MY PATH TO SHAMANISM

Stuart Norman

This is a story of a part of my life that is very important to me and might be of use to you. It details how I became a Shaman. I always knew I had a calling, but I didn't know what it was or how long it would take me to find it. I have no desire to write a full autobiography, so I won't bore you with details of a mostly mundane existence.

I am an only child born of progressive, loving, middle-class parents in 1948, in a small town in western North Carolina. My father had only a high school education and worked for the Post Office; my mother had an Associates Degree, was a Medical Records Librarian, then went on to hold various, high-level secretarial jobs. I was fortunate having loving, tolerant and supportive parents in that they gave me the opportunities to explore my many interests. The town librarians, all sweet older ladies, were also a significant influence on my development, encouraging me to read anything I wanted.

I realized at an early age that I was very different from most children. I didn't fully understand just how different I was until much later. I was very Intelligent, perceptive and curious about many things, but I had one handicap – I was fat from birth up until my early 20s when I learned how to manage it. This burden tended to make me non-athletic, although I've always enjoyed walking, hiking and exploring the outdoors, a deep love of nature. These conditions made me fascinated with knowledge, love the sciences and other mysteries, especially the occult. I'm in love with knowledge, a condition that will never end. I could read and write before I went to kindergarten. So, I study and observe.

Living in a small town with nearby relatives in the countryside gave me the opportunity to explore nature and learn about it from observation and from books. I also learned about living a rural life in which people farmed, raised animals for food and survived partially off the land. I fondly remember churning butter at grandma's when I was a kid.

When I was a small child I realized that some behaviors and beliefs of adults and even my peers seemed to be faulty. Men didn't understand women, although it seemed to me that women understood men somewhat better. I understood women and sympathized with them. Why were men so afraid of emotion, except perhaps anger? I was concerned with the authoritarian and patriarchal child-raising practices of many of my peers parents. I wasn't raised like them and was very glad about it.

I had a fascination with men from as early as I can remember; I wished a strong man could hold me in a loving embrace, but somehow realized that I couldn't express this. Before I was ten I wrote a short story in which a bit of this comes through. A big influence on me were the illustrated Bible story books from the church! Many of them had drawings illustrating scenes such as Sampson bringing down the Temple. Many of these men depicted were long-haired, bearded, scantily dressed, showing lots of skin, muscles, wearing leather harnesses and tunics. Why couldn't men look like this?, I thought. Little did those Southern Baptists who produced these books know what an influence they had on my life.

I was growing up in the 1950s, a time that I remember as gray and conformist, although comfortable and safe. But where was the color? Why were men so dull? I sensed something was missing. I think I was looking for the caring warriors among men.

Other children somehow knew I was different and smart, but they didn't know exactly how and neither did I. Yet, I was well-liked and respected by most of them. I was rarely bullied. However, not being the athlete nor a social being made me introspective and a loner. I had only a very few close friends who shared my interests.

In my high school years I almost literally grew up in a newspaper business. I think between sections A and B. My mother was executive secretary to the owner, publisher and Editor-in-Chief of the town newspaper, also our neighbor. I knew everyone who worked there as friends and had the run of the place and so learned journalism by osmosis.

I don't remember ever hearing a fag joke in high school. In this small town no one seemed to know anything about homosexuality. I surely didn't. No one ever accused me of it. I didn't feel that desire then. I was mostly asexual. I lived a life of the mind. I didn't date girls. There was one student who had nelly behaviors, yet no one seemed to know what those meant, and he was well liked. Now, I know. I graduated high school in 1966. The drug and counterculture revolution hadn't yet hit the town.

When I went to college I had decided to major in biology, specializing in botany. I'd had a love of wildflowers and had been identifying and photographing them since in high school. I was the star pupil in Taxonomy and Morphology class. Grade Point Average of 115 on a 100 point scale!

Christianity increasingly didn't make sense. The church I was raised in seemed cold and irrelevant. I rejected religion early in my college career and became an atheist. That didn't last because it's a belief that can't be proved or disproved. I was agnostic. I became a Hippy, smoked pot, dropped LSD. I flirted with Charismatic Christianity because they were different and very accepting of past and present sins. I experienced speaking in tongues, exorcisms, mine and others. That didn't last long, either, because they were too narrow and fundamentalist. I knew too much science and respect for its methods, but I also realized that science couldn't possibly cover all knowledge.

I dropped out of college in 1973, after six full years, never quite finishing a degree. I was tired of and disgusted with academia, especially its politics, although in many ways I was well-suited for an academic career. But I didn't want to teach. I wanted to study in my own ways and do other things, make a bit of money, have a life.

From the early 1970s the psychedelic drugs were a major influence in my development. From the first time I took LSD I realized that this wasn't a substance used only to blow your mind and party, as too many did, but a valuable tool that made your subconscious and conscious minds to merge and allowed you to see what was there. That's a reason why some people have bad trips when they must face their inner demons that they didn't know were there. At the time it was very fortunate that I had friends who also realized that LSD was a valuable tool to work on oneself. We were into yoga, exploring eastern religious/spiritual concepts and mind. We would plan trips and what we would do on them and write down our experiences and compare them. I never had a bad trip.

I had had a little bit of heterosexual experience, but it didn't seem all that great, although the women I had relationships with were friends. I also had experienced a couple of sexual encounters with men, but they left me feeling either neutral or cold. Later, I realized that those weren't the right men. That may have held back my coming out. I couldn't figure out what I needed, but I knew something was missing.

My coming out late at age 32 was the result of a major rebirth or born again experience. In 1980, I had what used to be called a “nervous breakdown”. I had severe anxiety attacks, depression and had no idea what was wrong or what had caused it. There was no desire to do anything. I could barely survive daily life. That was my Dark Night of the Soul. Then, a friend introduced me to people at a progressive psychological practice who helped turn my life around. These psychologists had been trained and had worked at the Essalen Institute in Big Sur, CA. It didn't take them long to find the root cause of my problem. They helped me to realize that I was gay and that it was OK. The real me had been trying to push itself out into the light. My old way of life could no longer function. With counseling and bodywork therapies, they provided me ways of coping with unreconciled emotions from the past, literally cleaning out and resolving emotional dysfunctions, deprogramming and reprogramming me and teaching me how to do it to myself. I was so relieved, joyous. The old me died. I began a new life. First, I was working with my counselors as a helper and learning this new, spiritually-oriented psychology. They encouraged me to become a Certified Crisis Counselor, I did, and worked for a couple of years at a crisis hotline, handling routine, on the spot emotional counseling to emergencies such as drug abuse problems to potential suicides. It was sometimes frustrating, but ultimately rewarding work. I also learned massage and bodywork, biofeedback, experienced many sessions in an isolation tank, began yoga and Akido classes. Eventually, I taught Hatha yoga and mastered Kundalini yoga. I had my first major Kundalini rise experience in 1982, a truly altering and very reverent experience. I was also working with the local chapter of Spiritual Frontiers Fellowship, a national, nondenominational organization that explored the spirituality in all religions. I met so many wonderful people from all over the world and learned from them at its annual conference, which was held in Greensboro, where I lived. Sadly, it no longer exists.

That was the beginning of my walk on a spiritual path in earnest. It was a way of continually increasing self-awareness. I experienced most of the major, classical spiritual experiences in those few years. While others were desperately seeking any kind of significant spiritual experience, from telepathy and clairvoyance to seeing God, I was experiencing them spontaneously. I soon realized that these experiences were just signposts on the path that I was making progress, but that they didn't make me a great enlightened being or guru, superior to others, although they certainly changed my life in positive ways. My perceptions were permanently changed by these experiences, and so I view the world very differently from most people. I haven't had any mountaintop high spiritual experience in several years. Perhaps I've experienced all I need.

All this self work paid off. I was learning increasing control over body and mind. When I realized that I could turn off an LSD trip in an instant just by deciding to do it, I knew I didn't need psychedelics anymore. Those drugs had taught me important lessons, but the student had to move on.

As all of this new experience was going on I was exploring gay life. At first, I read about it a lot, scholar that I am, and then had to find gay organizations and meet gay people. I ran into an old college mate in my first visit to a gay bar and renewed a friendship. I quickly became a gay activist involved in many organizations and met and worked with some of the major names in gay activism. Soon, I found myself very drawn to the images of the strong men who dressed in leather and their dark, sometimes dangerous sexual practices. I knew I had to meet leathermen and find out who they were, why they practiced SM, understand it. I did. These were men committed to a transformational practice. They weren't scary, dangerous outlaws who used others against their will. It was consensual. I loved their rough, but conscientious masculinity.

I discovered and joined the Dukes leather club, North Carolina's first. Later, I became it's second president. Through them I found my teaching Master. He was old enough to be my father and had years of experience in SM. This gave me the confidence to trust him, submit to him to take me into intense experiences, some of which were very painful, but exhilarating, and sometimes tinged with a lot of good humor. I learned to give up, let go. As this ongoing experience continued I found my top or dominant nature. If I could be made to feel wonderful in submitting to the desires of another man, I wanted to be able to satisfy my desires in making another man feel good, to learn to play on his body as a virtuoso musician plays on his instrument. My Master eventually brought another bottom to our play session for me to top under his guidance. It was not long after that that he released me to go my own way, however, we remained good friends.

At the same time I met Radical Faeries and resonated with their post-Hippy and back-to-the-land, non-dogmatic pagan philosophies. I attended their gatherings and met many new friends. I continue to be very involved with Faeriedom to this day.

From my studies of gay history and theory, along with spiritual practices from many religions, I was able to realize my spiritual calling: I had to become a shaman for my communities, my tribes: Leathermen and Faeries. In many tribal cultures shamans were often transgendered in some ways, not necessarily what we called “gay”, which is a social construction in our modern society, but different in sexuality, perceptions and many other ways, and this difference was seen as a special dispensation, giving the person a unique perspective that was valuable to the tribe. This alone does not make a shaman. There must be rigorous training by a shaman, often involving dangerous rites of passage, ordeals of courage, psychedelic drugs that alter perceptions, learning the lore of herbs and animals, healing, a vision quest. Shamans specialize in some areas of knowledge where their talents lie, so each one is unique. There was no existing shamanic training for the kind of shaman I needed to be. The few shamans who existed either were members of Native American tribes that had carried on or revived their traditions or outsiders who had been trained in those traditions. Yet, all the spiritual, psychedelic drug and SM experiences I had became my shamanic training and practice. I learned from many disciplines and traditions of the past and present, taking what was useful, what worked and discarding the rest that was just cultural ornamentation, sometimes pulling myself up by my own bootstraps. I knew that the knowledge was there; I just had to find it and practice it. I became a sexual and knowledge shaman. I don't demand that I be recognized as a shaman by anyone, just be recognized by those whom I can serve.

SM is essentially a shamanic practice. Its focus on intense body stimulation, leading to altered states of consciousness, emotional catharsis and greater self-awareness, is a therapeutic art. Trust and emotional bonding among players are other positive aspects of the practice.

Among the Faeries ritual drumming circles and dancing are other shamanic practices. Other shamanic practices often shared by Faeries and leathermen are body modification, piercing, tattooing, etc. We are sometimes called modern primitives, but I don't think we're primitive at all. We're quite sophisticated.

Much of my fully becoming a shaman and beginning to see myself as a fully mature man happened in San Francisco, where I moved in 1984 to be involved in its world-class leather community. It didn't take me long to belong to the core of the community and befriend many of the nationally known leathermen and some leatherwomen . By that time I was competent in SM, but still willing to learn, and I did both teach and learn and had a lot of fun, becoming a respected player. Many lasting friendships came out of those years, although too many of those men are no longer with us.

I moved back to NC, met some new, assertive gay activists, helped found the Tarheel Leather Club in 1990, which quickly came to national prominence because of our role in the fight against arch-homophobe Senator Jesse Helms. Unfortunately, we didn't win that fight then, but time eventually eliminated him.

Shortly after that, I began to develop a national reputation in the leather/SM community by attending major leather events all over the country and offering workshops on the spirituality of SM. Obviously, people were hungry for the message because my lectures/workshops were standing room only. I became known as “The Leatherfaerie Shaman”. I am proud to say that I am one of the first to teach the spirituality of SM.

In 2003, I finally realized a long-time dream and moved to rural New Mexico, near the Zuni Mountain Sanctuary, one of the Faerie communes. I serve on its Board of Directors and sometimes teach at our annual Shaman's Gathering. I'm living back in wild nature, where I belong.

Now, I have no religious beliefs, no doctrine, no dogma. I have doubt and skepticism. I question everything. Yet, I have a strong spiritual path that works for me. I can't say that it will work for anyone else. Spiritual paths are unique, individual and personal, unlike religion. I don't know whether humans have souls or that a creator God exists or if there is an “afterlife”. How I hate that word! Either there's life or not. I don't know that anyone can know. I am comfortable with unknowns, but I still passionately want to know. I do know that I must accept whatever the ultimate reality is. I have hope, but hoping doesn't create reality and can lead to disappointment. What I can't know in the absence of facts I must not have a belief about because that would be a delusion, neither provable or disprovable. However, I can speculate endlessly, and that is fun. I try to live a good life, do no harm and help others when I can. That is my shamanic mission.