Hawk Woman Dancing with the Moon (PDF)

Female shaman Tela Star Hawk Lake interweaves traditional Native ritual, ceremonies and prayers with her own personal experiences as a healer in a modern time where old traditions are widely abandoned and forgotten. She sets down shamanic knowledge that can be easily incorporated into the daily lives of contemporary women of any culture to cleanse, balance, comfort, and strengthen.For the first time, Tela Star Hawk Lake shares Native women’s wisdom anyone can follow:How to conduct your own moontime ceremonyHow to prepare yourself for surgeryHow to use prayer and ritual to replace alcohol and drug dependencyHow to use Native childbirth practices to ease pain and facilitate delivery and bonding with your new babyHow to use Native herbal treatments and diet to cure yourself of almost any female problemIn Hawk Woman Dancing with the Moon, Tela shares her story as a woman adrift in society that often emphasizes artificial values and solutions to natural problems. By recounting her ordeals as a healer and sharing her life story—including her spiritual initiation and rites of passage on her road to recognition as an intertribal shaman—she shows how she was forced to apply the principles of her own beliefs to daily life. Her story includes real life experiences with ghosts, spiritual battles, vision quests, and a variety of illnesses through which she learned to heal herself and, from these experiences, to heal others.