No Teachers, No Rockstars, No Shamans

Why spiritual authority becomes dangerous, and why healing must belong to community, not a single charismatic teacher.

Dear Readers,

I wrote this because I could simply no longer stay silent. I have heard countless heartbreaking stories of abuse recently between “healers” and women in my community and beyond, and it was weighing on my heart. I hope these words help you to navigate these tricky waters. Any teacher, shaman, healer, or other spiritual authority has no business, ever, in your bedroom. If you want to know why, please continue to read below.

There’s a certain feeling when you watch someone like Mick Jagger take the stage. The air thickens, the crowd becomes one body, and a single human being suddenly seems to be conducting thousands of nervous systems at once. It looks like magic. It feels like power. And in a way, it is.

I felt something similar watching Taylor Swift in concert. I’ve written before about how she is, in many ways, a shaman for 12‑year‑old girls—guiding them through heartbreak, identity, and self‑expression with songs as rituals and arenas as temples. She is helping to initiate a new generation of matriarchs, giving young girls language for their feelings and permission to take up space. The energy is different from Mick’s, but the mechanism is similar: one person on a stage, moving the emotional weather of thousands. I am… a Swiftie and I greatly admire her work.

We see this same energy in spiritual spaces. In a dark maloca, under the medicine, a shaman’s song can seem to rearrange reality itself. The room shifts, your body releases, visions rise and fall with their voice. In that heightened state, they don’t look like a person doing a job; they look like a portal. The line between human and “more‑than‑human” gets blurry fast.

That blur is where the danger lives. When we romanticize someone as a shaman, a guru, a rock star of spirit, we stop seeing them as a human being with limits, needs, wounds, and shadow. We turn them into an archetype: the Healer, the Master, the One Who Knows. Once we hand someone that role, it becomes very easy for them to hold all the power—and for us to surrender our discernment.

I learned this the hard way. For years, I studied with a tribal group of healers from Colombia, a lineage deeply rooted in their land and medicine. The structure was unmistakably masculine: men at the center, men holding the authority, men framed as the channels of power. At first, I accepted this as “just how it is” in that tradition. They were the shamans; I was the student.

Over time, though, something in me started to feel off. The way power gathered around a few male bodies. The way women held the perimeter, the service, the silence. I couldn’t name it fully, but I could feel the tension between the beauty of the work and the imbalance in how power flowed. Then, in a separate context, an oracle I trusted gave me a clear message: it was time to separate from that lineage and walk a path more deeply aligned with the divine feminine—a path where healing is not owned by a few, but shared among many.

Leaving was painful and disorienting. I had invested years of devotion and identity into that connection. But I listened, stepped away, and began seeking models of healing that honored softness, receptivity, and mutuality as much as vision and leadership. A few years later, stories began to surface—whispers at first, then clearer accounts—of profound abuse of women by men in that lineage. The same men who were once framed as pure vessels of spirit were now revealed as deeply human, and deeply harmful.

This is what romanticization does: it makes it almost impossible to see what is right in front of us. When someone is cloaked in the aura of the shaman, the rock star, the guru, we hesitate to question; we hesitate to believe our own bodies. We say, “It must be my stuff,” instead of, “Something is wrong here.” And for the women who come forward, it can feel almost impossible to reconcile the man who led them through cosmic realms with the man who crossed their boundaries.

We need a new architecture of power in spiritual and healing spaces. For me, the answer keeps coming back to this: power must be held in the community. Not in one charismatic man, not in a single “master,” not in a teacher nobody is allowed to question. Community is not a sexy word because it’s not something you can package and sell. You can’t brand “we hold each other.” You can’t put a trademark on genuine mutual care.

But community is where the real safety lives. When there are many eyes, many hearts, many voices, it becomes harder for abuse to hide. When leadership is shared, when feedback is welcomed, when people know each other over time and in ordinary life—not just in the high glow of ceremony—it becomes much more difficult for someone to build a private kingdom of power in the shadows. Community is “uncool” from a marketing perspective, but it is profoundly cool from the perspective of the soul.

And then there is friendship. Last but not least, friendship might be the most underrated spiritual container we have. Friendship holds the highest integrity container for the sharing of teaching and energy. In true friendship, no one is above the other. We might take turns leading, reflecting, holding, but the underlying field is one of equality and care. When you sit with a friend in their pain or expansion, you are not the shaman and they are not the client—you are two humans meeting in truth.

What if our new spiritual model centered friendship and community instead of hierarchy and spectacle? What if we let go of the fantasy that one person will save us, heal us, initiate us, and instead remembered that we save each other, slowly, through presence and honesty and shared responsibility? I know, it’s not a marketing plan. Making money relies on the illusion of value accretion in a particular direction. I am making a call for the accretion of value into the village.

A rockstar in an arena or a shaman in ceremony are all working with similar currents: rhythm, emotion, attention, surrender. All of them can open portals in us. But the invitation now is to enjoy the power of that experience without collapsing into worship. To recognize the medicine, while keeping our eyes open. To build communities—and friendships—where we no longer need a single, untouchable figure to carry the magic, because we’ve remembered that it was ours all along. To friendship, and community, I bow.

In Everything We Trust,
Sylvia