Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.

ARISTOTLE

Throughout this whole journey, Bikko Máhte had been quietly alongside me. With so very few words he had taught me so much.

A few years ago, he made me a drum. It was beautifully crafted. When I went to his house to receive it, he insisted that we play together. As we fell into the hypnotic rhythms of the overtones and undertones, he suddenly stopped.

‘What is this drum made from?’

‘Silver birch, silver, reindeer antler and the skin of a reindeer,’ I replied.

‘What does it mean to you that an animal died for you to have this drum?’

I was a little shocked by the sudden question. ‘I don’t really know,’ I said.

‘I thought not, by the way you play. If you wish to learn to play this drum, you must learn what it is to hunt and kill. How can you own and play a drum like this if you don’t know what it means to do so?’

I knew immediately that he was right. I promised him I would find a way.

A few months later, I spent some days with a friend of a friend called Will. He looked after the wild deer that roamed across three organic farms in Wiltshire. Deer are without natural predators in the UK. Humans have destroyed them. Without natural predators, the deer herds can grow too large and this can lead to sickness in the herd and in the land. Will had grown up as a landsman. Hunting had always been part of his life. He’d agreed to take me hunting too.

He began by teaching me to shoot. He made it plain that unless he could be assured that I was a good enough shot, there would no hunting. He then taught me the rudiments of stalking.

We had risen very early on my second morning with him. At 9 a.m. we returned to his home to rest and I went back to bed. I dreamed I was hunting a three-year-old healthy buck that I would kill later in the day. In the dream, I spoke to him and he told me that he would be my prey.

I woke up feeling a mixture of excited and sad. I’d told Will about my reason for hunting and he understood that taking life was a big deal.

Late in the afternoon, we went out to hunt. We had no luck at first and as the light faded, Will seemed to think that we’d missed our chance for the day.

I was certain the deer would show up. ‘Can we wait a little longer?’ I asked him.

We were perched on a high-seat hunting tower where a field met some woods. As I spoke, he hushed me.

‘Over there.’

At first I saw nothing, but then I realized that not more than 130 feet away from us, a young buck had come into the field and was standing in the one place in the field where I could safely shoot him.

I slowly raised my rifle, breathing slowly as Will had taught me. I had no idea whether or not I would go through with it.

As I saw the deer in the sights of my rifle, I felt a deep connection with him. He stayed where he was and I had the uncanny feeling that he was aware of me and of his own death. My finger was on the trigger. I said a quiet prayer and fired.

Immediately I saw the spray of blood that signifies a hit in the heart and the deer took off.

I was shaking and even though I very rarely smoke, I was glad of the tobacco.

Soon we were on the red trail and we found the body of the deer about 300 feet from where I’d shot him.

‘I’ll leave you with him for a while,’ Will said kindly.

I sat with the body of the deer and my tears flowed. I had killed him. Of my own free will.

I had such mixed emotions. On the one hand, I felt devastated and my tears were appropriate. On the other hand, something as old as the hills had been awakened in me. I looked at my trigger finger and saw that death was in my hands.

Being the bringer of death changed my relationship to dying. At that moment I was able to take another step towards accepting death as part of life and, in so doing, accept my own mortality.

I sat with the deer and offered tobacco for his spirit. As I did so, I heard the name Ré ir Ré and a song came to me with which I could honour the life I had taken. It was a fierce moment as I sat there singing, my throat sore and yet my voice strong.

Will waited patiently and when I let him know that I was done, he taught me how to take care of the carcass. We hung the body overnight and the next day I skinned and butchered the deer. My family and I ate the meat over the following months and a good friend, Dorrie, made a drum for me from the skin.

As Bikko Máhte had thought, my relationship with my drums deepened immeasurably after that. Now when I pick up a drum to play, I feel what has been given and I do my best to receive the gift again and to honour the one who gave it.

In 2015 Bikko Máhte decided to give me his own drum, a drum he’d been playing for many, many years. He spoke to me about our work together and told me that the reason we’d been close was that I’d never tried to take anything from him or from the Sami culture. He told me that the work that Susannah and I were doing was pure medicine. And he gave me permission to tell you his story and the story of our relationship.

Receiving his drum was the closest I will ever get to receiving a PhD. When he honoured me with the gift, he told me, ‘If you ever feel you have finished with this drum, please either bring it back to the Sami museum in Kautokeino or pass it on to your son.’

A shaman is called into being by their own predilection for matters of the spirit, a journey interspersed with healing crises through the shadowlands of their own psyche and, finally, by their community and elders. It has taken me half a century to recognize and accept my own nature.

When I look back over my life so far, I see clearly that the healing journey I’ve taken has been focused on changing the stories that have imprisoned me. ‘Being who you have been told to be is more important than being who you actually are’ and ‘You are not enough as you are’ were the messages I found again and again at the roots of my unhelpful behaviour. I was more than a little hypnotized by these stories. I found it hard to come out from behind the masks I’d learned to wear. For years, all my shamanic experiences fed those hungry ghosts inside me. But the ghosts just chewed them up and demanded more. And I didn’t feel that I was good enough, magical enough, shamanic enough. My focus was firmly on how others saw me, just as it had been trained to be. At the same time, my visions opened my eyes to the majesty and the joy of life. They reminded me of what I’d known as a child. But deep down, I continued to sing the painful song that is doing so much to destroy the fabric of life on Earth: ‘I am not enough. I don’t have enough. I need more.’ I believe that shifting our identity from this debilitating mantra is the healing task of our times.

Round and round I went, until I eventually found a ground of being inside myself, rooted in my body and in a sense of self that wasn’t dependent on the approval of others.

I couldn’t have landed in that simple everyday acceptance of my own nature without the help and validation of the indigenous shamans, indigenous people and many others along the way who gave me their trust over the years. Trust is a validation far more real and valuable than approval.

When we were last in the Achuar village of T’inkias, I was asked to give a healing to an old shaman who was visiting from another village. He had terrible pain in his legs. I went to work with him in the late afternoon. His relatives were close by and I did my work to the best of my ability.

On the other side of the house we were working in, a tiny old woman was watching us carefully. She was the shaman’s wife. Once we’d finished, I was asked to work with her as well. Through translation, it was explained to me that she was having some problems with her breathing. She was the archetypal Amazonian grandmother. The lines on her face told many stories of life in the forest. She was beautiful.

I sat down on the packed earth floor in front of her and started to drum in order to get myself into that hollow-bone state. When I opened my eyes to begin my work, she had calmly removed her top and was sitting half naked in front of me. I will never forget how humbled I felt at that moment. I was in the home of this woman’s family. The smoke from the fire was drifting through the open-sided house and there were sounds of children playing and village life all around us. And here in front of me, open to whatever I could offer her, sat this dignified woman, made stronger than I could ever hope to be by her total vulnerability. She smiled and I wondered if she knew the gift her trust was giving me.

Ever since I discovered there was such a thing as shamanism, I’ve wanted to find a form of it that is appropriate for the place and time we live in. Susannah has been my constant companion on that journey and Movement Medicine is the result of our search.

We have been blessed by meeting and working with many shamans from different cultures, and there is the temptation to imitate those we admire, but I’ve always been told that the point is to rediscover the medicine in myself, my culture and my lands.

So, yes, I have feathers and drums. Yes, I use a shakapa. Yes, I have beautifully coloured wristbands and seedpod shaman’s belts. I carry many gifts from those I have met. I wear them and use them for three reasons. First, because I have been asked to do so for my protection, and I have recovered from my naivety and recognized the need for protection. Second, I wish to honour the people who gave them to me and, in the case of our Amazonian family, the unbroken lineages they have come from. When I put my shaman’s gear on to work, I remember them and what they stand for and I say a prayer for them. And I remember what it is like to have an unbroken shamanic lineage that goes back thousands of years and I am strengthened by it. And the third reason is that I have learned that accepting help and guidance from trustworthy sources is a necessity.

But I was brought up in the modern world and one of the reasons why it took me so long to accept my nature as a shaman was because despite the fact that I was having all these experiences, part of me didn’t believe they were real. I often experienced a clash of cultures or stories inside myself. In the rational world, these things didn’t happen. And yet they were my experience.

Modern science is, however, beginning to show us what shamans have always known: all things are connected. And I’ve found that the more I’ve paid attention to how things are connected, the more connections have made themselves apparent to me. When I’ve allowed my cynicism to take over, it has taken over. And the world has been all the greyer for it. When I’ve allowed my curiosity to open my mind and my senses, on the other hand, some of what is hidden in plain sight has become visible to me. For me, the most basic practice of everyday shamanism is the simple act of noticing.

In June 2013 Susannah and I moved into a new home. It was the first time we’d ever taken on the guardianship and ownership of a significant piece of land. Learning to look after that land has turned out to be the missing cornerstone that has finally given my life a balance I’d previously only dreamed of. Working on the land has made me pay so much more attention to the value of simple things.

As the years go by, life feels more and more precious to me. Not just when I’m in a ritual space but in the everyday rituals of how I relate, work, shop, learn to look after the land I live on, eat, laugh, pray and make love. My journey has woken me up to the magic that is present in the most ordinary of circumstances and it has shown me that it is in being who I am and giving what I’ve got that my fulfilment as a human being lies.

Nine months after we moved into our new home, I was doing a birthday ritual on our new land. I was sitting under an oak by the stream that runs through the land, drumming with the drum Bikko Máhte had recently given me. I sang for several hours, giving thanks to the waters, the trees, the rocks and all the many blessings of my life. I was in a whimsical mood and a question popped out of me before I could censor it: ‘Great Spirit, I know you’re busy and I’ve never asked before, but would you mind sending me a little sign to show me that my prayers have been heard?’

I wasn’t really expecting an answer, but immediately after I’d finished speaking, I spotted a kingfisher flying towards me from my right. The kingfisher is the closest we have in Britain to the hummingbird. This one flew right up to me and circled my head three times. As usual, I burst into that sweet blend of laughter and tears as the spirit of life revealed a little of its mystery.

When I went back to the house, I told Susannah the story and she smiled a strange smile. Later she gave me my birthday gift and card. When I opened the card, I found it showed a beautiful kingfisher, all blues and silver light as it dived for fish.

This time we both fell into the delight of our laughter and tears. Susannah told me she’d bought the card for me three months before.

So, what have I learned on the journey so far? Over the years, I’ve had a real battle with the fear of being who I was and the bitter lack of self-acceptance that underlay it. I struggled to balance the parts of me that wanted to fit in and be acceptable with my existential need to stay in touch with the magical wild of the imaginal world of pure spirit.

This is still ongoing. The part of me that feels bewitched by the spell of the times can easily be overwhelmed by fear of what is happening in the world. In that fear, I see those parts of myself that cling to certainty and flee from the unknown. And what a temptation certainty is! But the more I rest in the knowledge of who I am and what I am committed to, the more I am free.

In my freedom, I choose to do my best to take small, consistent, everyday steps (and occasional quantum leaps) in the direction my heart calls me. On this road, there is dignity. There is the remembrance that my perception of myself and what is or isn’t possible is radically affected by the story I tell. And there is the remembrance that though I don’t decide what happens in life, I’m free to choose how to dance with it to the best of my ability.

I’ve come to accept that good and evil exist in this world. And, equally importantly, these forces exist inside me and I have the free will to choose the road I walk on. And the responsibility for that decision.

Shamanism isn’t nice. It’s as much about the darkness as it is about the light. It’s as much about the jaguar as it is about the butterfly. For those of us brought up in the modern world, it has to embrace the body and the heart every bit as much as it embraces the mind. Jaguar in the Body invokes the raw, embodied power of our true and wild natures and of nature itself. The jaguar is a fierce protector of what it loves. Butterfly in the Heart invokes the shining and fleeting beauty that we catch glimpses of in one another when we feel safe enough to see and be seen. The butterfly is the miracle of transformation that touches us with its soft and silent wings.

As in the micro, so in the macro. Shamanism has a role to play in reminding us that we all have a lot of jaguar power inside us and we are often blind to the effect its unconscious use has on ourselves, on others and on the environment. And shamanism consistently reminds us how important it is to protect those parts of the complex web of life that are fragile and butterfly-like, and that our modern way of life is deeply damaging to them.

By recognizing this dance in myself and owning all aspects of it, I am bound to do my best to stand up for what I believe in. The shamanism I practise demands more than sitting still in pretty visions singing about the light. Movement Medicine invites us to stand up and do all that we can to bring our visions and dreams to Earth as an act of gratitude for the great mystery that gives us life. I have learned that we weren’t given this Earth to do with as we pleased, but we came out of it and we are part of it.

Movement has been and remains my central medicine. In our Movement Medicine rituals, when the door to spirit opens, I know it is through my own effort and concentration that the connection has been made. And, perhaps paradoxically, my work with plants has helped me to know this more and more.

In the dance, I’ve found a way to acknowledge the paradoxes of life. In each ritual, I know and commit more and more to what matters to me. And yet at the same time, I’m bowing at the feet of the great mystery called living and dying, and acknowledging how very little I know.

I’m sitting in front of a small lake with a lively stream behind me. I’m surrounded by the old oaks who have lived here an awful lot longer than I have. They stand majestic in the landscape, singing and dancing in the wind. I am one of the guardians of this land. I have been learning how to look after it and what it needs from me. I have received such strength in return from the land I now call home. The sun is up and I’ve been here all night praying. Again.

Last night was New Year’s Eve. Susannah and Reuben and I spent some time in our ritual drumming giving thanks for the life we live and praying for the year ahead. Reuben is about to head off to continue his training in shamanism, yoga and outdoor survival skills. Susannah has a new album out. And I have this book coming into the world in June.

As we drummed, I entered the realms of the chaos we are living through as a species. I witnessed the turmoil of clashing ideologies and the horrible suffering of innocent peoples, animals and landscapes. Our voices and the rhythms of the drums made a path for me to follow. I saw shamans all around the world doing the same thing. And people, spiritual and practical and political and musical and young and old, and black and white and red and yellow, all in their own ways, their own traditions, carving pathways through the chaos, dreaming and weaving, being and doing what was needed to find a way through.

Warmed by the heat of the winter fire and with the musical sound of the stream rushing past, I felt the power of these elemental forces inside me and all around us. In the sauna, sweating, I felt the blessing of the fire. Afterwards, we washed in the stream.

The rituals of everyday shamanism help me to remember the bigger picture of my life and to connect to the bigger powers that shape it.

This book is dedicated to the medicine generation and to all those who wish to bring heaven to Earth and aren’t afraid to do the work of facing themselves in order to find themselves. The harvest of that work is being who we are and giving what we’ve got. There is only one difference, I’ve discovered, between those who keep their dreams in the sky and those who attempt to bring them to Earth. And, as old school as it may sound, that difference is work.

Not long after I finished writing the first draft of this book, I felt a strong need to drum for my dear friend and guide Bikko Máhte Penta, White Eagle. The next day I received the sad news that he had died. He had been out gathering wood for the winter when his heart had stopped.

As Susannah and I were driving to work a few days later through the lanes of Devon on a bright autumn day, I was astonished to see a blue morpho butterfly in front of the car. I stopped on the narrow lane to watch it and it flew back to us and fluttered around the windows for a while, coming as close as it could without actually entering the car.

We were both open-mouthed. Magic was in the air. Blue morphos live in the Amazon rainforest. For our friends there, their appearance often signifies the blessing of an ancestor or a last visit from someone who has just died.

There was a butterfly farm close to where we were driving and I assumed the blue morpho had escaped from there, but the timing of its appearance and the wonder we felt in its presence led me to believe that Bikko Máhte had come to say a final goodbye.

In the days after he died, I drummed for him every night. One evening, as I was drumming in our kitchen, I saw him – playful, free and with a big smile on his face. His antics made me laugh as I travelled on the overtones of the drum he had given me. And then he turned to face me and looked me in the eyes.

For the fourth time in my life, I felt the touch of lightning. For the fourth time, I felt hammered into the ground. My body shook violently as I struggled to maintain balance and consciousness.

At that moment, between the worlds, White Eagle gave me his last gift. I can’t tell you what it was. I don’t yet know. I can only tell you that all the ancient strength of our meeting, all the humility he had displayed, the trust he had placed in me and the faith he had had in the work Susannah and I had carried out landed in me in a new way.

I will be forever grateful for the love, guidance and support I and my family received from this gentle yet powerful man. He courageously held the essence of his people’s shamanic traditions in his shaman’s heart. He was consistently at my back throughout my journey and I will miss his physical presence on this Earth more than words can say. But more than that, I send a prayer every day that his spirit continues to fly on the wings of the white eagle and finds its way home.

Ya’Acov Darling Khan
January 2017