It’s not exactly a fairy tale to find yourself on the floor of a Midtown hotel room being shocked with fake electricity, but that’s where we enter this story.
Take off your shoes, Shaman Durek told me, gesturing to a little patch of carpet patterned to look like wood in a suit he’d rented at the Mondrian on Park Avenue in New York City. Shaman Durek doesn’t rely on medicine or plants or earthly tools. He goes right to the top, to the spirits themselves, so that he can clear communication in times of breakdown—to help, for a fee, his clients restore some peace and balance. He doesn’t tell you how to live. He wants to help you get out of your own way.
So when he told me to lie down, arms at my side, I let him guide me. I had been under a tremendous amount of stress, and I was glad for some guidance.
We weren’t alone. “Märtha,” he beckoned to a woman behind him. “Mmm,” he hummed as he bent down to kiss her, his girlfriend, the Princess of Norway. They had spent the last half-year dating and the last hour and a half doing a shamanic reading on me. My inner child had told them that I needed to dance in nature, and my bones told the shaman that I needed to have two homes, a garden with flowers and animals, two creative outlets for my hands, and a grip on what Durek called my dysfunctional empathy. Now the shaman was going to talk to my anima.
“I love you,” he told Princess Märtha Louise, who was sitting cross-legged in a gold pleated skirt and a plain black T-shirt. A little silver pendant dangled beneath her waves of hair. Then, he started on me.
Spirits, he said to the room, we are going to go inside her system. He asked the spirits to open my synapses, to create a spiral integrated energy field up my spine and flush any poison out through my nose and throat, and mouth. (I did not feel any forces inside my spine, nor did anything flush out of anywhere.) He asked the spirit of his father to create a pulse in my abdomen “three layers down” and the spirit of his grandmother to lift the vibrations enough to raise the polarity frequencies in my body (to the best of my knowledge, nothing pulsed or vibrated, but as Durek pointed out, I’m not equipped to evaluate polarity frequencies—no one is.)
I didn’t have to yawn. I didn’t have to cough, either.
Did I fake yawn to get the show on the road? It’s hard to say. Aren’t all yawns a little bit of a put-on, if you think about them? And I was tired. I had started to sweat lightly because the room was not air-conditioned and it was the beginning of summer in Manhattan; and because I, a germophobe before it was pandemic-cool, had been on the floor of a hotel room for nearly an hour; and because I knew from the waiver that Durek’s manager asked me to sign (yes, the shaman has two managers, a P.R. spokeswoman, a coordinator, a lawyer, a chief operating officer, and a media manager) that this really could go anywhere.
The waiver had struck me as odd. There were instructions for what to avoid before my session (no meat, alcohol, or cigarettes 24 hours prior) and what I should do when I reached the hotel, and it all seemed fantastic. Gwyneth Paltrow’s shaman was dating the Princess of Norway, and together they were reading my energy and spirits—a service for which the shaman usually charges $1,000—in a suite overlooking Park Avenue. The fact that they were asking me to sign a waiver seemed like another fun little detail. I breezily skimmed it, as I do with all waivers before I carelessly sign them, and forwarded it to my dad for an afternoon chuckle and a glimpse of what I was working on. He called me within a minute.
“This waiver—” my dad said over the phone.
“—I know!” I interrupted. “How funny?”
“You can’t sign it,” he said. My dad is a lawyer. “Did you happen to get to paragraph five or six where it talks…
I hadn’t. The waiver seemed long and he was a shaman. I cringed and told him I had to go and scrolled down to those paragraphs.
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 that 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 orgasms. “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 “fuck” 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.”
Märtha’s parents, the king, and queen, were slower to warm. “To be with a shaman, that’s very, extremely, terribly out of the box. It’s crazy.”
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 artistic 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.
Shaman Durek, photographed at a private residence in Malibu, California, in July 2019. Shaman Durek’s clothing by Studio One Eighty Nine.PHOTOGRAPHS BY TIERNEY GEARON.
The prince traveled far and wide, cycling through many princesses, but he couldn’t help wondering: Is there more to life than pedigrees and crowns? Dejected, he returned to his palace. As fate would have it, a furious storm thrust a young woman right through those castle gates. The prince’s mom, the queen herself, was a messy bitch who had a plan. She hid a pea underneath dozens of mattresses, wisely suspecting anyone with royal blood would know when they’re not sleeping on a Hästens. When the lady awoke, bruised by the interloping legume, a real princess was revealed and ever after lived happily.
The tale could be taken as a deeply sexist caricature of femininity and class. But Andersen likely meant that a true princess would be compassionate, able to carry her people’s pain.
Princess Märtha Louise never saw things quite like that. When she was little, she didn’t feel particularly royal. She loved being outdoors and hated getting dressed up. She wished her parents would be, instead of king and queen, dentists. When she was six or seven years old, she slipped a pea under her own mattress. It felt like Christmas morning when she woke the next day, flinging off her nightclothes in hopes of black-and-white evidence of her blue blood. When she found nothing, she was terrified. She knew it! She knew she wasn’t good enough, wasn’t deserving, didn’t have the stuff. Everything she’d felt in her entire six or seven years as a princess had been right, and everything she’d been told about herself had been wrong.
Don’t get it twisted. She loved her title. She loved her family. She loved her people. She still does. But being a princess is a tough business. Her birth alone sent Norway into a tizzy over the rules of succession. Women come second, even when they come first. Luckily, as she describes it, her parents had a boy two years later, and he leapfrogged her in line. Her young life was full and empty. She grew close with her nannies and the people she met at the stables, where she was a competitive rider. Her spiritual and sensitive nature made her withdraw even more. People in Norway thought she was weird and strange, and she knew it. The scrutiny felt ceaseless. She couldn’t leave her house without photographers documenting her moves. Even when she had supporters—and she did—she doubted them. At least the man she would love would really see her, she imagined. But people like that didn’t exist in her world. So when she was 15, she shut down. “Märtha,” she told herself, “You are crazy. He will never come.”
Märtha began traveling the country reading classic Norwegian fairy tales to her people—not Hans Christian Andersen, because he was Danish, but folklore about sad, stuck princesses. In 2002, she married a Norwegian writer, Ari Behn, and in 2007, she tried her hand at business. She opened an alternative-therapy center, known as “the angel school,” where people learned clairvoyance, healing, and how to talk to seraphim. She was slammed in the press. There were calls for her to be excommunicated from the church. Some Norwegians demanded that the princess renounce her royal title.ADVERTISEMENThttps://4f966cd4ff79070cd9d10b1e0285e8a7.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html
After she and Behn divorced in 2017, her school shut down, and the princess was once again lost. But isn’t that where most fairy tales start?
This brings us back to the beginning.
Once upon a time, in an Airbnb in the hills of L.A., a divorced princess rang the doorbell of Durek, Goop’s Goopiest shaman.
“I’ve met you before,” she said. “I know you already.”
“Yes,” he replied. “We were destined to meet before we were born.” They started a friendship, which turned into a romance, which turned into a business with talks and workshops. A royal wedding seems all but inevitable.
There are a few fractures: the pandemic that had marooned them on opposite sides of the globe; a tragic family suicide; and a reality that most people just don’t buy what the shaman is selling.
None of that may matter, of course. Surely Cinderella knew, on some level, that fairy godmothers don’t turn pumpkins into coaches and bestow glow-ups with the flick of a wand. But people want to believe. They want to be seen. And so when this shaman saw this princess, and the princess felt seen, it was on.
If you believe in oracles, it had been on long before they met. When the shaman was 14, his mother, a psychic medium of West Indian–Norwegian descent who apprenticed with a Romani woman, told him that he would someday marry the princess of Norway. He brushed it off, because his childhood was filled with that sort of mysticism.
“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.”
Shaman Durek describes his childhood in meandering, dramatic sentences, as if he has no idea what will come out of his mouth until the precise second that the words escape it. The experience of listening seems more important than the minutiae, as though he is so carried away with himself and his vision that the details don’t quite matter.
For instance, Derek Verrett, as he was born in Sacramento, California, in 1974 and grew up in nearby Foster City, is sometimes a sixth-generation shaman and other times a third-generation shaman. Some of his elders had powers but chose to stay away from them in order to follow more traditional paths. Regardless, his lineage is “mystical AF.” He says his great-grandmother was a medicine woman who grew up in Ghana before fleeing to Haiti and eventually settling in New Orleans. Her son, Durek’s grandfather, had powers too, as did his father, but they were traditional Seventh-Day Adventists.
Durek told me alternately that his grandfather was a minister of his own megachurch, and also a carpenter. Some holy men are known to do both, right? Durek grew up in what he says was one of the wealthiest homes in an affluent, primarily white neighborhood. After his parents divorced when he was three, he lived with his dad, a pious construction entrepreneur, and his stepmother. Durek says his father had a private plane and cars and domestic staff to match; that his dad insisted he eschew his powers, speaks perfectly, sits up straight, wears a suit to school, and carries a briefcase as a kid. Other times, he says he grew up splitting his time between Foster City and Hawaii, where his first language was pidgin and he’d have to wake up in the middle of the night to catch fish to feed his relatives.
Whichever way it was, the greatest tension seemed to stem from whether he should lean into his spiritual gifts, which he first noticed when he was five. He would have visions about kids in his class, which would freak them out and cause them to complain to the teacher. He would wake up from dreams and see his ancestors staring at him from across the room. He was already different enough from other kids in school; he was one of the few Black kids in town, which led him to buy bleach from the drugstore to lighten his skin and hair. And he was attracted to both men and women.ADVERTISEMENT
“My dad cared more about what the world thought about him than he cared about his truth, and that was a problem for me,” says Durek. The father would tell Durek that he was going to face enough trials and that openly expressing his spirituality would make everything harder. Durek couldn’t lean away from it, though, which he says set off years of physical and emotional abuse from his father. He says a male babysitter sexually abused him, which caused him to drink heavily and use drugs as a teenager. He dropped out of school and got into trouble, breaking into a home so that he and some friends could throw a party. Then they burned it down, and he found himself in juvenile detention. “It became really challenging. I hated myself for having these powers, but then I knew these were amazing gifts. I could really help people with them. So I went through this battle with myself constantly.”
For a while, he bounced between serious shamanic training and modeling gigs in Europe or brief stints on television shows. He married a woman, then they divorced. He opened a spiritual business with friends and a live-in boyfriend.
At 28, he died. At least, that’s how he tells it. He says he suffered a series of seizures and his potassium levels skyrocketed and his organs shut down. His body felt as though flaming knives were stabbing him, and the spirit of his grandmother told him to let go, but his mind took him to his mother’s womb and he relived every moment of his life and remet every person he’d ever met. He flatlined for four minutes; after doctors resuscitated him, he remained in a coma for two months, after which he needed to be on dialysis for eight years. In 2012, his sister gave him a kidney.
He writes in his book that the spirits told him if he wanted to fully recover, he needed to start thinking with “my expansive soul and not with my limiting brain.” He trained in Native American shamanism with the Lakota and Cherokee tribes; in Haitian, Nigerian, and Hawaiian shamanism; and in the Cuban Babalawo and African Kuba mystical traditions. He studied Judaism and Kabbalah with rabbis in Israel; Sufism in Turkey; and Christianity, Catholicism, and Christian mysticism throughout Europe. He changed his name from Derek to Durek in 2013, “to reflect German ancestry,” though he is of Afro-Creole and West Indian–Norwegian descent. But he felt like a new person. He built a following by marketing shamanism in a way that 21st-century people understood: celebrity. He got a stylist and started an LLC. He posted photos of himself with famous clients. He charged for workshops and spoke freely about “downloading” wisdom from your spirits. By 2018, he was hustling with a full team. And that was when the phone rang, an old friend telling him he just had to meet someone.
Durek and Märtha are rarely in the same room without being physically connected. In the handful of times, I saw them in person over the last year, their fingers were linked or their ankles were touching or they were seated directly next to each other, heat passing between two bodies. The “babes” and “my loves” and “honey” fly. Durek can be sharp toward an assistant bringing him a plate of food without a napkin or toward his P.R. person when she interrupts. But with Märtha, he’s mush. “Isn’t she so beautiful?” “Honey, you look beautiful.” “Can’t you see why I love her?”
I could, in fact, see. It’s not like Märtha hasn’t had people bowing to her since she was born. Fawning is part of princedom. With Durek, the adoration felt earned. Both of them had been outsiders castigated for their spirituality. They knew loneliness and pain from the jump.
“There is an instant bond, a common one, when you can tap into your own vulnerability and their vulnerability,” Princess Märtha told me, speaking softly, her pinkie resting on Durek’s canvas pant legs in Malibu last summer. Durek, who had just inhaled a mountain of food on a plate delivered to him by his assistant—with a napkin this time—told her to speak up. So she did: “You always think, I’m alone with my pain. And the more, I think, we share, the more we can shift that energy and help others to realize who they are not because of their trauma, but actually who they are underneath….”
Good thing she’d been able to find him. When they met, he had no permanent home, a point of contention among the princess’s circle. “My Norwegian friends, who know us, they’re like, ‘Why doesn’t he have a house? Warning! Warning!!’ Because we don’t have many nomads in Norway, so they get very skeptical.” The shaman says he “had the cars, and the beautiful house in the hills with the pool and firepit and guest rooms and artwork that I collected from Art Basel,” but to what end? “Is material more important than my relationship with God or with the divine?” he muses. “People have been programmed to believe they need to fill in space because they start to feel their own emptiness inside.
