HTo many lives in its existence, and many others lived before living the current one. Daughter of the laborious Lombardy bourgeoisie, from whom she escaped, orphaned very young of a beloved father, Selene Calloni Williams, among the best known counselors in the world of international Buddhism, is as if it had been born twice: first to Monza and then in Sri Lanka Where he met the man – another father – who then changed his life. The writer, founder of shamanic yoga, very popular on social media (and author of the Agorà column on our site) He now tells his story for the first time In a very intimate memoir, Diary of a shaman (Piemme), released from September 16th.
“Diary of a shaman is the memoir on my initiations”
It all started in the eighties. Selene Calloni Williams follows the dream of a jeweler eager to open a tourist village in Sri Lankto. The project fails due to the civil war, but she remains, survives. He is hit by depression, he tries suicide. He doesn’t feel love, he doesn’t know who he is. Yet life knows more than her: leads her to meet extraordinary people.
Between the sea and the forest he meets Buddhist shamans and masters, But above all his “mentor”, Michael Williams, which begins it with the archaic practices of yoga and martial arts. AND Reverend Gatha Thera, the meditation master With which he goes to live in an hermitage in the jungle, where Monaco began, because the female lineage, who has long since disappeared, will be restored only in the nineties.
A profound book, full of personal anecdotes, which explains the why of his choice and his spiritual existence. The author will present him as a national preview on Sunday 21 September, at 12, in Padua, at the Loggia delle Gran Guardia, as part of the Festival of awareness.
Shaman and warrior nun
Selene how was the idea of the book born? What was the decisive moment that pushed him to bring this personal story to paper?
Diary of a shaman It arises from the passage that opens when crossing the darkness. It is the story of my transition from the shade to light, on disease and dependence on spiritual rebirth through shamanic yoga and Buddhism. One of my students, a famous actress, listening to those memories told me that a film saw you, because in that story many could have recognized themselves. I don’t know how to do cinema, but I can write: so I delivered my resurrection to the page.
In the title we speak of “shaman” and in the subtitle of “warrior nun”: how does this double identity, apparently so different in her?
Shaman because the type of yoga that I encountered and that practical is a shamanic mold, is a technique of ecstasy. My master Michael Williams, of which I tell in the book, took me to the seesa villages – that are the Aboriginals of Sri Lanka – in the middle of the forest to practice the tovils, the shamanic rituals and taught me the yoga on the beach on the shore at the ocean. It was a period of great transformation and regeneration.
Then, one day he brought me to a Buddhist Romitage, with an enlightened teacher, the venerable Gatha Thera and told me that it would have made me good to remain a little there to learn meditation and practice Buddhism. I ended up staying six years, a long period of time in which I also became a monk and lived extraordinary inner adventures that I tell in the book.
Initially I thought they were two incompatible worlds, but over time I discovered that both traditions seek the same thing: to break the chains of illusion. The warrior nun who became born from this apparently impossible marriage.
“Every trauma was preparing for something bigger”
Selene Calloni Williams tells her initiation in Shaman
Since girl, she has experienced experiences that many would define difficult: the loss of the father, neurosis, inner wounds. When did you understand that these were not tragedies, but “initiations”?
When I started meditating I understood that the pains are not walls, but doors. Each wound is a passage that forces you to descend into the abysses and to be reborn new. Until we learn to let part of us die and to give birth to another, we remain imprisoned. I learned that the pain can become a ritual of transformation. Obchy trauma was preparing for something bigger.
How was the transition from “ordinary” life in the Italian province to hermitages in the jungle in Sri Lanka?
Inside me lived two souls: Maria, the “good girl” raised in the province, and Selene, the rebel in love with the mystery. I had to agree, and it was my biggest battle. Then there were the evidence of life: the death of my father, an abortion, an attack, a robbery. I faced the fear of snakes, I shaved my head to take the votes, I learned traditional martial arts.
But the deepest challenge was the impossible love for my master Michael: he was a Brahmacharya, he had sublimated sexual energy in spiritual force. Not being able to have it taught me to love in another way, to love with the soul. In the book I also tell when I had to face armed poachers to save an elephant puppy and meditation on a corpse….
“I was ordered monk with a shaved head and orange guise”
He had and known exceptional masters (Michael Williams, Gatha Thera): is his work to hand over his inheritance today?
Yes. I dedicate my life to teaching shamanic yoga, meditation and dharma. These are the tools that have saved my incarnation and that can save anyone who chooses to cross their shadows.
My teachers gave me keys who are likely to go lost forever. Michael Williams was one of the last custodians of authentic shamanic yoga. Gatha Thera possessed secrets of Buddhism that date back to the Buddha itself.
He says he has been started as Monaca Theravāda many years before the restoration of the monastic female lineage: what importance did this “gender” aspect had in his journey? Also because she had to practically hide her being a woman.
In the eighties the female lineage did not yet exist: I was ordered monk, with the orange guise and shaved head. Everyone took me for a man. This experience showed me that the genre is an artifice of the mind, a distinction necessary for civilization, which builds order by separating male and female, good and evil, true and false.
But if we forget that the senses are mental operations, we risk exchanging these artifices for absolute realities. In that illusion we become prisoners. In that deception I learned freedom.
“I hope that a shaman transform people”
There are chapters or passages of the book that has found particularly difficult to write, for the emotional intensity or vulnerability they had?
Yes, especially the last part, in which I tell my ombe, travel out of the body in which I risked my life. But it is precisely those travels that have returned my truest identity.
It was terrifying, but also the door to my true identity. Writing it was like reliving those moments: the heart that stops, the soul that flies, the desperate choice to return or let yourself go forever …
What does it hope that the reader will take home reading Diary of a shaman?
I don’t want my reader ‘read’ this book. I want it to be overwhelmed, upset, transformed. Each page is a mirror: you will show you who you are really under the masks. Not everyone is ready. But if you feel that something authentic is missing in your life, if you have ever thought that there is more than this mechanical existence, if you have ever sensed that the pain can be a teacher … then this book is already calling you. It is no coincidence that you are reading these lines right now. Destiny makes no mistakes.