Animal Fur, a smelling House and Women peeing in Kitchen Sinks

While I was in Amsterdam in 2005, there was another incident that I did not forget and which showed me again how broad that field is that people call ‘spirituality’ and what they think is spiritual work, how many things they include in this. I learned in that time that I had to show my organizers a little bit more in detail what I believed in or what I did not believe in, what I liked, who I was and who I was not.

My organizer, a woman who was from Scotland but lived in the capital of the Netherlands, had arranged a program for me a little bit outside of Amsterdam. She told me she had advertised my visit and had been contacted by a man who was interested to invite me in his own center. She was happy about the contact and of course agreed that we would come out there for some program. He was eager to have several days of program and my organizer agreed, we would come and stay for some nights at his place.

It was a drive of two hours until we arrived there. When we came in, we were welcomed and sat together to have a small talk. During that conversation we got to know that this man was a shaman. I had already heard of people doing ‘shamanic work’ and knew my impression that this was not really something for me, something that matched my ideas of spirituality and the world. I was open however to meet new people and knew better than to close my mind and heart for someone due to this.

I did not however feel very good there. It was not the man’s idea of spirituality itself, it was how this ‘shamanism’ expressed itself in his house. There were skins and furs of animals everywhere, hanging at the walls, lying on the floor, on the chairs, where you sat down and where you were walking, just everywhere. There were feathers lying around and the whole house was stinking, although that was probably rather due to some strange kind of incense than the remains of animals that I could see everywhere.

I did my program in the evening and knew that there was more program planned for the next days but in the next morning, I talked to my Scottish friend and told her that I did not like the place and that I did not feel comfortable at all. It turned out that I was not the only one who felt funny in that place and so we nicely told this man that we would not stay any longer and went back to Amsterdam.

After this short episode and a lot of talks with different friends, I decided that I needed to be a bit clearer beforehand about who I was and where I could work. I always told people before a program that I was vegetarian and did not like to eat when there was meat at the table for example. I would maybe need to get to know the organizer a bit before. But how? Often it was the first time that I met someone in person when I arrived in a town. Well, many questions to which I did not have an answer yet.

Despite all those funny feelings with this place however, there is always one memory connected with this that I have to laugh about, especially when I talk to my Scottish friend: the part of the house where she and I were sleeping was completely separate and unfortunately, there was no toilet in this part of the building! So for going to toilet, we had to go out of the house and go to another building. In the late evening, it had already got cold and my organizer had just left, saying she would go to toilet. She came back much too quickly however and when I asked her how she had been out in the cold and back so quickly, she answered ‘Oh, I have not been out! It is too cold, brr! No, ‘ and she giggled ‘I climbed onto the kitchen sink and peed there! You can do that too, you don’t have to go out!’ I could not believe it and had to laugh so hard about it! She had to laugh, too, and for a while we were just laughing together, feeling much better in this strange place.

Yes, that is what I remember from this program outside of Amsterdam: animal skins, bad smell in a house and a young lady peeing into the kitchen sink – and again I laugh about the memory!