Eliot Cowan is a post-modern shaman, and founder of the Blue Deer Center. The spiritual retreat in New York’s Catskills region is devoted to ancestral and indigenous spiritual teachings from around the world.

BY PAUL KAIHLA — When three people died and dozens were injured in Fall 2009 at a sweat lodge ceremony in Sedona, Arizona run by self-help celebrity, James Arthur Ray, we quickly learned that people are willing to pay almost $10,000 to go on a retreat to experience indigenous healing rituals.

Ray, who is a sometime-guest on Oprah and one of the self-styled gurus in the motivational movie The Secret, was investigated for homicide – and widely criticized for exploitative and bogus practices. But one expert who perhaps had the most to say on the subject held his tongue, Eliot Cowan.

Cowan is the founder of the world’s first retreat center devoted to ancestral and indigenous spiritual and healing techniques, and walks the humble talk of a modest post-modern mystic. And unlike Ray’s retreats, workshops at Cowan’s Blue Deer Center in New York’s Catskills region cost a few hundred dollars, not thousands.  The renovated farm on 96 acres of fields and forests doesn’t serve as a platform for a single cult figure; it instead draws myriad spiritual teachers from around the globe, ranging from a Hawaiian Kahuna priestess to a Peruvian expert on medicinal plants from the Amazon. “Other places present many, many approaches to personal growth,” says Cowan. “The Blue Deer Center is distinct because it focuses on teachings that have been proven over hundreds, and in fact, thousands of years.”

Post-modern mystic: from acupuncture to herbal healing

Cowan is a healer in his own right, and his teachings are based on a shamanic approach to herbal medicine. You can call it an eclectic, life-long learning but his main inspiration was the Huichol Indians in the Sierra Madre Mounts of western Mexico. Like Carlos Castaneda, the author of the 1960’s cross-over hit Tales of Don Juan, Cowan received a degree in anthropology (Pomona College, east of L.A.), and did post–grad work at UCLA at the time that Castaneda was a professor there and writing one of his best-selling sequels.

In 1969, Cowan set those studies aside to move to England, and spent the 1970s earning a bachelor and masters in acupuncture, and then teaching at the College of Traditional Acupuncture, in Royal Leamington Spa, England under the late J. R. Worsley, who is credited with bringing classic acupuncture to the west.

It was his mentor’s recommendation to seek the guidance of plants to help his patients that sent Cowan on the journey that led to an 1981 encounter with a Huichol mentor, Mexican shaman Don Guadalupe Gonzalez Rios. “His art was to form a relationship with the spirit of a plant, which is more than just a phyto-chemical factory,” said Cowan. “This is how traditional people have used plant medicine throughout the world from the beginning of time.” Cowan reported more than a decade of findings in his 1995 book, Plant Spirit Medicine, but wanted to make indigenous healing techniques directly available to the American public.

Visionary: Boot-strapping the first center of its kind in the world

After years of giving workshops across the country, Cowan parlayed an inheritance from an uncle along with a prospectus to raise enough funds from a handful of supporters to make a down payment in 2005 on an old farm near Margaretville, New York. It happened to be on the site of an Onondaga tribal council lodge. After two years of renovations, the Blue Deer Center unveiled two swank buildings, which  accommodate up to 50 overnight guests, and a wood-heated yurt that can seat up to 75. Since 2007, it has hosted more than 600 attendees in more than 40 programs. In 2010 alone, 30 programs are scheduled for 650 participants, a number which Cowan hopes to double in the next five years. “This was a community project from the very beginning,” says Cowan. “We didn’t have a sugar daddy hidden away.”

Traditional Huichol shaman healing ritual (not at Blue Deer Center)

In keeping with the discreet style of a shaman, Cowan is highly circumspect about his own techniques: what happens with an individual client is not only confidential, it’s shielded by a sacred space. But one woman who has attended Blue Deer Center calls Cowan’s work transformative and powerful. Marjo Go-van Straten was working as a 49-year-old somatic therapist in Holland when doctors diagnosed her with bone-marrow cancer in December, 2004.

Straten first attended Cowan’s healing camp in 2005, and describes rituals designed to dissolve her work-a-day world identity, such as adopting a new name for the duration of the retreat. Cowan administered several “deep shamanic treatments” akin to energy healing like reiki, and made supplements from medicinal plants like the locally-grown mugwort.

“All of the activities promoted connection with nature, and harmony and balance within my inner core, beyond description,” recalls Straten. The activities also apparently promoted fundamental healing because when Straten returned to Holland blood tests showed that her cancer was in remission. “The specialists in the hospital do not know why I am this stable but they decided to bring my diagnosis back down to the ‘before’ stage,” says Straten. Accounts like Straten’s inspire Blue Deer Center’s alumni and admirers to make donations to Cowan’s one-of-a-kind spiritual retreat. Meanwhile, participants from last fall’s tragic sweat lodge event in Sedona are lining up to sue James Arthur Ray.

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