In a century-old building in Detroit, far from the Amazonian jungles or West African forests where sacred plant ceremonies have taken place for millennia, Shaman Shu sits cross-legged on a handwoven mat. His journey here began not in a traditional shamanic apprenticeship, but in the high-powered world of corporate real estate, where he spent three decades as a CEO before a profound experience with ayahuasca in 2020 completely redirected his life’s purpose.
“The plants,” he says simply, when asked what inspired him to establish Soul Tribes International Ministries. “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.”
This communication, he explains, “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.” What follows is a historical reflection that spans continents: “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.”
These observations aren’t mere historical curiosities for Shaman Shu, but evidence of a continuous tradition of plant wisdom that has been systematically marginalized in contemporary health practices. His mission now centers on making these ancient remedies accessible to urban communities facing what he describes as “a mental health crisis” exacerbated by pharmaceutical dependence and limited treatment options.
The 7 pathways to healing
Through his ministry and healing center, Shaman Shu focuses on seven primary plant medicines and practices that he believes offer alternatives to conventional treatments:
Ayahuasca for spiritual awakening: The Amazonian brew that catalyzed Shaman Shu’s own transformation serves as a cornerstone of his practice. “I had an experience with sacred plant medicine, ayahuasca, back in 2020, and it changed my life in such a revolutionary way,” he recalls. Rather than positioning ayahuasca as merely a therapeutic tool, he describes it as a teacher that facilitates direct spiritual connection.
Iboga for addiction recovery: “Iboga is one in West Africa, that plant helps people get off heroin,” he explains, citing scientific research supporting its effectiveness. “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.” In a city where opioid addiction continues to devastate communities, this application holds particular relevance.
Psilocybin mushrooms for trauma and anxiety: “High dosages of psilocybin mushrooms have been used to help people with post-traumatic stress syndrome and anxiety,” Shaman Shu notes, again emphasizing the research supporting these applications. The mushroom imagery he identifies on ancient monuments suggests to him that these healing modalities aren’t new innovations but reclaimed wisdom.
Breathwork for emotional release: Beyond plant medicines, Shaman Shu teaches breathing techniques as tools for trauma release. “We’re learning how to teach people about the internal way to inhale with your breath and release things,” he explains, connecting these practices to what he calls the “air element” within human bodies.
Water ceremonies for emotional processing: “Our bodies are about 72% water,” Shaman Shu observes, connecting human physiology to spiritual practice. “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.”
Fire rituals for transformation: “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,” he explains, describing how fire ceremonies can both activate and calm different aspects of human experience.
Earth-based grounding practices: “Earth is about another 12% [of our bodies],” he notes. “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.”
What distinguishes Shaman Shu’s approach from both conventional medicine and some new age practices is his insistence on integrating these modalities within a coherent cosmology while simultaneously grounding them in contemporary scientific understanding. “Today we are in a mental health crisis,” he emphasizes, positioning plant medicines not as recreational substances or spiritual luxuries but as essential resources for community healing.
Detroit’s unlikely psychedelic pioneer
The choice to establish Soul Tribes in Detroit rather than in psychedelic-friendly coastal cities like Oakland or Santa Cruz reflects Shaman Shu’s commitment to bringing healing resources to communities that have been historically marginalized in both conventional healthcare and alternative wellness movements.
“We bought a 100-year-old building in the city of Detroit. We wrote legislation in our city to decriminalize sacred plant medicine,” he explains, highlighting how the ministry’s work extends beyond individual healing sessions to include policy advocacy. “That means that people don’t have to look over their shoulders to have access to these certain types of plants.”
This political dimension distinguishes Soul Tribes from many spiritual organizations that focus exclusively on individual transformation while avoiding engagement with systemic barriers to wellbeing. By working to change local laws around plant medicines, Shaman Shu demonstrates an understanding that spiritual liberation cannot be separated from social and political conditions.
The century-old building that houses Soul Tribes stands as a physical manifestation of this philosophy—reclaiming historical space within the city rather than retreating to rural settings where many plant medicine ceremonies take place. This urban presence makes these healing modalities accessible to community members who may lack the resources to travel to international retreat centers or rural compounds.
Equally significant is Soul Tribes’ technological strategy. “Now we’re on Roku, we’re on Amazon Fire Stick, we’re on Apple TV,” Shaman Shu explains. “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.”
This integration of ancient plant wisdom with contemporary digital platforms represents a distinctive approach to spiritual work. Rather than positioning technology as antithetical to spiritual connection, Shaman Shu embraces it as a tool for expanding access to healing resources. “We’re talking on Zoom now, we’re talking about a technology that is used to talk about spirituality,” he points out. “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.”
The digital shaman
Perhaps most innovative in Soul Tribes’ approach is how the ministry has systematically mapped community health concerns to specific healing modalities and made these connections available through digital platforms.
“We went into the community and identified the top 100-plus ailments within our communities, and we created sacred teachings around those things,” Shaman Shu explains. “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.”
This systematic approach demonstrates how spiritual intuition and data-informed strategy can work in tandem. By identifying specific community concerns and developing corresponding resources, Soul Tribes operationalizes compassion in a way that maximizes impact while remaining responsive to community needs.
The digital distribution of these teachings ensures that geography and economic resources don’t determine access to healing. “We use technology. So now we’re on Roku, we’re on Amazon Fire Stick, we’re on Apple TV,” he reiterates. “So we’re in all the households.”
This digital presence allows Soul Tribes to reach individuals who might never enter a physical healing center due to stigma, skepticism, or practical barriers. The YouTube channel Shaman Shu mentions serves as an entry point to practices that might otherwise seem inaccessible or irrelevant to daily urban life.
“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,” he explains. These digital teachings translate ancient practices into accessible contemporary formats without diluting their essential wisdom.
Beyond the pharmaceutical paradigm
Underlying Soul Tribes’ work is a fundamental challenge to the pharmaceutical approach to mental health and addiction that has dominated American healthcare for decades. When Shaman Shu speaks of plants helping people “getting off OxyContin, Percocets, and fentanyl,” he’s positioning plant medicines not merely as spiritual tools but as concrete alternatives to prescription medications that have contributed to the opioid crisis.
“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,” he insists. This comprehensive botanical framework stands in stark contrast to the pharmaceutical model that typically addresses symptoms rather than root causes and rarely engages with spiritual dimensions of suffering.
The ministry’s approach to addiction recovery particularly highlights this alternative paradigm. By utilizing iboga, a plant from West Africa, to address heroin addiction, Soul Tribes connects contemporary urban health challenges to traditional healing practices from another continent. This cross-cultural approach reflects Shaman Shu’s understanding that healing wisdom transcends geographical and cultural boundaries.
Similarly, the use of psilocybin mushrooms for PTSD and anxiety connects to growing research showing these substances’ effectiveness for conditions that conventional pharmaceuticals often fail to adequately address. By making these options available in an urban community setting, Soul Tribes challenges the gatekeeping that has historically limited access to innovative mental health approaches.
“In the Shamanism world, we deal with all three of them,” Shaman Shu explains, referring to physical, mental, and spiritual dimensions of healing. This holistic framework stands in contrast to the compartmentalized approach common in conventional healthcare, where physical symptoms, mental health concerns, and spiritual questions are typically addressed by separate specialists, if the latter are addressed at all.
The programming of consciousness
Central to Shaman Shu’s understanding of both individual suffering and social dysfunction is the concept of “programming”—the unconscious adoption of thought patterns, beliefs, and behaviors from external sources rather than authentic inner guidance.
“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,” he explains. This programming extends to spirituality itself: “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.'”
Similarly, he views religious exclusivity as a form of programming: “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.” He elaborates: “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.”
This critique of programming extends to social media and information consumption: “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?” By framing information consumption as a form of feeding, Shaman Shu positions spiritual practice not as an addition to life but as a recalibration of what we already consume.
The plant medicines that form the cornerstone of Soul Tribes’ practice serve a deprogramming function. “What the spiritual sacred plant medicine does, it opens you up to have a different level of freedom,” he explains. Rather than merely altering consciousness temporarily, these experiences function as circuit breakers for habitual thought patterns, creating space for new ways of being.
The elemental body
Perhaps most distinctive in Shaman Shu’s approach is his understanding of the human body as composed of the same elemental forces that constitute the planet—fire, earth, air, water, and space. This framework allows him to connect physical symptoms to elemental imbalances and to prescribe specific practices for rebalancing.
“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,” he explains. This elemental understanding creates a conceptual bridge between material and spiritual dimensions of existence.
Similarly, his emphasis on the water element within human bodies provides a framework for understanding emotional expression: “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.”
By connecting tear ducts to the water element present in all bodies, Shaman Shu normalizes emotional expression as a universal human capacity rather than a gendered behavior. This framework offers a distinctive approach to healing for communities where emotional vulnerability has often been discouraged or punished, particularly for men.
“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,” he observes, extending this elemental understanding to women’s health concerns as well.
This elemental framework provides Soul Tribes with a comprehensive system for understanding both wellness and illness that transcends conventional medical categories while remaining grounded in observable physical processes. By drawing parallels between human physiology and planetary systems, this approach positions health as alignment with natural forces rather than merely the absence of symptoms.
A global vision rooted in local action
While Soul Tribes maintains a strong presence in Detroit, Shaman Shu’s vision extends globally: “My role is to push healing, to push spirituality around the world, and that’s what Soul Tribes is about.” This international orientation is evident in how he describes learning from “shamans in West Africa and East Africa, and spiritual leaders out of Tibet and Thailand.”
Yet this global vision remains grounded in specific local interventions—buying a building in Detroit, advocating for legal changes, creating culturally relevant resources for specific community concerns. This balance of global perspective and local action distinguishes Soul Tribes from both purely local community organizations and international spiritual movements that lack concrete community engagement.
“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,” Shaman Shu explains, suggesting that the ministry’s impact extends beyond direct service provision to include consciousness shifting at a broader scale.
As legislative changes regarding plant medicines continue to unfold across the United States and research on psychedelic therapy gains mainstream acceptance, Soul Tribes’ pioneering work in Detroit positions the ministry at the intersection of emerging cultural currents. By combining ancient wisdom, contemporary science, community engagement, and digital distribution, Shaman Shu has created a distinctive model of urban spiritual entrepreneurship that challenges conventional boundaries between religion, healthcare, and technology.
In a cultural moment characterized by both mental health crisis and spiritual searching, this integrated approach offers pathways to healing that address both individual suffering and collective disconnection. Whether through in-person ceremonies in a century-old Detroit building or digital teachings accessed through streaming platforms, Soul Tribes demonstrates how ancient plant wisdom can be made relevant and accessible in contemporary urban contexts.
As Shaman Shu himself observes, quoting Kanye West: “One man can’t make a difference.” Yet in the same breath, he amends the statement: “And one woman can make a difference too.” This balanced acknowledgment of both individual limitation and possibility perhaps best captures the essence of his approach—realistic about challenges yet committed to transformation, grounded in tradition yet open to innovation, spiritually focused yet practically engaged.
