Treasures Past and Present

I've never been a particularly sentimental person when it comes to material things. Living in a small cabin in a warm and rainy tropical climate means being ruthlessly practical about possessions, as anything that doesn’t get used on a regular basis will quickly succumb to mold, rust, or other forces of decay. Yet among the utilitarian tools that furnish my home, one object stands out: a tarnished silver candlestick that belonged to my great-great-grandmother in Saskatchewan. I remember rolling my eyes when my mother gave it to me to me shortly after I graduated from college. What was I supposed to do with a candlestick? Who even used candles anymore?

At the time, I was living in San Francisco, and my life in the city felt lightyears away from my ancestors’ existence on the prairie. In my brightly lit apartment, there was no need for candles, and with all the taquerias nearby my roommates and I rarely ate at home. Indeed, we didn’t even have a dining table. Yet somehow, I held on to the candlestick through frequent moves, reluctantly packing it up even as I felt vaguely foolish for doing so. So what if it belonged to my great-great-grandmother? The candlestick was a nuisance, a random knick-knack I didn’t really need. Still, something in me couldn’t quite let it go.

Somehow, the candlestick stayed with me for the next eighteen years, outlasting books, instruments, and items of clothing I would have told you I cherished far more. It survived friendships, relationships, and versions of myself that were all destined to fade. And when I made the biggest move of my life, leaving city streets behind to live off-grid in the forest, the candlestick came with me. It sat on a milkcrate during the years I lived in a tent, and eventually graduated to a simple shelf I built out of scrap wood.

So many things in my life had not endured, and yet my great-great-grandmother’s candlestick had stayed with me all that time. After years of seeing it as “useless,” I now appreciated the unexpected dignity it lent to its humble surroundings. I realized that in my grandmother’s hut on the prairie, it had probably done the same thing. Like me, she lacked many of the luxuries and conveniences that people in the city take for granted; and yet she could still light a candle and eat a meal in its glow.

After a lifetime of feeling little connection to or appreciation for my ancestors, I began to wonder what else I had in common with them—what other shared threads ran through our lives? Which of their skills and talents had I inherited, and which of their wounds did I still carry? In which ways were their choices still shaping my life, just as the candlestick exerted a subtle but powerful presence in my cabin?

Last year, I had the opportunity to edit Dr. Steven Farmer's book, Healing Ancestral Family Patterns: A Practical Guide to Ending the Cycle of Intergenerational Trauma. Dr. Farmer writes that we inherit four types of traits from our ancestors: physical traits such as tallness or a proneness to insomnia, emotional traits such as a melancholy streak or a reputation for being irrepressibly cheerful, behavioral traits such a love of long-distance running or a tendency to flirt, and mental traits such as a facility with numbers or a way with words.

He points out that when these traits repeat themselves over many generations, family patterns emerge. These can be positive patterns, like loving and enduring relationships, or more challenging patterns, like a tendency to burn bridges and sever ties. In some cases, children can seem to be reruns of a particular ancestor’s life: the older brother who amasses a fortune at a young age and squanders it all by the time he’s thirty, just like his grandfather, the younger brother who seems cursed with misfortunes, just like his great-uncle, the daughter who’s the spitting image of her great-grandmother and has the same sharp sense of humor.

As I edited Dr. Farmer’s book, I couldn’t help but reflect on my own ancestry. Unlike my Hawaiian neighbors who can recite not only their own family lineage but the lineages of friends in their community, I know relatively little about my parents’ families, having grown up far from their hometowns. Yet this in itself constituted the first of several family patterns I ultimately came to recognize: like me, many of my ancestors moved far away from the places where they were born, and expressed few regrets about doing so.

Although my living relatives are scientists, teachers, and writers who live in cities, it warmed my heart to remember that most of my grandparents and great-grandparents had grown up in settings far more rural and isolated than my tropical homestead. They would surely relate to ordinary tasks such as carrying water from the spring, preserving a big harvest of fruit, and coming together with neighbors for seasonal celebrations.

I realized that many of the values I thought I'd discovered independently, such as resourcefulness, thrift, and community building, were actually family traditions—I just hadn’t recognized them as such. At the same time, I realized that some of the things I struggle with mirror the struggles of the generations who came before me. My family tree contains several sets of siblings who are estranged from one another, just as my sister and I have been estranged throughout most of our lives. Maybe this wasn’t “my” problem, but just one manifestation of a bigger wound that had its origins deep in the past—and by studying the histories of my aunts’ and grandmothers’ relationships with their siblings, I could better understand my own.

Throughout Dr. Farmer’s book, he emphasizes that you do not need to be a genealogy expert to heal ancestral family patterns. In some cases, it isn’t even necessary to know who your ancestors were at all. Simply opening yourself to the fact that you represent one link of a chain of being can be enough to change your mindset, empowering you to question which energies are really “yours” and which have simply been passed down, available for you to transform through your own wisdom and benevolence for the benefit of future generations.

When my solar batteries run low, I light a candle in my great-great-grandmother’s candlestick, and the flame illuminates my small space just as it once lit her prairie home. In those moments, the physical and temporal distance between us seems to collapse.

In the soft light of that candle, I sometimes wonder what she would make of me—a woman living alone in a hut in the rainforest, typing on a laptop which is powered by a handful of solar panels. Would she recognize in me the same deeply practical nature that allowed her to survive in Saskatchewan? Would she understand my choice to live in this unusual and inconvenient way? I'll never know for certain, but I like to think there would be a spark of recognition between us that transcended our physical traits.

As Dr. Farmer points out, our ancestors were far from perfect—they made mistakes, often held beliefs we would consider offensive today, and sometimes caused damage that reverberated through generations. Yet by engaging thoughtfully with our inheritance, neither rejecting it out of hand nor accepting it uncritically, we can weave something new and healing from these ancestral threads.

Toward the end of Healing Ancestral Family Patterns, Dr. Farmer describes the thrill of diving into your ancestry, which can be akin to a treasure hunt or mystery novel: “Just when you think you understand your story, some new piece of information comes to light, revealing insights that may have eluded you before.”

As I was drafting this essay, I picked up my great-grandmother’s candlestick and inspected it closely for the first time in years. I noticed nicks and scratches on its stem, and some kind of patch or repair just under the depression where the candle goes. Picking up a cloth to polish it, I was startled when the candlestick came apart into three pieces; I had never noticed they were held together by a long screw. For a moment, I had the wild thought that there might be a secret note hidden inside one of the sections. How incredible it would be to find an old love letter in faded, spidery handwriting, or a yellowed photograph slipped in there for safekeeping.

Of course, the candlestick was empty—yet it still felt like some imaginary threshold between the deep past and present had been unexpectedly breached. In the instant it came apart, I saw it for the first time—not as “my” candlestick, but as its own being, a thing which might well outlive me, just as it had outlived my great-great-grandmother. For a moment, I felt my own mortality. Then I screwed it back together, and pushed a brand-new candle in.

Sincerely,

Hilary T. Smith

Senior Editor, Hierophant Publishing

The patterns of the past don’t have to define your future.

Drawing on decades of experience in psychology, family systems therapy, and shamanic practice, Dr. Steven Farmer reveals how the physical, emotional, behavioral, and mental traits passed down through your family tree influence your relationships, decisions, and overall well-being. This compassionate and practical guide will help you:

Identify the traits and patterns you’ve inherited from your ancestors.

Heal emotional wounds that have been carried across generations.

Break free from cycles of addiction, trauma, and dysfunction.

Enhance your connection with your ancestors to draw on their wisdom and strength.

Create a legacy of healing that benefits both you and your descendants.

With a blend of modern therapeutic techniques and ancient shamanic practices, Healing Ancestral Family Patterns offers a clear path to ancestral healing. Whether you’re seeking to address deep-seated trauma, understand your family’s history, or simply connect more deeply with your roots, the practices within will empower you to transform your ancestral patterns into sources of strength and resilience.

Healing Ancestral Family Patterns

A Practical Guide to Ending the Cycle of Intergenerational Trauma

The Wisdom of Plants

Living on an off-grid homestead in the Hawaiian rainforest, my days are defined by encounters with plants. I pick lemongrass and mamaki to boil for tea, dig up a long, thin ‘awa root to chew for its relaxing effects, pull back the sweet potato vines that are trying to claim my spinach patch, chop down racks of bananas to share with neighbors, and relax in the hammock strung in the shade of two big, sturdy monkeypod trees. As I work at my desk, I can hear the wind rustling in the bamboo grove and the birds cheerfully raiding the fruits on the guava trees. My after-work to-do list is always packed with plant-related activities like pruning, foraging, and deciding what new trees and herbs to grow.

In the lush valley I call home, plants play the role of food, medicine, fuel, shelter, and unofficial currency. In the six years I’ve lived here, they’ve also become close friends. I look forward to seeing them when I wake up in the morning, and love to hear them whispering all around me as I fall asleep at night. When nobody’s looking, I’ll sometimes talk to them, bury offerings of coffee beans near their roots, or pour out a small cup of tea just outside their dripline. And when I go to visit a waterfall or sacred site in a distant part of the valley, I’ll try to bring some flowers or ‘awa with me in the manner of a respectful guest.

One of my neighbors, a basket weaver who is forever harvesting thin, sturdy roots and palm fronds for her work, is fond of saying that the valley where we live has “plant-dominant consciousness.” In her view, there are so many more plants than people in this remote and rugged part of the island that we can’t help but tune in to their mode of existence and be influenced by their constant presence.

I’m delighted by the idea that my neighbors and I are outnumbered by plants, and that our thoughts, worries, and opinions leave little trace on the vast green consciousness that surrounds us. I love knowing that I’m a minority in this plant-dominated world, and that even if I live among them for the rest of my life, there will always be new things to discover and understand. Most of all, I love the beauty and serenity of an environment in which sunlight filters through banana leaves, geckos chase each other up and down the sugar cane, and human-made structures are few and far between.

Of all the authors I’ve worked with since joining Hierophant Publishing, I think Wendy Dooner would enjoy this lush and remote patch of rainforest most of all—and she would almost certainly resonate with my neighbor’s ideas about plant-dominant consciousness. In her new book, Plant Spirit Herbalism: Discover the Power of Medicinal Herbs for Inner Transformation, she writes, “Shamanism taught me that herbs are so much more than the compounds we can extract from them. They are wise teachers and loving friends, and when we take the time to connect with them—not just physically, but mentally, emotionally, and spiritually—our lives become much richer for it.”

In Dooner’s experience, plants have distinct personalities, much like people—and like people, they’ll open up to us when we introduce ourselves, pay attention, and offer to be friends. The technical descriptions of herbs in Plant Spirit Herbalism are interspersed with stories of the ways they can show up for us on an emotional or spiritual level, and techniques for deepening our awareness of the varied and subtle ways they communicate. It’s clear that for Dooner, a walk in the woods or a stroll through a garden is an experience imbued with magic and meaning, every plant a living spirit with important wisdom to convey.

However, this holistic perspective didn’t come easily to her. The child of New Age parents who were more partial to meditation and crystals than chemistry, Dooner rebelled as a teenager by studying plant science, physiology, pathophysiology, and herbal constituents. As a student at a four-year herbal medicine program at a local university, she reveled in wearing a white lab coat and looking at plants through microscopes. She writes, “I certainly had no time for what I considered the ‘woo-woo’ nonsense that some of my older classmates were discussing about herbs—their ‘energy,’ their ‘wisdom,’ and the ‘healing’ they could offer human beings that had nothing to do with their physical medicinal properties.”

It was only after running her own herbal medicine clinic for several years that Dooner began to feel a tug towards a richer, fuller understanding of plants—and began to move from a relationship based on extraction to one characterized by loving reciprocity. In other words, she stopped using plants as objects, and started interacting with them as living beings.

The shift from extraction to reciprocity is perhaps the key marker of growing maturity in human beings. This is true at both the practical and spiritual levels. As babies, we’re extraction machines: our only job is to take as much food and attention from our parents as we can, no matter how much sleep or stress it causes them. As we grow older, we slowly learn to share, help out, return favors, and consider our impact on others. Ideally, this process would continue at a consistent rate throughout our lives, so that by the time we reach middle age we’d be deeply oriented towards reciprocity, having left our extractive instincts far behind.

However, this ideal is rarely easy to achieve—especially in a culture that teaches us to grab all that we can before someone else takes it, or to dismiss or minimize the existence of any type of consciousness that differs from our own. All too often, we limit our circle of empathy to include only our immediate friends and family: the people most like us, who speak our language, share our customs, and towards whom we most readily extend our assistance and concern. The people, plants, and animals who fall outside of that circle become abstractions: resources we extract, rather than friends we know.

For thousands of years, spiritual traditions from around the world have taught the value of expanding our circle of empathy, whether by loving our neighbors, practicing hospitality towards strangers, sending compassionate kindness to all beings, or bringing respect and restraint to our relationships with animals and plants. It’s clear that we are meant to grow beyond the extractive tendencies which can be so automatic, and bring our full selves to every relationship, no matter how unfamiliar it may be.

In Plant Spirit Herbalism, Dooner gives us tools for expanding our circle of empathy to the trees, plants, and herbs that surround us, no matter where we may live in the world. Whether it’s through journeys, offerings, rituals, or everyday conversations, Dooner shows that plants are more than mere matter to be steeped in a tea or mashed into a poultice, but friends and allies who can console, uplift, and inspire us every day of our lives. Far from simply relieving a headache or clearing up a rash, herbal medicines can also affect our minds, moods, and level of consciousness when we relate to them with reverence, curiosity, and respect.

Although bringing plants into your circle of empathy may feel unfamiliar at first, it soon becomes second nature. As Dooner writes, “We are always in dialogue with other forms of consciousness, whether we realize it or not.” Recognizing this dialogue is the key to expanding your circle, and inviting new kinds of friendship into your life.

As I edited Plant Spirit Herbalism, I loved to imagine Dooner strolling around her land in rainy Scotland, checking in with stands of nettle and lemon balm the way I check in with clumps of ginger and pineapple on my land almost seven thousand miles away. I’d love to know what she’d make of the enormous monkeypods, or what messages she’d hear from the kukui trees whose pale green nuts litter the forest floor. I imagine sitting down to a Sensory Tea Ceremony with her, a core practice she teaches in her book, and discovering all of the aspects of soursop leaf or mamaki I’d never noticed before. I have a feeling she’d know exactly what my basket weaving neighbor means when she talks about plant-dominant consciousness, and that she’d enjoy tromping through the forest with another neighbor of mine, looking for herbal medicines.

For now, I will have to content myself with leafing through Dooner’s beautiful book, recalling the friendships I’ve shared with plants like nettle, elderberry, and dandelion when I lived on the mainland, and whose spirits, according to Dooner, are still available to guide and delight me no matter where I live in the world.

This winter, may you all be surrounded by the wisdom of plants—and engage in the dance of reciprocity wherever you go.

Sincerely,

Hilary T. Smith

Senior Editor, Hierophant Publishing

Herbs are powerful medicine. Cultures around the world have cultivated relationships with healing plants for thousands of years, respecting them not just for their physical medicinal properties, but also for their spiritual power.

In this book, you will enter the world of what author and licensed medical herbalist Wendy Dooner calls Plant Spirit Herbalism—a rich, colorful landscape populated by benevolent plant spirits. Each chapter focuses on a specific herb, exploring its history, healing properties, and role as a spiritual ally. Every herb discussed grows in the world around you, from the humble dandelion to the stately rose.

Dooner’s unique combination of scientific rigor and intuitive insight provides a holistic approach to working with herbs that honors both their capacity for physical healing and their power for spiritual transformation. With her expert guidance, you will:

Create herbal preparations, including tinctures and flower essences

Develop a personal connection to plant spirits, accessing their unseen healing properties

Deepen your relationship with specific herbs through rituals and practical medicine-making

Undertake plant spirit journeys to deepen your relationship with specific herbs

Let Dooner be your guide on this journey as Plant Spirit Herbalism provides a fresh perspective on the natural world, inviting you to form deep and lasting relationships with the nurturing plant spirits which already surround you.

Plant Spirit Herbalism

My Good Friend the Rattlesnake

Love, Service, and Wisdom

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

Extraordinary Powers and Practices

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

The Shaman's Book of Extraordinary Practices

An Inward Journey

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.

The Cauldron of Warming, the wellspring of our innate knowledge, can be drained by past traumas, leaving us anxious and fearful. By replenishing this cauldron, you can restore your birthright of inner peace and security.
The Cauldron of Motion is on its side at birth but fills as we experience deep grief or joy. It is the source of our capacity to love and nurture. Learn how to balance this cauldron, establish healthy boundaries, and protect yourself from emotional drain.
The Cauldron of Wisdom is upside down at birth. When it is righted, we receive one of the most sublime gifts of Celtic spirituality—a profoundly felt connection with nature.

In each chapter, McCrimmon provides self-reflections and other exercises designed to help you:

Activate and balance your inner cauldrons.
Dispel fear by tapping into your innate wisdom.
Work through past traumas, foster love, and nurture emotional resilience.
Manifest creative potential through rituals and meditations.

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!