By Leow Ju-Len

Singapore

YOU’RE just as likely to find the new

managing director of Performance Mo-

tors Limited (PML) on two wheels as

four. Just don’t expect an engine to be

involved. Arnt Bayer, who took up the

role in August, is an avid cyclist.

But motorcycling is something of a

past pursuit for him. In his 20s, he got

around on a Japanese bike, which he

took on an epic road trip with friends.

“I had it for around five years and

rode it maybe six to eight thousand

kilometres a year,” he told The Busi-

ness Times. “I gave up my car, grabbed

a bag and a tent, and we rode all the

way from Switzerland to Portugal on a

four-week trip.

“We were quite happy that we got

back in one piece,” he added. “You

know, in your early 20s you do stuff

you shouldn’t be doing but it was the

experience of a lifetime.”

After a 20-year break from riding,

Mr Bayer jumped back on a motor-

cycle for the first time a fortnight ago.

He rode with customers into the main

tent of Pure & Crafted, a mu-

sic-and-motorcycles festival that PML

sponsored.

Apart from top billing, the sponsor-

ship gave PML the chance to put the F

850 GS, a new adventure motorcycle,

on preview at the event.

Pure & Crafted also showcased cus-

tomised bikes from other brands

such as Harley-Davidson, but PML

saw it as a chance to win new buyers

to BMW’s two wheelers.

“We want to reach out to all riders,

not just BMW owners, and show them

what the brand is about,” said An-

thony Chaw, the head of PML’s motor-

cycle division.

Bikes are a small business for PML,

which earns the bulk of its profits

from selling and repairing BMW cars.

Figures from the Land Transport Au-

thority show that BMW puts 20 cars

on the road for every motorcycle it re-

gisters. “You could look at the bike

business and say it’s not important at all. But BMW Motorrad helps to

sharpen the BMW brand, just as the M business does,” said Mr Bayer, refer-ring to the brand’s high performance

M division. “From that perspective, it’s actually quite important.”

Mr Bayer himself seems to know

first-hand how riding can stir up strong emotions. “Oh yeah, the itch is there!” he said, when asked if he in-

tends to ride more often. “The only

thing is I need to communicate that itch to my wife and to my

three-year-old son. With my son, it’s not a problem. You show him a bike, he gets excited.”

That excitement might be for two wheels, but there’s every chance that some could spill onto four. That

would only be good news for BMW, es-pecially if you believe that there’s a three-year-old in all of us.

Singapore

PARKWAY Pantai Limited has contrib-uted S$2 million to the establishment of a Mount Elizabeth-Gleneagles Graduate Scholarship fund for finan-cially needy Duke-NUS medical stu-dents.

The latest addition takes the cumu-lative amount of scholarship contribu-tion to S$8.5 million.

The Mount Elizabeth-Gleneagles Graduate Scholarship is valued at S$10,000 each and is bond-free.

Tan See Leng, Group CEO and man-aging director of Parkway Pantai, said: “Medical education is not cheap and tuition fees are rising even though our government has heavily subsidised these costs. We have to help aspiring doctors realise their dream regardless of their financial background.”

Dr Tan added that Parkway Pantai is committed to nurturing the next generation of medical leaders who will shape the future of medicine in Singapore.

“While nurturing our youth, we are cognisant that Singapore is facing a sil-ver tsunami. We have set up two pro-fessorships with YLLSoM to engage academics to research and develop strategies to help Singapore cope with a rapidly ageing population. As one of Asia’s largest healthcare providers, we continue to look at ways to give back to society through investing in medical education.”

M Premikha, an awardee of the scholarship who is from NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, said that such scholarships help to alleviate the financial burden at home. “Instead of doing part-time jobs, I was able to fo-cus on my studies, participate in addi-tional research projects in the areas of public health, neurology and obstet-rics & gynaecology, volunteer at vari-ous organisations, as well as pursue my creative writing abilities with Na-tional Library Board’s Young Writers Circle.”

The cheque was presented to Duke-NUS on Sept 21.

For Performance Motors’ new boss, motorcycles sharpen the BMW brand

Washington

TWENTY souls sprawled on the floor of the hotel wellness spa, swaddled in

earth-toned blankets. Their eyes were closed. A jellybean-sized crystal res-

ted on each forehead.Shhwwwoo! That was Deborah

Hanekamp, audibly sucking up the air

as she placed her hands on one of the young women, who trembled at the

touch.A stylish woman in her late 30s,

with a wrist tattoo peeking from her

long, flowy dress, Ms Hanekamp is a modern shaman, the preferred healer

of New York’s fashion crowd – though on this day she was chanting for an audience on Washington’s K Street

power corridor. She came to give a “medicine reading”, a ceremony that

at various points had her shaking a rattle and letting loose a musical wail,

spraying strange, fragrant concoc-tions into the air and stalking the room with a leafy branch, which she

rhythmically tapped on the supine bodies below.

Among them was Myra Chung, 26, who later described the experience as connecting to the greater vibes of the

universe. “It’s all about energy, you know?” she said. “Kendrick Lamar

said that ‘I can feel your energy from two planets away’.”

Wellness, the 2018 Edition, cer-

tainly seems to be catapulting us fur-ther into the astral plane. Like the

seekers of the 1960s and 1970s, a new generation of self-care devotees is taking up ceremonial sage burnings

(known in New Age circles as “smudging”), singing bowls, Japanese

reiki, crystals, Mayan sweat lodges and ayurvedic massages.

Sephora is selling a US$160 rose-quartz Crystal Energy Comb. And the spiritually lost are seeking

face time with shamans – in the case of Ms Hanekamp’s clients, paying

US$325 an hour for the privilege.“There’s a more inner, profound

searching that I’m seeing in myself

and a lot of people around me,” said Katherine Lo, the millennial executive

behind Eaton Workshop, the new hotel/club/workspace hybrid in downtown Washington that hosted

Ms Hanekamp’s ceremony. Eaton is now contracting with its own sham-

anic consultant.Ms Lo’s personal mid-20s emo-

tional fugue took her to a Zen monas-tery, a famed Big Sur retreat, and fi-nally, to a shamanic workshop in Ari-

zona. There, she said, she was in-

duced into a trance by drumming.

“You learn on one level to just con-

nect to nature and start to receive

messages from nature,” she said.

“It’s bringing information from the

invisible,” added François Demange,

the Eaton’s on-call shaman. “Some-

how, I believe that’s what people are

looking for – having access to more

than what the world is giving them.”

“I hate to use ‘cultural moment’,”

said Ms Lo. “But all my peers are

searching for this, when they

wouldn’t have cared 10 years ago.”

For most of us, “shaman” may

evoke images of headdresses and

trippy nights in the forests of South

America.

But there is no one kind of

shaman. The word itself is said to hail

from Siberia, and shamans have exis-

ted in many forms around the world

for centuries. In Korean cultures, they

are called mudang; in Yoruba,

babalawo; among the Bedouins, fu-

gara.

What they have in common, said

Susan Mokelke, president of the

35-year-old Foundation for Shamanic Studies in Mill Valley, California, is an ability to converse with spirits. “Sham-ans alter their state of conscious-ness,” she said. Whether they do that with mind-bending drugs or with a steady beat of a drum, they aim to journey mentally into the depths of another realm. “They acknowledge there are two realities.”

Her foundation, started by anthro-pologist Michael Harner, promotes an amalgam of shamanism from Mr Harner’s studies around the world, said his widow, Sandra Harner. “It’s acultural,” Ms Harner said. “It was important that we weren’t stealing anybody’s spiritual property.”

But the shamans of this resurrec-ted New Age have broadened their ser-vices. In Miami, the spa at the Faena Hotel enlisted a Mexican shaman to oversee its “healing” treatments, which are not exactly massages so much as spiritual greasings-up (start-ing at US$300), complete with “Sacred Oils, butters, resins, healing stones and poultices,” according to the menu. In the eco-chic Mexican vaca-tion destination of Tulum, shamans

lead sweat lodges known as temazc-als, drawing seekers nursing broken hearts or stressed-out minds. You can find shamanic drumming playlists on Spotify.

For some seekers, the allure of shamanism can be slightly more illi-cit. Some shamans, including Mr De-mange, offer ayahuasca, one of the buzziest drugs of the year and a po-tent ceremonial psychedelic that turns shamanic journeys, into, well, full-on trips.

Some shamans don’t even call themselves shamans – Ms Hanekamp doesn’t, for example – but for many it is part of their marketing.

Colleen McCann is a former fash-ion stylist who now offers a full array of shamanic services – crystals, sage-burning, energy-channelling – for a client base of music executives, admen, fashionistas, Wall Street ti-tans and staffers for the lifestyle em-pire known as Goop (she is its in-house shaman and crystals ex-pert). One of her specific market niches: scrubbing bad energies from their wardrobes.

It all started one night a decade

ago, she said, when she was trying to get a sandwich at a New York bodega at 2 am. She was struck by a clairvoy-ant vision – a voice, really, that warned her of a fight that was about to occur over the price of the bana-nas. What followed was a long string of coincidences, strange encounters and psychic consultations, somehow culminating in her enrolment in shaman school.

Speaking during a break at her own shamanic workshop in Nashville, Ms McCann compared herself to so-cial media trendsetters, who can sway followers’ purchases, clothing choices and more.

“People say, ‘You don’t look like a shaman.’ Which I take as a huge com-pliment actually, because we’re see-ing healers diversify and go into dif-ferent spaces than they normally would.” Her spin just happens to be one part Old World, and one part Ins-tagram.

Dana Robinson, an Easton, Mary-land-based teaching associate with the foundation, has been a seeker since his college days in Washington, in the 1960s. He dabbled with medita-

tion and the Rajneesh movement (the same one chronicled in the Netflix series Wild Wild Country). Then he found shamanic traditions. Now, over the course of two-day workshops, he shows students how to journey to those worlds, too – one of which he de-scribed as something like Alice tum-bling down the rabbit hole.

We decide to try to see whether I can journey. Mr Robinson laid out some rules of engagement for enter-ing this otherworldly place, telling me to try to find a hole or staircase in my mind, something familiar, and follow it to what he called the “lower world”. He beat a drum to help me mentally check out of this one. Shamans say that most people can journey. But the rabbit hole eludes me.

Though they were seekers in the 1970s and 1980s, Mr Robinson and others from the foundation do not im-mediately rejoice at the news of a youthful new wave of shamans, whom they view with cautious scepti-cism.

“People who do this work don’t make guarantees,” said Ms Mokelke. “They’re humble.” After all, Ms Hanekamp has dubbed her New York business Mama Medicine. Ms Mc-Cann “prescribes” crystals to her cli-ents. Still, she clarifies that seeing a shaman should not replace a visit to a doctor. “East and West medicines, old and new, both have a place and should play together,” she said. “It’s so important to try everything.”

Heather Mikesell, executive editor of the trade magazine American Spa, did. She ventured into a temazcal on a recent trip to a Mexican resort, where soul cleansing is listed on spa menus alongside massages and facials.

The memory is hazy, naturally. “You’re just sweating in there,” she said, in the dark, with a bunch of strangers and a shaman, who posed just one question to contemplate: What did she want?

The question was probably existen-tial. But “it was intense”, she said, laughing. “You’re in there for like an hour, and you reach a certain point where you’re like, I just need air.”

This year, American Spa listed “in-tentional” wellness and crystals as two of its biggest trends.

“We’re so tethered to technology, all this plays into that,” explained Ms Mikesell. “I think people really love rituals. I think we’re going to look for other ways to feel ‘in’ our bodies. People want their chakras aligned.” WP

Shamans broaden their services

Parkway Pantai gives S$2m to establish scholarship CRYPTIC CROSSWORD

Across

1 Good scope offered by initial moves

(6)

5 Money gets plain wool (8)

9 Show wine store for the most part

stocking popular red knocked back

(10)

10 Ready to complain if starter’s not

included (4)

11 Confuse playwright in Berlin? Not

half! (8)

12 Illegally obtained pet food? (3,3)

13 Previous over (4)

15 Envoy’s academic qualification, first

from Trinity (8)

18 Indignant, well-informed elected

members (2,2,4)

19 Almost perfect plan (4)

21 Credit is doubled in emergency (6)

23 Way to secure permit for gambling

game (8)

25 Prima donna very keen to return (4)

26 One into finance is enthralled by

French painter and what he

produced (10)

27 Decidedly trendy black suit (2,6)

28 In centre of Perth, mate there

caught out thief (6)

Down

2 Quick taking a short breather before

beginning of event (5)

3 Ashamed to make money working in

sport (9)

4 Rant made by one in commerce (6)

5 Company calls about poor lads

working in US city (8,7)

6 Horse-drawn carriage, second

phaeton, abandoned (8)

7 Worth millions, flag that’s turned up

(5)

8 Unprincipled person could bring about

authentication of a will (9)

14 Disparaging remark when being

taken round island (9)

16 Old poet wrong over colour (5,4)

17 Page carried on, took it as read (8)

20 Pressure applied to speak in golf

club (6)

22 Note coming from small plucked

instrument (5)

24 A test in translation may give one

experience (5)

YESTERDAY’S SOLUTION

Across: 1 Capacity, 5 As well, 9

Sergeant, 10 Dampen, 11 Retsina,

12 Firearm, 13 Tiddlywinks, 16

Troublesome, 21 Avenger, 22

Bug-eyed, 23 Guinea, 24 Hair-ball,

25 Tangle, 26 Asteroid

Down: 1 Castro, 2 Pirate, 3 Chemist, 4

Tyne and wear, 6 Sparrow, 7

Explains, 8 Land mass, 12 Full of

beans, 14 Straight, 15 Bohemian, 17

Big deal, 18 En garde, 19 Dynamo,

20 Addled

G Telegraph Group Limited, London

Spas enlist them to oversee ‘healing’ treatments and ‘soul cleansings’ that are listed on their menus alongside massages and facials. BY LAVANYA RAMANATHAN

Deborah Hanekamp, the shaman-trained owner of Mama Medicine, performs what she calls a medicine reading for visitors to Washington's Eaton Workshop hotel.PHOTO: WP

Arnt Bayer, who took up the role in August, is an avid cyclist.PHOTO: BIG FISH PUBLISHING

(From left) Tan See Leng, group CEO and managing director, Parkway Pantai; Mohammed Azlan bin Hashim, chairman, IHH Healthcare; Minister for Foreign Affairs Dr Vivian Balakrishnan; Professor Ivy Ng, group CEO, SingHealth, and Professor Thomas Coffman, Dean, Duke-NUS Medical School.

The Business Times | Friday, October 5, 2018LIFE & CULTURE | 27

Source: The Business Times © Singapore Press Holdings Limited. Reproduced with permission.