“Keeney’s story ranks with The Gospel of Ramakrishna and The Autobiography of a Yogi in terms of sheer revelatory power with its encounter with the sacred
. . . Some of us first encountered this feeling while reading Carlos Castaneda . . .”

STEPHEN LARSEN, Ph.D., author,
A Fire in the Mind: The Life of Joseph Campbell

Bradford Keeney, Ph.D., has been called “an all-American shaman, the Marco Polo of psychology, and an anthropologist of the spirit” by the editors of Utne Reader. Elders of indigenous traditions throughout the world – including the Kalahari Bushmen, the Caribbean Shakers of St. Vincent, the Guarani Indians of the Amazon, and leaders of the Japanese healing tradition of Seiki Jutsu – have embraced Keeney as an elder and spokesperson for their ways of ecstatic shamanism. Following an academic career as a systems theorist and psychotherapist, he spent over a decade traveling the globe, living with spiritual teachers, shamans, healers, and medicine people who trusted him to share their words with others – modern cultures in need of Elder wisdom.

The result of Keeney’s work is one of the broadest and most intense field studies of healing and shamanism, chronicled in the critically acclaimed book series, Profiles of Healing, an eleven-volume encyclopedia of the world’s healing practices. His autobiography, Bushman Shaman, tells how he became a n/om-kxao (shaman) with the Kalahari Bushmen. Megan Biesele, Ph.D., former member of the Harvard Kalahari Research Group, writes: “There is no question in the minds of the Bushman healers that Keeney’s strength and purposes are coterminous with theirs. They affirmed his power as a healer.” Keeney presently conducts his clinical work at the Center for Children and Families, Monroe, Louisiana. He also serves as Professor of Transformative Studies, California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco; Honorary Senior Research Fellow, Rock Art Research Institute, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, and founding director of the Bushman (San) N/om-Kxaosi Ethnographic Project, Institute for Religion and Health, Texas Medical Center, Houston.