Sacred Therapy

In Sacred Therapy Estelle Frankel travels to the heart of Jewish mysticism to reveal how people of any faith can draw upon this rich body of teachings to gain wisdom, clarity, and a deeper sense of meaning in the midst of modern life. In an engaging and accessible style, Frankel brings together tales and teachings from the Bible, the Talmud, Kabbalah, and the Hasidic traditions as well as evocative case studies and stories from her own life to create an original, inspirational guide to emotional healing and spiritual growth.

Integrating Western psychological understanding with ancient Eastern and wisdom traditions, Siegel addresses how spiritual resonance is achieved within the psychotherapeutic process in The Sacred Path of the Therapist. Readers will learn how mindfulness practices and attunement can help them move clients toward recovery and beyond, allowing full potential to emerge within a shared coherent field of awakening consciousness. Topics include translating transpersonal theory into practice, understanding the human energy field, and the integration of psychotherapy and spiritual initiation. Drawing from her unique experiences working with master shamans as well as practicing as a psychotherapist, Irene Siegel discusses the evolving role of the therapist as both therapist and healer. Shamans are ancestral teachers, guides to nonordinary realms of consciousness and a divine cosmic whole within silent sacred spaces. Using lessons from native shamanic tradition and the evolving field of transpersonal psychology, both healer and client will learn to access the innate inner wisdom and healing potential within themselves through guided meditation exercises within moment-by-moment sacred space. The expanding content and context of therapy blends the two worlds: the clinical world and the world of the shaman.

Clay is universally recognized as a medium of creative expression, and it also has great potential for therapeutic application. These two properties of clay are celebrated together in a book that explores the history, theory and techniques of claywork in eliciting therapeutic outcomes. Vignettes and case material explain and expand the text, which interweaves an appreciation of clay in art with many practical suggestions for its use in therapy. By according equal status to aesthetic outcomes and artistic integrity, the author offers a new and holistic approach to claywork. Practitioners and educators in the fields of therapy and art will find his book to be an essential source of information and ideas.

Drawing on narrative, postmodern, and other therapeutic perspectives, this book guides therapists in exploring the creative and healing possibilities in clients' spiritual and religious experience. Vivid personal accounts and dialogues bring to life the ways spirituality may influence the stories told in therapy, the language and metaphors used, and the meanings brought to key relationships and events. Applications are discussed for a wide variety of clinical situations, including helping people resolve relationship problems, manage psychiatric symptoms, and cope with medical illnesses.

The first volume of Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy presented the basics of craniosacral therapy as a gentle, compassionate healing art that can be used by psychologists, midwives, chiropractors, and massage and physical therapists. In this second volume, author Michael Shea goes deeper into the entire biodynamic paradigm, analyzing the relationship of trauma resolution, psychodynamics, and shamanism, and providing practical meditations, visualizations, and clinical skills to restore physical, spiritual, and emotional health. The book opens by exploring the meaning of biodynamic, followed by a discussion of human embryology as a path to healing in any form of therapy. This section offers a set of pioneering techniques based on perceiving stillness—slow movement–as a fundamental healing influence. The next section describes the bridge between trauma resolution therapy and biodynamic work, establishes a new containment model, and offers skills for resolving shock and trauma. A special section contains fresh strategies for anyone working with infants and children, along with a provocative analysis linking the infant-mother relationship to the patient-therapist relationship. Finally, Shea provides a unique perspective on depth psychology, mythology, and healing. This includes the defining difference between biodynamic craniosacral therapy and all other forms of craniosacral therapy: the focus on the nature of spiritual disease and shamanism.

Acting on what started as a hunch, Dr. Francis Martin has cataloged well over 20,000 distinct approaches to counseling and psychotherapy that are advertised on the webpages of licensed, practicing mental health providers. No doubt some portion of them are harmful, but the sheer volume of advertised practices and techniques, often with names deceptively similar to actual evidence-based practices, should be cause for concern among all stakeholders in the helping professions - from educators and researchers to policy makers and insurance companies and, especially, consumers. Based on this significant original study, and drawing from other research and supports, Therapy Thieves describes a near-universal crisis in the field and recommends ways to rescue mental health care from itself. The crisis is caused by declining competence among counselors and psychotherapists who have failed to regulate themselves and who, therefore, deliver inadequate - if not harmful - services. In presenting a simple, yet powerful indictment of the field, Dr. Martin advocates for major reforms in several areas of mental health care, including how prospective licensees are trained, supervised and licensed, a major reworking of professional ethics, and the need to establish regulations for mental health care providers. In short, the book calls for major, specific, and urgently needed reforms.

Sacred Knowledge is the first well-documented, sophisticated account of the effect of psychedelics on biological processes, human consciousness, and revelatory religious experiences. Based on nearly three decades of legal research with volunteers, William A. Richards argues that, if used responsibly and legally, psychedelics have the potential to assuage suffering and constructively affect the quality of human life. Richards's analysis contributes to social and political debates over the responsible integration of psychedelic substances into modern society. His book serves as an invaluable resource for readers who, whether spontaneously or with the facilitation of psychedelics, have encountered meaningful, inspiring, or even disturbing states of consciousness and seek clarity about their experiences. Testing the limits of language and conceptual frameworks, Richards makes the most of experiential phenomena that stretch our understanding of reality, advancing new frontiers in the study of belief, spiritual awakening, psychiatric treatment, and social well-being. His findings enrich humanities and scientific scholarship, expanding work in philosophy, anthropology, theology, and religious studies and bringing depth to research in mental health, psychotherapy, and psychopharmacology.

Artist, Therapist and Teacher is a compilation of writings taken from the author's 40 years of experience. The book is organized chronologically, earlier works are presented first and the most recent, last. Chapters include writings from particular years accompanied with commentaries by Chris Belkofer, Ph.D. that highlight their relevance to contemporary art therapy practices. Bruce L. Moon uses music, performance art, poetry, sports activities, visual art forms, and other task-oriented modalities to cultivate relationships with clients. His vision of art therapy work is intimately connected to creativity, artistic self-expression, and exploration of meaning. Based on the author's art therapy practice, his overwhelming sense is that art therapy is continually being reshaped and transformed. This sense of ongoing “re-creation” is connected to the foundation of art's healing power, which resides in the ability of art to constantly shift and find new forms of expression. Unique features include: social applications of the arts, art-based group therapy, art therapy education as performance, metaphor, artfully constructed narratives, and case vignettes. Further enhanced with 12 illustrations to completely clarify the vignettes discussed, this book is a call to art therapists to embrace the artistic dimensions of professional identity, and use creativity when presenting ideas about the discipline of art therapy. This book will be an excellent resource for art therapists, art lovers, artists, art educators, and other mental health professionals.