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Mandorla Books congratulates three of its authors for winning gold medals in the 2020 Nautilus Book Awards!

Sandra Rogers, Gold Medal Winner in the "Aging Consciously" Category
Ashok Bedi and Robert "BJ" Jakala, Gold Medal Winners in the "Rising to the Moment 2020" Category

Titles in Print

Consider this book your ally as you move deeper into the adventure of creativity. Syncreate is about the synergy of co-creation; it embodies the spirit of collaboration. Think of it as an approach to creative project management that can be used by anyone from students to artists and individuals to organizational teams. The Syncreate approach distills the creative process into three main components: Play, Plan, and Produce. These stages can help us to achieve our macro-level, big picture goals as well as our daily, micro-level activities.

Developing better right-brain functionality can be incredibly difficult without some kind of easy-to-follow process. Enter Syncreate, a simple but sophisticated twelve-chapter guide for individuals, teams and communities who want to more successfully steer their creative journey."

—Hugh Forrest, South by Southwest (SXSW), Chief Programming Officer

"The Syncreate process looks at everything important: the individual, team and community process of creativity in a practical, yet poignant manner. It would be hard for anyone to finish this text and not play, plan and produce."

—Diana Rivera, M.A., P.C.C, Ph.D., Creative Empowerment Coach and Facilitator
In his 30th published volume, The Way of Myth: Stories’ Subtle Wisdom, Dennis Patrick Slattery reaches back in “Part I: Mining the Myths Anew,” to some earlier essays on classic films and works of literature. He also includes extended meditations on the thought of mythologist Joseph Campbell; on creativity’s hungers; on beliefs as mythic constructs; and on the joys of painting. Many of the essays explore the act of reading and the importance of stories as they relate to one’s personal myth.

In “Part II: The Social Fabric of Stories,” Slattery includes a series of 19 short op-ed essays on a range of topics: the classroom as sacred space; uncertainty; the fact of myth; compassion; moral injury; peace; the gifts of conversation; gall-bladder surgery; the 'pan'-demic; and the poetics of myth, among others. Reflections on several of Joseph Campbell’s volumes are also included in this section.

The author’s reflective interests are trans-disciplinary, analogical and depth-psychological. These essays stretch out over many years of writing. Now, in this volume they are gathered so they can speak and engage one another to reveal the subtle wisdom of stories.

Kundalini is a spiritual, energetic force inherent in every human being and is well known in Eastern philosophies and religions. But for Westerners experiencing this force without cultural context or knowledge, it can be disconcerting or even frightening.

When the Light Breaks Through offers a contemporary and practical look at kundalini, combining historical, academic, and scientific research to help readers better understand kundalini. Dana Swain addresses a wide range of perspectives—from the biological to the psychological to the spiritual.

Interweaving depth psychology with real-life stories of Westerners sharing their kundalini experiences, including those of Swain herself, you’ll get a down-to-earth look at the challenges and possibilities that arise as kundalini itself arises. Each storyteller dialogued with the author not just by reporting their stories, but also by spontaneous art-making, creative writing, and accessing the wisdom of the body. You’ll follow along in the evolution of each participant’s understanding of how kundalini impacted their life in meaningful ways.
What makes for a good death? In Mortally Wounded, a best-seller in Ireland where it was first published, Dr. Michael Kearney reflects upon his experiences working with the dying and shows us that it is possible to learn to die well, overcoming our fears and soul pain and accepting death as an integral part of life.Believing that the root of the pain we face when dying is often a persona and cultural disconnection from soul, Dr. Kearney advocates a personal quest inward—and downward—the re-engage with this deepest part of our being. He shows how psychological techniques, such as dream analysis and visualization exercises, combined with mythological insights, can help us on this journey. He finds in the Greek myth of the wounded centaur, Chiron, a metaphor for this process—it is only after descending to the underworld for nine days and nights that Chiron finds relief from his pain and suffering and discovers a path that reaches to the heavens.Careful attention to our spiritual health, Kearney urges, is an essential complement to physical or outer care. Inner or “depth” work can, he believes, enables us to find our “own way through the prison of soul pain to a place of greater wholeness, a new depth of living, and a falling away from fear.


Living Grief: A Mother/s Odyssey of Surrender, Renewal, and Mad Joy is Angelina Avedano’s raw, heartbreaking account of seeing her adult son for the first time in six years and coming to terms with the reality of his advanced schizoaffective disorder. Using myths and stories, she finds a way to make sense of the senselessness of grief, and undergoes a personal metamorphosis. Her Mother/s Odyssey becomes a lesson in letting go of her dreams for her son’s future, their relationship as she imagined it would be, and her identity as a mother. Living Grief  is not only one mother’s story, it demonstrates how loss—no matter how great or small—becomes a catalyst for transformation.

Conducting Chaos is the ultimate guidebook for teaching improv to children! It’s filled with practical tips, easy-to-follow templates, and down-to-earth wisdom from author Jessica Arjet’s 15 years of experience developing and running improv classes for kids from kindergarten through high school as the Youth Programs Director at the Hideout Theatre in Austin, Texas, one of the largest youth programs in the nation. This book is an excellent resource for teachers of drama and improv, and everyone who works with kids and wants to add a little fun into their teaching and creativity into their classroom!

In the spring of 2020, America and the world were overwhelmed by the Covid-19 pandemic and the global racial justice protests. This inspired the co-authors Ashok Bedi, a psychiatrist and a Jungian psychoanalyst, and Robert BJ Jakala, a psychologist, a Jungian therapist, and an avid photographer, to compose a daily blog for 100 days to chronicle their soul response to staying centered in the eye of this storm.

The authors’ method captures the archetypal response of the personal and collective psyche. BJ would choose a photograph daily with his initial response to the collective crisis. Ashok would amplify the symbolic meaning of this image from an archetypal lens. Together, they strung a talismanic necklace to guide us into the center of the storm. Join them in celebrating the power of the unconscious to help us survive and master the storm.


​From the Foreword, by Dennis Patrick Slattery

As I read Beth Boardman’s insightful meditative poems in this new volume, I could not help but think of the relation between poetry and prayer. All of the poems she includes carry a prayerful tone and depth. Clearly, prayer, akin to poetry, is a deeply imagined experience that can move us to the edge of mystery and to the ineffable by allowing us a glimpse of a deeper, more fully dimensional view of reality.

Prayer, like poetry, is an act of imagination; the former contains or harbors a form of poiesis, a Greek word that suggests a making or forming or shaping something into a coherent form. One cannot help but sense Beth’s struggles and achievements as she negotiates that narrow gap between poetry and prayer, if indeed there is a gap at all. 

Lessons from the Garden is a memoir, a glimpse of the rhythm and rhyme of Kate Dahlstedt's life through time. Some of the poems go back 40 years, from courtship to becoming a wife, stepmother and mother. Others evolved from her Hospice social work with dying patients as well as her work with military veterans. Mostly, they are reflections on the everyday, ordinary events of life, in a way that gives them greater meaning.

"Reading Kate Dahlstadt's poetry collection, Lessons From the Garden, resembles a secret glimpse into the room where Penelope wove the tapestry that saved her life. In these poems are revealed the threads that created an alternately beautiful and painful pattern in the poet's life: love, motherhood, time, war, loss, mourning, nature, the divine. No wonder one of the ancient symbols for soul is thread.

~Phil Cousineau, author of The Art of Pilgrimage and The Blue Museum: New Poems
In the author's words:

A myth, I hope these essays reveal, is a manner and even a style of being present to the world’s matter as well as to interior ideas and images. Behaving like a fulcrum balancing two realities—the external one I meet daily and the inner psychic world that has its own objective nature to develop and then fade as its life energy diminishes—myths are organically alive.

My own personal myth is present in the chrysalis of each of these essays. Something in the subject matter of each of them sparked my curiosity and my attraction to them, rendering them complete only when I was able to give them sufficient form to breathe on their own. Each of the thirty chapters brought me to wonder about them, to turn them around and upside-down, to see them from several perspectives, perhaps revealing their paradoxes and their ultimate purposes. The presence of myth, the energy they carry, attract my wondering about them. Seeing anew is one of the main intentions of myth; a deepened consciousness is its richest end result.
Once upon a time, the princess slept in a castle or in a woodland bower, innocent and untouched until the brave prince defeated the evil witch to win his way to her side and awaken her with a kiss. They got married . . . and there the story ends.

Today’s princesses run away from the castle, seek out the witch for training, and solve their own problems. Today’s princesses earn their queendoms through their own actions and lead their people in new directions.

We have been witness to an evolution of agency–the taking on of personal power–in the heroines of science fiction and fantasy movies and television over the last 90 years. Female characters have been moving into greater and greater arenas of action, stepping up to becoming not just heroines but superheroines–and in the 21st century, goddesses.

In The Princess Powers Up: Watching the Sleeping Beauties Become Warrior Goddesses, Jody Gentian Bower traces this evolution with examples from Disney princess movies, the Marvel and D.C. universes, the Star Trek and Star Wars franchises, and many others. Dr. Bower discusses how our changing culture has changed the landscape of film, allowing for new depictions of not just women but people of color, the nonbinary-gendered, and the differently abled, and shows how we are already shifting into new paradigms of heroism that are far more inclusive and diverse.

MANDORLA BOOKS WAS SELECTED BY RELIGIOUS AND MYTHOLOGICAL STUDIES SCHOLAR DR. CHRISTINE DOWNING TO RE-RELEASE FOUR OF HER OUT OF PRINT TITLES

This work is an exploration of the ongoing significance of sister relationships throughout our lives, bringing together personal narrative with the illuminations provided by myth, fairy tale, and the depth psychological reflections of Freud, Jung, and their followers.
This intensely personal account of the little written-about sacred dimension of menopause combines religious studies with psychology to "understand menopause as soul-event regarding its symptoms as symbols" and provides insight into what this transition can be like for those women who choose to embrace it as a meaningful part of their lives.
In Women's Mysteries, Christine Downing celebrates the gains and achievements of women, psychologically speaking, as they have been recovered, reclaimed, and repossessed by women over the past several decades. Her title is itself a conscious appropriation, in homage, of a book Esther Harding wrote fifty years ago and an extension of her own much celebrated book The Goddess.
In a remarkable series of books Christine Downing has given us "perfected" as well as ambivalent images of the great goddesses of classical antiquity. In her latest book she turns to the "gods in our midst," the gods as they appear to women, and she shows how these energies and epiphanies embodied in male gods help us to see who we are and what we might become.

More Titles in Print


From War to Wonder, Dennis Slattery’s new book, not only explicates the beauty and power of the Odyssey, Homer’s twenty-seven-hundred-year-old marvel-filled epic, it also offers a marvelous way to interact with it on a daily basis. Those who do so will be amply rewarded by finding access to the poem's myriad meanings, as well as their capacity for forging their own personal myths.

-Phil Cousineau, author of Once and Future Myths and editor of The Hero’s Journey: Joseph Campbell on his Life and Work

Great visions deserve great guides. Dennis Slattery is one—a master mentor, teacher, interpreter and servant of the soul, bringing Homer’s ancient vision into our modern world desperately in need of renewed spirit. Use From War to Wonder, his wise and penetrating guidebook, to follow Homer and Prof. Slattery on your soul’s journey to your true inward home, mythos and destiny.

-Edward Tick, Ph.D., author of The Practice of Dream Healing,
War and the Soul, and Warrior’s Return
Depth psychotherapist Sandra Rogers articulates what many women intuitively know—that the archetypal configuration of Maiden, Mother, and Crone is missing something. She offers us the archetype of the Queen, a stage in midlife between the Mother and the Crone. Through rich examples of real-life women, Sandra brings the Queen to life, and then, shows us how to fully embody her energies through the chakra system, including suggestions for journaling, meditation, visualization, and instructions for conducting a self-coronation ritual.

"This book could not be more relevant or timely! Sandra Rogers has written a book that embodies the last 60 years of women’s efforts to achieve both deeper psychological realization and broader efficacy in the world. Sandra’s book, Inviting the Queen, is written for women (and for men who love women) who are searching for a practical guidebook to wholeness: she asks you to welcome the Queen, a symbol of inner empowerment, into your life via simple exercises, engaging stories, and an important new way of understanding the chakras. This book is a 'crowning' achievement!"

~Patricia Ariadne, Ph.D., LMFT, Associate Professor of Psychology and Licensed Psychotherapist
In 2015, self-professed “Wander Woman” Corey Hale arrived in Puna, Hawaii, and knew she found her forever home. She spent all of her money to buy a piece of property, and set about trying to tame the jungle and manifest her 30-year-old dream of opening her own retreat center. While living in the rainforest was a struggle, from the relentless rain to the lack of basic amenities to the constant visitations from both welcome and unwelcome creatures, Corey fell in love with the place, the people, and the lifestyle.
 
And then, the lava came. And kept coming. And coming.

Corey lost everything. For a while, she even lost heart. But in the end, nothing can keep a good Wander Woman down.

This memoir covers the trajectory of Corey’s “Punatic” years, from the moment when she first set foot on her land, to the months upon months where she worked relentless toward her dream of Hale Ōhana Honua, to the sudden eruption of Kilauea, to her year of living in a parking lot— unsure what had happened to her home, unable to let go—and to her eventual departure from the island. It’s a story of both great love and great loss, set in the Wild West of Puna under Pele’s shadow and inside her chaos. With with her unflinching honesty, Corey lays bare the emotional landscape of post-traumatic stress disorder, from sadness to anger to betrayal to peace, to acceptance, and always, to love. 

Here the world is turned upside down to meet our eyes staring downward instead of upward, and outward. Here poems meet you where you are, and return your vision to a world loaded with wonders and laughter, if you’ll just take a few moments to look and listen and breathe it all in. That’s one way of explaining the joys, surprises, and detours that you’ll find in Eve and Other Acts of Defiant Gratitude. In Donohue’s new work of poems and prose poems, all personal history and all life itself is seen as a continuum of elliptical conjunctions. The past and the present, magic and loss, creation and cremation coexist. Shakespeare and Texas Cafeterias, Michael Cohen and John Donne, Joni Mitchell and conversations stored in a giant freezer. In these pages, people and events are all conjoined because in Donohue’s retelling, and reconfiguring of The Garden of Eden story, Eve be-comes the way to all creation in this world, the progenitor of love and art. Her decision isn’t just consequential, it’s courageous, and wondrous and liberating. While Adam was content to laze about and name the animals in The Garden, Eve wanted to taste creation itself. Because of Eve, we know "that in the syntax of the soul, there is no handwriting that misspells our desire to share ourselves with another, to become love." In this book, even when life has defied our expectations, we see how we can defy it back with an act of discovery and a sense of gratitude.
Sallie Stratton thought she knew what she was getting into when she married a military man--a life of following him wherever he would go. What she hadn’t counted on was that the day would come that she would not only be unable to follow him, she wouldn’t even be able to find him--he had gone missing in Vietnam. It would be 7 years before his presumptive death was made, 28 years before his remains were recovered and another 2 years before she brought him home. In those years when Sallie lost Chuck, she found herself, coming into her own, from a mother and homemaker to an activist, a student, a career woman and an adventurer.

"After her husband's plane crashed in Laos during the Vietnam War, Sallie Stratton was convinced he was still alive and a prisoner of war. As years went by, she struggled with how she and her three young sons, living in Dallas, could move forward without leaving Chuck behind. As emotionally powerful a story ever written about the families of the missing and unaccounted-for in Vietnam, Sallie's journey ultimately takes her on a path of her own choosing: A way forward without forgetting her past."

-Dave Tarrant, Enterprise Writer for the Dallas Morning News
Dog-catchers seldom get their due, and they do more than catch dogs. “Animal Control Officer” doesn’t quite catch the full meaning of the job either. Other animals besides dogs can be involved—pigeons, ferrets, goats, cats, monkeys, snakes, squirrels, rats, and the occasional Bighorn Sheep. More than a few surprises happen in the course of a normal workday or night. At least they did in the 1980s when Linda Mack, Animal Control Officer Two, patrolled the streets of Seattle.
 
Linda was not raised by wolves, but their descendants were always family. Living and working with dogs and with other animals was more enjoyable than a barrel of monkeys. Besides being fun, More Than a Dog’s Tale recognizes that animals are medicinal, and good dog medicine can’t be beat as a natural remedy for many of the bumps and maladies of real life.

"More Than a Dog’s Tale is a collection of stories by the Seattle dog catcher who has a top tier IQ, and a heart that’s even bigger than her mind. Animal lovers be forewarned! You won’t be able to put this book down. You’ll fall in love with every manner of animal, and the dog catcher who saves them, and saves herself. Within these pages are true stories of rescue, of love, and of what matters in life."

-Kit Kirkpatrick, Certified Memoirist
Jaffa Frank transmutes her decades of suffering from endometriosis by engaging the mythic imagination to craft a narrative of hope and empowerment. Firmly grounded in the physical realities of the disease, she evokes its archetypal wisdom as a visitation of the Gorgon Medusa revealing healing and wisdom, even when medical cure is unavailable. Frank mythopoetically weaves together threads of endometriosis, Medusa, and Athene on the loom of her own lived experience of the disease, imaginative and embodied reflection the weft and warp of a life tapestry. By personifying endometriosis as Medusan, pathology is rendered sacred. By contemplating what it means to be human in embodied relationship with the divine, Frank provides a mythos of healing while living with chronic illness. 

Eyes of the Gorgon will be of interest to anyone who has been touched by endometriosis and longs to expand the story of the disease beyond the limitations of socio-cultural taboos and the medical model. It will be illuminating reading for analytical, somatic, and depth psychologists; students of myth and mythopoesis; and medical professionals.
From the introduction of Everyday Reverence:

"Everyday reverence is an attitude we bring to the world that seeks to see the spiritual everywhere, in all our values and activities and experiences, in all people, and in the whole of the sensual and natural worlds. To practice everyday reverence is to see all of nature as an altar, to perform any activity as worship, to hear the sensual world as a hymn, to view people as fellow pilgrims on a holy path, to seek experience rather than dogma, and make of our values a creed."

After offering an introduction to each of the one hundred ways, Selig curates a selection of quotations from wildly divergent sources meant to inspire and encourage us to experience the sacred every day out in our every where world.

Somewhere in the gap between the sacred and the profane, Deborah's poetry emerges to bring us into a more intimate relationship with the divine presence within and all around us. Her debut collection, SOUL BIRD, evokes a natural and accessible form of mysticism--each piece a poetic song of the soul, encouraging the heart of her readers (as well as her own) to awaken and take flight.

This book will bring the magic of mysticism back into your everyday life, help you to rise above self-imposed limitations, and cultural conditioning, and (re)inspire a holy pursuit of love and wonder that is only yours.
Jay Balter did not have an easy life growing up in mid-20th century Brooklyn. His father, known to his mother only as “that son of a bitch” was many things—a music publisher who gambled away the entire family fortune he made on Broadway, a philander, a gangster, a deadbeat dad—but mostly, he was absent. Jay comes of age in the Orthodox Jewish community of Crown Heights with his mentally ill twin sister, his angry older brother, and his beloved mother, an early feminist who will do anything to support her family. In 1958, at 18 years old, he enters the US Army. During his basic training in Georgia, Jay’s anger over both American racism and the European Holocaust comes to the surface, and he vows, “I was prepared to teach those rebels a lesson. I was not prepared to roll over and play dead like the Jews of Europe.” But after his medical training, he suddenly receives his deployment orders: to Nuremburg, Germany of all places. Not only that, but Jay finds himself living in the SS Kaserne, the former military barracks of Hitler’s elite Storm Troopers, sleeping in the very bed where Hitler was rumored to have slept. While there, he begins having dreams of revenging the Jews and assassinating all Nazis not convicted in the Nuremberg War Trials, and experiences an intense split between the healer and the hater within.  Will Jay start WW 3, or will he keep the peace in Germany?
OTHER TITLES IN PRINT