Faces of Your Soul: Rituals in Art, Maskmaking, and Guided Imagery with Ancestors, Spirit Guides, and Totem Animals

In Faces of Your Soul, Elise Dirlam Ching and Kaleo Ching combine art and archetypes, meditation and acupressure, guided imagery, journaling, and many different creative processes in a collage of healing knowledge and wisdom. The authors start by stressing the balance of complementary opposites—left brain/right brain, challenge/comfort, practicality/the sacred—as crucial to beginning the journey. Then through guided imagery, they lead readers through subconscious realms to connect with archetypal sources of inner wisdom. This process frees the creative and healing spirit, connecting explorers with the body's instinctive intelligence, which expresses itself through the creation of art. Central to this process is a detailed description of maskmaking—including how to work with a partner to mold each other's gauze mask—balanced with self-explorations of the inner experience of this event. Poetry, personal stories, photographs, and a gallery of Kaleo Ching's evocative totemic masks expand the reader's experience of this richly resonant journey to self.

Elise Dirlam Ching has been a Registered Nurse at the San Francisco County Jail for 22 years. She is a published and award-winning poet, has degrees in English, Anthropology, Nursing, Transpersonal Psychology, and Fine Arts, and is a longtime practitioner of Yoga and Qigong.Kaleo Ching is an exhibiting and award-winning artist. He teaches bodywork and Qigong classes at the Acupressure Institute in Berkeley, as well as elsewhere in the Bay Area.The authors' extensive teaching experience includes the Arts and Consciousness Program at John F. Kennedy University (since 1991), San Francisco State University, University of Creation Spirituality, and various national and international conferences, workshops, and retreats. Visit them at www.kaleoching.com.