Overview: This is the second of a five-part series titled “Learning at the Feet of the Plant Teachers,” by Jonathan Goldman, Founder and Director of the Santo Daime-based Church of the Holy Light of the Queen in Ashland Oregon. In this series, Jonathan recounts a powerful experience with Daime (Ayahuasca) and emphasizes the importance of responsible use in spiritual ceremonies. He warns against the dangers of seeking guidance from untrained shamans, highlighting the potential for psychological harm. True healing, Goldman argues, is a long and challenging journey, not a quick fix. Goldman expresses concern over a recent surge in the popularity of plant medicine use, which has unfortunately coincided with a rise in unqualified practitioners. He worries that improper ceremonies conducted by these individuals can lead to negative experiences and damage the reputation of plant medicine as a whole. He also criticizes those who exploit this growing interest for personal gain. To address these issues, Goldman proposes the creation of a "Guild of Entheogenic Practitioners" across the upcoming parts of the series. This voluntary organization would establish ethical and safety standards, ensure proper training for practitioners, and offer a trusted resource for those seeking safe and legitimate ceremonies. The guild would respect individual autonomy and traditions while providing a certified list of qualified practitioners. Unregulated practices, Goldman argues, risk government intervention and potential bans on plant medicine use. He believes that responsible self-regulation through a guild system can protect both participants and the future of plant medicine use. Stay tuned for the following parts of the series where Goldman delves deeper into solutions and the potential benefits of this approach.

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Learning at the Feet of the Plant Teachers: Part 2

True healing, most especially healing that is facilitated, provoked, and mysteriously guided by using entheogenic plant medicine, is not a Disney movie. For sure there are moments of epiphany, of overwhelming glory, even of authentic revelation. There is healing available that can be accomplished in no other venue or with any other methodology on earth. I have witnessed, participated in, and been the recipient of numerous unexplainable-by-my-western-trained-mind miracles. But it is not all flash and high fives.

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There are also, for almost everyone, moments — sometimes epochs — of being forcefully humbled, of being literally and figuratively on your knees as I was on that first visit to Brasil and have been many times after. Moments of having no option but to pray for mercy, for forgiveness, for relief from the vibrational and visionary confrontation with your own darkness and the darkness you’ve unconsciously absorbed from being a sensitive human in a world filled with pain and confusion.

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The two hardest things for human beings to embody are humility and forgiveness. And so of course they are the necessary inner states to enter if true healing and spiritual evolution are to be actualized. It’s supposed to be hard, to call up every last shred of faith and courage you can pull from the depths of your being. The plant teachers bring you nose to nose with the portion of human misery that you pledged to transform before you were sent down into the gift of your body. Those moments are not pretty and not easy, but they are real. Truth is sometimes not easy to look at. But when you are put nose to nose with the truth by the plant teachers, they are also holding your hand, and it’s a huge relief.

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You are suffering in an energetic context, an atmosphere of mystery and brilliant Light. You are not confronting that darkness and pain for its own sake, for some abstract moral principle. You are making that deep study because you have been promised that your illuminating of that material will lead you to a state of authentic illumination and soul level pleasure. That vibrational comfort makes possible saying yes to the necessary confrontation with what you’ve sequestered from your own self. How difficult is the necessary bringing to your knees, the humbling, depends on how stiff with pride, arrogance, and fear your knees are. Mine were metaphorically rigid.

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In the plant medicine space, in the expanded, Light-filled space, there are moments of the intrusion of ego, of fear disguised as truth, and of forces beyond oneself that will seek to fool you and lie to you and twist you into a knot of confusion. As above, so below. But it’s not random. It’s supposed to be that way. Learning discernment by being fooled is an ancient shamanic form of spiritual evolution. The plant teachers make you humble, then they test you, then they reward you with insight, work on earth that is satisfying and useful, and an authentic connection to they themselves.

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In the plant medicine world, you learn on the job, face-to-face with yourself and the forces that come through the portals of consciousness that are opened by the plants and the ceremonies designed to secure them. It’s centrally about the learning. The healing process is the curriculum, not the goal. And we humans are stubborn creatures, are we not? Hence the need for the strength of the plants, the length of the ceremonies, and the discipline of the teachers. And for the willingness to do your inner work outside of ceremony. Plant medicine sessions are laboratories. Your life is the proving ground.

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When you take a sacred plant into your body, you are asking for the thinning, even parting, of the veils of consciousness that normally separate us from the many beyond-this-material-world planes of reality. The veils of consciousness are there on spiritual purpose. You and I came to earth in these amazing bodies to be incarnate humans, learning human lessons. That is our number one job. When, by taking these plants into our bodies, we say, explicitly or implicitly, that we want the veils to be parted for us; to see, feel, and experience that which is normally kept behind the veils. We are stepping beyond the bounds of the normal human agreement. It’s a big deal. Or it should be.

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We have been given by our creators the profound gift of choice, so we can make that petition for the parting of the veils. And because within its design for cosmic evolution, the universe supports spiritual reunification and evolution, even down to the micro-level of you, that invocation for that opening of consciousness is most often answered in the affirmative. And since we are also scattered, divided in our consciousness, trapped by our fascination and habits with matter and its temptations, and since we’ve accumulated energetic, mental, emotional, and karmic material over many lives, the path of the answering of our prayer for transformation and illumination has many layers, many stages. The plant teachers speed up the process by a lot, but they don’t do it for you. 

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The first and ongoing lesson on the true spiritual path: Reality is not what you thought it is, and neither are you.

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Subsequent to making a commitment to follow the trail that the plant teachers open for you and proceed to guide you along, everything that is in you — that you came into this world with and gathered in your life, all the material in your field and in your consciousness that is in the way of the embodiment of the new state of awareness — the traumas, habits, addictions, thoughts, ideologies, karmas, and self-definitions- will be revealed, unraveled, and called up for examination and transformation. Meeting the plant teachers is serious business. That is why most people who engage with the plant medicine teachers become dabblers, rather than disciples. That’s not a criticism. Transformation is hard, demanding, sometimes discouraging on the way to freedom. You need courage, faith, and a willingness to go to your inner mat with the material you’ve sequestered. And even then, there are moments when we can regret the prayer we made.

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That choice to ask for the parting of the veils is a profound one, potentially a life-altering one. In my view, it is something that many people are doing today with no awareness of, or respect for, that seriousness. Often in our medicine sessions, when we make our prayers for what we are asking from the teachers and healers for our own healing, New Age cavaliers blithely declare that they are invoking the “full realization of my spiritual/higher/eternal self, the complete manifesting of my soul’s mission, the total Christedness of my being, etc.” When we hear those grandiose, ungrounded prayers being declared in a ceremonial space, we warm up the puke buckets. By the end of the ceremony, the ones declaring their eternal glory, bypassing the human challenges that hold the potential for true awakening, are humbly embracing their simple humanity, often literally on their knees, tears streaming down their cheeks. That humbling is the beginning of the true path. The real medicine comes from the deep forest, from the deserts. It calls up our matter as well as our spirit for purification so we can join vibrationally, authentically, in the celebration of creation.

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Oftentimes we are taken to the top of the mountain and shown who we essentially are and what life we can have by embodying that deeper, truer self. And then we are plunked firmly down at the bottom of the mountain and instructed to climb. In that sacred space and that illuminated state, we agree to make the journey. Then the work begins. The teachers take our pledge seriously. Even when we forget and allow ourselves to get subsumed in the swirl of the madness and the density of the mundane, they call us back to the path we ourselves have freely pledged ourselves to walk. That call is made more or less gently. It can be a nudge, a shove, or even a swat. The relative gentleness depends on our own stubbornness; how far we have strayed. Again.

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As inconvenient, difficult, and challenging on almost every level as that trip to Brasil was (and as have been many of the 40 subsequent ones), I feel fortunate that, in part because of that disruption and strangeness, I knew what I was entering into was not casual, was not because I had nothing else to do on a Saturday night, because I was looking for the next cool, latest thing, or because I saw an ad on Instagram.