This text combines study of the dynamic historical development of each religious tradition with a comparative thematic structure. Students are encouraged to discover and explore the nature of religious experience by comparing basic themes and issues common to all religions, finding connections with their own personal experiences. By sensitively introducing descriptive material within a comparative thematic structure, this text helps students to understand how each religion provides, for its adherents, patterns and meanings that make up a full way of life.

A discussion of Yoga, tantra, and vedanta, and what they mean for people today.

This text combines study of the dynamic historical development of each religious tradition with a comparative thematic structure. Students are encouraged to discover and explore the nature of religious experience by comparing basic themes and issues common to all religions, finding connections with their own personal experiences. By sensitively introducing descriptive material within a comparative thematic structure, this text helps students to understand how each religion provides, for its adherents, patterns and meanings that make up a full way of life (from Amazon).

Integrating Western psychological understanding with ancient Eastern and wisdom traditions, Siegel addresses how spiritual resonance is achieved within the psychotherapeutic process in The Sacred Path of the Therapist. Readers will learn how mindfulness practices and attunement can help them move clients toward recovery and beyond, allowing full potential to emerge within a shared coherent field of awakening consciousness. Topics include translating transpersonal theory into practice, understanding the human energy field, and the integration of psychotherapy and spiritual initiation. Drawing from her unique experiences working with master shamans as well as practicing as a psychotherapist, Irene Siegel discusses the evolving role of the therapist as both therapist and healer. Shamans are ancestral teachers, guides to nonordinary realms of consciousness and a divine cosmic whole within silent sacred spaces. Using lessons from native shamanic tradition and the evolving field of transpersonal psychology, both healer and client will learn to access the innate inner wisdom and healing potential within themselves through guided meditation exercises within moment-by-moment sacred space. The expanding content and context of therapy blends the two worlds: the clinical world and the world of the shaman.

Alternative medicine, holistic health, and spiritual healing are promoted as recent innovations in modern medicine, yet all have been practiced by native peoples for thousands of years. Native Healing: Four Sacred Paths to Health is unique among health-related books. Native healers explore and promote the powerful effects of family and community, as well as spiritual and traditional treatments, on personal health. Today they are beginning to be integrated into the health care system, and this book shows how you too can benefit from their wisdom. In words and photographs, Dr. Peate draws on his personal experience to describe native healers' holistic approach to healthcare, from sings to sandpaintings to chants and cures.

For 250 years, the Turkic Muslims of Altishahr—the vast desert region to the northwest of Tibet—have led an uneasy existence under Chinese rule. Today they call themselves Uyghurs, and they have cultivated a sense of history and identity that challenges Beijing’s official national narrative. Rian Thum argues that the roots of this history run deeper than recent conflicts, to a time when manuscripts and pilgrimage dominated understandings of the past. Beyond broadening our knowledge of tensions between the Uyghurs and the Chinese government, this meditation on the very concept of history probes the limits of human interaction with the past. Uyghur historical practice emerged from the circulation of books and people during the Qing Dynasty, when crowds of pilgrims listened to history readings at the tombs of Islamic saints. Over time, amid long journeys and moving rituals, at oasis markets and desert shrines, ordinary readers adapted community-authored manuscripts to their own needs. In the process they created a window into a forgotten Islam, shaped by the veneration of local saints. Partly insulated from the rest of the Islamic world, the Uyghurs constructed a local history that is at once unique and assimilates elements of Semitic, Iranic, Turkic, and Indic traditions—the cultural imports of Silk Road travelers. Through both ethnographic and historical analysis, The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History offers a new understanding of Uyghur historical practices, detailing the remarkable means by which this people reckons with its past and confronts its nationalist aspirations in the present day.

The nineteen Teaching Sessions presented in this book also explain the specific steps involved in conducting many ancient ceremonies that, collectively, can create a personal lifestyle that produces peace, harmony, and balance within the Sacred Circle of Life. The words to the songs associated with those ceremonies are printed in the Appendix.