An inspiring, informative, and practical guide to navigating end-of-life issues, by a groundbreaking expert in the field and the New York Times best-selling author of Knocking on Heaven’s Door. Katy Butler argues that we have lost touch with the “art of dying” as practiced by our ancestors, yet we still hunger for rites of passage and a sense of the sacred, especially in the important life transitions of aging and dying.

Noted psychotherapist Francis Weller provides an essential guide for navigating the deep waters of sorrow and loss in this lyrical yet practical handbook for mastering the art of grieving. Describing how Western patterns of amnesia and anesthesia affect our capacity to cope with personal and collective sorrows, Weller reveals the new vitality we may encounter when we welcome, rather than fear, the pain of loss.

The first-ever practical, compassionate, and comprehensive guide to dying - and living fully until you do.

Death is not waiting for us at the end of a long road. Death is always with us, in the marrow of every passing moment. She is the secret teacher hiding in plain sight, helping us to discover what matters most. Life and death are a package deal. They cannot be pulled apart, and we cannot truly live unless we are aware of death. The Five Invitations is an exhilarating meditation on the meaning of life and how maintaining an ever-present consciousness of death can bring us closer to our truest selves.

You get ready to die the way you get ready for a trip. Start by realizing you don't know the way. Listen to a few travel guides. Study the language, look at maps, gather equipment. Let yourself imagine what it will be like. Pack your bags. This book is one of those travel guides - a guide to preparing for your own death and the deaths of people close to you. The fact of death is hard to believe. Sallie Tisdale explores our fears and all the ways death and talking about death make us uncomfortable - but she also explores its intimacies and joys.

Caring for the Dying describes a whole new way to approach death and dying. It explores how the dying and their families can bring deep meaning and great comfort to the care given at the end of a life. Created by Henry Fersko-Weiss, the end-of-life doula model is adapted from the work of birth doulas and helps the dying to find meaning in their life, express that meaning in powerful and beautiful legacies, and plan for the final days.

Whether complete or only fragmentary, the 930 extant Dead Sea Scrolls irrevocably altered how we look at and understand the foundations of faith and religious practice. Now you can get a comprehensive introduction to this unique series of archaeological documents, and to scholars' evolving understanding of their authorship and significance, with these 24 lectures. Learn what the scrolls are, what they contain, and how the insights they offered into religious and ancient history came into focus.

What if you could live in a world where the guidance of those who were gone was available, right at your very fingertips? It's possible, if we are open to it. Anyone can reclaim the forgotten guidance of the dead, and anyone can return to the realm of magic and miracles. In Take Back the Magic: Conversations with the Unseen World, author, spiritual teacher, and co-founder of The Way of the Rose Perdita Finn reveals that life is beginningless, love is endless, and those who have passed don’t truly go anywhere when they die.

Most people want to avoid thinking about death, but Caitlin Doughty - a 20-something with a degree in medieval history and a flair for the macabre - took a job at a crematory, turning morbid curiosity into her life’s work. With an original voice that combines fearless curiosity and mordant wit, Caitlin tells an unusual coming-of-age story full of bizarre encounters, gallows humor, and vivid characters (both living and very dead).

The world's leading expert on near-death experiences reveals his journey toward rethinking the nature of death, life, and the continuity of consciousness.

Fueled by a childhood fascination with death, journalist Hayley Campbell searches for answers in the people who make a living by working with the dead. Along the way, she encounters mass fatality investigators, embalmers, and a former executioner who is responsible for ending sixty-two lives. She meets gravediggers who have already dug their own graves, visits a cryonics facility in Michigan, goes for late-night Chinese with a homicide detective, and questions a man whose job it is to make crime scenes disappear.

Die Wise does not offer seven steps for coping with death. It does not suggest ways to make dying easier. It pours no honey to make the medicine go down. Instead, with lyrical prose, deep wisdom, and stories from his two decades of working with dying people and their families, Stephen Jenkinson places death at the center of the discussion and asks us to behold it in all its painful beauty. Die Wise teaches the skills of dying, skills that have to be learned in the course of living deeply and well.

In this groundbreaking new work, David Kessler - an expert on grief and the coauthor with Elisabeth Kübler-Ross of the iconic On Grief and Grieving - journeys beyond the classic five stages to discover a sixth stage: meaning.

Fascinated by our pervasive terror of dead bodies, mortician Caitlin Doughty set out to discover how other cultures care for their dead. In rural Indonesia, she observes a man clean and dress his grandfather's mummified body. Grandpa's mummy has lived in the family home for two years, where the family has maintained a warm and respectful relationship. She meets Bolivian natitas (cigarette-smoking, wish-granting human skulls) and introduces us to a Japanese kotsuage.

Inspiring hope, solace, and courage in living through our losses, author Martín Prechtel, trained in the Tzutujil Maya shamanic tradition, shares profound insights on the relationship between grief and praise in our culture - how the inability that many of us have to grieve and weep properly for the dead is deeply linked with the inability to give praise for living. In modern society, grief is something that we usually experience in private, alone, and without the support of a community.

We all sit on the edge of a mystery. We have only known this life, so dying scares us - and we are all dying. But what if dying were perfectly safe? What if you could approach dying with curiosity and love? What if dying were the ultimate spiritual practice? Walking Each Other Home: Conversations on Loving and Dying reunites lifelong friends Ram Dass and Mirabai Bush, who speak on the spiritual opportunities in the dying process. They share intimate personal experiences and timeless practices for every aspect of this journey.

For thousands of years, these questions - which span all major spiritual traditions - have served as beacons for spiritual seekers: Who am I? What do I love? How shall I live, knowing I will die? What is my gift to the family of the Earth? As he guides us through these questions, Muller weaves poetry with true stories of love, courage, grief, and transformation in order to show how beauty and wisdom come to us at unexpected times.

When her earliest childhood friend is diagnosed with a terminal illness, Becker sets off on a quest to immerse herself in what it means to be mortal. Can we live our lives more fully knowing some day we will die? With a keen eye toward that which makes life worth living, interfaith minister, mom, and perpetual seeker Barbara Becker recounts stories where life and death intersect in unexpected ways.

When Paula D'Arcy lost her husband and baby in a car crash, she began an inner search for a faith that was stronger than fear. In Gift of the Red Bird she shares her remarkable spiritual adventure. Grief, she shows us, is an ongoing, never-completed process, one that becomes woven into the fabric of the grieving person's spiritual life.

When their only child was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis (CF) at the age of two, Maryanne O'Hara and her husband were told that Caitlin could live a long life or be dead in a matter of months. Thirty-one years later, Caitlin lost her battle with this devastating disease following an excruciating two-year wait on the transplant list and a last-minute race to locate a pair of healthy lungs. The sudden spiral of events left Maryanne in an existential crisis, searching to find an answer to the eternal question: Why we are here?

You get ready to die the way you get ready for a trip. Start by realizing you don't know the way. Listen to a few travel guides. Study the language, look at maps, gather equipment. Let yourself imagine what it will be like. Pack your bags. This book is one of those travel guides - a guide to preparing for your own death and the deaths of people close to you. The fact of death is hard to believe. Sallie Tisdale explores our fears and all the ways death and talking about death make us uncomfortable - but she also explores its intimacies and joys.

Spring Washam is a founder of the East Bay Meditation Center, the most diverse and accessible meditation center in the United States. In A Fierce Heart, she shares her contemporary, unique interpretation of the Buddha's 2,500-year-old teachings that get to the heart of mindfulness, wisdom, and compassion. Woven throughout the book are stories from her life, family, and community, along with soulful and unexpected stories of compassion in action from all over the world.

The greatest contribution of the ancient shamans to modern healing is the understanding that in the course of any life we are liable to suffer soul loss - the loss of parts of our vital energy and identity - and that to be whole and well, we must find the means of soul recovery. Moss teaches that our dreams give us maps we can use to find and bring home our lost or stolen soul parts. He shows how to recover animal spirits and ride the windhorse of spirit to places of healing and adventure in the larger reality.

Ya'Acov Darling Khan, best-selling author of Jaguar in the Body, Butterfly in the Heart, has travelled the world for over three decades to study with indigenous shamans. He has dedicated his life to cultivating a blend of shamanic practices that is both practical and poetic, both mystical and of the moment. In this audiobook, he invites us to rediscover our inner shaman. Shaman offers us an opportunity to reconnect with this spiritual path, and answers the question: What is shamanism's relevance to the challenges and opportunities we face in the 21st century?

The practice of mindfulness is most often touted for its profound mind, body, and spirit benefits. Shelly Tygielski here shows that mindfulness can also be a powerful tool for spurring transformative collective action. In a winning combination of memoir, manifesto, and how-to, Tygielski shares her evolution from a Jerusalem-born child of traditional Sephardic Orthodox parents to a middle-class American suburban youth who questioned her faith to a young executive in corporate America.

A mesmerizing and courageous memoir: the story of two sisters uncovering the depth of their love through the life-and-death experience of a bone marrow transplant. Throughout her life Elizabeth Lesser has sought understanding about what it means to be true to yourself and, at the same time, truly connected to the ones you love. But when her sister, Maggie, needs a bone marrow transplant to save her life, and Lesser learns that she is the perfect match, she faces a far more immediate and complex question about what it really means to love.

Everything changes. For Buddhist priest and meditation teacher Lewis Richmond, this fundamental Buddhist tenet is the basis for a new inner road map that emerges in the later years, charting an understanding that can bring new possibilities, fresh beginnings, and a wealth of appreciation and gratitude for the life journey itself.

World-famous 26 prose poetry fables written in English by the Lebanese-American poet and writer. It was originally published in 1923. It is Gibran's best known work. The Prophet has been translated into over 100 different languages, making it one of the most translated books in history.

Small Graces is a journey into the sacred moments that illuminate our everyday lives. In 20 elegant pieces, writer, sculptor, and theologian Kent Nerburn celebrates the daily rituals that reveal our deeper truths. Through the exploration of simple acts, Small Graces reminds us to chart a course each day that nourishes the soul, honors the body, and engages the mind.

Shaman, meaning "intermediary between spirit and the natural world", has become a much overused word in the West. It's not a job title one can give oneself, and in indigenous societies a shaman is usually born to this role. Ya'Acov Darling Khan is one of the few Westerners who have been acknowledged as shamans by indigenous elders or teachers. After being hit by lightning, Ya'Acov took a 30-year journey into the heart of shamanism to seek his own healing and to learn how he could serve others with the wisdom he acquired through his experiences.