Spirit hacking: Can shamanic healing change your life or is it just a fad?

Engaging with our spiritual consciousness is so en vogue. Christine Manby tries the new healing technique that is out of this world

Illustration by Tom Ford

The first I heard of Shaman Durek was when I caught part of a segment on This Morning during which the Los Angeles-based shaman and friend of Gwyneth Paltrow demonstrated his healing techniques on the show’s host Eamonn Holmes. Holmes was playing the clown. As the impressively regal Durek began to hover his hands over Holmes’ body, he detected bad energy and instructed the spirits inhabiting Holmes’ to help him cough it out.

Then he had the spirits rack Holmes with uncontrollable laughter. It was hard to believe that Holmes, a consummate showman, was being moved by anything other than the urge to entertain but he did a lot of passably realistic hacking and giggling. When the healing was over, Durek told Holmes that the spirits had told him Holmes had recently been unwell. Maybe something respiratory? It wouldn’t have taken a trained doctor to guess that from Holmes’ cough.

Though Holmes professed that he had felt genuinely moved by the healing Durek had given him off-stage, the segment seemed designed to raise eyebrows and laughs rather than spiritual consciousness. Or perhaps to entice the viewers with the prospect of gossip about Durek’s Norwegian princess girlfriend or Gwynnie’s latest fad. Durek is inevitably introduced as Paltrow’s guru, though when it comes to wellness and spirituality, surely the Paltrow brand has been somewhat devalued by her insistence on pushing the extremely expensive and the downright dangerous (vaginal steaming, anyone?). But does the residual glow of celebrity Durek gets from Hollywood’s most famous kale pusher necessarily mean he’s not the real deal?

Shaman Durek realised he had a hotline to the spirit world at an early age. While he was still a small child, he received visits from long-dead relatives, all keen to pass on what they knew about the reality of the universe. As a young man, Durek didn’t live a spiritual life. By day, he worked as a dancer and model. By night, he and his best mate used to take their paint guns down to San Francisco’s Castro district and shoot at men leaving gay nightclubs. Everything changed when Durek experienced organ failure and had a near death experience that left him in a coma. Though he was technically dead for just a few minutes, the nature of time, which isn’t linear as we think, meant it was long enough for Durek to wander all over the spirit world with his guides, gathering the esoteric knowledge he would need to fight the darkness upon his return.

I started reading Spirit Hacking, Durek’s new book (Yellow Kite, £14.99), while waiting to give my godson a lift home after his weekly prayer meeting. Sitting in the car park of the enormous new church his congregation recently moved into, I pondered the age-old link between spirituality and cash. Opposite me was a brand new 4-by-4 with a private number plate that approximated the word “miracle”.

Do you remember The Secret, the international bestseller on the subject of Cosmic Ordering? Cosmic ordering, in case you’ve forgotten, was the method Noel Edmunds used to reboot his ailing career in the early Noughties. Edmunds set his intention to cast off the Blobby years and experience a phoenix-like return to prominence in the light entertainment world, he sent the message out to the universe and the next thing you know he was back on our screens fronting Deal or No Deal. I wondered if the owners of the “Miracle” car were doing something similar in the mysterious confines of the mega-church.

Shamen Durek claims he has a hotline to the spirit world (Getty)

Outside in my Panda with the missing door-trim, I opened Durek’s book at random and found that I had happened upon a “Shamanic Infusion for Currency”. It seemed like a sign. Durek believes that we can choose what we draw into our lives by attuning our energy to the frequency of that which we wish to have more of. Our words – even the words we only whisper to ourselves – have great power.

Durek writes of his return to health after his near-death experience, which resulted in him spending eight years on dialysis. “The spirits explained that I had to align my thoughts with the reality that I wanted, and then speak to that reality, and to that reality only. Because whatever we say, we are giving God permission to make it possible for us.” Durek believes that adopting the mindset that he was already able to walk again, rather than allowing doubt to creep in, hastened his recovery. He writes that by complaining about being unfit or skint or single, we are inviting the great spirit to keep us that way.

Just to be clear, the suggestion that ill health is a matter of mindset gets my back up something chronic but I am prepared to accept that there are some areas of life where talking smack to oneself definitely doesn’t help. When it comes to getting that dream job or dream partner, then it makes sense that walking into a situation thinking, “I’ve got this,” is going to be more effective than slinking in feeling, “they’re all going to hate me”. You don’t get a miracle Mercedes by playing small. So, I read Durek’s Shamanic Infusion for Currency with interest. It goes like this:

“Sit quietly in a comfortable meditation posture.

“Say these words in your mind as you inhale deeply: I pull currency into my being with full allowance.

“Now trace the symbol of the dollar sign in the air with your finger, exhaling sharply through your mouth with each finger stroke. Imagine the dollar sign is electric blue, which happens to be a power colour in shamanism.

“Repeat the cycle several times while feeling the currency expanding into your body with each inhale, and seeing the blue dollar sign expand outward into the world with each exhale.”

It sounded simple, but I couldn’t get into a meditation posture in my car seat and the prayer club were by now pouring out of the church. I did however try Durek’s currency infusion at home the following day. There was nothing to lose after all. And as I sat on the bedroom floor drawing pound signs in the air, I heard the postman at the front door. He delivered two envelopes. The first contained gift vouchers. The second, infinitely more precious, a thank you note from child and a packet of wildflower seeds.

Of course, both were on their way before I started Durek’s shamanic ritual but the timing of their arrival seemed like a message and made me warm to Durek and his “poprocks” philosophy on life. Spirit Hacking is more than a rehashing of The Secret. At times, it’s a painful read – Durek’s childhood might be classified as abusive – and there are moments when the talk of flying all over the world to heal billionaires grates, but there’s a sense that here is someone who has successfully turned his own life around and wishes to share the good news.

Spirit Hacking ends with a call to arms to turn away from the consumerism, entitlement and fake news-manufactured fear that’s wreaking havoc on our world. It’s an exhortation to “dream the world greater” that left me quietly impressed. As did reading elsewhere that Durek supports Lunch On Me, a Los Angeles-based charity that feeds 10,000 homeless people every month. That’s a far greater endorsement for Durek’s commitment to healing than knowing Gwynnie is for me.