Would you pay £7,500 to be ‘healed’ by a Home Counties shaman?
Sarah’s an ex-City worker who claims to drive out toxic spirits with chanting and drums, but...
Sarah Negus is explaining how you become a shaman. Yes, yes, it’s all about mysticism and spiritualism and tribalism and holy healing, but there’s also a recognised route to the position. One that sounds like quite a palaver, frankly.
‘Traditionally, in indigenous populations, you have to be initiated by the age of 30 and cast out of the village with nothing. You have to go out into the jungle to find a feeling of not needing to survive.
‘shamans, you see, know they are more than their physical body and that they can connect with the universe and the earth. shamans aren’t limited by the physical body. They can transmute into a different form.’
she pauses for breath, then brings us crashing back into the real world.
‘Obviously, that didn’t happen to me, because I was born in Croydon.’
It’s a striking start to my meeting with a woman who styles herself as a modernday shaman.
still think shamans are holy men in cloaks, banging drums as they drive out spirits? Pah! This shaman is wearing a scarlet dress — from Boden, for goodness’ sake — and sexy heels.
More pertinently, she’s part of a new breed of shamans who charge thousands from wellheeled clients.
Indeed, shamanism is now quite fashionable. all the alisters have one. gwyneth Paltrow and selma Blair call on shaman Durek (who is also the boyfriend of Princess Martha Louise of Norway) whenever they need a ‘reboot’. shaman Durek travels the world expunging negative energy and rebooting souls.
sarah makes me a coffee from a pod machine in the kitchen of her pictureperfect cottage and asks if I want to join her outside.
OuTsIDe as in under the trees? Will we chant? she means outside in her office, one of those glorious garden rooms with a timber frame and glass walls.
Inside, she taps on her MacBook. Doesn’t she have a drum? actually, she does. It’s propped up in the corner, but she lifts it and obliges with a few bangs. ‘reindeer skin,’ she says. ‘But I don’t use it that much.’
Many of her clients are in the corporate world, which is where she started out as a secretary in the City. she married well in her early 20s. her exhusband, Terry, ran a property development business and a cleaning company, and they lived in a mansion in Croydon.
The significant point about her moneymaking background is that she has managed to bring it with her into shamanism.
her clients are highend, highworth individuals.
‘entrepreneurs, corporate clients,’ she says. Part of her sales shtick is that her shamanic trances can bring not just enlightenment, but great riches.
she says one client used to work in McDonald’s and is now a CeO earning £1 million a year. another, who runs a construction firm, closed six deals in four weeks after she sorted out his chakras. Bankruptcy was averted.
such ‘healing’ doesn’t come cheap, however. You might feel a bit faint when presented with one of sarah’s bills. Nothing to do with toxic spirits being driven out of the body (the big thing in shamanism). she charges £7,500 for a 12week course, which will allow you to ‘unlock your full potential’. studying with her for a year will set you back £26,000.
Who on earth would pay this? ‘someone who wanted to invest in themselves,’ she says.
shaman sarah believes she was born with shamanic powers — but, in suburban Croydon, where her dad ran a building company, she was just marked down as ‘odd’. she says she was a child who ‘saw things’. What sort of things?
‘shapes around people, tree spirits. I had imaginary friends. I would know what was going on in people’s lives without talking to them. I’d tell my mother what was happening in her friends’ lives. I knew things children shouldn’t know.
‘My father would say: “stop it, sarah, no one likes a knowitall.”’ sarah has a son, now 23, who is a scientist. she says shamanism isn’t his thing. I ask if he’s put off by the lack of evidence thing. she says: ‘are you trying to ask if he thinks I’m mad?’
she is more direct (and more terrifying) than those spiritual souls who spend their lives with crystals and scented candles. ‘I’d have been drowned as a witch in the olden days,’ she adds, cheerily. sarah was unhappy in her marriage, but didn’t realise it back then. When she was 30, she met a woman who changed her life. ‘My friend called and said she had a session booked with this “mad woman” who gave psychic readings, but couldn’t afford the session herself. Would I go with her?’ she starts to cry as she relates how this woman told her she was empty inside and needed a reboot. ‘That was the start of it. I worked with her for ten years. she became like my mother.’ seven years later, sarah left her marriage. she took off to Peru, as you do, to learn more about shamanism. she drank hallucinogenic tea (quite gloopy, apparently) and slept on reedbeds. But where was her son? ‘With his Dad. We’d separated by this time.’ Job? ‘I was teaching Pilates.’ Once she realised that she had shamanic powers, her life made sense. Bona fide shamans apparently suffer something called shamanic illness. sarah had had a quinsy — an abscess — in her throat when she was 21, and an outofbody experience in the hospital. Then there were the car crashes
— three over a few years. In Sarah’s shamanic world, bad things happening to you are a warning from the cosmos.
And it seems that we all need realigning. She offers to take me on a shamanic journey. To deepest, darkest Peru? Alas, no. I’m going into a trance. I sit back in my chair and close my eyes, and she says I must feel my core and tell the voices in my head to be quiet.
The room falls silent . . . apart from her chickens clucking.
I’d read that shamanic rituals can involve animal sacrifice. Is that why she has chickens?
‘Can you see a bright light? Walk towards it,’ urges Sarah.
Eventually, we are in a corridor filled with pictures of me throughout my life. I must pick one and beckon the me in it to step out of the picture and hold my hand.
‘What age are you?’ I’m eight, I say. Later, she will tell me this means something happened to me when I was eight years old.
Did it? I would argue I picked the photograph I most remember of myself from childhood, the one where I have pudding-bowl hair.
‘What do you want to say to that little girl?’ she asks. Crikey. Would ‘please never let your mother cut your hair’ suffice? Probably not.
We go to play on some swings, this younger me and myself. Later, she tells me I need to play more.
Then we meet an older woman. A grandmother? ‘I’m feeling this woman strongly. She wants to say something to you. What is it?’ If it’s really my late grandmother, who was a no-nonsense Methodist, she will want to say: ‘How much?’
THEN it turns ugly. ‘You’re going to hear a rude noise. I’ve collected some bad energy from you and I need to get rid of it,’ she says — and belches loud and long.
When I come back from my trance, I, too, am wearing a Boden dress and have glossy, swishy hair and a healthier bank balance. No, not really. More unsettling is what Sarah tells me she has ‘seen’ in my soul. Apparently, I did a good job of trying to block her, but she still had the measure of me, she adds.
She tells me my creativity is being stifled by my job. ‘You’ve spent a lot of time in your job thinking: “What the hell is the point?”’ she says. Hmm. She has a point.
Anything else? Should I leave my husband? ‘I think you could do better, and he could do better.’
What?! ‘You could communicate better, I mean, not that you should be married to someone else.’
Apparently, I am hard on him. ‘He wants to be the provider and you won’t let him,’ she says.
I run this one past my husband later. Would you like me to give up my job, which is stifling my creativity anyway, so you can be the provider? ‘Did she give you drugs?’ he jokes.
The thing is I can’t stop thinking about my job and my grandmother and my marriage for the rest of the day, so I can well imagine that 12 weeks of sessions with Sarah
could change your life, in the same way sitting looking at your feet for an hour will have you wondering if you need bunion surgery.
For the better, though? And would you pay for such enlightenment? After all, for the price of having a Shaman Sarah in your life, you could get your own garden room and who knows how many Boden dresses.