No More Pedestals: On Shamanic Apprenticeship, Initiation, and Becoming Your Own Authority

The first time I heard her voice, it was low and steady, carrying the kind of authority that made the air still. Then came the soft shu-shoo-shu-shoo of her rattle, the sound that meant our work had begun. Each session opened that way, the rhythm drawing me inward until the room itself became electric. Week after week I sat in my living room in Pennsylvania while she worked from hundreds of miles away, her voice sure, the rattle keeping time. For every problem I brought to session, I believed she could name its cause and cure.

When I first found her, in 2015, my world had cracked open. After attending a ceremony earlier in the year, ayahuasca had blasted my heart wide, flooding me with light, bliss, and a sense of at-oneness-with-everything. Spiritual euphoria and a profound hunger for understanding the fabric of reality itself lasted for months. But I was too open. My body felt like an antenna, picking up everything, from collective rage to astral noise, and memories that weren’t mine. My clairsentience (a psychic ability that means clear feeling) had awakened without boundaries, and I didn’t yet know how to turn down the volume or avoid absorbing what I felt. And then brilliance faded into disorientation as my dark night of the soul followed what mystics refer to as that initial illumination or spiritual honeymoon period. I needed someone who knew the terrain of awakening and collapse, who could help me find my footing inside a body that suddenly felt wired to the whole world.

An acquaintance told me about a shamanic guide and said she was “the real deal.” From our first session, I believed it. Practicing mostly the Andean healing arts, she would journey to the upper, middle, or underworld and return with healed soul parts that had splintered during moments when life knocked me off-center. Sometimes she returned with a symbolic gift or an animal ally and blew their essence into my energy field. Even through the phone, I could feel palpable shifts as despair turned to hope and pain to personal power. I was captivated by what I perceived as her magical abilities.

I took notes as fast as I could throughout each teaching session, documenting her guidance like it was gospel. When she assigned me rituals, I followed them step by step—making offerings, lighting candles, drawing sami, or highly refined energy, through my poq’po, or luminous energy body. I pulsed like a lighthouse in the dark, glowing steadily from within. Each time she told me to find a new khuya, or medicine stone, for my mesa, I’d rush out the same day, heart pounding like I was earning a gold star from the Divine.

And truthfully, I was always trying to make her proud. The approval of someone I admired that much felt like a first-place trophy. The possibility of disapproval felt like exile.

She seemed to know everything, like how to move through the world with ease and how to bridge the spiritual and the practical. I wanted that same assurance. I mistook imitation for mastery; I didn’t yet understand that my path was water, not air. Compared to me, she was wind—fast, intellectual, and precise. I’m deep waters and high tides—sensitive and emotional.  

In the early days, I held healthy skepticism regarding whether the soul retrievals and energy work she’d guide me through were even real or could help me. But I was transforming so remarkably that the people I knew couldn’t help but compliment my newfound steadiness, confidence, and faith. But sometimes she shifted into a practical tone, almost coach-like, and it jarred me. Like many people in the thick of awakening, I’d lost interest in the music, films, hobbies, and even friendships that once defined me. When I told her that the loneliness of those years felt like pressure building at my crown, she urged me to get out there, meet new people, “create the life you want.” I wanted to say, I’ve tried. Something inside me says this isn’t the time. But I still saw her as my spiritual authority, so I followed her advice, hoping she’d see me as a good student.

I was invited by my own inner guidance into deeper stillness and patience. My isolation was a necessary season of shedding and renewal. Those ten years alone were an initiation. I wasn’t meant to fill the silence; I was meant to learn to listen to it, to find companionship in creeks and constellations, and to let the wind and rivers become my friends. She didn’t understand that then. She wanted me to fix the problem of loneliness—not descend into its wisdom.

Still, she taught me miracles. She taught me how to move my awareness from particle to wave, from the fixed world of form into the zero point, where everything is pure potential. “Work with the waves,” she’d say, “create by shifting your perception. Anything is possible.”

And it worked. She taught me to heal my body through autoimmune illness the way she’d healed herself from paralysis. Once, she tasked me with meeting the mountain that had been my nature father since birth and bringing him an offering.

“But how will I do that if I can barely walk up my own street?” I asked. She told me to pray the night before, to ask Mother Earth, the Winds, the Sun, the Moon, the Waters, my nature mother, and Spirit itself for help—and not to let doubt enter.

The next day I drove an hour and a half, passing two billboards that said BELIEVE. And somehow Journey’s Don’t Stop Believin’ appeared in a personalized Spotify mix of jazz ballads. I carried my haywarisqa, or sacred offering, and hiked for the first time in years. Just 1,375 feet above sea level felt like Everest to feet that hadn’t traversed more than a few hundred yards in five years. I sat with my back against a tree and wept. I’d thought I’d never climb even a small hill again, yet there I was. That night I drove home elated, so full of energy I cleaned the entire house.

She showed me how to track—not just a client’s words or posture like I’d learned in somatic psychotherapy trainings—but their soul. To feel, in my own body, the emotions they were avoiding. To sense what the soul was trying to say beneath the noise of personal crisis.

She taught me to stop rescuing, to stop seeing myself as the victim, the fixer, or the one who must atone to my inner critic. She showed me that any story can shift when energy does—that gratitude is alchemy, and miracles are found not only in the mundane but are simply energy allowed to move. She taught me to look for possibility inside hardship instead of collapsing into despair or resentment. And most importantly, she encouraged me to take everything less seriously—especially my spirituality. The Q’ero in the Andes emphasize pukllay, or sacred play, the medicine of joy. “Watch some funny movies,” she’d say, “take a trip, buy a giant pink ball and bounce it.” I learned that Spirit loves to laugh—through each of us.

For years it felt enchanted.

But over time, cracks appeared in the altar I’d built for her. She began to disappear, canceling sessions for health issues or family emergencies followed by long silences that sometimes stretched into months. There were no updates, but I’d find out later she was working with my friend, or someone I’d referred. I tried to understand and be patient, but the absences reopened an old wound of abandonment I thought I’d healed. When she finally resurfaced, I’d forgive her instantly, too eager to reconnect.

By 2022, I encountered my own crisis. My cat was dying, rent rising, pipes leaking, my body seizing in pain as I detoxed from stage four Lyme disease. I needed compassion. Instead, she grew sharp. “If the shit’s hitting the fan,” she said, “you need to look at why”—as if every difficulty was evidence I’d failed to master my energy.

Years later, I felt the current turn twice more. Her impatience hit me like static. I tried to tell her that I was burned out, that I was listening to inner guidance asking me to rest—that I needed to stop forcing flight and let myself, like Hummingbird riding on the back of Condor, as told in the Andean cosmovision, be carried for a while toward what I’d been working for. But she pressed harder, coaching me to push through, create another workshop, “focus on what you can do.” When I disagreed, something in the space shifted—like two frequencies clashing. I sensed her own fatigue beneath the insistence, her fear of slowing down reflected in her frustration with me. My exhaustion seemed to mirror what she couldn’t yet face in herself.

It was the same session where I realized: my intuition was now as strong as hers. I could see her patterns: her fear of collapse, her own exhaustion, mirrored in her frustration with me. My falling apart scared her, because she wasn’t ready to let her own life unravel.

I never scheduled another session.

After ten years of apprenticeship, I simply walked away without even a goodbye.

For weeks, I cried. I cry easily; it’s my second language. I think she was burned out too, and my tears rubbed against her frayed edges. We used to laugh before every session, sharing inside jokes and lightness before the descent. I still miss that. I miss feeling like someone had my back. But I learned something important: no one can hold me better than I can. And no one knows me the way I do.

The sadness came in waves. Some days I accepted that she’d never consider me again. Other days I imagined, or perhaps hoped, that she’d apologize. The truth is that she held the frame she knew how to hold. I wanted more than that frame could give.

It’s hard to explain the kind of grief that follows when a relationship like that ends. To be a student, or a client, of a healer is to be seen in a way few people ever see you. You hand them your tenderest places and they meet them with acceptance. That kind of witnessing can feel like salvation. You believe they see something luminous in you that no one else can reach, and as long as they’re in your life, there’s hope. They become the key you keep reaching for when you feel lost. We often mistake the intensity of that bond for love, but it isn’t the kind that grows between equals; it’s the ache of being seen and wanting to stay seen forever. At some point, seeing yourself, truly seeing yourself, must suffice.

But I learned in my therapy training that this connection is also one-sided. I only knew her in one dimension—the hour she chose to show me. I saw her light, her skill, her best self. She once told me she “gets out of the way and lets Spirit move through” during sessions, which means maybe I never knew her at all. Over time, as my own inner sight sharpened, I began to see more clearly her light and her shadow, her humanness. And that was the heartbreak: realizing that the person you once saw as the doorway to healing is human too, capable of irritation, fatigue, even projection. The pedestal starts to give way, and something inside you does too.

The day I cut cords with her, I sat cross-legged in my living room, candles flickering. It was the same ritual she’d taught me to release others. I couldn’t believe I was using it on her since I’d assumed I’d be her student for life. I thanked her for everything she’d given me: the teachings, the healings, the years of initiation. I kept the gold, released the dross, and felt the air shift. It was my graduation day from gazing upward rather than inward for wisdom, from placing anyone upon pedestals.

That night I wrote: Every teacher is a doorway, not a destination. Some doorways are warm with welcome. Some are shaped like a test you didn’t know you were taking. All of them lead you back to yourself if you keep walking.

It was a freeing and terrifying thing to admit. I let the confession float in the candlelight and thought about all the times I’d been the one holding space for others, the one people handed their hearts to and said, Please be gentle. I remembered days when I was sturdy and days when I was threadbare. We are all both, woven and coming apart.

At some point, I took a deep breath and felt my ribcage widen around a new realization: it was never her approval I needed; it was my own trust in myself. I am ready to stand in circles where power isn’t granted from above but rises from within, where sensitivity is honored as strength, and where I no longer wait for anyone to confirm what I already know.

I wish I could tell you I never reach for approval anymore. Please. I still sometimes want a gold star. It’s just that now I recognize when that longing is arising. I can feel the small hand of me tugging on the sleeve of the adult me, asking, Do I matter? And I scoop her up—awkwardly, because she’s made of feelings and opinions—and whisper, More than stars, love. You matter more than stars.

The next time I held my online healing circle, I almost canceled. My heart still felt tender and my faith still bruised. But as I sat before the screen where faces appeared one by one, I felt the familiar soothing sweetness of Spirit weaving us together. I took a breath, opened sacred space, and let the energy move the way it wanted to. I wasn’t trying to earn anything. I was simply there.

When a woman lingered afterward and said, “I don’t know what you did, but I feel like I can breathe again,” I smiled. “Me too,” I said.

If I saw my former teacher at a café tomorrow, I would say hello. I’d thank her for what she offered, the doorway she opened—even if she couldn’t walk through it with me. I’d thank myself for what I kept searching for, the courage to keep walking. Then I’d lift my coffee, heavy with cream and cinnamon swirling, and step outside into the Sun that has always seen me as one of His own—Solarita, he called me in a dream. In the Andes they call us Children of the Sun. Even though I’m a North American woman in this lifetime, I think He’s proud of me. I think He’s proud of me. And I think my nature father is too.

When I made that offering years ago, I remember descending the trail alone, breathless but determined, in search of my parked car. A man’s voice echoed through the trees: “You’re quite the trailblazer!” I turned, but no one was there. In that instant, I saw him—my mountain father—showing me how to wield a sword. I didn’t understand the vision then, but I do now. He was reminding me that my path was never meant to follow anyone else’s footsteps. It was mine to clear and mine to walk.

In that acknowledgment, I feel held by something vast and familiar woven through and around me. It’s quiet, alive, and enduring. It has no name, no edge, and no condition to its care. It’s the same current that once spoke through her, and through me, and through the wind. It still breathes here silently, like the spirit of a forest on the longest night.

This, I think, is what it means to be your own teacher: to trust the wisdom that’s already in your bones, to listen when it stirs, to let it guide your hands and your days.

And maybe this is what love truly is, seeing myself as the Sun and my nature father see me: brilliant, whole, and already enough.