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Land Healing: Physical, Metaphysical, and Ritual Practices for Healing the Earth
Your hands can help to heal the earth. This comprehensive guide to land healing for neopagans and Earth-based spiritual practitioners allows those who have a desire to regenerate and heal human-caused damage throughout our world to make a difference. The book provides tools and information to take up the path of the land healer with care, reverence, and respect to all beings. It uses a flexible framework that allows one to address any land-healing situation. A framework that includes physical land healing, such as gardening, permaculture practices, creating refugia, and wild tending, as well as metaphysical healing techniques such as rituals, prayers, ceremonies, energetic healing, palliative care, meditations, psychopomp work, and much more. It also teaches the process of witnessing and deep listening and spiritual self-care, as well as how to create an earth healer's crane bag. Address the challenges of the present age and learn ways to heal the earth to bring forth a brighter tomorrow.
208 pages, Paperback
Published March 28, 2024
10 people are currently reading
63 people want to read
About the author
Dana O'Driscoll
9 books19 followersDana O’Driscoll spent most of her childhood in the wooded hills of the Laurel Highlands region of Pennsylvania, making mud pies, building brush cabins, and eating berries. Thankfully, little has changed, and she can still be found searching out tasty mushrooms, gathering herbs, and playing her panflute for the trees. Dana enjoys various kinds of wildcrafting, earth skills, and natural arts and is often covered with paint, dirt, or both. She is a certified permaculture designer and is working towards a more resilient, self-sufficient lifestyle through beekeeping, perennial agriculture, animal husbandry, food preservation, herbalism, and natural building. She also serves as a community organizer to promote ethical wild food foraging, food security, and community empowerment using permaculture methods.
Dana has published Sacred Actions: Living the Wheel of the Year through Earth-Centered Sustainable Practices with Red Feather 2021, as well as the Tarot of Trees and Plant Spirit Oracle. She is an Ollave Adept and currently serves as the Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America. Through AODA, she edits Trilithon: The Journal of the Ancient Order of Druids in America and the Druid’s Book of Songs, Ceremonies, and Prayers. She blogs at www.thedruidsgarden.com.
Dana has published Sacred Actions: Living the Wheel of the Year through Earth-Centered Sustainable Practices with Red Feather 2021, as well as the Tarot of Trees and Plant Spirit Oracle. She is an Ollave Adept and currently serves as the Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America. Through AODA, she edits Trilithon: The Journal of the Ancient Order of Druids in America and the Druid’s Book of Songs, Ceremonies, and Prayers. She blogs at www.thedruidsgarden.com.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
July 18, 2025
Land Healing: Physical, Metaphysical, and Ritual Practices for Healing the Earth by Dana O’Driscoll, Grand Archdruid of the AODA, is a wide ranging, rich, and comprehensive handbook on how to make working for the healing and wellness of the Living Earth and all their inhabitants – plants, trees, animals, land formations – a part of your practice.
The book is organized into nine chapters. The first few cover introductory concepts related to land healing and what one might want to have in a land healer’s toolkit (here described in the language of the crane bag familiar to Druids). Chapter 3 covers listening, witnessing, and apologizing for harms caused by human activity, and Chapter 4 focuses on a range of aspects of energy work including sigil crafting, land blessings, elemental frameworks, opening and closing sacred space, and working from a distance. From there, more specific practices are covered: land healing energetically in chapter 5, palliative care and easing suffering and passing in chapter 6, physical land healing (ex. seed spreading, litter collecting, wild tending) in chapter 7, and working with spirits who pass in chapter 8. Throughout, O’Driscoll provides helpful guidance around the level of proficiency and prerequisite skills involved – some of these kinds of work are absolutely accessible to beginners while others are definitely not. The ninth and final chapter focuses on self-care with a particular focus on navigating the grief, anger, and burnout that can come with doing earth-centering work amidst climate catastrophe.
Most of the practices in this text presume some level of animism in one’s cosmology. O’Driscoll explains that “an animist perspective recognizes that plants, animals, places (eg. rivers, forests), and objects (eg. stones, ritual tools) have a spirit and that spirit can be interacted with” [15]. There are some practices – holding space for one who has passed, some of the self-care approaches in the final chapter – that anyone with any cosmology could participate in, but the majority of the land healing work presented here is animist in orientation. A lot of the work is rooted in and draws on Revival Druidry broadly speaking and AODA Druidry in particular, but I do think that much of the activities and ideas in this book would be of interest to non-Druids as well, particularly those who practice other forms of nature-based / earth-based spirituality.
I think that beginners and more seasoned practitioners alike will find much wisdom and inspiration in Land Healing – definitely recommend.
A note of disclosure: I am an AODA member and, via that, know the author. I am totally confident that without this personal connection I still would’ve loved this book!
Content warnings: death, animal death, grief
The book is organized into nine chapters. The first few cover introductory concepts related to land healing and what one might want to have in a land healer’s toolkit (here described in the language of the crane bag familiar to Druids). Chapter 3 covers listening, witnessing, and apologizing for harms caused by human activity, and Chapter 4 focuses on a range of aspects of energy work including sigil crafting, land blessings, elemental frameworks, opening and closing sacred space, and working from a distance. From there, more specific practices are covered: land healing energetically in chapter 5, palliative care and easing suffering and passing in chapter 6, physical land healing (ex. seed spreading, litter collecting, wild tending) in chapter 7, and working with spirits who pass in chapter 8. Throughout, O’Driscoll provides helpful guidance around the level of proficiency and prerequisite skills involved – some of these kinds of work are absolutely accessible to beginners while others are definitely not. The ninth and final chapter focuses on self-care with a particular focus on navigating the grief, anger, and burnout that can come with doing earth-centering work amidst climate catastrophe.
Most of the practices in this text presume some level of animism in one’s cosmology. O’Driscoll explains that “an animist perspective recognizes that plants, animals, places (eg. rivers, forests), and objects (eg. stones, ritual tools) have a spirit and that spirit can be interacted with” [15]. There are some practices – holding space for one who has passed, some of the self-care approaches in the final chapter – that anyone with any cosmology could participate in, but the majority of the land healing work presented here is animist in orientation. A lot of the work is rooted in and draws on Revival Druidry broadly speaking and AODA Druidry in particular, but I do think that much of the activities and ideas in this book would be of interest to non-Druids as well, particularly those who practice other forms of nature-based / earth-based spirituality.
I think that beginners and more seasoned practitioners alike will find much wisdom and inspiration in Land Healing – definitely recommend.
A note of disclosure: I am an AODA member and, via that, know the author. I am totally confident that without this personal connection I still would’ve loved this book!
Content warnings: death, animal death, grief
January 3, 2025
This is a very thoughtful book on connecting to nature, the land around you and offering land healing. Many of the practices here I have tried, but the author goes deeper into the practice than I have done. I live in a place where trees are constantly being cut down for houses so many of the healing land practices in this book will be useful for me personally and locally.
This is a welcome addition to an existing land healing practice, or if you are new to this, it gives you many ideas on how to heal the land around you.
This is a welcome addition to an existing land healing practice, or if you are new to this, it gives you many ideas on how to heal the land around you.
May 5, 2024
"Land Healing: Physical, Metaphysical, and Ritual Practices for Healing the Earth" by Dana O'Driscoll is a brilliant book. One thing that she said in the Preface that I agree with is that this book is a gift. People who care about the Earth would benefit greatly from reading this book.
O'Driscoll explains in great detail what is wrong with the Earth, what we are doing to the Earth, and how to help heal the Earth. She teaches the different aspects of the land and the ecosystems we work within. O'Driscoll gives you plenty of tools with which to use in your efforts to help the land. O'Driscoll's book gives you mundane and spiritual ways to help heal the land. The wide assortment of healing tools makes this book appropriate for a vast audience.
From permaculture to psychopomping, you will find something you can identify with. There is always something you can use to help heal the Earth. Many ideas in this book help you do some healing for yourself. After all, you must take care of yourself if you are to take care of anything else.
O'Driscoll explains in great detail what is wrong with the Earth, what we are doing to the Earth, and how to help heal the Earth. She teaches the different aspects of the land and the ecosystems we work within. O'Driscoll gives you plenty of tools with which to use in your efforts to help the land. O'Driscoll's book gives you mundane and spiritual ways to help heal the land. The wide assortment of healing tools makes this book appropriate for a vast audience.
From permaculture to psychopomping, you will find something you can identify with. There is always something you can use to help heal the Earth. Many ideas in this book help you do some healing for yourself. After all, you must take care of yourself if you are to take care of anything else.
November 28, 2025
I have been called in to do land healing for a number of years now. I have been doing this work when there has been little in the way of written material on how to do this work. For me this is the written primer on how to do land healings. If you are experiencing eco grief or eco anxiety, this is one way to get involved in helping Nature and our More-Than-Human Kin.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews