In April 2004, Rupert Isaacson and his wife Kristin Neff discovered that their two and a half year old son, Rowan, was autistic. They now had a special needs child and had to navigate their way through a sea of therapies and conflicting schools of thought. From applied behavioural analysis (ABA) to detoxifying mixtures and anti-viral drugs, nothing seemed to break through Rowan's neurological no-man's land of emotional and physical incontinence, violent tantrums, limited linguistic skills and an inability to make friends.

Nothing, that is, apart from a horse called Betsy and a group of traditional healers from indigenous communities.
As a human rights activist and journalist, Texas-based Rupert had helped to bring six Kalahari bushmen over to the US to attend a convention of traditional healers. He noticed that Rowan responded positively to the laying on of hands by some of the bushmen and other healers with many of them saying, "He's one of us."

It was this observation, coupled with Rowan's extraordinarily close relationship with a neighbour's horse, Betsy, that sparked Rupert's dream of embarking on a family trip to Mongolia, the birthplace of both horses and shamanism.

"I realised that Rowan's autism could be the gateway to the greatest adventure of them all," explains Rupert when we meet at the Melbourne Writers' Festival, where he is promoting his book, The Horse Boy.

It took two years to persuade Kristin to get behind his dream. Not sharing Rupert's love of horses, she was also reluctant to add to the stresses of caring for an autistic child.

Clearly a deeply intuitive person - he knew, for example, within one day of meeting Kristin that she was to be his wife - Rupert quietly nurtured his plan. "Every fibre of my being was saying, 'Do this.' Even if it means people laugh at you."

Describing himself as a healthy sceptic and certainly not a born again shaman, Rupert was simply open to finding a way for his son to lead the most happy and productive life possible.

But his holistic approach to blending contemporary therapies with traditional spiritual healing has attracted criticism from some of the more hardline therapists, who mistakenly think he has jettisoned Western approaches. It was this level of scepticism that prompted him to take friend and volunteer cameraman Michel, and Michel's friend Julian, on the trip so they could document the changes.

Rupert points out that our culture tends toward polarised attitudes: "Either I'm a total New Age hippie or I'm totally rational. Most of us make rational and non-rational decisions all the time as a matter of survival."
Interestingly, some speech therapists had given up on Rowan just as his speech was beginning to improve as he bonded with Betsy. As an ex-professional horse trainer, Rupert argues the case for a more flexible model of education and compares it to training a horse. You start with the classic pyramid and then refine it to fit the individual animal.

Others challenged their sense of adventure. "People said Mongolia must have been dangerous. But when you're the parent of an autistic child, life is just flat out stressful anyway. Taking your child to a therapy appointment along the freeway is also dangerous."

As we continue our conversation, it strikes me that not only is this a story about listening to your intuition and following your dreams, but also about having the courage to be authentic and to support the individuality of other people and other cultures.

Through his human rights work in Africa, Rupert has come to know an elderly bushman healer, Besa. Their communication is largely non-verbal (Besa is most likely autistic himself) and based on an energetic exchange. The first time they met, Besa revealed - for no rhyme or reason - that Rupert's totem animal was the leopard and, at every subsequent meeting, Rupert has seen leopards: a relatively rare occurrence. This kind of symbolism and imagery from the natural world seems to be part of the fabric of Rupert's life - and that of his family - along with potent messages from the dream world.

Deeply respectful of the wisdom of ancient cultures, Rupert points out that traditional healers often live in harsh environments and take a deeply practical approach to survival, embracing Western medicine as appropriate. Sadly, people in the West often fail to reciprocate such flexibility.

"We do suffer from racism. It is okay to ascribe to these people a certain kind of noble savagery. It is hard for us to let go of our arrogance because we have mastered a certain kind of thinking."

Acknowledging that charlatans do exist, Rupert stresses that the best place to find authentic shamanic healers is at the village and community level...

Fast forward to 2007 and the second day of their Mongolian trip, and Rupert, Kristin and six year old Rowan are in the foothills of the sacred mountain, Bogd Khan. Shamans from all over Mongolia have converged in what is the largest gathering since the suppression of shamanism under communism.

They consult with nine shamans in all, one after the other. The first is a woman blindfolded by an antler headpiece and dressed in a deerskin coat jangling with iron objects. She calls in the spirits by drumming and singing. Rupert, milk-phobic, has to drink milk, say a prayer to the Lords of his homeland (England) and offer them the remaining milk. Then the antler-clad woman spits vodka over him and thumps both him and Kristin with antlers.

Rowan is spared such harsh thumping and the shaman merely rubs a whip across the child's back and belly, but as they progress from shaman to shaman, there is more trance inducing drumming, singing, whirling and yelling of prayers. Rowan's mood fluctuates, but he demonstrates remarkable stamina even when positioned right under the deafening sound box of a drum.

In the book, the description of this long, hot and sultry day reads like a modern day fairy tale. Two ravens fly in to share a branch with a steppe eagle and the birds - normally biological competitors - oversee the proceedings. Then shortly after the completion of the ninth ceremony, rain begins to fall, a sign that the Lords of the Mountain have accepted Rowan for healing. To Rupert and Kristin's amazement, there is almost instant proof of this - Rowan approaches Tomoo, their guide Tulga's son, and makes his first friend.

Several of the shamans pick up black energy in Kristin's womb and believe it originates in her family's past; her grandmother developed manic depression when her son died aged eight. The shamans believe that this ancestor spirit could be trying to take Rowan away and advise annual shamanic healings for the next three years.

Inevitably, as they continue into the interior of Mongolia, doubts and fears surface - are they doing the right thing? Other challenges range from Rowan's ongoing tantrums and incontinence, to indigestible meals of boiled heart and lung washed down with fermented mare's milk. But Rupert manages to bring out the humour in some of the most testing situations, particularly those relating to Rowan's lack of toilet training, known as "Code Brown" moments.

Their next destination is Lake Sharga, a lake fabled for its sacred properties. No one apart from Rupert seems to know about its existence, but, once again, he follows his hunches - and the results of a Google search three years earlier.

A major moment of anxiety comes when Rowan refuses to carry on by horse - he and Rupert are on a horse called Blockie - and so Rowan travels in the support van with its leopard skin seats and pink curtains. But eventually he is coaxed back into the saddle and they celebrate that evening with songs around the campfire. Incidentally, folk songs and tunes from the film Madagascar and a procession of toy animals from The Lion King are an integral part of the journey and recur like leitmotifs throughout.

There are other breakthroughs on the way to Lake Sharga. Rowan tells his father for the first time that he loves him and while Rowan travels in the van, he lets his parents ride ahead and enjoy some rare time together. Lake Sharga, when they get there, however, is an all-time low point and Rowan seems to regress into a major tantrum, whacking a group of other visitors on the head with a water bottle.

The last part of the journey when they head into the heart of the Siberian forest in search of the reindeer people is steeped in mystery and magic. They meet a group of horsemen who offer to guide them to the most powerful shaman in the area. Rupert honours his gut instinct that they are trustworthy and they enter the forest, "...and dreamtime. For there was something of dream in this forest, this ride," he writes.

As with all personal odysseys, they are tested along the way: Michel gets sick and loses his horse; Rupert and Rowan's horse falls into the black mud of a bog; and Justin sees a white ibex, which the horsemen believe represents the shaman coming to check them out.
"This tends to be the experience when you are in these places. Magical realism is alive and well and not just a construct. This is the alchemy of existence. It's just that it shows up in much sharper relief when you are in the natural world and are living in that highly authentic way," says Rupert.

The suspense builds - what if they don't find the reindeer people - but finally they see deer and reindeer tracks and hear a noise like the clicking of the castanets, which turns out to be reindeer hooves. The shaman, Ghoste, is expecting them and agrees to see them the next day as he needs to "travel" overnight to the US to work on Betsy, Rowan's protector.

They all sleep deeply - Rowan more so than usual - and Kristin dreams that Betsy and a leopard lie down in a field together. As with the previous shamanic ceremonies, Ghoste drums himself into an altered state of consciousness, but this time the procedure is over in about 20 minutes. The following day, Ghoste gives them seven stones to put under Rowan's pillow and the inside of a reindeer's stomach (one specially sacrificed) to make soup. He reiterates the message that they must undergo shamanic healings until Rowan is nine and that the child himself is destined to be a shaman.

"This is not necessarily regarded as a blessing. The work they do is often quite scary and physically demanding," explains Rupert. "So it's not flattery, but what they are saying is that they would value Rowan in their society. Autists, people like Besa, are not considered sick in these cultures."

As a Buddhist, Kristin recognises the fundamental lack of ego and natural state of living in the now that is part of the "autism package". Rupert and Kristin never set out to cure Rowan of his autism, his essence, but they did seek to heal him of his tantrums and incontinence - and he achieves both of these breakthroughs soon after the visit to Ghoste. This August saw the family travel to the Daintree for a healing with a member of the Kuku-Yalanji tribe and Rowan's cognitive skills have since leapt forward.

Rupert is keen to stress that he is not advocating shamanic healing as a solution to dealing with autism, but he does advise two things: keeping an open mind - "After all, someone like Rowan isn't buying into it or not buying into it." - and spending as much time as possible in a natural environment. He quotes academic and scientific research showing, for example, the link between autists and animals.

He talks of being open to the mystery of life, of which autism is a part. "The question in my mind was always: will it [having an autistic child] be the best thing or will we resist and not embrace it? Instead, we have dived in headfirst and are having the most amazing adventure of our lives. I refused to accept the wonder wasn't there. I am a glass half-full kind of guy."

The Horse Boy is published by Text Publishing, RRP AUS$34.95.

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