A Healer of Souls


Book Description

During a visit to Machu Picchu, Dawn Paul received a mystical experience, a vision of the Inca, who instructed her to follow the path of the shaman. She promptly resigned from her banking career. Over the following years, Dawn worked worldwide as a shamanic healer and spiritual teacher, assisting many people of all ages, from all races and religions.




Handbook of Culture, Therapy, and Healing


Book Description

Emotional, as well as physical distress, is a heritage from our hominid ancestors; it has been experienced by every group of human beings since our emergence as a species. And every known culture has developed systems of conceptualization and intervention for addressing it. The editors have brought together leading psychologists, psychiatrists, anthropologists, and others to consider the interaction of psychosocial, biological, and cultural variables as they influence the assessment of health and illness and the course of therapy. The volume includes broadly conceived theoretical and survey chapters; detailed descriptions of specific healing traditions in Asia, the Americas, Africa, and the Arab world. The Handbook of Culture, Therapy, and Healing is a unique resource, containing information about Western therapies practiced in non-Western cultures, non-Western therapies practiced both in their own context and in the West.




Ayahuasca Healing and Science


Book Description

This book offers a series of perspectives on the therapeutic potential of the ritual and clinical use of the Amazonian hallucinogenic brew ayahuasca in the treatment and management of various disorders. This book presents biomedical and anthropological data on the use of ayahuasca and provides critiques on how it is used for treating depression, PTSD, anxiety, substance dependence, and eating disorders. The volume also explores ayahuasca’s role in the psychological well-being and quality of life of humans, and discusses possibilities of it enhancing cognition and coping with grief. The book examines ayahuasca’s association with psychotherapy and also highlights the challenges of integrating plant medicines into psychiatry. Further, the book expands on some preliminary research with animals, suggesting that ayahuasca acts at multiple levels of neural complexity. The study on the neurogenic effects of ayahuasca alkaloids opens a new avenue of research with potential applications ranging from psychiatric disorders to brain damage and dementia. Psychologists, psychiatrists, and other mental health professionals will find this book relevant to their work regarding substance abuse and alternative medicine.




Amazon Healer


Book Description

This book focuses on the healing practices of an urban Amazonian folk healer, don Hilde, who uses a powerful plant psychedelic, ayahuasca, in the treatment of witchcraft and emotional disorders. His healing style is in many ways unique, since he incorporates a new spiritualist perspective into the traditional and cosmopolitan healing arts of the region.




Ecstatic Healing


Book Description

Understanding ecstatic spirit possession for physical and spiritual healing • Details the author’s direct experiences working with Brazilian miracle healer John of God (João de Deus) and African high shaman Credo Mutwa • Includes stories of psychic surgery, spirit possession, and shamanic healing rituals • Explains how each of us is capable of miraculous healing Margaret De Wys first became aware of ecstatic trance healing when she was a young girl fascinated by the rapture of the Holy Rollers. However, it would be decades before she would be called to explore that early fascination. At a gathering in Upstate New York thirty years later she was spontaneously possessed by a sacred Zulu necklace--a gift from one of the most powerful shamans in Africa, Vusamazulu Credo Mutwa. Frightening yet exhilarating, the experience set her on a search to understand the depths of ecstatic healing. Margaret journeys to Brazil to work with famous healer John of God (João de Deus), where she witnesses hundreds of miraculous healings through psychic surgery. During her years of spiritual service at John’s Casa, she experiences ecstatic visions, which increase her hunger for more knowledge. She begins to attend possession rituals held by Pai Lazaro, an Umbanda priest, and finds she is a natural medium to the African gods. Called through her dreams to work with Credo Mutwa, she travels to Credo’s Healing Village in Africa, where she discovers her gift as an ecstatic healer and the meaning of true faith. In sharing her journey to reach a profound understanding of ecstatic states and shamanic healing, Margaret De Wys not only gives the reader a direct experience of holiness but also reveals the potential each of us has for miraculous healing.




The Power Path


Book Description

According to José Stevens and Lena Stevens, business leaders and shamans share many important traits: the abilities to solve problems, to achieve goals, to see the big picture, and to forecast events. What their previous book, Secrets of Shamanism, did for the growth of the individual, The Power Path does for the growth of business managers and entrepreneurs. On the basis of years of study with shamans, the authors share a new way of thinking about the nature of power. By applying shamanic traditions of power to the workplace, readers learn how to improve work relationships, to understand employees' strengths and limitations, and to inspire effective teamwork — techniques aimed ultimately toward increasing business success.




Shaman, Healer, Sage


Book Description

Alberto Villoldo, a classically trained medical anthropologist, has studied shamanic healing techniques among the descendants of the ancient Inkas for more than twenty years. In Shaman, Healer, Sage, he draws on his vast body of knowledge to create a practical and revolutionary program based on the traditional healing methods used by these shamans -- methods that, until now, have been inaccessible to most of the world. Villoldo explains that central to shamanic healing is the concept of the Luminous Energy Field that is believed to surround our material bodies. His book teaches us to see and influence the imprints that disease leaves on this field and thereby to heal ourselves and others, as well as prevent illness. Villoldo weaves wonderful teaching stories throughout about the healing power of the energy medicine of the Americas. In one story, Villoldo comes down with pneumonia while in Peru. When antibiotics fail to control the infection, his mentor, the shaman Don Antonio, uses the process of Illumination to remove the toxins that had invaded Villoldo's body. These same shamanic techniques later allowed Villoldo to remove stagnant energy from a young woman whose marriage was suffering due to her past experience with abandonment. With the aid of shamanic work, the woman regained her trust in others, and her marriage was revitalized. This book is rich with ancient wisdom and contemporary techniques we can use to help ourselves and others, as well as with the more advanced methods of master shamans, which are being brought to a wide audience for the first time.




Brief Psychotherapy with the Latino Immigrant Client


Book Description

Understand the unique needs, beliefs, and values of your Latino immigrant clients! Brief Psychotherapy with the Latino Immigrant Client is a manual for the practicing psychotherapist or student, with tips on the assessment process and suggested interventions that work efficiently. With this book you will explore the influence of medical anthropological concepts on Latino immigrant populations in North America. The author draws on her experience as both a medical anthropologist and a licensed psychotherapist and on her extensive fieldwork in the Amazon for help in developing psychosociocultural assessments of Spanish-speaking migrants. This valuable book examines which kinds of therapy work for the growing Latino immigrant population and looks at metaphors (dichos) that can be used to help in brief interventions for clinical issues. In relation to the specific beliefs, values, and sentiments of these clients, Brief Psychotherapy with the Latino Immigrant Client presents: hypnosis techniques that work with this population behavior modification and cognitive restructuring techniques specific culturally appropriate metaphors for distinctive clinical issues an examination of alcohol issues in this population psychological issues that go along with tuberculosis hints for the non-Latino therapist who deals with Latino clients case studies that illustrate the book's principles of care and assessment shamanic techniques of healing that can provide a model for treating these clients Brief Psychotherapy with the Latino Immigrant Client includes a glossary of Spanish terms, appendixes on hypnotic pain control inductions, sample tests, scales and diagrams, several case studies, and listings of Spanish language resources. Every therapist who treats Latino immigrants should own this book!




Whole Medicine


Book Description

The first book to provide a comprehensive framework for ethical psychedelic medicine—for therapists, trip sitters, and anyone concerned about upholding boundaries and safety in the entheogen and plant medicine community Psychedelic advisor Rebecca Martinez lays out the groundwork for an ethical approach to 21st-century psychedelic therapy. Applying a social-justice lens to entheogenic practice, Martinez provides practical guidance for psychedelic sitters, advocates, explorers, and those practicing (or learning to practice) licensed psychedelic therapy. As psychedelics become a more accessible pathway to healing, how do practitioners—and seekers—navigate complex issues in a wide range of settings? Here, you’ll learn skills like: Understanding consent and boundaries Building safe and ethical psychedelic experiences How to integrate the cultural and historical contexts of plant medicines Considering the psychological risks and benefits of psychedelic therapy How to apply a social-justice lens to entheogenic healing Martinez also discusses how, in many corners of the psychedelic community, an overemphasis on positivity can overwhelm attempts to challenge abuses of power; dismantle internalized hierarchies; and acknowledge and integrate our own flaws and traumas. An essential guide for any psychedelic therapist, entheogenic guide, or mind-expanding medicine enthusiast, Whole Medicine brings much-needed conversations about ethics, boundaries, and informed use out of the shadows for better, safer, community-centered psychedelic healing.




Shamanism


Book Description

Shamanism has always been of great interest to anthropologists. More recently it has been "discovered" by westerners, especially New Age followers. This book breaks new ground byexamining pristine shamanism in Greenland, among people contacted late by Western missionaries and settlers. On the basis of material only available in Danish, and presented herein English for the first time, the author questions Mircea Eliade's well-known definition of the shaman as the master of ecstasy and suggests that his role has to be seen as that of a master of spirits. The ambivalent nature of the shaman and the spirit world in the tough Arctic environment is then contrasted with the more benign attitude to shamanism in the New Age movement. After presenting descriptions of their organizations and accounts by participants, the author critically analyses the role of neo-shamanic courses and concludes that it is doubtful to consider what isoffered as shamanism.