the purest peace I've ever felt fills my body. I open my eyes and see the world for the first time, as it really is: pristine, beautiful and perfect..."Thirty-year-old computer programmer Mark Flaherty's world is turned upside down when he is diagnosed with an incurable illness, and a voice within insists the answer lies with ayahuasca-a sacred, visionary plant medicine.Flaherty leaves his native England to live among the shamans of the Peruvian Amazon where he participates in hundreds of ayahuasca ceremonies. What he discovers about himself and the nature of existence is as shocking as it is inspiring.This captivating true story of a man's fight to heal himself demonstrates that anything really is possible and everything does happen for a reason.

The Ayahuasca Guidebook and sacred dieta weekly countdown, for the best and most healing experience possible. Includes; The most researched and detailed Ayahuasca dieta you can find anywhere. A spiritual dieta preparation, how to choose a shaman, how to choose a retreat, how to work with releasing fear, navigating on the medicine, travel tips, integration, a packing list for the Amazon Jungle & Sacred Valley of Peru, and much more!

In the tradition of memoirs like Daniel Pinchbeck's 2012 and Jim Carroll's The Basketball Diaries, Adam Elenbaas's Fishers of Men chronicles his journey from intense self-destruction and crippling depression to self-acceptance, inner awareness, and spiritual understanding, through participation in mindexpanding-and healing ayahuasca ceremonies in South America and beyond. From his troubled and rebellious youth as a Methodist minister's son in Minnesota, to his sex and substance abuse-fueled downward spiral in Chicago and New York, culminating in a depressive breakdown, Elenbaas is plagued by a feeling of emptiness and a desperate search for meaning for most of his young life. After hitting rock bottom at his grandfather's house in rural Michigan, a chance experience with psychedelic mushrooms convinces him that he must change his ways to achieve the sense of peace that he has always desired. Several subsequent psychedelic experiences inspire him to embark on a quest to South America and take part in a shamanic ceremony, where he consumes ayahuasca, a jungle vine revered for its spiritual properties. Over the course of nearly forty ayahuasca ceremonies during four years, Elenbaas discovers the truth about his own life and past, and begins to mend himself from the inside out. Fishers of Men is the gripping, heartbreaking, and yet ultimately uplifting story of the power to transcend one's past.

A searing memoir of reckoning and healing by acclaimed journalist Stephanie Foo, investigating the little-understood science behind complex PTSD and how it has shaped her life “Achingly exquisite . . . providing real hope for those who long to heal.”—Lori Gottlieb, New York Times bestselling author of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, Cosmopolitan, NPR, Mashable, She Reads, Publishers Weekly By age thirty, Stephanie Foo was successful on paper: She had her dream job as an award-winning radio producer at This American Life and a loving boyfriend. But behind her office door, she was having panic attacks and sobbing at her desk every morning. After years of questioning what was wrong with herself, she was diagnosed with complex PTSD—a condition that occurs when trauma happens continuously, over the course of years. Both of Foo’s parents abandoned her when she was a teenager, after years of physical and verbal abuse and neglect. She thought she’d moved on, but her new diagnosis illuminated the way her past continued to threaten her health, relationships, and career. She found limited resources to help her, so Foo set out to heal herself, and to map her experiences onto the scarce literature about C-PTSD. In this deeply personal and thoroughly researched account, Foo interviews scientists and psychologists and tries a variety of innovative therapies. She returns to her hometown of San Jose, California, to investigate the effects of immigrant trauma on the community, and she uncovers family secrets in the country of her birth, Malaysia, to learn how trauma can be inherited through generations. Ultimately, she discovers that you don’t move on from trauma—but you can learn to move with it. Powerful, enlightening, and hopeful, What My Bones Know is a brave narrative that reckons with the hold of the past over the present, the mind over the body—and examines one woman’s ability to reclaim agency from her trauma.

This book summarizes Ismael Apud’s ethnographic research in the field of ayahuasca, conducted in Latin America and Catalonia over a period of 10 years. To analyze the variety of ayahuasca spiritual practices and beliefs, the author combines different approaches, including medical anthropology, cognitive science of religion, history of science, and religious studies. Ismael Apud is a psychologist and anthropologist from Uruguay, with a PhD in Anthropology at Universitat Rovira i Virgili.

Winner of the International Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction Animal tracks, word magic, the speech of stones, the power of letters, and the taste of the wind all figure prominently in this intellectual tour de force that returns us to our senses and to the sensuous terrain that sustains us. This major work of ecological philosophy startles the senses out of habitual ways of perception. For a thousand generations, human beings viewed themselves as part of the wider community of nature, and they carried on active relationships not only with other people with other animals, plants, and natural objects (including mountains, rivers, winds, and weather patters) that we have only lately come to think of as "inanimate." How, then, did humans come to sever their ancient reciprocity with the natural world? What will it take for us to recover a sustaining relation with the breathing earth? In The Spell of the Sensuous David Abram draws on sources as diverse as the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, Balinese shamanism, Apache storytelling, and his own experience as an accomplished sleight-of-hand of magician to reveal the subtle dependence of human cognition on the natural environment. He explores the character of perception and excavates the sensual foundations of language, which--even at its most abstract--echoes the calls and cries of the earth. On every page of this lyrical work, Abram weaves his arguments with a passion, a precision, and an intellectual daring that recall such writers as Loren Eisleley, Annie Dillard, and Barry Lopez.

The quest for the lost Ark of the Covenent.