I deep cleaned and rearranged my writing space today

and I’m reporting to you now from inside a vibe so glad and floaty I feel like I’ve taken magic mushrooms. The air feels buoyant, notable somehow, like a friendly living thing. All my candles are lit. Everything is just-so in a new way. Heavenly.

What I want to tell you about is the shaman I met three times, last week and this week, and what we did.

I wish I’d seen him in person and maybe I will someday. He lives in Sedona, a place I’d love to visit. I am here to tell you that you can meet a shaman in your computer and get plenty done that way. I got deep cleaned and rearranged myself.

Clay is his name, this shaman I met. He’s incredibly cool. He looks like a Hollywood stunt man from the 1970s, lean, with long white braids, and he has a Hollywood voice, too. A voiceover voice. You’d pay him a billion dollars to sell trucks in an advertisement. He records audiobooks, in fact, for a living. I would not say that the shaman deal is on the side. The shaman deal is dead center. The money comes in from the side. I did pay for our sessions but it was not a Hollywood price.

What happens is this:

You tell him about what’s going on with you, and he listens in a special way. You can see and feel him listening with a penetrating empathy. What he’s finding as he listens is a large moment of pain you’re carrying. You’re telling him about the pain but what he’s finding inside what you’re telling him is something elemental and universal, a kind of pain that all humans can feel.

He tells you what he’s feeling is the big pain underneath, and you talk together a bit, the minimum amount necessary. Soon it’s clear exactly what the big pain is. The work is fast.

The next part, for it to be successful, requires you to abandon decorum. If you hedge, if you half-ass, nothing will happen.

Clay demonstrates something that you’re going to do. A gesture, like the shape of a statue, and a sound, a cry, usually a word, maybe two. Could be someone’s name. Could be a question. Could be an exclamation.

You have to copy the gesture exactly. Different placements of the arms and hands release different things, and Clay’s been doing this for thirty years. He’s leading. If he wants you to find the gesture—which he might—he’ll let you know.

Clay bursts into this shape and sound and then he lets it go the instant he’s hit it. Then it’s your turn.

There’s a vibration of pain that’s stuck in you, that got frozen and masked and covered over, and the sound and shape travel bang into the center of what was stuck, like striking a drum. The gesture and sound is the strike, the one that matches the moment of pain, and the moment of pain is the drum. Boom. You don’t hang out in the gesture, you don’t stick around and linger in it. You hit the note/shape hard and drop it, then you breathe and let the vibrations ripple out.

It might take a couple of tries to strike the right note with the right force in the right shape but you will not have to guess if you hit it. When you hit it, you will know.

Me, I hit a bunch of different pains in our three sessions. Elemental pains, the deepest ones I have. A dad one, some brother ones, and a cluster one with my grandmother and a few wayward friends folded into a larger mom one. I have a couple more elemental pains left in me on that scale, maybe, at maximum, at least from this life.

I hurt my throat a bit on a couple of my sounds. I went for it, ten on a scale of one-to-ten, which you have to do. Felt wild and bare to yell my words and let my body be so dramatic in shape but each time I struck the real note, holy shit.

I wish that sensation on everyone. You, I wish it on you.

I want a shaman or someone, anyone, to see you, to SEE-you see-you, to get who you are, to leap into the heart of your burdens, to know what happened, to yell for you, to help you yell.

I don’t want you to carry the loneliness of being unseen and unheard where you really live. That’s a bad deal. Why have we made this deal with each other? We act like we’re cool and everything’s fine, and sometimes we make small sounds and shapes about the things that have happened to us for the ones we trust, but nothing too crazy. We know the deal, we honor it. That’s what we honor.

It’s strange and sad that we don’t get to make the shapes and sounds we need to make at the moment we need to make them. Wild animals have it good in that way. No gazelle survives a lion attack, no mother gnu watches her baby gnu get eaten, and then tries to have decorum about it.

Restraint is one thing. We can use that. Restraint and wisdom are friends.

Stupid decorum.

I understand that we’ve set things up here in a certain way, that we’re not safe moving through the world without decorum. We’ve made agreements.

I felt tired after my sessions with Clay but not in a grim way. I needed rest in a good, pleasant way. Imagine watching a film where someone gets beaten up, but watching it in reverse. A lot still happens and that’s tiring but it ends clean.

What happened to you is important. That’s what I want to tell you. You swallowed some large sounds and hid some large shapes. You did it because you had to do it, you knew to do it, you had to be shrewd. You still have to live in this world with these stupid agreements we’ve made and that makes it difficult. You can go from one end of your life to the other and not make the sounds and you’ll be okay, you’ve come this far.

But what if?

When you hit a real one, a big one, boom, right where it lives:

______________.

P.S. Clay has another name, by the way. Lomakayu. It means “Everything ended well.”