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Specific body postures reappear in the art and artifacts of world cultures, even those widely separated by time and distance. What are these images of unusual postures telling us? Anthropologist Felicitas Goodman discovered that people who assume these postures while in trance report strikingly similar meditative experiences. The results from this research are astonishing, proving that certain body gestures and movements, when properly worked with, actually trigger us into accessing altered states of consciousness.

Trance-inducing postures for shamanic journeying, initiation, healing, divination, and transformation of the soul
—Provides practices from Mayan, Egyptian, African, Native American, Sumerian, and other ancient and indigenous traditions
—Shows how these practices can detoxify the energy body
—Includes 60-minute CD of trance rhythms to accompany the shamanic journeying exercises

Felicitas documents the effects of body posture on trance experience. Intrigued by the physical changes that take place during trance states, she began to record the observations of students who entered a trance-like condition while concentrating on the sound of Goodman’s rattle for 15 minutes. Whenever she led a workshop in trance journeys—whether in Berlin, Vienna, New Mexico or Ohio—her subjects’ journeys always lasted for 15 minutes, but where they went and what they saw, heard and learned, maintains Goodman, depended on the particular body posture they had assumed.

Felicitas traces the origins of religion to the dawn of human history, when religious behavior was accompanied by gesture rather than full-fledged modern speech. She also does a systematic comparison that shows that religion vary according to whether people are hunter gatherers, horticulturalists, agriculturalists, nomadic pastoralists, or city dwellers. Felicitas offers a “unified field theory” of religion as human behavior. She examines ritual, the religious trance, alternate reality, ethics and moral code, and the named category designating religion.

An “ethnography of the imagination” and a heart-warming celebration of the immortality of the human soul, My Last Forty Days is an adventure story with a rather unusual protagonist—a ghost. Celebrated anthropologist Felicitas Goodman combines the fruit of many years of research among the Pueblos with her own visionary experiences to fashion a moving tale of death and dying that remains buoyant with life and hope.

A Mexican Apostolic Pentecostoal minister introduced Goodman to the preacher in a Maya village in Yucatan. The congregation she came to know in 1969 experienced a “crisis cult” in response to a prediction of the end of the world, which was to take place on September 1, 1970. Goodman subsequently spent a part of every year until 1986 with the women of the congregation. Maya Apocalypse is a record of that fieldwork, which eventually covered not only the events in the temple, both ordinary and extraordinary, but also the lives of the women who acted as informants.

In 1972, Daniel Statnekov discovered a Pre-Columbian psycho-acoustical whistle made of clay at an auction in Pennsylvania. He spent the next 15 years researching the objects which are known as the “Peruvian Whistling Vessels.” He wrote about these experiences in his book, Animated Earth, published in 1987 by North Atlantic Books. August, 2003 – the second edition of the book is now available here. “From an auction barn in Pennsylvania to museums and research labs at UCLA, from New Mexico to Peru, Daniel Statnekov traces his heart-opening journey in rediscovering the psycho-acoustic effects of ancient Peruvian whistling vessels. I am glad I was able to share a bit of that journey with him and hope that Animated Earth will inspire you to follow your dream.” – Andrew T. Weil, M.D.