Land Healing: Physical, Metaphysical, and Ritual Approaches for Healing the Earth is my forthcoming title releasing on March 28 and May 28th (internationally) 2024 from Shiffer/REDFeather. Land Healing is a comprehensive guide to land healing for neopagans and earth-based spiritual practitioners who have a desire to regenerate and heal human-caused damage throughout our world. 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 needing to address!
Ordering Information: You can order 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!
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 changes to the earth. 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 much more. 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, and with increasing urgency, extreme weather-related events.
While these are hard for any human being, they 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 us, 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.
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 helps you have a response when the tree is being cut down on your street, 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. 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 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, and more
Land Healing – Back Cover – By Dana O’Driscoll - 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, rituals and sleep work
- 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
In addition to the text, the book features many useful illustrations, also by Dana O’Driscoll.
Invitation to Join the Land Healer’s Network
The Land Healer’s network is a place to share, network with others, post events, and discuss topics related to land healing. As more and more people take up this practice, this space will allow us to learn and grow together. Please check it out here and find ways you can connect!
Contents
Here is an image of the table of contents. You can click for a full-size image.
Appearances
Here are some of my appearances surrounding the release of the Land Healing book!
Stirring the Cauldron with Marla Books (Feb, 2024)- Audio via Youtube.
About the Author: Dana O’Driscoll
Dana O’Driscoll has been an animist, and bioregional druid for 20 years and currently serves as the Grand Archdruid in the Ancient Order of Druids in America. She is also a druid-grade member of the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids and is OBOD’s 2018 Mount Hameus Scholar. Dana took up the path of land healing because of the deep need in her home region of Western Pennsylvania, which is challenged by fracking, acid mine drainage into streams, logging, and mountaintop removal. Dana sees land healing as her core personal spiritual path, and has done both individual work in her home region as well as spearheading larger-scale land healing efforts at druid events and through the Ancient Order of Druids in America. Dana is a certified permaculture designer and permaculture teacher who teaches sustainable living and wild food foraging. She lives on a 5-acre homestead with her partner and a host of feathered and furred friends. She has been writing about land healing in all its forms on the Druids Garden at www.thedruidsgarden.com.