Category: Spirituality & Traditions

What therapy and ancestral wisdom can learn from each other without destroying what makes each unique 1

Imagine a client who comes to your office after losing her mother. She tells you her mother appeared to her in a dream, clear, luminous, with a message she does not fully understand. Since then, she cannot sleep.

Is this grief? Trauma? Spiritual experience? Psychosis? A call to pay attention?

The honest answer is: it might be all of those things. And the way you respond will depend, more than you might realize, on which shore you are standing.

Two shores. One river. No bridge.

Western psychotherapy and ancestral wisdom traditions have, for most of modern history, operated as if they were on opposite banks of a wide river, occasionally peering at each other with curiosity, suspicion, or misplaced enthusiasm, but rarely building anything solid across the distance.

On one shore: the language of the wounded self. Unconscious patterns, attachment wounds, trauma stored in the body, the slow and careful work of making the implicit explicit. At its best, psychotherapy is a disciplined act of love, witnessing someone’s interior life with rigor, ethics, and presence.

On the other shore: the language of the sacred web of life. Community as medicine, ritual as container, ancestors as living fields of influence, illness as disharmony rather than deficit. Traditions that have never believed the self ends at the skin, or that healing is something you receive alone in a room.

Both shores see something real. Both also have their blind spots. And in our rush to integrate everything, we have often done something that helps neither: we have put it all in a blender.

A blender makes puree. A bridge respects distance.

The wellness industry loves a blender. A little mindfulness from this tradition, a ceremony from that one, a chakra system loosely attached to a somatic protocol, shamanic language grafted onto a trauma model. The result is something that sounds whole but has been stripped of the very thing that made each element powerful: its context, its ecology, its relational and ethical demands.

A bridge works differently. A bridge does not collapse the distance between two shores. It honors the distance. It makes movement possible without pretending the shores are the same place.

This is the question I keep returning to in my clinical and personal life: How do we learn from both traditions without reducing either one?

Not “how do we merge them into a new spiritual product.” But how do we allow psychotherapy to become more soulful, more ritually aware, symbolically alive, culturally humble, without abandoning the rigor that protects clients from harm? And how do we approach ancestral wisdom with enough respect to leave its roots intact?

What each shore actually offers

Psychotherapy, at its core, teaches us to listen to the wounded self. It gives us a language for the unconscious, for developmental wounds, for the patterns that repeat because they were learned before we had words. It shows us that healing often happens through relationship, not technique, and that the body keeps score long after the mind has moved on. It brings ethics, boundaries, evidence, and the kind of careful container that protects the most vulnerable moments in a person’s life.

Ancestral and wisdom traditions teach us to listen to the sacred web of life. They remind us that the human being is not a private ego floating in an indifferent universe, but a relational, ecological, ancestral, and spiritual creature. They remind us that illness can be a form of disharmony, not just pathology. That healing sometimes requires community, not just technique. That some forms of suffering respond not to interpretation but to ritual, to offering, to being witnessed by something larger than the therapeutic dyad.

Where they meet is quietly remarkable: both understand that healing happens in a field, not in isolation. Both know that relationship is medicine. Both work with symbols, one through dreams and transference, the other through ceremony and cosmology. Both recognize the body as essential, not incidental.

Where they do not meet, and why that matters

Here is where most integrative conversations go wrong: they maximize the similarities and minimize the differences. But the differences are real, and pretending otherwise is its own kind of harm.

Psychotherapy generally works within a secular frame: the person, their history, their nervous system, their relationships. Many ancestral traditions operate within a cosmological frame: the person within the community, within the land, within the ancestors, within the spirit world. When a client’s “ancestral vision” gets translated into “part of the psyche” without asking whether that translation fits, something is lost, and something is taken.

The goals also diverge. Therapy often aims to restore function, coherence, and integration. Traditions may aim at liberation, awakening, balance, or right relationship with the sacred. A psychologically healthy person is not automatically an awakened one. A spiritually intense person is not automatically integrated. Conflating these two is one of the more common errors in transpersonal practice.

And the authority structures are entirely different. Therapy protects autonomy, consent, and the right to question. Many traditions involve apprenticeship, lineage, community recognition, and earned surrender. A healer in most Indigenous contexts is not self-appointed. The community recognizes the role, slowly, over time. Modern spiritual culture tends to invert this: brand first, authority claimed second.

Standing in the middle

There is a Nahuatl word that describes what it feels like to stand between two worlds: Nepantla. Gloria Anzaldúa used it to name the liminal space between cultures, identities, and ways of knowing, not a comfortable middle ground, but a living threshold. Uncomfortable, generative, and demanding.

Nepantleros, those who inhabit that in-between space, do not belong entirely to either shore. They are called to hold the tension without resolving it prematurely. To resist the blender.

For therapists and practitioners who move between these worlds, this is the actual work. Not to choose a camp, but to develop what Mi’kmaw Elder Albert Marshall calls “Two-Eyed Seeing”: the capacity to look simultaneously from the strengths of Indigenous ways of knowing and the strengths of Western ways of knowing, using both eyes together, without forcing one to see through the lens of the other.

A different definition of mental health

What would it mean to redefine mental health not as the absence of symptoms, but as restored participation? Participation in your body. In your relationships. In your community. In the natural world. In meaning and mystery.

This definition does not dismiss symptom relief. That matters enormously. But it expands the frame. It asks not only “what is broken?” but “what relationship has been severed?” Not only “how do we reduce suffering?” but “how do we restore belonging?”

How this looks in practice

A bridge-oriented clinician does not try to become a shaman or a guru. That is not the point, and it can be its own form of harm. What shifts is the quality of listening, and the humility with which you hold your own framework.

Before a client’s spiritual or cultural experience gets translated into clinical language, a few questions help:

What world does this experience belong to? Whose lens fits it better, the psychologist’s or the tradition’s? What does healing mean from inside this person’s cosmology? And perhaps most importantly: what is my framework missing that this client’s tradition might supply?

This is not relativism. It is clinical precision. Recognizing that the tools you bring to the room were built for a particular kind of suffering, and that some suffering requires different tools.

A bridge takes two shores

Let me end where I started: with the woman whose mother appeared in her dream.

The most useful thing I can bring to that moment is not a diagnostic category or a spiritual interpretation. It is the willingness to sit with her in the not-yet-knowing, the Nepantla, to listen with what one eye sees as a clinician and what the other eye recognizes as something that exceeds clinical categories.

A bridge is not built so one shore can conquer the other. It is built so that we can move, with care and respect, between worlds.

That, I think, is what good mental health care can look like when it is brave enough to hold the tension.

Interested in a talk or workshop on this theme? I offer presentations and trainings on transpersonal psychotherapy, ancestral wisdom, cultural humility, psychedelic integration, and the bridges between clinical care and spiritual traditions.

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  1. This article is a synopsis of my presentation “Wisdom Bridges: Modern Psychotherapy and Ancient Traditions,” presented at FITRA’s 2nd International Transpersonal Conference. ↩︎

(and How Shamans Can Help)

“[People] are so caught up in their own little lives that they are not getting their love up to the sun, out to the ocean, and into the earth… people are wrapped up in their little worlds, and they forget the elements, forget the source of their life. People have stopped gathering together, thanking the earth, the gods, the Sun, the sea for their lives.”
—José Ríos Matsúwa, Huichol/Wixarica mara’akáme

In an often-quoted reflection, The Paradox of Our Time, Bob Moorehead captured something many of us feel, even if we rarely say it aloud: we are more connected but more isolated. We have more knowledge, but less judgment; wider freeways but narrower viewpoints. We earn more money, but have forgotten how to live. We have conquered outer space but neglected inner space.

This paradox is mirrored inside. We’re stressed out, exhausted, scrolling compulsively, and burning out.

The polycrisis and its origin

The World Economic Forum has called our moment a polycrisis, meaning multiple crises that interact and amplify one another. Beneath it, I believe there is a common denominator: disconnection. We feel disconnected from the Earth, from others, and from ourselves. We have lost our ground. We feel uprooted. We’re adrift.

I want to suggest that Indigenous and shamanic wisdom may help. This is not a call to become plastic shamans, buy a drum, or move to the Amazon. I’m not here to exoticize or romanticize shamanism, but to acknowledge that these traditions worldwide have developed and preserved specific practical truths that modern life tends to erase. It is an invitation to remember them:

Slow down. Reconnect. Look around.

The Earth as a library

Luther Standing Bear, a Lakota leader, described a childhood where the natural world was a literal classroom, where the Earth itself was a library. Children were taught to study nature as modern students study a book. They watched ants at work. They observed clouds for long stretches. Lakota youth were encouraged to remove their moccasins and feel the “sacred earth” by sitting directly on the ground. They believed sitting in the “lap of our Mother” allowed a person to think more deeply, feel more keenly, and see more clearly into the mysteries of life.

Over time, Standing Bear says, this cultivated a “soft” heart—respect for living things—and trained the eye to perceive beauty everywhere: in a black thundercloud, in an insect, in the slow turning of seasons. Life was never trite or boring; instead, it was (and is) alive and pulsing.

Now contrast that with us.

We live enveloped by a manufactured environment, like astronauts encased in a metal world, alienated from organic reality. We’re trained to seek constant dopamine hits from our own artifacts. Everything that is not fast feels boring or pointless.

We need to move from nature-as-resource to nature as mother and teacher. Shamanic cultures remind us of something we’ve forgotten: relationship is the medicine. Relationship with ourselves, with others, and with our surroundings.

Three movements of reconnection

Here’s the good news: this doesn’t require exotic beliefs or borrowed rituals. To slow down, reconnect, and look around is simple and specific—not a performance but a practice.

First: slow down and return to your inner life. Learn to listen to the silence. Everything is meaningful. There are no dull moments. Stop judging and become curious. When we’re in pain, we ask: How can I get rid of this? A shamanic sensibility changes the question: What can I learn from this? It is an invitation to let things unfold and find out what happens next.

Second: reconnect. We are wired for connection (human—not artificial—connection). We can’t heal in isolation. We get sick alone. Isolation amplifies trauma. We need community to witness our story, help us make sense of our suffering, support us in our challenges, and celebrate our victories.

With community comes ritual, ceremony, and containment. Ritual emerges from deep places in the psyche to provide structure for grief, transition, fear, and renewal. Across cultures, people gather to mark life’s thresholds: births, coming of age, marriage, death. Without ritual and community, we struggle to understand life, and we feel the loss more sharply.

Third: look around. The Earth surrounds us. Get out of your concrete and steel confinement. We are not separate from nature. Earth is not merely “resources,” but a living organism we can relate to. Change the consumer mentality to one of stewardship—not “what can I take?” but “how do I live in reciprocity?” Shamanic traditions encourage gratitude, offerings—as ritualized gratitude—and a return to sacredness.

What happens when we lose connection?

The paradox of our time already told us. We feel out of balance—lonely, lost, sad, broken.

As Matsúwa suggests, we’ve forgotten the Earth; instead of giving offerings, we plunder Her and the Sea. We lose roots and drift in a meaningless world, trapped in “skin-encapsulated egos.” In the shamanic world, this is known as soul fragmentation. We lose aliveness. We become scattered, incomplete, not quite inhabiting our own lives. We feel as if we lost something but can’t remember what.

In The Little Prince, he finds a lonely flower in the desert and asks it about human beings. The flower gives an answer that sums up our predicament: “Men? The wind blows them away. They have no roots, and that makes their life very difficult.”

Let’s grow some roots…

What can we do?

Start small. Start today. The practice doesn’t need to be grand. It can be as simple as this: one small offering of attention.

Remember Standing Bear’s story. Walk on the ground. Leave behind your phone and observe nature for five minutes. Reconnect with yourself. Reach out to others. Get out of the city and look around. You are surrounded by beauty.

If you want to go deeper

If you want to learn more about shamanic-informed psychotherapy and practices, feel free to reach out. Mine is an integral approach that bridges Western clinical knowledge with ancient spiritual wisdom to restore wholeness. It rejects the mind/body split, treating the person as multidimensional, leaning toward transformation rather than symptom management alone. Illness is approached as a messenger, and through ritual, symbols, expanded states, and deep listening, we begin to understand the native language of the unconscious—inside, in between, and around us.

No borrowed outfits required. No foreign performance. Just the slow, steady work of remembering who we really are, to become human again.

Slow down. Reconnect. Look around.

While preparing a series of talks on Shamanism, I gathered a few reflections that gradually shaped themselves into something beautiful. I share them humbly and with no claim of ownership, trusting they may resonate with you:

Sink your roots with reverence into the Earth. To wound nature is to wound yourself (Haudenosaunee)

Attend to Grandfather Fire; he teaches those who wish to learn (Wixárika Huichol)

Let the great sea set you in motion; be carried trembling with joy (Netsilik Inuit)

***

Learn patiently from the plants; wisdom grows through discipline (Payé)

Hear the medicine speak; it reveals what is hidden (Mazatec)

Everything has its own song; listen until rocks and colors sing (Lakota)

***

Seek solitude; deep wisdom grows far from the noise of men (Caribou Inuit)

Find your inner light; let it guide you through the dark (Iglulik Inuit)

Understand your own madness; then the spirit world will not carry you away (Chontal)

***

Release your personal history; let go of the past that blocks your growth (Mochica)

Enter the places of fright and terror; truth often waits there (Mazatec)

Take responsibility for your health; neglect prevents healing (Aztec)

***

Look into the body like clear water; seek the truth beneath the sickness (Jívaro)

Know that heart heals heart; the strongest medicine is the desire to serve (Lakota)

Attend to the silence; songs are born there like bubbles rising to the air (Little Diomede)

***

Recognize that healing restores the balance of the community (Dagara)

Stay close in danger; do not separate on the paths of the wind (Wixárika Huichol)

Understand that I am you and you are me; everything in life is connected (Maya)

***

Thank the ancestors and the medicine; gratitude keeps the world in balance (Wixárika Huichol)

Know your place in the sacred hoop; every being is your relative (Oglala Lakota)

***

Guard your words; harmful words are shadows that lead you astray (Lakota)

Make your life a worthy offering; ask nothing in return for healing (Lakota)

Realize that each of us already carries the Great Medicine (Aztec)

***

Move in balance and harmony along the sacred Red Road (Lakota)

Walk in wonder; the world is alive and listening (Wixárika Huichol)

***

Trust what is greater than you; the sacred is never exhausted (Caribou Inuit)

Stand humbly like a child before the endless mystery (Wixárika Huichol)

Collected by Sergio Rodriguez-Castillo from traditional indigenous teachings worldwide

These teachings are shared with respect. Because many of the original voices are anonymous, I’ve listed only the cultural traditions from which these lines were collected, rather than attributing them to specific individuals. This post is offered as an invitation to reflection, not as a substitute for cultural context, lived relationship, or community-held knowledge.

Not that long ago, I went to Disneyland with my family. The idea was simple: go to an amusement park to have fun.1

After getting the (pricey) tickets, I started thinking that if we were going to do this, we had to do it “right.” I needed to do it efficiently, so I began strategizing how to ride all the rides we wanted. Once there, plan in hand, I dragged my family from one side of the park to the other. We rushed, we stressed out, we did it. I “won” at Disneyland.

But in winning, I missed the experience. I executed the plan successfully, yet it wasn’t fun.

That’s what striving does. It turns even an amusement park into a to-do list. It turns an experience into a chore. It turns life into labor. Based on what I see in my therapy practice, I’m not alone.

Do you ever feel like life is too much? Too many things to do. Not enough time. Too many messages to respond to. Too many crises. Too many ways to “improve ourselves.” Sometimes life can feel like a never-ending, grim self-improvement project.

So, what is the point?

Maybe deep down you’ve asked yourself that question. What if all our efforts amount to nothing? Or, as Shakespeare would put it, what if life is a “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”? What if Camus is right and life is truly absurd?

These can feel like depressing (if not downright dangerous) questions. But could it be another way?

I want to suggest an alternative: Play hard… but don’t take yourself too seriously.

Of course, suggesting that life is “play” can sound dismissive or naïve. Am I saying that life amounts to nothing? Work is not only necessary but often edifying. And what about suffering, does “play” make it meaningless?

No, I am not saying that. I am saying that we often make our efforts carry a weight they cannot carry. Let’s unpack it.

A different way: Līlā

Hindu thought offers an intriguing idea: life as God’s līlā, a creative expression of divine play. This whole universe, us included, is God’s playground. Another way to say it is that God2 is the sacred dancer, and we are the dance. The Divine is exploring possibilities, unfolding experience, and becoming intimate with its own creation through us.

From this perspective, life isn’t ultimately about achieving. It’s about participating.

Why life feels like work

Life feels like work partly because it’s designed to feel that way. There are layers of complexity that make the game both engaging and challenging.

We are biologically wired for survival. Since the advent of agriculture, life became future-oriented: plant, harvest, store, repeat. Modern economics suggests there is no room for freeloaders. We must be productive and add value. Psychology suggests that as children, we learn early on that we need to be “good boys and girls” and follow rules to be loved. And even religion, narrowly understood, can make life feel like there is something to achieve: Heaven, mokṣha, Nirvana…

What’s worse is that when we fail to perform, it can start to feel like there is something wrong with us. The stakes feel very high. No wonder it feels like there’s no room to play.

So, play hard… but don’t take yourself too seriously? Sounds like madness, unless we learn to see reality differently.

Two metaphors

Not everything we do in life is work, and not everything has a purpose.

Think about dancing or listening to music. Why do we listen to music? Why do we dance? Certainly not to win. If that were the case, the fastest musician would be the best, which is obviously absurd. The point is the experience itself.

Or what if life is less like a chore and more like going to the movies? Again, we don’t go to movies to win. We go to get lost in the story, to learn, to enjoy ourselves. We willingly enter the narrative while still knowing that it isn’t real. We don’t take it that seriously.

What about suffering?

Remember, we already established that this game of life is designed to feel like work. What about suffering and hardship? It has been suggested that part of suffering’s role is to “thicken the plot.”

Think about it. Would you want to watch a movie where nothing happens at all? A dancer who just stands there? A piece of monotone music? No. We appreciate a skillful dancer. We value a sophisticated piece of music, even if both are, in a utilitarian sense, “pointless.” We value the effort and time it takes to achieve excellence. Likewise, we love intricate movies. We pay to watch tragedies, thrillers, horror films, the kind that make our hearts race or bring us to tears.

The difference is that with music, dancing, and movies, we can remember it is not that serious and still enjoy the experience. In life, we get so engrossed in the action that we forget to witness it. We become method actors in our own drama.

Now, if life is play, are there any rules? Of course there are, although it is a bit of a stretch to call them “rules.” I’ll address that in a future article.

Movies, music, and dancing

We’ve seen that the game is wired to be challenging. All those layers may be designed to make us get lost in the storyline. We’ve also suggested that suffering thickens the plot, perhaps as the cleverest subterfuge to trap us in the narrative. However, please don’t read this as me (or the Hindu tradition) trivializing suffering.

We must be careful not to minimize another person’s pain. If one of my clients is suffering and I were to suggest that their misery is not real, I’d deserve to be punched in the face. Saying something like that would be spiritual bypassing and insensitive. When someone is suffering, we don’t philosophize. We meet them where they are. We honor their pain and support them in any way we can.

The Buddhists often say that pain is unavoidable, but suffering is optional. One way they explain this is through the Two Truths: relative and absolute.

At the relative or conventional level, harm is real, wounds hurt, and consequences are real. At the ultimate or absolute level (līlā), we can sometimes observe existence more like the audience of a movie. Suffering, and everything else, becomes plot. Whatever happens makes the story more engaging, but ultimately it is still a story.

The challenge is to hold both realities simultaneously: to fully engage conventional reality (like a football player engages a game) while not losing the perspective that, in the end, it’s still only a game (even if it happens to be the Super Bowl).

I’ve witnessed people touch this realization in psychedelic ceremonies. Often, they start laughing as if someone has told them a very funny joke. They report seeing the folly in their striving. I call this the cosmic laughter.

Pain does not invalidate the idea of life as play. It can block our access to it. Trauma contracts the body, and when the nervous system is bracing, play feels unsafe. With time and perspective, we sometimes see how our greatest battles and deepest wounds brought growth and change, just like the misfortune at the beginning of a movie becoming the call to adventure that pushes the story forward.

Building castles in the sand

It is possible to play hard while not taking ourselves too seriously. Let me borrow a powerful image from Nietzsche.

Imagine children building sandcastles at the beach. Picture them deeply engrossed in their work, making them taller, digging ditches… and then splash! A wave comes by and knocks it all down. The children both cheer and whine. They knew all along it was bound to happen. In fact, perhaps knowing it made everything more poignant.

What do they do next? Without missing a beat, they begin building another castle, fully aware it won’t last.

From a practical perspective, what they are doing is crazy. What is the point? Yet the ephemeral nature of the task does not keep them from giving themselves fully to it. Just like dancing. Just like listening to music. Just like watching a movie. Maybe, just like life, it is the experience that matters.

So next time you catch yourself worrying, striving, racing… remember those kids at the beach. How can you turn your efforts into play? Your struggle into a dance?

Play hard, but don’t take yourself too seriously.

Get it?

  1. This is a written version of the first session of “The Unfolding,” a CSP’s monthly offering. For more information visit https://sacredpractices.org/ ↩︎
  2. Please feel free to replace the word for Goddess or Mystery, the one that resonates best with you. ↩︎

A pesar de la prohibición de los hongos con psilocibina, cada vez más terapeutas, facilitadores e improvisados se dedican a tratar pacientes con esa sustancia. Mientras el Senado analiza la despenalización y regulación en México, un sector busca enseñanza y guía entre los sabios y sabias de los pueblos originarios. En la tierra de María Sabina, en Oaxaca, Alejandrina Pedro Castañeda es la mazateca más visible que apoya la despenalización, ante la mirada crítica de colectivos de la comunidad indígena, que exigen respeto y ponen distancia.

Lea el artículo completo aquí:

https://www.gatopardo.com/articulos/hongos-sagrados-medicina-ancestral-en-la-sierra-mazateca

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