The colorful artwork leaps off the page while the stories bring you right to the heart of how it feels to be alive today.

    Virtually all shamanic traditions use a variety of ritual practices as tools for personal transformation, healing, and celebration. Now, in this exciting and practical book, Toltec shaman and New York Times best-selling author don Jose Ruiz introduces and explains a wealth of these shamanic rituals and ceremonies, and provides a detailed and accessible guide to performing them on your own. This book will teach you how to::: Choose and create power objects Build a personal altar and medicine wheel Align your life with the cycles of nature Find and work with your spirit animals Honor your ancestors, undertake power journeys, and much more Like the medicine bag itself, this book is a potent tool kit of spiritual practices meant to open you to a world of beauty, exploration, and transformation. By offering step-by-step instructions in each chapter, don Jose Ruiz has made these rituals and ceremonies accessible to everyone who feels called to travel the shamanic path.

    Imagine a day when you can ride your bike up a path of falling leaves into the very tree they are falling from. Imagine a day when you release a handful of blue balloons into a cloudy, gray sky to create a postcard-perfect day. Imagine a day when the ordinary becomes the extraordinary...a day when anything is possible. Imagine a Day is the companion book to the critically acclaimed Imagine a Night, which School Library Journal declared "a fascinating foray into the imagination." Renowned Canadian artist Rob Gonsalves once again stretches the limits of visual exploration with his breathtaking paintings and encourages parents and children alike to look beyond the limits of the everyday world and imagine.

    Liber Null contains a selection of extremely powerful rituals and exercises for committed occultists. Psychonaut is a manual comprising the theory and practice of magic aimed atthose seeking to perform group magic, or who work as shamanic priests to the community.

    Endowed with her own magickal heritage of Scotch-Irish Witchcraft, Elizabeyta stands alone against the dark powers and twisted desires of Jason Blackthorn and his Dark Men. But Elizabeyta isn't the only one pursued by unseen forces and the fallout from a past life. A great battle for mastery ensues between the forces of darkness and light. As the local funeral parlor overflows with victims, Elizabeyta and the townsfolk begin to wonder whether there's anyone—in Heaven or on Earth—who can end the reign of terror and right the cosmic balance…

    She is hidden in the words of her lover. This is the first in a string of ancient riddles that will lead archaeologist Erica Conner on the most dangerous expedition of her life. After agreeing to help an esteemed colleague and a no-nonsense FBI agent, she finds herself in a race against a mysterious cult. A faction that was founded in Egypt over two thousand years ago. Erica joins forces with Agent Matt Pierce. The two exasperate each other at every turn, while they battle the intense desire growing between them. He is the one man who knows the evil group's secrets, and she is the one person who can outwit them. As the riddles lead Erica and Matt around the world, the true horror unfolds. They must fight for their own lives and defeat the cultists before an unspeakable plan is unleashed on the world.

    As the book opens, he is driving along a dark road when he is distracted by what seems to be a flight of arrows. He crashes into a ravine and suffers horrible burns over much of his body. As he recovers in a burn ward, undergoing the tortures of the damned, he awaits the day when he can leave the hospital and commit carefully planned suicide—for he is now a monster in appearance as well as in soul. A beautiful and compelling, but clearly unhinged, sculptress of gargoyles by the name of Marianne Engel appears at the foot of his bed and insists that they were once lovers in medieval Germany. In her telling, he was a badly injured mercenary and she was a nun and scribe in the famed monastery of Engelthal who nursed him back to health. As she spins their tale in Scheherazade fashion and relates equally mesmerizing stories of deathless love in Japan, Iceland, Italy, and England, he finds himself drawn back to life—and, finally, in love.He is released into Marianne's care and takes up residence in her huge stone house. But all is not well. For one thing, the pull of his past sins becomes ever more powerful as the morphine he is prescribed becomes ever more addictive. For another, Marianne receives word from God that she has only twenty-seven sculptures left to complete—and her time on earth will be finished.

    Sitting quietly can teach many ways to accept life, meet pain, age gracefully, and die without regret. The book encourages sitting quietly every day.Topics include: Sit Quietly; Care For Your Body; Accept Your Feelings; Give Thoughts Room; Pain is Natural; Be Who You Are; Live Each Moment Well; Love Indiscriminately; Listen to Others; Be Surprised; Wonder; Live gratefully; Do No Harm; Benefit life; A Wish for The World. The book is for people of any faith, religion, race, nationality, gender, relationship status, capacity, or meditation background.

    This helpful guide to the practice of chanting is useful for both the beginner and the experienced yogi.Mantras: Words of Power, now in its beautiful third edition, teaches how Mantra practice can be used to focus the mind and increase awareness. Each chapter of the book builds on learning from the previous chapter, beginning with an explanation about what Mantra is, how to practice, and then giving specific instruction for twelve mantras. It also includes chapters on Mantra and Healing, and Mantra and Initiation.

    Earth, air, fire and water are the four elements worshiped in many indigenous cultures and celebrated in earth–based spiritualities such as Wicca. In The Earth Path, America's best–known witch offers readers a primer on how to open our eyes to the world around us, respect nature's delicate balance, and draw upon its tremendous powers.Filled with inspiring meditations, chants, and blessings, it offers healing for the spirit in a stressed world and helps readers find their own sources of strength and renewal.Will appeal to Starhawk's traditional Pagan, New Age, and feminist readership.Young women newly interested in magic and witchcraft.A new and growing generation of those involved in ecology

    Although the tradition that traces its ancestry back to him did not flourish until nearly two hundred years after his death, today millions of Zen Buddhists and students of kung fu claim him as their spiritual father.While others viewed Zen practice as a purification of the mind or a stage on the way to perfect enlightenment, Bodhidharma equated Zen with buddhahood and believed that it had a place in everyday life. Instead of telling his disciples to purify their minds, he pointed them to rock walls, to the movements of tigers and cranes, to a hollow reed floating across the Yangtze.This bilingual edition, the only volume of the great teacher's work currently available in English, presents four teachings in their entirety. "Outline of Practice" describes the four all-inclusive habits that lead to enlightenment, the "Bloodstream Sermon" exhorts students to seek the Buddha by seeing their own nature, the "Wake-up Sermon" defends his premise that the most essential method for reaching enlightenment is beholding the mind. The original Chinese text, presented on facing pages, is taken from a Ch'ing dynasty woodblock edition.

    D. Wilson reminds each of us that to truly live we must recognize that we are dying. Every second we create more of our past—more decisions, more breathing, more love and more loathing, all of it slides by into the gone as we race to grab at more moments, at more memories made and already fading.We are all authors, creators of our own pasts, of the books that will be our lives. We stare at the future or obsess about the present, but only the past has been set in stone, and we are the ones setting it. When we race across the wet concrete of time without purpose, without goals, without laughter and love and sacrifice, then we fail in our mortal moment. We race toward our inevitable ends without artistry and without beauty.All of us must pause and breathe. See the past, see your life as the fruit of providence and thousands of personal narratives. What led to you? You did not choose where to set your feet in time. You choose where to set them next.Then, we must see the future, not just to stare into the fog of distant years but to see the crystal choices as they race toward us in this sharp foreground we call the present. We stand in the now. God says create. Live. Choose. Shape the past. Etch your life in stone, and what you make will be forever.

    Basing his work on the writings of the great fifth-century Buddhist master Vasubandhu and the teachings of the Avatamsaka Sutra, Thich Nhat Hanh focuses on the direct experience of recognizing the true nature of consciousness. Presenting the basic teachings of Buddhist applied psychology, he shows how the mind is like a field, where every kind of seed is planted — seeds of suffering, anger, happiness, and peace. The quality of life, he writes, depends on the quality of the seeds. By learning how to water seeds of joy and transform seeds of suffering, understanding, love, and compassion can flower.

    Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process. Though we have made best efforts - the books may have occasional errors that do not impede the reading experience. We believe this work is culturally important and have elected to bring the book back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide.

    This collection--among the oldest records of the historical Buddha's original teachings, given in India two and a half thousand years ago--consists of thirty-four longer-length suttas, or discourses, distinguished as such from the middle-length and shorter suttas of the other collections.These suttas reveal the gentleness, compassion, power, and penetrating wisdom of the Buddha. Included are teachings on mindfulness (Mahasatipatthana Sutta); on morality, concentration, and wisdom (Subha Sutta); on dependent origination (Mahanidrana Sutta); on the roots and causes of wrong views (Brahmajala Sutta); and a long description of the Buddha's last days and passing away (Mahaparinibbana Sutta); along with a wealth of practical advice and insight for all those travelling along the spiritual path.Venerable Sumedho Thera writes in his foreword: "[These suttas] are not meant to be 'sacred scriptures' that tell us what to believe. One should read them, listen to them, think about them, contemplate them, and investigate the present reality, the present experience, with them. Then, and only then, can one insightfully know the truth beyond words."Introduced with a vivid account of the Buddha's life and times and a short survey of his teachings, The Long Discourses of the Buddha brings us closer in every way to the wise and compassionate presence of Gotama Buddha and his path of truth.