In the heart of Detroit, a remarkable transformation story unfolds through the work of Bobby Shu, affectionately known as Shaman Shu. Once a successful real estate CEO with 30 years in the corporate world, Shu experienced a profound spiritual awakening through sacred plant medicine in 2020 that completely redirected his life’s purpose. Today, as the founder of Soul Tribes International Ministries, he bridges ancient healing traditions with modern approaches to mental health and spiritual growth. His extensive background as a Shaktipat initiate, Reiki grandmaster, breath coach, and sacred botanical alchemist with a Ph.D. in sacred botanical alchemy provides him with unique insights into holistic healing. In this exclusive interview with rolling out, Shaman Shu shares his journey and mission to make transformative healing accessible to all.
Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
I am a cosmic being, sitting in an avatar body right now in this particular dimension. In my former life, I was into real estate. I’ve been in real estate for about 30 years as a corporate CEO. Then I had an epiphany, a total spiritual change from buying and selling companies, buying and selling companies and large forms of real estate, to working with the human soul.
I had an experience with sacred plant medicine, ayahuasca, back in 2020, and it changed my life in such a revolutionary way. I started saying that I can share this with other people who cannot afford to go to other countries to have access to the healing, and so that was the invention of Shamanism.
I’ve done training, I’ve been trained by gurus and trees from around the world, but it really wasn’t until I had the experience with a sacred plant medicine, ayahuasca, sacred iboga, psilocybin mushrooms, that that became a transformative process for me, and today I’m focused on healing people around the planet.
How do you blend spiritual intuition with executive decision-making?
They work together, there’s a quote that says being woke doesn’t mean you have to be broke, and so there’s a philosophy years ago that said if you’re an awakened being, it meant that you were destitute for poverty, and that truly is a form of alchemy. If we’re talking about Shamanism and spirituality, it is to make a manifestation and a creation in this dimension.
So what does that mean? Whatever you’re doing, you want to be the best at it. If you are a candle maker, you’d be the best candle maker. If you’re a butcher, you’d be the best butcher. If you’re an entrepreneur, be the best entrepreneur. If you’re in the spiritual systems, be the best, and what that means, utilize the tools that are available today for those things.
Utilizing, as we’re talking on Zoom now, we’re talking about a Zoom that is a technology that is used to talk about spirituality. So whatever is available today, we need to use it and put it into our war chest to be successful in transforming and healing people.
What inspired you to create a spiritual ecosystem rooted in community access and healing?
The plants. George Washington Carver talked about how the plants talk to him, and I understand what that’s about now after having experience with sacred plants and having them communicate with me on a spiritual level, as if they were my master teachers, and so it was able to eliminate from me the hierarchy of man, preacher, God. I was actually able to connect directly with the divine through that process, like we all have that same ability.
So if you look at the pyramids in ancient Egypt or Kemet, or if you go to Algeria and you see the pyramids there, if you’re in the Caribbean markets, they’re all over the world, and on those pyramids are caps of mushrooms, and so it started teaching me that this teaching, this divine learning, has been around the planetary system, and the greatest minds had access to them, and I wanted to be able to bring that back to our people.
That’s what Soul Tribes Ministries was based upon, that we all are connected to one soul. I’ll call it a soul system; that’s a unit planetary system, and we’re all tribes, a part of that. Soul Tribes International Ministries was based upon that. Not only did we incorporate as an ecclesiastic organization, we bought a 100-year-old building in the city of Detroit. We wrote legislation in our city to decriminalize sacred plant medicine. That means that people don’t have to look over their shoulders to have access to these certain types of plants.
Iboga is one in West Africa, that plant helps people get off heroin, it is scientifically researched that people who have been addicted to heroin and other forms of drugs are utilizing the sacred plant medicine to get off of those things. High dosages of psilocybin mushrooms have been used to help people with post-traumatic stress syndrome and anxiety, and today we are in a mental health crisis.
When you’re able to fuse science with spirituality in our communities, those are the things that have always been available to us, but some kind of way, they were silenced, and so there’s a resurgence of our ability to heal ourselves within our body. There is a plant literally on the planet to heal every element within your physical body. There’s a plant that exists to heal every element of your mental body, your mind, and there is a plant that deals with the spiritual realm. In the Shamanism world, we deal with all three of them.
As a spiritual entrepreneur, how do you navigate growth, funding, and structure while keeping the mission sacred?
I start 100% with that and make sure that I keep my integrity around that process, and so, I found out the things that are pure, people want to be a part of it.
When there’s so much research, so much science available today for transformation, it is unique bringing what I’ll call spirituality and science together. Post-traumatic stress syndrome is a word we call it today, many years ago, they never called it that. They didn’t call these things; they just called that boy or girl dealing with a spiritual issue. Science determined them as anxiety, post-traumatic stress syndrome, mental health.
So I’m fusing the spiritual words, because they never called it that back in the day, with what’s happening today, utilizing where people are at, meeting people where they are in this dimension, and then bringing them to a whole different level.
Now, we’re in 200 million households on Roku. So if we go to our YouTube channel, our YouTube channel has literally a training utilizing sacred science, teaching people how to breathe ancient mantras, katas, different words that they’re able to plug into for their healing.
So things that people who are addicted to drugs, we’ve got a transformational video for drugs. If you’re looking for high blood pressure, we have something that deals with high blood pressure. If you’re looking for anxiety, we have something that deals with that.
We went into the community and identified the top 100-plus ailments within our communities, and we created sacred teachings around those things, and then, of course, we use technology. So now we’re on Roku, we’re on Amazon Fire Stick, we’re on Apple TV. So we’re in all the households. So there’s no excuse, if you will. If you want to be healed, we’re meeting you where you are to bring you to a higher level.
What does the phrase “divine masculinity” mean to you, and how do you embody it in your leadership?
Divine masculinity, so those are new words. We start identifying with these new terminologies, he, she, him, and the theys and the thems. We’re just avatars, I say that we’re spiritual beings wrapped up into bodies, and these bodies look a certain way, sometimes I call them leather suits.
Some people have light skin leather suits, some people have dark skin leather suits, some people have suits with stretch marks, some people have suits with long hair and wigs, some people have suits with all these different variants of suits, but what do I mean by that? We came from God’s creation, and we’re nothing but pieces of leather, but what’s inside of that leather can be what we choose to identify.
It’s a programming, by the way, divine masculinity, that’s nothing but a program. That is a teaching, and based upon that teaching, we say, ‘I am masculine male,’ ‘I’m alpha male,’ ‘I’m beta male.’ And so the same thing with female, but on a spiritual sense, it doesn’t exist. When you leave the avatar, you’re just a being, and so we try not to identify, on the spiritual realm as male versus female.
There is a duality, but the duality was not male and female. The duality was what they call the yin and yang. That is a true balance based upon what you have, and as you come back to this dimension, you may choose to be a male, you may choose to be a female, you may choose an old white male or a younger Black male. These are choices that you’re able to create in those spiritual dimensions.
How has your work helped men reconnect with their spiritual and emotional power?
We teach that. Listen, God gave us tear ducts for a reason, that means that it’s important. When we’re holding all these things in our bodies, trauma, we hold it in there. Trauma shows up in different ways, it shows up in high blood pressure, it shows up in other forms of triggers and traumas and stress.
So releasing those things, we focus on what we call the five elements. So the five elements in your spiritual world—fire, earth, air, water, spaces—within our entire bodies, we have these elements. Our bodies are about 72% water. So including our tear ducts. When we start identifying that we’re mostly water beings, that means we have to find ways to release these things out of ourselves. We also use water as a spiritual tool.
So if you go to Genesis, if you have a Biblical understanding, Genesis 1 and 2, God stared water in the face, and so that meant that water was already here as an elemental force. We are water creatures. When they said Jesus was pierced in the side, he bled blood and water.
When we start talking about the teaching tools for mental releasing, we are automatically built with a release mechanism that’s called water, which is 72% of our whole bodies in our existence. Then, of course, Earth is about another 12%. Our organs, as they say in the medical world, our skin is our biggest organ, and so in all the organs that are part of our body, water is running through our earth just like water runs through the physical earth that we see here.
Our bodies are made up just like the world—fire. Sometimes we need to increase the fire to get up and go and make things happen, and when you’ve overexerted yourself, you need to cool that fire down. So that’s also a teaching in itself, and we do that with the other element called breathing. So we’re learning how to teach people about the internal way to inhale with your breath and release things.
This is not just a masculine thing, women have the same challenge as well, and they keep their natural receptors, and so when you start talking about the spiritual science of the Yoni, and we know what I mean, the Yoni, the vaginal power, because you have water, you have all those same things in there. So women are having hysterectomies, and you’re having fibroids. It’s all based upon internalizing things within ourselves.
How do you foster spiritual inclusion and interfaith respect within your work?
I don’t leave my home without connecting, checking with myself. I am my own temple, so it’s not an external thing, I check in with myself on a daily basis and identify myself, looking, I do self-screens where you’re checking in with yourself. So that is my spiritual belief system. This isn’t for other people, this is for me, and because I am my own miracle, I’m a miracle, a manifestation of something that God gave me the ability to transform my own self.
What type of person would I not be then to be a living, bona fide testimony, sharing these experiences with the world? And that’s what I do. So when I share with people about how it changed my life, hopefully they’ll share, have their experience, and transform their lives.
We’ve had through our ministry hundreds of people come and sit with us and learn our teachings, to sit with the sacred plant medicine, to see themselves. Look, these are Michael Jackson moments, looking at yourself in the mirror to see who you are and what you’re made of, and these are our moments. That’s what it’s about, looking at you within your own mirror.
We have consistently, that’s what this whole thing is, looking at you, seeing yourself, your beautiful self, your ugly self, you transform yourself, the self that needs to heal, and the self that’s going through things now.
Everything is going to be okay, sister, for everything is guaranteed to be okay because when you speak these things into existence and you use your power that God has given you—and He’s given you an enormous amount of power that you speak that—and so there’s a trick out here to having us believe in programs, and so the programs now are—I’ll just be very simple—we’ll talk about Instagram and Facebook.
What are we feeding ourselves, all these feeds? What are we scrolling? What’s the garbage that we’re taking within our minds and our bodies? And so if you put yourself on a spiritual diet to say, ‘What? Let me feed myself something different,’ you notice you start feeding yourself something different. The programs, the programming, the words you hear within your mind and your body will be different. An average person has about 60,000 thoughts a day. Most of those thoughts are negative, and most of them aren’t even your thoughts, they’re programs.
What is your long-term vision for Soul Tribes on a national or global scale?
We’re all connected, and so the whole significance of saying Soul Tribes as a ministry, the things that help me heal, I’m sharing them with people. I’ve met with shamans in West Africa and East Africa, and spiritual leaders out of Tibet and Thailand, and people just all over the world who pour into me, and so that information is to go out to the community.
So Soul Tribes is a global phenomenon. In the Maasai tribe in Kenya, the Oloiboni, which is a spiritual leader from that vantage point. So there are different, but my role is to push healing, to push spirituality around the world, and that’s what Soul Tribes is about, and it isn’t just about the sacred plant medicine, but you can’t really graduate unless you taste it, unless you try it.
It’s like, how do you see what you’re made of? If you want to move all barriers of fear out of your way and utilize the actual things that the gurus and the pharaohs from Kemet or Egypt utilized for our healing, and so my goal with Soul Tribes is that people around the world are getting their healing, whether it’s coming directly from me or not, but if it’s enough, if we change the frequency and the vibration and the frequency and vibration go out there, and other people say, ‘Wait a minute,’ they start to feel that frequency, and that’s what I push out every single day. As Kanye West said, ‘One man can’t make a difference.’ He did say that, and one woman can make a difference too.
What would you say to someone who’s skeptical about combining spirituality with plant medicine?
There’s a herb to deal with every medicinal area of our body. There’s one that deals with every mental issue, but there’s also one that deals with the spiritual, and so, for whatever reason, we are afraid of the spiritual side of our thought processes.
When you think about it, spirituality is the most discriminatory place of our entire life. So, real simple, people that get out here and talk about spirituality, and we’re anywhere in North America, you’re only talking about three books: the Bible, the Quran, and the Torah. You won’t even allow yourself to receive anything else, and yet we say we’re spiritual beings.
We forgot about the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, we forgot about all those specific teachings around the world, and yet we say we’re spiritual. In elementary school, you couldn’t even graduate from elementary school unless you read at least 30 books. I didn’t say doctoral degree, I said elementary school.
So now here we are saying that we’re spiritual, powerful beings, and we will not allow ourselves to stretch away from our power bases, and they treat us like we’re vampires or Dracula, ‘Well, you can’t get, don’t go, don’t learn that, you’re going to put something else in your body’, as if we’re vampires, like we cannot have the spiritual power to refute the enemy.
So when I share with people, the fusion of sacred plant medicine and spiritual teaching is one of the other tools, and so if we truly say that we’re spiritual beings, allow ourselves to have access to all the tools that God has given us, the ones for our mind, the ones for our body, and the ones for our spirit in the earth.
These are things that have been structured so people can continue to be programs, and what the spiritual sacred plant medicine does, it opens you up to have a different level of freedom.You can’t graduate from elementary school reading one book. We are supposed to be these enlightened spiritual beings, and we will not let ourselves study any other spiritual system other than the ones that we’ve been programmed to receive.
