Experiencing a relationship with our Ancestors is a blessing and a privilege. I feel compelled to share my story and personal journey concerning relationships and encounters I have had with my Ancestors- our vivid interactions, their words of wisdom, inspiration, guidance, tough love, protection, and so much more. This book presents my recollections of actual encounters, whether visions, dreams, thoughts or various other mediums through which my Ancestors choose to communicate.The ability to interact in both the spiritual and physical planes through Garifuna Spirituality is a marvel in and of itself. I have been given permission by my Ancestors to share some of my experiences, while there remain some rituals, events, and encounters that I have been asked not to share.My experiences and encounters have shaped so much of my perception of the world and everyday life. I hope you will enjoy reading this book as much as have I enjoyed telling my story. My Spiritual Journey, A Symbiotic Relationship with my Ancestors has manifested!

An exploration of animal spirituality and the ability of animals to communicate with humans even in the afterlife • 2019 Coalition of Visionary Resources Gold Award and Industry Choice and Peoples Choice Award • Chronicles the author’s profound relationship with her dog, Brio, his ability to read her mind and emotions, and the messages she received from him after his death • Shares the author’s research with animal communicators, psychics, and scientists specializing in animal intelligence such as Rupert Sheldrake • Explores animals’ thoughts and feelings, interspecies communication and telepathy, animal souls and the afterlife, and animal reincarnation • Paper with French flaps Looking for companionship after a near-fatal car crash, Elena Mannes, an award-winning television journalist and producer, decided to get her first dog. But what she found with her dog Brio shook the foundations of her physical and spiritual worlds, sending her on a quest to discover the nature of his spiritual origins and to contemplate and seek out the possibility of interspecies communication--even after death. Soon after bringing her puppy home, Mannes realized that the master-companion relationship would not be possible with Brio, who quickly showed that he had a mind--and a spirit--of his own. A healer Mannes visited immediately focused on Brio, exclaiming that he was an old soul. Mannes’s growing curiosity about the intelligence, emotions, and consciousness of Brio and other dogs led her to contact an animal psychic in California who described, with amazing accuracy, Brio’s favorite walks and the author’s apartment from the dog’s point of view. Motivated by her experience, Mannes produced a filmed segment with Diane Sawyer featuring the same psychic, who described Sawyer’s country house and her dog’s favorite spots in the yard. Mannes’s skeptical journalist background compelled her to investigate further. She delved into the world of animal communicators, psychics, and scientists studying animal intelligence, including Rupert Sheldrake, to find answers to her multiplying questions: Do animals have thoughts and feelings? Consciousness? Souls? Is interspecies communication possible? Can animals reincarnate? Spanning the entire life and afterlife of Brio, including his last days and his messages to the author after he passed on, this book also explores Mannes’ investigations into the spiritual life of animals, offering a new understanding of the unbreakable bond between humans and animals. Mannes invites readers to move beyond the owner-pet relationship and shows us how to see animals as thinking, feeling, spiritual beings whose connections with us extend far beyond life and death.

Author Barbara Gray Armstrong came of age during Jim Crow when the color line was clearly drawn and America was divided into black and white. Black people were denied rights and endured discrimination. In Honoring My Journey, she weaves together both personal and public events as an exploration of what it was like being black in America. In this memoir, she shares stories from her youth, growing up in the 1950s and 60s in the South and prospering despite widespread bigotry. Representing just a slice of her life, Honoring My Journey narrates experiences with her parents, siblings, grandparents, friends, and classmates and of working as a nanny for a white family. Armstrong blends the details of her family and family history into a larger, societal context to tell a story that is both personal and universal. Honoring My Journey provides insight into what it was like growing up during such a turbulent time in the nations history.

This book examines Lee Smith's novel-length fiction and its powerful reflection of her personal search for and journey toward spiritual reconciliation. The protagonists of Smith's novels feel estranged from any sense of feminine sacredness as they struggle for a belief system that offers them hope and validation. Chapters describe how Smith has retrieved in her fiction a source of transformative power--the power of the sexual, maternal, feminine divine--in hopes of creating a new image of the total, sacred female whose sexuality, creativity, spirituality, and maternity can reside comfortably in the bodies of everyday heroines.

Given the renewed interest in Evelyn Underhill with the publication of Evelyn Underhill’s Prayer Book (SPCK, January 2018), the time seems right to offer a fresh perspective on the writer’s spiritual formation. Having undertaken original research, Robyn Wrigley-Carr first explores the spiritual nurture that Evelyn Underhill received from Baron Friedrich von Hügel (‘to whom I owe my spiritual life’). Second she reveals the spiritual nurture that Underhill gave to people herself, utilizing both published and unpublished materials. At the heart of the book is the idea of a ‘long obedience in the same direction’: Underhill’s life had purpose and meaning as a result of the Baron’s spiritual direction and the soul care she tirelessly bestowed on others.