Throughout her life, Raven Cypress Wood has been guided by a commitment to support others on their paths of healing, personal growth, and spiritual transformation. For more than three decades, she has guided individuals through spiritual growth, healing, and personal transformation through private practice as a spiritual counselor. She created and led a spiritual counseling and personalized healing ritual program at Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health while also serving her local community as an advocate for at-risk children, and training volunteers to be rape crisis counselors. After moving to Serenity Ridge Retreat Center in Virginia to spend three months serving practitioners undergoing the traditional dark retreat, she stayed at the retreat center for a further six years after being asked to join the Ligmincha International Council as a retreat coordinator. Today, she continues to serve the community from the foundation of the Yungdrung Bön religious tradition.

Since beginning her study and practice of Yungdrung Bön religious tradition, Raven has had the good fortune to receive teachings and guidance from many authentic Yungdrung Bön masters and ritual specialists. Seeing the need to make more of the Tibetan language prayers and teachings accessible, she decided to learn to read Classical Tibetan in order to translate the sacred texts into English. In addition to learning the standard Tibetan uchen script, she learned the more specialized umé script, commonly used for the Yungdrung Bön scriptures, in order to have much greater access to texts and resources. From the beginning of her study, she dedicated herself to preserving and sharing the tradition’s teachings with authenticity and accuracy to the best of her ability. She has now translated hundreds of prayers, ritual texts, commentaries, and practice manuals from Tibetan into English. Some of these translations have now been published and further translated into multiple languages.

Her translations are grounded in extensive research into the historical, cultural, and religious contexts of the source materials. Rather than adapting traditional teachings to modern spiritual trends or Westernized ideas, she is committed to presenting them accurately within their own context so that readers can engage directly with the authentic Yungdrung Bön tradition. In this way, the teachings and prayers are not adapted for the spiritual seeker, but it is the spiritual seeker that adapts according to the wisdom teachings in order to gain a deeper and more experiential connection with the profound truths that they contain.

Through her website Nine Ways, her mentoring and guidance programs, and Nine Ways Press, Raven continues to make authentic, well-researched teachings available to an international audience while helping preserve an ancient spiritual tradition for future generations.

Books by Raven Cypress Wood

• A Blazing Mala of Wish-Fulfilling Jewels: A Compilation of Daily Prayers from the Yungdrung Bön Religious Tradition
• Forty-Three Trainings for an Enlightened Mind and Other Divine Writings
• The Heartdrop of Jamma, the Wise Loving Mother
• Indestructible: The Longevity Practice of Lama Tséwang
•     Rikdzin
• Soul Retrieval and Death Ransom: A Retreat Manual
• Sacred Smoke: The Ancient Ritual of Fumigation and Offering in the Yungdrung Bön Religious Tradition
• The Practice of the King of Longevity: A Retreat Manual
• Summoning the Drala: Protection and Support from Primordial Guardians

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Nine Ways is supported by a mandala of kind and generous donors. Because of their generosity, the work continues.

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