Stephen Kiesling Returns to S&H

Our November/December 2014 issue brings Stephen Kiesling back at the helm as Editor-in-Chief. Here are some bits and pieces from his Editor's Note to give you a glimpse of the past and what's to come:

"A print magazine is like a fragile wooden sailboat, and when we launched this one back in the nineties, we headed into wild waters. Our goal was what Brother David Steindl-Rast calls “total aliveness,” and we set out to find it among the practices of all the faith traditions—including those who profess no faith at all. We looked deeply into gratefulness, forgiveness, and meditation, but also into the shaking medicine of the Kalahari Bushmen, the spirits of ayahuasca, and the instantaneous one-with-everything experience of inhaling 5-MeO-DMT. The journey was exhilarating, destabilizing, and eventually exhausting. A couple of years ago, I cleaned out my cabin and crawled off, happy to be ashore.

I’m also happy to be back. The boat has been redesigned and refitted since I’ve been gone, and I’m still figuring it out.The spiritual adventure—total aliveness—is the ultimate adventure...I’ll do my best to make it enlivening—and keep us off the rocks."

In this first issue back, Stephen describes a unique spiritual adventure with the bravest grandma he knows, "Bringing Grandma Home" (pictured above, photo by Rory Finney), plus sacred places, the world's best healing retreat, Shakti Gawain and much more.