Extraordinary Powers and Practices

Many years ago, and long before I moved to the off-grid homestead in the Hawaiian rainforest that I now call home, I met a shaman. He was a college sophomore named Sean, and we were both exchange students at the University of Otago in New Zealand. We quickly became friends thanks to a shared sense of humor and interests that lead us both out of the mainstream. I was into Jack Kerouac and the Beats and stayed up late writing stories and poetry; Sean was into meditation, precognition, and this mysterious thing called “energy” which he claimed to feel and perceive, the same way ordinary people used their senses of hearing, sight, and touch. We had long conversations about science and mysticism, often over the greasy pizza he liked, trading notes on the deep truths we’d learned during our short lives.

When our next school break came around, I convinced Sean to join me on a hitchhiking trip to the south of the island. I’d recently read On the Road for the third time, and even though I was a shy eighteen-year-old who’d spent most of her life reading books and practicing piano, I yearned to experience a wilder side of life. On a sunny day, we packed trail mix, warm sweaters, and our favorite books, walked to the edge of the road leading out of Dunedin, and stuck out our thumbs.

For the next week, we traveled wherever the wind blew us, exploring hiking trails, rivers, and forgotten towns, living on dried fruit and gas station pies. Wherever we went, Sean would spend at least a few minutes engaged in a variety of shamanic practices. One day we hiked to a waterfall, and he told me he wanted to sit still for several minutes and connect to the spirit of the place. I was bewildered. Why would anyone want to sit still? What was “spirit”? How long was he going to just sit there, doing nothing?

He invited me to join him in the practice, and I reluctantly sat down a few paces away. Over the course of many long conversations, Sean had told me that he sometimes conversed with ancestors or had waves of intuition that guided his actions; indeed, it was one such wave of intuition that had led him to make friends with me, even though we had no mutual friends and had no classes together. As I sat by the waterfall, I felt awkward and uncertain. What was Sean doing while he sat there? Was he seeing or hearing things? Was I supposed to see or hear things? How did this shamanism thing work, anyway?

When we left the waterfall, I felt embarrassed to admit that I hadn’t been visited by an animal spirit or heard the whispers of an ancestor. Yet my friend reassured me that these colorful experiences weren’t the point; the heart of the practice was to honor the natural world with gratitude and awareness, and to make space for more-than-human communication to take place in any form. He explained that shamanism was once practiced by human beings around the world, most likely including my own ancestors.

For Sean, everything we encountered was a message from the divine. The takahe bird we heard in the forest was speaking to us; the old sheep farmer who gave us a ride down the road was a teacher in disguise. As we journeyed together, I came to understand that for him, shamanism wasn’t about seeing auras or witnessing miracles, but cultivating a mode of perception in which everyday life was animated with beauty, wonder, and meaning.

For the remainder of my career as a hitchhiker, I cultivated this mode of perception everywhere I went. Standing in the rain or snow by the side of the highway, I’d tell myself that whoever pulled over to pick me up would be my next teacher; this prediction was never wrong. I felt protected and cared for by the universe itself, which was always giving me gifts in the form of the food, shelter, or clothing I needed. Far from worrying, I would bless each passing car, confident that whatever happened that day was going to be right. Although I wouldn’t have used the word practice at the time, I now realize that during those precious years, I was practicing all the time.

Imagine my pleasure, then, when José Luis Stevens’s beautiful book The Shaman’s Book of Extraordinary Practices: 58 Power Tools for Personal Transformation came across my desk. Paging through this collection of simple practices for awakening spirit and cultivating awareness, my years as a teenage mystic came flooding back to me. I remembered that spiritual practice doesn’t have to be rigid and formal, but can be creative, flexible, and fun. As Stevens says, you don’t have to sit in meditation for many hours a day to experience rapid personal growth—simply working with a powerful shamanic practice for a few minutes can be enough to open your eyes and reorient your heart to a higher truth.

One of my favorite practices in The Shaman’s Book of Extraordinary Practices is called The Extraordinary Practice of Blessing Everyone. Stevens reminds us that “Blessing is not an act reserved for ordained priests or respected gurus; it is an act of love available to all of us, all the time.” Reading this passage, I remembered how it felt to beam love at every passing car as I waited for someone to pull over and give me a ride; how, even though I possessed little more than a bag of trail mix and a copy of Coleman Barks’ The Soul of Rumi, my obsession with Kerouac having subsided, I nevertheless felt rich. Blessing others is something we can do anytime and anywhere, no matter how materially impoverished we may be, and it never fails to elevate the soul.

In another practice, The Extraordinary Practice of Seeing the Divine in Everything, Stevens reminds us of a quote from Christian mystic Meister Eckhart: “The eye through which I see the God is the eye through which God sees me.” Reading this, I remembered the way my old friend Sean would choose to see the divine everywhere he looked, and how he shared this life-changing habit with me. As Stevens writes, we have a choice to see everything as God or not-God—so why not embrace this remarkable power to transform our daily lives?

Practices like these remind us that our true wealth lies in our perception. A hitchhiker standing in the rain can feel richer than the millionaire speeding past her in a new car; a person dying of cancer can feel more alive than the healthy doctor who cares for him. By returning to practices like the ones in Stevens’s book, we can hone our ability to make this inner shift, unlocking untold magic in our lives.

In the years since I gave up hitchhiking, I admit that it’s been harder to hold onto a mystical frame of mind. As a landowner and homesteader, my mind is often crammed with plans and to-do lists, rather than being open to whatever appears. I have to consciously remind myself that the universe is still protecting and caring for me, just as it did when I was living on the road. I need to sit beside the waterfall, listen, and watch for signs; I need to bow to each teacher as they appear. It feels meaningful to me that Stevens’s book came into my life at exactly the time that I needed to remember these things—and I think that he would agree!

When our year abroad ended, my shaman friend and I parted ways; after corresponding for a while and visiting him once when I hitchhiked through Boulder, we lost touch. I like to think that he is still seeing the world through shamanic eyes; still feeling glimmers of intuition and allowing them to guide him; still tuning into the natural world, instead of blocking it out. I imagine him going to a bookstore in Boulder or Denver and finding The Shaman’s Book of Extraordinary Practices; I’m sure that he would love it. It pleases me to think that, after influencing my life so much, an author whose book I edited might reach through time and space to influence him.

It seems to me that extraordinary practices like the ones Stevens shares in his book could just as easily be called extraordinary powers: the power to love, to bless, to see, to hear, to trust, to know. We all have these powers within us, just waiting to be developed. They are there to be discovered and rediscovered countless times throughout our lives, leading us a little deeper into our own souls every time.

As we move into high summer, I hope that each of you has a chance to wash off whatever dust has settled over your own shamanic eyes and see the world anew. You are connected to everything in the universe, just as everything in the universe is connected to you, and through the power of your perception, you can transform your life.

Sincerely,

Hilary T. Smith

Senior Editor, Hierophant Publishing

Hitchhiking to Freedom

Dear readers,

As an editor at a spirituality and self-help publisher, I learn profound lessons from all the books and authors I work with. In fact, I often joke that it’s like getting paid to do therapy all day—there’s just no way to spend so much time reading and editing uplifting books without having those positive messages sink into my heart and mind. This has never been truer than with Adelfa Marr’s book, Lord Knows This Sh*t Ain’t Easy: How to Stay Emotionally Balanced in a Chaotic World, coming out from Hierophant next month.

I have to admit that I was a little nervous about working with Adelfa. After all, she’s a successful life coach, Instagram influencer, and lives in southern California with her husband actor Manny Montana—about as different a life from my rustic off-grid existence as you can get! How would we relate to each other as author and editor? Yet I soon found out we had a lot in common. On the very first page of her book, Marr writes of her struggles with anxiety and overthinking:

In my mind, being in control of my emotions—and ideally, the emotions of everyone around me—was the only thing that could keep me safe… I truly believed that I could eliminate any uncertainty, awkwardness, or discomfort from my life if I just thought hard enough.

When I read these words, I felt like I’d been struck by lightning.

Like Adelfa, I’d spent long periods of my life believing that I was responsible for, well, everything. It was my job to defuse conflicts, pre-empt disasters, and eliminate all negative emotions in myself and everyone around me. I was constantly rehearsing conversations, convinced that if I could just think of the perfect thing to say and the perfect way to say it, I would magically gain control over the situations that scared me. Yet for all my thinking and planning, life continued to be as awkward, uncertain, and uncomfortable as ever, and even my “successes” at controlling outcomes failed to bring me lasting peace.

As I slowly read and edited Adelfa’s manuscript, I began to remember a time in my life when I hadn’t been so fearful and controlling—when, in fact, I’d routinely taken risks that many people would find uncomfortable, with complete trust that everything would turn out OK.

At eighteen years old I was obsessed with hitchhiking. In high school, I’d read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, and On the Road. I’d also recently discovered mysticism, and begun devouring the works of Rumi and Lao Tzu. Between the swaggering characters I encountered in the novels and the thrilling ideas I absorbed from the poems, I was filled with eagerness to hit the open road and discover these states of freedom for myself.

I’ll never forget the day I walked to the side of the highway and stuck my thumb out for the first time, carrying a backpack stuffed with books and a guitar I had no idea how to play. The sky was clear and blue, and the air pleasantly chilly. I was filled with a sense of hope, possibility, excitement, and absolute trust. I trusted my body to walk for miles if I needed to, and my instincts to turn down rides that didn’t feel safe. I trusted my long johns and raincoat to keep me warm and dry if the weather turned stormy. Most importantly, I trusted in life. I believed that everything was a kind of teacher—the road, the drivers, the weather—and I was open to all of it, with a near-total absence of fear.

For me, hitchhiking represented a voluntary surrendering of control. I didn’t know who I would encounter on any given day, where I would sleep, or whether I would spend hours in a state of hunger, wet, or cold. Although cell phones existed at the time, they were not yet ubiquitous, and I was unencumbered by one. I was happy not knowing, and not having the option of knowing—content with being confined to the present moment, to the direct sensory experiences of wind, sunshine, and rain, and to the feelings of joy, curiosity, pride, and trepidation that came and went like passing clouds.

For the next four years, I hitchhiked on a regular basis—a short trip here, a long expedition there, sometimes alone and sometimes with a friend. I slept in public parks, in strangers’ homes, and in the occasional campsite or motel room. I interacted with people from all walks of life, and became very competent at meeting my own basic needs and staying calm and cheerful under all sorts of conditions. Those years were a magical period in which my tendency to trust was at an all-time high, and my tendency to control was at a corresponding low.

This all changed when, at age twenty-two, I got into my first “serious” relationship with a man I’d met after—what else?—hitchhiking to San Francisco. Interestingly, the easy and expansive sense of trust I’d felt towards the universe while hitchhiking dissolved abruptly when it came to trusting a specific person. I felt anxious about my partner’s eating habits, his approach to finances, his behavior in social situations, and a myriad of other subjects. My not-so-subtle attempts to control these things did little to gain me the sense of safety I craved, while doing much to aggravate my partner.

In Lord Knows This Sh*t Ain’t Easy, Adelfa Marr writes, “When you put your anxieties in charge, the first thing they do is cannibalize your joys.” This was certainly true for me. Like a swarm of termites, my anxieties about being vulnerable to another person swiftly began to bore holes in the joy I felt at falling in love. Before I knew it, I had turned from a carefree hitchhiker into a micromanaging control freak. Although I had no problem trusting strangers with lead feet to give me rides down winding forest roads in the backs of their pickup trucks, I could barely let my partner drive me across town without holding my breath and clenching my foot on an imaginary brake pedal, convinced it was only my hypervigilance that kept us from crashing.

Over the years I stayed in that relationship, this mystery tormented me: how could I be so trusting in some domains of life, and so controlling in others? What was it that made me shift so dramatically between these two states? When I was alone, I could sometimes recapture the sense of cosmic certainty I’d experienced in my days on the road; yet when I was with my partner, I often found myself in an anxious, contracted state that was anything but mystical. Which one was my “real” self? Was I a trusting, mystical person or a neurotic, controlling person?

It was only while editing Adelfa’s book that I finally stumbled upon the answer: I wasn’t inherently trusting or inherently controlling. These qualities simply appeared or disappeared based on how free I perceived myself to be. As an inexperienced twenty-something who had been socialized to value long-term commitment, it didn’t occur to me that I had the freedom to leave my relationship. It therefore became ever more important to control my partner and somehow turn him into the person I wanted him to be.

As a hitchhiker, I knew myself to be free, and could therefore accept all kinds of uncomfortable experiences, knowing I could always leave. I didn’t need to control things to feel safe, because my freedom was my safety. In the context of my first big relationship, I’d believed myself to be bound, and therefore fought tooth and nail to ensure that things would go my way. I’d forgotten my freedom like some precious coin that rolled under the couch, and with it, lost my sense of safety. For me, therefore, regaining that sense of mystical trust was contingent on regaining a sense of freedom. The more I learned to bring my hitchhiker self to my relationships, the better a partner I became—and the less I felt the need to control the minutiae of my own life and the lives of those around me.

In Lord Knows This Sh*t Ain’t Easy, Adelfa Marr gives us practical ways to reorient our lives towards trust, spontaneity, and ease, no matter how far down the rabbit hole of control we may have fallen. The tools she shares have been life-changing for me, and I believe many readers will feel the same way. I wish her wise, entertaining, and deeply relatable book had been around when I was twenty-two. As it is, I will be handing out copies to everyone I know—and to every hitchhiker I pick up along the lush Hawaii roads, trusting that they are all teachers in disguise.

Sincerely,

Hilary Smith

Senior Editor, Hierophant Publishing

Click here to read Hilary's previous essay, "A Tale of Two Waterfalls."

A worldwide pandemic, climate change, social injustices. . .

Over the last few years, it’s seemed like things on the outside are falling apart! Meanwhile, on the inside, many of us are struggling with feelings of unworthiness, fear of failure, and difficulty finding hope—all while trying to be perfect partners, parents, or friends!

In a world that seems increasingly chaotic, unpredictable, and sometimes downright scary, is it still possible to live a happy and fulfilling life?

Beloved life coach and self-care guru Adelfa Marr tackles this question with her characteristic wit, humor, and warmth, and readers will find a refreshing take in her answers.

Marr understands that self-care isn’t all bubble baths and scented candles. This book gets into the messy stuff—the fear, the shame, the regret—and shows how we can all become more authentic, joyful, and courageous versions of ourselves.

Lord knows this sh*t ain’t easy, but with Adelfa Marr as your guide, you may find that it’s not as hard as you think.