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