One of my favorite things about my job at Hierophant Publishing is that when friends ask me what I do at work, I can say things like, “Well, this morning I had a Zoom meeting with a shaman in Peru…” Over the course of helping them develop their books, I interact one-on-one with healers, teachers, and wisdom keepers from around the world, whose unique stories and personalities stay with me long after the book is published.
A few months ago, I had the pleasure of chatting with Jorge Luis Delgado, an Inca chakaruna or “bridge person” who will be writing a book with Hierophant sometime next year. As a child growing up in Peru, Delgado carried tourists’ suitcases and guided them to their hotels in exchange for tips to help support his family. Eventually, he found his way to law school and trained to become an attorney before having a spiritual awakening that led him to study spiritual and cosmic laws instead. He decided to follow in his mother’s footsteps and become a teacher and healer.
Meeting with Delgado was a bit like having a Zoom call with the sun. His warmth and radiance filled up my screen and spilled out of my computer’s speakers. Like the sun, he seemed to possess boundless energy, and a boundless generosity to go with it. Sure enough, one of the first things Delgado said to me was, “We are all children of the sun”—a theme that would weave its way throughout our entire conversation.
A few minutes into our call, Delgado explained to me the three principles underlying Inca spirituality: munay, llankay, and yachay. The first of these principles, munay, roughly translates to “love.” In Delgado’s words, munay means an attitude of respect, acceptance, and reverence for everything in life. When your consciousness is saturated in the energy of munay, you exude warmth and affection for all beings and all situations, just as the sun shines on all beings regardless of whether they are “good” or “bad.” Our ability to feel this unconditional love for life grows as we nurture our inner sun.
The second principle, llankay, roughly translates to “service” or “work.” The Inca people took joy in their work of tending the earth so that it could remain fertile and beautiful. Far from tedious or soul-compromising labor conducted in exchange for money and status, this type of work is humble, life-affirming, and healthy for both planet and person. When your consciousness is saturated in the energy of llankay, you naturally come into the service of all beings.
The third principle, yachay, means “wisdom.” This refers to the wisdom that arises from cultivating your inner sun, and is characterized by clarity, intuition, and discernment. Long before human beings developed books and universities, we nevertheless recognized the qualities of thought that made a person wise. When your consciousness is saturated in the energy of yachay, you instinctively know the appropriate way to speak and act in any given situation.
As our call went on, I sensed that Delgado was a person who had cultivated munay, llankay, and yachay in his own life. Warm-hearted and exuberant, he seemed committed to sharing the very best of his culture with outsiders. Indeed, in addition to being a chakaruna, he is the owner of a tour company specializing in spiritual journeys. At the end of our call, he invited me to Peru as if it was the most natural thing in the world. “Come stay in Cusco and we’ll discuss the book some more! You can join any of my trips to sacred sites, and then you’ll understand.”
When the call was over, I walked into my garden and spread my arms out wide, just as Delgado had shown me. Tipping my face upwards, I greeted the sun, feeling its bright rays saturate my being with warmth and light. How had I forgotten that I, too, was a child of this endlessly giving celestial body?
In November 2025, Hierophant Publishing and Insight Events USA will be offering a special Journey with the Shamans to the Sacred Valley of Peru. Jorge Luis Delgado will be leading the trip, along with Warrior Goddess Training author HeatherAsh Amara and the Queros, or shamans, of the Sacred Valley. This trip will take participants on a deep dive into Inca culture and spirituality, helping you establish the qualities of munay, llankay, and yachay in your own life.
To some of you, November 2025 may feel like a long way off. Indeed, when I sat down to write this newsletter, I thought, I don’t even know what I’m doing tomorrow, let alone next November! Yet one thing I’ve learned about these power journeys is that they really begin the moment you make the inner commitment to go. Your journey with the shamans doesn’t start when you get on the plane, but when you open yourself to being transformed by ancient wisdom and awakening your inner sun.
If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a long time, you know that I’m a homebody who prefers puttering in my garden to exploring distant lands—at least, that’s the story I tell myself. The truth is, my early experiences with international travel left me feeling lost and hungry. I knew I was seeing beautiful things, but I didn’t understand what they meant, or how they could change me. As a teenager and twenty-something backpacking through Samoa, India, and Morocco, I felt like a seedpod blown by the wind, never engaging deeply with the people and places I encountered. In some cases, I lacked the language and know-how to make those connections, and in other cases I was simply too shy.
In India, I remember visiting temples and sacred sites and being impressed by them on an intellectual and aesthetic level, but being too overwhelmed by the practical details to let them into my heart. Was I supposed to take my shoes off? Stand on this side of the room or that side? Join the chanting or stay silent? All of these questions distracted me from the experience, and I played it safe by hiding behind my sketchpad or reading my guidebook, while worrying that I was missing out on the very things I had gone in search of.
Then one day, I met an Indian woman my age named Radhika, whom I’d stopped on the street in Calcutta to ask for directions. She befriended me—or took pity on me, depending on how you look at it—and for the rest of the day, she appointed herself as my guide. With Radhika by my side, the world opened up, and everything I’d been missing revealed itself in exuberant color. Not only did she explain things, but she created a space in which I could truly be present, instead of having all my mental energy go into decoding rules and protocols or navigating the language barrier. All these years later, I have more memories from my afternoon with Radhika than from the weeks and months of traveling that came before.
My experience in India taught me the importance of having a “bridge person” when visiting a foreign land. Whether it’s a kindly stranger or a professional guide like Delgado, traveling with a person “in the know” can help you shift out of your head and into your heart, receiving the deep gifts of travel instead of staying stuck on the surface world of logistics. On next November’s journey to Peru, Delgado’s deep connection to the Queros of the Sacred Valley will provide you with experiences that would be nearly impossible to come by on your own—at least, not without years of time in which to slowly learn the language and build those relationships.
In the Quechua language, the word chakaruna refers to a person who forms a bridge between the human world and the divine. Although this might sound like a rare and distinguished title, the truth is we all become chakarunas when we cultivate the virtues of love, service, and wisdom in our lives. Whenever we pay close attention or approach life with an attitude of reverence, we are making ourselves a bridge, and inviting heaven to join us here on earth.
Whether you journey to distant lands or remain safely between the beds of flowers and beans in your garden, you can choose to serve life in this way. Indeed, just as flowers and plants synthesize light from the sun, we synthesize the divine, bringing it into the earthly realm through our speech, actions, and the artwork we create. Just as our beautiful planet could not exist without the hard work of plants, it also requires our love and our wise perception to bring it into being; it requires the shining of our inner sun.
As we move into the last weeks of summer, may your inner sun shine brightly—and may you always find the guides you need to take you where you need to go, and help you see clearly once you’re there.
Sincerely,
Hilary T. Smith
Senior Editor, Hierophant Publishing
Many years ago, and long before I moved to the off-grid homestead in the Hawaiian rainforest that I now call home, I met a shaman. He was a college sophomore named Sean, and we were both exchange students at the University of Otago in New Zealand. We quickly became friends thanks to a shared sense of humor and interests that lead us both out of the mainstream. I was into Jack Kerouac and the Beats and stayed up late writing stories and poetry; Sean was into meditation, precognition, and this mysterious thing called “energy” which he claimed to feel and perceive, the same way ordinary people used their senses of hearing, sight, and touch. We had long conversations about science and mysticism, often over the greasy pizza he liked, trading notes on the deep truths we’d learned during our short lives.
When our next school break came around, I convinced Sean to join me on a hitchhiking trip to the south of the island. I’d recently read On the Road for the third time, and even though I was a shy eighteen-year-old who’d spent most of her life reading books and practicing piano, I yearned to experience a wilder side of life. On a sunny day, we packed trail mix, warm sweaters, and our favorite books, walked to the edge of the road leading out of Dunedin, and stuck out our thumbs.
For the next week, we traveled wherever the wind blew us, exploring hiking trails, rivers, and forgotten towns, living on dried fruit and gas station pies. Wherever we went, Sean would spend at least a few minutes engaged in a variety of shamanic practices. One day we hiked to a waterfall, and he told me he wanted to sit still for several minutes and connect to the spirit of the place. I was bewildered. Why would anyone want to sit still? What was “spirit”? How long was he going to just sit there, doing nothing?
He invited me to join him in the practice, and I reluctantly sat down a few paces away. Over the course of many long conversations, Sean had told me that he sometimes conversed with ancestors or had waves of intuition that guided his actions; indeed, it was one such wave of intuition that had led him to make friends with me, even though we had no mutual friends and had no classes together. As I sat by the waterfall, I felt awkward and uncertain. What was Sean doing while he sat there? Was he seeing or hearing things? Was I supposed to see or hear things? How did this shamanism thing work, anyway?
When we left the waterfall, I felt embarrassed to admit that I hadn’t been visited by an animal spirit or heard the whispers of an ancestor. Yet my friend reassured me that these colorful experiences weren’t the point; the heart of the practice was to honor the natural world with gratitude and awareness, and to make space for more-than-human communication to take place in any form. He explained that shamanism was once practiced by human beings around the world, most likely including my own ancestors.
For Sean, everything we encountered was a message from the divine. The takahe bird we heard in the forest was speaking to us; the old sheep farmer who gave us a ride down the road was a teacher in disguise. As we journeyed together, I came to understand that for him, shamanism wasn’t about seeing auras or witnessing miracles, but cultivating a mode of perception in which everyday life was animated with beauty, wonder, and meaning.
For the remainder of my career as a hitchhiker, I cultivated this mode of perception everywhere I went. Standing in the rain or snow by the side of the highway, I’d tell myself that whoever pulled over to pick me up would be my next teacher; this prediction was never wrong. I felt protected and cared for by the universe itself, which was always giving me gifts in the form of the food, shelter, or clothing I needed. Far from worrying, I would bless each passing car, confident that whatever happened that day was going to be right. Although I wouldn’t have used the word practice at the time, I now realize that during those precious years, I was practicing all the time.
Imagine my pleasure, then, when José Luis Stevens’s beautiful book The Shaman’s Book of Extraordinary Practices: 58 Power Tools for Personal Transformation came across my desk. Paging through this collection of simple practices for awakening spirit and cultivating awareness, my years as a teenage mystic came flooding back to me. I remembered that spiritual practice doesn’t have to be rigid and formal, but can be creative, flexible, and fun. As Stevens says, you don’t have to sit in meditation for many hours a day to experience rapid personal growth—simply working with a powerful shamanic practice for a few minutes can be enough to open your eyes and reorient your heart to a higher truth.
One of my favorite practices in The Shaman’s Book of Extraordinary Practices is called The Extraordinary Practice of Blessing Everyone. Stevens reminds us that “Blessing is not an act reserved for ordained priests or respected gurus; it is an act of love available to all of us, all the time.” Reading this passage, I remembered how it felt to beam love at every passing car as I waited for someone to pull over and give me a ride; how, even though I possessed little more than a bag of trail mix and a copy of Coleman Barks’ The Soul of Rumi, my obsession with Kerouac having subsided, I nevertheless felt rich. Blessing others is something we can do anytime and anywhere, no matter how materially impoverished we may be, and it never fails to elevate the soul.
In another practice, The Extraordinary Practice of Seeing the Divine in Everything, Stevens reminds us of a quote from Christian mystic Meister Eckhart: “The eye through which I see the God is the eye through which God sees me.” Reading this, I remembered the way my old friend Sean would choose to see the divine everywhere he looked, and how he shared this life-changing habit with me. As Stevens writes, we have a choice to see everything as God or not-God—so why not embrace this remarkable power to transform our daily lives?
Practices like these remind us that our true wealth lies in our perception. A hitchhiker standing in the rain can feel richer than the millionaire speeding past her in a new car; a person dying of cancer can feel more alive than the healthy doctor who cares for him. By returning to practices like the ones in Stevens’s book, we can hone our ability to make this inner shift, unlocking untold magic in our lives.
In the years since I gave up hitchhiking, I admit that it’s been harder to hold onto a mystical frame of mind. As a landowner and homesteader, my mind is often crammed with plans and to-do lists, rather than being open to whatever appears. I have to consciously remind myself that the universe is still protecting and caring for me, just as it did when I was living on the road. I need to sit beside the waterfall, listen, and watch for signs; I need to bow to each teacher as they appear. It feels meaningful to me that Stevens’s book came into my life at exactly the time that I needed to remember these things—and I think that he would agree!
When our year abroad ended, my shaman friend and I parted ways; after corresponding for a while and visiting him once when I hitchhiked through Boulder, we lost touch. I like to think that he is still seeing the world through shamanic eyes; still feeling glimmers of intuition and allowing them to guide him; still tuning into the natural world, instead of blocking it out. I imagine him going to a bookstore in Boulder or Denver and finding The Shaman’s Book of Extraordinary Practices; I’m sure that he would love it. It pleases me to think that, after influencing my life so much, an author whose book I edited might reach through time and space to influence him.
It seems to me that extraordinary practices like the ones Stevens shares in his book could just as easily be called extraordinary powers: the power to love, to bless, to see, to hear, to trust, to know. We all have these powers within us, just waiting to be developed. They are there to be discovered and rediscovered countless times throughout our lives, leading us a little deeper into our own souls every time.
As we move into high summer, I hope that each of you has a chance to wash off whatever dust has settled over your own shamanic eyes and see the world anew. You are connected to everything in the universe, just as everything in the universe is connected to you, and through the power of your perception, you can transform your life.
Sincerely,
Hilary T. Smith
Senior Editor, Hierophant Publishing
Dear readers,
In the rural Hawaiian valley where I have lived off-grid for the past five years, local people come often to tend their ancestors’ graves, which are marked either by Western-style headstones or by traditional piles of stones, or pohaku. Wandering through the forest, you soon become aware that you are surrounded by graves. Noisy chatter gives way to quiet contemplation; a crashing gait turns into carefully-placed footsteps. The presence of so many ancestors exerts a subtle but powerful effect on peoples’ behavior: there’s a sense that your actions matter, and that you are being watched. Although the forest may look wild or abandoned to an untrained eye, it contains layer upon layer of human history, the evidence of which is all around. I often wonder about the people to whom these graves belong. What would they think of my presence here? Would they approve of the way I’m living? What could I do to earn their respect?
Sometimes, I feel wistful when I speak with a neighbor who can recite the names of relatives stretching far back into her family tree, all rooted to the same land for generation after generation. The deep knowledge of the land and enduring sense of belonging such families possess is something that I can only dream of. Like many great-grandchildren of immigrants, I’ve never felt quite sure of where I belonged, or even where I’m “really” from. For me, the nearest ancestral grave sites are not only thousands of miles away, but located in places where I have never spent meaningful time, if I’ve even visited them at all.
Earlier this year, I had the pleasure of editing Rhonda McCrimmon’s beautiful book, The Cauldron and the Drum: A Journey into Celtic Shamanism. One thing I love about McCrimmon’s work is her discussion of ancestors.
Shamanic practices from around the world involve calling on one’s ancestors for support, guidance, or protection. However, some of us have a tricky relationship with our literal ancestors—for example, if we know that they were abusive to others, we may not feel comfortable drawing them to mind when we need inspiration or support. For this, McCrimmon offers a wonderful alternative: connecting with “loving ancestors,” whether or not you are tied to them by blood. Just as many people spend the holidays with “chosen family” rather than blood relatives, McCrimmon teaches that we aren’t limited to literal relatives when it comes to seeking inspiration from those who have gone beyond.
She also asks us to consider what kind of ancestors we would someday like to be. How would we like to be remembered by the people who come after us? How can we become the kind of ancestors that our descendants will want to call upon for guidance? As a person in my thirties, I’d never given much thought to these questions, but as I edited The Cauldron and the Drum, I often found myself reflecting on my values, and asking myself how I could grow in the kind of wisdom that could someday be of benefit to others. Was I putting the right things in my cauldron? Could I reorient myself to something higher, something that would make a difference for generations to come?
But as I was editing Rhonda’s book, I began to think about my friends and neighbors who have died in the valley. Their deaths bind me to this place, just as their friendship did when they were alive. I decided to take a pilgrimage to a place I hadn’t gone in three years—a tumbledown house on the other side of the valley, where a friend of mine had died. I packed a small basket with ti leaves, flowers, and some ‘awa root, and set out on foot down the long dirt road. As I walked, I remembered all that my friend had taught me—how to train guava branches by tying them with rope, how deep to make a chainsaw cut in a tree you were felling—as well as the stories he used to tell about the time he was camping on the beach in a wind storm and got pinned under an ironwood tree.
I remembered the many times I’d given him a ride home from town, and how he’d give me avocadoes and plant cuttings for my garden—cuttings which were now six feet tall. As I approached his old house, which was now little more than a pile of rotting boards and gaping windows, I saw the plants from which those cuttings were taken, still standing. I crouched down, lay my offering in front of the gate, and said a few words to wish him well on the other side.
The very next day, my next-door neighbors came over. “They’re burning down the old house today,” they said. “Would you like to come with us to watch?”
“Which old house?” I asked, amazed.
It was my friend’s old house, which the new owners were destroying to make way for something new. I’d made my pilgrimage just in time. As I stood with my neighbors and watched the place burn, I felt that I’d crossed a transition point in my life in the valley. Where I was once a newcomer, with no memory and no relationships, I was now a person who remembered what it was like when the old house was there; I was a person who knew and remembered the dead. It wasn’t the same thing as having ancestors in the valley, but it was something. I did have graves to tend, and it meant something to me to tend them. In this unexpected way, I was starting to belong.
In The Cauldron and the Drum, McCrimmon writes: “Like many ancient peoples, the Celts believed that the visible world was only one layer of a complex and multifaceted reality. In addition to the everyday labor required to put food on the table and keep a roof over their heads, the Celts practiced extensive inner work, honoring the mysteries of their own psyches and seeking the wisdom within. They were also careful to maintain their relationships with the world of nature, knowing that all energy comes from—and returns to—the earth.”
The longer I live in this ancient and sacred land, the more I become aware of the complex and multifaceted reality of which McCrimmon writes, and the more moved I am by the cycles of energy she describes. Whether you are living in the land of your ancestors or in a place which is completely new to you, there are always ways to show respect, develop relationships, and tap into something timeless and precious.
Readers, I hope you all have a beautiful winter, that your cauldrons are full of whatever nourishes you best, and that you find deep ties of belonging wherever you go.
Sincerely,
Hilary Smith
Senior Editor, Hierophant Publishing
According to the ancient Celts, the root of a person's physical, spiritual, and emotional health lies in the balance between the body's three energy centers, called the Three Cauldrons: the Cauldron of Warming, the Cauldron of Motion, and the Cauldron of Wisdom. They believed a person must activate, nurture, and maintain all three cauldrons to live a whole, connected, and meaningful life.
In this book, renowned shamanic teacher Rhonda McCrimmon brings the ancient, healing wisdom of Celtic shamanism to life so you can break free from the chains of past traumas, hurts, and heartaches and live a whole, connected, and more meaningful life. You will embark on a spiritual journey from the lowest of the three energetic cauldrons to the highest, learning how to cultivate each cauldron’s unique potential along the way.
In each chapter, McCrimmon provides self-reflections and other exercises designed to help you:
You will also learn about the four Celtic fire festivals, and the sacred practice of saining. Celtic shamanism and its practices are open to all. Regardless of your ancestral roots, Rhonda McCrimmon invites you to explore this ancient wisdom and begin your journey down the shaman’s path.
Click here to learn more about The Cauldron and the Drum and to read two free chapters of the book!
Rhonda McCrimmon is a Celtic Shaman committed to creating shamanic pathways for those disconnected from their animist lineage and heritage. Walking a shamanic path for nearly a decade, she follows her calling with single-minded determination, making shamanic practices accessible for all within an ethical, loving spiritual tribe.
Dear Readers,
This weekend, one of my best friends came to visit me at the small off-grid community in rural Hawaii where I live. As we roasted green coffee beans in a cast-iron pan, we took turns asking each other questions from a game she had brought—What was your most embarrassing moment in high school, what’s the most important trait you look for in a partner, and so on. We soon realized, to our bemusement, that the game was hard for us to play, because we already knew each other so well we could rattle off each other’s answers off the tops of our heads. However, one card gave me pause. When did you change your mind about something?
As my ramshackle cabin filled with the scent of roasting coffee, and the myna birds began to chirp outside, I realized just how many times in my life I’ve gone from fearing, disdaining, or resisting something, to wholeheartedly embracing it. These days, wild horses couldn’t drag me away from my beloved rainforest hut—but five years ago, when life dropped me into this place, you’d think I’d been sentenced to an execution. My e-mails to friends and relatives were grim. To be fair, life was much harder when I was living in a tent, during a year of incessant floods, a stranger in what I then perceived to be a remarkably strange and inscrutable place.
These days, my e-mails to friends and family are filled with worshipful descriptions of fruit trees, waterfalls, and clouds, proud recountings of minor victories involving carpentry or truck repair, and fond descriptions of the neighbors who are no longer strangers to me. The difficulties and inconveniences I once viewed as outrageous and insurmountable, I now view as precious; where I once experienced isolation, I’ve become aware of teeming, riotous webs of community. I’ve changed my mind about off-grid life, and I can’t imagine going back.
Although my friends sometimes tease me about my “conversion,” I’ll be forever grateful that the people around me gave me the space to change, without trying to hold me to an outdated version of myself. How terrible it would be if we were permanently held to account for our former beliefs and attitudes—if an opinion, once expressed, had to define us forever. How wonderful it is to have the freedom to change—to update our beliefs, our opinions, and our identities as we proceed through life, shedding old layers as we go.
Last winter, I had the privilege of working with don Jose Ruiz on his wonderful book The Shaman’s Path to Freedom: A Toltec Wisdom Book, which releases on October 3rd. Of the ten freedoms he describes in the book, number three will always be my favorite: the freedom to change. In this chapter, Ruiz describes the Toltec concept of shapeshifting, which he defines as “living in dynamic relationship to life.” Life is always changing—not just decade to decade or year to year, but moment to moment. We can confront this change with brittleness, and make ourselves suffer, or we can learn to dance with life. We can learn to joyfully shapeshift, the same way life itself is constantly shapeshifting.
If there’s anyone qualified to talk about change, it’s don Jose Ruiz. As a teenager, he felt compelled to seek out suffering, after perceiving how much the adults around him seemed to prize their trauma and pain. Yet today, don Jose has one of the biggest smiles I’ve ever seen, and it’s hard not to grin when you so much as glance at his author photo. As a twenty-something, don Jose went through a phase where he felt he had to dress in “spiritual” clothes and listen only to mantras—but today, he’s no longer shy about his love of heavy metal concerts, and he doesn’t mind when his dogs get their paws all over his distinctly unspiritual cargo pants.
These days, don Jose Ruiz holds his identity lightly. He writes, When people ask me, “What are you, Jose? What is your profession? What race are you? What things are you?” I think to myself, “I’m just life.” Like a stream that changes shape a million times as it finds its way from a mountaintop to the sea, Ruiz knows that he isn’t any one of the innumerable masks he’s donned throughout his lifetime, but the ineffable life force, or nagual, running through them all.
I’m just life. What a beautiful sentiment—and how liberating. As don Jose Ruiz describes in The Shaman’s Path to Freedom, so much of our suffering comes from confusing ourselves with something other than life itself. We confuse ourselves with our jobs, our relationships, and our status in the community. We confuse ourselves with our bodies—our health and looks. Meanwhile, we are made of the same stuff as toads and jaguars, starlight and waterfalls, orchids and moss. Life is always manifesting itself in different forms, revealing new faces of the infinite. To think that we are exempt from this process, or to desire to be exempt from this process, is to miss out on the beauty of life—and to align ourselves with this process is to be free.
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Ten years ago, my sister took me to an ecstatic dance event in the city where I was living. For the uninitiated, ecstatic dance is an event at which people dance to electronic or other music, often for hours, with no talking or phones allowed. When I went with my sister, I found it incredibly awkward and swore I would never do anything of the sort ever again. “The music is terrible,” I remember saying, “And those people—well, they’re just not my people!” I considered myself a serious person with serious tastes—I listened to Indian classical music and was forever trying and failing to write important novels. Like the teenaged don Jose Ruiz, I thought that suffering was a sign of superiority. The thought of joining a bunch of smiling, unserious hippies on a dance floor was anathema.
Although I’ve long since ditched my love affair with suffering, I retained a sort of prudishness and formality when it came to music and art, and feared being caught liking anything that was, well, fun. Then near the end of the revision process for don Jose’s book, I realized I hadn’t been to town in weeks; I had been buried in a happy haze of editing and working on my land. It was the first Saturday of the month, and I knew there was ecstatic dance at the community center in town that night.
I felt in my heart a twinge of longing. What if I did something completely out of character? I thought. It’s about time I poked my head into the world and tried something new. Besides, I think don Jose would approve. Before I could talk myself out of it, I grabbed the keys to my truck and embarked on the long and precarious drive into town. I figured I’d stay at the dance for half an hour at most before high-tailing it out of there, grumbling to myself about the “bad” music and wasted gas.
I ended up staying for the whole two hours of dancing, and for the sound bath at the end, and for the closing circle where I realized that the people I’d formerly described as “not my people” were in fact very much my people. I drove home in a state of elation, my heart humming with the pleasure of allowing a new self to unfold. Am I a serious person? Am I a carefree dancer? Yes to both—because I am life itself. And a part of me that had been stuck is now free.
Of course, the freedom to change isn’t the only freedom don Jose Ruiz teaches in his new book. There is also the freedom to love unconditionally, when you’ve been taught to judge and condemn; the freedom to heal, when you’ve learned to live within the confines of your wounds; the freedom to see, when you’ve accepted a self-imposed blindness; and all the other freedoms that we must claim if we are to bring our gifts into the world in their highest form. When we attain this freedom, we touch the infinite potential of the nagual— a Nahuatl word for pure life force —which reminds me a whole lot of the feeling I have when I’m dancing.
Readers, I wish I could pour you all a cup of this freshly-roasted coffee, picked from the trees near my land—and I wish I could load you all into my truck and take you to ecstatic dance. I will have to settle for wishing you happiness in whatever form you find it, even or perhaps especially if means taking a leap away from the person you believed yourself to be. May you all have the freedom to change, and may those changes bring you wisdom and delight every single day.
Sincerely,
Hilary Smith
Senior Editor, Hierophant Publishing
Humanity is in crisis.
War, poverty, environmental disasters, and more have brought the planet to a tipping point. In our personal lives, many of us carry deep-seated fear, resentment, anger, and even hatred for others and ourselves.
Since ancient times, Toltec shamans have taught that the root of all this discord can be found in the human mind and what they called its addiction to suffering. They have also taught that the time will come when we must choose to either break free from this addiction or pay the ultimate price.
According to Toltec Shaman don Jose Ruiz, that time is now, and the change that is needed can only come from within.
In The Shaman’s Path to Freedom, Ruiz will teach you how to find and claim your own personal freedom, one based on unconditional love for yourself and others, and in doing so break your mind’s addiction to suffering. By walking this path, you can live a life of peace and harmony within yourself, which is the most important thing you can do to bring about the change that is needed in the world.
Filled with Toltec practices for establishing personal freedom, The Shaman’s Path to Freedom is don Jose Ruiz’s most personal and radical book yet, guaranteed to thrill both new readers and longtime fans.
Marie Mbouni, MD, is a shaman, energy healer, and artist. She was born and raised in Cameroon, Africa, before relocating to Los Angeles in 2000. Her mission is to help others experience healing in all aspects of life. Connect with her at mariembouni.com.
