The Embarrassment of Being "Woo"
On that moment the secret won't keep itself anymore
On the first day of shaman school, seven of us sat around a wooden table with tea and coffee, telling the stories of how we’d arrived.
“I told everyone at work I was going on a wellness retreat,” one woman said, and we all laughed.
It became our shared joke: language people could understand for what we were doing. But it was also a gross mischaracterization. There would be no yoga poses. No special breathwork or massage. The home-cooked meals were not intended to be detoxifying, or not exactly.
They were intended to be alive. Part of the aliveness of everything we would speak to: in this reality, and in another. Traversed by drums and rattles, in the way passed down for thousands of years.
As I stared out over the majestic Sognefjord—glimmering beneath a still, winter sun—I marveled at the fact that we could be in shaman school and still concealing our paths. For my part, I had tried to be as open as possible with the people in my life about what I was doing—explaining the concepts of shamanism to those who did not know, clunkily summarizing the events that had led me here. I was trying to write a book about these experiences, plus this Substack, and I knew I needed to practice “coming out.”
But even I at times downplayed what I’d signed up for. “I’m doing a training in Norway,” I occasionally said tight-lipped, smiling vaguely, hoping no one would ask.
Sitting at that table toying with a piece of afternoon cake, the fire warmly snapping behind us, it struck me that for once— in this room—no one had to hide.
It wasn’t until 2019 that spiritual things began to happen to me that I couldn’t easily lie my way past in polite company.
Things like getting chased out of an Airbnb by a spirit.1
Things like my writing no longer coming when pushed—instead coming only if I attuned my energy just right. (Which meant a book very very late to its publisher. Which meant daily prayer and meditation and tarot and smudging suddenly not optional but compulsory.)
Things like booking a reiki practitioner to move what felt stuck in me artistically, and then discovering myself, mindbogglingly, a full collaborator in the process. My hands going without hesitation to spots I knew were right but that my mind could muster no explanation for. My breath and voice doing what needed to be done to move certain energies in certain ways.
The more time I spent connecting to another plane, learning how that plane worked, or wiping detritus out of my energy body—that notorious “vibration raising” akin to turning up the flame on a candle—the more I pulled spiritual encounters toward me, and the more my understanding of life became colored by them.
Day by day, the lies I had to tell about my life fattened. The sidestep became a leap. Entire days of experiences (past life regression! sound healing! holotropic breathwork! angel communications!) flitted past in conversation, as I steered instead toward topics I knew to be socially acceptable.
Talking about my book had always been safe ground; now it felt littered with landmines, because there was no way to work on the book without working on the woo.
I was changing, but many around me didn’t know—couldn’t know!—how much, or why.
This was the end of my seventh year living in Tucson. It was the summer the monsoon never came; the summer Lightning Flowers was months overdue to its publisher; the summer my landlord forced me out of my home so he could sell, and I found myself sleeping in a grad student’s little casita off an alleyway downtown.
I’d moved to Tucson in 2012 to attend a Masters of Fine Arts program in Creative Nonfiction Writing. But I’d met most of my friends at the climbing gym. They were climate scientists and policy wonks, had PhDs in mathematics and geosciences. My research for my first book—requiring expertise in topics like mining and medical technology—contributed to our fit. Often, we talked about books and ideas as we tied into the rope; we talked about grant deadlines and research trips while grabbing beers.
They knew, of course, that I was more “woo” than them. More likely to tell an astrology joke. I might mention sheepishly that I’d “pulled a card” as part of my decision making. But in those early Tucson years, I often held back what these things fully meant to me.
I held it back even from myself.
The ways in which I was woo—we were all convinced—were more similar to “liking poetry” than “believes in demons.”
The truth was, by the spring of 2013 I’d flown back to Boulder, Colorado, to attend psychic school.
If you’d asked me then, I would have told you I was going as research for my creative nonfiction thesis, which I hoped would tell the story of my cardiac arrest, heart surgery, and sepsis experiences at age 24. Back then, I was focused on the failures of the medical system—and the cardioverter defibrillator implanted inside me—to provide healing.
What exactly was healing? I wasn’t sure I knew. But I knew what it wasn’t: hospitals and doctors who focused on technical fixes while ignoring the emotional, spiritual, financial, and resource implications of what I’d been through.
I thought of healing as something that helped bring you back from an experience. Something that made it okay, or that clarified what your experience was about, or that made you feel alive again.
From that framework, sex had been healing. I thought I might write about it in my MFA thesis as a kind of counterpoint to medical technology. Sex meant being in my body in a pleasurable way. Sex meant listening to what my body told me. Sex meant experiencing light and color and texture and touch the exact opposite of what you’d find in a hospital—stepping into what was distinctly the world of the living.
So, too, had bodywork the year before with a massage therapist named Grant (who resolved my burning, distracting chronic pain) been healing.
Around the time I signed up for psychic school, I took three sizzling, unnecessary shocks to the heart by my ICD—and afterward had my feelings dismissed by my doctor. Not only had my medical technology not healed me, it had done harm. I was angry and scared about what it would take to live through whatever came next.
The class at psychic school was called “How to Heal Yourself.”
I applied for a travel grant from the Graduate & Professional Student Council to go.2 I figured the program would offer an entertaining reporting vehicle for thinking about these questions (I would be like David Foster Wallace, going on his cruise in order to write about existential dread!).
It wasn’t my worst idea, but it wasn’t why I was going to psychic school. In truth, my first psychic3 had recommended I take the class, and the suggestion made me feel—honored? nervous? giddy?
After the shocks I was hungry for the answers it might give me.
Later, I sometimes mentioned psychic school in mixed company as a one-off party joke. It was a wacky thing about me, something I dismissed almost before it was out of my mouth. It was something I’d done, not who I was.
But isn’t it true that the more we do something, the more it shapes who we become? I kept taking the classes. After “How to Heal Yourself” in April, I showed up to the same course in July for a free refresher. That fall, I took a weekly class called “How to Read”4 over Skype.
For my “final” in late 2013, I was supposed to read for someone. I invited over the “woo-est” person I knew—a fiction writer from my grad program who did moon ceremonies every month and hired astrologers a few times a year. She sat carefully at the edge of my couch while I tried to do the thing I had been taught.
I remember her nodding a few times, confirming something I’d said based on the shapes and colors filling the screen of my mind. Relief flooded my chest, mingling with the shame and terror I felt in even trying this.
I didn’t believe I could possibly know anything—even though some part of me wanted to, badly.
Even though so much had led me there.
I stopped after that. I rarely brought it up. I kept quietly seeing my own psychic, but only mentioned her to certain people.
The story of my life didn’t have to contain this part of me.
Until, in 2019, it started bleeding over.
What do we think it means about us, when we believe in a world beyond the visible?
In my experience of academia, it seemed acceptable only to be what sociologists call the “Nones”—a person of no religious affiliation. To be overtly religious was to be naive or even ridiculous (except in the case of some immigrants, whose cultural difference was to be respected).
If academia was about asking questions and then strategically, scientifically making your way to an answer, religion seemed to propose skipping over those interrogations in favor of easy answers. It was a way of outsourcing your conclusions, which—among those of us who (over)valued their own minds and intellectual processes—rang as unrigorous. None of us could imagine following a pastor’s dictate to disregard what science had taught us.
I’m painting with broad strokes here. Theologians all over the world struggle thoughtfully with the philosophical questions proposed by religious texts.
But in the academic world in which I lived, it was hard to separate religion from that looser concept of “believing in a world beyond the visible,” because the point of academia was measuring, documenting, and working with phenomena in concrete ways. The only other route to believing in the unseen seemed to an appropriation of others’ cultural traditions, yet we knew this to be unacceptable too. (Of course we knew nothing of the beliefs of our own long-ago, pre-Judeo-Christian ancestors.)
Most of the people I knew in academia identified as “Spiritual, not Religious.” We had left the shut-down, sex-shaming traditions of our youth in favor of the expansiveness of a world that welcomed new ideas—but those ideas were grounded firmly in scientific materialism.
We were spiritual orphans.
To the extent we believed the world was alive, it was not sentient.
More than once I regretted saying something “woo” in the presence of an avowed atheist. I found myself trapped in endless intellectual loops with these people who took pleasure in challenging every sentence. What they called a “discussion” felt more like an argument—or even a shaming.
Among the “Nones,” it was okay to believe in something larger than you, to find god in nature, but only if you didn’t specify what, exactly, was larger than you. The vagueness was the point, the one-size-fits-all-ness of it. No prayers. No ghosts (except on sensationalized shows.) No controlling rules. Just a kind of belief in beauty and “nature” and the integrity of ecosystems. And maybe meditation.
One could go as far as synchronicities, the work of something known as “the Universe.”
But swap out the word “God” for “the Universe,” among the Nones? The room froze.
Because I first visited the psychic school under the auspices of academia, I of course arranged to interview the director before I began my studies.
Why had the school, I wanted to know off the bat, embraced the term psychic?
The word had certainly given me pause. It sounded cringey, or like a joke—conjuring images of the fake TV fortune tellers of my childhood, with their big hair and bad makeup and jangling beads.
Because we want to own it, she told me. Because exactly what people were leaning away from, the school wanted to lean into. Using the term “Intuitive” felt too soft, like it was subtly hiding.
They had nothing to hide, she said.
I acted impressed, but inside I wormed with discomfort. They might have had nothing to hide, but I sure did.
It’s another story to talk about the years between psychic school and the spillover. (You can read about it in my book Lightning Flowers, and I will someday say more here.)
In compressed format, what I can say is that from 2016-2017 I lived through a second round of medical crises—of death initiations—that, for a time, left me utterly faithless.5 I felt dry, raw, and angry. I felt abandoned.
As much as I could, I ignored god back.
In late 2017, I went under contract to write the book I had proposed in graduate school—about the cardiac defibrillator and its supply chain and the American relationship to death. The events of the book included that second round of medical trauma, and it turned out that I couldn’t write about them without processing them. After months of painful procrastination—my body shutting down every time I tried to approach the page—I turned back to the work I had begun with my first bodyworker Grant.
Alone on a mesa in an Earth Home, in New Mexico, I spent months screaming, shaking, moving my body. I Skyped once a week with a somatic therapist who showed me how to slow down enough to feel what needed to move. I drove into Santa Fe for acupuncture, thai massage, mythosomatic qigong, hot springs. I trusted a new psychic to help me see one step at a time beyond myself.
When I returned to my life in Tucson, the book still uncompleted and now overdue, I began reiki, which led to the other things— the compulsory meditation, the angel work, the past life regressions and holotropic breathwork and sound baths.
You might say I began healing.
Which led to the spillover.
“More than any formal initiation ceremony given to you by an authority,” writes
,“your true initiation process is the one Life creates just for you. Your life initiates you to the work that only you can do. You don’t need to be born to a witch mother or receive an initiation from a high priestess to become a witch; you just need to pay attention to the lessons the Goddess is teaching you through your own experiences, and then rise up and take action.”
It is my experience that a person will often not step forward unless their lives become so destabilized without that action that it becomes unbearable.
Which is to say: When we are meant to do something and we are not doing it, god will funnel us into a corner.
All my life I wanted nothing more deeply than to write books. In order to write this book, I would need to move what lived in my body. In order to move what lived in my body, I would need spiritual tools. And after the spiritual tools? I would be too changed—too set onto a new timeline—not to begin publicly owning my spiritual life.
The immense embarrassment I carried—not just over claiming any faith at all, but claiming faith in something that categorized me as an unserious, unscientific person—could in some sense only have been overcome by the legal problem of owing a major publisher a book. My spiritual problem had been made rational. If I couldn’t write it, I would have to pay them back the $30,000 I was paid at signing—and besides, my life would be in shambles. I had been building toward this for years. I had no backup plan.
I had to do whatever it took. I had to follow the process wherever it went.
It is through the cracks and craters of a life that something can enter.
This is initiation.
On that day, long ago, that I interviewed the director of the psychic school, I asked how she would define healing.
Healing, she said, was coming into alignment with what is.
Which is to say: After the spillover, I ceased to have the conversation only in my body. As I healed, I came into alignment with what was. I began to have the conversation in my world.
And now we are having the conversation here.
I apologize for the long gap between posts. I did not want to start with this, but there are 600+ more of you here than last time I wrote, and I have been intimidated.
I have also lately been thrust deeper in the work of earning a living—especially of paying medical bills— which has cluttered my writing mind.
I hold some hopes that Substack subscribership will, going forward, help me claw back some part of my attention from this paid work. I thank you in advance. I have so, so much to say here.
And, now that I have broken the seal, I will.
Read my latest Patreon post, “He praised my belly,” for $15— or join my Skin Hunger Patreon for $5.55/month.
If you loved this post, drop me a tip here.
Looking for an angel to buy me this shamanic drum. My address is PO Box 13551/ Jackson, Wyoming, 83002.
More on this in another post.
You know I did not get this grant. 😂
To find out what led up to meeting this psychic, read my third post, “Returning to Magic.”
It is only occurring to me now that, as an MFA student, I was already something of a professional “reader.” Now I was learning to read in the other way.
Thank you for beautifully sharing your sacred and wild stories — I look forward to more installments <3 As a non-white immigrant from a place that had gone through cultural and spiritual ruptures, somehow I can still relate to you on the being a “spiritual orphan” even with the grounding faith and practice of Buddhism. Perhaps it could be that the Buddhism I try to practice isn’t even the morphed version that took root in my homeland, and I keep getting pulled into shamanism in my wandering mind (and life occurrences). I’m just slowly putting two and two together lately about what might be actually going on for me. All that is to say — I trust finding your presence and energies in your words is some kind of cosmic nudge.
btw, after having used the word “Woo” so many times, I just realized how it sounds like the Chinese character “巫” (wū), which is the original name for the shamanic healers/seers/knowledge holders and their practices from the peoples on the lands and places now collectively known as China. Now I have to research the etymology of the expression “Woo”!
CHEERS lady-mate
I dearly love—and personally connect with—your story. I, too, have felt like a spiritual orphan; drawn to shamanic work and indigenous practices despite my white heritage. I, too, struggle with the acceptability of the ‘woo’ aspects of my spirituality. Keep writing! Your work is a ray of sunshine in my life!