Steven Farmer is a best selling author, teacher, shamanic practitioner, and Soul Healer. Sacred Ceremony gives you clear and simple guidelines for designing and performing ceremonies for any purpose—from healing emotional or physical wounds to honoring important life passages and celebrating seasonal cycles. Whatever your spiritual background or experience with ceremonies, this is a book you’ll want to refer to again and again! "Sacred Ceremony is the most through, thoughtful, and accesible book on ritual ceremony that exists today. It is a treaure that can help you connect to the Source of Life, renew in times of transition, find healing and guidance, celebrate the cycles of life, and maintain a vibrant cnnection to the Sacred every day. Thank you, Steven, for compiling such a meaningful and practical guide." - Joan Borysenko, PhD.

Within these pages, celebrated Native American writer Gabriel Horn weaves a hauntingly beautiful tapestry of traditional stories, songs, and prayers that highlight the sacred Native way of life. Interwoven throughout this visionary work are detailed ceremonies and rituals for: Marriage, Pregnancy, Birth, Greeting the Day, Death Divorce, Presenting an Infant to the Sun, Dreams and Visions Solstice and Equinox, Healing, and more... The Book of Ceremonies is filled with the heartfelt words of a powerful writer and the original illustrations of Carises Horn, a talented young artist. All of us who live on this sacred land will enjoy and treasure this beautiful book. Celebrated Native American writer Gabriel Horn weaves a beautiful tapestry of stories and short pieces that show us the sacred Native way of life. The writing is beautiful and emotional throughout. It is the work of a talented writer who has walked the native path for years, and is able to show us the native way in all aspects of life. The Book of Ceremonies offers clear explanations of a wide variety of ceremonies.

We perform ceremonies to mark important events and celebrate holidays—yet our modern approach to ceremony only scratches the surface of its true potential. With The Book of Ceremony, shamanic teacher Sandra Ingerman presents a rich and practical resource for creating ceremonies filled with joy, purpose, and magic. "We are hungry to connect with more than what we experience with our ordinary senses in the material world," writes Sandra. "By performing ceremonies, you will find yourself stepping into a beautiful and creative power you might never have imagined." Weaving shamanic teachings together with stories, examples, and guiding insights, The Book of Ceremony explores: • The elements of a powerful ceremony—including setting strong intentions, choosing your space, preparing ceremonial items, and dealing gracefully with the unexpected • Stepping into the sacred—key practices for leaving behind your everyday concerns and creating a space where magic can happen • Guidance for working alone, in community, and across distances with virtual ceremonies • Invoking spiritual allies—the power of working with the elements, the natural world, ancestor spirits, and the creative energy of the divine • Sacred transitions—including ceremonies for weddings, births, rites of passage to adulthood, funerals, honorable closure, and new beginnings • Ceremonies for energetic balance—healing and blessing, resolving sacred contracts, getting rid of limiting beliefs, creating Prayer Trees, and more • Life as a ceremony—how to infuse your entire life with ceremonial practice, from planting a garden to revitalizing your home or office to helping heal our planet The Book of Ceremony is more than a "how-to" guide—it will inspire you to create original ceremonies tailored to your own needs and the needs of your community. When you invoke the sacred power of ceremony, you tap into one of the oldest and most effective tools for transforming both yourself and the world. As Sandra writes, "If you perform one powerful and successful ceremony for yourself, the principle of oneness ensures that all of life heals and evolves."

"I Do" What? Religious or Not, Choose the Right Words For Your Wedding Day. "Sacred Ceremony: Create and Officiate Personalized Wedding Ceremonies," brings the focus back to the real purpose of a wedding ... not the cake, the dress or the centerpieces, but the sacred agreement between two people that defines their marriage. In step-by-step, informative chapters, Dayna Reid describes the elements of a wedding ceremony from beginning to end, and the choices people can make with each element. "Sacred Ceremony" includes a wealth of wording and ceremony selections, to celebrate diverse styles, beliefs and traditions, from Christian to Zen, to the simple declarations of love that transcend tradition. Reid, an ordained Officiant with more than a decade of experience discovered "the few ceremony books available were written in either a particular style or from a specific religious view, offering limited variety for customizing a wedding to reflect a couple's unique and personal perspective and intentions." Some key information within the book: * A large collection of spiritual and non-spiritual wording examples * Several sample wedding and renewal ceremonies * A worksheet to help easily compose the ceremony * Instructions for obtaining a marriage license * Who can legally perform the ceremony and steps to becoming ordained * Advice on selecting the right Officiant * Information on filing the paperwork to make the wedding legal

Discover the power of sacred ceremony! Stepping outside of your daily life and into sacred ceremony is an invaluable tool. Ceremony is a beautiful and active prayer that allows you to commune with the spiritual world in an incredibly meaningful way. When you are weighed down by challenges, these practices offer a powerful way to disperse and transform negative energy. When the beauty of life shines through, ceremony becomes a celebration of gratitude and an invitation for more blessings. Living Sacred Ceremony is filled with unique and beautiful practices that empower you to heal and transform your own life. Whether you are looking for assistance in the realm of love, money, family, health or beyond, there is a ceremony for you to become a powerful change maker and find deeper fulfillment. Inspired by the Peruvian shamanic tradition and fused with modern day practicality, this book will show you just how beautiful life can be when you are Living Sacred Ceremony.

A “profound and inspiring” collection of ancient indigenous wisdom for “anyone wanting the healing of self, society, and of our shared planet” (Peter Levine, author of Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma). A Penobscot Indian draws on the experiences and wisdom of the First Nations to address environmental justice, water protection, generational trauma, and more. Drawing from ancestral knowledge, as well as her experience as an attorney and activist, Sherri Mitchell addresses some of the most crucial issues of our day—including indigenous land rights, environmental justice, and our collective human survival. Sharing the gifts she has received from the elders of her tribe, the Penobscot Nation, she asks us to look deeply into the illusions we have labeled as truth and which separate us from our higher mind and from one another. Sacred Instructions explains how our traditional stories set the framework for our belief systems and urges us to decolonize our language and our stories. It reveals how the removal of women from our stories has impacted our thinking and disrupted the natural balance within our communities. For all those who seek to create change, this book lays out an ancient world view and set of cultural values that provide a way of life that is balanced and humane, that can heal Mother Earth, and that will preserve our communities for future generations.

Upanayana is one of the sixteen samskaras or purificatory rites in which a boy is invested with the sacred thread and thus endowedwith second or spiritual birth and qualified to learn the Veda by heart. In this ceremony the boy goes to an Acarya well-versed in the Vedas with a view to be initiated into Vedic studies or a Guru draws a boy towards himself and initiates him into one of the three twice-born classes. From the day the initiation ceremony takes place the young celibate commits himself to a life of austerity and abstinence; he chooses to lead a life rigorously disciplined by vows and disciplinary rules.

The Incas carried out some of the most dramatic ceremonies known to us from ancient times. Groups of people walked hundreds of miles across arid and mountainous terrain to perform them on mountains over 6,096 m (20,000 feet) high. The most important offerings made during these pilgrimages involved human sacrifices (capacochas). Although Spanish chroniclers wrote about these offerings and the state sponsored processions of which they were a part, their accounts were based on second-hand sources, and the only direct evidence we have of the capacocha sacrifices comes to us from archaeological excavations. Some of the most thoroughly documented of these were undertaken on high mountain summits, where the material evidence has been exceptionally well preserved. In this study we describe the results of research undertaken on Mount Llullaillaco (6,739 m/22,109 feet), which has the world's highest archaeological site. The types of ruins and artifact assemblages recovered are described and analyzed. By comparing the archaeological evidence with the chroniclers' accounts and with findings from other mountaintop sites, common patterns are demonstrated; while at the same time previously little known elements contribute to our understanding of key aspects of Inca religion. This study illustrates the importance of archaeological sites being placed within the broader context of physical and sacred features of the natural landscape.

The first English translation of Maria de Naglowska’s sexually magical novella, Le rite sacré de l’amour magique • Contains autobiographical material from Maria de Naglowska’s life • Continues, in symbolic story form, the sexual initiatory teachings expounded in Naglowska’s The Light of Sex and Advanced Sex Magic • Includes a summary of Naglowska’s religious doctrine in her own words Available for the first time in English, The Sacred Rite of Magical Love is a mystical, sexually magical novella written by Maria de Naglowska--the Russian mystic and esoteric high priestess of 1930s Paris. Her religious system, called the Third Term of the Trinity, taught the importance of sex for the upliftment of humanity. A natural continuation of Naglowska’s The Light of Sex and Advanced Sex Magic, this volume also contains autobiographical material from Maria de Naglowska’s life. Full of symbolic language and hidden meanings, the story follows a young woman named Xenophonta as she experiences the apparition of a dark force, whom she calls the Master of the Past and to whom she dedicates her heart and her service. En route to a midnight rendezvous with him, Xenophonta encounters a young Cossack, Micha, who sexually accosts her. Telling Micha that she already belongs to another, she escapes to keep her rendezvous. Micha, now jealous, follows her and ends up taking part in a strange, mystical ceremony that transforms him, through the magic of word and flesh. With a preface discussing the Sacred Triangle and the magical symbol of the AUM Clock, both central symbols in Naglowska’s religious system as well as in the story, the book also includes a summary of the doctrine of the Third Term of the Trinity in de Naglowska’s own words--important to any student of the Western Mystery tradition.

Sacredness and religion are not always synonymous. Using historical occurrences, myths, and anecdotes, the author guides readers through the fundamentals of the sacrosanct, looking at how we as a society have lost the sacred and why it is so urgently needed in today's world. Both traditional and nontraditional readers will learn how to apply sacred ceremony to make events in their lives more meaningful. Over 70 photos.