This room we devote to the Shamanic traditions of the indigenous cultures around the world, and also to Native American drumming. I really like bringing people down to this room for several reasons.

First of all, the stories in this room very clearly illustrate what I mean when I tell people that the veils are very thin here and people can experience Spirit through all the world’s traditions very directly, and that amazing things happen in people’s lives as a result. We can tell stories like this in other rooms as well, but the stories in this room are particularly clear.

Also I like to bring people down to this room because the traditions that are represented in this room are traditions that many people aren’t familiar with and others aren’t comfortable with. I find that when I tell this room’s stories, people come away with an understanding that even these traditions do have a very clear window on reality. Much of what our Center is about is the notion that our spirituality should bring everyone together rather than separate us. I find that when I tell these stories and people come to an appreciation of these traditions, they become open minded to other people’s views, to other people’s traditions.

The native cultures around the world have in common a belief that everything God created is alive with spirit. God has placed conscious, communicative spirits in everything, not just in people and animals, but in plants and stones and fire and earth and so forth. Many of these spirits communicate with us. These are spirits that, when they come to us, typically they come in animal forms, but often they come in a form that we can’t see. In these traditions, if you are out in the wild and you have what seems to be an unusual connection with a wild animal, their understanding would be that this is a spirit presenting itself to you in the form of that animal.

Each spirit has a different kind of personality, a different set of strengths and a different lessons that it is offering to you. This is called “medicine.” In these cultures, it’s very important that you learn what spirits are working with you because if you learn what spirits are working with you, you learn what medicine the universe is giving you, and if you learn that, you learn what ails you, what lessons you’re working on should be working on.

In these cultures, a shaman’s role is largely to introduce you to your spirits, which usually are called power animals or totems. One of the primary ways that a shaman does this for you is by taking you on a journey. When you journey, you lie down, the shaman beats a drum, the drum puts you into a trance-like state so that you can go into your subconscious, and the Shaman will then talk you through a journey, perhaps to a cave or to a mountain, to meet your power animals.

As an illustration, when my wife and I did this the first time we found that I had no trouble at all doing this. I had visions very easily, but she didn’t. Her spiritual life is often characterized by some frustration because she doesn’t see things easily. So here we were in a cave and I was having visions and she wasn’t, and she was getting somewhat frustrated. But after a bit she started bumping into things and she soon came to recognize that she was bumping into bats. At this point in the story I used to say “and nobody likes bats,” but I found that more than half the people actually do like them. My wife wasn’t one of them, though, she wasn’t happy when she encountered these bats. However, it turned out that bat medicine was exactly what she needed. It was perfect that a bat would appear for her because, as you know, bats can see in the dark. They have abilities that we might in human terms call ESP or intuition. So my wife came to recognize that first of all perhaps she had abilities that she didn’t realize she had that she could develop. Secondly, she came to realize that bat was there to encourage her, to support her. The universe recognized what she was working on and was there to help her with it.

The first story in this room relates to a painting that we used to have on the wall here, but the painter who painted it has taken it back because she wanted to have it with her for her 50 th birthday. We hope it will return. This painting was a painting of the visions a woman had when she went on a shamanic journey in the Celtic tradition. I’ll ask you to use your imagination as I first briefly describe this painting and then I’ll tell you the story. [I’m pointing at the wall as I do this] In the center is a woman seated with her legs crossed. Her head is a deer head, and arising out of her head instead of antlers is a tree. Behind the tree is a very large sun about the size of a plate, comprised of a number of concentric circles. In the front of the tree is a large gray and red bird bent over like a V upside down, and there’s a humming bird at the edge of the sun. To the left of the tree and below it is a very large blue and black butterfly. Many leaves surround the woman and beneath her is a thin layer of green and below that, water. In the water is a reflection of the sun on the right, a red stream in the middle, and a salmon on the left.

When the painter went on this journey, she was about 60 miles away from here with a shaman who’s never been here, and whom I’ve never met. The artist herself had been here only once for 15 minutes. All she had time to do was sit in the kitchen and talk with me. She didn’t have time to see any other part of the Center, including this room. We obviously didn’t have time to get to know each other, so I was rather surprised when she came to the door several months later carrying this beautiful painting and said that she’d gone on a journey, painted it, and she didn’t know why but the painting was supposed to be here. And she left it here. I later got to know her and learned that she’s a professional artist and it’s a $1000 painting that she left here for at least 3 years. Well, we devote this room to shamanic dreaming, so I brought the painting down here and hung it on this space on the wall. I moved one picture to make room for it, and everything else is where it was at that time, unless I’ve added it since then.

The point of the story is what I’ll show you now. I soon came to realize that everything in the painting is in this room. And it is so obviously the case that we feel quite certain, best guess any way, that what happened was that when she went on her journey, she came to this room and sat right here on the floor facing this tree. I’m going to show you why we think that.

First there’s the woman. She’s the observer, so that’s you, the viewer. Coming up out of her head is a tree - as you see, there’s a large tree in the room. Behind the tree is a very large sun or moon (the artist said it could be either) and it’s comprised of concentric circles - first there’s white, then gray, blue, white, gray, blue, and then the outer ring is white with gray on the inner edge. That’s this shield on the wall. At the lower right edge of the sun is a hummingbird with a red head. As you can see, there are red-tipped feathers on the shield. There are four of them on the shield, and there are four hanging on the painting. Then in the front of the tree is a large gray and red bird bent over like a V upside down. That’s this fuzzy thing in the front of the tree. The clincher for everyone, I think, is that to the left of the tree and below it is a gigantic blue and black butterfly, which is the mask on the floor. There are leaves surrounding the woman; they’re on this rug on the floor. Beneath her is a thin layer of green and then blue water below. The thin layer of green is the edge of the rug, and the blue water is the blue carpet beneath. In the water, at the lower right, is a large sun. That’s this drum. In the center, a stream of red. That’s the red cloth in the corner. And at the left on the bottom was a gray salmon. That’s the gray rattle on the floor (the blue rattle wasn’t here at that time). Now we come back to the woman. Her legs are tree branches, and hanging down into them is a circle with string hanging from four places - the top, the bottom, the left and the right. That’s what the dream catcher in the tree looks like when you’re looking at it from the floor. We’re not sure what this story means, but clearly something happened. Almost every time I tell that story someone says, “Wow.”

The large hanging drum has some wonderful stories as well, and these are a little easier to understand. In the early days of the center, I was looking for a large Native American drum with a really deep heartbeat of the earth sound and I couldn’t find one. There aren’t many like that in St. Louis and I didn’t know how to shop on the Internet yet. So I prayed to be led to one. We’d not yet opened and I needed furniture. And at one of the first furniture stores I went to I saw this large Native American drum. I saw it but I didn’t realize I’d been led to it. The reason was that it had been made into a table. It had a metal frame around it, a lamp on it, coasters, things like that. So, I couldn’t play it, I couldn’t hear it, and I also couldn’t afford it was a table as well as a drum. So I figured, “Well, this isn’t my drum,” but I wasn’t looking for a drum anyway. I was there looking for furniture. So I proceeded through this pretty large furniture store and in the course of doing so I met a young man who worked there. I started talking with him and told him about the Center, what we do. He then told me that I really needed to meet his mother, the owner of the furniture, right then. So he took me over and introduced us and I started talking with her and told her about the Center. And I told her about not just what we do but about the calling that I‘d received. I mentioned my calling earlier in the tour, but I didn’t explain to you that the nature of the center as I was originally called to create was a little different from what it is now. Specifically, this was to be a center to help people deal with mortality, with death - their own or anyone else’s.

When I told this to the woman, she then told me that that very morning she’d asked God to either let her die or send her a miracle that day, because her husband had recently died of cancer and she could no longer deal with it. She’d reached the end of her rope. What had happened was that when he was ill she wanted to protect him, so she buried her feelings so he couldn’t see how upset and afraid she was. Then when he died, she’d buried her feelings so deeply that she couldn’t release them. So she was miserable. I think he may have been dead a few months and she’d not even cried yet.

So I told her about our Reiki Circle. Reiki is a type of energy work where you learn how to become a conduit for God’s grace to come into people which can, of course, be very healing. We have the largest Reiki Circle in St. Louis. We usually have about 25 people every Thursday. At that time, we’d just started having them so there were maybe eight or ten, but it was already a wonderful circle. She came into the Reiki Circle about three days after we’d met. She got so much love and so much energy that, that night she went home and had the big release she needed. She said she made sounds she didn’t know humans could make. It was awful but she got to where she needed to be. I think she was up all night. She called me the next morning to tell me what had happened, and then she gave us this drum in gratitude. I took it out of the metal frame and hung it in this and found that when her prayer was answered, so was mine.

There’s a another wonderful story about the drum. Young women especially like to play the drum (about 25 percent of them are crying by the time I get done telling these stories). There was one young woman in particular who got herself through her really horrible divorce by playing this drum and singing with it several times a week. She has an incredible voice - it was as if the entire building was flying when she was singing. For her, the importance was this: she’s Jewish and in that tradition if you want to be able to get remarried in the faith, you have to get a spiritual divorce that a Rabbi performs. It’s kind of like a Catholic getting an annulment. This drum meant so much to her that she brought her Rabbi and all of her closest friends to this room. She played the drum and sang and then the Rabbi sitting here on the floor performed that service, which probably doesn’t happen in a Shamanic journeying room very often.

And as for the woman whose furniture store I went to, I don’t know if St. Therese sent me to that store but I was believe I was sent, her life was saved, and I got my drum. Many people find that their lives are transformed by coming here.