I don’t trust patterns. I’ve written elsewhere about how often I’m wrong about specific people. But across hundreds of ceremonies, certain patterns do show up reliably enough that I’ve started paying attention to them. I’ll share a few here. Take them with whatever skepticism feels right.
The people who do best are usually the ones who’d be fine without me.
This is the pattern that surprised me most when I first noticed it. The people who get the most out of this work tend to be people who already have something working in their lives — a meditation practice, a therapy relationship, a long marriage they’re invested in, a creative practice they take seriously, a regular relationship to nature. Something that’s already doing slow work in them.
These people don’t come to ceremony hoping it will fix something. They come to ceremony to deepen something that’s already underway. And the medicine seems to meet them where they are, which is somewhere already in motion.
The opposite is also true. People who come hoping the medicine will provide what’s missing in the rest of their lives — who don’t have a daily practice, who don’t have a therapist, who haven’t done the slow work — tend to have powerful experiences that don’t translate. They walk out of ceremony with what they came in with, except now they have a memory of having briefly been free of it.
The corollary of this pattern: if you’re considering this work and you don’t have the slower forms of practice in your life, build those first. The ceremony will mean more if it has somewhere to land.
The intention people stated almost never matches what actually mattered
I keep records of what people tell me they’re hoping to work on. When I look back at those notes after six months, the thing that actually shifted for them is usually not the thing they named going in.
A person comes to work on grief and ends up working on rage they didn’t know they were carrying. A person comes to work on a relationship and ends up working on the relationship they have with themselves. A person comes hoping to face their fear of death and ends up facing their fear of being insignificant, which turns out to be the deeper fear underneath the surface one.
This isn’t because the stated intention was wrong. It’s because the stated intention was the conscious version of something that has unconscious dimensions, and the medicine seems to engage with the unconscious version. People often only realize what they were actually working on in retrospect, months later, when something has resolved that they didn’t know was broken.
Difficult ceremonies are not bad ceremonies
I’ve come to think this is one of the most important pieces of orientation I can offer.
People sometimes leave a difficult ceremony convinced they got it wrong, that they missed something, that the medicine didn’t work for them, or that they failed to surrender. None of that is usually accurate. The people who have difficult ceremonies, six and twelve and twenty-four months out, are often the people who report the most significant changes.
The difficult experience and the meaningful experience are not opposite categories. They’re often the same category. What seems to determine long-term value isn’t how the experience felt in the moment, but what the person does with it afterward. People who do the integration well, including with difficult material, often look back at their hardest experience as their most important one.
If you have a difficult ceremony with me, I’m going to tell you this. I’m going to keep telling you it for as long as you need to hear it.
People consistently underestimate how long integration takes
The conventional wisdom is that integration takes weeks. In my experience, the meaningful integration takes years.
The first few months are often the most active — the period when new patterns are emerging, when old patterns are visible enough to work with, when what the ceremony made available is still close to the surface. That’s the period most people focus on, and rightly.
But the deeper integration — the part where the experience becomes woven into who you actually are, where the insights stop being insights and become the texture of how you live — that takes much longer. People I sat with three years ago are sometimes still actively working with what came up. Not in a stuck way. In a way that’s still alive.
If you’re going to do this work, plan for it to matter for a long time. Don’t expect to have integrated within a month. Don’t expect to be done with it within a year. The experience is brief; the way it changes you is slow.
The people who return for another ceremony soon are usually the ones who needed it least
This is the pattern I’m most cautious about sharing, because it can sound judgmental. I don’t mean it that way.
What I’ve noticed is that people who book another ceremony within a few months are often people who are using the experience to avoid the slower work. They’ve had a meaningful moment, they want another meaningful moment, and they’re starting to use the ceremony as an alternative to integration rather than as a deepening of it.
This is something I now watch for and talk about openly with the people I work with. I generally suggest people wait at least a year between ceremonies, sometimes longer. The exceptions exist — there are reasons someone might genuinely benefit from sitting again sooner — but they’re rarer than people imagine.
The medicine isn’t a tool for ongoing maintenance. It’s an opening into work that you then do, mostly alone, over a long time. If you find yourself wanting to sit again because you can’t make the work stick on your own, that’s information about what you actually need, and it’s probably not another ceremony.
These patterns, like all patterns in this work, are tendencies and not laws. There are exceptions to each of them. But they’ve been consistent enough in my experience that I’ve started orienting around them. Whether they apply to you is something you’ll discover, mostly afterward, in the slow shape of your life as it unfolds.
That’s the part of the work I can’t see from where I sit. That’s yours.
