‘I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination… Knowledge is limited, imagination encircles the world.’

ALBERT EINSTEIN

I had invited Bikko Máhte to come and join us for the Norwegian workshop. At his request, I’d also invited a Cherokee medicine woman named Rainbow Medicine Walker. They knew each other from a gathering of shamans in Finland some years before and I’d spoken to her after my dream ritual in the Amazon. When I’d woken up in tears, broken-hearted by the remembrance that we’d collectively forgotten where we came from, I’d followed an instinct to call her. It was 4 a.m. in the UK and 8 p.m. in Washington State, where she lived. We hadn’t spoken before.

I explained that Bikko Máhte had given me her number and asked me to call her. After some courtesies, she asked me why I’d called. I told her about my dream and I heard her gasp at the other end of the phone.

‘That’s quite something, Ya’Acov,’ she said. ‘I’ve been walking in the mountains today and I found myself weeping. The trees and the spirits were telling me that we’d forgotten where we’d come from and that I needed to remind my people.’

I was stunned to hear this. Our connection had clearly already been made and I immediately invited her to join us in Norway.

The workshop was a wonderful gathering. It took place at Nissedal, by a beautiful fjord. The focus was on shamanic trance – we were intent on following the beat of the drums to the deepest place we could journey together and, in that place, seek a vision for the next chapter of our lives.

We spent four days preparing to go into ceremony and on the first day we were deep in our dance when Bikko Máhte decided to join us. As he walked into the room, the sound system blew a fuse. Everyone turned to look at him, but he just threw his hands up in the air as if to say ‘Nothing to do with me’ and gestured to my drum. ‘Best use that,’ he laughed.

Laughing with him, I picked it up and for the next hour we all danced to the beat of the drum. Bikko Máhte joined in, playful as a child and clearly enjoying himself immensely.

Chris Luttechau, a good friend also on the shaman’s path, and I were sharing a small wooden cabin on the shore of the fjord. Bikko Máhte was staying a short distance away in a similar cabin. One early afternoon after lunch, we were all standing at the water’s edge together. The fjord had been covered by a blanket of grey cloud all day. Bikko Máhte called me over to him. He explained through a translator that some yoiks (spirit songs) were very old and were handed down from generation to generation. He said he knew a very old one for the sun. He started to sing in the quiet, guttural voice that was his way. As he sang, a remarkable thing happened. Right above us, the clouds momentarily parted and a shaft of milky sunlight bathed the jetty on which we were standing.

I looked at him wide-eyed and he smiled his cheeky smile and laughed. ‘Tell me a story,’ he said.

This was how our conversations happened. He never sat me down to teach me anything, but when I was with him, I was always learning.

On a recent visit, I’d asked him to share his knowledge of healing work with me. He’d agreed and we’d gone into his living room and cleared away the coffee table to make more space. He’d then lain down on a blanket on the floor.

I’d looked at him, taken aback and certain he’d misunderstood my request. I told him so, but he just smiled and invited me to go ahead and do my work. Nearly all the healing techniques I’d learned had been through sitting beside other shamans and medicine people doing their work. But when the teacher feels you are ready, you are thrown in at the deep end. Bikko Máhte clearly thought me ready.

I was nervous, but I took a deep breath, called my spirits, did my best to get out of the way and get down to work. He was satisfied. There was no need for feedback. Either the healing would work or it wouldn’t. I was so grateful for his trust and the chance to repay a little of the debt I owed this humble and powerful man for the manifold ways in which he’d helped me. And the confidence and implicit support this traditional mode of shamanic training gave me allowed me to start my one-to-one work as a shamanic healer.

Back by the fjord, now grey again, since the sun had disappeared almost as soon as Bikko Máhte had finished singing, I wondered which story to share with him. Then an event that had happened several years before, just after our son was born, came to mind.

I’d been working with my drum, attempting to guide myself on a shamanic journey through the roots, trunk and branches of the tree of life. Even though I’d owned my drum for many years, my relationship with it as a shamanic tool was just beginning and its efficacy and my own skill were very hit and miss. All I knew was that repetitive rhythm was good for trance and trance was good for journeying. So I wasn’t expecting much, but on that particular day the doors of perception opened wide.

In my vision, I find the tree of life and enter into the root system through a beautifully carved door in the trunk. There is a circular staircase going down, lit by smoking torches. After climbing down several hundred steps into the darkness, I emerge in to a poorly lit mechanic’s workshop. All the tools of the trade are lying around and there are several work benches. There is a faint smell of oil and rust and an air of organized chaos.

What happens next happens very fast. Several mechanics in overalls enter the workshop, pick up my body and get to work. They are almost gnome-like in appearance. I feel no sense of alarm and nobody speaks. The mechanics take my body to pieces. On one work bench, they work with my arms, on another my legs; on a third, my organs are spread out. The mechanics are cleaning, oiling, stretching and tweaking these parts in all manner of ways. I am clearly not in my body, as I am able to watch as it is entirely dismembered.

Each part is worked with and then put to one side. Once the mechanics have finished the cleaning, they insert 63 tiny crystals of varying colours into the different parts before putting the whole thing back together again.

I am then back inside my body and before I have a moment to ask anything or even feel what they’ve done, they lift me up and throw me with huge force into the Upper World (also known as the branches of the Tree of life).

I emerge from the dim light of the Lower World into the bright light of the Upper World and land on a gossamer carpet that is swirling like cloud beneath my feet. I look around to try to get my bearings.

Huge beings are moving silently about. They must be 30 feet high and they are swirling like the ground beneath my feet. I walk amongst them, feeling awe and peace in equal measure. All I can hear is the sound of air moving through the leaves and the melody of the wind grabs my attention totally. I feel rather than hear the words that are then spoken to me. They are like a tender caress inside the chambers of my heart and I sense their resonance shimmering throughout my body.

‘It doesn’t matter what you do, Ya’Acov. How you do it is what matters most. Intention is everything. It steers the mechanism of your fate. The dreams you carry inside you have many origins. Some belong to your spirit. Some are handed to you by your ancestors. Some you will bring to Earth. Others you will pass on to the next generation.’

I have so much to ask, but I’m not given the chance. Instead, the carpet beneath me dissolves and I fall back into my physical body.

As I opened my eyes after that journey, I was amazed to find myself still drumming. I gradually slowed the tempo, spoke my gratitudes and came to a stop. There was a humming in the room and inside me and it took me several hours to recover my normal perception.

Bikko Máhte had been listening quietly while I told the story. Then he said just one word: ‘Shaman.’

For the first time, I felt neither shame nor pride. I simply felt that my vocation and my journey had been accurately named and I nodded quietly.

I had my drum with me and Bikko Máhte picked it up and asked me if he could play it. I agreed. He looked at it, then listened with his hands to the contours of the wood and the skin. Afterwards, he lifted it up to the sky and held it out to the four directions. I sat on the shore and watched, fascinated. After a while, he played one note. Then he waited. He watched the sky, the birds, the wind and the water. Then he hit the drum again, just a single beat, and listened. One beat, listening, one beat, listening. I wondered what he was doing. I think I even fell asleep at one point. Eventually, he was done.

He then told me that each sound of the drum had a different quality and therefore spoke to different parts of nature and the spirit world. He told me to practise playing the different areas of the drum and watching the effect it had around me and inside me. I’d never been taught about the drum, and in these hours with this beautiful Sami elder, I recognized how very much there was to learn.

Chris and I had been planning to take a little rowing trip out to a small island that was about 600 feet from the shore. It was now too late for that, but later that night I dreamed I was there. I climbed a tree that was in the centre of the island and found myself once again in the Upper World. I walked along a wide tree-lined path until I came to a set of huge golden doors, guarded by two black dogs. I asked for permission to enter and I found myself in a throne room. I sensed a great force and I sat and waited for the dream to unfold.

Sitting on the throne was Odin. Although I’d heard his name, I didn’t know who he was. Somehow I knew that I wasn’t allowed to look directly at him, but I could see his feet and I could hear him speak.

‘The shamanic traditions of your land have been broken,’ he said. ‘The threads have been cut.’

Much as I respected the Druids who still held to their old traditions, and even though Celtic shamanism was beginning a renaissance, I knew this to be true.

‘You and Susannah will continue to be given opportunities to learn from the traditions of other lands and you must find ways to distil and translate what you receive. Your medicine is coming.’

Disturbed in a way that I couldn’t quite put my finger on, I bowed and thanked this old force of nature for his words.

I woke in my bed and lay there, unable to get back to sleep. Weren’t we already offering our medicine? What could the old Norse god have meant? In the years that followed, I would find out, but for now, there was an indefinable discomfort deep inside my belly, like an itch that I couldn’t scratch.

My time working with Victor was coming to a natural close. But before I completed my training with him, I went to one more gathering, at a venue in Wales called Spirit Horse. The final ceremony we did was a medicine walk through the night to visit and pay our respects to the podorios, or elemental powers associated with each direction.

We worked in groups of four, carrying smoking coals from one fire to the next to connect the four directions. Walking through the wind and the rain in the dark, keeping the coals alight and praying at each fire made for a tough night. By the end, as we reached the central fire, I was soaked, freezing cold and exhausted. The rain had finally stopped and there was a misty silence. The very first light of dawn was beginning to appear in the eastern sky.

I was sitting quietly, alone, close to the fire, finding a way to complete the ritual before I went to bed for some well-earned rest, when I heard a noise behind me and turned around.

I was more than a little surprised to see a beautiful woman standing there, dressed in buckskins with flowers in her hair. It was hard to tell her age, but she was clearly Native American. I was certain that my smoke-sore eyes were seeing things through the mist and changing light, but the image stayed steady.

The woman began to walk towards me until she was standing right in front of me. I was on my knees with tiredness and it seemed appropriate to remain there. My heart was racing, but at the same time, the closer she came, the calmer I felt.

I would have to use poetry to describe her beauty. She was physically beautiful, but much more than that, she was beauty itself. She looked at me with kind, wise eyes, and as she did so, the world stopped. She didn’t speak, but I heard her with every cell of my being.

She told me she’d come because of a promise I’d made some years before about the pipe I’d been given. I knew precisely what she meant. I’d promised that when I’d remembered how to pray, I would return the pipe to its own culture. She nodded as if she was hearing my thoughts.

‘That time has come. I am White Buffalo Calf Woman and I have come to reclaim what is mine. It is time to return what you were loaned.’ Her message given, she turned to leave.

‘Wait! Please wait.’

There was a pause and then she turned again to face me.

‘How will I know who to give it to? And how can I thank you?’

‘You will know and you can thank me through the way you live.’

And then she was gone. My heart burst. There were tears streaming down my face. I felt at once blessed and alone. We’d sung songs to White Buffalo Woman many times. I knew that she was the spirit being who’d originally brought the pipe to the Lakota people. To have an encounter with her was beyond my wildest dreams.

I knew Victor had his elders, and even though they were in Mexico, I quickly made up my mind to ask him to take the pipe to them as my thanks for what I’d received through his lineage. I asked him and he agreed. After the workshop, we said our goodbyes and I solemnly handed my pipe, wrapped in its beautiful black and white blanket, over to him.

I thought that was the end of it, but a week later, while working away from home, I dreamed that my pipe was being handed to a Native American grandfather for a blessing. I woke up, confused. The grandfather I’d seen in my dream was clearly not a Wirarika person. Had something happened?

I called up my friend Simon, with whom Victor had been staying after our ceremony. Before I could ask him anything about my pipe, he said how glad he was that I’d rung because he’d been trying to get in touch with me. He told me that Victor had decided at the last minute not to take the pipe, feeling that it wasn’t supposed to go with him.

‘After Victor left,’ he told me, ‘a medicine woman came to stay with me. Her name is Dina. She’s a Native American teacher. Something remarkable happened. She told me that she’d been without a pipe for some years but that recently she’d had a dream showing her it was time to work with a pipe again. In her dream, she saw the pipe that she’d be working with. It had two buffalos carved into the bowl and a very specific black and red pattern burned into the stem.’

Simon knew my pipe. We’d sat in ceremony together many times.

‘I knew immediately it was your pipe,’ he continued, ‘and I knew it would be okay with you, so I showed it to her. When she unwrapped it, she smiled and told me it was the very pipe she’d seen in her dream!’

I was delighted. ‘Is she still with you?’

‘No. She left two days ago. She said she was going to take the pipe to her elder and ask him to bless it for her.’

I was speechless. My pipe had found its way home and spirit had taken care of it.

My imagination had always been strong and for most of my life my everyday reality had been struggling to keep up with it. Now the scales were shifting. Synchronicities were increasingly common and now it was my imagination that was struggling to keep up with my everyday reality.

Although I felt clearer than I ever had before, it had become obvious that the part of me that liked to think I was in control clearly wasn’t. At the same time, I felt how important it was to continue to refine and sharpen my intention, communicate it precisely in ceremony and, most importantly, live it through my day-to-day actions.

I was learning how to connect with the powers of nature and the spirit world in a more grounded way. I was beginning to find my feet in the shaman’s world.

I had already discovered that one of the best ways to learn something was to teach it and had created an exercise called ‘Flying with Both Feet on the Ground’. It was clear to me that I was teaching what I most needed to learn.