Sacred Summer Reading List

Summer is in full swing and hopefully by now you’ve logged a few hours soaking in the surf and sand, traveling somewhere on your bucket list or simply enjoying a more relaxed schedule. This week I wanted to share some of my  favorite spiritual and wellness books that have informed both my way of living and work. Here’s our list to accompany you on those long flights or leisurely floats on the pool.

Vibrational Medicine by Richard Gerber

The original comprehensive guide to energetic healing 

Explores the actual science of etheric energies, replacing the Newtonian worldview with a new model based on Einstein’s physics of energy.

Vibrational Medicine has gained widespread acceptance by individuals, schools, and health-care institutions nationwide as the textbook of choice for the study of alternative medicine. Trained in a variety of alternative therapies as well as conventional Western medicine, Dr. Gerber provides an encyclopedic treatment of energetic healing, covering subtle-energy fields, acupuncture, Bach flower remedies, homeopathy, radionics, crystal healing, electrotherapy, radiology, chakras, meditation, and psychic healing. He explains current theories about how various energy therapies work and offers readers new insights into the physical and spiritual perspectives of health and disease.

Many Master, Many Lives by Brian Weiss

As a traditional psychotherapist, Dr. Brian Weiss was astonished and skeptical when one of his patients began recalling past-life traumas that seemed to hold the key to her recurring nightmares and anxiety attacks. His skepticism was eroded, however, when she began to channel messages from the “space between lives,” which contained remarkable revelations about Dr. Weiss’ family and his dead son. Using past-life therapy, he was able to cure the patient and embark on a new, more meaningful phase of his own career. With more than one million copies in print, Many Lives, Many Masters is one of the breakthrough texts in alternative psychotherapy and remains as provocative and timeless as it was when first published.

The Artist Way by Julia Cameron

Since its first publication, The Artist’s Way phenomena has inspired the genius of Elizabeth Gilbert and millions of readers to embark on a creative journey and find a deeper connection to process and purpose. Julia Cameron’s novel approach guides readers in uncovering problems areas and pressure points that may be restricting their creative flow and offers techniques to free up any areas where they might be stuck, opening up opportunities for self-growth and self-discovery.

The program begins with Cameron’s most vital tools for creative recovery – The Morning Pages, a daily writing ritual of three pages of stream-of-conscious, and The Artist Date, a dedicated block of time to nurture your inner artist. From there, she shares hundreds of exercises, activities, and prompts to help readers thoroughly explore each chapter. She also offers guidance on starting a “Creative Cluster” of fellow artists who will support you in your creative endeavors.

The Shamanic Astrology Handbook by Daniel Giamario with Cayelin K Castell

Shamanic Astrology is a profound, yet simple, revolutionary tool that quickly zeros in on the most useful and important information found in the astrological symbols. Some of the topics covered are:

• Understanding the Twelve Archetypes
• Determing Life Purpose Issues
• The Goddesses and Gods in the Horsoscope
• The Lunar Nodes — TheTime Track of Humanity
• The Relationship Axis and Sacred Marriage
• Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto Complexes and Initiation Cycles
• How to do Counseling with Shamanic Astrology

 

Tuning the Human Biofield by Eileen Day McKusick

A guide to the basics of Biofield Tuning, using tuning forks to clear trauma stored in the human energy field

• Provides a precise map of the energetic biofield that surrounds the body, showing where specific emotions, memories, traumas, and pain are stored

• Details how to locate stored trauma in the biofield with a tuning fork and clear it

• Winner of the 2015 Nautilus Silver Award

In this book, McKusick explains the basics of Biofield Tuning practice and provides illustrations of her Biofield Anatomy Map. She details how to use tuning forks to find and clear pain and trauma stored in the biofield and reveals how the traditional principles and locations of the chakras correspond directly with her biofield discoveries. Exploring the science behind Biofield Tuning, she examines scientific research on the nature of sound and energy and explains how experiences of trauma produce “pathological oscillations” in the biofield, causing a breakdown of order, structure, and function in the body.

The Miracle of Water by Masaru Emoto

Masaru Emoto has photographed thousands of water crystals throughout his years of research, yet few have been as beautiful and life affirming as those formed from the words “love and gratitude.” In The Miracle of Water, Dr. Emoto demonstrates how water’s unique role in transporting the natural vibration of these words can help you welcome change and live a more positive and happy life.

When we speak positive words, we send out a special vibration to others. They in turn emit positive words and, as a result, we are touched by the energy of love and gratitude. Words expressed in kindness and compassion are certain to result in positive effects for the giver. As Emoto says: ‘If you shine a light on those around you with the words you use, you won’t ever have to walk in the dark again.’

This reflective, contemplative book explores water’s critical role in transporting ‘vibration information’ to the body, and what we can learn from water crystals. There are compelling insights on using the lessons of resonance to mend disharmonious relationships, restore health and bring positive energy into your life.

Anam Cara by John O’Donohue

In this revered classic, John O’Donohue excavates themes of friendship, belonging, solitude, creativity and the imagination, among many others. Widely recognized for bringing Celtic spirituality into modern dialogue, his unique insights from the ancient world speak with urgency for our need to rediscover the thresholds of the soul.

With lyrical wisdom and fluency, O’Donohue encourages pathways of discovery to come home to the natural rhythm in ourselves in sacred connection with one another and the landscapes we inhabit. This timeless collection nourishes the heart and elevates the spirit. It is “a book to read and reread forever.”

This Is Your Mind on Plants by Michael Pollan

Of all the things humans rely on plants for – sustenance, beauty, medicine, fragrance, flavor, fiber – surely the most curious is our use of them to change consciousness: to stimulate or calm, fiddle with or completely alter, the qualities of our mental experience. Take coffee and tea: People around the world rely on caffeine to sharpen their minds. But we do not usually think of caffeine as a drug, or our daily use as an addiction, because it is legal and socially acceptable. So, then, what is a “drug”? And why, for example, is making tea from the leaves of a tea plant acceptable, but making tea from a seed head of an opium poppy a federal crime?

In This Is Your Mind on Plants, Michael Pollan dives deep into three plant drugs – opium, caffeine, and mescaline – and throws the fundamental strangeness, and arbitrariness, of our thinking about them into sharp relief. Exploring and participating in the cultures that have grown up around these drugs while consuming (or, in the case of caffeine, trying not to consume) them, Pollan reckons with the powerful human attraction to psychoactive plants. Why do we go to such great lengths to seek these shifts in consciousness, and then why do we fence that universal desire with laws and customs and fraught feelings?

In this unique blend of history, science, and memoir, as well as participatory journalism, Pollan examines and experiences these plants from several very different angles and contexts, and shines a fresh light on a subject that is all too often treated reductively – as a drug, whether licit or illicit. But that is one of the least interesting things you can say about these plants, Pollan shows, for when we take them into our bodies and let them change our minds, we are engaging with nature in one of the most profound ways we can. Based in part on an essay published almost twenty-five years ago, this groundbreaking and singular consideration of psychoactive plants, and our attraction to them through time, holds up a mirror to our fundamental human needs and aspirations, the operations of our minds, and our entanglement with the natural world.

Horns of the Goddess by Dolores Cannon

In 1983, Dolores was working with several individuals who volunteered for sessions to help her hone her craft in hypnosis. Over the years she had developed her own technique of hypnosis where the client would go into a very deep state of trance and was able to relive the past life they were seeing. When these individuals went back to a time in the past, it would be like they were actually there. If there was something in our time that was not in their time, they wouldn’t know what you were talking about.

This book is about the past lives of three of these volunteers who went back to the time of the Druids and were giving information about how it was to live during this time and the difficulties that were experienced while trying to live with the faith of Mother Earth. The Inquisition was always lurking around trying to find these special groups that were not of their religion and were trying to force them to reveal information about their beliefs and practices. The Inquisition believed these special groups had powers and too much influence on the regular people.

DMT: The Spirit Molecule by Rick Strassman

A clinical psychiatrist explores the effects of DMT, one of the most powerful psychedelics known.

• A behind-the-scenes look at the cutting edge of psychedelic research.
• Provides a unique scientific explanation for the phenomenon of alien abduction experiences.

From 1990 to 1995 Dr. Rick Strassman conducted U.S. Government-approved and funded clinical research at the University of New Mexico in which he injected 60 volunteers with DMT, one of the most powerful psychedelics known. His detailed account of those sessions is an extraordinarily riveting inquiry into the nature of the human mind and the therapeutic potential of psychedelics. DMT, a plant-derived chemical found in the psychedelic Amazon brew, ayahuasca, is also manufactured by the human brain. In Strassman’s volunteers, it consistently produced near-death and mystical experiences. Many reported convincing encounters with intelligent nonhuman presences, aliens, angels, and spirits. Nearly all felt that the sessions were among the most profound experiences of their lives.

Strassman’s research connects DMT with the pineal gland, considered by Hindus to be the site of the seventh chakra and by Rene Descartes to be the seat of the soul. DMT: The Spirit Molecule makes the bold case that DMT, naturally released by the pineal gland, facilitates the soul’s movement in and out of the body and is an integral part of the birth and death experiences, as well as the highest states of meditation and even sexual transcendence. Strassman also believes that “alien abduction experiences” are brought on by accidental releases of DMT. If used wisely, DMT could trigger a period of remarkable progress in the scientific exploration of the most mystical regions of the human mind and soul.

(All book descriptions are directly from the publisher)