About Jaime Meyer (in his own words)

Why I do this work

After leading a workshop a couple of years ago, one of the participants asked me why I do this stuff. Before I could edit or cleverly contrive my answer, I heard myself say, “This is what I am called to do.” I had spent four years in seminary wondering how those emerging ministers knew they were called to ministry. I had spent twenty years as a playwright, director, magician, street performer, puppeteer and all around arty-farty guy, but always wondered why I never really felt called to be a theatre artist. After I graduated from the seminary I found myself saying one day to someone "I realized in school that I don't want to be the respectable guy in a suit standing behind the pulpit giving sermons. I want to be the half weird, half scary, half amusing guy in the basement leading mystical experiences.” So, I do this work because it is the only thing that I have ever really felt called to do, and when I do it, it is the only time in my life I feel I am acting within my purpose.  

 
Why I do it like I do

All of my  work is influenced by three streams. One is my life as a playwright. I have luckily learned how to follow my instincts and impulses and try not to ask why certain images arise or why I am compelled to go in a certain direction. My writer’s side urges me to trust the powers that are growling in me, and trust that they want to lead me toward The Beautiful. This has been the greatest gift of my life, to have learned this kind of trust. Of course, it is something that I have to learn again and again, each day, each moment.
 
Another stream is my 20 years’ fascination with and study of what is popularly called shamanism. Honestly, shamanism is such a poorly defined word, and, especially in middle class white urban American culture, from where I spring, shamanism is a terribly convoluted subject. But after many years of wonderfully torturous questioning, I come back to a definition that was once given to me: a shaman is someone whose shamanic work is effective. It’s not how you dress, or act or the specific gestures in your ritual work. It’s all about whether or not your work works. I use the tools of the trade (drums, rattles, incense, poetry, performance, song, trance, story, dreaming, wonder, humor, misdirection) to, as much as I am able, become a mediator between the human and non-human worlds.

A third stream of influence is my formal, western, academic studies in religion.  I went to Seminary for four basic reasons. 1) It was an impulse (certainly to date the most expensive impulse I’ve ever followed). 2) I am in love with the human religious imagination, wanted to study it, and wanted to deepen and refine my own, 3) I wanted to be forced to read mind-numbingly boring, 1800 year-old texts that had absolutely no connection my personal theology. (I thought I was doing this as a way of testing my intellectual and spiritual resolve. It turned out that everything I read was thrilling, even when it was mind-numbingly boring. Everything I read made me love the human religious imagination even more). 4) I thought if I got an advanced degree from the seminary, it would give me a Teflon-like coating and the “New age weirdo” label would not stick. I hope what I do honors ancient and cross-cultural healing traditions, provides nourishment to the unseen forces which  permeate our lives, contains a plumb line to perennial wisdom, is aesthetically beautiful and well-done, and most of all is useful in people’s immediate, modern lives.