Marco’s thumb hovered over the screen for exactly 3 seconds before he committed to the filter. He chose “Lark,” because it gave the Peruvian highlands a soft, ethereal glow that suggested spiritual transcendence rather than the grueling, dust-caked reality of the road to Iquitos. In the photo, he’s sitting cross-legged on a hand-woven rug that probably cost him 403 soles, looking every bit the man who has seen the edge of the universe and returned with a better LinkedIn profile.

He tagged 3 other Westerners-all of them wearing the same linen ponchos, all of them sporting the same expression of curated serenity. What he didn’t do was tag the community. He didn’t mention the name of the elder who spent 13 hours singing into a ceramic pot to keep Marco’s psyche from shattering into a billion jagged pieces. He didn’t even mention the village, because in the economy of the modern spiritual seeker, the village is just the backdrop. It’s the set design for the main character’s breakthrough.

I watched this post unfold from my couch, feeling that familiar, itchy heat behind my eyes. It reminded me of a conversation I’d had 13 days prior with a colleague I’ll call Julianna. She was describing her latest ayahuasca “journey” with the exact same inflection she uses to discuss her Napa Valley wine excursions. She talked about the “vintage” of the brew, the “notes” of the experience, and how the whole thing was a “fantastic tool for her Q3 productivity.” She used the word “download” 23 times. Not once did she mention a lineage. Not once did she acknowledge that she was playing with a technology that wasn’t designed for her convenience or her “optimization.”

It’s a peculiar form of colonial amnesia. We want the lightning, but we refuse to acknowledge the ground. We treat these ancient, volatile substances like they’re just another app we can install on our existing operating systems. But the original cultures, the ones we conveniently overlook in our 503-word Instagram captions, have been trying to tell us for decades that it doesn’t work that way. They aren’t selling a product; they are inviting us into a relationship, and relationships come with messy, inconvenient obligations.

I’m not perfect at this. I’m the person who laughed at a funeral 3 months ago because the solemnity of the priest’s robe caught on a stray nail and made a sound like a deflating balloon. I have a talent for finding the absurdity in the sacred, a trait that often makes me a terrible dinner guest but a decent observer of human hypocrisy. I see my own reflection in Marco’s post-the desire to be seen as “evolved” without doing the heavy lifting of being “connected.”

Domesticating the High-Drive Spirit

Indigo S.K., a friend of mine who trains therapy animals, once told me that the biggest mistake people make with “wildness” is assuming it can be domesticated through proximity. Indigo spends 63 hours a week teaching people how to communicate with creatures that don’t speak English and don’t care about your tax bracket. She says that when you take a high-drive animal out of its working environment and put it on a silk pillow in a suburban living room, it doesn’t become a “pet.” It becomes a ticking clock.

The animal’s DNA is screaming for a task, for a landscape, for a boundary. When those aren’t provided, the energy has nowhere to go but inward, or outward in a burst of destructive confusion. “Plant medicine is the same,” Indigo said to me over a coffee that cost exactly 3 dollars.

“People think they can extract the alkaloid, put it in a white room with some ambient Eno tracks, and call it ‘healing.’ But the medicine is a working dog. It needs the forest. It needs the songs. It needs the specific, rigorous containment of the people who bred the relationship with it over 103 generations.”

– Indigo S.K.

Without that, you aren’t doing healing. You’re just doing drugs in an expensive hat. We are currently living through a gold rush of extraction. We see it in the way the “integration” industry has ballooned, with practitioners charging 203 dollars an hour to help you figure out what the “serpent” meant, while the actual people who hold the maps for those visions are struggling to protect their land from the very same corporate interests that fund the retreats.

It’s a closed loop of consumption. We go to the jungle to “find ourselves,” but we bring our suitcases full of the very ego-driven desires we claim to be escaping. The Huni Kuin and the Shipibo have issued 43 different public statements over the last decade, essentially asking us to stop. Not to stop the medicine, but to stop the extraction.

They talk about the “dietas”-the grueling 33-day periods of silence and restriction-that are required to actually “hear” the plants. In the Western model, we skip the dieta and go straight to the fireworks. We want the 13-minute ego death without the 13-month character rebuild.

When we strip the medicine of its cultural context, we strip it of its safeguards. There is a reason the ceremonies are conducted in the dark. There is a reason for the tobacco, the Florida water, the specific geometric patterns woven into the fabric of the space. These aren’t just “vibes.” They are architectural components of a psychic container. When you remove them, you’re essentially building a skyscraper without a foundation and then wondering why the 13th floor feels a bit shaky.

I’ve seen the results of this shakiness. I’ve met people who have done 53 ceremonies in two years and are less grounded than a kite in a hurricane. They talk about “oneness” while being unable to hold a steady job or maintain a relationship that lasts longer than 3 weeks. This is because the medicine, in its extracted form, becomes a mirror for our own narcissism. If you don’t have an elder there to tell you that the “vision” you had about being the reincarnation of an Incan princess was actually just a projection of your desire for importance, you’ll just keep believing your own press.

We have a pathological fear of being told “no.” We believe that if we have the money-the $3,333 for the “Master Plant Initiation”-then we have the right. But the originating cultures have a different metric. For them, the right is earned through service, through lineage, and through a profound respect for the warnings that come with the power.

From Extraction to Alliance

They tell us that the medicine is a living entity with its own agency. It isn’t a “tool.” It’s a neighbor. And you don’t “use” your neighbor. You live alongside them. This requires a shift from an extractive mindset to a relational one. It means acknowledging that we are guests in a house we didn’t build.

This is where the work of organizations like

Unseen Alliance

becomes so vital. They understand that you cannot have the fruit without the roots. They emphasize the necessity of lineage and the deep, often uncomfortable work of respecting the people who have carried these traditions through centuries of attempted erasure.

“Why would I know the shaman’s children’s names?” Julianna asked.

“Because,” I said, “if you’re asking them to heal your soul, shouldn’t you at least know who’s going to be left with the spiritual debt if you mess up?”

She laughed, the same way I laughed at that funeral. It was a nervous, dismissive sound. It’s easier to treat it as a vacation. If it’s a vacation, you can leave. If it’s an initiation, you’re changed forever, and that change usually involves chores you didn’t sign up for.

The cost of this “spiritual tourism” isn’t just felt by the visitors who return home confused. It’s felt by the 13-year-old boys in the villages who see Westerners coming in with more money in their pockets than the village makes in 3 years, and decide that the ancient ways are only valuable if they can be sold. It’s felt in the way the plants themselves are being over-harvested.

I think back to Indigo S.K. and her dogs. She told me once about a man who bought a high-energy Malinois because he saw a video of one doing amazing tricks on YouTube. He lived in a 603-square-foot apartment and worked 13 hours a day. Within 3 months, the dog had eaten his couch, his drywall, and his passport. The man was furious. He called the dog “broken.”

“The dog wasn’t broken,” Indigo said. “The man was just deaf. The dog was shouting, ‘I am a predator, give me a mountain,’ and the man was replying, ‘Be a TV.’ You can’t blame the animal for the cage you put it in.” Our modern “wellness” industry is trying to turn the most potent, wild technologies of the human spirit into a TV. We want to sit on our couches and watch the “tricks” of the psyche without ever having to leave the apartment.

We have forgotten how to be hosts. To be a good host, you have to prepare the room. You have to know what your guest eats. You have to know what makes them angry and what makes them sing. If you just grab a stranger off the street and demand they perform a miracle for you, don’t be surprised when they burn your house down instead.

I’m trying to learn the names now. I’m trying to listen to the 13-minute-long diatribes from elders that don’t make it into the glossy brochures. I’m trying to sit with the fact that maybe I don’t “deserve” access to these things just because I can pay for them. There is a profound medicine in being told “not yet.” There is a healing in being told “you aren’t ready for this weight.”

But in a culture that treats “not yet” as a market failure, those voices are hard to hear. We would rather listen to Marco. We would rather look at the “Lark” filter and believe that enlightenment is just a plane ticket away. We would rather believe that we can have the light without the 23 generations of shadows that define it.

If we want these medicines to actually work-if we want them to heal the deep, 103-year-old wounds of our disconnected society-we have to stop being tourists. We have to start being allies. And an ally doesn’t just take. An ally asks what is needed. An ally listens when they are told to stay home.

An ally realizes that the most “sacred” part of the ceremony isn’t the vision you have of the future; it’s the way you treat the person who held the bowl while you were sick.

Marco’s post still has 43 comments. All of them are variations of “Stunning!” or “So proud of your journey!” I wonder if any of them will ever ask about the 3 families who live behind the camera. I wonder if Marco ever did. Probably not.

It’s hard to see the village when you’re too busy looking at your own reflection in the brew. But the village is still there. The elders are still singing. And they are waiting for us to realize that the medicine was never the point. The relationship was the point. The medicine was just the invitation to finally show up.