Edward Tick

The ancient world had wisdom and spiritual health and healing practices that the modern world has forgotten and nearly lost. Edward Tick, PhD is a transformational healer, psychotherapist, writer, poet, educator and international journey guide. He has been using ancient and indigenous traditions for decades to understand the depth of our modern wounding, to bring growth and healing to intractable conditions, and to restore soul and spirit – the source of all.

Dr. Tick has been working to heal the invisible wounds of violent trauma for over forty years. He is honored for his groundbreaking work in the spiritual, holistic, and community-based healing of veterans and other survivors of severe violence who suffer Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and moral injury. He has published breakthrough books in this field, including War and the Soul, introducing the ancient concept of soul wounding and how to heal it to the fields of military and trauma studies and utilizing spiritual and holistic principles and practices from ancient cultures for modern trauma healing.

Dr. Tick is an internationally recognized educator, author and expert on the military, veterans, PTSD, and the psychology, spirituality and history of global trauma, ancient warrior traditions, and military-related issues. His books War and the Soul and Warriors’ Return are considered modern classics in the fields of war and trauma studies. They are used extensively and taught by clinicians, veterans and the military. For decades he has conducted trainings, retreats, and workshops across the United States and in Europe and Southeast Asia. He has trained staff, taught and worked with wounded warriors at major U.S. Department of Defense and Veteran Administration facilities and at colleges, universities, hospitals, health care and community centers across the U.S. and overseas. He has served as the US military’s expert trainer on healing PTSD and Moral Injury for the past decade. Dr. Tick cofounded the nonprofit Soldier’s Heart, Inc. with his partner Kate Dahlstedt and served as director for thirteen years.

Since 2000 he has led annual journeys to Viet Nam, practicing international war and trauma reconciliation and healing. His commitment is to bring the lessons from ancient and indigenous sources for healing from severe trauma from those audiences most directly impacted to the general public – all of us - experiencing dimensions of global trauma on a daily basis today.

Dr. Tick has also conducted original and groundbreaking work and writing in the Ancient Greek tradition. His book The Practice of Dream Healing is a classic in depth psychology, offering the most comprehensive account in decades of ancient Asklepian dream healing practices, its origination of Western medicine and psychotherapy, and its applications to holistic healing today. He has led more than twenty pilgrimages to Greece since 1995, teaching the ancient traditions and the use of myth, poetry and literature for deep soul exploration and unfolding and facilitating transformational growth and healing for modern pilgrims and patients.

In addition to the award-winning War and the Soul and The Practice of Dream Healing Dr. Tick is the author of Warrior’s Return, Sacred Mountain, Wild Beasts and Wandering Souls, the audio set “Restoring the Warrior’s Soul,” and the poetry collections The Golden Tortoise and The Bull Awakening. Affirming that poetry is the language of the soul, Dr. Tick uses poetry and the humanities extensively in the healing processes and for exploration of the deep and hidden dimensions of psyche and culture. His next book is The Future of Ancient Healing, forthcoming in 2021.

Dr. Tick’s books and other works have been translated into Greek, Vietnamese, Bulgarian and Japanese.

In all his work Ed Tick's deepest devotion is to the unfolding and restoration of soul as a meaningful and living concept in our personal and collective lives. Only by remembering, restoring and healing the sacred core of life can we transform ourselves and our wounded world for the better.

Official website: http://www.edwardtick.com/

Discussed subjects

The practice of dream healing

Western medicine and psychotherapy originated in ancient Greece over 3,500 years ago. It originally used spiritual and holistic methodologies combined with intensive dream “incubation” under the guidance of Asklepios, the god of healing. The tradition lasted for two thousand years and was practiced throughout the Mediterranean world. It resulted in many thousands of “miracle cures” to otherwise intractable conditions of body, mind, heart and spirit. This tradition is a foundation of archetypal psychology and available to us today. This presentation will present the origins, practices, healings and applications of Asklepian dream questing for holistic healing today.

Ancient healing of modern war and violent trauma

Post-traumatic Stress Disorder and Moral Injury are new names for ancient and invisible conditions, once understood as soul wounding and spiritual loss, known for millennia and well-tended in traditional cultures. Trauma has been made astronomically more destructive and pervasive by the loss of spirituality, the violent contemporary conditions of the modern world and technological warfare and global breakdown. This presentation will focus on trauma’s forgotten dimensions. We will explore trauma as a soul wound and become aware of the dimensions of spiritual and moral wounding. We will explore traditional roles of healers throughout time who have tended traumatic spiritual wounds. We will examine the essential conditions necessary for survivors’ healing, how to restore the proper relationships between survivors and societies, and how best to tend and transform traumatic challenges from curses into gifts, wisdom and blessings.

How inspiration speaks

In ancient Sanskrit atman, in Greek pneuma, and in Hebrew ruach are all words meaning both breath and spirit. To breath in, to inspire, is to fill with spirit, to have soul, to touch the true self. According to worldwide sacred sources, inspiration fills us with transpersonal energies and spirit communicates with mortals through dreams, visions, oracles and synchronistic events. Miracles are such experiences that seem to defy and transcend the natural order. In our modern world, with loss of faith and traditions and the wisdom and conditions that facilitate these, visitations and healings such as these non-rational and inspirational events have become rare. The result is a worldwide soul sickness and nostalgia for the experience of deep spiritual connection and guidance. In this evening experience we will seek inspiration to help us return to our deepest felt connections with the archetypal and transpersonal. Asking and questing with discipline, humility, urgency, sacrifice and endurance, and in a community of seekers, we can recover such connections and experiences. What are our sources of inspiration? Where? How? When did they occur? What wisdom and healing did they bring? What questions and needs do we wish to bring to higher sources? Our evening will foster answers to these questions together as we understand and practice spirituality in community.

Major publications

Nonfiction

The Future of Ancient Healing: Restoring Roots and Wings to Psychology and Medicine,
Inner Traditions, Forthcoming 2021

Warrior’s Return: Restoring the Soul After War, Denver, Colorado: Sounds True,
November 2014

War and the Soul: Healing Post-traumatic Stress Disorder in Veterans and Our Nation,
Wheaton, IL: Quest Books, November, 2005
Bulgarian Edition: Boimata H Dipsata (War and Soul), Sophia, Bulgaria, Ah-Ba-Ka
Publishing House, April, 2007
Audio Book Edition, Quest Books, Summer, 2008

The Practice of Dream Healing: Bringing Ancient Greek Mysteries into Modern Medicine,
Wheaton, IL: Quest Books, 2001
Greek Edition: H Therapeia tis Psyches mesa apo ta Oneira (The Healing of Souls Through Dreams), trans. Perseas Tasoulis, Athens, Greece: Enalios Publications, 2003

Sacred Mountain: Encounters with the Vietnam Beast, Santa Fe, N.M.: Moon Bear Press, 1989

Poetry

The Bull Awakening: Poetry of Crete and Santorini, Salt Lake City, Utah: Elik Press, 2016

The Golden Tortoise: Viet Nam Journeys, Granada Hills, California: Red Hen Press, 2005

Monograph

Wild Beasts and Wandering Souls: Shamanism and Post-traumatic Stress Disorder,
Elik Press: Salt Lake City, Utah, 2007
-Abridged version with new Afterword, Journal of Shamanic Practice, 3:2, Oct.2010, 14-18
--Vietnamese edition (English and French editions): reprinted in full in Vietnamese Studies, 2007:4, #166, 39-71

Audio/ Audible

Restoring the Warrior’s Soul: An Essential Guide to Homecoming, Sounds True, Fall, 2016

Art Catalog

Speak Peace: Vietnamese Children’s Paintings on Peace and War,
Organize and develop national tour for Children’s Art Exhibition from War Remnants Museum, Ho Chi Minh City, Viet Nam with Poetry in Response by Americans, accompanying catalogue with Afterword,
"War Healing Through Children’s Art", in collaboration with Wick Poetry Center, Kent State Univ., 2010