The Big Misconception in Western Medicine (and Spiritual) Circles
In our wish to make spiritual and medicinal practices available, relatable, and understandable for the “normal Western person,” we often make a huge mistake: we disconnect the practices and the medicines from their original foundation — from the very ground they stand on.
Cacao becomes a coffee substitute instead of a sacred plant spirit honored in ceremony with prayers and community.
Yoga becomes just physical exercise.
Meditation becomes a personal performance project.
All these practices are part of a bigger symphony. This is true for plant medicines like Cacao, Kambo, or Ayahuasca etc. — and also for practices like meditation or yoga asanas (the physical postures of yoga).
The symphony comes with archetypal energies, gods and goddesses, spirits of the trees, and ethical ideas about how to live in right relation with the world — and always something about community.
But when, in the West, we think these parts — the spirits, the ethics, the sense of the sacred — are too much, too strange, too “woo-woo,” we take them out.
“Let’s just focus on the mindfulness, the yoga poses, the cacao drink.”
And when we do that, we lose the grounding of the symphony itself.
Without that grounding, the practice becomes less potent. It also easily falls back into an egocentric, individualistic idea of me, me, me — which is actually the opposite of what these practices were created for.
These practices are imo about connection, relation, and sacredness. About your relationship to the divine — within and around you.
They’re not meant to be a personal development project for the ego. Of course, individual growth and healing happens — but I see those as beautiful byproducts of a sacred practice, not the main goal.
When we disconnect a practice from its roots, we might even end up blaming the medicine or the practice itself for being less potent, for being dangerous, or for “not working.”
Another byproduct of a disconnected practice is that it stays disconnected.
It is not lived, embodied and woven into life - but happens as a pause between life.
It becomes hard to hold on to a consistant meditation practice because it is not connected to anything, grounded in anything in your life.
The deep experience in a Cacao ceremony never becomes integrated because as soon as you leave the yoga studio, you rush on.
It’s Not About Shame
What I’m talking about is not about shaming “the evil Western capitalists capitalizing on indigenous culture.” or “people are lazy and don’t want depth”. On the contrary:
What I see more often are people with good hearts and good intentions — people who have been deeply touched by these practices and want to share them to help others.
When they bring these practices home, they need to find a way to translate them into a new context. And that translation is necessary — it simply is different to live in the jungle of Peru than in the middle of Copenhagen.
Different ways of living. Different cultural stories. Different cosmologies and worldviews.
We have spent years of translating, embodying and reclaiming our own way, through what we have learned out in the world. That is also how the student journeys to becomes the master. That journey is beautiful and needed and normal.
However — if we forget the foundation of these practices in this translation, we risk both capitalizing on and misunderstanding sacred traditions. Where, again, Cacao becomes just a coffee substitute instead of a sacred plant spirit honored in ceremony.
What Is Often Forgotten in the Western Translation
From our experience of living in the Peruvian jungle and studying with Cacao through Middle America (and very similarly from studying yoga in India), here’s what we see as the grounding that often gets lost:
Something about Spirit — about the energy behind it all, whether we call it Source, God/Goddess, or archetypal energies.
Something relational — connection to yourself, to others, to nature, to the world around you.
Community, community, community — not an individualistic self-development project.
Something about giving back — to nature, to others, to the plant spirits, to the spirits of the land.
Something about ethics — karma, right relationship, how we are in the world.
I’m not saying you have to buy into a whole cosmology to drink Cacao. But there is a cosmology behind it — one that has been practiced and refined for thousands of years. Maybe they know something. Maybe there’s a reason for the way they do it. Maybe we can learn something from that… and not only from the physical drink.
My Invitation
Bring something in about Spirit.
Bring something in about Nature.
Bring something in that is community-oriented.
Give something back — to the land your medicine comes from, or to nature where you are.
(One simple example: through mightytree.dk, we donate each month to the Danish Nature Preservation Foundation — Danmarks Naturfredningsforening. We give gifts and prayers to the land we have ceremony on. We ask participants to bring gifts to the land when they come.)Learn from the indigenous traditions where your practice comes from.
And maybe most importantly: learn from the nature where you are, right now.
How can you realign with the wisdom and sacred connection that exists right outside your own doorstep?
To me, that is also a way to honor all the other points.
All of this is said with responsibility — not shame.
Not to make anybody wrong, but to bring light to where we tend to fall, and where we can help each other rise again. Let’s hold each other accountable – not through shame and wrong-making – but through kindness and inquiry.
With love,
Eva Maria