Where Wonder Lives: Practices for Cultivating the Sacred in Your Daily Life

Description

Take a journey by map through your inner landscape to discover a life of awe, enchantment, and radical aliveness * Explains how experiencing awe and wonder can transform our lives, leading us to feel more satisfied, peaceful, and open to others * Offers contemporary and time-honored practices--from mindfulness to dreamwork and working with plants--that help you reconnect with Nature and your imagination, open your heart, and find vitality and enchantment * Explores ways of examining and embracing our shadow, deepening our relationships, and creating meaningful personal rituals Where Wonder Lives invites you on a journey, an expedition through your own inner landscape to reawaken to the mystery of life. The travels are by way of an imaginary map through 9 distinct territories. In each, you explore the terrain, then are led to a rich set of contemporary and time-honored practices--from mindfulness to dreamwork, cloudscapes, and working with plants--that help you rebuild a life of vitality, connection, and enchantment. There is no prescribed order in which to explore the map. Rather, the invitation is to begin at the territory that calls to you, or perhaps that which is most challenging. Each territory reflects and amplifies the others, and you will instinctively arrive at the practices that you need most. The Jungle delves into our original deep kinship with Nature and helps you rekindle your inner wildness. The Garden takes you on a journey through your senses, and the River unfurls your imagination. The Mountaintop presents a bird's-eye view of your life, while the Swamp delves into your inner shadow and delivers gold. The Village helps us deepen our bonds and relationships, the Lighthouse teaches us to quiet our minds, and the Fire inspires us to create meaningful ceremonies and personal rituals. The Ocean looks into the topography of the heart and offers practices to awaken the heart's most powerful emotions: awe, joy, compassion, gratitude, and love, the mother of them all. Throughout the journey you are immersed in a world of wonder and awe, discovering new possibilities for learning and expansion in ordinary life. Face to face with the mystery of life, Where Wonder Lives makes you feel at once both infinitely small and part of a vast, unfathomable universe--all while helping you to see the world anew.

Fabiana Fondevila is an author, storyteller, ritual maker, activist, and teacher from Buenos Aires, Argentina. Fabiana's seminars weave together nature exploration, dreamwork, mythic consciousness, archetypal psychology, social work, and essential emotions such as awe, gratitude, and enchantment.

"Fabiana Fondevila accompanies us into a beautiful maelstrom of insights and sources of inspiration in order to reconnect us with nature through wonderment, with the best part of ourselves through recognizing our basic goodness, and with others through loving kindness and compassion. A book for inner enrichment." * MATTHIEU RICARD, author of Altruism: The Power of Compassion to Change Yourself and the World * "Where Wonder Lives is one of the most intelligent, imaginative, and useful books I've seen in years. Truly, it is fun and enlightening, concrete and full of rich ideas. I have never seen deep intelligence and sensuous imagination come together so beautifully. It is practical and impractical, thoughtprovoking and full of charm." * THOMAS MOORE, author of Care of the Soul * "This is a book that speaks to the wild spaces that still live in us, longing to be awoken. It is beautiful and wise and filled with practical and powerful exercises. Every page is a seed of possibility, a glimpse at a more beautiful and vibrant future that is still within our reach. To read Fondevila's words is to forever transform the way you look at both nature and human nature." * MARY REYNOLDS THOMPSON, author of Reclaiming the Wild Soul: How Earth's Landscapes Restore Us * "Where Wonder Lives gives us tools and potions to re-enchant our world. Fabiana Fondevila encourages us to dream with our senses--face down in the grass, reading clouds, speaking the language of birds, sipping dandelion wine. She wants us to taste our feelings and choose those that nourish the heart. She guides us through a rich imaginal geography--from swamp to mountain, from fire to ocean--in which each locale becomes a portal for adventure, soul remembering, and deepening practice. She reminds me of the most important guidance I ever received from that inner voice you learn to trust: 'Remember this world is your playground not your prison.' She invites us to make more space to play with our Magical Child and bring the joy and energy of that great imagineer into everyday life." * ROBERT MOSS, bestselling author of Growing Big Dreams and Dreaming the Soul Back Home * "This is a special book because of the creative aliveness that leaps from every practice and every page. It is 'good company,' a vivid soul-to-soul gift of poetic textures, colors, images, and stories. This generous heart-gift shares initiations from nine sacred territories. If you accept them (in any order, by the way!), you'll keep being invited into deeper presence, joy, laughter, and wonder of wonders--this sacred and miraculous now-moment." * TERRY PATTEN, author of A New Republic of the Heart and co-author of Integral Life Practice * "Where Wonder Lives is a book you'd invite to travel the world with you. Language, myths, ideas, and clarity from many cultures and beliefs are all brought together to help us remember what is common among us in the intricate web of life. Through captivating journeys, playful practices, and researched science, Fabiana invites her readers to shift from the mirage of manageable complexity to the wonder of unmanageable simplicity. It's a book whose ideas and words can massage and reorient our innate intuition. As she quotes her own daughter, 'It's a good thing you're studying this, Mum, so I won't have to learn it from books.' What a wonder!" * NIPUN MEHTA, founder of ServiceSpace * "Wonder lives right here, in these beautifully lyrical pages that invite and entice us to play in Fabiana's magical realm and reconnect with our deepest wonder-full essence. This is a book that weaves insights from science, psychology, philosophy, myth, and the arts with playful practices that can deliver profound positive change. These pages offer an embodied and sacred experience as well as a return to the very sense of wonder that charmed you, as a child, to see not clouds but the shapes and stories they painted across the sky and deep in your heart. It is one of those books that people will not want to lend out but instead keep at hand to delve into time and time again." * JANE TERESA ANDERSON, author of Birds of Paradise * "Where Wonder Lives takes you on a journey, an expedition through your own inner landscape to reawaken to the mystery of life. The travels are accomplished with an imaginary map through 9 distinct territories. In each, you explore the terrain, then are led to a rich set of contemporary and time-honored practices--from mindfulness to dreamwork, cloudscapes, and working with plants--that help you rebuild a life of vitality, connection, and enchantment."-- * Jacquie C, Mystic Living Today * "Inspired and inspiring, inherently motivating and impressively informative, Where Wonder Lives: Practices for Cultivating the Sacred in Your Daily Life is a life affirming, life fulfilling, life enhancing, life embracing read." * Midwest Book Review * "In Where Wonder Lives, Fabiana Fondevila invites us to explore our inner landscape to discover a life of awe, enchantment, and radical aliveness. Each chapter includes fascinating stories, exercises, recipes, practices for exploring nature, and so much more. Excellent for self-reflection, perfect for family and group exploration." * Light of Consciousness Magazine *