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.
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.
Sandra Ingerman 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 or 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.”
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.
The Incas carried out some of the most dramatic ceremonies known to us from ancient times. Groups of people walked hundreds of miles across arid and mountainous terrain to perform them on mountains over 6,096 m (20,000 feet) high. The most important offerings made during these pilgrimages involved human sacrifices (capacochas). Although Spanish chroniclers wrote about these offerings and the state sponsored processions of which they were a part, their accounts were based on second-hand sources, and the only direct evidence we have of the capacocha sacrifices comes to us from archaeological excavations. Some of the most thoroughly documented of these were undertaken on high mountain summits, where the material evidence has been exceptionally well preserved. In this study we describe the results of research undertaken on Mount Llullaillaco (6,739 m/22,109 feet), which has the world's highest archaeological site. The types of ruins and artifact assemblages recovered are described and analyzed. By comparing the archaeological evidence with the chroniclers' accounts and with findings from other mountaintop sites, common patterns are demonstrated; while at the same time previously little known elements contribute to our understanding of key aspects of Inca religion. This study illustrates the importance of archaeological sites being placed within the broader context of physical and sacred features of the natural landscape.
With penetrating insight Combs-Schilling illuminates the remarkable survival of one of the world's oldest monarchies, still ruling after 1200 years. The author unravels the paradox of this ancient yet progressive institution that has weathered invasion, economic collapse, and colonial assult. The pillars of stability for which political analysts typicaly search -- military strength, bureaucratic control, and commerical prosperity -- have often been absent in Morocco, sometimes for centuries. How then has the monarchy stood firm? In this remarkable book, Combs-Schilling argues that the answer is to be found in the distinctive forms of ritual practice developed during times of great crises. Unique among Islamic governments, the Moroccan monarchy became cnetral to the popular celebrations of the most sacred rituals of Islam, cloaking itself in their sanctity. Combs-schilling breaks new ground in thinking about ritual. The author explores the consequences of the replication and reinforcement of Morocco's national ceremonies in viallages and homes and the metaphorical equivalence thereby built. The author outlines how ritual metaphors simultaneously fuse the monarchy with the hallowed prophets of Islam and the mundane structures of family life. In elucidating the forcefulness of ritual embodiment the book challenges anthropological theory. It demonstrates that rituals created realities by inscribing them deeply within the individual's body and mind. Rituals use eros and physical substance to build imaginative abstractions. Performances of exquisite beauty and grace make the monarchy intrinsic to definitions of male and female, to experience of birth, intercourse, death, and to the ultimate longing to break death's bonds. Combs-Schilling creates a model for national political analysis that takes meaning as well as strategic power into account. The author applies the anthropological analysis of rituals to new arenas -- the nation-state and the world political economy -- without ever losing sight of the individual and the flow of daily life. The book clarifies a distinctive form of nationalism that expands the boundaries articulated by Anderson in Imagined Territories. Rituals rather than territory or administration came to define the Moroccan monarchy and the Moroccan nation under Western assault, and enabled them to survive. For the novice, the book provides an unusual and compelling entry into Islamic culture and history. Yet it is provocative for the expert in its reinterpretation of the strategic dimensions of Muhammad's marriages and the political potency of the rituals of Islam where power, sacrifice, and sexual identity converge. By revealing the link between national ceremony and individual identity, the author calls into question the popular view that sharply divides East and West and suggests commonalities in the structures of political-sexual power that are built into societies that operate within the cultural contexts of the world's three monotheistic faiths: Islam, Judaism, and Christianity.
"It blew me away. I underlined things on nearly every page." —Anderson Cooper, All There Is The Wild Edge of Sorrow offers hope and healing for a profoundly fractured world—and a pathway home to the brightness, pains, and gifts of being alive. Introducing the 5 gates of grief, psychotherapist Francis Weller explores how we move through the waters of grief and loss in a culture so fundamentally detached from the needs of the soul. • The first gate recognizes—and invites us to accept—the painful truth that everything we love, we will lose. With this acceptance comes beauty and responsibility—and an openness into which we can pour the full love of our hearts. At the first gate, we meet the sorrow of losing a loved one; the grief of illness; and the unique and profound pains that accompany loss by suicide. • The second gate helps us uncover and tend to the places that have not known love: the neglected pieces of our soul that need restoration and care. These “places” can be our secret shames, or the parts of us that we feel are undeserving of love. At the second gate, we face our shadows and heal our most tender wounds. • The third gate meets us at the sorrows of the world, inviting us to open to the grave pain of our planet: the destruction of ecosystems, the harms of extractive capitalism, the unfathomable pain of war and occupation. We learn to honor and hold this grief even as we move through it, recommitting ourselves to the actions our souls call upon us to perform in service of healing and renewal. • The fourth gate, what we expected but did not receive, is present in each and every one of our lives. We may need love from a parent or partner unable to give it; we may lack the language to ask for the care we deserve. Each is a loss that must be acknowledged and grieved to move toward wholeness. • The fifth gate opens to our ancestral grief: the traumas, pains, losses, and unrealized dreams of those who came before us. Weller invites us to reconnect to our bodies, our communities, and the ancestral knowledge we hold in our bones...but may have forgotten. Profoundly moving, beautifully written, this book is a balm for the soul and a necessary salve for moving together through difficult times. Grounded in ritual and connection, The Wild Edge of Sorrow welcomes each grief with care and attention, opening us to the feelings, experiences, and sacred knowledge that connect us to each other and ultimately make us whole.
Shamanic journeying is the inner art of traveling to the invisible worlds beyond ordinary reality to retrieve information for change in every area of our lives from spirituality and health to work and relationships. With Shamanic Journeying, readers join world-renowned teacher Sandra Ingerman to learn the core teachings of this ancient practice and apply these skills in their own journey. Includes drumming for three shamanic journeys.
In this book, a distinguished team of authors explores the way space, place, architecture, and ritual interact to construct sacred experience in the historical cultures of the eastern Mediterranean. Essays address fundamental issues and features that enable buildings to perform as spiritually transformative spaces in ancient Greek, Roman, Jewish, early Christian, and Byzantine civilizations. Collectively they demonstrate the multiple ways in which works of architecture and their settings were active agents in the ritual process. Architecture did not merely host events; rather, it magnified and elevated them, interacting with rituals facilitating the construction of ceremony. This book examines comparatively the ways in which ideas and situations generated by the interaction of place, built environment, ritual action, and memory contributed to the cultural formulation of the sacred experience in different religious faiths.
Making a foundational contribution to Mesoamerican studies, this book explores Aztec painted manuscripts and sculptures, as well as indigenous and colonial Spanish texts, to offer the first integrated study of food and ritual in Aztec art. Aztec painted manuscripts and sculptural works, as well as indigenous and Spanish sixteenth-century texts, were filled with images of foodstuffs and food processing and consumption. Both gods and humans were depicted feasting, and food and eating clearly played a pervasive, integral role in Aztec rituals. Basic foods were transformed into sacred elements within particular rituals, while food in turn gave meaning to the ritual performance. This pioneering book offers the first integrated study of food and ritual in Aztec art. Elizabeth Morán asserts that while feasting and consumption are often seen as a secondary aspect of ritual performance, a close examination of images of food rites in Aztec ceremonies demonstrates that the presence—or, in some cases, the absence—of food in the rituals gave them significance. She traces the ritual use of food from the beginning of Aztec mythic history through contact with Europeans, demonstrating how food and ritual activity, the everyday and the sacred, blended in ceremonies that ranged from observances of births, marriages, and deaths to sacrificial offerings of human hearts and blood to feed the gods and maintain the cosmic order. Morán also briefly considers continuities in the use of pre-Hispanic foods in the daily life and ritual practices of contemporary Mexico. Bringing together two domains that have previously been studied in isolation, Sacred Consumption promises to be a foundational work in Mesoamerican studies.
