Discernment
The people who do this work well are found by referral, and almost never by advertisement.
How to find someone
A facilitator who is good at this fills a ceremony by referral. Somebody who sat with them sends a friend, and that friend sends another.
So ask. If you know people who work with these plants, ask who they sat with, whether it was a good experience, and what happened. Ask more than one, and ask somebody whose judgment you would trust about anything else.
Our founder worked as an attorney for years, at one of the largest firms in Los Angeles, and never advertised once. Everybody inside that profession knew what the billboards on the highway meant.
“Why does the guy on the street with the billboard have to have a billboard? Because every person that hired them had a terrible experience and nobody would refer their friend.”
Hamid Jabbar
An advertisement tells you that somebody bought an advertisement.
Before you book
Once you have a name, talk to the person. Not an intake form: a conversation, where you can hear how they answer.
Say what you actually need. Somebody who knows they will want a person beside them if something intense surfaces should say so first, because a facilitator holding forty people cannot promise that. It is better said on a call than found out on the day.
A good one will tell you plainly whether they can meet you there. Somebody who agrees to everything asked of them has not thought about it.
Then ask how they respond when a day goes badly. Difficult things happen in this work and anybody who has done it long enough knows it. What a facilitator does next tells you more than any amount of biography.
What to look for
A facilitator has to understand boundaries and hold them. That is the floor of this work rather than a feature of it, and it is never weighed against how gifted somebody is.
Look for somebody who is the same person inside ceremony and outside it. Appearance is not the practice, and devotion shows in how somebody lives rather than in what they wear for the occasion.
Years served matter less than the people who will vouch for somebody. Two hundred people who say this is the one to go to is worth more than two decades on its own.
What a good one does
People become very impressionable while the medicine is working. Anything said to them then lands deeper than it would otherwise, and somebody else’s reading of what they saw can take years to unpick.
The people who do this best say very little, and ask before they say it. Miguel Mendiburu will often say nothing at all, and when he does answer he asks first whether an answer is wanted.
The other half of it is where a facilitator points. Somebody worth staying with points at the plant and at the land.
“I hear people all the time talking about their curandero, their maestro and how powerful his medicine is. And it’s like, you’ve just given up all your power to this person.”
Hamid Jabbar
After you find someone
A man is told to dig a well. He digs ten feet, finds no water, moves along and digs another ten, and then another, until the field is full of shallow holes and none of them has water in it.
When you find somebody who feels safe, who holds a good space and who is straight with you about what they can offer, stay with them for a while. Depth comes from returning.
Sometimes a facilitator is the problem. Anybody who feels unsafe, pressured or badly handled should leave, and does not owe the person the benefit of the doubt first.
Something else can happen too, and the two are worth being able to tell apart. Going deeper brings difficult things up, and they can arrive feeling as though the person holding the space caused them. Sometimes that is what happened and sometimes it is not, and it is easier to work out with somebody whose judgment you trust outside the room.
Written down
We have put what we look for into a draft set of ethics, and we would like it argued with.
