Feather on the Heart
A Time Threads Novel
Angela is six when a jaguar stalks into her dreams.
Within weeks, the bright, laughing child her parents knew is retreating into a silence no doctor can explain. She stops eating. She withdraws from the world. Every system her father, David Colburn, has trusted begins to fail, and time is running out.
After his friend dies with Angela’s name and Peru on his lips, confirming the impossible dreams and visions David had tried to dismiss, David travels to the Amazon, where healers and ceremonies lead him toward a truth larger than illness. Angela’s suffering may be connected to an ancient wound carried through families, bodies, and generations, a wound that began long before either of them was born.
What David encounters in the jungle forces him to reconsider medicine, memory, inheritance, and the limits of a father’s love. To bring Angela home, he must enter the place where her story began and confront the part he has played in it.
Feather on the Heart is a sweeping literary novel about love that survives death, grief older than memory, and the moment a family finally catches what has been falling through generations.
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Notes from behind the mesa — on plant medicine, healing, and the journey behind the books.
Welcome to Heart Feather
Our thoughts, emotions, and unhealed wounds can influence, not only our perceptions of reality, but our physical beings as well. For indeed, healing the invisible wounds can often heal the visible symptoms.
Most importantly, we hope to help your heart become “lighter than a feather”, to help you experience Heaven in every moment of your life.
I would like to welcome you to this possibility. All that is required is a willingness to learn, to let go, to forgive, and to accept healing on a most fundamental level.
Dr. Richard Grossman
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Also by Richard Grossman
Trust and Forgive: The Medicine of Your Life
At five years old, Richard Grossman had a horrific accident.
The injury healed. The trauma remained.
The people around him lacked language for what had happened inside him.
He was a child left with pain, fear, shame, and memories of something he would later understand as an encounter with another world.
That accident became the beginning of a search that would shape the rest of his life. It led him through the counterculture of Berkeley during the Vietnam War, an Oregon commune, the ashrams and festival grounds of India, the study of acupuncture and Chinese medicine, a small Mexican village, and the deep jungle of the Amazon.
Trust and Forgive: The Medicine of Your Life follows that search from childhood trauma into a lifetime of healing work as an acupuncturist, Doctor of Oriental Medicine, ceremony leader, musician, and guide.
The path is raw, strange, and deeply human.
There are teachers and mistakes, visions and humiliations, sacred songs, failed certainties, moments of terror, flashes of humor, and healings that arrived without ordinary explanation.
A dying woman is reached through song.
A father lost in dementia returns for a few minutes through jazz.
In India, a young seeker walks through a fairground and finds himself inside a world made of light.
In an ayahuasca ceremony, Grossman is taken into the memory of ancestral horror and hears two words that become the center of the book: Trust and forgive.
He spends the rest of the journey trying to understand those words as medicine. This revised edition moves through trauma, plant medicine, spiritual practice, consciousness, humor, love, failure, and the strange intelligence that can appear at the edge of suffering.
It is the story of a wounded child who became a healer, and of a healer who had to return again and again to his own unfinished places.
For readers drawn to inner work, spiritual healing, forgiveness, plant medicine, consciousness, and the mystery hidden inside a human life.
★★★★★
“Profound without being pretentious.”
★★★★★
“Once I picked it up, I did not want to stop reading.”
★★★★★
“It left me feeling a sense of hope and optimism about life.”
Meet Richard – Video interviews
What if some of the pain you’re carrying didn’t start with you?
In this fascinating conversation, Richard Grossman shares his experiences with plant medicine, ancestral healing, forgiveness, and the wounds that may live beneath conscious awareness. We explore trauma stored in the body, the role of somatic healing, and why lasting transformation may require something deeper than understanding the story.
Whether you view these experiences as ancestral memory, past-life imagery, or symbolic healing, this episode invites you to consider a powerful question: What happens when we stop fighting our pain and begin listening to what it’s trying to show us?
Podcasts & Conversations
Richard in conversation on healing, ceremony, and the journey behind the books.
Your Host
Richard Grossman, L.Ac., O.M.D., Ph.D.
Grossman’s fascination with healing started quite early in his life, triggered in part by a severe physical and emotional traumatic event. He was the son of a pharmacist, and grew up surrounded by doctors. Summers and weekends were spent in his father’s pharmacy.
Richard was always intrigued by that process, especially the (rare) compounding of prescriptions that included plants.
Early in his education, he had the assignment to decided what he wanted to be when he grew up. Without thinking, his answer was that he wanted to study the effects of plants and medicines on the mind, this, without even knowing that such a thing existed.
By the age of 15, he had concluded that the only reason to be alive was to help others out of their suffering. It was the beginning of his calling to the path of the healer.
Heart Feather Mission
In the mystical balance of ancient Egyptian belief, a heart lighter than a feather symbolizes a soul in harmony with the universe. This delicate balance, measured on the Scale of Maat, signifies a life lived with purity, truth, and moral integrity. It’s the ultimate testament to a spirit unburdened by wrongdoing, ready to soar into the afterlife’s eternal bliss.