• Explores hidden soul-healing practices including dream incubation and interpretation as well as sacred pilgrimage

• Examines how dreams, visions, and other non-normative events reveal the conditions needed to restore the soul and facilitate healing

• Includes successful healing techniques, practices, and case studies to reveal how healings are achieved with these methods

The modern practice of medicine and psychology grew out of the ancient Greek healing tradition, said to be founded by Asklepios, god of healing and dreams. For two thousand years the system spread all over the Mediterranean world and planted the roots of Western medicine and psychology by offering ritual and holistic practices that recognized that healing begins at the soul level. Yet, since that time, the spiritually based practices were cast aside, leaving behind only the scientific medical techniques that dominate healthcare today.

Resurrecting and restoring the sacred, mythological, and cultural origins of medicine and psychotherapy, Edward Tick, Ph.D., explores the soul-healing practices missing in our contemporary health systems. He looks at the dream incubation tradition of Asklepios, sacred theatre of Dionysos, oracle gifting of Apollo, special practices of warriors, and their roots in Neolithic shamanism and indigenous traditions. Demonstrating the ritual use of dreams, visions, oracles, synchronicities, and pilgrimage for healing and connecting to the transpersonal and divine, he explains how dream incubation is a technique where you plant a seed for a specific healing or growth goal in order to facilitate dreaming and work toward soul restoration.

Using both ancient wisdom and modern depth psychology alongside stories of healings from his more than 25 years of guiding Greek pilgrimages, Tick explores how we can use ancient healing philosophies and practices to achieve holistic healing today. He examines the interaction between mind and body (psyche and soma) and between physical illness and the soul. He explains the art of making accurate and holistic interpretations of signs, symbols, and symptoms to determine what they reveal about the soul. Showing how dreams and other transpersonal experiences are essential components of soul medicine, the author reveals how restoration of the soul facilitates true healing.

Edward Tick, Ph.D., is a transformational psychotherapist, international pilgrimage guide, educator, author, and poet. A specialist in archetypal psychotherapy and the healing of violent trauma, he is the author of four nonfiction books, including The Practice of Dream Healing and War and the Soul. He lives in central Massachusetts.

Author’s Note

Foreword by Mark Nepo

Introduction

PART I
Walking the Ancient Ways

1 The Funnel of Healing

2 Akin to the Ancients

3 A Lifetime of Pilgrimage and Healing

PART II
With the God-Powers

4 Asklepios Returns

5 How the Divine Speaks

6 Divine Communication in the Greek World

7 In the Sanctuary

8 Restoring Sacred Theater

9 The Art of Interpretation and the Bear

10 Three Decades of Incubations, Ancient and Modern

11 Warriors, Ancient and Modern

12 Warrior Dreams

13 Living Mythically

PART III
Facilitating Healing, Restoring Soul

14 Ancient Healing Principles and Practices Today

15 The Harvest

Notes

Bibliography

Index