The Princess and the Shaman (2024)

You expressly consent to any and all treatments, methods, and techniques necessary that Shaman Durek may perform in your session as determined by him. This includes but is not limited to physical touching, energy healing, releasing of toxins…, energetic entry or physical touching of my genitals or electric shock treatment in the spine.

The waiver also gives Durek the right to terminate a session if you try to kiss or touch him; fondle yourself; get undressed or try undressing him; attempt to have intercourse or oral sex with him or sex with yourself; or threaten him in any way.

“So the reason why it’s in there is because we do talk about some sexual things,” he said a few months later, in the same hotel room over Park Avenue. He was wearing loose linen pants and a black shirt. Durek’s head is smooth and his eyes are almost feline. The way he talks sounds like a Valley Girl on ayahuasca.

“If I need to clean out your lymphatic system, it’s near your groin area. So if my finger’s here, that could be misinterpreted.” There is a technique in shamanism, he explains, to help women when they want to have babies, or men who are impotent, or women who can’t have org*sms. “You have to speak to their sexual glands…. There are things that I might have to take off to show me their genitals. I’ve had women who come in who--—one woman had vulva inflammation.” Clients proposition him. “I’ve had celebrities come to sessions with me, pull off all of their clothes, and ask me to f*ck them. I’ve had women and men—can’t say names, but I can tell you, big names—who have come in and been like, ‘I’ve always dreamed about having sex with a shaman.’ I’m like, ‘That’s not why I’m here for you.’ ”

This is where belief fogs. The lines between treatment and intimacy, and the perception of those things, can blur quickly. And if something makes you feel better at the end of the day, no one else can say for sure what is true and what isn’t, what works and what does not.

Modern shamanism, which gained popularity in the West during the counterculture of the 1960s, has rejiggered itself for the woo-woo 2000s, as Birkenstocks and God have given way to Goop (and Birkenstocks), and anyone can get famous by oversharing. Around half of the country has tried some form of alternative medicine, and about three fifths say they believe in something like spiritual energy or astrology, according to Pew Research Center. Shaman Durek’s profile has gotten a boost courtesy of a number of famous clients, from Chris Pine to Selma Blair to Rosario Dawson. Paltrow, queen of the commodified spiritual realm, whom Durek calls his “soul sister,” has called him her “light in shining armor.” But that, he says, doesn’t matter much to him. “People like to say that I’m the shaman to the stars. Everyone leads with that. But I hate that guy. I want to kill that guy,” he said. Later, in another conversation reflecting on the same idea, he added, “Celebrities are just people who have jobs, who have art abilities, who have singing abilities, and they just happen to be known. Those things don’t really impress me. What impresses me is what you do with your power.”

What Durek does with his power is itself an art. One afternoon in the summer of 2019, for instance, on the sunny patio of a little bungalow beneath the Holly-wood sign, he brought six women to tears over the course of 17 minutes. Breaking into song, speaking in tongues, sometimes touching the women, he became a spiritual emissary/janitor, releasing negative energy, minimizing pain, and healing trauma. This was the Shaman Durek show—he was loving it, and the audience was rapt. He congratulated them on “hacking their bodies,” sang them “A Whole New World,” from Aladdin, and instructed the spirits to send magnetic energy into their spines.

“I feel it,” one woman said. “Of course you do,” the shaman responded, throwing his head back in a laugh. “You have to be kidding me!” a different crying woman screamed. The woman to her left coughed vigorously as Shaman Durek instructed them to release all of the pain from the actions of their mothers and fathers that had been building up in their bodies. The woman next to her moaned and sobbed so loudly that it was reminiscent of the Katz’s Deli scene in When Harry Met Sally. Spirits, I’ll have what she’s having.

Or take a different Saturday morning, one earlier that summer in Manhattan—back in the “before times,” when it was still safe to gather in groups. Durek convened dozens of members of the “Litty Committee,” his name for his “tribe”(because they are “lit”), in an event space atop the Mondrian. They were going to walk Mandela Mile, an annual global constitutional that honors Nelson Mandela and Kofi Annan. It was June 29, and although the worldwide event wasn’t until July 18—the date clearly printed on the T-shirts worn by the Litty Committee—the shaman had a scheduling conflict, so here they were. Problem was, they hadn’t secured a permit, so the shaman instructed everyone they’d have to walk alone or risk being shut down by the police.

“I drove up from Virginia,” one woman with pigtail braids told me. Her T-shirt read “Stay Lit!” The Virginian is one of the shaman’s 185,000 Instagram followers, which is where he promotes podcast appearances, live healing sessions, workshops, cameos on TV shows like The Doctors, a virtual camp for kids, his book Spirit Hacking (which came out last year), and snapshots of himself with Princess Märtha and their famous friends, back when everybody could breathe together. “I am totally flying to his event in L.A. this fall,” a man with a skull tattoo of an angel told me. Shaman Durek told them all to hold their hands up to the sky, harness their powers, and scream from the depths of their lungs, “YES! Yes! YES! Yes!” for one minute and 20 seconds. “Doesn’t that feel gooooooood?” he shouted, as the sun streamed in. “Look at what we just did together.”

And then the congregants walked south through the city with the princess and the shaman.

Märtha Louise may be Shaman Durek’s most impressive adherent. Norway’s fourth in line to the throne, the firstborn child of King Harald and Queen Sonja, almost did not meet Durek two years ago because the friend who was trying to introduce them couldn’t get him to answer her calls. She was divorced, a mother to three daughters, and hiding her spirituality from a country that refused to accept the fact that she talked to angels. She had grown used to being single and had decided that her life felt full enough without a partner. Finally, though, her friend got through to Durek, and he invited Princess Märtha over to his Airbnb in the Hollywood Hills for lunch.

As Hans Christian Andersen wrote nearly 200 years ago, once upon a time there was a prince who wanted to marry a real princess, one just like him. There are no fairy godmothers or toxic apples or bippity-boppity-boos in this story. Just a prince, standing in front of a kingdom, asking for a similarly socioeconomically privileged royal to love.