The Healing Power of Prayer

Hans-Werner Schroeder

Softbound

$11.95

My experience of reading The Healing Power of Prayer is that it is, in itself, a taste of the grace of wholeness that awaits us if we but ask. Schroeder's little book is so awake with a warm wisdom that it becomes a portal into the world of Love, into the universe of Hope, and shows us how to walk there upon the foundation of Faith.

None of which is as easy to do as it is to percieve as possibility. Schroeder so gently but clearly makes plain the reason so few of us experience the healing that can come through prayer: we don't feel ourselves worthy to ask, we don't feel worthy to stand alongside Love. And yet, because he allows Love to answer, through his book, and with Schroeder as companion and guide, allowing blessing to be given us becomes a gift in the face of which we can bow our heads.

May this little book touch many hearts.

An Exercise for Karmic Insight

Rudolf Steiner

Originally published as part of Karmic Relationships, Vol. 2

Softbound

$6.00

There is the possibility of a comparatively quick maturing of insight into karmic relationships if, for a considerable time, we try patiently and with inner energy to picture, with greater and greater consciousness, an experience that would otherwise simply take its course without being grasped properly and fade away in the course of life.

Rudolf Steiner

In this unique lecture, Steiner presents an exercise one can practice for a better understanding of karma. He suggests using e the image of a single event in our life as content for meditation. He offers a detailed description and explains how, over several days and nights, the image becomes incorporated into our spiritual bodies. Eventually, the image, in a transformed state, reaches into the physical body, leading one to perceive a previous earthly life and the cause of the event pictured in meditation.

Kabbalah of Prayer
Sacred Sounds and the Soul's Journey

Shulamit Elson

Softbound

$20.00

In this remarkable, groundbreaking book, Shulamit Elson writes with eloquence and authority about our soul’s journey, our place in the universe, and our relationship to God through prayer. In beautiful and simple words, she shares the ancient teachings and the sacred sounds of the Kabbalah in ways capable of reconnecting us with the Eternal and changing our lives forever.

We learn of her journey from the closed world of an Orthodox Jewish family, on a voyage of discovery that took her into a secular life of poetry and travel throughout Europe. Then, faced with personal difficulties and waking visions, she began a path of meditation. Gifts of healing and prophecy followed. Eventually she met her Maggid, the traditional Kabbalistic “answering angel,” with whose help she developed a series of meditative “Sound Prayers” using sacred sounds made with the voice.

Elson explains the theological, cosmological, and esoteric foundations upon which “Sound Prayer” is based. We are introduced to the ancient wisdom of the Kabbalah, the “Tree of Life,” and the structure of the soul in its relationship with God. We learn the true nature of prayer, how it relates to Tikkun Olam (“Repair of the World”), and how “Sound Prayer” relates to different angelic levels of being and truth.

This is a practical book that gives individual exercises as well as offering help on meeting specific challenges, including spiritual struggles, feelings of meaninglessness, and harsh self-judgment, as well as illness, fear, and anxiety.

Seeking Spirit Vision
Essays on Developing Imagination

Dennis Klocek

Softbound

$23.95

Seeking Spirit Vision, if you are willing to take it up and work with it, will change your life, as much perhaps as the most significant person you have ever met did. This book, if you wish, can become a lifetime friend - a very wise friend.

- Robert Sardello, Ph.D.
The School of Spiritual Psychology

Dennis Klocek has always had a remarkable ability to bring together seemingly disparate bits of knowledge, observation, experience and alchemically transform them into golden nuggets of insight, lights along pathways formerly unseen. Seeking Spirit Vision brings together in writing and in one volume the fruits of Klocek's lifetime of pathfinding, of his quest to make manifest that the many dispersed spiritual streams, science. and art are, in fact, shimmering aspects of a truly unified Reality. This book is simply golden.

In it you will find bits of spiritual history, explanations of the nature of experiences both esoteric and mundane, and especially an overflowing abundance of exercises -- explained more clearly than any others I have encountered -- which, over time, can heal the human body, soul and spirit toward clear vision.

Seeking Spirit Vision can truly become a lifetime companion and lead you to a personal experience of the varieties of wonder and spirit our universe holds in store for us.

Zen and the Art of Knitting
Exploring the Links Between Knitting, Spirituality, and Creativity

Bernadette Murphy

Softbound

$10.95

Contains outstanding descriptions of knitting classes in a Waldorf school!

This book has an enormous amount to say about the value to human beings, young and old, of working with our hands. It also happens to contain two wonderful chapters devoted to who is an amazing handworker and the best Waldorf Crafts teacher it has ever been my privilege to know: Elizabeth Seward.**

Bernadette Murphy has given the most detailed, life-filled descriptions I've ever read of knitting classes actually taught to first and fifth graders in a Waldorf school (Highland Hall). Even better, what you'll find in these descriptions is what I have always hoped someone would do for these classes -- Elizabeth presented everything to the children in ways that united their hands with the hearts and heads, and left an opening for spirit and soul to thrive. We can all be inspired by the simple, yet deeply resonant way she guided the children through the techniques and leads them into a loving, caring relationship with the work of their hands. All this, while maintaining an atmosphere of joy along with setting high standards for the outcomes of that work! What she accomplished is truly what we all want for our children.

N.B. Contrary to what the title may lead you to believe, it is not a treatise on Buddhist meditation, though Murphy's exploration does include this. It is a heartfelt consideration of the core essence of what knitting evokes in the inner life. Interestingly, about 80% of the people she interviewed or observed are practitioners of Christian prayer and meditation. It is a book whose contents and intents are still living in my heart, well past the reading of it. I think you'll love it, too.

**Elizabeth is no longer active as a Crafts Teacher, but does still offer classes and workshops to adults and makes herself available as mentor and guide to Waldorf Crafts teachers. I have known Elizabeth for about 20 years and can think of no one better to call upon in this role. Whether you are involved with a Waldorf School, public or private, that is ready to deepen its crafts program; or are part of a home school cooperative and would like a workshop to help the adults become more skilled at both the crafts and teaching them; or are an adult wishing to enrich your own life with a deeper, more joyful relationship to handwork -- Elizabeth Seward, in my opinion, is some one you could call upon with confidence that your needs will be met and your time and resources more than well-spent. Elizabeth can be reached through her web site: www.workofourhands.net

Mister God, This Is Anna
A True Story of a Very Special Friendship

Flynn

Softbound

$6.99

This is one of my all-time favorite books - a story that warms your heart as it awakens you to look at the world in a way that allows the spirit to pour through what you see.

Anna was a four year old, neglected and roaming the streets along London's docks during the 1930's. Flynn found her when he was out for a late-night stroll. He took her back to his mother's home, where he discovered that this delightful child could penetrate into the truth of anything she encountered. Anna had an astonishing ability to ask - and answer - life's largest questions, to get to the heart of any matter. Her total openness and honesty amazed all who knew her. She seemed to understand with uncanny certainty the purpose of being, the essence of feeling, the beauty of love.

This is a book I return to again and again - it's simply wonderful each and every time.

Theatre of the Imagination
Volume 1

Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph.D.

6 audio CDs - approximately 7 hours

$69.95

I have learned more about the language of the soul and the language of the world's great stories from Theatre of the Imagination than from any other single source. Reviewing them for our bookshop was one of the great joys of my life - really!

Clarissa Pinkola Estés is one of the world's greatest story tellers, and also one of the great seers into the human heart. Raised in a remarkable extended family that gave her two world traditions (and their stories!) - Mestizo and traditional Hungarian - and the stories and understanding that make her a true contadora, a keeper of the old tales.

In each of these six lectures, Dr. Estés treats us to a captivating, luscious telling of a rich, traditional story and then invites us through poetry, conversation and clear seeing into the heart of the tale, into it's message for the human soul and the healing that is particularly its own. This is a journey which I urge you not to miss - a journey which will take you to the interior of your own heart and lead you out again to a deeper compassion and understanding others.

Highlights from this first volume, tape by tape:

• Tape One: "La Calavera" (Godmother Death) - The cycles of Life and Death - Our Mother Tongue - The language of symbols - "A Newspaper Interview" poem - The images of the moon landing - Aesculapius - The Aztec Goddess Txati - The symbolic 13 - much more
• Tape Two: The Lost Mother Moon - On the longing to return to the home within - the importance of community - Healing the homesickness of the soul - nostalgia - "Information-gorge Syndrome" - Wounds and the "violet light" - "The Rose Tree" story - "Abre la Puerta" chant-poem - much more
• Tape Three: Vasalisa and the Baba Yaga - On intuition, consciousness, and the loss of innocence - Claiming your strength - The meaning of "blessing" - Schmertzenreich (richness of sorrow) and tikkun olam (repair of the world) - "How to Silence a Woman: Retrieving Her Voice" poem - much more
• Tape Four: Bluebeard and the Forbidden Key - Naiveté and the predator in the psyche - Waking the 1000 eyes of intuition - Reclaiming your true life - "The Initiate" story - How to stop the destructive inner critic - much more
• Tape Five: The Ugly Duckling - On the gifted child - The "triumph of exile" - The Mistaken Zygote Syndrome" - Hephaestus and the 12 Women Made of Silver and Gold - The meaning of self-identiy - Finding where you really belong - Active imagination - "The Tenth Father" poem - much more
• Tape Six: The Joyous Body - La Mariposa/The Butterfly Woman - The female body of God - Sappho's poetry constructed - Procrustes' Bed - The negative shadow - Reclaiming the bodies we were born with - "Old Big Mother" poem - much more

Theatre of the Imagination
Volume 2

Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph.D.

6 audio CDs - approximately 7 hours

$69.95

Volume 2 continues and concludes the lecture series begun in Volume 1. What an adventure!

Highlights from Volume 2, tape by tape:

• Tape Seven: "Las Tres Osas Viejas" (The Three Old Ones) - Agelessness - the "aerial view" of the elder - "Crossing the crone line" - "The Grandmother Blessing" poem - The alchemical conjunctio (melding of opposites) - "The Three Old Women Bears" story - much more
• Tape Eight: The Fisherman's Wife - On fatherhood and "positive patriarchy" - Repairing the inner feminine in men - "Boy Who Married an Eagle" story - The "Silver Fish in the Pink Polka-dot Dress" story - "Drain Pipe" story - King Lear - much more
• Tape Nine: Skeleton Woman - Eros and Death - Facing the cycles of change in relationships - on staying in love - "Sedna and the Dog-Man" story - "The Wedding Night" poem - much more
• Tape Ten: The Crescent Moon Bear - On anger and the God of Love - Transforming relationships through forgiveness - Four vital steps to forgiveness - Pandora's Box - Watching Yourself exercise - Biographical Desconso exercise - "Balaam Chilam" poem - much more
• Tape Eleven: Sealskin/Soulskin - La Placita/the home place - On the marriage of the sacred and secular - The homecoming - "What have you done with your soul skin? - Overcoming loneliness - The power of the divine child - Soul as the individual mysterium - much more
• Tape Twelve: Wolfen - On courage and the sacred center of the psyche - Receiving the "pleasure of lushness" - "If You're Lucky" poem - The meaning of sweet - "Five Olde Praying Women" poem - "The Creation" poem - much more

Theatre of the Imagination
Volumes 1 & 2

Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph.D.

12 audio CDs - approximately 14 hours

Very special price - save $29.95 compared to purchasing separately!

$109.95

Bedtime Stories

Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph.D.

CD, 1 hour

$15.95

How wonderful! Bedtime stories for grown-ups! Just the thing for those of us who love stories but no longer have anyone who tells them to us.

This is a beautiful CD - an exquisite introduction to how the world of sleep and the world of stories intertwine to help us stay healthy, happy, sane and sound. If you have never heard Clarissa Pinkola Estés tell a story before, you are in for such a joyous discovery. I would call her a 'master storyteller,' except that she is so much more than that. I actually can't find the words to tell you how much warmth, depth and love she brings to each story she tells - and how magical even well-known tales become as she weaves them again for us.

As a child growing up in a family of storytellers, Dr. Estés learned firsthand how a story told at bedtime can soothe away the troubles of the day, and prepare the way for the night's dreams to follow. "Adulthood is only a disguise we wear during the daytime," she teaches. At night, we are all children.

In addition to learning how stories can open an "aperture" into the world of dreams and the meaning of such archetypal figures as Mother Night and the Sandman, you will also be treated to amazing retellings of:

• Sleeping Beauty (this is one that we all can learn from and then use what we learn to share with the children in our lives)
• The Mouse and the Lion
• The Jumping Mouse
• Winken, Blinken and Nod
• and more

You'll love this CD - even if you never have trouble sleeping! And once you hear these stories told so beautifully, I predict that you'll be rounding up the children in your life and treating them to stories yourself. Sweet dreams!!

Give Us This Day
The Story of Prayer

Rufus Goodwin

Introduced by Robert Sardello

$19.95

Gandhi called prayer "the key of the morning and the bolt of the evening." Somehow, we seem to know that this is true and yet, an uncertainty often lingers - what is prayer? Does it have to be done a certain way? And, more to the point, how can I pray? Give Us This Day explores these questions, looking at numerous traditions not in comparison, but as a means of getting at the essential core of prayer - the techniques, attitude, and inner workings. Godwin's exploration is deep, penetrating and highly practical, offering greater access to renewal, imagination, inspiration, and intuition - prayer's anchor to meaning in daily life. The seeds of this book are the sort that can become flowers throughout one's life. Highly recommended.

This Is for Everyone
Universal Principles of Healing Prayer and the Jewish Mystics

Douglas Goldhamer, DD
Melinda Stengel, LCSW

$14.95

I am so excited about This Is for Everyone. It is not only a very well-written, hands-on, experientially based guide to healing prayer, it is also one of the few instances where I have witnessed true ecumenicalism - that behind all the varieties of religious practice and experience lies the same spiritual reality - in practice. This Is for Everyone is itself a healing prayer - a loving balm to soothe and heal our separation from each other.
Rabbi Douglas Goldhamer is as universal a soul as you are apt to find - deeply committed to his own Jewish religion, yet even more committed to God and to all people. He has nearly 20 years experience with healing prayer and working with people from many different faiths. Melinda Stengel is a Catholic social worker who came to Rabbi Douglas to learn from him when she was faced with a deep life crisis and then stayed on to help with his work. Together they have written a book can place the power of healing prayer in the hands of anyone wanting to use it.
Each section of their tutorial is divided into three sections: Universal Principle, Liberating Concept, How to Do it - an approach which is empowering, unifying and healing. Please read this book - you'll love it!

After the Ecstasy, the Laundry
How the Heart Grows Wise on the Spiritual Path

Hardbound

Jack Kornfield

$24.95

Most spiritual accounts end with illumination or enlightenment. But what if we ask what happens after that? What happens when the Zen master returns home to spouse and children? What happens when the Christian mystic goes shopping? What is life like after the ecstasy?

From the author's introduction

I have given this book as gifts to more people than any other book I carry. Like myself, none of them considers themselves Buddhists. After the Ecstasy, the Laundry addresses one of our most pressing needs in such an immediate, accurate and (thankfully!) useful and healing way that it doesn't matter what one's personal path or affiliations may be - this book will speak for your heart and to your heart, with a perspective that rings true and offers solutions. This is the book for anyone who has pursued the spiritual life with commitment and integrity and then found themselves - after years of gathering insight upon glorious insight - staring their own failure square in the face. Kornfield draws on the life stories of practitioners of Buddhism, Christianity, Sufism, Islam, Hinduism and others - stories that demonstrate that the bright dawn of one's awakening is invariably followed by what the Christian tradition terms "the dark night of the soul." But these stories don't stop there - they allow us to follow others as they find their way back to a more truly wakeful daylight. The pathways share many common traits along with uniquely creative moments. Kornfield also provides clear instruction for meditative practices (each addressing a key common issue) based on the Vipassana tradition where meditation is an invitation to "know thyself" in an intimate and compassionate way. Anyone who is past the salad days of their spiritual journey will love this book. Recommended without reservation!

Choices of Love

Dorothy Maclean

$16.95

I put off posting this book in our Book Shop, not because I didn't like it, but because it touched my heart so deeply that I have had trouble finding the words to convey what lies between its covers. What Dorothy Maclean has poured into Choices of Love is nothing less than a mirror reflecting the burgeoning Love that overflows the Earth and can be seen anywhere one chooses to look for it. She has also shared exercises and attitudes that we can use to develop our capacity to see, hear and feel this Love as she is able to do. My experience of working my way through Choices of Love was multifaceted - I received gift upon gift of beauty, found door after door opening to me, was graced with epiphany upon epiphany, and finally found myself dropping chain after chain, able to embrace and be embraced by the Love which sustains all Creation. May you experience it likewise.

Alive in God's World
Human Life on Earth and in Heaven as Described in the Visions of Joa Bolendas

Joa Bolendas

Foreword by Therese Schroeder-Sheker

Compiled, Translated, and Introduced by John Hill

$16.95

I have found enormous wisdom, insight and warmth in the visions of Joa Bolendas. Whenever I have endeavored to carry into my own life a prayer, an attitude, an awareness gleaned from her work, I have always found it to be true and valuable. Working with the world in this way is so fundamentally healing - for oneself and for the world - that my hope is that many more may become aware of her message. This is the message of life lived in awareness of the unity with the divine - and in an awareness that this is to live as a full human being.

You may also wish to visit Joa Bolendas' web site - www.joabolendas.ch There she shares the heart of her work - I think you'll find it helpful.

Passion for God
The Path of the Bridal Mystic

2 Audio Cassettes

Tessa Bielecki

$18.95

These tapes are wonderful to listen to - even if you can listen only to brief bits at a time. And the technique of prayer they reveal is balancing - out of this ecstacy we can emerge as solid, clear participants in the rest of life. Very highly recommended.

Inside the great medieval monastery at Avila, Spain, one of history's great love affairs took place. Here, within these turreted stone walls, the Christian mystic St. Teresa surrendered her "ensouled body" to God. What emerged from this divine union informs our spiritual lives to this day through the ecstatic "spousal prayer" that St. Teresa embraced so fiercely.

With exuberance, humor and lively scholarship, Mother Tessa takes listeners far from the hard pews of dutiful worship and into a lush marriage chamber where God is mystically experienced as spouse. Through her enthusiasm and authenticity, you can also discover an authentic practice for achieving true sacred intimacy.

Tessa Bielecki is Mother Abbess of the Spiritual Life Institute, a Carmelite community with hermitages in Colorado, Nova Scotia, and Ireland. She is actively involved in Buddhist-Christian dialogs and international initiatives exploring world peace and planetary survival. And - she is one of the leading authroities on the life of St. Teresa of Avila and an enthusiastic practitioner and teacher of spousal prayer.

A Beginner's Guide to Forgiveness
How to Free Your Heart and Awaken Compassion

Jack Kornfield

Audio CD, 74 minutes

$15.95

I believe that the most profoundly healing thing anyone can do - whether they want to heal themselves or to heal others or to heal our Earth - is to truly forgive. Anytime anyone can really forgive a wrong - including forgiving ourselves for wrongs committed - it shifts everything for everyone and gives us all fresher air to breath.

What is marvelous about Jack Kornfield's teaching on this CD is that in addition to discussing the nature of forgiveness and its many gifts, he also teaches a practice that, if done over time, opens the human heart and enables us to really forgive. The 'forgiveness meditation' which he teaches comes from his training as a Buddhist monk in Cambodia - it is simply amazing and is something I wish I could share with everyone, so powerful is its capacity to move us closer to being able to completely forgive even devastating wrongs. I can't think of anything the world needs more, than that we all come to be able to do this.

Through stories, teachings and guided meditation, Kornfield opens the way for us to understand

• how forgiveness and compassion are possible in situations of suffering
• how forgiveness can be coupled with strength and self-protection
• the practices that lead to forgiveness of yourself and others

This teaching is a gift toward freedom and love - enjoy!

Forgiveness
The Greatest Healer of All

Gerald G. Jampolsky, M.D.

$12.95

Forgiveness is simple, peaceful and ultimately deeply penetrating. As with all of Jampolsky's work, the outer simplicity is the result, not of superficiality, but of the depth of work the author himself has done within the subject area. This is one of those little books to which we can turn again - to find a friend, to find guidance, to locate the path out of the daily hell of unforgiveness. Powerful, direct, healing. Unhesitatingly recommended.

Original Blessing

Matthew Fox

$15.00

Original Blessing is an incredibly liberating book. In it Matthew Fox lifts us out of what he terms the "fall/redemption" spirituality that has characterized the dominant streams of Western religions and opens our eyes to a universe that is filled with love, beauty, and joy. The dominant Western culture has led us to imprison God and ourselves in chains of fear, judgmentalism, and vengeance. In so doing, it has left the vibrantly spiritual path of joy and loving creation back in a dark corner, far from view. Original Blessing, grounded frimly in Fox's deep understanding of Thomas Acquinas, Hildegard of Bingen, Meister Eckhart, and many others, has gone a long way toward changing that fact. It is, in reality, "one of the 20 books that changed the world," as New Age Journal Source Book for 1995 characterized it. We rejoice with every copy we sell.

Prayers of the Cosmos
Meditations on the Aramaic Words of Jesus

Translated and with commentary by
Neil Douglas-Klotz

$12.00

If the English words of Jesus somehow don't really convey to you what you would expect from someone who says in humility and truth, "I am the Light of the World," Prayers of the Cosmos will not only confirm your suspicions that something has gone awry, but give you the cosmic truth you originally sought. The English New Testament (all translations) we know is a translation from the Koine Greek. Koine was sort of a "business Greek" and was itself used to translate the more provincial and more cosmically aware Aramaic that Jesus actually spoke. Aramaic is a language rich in its ability to convey multiple levels of human and cosmic experience. In this little book, translator Neil Douglas-Klotz gives us a Jesus who speaks in Loving Awareness of his consciousness union with Earth and All Creation. Wonderful!

Thoughts in Solitude

Thomas Merton

$6.95

This is a small book - designed to fit into almost any purse or pocket. However, it was written by a spiritual giant, someone whose life and work is really worthy of the deepest respect and admiration. This is, then, a book that, if you carry it with you to read when opportunity presents, can vouchsafe that any time spent in a waiting room or stalled traffic will be time you can look back upon with gratitude.

In thirty-seven concise and beautifully written chapters, Thomas Merton explores the meaning of interior solitude and its necessary role in bringing every life to joyous fruition. "What is said here about solitude is not just a recipe for hermits, it has a bearing on the whole future of man and his world."

Although Merton was a Trappist monk, this book is universal in its spiritual scope. Wonderful!