A conversation before the equinox

I turned my camera off.

So did he.

It felt more honest that way — voice to voice, without the small performative theater of Zoom rectangles. Rob prefers it that way. “Telephone vibe,” he said. I agreed.

We were speaking ahead of his upcoming appearance at the Henry Miller Memorial Library, where he will present his book Shamergence: The Shamanic Awakening to Divine Feminine Energy for Personal and Planetary Healing.   I decided early on not to smooth that tension away.

Rob lives among redwoods. For years he lived in a yurt — deliberately exposed, deliberately uncomfortable. Comfort, he told me, is the enemy of growth. When he and his wife Amy first arrived in Big Sur, he stepped into a fire circle and received what he calls a “download”: This is the land of your becoming. He recounts it without drama, as though describing weather. The yurt, he says, offered just enough shelter to keep the mountain lions outside but not so much insulation that he lost contact with wind, rain, or night sounds. Round spaces matter to him. He believes powerful things do not happen in squares. He invokes Black Elk and the breaking of the sacred hoop. Already we are in a landscape where metaphor and ontology intermingle.

His awakening, however, did not begin in California. It began in Vermont, at the age of five or six, when he suddenly realized that everyone he loved would die. His parents. His grandparents. His dog. Himself. The recognition terrified him so deeply that he could not sleep for weeks unless his mother lay beside him. Years later, at fourteen, reading Shelley’s Ozymandias — the shattered statue in the desert, the boast reduced to sand — struck the same nerve. Everything dissolves. Empires crumble. What survives time? For the adolescent Rob, the only answer available was the soul.

There were other “knocks,” as he calls them. A friend killed by a drunk driver. A growing fascination with Carlos Castaneda and the idea of death as an advisor rather than an enemy. And then the knock that rearranged everything: stage-four cancer in five organs, six months to live.

Before that diagnosis, there had been a different chapter entirely. Rob was part of The Samples, a touring band that brushed the edge of mainstream success. Dave Matthews opened for them. Maroon 5 opened for them. They appeared on The Tonight Show. This is not embellished nostalgia; it is documented history. And yet when he left the band, the identity that had once buoyed him collapsed. Without “rock star” as an organizing principle, he fell into a suicidal depression. He lost over fifty pounds. Antidepressants did nothing.

Then came the diagnosis.

He describes the moment in spare terms. First, he wanted more time with Amy. That was the immediate, human impulse. Second, he says, a voice — not audible, but unmistakable — told him he could live, but only if he surrendered his life to it. His life would no longer belong to him. It would be a life of service. Third, the depression lifted instantly.

He speaks of this voice as a somatic knowing, something that arises in the belly rather than the mind. It is not belief, not faith in the conventional sense, but certainty in the cells. It is also not, in his view, unique to him. “Everyone has it,” he insists. The only difference is whether we surrender to it.

That surrender, he says, reorganized his life in ways that defy linear explanation. The voice told him to go to Tasmania. He had no money. That same day his father called to say he was cashing out an old life insurance policy and asked whether Rob wanted the funds. Seven thousand dollars appeared. He bought the ticket. The voice later told him to write a book. On that same day, his wife met a writing coach who confessed she had woken up that morning knowing she needed to work with a shaman.

One can read these as coincidence, pattern recognition, narrative coherence imposed after the fact. Rob does not argue against those interpretations. He simply names them Spirit.

When I pressed him on evidence — on repeatability, on measurable outcomes — he shifted the frame. Science, he said, is a myth. Not a falsehood, but a story — the most powerful and useful story we have for describing certain aspects of reality. It gives us astonishing technologies. It also has limits. Using science to disprove Spirit, he suggested, is like trying to cut down a redwood with a pocketknife. Wrong tool. It is not an empirical rebuttal; it is a reframing of epistemology.

He speaks often of masculine and feminine energies, careful to insist that these are not genders but archetypal forces — logos and eros, doing and being, navigation and connection. In a cultural moment wary of binaries, such language can grate. He remains unmoved. These, he says, are elemental patterns, like gravity. Whether we like them or not does not dissolve them.

The more complicated terrain lies elsewhere.

Rob’s training came through Peruvian shamanic traditions. He studied for nearly a decade in the Andes and the Amazon. His teacher, Jose Luis Herrera, read and blessed the book. Rob insists that the shamans themselves descended from isolation because they believed humanity had entered an existential crisis. There is no time, he says, for territorial ownership of wisdom. All authentic traditions must be brought to bear.

Still, one cannot ignore the optics. Rob practices at Post Ranch Inn — perhaps the most conspicuous symbol of luxury in Big Sur. The clientele are wealthy, influential, powerful. He does not deny the irony. Instead, he reframes it: if those individuals have genuine transformative experiences, the ripple effects extend outward in ways that may affect policy, business, culture. He maintains a sliding-scale home practice and will see people for nothing. Yet the tension between ancient Andean cosmology and five-star wellness tourism remains palpable.

I asked him about cult dynamics — about the risk that charisma, certainty, and vulnerability can create unhealthy dependency. He answered by describing how his own teacher refused to be elevated. “Call me brother,” the teacher told him. Rob claims that the moment he believes the power is his, it disappears. Before sessions, he says, he leaves “Rob” outside the door. What enters is not personality but vessel.

Whether that is reassuring or unsettling may depend on where one stands.

I asked him what doubts he has.

“Only about Rob,” he replied. “Never about Spirit.”

It is a striking answer. It is also, in its way, a closed loop.

We live in an age of institutional erosion, ecological anxiety, and spiritual hunger. Science is politicized. Religion is fragmented. Wellness has become both refuge and industry. In that landscape, Rob stands as something difficult to categorize: survivor, mystic, disciplined practitioner, participant in privilege, sincere believer.

He believes what he says. Entirely. That alone distinguishes him from the ironic detachment that dominates much contemporary discourse.

He will speak at the Henry Miller Memorial Library on March 21, the day after the spring equinox — a balance point between light and dark. The symbolism is almost too tidy, yet somehow fitting.

Whether one arrives as skeptic, seeker, or anthropologist of modern spirituality, the encounter itself may be the point. At minimum, it compels a question that is harder to dismiss than any argument about proof:

What voice are we listening to?

And why?