My Rainforest Monastery

This December marks the six-year anniversary of my moving to the small piece of land in the Hawaiian rainforest I call home. As I am drafting this newsletter, it is sunny and warm, and I’m sitting in a simple eight-by-twelve structure with pink walls, mosquito screens, and a sturdy metal roof; a painting by one of the Hierophant authors I’m working with sits on a shelf made out of a rough, old board, and a motley assortment of new and salvaged solar equipment hums in one corner. A few minutes ago, one of my neighbors stopped by with some ‘awa to share, a traditional Polynesian beverage brewed from the roots of a knobby-limbed plant with heart-shaped leaves, and we drank it together on my front porch. Living here has brought me a sense of peace, contentment, and belonging unlike any I have known in my life. 

Today, I would describe the simple homestead I’ve built as a kind of monastery: a place characterized by natural beauty, solitude, quiet, and humble manual labor. The challenges of living in such a remote location have profoundly altered my body and mind, such that no aspect of who I am has remained untouched by this wild and willful place. I’ve learned to value the simple things: shelter, water to drink, fruit to eat, the presence of kindly neighbors, the opportunity to be of service, and accepting help from others in return. Perhaps most astonishing have been the lessons this place has taught me about surrender. On stormy days, it isn’t possible to leave this land bounded by rivers and streams and a crashing ocean; you quickly learn that your own will comes second to that of nature, and that existing happily here means embracing that reality. 

With all this being said, you may be surprised to learn that when I first moved to this land, I experienced it not as a temple, but as a prison. Six Decembers ago, my then-partner was in the throes of a manic episode; he had decided that uprooting our lives in California and going to live in the jungle was the only cure for what ailed him. At his insistence, and in great haste, we bought the land sight unseen. The first time I laid eyes on the muddy, lightless thicket that was to be our new “home,” I cried. 

My objections to this move were numerous. I didn’t want to live in a tent, with mosquitoes, geckos, and spiders, when I was used to living indoors; I hated the way the thick mud and relentless rain saturated my clothing, which were then impossible to dry; I was conscious of being an intruder in a place and culture to which I had no ties. With no cell service, internet, or electricity, I couldn’t even phone my friends on the mainland. Meanwhile, I was so desperate to go “home” that I resisted making new friends, as that would only make this nightmarish situation seem more permanent. 

While my partner reveled in our new and exciting surroundings, I boiled with anger and sadness, refusing to take joy in anything. I hated the valley, with its dangerous roads and rivers; I hated the roosters which woke me up at 4 AM, and the tiny frogs whose chorus screamed into the night; I hated the tent, whose walls flapped in the wind, and which offered no protection from falling branches and no privacy from the strangers strolling past on the trail nearby.  

Deep in depression, I decided my life was over. I had always wanted to be a writer, and had even published four books in happier years. Now, on a trip back to California to collect the last of our belongings, I took every journal I had ever written, starting from age eight, and dumped them all into a trash can, along with the half-filled bags of expired rice and car repair records I’d cleaned out of our old place that morning. As I pushed the thirty-odd journals and notebooks to the bottom of the can, I told myself that I would never write again. 

 

 

Several months ago, I had the pleasure of editing My Good Friend the Rattlesnake: Lessons of Loss, Truth, and Transformation by don Jose Ruiz. Part memoir, part collection of teaching stories, My Good Friend the Rattlesnake is organized around a central question: how can we learn to control our own poison—the negativity, anger, and false beliefs which can be so damaging to ourselves and others? 

In Chapter One, Ruiz writes: One of the most important things you learn when you live in rattlesnake country is that baby rattlesnakes are far more dangerous than adult ones. This is because when a rattlesnake is young, it hasn’t yet developed the ability to control its poison. If a baby rattlesnake were to bite you, it would inject all its poison in one go, and you would be far more likely to die. Once a rattlesnake grows and becomes an adult, however, it learns to control its poison. If an adult were to bite you, it may only release a small amount. This makes your chances of survival much greater. 

He goes on to recount his long and twisting journey from a baby rattlesnake to an adult one, including some never-before-told stories of the years he was addicted to crystal meth, and during which the stakes for learning to control his poison were literally life and death. Like many of us, he clung to his own pain, holding tightly to the identity of “victim” and “junkie,” while keeping the friends and relatives who were desperate to help him at arms’ length. During one of the most emotional moments in the book, Ruiz’s best friend Emilio confronts him at his home in Tijuana after a particularly destructive binge, saying, “You know, gallo, if you stay here, you’re gonna die.” Lucky for all of us, Ruiz listened and left. 

Looking back on my early days in Hawaii, I can see that like Ruiz, I had a lot in common with a baby rattlesnake. When faced with a set of circumstances I didn’t like and hadn’t chosen, I made a pact with despair. When I put a lifetime’s worth of journals into the trash can, I told myself that I was reclaiming some small bit of agency: by destroying something I cherished, at least I was taking back a little control. Sure, the poison I’d unleashed was hurting me, but that felt better than facing a complete unknown. 

Luckily for me, I, too, had a friend like Emilio. Later that morning, my old music teacher stopped by. When I told him what I had done with my notebooks, he insisted I take them out of the garbage and bring them back to Hawaii with me. “Why bother?” I said. “They’re just going to get ruined in the tent.” At that moment, I couldn’t imagine a future in which I was living happily on the land, any more than don Jose could imagine the life he presently leads, complete with puppies, hard rock music, vegan treats, and a role as a beloved author, teacher, and speaker. 

 

 

Today, the journals I once attempted to destroy live on a shelf in the small cabin I built with the help of a neighbor. Over six years of living here, this place has taught me much about controlling my poison. When the river is high, when the mosquitoes are biting, when the hurricane winds blow, and when one more thing needs repair just when I finished fixing something else, I know there is no sense in giving into despair, frustration, or self-pity. Instead, I do what I can to make myself comfortable, whether that’s brewing a cup of tea, listening to music, or just sitting still. 

Although I’m not sure I qualify as an adult rattlesnake quite yet, I think that after living on my homestead for so long I might finally be growing into a teenage one. I’ve learned that the darkest of times can give way to the brightest of days, and that first impressions of a place or situation can be deceptive. I’ve also learned that when a negative or despairing voice feels like “myself,” I should treat it with a whole lot of skepticism, and refrain from giving it control over my supply of poison. As don Jose writes: No matter what kind of self-destructive path you have been on, there is always a part of you that wants to live—a tiny seed that wants to grow and thrive. And no matter how many negative thoughts you have in your mind, this tiny seed knows its own worth.  

This December, as we pass through the darkest time of the year, I hope you all feel the presence of this tiny seed in your own hearts. A rattlesnake can be a fearsome foe, or it can be a good friend—and the difference is the skillfulness with which we approach it, the respect with which we treat it, and the reverence with which we hold it every day. 

 

Sincerely,

Hilary T. Smith

Senior Editor, Hierophant Publishing

 

 

 

Few understand the difficult work of overcoming trauma, abuse, and addiction better than don Jose Ruiz. 

In My Good Friend the Rattlesnake, Ruiz, now a bestselling author and spiritual teacher, reveals the dramatic twists and turns he experienced on his own path to personal freedom and inner transformation. 

Through this series of deeply intimate stories, Ruiz explains how he overcame his addiction to suffering and embraced a life of love, clarity, and self-awareness. In one example, he recounts his unexpected journey with temporary blindness, which paradoxically allowed him to see what truly mattered. In another, he celebrates individuality in spiritual practice, challenging the idea that it must look or sound a particular way to be authentic. 

Throughout, Ruiz incorporates the teachings of his father, don Miguel Ruiz (author of The Four Agreements). The lessons he shares are practical, profound, and accessible, making this book an essential companion for anyone seeking spiritual growth and emotional healing. 

Honest, vulnerable, and rich with exercises and meditations, My Good Friend the Rattlesnake redefines what it means to heal, grow, and live authentically. 

The Freedom to Change

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.

*

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. 

Shamanic Power Animals

Explore the Wisdom of the Animal World

Shamanism teaches us that the intelligence of nature is all around us, waiting for us to reach out with open hearts and listen to its guidance. When we turn our attention to the incredible community of animal life and the teachings they have to share, we open ourselves to a vibrant, interconnected world full of spiritual truths and transformational insights.

Through myth, tradition, science, and story—combined with the power of personal observation—we can see how animals offer profound life lessons every day:

In Shamanic Power Animals: Embracing the Teachings of Our Non-Human Friends, Toltec shaman don José Ruiz takes a deep dive into this rich and vital store of animal wisdom and demonstrates how we can incorporate its lessons into our daily lives.

The Medicine Bag

The Wisdom of the Shamans

For generation after generation, Toltec shamans have passed down their wisdom through teaching stories. The purpose of these stories is to implant a seed of knowledge in the mind of the listener, where it can ultimately sprout and blossom into a new and better way of life.

In The Wisdom of the Shamans: What the Ancient Masters Can Teach Us about Love and Life, Toltec shaman and master storyteller don Jose Ruiz shares some of the most popular stories from his family’s oral tradition, and offers corresponding lessons that illustrate the larger ideas within each story.

Ruiz begins by explaining that contrary to the stereotypical image of “witchdoctor,” the ancient shamans were men and women who fulfilled several roles within their communities: philosopher, spiritual guide, medical doctor, psychologist, and friend.

According to Ruiz, their teachings are not primitive or reserved for a chosen few initiates, but are instead a powerful series of lessons on love and life that are available us all. To that aim, he has included exercises, meditations, and shamanic rituals in an effort to help you experience the personal transformation these stories offer.

The shamans taught that the truth you seek is inside of you. Let these stories, lessons, and tools be your guide to finding the innate wisdom that lives within.

About the Author

don Jose Ruiz was born in Mexico City and raised in Tijuana, Mexico. When he was 21, he came to live in the United States with his father, don Miguel Ruiz. He lectures and gives workshops around the world and dedicates his life to sharing the ancient Toltec wisdom by translating it into practical, everyday life concepts that promote transformation through truth, love, and common sense. He is the coauthor, with his father, of The Fifth Agreement.