Francesca De Grandis aka Outlaw Bunny
Francesca De Grandis aka Outlaw Bunny is the bestselling author of Be a Goddess!
With thirty-five years experience as a grass-roots minister and spiritual healer, Francesca focuses her classes, spiritual counseling, and books on both your personal fulfillment and empowering you to make a difference in the world.
Francesca is devoted to sound magical techniques. Her students receive careful magical training.
De Grandis channeled The Third Road, a Faerie shamanism Goddess tradition practiced worldwide. Its curriculum is transformative, otherworldly, and sanity-sustaining.
De Grandis develops innovative shamanic modalities and understandings. The Third Road is a massive body of mystical teachings and tools. She continues to create more.
Francesca thinks, no matter how much we move forward in our lives, we eventually need to take another step, and always another, to fully achieve our dreams, our peace, our potential. She is devoted to creating steps for each leg of the journey toward fullness, including the various directions our journey takes us as multifaceted beings. Hence the Third Road multitude of classes and innovations.
The Third Road has both a written and oral branch. The written version is taught through books and the web. Francesca teaches the oral, oathbound branch in international teleseminars—group phone calls.
Francesca is descended from a long line of Fey-touched Italians. Each generation had what they called “the family witch,” who was groomed for shamanic priesthood in the ancient Faerie Faith (the family was in France before Italy). This made mysticism part of everyday life for Francesca, so Third Road lessons are experiential instead of abstract and theoretical. Her mother’s magic was natural and down-to-earth, making Francesca’s classes practical, with spells that address real life needs.
Like others in her lineage, she was born a good luck charm. (The following is about Third Road’s oral branch.) Her talismanic presence, which works even by phone, makes Third Road lessons safe and powerful. That is one of the many aspects of her teaching style that makes Third Road magic effective and safe. Another is Francesca’s commitment to her students. In almost all her events, she works with a small number of individuals.
Both as a priestess-poet who passes on her work orally and as a published author, De Grandis has been a pivotal influence in the spiritual and literary culture of both earth and alternative spirituality. De Grandis channeled many poems for The Third Road—prayers, rituals, liturgy, chants, meditations, and lectures, often presented as prose—that anonymously entered the oral and written literature of earth-centered and “new” spirituality. Her innovative techniques have become equally ubiquitous.
Francesca was once called “one of those multi-hyphenated types.”
She practices Goddess Spirituality and Chi Gung, is a long-time student of Taoism, and talks with Christ. She’s also been told she’s somewhat of a Buddhist. People of all faiths—and those who are just fine without one—are welcome in Third Road. It’s an inclusive global village of faeries, wolves, dragons, poets, clowns, and other independent thinkers.
Francesca started playing music in Boston clubs at age fourteen and toured the U.S. performing.
In her thirties, still working in clubs as a comedian and musician, she was kidnapped by Faeries. The next thing she knew, she’d committed to her heritage as a professional shaman.
She attended New College of California. Her focus was Shamanic Studies. Her thesis included the creation of some early Third Road lessons.
After leaving the entertainment business for a contemplative shamanic life, she understood that music was part of her spirituality. Her bestselling, award-winning music album Pick the Apple from the Tree represents this.
When Multiple Sclerosis made holding a guitar too difficult, she shifted from sacred music to painting talismanic art for her students and clients. (Clients from Boston to France to Arabia to Australia phone her for private professional shamanic counseling.)
She believes multifaceted people are common but often do not recognize their many abilities, or are not given the chance to develop all their talents. We all can express ourselves in many forms, given the right support. Whether using right or left-brain, we all can be Divine channels of love, wisdom, healing, and more. Plus you have many character strengths that, if honored, can combine together so you have the inner resources to successfully reach your goals. Third Road lessons support the whole you, a wholeness of being.
Peter Coyote wrote, “Like all good humorists, Francesca De Grandis has a radical and subversive agenda.” Francesca loves that, adding, “I’m a trickster working for benevolent chaos Gods, so I don’t play mean tricks. Instead, this bunny makes good-natured jokes and leads warm-hearted rites. Laughter and joy open us to greater possibility and create profound enchantment. That is subversive.”
De Grandis’s groundbreaking material—in different genres—draws imitators and starts trends. That is not her intent—she herself moves on to her next innovation. A lot of her forward-thinking work happens solely within oral tradition, the special processes of which allow rapid progress.
After a quarter of a century in San Francisco, Outlaw Bunny was kidnapped by Faeries—again!—and relocated to rural Pennsylvania where she lives with trees and sylphs, tries unsuccessfully to avoid deep thoughts—a typical shaman!—and juggles a large number of projects, some solitary, some international.
