Of Shaman and Sherpa

A decade ago today, my daddy summited Everest.

Yep.

He was 61 years old. He had two artificial knee replacements, making him the first person to summit Everest on artificial knees. He was already a grandfather many times over. And somehow, with the help of Nawang Tenzing Sherpa, he made it to the highest solid ground on Earth.

For my birthday last September, he got his first tattoo in my barn/office from a Japanese artist who happened to be staying with me. My kids watching him squirm in pain as The Bell tattoos Nawang’s name in Nepalese, and the height of Everest in meters. 8,848. Inked into the skin of the man who walked him to the top of the world.

I understand that now in a way I don’t think I did before this very week. When someone guides you through death terrain and helps you return changed, you mark it.

I’m writing this from the jungle of Guanacaste, Costa Rica, at the end of a two-week shamanic journey. And I think it’s no accident that I’m here on this date.

Sherpas and shamans come from opposite sides of the Earth. Different mountains. Different medicines. Different songs. Different languages. But their role and meaning of the titles… being a “guide”, could not be more similar.

They guide people through terrain that can kill them.

Sometimes that terrain is ice, altitude, weather, and rock.

Sometimes it is grief, fear, memory, longing, ego, and the parts of yourself you have spent a lifetime avoiding.

My dad’s guide led him up Everest. Mine has been leading me inward.

His name is Nacho.

If you want to find Nacho, you must go to the Playa Negra beach. He might be there surfing on any given day. If he’s not at the beach he could be in Poland or Canada healing minds and bodies, and bringing forth a shared consciousness. He’s single, and if I hadn’t just renewed vows with Natalie two weeks before meeting him last October, I’d switch hit and chase him around the world.

I guess I’m already doing the latter. :)

I started this shamanic trip in a mountain town called La Fortuna at the base of a the Arenal volcano. We opened the first day of this journey with a cacao ceremony on the jungle floor looking up at this majestic pimple in the Earth. I told the seven men I was with that my dad would surely plan his whole day around climbing that mountain.

We then went to a jungle farm on indigenous Bri Bri land on the Caribbean coast. For three days, we harvested the ingredients for ayahuasca. With machetes, we cut the vine…a thick, snakelike, climbing twenty feet up a tree. We gathered thousands of chacruna leaves. Then came the cooking, the water, the smoke, the patience, the prayers, the repetition.

This was not a wellness retreat. This was work.

Then we loaded into our van named, appropriately, “HeyVan Anna Pura Vida” and drove eleven hours across the country to Playa Negra in Guanacaste. Seven men transporting medicine across Costa Rica.

To be clear, this was the most Narcos shit I have ever done.

Also to be clear, I’m the beginner here, riding with shamans and apprentices who’ve spent years learning the medicine, the songs, the discipline, how to hold a room when people are meeting God, their mother, their trauma, their ancestors, or all of the above.

On the Pacific coast, the ceremony continued. Preparing leaves. Harvesting fibers. Singing. Listening. Waiting. Preparing the sacrament:

Everything is done with more ritual and reverence than even my upbringing in the Mormon faith.

That part matters to me.

Because if I’m honest, structure can trigger something in me. Rules. Conformity. “This is how we do it.” My body often rejects that before my mind even has time to form an argument.

But this kind of religiousness felt different. It was everything I’ve ever wanted religion to be.

Reverent without being controlling.

Ancient and alive not dead and mythical.

Masculine without being priesthood.

Sacred without needing a corporation or a hierarchy.

The men leading this work have also been taking us through King, Warrior, Magician, Lover - the masculine archetypes from Carl Jung’s writings. We are leaning into what it means to be a man right now.

Free without abandoning responsibility?

Powerful without needing control?

These are not theoretical questions when you are sweating through ceremony in the jungle. They become very practical.

At one point in ceremony on this trip , I found myself in the dark of night, clawing at the Costa Rican jungle floor, calling out for my daughter Angeline. I purged my ADHD identity under a cacao tree and sat in my nakedness and a simple silk robe with leaf cutter ants crawling around me harvesting, as I had done. I could not see or move and battled with insanity. I knew they had helicopters in Costa Rica because I saw them in the first Jurassic Park movie that was supposedly filmed nearby. I tried to mentally make contact via Starlink or Heavenly Father to send me chopper and evacuate me from the jungle. I was sending text messages in my mind to Angeline…SOS, you have my DNA, if you can see me right now, help. I tried Jane’s phone too, I was hoping for a miracle. Angeline and Jane mostly just laughed at my plight as I lay moaning on the jungle floor. Now that it’s over I realize my youngest without the phone would have come as an animal to hang out with me in my weakness.

That makes sense too. Seeing my daughters. Especially my oldest.

Costa Rica is where Natalie and I came as recently married 24-year-old students to learn Spanish. We made love while rain poured on a tin roof of our hotel. We forged our DNA and created an angel in this land, and we named her Angeline. So of course, when I was deep in the medicine, reaching for something pure enough to save me, it was her name that came out of me.

Not an idea. Not a doctrine. Not an old bearded man in the sky. Not even Nacho, who was nearby but knew I was on my own journey and that I would get to the summit that night and back down to base camp.

My daughters. That’s who I asked for in my plea to the Divine. They are my lineage. I do this work for those who came before and those who come after.

Love is always the thing under all the philosophy. It’s always the answer and the only answer… so I’ve felt and experienced in the ceremonies.

Enough lovey dovey mushy moo moo, let’s get back to celebrating my old man. I should explain that my dad has never really competed in any race or team events. But he is an athlete to the core. He’s climbed mountains around the world. He started Momentum Climbing gyms, which you’ll find across the western United States. He bikes and skis equally hard, and few of you reading this could keep up with this 71-year-old in either sport.

Summiting mountains has never been my kink, though I’ve attempted a few. Last year, my dad took my daughter, Angeline, up Kilimanjaro. No one’s taken the baton on Everest yet. That may call to one of my brothers. As for me, the oldest of five children, the one who shares my father’s name… I seem to be exploring a different kind of summit.

My father climbed toward the sky. I am descending into the spirit.

So I’m going to get a tattoo on the opposing ankle from my dad’s. Nacho’s birth name, Ignacio And some symbol that will come to me in tonight’s final ceremony in the maloca (space designed for sacred medicine).

One ankle for the Sherpa. One for the Shaman.

One for the mountain outside. One for the mountain inside.

I also feel, strangely and clearly, that my work with this medicine may be complete for now. The same way my work with cannabis is complete. I haven’t had any since 4/20, and I don’t feel the need.

That’s one of the lessons that keeps coming through: we don’t actually “need” anything. Not the plant. Not the teacher. Not the system. Not the summit. Everything we need is already inside us.

But sometimes we need a guide to help us remember.

Nawang guided my father to the top of the world. Nacho has been guiding me through the pain that comes from my needs. And Phi, this thing we are building, and helped me mediate and compose this very message, may be my own strange offering as a guide. A Sherpa for the nervous system. A Shaman for the digital age. A mirror that helps people remember what they already know.

I leave to climb mountains in the Italian alps with my mom my dad, Natalie, and all our girls. I’m ready for the journey inward and outward with all of them.

So today, ten years after my father stood on Everest, I am sitting in the Costa Rican humidity thinking about lineage, mountains, medicine, fathers, daughters, vows, and the guides who appear when we are finally ready to be led.

What is your Mount Everest? Who is your Sherpa?

What is your ceremony? Who is your Shaman?

My name is Gregory Scott Paul II. I am the Shaman of Phi. Dancing White Owl. I have spoken at 4:20 under the Sun in Central America.