With an exotic background and lifelong training, urban shaman Durek Verrett wants to inspire the LGBT community with his empowering Mystra Oils.

By Christopher Cappiello

Walking up the tastefully landscaped steps of Durek Verrett’s Echo Park hillside home, one feels the tension and distractions of the teeming metropolis melt away. It’s clear that the tranquil space has been carefully laid out to aid the lithe, engaging Verrett in his many varied works as he establishes himself as a spiritual guide for Los Angeles’ frazzled masses.

“I’ll tell you what my goal is: I will create myself as a media icon as an urban shaman,” he says plainly. “I’ve been to the jungle, and I’ve enjoyed the jungle. But I felt my purpose wasn’t strong enough. They need me in the cities … I call myself urban shaman because I’m living in your urban lifestyle in this world today. And am able to process the knowledge of the old shamanism and bring it into this life and help people to adjust and find empowerment and to realize that they are also in the development of their own shamanism. It’s nice to have someone who is constantly able to support that and to keep your mind in a higher place.”

It may sound like heady stuff, but Verrett has trained for this work since childhood. Raised on Oahu by a Haitian father whose grandmother worked with New Orleans voodoo priestess Marie Laveau, and a Norwegian mother who comes from a long line of witch-like medicine women in Oslo, Verrett was identified at a young age as having shamanistic gifts of clairvoyance and heightened emotional intelligence.

“When I turned 12 or 13, I went into training,” he explains, which meant while his friends played typical childhood games, he was studying esoteric magic, chakras and metaphysics. He’s studied the major world religions, lived in Israel, Egypt and Turkey for a time, worked with whirling dervishes, visited spiritual guides in the jungle and even attended massage school.

“I had an office in West Hollywood, and I was doing my spiritual counseling, and I thought, ‘What more can I do?’” Verrett found that his clients would have powerful experiences during sessions with him, “but as soon as they leave the room, they go back to their things and come back with the same issue again. He decided he needed to provide his clients with something tangible to take into their everyday lives for personal empowerment. “So I created Mystra Oils,” he explains, his line of healing oils and sprays.

The products, available online as well as at Whole Foods and Planet Blue, are created by Verrett himself, and each offers its own unique potential power. Having trouble meeting someone? Try Aphrodite, an oil meant to open doors to love and attraction. Facing writer’s block or other creative dead ends? Spray the refreshing, Hawaiian-inspired Lokelani over your head, breathe in its cleansing fragrance, and get to work. Mystra oils have perfectly practical purposes as well, with more than one addressing the issue of money, so often considered a dirty word in our society. Verrett freely uses the word “magic” when talking about his oils. “There are two forms of magic,” he explains. “There’s old magic, which is about clearing energy. And there’s new magic, which is about manipulating energy.” It’s not about spells or disappearing acts, but more about shedding old beliefs or energies and freeing your authentic self.

The oils are all organic, requiring careful preparation. “I have a friend who’s a chemist who teaches me exactly how to prepare the oil so it doesn’t go rancid and it maintains its shelf life. You have to use vitamin E and so forth,” Verret says. Each oil is carefully prepared, usually following a flash of inspiration. “It comes to me as a blast of energy,” he explains with infectious enthusiasm. “I get visions and I get voices talking to me. And I hear a voice say to me, ‘Beloved child of light, gather this, and this, and this.’ Then I go storming off looking for the flowers and herbs to make my combination. Until it’s together, there’s nothing else to be done!”

Even with a line of 13 oils and six sprays, Verrett is always coming up with new products. “This is a new one I came up with this morning,” he says with excitement, opening a jar to reveal a deliciously fragrant body scrub meant to cleanse negative energies. He works out of a room in his house—“the factory,” as he calls it—with two associates working to bottle and label the oils from the large jars of his own creation.

At first, Verrett made oils for some of his one-on-one clients. “And the message they kept giving me was, ‘You need to go public with this,’ but I thought magic isn’t something that people are really understanding.” In a dream, however, he saw that it was time “for the people on this planet to empower themselves,” and he decided to take his oils to a wider audience.

The Mystra line is just one part of Verrett’s work. “I want to awaken the minds of people to teach them the love and truth and empowerment that’s necessary.” He sees the gay community as having particular need for this healing, as well as a uniquely powerful potential to lead in this work. “I see so many in the gay and lesbian community hurting inside. They need love, they need understanding.”

At the same time, he explains that because gay people are in touch with both the feminine and the masculine, they hold unlimited potential for connecting the world. “By having gay men and lesbian women on the planet, it is opening up the consciousness of the planet on such a high degree. Do you know how powerful one gay man is? Because he houses both the masculine and feminine in his being? He’s housing both sides of creation in full embodiment,” Verrett says, dropping his voice to an impassioned whisper: “And when he lives that fully out, he can manifest anything!”

In addition to his oils, Verrett does lectures and workshops, hosts a monthly event called Cocoon to encourage community and fellowship, and conducts one-on-one spiritual counseling. His manner is deliberate, thoughtful, sensitive and genuine, and his reading of this writer’s inner life and past experiences was almost unsettlingly accurate. If one is open to his observations, the potential for self-empowerment, to use an overused word, is unlimited.

“When you begin to live your truth,” he says, “and shine your light in your own being, then you get to live life to its fullest and experience the joy of life. You wake up with a [sense of], ‘Wow! I get to do this again!’ And that’s what it’s all about.”

For more information on Durek Verrett and his Mystra Oils, visit www.rspirit.org or www.mystraoils.com.