Books

A renowned practitioner of herbal medicine offers a beautiful introduction to adaptogenic herbs, explaining what they are, how they improve your life, and how you can use them for personal wellness.

Adaptogenic herbs, like ginseng, cordyceps, and rhodiola, work to counteract the effects of stresses on the body. Used for millennia in Eastern healing, they have now become popular again. Adriana Ayales, owner of Anima Mundi Herbals, shares her in-depth knowledge of these amazing herbs. In addition to a list of complementary herbs that pair wells with adaptogens, Ayales also lists “master herbs” being researched for their adaptogenic-like chemistry. She offers 30 recipes for food, drinks, and natural beauty cures that can help banish fatigue, sharpen your mind, stimulate your central nervous system, and enhance vitality. Beautifully illustrated throughout, this authoritative guide also provides daily self-care tips for promoting wellness in mind, body, and spirit.

The core essence of these widely available herbs is that they are masterful longevity tonics, popularly known for their ability to protect against the negative effects of stress. In this beautifully illustrated book, Adriana Ayales, founder of Anima Mundi Herbals, shares must-know information on adaptogens and secondary adaptogens. You’ll also find everyday self-care recipes, from warming tonics and lattes to foods like smoothie bowls, to cocktails and spritzers, as well as bath and body products. With this book at hand, you can navigate the amazing world of adaptogens.

Neelou Malekpour brings us a gorgeously illustrated, essential guide to the energy rituals that will help transform your life. 

Learn how to cleanse and protect yourself and your space, tap into your intuition, and elevate your frequency through sacred smoke, candle, stone rituals—and more. Neelou Malekpour is here to support you for all occasions, whether that’s:
  •  healing heartache, relieving anxiety, and dispelling bad dreams;
  •  cultivating focus, receiving support during travel, and prepping a space for meditation; or
  •  calling in love, blessing others, and connecting to your highest self.
 
With The Art of Sacred Smoke, Malekpour is ready to share the rituals that are essential to aligning and calibrating your energy. Learn how to use the natural ingredients she employs in her practices—and in her frequency-raising business, SMUDGED—from rose petals to palo santo, and how to source them responsibly.
 
At a time when many of us are looking for mindful solutions to the chaos of modern life, The Art of Sacred Smoke offers an empowering new way to connect to nature and to your best self.

The Mesa 101 - Keep the Medicine Sacred to Your Heart book teaches you in a unique way, to be an active participant in paving the way for your Divine path to unfold as you wish. 

Elizabeth teaches you to walk in alignment with the Creator God that gave you the breath of life. When you walk in alignment with God, the whole Universe conspires on your behalf, for your Soul's highest good at all times. Life can be better than we ever dreamed. It's time to be the Co-creator of your life. It's time to make your dreams become reality. 

For over a decade, Brené Brown has found a special place in our hearts as a gifted mapmaker and a fellow traveler. She is both a social scientist and a kitchen-table friend whom you can always count on, to tell the truth, make you laugh, and, on occasion, cry with you. And what’s now become a movement all started with The Gifts of Imperfection, which has sold more than two million copies in thirty-five different languages across the globe. 
What transforms this book from words on a page to effective daily practices are the ten guideposts to wholehearted living. The guideposts not only help us understand the practices that will allow us to change our lives and families, but they also walk us through the unattainable and sabotaging expectations that get in the way. 

Brené writes, “This book is an invitation to join a wholehearted revolution. A small, quiet, grassroots movement that starts with each of us saying, ‘My story matters because I matter.’ Revolution might sound a little dramatic, but in this world, choosing authenticity and worthiness is an absolute act of resistance.” 

Aromatherapy for Healing the Spirit: Restoring Emotional and Mental Balance with Essential Oils. This aromatherapy guide synthesizes Eastern and Western approaches to restoring emotional and mental health by using the healing properties of 40 essential oils. 159 illustrations, 77 in color.

 Marriage should be based on love, right? But does it seem as though you and your spouse are speaking two different languages? New York Times bestselling author Dr. Gary Chapman guides couples in identifying, understanding, and speaking their spouse’s primary love language—quality time, words of affirmation, gifts, acts of service, or physical touch.

In Earth Medicines, Felicia Cocotzin Ruiz (Tewa/Xicana) weaves together stories of her own indigenous wisdom with the power of the four elements to achieve inner and outer harmony. Including recipes and rituals that highlight the power of Water, Air, Earth, and Fire, this book is a reminder that the natural elements are the origins of everything - and can heal our body, mind, and spirit.

In chapters organized by each element, readers will first find recipes and advice for:

• Promoting inner harmony through Hydrotherapy for Headache Relief, Mayan Tea to Calm the Mind, or Ginger Fire Honey Chews
• Nurturing beauty inside and out with Tepezcohuite Honey Mask, Salt of the Earth Deodorant, or Sweetwater Herbal Mouth Rinse
• Taking care of the spirit by creating an ancestral altar, making loose incense, or performing a Mayan Bajo Steaming Ritual

Felicia thinks of earth medicine as a way of engaging with Mother Earth every day, having a deepened relationship with the four elements and incorporating them into our daily lives. This modern guide to working with earth medicines is designed to support you on your path of wellness with lifestyle practices collected by Felicia in her twenty-five years of working with complimentary modalities.

A practical, hands-on guide to Mexican-American folk magic or brujeria.

The essential book of Mexican-American saints, folk-magic, and healing and a go-to for anyone interested in shamanism and Indigenous peoples' magic. American Brujeria is about the fascinating blend of American and Mexican folk magic currently used by those living in the US but whose roots are steeped in Mexican culture. This type of Mexican-American folk magic, which the author calls "American Brujeria," features its own unique saints and spirits as well as familiar ones, such as the notorious Santa Muerte.

American Brujeria includes stories from Mexico (folk saints, the story of Guadalupe), the influence of Catholicism, the art of limpias (spiritual cleansings), spell casting, oil crafting, praying the rosary (in English and Spanish), making an altar to Guadalupe, using novena candle magic, crafting protective charms from saints' medals, and more.

For generation after generation, Toltec shamans have passed down their wisdom through teaching stories. The purpose of these stories is to implant a seed of knowledge in the mind of the listener, where it can ultimately sprout and blossom into a new and better way of life.

In The Wisdom of the Shamans: What the Ancient Masters Can Teach Us About Love and Life, Toltec shaman and master storyteller don Jose Ruiz shares some of the most popular stories from his family's oral tradition and offers corresponding lessons that illustrate the larger ideas within each story.

Ruiz begins by explaining that contrary to the stereotypical image of "witch doctor," the ancient shamans were men and women who fulfilled several roles within their communities: philosopher, spiritual guide, medical doctor, psychologist, and friend.

According to Ruiz, their teachings are not primitive or reserved for a chosen few initiates but are instead a powerful series of lessons on love and life that are available to us all. To that aim, he has included exercises, meditations, and shamanic rituals to help you experience the personal transformation these stories offer.

The shamans taught that the truth you seek is inside of you. Let these stories, lessons, and tools be your guide to finding the innate wisdom that lives within.

A comprehensive guide to the safe and ethical application of expanded states of consciousness for therapists, healing practitioners, and sincere explorers.
 
Psychedelic medicines also known as entheogens are entering the mainstream. And it’s no wonder: despite having access to the latest wellness trends and advances in technology, we’re no healthier, happier, or more meaningfully connected. Psilocybin mushrooms, ayahuasca, and LSD—as well as other time-tested techniques with the power to shift consciousness such as drumming, meditation, and vision quests—are now being recognized as potent catalysts for change and healing. But how do we ensure that we’re approaching them effectively?
 
Françoise Bourzat—a counselor and experienced guide with sanctioned training in the Mazatec and other indigenous traditions—and healer Kristina Hunter introduce a holistic model focusing on the threefold process of preparation, journey, and integration. Drawing from more than thirty years of experience, Bourzat’s skillful and heartfelt approach presents the therapeutic application of expanded states, without divorcing them from their traditional contexts. Consciousness Medicine delivers a coherent map for navigating non-ordinary states of consciousness, offering an invaluable contribution to the field of healing and transformation.

Long before Michelle Tea was winning awards for her poignant memoirs, she was a scrappy misfit on the streets of San Francisco, supporting herself by giving eerily prescient tarot readings. As her reputation as a writer grew, she stopped publicly reading the Tarot, though she never stopped doing it privately. Based on over twenty-five years of experience and a deep and abiding love of the cards, Modern Tarot brings the full force of Tea's unique insight, inviting pop sensibility, and wicked humor to bear on the tradition of the Tarot in a fascinating journey through the cards that teaches how to use this tradition for radical self-growth.

Building on the principles found in his father’s bestselling book The Four Agreements, don Miguel Ruiz Jr. invites us to gauge how attached we are to our own point of view. In The Five Levels of Attachment, he will help you gain awareness of the agreements you have been implicitly making all these years that shape your reality and affect your future and show you how to release the attachments which no longer reflect who you really are.

A personal story of Black Elk and the teachings woven into the narrative. Wallace Black Elk, a Lakota elder and shaman, was born on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota. He traveled widely throughout North America, Europe, and Asia, addressing large groups and conducting healing ceremonies. 

"An unprecedented account of the shaman's world and the way it is entered." -Stanley Krippner, PHD., coauthor of Personal Mythology: The Psychology of Your Evolving Self and Healing States

This fascinating book by psychologist and medical anthropologist Alberto Villoldo, Ph.D., explains the practices for healing outside of ordinary time and space. It shows how to enter the timeless "now" to heal events that occurred in the past, and to correct the course of destiny. Dr. Villoldo discusses ways in which you can heal yourself and your loved ones by employing intention through practices used by shamans of the Americas--which, until now, have been inaccessible to most of the world. The shamans of old called this "journeying."

In this book, you'll discover that you have a four-chambered heart in the same way you have a four-chambered soul. In the first chamber, you store away the memory of a wound that derailed your destiny. In the second, you keep the limiting beliefs and soul contracts that you entered into at the time of your loss. In the third, you recover the grace and trust that will make you whole again; and in the fourth, you remember the calling and mission that you choose to unfold in this lifetime. "While everyone has a future," Villoldo says, "only certain people have a destiny." This book shows you how to find and manifest yours.

Since 1997, The Four Agreements has transformed the lives of millions of people around the world with a simple but profound message. Now bestselling author don Miguel Ruiz and his son, don Jose Ruiz, collaborate with this powerful sequel The Fifth Agreement. The Four Agreements provides the foundation for breaking thousands of agreements that create needless suffering and with The Fifth Agreement you recover all the power of your authenticity, which is who you really are when you are born.

Paperback - 232 pages

In the Upper Amazon, mestizos are the Spanish-speaking descendants of Hispanic colonizers and the indigenous peoples of the jungle. Some mestizos have migrated to Amazon towns and cities, such as Iquitos and Pucallpa; most remain in small villages, their houses perched on stilts on the shores of the rivers that are their primary means of travel. Here in the jungle, they have retained features of the Hispanic tradition, including a folk Catholicism and traditional Hispanic medicine. And they have incorporated much of the religious tradition of the Amazon, especially its healing, sorcery, shamanism, and the use of potent plant hallucinogens, including ayahuasca. The result is a uniquely eclectic shamanist culture that continues not only to fascinate outsiders with its brilliant visionary art but also to attract thousands of seekers each year with the promise of visionary experiences of their own. Ayahuasca shamanism is now part of global culture. The visionary ayahuasca paintings of Pablo César Amaringo are available to a world market in a sumptuous coffee-table book; international ayahuasca tourists exert a profound economic and cultural pull on previously isolated local practitioners; ayahuasca shamanism, once the terrain of anthropologists, is the subject of novels and spiritual memoirs. Ayahuasca shamans perform their healing rituals in Ontario and Wisconsin.

Singing to the Plants sets forth, in accessible form, just what this shamanism is about -- what happens at an ayahuasca healing ceremony, how the apprentice shaman forms a spiritual relationship with the healing plant spirits, how sorcerers inflict the harm that the shaman heals, and the ways that plants are used in healing, love magic, and sorcery. The work emphasizes both the uniqueness of this highly eclectic and absorptive shamanism -- plant spirits dressed in surgical scrubs, extraterrestrial doctors speaking computer language -- and its deep roots in shamanist beliefs and practices, both healing and sorcery, common to the Upper Amazon. The work seeks to understand this form of shamanism, its relationship to other shamanisms, and its survival in the new global economy, through anthropology, ethnobotany, cognitive psychology, legal history, and personal memoir.