Climbing the Sacred Mountain: Adapting Animism as Part of Your Everyday Life--An Indigenous Filipino Perspective

A short, practical guide to Philippine animism—how to rediscover an embodied relationship with the living world and each other

Kapwa: who you are is inseparable from, and owed to, the living world around you.

Psychologist and Sikodiwa author Carl Lorenz Cervantes offers a contemporary manual to Philippine animism, bridging Indigenous wisdom, psychology, and cultural roots. Climbing the Sacred Mountain’s psychospiritual model and practical animist toolkit help us awaken to the wonder, awe, and enchantment that exists all around us, if we know where (and how) to look.

Cervantes guides us to rediscover an aliveness and reciprocity with nature: the living, breathing world that each of us is connected to, and to which each of us belongs. Part cultural exploration, part spiritual map, this book reintroduces animism as a mostly “neglected part of our commonsense.”

This book shares the Philippine spiritual landscape of Kalibutan (the physical world) and Kabila (the other side), inviting us into a worldview shaped by engagement with and permeability between the human and more-than-human worlds. Cervantes offers:

• A deeply practical applied animist toolkit that includes rituals for divination, pilgrimage, meditation, offerings, and more
  
• Grounded dialogues among Indigenous wisdom, folk healing, and psychological science
  
• A framework for conceptualizing and engaging with the archetypes and unseen forces that operate all around us—from nature spirits (Duwende) that demand respect for the environment to traumatic memories (multo) that haunt the living
  
• Tools for maintaining harmony with your space, working with your shadow side, 
  
• Expansive, animist approaches to meaning-making, regardless of your personal background or spiritual orientation
  

Drawing on concepts like kapwa (shared identity), loob (interiority), and ginhawa (wellbeing), Cervantes explores how our personhood is inextricably connected with the world around us—and provides hope, grounding, and reenchantment to all of us seeking a sense of belonging and connection in an isolated and increasingly sterile world.