Imagine how your life would change if you discovered the secrets to understanding the Natural Laws of Creation? What if you could access the wisdom of the ancients directly and were able to live your life as a spiritually awakened being, with an open heart, creating the life you dream of? Wind Hughes is a modern-day feminine shaman. In this book, she takes you on a journey out of the confines of the body to the expanded reaches of spiritual experience beyond life as we know it. Life Is the Ceremony chronicles her visions, mystical experiences, meeting with teachers from other dimensions, and her use of ceremony to call in her soul mate. By sharing her personal journey through the mystical and quantum realms, Wind makes the transcendent life accessible to everyone. 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 that opens 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. In Life Is the Ceremony, Wind interweaves her professional life as a psychotherapist into her spiritual experience and mystical visions, providing the reader an intimate insight into our human journey and our desire for a deeper understanding of life. Wind's candid style of writing is evident in her award-winning first book, Daughters of the Moon, Sisters of the Sun: Young Women and Mentors on the Transition to Womanhood (co-authored with Linda Wolf, available from New Society Publishers). The book, which has been translated into Chinese, is based on a two-year project for teens designed to empower young women and facilitate healthy relationships between the genders. Those who shared their wisdom include Maya Angelou, the Indigo Girls, Riane Eisler, Angela Davis, Starhawk, Robert Bly, and many others. Win

• Explains how ritual can serve as a way to ground yourself, invite in the new, let go of what needs to be shed, and tap into your own inner powers • Shares ancient and modern rituals, ceremonies, and practices to connect with the seasons, the lunar cycles, and the five elements, as well as open your heart, dance with your shadow self, grow your intuition, and connect with your body • Offers detailed instructions for each ritual, ceremony, and transformative healing practice HEALING BALM for psyche and soul, ritual invokes a unique magic that allows us to step beyond the mundane and touch base with the sacred turning points in our life and the truth of our soul’s calling. In this evocative guide, Mara Branscombe offers potent soul-care rituals and ceremonies to purify and strengthen minds, hearts, and bodies, so as to enable us to activate our inner power. Connecting with the pagan wheel of the year, the five elements, and the lunar cycle, soulstirring rituals and step-by-step healing protocols show a path towards a deeper, heart-centered living. Transformative practices such as guided meditations and visualizations, breathwork, altar creation, and discovery of our personal empowerment mantras facilitate our healing journey. Ancient and modern ceremonies and specific spiritual formulas help us embody a loving existence, dance with our shadow self, engage with grief, grow our intuition, dismantle limiting beliefs, and heal toxic patterns to find inner strength and peace. Ritual as Remedy is an invitation to shape-shift, heal, transform, and reclaim one’s true soul purpose through powerful self-care protocols that awaken freedom, joy, and a wild, untamed self-love.

Ancestry is big business these days, but mere biological genealogy fails to tap into our spiritual roots. The shamans of indigenous cultures have known for millennia how to do this. 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. 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. Using these ancient techniques, indigenous peoples receive a variety of gifts from their Old Ones, including destiny guidance, healing, protection, and wisdom teachings. Yet some ancestors may behave like hooligans, causing psychological distress and physical woes, and even curses against a whole lineage. But these maladies are both prevented and countered by shamanic methods such as home cleansing, disposal of the deceased’s property, severance ceremonies, and the like. The author ends with practical takeaways—lessons from the lineages so to speak—showing how you and your ancestors, through concerted spiritual action, can co-evolve to higher spiritual planes. As a team.

The long-awaited first short story-collection by the author of the cult sensation Convenience Store Woman, tales of weird love, heartfelt friendships, and the unsettling nature of human existence With Life Ceremony, the incomparable Sayaka Murata is back with her first collection of short stories ever to be translated into English. In Japan, Murata is particularly admired for her short stories, which are sometimes sweet, sometimes shocking, and always imbued with an otherworldly imagination and uncanniness. In these twelve stories, Murata mixes an unusual cocktail of humor and horror to portray both the loners and outcasts as well as turning the norms and traditions of society on their head to better question them. Whether the stories take place in modern-day Japan, the future, or an alternate reality is left to the reader’s interpretation, as the characters often seem strange in their normality in a frighteningly abnormal world. In “A First-Rate Material,” Nana and Naoki are happily engaged, but Naoki can’t stand the conventional use of deceased people’s bodies for clothing, accessories, and furniture, and a disagreement around this threatens to derail their perfect wedding day. “Lovers on the Breeze” is told from the perspective of a curtain in a child’s bedroom that jealously watches the young girl Naoko as she has her first kiss with a boy from her class and does its best to stop her. “Eating the City” explores the strange norms around food and foraging, while “Hatchling” closes the collection with an extraordinary depiction of the fractured personality of someone who tries too hard to fit in. In these strange and wonderful stories of family and friendship, sex and intimacy, belonging and individuality, Murata asks above all what it means to be a human in our world and offers answers that surprise and linger.

A beautifully illustrated guide for connecting with the earth, your ancestors, and your communities as you come home to your whole self Despite our best efforts, our modern world leaves so many of us feeling isolated, unworthy, and alone. We’re unrooted from the land, untethered from our lineages, disconnected from our communities, and separated from our deepest sense of self. In Root and Ritual, Becca Piastrelli offers a pathway back to connection and wholeness through rituals, recipes, and ancestral wisdom. “Though we live in a radically different-looking world, the needs of our bodies and spirits are the same as the ancestors we came from.” Divided into four parts—Land, Lineage, Community, and Self—this book takes you on a journey for engaging more deeply with your life: Part 1 introduces practices for reconnecting with the land, including seasonal recipes, crafting with plants, and tending your homeIn Part 2, you’ll learn to reclaim the gifts of your lineage as you understand past harms and explore the traditional folklore, foods, and arts of those who came beforePart 3 centers around community, helping you cultivate sisterhood and celebrate meaningful rites of passageIn Part 4, you’ll return to yourself as you open your intuition, tune in to your body, and awaken the wild woman within A rich and dynamic treasure chest of timeless teachings, Root and Ritual is a beautiful guide for knowing who you are—and that you belong here.

We all need to find connection and meaning in the midst of the fast paced world we live in and rituals offer an easy and simple way to do this. In this 365 year-long exploration, Theresa Cheung offers daily practices to help us bring focus and attention to our lives for meaningful and achievable change. A ritual is any action we take that has meaning beyond its appearance; by giving an action intention it becomes 'sacred' and purposeful. The absence of significant ceremony in our lives has left us feeling disconnected, confused and alone Rituals and ceremony allow us to be present in the now, focus on the future and provide us with closure on the past, they return us to what matters. Drawing on science and psychology, Theresa Cheung's 365 non-denominational rituals will help anyone to transform their lives. Split into four sections, the book begins with 21 simple foundation rituals to help you ground your daily practice. The second and largest section is broken down into 4 areas: Body, Mind, Spirit and Heart. Each containing 74 rituals, some simple and some more complex. Choose the area you feel you want to focus on and follow the rituals in sequence or chose as you wish. The third section has a four-week programme focussing on success and broken down week-by-week and the final section contains 21 closing rituals. For those wanting a year long programme the book can be used day-by-day or alternatively choose a ritual at random.

One of the main tenets of shamanism is a belief in the power of rituals and ceremonies to manifest change in the physical world. Every shamanic school on the planet uses rituals and ceremonies as tools for personal transformation. In this book, shaman and New York Times bestselling author don Jose Ruiz explains many of the most popular rituals and ceremonies used in shamanism and instructs readers how to perform these rites on their own. This book is a how-to guide for creating power objects and animal totems and learning how to do soul retrieval, recapitulation, dream training, and more. The son of don Miguel Ruiz, the author of the world-renowned Four Agreements, don Jose Ruiz is a shaman in the Native American Toltec tradition.