Next Generation Indie Book Award 2015 —Winner (New Age)USA Best Book Awards 2014 —Winner (Philosophy)ForeWord Reviews' Book of the Year 2013—Finalist (Body/Mind/Spirit)Have you wrestled with uncanny, nightmarish imagery in dreams or waking? Life crises, trauma, deep meditation, prayer or inquiry can unleash surprisingly compelling yet scary, even revolting, imagery and related feelings. With few maps to help navigate this terrain, we are tempted to deny or repress our experience.
Precipitated by a descent into the dark recesses of her own psyche, in this award-winning book, Sandra Dennis explores the eruption of strange, wild, compelling characters from the unconscious that she calls ‘daimons.’
The Greeks understood the daimon as the intermediary between gods and humans, the guardian spirit assigned at birth that connects heaven and earth. These messengers come as agents of inner transformation. When we welcome them with understanding and compassion, they expand our consciousness and connect us with healing qualities of strength, compassion and vision.
This book leads us to this growing edge of the psyche and invites our curiosity and caring. It charts a course of radical acceptance of experience — no matter how painful or difficult — as absolutely necessary for our well-being and the well-being of the planet.
Sandra Dennis brings a spiritual context to what most disturbs us. She offers a simple method to navigate these alarming images and anxieties. Instead of treating them as perversions to banish, we are encouraged to embrace their primal power becoming more intelligent, loving and whole in the process.
"Embrace of the Daimon" can help:•Calm your concerns by understanding the role of these daimonic images in the larger context of growth to wholeness, or individuation.•Find the courage to explore these states of mind with more intimate, compassionate interest.•Learn to navigate your way through the unusual sensations that often accompany breakthroughs of the daimonic.•Expand your understanding of Jungian theory, with regard to the little explored mind/body connection role in personal development."Embrace of the Daimon" offers a rare look at this inner landscape and will help make your own trip, or that of those you are helping, less harrowing.Reviewers have called 'Embrace of the Daimon' -- "a pioneering work, a courageous and important book," "a significant contribution to the study of altered states of consciousness," "original and profound," "a rare documentation of unconscious processes","a work that advances our understanding of a descending spirituality tremendously," "eloquently descriptive," "deeply moving," re-imagines the work of integrating shadow to find beauty and dignity," "bridges the worlds of the scholar and the visionary" and "takes us to the radical edge of Jungian psychology today."One reader commented, "It is the only contemporary firsthand account of the day-to-day practice of mystical depth psychology that I have come across. I find it a very practical guide to my own inner and psychic realm journeys."Another called it "the most honest work on the psychoid/imaginal realms since Corbin...the engagement with the archetypal invasions, more like Jung in the Red Book than the scholarly Corbin."
"When I first read the draft for "Embrace of the Daimon" I was thrilled to be reading such an intimate portrayal of profound change embedded in the framework of experiences of other explorers of personal depth like Jung, Sade and Blake. This book is a rare documentation of a spontaneous eruption of wild stories and monstrous characters from the primeval spaces of the unconscious psyche, characters who, over time, become benevolent carriers of an emotional reunion of soul with body. Dr. Dennis takes us to the edge of imaginal experience and traces an implicit road map for the millennial tasks of healing the harmful separation between body, soul, and spirit that now afflicts us." -Betty Meador, author "Uncurse this Darkness"
"I find this an extraordinarily well-written, original and profound work that extends our understanding of the relation between psyche and soma. Dr. Dennis' integration of personal material and theory makes possible a synthesis of active imagination, the daimonic and the subtle body. Much of the region is still unexplored and any reader will have the excitement of seeing new lands for the first time. I believe the material to be deeply practical for individual integration of psyche and soma." -Dr. Alan B. Ruskin, Jungian Analyst
"I was deeply moved by the force and effort of these personal revelations that show that in spite of the alarming and painful character of the visions, they may represent something more than the bad effects of childhood, past lives, or defective genes. Dennis suggests that they may represent a cultural movement into the next era of great importance, as they indicate the emergence of a dark, descending spirituality, like the lower worlds of the shaman, which is absolutely necessary to balance the recent emphasis on 'light.' This world indeed corresponds with the rise of 'the feminine' and its values. This book advances our understanding of this ongoing process tremendously." -Don Sandner, author, "The Sacred Heritage: The Influence of Shamanism on Analytic Psychology"
"Sandra Dennis has written a courageous, important book. In "Embrace of the Daimon", she moves psychology into a fuller engagement with the uncharted depths of archetypal, imaginal reality embedded in bodily experience. In this pioneering work, she forges a bridge between the worlds of the scholar and the visionary, and in so doing makes a significant contribution to the phenomenology of altered states of consciousness. Her prose is eloquently descriptive, precise, at times compactly poetic. Her first-person accounts are moving, often searing in realms that traditionally resist description. Our era needs to hear her call for a descent into the dark recesses of the psyche that can reunite body and soul." -Richard Tarnas, author, "The Passion of the Western Mind, Psyche and Cosmos"
