Rattling bones and symbols in a bag.
Throw them and see where they fall.
Throaty chants.
A crooked post draped by patchy cultural canvas.
A crimson and purple tent dimly lit.
A ceremony, a ritual, a healing.
The Shaman has their ways, but gives nothing away.

Pulling the leg.
Pressing the spine.
Rubbing the skin.
Measuring the movements.
Watching the breath.
Aligning the bones.
Applying their magic.
A ceremony, a performance.
The therapist has their ways but won’t give away their magic.

A different time, a different people, a different culture, a different disease, a different healing.

“We can cut it out,
we can click it in,
we can zap it away,
we can stretch it out,
we can activate it,
we can realign it,
we can strengthen it,
we can habituate, we can expose,
we can educate it away”
We can meditate ourselves into catatonia.
Suffering is our relationship to pain.

“No, this does work!!
Everything works?
Nothing works?”
*Whispers “what am I doing?”
Lump in my throat. “I’ll get found out soon”.
Just keep moving.

“Your pain can go away. No. Sorry. I mean it can’t.”
“Accept your pain.”
“Meditate.”
Don’t look so clueless. You are a professional.
Clears throat, “Both. Do both. Reduce your pain and also stop worrying about it changing.”
Do both?

My feet are heavy with apathy, my eyes bloodshot with fatigue, nihilism rests damp on my feverish forehead while I slump in my arm chair and think.

We are the new shaman.
What if I see the stage, the audience?
What is a chess piece when not on a chess board?
What if I see bones and trinquets as just bones and trinquets?
Do I have to believe it for it to work?
Once I’ve seen it can I unsee it? please.

Stand up and press your face up against the crimson and purple.
It is a thin veil.
“Sit down!”
“Sorry.”
Inconspicuously cut a slit in the tent and let some free and windy chaos in.
Push the post over.
Feel the heat.
Maybe you don’t need a tent.
Wear it on your head like a Keffiyeh.
You are the movement across the territory. Become nomadic.

Notes

On the term “shaman”

The word shaman is originally from the Evenki people of Siberia and has a culturally specific meaning related to spirit work and healing. Its generalization across cultures is a legacy of colonial anthropology, which collapsed diverse Indigenous healing practices under a single term. In this poem, I use “the shaman” critically - not to represent or appropriate an actual healing tradition, but as a symbolic figure through which to examine the ritualized, opaque, and affective dimensions of contemporary therapeutic practice. I acknowledge the limitations and risks of this metaphor and welcome its contestation.

On ritual and performance in healthcare

This poem explores how healing - across times and cultures - is structured not only by evidence or technique, but also by belief, repetition, and setting. I draw parallels between therapeutic practices (manual therapy, education, breathwork) and ritual acts (chanting, bone throwing) to question what counts as knowledge and what gets disqualified as superstition. This is not to collapse cultural difference, but to draw attention to the performance and uncertainty within professionalized care.

On appropriation and aesthetics

Elements such as “crimson and purple tent,” “rattling bones,” and “throaty chants” are not meant to depict a real cultural practice, but rather to evoke the exoticized imagery that Western traditions have long projected onto the figure of the non-Western healer. These aesthetics are intentionally uneasy and are presented as part of a critique of how both traditional and modern healing practices are mediated through performance and belief.

On the poem’s ethical position

Rather than elevating one form of healing over another, the poem stages a crisis of meaning, certainty, and efficacy in therapeutic work. It emerges from within the position of the healthcare worker—fatigued, doubtful, yet responsible—who begins to see the tent, the script, the performance. This is not a call for cynicism, but for humility and attentiveness to the limits of our knowledge and the structures of belief we inhabit.

On the line “Wear it on your head like a Keffiyeh”

This line metaphorically references the Keffiyeh, a traditional Middle Eastern scarf that has also become a symbol of Palestinian resistance. Its use here is intended to gesture toward nomadism, deterritorialization, and the politicization of daily life - ideas drawn from Deleuzian philosophy. However, I acknowledge that the Keffiyeh is a culturally and politically loaded symbol, and its inclusion risks flattening complex realities. Readers are encouraged to approach this line critically.

On positionality

I write this poem as a White, male physiotherapist and scholar working within Western institutions. My reflections are grounded in my own professional practice and emotional landscape. Where I use figures drawn from outside my own cultural background, I do so with the intent to interrogate systems of authority and meaning-making, not to speak for or represent others.