The Shaman of Instagram
SHAMAN Durek was singing in an ancient language into his computer screen. His voice was deep and soothing.
“Breathe,” he said slowly, cupping his hands in front of his chest. He was wearing a Japanese kimono, detailed with Guatemalan embroidery. “Expand,” he commanded.
Behind the shaman was what looked to be a temple, soft orange light streaming from its stone arches. In reality, it was a green screen; he was in the studio of his Los Angeles home, where he has been isolating. This was a digital healing, for which some 900 people had paid $10
(R169) to tune in from their homes.
The shaman, whose legal name is Durek Verrett, snapped his fingers.
“Spirits!” his voice boomed. “Go inside of their hearts, remove the first layer. Dig out the poison!”
Almost immediately, the chat function of this Zoom video lit up.
“Chills,” wrote Michelle. “Crying,” said Stephanie. “Prickles at my heart,” added Kari.
Others described coughing, tingling, laughing and yawning. (The throat, Verrett said, is a pathway through which the body can expel negative energy.)
Had I not seen this ritual play out in person, I can assure you I would have been sceptical. But in pre-covid times, the shaman worked out of a meditation space where those in search of wisdom and healing could pay up to $1 000 for a private session, surrounded by Moroccanstyle cushions and T-shirts for sale that said “Meditation”.
Verrett’s clients have included Selma Blair, Nina Dobrev and Jimmy Chamberlain, the ex-drummer of the Smashing Pumpkins, who came to him a decade ago on a referral from Billy Corgan, he said. (“He and I are best friends to this day,” said Verrett, who is 45.) He once came home to find actor Chris Pine sitting in his studio, back when Verrett worked out of a converted garage. “I guess they heard that I was a shaman at the end of the street,” he said.
Other friends include Gwyneth Paltrow, whom he calls “my family”; Rosario Dawson, whom he met at a workshop in the Hamptons, New York; and Dave Asprey, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur whose “clean” brand of coffee, Bulletproof, is the only kind Verrett will touch. His girlfriend is Princess Martha Louise of Norway, with whom he co-hosted a tour of healing workshops, called The Princess and the Shaman, in Europe before the pandemic.
But the shaman also treats all sorts of non-famous people too, many of them women, who find him through some combination of his Instagram account, his podcast, his online shaman school where one can learn to “optimise” their spiritual powers and his book, Spirit Hacking, which came out late last year.
One of these clients was a music agent in Los Angeles, who allowed me to observe her session a few months back but requested that her name not be used because of the personal nature of the session. As instructed, she had abstained from meat, alcohol and smoking for 24 hours before. Her intention was, as she put it, to “level up” before her 40th birthday. (“Levelling up” is what Verrett describes as “going to another level in your evolution”.)
I followed her into the dimly lit room, where she lay on a mat, closed her eyes and, over the course of the next hour, went through cycles of sobbing, gagging, shaking and laughing – the shaman at one point beckoning me to pass the tissues so he could wipe her nose as she heaved into a rubbish bin. He said she was releasing deep pain from inside her; she said she’d never experienced anything like it.
“At one point he asked me to stand up. He said, ‘We’re going to ground you’. And I felt this pull from the ground anchor me to the floor – like a magnet,” she said later. “I was just like ‘What?! Will this last?! This is crazy’.”
To be clear, there are no drugs or herbs involved in these sessions. Rather, Verrett engages in what he calls “spirit shamanism”, an ancient practice in which a shaman, with a subject’s permission, purports to receive messages from spirits while working through the frequencies, energy, even the “colours” supposedly emanated by a person’s body, with the goal of alleviating negativity or pain.
At any given moment, Verrett might burst into song or shout commands to “turn up” a person’s “magnetic energy” or “release dopamine”. He is not trying to “solve” anyone’s problems, he said, but to be a “vessel” through which ancient advisers can speak. The idea is to help release his clients of the negative energy that could be preventing them from, you know, love, money, happiness – that sort of thing. “The joke that I always tell people is that I’m a messenger and I’m a janitor,” Verrett said. “I come to clean up your crap and I come to deliver the message.”
This is not always metaphorical. “I had a woman once who had a colostomy bag and it exploded on me,” he recalled. “Another guy I was working on projectile-vomited in my mouth.” If you’re a shaman – and Verrett claims to be the latest in six generations of shamans in his family – this is the reality, he said. “You’re not affected by those things.”
Contemporary shamanism was revived in the West by spiritual seekers of the 1960s, and has evolved since. In recent years, it has gained popularity in America, along with other healing practices glamourised by the Goop set – which seem to have saturated our therapy sessions as well as our Instagram feeds.
A decade ago, said Verrett’s girlfriend, Princess Martha Louise, the response to her co-founding a spirituality centre in Norway – where she is fourth in line to the throne – “was like, ‘Oh my God, she’s mad,” she said. “But now, it’s much more open. And I think a lot of that has to do with yoga, to be honest.”
Today, luxury hotels have shamanic masseuses. You can find shamanic playlists on Spotify. There are financial shamans who advise on business, fashion shamans who scrub bad energy from your wardrobe, even shamanic hair stylists.
“You don’t become a shaman because you went to Peru, bought a poncho, sang some sacred songs and learnt how to make a booming batch of ayahuasca,” Verrett writes in his book. “You become a shaman because the spirits choose you to be a shaman.”
Born Derek Verrett (he changed the spelling of his first name to
“Durek” in 2013, “because I felt like I was a new person,” he said), Verrett grew up in a wealthy, mostly white neighbourhood in Foster
City, California, in a strict Seventh Day Adventist home. His father, who had trained as a shaman but ran a construction business, was Afro-creole and from New Orleans; and his mother, a psychic medium, is West Indian-norwegian and from New York. She returned there after they divorced, and his father wavered between encouraging his son’s shamanic gifts and telling him to “be normal”, Verrett said.
In his book, Verrett writes that his father, who died in 2017, was physically abusive, taught him that homosexuality was wrong (Verrett has dated women and men) and that “the only way to get ahead in life was with a white woman on your arm”.
“I used to hate being black,” Verrett writes in his book. As a child, he would buy skin bleach from the chemist, trying to scrub the pigment from his face. “I bleached my hair, too – to the point where it fell out, which is why I still don’t have hair to this day,” he writes.
He grew up around extended family, including his paternal grandparents and an aunt, the famed mezzo-soprano Shirley Verrett, whom he said encouraged him to explore his spirituality.
His older sister, Angelina Verrettbyrne, a health kinesiologist in New York, said her brother was always “different,” even when they were children. Later, as teenagers, she said, she has a memory of him asking her and her friends to “be quiet” so as not to disturb the mushroom he was cultivating.
Verrett dropped out of high school and spent his early adulthood trying to determine if he wanted to be a shaman, a dancer or a model.
He taught Pilates for a while and took some acting jobs. He struggled with substance abuse, and was briefly married to a woman. He later ran a healing business with an ex-boyfriend. And then, at age 27, he died. Yes, that’s how he puts it. “I flatlined, I went to the other side, I got all the information on the other side, I came back,” Verrett said.
This took four minutes and 25 seconds, according to his book.
The medical reason, he explained, was hypertension and high blood pressure, and he had to be rushed to the hospital, where he said his organs shut down and the doctors wanted to take him off life support. “I was told to plan for his funeral,” Verrett-byrne said.
But he did make it, after spending more than a month in a coma. Verrettbyrne gave him a kidney, and he had to relearn to use his legs, he said.
Of course, dying is par for the course when you’re a shaman. Many consider it a rite of passage.
“The death solidified my path; who I am,” Verrett said. “It was a second chance. And I knew that if I came back, I was going to be focused on being there for the people.”
He is a vegetarian (“I will not eat death,” he said), believes alcohol is “spirit poison” and won’t drink carbonated liquids, though permits himself some caffeine. He eats a lot of soups and salads.
He has embraced technology, from the “Healing Temple” sessions he now conducts on Zoom to his Instagram account, where he promotes his work, captures snapshots of himself and his famous friends and conducts live healing sessions. (He also answers queries from his followers there, many of whom have come to him for guidance during the pandemic. “I’m like a crisis hotline,” he said.)
Which has earned him no shortage of critics. “A lot of people don’t like me in the wellness world,” he said.
“I’m a black man. I’m loud. I say what I feel. And I’m not into the hierarchy of, because I went to, like, ashram in India and then sat on the top of the mountains with some kind of monk I am allowed to think I’m better than everyone and I have all the wisdom.
“Because I don’t have all the wisdom, but I’m learning every day.” | The New York Times