THE MEDICINE WOMAN OF BEVERLY HILLS : Author Lynn Andrews Continues Her Odyssey of Enlightenment, Advising Fellow Seekers Along the Way

She is known as the “Beverly Hills medicine woman,” and comes complete with shoulder pads, Mercedes-Benz and a long, blond mane that could send even Linda Evans back for more Clairol.

Yet Lynn Andrews--who has spent much of the last 15 years studying with indigenous shaman women all over the world and produced five best-selling books on those adventures of spiritual self-discovery--is hardly your standard Westside shopper/luncher/dilettante.

Not anymore.

Key Pathfinder

A former art dealer, wife, documentary producer and Elizabeth Arden regular, she admittedly knows the pampered life all too well. But at 42, Andrews is considered a key pathfinder in post-feminist America. And, to a growing legion of fans, she’s known as the female Carlos Castaneda. (Anthropologist-author Castaneda wrote about his apprenticeship to a Yaqui Indian sorcerer in “The Teachings of Don Juan: The Yaqui Way of Knowledge.”) One book reviewer even credited her with co-creating, along with Castaneda, a new literary genre: “visionary autobiography.”

Like Castaneda’s, Andrews’ accounts are about a personal, transformational journey, what she calls “the extraordinary, internal struggle to find one’s true self.” (Then she adds, in the next breath, “God knows I haven’t found it yet--not totally.”)

On her often grueling road to enlightenment, she learned such things as living directly off the earth (finding and cooking larvae over coals in one instance), tracking prey, butchering a freshly slain deer and eating it raw (an assignment designed to teach her to deal with her emotions) ridding herself of all peripheral habits and using stones and crystals as tools for healing (which she frequently does in working with the hundred or so clients she now privately counsels).

As chronicled in her books, Andrews also was trained by various spiritual teachers to master an assortment of mystical feats: seeing and balancing auras (electromagnetic energy fields said to exist around human bodies), “dreaming” (entering a trance-like state and being simultaneously in one place with the physical body and another with the dream body), and doubling (a form of dreaming in which two or more observers report seeing the dreamer’s image in different places at the same time).

Once Divorced and Lost

When Andrews’ odyssey began, however, she was freshly divorced and totally lost, a woman “with no discipline who was unable to focus on one subject for more than 10 minutes at a time.” What’s more, she was addicted. Not to the conventional alcohol, cigarettes or drugs but to “vacuum cleaners, baths, sadness, not feeling worthy as a woman and to my fears of dealing with my relationship with my father.”

Her first book, “Medicine Woman,” published in 1984, is expected to be made into a film starring Sally Field. According to Andrews’ New York City-based literary agent, Al Lowman, 20th Century Fox has optioned the book and a script is presently in the works by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Marsha Norman.

Andrews’ latest chapter in her personal saga, recounted in “Crystal Woman: The Sisters of the Dreamtime,” published in September, made both the Los Angeles Times and New York Times best-seller lists. Perhaps more importantly, she is what publishers call a “backlist author,” one whose newest book typically increases demand for all those preceding it.

Though she still maintains a Benedict Canyon home (which she mockingly refers to as “the Beverly Hills wigwam”), Andrews is only there about half of the time. She spends several months each year with her teachers, especially Agnes Whistling Elk and Ruby Plenty Chiefs of Manitoba, Canada, and has studied with other shaman women in Australia, Guatemala, Alaska and the Yucatan.

Trip to Himalayas

This spring, she plans to travel to the Himalayas to camp with female shamans from around the world--the only white woman invited to be in their midst. That trip and its teachings will be the subject of a sixth book and will continue Andrews’ work as what she terms “a bridge between the primal mind and white consciousness . . . taking what I’ve learned about the spirit and power of women back to our patrilineal society.”

Andrews also spends considerable time writing in her tiny Santa Fe studio, five minutes from the Pecos wilderness. And when she’s in her Beverly Hills home, as she was recently, the author provides spiritual counseling to private clients three days a week. Andrews charges $150 an hour, sees up to 10 clients weekly, and is booked up through next July.

“Fortunately or unfortunately, we’re no longer hunting buffalo and living in tribal situations,” she said, sipping herbal tea in front of a gas-log fire on a rainy afternoon and launching into one of her favorite themes. “Because of that, I think we have to face our reality and understand what we’re doing to our environment, why we are creating pollution and disease that is running rampant.

“We have to go to the sources of diseases, the sources of pollution and understand that we are all responsible for that. . . . When I look at the indigenous people on the planet, I see that they’ve lived in harmony on the Earth for a hundred-thousand years. We’ve mucked it up in about 75.”

Andrews’ initial meeting with Whistling Elk and Plenty Chiefs came after she had attended a La Cienega art exhibit and become obsessed with a photograph of an Indian marriage basket. After repeated dreams about the basket and unsuccessful attempts to track one down, Andrews says she was led, by a chance encounter with a Native American author, to the two medicine women.

Months in Wilderness

After meeting Whistling Elk and Plenty Chiefs, spending her first six months in the wilderness and becoming what she considers “a radically different person,” Andrews wanted to stay. The last thing in the world she wanted, she said, was to return to Los Angeles and Beverly Hills.

“You are not Indian. The wilderness does not need you,” she recalled Whistling Elk reprimanding her. “Where do you think the world needs to be healed but in the cities? It’s very easy to be sacred with the trees and the wind. It’s very difficult to be sacred on the freeways of L.A. Los Angeles is a straightener.”

Though there is much abundance in her life, Andrews claims she is far from the enormous wealth a tony Beverly Hills address might imply. She revealed she still pays only $150 a month on her mortgage, sends half of her income to support 43 shaman women around the world, and is about to trade in her aging Mercedes on a pickup truck to facilitate hauling saddles and hay to Chino or Downey to ride her horse, which she does “at least every other day.”

Yet she has nothing against wealth and maintains it is one of the things humans are placed on Earth to master. “People tend to think you can’t be spiritual and be doing well,” she explained. “But actually, as my teachers have taught me in round huts, we have been chosen to understand the physical, the material, that it’s just another form of energy, part of the great spirit. We’re here to learn that money is just a medium of exchange. . . . When you resist anything in life, you are creating harm.”

To push Andrews into not resisting Southern California, Whistling Elk told her she could not return to visit her in Manitoba until she had produced a manuscript about her personal experiences in learning about shamanism.

‘Act of Power’

Two years later, with the manuscript for “Medicine Woman” in hand, Andrews returned to Canada, and realized her teacher had tricked her into making “an act of power, not in the sense of controlling or manipulating, but in the sense of realizing your dreams.”

It is a similar search, Andrews said, that brings many of her private clients. “They’re all on real spiritual quests. A lot of them want to become shamans in some way. . . . I use everything I can. I think we should all use anything that works.”

Asked to describe how she works with these seekers, Andrews replied that each situation is different, but she frequently uses shamanistic techniques such as employing certain sounds (from rattles or bells) to balance the electromagnetic energy field surrounding the body.

“Shamanism is really like gestalt therapy. It’s like primal therapy and it has a lot of Jungian in it. It has a lot of Reiki (a Japanese healing system) and even Rolfing (deep tissue massage) in it.” However, Andrews says she never lays her hands on people “because I feel that’s just going to bring more difficulty and I can do just about everything I want to do without doing that anyhow.

‘I Am Not Doctoring’

“I have learned these things from different shamans around the world. But I found the language of the spirit is always the same.”

For example, she said, “the whole new science of psycho-neuro-immunology . . . has a lot to do with the fact that what you think and feel directly affects your state of health. Shamans have always known that. You don’t deal with the illness essentially. You deal with the reason the person chose to have the illness.”

Andrews, who is a minister of the Universal Life Church, emphasized that she doesn’t “practice Indian medicine.

“I am an author who gives spiritual counseling,” she said. “I don’t really do anything other than that. . . . I am not doctoring. I don’t give prescriptions to people. I don’t heal the physical body. I heal the mental body and the heart and then, in turn, these people heal themselves.”

Client Mary Talisman, a horse acupressurist who lives in Marina del Rey, has been seeing Andrews--when she’s in town--about twice a month for two years.

Talisman has found sessions with Andrews have assisted her in “getting out into the world and doing something without smashing everything around you to do it. . . . I wanted to expand my business. I needed some sort of inner grist to write a book about my work and do a videotape. Now I’ve almost finished the book and am in the middle of the videotape.”

Lowman feels that much of his client’s appeal is that her readers pick up clues on how to balance the male and female aspects of themselves.

“Every person is made up of male and female and the (Indian) medicine wheel is about balancing that,” Lowman said. “Her message . . . is not about strident female power, it’s about the balance. And it’s about the balance in men as well as women.”

Experiential Seminar

Lowman said he is continually besieged with requests for Andrews to speak or make appearances, which she rarely does. (She is, however, planning to offer an experiential seminar in Los Angeles in February or March of next year, to be organized by Hollywood-based Channel Light Productions, which also markets her audio tapes.)

But don’t expect to find many Native Americans lining up to study with a woman some of them consider “a Beverly Hills witch,” according to Buck Ghost Horse, an adjunct professor at the Institute for Culture and Creation Spirituality at Holy Names College in Oakland. “I think her first book was very good and everything after that went downhill. It just got a little bit far out . . . more fiction than fact,” complained Ghost Horse. “You have to live a long life to do all that. You talk to our medicine people and they say you have to study years and years, not a few months here and few months there. She might be a real fast learner, but it’s hard to believe.

“The thing I see mostly about her books is that she’s getting people to feel they can learn everything right away and that adds to their frustration. Most native people try to teach patience and respect and responsibility. We’re not an instant, mashed potatoes society,” Ghost Horse added.

Ghost Horse and other Indians also regret that Andrews charges specific amounts of money for lecturing or working with clients.

Can’t Sell Spirituality

“I don’t think you can sell spirituality. That’s the one thing (about Andrews and some other Caucasian shamans) that the Native American community is really opposed to,” said Eduardo Duran, a Native American psychologist with the Corp. for American Indian Development in San Francisco and a professor in the school psychology at Pacific Graduate School in Menlo Park. “I’ve asked our elders about this. They feel pain at the exploitation of spirituality. It’s the last thing we Indians have.”

Many observers, however, are delighted Andrews has shared her story. “We have a need for the spiritual aspect of our lives, and she helps people in connecting with that part of themselves,” said Dr. Hyla Cass, an Encino-based psychiatrist who is an assistant clinical professor psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine. “Shamanism has been with us for thousands of years. If it weren’t effective, it wouldn’t be continued. People are made up of mind, body and spirit and the more of those aspects we treat, the more effective the results will be.”

Andrews is philosophical about her detractors.

“I am not teaching medicine,” she insisted. “I am teaching one woman’s journey. My teachers happen to be indigenous. That does not mean they’re teaching me anything that’s tribal. They give me insight into my own dilemmas and demons that are so very applicable to other people. . . . I am not teaching any sacred secrets or traditional Indian medicine. I don’t because I am not Indian. It’s not my way.”

As for the wampum issue, she considers charging fees merely practical. “When you go to a medicine person anywhere in the world, you give them something, usually what they need. If they need a cord of wood, you cut them a cord of wood. I’m just being pragmatic, knowing that I have to survive and charging money so I can do that.”

To those who find her adventures too strange or plentiful to have occurred in a relatively short length of time, Andrews stands by her accounts (with names changed here and there to protect the privacy of certain individuals). She suspects many such doubts spring from the fact that she is a woman: “If I were a man, it wouldn’t be so hard to believe.”

And she laughs at the thought that hers was even close to an instant self-realization.

“Most people come to me and say, ‘Do I have to go through all you’ve gone through for all those years?’ I tell them that just to change the habit of eating chocolate takes time, let alone to change all the habit patterns from childhood.”

Despite some criticism, Andrews says she really has “not had difficulty with native people. A lot of Indians support me because I write about the beauty and the power of their work,” she said.

“We are at a time on this planet when we all have to share what we know. Native Americans are surrounded by the people who have raped their land and broken their treaties. Sharing their religion doesn’t mean that they lose their tradition, not that I teach it. But if we don’t all get together and join hands across the Earth, we’re not going to have an Earth.”