The Dark Truth of False Light Plant Medicine and Should YOU Sit With it?!

Blog | Monday 25 May 2026 | Trysted Soul

Read this before you book your first ceremony.

There's a version of this conversation the plant medicine world doesn't want to have.

The version where everyone gets healed. Where the shaman is always pure. Where the medicine is always benevolent. Where every person who emerges from a ceremony is wiser, softer, more whole.

That version sells retreats.

The truth doesn't.

The truth is that plant medicine is one of the most powerful technologies for human transformation on this planet. It's also one of the most exploited, distorted, and dangerously misunderstood. And the difference between a ceremony that genuinely heals you and one that leaves you fragmented, inflated, or worse isn't the medicine.

It's everything around it.

This is the part nobody tells you before you swipe to pay your deposit.

The October that never happened.

In 2020, I was supposed to drink ayahuasca for the first time.

I'd spent the better part of a year being called toward it. A podcast here. A conversation there. A woman I'd never met who lived in a village I'd never visited running retreats in Spain. Synchronicities thick enough you couldn't blame them on coincidence.

I'd booked the retreat. I'd paid the deposit. The date was set for the first of October, my 38th birthday, on a full moon.

Then COVID hit.

The Colombian shamans couldn't travel. The retreat couldn't run. Everything I'd built toward in my head collapsed in a single email.

And looking back now, six years on, I see that email as one of the most important prayers I never knew I was praying. Because what I got instead, in October 2020, was Wachuma in Malaga, Spain. My first real ceremony. The grandfather medicine, not the grandmother. A different teacher entirely. One I needed first.

I didn't know that at the time. I thought I was settling. I was actually being protected.

That's the first thing you need to understand about plant medicine.

The medicine you think you need is rarely the medicine you actually need. And the people who tell you they can guarantee the experience you're after are the first people you should walk away from.

What the calling-in voices don't tell you.

If you spend any time in the plant medicine world online, you'll hear a particular kind of voice. Warm. Lit from within. Speaking about the medicine as though she were a beloved aunt who only wants the best for you. "Grandmother Ayahuasca." "Grandfather Wachuma." Soft language. Soft music. Soft edges.

I don't disagree with that voice. I've been that voice. The medicines ARE intelligent. They ARE feminine and masculine. They DO carry their own consciousness. There's a 5000-year-old archaeological record showing indigenous communities working with these plants before any of us had words for what we now call psychology.

That voice is true.

It's just not the whole truth.

The whole truth is that for every genuine healer holding the line of a 5000-year-old lineage, there are now 10,000 people running retreats who shouldn't be anywhere near a ceremony space. Some are outright charlatans, drawn to the money and the spiritual authority. Some are demons masquerading as angels, energetic entities that have learned to wear the costume of light and feed off the dysregulated nervous systems of unprepared sitters. Some, and this is the hardest one to hold, are good people. People who've had genuine, life-changing experiences themselves, who want that same liberation for everyone they meet, but who haven't done their 10,000 hours. Who haven't integrated. Who haven't embodied. Who are running ceremonies on the strength of their own awakening rather than the strength of a lineage.

That last one is the most dangerous, because it's the one wrapped in love.

The white woman in Bali calling herself a Lemurian priestess delivering Kundalini activations between yoga classes is the same archetype I'm pointing at here. I'll write about that BS separately, because trust me for 4+ years i helped others heal from that dangerous shit. For now, just know that the spiritual marketplace is saturated with this kind of figure, and most of them have no idea they're causing harm. They believe they're helping.

The harm is real anyway.

This is what I mean by false light.

• False light is the spiritual charlatan.

• False light is the entity wearing the angel's robe.

• False light is the well-intentioned facilitator who hasn't done the work to hold the energy they're calling in.

• False light is the lineage diluted into a workshop. The medicine sold without the prayer. The ceremony stripped of the prayer-makers.

And here's the part that breaks people's hearts. Even within authentic indigenous lineages, this is not a binary. Many indigenous shamans work with both white AND black magic. Both are real. Both are present in the medicine traditions. Discernment is not optional. Discernment is the entire game.

Which brings me to the foundation underneath all of this.

The discernment you don't have yet.

You cannot discern from a dysregulated nervous system.

Read that twice.

When your nervous system is dysregulated, your body cannot tell the difference between a safe person and a dangerous one. Between a healer and a wound-feeder. Between the medicine and the marketing. You'll feel pulled toward people you should run from, because the chaos in their field matches the chaos in yours, and your system reads that match as familiarity. Familiarity reads as safety. It is not safety. It is recognition.

This is why nervous system regulation is the foundation of all healing work. Not the supplement. Not the extra. The foundation.

Sit with that for a second, because the entire plant medicine industry has been built on the opposite premise. The premise that the medicine will do the work. That you can arrive dysregulated, drink the brew, and be handed your healing on a silver tray within a four-day retreat.

That's the lie.

The medicine reveals. The medicine amplifies. The medicine shows you what's there. It does not, on its own, regulate a nervous system that has spent forty years in fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. That regulation is the work you do in the months and years AROUND the ceremony. Without it, you walk into a ceremony space with no internal compass. And in a ceremony space without an internal compass, false light wins. Every time.

So the question isn't "should I sit with plant medicine?"

The question is, am I ready to discern what I'm sitting with?

Two stories running in parallel.

Let me show you what this looks like in practice.

Story one. A man hears about ayahuasca. He's in pain. He's tried therapy. He's tried antidepressants. He's tried meditation apps. Nothing has touched the core of what he's carrying. A friend tells him about a retreat in Costa Rica. The website has palm trees and beautiful Brazilian-style mala beads. The facilitator is a Western woman with a soft voice and a thousand followers on Instagram. She uses the word "Mother" a lot. He books. He flies in. He drinks the medicine. He has visions. He cries. He laughs. He leaves the retreat convinced he's been healed. Three weeks later he's back in the pain, but now he has a vocabulary for it that makes him sound enlightened. Six months later he's running his own retreats. He's read three books. He's done his own healing. He wants to give that to others. He starts the cycle again, on the next round of people, dysregulated himself, holding space he is not equipped to hold.

This is the pattern. It's everywhere. It looks like the medicine working. It is actually false light propagating itself through the spiritual marketplace, one well-meaning, under-integrated facilitator at a time.

Story two. A man hears about ayahuasca. He's in pain. He spends a year preparing. He works on his nervous system. He gets a therapist. He starts doing breathwork daily. He sits in cold water. He gets curious about why he's been running. He doesn't book the first retreat that comes up. He waits. He asks questions about lineage, about the shaman, about what happens AFTER the retreat. He notices which facilitators talk only about the experience and which talk about the integration. He waits some more. The right retreat, with the right people, holding the right lineage, finds him when he's ready. He sits. The medicine does its work because the foundation underneath it can hold the revelation. He comes home and the months after the ceremony are harder than the ceremony itself, because now he has to live what he saw. He does. He doesn't run a retreat the next year. He doesn't post a vision quest selfie. He goes quiet. He integrates. Five years later you'd never know he sat, except his life is unrecognisable.

This is the rare one.

This is what the medicine was given for.

What I actually know.

I want to be honest with you about what I'm qualified to say here, and what I'm not.

I've never drunk ayahuasca. I've never done DMT. I've never taken mushrooms or acid. I've never been to Colombia or the jungles of Brazil.

The list of plant medicines I've actually sat with is short - Cacao, Rapé, Mambe, Ambil, Wachuma, Tobacco and Bufo 5-MeO-DMT

I have always been drawn to Cacao and as such became qualified in administering Cacao and holding my own ceremonies during my time in Bali. I have also drank sacred tobacco twice and Bufo 5-MeO-DMT once (although i think my fear and lack of surrender blocked this)

My 1st real plant medicine experience came in Malaga, Spain, in October 2020, when I was introduced to Rapé, Mambe, Ambil and Wachuma in the 5 day ceremony that came in when ayahuasca couldn't (a prayer answered)

Earlier this year, more than 5 years later I drank Wachuma for the 2nd time on New Year's Eve 2025 in Urubamba, Sacred Valley, Peru, with Samantha and her teachers. And then Grandfather Wachuma again on Saturday the 9th of May this year, in Pisac, Sacred Valley, with my friend Janet. That's 3 ceremonies. 3 relationships really with 1 medicine, over 6 years.

What I'm telling you in this blog comes mainly from those 3 ceremonies, years of working with people who've sat with everything under the sun, watching the spiritual marketplace and from the trauma work I do every day with clients who arrive in my container after a plant medicine experience that broke them more than it healed them.

I'm not telling you not to sit.

I am however telling you to slow down!

I'm telling you that the people most aggressively marketing their retreats are usually the people you should trust least. I'm telling you that the facilitators most worth sitting with are usually the hardest to find, because they're not in the business of selling. I'm telling you that the medicine you think is calling you might be the medicine, and might also be your wound dressed up as a calling. The work of telling the difference is YOUR work. Not the facilitator's. Not the shaman's. Not the medicine's. Yours.

And the only way to do that work is to regulate your nervous system first.

Samantha's mentorship in this.

The clearest mirror I've had for this work is my partner Samantha.

She has gone deeper into her own ceremony journey than I have and to be honest many of the so called "teachers". She is solo-journeying with the medicines that have called her so she can truly connect, embody and then authentically guide others. She administered Rapé to me on the beach in Lagos, Algarve, Portugal when my furbaby boy Henke died. She holds a relationship with the medicines that I am in the foothills of and to be honest never think I will venture further in, at least from a teaching perspective.

What I have learned watching her is that the people who go furthest with these plants are the people who treat them with the most reverence and the least urgency. She does not chase ceremony. She does not collect experiences. She sits when she is called to sit, with people whose lineage she has personally verified and she spends the months in between in deep relationship with the work that the previous ceremony asked of her.

That's the pattern. Reverence. Lineage. Integration. Patience.

If your facilitator does not embody those 4 things, find another facilitator.

A readiness checklist for anyone considering sitting.

Before you book anything, sit with these.

1. Is my nervous system regulated enough that I can tell the difference between an intuitive yes and a trauma-pull?

2. Have I done at least 6 to 12 months of consistent foundational work on my body - breathwork, somatic therapy, cold exposure, daily practice - before considering plant medicine?

3. Do I know the lineage of the facilitator? Who taught them? Who taught the person who taught them? Can I trace it back to an indigenous source?

4. Is the facilitator themselves visibly integrated? Are their relationships healthy? Their finances stable? Their body grounded? Or are they running on charisma and a website?

5. What happens after the ceremony? Is there an integration container? Is there a community? Or do they wave you off at the airport and DM you about the next retreat 6 months later?

6. Am I sitting because something genuine in me is calling, or am I sitting because I want a shortcut?

7. If the medicine showed me something I could not unsee, do I have the support around me to integrate it for the rest of my life?

If you can't answer all seven with clarity, you're not ready.

That's not a failure. That's information.

Get ready first. The medicine will still be here.

Three truths to leave you with.

One. The medicine is real. The shadow around the medicine is also real. Both are true. Holding and integrating both is the work.

Two. False light is more dangerous than darkness, because it wears the costume of the thing you trust. The charlatan in the priestess robes. The demon in the angel's wings. The under-integrated facilitator with the genuine smile. Learn to feel the difference in your body. That's nervous system work. That's not optional. Remember the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist - he is lucifer the fallen angel!! He doesn't appear dressed in red, wearing horns and donning a pitch fork - quite the opposite. Only those with a regulated nervous system and integrated their own shadows will clearly see this and powerfully protect themselves. P.S. Archangel Michael has helped me here no end!

Three. You don't need plant medicine to heal. You really don't. Plant medicine is one path among many and for some people it's the right path, and for many people it's not. The people who tell you it's the only way are selling you something. The people who tell you it's never the way are also selling you something. The truth is more boring and more beautiful. You heal at the pace your nervous system can hold. The tools that get you there are the tools you can actually integrate. For some people that includes plant medicine. For most people it doesn't, or at least not yet.

The question isn't whether to sit.

The question is whether you're ready to discern what you're sitting with.

And the only honest answer to that question lives in your body, energy field and soul not in this blog, not in any podcast and certainly not in any retreat brochure. Your body IS the way; which is why we work there first and always.

Where to start.

If this blog has stirred something in you, if you've recognised yourself in story one and you want to make sure your next ceremony isn't another round of false light, the work starts before the medicine. It starts in your nervous system. It starts in your shadow. It starts in the rejection patterns you've been carrying since you were small.

This Friday the 29th of May, I'm running "Healing His Rejection", a live workshop for men and women ready to heal the Father Wound that makes any deeper journey, plant medicine or otherwise, actually safe.

It's where this work begins.

Register for Healing His Rejection here.

If you're not ready for that, that's fine, you can read this blog again, sit with the readiness checklist and talk, more so listen, to your body.

The medicine isn't going anywhere.

The necessary discernment, though, you can start building that today.

Mark Reid is the founder of Trysted Soul, a trauma healing and transformational ecosystem for men, women, and practitioners ready to do the foundational nervous system and shadow work that makes every other healing path possible. He is currently based in the Sacred Valley of Peru with his fiancee Saman