Conversations with Laurelann Porter

Today we’d like to introduce you to Laurelann Porter.

Hi, Laurelann. I am so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work life, how can you bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
When the pandemic first hit, and my university decided to close campus in the middle of March 2020, I caught a little glimpse of things to come. My first thought was that I would be able, every single day, to choose how to live my day. I could wake up whenever I wanted. I could work on whatever I wanted to work on. I could take a walk or ride a bike in the middle of the day. My time was my own. I felt a few inches taller as I rode my bike through the neighborhood. I was experiencing such a profound and positive shift in my reality and wanted to celebrate it. That euphoria was short-lived. Within a few short weeks, I started to look at the world around me and saw the systems and structures of our modern world collapsing right before our very eyes. Healthcare and Public Health became a sick joke. Low-wage earning jobs and the people who worked them became disposable. Everything I thought would help support our communities as we faced this global pandemic suddenly ceased. I felt like I was on a Gravitron ride, and the floor had been yanked out from underneath us. Around this time, I attended a Zoom webinar (long before we all had Zoom fatigue) with Naomi Klein and Angela Davis. I was thrilled that we had some community elders who were unsurprised at all this and gave some tips and guides for moving through this incredible historical moment most ethically and intentionally.

Fast forwarding to give you an overview:

• 2021 – Resigned from my post as a university professor and sold my car to pay for shaman school.
• 2022 – Sold house in AZ at the peak of the market, moved to Erie, PA, where my partner and I bought a house outright. (We have no mortgage – which is very liberating) Then, I spent the better part of that year in Brazil making music and doing deep healing work on myself.
• 2023 – Album release of my solo album “Soul Journeying,” an album of healing songs, as well as the single “10 Reais é o Novo Real” a song I wrote while playing in my band “Blue Angel banda de Blues” in Itacaré, Bahia, Brazil.

Now, I make music, serve individual clients with shamanic energy medicine, host sacred ceremonies, and lead mentoring programs. I lead a small group program for creative grieving and the other, Butterfly boot camp, where I teach others the skills in shamanic energy medicine and creativity that have helped me to become what I call a shamanic artist: one who channels through works of art that are healing for our communities.

Let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall, and if not, what challenges have you had to overcome?
Oh boy. The smoothest roads are the ones that are the least satisfying in life. Those roads lead us to suddenly find ourselves working a 40-hour-a-week soul-sucking job (or really, these jobs are usually 60-80 hours a week because we are expected to dedicate ourselves to our career and job). Perhaps in a kind of cruel poetic justice, I have worked in the craft of language, yet my biggest challenge has been articulating who I am and what I do. I can remember a time when I met with a mentor while completing my Ph.D. She looked at my CV and said, “You’re all over the place! You need to figure out how to narrate yourself!” It is true; I have been all over the place. And it’s only now, after passing the half-century mark, that I finally see how and why all those weird meandering pathways I took in life have led me to this place. All of my years teaching, my whole lifetime of singing and making music, my experience in theatre as both a performer and a director, my lifelong interest in the power of dreams, all of my studies of ritual and performance, even my primary doctoral research methodology of critical autoethnography, which helped me study myself when I was in crisis to find a way to figure out what was wrong with me and how I might envision a better reality for myself. Critical Autoethnography asks us to decolonize our minds and look deeply at the systems and structures in our lives that either empower or disempower us. I help others do the same by incorporating research, teaching, and creative skills into shamanic artistry.

As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might need to be more familiar with what you do, what can you tell them about what you do?
My primary gift is singing. I’ve been singing my whole life. But it was only recently that I realized my voice has healing capacities. I started to understand this when people told me it was relaxing to listen to my voice. During a meditation in ancestral medicine, one of my ancestors said, “Don’t forget to sing!” I thought it was just a simple reminder that singing is essential to any ceremony or ritual, sort of like the opening hymn at church. But then people told me how my voice contributed to their healing in my shamanic energy medicine sessions. Then, all of a sudden, people were telling me that my voice opened up portals. I’ve been told that with my voice, I can completely transform the energy of a space. I realize that my voice is part of my unique flavor of medicine.

My musical activities tend to be in roughly three different categories:

• The Rhythm and the Flavor:
  When I perform with my partner Mike Anderson, we perform as The Rhythm and the Flavor, an acoustic groove-based duo with hints of Brazilian jazz influences. We occasionally perform live in Erie, PA, and our first album, “Comfort Food,” is available on all major streaming platforms. We offered free Livestreams during the pandemic, which kept us both sane.
• Blue Angel banda de blues:
  We are a groove-based blues band when I perform in Brazil with Blue Angel. I love the blues because the structure is so simple that it opens up the invitation for improvisation, which is one of my favorite things to do. My favorite performing memories were when the band was jamming on something new, which felt like magic. And the blues have long been a space to express non-verbally the pain that we sometimes cannot express otherwise.
• Shamanic Healing Music:
  Even in this “genre,” my music spans several different musical styles. Some lean towards trance dance, others lean more sparse acoustic, and others are more soul-pop. But each one was born out of some healing process I did for myself. Some tracks are even explicitly designed to help release energetic wounds from our chakras. The one recently featured on the New York Times spring playlist was called “Hardest Thing” and speaks to the problem many of us who walk the healer’s path have to face. True healing comes from within the person seeking healing. Many of us start this life out of a desire to help our loved ones. But we have to learn, sometimes over and over in harsher and harsher ways, that we absolutely cannot “help” or “save” anyone who doesn’t want the help. This is a key precept in performance studies. You can truly learn something once you learn it from your experience.

I also write and perform solo performances, which I have been doing since college at Boston University. That sort of work has taken a back burner since I’ve mainly focused on music and healing arts. At some point, I plan to create new performance pieces that incorporate all of the various components of my experience—an evening of ritual, storytelling, song, and healing. In a way, my free New Moon ceremonies, which I offer for free to the community every month, are starting to be a place where I can develop creative ways to be present with folks and provide support in interesting, moving, entertaining ways.

One of the last areas I am very passionate about is helping train other theatremakers to tap those skills they already have to develop their innate potential as healers. I’m currently participating in the test drive of a curriculum with one of my mentors, Dr. Joseph Dillard, in a methodology he calls Integral Deep Listening. It’s a playful way to dialogue with your dreams. It can also work for folks who need help remembering their dreams. However, the basic concept central to his work is that when we listen deeply to our various emergent self-aspects, we develop skills to hold and entertain a variety of diverse perspectives. We use these skills to help ensure we live according to our interior compass. This is a skill that the entire world could benefit from. And actors already have those skills from all their experience taking on roles in the theatre. Being willing to assume a fictional role is the key to disarming our conscious mind to get deeper into what our subconscious or collective consciousness might want us to hear.

I want to encourage more and more theatremakers to adapt their skills to other arenas. The truth is every one of us can heal ourselves. It takes work. And it takes dedication and commitment. However, the primary skills of shamanic energy medicine are imagination and intention. Theatremakers have those skills deeply rooted in their craft. I have found them to be easily transferrable to healing realms.

We’re always looking for the lessons that can be learned in any situation, including tragic ones like the Covid-19 crisis. Are there any lessons you’ve learned that you can share?
There are so many lessons to be learned from the COVID-19 Crisis. One of my back burner projects is “Confessions of a Recovering Workaholic: or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Pandemic.” Being a recovering workaholic puts me in a double bind with this. I want to do the work to finish the book, but there are other priorities that I want to focus on in my life. And this was the biggest lesson for me.

The point when I first fell into depression from the whole situation, I was crying (again) one day. And my partner asked me, “What’s wrong? Why are you crying (again?/now?).” I just looked at him and said, “Everything is so fragile.” He laughed and said, “Are you just figuring that out now?” That moment demonstrated so clearly that there was no one but myself I could rely on to help me figure out what was wrong with my world. It’s not the big world of geopolitical conflicts but my reality. It was proven to me quite glaringly that the systems I believed in were a sham. The government wasn’t going to take care of us. None of our employers were going to take care of us. We would have to figure out how to take care of ourselves, either through collective organizing or cultivating resiliency, and it has to be both.

That’s the other lesson I’ve learned quite profoundly. We only heal individually. And we only heal collectively. It sounds like a contradiction, but both are true. We have to do both. I was inspired by the Mutual Aid societies that were suddenly visible during the initial stages of the pandemic. Seeing those groups operate and be useful for real people planted the seeds in my imagination that we could collectively visualize and co-create a better situation for ourselves. It’s one of the reasons I love leading the small group programs. I love that dynamic. A certain intimacy gets established in small groups, and there is a certain level of trust. When we enter the space intentionally, cultivating that intention to be sacred witnesses for each other while we are in this collective space together can be incredibly transformational for everyone involved.

Pricing:

• Free New Moon Ceremonies
• $10 Album available on all platforms
• $250 and up 1:1 shamanic healing services
• $997 Creative Grieving 6 month support program
• $5k Butterfly Bootcamp training and mentoring program in shamanic artistry

Contact Info:

• Website: laurelannporter.com
• Instagram: @laurelannporter
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/laurelann.porter
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laurelann-porter-936a7b8/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC28HboNmBjtg25c0ToN-gNg
• SoundCloud: http://open.spotify.com/album/1cSMFGeH2a6pQyLz73SboK
• Other: https://keap.app/contact-us/7542917943298796. (This is the link to sign up to receive notifications of the free new moon ceremonies)

Image Credits
Headshot Photo: Mike Anderson