There was a stretch, maybe two years in, when I thought my job was to heal people.
This sounds obvious. People come to this work hurting. They’re carrying things they want to put down. They’re stuck in patterns they want to break. If I could help even one person move through something they couldn’t move through alone, that felt like the whole point. So I sat down each time with a kind of quiet ambition: today, something is going to be different for this person because I was here.
For a while, this worked. People had meaningful experiences. They cried, sometimes, in ways that felt important. They walked out of the room looking different from how they walked in. I told myself I was doing good work.
Then, slowly, I started to notice something.
The ceremonies where I was working hardest — where I was most invested in producing an outcome, most attuned to whether the person was “getting somewhere,” most ready to gently steer their attention if they seemed to be drifting — those weren’t the ceremonies that produced lasting change. Those produced experiences that felt good in the moment and faded within months.
The ceremonies that produced lasting change were the ones where I’d given up. Not given up in a despairing way — given up in the sense of having no agenda. Where I sat down knowing the person was going to meet whatever they were going to meet, and that what I was there for was to be present, to keep them safe, and to bear witness. Not to heal them. Not to deliver them an experience. Just to be in the room with them while they did whatever they were going to do.
It took me longer than I’d like to admit to see this pattern clearly. When I finally did, it changed how I work.
I stopped trying to direct experiences. I stopped offering “guidance” mid-ceremony, the kind of murmured prompts and reassurances I’d been taught to offer. I stopped projecting what I thought a good outcome would be onto someone else’s process. I started, instead, to do less.
What I do now, if I had to describe it, is something like this. I prepare with the person carefully. I take preparation more seriously than almost anything else. We talk about what they’re carrying, what they’re hoping for, what their history is, what their support structure looks like, what they want me to know. We work on it for weeks sometimes.
Then we sit. The medicine happens. I’m there, attentive, ready to help if something needs help. But mostly I’m just there. I’m not directing. I’m not invested in what they find. I’m not measuring success by whether they cried, or whether they had a “breakthrough,” or whether they emerged with the kind of insight I imagine they should have.
After the ceremony, I’m available. I follow up. I help them think through what came up. I refer them to other support when they need it. I keep showing up for weeks and months.
But during the ceremony itself, I’ve stopped trying to heal anyone.
What I’ve found is that the people I sit with now come away with deeper experiences and more durable integration than they did when I was working harder. This is a humbling realization. I was, for two years, getting in the way of what people came for.
I think a lot of facilitators in this work make this mistake, and I think it’s encouraged by how this work tends to be marketed. Practitioners are sold as healers. They’re presented as having access to something special, as being able to do something for you. The implication is that the practitioner is part of the outcome.
The truth, in my experience, is that the practitioner’s job is to make the space safe enough that the person can do their own work. The practitioner doesn’t deliver the work. The practitioner holds the conditions under which the work can happen. There’s a big difference between those two things, and I didn’t understand it until I’d been at this long enough to fail at the first version many times.
I tell people this now, before we sit. I’m not going to heal you. I don’t have that power. What I can do is be present with you while you meet whatever you’re going to meet. The healing, if it happens, is between you and the medicine.
It’s the most honest thing I know how to say about the work.
