Land Healing – New Book Announcement!

Today I’m very excited to announce the upcoming release of my new book: Land Healing: Physical, Metaphysical, and Ritual Approaches for Healing the Earth.  The book is now available for preorder and will be released on March 28, 2024 from Shiffer/REDFeather (the same publisher who released my other two books: the award-winning Sacred Actions and the Sacred Actions Journal). Today, I offer a sneak peek of my new book–and I wanted to share it with my blog readers first. If you like my work and want to support me, please consider pre-ordering the book and sharing it with your friends and on social media!

Land Healing is a comprehensive guide for anyone who has a desire to regenerate and heal human-caused damage throughout our world. One of the primary audiences for Land Healing is neopagans, earth-based spiritual practitioners, or others who see the earth as sacred and want to do more. Land Healing is also appropriate for those who are already engaging in various kinds of earth-based regeneration practices like permauclture, herbalism, rewilding, conservation, and regenerative agriculture and who want to explore a more spiritual side to their work. The book presents tools and information to take up the path of the land healer with care, reverence, and respect for all beings. The book is structured with a flexible framework that allows one to address any land-healing circumstance that they may find themselves in!  As this post will describe, the book covers a range of approaches including working on the physical plane to help directly create sanctuaries for life and regenerate the land, and also working in a variety of ways metaphysically through ritual and energetic support.

Preorders

You can preorder Land Healing from:

All regions: Shiffer/REDFeather
USA: Amazon (US); Barnes and Noble
UK: Amazon UK
Australia: Booktopia Australia
Canada: Amazon Canada

…and pretty much anywhere else that books can be found!  The release for the US is March 28, 2024 with the international release soon to follow.

Why is this book needed?

One of the greatest challenges of our age is that our earth is radically degenerating due to human activity.  The age of the Anthropocene, the current age we live in, is defined by humans’ wide-scale shaping and changing of the whole planet. This has created a situation where, regardless of where you live, you bear witness to harm coming to nature: pollution, deforestation, extreme weather, desertification, fracking and other fossil fuel extraction, pipelines, and so on. These are both wide-scale problems but also problems we see outside of our door every day – the trees on our street being cut down, a local forest being logged, a wetland being bulldozed to make way for a shopping mall, chemical spills from train derailments, forest fires, sea-level rises, droughts, and with increasing urgency, extreme weather-related events.

While these are hard to witness for any human being, these kinds of events are especially hard for those of us who have found our way into earth-centered spiritual practices such as druidry, eco-spirituality, and other neopagan approaches.  To people who revere the earth and hold all life as sacred, the earth needs to be protected, preserved, and honored. And yet, as I’ve just described, that is the furthest thing from what is happening now on a large-scale basis.  This is a hard situation to bear witness to where you feel powerless and frustrated.

What we need is a new set of tools and practices to respond to the earth’s need for help for this current age–a set of tools to be able to respond to any circumstance we may find ourselves in. This book gives you multiple tools so that you have a response when the tree is being cut down on your street, when chemicals have spilled in a nearby waterway, or when a fire has ravaged through the forest. But just as importantly as actively responding to the earth that has been harmed, this book also puts tools in your hands to be an active force of good and learn how to actively regenerate the land, preserve life, and create sanctuaries for life–in your backyard, in your community, and beyond.

Through this book, you create a Land Healer’s Crane bag full of tools to actively work healing on the world, such as seed balls, sacred waters, and healing sigils.  Further, Land Healing recognizes healing happens on multiple levels, and working on the inner planes is just as important as working on the outer planes–and sometimes inner planes work is all that can be done.  Thus, the book also offers a wide range of frameworks for ceremony and ritual, including work for land blessing, healing, and abundance but also for palliative care and psychopomp work to assist in the most difficult times.  This book considers land healing as a framework for earth-based spirituality.  Finally, because healing work requires that we ourselves stay whole and healed, the final chapter of the book offers strategies for self-care for land healers.

What does this book offer?

Everyone lives in unique ecosystems and locations, and the challenges we face with land healing, and the framework in this book offer something for you, regardless of what circumstances you may find yourself in or the places in the world that you live.  The many topics covered in this book include:

• Land healing as a spiritual and sustainable practice and taking up the path of a land healer
• The land healer’s crane bag: How to create, bless, and empower the tools of a land healer: healing seed balls, land healing sigils, healing waters, herbal offering blend, a healer’s crane bag, and more
• Building trust with your local land: practicing listening, observation, witnessing, and apology work as a baseline before you do anything else
• Physical land healing: how to create refugia for all life, replant the land around you, convert lawns into gardens, create bee and butterfly sanctuaries, protect and preserve endangered species, and more

  

• Metaphysical land healing: using rituals and practices for healing including tree chanting magic, setting and raising standing stones, working with the elements, sacred fires and healing smoke bundles, and healing mandalas
• Energetic palliative care to working with land that will be damaged or has active damage: herbal work, working with the heartbeat of the land, protection, transplanting and saving seeds, and rituals to help the land address the ongoing pain and suffering
• Rituals for land blessing and healing: tree blessings, the sphere of protection for the land, sacred groves, and energetic work at a distance
• Working with plant and animal spirits that pass: holding space, remembrance, honoring those who have gone, psychopomp work, and dealing with large-scale death during the Anthropocene
• Self-care for land healing: developing a spiritual self-care plan, caring for our bodies, minds, and spirits, herbal allies for self-care work, sacred days, and self-care retreats
• A vision of a healed world and keeping hope alive

In addition to the text, the book features over 20 beautiful illustrations.

Table of Contents

Here is an image of the table of contents to see more about what the book covers.  You can click for a full-size image.

About the Author: Dana O’Driscoll

Since Land Healing covers both physical and metaphysical approaches to healing, I’ll share my experiences and expertise in both of these areas.

Metaphysical: As any of my long-term readers know, I’ve been writing and sharing rituals, ideas, practices, and challenges to address metaphysical land healing surrounding land healing on this blog over 1o years. Land healing is one of the core expressions of my druid path, especially in the region where I live: here in Western Pennsylvania, we have many environmental challenges: natural gas fracking, acid mine drainage into streams, unsustainable logging and deforestation, factories and heavy industry, coal-fired powerplants, and mountaintop removal. As a land healer working in my home region, I’ve had the opportunity to apply the practices and frameworks of druid tradition to this critical issue. I also work to spearhead larger-scale land healing efforts at druid gatherings, grove events, and through my role as the Grand Archdruid in the Ancient Order of Druids in America’s through our order-wide rituals, where we are exploring and enacting land healing for our seasonal celebrations.

Physical: I am a certified Permaculture Designer and certified Permaculture Teacher, also have completed courses in herbalism, natural building, and regenerative agriculture (and currently I’m studying mushrooms and mycoremediation). I have been teaching and organizing around these topics most of my adult life. I live what I practice and write about, and have dedicated my life to learning how to heal and regenerate the land where I live and to help others to do the same. I currently live on a 5 acre piece of land that was very damaged when I moved there, having been recently logged.  For the last six years, my partner and I have been working to regenerate this land using permaculture techniques, growing our own food and medicine, and practicing both earth-centered spirituality and rewilding.

These two bodies of knowledge have prepared me to offer you a comprehensive view of this critical area, which is so needed now.

Thank you!

I also want to say that without the readers of this blog, this book would not have happened.  I am grateful for all of the comments, feedback, ideas, and conversations that we have had on topics related to land healing over these many years. I’m so excited to see this book being released and wanted to thank all of you for the support!