I’m wrong a lot.
I’m wrong about who’s going to have a hard ceremony and who’s going to have an easy one. I’m wrong about what the difficult experience is going to mean six months later. I’m wrong about how long someone will need before they’re ready to sit again. I’m wrong about why a person is here, and what they’ll find, and what they’ll do with what they find.
After a few hundred ceremonies you start to develop intuitions. The intuitions are sometimes correct. They’re sometimes wildly off. The people I’ve thought were going to have transcendent experiences sometimes had ordinary ones. The people I worried about sometimes had the best experiences of anyone in the room. The pattern I thought I was seeing in someone’s life often turned out to be a different pattern entirely.
I used to find this discouraging. Now I find it the most honest thing about the work.
If I could reliably predict what the medicine would do, I’d be in the business of selling outcomes. I’d be telling people what to expect, what they’d find, what they’d come back with. I’d be promising. That’s the thing that should make you mistrust facilitators most — the certainty.
The medicine doesn’t take instructions from me. It doesn’t ask my opinion. It meets each person where they are, in the particular way they need to be met that day, and what happens between the two of them is between the two of them. I’m in the room, and I matter for being in the room, but I’m not directing what happens.
Being wrong, often, is what the work looks like from the inside. I’ve made peace with it.
