HEAL YOUR SOUL HISTORY

A shaman’s handbook focuses on overcoming the demons of daily life.

Dunblazier (Master Your Inner World, 2016, etc.), a self-described empath, reincarnated soul, and spiritual healer, here continues her Demon Slayer series. She looks at the possible complications individuals might experience as a result of their own past lives, and the strategies people afflicted with a variety of “demons” can use to find inner strengths they didn’t know they possessed. The author styles herself as a demon slayer, a spiritual warrior with survival skills honed over many lifetimes. In her latest book, the long sections on her own life are the most intriguing parts. She recounts, for instance, squatting in a third-floor walk-up in a derelict 1980s Harlem apartment building, and she relates her personal interactions and pregnancy. Through her own and other personal stories, she’s able to bring to life her underlying “demon slayer” philosophies: the strategies “for balancing life’s traumas” and daring to have “the audacity to laugh and see the world through someone else’s eyes.” The author prefaces her book with a disclaimer that it presents no legally constituted medical advice, and her approaches range over a wide variety of New-Age or “alternative” medicine concepts such as massage therapy, acupuncture, Kundalini energy points, and herbal supplements. The drift of the engrossing volume returns often to the idea of past lives and their effect on the present and—this account being about reincarnation—the future: “The state a person is in when they die is the state they remain in after death,” she writes. “And it is the lower vibrational states of being—like anguish, fear, anger, grief, bitterness, or hate—that keep a spirit earthbound.” In this and all cases, Dunblazier acts effectively as the reader’s coach, foremost cheerleader, and guardian angel, and this has a cumulative effect that’s genuinely encouraging. The overarching message of empowerment should speak to people struggling with their own personal demons.

An inspirational guide to using a soul’s long history to combat present-day negative forces.