Discover the power of sacred ceremony! Stepping outside of your daily life and into sacred ceremony is an invaluable tool. Ceremony is a beautiful and active prayer that allows you to commune with the spiritual world in an incredibly meaningful way. When you are weighed down by challenges, these practices offer a powerful way to disperse and transform negative energy. When the beauty of life shines through, ceremony becomes a celebration of gratitude and an invitation for more blessings. Living Sacred Ceremony is filled with unique and beautiful practices that empower you to heal and transform your own life. Whether you are looking for assistance in the realm of love, money, family, health or beyond, there is a ceremony for you to become a powerful change maker and find deeper fulfillment. Inspired by the Peruvian shamanic tradition and fused with modern day practicality, this book will show you just how beautiful life can be when you are Living Sacred Ceremony.
Within these pages, celebrated Native American writer Gabriel Horn weaves a hauntingly beautiful tapestry of traditional stories, songs, and prayers that highlight the sacred Native way of life. Interwoven throughout this visionary work are detailed ceremonies and rituals for: Marriage, Pregnancy, Birth, Greeting the Day, Death Divorce, Presenting an Infant to the Sun, Dreams and Visions Solstice and Equinox, Healing, and more... The Book of Ceremonies is filled with the heartfelt words of a powerful writer and the original illustrations of Carises Horn, a talented young artist. All of us who live on this sacred land will enjoy and treasure this beautiful book. Celebrated Native American writer Gabriel Horn weaves a beautiful tapestry of stories and short pieces that show us the sacred Native way of life. The writing is beautiful and emotional throughout. It is the work of a talented writer who has walked the native path for years, and is able to show us the native way in all aspects of life. The Book of Ceremonies offers clear explanations of a wide variety of ceremonies.
A “profound and inspiring” collection of ancient indigenous wisdom for “anyone wanting the healing of self, society, and of our shared planet” (Peter Levine, author of Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma). A Penobscot Indian draws on the experiences and wisdom of the First Nations to address environmental justice, water protection, generational trauma, and more. Drawing from ancestral knowledge, as well as her experience as an attorney and activist, Sherri Mitchell addresses some of the most crucial issues of our day—including indigenous land rights, environmental justice, and our collective human survival. Sharing the gifts she has received from the elders of her tribe, the Penobscot Nation, she asks us to look deeply into the illusions we have labeled as truth and which separate us from our higher mind and from one another. Sacred Instructions explains how our traditional stories set the framework for our belief systems and urges us to decolonize our language and our stories. It reveals how the removal of women from our stories has impacted our thinking and disrupted the natural balance within our communities. For all those who seek to create change, this book lays out an ancient world view and set of cultural values that provide a way of life that is balanced and humane, that can heal Mother Earth, and that will preserve our communities for future generations.
We perform ceremonies to mark important events and celebrate holidays—yet our modern approach to ceremony only scratches the surface of its true potential. With The Book of Ceremony, shamanic teacher Sandra Ingerman presents a rich and practical resource for creating ceremonies filled with joy, purpose, and magic. "We are hungry to connect with more than what we experience with our ordinary senses in the material world," writes Sandra. "By performing ceremonies, you will find yourself stepping into a beautiful and creative power you might never have imagined." Weaving shamanic teachings together with stories, examples, and guiding insights, The Book of Ceremony explores: • The elements of a powerful ceremony—including setting strong intentions, choosing your space, preparing ceremonial items, and dealing gracefully with the unexpected • Stepping into the sacred—key practices for leaving behind your everyday concerns and creating a space where magic can happen • Guidance for working alone, in community, and across distances with virtual ceremonies • Invoking spiritual allies—the power of working with the elements, the natural world, ancestor spirits, and the creative energy of the divine • Sacred transitions—including ceremonies for weddings, births, rites of passage to adulthood, funerals, honorable closure, and new beginnings • Ceremonies for energetic balance—healing and blessing, resolving sacred contracts, getting rid of limiting beliefs, creating Prayer Trees, and more • Life as a ceremony—how to infuse your entire life with ceremonial practice, from planting a garden to revitalizing your home or office to helping heal our planet The Book of Ceremony is more than a "how-to" guide—it will inspire you to create original ceremonies tailored to your own needs and the needs of your community. When you invoke the sacred power of ceremony, you tap into one of the oldest and most effective tools for transforming both yourself and the world. As Sandra writes, "If you perform one powerful and successful ceremony for yourself, the principle of oneness ensures that all of life heals and evolves."
Steven Farmer is a best selling author, teacher, shamanic practitioner, and Soul Healer. Sacred Ceremony gives you clear and simple guidelines for designing and performing ceremonies for any purpose—from healing emotional or physical wounds to honoring important life passages and celebrating seasonal cycles. Whatever your spiritual background or experience with ceremonies, this is a book you’ll want to refer to again and again! "Sacred Ceremony is the most through, thoughtful, and accesible book on ritual ceremony that exists today. It is a treaure that can help you connect to the Source of Life, renew in times of transition, find healing and guidance, celebrate the cycles of life, and maintain a vibrant cnnection to the Sacred every day. Thank you, Steven, for compiling such a meaningful and practical guide." - Joan Borysenko, PhD.
The twentieth anniversary edition of a transformative blueprint for ancestral healing—featuring new material and gateways, from the renowned herbalist, natural health expert, and healer of women’s bodies and souls “This book was one of the first that helped me start practices as a young woman that focused on my body and spirit as one.”—Jada Pinkett Smith Through extraordinary meditations, affirmations, holistic healing plant-based medicine, KMT temple teachings, and The Rites of Passage guidance, Queen Afua teaches us how to love and rejoice in our bodies by spiritualizing the words we speak, the foods we eat, the relationships we attract, the spaces we live and work in, and the transcendent woman spirit we manifest. With love, wisdom, and passion, Queen Afua guides us to accept our mission and our mantle as Sacred Women—to heal ourselves, the generations of women in our families, our communities, and our world.
A challenge that many pagans and earth-based spiritual practitioners face is how to integrate sustainable living with our everyday lives. By offering a vision of "sacred actions," or the integration of sustainable living with Earth-based spirituality, learn how to combine the three ethics: people care, earth care, and fair share, to execute comprehensive sustainable living through the lens of paganism. Find a wide variety of accessible sustainable living activities, rituals, stories, and tools framed through the neopaganism eightfold Wheel of the Year. Each chapter is tied to one of the eight holidays, offering specific themes that deepen topics, including home and hearth, lawns and gardens, food and nourishment, ritual items and offerings, reducing waste and addressing materialism, and much more. Consider this your manual of personal empowerment through sustainability as a spiritual practice.
An initiate’s inside account of ancient Maya spiritual practices alive today • Includes a Foreword by José Luis Tigüilá NABÉ kaxbaltzij, spokesperson of the Maya municipality • Details the initiation process the author went through to become a Maya shaman-priestess, including rituals, prayers, and ceremonies • Explains the foundational spiritual wisdom of the Maya calendar as a living entity, its cycles of time, and the significance of “the counting of the days”, which helps keep time itself alive • Examines the power of dance and Maya ceremonies, Maya future-telling, and communication with ancestors through the sacred fire Offering an insider’s experiential account of ancient Maya spiritual wisdom and practices, initiated Maya shaman-priestess Gabriela Jurosz-Landa opens up the mysterious world of the Maya, dispelling the rampant misinformation about their beliefs and traditions, sharing the transcendent beauty of their ceremonies, and explaining the Maya understanding of time, foundational to their spiritual worldview and cosmology. The author, an anthropologist, details the initiation process she went through to become a Maya shaman-priestess in Guatemala, including rituals, prayers, the presence of numinous forces, and the transmission of sacred knowledge. She explains the spiritual wisdom of the Maya calendar as a living entity, its cycles of time, and the significance of “the counting of the days,” which helps keep time itself alive. She examines Maya spiritual and cosmological concepts such as how the universe is shaped like a triangle over a square. She reveals the profound power of dance in Maya tradition, explaining how ritual dance halts the flow of time, reactivates primordial events, and captures vital energies that keep the Maya spiritual tradition vital and alive. Exploring other Maya secret knowledge, she also details Maya ritual attire, Maya future-telling with the calendar, the reading of the Tzi’te beans, and how the Maya communicate with ancestors through the sacred fire. Illustrating how contemporary Maya life is suffused with spiritual tradition and celebration, the author shares the teachings of the Maya from her initiate and anthropologist point of view in order to help us all learn from the ancient wisdom of their beliefs and worldview. Because, to truly understand the Maya, one must think like the Maya.
Casper ter Kuile, a Harvard Divinity School fellow and cohost of the popular Harry Potter and the Sacred Text podcast, explores how we can nourish our souls by transforming common, everyday practices—yoga, reading, walking the dog—into sacred rituals that can heal our crisis of social isolation and struggle to find purpose—a message we need more than ever for our spiritual and emotional well-being in the age of COVID-19. “After half a decade of research and hundreds of conversations with people around the country, I am convinced we are in the midst of a paradigm shift. That what used to hold us in community no longer works, and that the spiritual offerings of yesteryear no longer help us thrive.”–Casper ter Kuile What do Soul Cycle, gratitude journals, and tech breaks have in common? For ter Kuile they offer rituals that create the foundation for our modern spiritual lives. We are in crisis today. Our modern technological society has left too many of us—no matter our ages—feeling isolated and bereft of purpose. Previous frameworks for building community and finding meaning no longer support us. Yet ter Kuile reveals a hopeful new message: we might not be religious, but that doesn’t mean we are any less spiritual. Instead, we are in the midst of a paradigm shift in which we seek belonging and meaning in secular practices. Today, we find connection in: CrossFit and SoulCycle, which offer a sense of belonging rooted in accountability and support much like church groups Harry Potter and other beloved books that offer universal lessons Gratitude journals, which have replaced traditional prayer Tech breaks, which provide mindful moments of calm In The Power of Ritual, ter Kuile invites us to deepen these ordinary practices as intentional rituals that nurture connection and wellbeing. With wisdom and endearing wit, ter Kuile’s call for ritual is ultimately a call to heal our loss of connection to ourselves, to others, and to our spiritual identities. The Power of Ritual reminds us that what we already do every day matters—and has the potential to become a powerful experience of reflection, sanctuary, and meaning.
