Clearing My First Spirit
On accepting that the Universe has been training me for this, and launching a Substack
On the day I cleared my first spirit from a hotel room, I was supposed to be in a taxi to Guayaquil to spend a couple of nights with an old friend before I flew back to the States for Christmas.
The hotel room was beautiful. Sheer curtains hung over east-facing windows. Beyond them, Cuenca stretched into the mountains: red tile roofs and white cathedrals, a shimmering stretch of river.
But. Something was wrong in the back corner.
For five weeks I’d been traveling through Ecuador on a digital nomad package with Selina Hotels. First the capitol town of Quito; then the outdoor adventure mecca of Baños; then the rainforest town of Tena, perched on the edge of the Amazon; finally Cuenca, colonial city of the south.
There, I stayed for ten days in a compact room on the third floor, with a tiny balcony overlooking a loud main drag. I’d checked out that morning, only to find myself back at Selina by dinnertime. The Tres Cruces Pass in the Andes had slid, delaying my driver by hours; then, his black Chevy Sail broke down fifteen minutes into our trip.
This time, I stepped into an attic suite on the fifth floor.
I felt the energy immediately as a denseness over my breast bone. A slight tightening of my throat. Even just looking at the back corner of the room filled me with a powerful aversion, the desire to gag.
I sighed. Of course I would be brought back to spend the night in a room like this.
It was a test.
I carefully set my duffel down and unzipped the top compartment, to dig out the spiritual tools I now traveled with: palo santo wood and a lighter; a chime for detaching spirits from my energy field; stones I could use to anchor protective shields.
“I call to me Archangel Michael and the protection of his blue flame angels,” I said aloud into the room, before approaching the corner. “I call in my guides and ancestors who have my highest and best in mind. No malevolent energy or entities may enter my field. No energetic traces or trails may be used to find or follow me.”
I did not set out to become a person who worked with non-human energies. My first book—published two years before this particular hotel room—included extensive reporting from factories and mines around the world, and required that I speak into the worlds of electrophysiology, healthcare policy, and medical technology. It mattered to me to seem a sane, rational person, armed with an arsenal of peer-reviewed information even as my work crossed disciplines. I had an enormous, impressive brain, which I leaned on excessively.
Talking to spirits could strain my reputation.
Yet the reason I was living on the road in a foreign country was, in part, because six months earlier I’d been run out of my house—on a mesa in New Mexico—by an extremely malevolent entity.
For years now, I’d found myself growing a sort of shadow life, a second set of experiences I rarely mentioned in the presence of the first. Now they were becoming intrusive—hard to keep separated from the things people generally knew about me.
From one angle, none of this was surprising. Since my twenty-fourth birthday, I’d lived through repeated death initiations: heart surgeries, sepsis, accidental shocks to the heart, broken wires stuck inside me.
In cultures across the world, this was the mark of someone born to become a shaman.
But, not being from one of these cultures, it took a while to understand what was happening. When I was 26, I met—in rapid succession—an intuitive bodyworker at a hot spring and a psychic in a buffet line. (More on this in another post.) Over the next 12 years, tending to the trauma kicked up by those near-death experiences led me deeper into spiritual practice.
At some point, my energy brightened and sharpened. I became like a lighthouse. The spirits, drawn to me, began to arrive.
And then—oh god I did not ask for this— I had to learn to deal with them.
As far as I could tell, no one in my lineage played a publicly spiritual role. I’d grown up Methodist, a denomination that talked about angels while ignoring the existence of evil spirits. (Evil was us, not something that happened to us.) I knew about ghosts only from fetishizing shows like the 90’s Unsolved Mysteries.
Like so many white Americans, it wasn’t clear whether my ancestry gave me rights to any particular spiritual heritage. On my dad’s side, my family appeared to be from Scotland, Ireland, and England, with long layovers in Texas and Tennessee (and one appearance in Jamestown); on my mom’s side, I claimed a Norwegian great-grandmother, a Swedish great-grandfather, and a tie to “Germany” that placed my family in present-day Poland.
I envied the spiritualists I’d met whose fathers performed healings or whose great(x13)-grandmothers could be traced to the Salem witch trials. They knew who they were. In the same years my spiritual awakening was hitting its zenith, conversations about appropriation were spreading and deepening. I wanted to be careful not to take what wasn’t mine.
But what, exactly, was?
“In certain pre-literate cultures,” writes Michael Harner in the Introduction to the third edition of his classic book The Way of the Shaman, “persons spontaneously answer the “call” of shamanism without any formal training, while in others they train under the guidance of a practicing shaman anywhere from a day to five years or more.”
I’ve long believed humans are a collective organism more than we are individuals. In every culture, a set of archetypes are born: leaders, healers, storytellers. All exist to further the survival of the group.
Every society has, and needs, medicine people.
In the culture I live in, we largely ignore that other plane of existence: the one in which some of our dead don’t fully cross over. The one in which curses set upon the land hundreds of years ago still ruin lives. The one in which living in a certain house can cause an unexplained mental break.
Culturally ignoring something doesn’t make it any less real. Living in the shadow of colonization—in which the descendants both of colonizers and the colonized live (violently) divorced from their lineages—doesn’t mean fewer of us will be born as shamans. It doesn’t mean the task of maintaining balance with the unseen world is any less essential.
It just means fewer of us will answer the call. We’ve been scrambled. We don’t know what we’re doing anymore.
In a culture with intact traditions and lineage, a shaman may be recognized early, and folded into mentorship. In a culture fractured by colonialism, a shaman may be left to find their own way. In the worst-case scenario—ours, lol— they end up in psych wards or trapped in addiction: living through initiations without completing them. Broken by sensitivity rather than serving through it.
In the best case scenario, they find a way to listen to the land, to the gods around them. They study with whomever around them resonates—whomever clearly knows something.
Eventually, capable of serving, they step forward.
Hi, hello, welcome to my Substack: about being roped into a kind of work—a life path—I never expected. About not knowing what I am doing or where I am going, but trying my best anyway. About how the universe will chuck ever-escalating scenarios at someone it wants to train up.
About how the spirits always find a way.
This is a Substack about the divine process by which a person is awoken and connected with their next step, precisely when they are supposed to be—even if their culture (cultures??) is/are in tatters.
In this Substack, I’ll tell the story of how my death initiations led to the work I am beginning to do now, and about some of the challenges I’ve been asked to rise to. I’ll talk about the cultural context of shamanism (because, let’s be real, I’m still a sociologist and journalist at heart). And I’ll tell you the story, in real time, of studying at the School for Nordic Shamanism in Lavik, Norway. I begin in March.
It’s possible I’ll spin off another Substack for the other parts of me. After all: honoring this part of my experience doesn’t mean I’m casting off my other interests and storylines. I’ve been working to accept that all of these things can exist—are valid—in one body, in one life.
But friends, I’d be lying if I told you they felt integrated today. A Substack for all of them would feel like a mish-mash.
For now, I will continue writing and processing my next book Skin Hunger: A Sexual Reckoning on my Patreon account.1
In the weeks before I moved off that cursed mesa in New Mexico, a tarot reader I was then friends with said: “The things you struggle with become your mastery.”
And this has become, or will become, part of my mastery: not only the interactions with unsavory entities and entities, but the process of doing so without lineage. In writing about it, I will do the shaky work of hemming together our modern world—a modern identity—with that timeless other plane.
So—I know you are wondering—what did I do that night? (And what had already happened to me, to teach me how?)
You’ll have to read the next installation to find out. :) I’m going to aim for biweekly until the story gets told. Your reader support will be essential, and appreciated.
With much love,
Kati
p.s. The back end of this Substack remains heavily under construction. I’m learning! Please bear with me as I search for the right summary sentences, seek a logo, and build a bio. Let me know if you have a name for this newsletter that would sing.
For now, I’ve decided to choose “launched” over “perfect.”
Skin Hunger is a book about our cultural relationship to desire, played out over a life in which I’ve mostly been single. It traces my journey from judgy abstinence devotee to sex educator for a small abortion clinic, and wrestles with how both celibacy and casual sex can be, at turns, empowering or emotionally decaying.
I’m so glad you wrote this Katherine and especially glad that you named the inner conflict of being a white woman entering into liminal space without having a lineage to draw from. We need people doing this work now more than ever. Thank you.🙏
I think you have come upon a fine, brave title.
You have ambitious goals. You are wise to step out with just the single Substack, and the relaxing bi-weekly schedule.
You have reawakened in me the decades-old call to healing. When I first read about shamanism, I knew--KNEW--that I was called to it. But I let myself be sidetracked by life and children and multiple sclerosis. I'm physically limited in many ways, but my spirit is expansive. Thank you for helping me remember.