How are you supposed to address a shaman? I wonder, as Maria Lucia Bittencourt Sauer pops up on my computer screen. Sunlight streaks through her cozy-looking kitchen in Rio de Janeiro’s Leblon district (which cozies up to the district of Ipanema). “Good morning,” she greets me cheerfully. “I hope it’s okay if I eat my breakfast.” The sixty-two year old radiant blonde is a far cry from the stereotypical image that might leap to mind upon hearing “shaman:” an old, wise indigenous man in a sweat lodge, or, since we’re in Brazil, the leader of an Ayahuasca ceremonial ritual deep in the Amazon. I never imagined I would speak to a shaman over Skype, much less that the shaman would be wearing a sweater, glasses, and earrings rather than turquoise and robes. She looks pretty down-to-earth for a person who spends her days dealing with spirits, and so I begin to think of her as The Subtle Shaman. But how to refer to her? Shaman Sauer, or—?

“You can’t call yourself a shaman,” she explains. “A shaman is. Just is. I don’t know what I am.”

I wasn’t sure what to expect when I sat down for a conversation over coffee with Maria. Shamans aren’t exactly hanging out in the cafés of Brooklyn. I was intrigued, but also skeptical about spiritual healing, a “treatment” that doesn’t involve white lab coats and prescription pads. But she disarms me right off the bat with her openness and immediate admission to not even really knowing what she is. Maria and I talk about charlatans who pose as shamans for profit. You don’t find that in Brazil as much as places like LA, she tells me, since in Brazilian tradition, healers don’t go into their line of work to make money, and most have other jobs. (Maria, who charges one hundred US dollars for an hour-and-a-half long session, is also a therapist.)

Maria wasn’t always sure she wanted to be a healer. Growing up, she was a self-proclaimed “rebel” who wanted nothing to do with the family “calling.”

Maria comes from four generations of spiritual healers. When her family immigrated to Brazil from Portugal, they lost their coffee plantation and their land to a draught. Perhaps to deal with this upheaval, her great-grandmother began practicing spiritism. Maria calls those of her tradition “problem solvers” and “health healers,” and speaks of them as “they,” not “we.” “She was a channel,” Sauer says of her great-grandmother. “French people came to Brazil and brought Spiritism—the science of connecting with spirits,” she says. Spiritism itself has different branches, and her family’s genre is influenced by many traditions—Native American, French, Chinese—and yet is also uniquely Brazilian. In addition to her family’s tradition of channelling, Maria practices “spritual massage,” an energy healing practice based on the tradition founded by Allan Kardec, a scientist and teacher, 150 years ago in France.

But Maria wasn’t always sure she wanted to be a healer. Growing up, she was a self-proclaimed “rebel” who wanted nothing to do with the family “calling.” As she puts it, “I was very guarded, rebellious, I didn’t want to do any spiritual work. I just wanted to be a common person”—which did not entail becoming “an instrument for healing,” So she rebelled the only way she could in a family of healers and became a lawyer. Maria lived and practiced law in her native Brazil, a member of possibly the only family in which deciding to become an attorney would be considered a rebellious act.

But in 1980, after many years of practicing law, she began to crave a respite from the stress of her “busy lawyer’s life,” and decided to attend the Esalen Institute, the alternative education nonprofit in Big Sur, California made famous by the likes of Alan Watts, Richard Alpert, and Timothy Leary. Her original purpose was “some R&R and self-improvement.” But without knowing it, she had stumbled right into the very family tradition she had been avoiding all her life.

At Esalen, Sauer met Luiz Antonio Gasparetto, a trance medium who happened to be from the same tradition of Brazilian spiritual healing as four generations of her family. Gasparetto has been channeling since he was thirteen and is known specifically for his work with famous dead artists like Monet, Picasso and Da Vinci (he actually paints while entranced). “He was visiting while we were there,” she says. It would have been an extremely odd coincidence, if Maria believed in coincidences. “Carl Jung always spoke about synchronicity, about how everything in the universe is aligned,” she says. By this point, I’m nodding my head in agreement, being equally fascinated by the odd inexplicability of synchronous occurrences and the mystical, surprising feeling that arises when they occur, that there must be some meaning to all this.

In classic rebel style, she never looked back. She had found her way back into the fold but she would go about it on her own terms, not because it was what was expected of her.

The morning sunlight has grown stronger, shining directly on her already-bright hair. “How come at the same time I was there, at that time, two Brazilians of the same tradition meet?” Not all Brazilian shamans are “trance mediums.” The stereotypical image I see when I hear the word shaman is actually the most common indigenous cosmology—the Ayahuasca rituals, drumming, chanting, and sweat lodges—and even a whole tradition of “non-shamanic” shamans, such as the Barasana who live in the eastern Amazon basin, in which any adult male is said to have some aspect of shamanic ability. Given the relative rarity of her family’s tradition, it was pretty strange for Maria to meet Gasparetto, also working in that tradition, in what she had considered a retreat spot in Northern California.

After the fortuitous encounter with Gasparetto, Maria felt pulled in a surprising direction: toward shamanic healing. She soon realized that her break from lawyering had become permanent. She again rebelled—this time, against the life she had created for herself as a lawyer, and made the decision to enter the proverbial ‘family business’ after all. “When I let go of being a lawyer I knew I was not going to be rich,” she says. But in classic rebel style, she never looked back. She had found her way back into the fold but she would go about it on her own terms, not because it was what was expected of her. The coincidence, she says, made the timing feel right.

“[Gasparetto] put me to work right away,” she says, and after two months of training, her transition from attorney to shaman was underway. Now, at sixty-two years old, she has been practicing her healing specialty, “spiritual massage,” in Brazil, the US, and elsewhere, for thirty-two years. Spiritual Massage, she tells me, is a type of bodywork based on Chinese medicine. The technique uses both physical touch and energy work.

“The deep relaxation that happens when the client lies on the table and receives the work” Maria explains, “creates a special state that allows his energetic system to go into self-regulation, allowing the layers of the energy body, that envelops the spirit of the person, to align, and bring about a feeling of ease, a feeling that everything is okay again.” Tools of a session can include crystals, sage, feathers, chanting, whispering, and singing. “Spiritual massage is a work of cleansing of old patterns,” she continues, “it’s about bringing the person back into the body. That’s where the shamanic work comes in. A good shaman is a mirror for the healing abilities of the person. I want to be the mirror of the power of the people rather than them seeing me as powerful and themselves as needy.”

Brazilian shamanism, she says, “cannot be compared to any other kind of healing.” The practice of spiritual massage was passed on to Gasparetto by a Chinese spirit he channeled, Chung In Lang, who lived in ancient China. And like most jobs, the training is never done. “I’m still studying, still learning,” she says. “It’s not something where you say, ‘oh I’m a healer, I’m a shaman.’ It’s continuous work on yourself. You have to do a lot of cleansing and developing, not thinking of yourself only and your family, but of the planet the people around you, how can you help.”

The family tradition also continues. Maria’s younger brother, Carlos, travels the world doing the same work, and she has worked with her sister, Aparecida, at Esalen. As for her twenty-nine year old daughter, who was conceived in a tree house near Esalen, “she has the abilities but she wants to see first. She wants to see to believe. She’s very practical, down to earth.” If this sounds a bit like Maria herself, it may be a coincidence—or not.

What else can be learned working in this unusual family business? “The thing I wonder because of traveling so much teaching,” she says, “is why can’t everybody be your family?”

This startles me. I’m also of the belief that we create familial communities through the people with whom we choose to share our lives and that those ties that can be stronger than biological family ties. It might or might not be a synchronicity, but I find myself wanting to reach through the screen and give her a hug . As I can’t channel myself through the internet, I tell her instead about my plan to come to Brazil in December, and that I’ll passing through Rio on my way to a capoeira event in Brasilia. I make an appointment to see her when I’m in town—not as a journalist, but as a client. I’m curious—enough to want to experience this “spiritual massage” for myself. I’m not suddenly convinced that spirits exist among us, but feeling a warm personal connection to a person I’ve encountered only for a little over an hour through Skype isn’t something I’ve experienced before. As we smile and wave and she speaks the same signature sign-off I’ve come to know from our email exchanges—“much love”—I feel as though I’m saying “see you soon” to a favorite aunt. And then the rebel shaman signs off, on her way to lead some workshops in the Swiss Alps.

*Sauer will be teaching at Easlen March 11-18, 2012

-Liza Monroy is the author of the novel Mexican High, and the forthcoming memoir The Marriage Act. www.lizamonroy.com

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