Ananda Forest
Towards the Next Level
of Consciousness
Follow Your Bliss with Ananda Forest
“Follow your bliss, and you will come to the end of the Way.” Bliss or joy, as he prefers to call it, is the heart struck by the truth of its own nature. The Sri Yantra, the ancient Hindu symbol for OM, the vibration of the Universe, represents this note sustained at its fullest possible amplitude. You don’t need to believe or understand this. All you need to do is to follow the smile of your own joy. As Mary Oliver so kindly observes, “You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.” You only need to move toward your own joy as a plant’s leaves seek the light, as her roots seek moisture. Only in this way will you discover, what is written on your own seed packet, who you really are.
About Ananda Forest
Ananda Forest is a passionate writer guiding you on the path to self-discovery.
ANANDA FOREST was born George Emery Vaillant in Boston in 1959. He went to Andover, Oberlin, and Yale Law School and later taught English at St. Ann’s School in Brooklyn. In 1994, he left the city for upstate New York, where he worked as a carpenter and mechanic and started seriously following his bliss. For the next twenty-five years, he worked as a carpenter but never stopped teaching: twelve years guiding students of shamanism at Spirit Hollow, the nature and spirituality center he co-founded, and the last thirteen years and counting as an adjunct instructor of anthropology, history, and mythology at the Community College of Vermont.
Ananda now teaches remotely from northern New Mexico where he lives in a yurt with his wife, iishana, in a small intentional community, the Rio Grande Refuge, along the banks of the river. He includes as his teachers 12-step groups, shamans Michael Harner and Sandra Ingerman, and the gurus Neem Karoli Baba and Amma, as well as the Earth herself. He has done multiple vision quests in both Vermont and the Southwest, and has been pouring water every month in lodge for over twenty-five years.
He is available to speak to groups about his insights and experiences.
Home!
Books
Good News About The World Falling Apart
A fusion of Sapiens and The Power of Now, Good News About the World Falling Apart reveals that the current crises we face on Earth are the birth pangs of a species.
Humans have been here before. We were at an inflection point of this magnitude when we first developed fire and language 200 thousand years ago and, again, ten thousand years ago when we discovered how to germinate seeds. Although these Turnings could have led to our extinction, each time we used our superpowers—imagination and intuition—to transform our consciousness and persevere.
The crises we face today announce a Third Turning.
Our work today is to crack open our hearts, to kindle the fire inside, to germinate the Heart Seed within us. Good News takes the reader across time, through humans’ earlier challenges and triumphs in the First and Second Turnings. Forest then shows how the Third Turning is occurring all around us and that the challenges we face today are the call for Homo sapiens to achieve their full potential.
Here For The Joy
Where is the Joy?
Life can feel hard. And our experiences shape our thoughts and beliefs to the extent that it can feel as though we’re stuck in one traumatizing cycle after the other.
Worse, this can lead us to a dead end of despair and even addiction.
In his breakthrough new age recovery memoir, Ananda Forest tells of how a struggle with multiple addictions morphed into a quest for spiritual enlightenment. His personal Story of how he overcame a generations-old legacy of mental illness and
physical abuse.
It sings the good news that what each of us loves the most can set us free!
Ananda Forest on Finding Yourself
To paraphrase Vince Lombardi, “Enlightenment isn’t the most important thing. It’s the only thing.” The greatest opportunity of this human life is to discover our true nature, to be free!. The author, Ananda Forest, wants to “share the experience, strength and hope he has acquired along this path.” Visit the about the Author page for more details.
Good News! (Blog)
Contact Ananda Forest
Ananda would love to hear your thoughts and any questions you might have. Please use this form or send an email to anandaforest@gmail.com.