I Knew Something Was Wrong. I Went Anyway.

Something felt wrong about the shaman before the ceremony even began.

I noticed it. I felt it.

And I went ahead anyway.

I've spent more than a decade exploring consciousness, developing my intuition, and helping people understand themselves more deeply. Listening to what I sense is part of my everyday life. Yet when something in me said this wasn't right, I gave someone else's authority more weight than my own experience.

That's the part I keep coming back to.

I didn't enter that ceremony knowing nothing about myself. I knew I had a history of seeking acknowledgment and validation from other people. I'd spent years examining that pattern.

Apparently, knowing a pattern exists and actually interrupting it are two very different things.

The night I couldn't remember my own name

In March, I participated in an ayahuasca ceremony.

Looking back, I can see that I wanted something from the man facilitating it. Acknowledgment. Recognition. Perhaps confirmation that I was where I was supposed to be.

Which is interesting, considering how much of my work is about helping people reconnect with their own knowing. Apparently, I was still looking for someone else to validate mine.

During the ceremony, the shaman stood directly in front of me, banging his drum and chanting.

His face appeared gray, almost like television static. His eyes were completely black. Not dark. Black. And they were staring directly at me.

As he sang over me, I heard what I understood to be my Guides repeating two words.

"Entrapment. Enchantment."

I could see what looked like spiderwebs and intricate grids, and I experienced my energy being siphoned into them. It felt as though my life force was being violently pulled from me.

I couldn't stop it.

And in that moment, I had absolutely no doubt about what I believed was happening. I felt violated in a way I still struggle to describe.

I know I was under the influence of ayahuasca. I understand that altered states can profoundly change what we see, hear, and believe is happening around us. But knowing that doesn't erase the experience.

I remember what I perceived. I remember the terror. I remember the absolute certainty I felt.

And I remember what happened next.

I began losing my grasp on who I was. At one point, I couldn't even remember my own name.

My name.

I fought to hold on to something familiar, something that could remind me of who I was.

I've spent years exploring questions about identity and consciousness. Who are we beyond our personalities, our stories, our names?

Those are fascinating questions when you're sitting comfortably discussing philosophy. They're something else entirely when you're desperately trying to remember who the hell you are.

There was nothing romantic about it.

I experienced profound psychological disorientation. I couldn't reliably distinguish what was happening around me from what I was experiencing internally.

And in the midst of it, I was confronted with my past. Not in the gentle, reflective way we sometimes talk about revisiting old wounds.

I felt as though I was reliving experiences of powerlessness, beginning with sexual abuse I experienced as a child.

It was devastating.

I don't want to recount the details of that abuse here. I don't need to.

But afterward, I was left confronting something I couldn't explain away. I had entered an experience that made me extraordinarily vulnerable, despite already feeling that something about the person leading it wasn't right.

Why?

I thought I'd already worked through this

I've spent years examining my relationships, my need for external validation, and the ways I've allowed someone else's opinion to carry more weight than my own.

I've done the work.

Or at least, I thought I'd done quite a lot of it.

And then I found myself in a ceremony, placing my trust in a man I already felt uneasy about because some part of me still wanted acknowledgment from someone I perceived as having spiritual authority.

That's uncomfortable to admit. Especially publicly.

Because I know what I would tell someone who came to me describing the same situation. I'd want them to know they were allowed to question the practitioner. That their discomfort mattered. That they didn't have to participate in anything simply because someone else believed it would be good for them.

I believed all of those things before the ceremony, too.

So why didn't I act on them?

I think the answer has something to do with the difference between recognizing a pattern and changing our behavior when that pattern is activated.

I could talk about my desire for acknowledgment. I could explain where it came from. I could probably help someone else recognize something similar in their own life. And apparently, I could still participate in it.

Not because everything I'd learned was meaningless, but because understanding ourselves doesn't automatically free us from the ways we've learned to seek acceptance.

I've had extraordinary teachers. I've benefited from their knowledge, experience, and willingness to challenge how I see the world. I still believe in mentorship, and I certainly don't think we should stop learning from people who know things we don't.

But I've been questioning the point at which respect turns into deference. When does admiration become the assumption that someone else knows what's right for us better than we do?

Spiritual communities aren't immune to the same power dynamics that exist everywhere else. There are teachers, students, initiations, lineages, certifications, and people who seem to have access to experiences others desperately want.

Sometimes those structures protect valuable knowledge. Other times, they create opportunities for people to surrender their judgment without realizing they're doing it.

And sometimes the pressure doesn't even come from the teacher.

Sometimes we create it ourselves.

We place someone on a pedestal, imagine what their acknowledgment would mean about us, and begin making decisions around receiving it.

I recognize that in myself.

The problem with calling everything resistance

There's something about spiritual language that I've been looking at differently since that night.

We talk a great deal about surrender. Surrendering control, surrendering the ego, surrendering to the experience. We talk about moving beyond fear, releasing resistance, and trusting the process.

Sometimes those ideas are genuinely useful. But they can also become dangerous when we stop asking

what we're being encouraged to surrender, and to whom.

Not every hesitation is fear of growth. A boundary isn't necessarily an ego defense, and an uncomfortable experience isn't automatically an initiation we're supposed to endure.

What happens when a teacher tells you to trust your intuition, but your intuition tells you not to trust the teacher?

Whose interpretation wins?

I think that's a question every spiritual practitioner should be willing to sit with. Including me.

A person's willingness to question us shouldn't automatically be interpreted as resistance. Their refusal shouldn't be treated as evidence that they're not ready. And their vulnerability should never become an opportunity to establish greater authority over them.

Someone can have profound spiritual experiences and still exercise poor judgment. Being knowledgeable doesn't mean being right about everything, and being gifted certainly doesn't guarantee someone is safe to work with.

Those aren't contradictions. They're part of being human.

I think we sometimes forget that when we're so impressed by what someone seems capable of doing.

I refuse to call what happened a gift

I've spent enough time in spiritual communities to recognize the script.

Everything happens for a reason.

You needed to experience that to learn the lesson.

Your soul chose it.

Apparently my soul has terrible taste in curriculum.

I can own that I chose to participate, even though something in me hesitated. I can also own the ways I've deferred to other people's authority over my own knowing. Choosing to participate didn't mean I chose everything that happened afterward.

I've also been thinking about who benefits when we insist on calling someone's suffering a gift.

Sometimes that explanation seems to comfort the person offering it more than the person experiencing the pain. It allows us to rush toward meaning instead of sitting with something we cannot fix. And when those explanations are imposed on someone who has been harmed, they can obscure the responsibility of the people or systems involved.

I can say an experience changed me without thanking it for the pain.

I think we lose that distinction constantly when we try to turn suffering into spiritual wisdom. We rush to the meaning because the wound is unbearable to witness without one. We participate in our spiritual bypassing.

Sometimes something terrible happens. Sometimes we learn from it.

That doesn't make it a gift.

What I keep coming back to

I haven't stopped believing in spiritual exploration. I haven't abandoned my interest in consciousness or my respect for experiences that challenge conventional explanations. And I certainly haven't concluded that every spiritual teacher is dangerous.

What I'm questioning is the authority we sometimes assign to people because of the experiences they've had, the traditions they represent, or the confidence with which they speak.

Especially when we want something from them.

I know how compelling it can feel to be acknowledged by someone we admire. To have them recognize something special in us, or confirm that we're ready for whatever comes next.

But that desire can make us reinterpret discomfort as something we need to overcome. It can make us stay in situations we would advise someone else to leave.

I know, because I did it.

I also know that understanding this pattern doesn't mean I've undone it.

That's where the work becomes considerably less glamorous. We love the moment of revelation, the breakthrough, the sudden recognition of something we've carried for decades. But recognizing it and making a different choice when it matters are two very different experiences.

I knew something felt wrong before the ceremony. I went anyway.

I can't change that, and I'm not interested in constructing a beautiful spiritual explanation that makes the experience easier to accept.

What I am interested in is understanding why I was willing to give another person so much authority over my choices.

I don't have a neat answer. I wish I did.

I went into that ceremony looking for acknowledgment from someone else.

At one point that night, I couldn't even remember my own name.

I'm still sitting with the distance between those two things.

And with a question I think is worth asking long before we find ourselves in a situation where the stakes are so high:

If someone else's acknowledgment matters more to me than my own knowing, whose life am I actually living?

With grace and gratitude,

Shannon