Sept. 18, 2004,
9:47PM
Andrew Innerarity /
Chronicle 151 PROOF: Shaman Hugging Bear, left, spits a
mouthful of Bacardi 151 proof rum onto a candle as part of a
fire ceremony concluding a daylong workshop on healing
techniques.
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An unlikely mystic
Shaman provides a different brand of medicine By MARY
ANN FERGUS
Houston Chronicle
Andrew Innerarity /
Chronicle TUNING IN: An apprentice shaman, Josh Beier,
15, plays a drum as part of a classroom ceremony.
| Shaman Hugging Bear has a
headache.
So here, at his own anything-can-happen class in energy healing,
the shaman, Eric Davis, lies on the floor and tells apprentice Cindy
Sepcie how to help him.
As instructed, Sepcie presses her thumbs down and then up in a
spot just above his eyes. At the same time, Davis presses his
pinkies onto pulse points on both sides of his neck.
"Don't worry about hurting me," he says. "If you hurt me, I'll
yell."
Eyes closed, Davis exhales (breathing out the headache, he
explains) and inhales (breathing in light).
Forty seconds later, he declares his pain gone.
The reason for his headache can be traced to the previous day,
when he took his mother and 6-year-old son, Michael, to AstroWorld.
With an impish grin, the shaman lists causes of his pain: ice cream,
a funnel cake, rock candy and red soda. Oh, and all those rides.
His students and clients giggle as Davis describes his sugar
binge -- and that's precisely the point. His job, he says, is to
help people find bliss -- sometimes by example.
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SEE IT
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Andrew Innerarity /
Chronicle Eric Davis is a Houston native.
|  Video:
Eric Davis, Shaman Hugging Bear, says he has healing powers;
but he also believes everyone can learn to heal others.
(Video requires Real player)
| A shaman is someone with
psychic and healing powers who serves as a conduit between God or
the spirit world and a sick person. Shamanism goes back centuries to
Eskimos and some American Indian nations, as well as peoples in
northeast Asia and other parts of the world. This modern-day shaman
says simply, "I'm kind of like the messenger, the middle man."
Eric Davis makes an unlikely mystic. While he claims a bit of
Cherokee, he's a white, middle-class Houston native, also of Russian
and Irish heritage. He was raised Jewish but sometimes attended
Catholic church with his paternal grandparents.
At 34, he has a cherubic smile and a chirpy voice. He wears
shorts, a T-shirt and Nike Airs. His brochures show a thinner shaman
-- he says his metabolism and weight have fluctuated all his life.
He's in love with Teri Gray, a woman he met more than a year ago,
but as a divorced dad who shares joint custody of Michael, he also
knows about love gone awry.
He employs drums, fire ceremonies and dance in his work, but his
most useful tool might just be the cell phone -- he burns more than
7,000 minutes a month talking to clients.
He is almost always in good spirits and lives up to his name by
offering long, tight embraces. Get him talking at the end of a long
day, and he'll concede to a judgmental thought or two. Asked what he
thinks about one patient's chances for recovery, he says, "If she
puts as much energy in her healing as we do -- and as much energy as
she puts into poking people verbally -- I think she'll do really
well."
Houston's native shaman
Most of Davis' clients say they feel better after a session,
though few brag to friends and co-workers about the experience.
Andrew Innerarity /
Chronicle FAMILY TIME: Eric Davis plays air hockey with
his son, Michael, at a Houston area Chuck E. Cheese
restaurant.
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In the United States, 36 percent of adults try complementary
therapy (used with conventional medicine) or alternative therapy
(used in place of conventional medicine), according to a National
Center for Health Statistics survey published this year. When
vitamin therapy and prayer for health reasons are included, usage
rises to 62 percent.
Still, many sense a stigma to visiting a guy who claims to see
tumors and other bugaboos in the body and transmit healing energy
through his hands, or even his thoughts.
Davis understands. He has struggled to accept the "gifts" he says
were passed on through his family line. More than four years after
he "came out" as a shaman, Davis deals with old fears about what
others might think or say.
Days, after he was mentioned in a newspaper story, walked
into the Jewish Community Center, where he exercises regularly, with
retired professionals, including quite a few doctors, and
worried.
"I figured they would have tarred and feathered me on
the cross," Davis says, half joking.
Instead, his workout buddies called out "Hugging Bear!" in jest
and commended him. More than one has since asked him what he would
do for a sore ankle or back, and the next thing he knows, he is
laying his hands on the afflicted area and asking his spiritual
guides to help him heal in the JCC locker room.
But Houston is not an easy place to be a shaman.
He's worked in Denver, San Antonio and Austin and says people
there are more accepting of his work. Here in the mecca of high-tech
hospitals and space and medical research, he's often challenged.
"Houston has a lot of analytical people who want to see it in
writing, and you can't read it," Davis says.
Davis claims he has sent cancer into remission, helped a
quadriplegic take her first steps, and enabled estranged parents and
their adult children to forgive each other.
Last resort?
Clients come to him through word of mouth or his 75 or so
workshops a year. Often they are in dire straits: terminal cancer,
chronic back pain, severe mental illness. They have been to doctors,
therapists and specialists, and now they're at his door.
"I get people where nothing else has worked," Davis says.
At the heart of his work is the belief, shared by others in the
mind-body-spirit field, that disease and discomfort have a root
cause -- usually past abuse -- that has bred negative emotions and
illness.
His job, he explains, is to help people discover the cause and
deal with the pain so they can get healthy.
"The same brain that creates the problems is not the same brain
that solves it," Davis says. "They have to go through new training;
they have to go through something to get rid of the faulty
programming."
Davis, who says he helps people heal themselves, sees his real
mission as passing on the healing powers by teaching others. He
offers an apprentice program; among his four graduates are a
corporate executive and a former United Way director. Apprentices
spend hundreds of hours in classes, workshops and private client
sessions with Davis, until he's sure of their skills and ethics. His
35 students include a rabbi, a real-estate agent, a retired
lawyer/pharmacist and an Internal Revenue Service employee.
Pscyhotherapist Nancy Davidson says her counseling work has
become more rewarding since she began studying with Davis in 2000.
"He was 28 or 29 when I started. He looked 18," Davidson says.
"He has the name Hugging Bear. And he had very up front said that
there are no rules!"
But Davidson, 58, one of the four graduated apprentices, says
Davis helped her become more intuitive, enabling her to ask better
questions and find better words.
Sepcie, a Houston native, credits Davis with pulling her
from among the "walking dead" a few months ago. The 40-year-old has
suffered psychiatric problems since she was 19 and has seen many
professionals for obsessive-compulsive disorder, anxiety and chronic
depression. Now she says she is looking for a job and gets along
better with others.
"For making significant life changes, it has been more powerful
than anything that I did," Sepcie says.
The cost? Depends. Sepcie affectionately calls him a
sliding-scale shaman.
Davis charges $75 to $250 for private sessions, depending on a
client's income. He works with many people for free or a reduced
rate. In the end, he earns less than the $40,000 a year he made as a
teenage entrepreneur.
"A fair bit less," he says, with eyebrows raised and an ironic
smile.
Fighting to live
A year ago, Lynne Leon handled large accounts as a global manager
for Nortel Networks. Hers was a life of frequent travel and
multitasking. Then she was diagnosed with cholangiocarcinoma, a rare
form of liver cancer. By January, doctors gave her three to six
months to live. She underwent surgery, two rounds of chemotherapy
and radiation therapy. In May, new tumors were discovered, and her
doctor gave her Davis' phone number.
"I thought, 'I don't really have a lot of options open. I might
as well,' " Leon says.
Soon the 50-year-old, who had never before dipped into the
metaphysical world of auras and chakras, began seeing Davis three
times a week. Leon liked that Davis didn't ask her to avoid
conventional medicine or follow a strict regimen of vitamins and
herbs. On his advice, she gave up diet soda and cut down on
processed foods and sugar.
Through intense talking sessions, Leon says, she was able to
forgive people in her life, resolve family issues, and gain energy
and a positive outlook.
She stopped planning her funeral and began planning fun. In late
August, doctors reported that her cancer markers had decreased by
more than half.
Leon thanked her doctors -- and Davis.
"I don't know who or where to give thanks, so I just thank
everyone," she says.
Leon believes her doctors have offered her everything modern
medicine can give her, and they've been vigilant in removing tumors
and treating infections that have plagued her since her diagnosis.
She's certain Davis has helped her find peace and happiness.
Davis describes his energy therapy as melting or shrinking the
tumor by using their minds to ignite the immune system.
Alan Cohen, chief of vascular/interventional radiology at
Memorial Hermann Hospital, has seen Leon's outlook improve. But he
believes a combination of high-tech radiation therapies reduced
Leon's cancer markers -- not Davis' energy therapy.
"It's conceivable that it has helped, but I don't think that's
what's done it," Cohen says. "I'm willing to say unequivocally her
positive mind-set is a huge plus here. If it has some other
positives -- there's no way I can test whether this has lowered the
tumors or not. I'm a little more skeptical from a scientist
standpoint on this being clinically efficacious, but that doesn't
mean it's not good for her."
Bruce Barron, a nuclear-medicine physician who oversees Leon's
PET (positron emission tomography) scans of her tumors, is the one
who gave her Davis' number. Barron, a professor of radiology at the
University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, met Davis
while working out at the JCC.
Barron was open to alternative healing; his mother's lymphoma
went into remission 25 years ago through a vitamin regimen after
conventional medicine failed to help. Barron has occasionally passed
on Davis' number to friends and patients.
"If what Eric does is only a placebo effect, it seems to be
working," Barron says.
Barron hopes to work with him someday to measure Davis' effect on
cancer patients and their tumors.
"Patients seem more attentive with him and more open with him
about everything in their life," Barron says. "You can only take
medicine to a certain point."
Salesman to shaman
Davis says he's been a shaman since birth. He's been a salesman
for nearly that long.
He grew up in Sugar Land, the only child of Nancy Tipton, a
psychotherapist, and Tom Davis, a businessman.
His parents were part owners of a nursery business, and Eric grew
up learning how to care for plants and employees and talk to adults.
Family legend has it that he sold nursery products as a toddler and
even fired a couple of employees for sleeping on the job. His
psychic gifts showed up early; he once told his baby sitters that
his mother had been in a car accident before anyone knew about it.
Eric even described where he was conceived, shocking his parents,
though they both say they have psychic abilities as well.
He was an outgoing child who charmed customers at the former
Jamail Brothers Food Market, where as a teen he worked Saturdays
bagging groceries.
"He had a ton of people that specifically asked for him and only
him," recalls his friend Mac Miller, who worked there, too. "He'd
always have twice as much in his pocket. He was just being Eric --
he made people laugh and smile."
Finding his calling
It was during high school that Eric first sensed a healing touch
while, dressed as a clown, he visited hospital patients as part of a
volunteer group.
In his late teens and early 20s, he did "closet healings," and
one of his spiritual teachers named him Hugging Bear because he'd
been hugging people since he was a child.
He studied business and psychology for two and a half years at
the University of Houston but dropped out because he was bored and
already making a good living in the bonsai tree business he'd
started with his father when he was 14. Davis has sold
home-improvement services, renovated homes, appeared in a
nonspeaking role in the Houston Grand Opera's 1999 production of
Aida and performed at children's parties as a clown and
character actor (he can still do a good Scooby-Doo voice).
He briefly owned a restaurant in the Hill Country but gave it to
his manager when a spiritual teacher told him less is more. About
the same time, Davis lost a crop of trees valued at $300,000
wholesale, driving him out of the bonsai business. Both were lessons
in humility that would allow him to teach others how to live without
ego.
In 1999, Davis' mother went to a workshop on shamanism in
Michigan with author and shaman or "change-agent" John Perkins.
Davis tagged along.
He quickly discovered that he already possessed many skills used
in healing.
"The proof is really in the outcome," says Perkins, who believes
Davis has grown more confident and focused. "If you talk to a lot of
people who have worked with a shaman, think highly of that shaman,
he or she is probably pretty good."
Highway shaman
Davis spends more than an hour most days on Houston
highways traveling between the modest townhome he rents in southwest
Houston, his Spring Branch office and Michael's school in Katy.
On a recent morning, Davis, Michael, Gray and her dog, Tippy,
pile into Davis' 1996 Infiniti sedan, awash in Michael's toys, from
Play-Doh to play guns. They look like any other busy, makeshift
American family: Gray applies makeup while Davis drives and all of
them eat breakfast -- fresh doughnuts and éclairs.
Davis has a persistent cough. He's doing everything he advises
against: working too much, eating sugar, not exercising enough, not
drawing boundaries between work and play. He concedes to being
irritable and impatient, and Gray nods in agreement.
But the calls keep coming, and Davis has a hard time saying no.
He's working 10- and 12-hour days. He takes client calls as late as
8:30 p.m. and stays on the phone until midnight.
Soon after dropping Michael off at school, Davis gets his first
client phone call, around 8:30 a.m. The woman has thyroid and
pituitary problems, and Davis invites her to his 10 a.m. class.
In one class, Davis patiently challenged a woman who said she had
disappeared. "I moved my astro-body out 20 years ago -- that's
gone," the woman said. "I'm gone. What's left of me?"
She spent two hours trying to convince Davis of her nonexistence.
Unsuccessful, she stomped out of the class.
Today Davis has three new clients: a 6-foot-tall, 116-pound
man whose digestive disorder leaves him able to eat only rice and
broccoli; a heavyset disc jockey who hurt his back playing
high school football 20 years ago and still lives in pain; and a
woman with a thyroid disorder. A few other clients and apprentices
show up.
The apprentices sometimes witness emotional sessions between
Davis and a patient. Sometimes they participate, laying their hands
on the areas causing pain as Davis talks to patients.
Davis instructs his apprentices to close their eyes and
ask a higher power to help them pass on healing with unconditional
love. One falls asleep while resting his hands on Leon, and
the others laugh quietly.
Davis asks the woman with the thyroid disorder about her
lifestyle and later tells her to stop drinking 10 cans of diet soda
a day.
"I'm not making money on the water you drink," Davis says. "I'm
just trying to help you feel better."
He finds the man with the back pain "ready to heal" because his
back goes numb as soon as an apprentice lays her hands on his neck.
But the man with the digestive disorder will be "a tough nut to
crack" and may need several sessions.
Davis says his best attribute is that he's relentless.
Even as the woman who claimed she didn't exist was leaving his
office, Davis cheerfully called out, "Thank you." He turned to an
apprentice and said, "I think that was a good session."
Shungo
On a Monday night in August, Davis ends an all-day workshop on
energy therapy with a fire ceremony at CenterPoint for Body, Mind
and Spirit, a nonprofit center that offers classes from yoga and
feng shui to tarot cards and chakra balancing.
With drums beating, he asks the crowd of about 18
to breathe into a cup of 151-proof alcohol while they think
about what they would like to give up and what they would like to
bring into their lives. Then he shares a prayer:
"I'm asking, God, in the highest interest of everybody involved,
for me to continue doing work that is in the highest interest of
everyone involved. ... To be a pure, clean conduit for the work, for
the energy and for the guidance."
He takes in a mouthful of alcohol and spits it into the fire,
stirring the flames, and everyone shouts "Shungo,"
which means "from my heart to yours" in Quechua, an indigenous
language of the Andean region of South America.
Participants take turns, the drummers keep beating. Davis' mom
arrives with Michael, who has just created his own teddy bear at the
mall. They've also brought chocolate, marshmallows and graham
crackers -- on Michael's request with his father's quick approval.
"This is the first time we've ended a fire ceremony with
s'mores," someone says. The shaman just smiles and holds a
marshmallow over the fire, happy to be offering another lesson.
mary.fergus@chron.com
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