The young woman sitting across from me was vibrating with enthusiasm. “I just need to go deeper,” she said, her eyes bright with conviction. “Each ceremony shows me more. I feel like I’m finally starting to understand everything.” She had participated in ten ayahuasca ceremonies over the past six months, each one more profound than the last. Every morning, she would use rapé for “meditation,” as she called it. Her Instagram feed was filled with spiritual quotes and ceremony photos. She spoke of cosmic downloads and divine messages.

Her life, however, told a different story. Her relationship with her family had deteriorated to the point where they barely spoke. She was three months behind on her rent, and her life coaching business was struggling to find clients. Financial struggles were a constant companion, yet she kept finding money for ceremonies. Each aspect of her life that needed attention seemed to fuel her desire to escape deeper into medicine space.

As a facilitator of plant medicine ceremonies and someone whose own journey began in sound healing and meditation, I’ve witnessed countless variations of this story. The details change, but the pattern remains: seekers who mistake transcendence for transformation, who confuse visiting other worlds with healing this one.

My own path with plant medicines began in the United States, but it wasn’t until I made extended visits to Peru that I truly grasped their power. Those early ceremonies in America were profound, but the constant pull of ordinary life – work, relationships, and all the small tasks that fill our days – created a ceiling on how deep I could go. I didn’t even realize this limitation until I found myself in Peru, where the separation from my regular life allowed for a different kind of surrender.

During my training with a Shipibo lineage, I learned about their profound cultural relationship with plant medicines – how curanderos often begin their path at age eight, how the medicine path shapes entire families and communities across generations. This wasn’t some special “medicine time” separated from normal life – it was life. The medicine path was woven into the fabric of their existence, as natural as eating or sleeping.

The Western Seeker’s Trap

Here’s what they don’t tell you in the glossy articles about plant medicine healing: Ayahuasca can become its own form of spiritual bypassing, a term psychologists use to describe using spiritual practices to avoid dealing with emotional or psychological wounds. Except this isn’t just meditation or crystals – this is one of the most powerful consciousness-altering experiences known to humanity.

I know this trap intimately because I lived it. In my early years with the medicines, I was in ceremony almost weekly, convinced that each experience was helping me heal deeper layers of trauma. And in some ways, it was. But what I didn’t realize then was how this frequency was fundamentally altering my relationship with the world around me.

The medicines heightened my sensitivity to everything. The city that I once loved became overwhelming – the constant noise, the density of energy, the press of people. I found myself unable to tolerate the downtown environment where I’d happily lived for years. Even simple things like crowded restaurants or nights out with friends became too intense. I eventually sold my downtown co-op and moved an hour outside the city into the countryside.

While this wasn’t necessarily a bad decision – the peace of nature felt like a balm for my heightened sensitivities – it wasn’t exactly a fully integrated choice either. It was more of a necessity born from my altered state of being. My regular yoga practice, once a cornerstone of my daily life, fell away. I had little interest in current events or worldly matters; if you’d asked me who the vice president was, I wouldn’t have known. My head was in the clouds, quite literally, and while I was becoming more attuned to my inner worlds, I was simultaneously becoming less engaged with the world around me.

Nature became my refuge, and the rural life suited my transformed sensibilities. But in choosing this path, I also lost the convenient ability to maintain an active social life. I wasn’t a victim – these were all choices I made – but would I have made these same decisions if I hadn’t been so frequently in medicine space? Probably not. At the time, this all felt like liberation, like I was transcending the mundane aspects of modern life. In retrospect, I was also unconsciously creating a kind of parallel reality, one that while beautiful, was increasingly disconnected from the fuller spectrum of human experience.

The Instagram Healer and the Productivity Paradox

I recently scrolled past a post from a popular “medicine worker” promising “quantum healing” and “total consciousness upgrade” through their ceremonies. The post had thousands of likes. This is what happens when Silicon Valley optimization culture collides with ancient wisdom traditions – we try to hack our consciousness, to optimize our healing, to fast-track our enlightenment.

But here’s the uncomfortable truth: the medicine isn’t just about the moments of cosmic unity or profound insight. It’s about what happens when you come back to your body, your bills, your broken relationships. It’s about how you handle Tuesday afternoon when the magic fades and you’re just a human being again, dealing with the challenges of existence.

The Ceremony Crutch

Through my work with Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy, I’ve observed how ceremonial spaces temporarily disable our psychological protection mechanisms. It’s beautiful and necessary for healing – but it can also become addictive. When those protectors step aside, we feel free, connected, alive. Everything seems possible. We touch the divine.

Then reality returns. The protectors come back online. The expansion contracts. And instead of doing the hard work of integration – of actually changing our lives – we start planning our next ceremony.

I’ve watched people build their entire identities around being “medicine workers” while their fundamental wounds remain untouched. I’ve seen others become ceremony connoisseurs, chasing increasingly exotic experiences while their daily lives crumble. Some bounce between different medicines – Ayahuasca, Huachuma, Bufo, Rapé – treating them like spiritual channel-surfing.

The Rush to Facilitate

As plant medicines and psychedelics gain prominence in Western culture, we’re witnessing another intriguing phenomenon: the rapid proliferation of facilitators and healers. From psilocybin circles to ayahuasca ceremonies, from MDMA sessions to DMT experiences, there’s a growing community of people stepping into space-holding roles. This impulse is natural and often comes from a genuine place – when we’ve been profoundly helped by something, we naturally want to share it with others.

I understand this impulse intimately because I lived it. The medicines had helped me so much that I felt called to facilitate others’ healing journeys. Looking back, I recognize that I stepped into this role before I had fully integrated my own experiences or healed my core wounds. I was fortunate to have had ten years of experience working with people in other modalities, which provided a foundation of “do no harm” principles. But I still made mistakes – mistakes I now share with my students as cautionary tales.

What I’ve come to understand is that facilitating others’ journeys was actually part of my own healing process. By witnessing others, I could see reflections of patterns that were difficult to recognize in myself. This isn’t inherently problematic – many therapists acknowledge that they’re drawn to their profession partly to understand themselves better. However, in the rapidly expanding world of plant medicines, there’s often insufficient awareness of this dynamic.

When the Medicine Works

Despite these cautionary tales, I’ve also witnessed many people develop healthy, transformative relationships with plant medicines. The common thread among these success stories? Time. Those who seem to benefit most are those who allow themselves extended periods for integration – six months minimum, and often several years between ceremonial experiences.

These individuals understand something crucial about working with plant medicines in a Western context: our culture isn’t set up to support frequent ceremonial work. The legal limbo these medicines exist in creates a cloud of secrecy that adds its own psychological burden. The physical demands – the constant fasting, the dietary restrictions, the energy depletion that comes with regular ceremonies – take a toll that our busy Western lifestyles aren’t designed to accommodate.

I’ve watched some people navigate this reality by choosing to fully immerse themselves in cultures where these practices are better supported. They relocate to Peru or Costa Rica, where the legal and social framework allows for more open engagement with the medicines. In these settings, with proper community support and cultural context, regular ceremonial work can be sustainable in a way that it rarely is in the United States.

But for most Westerners staying in their home culture, the most profound transformations often come through patience and restraint. These individuals might have a powerful initial series of ceremonies, but then they do the harder work: they step back, sometimes for years, allowing the medicine’s lessons to percolate through their daily lives. They focus on integration practices – meditation, therapy, journaling, movement practices. They build ordinary lives infused with extraordinary insights, rather than seeking to maintain perpetual contact with the extraordinary at the expense of the ordinary.

The Way Forward

So what’s the alternative to this cycle of spiritual escapism? How do we work with these medicines without turning them into another way to hide from ourselves?

First, we need to be honest about what we’re doing. Are we seeking healing or hiding? Are we using these experiences to enhance our lives or to avoid them? The medicine will work either way – but the results will be vastly different.

Second, we need to restore these medicines to their proper context: as tools for connection rather than escape, for integration rather than transcendence. This means developing a relationship with ordinary consciousness that’s just as committed as our relationship with extraordinary states.

Finally, we need to understand that the real medicine isn’t in the ceremony – it’s in what we do with it. It’s in how we show up the next day, and the day after that. It’s in the small choices we make when no one’s watching and there’s no mystical state to validate our worth.

A Final Thought

Coming back to ordinary life after extended time in Peru was always challenging. The contrast between these worlds can feel almost unbearable. But I’ve learned that this very tension – this space between the extraordinary and the ordinary – is where the real integration happens. It’s where we learn to bring the insights and healing from ceremony into the everyday moments that make up most of our lives.

Sometimes the bravest thing we can do is stay right where we are, feeling what we feel, being who we are. No ceremony required.

Note: The anecdotes in this piece have been altered to protect the privacy of those I’ve encountered in ceremony spaces. While these stories reflect genuine patterns and experiences I’ve witnessed, the specific details and individuals mentioned are composite characters created to illustrate important points about plant medicine work. No real individuals are depicted in this article.