Encounters with Living Language: Book Spotlight

Book Spotlight – Encounters with Living Language

Written by Christina Donnell, Ph.D

Encounters with Living Language: Surrendering to the Power of Words awakens readers to the intrinsic energy of language, where we can experience its multidimensional transmissions connecting us to the oneness that underlies all of life. Christina’s book provides a riveting account of these discoveries and an invitation for readers to welcome an embodied experience with the living language and explore the dormant places within them still waiting to awaken.

In the early 1990’s, concerns about the increasing role of managed care and the absence of focus on the human spirit in the mental health profession motivated Christina Donnell, Ph.D.: to leave her clinical position to travel to Peru to explore the healing practices of indigenous tribes.

She spent decades learning the shamanic energy practices of the Q’ero Indians, working with sorcerers and shamans of the high Andes. Christina Donnell, Ph.D., has also spent nearly three decades studying Eastern traditions, practicing martial arts, and Zen meditation.

A dreamer and a “Mistress of Language,” Christina Donnell, Ph.D.: ‘s love of writing began when she was very young. Yet it was after a near-death experience with yellow fever in the high Andes, that she heard a voice calling her, “It’s time to do what you were born to do. Be language’s mouthpiece.” After returning to Minneapolis, Christina Donnell, Ph.D.: resumed her private counseling practice, and began writing about her experiences.

“What is a word? This is a word that at its core has an eternal, infinite, unbound being. … What is to be unfolded to knowledge and experience through the word is that which lies beyond the obvious. That which lies beyond the obvious must be experienced to be known.

The experience ends in opening the awareness to the unboundedness. Unless that unboundedness is experienced, language has lost its true value. Something will be gained…, but not the totality which is contained in every word.

At the deeper levels, there will be more connectedness, more connectedness, until it reaches the ultimate connectedness. Inert, now it is lively.” Maharishi’s view of the transcendent use of words struck a chord in me. That a word could influence the “wholeness of creation” awakened me to the unfathomable power of words — a phenomenon I call “holy word power.”