The Psychedelic Frontier Dec. 25

Q: After 20+ years in traditional indigenous ceremonies with mushrooms, peyote, and ayahuasca in South and Central America, I’m watching local options emerge with both curiosity and apprehension. Most seem facilitated by mental health professionals or those with limited connection to indigenous roots. What’s the difference between these approaches and traditional circles? Are there benefits or drawbacks to this Western medicalization? While I appreciate local access without language barriers or extensive travel, I’m concerned about impacts on traditional communities and whether these ceremonies can achieve the same spiritual depth and results. (edited for length and clarity)

A: Your question reveals the complexity many of us navigate as these medicines gain greater popularity, acceptance, and multiple forms of expression. After decades walking between traditional and modern spaces, witnessing diverse approaches, I’ve learned that the most important distinctions aren’t necessarily about geography or lineage. Rather, they’re about depth of reverence, experience, and genuine care.

I strongly push back on any oversimplified narrative that all Western approaches are coldly clinical, and all indigenous ones are spiritually pure. The reality is far more nuanced and, honestly, more hopeful than these binary categories suggest.

The contemporary landscape includes many practitioners who’ve spent years in deep spiritual training. Some with traditional teachers, others through therapy or allopathic training, or mystical traditions from various cultures. I’ve witnessed ceremonies held by non-indigenous facilitators that were profoundly sacred, expertly guided, and deeply expansive. These practitioners create containers that honor the medicines’ sacred nature while serving our contemporary needs.

Conversely, there are instances in traditional settings where commercialization, ego, ill-intent, or lack of proper care created unsafe or exploitative experiences. A ceremonial robe and indigenous lineage don’t automatically guarantee wisdom, safety, or authentic service. The sad reality is that harmful actors exist across all contexts, and might hide equally behind traditional authority, clinical credentials, or spiritual performance.

The recent influx of licensed therapists into this work represents just one thread in a much richer tapestry. What I find most meaningful is focusing on the qualities that make any facilitator, whether indigenous curandero, underground guide, or licensed therapist, truly capable of holding sacred space for transformation, and finding the one who feels aligned with you, your needs and worldview.

When looking for a facilitator, find ones that have:

Genuine humility and ongoing learning. They acknowledge what they don’t know, and regularly do their own work. They’re not performing expertise but living in authentic relationship with the medicines.

Clear boundaries and transparent practices. They’re honest about their limitations, don’t make grandiose claims, and maintain appropriate relationships with participants.

Deep respect for the medicines and their origins. This includes giving credit where it is due, avoiding cultural appropriation and finding authentic, embodied expression.

Trauma-informed awareness and safety protocols. They understand how to work with difficult experiences, have clear emergency procedures, and create emotionally safe containers.

Pre-and post-ceremony support. They understand that this work is not for everyone in every situation and are discerning about who they serve and ensure they are ready to face what they may encounter and also provide resources for ongoing processing and integration for as long as it is needed.

The ceremonialists I most trust often exist in the liminal spaces. They are humble, grounded, confident, and have system of support and accountability. They don’t make grandiose claims and they know their limits.

Your 20 years of experience with traditional ceremony gives you invaluable discernment. Trust that felt sense you’ve developed about genuine versus performative sacred space. The same qualities of presence, reverence, competence, and genuine care that make ceremony authentic in the Amazon, translate across contexts.

Rather than focusing primarily on credentials or cultural origins, I encourage cultivating the ability to sense when someone is truly in service versus serving their own needs.

The medicines themselves seem to be calling forth multiple expressions of healing, some honoring traditional forms, others creating new containers for our contemporary wounds. Perhaps our task isn’t to judge which approaches are valid, but to become more skillful at recognizing authentic medicine wherever we find it.

What matters most is that we never lose sight of why this work matters and understand that accessibility and context are important. There is no one correct answer, and there are not just two choices. The best facilitators, regardless of their background, never forget they’re servants of something much larger than themselves. Spiritual superiority is not a sign of true ascension.

(This is a big question, and one that I felt deserved more than just my own opinion. I’ve gathered additional voices from our community, each offering their own hard-won wisdom, and offer them below)

Thank you for your question. This is a complex issue that deserves great attention.

Folks in my experience find their way into healing opportunities in a way that is approachable for them. This is understandable. We reduce friction toward something different and scary so that we can actually approach it and digest it. The need for novelty is complex and varies widely person to person. South America with a shaman, your own backyard with the trees and bees or something in between? I’m not comfortable with ranking these experiences in a way that excludes the individual’s own relationship to what they commune with as sacred. Medicine is everywhere. I think we all are medicine ‘holders’ and can only offer our own medicine to others as we understand and communicate with it. We have a great responsibility to learn what resonates within us, most importantly the joyful work in knowing the sacred within ourselves. If we offer what appears to be for some a traditional/indigenous way of healing, inquire about it! We hopefully have spent countless hours honoring this practice and in doing so, paying respect to our teachers—all of them and often. Transparency and humility are vital. We must hold each other in love and accountability. Being in community so that we are known, will ensure the medicine is regarded as sacred. How we work with it is an extension of ourselves.

—Leah Williamson LPC & Whole-body health practitioner

I sense that part of the concern you’re voicing is about context. Traditional Indigenous culture tends to be organized around principles that give primacy to the health of the community, nature, and the larger web of life. We live in a capitalist culture that gives primacy to individualism and profit. If allopathic medicine and Western therapeutic frameworks have grown up in that environment, how can they properly hold this very vulnerable and sacred work for the benefit of all? Possibly you’re also speaking to how we are to hold the realms of Spirit, which medicines open us up to. Indigenous cultures have deeply embedded traditions and practices for interfacing with Spirit, while the Western systems you named often don’t. How can our Western systems possibly hold a field that they don’t even recognize as being real? On the other hand, perhaps Western systems offer some benefit with respect to their understanding of the Western psyche. There is a depth of research and practice around somatics and the nervous system that has big relevance to the trauma work that medicines bring to the surface. And Indigenous communities are also not absent of problems and complexities. The question of whether we do harm when work with medicines is done outside of lineage is an important one, and Indigenous folks who have held these lineages are the only ones who can answer it. What I have heard is yes. At the same time, many medicines are not connected to any lineage but may bring us into similar fields. I wonder if the important piece is less about whether a practitioner is directly connected to Indigenous roots, and more about whether they have done the depth of work themselves to attune to the many dimensions of the field—energetic, ancestral, spiritual, archetypal, somatic—not just mental and emotional. Whether they are in relationship with something larger than themselves or operating narrowly from an individual framework.

—Rachel Smith, writer and somatic practitioner

In my experience, the main difference isn’t the substance—it’s the worldview. Traditional ceremonies are embedded in a cosmology where the plants are teachers, healing is relational, and the work is done in benefit to the community. The ceremony isn’t “therapy”; it’s communion, alignment, and participation in a living tradition. The Western, health-based approach tends to medicalize the experience—framing it as treatment, centering on individual psychology, and often severing the work from its cosmological roots. In my opinion, this narrows the field of potential meaning and can flatten, or even eradicate, the spiritual dimension.

Local circles and practitioners are kind and well-meaning, but the risk is that the medicine becomes another wellness product, and the deeper ethos is lost. As for effects, yes, people can have powerful experiences anywhere. But the container shapes the encounter. Traditional settings often cultivate a depth of surrender, humility, and orientation toward the Other-than-human that the clinical frame rarely achieves.

Your concern about repercussions for indigenous communities is valid. When practices are copied without understanding or reciprocity, the lineage weakens. Done with respect and acknowledgment, cross-cultural transmission can enrich everyone. The key is honesty about what’s being carried—and what’s been left behind.

—Rune Aldrich, Bufo practitioner

The writer highlights many of the tensions girding psychedelic spaces right now. Tension is useful. In nature, growth and evolution require it. Tension exposes opposing beliefs and strategies—internal, communal, and cultural—inviting examination of what is true and necessary.

Central Oregon is home to a range of psychedelic practitioners: lineage-trained guides who hold spiritual, therapeutic, and ceremonial spaces, as well as licensed therapists and medical practitioners whose offerings stretch from the clinical to the sublime. Anchored in traditional lineage and scientific practices, while rooted in deep spiritual soil, I’ve guided people through psychedelic/plant/consciousness experiences since 2019. For western peoples, I’ve found this “both-and” approach to be most valuable and transformative.

Reciprocity and discernment mitigate this tension. As part of a greater web of intelligence, reciprocity sustains right relationship. Discernment is the foundation of personal and professional integrity. These practices include creating heart-felt client relationships, diligent self-practice, shadow work, prayer and honoring of traditions, teachers and plants, financial reciprocity and support of indigenous-led spaces and programs, creating space on my altar and in ceremony, and stewarding teachings in ways that center traditional beliefs—while thoughtfully employing scientific principles as tools to support and enhance spiritual, emotional and therapeutic evolution.

—Michelle Ericksen PhD, Ceremonialist & Wise Woman

In the megalith of modern medicine, even with our complex system of credentialing and training, there is enormous heterogeneity in the quality of care delivered. It seems trite to say it: There are bad doctors, therapists, social workers, etc. Indigenous cultures were not and are not immune to bad actors and healers with character flaws either. Fundamentally the use of psychedelics or sacred medicines is a personal journey, embarked on autonomously. This is not an experience that can be prescribed but rather facilitated by a fellow human being with enormous compassion, strength of character, grounding in morality, and with a deep sense of humility. These qualities cannot be instilled by an authority. Just as when embarking on a journey to the top of a steep mountain peak or deep in an unfamiliar jungle, there is risk and a need to identify a guide. The idea that we’re going to arrive at a gold standard, FDA approved widely distributable form of psychedelics is laughable. As more options become available, there may be excellent therapists that learn to be guides. There may be guides with no credentials that are superb. As more of our culture awakens to the potential for sacred journeys, it is my opinion, we’ll find that these can’t exist outside the context of a community. Accountability, trust, risk management naturally emerge when there is a strong community. I believe then it is possible for us to have and evolve our own sacred traditions, right here in our own communities.

—Anonymous Bend-area practicing emergency physician

Questions are encouraged to be sent to mary@myco.vision and free 30-minute consultations for further discussions can be made through her website https://myco.vision

This article appears in the Source December 25, 2025.