Part 1 - A Letter from the Field

“II put myself in the hands of people who were not equipped to hold what I gave them. It happened more than once. Here is what years of sitting in other people's ceremonies taught me, and the question it left me holding.”

I thought he was exceptional. I later understood he was not.

That is the sentence I keep coming back to, because it has been true more than once, with more than one teacher. The majority of lineage holders I have sat with over the years have struggled with money, with women, with power, or all three. I am not saying this to destroy anyone. I am saying it because I spent years making myself smaller in the presence of people I had placed above me. I put myself in the hands of people who were not equipped to hold what I gave them. The medicine opens you. Opened people are easy to take from. I know this now because it happened to me.

I want to be precise about that, though, because "taken advantage of" is only true the way the world outside would see it. From the inside, it did not feel like being used. It felt like learning intensely, through situations that needed handling, gaining real experience, paying for it in service rather than money. There is something in that I do not regret. It built something in me.

But that is exactly where the danger sits too. Not in the obvious exploitation. In choosing a teacher based on whether they want you to find your own medicine and shine from your own authenticity, or whether they need you shining for their ego instead. Those two can look identical from the outside. They feel almost identical from the inside, for a long time. The difference only shows itself later, usually after you have already given a great deal.

And I watch the field expanding around all of it. More mushrooms. More retreats. More trainings. More people serving medicine after one or two ceremonies of their own. Lineage holders bypassed. Diets skipped entirely. Participants going home without integration and falling apart quietly where no one can see them.

I watch people climb onto the altar in their minds and stay there. I watch facilitators begin to believe what the opened participants reflect back at them, because an opened person will tell you that you are extraordinary, and it is very hard not to believe it after the tenth time you hear it. I watch the ego eat the intention from the inside out. Slowly. Wearing the clothes of service the whole time.

I don't know what to do with all of this except say it out loud.

Maslow spent time with the Blackfoot Nation before he ever drew his famous pyramid, and what he saw there was not a mountain to climb toward self-actualization. It was the opposite. The Blackfoot treated self-actualization as the ground you are born standing on, not the summit you earn. A person arrives already whole, already worthy, and the whole of a life is spent giving that back to the people around you. Not climbing toward yourself. Living from a fullness you already have, and pouring it out.

I think about that a great deal in this field, because so much of it has the shape of climbing. Reaching for the next ceremony, the next teacher, the next breakthrough, as if the self is still somewhere up ahead to be earned. As if enlightenment is a summit instead of a starting point you keep forgetting you already have.

I still love the medicine. That has not changed. What I have seen it do in people, the grief released, the clarity arrived at, the lives that turned, I have no words for that that are not inadequate.

But I am tired of a field that asks so little of the people holding it. That mistakes intensity for depth. That calls itself sacred while it takes.

I am still deciding what my place in it should be. I think that is the most honest thing I can say right now.

You are the medicine.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Part two of this letter is coming. Where the deciding stopped, and the choosing began.

Tamara