Madman posing as shaman. A Greenwich Village adman claiming to be a shaman on weekends, now opening up a shaman-for-profit one- stop-shopping site.
Basically the man was looking for a quick fix to feeling like he was part of why the world was going to hell, promoting empty materialism with his marketing.
But rather than stopping the harm he was doing, playing shaman let's him pretend he's making up for it.
I also find it interesting that Beery was himself played for a victim. His "teacher" told him he was a shaman when it's pretty obvious he was instead a curandero, using practices that are as much or more Catholic than NDN.
----------
Weekdays, Creating Ads. Sunday, Invoking Spirits.
Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
Itzhak Beery, a Greenwich Village adman, as well as a shaman, says, “Most indigenous shamans don’t give up their day job.”
By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN
Published: July 23, 2010
Sometime around 9:30 a.m. on weekdays, Itzhak Beery enters a second-floor office in Greenwich Village to preside over his piece of the material world. It is an advertising agency, the latest he has owned in a 30-year career. Five computers await him, each thrumming with software for graphic design. Shelves hold the awards he has won.
On Sunday mornings, though, Mr. Beery returns to cover all the practical apparatus with sheets. From a cabinet, he withdraws
volcanic stones, candles, finger cymbals, bottles of rum and cologne, each with symbolic value. He arranges these on a red cloth, and lays beside them a carton of eggs and bunches of red and white carnations.
Such are the instruments of the shaman of Sullivan Street. For on Sunday, the adman engages in a second career, conducting healing ceremonies for a rotating cast of clients. On Sunday, the product of a fine-arts education in Israel draws instead on the skills he acquired in the Ecuadorean Andes....
After moving to New York in 1977, he put his art training to pragmatic application in advertising, ultimately building a list of clients including airlines, banks, colleges and snack companies. He and his wife had three children. “I was a skeptical person, suspicious,” he said. “I wasn’t someone you’d call gullible.”
Yet as he reached his mid-40s, Mr. Beery slid into a depression that, even with all of his accomplishments, he could not assuage. In some sense, they had provoked the descent.
“Part of it was my incredible guilt that I was in advertising,” he said, “that I’m helping consumption, that I’m helping waste, that I’m part of the problem.” During those unsettled years, Mr. Beery discovered several books about shamanism by John Perkins (who is better known now for “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man,” his 2005 best seller). Sufficiently intrigued, Mr. Beery signed up for a trip to Ecuador led by Mr. Perkins in 1997, and in the village of Illuman he met a shaman, Don José Joaquin Pineda, who practiced healing rituals from the Quechua tradition.
On a return trip, a year and a half later, Mr. Beery asked Mr. Pineda to try to heal him. In the course of the ceremony, which included drinking a hallucinogenic tea, Mr. Beery said he saw a vision of himself as a woman in 19th-century Vienna, leaping to her death.
That image, the presentiment it carried, startled him out of his own morass, he said. It inspired him to become more selective in taking on advertising clients, leaning more to nonprofit organizations for animal protection, immigrant aid and other causes he believed in.
And, finally, the experience in Ecuador compelled him to undertake studies with Mr. Pineda. Over succeeding years, the adman would hear and resist and ultimately accept what he believed was the call to be a healer. Which, of course, rather surprised the people who know Itzhak Beery in his rationalist mode.
“Coming out of the closet was very difficult,” Mr. Beery said. “It was difficult for me to say, ‘I’m in advertising but I do shaman work.’ Some people were supportive and some were dumbfounded. Even my kids had a hard time at first. ‘Is my father a nut?’ ”
Mr. Beery’s son Ariel recalls his father returning from the Amazon with a water gourd as a present for the children. It cracked open and set loose ants on the kitchen floor....
Such perplexity notwithstanding, Itzhak Beery began seeing clients about a decade ago, and gradually moved into teaching courses on shamanism, creating a New York association of shamans and building a Web portal for shamans worldwide. To the outside eye, though, he remains a trim middle-aged man with bristly gray hair, who wears the same kind of khakis and polo shirts for both of his occupations.
E-mail: sgf1@columbia.edu
-------------
This is Beery's marketing product, shamanportal.org. Basically for ten bucks anyone can post an ad to claim to be a shaman or healer. All kinds of abuse potential, and any casual glance can see all kinds of harm.
http://www.shamanportal.org/about.phpNotice what I found in the forum, someone calling themselves shamanRN, telling someone with a brain aneurysm "Consider your self healed!" Incredibly irresponsible, incompetent, and dangerous.
-----------
http://shamanportal.org/forum/shamanic-help-f9/brain-aneurysm-t610.htmlMacAoidh Post subject: brain aneurysm Posted: Wed Jul 14, 2010 10:26 am
Joined: Thu Oct 15, 2009 1:04 pm
Posts: 40
Location: Cumbria, England Hello
I am quite worried at the moment. A brain aneurysm is a life threatening thing, potentially, which is the enlargement of an artery due to high blood pressure.
I do not have high blood pressure, although a few weeks ago I strained very hard and I had a pain behind one eye, ever since I've been having a feeling of pressure in that side of my head. These are definatly symptons of an un-ruptured brain aneurysm. I told my GP, but, like always, she dismissed it as my anxiety. Well, that is unlikely to say the least!
I have had little luck with women in past (I am only 17) although I'm now in a loving relationship with someone who I would not want to loose for anything, and my almost definate aneurysm is preventing me from being myself with her.
I have started chanting, but if this problem is entirely physical will it not work? I read this on the Spiritual Science Research website. Also an aneurysm is like a bulge so how, biologically speaking could shamanic healing return this to Normal?
I am seeing my girlfriend on friday and want to have a good day with her and I want to devote the whole of tommorow to chanting and attempt to clear up the proble, to a significant degree, but please give your suggestions as it is very important to me.
I am a guy in love, and I know that a shaman should not become too attached, but I had always thought that love was to a degree made up, and now I know that it isn't and I don't have any materialistic cares any more other than for our relationship, I guess that might seem sad. I am not attached to anything apart from her, and I ccan't stop thining that I will not be wih her due to a rupturing aneurysm.
Would it be be too much to ask for blessings/to send me energy off her? this is not something I expect although I jsut don't know what else to do. Can I be guarenteed a life wih her if I keep the positive attitude and use the law of attraction?
kind regars and blessings
I eagerly await your responses and I hope
linden
MacAoidh Post subject: Posted: Thu Jul 15, 2010 8:10 am
Joined: Thu Oct 15, 2009 1:04 pm
Posts: 40
Location: Cumbria, England thanks, I shall do that. That doesnøt really solve the problem though Æ-
shamanRN Post subject: Posted: Thu Jul 15, 2010 10:19 am
Joined: Tue Jan 22, 2008 7:34 am
Posts: 28
Location: Texas Which problem? Thinking you have an aneurysm, anxiety, girl?
MacAoidh Post subject: Posted: Thu Jul 15, 2010 10:59 am
Joined: Thu Oct 15, 2009 1:04 pm
Posts: 40
Location: Cumbria, England hey;
Well I wanted to try and heal it if I did have it, or at least do something about it to be on the safe side.
blessings
shamanRN Post subject: Posted: Thu Jul 15, 2010 11:47 am
Joined: Tue Jan 22, 2008 7:34 am
Posts: 28
Location: Texas Ok, consider yourself healed.
