I was born into a cult. The Christ Gospel “Church” in Jeffersonville, Indiana, founded by Berniece Hicks. I’m not proud my parents bought the voodoo sold as “the truth.” But facts are facts.

I thank God my maternal grandmother planted early seeds of doubt. By thirteen, I viewed the Christ Gospel’s exclusive school, “River Falls Christian Academy…

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Before any law is written, the nervous system drafts its own code: tighten against threat, coil around wound, hold fast to survive. Trauma does not simply drift through. It carves architecture, muscle into armor, breath into shallow guard, spine into sentinel.

As an anthropologist who has mapped power across cultures, I never thought my own chronic pain would speak the loudest truth: protection, when it refuses to stand down, becomes the prison.

This is a story of convergence. Two radically different systems—one Western, structural, authoritative; the other relational, participatory, rose-petal-strewn—arrived at the same embodied truth.

In a Mexico City room where copal smoke curled like memory and petals bruised softly under bare feet, surrender proved more powerful than command.

Through lived experience and participant-observation, this essay traces how power operates in bodies as it does in societies: wherever authority supplants responsiveness, suffering hardens into structure. Wherever trust invites the guard to uncoil, life flows again.

What if the deepest healing—personal, political—begins not with tighter grip, but with the quiet, deliberate choice to let go?

The Breaking Point

I woke one morning already defeated, pain turned to grief. For more than twenty years it had ground into my spine, my days, my sense of self.

Western medicine had thrown everything at it. Chiropractic offered brief alignment. Physical therapy sometimes loosened the vise. Yoga helped until it didn’t. Weight-bearing exercises rebuilt strength—until the next collapse.

Dr. Brett Diaz had been my brightest light. His structural work stopped the terrifying falls that once had me clutching walls like a child learning to walk. For a season my body remembered steadiness. But geography proved cruel, making ongoing treatment impossible. Dr. Diaz is located in Ohio.

Opioids, even mild ones, dulled more than pain; they dulled me. I do not trade sentience for sedation, nor invite the slow architectural collapse those drugs promise over time. Better to feel the full weight of suffering than to transform it into something even more harmful.

That morning the grief was unbearable. I lay staring at the ceiling, wondering: Is this the exit?

I recalled a conversation about a clinic in Mexico City offering “spiritual surgery” with changa, a smokable DMT blend. My first thought: “Hocus pocus.”

Yet my medical anthropology training had taught me to suspend judgment long enough to see how different systems produce real meaning, efficacy, and healing. The field has long taken plant medicines seriously—documenting outcomes, mapping collisions between biomedical and indigenous epistemologies, treating psychedelics as structured technologies of transformation.

The explorer in me, the one always drawn to the edges of human experience, asked: What if?

Twenty years of escalating pain dismantled any remaining skepticism. The unknown no longer frightens me. It beckons.

I opened my phone and drafted a WhatsApp message to the clinic. Simply, “When can I see you?”

In Mexico, the line between law and humanity bends differently. Indigenous or plant-based practices often operate in the spaces where enforcement softens, reflecting a broader pattern of discretionary governance.

What unfolded in that Mexico City room, amid minister compassion, incense, meditative music, a prehistoric wood floor covered in rose petals, and the careful preparation of changa, challenged every Western concept of healing.

The combination of changa and attuned bodywork moved through me with intent I can only call spiritual release. Emotional pain, long etched into nerve and fascia, rose from sacrum to crown and exited in heaving waves of breath and sound.

What I did not yet understand was that my body had not simply carried pain for decades. It had reorganized itself around guilt, stress, injury, and trauma in the name of protection.

The Coil Unwinds

Structural Release in Two Worlds with Dr. Brett Diaz

Protection is physical as well as emotional.

Dr. Brett Diaz explains it plainly: when the body meets trauma, whether mechanical or psychic, the spine coils like a snake around threat. The spine, guardian of the central nervous system and the body’s master control system, tightens. Muscles lock, segments compress, movement restricts. At first, this is brilliant survival: stabilize the vulnerable, limit further damage, preserve the core.

But the nervous system does not always recognize the danger has passed. Weak links become magnets. Each new flare, each emotional hit, returns to the same guarded zones, deepening the coil.

What begins as temporary spasm hardens into structure. Pain stops being a signal and becomes the architecture itself. Scoliosis in extreme cases; chronic tension and restricted breath in most. The body begins living as though danger never left.

Diaz’s dedicated, hands-on work interrupted that protective hold for me just enough for my body to remember neutral. I stopped falling. For a season, steadiness returned. Yet unresolved psychic stress compelled the return of the coiling.

From an anthropological vantage, this mirrors how power consolidates in any system: crisis justifies control, control outlives crisis, rigidity replaces flexibility. The body, like society, pays the long price.

What I only understood later, after the Mexico City room, was the deeper symmetry. There, amid rose petals and incense, the “spiritual surgery” did not oppose Diaz’s logic—it completed it. Where his hands released mechanical coils through structural authority, the changa-assisted body work discharged the same guarded architecture through emotional and energetic release. Trauma rose from sacrum to crown and exited in sobs and breath—not as metaphor, but as palpable unwinding.

Both paths, Western precision and plant-medicine healing, target the same truth: the body reorganizes around protection until protection itself becomes the prison. Release, not reinforcement, restores sovereignty.

What was meant to protect becomes what confines. Healing begins when the guard stands down.

Surrender as a Form of Power

Nothing about the Mexico City “spiritual surgery” resembled a procedure.

No forms. No diagnostic labels. No charts. Language hovered in Spanglish, yet few words were needed.

What existed instead was presence.

Paulo met me not as a case to solve, but as a body already speaking its history. The prehistoric wood floor, scattered with white rose petals that folded softly under bare feet, carried the faint sweetness of copal incense curling through warm air. When I asked to sit cross-legged on velvet cushions on the floor instead of a table, he lowered himself, matching my position without comment. Consent came quietly: a question before each touch, “May I touch you here?” eyes reading my yes or no.

In place of hierarchy, the deepest respect.

I let go. Fully.

With each inhale, the decades-old urge to coil eased. Waves of sensation moved up from sacrum to throat and out in sound, not resisted but allowed. The nervous system that had armored me for survival now registered safety and began to soften.

Trust makes surrender possible. Not trust in diplomas or protocols, but in relational presence: Paolo’s unwavering attention to my comfort, his willingness to follow rather than lead, the shared recognition that my body knew its path. Compassion saturated the room like the incense: palpable, unforced. Healing unfolded as cooperation: his intuition meeting my yield.

This process stands in stark contrast to the Western encounters. In the United States, authority flows downward with experts diagnosing, hands adjusting, instructions prescribing, insurance companies approving or disapproving. Bodies are objects acted upon.

In that Mexico City room, the body led. Paulo responded.

From an anthropological lens, authority reconfigured: not imposed through institutional structures, but generated through relational trust that enables surrender. Consent and compassion opened the channels for uncoiling, as Dr. Diaz described.

Only in choosing to stand the guard down could the coil finally unwind with a power I had never known.

Healing, then, emerges not through domination, but through mutual honor. What if true healing power lies precisely in the act of letting go?

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The Political Body

The body is never separate from the systems that govern life. Bodies are their most intimate, unfiltered expression.

What etches itself into muscle, breath, and nerve mirrors what hardens in institutions, laws, and hierarchies. In crisis, power gathers to protect: the spine coils around threat like emergency decrees clamp down on uncertainty. Control tightens to stabilize. Rules solidify to preserve order.

Yet when the danger recedes and the structures linger—when protective spasm outlives the predator, when temporary measures become enduring policy—suffering turns architectural. Flexibility yields to rigidity. What once guarded life now confines it.

Law, governance, medicine, social order repeat the body’s pattern: protection mutates into domination, and domination breeds chronic consequence. The nervous system, once brilliantly adaptive, now lives as though threat never lifted; the state, likewise, patrols borders long after the invasion has passed.

The lesson etched in an unwinding spine is not merely physiological. It is political.

Healing, in bodies or societies, rarely arrives through greater force or tighter grip. It emerges when authority grows responsive again: when systems release what they once clutched, when relationships of trust supplant coercion, when consent and attunement replace command.

Wherever authority hardens against responsiveness, suffering becomes structural.

Wherever release restores adaptive flow, life reorients toward health.

What if the deepest reform begins not in legislation or intervention, but in the radical act of standing the guard down?

My work focuses on identifying hidden power structures shaping real human outcomes. Information about my analytical intervention is here.

Dr. Brett Diaz, D.C., founder of Scoliosis Treatment Alternatives, brings over thirty-five years of clinical experience to his work as a scoliosis-specific exercise specialist and scoliosis-centered myofascial release expert. He specializes in assisting adults with scoliosis-related pain through a home-based practice of mindful focus and corrective movements that promote lifelong maintenance of a more centered body, mind, and soul.

This essay examines how unresolved trauma embeds somatically, sustaining chronic pain through Western medicine's epistemic limits that deny the body's illegible truths. In a Baja Ayahuasca ceremony, four paradoxical powers converge: shamanic authority that empowers self-healing only by demanding surrender without coercion; epistemic authority that withholds meaning; somatic autonomy that forces recognition when cognition fails; and spiritual amplification that intensifies without mercy. Compassion emerges not as soft sentiment but as the hard-won, amplified outcome of facing stored physiological force and structural gaps—carrying grace and renewed vulnerability. The ceremony serves as a universal mirror, exposing how everyday systems (medicine, family, institutions) conceal power's consequences until the body demands accountability.

The Hidden Power Forces in a Baja Ceremony

In Baja’s vast deserts and shores where primal energy forces surrender to something timeless and indifferent, I did not arrive seeking spectacle or cure. I arrived carrying chronic, disabling back pain that had defied every medical intervention for years, and a lifetime of questions about power: who holds it, how it hides, and what happens when it’s exposed.

What unfolded was not a travelogue of ancient medicines or a romanticized shamanic adventure. Rather a stark encounter with four interlocking forms of power and their inescapable consequences:

• shamanic authority that empowers rather than dominates;

• epistemic authority that decides what counts as “real” suffering;

• the autonomous, willful power of the body itself; and

• the raw, non-benevolent amplification of plant medicines that intensify whatever you carry, compassion included, without offering comfort first

The journey is universal because these power dynamics are not exotic. They operate in clinics, courtrooms, families, and boardrooms. They shape who heals, who is believed, whose pain persists, and whose agency is acknowledged only when the body itself demands recognition.

As an anthropologist, I study power, the abuse of power, and its embedded impact on human lives. My early research plunged into violence, domination, and the structures that sustain them. All those threads—control, escape, belonging, harm—converged one night in Baja under the night sky.

Ayahuasca Calling

In 2021, a Facebook message arrived: an Ayahuasca ceremony in Todos Santos, not far from my La Paz home. Mother Ayahuasca, it seemed, was calling.

In preparation for the ceremony, I spoke at length with Emiliano of the Cantos shaman family hosting the ceremony. Yet chronic back pain threatened to derail everything. “Should I cancel?” I asked myself. My young son, hearing the doubt, became my anchor: “Go, Mom.” I drove toward Todos Santos with every vertebra protesting.

Arrival at the Todos Santos Bed & Breakfast felt otherworldly. Shamaness Celestina, draped in a moonlight-white gown, eyes distant in trance, greeted me softly: “Come with me.” She led me to a green lawn where amber sun met the house.

Twenty-two others arrived punctually. Mostly Baja locals, plus Vivienne, the only other American. The landscape defied expectation: crimson poblano fields, curling Kabocha vines, heavy mango trees. The tropical humidity kissed the skin in cool evening relief against the Baja’s blaze.

Gathered together with other guests on the thick St. Augustine grass, Celestina’s advice to me was almost poetic, urging that if her Spanish proved a barrier, I should simply “feel” her words. And so I did. That night, I learned to feel language, not just listen to it.

Guests pulled sleeping bags and cushions from upscale vehicles—comfortable chariots that quietly dismantled the “rusty Mexican car” cliché. Unprepared for outdoor sleeping, I scavenged my ever-ready Subaru Forester. Baja teaches you never know what the night will demand.

We converged around the growing fire. Silhouettes danced against the dark. I settled on sandy ground, legs folded, heart open, back silently at war with itself, awaiting what would come.

This opening sets the stakes: power is not abstract or distant. It lodges in bodies, in who gets heard, in what counts as legitimate knowledge, in hierarchies that can either contain or release nervous-system safety. The ceremony will not resolve these cleanly; it will amplify them.

The Communion and the Drums

Celestina moved through the fire’s hallowed glow, tending each participant like a shepherdess. Celestina then revealed a glass bottle of dark, mysterious brew, accompanied by porcelain glasses. Every dose was measured like a prescription. This act constituted ritual medicine. My turn came. I lowered onto the footstool before her. She poured. I drank. Every drop resonated with earth’s core.

I returned to my sleeping bag on hard ground, reclined, and gazed upward. Venus, Mars, and a crescent moon executed a silent cosmic waltz. Stardust reminded me of our place in the vast scheme.

Celestina sang, her voice threading the night. Other leaders chanted and rattled. Hand drums thumped in rhythm with distant Pacific waves. Nocturnal insects and frogs intensified their chorus, layering emerging energy. Nature’s symphony grew immediate; the veil between earth and heaven thinned. I tethered both realms.

An hour passed in elongated anticipation. I felt nothing. Doubting the medicine like a child questioning fairy tales, I approached Emiliano. “I feel nothing. My back hurts.” The ceremonial drums grated, each beat invasive, repelling introspection. “I want to leave,” I said, seeking escape.

Emiliano, eyes carrying countless moonlit ceremonies, answered with calm understanding, “Please don’t leave. Ayahuasca onset varies. Everyone reacts differently. Driving now would endanger you.”

His words carried weight. I stayed and accepted a second serving of the earthy, bitter brew. Celestina and Emiliano urged me to stop thinking so much and allow the medicine its course.

I complained again about the drumming. Deep, relentless vibrations reverberated through my body, forcing discord. “The drums are driving me crazy,” I argued. “They overwhelm someone unaccustomed to such rituals.”

I persisted: “You hear the frogs and insects? I want only those sounds, not drums.”

Then, as if he directed the night’s rhythm, the drums ceased. Emiliano smiled softly. “See? Now you hear your frogs and insects.”

Gratitude and relief flooded me. For the first time that night, I truly listened.

The Sound of Beauty

Celestina moved in the firelight’s ambient glow. Each step formed part of a sacred dance that transcended time. She cradled a conch shell from Isla Cerralvo. Rough exterior bore ocean scars; smooth interior guarded deep secrets.

With eyes closed and meditative breath, she pressed lips to the shell’s tip and blew. Sound emerged. Not mere noise, but the ocean’s voice: sighs of forgotten sailors, dreams of separated lovers, a prayer threading past, present, future. Surrender resonated.

Next she lifted a Tibetan singing bowl from the old wooden altar. Its bronzed surface, kissed by time, held ancient etchings. The wooden mallet, smoothed by countless hands, rested beside it. Celestina played. The bowl released echoes of mountain monasteries. Harmony lulled senses, offering sharp contrast to earlier jarring drums.

Nestled in my sleeping bag on firm ground, I watched stars twinkle, swatting occasional mosquito or fly. Still no Ayahuasca influence registered beyond a faint urge to purge.

Resigned to surrounding sounds of retching, I drifted toward sleep. But just as sleep neared, Mother Ayahuasca introduced herself.

Somatic Power Takes Command

Curled in my sleeping bag, senses suddenly electrified.

An ancient, ferocious force erupted within my left hip.

Vibrant geometric patterns—yellow, green, brown—exploded into violent motion, whirling like living fractals trapped beneath skin.

This was no mere pain. It was an independent entity: sentient, raging, desperate for release from its fleshy prison.

Like Venom. Dark, symbiotic, insatiable. It churned as a tornado of pure will, refusing containment, demanding absolute dominion over my attention.

My hip did not ache; it rebelled. A storm with its own life force, sovereign and unyielding.

Face buried deep in the pillow, I sobbed as the violent whirls intensified. Desperation overtook my mind. Primal anguish broke into screams: “¡Ayuda! ¡Ayuda! ¡Ayuda!”

My words poured out like a torrential river unveiling the dark specter of my past. Emiliano listened without interruption, his compassion reservoir-deep, as I peeled layers to reveal the wound. The violation that had stained my body and soul.

Memory arrived through sensation, not a reconstructed story. My ex-husband’s cruel kick to my hip while I carried our son now resurrected its full weight. Skepticism about bodily memory dissolved instantly. My hip held evidence medical systems could not read: chronic pain persisted for years because meaning remained structurally unavailable. Therapies, medications, surgeries addressed symptoms; none granted the explanatory frame the body itself demanded. Epistemic mismatch, not lack of effort, sustained the suffering even 18 years later.

Emiliano’s voice, steeped in ancient wisdom, delivered the core revelation: “Carisa, you have the power to heal yourself.”

My mind wandered into the realm of empathy. A powerful realization washed over me: Only compassion will resolve this pain.

Pondering deepened. I considered my ex-husband’s own childhood abuse: a tormented boy who became a mistreating man. Heartache replaced blame. I wept for him, for myself, for our son. Compassion flooded the wound. Pain dissolved. Innocence reclaimed space. The body, having forced confrontation, now permitted release.

In the stillness of an eternal moment, the fierce hold of pain that once staked a claim inside my back dissolved, revealing an untouched landscape of inner peace, a sanctuary of self, untouched by the heavy chains of violence and the smoldering fires of my lingering rage. I journeyed back through layers of memories, retracing steps lost in the labyrinth of trauma, to rediscover a primordial innocence that had always been mine. It was a homecoming, a reclamation of self from the shadows of an act that had tried to define me. Amidst this deeply human quest for understanding, a profound truth emerged, as timeless as the narratives we weave in search of meaning: Compassion emerged as the balm capable of healing the deepest scars. Not erasing them, but allowing release.

Ayahuasca had not cured; it had amplified everything already stirring within me, trauma’s imprint, unresolved rage, nascent compassion—exposing its power. The medicine delayed, resisted, then overwhelmed, stripping illusions of mastery. It revealed the hip’s sovereignty and, in doing so, exposed vulnerabilities I had armored for years.

Stars glittered overhead, silent witnesses. I drifted into sweet sleep relieved of all pain even as I lay on the hard ground.

Morning Reflections

Dawn transformed the indigo sky to violet. Jupiter silhouetted the crescent moon. Shared glances bound the circle in quiet recognition. We exchanged bananas for cacahuetes as warblers sang overhead.

Abuelo José invited stories. Voices rose softly. Some tentative, others radiant with insight. Participants spoke of visions, purges, and resolved wounds. Compassion surfaced repeatedly: toward self, toward others, toward the unseen forces that had stirred the night.

My own reflections turned inward. The hip’s fierce autonomy lingered as somatic echo: body had acted independently, forcing memory through sensation rather than narrative. Pain’s entity-like willpower had demanded recognition where mind had long failed. Yet compassion, once tentative, now flooded freely.

Shamanic safety held the space. Celestina and Emiliano never overrode distress; they listened, adapted, contained without domination. Hierarchy existed with clear guidance and ceremonial structure, yet consent remained intact. For perhaps the first time, my nervous system registered safety inside authority.

Ancient Remedies and Modern Journeys

The circle closed with deep embraces. Abuela Ana’s hug unleashed unfiltered love. Tears flowed without restraint. Compassion crystallized in that moment: not abstract ideal, but embodied force.

Driving Isabella home through the vast desert, silence settled. She whispered in broken English, “Female Indiana Jones,” a label assigned to me so many times before. Hip pangs returned faintly, yet when I channeled compassion rather than rage, pain subsided.

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Power, Surrender, and Compassion

The night in Baja did not deliver a tidy resolution or a magical erasure of pain. It exposed four interlocking powers and their irreversible consequences—dynamics that operate far beyond any ceremony, in every arena where human suffering meets structures of control.

First, shamanic authority: Celestina and Emiliano held legitimate hierarchy in guiding the ceremony, deciding timing, and shaping the container. Yet that authority never relied on force, fear, or domination. The pivotal moment came with the drums. When I voiced distress, they listened. When I insisted the rhythm overrode my nervous system, they adapted and the drums stopped. Consent remained intact throughout. Consequence: for perhaps the first time in a hierarchical ceremonial space, my body registered safety inside structure rather than threat. That safety enabled disclosure, vulnerability, and eventual release. Power here empowered self-healing precisely because it demanded surrender without coercion.

Second, epistemic power: who gets to define what counts as “real.” For eighteen years, chronic hip pain defied every medical frame—therapies, medications, surgeries treated symptoms but never located meaning. Institutional interventions hold the authority to declare what evidence is legible; my body carried proof that remained illegible to them. Consequence: pain persisted not from lack of effort, but because deeper structural meaning was unidentified. This is an epistemic mismatch, not dismissal. The body continued to hold the truth until a different epistemology granted it voice: somatic and experiential.

Third, somatic power: the body as an autonomous actor. My hip did not wait for permission. It awakened, it came alive in a new manner. Pain behaved as an entity with independent will, churning like a trapped force desperate for release. Memory arrived through raw sensation, not reconstructed narrative. This dynamic between conscious intention and stored physiological force dwarfed the original domestic violence episode in narrative weight. Consequence: when cognition failed to recognize the wound, the body forced recognition. Agency shifted decisively from mind to soma. The body compelled confrontation on its own terms.

Fourth, spiritual power without romanticization: Ayahuasca amplified rather than cured. It delayed for hours, resisted easy entry, then overwhelmed when resistance broke. It offered no comfort first, only intensification of whatever I carried: unresolved rage, trauma’s imprint, and the fragile beginnings of compassion. Consequence: compassion intensified, including its vulnerabilities. Open-heartedness invites pain anew; empathy for my ex-husband’s own tormented origins replaced blame but exposed me to fresh ache (another story for another day). The medicine left integration to daily life. Not a savior, only a mirror.

These dynamics mirror broader human encounters with power. Bodies hold truths illegible to systems. Spiritual forces amplify without mercy. Hierarchies can contain safety or harm. In Baja’s night, revelation arrived through surrender to compassion: raw, non-romantic, profound.

My work focuses on identifying hidden power structures shaping real human outcomes. Information about my analytical intervention is here.

Allan said he loved me. That we were building a lifetime together — that I was the only one. He told me exactly what I needed to hear.…

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Introduction

My pilgrimage to Huautla de Jiménez revealed a community marked by warmth and humility. Mazatecos enthusiastically crossed the street to greet me. They giggled at my Spanish and helped me find my way when Google Maps was disoriented. More than once, someone insisted on paying for my coffee. Fruit vendors charged fair prices. Families opened their doors, welcomed me into their space highlighting their coffee and banana trees, their birds and their flowers. They proudly guided me toward waterfalls, mountains, and caves that shape their daily lives. Their kindness was humble and they shaped my understanding of the Sierra de Oaxaca long before I stepped into a ceremony.

Most visitors arrive in Huautla with a romanticized image of María Sabina — a healer said to possess a direct line to the spirit world through her chants and the sacred Niños Santos. Few understand the life she actually lived. Poverty marked her from childhood to old age, matched only by the violence she endured. Local curanderos punished her for sharing ceremonial knowledge with foreigners, many arriving from the United States. Her house went up in flames. Her animals vanished. Her son died under a machete, his body left on her doorstep. Outsiders promised wealth in exchange for her words, her image, her mushrooms, yet she received nothing and collected firewood for sale until the end of her life.

Despite this history, María Sabina remains framed as one of the great healers of modern times. Niños Santos — ndi xijtho, “the little ones that sprout” — are not treated as simple fungi in Mazatec worldview. They are sentient allies and wisdom-holders (chjota chinej), mediators between humans and the unseen. Healing emerges not from biochemistry alone but from communal dialogue. Ceremonies repair fractures in the spirit, rebalance ancestral lines, and reorient the individual within the social and cosmic order. Even today, scholars praise the Niños Santos impact on neuroplasticity and trauma, yet Mazateco healing practices long understood what Western science only recently began to measure.

I study violence — how people use it to shape power, control, and meaning — so the violence embedded in María Sabina’s life forms a central part of my work here.

The Lie that Led to the Truth

I arrived at the María Sabina Museum, managed by her grandson from the Casimiro family and a woman named Christina, whose ties to the lineage remains unclear to me. The mountaintop compound carries several roles at once: a shrine to Sabina’s memory, a small tienda offering local crafts, and a group of basic dwellings built from unpainted, uninsulated concrete blocks. Rusted metal roofs leaked rain onto the dirt floors. Buckets replaced sinks. Thin mattresses, decades old, served as both beds and chairs. The place revealed a way of life shaped more by endurance than comfort.

As a typical visitor, I took photographs of the museum artifacts, and I asked Christina if I could participate in a ceremony with Niños Santos.

Christina agreed to hold a ceremony for me the following night and immediately asked for 2,500 pesos in advance. She justified the cost by saying she needed to pick fresh mushrooms at dawn so I could drink them as tea during the ceremony. When I hesitated, a teenage boy stepped forward and repeated the same story, urging me to pay so they could begin gathering the mushrooms. Their insistence on “fresh mushrooms” came with a confidence that suggested practice, not spontaneity.

The price surprised me. I could purchase Niños Santos in Mexico City for one-third of that amount. But I had traveled from Phoenix to Mexico City, then to Oaxaca, and another five hours by bus to Huautla with a clear purpose. I came to learn about Niños Santos in their birthplace and with curanderos trained by María Sabina. My time was limited, so I agreed to pay. I had only 2,000 pesos with me and promised to bring the remaining 500 the following night when I returned for the ceremony.

I arrived the following evening with flowers, a candle, and fruit for offerings, as instructed. Darkness covered the mountain, and cold rain fell without pause. Christina guided me along a slippery path with a flashlight to a simple room. No insulation. A damp dirt floor. A toilet outside with no seat. A thin, stained mattress with coils pressing through the fabric. None of this concerned me. I had attended ceremonies in places far more modest. Even so, the high cost of the ceremony lingered in my mind as I stood staring at the bare walls.

Anselmo entered the room and introduced himself. He said they were preparing the tea. I asked to see the mushrooms, since they told me earlier that the harvest happened that morning. Their story fell apart the moment he opened his hand. The mushrooms were completely dry — shriveled, dark, and brittle. I recognized the deceit, and the intention behind it was unmistakable. Even so, I questioned my own judgment and wanted to understand more before reacting. I placed the dried mushrooms in hot water, drank the tea, and ate the pieces with a spoon. They tasted like old portobellos with sandy grit gathered at the bottom of the cup.

I waited forty minutes. Nothing. No sensation, no shift, no trace of a psychedelic effect. Anselmo returned with more dried mushrooms and more hot water. I drank the second cup of tea and ate the additional pieces. Another forty-five minutes passed. Still nothing. Anselmo suggested the problem may be with me. “Did you eat lunch today?” he asked. “No. My stomach is empty,” I said.

Cold moved through the room. Even with three heavy blankets, a sweater, a down jacket, a shawl, and a beanie, I could not stay warm. I told Anselmo I wanted to return to my hotel, and he agreed.

Relief

Two other guests — a Mexican man and a Swiss woman — waited in a separate room. Anselmo brought them to my doorway while we all waited for a taxi in the rain. They told me they had also participated in the ceremony that afternoon and felt no effects at all. Anselmo told all of us: even without any sensation, the medicine was still within our bodies and would still work on a subconscious level.

Anselmo’s explanation did not match the facts. No psilocybin remained in those mushrooms. The mushrooms were dead, dried long ago, and stored without the conditions needed to protect their medicinal properties after the harvest season four months earlier.

Nevertheless, I paid the remaining 500 pesos I owed, as my integrity remains independent of their deceit.

Beneath the Surface

Reverence vs Exploitation

During my time in Huautla, I saw how the global reverence for María Sabina sits beside a long history of extraction. Outsiders praise her chants and her vision, yet her life reveals the opposite story: poverty, loss, betrayal, and violence. Communities often learn to survive by shaping themselves around the expectations of visitors, even when those expectations misrepresent the reality. I walked into that contradiction without realizing it. The reverence that draws visitors also creates new forms of exploitation, both subtle and direct.

Healing vs Harm

The story of Maria Sabina, Ninos Santos, Huautla de Jiménez, promised healing, but the experience delivered harm. Not physical harm, but a quiet emotional and psychological rupture. Healing requires trust, safety, and an honest exchange between people. Harm occurs when trust becomes a tool for control. Anselmo and Christina performed the language of healing while knowingly withholding the very substance of the ceremony. Their actions did not produce altered states, insights, or symbolic meaning. Their actions produced confusion and self-doubt. Harm entered the space in the moment they held the lie steady and expected me to accept it as truth.

Humility vs Audacity

The people of the Sierra de Oaxaca live modestly and their daily humility is shaped by the demands of the land and opportunities. The contrast between that humility and the bold demand for extraordinarily high advance payment created a dissonance I could not ignore. I recognize the poverty. I also recognize the audacity of demanding a high price for an experience they never intended to provide. This tension between local humility and this carefully rehearsed confidence revealed a pattern I later saw repeated: polite exteriors masking a deeper survival strategy.

Sacred Knowledge vs Performed Deception

María Sabina treated Niños Santos with reverence. Each mushroom held profound meaning. Anselmo treated the mushrooms in his hand as a weapon of deceit. The performance of “fresh harvest” replaces the sacred knowledge of proper care and preparation. I knew the mushrooms were long dead, and Anselmo certainly knew it as well. After all, he has been taking mushrooms since age seven. When sacred knowledge becomes a performance for outsiders, deception takes the place of wisdom. The gap between the two becomes a site of violence, not because of the lie itself, but because of what the lie erases: a lineage of meaning.

Healing vs Manipulation

Visitors arrive in Huautla searching for healing, but here healing is manipulated. The story of dawn mushroom hunting, the ceremonial setting, the ritual objects, and the tone of authority were designed to create an illusion of authenticity. When the promised product failed to appear, the manipulation became visible. Healing requires sincerity. Manipulation requires performance. In that room, I faced a performance of healing rather than the presence of it.

Legacy vs Wound

Anselmo claims the legacy of María Sabina, but what I encountered is the lineage wound passed through generations. The violence inflicted on María Sabina by outsiders and by her own community left deep marks on the people who carry her name. When wounds remain unaddressed, they shape new behaviors. The deceit I faced did not emerge from nowhere. It emerged from pain, scarcity, betrayal, and a long history of unmet promises. Legacy becomes wound when the story of power replaces the truth of suffering.

Community Poverty vs Ritual Cost

The economic reality of the community stands in sharp contrast to the ritual cost they demand. Concrete blocks, leaking roofs, dirt floors, and thin mattresses did not trouble me. I have spent time in many places with limited resources. The tension came from the deliberate mismatch between the living conditions and the price of the ceremony. Ritual carries meaning only when the exchange is honest. When the cost rises without purpose, ritual becomes transaction, and the transaction becomes extraction.

Visitor Hope vs Curandero Performance

Visitors often arrive with open hearts and a desire to learn and heal. I arrived that way. I came with offerings, respect, and genuine curiosity. Anselmo responded with a performance shaped for outsiders, not a ceremony rooted in tradition. His apology for the inactive mushrooms and his insistence that the “medicine still works inside you” belonged to the script of a salesperson, not a curandero. Hope met performance, and performance held more power in that moment than sincerity.

Inner Power vs External Authority

In the end, the most important paradox emerged in myself. I had traveled far and placed trust in the authority of a stranger because I believed the experience required his guidance. Yet the deeper truth arrived through the violence, not the ceremony. I paid the final amount I owed because my integrity did not depend on their deceit. That realization revealed a simple truth: no curandero controls access to insight. No lineage grants wisdom on demand. The power I sought in Huautla was already present within me. I did not need a charlatan, a ritual, or a title to recognize what I already carried.

The Lesson: Stop Handing Your Power to Charlatans

No curandero, healer, guide, lineage, or tradition controls access to truth. Insight does not arrive through a title or a ceremony. Insight arrives when a person recognizes the power already present within them. My experience in Huautla taught me that no performance of authority can replace that inner knowledge.

Violence often teaches through disguise. It hides in tradition, in sacred language, and in rehearsed stories that promise healing but deliver confusion. Once a person understands these patterns, the world looks different. They begin to see how power operates through expectation, performance, and the desire to belong. They stop accepting claims of spiritual authority without evidence. They stop mistaking charisma for wisdom.

Many people believe that wisdom must come from someone older, someone ordained by a lineage, someone standing on a mountaintop with ritual objects. That belief creates vulnerability. It encourages people to hand trust, money, and emotional safety to strangers who may not carry the integrity they claim. Tradition can hold truth, but tradition can also hold wounds. Lineage can carry insight, but lineage can also carry trauma. A revered name does not guarantee a refined moral compass.

My experience with Anselmo and Christina made this clear. Their actions revealed a simple truth: a person does not need a healer to authorize their growth. A person does not need a guide to validate their intuition. A person does not need a ritual to unlock their strength. Wisdom emerges from awareness, discernment, and a refusal to surrender one’s judgment to any external authority.

Do not outsource your power. Do not give your clarity to those who perform healing without practicing it. Do not suspend your intelligence in the presence of a title, a lineage, or a story designed to impress a visitor.

Everything you seek from a healer already lives within you. The work begins when you trust the truth you carry, not the performance offered to you by a stranger.

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Response from Mazateco Woman

Translated from Spanish.

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My work focuses on identifying hidden power structures shaping real human outcomes. Information about my analytical intervention is here.

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Why this, why now

This publication exists because power shapes outcomes long before those outcomes are identified, named, explained, or understood.

Across relationships, institutions, medicine, law, and culture, power and control is often exercised in ways that remain difficult to identify.

The consequences surface later, detached from their source, and individuals are left to absorb the cost.

This space is a response to the persistent gap between experience and explanation.

What kind of space this will be

Power & Consequence is a space for careful analysis, not commentary or performance. The work here examines how power operates in specific contexts and how its effects register in human lives and systems. Written for readers who value clarity over reassurance and understanding over opinion.

What to expect

Essays will draw on anthropological fieldwork and cross-cultural research, including medicine and healing, legal concepts, institutional practices, and contemporary culture.

While domains shift, the unifying method remains the same: identifying power, tracing consequence, and refusing to simplify complex impact.

My work focuses on identifying hidden power structures shaping real human outcomes — medically, spiritually, economically, legally — in business and deeply personal lives.