Dismantled: How Love and Psychedelics Broke a Clergyman Apart and Put Him Back Together - Softcover

Sanguin, Bruce

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0994887027 ISBN 13: 9780994887023

Publisher: Viriditas Press, 2018

Synopsis

With the ending of a marriage, a career as a clergyman in the church, and the alluring promise of love, the author turns to psychedelics, sacred ceremony and psychotherapy to get his life back. During this process, he discovers how childhood trauma forced him to develop a false self in order to survive. His personality is dismantled as these sacred medicines reveal the truth to him. In the process, Sanguin presents evidence for the shocking prevalence of childhood trauma. Along the way, the author questions and ultimately undermines much conventional wisdom, including the sentimentalization of family, the rush to forgiveness as a cure all and dogmatic Christianity. He supports the forgotten tradition in the gospels that authentic suffering and the acceptance of reality is the key to living a full and authentic life. The book is a testament, both to the importance of conscious integration of psychedelic experiences and to the healing power of these medicines when taken in the proper set and setting. By the end, we are given a model of healing which is not a quick fix, but rather one that honours the complexity of the human experience. This is a hopeful book that supports a growing body of research indicating that psychedelics as medicine hold one key to the healing and evolution of our species.

About this title

About the Author:

Bruce Sanguin is a psychotherapist living on an island in the Pacific Northwest with his wife, Mia, and his dog Koa. Formerly he was a minister in the United Church of Canada. He has written six other books in the area of evolutionary spirituality. His clients travel to the island to make intensive journeys with him as well as do sessions by Skype. Bruce regularly blogs at www.brucesanguin.ca.  All inquiries related to speaking invitations, intensives, or setting up a session with Bruce should be directed to bsanguin@telus.net.  If you enjoyed the book please write a review on Amazon.com. Other Works by Bruce Sanguin: - The Way of the Wind: The Path and Practice of Evolutionary Mysticism, 2015. (Winner of the Jenkins Medal Award in the category of Spiritual Book) - The Emerging Church: A Model for Change and a Map for Renewal, Expanded And Revised, 2014. - Painting the Stars: Religion and Evolving Faith (participant’s manual and featured presenter) - The Advance of Love: Reading the Bible with An Evolutionary Heart, 2012.  - If Darwin Prayed: Prayers for Evolutionary Mystics, 2011. (IPPY Gold Medal Award for best spiritual book of 2011). - Experiencing Ecological Christianity, 2011. Tim Scorer and Bruce Sanguin. (Study guide for Darwin, Divinity, and the Dance of the Cosmos).  - Darwin, Divinity and the Dance of the Cosmos: An Ecological Christianity, 2007.   - Summoning the Whirlwind, Unconventional Sermons for a Contemporary Christian Faith, 2005.

Review:

Dismantled is a remarkable book of highly applicable wisdom. Bruce Sanguin has done much of the inner transformative work anyone interested in spiritual healing needs to do. Based on this inner work and his many years working with others, he brings to bear a powerful gift for elucidating essential insights and truths about the work of awakening, delivering it all in language both eloquent and accessible. Too often to count I marveled at sentences that jumped off the page with crystalline clarity. And just as often, I found myself nodding in agreement at experiences and insights that rang true and resonated personally. Brilliant.

Dismantled is presented in the form of a seamless and consistently engaging interweaving of the personal and the universal. Bruce Sanguin courageously exposes his own dismantling and offers up his healing journey of hard-earned realizations as the crucible from which he fashions a powerful understanding of the true nature and path of spiritual healing. And though the wisdom is deep, the language is clear and accessible. This book is a work of compassion and generosity for the great benefit of anyone called to undertake, as Joseph Campbell put it, "the hero's journey."

About this edition

• Publisher: Viriditas Press
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 0994887027
• ISBN 13: 9780994887023
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 234