Overview: In this editorial, Jonathan Goldman, Founder and Director of the Santo Daime-based Church of the Holy Light of the Queen in Ashland, Oregon, explores the profound role of plant medicines in healing. He argues that the spiritual and transpersonal effects of these substances are far more significant than their chemical properties. Goldman emphasizes the necessity of experienced, trained facilitators who understand the intricate dynamics of plant medicine ceremonies. He critiques the commercialization and western adaptation of these sacred practices, advocating for a respectful integration that honors their indigenous roots and spiritual purposes.

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Beyond Chemistry: The Spiritual Essence of Plant Healing

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Being a facilitator of sacred medicine healing is not a job; it is, or should be, a calling. They are not the same thing.

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I need to convey something that may be difficult for you to understand if you haven’t experienced plant medicine in the context I’m advocating. I’m going to tell you this truth, because it is vital for understanding the discernment I’m making here.

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While these substances do of course have chemical components and physiologically altering effects — components and effects which you are welcome to study with a twitch of your Google finger — the physical aspects of these sacred medicines are the least important of their qualities. What is more important are the spiritual effects, the transpersonal realms of consciousness that are made available, the opening of the veils of consciousness, the introduction of the participant to their inner chambers of pain and glory.

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It is not the change in chemistry that heals, it is the change in perspective. That and the literal clearing of the energetic material that a person has unconsciously accumulated in their lifetime. And beyond that, the arrival in consciousness of beyond-physical beings: healers, teachers, challengers.

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These non-physical entities, as we call them, are sometimes revealed to have been long-time, hidden-from-view companions of the participants; they have had the job of holding patterns of trauma-based energetic protection in place for decades. Others show themselves in the veil-dropped ceremonial space as having previously subtly guided the person’s life and work, only now having the opportunity to explicitly make their existence known. And still others arrive for the newly available person in that most delicate state, inviting them into new possibilities for their life, health, and work. Those clearings, openings, and revelations can happen calmly, smoothly, easily. And they can also happen jarringly, scarily, and wrenchingly. 

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When we open a portal, sometimes disruptive energies fly through. And we have decades and lifetimes of constriction in our bodies and consciousness that need to be shaken, discharged, and pried open for us to be made available to authentic Universal Light. When these things happen, it can look to an inexperienced leader or space holder like a crisis to be intervened in; to be stopped. It’s really the answer to the person’s prayer.

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An experienced, trained leader of medicine ceremonies knows how to open and close the portals, how to lead the collective creation of a space where who and what comes through is committed to Light and not to disruption. They know how to work with the disruptive ones that occasionally slip through. That awareness-based skill is not something you learn in three weeks or three months in Peru, or in an on-line course for therapists. It comes with long apprenticeship, humble recognition of your tiny humanness, familiarity with your guides and with the tricksters, and dedication to the sacredness of your mission.

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It is incumbent upon the leaders and space holders of those ceremonies and those therapeutic settings to understand and be able to identify and assess those occurrences. People who have been poorly and/or inadequately trained, both in the ceremonial world and the therapeutic one, are universally lacking in that knowledge. Most of the time, they are just missing an opportunity to help someone take a life-changing step. Sometimes, especially when their instinct or bad training tells them to, they seek to shut the experience down, frame it as a problem to be solved rather than a movement to be guided. That can be shattering to a person taking a new, awkward step in consciousness.

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We have had countless instances in our ceremonies over the years when, if we had been trained as so many are being trained today, we would have panicked and called 911 to “stop” a person in apparent distress. Instead, we have helped them navigate the moment and heal an ancient pattern, or a present illness, and open to a new life.

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Another characteristic of the plant medicine space is an increase in both energetic sensitivity and emotional vulnerability. The plant medicines raise our vibrational rate so that we can be available to their teachings and healing. They consequently soften inhibitions: to feelings, to sensations, to suggestions. Until they learn how to discern inspiration from ego and truth from trickery, sometimes people get sidetracked by fantasies, imagination, interpretations, and distortions of thinking. And not just among the participants. Discerning what is clear revelation and what is colored by trauma and unfulfilled desires, takes training and maturity for the leaders most especially. I can’t recognize in someone else what I’ve denied in myself. 

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The people leading and holding space are also, at least in my world and in any setting that I would ever be a part of, taking the medicines along with the participants. A sacred, entheogenic plant ceremony has nothing to do with intoxication, which is the medical model being used by those who would demand that those conducting therapy sessions or ceremonies stay “sober.” We are not intoxicated in the ceremonies I lead. We are certainly altered, which is the point and the purpose. Without participating in the heightened vibration that the plants initiate, and therefore without access to our own higher guidance and perception through that vibration, we are diminishing the experience for everyone. We are missing the boat, standing on the shore imagining the water.

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The increased vibration, the sensitivity of all involved, and the resulting increase in vulnerability of the participants in the ceremony demand of us to have crystal clear boundaries — physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual. The maintaining of safe boundaries requires the leaders and space holders to, first, have ample experience as apprentices of ethical people. Second, to commit ourselves to ongoing work on our own traumas, weaknesses, and unconscious material. Third, we have to have clear, unbreakable rules for the conduct of leaders vis a vis participants in our ceremonies — when and how to touch (almost never), what to say (not much), directions to give (clear, simple, gentle but firm). People are coming for their healing and spiritual growth, period.

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I will add a final piece to this picture. Contrary to those seeking to patent these medicines and create multimillion dollar franchises for their use, the sacred medicines didn’t come out of western, European culture. They are, in fact, a vibrational counterpoint to those modern cultures. They existed, amazingly, pre-capitalist, pre-colonialist, pre-exploitation, pre-psychotherapy, pre-western medicine, pre-scientific categorization. They come from places and cultures that have histories dating thousands of years before the cultures into which they are now being pulled. Their divinely given purpose was to enhance connection with nature and in making direct contact with authentic spiritual forces. Those forces have now deigned to bring these sacred medicines into the immensely suffering, spiritually dry people of the north.

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Of course, there will be adaptations. We need these medicines, and we deserve them. But we can also honor those cultures, those roots: in our words, in how we conduct our ceremonies, in our direct, non-exploitive support for the communities that have guarded the medicines, waiting for us to be ready to receive them. We can learn their wisdom and intentions, entertain the idea that they know profound and useful things we don’t. We can consciously resist our materialistic arrogance that would have us make these plants adapt themselves to our purposes. We can correct our culture’s habit of being cultural and material thieves. Those cultures’ contribution to us is not just the substance, the plants; it is the vibrational connection to nature (in us and around us) that we have lost, and to the living forces that our civilized cultures have relegated to myth and silly movies. It is not an increase in serotonin that heals our souls.