Excerpt from The Gift of Shamanism.
From Skeptic to Believer
Don Jose stopped on his heels in the middle of a dark busy avenue of Corona, Queens. He turned to me, paused, and looked up at me with his fierce black eyes, “Did you start doing healing?” he asked. Perplexed, I watched this short, powerful shaman whom I admired, dressed in a blue llama-wool poncho, white cotton pants, white fabric sandals, and a gray felt fedora, in total disbelief. I pretended to not understand him.
“So, did you?” he prodded me. “Oh no, I didn’t, was I supposed to?” I finally said and went on anxiously protesting, “I’m not ready. How can I? I know nothing about it. I’m not even sure that this is what I want to do with my life.” “You are ready,” he declared flatly and with authority. “Vamos, let’s go eat now,” he said as he opened the door to a Chinese restaurant.
This was unexpected. My thoughts were racing. What does he mean? Do I have to change my life? I was confused and also frightened by the weight of the enormous responsibility he put on my shoulders. Immediately my old self-doubts cropped up like monsters looming out of their cage. Is he tricking me? What does he want from me or see in me? How can he be so sure I have what it takes to do what he does? Besides, I am a declared skeptic, cynic and atheist. I’m just an ordinary middle- aged man who was brought up as a communist Jew.
Oh my God, what did I get myself into? Do I have to? Why me? Why now? Before we start on this fascinating journey I must confess to you that for the longest time I did not allow myself to believe in the mounting evidence of the existence of unseen worlds, nor did I take the time to learn about them. But despite my doubts I was slowly forced to admit their existence and relevance; I found that I just did not have any other choice. At this point I no longer tried to intellectualize or understand these things in a rational way, as the shamanic experience is truly about learning to surrender to the magical and join in the workings of life’s mysterious forces. I’m now convinced that we human beings are truly living in multidimensional realities and that as humans we have the ability to perceive knowledge, images, and information otherwise hidden from our ordinary senses by shifting from the earthly plane into a shamanic state of higher vibrational consciousness. I believe that this is the key to humans’ survival for hundreds of thousands of years. It is not trickery or self-delusion as many more scientific and logical people might say, as we’ll see later.
Like me and perhaps you, there are millions of people who are now awakening every day, like sprouts after a long rain, to the call to embrace this age-old knowledge. Many indigenous societies have continuously lived with this wise worldview from the very beginning of time. We, in the technological, so-called First World, have forgotten it and in many ways have learned to despise it and label it as backward or primitive, rejecting it outright without even examining it. As the ancient Maya and Inca prophecies point out, since 1993 we entered into a new Pachacuti, a time of realignment and correction of the human journey and consciousness. It is time to be awakened and accept our true nature, by living in equilibrium and harmony between the two opposing and complementary forces of feminine and masculine that exist within each of us. It is a time to take the long overdue journey from our minds to meet our hearts. Only then, when the heart and the mind live in harmony, we can resolve war, poverty, and environmental destruction and ensure future generations’ survival on this miraculous planet.
I must confess that like many contemporary males I’m truly excited to play with the latest technologies and gadgets, read about new scientific discoveries, and hear about fresh innovations in every field, and I am sure I passed this enthusiasm to my kids. The future fascinates me, ignites my imagination, and sets free my fantasies. Growing up, I admired my dad’s constant search for new ways to improve machines to achieve better production and develop processes to make life’s tasks more efficient and convenient. I believe inventiveness and curiosity is ingrained in our DNA , as it is essential to our successful survival as a species on Earth. We have truly achieved a lot in the past few hundred years. We are now able to communicate in an instant all across the planet. Distances have become shorter; we travel into space; we predict the weather a year in advance; our homes are becoming digitized and weather insulated; we harvest solar, wind, and water energies; we engineer food to have long shelf lives; we have a DNA map of our bodies, better medical diagnostic tools, and robotic machines; and we all live longer.
No doubt this process is speeding up exponentially, as my friend Ray Kurzweil and other scientists say. And as this process accelerates, we need to rethink what kind of future human beings we are evolving into. We are now paying a huge price for these advances environmentally as a society as well as individually in our own physical, emotional, and spiritual existence. Obesity is at a record high. More people are using anxiety pills. Religious fanaticism is spreading like brush fire. It seems to me there is social disengagement and a disconnection from nature, which leads us to forget the most important aspect of who we truly are. Humans, like all animals, learn about the world through—and are entirely dependent on—their ability to employ their heightened senses for their survival: the ability to smell whether food is good or rotten; the coming rain; smoke from fire; and the subtleties in the fragrances of f lowers. Touching, feeling, seeing, telepathically communicating over long distances, and energetically connecting to the wisdom and knowledge of spirits and our ancestors are all part of our human birthright.
This process of digitally shutting down the senses can be illustrated by this example. As a young graphic designer I still witnessed the use of hot type presses, where each character was set individually by pouring molten metal into a tiny mold and once cold it was hand assembled into a word, a sentence, and a story. The press took a group of three people to operate. Today we only have to type on a virtual keyboard and watch it appear on a flat screen. To create a brochure, we used to personally meet with the client, come up with a concept, draw a sketch in pencil, use water colors, colored paper, or markers (I still love that smell) to fill it in, and measure and draw the brochure’s size on a board with three different color pens. Once the copywriter’s copy was approved, we sent it to a typesetter. Getting back the galleys, we rolled it into a wax machine (which produced a great smell and texture) at a particular temperature. We then glued everything together on a white board, covered it with transparent paper for protection, and sent it by messenger for the client’s approval. Only then did it go to the printer, who then did color separations, prepared plates, etc. Today one person, using only his or her eyesight, with a click of a mouse chooses from prepared color palettes, template sizes, stock photography, and illustrations and can complete this entire process in less than a day on a flat computer screen in a virtual reality without leaving his or her chair. The tactile, physical, sensory, communicative, and team elements of the old process are gone.
Modern technology has certainly made our lives much easier and more convenient, but at the same time it has also separated us from nature. And in the process it has isolated and detached us from our own true human nature. This has bred in us a fear of nature and the unseen worlds that we cannot control. As technology progresses we are learning to shut down our own senses. Instead we rely on smartphone apps. We use these apps for everything from weather forecasting and GPS navigation to finding out about star constellations and taking our pulses. We have learned not trust our eyes anymore because we have an app for face recognition. We do not even have to trust our memory because everything’s stored on the Internet and it’s so easy to use Google. Consequently, there is a universal memory loss; I no longer need to calculate numbers or remember phone numbers and addresses as I used to because all this information is stored in my smartphone.
Who needs to learn a new language when you can have an app that translates simultaneously? The danger is that we lose trust in our senses and ourselves. To diagnose our bodies we put our trust in the medical system. To know the truth about the world we trust what our politicians and the corporate media tell us. To know how to dress we trust the fashion gurus. We give our religious leaders the monopoly on the connection to spirit. We are attempting to make logical sense of and, by extension, control nature, not live in harmony with it. More and more people are plugged into technology 24/7. Unplugging and digital detox have now become buzzwords among the high number of gadget-users. People yearn for a time out—a break from the constant slavery of being connected—in order to gain a new perspective on life. There are even Internet rehab centers and technology-free vacations and retreats popping up to help us cope with “reality”! At Shaman Portal (www.shamanportal.org), the website I created as a hub for the global shamanic community, statistics show that three quarters of the visitors to the site come from the technologically advanced societies of the United States and Europe.
This sensory shutdown is real. You can tell by looking at the millions of eyes that are constantly glued to the two-dimensional screens of our smartphones, tablets, computers, and TVs. I am concerned human beings are becoming handicapped, dependent, and sometimes purely apathetic as we trade in our birthright sensual gifts and abilities for the gifts of technology. I believe we are in danger of losing our place as a species. Learning to trust and allow all your senses to come alive again can make you fully engage in life around you. The practice of shamanism helps to reestablish the “seeing” (our sixth sense or intuition), which is an important part of our ability to survive. Seeing is not linear or logical. It communicates to us in symbols, through poetry and idioms, and in body language, colors, shapes, smells, and bodily sensations.
How It All Started
"You heal with your heart’s intention. No matter what you know or how big a toolbox you’ve got."
Ipupiara
It’s hard to pinpoint an exact moment or a specific time. It could have begun at the time I emerged from my mother’s womb, which I will describe soon, but it was not until a sunny morning in 1995 that a dark green hardcover book with a strange, colorful illustration and strange name would start me on a fast, bizarre, and fascinating path. In this book I discovered a new world of earthly and spiritual belief systems and ancient healing practices, and was confronted with divination capabilities I never suspected I had. And maybe most fascinating of all, it was the beginning of my journey, in which I encountered, learned from, and worked with powerful, mysterious, colorful, and strange men and women—the shamans by many names and from many different cultures who mentored me and whom I grew to love. I will tell you more about this soon.
A Chance Encounter at a Local Bookstore
Looking back with the benefit of hindsight, it all looks so reasonable and predictable, as if it was planned by an unseen guiding hand. But in the summer of 1995 it wasn’t so clear to me—maybe to the Great Creator, but certainly not to me. I was in the middle of a midlife crisis, struggling to make sense of the past and lost in a thick fog of trying to figure out the future. I had already achieved many of my life goals—I had a beautiful family, had created a reasonable art career, and had made a successful life in the capital of the world, New York City. I had relative professional success, having received many design and advertising awards. But then a big, fat question started to haunt me: What next? Where is the next challenge? What is the reason to go forward? An old fear raised its head: When I was eighteen years old, my biggest fear was that I would live a boring life without meaning. I felt I was starting to slip into the dark cloud of depression. But a series of events changed everything for me.
That summer, Leighton Chong, my buddy from the Urban Gorillas, a men’s support group I was part of, suggested I join him for a men’s retreat at Kalani Retreat Center on the Big Island of Hawaii. Miraculously, the money I needed to attend manifested, as if sent by an angel. An hour before the car was to pick me up to take me to the airport I realized I didn’t have a decent book to read on the long, ten hour flight from New York. So I rushed a few blocks away, to a Barnes & Noble, and “by chance” picked up a book from the new releases shelf, Spiritwalker: Messages from the Future, by Hank Wesselman. It seemed like the right mix of Hawaiian culture, mystery, spirituality, and adventure—just the stuff I enjoy reading on a long plane ride.
As the plane took off I pulled out the new book and started reading. I was completely overtaken by the author’s intriguing visionary autobiographical story and could not rest until I finished reading it. Many times while reading Hank’s story I could not help but find myself identifying with his insights and messages. I had to stop from time to time and take a big breath, as I felt surprised and even grateful that someone else had the kind of thoughts, experiences, and observations that I had had throughout my life. It gave me hope; maybe after all I’m not that alone and not all that weird . . .
Somewhere close to the end of the book Mr. Wesselman mentioned his participation in a shamanic workshop facilitated by a man named Michael Harner. I didn’t pay much attention to it, as even the word shaman wasn’t yet familiar to me. But that was going to change soon.
A few months later, while leafing through an upcoming events catalog for the New York Open Center, I came across a basic shamanic weekend workshop to be given by Michael Harner. Well, that was a “coincidence” I could not pass up, so I decided to join some two hundred other shamanic virgins.
That weekend we all gathered in a large school gymnasium. It was a large and chatty crowd. Michael Harner, white-haired and bearded and wearing heavy glasses, was armed with his drum and sat at the far end of the room. With a tinge of humor as well as seriousness he introduced us to the world of core shamanism, which he had founded based on his own experiences in the 1960s. He taught us how to journey to retrieve our own power animals and teachers in the upper, middle, and lower worlds. We also journeyed to somebody else’s body and spirit to heal it. In our last journey we paired off to retrieve knowledge and healing for each other. I still remember vividly the vision and feelings I had when I journeyed for Pat, who happened to be sitting right next to me. I lay down next to her, touching her lightly. I covered my eyes and journeyed down my portal, a Hawaiian lava tunnel, to the lower world.
Soon, a giant anaconda appeared in front of me. His big, muscular body was maneuvering forcefully with twists and turns through the muddy Amazonian riverbank, which was covered by dry, tall reeds. Sensing a great danger in the air, I looked all around me. In the far distance, opposite the anaconda on the muddy ground, was a bird’s nest made of dry weeds. In the center of it lay three large white eggs. The bird was nowhere to be seen. I turned my attention back to the anaconda, which continued on his way in the direction of the nest. It was obvious to me that it was trying to devour or destroy the eggs. But it was not to be. I could not see the end of it. Michael changed the drumming rhythm, signaling us to come back.
As we sat across from each other to share our journeys, I apologized, as I was sure my “vision” had no bearing. But after listening to my story, Pat reassured me: “I just returned from an amazing trip to the Amazonian jungle of Ecuador, where I visited different shamans.
This anaconda lives in that area and the river you described was similar to what I recall. I am currently working on three different projects; maybe the three eggs symbolize them. The anaconda, I believe, signifies a man I know whom I believe is like a snake, endangering and trying to destroy my projects.” That was impressive, I thought. She thanked me then for confirming her suspicions about that man.
This vision and those shared by the other participants at that workshop impressed me greatly. It felt like a window had just opened enabling me to “see” into other realities. I wanted more—maybe to join a weekly drumming circle to continue this work. Unfortunately, my initial few attempts to form such a group were not successful. Two years later, I returned from my first trip to Ecuador, led by John Perkins and Joyce Ferranti of the Dream Change Coalition—a similar trip to one Pat had taken a few years back. Following this I took a seven-week workshop, “Practicing Shamanism,” at the New York Open Center, with Nan Moss and David Corbin from the Foundation for Shamanic Studies. These experiences led me to help co-found the New York Shamanic Circle, which I’m still a proud member of.
I met John Perkins for the first time at his New York Open Center workshop. His honest enthusiasm, firsthand knowledge of the indigenous Shuar and Quechua cultures and shamanic practices in Ecuador, and his powerful environmental message completely resonated for me. I just knew I had to go to Ecuador. Don’t ask me why; it was a pure gut feeling. Moreover, I could not fully explain this decision to my family. I just had to go. So, I enlisted my two great friends, Samuel and Ariel, to join me. It proved to be a very good decision, as we became the trip’s Three Musketeers, looking for fun and adventure everywhere we went, some of which I describe later in this book. But this threesome also provided the essential support system we each needed as we challenged ourselves during this life-altering trip.
That March of 1997 I first met the shamans I subsequently worked with, most importantly Don Jos. Joaquin Pi.eda, a fifth-generation yachak (a shaman or medicine man) from the village of San Juan de Ilum.n near Otavalo, who became my teacher. Through many healing ceremonies, workshops, and personal conversations, mostly translated by his daughter Soraya (as my Spanish is very, very limited), who also studied with him, he passed down some of his ancient family healing traditions to me. In 2000, without announcing it, with his loyal wife and my family looking on, he initiated me at nightfall and crowned me into the circle of twenty-four male yachaks at a sacred Magdalena spring, which streams into Lago San Pablo on the slope of the formidable volcanic Imbabura Mountain, and later in his modest healing room in Otavalo. It was an unexpected event, not usually given to gringos like me. Of course, the questions and doubts popped up in my head: “Why me? What does he see in me that I don’t recognize?” I have always been attracted to spiritual phenomena. I had had a few spontaneous experiences too, such as an out-of-body experience, or knowing who was calling before the phone rang. As a teenager, walking in the old city of Jerusalem, I had detailed visions of bloody wars as I touched the large ancient stonewalls, and got a horrible splitting headache. Years later as I arrived in Florence, I knew how to walk to my hotel as if I had lived there before. As a visual artist there have been times when I had spontaneous visions of new paintings to be painted.
Sometime in the early 1980s I had my first encounter with what shamans call “seeing.” It happened while taking a palmistry course with Richard Unger, who later become a good friend, and with whom I later co-led life-purpose workshops in the United States and Europe. As part of my developing clairvoyance we had to touch a specific area in our client’s palm and tell the person what we saw in their childhood. The images I saw were vivid and strong. They were also very accurate and detailed, bringing up an incident of my client’s abuse as a child, which was very disturbing to both of us. This newfound ability to see profoundly scared me. I suppose I wasn’t ready for it yet and didn’t know how to protect myself. I remember distinctly how my face turned white, the blood drained out of me, and I was left weak and lethargic. This is known as energy leakage. I decided not to continue with these studies, although I did use this gift on a few occasions with similar success. Slowly, with practice, I learned how to sustain my energy. With the help of Don Jose, the floodgate of visions and other experiences opened. But what should I do with it?
Early Experiences
In hindsight, my upbringing turned out to be the perfect introduction to the basic principles of shamanism: deep connection to nature, close encounters with death, boundless imagination, a sense of history, and the importance of community and storytelling.
I was born in Kibbutz Beit Alpha on the eastern border of the Yezrael Valley, not very far from the Sea of Galilee, in Israel. The kibbutz had been founded on the slopes of the Mount Gilboa range, to avoid the malaria-bearing mosquitos and wild boars that roamed freely in the nearby vast swamps that had welcomed the first settlers. King David (circa 1010 BCE), as it was written in the Bible, deep in grief, had cursed Mount Gilboa “Ye mountains of Gilboa, let there be no dew, neither let there be rain upon you, nor fields of offerings: for there the shield of the mighty is vilely cast away, the shield of Saul, as though he had not been anointed with oil . . .” (Samuel II , 1:21) as he heard of the death of King Saul and his son Jonathan, whom he loved, in a battle with the Philistines.
Ours was the first kibbutz—a collective farm—of the Zionist Hashomer Hatzair movement, a fact we wore around our necks in pride, like Mayflower descendants. Established in 1922 by young and enthusiastic Jewish Russian and Polish immigrants, the first kibbutzniks dreamed of returning to the biblical Land of Milk and Honey, returning to work our forefather’s soil and build a just society of “a new human model,” where we is more important than I, where the well-being of the community is more important than that of any single individual.
The founders were proud atheists—they did not believe in spirituality or religion per se, except for the beliefs of Marx and Lenin, and they held Stalin as their sun. Jewish holidays were celebrated as festivals of nature and the changing of the seasons with very little reference to any religious meaning—most likely in the same shamanic ways the ancient Hebrews practiced. We did study the Bible, but as pure history, more like an anthropology book of our ancestors.
Many years later I was invited to lead a shamanic workshop in my old kibbutz for a special women’s day celebration. I asked the forty mothers and daughters who were participating to connect to the spirit of Mount Gilboa and bring a personal message for them. It was a fascinating realization to hear how each of the women experienced and personified the mountain, all very intimately. He was a powerful protector from the sun, the winds, and the Arabs on the other side. He was a gentle lover, bringing flowers and life. He was to be feared, with his blackness and wild animals. He was an ancient history teacher. An overbearing father. A mighty witness and observer of our lives. All the women had a very personal relationship with the mountain’s essence, and it impacted their everyday lives as deeply as it had mine. Could this also be why later in life I felt so at home and at ease in the Andes and with mountain people in general?
My first conscious memory was of the sound of birds. I was not even a year old, lying on my back in a white metal crib that stood on a lawn by the nursery house. Transparent cheesecloth covered my crib to protect me from the unforgiving sun and the buzzing flies. I remember waking up all alone. There was no other crib or human being around me. “It was your daily sunbath, you needed vitamin D, you were sick,” my mother told me many years later. Terrified, not knowing if anyone would ever come for me, I listened to the repetitive mourning doves cooing on the tall Dalbergia tree (Indian rosewood) nearby: Greu, greu, greu, greu, greu. Even now, whenever I hear this mesmerizing cooing sound, it takes me back to those upsetting moments of loneliness and abandonment.
As children of the 50s we grew up intimate with nature. We walked barefoot most of the time. We planted trees on the dry, yellow mountain in an attempt to transform that old biblical curse. Coyotes howled the nights away, deer grazed in the topmost hidden valley of the mountain, and under every stone you could find poisonous yellow and black scorpions, while snakes abounded. We pulled worms out of the heavy, wet, fertile soil. We watched brown fur nutrias swimming in the fishponds, collected porcupine needles, and watched black bats flying and hedgehogs running in a hurry around our houses at night. Lizards crawling on the window screens were a common sight. We took long hikes and trips into the valley, desert, and mountains. We followed excitedly the many kinds of migrating and local nesting birds, turtles, and winter snails leaving their long gooey trail after them. We knew by name every tree, shrub, plant, and flower growing in the fields around us and on the mountain. We danced in excitement as the first raindrops fell from the sky on the summer’s dry soil. We’d be terrified during the dark nights that were fueled by a barrage of piercing lightning and exploding thunder. We could hear the heavy rain pulling rocks and mud through the narrow creek, which we named Wadi Cacao, for the brown, muddy water that ran through it, creating a powerful winter waterfall on a rock formation we called King Solomon’s Throne, just beyond our children’s house, where we lived separately from our parents, or any adults. We picked different kinds of wild mushrooms and colorful assortments of wildflowers after the rains. We raised chickens, peacocks, goats, rabbits, sheep, and cows. We watched them giving birth, watched them grow up, and then watched them be slaughtered or die naturally.
As we grew older we were assigned to daily work in the vegetable garden and fields, harvesting fresh olives, grapes, grapefruits, and carobs. I spent time helping my father as he worked at the Gan Bait, the first organic vegetable garden in the country, with another inventive man, where they developed a new breed of vegetables more suitable for our land, as well as ways to fight insects without the use of chemicals.
There were few radios and no televisions, record players, or computers to sedate us. We had one public phone to connect us to the outside world. We pretty much played in our natural habitat with sticks, rocks, and our imagination. And imagination we had aplenty: the storage room by the basketball field turned into a witch’s house. The lone tree on the mountaintop became my guardian. We played thieves and robbers and all kinds of inventive outdoor games. As teenagers we joined the Youth Movement. We often spent time sitting in circles, sometimes around a bonfire, much like a shamanic talking circle, and learned to share our thoughts, listen to others, and discuss challenges.
Growing up in the small, tight-knit, isolated community of the few hundred people in my kibbutz was a perfect laboratory to learn about the fragility of human nature. But it certainly had its challenges. For me, growing up on that land was like living in two parallel realities, the present and that of our ancients, who had left their marks and footsteps there. I believe it instilled in me a deep sense of a tribal continuum. This was confirmed literally when not too far behind our children’s house members of our kibbutz, while laying water pipes, discovered an ancient synagogue buried under a pile of land, and the remains of a thriving school from a Jewish settlement from the sixth century CE. Its elaborate mosaic floor with Jewish symbols became well-known worldwide; it depicted the zodiac of the twelve Hebrew months, and inscribed in the mosaic floor were the synagogue’s protector symbols of the lion, the dove, and the buffalo. At the onset of the winter rains we used to collect Roman coins washed down from the mountain. Old pottery shards and flint arrows of all sizes were all around us, and many of us had an impressive collection of them. We sat in the same caves the ancients used, along the cliff overlooking the valley below, and climbed down ancient grain silos carved deep into the soft chalk rocks. We dipped in the cold spring that bares the name of Gideon, the mighty biblical warrior. Even the names of all sixteen of my class members were biblical names. I truly felt like a son returning to live on his unknown father’s ancient land.
My parents raised me to denounce any reference to the Jewish religion, even though my grandmother Rashka, who lived with us, prayed devotedly several times a day, as was expected of her, having come from a rabbinical family. I recently learned through a newly found old article about my great-grandfather Mordechai Zundel Margolis (my mother’s grandfather) that he was a well-known Kabalistic rabbi and healer in Kolno, Poland, who devoted his life to the eternal fight between the forces of good and evil in the universe. Since starting my own work as a shamanic healer I became immersed in this aspect as well, without knowing that fact about him.
I was a surprise child, the youngest of four siblings. As a young boy I was skinny, “like a pencil,” or as my caretaker would say, “You are blue and transparent.” I was highly sensitive and sick most of the time, as my immune system had been compromised by sickness early on. “If it wasn’t for your mother you would not be here with us,” my father told me one night while holding my hand before he passed on. “You had typhus in the stomach when you were just a few months old. She sat by your side around the clock, feeding you with a dropper, washing you with icy towels to cool your boiling temperature. Everyone gave up on you, but she fought against all odds to save you.” Funny—I looked up the word typhus; it derives from the Greek word for “smoke” or “stupor,”because of the hallucinations that it induces in the sick person’s mind.
At the age of four I had another meeting with death. While learning to swim in the little kidney-shaped children’s pool, I was tiptoeing to the deepest part of the pool when I lost my footing and was sucked into the drain. With all my tiny power I flapped my arms and hit the bottom. It was my father who jumped over the pool fence and into the water with his shoes and clothes on to rescue me. I still remember that moment vividly, in horror, shame, and gratitude.
And as if that wasn’t enough, I had a third encounter with death. This time it was on a beautiful winter day, right after a night of a heavrain. Climbing up the mountain with my sister, we picked wild flowers to bring home to our mom. On our way up we picked lots of red anemone. But then we discovered a lone white daffodil with a golden crown in its center standing in the middle of a huge, wet, steep rock. I decided we must have it too. Against my older sister’s objections, I took a few sidesteps in my slippery rubber boots, as my father had taught me, and lost my footing. Next thing I knew, I was rolling fast down the smooth, slanted rock at a huge speed. Short of breath and in a panic, I knew I was going to die, when luckily a ledge almost at the very bottom caught my sweater. My poor sister, frightened out of her wits, ran all around that rock to collect me. To this day she can’t forget that terrifying moment.
From then on, death was a familiar entity to me and I was fascinated by it throughout my childhood. Somehow I believed I did not belong here; I wished to go “back home,” to the other side, as the old Amazonian Umbanda priestess Bibi once told me many years later.
Maybe it was why many years later I burst out with a long, uncontrollable sob of longing at the end of the Mayan initiation bodywork session held by my shaman friend Antonio Oxteik, as I saw my soul group floating in a perpetual cosmic dance, moving eternally in space. I instinctively knew that I was seeing my real home.
Every night at the children’s house before bedtime our caretaker who put us to sleep gathered us in one room to read us fables and stories. I loved hearing those stories as they allowed me to enter into the other worlds of magic, and I had a strong need to tell my own stories and share my own ideas too. But the woman who was my daily caretaker did not have the patience and time to listen to everything I had to say. “You are too chatty; you talk nonstop and too much,” she used to complain and tried to brush me off. One day when she had had enough she took me aside, bent down, looked at me sternly, and said, “Itzhak, God gave each of us a limited amount of words to use in our lives. If you use them all up, you will die.” I knew it was not true, but nevertheless I took what she said to heart. In shamanic language, as I later came to understand, that was a curse. After that I learned to control myself, fearing I would waste my words. I lived in that fear, so whenever I talked in front of groups my stomach churned, my heart palpitated, and I even used to pee in my pants. I came to convince myself that I had nothing worth saying, that what I thought wouldn’t matter to anyone. In his hand analysis reading many years later, Richard Unger shared with me, as he deciphered my fingerprint codes, that my life purpose is to be “a man with a message who needs a large stage to express himself.” To hear this said with such clarity was a turning point for me, one that literally set me free from that curse and my self-imposed restrictions. As I write my personal stories I realize that it is an act of profound personal healing for me. I have a deep-rooted fear of putting down on paper my innermost thoughts, feelings, and experiences, a fear that my class members, family, or the entire kibbutz will discover the true me. We grew up without even minimal privacy among hundreds of watchful eyes, with nowhere to hide. We had no personal rooms, locked drawers, or cabinets in which to keep a diary, secrets, or our personal belongings. We had no choice but to conform to the expectation of our society, or wear an invisible shield around us for fear of being exposed and ridiculed.
Cynical and Suspicious
I learned the hard way to be cynical and a doubter. I grew up being aware that my peers considered me extremely gullible. It seemed like every day was April Fool’s Day. They laughed at me without any hesitation when I fell for their fabricated stories. I just could not understand why anyone would make things up just to trick me and make me feel like a fool, so I always fell into their trap. One incident from my childhood is deeply etched in my memory.
One afternoon when I was in the second or third grade, I came to visit my parents’ house from the children’s house, as it was common that the children lived separately from the adults. My sister took me aside. “Itzhak I have a big secret, do you swear not to tell anyone?” she whispered, putting her two hands around my ears. “I promise,” I said, feeling so grownup and important. “This chewing gum you chew is made from rubber mixed with camel dung.” I was shocked. “Camel dung?” I asked in disbelief. “Do you want to see?” She pulled out a pack and showed me the illustration on the yellow wrapping. Sure enough, it had a red camel picture in the center. She went on reading me the ingredients written on the back in English. Because she was already taking English classes I trusted her. A couple of months later I saw my beloved, most trusted sister pulling a stick of gum out of the same package and chewing on it. I was utterly confused and upset. She had tricked me too. I then made a conscious decision to shed my innocence, thinking No one will ever fool me again. I need to ask for proof. I didn’t want to be hurt again and became suspicious and skeptical no matter what (in the shamanic language this is describe as soul loss). I guess we think of this as “mature” or “grownup.” Funny—when I told my sister this story, not so long ago, she didn’t remember it at all.
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I have written the stories in this book as factually as possible, knowing full well that some of you might be as skeptical as I was, and rightly so. That is why it’s been so hard for me to come to terms with my own shamanic experiences for the longest time. As I struggled to accept my visions I had many unanswered questions. Why and how do these images appear in my mind? Where are they stored? Who is volunteering all this information? Who is talking to spirits, angels, and teachers—my subconscious or me? How can we actually “see” other people’s thoughts? From what materials are thoughts made of? Are all those spirits or images following us in our daily lives? Are they guiding us? Which of these alternative worlds is the “real” one—the world of dreams and visions, or this world we think we know so well? How does the body’s energy field translate into images in our mind? Do they all exist simultaneously? Can we communicate with the dead? Where do we go after we pass over?
With so many unanswered questions, I turned to my friend, a prominent Israeli brain research scientist. I wanted him to scan my brain to understand where all these new-found images come from and why now. He listened patiently to some of these out-of-this-world stories, which you will be reading soon, and dismissed them. “There is no proof,” he said with the glee of a know-it-all expert in his eyes, and summed it up as follows: “You need to repeat these exact experiences three times so the outcome will be the same each time, otherwise it is just coincidence.” I challenged him to join my New York Shamanic Circle meeting, which made an exception and agreed to allow him in. At the end of the evening in which we journeyed to find our spirit animal, I had a convert.
“I just can’t believe I met this lion; it was so real. I was afraid I would meet a cockroach, the most repulsive animal for me,” he said. “Believe me, it was not my choice at all. It was surely a lion, and how did he know the answer to my question?” The scientist was bubbling with excitement. Some time later he confided to me that he subsequently incorporated this experience in his work.
A few years later over a sushi dinner at a local Greenwich Village restaurant as we reminisced about that evening’s experience, my friend said, “I believe, as a person who intensively studied how our eyes and brain see light and process that information, that humans are unable to conceptualize the world as it really is. Each animal species sees the world differently according to its eyesight, light receptors, and brain processing capacity. We know that a frog with its limited vision sees the world foggier and with shorter range than an owl, gecko, or a bee. Or, for example, mantis shrimp have sixteen color receptors compared to humans who have only three. Same thing goes for our other senses; we have a limited range of experiencing nature, and that is why we can’t fully comprehend it. And even if we do understand the mechanics of it, I believe that the act of seeing is still a mystery. As scientists we have to accept it.”
“There is also the shamanic teaching that says the world is as we dream it, not as we see it,” I interrupted him. “Many spiritual teachings say that that is the Great Mystery or The Unknown, what we may call God, which has no shape, form, or name.” “That seems to be true, and we may have to operate within this as we do our research,” he said as he took a short breath and added, “Most serious scientists are afraid to go public with this understanding for fear of being outcast from the conservative scientific community.” I was surprised to hear this coming from his mouth. “Why don’t you say it?” I asked him.
“Oh, leave me alone, I’m not going to ruin my career.” He waved his hands impatiently to dismiss me. I went looking for what the father of modern science, Albert Einstein, had said about that question in The Merging of Spirit and Science: “The most beautiful and most profound experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the sower of all true science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness.” He also said, “I see a pattern, but my imagination cannot picture the maker of that pattern. I see a clock, but I cannot envision the clockmaker. The human mind is unable to conceive of the four dimensions, so how can it conceive of a God, before whom a thousand years and a thousand dimensions are as one?”
I truly believe, as do many of the shamans I have had the great privilege of working with, that this capacity to bring knowledge and healing from alternative realities and parallel dimensions is a gift that all we humans share and, oddly enough, it is what makes us good survivors on this planet. Throughout the many workshops in which I have participated, taught, and organized, I have seen so-called ordinary people prove it time and time again. All you have to do is open a portal, trust your intuition, trust the spirits to guide you, and of course, practice.
From Skeptic to Believer
Don Jose stopped on his heels in the middle of a dark busy avenue of Corona, Queens. He turned to me, paused, and looked up at me with his fierce black eyes, “Did you start doing healing?” he asked. Perplexed, I watched this short, powerful shaman whom I admired, dressed in a blue llama-wool poncho, white cotton pants, white fabric sandals, and a gray felt fedora, in total disbelief. I pretended to not understand him.
“So, did you?” he prodded me. “Oh no, I didn’t, was I supposed to?” I finally said and went on anxiously protesting, “I’m not ready. How can I? I know nothing about it. I’m not even sure that this is what I want to do with my life.” “You are ready,” he declared flatly and with authority. “Vamos, let’s go eat now,” he said as he opened the door to a Chinese restaurant.
This was unexpected. My thoughts were racing. What does he mean? Do I have to change my life? I was confused and also frightened by the weight of the enormous responsibility he put on my shoulders. Immediately my old self-doubts cropped up like monsters looming out of their cage. Is he tricking me? What does he want from me or see in me? How can he be so sure I have what it takes to do what he does? Besides, I am a declared skeptic, cynic and atheist. I’m just an ordinary middle- aged man who was brought up as a communist Jew.
Oh my God, what did I get myself into? Do I have to? Why me? Why now? Before we start on this fascinating journey I must confess to you that for the longest time I did not allow myself to believe in the mounting evidence of the existence of unseen worlds, nor did I take the time to learn about them. But despite my doubts I was slowly forced to admit their existence and relevance; I found that I just did not have any other choice. At this point I no longer tried to intellectualize or understand these things in a rational way, as the shamanic experience is truly about learning to surrender to the magical and join in the workings of life’s mysterious forces. I’m now convinced that we human beings are truly living in multidimensional realities and that as humans we have the ability to perceive knowledge, images, and information otherwise hidden from our ordinary senses by shifting from the earthly plane into a shamanic state of higher vibrational consciousness. I believe that this is the key to humans’ survival for hundreds of thousands of years. It is not trickery or self-delusion as many more scientific and logical people might say, as we’ll see later.
Like me and perhaps you, there are millions of people who are now awakening every day, like sprouts after a long rain, to the call to embrace this age-old knowledge. Many indigenous societies have continuously lived with this wise worldview from the very beginning of time. We, in the technological, so-called First World, have forgotten it and in many ways have learned to despise it and label it as backward or primitive, rejecting it outright without even examining it. As the ancient Maya and Inca prophecies point out, since 1993 we entered into a new Pachacuti, a time of realignment and correction of the human journey and consciousness. It is time to be awakened and accept our true nature, by living in equilibrium and harmony between the two opposing and complementary forces of feminine and masculine that exist within each of us. It is a time to take the long overdue journey from our minds to meet our hearts. Only then, when the heart and the mind live in harmony, we can resolve war, poverty, and environmental destruction and ensure future generations’ survival on this miraculous planet.
I must confess that like many contemporary males I’m truly excited to play with the latest technologies and gadgets, read about new scientific discoveries, and hear about fresh innovations in every field, and I am sure I passed this enthusiasm to my kids. The future fascinates me, ignites my imagination, and sets free my fantasies. Growing up, I admired my dad’s constant search for new ways to improve machines to achieve better production and develop processes to make life’s tasks more efficient and convenient. I believe inventiveness and curiosity is ingrained in our DNA , as it is essential to our successful survival as a species on Earth. We have truly achieved a lot in the past few hundred years. We are now able to communicate in an instant all across the planet. Distances have become shorter; we travel into space; we predict the weather a year in advance; our homes are becoming digitized and weather insulated; we harvest solar, wind, and water energies; we engineer food to have long shelf lives; we have a DNA map of our bodies, better medical diagnostic tools, and robotic machines; and we all live longer.
No doubt this process is speeding up exponentially, as my friend Ray Kurzweil and other scientists say. And as this process accelerates, we need to rethink what kind of future human beings we are evolving into. We are now paying a huge price for these advances environmentally as a society as well as individually in our own physical, emotional, and spiritual existence. Obesity is at a record high. More people are using anxiety pills. Religious fanaticism is spreading like brush fire. It seems to me there is social disengagement and a disconnection from nature, which leads us to forget the most important aspect of who we truly are. Humans, like all animals, learn about the world through—and are entirely dependent on—their ability to employ their heightened senses for their survival: the ability to smell whether food is good or rotten; the coming rain; smoke from fire; and the subtleties in the fragrances of f lowers. Touching, feeling, seeing, telepathically communicating over long distances, and energetically connecting to the wisdom and knowledge of spirits and our ancestors are all part of our human birthright.
This process of digitally shutting down the senses can be illustrated by this example. As a young graphic designer I still witnessed the use of hot type presses, where each character was set individually by pouring molten metal into a tiny mold and once cold it was hand assembled into a word, a sentence, and a story. The press took a group of three people to operate. Today we only have to type on a virtual keyboard and watch it appear on a flat screen. To create a brochure, we used to personally meet with the client, come up with a concept, draw a sketch in pencil, use water colors, colored paper, or markers (I still love that smell) to fill it in, and measure and draw the brochure’s size on a board with three different color pens. Once the copywriter’s copy was approved, we sent it to a typesetter. Getting back the galleys, we rolled it into a wax machine (which produced a great smell and texture) at a particular temperature. We then glued everything together on a white board, covered it with transparent paper for protection, and sent it by messenger for the client’s approval. Only then did it go to the printer, who then did color separations, prepared plates, etc. Today one person, using only his or her eyesight, with a click of a mouse chooses from prepared color palettes, template sizes, stock photography, and illustrations and can complete this entire process in less than a day on a flat computer screen in a virtual reality without leaving his or her chair. The tactile, physical, sensory, communicative, and team elements of the old process are gone.
Modern technology has certainly made our lives much easier and more convenient, but at the same time it has also separated us from nature. And in the process it has isolated and detached us from our own true human nature. This has bred in us a fear of nature and the unseen worlds that we cannot control. As technology progresses we are learning to shut down our own senses. Instead we rely on smartphone apps. We use these apps for everything from weather forecasting and GPS navigation to finding out about star constellations and taking our pulses. We have learned not trust our eyes anymore because we have an app for face recognition. We do not even have to trust our memory because everything’s stored on the Internet and it’s so easy to use Google. Consequently, there is a universal memory loss; I no longer need to calculate numbers or remember phone numbers and addresses as I used to because all this information is stored in my smartphone.
Who needs to learn a new language when you can have an app that translates simultaneously? The danger is that we lose trust in our senses and ourselves. To diagnose our bodies we put our trust in the medical system. To know the truth about the world we trust what our politicians and the corporate media tell us. To know how to dress we trust the fashion gurus. We give our religious leaders the monopoly on the connection to spirit. We are attempting to make logical sense of and, by extension, control nature, not live in harmony with it. More and more people are plugged into technology 24/7. Unplugging and digital detox have now become buzzwords among the high number of gadget-users. People yearn for a time out—a break from the constant slavery of being connected—in order to gain a new perspective on life. There are even Internet rehab centers and technology-free vacations and retreats popping up to help us cope with “reality”! At Shaman Portal (www.shamanportal.org), the website I created as a hub for the global shamanic community, statistics show that three quarters of the visitors to the site come from the technologically advanced societies of the United States and Europe.
This sensory shutdown is real. You can tell by looking at the millions of eyes that are constantly glued to the two-dimensional screens of our smartphones, tablets, computers, and TVs. I am concerned human beings are becoming handicapped, dependent, and sometimes purely apathetic as we trade in our birthright sensual gifts and abilities for the gifts of technology. I believe we are in danger of losing our place as a species. Learning to trust and allow all your senses to come alive again can make you fully engage in life around you. The practice of shamanism helps to reestablish the “seeing” (our sixth sense or intuition), which is an important part of our ability to survive. Seeing is not linear or logical. It communicates to us in symbols, through poetry and idioms, and in body language, colors, shapes, smells, and bodily sensations.
How It All Started
"You heal with your heart’s intention. No matter what you know or how big a toolbox you’ve got."
Ipupiara
It’s hard to pinpoint an exact moment or a specific time. It could have begun at the time I emerged from my mother’s womb, which I will describe soon, but it was not until a sunny morning in 1995 that a dark green hardcover book with a strange, colorful illustration and strange name would start me on a fast, bizarre, and fascinating path. In this book I discovered a new world of earthly and spiritual belief systems and ancient healing practices, and was confronted with divination capabilities I never suspected I had. And maybe most fascinating of all, it was the beginning of my journey, in which I encountered, learned from, and worked with powerful, mysterious, colorful, and strange men and women—the shamans by many names and from many different cultures who mentored me and whom I grew to love. I will tell you more about this soon.
A Chance Encounter at a Local Bookstore
Looking back with the benefit of hindsight, it all looks so reasonable and predictable, as if it was planned by an unseen guiding hand. But in the summer of 1995 it wasn’t so clear to me—maybe to the Great Creator, but certainly not to me. I was in the middle of a midlife crisis, struggling to make sense of the past and lost in a thick fog of trying to figure out the future. I had already achieved many of my life goals—I had a beautiful family, had created a reasonable art career, and had made a successful life in the capital of the world, New York City. I had relative professional success, having received many design and advertising awards. But then a big, fat question started to haunt me: What next? Where is the next challenge? What is the reason to go forward? An old fear raised its head: When I was eighteen years old, my biggest fear was that I would live a boring life without meaning. I felt I was starting to slip into the dark cloud of depression. But a series of events changed everything for me.
That summer, Leighton Chong, my buddy from the Urban Gorillas, a men’s support group I was part of, suggested I join him for a men’s retreat at Kalani Retreat Center on the Big Island of Hawaii. Miraculously, the money I needed to attend manifested, as if sent by an angel. An hour before the car was to pick me up to take me to the airport I realized I didn’t have a decent book to read on the long, ten hour flight from New York. So I rushed a few blocks away, to a Barnes & Noble, and “by chance” picked up a book from the new releases shelf, Spiritwalker: Messages from the Future, by Hank Wesselman. It seemed like the right mix of Hawaiian culture, mystery, spirituality, and adventure—just the stuff I enjoy reading on a long plane ride.
As the plane took off I pulled out the new book and started reading. I was completely overtaken by the author’s intriguing visionary autobiographical story and could not rest until I finished reading it. Many times while reading Hank’s story I could not help but find myself identifying with his insights and messages. I had to stop from time to time and take a big breath, as I felt surprised and even grateful that someone else had the kind of thoughts, experiences, and observations that I had had throughout my life. It gave me hope; maybe after all I’m not that alone and not all that weird . . .
Somewhere close to the end of the book Mr. Wesselman mentioned his participation in a shamanic workshop facilitated by a man named Michael Harner. I didn’t pay much attention to it, as even the word shaman wasn’t yet familiar to me. But that was going to change soon.
A few months later, while leafing through an upcoming events catalog for the New York Open Center, I came across a basic shamanic weekend workshop to be given by Michael Harner. Well, that was a “coincidence” I could not pass up, so I decided to join some two hundred other shamanic virgins.
That weekend we all gathered in a large school gymnasium. It was a large and chatty crowd. Michael Harner, white-haired and bearded and wearing heavy glasses, was armed with his drum and sat at the far end of the room. With a tinge of humor as well as seriousness he introduced us to the world of core shamanism, which he had founded based on his own experiences in the 1960s. He taught us how to journey to retrieve our own power animals and teachers in the upper, middle, and lower worlds. We also journeyed to somebody else’s body and spirit to heal it. In our last journey we paired off to retrieve knowledge and healing for each other. I still remember vividly the vision and feelings I had when I journeyed for Pat, who happened to be sitting right next to me. I lay down next to her, touching her lightly. I covered my eyes and journeyed down my portal, a Hawaiian lava tunnel, to the lower world.
Soon, a giant anaconda appeared in front of me. His big, muscular body was maneuvering forcefully with twists and turns through the muddy Amazonian riverbank, which was covered by dry, tall reeds. Sensing a great danger in the air, I looked all around me. In the far distance, opposite the anaconda on the muddy ground, was a bird’s nest made of dry weeds. In the center of it lay three large white eggs. The bird was nowhere to be seen. I turned my attention back to the anaconda, which continued on his way in the direction of the nest. It was obvious to me that it was trying to devour or destroy the eggs. But it was not to be. I could not see the end of it. Michael changed the drumming rhythm, signaling us to come back.
As we sat across from each other to share our journeys, I apologized, as I was sure my “vision” had no bearing. But after listening to my story, Pat reassured me: “I just returned from an amazing trip to the Amazonian jungle of Ecuador, where I visited different shamans.
This anaconda lives in that area and the river you described was similar to what I recall. I am currently working on three different projects; maybe the three eggs symbolize them. The anaconda, I believe, signifies a man I know whom I believe is like a snake, endangering and trying to destroy my projects.” That was impressive, I thought. She thanked me then for confirming her suspicions about that man.
This vision and those shared by the other participants at that workshop impressed me greatly. It felt like a window had just opened enabling me to “see” into other realities. I wanted more—maybe to join a weekly drumming circle to continue this work. Unfortunately, my initial few attempts to form such a group were not successful. Two years later, I returned from my first trip to Ecuador, led by John Perkins and Joyce Ferranti of the Dream Change Coalition—a similar trip to one Pat had taken a few years back. Following this I took a seven-week workshop, “Practicing Shamanism,” at the New York Open Center, with Nan Moss and David Corbin from the Foundation for Shamanic Studies. These experiences led me to help co-found the New York Shamanic Circle, which I’m still a proud member of.
I met John Perkins for the first time at his New York Open Center workshop. His honest enthusiasm, firsthand knowledge of the indigenous Shuar and Quechua cultures and shamanic practices in Ecuador, and his powerful environmental message completely resonated for me. I just knew I had to go to Ecuador. Don’t ask me why; it was a pure gut feeling. Moreover, I could not fully explain this decision to my family. I just had to go. So, I enlisted my two great friends, Samuel and Ariel, to join me. It proved to be a very good decision, as we became the trip’s Three Musketeers, looking for fun and adventure everywhere we went, some of which I describe later in this book. But this threesome also provided the essential support system we each needed as we challenged ourselves during this life-altering trip.
That March of 1997 I first met the shamans I subsequently worked with, most importantly Don Jos. Joaquin Pi.eda, a fifth-generation yachak (a shaman or medicine man) from the village of San Juan de Ilum.n near Otavalo, who became my teacher. Through many healing ceremonies, workshops, and personal conversations, mostly translated by his daughter Soraya (as my Spanish is very, very limited), who also studied with him, he passed down some of his ancient family healing traditions to me. In 2000, without announcing it, with his loyal wife and my family looking on, he initiated me at nightfall and crowned me into the circle of twenty-four male yachaks at a sacred Magdalena spring, which streams into Lago San Pablo on the slope of the formidable volcanic Imbabura Mountain, and later in his modest healing room in Otavalo. It was an unexpected event, not usually given to gringos like me. Of course, the questions and doubts popped up in my head: “Why me? What does he see in me that I don’t recognize?” I have always been attracted to spiritual phenomena. I had had a few spontaneous experiences too, such as an out-of-body experience, or knowing who was calling before the phone rang. As a teenager, walking in the old city of Jerusalem, I had detailed visions of bloody wars as I touched the large ancient stonewalls, and got a horrible splitting headache. Years later as I arrived in Florence, I knew how to walk to my hotel as if I had lived there before. As a visual artist there have been times when I had spontaneous visions of new paintings to be painted.
Sometime in the early 1980s I had my first encounter with what shamans call “seeing.” It happened while taking a palmistry course with Richard Unger, who later become a good friend, and with whom I later co-led life-purpose workshops in the United States and Europe. As part of my developing clairvoyance we had to touch a specific area in our client’s palm and tell the person what we saw in their childhood. The images I saw were vivid and strong. They were also very accurate and detailed, bringing up an incident of my client’s abuse as a child, which was very disturbing to both of us. This newfound ability to see profoundly scared me. I suppose I wasn’t ready for it yet and didn’t know how to protect myself. I remember distinctly how my face turned white, the blood drained out of me, and I was left weak and lethargic. This is known as energy leakage. I decided not to continue with these studies, although I did use this gift on a few occasions with similar success. Slowly, with practice, I learned how to sustain my energy. With the help of Don Jose, the floodgate of visions and other experiences opened. But what should I do with it?
Early Experiences
In hindsight, my upbringing turned out to be the perfect introduction to the basic principles of shamanism: deep connection to nature, close encounters with death, boundless imagination, a sense of history, and the importance of community and storytelling.
I was born in Kibbutz Beit Alpha on the eastern border of the Yezrael Valley, not very far from the Sea of Galilee, in Israel. The kibbutz had been founded on the slopes of the Mount Gilboa range, to avoid the malaria-bearing mosquitos and wild boars that roamed freely in the nearby vast swamps that had welcomed the first settlers. King David (circa 1010 BCE), as it was written in the Bible, deep in grief, had cursed Mount Gilboa “Ye mountains of Gilboa, let there be no dew, neither let there be rain upon you, nor fields of offerings: for there the shield of the mighty is vilely cast away, the shield of Saul, as though he had not been anointed with oil . . .” (Samuel II , 1:21) as he heard of the death of King Saul and his son Jonathan, whom he loved, in a battle with the Philistines.
Ours was the first kibbutz—a collective farm—of the Zionist Hashomer Hatzair movement, a fact we wore around our necks in pride, like Mayflower descendants. Established in 1922 by young and enthusiastic Jewish Russian and Polish immigrants, the first kibbutzniks dreamed of returning to the biblical Land of Milk and Honey, returning to work our forefather’s soil and build a just society of “a new human model,” where we is more important than I, where the well-being of the community is more important than that of any single individual.
The founders were proud atheists—they did not believe in spirituality or religion per se, except for the beliefs of Marx and Lenin, and they held Stalin as their sun. Jewish holidays were celebrated as festivals of nature and the changing of the seasons with very little reference to any religious meaning—most likely in the same shamanic ways the ancient Hebrews practiced. We did study the Bible, but as pure history, more like an anthropology book of our ancestors.
Many years later I was invited to lead a shamanic workshop in my old kibbutz for a special women’s day celebration. I asked the forty mothers and daughters who were participating to connect to the spirit of Mount Gilboa and bring a personal message for them. It was a fascinating realization to hear how each of the women experienced and personified the mountain, all very intimately. He was a powerful protector from the sun, the winds, and the Arabs on the other side. He was a gentle lover, bringing flowers and life. He was to be feared, with his blackness and wild animals. He was an ancient history teacher. An overbearing father. A mighty witness and observer of our lives. All the women had a very personal relationship with the mountain’s essence, and it impacted their everyday lives as deeply as it had mine. Could this also be why later in life I felt so at home and at ease in the Andes and with mountain people in general?
My first conscious memory was of the sound of birds. I was not even a year old, lying on my back in a white metal crib that stood on a lawn by the nursery house. Transparent cheesecloth covered my crib to protect me from the unforgiving sun and the buzzing flies. I remember waking up all alone. There was no other crib or human being around me. “It was your daily sunbath, you needed vitamin D, you were sick,” my mother told me many years later. Terrified, not knowing if anyone would ever come for me, I listened to the repetitive mourning doves cooing on the tall Dalbergia tree (Indian rosewood) nearby: Greu, greu, greu, greu, greu. Even now, whenever I hear this mesmerizing cooing sound, it takes me back to those upsetting moments of loneliness and abandonment.
As children of the 50s we grew up intimate with nature. We walked barefoot most of the time. We planted trees on the dry, yellow mountain in an attempt to transform that old biblical curse. Coyotes howled the nights away, deer grazed in the topmost hidden valley of the mountain, and under every stone you could find poisonous yellow and black scorpions, while snakes abounded. We pulled worms out of the heavy, wet, fertile soil. We watched brown fur nutrias swimming in the fishponds, collected porcupine needles, and watched black bats flying and hedgehogs running in a hurry around our houses at night. Lizards crawling on the window screens were a common sight. We took long hikes and trips into the valley, desert, and mountains. We followed excitedly the many kinds of migrating and local nesting birds, turtles, and winter snails leaving their long gooey trail after them. We knew by name every tree, shrub, plant, and flower growing in the fields around us and on the mountain. We danced in excitement as the first raindrops fell from the sky on the summer’s dry soil. We’d be terrified during the dark nights that were fueled by a barrage of piercing lightning and exploding thunder. We could hear the heavy rain pulling rocks and mud through the narrow creek, which we named Wadi Cacao, for the brown, muddy water that ran through it, creating a powerful winter waterfall on a rock formation we called King Solomon’s Throne, just beyond our children’s house, where we lived separately from our parents, or any adults. We picked different kinds of wild mushrooms and colorful assortments of wildflowers after the rains. We raised chickens, peacocks, goats, rabbits, sheep, and cows. We watched them giving birth, watched them grow up, and then watched them be slaughtered or die naturally.
As we grew older we were assigned to daily work in the vegetable garden and fields, harvesting fresh olives, grapes, grapefruits, and carobs. I spent time helping my father as he worked at the Gan Bait, the first organic vegetable garden in the country, with another inventive man, where they developed a new breed of vegetables more suitable for our land, as well as ways to fight insects without the use of chemicals.
There were few radios and no televisions, record players, or computers to sedate us. We had one public phone to connect us to the outside world. We pretty much played in our natural habitat with sticks, rocks, and our imagination. And imagination we had aplenty: the storage room by the basketball field turned into a witch’s house. The lone tree on the mountaintop became my guardian. We played thieves and robbers and all kinds of inventive outdoor games. As teenagers we joined the Youth Movement. We often spent time sitting in circles, sometimes around a bonfire, much like a shamanic talking circle, and learned to share our thoughts, listen to others, and discuss challenges.
Growing up in the small, tight-knit, isolated community of the few hundred people in my kibbutz was a perfect laboratory to learn about the fragility of human nature. But it certainly had its challenges. For me, growing up on that land was like living in two parallel realities, the present and that of our ancients, who had left their marks and footsteps there. I believe it instilled in me a deep sense of a tribal continuum. This was confirmed literally when not too far behind our children’s house members of our kibbutz, while laying water pipes, discovered an ancient synagogue buried under a pile of land, and the remains of a thriving school from a Jewish settlement from the sixth century CE. Its elaborate mosaic floor with Jewish symbols became well-known worldwide; it depicted the zodiac of the twelve Hebrew months, and inscribed in the mosaic floor were the synagogue’s protector symbols of the lion, the dove, and the buffalo. At the onset of the winter rains we used to collect Roman coins washed down from the mountain. Old pottery shards and flint arrows of all sizes were all around us, and many of us had an impressive collection of them. We sat in the same caves the ancients used, along the cliff overlooking the valley below, and climbed down ancient grain silos carved deep into the soft chalk rocks. We dipped in the cold spring that bares the name of Gideon, the mighty biblical warrior. Even the names of all sixteen of my class members were biblical names. I truly felt like a son returning to live on his unknown father’s ancient land.
My parents raised me to denounce any reference to the Jewish religion, even though my grandmother Rashka, who lived with us, prayed devotedly several times a day, as was expected of her, having come from a rabbinical family. I recently learned through a newly found old article about my great-grandfather Mordechai Zundel Margolis (my mother’s grandfather) that he was a well-known Kabalistic rabbi and healer in Kolno, Poland, who devoted his life to the eternal fight between the forces of good and evil in the universe. Since starting my own work as a shamanic healer I became immersed in this aspect as well, without knowing that fact about him.
I was a surprise child, the youngest of four siblings. As a young boy I was skinny, “like a pencil,” or as my caretaker would say, “You are blue and transparent.” I was highly sensitive and sick most of the time, as my immune system had been compromised by sickness early on. “If it wasn’t for your mother you would not be here with us,” my father told me one night while holding my hand before he passed on. “You had typhus in the stomach when you were just a few months old. She sat by your side around the clock, feeding you with a dropper, washing you with icy towels to cool your boiling temperature. Everyone gave up on you, but she fought against all odds to save you.” Funny—I looked up the word typhus; it derives from the Greek word for “smoke” or “stupor,”because of the hallucinations that it induces in the sick person’s mind.
At the age of four I had another meeting with death. While learning to swim in the little kidney-shaped children’s pool, I was tiptoeing to the deepest part of the pool when I lost my footing and was sucked into the drain. With all my tiny power I flapped my arms and hit the bottom. It was my father who jumped over the pool fence and into the water with his shoes and clothes on to rescue me. I still remember that moment vividly, in horror, shame, and gratitude.
And as if that wasn’t enough, I had a third encounter with death. This time it was on a beautiful winter day, right after a night of a heavrain. Climbing up the mountain with my sister, we picked wild flowers to bring home to our mom. On our way up we picked lots of red anemone. But then we discovered a lone white daffodil with a golden crown in its center standing in the middle of a huge, wet, steep rock. I decided we must have it too. Against my older sister’s objections, I took a few sidesteps in my slippery rubber boots, as my father had taught me, and lost my footing. Next thing I knew, I was rolling fast down the smooth, slanted rock at a huge speed. Short of breath and in a panic, I knew I was going to die, when luckily a ledge almost at the very bottom caught my sweater. My poor sister, frightened out of her wits, ran all around that rock to collect me. To this day she can’t forget that terrifying moment.
From then on, death was a familiar entity to me and I was fascinated by it throughout my childhood. Somehow I believed I did not belong here; I wished to go “back home,” to the other side, as the old Amazonian Umbanda priestess Bibi once told me many years later.
Maybe it was why many years later I burst out with a long, uncontrollable sob of longing at the end of the Mayan initiation bodywork session held by my shaman friend Antonio Oxteik, as I saw my soul group floating in a perpetual cosmic dance, moving eternally in space. I instinctively knew that I was seeing my real home.
Every night at the children’s house before bedtime our caretaker who put us to sleep gathered us in one room to read us fables and stories. I loved hearing those stories as they allowed me to enter into the other worlds of magic, and I had a strong need to tell my own stories and share my own ideas too. But the woman who was my daily caretaker did not have the patience and time to listen to everything I had to say. “You are too chatty; you talk nonstop and too much,” she used to complain and tried to brush me off. One day when she had had enough she took me aside, bent down, looked at me sternly, and said, “Itzhak, God gave each of us a limited amount of words to use in our lives. If you use them all up, you will die.” I knew it was not true, but nevertheless I took what she said to heart. In shamanic language, as I later came to understand, that was a curse. After that I learned to control myself, fearing I would waste my words. I lived in that fear, so whenever I talked in front of groups my stomach churned, my heart palpitated, and I even used to pee in my pants. I came to convince myself that I had nothing worth saying, that what I thought wouldn’t matter to anyone. In his hand analysis reading many years later, Richard Unger shared with me, as he deciphered my fingerprint codes, that my life purpose is to be “a man with a message who needs a large stage to express himself.” To hear this said with such clarity was a turning point for me, one that literally set me free from that curse and my self-imposed restrictions. As I write my personal stories I realize that it is an act of profound personal healing for me. I have a deep-rooted fear of putting down on paper my innermost thoughts, feelings, and experiences, a fear that my class members, family, or the entire kibbutz will discover the true me. We grew up without even minimal privacy among hundreds of watchful eyes, with nowhere to hide. We had no personal rooms, locked drawers, or cabinets in which to keep a diary, secrets, or our personal belongings. We had no choice but to conform to the expectation of our society, or wear an invisible shield around us for fear of being exposed and ridiculed.
Cynical and Suspicious
I learned the hard way to be cynical and a doubter. I grew up being aware that my peers considered me extremely gullible. It seemed like every day was April Fool’s Day. They laughed at me without any hesitation when I fell for their fabricated stories. I just could not understand why anyone would make things up just to trick me and make me feel like a fool, so I always fell into their trap. One incident from my childhood is deeply etched in my memory.
One afternoon when I was in the second or third grade, I came to visit my parents’ house from the children’s house, as it was common that the children lived separately from the adults. My sister took me aside. “Itzhak I have a big secret, do you swear not to tell anyone?” she whispered, putting her two hands around my ears. “I promise,” I said, feeling so grownup and important. “This chewing gum you chew is made from rubber mixed with camel dung.” I was shocked. “Camel dung?” I asked in disbelief. “Do you want to see?” She pulled out a pack and showed me the illustration on the yellow wrapping. Sure enough, it had a red camel picture in the center. She went on reading me the ingredients written on the back in English. Because she was already taking English classes I trusted her. A couple of months later I saw my beloved, most trusted sister pulling a stick of gum out of the same package and chewing on it. I was utterly confused and upset. She had tricked me too. I then made a conscious decision to shed my innocence, thinking No one will ever fool me again. I need to ask for proof. I didn’t want to be hurt again and became suspicious and skeptical no matter what (in the shamanic language this is describe as soul loss). I guess we think of this as “mature” or “grownup.” Funny—when I told my sister this story, not so long ago, she didn’t remember it at all.
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I have written the stories in this book as factually as possible, knowing full well that some of you might be as skeptical as I was, and rightly so. That is why it’s been so hard for me to come to terms with my own shamanic experiences for the longest time. As I struggled to accept my visions I had many unanswered questions. Why and how do these images appear in my mind? Where are they stored? Who is volunteering all this information? Who is talking to spirits, angels, and teachers—my subconscious or me? How can we actually “see” other people’s thoughts? From what materials are thoughts made of? Are all those spirits or images following us in our daily lives? Are they guiding us? Which of these alternative worlds is the “real” one—the world of dreams and visions, or this world we think we know so well? How does the body’s energy field translate into images in our mind? Do they all exist simultaneously? Can we communicate with the dead? Where do we go after we pass over?
With so many unanswered questions, I turned to my friend, a prominent Israeli brain research scientist. I wanted him to scan my brain to understand where all these new-found images come from and why now. He listened patiently to some of these out-of-this-world stories, which you will be reading soon, and dismissed them. “There is no proof,” he said with the glee of a know-it-all expert in his eyes, and summed it up as follows: “You need to repeat these exact experiences three times so the outcome will be the same each time, otherwise it is just coincidence.” I challenged him to join my New York Shamanic Circle meeting, which made an exception and agreed to allow him in. At the end of the evening in which we journeyed to find our spirit animal, I had a convert.
“I just can’t believe I met this lion; it was so real. I was afraid I would meet a cockroach, the most repulsive animal for me,” he said. “Believe me, it was not my choice at all. It was surely a lion, and how did he know the answer to my question?” The scientist was bubbling with excitement. Some time later he confided to me that he subsequently incorporated this experience in his work.
A few years later over a sushi dinner at a local Greenwich Village restaurant as we reminisced about that evening’s experience, my friend said, “I believe, as a person who intensively studied how our eyes and brain see light and process that information, that humans are unable to conceptualize the world as it really is. Each animal species sees the world differently according to its eyesight, light receptors, and brain processing capacity. We know that a frog with its limited vision sees the world foggier and with shorter range than an owl, gecko, or a bee. Or, for example, mantis shrimp have sixteen color receptors compared to humans who have only three. Same thing goes for our other senses; we have a limited range of experiencing nature, and that is why we can’t fully comprehend it. And even if we do understand the mechanics of it, I believe that the act of seeing is still a mystery. As scientists we have to accept it.”
“There is also the shamanic teaching that says the world is as we dream it, not as we see it,” I interrupted him. “Many spiritual teachings say that that is the Great Mystery or The Unknown, what we may call God, which has no shape, form, or name.” “That seems to be true, and we may have to operate within this as we do our research,” he said as he took a short breath and added, “Most serious scientists are afraid to go public with this understanding for fear of being outcast from the conservative scientific community.” I was surprised to hear this coming from his mouth. “Why don’t you say it?” I asked him.
“Oh, leave me alone, I’m not going to ruin my career.” He waved his hands impatiently to dismiss me. I went looking for what the father of modern science, Albert Einstein, had said about that question in The Merging of Spirit and Science: “The most beautiful and most profound experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the sower of all true science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness.” He also said, “I see a pattern, but my imagination cannot picture the maker of that pattern. I see a clock, but I cannot envision the clockmaker. The human mind is unable to conceive of the four dimensions, so how can it conceive of a God, before whom a thousand years and a thousand dimensions are as one?”
I truly believe, as do many of the shamans I have had the great privilege of working with, that this capacity to bring knowledge and healing from alternative realities and parallel dimensions is a gift that all we humans share and, oddly enough, it is what makes us good survivors on this planet. Throughout the many workshops in which I have participated, taught, and organized, I have seen so-called ordinary people prove it time and time again. All you have to do is open a portal, trust your intuition, trust the spirits to guide you, and of course, practice.