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I often get asked for lists of books. That list could go on and on. But here are books that have changed my life or are my favorite source works.

Truth or Dare - Starhawk

Here it is: what is the patriarchy and how does it destroy life and community. And also, Starhawk offers some prescriptions for liberating ourselves from patriarchy's grasp. In my humble opinion, this is Star's master work - a psychology and mythology of patriarchal liberation.

Intuitive Body - Wendy Palmer

This is somatic work, moment to moment practice as a process, with gems on opening to our intuitive wisdom.

Who Dies - Stephen Levine

It was through this book that I finally was able to create a personal moment to moment practice. But there's a great deal more in this book: fully living with our inevitable death, the nature of mind, daily practice, how to meditate. My life changed forever after working through this book.

Compassion and Self-hate - Theodore Rubin

This book details how the patriarchy plays out in a our mind/emotions, how our self-hate can take so many disguised forms and what is a "full" human being.

Conscious Dreaming - Robert Moss

Nonhierarchical dream techniques to the nth power. This is an absolutely fabulous work, very informative with lots of dream techniques, while also managing to be quite magical, as well. If Robert comes anywhere near you, go to one of his workshops. He's delightful in person, as well.

Romancing the Shadow - Connie Zweig, et al

This book is about how our lost selves act out - how shadow works, why work on shadow stuff. It's all here.

This is the shadow-work bible. Romancing the Shadow is the best that I've ever read on the mechanisms of how shadow plays out in our lives and especially, in our relationships. The descriptions of how we get triggered by others and events, how we put our shadow meanings on things, how we act out shadow needs unconsciously is without peer as far as I know. I highly recommend this book to anyone who cares to dig into the psyche to "know myself in all my parts", as the Feri prayer goes.

I don't resonate much with the authors' Jungian archetype techniques. I feel like they try way too hard to make Greek mythic archetype fit personalities and to classify (and a bit, demonize) personalities into a few limited archetypes. What about all the other mythic archetype which are not at all like the Greeks? A "Morighan" archetype?!?

Women Who Run With the Wolves - Clarissa Pinkola Estes

This is a great book on a couple of different levels. It's a source work for personal liberation from patriarchal limitations. Yes. But it's also a terrific book for learning how to work with stories and myths as personal change tools and as shadow work frames.

The Tao of Fully Feeling - Pete Walker

Reparenting our selves, how our family of origin shapes us, what is a full human being. These are some of the themes.

Resource Manual for a Living Revolution - Virginia Coover, et al

This book is the consensus, nonhierarchical groups, Empowered Learning, and facilitation source work. I've loaned out and never gotten back, 3 copies of it. It is now long out of print. So, my current copy is going nowhere but back onto the shelf. You'll have to find your own. Do it! If you want to facilitate participatory workshops, read and work with this book's material.

Sitting in the Fire - Arnold Mindell

It's been a long time since I've read a book on group process that has fundamentally altered my approach. But this book is without a doubt in my opinion, the single best book on how power operates in groups - any group, work groups, collectives, church, team, neighborhood, what-have-you. If your group is having issues that just can't seem to be resolved with mediation or by stressing good process, the usual fixes (and what group does not have these seemingly intractable problems?) my guess (and Arny's point in this book) is that power is not being acknowledged and used with awareness. Further, the role of the facilitator as elder, fool and always the student is described in detail. This book has thoroughly changed the way that I view intra-group dynamics.

Getting the Love You Want - Harville Hendrix

His work on lost self in relationship is the best that I've seen - it's unparalleled. I feel the resonance of Truth (TM) when I read his couple-dynamics chapters. I don't agree with the concluding chapter because he expresses his personal beliefs which do not particularly resonate with my own. But this does not diminish the power of the rest of the book for me.

Natural Learning Rhythms - Ba and Josette Luvmour

And, for those interacting with kids this is the best book/technique that I know of when working with children. They take a systemic view of families. The kids are not the problem (but that doesn't mean that you don't get to be honestly peeved with your kids' behaviour. It's just that if it's recurrent, we must look at the entire system, not focus on the "bad" or "misbehaving" child)

I cannot recommend this book and the Encompass (their foundation) work highly enough. If you have children or if you work with them, read this book.

The Luvmours have looked at progressive literature on raising children of the last 400 years. They have worked with thousands of kids. And, they never give up on a child - every child may remediate lacks in the past by being given what she/he needs to grow right now. While their conclusions may turn out be too broad in scope, still, their framing of the stages of childhood is easily understood and practiced (which is the point).

You can practice this material at the lightest, tool-in-the-shed level, or go very deep. At any level, it's all useful and may very well change the dynamics of your relationships with kids.

Unfortunately, they don't write about their shadow work much in the book. I wish they would, because I found it profoundly helpful. Along with other things, I picked up their way of very quickly finding shadow assumptions through "I am", "I am not", "I should", "I shouldn't", "I never", "I always" statements.

A Midsummer Eve's Dream - A.D. Hope

This book was recommended to me as a Fairy source work. And while it is that, in its own way, the scholarship on Celtic culrture in this book is amazing. Many of my personal myths about women's rights and different ways of humans organizing themselves rather than a top down, man-on-top, property orientation (patriarchal, primarily Roman, in my opinion) were practiced in the Celtic world, even quite recently. And AD Hope, for whatever reasons (he doesn't really say in the book) chronicles a great deal of the extant Celtic feminist material.

Midsummer Eve's Dream is ostensibly a historical context for a 15th century Scottish court poem. Don't let the dry nature of the first few chapters stop you from getting to Hope's scholarship. Besides, if you can work through the literary material, I found the poem itself hysterical!

In the Absence of the Sacred - Jerry Mander

This is was a tough book for me to read. I think it took me about a year. How much can I take in at one sitting about the continuing destruction of 1st nation and native peoples by the North American governments? In that way, this is a heavy book. But the notes on why TV is just plain bad for people and also the chapters on the deep wisdom and contributions of 1st nations people are excellent.

Occidental Mythology - Joseph Cambell

Dense, yes. But this is one of my source books for understanding the arc of western mythology. Who created Hell first? It wasn't the Abrahamic religions! It was what would become the Zoroastrians, 100's of years previous to the Abrahamic religions. Gems like that help me both step into and step out of cultural assumptions so that I can ask better questions.

The Well of Remembrance - Ralph Metzner

If you want to come to some peace or understanding with Germanic mythology, this book is a must read.

Everybody's Guide to Natural ESP - Ingo Swann

The title alone would put me off. It sounds like something I might find at the checkstand at the grocer's. But this book is anything but light. Ingo Swann was in the Stanford Research Institute's (SRI) years of ESP experiments, from which this material is taken. I've made no conclusions about his theories on how ESP works (who does?). But as far as how to tap into your own? This is it, no nonsense, the real McCoy. Thanks to Breakfast for recommending it. Thanks to my ex, Phebe, for having it on the shelf so that I could read it immediately.

Journeys Out of the Body - Robert A. Monroe

This is a seminal work on astral-travel.

Tarot Symbolism - Robert O'Neill

I bought this book because Mary Greer listed it in her favorites, not knowing what I was getting.

Yes, O'Neill's history of the tarot is as close as one can come to an accurate account.. You won't find any ascended masters here (well you will, thoroughly debunked, though - sorry if that's your favorite tarot myth).

In addition, the history of social movements in Europe from 1000CE was really powerful for me. Current progressives are far from the first people to think that life could be more peaceful and more just. European history is filled with progressives living and dying (all too frequently) to make a better world.

The Triumph of the Moon - Ronald Hutton

On the subject of history (or, in this case, at least partly, herstory), Hutton is not a neo-pagan. But, apparently, he's fascinated with us (this isn't his only book on the subject).

This is the history of modern witchcraft in England. It's thorough. He sets the stage with as much background material as he can muster. He looks at every idea about this history that he can find - including the rise of the Forester movements and by pouring through Aleister Crowley's diaries (which couldn't have been particularly much fun. Crowley didn't ruminate on his philosophies in these. They are simple documents of what he did and who he spoke to about what, in each day's entry. Ugh!)

To my mind, Hutton more or less demonstrates the very newness of modern neo-pagan witchcraft. The last chapter was particularly enlightening to me. It is where he suggests that this religion may in fact be one of the most modern rather than something ancient.

By the way - I in no way agree with Hutton's analysis of Starhawk's theology as written in the The Spiral Dance and other works. His work on the influence of North American feminism on witchcraft seems an accurate historical (herstorical) analysis. But, he simply does not "get it" about immanence and a poetic experience of the divine. My guess? Perhaps he's too linear a thinker (good history, bad priestessing) to understand that connection with the Divine is poetic and symbolic not reasoned?

The Essential Rumi - Coleman Barks

And to round out my list are Barks' translations of Rumi. I can't live/love/joy without these in my life.

The Man Who Tasted Shapes - Dr. Richard Cytowic.

Ostensibly, this is a book about synethesia. It is that, but it is so much more, as well. Cytowic reviews the last 20-30 years of brain research, exploding some very dearly held beliefs along the way. The short answer is, we are not rational beings - this is an impossibility, and being so would be maladaptive. This is not to say that we can't or shouldn't think rationally. We do! The rational mind has it's functions. But we are so much more: amazingly emotional, emotive, and emotionally driven beings. This is where we spend the majority of our mental prowess.